The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  The heavy fibreglass speedboat nuzzles at the shack’s bore-pipe foundations beneath them like some farm animal wintering restively in a barn. Seeing the look on her face and knowing what she’s thinking he reaches across the table and taps her on the wrist with his fingertips. ‘You’re wrong, you know. Em and me’ll be fine.’ He kisses Em on her bare arm. ‘They’ll treat me like a rightful and true emancipator. Think of me not as a man going to his doom. Think of me as a Prince coming into his kingdom, bells tolling across the land and people lining the riverbanks.’

  ‘Can I be excused?’ Em asks.

  ‘Sure you can. Take Barwon down to the boat and get him a Mars bar. And bring up a DVD and I’ll start the generator and you can watch it on the telly here.’ The children go out the front door across the deck and down the stairs.

  Bridget and Merv watch them gone. She turns to him. ‘Seriously, how have you decided to end this?’ She reaches for the bottle and fills her glass and his. ‘We’re getting close now, and I want you to promise me you’re not planning some grand … gesture. Something for the TV news. Some last political point. A Glenrowan moment. Just put your hands up and go quietly. I’ll plead for you. I’ll say you never held me by force and the stand-off with the Queensland cops was a fake hostage scene we were both in on so as to save shots being fired. I’ll tell them how you saved me from that kangaroo court outside Dickenson. We’ll downgrade this into just an act of vandalism. I’ll testify on your behalf.’

  ‘Well …’ he shakes his head wonderingly. ‘Well you shouldn’t. How’s that going to look in Queensland? You’re a victim here. And it’s important for you you come out of this looking a victim. You don’t need to be an accomplice. That wouldn’t do your career much good. But thank you.’ He nods at her and looks away, scratching at an itch on his neck.

  ‘Merv … Please. You made your point. The whole world’s seen your flood. Em doesn’t need to see you get … harmed.’

  ‘The amount of D10s Karoo have got sitting around they’ve probably rebuilt that levee already. That’s my point.’

  Staring at him she lays her hand on his. ‘Merv …’

  ‘Darling, you read Australia wrong. I’m Neil Armstrong returning from the moon. There’ll be marching bands, not guns.’ He smiles at her, his lips quivering.

  Way out on the lake a yellow moon ripples in the breeze, and as she watches it hazes further in the imperfect lens of her tears. ‘There is no honour or point in whatever you’re planning. The thing you’ve done, if it is a good thing, can’t be made better by a bad ending. If you’ve done a bad thing, then … let it end quietly.’

  ‘What? Quietly in jail? No. The end of this is already planned. The end of this was written into the start of it. Moment that truck blew up there was one casualty. Was it Karoo Station or me? Queensland or South Australia?’

  In the morning Merv pilots the boat out onto the lake and cuts the engines and allows it to be taken across the lake like a bath toy toward the plug by the slow pull of the river. Bridget is tense and silent now, with the end getting closer. A violent arrest looming. The likelihood of Em becoming some form of state-owned child. Merv hands Bridget coffee without a word. The chitter of ducks in black-fleck flocks on the metal-coloured lake and the last stars before the sun across the lighting sky. Soon they will be out of the lakes and onto the lower Darling.

  INTERVIEW WITH COTTON GROWER AND MAYOR OF MENINDEE, BRIAN MCALOON. FILMED ON THE BANKS OF THE FLOODED DARLING RIVER BELOW THE MENINDEE LAKES SPILLWAY, WHITE WATER LUNGING NOISILY AT THE AIR BEHIND, MAKING THE INTERVIEWER AND INTERVIEWEE SHOUT. AIRED ON ABC TV, 10 SEPTEMBER.

  CAMERAMAN: Okay. Action.

  FEMALE REPORTER (ex-Olympic swimmer): Mayor McAloon, as far as you are aware, did people around this area have any foreknowledge of this flood?

