Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  In the end it was four-thirty in the morning and there were only five other people left, two of whom had flaked in the kitchen, one of whom, Ronnie, was still awake but only just so, swigging the dregs from a bottle of brandivino as he lay in the bathtub humming an Abba song, while the remaining two were coupling fully clothed on the carpet, dry humping at the edge of the lounge-room, occasionally rolling in their drunken, languorous passion into a half-empty bottle and spilling beer or cider over themselves. Neither seemed to notice, or if they did, showed no outward signs of caring. Aljaz’s head ached and he was totally confused as to whether he ought stay or go. He and Couta Ho had been passionately embracing on the lounge suite for what seemed an infinity and Aljaz was unsure as to what the next stage was, and recognising that he had neither the experience nor the energy to make a decision, announced that he’d better take off home. Couta Ho, and not for the last time, shook her head, took his hand, and led him into her bedroom.

  He had not known it would be like this. He had expected that somehow he would initiate and lead, make the big and vital decisions. And now knowing that this was not expected of him, that she wanted him and his body urgently and would lead him through the mystery of what remained of the night, he felt a curious relief. When he joined her in the bed, and when he felt her naked body next to his, when he smelt the ocean rising up from her thighs and when she guided his hand downwards to feather through that ocean’s wonders, then he found himself possessed of a tenderness so exquisite and gentle that he felt afraid she was unlocking parts of his soul that had until then been hidden even from him. Aljaz marvelled at how his body, a few moments previous loose and without purpose, now entwined so powerfully and fiercely with that of Couta’s, marvelled so much that he no longer saw her body or felt his own, but thought that they had been transformed into two strands of some strangely animated steel cable, a writhing tautness, that was at once still and moving, twisting, enwrapping and springing off the other’s sinuous strength. It was a battle and it was a dance, and where she led he followed with such a provocative purpose that he found his body responding to her desires and not his. He no longer thought of nor cared for himself, but was lost in her pleasure and he was grateful. She simply wanted him to be, not to do. She began to sigh, and each sigh he felt as a rush of hot petals tumbling over his body and he felt a great rising emptiness, which overwhelmed him so completely that afterwards he found himself shivering with an unnameable anxiety.

  Couta Ho lived alone in the old family home. She seemed to have an infinite number of brothers and sisters who, although they shared the same father, had a number of different mothers and therefore different homes. As his name suggested, old man Ho had Chinese blood in him, but his Oriental heritage seemed to have largely passed him by, culturally and physically. He was, as he was wont to say, as Chinese as a Chiko Roll. He was of a small and powerful build, and did have large brown eyes that Couta inherited from him. But his thin blond hair which, along with his eyes, he believed made him irresistible to women, was a consequence of pasts other than that of China.

  And now I am being washed into the Ho family past. Without wishing it, I should add, for frankly I have no desire to see any of it - but this newly acquired capacity of mine to witness the past means that the stories of the dead weigh like a nightmare on my still-living brain. I try to stop it. I try to make my mind see something else, but it’s no good, for there’s the original Sun Ho, patriarch of the Ho clan, and he’s being busily belted up by a dozen drunk English and Irish prospectors on a Victorian gold-field. No. No. I really don’t want to know about it. Oh no! Here’s his son Willie in a chair-making sweatshop in Melbourne in 1885 trying to organise the Chinese Workers Union, and here’s the local furniture-union steward (a white man, of course) telling him they don’t want slant-eyed opium fiends, for a slope must be a bad union man by the fact of his Oriental nature. And here’s Willie some years later at the north-east Tasmanian town of Garibaldi, where, apart from being stoned by an irate mob of unemployed from the nearby town of Derby and losing the sight of one eye in consequence, he suffered but rarely from racism. In his youth Willie read Dietzgin and Henry Hyndman’s tracts on the coming proletarian revolution. In his old age in Garibaldi he had a grocery shop and helped run the local josshouse, in which he regularly prayed, asking his gods that men might love their fellow beings.

