The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Better not let on it’s possible to drown in a tablespoon of water,’ says Locke. ‘Just inhale that first little drop of liquid and the larynx can go into violent spasm. Back home in Connecticut I’ve processed bodies with no water in the lungs that died of lack of oxygen. Businessmen choking on their morning coffee. Babies in the bath.’

  ‘Laryngoplasm,’ says Malebranche.

  ‘Dry drowning,’ says Locke, between mouthfuls. ‘You know what Pliny the Elder said? “The corpses of drowned men float upwards and those of women face down. As if nature wants to respect the modesty of dead women.” He’s wrong. I’ve seen them both ways.’

  ‘That was a woman just passed by,’ says Axel Boehm.

  Inez sits on the iron bed in her tin-walled hotel room bombarded by unfamiliar sounds. She feels hollow and giddy. After the coach and the ship before it, the room’s angles surge and slide.

  The drunken rowdiness, while not unexpected in a mining town (she has experienced it even in Melbourne), seems threatening and, in her present state, even personally directed The unsympathetic mix is unnerving: the malign roar of drinking men, the growling of camels, donkeys braying, and all around sheets of roof-iron flapping and screeching in the wind. Having finally reached her destination the realisation suddenly overwhelms her.

  Weeping brings surprisingly quick relief. Shortly she dries her eyes, opens her travelling-bag, takes out a pile of banknotes and pushes them inside her underwear. Then, still fully dressed, she beds down uncomfortably and anxiously for the night, too conscious of the flimsy walls to fall properly asleep.

  When Inez steps into the street next morning a tall, sharp angled man is barring her way. He wears a solar topee and a three-piece cream tussore-silk suit that suits the temperature but not the conditions (his trouser cuffs are stained red-brown), and when he removes his hat she sees pomade and dust have turned his ginger hair a rich red.

  ‘I am Axel Boehm,’ he announces, ‘and I would be honoured to take your photograph.’

  He has a reedy German accent, and a camera, tripod and square black case of glass plates standing by.

  She doesn’t trust his smooth, freckled skin. ‘Have you been waiting for me?’ she asks. ‘This is most untoward. I have no love of the press.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he says vaguely, frowning at the sky. ‘The light, the light. You will need to stand over there.’

  ‘I am merely a nurse.’ She clears her throat. ‘Probationary nurse.’

  He briskly motions her. ‘I have marked the spot.’

  In the early morning light he poses her standing with her back to the wide, roughly cleared main street. Her body bisects the street. The dusty canvas and brush offices and iron-roofed hessian stores fan back in a ragged row each side of her. A scattering of coral gums, left standing for their thin shade rather than their blossoms, still grows in the middle of the road. Under the trees two grubby men transact business. A thin kangaroo dog scratches itself at their feet. Three or four other men looking dirtier than by lamplight bash the dust out of their clothes. Camels and horses and coaches and carts of all types and sizes raise more dust as they manoeuvre around the night’s bottle heaps and the tree stumps left behind in the haste of clearing. Higher dust clouds hovering over the entire scene show that mining operations have already begun for the day. There is a sting in the sun.

  She’s surprised to find herself standing on an X in the sand obeying this skinny foreign dandy. Staring obediently at the camera eye, the black hood, feeling men’s stray eyes landing on her from all directions.

  It’s because I’m exhausted from too much travel and emotion, she thinks. This strange passivity.

  In the photograph, as is the fashionable pose, her almost-expressionless face hints at boredom and crossness. It accurately mirrors her feelings. The photographer has timed the shot so a Cobb and Co stagecoach behind her appears to have just set her down. In her dress from London, and shoes and hat from Collins Street, with her hint of a frown, and clutching her bag in front of her pelvis, she doesn’t look like a nurse, more like a socialite in vastly changed circumstances.

  She can’t guess he will spend whole evenings holding the finished print up to the lamplight. Staring at the clear eyes, the insolent tilt to the mouth and the point of the chin jutting at the unknown desert. Slender fingers like a bird’s foot holding her bag before her. Imagining touching them, rolling each finger between his own. Sniffing the photograph, as if he had captured her light, moist scent in the viscous techniques of his process.

