Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘What a one we got here,’ whispers his fellow guide, the Cockroach, pointing at the large accountant from Melbourne. ‘He looks a real goose.’

  ‘Like an emu,’ I hear Aljaz say.

  ‘Like a …’ says the Cockroach, and I can see him searching for the appropriate animal with which to compare the gauche and arrogant accountant, ‘like a fucken …’ But the precise analogy eludes him. ‘What’s his name anyway?’ whispers the Cockroach.

  ‘Derek,’ Aljaz replies, then further pondering upon Derek’s form, says, ‘praying mantis.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Cockroach, then, ‘no’, says the Cockroach. ‘No. Almost, but no.’ The Cockroach thinks again, then says, ‘Like a locust, that’s what he’s like, a fucken locust.’ And the analogy is entirely correct.

  Derek looks like some strange creature that is far too big to be a human, his large pupils at once oddly sensitive and entirely inhuman, capable of suggesting both an emptiness and a certain greed. His nervous hands are rarely from his mouth, to feed it food or cigarettes, and below that bulky body those ludicrous stick legs clad in luminous striped-green thermal underwear.

  Aljaz turns and heads up a side track, where in early summer they put bees to harvest the nectar of the leather-wood trees that dapple the rainforest rivers with their white flowers as if it were a wedding and their petals confetti. He feels good. Even his guts, for the first time in such a long time, even his guts don’t feel knotted and aching and lurching themselves in readiness for another diarrhoeic discharge. I watch Aljaz change into his rafting gear, dressing in an unhurried fashion, enjoying once more putting on the various bits and pieces. First the bathers, then the long-john neoprene wetsuit with its vivid fluoro-green slashes. Aljaz likes the feel of the wetsuit around his body. It lends him an illusion of strength and purpose. Next layer: the thermal tops, then the bright white and blue nylon outer jacket they call a cag, and finally the lifejacket, bright purple and replete with sheath-knife upon one shoulder, whistle and brightly coloured anodised aluminium carabiners and prussic loops upon the other. Ah, the old carabiners. The customers ask their guides why they wear them on their bodies, and in a condescending tone the guides explain their high and serious purpose; how it is that the carabiner might save all if they become caught in the middle of a flooded river and the guides have to set up pulley and rope systems to get to shore. But the truth is they look dramatic, they lend the necessary sense of danger that instils both fear and respect among the punters - fear of what is to come, respect for the guides on whom they must now depend. It is a visual lesson that talks of life and its smallness. The guides wear the carabiners everywhere, like Mexican revolutionaries with bandoliers, bit players in an extravagant theatre of death. It is all part of the joke. Around his waist Aljaz wraps his flip line, three and a half metres of rainbow-coloured climbers’ tape, buckled with yet another carabiner. Upon the side of the flip line he crabs a throw bag. And upon his head goes the crash helmet. Like some luminous and savage tropical insect he returns to his customers.

  As they ferry the gear down to the river Aljaz notices that Sheena, the dental asistant, takes and gives things only with her left arm. Her right arm seems to move not at all, seems to hang there like a hinged stick. ‘Excuse me,’ asks Aljaz, ‘but have you hurt your arm?’

  ‘No. No, it’s fine.’

  Aljaz looks at the arm. He is not persuaded.

  ‘It’s withered.’ Sheena says nothing. ‘Your arm.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘This is a very physical trip, Sheena. You have to paddle a raft for ten days, carry heavy loads …’

  ‘I am strong.’

  ‘I am not saying you ain’t.’ Aljaz halts. What is there to say? She is there. It is his job to get her down the river. Somehow.

  ‘Look,’ says Sheena, but before she can go on Aljaz interrupts, saying what he has to say.

  ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry. You’ll have a great trip. Just let me know if ever things seem a bit hard.’

  Afterwards he goes over to the Cockroach, who is tying gear frames into the rafts, and tells him the story.

  ‘He’s not supposed to take people who don’t meet the necessary physical requirements,’ says the Cockroach, referring to Pig’s Breath.

  ‘Fit enough to sign the cheque. That’s Pig’s Breath’s sole physical requirement.’

