Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
Ever seen a mouse plague? At first it looks like a rolling grey sea of velvet, a mass without borders or shape. Then your eye is caught by a flash of light, a flicked tail, a panicky eye and with a sudden horror you realise they are individual mice, thousands upon thousands of them. They’re starving and unstoppable.
We’re on Dublin dock. It’s 1850, the final in five long years of famine. Against the misty backdrop of a Dublin morning, slick cobble stones, creaking wooden ships, swearing sailors, there are piles and piles of rags. Who would export such dross? But wait. A child lifts his eyes, squints into the gloom. And the starving crowd is revealed. Just like a mouse plague, without the life. Scarecrows, the lot of them. Filthy, grey, bedraggled skeletons, some holding babies too malnourished to cry, some stretched sideways, some crouched in silent communion with a god they’ll never trust again. They’re waiting – what choice do they have? – to be loaded like sheep onto the floating hulks, and shipped away. Away.
An agonising death awaits. They know this. They’ve long ago resigned themselves to that grisly fate; for what could possibly be worse than lying in a ditch in your beloved emerald country, with the stench of rotten spuds in your nostrils and the sound of your children’s wailing turning into sobs, then rasped breathing, then silence?
So. One by excruciating one, the people hobble, limp, drag themselves up gangways. The coffin ships fill quickly. And then make room for more. And more. Entire villages, families, streets, neighbours, crush forward until their groans mingle with that of the ancient timbers.
Among the melee, a slight, bespectacled man moves quietly but intently. He pauses often, resting a hand on a shoulder here, bending to whisper sympathy there. Occasionally he stops, placing his medicine bag on the ground, and rummages for some potion or tincture, perhaps a bandage. He offers medicine where he can, comfort where he must.
One scrawny man, who could’ve been 15 or 50, turns his face up to the doctor. ‘If we see y’ in the new country, then there’s a heaven after all.’
The doctor leans down to hold his hand, murmurs a prayer, holds his gaze. ‘See you in Melbourne, boy-oh. See you then.’