From the Wreck Read online

  Aeon after aeon we explored it, stretched our shapes into other life forms across a million years and a million places, times and ways of being. We found there was no place like home. A planet all ocean. We sank ourselves back into the soft waters and vowed to always stay.

  They came out of the sky, tumbling through our atmosphere and dropping into the sea. Their ship bobbed about. We thought they were just curious and that soon they’d be gone.

  They stayed. More showed up. Many, many more. They built machines, giant, and chemical plants. They built walls in the water and broke the ocean into seas and then they pushed the seas aside. They filled the spaces with dirt and their big dirty footprints got bigger and bigger and bigger until our all-ocean world became a world half land. The ocean broke upon the shore.

  Now there wasn’t space enough to hold us. Now there weren’t creatures enough to feed us. Not enough niches to go around and no one sure anymore whose niche was whose anyway. We fought each other and we fought them.

  They moved us like they moved the water. They filled in our ocean. They murdered us by accident and by design. They won and we lost and there were so, so few of us left and so we fled. We launched ourselves out into that great quiet space. We listened to nothing but the thrum of stars for I don’t know how long. We tumbled into another time, space, dimension.

  I crawled into this cave.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been here and I have no idea how long I can last. Is there anyone left?

  I sleep. I catch and eat and sometimes it is slippery and others the crunch of tiny bones. I will not die here. One part of me, then another then the next, becomes sand and I am once again on my way. Sliding sand, slow floater with greygreen strands, this time the darting stripes of some intrepid speedster, then rock again and rock and rest. The sun, that star. No resting in that meagre light this time. Too much time at rest and I will lose my nerve.

  Above it is turmoil. Water in great towers and sheets, pushed to mountains by the freezing wind. A great grey-green howl of it. Chunks and spars of scaly and slimy and once-was-tree, all tumbled about. I fix myself fast to one and let it go where it will. We go and go and go and I couldn’t say if it’s towards or away from whatever it is I had meant to be doing here in this better life. It’s darker, the one star gone - the sun, that bully – but all the rest are still there, I see, now they have a chance to show their faces. I bathe in their hum and sing the song of my people and it drops frail into the sea, no other ears to hear.

  We smash now against another, swift and looming, and I move on.

  I am the shape of the wood now and all about me is the shape of the sea. I cling and spread and make my way higher until I find a place that is closed and dark and for now I rest.

  I sleep.

  When I wake there is a smell so gigantic I hear it as a noise pounding on my brain. The world is full of animal: hard smashing feet and white rolling eyes and this is not a good place to be soft and floor-bound.

  I wait, small and dark. Squeezed into a dry corner I make myself the feel the look of wood and keep my softness clear of the smash of feet. I watch for a shape I could be. Others come and go, one or two, brown and upright and with a lot of whispering hush between themselves and the footsmashers. They cart and carry things, they provide food and try to scrape away a little of the smell. Could I be one like this? They feel so very present, so obvious, and I have put my bravery away somewhere and can’t quite remember how to find it.

  Another comes and it is upright too but smaller, quieter and also brighter, blues and yellows, greens sprinkled across itself. It performs no tasks. It murmurs to itself and maybe to the foot-smashers, but they do not heed it the way they do the browner types. It is shadow-bound and ignored and it slips away again without any type of notice.

  This I could try.

  I remember how the creature looked and squeeze myself to the boundaries of its shape, approximate myself to its tentacles and tendrils and colours. None of it is quite entirely right but perhaps it is good enough that I can eat and not be eaten.

  The feet have stopped with their smashing. Those creatures stand quiet now and I sit, the way my model did, and watch them. I murmur in a way I hope will pass. But though I am shadow-bound, I am not ignored. They stare at me and roll their big white eyes and over them a dampness spreads. ‘You are bringing the sea inside,’ I tell them. ‘What tiny oceans are these?’ I move to them and dip my extremities in their moistened hides, taste their salt. They are not soothed.

