by Paul Haines
I know I can.
I’ve thought about it a lot. I wonder if the actuality is worse than my imaginings. I know, of course, that it must be; far, far worse.
I’ve heard it said that the only truly important question in life is whether or not to kill yourself. If so, then every ruined body I’ve retrieved from the bottom of the Yarra is the shell of a great philosopher, who solved the only real riddle in existence with final aplomb. I can’t claim as much.
Here’s how it works.
When someone jumps off the West Gate, they fall one hell of a long way. I’ve already told you how high the bridge is in metres, but all that matters when you’re a human body plummeting from the bridge is that it’s one hell of a long way. So, after falling for eternity within a brief moment, the body hits the water. It can get pretty messed up on impact, sure; but that doesn’t concern us right now, because if they just end up in the water (or, if they miscalculate entirely, the riverbank), they don’t need me to go get them. They float. Eventually. But I can tell you now, most of them don’t just hit the water. Because—remember?—they fall such a long way. They’re like fleshy torpedoes; they keep right on going. They part the water like a willing woman’s legs, and they penetrate the fecund muddy cradle that lies beneath. And there they stay; implanted like sperm in an egg, only the merge is not one of life but of death.
And we can’t just leave all those bodies planted in the mud down there, in the river our city plays in, gazes upon, drinks from (never mind the fact that it’s already a polluted cesspit). No, somebody has to go and remove them. And that somebody is me.
I’m not the only one, of course. Victoria Police contract 10 divers from Any Dive, the HAZMAT diving company I am part of. But most of the other guys only do a West Gate suicide dive now and then; they also do the other stuff Vic Police need chumps like us to do for them—the raw sewage dives, the chemical infested pipelines, the simple body removals (usually murders, not suicides) from more placid lakes and waterways. Me? I’m a fulltime West Gate diver. I manage the Any Dive team. I’m on call. I’m devoted.
Not that it really matters, but my name is Ryan Deer. I’m 38, I’m single, and I live in a two bedroom apartment in West Brunswick. One bedroom for me. Another for the West Gate suicides who live with me always, their twisted limbs cavorting in my dreams, their agonised faces floating behind my eyes, breaking my heart over and over.
They are all my darlings; I have a memory slot in the computer of my brain allocated to saving each and every one of them. We tousle in the hungry soil of the riverbed together and we share an intimacy (them dead, me alive—in theory) that I never find above the roiling waterline of the Yarra. I have loved them all well.
But none as well as she.
* * *
It was a 4am dive, one summer Sunday.
We usually do them in the very late or early hours, when traffic on the West Gate is a sluggish crawl and we’re not likely to be noticed. Berko—self-dubbed “King of the Yarra”—squatted on the boat as I dove, cigarette dangling from the corner of his wisened mouth, directing the big industrial spotlight on me and the sprawling riverbed. I’ve got my own kit, torches included, but that spotlight is vicious, and it slices deeply into the water without mercy. It’s enough to see all I need to see. You’d be surprised just how much I do see under that glare.
The first thing I see is her hair. Well, some of it. It’s lying on the riverbed about a metre from the rest of her. It’s a lonely thing, swaying to and fro with the water’s movement like flaxen seaweed. It’s anchored down by the hunk of scalp it’s still implanted in; the bloody underside of the skin flap glued to the dark mud of the riverbed. I guess the impact of her body meeting the water—akin to smashing into a mass of concrete at great speed when you jump from such a height—caused half her scalp to shear right off her skull.
It’s far from the worst thing I’ve seen down here on the scummy underside of the Yarra, but it might be the saddest. The portion of scalp and the endless riverbed, clinging to each other like star-crossed lovers while the owner of the scalp resides—alone, separate, discarded—elsewhere.
I hook the piece of scalp with my pick-up-stick, bagging it and sending it up the line to Berko. I’m not interested in that lost piece of her. It forsook her, and it must fend for itself now.
