The Clay Dreaming (8 page)

‘Your mind is not on your game!’

Charles Lawrence berated King Cole for the poor quality of his most recent performance. A brisk day’s play at Maidstone on the 30th had ended, unsatisfactorily, in a draw. ‘We should have won that match.’

‘Sorry, Orrince,’ mumbled Cole.

‘And as for you…cap it all!’ Lawrence turned on Bullocky. He thrust forward a half-empty whisky bottle. ‘Say black’s your eye,’ said Lawrence.

‘Him not belonga me.’

‘You’ve not seen this bottle before?’

Bullocky regarded the evidence sadly: it was still half full. Carefully he weighed his answer.

‘Dat bottle,’ he said, ‘belonga some other pella.’

The merry-go-round whirl of the metropolis behind them, the entire company had returned to the Bear Inn, Town Malling, spare in its comforts. Friday’s violent thunderstorms had abated, turned to drizzle.

‘It’s this sort of day I hate the most,’ sighed Bill Hayman.

‘Pentecost?’ said William South Norton.

The pair stood looking out of the casement window. They occupied the antechamber to the first-floor lodgings reserved to the Aboriginals – a room they had begun to refer to, strictly between themselves, as ‘L’s guardhouse’.

‘The sort of day,’ said Hayman, labouring his point, ‘when the hour of nine in the morning cannot be distinguished from five in the evening. The gloom neither lifts, nor the damp ground dries. It’s like living in a cloud!’

The far door exploded inwards. Almost taken off its hinges, it ricocheted off the wall, shuddering furiously. In stormed Lawrence, knotted up with rage. South Norton raised a weary eyebrow.

‘The maid found
this
in Bullocky’s bed!’ shouted Lawrence.

They stared at the whisky bottle clenched in his fist.

‘Perhaps it was there to smooth his pillow,’ Hayman suggested.

Lawrence slammed the bottle down next to the fireplace, so hard it was a wonder nothing broke.

‘Let’s hope he remembered to toast Her Royal Highness,’ said William South Norton.

‘The Melbourne Parliament has passed a law against sedition,’ Hayman explained. ‘It is now an offence even to boast of refusing to drink the Queen’s health!’

‘No separation for the colonies…’

‘And they have executed the Duke of Edinburgh’s assassin.’

‘Would-be assassin.’

‘It was a mistake,’ said Lawrence, ‘to attend church this morning.’

‘You insisted,’ said Hayman. ‘Said it was important. “Whit Sunday, when the Holy Spirit descends upon its disciples.”’

The priest had taken his sermon from the
Acts of the Apostles
, chapter two. ‘A prophecy of fire and brimstone, signs and wonders?’ said Lawrence. ‘It’s stirred up the Blacks something awful.’

‘Put, quite literally, the fear of God into them,’ said Hayman. He had never much approved attempts to Christianise or Anglicise the Australian natives, even in order that they might be saved.

The unhappy pair communicated their differences by addressing themselves to William South Norton – whose back was turned.

‘Even I found it terrifying,’ Lawrence admitted. ‘A blood moon…the Spirit poured out on all flesh.’

‘Perhaps,’ suggested Hayman, ‘you might disallow Bullocky from this evening’s outing.’ One Mr Allerton, ‘an amateur of distinction’, was to present the tragedy of the Danish prince at Town Malling’s Assembly Rooms.

‘No,’ said Lawrence. ‘I’d much rather have him in hand…’

His voice trailed away. William South Norton had magicked a tumbler from somewhere, and casually poured himself a generous measure of whisky. Swirling the golden liquid around in his palm, he took his turn holding forth.

‘My wife and I have enjoyed nursing Little Johnny Cuzens,’ he said. ‘He has, I think, the makings of a first-class player. And that fellow Mullagh,
he’s
quite
the Pilch of your Eleven…up to county form! You work very hard for them, Lawrence, you do. It’s most commendable.’

He raised a toast, no irony intended.

Lawrence’s face threatened thunder.

‘To Her Imperial Majesty!’ said South Norton. ‘Long may she reign.’

He drained his glass. As the contraband warmed his cockles, he warmed to his original theme.

