Drift

by Brian Castro

  Pierres, Adèle said.

  Pierres, Aimée echoed. A terrible man.

  But it was different here.

  Yes, here it was more civilised.

  They were mentally trained, not often physically punished.

  Yes, they were isolated.

  According to Bentham’s theory.

  Every prisoner watched.

  Without him seeing that he was so.

  Silence was the golden rod.

  Silence and observation.

  Observation and silence.

  A modern concept.

  Conceived in darkness.

  Executed in light.

  Each cell dank, with thick walls.

  For self-examination.

  So others could not hear, save the gaoler of the self.

  Creative solutions to stifle creativity.

  Training the mind to ritual.

  To dissymmetry.

  I and my fellow man.

  All unequal depending on one’s time.

  Wooden boxes like coffins in chapel.

  Chapel boxes so they can’t see each other.

  Just man and God.

  The scourge of solidarity.

  The eye of Humanism.

  In the eye of the Law, just parts.

  Balanced shares.

  Shared balance.

  Punishment without pain.

  Contrition within time.

  Supervision.

  Codes.

  A refuge from disorder.

  One man took off his hand.

  Perhaps it was gangrenous.

  And said: put that in yer stew.

  We are our own worst enemy.

  Janus-faced.

  Good and evil.

  Evil and good.

  You can hear them stirring now.

  Turning about, to and fro, muttering.

  Isolated, internalised.

  Trying to find remorse.

  In the end, just ghosts.

  Just voices.

  Justice.

  Which suddenly reminded the twins of the purpose of all this. They leapt up, looking at the clock. The ghost tour!

  I will be a guide, said Adèle.

  And I too, said Aimée.

  Therefore we shall split into two parties.

  But you will see the same things.

  Mrs D., I can see by the way you stand.

  You are anxious.

  Real ghosts are not malicious.

  Julia Dickenson and Byron Johnson. They were picked in the same group, much to the consternation of Mrs Mitchell-Smith, who thought it unfair. Julia chewed on a corner of her handkerchief.

  Boom! Something knocked against the hull of the ship and echoed across the water. A presentiment, Byron Johnson said. Her anxiety a denial. Boom! Her seriousness a refutation. He wanted to kill the child in him, that provocation to diversion. Boom! The twin guides separated the dark with their lanterns, poled along forked paths at a similar pace beneath ancient trees contorted by wind. Boom again. From the ruins a groaning, a low murmur. A few drops of salted rain. Pitch black now, as Julia Dickenson and Byron Johnson lingered behind while one twin talked, another reminisced, made incantations to an unknown soldier in a forgotten war, answered herself, then answered each other beyond the hedge with words preserved like ginger or ashes in a jar stowed in memory bright as day; otherwise the grey truth in the loquacious presence of madness.

  Julia held her silence. He smelt her perfume, the fragrance of what could have been, a smile, flashing eyes, subtlety, the intermarrying of minds. Boom! Already the gossip spread by Adèle and Aimée of Julia entering the Guard Tower, having been detached from the rest of the party which came together below it, escaping that detestable Johnson. How she was wandering in the dark when something struck her face… a bat? How she fled but couldn’t find the others, scurrying up and down slopes and paths and stone steps, hearing her voice echoing and then nothing but the terrifying moan from somewhere deep in the isolation cells, convicts whispering:

  Arrrgh! Let’s play Chinese Whispers.

  What’s that?

  Don’t you know? Didn’t you play it as a child?

  I had no childhood.

  That’s what they all say.

  All right. Stop arguing. I’ll spread a rumour. You pass it on to the next. Let it do the rounds and then back to me and I’ll report it to all of you.

  What’s the point?

  To see the difference.

  To tell the truth about lies.

  To see that justice is never done.

  To illustrate the jury system.

  Ah! a good game.

  ‘Tisn’t a game.

  You are what they say you are.

  Chinee whispers, Chinee whispers.

  You! Cell number ten! Why aren’t you playing?

  Go fuck yourself.

