Gould's Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish

  I found myself lying on a damp flagstone floor, panting, breathing in a confusion of rich odours: dust, dried hops, damp leather, smoked tobacco, &, overriding them all, that particular must I would later discover to be that of parchment when combined with the imminence of death.

  I went to stand up, hit my head on what I realised was some sort of table, fell back down, crawled out, & this time stood up, daring all, only to discover myself in a large room bathed in a bright, coldly luminous moonlight that lent it an ultramarine mystery. The room appeared entirely empty—except, that is, of books.

  Books were everywhere and everywhere I looked there were more books, & all those books neatly stacked & arrayed on rough-hewn, heavy blackwood shelves in great bookcases that rose from floor to ceiling, all radiating out like the spokes of a wheel from a hub where sat a large, circular desk from beneath which I had emerged like a moth from its cocoon, stiff & awkward.

  Circling all round me were so many books it made me dizzy just to look at them, to realise that not only might there be this many books in the world, but that there could be this many books in a single room. There were tall vellum-bound volumes above me & huge dusty tomes below me. Behind me there were string-tied manuscripts of varied sizes & at my front, newer, smaller ornate registers covered in dark Morocco leather.

  I would like to say that in the full moon light that shone from windows high above, that the room took on the colour of dark honey & the amber charm of old libraries. But that would be to lie. It is the sort of nonsense Pobjoy would like me to paint, or that Miss Anne might write. The truth was that the room was a shifting labyrinth of grey & blue shades, ugly & sinister.

  On the circular desk there lay open a plain folio volume clad in abortive, that dainty vellum made from cow foetuses. I looked down at its blue-inked columns, the slipping Italianate hand, its ornate, archaic loops & whorls throwing long shadows of monstrous links, as though all the words were manacled & subjugated.

  What I then read confused me: it purported to be a list of convict activity for the previous six months, but seemed wrong in almost every detail. Still it cleared up one puzzle: that of the room’s purpose. It was, I realised, the settlement’s mysterious Registry, the bookcases the repository of all the island’s records; the circular desk at its centre presumably where the old Danish clerk, Jorgen Jorgensen, had daily disappeared to work compiling the only enduring memory of our strange world for longer than anyone could remember.

  Dawn came & the light grew stronger. My eager eyes no longer had to strain but reluctantly I closed the volume I had only partly read, & prepared to return to the underworld.

  I concentrated on trying to render my break-in as invisible as it was possible. Fortunately the part of the Registry floor I had destroyed under the circular desk was a dank, dark place where it was hard to imagine anyone ever looking. I took a large & what seemed little used volume from near the top of one bookcase, & splayed it over the hole. It was a desperate expedient, but I could think of none better.

  Then, with my primitive trapdoor in place above me, I returned to my cell. As best I could I shored up the broken beams in a way I hoped not obvious & covered the fallen flagstone with the sea pebbles & gravel that formed my cell floor, so that Pobjoy might not discover anything untoward. That he might look up & notice something amiss with the ceiling worried me less; given his need to stoop such was unlikely, & the ceiling was in any case heavily shadowed.

  You might well ask why Billy Gould didn’t just bolt there & then, seeking to escape via the unlocked door of the Registry he had earlier chanced upon. He had—showing that singular boldness that was entirely in character—resolved to postpone his escape until he had made proper preparations. In truth I think he was like a bird when taken out of its cage—his first response was fear, then a desire for familiarity; his initial thought simply to retreat back into the world he knew, that of his saltwater cell.

  And then there was the further matter of what he had read that first night in that opened volume—things so inexplicable & shocking in their effrontery, yet at the same time so compelling in their lucid madness, that they demanded further investigation so he might better plumb &, he hoped, divine their mystery.

  V

  FOR THE NEXT seven nights I could not wait for the tide to rise quick enough, so slowly did it seem to lap my mussel-bound ankles, my lice-crawling crutch, my scabby guts, & it seemed as long as one of Miss Anne’s interminable letters until at last I was floating, rising, & finally able to touch the rough split sandstone & then lever myself into the Registry above.

