The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  He turns his back on the sun’s glare and looks back towards the bungalow shimmering in a mirage of quivering light. The sensation is like the warning of an approaching migraine headache. He’s struck by the bright, blunt morning, the ferry’s swirling coal smoke, the steady, capable drumming of the paddlewheel, the diced jellyfish bouncing in the wake—the realistic, pessimistic here-and-now.

  He has caught her latest mood. He thinks how easy it is for the grandest adventure to be negated by a look, a remark, a silence. Maybe worse than missed opportunities are those not missed which should have been.

  Her blood. He can’t say the word he’s thinking, even in his head. Her other inheritance.

  The river had dictated the position and design of the capital. Placed on the rim of a remote continent of immense space, the town had nonetheless been drawn up seventy years before on a tight English urban-provincial grid pattern, with narrow main streets running along the river flats parallel to the river.

  Jostling his way through the crowds along a narrow footpath of oyster shells and sand, Will saw how the early planners had actually created two towns within the one. There was the lovely town comprising the elegant and wealthy St George’s Terrace and Adelaide Terrace and their bisecting streets, with their macadamised road surfaces, Governor’s mansion, river views, shady Cape lilac trees and stately commercial buildings and residences. And the three streets of hotels and shops and boarding houses and small businesses running behind them seemed bustling and prosperous, if only because of the narrowness of the limestone roadways.

  But directly north and east of these pinched city blocks the road turned abruptly to dirty sand. Here, in an old mulberry plantation far from the river and the social whirl of the Governor’s parties, was another town for the poor, sick and homeless, for the refugees and immigrants and the thousands of would-be or luckless gold diggers. A stinking, crowded camp of tents and lean-tos whose refuse drained into the sand and whose inhabitants, those lucky enough to escape typhoid, were driven mad by the bites of sand fleas and bush flies.

  This city represented both joy and frustration. He desperately wanted it to mirror his own grand visions, to look back on Europe and Asia and Africa, and forward across the river to the future.

  What he wished was to impress her with it, and with his place in it.

  He walked up from the ferry wharf through a sea of men’s hats, a cacophony of voices and clashing musical instruments. From the brewery the rich aroma of hops wafted in the bright air. At any time of the day or night the streets were thronged with crowds of men on their way to or from the goldfields, drawn to the hotels from whose balconies spruikers and loosely corseted barmaids and sentimental Irish tenors and fiddle players attempted to entice them inside, while at the same time the brass and tambourines of the Salvation Army strained to draw them in the opposite direction.

  The easterly wind blew against his back. The early planners had also paid no heed to the prevailing winds. Sea breezes sweeping up the river turned those streets running north and south into fierce wind tunnels, while the longer east-west boulevards (he was now morosely climbing west up the hill of St George’s Terrace) efficiently trapped and retained the hot, gritty winds of summer.

  In his present mood, arriving in the already sweltering brick offices of O’Connor’s Department of Public Works, Will could see why the Chief’s band of imported engineers scoffed at their unimaginative predecessors. And at all politicians and newspaper editorial writers since. In this colony of a million square miles, with its three thousand, four hundred miles of coastline stretching from the Timor Sea to the Southern Ocean, the Chief was responsible for, in the words of Premier Forrest, ‘railways, harbours, everything’.

  Fortunately his recruits were a loyal and enterprising team: James Thompson, like O’Connor, from Dublin and London and New Zealand, F.W. Martin, W.W. Dartnell, Frank Stevens and A.W. Dillon Bell, from London via New Zealand, all experienced in harbour and railway construction, and John Muir, the engineering surveyor from Victoria. All were in their thirties. By at least ten years, William Dance from Hartbridge, Wiltshire, via Bristol, was the youngest.

  They were all accustomed to ill-informed criticism of their grand and radical schemes. For spending too much public money. For being not from here but from somewhere else. But the Chief seemed able to ignore the sniping in the parliament and press. Having recently pushed the new railway east to the goldfields and dredged out his new steamship harbour, he was trying to concentrate on his goldfields water scheme. The parliament had adopted the scheme in principle, then taken two bickering, filibustering years to agree to buy the pipes to carry the water. Only this week had it finally passed the bill to contract the companies chosen to build the pipes for the water main.

