Fiction

Excerpts

Spoiler-free passages from novel, The Final Voyage of Charles Le Corre, 2025—currently shortlisted for the 2026 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards for the Unpublished Manuscript Award.

  • Then, most famously, there was Aime, for whom the ceilings and corridors below deck were too low and narrow, and the people too many, resigning him to eat, sleep and seek his solitude in the open sea air on deck. It was he who introduced the tradition of tattooing the names of past lovers onto his body, a list which on Aime coiled its way around both legs and enveloped most of his torso, like a boa constricting its prey. And yet, even with these markings, it was widely accepted that Aime was the most handsome man who ever lived.

    He was immense in stature and as strong as an archway. His skin had been so thoroughly sunbaked that even in winter’s depths it never lost its brownness or warmth, while the inky hair of his youth had been lightened by years of salt and sun. On him all clothes looked borrowed from a boy, so that when summer found him spartanly dressed in nothing but fraying breeches he was let alone on account of the confusion he caused in his fellow salts.

    His days of hunting women had long passed as by then his legend was so strong that they would travel for days to intercept him at Nancy’s regular ports. On land Aime was businesslike in his tallying of lovers, recording their names on paper before they undressed and rarely taking any fewer than seven at a time. These women, upon meeting Aime and having to reconcile the man with the myth, were never disappointed, for no description could’ve prepared their imaginations for such potent beauty. Both his physique and character had been rendered so elemental by decades of sun, salt, sea, rain and wind, that the women likened the experience of fucking him to being lifted heavenward in a hurricane.

    And yet, what was most striking about Aime was that he had such little bravado about him. His melancholic eyes, usually fixed on the horizon, seemed out of place in the candlelit rooms of his orgies. Given his prowess as a harpoonsman, and the power of his legend in coastal towns, comparisons to Poseidon were naturally drawn. But a shrewder mind might’ve likened him to the Minotaur, for not only was there something frightening in his beauty, something beastly in his appetite, but a part of him seemed to long for that final, fatal encounter with love. Moreover, in the case of Aime, love was the labyrinth to which he was condemned from birth: for it was said that his inventory of names was merely a means to cover the invisible scars left by the mother whom he could not have—or at least, so the story went.

    Charles, like most people, had heard of Aime long before seeing him. During a homeport landing rumours began to circulate in the seaside taverns where the women were growing scarce. The distress this caused was only surpassed by the curiosity surrounding tales of a gargantuan man who could be found squatting in an old quarantine station on the headland, and who, allegedly, took women in nines. Civil unrest grew when females of every rung started disappearing into the night to visit him, only to return days later, bereft of desire or the capacity to walk without a hobble. 

    After two weeks, a mixed mob of cuckolded and curious locals stormed his camp with intention to cause harm—or, at the very least, dismember. But upon seeing Aime they adjusted their demands, issuing an eviction notice with a tentative grace period of one month. Simple though he may have been, Aime knew when he was not wanted in a place and so set about leaving the city that very night.
    Charles was among the mob - belonging to the curious half - and couldn’t help but notice what everyone else was too awestruck to see. For one, Aime was living in total squalor, with nothing but a few precarious threads on his back and the bones of some poor farm animal scattered beside him. (Soon it’d be shepherds after him too.) Beyond his startling appearance, it was also plain in his eyes that the fugitive life was wearisome business. Of course, when Charles offered Aime bed and board on Nancy, it wasn’t complete charity. He knew just by looking at him that Aime could probably skewer a Blimp at a league’s distance. In any case, Aime accepted the position in the hope that sealing could relieve whatever vice he was fighting.

  • As per the parlance of the day, the sealer – or any mariner, really – came in one of two varieties: Brines or Clods. The Brines were the native seamen, usually marrying themselves to the trade with unquestioned, life-long fidelity, like a tree to dirt. The Clods, on the other hand, were the uprooted, those who shirked society in search of a liberation that three years of being ship-bound somehow provided. The term Clod also doubled as an insult, a reference to one’s greenness in all things seafaring. But, it must be said, after a sufficient apprenticeship of two or so years – in which time a Clod could absorb the skills, jargon and conduct of his mates – differentiating between a Brine and a Clod became nearly impossible.

    For the Brines, their paths to becoming seamen were as undeviating as the anchor’s to sea bottom. Most were, like Charles, continuations of their forebears, inheritors of whatever was left of their fathers’ spirit and possessions. Even words, as though a finite resource, would seemingly deplete with each generation, so that each Brine was quieter, blanker and deader in all facets than his father. 

    The Brines of Nancy were a semi-conscious, illiterate group, whose bent for hard labour was in itself a means of muzzling thought. They were ignorant of all matters life on land but buoyed by the convenient belief that there was so little worth knowing. Thus on the confines of the ship they were placid creatures, comforted by the certainty that conversation would rarely drift into the uncharted. But when Nancy berthed this calmness was ruffled as though by a squall. In seaside establishments some Brines clammed up, thrusting pipes between their lips to ensure not a word spilled out; while others adopted an air of superiority over their land-dwelling hosts, going to great lengths to exhibit both a disinterest and disapproval in all things terrestrial. Of course, liquor could lower these defences, but just as often it unleashed a torrent of complaints, most of which asserted an unvarying thesis: things aren’t what they used to be.

    Excluding Charles there were eleven Brines in all, each of whom maintained their position from Nancy’s previous owner—what they call a ‘Barnacle’ in the fisheries. These men would speak of their whaling days as the preacher spoke of Eden, regularly reminding the uninvolved that they now lived in a fallen age—despite the fact that under Charles’ leadership the voyages were far safer and more lucrative than ever. 