I move over towards her, approaching slowly; respectfully. Only her legs are visible, pointing up at the water’s surface like accusations. They are naked, and streaked with deep furrows where her body has caved under the assault of the long jump. Blood and mud and pain are visible in her wounds. One of her feet is aimed backwards, bent double; her left leg is moving in a fluid way that boned limbs should not be able to achieve. At the point where her thighs should meld with her buttocks and pubic mound, there is only the riverbed; a muddy chastity belt, devouring her sex and the rest of her body; hiding her in the netherworld beneath the sod.
She’s a head-first jumper. I don’t see many of them. Most suicides literally step off their platform, or leap—but almost always feet-first. They hit the water in a messy heap, sideways or footways or any which ways—but rarely headways.
I have a sudden image of this woman, tall, blonde, and nude; arching her back as she reaches above herself with pale arms, looking at the sky before soaring away from the bridge in a perfect swan-dive.
Do-it-yourself fatality, head-first.
She must have been something. No doubts. No half-arsing. Just diving right into death, naked and determined. And how did she manage to climb to the middle of the West Gate with no clothes on? Did anyone try to stop her? Was she naked before she even got onto the bridge? Why?
Without thinking, without even pausing, I peel off one of my gloves and cup the curve of her right calf in my hand. She feels smooth and cool, and somehow hard. We stay like that for a while, she and I, clad in water and skin to skin. I have to fight the urge to wrench out my mouthpiece and press my lips to her legs; lick healing into them, taste her, know her. The compulsion to surrender my oxygen for her is overwhelming.
Then Berko jiggles the spotlight, impatient, and I know it’s time to get to work.
I’m going to get you out, I mouth, chewing on my life-giving bit, the urge to spit it out still strong. I’m going to free you from this river. I promise. Trust me.
The alabaster tendrils of her legs move in my direction, and I know she is relying on me. I won’t let her down. I’ve never let any of them down—I always get them out—but it’s never mattered to me as much as it does right now.
Reluctantly, I flip the switch on the pack on my belt, activating voice communication with Berko as he bobs high above me. His voice barges down the umbilical line connecting me to the boat, ornery and indignant, violating my suit and flooding my head.
“Bin ’avin’ fun down there, ’ave ya? What the fuck’re ya doin’, anyway? Courtin’ the stiff?”
“Sorry, Berk. I’ve cleared the surrounding area now. Ready to excavate.” My lips move with difficulty around my mouthpiece, and my voice is a clumsy wet murmur in my ears. I hate talking this way. The tinny electronic wail of it all is a profanity down here in the under-Yarra world.
“Cleared the area, yuh. If ya mean ya copped a feel of some dead legs, then you’ve cleared up real good. Think I can’t see what yer up to from up here? I can see everything. Got it? Don’t leave yer voice box off again. I’m not just gonna sit up here with me thumb up me arse while ya jerk off. Hear me?”
God, it’s so wrong that he’s even here; cranky old fart. I could steer the frigging boat myself, avoid his interference. They won’t let me do a dive alone, though—safety reasons. I want to throw myself over her, wrap my body around her legs and shield her from his probing eyes and compassionless brain. Fuck you! I want to shout up to him. Fuck off! Leave us alone! You don’t belong here—you have no right!
Instead, I wait without comment for him to feed the equipment down to me. After a moment, when he feels his point has been made, I see it break
the surface above and begin to weave down. There are technical ways to explain how we get the bodies of the West Gate suicides out of the mud, but I’ll keep it simple, because I don’t care, and neither do you. Not about that stuff. We’re here for them,
(her)
you and I.
Basically, we blast them out with a high-pressure hose. Berko’s boat sucks in the river water—a hydraulic vampire, drinking the Yarra’s blood—and spews it back out with enormous strength from the mouth of the hose that I’ve secured near the body. The riverbed is strong, but it’s no match for the false strength of man-made power. My job is twofold. I have to try not to vapourise the corpse by putting the hose too close; it has to be near enough to get rid of the mud holding the body, but not so near that it hits the body itself. And, when the hose clears enough mud, I have to pull the body free. Then I take it up and after that, it’s Berko’s responsibility. He ferries his cargo to Vic Police, and who knows what they do with the bodies after that. Return them to their families for burial, I guess. If the suicide has any family.
