The Swan Book (20 page)

The discussion took a strange exploratory route, analysing
the blocked tributaries of Western matrimony, and being a distinct Nation themselves and people of the longest surviving culture in the world, they had become world-wise at studying such marriages. They favoured a cynical critique, where each member of the Swan Lake Government had their own peculiar but excellent first-hand knowledge about other people's relationships; the warring spouses, neighbours, or adult children, and numerous family dealings with bad marriages in countless Western soap operas. They presumed the right to ask questions,
when a husband comes looking for his wife, you have to think whether there is anything good in marriage?

Was this the bloody butcher's shop? The abattoirs? Nobody hesitated or blinked an eye at the fact that Warren Finch wanted to collect a piece of meat. He hardly noticed the fakery in the cynicism in their enquiring about his personal affairs.
Mr God Sir. Well! Who didn't suffer in marriage?
Mr No One At All asked. If Warren worried about his wife, so what was the mystery in that? He could join the club of broken marriages in Swan Lake. There was a bad smell in the room circulating with the fans, as if a very fat rat had died in the ceiling. The smell reached down the nostrils and mixed with the fish dinner into a nauseating retch but the Ministers for Government seemed unaffected, used to problems like that, and asked if the putrid smell was still there to avoid Warren Finch glaring at them. And someone, probably the controller, changed the subject by bluntly asking:
What wife?

So what does your wife look like?
It was insulting for the minders to hear anyone speaking to Warren Finch as though they were talking to a piece of scrap. The retorts came thick and fast.
What was wrong with you people? Don't you know who you are talking to? You are speaking to the Deputy President of Australia here. This man is so highly respected abroad, they call him Deputy Right Excellency, Deputy Mr President of Australia. Show a bit of respect!

Warren held up a gracile hand in a gesture that was like a blessing given by a holy man. This was the hand frequently seen on television news from countries throughout the world. It was the very hand that had stopped atrocities and made peace amongst war-torn peoples. The hand was loved throughout the world. Here though, it simply meant,
enough was enough!
The ghostly Harbour Master panicked in his ethereal heaven somewhere up where the rat smelt in the ceiling, and stirred-up extra doubt in the room:
Does he really stop destruction?

The question about his wife was a difficult one to answer without resolving what residual similarities lay between him and the people of Swan Lake. They could only answer him by asking what old bridge still existed between them and this top Australian? Did it mean if they spoke plainly to him that they were Australian too? Or, were they really invisible in anyone's language no matter what they said, and would remain un-Australian for loving ancient beliefs of their traditional lands too much. All history had to be tested in these questions. Why? All history needed to be addressed in their answers. So what wife was he looking for?

A wife, a wife, in any case, might end up being a piece of meat. Someone who might have been called
Does it matter
, then asked a simple question really, and very politely,
What's her name then – your wife?

I sent you people a letter,
Warren snapped, while checking the time once more on his watch, and blimey, he kicked his brain for wasting time.

Honestly, nobody remembered receiving a letter:
Can you tell us what was in the letter?
Weisenheimer asked.

It was explained in the letter.
Warren Finch said – full stop. He was in no mood to explain what should have been read in a letter.

Was it that impossible to read a simple letter?
He was clearly annoyed that these people were trying to force him into talking about what
was really, after all, a delicate matter. His minders thought so too. A man of his position expected to have things organised properly. It happened that way everywhere else on the planet, so what was the trouble with this place? Why could one simple thing not be done right in this place of all places – his homeland?
You want to tell me if someone wants to play around with me here?
He suspected the financial controller was lying.
If you are running the show you must have seen the letter.