  MAYOR McALOON: Let me first of all say we acknowledge the traditional owners of this country … the … umm … Yangarna people. Now. As to the people around here … I can’t speak for people around here other than in a mayoral type capacity to say they’re good people and this is a vibrant and welcoming community. But what they know, the people around here … maybe they know how to cure cancer and turn Lucijet to Grange. But if they do they haven’t told me about it. I’ll be pretty pissed off if I find they knew that and didn’t tell me, believe me.

  REPORTER: You personally had no knowledge beforehand of what the Prime Minister has called ‘an act of homegrown terrorism’.

  MAYOR McALOON: Me personally? I dislike the question. I really dislike the question. You’re implying I’m some sort of accessory or sidekick.

  REPORTER: But it’s rumoured there has allegedly been some … speculation about the Darling flooding at this time.

  McALOON: You can take a ride out with me to my farm and see if I’ve got a crop sowed, Ms Timmins. Believe me, I’d have sown a crop if I thought this water was on its way.

  REPORTER: Do you sympathise with the farmers in Queensland who have suffered this loss?

  McALOON: Honestly? No I don’t. To my mind if you’re entitled to throw up a wall and take someone’s water, that someone’s entitled to knock it down and take it back. That’s about what people round here think.

  REPORTER: So there is sympathy for the alleged perpetrator, this Mervyn Rossiter, in the district?

  McALOON: There’s sympathy for everyone in this district. We’re a sympathetic people.

  REPORTER: But do you think people around here might be harbouring him?

  McALOON: Harbouring him?

  REPORTER: Helping him evade justice.

  McALOON: Well, you know, thoughts round here are that, to put the very worst spin on what he did, yeah, the guy vandalised some property. But no one was hurt. And we got kids in Menindee booked every day for vandalism, and here again I’d like to acknowledge the traditional owners. And that’s vandalism with no upside. Not like this bloke’s vandalism. Serial, serial offenders. Worst they ever get is community service, which they never ever do, by the way.

  So I don’t know that people here would consider helping this guy evade anything. I think we all agree he’s got justice coming. We recognise vandalism is a blight on society. And I wouldn’t think there’d be a person from here to Murray Bridge who thought this bloke was hard done by if he was sentenced to paint a smallish to medium-sized shed or pick up a few cans along a highway or read potboilers to senior citizens for a couple of weeks.

  REPORTER: But, Mayor McAloon, reading to senior citizens isn’t really justice, is it. Are you suggesting this man, who is considered a dangerous madman in Queensland, might escape justice here?

  MAYOR McALOON: Oh … Oh, not at all. Whatever gives you that idea? I think justice will swoop on him from on high. He stole a boat in Bartel. (Puts hands on hips. Looks into camera shaking his head.) That’s not on. I’d be pissed off if someone stole my boat. Mind you … he seems to be bringing it back.

  REPORTER: So have you got any message for this fugitive, Mayor McAloon? Should he give himself up?

  MAYOR McALOON: (Still staring at camera, getting a taste for public pronouncement.) Give up, fess up to your stuff-up and live up to your bringing up. And God bless you, Mervyn Rossiter. From all of us down here at the river’s end. God bless you.

  REPORTER: Thank you, Mayor McAloon.

  In January of the year told of here, a man moved to the town of Bartel, South Australia, who, for a short time, became a guru and hero to that town. Easily done. The Australian farmer is an intrinsically superstitious animal needing priests to guide him through the vast house of mirrors and horrors that is country life. Hard times swell congregations in the bush. A perusal of any parish ledger will show a church doubles its order from head office for the body and blood of Christ, biscuits and wine, during a drought.

  And the Church only offered Hope, that vague chimera of future life from which, with overuse, the colour had leeched. The people hadn’t turned irreligious. They didn’t skimp on the morsels of transubstantiation. But they were not deaf
ened, either, to the promises of new priests with more immediate salvations. And this man who came to their town offered a deliverance codified and ratified by science. The Church doled out chits of happiness redeemable in another life. This man promised happiness served up at the farm gate in September.

