Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  From the occasional glint of reflected sunlight in the dark open doorway, I know what it is they are doing. They are filming my death, the sight of my forearm and hand rising from the furious surging waters to my helpless and hapless would-be rescuers above, whose efforts have now been redoubled by the knowledge that they will be on national TV news in a few short hours. Their arrival has created an audience, and hence my death moves in their minds from the plane of hopeless futility to the altogether higher plane of tragic drama. None of which brings any solace to me. Their new-found energies are transmitted to me only as greatly increased pain in my raised arm and shoulder as they wrench it this way and that. And the knowledge of the helicopter being there only to record my fate rather than to act against it fills my soul with despair. The helicopter should be dropping men and equipment here, should be bringing its technology so that I might live, should abet my hope instead of recording my terrible, terrible despair. But as long as it remains, as long as the rocks pulse around me, then some chance remains. Surely after finishing filming they will come to my aid. Perhaps they are in contact via radio with another chopper which is at this very moment rushing the appropriate gear and personnel to this remote wilderness to ensure that I live. Perhaps they are simply assessing the situation thoroughly before taking action. No doubt they have some very clever plan to rescue me, but a plan which must be totally checked out before being put into action. My rescue can only be a few short minutes away now, maybe less. But my mind is already begin to drift again. I must stop it wandering.

  What is a minute? How long have I been here? Minutes? Hours? Days?

  How long can I stay here?

  Not much longer.

  No! No! Minutes! Hours! Days! I can last. I can.

  I must live.

  They cannot leave me here to die.

  Please! Please! I am here, a human being. Please don’t go!

  But as these words scream through my mind, I feel the pulsing of the rocks dying away. The helicopter has enough footage of my death and is returning to Hobart to file its report in time for the evening news.

  All my hope and despair and pain seems to leave with the chopper. All that remains is an immense stillness.

  For the first time the contours of my true country become clear in my mind as the clouds of life fall beneath me and the blueness of death beckons from above.

  Eliza, 1898

  Eliza closes her eyes. For a moment she has the most childish notion that there is a dinghy coming through the clouds to take her away. She opens her eyes and her old watery eyelids blink away the foolery of such a vision. For a second time, Eliza closes her eyes. For the final time.

  Thinking: Well say You in th. New Jerusalem.

  Aljaz

  As I float a little above the river I can see a group of men trying to pull something out of a flood-swollen waterfall. Their work is difficult and dangerous. They stand on the edge of a greasy rock with a furious torrent raging down beside them. They wear blue overalls marked POLICE SEARCH AND RESCUE in bold white capital letters across the yoke. I can see a stiffened hand and forearm rising out of the whitewater. The men try all sorts of things with the body that is apparently connected to the hand, and which is underwater, submerged in the monstrous deafening roar of the river. They attach ropes to the hidden body, and radio in a helicopter that lowers a winch cable which they connect to the rope. The helicopter pulls gently.

  ‘If it pulls hard,’ I hear one man say, ‘it might just rip the body’s arms off, or, alternatively, it might pull the helicopter down from the sky.’

  ‘It don’t take much to pull down a little chopper like that,’ another says. The attempt with the helicopter fails and it is waved off. The men give up for a while and light cigarettes.

  They talk about the difficulty of getting the body out, of other awful jobs where drowned bodies are so decomposed that the flesh parts like mush when they grasp them and they are left holding nothing but an arm or leg bone. They nervously joke about cutting the body out with knives, severing it in half at the waist, thereby freeing both halves. They walk back to the edge of the rock, and wave their cigarettes in the direction of the outstretched hand as they discuss the technical difficulties of freeing the body.

  Their chief stands near the top of the rock, talking to the departing chopper on a walkie-talkie. He looks a troubled man. No doubt the job is anything but a straightforward one for him. Perhaps he has promised his wife he will be home early. Or perhaps he is worried about what he will say to the media when he gets back to Hobart, and what the media will say about his efforts. Maybe he is unsure how they can free the body without mangling it. He notices the men near the edge of the rock slab and shouts at them.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, watch your step near the edge of the rock slab. Already claimed one fucking life.’ The men go sullen and quiet.

  One fucking life?

  Whose life? I don’t recall that anyone has drowned at this rapid.

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. But what connects the two? What remains? What abideth in the earth forever?

  I hear a half-horse, half-snort laugh.

  Who am I talking to?

  I see two tables of riotous drunken animals blow down through the gorge above all our heads, and as they tumble past way up high I feel the gale that is taking them begin to lift me, and I notice that the animals seem to be looking less and less like animals and more and more like people. Then they are gone. I see a piners’ punt laden with lost souls descending from the stormy skies, all beckoning toward me.

  Madonna santa!

  These visions, these crazy crazy visions. As if I have seen them all before. As if they are eternal. As if they have all been written before and as if there is nothing new under the sun, neither the pleasure nor the misery nor the tears nor the laughter of man. As if there is only one story and it could be writ on a pinhead and within it every story of every man. They come to me faster and faster now. Perhaps I always held these visions within me. From the moment of birth when I looked up through the milky red orb that imprisoned me to see those muscatel eyes of Maria Magdalena Svevo staring back. Or even earlier. Perhaps my mind was never a blank slate upon which my solitary experience was to write its own small story, unaware that it was but part of so many other stories. Perhaps that is why these visions are not solely of me but of a whole world that leads to where I am. And beyond. To where we all are going.

