The Swan Book (40 page)

She walked away from the semitrailer hearse, and listened for
heartbeats: the silent chilled voicelessness of swans you hear in the weakened old and the very young tossed from the heavens, and those struggling to stay airborne with their wings stretched wide, locked against the force of the wind.

In a place where footsteps crackled on frost-hardened grass, her dreams were askew. Still! Quiet! Nevermind! There were people approaching, shadows in the darkness that looked like old Aunty and the Harbour Master with the monkey twisting around on his hip. The old woman was talking to the Harbour Master but her voice broke with the chill in the air.
You'd be reaching for gold to find the place now.
You could hear her continuing to recite bits of her old poetry, although she and the Harbour Master had already disappeared, and were walking somewhere that was infinitely far away.

In the morning there were only blue skies where the girl widow had walked off to find a flock of swans. For her, the mad hearse journey had finished. Who cared? The driver shouted to the thin vapours of air rising from the cold earth all around him, when he discovered she had left.
You there? You there? Come back here.
But tell you what? What did he care about anyone disappearing from his cortege if they had no respect for the dead? He had not seen the said personage contributing much to the memorial anyway. There were appointments to keep. A heavy schedule raced through his mind. He had a stiff in the freezer to think about. The haul going overseas once they got through Australia. So, with his cap pulled down lower over his sunglasses – man, he was hitting the highway. The rubber burnt the bitumen. A trail of smoke was left behind. You would think he was raising Lazarus from the dead.

She watched the semitrailer roaring up the highway from the ghost town's park, amongst oak trees with exposed roots like the fingers of giants crossed for good luck.
There he goes,
she thought of Warren Finch,
he's still holding on to power, still searching for
the ultimate paradise.
Yep! The same stories you hear about power. A dead man was still making people run after him. It was the first time she had really thought about Warren Finch for a very long time.

Alone in this quiet forest where only a blackbird's song rung out while the last stars disappeared, and the scream of the schedule became a dot on the awakening horizon, she suspected he was not dead at all. But who knows what thoughts will come right out of the bushland when you are alone? She saw for herself how Warren Finch could loom monumentally in the atmosphere like a gift from God. He was so indestructibly alive, just like the sky. Even in the middle of nowhere, he was still around, just as he was when she had watched the coffin absent-mindedly on the long journey, where he was being preserved as though he was some masterpiece in an art gallery. And just like famous paintings, he would never die as long as people looked at his dead body and appreciated the unique quality of his extraordinariness, and the propaganda of what he stood for in the world.

With leaves dropping from the oak trees at the slightest hint of a breeze, she thought about the frailty of perpetuity, and imagined she could still hear Warren talking on his mobile phone from the coffin in the semitrailer's freezer, where he was continuously calling the driver and complaining about her disappearance. His muffled voice now giving the orders and snapping at the driver, the mobile capped to his ear,
Where in the hell did she go?

Yes, she knew something. Warren Finch's elaborate montage-self never intended to be buried. He was insisting that the glassy-eyed driver forget what he called the girl widow. She could look after herself. He was wondering why she was brought along in the first place. He yelled down his mobile from the sassafras coffin in the freezer.
Well! Let it roar. You are doing the right thing driver. Keep going man – you got no time to frig around.

For what was death? It was just a matter of continuing on, keeping his ideas streaming out of centre stage in perpetual memorials. The fact of the matter was that it was hard to kill off someone who had gotten as big as the United Nations itself. Naturally, the gift from God would have to go around the world after this. No drama. Death was not an excuse for burying a person, and a bit of good history along with it. No – no drama at all.

Somewhere in this landscape, swans were stirring. It was a bright starry night. As the entire flock awakened, great hordes wove in and out of the tight pack with necks stretched high. These birds anticipated the movement of wind in the higher atmosphere. They gauged the speed of northerly flowing breezes caught in their neck feathers and across their red beaks and legs. The swans made no sound, but stood still while the wind intensified through the ruffling feathers on their breasts. Then suddenly from somewhere a startled swan flies up, and is followed by the roar of the lift off, and the sky is blanketed by black swans in the cold night, and Oblivia recalls the old Chinese monk Ch'i-chi's poem of the flight of swans in the night, like
a lone boat chasing the moon.
She watched, and knew she had found her swans. They had found each other's heartbeat, the pulse humming through the land from one to the other, like the sound of distant clap sticks beating through ceremony, connecting together the spirits, people and place of all times into one. These were her swans from the swamp. There was no going back. She would follow them. They were heading north, on the way home.

On this night, she travelled over hills of heavily-scented eucalypt forests, until she reached the shallow swamps of wintertime flowing through the scattered tea-tree country where most of the land was perpetually under water. The swans rest, but there will be days of walking through water to follow them.

She was not the only one who kept away from the heavy migration of travellers – poor families on foot, and those able to afford to travel in a vehicle like Big Red's family – who had been forced to leave the ruined city. They were the people with passports and not a threat to the national security. They were not like potential terrorists: this colourful procession of licensed travellers – those who had passed the rigid nationality test for maintaining a high level of security in the country, and could pay the tax that allowed them to pass through the numerous security checkpoints on the highways.

Oblivia joined those who were travelling incognito on unofficial and illegal crossings through the swamps. There were so many people moving through the country, she was never alone. They were all searching for the same shallow pathways, and dazed like her, all following each other, while trying to take their life somewhere else. There were people dressed in dark clothes across the landscape, trying not to look conspicuous. Some were former street people. Others were the homeless people who had slept on the footpaths with cardboard blankets, or in empty buildings. Now in hordes and all travelling north, they crowded the swampy lanes on pitch-black nights and nestled close to one another for safety. Most had white hair, even the children, and similar stories of what happened,
it was those snakes. It was the last straw.
A moment was all it had taken, many had claimed, to turn anyone prematurely white; that night when the rain and wind hit the city like a brick wall had been thrown at it after Warren Finch was killed.

