The Clay Dreaming (56 page)

All of this occurs without a single sound.

A sudden spillage of ink into the sky, black sunrise inspires swift growth of bare black branches, a canopy of waving spider-legs, extended, stretching out across the firmament – thick trunk of solid blackness dragged pulsing behind.
A furious thunderhead gathers, shadow casting shadow across the ground. Tornado-twists spiral down, the air streaked with great black tears – Sky World pulling itself back down to earth.

A last wink of light, and then there is nothing, save blackness and the darkness forever, more dreadful than any night.

Only the river stays clear, its broad beam his guide. The blacker it gets, the brighter seems the light. A distant star suggests itself, a candle in an open window…

The coarse laughter of a ferryman, his lantern working below, brings Brippoki around. Dust, filling up his gaping mouth, lodges fast in his throat. Dark clouds are under his feet, and the shadow at his back.

Guts churning, Brippoki’s chest heaves. He throws up on the spot.

His brow burns as his throat burns. He takes one last slug of blue gin, then dashes the clay jug across the vomitous rock, resolved to run. Feet stumblesliding through the puke and jagged shards, he staggers towards the remote flare of light.

The Aborigine breezed in, quite soundless, through the open parlour window. He walked directly up to the fireplace and stared intently into the ashes. The fire was unlit; she had been meaning to sweep it out, but never quite got around to it.

His appearance was the most extraordinary yet; still naked, near enough. Objects increasingly arcane were tied onto strands of his hair: longer feathers, more teeth, and a dangling claw, either crab or lobster. Smeared with gum as before, as far as she could tell he had added horse manure to the mix.

Sarah shifted in her seat and cleared her throat, politely.

Brippoki leapt back, nearly going for the window again. He collided with a small occasional table, dislodging its lace doily.

‘It’s only me,’ she said.

The wing of the armchair had perhaps hidden her face. Why she had chosen to sit alone in a darkened room, Sarah couldn’t exactly say.

‘I’m…sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

Granted, she didn’t occupy her usual spot; still, she found it hard to believe that he, of all people, could be surprised by her – a turn-up for the books! She almost laughed: and would have, were it not for his pitiable state.

He was sweaty and breathless. She could smell the drink on him.

Brippoki keeps his eyes averted. He paces the carpet, warily, making sure to tug at his
min-tum
so that she sees he is protected. The Guardian has her days. It is not good to look on a woman when she is bleeding.

He remains on edge, unsure of propriety.

Thara moves to light the candles. ‘I’ll boil a fresh pot,’ she says. ‘This one has gone cold.’

As soon as she is gone from the room Brippoki returns to the fireplace. He crouches down, hurriedly reaches in and retrieves the object of his desire – stands, unsteadily. His dilly bag is lodged in its place of concealment. Hands cupping the precious trophy, he casts about for another pouch suitable to keep it in.

Sarah returned bearing the teapot, piping hot. Brippoki was grovelling in the grate again. He ducked back when he saw her, looking a trifle sheepish. Abruptly he let go the poker, as if it were red-hot – confounded by the clang of it striking the hearth. He looked tragi-comical in his guilt. The notion that he might wield it as a weapon barely creased her consciousness.

He was as dead and grey as a cast in the half-light, bathed in a fresh coating of ash. The skin of his feet appeared dry and scaly. The nails, long like talons, needed clipping. Brippoki, expanding his thin chest, gathered himself to his full height, and did his unsteady best to affect nonchalance – a valiant effort in vain: he was so very obviously liverish, more than a little green about the gills, almost blue, his rapid breathing far shallower than previously.

Brippoki sat – collapsed rather – as if strings holding him up had been cut, all the cartilage in an instant removed from his bones. Folded in on himself, he clutched and massaged the muscles of his upper arms and occasionally his calves, deficient by comparison. Formerly so bright, so sharp and swift, his distracted attentions easily wandered.

Sarah too, weary with cares, struggled to concentrate. She had left Lambert sleeping, finally quieted, or else would not have left his side at all. Clarity and recognition returned to his looks, he had drifted away with a wan smile tugging at the sides of his mouth.

She told herself he was past the worst of it – on the mend, like so many times before.

Brippoki’s head lolled, drowsily. Speech seemed beyond him.

Earlier, Sarah had taken the latest batch of Admiralty papers from their envelope, intending to read out the details from the muster roll. She realised that would be to little advantage at this juncture.

Bleary-eyed, her guest waited doggedly on her. She knew what he wanted. Still standing, she took up her notebook; forgetting, in all her distresses, that Brippoki had run out on her previous reading.

‘Last we saw,’ she said, ‘our man had been returned to England, all of his various attempts to return to New Zealand frustrated.’

Sarah started to read from the notes she had most recently transcribed: the sole reason for Brippoki’s visits, for what other reason could there be?

