In the streets outside the cathedral, the rioters were sleeping in the pall of campfire smoke, low fog, or was it just the mist of sleeping gas, when the big Mack truck arrived. Perhaps rioting was exhausting work, or perhaps the city’s angels had been rocking the night watchers’ cradle, but no one stirred from the haze, lifted a head to see what was happening, stood up and yelled daylight robbery when the semitrailer hearse crawled in with the stealth of a sneaky fox. Even King Billy was asleep.
The huge vehicle slowly made its way through the snakelike barricades along each side of the road. The three-metre high riot barriers had been set up before nightfall when riot police pushed and crushed people off the road. With the cordon up, a long chain of heavily-armed soldiers in gas masks moved in, and were stationed on each side of the road.
The coffin was soon popped into the deep freezer of the Fresh Food People long-haul semitrailer attached to the Mack’s cab – now painted up in blue, red and white, as though draped with the nation’s flag. The semi was fully loaded and ready to hit the road at a quarter past three in the morning. Soon, the driver claimed through his gas mask to the sleeping widow accompanying him on this journey, when we get the hell out of this, he would soon be going somewhere else. This was the first and last thing he said to her. He was more interested in the road and the schedule. He normally travelled by himself and now it did not matter who was in his truck or how important they were, he still worked alone. This looming giant gripping the driver’s wheel never slept. He stared ahead through black sun-reflecting sunglasses that rested on his white block-out covered nose. He wore his Aboriginal flag-coloured cap down to his eyebrows to block out the sun that would stream in the driver’s window, and to keep his personal world secret, beyond the reach of others.
The cab was over-crowded. Claustrophobic. As well as the driver with all the clothing he owned on earth shoved in a bag, his collection of holy beads hanging from the rear-view mirror, and leprechaun good luck charms all over the place, he had to share the cabin with the security, all big sweaty units squashed up against each other, and the recently widowed First Lady thing – although what room did a mere slip of a thing like her need?
Even the Harbour Master, reunited with the recalcitrant Rigoletto sulking on his lap, had invited himself along for the ride. They were both squashed in a corner of the back seat next to Oblivia and were whispering to one another about having seen the security men before. It was hard to place where, the Harbour Master said, but he knew them. The girl thought the genies had come back into her life disguised as middle-aged men who now suspected her of killing her husband. These security men sat around in the cab of the truck and acted like Supreme Court judges. They whinged about dragging a coffin around the country, which they said was a stupid idea. Their power radiated through the driver’s cab like hot air and the unmistakable, uncontrolled yearning of a courtroom that was seeking the truth about Warren Finch’s killer. Unquenched, uncontrolled yearning that lasted thousands of kilometres with Oblivia tormenting herself with the question – did she, or did she not kill her husband, and was she just chasing the hare king that day? The driver pulled his cap further down onto his eyebrows. It was academic to him. He was not wishing for anything. Didn’t care if she had an alibi or not, or whether it was easier to believe that she killed her husband than to believe she was chasing a hare king. He became lead-footed to cure any urge for wishing, thinking or yearning, pressing harder on the accelerator and sending the semi flying along the road. On and on they flew, hundred of kilometres of gum trees quivering in their wake, and flatlands of sheep and cattle-filled grasslands wondering what had just happened, while she tossed and turned over her alibi, whether she had one or not.
The road train carted the body everywhere – up the Hume Highway, down the Stuart Highway, around the Monaro – eleven highways in all. Twenty thousand kilometres of the nation’s highways had been split down the middle to divide the country like two giant lungs.
The See You Around journey was for all people who bothered to stand out in a chilly night, or in the midday sun, if they cared enough to line the streets just to watch the Spirit of the Nation roaring by. The whole thing was a rhapsody in motion and could not have been more successful, as the road train roared down the highways of country and western music – mostly legend music by the country’s great singers like Slim Dusty, Rick and Thel, a bit of Chad Morgan – Camooweal, Mt Isa, Cloncurry, The Barkley, Wagga Wagga, Charleville, Cunnamulla, Yarrawonga, Plains of Peppimenarti, and the Three Rivers Hotel. But mostly, the clockwork nature of the thing was to keep to the Fresh Food People’s schedule of deliveries to its supermarket chain throughout the country, picking up and delivering crates of fruit and vegetables such as asparagus, mangoes, pawpaw, bananas and pineapples; or the oranges, apples, potatoes, strawberries and peas from the packing sheds and cool rooms of its Northern or Southern growers.
Along the way, the coffin was paraded and displayed for all to see in this festival of grieving. The black sassafras heritage coffin was wheeled out of the semitrailer on a trolley and set down in the middle of a dead-grass flat, banana plantation, or salt bush plain, where speeches were made in the slow drawl of the North, or a fiddle played through amplifiers at each tinker-tailor gathering, in fiddlestick towns, depressed cities, cut-throat roadhouses, or else, the coffin was rested on a bench in a mine’s mess room, in machinery, produce, wool and cattle sheds, or laid on the best linen table-cloth over the dining table of a cattleman’s station home.
