Drift

by Brian Castro

  Silence comes over the whole of the island. The plovers and the redbills and the muttonbirds all go to ground. Seals slip slowly into the water eyes rolled back in fear. McGann passes a hand over his brow, sees that there is no time, remains rooted to the sand.

  One and a half.

  Suddenly…

  Shit!

  He hears the cry first, then sees that the man on the bowsprit has fallen into the water. They’ve hit a sandbank. The sails luff, but they manage to come about. Now they will have to drop a longboat for him.

  McGann seizes the moment, moves quickly and invisibly along the rocks, blows a blast through his cupped palms and almost immediately men are herding their women through the scrub, hiding them in grass, burying them in sand, reminding them that if they show, the British will have them do needlework and read the bible and cage them up for these activities, spikes around their necks. This message entrenched with occasional beatings and slavish incantations… oh, ye children of disaffiliation, McGann would croon, repeat after me…

  They were well rehearsed. One or two ran vines into their hair and popped up camouflaged in the distance, invisible even to the cheeky seabirds wheeling and nagging over the bluff to examine the ship for offal.

  They had, by now, picked up the fathomer, rope still wrapped around his wrist.

  Half! I said half! he spluttered.

  The ship had dropped anchor, chain running echoes along the cliff-face. Shouts. More longboats swinging beneath the davits. Sounds not heard in years. Cavalho loaded the muskets. Through his spyglass he could see McGann lighting a dozen wax-heads fixed on stakes in inlets and hidden coves, a kind of pagan ritual at first glance, but he knew the wax melted in time to light the gunpowder compacted in the shafts, soon to give the impression of a hundred guns. Foolishness, to be sure, against cannon the barque was undoubtedly carrying, but these would be precious minutes of chaos to mask their escape in whaleboats which would thread through shallows to another isle.

  The longboat grounded. Two marines are thrown forward, looking sheepish, stumbling ahead of the incoming surf. Waxheads glimmering in the mist.

  Don’t look good, Sir. Them taboos terrifyin’ me.

  Fear not, son. Them is white man’s devilry.

  Southern swells waking from the ocean bed. One who looked like their leader steps off the bow and sinks his leather shoe into the grey sand. The sand is soft. He sinks up to his calves. Water seeps into his silk stockings, up his satin breeches, splashes his red coat, sash and various decorations. He has on an enormous penis gourd, the tip of which is held up with string fastened around his neck. For over four years he has lived amongst the natives, travelled up and down and through their lands, slept with their women, scratched himself raw on freezing nights wrapped in wallaby skin and layers of fat and lice. He knew the penis gourd impressed them. The Great White Father. He adjusts himself; winces at the gonorrhoeal itch-and-sting in his groin. Sniffs the air and says:

  Bastards!

  22

  We were milling around the small bar housed in the main cabin mid-way along the deck, getting to know each other under the generous influence of alcohol, when the toffee-nose, Julia, her name was, let fly with a few historical banalities. She reminded me of an actress, I don’t know why, perhaps there was a very slight resemblance to Ainslie, whose curls gave her a child’s aura when she spoke her lines and made every critic feel like a paedophile. But Julia was much more professional. She had a hard edge to her voice. Perhaps aspirants had to try harder. I thought about actresses. Thought about movies. Maybe Julia was in movies. I gathered she lived on a big property in the northwest. I wanted to talk about moviestars; how they coped with nude love scenes. They never mention it, even in avenging memoirs, how they managed the foreplay and the simulated sex and then picked up their dough and said goodbye till the next film. Did they work off before the shoot, take valium? Go with the flow? Shower with ice cubes?

  George Augustus Robinson, Julia said, sailed these waters gathering up indigenous people planning to house them on the Tasman peninsula. (Here she crooked a finger at the cliffs off the port bow. She sounded like a tour guide.) He sailed up to the Furneaux trying to rescue the women from the sealers in order to settle them on Flinders Island.

  The Mitchell-Smiths went Hmmmm. Interesting.

  Bravo, I said. But George Robinson was really an upstart bricklayer.

  She looked across at me.

  What he did was as bad as killing them off. He institutionalised them to death. In fact…

  She was blushing, drinking her vermouth in one long swallow.

