The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  To avoid worrying visiting London investors, Locke was now expected to gather up the corpses late at night. Often he went on his rounds directly from the pub. The drink gave him a jauntiness helpful both in dealing with his morbid task and for bantering with the night nurses. And, incidentally, for masking his disappointment at his lack of success with Inez.

  Of course he’d long known about Inez and Boehm. He was disappointed, but not as surprised as he might have been. She was with Axel. She was Axel’s subject. (Miss Gosper Arrives in the Goldfields, Woman Kissing Cockatoo. He had seen both photographs.) After five years in this place what could surprise him now?

  As he stacked young men’s bodies in the hearse he kept up his cryptic joking with her.

  More out of habit than optimism, he’d shout over the ranting of the delirious patients, the poor typhoids: ‘Come here often?’ (How clever he was at masking his strange shyness with her, and her attractiveness to him. And how stupid and perverse. He hated his own jokey bullshit. He didn’t want this platonic banter, he wanted passion.) ‘Lovely night for it!’

  She kept up her part of their routine. Dashing past with damp towels, subduing straps, a stinking bedpan, maybe a kidney dish of maggots she’d extracted from some prospector’s suppurating Barcoo ulcer, she’d flick a damp strand of hair from her eyes and shoot back, ‘Couldn’t be better!’

  He’d never felt so aroused by anyone. He adored the flush in her cheeks—the life, the passion, the confidence, evident there. She stood for good works without the piety. And the quirky mystery of her choices certainly added to the intrigue. Her circumstances and surroundings made her seem twice as alive. Umpteen beers and a couple of scotches in his bloodstream: it was all he could do not to put down the body he was carrying and take that quick body in his arms.

  Of course carting the bodies back to the funeral parlour, his mood swung with the alcohol in his blood from lust to depression. The moon and stars in the clear sky made him ache with longing. Luckily the horses were alert. Every so often they had to manoeuvre the hearse around a body passed out drunk in the street. Lying behind him tonight under the tarpaulin, ten males aged seventeen to thirty. Compared to him they were noble and full of infinite sense, on a loftier plane. And another four hospitals to go.

  A brightly painted woman cooed and swung her hips at him from Madame Rioux’s. Then, realising who it was, she gasped and stood staring from the doorframe as he passed, her hand to her mouth. His answering wave was cursory. A dull pain was beginning behind his eyes.

  Inez was just another skittish, superstitious woman who wouldn’t permit these undertaker’s hands to touch her.

  Her hands caressed the skin of the dying, his the dead. The very same patients. The difference in their condition only a matter of minutes. Both pairs of hands were privy to the same intimate secrets. Why was that tiny step in time such an unbridgeable gap? Why did that hiccup make such a vast difference?

  Violette came back inside the house looking drawn and anxious under her makeup. Dr Malebranche was sitting with Madame Rioux at her kitchen table smoking and drinking cognac. Violette sat down and crossed herself.

  Malebranche had heard the hearse rumble past in the now quiet street, the horses’ slow tread giving it away. He said, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The undertaker just went past!’

  He blew smoke across the table. ‘So what?’

  Violette pulled her chemisette together, folded her arms across her chest. The skin of her arms was suddenly goose-fleshed and patchy. Her voice was faint. ‘He beckoned to me.’

  ‘He’s a decent fellow, Felix.’

  ‘He was staring at this house. His eyes looked right into mine.’

  ‘Merde,’ said Madame Rioux, looking at the clock. Half-past three. She screwed the top back on the brandy bottle and placed it out of reach.

  Malebranche patted Violette’s damp shoulder. Only a few hours before, after his own rounds of the hospitals, he’d been drinking with Locke. ‘He probably fancied you,’ he said. ‘He’s just a normal man, you know, doing his job.’

  ‘Collecting the dead!’

  ‘Someone has to do it.’

  ‘He brings death. The fever of the rosy spots.’

  Madame Rioux was yawning loudly and restlessly jiggling her brandy glass on the tabletop. The plague to deal with, and now the Exhibition’s visiting excitement-seekers as well!

