Em, who has also been waving at Fuzzy, looks at him like there is something wrong. His laughter coming from nowhere. And maybe there are tears in his eyes, too. She takes hold of him around the waist. ‘Why are you laughing, Daddy?’
‘Because I just realised what I hoped was true is true.’ He picks Em up and hugs her and puts her on his shoulder. ‘Wave, Em. Wave to Fuzzy. But not too hard. There are going to be plenty of people to wave at.’
David Wallace, lead journalist at the Bartel Standard, felt the event a phenomenon and it welled up in his chest until he wrote a purple front page that left his reader-ship in awe. People cut the piece from the paper and later they laminated it and hung it in their toilets.
Armistice Day, VJ Day, The Moon Landing … there are immemorial moments in the brief lives of men and women that let us know God is in His heaven and life is wonderful. The rebirth of a beautiful river, a river our forefathers knew and loved and depended on, is in its own way the equal of any of these historic days. It is not too much to say that the brief and miraculous resurrection of our river is no less an emblem for hope in our shire than the brief and miraculous resurrection of Jesus Christ was for the Christians of Rome … one man sacrificed himself here, too, so that we may live as free people.
If he went too far in making the citizens of the town of Bartel ancient Romans and Merv Rossiter their Christ, then no one said so. It’s not the sort of epoch-defining event a journalist working for a rural weekly gets his teeth into often. As a writer it was energising and intoxicating to have an experience with nationwide repercussions to narrate, a topic commensurate with his powers of expression to write about for once, rather than the broken public toilets and stolen goal-post covers and feuds, fire sales and traffics of an isolated community. He called for a full pardon for Merv Rossiter, stating that the reversal of a theft was not theft … but justice. And that the taking of the Karoo water was nothing but the reversal of a theft.
Cathy Vibert-Williams rang Geelong Grammar and asked to be put through to the enrolment officer. While her children fought at her feet, wearing torn shirts and their shoes gaping like carp, and while the broken window-frames and hanging doors bit at her house in the high wind, she asked to be sent three enrolment forms and she booked a date one month hence to tour the school so she might run an eye over it to determine its suitability for her youngsters, who, she advised the enrolment officer, were sensitive, artistic kids. The enrolment officer assured her the school had a strong arts program and mentioned Missy Higgins had been a student. That led Cathy Vibert-Williams to dream and to hum. She thought she should buy a big car, maybe a Range Rover, to make the inspection of the school, because … who knew if those people mightn’t frown on her and her kids if she pulled up in her old Nissan Skyline. Maybe they would put a cross against her, which would mean little Laura would never get to spread her wings and fulfil her destiny à la Missy Higgins.
The day before the water arrived Guy O’Connor who, just before his bank could foreclose on his family farm in February, had forward sold all his water, thereby entangling the bank and the government in a legal standoff, pulled his ute up on Ral Ral Avenue and climbed out and got undressed right there in the street, folding his clothes and stacking them neatly on the hood. And walked into the Bartel branch of the ANZ bank buck-naked bulbous and furred head-to-toe. He filled out a withdrawal form for twenty dollars and stood quietly between the queue ropes where there was no queue. Customers came in, saw him, and turned around and walked out. From the back offices the manager and head accountant and accounts manager gathered at the CCTV monitor and leant in close and watched him. They each wore a suit. A strange costume because no one within five hundred kilometres respected anyone who wore a suit.
They watched this fat man queuing patiently in a queue of one with his hands crossed in front of himself athwart his belly and the withdrawal form lolloping down like a palm frond, resting on his penis. They did not emerge from their backroom sanctuary to admonish him, or warn him off, or threaten him with the law or speak to his decency. They wore their suits, and watched. They were captivated by this black-and-white cinéma vérité vignette. This fat man standing quietly with not a stitch on. It signified a cataclysmic change in status for all of them. And each began to ponder a transfer to some other branch or a leap to some other vocation.
