Death of a River Guide (37 page)

‘It don't take much to pull down a little chopper like that,' another says. The attempt with the helicopter fails and it is waved off. The men give up for a while and light cigarettes.

They talk about the difficulty of getting the body out, of other awful jobs where drowned bodies are so decomposed that the flesh parts like mush when they grasp them and they are left holding nothing but an arm or leg bone. They nervously joke about cutting the body out with knives, severing it in half at the waist, thereby freeing both halves. They walk back to the edge of the rock, and wave their cigarettes in the direction of the outstretched hand as they discuss the technical difficulties of freeing the body.

Their chief stands near the top of the rock, talking to the departing chopper on a walkie-talkie. He looks a troubled man. No doubt the job is anything but a straightforward one for him. Perhaps he has promised his wife he will be home early. Or perhaps he is worried about what he will say to the media when he gets back to Hobart, and what the media will say about his efforts. Maybe he is unsure how they can free the body without mangling it. He notices the men near the edge of the rock slab and shouts at them.

‘For Christ's sake, watch your step near the edge of the rock slab. Already claimed one fucking life.' The men go sullen and quiet.

One fucking life?

Whose life? I don't recall that anyone has drowned at this rapid.

One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. But what connects the two? What remains? What abideth in the earth forever?

I hear a half-horse, half-snort laugh.

Who am I talking to?

I see two tables of riotous drunken animals blow down through the gorge above all our heads, and as they tumble past way up high I feel the gale that is taking them begin to lift me, and I notice that the animals seem to be looking less and less like animals and more and more like people. Then they are gone. I see a piners' punt laden with lost souls descending from the stormy skies, all beckoning toward me.

Madonna santa!

These visions, these crazy crazy visions. As if I have seen them all before. As if they are eternal. As if they have all been written before and as if there is nothing new under the sun, neither the pleasure nor the misery nor the tears nor the laughter of man. As if there is only one story and it could be writ on a pinhead and within it every story of every man. They come to me faster and faster now. Perhaps I always held these visions within me. From the moment of birth when I looked up through the milky red orb that imprisoned me to see those muscatel eyes of Maria Magdalena Svevo staring back. Or even earlier. Perhaps my mind was never a blank slate upon which my solitary experience was to write its own small story, unaware that it was but part of so many other stories. Perhaps that is why these visions are not solely of me but of a whole world that leads to where I am. And beyond. To where we all are going.

I feel the water swirling and whorling about me and over me and now through me, and joining it is my head forming similar swirls and whorls, my life essence spilling out from my ears and nose and mouth and arse and tangling itself into untieable Celtic knots with the water, which is no longer destroying me but remaking me as something else, and I am no longer sure if I am me, or me the river or the river me.

And at this point there is one final sensation of physical pain, as total and unbearable as it is shortlived, that reminds me forever of what I have been. The rocks crack one final time at my shins, and for one last eternal moment the swirling water pushes my body downwards and buffets my face, and at the point the heaviness of my body becomes an overwhelming agony I feel as if I have abruptly lost my anchor and am flying ever higher above the waterfall, far above the departing helicopter, lighter than a kite whose string has been cut. The police far below give up on the sheath knife idea and go back to brooding as sheets of rain drench them. I would like to stay and watch them, see what they will ultimately do to get the body out. Yes, I would like to observe this, it is interesting, but I feel myself rising and drifting ever quicker away from the narrow wild gorge and I know I can no longer return.

And as I so rise I am filled with a single, dreadful question.

Am I alone?

An immensity of blue.

Sky-blue. A fleck, a piece of flyshit at the centre of this vast emptiness. Moving.

A soul.

My soul?

I continued travelling for what seemed a very long passage of time. In the course of my interrupted journey I saw many things along the banks of the Franklin and Gordon rivers and upon the shores and waters of Macquarie Harbour. Things both strange and wondrous. I saw the earth bulge up into mountains, saw plants flowering, some large and dramatic, and cover the earth. Saw ice and snow form over much of the land, and the rainforest retreat into the lowest and warmest valleys. Saw giant wombats bigger than a man, and huge kangaroos and monster emus arrive. Saw people and their truth of fire arrive. Saw them create a new land in the image of fire: mesmerising yet confrontational, old as time yet new as a flame, destructive yet fecund. Saw the huge animals disappear completely. Saw the ice and snow largely disappear and the rainforest reappear. Saw white man arrive and saw the world turned upside down. I saw all this and much more besides, saw it all and continued on.

