Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  He feels the tree to which the rope is anchored move slightly with their combined weight. He realises Derek is hanging only by his harness. ‘Put your arms around my neck,’ the Cockroach says to Derek. And just as Derek starts to move, his body begins to topple. His forearms immediately lock around the Cockroach’s neck and his legs wrap around the Cockroach’s waist. The Cockroach feels as if his neck is about to break with the strain. The Cockroach locks Derek in a bear hug. It hurts, it hurts like hell to take this fat man’s weight with his neck and arms, but if he lets go the fat man might fall to his death. Locked in this curious, awkward embrace they swing in space above the waterfall, softly bouncing into the rock.

  A human metronome slowly marking time against a cliff.

  ‘Why me?’ asks Derek. ‘I’m only a tourist.’

  Then, for no reason, Derek suddenly goes frantic. He pulls with all his might at the Cockroach’s neck, trying to clamber up him as if he were a ladder. ‘No!’ yells the Cockroach, but Derek’s wild scrambling overbalances the pair of them and their embracing bodies swing from a vertical to horizontal position. The Cockroach feels himself sliding out of his own harness as they topple. Instinctively he throws his hands up to grab the rope to stop them both falling. And for no reason, insanely, at the moment the Cockroach lets go of Derek, Derek, as if feeling he has been betrayed totally, also lets go. He throws his arms outwards, as if crucified, lets go of the Cockroach and topples backwards, slithers out of his harness, and falls.

  Falls through the air. Falls fully ten metres. When Derek’s body slams, back first, upon a round-topped boulder below, there is no sound discernible above the noise of the waterfall. The Cockroach watches Derek’s body as if it were an insect shell, as if it were a clump of earth limply sliding off the boulder into the waterfall, at first slowly then quickly, leaving no trace in the foaming turbulence. The Cockroach is surprised at how little he feels at this precise moment, thinks how he will have the rest of his life to feel and at this moment he is glad to not feel.

  Eliza Quade, 1898

  Let’s get one thing straight. Now. Here and now. I have no desire to be here. Drowning, that is. You might think I am resigned to my fate - well, yes, perhaps I am, but that’s not the point. Even if I accept that I am going to drown, that doesn’t mean that I want to drown. Or that I won’t struggle against drowning. I have never been one to accept what fate has dealt me, which has proven unfortunate, given that life has always been beyond my control, and I, limbs flailing in protest, have always, despite my protestations, been swept and bowled along by life until I got jammed at this point. A full stop at the end of the river.

  You might think that I am rabbiting on too much when I should instead be concentrating on a way out of my plight, looking for some way I can physically lever myself out of this watery trap, trying, perhaps, to flex my body different ways to enable it to slip out. Trying. Perhaps. Possibly. All my life was trying, perhaps, possibly. And none of it made a jot of difference. For here I am where I was always intended, always fated to be. Put yourself in my shoes (so to speak - I can feel that mine were swept away by the river current some time ago) and recognise that the physical battle has long been lost. Perhaps these frantic, crazed meanderings of my mind, these visions, perhaps these represent the ultimate plane of conflict. Perhaps these visions are my precarious path back to existence.

  If I am to die, and I am not saying that I will, believe me I am not, but if I do, there will be at least one good consequence of my death. It will mean I will no longer age, no longer be confronted with the daily and ongoing disintegration of my body. In this death seems to share a purpose, as well as a sensation, with aerobics - to stop ageing. Except that where aerobics is ultimately doomed to fail, death will always succeed, as long as you are fortunate enough to have it come your way at a young age.

  But then I am struck by the heretical thought: what if ageing were preferable to dying? What if growing old and the accompanying decline of the body were accepted with grace? Would it not be possible to see the growth in wisdom and in the heart as sufficient compensation for the slowing down of one’s physical attributes? Could it be that I might even enjoy slowly wrinkling up next to the one I love more than jumping, almost trampolining, from the bed of one young girl to an even younger girl in the hope that their firmness of flesh and clear eyes be catching, like some socially transmitted disease? The question that obsesses me at this moment of mortal peril is perverse in the extreme, and one that goes against all the strictures and nostrums of our time. I feel silly even thinking such a question, for it is evidently only the product of a greatly distressed mind, but I must put it into words.

  Is there life after youth?

  I ponder this question for some time, then think, Yes, there is, and I want it, want to enjoy it for what it is, not despise it for what it isn’t. It seems ridiculous, valuing old age, but why not?