The eyes of Janine Thomas, the white-faced, blank-faced thirty-year-old teller, bugged out when she looked up and saw Guy O’Connor standing pinkly and massively before her. And her hand crept down her thigh toward the button that would whang the security screen up between them. Then anger began to boil up in her at being left to cope with a hairy nude farmer by herself. Those bastards must be watching this out the back. They’re probably laughing. Or frozen, too scared to come out here.
He handed over the withdrawal form and she read it bug-eyed and blank-faced and punched his account numbers into her keyboard and then opened her drawer and took out a twenty dollar note and as she handed it over bug-eyed and blank-faced he felt his moment somehow slipping away unspent, so he asked her, ‘Who’s wearing the pants now? Eh?’ To which, not knowing what to say to a naked, hairy client, or even if she should be talking to him, she replied, ‘Have you heard about our new six-month-interest-free car loan for ten-year clients?’
He scratched a hairy tit and replied, ‘Have you heard I’ve hit a jackpot and am free of that type of cruel shit? Your horrendous fucking car loans?’ While she was boggling at that reply he said, ‘You have dandruff.’ And he never felt so good. Dandruff. As if he had just deconstructed and explained the killing flaw in the great philosophical apologia that underpinned Capitalism. Then the ducted cooling kicked in, and he felt that man-made zephyr begin to vibrate his body hairs, pubic, leg, back, buttock and crack, and he believed he might well be a tuning fork for God.
The first to die because of the new water was Hamish Atkins who, at the age of twenty-four, was hoodwinked by the arrival of the flood and fortune into thinking he was Michael Schumacher. He bought a metallic blue Porsche 918 Spyder. The thing was hard-sprung for autobahns, not for roads made of the financial leavings of a heavily indebted state government. It was bucked off the Talinga Loop by a pothole when it was doing two-sixty kph at ten-twenty pm. The Spyder went into the river like a harpoon and Hamish Atkins, who had been alternating his lung-bursting accompaniment of ‘Sex On Fire’ with rapid inhalations of the life-affirming smell of fresh Porsche-leather, was already breathless from the loud singing and ostentatious sniffing when splash-down occurred and he began to scream and scrabble at the glass, just part of the natural attrition that attends Plenty.
But these things happened after the water came. So let it come now. Because the citizens have been waiting a month, bulletins of the water’s travels becoming more frequent and detailed as it got closer, phone calls snaking up and down its length like volts along a wire. Until all they could talk of was this flood, this revolt, this last great flush, born of vandalism but a repatriation of stolen goods nonetheless. All they could do was watch from satellites as this ocean’s birth coincided, ever so slowly, day-by-day, miraculously, with the sale of their water.
They are gathered along the banks of the river now primed for celebration. A celebration of the revolt it represents, as much as a celebration of the water and the fortune it is bringing. Damn Queensland. Damn all upstream thieves. This is where water rightly flows, where it has rightly flowed for a million years. To us. We are the destination elect of God and gravity.
In the parks that line both sides of the river right through Bartel cars are parked and people sitting in them waiting. Cameras stand waiting on tripods. There is a Dixie jazz band in striped shirts blaring at the riverbed. People are grouped around barbecues squirting wine from boxes into plastic cups, and fathers are bowling tennis balls at sons and dogs stealing the balls are not even sworn at because the water is coming.
When the water ushers around the river bend cricket bats are dropped and sausages ar
e left to burn on barbecues as people hang their toes over the cliff of the riverbank to watch it come. People sitting in cars lean on their horns, one-by-one, drowning the jazz and the barking dogs. A war has ended. Boys use this glorious minute to kiss girls they could never have kissed otherwise. Busted farmers sweep their wives into embraces crying at what life could have been … might be. Men are watching the plummeting price of water on their phones, ogling their escalating fortunes, blinking, shaking their heads, holding their phones out for their wives to read so they can blink and shake their heads as well. They hug each other and stroke each other’s shoulders, a thousand tense interchanges stretching back a decade drifting away forgiven.