    They were the oldest on the boat and their minds were generally sealed shut against the fresh ideas of newcomers. Maybe more so than any other Frenchman, the Brine was deaf to all domestic affairs. In most cases the bloody wedding, reign, and death of Marie Antoinette had all transpired without their notice. Suffice to say, it is from the Brine that the mute, pipe-puffing caricature of the seaman was born.

  • A scuffle ensued and again the convicts and gaolers prevailed with their numbers reduced only by four. It was from this encounter that they entered Australian folklore under the moniker ‘The Terrible Twenty’.

    Before setting off again, The Terrible Twenty rounded up the female kin of seven officers after having exterminated their husbands and fathers. They then loaded up on rum, more arms and non-perishables—rice, oats and sugar, which they had forgotten to take on their previous flight and which they redeemed by taking as much as they could find.

    Again they plundered the stables but this time they were overwhelmed by the task of loading horses onto the pinnace, rowing them out to the barque and then hoisting them onboard. For that reason most of the horses were abandoned on the beach—freedom they capitalised on by sauntering about ashore, chomping on seaweed. In the end they attempted to freight just four horses – three mares and a stud – for their runaway settlement, but would succeed in getting only one aboard Lady Barlow.

    All three mares fell overboard in the transit from pinnace to barque; and while amazed by their ability to swim, there was no time to fish them out of the bay before setting sail. Thus the Twenty fled Sydney Cove leaving a small cavalry grazing on the beach as well as three mares treading water, whinnying as they whirled in circles, as though being sucked down by a very big, slow drain.

    The stud they managed to get onboard was a draught horse named Old Nevis who, it just so happened, was the most famous horse in the colony and possibly all the world. The prefix ‘Old’ (designated at birth) had by that time proven providential, as legend had it that Old Nevis was over one hundred and thirty years old at the time of his capture. More famously, however, he was the first equine to sink his hooves into all six continents of the inhabited world. For these achievements he became a household name across Britain and her colonies and was regularly evoked by the newspapers as a symbol of the Empire’s immortality.

    As they sailed south, however, the Twenty did not know that they were carrying such an esteemed passenger and before long Old Nevis would succumb to their infamous cruelty. Within two weeks asea the Twenty had already run out of fresh water and were henceforth obliged to cook rice and oats in seawater—meals most deemed inferior to hunger. After that it was only a matter of days before Old Nevis fell victim to their famine. It took six bullets to the head to drop the venerable steed to the deck, and another four to quieten his braying and kicking as he lay on his side. His flesh, it was said, tasted like wood.

  • More famous, however, was Flinders’ chance meeting with Le Geographe, upon whose decks roamed the wistful Captain Nicolas Baudin. Their encounter – at what would later be dubbed Encounter Bay – served as another testament to the mariner’s ability to transcend national feuds, even when sailing under the King’s shilling or the Consul’s franc. (Neither Flinders nor Baudin could’ve been aware of the Amiens Treaty signed a month prior to their meeting.)

    Any misgivings one had for the other were played out as a mere formality, and could not be affected for long given the mutual languor that had descended upon both captains after a year at sea—a fatigue which had seen buttons on jackets and holes in pant legs go unmended for months. Without reservation Baudin and Flinders shared details of their respective discoveries, doing so over the type of rum whose occasion for opening at sea generally never arrived, but which, on this day, assisted in the lubrication of both sensitive findings and easy seafarer’s gossip.

    Chief among Baudin’s scientific endeavours was his plan to bring Australian plants and animals back to France, where they’d be condemned to shivery afterlives on Napoleon’s Parisian estate, Château Malmaison. To achieve this Baudin relegated Le Georgaphe’s high-ranking officers to common quarters so as to accommodate the seventy-two native animals he had rounded up like disobliging cattle. Almost every creature took to the high seas with great distress, despite Baudin’s eagerness to give each the ultimate French reception, furnishing them not only with the cosiest accommodations but with French names and diets generally reserved for members of civilised society.

    Many refused their meals, either in protest of their captivity or because the choppy seas robbed them of their appetites. But Baudin was unyielding, going as far as to hand-feed rissoles into the beaks, mouths and muzzles of the sick, often at the cost of the crew’s diminishing stores. On finer days, when the sea was calm and the deck warm from sun, Baudin would lead a wombat or wallaby on a rope, allowing it to ruminate among familiar vegetation on deck.

    Of the seventy-two animals taken from Australia only sixteen survived the journey to France. Most were destined to ignoble burials: thrown overboard, left to perplex fish. Baudin himself would meet a similar end, dying kinless and confused on Mauritius. The cause of death, while undiagnosed, was believed to be the same that claimed some of his passengers—that which saw Eugene, the tiger snake, ingest its own tail and the floating primroses dive to their collective death. However, Baudin’s demise did not take the form of self-ingestion or a voluntary plank-walk, but rather an unwillingness to eat, drink or fight in any way against the degeneration of his body, so much so that he refused to be transported to a more comfortable location than his foreshore hammock, where he contently decomposed in his final weeks among the living. 

    Three months later, when Flinders arrived in Mauritius, he visited Baudin’s grave—a plot of earth marked only by an assortment of flowers begging to be replaced. It moved him deeply. 

    However, paying his respects to a peer was not the reason he had docked in Port Louis. On his way home to Britain, Flinders’ vessel had encountered seething seas on the Indian, resulting in severe damage to the hull. Out of desperation he pulled into Port Louis for repairs. It was dumb, rotten luck for Flinders and crew that hostilities between Britain and France had resumed in the meantime and that he and his men were thus detained by French authorities for six years.

  • By the time Cook landed on mainland Australia, Tasmania’s bounties were some of the worst-kept secrets on the sea. For decades small-fry fishermen – lured by the songs of the humpback – had been ploughing its waters with great rewards. But ultimately it was the blaring honks of the seal that compelled these men off their boats and onto her wild shores.

