Joan Makes History (3 page)

My dour Captain smiled seldom, but when he looked around at Stubbs and Devereux, and at me, he was smiling in a way to dim the sun, his face creasing into those unaccustomed lines.
Make a note, Mr Devereux, for the log,
he said calmly, but his eyes were on me, and the words were made jubilant by that smile.
Make a note: at a quarter of three in the afternoon, the Great South Land was sighted.

There were those who doubted my existence, women slack with childbearing who assured the thin woman that the rigours of the voyage were enough to explain the gap she was noticing in the cycles of her months, those who assured her that in this upside-down land such signs did not always mean anything. Perhaps, she told the bald man.
Or perhaps not.
There seemed a sort of hush over them, in spite of the clamour and anxieties of settling in the new land, of buying pots and pans and learning what to do with mutton, and having halting conversations in the new language with people who shouted at them.

But when the thin woman began to be sick, pale and peaky in the mornings, craving food and sickened by it at once, when she began to quaff jug after jug of water and still thirst, when she began to sleep longer and longer, and still need sleep: these paradoxes began to inform them that I was there. At last the thin woman became no longer thin, and when she could no longer make her buttons meet because I was lengthening within her, she and the balding man doubted no longer.

Would his creature be a female, the balding man speculated: a dazzling beauty with teasing copper curls and a smile that would make rocks crumble where they stood? His heart clenched
with the foreshadowed pain of seeing his untouchable exquisite daughter become a woman, of seeing her eyes grow red, languishing after some unworthy oaf, of sitting up late at night, waiting for her to be returned to him from some night of dancing, or worse, and of seeing in her swollen lips that she was no longer his pure girl, but was a woman, defiled by the lust of some man. That was pain: that she would no longer belong to her father, but to the world, to strangers who would not care as he did, for he would lay down his life a thousand times for her: strangers who would make her bored, make her weep, perhaps even raise a cad's hand against her and bruise her white skin. Were there worse pains? Yes, that of having not a peach-skinned copper-curled girl, but an angular hairy-faced lank dolt of a girl with no more sparkle or loveliness than a cold sausage.

If it was a boy! The bald man's mind leapt to two images: one of the limp body of his son, killed in a duel at dawn, a ridiculous fear but his picture of dread: the other of his son in a dark suit, unrecognisable to his father because of the grave look on his face, accepting the keys or crown of government, and himself bursting into tears from sheer fullness of proud heart.

Well, all this I guessed, and some I heard, as the bald man mused aloud to the thin woman, who smiled and nodded as she counted the stitches on the tiny garment she was knitting. I heard secrets, too, from my tight red hiding place. I heard that guttural man, who loved his wife like an addiction, groaning over her body and laughing at the way she swelled with me. He laid his hand over the curves of her belly, warming me inside, feeling my life stirring there: I could feel his hand reverent on the thin woman's skin, and tremulous with the possibilities he felt within. I felt him lowering his large head towards me, ear first, and sensed
how he became congested, holding his breath, trying to listen to the quick flicker of my heartbeat.
My darling,
he whispered,
you are most precious, even when grotesque.
I felt the thin woman—not so thin now—shake with laughter and I laughed too, as she was doing, fondly, at this man who watched her with eyes soft with adoration.

I swelled and caused the thin woman to swell, I laughed and cavorted in my warm room, for my job was simple: to wait and to grow. When I began to kick and jab at the thin woman with my elbow, they remembered that I was waiting to join them, and made ready. As well as the tiny knitted garments, and the others laboriously stitched and smocked, the thin woman obtained a cradle, and they both crowed and exclaimed over it, and planned how I would look, lying in it perfect and peach-like.

In the end I was impatient at the limitations of my space: my legs kicked out, longing to stretch, and I arched and thrashed against the muscle and bone that held me. Yet when they began to release me, I fought against the tide that was forcing me down and out.
Self!
I cried.
Thin woman! How can you turn against me like this?
Oh, I wept in my wetness, and struggled, and clawed at the slippery walls of my nest, but there was no resisting those muscles squeezing against me, no turning back from destiny now. I reminded myself that I was born to make history, so it was necessary for me to be born.

