From the Wreck Read online

  FROM THE WRECK

  From the wreck

  JANE RAWSON

  MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

  www.transitlounge.com.au

  Copyright© 2017 Jane Rawson

  First Published 2017

  Transit Lounge Publishing

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Cover image: Malgorzata Maj/Trevillion Images

  Cover and book design: Peter Lo

  Printed in China by Everbest

  A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the

  National Library of Australia: http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

  ISBN: 978-0-9953594-9-9 (e-book)

  For Soren Holm and for Tane

  Many of the parrots, monkeys, and other animals we had on board, were already burnt or suffocated; but several had retreated to the bowsprit out of reach of the flames, appearing to wonder what was going on, and quite unconscious of the fate that awaited them. We tried to get some of them into the boats, by going as near as we could venture; but they did not seem at all aware of the danger they were in, and would not make any attempt to reach us. As the flames caught the base of the bowsprit, some of them ran back and jumped into the midst of the fire.

  Alfred Russell Wallace, Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro

  But I, awakened from sleep, considered in my excellent heart whether to drop from the deck and die right there in the sea or endure, keep silent, go on being one of the living.

  Homer, Odyssey

  THE WRECK

  1

  He felt it first when the horses shifted and cried. They had been muttering among themselves all day, but this was different, a note of panic in it. The horses aren’t yours to care about, George, he reminded himself. He went from cabin to cabin and collected the crockery and cutlery smeared and encrusted with an early dinner, the passengers getting ready for bed.

  Jupiter. He’d heard them call the horse Jupiter. He could hear the horses nickering and wondered why it was that everything felt a little off. I’ll leave this cleaning just one moment, he thought, and go below. I’ll just make sure someone is attending to them and then I’ll return to the galley.

  ‘Jupiter.’ He breathed the name out because there was no one there, only the six horses and George himself. ‘Jupiter,’ but no horse turned his head to look. He didn’t know which among them was the famous racer. They were shuffling still, something anxious about them. He told himself, You know nothing of horses, what do you mean something anxious, how would you know? But he felt his own sweat prick a little.

  He sat himself on a flour barrel and watched the horses nudge one another, the flick of their tails. He may have closed his eyes. He did not think he had. But when he opened them there was another, a woman. She was running her finger around the rim of the horse’s mouth and it stood, death-still, eyelids peeled back and eyes locked on her shadowed face. She leaned forward out of the darkness and licked the foam from the horse’s quivering muzzle and George could hear the creature breathe, a strange whimper deep in its chest. That did not sound like comfort. ‘Harvesting’ was the word that forced itself to George’s mind.

  He stood as slowly and quietly as he could and left the enclosure back-first. The floor creaked but she did not once raise her eyes to him, nor did the horse shift its stare from her face.

  He returned to the galley and the cleaning he’d abandoned. There were eighteen women on board and he had served each of them dinner during the evening. That woman had not been among them. But you did not see her face, he reminded himself. And you are only one day out from Port Adelaide — how can you be so sure you know your passengers well enough to recognise one in the darkness, in an unexpected place?

  There were steps behind him and a hand sliding into the crack of his arse: Mason, of course. The assistant steward cackled loudly as George turned to flick him with the wet dishcloth.

  ‘You’ll have a brandy with us, won’t you, Hills? Finish that up and come have a brandy.’

  George packed the last of the crockery away and cast the woman from his mind.

  The other stewards and a couple of the able seamen were packed around a table in an empty aft cabin. Davey Peters, too, the fireman George had travelled with the last four or five times. Not Mrs Meagher, though; she preferred to stay up front, where the company was ‘higher quality’.

  Mason slid a glass over to him and asked what he thought of the horseflesh.

  ‘Horseflesh?’ Had someone seen him visiting the horses below?

  ‘The sheilas, man. Seen a decent set of catheads among ‘em?’ Mason asked.

  ‘All mothers and wan spinsters back our way, aren’t they, George? Not much chop at all,’ said O’Brien, who’d been handling the aft cabins alongside George that evening.

  ‘Haven’t seen a one as wouldn’t splinter to bits under the weight of me,’ George confirmed, and it was true: they were a feeble-looking bunch. ‘Still, as long as they could hold it together for the duration, I wouldn’t complain if they expired after.’

  Mason cackled – it only took the slightest provocation – and poured him another.

  ‘There is one up front, though,’ Peters said, ‘much more your style, Georgie. Big, plump pair on her, arse like a pumpkin.’

  ‘Blonde?’ George asked.

  ‘Brunette as they come. What do they call it? Mahogany or somesuch.’

  He did like a strong, plump brunette.

  ‘Big girl, is she?’

  ‘Ooh, I’ve really caught your attention, haven’t I? Nope, not above five four, I’d say, but plenty of meat on her bones.’

  George’s Eliza appeared before him, her shining brown hair and adorable chubby backside, and he reminded her he’d be back to marry her soon, he just had one or two more trips to make, a few more coins to save, another girl or two – adventurous, entangled elsewhere; he didn’t like the lonely types – to tumble.

