The Swan Book (37 page)

Swans were not the answer in times like this. The big birds were struggling up there in the sky. A changed wind blowing in from the opposite direction was so strong that the wings of the swans were being buffeted. The wind circled like a cyclone and carried everything in its path towards the centre of the city, including people hurtling through the streets who had wanted to see their visiting Head of State. The swan wings became sails that were being blown backwards in squalls moving towards the noise of thousands of screaming people caught in the storm in the streets where Warren Finch had just been assassinated.

Whether she ran or not in dreams of other things, nothing could change the fact about running against the wind, for she was back next to Warren Finch. Beside him, she felt strangely re-united to the moment when he had left the apartment on the day long ago when she had arrived in the city. She still feels the strength of his control even as he lies flat over her lap. She cannot move from his weight, but her mind switches uncontrollably in a futile struggle. She shivers with the shock of finding herself beside Warren, replacing the television wife, even though in her mind, she is still chasing after the hare king through raspberry brambles. Alone and exposed, she recognises the faces of the street kids placed here and there among the crowds falling over her, hears the approaching sounds of sirens of police cars and ambulances speeding through the city. She feels terrified because they will think that she has killed
him. She does not remember, does not know what has happened anymore. Was she just chasing the hare king? Everywhere the voices of police on loud speakers rip apart both reality and dreams, and she focuses on the helicopters hovering haphazardly low, with rotor blades whirling where the swans are flying above her.

The pains of distance roar through her like a flood emptying into insignificance, that leaves behind, as in dry plains, a surreal indifference in the midst of chanting crowds that have become hundreds of thousands deep, and still throng on the streets, as police desperately try to force through an ambulance. Hemmed in by the cries and screams, she is stuck, unable to leave, and cowers into Warren's limpness. There is no chance of escaping, except when she looks upwards to the swans correcting their flight above the narrow street with the sudden disappearance of the wind. He is going now.

The doors of the ambulance were quickly pushed closed, but nothing can move through the outpouring of grief from the surging crowds blocking the road. In this bedlam, where there is no control over what is happening, the security people manage to create a barrier and have the body loaded into a helicopter precariously hovering above the buildings. The girl-wife is left behind while the helicopter makes its way to the hospital, but the crowds break through the barrier in efforts to express their grief to her. She is enveloped in a sea of hands. Strangers one after the other shake her hand, tearfully hug her, and pass her on to the next person in grief, and the next, until she is lost and drowning in the crowds. She is pulled by this tide of grief through the city streets, packed with people crying and praying, people determined to express their gratitude to her, for the man who had watched over the global security of all peoples, whom they had known as Warren Finch.

The long day slipped into evening and by this time there were
the hands of the monkeys, street children, the Harbour Master, security guards, police, the genie minders – strangers steering her into the night.

A mother of all storms could grieve too, along with all those sad old country and western songs piped through the flooding city streets that carried, among other drifting things, an abandoned Chinese dragon that only yesterday had played a bamboo flute sweetly from its mouth to evoke a desert homeland, when the mythical creature danced a thousand-year-old ceremony through this foreign and soulless city as a welcome to the new President. Well! Its festival was over. So were the drums, and the clanging cymbals, the big brass band, the Scots Highland bagpipes, and all the jazz and gospel choirs, as well as the spinifex dancers with clapping sticks in front of the swans dancing with wings spread wide. These people had welcomed the President of Humanity they treated like a living God with death. They were all probably sleeping now.

Oblivia, the missing wife of the assassinated President, emerged through the large open mouth of the dragon. She looked around, still not knowing whether she had killed Warren Finch or not, and then stepped out into the ghost fog that rested its old body over the city. There had been another cyclone during the night and a tidal surge had flooded many of the city's streets. She held onto the golden tentacles that flowed along the side of the multi-coloured creature with mirrored scales, while it rocked and moved effortlessly through the darkness.

Only the monkey living in the main street's Cathedral was up this early. It was listening to the silence of traditional Country – the only sound it believed belonged to this city. The monkey was way up high, sitting in a small fig tree that grew out of the steepled roof of the sandstone cathedral. He began saying his morning prayers
to his distant monkey God, this God and that God, the God of the church where he lived. Prayers that took forever, until he could no longer concentrate on what he was praying for, or even believing which God loved him equally with other Gods. He started looking down through the lonely fog spirit travelling through the city, hoping nostalgically for a dawn chorus of songbirds that no longer existed. Then the monkey had to remind itself that some old habits died hard. The white furry creature sung a religious hymn of joyous awesomeness about how he too had become invisible like the gods, and how he actually felt magician-like. He could disappear then return to life again without even knowing it had happened.

It is only Rigoletto
, a flock of common myna birds squawked as they flew out of the cathedral's nave,
that religious monkey from Asia
. The monkey ignored bird chatter, particularly that of starlings, crows and myna birds. He believed that he was too good for screechy types of birds. He preferred to think of himself as an old gentlemanly monkey that looked down at life, like he was now looking down at fog ghosts, but this time was different. He saw the Chinese dragon floating along the street with a cold-looking bony girl clinging to the side.

From so far above, he was not sure whether it was the girl he was supposed to be looking after or not. Rigoletto
's
eyes were not like they used to be, even if he could clearly remember a time in his life that was spent snatching fruit, and stuffing his mouth with a whole peeled mandarin while performing multiple somersaults on the top of a stick all day long for tourists. You need good eyes for that. He often reflected about this magnificent feat, and about how this so-called land of opportunity had robbed him of his spontaneity and each point-zero-zero-zero-one-half-of-a-percent of a dollar he could have earned from performing the trick right throughout Asia. He doubted whether he had the heart for showing off this kind of trick now. He felt that a big devil in this country had gutted
him of every bit of spontaneous happiness he had in his body. Now he casually looked down with an accusing eye at the fog ghosts just to show – he knew it was her.

