Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  Next morning, before any of them at ‘Villa Rosa’ were awake, a boy drowned in the cove. MacCracken knew him as Charley Pickastick, his faithful shark-watcher. Down at the rickety wharf, whenever a boat arrived, Charley dived for coins. His cheeky face challenged visitors, his tongue making a high-pitched, excited wailing—a song chilling the blood when heard at night, and even by day not so much asking for reward as demanding propitiation—except that whenever Charley saw the affrighted faces of his listeners he gave a laugh, and rolled around clutching his sides as if Europeans were the greatest show on earth, and not wide-eyed simple black-faced he.

  It was said that when Charley leapt off the end of the jetty that dawn his legs were crooked in midair and his elbows jerked no different from any other time. He was seen to arrow under in the shallow tide, and then spike the bottom and stay there. He was like one of the coins he dived for, glimmering fainter and fainter until gone and lost among waving waterweed where dugongs browsed and seahorses dangled.

  Roused by cries for help, bleary from sleep and with a head murky from port, MacCracken made his way to the jetty. ‘What gives?’ Fishermen were there, and a few blacks already grieving. ‘Boy under,’ he was told. Someone broke the water, gulped a great intake of air, and went under again. It was Mr Covington. He’d learned of the matter before anyone—who knew by what sign language and reading of lips?—and had run to the cove flinging his coat away as he went.

  The Afghans joined MacCracken one by one, looking pale, useless, ridiculous in daylight.

  ‘How long’s he been down?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ estimated a fisherman. ‘Or longer.’

  ‘Tell Covington there’s no chance.’

  He was told. He was deaf. He kept diving.

  ‘The madman is an ox.’

  Nobody else went in. On one of his dives Covington stayed down long enough to cause alarm on his own account. Then as Mrs Covington and others arrived he emerged treading water with the boy limp in his arms. He bellowed in the doctor’s direction, ‘MacCracken!’—surging from the sea bearing his load all strung with weed and disgorging water from the mouth. The crowd stepped back, forming a fearful, interested circle. Charley Pickastick was cold stone dead already as his neck was broken. ‘Uh! There!’ said Covington, plainly expecting miracles, having once been saved by MacCracken and expecting no worse remedy than the resurrection of a foolish boy. MacCracken made show of doing what he could, which was nothing at all except to be respectful in arranging the boy’s limbs on the beach, and then to kneel at his side feeling helpless and to blame. Who was it had first flicked coins in the air and started Charley diving for them? MacCracken.

  The Pickastick clan grabbed him from MacCracken’s charge, running away with him rocking in their arms, giving out their wails.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for this,’ muttered Covington, staring hard at his doctor friend.

  ‘Waiting for what?’ blinked MacCracken.

  Without ceremony Covington flicked his right hand as if shedding water droplets. And then, bunching a fist, he slammed MacCracken in the jaw, knocking him over. Everyone heard the almighty slap—bone on bone—and MacCracken knew his jaw was dislocated at the very least. His head jarred, his vision doubled, and tears shed for Charley Pickastick splashed down his cheeks and stung. Then came worse. MacCracken twisted on the way down and knew his ankle was gone. Engulfed in a rush of pain he was plucked at by Covington, who grunted, ‘That’s better!’ and MacCracken blacked out.

  He woke to find the Afghans carting him up to the house and placing him in the shade of the verandah, with Covington sullen and trudging along beside him with his shirt draped over his shoulders. Cushioned in shock, half-dazed, MacCracken looked around at a crowd of helpless, nonplussed faces. Nurse Parkington was sent for and took command. At the edge of MacCracken’s vision he saw O’Connor and Forsyth taking Covington by the shoulders, shaking him in an effort to get his teeth rattling. ‘Idiot, madman,’ they kept repeating, ‘imbecile, why?’ But they might as well have been dealing with a boulder for all the response they won. Mrs Covington used a sleeve of his shirt to wipe her husband’s mouth, and admonished: ‘You are such a one, dear.’

  Let him go, MacCracken said to the Afghans, or tried to say, but found, as he spoke, that no words came out. He was without the use of his jaw. It was clamped tight as a barnacle.

  ‘Take him to my house,’ commanded Covington.