It was a hard schedule, and the silent driver drove that little bit faster to keep on track when memorials could just as spontaneously spring up out of the blue when influential, backblocks politicians at the end of a dusty road demanded their impromptu See You Around event with the Spirit of the Nation. The driver did not complain. He did his job. Dragged out the coffin. Wore the consequences for making up time after listening to another dozen pip-squeak speeches for a half-dozen people at another local church, football stadium, soccer oval, paddock, courtroom or meeting hall of the Country Women’s Association, Boy Scout, or other local hall of fame.
The ghosts travelling in the road train were not complaining. The security guards enjoyed the view and started granting three wishes to whoever required them. Who were they to give two hoots if the coffin was continually being dragged out here or there in a journey that was endless? But the driver wished for nothing. He just kept growing older and driving on. He pushed the now less than splendid, soiled and chipped coffin out one more time, waited for the mourning to be done with and souvenir-hacking to be completed, and pushed the defaced coffin back up the ramp and into the freezer. There was no time any more for deliveries. It saved time to cut the words delivery or pickup off the list. He kicked the security men out. Said that they were weighing him down. They were too congenial to their ever-increasing queues of wish seekers. He could not sit around all day for other purposes. Everything in the big freezer began to rot. The driver’s eyes grew teary from being glued to the dusty road ahead, and he kept singing the same old song, Yea! Keep your eyes on the road, and your hands on the wheel, we’re having fun etcetera whatever. But when he sang, he only heard the transport; the roaring road train’s engine, wheels rolling over the highways. The widow never heard a thing said about Warren Finch in the endless parade of speeches. She had left before the journey began.
Goodness poor heart, the ghost walk. There are those who will warn anyone making this strange solitary journey, and will say: You have got to take enough to make it through.
This was what happened. Oblivia disappeared from the hearse’s spectacular schedule after the wind dusted off an icy night. What was the reason? And what was it about those prevailing dreams children have about life, that make them to go ghost walking like this? Away! Anywhere! That’s what happened to them. Was there ever a right way of leaving?
In a panicky night off she went, entangled in the vortex of a thunderstorm dizzily spinning over many kilometres in the higher stra
ta of the atmosphere. She just walked away without any thought of where she was going. Death, dying, or living had nothing to do with it. The truth of it was that wars do this to children. War children, like the torn world of Aboriginal children. Where were the kind crickets singing? Or, the big leaf under which to hide? The country’s hearth! Ah! She just walked around the smudged lines of the circles the giants had sketched in another of their hell maps.
She walked away from the semitrailer hearse, and listened for heartbeats: the silent chilled voicelessness of swans you hear in the weakened old and the very young tossed from the heavens, and those struggling to stay airborne with their wings stretched wide, locked against the force of the wind.
In a place where footsteps crackled on frost-hardened grass, her dreams were askew. Still! Quiet! Nevermind! There were people approaching, shadows in the darkness that looked like old Aunty and the Harbour Master with the monkey twisting around on his hip. The old woman was talking to the Harbour Master but her voice broke with the chill in the air. You’d be reaching for gold to find the place now. You could hear her continuing to recite bits of her old poetry, although she and the Harbour Master had already disappeared, and were walking somewhere that was infinitely far away.
In the morning there were only blue skies where the girl widow had walked off to find a flock of swans. For her, the mad hearse journey had finished. Who cared? The driver shouted to the thin vapours of air rising from the cold earth all around him, when he discovered she had left. You there? You there? Come back here. But tell you what? What did he care about anyone disappearing from his cortege if they had no respect for the dead? He had not seen the said personage contributing much to the memorial anyway. There were appointments to keep. A heavy schedule raced through his mind. He had a stiff in the freezer to think about. The haul going overseas once they got through Australia. So, with his cap pulled down lower over his sunglasses – man, he was hitting the highway. The rubber burnt the bitumen. A trail of smoke was left behind. You would think he was raising Lazarus from the dead.
She watched the semitrailer roaring up the highway from the ghost town’s park, amongst oak trees with exposed roots like the fingers of giants crossed for good luck. There he goes, she thought of Warren Finch, he’s still holding on to power, still searching for the ultimate paradise. Yep! The same stories you hear about power. A dead man was still making people run after him. It was the first time she had really thought about Warren Finch for a very long time.
Alone in this quiet forest where only a blackbird’s song rung out while the last stars disappeared, and the scream of the schedule became a dot on the awakening horizon, she suspected he was not dead at all. But who knows what thoughts will come right out of the bushland when you are alone? She saw for herself how Warren Finch could loom monumentally in the atmosphere like a gift from God. He was so indestructibly alive, just like the sky. Even in the middle of nowhere, he was still around, just as he was when she had watched the coffin absent-mindedly on the long journey, where he was being preserved as though he was some masterpiece in an art gallery. And just like famous paintings, he would never die as long as people looked at his dead body and appreciated the unique quality of his extraordinariness, and the propaganda of what he stood for in the world.
