The Clay Dreaming (45 page)

Lambert sat, patiently aware that she lingered just outside. Her head popped back around the doorjamb. ‘I shall sit with you this afternoon,’ she said, with seriousness of purpose.

Lambert merely nodded, and in a trice she was gone. Life…the very image of the woman who was life to him, and she was gone. Life might only be understood backwards, yet must be lived forwards. He must look forward.

Looking forward, Lambert saw the tip of his nightcap, dangling.

Taking two pieces at a time from his
coolamon
, Brippoki adds fresh fibres to his
kaargerum
, the string as it grows under the steady movement of his other palm. Hands working, his mind drifts. Unwilling thoughts, helpless to stop themselves, turn to his lost years as a youth – when he is no longer a boy, yet not a man.

Ngamadjidj
, the whitefellow, comes in numbers far more than the
guli
can count.
Ngamadjidj
come, kangaroo go…blackfellows famish away.

With every passing day their anguish grows.
Walypela
keeps on coming, deeper and deeper up country, driving them further into the Bush. The land that has been theirs for countless generations is lost to them. Their birthrights are denied. Is it nothing, for them to receive nothing in return? But what can be given that is of equal value?

The forests and plains disappear, squatter settlements spreading over the whole of the country. There are more of the white man’s
gunyas
than stars in the sky. Nothing else remains, as far as the eye can see.

Through soot and smoke, Brippoki looks out over London.

The days do not grow straight, as spears of grass. They are strands of spider web. He lives as his people came to live – hiding in the back country, deep in the territory of their enemies. It is country unfit to live in, offering little means of support, a place where, unless canny, a man might starve.

Deftly, he draws the two ends of the string back along his thigh, exerting a firm pressure to twist them tightly under, then rolling them with a swift motion down towards his knee.

The
walypela
problem is, they have no concept of fair exchange – only taking, never giving. Out of respect for the dead, and as a duty to those unborn, between the living there must be payback. This is the only correct way to conduct one’s life – to acknowledge oneself as part of a continuum.

In the Reading-room at the British Museum, Sarah suffered hot flushes and felt her mind wandering. The day promised to be another hot one – bright, and hot. The library’s ventilation was quite inadequate, too cold in the winter, too hot in the summer, and in England all four seasons often came the same day. It was not good for people. It could not be good for the books.

She turned over the brittle pages of Druce’s manuscript, ready to resume her transcript. The new section began with a list headed ‘The Names of the Ships’.‘

Sarah didn’t know what jewellery he meant. Nothing else was said of it.

The material went on to repeat that period of his life covered in his 1810
Memoirs
, with several notable additions. No mention of the quest for gold dust, made so much of elsewhere.

The penmanship of the manuscript shifted; the curlicue of each letter ‘d’, significantly developed, indicated the presence of yet another new scribe – Dalrymple’s identity abbreviated, with suitable flourish, to ‘Capt. D.’

As the steady hours passed, the heat only increased. From somewhere across the Reading-room’s vast circumference resounded a loud clatter, the fainting collapse of some other poor soul. James Hornblower, junior assistant to the Department of Printed Books, delivered to her designated seat the latest volume Miss Sarah Larkin had requested.

She looked up: he handed her the book – the compilation of
Tracts
containing the
Memoirs
of Mr. George Bruce
from 1810; lost to them for a fortnight and at long last successfully re-ordered.

‘Thank you, Mr Hornblower,’ she mumbled thickly.

‘Are you all right, miss?’ enquired the fair-haired clerk.

He heard the break in her voice, and readily perceived that she was in some distress. When she looked up again, he saw the dark circles under her eyes.

‘I-I’m…yes. Please,’ she requested, ‘leave me be.’ She waved a weak hand and averted her face. ‘I’ll be all right.’

Events within the compared texts more than normally upset her, shortly bringing Sarah’s work to an abrupt close.

Retreating back to the house, she lingered by their own bookshelves, over a section generally avoided: only a few titles, kept on one particular shelf – a chapbook, some poetry and plays for children, but mostly popular travel books, voyages of discovery, strange new lands and stranger people. Travellers’ tales best expressed her mother’s love of the exotic – a complement to her father’s natural histories, Sarah supposed, but a curious collection for someone who, so far as she knew, had never been anywhere in her life except for Norfolk, Kent, and London.

How the spines had faded. Some titles Sarah remembered, others not at all. She couldn’t find the one she had vaguely felt she wanted. Perhaps it wasn’t a book after all.

The touch and feel of every object brought with it unwanted associations, emotions tender and exposed. These were among her mother’s favourite things.
Modern Voyage
s by the Reverend John Adams, another slim volume next to it; she picked it up.

The Shipwrecked Orphans.

Sarah felt unbearable heat, and a pressure behind the eyes. She fumbled to slide the book back into place, a thickness of mucus welling in her throat.

The
guli
belonging to the scrubs are strangers in their own country, the land no longer their own. Life having no meaning, violence, whoring, begging and theft become their new ways. The only escape from the misery of their days is
in the bottle. No good blackfellows, all same like croppy, convicts and drunken sailors. Many times he is witness to the use of the flogging triangle, sees his clan brothers led away, linked in chains – brothers, father.

In his twentieth summer, the time comes for the man-child to receive the marks of adulthood. His back, shoulders, arms and chest scarred, he may yet enter into the fourth stage of his life cycle,
Wilyaru
. 

