Gould's Book of Fish Read online

  The Commandant suffered from a strange variant of Saint Vitus’s dance, nourished himself on a stuttering deference to the mirages & ghosts of the new age, & declared to us that man’s highest creative urges would henceforth be realised through engineering. We were swept up in his great never-ending romance of construction—his plans for rebuilding the market as a colossal glassed-in arcade; for the crooked, muddy track that led up from the water to be reconstructed as an immense, straight Boulevard of Destiny at the far end of which would be a massive iron arch, down which lovers might promenade if the weather proved pleasant, & up which troops would rush if the convicts were not.

  Yet he never saw what it was that dazzled us all so about such a city: his words.

  When he spoke anything & everything became possible, & though we knew our part in it all was not to benefit from these dreams, but to give our lives over to transforming them into brick & mortar, into glass panes & iron lace, our decrepitude was so great that we felt—for at least as long as he kept talking anyway, & that was long enough—this offered us a purpose, a meaning, something that meant we weren’t convicts, something beyond the Cradle & the Tube Gag, & that’s what we all craved. Some alternate idea of ourselves, some steam machine by which we could remake ourselves & our world, for to escape being a convict, we had to escape who we were, escape our past & the future decreed by the Convict System.

  It was a world that demanded reality imitate fiction, demanded that of us all. For a forger the possibilities momentarily seemed endless, and, to be frank, who then could have honestly foretold both my fabulous future & the horrific destiny that was to consume us all? In the end, of course, the Commandant was to suck the sea dry, then explode with an oceanic excess of pride & maroon the island & its few survivors once more in their desolate isolation. The easiest path with authority is inevitably acquiescence: the stupider they are, the stupider you need to be. It was then inevitable, I suppose, that I would on Sarah Island become what I had hitherto only ever feigned being—that most despicable of creatures—an Artist.

  III

  ON DISEMBARKING, WE were to discover all the requisite brutality & squalid circumstances you might expect of such a place. But even before alighting, even before we saw anything up close, our noses were assailed by the effluvium of death. Death was in that heightened smell of raddled bodies & chancre-encrusted souls. Death arose in a miasma from gangrenous limbs & bloody rags of consumptive lungs. Death hid in the rancorous odour of beatings, in the new buildings already falling apart with the insidious damp that invaded everything, was seeping out of sphincters rotting from repeated rapes. Death was rising in the overripe smell of mud fermenting, enmities petrifying, waiting in wet brick walls leaning, in the steam of flesh sloughing with the cat falling, so many fetid exhalations of unheard screams, murders, mixed with the brine of a certain wordless horror; collectively those scents of fearful sweat that sour clothes & impregnate whole places & which are said to be impervious to the passage of time, a perfume of spilling blood which no amount of washing or admission was ever to rid me. And perhaps because everywhere was death, life has perversely never seemed so sweet as what it did when I first came to Sarah Island.

  As we stumbled in our chains up the hill towards the Penitentiary, perched precarious on a small cliff abutting the sea, as our eyes found sordid images to unhappily marry all those horrific smells, we saw that the island was both something more & something less than the marvel we had first supposed it to be, as if it was unsure whether it was to be the Commandant’s dream or the convicts’ nightmare.

  Jammed next to magnificent stone buildings, some completed but empty, others as yet half-built, were dilapidated sod huts & broken-down timber sheds leaning at so many odd angles it seemed as if they were drunk. While the wharf area & the road leading into it were cobbled, the rest of the island’s thoroughfares were stinking mud-churned paths in which you might disappear up to your waist. Swarms of fleas that rose in small clouds wherever people sat & immense quantities of flies infested the island, along with rats that were so bold they would be seen scurrying in packs around buildings of a day.

  As I bob about my cell now & think back on it, we were not surprised when we felt upon us as an implacable hatred the malignant stare of that unholy army of the persecuted—filthy little clawscrunts & half-starved wretches, their pusfilled eyes poking like buttercups out of scaled scabby faces, their misshapen backs hacked & harrowed out of any natural form by endless applications of the Lash; brawn-fallen, belly-pinched wrecks of men bent & broken long before their time, the one I thought the oldest only thirty-two years of age.