  Willie Ho’s grandson Reg did love all his fellow beings, particularly those who were women. Most particularly, women other than his wife. Quick-witted and lively, and constantly falling in love and making vows to one woman at night while breaking them with another during the day. As a consequence of her father’s numerous infidelities, Couta Ho’s parents had split when she was four years of age, but not before Reg (who had been, as his father before him, a fisherman) gave Couta her nickname. It was in honour of the wormy baracouta from which he made most of what had to pass for a living, and in celebration of her catching worms from the dog next door, in whose kennel she would spend much of her day. The nickname stuck so thoroughly that even Couta had to sometimes think twice when she went to write her Christian name of Kylie down on some official form. After the marriage bust-up Reg Ho had gone to live and fish in Darwin, where he had ended up remarrying a Tiwi Islander. For a few years afterwards, Couta had gone to Darwin to stay with her father for holidays, but then in her mid-teens that too came to an end. Couta stayed in Hobart with her mother and her father’s mother, old Mrs Ho, who never spoke again to her son following the marriage breakup. On evenings when old Mrs Ho had bad dreams about her ancestors visiting in her sleep, Couta Ho would sleep with her. When Couta Ho was sixteen her mother and grandmother were killed in a car accident, their car being cleaned up by a train on a level crossing when the warning lights failed to work.

  As the months went by Couta Ho talked a lot about her past. ‘I hated the bastard for doing that to Mum,’ she said. ‘I got all the photos I had of him and I cut them up into little pieces. And the photos that had us and him in them, I just cut him out of.’ She paused. Aljaz looked up and down her body, at the smoothness of her face, at the down beside her ears, at her eyes, which are unusually large and whose pupils are a deep brown. She looked at him with those eyes and he knew at once that she trusted him entirely and completely, and it frightened him, because he knew he was not equal to that trust and that there would come a time when he would inevitably disappoint her. She looked at him with those large eyes and he felt guilty, though about what he did not know. He had to look away.

  For the first time Aljaz talked about his mother’s death. He told Couta Ho how one night he had found Sonja sitting on the floor of her bedroom weeping with pain. Sonja had told Aljaz she was dying, that although the doctors said it was only gallstones she knew different. She told him she loved him, that the world was out of kilter, that she loved him, that she loved him. She held his head into her chest and wept and wept the more and he felt her tears wet his hair and some even splash on his face. In his stomach, for the first time, he felt the fear arise, the terrible terrible fear that was never to depart. She lost more and more weight, till in the end she was a shrivelled up shell weighing only six and a half stone. When in the hospital they cut her open to remove the gallstones they found three huge hydatid cysts. They successfully removed two but the third burst and the dreaded hydatid seeds dispersed into her body to complete their fatal mission. She died within half an hour, still on the operating table. Harry stopped talking and laughing and for a time even stopped working on his barbeque. His drinking grew steadier, or worse, I suppose you would say, says Aljaz to Couta Ho, his mouth a sort of smile.

  ‘He’d be off most nights at the pub, or round at Slimy Ted’s drinking and playing crib, and when he was at home he just sat around quiet as can be, smoking at the kitchen table, drinking, saying nothing, looking at nothing. Sometimes, not often, he’d say, “How’s school goin then, Ali?” And I’d say, “Not great,” and he’d just kinda look down and shake his head just a fraction and
say, “Well, ’spose that’s how she goes,” like he kind of expected it anyway. “Yeah, well. That’s how she goes,” and he’d take a big drag on his cigarette like we were in this thing together and neither of us could beat it. Which I suppose was pretty much how it was. Mama had held it all together, made sense of all the hard times cos we were going somewhere and we were going there together, as a family. But we weren’t a family any more. Dad and I weren’t making the journey any more. We were a sad old drunk man and a boy who was getting into more and more trouble, and the more trouble he got in the more people just expected him to be in trouble.’

  ‘Things kind of fell apart at school after that,’ says Aljaz. ‘One day, a teacher scruffs hold of me and he tells me off and he says, “The problem with you, Cosini, is that you don’t take school seriously.” And I said, “Yes yes, sir,” but what I wanted to say was that I couldn’t take anything seriously any more.’ And he looks around at Couta Ho who looks at him. ‘Not after what happened to Mama. But I didn’t.’

