Gould's Book of Fish Read online

  You might think such a venture would have met with the greatest approval, that inevitably it would have progressed, diversified, grown into a redemptive undertaking of global proportions and national merit. It may even have won export awards. Certainly in any city worth its sly salt—Sydney, say—such dreaming fraudulence would have been handsomely rewarded. But this, after all, was Hobart, where dreams remained a strictly private matter.

  Following the receipt of several lawyers’ letters from local antique dealers and the attendant threat of legal proceedings, the arse fell out of our noble enterprise of offering solace to a decrepit empire’s retired tribunes. The Conga felt compelled to go into eco-tourism consultancy with the Vietnamese furniture faker, and I went looking for some new lines.

  III

  SO IT CAME to be on that winter’s morning that was to prove fateful but at the time merely seemed freezing, I found myself in the wharf-side area of Salamanca. In an old sandstone warehouse I came upon what was still a junk shop, before that space too was appropriated by tourists and turned into yet another delicately overdone al-fresco restaurant.

  Nestled behind some unfashionable 1940s blackwood wardrobes no tourist would ever be interested in receiving as absolution, I chanced to notice an old galvanised-iron meat safe which, with a child’s desire to see into whatever is closed, I opened.

  Inside I could only make out a heap of women’s magazines of years gone by, a discovery dusty as it was disappointing. I was already closing the door when, beneath those fading rumours of love and tawdry tales of sad, lost princesses, my eye caught on some brittle cotton threads cheerily jutting out like Great Aunt Maisie’s stubble, without shame and with a certain archaic vigour.

  The door scratched a flat note as I pulled it back open and peered more closely inside. I saw that the threads grew out from a somewhat frayed binding, the spine of which had partly fallen away. As carefully as if it were a prize fish hopelessly entangled in my net, I reached in, lifted up the magazines, and from beneath eased out what appeared to be a dilapidated book.

  I held it up in front of me.

  I put my nose close.

  Oddly, it smelt not of the sweet must of old books, but of the briny winds that blow in from the Tasman Sea. I lightly ran an index finger across its cover. Though filthy with a fine black grime, it felt silky to the touch. It was on wiping away that silt of centuries that the first of many remarkable things occurred.

  I should have known then that this was no ordinary book, and certainly not one a deadflog like me ought to be getting mixed up with. I know—or at least, I thought I knew—the limits of my criminality, and I believed I had learnt how to say no to any tomfoolery that involved personal risks.

  But it was too late. I was—as has been put to me before in the course of legal proceedings—already implicated. For beneath that delicate black powder something highly unusual was happening: the book’s marbled cover was giving off a faint, but increasingly bright purple glow.

  IV

  OUTSIDE IT WAS a melancholic winter’s day.

  Snow mantled the mountain above the town. Mist billowed down the broad river, covering like a slow-falling quilt the valley in which lay the quiet, mostly empty streets of Hobart. Through the chill beauty of the morning, a few figures clad in the motley of cold-day clothes scurried, then vanished. The mountain turned from white to grey then disappeared to brood behind black cloud. The town was passing into gentle sleep. Like lost dreams snow began waltzing through its hushed world.

  All of which is not totally beside the point, for what I am really trying to say is that it was cold as a tomb and ten times quieter, that there were on such a day no portents, nothing that might have warned me of what was about to happen. And certainly on such a day no-one else bothered to venture into a dark, unheated Salamanca junk shop. Even the owner stayed huddled over a small bar radiator at the far end of his domain, his back turned to me, surreptitiously slipping off that vile anthem of contemporary retailing, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, and putting on the comforting low rubato of the races, a golden slipper of sound.

  No-one else in the world was there to notice, to witness along with me that miracle when the world seemed to contract to a gloomy corner of an old junk shop, and eternity to that moment when I first brushed the silt off the front of that bizarre book.

