The Swan Book (39 page)

The city responded to its own questions by creating workplace strikes, protests, and rioting on the streets. The squatters burnt the abandoned buildings they had been living in. In the lanes of the city where the homeless lived, the grief found its own language. This nocturnal world destroyed everything that resembled its insular lifestyle by creating bonfires of every piece of cardboard shack they owned. Embracing grief escalated into a stranglehold of destruction and looting over the city. The streets overran with picketing mourners spurred on by a bellyful of Government conspiracies in their heads. The mouth-to-mouth talk rampaging through the streets was very simply this:
Warren Finch was not dead
. In the uprising that now demanded the government stand down, it was as though the protesting city thought Warren Finch could be found amongst the wanton destruction of public property, or under barricades of trashed cars and buses, or beyond the lines of soldiers that had been called in to deal with the troubles.

These were only normal people of the times. People who were struggling to keep up with what was happening around them, so hard to keep up with the memories – the missing, yearned-for things in life, which now included Warren Finch. They prayed for the people who had gone missing, those that had been snatched off the street, those that had had the life beaten out of them by thugs wearing balaclavas over their faces at the end of a lane, or those seen shot and fallen to the ground on a lonely wharf in the middle of the night, then disappearing without trace. In principle, it was normal to live in hope, to hope that loved ones would return to life in the lanes and squats of the abandoned buildings, or hope for luck through sprawling suburbs where fate was as slender as a spider's thread blowing in the breeze.

The Ghost Walk

F
resh food and the body of Warren Finch travelled together. The important public officials, passionately depicting themselves as unified people, were obsessed with imagination, narrow though it was in their minds. Well! Aesthetics was all. They were pretty tricky to wipe their hands of the rioting city, by finally deciding to get rid of the coffin-worshipping in the cathedral. It was a job that had to be done, and quite frankly, they finally agreed to be finished with hand-wringing over rioters. They were over it. So, while standing around in the cathedral like a cohesive
think tank
, assembled to argue and shout each other down about what to do with the coffin, they reached a brilliant decision in total ignorance of the havoc on the streets, where the Bishop of the Cathedral was spending most of his time amongst the rioting picketers and youths breaking glass windows with rocks, trying single-handedly to calm everyone down.
You are in the Lord's presence would you believe?
He was just told to get out of the way.

It was not the Bishop's fault that he could not bring peace to the city, so with hands clasped behind his back, he strolled back inside his glorious cathedral. Then, with a quick glance around the building he had known for decades for peace and tranquillity, he singled out the public servants amongst the people crowding
through the roses to reach the coffin, and rightfully asked:
What brings you down here?
The most senior public servant, the Director, drew the clergyman aside, where he spoke to him in the abstract logic of public official language about
Closing The Gap
. The Bishop knew that this was the language of economic rationing but he could not reconcile it with the language of the Church, of creating or closing a gap to catch the sinners. There was no gap between God and the Church. Yet, all was not lost on him. He was able to surmise the Government had a strategy, and during the conversation of voices speaking hastily, he heard of an assembling plan that was frequently called,
Highway Dreaming Code
. Ah! It was high talk. Way above what a normal person could begin to understand. A hard-edged decision made on the spot.

The Bishop's question of
what are you going to do about this
, with hands gesturing at the enormity of the crisis, initiated a quicker decision than would have normally occurred in the realms of public sector abstract dialogue – as impersonal as can be expected when talking about a coffin rather than a dead person – and it rightly ended with the officials complimenting him for reaching this solution himself.
Dead right, Holiness
.
A last lap of honour. People need to see the coffin. This is exactly what the country has been calling out for. What could be more beneficial than respecting the voices of Australians right now? This would show all of those foreigners we are in charge in this city, and that is for sure. And they can all get their planes up in the skies and go home.

Warren Finch would be taken on a final journey to farewell the nation, and the beauty of the thing was its giving the Government time to make a final decision about where to bury the coffin in the end. The lap of honour could take as long as needed, even forever, if the need arose.