  Professor Clancy Sawyers was a nationally known and respected climatologist whose tenure at the University of Adelaide had been recently terminated by the University Council. One of the country’s most feted scientists and a leading voice in the field of meteorology and climate, his sacking, after a decade as that university’s most visible academic, and a feather in that institution’s cap, had created controversy and acrimony.

  But the council felt it could do nothing else. Sawyer’s teachings had become increasingly dependent on a theory he had developed that the Earth’s weather patterns, both short-term and long, were chiefly caused by solar winds and that the auroras, borealis and australis, as visible manifestations of these solar winds could be photographed and laid out and studied and dissected and read like x-rays. Or like chicken entrails, as one of his detractors noted.

  Professor Sawyers had observed and noted correlations proving, he said, weather could be predicted and known by these polar light shows. The aurora told an amazingly precise story of geomagnetic storms and these storms were a harbinger of following meteorological events. The mapping of this grand luminescence and thus the prediction of the weather was in its earliest stages and not yet well understood. But to his mind the aurora was God’s weather report, a detailed and pulsing map of the near future.

  The old boy had ‘gone feral’ was the consensus of the climate science community. He had, at best, a series of handpicked coincidences observed in the night sky over Mawson Hut and rain events in the Styx Valley in Tasmania. Enough observation to raise an eyebrow, but nowhere near enough on which to raise a theory. He’d become bedazzled by the pretty night sky of the Antarctic and hell bent on inventing a causal link with events some months hence. Sad, but his science had gone awry and there was no place in a well-respected university for the maverick hunches of Nobel wannabes.

  Having been armpit-deep in scientific research since his twenties Sawyers had had no time to meet, woo, and win a woman. He had sent away to the Philippines for a virgin instead. He was no catch himself, having indoor skin and a spine curved from perusing desktop knowledge. But when Mahala Corazon arrived in Adelaide from Manila lean and hungry with a chubby, grubby child at foot and another in utero he was outraged. He stared at her little boy and her swollen belly. He may have been physically professorial, but he was not a fake virgin. She drew him into the nursing station at the airport, pushing the grubby lad outside to mind the luggage, and got to her knees and fellated him. And thereafter began fellating away his protestations with the earnestness and regularity of prayer. Matins, Lauds, Sext, Vespers and Compline … his objections to the lies she had told about her status as a virgin ebbed with the tide that was flowing out his previously unemployable member.

  But when they were married Clancy’s seed suddenly curdled and Mahala could no longer abide its flavour. Not an unknown phenomenon. She spat and gagged and called him a poisoner. That was the end of Clancy’s wondrous month of prayer, brought to an end by a simple ceremony in which a civil celebrant named Doug recited an own-poem and pronounced them husband and wife.

  After the first year of their marriage Clancy’s controversial climate theory brought his tenure at the university to an end and his respectability vanished and his income halved. To Mahala’s way of thinking any theory of climate that gave you tenure and respectability and an income was a true and correct theory of climate and any theory that did not was not. She cursed Clancy pawing over his abstract expressionist photos of flaring aurora. She did not understand science, but she understood hunger very well.

  Mahala, with her boy and her baby, moved into an apartment above the Adelaide market with a Greek-Australian fishmonger named Jim. The noise and hustle of the market reminded her of Manila. The smell of fish and coffee and garbage was sweet to her. The boy, Hilario, whose miraculous birth through Arrival Gate 3 at the Adelaide International Airport had so infuriated Clancy, was by now attending St Peter’s College, and Clancy was bound by the Family Court and his conscience to pay the boy’s school fees.

  Ousted from his ‘dovecote’ on the old sandstone campus the fifty-nine-year-old professor went home to the country town of Bartel in the east of South Australia where he still owned a small house with a dead garden and a rusted roof in which his mother had lived.

