First Person

by Richard Flanagan

  I suppose so, Ray said, a little deflated. I know that was all bullshit what happened in the Queensland parliament though.

  When the government denied it had anything to do with the proposal?

  Yeah.

  But that would have suited Heidl, I said. Because once the government denied it, other people thought that they were covering up and that there must be something in it. Or that if our government wasn’t, then another government, the Americans, were. And that made Heidl look far bigger and more important than he was.

  Ray went quiet a second time.

  2

  And then he said:

  It was beautiful up there, you know. Just landing where we wanted. The night sky.

  He went on talking like that, about swimming with dugongs, about hunting with local blackfellas, the taste of goanna cooked on a fire, sweet and full, the particular odour of a mangrove swamp halfway between stench and perfume and how he rubbed the mud into his body so he could work out exactly what the smell was and how it was something different again, how one day with the blackfellas they caught a big leatherback turtle, and the blackfellas broke its legs so that it would neither wander off nor die quickly and its meat would not go off in the tropical heat. They killed it two days later.

  The taste was unreal, he said. Great meat. But you know what was amazing. I was looking into that turtle’s eyes and it just wanted to live. It wouldn’t die. Two days before we ate it and it wouldn’t die. It wanted to live, he said. It’s an incredible thing.

  I remember that night, he went on, on this beach, just staring into that sky. Like the world was new. It was—

  He stopped, searching for words.

  —free.

  Maybe that was all it was.

  Maybe.

  Ray took a swig from his beer, belched, and wiped his wet mouth with the back of his hand.

  Maybe that’s something, he said, maybe it’s everything. I dunno. It was fuckn great, that’s all I know.

  We both went quiet for a moment.

  The thing is, Ray said, the turtle wanted to live. That’s what I remember. Looking at its eyes. It was in agony. But it wouldn’t stop living.

  Ray seemed to have drifted back to some other memory. He ran a thumb up and down the condensation on his beer glass.

  Pedro and them don’t know, he said.

  Don’t know what?

  The money’s all gone.

  Their money?

  Heidl blew it all on us frigging around in choppers for a year and a half. That new LandCruiser of his. A few other toys.

  You didn’t tell them?

  You fuckn joking?

  So they’ll lose their houses?

  Well, I don’t know about that. Ziggy will—he’ll get their money back.

  You just said their money’s gone.

  I don’t know. Probably. Maybe. That’s what Heidl told me. That’s why—I’m guessing—why he rang you. He needed to look like he was going to deliver the book to pay them back a bit.

  I might have felt angry if I wasn’t so despairing, and I might have given in to my despair if I wasn’t so angry. As it was, the effect was to leave me numb.

  So I’m just another con?

  I didn’t say that, Ray said.

  It was my turn to be quiet.

  I mean, he’s doing the right thing, isn’t he? Ray said, screwing up a beer coaster. He’s using the advance to give them a bit of their money back?

  He is?

  Well, what did he tell you then?

  I told Ray how I thought I had overheard Heidl on the phone ordering a hit on Eric Knowles. Maybe the money was for that, I said. And I told him how when I’d rung the number I had got a pizza parlour answering machine. I laughed, but Ray seemed to take a more serious view.

  You think you know him, and then you find out you don’t know anything. You think he’s telling the truth and it turns out to be all lies. You think he’s telling the most outrageous bullshit and it turns out to be all true.

  I think he just lies. Maybe he doesn’t even care about the money and it’s just a game.

  Or maybe, Ray said, he needs the advance to quieten Pedro Morgan. Or maybe he just wants it to pay for our hotel. We’ve been there two months now.

  There is no book, is there?

  Ray looked away.

  Is there, Ray?

  Fucked if I know, Ray said, staring down at his drink. You tell me. You’re the writer.

  There is no fucking book. It’s just a new scam to pay something off the old scam, and Heidl just keeps moving on.

  Just finish the thing and then there will be a book. That’s what you want to be, isn’t it? A writer? To be a fuckn writer? So just write the book. Heidl doesn’t care what you do. Write or don’t write. It’s up to you.

