The sad, sad, sad story of Mr. K

One cold December day, an ordinary American guy called Mr. K was walking along the road towards the future when he was mugged by Modernist and left for dead.

Postmodernist came by, heard Mr. K moan, and gave him another kicking.

Evangelical came by and left Mr. K an autographed copy of a Red-Letter Bible.

Roman Catholic came by and left Mr. K a get-well card with a picture of Our Lady of Lourdes on it.

Anglican came by and left Mr. K a glass of sherry.

Progressive came by and left Mr. K a skinny latte.

Jehovah’s Witness came by – correction: two Jehovah’s Witnesses came by – talked to the unconscious Mr. K about End-Time signs for twenty minutes, and left a tract.

Orthodox came by and made the sign of the cross.

Baptist came by and didn’t make the sign of the cross.

Presbyterian came by and looked cross.

Charismatic came by and garrulously shouted at Mr. K.

Quaker came by and kept contemplatively shtum before Mr. K.

Methodist came by and sang a hymn to Mr. K. Then three more.

Prosperity Gospel came by and stole Mr. K’s wallet.

Humanist came by and left some flowers.

New Atheist came by and drank the sherry. Then came back for the flowers.

Finally, a man with ostentatiously coiffured hair the colour of the orange juice he was drinking came by in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce Phantom. The man told his chauffeur to slow down, rolled down his window, thought “Loser!”, then told the chauffeur to step on it. Startled into consciousness by the acrid smell of the man’s cologne, Mr. K survived. Indeed, he prospered. In his prayers he always thanked God for that Good Samaritan who stopped with (what he thought were) the smelling salts, and he told anyone who would listen, “He’s just the kind of caring man we need for President.”

And so it came to pass. Of course, Mr. K was never able to put a face, let alone a name, to the bearer of the aroma of ammonia he never forgot. And sad, sad, sad to say, in October 2016 he lost his shirt at a casino in New Jersey and cursed the day he was born.

A guide dog at holy communion

On the mountain where my parents live, deep in the rainforest, there is an unassuming red-brick chapel where the people go to pray. I went there one Sunday morning, following the winding way through the forest, past the winery and the empty cafés and the smoking chimneys where the villagers still slept nestled among the trees. I parked the car across the street near the old log sign. The organ was playing. A plump of ducks crossed the road in front of me, preening themselves and gossiping amiably like the clucking women who waddled their way into the church. High in the treetops the whipbirds sung their morning antiphons. I stepped over a puddle and went inside.

“The Lord be with you.” The service was led by a white-haired skeleton, profoundly old and happy, a long-retired priest who laboured over the prayerbook, scrupulously working at each syllable and then looking up and beaming deafly at the congregation whenever we replied. “And also with you!”

When we all came forward for Holy Communion I noticed a man I had not seen before. He stepped out from the pew right at the back. He was wearing sunglasses, which would have been strange enough in church, and he had with him a dog, a labrador, who led the man into the line and brought him step by step towards the altar. When they reached the front, the dog sat down and faced the altar while the priest put bread into the man’s hand and raised the cup for him to drink. As soon as the cup withdrew, the faithful dog was on his feet again, gravely leading his master back to the pew. He was a good dog, anyone could see that. He behaved with all the ceremony and propriety that you could ask of someone who has to go to church wearing a collar. He was not himself a believer, not exactly, but he respected the thing for what it was and loved it because he knew, by an unerring instinct, that his master loved it.

After church I met the blind man outside and asked about the dog. He loved the dog and told me how they went to church together every week. For ten years the dog had led him and they never missed a Sunday.

I told him how impressed I was by the dog’s behaviour at Holy Communion. “I have a labrador,” I said, “and he would never have the discretion to wait facing the altar while I took the bread. He would sit there, sure enough, but he would turn his face towards me and his eyes would silently implore me for a crumb of consecrated bread, and then, when I refused, his hopeful eyes would brim with mourning.”

“They are good dogs,” the man agreed. “Their respect for food is very deep. That is why he understands the eucharist. He grasps it not as an idea but in its real depths. It is food. He knows that.”

“Ten years,” I said. “That is five hundred times he has gone with you to the altar.”

“Sometimes,” the blind man said, “I have felt his hunger. There is a holiness in all God’s creatures. The bread is offered in thanksgiving for all that lives.”

I said, “Perhaps in heaven there will be a eucharist for him.”

But the man said, “No, I don’t believe it. There will be no eucharist on the other side, no church or priest, no bread or wine. We have these things now because we need them. But on that day, need will be no more. There will be no sun because the Lamb will be our light. No eucharist, because everything will be thanksgiving.”

Morning found its way belatedly through the trees and we stood there transfigured in the sunlight. The ducks went by again; the dog watched them coolly, with studied indifference. The old deaf priest shuffled up and greeted us one last time and went inside to close the church.

“Besides,” the blind man said as I turned to go. “He has gone five hundred times to church already. He is a working dog. It is the same with him as with a priest: church is work. Whatever else heaven might be for him, it will not be anything that includes spending another solitary second inside a church!”

Maybe he was right, I don’t know. There is no use dwelling on it now. All this was years ago. By now the dog will have retired from active life. By now he will have died. What God thinks of him, no one can say. But I will always remember the way he sat and waited, lovingly facing the altar, while beside him the one he loved stood blessed under the name of God and ate the world’s redemption.

In which the boy gathers leaves

We had all been cooped up too long inside because of the rain. The children were growing restless. I was in the armchair by the window watching my son thump his sister over the head for the ninth time with a big red picture book. My spirits had sunk into a wet-weather torpor, which is why I had not tried to stop him the previous eight times. Thwack! He did it again. Again she cried out in protest: lashed out to hit him: retreat: running footsteps: maniacal laughter. You could see from the way my daughter clenched her fists that chaos was about to consume us all.

Wearily I roused myself, remembering my solemn duty to maintain a semblance of moral order in this domestic menagerie. I stood. I strode down the corridor, pausing in front of a mirror to check that my appearance was sufficiently dignified. The Representative of Moral Order can scarce afford to let himself go. I entered my son's bedroom. He was not there. I slid back the wardrobe door. There he was, crouching in the shadows of hung clothes, clutching his red picture book and grinning like a gangster. My daughter came into the room after me. Thwack! Quick as lightning the boy had leapt out from his hiding place and clobbered her again. She shrieked. I knew that thunder was crashing somewhere in the distance on this dark globe.

I apprehended the offender before he could make his getaway. I knelt down among the ruins of lego to look him squarely in the eye. He looked back at me the way James Cagney looks at the policeman in one of those old movies. I cannot remember whether he had a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. It was not his fault. The boy was born in sin: his father and his father's father were sinners before him: and besides, it had been raining for three days straight. Very sternly I spoke to the little outlaw. "Son," I told him, "son, I need your help." I saw a glimmer of virtue returning to his eyes. "I've got a very important job for you. Do you think you can do it? Or..." – I glanced around the room – "shall I find someone else?"

He stood up very straight, a tiny man ready to make his mark upon the world. He promised: "I can do it." I looked him up and down with a sceptical eye. He implored me: "I can do it."

Take it from me, reader, your six-year-old boy is no different from a grown man in this respect, that he loves nothing better than having a job to do. It makes him feel very grand. It takes his attention away from other things, like perpetrating random acts of violence with a picture book.

"What I need, my boy," I told him, standing up straight and tall and hitching my thumbs into my trousers, "what I need is leaves."

"Ah!" said the boy, all interest. "Leaves!" He put down the picture book. He looked up at me with new respect. 

"Here's what I need you to do," I told him. "First, put on your gumboots. Second, get your umbrella. Third – are you still listening?" His eyes begged me to continue. "Third, I want you to go outside and collect thirty different varieties of leaves. Thirty – each one different from all the others – do you understand me?"

The boy did not answer because he was already halfway down the hall, hopping wildly on one foot and pulling a boot on to the other. Before I could even congratulate myself on a job well done, the little chap had seized his umbrella and flung himself out into the yard where he set at once to work scavenging among the shrubs and trees. It's exactly as I told you, reader: a boy likes to be gainfully employed.

Forty minutes later he was still bringing in the leaves. This was no shoddy workmanship either. No cracked leaves, no dry or haggard specimens, no duplicates slyly passed off as different species. Each leaf was a work of art, distinct in shape and vivid in colour, lovingly plucked and brought inside and arranged on the table, all glistening with rain. My son set them out neatly, side by side, sorted according to the principles of his own mysterious taxonomy. When he arrived with the fifteenth leaf and laid it down with all the rest, I complimented him on the collection. I confessed that I never even knew there were so many varieties of leaves in our garden, or that they were so beautiful. He hurried out again into the rain and was gone a long time.

It was nearly dark when the boy came back inside. He stamped mud across the floor and flung down the wet umbrella. He stood there glowering at me with a thundercloud in his face. I was about to inquire if something was the matter when he blurted out, "Thirty! We don't even have thirty different kinds!" He crossed his arms and turned away from me, shaking with rage.

