Remembering Babylon (7 page)

There was no end, no limit either, to his plans.

Janet could not take it seriously, not because she did not believe in his capacity, one day, to do such things, but because the things themselves were so ordinary. Her view was that when real life caught up with you, it would not be in a form you had already imagined and got the better of. But she had no wish any longer to bring him down, so in this too he had his triumph over her.

The chief sharer of his visions was Gemmy, who listened, grasped only half of what he heard, and made his own assessments.

What moved him most was to see that he too was there in the boy’s dreams. He felt a rush of affection at being trusted and given a place in what Lachlan Beattie had laid up to himself, but also a fearful protectiveness that Lachlan, if he had perceived it, would have resented.

He was just a child! The realisation shocked Gemmy but settled him too. It was not often here that he could reclaim a sense of himself as a grown man.

F
ROM THE BEGINNING
there were those among them, Ned Corcoran was the most vehement, for whom the only way of dealing with blacks was the one that had been given scope elsewhere. ‘We ought to go out,’ he insisted, controlling the spit that flooded his mouth, ‘and get rid of ’em, once and for all. If I catch one of the buggers round my place, I’ll fuckin’ pot ’im.’ He jerked out the last couple of syllables, and the explosion they made, and the silence afterwards, made some men uncomfortably hot. The rest shifted their boots but did not speak. They were not so candid as Ned Corcoran, but did not essentially disagree with him. It was the quickest way; the kindest too maybe, in the long run. They had seen what happened to blacks in places where the locals were kind. It wasn’t a pleasant sight.

But there were others, the milder members of the settlement, who argued that it was surely worth trying a softer policy. What they looked forward to was a settled space in which they could get on with the hard task of founding a home, and maybe, if they were lucky, a town where in time all the civilities would prevail. If they got the preliminaries right, the natives too might be drawn in, as labourers, or house-servants. They had secretly, some of them, a vision of plantations with black figures moving in rows down a field, a compound with neat whitewashed huts, a hallway, all polished wood, with an old grey-haired black saying ‘Yessir’, and preparing to pull off their boots (all this off in the future of course, maybe far off; for the moment they would not mention the boots since most of them did not have any). They ought at least, so they thought, to use this Gemmy fellow to
get some reliable information that would temper with fact the fantastic rumours that flew about the place and kept them in a state of permanent anxiety. What haunted them was the endless round of reprisals they would be involved in if one of their number got jumped and speared (as God knows could happen easily enough) and some hothead like Ned Corcoran took it into his head to get up an extermination party.

So from the beginning his questioners, Gemmy saw, were of two kinds.

One lot wanted to make an ally of him in what they hoped would be an easy war.

They were affable, these fellows. They offered him chews of tobacco, squatted on their heels, and hummed and harred and looked off into the distance – he had a good idea what they were seeing there. They fished about, first one, then another, in a casual way, for what they wanted to know: whether the tribes, out there, up there, were in the habit of gathering at any one particular spot, and in what numbers, and if it was just the men or the whole mob of them, women and children as well. They chewed their tobacco and shot out the juice, or quietly smoked, with no urgency in them; but he felt the purpose in their hands, saw in their eyes the volleys of grey smoke spreading, then hanging like rain. They chuckled to themselves and thought he could not hear. He chewed his tobacco and was still.

When he first came among them he had been unable to tell from their wooden expressions, and the even more wooden gestures, what they had in their heads. They hid what they felt as if they were ashamed of it, or so he had decided; though whether in front of others or before themselves, he could not tell. Their eyes, their mouths, seemed dead in the rigid faces. Only slowly, after long watching, did he begin to distinguish the small signs that made them trackable: the ball of gristle in the corner of a man’s cheek, which you could actually hear the soft click of if you listened for it; the swelling of the wormlike vein in a man’s temple just below the hairline, the tightening of the crow’s feet round his eyes, the almost imperceptible flicker of pinkish, naked lids; a deepening of the hollow above a man’s collarbone as his
throat muscles tensed, and some word he was holding back, because it was unspeakable, went up and down there, a lump of something he could neither swallow nor cough up. He saw these things now, and what astonished him was how much they gave away. Perhaps their faces were more expressive because he could catch these days more of the words they used, even the ones they left unspoken. So long as he was deaf to the one he had been blind to the other. No more.

