Preservation

by Jock Serong

  ‘Rum,’ he said, without taking his eyes from Grayling’s. The woman busied herself with a bottle and two cups. ‘Have you come alone?’ Figge’s tone indicated no surprise that he was there. On the contrary, he sounded as though this was a social engagement fulfilled. Grayling’s throat tightened. The hand hadn’t moved from his shoulder. He was seized by a desperation closing in on panic.

  ‘There are redcoats outside,’ he said. ‘Half-a-dozen. And a provost.’

  Figge laughed mildly. ‘Expecting trouble, then.’ He took the bottle and cups and motioned towards the far wall. When they sat either side of the narrow bench Figge had indicated, Grayling found that their knees were touching. He wasn’t sure where to begin. Figge was watching him with a look of sly anticipation.

  ‘You left town unexpectedly, Mr Figge.’

  ‘I was bored,’ he smiled. ‘I am fully recovered. A man senses opportunity in a place like this. Can’t blame me for getting out and pursuing it.’

  ‘It seems you left just as the most interesting questions were starting to arise.’

  ‘Whatever can you mean?’

  ‘You don’t know a great deal about tea, do you, for someone in the trade?’

  ‘Bah.’ He grinned again. ‘I wasn’t at my best those early days.’

  ‘You got the leaf wrong.’

  ‘Easy mistake.’

  ‘Three times.’

  He shrugged. ‘Three easy mistakes.’

  ‘How did you come to be on the Sydney Cove?’

  Figge looked up at the beams of the low ceiling. He ran a hand over the timber surface of the bench, dug the ends of his fingers into the smooth join where two boards met. ‘The lags make fine furniture, don’t they? Poor old Kennedy would’ve approved.’

  If he was trying to look bored, he had missed the mark by just enough that Grayling sensed a sudden advantage. ‘What were you doing on that ship?’

  ‘I told you, lieutenant, I was accompanying the tea consigned to the vessel by Sumpter & Co., traders of Calcutta, where I am employed as a merchant. You will not have seen, but I provided a letter of introduction to Captain Hamilton when I boarded the vessel on the Hooghly.’

  Grayling sipped at the rum and the raw spirit burned in his throat. It was no example to set, the drink and the uniform.

  ‘Do you want to take any of that back, sir? Do you want to take your opportunity again, and this time tell me the truth?’

  Figge watched him carefully. After a long while he spoke. ‘I don’t care to be interrogated, lieutenant. Perhaps you should explain whatever concern it is you’re harbouring.’

  ‘Very well. A ship came in. You might be unaware of it, holed up here. The Reliance. Usual speculative stuff aboard: rum, of course; textiles, shoes. Guinea fowl in cages, oddly enough. But you see, sir, there were two representatives of Sumpters on board and they carried rather alarming news. It seems their agent, a Mr John Figge, was found murdered at Fort William several days after the Sydney Cove sailed last November. Head stove in, letter of introduction stolen, along with a sum of money.’

  Grayling looked directly into the man’s eyes. ‘So who are you?’

  Nothing, not even the tiniest muscle, altered the man’s stare. ‘No, no, go back a moment. Are you accusing me of murder?’

  Grayling knew the circling and feinting was over.

  ‘They are, sir. You will have to reckon with them.’ This imposter, whoever he was, had his hands under the table and his body had taken on a faint attitude of readiness. Where in the name of Christ were the fucking redcoats?

  ‘And you, lieutenant? What reckoning do I have with you?’

  ‘With me the matter is of a different nature. Your true identity, for one. But you have more than that to answer to.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It turns out that the lascar boy, Srinivas, speaks very good English.’

  If this surprised the man, he showed no sign of it.

  ‘And it follows, of course, that he understands English. Perfectly.’

  Grayling was waiting for a movement now, some outburst of violence that would break open the standoff. He pressed his fingers on the sticky surface of the bench to stifle their trembling.

  ‘He overheard, sir, and he relayed to us, your discussions with Mr Clark about the Sydney Cove.’