I tried to reassure him. "It doesn't matter. How about twenty? Twenty leaves will be enough. Twenty will be fine, just fine."

"We don't have twenty," the boy snapped back. "Fifteen! There are only fifteen types of leaves. How dare you tell me to get thirty. It's impossible."

There would be no more leaf-gathering today, anyone could see that. Now that he had declared a strike, there would be no way under heaven of getting my disgruntled labourer back on the job. Not that it had been a complete failure. It had kept him occupied for the better part of an hour. It had dramatically reduced the incidents of violent crime in our living room. But now I had other problems to deal with.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Honestly, fifteen leaves will be plenty. I really don't need thirty."

"Don't need them!" he spat the words back at me like a curse. "Don't need them!" Like cursing a second time.

"You have done a good job," I said. "It is very good. The leaves are excellent." We stood there together looking at them spread out across the table.

But my son was no longer pleased with the leaves. He was in one of those glass-half-empty kinds of moods. What I saw were fifteen flawless, glistening leaves, lovingly gathered and assembled. What I saw was a job well done. What he saw was the other fifteen leaves, fifteen missing leaves, fifteen impossible-to-acquire specimens. What he saw was a job half-done. And I don't think I have to tell you that it made him very, very cranky.

I reached out a fatherly hand to comfort the boy, but he lurched away from me. In a single motion, swift as death, he swept up all the leaves into his arms and began to crush them. An involuntary cry escaped my lips: the leaves! But there was no stopping him now. He tore them, smashed them, pulverised them, scattered them across the floor like so many dead leaves.

It was, in short, a tantrum against all the glory of nature. Like any boy in such a mood, he would have destroyed the universe, and more besides, if he had had it in his power. I turned and left the room, whistling a Frank Sinatra tune as though nothing had happened. Fly me to the moon and let me play among the stars. I felt for the boy, reader, please believe me when I say that. But the Representative of Moral Order mustn't encourage tantrums against the glory of nature. No good will come of it.

I picked up a comic book and sat down to read it, still whistling from time to time. Fill my life with song and let me sing forevermore. Minutes passed. I wondered if the boy was ok. No sign of him anywhere. The night train rattled by. I turned the pages of the comic book.

Then I heard a sort of rustling. I looked up. Before me stood the boy. He stood there facing me, arms by his side, saying nothing. He waited for my full attention. Neither of us said a word. I closed the comic book and put it down. He raised a hand and I saw that it held one of the leaves. One last big perfect maple leaf that had not been destroyed. I smiled at the sight of it. I was glad one leaf had been saved. I was pleased that all his hard work had not been for nothing. For one rash misguided second I thought he had brought it as a peace offering.

That was before the child calmly placed the maple leaf into his mouth and ate it. His gaze was fixed on me as though by nails. His face was as blank as stone as he slowly moved his little jaws, chewing the leaf over and over, crushing the lovely organism between his molars. When he had done this for what seemed a very long time, he turned and left the room.

I went into the kitchen just in time to see a small boy leaning over the railing outside and spitting bits of leaf into the garden.

Five minutes later he had forgiven me and we were building lego houses on the floor. We never spoke of the leaves again.

But today, when nobody was looking, I went out in the yard and plucked a single green leaf from the maple tree. Autumn is here and there are only a few green leaves left. I wanted to get one before they are all gone, before they have all turned red and fallen to the cold earth. I held the perfect leaf up to the light, studying the tiny veins. I turned it over in my hand. Then I raised it, very tentatively, and put it in my mouth. I bit down once, winced, and spat. It was just as I thought. Like eating poison. I considered the way the boy had chewed it over and over, eyes hard, face like stone. The taste of maple leaf lingered in my mouth. I thought: Shakespeare: Dostoevsky: the Bible: it is all true. And my heart thrilled with love and fear.

The man who told stories

There was once a man who lived at the bottom of a hole, and every day he was forced to tell stories. He lived in the hole because of the monkeys who, thirty years before, had plundered his village and taken him captive and dragged him to their city and thrown him into a hole in the ground. Each night, just after sundown, the monkeys would gather around the hole for their bedtime story. If the man was too slow to begin the story the monkeys would kick stones and dirt into the hole until their prisoner stammered out his frightened "Once upon a time." When the story was finished, the monkeys would throw down some bananas and some bottled water, and the man would eat and drink greedily, for this was his only meal each day, and he lived in a perpetual state of gnawing hunger.

As he told his stories, the man had to proceed with the greatest caution and delicacy, not only because he would be refused food if the story was not good enough, but also because an unsatisfying story could make the monkeys react in unpredictable and dangerous ways.

There were times in the middle of a story when the monkeys would start screeching and hissing and scratching each another's eyes and throwing rocks into the hole, and the man would have to do some very quick thinking to alter the plot or introduce a new character or bring the villain to a grisly end. When a story ended happily the monkeys would grow very hushed and grateful and contented. When a story ended sadly but beautifully, the monkeys would shake their heads in silent wonderment and creep quietly back to their houses for the night, and the man would get to eat his bananas in peace and quiet. Sometimes when he was narrating a story of particular sadness and beauty, from where he sat at the bottom of the hole he would hear the monkeys crying and blowing their noses.

Once, when a story had ended badly – a character they loved had died – the monkeys rioted and began tearing their clothes and breaking glass and setting their houses on fire. Their entire civilisation might have been threatened had not the man called the monkeys back and told them a sequel in which their beloved character – a purple starfish named Rick who was a private detective with a hardened outlook on life, a history of alcoholism, and a weakness for the wrong kinds of women – turned out to be not dead after all but only unconscious, and he escaped and was saved and the villains were apprehended and everything ended well. Rick the starfish detective was to appear in over nine hundred other stories, until the man in the bottom of the hole could not bear it anymore; even thinking of Rick made him nauseous. So he had created a new character named Sam. Sam was very different from Rick. He was a clam, not a starfish, and he solved murder cases using nothing but lucid reasoning and his own uncanny powers of observation. Sam the clam drank bourbon whisky and had a gritty outlook on life and most of his stories involved his seduction by a mysterious femme fatale. For six or seven years the man in the hole told stories about Sam and the monkeys were very pleased and after a while they forgot all about Rick the starfish, which was a great relief to the man in the hole.

But after thirty years like this, there came a day when the man found he could tell no more stories. No matter how much the monkeys screamed and bared their teeth at him, he just could not get the words out. Perhaps it was the inadequate living conditions that had given him writer's block; perhaps it was the bland diet. Whatever the explanation, one wintry night when the moon was high the man collapsed on to his knees and explained to his captors that he could not think of a story. "I'm sorry," he told them helplessly. "Tonight there will be no story." As he spoke the fateful words, the moon went behind a cloud and the sky went black and the hole grew darker and colder than ever. The man covered his ears as the monkeys shrieked at him. He covered his face with his hands as the monkeys kicked dirt and stones and sticks into the hole.

Then the monkeys began to tear at one another with their fingernails, scratching and biting one another, consumed by a blind animal rage. For a moment they forgot all about their prisoner in the hole. And a moment was all it took. For at that moment the man, wearied by the monkeys' violent and uncharitable ways, stood up straight and peered out of the hole. The hole was about as deep as his shoulders, and with only a little difficulty he found that he could push his elbows out of the hole and heave himself up and climb out. He dusted himself off. He had never thought to climb out before, because like most storytellers he was not a practical person but a daydreamer who, for thirty years, had spent all his time sitting on the ground planning his next story. But it felt good now to be standing in the open air. He took a deep breath and walked off down the street. By now the monkeys were rioting. The man stopped for a second to watch a group of them set a police car on fire. They were so preoccupied with their angry nihilism that they didn't even noticed as their prisoner left the city and walked off into the woods.

The man walked half the night through the woods until he came to the edge of a great lake. He was given passage across the lake by a ferryman who smoked a pipe and whistled through his teeth and had the name Mavis tattooed across his arm. On the other side, the man went down a little trail and found the road, just as he'd remembered it, and from there he managed to hitch a ride back to the village where he had lived all those years ago, before he had ever been taken captive by the wicked monkeys.

The sun was coming up as he walked into the village. Everywhere he looked he saw people and places that he remembered. But everyone looked at him strangely, no one recognised him, for in the time he had been gone he had grown old, his face had grown wrinkled with care, his eyes were pale, his beard white as snow. Taking him for one of the hobos who used to wander from town to town in those days, a kindhearted woman ushered him into her house and sat him down by the fire. All the children gathered round and stared at him expectantly.

"Are you hungry?" said the woman. "You can join us for porridge if you like." The children watched to see what he would say.

The man, who had eaten nothing but bananas for thirty years, said with genuine feeling, "Porridge would be wonderful." And he did his best to smile at the watching children, though they retreated in fear when he bared his yellow teeth at them.

While the woman was ladling steaming porridge into wooden bowls she gave the stranger a sideways look and clucked sympathetically and said, "Poor soul. You look as if you've got a story to tell."

