Death of a River Guide (16 page)

 the third night 

Aljaz was woken by the
hop hop
of raindrops landing on his sleeping bag. The sound hauled his mind up from the great depths where his dreaming took place and brought him enough to his senses to realise he had to get out of his sleeping bag. The gentle rhythm of the drops was being swamped by the sound of a heavy downpour smashing on the rainforest canopy, pressing its intent upon the myrtles and the sassafrases, then permeating downwards, entering the forest branch by branch, leaf by leaf, until every branch and every leaf could be heard to move by the power of the rain. Until the rain was cascading down on the forest floor and all the billions of raindrops and all the millions of leaves moving had become one deafening sound and one overwhelming purpose.

Aljaz and the Cockroach, who by now had also woken, quickly stuffed their sleeping bags into their waterproof gearbags, donned anoraks and worked quickly to pitch a light brown nylon fly above their sleeping site, their head torches darting cones of light describing white lines of rain wherever they moved. Outside of these cones the world was entirely black. Twice after pitching the fly the rain, which now fell in torrents, began to form in ominous pools in the fly and they had to steepen its pitch. They hadn't bothered bringing a tent for themselves, although the punters always slept in tents. Guides never slept with the punters in the tents, and they always slept at a slight distance.

Aljaz and the Cockroach went and checked the punters' tents to make sure they were pitched properly and then they scrambled down the bank, their naked legs feeling the cold wet caresses of the hardwater ferns and tea-tree. Aljaz wondered why paths always seemed so much longer in the dark. They manhandled the rafts up from the river onto higher ground where they tied them to trees, then gathered all the life jackets, helmets, and paddles left lying dangerously close to the river's edge and brought them up to the safer, higher ground of the campsite. The rain continued to pour, but the river hadn't risen. They stayed awake for half an hour, playing cards by candlelight under the fly.

‘Bastard,' said the Cockroach unexpectedly. He flicked a finger across his forearm upon which sat a bloated leech.

‘Watch this,' said Aljaz. He crawled out of his sleeping bag, went over to where the black food barrels were, and returned with a box of matches and the salt container. He made a ring of salt on the ground, the size of a five-cent piece. ‘Now watch.' He lit a match, let it burn, blew the flame out, then placed the red hot tip on the leech. As the match tip seered its back the leech arched up in pain. It fell off the Cockroach's forearm onto the ground. Aljaz picked the leech up with a piece of bark and placed it within the circle of salt. Every time the leech tried to move, its body touched the salt circle and the salt was absorbed into its body. The leech began to writhe and bleed the Cockroach's blood. ‘See how it suffers,' said Aljaz. ‘Wherever it moves, however it moves, it only absorbs more salt and suffers more.'

‘You're twisted, Cosini,' said the Cockroach.

‘How come you became a river bum?' Aljaz asked.

‘I had a job in Cairns working on airconditioning at a new resort - I'm a plumber by trade - and thought, To hell with it, I don't want to be like the other old farts on the site knowing nothing else but plumbing at sixty. So I got a job working on the Tully River, four years ago now.'

‘You ever think about going back to plumbing?' asked Aljaz.

‘Sometimes. But guiding sort of gets in your blood after a while. It's a way of life, really. Partying and women and always the river the next day. Making you feel like you going somewhere. Even when you're not.' The Cockroach turned and looked at Aljaz, who continued to study the death agonies of the leech. ‘Sometimes though, I think how I'd just like one woman and one job in one place. Settle down like. You ever feel that?'

