The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  For some moments there is just the curling of water beneath the hull of the boat and the chirp of bats across the stars. ‘Merv, that’s a story about a clever, brave man who died for his people.’ Bridget hesitates, letting Merv enjoy this.

  ‘But he isn’t you and you’re not him. Jesus, have you been sitting in a pub down there in South Oz dreaming of yourself as some sort of hero sacrificing himself for his people? Some modern-day Butarak taking a bullet for the Crow Eaters?’

  ‘No. I know downriver our way of life’s stolen by Queensland. I know it’s not coming back, too. Queensland’s decided we’re going to be a desert so she can be an Eden. And I don’t even think that’s a strange thing for a person to decide. It’s a pretty natural thing for people to take whatever’s there right at their fingertips. I just don’t want her to be able to pretend she hasn’t done it, I suppose. I want the world to see where this water goes and what it does when it isn’t stolen. To make the country downriver bloom and come alive and be an Eden, too, for a moment, just to show what was stolen.

  ‘I guess the difference between you and me is – I think this river’s moving us away from a hell of ignorant, greedy bastards and cowboy corruption they like to call capitalism, downstream to a place where the people aren’t bloody thieves. And you, you think I’ve got it arse-about and we’re headed for a hell of southern fools and hangers-on who want to suck at your tit and feed off your table. Welfare-leeches on Queensland’s coat tails. Communists and mummy-government junkies. We just differ on which end of the river hell’s at. Is this piece of water a snake or a ladder?’

  ‘The rain falls on Queensland, Merv. We take nothing out of the south.’

  ‘Meanwhile the river itself, this line of life that runs between hell and heaven or heaven and hell, every wild thing that ever lived in it, on it and around it … that dies, too. A two-thousand-kilometre-long world that was fed from floods that flowed from where rain fell; you’re going to kill it for a made-up concept called Queensland and fifty fat-arsed cotton farmers. And this is how the world dies, piece by piece. Water came regular enough to make this place what it is … or was. A season ran its lifeblood down this river as regular as a heart pulses blood down a limb. But not now. Now there’s a tourniquet in Queensland. Now the limb withers. The sap dries in two thousand kilometres of trees and the blood of a hundred species becomes dirt.’ He sits upright, looking around at the dark trees fissuring the night sky.

  ‘Next flood Queensland lets flow through here will run a thousand miles through a lifeless plain and not one reptile, fish, bird, tree, insect or person will be advantaged by its passing.’ Merv snaps a stick from the canopy of the red gum hanging over them and points it at her. ‘And the building of a dam is a precedent, Honourable Bridget. And it being the nature of us all, someone will build a dam that catches your world as surely as you built one that caught our world. There’s always someone upstream. There’s someone upstream of you. And they’ll hate you for being downstream. And I’m not even talking rivers any more.’

  The river is marked by a winding avenue of pale-trunked gums through the flooded plain. Rounding a bend in this avenue, across the grey brown waters patterned with breezes and currents a dinghy rows out to them from a white-painted homestead with a wide verandah and a pitched ripple-iron roof. The homestead is surrounded by bright green date palms alive with feuding parrots. Across the water through the trees the dinghy comes, a man in a wide brimmed hat at the oars. A woman sitting on the stern seat holding something on her lap. A boy standing, surfing the jerky momentum of his father’s oar-stroke. Twenty metres away the man lays off his oars and takes off his hat. Merv cuts The Party Animal’s engines. ‘How’s it goin’?’ the man asks.

  Merv nods at them. ‘Yeah, good. What about you?’

  ‘Stranded,’ he smiles widely. ‘Flooded in.’

  The boy stares at them agog as at pirates and princesses. Here is a pretty girl with dark hair and green eyes and the man who blew up a dam and brought this water. Criminals on the run. And a woman in men’s baggy work clothes nipped at the waist like a wasp with some air let out of it.

  ‘Can I come alongside?’ the farmer asks. ‘We’ve got something for you.’ He points at his wife. In her lap held by her widespread hands is a silver tray covered by a tablecloth.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, do.’

  The dinghy bumps up to the gunwale of The Party Animal and the farmer reaches up and takes hold. The boy is staring at the girl now. She is thin, with woven bracelets on her brown wrists.

