The Clay Dreaming (20 page)

Sarah’s free hand flew to her throat. She laid down her pen and turned in her seat, nearly knocking over the ink bottle.

He held a plain sort of a notebook, as one would find in any stationer’s, the right-hand corners at both top and bottom quite battered and worn away. She read the grubby label on the front.

From the worn cover she looked up into the freckled face of the young clerk. He smiled awkwardly.

She reached out for the notebook and, trembling, took possession of it. The birth date was right – well, close enough. The details were right. She turned it around and around in her hands, hardly daring to open it up.

‘How…?’ she said. ‘I mean, wherever did you find it?’

Circumspect, the junior assistant glanced around, so pale and awkward, he couldn’t even stare at his own oversized feet with composure. ‘It was – um – it was among the manuscripts that had been filed incorrectly?’ he said. ‘There are a number without their correct details, and this was among the pile.’

Benjamin J. Jeffery finally managed to look up.

‘It’s not a big pile,’ he said in earnest.

Three times a year, the library was closed for a week in order that it might be thoroughly cleaned. Such opportunities were taken to check and update the book stock: always a number of items had been misplaced, or gone astray.

‘Some of the entries lose their numbers and have to be checked individually?’ said the junior assistant. His voice often rose at the end of his sentences, as if doubting even of itself. ‘That is,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t immediately clear where they should go. We are each of us given a few to check through, when we have a spare moment. When I overheard you repeat the – uh – title to Mr Ward, it sounded familiar. It was in my…in my pile, but I hadn’t got around to looking at it just yet.’

Benjamin J. Jeffery flapped his long hands in her general direction.

‘You can…you can read it for me.’ His sheepish grin indicated a joke. With a fearful twist his head suddenly jerked around, and back again. ‘Don’t tell Mr Ward! Or Old Bullen,’ he urged. ‘Please, miss. I shouldn’t really be giving out the book, not until it’s been located within the catalogue.’

Sarah was only half listening. He veered away. She turned the slim notebook over in her hand, feeling a little queasy. Had she ever found the correct entry, somewhere in the catalogues, the book itself, misplaced, might still have eluded her grasp.

She turned over the first page and began to read.

Sailors slung over the sides of ships apply fresh coats of paint. Others work high in the rigging. The outlines of human figurines are reduced to a smudge, to a blur, lost in shadow or motion. The cranes swing, and on every side more labourers trudge to and fro, backs bent and heavy-laden. In raucous crews, smocked and hatted, the dock-workers of the great Port of London labour hard to unload enormous merchant vessels. The quayside swarms – men with red faces, yellow, brown, and black faces; even men with blue faces.

Brippoki cannot get used to the deafening levels of noise. Emptied barrels, rolled across cobbles, emit a deep bass rumble. The hammers clank as coopers fashion brand new casks. Greased lengths of chain, let out link by link, clink clink in steady repetition. Their loads cast loose, they whizz free, rattling in a manner most alarming. Long ropes, freed, drop down into the waiting water with a satisfying plash.

A ship’s captain cups both hands to his mouth, voice suitably amplified to relay his orders.

‘
Whippers
,’
he cries, ‘tackle them barges! Ballast, to the colliers they’ve emptied! Attend to that cranky one first. Fill the hold good and fast. It’s pitching like a proper lushington!’

On his command each team scurries forward, toting great sacks of gravel.

Brippoki looks away to an upper level, where sweating workers slug on clay bottles of beer. They gather close and shifty around the pedlar. Nearby, another man dips his long brass beak into a cask of spirits, a hummingbird at a flower.

More ships arrive, groaning, full bellies submerged, flags of many colours flying from their masts. Quayside crowds clamber down to the decks on long ladders, to begin the unloading. Bales of goods emerge, unreadable scripts and symbols classifying their contents: camphor and cocoa, hardwood and jacaranda; jute, molasses and tin; spices from Java; ice from Norway; tobacco, timber, rice, and rum.

A long open shed spans the waterside, waiting to receive these discharged cargoes. Here, under cover, coopers, weighers and measurers beetle forward to meet them, and attend to their several departments. In weighing stations positioned beside each loading bay, the large beam scales tilt back and forth. From the riggers to the dockers a polyglot chorus is spoken and sung, but in these check cabins, no one speaks except in numbers.

Cranes hoist the valued goods up and out of sight. Dwarfed by the huge blocks of intricate machinery, their operators have to work hard and fast, just to keep up. The machines set the pace, not the men.

Idly, Brippoki looks across the surface of the waters, stained a dark rainbow: black with coal dust; blue with indigo dye; purple with wine; white with flour; and brown with tobacco. Contents disgorged, the ships rise up, their decks now high above the quay.

Brippoki sees a pair of mounted constables advancing in his direction. They carry guns. Men like these he associates with the cruelties of the Native Police. Casting around in alarm, he turns aside, abruptly disappearing into the depths of the nearest warehouse.

The floor is sticky underfoot, the cavernous interior thick with a hanging mesh of knotted rope and strangling chain. Crossbeams and wooden planks recede into forbidding depths of shadow. The chaotic black space echoes with cries: a hurly-burly jumble of orders, cautions, and yankee-nigger songs,
blending into one monotonous drone. He can just about make out the bodies of men, tugging and straining at their bonds.