  ‘Violette, you’re crazy.’ Malebranche snorted in exasperation and stubbed out his cigarette. He’d rarely felt so frustrated. The deaths kept increasing. His own puny search for the causes of typhoid was bogged down. The infusoria eluded him. He was suddenly shocked at the sight of his hand hovering over the ashtray. From tonight’s bore-water bath with Violette it was wrinkled and white and glistening with salt.

  He stared at it and shuddered. ‘Felix removes death.’ He almost shouted. ‘He carries it away!’

  Violette rocked back and forth on her chair and stared out the window at the black sky.

  ‘Time to go,’ Malebranche announced. He finished his brandy as he stood up. He was adjusting his clothing to leave when the young English customer who had been smoking opium with Juliette in the next room abruptly appeared in the doorway. He was naked and shivering violently and his eyes were bright and glassy. He was trying unsuccessfully to grip the doorknob, perhaps to help support himself. Even across the room Malebranche could hear his teeth chattering.

  Juliette was holding him up with difficulty and making a nauseated face. ‘This one is sick,’ she said.

  THE LUNATICS’ DOUCHE

  IT’S NOT ALWAYS her in his fevers. Grey eyes glazing green. The pointed chin. Hair cascading to her thighs. The nightmare woman at her sunset bath.

  Unfamiliar women, too, populate his dreams. But they erode in his arms, before his eyes. They lose their lips. Everything dries up. Ears and noses age and dangle like scrotums in warm water. Even so, you’d think nuzzling turkey necks, kissing faded eyes, would return them to their prime—fleshy, flirting farm girls and smooth-skinned washerwomen. But running sores break out across their skin and stinging insects sup on them.

  He sweats and thirsts for love. He almost chokes once on a fat woman’s tongue. Her breath tastes like hot tin and mustard. He’ll warm to anything friendly. One glittery dawn he reaches out to love a citrus beetle on a lemon tree. It couldn’t be a more enticing green; it’s just its musky ooze that makes him gag. Another time a jolly dog stands above him panting. When it slobbers, its turd-eating breath alone is worth a yell. He goes to pet his budgerigar and dead pelicans’ wings span the room.

  Sometimes, in tears, he sees himself as a little boy with sleepy hair, and loves himself as son and father. Wakes gently picking scales of cradlecap from his own scalp. Kissing the softly pulsing diamond of his fontanelle.

  No, his dreams aren’t always of her. Bold Wiltshire nightmares arrive from yesteryear. Pig-hating horses screaming at the steam rising from horseflesh stewing for the sows. And his laughing father spreading chunks of raw horsemeat in the boughs of apple trees. Trees bursting with flesh and hens and rosy apples. Hens falling on the maggots of the flesh-fly with noisy relish.

  He canters through the damp orchard of his bed and greedy oinks and clucks and horse’s screams burst from his dry throat.

  The high smell of horse urine wakes him that time. His father insisting on soaking everyone’s boots for extra suppleness.

  Even at his most conscious, mid-afternoon, he still lives in his throbbing head. Each pulse-beat is a rhythmic thought compulsively repeated. Sometimes he could swear he’s smoking opium. Slithery fish. Sloshy sties. Mucus in a spaniel’s eyes. In his mind he holds a pencil in his curled hand, writes hieroglyphics in the saucer of his skull. Morning dew on horses’ gums. Apes’ red suppurating bums. When he becomes aware of the nurse Inez sponging him down, he clears his papery throat and tries to scrape up the sanity and spittle to address her.

  ‘Dribble of tots. Women’s froth,’ he confides.r />
  ‘We’ll have two ounces of glycerine and borax now,’ she says.

  Her hand strokes his forehead, prises open the flaky lips. His tongue is painted in curds. Its edges and tip are red. He gags a little and shares another confidence about moistures.

  ‘Madmen’s spit. Egg-white snot.’

  ‘Yes, indeed.’ She pats his arm, pushes hair from her damp brow. ‘I want to clean out your mouth, William Dance, and have you drink something.’

  It’s mostly Angelica though. Two years down the track is nothing to a fever.

