“Leave her alone!” I screamed. “Leave her alone!” All of me wanted to rush back down to the dock, to help them, my father, my grandmother. The soldier raised a hand and struck her again. My voice got lost in all the commotion, rising upward like smoke dispersed by the whipping of the sails, but one soldier heard me and walked towards me, his hands lowering his musket from his shoulder and lifting it to me.
“Stop!” shouted Makepeace. “I don’t know who that girl is, hand on the Bible,” she said, stumbling to her feet. I looked at her but she wouldn’t look back at me.
“Hurry along,” the captain said and I felt my helplessness prickle through me. “You don’t want to go wasting your family’s hard-won money now, do you?” he said and I looked at his face and saw a kindness there. He took my elbow and led me across the deck, where a sailor sat whittling at a piece of wood, his wood shavings spinning through the air like sparks.
The captain then led me to the rear of the ship, down some stairs and knocked on a door. An older woman answered and stepped aside for me to enter. Spread down the centre of the room was a large table and chairs, fanned on either side by hammocks strung from the ceiling and filled with the sleeping. Beneath my feet the ocean swelled, restless, ever moving. The matron showed me my hammock and I crawled into it, like a caterpillar in its cocoon, and slept in the ship’s belly.
THIRTY-SIX
Eglantine, 1838
When I next opened my eyes a lantern was lit and sent ghost waterfalls up the walls, light reflected from the porthole as big as a mermaid’s mirror. Around me moved other women, their voices felt far away, the ship all sway on the greenish waters. Someone retched, seasick and as helpless as a newborn. All I desired was fresh air, great big gulps of it, but all I could do was breathe the fetid air and make do. The matron came with water and a flannel; sometimes I thought she was Makepeace and I reached for her, but the matron just returned my arm to my side.
Time passed differently on water, the clocks kept time with the tide, though the captain kept his ship run to his own instrument. Early the women rose and breakfasted and were ushered up on deck to help under the strict supervision of the matron until they returned for dinner; the smells of cooking made me bury my face in the calico hammock, feeling my whole body revolt – at food, at sleep, at life itself. All of me was heavy, confined to my hammock; I had no will to move, grown suddenly homeless, rootless, made an orphan by everything my father had created, but even then I loved him. I pushed away the thought of him swinging. He was my father. He’d kept me safe in the only way he knew how, he’d given me whatever love he had, taught me what he knew – none of it perfect, but mine. And what of Makepeace? Her cry still echoed in my ears. I was a ship lost of all ballast at the mercy of whatever wind blew, spinning into the darkness. I retched in the motion of the ship with my loss.
At some point I woke and the layers of my clothing had been removed; I’d been peeled of layers like a pearl until I was just a speck of dirt. I looked around for them madly, for I’d lost my bag in the fray, but I saw them folded at the foot of my hammock. The matron, seeing me try to sit up, came over and placed a hand on my back.
“All is well, Mrs Fookes, all is well,” she said and I looked at her clearly for the first time. She was not like Makepeace at all, she was tall and broad, her grey hair pulled back severely from her face, but she was not unkind in her expression. “It’s not uncommon for women in your condition to find the voyage an added chore,” she said. “No point sending you to the infirmary and risking you and the baby.” She said it, the word hanging in between us like a question, answered.
“But the fresh air would do you good if you found a way to raise yourself,” Matron said. I tried to do as I was told.
The brightness was blinding, light reflected on both the wood and the water. The world danced with light. I shielded my eyes with a saluting hand, too dazzled by the open sea, with no green earth to rest my eye upon. A sailor was stitching a tear in a swathe of sail, a toothpick dallying between his lips, though he still managed to sing too ra, loo ra la, aye. The matron’s hand was on my back.
“Look here, Mrs Smith, over the side, the sailors’ friend come to say hello they have,” the sailor said, the toothpick never leaving his lips. Together we all peered over the ship’s edge and saw dolphins streaming alongside in the spray, sending a shimmering fine mist all over us. Matron Smith moved me away from the edge of the ship, tutting at the ocean for sending such streams of water, but I felt it fall on my skin, salty and wet, breaking whatever fever had settled upon me, breaking the trance of it, the loss of all I’d known. My tears seeped through the knotty wood of me.
