Matthew Flinders' Cat (28 page)

He’d been drinking more than was reasonable since university when he’d entered law school at the age of seventeen. He was fifty-six years old, he’d been drunk at his graduation, drunk at his wedding, drunk at Charlie’s funeral, drunk at his daughter’s graduation, he’d been drunk when he signed the deeds to the family home and the settlement he’d made with his wife, drunk when he’d made the financial arrangements for his daughter, drunk when he’d bade them all adieu and walked away from everything. But he hadn’t been drunk when he’d made the decision to walk away from Ryan. That was the only mistake he’d made, running away while sober. Now they were taking away his support, his emotional crutches, before he could walk. He’d been using them for thirty-five years, matching strides with Johnnie Walker, and now they were expecting him to walk alone without a friend in the world. It wasn’t fair!

Two hours later, when he received a second shot of Valium, he was still awake, the night nurse asking him if he was all right. Billy nodded. He didn’t know if he could speak, but he didn’t wish to do so, speaking was out of the question, his mind was turned inward and all he could think was that the lights in the ward didn’t go out. The bloody lights never went out. The fucking lights never went out! A great spotlight was beamed on him and its heat was making him sweat but instead of feeling hot he was freezing. That was it, ten thousand candlepower burning, focused on him, like a magnifying glass concentrating the sun’s rays, white light burning into the ice of his soul, demanding he do something he couldn’t do.

By morning he’d had 80 mg of Valium and had barely slept at all, the constant coming and going of nurses sounded to him like a troop of horses stampeding down a tarred road. The medication they gave him became lost in the confusion of whirling lights, mixed with faces, groans and sighs and occasional screams from other patients. The accumulated terror, his, theirs, the terror of every drunk he had ever known, now aggregated, then clumped together tighter and tighter until it seemed to become a ball of light roughly the size of a tennis ball that proceeded to bounce against the white walls of the ward, each bounce harder, faster, louder, more furious, until he became exhausted attempting to follow its frenetic cat’s cradle progress.

Suddenly, without making a conscious decision, he’d shoot upright in bed and catch sight of the sign on the back wall, but instead of giving him courage, he grew furious and cried out, ‘Scrub it! Scrub it off!’ Then he had a cunning thought, he’d get the yellow ball to wipe out the sign, direct it, make each furious impact eliminate a tiny portion of the sign, until he’d blasted and bounced the scary message off the wall.

Billy worked on this new plan, concentrating, directing the ball onto the bright-red paint.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
It seemed to go on for hours and when the dayshift nursing staff came on duty only the three letters
OPE
remained. He kept whacking them with the ball but they remained stubbornly on the wall. He tried removing them by creating different words,
COPE
(He couldn’t!)
DOPE
(That’s what he was! Stupid!)
SLOPE
(He was tumbling, falling head over heels down, down, down!)
ROPE
(He was hanging from a tree.
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth!
) Then it turned back into
HOPE
and he started to scream.

Twelve hours after he’d taken the first 20 mg of Valium, Billy’s alcohol-withdrawal symptoms rating scale, based on a maximum score of four points in each of six categories, reached eight points and the alarm bells went off and the doctor was called in. The rough ride they’d promised him was beginning.

Mike Todd sat with Billy, asking him questions. ‘Do you know where you are, Billy?’

‘Yes, the drunk tank. Scrub it off, scrub it off!’ Billy begged. The ball was still bouncing, though now it had gone haywire, nowhere near the sign on the wall. He could no longer direct its erratic behaviour.

‘And where is the drunk tank?’ Mike Todd asked.

‘Foster House, scrub it off! Please scrub it off!’ Billy pleaded. He was waking up in the drunk tank in Sydney, but this time his hangover was a hundred times worse than anything he’d ever experienced before.
Whack! Whack! Whack!
The ball was coming at him, it was going to turn on him, he knew it for certain, it was going to kill him!