  The Afghans stood in his way.

  ‘What a capital idea,’ said Evans. ‘Quite perfect.’

  ‘A very good one,’ said De Sousa, taking a step backwards as Covington snarled at him. ‘Excellent, I must say. What will you do there, bludgeon him a little?’

  The Afghans went into a huddle. They were worse than useless if they wanted to save their friend. ‘Might we send for Doctor Crews?’

  They read MacCracken’s eyes at this and understood: Not unless you want me amputated.

  ‘Look here, why did you hit him?’ They formed a circle around Covington but kept their distance.

  MacCracken read Covington’s eyes: You wouldn’t know.

  ‘We don’t know.’

  Get back to your parlours.

  ‘Tell us why.’

  Covington raised his fists making a show of them as products of nature: two rough blood-smirched stumps of a tree. These’ll tell you why.

  MacCracken, seeing those fists blocking the sun, was obscurely relieved that the knuckles were barked, that his jaw had made a mark on them. He hardly knew why, except to recognise that a point in his life had arrived when he was tired of who he was, and had come to feel a flimsiness of character running right through to the physical. Good to know he was solid, then, to some slight degree. He saw Covington’s point somehow—how dare a boy’s life be wasted when MacCracken was so lightsome himself, and fit for hanging?

  Mrs Covington fussed between Covington and the Afghans.

  ‘Do you mean to go with him, MacCracken?’

  ‘Are you sane, MacCracken?’

  They stared into MacCracken’s face. ‘Answer us, man!’

  ‘He can’t speak,’ said Covington. ‘On account of he’s been hit “right-tenpenny” on the cranium. And as for any of you wanting to know why I struck him, he knows why I struck him, don’t you MacCracken?’

  MacCracken was mute. Aye, he indicated with a nod. He knew in a sour kind of way. He was struck because the boy died. Because nothing could be done about the boy. Because all the time MacCracken had known Covington the old dodger had appealed to MacCracken to know him—and MacCracken had not known him, refused, and saving the boy had much to do with it. That was the reason he was struck. He would never be able to explain it deeper than that—but he understood it. A boy had died. A boy had died.

  Pain throbbed with the repetition.

  ‘Well, old pal, are we to give you up?’

  Adopting the logical imperative of his attacker that was in the process of carrying the day, MacCracken nodded. Nurse Parkington endorsed the decision. She was in cahoots with Mrs Covington anyway—they had become great friends—and she had often thought that a good hard knock was what MacCracken needed, and had sometimes rolled up her commendable sleeves threatening to deliver one.

  ‘Stand back,’ she scolded the Afghans. ‘Give the doctor his air.’

  Thus it was that MacCracken found himself surrendered without any great opposition to the care of the Covington family. Once the decision was made Covington himself was nowhere to be seen. It emerged he was over at the blacks’ camp asking after the drowned boy, being the only one of them to go there and still in his sodden clothes too.

  Before they set off for ‘Coral Sands’ De Sousa brought MacCracken his medical chest and Nurse Parkington fed him tincture of opium. When MacCracken was blissed he chuckled to himself. It was a nice thought he had. Covington was deaf and he was dumb, and so they were down to bedrock in their dealings with each other.

  The Afghans lifted him onto the same planks that had
carried Covington to him in the first place. As their last duty in their friendship they bounced MacCracken to ‘Coral Sands’. Since the night of the rat on the table MacCracken had not been through that door. There had been invitations, but when MacCracken hesitated on hearing them they were swiftly withdrawn. Lamps had burned in the separate windows flickering offence. But now MacCracken was peeled of any pretension and so he was taken in. As he entered the house he rolled his eyes around. It was even more like a ship inside than previously—everything neat, scrubbed, fresh and somewhat threadbare, yet purposeful withal. He was taken through to the room matching his library (both cottages being of similar design). He found that Covington’s room was a library too, reflecting MacCracken’s own down to the many books, the chronometer on the wall, and the chart table in the corner—but also including the most beautiful displays of butterflies and beetles MacCracken had ever seen. Lying in a row on a tray were six rosella parrots, plump, stuffed, lifeless, each on its back and with its stalky feet in the air and tied with twine. In the opposite corner, in the matching alcove where MacCracken kept his globe of the world to spin with a finger and conjecture where he might alight next in his flutter of existence, Covington had a tin hip bath and a scrubbing brush and a bar of yellow soap.

