A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

  Sort something out? That’s what the plumber says, or the man who comes to nail the roof back on. ‘Reckon we’ll be able to sort something out,’ they say with one of those confident winks. Well, they didn’t sort something out on this occasion, did they? They bloody didn’t. And in the last days of the crisis, Greg didn’t always come home at nights. Even he’d finally noticed and decided to have some fun before it was all over. In a way I couldn’t blame him, except for the fact that he wouldn’t admit it. He said he was staying out because he couldn’t stand coming home and getting nagged at by me. I told him I understood and it was all right, yet when I explained he got very uptight. He said if he wanted a bit on the side then it wouldn’t be because of the world situation but because I was on his back all the time. They just don’t see the connections, do they? When men in dark-grey suits and striped ties up there in the north start taking certain strategic precautions as they term it, men like Greg in thongs and T-shirts down here in the south begin staying out late in bars trying to pick up girls. They should understand that, shouldn’t they? They should admit it.

  So when I knew what had happened, I didn’t wait for Greg to come home. He was out there knocking back another beer, saying how those fellows up there would sort something out, and in the meantime why don’t you come and sit on my knee, darling? I just took Paul and put him in his basket and got on the bus with as much tinned food as I could carry and some bottles of water. I didn’t leave a note because there wasn’t anything to say. I got off at the terminal on Harry Chan Avenue and started walking towards the Esplanade. Then guess what I saw, sunning herself on the roof of a car? A sleepy, friendly, tortoiseshell cat. I stroked her, she purred, I sort of scooped her up in my arm, one or two people stopped to look but I was round the corner into Herbert Street before they could say anything.

  Greg would have been angry about the boat. Still, he only had a quarter share in her, and if the four of them were going to spend their last days drinking in bars and picking up girls because of the men in dark-grey suits who in my opinion should have been fixed themselves years ago, then they weren’t going to miss the boat, were they? I filled her up, and as I cast off I saw that the tortoiseshell I’d put down just anywhere was sitting on top of Paul’s basket, looking at me. ‘You’ll be Linda,’ I said.

  *

  She left the world behind from a place called Doctor’s Gully. At the end of the Esplanade at Darwin, behind the modern YMCA building, a zig-zag road runs down to a disused boat ramp. The big hot car-park is mostly empty, except when tourists come to watch the fish feed. Nothing else goes on nowadays at Doctor’s Gully. Every day at high tide hundreds, thousands of fish come right up to the water’s edge to be fed.

  She thought how trusting the fish were. They must think these huge two-legged creatures are giving them food out of the kindness of their hearts. Maybe that’s how it started, but now it’s $2.50 admission for adults, $1.50 for children. She wondered why none of the tourists who stayed in the big hotels along the Esplanade thought it odd. But nobody stops to think about the world any more. We live in a world where they make children pay to see the fish eat. Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. Exploited, and then poisoned. The ocean out there is filling up with poison. The fish will die too.

  Doctor’s Gully was deserted. Hardly anyone sailed from there any more; they’d all moved off to the marina years ago. But there were still a couple of boats pulled up on the rocks, looking abandoned. One of them, pink and grey, with not much of a mast, had NOT FOR SALE painted along its side. This always made her laugh. Greg and his friends kept their little boat behind this one, away from the fish-feeding place. The rocks over here were strewn with discarded bits of metal – engines, boilers, valves, pipes, all turning orangey-brown with rust. As she walked, she stirred up flocks of orangey-brown butterflies which had started to live among the scrap metal, using it as camouflage. What have we done to the butterflies, she thought; look where we’ve made them live. She gazed out to sea, across the scrubby bits of mangrove pushing up by the shore, towards a line of small tankers, and beyond them low, humpy islands on the horizon. This was the place from which she left the world behind.

  Past Melville Island, through Dundas Strait, and out into the Arafura Sea; after that she let the wind govern her direction. Mostly they seemed to be heading east, but she didn’t attend too carefully. You only followed where you were going if you wanted to get back to where you had started from, and she knew that was impossible.

  She hadn’t expected neat mushroom clouds on the horizon. She knew it wouldn’t be like it was in the films. Sometimes there was a shifting of the light, sometimes a distant rumbling noise. Such things could have meant nothing at all; but somewhere it had happened, and the winds that circled the planet were doing the rest. At night she slackened sail and went below to the little cabin, leaving the deck to Paul and Linda. At first Paul had wanted to fight the newcomer – all the old territorial stuff. But after a day or two the cats became accustomed to one another.

  *

  She thought she might have caught the sun a little. She’d been out in the heat all day with only one of Greg’s old baseball caps for protection. He had this collection of stupid caps with silly slogans on them. This one was red with white lettering on it, an advertisement for a restaurant somewhere. It read UNTIL YOU’VE ATE AT BJ’S YOU AIN’T SHIT. Some drinking mate of Greg’s had given it him for a birthday, and Greg could never tire of the joke. He’d sit there on the boat with a can of beer in his hand and his cap on his head and just start chuckling to himself. Then he’d laugh a lot more until everyone was watching, and finally announce ‘Until you’ve ate at BJ’s you ain’t shit.’ That would crack him up, time and again. She hated the cap but it made sense to wear it. She’d forgotten the zinc cream and all the other tubes of stuff.