  He was a whitewash. He existed to temper everyone’s guilt.

  Julia pinched a strand of hair from her mouth. I had touched a sore point, hypocrite that I was, who, devoted to sense, was nevertheless blowing smoke. I revelled in the gaps between historical furores. Once at a literary festival I was asked about my devotion to truth… whether I went with narrative history or temporality or the genealogical tradition. All three, I replied, but only if you lived it yourself. I was generous, even affluent then. I could afford a joke at my own expense. In humanities departments this became no laughing matter. Professors soon wrote me off as a joke. I was no longer a serious novelist. That too, is a way of coming to the truth, to life, to what is necessary, without artifice.

  Julia’s husband/lover/gigolo rubbed his earring. Morris was having a great time, looking from one face to another.

  Well, I was getting to that, Julia said primly. Whatever the case, Robinson had good intentions.

  I let that pass to oil the waters. Morris looked disappointed. I asked Julia where she lived. She sensed a trap, but answered gamely.

  Northmere.

  I saw Morris frown. He knew what that name meant: the huge pastoral leases of the Van Diemen’s Land Company. The northwest corner of this foreign field where aborigines mysteriously disappeared. The clean air monitoring station. Cape Grim.

  By the way, Julia said, thinking she was holding a trump card, I’m a descendant of Robinson’s.

  Everybody held their breath. I wasn’t shocked. All I thought of was Robinson’s diary:

  Wybalenna Aboriginal Settlement

  Flinders Island

  Monday, 23rd November 1835.

  Robinson is out walking with Mrs Dickenson, the storekeeper’s wife. That evening he writes:

  Mrs D. REE. DEVERY my.

  He likes ciphers. Studied signals and codes once. Not so difficult really, if you knew the Aboriginal words as he did. Wrote it in upper case. VULVA! Erupting like a volcano from its coded compactness. And later:

  Mrs D. in the evening my PAGENNA.

  KISS! came the confession of foreplay as an afterthought, Robinson of the cunningly retrogressive pen, as if thought precluded action. Robinson of the good intentions.

  But let’s burn some bird fat and barilla and wash out our mouths. Robbo was a writer.

  I didn’t trump Julia. I let her smile linger. She denied me in a kind of reversal of what I knew. She denied me the truth. At one stage… I cannot remember now when it occurred… perhaps after the burning whisky had loosened my face, collapsed the rictus of marmoreal cynicism… she asked me how old I was. Too old, I had answered, but not old enough for suicide. (Yes, self-preservation had a distinctly erotic nature). Yet hers was a strange question. I fleetingly imagined how it would feel to be loved by her, but my weakness for the death-wish manifested itself. I expected her to say something further, for she seemed to enjoy my prognosis a great deal.

  So with the sea, with adventure, the intangibles became clear. I believe she could have saved me. I could smell excitement, a dimension of life I thought had passed forever. A dark shape slid beneath the ship.

  We sailed close to the imposing cliffs, pipes and flutes like a grand organ, erosion working stone into frightening pinnacles topped with bird lime, and rode the light swell into Port Arthur. It was very calm in there, the water dark and the ruins of the penitentiary glowing pink like
a burning mansion, a crumbling, porous cake of wormy expectation. Dusk must have woven something magical. I expected Julia to make another sign… some courtly concern for passion. I kept staring at her and became trapped. I think she was frightened. The light fell in different layers on her and there was this kaleidoscope of colours working on her face as she turned, the moving landscape behind veiled in shades and she became an imposing Madonna carried on the backs of swaying priests. Things began to whirl inside my head and I withdrew and Julia carried the evening, won everybody. As for me, I had escaped just in time. The Other was capable of so much sound and fury.

  I think I could have lived off scandal for years if I had kept up with the Julias and Ainslies of this world… made public banal love stories about broken hearts, desperation wrung from a glance, the touch of fingers in the afternoon light. But the clothes soon drop and in brazen nudity the Other and I would have lectured the world long after it had stopped listening. Better the false step now… the indiscretion, the violation. Between that and the veil, practical philistinism. A lobotomy of sorts.