  ‘Small creatures,’ I tell them, because aren’t we all? ‘Small creatures, calm yourselves.’ We taste each other’s breath and they know there’s none of their kind been through my mouth and they still themselves. Small creatures. We talk, this and that. Minds only; no sounds. They are the feel of speed squeezed into muscle and bone. They show me their terrible smashing feet pushing hard against grassy ground, an ocean of sweat, blood so loud in their ears they can’t hear a single other thing.

  Someone has come, silent, making our seven into eight. I don’t turn to look but I feel it, another of those brown uprights, it hides quiet in the shadow and doesn’t seem to want to bite. These hard-foots feel no fear so I ignore it too. When it’s all done and I understand the taste of bladey-green after a high-speed chase, and they’ve felt the way it is to tumble like a rock to the very bottom of everything, I leave these creatures and go up into the air.

  Some time in the darkest part of it, just before light returns, there is a scraping and a shuddering and we stop and we do not go. Sounds come out of the mouths of all of them, no longer a muttering and mumbling now, but a screeching and howling that tells me we are done with sleeping for the moment. Water comes in among us. Our wooden home is crumpled and bent, split into three. All of us are oceandwelling creatures now.

  I watch the smash-footed creatures, the speed lovers, the grass croppers. They try to stay afloat but this is not their habitat. My first friends in this ecosystem and they are gone and I am sad.

  One of those brown uprights, though, has found me and seems friendly. Not brown anymore so much as pink, he is, and grey sometimes. They do not like the cold. Our wooden house has become mostly sticks and we perch on them above the waves. Around us perch others and their skin too grows purple and bumped and the waves crash over us and over and over and over. Some of the perchers drop and some try to float and do for a little. Then they sink. I see the one I made myself from slide by, her blues and greens and yellows billowing under waves, pulling her down and down to the deep ocean floor.

  This does not seem a good place for them, these uprights, and I wonder why they do not leave. Here the food is wet, cold and alive and speeds past too fast for their clumsy tentacles though why they don’t even try to grasp it I do not know. There is the slippery stuff too, green and floaty, that hovers just below us and well within reach, but none try for that either. I have seen some of them – only when the sun, that star, is looking the other way – peel a little meat from one of their purpled companions now gone cold and still. But that is not enough for sustenance.

  I don’t mind it here for now. The cold has never bothered me. Nor the wet, obviously. And this one curls himself into me and snuggles against me all damp. I’ve taken the pinker shape that seems in favour, let go my greens and blues, so our pink shapes make a purpling blob together here in the middle of a cold, cold sea. We taste each other’s breath and I try to talk with him, minds only, but he cannot hear. So back to the tasting, the tentacles, the making of a damp and snuggly blob. I cannot learn a great deal about him this way but still it is better than alone in a cave. I stay.

  Each day the sun, that star, puts its dumb wan face over one, two, three fewer. Each night we see those million billion other stars. I bathe in their hum and sing the song of my people and again it drops frail into the sea, no other ears to hear. Then once more the sun, and again we are grown smaller. A few float without sinking and others become food for those slippery bits of meat with teeth. This will
be the last worldly place for these uprights, those scattered still around me, and I hold the one beside me and try to think him onward into peace. ‘Small creature,’ I tell him, and I dream him a dream of the endless sky, the hum of the stars, a world all ocean, an eternity of dark. I dream him a dream and press the very edges of myself to his to bring him calm. But he stares still, lost and trapped in the shell of himself.

  A tossed wooden vessel packed with browns and greys comes up beside us and they lift us in and off we go, farewell to our ocean home. They wrap us in cloths and mutter little noises, then my friend goes one way and I go another and once more I am alone. My cold wet cave tugs at me but I am beginning to find again those scraps of bravery so I take a smaller form, closer to the ground, four-legged and fine-whiskered, soft-pawed, sharp-clawed, and I raise my tail like a flag and slip out into this world to see what is what.

  LIFE ON LAND

  1

  William talked on and on and George felt a hideous discomfort bubble in the guts of him. Cannibalism, William was saying now. What of it? George fidgeted on his cushion, tried to concentrate. That cannibalism might better fit a man to life. ‘Not so implausible,’ William was saying, smiling, man of science he was.