Rigoletto sprung from his perch in a heavy free-falling fashion that felt as though his body was full of lead, and in no time at all, he had scaled down the wall of the cathedral and half swam, half ran through the storm-water, until he too was holding on to the dragon's golden tentacles to save himself. He worked his way along the dragon until he was behind Oblivia and peering over her shoulder and looking at her face, to make sure it was
her
. Lo and behold, it screeched. It was the Harbour Master's
gardée.

This made the monkey very angry. He leapt in front of Oblivia, splashed about in what resembled a sort of dog paddle, and dealt with the crisis by thrusting himself as stiff as a board in and out of the water, and screamed his native language into her face to ask her what she was doing, which in Australian English meant:
You are crazy. What in the bloody hell's name are you thinking? Don't you know what you are doing? Haven't you got a clue in your head?
He swallowed a lot of water from screaming his lungs out for nothing in all forms of language. Swallowed language. Moral language. Peace and harmony language. Religious language. Angry language. Law language. Culture language. Political language. Enthusiastic language. Monkey language. The wings of language will never again fly so triumphantly in the soulless country. If the monkey wanted Oblivia to go back inside the dragon where she would be safe, she paid no attention to a single thing it said.

Instead, Oblivia looked straight through the monkey as though it never existed, and concentrated on the low fog shrouding the high-rise glass buildings on both sides of the street. Her eyes focussed on the darkened haze of a cloud of flying swans with steam flowing out of their nostrils, their wings labouring in flight from pulling the strings attached to the dragon, pulling it ahead.

She heard a voice coming from the water – coming all of this way from somebody's final resting place. Warren Finch's voice, teasing as he tried to hop on board the dragon of great hope and expectations, almost as mighty as the dawn swans flying Apollo's chariot while he pulled the sun across the sky.
Are you trying to escape?

Then he was gone. Or it may have just been the monkey Rigoletto complaining as he swung himself behind her again, and when he had a good grip of some golden tentacles, he kicked her for all of his troubles, and as many times as he could to force her towards the dragon's mouth. But nobody feels the kicks of an invisible, oppressed, and foreign-to-boot monkey that did not like living in Australia. The defeated monkey ended up sitting on top of the dragon sulking, while nervously chewing bubble gum in its big teeth.

As he looked around the deserted and broken city, it was only a cheap form of advertising that managed to fly around his head. The flittering myna birds had spied an audience to spread their same old government propaganda about generous household assistance that they had been trained to sing for peanuts. Worthless incentives. The monkey had no need for a government. He stubbornly turned his flat face this way and that, looked into space, and was not buying any of it. He was more concerned about myna birds alerting the security people.

Rigoletto already knew that the flooded city was being scoured from top to bottom to find the girl-wife from a call he had received on his miniature mobile phone. The phone's ringtone went ding dong all night, until he answered it. It was the Harbour Master hollering into his ear that the girl was all there was left now for the people of the world that had gone into mourning after Warren Finch's assassination.

Listen!
the absent Harbour Master chattered into the complaining monkey ear:
She was his wife so of course they want to find the only living
thing that they think was close to their dead legend who they reckoned had championed peace for people across the world, even if he didn't, and was only a self-proclaimed Indigenous hero who had made it all the way to the top in a suit and haven't I told you before about the importance of looking well dressed in a suit, because it goes to show that even an Aboriginal man in Australia can get elected by the common Aboriginal-hating people to be the Head of State of Australia, and that was a very good thing, even if it was the best thing that ever happened to the flippen what have you country, and now some mongrel moron still had to come along and murder him out of jealous racist spite. So, don't groan – of course she has to be found, even if you and I KNOW she was not close to him, and she can't save them from themselves, but she still belongs to these people because she is still the First Lady of whatnot.

Any little monkey could rattle off a litany of worse things happening in his world, but Rigoletto sat with steely red face on the dragon, and thought very seriously about prescribed responsibility as the worst kind of thing that could have happened to him. It was the only problem he had with being a pet monkey. He knew that he was supposed to step in like a man instead of just being a monkey and become the girl's guardian if the Harbour Master was not around, although very clearly, he recognised that the act of guardianship over others did not come naturally to him. He hated being trained to act responsibly. There was nothing in it. He was not the Harbour Master's pet monkey by any stretch of the imagination.

It was moments like these where a few guilty pangs forced Rigoletto to forget he was supposed to be a pet by acting like a wild animal. A wild animal was not supposed to look after people. It was supposed to be the other way around. Where was the beauty in a monkey worrying about people? His brain bolted from the reality of floating along a flooded city street on a magnificent but ruined dragon. His idea of beauty lay tens of thousands of kilometres away
where long-necked swans foraged for insects in muddy rice fields with the swallows, in a world that enjoyed listening to exquisite plum-blossom music being played on a bamboo flute. He held this thought. He hummed through bubble gum sticking between his clicking teeth, and did not lose any sense of the flute's musicality in his own rendition of the plum- and cherry-blossom music that he had locked in his head.

These were only the delusional thoughts of a monkey that had enough troubles occupying his mind than to be bothered with fantasies being projected on him by the Harbour Master like,
You poor, old, good monkey.
He had the worries of a thousand monkeys. So
da, da, de, da, and la, la, la!
Presently, aloft on the dragon, his main worry was the soaking wet Rigoletto jacket. Would it shrink on his furry body and strangle him? A monkey sitting on a dragon in the middle of some common big-storms-of-climate-changeraising-sea-levels event was nothing to worry about. He hugged himself tight. Rigoletto had seen flooding on seaboard city streets all over the world. It was really just as natural as seeing water flooding in the lanes of Venice, Bangladesh or Pakistan.