Preservation

by Jock Serong

  The tiny smile again. Figge had turned his head to stare into the straight-edged beam of light. He spoke without looking back at Grayling, slurring a little.

  ‘You have the others, then?’

  ‘Oh, of course. Yes, yes. We have accommodated them elsewhere in town.’

  ‘They are well?’

  ‘I believe so. I am yet to meet them.’

  Figge lifted himself up on the pillows with some considerable effort. He tried to reach across himself to lift the teapot; Grayling intervened, poured a cup and placed it in his hands. As the cup passed between them Grayling saw ripples in the tea from his own shaking hand. The liquid stilled when Figge took the cup.

  Grayling sat in the armchair, his eye line now slightly lower than that of the man in the bed.

  ‘Not too hot?’ He heard his own forced joviality.

  ‘No, it’s wonderful. I’ll be calling for the chamber pot after this, of course.’ Figge made a face that mocked exasperation, but Grayling was taken by something else. The choice of words, the delicacy about it.

  ‘Mr Figge, the governor is very interested in your story. As you know there has been so little exploration of the coast—indeed of anything beyond this settlement.’ The eyes in the bed shifted his way, evaluating. Under the swelling they burned bright.

  ‘What did you see out there?’

  ‘I believe Clark wrote it all down,’ he said eventually. ‘Did he not?’

  Grayling shifted in his chair and took a folder from the table where the tea service rested. ‘I have his account and also the letter from Captain Hamilton that he carried. Both are extremely helpful but they are…brief. I would value some more detail from you.’

  Grayling watched Figge take a deep sip from the teacup. ‘I’m tired just now. My grasp of events may not be acute.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Perhaps we could begin tomorrow. I could…I might read passages for you to comment upon. Would that be helpful?’

  The man shifted under the sheet, craned his neck. ‘You’d read it to me? The diary?’

  ‘And the letter, if that helps you.’

  ‘Never mind the letter, that won’t detain us long. But the diary…’ His sudden vigour opened a split in his lip; a bright red droplet appeared over the scarlet track of the old scab. He took up the teacup and drained the last of the tea, leaving a smear of blood on the china.

  ‘Come back tomorrow morning,’ he said, clearer now. His voice carried something softer than command. Persuasion. ‘I may speak to you then.’

  Grayling rose from the armchair.

  ‘Oh, lieutenant?’ The man was up on one elbow, smiling faintly. ‘It was bohea.’

  Grayling took a moment to understand. ‘Ah! Yes, very good, Mr Figge. I believe it was.’ He took up the tray and tucked the folder of documents under his arm. The room was still and silent again, but the unsettling presence of the man in the bed had lodged itself deep within him.

  As he closed the door behind him, he imagined the man becoming inert without the human company that lit him. The eyes would go cold and dark and the voice would recede somewhere, into some silent depth beyond the reach of the virtuous. Or the sane.

  In the space of ten minutes, the man in the bed had unnerved Joshua Grayling completely.

  3

  This, I must say, is a better fate than I’d expected. I am asked only to lie in bed and tell stories, and in return they’ll bring me tea.

  Well then, why not? I will bring him up the coast as we went. But judiciously. There are places I can take the good lieutenant, and places best left in darkness. One of those is Calcutta.

  I do not recall bringing the jug down on the man, but that is the only explanation.

  The handle is still in my hand. Fine china: a dynasty scene in blue, fragments here and there about us. His head is beside mine on a pillow that was recently white, the sharp edge of his broken skull not far from my nose. White chips of the jug are lodged in the deep cavity over his ear: he has china on his mind. The hair is glued in licks, his sticking dark blood now a bloom and splatters on the linen about us. Did I do this here? Or have I placed him here, and myself with him? I do not recall. Sometimes you wake thus, and no explanation is to be had.

  I needed him undressed, of this I am sure, and yes—there are his clothes, neatly draped over the back of the chair. I lift the sheet and the planes of his naked back answer me.

  His portmanteau, a nice piece, rests under the table.