  They’d had beef for dinner, hadn’t they? Corned beef. Some vegetables. Why was William talking about cannibalism? George stared into his claret for a moment, smiled at his sister-in-law Sarah, put his pipe down and smoothed his trousers. A breath in – slow – then out; he turned to her husband, asked, ‘What are you saying, exactly?’

  From his reading of Darwin, William said. Charles Darwin. His reading, his understanding, was there was no such thing as morality. Nothing in and of itself good, only fit for purpose, for living and thriving wherever it was the thing found itself.

  ‘And so cannibalism? What you’re saying is?’ asked George, wondering why William would always use ten words when one would do.

  ‘That should humans be the most widely available meat, eating the flesh of humans would be the best response to such availability.’

  Oh, now he saw. George knew what William was poking at. The bubble solidified into something obsidian-cool, rubbed smooth and sharp-edged in the year after year. George weighed it in his palm, tested its blade, pocketed it. Said, instead, that this would be true, surely, only if you’d nothing else to eat, yes?

  ‘Well, not necessarily,’ replied William. ‘Humans, remember, are constantly at hand. Perhaps a person best suited to eating other humans would be also best suited to thrive.’

  ‘Apart from the law, of course. Eliza, dear, do you think we need another log for the fire?’ Sarah asked.

  Eliza continued working on her cross-stitch but nodded at her sister. ‘One moment.’

  William said that this was a discussion about biology, not the frail paper of human law, and if Darwin was right, ‘laws stand between us and our reaching a higher state of humanity.’ George saw the man’s buttocks rise out of his chair a little as he declaimed.

  ‘That’s disgusting. Eat one another if you must, but I would rather have cheese,’ Sarah said, and went to the kitchen to look for some.

  ‘It’s not that I want to eat George,’ her husband called after her. ‘At least, I am discussing it only as a matter of theory. I am not actually suggesting that we should become cannibals.’ He turned back, smiling glibly, while George thumbed the dark bead inside, tried to keep his calm under cover of keeping his pipe alight. ‘A thought experiment. Isn’t that right, George?’

  ‘So this Darwin,’ George said, shaking out his match, shaking out the creases in his voice, ‘he’s saying you’d be a smart man, wise, to eat another bloke? Better fit to be a man than another who turns his nose up at human meat?’ George could see his wife Eliza from the corner of his eye but she hadn’t flinched and he wondered why it was he always thought people could see inside him, see the monster lurking there.

  ‘Well, Darwin does not say that precisely. He doesn’t concern himself with morals. I am merely …’

  George interrupted. ‘Forget morals. Is he saying the cannibal is better fitted, is a more fully formed man?’

  ‘Well, George, he didn’t speak specifically on this matter.’ William shifted a little in his seat, stopped talking for a second and George was pleased to see him just the slightest bit on edge, just for a moment. It was only a moment. ‘I am extrapolating. But it does seem that if one takes his arguments at face value, then you could conclude … Say, if you, George, were to eat a man in circumstances where no other food was available, and due to that to go on and breed rather than die and have all your possible progeny die with you, then indeed, cannibalism would prove you the fittest and most appropriate to survive. Those who chose to abstain and therefore condemn their children to non-existence would, on the other hand, have proven themselves inadequate for the task of life.’

  ‘And where is God in this?’ Eliza asked. She knelt before the fire and took the poker from its stand. ‘You would survive in this life but surely condemn your mortal soul. Thirty or forty more years of life, beautiful children, but then an eternity in hell?’

  ‘Well, yes, there is always that to look forward to,’ George muttered.

  ‘Eliza!’ William sprang from his chair. ‘Let me do that. You must sit!’ He grasped the poker from her hand and took the log she had placed on the hearth. ‘Sit, dear, do, please. My apologies, Eliza – making you fetch wood in your state is unforgivable.’