  Oh! Julia blushed, holding in her hand a tourist brochure, a magazine, a map, a bookmark printed with the times and meeting-places of tour parties. But it was too dark to read the

  Notes on contributors:

  Cell no.1 : John Thomas : 25 years for self-abuse.

  Cell no. 2: Ernest Pleasure: 2 years for homicidal rape.

  Cell no. 3: Marcus Green: 20 years for hawking with intent to expectorate on the King. Author of The Everyman’s Guide to Port Arthur’s Panopticon.

  Cell no. 4: Sam ‘Boon’ Halliday: 25 years for recidivism. Original crime unknown. His study of the Huon Pine was funded by the Van Diemen’s Volk Group.

  Cell no. 5: Chris Femfresh: 5 years for impersonation. Is working on a book on gender and confusion and was most recently awarded the Commandant’s Prize for good behaviour.

  Cell no. 6: Joseph Nill’s published work includes a collection of short stories and the novels Absence, and Nothing. He is a reconstructed escapist.

  Cell no. 7: Rodney Pearce: Brother of the famous cannibal from Sarah Island. On bread and water diet.

  Cell no. 8: Simon Solomon: 20 years for forgery. Has worked as a journalist and arts editor of the V.D.Times. His publications include Oh, Plagiarism! and Why Are We In Port Arthur? He is currently working on an experimental novel without punctuation, entitled Will The Sentence Ever End?.

  Cell no. 9: Charlie Challenger: 50 years to life for being black. A member of the Ben Lomond tribe, Charlie published a pamphlet on English immigration which was deemed to be inflammatory. It was pulped in 1848.

  Cell no. 10: Wilson Ho is a Chinese-born writer stranded in Port Arthur.

  Oh! Boom! Julia flees. She runs from the cells and steps out into the rain, into the arms of Byron Johnson, who, taking advantage of the dark, kisses her firmly on her half-open lips.

  Oh, Ms D. REE.DEVERY, my, oh my! he exclaims.

  What? Asks a startled voice from cell no. 9.

  25

  I must have been quite drunk that night, eating alone in the motel dining-room… three empty bottles stood on the table, toppling over when I managed to get up. Thought they would have taken them away to alleviate the embarrassment at least. I was full of spleen, though they say you can do without it. Suddenly hated myself, the suddenness of it getting to me, not the familiarity of its occurrence. The long, empty sentences of the night; the blowing in bottles; shuffling swill of sea at my feet; my life made fit for other people’s words. I was sick of it. I wanted Emma to hold in my arms, not feel her pages rustling beneath me. I groped along the wall to my room; didn’t see Julia D. at all, but passing, heard groans from intermittently occupied rooms, long, unstaunched suffering so often confused with practised ecstasy. Take no pride in solitude. To love, you must have fact! Another. But through savagery or treaty, the worm of solitude is already in the heart at birth… though mighty deeds have sprung from the microfilaria of loneliness. In passing. That deadly move in chess which picks off the isolated with indifference. I looked for a gymnasium. There was none. I tried her door.

