Free Wanting by Richard Flanagan

for here there will be warmth and food; here there will be those who know how to find their way home. But a search of the silent, chill cabins reveals only frozen corpse after frozen corpse.
    Something was guttering within him, no matter how he fed the flame. He chose to embody merriment in company; he preferred solitude. He spoke here, he spoke there, he spoke everywhere; he felt less and less connection with any of it. He walked more than ever, he travelled overseas ever more; yet on the inside he felt as still as a seized cog. Nothing moved.
    He resolved to live a year in solitude in the Swiss Alps with monks and St Bernards. He resolved to move to Australia. He resolved to escape from himself, yet there was no escape. He felt such pity for the beggars and the downfallen he saw everywhere, the ragged people to whom he often spoke, but he could not understand why his wife,to whom he now almost never spoke, seemed fearful and sullen, why she spoke little to him, and why, when she did, it was so often sharp. He suspected he hated himself. He felt he might burst if he did not press on.
    On the train to Dover, he read a whaling captain’s description of how, at a certain point in winter in the polar regions, the drifting pack ice joins together into one frozen mass, and any ship so unfortunate to be trapped is unable to move and is squeezed tighter, ever tighter, and everyone waits as the turpentine drips out of the boards slowly being crushed, everyone listens to the ache of the tormented timbers, everyone can do nothing but wait, not knowing if the boat will break and they will then die. It could have been a description of his own life.
    ‘I believe no two people were ever created with less in common!’ he cried out to Wilkie on the Montmartre one evening, as with a noisy crowd they watched two Turks wrestling: one large and covered in filthy scabs, the other small and oddly tenacious. ‘It is impossible…’ For a moment he seemed lost for words. ‘There is no interest, empathy, confidence, sentiment, tender union of any kind,’ he said dully, as if he were reporting on the effluvium of a cesspit.
    Wilkie did not know what to do—to express sympathy would be to encourage what perhaps should not be encouraged, rash words that might later be regretted; not to react was to look callously indifferent to what was clearly consuming the man. Fortunately, before he had decided how he would respond, Dickens was again talking.
    ‘It is an immense misfortune to her,’ he said, shaking his head, seeming to be uncharacteristically bewildered. ‘It is an immense misfortune to me. She is the only person I have ever known with whom I cannot get on somehow or other. I know I have many…faults…’ He shook his head again, as if he were working on a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces cannot be made to fit. ‘ Which ,’ he said, and now tried to soldier on, ‘belong to my exercise of fancy. But I am patient and considerate at heart, and I would have beaten out a better journey’s end than we have come to, if I could…’
    Again Wilkie was faced with the impossibility of knowing how to respond, and for a second time Dickens recovered and went on, but in a darker, more bitter, more determined strain, saying Catherine had never overly cared for her children and showed little affection. In front of them, the scabby Turk finally pinned his opponent to the ground. Around them, the crowd roared its approval, then laughed when the Turk spat on the face of his compatriot.
    After the evening of the Turkish wrestlers, Wilkie did not hear Dickens speak of his marriage again—or not at least until things had reached such a sorry pass that he could speak of little else. In the meantime, Dickens’ activity grew even more frantic: he walked more and more, slept less and less; he attended ever more events and took on ever more burdens. He found himself, one evening, sitting with Wilkie in a Covent Garden theatre watching Romeo and Juliet . The