Ep. 4 Van Demonian Supernatural: Oisin of Hobart Town

That was when all the clocks stopped again. 

The rivulet was in full gush as it rained and rained. The dead have membranous feet you see, leaving behind the translucent mucous trails like snails, silvery footsteps that last only up until the nascent dawn. It’s easier for them to move around along wet tracks. Martha taught me that, many years ago and it made sense of what I’d always observed around the rivulet and the sea mist. 

            When you saw I had really stopped all the clocks in your house like I told you I used to, (both the clockwork and digital therefore ruling out an electrical surge) you started to really believe in me. -Not to contradict your earlier assertion about timing. Merely to say that our experience of belief has layers, like being slowly stripped by a lover. It’s one thing to accept the proposition that I have come back from the dead, in absence of another explanation. Quite another for a woman of a time that has grown so very modern to believe the whole story I bring up out of the Bridgewater Jerry with me… 

Belief has its own apocalypse wrapped up in it. Once people know something is possible it doesn’t take long before it must happen. The mustness gathers pace behind all possibilities like the early stages of an avalanche. Once you start to believe you can… It’s as if people cannot bear to sit with the tension of the uncreated, of the not-yet-come-to-being… To be honest I don’t blame them, my whole body for so long has been made up of not-yet and maybe-never, and who (given the chance) wouldn’t release one’s true soul song in a spasm of apocalypse? This urge in us, it comes from a place so deep morality has never been there.

I went outside in the rain after the ticking stopped for good, and walked through the deserted streets. With my fingers I reached out to touch old buildings that I recognized with my eyes closed, dragging my pink tips along the wet rock, reading the wear and tear of a century and a half of wind and rain in the surface like a brail message from the elements. The wind seemed to play music on my exposed ribs as I walked, even though I was fully clothed for the weather. Where once I was the musician I had become the instrument. This city is the artist, out of whose dark imaginings and underbelly I’ve come forth, slouching my way up out of the sludge of forgotten things. 

I longed savagely to play music. I think the wanting was what always made the clocks stop. But even as I delicately palpitated my fingertips against the stones I could already feel it was gone. The delicious tremor of music that used to thread through my muscles and tendons, starting somewhere in my hips and rising, had been sucked away by the retreating wave as I left the water. The sea will have her sacrifices, after all. I smiled softly, sadly, because I knew in that moment, passing through the curtain of rain, what it meant and why it was worth it. Later, as you know, when I first sat in front of a piano and tried to play and felt the stump of my cut out tongue flap uselessly against my mouth’s roof I reacted somewhat less gracefully… 

Nonetheless I’ve learned that its not about where you reach at your lowest that defines your courage, but it’s what decisions you make about how you will go forward from there. The purity of the decision I would make for him again and again, will outlive and outlast the memory of that graceless tantrum, where I kicked my feet about, flailing at the great binding of the Old Woman Fate. 

When you’ve had someone you love grow old while you were away, you slow your step even in the rain. I didn’t care if I couldn’t play anymore, only that  I would find him and with whatever art was left to me I would at last find expression, in some way that would reflect the fineness and intricacy of the feeling itself. Nothing else of who I was or what I could do mattered to me by comparison to that one dread wanting… The one I had broken my body against, inside the gullet of the rivulet in flood. 

I watched for his slower moving shade to keep pace. I lined our steps up so that they came into rhythm. I had wanted to grow old with him, after all, and so sometimes now, I do... The moisture in the air makes my old man joints ache and I am forced to shuffle. My feet are made of whatever the hands of frogs are made from. This is why no one can hear the dead when we’re walking beside or behind you. We move when you move and stop when you stop. Our patience is infinite. There are no ticking clocks where we come from, that’s why when the part of me that is Other arrives there are no ticking clocks around me either… Nobody can watch you sleep quite like us. My mother died in our rocking chair and whenever she would watch me sleep afterwards she would always rock back and forth just the same, as though caught in some eternal loop. 

If one could be as the dead whilst still alive the power one would have! There are some crooked paths I’ve walked, and know of, where feral visionaries meet you with meadowsweet in their hair and wormwood on their breath, they will tell you that such a thing is termed ‘initiation’ among the hedge-wise.  

If I’m still here does this mean I’ve achieved initiation?

