Oscar and Lucinda bw-1988

by Peter Carey

  "A rank?"

  "Yes, sir, a rank. An admiral, a vice-admiral, someone who is entitled — in certain circumstancesto give orders to the captain of a pilot boat."

  Oscar and Lucinda

  "I am a gentleman, you knave," said Wardley-Fish.

  "You must not call me knave, sir. I am a captain."

  This answer made Wardley-Fish narrow his eyes. If all of New South Wales was like this, why then, it was beyond toleration-nothing would get done. You could not argue with a man about whether he was a knave or not.

  "I am a gentleman," he said.

  "And I am a captain, and it's the other captain I must take you to visit, not go running you across the harbour."

  "What other captain, man?"

  "The Captain of the Sobraon, the Captain from whose authority you have thought to run away." Wardley-Fish sprang to his feet, but the blessed boat was so small there was nowhere to go. In two paces he was at the wheelhouse where he met the possum-bright eyes of Arthur Spinks. He looked up at the Sobraon but its decks were now crowded with faces, all carefully observing his public disgrace.

  "I beg you, man," he hissed at Captain Simmons.

  A smile stirred in the depths of Captain Simmons's silver beard. i "You do not look like a begging sort of man," said Captain Simmons, and began to tamp his tobacco with a broad black thumb.

  Wardley-Fish cast another look towards the decks of the Sobraon. He caught the eye of Miss Masterson, she who, not five weeks before, he had imagined he was in love with. She did not avert her gaze, but neither did she smile. She looked down on him as if he were some species of marsupial rat.

  The barges were now a quarter of a mile away. Wardley-Fish considered swimming but knew he was too drunk for it.

  "Why do you take it to act so uncharitably?" he asked the captain. Captain Simmons thought that pretty rich: charity. But he said nothing.

  "If you are a captain," said the gent, "you must be the slowest-witted captain on the sea. I told you once, I told your man here twice-I only wish to see my friend. He is over there. There he goes. I have travelled all the way from London to see him. And he is there, damn you, and you will not take me. Take me, please, I beg you," cried Wardley-Fish, but his manner, as the Captain had previously observed, was not that of a begging man.

  "So he was on his way to see his friend," Captain Simmons exclaimed to his deckhand. "Is this the case?"

  "You know it is," said Wardley-Fish. ' *

  Laudanum

  "And yet, you know, I have the damnedest feeling that there is a problem of a friend behind you, some problem perhaps, a little debt incurred whilst gambling, or a matter between you and the purser on the Sobraon, some little thing like that which made this 'friend' you saw upon the barge seem like a chap you must get in touch with urgently, if you get my meaning."

  "Oh, you have a beastly, tricky little mind," roared Wardley-Fish. "Would you like money? I will give you five pounds if you take me where that barge has gone." Captain Simmons stood slowly. He tucked his pipe in his trouser pocket. "Ten pounds," he said. Wardley-Fish was caught in the tug of different violent passions his outrage at being robbed of ten pounds, his realization that he did not have ten pounds, that it was in his jacket aboard the ship, his knowledge that this hawk-nosed little chap would enjoy refusing credit, his mortification at disgracing himself in the eyes of the entire ship, his grief at missing his friend, his anxiety that all was not right with the Odd Bod who had seemed, in that ridiculous shirt and criss-crossed braces, like a poor fowl trussed up for a cooking pot. It was all of this, not his simple dislike of the sly aggressions of the pilot, that led him to pick the man up bodily in his bearlike arms and, with a terrible roar that could be heard by all aboard the Sobraon, hurl him into the water.

  The incident created complications that kept him a prisoner in Sydney for two days. On the third day he set off in search of Mr Jeffris's expedition.