Mike Todd injected Valium directly into Billy’s muscle. ‘He’s not too bad, but I’d like him monitored every twenty minutes, nurse. Has he complained of nausea yet?’ he asked. ‘No, doctor.’

‘He probably will at some stage, or he’ll start to vomit, you know the drill. I’ll call in around five tonight.’ Mike Todd turned to Billy and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Hang in, mate, you’re not doing too badly.’

‘Scrub it off! Please scrub it off!’ Billy cried.

‘Tactile hallucination,’ Mike Todd said quietly to the nurse as they left the bed. He had mistaken Billy’s pleas to scrub the sign from the wall for the most common hallucination in alcoholic withdrawal, described in medical terms as ‘
a sense of false movement or sensation on the surface of the skin
’. In other words, a sense of something crawling all over your skin. This is a part of the total sensory overload that withdrawal from alcohol brings about.

The usual effect of alcohol is to dull the senses and in an alcoholic this eventually numbs them to the point where they can withstand quite severe shock or trauma. Badly festering ulcers remain untreated, the pain of a bad sprain or even minor fractures are left unattended, or they will tolerate problems, such as bronchial infections, which would send most people to hospital. They may often be medically in an extremely poor, sometimes life-threatening, condition without seeking help. Alcoholics seldom die from alcohol poisoning or liver and kidney malfunction, it is usually from something they’ve neglected to attend to.

However, when alcohol is withdrawn from the system, the system begins to experience sensory overload. Every condition is massively exaggerated, sensory perceptions increase, sometimes a hundredfold, dull lights appear as blazing floodlights. Footsteps sound like a herd of buffalo passing, the mild sting of an injection needle feels as though a sharp, probing dagger has entered the skin, smells hitherto unnoticed become suffocating, what on the outside appears to be a slight trembling has the effect of feeling as if a goods train has rumbled over muscle and sinew and crushed the internal organs, so that, almost inevitably, the mind is affected and hallucinations begin to follow.

Shortly after the doctor’s departure, Billy’s headache, already severe, started to increase in intensity until the throbbing sounded like artillery fire and the pain was as if he was being beaten over the head every few seconds by someone using a pick handle. This was followed by a massive, all-consuming feeling of nausea, though he was too far out of it to tell the staff monitoring him, so they were unable to give him medication to calm his stomach. The first sign of the nausea was a sudden convulsing, pushing the contents of his stomach up like an erupting volcano. Billy had only the remains of the soup and bread in his gut, and after this came up as a gruel, there was nothing left to follow, although the muscles continued to convulse, bringing up a burning bile that seared his throat. He became dehydrated and the nursing staff hurriedly set up a saline drip.

Then, despite the Valium, Billy’s legs started to cramp and jerk wildly, the muscles cramping and releasing, the pain so unbearable that he cried out constantly. And always the light, Billy was drowning in the light. The hours went by and he kept getting injections of Valium, but the sensory overload continued. Five o’clock arrived but the doctor had been delayed and Billy, already confused and disorientated, knew he was dying. He tried desperately to concentrate through the intense pain, beating his arms against his chest and stomach to rid himself of the lice he imagined covered him in a moving, itching, thick grey blanket. But the harder he tried, the more confused he became. In the early evening, though of course Billy had no sense of the time, he became totally consumed with fear and shortly afterwards went into a full-blown panic attack, gasping for air, his eyes bulging, his body completely soaked with perspiration.

By the time Mike Todd arrived it was eight o’clock, Billy’s heart rate had soared, pumping so hard that it filled his chest and throat and threatened to bring on a heart attack.

‘Can you hear me, Billy? It’s Mike Todd. Hold on, mate, it’s going to be all right.’

The ball was back, flying through the air, this time a small meteorite, blind with malice. It smacked into the wall time and time again, each time tantalisingly close to the word
HOPE
, though never again touching it. ‘Scrub it off!’ Billy sobbed.

Doctor Todd immediately administered the Valium through Billy’s rectum to get it into his bloodstream more effectively. He’d absorbed a massive amount into his system without it seeming to slow him down.

