Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘If only they knew the truth about us,’ he whispered to the Cockroach.

  ‘They’ve got to believe in something,’ said the Cockroach, ‘even if it is only us.’ He turned around with a broad smile and slapped Derek on the back and said loudly so that all could hear, ‘We’re your ticket out of this slimy hole, aren’t we Derek?’ Derek nodded his agreement.

  ‘You won’t let us down?’ asked Derek, whose fear remained.

  ‘Only if you burn the porridge again,’ said the Cockroach, his smile unmoving.

  The second day was hot and the guides sat motionless at the back of the rafts, making imperceptible paddling movements to steer, even their restless eyes stilled behind the reptilian black pupils of their RayBans. They sat unmoving in the glare of the sun, goannas absorbing energy from the surrounding elements, waiting for the moment to strike.

  About midday the river, its volume subtly increased by the water of numerous minuscule tributaries, began to deepen enough for them to paddle for stretches of up to a kilometre before having to get out and drag the rafts again. The water lapped at the sides of their rafts as they made their way downriver, the punters sitting sideways, one at each corner of the raft, dipping and pulling their single-bladed paddles through the water. Aljaz rocked back and forth in rhythm with the slow surge of the boat. He thought that perhaps they were not such a bad crew after all, for it was only the second day and already they were beginning to paddle in time. He sat in the middle of the rear pontoon that formed the back wall of the raft, his paddle trailing in the water, acting as a rudder. Aljaz let his body sway and his mind wander as the four punters pulled in long, slow, rhythmic strokes. The day was warm, the sun having finished its slow climb down into the valley to the river. Aljaz took off his cag and thermal, and put on his life jacket and helmet. ‘What’s that tree up there?’ asked Rickie, pointing up at a bank of dense rainforest.

  ‘Erica ragifola,’ said Aljaz, quoting the name of a plant he had seen in a nursery Couta had taken him to once.

  ‘Erica ragifola,’ repeated Marco.

  They passed snakes swimming, unravelling ripples in warm flat pools. They passed platypuses that floated like sticks as the rafts approached, then sank like stones at the sound of a punter’s exclamation, leaving only a few fatty bubbles on the water’s surface. They startled a flock of swifts from a cliff face and saw a giant lobster sitting on a log at the river’s edge, glistening iridescent greens and purples and blues in the sunlight, and even the punters did not have an immediate response to its proud perfection.

  They paddled on. Now there was enough water to paddle, Aljaz taught them how to paddle properly. He took time with Sheena, showing her how to twist her torso so that the power of the stroke came from her body rather than from her arms. She learnt quickly, locking her arms into the stroke, using them only to transfer the power of her body. They paddled on. Sheena sat at the front of the raft and she told the story of her withered arm. Of how she had had radiation treatment for moles in Switzerland in the 1950s. Of how the radiation cured the moles but destroyed the arm, so that it never developed properly. Of how the radiation had rendered her unable to conceive children. Derek said he had no children because he was yet to meet the right woman to mother his offspring and asked Aljaz if he had any kids. ‘No,’ said Aljaz, his face unmoving. ‘Guess we’re all in the same boat then,’ said Derek laughing. ‘Guess so,’ said Aljaz, though neither he nor anyone else laughed with Derek. Withered and dead, thought Aljaz, in different ways, in different places, all of us withered and dead. Sheena told her story lightly, in the sun, almost gaily. She smiled as she told the story. They paddled on.

