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  It turns out, C said, contra a thousand adventure stories, that humans are very seldom cast up on shore unconscious and alive; either they swim in and crawl out and then collapse or they die at sea and their bodies are thrown up like so much flotsam on the sand. Our man had swum, they think, but where had he swum from?

  This was one of the major unsolved mysteries of the case. At first sight it seemed likely that he had been swept off or jumped from a merchant ship, many of which, as you probably know, nowadays carry Asian, often Filipino, crews; but no merchant ship in the area at the time reported any man lost overboard and subsequent inquiries, examination of crew lists, manifests, etc. confirmed this to be the case.

  The next thought was that he might have been from a Japanese or a Korean boat fishing in those waters, but that too seemed unlikely because Dark Point isn’t in an area frequented by such boats; they don’t as a rule come into that part of the Tasman Sea—the fish they like to catch aren’t found in those waters. Besides, a check of maritime traffic records showed no such boats in the vicinity at the time. There was at this stage no way of asking the man himself because he was still unconscious. He had been taken to a nearby hospital for tests and then, quite quickly, moved to a military base hospital. Already, so early, it had become a matter for government.

  We were now walking slowly in the direction of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair; the sun was westering, shards glittered and danced on the black harbour water to our left, long shadows lay across the green sward behind us, golden light tangled in the coppery leaves of big old fig trees on that rocky promontory looming above.

  They called him Thursday, isn’t that funny? C said, ogling me comically with too big eyes behind her glasses. After the day he was found. The Man Who Was Thursday, she went on, have you read that?

  I hadn’t but I nodded anyway and murmured the author’s name, G.K. Chesterton. After all, I did have other books of his, the Father Brown tales, for instance. I had read them.

  Why not Friday? I ventured and C caught that one and laughed. Presumably because his Crusoe was missing, she said and laughed again. Or yet to be found. I felt, unaccountably, in that moment as if I was, or might become, his Crusoe.

  So, Thursday. They loosed the neurologists, the neurosurgeons, the brain doctors upon him, a series of experts probed and scanned and deliberated, but no obvious permanent organic damage or deficit was found. And yet when, as it seemed likely to all of them that he would in time do, Thursday did at last wake up, he turned out to be unable or unwilling either to speak or, perhaps, to hear. A deaf-mute, apparently.

  So that’s why Manx wanted you to get involved? I asked.

  Well, yes and no, she said. Ultimately yes, but not at that stage. At that stage it was strictly in-house. What they had was an unidentified, stateless man, without any documents, and thus without any right to be in the country. That made it a matter for the Immigration Department and so, when Thursday was well enough, he was transferred from the military hospital to a detention centre.

  Well enough? I asked.

  He was conscious. Eating and sleeping, drinking and defecating; he was well enough.

  What about the rest of the time?

  He just sits there, she said quietly. Cross-legged on the floor. That’s all.

  The place they chose to put him was one of the lesser known ones: at Coonawarra, attached to the military base of that name at Berrimah on the southern outskirts of the city of Darwin, where most of the inmates, apart from a few unauthorised arrivals who come by air, are fishermen picked up off boats that have entered Australia’s 200 kilometre exclusion zone illegally. Their boats are confiscated and they are imprisoned, usually for not very long, a matter of months rather than years, before being returned to whatever island it is they came from—Savu, Timor, Rote; Wetar, Roma, Damar or another of the Thousand Islands; the Tanimbars, the Keis, Aru or elsewhere in the Banda Sea.

  It’s a complete disaster for them; these men from tiny unknown islands very rarely own the boats they work, they hire them from wealthy individuals, big men, who also take most of the catch, leaving the fishermen with just enough to support their families. They usually owe their bosses and, when the boats are taken, that’s it for them: at one blow they lose their livelihood and receive in return a lifelong debt.

  They go back to their island destitute and, often enough, face physical violence at the hands of the boat-owner’s thugs, attempting to recover money where no recovery is, nor ever will be, possible; they are effectively made into slaves.