All I know is that my mind tries to fill the blanks in, to catch up with the life lived while I was away. My love has become a dead man while I was gone and now the wind and the rain that sleet my face become eroticized, even with their moss-bleak taste. The feelings that once belonged exclusively to the shiver of his hand grazing my skin, diffuses, in the forever-absence of that touch, into the old stone, into the thick soul of our city… Don’t think I mean an easy letting of the edges, where grief just pop goes and weasels away... No…. This is a grim, cold joy-sorrow in the pit of the gut, a cutting elation. Our city caresses me with his many hands made of wind currents, rain running down the back of my shirt, jagged bird flight, and the way stone holds the sorrow salt and the tremors of shroud-muffled voices. 

I wanted to go with him where he’d gone. I suppose I only didn’t because you cared for me... Rather than sending me to the insane asylum as would have likely been my fate if I turned up in my time from yours, you have sheltered me, tended my wounds, cooked me strange and fascinating new foods... You showed me how music could be immediately conjured which seemed to suit any mood or taste, even my eccentric ones. Soon I found songs on your machine that gave voice to the music I could no longer make with my hands but had spilling out of my heart. Maddie worked for hours on repairing as much of my clothing as could be salvaged and you brought me home replacements in the modern style for what could not be fixed. With great gusto you dressed me up in this hybrid costume, much like my own mind, straddling two eras. 

            Instead of killing myself again I walked to his old house, because you cared. As I stood outside his home on Upper Davey Street that night in the rain staring up at the windows, I was on the outside looking in again. Never to be invited inside, a stray of sorts, part of time’s beach rubble and jetsam, floating in and out of the picture with too much agility for history to get a lock on me. The type of uncatalogued item he never could quite collect... The name that gets omitted, the part of the journal torn out, the letters confiscated... A watermark here, a scrawled name there but nothing that would stand up in court...

The wind that caught my clothes, blowing through the bone tunnels of me, spiked a longing so savage I heard a wolf’s howl echoing out over a frozen tundra inside me. So stark was the desolation of this feeling-sound that I shuddered as no returning cry answered. I had thought longing to be a hot, pulsing, palpitation of sound something thick and percussive that made me sometimes wish to hit the body of my cello with my open palm and hit out a beat. But instead perfect-want is a thing of stark, cold purity. Colder than the low-soft-ache of the cello, like a violin made of ice, lupine sharp and nuclear bright. 

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Y7TAZtbqzI

You found me about dawn. I should have found it strange you knew to come to Fernleigh... It suggested a bit of knowledge about the Allports, but at the time I thought nothing of it and of it nothing... I was sitting in the gutter trying to hold so as not to fall off the surface of the world. 

            “Hey, look at me. That’s better… You’re doing so well, you get that?” Forcefully you made me hold your gaze as though with pure force of will and persuasion you could convince me I was all right. “What you’re processing at the moment… It’s huge. How many people have ever had to process something like this?”

            These words, said to fill the silence, in themselves seemed to mean very little. But what was more important was the certainty in your warm brown eyes. You seemed to believe I deserved to live, not everyone had always shared your opinion, and so I trusted you.

            “Indeed,” I replied.

            “Who are they to you?” you asked, looking up at the house.

            “You know of them? The Allports? You had heard of their family before I mentioned the name?”

            You smiled oddly at me, kind of ruefully. “I hope you’re not going to hate me when you find this out…. But when you mentioned Elizabeth Allport, Maddie and I went back through our family tree to check we were right… She was the grandmother of my great, grandmother Eileen Allport.” You came out with this all in one breath. “You don’t hate me now do you? Am I, like, descended from your arch nemesis or something?”

            “Who was your great, great grandparent?” My voice a husk of sound. “Which of the Allport children was Eileen’s parent?” 

            “Cecil Allport.” 

I swallowed down hard and closed my eyes. 

“Who was Elizabeth to you?”

“The mother of my dearest friend,” I replied quietly. Those words stuck thickly in my throat like I’d swallowed glue. “She did not wish me well, in a way, you could say... there was an action of hers that caused me much misfortune.”

Understatement sticks me together with sticking-plasters, always a sign you’ve hovering over a deep bruise. 

            “She’s the one you were setting out the witch bottles against? To avert her evil eye? Was my ancestor a witch or something? But… So… does that mean her son Cecil was your… friend?”

            I jumped at the mention of his name as I always do, even though it was the one his family called him, not the one I did, or even the one on his birth certificate. My friend was, you might say, a man of many faces. “Yes.” The fact you knew of him left of me nothing but an ache that harrowed up my lungs with its sucking power. I wanted to ask all the questions immediately, about what he did with the rest of his life, but the grief was still too near for words. 