How could he explain what he felt? How could he explain that beyond his family nothing had seemed important and yet he had turned his back upon his family. How could he describe being pursued by a terrible fear he could never name that sat behind him like a shadow, how as if in a dream he could never turn and face that shadow and name its truth. How the fear sometimes grew so vast that he thought it might crush him, and how he felt as if he could no longer hold it all together, that even getting up in the morning and saying hello to people and smiling and laughing had gone beyond his powers. And he had drunk and drunk and smoked bags of dope until he felt so bad from his overindulgence that that pain temporarily eclipsed the pain of his shadow. At which point he would lay off the bottle and the dope, in the hope that the shadow would have gone. But it would only reemerge stronger, as if it had fed off his madness and wanted more, demanded more. And then he would deny the pain with work in some new job, work till his body burnt with physical aches and pains, and sheer exhaustion gave him the blessing of sleep, the deep sweet sleep of those who labour, where even when the mind has sunk into its farthest recesses there is still a surface consciousness of the pain of the body. And the body seems unbearably heavy and sinks like a necklace of stones into the mattress, and any movement is avoided because the effort of moving those fatigued limbs even once more is too great. But then after some weeks the shadow would reemerge in his dreams, and he would suddenly sit bolt upright in bed, eyes wide open, feeling so terribly afraid. He would try to find a woman to take away the darkness and occasionally, though not often, he found one, but instead of him crying to her, he inevitably made her cry in front of him, as if her suffering assured him that his suffering wasn't a solitary insanity but the keystone of a humanity he desperately wanted to share in, and the more women he had, the worse he treated them and the more they cried and the sooner they left him. And then he knew it was time to move on and the whole thing started to replay itself, this circle of hell.

It had become easier not belonging; he had learnt to cope with that, had made a life out of it, drifting, made a virtue of having no roots by never allowing himself to hang around one spot too long. He felt himself a nobody, an invisible nothing, told himself that was the beginning and end of it. But it wasn't and he knew it. He didn't want to know about it, but it had always known about him and it had shaped him, and though he could deny it there was no way it could deny him. It just seemed to be more food for the shadow, and Aljaz hated it and hated himself even more. And how could he tell the Cockroach any of it?

‘No, I don't,' said Aljaz.

‘You're lucky,' said the Cockroach. ‘Maybe you're the sort of bloke who gets a woman when he wants one, then moves on when he doesn't want her. But me, I dunno, I can't do that any more, you know what I mean?' said the Cockroach. Aljaz said nothing. He pushed the leech back into the salt ring with a twig. The Cockroach continued. ‘I don't know anything any more. Not what I want or what I'm gonna do, nothing. If I could find one woman who wanted to sleep with me through the night - sleep, I'm saying, nothing else - I'd love her till I die. Know what I mean?'

‘No,' said Aljaz.

‘You're so twisted,' laughed the Cockroach. ‘You know that? Really twisted.' But he looked at the writhing leech and not at Aljaz.

By then it was 4 am. They left the leech to its agony and went back down one final time to check the river level.

The river flowed west quietly. But Aljaz could hear its waters beginning to lick the edges of the bank, its appetite heightening.

The river was beginning to rise.

And with it me.

Beginning to float.

This night of rising water I see a bedspread. Very clearly. It looks like this: pure white, elegant in its prewar fashion, the size of a double bed, and at its centre a large faint yellow stain. The whole, in spite of or perhaps because of this aged blemish, elaborate and beautiful in its design and texture and feel. But there is no double bed. There is a single bed and the bedspread is folded to fit upon it. I look more closely at the stain till it has assumed the proportion of a large estuary. And floating up that estuary a ship, ambling up the broad reaches of the lower Derwent River.

An old rustbucket of a steamer contracted in that year 1957 to bring wogs from Europe to Australia. And upon its deck, is an ashen-faced Sonja, wearing a long coat, clutching a three-year-old child to her hip: me. And the child is smiling and laughing his weird, gurgling giggle. Because the idiot child recognises his other home, that is to his mother a strange country.

 Sonja and Harry 

When she first saw it from the ship, Sonja fell to weeping.