    In the early days, fleets of sealers would row ashore at dawn and return to the mother ship by the end of the day, bearing a haul of dead seals to be skinned and rendered on deck. But with years of refinement this process came to resemble in efficiency the mills of mechanised Europe. For entire summers gangs were left ashore to harvest seals by means of club or pike. There, pelt shelters were erected to preserve the skins, while try-pots were installed to boil blubber on site. 

    As it happened, these sealing settlements brought about the earliest contact between Europeans and the Aborigines of Tasmania, the Palawa. To the latter, how lost the shivering sealer must have seemed, how inexplicable his mission. It stood to reason that he came from a world where seal pelts were more vital to life—how cold his distant lands must have been! Either that or the unindustrialised Palawa saw the white man’s need to build pelt shelters and set up try-pots as a forewarning to his inclination for excess. Either way, a cautious distance was kept.

    As for the sealers, the smoke that rose from the bush and carried scents of roasting kangaroo and shellfish was easy to resist at first. For weeks, fear confined them to the beaches and to their meagre diet of hardtack and rainwater. But gradually a kind of mania would set in. Day by day their spirit eroded, as card games, conversation and the drudgery of work did little to alleviate the boredom that came with land sealing. It wasn’t curiosity or even adventure that finally led them into the bush—but the overwhelming tedium that came from watching pelts dry.

    Upon first meeting, both sides were naturally tentative. After all, these early encounters were not only the Palawa’s first sightings of white skin, but ships, firearms, mirrors, trousers and so on. For that reason the Palawa showed disproportionate curiosity towards the sealers, while the sealers chiefly focused on how they could benefit from the meeting—namely through food, sex and labour. Soon this imbalance afforded the Palawa a new thesis: there is nothing more dangerous than a bored white man.

    It wasn’t until much later that the misadventures of sealing gangs made their way into the gazettes of European England, fuelling a budding literary genre of the coloniser in his fight against nature—and the very people who embodied that concept. The tales generally tell of a hungry sealer who heads inland to befriend a native, hoping to trade his tools for food. Depending on the author, these encounters then went one of two ways. One, a sealer is bemused by the natives’ traditions, charmed by their simple way of life and in awe of their skills as hunters. Alternatively, the white man’s trade proposals would result in sealer-Palawa violence, where the former would invariably prevail in all-out war.

    Whether these tales had any fidelity to the truth mattered little to their audience, for no reader was willing to go to the trouble of verifying them. They served either to cast doubt on or justify the Crown’s claim to these faraway shores and the people who inhabited them. In reality, the nature of the sealer-native dynamic had evolved year on year, becoming more complex each season. Of course, sealers were less swashbuckling than the stories represented and the natives far less uniform in their responses to white settlement.

    In Charles’ day, decades prior to the gazettes, land sealing was so established across Tasmania that, upon landing, a gang was often greeted with a dance from a Palawa tribe. A group of native men would then enlist themselves as envoys to the sealers, with the primary object of finding women from rival bands who could assist in sealing operations - chiefly skinning and preparing hides – as well as offering the sealers companionship during their stay.

    Whether the arrival of the sealers and their want of women incited fresh rivalries between bands or aggravated old ones was never clear. But whatever Palawa life was like before land sealing, it couldn’t be recovered. Tribes would often retaliate against the sealers with rescue attempts which, in the long run, offered only ephemeral glory in an inexorable process of replacement at the hands of Europeans.

    Soon the women became a commodity in the economy of the islands, valued for their knowledge of the environment as well as their amenability as lovers and labourers. In the summer months they assisted by not only skinning and preserving pelts but also hunting mutton birds, shellfish, gulls and their eggs. Often, gangs would ferry the Palawa women to neighbouring islands where they, like the sealers themselves, were abandoned for months at a time to hunt and process seals on their own.

    If the women resisted these duties the consequences were, naturally, more brutal than the reality of their servitude. Sometimes they were beaten, sometimes shackled to a tree and deprived of food. Those who didn’t submit to their new reality were made examples of—either killed or abandoned to an island of their own. The latter punishment explains how the women Milou saw from Nancy reached their island.

    In many cases the relationship between a sealer and a Palawa woman resembled the sealer families of Europe, so much so that sealers and their partners adopted the titles of husband and wife. Much like their European marriages, this was a union of estrangement where the man would spend but a few summer months with his wife, followed by a year or more of separation. Of course, it was rarely up to a gang sealer if he came back at all.

    In her servitude, the sealer wife was not only tasked with various sealing operations but was also charged with reconstructing, as best as the elements permitted, a European home on sand. Of course, this was a concept she would have to be taught. But before long many sealer wives were cooking and cleaning, as well as learning to await or dread their husband’s return in his absence.
    Another responsibility of hers was raising children, both those born from conjugal and non-conjugal relations. From their fathers, children might have picked up phrases in Dutch, French, English and so on. But generally the sealers didn’t interfere as Palawa mothers passed down their language, customs and their knowledge of the environment to their children.
    One such tradition was crafting shell necklaces. Like sealing, this was performed in the summer when the tides were low and the choice shells were most accessible. After gleaning the shallows for pieces – often, as in the case of the maireener, no larger than a rice grain – the shells were rinsed and left in open air, much to the delight of the bugs that cleansed them of any remaining debris. After sorting through the shells, the best ones were perforated with sharp animal bone and then threaded with the sinews of a kangaroo tail or plant fibres dried, softened and twisted for the purpose. Once the shells were arranged in a pleasing order the necklace was worn by the maker or given to a loved one on a worthy occasion. The most special necklaces acquired the status of heirlooms and were passed down the generations.
    Every  summer these mixed-race communities proliferated, and within a few decades, as gangs came and went, as Brits established their claim, the white man and mixed-blood Palawa would outnumber those of full Palawa ancestry, until eventually replacing them altogether.