  They look down at the river’s edge where Sheena is working, ferrying gear with her left arm from the trailer to the raft. There is about her something so determined that it makes Aljaz mad.

  ‘Why the hell did she decide to come on the trip? She ought to have had the sense …’ He shakes his head.

  ‘I had a polio victim once,’ says the Cockroach. And laughs. ‘Nice bloke, actually.’

  ‘I’ll take her in my boat,’ says Aljaz without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose she’s my responsibility.’

  They finish tying the gear frames into the middle of the inflated rafts and begin to load up. I watch as Aljaz stands in the boat and calls for the gear in its correct order. First the big black plastic barrels full of food, each weighing in excess of sixty kilograms. It takes two punters to carry a barrel, but a guide must be able to carry one by himself. Aljaz grabs a barrel and feels its immense weight and wonders how he will ever be able to lift it. I can see that Aljaz is badly out of condition. But such things are simply matters of will. The customers believe they are weak and in this instance must act prudently. Aljaz, to the contrary, must look strong and fearless, whatever he knows himself to be, however weak and frightened he might feel inside. It is a charade that is necessary to sustain the whole trip. It is the antidote to fear that spreads like a contagion if it is admitted by a guide. There is a sad lesson in this: people must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable. And so Aljaz lifts the barrel onto his shoulder, swings it around and gently deposits it in the cradle formed by the gear-frame netting. Beneath the load I can see his face smiling and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

  The beginning of the trip takes on something of a carnival atmosphere. A bottle of cheap rum is produced and passed around. All have a swig, some giggling at their boldness, others affecting a nonchalant air, pretending it is something they do regularly in their daily lives as accountant or nurse or merchant banker or public servant. The bottle comes to the Cockroach. He has already had a joint with Nino the busdriver in the dusty solitude of the empty microbus and is half stoned. The Cockroach drains the bottle, gives a yelp, and grabs Sheena and begins dancing with her on the river rocks. He lifts her up in the air and sweeps her through the air, carrying her into the river, in which he gently lets her down. She staggers to her feet and with her good arm slaps the Cockroach on the face. The Cockroach hasn’t anticipated such a response and falls backward.

  Aljaz goes back to loading the rafts. On go the waterproof personal gearbags, brightly coloured in blues and greens and reds. On go the additional bags with tents and tarps and cooking equipment. On goes the hard vegetable bag, allowed to swill around at the bottom of the gear frame. On go the ammunition boxes full of first-aid kits and repair kits and punters’ cameras. On go the ropes and spare carabiners and carabiner pulleys and rescue throw-bags and bailing buckets, all clipped on at various points to the frame. On goes everything ten people need to survive for ten days in the wilderness.

  I can see that Aljaz likes the beginning of the trip - it gives him certainty, it brings order to the chaos of his thoughts. It gives him tangible fears, real fears. Will the food stay dry for ten days? Will the customers get through safely? Will none burn themselves? Or drown? That is always a great, Aljaz’s greatest, abiding fear. That he will lose a customer on the ditch. It is so easy, it happens so smoothly. Violen
t death can come with a deceptive grace; so quick, so effortless, so silent, that it is not immediately apparent what has taken place. People turn around thinking that the person is perhaps standing behind their back about to surprise them, whereas they are not playing an elaborate joke, they are dead. Simply dead. A revealing phrase in itself - death is not the complex matter life is. At least not for the dead.

  ‘I once saw a woman who had drowned in the Zambezi,’ says the Cockroach. He is back out of the river, wet, still smiling, and is standing next to me in the raft, helping to buckle the netting down over the gear. ‘She was with another company, not ours, and she had fallen in and got tangled up with the rescue rope. By the time we turned up they had fished her out, but it was too late. She was already blue and they were giving her CPR. But they knew she was gone, you could tell the way they went through the CPR routine so calmly and efficiently, like they were preparing the corpse for embalming rather than trying to keep her alive. This punter on my raft turns around and says, as if he’s just seen a fish jump, he says, “She just drowned, is that what it is?” A stupid bald Pom he was. Of course she just drowned, her lungs just filled with water, I felt like shouting at him.’