  She knew what she was doing. She knew probably nothing would come of what Greg would have referred to as her little venture. Whenever she had a plan of any sort – especially something that didn’t involve him – he would always refer to it as her little venture. She didn’t think she was going to land on some undamaged island where you only had to throw a bean over your shoulder for a row of them to spring up and wave their pods at you. She didn’t expect a coral reef, a strip of sand from the holiday brochures and a nodding palm. She didn’t imagine some good-looking fellow turning up after a couple of weeks in a dinghy with two dogs on board; then a girl with two chickens, a bloke with two pigs, and so on. Her expectations were not high. She just thought you had to try it, whatever the result. It was your duty. You weren’t allowed to get out of it.

  *

  I couldn’t tell last night. I was coming out of a dream, or maybe I was still in it, but I heard the cats, I swear I did. Or rather, the sound of a cat in heat, calling. Not that Linda would have had far to call. By the time I was fully awake there was only the sound of the waves against the hull. I went up the steps and pushed open the doors. In the moonlight I could see the pair of them, sitting smugly on their paws, side by side, looking back at me. Just like a couple of kids who’d almost got caught necking by the girl’s mum. A cat in heat sounds like a baby crying, doesn’t it? That ought to tell us something.

  I don’t keep count of the days. There isn’t any point, is there? We aren’t going to measure things in days any more. Days and weekends and holidays – that’s how the men in grey suits measure things. We’ll have to go back to some older cycle, sunrise to sunset for a start, and the moon will come into it, and the seasons, and the weather – the new, terrible weather we shall have to live under. How do tribes in the jungle measure the days? It’s not too late to learn from them. People like that have the key to living with nature. They wouldn’t castrate their cats. They might worship them, they might even eat them, but they wouldn’t have them fixed.

  I just eat enough to keep me going. I’m not going to calculate how long I might be at sea and then divide the rations into forty-eight portions or anything like t
hat. That’s the old sort of thinking, the thinking that led us into all this. I eat enough to keep going, that’s all. I fish, of course. I’m sure it’s safe. But when I catch something I can’t help giving it to Paul and Linda. Still tins for me, while the cats grow plump.

  *

  I must be more careful. Must have passed out in the sun. Came to lying on my back with the cats licking my face. Felt very parched and feverish. Too much tinned food, perhaps. Next time I catch a fish I’d better eat it myself, even if it makes me unpopular.

  I wonder what Greg’s up to. Is he up to anything? I sort of see him there, with a beer in his hand, laughing and pointing. ‘Until you’ve ate at BJ’s you ain’t shit,’ he says. He’s reading it off my cap, staring at me. He’s got a girl on his knee. My life with Greg seems as far away from me now as my life in the north.

  I saw a flying fish the other day. I’m sure I did. I couldn’t have made it up, could I? It made me happy. Fish can fly, and so can reindeer.

  *

  Definitely got some fever. Managed to catch a fish and even cook it. Big trouble from Paul and Linda. Dreams, bad dreams. Still heading more or less east, I think.

  I’m sure I’m not alone. I mean, I’m sure everywhere in the world there are people like me. It can’t be just me, just me alone in a boat with two cats and everyone else on dry land shouting silly cow. I bet there are hundreds, thousands of boats with people in and animals doing what I’m doing. Abandon ship, that was the old cry. Now it’s abandon land. There’s danger everywhere, but more on land. We all crawled out of the sea once, didn’t we? Maybe that was a mistake. Now we’re going back to it.

  I imagine all the other people doing what I’m doing and that gives me hope. It must be an instinct in the human race, mustn’t it? When threatened, scatter. Not just running away from the danger, but raising our chances of survival as a species. If we spread out over the whole globe, the poison won’t be able to harm everyone. Even if they fired off all their poison, there must be a chance.

  In the night I hear the cats. A hopeful sound.

  *

  Bad dreams. Nightmares, I suppose. When does a dream become a nightmare? These dreams of mine go on after I’ve woken up. It’s like having a hangover. The bad dreams won’t let the rest of life go on.

  *

  She thought she saw another boat on the horizon, and steered towards it. She didn’t have any flares, and it was too far away for shouting, so she just steered towards it. It was sailing parallel to the horizon, and she had it in view for half an hour or so. Then it went away. Perhaps it wasn’t a boat anyway, she said to herself; but whatever it was, its disappearance left her feeling depressed.

  She remembered a terrible thing she’d once read in a newspaper story about life on board a supertanker. Nowadays the ships had got bigger and bigger, while the crew had got smaller and smaller, and everything was done by technology. They just programmed a computer in the Gulf or wherever, and the ship practically sailed itself all the way to London or Sydney. It was much nicer for the owners, who saved lots of money, and much nicer for the crew, who only had to worry about the boredom. Most of the time they sat around below deck drinking beer like Greg, as far as she could make out. Drinking beer and watching videos.