Those moments outside his home were of the leaden hour. For focusing on the next breath that must be taken without him, and then the one after that. Grief is an endurance run and I am more of a sprinter... People depict the Victorian Age approach to mourning as hyperbolic and melodramatic but there is a discipline expressed in it that was part of our love language. To lose well and deep is part of loving what is mortal, part of holding it with no guarantees, knowing your life depends on it, and having it ripped away, or suddenly granted back, with no real understanding possible of why.

             “Are you just finding out that the love of your life married someone else, hun?”

The unexpected understanding I read in your words degloved me. Normally I’d not have confirmed it but I nodded. What was to be lost now?

“He named his son Henry, if that helps?” 

            “Lovely,” I murmured, because there weren’t really any words, but custom demanded I make a response. I was thinking through the pain of knowing there was a woman who did for him and gave him all that I never could. I was pushing through it to how this shrieking pain meant your skin and hair cells carried part of him alive into the future, so therefore it was worth it.... I found myself gazing into your face like it was a skrying ball, trying to see something of him still echoing up to the surface of manifestation and joining me in the world of the living.  

            “Your eyes are somewhat like his.”

“There’s something I want to show you,” you said getting to your feet and offering me your hand as if you were the gentleman.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iSmrryfxGM

When we arrived at Parliament lawn you showed me the textual public monuments worked into the pavement there. The first of them said: ‘In the wake of your courage I swim’ the other: ‘Sorry for not holding you in my arms.’ Upon reading I closed my eyes for a moment and they misted with tears. I didn't yet know it's meaning to its creator, but I knew what it meant to me. 

 “What do they mean?” 

You came and put your hand on my arm. “They mean the city is saying sorry to you, Henry.”

It took me some time to understand what you meant, and after that what it meant, even once you explained about the Stonewall riots and the civil rights movement. I was coming to understand that I wasn’t a deviant deserving of death in your eyes, but a fellow human carrying the albatross of a story around my neck. Because you were his flesh and blood it was important to me that you knew. “He was a good man,” I said in the tight-lipped way that people use to gloss over the raw choking power keg of life when its gets stuck in the throat of their narrative. “A kind and decent man,” I continued, gaining courage in my convictions as I used that word I was told was off limits to me. “With a beautiful soul. If anyone spoke ill of him… well… evil be to he who thinks evil of it.” 

Episode 2. Of dolls heads and demons

You really want a story about what I did next? Walked down to the corner of Argyle and Collins Street where the rivulet tunnel opens and climbed down inside to hide from people, is what I did. But I contend that part was quite unremarkable. Luckily it was only an hour or two from dawn on a weeknight and the city was quiet. So I was able to duck and weave. 

I walked at first down an avenue of cypresses that seemed to commemorate some great and terrible war I’d not yet heard about, but did not approach the monument in fear of seeing the date. I came to a place where I could watch the wide, empty eyes of the horseless, carriages. Instead of headless horseman the night streets of Hobart now bore headless carriages. 

            Also in my favour was the my feverish imagination has always been balanced by a streak of cooler reason. Observing everything from the trees, I steeled myself into a state of calm. I reasoned that these vehicles were run by some type of engine in the front, one more advanced than steam, but nonetheless non-magical. When the noisy things stopped for the red lights (moving away again at the green signal) I was able to see people inside them operating the controls, just as with a normal carriage, but with engines. Inside something was combusting other than coal. I discerned the safe way to cross the road and went about doing it.

What was far louder in me at the time than the cars or my heartbeat was the queasy autogenesis of fear. The dread that I had indeed been away longer than twenty or even thirty years... My earlier surge of faith where I’d told Arthur aloud I was coming for him was greatly rattled by this doubt that edged and thorn-needled its way into the back of my brain. Witch-pin like it gave off subtle venom, that doubt-demon. I knew all I had left going for me was the power of my determination, the pin-cushion poppet of my body endured these regular bone-deep injections, whilst on the outside I effortlessly negotiated the changed world around me. Below the surface I was still drowning, on the surface I am… well, good at things, I suppose. You will think me arrogant for saying so, but it’s true. It’s also not a choice for me whether to believe this of myself, because for me the other alternative to self-value is always death. 