‘Minnie tended Cuzens with her special recipe chicken soup. She says his ears went up like a sow in beans. But the others?’ he said. ‘Odd, superior sort of savages… It’s hard to get friendly with ’em. You’ve a good wicket-keeper in Dick Dick. Big old Bullocky does solid stick-in-the-mud business, all right. As for the rest? Boomerangers and Shake-a-spear-ians. The fielding’s good, but, Mullagh excepted, there’s not a third-rate batsmen among them!’

His emptied glass, upturned, hit the occasional table with a thwack.

‘And that, as it turns out, is the pudding in the bowl…’

South Norton meant well, but it had come out all wrong.

Lawrence’s face darkened: three in the afternoon, and already the grease-merchant was full of new wine.

‘You simply have to get to know them better, William,’ said Hayman quietly. ‘And that takes time.’

Charles Lawrence said nothing. Face turned away, he had begun to brood. The sentiments expressed by William South Norton unwittingly echoed many of the match reports published in his adopted homeland, clipped from the newspaper articles Lawrence followed so avidly – in
The Australasian
, the
Hamilton Spectator,
the
Melbourne Age and Argus,
and the
Illawarra Mercury
. Following a game played in the sweltering heat of Boxing-day, the
Bathurst Times
had seen fit to comment on the Edenhope Cricket Club’s new uniforms: how greatly their intelligent appearance stood in contrast to their debased brethren, skulking in the Bush.

Lawrence recalled how, some months earlier – during their first game following his engagement, in the mid-August of 1867 – the fielders had been unable to keep their feet on the ice.

That was how it was in Australia: everything topsy-turvy.

‘We must have a stowaway on board,’ said Lawrence. ‘Is there some Maori tribesman we don’t know about?’

‘Oh, you’re not still harping on about
that
, are you?’ said Hayman.

Saturday’s edition of
The Field
had reported, ‘A variation in the black hues of their skin, these men represent the colonies of Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and New Zealand.’

‘Obviously, they meant New South Wales! I’ll get on to them to print a correction,’ said Hayman. ‘That way, we get another mention.’

‘Art is of no country, indeed,’ huffed Lawrence. ‘Why pay attention, when everyone’s a Johnny Foreigner!’

‘The niggers begin at Calais,’ said William South Norton.

Lawrence rounded on him.

‘For your part,’ he snapped, ‘you might at least keep Malling’s underworld at bay.’

‘You’re not in Pall Mall now, old boy,’ said South Norton, sleek as a cormorant. ‘It’s always pronounced “Mauling” by natives of my age.’

‘
Aul
the same, dear chap,’ said Hayman, ‘see if you can’t keep that feltmonger Seagar away from the lads.’

Further overtures from the roguish local pelt merchant must needs be discouraged.

‘Last week’s fox hunt was very regrettable,’ said Hayman. ‘We’ll have no repeat of it.’

‘They have need of our protection,’ said Lawrence. ‘They’re like children.’

‘And, like petted children,’ said Hayman, ‘not quite so docile and obliging as on first arrival. They have been rather spoiled by their good reception in this country.’

‘You could both try harder,’ said Lawrence.

Their heads turned, all amazed and in doubt.

‘To do what?’ said South Norton.

‘Keeping Bullocky out of the Bull, for one thing. Or the Prior’s Arms…’ Lawrence sighed. ‘The King’s Arms, the Swan, the Cricketers…so many opportunities for drink in this puddle of a town,’ he said, ‘I’ve lost count!’

‘It can’t be helped,’ said South Norton, ‘if we are famously hospitable.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Lawrence. ‘To the point of finding someone else’s bottle of whisky under one’s pillow!’

‘The honeymoon is over well and truly,’ said South Norton. He moved to recharge his glass. ‘You are annoyed with me because I played for Maidstone, against your precious Blackies,’ he said. ‘I’m not on the opposing team now, you know!’

‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ said Lawrence.

South Norton threw back the tumbler of whisky, and then set it down. ‘I’ll gladly serve my country,’ he said, ‘and see you on the field!’

And with that, William South Norton swept out of the room.

Bill Hayman laid his head to one side.

‘Don’t piss him off, Charles, there’s a good fellow,’ he said. ‘He may yet come in useful in the days ahead.’