So he hummed and harred and chewed his tobacco, and when he was forced to speak at last, put them off with answers which, by shifting a landmark and counting a few dead in with the living, set his people further north than they actually were and made them more numerous. He felt a heavy responsibility.

They were sly. They pretended to be pleased with him. He too was sly, but was less sure than he would have liked to be that he had told them nothing they might use. He leapt about, and with his heart very heavy in him, joked a little, and they narrowed their eyes, all smiles. ‘Good boy, Gemmy,’ Ned Corcoran said, as if he could have brained him.

But it was the other lot, those who were looking for the soft way, who gave him trouble. They could not understand why he was holding out on them. They were the peaceable ones, the ones who wanted to avoid bloodshed, couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he tell the difference? Urgency made them desperate. They shouted at him, and then at one another.

And in fact a good deal of what they were after he could not have told, even if he had wanted to, for the simple reason that there were no words for it in their tongue; yet when, as sometimes happened, he fell back on the native word, the only one that could express it, their eyes went hard, as if the mere existence of a language they did not know was a provocation, a way of making them helpless. He did not intend it that way, but he too saw that it might be true. There was no way of existing in this land, or of making your way through it, unless you took into yourself, discovered on your breath, the sounds that linked up all the various parts of it and made them one. Without that you were blind, you were deaf, as he had been, at first, in their world. You blundered
about seeing holes where in fact strong spirits were at work that had to be placated, and if you knew how to call them up, could be helpful. Half of what ought to have been bright and full of the breath of life to you was shrouded in mist.

So they shouted at him in one language and he clenched his teeth on another, and the angrier they grew, the more he saw that it was better to keep to himself what even the good men among them were trying to rattle out of him.

There was an exception to this, an odd one.

He ought to have been intimidated by Mr Frazer, the minister – most of the others were; it had not escaped him that even the loudest among them went tongue-tied when the minister approached, though they were quick to reclaim their prestige as hard fellows by scoffing at the man as soon as he was gone. But Gemmy, from that first day at the schoolhouse, had attributed to Mr Frazer a gift of understanding which somehow saw right through to what he wanted to express, and often enough, before he himself knew it. He trusted the minister, and was happy in his presence to open himself entirely to whatever might emerge from their silent communing when, in the cool early mornings, and sometimes again in the late afternoon, they went out together to
botanise
, as Mr Frazer called it, in the scrub country on the far side of the creek, or along the shady gallery of the creek itself where it climbed the escarpment to the west.

Mr Frazer on these outings wore a wide-awake hat, much frayed at the edges, and bore on a strap over his shoulder a portable inkstand, and in another bag, of canvas, a set of fat little books. Here, to Gemmy’s delight, he sketched the parts of the plants Gemmy showed him, roots, leaves, blossoms, with straight little arrows in flight towards them from one side or other of the page, where Mr Frazer, in his careful hand, after a good deal of trying this sound and that, wrote the names he provided.

It disturbed him at first, it offended his sense of propriety, that what Mr Frazer wanted to see were the same things he showed the McIvor girls: women’s business. What would the other men think if they knew of it? He felt ashamed for the man, but lost his concern at last in the sheer joy of being free
again to wander, and in the satisfaction he felt at the cooperation between them that made him the hands and eyes of the enterprise, the breath too when it came to giving things a name, as Mr Frazer was the agency for translating it out of that dimension, which was all effort, sweat and dirt, and grubbing with your nails, and thorns, and scratches, into these outlines on the page that were all pure spirit, the product of stillness and silent concentration.

