The Resurrectionist (21 page)

W
ORD IS SENT
, telling him it is me who seeks his company. Two days he has been alone, and I am afraid of what he will have done, alone in the house.

As I walk I seem to float. I did not sleep today, and the night is cold, a bitter wind blowing hard against the sky. No opium, I told myself this morning when I woke – I should be clear tonight, and calm – but somewhere I drank, and then again, the depth of it pressing out against my eyes.

I am late, I think as I arrive, or early, or maybe both. We are to meet in the yard of St John’s, a narrow place and walled. I have been here, I know, but I cannot find the memory. Time is slipping about me.

And then his voice.

‘Prentice,’ he says. With a start I turn to see him there.

‘What?’ he asks. ‘Did you not think that I would come?’

I shake my head.

‘Where have you been?’ he asks.

‘Nowhere,’ I say, ‘nowhere.’ He takes a step closer to me, and I step away, and he goes still.

‘Why back away?’ he asks. ‘Are you afraid of me?’ I hear the crack in his voice, sharp as a gun. There is something in his hand, some heavy thing.

‘No,’ I say, ‘not afraid.’ Then he extends a hand until it almost touches me.

‘Then what?’ he asks, his voice trembling.

But I hear a sound, and without thinking turn. He too starts, one hand grasping me by the collar and pressing me back against the wall.

‘No one,’ I say. But as he presses me against the wall I see his eyes are wet with tears.

‘Do you mean to give me up?’ he demands, pushing me, his body pressed against my own.

‘No,’ I say, ‘I will not give you up.’

His face is full of this thing that is in both of us. I see the way it swells and grows, like tenderness, or love.

‘Please,’ I say, and then all at once he steps away. At first I think to run, for now I understand. I am betrayed by all.

And then I see his eyes are not on me but on a shovel abandoned by a grave nearby. Taking a step towards it he reaches out, closing his hand about its haft.

‘What do you do?’ I ask, and he laughs.

‘You did not think I would let you kill me, did you?’

‘Let me go and you will never see me again,’ I plead, and Caley nods. Encouraged I take a step away, but then he yanks the shovel free, pulling it into his hands and around in one long arc, its passage slicing the air only inches from my head as I stumble back. Near the fence a tree grows upwards, and I make for its dark shape, the quickest way across the wall, and am almost there, when suddenly I am grabbed out of the darkness, and go down into the reeking mud. A hand claws at my face, and I struggle upwards, but something strikes me in the head from behind, a massive blow that sends me crashing to my knees. I struggle to rise, but then it strikes me
again, sending me down once more, then again, and again. Dimly I know it must be the shovel.

Then a hand grabbing me, my body rolled onto its back, the weight of a knee upon my chest.

‘Betray me, would you?’ he demands, and I hear the way his voice is breaking. All I see is red and sparking light. Then taking me by the throat he dashes my head down upon the stones, and consciousness ebbs and all is dark.

I
WAKE WITHOUT WAKING
, merely rising from a kind of stupor into a different darkness. Where I am I do not know. Above me is the sky, although I do not recognise it at first. A girdle of light, dark cloud scurrying fast. For a time I lie, staring upwards. I can feel the earth beneath me I think, moving in the void. I am cold, and everything is slipping upwards, like heat lost into the night. The slivered moon. I try to move, but cannot, or not my arms, and so I twist my head back, and then I see the lantern, the opened grave. I am floating, smooth as a stone borne in the mouth.

Then I am above, the grave open beneath me. A pauper’s hole, the bodies wrapped and stacked one on the other, nameless in the earth. With a strange clarity I understand what is happening, what Caley means to do. One by one he pulls the bodies forth, lining them around the pit. Then I see him take the one I recognise as my very own, and pressing his face close to it to whisper something I cannot hear, he pushes it into the waiting pit.

I am above and I am beneath.

Then one by one the bodies falling in upon me there, their swaddled shapes rolling in on top of me. And all at once I am afraid, and I start to strain and fight, but my body is not mine, it will not move, and so I try to shout, but my voice is mute, as if this was a dream, and one from which I could not wake. From overhead the earth still falling, the close stink of it, as my body seems to fall into the smothering dark, its pressing weight, as if I am not to die but to be unborn, and unmade, returned to the womb from which I came. And all at once I think I understand. Time is not a river, but a prism, in which we are broken and divided like light. Then the last earth tumbles from above, and all is still.

A
T FIRST IT IS NOTHING
, or less than nothing. A sort of hesitation in the air. Bourke has fallen still; all about is silence, the only sound the breathing of the bush. In the depthless mirror of the water’s surface the clouds stream by, a silent motion, the dipping flight of a currawong moving crosswise to their current like a stone forever falling but never striking. On every side the world unspools.