‘What is this place that you have brought me to?' she asked of Harry. The town, with its wooden buildings that teetered and sloped at all angles in consequence of their age and a lack of care and money, with its huge purple mountain that rose behind its offspring like a crabby matriarch ready to strike out at anybody who badmouthed her child, this town looked like a nightmare. None of the town made any sense to Sonja. It was painted in the drab colours favoured by the English, and the sky was black with clouds that threatened to rain but didn't. Yet, as their ship shimmied up the Derwent River, the town glowed a rainbow of colours in the winter light of late afternoon. The town looked crabbed and cramped, hemmed in by olive-coloured forests on all sides bar that of the sky-blue river that defined its front, yet it seemed open to something that Sonja had closed her mind to many years before. The town was obviously not old, only a hundred or so years, yet in the streets they walked down from the ship Sonja could smell something much older, the smell of the receding tide, the smell of salt and drying kelp. This world that seemed like it ought be full of people was largely empty. Through a stillness so vast that it seemed an ocean, the wind cracked and swept from every angle as they walked the quiet, empty streets.

‘What is this place?' Sonja asked again.

‘What do you reckon it is?' said Harry, somewhat annoyed at what he felt to be a pointless and silly question. ‘It's Hobart.'

They saw a man arguing with a telegraph pole, and a woman pleading with him not to make a fool of himself.

‘Piss off,' said the man, ‘this is private.'

They saw a woman sitting in a gutter with pigeons, laughing as they fed from her hands. They saw a drunk fisherman stagger out of a pub with half a broken beer bottle in his face.

‘I went searching for the pink-lipped abalone and found this instead,' he said to Sonja and Harry, then staggered away, weeping not from pain but out of an infinite sadness.

Sonja grew harder with the years that then passed. She was wont to recall her time in the Radovlica chain factory as a young woman. ‘You know what they made? Chains - not dog chains or little necklace chains, but those huge heavy things that ships use. And our job was to lift and stack them.' She would at this point normally pause and reflect upon her time in the chain factory, to the memory of which she remained inextricably shackled, then look back up with her pupils reflecting rusty steel, saying, ‘And I never want to carry chains again.' In this regard - that of material betterment - Harry was to prove an ongoing disappointment, never being able to rise out of the class he had been born into and, worse still, seemingly content to sink further into it. Nevertheless, Sonja's relentless industry and astonishingly focused purpose meant that they did get a home and they did in a few short years manage to pay it off, and they did manage to be if not affluent, well then, neither struggling. And they did manage to share a dream. Of a large family.

But after me, there were no more children. Why? I don't know. Certainly not for want of trying, because I can now see a whole sequence of ever more desperate couplings of Harry and Sonja taking place before my eyes. She blamed it on the drink and was inclined in her more perverse moments to see his lack of a thumb as a portent of a more fundamental incompleteness that she ought to have heeded. They went to the doctor, who sent them on to a specialist, an aspiring young man called Mr McNell, who assured them that it was almost certainly Sonja's fallopian tubes and that this could be easily remedied. Sonja was hospitalised and endured an excruciating procedure in which air was pumped through her tubes to clear out supposed obstructions. This was repeated at monthly intervals for a year and at the end pronounced a success by Mr McNell, who told them that there was now no scientific reason why the couple could not have children. Now the nature of their couplings changed from desperate desire to a huge sadness. For Sonja felt her body to be a husk, its purpose stolen from her, and her husband's attention a futile mockery of the consequences that ought to have flowed from such passion. Now she lay beneath him and did not move and did not milk his testicles with her hand. She lay beneath him and closed her eyes and saw herself back in the chain factory.