A seabird hovered close to the side of the ship, observing us before it took a higher current of the breeze, inspecting the other passengers who appeared blinking against the glitter.
A wave slopped over the side of the vessel in an almighty swell of water and saturated all on deck.
“Below decks, below decks,” the captain commanded and quickly the others fled below, the sky pressing us down into the hold as lightning licked across the sky, but I stood transfixed by the water, the green glassy swill of it reaching up onto the deck and soaking through my shoes, before Matron Smith tugged at my arm and I let her lead me down below deck.
The waters raged with a deafening roar and I retreated to my hammock, trying to surrender myself to the wild ebb and flow. Women were sick everywhere; a wooden bowl was pitched off the table and slid across the floor, back and forth, but none had the balance nor the will to retrieve it. Someone was singing. All the while Matron Smith’s voice boomed above the din with, “Save me, O God: for the waters are come into my soul.”
It was then I saw the eye.
The eye filled the porthole as it swivelled all over us, searching, seeking, peering, and the more it did, the more I felt like a magnetised compass needle, spinning every which way. When it spied me I wanted to scream for it was so vast and so large and I felt the vertigo of space fall between us and drag me down as a funnel does water. Did anyone else see it? And then the eye was gone and the waves subsided, soothed into submission by a magnificent spume of water that reflected a rainbow into the cabin. And I felt the little seahorse within me flutter for the first time and my body move in time with the ocean, instead of against it.
The next time I made it up on deck, a light rain fell and I opened my mouth to it, like a creature too long kept in the desert. The other passengers filled the deck, with excitement, ready to cross the line.
“All hail Neptunus Rex,” the sailors cried out, “and his bride, Queen of the Seas, Amphitrite, Goddess of the Waves.” Passengers cheered at the sailors dressed as the King of the Sea and his bride, who stood with buckets in their hands, unshaven, dressed in shells and rope.
“Landlubbers, prepare to be initiated into our solemn mystery, the ancient order of the deep,” Neptune said and splashed the contents of their buckets all over us, drenching us. From up through the planks of wood and into my feet I felt a deep sound vibrate, loud and sonorous, the echo of the conch, so low that even the seagulls observed it in silence.
The celebrations continued on deck until the early evening, the first stars casting their shimmering reflection in the water. When the bell was called for dinner, my fellow passengers dispersed below decks, but I was reluctant to follow. I stayed on deck and watched the ocean stream behind the ship as we moved slowly through it. The sails hung slack against their masts, an embrace in repose; above them pooled a strange greenish light around their highest tip and I stood and watched it, like the reflection of a jewel through a loupe. I watched the rippling wonder of the double moon, one in the sky, the other in the water, shedding light like a briar rose does petals across the dark water.
I held my hands over the edge of the deck, hovering above the water, and thought how easily it would be to add one foot, then another; I’d not be alone as I exchanged water for breath. All it would take would be one step. What if I had left all I knew to a
rrive still at nothing? There was no guarantee that Fookes had even arrived or that he would have me still. All my pain would be gone, just as my mother’s had, the water slipping over my head, filling my nose, my lungs, my mouth, a liquid caress.
All the water called to me. My feet itched with wanting to move, to stretch, to leap.
But what of my mother’s sacrifice, all she had done to save me? I would not deny the life that grew in me. I would not undo what could not be undone.
I unlooped the putsi from around my throat and held it suspended out over the water, weighed in my hand, a dark heart. The ocean beneath was spangled, each wave tipped by starlight, and I felt my mother’s presence, her voice in my ear, her breath in the hush of the water. She was the sea in my heart.
I let the putsi go. My eyes held it for a moment before it disappeared into the dark, hitting the water with a tiny splash, and was gone. Piece of velvet, river pebble, curl of hair, beans and fragments of petals. Gone was the thin coral like a cut. Across my throat I felt a lightness, the salt air made my skin tingle, and I made my way back to the cabin.