  97 Laudanum

  He had accepted the laudanum for three days because Percy Smith had begged him to, but now he was resolved he would accept it no more. The laudanum did not suit him. It gave him unsettling dreams. It made him nauseous and jittery. It also produced severe constipation

  Oscar and Lucinda

  and now he had haemorrhoids and his anus itched and bled continually. He had no experience of haemorrhoids and imagined a condition far more serious. He had dreams involving shit and blood, the buggered carpenter, and the endless ridge roads out of Sydney, which laced through his imaginings like the stretched intestines of a slaughtered beast. The others had all washed. He had not washed. He would not stand naked before them. He splashed water on his face and forearms and calves, but the rest of his body felt cased with a grimy viscous film. His modesty was somehow offensive to the party. Mr Jeffris suggested that it would be in his interests "to reassure the men that you have all the correct equipment." Oscar had never hated anyone before (not even they who made him eat a stone, or those who had let rats loose in his room at Oriel) but he hated Mr Jeffris who was now, on the fourth morning of their journey, strutting around the dead brown dew-wet grass finding fault with his "soldiers" and their wagons.

  Oscar and Mr Smith stood beside their wagon. Mr Smith had the laudanum bottle perched on the metal step and the funnel stuck in the pocket of his twill trousers.

  "I do not have the strength to defy him," he said, crossing his burly, sandy-haired arms.

  "Then we will pretend," said Oscar. "You will pretend to pour. I will pretend to drink."

  "No," said Percy Smith. "He will know."

  Percy Smith had a kindly, decent face, one you would naturally trust to the end of the world. But Mr Jeffris had such a power over him that when Oscar looked at his face he was reminded of a rabbit on a laboratory bench assaulted by current from a voltaic cell.

  "I am employed by him," pleaded Percy Smith, blinking.

  "Look at him. He is too busy to know anything."

  Mr Jeffris pulled at a rope on the lead wagon in such a way that a vast lumpy canvas swag fell to the earth.

  "If you wish to change his orders, you must settle the matter with him."

  "Oh, mercy," cried Oscar in despair. "You were there when I attempted it."

  "And he said it could only be settled with Miss Leplastrier present. He does not accept your authority. But I must accept his. Dear Mr Hopkins, you are a good man-"

  "An angry man."

  "A good man, and I must ask you, please," said Percy Smith, sneaking his hand around Oscar's shoulder and suddenly clamping it around his jaw, "you must forgive me."

  "No," said Oscar. The back of his head was jammed hard against

  An Explorer

  the buckle of Mr Smith's crossed white braces. He was pulled back,and down, out of the shadow of the wagon. The sun laid a stripe across his livid face. A blow-fly settled on his nose. He tried to wave it away. Mr Smith clamped his wrist with his other hand. Two bullocks in the carpenter's team defecated at once. Mr Jeffris was bawling out the cook and threatening to make him walk without his boots. And at this moment, with Percy Smith's hand held around his jaw, Oscar thought: I do not even know where I am.

  Percy Smith had found the funnel and pushed it hard against his lips. Oscar opened his mouth. It hit his teeth. He opened more. He had already been cut. He could taste the blood. Percy Smith's breath was bad. He had his knees against the back of Oscar's knees, making him keel over backwards.

  "No," Oscar said, or tried to say, for trying to speak made him dry-retch.

  Percy Smith lowered him to the ground. Oscar did not struggle. His friend put a knee upon his chest. He had the stone bottle with "Manufacturing Chemists" engraved in brown upon its rotund middle. He pulled the cork with his teeth. And then, before he poured, he put the bottle down. He touched Oscar's cheek with the back of his hand. An odd, gentle, lover's pat. "I would not do this to you," said Percy Smith, "for anything."

  And then he poured the muck into the funnel.

  Oscar kicked o
ut with his boots. He connected with nothing. He hated Percy Smith. 98

  An Explorer

  Until he had the ill fortune to imagine a glass church and therefore be obliged to take this journey, Oscar's knowledge of the world had been severely limited. He was, by his nature, a creature suited to burrows and hutches and so even at Oriel-which many would see as a

  Oscar and Lucinda

  civilized and unthreatening environment-he had his definite tracks beside which there were great unexplored areas he was either frightened of or had no interest in.

  His knowledge of Hennacombe was confined to two households and various red-soiled paths no more than one foot wide. And although he had, in the very act of writing home, posed as an authority on Sydney, had been happy to relay the common platitudes (that it was, for instance, a working-man's paradise) he had known nothing of it.

  Now he felt himself cast into a morass and little dreamed he was dragging his puffing, saddlesore friend, the bewildered Wardley-Fish, through the muck behind him. He felt himself a beetle inside the bloody intestines of an alien animal. And any idea he had harboured that the bush was, as the engravings of the Sydney Mail might suggest, a pure and pristine place of ferns and waterfalls was soon demonstrated to be quite false. There were ferns, of course, and waterfalls. There were clouds of splendid birds but this was not the point.

