Richard Flanagan: Wanting

‘Don’t die,’ said Ellen Ternan.

His head lay in her lap, her tears were falling on him like rain, and the universe was flowing into him, he was open to everything, it was an immense thought, a terrifying feeling, something at once outside of himself that had now entered him, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. It was as though he had awoken startled from a dream. He had survived. He felt as if he were coming down from a mountain, that the snow drifts were thinning and then giving way to grasslands, that a great green valley beckoned before him, a space so immense and free he felt himself gasping contemplating it. On and on he walked. The air was sweet, and breathing felt like drinking water on a hot day. He was coming home. It made no sense. It was beyond understanding. He was being held by her, feeling her draw breath. He was tasting her tears. The sound of sobbing from the darkness was unbearable.

‘Please don’t die,’ begged Ellen Ternan.

His cheek pressed against her uncorseted belly. He could feel its softness pulsing in and out. He could not know that within a year his marriage would be ended. That in the thirteen years of life left to him, he would be faithful to Ellen Ternan, but that theirs would be a hidden and cruel relationship. That his writing and his life would change irrevocably. That things broken would never be fixed. That even their dead baby would remain a secret. That the things he desired would become ever more chimerical, that movement and love would frighten him more and more, until he could not sit on a train without trembling. He was smelling her, hot, musty, moist.

‘Nelly?’ whispered Dickens.

And at that moment, Dickens knew he loved her. He could no longer discipline his undisciplined heart. And he, a man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realised he could no longer deny wanting.

‘WE’VE GIVEN DEATH THE SLIP,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘But for how long?’

Walter Talba Bruney was a drunk now, and fat and morbid with it. He was only in his late twenties but looked far older. The war had ended, but another war went on and on inside Walter Talba Bruney and it would not let him go. When he was drunk, he was angry with God. When he was sober, he prayed to God to help him get drunk. When he was drunk again, he shouted that if he had a chance, he would get a spear and spear God good, teach him a lesson.

About God Mathinna had no particular opinion—perhaps, as she sometimes told her fellow rum drinkers around the fire, it was because she was high church. But she told Walter Talba Bruney she hated him talking about death.

‘All blackfellas die at Wybalenna,’ said Walter Talba Bruney, ignoring her. ‘We think, come back to our country and we be good and healthy. But we come back here and we keep dying. Devil in us. Devil killing us. God killing us. Why God and the Devil want to work together?’

There were five of them drinking rum and sugar that night: two other natives and Burly Tom, a one-time whaler who had of late been living by mending nets, but who later denied ever being there.

Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirées, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn’t Government House but Ira Bye’s sly grog shop—an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay—that it wasn’t a soirée and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro’s bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.

And because, as well as a direct gaze, she had in her time at Government House absorbed the idea of example to one’s lowers, and because it made the point—to herself as much as to them—that she was somebody, Mathinna talked about the new dances that season in London, though her knowledge here, too, was both hopelessly inadequate and entirely out of date. When she asked Gooseberry what she thought, she just cackled into her cracked china cup, and, not really knowing anything about the whites’ new dances, Mathinna turned to the one subject about which she could manifest some authority: why she would like to hunt foxes, something that offered a union of her heritage with her upbringing.

‘We been treated shamefully, worse than the old people in the bush,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘And them savages not good Christian people like us, them just savages who never learnt nothing.’ He was mumbling now, and then he had another drink and changed his mind. He felt God was back on his side now, but he couldn’t understand why He didn’t help more. When Walter Talba Bruney looked up at Mathinna, she saw there were tears in the slits that were left for eyes in his big puffy face and in one tear was caught a flailing louse.

Mathinna knew Walter Talba Bruney now had a wife, and he had tried being respectable, but the government had taken his sheep when they left Flinders Island and now he wanted them back, and moreover he wanted land, and they wouldn’t give him anything unless he swore off drink, but, sensing this was just one more lie, he drank all the more.

‘We know whitefellas just us, blackfellas when we die we reborn with white skin. But why…’ He was lost now, somewhere between God and Jesus and savages and civilisation and all their impending deaths and the curious, terrible, impossible certainty they would be reborn as unthinking as a white. ‘Why,’ he said again. ‘Why?’

‘I no a savage or slave,’ said Mathinna. ‘Them no-good lazy blackfellas, they disgust me. I marry a whitefella, you watch, you see, I be big lady.’

‘Why you drink with us then if you a white lady?’ said Walter Talba Bruney, seemingly startled back into conversation. ‘You better be drinking with them.’

But Mathinna drank with Walter Talba Bruney because, other than a few blue gin riders, no one else would. For all that they annoyed each other, the Aborigines shared something so obvious that it sometimes evaded them, as they sought in the rise and fall of their chipped cups and rusty tin mugs, in the merge of their old and new worlds, some answer to who they were and who they might yet be.

Whoever she drank with, Mathinna drank more and more. Which was why—when Walter Talba Bruney walked with her down that dark track from Ira Bye’s through the forest, where the setting moonlight was lost in the blackness of the great trees’ canopy—she grew angry. It was not that he then hurt her in his entry, nor his excuses that she was not wet or willing or pretty enough any more to deserve any payment, or his nonsense that it was she who should be paying him for such pleasure. It was simply that he refused to give her the half-bottle of rum he had promised in exchange.

That was why she argued with him. It was why, when he yelled back, she spat at him. It was why, when he hit her, she hit him. But when he forced her head down into the puddle, crying out that she could drink this then, there was nothing she could do, try as she might.

All around her were trees older than knowing. If you held your face to their taut mossy bark, you could hear it all. It passed understanding. It defied words and spoke in dreams. She was flying through wallaby grass, her body no longer a torment but a joy. Soft threads of fine grass feathering beads of water onto her legs. The earth was her bare feet, wet and mushy in winter, dry and dusty in summer.

Mathinna managed to lift her head out of the puddle once. Walter Talba Bruney slipped the filthy red scarf from her hair down onto her throat, and twisted its greasy loop into an inescapable garrotte. The track in front of her shuddered. Time and the world were not infinite, and all things end in dirt and mud. She finally saw her father’s face. Long, with a slightly bent nose and a kind mouth, it was, she realised with rising terror, as she felt herself being forced back into the wet void, the face of death.