  MacCracken was placed on the chart table, farewelled by his friends’ babble, and Mrs Covington and Nurse left him alone while they organised a bed.

  How long then passed? The fireflies danced. The parrots took to shooting around the room with their wings tucked in. Charley Pickastick walked around doubled over, squelching water between his toes, dripping it from under his armpits. Later, much later, MacCracken confessed to himself that he had sipped more tincture of opium than was wise. His dreams were over-vivid. Life declared itself to possess an unbearable contradiction. He remembered butterflies with wings of patterned lace, each with a thorax of blue flame and a singing voice of beautiful simplicity. More like a hum. In Spanish, too.

  He also remembered this: his jaw being taken in a capable hand and twisted slightly, so that it clicked with a sour piercing pain. That was surely no Nurse Parkington. His head had seemed cradled on a firm swelling breast, not a voluminous one. He had wanted to lie there until eternity dimmed. There was a perfume of orange blossom in the air. There were eyes, and they were dusky green as midsummer night’s eve.

  When next MacCracken woke he found his jaw bandaged and his ankle firmly taped. He darted his glance around. Who had it been?

  ‘Theodora was here,’ said Mrs Covington, giving his hand a squeeze. ‘She will be back later to tend you again, unless Nurse Parkington comes in the meantime—but I assure you, sir, Dorry is capable.’ Mrs Covington leaned close. ‘Only don’t call her Dorry in front of Mr Covington. He don’t like it. It’s not the Spanish way.’ She acknowledged MacCracken’s condition with a laugh. ‘Not that you’ll be saying a word to anyone.’

  ‘Did you see her?’ the Afghans asked when they called to say their final farewells that afternoon, bearing a tray of yellow-eyed mullet for MacCracken’s supper, that he would be able to eat only after it was mashed into gruel and fed through his lips with a narrow spoon.

  See who? He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Theodora,’ they said. ‘The woman in patterned skirts and a flowery shawl who made a bee-line for the Covingtons’ cottage. Her skin was white,’ they dropped their voices, ‘her eyes emerald, her reddish hair a miracle of careless calculation. It was tied in a single braid and tossed forward over her shoulder. Her shapely feet were encased in black slippers with silver stars, and is she an actress? We don’t know. Apparently, yes. Couldn’t tell. We are rather struck. Goodbye!’

  ‘By the way,’ said Mrs Covington when they had gone, ‘your friend the bookseller, Mr Evans, left a package. He said I was to give it to Mr Covington, and so I will leave it here on the shelf, where he keeps his library. And Miss Ferris came with a note.’

  Pass me the note, MacCracken groaned, whereas he more than wanted the book, he craved it.

  He opened the envelope, peered at its contents, and abruptly folded it over again. A stab of pain more acute than the physical came from the words. MacCracken had read such accusations of aggrieved expectation from a woman before. He disliked the feelings they stirred and had never expected to feel them again. But that was the pattern of his life, it seemed—to go round and back on himself. The last time was in Boston when an attack of difficult breathing occurred every time he considered certain promises he had made, which he had breached for his own sanity, leaving a broken heart and an insistent, hostile attorney.

  But this from his quiet Georgina? The easiest, most malleable trader of animal caresses it had ever been his fortune to enjoy? He pressed the letter in his fist until it crackled, and then he dropped it to the floor. When had he ever said he would marry her? Hers was a hard blow following Covington’s punch; just as unexpected; but not as promising at all. She appeared to believe that ‘Dorry’ was his secret lover. One or other of the light-witted Afghans had put the thought in her head, no doubt—and why?—because of a streak of humorous malice poisoning its way through MacCracken’s friendships, he guessed. Lightness of character was a subtle poison. Sometimes MacCracken’s friends didn’t like him the way he didn’t like himself, and the punishment exacted might almost have been chosen by himself.

