‘Otis,’ said Aljaz, ‘this is the third night you have eaten no tea. Tell me what the matter is.’ Otis looked up, his big freckled white face tear-glazed, stretched like uncooked shortcrust pastry over a meat pie. ‘Has someone being giving you the shits, Otis?’
‘I ain’t never eaten that sort of tucker,’ said Otis.
‘What you talking about?’ asked Aljaz.
‘All them curries and poppadots.’
‘Dams,’ said Aljaz, ‘poppadams.’
‘Eh, yeah. Them. All them and them modern rice things as well that you and the Cockroach cook up in the wok,’ said Otis, then paused, his humiliation great. He swallowed. ‘Well, I ain’t never seen such food and I can’t eat it.’ Aljaz smiled, and would have laughed if he had not been concerned about upsetting Otis even more. With some sense of finality Otis said, ‘I tried and I just can’t and I feel a bloody fool ever coming.’
‘There’s no shame in it, Otis,’ said Aljaz.
‘Mum’d cook us roasts and three veg and chops and three veg, and jam roly-polies and apple crumble and beef soups and steaks and three veg and all that stuff, and I ain’t never eaten this modern city tucker and I just can’t get it down. I tried but I can’t.’ Otis burst out sobbing again.
‘I’ll fix you something decent,’ said Aljaz.
‘I tried gittin it down but it just wouldn’t get past my throat,’ said Otis between sobs. ‘I tried but I can’t and I just feel so stupid.’
‘There’s no shame in it,’ said Aljaz and turned, dropped the tent flap and was gone.
He searched two barrels with the light of his head torch till he found the food he was after. He fried up four eggs and eight tinned sausages, and boiled five pinkeye potatoes and a canned self-saucing chocolate pudding and brought it all to Otis’s tent arrayed on a large enamel plate and plastic bowl.
‘I’m grateful,’ said Otis.
Ten minutes later Aljaz spied Otis leaving his tent with an empty plate and bowl. Otis saw Aljaz standing alone by the fire and came over. ‘Now, that’s what I call a proper feed,’ he said with a broad smile. Otis and Aljaz fell to talking. Otis told him stories about growing up on a remote South Australian farm, two days drive from the nearest town, confessed to Aljaz how he had a daughter to an Aboriginal woman. ‘You’re the first person I ever told that,’ he said. ‘You got kids?’
‘No,’ said Aljaz looking into the fire.
Aljaz lay down on his air mattress. Too tired to get into his sleeping bag, he just threw it over himself. The rain had ceased some hours earlier and he and the Cockroach could not be bothered pitching their fly, had simply placed their air mattresses on the small platform of river sand a few metres below what remained of the the main campsite. His body felt leaden, the effort to raise or move one limb enormous. Were it not for his bones, he thought the whole mass might simply dribble away like molten lead into the depressions and recesses of the earth. He slept the sleep of lead: dark, heavy, immobile, malleable and, ultimately, molten. Aljaz dissolved in his sleep, and I with him.
Ned Quade, 1832
Slowly people appear around me, faces of people I have never met but about whom I know everything. A curious thing, I’ll admit. And an annoying thing. I’ve always tried to keep myself to myself, as the saying goes, and here I am besieged by people clamouring for their stories to be heard and seen and felt. Piss off! I screw up my face and shut my eyes and scream a second time. Piss off! But it does no good. My bad humour is to no avail. The vision won’t depart and my throat just feels as if it is burning.