The sounds of song and laughter bled through the partition wall from the next room. No fans of the English rain, all the Aborigines sheltered safely indoors, engaged in some worshipful rite of their own.

‘You should congratulate yourself,’ said Bill Hayman at last. ‘All that hard practice has paid off. The Blacks do very well, everything being taken into consideration.’

‘Don’t they, though?’ said Lawrence. ‘Remembering to pass the port widdershins, and good for parlour tricks!’

Hayman’s breath escaped. ‘Confound it, Charles!
You
confound me!’ Every attempt to pay the team captain a compliment was turned on its head, and its pockets emptied.

‘You know, my own belief was that their manners should be improved,’ said Lawrence, ‘at first.’ He thought of their time back in Australia, when all seemed right, and good – and everything the other way up. ‘Increasingly, I find myself more attached to the Blacks’ natural character.’

‘Sorry, Lawrence?’ said Hayman. ‘Blow me down!’

A fan of the theatre, Bill Hayman occasionally indulged a sideline as amateur entertainer, his forte being pastiche, or comical ditties in character. Drawing on these skills, he started to strut in front of the fireplace. In mellifluous but mocking tones, to the tune of ‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’, so popular of late, he improvised a marching song.

Hayman teased Lawrence over his favourite text, and in the parlance of civil war, to boot. They no longer spoke the same language.

Bill Hayman clasped at the small of his back – injury, added to insult. The damp was proving no good for his bones. Smarting, he departed, following South Norton down the stairs.

Lawrence drew closer to the only company remaining.

The edges of the old mirror above the fireplace hung ragged, where the silver flaked. He seized South Norton’s empty glass. So as not to take up the bottle, Lawrence reached into his pocket and clutched hold of his cherished copy of
Tom Brown
, like a charm.

Heaven only knew, idle hands got up to no good when left to their own devices. They took to pilfering, poaching and in-fighting, where they might be better controlled by organised games.

His far-travelling children were not blank, like slates. But, otherworldly in their innocence, while neither good nor evil, they seemed of capacity for either – their characters malleable, like clay. Thus impressionable, they might be led anywhere – along the straight and narrow path of righteousness, or else
astray. Ultimately, however, it all amounted to the same end. Even with good intentions, they could only be taken advantage of.

Lawrence swirled and spat disgust into the ashes of the fireplace. Rising, he again caught sight of himself in the flyblown, corroded mirror. His face, warped, bloated, stretched across the uneven surface of the glass. Shirked in places, shifting with his slightest movement, it shrank even from itself.

‘“To be, or not to be: that is the question…”’

Onstage, before a full house, Hamlet made his immortal Third Act entrance. A thrill of excitement rippled throughout the theatre audience: young or old, nearly everyone knew these famous lines, even if they did not entirely understand them.

Lined almost the complete length of the second-to-front row, the Aborigines sat agog. It had been over a year since their last trip to watch the ‘drama’, Bill Hayman having taken them to a double-bill of
Rip Van Winkle
and
Nan, the Good for Nothing,
at Ballarat’s Theatre Royal.

Hayman glanced down the line and wondered, as he had then, what the show might possibly mean to them. Some of the team members had since departed, and new ones joined. Some at least might never have seen the like.

Dick-a-Dick had used his share of the team’s prize monies to hire an extravagant costume for the evening, looking more Genghis Khan than Aboriginal cricketer – nothing he need learn about dramatics. As for the remainder, was it more or less to them than mere play-acting?

Hayman felt wary of Lawrence, seated stolidly by his side. Nanny Lawrence, Good for Nothing, stared fixedly ahead; still in his almighty sulk. Bill Hayman returned his wandered attention to events onstage.

‘“To die,”’ rhapsodised Mr Allerton, ‘“to sleep. To sleep: perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub.”’

Neither of the team’s guardians noticed, at the very end of their row, an emptied seat.

‘“For in that sleep of death what dreams may come…”’

Mityan
, Brother Moon, emerges from the Shadow Lands. Between the bars of a blue gate, Dreaming streets give way to Dreaming fields, dim borderlands lit by His pale face.