  C was becoming impassioned in her exposition of the cruelties inflicted in this tiny corner of the vast system of detention camps that now spans the globe.

  The boats are stupidly burned, she went on in a low voice, unless they happen to be of a particularly unusual kind, in which case they might end up in the Maritime Museum at Fannie Bay. It’s just outrageous, most of these people don’t even know they are straying into Australian waters. All they’re trying to do is catch enough fish to keep their bosses happy and have something left over to feed their families.

  She sighed.

  I’m on my way there now, she said. I’m dreading it. It’s going to be horrible. Someone needs to write a history of Australia’s detention centres, she went on. It’s an unwritten story and it needs to be told.

  This while giving me a sideways glance, whose import seemed clear enough. I could feel myself flushing: out of guilt and shame, exasperation and regret, a stubborn refusal to engage in such a task even though I knew it to be a worthy endeavour, far worthier, perhaps, than the self-indulgent wandering tracks I like to follow in my writing. Nobody wants to be told what they should be doing, especially if they’ve thought of it themselves and decided against it.

  I could feel my face set in familiar obstinate lines, the way it used to do when my mother tried to talk poetry with me. (Did I say that C and my mother were friends, that it was from her, my mother, that I’d learned the fragments of her story that I knew? That C got on with her better than I did myself? An unholy alliance, that, between former girlfriend and disappointed mother … )

  I know, said C after another long scrutinising look at me. You’re not a journalist, you’re an artist.

  The faint edge of sarcasm in the way she said artist made me bridle and start up in my own defence, but she was still ahead of me.

  It’s all right, she said, I don’t mean you. I know it isn’t something you’d take on. I was thinking of Lee. But you could … she paused.

  I still felt defensive and aggrieved and, as a result, interrupted more vehemently than I might otherwise have done.

  What? I asked, loud enough for C to put up her hand to her ear to still the interference of angry sound waves impacting there.

  Calm down, she said, you’re making my aid shriek. All I meant was that you could, perhaps, if you wanted to, tell Thursday’s tale. Haven’t you worked that out yet?

  I hadn’t. The implications were disquieting. I said I needed to think about it.

  All right, she said. Then: I’ve been talking all afternoon and I’m hungry. Let’s go and have dinner somewhere; if you’re free?

  I was. I’d made sure that the whole day, and the night as well, were available to her if she so wished. We left the unappeased, voracious, glittering sea behind and scrambled up a rocky path to the turn-around where the tourist buses wait.

  There was a cab, a cruiser, just passing; we hailed it. A rickety, fume-haunted white rat, driven by a dishevelled Chinese man who grunted in a resigned manner when I asked him to take us to the city. He might have been imagining Bondi or even Manly; he might have thought proper money, not the pittance we were offering. Past the grey navy ships tied up across the water at Garden Island, past the Boy Charlton pool where I used to swim, the Art Gallery, the statue of Robbie Burns with his plough, we went in silence, and on down St James Road into the dark cavern mid-town where office workers hurried away towards the temporary resumption of their real lives.

  I was taki
ng C to the Retro Café next to the State Theatre in Market Street, my default place of meeting when I was going to see someone in the city. It had no particular virtue as a restaurant but no obvious vices either; I liked it because it made me think, howsoever briefly, of a café in a European city where artists and writers might convene their weekly salon: the pressed-metal ceiling, the mirrored walls, the deco ornaments, the spindly chairs and too small tables which rocked and wobbled on the black-and-white checked floor.

  It was almost empty. Just one other couple, young lovers perhaps, sitting under the wheezing coffee machine eating pasta. The cacophonous inanities of a flat-screen TV. We chose a table around the corner, where the noise of the rush-hour traffic in the street outside was somewhat muted, and ordered a glass of wine each—red for me, white for her—and began to study the menu. I saw C, with a flicker of annoyance, adjust her hearing aid. Turning it down, I suppose. Well, we were sitting opposite each other now, in a tête-à-tête if we chose to go that way. I would certainly be able to hear her and she could read my lips if she wanted to; but the uneasy silence that had descended in the taxi persisted, as if neither of us wished to be the one to make the next conversational opening.

