He discovered his capacity for reinventing the world was matched only by the world’s capacity for destroying itself. He was, said he, with Erasmus of Rotterdam. ‘The reality of things,’ he would say, quoting the peregrinatory Dutchman, ‘depends solely on opinion.’ It was a maxim that the example of his life, he believed, amply bore out. When the world’s belief in him seemed low, his fortunes went sour, he was beaten up, incarcerated & finally transported all because of the erroneous idea that he had no intention of honouring his debts. ‘There are words,’ he would say from the box of the accused, hoping to win the court if not by his history then with his philosophy, ‘& things, & ne’er the twain shall meet.’ But it was untrue, & he knew it. He made words things—that was his gift, & that had been his downfall.
He suffered badly from the nostalgia of realism, &, imbued with the great Romance of the Age, he made his own revolution as best he could, overthrowing at the age of twenty-six the defenceless Danish Governor of Iceland with the aid of an English privateer & by sending six armed men to the back of the Governor’s house in Reykjavik, & six to the front, then marching in, waking the poor man from his afternoon slumbers on his sofa, & arresting him. He next hoisted the ancient flag of a free Iceland, issued a proclamation declaring that the people of Iceland, being tired of submission to the Danish yoke, had unanimously called upon him to head their new government. Forever after he insisted on titling himself the King of Iceland, though the English usurped his sovereignty within a week.
He arrived at Waterloo a day after the great battle for the future had ended with the past ascendant, invoking his own particular genius for arriving too late at the wrong place, something which he rightly felt qualified him to be a journalist, though his report (largely cribbed from newspapers) from the field of battle was not a great success with the street pamphlet sellers of London in the hungry winter of 1816. He was, in any case, promptly arrested as an escaping French soldier in disguise, & was only able to escape after bribing a guard on duty with a field spyglass he had stolen from an English soldier’s corpse.
Jorgen Jorgensen was a man given to telling stories—true or untrue it didn’t really bother him or matter to others—for they were his trade & he was a journeyman of tales, a traveller through the republic of fictions. In his stories he tended to present himself & his ventures as though he were the narrator of one of the picaresque novels that had in the last century been so in fashion with scullery maids & skulking servants, & of which he was himself such an avid reader, so much so that behind his back Mr Lempriere was to call him Joseph Josephson.
His complexion was sallow, his white hair bedraggled, his nose long & pointy, & he wore a droopy moustache of the type that hangs in pointy strands over the lips & holds soup fat at the tips in small congealed pearls.
In times long before the arrival of Lieutenant Horace, Jorgen Jorgensen had been posted to the settlement as the Commissary, purportedly to head up the government’s stores, but in truth as an agent of Governor Arthur, ready to report on whatever intrigue may have arisen in such a far-flung post of the Van Diemonian despot’s then small empire. But with Lieutenant Horace he recognised the limitations of his perfidy.
Later, when their work was to bind them together in a bond as sacred as that of murder, it was said that it was his conspiratorial complicities that brought Jorgen Jorgensen to the Commandant’s attention, that capacity to be ever ready to invent whatever story he fancied the Commandant might want to hear. It may well be that Jorgen Jorgensen saw the necessity of ingratiating himself with the new Commandant with his tales, but perhaps also—that day long ago he was commissioned to keep the records of the island—he found in the Commandant a mirror to his own long repressed desires to betray the world in a more fundamental way, as he felt the world had once betrayed him by not being a book. In the Commandant he sensed the creative mania of a true audience, an absolute desire to believe at any cost.
Continuing to hold Voltaire’s head in front of him like Yorick’s skull, Jorgen Jorgensen told me in his unusual voice—as affected, as I was to discover, as his overly decorative Italianite handwriting—how it was no longer possible to present Mr Lempriere’s demise as death by misadventure. Circumstances demanded that the animality of man occasionally be shown, & when shown, punished. The Surgeon’s family would settle for nothing less, & the Commandant had no need of an enquiry being launched from Hobart Town, given the extent of his commercial ventures & political ambitions. The Commandant would have me killed in a particularly slow & barbaric fashion for stealing his favourite perfume if told of my theft. On the other hand, he, Jorgen Jorgensen, was willing to allow me the opportunity to do some final good for the Nation as well as myself. At this point he paused, somewhat obscenely raked his tongue along the sorry sawteeth of his moustache, then continued. He would, said he, ease my passage to the other side with a relatively quick death on the gibbet if I would just sign a statement confessing to the murder of Mr Lempriere.