  The man’s face took an ugly turn towards aggression. ‘What about the Sydney Cove?’

  ‘About you having persuaded Captain Hamilton to beach her in a place where no shipping could lend assistance. Having deliberately scuttled the longboat in an attempt to cause more casualties. Having done away with the boy’s father, Prasad, in the knowledge that the other lascars would remove themselves from the party out of loyalty to him.’

  ‘My, the lad has me busy.’

  ‘He witnessed with his own eyes the murders of Kennedy and Thompson. I anticipate that when the current search party finds their remains his version of events will be corroborated.’ The tiniest echo of his shaking had started now to infect his voice.

  The man sensed it. He leaned forward confidently. ‘You don’t do this very often, do you? This weak excuse for a confrontation. You’re all over the place because you’re scared, lieutenant. This is what you give me after I saved your lovely fainting wife. You give me this—this cheap attempt at intimidation executed without any plan, without even a vestige of style or substance. Nothing, just this’—he waved a dismissive hand—‘play acting.’

  ‘I am doing as the law requires me to do.’

  The man laughed. ‘Really.’ He leaned forward, both hands still concealed. ‘I did what I had to do also, lieutenant. You’ve not been in the bush, have you? Maybe a timorous peek in at the fringes. Maybe you wondered, some days, what it holds? Days like the ones when your wife betook herself to the wilds on those lovely long legs of hers. I know it, you understand. I’ve slept the nights and walked the days that were the same as the other days and heard the sounds and fought the temptation to sob like a frightened child and the other temptation to jump at the shadows and to see a cannibal in every native because it is nigh impossible to accept that such spreading immensity could still be part of God’s creation. Clark and his ilk, they want the place to behave like the woods of Midlothian, all gentle glades and fucking robins in the trees. Deluded, and cowards with it. If I seem a little raw to you, lieutenant, it might be a response to five hundred miles of traipsing a godless waste with no fucking shoes.’

  ‘Doesn’t explain the man with the crushed head in Fort William. Or what you did to Kennedy and Thompson.’

  ‘Your people will find their bodies stripped and violated and the blame will naturally fall on the natives.’

  ‘You reckon without the Bengali boy.’

  ‘Really? You want to try my version against the word of a lascar?’ He drank, wiped his mouth under the bend of the shattered nose. The whore who had earlier approached Grayling now staggered free of the crowd and draped herself over the man in a clumsy embrace. He pushed her away without a glance.

  ‘He is being held as we speak, in anticipation of giving that evidence. He wishes to walk back into the bush in search of his father. Perhaps you know what he will find.’

  The man looked around himself, took in the tumbling packs of drunks and the wreckage about them. ‘If you want a confession, go to Clark.’

  ‘He was staunch for you to the last. Still saying it was the Tharawal that did it. What did you have over him?’

  ‘The last? What’s happened to him?’

  ‘Clark has left. He sailed on the Reliance when it left harbour. In doing so it seems he’s relinquished any claim on the salvage that you and he might have cooked up.’

  ‘You think that’s what this was about? You’d arrest me if you had any proof.’

  ‘I’d arrest you but for the small chance I want to extend to you.’ The words he had to say were like bile, but he forced them out. ‘My debt to you…after…my wife. I could call the redcoats in, but I want to let you walk out of here w
ithout duress.’

  ‘Just surrender myself to your redcoats and sign a confession for the governor?’

  ‘Yes. That is all.’

  The man laughed and shuffled forward again, so close now. His eyes darted around the room as if seeking escape from his thoughts.

  ‘You,’ he breathed, with an air of resignation, ‘have a very poor sense of obligation. No sooner had I saved your wife’s life than you reneged on your promises to me.’

  ‘Promises?’

  ‘I’ll read you the journal,’ he hissed. ‘I won’t read you the journal. I’ll put you on the rescue ship to Preservation. Actually, no, I won’t.’

  Grayling said nothing. He was watching, tensed for violence.