  They came upon three people on mossy boulders next to a creek that fed its clear wrinkling water into the Franklin, two men and one woman and they seemed to be drunk or stoned or perhaps both; the woman, wearing only a pair of ageing Adidas tracksuit pants, playing strange discordant notes on a nose-flute while the two men danced with movements that were in accordance neither with the music nor, as they had it in later conversation, with the rhythms of the earth. They stood in one spot, heads dropped, and waved their arms in slow exaggerated gestures. One man had dreadlocks dyed red, the other was entirely bald save for some slogans tattooed into his forehead, the most dominant of which read ‘This Head Kills Fascists’. Aljaz swept his raft into the bank near this strange trio and went to talk to them because he liked to know all who were upon the river, liked to hear the latest river news and exchange tidings from the outside world. The trio had no news, only multiple opinions on the state of mother earth, the fundamental evil and destructive nature of all humanity, and the great and total beauty of the river. They had been on the river for eight days already and had in that time only managed to traverse the distance that Aljaz’s party had travelled in a quarter of that time. Aljaz’s party were the first people they had seen since departing the Collingwood River bridge, but they were little interested in anything outside of the dance and the music of the nose-flute. Both men appeared to strongly desire the woman, who seemed to have little interest in either, concerned only with attaining some state of supra-natural harmony with cosmic forces that she alone seemed capable of divining. The trio’s supply of food was already low and Aljaz left them with some fresh sweet potato and cabbage, though, as he later said to the Cockroach, he didn’t know why he bothered. The woman abused him for even carrying sweet potato, which she said was a bad food, being too high in aggressive energy. In spite of this psychological objection, she accepted the vegetables. They had two old yellow rubber rafts in a bad state of disrepair, and they had named one Gaia Seeker, the other Fagus Finder, presumably a corruption of the Latin name for myrtle, nothofagus cunninghamii. Aljaz cast a careful eye over their gear as he spoke with them: dowel and plywood paddles, no helmets, kapok life jackets that looked as if they had been excavated from a pre-war Manly ferry. ‘What were Gaia Head and his two cobbers like?’ asked the Cockroach afterwards.

  Aljaz cast one last look back upriver where the two forms of the men could still be made out weaving their deranged dance through the whitey wood and riverine scrub. What was there to say? He said nothing.

  The Cockroach said, ‘Any stories?’

  ‘No,’ said Aljaz. ‘They had no stories.’

  In the afternoon of the second day they stopped for a break at the side of a rapid where a kayaker had drowned the year before. Like other sites on the river where people had drowned it had become something of a highlight for tourists. Aljaz looked into the slot in which the kayaker had become wedged. With the river so low, the slot was not a part of the rapid as it was at higher levels, but simply an exposed mass of warm rock undercut by erosion. Within these undercuts were sieves of sticks and logs through which a trickle of water gently splashed. When the kayaker drowned there would have been nothing gentle about the sieve. He would have been tumbled into it by the force of the river, as if he were a leaf being hosed off a pavement, and his body would have slammed into the slot and jammed there. Face pressed up against the sticks, his shoe or life jacket snagged upon a branch, powerless to free himself, he would have remained for some days, his face slowly turning from florid red to the soft white of wet dead flesh, pinned by the onward rush of the water until such time as the river ebbed enough for his body to be found and retrieved.

  The ammo boxes unsnapped and half a dozen Nikons and Canons were unleashed upon the wet rocks in the mid-distance, to capture upon film the place that once ensnared a human underwater until he breathed no more. They stood in a semicircle around Aljaz. Where exactly did he drown? they asked. How exactly did he drown? Neither Aljaz nor the Cockroach were comfortable with the questions. Both had rafted enough to know that some day it could be one of them, or, worse, one of their punters. ‘He opened his mouth and filled it with water,’ answered Aljaz. And smiled. The punters looked askance at each other, then looked away in embarrassment and stopped asking questions.

  From the bank Aljaz and the Cockroach continued to watch t
he punters examine and document the site. ‘I wonder if the tourist industry pays his family a commission,’ said the Cockroach. ‘Fighting against the water to live is one thing. But fighting against becoming a tourist monument - that would be impossible.’

  ‘Like Queensland,’ said Aljaz.

  The guides gazed upon the death site, unknowable, inscrutable behind the blackness of their sunglasses, behind the whiteness of their zinc-creamed lips and cheeks and noses. Like greasepainted clowns whose whole act was at once a denial and a celebration. The Cockroach smiled. ‘If they can do that to an entire state, one bloke doesn’t stand a chance.’

  Aljaz turned around. ‘No wonder the poor bastard gave up the ghost.’ And laughed. He felt a liking for the Cockroach. The punters, like mosquitoes, returned. Their guides’ smiles vanished and their white lips returned to an autistic straightness.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Marco.

  ‘Bloody interesting,’ said Derek.

  It was as if the kayaker’s life had been pointless and his drowning only meaningful as a photo opportunity for the tourists who would follow. As if the beauty of the place was born with his death.

  Madonna santa! Could that be me? Could that be me?

