The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  Pelicans wheel over the spit, and in the shallows shags dive, disappear, resurface. The small dead-man’s-floater splashes on, dabbing himself into the frothy shallows. Persevering but still pulling back from the brink.

  The boy, the birds. He has the vague notion that swimming would exercise his fingers, so he walks fatalistically into the river and begins to swim out into the deep. But it’s not the cupped stiffness of his hand striking the water, or the throbbing ache, that worries him. It’s that he starts choking. He stops and coughs and clears his throat and wipes his streaming eyes. He takes a breath and begins to swim again, but the choking sensation returns. His chest feels cold and tightly stretched against the grey water. The taste of the opium pipe comes into his mouth. And when he stands, gagging and hacking up pale bubbles, the water presses around his chest and throat and he feels compelled to cough or die.

  There is a pattern to this. When he starts to choke, when his lungs tell him they are filling with liquid, he is thinking of her.

  Returning to work, he notices a strange phenomenon. He feels oddly calm. Another thing, in this past month of absence and opium the colours of life seem to have moved to the extremities and disappeared. Maybe they are so bright he doesn’t see them any longer. Maybe this hazy panorama is all his eyes can accept.

  The sun is a dull light behind phlegmy clouds. He leans on the ferry rail peering down into the river. Orange algae specks compressed by depth have turned the water black and rich as stout. Jellyfish undulate below the surface as if swaying under glass. In their translucent but individually patterned globes the urgent faces of unborn babies press up against the ceiling. Grinning skulls, weeping children, sly women with almond eyes.

  The invisible sun bores into his skull, but he knows he needs to stay outside in the fresher air above the river. In the submarine mood of the saloon there is the danger he might start to choke.

  When the ferry docks at the city wharf, the leached piles rock back and forth and black shags and white gulls flap away. He is the last passenger off the boat. By then the engine has shut down and the surface is slick again. Bird lime is on his sleeve. He scratches it off with his good hand and walks down the gangplank across the oily shimmer of water.

  This is what absence is: deep reflecting water like this, a black mirror. His feet strike the land again. He sets off mechanically, pacing steadily up the hill back to work.

  All is chipper in the city. Once again he is observing the requirements of the city, of professional men and of bright, noisy daylight. But he’s not fooled. He knows what is the only point of day. To see a loved woman bathing at sunset.

  The water scheme has suddenly surged ahead. On his return to the Department of Public Works he finds another ceremony is coming up, more official speeches. Another stage in the construction of the pipeline to be celebrated before the press and important guests.

  He thinks perhaps the Chief and the manufacturers are publicly celebrating each juncture so the latest indecisive government—the fourth in four years—will be locked into the project. Just like a section of Mephan Ferguson’s steel pipe.

  Mephan Ferguson has come to an agreement with the metal-working firm of G. & C. Hoskins to make the sixty-six thousand pipes necessary for the project, and they are giving a formal luncheon party to celebrate the manufacture of the first three pipes at their factory at Midland Junction.

  The company has come up with a gallant idea for the occasion: to engrave the first pipe with the names of the Premier’s wife and the wife of the Minister for Public Works. And of engraving the second pipe with the names of the Engineer-in-Chief’s wife and the wife of the Under-Secretary.

  There is a problem with the third pipe. On this one the company wants to engrave the names of the wife of the parliamentary Opposition Leader and the wife of the on-site engineer. Before the ceremony Will is sounded out on the matter.

  ‘I’m too young to have a wife’s name on a water pipe,’ he tells the Hoskins people. ‘Leave me out.’

  ‘It will look uneven.’

  They say it’s an honour. He tries to think but his head is thudding. He sees the names exposed to the sun and wind and crow droppings, the gaze of random sheltering kangaroos and dingoes for a century or two.

  ‘Write the name Angelica Lloyd.’

  ‘She is?’

  ‘My fiancée.’

  A fiancée is acceptable. They ask him to write down the name to save the embarrassment of a spelling error. It’s for posterity after all.

  No doubt they wonder at his stiff fingers, the gruesome scar. His hand shaking so for such a minor effort.

