The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  ‘Some questions,’ said Boehm. He had shown no surprise at Inez’s query. ‘How much money? Which bank?’ And, ‘Defunct, I presume?’

  She toyed with a whiskery bacon rind, but didn’t look at him. A pallid egg congealed untouched on her plate. ‘Ten thousand pounds. The Colonial Bank of Victoria. Large denominations. Only quite recently defunct. Very recently.’

  As if that made it better. He looked at her carefully. ‘How long do you plan to stay?’

  ‘Indefinitely.’ She gave him an ironic glance. ‘I’m seeking my fortune, too.’

  The proprietress, a woman with a face like grinning wood, sidled up to their table and exposed her pearlshell dentures in an opaque grimace. She thrust an open bottle at them. ‘Here you go. Get into it.’

  Boehm poured the champagne. ‘There’s not a complete barrier to outside information here, you know. Shrewdness is not in short supply. And you’re talking about passing off a large sum of useless paper.’

  His voice was light but his accent was too harsh for her liking. She fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, wiped away any hint of breakfast, then turned and looked up coolly.

  ‘I’ve come to some decisions about money. Money addles people’s heads and I’ve no feeling for it any longer. Money won’t cause me any more sleepless nights. I don’t care about it, or for those tangled up with it.’

  He gave a long and heartfelt sigh. ‘It’s not like a bad habit you just give up.’

  She couldn’t be bothered talking. She was feeling more aloof by the second. She looked away, wiped her lips and gazed around this poor excuse for a restaurant. At the next table a young man sat alone. His wig caught her attention first—a rusty windblown affair with a low hairline, like a lop-sided fox-fur muff on his head. It needed adjusting and, as if she were telepathic, the woman with the pearlshell teeth just then straightened it as she passed. The man meanwhile sat straight-backed and motionless in his long-sleeved cotton shirt. His loose empty sleeves hung down his sides and a draught from the door caught them and gently stirred them.

  Inez looked quickly away.

  Boehm said, ‘There’s a going rate for most things, but this place is highly sensitive to wealth and fraud. Forget gold, the two real powers here are death and human society. They are the levellers.’

  Inez said nothing, but for several seconds in which the plywood door of the cafe snapped open in the gritty easterly wind, tousling her hair, and then slammed back again, her face lost the fullness of confidence.

  Her cheekbones, her forehead, her eyes, appeared suddenly prominent to him. The smallest broken vein, unpowdered, glowed under one nostril. Another tiny blood-string shone in the clear white of an eye. Above her full lips was a mole as pale as a pearl. Boehm thought of the levelling of the human face by death and he thought of the wasteful rush of time.

  Inez was watching the next table out of the corner of her eye. The proprietress was cutting up the armless man’s food. She began to feed him like a child with forkfuls of egg and bacon. She had also brought him a long glass tumbler with a drinking straw, and he turned and frowned back at Inez for a second before leaning his face over the glass and steering his open mouth over the end of the straw.

  Boehm poured more warm champagne. ‘Explosives,’ he whispered.

  Inez took a deep breath. ‘I will take what I can get,’ she said.

  He stretched out his legs and said, ‘I will give you a hundred pounds and photograph you from time to time.’

  Not being able to bring herself to say yes or no, she said nothing.

  Inch by inch, the water draws back and exposes the claypan to the billowing heat. Locke considers a simile. Yes, the clay is as moist and vulnerable as membrane, damp and shiny as human tissue. Sliced, spread and laid glistening. And as its moisture evaporates further the surface contracts like a drying scab.

  Flesh equals clay. But the similarity ends when the hairline cracks appear, widening and joining in a jigsaw of interlocking pieces. When it finally dries, the surface gleams like … ceramics.

  He muses on the pleasant words ochre and umber. Sepia. Cosy poets’ words, rolling italicised in his mind. Burnt sienna. But these mosaics last only a moment. Soon the glossy tiles curl up at the edges, their glaze dries and fades. The elements crush them into powder and blow them away.

  And no-bullshit brown.

  Locke the hungover poet is still meditating on the shirred skin of claypans when the Afghan finds the dried man sunk face-down in one.