  I watch Aljaz pretend not to hear. I watch him raise his eyes to the sky and stare through darkened lenses at the thin clouds that drift into the narrow space permitted them by the mountain ranges that flank Irenabyss Gorge.

  Thinking: Rain is coming.

  Three

  Of course, although I can see all these things in my visions, including myself in days gone by, nobody in my visions can see me. I am simply invisible, like I have been invisible for such a long time in my life. The world changed, rolled on, the weekend papers and women’s magazines and TV talk shows and the talk radio full of what was now the fashion and what wasn’t, of who was changing things and who had power and who was in the process of losing power. The movers and the shakers. But I was never part of that. Though I was in constant flight, something about me was essentially still. The world rolled on but without me on it. I watched in disbelief. All of it. Its wars and its famines and its children selling themselves off Fitzroy Street and its old women beggars being hustled away by security guards from the shopping plazas, so that the old women too could enjoy this wonderful state of invisibility. The world had no place for me and I saw it in all its ludicrous, crazed ways but it did not see me, and I would have to say there was a strange freedom in this. Nor did the world see all the bad things and the evil things and the wrong things, nor those who suffered accordingly. I am not saying I objected or even cared. I just felt a slight sense of slippage in the world and it made me laugh, which seems to me more preferable than crying. So my invisibility at events is nothing new, nor even anything unique. It is only being able to transcend time that now gives my invisible spectating the curious power of a vision.

  These visions come to me in all manner of curious ways. I can no longer be entirely sure whether my eyes are open or closed, but it does seem that I am looking at a sweep of bubbles rising up from God knows where, and sometimes one bubble grows and grows until it has taken on the form of a face, and that face is the beginning of the vision. At other times the faces simply appear from nowhere and are vast, huge apparitions and I seem to be able to see all the gorge below me, but all the gorge is filled with the immensity of that face as it begins to talk. Whether they come as bubbles or manifest themselves as vast entities, the faces are more often than not curiously distorted at the beginning, as if shrouded by the passing of time. They do not depart from me in the same manner. Sometimes they dissolve into new images, while at other times I slowly, dimly become aware that I have not thought or felt or seen anything for a period of time that may only be a few seconds or may be an infinity.

  My strange torment blurs the whiteness of the rapid before me into vast emptiness, and sings the emptiness full of a new colour: blue.

  An immensity of blue. Sky-blue. A fleck, a piece of fly shit at the centre of this vast emptiness. A fleck of fly shit upon a sheet of blue glistening satin. Moving. And there, me, moving with it.

  With what?

  A boat.

  A small boat. A small wooden clinkered boat known as a punt, lovingly built of planks of Huon pine impervious to the worm and to rot, seven a side steamed into perfect shape and trenailed and caulked into position by old Gus Doherty - no finer piners’ punt builder there be on all the west coast of Tasmania, one pound sterling per foot of punt for his craftsmanship and this boat fifteen of the king’s finest for old Gus, beamy as buggery for heavy loads and square sterned and square bowed for riding the rapids, laden with hessian bags of chaff and flour, onions and spuds, wooden crates of jam and butter and sugar. A dog asleep on top of the mound of sacks. An axe and a crosscut saw at the bottom of the boat. A man rowing the punt, his mind as empty and as vast and as still as the inland sea called Macquarie Harbour that he is rowing his punt across, heading it toward the wild rivers, the rainforested rivers, where his axe and saw will work in rhythm in the damp and the humid closeness and the heavy sweet smells of the peat-created wet earth, among the myrtles, craggy and towering and bearded with hanging festoons of lichens, cracked and scabbed with fluorescent orange fungi, among the scented leather-woods, among the pungent lime-green sassafras whose aromatic leaves make women want men (or so men who want women say), among the crazed pandannis, emaciated elongated trunks betopped with pineapple heads of thrusting leaves, among the celery top pine and the lemon-tasting whitey wood and the spiralling native laurels; there his axe and saw will work in rhythm in the damp and the humid closeness and the heavy sweet smells of the peat-created wet earth, to fell the waxy whiteness, the wet-cheese coloured, the prized, the Huon pine.

  More precisely: I am observing my father as a young man heading off to work.

