The Forgotten World Read online

  Dedication

  For Liv and Eamon

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARK O’FLYNN

  COPYRIGHT

  ONE

  When I was a babe in rags my father had three wives. Not one after another, the way a man of misfortune might have numbered them, but all at once. They were married to him by the self-styled Reverend James Cowley Morgan Fisher in a midnight ceremony with flaming torches and bouquets of wattle blossom. So make of that what you will. For a while we all lived together in a makeshift village in the depths of the valley, beneath the great rough wall known as Narrow Neck. One of my earliest memories is of those rags hanging from the trees and bushes about the shack. Unless they were the rags of those who came after. And if I am wrong about this, how can my memory of any of it be pure? So, rags in trees there were.

  Village was too grand a name for where we lived. It was just a hotchpotch of timber wurleys, wattle-and-daub huts and bag humpies held upright between immovable boulders, with corrugated-iron roofs, bark or weatherboard walls and canvas flaps for doors. There were no streets. Some people, lobbying for a schoolhouse, referred to us as South Katoomba, but this also was too grand. We were a nameless settlement of miners and their scrawny children and also, as it happens, Christian Israelites, all cohabiting in the Jamison Valley, spread out along the talus slope, digging away at the coal seams beneath our feet. Our rags hung from branches – I can see them now, old as I am – like the aftermath of a fierce storm.

  Aside from the ever-present cliffs we also lived beneath the nose-leering judgement of the people on top of the escarpment in the burgeoning town of Katoomba. That world was as unalike to ours as a crayfish is to a kitten. A strange name, Katoomba; one which meant, by all accounts, tumbling-down water. A fair enough description, because the waterfall it referred to rarely did anything else. It kept the air moist and the washing wet for those who lived near it. Those above were biased against us, the people who lived in the valley. If we’d had two heads they’d have been biased against us for that. They called us Shadies, inbreeders, rooters of animals.

  We were not all Christian Israelites. In fact they were but a vocal minority. The coal miners were a more neutral bunch, though they each had a dirty black soul, and what were souls for but to be saved? James Cowley Morgan Fisher had risen through the ranks to become a Captain of the Salvation Army. He had authority. He had magnetism. He also possessed a tambourine and a fine tenor voice. Among their many good works the Salvation Army liked to march down into the Jamison Valley to hold their services and sing hymns in the forest. ‘Climbing up the Golden Stair’ was one of their favourites. I recall it being sung in our humpy, along with prayers and old songs from Ireland. I can only suppose that my baptism at Fisher’s hand took place in that humpy.

  ‘O I’m climbing up the golden stair to Glory.

  O I’m climbing with my golden crown before me.

  I am climbing in the light,

  I am climbing day and night,

  I shall shout with all my might when I get there.’

  Nice song for a babe in rags to grow up with.

  Douglas Wilson, my father, whose parents came from Roscommon, was glad to be a soldier in the Salvation Army. However, Roscommon is going too far back in the tale. If ever I asked him of it he always said he couldn’t remember, it was too long ago. The young prefer to stay within sight of their own breakfast bowl, and that is largely where I shall stay. The time before my own birth takes its toll on my imagination, and now I am old I can barely remember what it is I had for my last meal. Yet the past is as clear to me as a frosty night.

  After the strictures of his own upbringing, Douglas enjoyed the relative liberty that the Salvationists allowed him. He was one of many miners who came to the prayer meetings to sing songs. Miners and singing, you couldn’t separate them. There wasn’t a lot else to do, and nor were there many women in the valley. Entertainment was in short supply. The men worked all day, so the services and singalongs had to take place at night, sitting around a bonfire that spat sparks into the black sky. In the trees the glowing eyes of possums peered down. They must have liked the singing, too.