  For seven nights, lest my light betray my presence, I would sit on the floor next to the round desk in a small puddle of light thrown by a Registry candle & the larger dull illumination of the moon, & continue with my reading of those great volumes so heavy that some took all my strength simply to lift from the bookcase.

  What I discovered between their clapboards was no chronicle of the penal colony I knew, the Commandant’s nation of Nova Venezia. As I leafed through memorandum register after letter book after convict indent, I searched for records, drawings, mason’s plans of the wonder of the Great Mah-Jong Hall.

  There were none.

  For seven nights I scoured the Commissariat records for accounts, invoices, receipts, that might prove the Commandant’s purchase of South American locomotives; tried to find paper trails that would definitively establish his sale of the Transylvanian wilderness, or, for that matter, his even more audacious bartering of the mainland of Australia & the purchase of Moluccan jewellery, Chinese medicines, sea cucumber, Javanese furniture & boatloads of Siamese girls.

  There were none.

  For seven nights I gleaned personal letters & diaries for the smallest details that might hint of the Commandant’s nightmares of a past that never left, of Arab traders & immortal Japanese pirates & naked French rationalists.

  There were none.

  As I made my way through the old Dane’s writings my feelings passed from bewilderment to wonder as to why he might have written such so much with so little foundation in life.

  The necessity to lie to Governor Arthur in Hobart Town & to the Colonial Office in London was clear enough: I had come upon letters dated several years earlier from the Colonial Office requesting full acquittals, reports, inventories & audits, all of which demanded an untruthful response, the portrayal of a penal colony as they might imagine it & not as we knew it to be.

  At what point—& why—this necessary clerical invention had been extended to the much grander project of reimagining the penal colony, I know not. All that was clear was that it was the old Dane who was selected by the Commandant to work upon the entire records of the settlement, in a way that would accord with expectation & not reality.

  But at a certain moment Jorgen Jorgensen’s work began to outstrip even his master’s ambition in its deranged achievement. Though at first he had allowed his works to be guided by the desires of the Commandant, a seeming cipher of another’s whims & inventions, he had slowly drifted into his own extraordinary conceit of an alternative world.

  As night succeeded night, as I read on & on, the magnitude of his audacity became clear, & my wonder changed to simple awe.

  The world, as described by Jorgen Jorgensen in those blue-inked pages, was at war with the reality in which we lived. The bad news was that reality was losing. It was unrecognisable. It was insufferable. It was, in the end, inhuman. It was also impossible to stop reading.

  I tried to imagine the old Dane at first compelled to reinvent all that barbarity & horror of our settlement as order & progress, material, moral & spiritual, recording it by slipping whale-oil light in his elegant Italianate hand in the official papers of the settlement. It was for him, I suppose, a necessary burden, & at the beginning he probably saw it as trading his life for an incredible & entirely untrue story as he once had traded lies for credit to play the gaming tables of Europe.

  And then after some time—one year? several years?—p
erhaps there was a moment so exhilarating that he was forever after imprisoned in its mad liberation, a moment when he first transcended his own consciousness, dipping his quill in demons, & discovering to his fear & astonishment that contained within himself was all men & all women: all good, all evil, all love, all hate, & all time that single moment when his soul exploded into a million beads of vapour through which the light of his imaginings began pouring, refracting into a rainbow of stories made concrete as reports, standing orders, convict indents, letter books & memoranda.

  For in the old Dane’s account everything was different. Every life, every action, every motive, every consequence. Time, which the Commandant understood to be something of which we were all inexorably composed, our essential substance & lifeforce, was in these accounts something separate from us—so many equally weighted bricks that together made the wall of the present that denied us any connection with the past, & thus any knowledge of our self.

  Where waking & dreaming & nightmares under the Commandant had been one, with the old Dane’s records they became hopelessly divided & opposed. Nightmares were banned, & no collusion between living & dreaming was admitted to. It was the greatest piece of card sharping in history, & how proud I thought dear old Marshal Blucher would have felt of his onetime skat partner.

