Preservation

by Jock Serong

  32

  Downslope after that, under rolling bruises of cloud. Ahead a coast that looked north.

  The bay that Clark had promised us was indeed a thing of beauty. In the small intervals when the sun lit it up we saw curves of glorious white beach below us, water that was turquoise in the shallows and a crescent bay of the most exquisite blue.

  Clark and Thompson were imprisoned in their own agonies, neither taking it well. Clark had discovered that if he slung his burden over his shoulder and kept his hands raised they did not bleed so much but cooled to a deathly white as the blood drained from them. Thompson, on the other hand, was bleeding well. His wound was over to one side, straight through him. No imminent danger to his vital organs, but the seepage might yet do him in. And how he groaned, the feeble wretch. The two of them were a diptych Christ: stigmata and lance. Had the natives been got at by the missionaries, they might have been tempted to crown the boy in brambles and send them off a trinity.

  I was a little knocked and chipped by the journey but mostly whole, and the walking was mine to enjoy. The prospects were good for Thompson’s demise, and Kennedy had a talent for his own undoing; there’d be time for that. Clark and his boy were the most useful to me as walking companions: the boy was a mouse to paw. Later for them.

  When we reached the sand, the bush surrendered to it with a carpet of succulent little shoots that were pocked with purple flowers. The shoots were edible, I quickly discovered. These I devoured, sitting on the sand, along with a fine lizard I had found in a scatter of loose bark. Once I tore the guts out and the scaly jacket off, the meat was tender enough. I waggled him at the others, slumped nearby, knowing that the swinging tail would be enough to offend their delicate tastes. Clark, with his Hebridean insistence on meal times and foods he understood, had missed countless opportunities for sustenance.

  When I’d eaten my fill I walked across the perfect beach again and disrobed at the water’s edge. Naked in the rain, four steps into the sea, scooping handfuls of the grainy sand from the bottom and using them to scour my tatty vestments. Then I took the clothes to the nearest ledge of f lat rock and laid them out in the rain. Back into the shallows, and I stood there, listening with a pleasing sensation of melancholy to the rush of the heavy droplets on the surface. I took handfuls of sand again and scrubbed out the stinking parts of me, stepping away from the discarded clouds of sand into clean water as I worked. Behind me I could see a scum forming—flakes of skin, dried food and the various emissions of my body—disappearing as the heavy rain pounded them through the surface. I felt some small alarm at the bumps of my ribs under my hands, and the two points that now revealed my hips like those of a child. I’d become accustomed to the sight of my scrawny companions, but the nourishment I’d extracted from the bush I’d thought would keep me fat and jolly. No matter: sustenance was near at hand.

  Up at the high tide line, the others showed no inclination to take advantage of this marvellous laundry. Fitting, then, that I should be the odyssey’s sole survivor. That day exemplified like no other that the pleasures of this place were well within reach of those who would embrace them.

  The days that followed were unexceptional for the most part. Only late on the second day of our curve around the crescent bay we rested, under another downpour, on a sheet of sandstone that sloped up from the shallows. I sat near the lascar boy, watching what my proximity did to his eyes. He shied in terror, perhaps mistaking our recent moment for an ongoing romance. He shifted, I shifted. The game moved us all over the rock.

  As the rain became a little steadier, the contours in the wet stone began to reveal themselves, much the way a human body looks different after immersion: superficial defects disappearing to reveal the truth in shapes.

  I was peering thus at the boy—entertainment among us by now having run rather thin—when beyond his slender shoulder I saw a fine cleft in the rock. An inch deep and bent to a curve that instinct said was not the work of nature. I stood and my eyes followed the line. A fork, an angle, a straight line. Stand up, I roared at the boy and he did so.

  And there, carved in the sandstone, was a ship-rigged vessel resting eternally at anchor.

  It had a foresail, three masts and a square stern. I squatted and ran a finger along the lines, cut clean and deep as the scars in the trees. For a people working with stone tools it must have been a long project. This is a wonderful sign, Kennedy squawked. There is a rescue about. But the last sentence was curled up at the end and became half a question and in answer to it I pointed to the lichen that had grown slow and steady in the wells of the lines.