The mouth of the hose nuzzles at my neck, a grotesque proboscis. I wrap both my hands around it and position it on the river floor. I used to need to spend time calculating precise measurements for positioning—in fact, I’m still meant to do that—but experience has given me a sixth sense for it now. I spend time with the jumpers, I dwell in their watery grave, and I just know where I have to put the hose in order to liberate them.
I follow this intuition now, and anchor the hose down. This does take a while, because if the hose comes free once the water is surging through it, I’ll become the second corpse down here today. One blast of that water full in the chest and I’m the HAZMAT rather than the HAZMAT Diver.
“Hurry th’fuck up, Deer. I want that body onshore by sunrise.”
“It takes the time it takes, Berk,” I reply, the closest I get to snapping at him. It’s unwise to bitch at the man who controls your air, your communications, your very body temperature with the warm water he sends into your suit. But more than that; if Berk complains about me enough, I could get taken off the West Gate team. And that would mean no more time spent under the water with the jumpers.
I need them. They need me. I’d be a fool to let anyone mess that up.
I test the last bolt on the hose’s tether, and yank on the umbilical line six times, signaling Berk. The old bastard must have been waiting with his hand on the lever, because I feel the hose come alive in front of me immediately. Swearing, I propel myself backwards with all my strength (which is considerable, after years of this job).
As the first gout of water hits the mud around her—a near invisible stream of pure power, water in water—I stand on the riverbed and watch, my heart tight with anticipation.
In a matter of moments, she won’t just be a pair of legs. I’ll see the rest of her. I’ll hold her. I’ll save her.
God, I can’t breathe.
When her legs thrash violently and begin to tilt like a felled tree, I jerk on the umbilical cord six times again. The torrent of force pouring from the hose ceases, and the hose wilts, its ardour spent.
I move forward, pushing against the stubborn water, wanting to get to her.
I catch her just as her legs crumple and fold in on her torso. I gently spin her, turning her right side up, pulling her head out of the hole she’d tunneled with her death-dive. She’s bundled in my arms, a long baby, the hair left on her head trailing across my bare hand where I’ve forgotten to replace my glove.
“Send the stiff up, then git that hose dismantled and git your arse up here, Deer,” Berko’s voice grates in my ears, shattering the perfect moment. “Sun-up soon. Time t’go.”
Her eyes are open. They’re fixed on me; black rings in the white of her face. One of them is filled with blood, bulging against the thin skin of her eyeball, but still beautiful. Her lips are pale, torn a little in the corners where the water barreled in and stretched them, but they’re curved in a smile, and that’s beautiful, too. Her mottled cheekbones are high and wide, and her nose is straight and proud—even when it’s pushed over to the right, broken. The white of her skull where half her scalp was torn off gleams at me like a bony hat, jauntily tilted to the side. Her remaining hair is long and golden, curling around me like tentacles. Her body is firm against my arms; I wish I could shrug off my suit and feel the coldness of her dead skin—that iciness that is so cold it’s hot.
When she moves her hand to my face and speaks, I’m not even surprised. I’ve been waiting for this; for one of them to feel me, to respond to me. To reach them, and have them reach back.
We don’t want to get out, she murmurs, her voice a liquid melody in my veins. We want to get all the way in.
“All the way in? You mean, under the riverbed?”
“Wha’the fuck’re ya jawin’ about, Deer?” Berko’s voice is an obscenity, and I drop one hand to my belt, silencing my voice box before putting my hand back on her body.