It was always the same routine. He named the fruit as he plucked it, biting into the flesh or splitting it (the fig or apple as Mr Frazer called them) to show the pulp, or, if it was a berry, staining his mouth with its juice. Then he passed the thing to Mr Frazer, who sniffed, then warily, his mouth screwed up like an arsehole, tasted, and gave a smile as he savoured, or yowled and spat. Then he too tried the name on his tongue; took, as Gemmy saw it, a preliminary lick at the yam or tuber to reveal a streak of colour or test the roughness of its skin, as he himself had done, more vigorously, with his thumb. He did not often get it right. He did not open his mouth wide enough, or his tongue was in the wrong place or lolled about like a parrot’s, or he put too much spit into the thing or too little. Gemmy was glad that none of the clan were there to hear it.

To get a name wrong was comic but could also be blasphemous. In one case what emerged from Mr Frazer’s mouth was an old man’s testicle, in another, the tuber came out as a turd. Of course he understood immediately that he had botched the thing and after a good deal of trying amended it, but so scandalously on one occasion that Gemmy was shocked, and looked about fearfully, since the word Mr Frazer had hit upon was one the surrounding spirits should never have heard on a
man’s
lips, and he worried a little that some of these things might get into the book.

He was sensitive to this dealing between name and spirit. It was out of a kind of reverence, as well as concern for the danger he might put them in, that he concealed from Mr Frazer, who he knew would not notice, a good deal of what he himself could see. Things it was forbidden them to touch, since they were in the care of the men whose land they were
crossing; others that only women could approach; others again that were a source of more power than he could control. They could have nothing to do with these things without creating a disturbance in the world that would do him, and Mr Frazer, and others too perhaps, irreparable injury.

So when he and the minister, half-crouching, pushed in under the overhanging boughs of a gully or trudged up a rocky, sun-scorched slope to where they could see, north and west, all the country he was at home in, he was moving through a world that was alive for him and dazzling; some of it even in the deepest shade throwing off luminous flares, so that he had to squint and cover his eyes, and all of it crackling and creaking and swelling and bursting with growth; but he cast the light only in patches for Mr Frazer, leaving the rest undisclosed.

Once or twice on these outings he saw blacks who were unfamiliar to him standing frozen in the brush, every muscle alert.

He made no obvious sign to them, none anyway that Mr Frazer would observe, since he knew the suspicions the white men had of him; but very gravely, in passing, acknowledged the watcher’s claim, and they accepted and let them pass.

On other occasions he saw nothing but felt the presence of watchers as a coldness at the base of his spine, a thickening of the darkness to one side of the track. Once again, he acknowledged them, whether they were there or not.

Mr Frazer saw nothing at all. Even when they were meant to be seen, he did not distinguish them from the surrounding vegetation or the play of light and shadow between the leaves. Puffing and singing odd little songs to himself, and fanning away flies, and calling Gemmy to notice this or that, he went barging through; and Gemmy did not enlighten him.

As for what the blacks would be seeing, Gemmy knew what that was. He himself would have a clear light around him like the line that contained Mr Frazer’s drawings. It came from the energy set off where his spirit touched the spirits he was moving through.

All they would see of Mr Frazer was what the land itself
saw: a shape, thin, featureless, that interposed itself a moment, like a mist or cloud, before the land blazed out in its full strength again and the shadow was gone, as if, in the long history of the place, it was too slight to endure, or had never been.

‘O
H, I WOULDNA
’ concern yursel wi’ Gemmy. He’s hairmless.’

This was Jock McIvor to the little group of neighbours that on odd days gathered where three farms came together high on a slope; not by arrangement, it was never formal, but by an unspoken agreement that it was the sort of evening, at the end of a hard day, when a man might take a stroll uphill, have a smoke and see what was doing; in the harshness of their lives up here a point of easy fellowship and repose. He was making reply to a doubt his neighbour, Barney Mason, had expressed. It wasn’t a complaint – the code of friendship between them forbad that; rather, a long-standing anxiety on Barney’s part that was general but had recently, to Jock’s distress, found its focus in the white black man.