After jogging concrete miles beyond a train journey’s many more, King Cole has arrived at the edge of the city, at least as he knows it. From here on, the stone desert should peter out, like the ash at the end of one of Bullocky’s cigarettes. Instead the hard roadway beneath his feet scrolls on, splitting as it spreads ever further out. From each dividing branch more buildings sprout forth. Every blade of grass is flattened, every tree felled. All earthen tracks are paved over. Smoke fills the air, bringing the horizon ever closer.

Any hope of open country denied, Cole stands at a crossroads, confounded by a barren wilderness that never ends. Into this latest aberration he will not stray. Keeping within known margins, he makes his way along what the
walypela
markings call ‘New Road’; even before lessons with Lawrence, he could read a little.

Weak gas lamps, posted either side at regular intervals, taper away into the darkness.

All is silent, but it broods.

A new sensation disturbs, something unfamiliar, the shadow of a shadow unseen. All the same he feels it there, enough to acknowledge a lurking presence – the fear that creeps beyond a campfire’s bright circle.

Cole shudders. He catches a faint whiff of it; the burgeoning guilt a dog must feel, dragged before evidence of its crime. The same as for any yellow dingo, he cannot comprehend the misdeed, beyond that implication of wrong relayed by his remote accuser.

This slippery notion either escapes him, or else he shakes it off.

He recalls his parting from Sundown, and, last thing, the secret he shared. ‘Ancestor Spirits have led me here, and I must find my Way.’

Words a melody on the tongue rattle an urgent tattoo inside his skull.

Step for step, moving soundlessly, Cole heads south.

Passing through a succession of inner courtyards, evil-smelling and indiscriminate in character, King Cole gains ground by degrees. Sibilant beings loiter close to each obscure entrance or exit, bodies pressed close to the sticky walls. He keeps to the middle of the pathway as it finds him.

Looking down at his formerly smart evening-wear, foot-stinkers and jacket again discarded, he sees the shirt is smeared with grease and soot. His trousers are sodden. Cole recalls that earlier night’s incantation, and supposes it to have worked. He is now as they were, those pale and stunted spectres. The splash and reek of the streets have rendered him unremarkable. At one with his surroundings he is beneath notice, and therefore safe.

One must first seek permission to pass through any hostile country. He should very much like to keep his kidney fat!

Having skirted the Well of Shadows, Cole means to pick up his previous trail. Before him squats a mean red-brick building, longer than it is broad, and bordered by a thicket of trees. A low, square tower tops the church, as it seems to be, decorated with globe-like ornaments that resemble huge chess pawns.

He looks on in wonder as the roof falls in. Through the collapsing body rises a monumental spearhead. The black tower springs up straight and true, an enormous nail, only stopping once its sharpened point has sliced through a bank of low cloud. Succeeded, the ornate old structure at its base crumbles away, until not a sign of it remains.

A single strike of the church bell dies in the air. Not even the promise of dawn colours the night sky.

Stairs dripping with filth lead the way down to the river, running shallow towards low tide. At their base, he crouches low over the exposed bank, close to the water’s edge. He dips nimble fingers into the nightmare sludge, repeatedly daubing the upper parts of his face, neck and breast, until caked with a fearsome ritual garb.

King Cole stands tall in the presence of the Great Serpent,
Mindeye
.

Mindeye
eats up clay and spits it out again. Masked in the stinking slime that trails in His wake, His lowly follower seeks to honour and placate the great Spirit Ancestor. Cast from the mud, in His image, they are one. His scent is the same.

Cole holds the vast body of water in awe. He stares a while across the turbid expanse – the sheer breadth of the river, in the dead of night, accentuated by its emptiness.
 

On the opposite shore, the darker side, a lightless mass cleaves to the riverbanks. Likewise moulded of tidal muck, it rises from the slick silt – bricks and mortar black with the dust of coal-ships, and soot from the smoke of squat hutments there compacted – an impenetrable wall.

Marshland this was, and always would be.

Cole traces the progress, swift progress, of a broken bough bobbing in and out of sight among treacherous currents. The wide mud-tide flows thick and fast. Under what is again a moonless sky the river is a deadly torrent of ink. Surface taut with menace reflects nothing. It is like staring into empty space, a bottomless pit – an immense and unquenchable hunger.