As he works, Brippoki sings the cutting song. He feels the traces of the knife glow hot across his upper arms, his chest and shoulders, aware and proud of the emblems of his clan – the complex arrangement of dots, circles and long, livid lines that distinguish them from their neighbours

As he endures the pain of his transformation, that same ancient skin-song fills the air. The words help to soothe his pain, guard his life against deadly dangers. 

His boyhood name, which is only shame to him, shall disappear in a sandstorm of new titles. During the cutting, he is called
ngulte
. The incisions made, until they begin to scab over, he is
yellambambettu
. After the sores have first healed,
tarkange
; when the skin rises,
mangkauitya
; and when the scars are at their glorious height, he will be
bartamu
.

The wounds are made very deep, and, to ensure they heal over in suitably elevated fashion, impacted with a mixture of sacred herbs and clay. His body becomes one with the land – their ritual homeland, lost to them since the incursions of
Ngamadjidj
.

As the scars criss-crossing his body prove, Brippoki has undergone the agonies of man-making.

The pain is almost too much. He sings louder.

With the change in appearance he will become a new and more powerful being, unrelated to that man-child he once was. His great pain is the pain of becoming, to be suffered in stoical silence, sufficient for him to earn full rank.

Finally accepted, cut in
Wilyaru
, his manhood, he stands to gain his new name, one that will reflect his new and adult status, come at last.

Only it never happens. A party of settlers armed with rifles interrupts the initiation at its most crucial point. Unceremoniously scattered, they flee for
their worthless lives into the depths of arid scrubland. Without meaning, their lives are worth less.

Brippoki falls silent.

‘All things,’ Lambert insisted, ‘living or no, come from the hands of the Creator, and retain the same distinctive characteristics they were blessed with.’

Sarah sat with her father because she had said she would. She made no mention of her night-time excursion to Piccadilly; it could serve no purpose. Instead, Sarah had made the very great mistake of telling him of her probable intent, to attend Sir John Lubbock on the occasion of his Thursday afternoon lecture to the Royal Institution. Lubbock was an evolutionist of the first order, a literal neighbour to Charles Darwin. This immediately set Lambert on his back foot.

‘From the very beginning,’ he said, ‘the image of man rises before us noble and pure.’

Sarah was supremely tired of being lectured at, without resort to her own questions or opinions.

‘As far back as we can trace the footsteps of man?’ she asked.

Lambert was genuinely taken aback.

‘Who have you been talking to,’ he demanded, ‘that you make the empirical demands of science?’

Sarah fell stubbornly silent. Nothing could be further from her mind, except her heart. Excluding itself, science found the whole world mad; and in that it shared much with religion.

‘“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him. Male and female created He them.”’ Lambert laid a cool hand against her hot cheek. ‘“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth…”’ he paused for breath ‘“…and subdue it.”’

Sarah’s face was a picture.

Lambert relented a little. He knew of her sympathies.

‘Yet, rather than convert by the holy sword,’ he said, smiling, ‘is it not preferable we use a bat? And may the best man win!’

If he was spoiling for a fight then she would give him one.

‘You mean,’ she said, ‘survival of the fittest?’

‘Evolution?’ A flash of lightning. ‘EVOLUTION?’ A bolt of thunder. ‘You
dare
speak to me of evolution?’ Lambert railed. ‘In
this
house?’

Sarah’s mouth was working. She did not see the problem: Herbert Spencer had coined the phrase, although it had taken Darwin’s
Origin of Species
to make it common currency – and they counted the works of both men under their roof.

‘God created all things,’ Lambert insisted, ‘and each after its own kind. Every herb bearing seed, every tree yielding fruit, every fish, every fowl of the air…the beasts of the field and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. They were not “evolved” one out of the other! The foundation of my argument is taken from the first book of Moses.’

Lambert leant a little forward in his bed, pointing a finger.

‘I take the Word of God as my authority. By what right does Mr Darwin make himself a higher authority? He discovers what he finds in the world of Nature…which is itself the Work of God!’

‘Father, you are – ’

‘Darwin’s theories run contrary to revelation, and against Nature…against all that man’s science knows of its workings! Has gravity a “fixed law”? The elements or their 64 chemical constituents, are
they
evolved? Fire, from air? Air, from water? Has carbon evolved from hydrogen or oxygen from nitrogen? Or vice versa, perhaps?

‘No, only animals and plants…even Darwin dares no further.’

With one hand Lambert smoothed the top-sheet. ‘No doubt a whale had hind legs once upon a time. One needs only go to the College of Surgeons, where they exhibit his thigh-bones, to see the proof! The poor creature languishes in the condition of a Chelsea or Greenwich Pensioner, his legs and feet quite gone…’

‘Eh?’ Sarah perked up.

‘Protoplasm! We are to believe ourselves the descendants of…of slime! Oh, his ideas are not new, his precious theory but another revival, as old as Lucretius. The ancients would have it that everything had been fashioned out of mud. Hardly…
huk, hchaa
…original!’

Lambert carelessly gathered up a corner of bed-sheet and coughed into it. Sarah hated it when he worked himself up into a state, and not only for the risk it presented to his delicate health.

‘This so-called law…of “natural selection”, from which all living beings result! “The struggle of Life”? I’ll show you struggle, my man!’ His great meaty hands clutched thin air, throttling all competition. ‘Bring on your ear-worming catchphrases, and I’ll crush the Life out of every one!’

Lambert, lover of bird-life, of plants, had at one time approved the works of the eminent naturalist Mr Charles Darwin. The publication of
The Origin of Species
, however, had come as a shock, the worst in an age of shocks. So much so, he would no longer contemplate eating off the Wedgwood.