The Swan Book (36 page)

Oblivia ignored the rusty old signs. What were signs to her? These ones were wired all along the fence of wrought iron. She did not bother reading the warning of the dangers of entering, or notice what the penalties were for trespassing in neglected areas such as these old botanical gardens. The signs that might have once stopped homeless people squatting, now robbed the city's memory of the gardens. Who in the street life of the city would guess why such a wasteland had ever been created? It was as though places of antiquity had lost their usefulness to those who lived for the moment, the here and now, and where the gates were forced shut by boa-constrictor thick renegade vines, wound like a monster's woven carpet throughout the wrought iron lacework.

The swans circling in the sky above the neglected gardens guarded the green leafiness of their island in the city, while people who had come from other parts watched the phenomenon like it was a thing of wonder. The Chinese people, who had long lived in the city, praised each sighting of swan flight for its momentary
beauty, and called the swans
hong
in their own language. A story floated around the Greek side of the city, of likening the swans circling the island of wilderness to a long ago belief of a mystical island surrounded by white swans where Apollo was born. These were all poor people's stories. A good feeling was left in the air from seeing swans, they said. The air felt lucky. Even – prosperous. Safe. Warren Finch was in the city. Everyone felt in a blood-tingling way that something big was about to happen.

All of the broken birds had been set free from the apartment in The People's Palace, and now, in the botanical gardens, Oblivia was watching the assembling swans swarm in numbers so vast they blocked the moonlight. But this freak of nature plagued her. When had her swans bred? Where had time gone? How many seasons of swans' breeding had passed by and she had not noticed? How long had she lived in the city?

This was the reason why she never went to the genies' magic shop any more. It was not just that the owl never returned once all of the swans had been released, or even that the owl's memory had receded from her mind as silently as its flight. It was how she had been kept captive, while time had been stolen from her in those long nocturnal journeys following the owl around the streets with a swan under her arm. Now she knew there had been many seasons of swan-egg cradling and cygnets reared which signalled above all else, that she had spent more time in the city then she had ever expected.

The girl had not even thought about saying
goodbye
or
sayonara
to Machine, nor said
yunngu
, that she was going away for good, nor a simple
ciao
to the Harbour Master. Leaving was leaving. Nothing more than a curious unemotional response – a flatness of spirit for the flight inward when being removed from places,
as it had from being pulled off the hull and before that, from the tree. She left Machine to piss around in his own fairytale. Left him mooning over his cats. The Harbour Master? Left imagining why his monkey had just trucked off for nothing, and to blow his mind away with whatever took his fancy about Mr Fat Cat, Indigenous leader of the country, Warren Finch on television.

She had just kept walking, barely noticing the network of overgrown hedges reaching for the sky inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the botanical garden. When she was far away into the park steaming with early morning mist, she no longer heard the skin and bone dogs barking on the street outside. The street kids and their dogs still followed her from the lane as though she was some kind of reclusive ghost kid, just like an Aboriginal
tinkerbell
fairy. Would she lead them somewhere? That was the thrill of it all.

But now, outside the botanical gardens, they held back and just hung about on the footpath, too augured in dusty city mythologies of what lay beyond the gates – where they heard thousands of noisy myna birds pealing hotly at one another from orange aloe flowers growing all over the place like weeds, and flying aggressively through the dense undergrowth. Their dogs panted for water beside the legs of their owners, while all the while the ghosts from the park were out there in the street in broad daylight, whispering scary stories close into the ears of the children about this and that, but mostly about the troubles of dark nights in this wilderness, and scaring the dogs stupid too.

Where was the guidance from elders? It was the cruellest fate for children of bad weather times, whose brains had been clogged with mysteries of their own making, more than you could imagine – where would you believe? The skies were haunted with the ghosts of swallows and pigeons flying about. Among the throng of
children out there on the footpath, their Mohawk-haired leaders of skin and bone were swearing black and blue at their mad dogs snapping at the air. These animals saw invisibility better than anything real, and everything untrustworthy, while all the while, they went on lurching madly about on their chains.