  I feel the water swirling and whorling about me and over me and now through me, and joining it is my head forming similar swirls and whorls, my life essence spilling out from my ears and nose and mouth and arse and tangling itself into untieable Celtic knots with the water, which is no longer destroying me but remaking me as something else, and I am no longer sure if I am me, or me the river or the river me.

  And at this point there is one final sensation of physical pain, as total and unbearable as it is shortlived, that reminds me forever of what I have been. The rocks crack one final time at my shins, and for one last eternal moment the swirling water pushes my body downwards and buffets my face, and at the point the heaviness of my body becomes an overwhelming agony I feel as if I have abruptly lost my anchor and am flying ever higher above the waterfall, far above the departing helicopter, lighter than a kite whose string has been cut. The police far below give up on the sheath knife idea and go back to brooding as sheets of rain drench them. I would like to stay and watch them, see what they will ultimately do to get the body out. Yes, I would like to observe this, it is interesting, but I feel myself rising and drifting ever quicker away from the narrow wild gorge and I know I can no longer return.

  And as I so rise I am filled with a single, dreadful question.

  Am I alone?

  Eleven

  An immensity of blue.

  Sky-blue. A fleck, a piece of flyshit at the centre of this vast emptiness. Moving.

  A soul.

  My soul?

  Twelve

 
I continued travelling for what seemed a very long passage of time. In the course of my interrupted journey I saw many things along the banks of the Franklin and Gordon rivers and upon the shores and waters of Macquarie Harbour. Things both strange and wondrous. I saw the earth bulge up into mountains, saw plants flowering, some large and dramatic, and cover the earth. Saw ice and snow form over much of the land, and the rainforest retreat into the lowest and warmest valleys. Saw giant wombats bigger than a man, and huge kangaroos and monster emus arrive. Saw people and their truth of fire arrive. Saw them create a new land in the image of fire: mesmerising yet confrontational, old as time yet new as a flame, destructive yet fecund. Saw the huge animals disappear completely. Saw the ice and snow largely disappear and the rainforest reappear. Saw white man arrive and saw the world turned upside down. I saw all this and much more besides, saw it all and continued on.

  I saw pods of slaughtered whales, huge somnolent presences, flying over Frenchmans Cap, casting small shadows upon me who watched in awe below, saw swirling through their ranks colonies of slaughtered seals similarly airborne. Saw an Aboriginal village of beehive huts whose women had been stolen and who had returned with terrible stories and strange haunting songs, shared their fire and danced with them, and out of their shimmering hands they cast meteorites and where each meteorite landed there grew a mountain or a valley or a hill or a river or a forest through which I travelled. Passed a colony set up on an island inhabited by ex-convicts and run upon the strictest communal principles, the first among these people being a large matriarch with a ring of moles around her neck; I did not share their fire but passed on. Saw hulks emptying convicts along the Milky Way, their coarse woollen magpie outfits transformed into the ethereal colours of the vast southern aurora, and they were all swirling and smiling and free at last. They all spin around me now. Whales, people, trees, animals, birds. A tunnel of grace through which I continue to travel. But to where? I am floating down the river. But it is no river I recognise.

  and sees the morning light

  ‘We’re here.’

  Smeggsy looks up and he feels an incoming tide of sensations wash over him as his mind races back to join with his body: a physical exhaustion so great that the oar suddenly feels as if it were weighed down by a locomotive and beyond his powers to ever move again, a tiredness so profound that it seems too much effort to even sleep; an arse that feels like it is made of two river rocks; a mouth parched, with a pebble for a tongue; a clammy coldness of the body that frightens him. He is no longer seeing Old Bo’s stories, but the morning light smacking the scattering of weatherboard shops and pubs that compose the front street of Strahan and which face directly onto the wharf; sees three cars parked outside the pub, the doctor’s baby Austin, a Studebaker he doesn’t recognise and an old rusty wood truck, sees the old wood fishing boats stacked high with their wired willow-stick cray pots.

  ‘We’ve done it, Smeggsy.’

  And Smeggsy looks up to see Old Bo’s face crack into the biggest, craggiest smile he has ever seen light across the old bastard’s face.

  ‘We’ve bloody well done it.’

