Joan Makes History (13 page)

It was hard to imagine happy futures for any of these children, removed from their mother's humpies—for their own good, naturally—and trained up to be useful. As a person of mixed blood myself, I might have suffered the same fate if such an ingenious scheme had been devised a few years earlier, and I could not get away fast enough from this place: the very air threatened me with its miasma of lost souls.
On!
I cried to myself, and made for the open road.

My next conveyance was a coach, boarded on an impulse as it changed its horses at an inn on the edge of town.
Where to, then?
the driver rudely asked, when I approached him, and I mumbled
The coast, mister,
at hazard, and he nodded in an exasperated sort of way.

What coast? Not knowing where I was, I had no idea, but knew that one road out of town must lead eventually to some
coast, somewhere or other, for I knew my nation was an island: and it gave an appearance of knowing where you wanted to go, to say something definite like
To the coast.

As a coach going to the coast ought to do, this one stank of fish, and was tightly packed with travellers. It was a mad extravagance to be in a coach. But I was still afeared by what I had seen at the Welfare, and wished to make haste away. Besides, I had never before been rich with nuggets, and probably never would be again, so I relished the plush seat of the coach and the way the bush went past at a good speed, and the way the other passengers and myself passed the time of day with each other.

The other female in this coach was a Miss Haines, a very tightly curled and corseted rouged lady with a way of saying
if you don't mind,
such as:
Give me a nice leg of mutton any day, none of your foreign muck if you don't mind,
or:
Oh no, I was not obliged to come out to the colony, I had a very nice position in Giddingly if you don't mind.

I did start to mind in the end, for Miss Haines was tiresome with her fine mincing ways and tiny tight mouth, and the way she made sure no part of her person came in contact with any part of the person of the black girl beside her, and when she was persuaded to reveal that she was going to a place called Eden, the hairy-nostrilled man Barnaby exclaimed,
Oh, the new barmaid then are you, love?
and Miss Haines flushed and said,
Do you mind,
and became highly interested in the view from the window.

Barnaby did not mind us knowing all his secrets, for he was a coarse guffawing sort of man, who was forever nudging Herman next to him, an acquaintance of sorts, it seemed, but Herman did not conceal how wearisome he found this nudging Barnaby.
Then there was a huge pale man with cropped yellow hair and ears like feet sticking out of his head: his name was something that sounded as if he was about to bring up his breakfast, and his enormous hands, each one the size of a dinner plate, were as bright red as if they had been boiled. Barnaby, not one to be backward in asking questions of a personal nature, shouted at him to ask why they were that colour, and we all craned to look at them, resting huge and glowing on his powerful thighs. Barnaby poked and bellowed:
Red, red, why red? Looky here, mine white, see, white-white, you red-red,
and it was easy to see that this fair foreign man knew what was being asked, that he was sick of being asked, and that he could not think of how to explain without the necessary words of English. We all watched, even lemon-lipped Miss Haines, as the huge man demonstrated cold, shivering and hugging himself, shaking the fingers of his big raw hands, until suddenly Mr Jellicoe who was going to join the bank at Eden exclaimed,
Frostbite! If they do not fall off altogether, they turn red, I have heard.
This was more than Mr Jellicoe had previously said all at once, and like the big man's hands he turned scarlet and subsided in his seat, and now that the mystery was solved, the red-handed man was no longer of much interest.

Through all this I was the grinning darky, feigning being too shy to do more than giggle and cover my mouth with my hand, as that was the easiest way to avoid more sticky-beaking and the best way to enjoy the spectacle of people behaving.

We had all gone a bit silent after the red-handed man had been explained, and at that moment the road took a sudden turn downwards as if at a line drawn through the bush. We hung onto the benches under us that threatened to tip us all head over turkey: the jolting became so extreme we could hardly hold on,
and I could see nothing but the bush all crooked out the window of the coach. Then it was decided that we must all dismount, for the brake was smoking against the wheel and the horses, poor creatures, were tossing their heads and slipping and sliding on the dirt.

I thought at first there must be a tribe in the bush, hidden among the trees and green ferns in all these mysterious clefts and folds of valley: for when the coach had been left behind a little way, and we were all on foot straggling down this yellow road, I could hear things calling to each other: clear, soft metal sounds like chimes with a human voice.