  I want to age.

  I want to live.

  And yet … and yet.

  I am so very scared.

  But it’s getting harder to hang on to any thoughts. My mind pounds and wavers and feels so heavy, so very heavy, while my thoughts are so light and becoming lighter all the time. Just when I have nearly caught them, they swirl away with the bubbles above my face, away from me, upwards, towards life.

  A woman’s face, elderly, criss-crossed with lines that denote not only age but ongoing pain and incessant hardship, so deep and strongly defined that they look as if they have been gouged out of her flesh with a chisel, looks at a yellowed and brittle piece of paper upon which is scrawled the most curious message, the meaning of which still eludes her. Her husband, who is without teeth and without memory, comes into the poor kitchen in which she sits in front of the cooking fire with a rug over her legs. She folds the note. It has been folded and unfolded so many times that the creases have opened into tears, and only the infinite care with which she tenderly folds it back prevents it from falling into four separate pieces. She puts the note back into the book of prayers she is reading by the light of a kerosene lamp. Her husband apologises for interrupting and then asks her if she has seen his wife. She asks him to sit down and make himself comfortable, and he thanks her for the kindness she is showing to a stranger.

  ‘We are all unknown to one another,’ she says, but he does not hear, for he has started speaking again, this time of his brother.

  ‘Successful bugger he is, mayor of Parramatta. You would like him, like him very much,’ he says.

  ‘Has he a wife?’ she asks.

  ‘O yes, my word. Has he a wife? Huh! O, yes. Beautiful woman. And a wonderful wife. Wonderful woman.’

  A small red-headed girl runs into the kitchen. ‘Rose,’ says the old woman, ‘what are you doing here?’

  ‘Auntie Eileen sent me over with a loaf of bread for you and Grandad,’ says Rose, and she goes and kisses the old man on the forehead.

  ‘I am not your grandad,’ says the old man. ‘Your grandad is the mayor of Parramatta.’

  ‘Pay no heed,’ says the old woman to Rose, smiling, ‘he is not too well today.’ The old man looks hurt and confused. After the child has gone, she looks across at him and says to him, ‘You remember none of it, do you?’

  ‘Remember what?’ he asks. ‘Nothing wrong with my memory.’

  ‘How Ned died escaping. And how you then married me and raised his children as your own.’

  ‘But they are my own,’ he says, perplexed.

  ‘Of course,’ she reassures him, ‘of course.’

  Within a few minutes he has fallen asleep, and starts snoring. The old woman takes the letter back out of the book of prayers and looks at it some more. Then looks into the fire and looks at the way the near-invisible red flames, as they so sensuously lick the coals, form into the image of her first husband, the father of all her children, Ned Quade, the brother of her second husband, Colum, who lies asleep in the chair opposite, an exclamation mark of dribble hanging from his slack lips.

 
Eliza looks at the letter and reads it yet one more time. Reads it for perhaps the thousandth time and still ponders its mystery.

  My Esteemed and Most Noble Madame Elijah -

  Well say You in th. New Jerusalem.

  Your loving And humble Servant etc etc in Eyes of The lord

  Ned Kwade His Mark

  And below this message the outline of a Celtic cross, a cross enclosed within a circle. His mark, sure enough.

  Well say You in th. New Jerusalem.

  But where? And when?

  the Cockroach

  The Cockroach turns around to face the cliff and slowly climbs back up the rope to the top, his body finding the work a relief after hanging in one position so long. At the top Aljaz grabs the Cockroach’s wrist in a strong grip for the final haul to the track. But he does not immediately heave the Cockroach up. Aljaz realises he is staring into the Cockroach’s eyes.

  The Cockroach cannot tell Aljaz that Derek is dead, because he cannot verify the fact of death. But he knows what he has witnessed. Further, he believes himself to be responsible for what happened because he acted and failed. Aljaz knows by the Cockroach’s lack of speech what has happened. And Aljaz believes himself to be responsible because he didn’t act. It eats at them both. Neither can bear the other carrying the burden of what they see as their own individual crime. With a sudden sharp burst of strength Aljaz heaves the Cockroach up past where Aljaz stands on the track, and I can see that Aljaz does not look around at his fellow river guide but is continuing to stare at the place where the Cockroach had been hanging from the rope. Or, more precisely, that he looks through and beyond that position into the vast roaring moiling maelstrom, and, beyond that, at the cliffs and at the base of the mountains and at the gorge itself. And sees his face and it looks no longer separate from the world around it: it looks as if it has been dead and petrified for millennia. As if it and he were part of the gorge and the mountains and the cliffs and the maelstrom. As if he were rock so hard that the furrows in his face down which the rainwater is channelled have taken an eternity to be so eroded by the wind and water. As if he were so hard, as if he were. As if he were alone. That is what he is thinking, yes, now it is all coming back to me.

