Death of a River Guide (17 page)

Tomorrow Ned Quade and Aaron Hersey are to be part of the gang that is to row up the Gordon River and relieve the Huon pine-cutting gang that has been stationed there for the past two weeks. It is from there that they intend to effect their escape. Ned Quade dictates a note for his wife, who is incarcerated in the Hobart Female Factory, to Aaron Hersey, dissenting weaver from Spital-fields and fellow plotter, who learnt to read and write in various churches.

‘How will it be got to her?' asks Aaron.

‘Solly. In the commissariat. He owes me. He'll smuggle it out on the next ship bound for Hobart Town.' Ned Quade looks around to make sure that none of the other convicts in the barracks are taking any undue interest in their whispered conversation. ‘How should it begin?' Ned Quade asks Aaron Hersey.

‘However you'd like it to begin,' replies Aaron. ‘My task is only to capture your words on the paper and speed them to her mind.'

Ned looks at his feet and thinks awhile, then looks up sheepishly at Aaron and says, ‘What if you write “My beloved Eliza”?'

‘That is what you want?' asks Aaron. Ned says nothing, but nods.

Aaron Hersey writes with a stolen stub of pencil on a sheet of paper that both men hide with the positioning of their bodies. Aaron Hersey writes what he would write if he were to write to a queen. Aaron Hersey writes:

My Esteemed and Most Noble Madame Elijah
-

His confidence in the process now boosted by the sight of his words being transformed into a flourishing script upon the paper, Ned Quade continues. ‘Tell her,' he says, ‘tell her how we are bound for the stockaded town many, many hundreds of miles to the north of Parramatta where all are free and no one is bonded, and that having arrived there and secured work and lodgings, that I will send word and someone to bring her and our children out of bondage into the glorious light of liberty.'

Aaron Hersey writes what he can. Aaron Hersey writes:

Well say You in th. New Jerusalem
.

As the flourishes and swirls and loops continue to grow in their grand parade upon the page Ned begins to sense the power that words might have, their subversive possibilities, their seductive strength. ‘Write her,' he says, ‘that I love her, and only that love has kept me alive till now, God knows there is so little else to nourish a man's soul in this Hades.'

Aaron Hersey writes what he knows to write as a conclusion. Aaron Hersey writes:

Your loving And humble Servant etc etc in Eyes of The lord

Ned Kwade His Mark

And below this message Ned Quade scrawls the outline of a Celtic cross, a cross enclosed within a circle.

Madonna santa!
Just as I want to stay and watch what now happens the cross and the circle begin to dance and swirl before my eyes, begin to form spiralling chains with other white swirls of foam, and then, there, standing above the river's swirling currents, looking down into the river, I see Aljaz.

 the fourth day 

In the early morning light, grey and soft and spreading, Aljaz watches the water rise. He stands a little beyond the river's edge upon a large protruding log, and to the Cockroach glancing down from the campsite above he looks uninterested. But his eyes are everywhere, reading the immediacy of the quickly surfacing, quickly disappearing whirlpools, reading the swirling white patterns of foam washing down from newly formed rapids upriver, hearing the river's new sounds, seeking to understand what the shushing of the branches of low-lying tea-tree as they throb under the rising, shoving waters foretells. The river seems to be urging the plants and him to come with them downriver, to join the smooth fast madness of a river in rising flood. The tea-trees bend but don't yield, forever grow with a permanent downriver lean in recognition of the power of the flooded river, but never move from their original position. They grow year in year out, these stunted plants, perhaps a century old, only a metre or so in height, their hunched form bearing physical witness to a hundred floods and a hundred droughts. In the detail of a piece of rushing water Aljaz reads the changing visage of the entire river, hears the terrible soul history of his country, and he is frightened.

He goes back to the campfire and squats down. The others look at him, knowing that he and only he can divine the river and its moods. Aljaz ignores the gaze and looks into the coals of the fire, but he sees only the foam and mist rising from the waterfall at the Churn, feels not the warmth of the flames but the clench of his guts as they push the raft into the big rapid below Thunderush and hope to God that they make it through safely. No one speaks. All wait. Aljaz takes a piece of wood from the heap and goes to make firm a precariously balancing billy. But before he is able to fix it, the Cockroach has kicked a log from the outer of the fire into its centre and deftly repositioned the billy for Aljaz. Then, as he levels the billy, the Cockroach looks around to Aljaz and speaks.

‘What you reckon, Ali?'

Aljaz stands up and brushes his trousers. ‘A good day for cooking,' says Aljaz, ‘that's what I reckon.' And he goes over to a barrel and takes out some flour. ‘Reckon we might start with pancakes, that's what I reckon.' Some of the punters are relieved, their own fear arising not from a knowledge of the river, but an intuitive foreboding born of their awareness of their guides' growing unease. Some read this unease as an opportunity to display their own bravado.

