He is transferred by ship from Norfolk Island to Port Arthur and then to a probation station at Saltwater River. There he regards a chartreuse sea brushing against a shore of almond stone and white sand. Oaks and eucalypts fringe the shore. Seabirds soar and cry in a cerulean sky. Such sparkling beauty would once have moved him to tears. Jacques-Louis and the others awaiting their transition back to society are put to work in the gardens. The soil is fertile and the crops are extensive. Potatoes, turnips, cabbages and beets. Food to feed officers, guards and their families, the leftovers added to the rations of salt pork and hard bread for the prisoners. At night, in their quarters, he hears of the grim world at the coalmines nearby, where men are locked beneath the earth twelve hours a day, digging, sweatin g, in an eternity of squalid darkness only to be entombed again in underground cells all night. These accounts are rivalled by the stories of the men who carry the great timbers from the forests at Port Arthur upon their shoulders, sometimes thirty men to a tree, carrying the dread burden three miles and more to the mill, the tallest men worn down until their backs are broken. Jacques-Louis responds only with silence. None of these stories yet compare with the horrors of Norfolk Island during the reign of Morisset or Anderson, but horror has no comparison. All horror is horror . One afternoon, a few weeks into his stay, he witnesses an overseer beat with a cudgel the boy who ferries the slops in a wheelbarro w from the latrines to the bay. He is barely five feet in height, misshapen and afflicted with a speech impediment. The boy is sixteen and had been at the boys’ prison at Point Puer, near Port Arthur, since he was eleven—co nvicted for theft. The beating of the boy is but a small cruelty amongst countless on the ledger of human suffering, yet Jacques-Louis’ hands tremble with the desire to seize the overseer by the throat, to feel the man’s pulse weaken beneath his grip, to hurl him to the dirt and pound him down, down, until he is
nothing. It burns in him, a rage so fierce he can taste it. But he cannot, he must not. He turns not to the overseer but to the forest that borders the station, and he screams into the wilderness of trees and into the boundless sky. He screams into some forsaken hollow within himself that light will never reach again. His voice cracks with rage at all that is and all that has been. The cruelty of men. Men who shape this world like a thing of spite and greed, who have fashioned it in their own image and damned it with the same wrath and fear that now howls from de ep within him. There is no rest, no peace in living. What survives is but the wreckage of himself, stripped bare by the years and the ruin of it all, tethered to this destruct ion he once called his life. When his cry dies, the birds have ceased calling. The men scattered nearby, frozen in the moment, stare blankly into the forest, too. It is as though Jacques-Louis’ voice had found something shared by them all; a knowing of a world that feels nothing, that answers only with its indifferent cruelty. In that gaze, they saw their own place, their own smallness, standing always on the edge of a life that was violent, cold, occasionally lit with brief flickers of hope, yet always haunted by the truth. We are alone. There is neither salvation nor absolution. And then slowly, as if waking, the men stirred, the spell of the moment dissolved. They returned to their tools, their backs bent once more under the familiar yoke of their labours, as though nothing had happened. Everything would carry on as it always had, as it always would. The cry had been no more than the wind. But the oversee r beckons Jacques-Louis with a slow, deliberate hand. ‘Does it rouse you, Frenchman, to watch a fool receive his due? It would be dangerous of you to think yourself better than the rest of us, old man. You’re on borrowed time. Be very, very careful.’ His eyes narrow, his tone is almost amused. ‘Maybe we’ll set aside a little lesson just to remind you where you stand.’ Jacques-Louis waits through the night, anticipating what will come. But in the morning , he discovers he is not to receive the lash—he is to administer it. If Jacques-Louis refuses to punish the man, he will receive the sentence himself and will lose any chance of receiving his ticket of leave. He thinks of the flogging he had received on Norfolk Island, beneath Anderson’ s cold eye, where the lash was crueller and fell harder than
anything he had known aboard the Rochester . He had bitten his tongue almost in two. The memory sears through him. He cannot endure that again. His fingers tighten around the leather handle, feeling its weight rough in his palm. The plaited whipcord is stiff as wire, hardened by salt and sun, the tails running through his fingers as sharp as a blade. Nine tails tied with nine knots apiece. Eighty-one ways to cut a man in each stroke. He looks ahead, sees the man’s back stretched taut across the triangle. There is no room for mercy here—not in this place, not for him. The past lingers in his grip, and in that moment, the line between victim and persecutor blurs. There is low laughter from the soldiers watching on. The superintendent says that he will call the number every half-minute, and Jacques -Louis must wait for his instruction, thus ensuring a slow and constant pace for the punishment. ‘And do not hold back,’ the superintendent adds, ‘or I shall make it one hundred.’ ‘One ...’ The whip flies and the skin receives. The shock of the contact travels through the tails to the leather handle, through Jacques-Louis’ arms and down to his toes. He tries not to look at the grim effect of his work. He steadies the weapon and waits for the superintendent who is scrutinising his pocket watch. ‘Two ...’ The wait. ‘Three ...’ The man on the triangle makes no sound. Jacques-Louis tries to blur his vision, to see not the man, nor the yard, nor the idling guards. ‘Twenty-eight ...’ Wait. ‘Twenty-nine ...’ Jacques-Louis’ shoulders ache. His legs ache. He will do this thing. He will not see the web of white sinew and bright blood, the skin on the bones of the rib cage scored away . ‘Forty-one ...’ Wait. ‘Forty-two ...’ When it is done, flies settle on broken and mutilated skin. A three- legged mongrel dog is licking blood of f the triangle.
Jacques-Louis awakes to the sound of men in the dormitory moving about him, the morning bell demanding their attention. He is bathed in sweat. He pushes his head back under the blanket but the dream will not leave him. This is what he will know in the years beyond. Memory and dream, the two as alike as if he had lived it all, and the dreams he will have for the rest of his life will be far worse than any of his days. When he is called to the superintendent’ s office, he is certain he has prophesied his future and is to be ushered into the yard to administer a punishment. He fears it will be the simpleton he must brutalise, but instead the superintendent advises him that he is to be returned to Port Arthur. A ship is to carry him to Hobart Town, where his ticket of leave awaits him.