Isinglass Read online

  Martin Edmond was born in Ōhākune, New Zealand and now lives in Sydney. He has worked as an actor and stage manager with travelling theatre group Red Mole; as a lighting designer for rock bands; and as a screenwriter. His books include Luca Antara: passages in search of Australia (2006), the prequel to Isinglass; Dark Night: walking with McCahon (2011), shortlisted for the 2013 NSW Premier’s Awards; and Battarbee and Namatjira (2014), shortlisted for the National Biography Awards in 2016. He is a past winner of the New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Non-fiction.

  First published in 2019 by

  UWA Publishing

  Crawley, Western Australia 6009

  www.uwap.uwa.edu.au

  UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing

  a division of The University of Western Australia

  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 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Copyright © Martin Edmond 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN: 978-1-76080-011-6

  Cover image: untitled, Dean Buchanan, 1989.

  Cover design by Upside Creative

  Typeset by Lasertype

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  for

  Jesse and Liamh

  I

  Dark Point

  II

  Thursday

  III

  Isinglass

  IIII

  Darwin

  V

  Crescent

  I

  Dark Point

  He came ashore in the last hour before dawn, having drifted and swum, swum and drifted, for longer than he knew; now, at the point of collapse, he was lifted up by one of the small choppy waves expiring on that unknown shore and pushed like a sodden log forward; then the scrape of sand on belly skin. His fingers clawed into the beach, his toes sought for purchase in the quickening liquid of the backwash. Crawling up the slope he encountered shells and small stones, a crab’s brittle carapace which crumbled to shards under his nails. A drift of bubbled kelp from a receding wave caught at his neck then slipped down over one shoulder, holding on there like a necklace of clammy mouths. He shrugged it off and, with the hiss and mutter of the sea loud behind him, on hands and knees inched further up the beach. So far he thought he might have escaped a watery grave. A long time passed in contemplation of what his next move should be: wondering if he might stand and walk. It took an age to understand how to do that and another to transmit the signals to his body, far away as it seemed from his dim intent. When that was accomplished he lifted himself slowly into a half-crouch, knees bent, hands still knuckled on the sand, lurching apelike upright … a red flood rose before his eyes, dizziness, vertigo, blackness and he crashed heavily down, head first, striking the corner of his brow against a piece of rock protruding from the sand, jerking sideways once then going still. Lay there unconscious while the waves leapt over each other up the beach but failed to cover more than half of one outstretched leg; and as a grimy pink overtook the soft pearl-grey in the east the tide turned and left him sprawled there, feet splayed and puckered and bare, one brown arm thrown out as if in salute to the nameless land, the other tucked under his chest, head to one side, eyes closed, mouth open, while blood from the wound at his temple leaked silently away through matted salt-encrusted straight black hair into the ochre sand and small creatures came through the grains to sup at it. He lay in a dream so deep all individual history and circumstance, all that had thus far told who he was, what he had been and what he might become like his blood leaked silently away and was erased in the manner any markings on a beach are erased when the tide, twice daily, sweeps up and over and then muttering retreats. He lay anonymously still like that in his ragged khaki shorts and ripped yellowing T-shirt which had once been white while the sun hoisted itself up above the horizon line, through a paling band of pink and grey cloud, and began to throw down dazzling knives of light upon the rucked and crenellated, unplumbed, never-silent sea.

  He was lying on the pale ochre sand above a small cove which curled at the end of a long smoking beach stretching away north into a blue haze, having come in on the rising tide between a small grey–green island offshore and, on the south side of the cove, a round promontory that was its land-locked cousin. Outcrops of rock like the one which had bruised his head showed reddish through the scrub of the promontory; the reef went all the way out to the island and also tracked back, jagged as a lizard’s backbone, into the enormous sand dunes rising like the sliding pyramids of a forgotten city at the back of the beach. Nearby a white log, half-buried, stuck out of the beach sand and there, on one of its bony arms, with a closing of wings and a harsh gurking sound, one black crow came to perch. It examined the recumbent figure of the man with a curious white eye. A moment later a second crow flew down to join it on the log and then the first, emboldened, hopped down onto the packed sand. Long fingers of light walked up the beach towards the small tableau and where they caught in the crows’ feathers glossy black revealed iridescences of purple and green and midnight blue. The crow swaggered closer to the man: splay-footed, cautious and greedy. It knew he was not dead and so felt some trepidation about a closer investigation of his moist spots, his soft tissues, his tenderly closed eye. Now its mate flew down onto the sand too, landing nearby, and they gurked to each other then paused in silent colloquy over their next move. It was not to be: just then a big yellow–white dog trotted out of one of the sand valleys leading from the high dunes down onto the beach and stopped to scent the air. The crows took wing, banking south past the old dead log and on over to the small promontory where some other find might prove more amenable to the tearing of beaks and the swallowing down gullets of gibbets. There was no fear in the dog, just a wary apprehension; she was in pup and hungry and came slowly down to where the man was and stopped a little way away. What thousand thousand things from those complex odours might have been ascertained. Galley stews on oily merchant ships; the hempen smell of rope; iron of stupendous anchor chains; tobacco flavoured with cloves; Chinese whisky; fish sauce; old paint flaking with rust; new paint fresh out of the tin, slipping creamily from brush to bulkhead; diesel; semen. The dog likewise knew that this was not a dead body; but she also knew she had the means to make it swiftly so: white sharp teeth at the throat, a quick bite and grip and tear at the soft tissue, the crunch of small bones, blood … She would not. Some atavistic tug of race memory, some faint trace of ancient companionship prevented her; as if she recalled coming out of Asia at the heels of one such as this might once have been or could yet be again: standing in the prow of a wooden boat, scenting maritime air for the fragrance of land, crossing island to island over shallow seas. She came closer and looked as if she might push her wet nose into the man’s face so as to wake him up; but snuffed instead at the edge of the bloodstain soaking black into the sand where ants had already begun their immense labour and were carrying tiny parcels of salt and iron away. The man stirred, as if feeling animal breath on his cheek; the dog leapt back in brief and comical alarm. When he did not move again she sat down on her haunches to see what might happen next; but nothing did. After a while the nor’-easter brought the scent of something ripe and fishy from further up the strand and she left the man where he was to resume her daily scavenge, printing big quatrefoil toeprints on the crusty sand just above the tideline as she trotted north. The incessant ocean roared and sighed, sighed and roared. The man lay still. Out at sea, terns and gannets found a school of tailor running and made downward-pointing arrows of themselves, diving again and again into the swelling wh
ite-flecked green. Their cries faded across the water as the school moved on. Time passed. Then, distantly, there came upon the morning the clear high sound of children’s voices calling.