  As with the skin of a bastard trumpeter caught at night, the book’s cover was now a mass of pulsing purple spots. The more I brushed, the more the spots spread, till most of the cover was brightly glowing. As with the night fisherman who handles the bastard trumpeter, the speckled phosphorescence spread from the book onto my hands until they too were covered in purple freckles, twinkling in splendid disarray, like the lights of an exotic, unknown city glimpsed from a plane. As I held my luminous hands up in front of my face and then slowly turned them around in wonder—hands so familiar yet so alien—it was as if I had already begun a disturbing metamorphosis.

  I laid the book on a laminex table that sat next to the meat safe, ran my now sparkling thumb up its soft underbelly of unruly, frail pages, and turned the cover. To my wonder the book fell open to a painting of a pot-bellied seahorse. Gathered around the seahorse, like a flotsam of bull-kelp and sea grass, was a rumpled script. Interspersed every so often would be another watercolour painting of a fish.

  It was, I must admit, a dreadful hodgepodge, what with some stories in ink layered higgledy-piggledy over others in pencil, and sometimes vice versa. Upon running out of space at the end of the book, the writer seemed to have simply turned it around and, between the existing lines, resumed writing—in the opposite direction and upside down—more of his tales. If this wasn’t confusing enough—and it was—there were numerous addenda and annotations crammed into the margins and sometimes on loose leaves of paper, and once on what looked like dried fish skin. The writer appeared to have press-ganged any material—old sailcloth, edges ripped out of God knows what books, burlap, even hessian—into use as a surface to cover with a colourful, crabbed handwriting that at the best of times was hard to decipher.

  The sum of such chaos was that I seemed to be reading a book that never really started and never quite finished. It was like looking into a charming kaleidoscope of changing views: a peculiar, sometimes frustrating, sometimes entrancing affair, but not at all the sort of open-and-shut thing a good book should be.

  Yet before I knew it, I was washed far away by the stories that accompanied these fish—if they can even be described as such, the volume being more in the manner of a journal or diary, sometimes of actual events, immersed in the mud of the mundane, at other times of matters so cracked that at first I thought it must be a chronicle of dreams or nightmares.

  This weird record seemed to be that of a convict called William Buelow Gould who in the supposed interest of science was, in 1828, ordered by the surgeon of the penal colony of Sarah Island to paint all fish caught there. But while the duty of painting was obligatory, the duty of writing, which the author carried as an additional burden, was not. The keeping of such journals by convicts was forbidden, and therefore dangerous. Each story was written in a different coloured ink which, as their convict scribe describes, had been made by various ingenious expedients from whatever was at hand: the red ink from kangaroo blood, the blue from crushing a stolen precious stone, and so on.

  The author wrote in colours; more precisely, I suspect, he felt in colours. I don’t mean he would wax on about wine-dark sunsets or the azure glory of a still sea. I do mean to suggest that his world took on hues that overwhelmed him, as if the universe was a consequence of colour, rather than the inverse. Did the wonder of colour, I pondered, redeem the horror of his world?

  This clandestine rainbow of tales, in spite of—and to be truthful, perhaps also because of—its crude style, its many inconsistencies, its difficulty to read, its odd beauty, to say nothing of its more ludicrous and sometimes frankly implausible moments, so captivated me that I must have read at least half before I came to my sens
es.

  I found an old rag on the floor with which I rubbed my hands near raw until they were rid of the glowing purple spots, and hid the book back in the meat safe which I then purchased, after some haggling, for the suitably low price that rusting galvanised-iron meat safes commanded before they too, like all other old junk, came into fashion.

  Exactly what my intentions were as I walked out into the light snowstorm, struggling with that cumbersome meat safe, I cannot to this day say. While I knew I would be able to spray the meat safe in a heritage colour and then flog it off as an antique sound-system cupboard for double what I paid, and while I was eventually to con a free filling from a dentist in return for the old women’s magazines to fill his waiting room, I had no idea what I was going to do with the Book of Fish.

