The Drowner

by Robert Drewe

  He wakes suddenly, wondering, ‘What’s that noise, that cool wind, in my head?’

  ‘It’s the tail end of the gale that went through this morning. Thank God you lot were prone and out to it. The top blew off the tent in the first minute. Then the kitchen roof-iron speared through here at head level. See, you’re lucky, after all.’

  ‘There’s dirt and beetles on me. We’re in the open!’

  ‘Don’t excite yourself. They’re bringing new tents.’

  ‘It’s all right. I like to see dark clouds and feel the cool.’

  ‘You should have seen it! The warning plume of dust. Then beetles swarmed inside the tents just before it struck and covered the walls like pepper. Camels and horses were tossed about. Raindrops as wide as saucers for a minute, then of course no rain at all.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s excited.’

  ‘It blew the rubbish heaps and dust away. I like things that clear the air.’

  She smiles at him, then shivers.

  ‘In the mine shafts they lost electric power for the cages. Can you imagine climbing up all that distance to reach the surface? From the centre of the earth, half-a-mile hand over hand, in the dark?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is that a bullet wound?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone shot you quite recently?’

  ‘Two years ago.’

  ‘What dreadful thing had you done to them?’

  ‘Just opened the wrong door.’

  ‘May I touch it?’

  ‘Be my guest.’

  ‘It feels like satin.’

  One time around, two, her finger circles his scar. Like a nursery game.

  ‘Actually, I touched it once when you were out to it.’

  ‘Drink this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A little condensed milk and water.’

  ‘Here I was expecting beer.’

  ‘And then some sago.’

  ‘My God, I’d love a plate of ham and eggs.’

  ‘Soon. After the red patches separate and go away.’

  ‘What week is this?’

  ‘The third.’

  ‘I can feed myself now, you know.’

  ‘It’s my job.’

  In the middle of the fourth week he wakes suddenly towards dawn from a light night fever. It’s quiet except for the usual groaning and chattering of teeth. His body begins to tremble. An explosion of heat runs through it. He streams with sweat. As he kicks off the blanket he hears various inner sounds. A waterfall, the tinkling of bells, flutes tootling. A noise like the humming of bees or smoothly running machinery. No pain, but he visualises geometric shapes and the brilliant outlines of flames and waves. His head feels giddy and his mouth fills with saliva.

  Either I’m dreaming this or I’m a lunatic. He has rollicking, singing visions. Energy seems to pour in a powerful current from his spine, his balls, belly, heart, throat and forehead. He can feel his blood coursing through his limbs. Outside the tent some night-bird’s sudden choking call settles the quiet moans around him. Bodies flop finally into sleep. And soon he settles, too, calm and cool.

  After a moment he sits up and pulls open his vest. A pale, unfamiliar chest frail as a leaf, the ribs poking out, sadly concave abdomen, clear skin gleaming ghostly in the candlelight.

  Just then she comes through the tent flap into the ward.

  ‘Look!’ he calls out. ‘Up I get!’

  A dingo rustles outside in the rubbish heaps. A passing drunk shouts some gibberish. A patient moans and mutters back. Inez has a hand on his bare chest, lightly pushing him down.

  ‘Wait until morning.’

  Her touch stays on his new skin as she and her guttering candle move through the last hour of the night. He sits there bolt upright, a bold twig, sentinel of the typhoids.

  He leaves the Sisters of the People, but travels only sixty yards. He takes a room in the Prince of Wales, next door to the hospital, while he convalesces. He’s weak and emaciated. He could hardly return to the pipetrack yet. It makes sense, he tells himself, not to move until he’s stronger. And it’s handy to things.

  The room opens on to the balcony. From there he can see the cobalt sky and the red land pooling together in the huge mirage on the horizon. The mythical inland sea. The tall poppet heads and smokestacks and mullock heaps jutting up in all directions. The white heaps of tailings shimmering in the glare. Crows and cockatoos flapping by below eye-level. He can see their wing joints working under the feathers.