  I watched her studying her menu with her eyes downcast, feeling the strangeness of our situation: who was she really and who really was I? What did we have to do with one another? Why did she think I might be the one to tell Thursday’s story? And yet it is always so. Ideas are never dreamed up in the solitary splendour of the study, nor even in the private recesses of the mind: they come from a world beyond as if borne, as the ancients used to think, as messages from the gods; they come with resistances attached and often the first response is refusal, denial, a wilful abnegation of responsibility that has in it somewhere a despairing recognition that no is not and never can be the answer to the summons …

  C looked up. I think I’ll have the gnocchi, she said. You?

  Cajun chicken, I said. Then: I didn’t realise you haven’t seen him yet, I offered, contrite, once our orders were taken and we could concentrate on the wine.

  How could you? I only just told you … She had forgiven me.

  Then why … ? I began.

  It doesn’t matter, she said, it was just a thought. You don’t have to. But at least hear me out; I haven’t told you the rest yet. I haven’t even got up to Lee’s part in all this. Hear me out and then tell me if you’re interested or not.

  This with a rueful smile and an almost imperceptible shake of the head; and suddenly, telepathically, I understood what it was she wanted from me. She was alone, full of trepidation, confronting a task that had come unbidden to her too, one she had not been able to refuse or deny, one which had wrenched her from her life of retirement, of pleasure, perhaps even of a kind of bliss, and returned her to the barricades where she had fought so bravely and so uselessly in the past.

  She wanted me beside her like a comrade in arms, as it were; she wanted to resume the partnership we shared in the extremity of our youth, when we had contended with the mechanists of operant conditioning for possession of the life of the mind. This is a battle that has to be fought again and again; we are never safe, no one is safe from those forces that would subsume the only freedom we can reliably call our own beneath the strictures of a systematic brutality, a bureaucratic regime of classification, incarceration, medication and slow death inside the blank walls of some institution or other.

  I remembered her own trials and tribulations, the regular visits she used to have to make to the medical superintendent of the psychiatric hospital not so very far away from where her parents lived. Naïve and inexperienced as I was, I never really found out (perhaps I never asked) exactly what was wrong with her, what kind of pills she took, what the official diagnosis was. Depression, probably, that catch-all.

  I do however remember the accounts she used to give me, mostly by letter, of the mind warps she suffered, the terrifying hallucinations she used to experience, in which space, ordinary three-dimensional space which most of us take for granted, took on an ultimately threatening guise, as if the abyss should literally open before us, the floor beneath sinking unimaginably into the black, the walls flying away, the ceiling retreating forever beyond a vanishing sky.

  She found equivalences for these experiences in the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, some of whose sonnets she knew by heart: No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring … she would quote hectically, the words tumbling over each other as they fell from her mouth. And then the opening lines of the sestet: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there … In her hallucinations she would actually see those cliffs where she clung to what sanity she could, a perceptual illusion perhaps but real enough to her; they were, those cliffs of fall, I recall her saying, green like the walls of Arctic ice seen from a plane crossing the Atlantic.

  Her psychiatrist, whom she only ever called by his surname, was a distinguished man, Māori, from a famous family that included archbishops and educationalists, high-ranking civil servants and military officers as well as tribal leaders. He perplexed her, and her vivid accounts, also usually by letter, of their monthly sessions, perplexed me too: along with the talking cure, part of the treatment he gave her was physical: he used to embrace her, hold her hand sometimes, touch her hair or let his warm brown hand linger on her cheek. She did not object to these caresses and they did not seem in her recounting of them to be (my fear) in any way erotic. It was as if he gave her troubled mind elemental comfort in the only human way possible, by bodily soothing.