Mike Todd stayed at Billy’s bedside for the next two hours, waiting to administer the next dose of Valium. An hour after midnight, twenty-nine hours after he’d been given the first injection, the sedative finally overcame him and Billy watched the ball bounce into the wall before it fell to the floor and rolled away under one of the beds. He fell into a deeply sedated sleep.

Finally Billy had come out of the delirium tremens. It had been fifty hours since his last drink. He’d taken the first small step towards rehabilitation. In his tiny office near the detox ward, Dr Mike Todd fell asleep writing up the patient’s notes. He’d written:
The patient has responded well to treat . . .

Billy, still in his pyjamas and shower-cap slippers, sat in a small enclosed courtyard behind the detox ward in Resthaven munching a bar of chocolate with a Coke at his side. The sun was high enough to enter a corner of the courtyard and this was where Billy was ensconced, writing with the sun at his back under another relentlessly blue sky.

It was six days since Billy had arrived and he’d been allowed out of bed for the past four. Over the four days following the delirium tremens, the dosage of sedative had been gradually decreased until this morning, when he’d finally been weaned off Valium. With drugs no longer present to mask his condition he was feeling battered and intensely weary but he was nevertheless anxious to be up and about, as he was to be discharged the following morning.

The chocolate bar and Coke business was run by Nick, the shower attendant, who was aware of the craving for sugar patients experienced coming off detox. He kept a supply of both in his little room off the shower block. The Coke rested in a yellow plastic bin containing ice which Nick hauled twice-daily from the party ice dispenser at a nearby service station. On a hot day, which was almost every day, he’d unwrap the chocolate bars and plunge them in the ice bin and sell the combination as Sip ’n’ dunk. He made no profit, selling his wares at the price he paid for them as his witness to the Lord, or as he put it, ‘It’s me Christian duty, mate, them fellas is cravin’ somethin’ sweet and with Gawd’s help I can give it to them.’

Billy, still fearful, was writing to Ryan. Detox had been a horrendous experience and perhaps its only advantage was that he had been left too ill and too sedated to think about anything very much. Even now he didn’t feel strong enough to talk directly to the boy about the passage of time he’d been away, nor was he sure what his immediate future might bring or whether he would ever post the letter.

Billy had been brought to the point where he’d been reduced to nothing. He could no longer harbour any illusions about himself, there were no more comfortable boltholes in his past behaviour where the always honourable gentleman could crawl when things got tough. Quite simply, he was an alcoholic, a nobody on the way out, he’d reached the point where the excuses and selfjustifications were all used up and he was going to have to start at the beginning again or slide into oblivion. The letter to Ryan would assume that he had something to say that was valuable and important to the child and Billy wasn’t at all sure that he had the right to make such an assumption. The values that Ryan needed were not ones that Billy believed he truly possessed and in writing to Ryan, his fear was that it would seem as if the devil had taken up preaching the gospel.

This time he couldn’t hide behind the fact that he’d once been a famous barrister with seven generations of First Fleet pedigree behind him and a considered opinion on just about everything.

The starting point for Billy now was the same as it was for every other derelict on skid row. He had to learn to crawl, then walk, and then come against a hard-faced world that didn’t care if he lived or died, and he had to do this without the help of Doctor Bottle.

As a drunk and a derelict Billy had fashioned a world to live in and while it was grim, unpredictable, dangerous and difficult, it nevertheless had quite specific parameters. Sober, he faced a life that had no defined boundaries and in which he would be shown no mercy. Whatever the weakness that had caused him to become a drunk, it was nothing to the strength of character he would now require just to stay sober. The detox clinic may have been the big dipper, but the bumpy ride was by no means over.

Billy took three days to write the letter to Ryan, not knowing if he would ever have the courage to post it.

My dear Ryan,

Since last we talked, much has happened to Trim and not all of it good. With a master like Captain Matthew Flinders, who seems prepared to face any hardship to achieve his objective, this has meant facing danger and living under extremely difficult circumstances.

