‘Don’t,’ said Ellen Ternan, his Nell, saying words that neither Dickens nor Wilkie had ever scripted; then, realising her error, she shook her head. And as her body was seized with a most terrifying presentiment of its destiny, she tried to retreat into her lines, mumbling and confusing them in a way that was mistaken for acting.
But Dickens was pulling her into him, into some strange and terrible new fate, and she was unable to stop falling. She was terrified for them both. She looked around desperately, but everywhere outside the halo of light defining the two of them together was darkness. The wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else. The other cast members gathered around. The men reverently uncovered their heads. The end was near; they all saw it now.
‘Kiss me, my sister, kiss me before I die!’
His words were firing into her heart like a cannonade without end. Ellen Ternan leant over him and kissed his forehead. She kissed him not simply because it was in the script but because there was an inexorable logic to her kissing him that she struggled against but could not deny. The question is—can you pay? She could see now that it was a novel contained in his notebook, only she had not understood until that moment that she was its unwritten heart.
He could feel her lips on his brow, he could feel the immense human tensing of the darkened audience, a black void that radiated some energy that allowed him to live a little longer. He could feel it, feel them, willing him on. He had come here by chance, coincidences were bringing him to his destiny, and yet, as in his stories, he knew there were no coincidences in this world, that the purpose of everything is ultimately revealed, be it a savage’s skull or Sir John lost in ice floes or he, Dickens, lost until this moment. He had thought he would have to drag himself in a strange waking sleep through the rest of a life that had become a strange torture. But perhaps it was not so.
‘What is it?’ asked Dickens, with words Ellen Ternan had never heard before, unscripted words. She looked at him in shock, not knowing what was happening. ‘The way we are denied love,’ he continued, and she, along with the audience, could hear how hard it was for him to say these words. ‘And the way we suddenly discover it being offered us, in all its pain and infinite heartbreak. The way we say no to love.’
He never saw Lady Jane, white-faced, abruptly stand, turn and leave her box. Outside, in her rush to get away from the theatre, she accidentally trod in a gutter gouted with something foul and thick. She dropped her handkerchief and her nose and mouth were overwhelmed by the foul effluvia of the city, heat-leavened and wind-stirred: the wet sewage flowing through the streets and the dry dust of horse dung blowing in the air, the caustic filth of a thousand tanneries, workshops and factories, the stench of a million unwashed bodies.
Lady Jane felt lost, felt that she might vomit. It occurred to her that perhaps one only exists in those who love you. She could not find a landau or even a hansom cab. Had she said no to love, that day she looked down into the courtyard? She called out for a cab, called out louder, but none came. And if you turn away from love, did it mean you no longer existed? Did she? She felt as lost and dead as the silky soot that eddied around her. She was calling louder and louder, but still nobody came.
Inside, the only sound that could be heard was the slow puff and wheeze of the gigantic bellows working hard to sustain the burning limelight, as though that one pale fire were breathing for the two thousand mesmerised audience who remained.
‘Don’t die,’ said Ellen Ternan.
His head lay in her lap, her tears were falling on him like rain, and the universe was flowing into him, he was open to everything, it was an immense thought, a terrifying feeling, something at once outside of himself that had now entered him, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. It was as though he had awoken startled from a dream. He had survived. He felt as if he were coming down from a mountain, that the snow drifts were thinning and then giving way to grasslands, that a great green valley beckoned before him, a space so immense and free he felt himself gasping contemplating it. On and on he walked. The air was sweet, and breathing felt like drinking water on a hot day. He was coming home. It made no sense. It was beyond understanding. He was being held by her, feeling her draw breath. He was tasting her tears. The sound of sobbing from the darkness was unbearable.
‘Please don’t die,’ begged Ellen Ternan.
His cheek pressed against her uncorseted belly. He could feel its softness pulsing in and out. He could not know that within a year his marriage would be ended. That in the thirteen years of life left to him, he would be faithful to Ellen Ternan, but that theirs would be a hidden and cruel relationship. That his writing and his life would change irrevocably. That things broken would never be fixed. That even their dead baby would remain a secret. That the things he desired would become ever more chimerical, that movement and love would frighten him more and more, until he could not sit on a train without trembling. He was smelling her, hot, musty, moist.
‘Nelly?’ whispered Dickens.
And at that moment, Dickens knew he loved her. He could no longer discipline his undisciplined heart. And he, a man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realised he could no longer deny wanting.
13
‘WE’VE GIVEN DEATH THE SLIP,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘But for how long?’
Walter Talba Bruney was a drunk now, and fat and morbid with it. He was only in his late twenties but looked far older. The war had ended, but another war went on and on inside Walter Talba Bruney and it would not let him go. When he was drunk, he was angry with God. When he was sober, he prayed to God to help him get drunk. When he was drunk again, he shouted that if he had a chance, he would get a spear and spear God good, teach him a lesson.
About God Mathinna had no particular opinion—perhaps, as she sometimes told her fellow rum drinkers around the fire, it was because she was high church. But she told Walter Talba Bruney she hated him talking about death.