Opening chapter from an upcoming novel entitled Calico, 2026.

  • SHE lived in a bark hut on the shores of an ocean of dirt. From her front door she looked out on a featureless expanse which like the sea was conducive to a hankering heart. She longed for her husband’s return, but dreaded it all the same, dreaded having to tell him about the roof, the cows, the mantelpiece, their two sons—all in fine working order when he left, all now defunct. 

    Out back lay a tract of sporadic trees and hardy shrub, which after two days of eastward bashing brought one to the nearest town, fixing the drover’s wife between two wildernesses, like a nit on the hairline of a balding man. She and her husband settled there over a decade prior, inspired by the notion of writing their story afresh—a story that would start with a bark hut and anonymity and end with a stone homestead and a surname known at both extremes of their solitude. But after years of loyal tenure she still felt nearer to the beginning of that story than its end. The house was in termitic ruin and the task of spreading their name was destined to fall to a solitary daughter who in her first nine years hadn’t encountered anything besides that which she could spy from the hut.

    When it came to names, among other things, the girl was a total ignoramus. Credit where due, she knew her own—despite being given every chance to forget it: her father was long absent, brothers long dead, and her mother only called her Child. But she did not know the family name that her father toiled so hard to circulate, while her mother was Mother and did little to elaborate on that paltry fact. 

    So it went for a child in those days, in those parts: you knew what you were told. Even she, raised in total seclusion, conformed to the land’s prevailing custom of never asking, even kin, about their lives before settling, so that as far as both she and the colonial office were concerned her parents had no history before the bark hut. 

    As for the drover’s wife, if she had been a child at some point she was doing a mighty job of hiding it from her daughter. She did not kiss or hug her child and she nightly put out the candles without even a story or so much as a tender warning against bed bugs. Even still the drover’s wife never strayed from her duty of cleaning, brushing, feeding, washing, or shielding her daughter from every danger her pessimistic mind could conjure.

    It is likely her confidence as a mother died with her snakebitten boys. Likely that the countless days spent fighting whatever nature so casually ruined had robbed her of her warmth. Likely that when her daughter asked after her father’s return, and she replied Pray, not anytime soon! she was seized by shame at the thought of his seeing the ruination of all things, herself included. And likely that she had grown comfortable in that shame, that privation, that strange freedom from needing to be happy, presentable, or a young wife at the start of a story with nothing but hope ahead.

    *

    It’s hard to fathom the turmoil a knock at the door brought a drover’s wife, hard to fathom the woe of turning the knocker away. But when a big, blue-eyed drifter came by offering a few days’ work in exchange for food and shelter she told him, as she always did with drifters, that they didn’t need the help, that her husband and two sons would be back any minute.

    But to her surprise it didn’t scare him off as intended. The drifter simply replied that it was no trouble waiting and without further invitation collapsed into a chair like something returned home, sighing out days of dust and dirt in so doing.

    She didn’t ask him to leave, maybe out of fear, maybe some archaic politesse. She went inside and bolted the door. Her daughter asked if Daddy was home and the drover’s wife said no, then paused, I wouldn’t’a thought, stowing a kitchen knife under her pit and wrapping herself in a shawl. She told her daughter to bolt her out then rejoined the drifter, leaning against the front door.

    The drifter was airing his feet, toes aspread in the cooling dusk, his gaze resting on the horizon. It is something isn’t it, he said. 

    She confirmed that it was.

    Bemarvelled, he replied that she could’ve probably seen him coming two weeks ago, so vast and flat and empty that it was.

    You came from out that way? 

    For the life of me, said he, I can hardly remember, happy to perpetuate the mystery of his visit and by extension his person.

    Well I has only saw you when you knocked.

    Thought I was your boys I spose?

    I don’t know, her eyes now splayed upon the same scene, a vanishing day, an eternal plain. 

    The drifter then looked about him for the first time, taking in the condition of the hut, of the chair on which he sat. What does he do?

    He’ll tell you when he gets here. 

    Impressed by her bluntness, he now turned to take her in for the first time. She felt his scrutiny and tried not to betray the rampant thoughts that wondered what he saw. 

    I look forward to it, he said.

    They did not speak again until it was dark and her feet were sore from standing and her bottom from leaning and her pit from clamping the knife. I’m heading in, she said, and she knocked and almost instantly her daughter unbolted the door. 

    She did not sleep a wink as she listened for movement outside while clutching the knife under the pillow, unable to take her eyes from the gaping hole in her roof. As happened every night the roof was animated by passing birds and winds—sounds she could never distinguish from the dreamscape of an anxious mind but which tonight were accompanied by visions of a silhouetted, spiderlike drifter climbing through, presumably to gobble up both her and daughter.

    He was awoken when she stepped out at dawn, again the door bolted magically behind her. He watched her steal wood from the pile but for reasons that baffled even himself he feigned sleep as she made her way back towards the hut. Once she was inside he laughed about that strange little dance, granted himself a moment’s gaze, and then set out. 

    He returned midmorning with some wood and a dead possum. He gave the latter to the drover’s wife and asked if she knew what to do with it, to which she nodded. He set out again with the primary object of building the pile up, which he worked at steadily for a few hours until some canine instinct told him the food was ready. He returned to his chair and in no time the drover’s wife came out with tea and two plates, giving him the heartier share. She ate next to him, standing up.

    Tomorrow I’ll take a look at that roof if you like.

    Alright.

    I picked up some of the right twine today too. Will hold better than what you got.

    Alright.

    They finished their plates in silence.