  The woman in the dinghy must once have been beautiful, but her appearance has become eccentric and unkempt in this place, her hair piled carelessly atop a face too long away from a mirror and the judgement of strangers. She stands shakily in the rear of the dinghy and hands the tray to Merv. He takes it and she lifts the cloth revealing a leg of lamb and roast potatoes and carrots and parsnips and on top of those lusty aromas steaming into the cool evening the astringence of mint sauce. ‘Dinner,’ she explains. ‘We thought, you know, nothing like a nice roast.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Merv turns and puts the meal on a seat. ‘Would you like to join us?’

  ‘No thanks,’ the farmer shakes his head. ‘No. Just wanted to say … thanks, I s’pose. We’re on Moombah. That’s us there.’ He points at the homestead. ‘We’ve had no water come through here since ninety-three. Going to live in Narrabri at the end of the month.’ He looks over at Bridget. ‘You all right?’

  Bridget Wray jumps from The Party Animal into the dinghy, making all aboard the small vessel grab for balance. The man sits hard. ‘Take me away. He’s mad. He blew up the dam at Karoo.’

  Em looks hostile and leans down at the dinghy and tells the blonde woman, ‘We found her in a toilet.’

  The woman from Moombah turns to Bridget Wray and looks at her and then looks down at her own feet in the grey mud of the boat bottom and says softly, ‘No madder than me in all my dreams. Or anyone else who dreams as far up and down river as I know people. All ruined by your dam.’ The woman’s arms are by her sides, her body shivering like a gas jet. ‘Get back on that boat, Minister Wray. Take a tour of what you done, girl. Seeing the people you’ve done it to is the least you deserve. Get back on the boat before I throw you into the river you stole.’

  ‘Feelings are strong here,’ the farmer explains. ‘Feelings are high on the subject of Queensland, and people upstream in general.’

  Merv holds his hand out to Bridget. She takes it slowly and uses it to haul herself back into The Party Animal. The colour is gone from her face. With the woman’s rebuke she realises that having crossed the border from Queensland to New South Wales she has turned from heroine to villain. Merv has transformed from her kidnapper to her protector. He holds her hand tight a little longer than necessary. She lets him. She is in a hostile land now.

  The boy, staring at Em all this time, leans and grasps the larger boat and holds something out to her. He sees few other children in the course of a year. Now here comes this green-eyed girl down the river on a flood she made herself. Sailing through his life on this one day, this one day ever, never to be seen again, a beautiful girl who undid the slow creep of drought that is killing his world. And her green eyes and black hair and mouth shaped like a bird taking flight. Nervously he holds out an offering. She stares at him until her father says, ‘Take it, Em. He’s giving you a present.’ She takes the gift from the boy’s hand. It is a silver handle off a drawer, a brushed-silver knob on a threaded bolt. Treasure from an isolated boy who does his schooling on a radio. ‘Thank you. What is it?’

  The boy is astounded. ‘It’s … a …’ It’s clearly treasure.

  ‘It’s a beauty,’ says Merv. ‘Shit … It’s a beauty.’

  Bridget Wray looks away lips pursed in exasperation. Is everyone down this river from here on to be a political dupe? Emma holds the drawer knob tightly. With it in her hand she knows her father is a hero and right and her dreams of the parade in Wentworth will come true. ‘I want
the tray back,’ the woman from Moombah says. ‘It was my grandmother’s. It came out from Yorkshire.’

  Word passes downstream. It is to be this way all down the river. Hush, don’t let the world away from the river know, but the guy who blew Karoo is on his way. He’s coming, and he’s no terrorist, he’s a farmer. A ruined farmer. Like us. Rumour says his wife knocked herself in the drought. And the politician’s unscathed and reasonably unperturbed and not even such a bad woman, for a Queenslander, when you think of the cast of dullards and ghouls they’ve raised up in their service otherwise. He’s touring her down the river so we can see her and she can see us … who we are and what they’ve done.

  The people of the river know The Party Animal’s exact whereabouts. They plot its progress and ring one another to tell of its passing. Sometimes a lone man, or a couple, or a small family grouping, will watch them pass from a homestead or a dune and wave shyly. The woman might step forward and cheer and clap, causing her children to follow. Em begins to see her dreams of glory are not so wishful and false. The same man might be hero and villain in one. She waves back frantically, urging them on, wanting them to be right about her father.