Well! What would you expect? This was not an ashram out on the street. Theirs was a city that bred the jumpiness of sissy-girl boys who normally saw ghosts flying about – right above the streets. They always pointed out the ghosts travelling through the mist and smoke rising over the city – and even travelling procession-like in the sky trains of diseased bats. Well! Lucky virus bats were asleep. They were dangling upside-down through several groves of trees in the old botanical gardens.

And what of the Aboriginal girl they followed? That skinny thing in dark trackies, hoodie covering her face with the swans flying around her? Well! If you think like a sissy-girl, then she was not real neither. They saw her as a spiritual ancestor because they knew what an Aboriginal looked like, since they were modelling their subsistence as it were, albeit only on junk food, on the country's original inhabitants. She was their backfill now.

Erratic, unexplainable weather makes you feel no good in the heart, and this was how they felt about Oblivia with the ghost swans that seemed to multiply into clouds when they flew in the night. They talked about how she was the first Aboriginal spirit they had ever seen, the only way any could return as far as they knew from the total cleansing of the city of all those people ‘rounded up' and impounded in the North country in the old days, many years ago.

The dogs continued barking although Oblivia was now far away in the undergrowth with the fluttering butterflies, leaving the whole shebang kid-and-dog thing chasing one another up and down the footpath in the bedlam of yelling and dog howls. Those darn dogs, uncontrollable if not kept properly tethered to their
chains. Dogs more wild for chasing ghosts than anything else, driven mad by the smell of swans and bats. Oblivia ignored the noise and kept going. Soon, she would not hear the little war with other gangs converging on the footpath.

Hey! What's happening sissy-girls? We were here a long time first.

What is a long while? Ten minutes?

There were rules about standing your own ground, even if you were a sissy-girl when anybody could be
hookin' em
and
trickin'
a good gang.

Hey! Wait youses.

Nah! Let that blackfella fairy go. She's ours. Not yours. We will fight you for her if you like.

Come on then…

The river of bats streamed over the battle on the footpath without noticing a thing, and kept flying towards the epicentre of the darkened parklands. The colony had come from city suburbs where it had flown the previous evening at dusk to find gardens with fig trees loaded with ripened fruit. Down below their roosting trees, Oblivia continued to crawl through tunnels in the undergrowth that foxes had once clawed apart to chase the aged hare king. She passed several grassy fields trampled by the swans, and finally arrived at the grasslands where the colonies of swans were gathered around a marshy lake infested with insects. Who knows the truth, but it was in these grasslands where swans had preened themselves and slept in waves with long necks curled s-shaped over their backs, that life seemed the cleanest, and where the air filled her mind with a sense of peace.

She ignored the bats snoring in skeleton trees, to listen to the conversation of the swans' agitated whistling, and swinging necks lunging and hissing, before falling into quietness, when suddenly, the cicadas roared from the treetops. The alarm radiated over the entire precinct of the abandoned jungle of undergrowth
and sprawling treetops. The butterflies of blue, yellow and black jumped in midair. The swans scrambled, tumbling with quivering wings spread, fanning the rising mist to take off, and in a stormy rush, all were gone.

The Harbour Master was bone-idle, sitting up there in the apartment of The People's Palace, and actually minding his own business in his smelly old singlet and shorts when all of a sudden, a news flash appeared right there on the television, and he saw the assassination.

Those people in charge of television programs should think about what they are doing to an old man. Poor old thing was shaken. Who had been half asleep and dreaming about Rigoletto, and half watching an opera program on the ABC. When he saw the assassination he instantly felt sick. Soon, all there was to see on the television was news replayed a thousand times about the assassination. This was the fact of the matter. Warren Finch had been shot in the streets of the city, and his life was fading.

The old Harbour Master's face was concrete grey and motionless, but his head was spinning. He was like the rest of the world – spellbound and compelled to watch hours of repeated footage about Warren Finch's life on news media television.