  Fever’s eyes are ash, her cheeks are flames. Fever dips a wet tongue into his every corner, buries her hot and restless face. Fever arches her hips up at him, her damp hair in his mouth, while he holds her moist breasts from behind.

  Of course he responds to Fever. Loses himself in her luscious lips, wide mouth and eyes, flaring nostrils, sumptuous thighs. (In the beginning he couldn’t find his way in, Fever’s door was so narrow. Then it suddenly unlocked so wide she turned almost inside out.) But sadly now Fever has become all beak and wings and coiling neck. Fever pecking at his daydreams, hissing in his face, gutting him with lightning kicks.

  Angelica directing the Lunatics’ Douche as his swansong and making certain things happen to him.

  Coming into town from the pipetrack he had felt strangely detached and languid. During the first day of the Exhibition his languor grew. His muscles turned as light and flimsy as tissue paper. The Chief and the Department of Public Works held a public presentation of the plans and progress of the water scheme while his lethargy increased.

  O’Connor presided in the Mechanics’ Institute Hall over his maps and models and miniature pipes and pumping stations. Will propped himself up against the iron wall watching the people of the goldfields nod soberly at this other tussle with gravity and nature. (As they left, however, they muttered to themselves, ‘But will the bloody thing ever happen?’) The visiting engineers and industrialists seemed suitably impressed. ‘Bold but clear in principle,’ was their reaction. (They couldn’t have missed the pipetrack from the train.) ‘Anyway, there’s no feasible alternative.’ As Will fought to stay on his feet, they shook his hand as well.

  Later O’Connor spelled it out for him in the back bar of the Windsor Castle. ‘It might be all beer and skittles here—they want the bloody water to arrive.’ But in the city the attacks on him were getting more petty and malicious. ‘They’re not thirsty there and they don’t let up. Every man thinks he’s competent to make engineering and economic judgements. I’m supposed to be greasing my palm, stealing millions from the taxpayer. In parliament and the papers I’m the whipping boy more than ever.’

  Will was so wobbly he could barely hold his pint of bitter.

  O’Connor was weary, too, but fierce with tension. He rubbed at the neuralgic twinges around his eyes. ‘I’m supposed to be nefarious, corrupt, a reckless blunderer!’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘And Forrest has gone into federal politics, so no bastard in parliament has the courage to stand up for me.’

  By then Will was seeing geometric changes in his surroundings. Wavering perpendiculars. Indoor mirages. He put it down to a touch of sunstroke and excused himself. In his hotel room he smoked a pipe and in its strangely cooling daze walked outside into the street still seeing fields of snowdrops. Feeling the touch of their ice-cold stalks and inhaling their bitter smell.

  He wanted to retain that image. The glittering winter sunshine and the icy radiance of the snow! Searching for the luxury of cold, he went looking for the legendary watery ministrations of Madame Rioux’s. As he told Juliette that night, he longed for dark earth instead of red sand, mud instead of dust, apple-faced girls washing sheets in grey streams. He wanted loamy puddles and dripping greenery.

  ‘I want frost,’ he said.

  The very idea of cold was sensual. Cold was lusty. Making love after the theatre that midnight on the frosty grass of Batheaston common! Heedless to the cold and wet, laughing at their cold, tight lips, their teeth clashing like tombstones. Becoming aware of a man’s shape watching them from the shadows, he’d grunted, ‘Piss off!’ and growled like a dog, but was in no position to do anything about him, not lurching helplessly in that specific moist oven-heat. (Angelica just closed her eyes and ignored the pervert.) And when they’d finished, the man wandered off snapping twigs in his hands and cackling bitterly to the stars.

  He ached for ferns and moss and snow and her.

  ‘Neige. I want la neige,’ he murmured. ‘Je veux la neige.’

  ‘Quoi?’ Juliette said. The time he was taking! Just as well he’d paid the long-time rate. Just seeing him and his pipe swaying on the doorstep, Madame Rioux had demanded it.

  Amazing, he said, now he wouldn’t even mind the Levels. ‘Imagine that!’ he mumbled into Juliette’s dimpled shoulder.

  Then he was sitting up suddenly and ranting about the man watching in the frosty grass.