  But Aljaz hardly hears this story. His mind is elsewhere and I am with it. He is thinking how without the trip his thoughts take on a darkness he cannot overcome. Upon the ditch he can meet his fears, name them - Nasty Notch, the Great Ravine, the Churn, Thunderush, the Cauldron, the Pig Trough - and having met them, bid goodbye to them all. Without the trip his thoughts are beyond his control, and wander toward a divide that he can never see, the presence of which chills him to the bone. At such times he feels the workings of his mind hang by a few slender threads, and if they break he will be unable to do anything, unable even to get up in the morning, unable to do the simplest of things that people take for granted. Unable to say hello without bursting into tears, unable to talk to people without feeling his bowels being gripped by the most terrible fear, unable to meet with friends without experiencing the most horrifying sense of vertigo, that he might suddenly tumble and fall into the abyss.

  ‘Then suddenly,’ continues the Cockroach, ‘suddenly, some spasm of her muscles made her spew up all this water and they got their hopes back up for a minute. But it was too late. I knew that. Even the bald Pom knew that. She was a goner.’

  Now I can see that Couta Ho had understood all this, that long, long ago when she said it would take time to heal but that time could never entirely fill in the hole, that she had said it not because she knew nothing better to say, but because she was right. For a long time I had been sick, and she had found me once and tried to stay with me, still as the moon. And I, like some errant satellite, had drifted away to return only when it was too late. Far, far too late.

  the first day

  I watch the river trip proceed in front of me. On the first day the river was so low they had to drag their rafts most of the seven kilometres down the Collingwood River, to the place where it ran into the Franklin. At such a low level, the Franklin at the junction was also little more than a dry creek bed studded with occasional rock pools. The first day was hard in every way for Aljaz. Physically it was a torment, because the punters had neither the wit nor the inclination to lift and drag the two rafts, each of which weighed hundreds of kilograms, so it was he and the Cockroach who had to do most of the labour. His body was unequal to the hard work. His soft hands burnt from where he pulled the nylon deck lines. His back knifed pain when he lifted the pontoons. They camped at the Collingwood’s junction with the Franklin, in the rainforest above a small shingle bank. The night was so clear they slept without tents and Aljaz knew that tomorrow, with no rain, the river would only be lower, their bodies stiff and bruised and their work even harder.

  That evening they sat round the fire drinking billy tea and Bundaberg rum and watching the moon, waxing to near fullness, rise high enough for its light to silver the river valley. Their weary bodies felt bathed in mercury. The fire and the banks of rising rainforest were mirrored in the monochrome river as a dancing daguerreotype. They traded stories back and forth, the guides of river lore, of feats great and ridiculous, of floods that awoke them with a roar in the middle of the night, the river banking up around their tent before washing it and most of their equipment away, to deposit it at some point downriver atop a cliff, along with uprooted trees and dead snakes and devils. Of droughts in which the river was so low the rafts had to be dragged along the dry bed for four and five days before enough water could be had to float them. The punters’ stories tended to be smaller and sadder. There was Rex from Brisbane, who three months before had taken a large redundancy to leave his position with Telecom and now was totally lost. ‘I am only thirty-five,’ he repeated, ‘only thirty-five. What am I to do?’

  ‘Keep travelling,’ advised Derek. ‘With money you can see or do whatever you want. Every spare cent since the divorce I put into travel. What an age it is!’

  No one else much knew what Rex ought do, except for Rickie, who said he had a very good broker with whom he could put Rex in touch come the end of the trip. Sheena suggested maybe Rex didn’t really have that much to worry about, but the others were more sympathetic.

  There was Lou’s story of working as a crime reporter on the old Sun and being sent to interview a crim who had a contract out on him. The crim lived in a squalid bedsit in Fitzroy and only went out twice a day, once to shop at a Vietnamese store up the road, the other to eat tea at a Syrian café. ‘Why don’t you run?’ Lou had asked him. ‘Why don’t you just do a bunk and go to Darwin or Dubbo or somewhere they won’t find you?’ The crim sat on his bed the entire time and seemed gentle and pleasant. He agreed it would be the sensible thing to do, but life, he suggested, wasn’t always such a simple thing. ‘This is my home,’ he said. ‘I live here,’ he said. ‘And I’ll die here.’ So he did. Two days later they came while he was lying in bed and, as Lou put it, vitamised his head with shot.