  To my shame, I must admit that at first I may have had the base impulse to rip out the many paintings of fish and frame them up and sell them to an antiquarian print dealer. But the more I read and reread the Book of Fish that cold night, the following night and the many nights thereafter, the less inclination I had to profit from it.

  The story enchanted me, and I took to carrying the book with me everywhere, as if it were some powerful talisman, as if it contained some magic that might somehow convey or explain something fundamental to me. But what that fundamental thing was, or why it seemed to matter so much, I was at a loss then—and remain at a loss now—to explain.

  All I can say with certainty is that when I took it to historians and bibliophiles and publishers for their opinion of its worth, thinking they might also delight in my discovery, it was sadly to discover that the enchantment was mine alone.

  While all agreed that the Book of Fish was old, much of it—the story it purports to tell, the fishes it claims to represent, the convicts and guards and penal administrators it seeks to describe—seemed to concur with the known facts only long enough to enter with them into an argument. This bellicose book, it was put to me, was the insignificant if somewhat curious product of a particularly deranged mind of long ago.

  When I managed to persuade the museum to run tests on the parchment and inks and paints, carbon date and even CAT scan the book page by page, they admitted all the materials and techniques seemed authentic to the period. Yet the story discredited itself so completely that, rather than agreeing to attest to the book as a genuine work of great historical interest, the museum’s experts instead congratulated me on the quality of my forgery and wished me all the best in my continuing work in tourism.

  V

  MY LAST PROSPECT lay with the eminent colonial historian Professor Roman de Silva, and my hopes rose for several days after I posted him the Book of Fish, then sank for as many weeks after waiting for a reply. Finally, on a drizzly Thursday afternoon, his secretary rang to say the professor would be available to meet for twenty minutes later that day in his university office.

  I discovered there a man whose reputation seemed not just at odds, but in complete conflict, with his appearance. Professor Roman de Silva’s twitching movements and tiny, pot-gutted frame, his dyed jet-black hair swept up over his pinhead in an improbable teddy boy haircut, suggested an unfortunate cross between an Elvis doll and a nervous leghorn rooster.

  It was clear that the Book of Fish stood in the dock accused, and the professor opened what was to amount to a withering case for the prosecution, determined never to allow our interview to degenerate into a conversation.

  He turned his back to me, fossicked in a drawer and then—with a sudden movement meant to be dramatic, but which succeeded only in being awkward—he dropped a cast-iron ball and chain onto his desk. There was a tearing noise that sounded like wood fracturing, but Professor de Silva was already well into his act, and, a true pro, he wasn’t going to let this or anything else deter him.

  ‘So you see, Mr Hammet,’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  ‘What do you see, Mr Hammet?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘A ball and chain, Mr Hammet, is that what you see? A convict ball and chain, is it not?’

  Wishing to be agreeable, I nodded.

  ‘No, Mr Hammet, you see nothing of the sort. A fraud, Mr Hammet, is what you see. A ball and chain made by ex-convicts in the late nineteenth century to sell to tourists visiting the Gothic horror land of the Port Arthur penal settlement is what you gaze upon. A tacky, fraudulent, tourist-souvenir type of fraud is what you see, Mr Hammet. A piece of kitsch that has nothing to do with history.’

  He halted, balled the knuckle of a small index finger up into his hirsute nostrils, from which moist black hairs large enough to trap moths protruded, then resumed talking.

  ‘History, Mr Hammet, is what you cannot see. History has power. But a fake has none.’

  I was impressed. Coming from where I did, it looked like the past of my own noble art. It also looked sellable. While I stood there wondering what Mr Hung’s skills at forging and blacksmithing were like, whether I should call the Conga and advise her of the potentially lucrative new line I had chanced upon, and what euphemisms I might deploy to communicate the erotic charge our American friends would inevitably find in such an item (‘Is there nothing that doesn’t mean sex to them?’ the Conga had one day asked, to which Mr Hung had replied, ‘People’), Professor Roman de Silva dropped—with what I felt to be an entire lack of respect—Gould’s Book of Fish next to the ball and chain.