  Morning. Raining lightly outside. Port Arthur veiled in glassy mists sweeping sideways in fierce wind
gusting from the sea. Cold rain. Puff. Puffing. Penance for taking everything too lightly. I set off on a slow jog not knowing where I was going, puff, preparing, though prisons have circular exercise yards, surprised at the iciness of this rain, puff, the cold slick of the road, long and black, so lonely and deep, the colour. I’m prepared to run forever, puff, the arduous dips and crests hardly noticeable at first, but each breath registering some degree of death, the pain so subtle, maybe round the corner the swaying caravan of some crazed camper will flatten me like a possum, puff, steep now, almost sheer, turn right onto a dirt road climbing into fog, ascending Calvary, the cross of this weighty body, puff, trees black, sky black, too Olympian, this pace, still refusing respite, the beat of blood drives a numbed mind past some cleared land and a farmhouse, bark of a startled terrier, thinking of you then, Emma, perhaps indecently, the sway of your walk, the way you fold your thin arms beneath the sweater draped over your shoulders, just like Julia… the sadness of your eyes, perhaps the sweetness of your breasts, of which I can only guess, no, puff, the bleak score of heath between heavy and scanty vegetation in these climes, puff, member shrunken to a champignon with this Herculean effort, near the top now, each step the loosening of gravel, feet sodden by runnels, the tide of arterial blood in my ear, I’ve gone to water, puff, will not give in, can hear the brief thunder of startled kine, the summit: die, die. Ho! What blows? A meadow soft with the fuzz of rain-smeared flowers. Out there. Look. The harbour. Neap tide. Point Puer. Pronounced ‘pure', though Latinists (but not dyslectics) would disagree. The suspicion of pederasty, but much worse, the stink of hypocrisy. Boys. They transported boys here, placed them on an outcrop and watched them wither and die while making shoes and boats, in cretinous mimicry of God the Economist, of labour and debt, of Service to the King, in one of the most severe climes in the world… watched them shiver… here, a telescope… twenty cents for half a minute of horror. How many dashed themselves from the cliffs? Sheer, no shortfall if a few dozen slipped quietly down, heads split on submerged rock and then the slow diffusion of a tide incarnadine. Breathe in. The smell of coffinwood and weed, pungent with age and dank, whips across the bay. A wormy attitude in the best views. All those attitudes wrought of soured breaths in all those small-minded ways of proud ancestry whispered to us in the night. Yet in childhood, having been told of glorious deeds, we were locked in rooms for essaying them, refused the air-raid shelter and dared to wet the bed in excitement. We told the time by bending the hands of the clock, watching the days by the movement of the sun across the walls, suffering enuresis in the soft flare of bombs at night and dwelt in recurrent dreams, so as not to miss any part of the show. Hearing the sirens of frightened men, Father with a newspaper and matches in his warden’s helmet, torched our sheets, the soft ‘phutt’ of saturated linen refusing to burn our sins away when during his rage, murderous rage, he hoped we would all perish in the chaos.

  Here, let me discard these trappings of the past. Here, strip naked; football jumper, shorts, socks. Standing on this rock and holding my arms outstretched, I gesture to She who makes all things possible. Oh, Magna Mater, deliver me from Elohistic mysteries, call me by my own name. Let me live simply, without meaning.

  I’m cold. I try to run down a little. Catch my foot in a hole. Stumble.

  26

  On an isolated, tiny island two years after the brig Nora disappeared, George Robinson, self-appointed aboriginal agent and master of the Wyballenna settlement, sighted a naked white man running along the beach waving a smoking branch. He sent a boat to pick up the castaway. The man stank. He was unable to speak. They put him in quarantine. He coughed up blood and looked to be dying. He indicated he wanted pen and paper and began to scribble illegibly with a shaking hand.

  My name is Orville Pennington-James, erstwhile master of the brig ‘Nora’ which was taken from me by a mutinous crew. I was cast on that island and left to die. I didn’t, as you can see. Some native women paddled across in a bark canoe every week with stolen provisions, filched, I guessed, from white men. Well, I’ve learned a feckin thing or two about native women. My father always said that I would…

  At this point his hand fell and ink spilled across his chest. Blood bubbled from a corner of his mouth. Writing had been such an immense effort that he suddenly lost all desire for it and began wrestling with a knot deep in his chest, dreaming of a dark woman who suckled him.

  27

  WORÉ has a knot in her chest. Right here. All night she coughs inside her bark shelter. All night the terrible sound she has never heard before: a high-pitched whine, phlegm erupting at the end of it, a string of tiny explosions like bursting sutures. That’s what she has seen McGann do… sew up the wounds in the bodies of men he’d killed, the bodies expanding and stinking, bloated by sunlight and then… the sound of bursting sutures. He studied them, measured their chests, placed wax over their faces; sealed their mouths. He would take a sharp needle, the kind for making sails. Go down to the third or fourth space between the ribs. Pierce the flesh. Insert a larger needle in the weal. All the way in. Watch as the cloudy fluid seeped out. A hiss of gas.