  I am so alone and alone.

  So it is that Aljaz and the Cockroach stop talking to one another, except to coordinate their search around the base waters of the Churn, and later further below in Serenity Sound.

  They drift the half-kilometre down toward the Coruscades, the towering walls of the gorge enclosing them on both sides as they examine every eddy and every backwater. Aljaz and the Cockroach notice the water line on the riverbanks, which shows how high the water is, and how it is continuing to rise. They pull in at the Coruscades campsite, which is still a little above the water line. Aljaz orders his punters to stay in the raft, while he and the Cockroach check the campsite. But they do not immediately go to the campsite. The pair, one small and stocky, the other long and straight, scramble up the bank, then head around to the boulders at the river’s edge to survey the large rapid known as the Coruscades. Scanning the cataract for Derek’s body. Standing on a boulder as large as a house they look up and down the river, two twigs jutting out upon part of the gorge’s huge grim profile, the edges of which are softened by the heavy rain. They are numb, their emotions suspended, because they have not found the body, and the brief hope remains that somewhere down the river Derek may have been washed ashore alive. Neither believe it, but neither can dismiss it.

  ‘So we camp there tonight?’ asks the Cockroach, pointing at the riverbank campsite.

  Aljaz nods his head.

  ‘We won’t get flooded out?’

  Aljaz shakes his head, but they both look up at the cliffs and wonder how, if he is wrong and they are flooded out of the campsite, they will camp ten people up there.

  ‘What does it matter?’ says the Cockroach and turns to head back down to the rafts.

  While the punters set up camp the two guilty men work their way back upriver to the Churn, scouring the waters and the rocks. They work like madmen, seeking to find where the body might be, pretending, as they must, that he might possibly be alive. They manage to climb back around to the boulders upon which Derek fell, and are able to identify the actual rock by the thin blood smear running down it to the water. They stand on a boulder directly opposite for some time, neither man talking. The boulder is round and smooth, and the rising river foam whipped up by the waterfall directly upriver banks up around the boulder’s base. As the foam laps the edge of the rock the sticky blood loosens into drifting slags, then dissolves to stain the foam slightly pink, the whole like a bloom blushing at its centre then pale at its extremity, the rock the stamen. But there is no blood trail leading to the body, no body to be seen. Only a river made incarnate. They swim across to the boulder and they haul themselves up, their hair and faces covered in large tufts of pink and brown foam, like some malevolent creatures of the river. No body is to be felt in the water.

  So they stand at the base of the roaring waterfall, deafened, foam-flecked faces slowly saturating and dissolving in the pounding mist thrown by the cascade above, the foam blown away by the wind gusts generated by the tons of falling water. Far below, Sheena looks up from the raft in which she and the other punters sit. What I notice looking at them now is how no one else looks back upriver except her. And what she sees at the base of the massive waterfall are two extensions of the boulder caught within the shadow of the gorge. She is no longer entirely sure who or what the figures are.

  By the time it is dark they know that Derek’s body must be somewhere in the river below the Churn. It is not visible in Serenity Sound, so it either has been washed by the flood waters further down the river, or it is snagged underwater, where it will remain till the waters fall and the gases of decay bloat the body and float it blimplike to the river’s surface.

  Gaia Head

  The rain continues.

  Heavy upon their tents, heavy upon the rainforest, heavy upon the surrounding mountains down which race the tributaries that fill the Franklin.

  Just as night falls the despondent camp has a new and strange arrival: a tatty yellow rubber raft paddled by the bald dancer they met some days previous. He is very cold and has lost, in addition to his entire supply of food, something but not all of his previous arrogant distance. He is given the warmest spot by the fire and he is given a bowl of vegetable curry, complete with sweet potato, which for all its aggressive energy he accepts with gratitude. He tells them his story and it is this.