  Was he a mere seducer, as she said? He bridled at the lady’s choice of words. She was no stranger to delight. And believe him, there was something useful about someone— MacCracken himself—who ignored your opinion of yourself as a not so young woman any more, and devised a picture of you in their mind, and then led you towards that picture until it became you, and you liked it, and before long there was a craving in you for its consolations, because without them you found you were nothing at all, nobody. Was that a seducer? It was how Miss Georgina Ferris first became MacCracken’s night visitor, slipping through a gate at the side of her father’s house and coming through sheltering trees and arriving at his window. She was a woman of thirty-two years and of good family— daughter to an ailing sea captain, who had obliged her to make him her first priority. She had few obligations after dark, and so MacCracken sequestered her under his roof. She had spoken a thousand times of her gratitude to him, a younger man. But now this. ‘Viper. Double dealer. Weed,’ when all they had wanted was an easy time on a chaise longue with a glass of champagne and a tickling whisper in their ears. When all he had wanted at this end of the earth was his pleasure taken to the limit in his own snug cottage, without having the bother of getting to Sydney and seeking it there among the would-be marriageables with their narrow hopes. And why not? He believed it was his bargain with posterity to seek love, and have it to hand if he could. Marriage itself wanted no less, but MacCracken had a sworn dislike of the marriage vows, as such, and Miss Georgina likewise, he believed—until this note.

  MacCracken became aware of Covington standing at the door in the half light. ‘The folk over the way are grieving,’ he said. ‘Nought is of comfort to them. They wail and gnash their teeth and throw themselves on the ground. Look at me, MacCracken.’ The doctor-become-patient turned his eyes sideways at the old sea-dog. ‘You never look at me and see me true.’ Then, to MacCracken’s amazement, Covington began to undress himself. His clothes rustled with sand. Shedding it from his fingers he stood in his underdrawers brushing his grizzly chest-hairs. ‘The soil is precious insubstantial in this part of the country, being nothin’ but grit. Mrs Covington has great success in growing thistles for her milker, that’s the best I can say for it.’ With a puzzled, irritated manner he slapped at himself more—muttering ‘thistles’—and then peeled off his last item of clothing, his damp, clinging long johns smelling distinctly wet-horsy: until he was revealed stark naked.

  The reminder of horse fitted him any way MacCracken chose. His lips articulated themselves around words disdainfully, as if avoiding prickles. His yellowed toenails curled slightly upwards demanding a trimming, and it seemed as he rocked on t
he balls of his feet they were broad hooves. He was a bruised, scarred, ruptured dombey, this strong-boned, coarse-sinewed man, smoothly round in the belly with a maze of subcutaneous veins standing out. He brushed his flattened pubic hair and peered downwards, lifting aside a squat, mottled penis. ‘Get out from under there you shallock.’

  There was no falseness about him. Nothing about him detracting from his dignity. And yet, it seemed to MacCracken, it was on this point that Covington was in constant battle with himself. Thus he had lain on MacCracken’s impromptu dissecting table at the very start—a promising old cadaver with skin the colour of plums—and emanated, even in unconsciousness, a disgruntled questioning purpose. Today his colour was silvery, and he was touched with a faint, rosy finish from his exertions—strawberry roan you might say. ‘Tip him over and straighten him out, wrestle him down till he ceases to kick,’ thought MacCracken, mentally lugging him to his dissecting table for another try. Cleave him from head to tail and what would you find? Not the thing that Covington was craving, surely, not the longed-for fullness of soul, not there—only blood and breath of man and beast. For that other part a different sort of examination was called for, with no sharp instruments, lancets, fleam-toothed saws, bandages or lint; but an art of understanding akin to revelation.

  What would MacCracken have to be for that?

  The question defeated him. Better. That was all. Better and striving.

  Mrs Covington entered, giving a quick, exasperated tsk, and asked if Covington was ready for his bath.

  ‘Does it look as if I am?’ he preened.

  ‘I am sure the doctor has seen grander sights.’

  Covington stood slapping his chest as his wife busied herself bringing his buckets of water. He made no move to help as she strained and grunted, hauling pails from the kitchen cauldron. Her service was a point he made about their life together. In a while the tub steamed and was near-full. When the temperature was to his liking Covington dismissed her and lowered himself into the water. MacCracken heard him sigh.