  Through a school friend who had become a shire councillor he received an offer from the Taringa-Bartel shire to become that shire’s climate consultant. This was a new position that seemed warranted to the council whose rates were diminishing alarmingly because of the record number of local bankruptcies caused by drought. Having a climate that had gone haywire was like having an unruly giant in the district, it made any major public work a financial risk. So the Shire Council decided it would pay for the defrocked professor’s office and give him a small weekly stipend to be their consultant on any future works or projects that might depend on climate. Using known and accepted climate-prediction models he was to advise on the wisdom or otherwise of spending money on this or that and to what level of structural integrity this or that should be built. His imprimatur would give the Shire Council’s decisions a professional legitimacy and demonstrate they had undertaken due process. He would save them hassles with public liability, they hoped. You are less likely to be sued when a caravan park built on an alluvial flat floods if a globally recognised expert in weather and climate has rated the probability of such an event as negligible and given the project the green light.

  But there was to be no talk of aurora and no reference to solar winds in his official shire duties. Theories that had been pooh-poohed by the world at large would not, if you relied on them to green light a project, save you from litigation if that project was ripped up by a cyclone or squeezed dry by a drought. Any freelance work he could garner using his new, radical theory of solar winds was his own business. The Shire Council was happy to let the marketplace of ideas operate freely on that score, even if it meant the likelihood of farmers being befuddled and duped.

  Clancy was at first saddened by the moribund townsfolk of Bartel. They walked the streets stiffly in a post-apocalyptic haze. They had a way of staring about as if they’d just emerged from bomb shelters, stupefied by the smoke rising around them. How had it come to this? They seemed a people who knew their time had slipped away, but couldn’t understand how, and didn’t really expect anything good from the world again in their lifetimes, but would at least have liked an explanation, from God, or the government, or some scientific guru, as to just how this apocalypse had happened. Clancy felt them watching him as he went about his business in Bartel, as if they weren’t sure whether he was a Holy Man who might tell them what had gone wrong with the world, or a crank.

  On the streets they asked him about the weather, the climate, the year to come. Sometimes they seemed so downcast he thought maybe they just wanted him to confirm that the patterns of weather were permanently broken, that the years and lifestyles they had known would never come again and that they should just close their houses and lock their gates and head south to the coast. A new life on welfare, or working for someone else, in a tower, or a mine, or a mall. Sometimes he felt they just wanted him to put his hand on their shoulders and tell them it was all right to go away.

  Drought will do this. It will, finally, after long years of failing wheat, bare trees, ebbing finance and warring marriages, make a community know it has crossed over into unstoppable decline and it will erase any thought of the future. And that community will beg for final confirmation that this is so in order that it can breathe out, relax, give up.

  With drought suicides rise, congregations swell, and people look to providence and professors. In the grip of a long dry primary producers come to resemble mediaeval peasant
s, constantly glancing at the sky, hearing the voice of God in the distant rumble of thunder. Blues come from a blue sky and big questions force their way into every conversation and every dream. Maybe the world has changed irretrievably. Maybe the seasons are broken, the cycles of wet and dry, like circles in a pond, shattered by our hand.

  In the morning Clancy Sawyers walks the few hundred metres from his small weatherboard house to Ral Ral Avenue and sits at a footpath table sipping coffee at Glenda’s Vietnamese Bakery and Pho Café sourly nursing his unloved theory of atomic winds. He is a man who has a world-changing secret within his grasp and is unable to reach out and take hold of it. An unresearched theory, the tip of the tale of a great discovery. How will he get the money to fund the research to prove his theory? How will he pay for the private school fees of Hilario, that miraculous child birthed through Arrival Gate 3?

  Merv Rossiter introduces himself to Clancy as he is sitting at the café. He remembers Clancy a few years ahead of him at school. The sort of alien kid whose mind was too big for the campus and who made everyone feel guilty about not being a grander school with better facilities. When Clancy left town on an academic scholarship at the age of eleven to go to Adelaide, Merv remembers the school community feeling freer about being mediocre. No more daily reminders of its shortcomings as a seat of learning.