  At the time Lou told that story I had been poking around in a barrrel trying to find another bottle of Bundy and the tale had largely passed me by. But now I think it an interesting story: a man who could evade death chooses against good advice to meet with it on his own terms. Is this an act of cowardice or courage? Of stupidity or wisdom? Of ignorance or enlightenment? I don’t know the answer. I wish I did, because it would help me resolve what I am to do, whether I should continue to struggle, or just give in now. This battle of mine, all these strange thoughts and these bizarre visions, why should I hang on to any of them, what does any of it matter if my ultimate fate is only to be carried away by this river as waterborne peat?

  But at the point where I most need time to reflect and think, my thoughts are overtaken by my vision. I watch the small solitary camp sleep beneath the vast southern sky, enshrouded in rainforest. Flowing above them and over the valley, the quicksilver river of the night. Aljaz felt the bright moonlight lap at the edge of his sleeping bag. Then, as the moon rose further, the light washed over him, his body a stone too heavy to move in the flowing water of the night. He felt the running shadows caress his body in fluid stripes. He grew lighter and lighter, and heard his body wonder how long before it floated away into the night. In his meandering dreams Couta Ho was upon a beach waving a flag toward him and he was in a boat far out to sea, unable to see and hence decipher the fluttering code.

  the second day

  I watch the moon reach its zenith then slowly fall into the darkness of the pre-dawn hour. I watch the beginning of the morning of the second day, when the river world takes on new colours. And I watch myself awaken.

  Aljaz knuckled the sockets of his eyes. He ran his hands down over the roughening skin of his cheeks to join together at his chin as if in prayer of thanks, shaping the flesh into the face that he would wear through that day. He looked across at the tents. No punters up. Across at the fire site Cockroach was up and rebuilding the fire from the evening’s coals. Aljaz divested himself of his sleeping bag, stood up
and walked down the short, steep track to the riverbank. He pissed on some rocks near the shore, sleepily observing how the steam rising from his urine matched and then merged with the steam rising from the wet black logs of river-fingering fallen trees. He walked upriver fifty metres to where he had set three dead lines the evening before. The first had been snagged by some unknown river creature in a log jam downriver, the second had been snapped, and the third had a two-foot eel writhing like a wild sea snake at its end. Aljaz collected the various pieces of catgut and carried the eel, lashing back and forth, by the line that bore down through its primeval mouth and throat into the remote regions of its gut. There the hook had been irretrievably lodged and there its barbed presence was an uplifting horror for the pitiful creature. At the fire Aljaz with his free hand used a stick to clear a place in the coals, into which he gently laid the eel. The eel twisted and slid as if it were, in its final agony, miming its own swimming movement, for it did not and could not move beyond the hot ashes. As its slimy skin began to smoulder and its flesh to roast and its life juices to simmer, the creature relaxed to a slow movement almost sensual until it began to stiffen then moved no more. Aljaz carefully scooped the eel’s charred form out of the fire and ran a knife along its sooty back, splitting the charcoal skin and neatly peeling it away from the sweet steaming white flesh. Upon the rainforest floor he and the Cockroach ate, though none of the punters took up their offer to join them.

  Instead they ate porridge, which Derek cooked and which Derek burnt. Two hours later Derek managed to fall out of the Cockroach’s raft in a small rapid and become ensnared on a dead tree limb in the middle of the river. Unable to paddle their rafts back to where Derek was stuck, Aljaz and the Cockroach swam down and Aljaz cut Derek’s life jacket to free him. The Cockroach helped him swim down the rapid to the riverbank. There the relieved punters beamed and laughed, even Derek. They hugged him and he hugged them, and it was almost as if they were celebrating his fall as a great achievement. The punters looked at Aljaz and the Cockroach with some awe, and both guides knew that now, because of their rescue of Derek, their authority was complete, that anything they said or suggested would be done, taken as gospel, and it frightened Aljaz, this blind belief, like it always frightened him.