  Of course a bullet striking flesh has a terrible and forceful effect. There is a jagged tearing, ripping and stretching. A bullet fired across the room from the showy octagonal barrel of an actor’s Tranter six-shot .45 is violent but fortunately fairly slow.

  This bullet went through the prominent veins and thin flesh on the back of his hand, below the middle and index fingers, leaving a hole an inch across. It severed two tendons, fractured the second and third metacarpal bones and was lodged there until he flicked it out with his pen-knife in a half-swoon onto the deck of the South Perth ferry.

  Then stumbled home like a wounded bear to his cave.

  It left him with two numb fingers that wouldn’t fully straighten and a puckered scar like a coin. And some minor clumsy habits. He couldn’t scoop up water to wash his face without poking himself in the eye. When he tried to put his hand in his pocket it got snagged up. And he couldn’t tuck in a bedsheet without catching his fingers.

  But despite the wound, despite himself, he gradually found he could write and draw plans and tie shoelaces, although it took a greater effort. He could do more or less everything else.

  (He could write letters to her, and did so for a month. He did not really expect a reply and there was not one.)

  He could easily cup the bowl of a bamboo opium pipe in his wounded hand throughout the night.

  In eight weeks the wound had healed and the pain was gone. The explosion inside his head also eventually went away. What remained was the vision of her in the white nightdress, in this bewildering context. His blood on her face, the rueful smile, her short-haired head shaking no. No to reality, to the memory of loving attentions and laughing intimacies. To firm declarations.

  I just know we were together.

  What remained was his hand permanently moulded in the gesture of opening a hotel bedroom doorknob.

  STUDIO PORTRAIT WITH BICYCLES

  AFTER FOUR YEARS of water famine, the government at last sent ten thousand gallons of fresh water from the coast in two hundred and fifty 40-gallon steel drums on O’Connor’s new railway. Halfway to the goldfields the water express was stranded by the leading edge of a tropical cyclone which swept south from the Timor Sea, flooding the track and the flat western desert for a hundred square miles.

  People later spoke in awe of those first huge raindrops which left pockmarks like teacups in the red dust. In the goldfields the torrential rain soon flooded the houses and hotels, washed away the hessian and canvas miners’ camps and overflowed every available receptacle. Every tank and bucket, all the dams and abandoned pits were filled. Millions of gallons ran off into the sand. In the deluge the Cobb and Co mail coach was swept away. The driver could just cut the lead horses free and ride them to safety, but the horses yoked to the pole were drowned. Those prospectors cut off by the floodwaters from food supplies stayed alive on pearl barley and dried beans. In the short life of the goldfields no one had imagined such heavy rain could fall.

  Two weeks after the deluge began the sun burst over the sheet of clotted red water spreading to the horizon and turned it purple. Only the camels, reasserting their eminence over the railway, their nostrils and humps barely above water, could make the crossing to the goldfields. In the claypans and in the chains of submerged salt lakes which had linked up along the courses of ancient rivers, the eggs of desert frogs and transparent shrimp responded magica
lly to the rare moisture and hatched in their millions. Flocks of swans and ducks, egrets, herons and ibises appeared in the crisp sky. The birds gorged themselves in the receding waters while glistening succulents and crimson creeping pea-flowers spread over the red shores.

  In the newly formed creeks and lakes the miners and barmaids and prostitutes held swimming contests, boating picnics and shooting parties of great hilarity and alcohol consumption. The strange turn in the weather had made both men and women excitable and reckless.

  Sweltering in his cream suit, Axel Boehm was on hand to photograph many of these novel moist occasions. He captured the miners splashing like toddlers and delighting in their nakedness. Their chests and buttocks gleaming with the blue-white of skim milk. Their heads and forearms as dark and shiny as big-city coffins or rosewood pianos.

  Although the humidity made his work more uncomfortable than usual, he gruffly ducked their cheerful splashings, resisted their tipsy calls to have a beer and a breather. To shed his clothes. To grab a slippery woman and dive in. He pleaded pressure of work. There was too much photographic potential in the muddy fun and mayhem.