The meeting waited while some clerk was called up to the office to find the letter. Meanwhile, Warren looked miserably around the building at paper piled and paper strewn, and then blankly at one of his minders who immediately left the building to make a call on his mobile phone to an office so far away from everything abysmally slack-assed that he could see in the dismal swamp, and cheerfully spoke to the real world of Heaven, where things happened with a single snap of one's fingers, where people could not run fast enough to do things properly. When he returned, the minder reported that the letter had been sent a long time ago and there had been no reply. The two-line, three-short-sentenced letter was now emailed to the mobile phone that was passed around the room, so everyone could read the contents of Warren's letter.

Well! Wasn't that just typical, just typical.

At this point the electricity suddenly stopped flowing from the malfunctioning power station down the road, and the fans rumbled to a halt. There was sweat in the room. The Army mechanic, who had gone away fishing for the weekend with ‘neglected' children, would not be able to fix the problem, Weisenheimer announced. He was uncontactable. Finch had now clearly had it up to his eyeballs
. What use was a mechanic if you can't even contact the bugger when you haven't got any power?

Well! You tell me? Who is the boss? You, or the flaming mechanic?
Finch glared at the controller.
Or who the parents are around here?
He was now counting the bad vibes, all falling like dominos. All the ammunition! He was a master at pinpointing incompetence. Unlike beef cattle, this was what fed the belly of Canberra, the paradise hungry to shut down the Indigenous world. A bloody lost letter, and the lost wife, now the lost power, plus the smell of a dead rat in the ceiling, who could dream of what was coming next? The question of Warren's lost wife quickly became a lengthy
in camera
discussion in the full-blown humidity of the tropics in the closed room where swarming mosquitos were playing noughts and crosses on exposed skin.

So it was in this inner sanctum of the swamp's Aboriginal Governmental Nation, which was trying to find a pleasing resolution, while Warren Finch was simply wondering if they were even worth saving at all. Then, the last-straw cold tea circulated to the meeting by a young girl – long after she had responded without much enthusiasm to repeated loud, clicking fingers by Weisenheimer, because she was too busy ear-dropping at the closed door and dreaming that
she
was Warren Finch's wife – blasted the lid off politeness. No tea tipped the balance.

She was a promised wife.
A promised wife? Ah!
Now that was different.
This is very different to what we were thinking. Sorry, but we didn't think about that, because we don't do that kind of thing here anymore. It died out years ago. Nobody wanted to continue with this old law.
The old elder said this straight out because he said he was nobody, and not just because everyone knew that a discussion of a highly contentious issue like this might end badly by the end of the night.

One of the older women said she had been a promised wife. Another woman said that she was more concerned about how the township kept moving by itself, and if this moving around of people kept going on, soon there would be so many of them, they would be living off their traditional country, and something needed to be
done about this. The controller urged the meeting to think very carefully about what Mr Finch was talking about. He too wanted to hear the truth about the lost letter that might explain the reason for such a highly prominent person in the Australian community behaving this way – like what the locals would gleefully think was a deranged hobgoblin sent by Canberra to personally annoy him, so of course he asked:
What age would this ‘so-called' promised wife be?
He wanted to know if Warren required a child. Was it a virgin? What hymn sheet were they to sing?

The Aboriginal Government men and women saw all kinds of awful ramifications for Swan Lake and stayed quiet. Actually, they knew the reality of his request, but Weisenheimer was on a roll, becoming emotional – nothing would stop him. Now he lost the plot by asking a lot of questions on behalf of his people's welfare:

Why did you come here like this, making these demands of us?

Why didn't you just come here with good intent?

What about those doctors? Why were doctors being wasted as bodyguards? We need doctors here to look after the sick people. We've got plenty of sick people here.

Yes, Warren Finch could have gone anywhere he liked while he was busy out saving the world, other than visiting the people who needed him most, his own people in Swan Lake. And! Gosh! A man like Warren Finch was too busy, he did not need a wife.

So why come here and bother the little people on a Friday evening when people needed to be home relaxing after a hard week and eating their dinner while it was hot?