  I place a hand on his shoulder as I pass over to leave the bed and his skin is cool. Some hours have passed: the sun now lights the room in thin spears through the shutters. It falls on the heavy stone walls of the room: perhaps it was a cell in other times. There is something monastic, calm, about it. Standing bare in that gentle light the life returns to me and I will not rush it. I have some of this man’s gore on my neck and cheek, leading me to think I must have been close to him when it happened. There is a little also on my left forearm. I am left-handed this time, it seems.

  The portmanteau contains his clothes, some money and his papers. A letter of recommendation from his employer. I know already he is the right size: I studied this carefully when we met. I will dress in the clothes but first I must bathe, and the jug unfortunately contained the only water in the room. The gin bottle, I can see, is nearly full: missing only the small amount we poured ourselves. I take my previous day’s drawers, slosh the gin onto them and wipe the blood from my skin. I am left smelling faintly medicinal.

  By the time the wallah comes past in the corridor outside I have donned the dead man’s fine britches, shirt and coat and taken a moment to use his oil in my hair.

  I am John Figge, tea merchant, representing Sumpters of London.

  And in that guise, by mid-morning I have found myself a desirable place to sit: on the platform of a cart, unhitched from its beast with the drawbar wedged in the low fork of a shady tree. Just high enough to cast an eye over everything.

  Calcutta, the mighty stone ramparts of Fort William behind, arched windows squinting out at the Hooghly like the eyes of a sceptical merchant, one who counts and recounts each handful of coins. And on every square yard of ground between those walls and the river, the supplicant throng of Bengal: the ant-scatter activity of the byse caste, children darting underfoot, merchants and lascars hurrying between the pillars of the English society and the foresting masts of the waterfront.

  Life abounds in this narrow strip of possibility, on the clogged streets and the chaotic boards of the quay. Ships berthed beam to beam, waiting to be engorged or disgorged. And out there—yes, just there, past the hulls of the country traders and under their slimy timbers—oozes the Hooghly, conveyer of half-dogs and raw timbers and human shit and ashes and the dreams of holy men upstream on the ghats. Between khaki and brown but paler than both, the discharge of a septic wound.

  The clouds come and go and sometimes they descend and wander through the commerce, leaving dampness on the skin, but they make no difference to the unrelenting heat. It seeks to suffocate, gives no ground to the Englishmen. Look at them—dressed to a stubborn belief that they rule over the climate as well as the people. The sweat makes patches in the black of their frock coats and the dust sticks there, betraying their bodily torment. Heads puce above tight collars, they hector and bluster, one eye on the chap from Gloucester or Plymouth or Hull, one hand raised to cuff the boy who returned late with the tobacco.

  The vessels are a miscellany: great schooners dominate the closer berths, brigs and snows and sloops further out, circled by insect clouds of coracles and dhows. Midstream in the river, the gunboats of the Company lie at anchor, glaring over all. A bridge to the north, a bridge to the south, and the heaving belly of Howrah on the other bank.

  The rains finished two months ago, before my arrival here. But their legacy is everywhere, from the swelling of the river against the marshy banks to the putrid puddles in the street. At the far end of the wharf, children play on what appears to be a small grassy hill in the r
iver. When I peer harder, it reveals itself to be an abandoned skiff filled with rice sacks that have burst open, the soaked grains sending forth a fine crop of lush green stems.

  I am close to something now, with Figge to cloak myself in. A careful study of his papers and I have a good idea what I’m looking for.

  A small man approaches and sits himself on the edge of the cart beside me. His slight body, his face and his hair mark him as Bengali, though his clothing is neither of their world nor mine. A long white tunic; a pair of sturdy leather sandals on his feet. Though I continue to study the wharf, I feel his eyes upon me.

  By and by he begins to speak and I understand that he means to present himself as some sort of guide. He begins by describing the fort: Its twelve-foot walls, sir. Thick I mean, not high. Undeterred by my lack of reaction, he persists. The moat is a most wonderful design. It can be flooded, and any hostile approach may be cut down most assuredly by enfilade fire. Wedded to an inner script, he senses I am preoccupied but he prattles on about the botanical gardens and the great banyan tree.

  Then he stops, watches me. Sees I am intent upon one vessel.