  They needed no encouragement to pose for him. Look at that wobbly human pyramid of nine naked miners! That old bare-arsed prospector carrying Ruby Nattrice, the singing barmaid, on his shoulders! That leering woodcarter posing with a black swan’s neck protruding from his trouser flies!

  Around the lustful water parties, more birds—crows and galahs—now came in clouds to feed. Full of food, they were even easier to shoot. Bloody bird-down smeared the creek banks and barmaids returned to work with sunburned cleavages and wearing pink and grey galah feathers in their hair.

  The deluge had somehow changed the emotional climate. Unlikely people became intense and passionate and unrealistically optimistic.

  Take the reclusive sixty-year-old Californian prospector, Frank Knapp. Stimulated by the wet flesh of a weekend swimming party, he followed Ruby Nattrice back to town, and while she was at work let himself into her room behind the Duchess of Kent Hotel. Ruby was by now a longstanding popular attraction at the Duchess of Kent, singing and playing her catchy tunes on the piano while balancing a pint of pale ale on her chest. Her screams on finding a naked Frank Knapp drinking champagne in her bed brought drinkers running from the bar.

  Frank Knapp was astonished at the change in demeanour and attitude of the shoulder-riding nymph of the water picnic. Hadn’t her moist, muscular thighs gripped his ears until his head boomed and he saw red sparks? Didn’t he have a glass of champagne poured ready for her, and an interesting proposition to put?

  But she kept yelling. Frank Knapp had no inkling that his prank had touched a raw nerve with Ruby, that she was recalling brains on the sheet-iron wall and young Taffy Evans’ head peeled like a banana.

  He pulled out his last card. When his proposal of marriage was treated with the same shrieking disdain, Frank, offended and emotional, pitched the bottle at her. Ruby fell screaming with a glass sliver in her right eye. This was when the mob dragged him to the bedroom floor and stove in his forehead with her porcelain chamber pot.

  In the commercial side of town, meanwhile, previously conservative businessmen suddenly took the rainfall as a constant, like gold or the new railway, and planned rapid development. Talking Progress they began to form clubs and erect buildings which would last: impressive offices of granite and red clay-brick with galvanised-iron roofs and overhanging verandahs of imported hand-wrought iron. At the same time a rent appeared in the miners’ camaraderie of earlier days when both labourer and lord, smeared with the same dust, had drunk together. A consciousness of social status was stirring.

  A smart set rose mysteriously, literally from the red earth. The smart set came up with the idea of compacting the newly moistened ant beds to provide a surface for tennis and cricket and croquet games. Emboldened, they moved on to the jarrah-wood floors of the new Hippodrome where they held roller-skating parties presided over by a ‘Professor’ Seguy, a Frenchman who was a skilled skater and spoke five languages.

  Next thing the smart set were attending natural science lectures and conversazione evenings run by their new Art Society. Then, as members of the new Orchestral Society, they held their first charity concert and ball at the new corrugated-iron Mechanics and Miners’ Institute hall in aid of the Children’s Fresh Air League, to raise money to give disadvantaged miners’ children a summer holiday on the coast. Before long they were planning the first University and Public Schools Dinner, which attracted social attention for its variety of imported foods and French wines and for excluding the Scots and Irish. That every other nationality was excluded went without saying. ‘University’ meant Oxford and Cambridge.

  Every species was heedless and thriving in the new fertile inland. Late at night, when the pubs eventually ceased their bellowing, the rare noise of the frogs, like the bleating of demented sheep, kept the town from sleep.

  In the rare humidity of the myriad creeks and streams trickling through the backyards of the town and the refuse of the miners’ camps, the typhoid also thrived.

  The floodwaters mean that work on O’Connor’s aqueduct is delayed yet again. But the deluge teaches an important lesson: that once every forty or fifty years the desert floods. So where ancient water courses, as well as valleys and gullies and salt lakes, have to be crossed, the pipeline will have to be laid on high trestle bridges. Elsewhere O’Connor wants it to be laid on stanchions in high-banked trenches, to minimise expansion and contraction in the desert heat and cold.

  As well as keeping the water scheme on course and on time, the site engineer has to supervise the digging of the trenches, and the building of the timber trestles, and especially the caulking of the sixty-six thousand separate pipes into one pipeline.