There is the face of the stone man, Ned Quade, small, round, and scarred all over by the pox, so that he looks much older than he is. How do I know it is Ned Quade? How the hell do I know? I just know. I don’t want to know, but there it is. I mean, Harry once told me how his great-grandfather, Ned Quade, had been the mayor of Parramatta. But this Ned Quade is not dressed as a mayor. He is dressed in the coarse piss-yellow and black woollen uniform of a convict, and there are chains around his ankles. And I know what this Ned Quade is thinking. He is thinking of what a convict woman called Joanna Heaney had told him: of how some hundreds of miles to the north west of Parramatta there is a great river which, if one could make a craft and travel upon it, leads to a huge estuary, on the other side of which is the land of China. And in the middle of this huge estuary, suspended halfway between Australia and China, is an island upon which a large stockaded town has been built by a free and happy people, bolters and their kin to the last, all those who had escaped from the chains of the System and never returned. Joanna, she who spoke in tongues and saw things that others had only heard as rumour, had seen the island in a vision. It was, she said, a land where all were welcome save for His Majesty’s soldiers; a crowded land with bustling streets, a lack of priests, social arrangements where man and woman lay together without the approval of any church but with the sanction of their love and hence God, farms and workshops owned not by distant fat men but by the people who cracked open the rich river-flat soil with the plough and who forged the iron into the plough, a land where there was schooling for all children paid for by levy from all. Joanna called the town the New Jerusalem and said it was led by a single woman known only as Mother Lucky.
And I see Ned escape from his gang working upon a remote reach of the Gordon River, rolling logs in waist-deep water, he and eight others whom he persuades to go with him. They strike their overseer from behind, garrotte him with their chains until he goes floppy, and, after breaking their chains with their picks but still burdened by their steel ankle-collars, they hold the overseer’s head under the Gordon’s water for a good five minutes, then leave his limp body to slowly spin in the river’s side eddy. They hobble on foot heading north east, using a crude compass one convict has made out of lodestone and a stolen fob-watch case. After two days’ travelling, three decide to abandon their walk toward the New Jerusalem and return instead to the shores of Macquarie Harbour, there to take their chances robbing convict gangs of their supplies. Ned and the five others press on. Of their number, only Ned Quade and Aaron Hersey believe in Joanna Heaney’s vision of a New Jerusalem. Liam Breen, Jack Jenkins and Paddy Galvin plan to join the banditti that run the country surrounding Hobart Town almost with impunity, terrorising Babylon. Will Dorset travels with them without destination, only with the relief of no longer being in the hell of Macquarie Harbour. The harsh brightness of the sun wanes to a slowly encroaching greyness, the scrub they are bashing through gives way to an alpine moor, all russet browns. Then the men’s faces begin to dim and disappear altogether as I return to the darkness of my paralysed body, left only with questions and doubts.
the third night
Aljaz was woken by the hop hop of raindrops landing on his sleeping bag. The sound hauled his mind up from the great depths where his dreaming took place and brought him enough to his senses to realise he had to get out of his sleeping bag. The gentle rhythm of the drops was being swamped by the sound of a heavy downpour smashing on the rainforest canopy, pressing its intent upon the myrtles and the sassafrases, then permeating downwards, entering the forest branch by branch, leaf by leaf, until every branch and every leaf could be heard to move by the power of the rain. Until the rain was cascading down on the forest floor and all the billions of raindrops and all the millions of leaves moving had become one deafening sound and one overwhelming purpose.
Aljaz and the Cockroach, who by now had also woken, quickly stuffed their sleeping bags into their waterproof gearbags, donned anoraks and worked quickly to pitch a light brown nylon fly above their sleeping site, their head torches darting cones of light describing white lines of rain wherever they moved. Outside of these cones the world was entirely black. Twice after pitching the fly the rain, which now fell in torrents, began to form in ominous pools in the fly and they had to steepen its pitch. They hadn’t bothered bringing a tent for themselves, although the punters always slept in tents. Guides never slept with the punters in the tents, and they alway
s slept at a slight distance.
Aljaz and the Cockroach went and checked the punters’ tents to make sure they were pitched properly and then they scrambled down the bank, their naked legs feeling the cold wet caresses of the hardwater ferns and tea-tree. Aljaz wondered why paths always seemed so much longer in the dark. They manhandled the rafts up from the river onto higher ground where they tied them to trees, then gathered all the life jackets, helmets, and paddles left lying dangerously close to the river’s edge and brought them up to the safer, higher ground of the campsite. The rain continued to pour, but the river hadn’t risen. They stayed awake for half an hour, playing cards by candlelight under the fly.
‘Bastard,’ said the Cockroach unexpectedly. He flicked a finger across his forearm upon which sat a bloated leech.