Naturally, the widow had to be consulted first, and the decision was explained to her in simple terms to spell blind her with the
obvious glamour in it all, flying up the highways in a magnificent hearse. She instantly agreed of course to have the coffin removed a-s-a-p, from the cathedral.
Okay
. She was more interested in the angel swans flying on the ceiling's frescoes, tethered with the ribbons of heaven, unable to fly off. She heard the angels breathing, their warm breath falling down onto her uplifted face, and she wondered if the angels would
fly the coffin home.

In the streets outside the cathedral, the rioters were sleeping in the pall of campfire smoke, low fog, or was it just the mist of sleeping gas, when the big Mack truck arrived. Perhaps rioting was exhausting work, or perhaps the city's angels had been rocking the night watchers' cradle, but no one stirred from the haze, lifted a head to see what was happening, stood up and yelled
daylight robbery
when the semitrailer hearse crawled in with the stealth of a sneaky fox. Even King Billy was asleep.

The huge vehicle slowly made its way through the snakelike barricades along each side of the road. The three-metre high riot barriers had been set up before nightfall when riot police pushed and crushed people off the road. With the cordon up, a long chain of heavily-armed soldiers in gas masks moved in, and were stationed on each side of the road.

The coffin was soon popped into the deep freezer of the
Fresh Food People
long-haul semitrailer attached to the Mack's cab – now painted up in blue, red and white, as though draped with the nation's flag. The semi was fully loaded and ready to hit the road at a quarter past three in the morning.
Soon,
the driver claimed through his gas mask to the sleeping widow accompanying him on this journey
, when we get the hell out of this,
he would soon be going somewhere else. This was the first and last thing he said to her. He was more interested in the road and the schedule. He normally travelled by himself and now it did not matter who was in his truck
or how important they were, he still worked alone. This looming giant gripping the driver's wheel never slept. He stared ahead through black sun-reflecting sunglasses that rested on his white block-out covered nose. He wore his Aboriginal flag-coloured cap down to his eyebrows to block out the sun that would stream in the driver's window, and to keep his personal world secret, beyond the reach of others.

The cab was over-crowded. Claustrophobic. As well as the driver with all the clothing he owned on earth shoved in a bag, his collection of holy beads hanging from the rear-view mirror, and leprechaun good luck charms all over the place, he had to share the cabin with the security, all big sweaty units squashed up against each other, and the recently widowed First Lady thing – although what room did a mere slip of a thing like her need?

Even the Harbour Master, reunited with the recalcitrant Rigoletto sulking on his lap, had invited himself along for the ride. They were both squashed in a corner of the back seat next to Oblivia and were whispering to one another about having seen the security men before. It was hard to place where, the Harbour Master said, but he knew them. The girl thought the genies had come back into her life disguised as middle-aged men who now suspected her of killing her husband. These security men sat around in the cab of the truck and acted like Supreme Court judges. They whinged about dragging a coffin around the country, which they said was a stupid idea. Their power radiated through the driver's cab like hot air and the unmistakable, uncontrolled yearning of a courtroom that was seeking the truth about Warren Finch's killer. Unquenched, uncontrolled yearning that lasted thousands of kilometres with Oblivia tormenting herself with the question – did she, or did she not kill her husband, and was she just chasing the hare king that day? The driver pulled his cap
further down onto his eyebrows. It was academic to him. He was not wishing for anything. Didn't care if she had an alibi or not, or whether it was easier to believe that she killed her husband than to believe she was chasing a hare king. He became lead-footed to cure any urge for wishing, thinking or yearning, pressing harder on the accelerator and sending the semi flying along the road. On and on they flew, hundred of kilometres of gum trees quivering in their wake, and flatlands of sheep and cattle-filled grasslands wondering what had just happened, while she tossed and turned over her alibi, whether she had one or not.

The road train carted the body everywhere – up the Hume Highway, down the Stuart Highway, around the Monaro – eleven highways in all. Twenty thousand kilometres of the nation's highways had been split down the middle to divide the country like two giant lungs.

