Wanting

were like a living being, a single animal, waiting, ready. Dickens realised he was no longer speaking to a script, but that the script was—improbably, inexorably, inescapably—describing his soul.

‘You,’ he said again, this time louder, for he wanted to fill his mouth with her, he wanted to lose himself in Ellen Ternan’s breasts, to bury himself in her belly, to bite her thighs, to be rid of all that being still and alone made him fear. He was panting. His terror was absolute. He was shaking violently, his voice trembling, his words now revelations to him. ‘It was always you!’

‘Don’t,’ said Ellen Ternan, his Nell, saying words that neither Dickens nor Wilkie had ever scripted; then, realising her error, she shook her head. And as her body was seized with a most terrifying presentiment of its destiny, she tried to retreat into her lines, mumbling and confusing them in a way that was mistaken for acting.

But Dickens was pulling her into him, into some strange and terrible new fate, and she was unable to stop falling. She was terrified for them both. She looked around desperately, but everywhere outside the halo of light defining the two of them together was darkness. The wholly wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else. The other cast members gathered around. The men reverently uncovered their heads. The end was near; they all saw it now.

‘Kiss me, my sister, kiss me before I die!’

His words were firing into her heart like a cannonade without end. Ellen Ternan leant over him and kissed his forehead. She kissed him not simply because it was in the script but because there was an inexorable logic to her kissing him that she struggled against but could not deny. The question is—can you pay? She could see now that it was a novel contained in his notebook, only she had not understood until that moment that she was its unwritten heart.

He could feel her lips on his brow, he could feel the immense human tensing of the darkened audience, a black void that radiated some energy that allowed him to live a little longer. He could feel it, feel them, willing him on. He had come here by chance, coincidences were bringing him to his destiny, and yet, as in his stories, he knew there were no coincidences in this world, that the purpose of everything is ultimately revealed, be it a savage’s skull or Sir John lost in ice floes or he, Dickens, lost until this moment. He had thought he would have to drag himself in a strange waking sleep through the rest of a life that had become a strange torture. But perhaps it was not so.

‘What is it?’ asked Dickens, with words Ellen Ternan had never heard before, unscripted words. She looked at him in shock, not knowing what was happening. ‘The way we are denied love,’ he continued, and she, along with the audience, could hear how hard it was for him to say these words. ‘And the way we suddenly discover it being offered us, in all its pain and infinite heartbreak. The way we say no to love.’

He never saw Lady Jane, white-faced, abruptly stand, turn and leave her box. Outside, in her rush to get away from the theatre, she accidentally trod in a gutter gouted with something foul and thick. She dropped her handkerchief and her nose and mouth were overwhelmed by the foul effluvia of the city, heat-leavened and wind- stirred: the wet sewage flowing through the streets and the dry dust of horse dung blowing in the air, the caustic filth of a thousand tanneries, workshops and factories, the stench of a million unwashed bodies.

Lady Jane felt lost, felt that she might vomit. It occurred to her that perhaps one only exists in those who love you. She could not find a landau or even a hansom cab. Had she said no to love, that day she looked down into the courtyard? She called out for a cab, called out louder, but none came. And if you turn away from love, did it mean you no longer existed? Did she? She felt as lost and dead as the silky soot that eddied around her. She was calling louder and louder, but still nobody came.

Inside, the only sound that could be heard was the slow puff and wheeze of the gigantic bellows working hard to sustain the burning limelight, as though that one pale fire were breathing for the two thousand mesmerised audience who remained.

‘Don’t die,’ said Ellen Ternan.

His head lay in her lap, her tears were falling on him like rain, and the universe was flowing into him, he was open to everything, it was an immense thought, a terrifying feeling, something at once outside of himself that had now entered him, a thing both wicked and exhilarating. It was as though he had awoken startled from a dream. He had survived. He felt as if he were coming down from a mountain, that the snow drifts were thinning and then giving way to grasslands, that a great green valley beckoned before him, a space so immense and free he felt himself gasping contemplating it. On and on he walked. The air was sweet, and breathing felt like drinking water on a hot day. He was coming home. It made no sense. It was beyond understanding. He was being held by her, feeling her draw breath. He was tasting her tears. The sound of sobbing from the darkness was unbearable.

‘Please don’t die,’ begged Ellen Ternan.

His cheek pressed against her uncorseted belly. He could feel its softness pulsing in and out. He could not know that within a year his marriage would be ended. That in the thirteen years of life left to him, he would be faithful to Ellen Ternan, but that theirs would be a hidden and cruel relationship. That his writing and his life would change irrevocably. That things broken would never be fixed. That even their dead baby would remain a secret. That the things he desired would become ever more chimerical, that movement and love would frighten him more and more, until he could not sit on a train without trembling. He was smelling her, hot, musty, moist.

‘Nelly?’ whispered Dickens.

And at that moment, Dickens knew he loved her. He could no longer discipline his undisciplined heart. And he, a man who had spent a life believing that giving in to desire was the mark of a savage, realised he could no longer deny wanting.

13

‘WE’VE GIVEN DEATH THE SLIP,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘But for how long?’

Walter Talba Bruney was a drunk now, and fat and morbid with it. He was only in his late twenties but looked far older. The war had ended, but another war went on and on inside Walter Talba Bruney and it would not let him go. When he was drunk, he was angry with God. When he was sober, he prayed to God to help him get drunk. When he was drunk again, he shouted that if he had a chance, he would get a spear and spear God good, teach him a lesson.

About God Mathinna had no particular opinion—perhaps, as she sometimes told her fellow rum drinkers around the fire, it was because she was high church. But she told Walter Talba Bruney she hated him talking about death.

‘All blackfellas die at Wybalenna,’ said Walter Talba Bruney, ignoring her. ‘We think, come back to our country and we be good and healthy. But we come back here and we keep dying. Devil in us. Devil killing us. God killing us. Why God and the Devil want to work together?’

There were five of them drinking rum and sugar that night: two other natives and Burly Tom, a one-time whaler who had of late been living by mending nets, but who later denied ever being there.

Mathinna swung the conversation to dresses they were now wearing in London, and, though she knew she was only repeating what she had heard years before, she tried to lead the conversation as she had seen Lady Jane lead her soirees, introducing a topic and then turning to someone else for their opinion. Yet when she tried to look her companions directly in the eye, Mathinna realised this wasn’t Government House but Ira Bye’s sly grog shop—an earthen-floor split-timber hut of two rooms at North West Bay—that it wasn’t a soiree and they were anything but society, just stinking no-good stupid blackfellas. She wished she had the Widow Munro’s bamboo cane to hold under their chins until they did look back at her, these no-good, good for nothing savages who knew nowt.

And because, as well as a direct gaze, she had in her time at Government House absorbed the idea of example to one’s lowers, and because it made the point—to herself as much as to them—that she was somebody, Mathinna talked about the new dances that season in London, though her knowledge here, too, was both hopelessly inadequate and entirely out of date. When she asked Gooseberry what she thought, she just cackled into her cracked china cup, and, not really knowing anything about the whites’ new dances, Mathinna turned to the one subject about which she could manifest some authority: why she would like to hunt foxes, something that offered a union of her heritage with her upbringing.

‘We been treated shamefully, worse than the old people in the bush,’ said Walter Talba Bruney. ‘And them