  And in the great fat yellow light of the new morning Aljaz opens his eyes to see his home and his people, sees the mighty snow-capped Triglav rising up the back of Strahan, sees the wharf heavy with blackfellas and a whole host of others happily eating mullas and crayfish together, sees Black Pearl climb out of the harbour wet and sleek and black and as naked as a seal with a big crayfish in her hands. She walks right through that whole mob, until she is at the hub of them all, and everyone radiates out like spokes on a bicycle wheel from where she stands, right smack bang in the middle of all those people, and there it is, smoking and spluttering, Harry’s celebrated barbeque, spitting and flaring, the griddle full of roo patties on one side and cevapcici on the other, and people crowding all around it eager for a feed of Harry’s famous abalone patties which are yet to be grilled over the myrtle coals, and people around it shoving and laughing and yarning with each other. Aljaz sees them and he sees him, Harry, and he is squatting, pulling a fresh loaf of bread out of the adobe oven beneath the grill, and behind him and around him, there on the Strahan wharf, sees Ned Quade embracing Eliza Quade holding a half-gnawed drumstick in one hand, sees Rose, sees Sonja, sees a man who is the dead spit for Harry and it’s his twin brother Albert and he’s smoking rollies and talking with George and Basil and Boy Lewis, sees Milton sitting on the ground picking up slaters and snails, kissing them, then throwing them on the barbeque plate, much to Harry’s displeasure, sees Eileen and Tronce, and George - already drunk - and he’s bent over backwards showing a wart on his bum to be read by cousin Dan Bevan, sees Willie Ho and Reggie Ho and he’s already chatting up Auntie Ellie, sees Reg with sauce upon his walrus moustache and a glass of beer in one hand and the baby Daisy in the other arm, sees them all, his home and his people.

  And he hears the peat crumbling and smells the colours of it growing and at last he knows the song and he knows.

  How much he loves them!

  And he sees Black Pearl is holding something to her chest. From below her forearm falls a puffy shin and a yellow woollen bootee, and the yellow woollen bootee is kicking up and down, and he sees cradled within Black Pearl’s arms Jemma, all cooing and laughing. Black Pearl takes Jemma’s hand and points at him, and he hears her tell the child that the sea eagle she can see high up in the myrtle tree carries the spirits of her ancestors.

  But before Black Pearl has finished speaking he feels a warm updraught, and rising with it his body, wings outstretched, feathers feeling every sensation of the crisscrossing air currents, rising in a spiral, a circle growing ever outwards.

  Richard Flanagan was born in Longford, Tasmania, in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist and Wanting have received numerous honours and are published in twenty-six countries. He directed a feature-film version of The Sound of One Hand Clapping and co-wrote Baz Luhrmann’s Australia. A collection of his essays is published as And What Do You Do, Mr Gable?.

  ALSO BY RICHARD FLANAGAN

  The Sound of One Hand Clapping

  In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, Sonja’s mother walked into a blizzard never to return.

  Some thirty-five years later, when Sonja visits Tasmania and her drunkard father, the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present – changing forever his living death and her ordered life …

  Since its first publication in 1997, Richard Flanagan’s classic story of a migrant family has become one of the most loved literary novels in Australian history.

  Praise for The Sound of One Hand Clapping

  ‘Heart-wrenching and beautifully written … A rare and remarkable achievement.’—Los Angeles Times

  ‘Haunting and unforgettable.’—The Canberra Times

  ‘From its wonderfully atmospheric opening to its touching conclusion, this is a heartbreaking story, beautifully told.’—Literary Review

  ‘A story about redemptive love, a celebration of the resilience of individuals and of their power to change … deeply moving, eventually uplifting.’—The Advertiser

  ‘An almost unbearably sad story … an epic tragedy conducted under the author’s microscope which requires fortitude and a man-sized box of tissues to get through … This novel is a passionately literary account of one of this country’s formative experiences.’—The Sunday Age

  ‘Flanagan is an accomplished ringmaster of despair and tenderness.’—The Globe and Mail

  ‘Flanagan imbues this most Australian of stories with a middle European sensibility found in the reserve of characters in Milan Kundera’s writings … Flanagan tells an immortal story of faith and hope, its loss and rebirth … The Sound of One Hand Clapping is destined to be a classic.’—Sunday Herald Sun

  ‘Flanagan makes
us care about his central characters and breathes life into dark pockets of history. He underscores the terror and mystery of the landscape with a strange tenderness, a loving attention to the little rituals and memories that serve both to sustain and debilitate the people he writes about.’—The Weekend Australian

  ‘Magical realism, the literature of postcolonial nations, is a literature of loss, of lament for pure origins that can never be recovered, and loss is something Flanagan captures brilliantly.’—The Australian’s Review of Books

  ‘The Sound of One Hand Clapping is an intensely disturbing book … and yet in the moral tale played out in the novel there is some hope … the novel is haunting.’—Australian Book Review

  ‘Richly imagined … told in a voice rarely heard in Australia: almost violently masculine, shot through with heartbreaking delicacy of feeling.’—Robert Dessaix

  ‘Flanagan’s absorbing and at times deeply touching second novel seems certain to make a large mark.’—Who Weekly

  ‘A masterpiece of storytelling.’—Mercury

  ‘The novel that moved me to tears this year … When I read the manuscript on a plane, I had to reassure the man next to me that it was not that my life was a mess, it was just that the book was so poignant.’—Caroline Baum, The Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘He has the capacity to give voice to wordless passions, primal voices that whisper and echo through memory. Tasmania reverberates throughout The Sound of One Hand Clapping like a monumental force; a character in its own right.’—The Sunday Times