  At Maitland, Wardley-Fish had been barely a day behind the party, but then there was a game of cards with squatters in a so-called Grand Hotel. He had tried to leave, but he was too far ahead and his cornpanions would not hear of it. By the time this game was finally settled Mr Jeffris's squeaking, whip-rattling convoy was far ahead: passing along burning ridges somewhere north of Singleton. The Odd Bod's eyes streamed. His lungs rebelled. His hard-sprung wagon lurched and banged over rocky tracks or squelched into fart-sour mud. The Odd Bod sat on a wooden bench and buttoned his long-sleeved shirt against the mosquitoes and the sun. He comforted the burly Percy Smith. He assured him that he was forgiven. The air was filled with foul language, such hatred of God as Oscar would have imagined suitable for hell itself. They travelled behind the quartermaster's wagon and thus behind the smell of bad meat which made up their diet. They travelled beside ugly windrows, great forest trees pulled into piles by settlers eager to plant their first crops.

  In a pretty clearing beside some white-trunked paper-barks, Oscar saw a man tied to a tree and whipped until there was a shiny red mantle on his white shoulders and brown seeping through his Anthony Hordern's twill trousers. His "mates" all watched. Oscar prayed to Jesus but no prayer could block out the smell of thé man's shit.

  He forgave Mr Smith. How could he not? He who stood witness to far greater crimes than his. He accepted his laudanum. He lay down on the grass and let the funnel be inserted. He had queer laudanum dreams and other thoughts you could not label so neatly.

  An Explorer

  If you plucked Sydney from the earth, he thought, like an organ ripped from a man, all these roads and rivers would be pulled out like roots, canals, arteries. He saw the great hairy, fleshbacked tuft, which he saw was Sydney, saw the rivers pushing, the long slippery yellow tracks like things the butcher would use for making sausages.

  While he saw all this, he also saw Percy Smith's unhappy, pale, blinking eyes as he handled his blackened short-stemmed pipe.

  He saw his father killing moths by driving copper pins into their eyes. He dreamed of enormous sea-shells, soft, like ladies' quilted jackets-pale pink, lilac, lily greencast up on a Devon beach. He had ecstatic dreams involving water in one of which his body assumed the form of a river. His anus itched. His head was jolted and thrown forward. Through all the physical discomforts, the dreams came to him, like complicated melodies played by a man lying in a bed of nettles. He dreamed he was somehow inside his father's aquarium. The cool water was very soothing to his prickling skin. He could see his father's wise and smiling face peering in at him. He could see, dimly, the outside world, the chair and benches of his father's study. Sunlight streamed through a window. He thought: That window faces north. He felt very happy for he knew that the sunlight meant his father was now in the southern hemisphere.

  But it was Wardley-Fish who was in the southern hemisphere. He was one day's fast trot behind the wagons. He had a tired horse, but plenty of money for a fresh one. He walked the darkflanked beast along the flat sandy path above the Macleay. The path was through tea-tree scrub. He came round a bend to find a man with a handkerchief tied across his face. As the man produced his pistol, bright loud birds flew across the path behind his shoulder. Oscar had dreams in which portions of the real world stumbled, like horses' hooves stuck in drought-cracked clay. These dreams were marked by the filigree of giant trees silhouetted against the sky, by beards, by curses, and the plant collector's German hymns. But only the longest and most beautiful dream transcended the jolting, jogging rhythms of the wagon. It involved a glass-house shaped like a seamless teardrop; the teardrop suspended in a wire net; the net held by cast-iron rods out from a cliff above the sea. On the sand below was the refuse from his other dreams, those enormous pink shells, his mother's buttons, a sherry bottle. In his dream he had one thought which turned and turned on itself like a shining steel corkscrew. The thought was this: I am not afraid.

  Oscar and Lucinda

  Wardley-Fish returned to Sydney in the company of a travelling draper of exotic extraction. He was indebted to the man for the trousers he wore. … ,".

  *-*.