  But priding himself on being an objective professional, he can also consider the picture as cultural history. Both in the studio and out of doors, he regards himself not only as a person of experiment—an artistic adventurer adept at capturing unusual natural phenomena: dust storms, flash floods, the indigenous people—but as a sensitive portrayer of sociology.

  Sometimes his sociological and experimental sides converge. Because of the climate his gelatine-coated photographic plates are set in what often becomes hot water, and without care the gelatine runs and distorts the image. His experimental nature goads him into sending some of these ghostly distortions off to the papers with wry captions. A distorted image of the same spot where Inez posed had gained wide newspaper exposure when entitled Street Scene in Hell.

  But he doesn’t want to distort Inez’s image, or even—although he’s an expert at this—to enhance it. Just to … yes, inhale it, absorb it, touch the long-missed essence of her gender and class. Forget for a moment the lives of men. Working men with breath like camels. Men with their crusty lashes, nicotined moustaches, disgusting dried red spittle on their lips and stubble, the ingrained beer-sweat-dust stink of unwashed clothes.

  In the eternal war between the Nominalists and the Realists, he counts himself, like his countryman August Sander, an avid follower of Realism. Like Sander he believes the great universals are effective and real, and when he takes a ‘proper’ photograph (or even a commercial studio portrait), the picture isn’t necessarily a likeness of old Fred Smith or young Dominic O’Hara that their friends back home would recognise. What can be recognised, he hopes, is a cultural history, a sociology of time and place.

  But he can’t escape the European aesthetic tradition. The goldfields’ landscape is still as stark and strange to him as Mars. When he first arrived the frankness and irony of the place-names made him shiver with pleasure: Dead Finish, Siberia, Island of Gold, White Feather, Day Dawn, Mount Magnet, Poverty Flat, Black Flag, Broad Arrow, Niagara.

  On a waterless plateau above Dead Finish he once heard odd noises, like boars truffling in the Black Forest. He peered around a granite ledge and saw two glowering people rutting in the dirt like animals. Dusty beyond sex and age and race, almost beyond species. Eyes closed and fiercely frowning, boots threshing, faces snuffling up the soil. Oblivious to him, the hot, high sun and the whole present world. Snorting and kicking up clouds of dust as if imagining themselves other creatures in other lives.

  He is no longer surprised by things chanced upon. He simply takes the photograph. In the same way he’s a photographer of the dead. Occasionally they are posed and dignified and casketed, their presentation courtesy of Felix Locke the undertaker. And sometimes they are unposed and natural, just happened upon like any sunset or lightning strike.

  Unlike Inez, the lucky, the dead and the fornicating are not self-conscious. A man holding a gold nugget shaped like an angel will give you plenty of time to set up the tripod.

  Strangely, what he noticed in each case was the emphasis of the hands, what they were doing.

  He emerges from his hood, packs up his equipment, straightens his long limbs and replaces his pith helmet on his gleaming hair. He says to Inez: ‘May I welcome you with a champagne breakfast?’

  And the photograph? Axel Boehm will later caption it Miss Gosper Arrives in the Goldfields.

  When, on hearing of the mutual collapse of the Southern Cross Land and Pastoral Company and the Colonial Bank of Victoria, Ine
z’s father had stumbled down St George’s Road to the loamy bank of the Yarra at Toorak and, seeing an alternative fate across the river in the narrow terraces and grim chimneys of Richmond, hanged himself from a willow, his dazed widow reacted strangely. ‘The trouble with Bernard is I don’t know what music to play at his funeral,’ she complained. ‘He doesn’t trust music.’

  Music was about all Inez trusted now. Mozart. Vivaldi. The voice of Melba. No longer did she trust her schooling at The Hermitage, or society, or money. Clearly she would have to work at something. It was also evident that work—even ordinary living—couldn’t be undertaken in Melbourne. Leaving her mother in the care of her suddenly smug shipping-clerk of an uncle in Bentleigh, she filled a bag with banknotes from the wall safe behind the cue rack in the billiard room and, with hundreds of other emigrants from the land and bank crashes, sailed west on the steamship Waroonga for the goldfields.