  VI

  I TOO, LET me add, felt a growing glow toward Jorgensen, a feeling only heightened by the discovery on the seventh night of a stash of Danish schnapps hidden behind a pile of unused Commissariat requisition forms. As I read on in the waxing summer moonlight beneath the circular desk, pausing only to squash a mosquito or pour another finger of schnapps or take a quick piss in the hole that opened into my cell, I came to appreciate how the old Dane’s invention was as subtle as it was infinite: in the universe he had spent so many years creating for his master every detail—no matter how trivial—was augmented & qualified & tabulated.

  I could only marvel at all that Jorgensen had created: for example, the long ordered columns in which he had tabulated statisticks showing a declining use of the Lash over several years, the books of handwritten sermons, the drawings of new cells, etc, etc, collectively depicting a regime of necessary corporal punishment battling the convicts’ inherent brutality slowly ceding to more enlightened practices, the use of solitary confinement & Wesleyan missionaries.

  It was no doubt slow & often tedious work for Jorgensen, but by obeying the laws of pattern & succession, of cause & effect—which never characterise life but are necessary for words on paper—he had created an image of the settlement that would persuade posterity of both the convicts’ animality & the administrator’s sagacity, a model of the power of unremitting, tempered discipline to transform pickpockets into cobblers & catamites into Christians.

  There were buried in these volumes—entwined like so many fibrous roots of twitch—individual stories one could tease out, mainly of convicts but also of their gaolers, such as the mundane, but successful career of Lieutenant Horace, latterly the Com mandant, as implausible as the life of any saint. He had come from the humblest of backgrounds, born in a cottage he had built with his own hands, rising in the army from an ensign in the 91st Regiment with displays of gallantry in various administrative postings, his successful work as a staff officer in the British Honduras, dealing humanely & in an enlightened fashion with the native Indians prior to their mass execution & his transfer to Sarah Island, a record of humanity underlined by copies of several letters to his dear friend William Wilberforce on the evils of the slavery system.

  I toasted such a benign prison so marvellous you’d happily pay to leave England just to come & live here, & I toasted the way he even permitted us convicts a random agency. I raised my glass repeatedly to all the artful forgeries of smuggled convict letters that backed up details to be found in the official reports & standing orders of felons dropping tools & refusing to work until certain conditions were allowed, or grievances addressed. On one high shelf there were even bottles containing the skin of hanged men on which particular tattoos were emblazoned, which tallied with lives of crime & punishment to be found in the many volumes of letter books, so that these real pieces of dead flesh were given correspondence, nay, the very breath of life, by the old Dane’s tales, & I drank to every last bobbing anchor & angel & blue-inked maxim.

  On & on, round & round, went more stories & down & down went more schnapps. I toasted Jorgensen again & again & each time Jorgensen’s glass was empty how it seemed only right & proper to fill it once more to toast the wonderful world Jorgensen had made: a penal system as some enlightened mass-migration scheme created by beneficent elders, in which horror was only very occasional but always deserved, & in which men made good rather than bad. This world was not an act of creation, for good or bad, in which people constantly reinvented themselves, but a system in which one was accorded an ignoble but necessary part, like a piston head or belt in the steam engines the Scot weaver had once so futilely smashed.

  I guzzled to the greater glory of machines & systems & then my head was spinning with the brazen audacity of all those forged reports & letters & standing orders that suggested none of the monstrosity or derangement with which I had become familiar—of which I was part.

  I toasted the total absence of such things, & I toasted the inclusion of all the new gorgeous lies. And then I ran out of things to toast so I just finished drinking straight from the bottle, & at its end I found myself feeling queasy & guilty, & I began to worry that Jorgensen’s world might be the Hell that had filled the machine breaker’s eyes & mouth before Capois Death sat on him.