"No," the man pleaded. "I don't." And he covered his face with his hands and wept.

Phone call from uncle (overheard in a London cafe)

In a crowded cafe near Trafalgar Square, a crumpled old donnish-looking gentleman put down the book he had been reading and made a phone call. Though I was sitting at the other side of the room, I had the benefit of hearing the conversation quite distinctly since the gentleman bellowed every syllable at the top of his lungs, holding the phone at a distance from his face like a singer with a microphone. I have thus recorded his words for posterity, as a distillation of general sound advice for young people everywhere.

Hullo! Now I wanted to say I'm frightfully sorry I've not come to see you. I know we talked about it, and I haven't forgot to come, but I'm afraid it's been quite impossible because, as it were, of the weather. It's been awfully cold and wet in the city – sunny from time to time, you understand, but very cold as a rule – and I can't get out much in weather of that sort. But I hear you've settled in, and I wanted, as it were, to say hello and find out how you're doing. So then: how are you finding things in Sussex? And where are you staying? Do you have, as it were, a flat? And are you sharing it with three or four other characters, or do you have your own little place all to yourself? Ah, I see, and these other characters, what are they like? That is to say, do you get along with them? And do you all, as it were, eat together? And how often do you take these meals together? Excellent. I suppose it's one of those little flats with a shared bathroom and loo somewhere in the building? No? Your own loo? Splendid, splendid, excellent. And how are you finding university? I'm sorry we didn't to get to talk about your Johnson paper, we could certainly have had a little talk about that, but I'm sure the paper went splendidly all the same. And what is the teaching like, how do you find it? I suppose by now you've found the good men who are worth hearing? I suppose you're rushing back and forth taking in lectures by all the best people? And have you been all right, because last year you were really quite depressed. How is all that business now? Do you get out and do things? I mean, apart from study and socialising, do you go out, as it were, to discos? What do you do then? Are you involved in any clubs, that is to say, university clubs apart from study? I see. Are there any hobbies, pastimes, that sort of thing? You do what? Now the trouble with poker is that in the end one always ends up losing one's money, so stay away from poker from now on. And what about girls, do you see any girls? Have you managed to find, as it were, a girlfriend? And where does one go to meet girls in Sussex? I see, I see. It was rather different in my day, quite a different thing. Girls today are concerned about hygiene and cleanliness and that sort of business. It really makes it a lot harder for a chap. But you mustn't let it get you down. I'm not talking specifically about sex, if you catch my drift, but you must try to find a girlfriend if you can, just do your best, but above all, don't get too concerned about it. But you must certainly try to get out more often to places with girls. Get out, as it were, in the evenings. Good man, good man. Now then, here is what we shall do. When the weather improves I shall come to see you in Sussex, and we shall have, as it were, a drink together. It'll be soon, soon. But until then: goodbye!

The monk's toes

Tarrawarra Abbey, All Souls' Day

So it turns out I have feet. Two of them. They squat like white toads on the green grass, wrinkled, sprouting hairs. Every once in a while the toes twitch and sometimes when they do this a blade of grass pops through one of the cracks between the toes. It gives me joy to see the grass pop through so suddenly.

It appears there is something wrong with the toes, for each of them has grown a curious yellowish claw. What are they for? What will the feet do with these sharp protrusions? Use them to catch prey? Dig holes? Peel fruit? They could, I suppose, be used to soothe me if I brought my mouth down very close to chew them. Chewing the nails along my fingers is a thing that I have always liked to do, and I have always found it soothing. But the toes do not look appetising, and besides, a centipede is making his way across one foot and I would never want to startle him or to bite his little legs off by mistake. Walk on, little brother! I will keep an eye out for you and make sure no harm comes to you!

And how did they get so wrinkled, my toes? The rest of me is young, youthful, very fresh and new, a  spring chicken. But the toes are prunes. They look, if I am not mistaken, nearly a hundred years old. There must be some mistake. I check my legs, running both hands from the knees down to the ankles. No, there is no denying it, those feet are definitely my feet, the toes my toes. Well. That is disappointing. I forgive you, toes! I hold nothing against you!

Just think, I must have been lugging these toes around with me all this time but never knew it. Oh, I suppose I might have caught a glimpse of them from time to time. I recall trimming the nails once or twice. I recall showering, toes being washed and dried with a towel. I must have noticed them too the time I cut my toe, for I must have cut it once upon a time, the scar is proof. I am sorry if I hurt you, toe. Forgive me! Let us speak no more about it!

Let us say then that I have seen these toes before, yes, that I have quite definitely seen them, but had never truly noticed their existence until now, until today, until I pulled my shoes off and sat down under this kind wise tree and prayed and stared for one hour at my toes.

The centipede has stopped to take a look around. He cannot decide whether to walk across the toes, five arduous hairy hills, or to go back where he came from. He is sniffing around with his antennae. Perhaps he is trying to establish if this is all dead meat, these feet, or a living thing; he wants to know if he should start eating me now or come back later. A little later, brother! A little longer and I will lie down in the ground and feed you.

The tree's big shade is very good to me. It makes it good to sit here praying and looking at my feet. The branches creak when the wind comes up the hill. Some of the leaves fall down but not too many. I lie back in the grass and look up at the branches that stretch into the sky, a leafy ladder. Sometimes, I have often felt it, a great urge has come upon me to climb the ladder. I would go up to the highest branches and look out from the treetop. I would love to climb your branches, sister, and to look down at the river. Nobody would see me there but I would see the winding river and the bridge and the cows over the first or second hill. One day I will do it, I know I will. One day, sister, when I am younger I will climb every branch until I reach the top. And then I will climb back down smiling at the terrific secret of it and climb down under the ground and rest there in the shade with my toes tucked under your roots for fertiliser, deep down there beside my brothers, and all of us will pray under the ground and feed you and feed the grass and I will be a great feast for the little tickly centipedes which I love.

But not today. I am only resting. This is just the dress rehearsal. Some days, on days like this, the thought of dying grows so big in me that I am frightened that my face will break in two from smiling.

Edward J. Edwards: a biography of the founder of our civilisation

PREFACE

Though no one would deny that Edward J. Edwards is the founder of civilisation as we know it today, the story of his life, his career, and his untimely death has until now never been told in a complete and satisfying way. Many are the books, the journal articles, the conference papers, the postgraduate dissertations on Edwards' work. But they are partial; they consider the minutest details but miss the great outlines. They sever the man from his work, and on that account even their most satisfying conclusions have about them something cold and unpersuasive. I have studied the literature; I have attended the conferences where Edwards' ideas are parcelled out like items at a yard sale. I have seen how his thoughts are bought and sold. I have watched the scholars haggling over prices. But Edwards – Edwards himself, Edwards the personality, Edwards the man behind the work – where is he in all this? Who is he?

Naturally it would be impossible for any writer to give a comprehensive account of such a mighty subject. To present Edwards adequately would require another polymath, another Edwards. Who among us could even begin to take the measure of Edwards' contributions not only to theology, philosophy, psychiatry, theosophy, but also to chemistry, neurobiology, art history, philology, Egyptology? And that is to leave aside his stranger, harder to evaluate experiments in poetry, music, sculpture, as well as the anatomical sculpture of plastination. Yet without some idea of how and why Edwards spread his genius across these far-flung continents of learning and inquiry, how can we ever hope to fathom that one great all-consuming labour toward which he bent the full power of his mind: I speak, of course, of anastology. We will, I believe, never fathom the depths of the science of anastology until we come to terms – somehow – with its discoverer, its pioneer, its architect and priest. 

That is why I have resolved to write this book. Not merely to uncover some isolated aspects of Edwards' thought, nor to unravel some of the complex strands of his legacy, but to uncover the person himself – the Man behind the Work.

I do not, of course, presume to be able to explain the mind of Edward J. Edwards. One does not explain a thing like that, any more than one explains poetry or hatred or the immense blank beauty of our poisoned seas. I do, however, intend to take a wide view, abandoning the safe limitations of the specialised monograph and seizing as my theme the man himself – his childhood, his studies, his travels, his career, his work habits, his relationships, as well as the tangled circumstances surrounding his death. Only then, I believe, will it be possible to provide a clear and (as far as possible) comprehensive view of what Edwards' work was fundamentally about.

To speak of his achievement is hardly necessary. But to say what that achievement was for – that is the aim that I have set myself in this book. How far I may succeed is for the reader to judge.

It is not hard to see why no one until now has attempted a comprehensive study of Edwards' life. For one thing, there is the whole history of the heresy trials and the Anastological Wars – with all that this entailed for the freedom and limits of scholarly inquiry into anastological science, especially in Europe and North America. Then there is the destruction of so many of Edwards' writings and personal papers at the time of his death – a melancholy obstacle for the would-be biographer, notwithstanding scholars' careful reconstruction of several writings from the fragments that survived. To these challenges must be added the peculiarities of Edwards' working habits. A person whose research was carried out in libraries, universities, and laboratories might indeed have left behind a colourful trail of documentary evidence. But a life such as Edwards' leaves for posterity precious few institutional traces, given his tendency to pursue his research in slums, factories, brothels, insane asylums, not to mention of course the many morgues and cemeteries where Edwards laboured in his final years.