  Douglas Wilson spied Emma Gorman from Springwood over one such fire. Fisher had brought her, and others, down to show the single men what Jesus could provide. There was darkness all around. She raised her head and let fly with a pure singing voice. Contralto. The firelight lit her throat like it was made of marble. My father used to say she warbled like a mudlark but without the mud. He was never good at giving praise. In time, and at the behest of Fisher, he married her, persuading her down into the valley to what must have been a harsh life. She was a beautiful girl back then, so he told us, with high cheekbones that blushed like apples. That was before the bush took a hold of her and gave her a dislike of mirrors. She put up with much discomfort, quite apart from the lack of privacy and a proper roof.

  James Cowley Morgan Fisher himself had four wives. The higher echelons of the Salvation Army didn’t think well of Fisher’s domestic arrangements. What sort of example was he setting? They ordered him to stop. Four wives was more than enough for any man, and weren’t there plenty of single men without even a one? Fisher scoffed. Jesus provides. He would fight them all in the court of heaven. There was what they call a schism, a word which sounds to me like a prim lady having a tight little sneeze into her glove. The upshot of this was that Fisher split from the orthodoxy and formed his own one true church, the Christian Israelites. There were raised voices on both sides and Fisher’s tambourine was put in receipt of a puncture wound via an altercation with someone else’s noggin. He didn’t worry about such ecumenical trivialities down in his newfound oasis.

  Fisher was a charismatic messiah. He wore his beard at a length he could divide and tie in a knot at the back of his neck. This gave him a formidable appearance, as if he was standing in a perpetual gale. His heavy brows joined as one over the bridge of his nose, a broken and lumpy one on account of a kick from a horse in his youth. He had repaired the bone, so the legend went, through the intervention of his own powers. These wonders gave a forcefulness to his personality. He led Douglas Wilson to believe that the portion of the middle finger he, Douglas, had lost as a result of a coal skip rolling backwards over it when he was employed spragging the wheels might be repaired through similar intervention. Douglas didn’t dismiss the idea.

  Soon after the schism my father, a gullible man it must be said, was easily persuaded to accept the hand of not only Emma Gorman but also her sister, Ann, who was the smaller of the sisters in both age and longitude, though larger in terms of temperament, and then a widow called Mary Jansen of Weatherboard. Fisher had wives for all, although only a handful wanted to take him up on the offer. There would be a joint ceremony. Much singing.

  Emma and Ann’s parents had passed away from tuberculosis, leaving both girls in the care of the church. The church didn’t know what to do with them. They were too old to be orphans, yet they were naive in th
e ways of the world. Captain Fisher, passing through Springwood, had taken them under his wing and put their sisterly harmonies to good use in his choir. To offer them sanctuary, he told Douglas, would be a charitable act. And the charitable acts should be shared around. Douglas Wilson had no wives and a broad back. Ann Gorman needed a broad back. Fisher couldn’t carry her. She was like, he said, an eel in a flour sack. She needed tamping, like tobacco in a pipe. The church fathers had meant only one sister, not both, but by the time they found out and had made their objections known it was too late. The conjugal fires burned long into the night. The tambourines shook like billy-o.

  Douglas Wilson couldn’t believe his luck. They all had well-turned ankles and fair to middling complexions, even the widow. The wives gave a convincing impression of being satisfied with this arrangement, with as yet no indication of any rivalry for the attentions – let alone the food – Douglas was able to provide. As I have told you, Fisher was charismatic. Initially no one gave thought to the state of grace of the situation. As long as everyone had a full belly they went along with the edicts of his will. Providence, he called it.

  However, within a pretty short shrift two of the wives were pregnant and, with winter coming, wondering about the wisdom of the whole enterprise. Polygamy, Fisher lectured them, was acceptable to God, but only in men who were spiritually sophisticated. Douglas Wilson pushed back his shoulders and raised his head. He could soak up all the compliments you could throw at him. The triumvirate of wives was quick to cut him down a peg or two. Sophisticated as a sackful of spanners; spiritual as a burl on a gum tree. He may be husband, but he was not Lord and Master. Ann, it became apparent, was the cantankerous one, while Mary Jansen was a downright bully. No one dared ask how she had become a widow.