  Her husband found Morris in the engine room. He knew something about diesel motors. That was all I needed to free myself to think of Julia all night, to have her while Morris and her husband repaired the engine I had unwittingly sabotaged earlier that morning. I waited at the stern for the painter. Unfurled a torn page of Robinson’s diary to pass the time. The year was 1830.

  23

  Robinson walked up and down the gravelly beach, on the first of these islands to be liberated, Union Jack held aloft behind him, a lieutenant following with a basket of food. He stopped periodically, placed a hand on the shoulder of a valet, removed his shoe and shook out the sludge.

  Hello! Anybody about?

  There was nothing.

  He walked on, irritated, snatching up the smouldering wax heads and dousing them in the water.

  Perfidy! he shouted.

  They reached the huts. Robinson entered one; came out scratching.

  Fleas, he said.

  Sandfleas covered his legs. He bent to slap at his calves and the tip of the gourd poked him in the eye.

  Shit!

  There was an irrational moment when he wanted to torch the huts. His men seemed to sense this and came forward with firebrands. Robinson waved them away. Better to threaten than to antagonise. He picked up a smooth rock he found in the fireplace and tacked a notice on the centrepost of the largest hut: All Native Women to be returned to the Authorities at earliest convenience. He spun around on his heel, strode back to the longboat.

  Wha’ ‘bout the hamper, Sir? asked the lieutenant.

  Poison it. Goddamn, man, this is no picnic.

  Within an hour they had rowed back to the cutter. When the ship disappeared on the outgoing tide, Cavalho whistled up the women. They tested the roast chicken in the basket on a cat. Within minutes it lay writhing, convulsing, its eyes red and bursting from its head. Cavalho snatched off the decree. None of them could read save McGann, who had already sailed west in a four-ton whaleboat. Cavalho tore up the parchment and crazed with hunger for chicken, chewed on the fragments.

  24

  Byron Johnson had the common but unfortunate affliction of seeing himself speak and therefore experiencing the excitement of the object of love slipping away in the balloon of dialogue. It would have resembled Montgolfier’s craft. Lifting off on hot air. But how sweet the pain! How defiant of gravity! Whenever he felt love, even in the emptiness of letters, (whose distance made it love, yes, love was absence, always a wanting… to express and to die), he sought out another as surrogate, with whom he would make metaphors instead of love. Uncomprehending strangers became his obscure object of desire, who unwittingly protected him from the pain of the original slippage. But of course, there was a penance for this… parody; sometimes revenge; even love itself.

  Except for the ruins of the penitentiary, Port Arthur presented nothing extraordinary to him. Tasmania, heralding itself as the Holiday Isle made much of this volcanic peninsula joined naturally by the narrowest neck of land. It made much of history. It even afforded the same tutored views of England… headlands and sea, trees and rocky coastlines which, viewed from one lookout to the next, brought upon him a mild exhaustion, for he had been told, time and again, what Countryside and Beauty and Wilderness were. He’d seen them on cans of air-freshener. Forever sentenced to a displaced Nature, standing on the edge of a lookout like a hanging verb, the English mind, with its hatred of cities, brought a clumsy intimacy to a horrifying aesthetics. The beauty of transportation was that isolation purified the soul. Men were reformed to innocence.

  So the penal settlement, the institutionalised viciousness of the past, remained the one true repository of anticipation for present-day tourists, its gloom powdered with English lawns, mouldering stones and melancholic trees, its savagery residing only in popular mythology and imaginings… if not for the human toil which produced all of it, rubbed everything with elbow grease and brow sweat and bloodied back, polished every block and beam, all the iron accoutrements, every leathern boot and wooden stock and soaked every cap and whip in blood in the service of the Motherland. So eager were the condemned in the end to find the promised nirvana of animals, they gave up even momentary life for sweet, sweet death by going down to the sea, or into the forest.