  Will was to become an expert on water pipes. From that morning the Chief would talk pipes to him constantly, in person and by telegraph, for three years. He would sing the praises of a radical rivetless locking-bar pipe new to the engineering world. It was invented by a Melbourne man named Mephan Ferguson and only recently patented. The beauty of Ferguson’s invention, insisted the Chief, was that its design minimised leaks and offered less frictional resistance to the flow of water than the usual riveted pipes.

  It had been tried only on a small scale. The longest aqueduct in the world, on an uphill grade, in the world’s driest continent, would certainly offer a rigorous test of the revolutionary water pipe.

  Implicit in the Chief’s enthusiastic lectures to Will was the great good fortune of a brilliant inventor and the one engineer with the imagination and courage to prove the worth of his invention managing to find each other.

  So after a busy workday in the strange novelty of a new place, in the intensity of a new project, Will returns home on the ferry that evening, the water and twilight united in cool harmony, and his mood is … hopeful.

  He can taste the night and smell the perfume of the water. The night is calm and salty. The warm, weedy fetor of sunlit water has gone. The river and the night’s offshore breezes have taken on a common fragrance of subtle algaes and blossoms and eucalypts from across the water.

  From the ferry’s bow he sees the bungalow’s lights—first a speck, then a growing glow. Electricity has recently come here. The particular electric light across the narrowing strip of black water owes its existence to her. It’s a symbol: it means Angelica. It’s the verandah light facing the river which she has switched on as a welcoming sign for him, and it fills him with peaceful resolve.

  She is bent over her tarot cards, fanning them out on a red silk scarf, the scarf itself spread smoothly out on the dining table.

  Halfway across the Indian Ocean she had first produced the tarot pack from her trunk. She kept the cards bound in the red silk scarf. It had seemed to him an exotic, even over-vital covering for something so mystical and dreamy.

  He saw tarot cards in the category of the female and secretive. Even now as he enters the room and kisses her cheek she protectively half-shields them from his intrusion with her hands and the angle of her body. Even trying to avoid looking at them, he catches a flash of the ominous magical symbols: wands, pentacles. He is a Baptist again and struggles to ignore this heathen witchery.

  ‘A lovely evening,’ he says. ‘And a busy day.’

  She smiles wearily, as if it were she who had laboured all day to bring water to the desert. To push water uphill.

  He moves behind her chair and begins, tentatively, to rub her neck. ‘What have you been doing?’

  She sighs, then says, ‘Listening, learning.’ A pause. ‘Writing.’

  Beside the cards and red scarf is a pile of paper and three pencils with snapped points. Perhaps fifty pages covered in wavy scribbles. He had forgotten Mr Pitman’s hieroglyphics.

  The tip of her right index finger is still indented from the pencil.

  ‘Just some notes,’ she says.

  The sheets of shorthand rustle in the warm evening breeze drifting through the lattice. The way sh
e continues to lean over the table is making it hard for him to rub her neck.

  When he stops, she straightens in her chair, quickly scoops up the tarot cards, bundles them in the scarf and looks up at him with the greenish shrewd eyes of a stranger.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to mention something,’ she says. She shakes her head as if to clear it, and smooths back her hair. ‘Your aura has become very ill-defined.’

  He looks at her for a long moment. There is a moat around her. Cold, grey fathomless water.

  ‘I’ll attend to it at once,’ he says, pouring himself a strong whisky.

  His aura had changed from blue to grey.

  For some weeks now she has seen auras around everyone, and she has seen spirits floating under the stamped-metal wildflowers of the bungalow’s ceiling.

  The spirits are white and gold and not the least frightening. Quite the opposite—they seem to be offering her silent support. The more encouraging and affectionate, the more golden and plentiful they are. On the other hand, the auras she sees around people’s outlines range in colour from deep happy blue to a melancholy leaden grey. Of course their clarity, too, can vary from misty to sharp.