All this has prevented earlier scholars even from contemplating the audacity of a comprehensive biography. But our frustrating reliance on partial and piecemeal interpretations of Edwards' thought has emboldened me to attempt this work, in spite of its obvious limitations. It is my hope that this biography will enable a fuller appreciation of the huge and multiple dimensions of Edwards' legacy, and will inspire a more penetrating insight into the science (what some, before the Wars, falsely called the miracle) of anastology. 

This work is dedicated to my grandfather, a first-generation anastological subject (born 2 April 2011, died 28 December 2073, resurrected 3 January 2074), and a constant source of inspiration and encouragement in my work.

The song: a short story

After dinner he felt so happy that he went into the other room and wrote a song, full of small words of simple gladness. When it was finished he brought it to her and said, Look, I wrote you a song.

She said, All this time you were so silent, I thought you must be mad at me, I thought you must be brooding, I thought you no longer loved me, I thought you were all alone, I thought you might be thinking of someone else.

He said, But I only think of you.

When she sat down to read the song, she was silent a long time while her heart within her grew glad and boundless as the heart of a child. Watching her carefully from the corner of his eye, he wondered if it was his fault that she had suddenly grown so quiet, so sullen and so subdued, if he had done something to offend her, if she still loved him, if she had ever really loved him, if she was thinking of somebody else, if she was all alone in her thoughts, alone beside him in the pale lamplight with the song of his heart in her hands.

Hurt: a short story

BOY: That’s what I’ll do! This’ll really cheer you up! I’ll clip a clothes peg to your tail! And put rubber bands around your ears!

DOG (looking up with sad eyes): I’d rather be hurt by you than loved by anyone else.

Dreaming of tigers

Two nights ago, my wife dreamt of tigers. In the morning she told me. A tiger bounding through the house, big and terrible yet somehow innocent as a kitten, purring and growling with ferocious hungry joy.

I said, I suppose it is the dog.

She said, Yes, when he sleeps beside the bed I hear him breathing and stirring in his sleep.

I said, Like all dogs he dreams of hunting.

She said, The dreadful chase, the murderous lunge, the bloody feast and bones.

I said, He is never happier than in those dreams.

She said, And in my sleep I must have heard him dreaming, and so I dreamt of tigers.

The next night I went to sleep after a long sad day, and I dreamt I was standing outside on the lawn as a tiger came towards me, his great paws pounding the earth like drums. I looked into the tiger’s face and loved him, and I was seized by a sudden horror that I would be torn and eaten in one of his savage spasms of reckless unselfconscious joy.

When I awoke I told my wife. Had I dreamt of tigers because of the happy snarling sleeping dog beside the bed? Or was it my wife’s slow breathing that I heard as she lay beside me, naked and dreaming of tigers, a dark tendril of her imagination creeping across the bed into my mind, her quickening heartbeat echoing like dreadful footfalls in my dream? Was it my own dream tiger that I saw, or hers?

Giggly theology: Owen responds to Off the Shelf

My video on six types of reading has provoked a brilliant and provocative response from one of America's youngest philosophers. Here is Owen, son of R. O. Flyer and grandson of Roger Flyer, subjecting my video to a stringent critical analysis:



I'm especially impressed by the way he bursts into peals of laughter when he hears the name "Chesterton": the word tends to have the same effect on me.

In fact, I once missed out on an important job opportunity simply because the interviewer – the dean of Harvard Divinity School – happened to mention the name of G. K. Chesterton. We sat in the autumnal light of the dean's office, facing one another across a polished mahogany desk beneath the shadow of towering bookshelves and the high baroque majesty of that Ivy League ceiling. "... And that's the real problem with someone like G. K. Chesterton," he said.

I cleared my throat. I shifted in my seat. I felt my nose twitch as I stifled a little giggle. I concentrated all my mental powers on suppressing the shaking that had started somewhere deep in my diaphragm. I wiped a solitary tear from my eye. I breathed.

At last after a few moments I had calmed myself. I coughed politely into my hand, and opened my mouth to make an erudite remark about Catholic thought on distributist economics – when, to my horror, the dean leaned back in his chair, coffee cup in hand, and said the dreadful word again: "Chesterton." All my defences collapsed. It was as though a gigantic hand had seized me by the rib cage and given me a fierce shake. I covered my mouth. I heard a terrific snort. I wiped my eyes and said, "I'm terribly sorry, I do beg your pardon. We were speaking, I believe, of Ches – Ches – Chester –"

And then it happened. The Dean of the Divinity School leapt from his chair as though stung; coffee shot from his cup like a missile and splattered across his lap, across the floor, across the papers on the desk, across my lovingly shined black shoes. For, before I had quite pronounced the name of that immense theological humorist, my lungs seemed to have erupted in a single, tremendous, high-pitched, belching great guffaw, just as if a bewildered donkey had burst into the room. I covered my mouth. I was mortified. I began to apologise, leaning forwards in my seat and scrambling to remove the coffee-sodden papers from the mahogany desk.

Then I heard it again, that terrible sound, that startled guffaw. And before I knew what was happening, I had blurted out the name at last, bellowed it, all in capital letters – "CHESTERTON!" – not so much a name as an air raid siren. And it was only then that I knew it was really too late: I would never get the job, would never hold a position at Harvard Divinity School, would never fulfill my dream of becoming Administrative Assistant to the Dean. For just as Satan fell from heaven, so I had plummeted from my chair on to that luxuriant coffee-stained carpet, and was rolling about the floor in the shrieking grip of a helpless, hilarious, humiliating theological hysteria.

Curls: a short story

For J. M.

There was once a man whose scalp was blighted by an appalling shock of red curls. He had suffered from this condition ever since the first nurses had poked their heads over the edge of his crib beneath the glaring lights, tickling his tummy and saying, “My oh my, would you just look at that hair!” His mother dressed him in an array of hideous orange costumes while he blew bubbles of spittle and flailed his arms about in protest (he tried to undo the buttons and remove the clothes, but could never quite keep his infant hands steady: trying to control them was like chasing a pair of rabbits), and all the neighbours came by to say, “Well halloo dair liddle bubbyboy, oooh aren’t your wittle curls so adoowable, awww and lookit your bootiful wittle itty-bitty owange outfit, ooh wittle schmooky-poochie-poo, aren’t you jes so pwetty, yes, coochie-coochie-coochie-coo.”

He was disgusted by the attentions of these women, the slobbery humiliations of their lipsticked advances, their plump bejewelled fingers jabbing his ribcage, their wobbling jowls looming over him like a German airship, and above all their rambling rhapsodic homilies about his hair. He tried to ward them off, waving his arms furiously, but that only seemed to draw them like flies to a honey pot. He tried to frighten them away, howling and screaming and kicking like a mule, but then they only redoubled their efforts, stroking and cajoling him, or even scooping him up and flinging him over the vertiginous heights of their shoulders, or squashing him against their intolerable dry breasts while they sighed and crooned, wobbling about in the throes of a frightening and ludicrous dance.

But he was a kind-hearted fellow, even at that age, and he never once blamed all this on the incorrigible women, or on his unfaithful mother who had let them into the house. No, he laid the blame right where it belonged: on that abomination of curls that perched upon his head, turning his pale face into a gleaming beacon, a round white road sign circled in red.

When he was five years old, the pretty little French girl and her ugly French parents moved in next door. He was madly, fiercely in love with her for exactly three minutes, from the moment she stepped out of the car into the sunlight, licking a strawberry paddle pop like a cat, until she walked over to him, brushed back the black fringe from her startling green eyes, and said, “Bonjour, how do you do, you must be my new neighbour, my name’s Juliette, I’m from Paris, that’s in France, do you like my new dress, I like your hair, what’s your name, are you a boy or a girl?” By the time the first few words had escaped her lips, he knew he was happier than he had ever been in his life; by the time she pronounced the lovely syllables of her name, he was preparing his marriage proposal and wondering how many children they should have; by the end of her speech, he hated her more than anyone he’d ever known, and instead of answering her impertinent question he screwed his face up like a ghoul, stuck out an angry pink tongue, gave her a good hard shove in the shoulder, and wiped his hand on the side of his shorts, exclaiming, “Eeeeew girls’ germs,” before scampering back inside like a frightened possum.

No, he never was a great ladies’ man, a fact that is hard to account for unless we put it down to that slithering snakepit upon his brow.