With as much conviction as I could muster, I told him that Constable Musha Pug, while assistant to the storemaster in the Commissariat, had sold me the perfume bottle—which he had boasted he had stolen in order to advance himself in his pursuit of the Mulatto, the Commandant’s housemaid—& that therefore I couldn’t sign.
V
I SIGNED. IT was the next morning, it was still raining, & Jorgen Jorgensen had presented me with a florid statement detailing my lurid boasts to others of how I had drowned Mr Lempriere, then fed his body to the sharks. All of the aforegoing corroborated by a lengthy confession written & signed by the Commandant’s black housemaid.
There were no sharks in Macquarie Harbour. But there seemed no reason to point out either this, or that Twopenny Sal could not write. To be frank, it seemed unreasonable not to sign after it was mentioned in passing how Constable Musha Pug had been woken in the middle of the preceding night & had his groin pounded with a hammer, ending up with a ball bag the size of a sugar sack in which the gritty remnants of his manhood swam in a ragout of pendulous horror.
When I was fairly tried for Mr Lempriere’s murder—along with Roaring Tom Weaver for dressing in a maid’s petticoats—there was placed next to us as we sat in the condemned pew, in revival of the old practice, a pointed reminder of our soon to be fates, as if they were our cat & dog, two coffins.
Roaring Tom Weaver laughed as he stepped up onto the scaffold the following day &, with a broad grin, pulled a ribbon out of his hair & let his blond braids fall, reached down & taking his laceless boots off, threw them to Old Bob Muff who had first looked after him when he had arrived at Sarah full of plans of escape & liberty. Walk with me, Bob! he yelled, then began his famous roaring & wailing. It was clear he was drunk, full as a fat girl’s blouse, & we all cheered & laughed, & his roars & wails rose with us, through us, beyond us.
The executioner, outraged at such a performance mocking the solemn power of capital punishment, rushed his work. The trap door fell open with a dull thump, Roaring Tom dropped, shook & shuddered, his roaring blowing up inside him one last time, & it became apparent that the hangman had botched the noose & failed to snap Roaring Tom’s neck. Rather than rapidly dying, Roaring Tom thrashed around slowly choking, his roaring now a shrill gurgle. The hangman walked around to the front of the gibbet, shaking his head, leapt up, grabbed Roaring Tom’s thrashing legs, & hanging on, swung with him, bringing his additional weight to bear in order to kill him quicker. It was an awful thing: even Capois Death, to my surprise, gave a choked scream.
The following morning in the Penitentiary, the convicts were awoken for morning muster. Hammocks were furled & neatly hung, each from a hook on the wall, from one of which now hung Old Bob Muff. The hooks were only at elbow height, but it doesn’t take height to hang, only some rope & a strong will. They worried I might do the same & cheat the gallows, & so had me brought to this saltwater cell & put under the regime of Pobjoy.
In the court I was asked for an explanation—but what was there to say? Tha
t at first I saw people in fish? That then, the more I looked at those sad creatures, still dying, the occasional mortal flap of the tail or desperate heave of the gills signalling their silent horror was not yet ended, the more I looked into the endless recesses of their eyes, the more something of them began to pass into me?
And how then could I confess to something even more peculiar, more shocking: how lately some small part of me, without me willing it, was beginning a long, fateful journey into them! Some small part of me & then more & more of me was tumbling downwards, was falling inwards through their accusing eyes into that spiralling tunnel that was to end only with the sudden awareness that I was no longer falling but rolling ever slower in the sea, not knowing whether I was finally safe or whether I was finally dead, & at a certain point in my fall I realised with horror that I was looking up at a sawtooth shark pretending to be Jorgen Jorgensen, & I was seeing fish in people!