  During the day he takes the dry air on the balcony. He watches life go by. He eats a roast lunch of overcooked lamb or beef or pork, an evening meal of cold collations and sherry trifle. He drinks tea with five sugars to curb the salt. At night the light from the hotel bar below glints in the cracks and knots of his floorboards. The sounds are much the same: the ranting of the drinkers—men exchanging gold for alcohol—that much louder, the hubbub from his old colleagues, the poor typhoids, not quite so loud.

  Some nights the celebratory and nationalistic songs and banjo and fiddle and piano-accordion music swelling up from the bar drown out the typhoids altogether, and he, like everyone else, forgets about them. Then, in a rare quiet moment between numbers (perhaps the barmaid is shuffling though her sheet music and the hoarse-throated men decide to take a break and gulp a mouthful of beer) a blood-curdling shriek, a devilish gurgling laugh, cut the smoky silence.

  From the balcony he can see Inez moving between the tent wards, to the nurses’ tent, to the rubbish heaps and back. The sun darts off the pans and dishes as she empties them. In the mornings she hangs the night’s sweat-drenched blankets out to dry on the tin fence by the pub. She flicks back her hair and moves self-consciously.

  She knows she’s being watched.

  He waves.

  He knows her roster. Her first day off-duty he stays in his room all day. He doesn’t want to be seen so obviously waiting on the balcony.

  Two days pass. When he ventures outside the hotel for exercise—his legs still shaky, the sun beating on his dizzy head—he walks in the other direction, away from the hospital, towards the mirrored sea on the horizon. But only for a hundred yards.

  In two days she knocks on the door of his room. She’s out of uniform and holding a string bag of oranges.

  ‘I have something for you,’ she says. ‘I wanted to wait until your system could take it.’

  He lies back on the bed while she squeezes an orange segment into his mouth.

  ‘Just half an orange today,’ she says. ‘Not too much acid all at once.’

  She’s still acting the nurse. She has neatly diced the orange and flipped out its pips and laid the pieces on a saucer. She eats some, too, at first sitting on the edge of the bed holding the saucer, then gradually inching into a firmer, more central, position.

  He’s intoxicated by the sweet spikiness of the juice.

  ‘Are you spoken for?’ he asks abruptly.

  A breath of dusty air stirs the net curtains. She frowns, sighs, licks a sticky finger, eventually touches it to his scar.

  ‘Are you?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  There is a spot high on her thigh she steers him towards.

  ‘I could get more central than that.’

  ‘No, that’s right.’

  Not wanting to lose herself yet.

  She is in his room late on the humid Monday afternoon when the boy delivers the telegrams. She has sandalwood chips burning in a saucer. The day seems tight and swollen, ready to burst but unable to crack. Thunder rumbles in the eastern desert.

  The first telegram is from O’Connor, informing him that the government wants to hold yet another inquiry—its third—into the conduct and completion of his water scheme. This time ‘the instrument of tortuous delay’ is to be a Royal Commission.

  ‘This means you could be required to give evidence,’ he warns Will. ‘I hope your health is up to it.’

  The timing of the second telegram that the in
dignant telegraph boy brings up the stairs only half an hour later is—what with its shocking revelations—most confusing. But a weekend, with its Sunday break in telegraph services, has intervened between the sending of the two messages.

  In the overcast afternoon the room is dark. He takes the telegram out on to the balcony to read it. Crows flop in the hospital rubbish heaps. This message is from the Department of Public Works regarding the Engineer-in-Chief’s customary early morning ride along the foreshore.

  A finger of sandalwood scent follows him out onto the balcony.

  ‘You’ve suddenly lost your colour,’ she says.

  Bridget O’Connor had woken with a cold. So she had stayed in bed and not ridden with her father that Monday morning. The start of another week. Early autumn in the crisp coastal air. The Chief saddled up Moonlight as usual, and Arthur Lynch, his groom, saw him cantering off at 6.30 towards Fremantle harbour. Then he turned south along the coast toward Robb’s Jetty.