  Then—& my shame is such that I can only refer to myself in this regard in the third person—Billy Gould felt the urge to throw up. Not that Billy Gould thought vomiting a bad thing, for the Surgeon had told him it rid the body of unwanted fluids & humours, & prevented the continuing horrors of crapulence & flatulence the following day.

  Indeed, to hasten this therapeutic cleansing of the body of which I am sure Pastor Gottliebsen would have approved, Billy Gould even stuck two fingers down the back of his throat & waggled them back & forth, until he felt rising up his chest, filling his throat & then issuing as a broken stream from his mouth, amidst the tomatoes & carrots he had never eaten, the dreadful awareness that all he had read was simply the Commandant’s image of rational society as a prison of which even Miss Anne in Europe did not dare dream, & this final creation, perhaps in many ways his most monstrous—if unintended—achievement, outdid the Great Mah-Jong Hall & the National Railway Line in its unknowing yet grotesque reverence of the Old World.

  It was a lot to be aware of & have sprinkle your feet & splash your dacks at the same time—too much if one is to be absolute frank—& Billy Gould would have started trying to clean up all that mess of partly-digested Europe there & then if he had not suffered a second realisation even worse than the first.

  It came upon him like the heaviest, the most intolerable of burdens pounding away at the front of his head as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand: that in this universal history, all he had seen & known, all he had witnessed & suffered, was now as lost & meaningless as a dream that dissolves upon waking. If freedom, as Capois Death carrying his spirits of the past in a bottle of purl-ale had maintained, exists only in the space of memory, then he & everybody he knew were being condemned to an eternity of imprisonment.

  VII

  MY MIND FELT a sickening horror that is beyond words to describe. Gargoylish faces seemed to cluster at the windows far above & plead for something to appease their endless suffering that went unremembered & unrecounted. I felt as if those awful flayed skulls were advancing & receding—with their red bone sticking through as though they had been gnawed by dogs—as if they wished me to make the past right, something that was totally beyond my powers.

  I had read & I had read, & still the past went unavenged & unnoticed, & how was it possible for me to remake it as anything else? Out of the staring, accusing sockets of the skulls of the Scottish
weaver & Roaring Tom Weaver, out of Towtereh’s stolen skull & his grandson’s smashed skull crawled cockroaches. Fleas flew out from their jagged nose bones. The skulls began dripping putrescent tears of pus & blood that passed through the glass & spread all over me. In terror I brushed fiercely at my shoulders, my arms, my head as if I could so wipe them away; No! cried I, & No! Please leave me alone! But those fearsome shades would not leave & were begging of me what was impossible. I, who was covered in sloughing rotten flesh, who felt all the maggots that once had crawled over the staked dead black woman now crawling over me, who stank of all decay & of all sickness & of all return, saw the incarnation of the world passing me by in all its horror & all its beauty, & how could I say that both were inescapable?

  I am but the reader, I tried to plead with them. But they did not listen, could not listen, would never listen, & seemed intent only on making me the instrument of their vengeance.

  And then Billy Gould found himself being not just a little sick, but most violently ill.

  For the world no longer existed to become a book. A book now existed with the obscene ambition of becoming the world.

  VIII

  I SLUMPED TO the floor. I lay there for a time like a Chinese lantern emptied of light, crumpled & flat, my head sunk in disbelief & bewilderment. Was this what people would one day remember as their past?

  It was then I heard a bizarre shrill whistling. With a terrified jerk, I swung around, at the same time throwing my arms over my head in protection.

  In front of me was a small, mangy dog, standing on its two hind legs in the moonlight, whistling. Then the dog ceased, fell down on to its one other good leg, & looked up over my shoulder. Before I could turn back around, before I even heard him speaking I knew who it was behind me.

  ‘You are a counterfeiter, Gould,’ said he, his words slipping & sliding like his handwriting.

  I slowly turned & saw smiling down at me, of all people, Jorgen Jorgensen. For a moment I thought he was standing on a chair or a bookcase, he seemed so high up. He leant over me, throwing me into shadow, looking like a bookcase waiting to fall. Very slowly, my eyes never daring leave his, I stood up.