  ‘And this, this is no better. An old fake, perhaps, Mr Hammet’—and here he fixed me with a sad, knowing gaze—‘though I am not even sure about my choice of adjective.’

  He turned, put his hands in his pockets, and stared out of the window onto a carpark some storeys below for what seemed a very long time before speaking again.

  ‘But a fake nevertheless.’

  And with his back to me, he continued rabbiting on in a manner, I suspected, honed on generations of suffering students, telling the window and the carpark how the penal colony described in the Book of Fish seemed, on the surface at least, the same as that which then existed on that island to which only the worst of all convicts were banished; how its location also accorded with what was known, marooned in a large harbour surrounded by the impenetrable wild lands of the western half of Van Diemen’s Land, an uncharted country depicted on maps of the day only as a baleful blankness colonial cartographers termed Transylvania.

  Then he turned around to face me, brushing back his dandruff-confettied quiff for the hundredth time.

  ‘But while it is a matter of historical record that between 1820 and 1832 Sarah Island was the most dreaded place of punishment in the entire British Empire, almost nothing in the Book of Fish agrees with the known history of that island hell. Few of the names mentioned in your curious chronicle are to be found in any of the official documents that survive from that time, and those that do take on identities and histories entirely at odds with what is described in this … this sad pastiche.

  ‘And, if we care to examine the historical records,’ continued the professor, but I knew by then he hated the Book of Fish, that he looked for truth in facts and not in stories, that history for him was no more than the pretext for a rueful fatalism about the present, that a man with such hair was prone to a shallow nostalgia that would inevitably give way to a sense that life was as mundane as he was himself, ‘we discover that Sarah Island did not suffer the depredations of a tyrant ruler, nor for a time did it become a merchant port of such standing and independence that it became a separate trading nation, nor yet was it razed to the ground in an apocalyptic fire as recorded in the cataclysmic chronicle that is your Book of Fish.’ On and on he blathered, taking refuge in the one thing he felt lent him superiority: words.

  He said that the Book of Fish might one day find a place in the inglorious, if not insubstantial, history of Australian literary frauds. ‘That one area of national letters,’ he observed, ‘in which Australia can rightly lay some claim to a global eminence.

  ‘It need not be added,’ he added, sly smile almost ob
scured by the limp quiff leaning over his face like a drunk about to vomit, ‘that if you were to publish it as a novel, the inevitable might happen: it could win literary prizes.’

  The Book of Fish may have had its short com ings—even if I wasn’t willing to admit to them—but it had never struck me as being sufficiently dull-witted and pompous to be mistaken for national literature. Taking the professor’s remark in the spirit of an ill-mannered jest at my expense, I concluded our meeting with a curt goodbye, took back the Book of Fish, and left.

  VI

  AT FIRST, I was partly persuaded by such arguments as I had heard, and agreed that the book must be some elaborate, mad deception. But as one who knows something of the game of deceit, who knows that swindling requires not delivering lies but confirming preconceptions, the book, if it was a fraud, made no sense, because none of it accorded with any expectation of what the past ought to be.

  The book had grown into a puzzle I was now determined to solve. I trawled the Archives Office of Tasmania, whose neat, unremarkable urban shopfront belies the complete record of a totalitarian state that it houses. I discovered there little that was helpful, with the exception of the wise and venerable archivist, Mr Kim Pearce, with whom I took to drinking.

  Beyond what Professor de Silva had termed ‘the undivinable oddities’ of the Book of Fish, there was the further problem of the identity of the chronicler himself, ‘the lacuna of lacunae’ as Professor de Silva had called it, a phrase that made as little sense to me as William Buelow Gould had to him.

  In the convict records Mr Kim Pearce found several dead William Goulds, while introducing me to a living Willy Gold in the Hope & Anchor; an alcoholic watercolour painter of birds with a cleft palate (the painter, not the birds) at the Ocean Child; and Pete the publican in the snug—a small and comfy taproom—of the Crescent.