Barnaby caught up to me and saw me listening: whiskery Barnaby had taken a fancy, I could tell.
Bellbirds,
Barnaby said,
funny kind of racket they make.
And, embracing me so suddenly he knocked the air clean out of my chest, he went on talking while he propelled me off the road and behind a tree.
Oh, you hot slut!
he exclaimed. Behind that watching tree, with Barnaby pressing the flesh of his mouth against various parts of my person, I found him repugnant, his whiskers coarse, his hands ungentle, his clothes odorous and repellent.
Go 'way, go 'way,
I shrilled at him, and scratched at the hands holding me until they let me go and oh, the bewilderment, the what-have-I-done, the indignation and the surprise of this fishy dolt, to be spurned!

He still did not believe me, in spite of the graze of blood on the back of his hand, and showed his teeth, saying, Oh
you black-fire-brand-you, you are a tease, you want it too, upon my word you do.
We struggled in an undignified way among the dead leaves, and only when the toe of my boot struck Barnaby with enough force to make him stagger did he believe me.

This Eden seemed as far off as the other one, and the coach
was oppressive when we got back inside with Barnaby glowering and muttering, and with Miss Haines refusing even to sit alongside of me now, and with Herman smelling powerfully of his pipe, although he had put it away back in his pocket when we had remounted. We had all gone quiet now, except that Barnaby said from time to time, jerking a thumb at various landmarks,
Not long now, not long now.
He could hardly wait for Eden, and nor could I.

It was Herman, next to me now, who broke the silence that was starting to stifle us, and enquired where I was bound. This time I was prepared, and had a long garbled giggling story prepared, of how I was
looking for me auntie, by the name of Auntie Bess, me Mum died see and she says, you gotta find your auntie,
and so on. It was easy to run on and watch their smiles grow weary finally, and I finished it off by saying loudly,
Might getta job, I learned how to clean real good, up Mrs Oliphant's place.

Herman did not appear to be altogether fooled by my performance, and watched me with a shrewdness that made me uneasy until I realised he was enjoying it as much as I was. He was a Yankee, perhaps that was the difference: he was a large bristling man, black of beard and cross of brow, and seemed to know a thing or two about most things, not just about the whaling that was his profession.

And it was Herman who, when we reached
the coast,
persuaded me to join him in boarding a small boat that would take us to another part of the coast where he had business to conduct. I felt it only right that I should sample a short sea voyage, so I stepped on board behind Herman with my bundle of things, and prepared to enjoy being something of an old salt.

But this was a small creaking wallowing sort of boat, and I
was not accustomed to any manner of boat, and felt uneasy of stomach at the way it heaved up and down in the troughs of the sea and jerked me around as I sat on a slippery bench and tried to fix my mind on something that did not move, and tried harder still not to think of and certainly, after the first indelible glance, not to look at the water slopping around our feet in the bottom of the boat, greenish water in which several decaying fish heads floated, and a long thread of the innards of something with a morsel of liver attached, that stretched and contracted with each toss of the boat.

The less I thought about these details, the more uncertain my own innards felt about the whole enterprise and the more green I felt myself going as the waves crashed over the front of the boat. It no longer seemed to matter that I was travelling, and it was hard to remember exactly what it was I was travelling to, or from. With an effort I could recall William and dreadful Barnaby and could remember various bicycles, streets, trees—my mind moved fast, trying to fill itself with clean dry images—but in the end everything went a sort of grey shot with stars before my eyes, and for a while I felt nothing but my insides turning out and the cold wet wood of the gunwale I clung to, leaning out over the cold green waves.

So much for boats, then: they were no way to travel. When I stepped off the boat and felt a solid jetty under my trembling legs I swore I would never again go on water, that I was a terrestrial creature, and that man, and perhaps more particularly woman, was not meant to venture on that cold unfriendly medium, and would have been equipped with gills if that had been intended.