  If he were here he would have studied this cough, listened with his ear to her chest. But now he has gone to fetch more women. Perhaps he will not be back. WORÉ has a child in her belly… but something tells her it cannot be… like a wallaby with two heads, it just cannot be.

  She goes down by the water, immerses herself. The pain returns. She has a fit of coughing, her heart moving in her chest, beating in her throat at times and below that an emptiness, a falling. This, her mother had told her, was an experience of death. After that there is no more fear. She coughs, lips smeared in blood. She wades out into deeper water. It is cold. The pain comes like the waves. Slowly, then terribly when it hits and then mercifully recedes and returns more rapidly than before. WORÉ stays in the water. She floats, she pushes, squeezes. She is filled with a murderous joy. There are spasms. A trembling. Then quite easily, something comes. She can see it through the water, white and trailing blood and umbilical and bits of her insides and she grows dizzy and makes one last effort, suddenly grabbing it like a fish and holding it under with great love and gentleness and keeping it there for all eternity.

  Cavalho sees her, rushes down to the water and understands what she is doing. He takes her by the hair and drags her out of the sea and sees that she is choking on blood. He pitches her onto the sand, the dead baby with her. He is too late. WORÉ's eyes are glassy, her legs awash with dark blood which pumps out, deep red, purple. Cavalho sits down and howls. Doesn’t know why he is doing it, but hears a wondrous sound emerge from his throat. Feels all alone.

  Something else floats in the amniotic sea. Cavalho wipes away his tears, rushes back into the water, raises it up. A twin! She had delivered twins and had missed one, which he hurriedly transports to one of his concubines, to Worrete-Moete, who had milk. Cavalho disappears for a while, then returns; toys with a little package, a ball of wax.

  A week later, assured that the baby would survive, Cavalho and his men fire the grasses. They burn down the huts, destroy what they cannot carry and sail off, the whole island alight, singed muttonbirds caught in their burrows darting into the sea, others, aflame, exploding in mid-air, spiralling on short wings like fizzing cannonballs.

  28

  An exemplary life is one that prepares for the perfection of its own death.

  That was the last thing Byron Johnson ever wrote. He was in his cabin, the motor chugging away through a dead calm sea, so calm that it was suddenly stopped and the passengers were invited to swim, though there was something about the temperature of the water, warm on the surface with a cold submarine turbulence which brought cramp and headache.

  Julia Dickenson said to him, standing by the bow stanchion: You sentimentalise them. They are no more victims than you are to your own alienation. If you had identified with a piece of land, with property and with lineage, you would have had more conviction… just as they do.


  He hadn’t been taken seriously.

  Julia wore a black costume and dove with that long-legged smoothness and precision, dove clinically, speared over the side like a sailfish. There was something about her that wasn’t human. It was attractive, this literalness. It punished him, drove him on. Later he had received a note. It slid under his door and then was given a flick so it became airborne and fluttered at his feet.

  If ever you need to talk, I’m a very good listener.

  It was from Beatrice Mitchell-Smith.

  The storm came in the night. They were out a day from Eddystone Point and were sailing along the top edge of Tasmania, prey to the sudden and erratic storms that lashed the coast. Bass Strait, renowned for its shallowness and ferocity, calm as glass one day and whipping up frightening waves the next, unleashed an unexpected and bilious tempest. The Nora made for Stanley. At least, Morris said, there was a smidgen of a breakwater there, at the bottom of a circular curiosity of eroded rock called The Nut. That would do me, Byron Johnson said. The Nut sounded like a good idea. They could make out a brown smudge of land in the spray. The sky grew darker.

  Soon it began to rain and everyone went below except Morris and Johnson and the novice at the wheel, and the ones who went below grew violently sick with the fumes and the lack of air since Morris had to run the motor. Suddenly the seas grew heavy, long rolling swells heaving under the ship and Morris chose to remark he had not seen such seas too often, not even off the Cape, and said it was too late to head for the breakwater, since the wind had changed and the motor couldn’t match the current. And so they stood out to sea and were being borne away from the coast at a mighty rate.