  And though he’d cast her from his mind, he did see her again, fleetingly, that apparition among the horses. Had she been brown-headed? A set of rounded handfuls? All he had left of her was a creeping sense of dread; nothing physical he could call to mind.

  ‘Ledwith, her name is,’ said Mason.

  ‘Oh, how do you know, you big show-off?’ the cabin boy blurted out, and someone threw a cushion at his head and told him to pipe down.

  ‘It is,’ Mason said. ‘Bridget Ledwith. She was down below, wandering around, and I asked her did she need a helping hand’ – he mimed groping her arse – ‘was she lost, and she told me all chilly that no thank you she was just fine. I followed her back to her cabin anyway, just in case. Got her name off the door.’

  ‘Down below?’ George asked.

  ‘Trust you to pick that up, Hills,’ Peters laughed, and George laughed with him, remembering suddenly the mouth on the woman and thinking what she might be able to do with it.

  Between them they finished that bottle and then another one and there were only a few more hours until they all had to be back on deck. George looked around him and saw that only Mason and he and the cabin boy, asleep on the floor, were left.

  ‘Enough,’ he said, and Mason agreed. It was a stumbling walk back to their quarters, made longer when George declared he was just going above to piss off the edge.

  ‘Have one for me,’ Mason said, and veered off towards bed.

  Just a small look, George thought to himself. Just a peek. And if she’s worth it, then tomorrow I’ll be all charm. Might even comb the old locks, he thought.

  All the stewards knew how to come and
go, unobtrusive, so it was nothing for George to gently slide open the door of Miss Ledwith’s cabin, to adjust his eyes to the dark and scan her sleeping form for flaws and favours. There were many points in her advantage, Mason was right, but there was one thing she was not, and that was the woman George had seen below. The shape of her was the same; the colouring too – it all came back to him in a rush. But when he saw her he did not feel death behind him and the cold pit of the sea floor.

  It’s the brandy speaking, George, he told himself. Cold pit of the sea floor, indeed. Bed now, and a smidge of sleep, then tomorrow a play for this flossie. But still he couldn’t shake the sight of her, her lips against the horse’s foaming mouth.

  *

  He had slept, perhaps, for two hours, then arisen to prepare the ladies’ breakfasts.

  At the inquiry, months later, he heard that some time on that first evening one of the horses had fallen, knocked from its feet by the rough seas. The racer’s owner had demanded a shift in course and the captain had turned the prow of the ship into the swell to ease its heaving. Had it brought about the wreck, this shift? Perhaps. It did not occur to George to stand and say that it was something other than the swell that had caused the horses to panic. He didn’t even believe it himself.

  Instead he had told the inquiry, blunt but polite, that he did not know the cause, he did not hold blame; that all he could say was eight days, eight nights was too long to spend half-submerged in the freezing Southern Ocean with little food and no water and with the dead and the sharks ever increasing in the bloody waters around. But whose fault was it? He didn’t know. Perhaps the lifeboat could have come sooner: it seemed it had tried. He was thanked and dismissed with no further questions because it was clear to everyone he had nothing more to add.

  He had a great deal more to add, and none of it on that particular topic. He would have liked to ask the court how it was possible that the woman Bridget Ledwith had changed her form so utterly from one day to the next. He would have enquired how was it she had seen into every part of him those eight days and eight nights but now he could see nothing of her because she was gone. Vanished. They mentioned her in the course of the hearing, certainly, but as though it was no great mystery for a grown woman to go missing, to disappear entirely from the colony’s face. Privacy, they said, or something; a lady’s right to be left alone.

  Also, he would have liked to say, how did such a little wreck, such a gentle wreck, break, ruin and drown the lives of so many? He had not even noticed when the ship first lifted and dropped onto the reef. One drop of coffee had spilled from the pot he was carrying to the ladies’ cabins for breakfast service; he could see, clear in his mind, that drop as it rolled across the timber below his feet and he felt the shuddering mass of the boat slow, settle, creak to a halt. Why have we stopped? he’d thought. We’ve arrived already? But before the thought had even completed itself he saw an enormous wave wash over the companionway, taking men, women and children to the bottom with barely a chance to scream.

  He couldn’t say for sure that even then he’d realised the ship was sinking. He had dropped the pot and rushed to his cabin to find his savings. Is that something a man does on the brink of death? Perhaps it is. He’d thrust the money in his pocket, and by the time he’d made his way up top, the boat had begun in earnest to tear itself apart.

  George had hauled himself over the broken bulwarks, tearing his back to shreds, dodged between the hoofs of maddened race horses stampeding about the deck, scrambled into the rigging of the main mast, where a phenomenal wave washed over the lines where he was clinging, and both he and the mast were swept into the ocean. He could still see, always somewhere behind his eyes, that monstrous wave rushing towards him, its foamy head hanging above him, then the blue-black-green crashing upon him, filling his lungs and mind with blank, white, drowning fear.