‘All blackfellas die at Wybalenna,’ said Walter Talba Bruney, ignoring her. ‘We think, come back to our country and we be good and healthy. But we come back here and we keep dying. Devil in us. Devil killing us. God killing us. Why God and the Devil want to work together?’
There were five of them drinking rum and sugar that night: two other natives and Burly Tom, a one-time whaler who had of late been living by mending nets, but who later denied ever being there.
Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirées, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn’t Government House but Ira Bye’s sly grog shop—an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay—that it wasn’t a soirée and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro’s bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.
And because, as well as a direct gaze, she had in her time at Government House absorbed the idea of example to one’s lowers, and because it made the point—to herself as much as to them—that she was somebody, Mathinna talked about the new dances that season in London, though her knowledge here, too, was both hopelessly inadequate and entirely out of date. When she asked Gooseberry what she thought, she just cackled into her cracked china cup, and, not really knowing anything about the whites’ new dances, Mathinna turned to the one subject about which she could manifest some authority: why she would like to hunt foxes, something that offered a union of her heritage with her upbringing.
‘We been treated shamefully, worse than the old people in the bush,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘And them savages not good Christian people like us, them just savages who never learnt nothing.?
?? He was mumbling now, and then he had another drink and changed his mind. He felt God was back on his side now, but he couldn’t understand why He didn’t help more. When Walter Talba Bruney looked up at Mathinna, she saw there were tears in the slits that were left for eyes in his big puffy face and in one tear was caught a flailing louse.
Mathinna knew Walter Talba Bruney now had a wife, and he had tried being respectable, but the government had taken his sheep when they left Flinders Island and now he wanted them back, and moreover he wanted land, and they wouldn’t give him anything unless he swore off drink, but, sensing this was just one more lie, he drank all the more.
‘We know whitefellas just us, blackfellas when we die we reborn with white skin. But why…’ He was lost now, somewhere between God and Jesus and savages and civilisation and all their impending deaths and the curious, terrible, impossible certainty they would be reborn as unthinking as a white. ‘Why,’ he said again. ‘Why?’
‘I no a savage or slave,’ said Mathinna. ‘Them no-good lazy blackfellas, they disgust me. I marry a whitefella, you watch, you see, I be big lady.’
‘Why you drink with us then if you a white lady?’ said Walter Talba Bruney, seemingly startled back into conversation. ‘You better be drinking with them.’
But Mathinna drank with Walter Talba Bruney because, other than a few blue gin riders, no one else would. For all that they annoyed each other, the Aborigines shared something so obvious that it sometimes evaded them, as they sought in the rise and fall of their chipped cups and rusty tin mugs, in the merge of their old and new worlds, some answer to who they were and who they might yet be.
Whoever she drank with, Mathinna drank more and more. Which was why—when Walter Talba Bruney walked with her down that dark track from Ira Bye’s through the forest, where the setting moonlight was lost in the blackness of the great trees’ canopy—she grew angry. It was not that he then hurt her in his entry, nor his excuses that she was not wet or willing or pretty enough any more to deserve any payment, or his nonsense that it was she who should be paying him for such pleasure. It was simply that he refused to give her the half-bottle of rum he had promised in exchange.
That was why she argued with him. It was why, when he yelled back, she spat at him. It was why, when he hit her, she hit him. But when he forced her head down into the puddle, crying out that she could drink this then, there was nothing she could do, try as she might.
All around her were trees older than knowing. If you held your face to their taut mossy bark, you could hear it all. It passed understanding. It defied words and spoke in dreams. She was flying through wallaby grass, her body no longer a torment but a joy. Soft threads of fine grass feathering beads of water onto her legs. The earth was her bare feet, wet and mushy in winter, dry and dusty in summer.
Mathinna managed to lift her head out of the puddle once. Walter Talba Bruney slipped the filthy red scarf from her hair down onto her throat, and twisted its greasy loop into an inescapable garrotte. The track in front of her shuddered. Time and the world were not infinite, and all things end in dirt and mud. She finally saw her father’s face. Long, with a slightly bent nose and a kind mouth, it was, she realised with rising terror, as she felt herself being forced back into the wet void, the face of death.
Walter Talba Bruney walked through what remained of the night, returning to a world of light, of children laughing, of horses serenely eating grass, of people who had things to do and lives to live. As dawn broke, he passed an ox driver resting with his beast, and as his home drew close, he came upon a sight that reminded him of his beloved Bible and made him smile: a lamb lost on a road.
Garney Walch stood a moment longer in front of the ox, warming his hands in the steaming breath billowing from the beast’s wet-ringed nostrils. Then he, his ox and sled moved on. His path took him along a clifftop that overlooked the D’Entrecasteaux Channel and its fishing boats and led down into a small valley, where he was to help a farmer and his convict labourer build a barn.
