Drift

by Brian Castro

  The girl gave no name, but placed a cross where she had to sign. She had travelled most of the night from Cape Grim in the north-west corner of Tasmania and there was much desperation in her. I watched her come out of her cabin at two in the morning and walk barefoot to the phone-box by the main road. She was in there for exactly thirty-six minutes.

  I could well have imagined what had happened at Cape Grim; the massacres, the violation of our mothers, the shoals of execrating silence. But what possessed her was far worse than history. I wasn’t prepared for that. Wasn’t prepared for it to be so close; for until that time my hand had been unsteady… and well… when it came to the pen, one hoary hand was as good as another.

  When it came to the knife as well. Even though I’m studying medicine, they’ll never let me practise; not even as a G.P.. Not with this stump of an arm, out of which grows a finger; a fully-formed finger, mind you, capable of grotesqueries. Imagine telling a patient to relax while I stick it up his bum, or grasping a scalpel with it to incise, excise, circumcise, exorcise whatever. No. There was no equal opportunity in this profession, which grew from humble and despised origins… I mean the clinical side of it: butchering, barbering, vivisection, crusading wars. In those days a stump would not have been despised. Let the deformed dissect the putrefying. It was licence for the ignoble. To them fell prosaic anatomy. Real doctors dealt only with poetry of the spirit. And what a mess they made, Philosophers and Critics.

  Enough. I wear a long knitted glove over the stump and try to look like a pop star. For a long time they wouldn’t let me join a golf club down in Hobart. Though I think that was for a different reason. I learned to agitate, but I’m mostly seen with pity. Most folks still think I eat a muesli of white ants for breakfast; maybe suck opium out of a didgeridoo high on a one-note samba. No, hang on a minute, we’re not Asian. I play upon it when it suits. Sell an odd bark painting or two executed with execrable pointillism which, when seen from afar resembles the face of Dali. I prefer jokes at other’s expense, but always end up paying. It’s written on the body: I can count my friends on one hand. I wouldn’t lift a finger. Etc. But you could say I’ve made the most of my disability. It opened doors. I have a knob on the steering wheel of my Volkswagen which helps me to drive with one hand. And when it comes to the crunch you’d be surprised how strong the finger could be.

  Let’s see. I’ve got thirty-six minutes.

  2

  See that?

  Penguin.

  Nah, too white.

  Albino seal, matey. Chucked out of the tribe.

  There it is again.

  Could be King Penguin. Curious little bastards. Walk right up to be killed.

  Down MacQuarie Island they put ‘em in digesters. Four thousand a day. Boiled ‘em alive for oil.

  Whitey’s way, eh. The commodification of nature. No fuckin’ respect.

  There, look.

  Sea-cow, I reckon.

  3

  An empty expanse of ocean. Black water and spindrift and a jagged surface; but deep below, listen to the squealings of submarine play, Cetacean delight, all having a whale of a time as the pod tosses him like a football upon their spouting heads, scoring his back to bring him shoreward with barnacled intelligence.

  Thinking he was already dead, Byron Johnson felt the floor of heaven beneath his feet. He was careful not to take a false step. It felt like a dance-hall, smoothly waxed parquetry. Shuffle shuffle, cha-cha-cha. Ainslie jigging up close to him, her breasts ebbing and flowing, legs electric in the strobe near the juke-box in Stromboli’s Café. Slip. Slide. Turn her around. The floor moves. Broken beer glass. Slip-slide on his back.

  Jonah Johnson is vomited up on shore and dumped onto sand. The recoiling wave wrenches him back a little. His stomach heaves, he floats. This is a joke, he thinks. It’s necessary to make a joke of everything at sea. Figures moving on the shoreline. Soon he is hauled up. They wrap him in a blanket, give him a sip of brandy. Worse thing you can do to a drowned man. Soon there’s a fire inside and out. He retches.

  Who are you?

  Birders.

  Berbers? Am I in Africa? Must be treading water a long time.

  You’re on an island, matey.

  I…aaagh!

  He sank into unconsciousness and awoke periodically, but had lost the ability to speak.