‘I thought that was what the trip was all about,' says Rickie the doctor. ‘A few thrills.' He says it slightly uneasily. The Cockroach looks at Rickie.

‘Feel free to take a raft and go,' says the Cockroach. ‘I might hang back for a pancake myself.' A few of the group laugh.

Rickie thinks the guides are not going because they think their customers will be scared. ‘I am not scared,' he says. He says it hesitantly.

Aljaz looks up from the margarine melting in the frypan. ‘I am,' he says, but then immediately regrets saying it in front of them all.

‘I'll go a pancake,' says Otis with a smile. ‘Mum'd cook a truckload of 'em every Sunday lunch.'

They spend all the day in their dripping wet rainforest camp. The men stay in their tents and their sleeping bags as if they existed only to live in them. The women do what the men are always too tired or too uninterested or too caught up in a conversation about sport or politics to be bothered doing. They work. They peel vegetables. They collect firewood. They fetch water from the river up the steep and awkward bank to the campsite. They wash dishes. They help the guides organise the camp, unpacking and packing barrels. Repairing equipment. The men reserve their energies for some future conjectural act of courage. The women's courage is of a type that endures this day of rain. Meanwhile the men get depressed. The men feel some embarrassment that women are on the same trip and doing things that really only men ought be doing. The guides prefer it. Nothing, for a river guide, is worse than an all-male trip. They are boring and lazy and inclined to foolhardiness. They are considerable work to look after. They are generally not in the same class for company. Aljaz likes sitting down with the women around the fire. The Cockroach organises them into a massed Welsh miners' choir and makes them sing old Tom Jones songs, to which he seems to know all the words. They sing ‘Delilah' and they sing ‘The Green Green Grass Of Home' and they sing ‘Me And Mrs Jones' and they sing them all badly, says the Cockroach, who claims to be of Welsh extraction.

After lunch the Cockroach and Aljaz unpack and pitch the spare tent, and then try to catch up on some sleep inside it. About mid-afternoon they awaken, unzip the flyscreen and look outside the vestibule. The camp is dark, what little light there is having trouble penetrating the rainforest. Out on the river, which looks lit up in comparison, the rain falls heavily in sheets. But in their dark camp, beneath the dense, interwoven canopy of myrtles and blackwoods and Huon pines, the rain falls lightly, a mizzle interspersed with an occasional drip from a branch. Two punters - Marco, in a bright red Goretex anorak, and Derek, in a damp black japara - stand under the large blue polytarp which is pitched as a fly, under which cooking can take place out of the rain. Derek and Marco talk in low tones.

‘They're bored,' says the Cockroach.

‘Get out the monopoly set,' says Aljaz and they laugh.

‘Fucking punters,' says the Cockroach.

Dappling the blue polytarp are green and brown myrtle leaves, fallen with the rain. A pool of water has collected in the middle. Marco pushes a paddle up under the pool, sending water rushing down into an open food barrel, drenching the food inside.

‘Fucking idiots,' says the Cockroach.

 Sonja and Harry 

Couta Ho called on Maria Magdalena Svevo to hear the latest news about Harry. The talk was of old times, of Aljaz, whom neither had seen for many years, and of Sonja, whom Couta Ho had never met. Maria Magdalena Svevo told Couta Ho the story of how Sonja met Harry in Trieste in 1954. She began the story in a dramatic fashion.

‘On either side of the border, troops were massing. Tito demanded the Slovenian town that the Slovenians called Trst and the Italians called Trieste be returned to Yugoslavia. The Allies refused. For a short time all the tensions of the Cold War built up in a painful boil on the arse of the Adriatic.' Here her tone returned to the everyday. ‘And who should be selling Japanese sewing machines door to door but Harry Lewis. No one was buying. Post-war Trieste was still finding it hard enough to get money to buy polenta, much less a shonky machine from Asia that promised a lot, cost more, but looked inadequate to its ambitions and was pushed by a foreigner with a strange accent and missing his right thumb.

‘Sonja was working in the café in which Harry, at the end of his second fruitless week of salesmanship, stopped for a coffee. Harry liked the expresso, so unfamiliar and strange to him. For a time he wasn't aware that it was even coffee, but thought it some exotic foreign beverage.

‘Sonja was intrigued by the dark stranger who carried a sewing machine under his arm, who looked as if he came from the south of Italy, yet walked differently from the peasants streaming up to the north for work. His movements were slow, as if space and time meant something different than it did to everyone around him, something somehow open and bigger.