  The steerage passengers were mostly desperate jobless men from across the spectrum of working life, from bank clerks to blacksmiths. But there were young women aboard, too, keeping up appearances as saloon passengers, society girls whose family fortunes had foundered in the crashes and who were too proud to work in Melbourne. Like her they were heading for the goldfields, to the acceptable occupation of the three available there to young women. Nursing.

  The lower orders might be off to make their bundle as barmaids and prostitutes but, in the tent hospitals, attending sick or maimed miners for three guineas a week, running errands on horseback, brushing off the flies and dust, emptying bedpans, cooking in the heat or standing over a campfire in the winter desert wind, a socialite turned novice nurse could find, so the girls taking the air on deck had heard—how to put it? Satisfaction. Truly. Also men, in the favourable ratio of a hundred to one. Some of them, in the scheme of things, suddenly filthy rich. And even Englishmen from good families. Lords and whatnot.

  ‘I have a question,’ Inez said to the gangly German over breakfast. ‘Where can I sell some money?’

  Despite their friendly banter, the barmaids wouldn’t go out with Felix Locke. And the miners didn’t offer to fight him. Locke suspected that the barmaids and miners believed he had some irregular attachment to the dead.

  Many times he wanted to announce to the bar: ‘Relax, I’m no more attracted to the dead than Dr Malebranche is to your Barcoo ulcers, or the nightcart man is to your shit. Believe me, I’ve got no more stomach for sadness than the butcher or the baker or the gold assayer.’ But he kept smiling and bought drinks all round.

  He blamed himself for this sorry situation. As he left the Prince of Wales or the Windsor Castle or the Duke of Norfolk of an evening he would call out in farewell, ‘I’ll get you all in the end!’ It always got a laugh. The pub crowd had come to expect him parodying himself and the undertaker’s life. He was a character. They laughed, but they shuddered inside. These gold seekers had been printers, blacksmiths, sailors, peers of the realm, lawyers, violinists, teamsters, speculators, doctors, journalists, criminals, clerks and farmers; they were presently rich or poor, yet he reminded them of the uniform hopelessness of their situation. Their momentary existence.

  Even, dare they think it, the transient nature of wealth. The final uselessness of gold.

  Felix Locke was a gregarious man, short and fair and muscular and full of American quips, quite unlike their image of a mortician. Everyone was polite, shouted him drinks, brayed brittle laughter. But he was an undertaker—he took them under—and they could never forget it. No man disagreed with him, much less offered to fight him. No woman would go out with him, much less make love.

  They were loath even to shake hands. And, he bitterly reminded himself, these were people at the rawest end of existence, international adventurers at the end of the earth. He would catch pugilistic prospectors sneaking wary glances at his pink, callous-free hands, his clean nails, his scabless knuckles. He knew the barmaids winced at the thought of those embalmer’s hands on their living flesh. He knew the barmaids assumed—many of them with good reason—that he wanted their bodies.

  When men did shake hands—with a hasty bravado—he detected a blink of surprise at his dry palms and firm grip. Ever since becoming an undertaker in New Milford he had concentrated on having dry palms and a firm grip. There was a calming mental exercise he did: by concentrating hard and repeating ‘warm hands’ to himself ten times he could think his palms dry. And, by so doing, think his nerves away. Slow down his pulse. He could imagine he was bursting with warm and sturdy life.

  And he was. It was just that he was a chronic hypochondriac. For whatever reason—his professional preoccupation with death, his frustration at his role as outsider—he imagined himself succumbing to every illness. His lower-back twinges from lifting coffins he feared were spinal cancer. A bad whisky hangover was an imminent stroke, canned-food heartburn was a coronary attack. Venereal disease and its treatments (the dreaded mercury, the legendary scouring umbrella!) were simply too appalling to consider. It was the reason he wouldn’t visit the prostitutes, even though Malebranche had suggested they might put an end to his vicious cycle of frustration and hypochondria.

  ‘Look,’ he told the doctor. ‘Some of your clients pull through. Mine don’t. Is it surprising I’m in no hurry to die, too?’