  Harry, 1946

  After a time, a long time, he came to the river mouth, and after a further time the mouth disappeared and the inland sea behind it disappeared as the man, the name of whom was Harry Lewis, continued to row. The Gordon ran deep and black beneath him. Deep and black and cold. Harry Lewis looked at the low hills, rainforest-rumped, humps like hunchbacks heading away from the river. The water was dead-flat calm. Not a breeze. The cold in the river was the last of the snow melt from the big freeze the week before. Though the cold rose up from the water through the Huon pine planks of the punt’s flooring, Harry wore only a blue singlet and his denim trousers, his body hot and sweating from the exertion of rowing his punt twenty miles already that day. He had started out early and the sun still lay on his back, as he headed further up the river, further away from civilisation, if that was the right name for Strahan. Harry’s eyes looked to the west, but his arms placed the oars at the beginning of the stroke east. East to west, east to west to east, that was the direction of the oars, as they pulled Harry and the punt further into that vast wild land known only by its geographical description: the South West. He was heading into the rainforested wilderness, up the mighty Gordon River, up its tributary the Franklin River, up the Franklin’s tributary the Jane River, following the paths these serpentine watercourses cut through the green carpeted temperate jungle into the land once called Transylvania, now shown on the government sketch map Harry carries in an oilskin satchel as an empty wilderness designated only as ‘Little Known About This Country’ but which was well enough known to Harry and his workmates.

  Some good pine to be had up there, thought Harry.

  In the ongoing pain of his body I feel Harry’s hurts and sadnesses dissolve into small concerns, dwarfed by the red-hot poker that burnt into the back of his neck, the ripple of soreness that ran across his breast each pull of the oars, the ache in his arse. The river was beginning to run faster. Harry took the punt to the edge of the river and rowed up the slower water at its edges, just far enough out from the banks to avoid the Huon pines and native laurels that blanketed the bank. He liked looking up close at the big trees, at the myrtles leaning at
all angles, huge majestic trees with big iridescent fungi growing off them.

  Harry always hated the first hour of rowing, when his body rebelled against the demands being made of it. But after a while it warmed up and then there was something enjoyable about the journey. Imperceptibly the pain transformed into a rhythmic ache that demanded the steady caress of the action of rowing. Each pull of the oars hurt, but Harry’s body revelled in the strength that came with the ache. He could feel each muscle, every sinew in his arms and upper body when the pull began, and harnessing them all together, stretching and tightening them simultaneously, he was able to achieve power in his stroke and the smoothest and easiest of movements to accompany that strength. His mind emptied of thought and worry, and as his body took control of the punt, taking it this way and that to best and most easily get up the fast flowing river, his mind drifted into the hills far away, up the wild King River valley, past the ruins of Teepookana, past the ruins of Crotty, up into the town of Linda and beyond to the mining town of Queenstown with its strange, bald hills - a desert valley that had once been full of rainforest, now denuded of all vegetation by the dense plumes of sulphurous smoke which emanated from the copper mine’s smelters and which, rich in heavy metals, heavy in evil riches, caressed the downwind hills and mountains in an embrace of death. His mind watched the suppurating rivers that ran in garish pus-green and bloodied rills down those sad hills when the rains came (which was near enough to all the time) then wandered back into Queenstown itself and into the Empire Hotel and Gwennie’s eyes, those eyes that had led him out into the back of the pub where she let him touch her breast then asked him fivepence for the pleasure; into those dark empty pupils that said nothing and hid everything; beyond their vast universe back to the Strahan wharf, where, as he had set out in the mist of that morning, a seal lay dying on the nearby rocks. It was said that the souls of the drowned came to rest in the bodies of seals, and once Auntie Ellie would have been down making the seal comfortable, worried lest it be Jimmy Rankin, who had been washed off a boat at Hells Gate, or lest it be Ron or Jack Howard, who had drowned the previous year at Granville Harbour going in too close for their cray rings in a gale, their cray boat picked up by a giant wave and dropped like a toy on a rock. His mind wandered up along the Eagle Creek track that ran from the Gordon River across the flank of the Elliot Range and down into the Franklin valley, and the large shingle bank there with its red- and brown-coloured rounded river rocks, which gave the bed, when the sun shone through the tea-stained water running over it, a beautiful red-gold colour.