The whole quay was filled with noise and it struck at me as a physical thing after the sounds of the open sea. A man stood singing just like in the streets of London, “Fish fish-o,” and I felt the globe shift beneath my feet, the fish scales shimmering with light. I stepped over small wicker cages where black swans were trapped, their scarlet beaks poking through the gaps. A woman with her skirts hitched up to her knees, her bare feet brown with dirt, sat plucking the feathers of a living bird. She plucked at its down, the finer feathers floating in the air around her; the rest of the down she placed in a basket beside her, the animal too exhausted to strike her back.
It was difficult to get my bearings, to follow Matron’s directions; the light seemed to seep into my eyes, my brain, addling me with glitter, the water struck golden. The salty lap of it hit the sandy strip of beach and I was afraid.
A riverman was leaning against a tree, enjoying his pipe, the smoke twirling up into the green-grey leaves of the eucalypts. I watched as the smoke vanished, apprehensive. On the ship I’d begun to feel weightless, the vessel lending me its buoyancy, its possibility. But now all I felt was heaviness. What if Fookes wasn’t there?
“Can I help you, miss?” the riverman asked, his white clay pipe still hanging from his lip, dangling in the balance, his boots caked in thick river clay. I stepped forward and felt his eyes on the swell of my belly. “Missus,” he corrected himself. His stare set off an itching on my belly as if a swarm of ants ran across the surface of my skin, but I was unable to scratch.
“Mrs Fookes,” I corrected him and watched his face for recognition of the name, hoping that he’d say something of my Fookes, but he said nothing. His boat was not as large as the boat my father had rowed upon the Thames; it was wedged into the sand, the prow marked Gypsy Queen. The name made me shiver.
“Are you headed down Richmond way?” I said, looking at the scrub closer to the shore. I prayed that Fookes had kept his path. A group of natives in their vardo made of sticks were gathered around a fire, partially clothed, their voices low. Another man stood smoking a clay pipe, a soldier’s jacket covering his chest, but as for his trousers, they were completely missing. I looked away. A large parrot raised its scratchy voice from the nearest tree and it echoed out above us, a yellow crown of feathers arching on top of its head.
“Aye, Richmond by and by,” he said. “For a fee.”
With effort I pulled the wedding ring off my swollen finger, dropped it in his palm and watched the circle of it spin. He picked it up and bit it between his teeth.
“I’ll take you there and back again for that. Ready when you are.” The riverman held out his hand to help me in, and this time I gratefully accepted the help.
The riverman pushed the boat into the clear water, and it made a dark tidal stain on his trousers, before he hoisted himself up into the fine boat, made of a beautiful honey-coloured wood. The water was sparkling; greenish blue and wondrous, the light fell through it like star-shine. One of the natives walked down towards us. She was dressed in petticoats and a blanket that she wore tight around her shoulders, a scarf tied firmly under her chin. Around her neck hung a pouch woven in threads of ochre and brown, and a brass crescent etched with words. Her hair and her face were as dark as Saint Sarah’s herself.
“Thanks for keeping watch on the cargo and the boat, Cora,” the riverman said.
“Come with you up river, sir?” she said and the riverman nodded. She waded through the shallow water towards the boat, but the riverman didn’t hold out his hand for her, though she was in need of assistance. I reached out but she declined and lifted herself into the boat, the edge of her blanket starting to steam in the sun.
“This is Mrs Gooseberry. Mrs Gooseberry, this is Mrs Fookes.”
I nodded at the native woman, my eyes never leaving the pouch of woven grasses around her neck; I felt a longing run through me like a note of sound ringing my entire wooden body, as hard as a woodsman’s axe.
With an oar in each hand the riverman rowed us out across the water, the salt, the eucalyptus, the strange fuzzy blossoms blooming along the bushes and the sunshine making a peppery perfume as we passed.
Cora Gooseberry took a pipe from the folds of her petticoat skirts and looked at the riverman for a light, but he shook his head that he didn’t have one. Undeterred, Mrs Gooseberry took the pipe in her teeth and sucked on the unlit stem.
My eyes followed the glittering water to the coastline that turned inlet to riverbank under the oars. What was this hell my father had spoken of? All I saw was strangeness and promise, all of it overlit, not even my bonnet shielded my eyes from the glare of this world.
Downriver a native woman picked her way over the small inlet, a baby strapped to her body with a blanket. Mrs Gooseberry called out to her and waved. She was missing part of her finger. The woman on the shore stood and waved and called back, the language their own.