Trim was a ship’s cat born and bred, he accepted that some days were fair sailing with a fine breeze, the cirrus clouds on the horizon the only smoky smudge in the blue of an everlasting sky. Then there would be days when the weather turned foul and the wind howled in the topsails with the decks awash with foam, the sputum of an angry and malevolent ocean.

There were times too when they faced hunger and, unless a dolphin or a large ray might be hooked or netted, they would go without, as smaller fish were not always plentiful and the seine, a fishing net cast out in shallow water and used to encircle fish, didn’t always supply food for the eighty-eight men on board.

On one expedition, Trim’s fine glossy black coat turned to grey and his ribs stood out for all to see. It was greatly feared that Master Trim would not recover from such onerous times but, as it transpired, when conditions were plentiful again, the darkness of his fine pelt returned to its full burnish. Trim did not see his needs as superior to those of the ship’s crew and he suffered, with never a meow of complaint when times were bad, which was more than may be said of some of the crew when their stomachs cramped for need of sustenance.

It was generally supposed that the natives, for they were not called Aborigines but were referred to as natives or often as Indians, were of a cowardly demeanour, by nature timid and fearful. But this was not the case. Although they soon developed a hearty respect for the musket ball, they were prepared to defend their territory from intruders with their spears of strong, resilient sapling, the tips hardened by means of fire. Though primitive to our eyes, these ‘sticks’ were not to be disparaged as weapons and were as capable as well-forged metal for the purpose of penetration into the chest or stomach of a victim or to bring down a kangaroo or giant lizard.

Trim could recall one occasion when the Indians were not pleased to see them. They had been preparing to do a survey of Cape Barrow and had moored the ship on the leeward side of Woodah Island where the botanical gentlemen and Captain Flinders had gone ashore, the former to examine plants and Mr Flinders, as always, to survey the surrounding land and to observe the shoreline of the bay that formed the mainland. Trim had not accompanied Mr Brown and Mr Good, the two botanicals, nor followed his master, deciding to take a bit of a kip on board, his stomach still a little upset by a rough passage the previous night.

However, the next morning a wood-collecting and fishing party were sent out and the botanicals as well. Once ashore, Mr Brown called out, ‘Trim, wilt thou be part of our expedition today?’ Trim shook his head and expressed in meowing terms that he was afraid that they must do without his feline company on this bright and cloudless day, that, alas, he felt it his duty to accompany the working party.

This was not an altogether honest response, Trim had been fantasising about a tasty morsel of fresh-caught fish and the prospect was more than he could resist. Feeling just a little shamefaced, he branched off with the wood and the fish, leaving the floras to fend for themselves. He was soon running ahead, enjoying the light clean air, stalking a bird or small lizard, chasing a clicking locust and, generally, having a fine old time. Although soon the sun grew exceedingly hot and he found himself seeking the shade of the bushes. On one such occasion he came across a small patch of washed sand and upon it, clear as daylight, were to be seen the footprints of Indians, broad and barefooted and not to be mistaken for anything else. Trim sat firm and commenced meowing mightily to attract the attention of the working party.

‘What is it, Trim?’ Mr Whitewood, the master’s mate, called, then came over to inspect the reason for Trim’s caterwauling. ‘Aye, thou art surely the finest of thy breed, Master Trim, we shall keep a careful lookout for these Indians and our weapons shall be at the ready, though we are cautioned by Captain Flinders to treat the natives with friendliness, it is as well to keep our muskets primed.’

Soon after they passed through a small wood not suitable for gathering timber and commenced to a second further up a ridge where the trees seemed of a more mature appearance. There, not more than half a mile away upon the ridge, stood five Indians, all in the peculiar stance Trim had first observed in Rushcutters Bay, the instep of one foot resting on the knee of the other, their spears pinned to the ground and held vertical to maintain their balance.