  Will has seven caulking overseers to assist him along the length of the pipeline. One of them truly stands out—a middle-aged Yorkshireman named Dudley Bright. It’s Bright who every evening seeks out the highest point in the vicinity of their current camp on the pipetrack. A sandhill perhaps, maybe a granite outcrop, even an old ant hill. Carrying a narrow leather case, he climbs this rise and stands on the crest securing his footing and facing into the sunset. At the precise moment when the last ray of sun hits the horizon he produces a cornet from the case and begins to play.

  Sometimes on the flat plains the pipeline itself is the highest point in the landscape. Then Dudley Bright heaves himself up on the trestle, climbs up on a rapidly cooling length of pipe, to blow his cornet. He’s a dark, serious sort of fellow, slow and red-jowled. The day’s clanking and hammering is suddenly over. Men stop their murmuring. In the cooler air the sound of Dudley Bright’s cornet is as sharp and startling as condensation on steel pipe, as the fresh dark, as the smell of damp turned earth.

  The tune he plays each night is ‘Sweet Marie’. The nightly notes of ‘Sweet Marie’ have become part of the project, like hauling or bolstering, as vital as the caulking process itself.

  As for the caulking, each pipe has to be joined to its fellow by a simple thimble ring packed with lead. Every twenty-eight feet along the aqueduct’s three hundred and fifty mile length there is a joint to be caulked—the pipes’ length having been determined by the length of the railway wagons hauling them into the desert. The wagons are thirty feet long.

  The caulking is done by hand. The work is hard and exacting and encourages bad tempers. The pipes absorb the sun. Long before noon a flick of sweat sizzles as it drops on steel. The caulkers have to work in exposed conditions, handling molten metal in cramped and twisted positions, often lying on their sides and backs. Hot lead scorching through clothing and leather aprons can burn their groins and bellies.

  On the aqueduct there is no place for sloppy work. A caulker is a special sort of skilled labourer: steady, sober and physically strong. A man who can work with minimum supervision in a small team strung out along a remote stretch of pipetrack. That’s the ideal. In the harsh reality of the climate and countryside w
ho could find one of these paragons? Few of Will’s caulkers have any experience. Drawn from other states and countries and occupations by the lure of gold, most are failed prospectors—boozers and misfits unused to hard labour.

  They have to be scrutinised, bullied and inspired to work effectively as a team. The overseers are expected to coax them along, to impart a sense of the importance of the caulkers’ work to the success of the water scheme. By day Dudley Bright is barely adequate as an overseer. He lives in his own dour world, dull-eyed, with a constant string of spittle in the corner of his mouth. He stands too close, and he spits when he talks. Despite Will’s seniority, whenever his overseer looses spit on him, he agonises over whether to wipe it off or leave it.

  But at dusk Dudley comes into his own. His cornet playing brings his caulkers together. At the end of the day his ‘Sweet Marie’ lifts their spirits. They love the whole procedure. By late afternoon they are all pointing out to him the best hill for his evening recital. At knockoff time a hush falls as he strides forward with his cornet case. As he climbs the rise they regard his stocky frame as almost heroic.

  ‘Up he goes,’ they murmur. ‘Up goes Dudley.’

  Suspense hangs in the lemony light as the sun slides down, as he shuffles and positions himself on the crest. The pipeline stretches back to the west as far as they can see, thin as a hair. It’s longer than yesterday. It’s a cord linking them to the sunset, to where they have come from and to everything they have already accomplished. The sun is falling fast now as he takes the cornet from the case. The brass glints as he raises it to his juicy lips.

  The split-second joint explosion of sun and sound.

  Dudley Bright’s caulkers’ gang reaches the outskirts of the small wheat and sheep town of Merredin. The gang camps that night by a thinly timbered rise just west of town. As dusk approaches, Bright strides alone up the gravelly hill. Casuarinas and stunted banksias struggle up the stony slope. Magpies carol and dive past him, and pairs of green parrots whizzing home before nightfall. He straddles the hilltop as usual and takes out his cornet, nobly faces the setting sun, pops his lips and raises the mouthpiece.