I saw pods of slaughtered whales, huge somnolent presences, flying over Frenchmans Cap, casting small shadows upon me who watched in awe below, saw swirling through their ranks colonies of slaughtered seals similarly airborne. Saw an Aboriginal village of beehive huts whose women had been stolen and who had returned with terrible stories and strange haunting songs, shared their fire and danced with them, and out of their shimmering hands they cast meteorites and where each meteorite landed there grew a mountain or a valley or a hill or a river or a forest through which I travelled. Passed a colony set up on an island inhabited by ex-convicts and run upon the strictest communal principles, the first among these people being a large matriarch with a ring of moles around her neck; I did not share their fire but passed on. Saw hulks emptying convicts along the Milky Way, their coarse woollen magpie outfits transformed into the ethereal colours of the vast southern aurora, and they were all swirling and smiling and free at last. They all spin around me now. Whales, people, trees, animals, birds. A tunnel of grace through which I continue to travel. But to where? I am floating down the river. But it is no river I recognise.

 and sees the morning light 

‘We're here.'

Smeggsy looks up and he feels an incoming tide of sensations wash over him as his mind races back to join with his body: a physical exhaustion so great that the oar suddenly feels as if it were weighed down by a locomotive and beyond his powers to ever move again, a tiredness so profound that it seems too much effort to even sleep; an arse that feels like it is made of two river rocks; a mouth parched, with a pebble for a tongue; a clammy coldness of the body that frightens him. He is no longer seeing Old Bo's stories, but the morning light smacking the scattering of weatherboard shops and pubs that compose the front street of Strahan and which face directly onto the wharf; sees three cars parked outside the pub, the doctor's baby Austin, a Studebaker he doesn't recognise and an old rusty wood truck, sees the old wood fishing boats stacked high with their wired willow-stick cray pots.

‘We've done it, Smeggsy.'

And Smeggsy looks up to see Old Bo's face crack into the biggest, craggiest smile he has ever seen light across the old bastard's face.

‘We've bloody well done it.'

And in the great fat yellow light of the new morning Aljaz opens his eyes to see his home and his people, sees the mighty snow-capped Triglav rising up the back of Strahan, sees the wharf heavy with blackfellas and a whole host of others happily eating mullas and crayfish together, sees Black Pearl climb out of the harbour wet and sleek and black and as naked as a seal with a big crayfish in her hands. She walks right through that whole mob, until she is at the hub of them all, and everyone radiates out like spokes on a bicycle wheel from where she stands, right smack bang in the middle of all those people, and there it is, smoking and spluttering, Harry's celebrated barbeque, spitting and flaring, the griddle full of roo patties on one side and cevapcici on the other, and people crowding all around it eager for a feed of Harry's famous abalone patties which are yet to be grilled over the myrtle coals, and people around it shoving and laughing and yarning with each other. Aljaz sees them and he sees
him
, Harry, and he is squatting, pulling a fresh loaf of bread out of the adobe oven beneath the grill, and behind him and around him, there on the Strahan wharf, sees Ned Quade embracing Eliza Quade holding a half-gnawed drumstick in one hand, sees Rose, sees Sonja, sees a man who is the dead spit for Harry and it's his twin brother Albert and he's smoking rollies and talking with George and Basil and Boy Lewis, sees Milton sitting on the ground picking up slaters and snails, kissing them, then throwing them on the barbeque plate, much to Harry's displeasure, sees Eileen and Tronce, and George - already drunk - and he's bent over backwards showing a wart on his bum to be read by cousin Dan Bevan, sees Willie Ho and Reggie Ho and he's already chatting up Auntie Ellie, sees Reg with sauce upon his walrus moustache and a glass of beer in one hand and the baby Daisy in the other arm, sees them all, his home and his people.

And he hears the peat crumbling and smells the colours of it growing and at last he knows the song and he knows.

How much he loves them!

And he sees Black Pearl is holding something to her chest. From below her forearm falls a puffy shin and a yellow woollen bootee, and the yellow woollen bootee is kicking up and down, and he sees cradled within Black Pearl's arms Jemma, all cooing and laughing. Black Pearl takes Jemma's hand and points at him, and he hears her tell the child that the sea eagle she can see high up in the myrtle tree carries the spirits of her ancestors.

But before Black Pearl has finished speaking he feels a warm updraught, and rising with it his body, wings outstretched, feathers feeling every sensation of the crisscrossing air currents, rising in a spiral, a circle growing ever outwards.