    Is it cause for alarm, your boys not coming in yestdy?

    No.

    He smiled at her and again she feigned blindness to his gaze. 

    He then laughed, shaking his head, and she was annoyed at him for not knowing why.

    Any idea why he pitched you up out here? 

    She didn't reply in time.

    Don’t get me wrong, is something to look at, by God, he said regarding the plain. He put his plate down and wiped his hands on his pants. But a fair hike to the nearest puddle too. Not much game either. Or good timber. It’s a wonder he found enough to put something together. Credit to’im I say, and he saluted the drover with a lift of an invisible hat. 

    He glanced at the drover’s wife who was looking at her shoes waiting for him to stop. He realised he had overstepped. 

    Ah, probably just a romantic like me, he resumed. Longs for the quiet life, I can appreciate it.

    Can you? 

    She picked up his plate and knocked on the door which immediately opened. She didn’t go out again all day and all night her mind whirred with insults for the drifter, cursing his arrogance, his impertinence. He probably bounced around the country trying to make himself useful, likeable, but inevitably was spat out into the lonely void. She told herself to pity him—advice she couldn’t follow, although she felt mighty giving it. But as the drover’s wife lay in bed, tired from hate with no destination, she gazed at the stars through the hole in the roof and cursed him, her husband and the world for how much she needed his help.

    The next day the drifter vowed to work himself into the dirt, driven by the realisation that he had been rude the night before, had tried to seem smarter than her husband. And while he believed it was true – that he was at an advantage over most men, courtesy of an edge or insight he couldn’t quite name – he didn’t like being perceived as the kind who knew it. 

    It was a gallant redemption: he worked at the roof from dawn until dark and didn’t even dare sit during intervals for tea and damper. Out of respect for the drover's wife he also avoided contact with the girl, who was shepherded outside by her paranoid mother whenever he entered and inside whenever he went out. Of course, the occasional glimpse was unavoidable – such was the nature of fixing a hole in a roof – but despite his curiosity having been piqued by the mystery porter, so diligently concealed by her mother, he likened his chivalric restraint to that of a bush-knight.

    At dusk, collapsing in his chair for the first time all day, the drover’s wife brought out a pannikin of tea. She stood beside him as he drank, again exhibiting her capacity to remain at arm’s length without feeling any need to converse.

    I was rude last night, he said.

    The roof is good.

    I’ll fix the mantel tomorrow.

    You’ve done plenty. And we can hardly feed you. 

    The chair is wage enough. I’d otherwise be under calico, out there—left to the bugs and bunyips. 

    He put his empty pannikin down, closed his eyes and let his head fall back on the hut wall with a thud.

    Do you have a destination in mind?

    Of sorts.

    She would only permit herself as much curiosity as he was willing to satisfy, and so left it there. 

    She picked up his cup but didn’t go back inside.

    She then watched the drifter, seemingly without waking, take a pipe out of his bag and clinch it in his mouth. Still asleep, he grabbed a tin out of his shirtpocket, pried both it and an eye open, then shut them both and returned it unused. He sucked on the unlit pipe. To the drover's wife this seemed the first defeat to an otherwise imperturbable being.

    I have a spare blanket, I’ll bring it out. 

    No need, it’s nice out.

    I’ll bring it out.

    *

    He slept in that chair for five months.

    After two the drover’s wife had also taken to sleeping in a chair, one that the drifter had built and that by day sat in the centre of the hut but by night she moved to the humming daub wall, animated by his snoring. When her daughter asked why she slept sitting with her head to the wall she alternately claimed the bed hurt her back or scolded the girl for asking the same damn question every damn night. 

    The rigour the drifter had exhibited when fixing the roof quickly proved an exaggeration as he now made his small daily improvements while showing sound judgment for when to call it a day. This only endeared him to her more—disabused that she was, thanks to her husband, of the merits in working oneself into the dirt. 

    No task ever flustered him and he deemed no question or conversation too serious for his customary wit. It was with similar lightness that his long curls jounced as he worked and seemed to trap sunlight in their ringlets as the days grew hotter; while his habit of chuckling at things she didn't understand no longer annoyed her but only added to the mystique by which she was increasingly beguiled.

    His contribution went far beyond domestic repairs and recreational forays into woodcraft. Twice during his daily wanderings he intercepted a fugitive brumby and wrangled it back to the hut to break in; and twice within two weeks he mounted a compliant beast and set out for the nearest town to sell it. With his departure the drover’s wife succumbed to the same hollow longings of her earliest desertions. And despite his promise of a swift return each hour she grew more certain that he’d vanish with his winnings and more convinced that he’d be a fool not to.

    The first time he came back much sooner than promised, bearing as many provisions as he could carry—jam, tinned coffee, Windsor soap, tallow candles, tobacco for himself, school books for the girl, and a copy of The Illustrated London News for the drover’s wife. But on his second journey she was made to wait beyond the point of hope, such that it bore the quality of a Christmas miracle when one brittle December morn the child burst in announcing the drifter, shaggily bearded and leading a donkey that moped under the weight of a festive haul. At that moment the drover’s wife failed to hide her happy tears from both daughter and drifter, from which point there was little doubt over the effect he had had on her stale heart.

    But while there was not yet verbal or physical testimony to these feelings the drover’s wife was sure that the drifter felt the same way about her—that he, like one of his colts, had chosen to forsake his feral freedoms for the warmth of a shared stable. While he maintained his way of speaking in riddles, his once-elusive gaze that couldn’t be torn from the horizon now settled on mother and child with hasteless affection, with winks and laughter and invitations to play, altogether suggesting a man who had, at last, found his hearth. 

