by Brian Castro
Yes, he said, Sperm rid himself of tuberculosis through obsession alone, riding these cliff-tops every morning.
He gulped down his drink and then seeing mine, swallowed that too. Strange for a Pakistani caught on the wrong side of Partition.
Come, he said. I’ll show you.
I followed. It was the sort of thing you did with mentors. We walked along a line of pines towards the creek. There was a wind. He stumbled once or twice over fallen branches and pine cones and I had to support him with my good arm as we walked over the wooden bridge. Under it, the stained water rippled red and frothy. We climbed the hill on the other side, following a sheep track, trying at first not to step on the pellets and then, resigned to the amount, tramped over them. Presently the trees ended and the stunted bushes thinned and a heath extended along the hilltop, tussocky grass concealing the steepness of the cliff-edge. At the top, he pointed to a clearing.
There! he shouted and strode off.
Here, he said, panting, this is where he would have come. Here, kneel. Our age forbids such regularity. Kneel, for God’s sake and listen to the hacking cough, the dry fever of an afternoon drawn to the coolness of an open door; out there the sea beyond the hut, here, the remains of a chimney crumbling to a husk, still black these stones, plates of simple clay he held heated to his chest, and there engraved with the image of his lungs, fragments of mottling and cavitation; here, feel the wind and its time entering through the stone where the lintel and threshold have fused, just there he would have stood, contemplating the opening, as if the afternoon had let him down, rejected his plea for the next rising of the sun; listen; smell the salt upon that sea and you can smell him, the clothes on him all he had, maybe a bedroll and an quartpot or two flapping and clanging about him and the leather bridle, signal of a new start on land, a pipe when he felt the mood at night; no, listen for the poetry that had left him, strangled with the past before he was born, a man of too much feeling and vision spending too much time chasing the fate that would kill him; sleeves out of his shirt, neck goitered and face scarred, arms snake-bitten, his work amounting to nothing, rookeries destroyed by sheep and cattle; he came here returning from that infernal island where he found his woman buried, body without a head in a grave the size of a baby’s; came here to die, kill himself by eating of the land, chewing soil and drinking in freezing storms, chains around his neck when the lightning drew close; each afternoon in the days that followed the deaths he gathered up a handful of this dirt, soaked still in the blood of slaughter, and ate it carefully. See how rich it is; and yet we frail mortals cannot absorb it. Streptomycin.
I received the dirt from his hands.
Yes, he continued, not far from here he received his spear wound, a crude pneumothorax, the almost-fatal barb without which he would not have breathed, and when he visited the island, when he found WORÉ dead, decapitated like a wallaby, legs stiff and bent foetus-like when he exhumed the body, he became the killer that he was… he had come to the moment, you see… there was no reason, just that coming to the moment… single-handedly ridding the island of anything that breathed… marooned sailors, itinerant whalers, escaped felons. He lived on muttonbirds, learned to remove the small gland from the stomach, squeeze out the oil, mix it with honey and swallow it slowly. It cured the cough. But he had seen the settlements, the native enclosures, the institutions. He had seen the kinds of settlers they sent up from Hobart. Someone must have known about it. Someone must have been keeping records. The idea must have come first… and after that always following like the Angel of Death, the gratuitous act.
I’ve relaxed, he said. I’ve slept, dropped the oars to look at the shoreline, drifted in and out of lagoons admiring their beauty… and yes, it was beautiful, but I lost my purpose. I fell in love and almost drowned.
I knew who he was then.
Sperm wasn’t writing a novel, Byron Johnson said. He was on a punitive raid.
The waves spat up onto the rock-face, mist curling over the top; clouds scudding low; the grass engorged; muttonbirds weaving a threnody of notes across the sea; it grew dark and I felt a tremor in the soul. I liked masquerades, but not the responsibility of catering to madness. I knew how much like rolling thunder that was… I knew too, the gentle, disconnected nights of holding a mute sister in my arms.
Ainslie said you were fair.
He took a deep breath.
That too is absorption, he wheezed.
You’ve got it wrong, I said, we’re none of us black anymore.
Yes… he answered, watching a tern arc its flight across the sky, those familiar grey, angled wings, smoky-cold, like Antarctic ice… but the intensity serves its purpose.