Gemmy had been with them for five months but Jock had not got used to him. When he had agreed that first afternoon to take the fellow in – in the confused excitement of the occasion, with the children noisily clamouring and his wife making silent appeal that just this once he might relax his strictness and indulge them – he had been acting against his own better judgment. He knew that and had gone right on and let the thing happen. He had done it out of embarrassment; because he did not want exposed before others a difference between Ellen and himself that was private, and which he felt she ought not to take advantage of.

He did offer a protest but it was a weak one. Their life was hard enough already; did they need a new addition to the household? ‘But Jock,’ she said quietly, ‘look at the puir creature! He’ll be nae trouble – Lachlan’ll see t’ him.’

He had made no further argument because the chief thing
he had against the man was so unreasonable; he was ashamed of it.

From the moment he saw the fellow he had felt a kind of repulsion, a moral one he thought, though it expressed itself physically. Even now when he was used to having him about the place, and saw what a pathetic creature he was – how keen to make himself useful and how good with the children – he could not get past what he had felt on the first day, and so far as he could recall, at the very first sight of him hobbling down the gully with Lachlan driving him. He could not bear to have Gemmy come close to him. If he did, and tried to touch him, out of gratitude it might be for some small kindness, for he was very emotional, he would lose his head. ‘There’s nae ca’ for that, man – enough! For God’s sake, get off o’ me!’ Gemmy would look baffled. It was Ellen who had to step in and restore things. ‘A’richt, Gemmy, that’s enough, there’s a guid lad. Just step ootside, will ye, and fetch me an armful o’ wuid.’

So when he put Barney off with an assurance of Gemmy’s harmlessness he was being truthful in one way – there was no physical harm in him – but in a deeper way he was not.

He was a worrier, Barney. He was for ever gowling or greeting over one thing and the next. Though not much more than thirty, he wore a permanent dent in his brow, as if someone, years back, or some
thing
more likely, had let him have it with a slingshot; though it was also possible that the blow was still to come. Jock sympathised but had decided he could do most good by making light of Barney’s fears while admitting, secretly, they might be real.

Worrying out loud was Barney’s way of dealing with things. His own way was to clamp down hard and keep his troubles to himself. He wasn’t sure it was more effective than Barney’s, but it suited him. When Barney developed this bee in his bonnet about Gemmy he did not know how to save himself. He hated the difference it made between them, the looks of appeal Barney cast at him, and uncomprehending disappointment; even more that the constraint between them should be revealed when others were about. It was a shame. It spoiled things.

Under the hard conditions of life up here neighbours were important, and over the last years he and Barney had become more than that. Their huts were visible, one from the other, through the half-cleared forest – or at least the lights were. Polly Mason was Ellen’s best friend. The children, when they had no chores to do, went off together on adventures in the scrub, swapped treasures, had quarrels that kept them apart for a day or two but were soon patched up. They had never worried about fences or boundaries. So when they took Gemmy on, the Masons too were affected, and Barney did not like it. Gemmy was warned against straying across on to the Masons’ land, and so far as Jock knew, complied, but Barney, in his anxious way, was forever out there pacing the line and looking for signs of trespass; except that there was no line, and the trespass too might be no more than a shadow on Barney’s thoughts, and how could you deal with
that
? All he could do was meet the ritual complaint with ritual reassurance, and hope that conversation, which was slow up here, with many pauses that easily took the place of words, would have moved on under their long-drawn silence and when it resurfaced hit a new topic. But on this occasion he had no luck.

‘Yair well,’ Ned Corcoran put in after a longish gap, ‘I dunno about that. You’d be the best judge a’ that, Jock, you an’ Barney. How harmless the cove is. Seein’ yer all so close. On’y I woudn’ want ‘im hangin’ roun’
my
place. Coudn’ sleep at night – I k’n hardly sleep now. I’d be askin’ meself – you know – if ’e wasn’ – you know – receivin’ visits. From ol’ frien’s.’