The navigators at the top of the line of the people travelling through the water were continually arguing amongst themselves about their weapons – if a bread knife was better than a sugar-cane cutlass for cutting through, or whether the thickness of a long pole was better cut by an axe, but whether or not they were arguing,
they had to decide which direction either left or right that any idiot would take through the shallows ahead. And then they continued yelping: Yep!
Good job I traded that bread knife.
Yep!
Good job I made that bamboo pole longer.

These men claimed to be the policemen over this stretch of country, although in the real world, they were only a bunch of intergenerational environmentalists, turned greenies, turned
ferals
, turned strapped for cash to save a multitude of furry or feathered threatened species in international forums, or their favourite rare trees. They knew the swamps. Their families had grown up with rising waters. When the opportunity arose to make some money, who could blame them for becoming entrepreneurial? Human removalists, they called themselves. It sounded nice. Sure it was not legit or leftie, but what was? Their mantra while leading the incognitos was a list of challenging superiority-complex questions, such as,
what makes you people from southern cities think you can speak for us? What makes you think we can't speak for ourselves? What makes you think you are better than us?
Or,
How would you know this country better than us?

They guided dirt-poor people through rough country, even though the plain and simple truth was that they were just people smugglers, not interested in public investment, or becoming security-conscious public servants. Whether they thought what had happened in the city was of any consequence, what did it matter? There were plenty of snakes around this neck of the woods too.
It was all of this mixed up weather,
they claimed. Anything was possible, but that was not their problem. Their job was simple enough. Ask no questions, and get enough people through expansive low-lying flood water in the flat lands in a transaction that implied:
We can show you a thing or two about hardship if that's what you want.

The job was simply this: keep the line from falling into deep flowing water:
Stop anyone from being washed away.
It was easy
enough. The environmentalists and their families lived rough along the water's edges like nesting swans or a colony of egrets, in makeshift rafts, or roughly-made reed huts. Even their babies knew how to cling to the watery nests, or the bosoms of their mothers. It helped to have lived numerous seasons with spreading water to remember how to stop being washed away. Still, it was always difficult to predict before a crossing began whether there was a likelihood of flash floods. The last-minute cancellation of a crossing was always imminent. Refugees would squat by the water's edge in the rain until conditions settled, while the water-navigators argued the toss in numerous committee meetings about whether the water's stability was a goer, so a journey could begin.

But it did not matter how adept these environmentalists were with the bush, or with travel through water, or whatever else they could do to save lives. They were not to be trusted in the least by the refugees of every nationality coalesced by flights from the ruined cities – young or old who were hardened fighters too. None of them wanted any extra favour for who they were or where they had originally come from, and being essentially numb about risk-taking, they asked no questions, and just told the people-smugglers to get on with it:
All we want to do is head north. We don't care what happens. Just do your job. Anything will be worth it. Just show us where the Aborigine people live.
So for days, sometimes weeks, the lines of humanity walked knee-deep in yellow billowing water, and if the predictions were wrong, waist-deep or up to the neck of children, which left each person to figure out how to keep carrying the burden of treasured belongings. The leaders called,
Say c'est la vie, or drown. Chuck it all.
The trail was littered with submerged electronics, cartons of beer, some huge paintings that had become completely transformed by the mud, as did the books about birds or the high country, or any treasured books of philosophy, music, Shakespeare's sonnets.

Usually, the only treasures that survived were animals. Many had brought along the family watchdog, their old
daras
, and these were left to swim alongside their owners or were carried, like those tagging along with the dog boys, hungry puppies stuffed under their jackets, among hundreds of street kids on the run. Someone had brought along their cow, the old beloved black and white
bulaka
. It was not like travelling on an aeroplane, or a catering bus. Forget that. Nobody had any food. No aeroplane.
Budangku yalu julakiyaa
. It was more like a self-serve journey, which meant everyone was constantly hungry, always too
balika
, looking for something to eat. The mortified travellers, who had not killed anything before, killed the cow finally. It was difficult to think of anything else. It was butchered in a frenzy in the water, and eaten raw, with no fire,
budangku yalu jangu-yaa
. Afterwards they had nothing. Not anything.
Budangku yalu jumbala-yaa
. Still, what was hunger to these people? They had always known hunger, and about this alone they cheerfully narrated their stories, rather optimistically, about how they were surviving on nothing:
Yea! Who cares about hardship? It is just being cold and wet, that's all, and being rained on, but was worth it.

The more enterprising street people who had pillaged poultry before leaving the city, had a ten out of ten chance of feeding themselves on the journey. These fowl thieves carried bantam roosters and treasured, egg-laying white silky hens stuffed inside their clothes, or a half dozen ducks, close to their hearts, and secretly hoarded the eggs.

The buskers of the city sung through hunger, and kept singing through the night to keep warm as the weary line walked on, while more water seeping out of distant hills and creeping along the crevices joined the flow of the flood on the flats. You could say that the country was a drain that wanted to drown strangers singing up its landscape.

Oblivia walked with her head down, but she also watched
elderly men and women, and children holding cats,
kinikini
stuffed inside their jackets, trying to shield their pets from the savage attacks of dogs sniffing out anything they could eat. The dogs were often attacked with bamboo poles, which quickly escalated into brawls with the dog owners. The water leaders often lost control of the line when tempers flared over dogs, and the fighting broke into splinter groups.