  Being no more a seafarer than a tea merchant, I deferred to poor old Thompson as he studied the carving. It’s a bark, he said eventually. They even got her boxy beams right. That there is Mr Cook’s ship, thirty years back. He looked up and out at the hooked headland that made half the horizon, the low island just off the tip of it. And that would be Cape St George.

  There was some desultory conversation about what that meant: how many miles, how many days. Kennedy was greatly anguished that the ship wasn’t the work of his imaginary rescue party. Fuck me if I ain’t killin’ the next one we meet he muttered. Clark ignored the fool and tried to write in his diary, pencil flapping uselessly in his holey hands. Thompson lay flat and sucked water out of the carved ship’s keel while his weeping flank stained the rock. For seconds the blood was bright and alive and then it faded and washed away with the trickles.

  None of it mattered to me. They would all be dead soon enough. And I could walk like this for another year, if pressed.

  33

  Charlotte had been reading, seated with her bare feet crossed on the hearth, a small fire burning.

  She smelled the bread and slammed the book down on its face. The Mysteries of Udolpho: a gift from the governor. Not, she thought, a book he’d choose to read himself, and she worried what he’d discerned in her that made him choose it for her. But she loved it anyway.

  Joshua smiled as she rushed to pluck the tin from the coals in towelled hands, and flipped the loaf onto the table to cool. The soup she ladled into a smaller pot and found a lid for it. Her husband took in the aroma of the bread, drew a finger through the flour on its upper surface. Between his wife and the governor, he was outflanked and he knew it.

  ‘I can’t talk you out of this, can I?’

  Charlotte stopped, closed her hands in the warmth of the towel.

  ‘No.’ She kissed him. ‘It needs to happen this way. Is the old man still in favour?’

  ‘His Excellency? I’ve told you, he thinks it’s a good idea. I just…you know my reservations. You being drawn into… something is very wrong here, I can feel it. And I don’t know that it is wise to bring a woman into it.’

  She arched an eyebrow at him and said nothing, but added a bowl, a plate and a spoon to the basket.

  ‘The fishermen should be back today,’ he said.

  ‘Fishermen?’

  ‘The ones who went down the coast to find whatever’s left of Thompson and Kennedy.’

  ‘That’s a bleak prediction. They might just be sitting around a fire waiting for them.’

  ‘These are dangerous people, Charlotte. Figge’s a dangerous man. The Wandandean, Pemulwuy and Goam-Boak, any number of escapees out there…I can’t imagine a situation in which those men are fine.’

  ‘And if you’re right about that? What then?’

  ‘We have three survivors from seventeen. And according to Clark’s journal, another thirty-two awaiting rescue on this rock island.’ He was drumming his fingers on the table now. ‘I believe I ought to post a watch outside Clark’s quarters. And Figge’s.’

  ‘Not a guard?’

  ‘No, just a watch. There is no reason to detain either of them, but I feel considerable relief now that we elected to keep them apart.’

  A towel over the top of the basket and she was done. She pressed against him, feeling a strange reluctance to leave, then she broke the embrace and hurried o
ut.

  The Sydney morning crowded her immediately, the sounds of a place making itself: pounding hammers, livestock protesting, human voices and a faraway ringing of iron on stone. She passed down the paths and laneways as one of a busy throng; a tilted cap here and there from a soldier, averted eyes from a lag.

  It had been agreed in advance that William Clark would be summoned to the governor’s office to discuss geography so that Charlotte would have time and privacy to talk to the boy. At Clark’s quarters she found things as she had hoped: the front door open, the room empty and the connecting door swung back. A convict maid scuttled out as she entered.

  She called cheerfully from the main room but Srinivas did not respond. She found him sitting formally on the bed, in much the same position as she had left him last time. Something like embarrassment threatened to rise in her but she ignored it. She placed the basket on the floor, removed its contents and set out the meal for him. His dark eyes were wide with apprehension, but also something else. Resolve, she thought.