  >K4f: V!' S*,

  99

  ArfOldm<^ltow

  The sand for our glassworks did not come from Bellingen, but from Yellow Rock, which is on the coast, not far from where Mr Jeffris's party finally emerged from the bush. The sand at Yellow Rock is not as good as the Botany sand which Dennis Hasset, and others before him, tried to promote in London and Sydney, but it is good enough sand. It produces a glass with a faint yellow tinge, the effect of which, in the windows of old Bellinger Valley farmhouses, is to make the kikuyu pastures a particularly dazzling green. The sand was held in big corrugated-iron hoppers and when these ran low my father would employ a gang of men and we would take three wagons over to Yellow Rock and load them. I say "we" because I went too, even-and I cannot see how this was so, except that it waseven on a school day. We would stay overnight at the Old Blacks' Camp.

  The Old Blacks' Camp consisted of seven weatherboard huts, built in a row. They were constructed after the style of the so-called "shelter sheds" which are still the feature of school playgrounds around Australia. They were bleak places, each with a single "room," a single door, three steps, one window. In these huts the surviving members of the Kumbaingiri tribe lived, and died.

  The only one I remember is the one they called Kumbaingiri Billy. More commonly he was known as Come-and-get-it Billy. I do not know his real name, or even his age. My father liked Kumbaingiri Billy. He always brought him bacon. I think they were friends, proper friends. They drank tea together. My

  Glass Cuts

  father never made jokes about him. Once he said: "Kumbaingiri Billy has more brains in his nose than the whole shire council wrapped into one."

  When I was ten, Kumbaingiri Billy told the story of "How Jesus come to Bellingen long timeago." Afterwards I made a patronizing joke about it and my father hit me around the legs with the electric flex from the kettle. I didn't make jokes about it again, although I listened to the story a number of times. Kumbaingiri Billy must have first heard it when he was very young, and now I think about it it seems probable that its source is not amongst the Kumbaingiri but the Narcoo blacks whom Mr Jeffris conscripted at Kempsey to guide the party on the last leg of its journey. But perhaps it is not one story anyway. The assertion that "our people had not seen white people before" suggests a date earlier than 1865 and a more complex parentage than! am able to trace. «

  100

  Glass Cuts

  The white men came out of the clouds of Mount Darling. Our people had not seen white men
before. We thought they were spirits. They came through the tea-trees, dragging their boxes and shouting. The birds set up a chatter. What a noise they all made. Like twenty goannas had come at once to raid their nests. Anyway, it was not nesting time. We thought they were dead men. They climbed hills and chopped down trees. They did not cut down the trees for sugar bag. There was no sugar bag in the trees they chopped. They left the trees lying on the ground. They cut these trees so they could make a map. They were surveying with chains and theodolites, but we did not understand what they were doing. We saw the dead trees. Soon other white men came and ring-barked the trees. At that time we made a song:

  VK

  « «

  Oscar and Lucinda

  Where are the bees which grew on these plains? av The spirits have removed them. 72

  They are angry with us.

  They leave us without firewood when they are angry. They'll never grow again. <>> t We pine for the top of our woods, ' .;

  but the dark spirit won't send them back. i. ^ ' ï 'The spirit is angry with us. < The white men spoke to two men of the Narcoo tribe. They were young men. They gave the white men a big kangaroo, and some coberra. The white men would not eat the coberra. They told the Narcoo men to show them the way to the Kumbaingiri, although the Narcoo men had never seen anyone from that tribe. They were neighbours, but they did not visit. The Narcoo men said: "You wait here."

  They went back to the tribes and the elders had a big talk and then they told the young men:

  "You keep them buggers going quick and smart."

  So that is what the young men did. They showed them the way, although it was not easy. They had seven wagons. Sometimes the boss would say: "We going to camp here." And then he would gallop off and chop down trees and make more maps. Then he would come back and say: "Right you are, we go now."

  It was in these camps the young fellows learned about Jesus. This was the first time they ever heard of such a thing. They were told the story of Jesus nailed.to the cross. They were told by the Reverend Mr Hopkins. Whenever they crossed a river this fellow had to lie on his back first. Then he would put a tin funnel in his mouth and then they would fill him up with grog. He must have been drunk, but the young men were never offered the bottle so they did not find out what it was he drank.