Have you ever been in the grip of an instinct so total there is nothing else? Like when you’re trapped under water and kicking for the surface, your whole being sharpens into desire. Your body becomes a single raw nerve of will to live and nothing more. Even the sound of your own name is less familiar than the taste of air. Nothing before the absoluteness of it seems to exist.
It is like this when I try to remember what happened before I came back.
Only the white noise of the tide above pressed in and down on my senses as I strove for the light. I could hear the steady roar becoming sea girls singing to me, or perhaps to each other, which is always a far worse sign of one’s impending doom... Was that the light above that I must reach to breathe, or did that growing whiteness blanching my vision salt-white mean I was going under? There shouldn’t have been such well-being, such rising peace, at the same time as the water was pushing up my nose like wet cotton wool. I knew all about drowning, after all. I do it with an easy grace. I take in water like a creature designed for penetration and gushing.
The temptation to surrender to the spreading opiate of death was intense. Surrender is all through the thing I am, but so is this fight, this implacable determination… Fighting and kicking felt like cold wet hell is bearing down on you, and you nothing but a single thought of love in the grip of darkness. I. Will. Never. Stop. Fighting.
But is this the biggest lie I tell myself? This sinking, this letting of the sea girl’s frigid hands… This was a cool, unraveling shiver of ecstasy, what was the point in saying no to it anyway? When everything beautiful in the world is heading West, out into the mist and further, further… The feeling of this potential surrender smelt like formaldehyde and felt against the skin like the sound of the word ‘syringe’. I could feel my legs membraneing themselves together and turning into a marine tail in one big numb fuzz. Soon someone would force me to wear oyster shells. The peonies that grow on the bottom of the ocean are unlike other peonies. We will pick them together in the sea gardens, nestled in the guts of shipwrecks. Take my hand. We’ll walk straight across a moonbeam.
I called my song out into a thousand shells that trapped the echoes and sent them all back on themselves like a love making. This is your realm, I came here on purpose. Your many hands tore my clothes off. Sullivan’s Cove had me in a gang bang full fathoms five, my brains fucked out with ambergris and mankind’s lies. But before it could end without beginning strong hands lifted me skyward, skittering towards the choking light sluicing amniotic. I cannot truly account for the power of those arms. No mortal man I’ve known possessed such a strength as the one that plucked me from the water in the teeth of all probability.
The next thing I remember is the way the oyster shells fossiled into the rocky edges of Hobart town cut my feet as I walked towards the shore, my wet clothes clinging to my ragged breath. It took me some time to realize it had happened, in truth, those deep lacerations. At first I couldn’t feel it, but then as the salt worked in it seemed all too natural that every step I took back onto human ground felt like walking on broken glass. This is the deal after all, is it not? When you want to take something that belongs to the ocean? It is the condition, after all, for people like me who seek what I seek.
As I walked an undulating sea mist parted around me. I'd lived in Hobart long enough to know I was in the middle of the Bridgewater Jerry. Some countries have the Wild Hunt, here our spectral horsemen are of the marine variety, riding horses made of mist. It gave me weird clammy shudders to have it souping its way around me and pulling at my clothes. I felt I heard echoes in the silent white cavalcade as though through he mouth of the bay the dead were gathering up their bones from Cornelian Bay, under the burial ground and constructing ghost horses from them.
It is the one great outrage to the order of things that nobody is ever expecting, when the dead come back. Of course they do it in all kinds of way, every day, but mostly no one notices. At this stage all I remembered was falling into the floodwaters and then the reason why I was now fighting so hard for the shore. The reason was a man, and the man had a name, a number of names… But could I have told you my own name at that moment? I don’t think so. Could I have told you that the year was 1874 at my last recollection? Unlikely.
When I reached dry land I fell down. Even after rest against the familiar grit of my home I was not able to frame the questions that were already eating at me like sea lice. I'd woken up swimming hard for the surface, full of all the drama of life and love and ready to fight like hell, only to realize that I can never make that last assay across the final abyss of night without him lifting me. No matter how many different angles we try it from throughout the centuries, this part of the outcome is always the same. I can jump so far that I go close to crossing, but at the last minute I am always there with my hand out. If he doesn’t grab it I can’t do the last bit.
The knowledge of our perpetual triumphant defeat was a kind of soft surrender all its own. To lie half broken with fatigue and bruising on a nighttime shore, devoid of the knowledge of time and space… It was liberating. The bloodlessness of refusing the struggle...
But the cold of a Van Diemen’s Land autumn wouldn’t allow me long to contemplate who had lifted me and the poetry of it I still half knew, or how I’d come to find myself water buried in our deep port harbour. Unsteadily I got to my feet and looked down at myself. I wasn’t sure at what part of my ordeal I’d lost my shoes. My clothes were torn in several places but it was too dark to see if I was injured. The imperative of the cold was far more urgent.
It was then that I mounted the bank and was blinded by the most intense light I’d ever seen. Staggering back I shielded my eyes from it whilst at the same time trying to investigate. I was of the type to see visions and spirits, had been since early childhood, but this was a corpse light of a new magnitude. Once my eyes adjusted a little I went further up the bank to investigate, as this intrusively bright illumination was not getting any dimmer. I was shivering and hugging my body and as the harsh white light bathed me in its cold gleam I saw my bluish-white flesh and wondered if I would frighten someone when they came upon me. It was too overwhelming in the first instance to try to understand the source of the light. Something was wrong with Hobart, or perhaps something was just wrong with me? That had always been the fundamental question, after all.