  Locke the undertaker drives a buckboard now, a two-seater, just big enough for a clergyman to accompany him on the front seat, with three mourners squashed together on the back seat with their feet up on the coffin. Things have improved since his arrival. In those days he drove a small rented cart and the minister had to sit on the coffin. But the coffin is still carried the same melancholy route through the town and a mile west, past a stand of spindly eucalypts, to the cemetery, where mounds of fresh red sand and rough crosses made from fruit boxes and branches mark the graves.

  From the buckboard he misses the body—as brown and desiccated as the claypan—and might have driven over it. But from his higher vantage point on camelback Mahomet Mahomet gives a whistle. The body is splayed out in the clay, stuck like an ant in amber. It used to be a man named Lester Drake who suffered heatstroke and delirium riding in the box seat on the Cobb and Co coach and reeled into the bush chasing visions of water. Water sparkling in the sun and rippling from the easterly wind, wide water needing only the swells of surf to be a convincing ocean.

  Coming toward him, Mahomet Mahomet and his camel appear to Felix Locke to be walking on water. And as they meet at Drake’s body the sheet of water seems to close in behind them.

  Mahomet Mahomet helps him to prise and pull the body free. In the struggle against suction the noise of its resistance is like the camels breaking wind and the front of it comes away.

  Locke’s hangover this morning is not a throbber but the sort he prefers: helpful to tranquil meditation. The contemplation of landscape, the taking of logical steps, the calm focussing of poetic ideas. Helpful to meditation but not to exhumation. And not so good under a glaring sun. He takes a breather while he ties his handkerchief over his nose.

  ‘So much for being in the box seat,’ he says.

  Accustomed to Melbourne’s two or three centuries each summer when the gritty brown northerly scorched the city and bay and turned the sun red at noon, Inez had anticipated heat, desert days shimmering around the hundred. But then the thermometer under the coolest tarpaulin of the main hospital ward hovered for three weeks at a hundred and fifteen. The red earth outside radiated heat so intense that flocks of budgerigars fell from the sky like balls of green blossoms and the breath was squeezed from her lungs.

  She couldn’t breathe air that was hot enough to stop birds’ wings. On her regular treks back and forth to the excreta heap and incinerator she had to concentrate on taking the air in tiny sips simply to stay conscious. After a moment the nauseating reek of excrement and smouldering dressings and detritus would rise up and club her senses, and the clouds of glistening flies would rise as well and dive on her meagre moisture before it evaporated. And all the metal instruments and tin billies and dishes were too hot to touch without gloves, and her patients burnt their buttocks on their bedpans.

  Six tents strung together on the flat behind the Prince of Wales Hotel—this was the hospital started by the Sisters of the People and run by Matron Beatrice Shand, a Nightingale nurse with a distaste for amateurs but a desperate need of staff. The undenominational Sisters attended to the sick without charge. With more heat and more people this summer there was more diarrhoea and delirium and death, too.

  More than one fever was beginning to grip the goldfields. Matron Shand anxiously looked for, and too often found, the telltale red tongue tip, the glassy eyes, the swollen abdomen, the rose-coloured spots on the chest. Men behaving like crazy deaf mutes and raving at night. There was gold fever and there was what
Matron Shand thought could be an epidemic of typhoid.

  In the middle of this heatwave and water famine an old prospector called Alphonse Brazier found a forty-ounce gold nugget shaped like an elephant at Siberia, eighty miles north in waterless, trackless country. After the stampede that followed, six hundred foolhardy prospectors with equally thirsty horses rioted at the Thirty-Five Mile Soak when they were rationed to two tablespoons of water a day. The strongest and best-armed took the water, and the rest cut their horses’ throats and drank the blood and, still insane with thirst, tore off their bloody clothes and stumbled into the mirages of the desert.

  With eight camels carrying three hundred and fifty gallons of condensed water, Mahomet Mahomet and the Afghans rode to Siberia and, following the meandering trails of discarded trousers and empty waterbags, miraculously saved all but a dozen men. Mahomet Mahomet refused a government reward or even expenses. He declared, ‘These men are the sons of God and therefore I have saved them,’ and in a cacophony of beads and cowrie shells and brass bells, and hacking groans from camels and naked, peeling men alike, deposited the sick survivors at the hospitals of the Catholic Sisters of St John of God and the Salvation Army Hospital Corps, and fifty of the sickest men with the already overloaded and understaffed Sisters of the People.