Turning my hand I look at it. It is part of me, and yet it seems another lives within its skin. The water spilling down from it, beaded glass, as slowly as a feather might. My blood moving past inside of me.

Lifting my eyes I see them. Silent on a rock upon the creek’s other side; so close we might speak. How long they have been standing there I am not sure: though it is only now that I have seen them, it seems that they have stood there all along, or even are already gone, as if the fault lies with my senses or with time itself.

In his hand, each holds a brace of spears, light and slender things which give the impression of flight. And yet they seem
dressed not for the hunt but for some ritual, their faces and bodies painted with circles and lines of white, lending them the appearance not of men but of ghosts, which perhaps they are.

Unfolding myself I rise. They do not speak, or move, though for a moment I think perhaps they will utter some words which will give this sense, in some tongue known to all of us. But they do not, instead they stand, and watch, their eyes deep and liquid beneath their painted brows.

How long we stand like this I am not sure. A few seconds only, no more, though time seems to stretch impossibly. And then, quite suddenly, a flicker in the light, as if a shadow moved over us. In the water’s rusty depths a shaft of light slips upwards and away. Too quick, I think, as if it were just a bird that moved against the sun. But it is enough to break whatever spell it is that binds us here. Across the creek the smaller of the two steps backwards, his eyes passing over me and away. Then the taller too, and without a sound they are gone, slipped away into the bush.

When at last I turn from the space that they have left, I see Bourke still standing there, his horse’s bridle hanging in his hand. His eyes meet mine, and briefly we are equal in each other’s gaze. And then he looks away again as if some intimacy has passed between us and we were made closer by it than we might care to be.

Only later, as we come acrest the road towards the settlement does he speak of it. It is growing late, and overhead the birds shoot and wheel against the fading sky.

‘They thought us spirits once,’ he says, not turning in his saddle. ‘They took the colour of our skin for the pallor of the dead and imagined us their ancestors, lost and wandering in the living world once more.’

Though it is a story I have heard before, the memory of the silent way they stared at us across the creek, the spectral masks of their painted skin rises unbidden in my mind. Then all at once he turns to me.

‘You have never felt it?’ he asks. ‘That sense we are not quite real here? That this land is not our own?’

In the failing light his face is unreadable, and so I let the question hang unanswered.

I
AM WITH
J
OSHUA
, upon the hill, when I see the horses on the path, moving slowly up the slope. Lost in the act of drawing, Joshua does not notice them at once, his eyes moving from the view to the page and back again. Only when the quality of his attention changes, do I know he has seen his father there. Then, looking down again, he returns to his work, determinedly, though the fluidity of before is gone, his hand moving awkwardly upon the page.

As they approach I lift my arm to shade my eyes: the day is clear, and bright, Bourke reining in his horse and greeting me with a hand upon his hat.

‘I had thought to find you here,’ he says, though I am sure it is not me but Joshua, still bent over his book, that he had thought to find.

‘You ride out?’ I ask, and Bourke nods.

‘Not far.’ Then with a hand he indicates his companion. ‘You have met our new neighbour?’

‘I have not had the pleasure,’ I say, still shading my eyes.

‘Edmund Winter,’ says the figure on the horse. He is a thin
man in his early thirties, dark-haired and precise in his saddle, and though he is careful enough in his words he does not offer me his hand. Joshua sets down his pen.

‘Thomas May,’ I reply. I turn to look down the hill.

‘You have bought the Wemys property?’

Perhaps he finds my questioning distasteful for he lets the question hang unanswered a moment longer than is polite.

‘And the land upon its northern boundary.’

‘But you are new to the colony?’

Winter stares down at me. ‘I am,’ he says. His mouth is a little wide and full in his high-boned face; in another it might lend an air of sensuality to his looks, but in him it seems somehow cruel.

‘Sydney’s gain is Hobart’s loss,’ Bourke says, good-humouredly, but Winter glances at him as if this revelation displeases him.

‘How do you find it here?’ I ask.

Winter smiles thinly. ‘Handsome enough,’ he replies.

Once they are gone I direct Joshua to return to his sketch. Westward I can make out the border of the land that was once Major Wemys’s. For three years it has lain deserted, its fields left to go to seed, its stock sold by the executor while the cousin he had willed them to was found and informed of his good fortune. A solicitor in Somerset, I have heard, or Surrey, but with no desire to see this land he has come into unexpectedly. For a time Bourke himself thought of buying it, as did others hereabouts, but one by one they each declined, and so the agent was bound to seek buyers elsewhere.

Beside me Joshua sets down his pen again, interrupting my thoughts. The image on the page before him having
faltered I refrain from directing him to continue, telling him we will finish for the day.