  You watch them, these birders. Some white, some dark. They speak little and move slowly. Hundreds of campsites along the beach, fires flaring and smoke hanging blue beneath the cliff face. They speak only of the ‘season'. They glide, dark shapes in feathers and boots. They ask no questions, but give you clothes and food and shelter. You want to say you’ve fallen off a ship, but they shake their heads. You tell them you’re a writer, but they shake their heads and laugh, showing very white teeth. You ask them where you are and they say you’re on an island. That is all you know. Mostly these people just shake their heads. Perhaps because you cannot form a basic sentence; with a verb, a subject and an object. Amen. It is a great relief. Example:

  How?

  How? Are you a native American?

  How get here?

  Ah! You must’ve drifted off a boat.

  See?

  See what?

  You.

  We are Aborigines. So the anthropologists insist. We come for muttonbird, every March, for five weeks. We come for Yolla. Yolla is a short-tailed shearwater full of fat and oil. Puffinus tenuirostris. They have strong wings and fly thousands of miles a year. When the blackwood blossoms, they arrive here and build burrows in the sandy soil. Come. I’ll show you. See this one here? Put your hand in.

  Nnnngh.

  Go on, grab him by the beak.

  Furry.

  Yeah. Break his neck. Like this.

  She held the bird in her hand like a tiny, dead Cupid. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, but she killed cherubim and in doing so, brought him back to life.

  Your name?

  Emma.

  Kidding.

  No. She smiled. Oh, God, the sadness of that smile!

  Her name was Emma. Emma McGann, and the whales had brought him to her. She wasn’t surprised. She said she knew he was coming. Her brother Tom told her she could make things happen simply by writing.

  His heart was pounding. Just the sight of that thin, willowy girl striding up from the beach with plastic buckets of seawater was enough to make him faint. Her feet in sandals. Ankles wrought by the gods of Egypt. Hair a veil of lapis lazuli. Had trouble speaking though. Pity. Yes, sometimes she was incomprehensible and sometimes she completed his sentences. But on the whole it became a wordless love, a labour of lockjaw. Upon their meeting, nothing was more desirable.

  Nights there would be fires, seen and transcribed from one island to the next. They appeared out of the past, hair matted, wearing kangaroo skins, sunburnt, healthy and wild-eyed, their huts in twos and threes along the coastal fringes. In the sheds, the women still working into the night by oil-lamps, heads in shower caps all covered with feathers, scalding, brushing and laying the muttonbirds on racks; washing, grading, sprinkling them with salt and packing them into barrels for New Zealand; pouring in brine and watching for the spud to float up when the salt was right.

  Maybe she’d chosen him to be the potato, he thought. A gauge of some kind. A prater; maybe a prat.

  She heard voices, she said. He did too, when he began to work in the sheds, plucking and brushing alongside her, long days and long hours of dirty work accompanied by a howling radio. Huge draughts of steam caulked with humid down clogged his lungs, filtered through his teeth and choked him when he opened his mouth. Feathers rained into his hair, bird oil shot like sperm into his face. It took a week for him to do it properly. Even then, the birds he processed were always smaller than the rest. Emma said if he worked faster he’d get the bigger ones. She would smile at him and his heart would melt. When he went to his bunk at night he slept in the feathers of a million birds, his dreams borne by an unending flight of petrels, E
mma somewhere there, in the light of desire. But there was always the noxious consequence of realising he had been unable to give himself to the sea. Human, all too human.

  He knocked on her door. Men’s quarters over th’other way, one of the women indicated with a disapproving chin. But Emma dragged him into her room holding his wrist lightly and made him tea. She wore a long tee-shirt bordered with a colourful motif. It was the same, he noticed, as the border around her letter-paper and envelopes. Later, she led him out the back, into an old truck and drove him steadily and competently up onto a dirt road. In the moonlight he watched her manoeuvring the wheel with one hand, imagined her breasts beneath the tee-shirt. He dozed and woke and dozed again with the rhythm. He was unborn and she had no substance and he felt the most curiously unfocussed desire. She was beautiful, truly beautiful. So beautiful that he was soon passing out, in and out, images of his life reeling from A to Z and back again. She made a fire, heated a can of soup and fed him from it.