  ‘I wanted a pretty uniform too, but that was a flourish.’ The man’s face curled once more into a smile, pulling the skin taut over the broken bone in his nose. ‘I’ll tell you a thing I learned out there. All these people are taken with a morbid loathing of the spear. More so even than the natives fear the gun. Not—I don’t know—not snakes, or poisonous plants or falling trees. The spears fucking terrify them.

  ‘Elemental, I suppose, the fear of having something thrust through you. Impaled. Mouth filling with blood, eyes like a landed fish. The doulls they use, the Cadigal, they’re lined with sharp stones, tiny slivers of shell. They come away in the wound so the more some friend helps you by pulling out the shaft, the more horribly they are killing you. The malignant will of the thrower, lodged there like a curse. When Pemulwuy put one through McIntyre, they say it took him weeks to die. He screamed himself to death, lieutenant. For weeks. Impressive, no? How many generations did it take for that idea to perfect itself? For the hunters to realise that the mortal damage might be done in the extraction as much as in the insertion? This is the thing, isn’t it? You cause more harm by trying to help.’

  His face never altered as he moved and the sudden pain shocked Grayling. Robbed him of the opportunity to understand what had been done; a pinpoint of fire burning ferociously from the base of his scrotum.

  The man was leaning in now, breathing hard on his face. Grayling didn’t want to look down but he couldn’t help himself. The steel of the knife glinted just faintly in the shadows of his lap: blood was spreading warm already under the creases of his thighs and onto the seat.

  The man looked quickly from one side to the other. ‘Now, where are your companions?’

  Grayling held a tight breath, pressing down against the pain. ‘Supposed to be here. Out the front.’

  ‘Good. None in here I trust?’ He pushed the knife just a little. Grayling couldn’t tell how much of it had been thrust into him.

  The man’s face was close, the tombstone teeth bared with malevolent intent. ‘I crossed a fucking ocean only to fall a couple of islands short. Walked hundreds of miles only to get picked up with Sydney in sight. And now I have you on a pike, lieutenant, and the obvious thing to do is finish the job.’ He pushed again. Grayling wanted to howl.

  ‘But I won’t. It’s the incomplete that lights our dreams, don’t you think?’ The faintest chuckle. ‘So here’s how we’re going to do this: I can cut the balls clean out of you if you make just one squeak. Last thing you will ever see is the two of ’em and their bloody coils lying here on the table. I am going to stand and walk out. You are going to sit there and…’ He turned the blade. ‘Let me.’

  The tip of the knife came free and the blood flowed warm. He lifted it to the level of the table and wiped its edge across the timber; they both watched the red smear it left. He secreted the blade somewhere in his coat and stood, looking at Grayling but also through him or past him, a thing now dealt with; immaterial to a racing mind. He walked past the fireplace to where a small doorway was closed off by a curtain of hessian sacks. The curtain billowed slightly: the flow of air told Grayling the doorway led outside, behind the building. The man was gone then, the curtain swirling after him. The fire blew sparks. Someone near him cursed the rush of cold air, but there was no one in the doorway to accost. Grayling wanted to stand and give chase, but he was slow and cold. He thought to pick up the cup and drink more of the rum, but his hand wouldn’t cooperate. His fingers fell from the bench and dabbed sticky in the pool of blood that was collecting under him.

  He saw the runs and swirls of the grain in the benchtop. They came alive and spilled around each other like slicks of oil, turning and curling but never meeting and his head fell and smashed heavily against the timber. The troopers were pouring through the door now, peering through the haze and the tumbling fools to find him. A face turned from the crowd and registered without surprise the man sliding from his stool. The room churned relentlessly on.

  He spilled almost to the ground. Found his feet and careened towards the doorway where the man had vanished. His shoulder punched into an unyielding hip and someone swore, then he swept the curtain aside and fell forward into a small stable. In the gloom, three or four horses were tied and stamping restlessly as though a sudden wind had thrown dust in their soft eyes.

  Outside in the night, further away, a chestnut mare turned as a rider worked its reins. The man cast one look at Grayling and was gone, clatters fading into the night.