  Along one lonely stretch of river a white-haired woman in jeans and a red-checked flannel shirt sits atop an old brown tin shepherd’s hut surrounded by water beneath giant gums in which a flock of corellas call and whistle the old music of the place. A widow retreated from her former existence? An artist who has sought solitude? Some downsized or exiled life. Some withdrawal from the world of people into birdsong and day and night and day. Stars and wind and sun and dirt. As The Party Animal passes the woman stands and holds up a sheet of corrugated iron on which she has written in charcoal ‘BIBLICAL’. Merv chuckles and reads aloud, ‘Biblical.’

  They begin moving at night. The Party Animal is tied up under trees and sheltered with branches by day so the helicopters can’t find her. This night, sixty kilometres above the town of Dickenson they round a bend in the dark boulevard of trees that marks the river and before them on high ground is a bonfire and the nearby trees and a wire-walled meat-house and a collection of corrugated iron buildings shivering in its yellow light, some bright and close and some faint and distant lit by white moon. Flame-yellowed men sit around the fire in armchairs holding long-necked beer bottles, talking silently into the embers, laughing. Some are dancing spastically, the bottles in their hands flashing in the light of the fire. The hindquarters of animals dangle from ropes hung from tripods above red coals skirted out from the fire’s core by a man with a metal rake. They spin slowly and drip firelit droplets of fat onto the coals and the smoke of that fat rises back at them.

  Beyond this is darkness, save for the bulk of a homestead pale and spectral in the quarter moonlight at the far reach of the river bend. A shadowy supernova of palms hangs above it in the night sky. And out on the flooded plain behind, phosphorescing in that moonlight, a shearing shed leaning fatigued and keening tinnily as its loose lower irons are harried by the floodwater. On its roof, painted white to be read from the air, is ‘Mt Murchison Station’.

  A dinghy pushes off from the firelit shore of this island and comes out to meet them mid-river. Three men in it. One stands unsteadily, silhouette wide-hatted by the fire behind, as the dinghy closes on The Party Animal. ‘Welcome to Mount Murchison. We been expecting you. Upstream neighbours watched you go past last night. We hoped we hadn’t missed you. We have a meal, sir. In your honour. A feast. Rotisseried kid with a lovely bread and butter pudding to follow. And, young lady,’ the wide-hatted man addresses Em, ‘“kid” on this occasion means “goat”, not kid. Wild goat.’

  ‘Who are you guys?’ Merv asks. ‘You shearers?’

  ‘There are no shearers here now. Though the smell of lanoline still haunts the shed. No. We are anthropologists and jurists and blatant pisspots with grudges, here to dig among the ruins of the sheep empires of the west and lament the death of the river and its country and to ask why and to pass judgement on those who caused this Carthage. We heard you were coming. We came out to greet you. We came out here to celebrate you. North of here they call you lunatic. Here we call you King.’

  The men around the fire, hearing this, raise their bottles and make a ragged, staccato toast, ‘The King.’ ‘The King.’ ‘Our King.’ They drink and as they tilt back with their bottles rising above their heads those bottles are lit by the bonfire, becoming amber globes and illuminating each drinker like a saint in a medieval manuscript.

  Merv baulks at the idea he is a king and shakes his head at the calls, smiling, embarrassed. As the dinghy and The Party Animal nose into the shallow water near the fire he says, ‘No. Just a bloke who’d had enough.’

  ‘And that is how a king is made and what a king is made of,’ says the wide-hatted man. ‘Always a bloke who’s had enough.’

  Men, covered in wet grey mud to their knees, lay duckboards down for the crew of The Party Animal to disembark. As the three enter the light of the fire a man places a plastic crown on Em’s head and hands her a lollipop. ‘Our princess,’ he explains. The men in their chairs, hearing this again, raise their beers and toast, ‘Our princess,’ their faces lit again by the wattage of their bottles as they tilt their heads to the stars.

  Every girl expects to be made a princess at some point, and most are ready at a finger-snap to assume airs and graces appropriate to that role. Em smiles, her time has come, she reaches up and touches her crown with satisfaction. Merv takes her by the shoulder and pulls her in close to his side. He takes the crown from her head, but she takes it back from him, giving him a scowl in return for it.