  Nor were we at all shocked by how here all Nature was inverted—from the molly-boys to the nancy-men, one such blowsabella even getting about with a blind-tam hidden beneath his slops, a bundle of filthy rags he claimed was his baby that he would make to feed from his bloke’s bub; how here Nature herself was to be feared—the harbour, so we were told, full of sharks, the unknown wild lands beyond full of murderous savages. In an odd way it was a relief finally to see it & begin to learn how best it all might be endured, & if at all possible evaded.

  But in truth there was no way to make a cosy push of the several forms of torture unique to the island. You might succeed in tipping the blacksmith to give you lighter chains, but there was no cure for the agony of three months, day & night, wearing thirty-pound leg irons the inside basils of which were deliberately jagged to lacerate the flesh.

  There was, I knew even then, long before having their intimate acquaintance as I do now, no way of copping sweet the saltwater cells where one might spend months or even years bobbing up & down with the tides. Nor the Tube Gag—that ingenious instrument which taught silence at the price of agony, a hardwood tube thrust into the mouth like a large horse’s bit, often with such force that teeth were knocked out. With a leather strap fixed to each end, the tube was then fastened at the back of the head & winched tight until a low spasmodic whistle & a froth of blood indicated that the gag was working. Nor the Spread Eagle, where a man’s arms would be chained to two ring bolts six feet apart & six feet high, his feet to a bolt on the floor, his head facing the wall, with the Tube Gag applied if any screams were forthcoming when he was bludgeoned around the head & body.

  There were several other exotic tortures with names redolent of perverse humiliation—the Scavenger’s Daughter, the Witch’s Broom, the Mistress’s Scald. Most feared of all, also the most passive, the Cradle, an iron rack to which men were strapped down on their back, often after a flogging, for weeks on end entirely immobile, their scarified backs sloughing into maggot-ridden putrescence beneath their stilled, rotting bodies, as their minds dissolved into an even worse mush.

  One or several of these punishments could be incurred for the crimes of being found with tobacco, some fat, a tamed bird, or sharing food, singing, not walking fast enough on the way to work, talking (insolence), not talking (dumb insolence), laughing, scowling—though really the only true crime was running foul of a convict constable, or a dog who dobbed. You fell or rose on the Ladder of Sarah Island not according to your behaviour, your reformatory zeal or your recurrent villainy, but only because of luck, good or bad.

  For all of which I was ready.

  But for the porcupine fish nothing could have prepared me.

  IV

  ALL THAT I have recounted about new nations & the remaking of Europe as a stunted island of misconceptions beneath the southern heavens still lay before us to discover, while before me that following chill morning after we had landed & been incarcerated in the miserable brick-nogged barracks reserved for new arrivals, stood a big, bowl-headed steaming pudding of a man, floury & treacly by turns, who was about to alter my life forever.

  ‘TOBIAS ACHILLES LEMPRIERE—MISTER,’ the pudding said, ‘SETTLEMENT SURGEON—DEMANDING—AS AM I,’ hot-breakfast breath pouring turbid clouds of mist into my cell. Even if his mode of speaking was largely incomprehensible, his tone was portentous, which is perhaps why
he inevitably spoke in capital letters. Words existed in his speech as currants in a badly made bread-and-butter pudding—clusters of stodgy darkness.

  His appearance was so dreadful that on first sight it made me shudder. He was so rotund he looked as if he had been coopered rather than conceived. His black swallow-tail coat, too small & more tatty than natty, his tight breeches, his tiny silver-buckled shoes, all suggested a sufferer of the dropsy unsuccessfully masquerading as a Regency rake of yesteryear.

  What was most distinctive about him was also what was most terrifying—the utter whiteness of his great bald head, so striking that at first I thought it was the shade of the machine breaker returned to haunt me. Contrasting with the white desert of the rest of his face were flaps & folds of fat in which darkness ran in scheming rills. Later I discovered his face was naturally sallow rather than spectral, that he used glistening white lead powder to make himself look as if he had been freshly floured. Perhaps as they say of the crazed hatters of London, it is this too close association with that metal that explains something of his later erratic behaviour. Even so, my first impression of his grotesque unhuman visage is what has most strongly endured of him in my memory.