They shifted their boots in the dust. Jock’s heart fell. And Hec Gosper, the youth whose hammer Gemmy had wrestled for that first day, and who ever since had harboured a kind of grudge, dropped his chin to conceal a smile.

He was new among them, having just moved up from the group of half-grown boys who hung about the verandah of the store. He did not say much, he was still on trial here, but he was very observant. He had recently discovered in himself a streak of irony that he found scope for in the play that went on under the slow utterances of these fellows, but even more
in the depth of their silences. It amused him, for instance, that they had begun to regard Jock McIvor, who was one of the little inner band, with a closer eye; as if he had developed a mark of difference, or some deformity had emerged in him that they had failed till now to observe.

What intrigued Hector was that Jock McIvor, who had always been such an acceptable bloke, with all the easy confidence a man derives from it, had begun to lose that magic quality. Little defensive spikes and spurs appeared in him that surprised the others and increased a suspicion that they might somehow have been mistaken in him.

Hector owed his expertise in these matters to his lip, though it otherwise offered no impediment to his view of himself (and especially since it had begun to be obscured with the softness of a moustache) as a flash young fellow and potential dandy, if he could only get away to Brisbane, or any place in fact with barbershops, pool rooms, buggies in the street, and of an evening the glow of streetlamps and the clicking on the pavement of women’s heels. He saw himself in tall boots with a yard of ribbon behind his hat, but stood meanwhile, barefooted and with his head down, stroking the hair on his lip, while Ned Corcoran, who was persistent, led them back to where they had stuck.

‘Yair, well,’ he said, ‘it’s the wife I’d be worried about. If it was me. You know what I mean? Gracie.’

There, Hec thought, Jock McIvor. What now, eh?

He had no malice towards Jock. Malice was not in his nature. It was the spectacle itself that drew him, the discovery, which was new, that there might be more in the world to dwell on than just himself.

Jock swallowed hard. He restrained himself from replying that Gracie Corcoran, unlike his own wife, was a mouse, if not a bandicoot. But it saddened him, all this. He felt the knot in his throat as a hard little nut of injustice. That the others did not come to his aid – Jim Sweetman for instance, who merely looked embarrassed and turned away. That Ned Corcoran, a man for whom they had no respect, should be glancing about now with such cocky assurance that he had hit the mark and was being listened to.

None of what followed was new, though it wounded him just the same; they were not original, these fellows. What surprised Jock was that not so long ago he would not have seen it, and if he had would have found reassurance in their being so easily predictable. He had begun lately to be critical, even of Jim Sweetman, and he did not want to be. He did not like the experience, which was new, of seeing his friends from a distance, of finding them on one side and himself on the other, and the knowledge that if he was seeing them with new eyes, he too, since the distance must work both ways, had become an object of scrutiny. He was disturbed, most of all, by the view this gave him of
himself
. As if there was something in him that justified scrutiny. That he might be less open than he appeared.

Watching Jock’s difficulty with Gemmy, the terror, which was almost comic, into which he was thrown by the poor fellow’s extravagant bursts of feeling, Ellen McIvor found herself taken back to a vision of Jock that had been obscured in these last years by the hardships they had been through. She had been attracted then by a quality in him that went oddly with his big frame, and must, she thought, be what other women too were drawn to, a mixture of forcefulness and almost girlish modesty.

Work in the outdoors had burnished him; he was ruddy. His flesh, when his sleeves were rolled, had none of the dead marble whiteness she knew from her brothers and associated with the sunless world underground. It glowed. You felt the heat of it right through his shirt. It carried a scent of grass and clean sunlight she had longed for all her life, or so she believed, in the dismal world she had grown up in, where everything was smudged and smirched with coal dust and even the air you breathed was gritty, and the taste in your throat always of tar.

He had wanted them to go to Canada. That was what he offered, along with himself. But when they got down to it, Australia seemed the larger choice. There was land there and sunlight (she could not wait) and spaces, he told her, they
could barely conceive of here. But
she
could. Sunlight and space were the first things she had glimpsed in him.