‘Ahoy, Master Trim, we have found your Indians, a small party not of a sufficient size to cause alarm, we shall approach them in a friendly manner for this is their territory and it is we who trespass,’ Mr Whitewood explained.

Trim was the friendliest of all creatures and feared nothing and no man at sea, but on land he was prone to sensible caution. Once, when somewhat younger and while in Sydney Town, he had observed a chain gang proceeding along the Quay, a string of such utter human misery where the clink of shackle and chain and the groaning of the men near broke his feline heart.

Trim knew that nothing touched the human soul more deeply than the stroking of his fur against a leg accompanied with a purring resonance to indicate an affection and a bond between fellow creatures. On board ship there were sailors who would be brought near to tears if rewarded in such a manner for a clean-scrubbed deck or well-tucked sail.

With this small and harmless charity in mind, Trim picked out a particular fellow who seemed even more woebegone than the rest of the wretched line and commenced to rub his glossy coat against the man’s naked ankles. In a trice, a hand shot down and grabbed him, lifting him off the surface of the road and holding him aloft and directly to the front of the man’s foul-smelling breath. With both hands about Trim’s throat, the convict set about choking him, this to the greatest possible mirth of his fellows in bondage.

But Trim was not so easily dispossessed of his life and he lashed out with his claws to the demonic, bloodshot eyes of the miserable villain and rendered him sightless, no doubt condemned to wander blindly for several days. With a scream of anguish, the convict allowed Trim to fall to the ground and escape, though Trim did so by walking away with dignity, tail flicking in anger at such a gross attempt to humiliate him. He could hear the jeers and laughter of the men now turned upon the evil perpetrator, this time they seemed even more pleased at the merry japes they’d witnessed and the swift comeuppance of their murderous colleague.

And so it was with a modicum of caution that Trim followed the wooders as they went to meet the Indians on the crest of the hill. There was, he observed, little attempt to prepare the muskets as it seemed Mr Whitewood had not informed the men to do so and had simply spoken of taking the precaution to humour Trim. Somewhat to the surprise of the party, the natives stood their ground.

As they drew closer they could see a smile on the face of the leading Indian. ‘They seem friendly enough,’ Mr Whitewood remarked. ‘It is the captain’s wish that when the natives appear docile we must return their goodwill and encourage them to visit the ship to receive trinkets.’

The foremost Indian held his wooden spear in such a manner as to suggest that it might be a gift for Mr Whitewood, though Trim did not care for the look in his eye and took a cautionary step to conceal himself behind a clump of spinifex. As the master’s mate stretched out his hand to receive the spear, the ‘friendly’ Indian ran the spear into his breast. Mr Whitewood, with the spear embedded in his chest, raised his firelock and aimed it at his assailant. Though the weapon fired and the range was point-blank, such was the shock of the spear in his chest that the officer missed. Pulling the spear from his chest he retreated, only to receive three more spears to his back and thigh. The men, hastily retreating, and Mr Whitewood, still able to run, attempted to fire upon the natives, but the marines, charged with the protection of the party, had paid scant attention to the preparation of their weapons. It was only after some little while that two were made to fire and the natives fled, taking with them a cabbage-tree hat dropped in haste by one of the crew.

Still, some among them were able to witness how Trim, seeing the spear pierce the chest of Mr Whitewood, flew from where he was hidden and leapt to the shoulders of his assailant, his claws striking lightning blows to the Indian’s eyes from behind. The native gave a howl of pain and fell to his backside, clutching at his eyes as Trim made good his getaway. This astonishing act of bravery was to be seen the next day, in circumstances I will shortly tell you about.

Mr Whitewood was carried aboard and the prompt attention of the ship’s surgeon saved his life. It was most fortunate that the Indians, unlike those of South America, applied no poison to the tips of their spears and thus his life was saved. But not so lucky was a marine by the name of Thomas Morgan, who had foolishly left the ship without his hat and suffered what at that time was known as
coup-de-soleil
, but which we call sunstroke, and he died in a frenzy that same night.