  They were already working on it when I arrived at dawn, and it was the sense of urgency that caught my eye. The employment of large numbers of men, the queue of carts waiting to unload into it; the arguments, the shouted orders…All of it suggested that this modest little three-master of perhaps a hundred foot was the core of some vital commercial project.

  My watching, which had begun in general interest, became focused upon this one ship. They had it empty at first, floating high at the wharf, and they rigged a block and tackle over the foremost yard so they could lower a great smoking ball of yellow brimstone into the hull cavity. The smoke seeped out the hatches, and here and there it would find a crooked seam or a split timber and a party would scurry to the place to apply tar.

  So she leaks. This I noted.

  When they had finished the fumigation, the men began working barrowloads of sand into the holds. The sand came from a small pile on the wharf, no higher than a man. They planned a cargo for her, then: something heavy. The slow pace of the loading told me there was an inner deck. There was some argument at that point, some protracted negotiation that stopped the work.

  But now this little man sits here and, nearing noon, the operation has recommenced around the ship. We are watching together and he seeks to measure my thoughts by careful study (he will be another of the many who have failed in this). A cart arrives at the wharf ’s edge, then two more, carrying the dunnage: sticks and branches and fragments of thick bamboo stalks. Other carts arrive with heavy casks, two on each, and the oxen straining under short whips. There is much unnecessary yelling and waving around these carts: the work of men who have no work.

  A cask comes down from the first cart. It stands briefly on the wharf and I can read the large crest they’ve singed into its side: C&C. There at last: Campbell and Clark, the minnow that seeks to take on the whale of the East India Company. Leisham’s story comes back to me like he’s standing there before me, gusting breaths of cheap gin into my face.

  Six weeks ago, Leisham accosted me in a tavern in the deep recesses of this city, a node in a nest of veining alleys. He lurched over and barely managed to slur his own name before tipping himself a measure, uninvited, from my bottle. Sang for his supper, though, with the arresting claim that he worked for the most desperate man in the world. One William Clark, said Leisham. The unloved scion of a Scots trading house called Campbell and Clark, come to Calcutta to join the family concern and to prove himself in a conclave of flint-eyed Scottish merchants. Which he had done: the Chinese took him at mah-jong, the English at crown-and-anchor; he could not help himself with the local whores and, though he pranced about in the robes of respectability by day, the night had him firmly by the balls. Dissolute and impulsive, massively in debt, he had his fingers in the Campbell and Clark treasury within weeks.

  Clark’s fortunes came to a point of crisis, according to this Leisham. He didn’t know what it was: whether he’d landed a great win at the tables, or whether his debts had compounded and he’d borrowed gigantically elsewhere to resolve them, but the net result was the same. Fatuous Mr Clark, despised by his family and deep in debt, took it upon himself to finance a speculative voyage of his own. A final roll of the dice that would pay out in complete vindication or utter ruin. There was rum involved—he could access that from the family’s own distillery—and tea. Leisham had met the tea merchant already: a man named Figge.

  And so, finally, here is Clark’s speculative venture in the making. A crowd works to roll the branded cask over the gangway and into the hold. Another crowd runs forward with armfuls of the dunnage material. Somewhere in the gloom down there they will be packing it around the massive casks; any shifting of such great weights at sea would spell doom. A count of the pile on the wharf: three rows of ten, eight casks already below. I inquire of the little Bengali where one might send thirty-eight casks of wine, and he brightens at the prospect of helping.

  Not wine, sir. Rum. You can see the crest of Campbell and Clark on each one. They have a distillery across the river at Howrah. Now the bright little man and his words hang in the foetid air while I measure their impact. Thirty-eight casks; two hundred gallons to the cask. A fortune. A bounty almost beyond calculation.

  But I regret to say, sahib—my companion’s face registers disappointment—I do not know where they are bound. He returns to chattering about architecture in hope of recovering this shortfall. The colonnades are magnificent, and the porticoes gleam, sir, because of the use of chunam.

  The carts are lining up now: there is more to come. Madeira pipes, crates of porcelain, more crates marked as champagne and brandy. One such crate is placed too heavy on the deck and a great clattering of bottles sparks an argument.