There was a man waiting at the dock with a waggon and a big square horse that would take us up the hill to the township,
and I got up beside Herman in the waggon, and calmed my fluttering stomach and my tingling fingers and toes by watching the calm dignified buttocks of this humble brown horse and telling over to myself like beads on a rosary all his paraphernalia: bit and bridle, collar and hames, saddle and girths, shaft-leathers and crupper-straps, until I was soothed, and could again enjoy my journey and my companion.

Herman proved a teller of tall tales after my own heart. Sitting on a bollard down on the pier—as close as I would go to the water—he told me of the whales he had seen harpooned, the arms and legs he had seen snapped and crunched in tangles of ropes or between gunwales or in the gripe of monstrous agonised fish leaving trails of gore in the water. He had a fine way with words, this Yankee, though his tales tended towards infinite elaboration of insignificant detail, and frankly I was sure that most of them were extravagant invention. But he sat in a gentle way on the bollard, drawing these ferocious pictures before my eyes, looking off into the bay as if the words were written there for him to read off.

His tales led to a certain fondness, and to certain fondlings to which I found I was not averse.
Joanie, you are the Eve of my Eden,
Herman told me, and I enjoyed his hyperbole, and the way I could make him rumble with laughter at a few tall tales of my own. I told him the history of William, who had taken me so young and silly that I had been flattered, and fearful of my orphaned outcast future, and with Herman I did not bother to be half-witted, but told my tales with all the gift of the gab at my command.

I enjoyed Herman, but my life did not belong with him: it was not for Herman that I had taken to the road. So, before too
much fondness grew between our skins, I went down to meet him on our pier with the open road on my mind once again. Herman was sitting on his bollard smoking as if it took all his attention, and did not turn to me when I sat on the next bollard. There lying blamelessly at anchor out in the bay was the
Chesapeake
which would shortly take Herman back onto the sea, and he would watch seagulls and harpoons fly and smell the stench of blubber rendering. Perhaps he would himself be carried to the depths of the ocean, tangled up with some maddened whale with an iron spear in it and a few miles of wild rope streaming after. Perhaps in another port another Joan would hear his tales, light his pipe for him, admire his bristling hairs and his soft way with a few words, and on other bollards he would stare out at the horizon with the smoke blue around his head, preparing to say farewell.

I am going on,
I said: for I, Joan of the unbending spirit, would not be at the beck and call of any Herman. I would be no fond teary-eyed slattern waving and waving as a ship grew tiny on the sea, with some man on board not glancing back to the land but quaffing up the salt air of the next thing, and enjoying a lewd joke or two with some other whiskered worthy, having already forgotten me. No! I would be no such namby-pamby nincompoop.
I am off, Herman,
I said, and was pleased at the surprise on his face, and the way he drew me between his knees as he sat on his bollard, and placed his large hands around my waist:
Well Joanie,
he said,
There are not two like you in this wide world, of a surety.
We parted, then, with the soft hankering glances on his side, not mine, and I set off again for my unknown future.

I had had an adventure or two since I had taken the two steps across William's kitchen and out the door. I had covered many
miles by different devices: I had become an expert on the subject of transport, and now I had the feeling that I was on the last leg of my voyage. Certainly there was no persistence by which William could possibly trace my chequered journey.

I sat behind the rising and falling haunches of a horse pulling a waggon full of whalebone bound for the torsos of the ladies of Sydney, beside a hard-breathing man with long white hairs springing out of his nostrils. When, after some miles, he had tired of flicking at the flies on the horse's rump with the reins and turned to me to make a little conversation, I was ready for him. In his slow way he asked me where I was bound, and I had an answer:
Sydney,
I told him.
I am on my way to Sydney, I am a bareback rider by profession, and the circus is in my blood.
The words seemed strange, out here on this peaceful dappled track with leaves all around us, and a fine fragrance of eucalyptus making everything sweet and simple, but it was a satisfaction to have such an answer, and I enjoyed the way this whiskery old gent craned round to have a good look at me, and see what a bareback rider with the circus in her blood might look like.
I have always been a performer,
I told him, warming to the truth of the words:
performance has been my whole life.
I could see I was impressing this simple soul, and that he knew the truth when he heard it, and I sat more eagerly now, staring forward past the huge haunches of the horse, looking forward to my new life.