Peter Carey - Oscar and Lucinda

"If you are a captain," said the gent, "you must be the slowest-witted captain on the sea. I told you once, I told your man here twice-I only wish to see my friend. He is over there. There he goes. I have travelled all the way from London to see him. And he is there, damn you, and you will not take me. Take me, please, I beg you," cried Wardley-Fish, but his manner, as the Captain had previously observed, was not that of a begging man.

"So he was on his way to see his friend," Captain Simmons exclaimed to his deckhand. "Is this the case?"

"You know it is," said Wardley-Fish. ' *

Laudanum

"And yet, you know, I have the damnedest feeling that there is a problem of a friend behind you, some problem perhaps, a little debt incurred whilst gambling, or a matter between you and the purser on the Sobraon, some little thing like that which made this 'friend' you saw upon the barge seem like a chap you must get in touch with urgently, if you get my meaning."

"Oh, you have a beastly, tricky little mind," roared Wardley-Fish. "Would you like money? I will give you five pounds if you take me where that barge has gone." Captain Simmons stood slowly. He tucked his pipe in his trouser pocket. "Ten pounds," he said. Wardley-Fish was caught in the tug of different violent passions his outrage at being robbed of ten pounds, his realization that he did not have ten pounds, that it was in his jacket aboard the ship, his knowledge that this hawk-nosed little chap would enjoy refusing credit, his mortification at disgracing himself in the eyes of the entire ship, his grief at missing his friend, his anxiety that all was not right with the Odd Bod who had seemed, in that ridiculous shirt and criss-crossed braces, like a poor fowl trussed up for a cooking pot. It was all of this, not his simple dislike of the sly aggressions of the pilot, that led him to pick the man up bodily in his bearlike arms and, with a terrible roar that could be heard by all aboard the Sobraon, hurl him into the water.

The incident created complications that kept him a prisoner in Sydney for two days. On the third day he set off in search of Mr Jeffris's expedition.

97 Laudanum

He had accepted the laudanum for three days because Percy Smith had begged him to, but now he was resolved he would accept it no more. The laudanum did not suit him. It gave him unsettling dreams. It made him nauseous and jittery. It also produced severe constipation

Oscar and Lucinda

and now he had haemorrhoids and his anus itched and bled continually. He had no experience of haemorrhoids and imagined a condition far more serious. He had dreams involving shit and blood, the buggered carpenter, and the endless ridge roads out of Sydney, which laced through his imaginings like the stretched intestines of a slaughtered beast. The others had all washed. He had not washed. He would not stand naked before them. He splashed water on his face and forearms and calves, but the rest of his body felt cased with a grimy viscous film. His modesty was somehow offensive to the party. Mr Jeffris suggested that it would be in his interests "to reassure the men that you have all the correct equipment." Oscar had never hated anyone before (not even they who made him eat a stone, or those who had let rats loose in his room at Oriel) but he hated Mr Jeffris who was now, on the fourth morning of their journey, strutting around the dead brown dew-wet grass finding fault with his "soldiers" and their wagons.

Oscar and Mr Smith stood beside their wagon. Mr Smith had the laudanum bottle perched on the metal step and the funnel stuck in the pocket of his twill trousers.

"I do not have the strength to defy him," he said, crossing his burly, sandy-haired arms.

"Then we will pretend," said Oscar. "You will pretend to pour. I will pretend to drink."

"No," said Percy Smith. "He will know."

Percy Smith had a kindly, decent face, one you would naturally trust to the end of the world. But Mr Jeffris had such a power over him that when Oscar looked at his face he was reminded of a rabbit on a laboratory bench assaulted by current from a voltaic cell.

"I am employed by him," pleaded Percy Smith, blinking.

"Look at him. He is too busy to know anything."

Mr Jeffris pulled at a rope on the lead wagon in such a way that a vast lumpy canvas swag fell to the earth.

"If you wish to change his orders, you must settle the matter with him."

"Oh, mercy," cried Oscar in despair. "You were there when I attempted it."

"And he said it could only be settled with Miss Leplastrier present. He does not accept your authority. But I must accept his. Dear Mr Hopkins, you are a good man-"

"An angry man."

"A good man, and I must ask you, please," said Percy Smith, sneaking his hand around Oscar's shoulder and suddenly clamping it around his jaw, "you must forgive me."

"No," said Oscar. The back of his head was jammed hard against

An Explorer

the buckle of Mr Smith's crossed white braces. He was pulled back,and down, out of the shadow of the wagon. The sun laid a stripe across his livid face. A blow-fly settled on his nose. He tried to wave it away. Mr Smith clamped his wrist with his other hand. Two bullocks in the carpenter's team defecated at once. Mr Jeffris was bawling out the cook and threatening to make him walk without his boots. And at this moment, with Percy Smith's hand held around his jaw, Oscar thought: I do not even know where I am.

Percy Smith had found the funnel and pushed it hard against his lips. Oscar opened his mouth. It hit his teeth. He opened more. He had already been cut. He could taste the blood. Percy Smith's breath was bad. He had his knees against the back of Oscar's knees, making him keel over backwards.

"No," Oscar said, or tried to say, for trying to speak made him dry-retch.

Percy Smith lowered him to the ground. Oscar did not struggle. His friend put a knee upon his chest. He had the stone bottle with "Manufacturing Chemists" engraved in brown upon its rotund middle. He pulled the cork with his teeth. And then, before he poured, he put the bottle down. He touched Oscar's cheek with the back of his hand. An odd, gentle, lover's pat. "I would not do this to you," said Percy Smith, "for anything."

And then he poured the muck into the funnel.

Oscar kicked out with his boots. He connected with nothing. He hated Percy Smith. 98

An Explorer

Until he had the ill fortune to imagine a glass church and therefore be obliged to take this journey, Oscar's knowledge of the world had been severely limited. He was, by his nature, a creature suited to burrows and hutches and so even at Oriel-which many would see as a

Oscar and Lucinda

civilized and unthreatening environment-he had his definite tracks beside which there were great unexplored areas he was either frightened of or had no interest in.

His knowledge of Hennacombe was confined to two households and various red-soiled paths no more than one foot wide. And although he had, in the very act of writing home, posed as an authority on Sydney, had been happy to relay the common platitudes (that it was, for instance, a working-man's paradise) he had known nothing of it.

Now he felt himself cast into a morass and little dreamed he was dragging his puffing, saddlesore friend, the bewildered Wardley-Fish, through the muck behind him. He felt himself a beetle inside the bloody intestines of an alien animal. And any idea he had harboured that the bush was, as the engravings of the Sydney Mail might suggest, a pure and pristine place of ferns and waterfalls was soon demonstrated to be quite false. There were ferns, of course, and waterfalls. There were clouds of splendid birds but this was not the point.