  His eyes were large & dewy and, if I may permit myself the word, moony, but what in a different body might have suggested a poetic or even mystical disposition, here suggested only a certain callous lack of interest with others. Still, in that ghostly moonscape of a face, they were the only things that hinted at life & drew you into their gaze, &, as I was to discover, into the obsessions upon which they so relentlessly focused.

  I dimly apprehended that Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere, as surgeon, occupied a position of considerable power over us, who were, it was already obvious to me, no better than slaves. It was Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere who would determine whether a man was too sick to be sent out working on some back-breaking task or other on one of the gangs, or whether the man deserved to be charged & flogged for such malingering. It was Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere who would determine if a flogging should cease, & it was Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere who would say whether the stroke of the cat was too light & needed to be heavier & more forceful.

  I hiked myself up from the damp earthen floor to try to look a man of some dignity rather than the miserable felon I was, but as I rose my body felt the weight of my chains being taken up, felt the lice itch with the sudden movement, felt the scratch & rasp of the filthy convict slops upon my skin. My oppression heavy upon me, I longed simply to fall back to the ground, but I stood as tall & erect & still as I could make myself in such squalid circumstances.

  I was preparing to be all suitably meek & mild, to fawn & feign, when to my surprise Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere produced a tiny shoeing stool from behind his back, placed it on the slimy floor, & then sat his own considerable bulk down on it, looking for all the world in his tight black coat like a burnt jam roly-poly resting on a bent dinner fork that might any moment disappear up his great lardy arse.

  ‘STUDY OF THE KELP FISH—FINE WORK—MOST FINE,’ said he, settling himself on the stool. ‘CONCEPTION—EXECUTION—SPLENDID—SCIENTIFICK.’ I thought that he must want his portrait painted; he looked a little like Marat gone to fat, & I felt I might just be able to swing a passing copy when the Surgeon sighed once more, & continued. ‘MOST APPLICABLE—DINED LAST NIGHT—GOOD CAPTAIN,’ said he, a little irritated, thinking perhaps that my lack of reply indicated some imbecile incomprehension on my part.

  ‘VIEWED TRIPTYCH L’AMORE—FISH GREAT WORK—EAGLE, NOT SO; CRIPPLED RAT, HARDLY—YET THOUGHT I—AN ABILITY TO PAINT, IF NOTHING ELSE—FISH—YOU—ME—DESTINY—MY DESIRE TO SERVE SCIENCE.’ Then he asked—with what I felt to be some humility, & the unprecedented deployment of a full sentence—‘YOU ARE AN ARTIST OF SOME EXPERIENCE?’

  I hastily fashioned several stories that seemed agreeable to him, each new tale built upon his own conceits as to what Art should be & what it should not be. It required me to be halfway between haughty & humble, a little above my fellow felons, a little below such masters as he, a highwire act from which I nearly once or twice fell, but recovered at each stumble by making an oblique reference to Shuggy Ackermann—of whom he, of course, had heard not a sausage—who was, after all, an engraver. I celebrated him in my asides as the amazing Ackermann, the genius Ackermann, the thick-accented Hanoverian emperor of London engravers, Ackermann, & bathed in the glory I hoped the Pudding might find reflected in me.

  ‘ACKERMANN—YES? NO? YES,’ Mr Tobias Achilles Lempriere finally sighed, knowingly tapping his nose with a podgy index finger revealing varnished scarlet flesh beneath the powder. ‘NOW THAT WAS ENGRAVING.’

  But beyond saying I had served valuable time with Ackermann—which indeed it was—I avoided saying it was time more spent on his petty schemes of fraud & theft than on engraving, & much more time than either simply drinking at the dear old Man of War in Spitalfields.

  Nor did I bother the Surgeon with tedious details now flooding my memory of the publican’s offensive behaviour there, pressuring Ackermann & me incessantly like some Eightways harpy about our tick, him would you believe with all his money planted away!