Warren Finch had obviously thought the whole thing through – start to finish – beforehand. He had come to collect his wife and expected a wall of silence, but he knew he would push on through the night if he had too, and he was digging in. He was prepared to get no sleep for days to get a result, and knew the ramifications of naming his mission.

Dr Hart, Dr Doom and Dr Mail, his long-time minders, who always thought that they knew everything there was to know about Warren as his closest confidantes, now exchanged questioning looks. Warren Finch already had all the women he could ever want. Didn't he have some sort of long-term relationship with somebody in Canberra? What about Marcella of Milan? Wasn't he seeing a Maria in Warsaw? It was hard to keep track of the women in his life. Why would he want to do this? What kind of wife was he thinking of?

Names, names, names,
Warren continued, clicking his fingers impatiently. It was only a simple name that a person needed.
This was a reciprocal agreement and it must be honoured,
said one of the ex-boxer-type minders. His minders were quick to take up the thread of what was news to them, while not knowing how a promise wife fitted into Warren's grand plan, in which he had always been honest enough to admit that he had no time for wives. The painful issue was prolonged further by excuses from the Swan Lake Government suggesting it would be happy for
the promise
to be annulled.
It was time to go home. Time for bed.
But it was up to him to make the final decision since they knew the families involved in the first place were now deceased.

Weisenheimer pushed on.

Warren, I can guarantee you as real as I am sitting here that we do not have anyone around here who would even remember this promise wife arrangement.

He encouraged others to say something to end the matter, and they did.

You do not have to go through with it, Mr Your Highness. You should feel free to marry someone else and we give you our full blessing our boy.

Yes. This is what people do now because the Army is in control here for the Australian Government punishing us people. We still live in punitive raid times. They do not worry about the promise. We just get married with the controller's permission.

No! No! No!
The minder called Dr Doom fired the shots in a deep operatic voice of the likes you would hear in the
Teatro la Fenice
in Venice; a soaring ghostly phoenix roaring, that as sure as hell did not belong in this swamp. The boom killed free speech in an instant. Meandering
talkathons
were pronounced dead. There were no other cards to play except Warren's, and he had placed those squarely on the table. Men like Doom made many people wonder whether there were other Aboriginal people coming up through the education system who could use their voices like that.

Still, what was pretty much the
vox populi
of wishes in Swan Lake became grist for eyeballs bouncing back and forth, where they looked up from the bottom of a Rio Grande chasm between one of these super humans and the next. Warren Finch's eyebrows rose, and he transformed himself into television Warren with legs stretched out under the table, but nobody copied his behaviour. It did not matter to them how much Warren Finch was relaxing because it just felt like intimidation. They knew that feigning to be relaxed was one thing for the champion peacekeeper of the world, but this type of person does not travel out of his way, just to reach a swamp and settle for rejection, be bluffed by diversions, or just plain mucked around. His relaxed state only emphasised his intransigence and he casually restated what he wanted, with a smile:
The law is the law.
He simply wanted what was his to claim from an agreement made between families, of
Our nations,
he said.

It should not be that hard to understand.

But nobody told us,
somebody nervously chanted.

But nobody told us?
Warren's sauna-soaked minders whispered, in mocked shock. The pressure-cooker room was not to everyone's taste.

You had to give it to the bosses of this swamp for being true masters of their own game. They were not going to be duped by
anyone walking in off the street so to speak, or more factually, coming in off the road like some unannounced hobo Black fellow, and aiming to rip the dirt from beneath their feet. They knew what people like this try to do. He was making a claim on their traditional land. They dug their heels in. Claimed no knowledge of the letter. Claimed there was no misunderstanding, and the reason being, they were always kept in the dark. Nobody could blame people who were kept ignorant to whatever was going on behind their backs. A few words on a mobile phone?
Blah! Meant nothing.
It was not a letter they received.
You can't receive letters on a telephone
.
Never heard of such a thing.
They accused the financial controller: Ask him!
He never spoke to any of us Aboriginal people.