He thought that he saw the girl-wife, a glimpse of somebody that looked like her anyhow, running beside the ambulance trolley that was carrying the heaviest public life in the world as though he weighed nothing. Bodyguards he recognised as those genies threw themselves in front of cameras to shield anyone getting a proper view of Warren Finch. All seemed to be lost now. All lost. But somehow in all of those thoughts of loss that now blanketed the world, something extraordinary happened when a burst of energy filled the apartment. Could it possibly be?
Warren at last visiting…
The apartment felt as though it had become alive.

A sensation of phenomenal energy swishing around madly – horizontally bouncing from one wall to the other, and each time it passed, cold air slapped the Harbour Master across the face until he had been struck countless times.

It had to be Warren Finch who lay dying on a stretcher on television too lifeless to look at his watch or answer his mobile phone, but he had come back to the apartment like a crazy person with no time to spare, and acting like he could not find his favourite pair of socks. Well! He left everything in his path upturned and strewn, because sure enough, he would not be staying long. His voice was another matter: it was like a large ball at the end of a piece of rope being dragged into the ear of the Harbour Master, as well as Machine downstairs with his cats –
Where is she?

Then the Harbour Master snapped. He felt very alone with the solemn television presenter who was trying to become his friend while he spoke intimately about the life of Warren Finch who lay covered in bloodied sheets on the stretcher, and as the journalist was trying to speak with the ambulance men frantically working with drips and life-saving equipment, they moved to take Finch to a hospital. But, the old man was no longer in the mood to know whether Warren Finch was dead or alive. He packed his bag in a jiffy, all his clothes (not much), found the monkey's exotic clothes of course, and after a quick, final glance around the apartment, he left very speedily, through the gushing fountains, and the mist settling on the mossy statues. He walked straight past the openly crying Machine who was hugging his wailing cats, and was all too occupied watching the television to notice the front door slamming and the Harbour Master screaming,
Where is the wife in grief?

The swans have all gone to the sky, but the sound of their wings beating quickened every beat in the girl's heart. Swish! Swish! The sounds resonated, but she felt only the familiar claustrophobic
sense of being trapped in a confined space, a place where her vision had been reduced to a keyhole view, of being slung back into the roots of the ancient eucalyptus tree. It was a view she had seen before, a blanket of swans forming into a giant bird in flight.

But this world was falling apart, and the girl's heart raced like a trapped animal looking for the fastest way out. There were voices everywhere now with the news spreading quicksilver through the dense population in the streets. Yes. The city itself was screaming for her, beckoning, beseeching, or if you like, crucially confronting her with its great pain by trying to pull her into its troubles.
Ahhh! Ahhh! NO! She's looking the other way. Is she actually doing that? Her husband is dying for pity's sake. Don't go. She is running away.
C
ome quickly! Come back you somebody. Somebody! Stay!
The city people cried a million buckets of tears for their famous Warren Finch to live. But! But, this President's wife, she was a very good question indeed. What was she doing? Where was she? The problematic promise bride who had turned up from nowhere! Her name being just too plain forgettable and foreign – the real heart of the issue: who would remember such a fictitious, ridiculous name?
Where are you, you person?

She barely heard the quibbling of thousands of people calling for her around the city. It was really more the memory evoked from long ago, that warned her to keep running from painful voices falling over the reeds in the swampland to reach her – bowling over the beauty of wild flowers that were kind of special, and crackling branches of trees where dozy fruit bats had fallen flat on the ground.

Now she could be seen by the swans in the sky as she ran around the marshy lake in the botanical gardens, and through the hare king's bramble tunnels where she sees the grey hare run off in front of her, and heads after it loping through paths that the foxes had dug. All the while she is looking skywards – trying to keep up
with her swans flying overhead in the cloud, and needing not to lose them, she must stay under their shadow. It is as though she is running in somebody else's dream, where someone like Warren Finch is calling –
fly me to the moon.
She sees the three genies too. They are like giants standing in passing clouds, talking to one another while they struggle to steer the swans flying wildly away from the city.
Listen! Can't you hear? She's making a wish. She wants to fly with the swans so that they do not leave her behind.