As far as hairdressing goes, his mother lacked the tools, the training, the experience, the eye for detail, and the even temper to ever really distinguish herself in that field. But she had a wooden stool, a pair of scissors, and a comb, and so, two or three times a year, she would take him out to the backyard and sit him down to cut his hair. To say he had mixed feelings about these episodes would be euphemistic. It is true that he had longed for nothing more than this, every day craving it, ever since those first malignant red squiggles had reasserted themselves above his ears. It is also true that there was nothing he dreaded more. For his own lifelong inability to sit still in one place for more than eight consecutive seconds produced catastrophic results when you combined it with his mother’s lifelong inability to tolerate anything that moans, mumbles, whines, whinges, and generally wriggles about as restless as a worm on a hook.

At the start of the Haircut – before everything escalated into a wild hurricane of snot and tears and murderous threats – he would plead with her, demanding that she cut off all the curls. “But I love your curls,” she would say. “Cut them off!” he would say. Oh how he longed for the soothing oblivion of baldness, the blithe anonymity of the short-back-and-sides! When it was all over, he would stand in the bathroom with the tap running, pretending to be brushing his teeth while he patiently scrutinised the shape of his head in the mirror, turning from side to side in a painstaking inspection, examining it from every angle to ensure that every last obnoxious question-mark had been eradicated.

He never learned much at school, since he was always preoccupied with more important things. During maths he drew cockatoos and clowns and dingos inside the cover of his book. During history he sketched designs for fighter planes and steam trains and spacecraft. During science (his favourite subject) he drew a tree, a fence, a rainwater tank, a windmill, the ruins of a farmhouse, and a pair of roos standing on a dirt road. During English he held his pocket knife in his lap and whittled his pencils into little sculpted figurines, or etched trains and cars on the brittle timber underbelly of the desk. At lunch time he could often be seen eating his Vegemite sandwich or kicking a soccer ball or playing marbles or glancing up at his reflection in an empty window and smoothing down the hair above his ears with furtive moistened fingers.

When he was twelve years old, there was one of those hot school sports days when all the swaggering boys scramble and sweat to outdo each other in the winner-takes-all race towards manhood, grunting, cursing, spitting, kicking dust, picking scabs, assembling in solemn huddles to compare the hairs on their legs and the shoes on their feet, hotly debating the secrets of semen and cigarettes, exchanging heroic autobiographical tales of sex and violence, determining which of the girls are wearing bras, which of the girls are wearing g-string panties, which of the girls are shaving their legs, which of the girls are shaving their armpits, which of the girls have the best tits. Then all of a sudden Mrs Nickles, the tuckshop lady, lurched over to where he stood amid a scrum of murmuring boys, ruffled his hair with her greasy tuckshop fingers, grimacing gleefully with her ghastly gold-toothed smile, and said (while all the boys sniggered behind their hands): “Gee whiz, such pretty curls, such a pity you’re not a girl.”

The next morning he stole five dollars from his mother’s purse, wagged school, and walked in drizzling rain to the barber shop, where he had his hair clipped short, as straight as knives.

Time passed, and somehow or other he pieced together a life for himself. He married a girl who worked at the bakery but dreamed all her life of working at the library; she wore blue-rimmed glasses, read the same six novels over and over, and knew the whole three hours of The Sound of Music by heart. The first time they made love, her skin smelt of bread and cinnamon; she draped her strapless floral dress over the chair and pulled him down on to the floor, and afterwards she ran her fingers through his hair, though he never knew it because by then he was asleep. Over time they acquired a house, a car, a black and white television with rabbit-ear antennas, a bed that her parents had given them, a garden that was always dying but never quite dead, a dog that dug up the garden and chewed up the bed, two cats that were hardly ever seen, and a son who scampered around the house beneath a tangled mop of luxuriant red curls.

On weekdays he wore a wide-brimmed cotton hat to work, and did not take it off again until he came through the front door at six o’clock. When he was not working, he assembled jigsaw puzzles and made leather bags and built his own transistor radio and subscribed to magazines about model trains. He replaced the back screen door, fixed up the bathroom, made wardrobes and bathroom cupboards, replaced the kitchen bench and the wiring on the oven, and built a little shelf beneath the bedroom window for his wife’s six novels. For his son, he built three wooden trains, six wooden puzzles (one of them so large and elaborate that it was never fully assembled), a castle with an opening portcullis and drawbridge, a jack-in-the-box with the painted face of a clown, two clown string puppets, a bed in the shape of a racing car with a movable door and leather pouches underneath for clothes and toys, a toolbox with sliding drawers and many small compartments, an abacus, a spinning top, a drum, a fire truck painted red with an electric flashing light, a tiny balsa wood yacht with a plastic sail and cotton rigging, and, out in the backyard beside the shed, a two-room cubbyhouse with miniature furniture, a miniature transistor radio, a little bookcase, a secret trapdoor in the kitchen floor, and a front veranda with little wooden deck chairs.

That is how he spent his weekends in the big garden shed, hammering and painting and sewing and stitching, while the boy looked on in silence or asked questions or scuttled around the floor scooping up bent nails and woodshavings and sticky globs of dried glue that sometimes got caught in his hair.

Then one hot December afternoon he grew tired of the wooden pirate finger puppets that he was making. He grew tired of The Sound of Music. He shouted at the boy and slammed a door. He took up smoking. He began to work late. The wooden pirate finger puppets languished unfinished on the workbench in the shed. And that was when he began to forget things.

Here are the things he forgot: he forgot to fix the bathroom tap, which dripped for four months; he forgot to fix the kitchen screen, and the flies and mosquitoes moved into the house; he went to the shop for bread and milk but came back with tinned peaches, or paper cups, or Swiss cheese, or insect spray, or tubes of toothpaste, or mosquito coils, or pickled onions, or plum jam, but no bread and no milk; he forgot to treat the dog for fleas, and they could hear its melancholy scratching in the night; he forgot why he had ever loved his wife, and she grew restless and dejected; he forgot to renew his magazine subscriptions, and finally forgot that he had ever loved the model trains with their tiny clockwork engines and their lovingly weathered landscapes.

There was also the time, one Saturday afternoon, when he tied his shoelaces and put on his hat and climbed on to the roof to clean the leaves from the gutters, and forgot to come down again for his three o’clock appointment at the barber. He forgot all the next day as well, and all the next week, and all the week after that.

Then one morning as he was rubbing his eyes and yawning and walking to the kitchen he caught a sudden sideways glance of himself in the hallway mirror. He stopped. He leaned forwards. He narrowed his eyes. He stared intently at the clusters of shy red ringlets springing out above his ears. He turned his head to one side, then the other, then back again. He walked into the kitchen, hands on hips, and stooped down to the place where his son sat playing with a painted wooden train. He frowned silently, his brow creased in concentration as he scrutinised the boy with the freckled round white face, the pink ears, and the frightful mess of curls. Then he went back to the mirror and looked again, frowning deeply.

And then, all at once, he remembered all the things he had forgotten.

Daylight fell slanting through the blinds across the floor as he marched back into the kitchen. He had never noticed it before, how much like his son he looked. There was no denying it: he was the spitting image of the boy.

He went out through the backdoor barefoot across the grass towards the garden shed. He stopped to wait for the boy to catch up, sunlit red mop bouncing as he ran. In the darkness of the shed, the half-made pirate finger puppets lay waiting. He hitched up his pants a little, rocked back on his heels a little, and raised his hand and ran five fingers slowly through his hair. Somewhere in the trees a bird had started singing. The grass was cool and wet beneath his feet. He looked down at his son. He felt, for the first time in his life, rather dashing.

A Love Story

After their fourth date at bingo night, he untucked the napkin from his top shirt button, carefully returned the crumpled handkerchief to his pocket, pushed his glasses all the way up to the bridge of his nose, and inquired, squinting intently across the table in what might have been a gallant smile or might merely have been a stomach complaint, gastritis or pancreatitis or giardiasis, or just a touch of reflux or heartburn or indigestion, if she would like to take a turn around the rose garden. They went out together in the evening air and sat a while under the winking stars and the vine-tangled trellis and the heavy lovesick fragrance of the roses.

When their talk had stumbled into one of those cavernous silences, he began to fidget with the buttons on his shirt. He blew his nose. He scratched at something on his knee. He found some wax in his left ear. He coughed politely. He said, There’s something I’d like to tell you, though I’ve never told another soul.

She thought: Ah, and so it goes. She thought: There has been some scandal. She thought: He is a gambler. She thought: He is a homosexual. She thought: He is married, a Don Juan, a heartbreaker, a scoundrel. She thought: He is a war criminal, and they will take him away to jail. She thought: Oh my dear God, he is a Mormon.

He said: You see, it’s just that I – I never – well, you see, I never really read. I only buy books for the colours. They look so lovely, like flowers. I arrange them like my mother used to arrange bouquets of gardenias in the kitchen. But I never read them. Not a single page. Not anymore.

She said: My daughter says I love the opera. She always takes me. She got season tickets last year. Before the music starts I turn my hearing aids off. The silence, it’s just so, I don’t know, so – calm.

He said: When I get a new one, I always read the back, just in case someone asks about it. So I'll look like I’ve read it.