  We drank on.

  The hours passed, Ray flirting unsuccessfully with a goth, and after midnight we found ourselves leaning against a wall, shouting to be heard over the band and the crowd.

  Why hang with the prick? I asked Ray.

  What? Ray yelled.

  Heidl, I said.

  Heidl? Fuck him.

  Why?

  Because he’s got into me, Ray said. That’s why.

  What do you—?

  He gets into you, Kif, that’s what I fuckn mean.

  Ray pinched two fingers together and holding them close to my forehead twisted them back and forth like an auger.

  He gets into you and he gets into you, he bores into you and you just…just…

  What?

  Can’t, Ray said, dropping his hand. Just can’t escape.

  And he began babbling on about slimy mud.

  I couldn’t see Ray. What was standing next to me was an ordinary man; perhaps of all things, a weak man, a weak man whom I had made the mistake of for too long thinking was a strong man.

  What’s he got over you, Ray?

  What do you mean? He hasn’t got—

  It’s like he’s got you scared.

  And having said it, I immediately regretted saying what I thought Ray would take as the greatest insult.

  He took out his pouch of Champion Ruby and started rolling a cigarette, eyes determinedly fixed on the tobacco and paper.

  Maybe I am, Ray said quietly and licked a paper. Maybe I am, mate.

  I thought it was only about the book.

  Ray laughed.

  Oh, mate, he said, and looking up from his durrie, shook his head.

  And then we talked of other things, and after a further time my stories were once more his stories, we again agreed on all things, and later when we left the bar everything was as it always had been between us, as natural and close as if we were brothers.

  3

  When we were young, sometimes I’d drive over to the remote Tasmanian west coast, to where Ray was working as a welder on the last of the great hydro-electric construction schemes, the damming of the Pieman River, said to be named after a Tasmanian convict, a pieman, who, on escaping, had killed and eaten his fellow escapees. Five hours up into the empty ache of the highlands then plunging back down into the wild rainforested gorges of the west, until I hit the dying mining towns, spectral ruins in a moonscape of desolation, wounded blues and greens and bright bronze rock glistening in the forever rain and lonely yellow headlight trails, turning north past the last of the rusting ripple iron shanties, seven stubbies down, maybe more, gunning it up the green-walled mountain passes until I finally reached the last great dam construction village of Tullah.

  Listening to Ray in the St. Kilda bar, I could see he was engaged in a mysterious battle between his desire to be free and where that desire had now led him—servitude to a monster. Ray seemed suddenly childlike, defenceless; he, the man who had first made his name as a pub brawler in that mountain camp; he, who had strutted his stuff there, claiming to be a French aristocrat, daring anyone to laugh at him, to throw the first punch, going up to the bar in the Tullah camp and, in what everyone else in Tullah thought was French, asking for
a beer.

  Je suis more drinko.

  Daring someone to laugh, because it was funny, to acknowledge the absurd joke that it was and he was and the whole world of the Tasmanian mountain camps were, the world of men pretending to be something that wouldn’t quickly be consumed and transformed into broken bodies collecting pension cheques and queuing for medicines for their emphysema, their diabetes, their ruinous hearts and broken backs and increasingly confused minds; pretending to be immortal, ferocious, unbreakable; these, the most brittle and easily broken of human beings, working-class men.

  Jay swee more fucking drinko? repeated the canteen’s number two cook, reputedly Tullah’s toughest man, if not its leading francophone.

  The number two cook was built like a road train, his head an angry red balloon stuffed full of gravel. He was inclined in rage to speak sentences of one word or make of many words one sentence, spat out like broken teeth.

  You! Fuckn! Arrogant! Froggycuntfucker!

  They went outside, the bar following them, leaving the three-metre-long fire in which they burnt logs the diameter of telegraph poles. And in a wet gravel car park, in the sodium-lit rain, they watched the two men brutally beat each other.

