The Secret River (28 page)

In flight, the way they were constructed made the most perfect sense.

He stood up behind the fallen tree, listening to the crashes and thumps as they leaped up the ridge through the forest and the rocks. The gun hung useless from his hand.

Sal was standing at the door of the hut when he came down the hill. She watched while he hung the gun back on its pegs and put the bag of powder on the shelf. He could not trust himself to speak, disappointment a stone in his chest.

There was no conversation around the fire that night as they held their bits of pork on sticks over the coals, catching the drips with the dry cornbread that crumbled into pieces as soon as it was handled. His throat closed against the food, the smell of it in his nostrils made him gag. Sal ate, doggedly, beside him, but he could not. She glanced at him, at the food in his hand, but said nothing.

Dan was the first to smell it, his head turning like an animal’s to where the scent came up on the evening air all the way from the blacks’ camp: the smell of fresh meat, roasting. Thornhill could hear his guts rumble with longing.

~

A few days later, seeing Long Jack and Black Dick sauntering back to their camp with another kangaroo slung on a stick between
them, Thornhill slipped into the hut and took one of the small calico bags of flour and made his way down to their camp.

The old women were sitting by the fire the way they always seemed to, with their legs stuck out straight in front of them. They did not glance at Thornhill as he arrived. The one they called Saucy Polly was poking around with a stick at something in the ashes. Meg had a baby on her lap, a chubby thing squealing at some game she was playing with her fingers. She glanced at Thornhill and the bag in his hand. The baby took hold of her finger and laughed into her face.

A little way off, the men had dug a pit and lit another fire in it. As Thornhill came up they threw more sticks on, heaping them up high. Long Jack was there, and Black Dick, but they seemed intent on the fire. If he had not known better, Thornhill might have thought they had not seen him.

He could see the kangaroo stretched out stiff beside the pit, most of its hair singed off. The spear-hole gaped in its side. The spear had gone right through, in one side and out the other. Nearby was the spear itself, slick with blood. Nothing more than a length of wood thrown by a human arm, and it could pass through fur and skin, muscle and sinew.

He had never seen what a musket ball did to a body, whether it also would pass through it from one side to the other.

Whisker Harry stood by the pit. Like everyone else, he did not seem ready to acknowledge the visitor. His face was turned in the general direction of Thornhill, but the space occupied by him was nothing more than a piece of air the shape of a man.

Thornhill took a step towards him, holding out the bag. Among so much that was dark—skin, earth, wood, stones—the calico bag had a grubby look on the end of his arm.
Fair exchange, old boy
, he said. His arm was beginning to feel foolish, stretched out towards the unmoving old man. Was it absurd to suggest the idea of purchase to him? Or was it that the bag of flour was not enough?

Thornhill did not see the old man’s mouth move, but he heard a few words and Long Jack moved to take the bag. He undid the knot at the neck—Thornhill’s hands went out to show him how, but it did not seem to be necessary—and took the bag over to Whisker Harry, who reached in and got a handful of the flour, held it up to his nose to smell it, inspected it on his palm, tasted some with the tip of his tongue. For all the world he was like a fussy customer at Covent Garden.

He turned and called to the other men, the words blunt and choppy, and flicked his hand towards the kangaroo. The forefinger with its long pale nail was as expressive as a dance. Black Dick bent over the kangaroo with his little stone-bladed hatchet, working away at it, and straightened up with part of the animal’s leg in his hand. He gave it to the old man, who handed it to Thornhill. Some words came out of his mouth, unsmiling and peremptory. It seemed that the notion of a transaction had been understood.

The bit of kangaroo that Thornhill now held in his hand instead of the bag of flour was not the part he would have chosen, being mostly the foot, with a claw of brown horn, and the sinewy first joint with a small amount of meat on it, the whole still covered with a considerable amount of hair that had missed being singed off. If he had had the words, he would have haggled. But the old man had turned away. It did not seem that the idea of haggling was part of the idea of purchase.