She said: Sometimes I even turn them off when my daughter comes to visit. My how that one prattles, she’s every inch her father.

He said: I cheat on the Sunday crosswords.

She said: It was me who drove my husband’s car into the pole. He was so sad, so disappointed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I said someone else must have done it while I was shopping. He went to his grave believing that, Lord rest him, poor dear sweet kind man.

He said: Some days when I wake up tired, I don’t have the strength to change my underwear. I slip a clean pair in the laundry basket so the nurses won’t know. They count them, you know. They’re watching everything, keeping records.

She said: Sometimes I can’t control my – you know, my – sometimes I think I might be a little – what's the word? – incontinent? The nurses all know. But I try to hide it all the same. I sometimes think it’s the worst thing about growing old.

He said: The bladder.

She said: Not specifically. Just the way I'm always so – embarrassed.

He said: I don’t really like the bingo. I just thought you’d enjoy it. I just wanted to be with you, that's all.

She said: Now that you mention it, I suppose I don’t really care much for bingo either. Not like I used to.

And then she smiled shyly, like a girl.

Beside the goldfish pond hedged with roses he took her hand, and, after a few fumbling false starts, squinting and panting from exertion, he pressed it to his lips. Their hands were still touching when the nurses wheeled them back up the path, side by side across the green lawn and into the common room, where one or two other residents looked up, blinking in surprise, as though for a moment they had caught a sudden faint scent of something sweet, like a summer garden or a house where children play or one of those milkbars with the big bright jars of six-a-penny lollies in the window.

The dream and the drawing: a short story

Another attempt at a single-paragraph story, again inspired by the style of Lydia Davis.

My daughter saw an animated film about a girl and a witch, and she was frightened. Every night after that she saw the face of the witch, cruel and terrible, in her dreams. She wept from horror, because the witch had turned her nights into a prison, her soft white bed into a dungeon. I told her I would cure her of the nightmares. I found a picture of the witch’s angry face, and at the kitchen table we sat down with pencils, with paper, and with the picture of the witch. She drew the face, and drew it again until she had learned to draw it from memory. Then she understood her terror, that it came only from techniques of line and shadow, from the shape of the eyes, the direction of the eyebrows, the proportion of the mouth, the subtle curling at the corner of the lips, the length of the fingers, the way the long black cloak enfolds the body and conceals it like a secret. Then the nightmares stopped; then the witch’s face no longer leered out from the darkness of her dreams; then her bedroom walls no longer echoed with cruel laughter when the lights went out. But some time later she came into our bedroom as before, creeping up between us in the middle of the night, burying her face in my neck because she was afraid, because her fears had folded over like a cloak, because in her bed she had dreamt the hand of a witch clutching a crooked pencil, scratching white lines on a black page, patiently bringing to life a face, her face, the small frightened face of a frightened child.

The Names of the Sea: chapter 6

(Different title, same story.)

Chapter 6. Harry

But those long swimless days of my recovery were not quite as I have described them, alone with my map and my sunburn and my little patch of coconut shade. Something else had happened at that time too: my mother had brought home Harry. She turned up with him one afternoon as I was using a broken pine cone to draw an elaborate map in the sand. Where he’d come from I never found out. But there he was, a shabby, melancholy chap with eyes the colour of creekwater and a big lopsided smile that always looked like he was halfway between apologising and planning how to perpetrate his next devilish mischief. For Harry, I soon found out, was fond of mischief.

My mother said, “What’ll we call him?”

I blinked, incredulous at the question, and said, as though nothing could be more obvious, “His name is Harry.” And so that was his name.

He was a thoroughbred mongrel, splotched all over brown and grey except for a scraggly white tail, a scruffy hobo who’d wander the streets for scraps and bark at the moon at night and cringe in whimpering fright if ever you raised your voice or spoke a single harsh word to him. Looking back on it now, I suppose my mother thought he'd be a distraction, that he’d give me something else to think about. I suppose she thought he’d keep me from the sea.

Harry had a grim white scar running down from his ear to the corner of his eye, and he’d flinch whenever you touched it. “Was he in an accident?” I asked.

“It was his father,” my mother said, squatting down beside me in the shade. “It happens sometimes with puppies. If you don’t keep the father away, he’ll try’n kill them.”

“What for?” I said.

“The bitch, all he cares about is the bitch, mating with her over and over. Can’t mate when she’s raising the pups, so if you're not careful he'll go over and bite them, crush their heads in.” She slapped a mosquito and added, “Typical man, when you think about it.”

*

When I was back on my feet, the map of the island shimmering in my mind as bright as a migraine, I discovered that Harry was an inveterate explorer. Under the oppressive regime of that period – all swimming had been banned absolutely until further notice – Harry and I set out to lay bare whatever secrets the island might be concealing from us. We climbed the colossal grey rocks that line the bay. We found the places where the waves had drilled their patient caves into stone. We followed each other deeper and deeper into the bush. We surveyed the island from the hilltops. He kept lookout while I climbed the trees in search of birds’ nests. We found snake skins and cicada shells and inexplicable sheets of metal buried in sand. We crept into the old mineshaft and dug pits in the sand to trap the lions and the bears. We unearthed prehistoric bones beneath the dry creek bed. How Harry could detect these subterranean artefacts remains a mystery to me, but his skills were infallible. I tried to teach him to locate buried pirates’ treasure, but his only facility was for bones.

It was at this time that I started to draw my first maps, scanning the rugged topography from the highest trees and cartographically recording the sites of our adventures. It was also at this time that my mother sent me to church.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s hard to believe I was ever much of a churchgoer, but it’s true, I congregated at the Magnetic Island Revival Church for the better part of two years, right up until the day the drowned preacher was found washed up on the shore, his face wrapped in seaweed like a bloated Egyptian mummy.

The preacher’s name was Pastor Dave. He and his wife raised their children on a sprawling dilapidated farm over at Florence Bay. I can’t be sure of the exact number of their children since I was never able to count them all at one time, but I’d say there must have been at least twelve of them, certainly no fewer than ten. They were communists and homeschoolers and Vegetarians. They made their own shoes and grew all their own food and never ate tinned soup, because they believed the barcodes on canned goods were the Mark of the Beast, a code of eighteen digits that spelt 6-6-6. They also believed in breastfeeding, and even some of the older children could be seen walking alongside their mother, pulling down her sarong for a quick drink while she was outside picking oranges or feeding the chooks. Their farm was one of the biggest and rowdiest places on the island. There were always strangers and blow-ins and backpackers staying in the bungalows down the back while the children ran around chasing roosters and hacking down branches and setting fire to green ants’ nests and pissing on the vegetables that grew everywhere like wildflowers. Not many people went to the Revival Church, but Pastor Dave was pretty well known on the island because he was always going around to the different bays, knocking on doors and offering prayers and fresh vegetables, or hanging around at the Nelly Bay jetty telling the good news to anyone who'd listen. That’s how he’d met my mother, and when he heard about my near-fatal cirvumnavigatory swim he’d come knocking at the Old Train, more than once, offering to come and pick me up himself and take me along to the Lord’s House on Sunday morning. I suppose my mother thought I needed a bit of straightening out; so finally, swallowing her atheism and her pride, she agreed to let me go, remarking with a weary sigh, “At least they’re not Catholic.”

I was nervous the first time, never having darkened the door of a church before, and not knowing quite what to expect inside. I’d heard about the Revival Church, of course, and knew they could speak in magical languages, could predict the future, could perform miraculous cures, and could tell just by looking at you if you had an evil spirit. Once Pastor Dave had levitated six inches off the ground during a powerful sermon about repentance and the Queensland State Government, they’d even reported it in the paper, that’s what I heard.

Anyway, one Sunday Pastor Dave came by to pick me up. He drove this old school bus, painted bright and crazy as a flowerbed with JESUS IS LORD written down each side and a big psychedelic peace sign on the back. That was how he used to round up the whole flock on Sunday mornings, so there’d already be a congregation singing and clapping their hands and rocking the bus from side to side before it ever got to church. That’s how it was that morning, with a whole busload of parishioners, at least half of them the pastor’s kids, all peering out the windows at me as I stood waiting by the roadside, barefoot in my blue shorts with Harry by my side, and Pastor Dave leaned his elbow out the window and honked the horn and hollered out as cheery as if he were Santa Claus, “Well don’t just stand there matey boy, hop on board!”

The first unsettling piece of theology I ever learned was that you’re not supposed to bring the dog to church. Harry jumped on board beside me, as excited as I was at the prospect of a bus ride, but the woman up front with beads in her hair – it was Mel, the pastor’s wife – patted my shoulder and said with a pearly kind smile, “Sorry, sweetheart, no pets allowed on the bus bound for glory.” Everybody laughed and the whole place erupted into raucous song, and there I was at the middle of it all, you can just imagine, peering at all those sandalled feet and down at my own dirty bare ones, and leading poor bashful Harry back out the door on to the road, where he wagged his tail forgivingly even though I had dealt him a cruel betrayal and a terrible disappointment.