With leaves dropping from the oak trees at the slightest hint of a breeze, she thought about the frailty of perpetuity, and imagined she could still hear Warren talking on his mobile phone from the coffin in the semitrailer’s freezer, where he was continuously calling the driver and complaining about her disappearance. His muffled voice now giving the orders and snapping at the driver, the mobile capped to his ear, Where in the hell did she go?
Yes, she knew something. Warren Finch’s elaborate montage-self never intended to be buried. He was insisting that the glassy-eyed driver forget what he called the girl widow. She could look after herself. He was wondering why she was brought along in the first place. He yelled down his mobile from the sassafras coffin in the freezer. Well! Let it roar. You are doing the right thing driver. Keep going man – you got no time to frig around.
For what was death? It was just a matter of continuing on, keeping his ideas streaming out of centre stage in perpetual memorials. The fact of the matter was that it was hard to kill off someone who had gotten as big as the United Nations itself. Naturally, the gift from God would have to go around the world after this. No drama. Death was not an excuse for burying a person, and a bit of good history along with it. No – no drama at all.
Somewhere in this landscape, swans were stirring. It was a bright starry night. As the entire flock awakened, great hordes wove in and out of the tight pack with necks stretched high. These birds anticipated the movement of wind in the higher atmosphere. They gauged the speed of northerly flowing breezes caught in their neck feathers and across their red beaks and legs. The swans made no sound, but stood still while the wind intensified through the ruffling feathers on their breasts. Then suddenly from somewhere a startled swan flies up, and is followed by the roar of the lift off, and the sky is blanketed by black swans in the cold night, and Oblivia recalls the old Chinese monk Ch’i-chi’s poem of the flight of swans in the night, like a lone boat chasing the moon. She watched, and knew she had found her swans. They had found each other’s heartbeat, the pulse humming through the land from one to the other, like the sound of distant clap sticks beating through ceremony, connecting together the spirits, people and place of all times into one. These were her swans from the swamp. There was no going back. She would follow them. They were heading north, on the way home.
On this night, she travelled over hills of heavily-scented eucalypt forests, until she reached the shallow swamps of wintertime flowing through the scattered tea-tree country where most of the land was perpetually under water. The swans rest, but there will be days of walking through water to follow them.
She was not the only one who kept away from the heavy migration of travellers – poor families on foot, and those able to afford to travel in a vehicle like Big Red’s family – who had been forced to leave the ruined city. They were the people with passports and not a threat to the national security. They were not like potential terrorists: this colourful procession of licensed travellers – those who had passed the rigid nationality test for maintaining a high level of security in the country, and could pay the tax that allowed them to pass through the numerous security checkpoints on the highways.
Oblivia joined those who were travelling incognito on unofficial and illegal crossings through the swamps. There were so many people moving through the country, she was never alone. They were all searching for the same shallow pathways, and dazed like her, all following each other, while trying to take their life somewhere else. There were people dressed in dark clothes across the landscape, trying not to look conspicuous. Some were former street people. Others were the homeless people who had slept on the footpaths with cardboard blankets, or in empty buildings. Now in hordes and all travelling north, they crowded the swampy lanes on pitch-black nights and nestled close to one another for safety. Most had white hair, even the children, and similar stories of what happened, it was those snakes. It was the last straw. A moment was all it had taken, many had claimed, to turn anyone prematurely white; that night when the rain and wind hit the city like a brick wall had been thrown at it after Warren Finch was killed.
The navigators at the top of the line of the people travelling through the water were continually arguing amongst themselves about their weapons – if a bread knife was better than a sugar-cane cutlass for cutting through, or whether the thickness of a long pole was better cut by an axe, but whether or not they were arguing, they had to decide which direction either left or right that any idiot would take through the shallows ahead. And then they continued yelping: Yep! Good job I traded that bread knife. Yep! Good job I made that bamboo pole longer.
These men claimed to be the policemen over this stretch of country, although in the real world, they were o
nly a bunch of intergenerational environmentalists, turned greenies, turned ferals, turned strapped for cash to save a multitude of furry or feathered threatened species in international forums, or their favourite rare trees. They knew the swamps. Their families had grown up with rising waters. When the opportunity arose to make some money, who could blame them for becoming entrepreneurial? Human removalists, they called themselves. It sounded nice. Sure it was not legit or leftie, but what was? Their mantra while leading the incognitos was a list of challenging superiority-complex questions, such as, what makes you people from southern cities think you can speak for us? What makes you think we can’t speak for ourselves? What makes you think you are better than us? Or, How would you know this country better than us?
They guided dirt-poor people through rough country, even though the plain and simple truth was that they were just people smugglers, not interested in public investment, or becoming security-conscious public servants. Whether they thought what had happened in the city was of any consequence, what did it matter? There were plenty of snakes around this neck of the woods too. It was all of this mixed up weather, they claimed. Anything was possible, but that was not their problem. Their job was simple enough. Ask no questions, and get enough people through expansive low-lying flood water in the flat lands in a transaction that implied: We can show you a thing or two about hardship if that’s what you want.
The Swan Book Page 30