  There was one thing she couldn’t ever forget from the article. It said that in the old days there was always someone up in the crow’s nest or on the bridge, watching for trouble. But nowadays the big ships didn’t have a lookout any more, or at least the lookout was just a man staring from time to time at a screen with a lot of blips on it. In the old days if you were lost at sea in a raft or a dinghy or something, and a boat came along, there was a pretty good chance of being rescued. You waved and shouted and fired off any rockets you had; you ran your shirt up to the top of the mast; and there were always people keeping an eye out for you. Nowadays you can drift in the ocean for weeks, and a supertanker finally comes along, and it goes right past. The radar won’t pick you up because you’re too small, and it’s pure luck if anybody happens to be hanging over the rail being sick. There had been lots of cases where castaways who would have been rescued in the old days simply weren’t picked up; and even incidents of people being run down by the ships they thought were coming to rescue them. She tried to imagine how awful it would be, the terrible wait, and then the feeling as the ship goes past and there’s nothing you can do, all your shouts drowned by the engines. That’s what’s wrong with the world, she thought. We’ve given up having lookouts. We don’t think about saving other people, we just sail on by relying on our machines. Everyone’s below deck, having a beer with Greg.

  So maybe that ship on the horizon wouldn’t have spotted her anyway. Not that she wanted to be rescued or anything. There just might have been some news about the world, that was all.

  *

  She began to have more nightmares. The bad dreams hung over longer into the day. She felt she was on her back. There was a pain in her arm. She was wearing white gloves. She was in a sort of cage, as far as she could tell: on either side of her metal bars rose vertically. Men came and saw her, always men. She thought she must write down the nightmares, write them down as well as the true things that were happening. She told the men in the nightmares that she was going to write about them. They smiled and said they would give her a pencil and paper. She refused. She said she would use her own.

  *

  She knew the cats were getting a good diet of fish. She knew they didn’t get much exercise and were putting on weight. But it just seemed to her that Linda was putting on more weight than Paul. She didn’t like to believe it was happening. She didn’t dare.

  One day she saw land. She started the engine and steered towards it. She got close enough to see mangroves and palms, then the fuel ran out and the winds carried her away. It was a surprise to find no sadness or disappointment within her as the island receded. In any case, she thought, it would have been cheating to find the new land with the help of a diesel engine. The old ways of doing things had to be rediscovered: the future lay in the past. She would allow the winds to guide and guard her. She threw the empty fuel cans overboard.

  *

  I’m crazy. I should have got pregnant before I left. Of course. How didn’t I see that was the answer? All these jokes from Greg about him being just an impregnator and I couldn’t see what was obvious. That was what he was there for. That’s why I met him. All that side of things seems odd now. Bits of rubber and tubes to squeeze and pills to swallow. There won’t be any of that any more. We’re going to give ourselves back to nature now.

  I wonder where Greg is; whether Greg is. He could be dead. I’ve always wondered about that phrase the survival of the fittest. Anyone would think, looking at us, that Greg was the fitter to survive: he’s bigger, stronger, more practical in our terms anyway, more conservative, more easy-going. I’m a worrier, I’ve never done carpentry, I’m not so good at being on my own. But I’m the one that’s going to survive, or have the chance to anyway. The Survival of the Worriers – is that what it means? People like Greg will die out like the dinosaurs. Only those who can see what’s happening will survive, that must be the rule. I bet there were animals who sensed the Ice Age was coming and set off on some long and dangerous journey to find a safer, warmer climate. And I bet the dinosaurs thought they were neurotic, put it down to pre-menstrual tension, said silly cow. I wonder if the reindeer saw what was going to happen to them. Do you think they ever sensed it somehow?

  *

  They say I don’t understand things. They say I’m not making the right connections. Listen to them, listen to them and their connections. This happened, they say, and as a consequence that happened. There was a battle here, a war there, a king was deposed, famous men – always famous men, I’m sick of famous men – made events happen. Maybe I’ve been out in the sun too long, but I can’t see their connections. I look at the history of the world, which they don’t seem to realize is coming to an end, and I don’t see what they see. All
I see is the old connections, the ones we don’t take any notice of any more because that makes it easier to poison the reindeer and paint stripes down their backs and feed them to mink. Who made that happen? Which famous man will claim the credit for that?

  *

  It’s laughable. Listen to this dream. I was in bed, and I couldn’t move. Things were a bit blurry. I didn’t know where I was. There was a man. I don’t remember what he looked like – just a man. He said, ‘How are you feeling?’

  I said, ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you really?’

  ‘Of course I am. Why shouldn’t I be?’

  He didn’t reply, just nodded, and seemed to be looking up and down my body, which was under the bedclothes of course. Then he said, ‘None of these urges?’

  ‘What urges?’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about.’