He pointed.
That bird surpasses itself in the joy of flight. It’ll die on some ice floe, without desiring at any time to move to the tropics. But its flight transcribes something for us… the shape of a thought unthought: its anonymity both its joy and sacrifice.
He turned to me and smiled. It’s not alcoholism… it’s not what you think.
I wasn’t thinking that, though it crossed my mind… the jaundiced symptoms, liver-malfunction, minimal eating… these could bring on a deep tan. But he had gone beyond that. His pigmentation cells, the melanocytes, had already started their own revolution, increasing their activity with sunlight; anarchy, perhaps. The degree depended of course, on that mischievous enzyme tyrosinase… and the injection of copper.
He turned and began walking down the sheep-track.
I would appreciate it, he panted, if you don’t mention me to Ainslie. It’s not relevant to her.
I was determined, however, to meet with him again, involuntarily learning his mimetic association with the past… already the nervous tic; already the sardonic smirk, passing through him to me.
8
Not fixed yet, Byron Johnson was thinking as he returned to his room in the hotel. That’s what that fellow McGann doesn’t seem to realise. We’re not fixed in our deadly purpose of grand folly. How therefore to construct the work? Bring about the act itself? Let whosoever dare sign here:
________________________________
Thomas McGann indeed. His name brings pain to these stern intercostals. No succussations of laughter driving down the gall yet; just the visigoths of the night; pathetic dreaming of gaol-cells, and like all dreams, were visitations from the Devil; out, out, dreaded succubi, Oedipal analysts! How you have diminished us! Ah, disinfectant come to save me from their smell! They’ve cleaned out the vomit from the previous night. Good for them. That’s something to count on in a family hotel. See this dreaded limp… from stumbling many times, for many years… long attenuated by weights, balls and chains in the best health clubs, preparing, waiting, longing for the next oiling season; oh, how she hung above like an adamantine star in a tempestuous sky, while her patient, impatient, roiled in wetted illness: Emma, dear Emma, no vision nor persuasion from an austere past were you. So there; your cloven-hooved author has sent word… by appearing, wholly present… well, maybe not quite whole; Aha! A pressurised can of deodorant which will presumably mask the mask of disinfection; there; stinging perfumery far wilder than castor. Heave ho. Reach for the starched beaver. Retch. Again, no. No need for the surgeon’s muzzle now. Things are gathering apace; pestilence, plagues. Sweet anaesthesia, how coincident such dreams and acts under your authority! It was imperative a McGann would come to record it all. No, not the vomit. McGann’s flickering paleness gives him the authority. For this skin has silenced the unauthentic, endowed a potential simply for action, not words. Wait. No doubt about that. Draw another syringe from the velvet-lined case. A gift. Hold it like a cigarette. Into the thigh. Extinction. No longer white, unquestioning, biblical. No more dreams of primogeniture and ownership. No longer an author. What a relief. That McGann came running. An amanuensis; a porte-parole; a vicarious vox. There’s profit in playing him like a fish, teasing out his sincerity and then to pounce upon his twin. Nothing to lose; a double-agent to fate; plan and
yet unplan; build and explode. Why do we seek love upon death, from which others are quick to run? Why, to balance the books of course; fill the emptiness of the final hours with an illusion we were still capable of a goal at the final whistle. But the result is always a foregone conclusion: love - 0; death - 1. Tired. Enough. The lava’s cold, like stone. Here, the form of a human soul. Something there that nags me though, a missing emotion. See this sodden letter… sent by the proprietor of the café where I used to work… Stromboli himself… to say my mother had… gone… passed away in the night… she’d arisen for something and fell, hit her head on the side of the kitchen table… that awful laminex from which she was always slipping to the floor… cut herself open and died that way… blood strewn all over, so they didn’t know at first whether she had been the victim of foul play. Yes, Stromboli always harboured intentions. Of becoming a writer. His description profited from distance, though at the time of reading it passed me like a blur. He had polished it as a kind of elegy and that made me doubly guilty. So there it was. Claustrophobia at the hands of others. They’ll expect me to go back. Not my mother though. Not her. She’ll expect me elsewhere. I’ll be along shortly, I cable Stromboli. But don’t wait up.