I would get all prickly & sweaty just thinking about such terrifying things, far less saying them publicly, because I knew in order to survive & prosper it was important to feel nothing for anyone or anything, & I knew I wanted to survive & prosper. But because of my new-found proximity to what hitherto had been little more than stench wrapped in slime & scale, I began to dream that there was nothing in the extraordinary universe opening up in front of me, not a man or woman, not a plant or tree, not a bird or fish, to which I might be allowed to continue remaining indifferent.
The ostensible crime with which I was charged, & later to be tried &, inevitably, found guilty was of murder. But my real crime …?
My real crime was seeing the world for what it is & painting it as fish. For that reason alone, I was happy to sign a confession of guilt with no need for the Cradle or the Tube Gag, however inaccurate the details of my crime may have read.
I have been in this saltwater cell now for the best part of a year and a half waiting for my execution, which Pobjoy through various subterfuges succeeds in constantly postponing. At first this suited me well enough. My original fish paintings were collected & bound together by Pobjoy, who then sold them off to a Doctor Allport in Hobart Town. It was no matter to me, for I was never satisfied with any of that work for Mr Lempriere’s book of fish. Oddly, not until now, painting only from a shoddy memory in the bad light of this saltwater cell, have I felt my fish finally worthy of the name.
Pobjoy sensed that since being incarcerated in the saltwater cell my belief was renewed, that here my talent was unfolding like a fern frond into the shade. Pobjoy, who formerly only saw me as an object to beat & kick, was impressed by the way I now cared about—& only about—painting, & even more impressed by the sum the Hobart Town doctor was willing to pay for Mr Lempriere’s book of fish.
Pobjoy came to see that paintings were a currency more useful than tobacco or rum when parlayed in the right quarters. But for me to paint, for Pobjoy to make money, I needed materials, which he, in his careful way, has provided.
In my saltwater cell, under the cover of the convict-Constables, I determined I would repaint all the fish from memory, this time around adding to them these notes. Pobjoy provided me with oils & canvas for my Constables, as well as the paper I insisted I needed for my preliminary sketches. But to complete my second book of fish I needed watercolour paints.
The last time I saw Twopenny Sal was when she came to the cell ostensibly bearing some food. My life in the cell was fabulously monotonous & apart from Pobjoy, I was blessed with being spared the problem of people. Heaven is other people, the old priest, who would rub my feet in the hope of rubbing other things, used say, but then, I suppose, so too is Hell. So I didn’t want to see Twopenny Sal—to tell the truth I never wanted to see her again. But there she was, dressed as the domestick she sometimes pretended to be.
I could see from her heavy belly that she was far gone with child. But we didn’t really talk of that or, for that matter, of her father’s death. Though said she nothing I knew she would soon be bolting back into the bush, leaving the Commandant broken-hearted & me in possession not only of Mr Lempriere’s watercolours that she that day smuggled in, but Mr Lempriere’s copper pot of green laudanum in which, after her leaving, I must confess to having resorted to for solace.
Green—fertility, birth, immortality, the resurrection of the just. In Art denoting hope, joy. Among the Greeks & Moors, victory. In church, God’s bounty, mirth, the resurrection. In planets, Venus. But the smell of pig shit, the malevolent power of jealousy & the visage of hallucinations are for me forever turquoise.
Eyes fixed on her belly & wondering which devil was responsible, I said only one word as she turned to leave.
‘Moinee?’ asked I.
‘Cobber,’ said she.