There was no further interest in the white man standing with the kangaroo leg in his hand. Whisker Harry spoke sharply and the men began to scrape some of the glowing embers out of the pit with sticks and heap them at the side. Black Dick picked up the kangaroo and threw it down into the pit and they all got to work covering it with the scraped-out embers. They did nothing quickly, and yet the carcass was covered over, first with a smoking layer of coals, then with dirt and sand, until the pit was filled up to the top.

Good luck to you, boys
, Thornhill said. It was hard to keep the scorn out of his voice, that these savages had no better way of dealing with meat than bury it with a few hot embers. Long Jack glanced at him and his mouth moved around a thought, but he said nothing and a moment later Thornhill realised he was alone by the faintly smoking dirt of the pit with no company other than one of the skinny dogs, its yellow eyes watching him.

~

Sal looked askance at the kangaroo shin, but Willie went to it with the knife, trying to slit the skin to peel it off. The knife would not go through the skin, only sawed away uselessly at the fur: the boy might as well have taken to a tree for all the progress he made. His father took the knife from him and by sheer brute effort managed to make a cut. If it had been a sheep, the skin would then have peeled off like a sock. But with this lump of wood-like meat the skin was glued to the sinews beneath. Thornhill could feel the blood pounding in his ears with the frenzy to get at the meat, the rage swelling up to choke him. The thought of the way the blacks did it, flinging the carcass onto the coals, enraged him all the more.

Finally he cut the thing up with the axe, out on the ground, right on the dirt. The lumps he dropped into Sal’s pot were all fur and bone and gristle.

The exchange he had made was looking less satisfactory by the moment.

They ended up with a kind of soup with a scum of hair that had to be strained through muslin. In the liquid were lumps of bone and strings of sinew gone like bootstraps. Even Willie could not get his teeth around those shreds of meat. All they could eat in the end was the juice, a rich dark soup like an oxtail. It was something to flavour up the mealy old cornbread and as they ate they remarked, until they were weary of saying it, how excellent the broth was. But a piece of good meat was what they longed for.

They won’t never believe it back in Bermondsey
, Sal said, wiping her chin of the juice.
That we eaten kangaroo!
The meal had made her cheerful in spite of its shortcomings, and he tried to join in her mood.
Not so much eat, Sal
, he said,
more like we drunk kangaroo
.

Later she heaved over on the mattress to lie against him, sighing with the pleasure of a bellyful of something warm, and fell asleep at once, breathing serenely. He lay awake, hearing her scratching at a flea, and thought about their neighbours, thanks to whom the Thornhill family had eaten better than usual.

It was true the blacks made no fields or fences, and built no houses worth the name, roaming around with no thought for the morrow. It was true that they did not even know enough to cover their nakedness, but sat with their bare arses on the dirt like dogs. In all these ways they were nothing but savages.

On the other hand, they did not seem to have to work to come by the little they needed. They spent time every day filling their dishes and catching the creatures that hung from their belts. But afterwards they seemed to have plenty of time left for sitting by their fires talking and laughing and stroking the chubby limbs of their babies.

By contrast, the Thornhill household was up with the sun, hacking at the weeds around the corn, lugging water, chopping away at the forest that hemmed them in. Only when the sun slipped down behind the ridge did they take their ease, and by then no one seemed to feel much like fun and games. Certainly no one seemed to have energy to spare for making a baby laugh.

On the point of sleep the thought came to him: the blacks were farmers no less than the white men were. But they did not bother to build a fence to keep animals from getting out. Instead they created a tasty patch to lure them in. Either way, it meant fresh meat for dinner.

Even more than that, they were like gentry. They spent a little time each day on their business, but the rest was their own to
enjoy. The difference was that in their universe there was no call for another class of folk who stood waiting up to their thighs in river-water for them to finish their chat so they could be taken to their play or their ladyfriend.

In the world of these naked savages, it seemed everyone was gentry.