As I walked barefoot up the embankment towards the regatta ground I decided that it was the latter. I’d hit my head in the initial fall that had somehow terminated in the depths of the bay… I shuddered at the thought of the sharks and other marine monsters that moved in the dark there and the blood and intestinal sludge I must have passed through around the abattoir.
It was only then, with the thought of dirt that I paid heed the open cuts on my feet. They didn’t simply mean, as I had previously imagined, that walking back into the world of man to find the man I loved would be like every step was cutting my otherworldly feet with knives. No, they also meant I was at great risk of infection.
Stumbling at the first notice of the bloody footprints I was leaving, I sat down on the grass in the severe floodlight that was doing such violence to the night, and tried to get my bearings. If it was something altered about my perception rather than my surroundings why were the steps different? How long could it reasonably have taken my body to make its way from Strickland Falls to where the mouth of Hobart Rivulet gave itself up to the bay? Not long enough for someone to have put in this ugly new railing… Getting to my feet I ran my hands along it, checking to make sure it was indeed objectively real.
It was while I was confirming this that the first surge of panic began to set in. My heart started hammering, forcing a new heat out to my extremities. Something was gravely wrong. I got to my feet unsteadily. My palms were now wet with sweat as well as seawater as I tried to use the strange new railing to stay on my feet.
“Arthur,” I whispered into the brazen night air. It was as though through invoking his name with the vibration we call sound, I had somehow conjured to quivering every bloody rooted heart wound that had brought me to my current predicament. Needless to say the sudden memory gush, strong as a main artery, forced me back down into a sitting position. All the blood had gone out of my face and my legs wouldn’t work for a moment. “No… Our Lady… no… what have I done? I must… I must,” as I muttered aloud I made another attempt at standing. “He must be frantic…” I whispered. My breath was turning to anxious spurts of vapour in the crisp night air as I slowly turned in an arch to look backwards upon the direction I had just come.
With a start as strong as a shove in the chest I stared and frowned at the sight before me. The other side of the bay was awash in pinpricks of distressed light, each so concentrated as to make up the power of five gas lamps. “I must have hit my head.” Yet even as I spoke these words I began to run up the hill in the direction of the town. It didn’t matter that my feet were cut or that I was half frozen and bathed in confusion by the orange glare. My body was possessed by something greater than these forces. Fear for the one I love, and the power of this emotion drove me without mercy.
It was only when I crested the hill and saw all the metal carriages without horses that lay still and quiet like sleeping monsters stinking of chemicals that I retched and stopped. For a while I stood with my hand reassuringly wrapped in the green branch of a she-oak, which for a time seemed the only familiar thing left. The waves of nausea were accompanied by a sickly sense of growing understanding. What happened to Oisin and Thomas the Rhymer has happened to me, I managed to word to myself. But if I had been in Tir nan Og why hadn’t I turned to dust yet when I first stepped foot upon the land of man? It must mean I haven’t been gone too long… Otherwise I would be dust... Dust.
After Fear came the rampaging scavenger Hope. How much more did that particular demon wish to ring from me yet? Had I not been squeezed out like an old dishcloth over and over and never yet known water? How long could it have really been that I’d been away? I looked at the backs of my hands, which were still those of a twenty year old who had done only moderate physical labour. Worst-case scenario? Ten years? No. Though my hands don’t show it, it must be longer for all this change to have occurred… What are these things here? Twenty years? Thirty years?
It wouldn’t matter, I told myself desperately, I wouldn’t care how old he’d grown while waiting for me all that mattered was finding him. What made me pause to be physically ill was the thought of the not-knowing he had lived through, the anguish he must have known in my absence... I thought my heart wouldn’t stand it, yet somehow, like the diamond bright thing it was, it took it. Carbon doesn’t end up adamantine from being unable to withstand intense pressure, after all. However long it had been I must make it to his home as rapidly as possible to put a swift end to it, no matter how long he’d been forced to live with the mystery of my disappearance I could still make it all better and there was no question in my mind that he would remember and miss me bitterly.
Before I could find my way to Davey Street and rush along it to the richer end of South Hobart, it appeared I would have to do some purging. My legs shaking I leaned for strength against the she-oak. Ocean water came out of me at first, and then a long, thick sludge with the appearance of wet bladderwrack, soggy written-on paper, laudanum-blue with running ink, heaved together with the seaweed in a gelatinous mass, tangled all together in hair and fish bones. The disgust I felt in voiding this ocean junk via the mouth was much dwarfed by the relief I felt in ridding my system of it. I wanted to poke with a stick that which had come out of me, as though it were the embryo of some monstrous oyster-bodied young I’d miscarried onto the Regatta Ground.
There wasn’t time for that or to try to understand how such things got inside me, I had to find Arthur. I had to tell him I was sorry… I had to put things right. Whatever pain I’d caused when, like an injured cat, I’d stumbled into the wild looking to take myself off with myself and slipped into the faerie mists, I would pull it clear from his body through sheer force of will and take it into my own. “Hold on, my love,” I whispered to myself aloud as I headed for the lights. I blinked several times as I tried to come to terms with what had happened to my city where only so recently had been cobblestones were now hard endless cement without evidence of natural providence. “You have to be out there,” I said my chin set with stubbornness, pulling my torn shirt closer around my chest. “I know you do. Because without you, not me... It’s that simple. If I am here in this strange place, then so are you. And I’m coming to find you.”