Bryce Courtenay - The Potato Factory

Mary tried once again to move her head. 'No!' she managed again. She was suddenly aware of a strange sound and at the same time the vessel shuddered and then rolled slightly. 'Wind?' Mary whispered.

'Oh yes, wind! Glorious wind! Gawd's breath is back with us, Mary Habacus!' Tiberias Potbottom said triumphantly then pushed his ugly little monkey face close to Mary's. 'Gawd is not mocked!' he said, spraying her face with his fierce spittle. 'You have been punished and He has restored His precious breath to us!'

Tears ran from Mary's swollen eyes and she drew blood as she bit her top lip in an attempt to stop them. She did not want to show her physical pain, nor her confusion and agony of mind to the creature perched on the stool beside her.

'What's this then?' Potbottom asked suddenly.

Mary made no attempt to look, thinking him to be making comment over her distress. Instead she kept her lumpy eyes closed fighting back the tears that threatened to grow into a desperate sobbing. They were stupid tears, tears that showed Potbottom that he'd won, that he'd broken her spirit, tears for the past and the present and the future, tears that washed over her awful life.

'What be this I'm holdin', eh!' Potbottom asked again, and this time his demanding impatient tone caused Mary to open her one good eye. Tiberias Potbottom held up a prisoner's purse. 'Never know what you'll find when you looks, does you, me dear?'

Mary's hand went instinctively to her cunny but she knew before she reached it that her prisoner's purse was no longer hidden there. The brass tube Tiberias Potbottom held contained her fifteen sovereigns and Ikey's precious Waterloo medallion and chain and Mary began to sob uncontrollably.

'Shall we see what we's got, then?' Potbottom said gleefully. His small hands twisted the brass cap, removed and upended it, tapping it into the centre of his palm. 'Very curious,' he said, 'it don't have nothin' in it!' He tapped the tube once more in the same manner then held it with the open end facing Mary. Potbottom raised his dark, bushy eyebrows, his tiny black eyes shining. 'A pleasurin' device is it? A poor convict woman's comfort for the dark lonely nights at sea?' Potbottom shook his head and clucked his tongue several times. 'I don't think Mr Smiles will take kindly to such a device. Not kindly at all!' He replaced the cap and, leaning over Mary, he placed the small metal tube on her chest. As he did so, Ikey's medallion fell from within his linen shirt and dangled on its chain directly above Mary's breasts. Then, without a further glance at the hapless, sobbing Mary, he scuttled out of the hospital, leaving her to contemplate the loss of everything she possessed in the world.

Mary had secretly dared to hope that her life might change, that despite the hell of Van Diemen's Land she would survive and that something good, no matter how small, might come of it. Now she knew that she had been deluding herself all her life, in truth, the flame of her existence had been blown out the very moment she had been born. As she lay in the prison hospital Mary craved emptiness, to feel nothing, to walk upon the earth as a shadow until death came as yet another misadventure upon her senseless life. Her past filled her up, taking possession of every corner of her soul to make her life a dark, repugnant experience. Where others might have craved Christian salvation, Mary asked only for emptiness, for all feeling to be taken from her. She wanted neither God nor the devil, but what lay between. Without feeling, she told herself, she could continue to exist; with it, she wanted only to die.

Soon her tears dried up. They were pointless. To cry was to mourn and to mourn was to care and caring was what had always destroyed her. She cursed her mouth and its ability to find trouble; others knew their place and remained silent with their heads bowed in obsequious obedience. It was her big mouth which had destroyed her life. If she could empty out all that had happened to her, she would grow silent forever, not be seen or heard, or be there at all, her lips frozen forever.

But instead of emptiness, as Mary lay perfectly still, there grew slowly within her a great anger and then through the anger came pain, a sharp throbbing in her left hand. She tried to ignore it, but it was too alive and demanding, and soon the pain within the centre of her hand burned as though it were a fire kindled there, a furnace of white heat expanding and filling her, roaring at the very centre of her being. She could no longer ignore it. Mary lifted her hand to within the line of her vision and perceived for the first time that it was held tightly in a claw-like grip, its dark twisted fingers resembling, not a human hand, but an ugly, twisted knot. Within the knot a searing, leaping, roaring flame called out to her for revenge.

Mary attempted to open her hand but the fingers would not respond to her will and the pain caused by the effort brought her close to fainting. But she persisted, and after several minutes, her stiffened and contorted fingers broke loose sufficiently to reveal within them the small knotted rag bundle containing her brass talons. Mary started to weep again, but this time with a sense of great relief, for she knew instinctively that she would recover, and that the odious little monkey creature had not broken her spirit. She knew that the hatred in her would restore her health, though to be God's or the devil's child she knew not, and cared even less.

Mary's punishment was not completed with her beating and admission to hospital. A week after being released she was paraded on the prisoners' deck and charged with causing a riot within the prison. This was too grave an offence for Tiberias Potbottom to resolve by the usual proxy of his prayerful master, and Joshua Smiles himself was required to preside. With a charge of inciting a riot, the safety of the ship had been placed in jeopardy and the ship's master and those officers not on duty were required to be in attendance.

A muster of all the prisoners was called mid-morning with Mary standing with her head erect before the pale and mournful Smiles. The surgeon-superintendent, as was his usual habit, was dressed completely in black. This colour included both his blouse and neckerchief and a top hat of unusual height. The total effect gave him the appearance of being perhaps on stilts. He towered over the remainder of the prisoners, matrons, guards and even the tallest of the ship's officers present, and Mary was seen to come not much above the waist of his frock coat.

In a tone incurious to the consequence of his words he read out the charges against Mary and then, without raising his voice or heightening the inflections placed upon his words, he pronounced sentence. It was a noticeable contradiction to the blandness of his voice that throughout his reading the surgeon-superintendent, on no single occasion looked up or at the prisoner, and his hands shook as though in a tremor as they held the paper from which he read.

'… Mary Abacus, I, Joshua Jeremiah Smiles, under the authority given to me by the Admiralty and further, under the provisions of the Home Department and in the name of His Majesty King George IV, sentence you to twenty-five strokes of the lash to be administered at one time. Whereupon you shall have your hair shaved and be placed in solitary confinement within the coal hole and shall remain there for one week, this to exclude the Sabbath. During this time you shall be given bread and water as your only sustenance. I further order that the sentence be carried out immediately by Mr Tiberias Potbottom and that all prisoners and those who be in charge of them, and therefore under my authority, shall bear witness to these proceedings.'

There was a gasp from the prisoners, for even the whores felt great remorse at what they'd done to Mary.