  So, after working fourteen sixteen-hour days in a row, Inez agreed to pose for Axel Boehm. Of course he had been on hand to photograph the elephant-shaped nugget and the return of the gallant camel train. Tipping his topee to her, his offer still hanging in the air like a whiff of his aromatic hair cream. It wasn’t as if it would take too long, she told herself. A photograph was not a painting, after all.

  It would be her first outing. Her first day away from mining accidents, coated tongues, watery stools and heatstroke. Above all, away from doing and acting.

  She had learned, in her tiny corner of the nurses’ tent, to wash her hair and her whole body with only a cupful of brackish water. Melbourne seemed light years away, but her feeling of anticipation during her spartan sponge bath was suddenly keener than before any Melbourne Cup or Government House ball. (And after those frantic sixteen-hour days in the desert she could cinch her waist in to eighteen inches!)

  Standing outside under the tent fly so her hair would dry in the hot air, she half-noticed a line of bulldog ants moving along their tunnel just below the surface of the sand. Here and there the tunnel’s crusted roof had collapsed, exposing the glistening artery of ants as they hurried to and from the rubbish heap. Scurrying there empty-handed, struggling back with their heavy individual loads of human detritus.

  She turned away from the red nerve of ants and shook out her hair. In her preparations, her body, and then her mind, wished only to consider the glorious passivity of allowing a healthy man to dance attention in the shade.

  The studio of Axel Boehm is surprisingly neat and spacious and, beneath its tin roof, relatively cool. He leads her through props and scenery, shrewd backdrops of sandy desert and ferny verdant bushland and the mock headframe of a mine shaft.

  ‘For creating illusion,’ he says airily. Though she notices his hands are trembling.

  ‘Illusion? I thought the camera told the truth.’

  ‘Truth?’ he says, sitting her down. ‘I want something more than truth.’

  Even if he has to cheat to get it, she thinks. Now he’s rattling on about how his studio helps to isolate people from their environment.

  ‘So they become symbolic of themselves,’ he says.

  Inez can’t take that in, or the vaguely threatening, isolating, ‘they’ that he’s apparently applying to her as well. She’s beginning to feel like an object, abruptly suspended between the tense realities of city bankrupt and goldfields stretcher-case. But then … it’s coolish here, and while this dangling sensation, this detached languor, is unsettling, it’s preferable to illness and poverty and heat.

  In a swoony fatigue she watches and half-listens as the German sounds off on this sharp contrast between his aims and those of his customers. Relishing talking to a woman. Showing off in a silly boyish manner, gesturing, pacing on his long, stick-insect legs. She guesses he had a cruel nickname as a boy.

  ‘People want a precise record of personal and commercial life, and then complain if the likenesses are unflattering,’ he tuts. How could they foolishly believe the camera caught reality just as it was, ignoring the vast difference between their human vision and the camera’s monocular, unblinking eye?

  It didn’t seem so unreasonable to her.

  ‘The thing is,’ he confides, ‘people come to me as they would go to a doctor or a fortune-teller. To find out how they are.’

  ‘So they’re dependent on you.’

  He smiles. Waiting for her to arrive, he’d anticipated the look (and smell and feel) of her, the insolent upper-class tilt he remembered in her top lip, the faint purple shading under the eyes. But there is already something different in her face. A subtle shift has occurred. Not just the sharpening of fatigue and climate and work and diet. The levelling, the democratising of her features, has begun.

  He looks slyly at her hands. Yes, efficient short nails now, rimmed with dust. Browner, more capable fingers.

  Maybe there is a fascinating photographic serial in her changing features, an evolving narrative of Inez portraits? Serving tea, he asks, rather excitedly, ‘How are you finding your work here?’