After crossing the line, the ship hit its stride, the wind in the sails driving us over the water, the days and nights blending together in a parade of sunrises and sunsets, fogs and storms, nights where forks of lightning seemed to erupt from the waters like Neptune’s trident. The air grew warmer and birds began to take their rest up amongst the sails at night, their beaks beneath their wings, never lifting their heads as I made my nightly orbit around the deck, my footsteps growing less frantic, more determined, I’d forge a road yet.
When we rounded the headland into Port Jackson I squinted against the light. The cliffs were rosy stone and they flanked us on each side, the sailors’ singing filling my ears. From below deck they all came, all the fellow passengers, their faces sunlit and bright, all of us looking in anticipation of arrival but each seeing different things, the future spread before us in shades of gold. But what future would I have? When Makepeace read the seeds, all she saw was a journey where I was not alone, but what then? As we passed through the heads and into the swell of the harbour, the passengers all raised their voices to sing to the captain, “For he’s a jolly good fellow” and the captain dipped his hat to the ladies.
The harbour was filled with ships of every size all jostling for space, the sailors called out to each other, the sound of human activity, a roar from the port after the constant sea-song of ship, water and wind. People were as small as dolls on the horizon. As night fell everyone returned to their cabins ready to disembark in the morning. Lights hung off the prows of the ships and on shore, pretty as any jewel strung with ribbons.
The morning brought new birdsong, a strange black and white bird carolling us from the deck. Such music in one bird, I’d never even imagined, the strangeness of its herald.
“It’s a magpie-lark,” Matron Smith said. “But not to worry, she’s not after silver things.”
I laughed then; it was welcome to all the silver I had and I’d not care.
Magpie, black and white not a green sheen of feathers in sight, not even a hint. Kakkaratchi, I heard my mother’s word for it as clearly as I heard the magpie’s wardle-ardle.
“Kakkaratchi,” I said aloud. The bird turned and looked at me with her amber eye and swooped to shore.
We were in the first boat that came to land, and I declined a gentleman passenger’s hand to help me find my feet. My legs still tipped with the ebb and flow of the water; I didn’t care that my petticoats trailed all the way from the ship to the shore, flicking the water, my hand like a salmon against the tide. Once on shore I’d follow the directions the matron had given me to find my way to Richmond, where Fookes had told me I’d find him. But would he be there? Fookes’s face wavered in my memory, pieced together with ripples; I didn’t remember the sound of his voice. Did he still think of me or was he in pursuit of his fortune without another thought?
I heard my father’s scoff, my little shoemaker, married by a bit of water and a shared cup.
I stepped onto new land.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Eglantine, 1838
The whole quay was filled with noise and it struck at me as a physical thing after the sounds of the open sea. A man stood singing just like in the streets of London, “Fish fish-o,” and I felt the globe shift beneath my feet, the fish scales shimmering with light. I stepped over small wicker cages where black swans were trapped, their scarlet beaks poking through the gaps. A woman with her skirts hitched up to her knees, her bare feet brown with dirt, sat plucking the feathers of a living bird. She plucked at its down, the finer feathers floating in the air around her; the rest of the down she placed in a basket beside her, the animal too exhausted to strike her back.
It was difficult to get my bearings, to follow Matron’s directions; the light seemed to seep into my eyes, my brain, addling me with glitter, the water struck golden. The salty lap of it hit the sandy strip of beach and I was afraid.
A riverman was leaning against a tree, enjoying his pipe, the smoke twirling up into the green-grey leaves of the eucalypts. I watched as the smoke vanished, apprehensive. On the ship I’d begun to feel weightless, the vessel lending me its buoyancy, its possibility. But now all I felt was heaviness. What if Fookes wasn’t there?