I watched that missing finger until it curved back around the base of her pipe.
“What happened to your finger, Mrs Gooseberry?” I asked. The riverman never lost the rhythm of his rowing for a moment, the rushing of the water ceased and we glided on across the water that grew darker and deeper as we went down the river.
“Women’s business,” Mrs Gooseberry said and smiled and nodded.
“They cut a part of the finger off the girl infants when they are a few months old, the second part when they reach puberty,” the riverman said and Mrs Gooseberry frowned at him.
“But why?” I said, feeling the nausea rise and fall in me.
“An offering of some sort, to the deep,” the riverman said, the sun beating down on the boat, a sheen of sweat beading his face.
A kingfisher, a flashing shot of brilliance, dazzled my eye, golden and blue. It plunged into the water, a fish with jewelled scales flip-flopping between its beak before it flew back to the safety of the trees.
I looked at the brass crescent sitting on Mrs Gooseberry’s blouse and Mrs Gooseberry’s face lit up.
“I am a queen,” she said, tapping her crescent-shaped breastplate. “Governor made me so.” She grinned wider then. The queen. Her doll, my faithful constant, now buried with my mother in the embrace of the oak, the river eroding the soil, year by year. The Coronation. My father’s return. Attracted by the brightest jewel in the kingdom. I was a thief’s daughter, but no matter how agile my fingers, no matter how many times I fished out things from my father’s pockets, no matter that I’d taken a doll from a child who’d have more dolls in her life than a hundred children, I’d never be like him. My mother had been stolen from me. The loss of her shaping all that was to come. I leaned over the edge of the boat to splash water on my face, but it rose up to meet me.
The water filled my ears, my nose, my throat.
The boat disappeared above me like a dark cloud on the horizon.
The water turned from light to dark as I fell towards the bottom of the river, fish drawn to the bubbles that strung up above me, a rope to the rescue, but I had not the strength to climb it, my arms and legs not at my command.
The riverbed came closer and in the dim light the tiny minnows swam around and around, opaline flashes, the foreign bracken and the bladderwrack brushing out to touch me like fingers. And then there was a rushing sound as if all the waters of the world were converged in one place. And then I stopped falling. I was on the bottom of the riverbed, the white sand cradling me.
A curious eye peered at me, the eyelid ribbed like a cockleshell, drowsy at half hemisphere.
In the ripples of his beard of bulrushes little seahorses hooked their tails, little twirling fins. His grizzly chest was covered in sea lichen and moss and tiny molluscs whose frilled lips held on with a kiss. His breath made its own tributaries.
Oh, how the thing laughed then, a wide stormy laugh, a little fish darting in and out of his mouth during its duration. The water vibrated around us, a living thing.
“You know me not, little human thing?” he said and his eyes flashed, seaglass. Then he sighed, the sound of water rushing. He sucked deep on an abandoned clay pipe and puckered his lips upon it; a plume of bubbles soared to the surface of the river. With a barnacled hand, he caressed my hair which rippled upwards in the water like black coral.
All the world was refracted light. I blinked and she was there.
My mother. Patrin. In the water, willing me to move, but all I wanted was her and I reached out. Her dark hair had not faded, nor had she aged; all the love she had for me shone from her face. We were the cogs to each other’s wheel, orbiting each other, even after death. She’d been with me all along, always the water. She pulled at my arm and I blinked again. The air dispersed from my lungs and all the faceted light of the water turned dark. But then my mother called to me by my secret name; it swelled in my chest like a song, the name she had given me at birth, and something in me snapped open, desperate for breath.
Above me was the shadow of the boat’s hull, the reflection of faces peering over the edge, hands breaking the surface.
My mother pulled at me and I felt my body leave the sandy riverbed. I saw the diamonds in the water, all sparkling, shooting stars through the water, my clothes heavy. I hung on to my mother, my heart tied like a rag on a wishing tree, full of her, up towards the light. Together we broke the surface, the water teeming from my face. She was with me in the water, one arm around my waist, the other holding the side of the boat. She had her hand beneath my arm, trying to pull the heavy weight of me, my skirts, dragging over the edge like a fisherman’s haul.
On the boat I heaved with air. The riverman leaned over and helped Cora Gooseberry, Queen of Sydney, back into the boat. I blinked river water from my eyes. It was she who had pulled me clear, pulled me back to life.