Four o’clock. Walk down three flights of concrete steps. Children playing in the spa, seeming very happy, laughing and giggling and ducking each other, surfacing and making faces. Smile back at the innocents. The afternoon walk past the kitchens and round to the back where they stack the bottles and cans and empty beer kegs. The ground wet, garbage cans crawling with maggots which are making off wriggling toward the grass when I stir them with my boot, the grease-trap clogged and overflowing and the cleaner who likes to be known as a greasologist, though hard to see where the logos was involved, says not a word nor has ever been known to, digging out mounds of fatty substance; peculiar smell with a pungency all its own; dogs barking, couple of large German Shepherds tied near the bottle-department which I silence and unhook and let them slurp and jump and wag and we all go for a walk to terrify cats. I’m black and in my element. Though they didn’t have dogs to hunt with and were therefore superb hunters, great survivors in a harsh land, wind-chill pulling below zero, wrapped only in wallaby fur, maybe stitched possum vests and bare flesh and head covered in layers of grease, fat, wax… and understanding which substance had purpose and which ornamental, had several words for grease and so were the true and original greasologists. Watch the waves swirl into grey slop. Night moving inexorably onward and the erstwhile writer feels these cold pebbles underfoot. This, the substance of the world; counting-stones. Nothing here but the grand folly of infinity. Let me lay them down, one after one, for that is the only way; no metaphysics, no fancy, no belief in the common experience. Rise. Shake off the wet sand. Over there, the end of the beach indistinct in smoky spray and mist, further on past more curvaceous beaches piked by sentinels of submerged and jagged rocks, further round again… are sharp points, horns of unicorns, white apophyses streaked with lime; over there, the outline of my body, beached in froth like a jellyfish. There, I had the undifferentiated experience of a critical and voluptuous state, my howls informed by primary and unsocialised rigour. Listen. Hear how detached now, this dry observation. And there I met a woman, and we were joined by a shared circumscription of the letters of passion and fury, before we were both split apart by a different season of the mind… or by the rituals of gender, I know not which.
She told me what had happened at Cape Grim, and I said to her: I want to go there; to see it.
To see what was happening.
Sperm McGann spurred his horse up on to the rise and saw a cloud of dust. A mob of sheep making for open ground, stumbling, jumping, and in among the grey and white there were natives, running with them. He reined in the horse and felt his heart beating. His condition had made him over-sensitive to sight and sound. He looked to the right and saw in the low scrub men dismounting, saw them kneel and heard musket fire which seemed to have two reports, saw the smoke, heard the slapping sound which brought down sheep, men, those who crawled; saw animals kick over, natives trying to seek cover, women tripping, running one-legged and stiff-limbed, one or two children clinging on. The firing didn’t stop. Then the horses came down into their midst and soon the sheep went one way and the Pennemuker people the other, making for the sea like lemmings, irrationally, illogically leaping, leaping, and leaping.
Soon nothing but the sheer cliff and haze of dust; water glistening, waves pelting ashore one or two bodies, arms asunder waving like kelp.
NOWHUMMOE! they had cried, coughing, panting, feeling the contractions in their chests.
And the waves boomed into the sea-caves.
Sperm McGann saw them tumble from what is now called Victory Hill. Heard the thudding of bodies onto rocks; saw the slow ragged waves beat back the shapes and drag them out and the white men reining in their horses from the edge, some turning and herding back the sheep without waiting and a trio cantering back and forth firing at the waves. Saw the devil.
Nowhummoe.
McGann sat and watched and felt nothing, his horse stepping over spears wedged furtively in the buttongrass, beads of blood clinging crimson and black on the weed-stalks, and then he gradually fell into himself, into some secret, indistinguishable pleasure wrapped in grief as he saw the swell lift what was left into the smoky and cavernous ovens of the earth. The slaughter was neatly hidden and buried. They won’t return; that was the last of them, he said to himself, his lungs rasping and he looking to the reddening hills for a distant promise of rest. In the shadows through which he rode he smelled the shale-breath of the cold and the wet and rotting vegetation, and jumped the moss-caked logs feeling the cramp in his thighs.