Harry and Sonja's marriage was not, then, a great success. No, I'll rephrase that. Harry and Sonja's marriage was as unpredictable as this river. It could be terrible. They would stand screaming at one another and Sonja would sometimes lay into poor old Harry with her fists, and he would hold her out at arm's length, preventing her landing a blow while she flailed her fists and berated him with every Slovenian curse peculiar, not to that nation, but to Italy. ‘Slovenians,' she would remind him, ‘are too polite to invent their own swear words. That's why we use the Italians' instead.' Not that Harry was always successful in avoiding her fists: sometimes she managed to strike him. Over the years he grew quieter and drank more, and tried to avoid antagonising her, which was harder than avoiding her wild punches, because there was much about Harry that irritated Sonja immensely and it would sometimes take only a careless sentence to send her off again. Over the years, her early passion spent, she grew physically distant with Harry, went limp in his hugs and stiff if he came up from behind and kissed her on her neck. She particularly despised him kissing her on the mouth. Her lips would remain frozen and her face unmoving and she would say, ‘Finished now?' Or, ‘Can I get back to what I was doing now you're happy?' She found him shabby, dishevelled, and ill-kempt. He found her cold, removed and uninterested in him. Over the years she changed from a young, somewhat wayward and even wild woman who wanted to leave her past behind to one that increasingly wallowed in a past that never existed. She dressed ever more conservatively, took up going to church, and kept the house looking like a museum of rundown and recycled Mitteleuropa. She became an old European mama. But for all that and all that, it was not a bad marriage. Sonja loved Harry with a passion, albeit an ever curioser one, and he in turn loved his lady of the clove dust, as he sometimes whispered to her as they lay in bed. And for all her coldness, there were times in that bed when she revelled in being with Harry. I am a witness to their lovemaking much against my will, for it is not the way I wish to see my parents. I am, as I have said, a private person and this intrusion upon their privacy seems somewhat unfair. What is evident from what I see is that while Harry knew he loved her, even if he would never understand her, Sonja knew she understood Harry and wondered therefore if he was worth loving.

Long after, as Harry was dying, he thought about the day he and Sonja had arrived in Hobart, thought of the love he had once had for Sonja, the love that had seemed so strong, that had seemed so eternal. Where had it gone? As he lay there with the drips spiralling around his cancer-bloated belly he remembered Sonja and what they had and what they had lost. Why do such things so often prove so transitory? In the end he thought that he hated Sonja. But then, in the methylated-spirit afterscent of the ward, the smell of the flesh of her back as he lay curled up behind her came back to him and the smell of clove dust came back to him and the sound of her voice came back to him one last time.

O I am missing you.

How much he had loved her.

O I am missing you.

 Ned Quade, 1832 

Two faces. Among the many bubbles, two faces - one scarred with the pox, the round head almost shaven so that its red hairs appear as jagged points over the scalp, like so many rusty needles.

My hair! My red hair!

Ned Quade, the stone man.

Why this curious name? Because upon the triangle where he is flogged for possessing a wad of tobacco, or, once, for singing a song, he betrays no pain. On his first flogging of a hundred lashes I hear the flagellator, a one-time baker called Proctor, say as he unties Ned Quade's white wrists at the end of the punishment, ‘You are of stone.' And his back is transformed by the relentless slash of the cat-o'-nine-tails into blood-flecked alabaster. Because in his heart he is innocent and he will not betray his innocence with a single cry of suffering. For that would be an admission that punishment had been felt and was therefore somehow just.

The second face is thin and long, with a scar above the left eye that twists that eye away from the nose, giving the face a distorted appearance. It is topped with medium-length brown hair that is dirty and matted. Aaron Hersey. Dissenting weaver from Spitalfields. One-time Muggletonian, later of the Ancient Deists of Hoxton, he talks of dreams and of having communion with the dead, and regularly sees angels with burning wings and smells the ash of their passing. The angels are beautiful, save for their breath, which he finds most putrid.

The two men sit in a corner of a chilly, fetid stone dormitory, on the floor of which some hundreds of other convicts lie, some moaning in agony, some giggling in madness, some shouting curses in their sleep, some pissing through the gaps in the floorboards upon the Aborigines rounded up from the surrounding wild lands and imprisoned on the floor below. Chill draughts blow through the open slits that serve for windows. From outside, the sound of the gale-whipped waters of Macquarie Harbour slapping the shore of the small island which is their prison. Sarah Island. The Devil's Island of the British Empire, the endpoint of the vast convict system, the remotest island of the remotest island of the remotest continent. From the blacks incarcerated below, from the throats and mouths of the proud people of the Needwonne and Tarkine, come screams and weeping and terrible coughs and wheezing. They believe the building to be possessed of evil spirits. Some are terrified and some propose escape, and some are dying of influenza and colds and horror, and all believe that devils run around the room and spear them in the chest with evil. From outside, the splatter and surge of the rain carrying off the last of the topsoil from the island that has been totally deforested by the convicts' slave labour.