The
See You Around
journey was for all people who bothered to stand out in a chilly night, or in the midday sun, if they cared enough to line the streets just to watch the
Spirit of the Nation
roaring by. The whole thing was a rhapsody in motion and could not have been more successful, as the road train roared down the highways of country and western music – mostly legend music by the country's great singers like Slim Dusty, Rick and Thel, a bit of Chad Morgan – Camooweal, Mt Isa, Cloncurry, The Barkley, Wagga Wagga, Charleville, Cunnamulla, Yarrawonga, Plains of Peppimenarti, and the Three Rivers Hotel. But mostly, the clockwork nature of the thing was to keep to the
Fresh Food People's
schedule of deliveries to its supermarket chain throughout the country, picking up and delivering crates of fruit and vegetables such as asparagus, mangoes, pawpaw, bananas and pineapples; or the oranges, apples, potatoes, strawberries and peas from the packing sheds and cool rooms of its Northern or Southern growers.

Along the way, the coffin was paraded and displayed for all to see in this festival of grieving. The black sassafras heritage coffin was wheeled out of the semitrailer on a trolley and set down in the middle of a dead-grass flat, banana plantation, or salt bush plain, where speeches were made in the slow drawl of the North, or a fiddle played through amplifiers at each tinker-tailor gathering, in fiddlestick towns, depressed cities, cut-throat roadhouses, or else, the coffin was rested on a bench in a mine's mess room, in machinery, produce, wool and cattle sheds, or laid on the best linen table-cloth over the dining table of a cattleman's station home.

It was a hard schedule, and the silent driver drove that little bit faster to keep on track when memorials could just as spontaneously spring up out of the blue when influential, backblocks politicians at the end of a dusty road demanded their impromptu
See You Around
event with the
Spirit of the Nation
. The driver did not complain. He did his job. Dragged out the coffin. Wore the consequences for making up time after listening to another dozen pip-squeak speeches for a half-dozen people at another local church, football stadium, soccer oval, paddock, courtroom or meeting hall of the Country Women's Association, Boy Scout, or other local hall of fame.

The ghosts travelling in the road train were not complaining. The security guards enjoyed the view and started granting three wishes to whoever required them. Who were they to give two hoots if the coffin was continually being dragged out here or there in a journey that was endless? But the driver wished for nothing. He just kept growing older and driving on. He pushed the now less than splendid, soiled and chipped coffin out one more time, waited for the mourning to be done with and souvenir-hacking to be completed, and pushed the defaced coffin back up the ramp and into the freezer. There was no time any more for deliveries. It saved time to cut the words
delivery
or
pickup
off the list. He kicked the
security men out. Said that they were weighing him down. They were too congenial to their ever-increasing queues of wish seekers. He could not sit around all day for other purposes. Everything in the big freezer began to rot. The driver's eyes grew teary from being glued to the dusty road ahead, and he kept singing the same old song,
Yea! Keep your eyes on the road, and your hands on the wheel, we're having fun etcetera whatever.
But when he sang, he only heard the transport; the roaring road train's engine, wheels rolling over the highways. The widow never heard a thing said about Warren Finch in the endless parade of speeches. She had left before the journey began.

Goodness poor heart, the ghost walk. There are those who will warn anyone making this strange solitary journey, and will say:
You have got to take enough to make it through.

This was what happened. Oblivia disappeared from the hearse's spectacular schedule after the wind dusted off an icy night. What was the reason? And what was it about those prevailing dreams children have about life, that make them to go ghost walking like this? Away! Anywhere! That's what happened to them. Was there ever a right way of leaving?

In a panicky night off she went, entangled in the vortex of a thunderstorm dizzily spinning over many kilometres in the higher strata of the atmosphere. She just walked away without any thought of where she was going. Death, dying, or living had nothing to do with it. The truth of it was that wars do this to children. War children, like the torn world of Aboriginal children. Where were the kind crickets singing? Or, the big leaf under which to hide? The country's hearth! Ah! She just walked around the smudged lines of the circles the giants had sketched in another of their hell maps.