  ‘My husband, poor Tuppy, was the sweetest man alive,’ she used to say when making unflattering comparisons with Douglas. ‘Even on his deathbed, rasping with the catarrh, he had the sweetest disposition. My pigeon, he called me. A mercy God took him to his bosom.’

  Everyone was afraid of Mary Jansen’s bosom.

  Polygamy was proving to have a few drawbacks. Mary was a big eater. Ann didn’t like the dirt floor, which turned to mush in sudden downpours. Emma didn’t like Mary Jansen’s appetite. No one liked Emma’s singing. However, when Douglas took to explaining all this history to me, I would not hear a bad word about my mother. I loved her singing. Mary Jansen was frightened of the bush mice, which had free access to the hut. She had a scream on her that could make a candle flame flicker across the width of a still room. A room that seemed, as wedded life went on, increasingly small.

  They soon had Douglas jumping to their instructions, making repairs to the hut, fetching water, handing over his wages. Polygamy might well be acceptable in the eyes of God, but pretty soon none of the wives was interested in having the husband collect on his end of the bargain. Sophisticated my eye. The charitable act of taking them under his roof was losing its allure. The talus slope, on which they lived at the base of the escarpment, was proving to be, in the shivering rains, a slippery one. What had seemed a cosy arrangement rapidly became cramped. Mary Jansen, being the largest of the three wives, slept in the centre of the big bed Douglas had knocked together, with one sister on either side for warmth and also protection from the mice. Douglas slept elsewhere. His missing finger throbbed in the rains, which he took to be an omen of something. More hard work, probably. Why had he ever allowed himself to think Lord and Master? Fisher told him to have faith. Be strong in the spirit. His message was simple. Satan was on the earth, but so was he, Fisher. It was an even match.

  Two years after the schism of 1876 when the Christian Israelites had split from the Salvation Army, and Fisher consolidated his flock, there followed a schism among the Christian Israelites themselves. Clancy and I were three years old. The Salvation Army did not approve of polygamy, spiritually sophisticated or otherwise, and so it had kicked Fisher out of the synod. Many of the miners in the valley didn’t care for his monkeyshines either. They were giving the place a bad name. To say you were a Shady in the Biles Hotel in Katoomba could lead to punches being thrown. (They would have been thrown under any other pretext, so why not that?)

  Satan had thrown down his gauntlet to James Cowley Morgan Fisher. Together his small congregation, also called the New Church of the First Born – or Fisherites, as they became branded (less politely as rooters of animals) – set about exorcising devils, demons and satyrs from the surrounding forest. They would bang on pots and pans and empty kerosene drums, making such a din that the miners and their families were kept awake at night. ‘Out, devils, out,’ the Fisherites chanted. Mary Jansen was a wild pot banger.

  Douglas Wilson worked long hours trying to provide for the welfare of his wives and children. So many mouths to feed. The mine manager, a fierce man called Crusher Edwards, didn’t approve of Fisher and didn’t like Douglas fraternising with these Bible thumpers. All of this played on Douglas’s domestic harmony. He couldn’t gallivant about the bush all night tin-kettling and whipping the air with a branch chanting, ‘Out, devils, out.’ He wanted to go to bed. His finger hurt. (‘How can it hurt? It’s gone.’) Douglas had a great deal of fondness for his missing finger, and not a little resentment for everyone else’s lack of sympathy. However, if truth be told he had all but forgotten what it was like to have the finger there. And sometimes he would place it at the entrance of a nostril, for the entertainment of his sons, to look as though he was excavating his brain.

  He had to get up early. That was the crux of it. He was also certain that if they kept up these midnight shenanigans then someone would sprain an ankle. He told them as much. What if one of them were bitten by a snake or a spider? If they were, Fisher declared confidently, he would cure them by a laying-on of hands. This wasn’t just a bit of fun and games for the congregation. This was a battle for the spiritual supremacy of the world. Fisher always bit off more dodger than he could chew. No pulpit was big enough for him. When he spoke like this, Ann looked as if she would have liked to bang a pot on his topography, by which she meant his head.