It was the greatest moment of my history, without which there would be no further moments, although to the hard-handed doctor and the Sister in her starch, I was nothing more great than yet another baby, wrinkled like a prune and as anonymous as a ham. Even the mother, lying back triumphant at last, and the bald father tremulous later with his bunch of flowers, did
not relish the greatness of this moment. They turned away from me lying puckered in pink, and the man who had contributed his tadpole to the making of me took the hand of the woman who had done the rest: pale now, sunken into her pillows, full-eyed with our struggle.
My precious one,
he whispered,
I thought I would lose you for ever.
His voice shook with feeling, for he loved this thin woman of his, whom I had nearly done to death in our battle. His voice shook, his soft eyes filled with tears, and his hands warmed the bloodless dulled hands of his wife as if to infuse her with his own strength. She could not speak, the woman whose hand was being crushed, but did not mind the pain of her husband's love around her hand, now the other pain was over, and she managed some sort of a smile that revealed the gold tooth teasing at the side of her mouth and showed him that, balding, egglike, trembling, fearful, uncertain though he was at this moment, she would never feel anything for him but the tenderest love.

There they were then, making their pacts of skin and soft looks together, and I lay unwrinkling like a beetle. I was preparing for great things, though they, myopic of vision, tiny of mind, feeble in their grasp of the largeness of life, knew none of it: they had no inkling that history lay in the room with them, quietly sucking at the air of the brand-new world.

I, Joan, was snivelling, lecherous, a despiser of men and a woman with a skilled shrill way with a useful lie. I had been sentenced to be transported to the bottom of the earth for the term of my natural life, considered expendable by the authorities of my native land, but I was not one to be cowed by the chilly schemes of His Majesty's Government. I had decided that, of all the feet on this unhappy fleet of ships, mine would be the first to soil the new land.

As prisoners of His Majesty, we were not allowed up on deck at this historic moment, but we heard the thunder of the anchor chain through water and felt the slimy boards shake under us. It was a sound we had not heard for many weeks, or it could have been months or years, for none of us had cared enough in the beginning to keep track of the days, and now the uncounted flow of time swept us along like animals. I was locked in among weak puling women who had moaned and cried, cowered and shivered and ineffectually rubbed at their arms all the way from the Thames, rubbing at goose flesh even in the smelly tropics. Now I was sick to death of them.
Give me a man!
I had shrieked often enough on our voyage, and one-eyed Betsy had cackled in her hoarse way,
Give him to me after, love, I have never minded
the second suck at a bottle,
but at this moment I had greater things to think of than men and their pathetic bottles of lust.

It was like stripping skin, paring flesh from flesh, to peel off boots, stockings, skirts, petticoats, bodice, until I stood in the hold, my skin green in that light, with a ring of silent sick women around me, staring as though they had never before seen a nipple, or flesh in quantity.
I will now make history,
I said loudly, so the women blinked at me in a considering way. But I knew these women, and I knew that nothing like consideration was going on behind their blinking eyes: nothing more interesting than the blossoming thought that my boots, sad creatures though they were, and my skirts stiff with the filth of a year, might be better than their own and might, now they were stripped from the flesh of their owner, become available to one of these blinking women who was short of a boot or two.
I will make history, and the devil take all those men and their red coats and strutting,
I cried and, breasts swinging loose so the women blinked more, went to the hatch where in fine weather we could take in turns the pleasure of a faceful of fresh air and the kiss of spray on our dirty cheeks.

It was too high for me to climb through, but I was about to make history and would not be held back by any such feeble physical obstacle as a bit of height.
Dot,
I shouted into Dot's unblinking face, which was aghast at my flesh shaking before her in all its majesty,
You can make history too, Dot, give me a leg up.
Dot had never heard of history, you could tell by the way she looked scared and opened her mouth as if to understand this difficulty by eating it. But even Dot, big feeble Dot, knew what a leg up was, and was frightened enough by the way I was
shouting and gesturing at her to make her hands a calloused cradle, and be my clumsy midwife into the new world.

You will go and drown,
Agnes said in her lugubrious way.
You will drown, Joan, when you hit that water, or be swallowed by something, some eel.
But eels did not frighten me as much as the prospect of an adventure caused the blood to pulse in my veins.
Damn the eels,
I cried,
and Agnes, I was a mudlark when you were slime in your mother's belly and I can swim like a fish, watch if you dare!