“Can I help you, miss?” the riverman asked, his white clay pipe still hanging from his lip, dangling in the balance, his boots caked in thick river clay. I stepped forward and felt his eyes on the swell of my belly. “Missus,” he corrected himself. His stare set off an itching on my belly as if a swarm of ants ran across the surface of my skin, but I was unable to scratch.
“Mrs Fookes,” I corrected him and watched his face for recognition of the name, hoping that he’d say something of my Fookes, but he said nothing. His boat was not as large as the boat my father had rowed upon the Thames; it was wedged into the sand, the prow marked Gypsy Queen. The name made me shiver.
“Are you headed down Richmond way?” I said, looking at the scrub closer to the shore. I prayed that Fookes had kept his path. A group of natives in their vardo made of sticks were gathered around a fire, partially clothed, their voices low. Another man stood smoking a clay pipe, a soldier’s jacket covering his chest, but as for his trousers, they were completely missing. I looked away. A large parrot raised its scratchy voice from the nearest tree and it echoed out above us, a yellow crown of feathers arching on top of its head.
“Aye, Richmond by and by,” he said. “For a fee.”
With effort I pulled the wedding ring off my swollen finger, dropped it in his palm and watched the circle of it spin. He picked it up and bit it between his teeth.
“I’ll take you there and back again for that. Ready when you are.” The riverman held out his hand to help me in, and this time I gratefully accepted the help.
The riverman pushed the boat into the clear water, and it made a dark tidal stain on his trousers, before he hoisted himself up into the fine boat, made of a beautiful honey-coloured wood. The water was sparkling; greenish blue and wondrous, the light fell through it like star-shine. One of the natives walked down towards us. She was dressed in petticoats and a blanket that she wore tight around her shoulders, a scarf tied firmly under her chin. Around her neck hung a pouch woven in threads of ochre and brown, and a brass crescent etched with words. Her hair and her face were as dark as Saint Sarah’s herself.
“Thanks for keeping watch on the cargo and the boat, Cora,” the riverman said.
“Come with you up river, sir?” she said and the riverman nodded. She waded through the shallow water towards the boat, but the riverman didn’t hold out his hand for her, though she was in need of assistance. I reached out but she declined and lifted herself into the boat, the edge of her blanket starting to steam in the sun.
“This is Mrs Gooseberry. Mrs Gooseberry, this is Mrs Fookes.”
I nodded at the native woman, my eyes never leaving the pouch of woven grasses around her neck; I felt a longing run
through me like a note of sound ringing my entire wooden body, as hard as a woodsman’s axe.
With an oar in each hand the riverman rowed us out across the water, the salt, the eucalyptus, the strange fuzzy blossoms blooming along the bushes and the sunshine making a peppery perfume as we passed.
Cora Gooseberry took a pipe from the folds of her petticoat skirts and looked at the riverman for a light, but he shook his head that he didn’t have one. Undeterred, Mrs Gooseberry took the pipe in her teeth and sucked on the unlit stem.
My eyes followed the glittering water to the coastline that turned inlet to riverbank under the oars. What was this hell my father had spoken of? All I saw was strangeness and promise, all of it overlit, not even my bonnet shielded my eyes from the glare of this world.
Downriver a native woman picked her way over the small inlet, a baby strapped to her body with a blanket. Mrs Gooseberry called out to her and waved. She was missing part of her finger. The woman on the shore stood and waved and called back, the language their own.
I watched that missing finger until it curved back around the base of her pipe.
“What happened to your finger, Mrs Gooseberry?” I asked. The riverman never lost the rhythm of his rowing for a moment, the rushing of the water ceased and we glided on across the water that grew darker and deeper as we went down the river.
“Women’s business,” Mrs Gooseberry said and smiled and nodded.
“They cut a part of the finger off the girl infants when they are a few months old, the second part when they reach puberty,” the riverman said and Mrs Gooseberry frowned at him.
“But why?” I said, feeling the nausea rise and fall in me.
“An offering of some sort, to the deep,” the riverman said, the sun beating down on the boat, a sheen of sweat beading his face.
The River Sings Page 28