  It was still low tide as he cantered over the shells and strings of kelp and crusted powder of the shore. As he neared the jetty, he rode his horse over the lip of the tide and through the line of grey waves into the Indian Ocean.

  The breakwaters he’d built had altered the configuration of the coastline here, changed the surf, dictated how the tides behaved. Regardless of the wind or moon, the waves were now smaller and snappier south of his new harbour. And becoming chilly with the change of seasons.

  He urged the horse further out to sea. He let the breeze take his hat. The water was over the stirrups and Moonlight began to swim. The Chief faced across the ocean, took a revolver from his jacket pocket and put it to his head.

  ‘I have to leave here.’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not yet.’

  Oranges on the dresser. The sweet aroma of sandalwood. Other things associated with her, presents she has brought him. He’s amazed at the way they instantly represent the past. Lemon barley water. Glucose lozenges. Sadly leached by heat and storage: a tin of Swallow and Ariel chocolate biscuits illustrated with a snowy, sentimental European Christmas scene. Red desert peas in a beer glass. The changing cheery wildflowers she has picked from around the mines and mullock heaps. (Once arriving, smiling, saying, ‘I found orchids in Siberia.’)

  Symbols of femininity and need.

  Life was timing. That agonising moment when novelty became familiar.

  As small children he and Sarah had eagerly picked the first primroses when they appeared in January. A few weeks later, when they shone in every bank and hedgerow and filled the copses, they ignored them. They could have been weeds. And in early March hadn’t all the village children scrambled for the best violet marr? At the end of the month the blue and white flowers lay strewn on the road, dropped by bored hands.

  She’d brought him something else. Gold in a Players cigarette tin. Little nuggets like golden raisins.

  Rattling the tin, she’d said, ‘You can get some nice cufflinks and tie-pins made.’ Earlier, she’d asked, conversationally, ‘Do you have any gold?’ Like, ‘Do you play tennis?’

  ‘Not a speck.’

  ‘I have some.’

  The way she’d described it, she collected gold as a hobby. She said sick miners always brought their gold to hospital with them. Samples of rich ore, nuggets wrapped in rags or bags, hidden in their boots or billycans.

  ‘They give us presents when they pull through.’

  ‘What if they don’t pull through?’

  She’d looked off out the window. ‘You shake out their clothes before you burn them. Of course it depends whether there’s next-of-kin.’

  He can’t tell whether this charged and rumbling air is an approaching electrical storm or just the thunder of the ore batteries, the pulse of the goldfields. Like these surroundings, noticed for the first time.

  Brilliantine patches on the pillow. Old tobacco smoke (hence her smouldering sandalwood chips) permeating the kapok, the blankets, the filmy yellowed curtains, the sliding musty curvature of the mattress. Those pendant bedsprings whose squeals had first brought forth answering thumps and guffaws from the bar below, then hoots and cheers. Finally a bottle of Moët sent up with a grinning barmaid.

  ‘It would be a terrible shame to end this at the beginning,’ she says.

  The certainty of her touch. Lingering and hopeful. She would stay and hunker down in the desert with him. He knows this. Bartering gold to live. Eating oranges, fighting off the Barcoo sores of diet deficiency and the new bitter breeze humming along the telegraph wires.

  He’s dressing already.

  This is like delirium again, seeing the panicky horse snorting into the swell, swimming towards the mirages of land smudging the horizon. Its hooves chopping frantically at the rising waves. Dragging him by one stirrup out to sea. Without instruction, however, instinct taking over. Its reins trailing and the surf surging over the saddle. The horse turning back to shore.

  In the electrical humidity she stands naked in front of him. Her hands framing his thin face. He sees the line of her neck, a wisp of her hair, in geometric relation to the purple clouds behind them.

  ‘You shouldn’t travel yet.’

  ‘I have to go.’

  MARIONETTE JOYEUSE

  HUNCHED OVER A SLIDE containing a squirming droplet of Madame Rioux’s brothel’s bathwater, Dr Malebranche considered for the several hundredth time that, in the sequence of life, water was related both to the uterine and seminal fluids into which life dissolved and from which it regenerated.