  It went on for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

  The cook could take punishment. He could also inflict it, and his methods—knees, trips, kicks—were pitiless. In some fighters there is a grace, aesthetic, or even a charm. There was none of that in the number two cook. He was a beast—a rhinoceros, a crocodile, a prehistoric thing more commonly found in tar pits. The cook’s blows swung Ray’s head wildly this way and that.

  Ray was smaller, but fast. He managed to keep the number two cook mostly at bay with a rapid series of left jabs, until the big man was puffing and slowing. A right blow from Ray in the middle of the cook’s chest oddly halted the big man—he wheezed, he barked; and Ray saw his chance, moving in on the cook’s unprotected face, snapping his head back with a blow to his jaw. When the cook fell to the ground, Ray kicked hard at his head to keep him down. No one moved. The cook was no longer trying to fight, his bloodied pudgy head and ginger hair strange jetsam in the large puddle where they floated icon-like in the gilded reflection of a sodium street lamp. His body was shuddering in strange convulsions.

  He’s retaliating! Ray yelled at me as I went to pull him off. The lousy cunt! he cried, throwing a wild punch at me to leave him, so that he might continue beating the cook. He pointed at the spasming body. He’s still fuckn wanting to go me, the CUNT!

  I grabbed Ray again, twisting his arm behind his back, but he broke free, throwing me against a parked car. He stood above the number two cook, fists out, not kicking, yelling.

  Tell me now! he cried as much to the primeval forests and the mountains beyond as to the number two cook, as much to the moon as to the mountains. Tell me fuckn now! he roared. What is it? What! What the fuck is it?

  But the number two cook could make no answer; no one could as the mob—realising it was raining and cold, and that the bar was dry and warm—dissolved into the night and that distant night into another and the city bar in which we now stood. Had Ray, in Heidl, for the first time in his life come up against some sort of limit that he could not adequately apprehend, far less surmount, flee, and escape? Something that he could not beat into the gravel and puddles, could not reduce to an umber-hued groaning animal felled in a dirty bowl of yellow water at the base of rainforested mountains? For some gravity of life was now reaching for us, pulling us back into the terrible void we both for a short time had had the vanity of thinking we might escape, he with his body and adventures, me with my books and my writing. His violence, my words: two aspects of the same doomed revolt.

  And perhaps for the first time I felt his fear, that everything we did, everything we had done, would not be enough to prevail against the island that was still strong within us—the burghers and political hacks, the small-town businessmen and assorted silversides who had thrown us out, his family and my family, descendants of convicts in whom the sluggish, tormented blood of slavery still pulsed, the jailed and the jailers and their torturous games, the way in which some essence of oppression had for two hundred years confounded the bitter, mad, beautiful island.

  I remembered that wild rage, the desire to hate and be hated and spit in the face of it all, kick it until it stopped moving, a mad violence that was also an act of liberation. It was wrong. That was its attraction. It was wrong, because the world is always right, and we would break before it, and it would roll over us. But not before Ray and I went up to that bar in Tullah one last time, and Ray called out to the barman in a most absurd voice,

  Je suis more drinko!

  Then looking up and down the bar, meeting each man’s eyes until they looked down or turned away, daring all of them, any of them, to back the world against him.

  And it was only at that moment, leaning against a sticky bar wall in St. Kilda, that I realised that the Ray I had for so long known had disappeared. Ray, who was always certain and never fearful, was somehow at once lost and frightened. And if he was frightened, then, I thought, I should be terrified. I looked at him again, and tried to see once more that same man hammering a stolen Valiant through red light after red light, slewing around cars, full of a wild exhilaration, because we were finally living.

  But it was no good. He was gone.

  9

  1

  THE WEEKEND AT HOME with Suzy and Bo came and went too quickly. I was back at work, and behind his executive’s desk Heidl was, more than ever, all evasion and faux irritation with my questions. Who could blame him? I was bored with them too, bored with the persona he insisted I work to create: a tepid technocrat; a diligent family man; an accidental leader so subsumed in his own humility that the great successes of the ASO simply happened like Topsy. Heidl could now rarely pass more than a few minutes before beginning a song cycle of demands—for better morning teas, for another instalment on his advance, for the heating to be turned up or turned down, for sealed windows to be opened, or a nearby executive’s door to be closed.