  Eliza settled herself again in the straight-backed chair before the fire. ‘The Bible tells us we shouldn’t put today’s riches ahead of the prospect of heaven – surely eating another man in order to survive, or even have one’s children survive, is worse than exploiting one’s fellow man for money? If Mister Darwin really does support such an idea, I think someone should be speaking out against him. Do you not think so, George?’

  George’s heart crinkled black against every person in the room. He let the cold smoke of it curl out into the kitchen to also wrap his wife’s sister, happy to eat his cheese but too slow to bring it in here and stop this infernal questioning. He smiled and opened his mouth.

  William interrupted before George could answer. ‘Of course, Eliza, Mister Darwin says no such thing. His work is confined to the past, to attempting to explain how the creatures we see around us today came to be. He does not speak of moral dilemmas, nor does he attempt to rewrite God’s law. It is merely my own foolishness, trying to apply sensible and well-thought-out science to our modern society. If anyone should be spoken out against, it is me, for drawing your wise and measured husband into such a foolish conversation!’

  ‘No, William, no – I am interested.’ George gritted his teeth, grinned at William through them, tried to relax his face. ‘You do not impose.’

  ‘But perhaps another topic of discussion.’ William turned an imploring eye to his wife. ‘Sarah?’

  Sarah had fetched her sister a cup of tea and was now perched on the arm of a sofa, making her way through a small plate of cheese and a glass of porter. ‘I was speaking this morning with Missus Higgs,’ she began.

  ‘The baker’s wife?’ her husband interrupted.

  ‘The very same.’

  ‘That does remind me, dear,’ said William, ‘that Mister Higgs was telling me the other day that he had heard old Jeremy Swanforth has given up his position.’

  ‘At the Sailors’ Home?’ Eliza spoke up.

  William nodded, swallowing the cheese he’d stolen from his wife’s plate. ‘Too frail to continue his duties, Mister Higgs said. He’s going to live with his daughter in Portland …’

  George stopped listening, began instead to wonder about this daughter. He hadn’t known Swanforth had a daughter in Portland. The lifeboat had taken them there: Portland. He jammed a finger into his mouth, tried to dislodge a string of meat caught between two back teeth. He hadn’t been back there since, to Portland. William was still talking.

  ‘… near burned the place to the ground last month when he fell
asleep smoking.’

  ‘I see,’ Eliza said and turned to look at George. He smiled and gave her an encouraging nod. Whatever it was she had wanted from him, she did not press the point. She turned back to look at the fire and he continued worrying at the shred of meat.

  ‘At any rate,’ William was saying, ‘what was that you said about Missus Higgs, dear?’

  ‘She claimed to be in mourning, though I must say I saw no sign of it. For Australia’s greatest poet,’ Sarah said.

  ‘Not Carboni!’ George was taken aback by the anguish that flickered on William’s ironic face.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The hero of the Eureka! Raffaello Carboni! Who, indeed.’ William crossed his arms and sank back in his chair. ‘Well, at least it was not him. Who then?’

  ‘Adam Lindsay Gordon.’

  ‘Gordon? That hack! What’s to mourn?’

  ‘I rather enjoy his work,’ said Eliza, and George saw the sweet corners of her mouth turn up as she recited, ‘“Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone, Kindness in another’s trouble, Courage in your own.”’

  ‘You see?’ William retorted.

  ‘How did he die?’ Eliza asked.

  ‘His own hand, I fear,’ Sarah replied.

  ‘Oh the poor man!’ cried Eliza. ‘Surely things were not so bad. He had a gift.’

  ‘Financial troubles, Missus Higgs said. And pain. Too many riding accidents.’

  ‘Courage in your own, indeed,’ said William.

  Sarah ignored him.

  ‘That reef,’ George said, and let the stones of it rattle around his mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry, George?’ Sarah turned to him.

  ‘Look sharp.’ He hadn’t meant to yell. ‘A large vessel lies jamm’d on the reef, And many on board still, and some wash’d on shore. Ride straight with the news – they may send some relief from the township; and we – we can do little more.’

  ‘From the Wreck, isn’t it?’ Sarah replied. ‘Didn’t Gordon ride to Gambier Town to raise the alarm?’