A square of daylight extends inward from the open entrance. At its furthest edge, a crooked line-up stands before an array of heaving trays. Ancient old men prop themselves up against the edges of the long work-tables; their elderly faces haggard, empty as skulls.

‘Where the hell is he?’

In a righteous fury, Charles Lawrence flung aside an empty chair.

‘Catching Captain Boycott at slip like that,’ said Bill Hayman. ‘Is that what gave their game away?’

No sooner had Lawrence cast off one set of chains than he would set to work forging new ones: Hayman sought to distract his colleague from brooding.

‘I mean,’ he said, ‘Cole is a fine player. But he was never that sharp!’

Their latest engagement had returned the touring cricketers to Gravesend, their first port of call, playing against Kent.

In spite of their sudden straits, Lawrence smiled wryly. ‘You know what it was?’ he said. ‘I could hear Tuppenny grinding his teeth at the bat.’ His face fell. ‘That’s when I thought to look under the cap.’

‘Ha! I just thought he’d put a bit of weight on!’ said Hayman, a touch too eagerly.

Lawrence regarded him sourly, face red with shame enough to share. He looked down and away.

‘It’s not like it’s a new problem, Charley, this absenteeism, or whatever you want to call it,’ continued Hayman. ‘Their clearing off without a word of warning, it’s the plague o’ the sheep stations and the welfare both. One day you’ll see them happily working the herds, and the next,
poof
, vanished, without a trace. It can be anything up to a year later and they’ll return, nary a word of explanation, and acting as if nothing has happened.’

Or never to return at all; Hayman dreaded to think it, let alone make mention.

‘One has to remember,’ he persevered, ‘they’re not like us. Not, by nature, given to sitting around.’

‘This does, I think, present a new problem,’ said Lawrence, darkly.

‘What I mean is, they’re nomads, wanderers,’ said Hayman. ‘That’s their lifestyle. Stick them in one place too long and their spirits flag. They’ll soon get restless, if not sick, in their longing for a change of scene.’

Introducing games of cricket to the Wallace yards had been of great benefit, going some way towards countering the Aborigines’ temperamental depression, and the problems arising. They were no longer so tempted to stray off into the Bush, for one.

Hayman shrugged. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that’s why touring seemed such a good idea. But they don’t like to work. Not all of the time.’

He seemed to surprise himself with that rare moment of insight, and looked the guiltier for it.

Lawrence knew full well about their nocturnal habits, the Aboriginal foraging for Bush tucker. He had done his best to suppress these urges while they were on English soil, but, in the night, he guessed they went ahead anyway.

And now one of their number had run off.

Teaching, controlling, reproving, governing…had he been too harsh?

Only when Sarah lifted her head to look at the clock did she realise the hours that had passed, so absorbed was she in George Bruce’s book. If she didn’t soon begin her transcription, she would have nothing to show Brippoki on his next visit.

There could be no doubt –
The Life of a Greenwich Pensioner
was the work of the same man. Given what she had already understood from his pamphleteered
Memoirs
, Bruce had been the first white man to live amongst the natives of New Zealand, as one of them. He had even gone so far as to marry their princess, and possibly to father her a child. Whatever became of them all, Sarah soon expected to learn for herself.

She turned again to the opening text of the first page.

As used as she was to both antiquarian language and handwritten scrawl, the wording of the manuscript was hard to make out at first.

Resisting her eagerness to skim ahead and discover all, Sarah directed her energies towards initiating a transcript. As per her normal working practice, she started out with an assessment, a brief note describing the book itself.

A labelled notebook, the pages had been numbered by hand, 119 in total. The flyleaves were watermarked 1847, indicating an approximate date when the pages had been assembled between covers: somebody had cared enough to look after it. That in itself perhaps furnished a clue as to when the Museum might first have acquired the original manuscript.

The work was principally of one hand, but with at least three differing scripts alternating. It seemed fair to presume George Bruce illiterate, dictating his story for others to record. A service performed most likely by his fellow inmates; they were, unfortunately, not so very literate themselves. The text, however, looked to be complete, in good condition, and – excepting occasional idiosyncrasies in spelling or grammar – relatively easy to decipher.

Steeling herself, Sarah began her transliteration.

She made a separate note –
‘St Paul’s, Shadwell’
. His birthplace had already been given as ‘the parish of Ratcliff in 1779’ – a parish centred on the Highway, that notorious stretch of slumland struck through the riverside hamlets of Stepney and Limehouse. St Paul’s was presumably the parish church there, St Paul himself a persistent echo worth investigating.

‘
Wood? Woodham
?’ Sarah made another note in the margins. Thus, details rendered in both
Literary Panorama
and
Memoirs
were confirmed.

‘…icstronory ad vent. Icstronory ad vent.
’ Sarah repeated the confounding phrase over and over under her breath, before making additional notes. All that seemed necessary to solve each riddle was to read the text out loud, if discreetly. It made sense, if the words had been dictated in the first instance.

Every new line started with a capital letter; other random capitals were scattered throughout the text. Following careful consideration, Sarah elected to record the exact wording, peculiarities and faults intact, although eliminating the unnecessary capitals. It made for harder going and slowed her down, but better preserved the narrative’s antiquated charm. The unlearned, almost phonetic nature of the original transcript was quaint; more than that, intrinsic.

Sarah halted again.

‘
Propety
,’ she hummed, ‘
propety
.’ Property? Poverty! Like Brippoki perhaps, Bruce could not pronounce his Fs and Vs.