  The colonnades are magnificent, says my friend, and he says some other things. A procession of the low-caste men weaves slowly through the crowds, each bearing a pale lump on his back. I have to wait until the first one nears my position to make out what it is they carry: even then my mind protests the sense of it. For each man bears an animal skin—mostly calves, but some small pigs and even a deer, the heads gone and the necks rolled up and firmly stitched. Where the bones have come out of the limbs, those are sewn up also. They are water carriers, bent under the weight and trailing drips as they go. The pressure of the water inside the skins bulges the animals out to an approximation of their original shape. A bloated foetus; a headless goat with a knot securing the dark star of its anus, the bulbous limbs waving pathetically as the bearer’s steps bounce the load. The swollen, splashing carcasses wending like some mad religious cavalcade through the ranks of the unbaptised.

  There are men loading shoes in strapped bundles and piles of fine crockery into boxes of straw. The lascars in their turbans, loose cotton drawers and white jackets, preparing the rigging and washing those parts of the ship where the loading will allow them. Malabars, Malays, Hindoos, Gentoos, Persians. Only the smaller details in their dress to communicate the differences, and the differences are extinguished by sheer numbers. Human toil as insignificant as grain in the Company’s mill. If a man could only see the scale of it, the mortality of others would cease to trouble him.

  A terrified horse is led down into the smoky darkness, turns its desperate head back to the day. An eye huge with fear, a nostril, then gone. A buggy: a complete buggy, sprung below and canopied above, wheeled ridiculously over the gangway and in. Is it intended that the horse will one day draw the buggy?

  Two larger men, Mahometans by the look, strain under the weight of a musical organ packed in a case, its pedals and elegant legs protruding beneath. As they set the thing on the deck of the little ship my gaze has narrowed to exclude all else in the world: no movement draws my eye nor sound my ear.

  What travels on this boat is not the business of coastal trade. These are luxury goods, almost without exception. Such goods are not headed for Kerala.
Not Gujarat nor Bombay. And who loads this finery onto a piss-leaky coastal trader in such a hurry?

  It’s Clark the Unloved Scion and his bloody great gamble all right, and it hasn’t left port yet. No one paying heed, no one open-mouthed in astonishment as I am. Did this opportunity come to me alone of all men? What fates conspire to tempt me thus?

  I stand abruptly and make for the wharf, leaving the tourman in my wake, still burbling about the Great Tank of Calcutta, sahib. Down the Esplanade Row, between the stalls and the lines of stacked provisions, around the remnants of the sand pile to the gunwales of the three-master. Out of breath when I get there, I stand a moment taking it all in: the swarming of the hands, the huddled conversations. You are going somewhere fateful, you lot.

  I am thus transfixed when a man approaches. Shorter than me, now we’re standing together, though most men are. Thick-built and rough from the years, and in the same clogged Brummy I remember, he asks me my business.

  Leisham. He’s forgotten me, of course, because he was blootered.

  Good day to you sir, and forgive me the interruption. You see, I’m interested to know where this here ship might be headed, I tell him as bland as I can manage. Int your fucking concern, he replies. I sometimes think my eyes can cut a fellow from his impertinent line, because I see him now hesitating just a little: not sure, not sure. Then he stiffens again.

  Why, where’s the harm in such an inquiry? I offer. When do you sail?

  Get your nosyarse face and have it gone from this wharf, he says. Or I’ll see to your query with a fuckin ’ook.

  An odd empty second or two elapses before someone calls to Leisham from the deck, needing him for something. It’s in turning and walking away from him that I pick up the very detail I need.

  Three boys slung from a bosun’s chair over the stern. They’re prising away at something with jemmies, ripping it free with timbery squeaks. A nameplate, ten feet long. One passes it up to another on the deck, and on the battered length of carved wood I see the name Begum Shaw. The second boy wields a hammer and long nails, affixing the new nameplate, which is held in place by the third while the hammering is done. The lettering on the nameplate is picked out in fancy gilt: too fancy for this lumbering old tub.