  This evening, however, it’s a different spiritual experience that has tired her. As his ferry pulled out from the jetty and chugged off into the sun and seagulls that morning she’d felt a compulsion to write a letter—to whom she wasn’t sure. The ferry had moved off so slowly. She knew the boat was carrying too much weight—all the souls aboard were heavy. She couldn’t grab up pen, ink and paper fast enough. She had just written Dear … when she threw the pen aside as too slow and cumbersome and snatched up a pencil.

  And then—there was no other explanation for it—her hand had hovered over the paper, and an outside force had come into her arm and hand and begun writing. For a second or two he had written in his old man’s spidery, if impatient, longhand the words Isaac Pitman and she had felt the weight and fatigue of his years—the crick in his neck!—in her heavy wrist and shoulders, then in mid-sentence—gleefully, youthfully—he had switched to his shorthand.

  Oh, he had a lot to say, and in much faster, more proficient shorthand than she had ever managed—at least one hundred and sixty, one hundred and eighty words a minute he was going, her hand whizzing over the paper, whereas she had never progressed beyond a hundred words a minute at her fastest.

  She wrote down questions and he answered them, sometimes so eagerly he didn’t even wait for her to finish the sentence before jumping in. Soon she found it was enough just to think the question and he would answer it.

  She wrote all morning in this spirit-hand, filling page after page until she thought firmly, I’m too tired to go on, and immediately the pressure lessened and she found herself writing in his old man’s longhand again: Angelica, dear, is there anyone else you wish to speak to?

  Her scalp tingled, a pulse thumped in her wrist. She was too wrung-out to answer, to write anything but Tomorrow. And she had slept all afternoon as the sun beat down on the tiles of the roof and the breeze strengthened and shifted from the east to the south-west and drove off the swans and pelicans from the sand-spit and whipped the river’s slick surface into lines of blue waves.

  When she woke the sea breeze had dropped and it was after dusk. Warm yeasty air flowed through the lattice. She was consulting the tarot to regain her equilibrium when he arrived home, his grey aura drifting about him like thin fog in the verandah light.

  He has learned how Chief O’Connor deals with obstacles in the path of his water scheme.

  O’Connor had decided on a site for his main dam on the Helena River at Mundaring, in the Darling Ranges. The dam workers had been digging through gravel and limestone and granite for six months and were down one hundred feet when on the north side of the river they made an extraordinary discovery. A granite boulder eight miles long and two miles wide was lying in their path, detached from the solid rock and overlaying a porous vein. O’Connor hurried to the reservoir site and spent two days examining the problem. The government totted up the cost and pressed him to abandon the site.

  ‘We can remove the boulder,’ he said.

  Aside from the exhaustive work, this would delay the pouring of the concrete for the dam wall. So he installed an electric lighting plant enabling shifts of men to dig into the night. He commandeered five more drills. And in twelve months his men excavated down a further hundred feet to bedrock and drilled this gigantic boulder to rubble and chips no bigger than house bricks.

  Will is at the dam site to hear this background story to the ceremonial pouring of the concrete. There to climb down into the vast hole and try to imagine a granite monolith as big as a city. And to envisage deep clear water lying over where they stood.

  A fine day, as the Chief has prayed for. The cool, dry smell of stone dust in the air. Optimistic speeches have been made. Down in the fresh cavity, in the depths of strata of brown and yellow and rusty smears of iron, below a slice of deep blue sky, four barrowmen nervously abseil down the sharp incline to pour the first concrete.

  The difficulty of the men’s task is lightened by a clever invention of the Chief’s: a concrete mixer he has made from a boiler casing, fitted with internal flanges and running on a conveyor.

  A shot from a pistol, the barrowmen release a slow grey trickle, then an oozing surge, as officials clap sternly and workmen whistle their ironies.