  On the day following their previous meeting, the woman with the nose-flute had declared her undying affection for both men and her physical desire to be with the man with dreadlocks. Enraged and embittered - for it had been the bald man who had organised the entire river trip in the first place, and who had funded their plane fare from Sydney - enraged and embittered and plain jealous, a fact he now freely admitted, he decided the party would be best split into two groups. He then announced that one group would be him, the other them. He set off immediately, but the following day met with bad luck when his raft was overturned in a rapid and swept off downriver. He spent a miserable night in the rainforest without food or clothes or fire, covered only in manfern fronds, cursing the river and the woman and his best friend. The following day he had to come to a decision as to whether to wait for his two ex-friends, which, as he now admits, would probably have been the most sensible option, or whether to attempt to find the raft and catch up with Aljaz’s party. Pride in his own capacities and his desire to take his leave of the others prevailed, and he set off scrub-bashing his way down the river. At about mid-afternoon (here, having lost his watch, he was imprecise on detail) he discovered his ruck-sack with his clothes and his sleeping bag washed up in an eddy. Heartened, he continued his walk the next day in the heavy rain, to finally find his raft snagged on some sticks on his side of the river. He fashioned a new paddle out of a tea-tree trunk, string, and his enamel plate and plastic
bowl which had been in the rucksack, and thus curiously equipped had continued downriver hoping to catch up with Aljaz’s group.

  The bigger rapids he has been forced to navigate that day have left him terrified and humbled. He asks Aljaz if he can henceforth travel with his party. Aljaz and the Cockroach agree. His name, he says, is George, but the Cockroach immediately announces that for the rest of the trip he will be called Gaia Head, because it seems to fit him much better than George as a name. At which Gaia Head looks away and shrugs his shoulders. Having decided to take their food and their shelter and their knowledge of the river, he now has no choice but to take their name.

  Gaia Head wonders why they had been so grave and quiet when he told them his story. Until Sheena (Why her? I wonder now. Why was it she who had the courage that had abandoned the Cockroach and me?) tells him what she knows of what has passed that day at the Churn.

  ‘Jeezus,’ says Gaia Head. ‘It was only meant to be a fucken holiday.’ And shakes his head, now stubbled with circles of black hair, as if iron filings have been thrown upon it, his mind the determining magnet.

  By the next morning the river is slapping within half a metre of their lowest tent. The mood of the punters is depressed and frightened. The Cockroach tells them, because he must, what he had not told them or Gaia Head the night before, tells them exactly what happened down the cliff, and bursts into tears in the middle of it. Aljaz, ashamed, guilty, says nothing. The punters stop asking him their insistent questions, which are now all directed to the Cockroach, who is seen as the real trip leader.

  The rain continues.

  They break camp quickly, partly because they must clear the gorge before the flood waters rise any higher, partly because of the forlorn hope of finding Derek, or at least his body. Down the slimy boulders of the Coruscades they work, carrying bags, paddles and ammo boxes, like ants carrying crumbs to the nest, they scurry up and over the boulders that dwarf them. Racing before them are the Cockroach and Aljaz dragging and lifting and pulling the rafts. Aljaz feels himself possessed. Of a madness made up of guilt and anger and shame about what has passed. And the madness makes him feel powerful and invulnerable, because he no longer has cares or fears about himself. And he knows that the Cockroach feels the same. Their work has become the expression of their madness. They feel no pain as their lungs sear with their efforts of racing with heavy loads over the uneven gorge boulders; or, rather, they feel the pain but they want to feel it more, wish it to hurt so much that the pain might extinguish all the guilt and shame and anger they feel about Derek. And their work is a fury, because they are mad and because they are caught in a frenzy, because they must get through the gorge quickly as the river is rising and they must keep ahead of the flood peak. For the portage to work quickly the guides must take the rafts, food barrels and their own gear through in the time most punters take to carry just their gearbags to the bottom of the rapid. The Cockroach and Aljaz race back for the next load, exhorting and praising the red-faced punters as they stumble and fall with their small waterproof gearbags and solitary paddles. And the punters look at them and their own fear is amplified by their guides’ madness, for what they had only dimly felt as a titillating apprehension they now know as a truth: the river is not benign, the river is dangerous, the river kills. And their own fear is amplified by their guides’ new lack of fear, by the inhuman loads they carry and the speed at which they labour and the way they seem to have become as unpredictable and as insane as the river itself. ‘Good on ya, keep it up, let’s keep her moving,’ exhort the guides. But the punters only stare back in terror, at the guides and at the river. They move only because their fear of remaining is greater than their fear of moving.