  The man who led them ashore now removes his hat to reveal a bonfire burning coolly on the mirror of his sweaty, bald head. ‘Please, sit,’ he waves the three travellers to armchairs. ‘What will you drink? Lemonade for our princess? Wine for the dambuster? And for the lady?’

  ‘White wine. Thank you.’ Her eyes are darting, suspicious of this feast on this island in a flooded nowhere.

  Two men, both in stained shirts, shorts and wide-throated Blundstone boots walk up close and stare at Bridget Wray as if disbelieving in her. When the first rhinoceros was brought out of Africa and displayed in London women were banned from viewing it lest it derange their fragile psyches. The men who paid their shilling and saw it believed it trickery, a thing got up by carpenters and saddlers urged on by fabulists, a machine with dwarfs inside working pedals. Those men looked at that rhino like these men look at Bridget Wray. They moue their lips and shake their heads and hold out their hands in inquiry before her. What is this? This can’t be. How can this good-looking young woman be the demon who laid waste our world?

  ‘I can’t even believe this,’ one man says.

  ‘Me either. I thought, you know, Russ Hinze or Joh Bjelke or some other grotesque. But not an attractive young woman like this.’

  ‘No. Not this,’ the other man agrees. He reaches out and touches Bridget Wray on the arm with a finger to confirm her lithe reality. ‘It just makes me sad as hell.’

  A man on the far side of the bonfire is plucking a guitar. Just licks and runs and chords amid a jabber of strumming and nothing approaching a tune. The bald man takes a bottle of wine from a trestle table laden with plates, cutlery, condiments, glasses and bottles, and pours a glass and hands it to her. ‘That’s a South Australian Chardonnay, and if any hue or tincture of its personality gives the smallest spark of pleasure to even the furthest reach of your palette then take it as evidence the world is bigger than Queensland and the fugitive litre of water that escaped you to become this wine was used to birth a vintage of some beauty.’

  Minister Wray takes the glass. She looks at the bald man. He is massively wide, wearing an oilskin vest and moleskin jodhpurs. ‘What’s your name?’ she asks.

  ‘I am Judge Briedahl of the Travelling Court of Rare and Uncommon Justice for the Certification of Vigilante Intercession. I once had hair, an orchard, and a wife. But found all to be dependent on water that flow
ed out of Queensland.’ He sweeps his hand at the surrounding men. ‘These other blokes are, by turn, first one thing then the next, first counsel for prosecution, and for the defence, and lastly … jurors, for which post they are well suited, for they are bankrupt and their hearts are broken, as the hearts of jurymen ought and must be if one is seeking a guilty verdict.’

  ‘This is a trial? I’m on trial?’ A whisper of incredulity. She has done no wrong. ‘You’re a court, you guys? Is that what this is?’ She casts around at their yellow visages flickering and throbbing with light. ‘This isn’t some … This is Australia.’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Judge Briedahl nods, ‘we heard rumours of that place, too. An Atlantis, a Shangri-la. But we don’t listen any more to the fairytale that we are brothers and sisters who will live and die together, arms linked, on this fragile Eden, the self-congratulatory tosh that we are federated states, a Commonwealth, mates, Aussies, a people who have eked a wondrous ethos from stony bush and look each other in the eye with an understanding other peoples don’t enjoy.’ He smiles vacantly up at the night sky.

  ‘Our belief in Australia’s existence paled and withered when Queensland, like some obese Dracula, was allowed to monopolise the artery that kept her sisters alive. No. Australia? No. In books only. In foreign wars. In anthems and songs. But here … a rumour. A wish. No. Water is scarce now and suspicion begins at the neighbours’ fenceline. War begins at the state border. And Queensland is a black-hearted pig that must be bombed backward into barefoot beggary. Which is not so very far, it being a nest of hillbillies and drudges.’

  Bridget Wray can only stare. The broken Australian farmer; a man with his ego ground between the mortar of the natural elements and the pestle of finance. Most ubiquitous murder-suicide on the nightly news, most successful assassin of rural bank managers, and, then, his own wife, kiddies and self, in that order. And she has been delivered into a squadron of these kamikaze hayseeds. She sees this for the looming horror it is. She turns on Merv. ‘Are you part of this? Is this part of your plan?’