Darkness calls to darkness.

East is the direction in which Cole is drawn, and so eastward he goes.

Massive warehouse walls blinker his vision, affording only glimpses of the Serpent’s course. The path is wrong. He feels certain he should walk with the river on his left side, not the right.

King Cole retraces his steps, until standing once more at the head of Pelican Stairs. He turns west. Looking back, a wavering form shimmers briefly, and disappears from view – a place he knows well drowned beneath two great waterholes. Taking this as a promising sign, Cole advances. His temples throb with foreboding. Just ahead rears an apoplectic grey tower, penitential and severe.

He paces nearer the wall’s great curve. Dull, metallic vibration – power bound by the bleak stone circle – causes him to tremble. Cole reaches out a cautious hand, establishing contact. The presence is physical, solid and undeniable. Cracked plaster, peeling paint, meaningless slogans scrawled across the surface; the tower bears outward signs of neglect. The place, so it seems, is abandoned and ignored. He spies a doorway, partly concealed. The gate that bars the way is flimsy. Beneath layers of clogging dust and trailing broken cobweb, hangs a notice.

With fluid ease Cole squeezes through a broken slat, low to the ground. By the wan light he can make out, immediately to his right, a modest wooden cabin. The window-glass throws back a smeared reflection. He searches his pockets for a stray coin. This he places on the ledge of the phantom tollbooth, amongst delicate spider-spun filaments. Passing inside, he stands and waits for his eyes to adjust.

His keen night vision gradually discerns differences in density. Within the total blackout of the tower’s interior, he senses volume and scale. High overhead,
an immense domed ceiling shuts out the sky. Only a couple of paces in front, a balustrade curves away to either side. Open space yawns below.

Cole peers over the edge into abysmal gloom. A gaping maw at least 50 feet wide eagerly waits to swallow him up. No telling how deep down into the bowels of the earth the great shaft might sink; there is no certainty it even has a bottom.

An urge to flee furiously battles the intense compulsion spurring him on. Lure eventually overcomes dread. Cole turns to one side, grips the raw-bone rail and, guts tightened, braces to launch himself into the void.

He runs, full tilt, hollering at the top of his voice. Hysterical echoes accompany him all the way down, inexorably down.

Twinned stairwells sweep back and forth, traversing the sunken circumference. The stone pathway splits, only to reconvene, and then once more part company – the cadence of a falling leaf.

King Cole, swept to the bottom, slows.

His bare feet slap onto a paved platform, a subterranean road. Colliding with a fixed length of iron track, he stumbles. His flailing hand meets with clammy plaster. The walls run cold, rivulets chill as the sweat that streaks Cole’s forehead. He is down, under the ground, farther than he ever believed he could sensibly go.

Reaching for his
waddy
club, tucked into his belt, he withdraws it.

Ahead of him in the gloom, a light flares above two massive,
horseshoe-shaped
arches, each more than twice his height and wide enough for a single carriage. Burning overhead at some nebulous mid-point, the gaseous star too soon winks out. Twin corridors stretch out before him, into everlasting midnight – a hope-devouring darkness.

The dismal black lanes bring to mind the holes of shipworms, bored into the soft wood of the
Parramatta
. He faces perhaps the Great Serpent’s lair, or, worse, His interminable gullet. He perceives ribs, diminishing with distance. They lead to
Mindeye
’s foul black belly.

Is that the stench of His guts he can smell? From far off in the distance comes a faint churning sound, the racked workings of waterlogged lungs. The foetid vapour suggests the impossible: the breath of a corpse.

Beyond fear, King Cole passes the point of no return. Choosing a side at random, he starts into the left-hand tunnel.

Positioned at fixed intervals, flame-jets of gaslight spark into fitful life. From some way ahead, snatches of a queer, mechanical music waver amidst ghostly echoes: weak, female voices; scuffles and scrapings that come from the frequent little alcoves conjoining the paired passageways. As he approaches, Cole perceives – deep within the darkness – termite forms. From the shadows of their dirt caves they whisper and beckon, pitifully eager, sadly imploring.