  A weak sun creased the horizon. When he woke he was wet and cold and lying on a cliff ledge. He couldn’t move. Suddenly the air was beaten, feathers flew and when he looked up saw a helicopter hovering there, basket spiralling out like a spider scurrying to check for movement and soon two men appeared, wrapped him up in foil like a fish finger and took him off the island under protest, strapped into a papoose.

  AUTHOR RESCUED FROM SEA

  Byron Johnson, avongard British author was yesterday rescued from a rocky ledge after having fallen off a boat and spending some time in the water. Mr Johnson, suffering from hyperhernia and hallucinations told The Northwestern News he was saved by a pod of whales and a million muttonbirds. Sgt Bryce of the Stanley constabulary said that this was quite common.

  4

  Well, thirty-six minutes or my name isn’t Thomas McGann.

  When the girl came out of the phone-box I knew I would have to talk to her, tell her I’d discovered a writer called B.S. Johnson who wrote about us Tasmanians.

  And that was how I met Ainslie Cracklewood some years back when she had run out of money in the Apple Isle.

  Johnson? she frowned. He’s my husband.

  It was raining lightly, but even then, the motor began, thumping and throbbing and sluicing black water. It was a sound which connected, gave me an uncontrollable desire to be linked with genius, and when later I’d brought books and a bottle of milk to her room, that shabby room noisy as a drum, she’d already seduced me, long before she had touched my stump and had discovered absence made for twice the excitement and even longer before my own discovery of her obsession with disability.

  You don’t get a girl like that often. I mean, who allowed perversity to get the better of pity. Maybe it was just my style, the way I wrenched at the steering wheel of my VW, the way I avoided disabled parking spaces, the way I spat through the little side window. I simply didn’t care. We drove up to the Cape, rippling button-grass brown as onion soup, the car percolating from lookout to lookout and we necked and kissed until our lips were paralysed. We went down the coast and stayed in the best hotels while it rained constantly. We spent two nights at the Sheraton with a harbour view on my stepmother’s money and watched the glitter on the waterfront, though Ainslie didn’t come near the window and wouldn’t let me turn on the lights. She said her father would be sending someone after her if she wired home for money. She slept on the spare bed. I liked that kind of paranoia. It made her dependent. For a powerful woman, she had vulnerability. She showed it in the most delicate emotional striptease. I was ready to follow her back to London.

  It didn’t work out as planned, of course. It was almost a year later before I got my grant to go, and in the meantime my stepmother had died. She wasn’t joking, she said. My stepmother’s last words. I carry them engraved upon my heart.

  When I arrived in London I didn’t bother looking Ainslie up for a few weeks.

  She would keep. No good scurrying for the safe and familiar in my business. That’s why they picked me to collect WORÉ's remains from the British Museum.

  5

  Who were they?

  They were my people. We were very closely knit. After one genocide you didn’t branch out much.

  There were three children. When our real mother died the extended family looked after us. When they died, we were fostered out. Emma and I were twins. And then there was Jimmy. Jimmy was born with a bubble on the back of his head which went pink and yellow, and when it was cold, blue. Then they amputated the bubble and Jimmy’s head was covered in blood and Mum said the spinal fluid wasn’t going to form there anymore. Jimmy grew up listless and silent and it was a long time before he could speak. When he did speak there were long silences. Slowed down by his disability, he always seemed to have time, like a great footballer with a clearing kick, appearing ridiculous to some and profound to others. But life was cruel and things changed rapidly.

  Jimmy began knocking off car badges and turning them into belt buckles and sold them to other kids, and while I was watching him one day two policemen nabbed us, one with his arm around Jimmy’s neck and one holding my stump up my back. At the station I convinced them Jimmy was a retard and even undid his shirt to show the scars on the back of his neck and said how the spinal fluid would run if the skin was punctured and if this yellowy stuff came out it would mean he would die in their custody, particularly since they were manhandling him, their big police paws slapping at him since Jimmy was falling off to sleep. He did that often when there was stress. They’d never dealt with disability before, so they let us go with a caution and said we were lucky not to cop a size 12 police boot, to boot. I knew then that I had a gift. Knew that I had to speak. For Jimmy; for all the contradictions. Maybe it was because I had the sun and the sea and I knew there was something there beyond thought, in the same way that Jimmy was beyond misery.