I don’t know why it is, this universal law since time immemorial that prohibits dogs from ever resting their heads in the cool shade of our places of worship. For what is more worshipful, more thoroughly possessed of religious instinct, than a dog? Even the sparrow hath made a nest at thine altars, that’s what the Psalmist says. But ever since the first hallowed bricklayer laid the blood-soaked stones of the first temple at the dawn of time, dogs have been left outside, made to stay behind while the bus rattles off down the road without them. I suppose those ancient priests and lawmakers knew that the awkward solemnity and morbid vanity of our rites would instantly be put in the shade by the free and unselfconscious, the good-hearted and open-mouthed devotion of the dog. Man takes himself too seriously to be a genuine worshipper: you’d see that right away if ever you allowed the adoring canine to prostrate himself beside you in the temple, paws splayed out in petition, tail thumping like a drum, tongue lolling on the cold hard floor at the hour of prayer.

At any rate, I went to church alone, and I don’t like to think of what Harry must have got up to in those lonely hours, left all to himself on a hot summer’s day when the sand burned like fire and your eyes stung from the sun that lit the sea as white as teeth.

My Life and the Sea: chapter 5

Chapter 5. The Map

I guess I lay there most of the night before he found me. He picked me up off the sand and carried me home. The lamp was still burning inside but my mother wasn’t there, so he hauled me back up the road to his place. They lived at the old abandoned pineapple farm, the old bloke and his wife. I’d seen them around but had never been to their place before, because they were what was known as Abos. At the time I wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but I knew it must be something dangerous or infectious, since most people didn’t get too close to them.

I'd asked my mother one time, “What’s an Abo?”

She said, “It means dark skin.”

“Oh,” I said, “you mean like Gina,” whose skin was tanned darker than anyone’s on the island.

“No,” she said, “not Gina. She’s White.”

“Oh,” I said. I could see that this whole Abo business was a complicated affair, best left to the grown-ups, so I didn’t ask any more questions after that. But I understood enough to know that you’re not supposed to visit them at home, and so I’d never been. I’d often peered at their place from across the road though, because it was a peculiar residence, even by the eccentric standards of Bite Bay. The pineapple farm had been closed for many years, but you could still make out the original sign through the trees, boasting of the best pineapples in Australia: "Come take a bite!" The whole place had an air of ruined grandeur, like an ancient graveyard or an abandoned carnival. It was overrun by trees, and every once in a while they would chop one down and drag it inside. This usually left half a tree stump sticking out through the front door; sometimes it would even stretch out onto the road, which I suppose must have been quite a hazard for motorists. That's how it was on this night too: as he carried me through the front door, he had to step carefully over the tree trunk that ran right out the doorway and onto the front path.

When he brought me inside, I was able to solve the mystery of the tree all at once: it was firewood, only instead of chopping the wood before burning it, they would put the whole end of the tree trunk directly into the fireplace. I got to see how this ingenious system worked, for as soon as he had set me down on a spring mattress near the fireplace, he heaved a little on the tree stump to bring the fresh wood forwards, then poked around in the coals for a few moments, and soon enough he had a good blaze going.

It was cosy by the fire, and before long my teeth had stopped chattering. But my feet were killing me, and the old bloke sat down beside me and got to work removing my flippers. They were pretty much grafted to my feet, and once he got them off I could see all the bleeding cuts and blisters and the hideous swelling around my ankles. It hurt something shocking, I won’t deny it, but I never cried, I don’t know if this is because I was so brave or because I was so tired.

He brought me a big bottle of water and I guzzled the whole thing down in one go, though I hadn't even realised I was thirsty. He refilled it, and I drank again. Then he got a tin billy and hung it over the fire. All this time he said nothing, but as he was clanking about in the kitchen for some teacups, his wife walked in, rubbing her eyes and yawning and saying, “What’s all the racket?” He didn’t reply, but stuck his thumb out in my direction, and when she saw me the woman said, “Oi, young fella, where you bin at?”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “Swimming.”

“Well, all safe and sound now,” she said. “I spose you'd be Dylan.” I nodded, and she said, “You can call me Auntie Joyce.” Then she looked over at the man with the teacups and added, “That’s Kev.”

“Found im down the beach,” said Kev, and he poured a cup of steaming hot tea, and handed it to me. “Warm you up,” he said.

“I tell you what,” said Auntie Joyce, “everyone bin out lookin for you. Them all over the island lookin.”

“I went swimming,” I said.

“Your mum reckons you bin drowned, she got the p’liceman outta bed and everything. You git lost?”

I sipped the tea, and started to feel a little better. “No,” I said. “I swam round Australia.”

Kev roared with laughter and nearly spilt his tea, his big hand thumping on his thigh. “You swim round ’Stralia? Geez, I reckon that’s a pretty good swim for a little fella.” His face was golden by the firelight, and I had never such a smile, such dazzling white teeth, so broad and free.

“You mean the island, luv?” said Auntie Joyce. “You swim round the island?”

I nodded, and I suppose I looked a little triumphant, notwithstanding my blue cracked lips, my bloodied feet, my soggy wrinkled skin. “Yep. Right round the whole country.”

We heard a car go by, and Kev went out to look. It was the police car, with my mother. I said goodbye to Auntie Joyce, and Kev lifted me from the mattress and carried me outside. When he brought me in his arms to my mother, she gasped and stared at him in horror, as though he’d snatched me up and murdered me in the night, instead of peeling off my flippers and giving me a cuppa. Kev didn’t say anything either, just stood there in the dark, until she'd rushed over and grabbed me from him, wrapping me up in her arms.

Anyway, the copper came over to speak to Kev, and my mother brought me inside and laid me out on the bed, and then she bawled her eyes out so bad it scared me. She was mad as hell of course, I hardly need to tell you that. Half the island had been out looking for me, even a couple of boats had gone out, risking the shallow midnight reefs to scour the water with their spotlights. The copper had come up from Nelly Bay and made her fill out forms, and she’d been driving around with him all night. They all thought I'd drowned, or been taken by a shark, or captured by child molesters, or stung to death by jellyfish. There'd be hell to pay in the morning: but right now my mother clung to me and cried her eyes out, more than I'd ever seen a person cry, until my face and hair were wet all over again from her salty sea of tears.

The cop came back in the morning and asked some questions, “Just to clear everything up,” he said, hitching up his blue shorts with his thumbs. He kept asking about the Abos, I don't know why. I was scared I might get in trouble for drinking their tea, so I left out that part out of the story. When I told him they'd looked after me, and he grunted disapprovingly and scribbled notes in his little book. When I told him how I’d swum around Australia, he went to the car and came back with a map. He unfolded it in front of me. He pointed to the big island, tracing its outline with a stubby, nail-bitten finger, and said, “Y'know what that is mate?”

Now I must confess, until this point in my life I had never once laid eyes on a map of Australia; but I thought it was a pretty safe bet, so I said, “Australia?”

“Right,” the copper said. “And you see this dot, that’s Townsville, over on the mainland.” Then he pointed to something else, nearly invisible – it might only have been a smudge of dirt or a dead mozzie on the page – and he said, “Y’see this? That’s Magnetic Island. Did you swim all the way round the island? Is that what you done?”

I nodded again, but a strange feeling had come over me, cold and lonely. I was staring at the map, at the monstrous size of the country and the offensive little brown smudge beside its coastline. I had always thought that Australia was another name for our island, its official title perhaps, but a synonym all the same. I felt sick in my stomach, and I reeled from the blow of an enormous betrayal. I had not circumnavigated Australia, not even close. My great exploit on the sea was crushed to dust; my swim had been puny and infantile, a humiliation instead of a triumph.

I was sick for a long time after that, and I could hardly walk for several days, partly because the muscles in my legs had turned to jelly, partly because of the huge blisters and the swelling in my feet, partly because of the dehydration that had wracked my body. I couldn't sit or lie comfortably either, on account of the murderous sunburn that had roasted my back and bum. A doctor came over on the ferry to see me, a friend of Gina’s, and he said, “Dear oh dear young man, dear oh deary me,” and made me swallow pills and made my mother rub a frightful cream all over my back. It hurt like billyo, I don’t need to tell you that, but more than anything it was the God-awful smell that got to me, driving me half insane as I writhed about day and night in my bed. (Even to this day, I sometimes awake from nightmares in which all I can recall is the pungent, suffocating stench of sunburn cream.) My mother couldn’t sleep at night either, and as she lay beside me in the dark I told her over and over about the map, about the appalling vastness of the continent and the tiny smudge of the island, about the meaning of the word Australia, about this violent geographical enormity that had forced itself upon me, disfiguring everything and bending all the shapes and forms of my imagination into hideous distortions.

On the third day I found that my wounds felt better when I lay down in the sand. It soothed the constant burning, and the fresh air of the beach was a blessed relief from the stagnant indoor stench of that medicinal horror. So my mother let me lie all day in the sand under the shade of the big coconut palm. I was so comfortable there that she even let me sleep outside at night, though she dragged a mattress out and slept right next to me, afraid, no doubt, that I would creep away by moonlight and slip back into the sea.

