The Clay Dreaming (52 page)

‘By our injustice and oppression towards the natives, we have provoked them to retaliation and revenge; whilst by not affording security and protection to the settlers, we have driven them to protect themselves. Mutual distrusts and mutual misunderstandings have been the necessary consequence, and these, as must ever be the case, have but too often terminated in collisions or atrocities at which every right-thinking mind must shudder. Thus, as in a circle, injustice will be found to flow reciprocal injury, and from injury injustice again, in another form.’

‘Mutual distrusts and mutual misunderstandings’ –
utu, utu, UTU
! Eyre’s text reminded Sarah of the indomitable Maori concept of ‘retributive justice’, the diabolical spirit of revenge; about the only trait they and the
Pakeha
shared with the native Australians. The law of the land of the lazy Doasyoulike was better understood as ‘Do as you would be done by’.

The Golden Age of Greek and Roman legend was a mythical period, when perfect innocence, peace and happiness reigned. It was also considered the most flourishing period of a nation’s history. No one seemed to consider that the two might be mutually exclusive.

The slaughters were mutual.

Frantically Sarah scribbled her notes. There was more, much more, but no time left to attend to it. Her eyes were on the clock face, and her own immediate future. A quarter to one already – Bullen would be on his lunch break. She had not yet found the courage to act. She would. She had to. Overdue since May, the library’s temporary closure began on Monday. It was time for her to go, for good, for Lambert.

She blotted the pages of her copybook. They were carelessly smudged, but legible.

Sarah gingerly lifted up the volumes by Eyre, the manuscript concealed beneath. Checking to see that she was still unobserved, she slid it forth – carefully, carefully – and interleaved it with her notebooks. Her last hours, it
might be argued, could have been better spent on the transcript; but in light of what she had learnt, she didn’t think so.

Standing, she had the books gathered one on top of the other. Returning the volumes of Eyre to the
ad libitum
shelves, she started walking slowly and calmly towards the exit. It was not so very far. More clergymen than ever seemed present, and every single one of them looking her way. Not daring turn her head, she sensed Bullen still at his station. A warden patrolled the upper deck, almost overhead. Her breath caught: she had not thought to check above. Was she seen?

The doors stood open before her. The sound of books slamming shut shot a fusillade behind. Between the doors to the Salon and out, too late to turn back now, Sarah strode down the corridor into the Hall. Were she to look up, she felt sure she would see the glowering marble bust of architect Sir Anthony Panizzi, toppling down.

Her burden was heavy. She knew by heart the Penalty for the Infringement of Rules. A Reader, once excluded, was seldom re-admitted.

Across the threshold and into the lobby area without a single backward glance, Sarah Larkin passed out through the colonnade, never to return to the scene of her crime.

The weather was fine, to look at: bright sunshine and a cloudless sky. It took the tattletale rattle of the window in its frame to inform on winds stronger by the hour. Sarah folded a napkin and used it to interrupt the noise.

From within the interior pocket of her skirts she retrieved Druce’s manuscript, laying it on the table alongside notebook and papers. There could be no more trips to Shadwell, Piccadilly, or anywhere – to the library at the British Museum, most especially not.

What had she done?

Sarah removed the plunder at arm’s length, and stared at it, almost in disbelief. She couldn’t bear to handle the thing, not for a while at least.

Lambert appeared asleep. From the lightest touch of her hand however his eyelids fluttered open, and at the look on his face…she vowed never to leave him alone in the house again, not for anything.

He gave assurances that he was well, and, what was more, hungry. She made him a little broth, which he accepted gratefully, spoon after spoonful.

They passed much of the afternoon in gentle chatter, inconsequential but for Lambert’s appearing to gain in strength. As evening drew close a slight cloud fell across Sarah’s face, her expression fixed with serious intent.

‘If… Father, you said that objects might still exist, even if they could not be seen?’

She spoke tentatively, not wishing to excite him.

‘Objects?’ said Lambert.

She wished to say ‘persons’, but dared not.

‘If one of us were to look at the table, and see a table,’ said Sarah, ‘while the other could not…would you believe a table to be there?’

‘If you see it, you say?’ Lambert studied the bedside table, entertaining the idea. ‘I can only think of that fable about Dictionary Johnson and Bishop Berkeley,’ he said.

Of course, Sarah thought. During his sermon one day, the bishop had put forward a theory – that reality was a matter for individual sensation, rather than of physical material. The good doctor had emerged from the church, kicked a large stone, and declared, ‘I refute it, thus.’

‘Hm,’ hummed Lambert, ‘yes, I could accept the possible existence of the table.’

Naturally he sided with the bishop. Sarah was no longer sure what to think.