    And yet, while convinced of the drifter's feelings, hers would continue to find no voice. For while God had lost all sway in the bark hut, His influence could still be found in her moral rigidity, which, in the enduring absence of both God and husband, might've resembled pride more than virtue.

    The drifter's command over every element that once plagued the hut – rain, sun, wind, drought – relieved the drover’s wife to such a degree that she was now faced, for the first time since childhood, with the forgotten luxury of boredom. With that she happily rediscovered a lost vanity. Her Sunday best that over time had been absorbed into a haze of uniformity was restored to its original purpose: to weekly mark her transcendence over her world. She also let tumble her quotidian plait, which she now brushed almost hourly, while it had become a secret vice to walk around the back of the hut and pinch her cheeks for colour. 

    Perhaps the best proof of the drifter’s attachment was his bond with her daughter—now seemingly unbreakable. He had taken charge of her schooling with a tenderness that was hard to reconcile with his methods for breaking in horses and which was marked by that steady, unerring application that explained his virtuosity in all things. He watched with eternal patience as she traced the alphabet in her crude hand and repeated each letter after him. Skirting the enigmas of English phonetics he moved onto writing and reciting maxims like Respect your elders and Idleness is the root of all evil which, once absorbed, only reinforced the merits of learning and obedience.  

    But his indoctrinations soon proved unnecessary. The drifter’s initial carrot of barley sugar animals quickly gave way to the sweeter incentive of knowledge, for which the girl was more greedy and which had the added bonus of not turning her teeth brown. As a result her reading developed with a rapidity that astonished even him so that within two months she was already studying her mother’s magazines, rectifying the unworldliness to which a drover’s daughter was condemned from birth. 

    The only subject that captivated her more than London News’ take on global affairs was the drifter’s history. Of course she was increasingly tantalised by his evasiveness which only rationed morsels of the past at a time. When she asked how he became so good at taming horses, for instance, he alluded to a brief stint in Astley’s circus in London but diminished its importance by philosophising in that vague way of his how most things wanted to be tamed and that it was just a matter of identifying which ones. As always he’d divert her by asking if she was one of those things and she, fresh to the pleasure of talking about herself, leapt at the chance to self-reflect and have her answers heard by an adult of such well-travelled wisdom.

    By then their classes had progressed beyond the stool and desk and were conducted in the open air where meandering feet seemed conducive to meandering talk. They spent entire days outside talking, teaching, learning, laughing. As she asked insatiably about his life he became more and more susceptible to these deviations so that in no time her image of the drifter became far clearer and richer than that of either of her parents. 

    The drover’s wife grew increasingly uneasy as they returned from their long walks with the girl naming each British colony by continent or reciting in pretty, alphabetised melodies every European kingdom. And yet she could only bring herself to compliment both student and tutor, suppressing any complaints of loneliness she felt in their absence. 

    But one afternoon when they came home and recited an entire dialogue in German – scripted though it was, with jokes and laughs scattered throughout –  the drover’s wife said that the girl was needed around the house from now on and that future classes had to take place inside on account of the incoming rains and winds that carried pestilence from the coast.

    As when he mocked her husband the drifter was able to recognise that he had once again upset the drover’s wife. That evening when she dropped him his tea and tried to leave without their usual conversation he grabbed her arm in what was their first contact that couldn’t be misconstrued as accidental. She froze in his grasp and gaze and when he spoke she felt a sudden urge to cry: I’m sorry about the German. We wanted to amuse you is all.

    From that day on the drifter was sure to pay the drover’s wife more attention, as well as lip service to her changes in dress that previously went either unseen or unmentioned. That small token was enough to assuage the drover’s wife’s feelings of neglect and with her blessing soon the drifter was taking lessons outside again, though now doing so sensitive to her growing impatience as well as her resentment of her child’s burgeoning intellect.

    With his days now rebalanced between daughter and mother, lessons and labour, he devoted his evenings to spending time with them both, evenings full of play and jokes and card tricks that he refused to explain despite the daughter's insistent begging. Once the daughter was put to bed the drifter and drover’s wife would drink tea on the porch and talk deep into the night.

    And yet, while the drover's wife's peace was somewhat restored, a new turbulence had started to brew inside her. It started on the day the drifter seized her forearm and fixed his blue eyes on her. From that night, while in her sleeping chair, she would close her eyes and squeeze her own arm to conjure the memory, clawing harder to make it more vivid. It soon developed into a daily vice where she'd wait until drifter and daughter were distant specks, at which point she'd sit in the drifter's outdoor chair and smother her face with his coat, gripping her arm and with her other hand surrendering to fantasy.

    Inevitably, however, the fantasy became insufficient. And one afternoon, as drifter and daughter were returning home, she pretended to fall when cleaning outside. She let out a cry. The drifter rushed over, picked her up and carried her to his chair. She sent her daughter inside to watch the billy as the drifter proceeded to assess her ankle. Does this hurt? And this? How about when I do this? And in her moans pain and pleasure were indistinguishable. 

    She feigned a limp for a week and used him as a crutch to get around. And then one night, frustrated by her own cowardice she finally confessed to the drifter what he already knew. As she handed him his tea she came out with it: I'm very fond of you you know. 

    And I you—as fond as a frog of a pond.

    No that's not it. You know that's not it.

    He swirled his tea around. What is it then?

    Don't tease. 

    He waited. 

    I want you. More than I want my husband. More than I ever wanted anything.

    There was no cryptic chuckle or deflective reply, but a long silence of contemplation where he fixed on his tea until the swirls became placid again. 

    We jus gotta be careful is all, he said without looking up. I don't wanna confuse her. She still asks about her ol' man when we're out together. And I tell her the truth: the drought's all but done. He could be back any day now. That's the real issue here. Then we can worry about us.

    He looked up—she was studying him.