  They were two boys running ahead of their father, who came down here every few days to trawl the tide-wrack for things he would put into his collages: shells, wood, stones and bones as well as the infinite variety of human detritus. Rope, fishermen’s lures, bits of netting, nylon and plastic, orange foam floats off lobster pots, single shoes, balloons, medallions, the ties and cards from bunches of flowers thrown by mistake or else as offerings into the indifferent water. The younger boy, nine or ten years old, running ahead of his brother who was pretending, not very hard, to chase him, was the first to see the anomalous dark figure on the sand. He pulled up in alarm, looking back for reassurance, advice or just confirmation that this prodigy was what it seemed to be. The older boy, twelvish, on the cusp of adolescence, took his responsibilities seriously and so his first thought was for his brother’s wellbeing. He came up and stood beside him, looping an arm about his shoulders.

  Is he dead? hissed the younger.

  I don’t know. We could go and see.

  They did not move.

  Let’s wait till Dad comes, the nine-year-old said.

  No, I’m going to look, said the other, moving off in the direction of the man lying fifteen or twenty paces away.

  No! the other insisted, running after and grabbing onto the arm of his brother, who shook him off, not violently, and when the younger boy persisted, allowed himself to be restrained.

  He did not really want to look too closely at a dead man, he just felt the need to show a bit of courage; and so the two stood side by side, gaping at the black, fly-haunted shape lying huddled and recumbent upon the sand until their father walked out onto the wide beach and they both ran back to greet him.

  Dad, Dad! Look, there’s a man …

  It did not take their father very long to ascertain the castaway’s true state. He walked quickly down the beach, knelt beside him and put the back of his hand to the slack mouth; and felt a feather of breath wisp against his skin.

  Is he dead? the younger boy hissed again, dread and excitement mingled in his voice. Is he?

  There was a pause.

  No, the father whispered incongruously back. And, standing up, spoke in a normal voice. No, I think he’s still alive.

  Then he took out his mobile phone and dialled three zeros.

  II

  Thursday

  1

  In the autumn of 2010, at about 10.30 in the morning of a Tuesday in March, I heard from someone I had not seen for thirty years: a ghost voice out of the murk of the past. I was trawling the internet looking for references to the Great Rift, which the Maya called Xibalba be, the Black Road, and which was for them variously the birth canal of the Great Mother, a crevice in the trunk of the cosmic tree and one of the entrances to the underworld: a terrifying abyss ruled over by the Lords of the Place of Fear—One Death and Seven Death, Flying Scab and Gathered Blood, Pus Demon and Jaundice Demon, Bone Staff and Skull Staff, Sweeping Demon and Stabbing Demon, Wing and Packstrap, who causes people to die coughing up blood while out walking on the road.

  For astronomers in our tradition it is otherwise, a complex of dark nebulae that seems to divide the bright clouds of the Milky Way lengthwise; but I was intrigued by resonances between both understandings and further with the great rift valley in Africa, along which some of the earliest of our kind first flourished and by which, it may be, they left that continent millennia ago in order to see what they might find on the rest of the planet.

  I heard the echoic, reverberatory, submarine sound of an email arriving, my heart gave its usual involuntary fillip, and I turned my attention away from the pursuit of fragmentary and perhaps tendentious analogies to see who had sent me a message; and found, above the intriguing subject line longtemps, an address I did not recognise. It turned out to be from C, a woman I had known in my university days: what on earth did she want?