The dead city seethes with such horrors. It has no space that is not filled. Even here, thousands teem, groping blindly. Some seem to tend humble stalls for penny wares. Others have nothing to sell except themselves. Withered scraps and faded charms – shopkeepers, whores, but nowhere any customers.

Fast travelling between worlds, Cole often witnessed phantoms in some sense or another existing. None he can recall is as pathetic and forgotten as these white-haired, pale-limbed creatures. Dully aglow in the intense gloom, they wear glass marbles for eyes. Be they relics of the past or figments torn from some dread future, he neither knows nor cares. Sensing they are not as solid, as constant as he in the Dreaming, he chooses to ignore them.

Doggedly, he drives himself forward.

At a junction where the tunnels widen, a miniature steam-driven organ plays without any audience. Garlanded with artificial flowers, all choked up with dust, it grinds out indeterminate tunes, ceaselessly and carelessly. Cracked and dirty orange-coloured tiling surrounds a complex array of mirrors, lamps, and lenses. Billing itself the ‘Cosmorama’, the elaborate object idles, extinguished.

King Cole finds it increasingly hard to draw breath.

The passageways are suddenly choked: with ancient silt; bygone sands; or fathoms’ river-flow. He struggles on through suffocating murk, his arms and legs flailing desperately.

Globes of liquid light swell and burst before him. Cole runs. Every insubstantial spectacle intended to delay and doom, he ignores, stopping for nothing. A treadmill pace gains the far stairs; he ascends swiftly, bursting through barred doors.

Flopped like a landed fish, convulsing, vomiting a little, King Cole lies sprawled on the dry paving. He rests a while.

Above and behind snores a sleeping giant. Hand pressed to his chest, Cole turns to look. The sounds growl out of a bump on the skyline – all that shows of the great nest below.

His heaving lungs eventually calm, rising and falling in tune.

Regaining his feet, he surveys new surroundings; another distinct region, cognisable from other days’ and nights’ Dreaming – yet, again, subtly different. As he turns east, the river is now on his left. The great black beast stretches out, skin scabbed by countless dark barges.

Cole searches for some trace of the road bridge he has just crossed. There is no sign. The city, divided in two, is all alike one piece of dry land. A warrior of the
Wudjubalug
, he has walked beneath the waves without getting wet! Resolute, he resumes his passage eastward.

Ahead lies a cold, black swamp.

Cole picks up the pace. He runs along a strip of dry land, sees a strange stone house on legs. Turn-turn fetch-the-water, a windmill rises to his right.

He runs on into a maze of smaller streets, dense overgrowth almost impenetrable. Sharp left, hard right, the lie of the land is a complex set of rhythms. Ahead, two lanes converge. Another course joins his own. The only way forward lies straight ahead. At every junction his choices are predetermined. He is being driven, like a sheep to its pen.

A narrow causeway crosses over a whiplash twist of creek, where the air reeks worse than swamp gas. Cole is returned beside the Great Serpent.

A scattering of vessels drifts unmanned on the low-lying waters. Their
crisscross
cables drip, slathered over with tar, draped with weed.

From behind high cloud, a lambent screen, reappears
Mityan
– a good hunting moon. Bone-stark, every detail of the Dreamscape gains in definition. Moonlight ripples the currents, white to black and black to white – the scales of the Great Serpent, writhing.

Impetus turns Cole inland.

The streets converge on an open marketplace, above which rises a complex of tall, rectangular buildings. Glowing white in the night, it is a moon palace.

He approaches closer, along a riverfront terrace. The tranquil galleries, lined with stiff columns, recede into middle distance. They seem to float on a slight ground mist, as if becalmed on cloud.

A restless crowd emerges from among the sturdy pillars. Steadily they stream, pouring forth from all points of the compass. Croaking voices harsh and grating, they call like crows, occasional laughter dissolving into fits of racking cough. Dressed in uniforms of ragged blue, some wear hats cocked with three corners, others, knitted caps. In all shapes and sizes they come – men, and the remains of men. Limbless, peg-legged, one-eyed or one-armed, some bend so low they resemble lobsters or crabs. They drag themselves through low oceanic mist, strangely undisturbed by their laboured progress.