‘Watch this,’ said Aljaz. He crawled out of his sleeping bag, went over to where the black food barrels were, and returned with a box of matches and the salt container. He made a ring of salt on the ground, the size of a five-cent piece. ‘Now watch.’ He lit a match, let it burn, blew the flame out, then placed the red hot tip on the leech. As the match tip seered its back the leech arched up in pain. It fell off the Cockroach’s forearm onto the ground. Aljaz picked the leech up with a piece of bark and placed it within the circle of salt. Every time the leech tried to move, its body touched the salt circle and the salt was absorbed into its body. The leech began to writhe and bleed the Cockroach’s blood. ‘See how it suffers,’ said Aljaz. ‘Wherever it moves, however it moves, it only absorbs more salt and suffers more.’
‘You’re twisted, Cosini,’ said the Cockroach.
‘How come you became a river bum?’ Aljaz asked.
‘I had a job in Cairns working on airconditioning at a new resort - I’m a plumber by trade - and thought, To hell with it, I don’t want to be like the other old farts on the site knowing nothing else but plumbing at sixty. So I got a job working on the Tully River, four years ago now.’
‘You ever think about going back to plumbing?’ asked Aljaz.
‘Sometimes. But guiding sort of gets in your blood after a while. It’s a way of life, really. Partying and women and always the river the next day. Making you feel like you going somewhere. Even when you’re not.’ The Cockroach turned and looked at Aljaz, who continued to study the death agonies of the leech. ‘Sometimes though, I think how I’d just like one woman and one job in one place. Settle down like. You ever feel that?’
How could he explain what he felt? How could he explain that beyond his family nothing had seemed important and yet he had turned his back upon his family. How could he describe being pursued by a terrible fear he could never name that sat behind him like a shadow, how as if in a dream he could never turn and face that shadow and name its truth. How the fear sometimes grew so vast that he thought it might crush him, and how he felt as if he could no longer hold it all together, that even getting up in the morning and saying hello to people and smiling and laughing had gone beyond his powers. And he had drunk and drunk and smoked bags of dope until he felt so bad from his overindulgence that that pain temporarily eclipsed the pain of his shadow. At which point he would lay off the bottle and the dope, in the hope that the shadow would have gone. But it would only reemerge stronger, as if it had fed off his madness and wanted more, demanded more. And then he would deny the pain with work in some new job, work till his body burnt with physical aches and pains, and sheer exhaustion gave him the blessing of sleep, the deep sweet sleep of those who labour, where even when the mind has sunk into its farthest recesses there is still a surface consciousness of the pain of the body. And the body seems unbearably heavy and sinks like a necklace of stones into the mattress, and any movement is avoided because the effort of moving those fatigued limbs even once more is too great. But then after some weeks the shadow would reemerge in his dreams, and he would suddenly sit bolt upright in bed, eyes wide open, feeling so terribly afraid. He would try to find a woman to take away the darkness and occasionally, though not often, he found one, but instead of him crying to her, he inevitably made her cry in front of him, as if her suffering assured him that his suffering wasn’t a solitary insanity but the keystone of a humanity he desperately wanted to share in, and the more women he had, the worse he treated them and the more they cried and the sooner they left him. And then he knew it was time to move on and the whole thing started to replay itself, this circle of hell.
It had become easier not belonging; he had learnt to cope with that, had made a life out of it, drifting, made a virtue of having no roots by never allowing himself to hang around one spot too long. He felt himself a nobody, an invisible nothing, told himself that was the beginning and end of it. But it wasn’t and he knew it. He didn’t want to know about it, but it had always known about him and it had shaped him, and though he could deny it there was no way it could deny him. It just seemed to be more food for the shadow, and Aljaz hated it and hated himself even more. And how could he tell the Cockroach any of it?
‘No, I don’t,’ said Aljaz.
‘You’re lucky,’ said the Cockroach. ‘Maybe you’re the sort of bloke who gets a woman when he wants one, then moves on when he doesn’t want her. But me, I dunno, I can’t do that any more, you know what I mean?’ said the Cockroach. Aljaz said nothing. He pushed the leech back into the salt ring with a twig. The Cockroach continued. ‘I don’t know anything any more. Not what I want or what I’m gonna do, nothing. If I could find one woman who wanted to sleep with me through the night - sleep, I’m saying, nothing else - I’d love her till I die. Know what I mean?’