  God, the despair when his trousers, with his savings in the pocket, were torn from him and swept out to sea. All that bloody stewarding for nothing, he’d thought, forgetting for the moment he would probably be dead before ten minutes was up. All that yes ma’am no ma’am right away ma’am and now I haven’t got a damn bit to show for it and I might as well drown myself this second. Twenty-four bloody years old and nothing at all to show for myself. He was in space, it seemed; flying through space. The bottom of the mast had got stuck in something and now the top, with him attached, was thrashing itself about in the air. George had always hated the circus and this did not strike him as particularly funny. Hurtling through space with a naked arse he looked towards the ship, expecting a laughing crowd arrayed on the deck, and he’d been surprised to see a mess of floating, splintered lumber, a wet and screaming array of bodies, where once his ship had been. He fell back into the water beside one of the bigger chunks.

  That young bloke, Soren Holm, just come from Denmark, reached down and pulled him from the water. George was wearing one shoe and a belt. He felt a body pressed beside him, softer than his own. He turned his head and saw it was her, but with a dampness and coldness about her that told him here, at last, was the woman he had seen below. ‘Miss Ledwith,’ he said, though he knew she wasn’t, and he felt her small, clinging hand slip inside his.

  The sun was just beginning to rise.

  2

  One eye open, then the other.

  Am I still me? I touch here, taste this, smell that. I remember. I am still me. One thing holding fast in this shifting, blurring mass.

  But the rest of it? None of the shapes are right. Is that a life form? Is that? There is neither the sight nor feel of wrappedtight energy, of breathing hot, of burning fuel, of soul-filled bursting selfness that is like anyone I have ever seen. I don’t even know who to eat.

  I will sit slumping cold and starving here, in this cave, in this wet puddle of an ocean. Who would even mark my death? That crusty-shelled little nobody over there? That slippery piece of meat and teeth? I don’t think so. Weren’t we supposed to be a once-proud race of warriors? I flail at the memory of us and the hurt of it tears strips from me and I decide I can’t remember. Still, I am certain we were not the type whose deaths were marked by becoming passing food for some slippery piece of meat and teeth.

  No, not that.

  I may be me but I know how not to look it. I put one small part of me out of my cave and make it the shape of the sand. I watch it and squint my eyes and I think, yes, sand. So I put another small part of me out there to join the first. Still sandy. With five parts out and three in I suddenly feel ashamed as though maybe another of my people can see this cringing cowardice and the rest pours out and I’m all there, out of the cave, and I am as good as sand. I roll my eyes up down left right and feel the flavours around with every feeling part of me and nothing is there ready to eat me but nor are there any of my people laughing at my doltish slow transformation into what maybe is sand. I move, slowshifting, sand-like, across the land until I meet rock and then I am shifting even slower, rock-shaped and rock-like, but oh rock moves so slow so slow and so I have to take the shape of another. I sit, rock-like, and watch first this one then another cruise by until I have a library of forms and movements and I am all shifting life forms behind my eyes. I try that one, slow floater with grey-green strands and I am it, letting go of the rock I slow-float strands, swimming the currents around me.

  Something goes by and so I eat it. At least the crunch of tiny bones is familiar when all else is strange. Here some star is oozing warmth and light. There are shards and vivid jangles; shadows smear the outlines of things. I smear my own, slide a little higher – through this colour and that, one smooth, one sharp, one altogether knobbly – always towards the heat of that star. It is tender and tentative on the skin of me, barely warm, barely more yellow than grey. I spread myself flatwise to make the most of it. I stretch and thin my shape, I slide myself up this rough rocky form and that, and find myself in another kind of air altogether.

  It is dry and it is bright. There is a crashing, pounding, smashing sound a
nd I hear it in my ears and then I hear it in my whole body. I do not want to be here or there or anywhere but only then and past and previous. Not now. Nowhere and nowhen that ocean strikes shore.

  I tumble back, in: under. I tumble back under, down, down, down. I am a rock that plummets back to the sandy floor. I am a rock that rolls – and no I don’t care how – into the mouth of this cave to stop and breathe and sorrow. I make myself me. One wet ball of hate and homesickness, I take the shape of fury and grief and hopeless, hopeless, hopeless.

  I sit. I wait. I think.

  Once upon a time there was a world all ocean. It fell wet across the whole world, nothing but water. The water was fat with life and with death. It had been this way always, though of course once it had been ice, a brittle ball of crisp bluewhite with life squeezed into the tiniest corners and cracks, fidgeting its way to warmth for thousands and thousands and millions of years.

  Once upon a time the globe stretched its crumpled warming tentacles and ice melted to water. This life form got bigger and this one got smaller, harder or softer or a few extra tendrils until every niche on the whole wet ball of it was full of the creature that had evolved to be there. And for thousands and thousands and millions of years, that was what we did.

  So many creatures were bigger than we were, and so many had more teeth. But we were built for thinking, for making, for talking. We could squeeze into any space. We could shift into any shape. And that was who we were and what we did: we didn’t fight the others to be bigger, fiercer, more toothy. We were evidently us.

  We knew the place we lived. We came to know other places – other planets, other dimensions. Places that were just like home but not quite; times that were nothing like this at all and even beyond anything we could imagine or understand. We found a billion realities where we could be so impossible as to cease existing.