  Then a week later, Mum died of a heart attack. Jimmy went to sleep in Uncle Ronnie’s car and Uncle Ronnie went fishing and left the car in gear because the hand-brake didn’t work and somehow the car jumped into gear on the slope and went walloping down over the rocks and settled very slowly into the water, hardly making a sound. When Uncle Ronnie came back the car was gone and he cursed and swore and wondered why he’d ever taught the kid to drive.

  It was then that I began to agitate. I’ve been agitating ever since. And that was how I got to London.

  Not through agitation. I’d written a book. But I did have a particular voice that was hard to ignore. I used to go to every demonstration, proclaim with passion my own private repression. It embarrassed people. Passion always did. They tried hard to connect with it. And when politicians attended, I could wheel out a three-pronged irony which made them uneasy. People loved cripples. They partly identified, partly felt guilty, partly respected its power… all of which could be reversed at any moment. People were parts. My gift lay in that recognition. I revelled in complication, ambivalence, ambiguity. I could cross the floor at any time, convinced the most indecent operation of the human mind was the either/or; or the bifurcated brain. That’s why I could speak outside of logic; of that dark irrationality forbidden to moralists; of that deeper purpose: graceful and transcendent malignancy.

  That’s why I was deputised to collect WORÉ's head from the British Museum.

  The curator had no idea I was coming. What’s the name? he asked, shuffling along germ-ridden backrooms amongst the mummies. I told him we didn’t name the dead… WORÉ simply meant woman. Oh, we have heaps of tribal cadavers, he said.

  The authorities were accommodating… a traditional strain of politeness practised towards madmen and savages who came to claim. They rolled out the red carpet for Ghandi, but gave me scones and tea instead, relieved this wasn’t the Elgin Marbles all over again and I did some signing, even an autograph here and there. Then they brought out a cardboard box and I ceremoniously wrapped it with a flag I’d brought with me and transported it slung from a shoulder strap from Russell Square to my digs in Clapham, on the Tube and
all the way felt someone watching me, watching over the relics.

  Don’t get me wrong. I felt entrusted with a sacred duty; but you had to see the parts that weren’t so sublime: having my great-great-grandmother’s head in a box under my bed in a cold B & B in East Clapham. Nights I read medical books. Kept up with my studies.

  Autophony: a form of auscultation in which the examiner speaks close to the patient’s chest and notes the modification in his own voice as affected by the conditions of the patient’s chest.

  Back home the newspapers unkindly said I was listening to the Community Chest, but mainly I was listening to my own… oh, the feelings that cannot be articulated there! The sensitivities which would render me powerless after a century and a half of pent-up frustration. Yet I dreaded the emptiness underneath it all… the inaccessible self. No such thing as an individual. We are the sum of our ideas. Mamamamamamama. Quaquaquaquaquaquaqua. In the dead of night I spoke, with my ear to the box, my hand which they had shaken and betrayed when alive and black, on my beating heart.

  A week later, when I had almost run out of money, my publishers rang to say I was on the shortlist for a prize. I demanded an upgrade. So they put me in a five-star hotel in Knightsbridge and I went to call on Ainslie.

  Ainslie Cracklewood. When I saw her again in London she was more desirable than ever. Gone was the tourist, the unsettled, restless traveller, the seeker after experience. Here she was displaying the vulnerability, danger and lethargy of one who had recently shed a husband. Yes, you could say a slow reptilian fire burned in her, a passionate and smouldering intensity waxing and waning with the day, a consumption devoutly to be avoided. I went up in the lift with my box. I took it everywhere since hotel staff could not be trusted. Ainslie’s apartment was a huge space, a kind of penthouse in Bloomsbury, with attic windows and slate clattering down into the guttering when I shook open the windows. It was unnaturally warm. I had a desire to sprint across the floor, from the door to the front windows. It was long enough for a good sprint, but stopping would have been difficult, especially with the window open. I come from a long line of jumpers. Ainslie, I could see, wasn’t in the mood for such activity.