  But the rorts—that marvellous Australian word for robberies done with sufficient chutzpah as to approach human virtue—the rorts demanded something more in the memoir; something approaching, well, honesty. Very occasionally he opened up, if only a little, and spoke in the manner of a tradesman describing his craft, which was to him so simple, so obvious, as to be everyday. But just at such a moment early that Monday when I felt revelation was imminent, when I was almost hopeful that a book might remain possible, Heidl stood up, put his jacket on, and quietly said he had to go to a meeting with his lawyers and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon.

  Pia Carnevale, looking in later and seeing me alone and despondent, offered to take me out for lunch to cheer me up. We went to what was for me an exotic, even alien location: the inner-city restaurant. The welcome of the owner—an old friend of Pia—the ease of the waitress, Pia’s familiarity with the many dishes that were not even words I knew—all this was novel for me. If I felt an awkward ingénue, a provincial in his cheap clothes and torn runners, Pia gave no sign she noticed, and every word and every gesture suggested she saw me as nothing other than an equal. She was dressed, as ever, strikingly, which is not to say I remember what she wore. What I recall was her spiky charm, that ease of someone who was confident in themselves and comfortable in their world, things I was acutely conscious of not being.

  At first, Pia wandered off into salacious tales of the famous, stories delivered straight-faced and invariably ended by a short, salty cackle. The multi-millionaire Scandinavian thriller writer who, at seventy-eight, had married a twenty-seven-year-old, insisting on sex after writing his daily five hundred words, and who, while touring Australia, had to be revived by an ambulance crew after having had a creative outburst of sixteen hundred words in a single morning; the English Booker winner who always had to have two prostitutes waiting for him after an event; the celebrated American poet who phoned her publicist i
n the adjacent hotel room, demanding the publicist ring room service for her to order a boiled egg; writers who passed out from drink and drugs before major TV interviews, on and on Pia regaled me with the whole glorious, raucous panoply of errant behaviour, of demons and madnesses private and public.

  And when she finished a story, Pia would ever so slightly tilt her head back and blink two or three times, a gesture halfway between a nervous tic and the shutter click of a camera—as they were then—that captured that moment of your response, as if with those two or three blinks she knew you but didn’t judge.

  Punctuating her anecdotes were asides. About her mother dying of dementia. Her ambitions. The hopes she had had as an editor of working with great writers, the reality of making rubbish that the trade could sell. The terror of old age, of losing her mind. How she had made a name for herself transforming the hastily collated nonsenses of celebrities into bestsellers. The enormous labour of rewriting Jez Dempster’s annual tomes, the rubbish dialogue she had to reinvent. She asked me about my marriage which was, I understood, another way of telling me about her own private life. She was unmarried, seemed not to lack admirers, and confessed to the malign attraction of having a partner.

  Do you think, she said, you can be in love with being in love?

  Beneath her confidence, her ease, I began to be aware of a diffidence, a nervousness, a fear. Pia Carnevale’s details began to build in a strange haste leading to some unknown point, as we rushed from topic to topic, until there we suddenly were—there, at our true destination, the point of our lunch.

  Kif…Kif—does Siegfried ever call you at home?

  I told Pia he didn’t have my number and I wasn’t in the book.

  Nor me, Pia said. But somehow he got hold of my number. Should I be worried?

  But like all people who ask questions she didn’t want an answer, and I didn’t bother giving one. Pia had been overseeing Heidl’s memoirs from the beginning, working with the earlier editors and ghost writers whom Heidl had so quickly demoralised to the point of resignation. Heidl and Pia had seemed like old friends the first time I had seen them together in Gene Paley’s office. But clearly it wasn’t so. She dipped the tip of a sugar cube into her espresso.