  And finally he says, ‘You’re the first thing I have taken seriously since Mama died.’

  Aljaz liked Couta’s thick black hair, liked the way she tied it behind her head in a ponytail, liked the way she moved, the way she smelt. He liked the jewelry she wore, big and flamboyant, gypsy rings in her ears, plentiful bangles and chains. He liked the smoothness of her olive skin, he liked her youth and he liked her old outlook on some matters. He liked watching her sleep at night, her heart-shaped face illuminated by the light that filtered in from the street lamp outside, and he wondered if there was anything in the entire world as peaceful or as beautiful as the sight. He liked her so much that for a long time he wondered if there was anything about her he didn’t like. Within five days of their first meeting Aljaz had moved into the Ho family home, and there he was to remain living with Couta for the next three years.

  Throughout that time - which was, looking back now through these refracting waters, the best time in my life - Couta Ho was a source of constant wonderment to Aljaz. She had as full a sense of self as anyone he ever knew. For Aljaz, who had so little sense of who or what he was that for a long time he wondered if he might not be mildly autistic, this was a marvel. Couta Ho lived fully and completely in her world, celebrated its small moments with love and wonder. He continued telling her jokes and stories and after a month began to fret. She asked what was the matter and he felt compelled to answer honestly and say that he had run out of all the jokes and stories he had ever heard and no longer knew what to say to her. At which she also laughed and he relaxed considerably and took to not bothering to say anything much at all unless it seemed absolutely necessary. He liked the way she seemed to know things about life that he believed to be beyond his ken and which allowed him to continue to be a child in much of his thinking, as if her experience was enough to sustain them both, which of course, I can see now, it was not. She was stronger, she was surer, and he felt like a shallow creek whose babbling waters had just run into the silent current of a big river, moving swiftly and powerfully, though to where, he knew not. He was humbled, and he disliked it, and he disliked her for making him feel this way, while at the same time he was forced to recognise that he needed her more than he had ever suspected.

  They would sometimes go to Roaring Beach, abandoned save for a few solitary surfers, and on Couta Ho’s insistence swim in its dangerous rips and ride the wild waves that formed on the beach’s steep bank. And though it frightened him, Aljaz found his fear overwhelmed by a feeling of enchantment as he watched her emerge laughing from that treacherous surf. There was something so desolate in her that it was akin to a magnificence, and he was filled with awe at her wildness.

  Aljaz’s life took on a discernible pattern. He played professional football in winter and worked as a river guide on the Franklin River in summer, taking parties of tourists down Australia’s ‘famous last wild river’ as it was billed, a job he had originally got through a mate in South Hobart. The job filled in an otherwise empty season, and filled in something else besides - a sense of who he was and what he was and where he was, and though he said it was all about money and having a laugh, it wasn’t entirely that. Sometimes the work down the river was wet and miserable with crews of selfish shitheads who saw the guides as nothing more than sherpas. But sometimes it was warm, with the river running high, though not too high, with big rapids not too big, the customers decent, and the nights long and full of talk. And there was, of course, life with Couta, sometimes difficult and often bizarre, for Couta, as Aljaz was to discover, had a few bizarre edges to her character.

  The weekend before Reggie Ho had walked out on his marriage he had given Couta a wooden apple case full of old marine code flags, used for signalling between boats at sea. To each flag Reggie had attached a dowel. He and Couta played with them in the backyard, signalling messages to one another from opposite ends of the garden. Long after Reggie had gone, Couta learnt the flags’ meanings off by heart from a booklet she found at the bottom of the apple case. Over the years the old box of flags became her most prized possession, though why she took to using them in her lovemaking with Aljaz, I am unsure. All I know is that on the second night they slept together she took to semaphoring her desires.