    Of course I feel the same way, he added, taking her hand and caressing it with his thumb. Jus gotta be careful you know.

    No. I'm done with careful. And she knelt in front of him. And I'm done waiting and worrying. He's left me for dead. When he comes back I want you to shoot him.

    You don't mean that.

    I do. 

    You don't.

    How can you say that? How can you say I don't? And just to prove it she clawed his upper thighs with each hand. 

    He shot up. Easy now.

    She told him to shh and made for his belt. He pushed her back but his resistance was pale to her desire. She was already in his pants when he started to whisper protests: She'll hear us, You'll confuse her. But once her hands were around him he slid down the chair in resignation. She grinned. She fixed on his anguish, his clenched eyes. She stroked him until she felt she had totally broken him in. But as she climbed onto him he told her No. She tried again but he pushed her back to her knees then forced her head to his crotch. His strength was inarguable. He told her what to do and she took pleasure in obeying. He coached her until she was good at it. He didn't open his eyes once. 

    When he was finished she sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him all over. He squirmed some but she told him to relax. He tried to.

    Then after some time he spoke: I will kill him.

    She stopped kissing and looked at him.

    If that's what you want, he resumed. If you're really serious about us.

    It's what I want. Yes. A thousand times yes. He's already dead to me. 

    Well alright.

    And she squeezed him some more. Choked him almost. He peeled her arms away.

    But the girl knows nothing until then okay?

    Fine. Yes, of course. Yes.

    Until then I'm a drifter, you're a drover's wife.

    *

    The next morning they all sat at the table for tea and damper. Both adults seemed satisfied that the daughter had not heard anything the night before. The drover's wife couldn't hide her excitement and more than once massaged her foot into his crotch. He gave no smile or indication of complicity and she eventually restrained herself.

    When the daughter and drifter stepped out for their lesson the drifter looked up at the sky and said it could get cold soon, maybe even rain. He told her to grab her cloak and he grabbed his big heavy coat. They set off without ceremony.

    The drover's wife watched them turn into specks. She then sat in his chair and clutched her arm. She had to show great strength not to give into fantasy—which she mightn't have been able to resist were his coat there. But she prevailed, deciding to save herself for him. 

    In his honour she also busied herself with pointless work, cleaning and improving the hut in whichever way she could. But it made little difference to an already pretty home. She retired for the day and waited in his chair. 

    That cold weather never did blow in. She rehearsed what she'd say to the drifter when he came back, how she'd tease him some. How'd those coats go? Get much rain out your way? After all, he was never wrong about such things. 

    And then a thought came over her. She looked in his rucksack and found it nearly empty. His gun and money were gone. She did laps of the hut until dark, looking in every direction for two homecoming specks.

    And for a week that's how she spent every day: circling the hut like a dog chained to its post, until she realised what a fool she'd been and took the knife to her throat.

Opening section from a story entitled The Sheeners, 2023.

  • For maybe the twelfth consecutive day I sit in the streetward seats of La Comédie permitting the world to spin hurriedly on without my contribution or care. I come to these parts of the world - where one’s dollar stretches further than at home - for this exact purpose: stretching time. 

    Every day the prime object of my attention, chief extractor of my ink, has been the curious activities of the shoe-sheeners. Their industry is a small one, and their service of accordingly little popularity. And yet without cease these men prowl the shady esplanades like wasting, weary jungle cats, eyes fixed floorward, only to be lifted by the sight of scuttling, shuffling leather. 

    Only then do they behold a man – for it is a service, it seems, rendered and received solely by that sex – and in doing so set upon him a look of humble duty, seasoned so judiciously with sadness, that anyone in possession of two feet is struck with a sharp regret for not having worn their dress shoes that day. Nevertheless, pity rarely translates to the exchange of pay and polish in this trade, as in this town locals and travellers alike are wise to adopt a blindness towards the goods and services so relentlessly hawked at every corner—lest they be made penniless before reaching the end of their street. And yet, while the sheeners occupy the same subterranes of the inalterably poor as the beggars, it is not clear – even to them, I venture – what portion of their fee is the fruit of service and that of charity. And it’s partly this ambiguity that makes them such curious subjects. 

    My intrigue was first stolen by two sheeners entangled in what seemed a territorial dispute at the prized sight of this very café. It was my first day in the city and I was immediately struck by the notion that there was more than one man of this profession. My surprise was then justified after taking a quick inventory of the feet in my environs, alarmingly few of which were rigged out in that precious material of black, buffable leather. The feud soon fizzled, but as time crept on my interest was intensified as two more sheeners, at intervals, passed through the scene, weaving through the tables and taking stock of the same feet I had moments prior—dispirited by the unchanged results. 

    Over the next few weeks of acquainting myself with the city I deduced that the trade was confined to a few city blocks, the epicentre of which being the point I pen these observations. And of the dozen or so sheeners I have spied, it seems only one is a fixture of the shaded strip stretching before La Comédie—the instigator of the row. So I can only comment on his dealings with any credibility.

    Across two weeks in this café - roughly twenty hours - I witnessed just six customers submit to the kiss of his brush. Coins, not notes, were the mode of pay, which meant that his fee (unfixed and determined wholly by the mood of the customer) would rarely exceed ten dirhams. Across a day this can’t have equated to much more than a fleeting repeal against the protests of his stomach. My opinions on whether this sum is sufficient or even just don’t mean much—to him, you or me. All I’ll say is what needn’t be said: it isn’t much.

    *

    The sheener is always in possession of two key articles. The first is the small, wooden box which serves simultaneously as the ‘toolkit’ - where rags, brushes, polish and other paraphernalia are stored - and as a platform (the handle of the case) on which the customer’s foot is perched when succumbing to the brush. The sheener also carries a tiny seat - manufactured by the same people who make clown bicycles, I suspect - which allows him to get as close to the ground as possible without suffering the indignity of sitting on it.