Not far from the road to Cape Grim. It was night. There was a grassy knoll near the sea. Emma’s ute crunched and bounced over the hidden rocks. She led the man who had come from the sea towards the fires spaced out in the caves beneath the cliffs, where the birders would gather to wait for boats in the oiling season; amongst the illuminated shapes of the past; the soft dancing and the lion-maned silhouettes of greased and ringleted hair; the sighs of time squeezing out of burning driftwood, white husks collapsing into the redness; she led him among the errors which would never be righted, amongst the disregard and the neglect and the trammelling of centuries. She stopped on a patch of sand and made him kneel down. And then she removed her tee-shirt and in the flames he saw her ochre-dusted breasts, tattooed, one word above each: Whitey Sucks. Mica in her hair like stars.
She had spread pine needles on the sand. He lay back on them and heard his own voice, far back in time, during a Christmas in Hammersmith, and saw his father dressed like Santa Claus pushing a woman in a thin dress up against the wall of the pub.
Then the air was beaten by the blades of a machine and he saw sand sifted through the light, deep rumbling now, the beach shaking. Caught between the devil and the sea, he saw the natives run towards the cliffs. They were swift in the bush, but here moved ungainly, like seals over rocks. Only the women could swim, but the sea was no haven and it began to rain; hot pellets pushing them under.
‘They are here again,’ she said.
But he was losing consciousness by then.
Now he watches the dogs gallop over the ridges of sand, sending up bursts of gulls. He squats down near the water and looks out to sea, and then allows the tears to stream down his cheeks and onto Stromboli’s letter.
9
Tom McGann decided not to tell Ainslie her ex-husband had turned up.
The locals talked, sitting on their porches watching the tide come in and out. They talked about Ainslie with her plummy accent living with a fella who had black blood, a half-caste what’s more, who made a helluva racket about land rights and was pushing out fifth generationists, they were saying. Then these women on motorcycles began arriving and staying for weeks at a time. And then there was that black fella with a cockney accent, not an abo, no, but one of them Jamaicans, Pakis, tourists t
hey get out here when they’re not playing cricket or rioting… fell off a boat dead drunk, they said, and they had to send a helicopter for him… one of those real black ones… they were saying when they came into the newsagency to collect their magazines; Bikes and Boobs, Body-building Babes, Truck ‘n Trailer.
McGann crossed the street in front of the newsagency and the locals watched and when he was just within earshot began to talk more loudly. He walked slowly up the hill. At the brow of the hill he would turn right into Travers Lane and at the end of the lane the dirt road began and went straight out into the countryside and he would follow the creek a little, beating his way along a track parallel to the road and then cut up through the bush along a fire trail, crossing the peninsula, dipping now and then into rainforest and again into low-lying scrub and heath and some swamp grass spiked with balls of spoor, then forest again, tree ferns so tall they formed a canopy above him and then presently he would come to a gate, a cattle grid over a small stream. Down the track a little more, and there it was: the wooden house almost completed, skylights in the roof, a deck hoisted on trestles above the canopy of rainforest from which you could see the water, the passage emerald green between the islands, once spouting with black whales. Ainslie’s house. Her goal to craft in isolation a structure in the wilderness and in the meantime they ate, slept, lived in an aluminium caravan rocking in the wind like a tiny sailboat in a sea of teatree. There’s courage there, he was thinking, and had been watching her for months while she and the other women scurried around with beams and lintels, marking out Oregon and Huon and Cypress with chalk at the joins, numbering them, cutting fox-tail wedging and tenon joints and dovetails and housings, checking the mortices and dowels, bracings, struts, studs… there’s courage there too, like a lone bird he saw winging its way across an ice-grey sky, and he felt dispossessed as if all conviction had been stolen from him. For Johnson too, had conviction, changing his skin knowing he would never be authentic, but articulating something there as though injected with divine mission. What were these people doing here, they, who all had a beginning made for them, both materially and psychologically, when he, Tom McGann, staked a patternless existence in his own land where even the government’s policy was drift, his stump useless in organising meaning for himself? For after that house fire he had started at the age of four, they were supposed to complete the plastic surgery, extend the bones, but somehow they forgot, his family out of pocket, the agencies neglectful, and so one carpel remained and waggled out of a web of skin… here, look… and this rarely enunciated notion of himself was as frangible as the frost which still lay in dark patches underfoot where the sun had not yet entered.