  How did she use them? Well, I see a great deal, and much of it of a very intimate nature. Suffice to say that Couta used the flags to signal her passions to Aljaz and that Aljaz learnt the flags’ meanings from the silverfishchewed booklet. It is difficult to convey in a few words the erotic charge carried by a horizontal blue- and white-striped flag (meaning: I have a diver down, keep well clear at low speed), or a blue flag divided by a horizontal white stripe (meaning: I am on fire), the lascivious intent signalled by a flag divided by crossed diagonal lines into black, yellow, blue and red quarters (meaning: I require a tug), or the carnal satisfaction implicit in a white square in the middle of a blue background (meaning: my nets have come fast upon an obstruction). Difficult. And even more difficult to describe how they were used, because I am of nature a private person. Sometimes Aljaz would object that there was no code flag to adequately express his physical sensations. ‘Such,’ Couta Ho would reply, ‘are the limitations of language.’

  Couta Ho had grace, a quality I much admired as I had none of it. Even when she sat naked in bed, staring through and beyond the wall, she remained possessed of it, and she knew this to be her redeeming strength in a tortuous lifetime unravelling the mystery of her past. Perhaps expected one day to finally sight the code flag that at last answered it all. Perhaps expected to see a face and torso shaping out of the plaster and then emerge limb by limb until a body, powdered white, had separated from the wall and it would be her father and he would hold that code flag, would lower it, would take her hand and lead her back into the wall and together they might walk the final distance between here and that space on the horizon that lies between the sky and the sea, their colours finally merging in a brief azure gloaming.

  For a young man it was an easy life and would have remained so, had not in their third year together two events, one tragic, one trivial, conspired to destroy all that they had. The trivial event was football. In his third year with Couta Aljaz made the cardinal error of getting serious about his football and wishing to play for the national league. That was a mistake because, good as he was, he was simply too short for the national club scouts ever to be interested. When this became clear to Aljaz his interest in the game waned and for a time he contemplated throwing it in altogether. But it had become a way of life, and for someone without work, it offered the society and routine and money of a job. Because it was a job and one with which he had become bored, the offer of a professional contract with a Darwin club was an appealing prospect save for the fact Couta Ho did not want to leave Hobart because she had fallen pregnant with Jemma.

  Then, sometime between the hours of 5 am and 8 am on the first Tuesday of May, Jemma, our perfect baby, our beloved Jem-Jem, my child my beautiful beautiful child, all of two mo
nths, died in her cot. And though the thought and the memory will not go away I have frozen that memory like Father Noone froze the hapless adulterer, and there remains in my soul a barren patch of ground in which nothing will grow. About Jemma there is nothing else to recall. I can say that now, because I retain no memory of her save for the salient facts of her death, the great fact of her life.

  Of course, Jemma’s death changed everything. Couta Ho had no capacity for self-delusion: a tragedy was, for her, exactly that, a terrible burden beyond words, the experience of which she understood would be bordered by the encroachments of passing time, but the pain of which would always endure. Couta Ho knew this to be something she had to bear alone because, much as she loved Aljaz, it was beyond his imagination, because his imagination could only encompass the present and her tragedy was one that needed the passing of time to be revealed. She knew the vast dimensions of what they had suffered, even if she did not understand it. He, on the other hand, claimed to understand the tragedy, tried to reduce it to something small, and thought it could be left in its time. For Aljaz saw Jemma’s death as an obstacle to be got around, and once passed, to be left behind.

  These vague thoughts of mine are spreading out like the jetsam that washes past my wet flesh. More precisely: how did Aljaz try to shrink the tragedy? By pretending it was Couta’s alone. Watching all this unfold for a second time, it is this macabre refusal to acknowledge his own involvement in the death that is so sad. More precisely: his sadness shortcircuits itself by being unable to recognise its own existence. Aljaz said little; in fact he said less and less. What he did say were disconnected things like, ‘Life must go on,’ or, ‘I’m just glad we had her for two months.’ Things that made no sense to Couta, but which Aljaz seemed to gain some comfort from; things he kept on repeating as if they were some incantation that, if uttered enough, would ward off the darkness. Sometimes he tried to express his sympathy for her, to give her a cuddle or kiss he believed to be affectionate. Which she resented. ‘I’m just trying to be tender,’ he protested.