One day as I was loitering in the curative shade of my coconut tree, old Kev came by with the flippers. “Left em behind,” he said, looking out at the water as he dropped them on the sand beside me. “How you feelin, young fella,” he asked.

“Okay,” I said.

“Talked to your mum,” he said. “Heard bout that p’liceman’s map.” I shrugged. He was silent a long time, and then he said, “Y’know, I don’t think nobody’s ever swam round Maggie Island before. Not right round Maggie. Not till now.”

Then he gave me something. He was standing with his back to me, looking at the beach, and he casually reached into his back pocket and took something out. Then, turning slightly, he dropped it in my lap and said, “I’ll see you round, young fella, you take care now,” and off he went.

To this day, I have no idea how he found such a fine specimen, or how much trouble it must have cost him to acquire it. But when I unfolded the paper and spread it out on the sand before me, I saw the gigantic shape of Magnetic Island, huge with glossy colour, surrounded on every side by the bright blue majesty of the sea.

*

That was how I discovered that, if you can’t be out swimming with your flippers, looking at maps is the next best thing. Day after day I studied it. I pored over every detail, memorising all the names and the shape of every bay. I kept it open on my lap at dinner time, casting furtive glances at Mount Cook and Alma Bay between mouthfuls. There were so many bays and beaches, so many hills and roads, so many rocks and reefs, and I learned them all, and I drew the whole thing on the sand with my finger, over and over, until I could have drawn it in my sleep, or drawn it without eyes.

On the seventh day, I asked my mother to bring me a pen. Then, with the map spread out before me, I carefully crossed out the words "Horseshoe Bay," and wrote, in my best and neatest handwriting, "Bite Bay." At the top of the map, where it said MAGNETIC ISLAND, I added one more word, in great defiant capital black letters: AUSTRALEA.

My Life and the Sea: chapter 4

Chapter 4. The Decision

I still remember the day, it was my eighth birthday, when I decided to swim around Australia. Of course, I’m exaggerating when I say I decided. It’s not as if I gave it any thought beforehand, it just happened, I suppose because since the day was so fair, the water so clear and calm, such a fine good day for a swim.

We’d gone to Gina’s place that day because it was my birthday. Gina lived over in Balding Bay, a few miles around the point from our place. She was something of a legend on the island, since she’d been to university, and it was rumoured she could even speak French. In all the years I knew her, I never saw her wear anything except bikinis. Her skin was tanned all over as dark as chocolate, and she always wore dark glasses, even indoors, even in the shower for all I know. Before she moved to the island she’d travelled the world, and she’d had a big job lined up on the mainland, something important, I don’t know what, but a week before the start of her career, she’d hopped on the ferry for an afternoon trip to the island, and never went back.

She’d paid three hundred dollars to lease the place at Balding Bay for ten years. It was a cottage with green concrete floors and louvered windows from floor to ceiling, so that you could always see the ocean from wherever you happened to be standing. There were books everywhere, lined up and piled up and leaning on shelves made out of old boxes and those wooden crates that wash up on the beach from time to time. There were big cane chairs, a high table with stools, potted ferns hanging from the ceiling, and a huge cane mat on the floor that you could stretch out and sleep on, as I used to do when we stayed overnight. As a matter of principle I’ve always objected to sleeping. But if you really insist on it, and if you can't do it as the noble dolphin does, snoozing with half his brain while the other half goes on swimming, then I’d recommend a good cane mat on a concrete floor, stripped naked to the waist with all the windows open.

In the middle of the room was a steel pole running up to the ceiling, which was to bolt the place to the ground when the cyclones came. Whenever a cyclone blew in we’d go and stay at Gina’s, since it was widely believed that the Old Train would one day be picked up and blown out to sea, there to be relocated as a haven for crabs and manta rays amid the sand and the seagrass. (That turned out to be true, though not till many years later.)

We went to Gina’s place a lot, and she came to ours a lot, because she read all the same books as my mother, and there’s not much point reading a book unless you can argue about it afterwards. She got books in the mail, loads of them, and my mother was always borrowing them and bringing them back again, just as if it was a lending library. She also brought things for Gina, fruit from our yard, a basket of eggs, a bag of the herbs that we grew down by the creek, or a box of mangoes.

Don’t get me wrong, no one on the island needs to be given mangoes. Mango trees are everywhere, as ubiquitous as the rocks and the green ants. You might live on nothing but mangoes if you could bear it, even though what we eat is merely the leftovers from the bats and the incorrigible possums. But Gina made mango chutney, lots of it, best mango chutney on the island, and people gave her fruit and veg in exchange for chutney, she even sold a few jars at Bob’s grocery in exchange for bread and cheese. (Cheese was one of the many exotic wonders of Gina’s place, an unthinkable luxury for someone who lived in a railway carriage without a fridge.) All year round, her place reeked of mango. In summer, the acrid taste was in your mouth every time you breathed, and you could feel the sap stinging the corners of your eyes and prickling on your skin. How a house constructed almost entirely of concrete and glass could absorb a smell so thoroughly, I confess that remains a mystery to me. But that’s how it was, and I loved it.

My mother and Gina would lie back in the cane chairs drinking wine and arguing over books, work, gender, capitalism, the System, the Movement, the government, whether it was better to organise or to opt out, that sort of thing. The discussions always orbited around one thing, and always returned there in the end. Men. Both of them were agreed on this diagnosis of the fundamental social ill, though what their prescribed remedies were I’ll never know, since by that time I was usually out on the water.

But today being my birthday, we were all seated on Gina’s woven mat while she lit the candles on the cake that had just come out of the oven. I forgot to tell you that Gina was a Vegetarian: that is why she never used unnatural ingredients, and why every year my birthday cake tasted of flour and vegetables, and why the icing was a rich, oozy, leafy green, the colour of crushed spinach, which is what she used for food colouring. It was delicious, we all said so, and after we’d eaten a piece Gina went to her bedroom and came back – “Drum roll,” she said – with a birthday present. When I unwrapped it, it was the biggest pair of shoes I’d ever seen in my life. I was polite, I said thank you, but to tell the truth I was a little disappointed, since in eight long years the tips of my toes had never so much as touched a shoe, nor had they had ever had any reason to. I tried putting on the new shoes but didn’t know how, and Gina had take my foot in her hands and show me. That was when she explained their proper use, and my mother pronounced their name: Flippers.

Having always gone into the water naked, I was sceptical about these rubbery appendages. But I stomped my way down to the beach all the same, and after the first three kicks I understood: the webbed toes were not an alien device, not an artificial extension of the body, but a restoration of the foot to its proper original form. All our ancestors had been swimmers, back when all the land on earth was an inhospitable wasteland of volcanic ash and rock. When our first parents crept out from the primordial waters and began to walk about on land, this sad calamity befell them, that they lost their fins and webbed feet, and instead got fingers, toes, opposable thumbs, all designed, I suppose, for the undignified and unphilosophical purpose of scratching at prehistoric fleas while you’re hanging upside down from the branch of a tree. With webbed feet, you could have drowned all those itching parasites in the course of one good ponderous swim. Yes, nature has failed us here, or maliciously betrayed us, and I saw at once that flippers are the grace that repairs what nature left in ruins.

That is why, when I had swum to the end of the bay, I did not feel like turning around just yet. Nor when I had swum to the end of the next bay. Nor when I had gone around the point to Florence Bay, further than I’d ever been before, gliding like a shark through the shimmering waters. I was silent and swift as death, sweeping my great black fins, the terror of the sea. All things that teem in the deep were my prey. Reef after reef, bay after bay I swam, breathing slow, calm, hypnotic, synchronised to the languid rising and falling of the sea.

It was not until the sky had grown dark that I realised a decision had been made – by whom exactly I couldn’t say – that I would swim all the way around. One minute you’re paddling along, breathing and exhaling, peering down into the murky deep, and the next minute, quick as a stingray, the idea has seized you, stark and white and electric. Once that’s happened, there’s really not much you or anybody else can do about it. You are going to swim around Australia: that’s what you’ll do, plain and simple.

And that’s what I did. By this time, I’d already gone past Picnic Bay, past the jetty, around the southern point and out onto the wide teeming reef along the western rim of the island. I’d never swum at night before; my mother didn’t let me out after sunset, because of the sharks. But in the darkness, the reef was alive with a million phosphorescent lights and colours. I was swimming in the stars, and I was not frightened, and I did not lose my way.

It was many hours later, though it might as well have been years, that I saw the ghostly moonlit figure of the White Lady, the rock up on the promontory that looks like a woman dressed in white, the rock I saw each morning when I swam out on the bay. Then I saw the distant gleaming windows of the railway carriage, and when I’d come in close I found that my legs didn’t work, that I couldn’t stand or crawl, so I lay there in the shallows until the waves had washed me up like a dead sailor on the shore.