Daylight was creeping up on them, whip-crack calls already sounding in the forest. She released the second bundle, having to push-start them with her feet, and then jumped free.
* * *
The birds sang in the dawn, a fiery red, while they breakfasted on muesli bars and apple. Layney and Gill sat up front, cross-legged, to watch.
It was cool enough to goosebump her forearms, a light breeze coming off the water. They would be gathering soon, back at camp, to salute the sun from the breakfast deck.
Dean chewed, fidgeted. ‘Did you hear that new mill down south might still go ahead?’
Jess nodded. Began her stretches, focusing on the horizon, and hoped he would take the hint. Her arms were stiff, but would soon loosen up today.
She and Cliff had both been at the protest. They had come back from a desert walking tour early to be with their friends. It wasn’t exactly peaceful, what with the rocks thrown at the pigs, and high-pressure hoses washing the crowd back in a tide. But she had not expected it to get so out of control. She and Cliff were picked up together but taken in separate vehicles. He had a bunch of warrants—unpaid fines going way back, before he dropped off the grid—she had known about those. She spent the night in lock up, but was set free late morning.
Cliff was held, awaiting court; he’d punched a policeman and broken his nose, they said. While he waited, pacing the four walls, they dug up some old files. On a protest group from nearly a decade before—some development fire gone wrong—wanting to pin a terrorist charge on him. He had just been a lookout, still at uni, but a known member. And there had been other fires. She hadn’t known about any of that.
Like the rest of them, he had straightened out, moved on, but one of the leaders had been picked up, on a drug offence. And he was singing to reduce his sentence. Naming every name, those he could remember, anyway.
Two years. That’s how long it took to get to trial. She watched Cliff wither and pale to a husk of her man, and she thought she’d die waiting. He could have pleaded it out, like the rest of them, given up the names of his old friends and lovers, but he refused. When they handed down the sentence, ten years without bail, in high-security, with only monthly visiting access, she had seen the life leave his face. He had looked up at her, asking, and she had let him go.
When the guards went in to move him the next morning, they found his body hanging from his sheets.
* * *
She felt it before she saw it. The low hum of all those screen-based lives. The stench of it was in the water, splashing up now, in little wind waves. The last bend meandered in a great looping sweep, as if it, too, wanted to hold back the moment as long as possible.
‘Do you hear that?’ Dean stood, paddle raised. ‘It’s the sound of change coming.’
Jess coughed her disapproval, not for breaking protocol but their last moment of silence on the water. There was a change coming in, a southerly, but Dean couldn’t read the weather, let alone the future. She hoped he was right; that’s why she had kept going, after all. If there was anything to admire about humans, it was their undying capacity for hope.
Layney and Gill exchanged a look across the raft, still paddling. They were the finest raftswomen she knew. University rowers, the pair of them. Layney had made the squad for the Olympics, ten years ago, though she didn’t survive the final cut. They were the best people she knew, too. Always the first picked on her team.
They eased the raft into the river’s centre, where the current was deep and fast now. At last, they were thrown out of the bend, the river sending them on. There it was: the reaching, sprawling mess of steel and concrete and glass. The mill was centre stage, belching smoke from its twin towers.
‘Okay,’ Jess said. ‘Stroke, stroke, stroke.’ They had to race now, lucky to have gotten this far without attracting attention. She breathed through the adrenaline surge, focusing the desire to succeed in order to drown out the fear. Leaving everything behind. She felt the logs beneath her, the spirits of the trees they had once been, retracing the journey of their ancestors.
Dean erected their protest banner, the perfect backdrop for his dreadlocks and holey striped leggings, all that facial hair. A fisherman buzzed past in a battered tinny, and gave them a wave. Dean waved back, and resumed paddling. His longer arms gave him a deeper stroke but his technique could not match theirs. She had to work harder to compensate, and keep them on the straight.
An aircraft flew low overhead. Her thinking was muddied by noise, the presence of the city, and the other craft on the water. A ferry passed them on the outside and, for a time, they surfed its bow wave.
‘A hundred and fifty metres to go,’ she said. ‘C’mon. Surge.’
She entered a state of calm, bliss even. Muscles straining, moving over the water. She was water. Her blood would run upstream, counter to the machine. For the first time, she focused on the cargo that had sat amongst them, unspeaking, for the length of their journey. It was too late to worry whether it was enough, if they had rigged it right, if the water had got in somewhere.
They paddled for all their lives, to meet the mill, head on. Dean dropped his paddle to arm the explosives, and for a moment, Jess thought he was going to try and jump free. Brave a life inside. And then he grinned, and shut his eyes.
The Good Mother / In The Wake Of The Raftsmen Page 4