Lambert’s active mind meanwhile turned the tables on science. ‘It is,’ he announced, ‘much less rational to conceive of a stone, or any other inanimate object, that could start into being
without
a Creator. One might as well worship the stone!’

He nestled deeper into the bed. He enjoyed philosophical discourse.

‘What of the soul?’ he asked. ‘Few people can claim to have seen one, yet all believe we have them. What of the Holy Ghost?’ He reached one hand towards his daughter. ‘We do not have to see something to appreciate its hold over us. I know the spirit of your dear departed mother watches over us still… Always keep her in mind, I beg of you.’

In the night, in his delirium, he had called her Frances; it had alarmed Sarah at first, until she realised that she wore her mother’s nightdress.

‘I…’ Sarah almost choked ‘…I do.’

It wasn’t true. Her recollection was hazy at best.

A little later on, no more than half an hour, and Lambert returned to the topic he had obviously been mulling over.

‘There is the material world,’ he said, ‘a world of “phenomena”. Except, larger forces are at work in the universe. Beyond the limits of what we know according to our senses, exist things beyond our ken… Not phenomena, but “
noumena
”, sufficient unto themselves and without the need of our proof for their existence. To assert that we may never know them only sets a limit on our experience.’

No limits, indeed – Sarah looked towards the window.

‘Nature…’ he said, drifting slightly ‘…is itself but “the Veil and mysterious Garment of the Unseen”.’

Lambert operated at the very edge of her understanding.

His head lay back on his bank of pillows.

‘“The light of the body is the eye”,’ he quoted, Biblical verse. ‘“If therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”’ His voice, faltering slightly, turned husky. ‘“But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness…how great is that darkness.”’

Emerging from his introspection, Lambert studied Sarah in hers: he wondered from where she had received her recent ideas. ‘“BEWARE,”’ he said, so loudly that she jumped, ‘“lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men…and not after Christ.”’

Once more teacher and guide, he fixed her with his concentrated eye. She scowled, ever so slightly.

‘The idea,’ he said, ‘is the basis for knowledge. Man makes what he will of his own existence…cant, merely, should he forget that all of existence we owe to God. The tailor makes the man.’

Lambert relished the discovery that he could argue theology with his own daughter, yet knew nothing of equal say: he was able to look at her and not see the years of opportunity wasted.

‘Men,’ said Lambert, ‘civilised men, live their lives governed by a system of checks and balances…mindful of the afterlife, fully expectant of going on to their great reward, or an eternity of punishment. Is this to be the only qualification of our behaviour? The only result?

‘No. Obedience to the whole of the law is required. A physical obedience does not atone for moral sin, or vice…’

Lambert threatened to repeat the subtext of almost every sermon – original, or pastiche – ever delivered to an anxious congregation during his long life of service. But then the expected message turned on its head.

‘…vice versa… Moral obedience…will not atone for physical sin.’

His demeanour, dark before, grew dark indeed.

Though his children might be starving, a man should not steal so much as a loaf of bread: Lambert’s absolutism had always given Sarah pause. Here was some new dimension. She sat forward.

‘“The gravitation of sin to sorrow is as certain as that of the earth to the sun,”’ said Lambert. ‘Wherefore do you seek out the rewards and punishments of the next life? Those rewards and punishments,’ his gravelly voice turned barely audible, ‘are here.’

Inexpressible agonies worked his face.

‘When we suffer,’ he said, through wrecked lips, ‘God is often silent… I do not take that to mean…he is absent. Deny the power of the Unseen…and you may as well go mad.’

Lambert turned to her, eyes welling.

‘I do fear…’ he gasped. ‘I do…’

He is
Kertameru
, ‘first-born’ – as a first child, and boy child, no more than numerically distinct. With the death of his mother, even before the disappearance of his father, he becomes
Parnko
. In whispers around the campfires, thinking him no longer awake, the others call him ‘the son of gunfire’.

Somewhere in between his birth name and the name after death, another name belonged to his childhood – a name given by his parents, and taken from their natural surroundings – but Brippoki no longer remembers it.

He buries the bones and other remnants of his meals, and throws earth over the ashes of his last campfire.

To the north-northeast is a bank of cloud massive as
Gariwerd
– a mountain range, piled high, and just as solid-seeming. Brippoki thinks of his former home,
Kantillytja warara
, become the empty lands where he once walked.

The fourth stage of his life, as with the third, has been marred. The fifth, that of
bourka
– full man, or elder – can only be attained with the wisdom of grey hair. As a full man he should take the name of that particular place he belongs to, belonging to him.

Brippoki knows now that this will never come to pass.

A man’s
goobong
is his family crest or totem, adopted from some aspect of Creation, be it animal, vegetable, or mineral. Without a mother, his father missing, he is ignorant of his very root – his
goobong
.