A woman begins to cheer. A few others try that, too. But it doesn’t seem right, or reverent, or enough. They laugh at themselves and that seems correct for the water as well. So they laugh at the water as it rises up the river banks and the flotsam of a thousand miles rolls past on its surface giving off a hilarious muck stink of old death, at which they hold their noses and kids shout out ‘Poo.’ ‘Yuck.’ The stink of Queensland’s underbelly.
In a few hours the river has risen to touch their toes and the adults are crying with memories of bountiful seasons – ’54, ’67, ’75, ’87 – years in which the faint tick tock of the world’s inner mechanicals sped to make their shire green and deathless and their mortgages vanish like cloud. This was not another such year. It was a re-enactment of such a year. A full-costumed restaging of the way things had been in the good old days. A comedy and a tragedy at once, a celebration and a lament. This man-made bounty only served to show that the earth could no longer provide such a thing. The kids of the shire continue laughing, but the adults are crying now. There would not be many more days like these, days without bankruptcy, divorce and depopulation. We are suddenly rich. But our world has moved many parallels north. And so many have gone away or gone inside themselves.
The police sergeant pilots Merv and Em through this audience, this dishevelled guard of honour, lining the riverbanks with its many faces tracked silver with tears for the dead and for the future. The whole adult town is crying amid barbecue smoke at the beauty of the moment and at the knowledge that this is only a moment. A cruel glimpse of what the world was and can never be any more. As The Party Animal motors past, each person moves from tears back to laughter and celebration. Because all victory is fleeting and, even being so, or especially being so, deserves celebration.
Merv and Em each see this congregation lining the banks in their own way. Em sees the people waving and blowing kisses, jumping up and down and cheering, and she knows her father is a good man and this makes her happy. All their neighbours and friends variously cast into happiness, disquieting tears and quiet gratitude are proof of Merv’s goodness. She sees her schoolmates running the banks to keep up with the boat and they are cupping their hands around their mouths calling her name, each trying to tell her their happy piece of this day. All she can possibly know now is that her father is a king, a good man. Everything he said is true … parades and happiness and home and an end to the bad times.
But Merv sees many people lining the banks that Em fails to see. He sees the dead and the missing, the busted and broken. He sees David Birrell and Paolo and Maria Del Negro. He sees Shane O’Connell. He sees his own wife, Jana, hanging centre-shot in a web of bloody ejaculations in the dust. Jana who drank alongside him and laughed at his jokes, her pale skin and dark eyes. He sees himself among the exhausted, silent drunks, who have gone irretrievably into themselves or into the cities and are waiting out their last years with Oprah and dollar-machines and cask wine. They don’t wave, these ghosts lining the banks. They stand silent, their arms lank at their sides.
He stares at his cheering people and knows blowing up a dam is a worthless act. Any small-time empire builder with a dozer can build a dam. A councillor in Queensland with a year-eight education and an electorate to stroke can suck all colour and movement from a land as big as France. The world belongs to the most gifted thieves. Ask the blackfellas. Men will change the world to whatever extent their technology and law allows. The ancient, sustaining rhythms will be broken, repaired momentarily by dreamers, before being broken again.
‘Where is David Birrell now?’ Merv asks.
‘No, Merv.’ Em is shocked. She stares at him in disbelief. ‘I’m not saying about all those people today. This is happy now.’
‘Where is David Birrell?’ he insists. ‘A good farmer and a good father of three kids.’ He stands watching the waving crowd slide past with his arms at his sides. ‘Where?’ he asks.
‘His vines died,’ Em answers sadly. ‘He gassed himself from money trouble.’
Merv nods. ‘And on his grave is written “Dearly Beloved” and the date of his birth and the date of his death and “Rest In Peace” and nothing about how or why. Nothing about … those people … upstream.’ The exultant calls of their friends and neighbours cross the water to them.
Above this celebration Merv asks Em, ‘And where is Paolo Del Negro?’