            As I write this I fall again into the semi-stupor in which I wandered those nighttime streets… A functional stupor, of course, because one’s worth to this world must always be re-demonstrated, for humans forget past services very rapidly when made comfortable and complacent. Last time I stopped being functional something terrible had happened to me that I didn't fully understand as yet. So I was avoiding other humans like the concrete-spreading plague animal it seemed they had become. 

Or should that be that we have become? After what I had done I felt more human than ever somehow, up against the stark background of this miracle that tasted clean-bitter like the pith of the blood orange... I was ever so much more human than this world, ever so much more fragile than the current Spirit of the Age, I guessed from the start. Time it appears, the lineality (to coin a word) of experience is also quite deceptively delicate. It folds in like treacle and the distinction between its layers is quickly lost. This is what is important about my story. I hope you didn’t expect I was going to leave all the analysis up to you, did you? I didn’t come here to let you study me, together we will study what has occurred and together draw the conclusions. 

            A brief observation of the system for regulation of traffic and spying on another late night pedestrian allowed me to cross the highway without incident. Running where possible and walking when I fatigued I generated sufficient body heat to partially warm and partially dry my clothing. So there could be no doubt I was quick with life.

            Next I discerned where best to jump the very serious looking fence that seems to bar our descent down into the darkness. There is no sign to say it’s explicitly not allowed for citizens to crawl down into the Hobart Rivulet Tunnel but there’s a fence. As if the dark bowels of our city, seething with memory, are not quite forbidden by the rule of modernity, just strongly discouraged. A mild prohibition was never enough to prevent me finding my way into the guts of Hobart. It was where I belonged after all, was I not something that ought to have been digested by her long ago? Was I so uniquely unpalatable that of all Hobart’s dead only I had been coughed up, phlegm-covered and wriggling like a raw nerve? 

            The walls of the rivulet tunnel hissed and wriggled with voices. You could smell the history down there as strongly as you’d have smelt rot around the water in my time. History is buried into the foundations of Hobart, the skeletons of cottages of convict-hewn stone rise like stone ghosts to the sight of the late-night wayfarer. Deeper into the arteries of the city the air smelt like the effluence of well advanced capitalism. Just from the way they vented into the Undertown my nose wrinkled and I knew I wasn’t going to like what the living had been up to above. 

The rest you know. How you say I froze, like a ‘deer in headlights’, when you flooded me in torchlight. You were standing there with your modern camera, a girl who was to my perception dressed in boy’s clothes, right beside the place with the baby’s heads. You pointed at the numerous plaster castes of boneyard-white doll faces that looked out eyelessly from the walls of the tunnel. You didn’t seem worried by them or by me. 

            “My theory is that this is here to commemorate the high infant morality in Hobart during the nineteenth century. Did you know they used to call part of South Hobart ‘shadow of death valley’ back in the day?” You addressed me.

            “Yes,” I whispered, still caught staring into the bright light you wielded in your hand and forgetting to lie.  

            You turned the direction of the light on the baby head art next, so I was able to think more clearly. 

            “Well aren’t you the current reigning Smartypants of Smartypants Town?” 

            I wondered if I should agree it was likely, but I sensed you were perhaps facetious. "Well answer me this one then if you're so smart." You said this shining light on a gold painted plaque of a demon. "Whose this ugly, fella?" 

             "He looks like Typhon the many-headed monster of Greek myth, or perhaps his spawn Gorgon." I said it very quietly, as someone well aware that I wouldn't always be rewarded for knowing things. You nodded as if you were genuinely pleased to know. But all the learning in the world wasn’t going to help me out of the fix I was in, and I knew it. There was a question that would come to mean everything and it was going to hurt less to answer it now than when I would later find myself standing outside Lebrena and seeing the physical evidence.

            “When you say… the nineteenth century… what… which year would that… make it today? Please?” Even cold and injured as I was it pained me not to use my manners in a proper introduction, to say my name and ask yours, as two humans ought. But the imperative around my question had become stronger even than my good upbringing. 

I watched the motion in your eyes from incomprehension to growing fear, and who could blame you really? When some lunatic in a tunnel looking like something the ocean regurgitated asks you what year it is, it’s reasonable to feel unsettled. But you didn’t run, thanks be to Our Lady…. You stayed and told me how many years it has been. I don’t want to write about that… About what I felt. About realizing… No. I’ve got nothing more for now. Give me a different stimulus question. 

Episode 1. Out of the bridgewater jerry

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.”