They started the morning selecting dead trees that had barrels straight and true enough for good poles, and then set to work. After felling the trees and stripping their trunks of bark and branches, Garney Walch had his ox haul the poles to a small meadow glistening with so many wet spiders’ webs that it seemed veiled in a sticky gossamer. The hoar frost on the long grass was melting to a sparkling dew, and all things, including the men and the ox, steamed in the winter sun as they worked, and all things seemed to have a place.
A mile away, an old lag waded out on a small rocky reef, shivering and cursing and happy in his pursuit. He emptied a dog’s leg from a hessian bag into a wicker lobster pot and, carefully choosing his point at the drop-off where a large amount of bull kelp rose, lowered the pot with a long line of hemp rope. And so the sun rose, birds sang, men worked, boats sailed by, and life went on.
A dazzling sunburst of light, ruby gold in colour and warm on the flesh, burst through the eucalypts and found the three men: the farmer, who was worried about his wife, pregnant with their fourth child; the convict, who was hoping to find a wife once free; and Garney Walch, who carried his grief for a daughter lost to typhoid twenty years before as a stone in his belly. The men worked with few words around the fallen trees, rolling, chocking, measuring, sawing, until at last they had nine good poles.
They loaded the sled, three poles a trip from the paddock to the homestead, and before each trip Garney Walch patted the ox on its muzzle and seemed to be sharing a joke with it. He was unexpectedly gentle with such a beast, as though the burden of the logs were equally borne by both.
The sun swung its low winter course, the men slowly divested themselves of coats and worsted shirts, till they laboured only in trousers and dirty undershirts, and when the sun had risen as high as it would get and the men felt no longer stale and putrid but fresh and good, they halted. While the convict got a fire going with the oily spikes of grass-trees, Garney Walch produced some cold hoggets’ necks from his sugarbag. The farmer had bread and salt, and they moved two of their poles to form seats around the fire and ate their cold hogget and bread with relish, then washed it down with black tea sweetened with the farmer’s plum jam, and talked happily of how well they lived.
After lunch they returned to their labour. As each pole was set in its hole and then the earth rammed into place around it, the men rejoiced. The barked poles were the colour of gnawed bones, dull white with vivid ochre streaks, and the way they stood in odd pattern, both part of and separate from the world around, filled the men with a deep pleasure for which they had no desire for words.
So that he would be home before the worst of the night cold, Garney Walch left an hour before dusk. Because both he and his ox were weary, he took the long way home through the forest, avoiding the hills of the morning. A quarter-mile down the right-hand fork of a muddy track that ran through to Ira Bye’s sly grog shop, the ox stopped and refused to go on.
Raising his head from his memories and the sled, which he simply followed as though he were the dumb, obedient animal, Garney Walch’s first impression was of how the bare feet splayed over the broken bracken fern seemed so small.
He stepped around the sled and the ox to get closer. The back of the body, ragged clothes partly torn away, was crawling with so many lice it more resembled an insect nest than a human being. Several bloody holes gored the exposed flesh where forest ravens had eaten, their unreadable footprints in the mud around. He dug the tip of his boot in under the shoulder and rolled the body out of the dirty puddle, and immediately felt ashamed for treating a fellow human being so.
He stood there silent. Mist was filling the forest and everything was lost in its soft white shroud. Beads of water ran down the white glistening trunks that stood like pillars of salt, rising, falling, crumbling. As his silver hair grew wet, as water began gathering like dew on his face, he felt increasingly lost in a dream.
For Garney Walch knew her. Only a few weeks before, he had seen her break into a drunke
n dance in the middle of a Hobart street before it was even noon—part native jig and something of a toff’s dance, half-hyena and fully a princess, queer, lost, belonging and not belonging. A few had jeered, some threw scraps of food at her, urchins chased her as though she were a bird with broken wings.
It was not so hard to guess how she died—the twisted rag, the bruised neck, the torn dress—but he doubted there would be any trouble, far less an inquest.
His gaze followed the dead girl’s open eyes upwards. Beyond, life went on as it always had, oblivious to tragedy or joy. Over the next ridge, in a rude, lonely cottage of boughs, a woman was moaning in childbirth, while down on the rocks a fisherman cursed after pulling up his pot only to discover the legs and shells of crayfish left by a thieving octopus.
‘That’s how it goes,’ said Garney Walch softly, as he closed her eyes.
There was nothing left of her other than work. He picked her damp body up with hands that were at once very large and very gentle, and, placing it on the sled, he cleared the rags of bark away before laying her down, her head framed between his axe and saw.
She had been seven years old when he first swung her through the air and sat her on his cart and tweaked her toe. She had reminded him then of his dead daughter. She had been beautiful.
He tried to tally the passing years. The world was darkening, the long night was only beginning, a tree dropped a bough, a boobok owl ate a pardalote, and a black swan flew skyward. He dropped his head, his calculations done. She would have been seventeen years old.
‘How it goes,’ he murmured, ‘and keeps on going.’
With the stringybarked back of a hand, the sawyer wiped a dead and milky eye, then stroked the ox on the muzzle and asked it to help him carry the poor child home, her dirty feet jolting over the sled’s back as the ox took up its burden, their light-coloured soles disappearing into the longest night.