  He thanked her, again with the formal memsahib, and ate with a delicacy that surprised her, using the cutlery correctly and dabbing his mouth with the cloth she had included. Every now and then he would raise the spoon to his mouth and his eyelids would come up as he did so, his eyes fixing on hers. She saw an eclipse in them, a light obscured.

  ‘Do you still want to talk?’ she asked gently.

  He nodded, arranged the spoon carefully on the plate under the bowl.

  ‘I’m not going to write it down or anything,’ she smiled. She raised her hands, fingers spread: unarmed.

  ‘That is all right,’ he answered.

  She leant forward, clasped her hands together and looked into his eyes again. ‘Tell me what happened on that beach. When they found you.’

  He looked momentarily unsettled, confused maybe.

  ‘Tell me why you were crawling.’

  And so he began, haltingly at first, until his speech gained strength and purpose.

  ‘Mr Thompson was speared late in April, and he had a hole through his side that would not heal. Through the front and out the back, ma’am. I would walk at times behind him, watching it bleed. The stain spread over his breeches, went brown and grew again from the top where the blood was still coming.

  ‘We walked a long way around a beautiful harbour. The place was marked by the natives, a ship they had carved into the stone, and Mr Kennedy was angry because he thought it was made by a rescue party, a signal for us, and Mr Figge made fun of him.

  ‘The land was good north of the harbour: the walking was easy and the days were warm. Little wind, just the rain sometimes but never cold. Only the dawn was cool.

  ‘Every day I cried for my father, empty inside. He was our guide and he had answers to all the questions. Every hour of every day was filled with questions and when there were thirteen of us he knew how to answer. But now it was just me and I did not feel able.’

  Charlotte’s eyes wandered the room as the boy spoke. He had taken the coat that someone had brought him and placed it on the chest of drawers, folded so that the lapels faced symmetrically upwards. The slippers were on his feet and he had placed the boots precisely side by side under the edge of the bed. He was making tiny order from the chaos.

  ‘What do you think became of your father?’

  ‘I do not think the natives killed him. They knew he was our serang, our senior man. They had no reason.’

  ‘Maybe some didn’t, but some others did?’

  ‘I am sure, ma’am, that they spoke to each other. I think such things passed ahead of us as we went.’

  Charlotte found herself thinking about reasons. About Pemulwuy, and Goam-Boak, the so-called cannibal of the south. Was the boy thinking wishfully about his father’s death? The natives she’d seen had no need to kill a man for food; the food was all around them. But that didn’t stem the terrified whisperings of Sydney. It only focused them upon the notion that the cannibalism in which they wished so fervently to believe was gratuitous ritual: a pagan lust.

  The boy had fallen silent, deep in thought. He looked up eventually.

  ‘Mr Figge went into the bush with him. He came back without him. That man’—his jaw clenched and flexed—‘he is a great deal stronger than my father.’

  ‘Only his body.’

  Almost a smile. ‘Only his body, yes.’

  An image came to her, unwelcome, of a small man who could be the father of this boy. Sorrowful, broken. At the mercy of Figge’s powerful hands. She shuddered. ‘I am sorry, Srinivas. I interrupted you. Keep going.’

  The boy waited until the anger had subsided. He muttered to himself—Charlotte assumed it was Hindi—until he was composed.

  ‘Two days on from walking the bay we were going north again. Mr Clark said we might be only a week from reaching Sydney, but we were tired. Mr Thompson was in a terrible state. I did not like him, you understand, ma’am. But he was suffering, and he fell behind us all the time, even though we were slow. Mr Figge made fun of him, did cruel things like hide behind trees and leap out at him shouting, and Mr Thompson would fall to the ground and cry out or weep. It only made him slower.’

  ‘Why was there a need to hurry?’

  The boy paused as though the question had never occurred to him, then shrugged. ‘Faster would end the misery sooner; but it also made it worse.’