  Her conversations with the spirit of Isaac Pitman have given her a breath of herbs and garlic. Now she carries a notebook and sharpened pencils with her in case a spirit has something to say. And, wrapped in the red scarf, is the tarot to which she refers for a second opinion, on spirit-writing and most other matters.

  He is worried about her … stability. But to voice his concern would make things worse.

  Following Isaac Pitman’s shorthand instructions she is using his old herbal nostrums to cleanse her blood of blackwater fever. She has stopped eating meat and visits Li Tun at the Chinese market gardens for dried barks and fungi and whiskery twists of root. She boils them up with long peels of yam and drinks the stinking broth. Will catches her examining her tongue a dozen times a day. Toxins rise to her surfaces: little adolescent pustules on her forehead, between her breasts and shoulder blades. Her hair is greasy, her thin face is all pointed chin, her bones start to stick out and all her body is pasty like her tongue and seems turned to air.

  Next thing her breath smells of seaweed. She is boiling up kelp gathered from the shore into a green-black soup.

  During these rituals her eyes avoid his. She leaves notes for herself in shorthand which are meant to exclude him, although he can tell the difference between her marks and scratchings and those dictated by Isaac Pitman.

  Woken by vivid, violent dreams, she rises in the night. His thrown-out leg finding empty space, he comes into the dining room to find her bending naked over the tarot.

  And unable in the night to hide his anxiety, aching to touch her, he whines like a child, ‘What are you doing?’

  She is in a fugue. For weeks she has the look of someone mentally and physically separated from her surroundings. In the face of her distracted intensity, sighing resentments and kelp breath, he is helpless.

  So he crosses the river. He escapes into his work, into Mephan Ferguson’s interlocking pipes, into the technical problems of temperature, heat and gradient, of caulking and hydraulics, of distance and the reckless openness of the landscape.

  This is a landscape of such stark space and beauty that reason can only try to defy it. Small boys kneel on the ferry jetty burning ants with magnifying glasses. From these tiny squirming fires rise little plumes of smoke and the acrid smell of hot varnish. A dog barks all day at a stationary goanna with a blue tongue. A laughing bird shakes a snake five times its length in its beak. Pink trees with the delicate texture of moist flesh sprout from the sand; to touch their soft trunks leaves fingerprints. And all around the city bushfires burn, defining the sky and heat.

  This is a la
ndscape to easily make him curt and undemonstrative in return. White flowers, white sand everywhere, the sun glinting off the limestone and oyster-shell footpaths, can bring on headaches. So the eyes of newcomers are constantly guarded and squinting against the glare and its flickering surprises.

  Bone-weary of moods and crazes, every day he’s grateful to be able to cross the river.

  He takes to recrossing the river several hours later of an evening. Instead of catching the dusk ferry home, he works late and joins his colleagues in the Weld Club for an hour or two. It relaxes Chief O’Connor to entertain his engineers over whisky in the Strangers’ Room of his club and point out the basic mistakes of planners and politicians.

  One Friday evening the Chief is in typical form, announcing cheerfully, as if it had just occurred to him, that the early planners had got the climate wrong. Because the Andes had snow at this latitude on the west coast of South America, they had decided it would be the case here. ‘They forgot to take into account the small matter of altitude.’

  His eyes are twinkling. He allows the chortles to subside before continuing.

  They had also got the rocks wrong, concluding that there was coal here because of the prevalence of limestone. ‘But of course it’s coastal limestone from the Pleistocene Age, not Carboniferous like the mountain limestone of the Pennines.’

  ‘Of course,’ echo his engineers.

  They had even got the trees wrong, mistakenly believing that if the trees were tall and green then the river flats must be fertile and productive.

  ‘Even this place,’ says the Chief expansively, of the red brick, Queen Anne-style club with its belvedere tower looking obliquely across the Esplanade to the river. ‘Designed so the sea breeze blows into the members’ room and the Chinese servants’ quarters are hidden from sight. Meanwhile the chimneys smoke, the dining room’s so stuffy you can’t breathe, the drains clog, there’s six inches of water in the cellar and the skylights leak on the billiard tables.’