    The sheener’s attire is so lacking in variation from one to the next that I wonder whether there isn’t some community forum, or at least a handbook, where matters of dress-code are discussed, or rather, declared closed for discussion. But I doubt it. For while the sheeners are a breed of their own they are sole traders (if you will) in every sense.
    The uniform is a royal blue chore coat which on every practitioner is now a baronial shade of its former self. Even on sweltering days (most days, for me) the sheener wears pants. This leaves his shoes and hat as the last resort for self-expression—usually sandals and a cap which, like his jacket, has been rendered chalky from decades of sun.

    Which brings me to the final precondition of the sheener. Every sheener is old. And yet, despite a lifetime of having (almost certainly) consumed less than the prescribed three meals a day, these men are exceedingly fit for their age. I attribute this to the kind of hunger which is vital to the prowl, the constant foraging, stalking and readiness to pounce.

    I never had these skills, those of the hunter. While some spend their lives racing against the clock, others busy themselves with activities aimed at slowing it down. I’m the second kind. I don’t know if one is better than the other, or if we even have a choice in which one we are. Nor do I think it makes much difference.

    From what I can discern there are no boy-sheeners rising through the ranks; no sheener understudies, nor sons to inherit their father’s box and brush. (For some reason I can’t even imagine these men going home to wives or children. Like the truck-driver or jungle cat, they seem too damn solitary.) My point being this: on the day that a sheener stops showing up to work there might be a scramble for his territory but I suspect the number of sheeners in the city will simply reduce by one.

    This may mean that this is the last generation of sheeners. And from a long view, maybe this is a good thing. (I have been told that in some of the less-developed, neighbouring countries - or even in a few cities in this one - the sheener is still a viable path. Not because there are more leather shoes there, but because all paths are more viable in places where opportunities are fewer.) Here and now, most children are at school, fashioning for themselves dreams previously unavailable to the sheener.

    But that’s not the only reason the trade is on the wane. I’d add that even the development of cheaper, more versatile materials - canvas, cotton, nylon, polyester, even faux leather! - isn’t the whole story either. The problem, I think, is more abstract: the trade itself belongs to a lost world. Some youngsters see it as a quaint relic, others a demeaning profession.

    But all can agree that the sheener is a vestige of another time, a time that isn’t their own, a time many would like to forget (even if they can’t remember it).

    But in the case of the sheener, being an anachronism is a part of the gig. (I think the customers know this too, that having one’s shoe polished is the cheapest available form of time travel.) Amidst the hum and buzz of the centre-ville, it seems their style has been preserved and has pickled its way into the present. It takes the form of a slow, careful solemnity—a solemnity which seems to acknowledge a human hierarchy most feign an inability to see. (Is there any readier illustration of this than a man cleaning another man’s shoe?) And yet, there seems a willingness on the sheener’s part - a pride even? - to exist within the structures of this social order.

    This pride, this quiet dignity, resides not in his dress nor even the sheener’s demeanour, but in the ceremony with which he sheens a shoe. I don’t know if they’re aware of it, the impression they give of belonging to the past. Nor is it clear whether they belong to it for commercial reasons or like the bug does its sap.

    *

    These tired ol’ themes - solitude, the past dying quiet and slow - have loyally pursued me, or me them, for my whole career.

    My first book, Fading Glory, is a historical fiction/romance which chronicles the rise and fall of Jim Glory, an Australian drover-turned-Kanoot hunter. A Kanoot is a made-up, flightless bird whose industrialised slaughter came as result of the booming hat and quill trades in Europe. The combination of Jim’s thirst for wealth and the Kanoot’s indifference to death means that the former becomes a man of great means, and the latter extinct. Of course, the fate of the Kanoot, Jim’s fortune and thus Jim himself all eventually converge at the point of oblivion. Even the hats and quills prove a fading fashion by the end of the book. 

    I liked that book but no one wanted to publish it. And so my next book, Nothing Toulouse, was written solely to sell. It weaves a similar thread to Fading Glory. It details the decline of an underground abortionist in 1970s Toulouse, who, upon the legalisation of his trade, resorts to robbing pharmacies, bookstores and, finally, an antiques dealer who puts him out of his misery with a Napoleanic bayonet.

    Though it is custom to use the present tense when discussing an artwork, in this case it feels unwarranted. There are no surviving copies of Nothing Toulouse and it exists only in memory—in my and my dead mother’s respective heads. Equally sensical is the passage: Despite being wiped out some 4,000 years ago, you can find the woolly mammoth roaming the Eurasian steppes, grazing on nutrient-dense shrubs and grasses.

    Anyway, the book was pure pulp, and sold as many copies as my books that weren’t written to sell (zilch). And I’m certain, had it ever been published, it would have eventually been pulped too...

    To pulp is a verb used by second-hand booksellers to describe the fate of the donated books that are left on their shopfronts in giant Ikea bags. Most of them aren’t any good, so are taken to factories where they’re to be pulped en masse. (The paper made from the pulp is probably recycled and used to print more pulp—quite harmonious in a way). As a young, ambitious writer who claimed to care deeply about the sanctity of a book - the dog-eared pages, the smell of the paper, the satisfaction of seeing platoons of them ranked and filed on a shelf - I found this quite depressing. But the longer I went unpublished - remained invisible - the more comfort I found in the fact that even published books died undignified deaths. At least mine passed peacefully in desk drawers and never experienced the violence of inexorably fading. But now, neither ambitious nor bitter, I don’t know what I feel about it. (Actually, yes I do. I feel nothing about it. Diddly. And that’s very different to not knowing.)