  In the painter, which could only ferry three people at a time, Ms Julia Dickenson was heard to say to Mrs Mitchell-Smith that she fancied a ghost-tour, for that was the speciality of the evening. The Commandant’s residence came into view as the dusk submerged into night. For Byron Johnson, there was always a moment at that critical juncture when light met darkness, that the heart crossed from melancholy to illicit arousal. A little flutter, irregularly on the cardiograph. But at that very moment a crow glided across the velveteen lawns and nagged its way across a line of trees, landing with heavy, slow beatings of its wings. For Byron Johnson, a presentiment. Ah, scavenging heart… he said… poring over the rubble of a ruthless time, the dead watching the winter coming on with admirable disinterest… I’m outside of it all again. But no one was there to listen. Just as well, for a strange laughter erupted across the harbour and foam curled on the crests of waves and there was the beginning of a gentle fit.

  A creamy cottage, its warm light astride the lawn, welcomed the ladies. Lamps lit the path. Across Eaglehawk Neck they saw bonfires and heard the baying of hounds. Up at the church, carriages disgorged huddles of people which soon disbanded and disappeared. Coaches rounded the drives and there were little shouts of Get up! and Whoa! and the scrunching of hooves over gravel. Pines swooned menacingly in the strengthening wind.

  Morris returned, casting his oars expertly between waves. The gentlemen came next.

  I think, Mrs Mitchell-Smith said, adjusting her bonnet, that we should need a stout arm on this tour. I’m often subject to frights and faintings.

  Oh, but there’ll be plenty of them, Julia Dickenson said.

  The latter was far more experienced in these matters, and was already looking for the unwelcome presence, which came in the form of Alf Mitchell-Smith and that detestable Byron Johnson, who was chewing on a bit of paper. Julia’s husband and the Captain had decided to stay on board.

  They all walked up the path, the ladies ahead, to the Commandant’s cottage. Two sisters had turned it into a guesthouse, and there they were, Adèle and Aimée, one grave, one acute, fluttering like aging moths in new light, ordering servants and porters about, instructing the cook and turning down featherbeds. They were twins, one in red and one in blue, long dresses brushing over gravel, stepping sideways through doors, whalebone swimming beneath velvet.

  Ahoy! they sang in unison. What ho, agreeable visitors?

  There were twin murals on either side of the portico, some Grecian or Egyptian fancy which fired the romantic past despite their last lover abandoning them, yes, after a lucid explanation that he could only satisfy one at a time and like Solomon, drew a sword to his manly parts, ho
ping to have love declared by one or the other, but both twins urged him on, impressed. Never mind that it had been so long ago that the murals were flaky from sea salt and were melting into ancient absences. Never mind that the story, so oft repeated at dinners with the utmost propriety, yet with a hint, just the slightest, of prurience, the story of their god-like lover, may have been interwoven with Homer’s. For his name was Paris. No, it may have happened in Paris. What? Oh, Aimée, such audacity! Our guests, remember?

  By then a cloth had quickly been laid and there was hot soup and a roast and wine, then coffee with the most exquisite cream and a fire crackling in the hearth as the evening grew cool and the guests chattered on, Adèle and Aimée providing the stories through the spell of their voices, the quaint pronunciation, the rustling sibilants and lilting vowels, inducing a coma. They told of the Commandant’s wife, of how her ghost had recently reappeared in the rocking chair in the back room, by the fire. But they did not know why she had returned to haunt the house, nor whether she was an evil woman, nor whether some sadness lay unresolved. All ghosts are lonely. And banal. And secretive. A reflection of our scourge when we are not at one with ourselves, Byron Johnson interrupted. The others frowned. A terrible man, this Johnson. Intruded all the time. Claimed to be a writer, but none had heard of him. That’s the trouble with such aspiration… nothing but constant chafing. But there were other ghosts, other stories of runaway convicts… of Pearce, whose name was on everybody’s lips… Pearce, who escaped from Sarah Island in MacQuarie Harbour, who made it through the wilderness, the rainforests, the impregnable walls thick with tanglefoot and mined with ravines, made it through gorges and the jungle of Huon pine, myrtle and celery-top, swinging on vines across hanging swamps and strangulated sassafras, walking for a mile without setting foot on the ground over fallen swamp gum and giant moss-bound roots and gangrenating undergrowth; Pearce, who made it by eating his fellow escapees; Pearce, who was caught and escaped again, running naked on a beach near Hell’s Gates posing and proposing lyrically to his mate that grace was dying for another… real passion; indolently whispering in his ear; seen running again, alone this time, hailing a passing whaleboat.