  She grunted and pushed away and reclaimed her air space from this clammy body. Not understanding her client in the least, she had difficulty for once knowing exactly when a man’s want meant demand, when sweat became fever, when maudlin turned delirious.

  He began to shiver, then he vomited. He felt a disgust for food but a great thirst. He had a violent headache and repeated diarrhoea. His eyes were vacant and glassy. He was deaf and confused and he raved at night.

  After three days his abdomen swelled and was painful on the lower right side. On the fifth day rose-coloured spots sprouted over his chest and abdomen like huge fleabites. At the same time he complained of a sore throat and pains in all his limbs.

  It wasn’t surprising that his stomach hurt. In such typhoid cases the lower half of the small bowel and the upper part of the large intestine are covered in ulcers.

  ‘This is where death takes over,’ Dr Jean-Pierre Malebranche explained briskly to the victim’s employer. The Engineer-in-Chief had postponed his departure back to Perth until the next day’s train. The doctor said, ‘If one of these ulcers penetrates the bowel it’s all over.’

  ‘What are his chances?’

  ‘The typhoids have to be kept as quiet as possible to prevent perforation and haemorrhage of their bowels. This may happen in the third week. Or any time, if the wrong food is given or they aren’t kept quiet.’

  ‘My God.’

  ‘If they survive three weeks they may eventually crawl back to convalescence.’

  ‘Naturally I want the best treatment for him.’

  The doctor looked carefully at O’Connor. ‘I’m sure the nurses will observe their usual high standards of care,’ he said drily. ‘You know he’s just one victim in the middle of a continuing epidemic.’

  In one respect, of course, this victim was different from the others. This one he’d seen himself teetering through the bedroom door at Madame Rioux’s, melting in his own sweat. This one’ s body, like his own, had glistened white with the salts of the bore-water bath. Ever since he’d pondered on the source of the young man’s infection. Yet again he worried about the elusive infusoria. About where and how it chose to strike. But he felt tense and overtired and said, brusquely, ‘I’m curious that you encourage your employees to live such reckless lives. I refer to his opium smoking and the old gunshot wound.’

  The Chief blinked slowly, then glared at him. His eyes were tired, too, and fiercer. ‘This is the frontier. We’re all pioneers here, doctor.’

  ‘We’re certainly that.’

  ‘I hope you appreciate the sad irony that this man is in charge of bringing water to your town. To eliminate disease from your patients’ lives.’

  Malebranche sighed and rubbed his eyes. ‘We’ll do our utmost,’ he said.

  For the moment the patient lay mostly quiet on the hospital cot. The nerves around his mouth and closed eyes skittered under the sallow sheen of his skin.

  In his head, trees whirled in the wind, rain sluiced down the roof, and parrots scattered from the thunderstorm int
o hollow trees. Lightning flashed through his eyelids. The river was a black sea battering the shore. Branches thudded against the bungalow like sledgehammer blows. Above him in the empty, echoing house the possums growled and hissed and scrabbled across the ceiling, sent mad by the driving rain.

  Of all the nurses’ touches, hers is lightest and coolest and registers most on him. Even when she doesn’t speak and his eyes are closed his skin recognises her soft fingertips.

  While capable enough, her touch is more tentative, not as brisk and cursory and professional as the touches of the others. There is another thing different about her touch. What is hinted at when her hands brush or clasp or bathe his flesh (and this is mostly in his daytime waking periods, when his skin is so sensitive, the nerves so close to the surface that it feels like raw flower petals) is that her touch is … almost grateful.

  Not that the demeanour of Inez Gosper says this. It’s just the hint in the pressure of her palms, their unconscious reacting to a faint flicker of response. Her fingertips speaking to his sick but still striving skin.

  Her hands—her amateur’s fingers, her woman’s fingers—treat him as a patient rather than a victim. As a man rather than a poor typhoid. He responds to the equality in this. And the optimism.

  As for her, she is doing—and getting a response. She’s not in control so much as taking part in a mutual act. It’s a vaguely uncomfortable realisation, but for once she feels there is something in this job for her.

  Could this byplay be what the other Melbourne girls in the ship’s saloon had chattered about? The satisfaction?