  Mr and Mrs Auld, who ran a makeshift store at the base of the cascades, were righteous enough in their own way to bring charges of bigamy against Fisher. Auld alleged that Fisher masqueraded as Christ under false pretences, and furthermore would not pay his bill. He owed still for a side of colonial duck without so much as a word of thanks for the credit. Fisher called him a moneylender in the temple, his whiskers greasy with mutton fat. Auld went to a higher authority.

  A stiff, or summons, was served by Sergeant Matthew Brownrig of Katoomba. Unfortunately he served it while Fisher was in mid-sermon by a babbling, noisy pool at the base of the waterfall. Fisher was busy banging a tin can. Brownrig had to wait. It had cost him a lot in sweat and shoe leather to traipse down the nine hundred or more steps. He needed to get his breath back. Crusher Edwards also stood by, no doubt, with his beefy arms folded into a sign of resistance.

  ‘Out, devils, out,’ chanted the several wives.

  A wind blew through the treetops, making the wives ooh and ahh and clasp their hands together. I can only suppose that my own mother was among them, oohing and ahhing, and I a babe in rags on her hip. My aunt Ann also, with Clancy similarly clad, resting on her own bony pelvis. I can almost picture that, my earliest memory of Clancy. The air would have been damp with the mist thrown up by the cascades. There would have been leeches.

  Feeling in the mood for a miracle, the assembly, along with Sergeant Brownrig, turned expectant eyes on Fisher, whose bare knees looked tortured beneath his kilt. Foolishly, as evidence of his divinity and his qualification to combat Satan in our midst, he volunteered to walk upon the waters of the bubbling pool. That was a sight all present would have paid good money to see. Not much else was happening. Did they all believe he was the messiah? Well, the wives believed. Mary Jansen believed. Clancy and I were perhaps beginning to stink.

  ‘Yes, yes, we believe,’ cried the wives.


  Fisher stood on the slippery rocks. He had to shout to make himself heard above the gushing of the cataract. ‘Is there anyone here who doubts I can walk upon the waters?’

  ‘No, no, we believe.’

  Douglas Wilson dearly wanted to believe. It would have made things so much easier.

  ‘Well, if you all believe that I can walk upon the waters then there is no need for me to demonstrate that I can. That is the power of faith.’ Fisher climbed up from the pool and received the writ held out to him by Brownrig.

  It was this logic that finally turned my father against the Christian Israelites. As far as he could see, the congregation of the New Church of the First Born consisted largely of Fisher’s wives, his own wives, and the wives of a couple of other bog Irishmen who missed the shindigs of the old country. He felt something peel away from his soul, as he had heard it called, and the greater part of him adhere to the logic of the earth. Douglas did not believe. His gullibility had, as they said, come to an end. He had two sons to feed, Clancy and Byron. Ann and Emma, trailing behind him, were also beginning to have their doubts. And the third wife, Mary Jansen, was feeling not so much neglected as envious as a cuckoo of the attention her rivals, now proud mothers, were garnering in the village. When she lullabied us in the hut at night she shook her tambourine like a thundercloud until we cried, so that our mothers would have to intervene and she would then have free rein to berate her husband and demand better conditions. She had seen the side of colonial duck that Fisher had produced, and thought that slightly more miraculous than the dodger Douglas Wilson was able to conjure up. A few old potatoes and a stewed possum once in a while did not a harmonious household make.

  The charges against Fisher were never pursued. No legal marriages had taken place, so bigamy couldn’t be proved. The situation was one of a moral nature. Sergeant Brownrig let his disapproval be known, but morality wasn’t something he was happy to poke his nose into. It gave him sleepless nights. Douglas Wilson breathed a sigh of relief. Morality he could live with. He too was not legally married to any of them; this was only a small source of relief, as he still had to put up with more than his fair share of nagging. Life went on. Crusher Edwards told Fisher that he wasn’t welcome on the mine, which was the property of the owner, Mr John Britty North.