Em is waving to the people, smiling obstinately, as she says, ‘His orchard is dead sticks and he is in jail for having an inviction siege with the police.’
‘True. True. And where is Maria, his beautiful wife?’
‘A warfare recipe in Melbourne,’ Em says.
‘That’s right,’ Merv nods waving at old friends. ‘A welfare recipient, visiting Paolo in prison every week.’
Em knows it is her turn now. ‘And where is Old Shane O’Connell, who used to let me ride on his horses?’
‘A drunk in a pub in Adelaide,’ Merv whispers, giving a thumbs-up to the cooper Stevie Jamieson who is jumping up and down in the back of his F100 ute loosing birdshot from an old double-barrel by way of a salute. ‘Turned his horses into beer and turned himself into a drunk with that beer.’
‘He sold his horses and bought beer with the money,’ Em clarifies his demise. ‘So someone else has the horses.’
‘But he really turned into a drunk,’ Merv says.
‘Yes, he did. And where is Deano Cargill who had forgotten more about citrus than most people ever knew?’ Em asks quickly, impatient to have this litany finished.
‘Gone,’ Merv is crying again at the image of Lucy Cargill surrounded by her shoeless kids. ‘Walked off. Bolted. And the young Cargills wandering the streets like …’
‘Look,’ Em points downstream at four children standing on a picnic table in shallow water. ‘The Cargills. Look.’
‘They might as well have bombed us,’ Merv whispers.
‘Who?’ Em asks.
‘The bastards we bombed.’
‘Merv?’
‘Yes, Em.’
‘This is happy now. Why do we have to do the dead people and the Cargills? This is a happy day. Everybody is happy. Why are you crying?’
Epilogue
Near midnight and Clancy Sawyers, his predictions of rain come to nothing, is packing up his office. Taking photos from the walls, unplugging office machinery, binning paperwork, classical FM and a tinny waltz in the room. He knows the tune and is a beat ahead of it, whistling, and stopping now and then in his packing to let the tune catch up to his whistling so he can conduct a stanza or so of it.
Merv raps on the glass door and Clancy Sawyers beckons him come, and the big man crosses the room and, looking around for chairs and finding none, sits on the desk. ‘Well this is weird, Prof.’
‘What were you expecting?’
Merv folds his arms and leans back to look at the professor. ‘You don’t think anyone is going to say anything?’
‘No.’
‘You think they’re onto us?’
Clancy Sawyers takes a poster-sized glossy photo graph of the aurora from the wall and holds it at arm’s length, a bemused glance at this perplexing wonderment up there, still beyond man’s knowing. He smiles at it.
‘Onto us? Who? The government? Or the people round here?’
‘People round here.’
‘They’re not looking to know. A miracle happened. People enriched by miracles don’t dissect them. That’d make Jesus a scrawny Jew with trapdoors and mirrors.’
‘What about the law? Does the law dissect miracles?’
‘The law doesn’t dissect anything inside which it might find the cancer of its own stupidity, cupidity and culpability.’
‘So, no one. No one at all is going to ask us.’
Clancy Sawyers rolls the aurora tight and stabs it into a waste paper basket. ‘Are you the guys that stole an ocean and sold it to Canberra for a king’s ransom? No. No one at all.’ Professor Clancy Sawyers smiles an old easy smile.
‘Well … it’s weird. And it says something about us.’ Merv pushes off the desk and crosses the room to the stainless steel sink by the back door.
Clancy Sawyers nods. ‘If it says anything, it says the country’s young, unformed, malleable, many-headed … with its wars yet to fight before it becomes Australia.’ From an array of upside-down coffee mugs on the draining board Merv chooses two and looks inside them to see if they’re clean. Sniffs each, then fills them from the tap and takes them back to the professor and hands him one. They clink their cups together.
‘Cheers.’
‘Cheers. Rainwater?’
‘Yes.’
‘I prefer a bit of mud in mine. A bit of northern mud. But … cheers anyway.’ Merv raises his mug and drinks.
The Last Pulse Page 20