So he became a Thames waterman, like the ‘water-poet’ John Taylor. The repetitive cycle of Druce’s behaviours appeared the chief cause of his woes, a self-frustrating prophecy.

Brippoki sat trance-like in his apathy. Features blank and unresponsive, he appeared morose more than impassive, sunken into a profound and personal gloom. He fingered and twirled the thong around his midriff – not proudly, as he once had, but from nerves. On a separate string around his neck he wore what looked to be the beak of a small bird, and this too he touched, almost by way of reflex. That same splendid body capable of monumental stillness was a mess of tics and twitches.

Their progress only brought on his decline. Sarah was almost loath to carry on. Something ate him up from the inside. She was losing him too.

The oracle spoke. ‘What is “pawned”?’ he asked. Brippoki inflected his accent in precise mimicry of hers.

Sarah sat down closer to him to explain.

‘It means he gave these things away, his prayer book and his Bible,’ she said, ‘for money.’

Such a clear suggestion that the author had lost his faith – more so, rejected it – upset Brippoki gravely.

‘Him still
budgere
goodpella,’ he expressed, sincerely. ‘Him still love God, inne.’

The alternative seemed too terrible to contemplate.

‘Yes,’ said Sarah. ‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Only his need for money is greater, at this time.’

‘Behold,’ he said, sadly, ‘what manner o’ love, that we be called the sons o’ God.’

He quoted the First Epistle General of John. Sarah’s mouth hung open.
Beloved, now, are we,
it went,
when he shall appear, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is.

‘We be called the sons o’ God,’ Brippoki repeated. ‘Dem first words Lawrence teach to us boys, from the Holy Bible.’

Sarah felt she should very much like to meet this Lawrence.

The humble and despised Aborigines, unsuspected by the world at large, truly were the favourites of God. She wondered how much of the message Brippoki might have taken to heart, if only as a measure of the strength of his white brethren’s beliefs, as opposed to his own.

‘The prayer book,’ she said, ‘the Bible, they are but things. Faith…is something you carry inside of you.’

She tried her best to sound sincere, to soothe him.

‘And every man that has this hope purifies himself, even as he is pure. Purifies himself, and “Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not”.’

Brippoki was nodding, more sage than savage. ‘We should love one another,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Sarah. She worried how well he might know the remainder of that text.

‘He says he has given up on his fellow man, that is all,’ she said.

It was enough.

‘You can understand,’ she went on, ‘how he might. Lose faith. In man. After all he has been through, I mean…turned out onto the street…’

Best to press on.

‘You see?’ said Sarah.

Brippoki slumped, inconsolable. Apprehension, the threat of some sort of ever-present danger, seemed the only thing to rouse him from these frequent bouts of listlessness.

One eye on him, she read –

Sarah fell silent. She had reached the end of the fresh material recorded that day, as well as the surplus from her previous session.

The intervention of yet another gentleman helper who ‘knew’ Druce aroused her suspicions: were such instances of brotherly love the agency of Christian charity, she wondered, or rather evidence of Freemasonry in action? The
Guildford
. Guild Ford. They too favoured the First Epistle of John.

Brippoki’s bearing brightened, as if he entertained genuine hopes of a happy ending to the story – that their unlikely hero, after so much frustration and disappointment, might actually achieve his goal and be returned to New Zealand. He had forgotten the bare facts: the manuscript had been written at the Naval Hospital in Greenwich, and its narrator buried there, long since. Or could it be that she herself presumed too much? Only a little way ahead with her transcript, she had not yet made the end of it. The ending was unknown. Should she even dare, to hope against hope?

Sarah laid her notebooks aside and took up the manuscript itself. There were only a couple of pages left to go.

Finding the same passage, she transliterated the speech as she read it.

‘
Sincehiedoor
’, it read. How on earth could she hope to decipher that?

‘What that?’ said Brippoki.

‘I don’t rightly know,’ Sarah said. She had not even tried to pronounce the word aloud yet. She looked up.

The Aborigine’s entire stance had altered. He cringed, all a-quiver, seeming electrified, staring wild-eyed at the book held in her lap.

‘Oh. You mean this…?’ Sarah blushed slightly, forced to admit. ‘I have…’ she started to say. ‘It’s the manuscript. From the library. I took it.’

Smiling awkwardly, she held it up so that he might see.

‘This is the actual document.’

‘Wa… Wa-day!’

‘Only a day or so ago, I meant to…’

Brippoki leapt to his feet, hissing and spitting. ‘
Tjurunga
!’ he shouted.

‘W-what? Brippoki?’

Averting his gaze, he pointed.

The Book of the Law – in awe, Brippoki backs away.

A
tjurunga
is the holy of holies, a very sacred object. More than representing the Spirit of an Ancestor, it embodies Them, a portion of Their vital force, eternally fertile. Transformed over time, the essence of the Ancestor thereby escapes the inevitability of decay.