The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally Page B

Dabby Bryant’s arms Ralph did not fear any of these blunt, earthy dangers. Releasing him, she dropped the fairly fashionable scarf from her shoulder, opened the grey penal blouse the Home Secretary had given her. Within the sullen fabric lay two olive and, so Ralph thought of them, feral breasts. Images of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf came to his mind.
    As Ralph tore at his own military jacket and unbuttoned the sides of his breeches, there was more than the desperation of lust. For he knew it was specifically the seed of his dreams that he was about to pass to her, and that chance must be taken instantly.
    Her legs now locked over his shoulders, she too worked at him like someone ministering an urgent mercy. And soon they lay together gasping cruelly, like two people who had somehow mutually rescued themselves from drowning in a canal.
    Later he was astounded by the ease and blamelessness of this infidelity. Given the whole story, as he hoped she never would be, Betsey Alicia might nonetheless understand that he had put off an inhuman burden. He no longer dreamed those well-arranged but mystifying dreams which he had suffered in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, whose cries had awakened other officers and, for all he knew, reached even the lags on the convict decks. His dreams now became chaotic, like other people’s, and dimly remembered. There was nothing to write down of them. They possessed no story. He woke from them feeling strong and normal.
    Without those intricate dreams to set down, the journal he had been keeping now possessed no meaning. Davy Collins’s journal was fuller in describing this remarkable penal station and the outlandish mysteries of its animals and plants, and of the Indian inhabitants who had lived here ab origine , from the start of time. His own journal had never had any distinction apart from the dreams. The Pharaoh-like burden of dreaming significantly, which he had caught from his wife, Betsey Alicia, had now been lifted from him by Dabby Bryant. And so, when the convicts had been ashore fewer than three weeks, and himself ashore barely a month, he abandoned his journal so rigorously kept aboard the Friendship .
    Not only did he never approach Dabby again for a repeat of the exorcism, he was not even tempted to. Dabby Bryant had got the balance right. Now it should be left to itself. He saw her sometimes when she was in the company of other convict women from that side of the stream, and heard reports of her from Harry Brewer.
    Now, a full year after she had delivered him of the dreams which until then had oppressed his days, he went across the stream to ask her to play Rose.
    When Ralph got to the door of the Bryants’ shack, the venue of his cure, he was shocked to find the convict Cox there. Cox was Will Bryant’s foreman. His face was large and disordered from an excess of imprisonment and now from the cruel reflections of the sunlight off the harbour. Neither Dabby nor the child was there. Ralph felt the Bryant hearth had been violated.
    Cox reminded Ralph that Will had been turned out of his house. “Turned out of being chief fisher too. He were flogged and sent across the stream. And now he works for me, that kiddy, that Will.”
    Ralph did remember now having heard that Will had been tried for keeping back some of the catch. He had been sentenced by the Court of Criminal Jurisdiction on a day when Ralph had, thankfully, not been sitting on it.
    Crossing the stream again, Ralph found the Bryants in poor Charlie Wilson’s hut in the male convicts’ encampment. He felt shame at having been ignorant that his Cornish exorcist, Dabby Bryant, had been forced across the stream and into a hut which had gone empty and haunted since Charlie Wilson had fasted himself to death months before. Charlie, working at the shingle-cutting camp, had starved himself, selling off his rations to other lags. He wanted to raise money for a return to that England