  She draws a deep breath and runs a hand over one of his props, the sculpted head of a young woman. ‘Exhausting, of course.’ She strokes the cool forehead, the closed eyelids, the hair falling smoothly to the right and left of the parting. The head feels like cold water, soothing to the touch. ‘This piece is quite lovely.’

  ‘Yes, a cast of the death mask of the famous Unknown Woman from the Seine.’

  As her fingers fly off it, he hastens to say, ‘In Europe many people have casts or reproductions of her.’

  ‘From a real dead person? We aren’t keen on such things in Australia.’

  He says crisply, ‘You should not be frightened. This is beauty. L’inconnue de la Seine. Look at her.’

  So, challenged, Inez looks. The unknown woman is very young, maybe still a girl. Pretty. Her mouth is gently pursed. Below her peacefully closed eyes (closed, Inez realises with a shudder, against the cold river water, closed also in order to see only an inward image), below these serene eyelids and high cheekbones, around the edges of her sensual lips, a small smile of expectation and pleasure seems to stir. A smile that calls or whispers of a glimpse of something intimately known.

  ‘The last thing her eyes saw was the bank of the Seine, then the waters of the river, and then she closed them, and then the cold shock came, and the dizziness and suffocation and numbness.’

  He’s actually smiling while saying this.

  ‘Now see these photographs I have taken of her.’

  They are worryingly close at hand.

  Inez forces concentration. Again, the unknown woman seems to be approaching something that offers happiness. But now in her appearance, and the way his prints reproduce it, there is an added uncanny element of seduction and temptation. While for Inez—ever since her father looped the rope over the Toorak willow branch—there can never be a soothing quality in any representations of death, or even thoughts of it, she must admit this face radiates something almost bewitching.

  Surely this isn’t his seduction technique?

  It turns out he also collects books of death-mask photography. Of course. But leafing through these volumes at his insistence, Inez is struck, as he has promised, by the uniformity of the faces, whether brimming with youthful health or emaciated by grave illness.

  Yes, she agrees, the burden of strife and change and mortal existence has been erased from their features. The women all look like the Virgin, the men like saints.

  So? She isn’t frightened exactly, just bemused and disconcerted. Is this art? The European way of doing things? Hanging over the serene religious images is the pervasive smel
l of his hair cream. His aroma is on the pages of the books, the prints, her cup and saucer, and therefore on her own lips and fingertips.

  She can taste his smell in her lungs.

  ‘The way I see it, death carries out a massive retouching operation,’ he says.

  Not frightened, but disconcerted, Inez is surprised then to find herself posed sedately on a chaise longue. There is nothing macabre about having a sulphur-crested cockatoo dancing up and down your sleeve. Its claws gripping her wrist, her forearm, its grey bullet of a tongue tasting a button now and then. A beating wing ruffling her hair. Peering at her out of its crocodile’s eyelids, fluffing up its yellow crest and screeching ‘Hello?’ with the rising inflection of a querulous schoolteacher.

  ‘Why the bird?’

  ‘It’s tame. You say kiss to it. It will make a good photograph.’

  The cockatoo nibbles her knuckles. (That huge eagle’s beak! Those talons on her arm! Its strange rising-and-falling weight.) While, uncaring, this idiotic photographer potters with his equipment.

  She’s grumpy enough to call out, ‘Did you have a nickname as a child?’

  Under the hood he pretends not to hear. As soon as he has taken the photograph he smooths back his hair and, rather grandly, hands her one hundred pounds.

  ‘Oh.’

  She’s frowning and rattled. She thrusts the flapping bird back at him and, her hands shaking at her handbag—she can’t open the clasp fast enough—she wrenches it open, shakes out the bundles of Colonial Bank of Victoria notes on to the chaise longue. As if making a simple currency exchange. Why does she feel like this?

  She has to excuse herself to powder her nose, gather her wits.

  The outhouse is relatively clean, for these parts. Newspaper squares hanging neatly on a nail. Smoothed wooden seat on the bucket. A dry dirt floor. And something catching the sun rays coming under the privy door.

  In the sudden heat of outdoors she feels giddy. Can this be right? A semicircle of gingery-red curls. A fine fleece of scissored pubic hairs glinting on the floor.