  It was brief and to the point. She had found my address on my website and hoped I did not mind her contacting me out of the blue like this; she would be coming to the city where I live in about ten days time and would like to meet up if that was possible, not simply to renew an old acquaintance, though she would like to do that too: there was something she wanted to talk to me about, something she thought might interest me. She closed by saying she had read two of my books (Chronicle of the Unsung; Luca Antara) and enjoyed them, and was looking forward with curiosity and some apprehension to our (possible) meeting.

  I emailed straight back to say I would be delighted and suggesting a possible place and time for the meeting, which was quickly agreed upon. And that was that—except for a sudden recollection I had of C’s no-nonsense approach to most things, from lovemaking to the absurdities of behaviourism, and its strange alliance in her character with an ability to apprehend the numinous, or the merely hidden, with uncanny precision. I wondered if and how these two seemingly antithetical traits had balanced out over the years; whether she was happy in life; most of all, what she could possibly want to talk to me about.

  We had met in 1970, during our first year of university, in Psychology I, where we sat together at the back of the class, united in our derision of the philosophy then in favour, behaviourism, and in our contempt for the associated laboratory work, the methodology called operant conditioning, which involved rewarding (or not) caged pigeons with grains of wheat should they do, or not do, whatever it was that was required of them: pecking one button not the other, so far as I recall.

  We thought the proper subject of psychology was consciousness, not behaviour—the mind, not things rats or pigeons did—even though we were ourselves perfectly capable of acting in a barely conscious manner. For instance: on one occasion, arriving by chance at the same time outside the old wooden villa where the pigeons were incarcerated and, as we saw it, tortured, C and I by mutual consent skipped the class and went instead to her flat on nearby Constitution Hill and made love on the Moroccan blanket laid across her big brass bed. And so our romance began.

  We were almost exactly the same age: our birthdays are just a day apart (I am the elder) and we took that, along with much else, as a portent of the inevitability of our union: which, in the way of the young, especially in that era of social and sexual experimentation, did not last very long at all. Within a year it had foundered under the pressure of the presence of another lover of hers, an older man, her cousin’s husband, who had seduced her when she was doing her gap year in England and now came down to the Antipodes to renew the liaison; and he did, or they did, heartbreakingly, on long summer afternoons at his house while I was away working at a carpet factory in the suburbs. The revelation of infidelity was too much for me and I precipitously left her, left our improvised home, left and went to live with her older sister in a string factory nearby that was, technically, a squat … and so on into the accumulated missteps, tumbles, falls and gettings-up-again of learning youth.

  There was hurt but no bitterness, and our connection survived this and other dramas, so that, for the next few years, when circumstances allowed, we were in the habit of going to bed together again: as if looking to recapture the innocence of a passion that came once only. This went on, sporadically, in two different cities, until towards the end of that decade we both departed overseas, she for postgraduate study in Canada, I in the train of a motley group of actors and musicians setting forth to conquer the world.

  We didn’t see each other again, though I sometimes heard news of her, usually through my mother, with whom C remained in contact: she persisted in her psychological studies, attained eminence in her profession, was a specialist in the understanding of deaf-mutes, was it? Or should I say the hearing and speech impaired? These fugitive bits of information said nothing about her personal life, whether or not she had married, if she’d had the six children she wanted, if she was keeping goats the way she always
said she was going to do. She had become, like so many other contemporaries, a rumour trailing clouds of equivocal nostalgia, a perfumed memory, a lover I recalled occasionally without pain though not always without regret. That is, until her email arrived.

  She was standing looking intently up at something on the wall of the Mitchell, seeming perfectly at ease in that uneasy space, between one library and the other, the old and the new, where the café stands. I recognised her from the set of her shoulders, the way she held her head to one side as she gazed upwards, her open, quizzical stance. I walked over and when I was close enough for her to hear me above the noise of traffic on Macquarie Street, said her name. There was no response. I called again. Again nothing. I was close enough to touch her on the shoulder, which I did not want to do, when she turned; and, as she did, I saw in her left ear the dull brown of the plastic that is for some reason the preferred colour of hearing aids. Perhaps it is meant to, but never does, mimic skin tones.

  She wasn’t one for extravagant gestures.

  Hello, she said and offered her hand for me to shake: that rough, square hand she was once so ashamed of, her peasant hands, she called them. A quick down and up, a brief appraisal of what I might have become, as witnessed by the body shape, the lines on my face—then she smiled and in that smile the years fell silently away.

  Have you seen this? she asked, in her voice that still had a trace of a patrician English accent, the so-called Strachey voice, with echoes of Oscar Wilde, which she got from her mother, and pointed up to the south wall of the Mitchell Library.

  There, beyond some native palms crowded behind a fence, the surfaces of the flat wide blocks of Maroubra sandstone had been inscribed by the Beat Brothers with images commemorating the religions, the philosophies and the arts of past civilisations: a horse and rider from a frieze on the Parthenon, an Assyrian mounted archer from the King’s Palace at Nineveh, a lion of the Egypt of Thutmose III, a T’ang Dynasty phoenix, peacocks and griffins guarding the Tree of Life … these were not what she meant.