  Nowadays such ‘treatment’, if that is what it was, would of course have him hauled up quick smart before the sexual harassment board or equivalent; but then it seemed, while equivocal, actually able to restore to her some of the sense of self-worth she had lost during that tumultuous gap year in England, when her cousin’s husband had seduced her, their affair became public, and she was alternately anathematised and passionately defended by all around her and especially by the members of her extended, riven, eccentric and wealthy English family. Besides, the alternative (her fear) was incarceration, committal, even electroconvulsive therapy; whatever else he might or might not have done, her psychiatrist had saved her from that … All of this raced through my mind with that electric speed we sometimes command, especially as the synapses begin to fizz in the first heady rise of blood alcohol to the brain, but I said none of it. C was looking quizzically at me, awaiting my consent in the continuation of her tale.

  Lee didn’t hear about Thursday until after he’d been in detention in Darwin for some time, a matter of weeks; his office is in Canberra and as a rule he doesn’t interest himself in individual cases unless there’s a problem. What happened was, something caught his eye in some routine report that came across his desk one day. The resident medical officer had suggested that inmate K370582, or however they designate Thursday, might have been catatonic—that was the word—and this alerted Lee’s psychiatric instincts.

  One of his specialities when he was younger was what was once thought of as a subcategory of schizophrenia, oneirophrenia, which isn’t fashionable as a diagnosis now but was much studied in the 1950s and 60s. When we were students in Canada, Lee wrote a paper, not on the condition itself but on the history of its study and treatment … She paused to explain: Oneirophrenia is a kind of waking, dream-like state, hallucinatory, delusional, you can get into it with drugs as much as through so-called mental illness. You’ve probably been there yourself, she added, acidly, that LSD trip you describe in Chronicle of the Unsung reads like classic oneirophrenia to me. Dreaming while you’re still awake; you seem to do quite a bit of that, don’t you?

  I let that one go through to the keeper.

  Anyway, the MO or whoever he was wanted to try treating Thursday with antipsychotics, benzodiazepines or something, and for that he needed consent from the higher-ups. Lee
asked for a full report and, when that arrived, decided to go up to Darwin to have a look for himself. That report was among the files Lee sent me, C said. It’s a pretty gruesome document. It claimed that Thursday showed all the signs of full-blown catatonic schizophrenia, was dissociated, spent hours just sitting on the floor of the donga where he’s kept, didn’t respond to stimuli, didn’t socialise, totally uncommunicative.

  It was really because they couldn’t learn anything about him, who he was, where he came from, what he was doing. They wanted to find out by zapping him with these horrible psychiatric drugs; they would probably have tried to give him ECT if ECT was a treatment they were still allowed to use. But Lee had noted that the report also said Thursday still took his meals, followed a daily routine, got up in the morning, ate his breakfast and so forth, went to sleep at night. He just wouldn’t or couldn’t participate in any group activities, occupational therapy or soccer or whatever; and, obviously, wouldn’t cooperate with the authorities, who no doubt just wanted to get enough information out of him so they could send him back to wherever it is he comes from. That’s what they’re like, that’s what they do. People aren’t people to them, they’re units to be disposed of as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  So Lee went up there … and found something totally unexpected. He knew on sight that Thursday wasn’t crazy, wasn’t catatonic, wasn’t schizophrenic—he just didn’t have that look. He was a composed individual who nevertheless managed somehow to exist in a totally removed state within the institutional structure. It was as if he was meditating, Lee said, as if he was looking into some world beyond the world the rest of us inhabit most of the time. Like some kind of monk.

  In many respects he was a model inmate. He conformed to the demands of the routine, eating, sleeping, exercising and so forth, he just didn’t participate. And, this was the most amazing thing of all, he had respect among the other inmates: the poor fisherfolk whose boats had been burned, the odd middle-class refugee who’d flown in without papers from Timor or Sulawesi or West Papua, even some of the guards, regarded him as, I don’t know, a man apart. The Gandhi of the detention centre. He wasn’t actually disengaged either, Lee said. Although he didn’t communicate verbally, you could have eye contact with him and through that contact some kind of meaning flowed, only it wasn’t a meaning expressed in words, it was some other form of communication, like what you might have with an animal. Or a god.