  ‘Keep telling me,’ Charlotte said. She took the loaf and tore an end off it. ‘Excuse me. I’m starving.’ She heard herself, and blushed. ‘You were walking north after the bay you described…’

  ‘Yes, it was a dark time now. The way was clear but Mr Figge and Mr Clark were at each other now and I still had my duties to Mr Clark. Make his meals, carry water for him. Some days wash his clothes, if that was his order. Mr Thompson was dying, I think, by then. The carpenter was close to him.’

  He paused, pointed in the air at the walkers in his haunted eyes. ‘One, one, two, one. Very slow, wide apart.’

  ‘Srinivas, there is something I have not asked you. Which of these people knew you could speak English?’

  ‘None of them. Something my father taught me. He did it as a young man at sea until he could do it no longer.’

  ‘But they must have been giving you orders, and you were carrying them out? Even back on the ship…’

  ‘Yes. But ma’am, forgive me: the gentlemen do not stop to wonder whether you speak the King’s English. They think as far as the order: is the lascar doing as I say? If not, a fist or a boot. A lascar on a ship is a…a turnbuckle or a binnacle. They no more think a lascar will talk back than a pump. My father taught me: you keep your world and you are its king. It is the place you go to.’

  He stopped, smiled carefully. ‘And you hear things.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Charlotte. She took another mouthful of the bread, wondering as she chewed if the eating was disconcerting to the boy. He showed no indication that it was. ‘Keep going, please.’

  ‘So those days, bad days. We met more natives. Not the ones who had attacked us. We had an eye for them by then: different markings, different things they carried. And when we tried our words, the ones we had learnt, we could see they knew some but not others. The words were new again.

  ‘They came to us, out in the middle of this long beach, just after we made two rivers. The coast there was hard: lakes and sand spits and creeks. At one time we followed a spit, the ocean to our right and a lake full of swans to our left and the land ahead of us was, oh, less than thirty yards across. We were tired. Our feet sank deep with each step in the soft sand and each step we would pull them out and…It took…work to find the line that was the hardest sand and made the walking lighter. Mr Thompson was past that now: he just dropped his feet wherever they fell.

  ‘There were mountains ahead of us to the north, or—you are Scottish, ma’am? Big hills, I should say then. Mr Clark would not have called them mountains. I could hear him talking low to Mr Figge—if the spit ended, we would have to double back so
far that it might be the end of us.

  ‘Then these men came. Four native men, painted, no spears. Smiling and showing great care for Mr Thompson and Mr Clark.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘They were kind with me but the cut on my head had dried and the blood had stopped.’ He touched the old bruise at his hairline, with the crust of scab in its centre. ‘I was lame like the others, that was all. They wanted us to go with them. At first the men did not trust them, but we had to. They led us back off the sand spit, into the low ground behind the beach, and we came into a clearing as the sun was coming down through the trees in the smoke of their fires.

  ‘A family was there; not so many of them but women and children, and we knew by now that if the women and children were shown to us it was a good thing, a sign of trust.

  ‘We sat about their fire and they made a great fuss of us. This was not their village, no houses, just somewhere they had stopped to camp. They sat on logs they had brought up, and they touched our wounds; they made much of Mr Clark’s hands: maramal, they said, over and over. But we were apart from each other and they must have seen this. The women tried to use herbs on Mr Thompson’s wound, but he would not let them. He slapped them away, weak as he was, when they came near, and Mr Kennedy shouted and made fists to protect him. Mr Thompson’s face was, oh it was ash by now. His breath very small and quiet.

  ‘But they took the food. We all did. The natives gave us good fish they called mara mara, but Mr Kennedy was angry, wanting more. He took one off a small girl and she cried, and the natives saw it, but they did not act.

  ‘We tried to talk, we drew in the earth with sticks and we pointed, like always. They were Tharawal, or Dharawal’—the boy’s mouth made the sound several more times as he grappled with it—‘and this land was theirs for many more miles, they said. They would protect us, they said. Gaba, they called us and they made like to embrace us. I wanted to stay with them and recover. I did not trust that Mr Clark had reckoned it right and we were within reach of Port Jackson.