Her hand reaches for my mouthpiece, and in a flick of her shattered wrist, it’s gone. I’m breathless, and my first instinct is to panic; to gasp in lungful after lungful of dirty water. To choke. To drown. I see my mouthpiece, floating within arm’s reach, and then her fingers brush my cheek. She draws my head down toward her, her lips waiting for me, her eyes closing.
Kiss me. Say goodbye to me. Take my secrets. Sing me home.
And I do. I take her in, mouthful after mouthful. We twirl in our sacred place beneath the water, beneath the city, beneath the world. She gifts me with her secrets, and I offer her mine, feeble though they are in comparison. The hum of the nothing that is everything fills my ears, and as we dance alone together, I sing her home.
* * *
I’m fired, of course. Berko really did see everything from his craven perch up there on the rolling boat. When he tells them he saw me remove my oxygen bit and smooch a corpse, I’m handed a tidy severance package and some complimentary counseling sessions. Trauma, they said. Understandable after spending as many years on the job as I had. Nobody held it against me. There would be no . . . repercussions.
When I laughed in their faces, they thought it was evidence I truly had lost it. But I couldn’t help it. They were just so damned funny, sitting there quacking at me, utterly clueless. Poor bastards. But how could they know? They’d never been down there, beneath the world. There was always someone else to do their dirty work for them. And nobody else had spent as much time down there as I did; nobody even came close.
Nobody else had known the jumpers the way I had. Nobody had touched her the way I did. They didn’t know anything, and it wasn’t their fault. I pitied them. I told them so.
Berko was in the room. He didn’t speak while they fired me. He just sat and stared at me, the corner of his left eye twitching now and then. From the little you know about Berko, you can probably already guess that was mighty strange behaviour for him. They left us alone in the room for a few minutes at one point. Berko leaned forward and put his hand on my leg. He was trembling.
“What was it like?” His voice was awed and he took great care to enunciate clearly. “Did she show you . . . y’know, what’s there? I saw things twisting and shining . . . in the mud . . . God, they were reaching for you! Such beautiful things, they was.”
That old bastard. He’d seen more than he deserved.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, smiling serenely into Berko’s watery eyes. He snarled at me, all reverence gone.
“Why you fuckin’ . . . who d’you think y’are? D’you know how long I’ve been workin’ that river? Long before your daddy forgot to wear a condom, I was there. I’ve seen and heard things you wouldn’t believe on and under that water. It ain’t fair. Hear me? It ain’t fair. Why should you be the one—”
They came back into the room then, and Berko jerked back into his seat, his mouth snapping shut and his eyes sinking back into his head. I offered to tell them what we’d been talking about, but they ju
st exchanged odd looks and shook their heads.
I didn’t offer to tell them the secrets she’d sang to me, though. I didn’t go that far. They hadn’t earnt it the way I had. They weren’t ready.
But I was. Oh, God. I’d been ready for the longest time.
* * *
There are no walkways on the West Gate; it’s not a walking bridge. As if it matters. As if the lack of designated areas for sad feet will somehow prevent people from scaling the bridge and leaping to their deaths.
There has been a call for “suicide fences” on the bridge for a long time, but they (the powers that be, the builders of fences, the rulers of bridges) have refused to erect any such thing. Think about that for a moment. Some simple fencing might save some desperate lives, but they won’t oblige. Why? Don’t they want the suicides to stop? Don’t they care? Is it too much expense to save the sort of washed-up souls who shuffle off the West Gate every other week?
Or is it just that they know that it all goes much further
(deeper)
than it seems? Do they somehow understand that a fence wouldn’t change a thing?
The mud is hungry, and deep, and we know that something better lies on the other side of it. If we could just . . . get . . . in.
She told me that, my darling in the river, whispering her secrets to my soul as I kissed the pulpy meat of her dead lips. I cradled her in my arms, she who didn’t quite make it through the mud, and I sang her home. A song drawn in bubbles and silt and cold aquamarine. Not the song she dove in search of, but a song that put her searching essence at rest, all the same. My song was my love. She knew I cared, and in death she found the connection she