Walking back to the house Joshua talks, and laughs, the encounter with his father seemingly forgotten. By the gates he asks me to accompany him inside, assuring me his stepmother would be happy to see me, but I shake my head and tell him I have business of my own, and so we part.

It is a delicate thing, my relationship with the Bourkes. In the three years that I have known them I have gone from a thing bought and sold, to being their employee and, finally, a friend. And yet between us there is much unsaid, omissions and questions unpursued. When first I sought work it was Bourke who engaged me to educate his son, and, later, Mrs Bourke who found me work with the ladies of the settlement. This would be enough to place me in their debt, but still they treat me as one might a friend, a kindness I am uneasy with.

I make my way back down towards the road, my portfolio upon my back. At the sound of approaching hooves, I step aside and turn, expecting to see Bourke come after me to pass on some word or make some request, but it is Winter. Pulling his horse about he stops in front of me.

‘Mr May,’ he says, ‘I had thought to find you at the house.’

I shake my head. ‘I have other business that needs attending to.’

He nods almost imperceptibly.

‘Your lesson with the boy is done?’ he asks, and I nod.

‘Bourke says he has talent of a sort.’

‘He draws well,’ I say, ‘and finds pleasure in the act.’

Winter looks me over. ‘You take other pupils, I understand?’

‘I do,’ I say.

‘I have a sister,’ he says slowly then, ‘unmarried, and with too little to fill her days. It would do her good to have some accomplishment to find pleasure in.’

Something in his manner makes me hesitate. ‘You have discussed the question with her?’

He smiles coolly. ‘She is my sister, Mr May, I think I know her mind.’

Drawing a card from his jacket he places it in my hand. ‘Call on us,’ he says. ‘Next week, if you will.’

I place the card inside my jacket. ‘Very well,’ I say. Then pulling on the reins Winter turns the mare about and sets off across the hill.

M
Y HOUSE IS QUIET
when I return, the shadows long about it on the ground. In the air the smell of the eucalypts, the dusty fragrance of the bush. Setting down my portfolio I loosen my waistcoat and collar, drawing water from the bag that hangs behind the door, its wetness coming cool and close with the memory of the stone from which it sprang. Before me the evening stretches out in solitude, an unbroken space.

There are those to whom it would seem strange that privacy should be a luxury in such a place. The colony is small, and the roads between the settlements and the houses long and little travelled. But solitude and privacy are different things: though a man may easily go a week here without crossing another’s path, in truth it would be easier to pass unseen amongst the press of a London street, to lose oneself in the throng of the passing multitudes than to go unnoticed here in solitude, for in this place all know the business of their neighbours, and gossip travels far, and fast.

It is a strange kind of solitude then that I have found for
myself here. I am one amongst the people of the colony, and yet not. My profession grants me entry to their circles and some measure of trust, but for all of that I still keep myself apart, for I find no ease with them.

This is not a privilege I have always enjoyed. For the space of my sentence I lived and worked with other men, sleeping rough upon the ground, and later in beds six to a room. I was not happy thus, nor unhappy, instead I learned to mind myself, to make a place inside of me where my thoughts might be my own. And when my time was done, Bourke gave me first a room, and, later, the lease upon this house and land adjoining his estate.

Though it is small, with little in the way of amenity, the rent was cheap and the neighbours few, and so I took it gratefully. It had been an officer’s, a man returned to England five years past, and had been abandoned long enough to be reclaimed by the bush. Cockatoos nested in the chimney and possums scuttled in the roof, and leaves and dung were scattered on the floors. No doubt it was convenient for Bourke to have me here, for I cleaned it out and fixed the roof and walls, and kept the blacks from burning it or escapees making it their own, but his was an act of kindness nonetheless.

Another might be lonely here, but I find pleasure in the solitude. I have little taste for company, travelling only when I must to take specimens for those who commission me, or to teach amongst the ladies of the settlement. No doubt I could make a better living other ways; there are many who would have me make their likeness, or those of their loved ones and family. Many too who desire portraits made of animals they possess: most often horses, but sometimes cattle and dogs, and even once or twice a pig of great consequence. But I have no taste for this work; though I am a fair hand at the rendering of the human form there seems something false and overweening in this desire to have one’s likeness set
down for posterity. And so instead I teach, helping guide the hands of ladies who would attain some degree of accomplishment in the art of drawing and water colours. For though it requires me to gild my words and to flatter them, there is an honesty to it nonetheless, a truth in the moment when a student finds something perfect and true in a line, which brings me happiness. But more importantly, through my teaching I am left alone, the world I hold inside and my other work kept private and inviolate.