They arrived in Brisbane in a January swelter. The town, its muddy streets made passable by duckboards, its houses, huts rather, mere makeshift affairs of bark and iron among dark, glossy-leaved figs, was a low place, sunk in a steamy torpor where everything the flesh touched was damp and the flesh itself damper, and the air had a sweetish smell just this side of putrescence. The drunkenness they met in the streets had a desperation to it that made her wonder what there might be in the place, given so much space, that could madden the men and made the women so pinched and colourless. It was not what they had expected. Jock turned gloomy, and she saw for the first time then that the sunniness she had seen in him was not his real nature. She was the one who had to insist that the heat was not too bad, or the steamy rain when it gushed down, or the clouds of mosquitos that blew in from the mangrove-choked islands in the river’s mouth, and whose bites made his eyelids swell; or the cockroaches, big as wrens, that came flying in at every open window and ran over their faces in the dark; or the delays. A different kind of balance was established between them in these first days in the colony, as if, in coming halfway round the world, they had arrived not so much at a new place as a new accommodation with their own natures.

The delays went on, their money dwindled; they had to take cheaper lodgings where they were separated into dormitories, male and female, and still there was no sign of the land they had been promised. At last, when it was clear that they could expect nothing of others and must act for themselves, they left Brisbane for the Darling Downs, he to work as a general hand on a big holding, she as a housemaid. And Jock, in his disappointment, his shame too, perhaps, at having promised her so much and provided so little, began to refine in himself the stringy, hard-bitten qualities of dourness and harsh self-discipline that the land itself appeared to demand, and which, for all the fierceness of its own sunlight, dashed out the last of sunniness in him. She had Janet, then lost a little boy, then a girl. They stuck it out, saved what they
could, and when land was opened in the unsettled districts beyond the Burdekin, came north. She had left more of herself than she dared consider in the rooms of the homestead whose wide verandahs she had scrubbed and in the copper where week after week, on Mondays, she had boiled the household wash; most of all in the two small graves she knew she would not see again, under the black soil in the grove of bunyas.

Jock, harder than ever now, since more was at stake, dealt sternly with himself and with the children too, Meg when she came, then Lachlan. She saw the last of his youth burned out of him in the hot, bushfire summers up here, when the whole sky, for days on end, was a glowing furnace. And it was to recall a little of his old light-hearted gallantry then – for her own sake, as well as his – that she would tease him about the girls she had won him away from; she knew their names from her brothers – Annie McDowell, Lettie Davidson, Minnie Kyle – happy to see, for all his protests, that it pleased him, woke some spark of his old shy devilry in him, to be taken back to his youthful conquests and the fair lad who had had to dip his head, that first time, silly-drunk as he was, at the door of their parlour. In time this teasing became a show to amuse the two little girls, but also to give them a glimpse of some other side of their stern father. They loved to hear the names – there were so few names in their lives.

‘What was she like,’ they would insist, ‘Lettie Davidson? Tell about Lettie.’

‘Oh, ye’ll hae t’ask yer faither aboot that,’ she would tell them. ‘Ah never clapt eyes on the huzzie. Tell them, Jock.’

He looked foolish. ‘Get awa’ wi’ ye, thir wasnae ithers,’ he told her.

‘Keep me!’ she’d laugh, ‘sic lees the man tells. Look at the colour of him. Look at yer faither and see what lees a man can tell.’ It relieved him.

He was often homesick though he did not say so. The land here never slept. If only he could wake one day and find it, just for a day, under a blanket of snow! What he missed were the marks of change. The crying, high up, of curlews flocking to a new season, to some place thousands of miles to the
north where it had been winter and was now breathing the freshness of spring, brought an ache to his heart for the sight of rowans just bursting into sticky leaf, and for days afterwards he would be rough-tempered, as if the need of bark for the shiver of radiance was in himself.