VI
DO YOU THINK I was only gaoled? I wished to cry out as she turned to leave & rapped thrice on the door for Pobjoy to come & open—for I too was the gaoler. Do you think to keep my own hide unflogged I never lied? Never stole off a mate? I have a weakness for blue gin, old women, white rum, young girls, porter, pisco, human company & the Commandant’s laudanum. I have a great fear of pain. I am beyond shame. Do you think I never informed on a mate? I was both cobber & dobber, I liked them & wept for them when they took them off to be flogged on my false information. I survived. It was bad & wrong & I may as well be the cat-o’-nine-tails stripping bark off their backs when I traded souls for some scraps of food or paint. I gave away all I needed. I was a vile piece of cell-shit. I smelt the breath of my fellows. I tasted the sour stench of their rotten lives. I was the stinking cockroach. I was the filthy lice that didn’t stop itching. I was Australia. I was dying before I was born. I was a rat eating its young. I was Mary Magdalene. I was Jesus. I was sinner. I was saint. I was flesh & flesh’s appetite & flesh’s union & death & love were all equally rank & all equally beautiful in my eyes. I cradled their broken bodies dying. I kissed their suppurating boils. I washed their skinny shanks filled with ulcers, rotting craters of pus; I was that pus & I was spirit & I was God & I was untranslatable & unknowable even to myself. How I hated myself for it. How I wished to essay the universe I loved which was me also & how I wanted to know why it was that in my dreams I flew through oceans & why when I awoke I was the earth smelling of freshly turned peat. No man could answer me my angry lamentations nor could they hear my jokes why I had to suffer this life. I was God & I was pus & whatever was me was You & You were Holy, Your feet, Your bowels, Your mound, Your armpits, Your smell & Your sound & taste, Your fallen Beauty, I was Divine in Your image & I was You & I was no longer long for this grand earth & why is it no words would tell how I was so much hurting aching bidding farewell?
THE STRIPED COWFISH
Mrs Gottliebsen’s areolae—Other surprising phenomena recounted—Twopenny Sal & her circles—On why the striped cowfish quivered—A mysterious calamity—Discovery of the Registry—The old Dane’s invention—A fatal confrontation—Literature of murder—Surgeon’s head multiplies ceaselessly—A cocoon unravelling.
I
I CAN SEE I have put the cart before the horse in my telling of this tale, while all the time Mrs Gottliebsen was waiting, ready & harnessed at all points to speed me on to my fateful destination.
If the reader should have the fancy that Billy Gould—back before being found out as the Murderer of the Enlightenment & while still a painter of fish for the Surgeon—having been with Twopenny Sal remained faithful to her, the reader would be at once entirely right & entirely wrong. She was having her way with Musha Pug, & Billy Gould was being introduced to Mrs Gottliebsen, wife of Pastor Gottliebsen, visitors on a sloop bound for Sydney that had stopped over at Sarah Island.
They were suffering the hospitality of Mr Lempriere, who had given them use of his cottage while he was away doing a tour of the settlement’s outposts up the Gordon River. I had been instructed to act as their manservant & to suspend all painting until their visit was ended.
Pastor Gottliebsen was a gaunt & pursed individual. He was not without that partic
ular confidence that arrives unencumbered by the need for thought, & for that alone I disliked him. He had a mind as narrow as the neck of a vinegar cruet, & saw himself as something of an aesthete, a veritable Lakes poet, & the idea of the artist criminal interested him; it interested him, he told me as I served dinner that evening, that these two polarities can exist—perhaps must exist?—under the umbrella of one soul.
If you ask me, it’s a pretty tatty & leaky umbrella & only someone very foolish would seek shelter under it; but Pastor Gottliebsen was not asking & I was not saying, only assuring him as a man obviously in the prime of his life that he could look at worse investments than Art.
‘Why do you paint?’ asked he, & before I could point out that it beats being gang-buggered behind a blackwood, but only just, answered he his own question: ‘Because you must find beauty in the most adverse of worlds. Because even in the heart of the most depraved,’ reflected he, so that I might confirm his trite observation, ‘is the hope of Divine Redemption through Nature, which is Art.’
‘You wouldn’t happen to have a taj of nigger-twist on you?’ asked I.
Pastor Gottliebsen halted, turned his head sideways in wonder at his own revelatory insight. He shook his head in exaltation at the glory of man, his infinite desire to ascend to the ethereal realm.
‘For my pipe,’ continued I, ‘Mr Lempriere won’t object.’
But he didn’t seem to hear, relaxed after a time & offered me some snuff which I took as an acceptable alternative, along with his considered opinion that criminality arises precisely from an imbalance of bodily fluids that he believes could be rectified if, as children, cases such as mine were suspended upside down for several hours a day over a period of some years as a curative treatment.