  Then the publican with his throat cut, the money gone, & Ackermann for once looking a quarter-flash, dandruff spilling over the yoke of his new pig-skin jacket, a look less than fortunate continued in his brown buck teeth flecked white with potted eel, his favourite dish, as he flashed a grin that went from Wapping to Tyburn, & Ackermann not realising that he was soon to follow his grin there, dancing the diddly-back-step from the gibbet as a wretched murderer.

  My past, which until then had not really existed for me, was now exploding like a jumping-jack firecracker all over my mind. It was as though I needed the truth of these memories I didn’t mention as a necessary ballast for all the lies I was sprouting.

  For as I was telling the Surgeon of my passion to pursue a higher calling with my art, I was filling with the same terror that I had had when the peelers were out searching for me in the grizzled shadows of my old haunts, that terror that seized me & threw me down a shivering root outside of myself, huddling in the stinking dirt & filth behind barrels in dark rookery laneways, the terror I may actually be someone else, that everything around me was beginning to whirl, that all my life was only a dream dreamt by another, that everything around me was only a simulacrum of a world, & I was crying, lost, I really was somewhere else, somebody else, seeing all this.

  V

  BUT THEN I was already long gone, out of London like a musket ball leaving everything behind, including my old name, my terrible fears, all that whirling & hurtling & nonsense at last dying down, & as I walked north, my humours picked up. Said I to myself, I am indeed now an Artist, the well-known Portrait Painter Billy Bellow—it had a definite ring to it—though after further thought that seemed too common, & I became Billie Buelow—it sounded all Frenchie & fancy-like & made me feel some connection with my father, as though I now had an ancestry that meant something rather than nothing—but then thought I, No, Frenchies are not flavoursome with the People, but when I found work for a time in the Potteries, I there answered to the cry of William Buelow because I could think of nothing better.

  I had the good fortune to meet up with a master potter known only as Old Gould. Coupled to the old man’s endless chattering—and upon reflection, perhaps its cause—was his fear of being trampled to death beneath a passing cart or coach. So great was his sense of this inexorable & cruel fate, that he would stand for up to an hour at the side of a street summoning the courage to cross it. Our first meeting was accidental & providential. I had staggered out of the Bird in the Hand in Birmingham with nothing left in my pockets & walked straight into his trembling figure on the corner. Feeling well disposed to humanity, I agreed to his stammered request to escort him across the street. Then, sensing that his need for help in this regard would not be ended until he reached his destination—a pub where he was staying the night a mile & a half away in the old town—I walked
him there, & by the third crossing the tall, stork-like figure was bowing over me, full of such heartfelt gratitude for saving his life that he there & then offered me work in his workshop.

  The Surgeon interrupted my reveries by asking me in his stilted fashion what my opinion of still lifes as a form might be?

  I told him in no uncertain terms how my work was strongly influenced by the great Dutch masters of the last century—van Aelst, de Heem & van Huysum—but did not mention that my entire knowledge of them, along with my standard design for a wisteria garland, came from those six months that I had then spent in the Potteries, working for Old Gould on his fine china, painting that same tedious floral arrangement over & over, & every night in the taproom, Old Gould drearily & endlessly eulogising some dull Dutch hacks of yesteryawn—he loved them so, you see. One night his only daughter, said she, ‘Come,’ she with the hair long & red gorgeous & face fern-tickled with freckles, said she, ‘Come with me.’ We sneaked out & we drank so much I could hardly find the way back to Old Gould’s darkened workshop where we fell onto a canvas on the floor in front of all the paintings that he had collected, & on that canvas we danced the old Dutch still life, rolling waxen pears & bursting pomegranates & me a dead limp hare at the end of it all.

  In this & other ways Old Gould was a greater education than he ever realised. Scattered among his brushes & tools would be copies of Grotius & Condorcet & he would sometimes have his daughter stand up in front of the workshop with a small bust of Voltaire’s sitting on the bench above her with his inscrutable smile, & she would read to us from the great man’s work as we painted our intricate designs over & over.

  So taken with Candide & Dr Pangloss were we that me & my beauty forsook the Dutch still life & began dancing the Enlightenment instead, & she would take such joy from Voltaire’s smile of reason entering her, advancing & receding like a slow wave waiting to break, thinking all the time to herself how lovely it was to have one’s own garden attended to so.