  He’d seen this under his microscope in other samples from his visits to Madame Rioux’s. Myth and science and sex coming together. (The prostitutes couldn’t believe he took the used sheaths home.)

  Of course the water of life was also mythically related to other vital fluids—ambrosia, amrita, mead for the warrior, soma, wine, blood—all symbolising the surge of the libido, the feeling of being alive, the continuous flow of vital interest to and from the unconscious. Sensations not unknown to Jean-Pierre Malebranche, thank God. Even now, even in this place.

  Why then did it kill? And how? Or was he mistaken in this?

  Was Father l’Estrange right in saying that this vitality arose from the animal passions and drives? (Implying that the vital fluids were guarded by monsters! The Devil himself!) That only if one’s physical vitality were beaten down by prayer and abstinence could the pure, uncontaminated pleasures of life be enjoyed? He couldn’t accept God-the-Odd’s view that all those dead youths had had such a strong hand in their fates. That they had died merely from being adventurous boys.

  But wasn’t water supposed to warn the unwary? Like the pool of poisoned water in the desert which stopped you near its bank. Its eerie stagnant sheen silently screaming go no further.

  The irony was that he came from the new generation of science, the modernists for whom water meant health and industry, even pleasure, rather than religion. Water to him was a sanitary, industrial and commercial product, a raw material, a secular source of hygiene and energy.

  Of course he often married his belief in hygiene to his sensual nature. Bowed over his microscope slides now, deeply fatigued, he felt a real physical longing, a deep spinal ache from his sacrum to his shoulders, for the spas of Europe. For the romance of Baden-Baden, say, or Marianske Lazne. And, yes, a nostalgic twinge for the seductive ambience of a particular spa in Tokyo, with its shoji windows, tatami floors and a fresh chrysanthemum arrangement every morning.

  Beautiful women not only bathing him in waters of several temperatures, but pampering him with delicately sculpted meals, each delivered with a fan and a Zen poem. Giggling charmingly, teaching him to play wind instruments and make prayer arrows.

  Understandably, he sometimes optimistically mentioned these nostalgic enchantments to the Japanese prostitutes on Thursday nights. He’d murmured his approval, too, of their traditional douching habits.

  Little Oyoni sitting in her humid tin and hessian room, the French language washing over her, her s
ullen boyfriend pacing the gravel outside, just looked blankly at him.

  He was hardly writing anything these days. The difficulty of poetry, thought Felix Locke, was compounded by activity. There was too much happening around him. Too much flamboyant death and exaggerated life.

  But applying his imagination to the usual grass stems and sand-dunes and salt lakes suddenly seemed too silly to contemplate. In the midst of two such fierce fevers, why waste words on scree and shale and talus? He might as well be a geologist or a mining engineer. Why bother giving rich inner lives to crows and beetles? Why view the tumultuous world in a pock of dried mud?

  He was a romantic who was weary of nature.

  He was bone-tired and sexually frustrated and drinking too much.

  So he poured himself a long whisky, lit a Players and sat down and began to write a poem.

  Felix Locke and Mahomet Mahomet had, earlier this thundery afternoon, brought back to town a body charred evenly down its right side and missing the right ear, sleeve, trouser leg and boot. Now Locke, Dr Malebranche and Boehm are sitting on the balcony of the Prince of Wales drinking their sunset whiskies in the rumbling air and discussing the effects of lightning on the human body.

  ‘His heart stopped dead,’ says Malebranche, staring off at the sun disappearing into the violent green, yellow and purple clouds. ‘That’s what does it, the electrical shock.’

  ‘The lightning bolt through his skull didn’t help,’ Locke says.

  ‘What must be the odds against a man being struck by lightning?’ Malebranche continues, shaking his head in wonder. ‘Think of the tiny population and the vastness of the land and sky. The insignificance of the individual in the landscape.’

  ‘Look at it this way,’ says Locke. ‘It’s flat as a pancake for hundreds of miles. Not many hills, very few trees. Anyone standing up is a lightning rod. And my fellow was a six-footer.’