  ‘Visit the French girls,’ said Malebranche. ‘They’re a cut above the rest. I promise you will survive the experience.’

  ‘Have you ever seen terminal syphilis?’

  Malebranche didn’t deign to answer. He looked at him over his spectacles. ‘I can recommend the latest gutta-percha Continental protectors. Or sheep intestine, very sensitive. You hardly feel the stitches.’

  He shook his head. It was the barmaids he hankered after. He didn’t disagree with those pretentious local newspapermen who had taken to referring to the barmaids in their columns as ‘Hebes’, after Hebe, the beautiful cup bearer of Olympus, the girl who served the Greek gods with nectar. He was already romanticising their standoffishness to him.

  But there was one group of people who didn’t regard him apprehensively or hide a shudder at the brush of his skin: the Afghans. They smiled down on him from their jangling camels and saluted him. Muslims, with no fear of death, quite the reverse, they saw his role as that of honourable and patient helpmeet to God. Their curiosity was lively. They didn’t shiver and turn their minds from his preparations with veins and chemicals.

  Mostly it was they who helped him bring in Europeans’ baked and juiceless bodies from the desert.

  It wasn’t that the town was ungrateful at having a proper undertaker at last. Before Locke’s arrival the job had belonged to Tom Tully, the odd-job man, who stalked the streets with his vegetable cart on Mondays and Thursdays, like a visitor from the Black Death, shouting, ‘Bring out the meat!’

  Tully was a wiry ignoramus with scars all along his nose and forehead from walking through panes of glass as a party trick. He buried the dead as they came, in graves scraped out of the sand or, for an extra pound, in coffins knocked up out of packing cases, still with the painted instructions: THIS SIDE UP and STOW AWAY FROM BOILERS. Either way, they lay so shallow that the native animals and the town dogs easily dug them up.

  The unsatisfactory situation was brought to a head by the behaviour of Mrs O’Connell, the wife of the publican at the Limerick Castle, whose young son had died of fever. The case had raised the spectre of an epidemic and with Malebranche treating a patient out of town, Tully had gathered the body from the pub, hastily prepared a coffin and packed the boy inside.

  On the morning of the funeral the grieving mother wanted a last glimpse of her son. When the coffin lid was opened it was found that the small corpse had turned over on its stomach. In that second Mrs O’Connell’s mind became unhinged. She became a recluse, heavily veiled and always clad in deep mourning. By day she stayed shut in her quarters upstairs, but at night she wandered the town, frightening drunken miners with her mysterious and melancholy aspect. Then her heavy tread would be
heard on the hotel stairs, the few remaining bar-room customers sobering as they waited for the squeak of her piano stool and the first dark chords to crash above them.

  The mining warden, Joseph Finnucane, asked the Mines Department in Perth to find the goldfields a professional undertaker. Felix Locke, who had landed in Western Australia just three days before, answered the advertisement in the West Australian.

  Perhaps, he wondered, the townspeople were unsettled at the result. They were expecting him to be philosophically different from Scarface Tully, the man with the vegetable cart. More remote, somehow dirgeful and sepulchral. It was a paradox: these boisterous people required more of the very trait that made them uneasy—more damp-palmed melancholy—in their undertaker.

  But Tully knew the dead didn’t care. In this way the dead that he, Felix Locke, buried were like all the dead before them, for whom time and space had become mortally unimportant. In fact, as he said to Malebranche, ‘This loss of interest is the first sure sign that something serious is about to happen.’

  Of course the living cared, which was why he was in business. When drinkers accosted him, pathetically intent on telling him what it was they wanted done with them when they were dead (did they think it would stave off the moment?), he would grin resignedly and pass the whisky bottle.

  ‘Have a drink. Remember, once you’re dead it’s not your problem. You can give it a rest. Call it a day. Put your feet up.’

  Some bravo was always breasting the bar and grunting in front of cronies, ‘When I’m dead, just put me in a box and throw me in a hole.’

  And he would smile and say, ‘Yep, that’s what I do with everyone.’ Then the daredevil would grow sullen and turn away, muttering.