All the same, when Dot's hard hands propelled me up and out through the hatch and there was nothing but air, sun, blinding water, and the alarming sound of nothing but space, for a moment I was jammed by my hips in the hatch, which had not been made with the egress of large-hipped women in mind, and I was afraid. I felt them pushing and thrusting at my feet: now it felt as if they were eager to push me out, conspiring to expel me, and all at once I was not so sure I wanted to be expelled: that vile hold seemed like home and was for a moment preferable to the bright unknown beyond.

I hit the water shrieking, for in the end I burst out of that hatch like a cork out of old beer, head first and flailing into water that was a shock like a shout on my skin. The water was an explosion of blue, of wet, of clean, so that I screamed as it took me in and I felt the silver bubbles caress my cheeks. There was terror, too, in being weightless, unbound, in nothing but space, for the first time in so many months. The great cry that only the blue water heard was the cry of a being in bliss and fear, bursting into some new world or other.

When I came up and breathed air again the ship was black and sullen, sitting on the water full of the vomit and anguish of months. On the deck a man or two pointed at me, and there
below them at the hatch were the pale moon faces of the women. I could hear feeble piping shouts, and a shrill cry from one of the women at the hatch, that had an encouraging sound, although birdlike and unclear to my water-filled ears.

I turned away from that dark and wormy hulk sitting on the water, and struck out boldly, my breath coming short and painful with the excitement, and with the exercise I was unused to, so that I began to splutter and take some of this large blue bay into my gullet, and had to float for a moment on my back, fighting the panic of liberty. I reminded myself of my destiny, which was to be the first foot to touch the rim of this land, and I remembered the pinnace they had been readying for the Captain and his lantern-jawed officers, who would be after me if I did not shake a leg.

I shook a leg, then, and floundered towards a bit of yellow sand between the trees, until, groaning and coughing, feeling hot blood in my aching shoulders, I knew my feet with their long and filthy nails would touch bottom if I put them down now. I did, and felt with my unsavoury toe the Great South Land.

We had the continent to ourselves for a short while: briefly it was just myself and the people who lived there, whom I glimpsed from the corner of my eye, but who were never where I was looking. But it was not long before the pinnace approached from the ship, and I prepared to surrender my moment of freedom.

I watched as the sailors lifted the Captain and his officers from the boat and carried them the last few yards through the wash to the beach: the ceremonial braid-piped tailcoats of these important men would run blue down all the white breeches if they became wet, and the dignity of the occasion would be sadly marred. Later I watched from between two redcoats who held
me more tightly than was necessary as everyone tried to make a bit of drama out of it all: soldiers fired a salute, the flagpole was finally persuaded to stay upright in the thin stony soil, the chaplain stumbled through the words in his book:
In the name of His Majesty,
and the prayer was droned through to its loud
Amen.

All this you will read in any book, but what you will not read there are the sordid secrets of that moment. You will not read that mine was the first foot ashore, or that a white woman (or at least a grey one), her nakedness insufficiently hidden beneath a piece of canvas sailcloth, was present when that wrinkled flag was raised. Nor will you read of how the ceremonial jackets of all those important men, unfolded after months in a sea chest, stank of damp and mildew and the stale old sweat of other splendid moments. When the flag had been raised, no time was lost in tearing off those foul jackets and flinging them over bushes in the hope that the glaring sun might cauterise the smell.

With the flag planted, already listing in its hole—or did everything look crooked after all the months at sea?—it was hard to know what to do next. The fact had been announced: this piece of nasty land (which was already proving itself rich in small persistent insects if in nothing else), was now a part of Britain, a blank new land waiting to have its history written on it. The silent dark people watching from their secret places knew this to be a lie, but the invaders did not.

Anyone could see that this was a great moment of history, but above the flagpole a crowd of birds was becoming hysterical in a tree, laughing like lunatics through long beaks. I fancied the idea of a land where the ground repelled flagpoles stuck in it, and where the birds did no feeble tweeting, but gave forth mockery.
This is a land after my own heart,
I decided, and at the risk of a
flogging I joined the birds. Mine was not only the first foreign foot to step ashore: mine was also the first foreign laugh to sound out, sharp and rude, across the waters of Botany Bay.