  41

  Charlotte had walked beside Srinivas for a long time before she felt she could speak. So many thoughts troubled her that it was hard to know where to start. But one thought returned most often: a sorrow that stayed with her and could not be shifted. What the boy wanted to do was impossible.

  ‘Have they taken everything ahead for you?’

  His head was down. He spoke distractedly. ‘Yes ma’am.’

  There were cut walls of sandstone along the bridle trail that led to the wharf. They’d gone the long way, though it wasn’t discussed. The boy’s shadow passed along the old rock, swallowing the sunshine and being replaced by it. He was walking fast, pulling away from her so that she was left watching his shoulders: their width hinted now at the man emerging from within him.

  ‘Have they given you enough food?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What else? A flint? Blankets?’

  ‘Yes ma’am. There is nothing I need.’ Faint exasperation in his voice.

  She hurried along until she was beside him again. Sunlight fell through the loose cover of the banksias and wrapped over his cheeks. ‘You’re angry, Srinivas, I know. You’re angry that the governor took you into custody.’

  ‘It did not need to be that way.’

  ‘But can’t you see? Mr Clark has gone. Mr Figge has disappeared. It was necessary for him to hold you while there was a chance that Mr Figge might be arrested. You’re the only one who can tell the whole story.’

  ‘I am the only one who is a Bengali, ma’am. No one locked up the Scotsman.’ He stopped walking and eyed her with an unfamiliar bitterness. ‘I trusted you.’

  ‘And we, my husband, managed to get you out,’ she answered. ‘You struck a fine deal. Provisions and a passage south on Mr Bass’s boat. You did well out of a grim situation.’

  ‘Mr Bass will be wealthy, ma’am. We did the suffering and he gets the strait. Those seals that Mr Clark had in his journal: I saw them too. Thousands, ma’am, millions, perhaps. And the coal, and the timber and the land for clearing. Good water. All those things. All those fortunes coming. There will be a rescue and Captain Hamilton will be a hero. None of that counts for me. I will be fine. But I did not “do well”.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Charlotte offered meekly. ‘But you are free now.’

  Birds overhead, whips and piercing whistles. The metal and timber sounds of people working, the cove a shimmering blue below. The place made beauty despite itself, despite the intentions of almost everyone in it. The boy had stopped walking and was staring out over the harbour to the folds of the drowned valley that formed its points. The flash of anger in him was gone.

  ‘What is that rock out there, off the cove?’ He pointed and she followed the line of his finger.

  ‘With the timber
work on it? They call it Pinchgut. The previous governor had the convicts cut it into that flat shape.’

  An object was faintly visible on the high point of the rock island they were looking at: a short mast, or a flagpole. Neither of those things.

  ‘Why does the man’s body hang there?’ he asked.

  ‘His name was Morgan, an Irishman. He murdered a man and they executed him there last year. They gibbeted his body as a lesson to others.’

  ‘Gibbeted?’

  ‘Strung it up. In chains.’ She studied him closely, and found he was lost in thought. ‘Can you see that from here?’

  ‘No ma’am. When they brought us in, on the fishing boat. I was…sometimes awake, sometimes not. But I remember the boat tacked off that island to come into the cove and I looked out over the gunwale and saw the skeleton. It swung in the wind, and there was the metal sound from the chains. You arrive at this place, and a rotting man greets you.’

  They both stared over the blue distance at the faint black mark that disfigured it.

  ‘How long will it stay there?’

  ‘Until the chains break, I imagine.’

  ‘Then what will they do to caution us?’

  They will hang another one, she thought. But she did not answer him.

  He started walking again and she stayed close by him. He seemed forlorn.

  ‘Where will you have them take you?’

  ‘Moruya. That is the last name the Walbanja gave us, before…’

  ‘You must be careful. There was a native man from the south who came to Sydney. Goam-Boak, they called him. They said he was a cannibal.’

  ‘Ma’am, if there were cannibals to the south I would not be talking to you now.’ Silence again as they walked. Then: ‘You think my father is dead, don’t you?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘The Walbanja were good people,’ Srinivas insisted. ‘They carried us over rivers. They fed us.’