~

Thornhill was less anxious now each time he sailed away from the point. The bit of practical commerce—kangaroo for flour—had reassured him that the blacks could be absorbed into some version of a normal society. Trade was picking up too. Nearly six months after they had come to the river, the
Hope
was never empty and he had his regular round now, of farmers who waited for the
Hope
rather than some other, less trustworthy boat.

Smasher Sullivan was one of those regulars. Lime was at a premium in Sydney, where stone and brick buildings were going up apace, limited only by the lack of ingredients for mortar. Carrying the lime to Sydney was a good trade, five shillings the keg.

But Smasher’s Arm had never sat right with Thornhill. It was acrooked length of water between high wooded ridges that bent away into the wild plateau beyond. In there the sun seemed to shine coldly and the water was a black mirror. Even when a nor’easter was ruffling the main river, not a breath of wind stirred the glassy surface or blew away the stain of smoke that hung between the ridges.

Smasher had his place on a triangle of flat ground wedged between two hillsides that rose up uncompromisingly. He had cleared it, after a fashion. Now it was a lumpy patch of land thick with the stumps of trees, a ragged stand of corn struggling in the sandy soil. Beside the corn he had built his hut, but too far up the slope so the whole thing tilted downhill all skewed and ramshackle. Beyond the clearing and the crooked hut the forest pressed down.

The third side of his triangle was bounded by the water, the shoreline a strip of bare dirt. He had hacked down the mangroves for fuel, and bald scraped places on the shore showed where he had scratched at the shell-heaps left by the blacks, gathering them for lime until he had got down to the original dirt. The fires that reduced the shells to lime burned day and night. So much burning had left the place stripped of every tree and bush.

Thornhill was always in a hurry to get away from Smasher’s. Load up quick, get away under the hour with the tide ebbing out to speed him on his way. That was the way he liked to do it.

The forest beyond the clearing seemed to be holding its breath as the
Hope
glided in on the last of the flood tide. Smasher’s dogs, those biters he was so proud of, were chained up outside the hut, all except Missy who never left his side. When they picked up Thornhill’s scent they started to snarl and bark and hurl themselves against the end of their chains.

Thornhill stood in the stern, coming up to the jetty. He glanced towards where the black sack-thing had hung and twirled. There was nothing there now: no tree, no body.

Smasher was down by the water moving around a mound of sticks. He hallooed and waved, shouting across the water to Thornhill, who waved back but said nothing. Something about the brooding watchfulness of the place made him reluctant to break it with his voice.

Close up, Smasher stank of dead oysters and his own rotting teeth. He had a firestick in his hand and was lighting the dry leaves heaped around the pile and thrusting the stick into gaps he had left. Wedged in among the sticks were the shells: not dead ones but whole fat fresh oysters shining pale among the twigs. A dangerous crackling was beginning deep inside the heap and bulges of smoke floated away.

His voice always took Thornhill by surprise, high like a boy’s.
Thornhill
, he called,
have you got any baccy about you, I would kill for a
plug
. Reluctantly, Thornhill handed him his pouch and watched him cut off a plug and put it in his mouth.

He saw an oyster in the top of the heap feel the first lick of flame. It tightened itself down hard, straining to stay shut. Then a bead of juice ran out and sizzled and in the same moment the shell sprang open.

Smasher was watching him.
None a them other ones now
, he said.
Finished all them piles the blacks left
. All through the heap there was a tinny crackling as the oysters opened and urgent plumes of steam shot up out of the vents in the mound, followed by streams of black smoke that smelled of burning meat.

Thornhill had eaten his share of Thames oysters as a boy. They were tough, no bigger than a walnut, prised off the rocks before they had a chance to get big and juicy. These Hawkesbury oysters were the size of a man’s hand, great generous flat things. At the start he had made himself sick, gobbling them down as if it were his last chance. But there was no need to gorge himself: nobody’s hunger would ever make a dent in so many.

Looking now at the rocks around Smasher’s place, stripped of every last shell, he wondered.

Only good thing is, they gone and buggered off now. Nothing to eat here
. Smasher laughed, coughed, spat.
One way to get rid of them
. His laugh rang out hard across the water.