As dusk falls, the birds swoop and circle overhead, though their waterhole has for the moment dried to dust. Brippoki is reminded of the constancy in nature, and of its importance.
Pirpir
, the wood duck,
gunewarra
, the black swan,
otchout
the cod – each cycle of the seasons, and when it is time to mate, they return to their birthplace, the ancestral feeding grounds, site of every former and every future congregation. They return there year on year even should the rivers cease to flow and the waterholes dry up, even until the last straw is withered and gone. The earth might be covered over, water poisoned, wood disguised and trees taken away, and still they would return, unto generations out of mind – living, in hope.

As ‘the one from Brippick Station’, he belongs to no land. He has no true name. No longer numbered boy or youth, nor may he yet be admitted a man. Brippoki is considered a foolish sort. His initiations are incomplete. His Dreaming is at odds. A solitary individual obliged to keep largely to himself, he is treated in much the same way as a doctor or holy man would be – except without any of the skills, and therefore none of the status. Whenever possible, it is appropriate that he eats and even sleeps at different times, separate from the others. Excluded from ceremony, he maintains a respectful distance. In this regard alone might he observe his sacred duties.

He has spent his entire adult life profoundly lost and alone.

Only now that he is come to London does Brippoki recognise his Dreaming. Here in this place, far outside of the World, he finally knows – or at least suspects – what his
goobong
is.

Sarah sat downstairs, away from Lambert. Following his bewildering turn, her continued presence only seemed to upset him. He threw her looks, often confused, as if unsure of who she was or else thinking she must hate him. She might have administered another sleeping draught, if it hadn’t smacked of knocking him out for the sake of her own peace of mind.

She wrung her hands, no longer sure of anything, herself least of all.

The clock in the hallway struck the hour of ten. With a stretch and a flex of her fingers Sarah laid the manuscript and her notebooks aside. Brippoki, apparently, was not coming – not this evening.

She could only throw herself into more work. She attended to various household chores in half-hearted fashion.

The
Life
wound down towards its close; there was only the matter of a few pages to go. Only an increased burning sensation behind her eyes, as well as faint deference to Brippoki, prevented her from seeing events through to their conclusion. In many ways she would prefer the story not to end, for that would probably mean, to her, the loss of both men. Druce, in the manuscript, had been staring death in the face so long that it was a wonder he was not dead already – although he was, of course.

No doom, however, should be accepted as inevitable, no evil ever ‘necessary’.

Nearly every commentator on the Australian Aborigine had spoken of their likely extinction: it was even said that, once an Aboriginal woman had given birth to a half-caste baby, their own seed lodged no more. The destruction of Brippoki’s people was undeniably a reality – but natural succession, the work of Providence? Pragmatical men of affairs might shrug their shoulders and turn their backs to the scene, but she was convinced: the way things were did not make them acceptable – and if that was naivety, then she clung to it fiercely. No law of nature dictated thus. No right in the least divine might excuse it. Man was dishonest if he summoned either in defence of his own actions. Should their extinction come to pass, it would be the work of his bloodied hand, no more and no less, and a stain on his conscience forever.

Sarah quietly cleaned out the grate in Lambert’s bedroom, ready to build a new fire, then made her way back down to the parlour, meaning to do the same.

Life had been simpler once, without the shame that knowledge brings.

Lambert could make of it what he cared to, but there must be more to religion, she felt, whatever its origins; more than keeping to a set of rules; more to appeasing God, or gods, than strict obedience. Saul once claimed to have never broken a single rule, and no one could dispute that as Paul he was the better man.

The Old Testament was filled with stories of angels and demons, possession and exorcism, spirits of good and evil – a fiery brand of religion appealing to
men most especially in their weaknesses. They lived their lives and often died by the sayings and doings of supernatural forces. Should the imps and saints of any one particular belief demand sway over all others? Providence, surely, allowed for more than one single path to happiness and fulfilment. Any faith, strong in itself, should confidently withstand the existence of others.

All of heaven and the earth had been created in seven days. Was it really so much harder to credit the world sicked up by a serpent, or hopping frog?

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy
; the first five books of the Old Testament, the
Pentateuch
, were ascribed to the prophet Moses. Mosaic chronology of an entirely different order might also exist on the earth. The lead that separated differently coloured pieces of glass also served to bind them all together. If, instead, seeing them set against it, a religion sought to deny or crush all others, then that belief was weak and not worth subscribing to – for even as it saw that there were other possibilities, it made no allowances. Absolutism, moral or otherwise, set a limit to knowledge. Knowingly, it fostered ignorance.

And it was in ignorance that evil took its root.

Could a race of human beings appear so different as to make any possibility of connection painful, Sarah wondered, so that we simply needed to see them conquered in order to preserve our ideal of the civilised people we thought we were?