‘No,’ said Aljaz.
‘You’re so twisted,’ laughed the Cockroach. ‘You know that? Really twisted.’ But he looked at the writhing leech and not at Aljaz.
By then it was 4 am. They left the leech to its agony and went back down one final time to check the river level.
The river flowed west quietly. But Aljaz could hear its waters beginning to lick the edges of the bank, its appetite heightening.
The river was beginning to rise.
And with it me.
Beginning to float.
Six
This night of rising water I see a bedspread. Very clearly. It looks like this: pure white, elegant in its prewar fashion, the size of a double bed, and at its centre a large faint yellow stain. The whole, in spite of or perhaps because of this aged blemish, elaborate and beautiful in its design and texture and feel. But there is no double bed. There is a single bed and the bedspread is folded to fit upon it. I look more closely at the stain till it has assumed the proportion of a large estuary. And floating up that estuary a ship, ambling up the broad reaches of the lower Derwent River.
An old rustbucket of a steamer contracted in that year 1957 to bring wogs from Europe to Australia. And upon its deck, is an ashen-faced Sonja, wearing a long coat, clutching a three-year-old child to her hip: me. And the child is smiling and laughing his weird, gurgling giggle. Because the idiot child recognises his other home, that is to his mother a strange country.
Sonja and Harry
When she first saw it from the ship, Sonja fell to weeping.
‘What is this place that you have brought me to?’ she asked of Harry. The town, with its wooden buildings that teetered and sloped at all angles in consequence of their age and a lack of care and money, with its huge purple mountain that rose behind its offspring like a crabby matriarch ready to strike out at anybody who badmouthed her child, this town looked like a nightmare. None of the town made any sense to Sonja. It was painted in the drab colours favoured by the English, and the sky was black with clouds that threatened to rain but didn’t. Yet, as their ship shimmied up the Derwent River, the town glowed a rainbow of colours in the winter light of late afternoon. The town looked crabbed and cramped, hemmed in by olive-coloured forests on all sides bar that of the sky-blue river that defined its front, yet it seemed open to something that Sonja had closed her mind to many years before. The town was obviously not old, only a hun
dred or so years, yet in the streets they walked down from the ship Sonja could smell something much older, the smell of the receding tide, the smell of salt and drying kelp. This world that seemed like it ought be full of people was largely empty. Through a stillness so vast that it seemed an ocean, the wind cracked and swept from every angle as they walked the quiet, empty streets.
‘What is this place?’ Sonja asked again.
‘What do you reckon it is?’ said Harry, somewhat annoyed at what he felt to be a pointless and silly question. ‘It’s Hobart.’
They saw a man arguing with a telegraph pole, and a woman pleading with him not to make a fool of himself.
‘Piss off,’ said the man, ‘this is private.’
They saw a woman sitting in a gutter with pigeons, laughing as they fed from her hands. They saw a drunk fisherman stagger out of a pub with half a broken beer bottle in his face.
‘I went searching for the pink-lipped abalone and found this instead,’ he said to Sonja and Harry, then staggered away, weeping not from pain but out of an infinite sadness.
Sonja grew harder with the years that then passed. She was wont to recall her time in the Radovlica chain factory as a young woman. ‘You know what they made? Chains - not dog chains or little necklace chains, but those huge heavy things that ships use. And our job was to lift and stack them.’ She would at this point normally pause and reflect upon her time in the chain factory, to the memory of which she remained inextricably shackled, then look back up with her pupils reflecting rusty steel, saying, ‘And I never want to carry chains again.’ In this regard - that of material betterment - Harry was to prove an ongoing disappointment, never being able to rise out of the class he had been born into and, worse still, seemingly content to sink further into it. Nevertheless, Sonja’s relentless industry and astonishingly focused purpose meant that they did get a home and they did in a few short years manage to pay it off, and they did manage to be if not affluent, well then, neither struggling. And they did manage to share a dream. Of a large family.
Death of a River Guide Page 13