Death of a River Guide (15 page)

It was the first meeting between guides and punters that Aljaz loathed more than any other. It depressed him, and coming as it did after two days of frantic work rushing around town, buying a fortnight's food for ten people, then stripping it of its packaging and waterproofing it by wrapping each piece separately in three layers of plastic bags, then carefully packing them into large black plastic barrels. After two days scouring the chaos that was Pig's Breath's storeroom for knives and woks and billies and petrol cookers that worked and tents that didn't leak and paddles that weren't bent and pumps that had pressure and first-aid kits that were not wet and repair kits that were not empty, after all this hectic, crazed, frustrating work, they had to meet the punters and impart to them an air of serene organisation and calm control, while all around them was blind panic. And as always, the punters looked so pathetic, so hopeless, so dependent upon the quiet leadership of their guides. The Cockroach took refuge in seeking to be efficient.

‘Now,' he said, ‘who's going to be needing to hire a wetsuit?'

 the third day 

The pork satays that Aljaz had prepared for the evening of the third day had gone rancid in the heat. Aljaz delved down into a large barrel, pulling out bag after carefully packed bag of food, until he at last found a piece of silverside that smelt only a little bad. He washed the lump of meat in the river, then boiled it for an hour, after which he diced it into cubes and tossed it into the wok on the fire along with some canned tomatoes, kidney beans and a more than generous serve of chilli powder.

‘Ekala,' said Aljaz in reply to Derek's questions as to what they were eating for tea. ‘Traditional Brazilian dish. Aged silverside is the closest approximation available to smoked llama meat.' Derek looked on with interest and Rickie said that he would have to visit a Brazilian restaurant when he returned to Adelaide.

After they had eaten the meal out of their plastic bowls the Cockroach told them the stories about Tasmania that they wanted to hear. About the grandfather who slept with his daughters until his son chained him up, beat him every morning until he was mad, then used him as a watchdog. About the son who carried his dead mother in a sugar bag to the nearest town to register her death and, finding her too heavy, stopped at the wayside and did what he did with all the roos he killed and carried, gutted the corpse and then proceeded on. The punters greeted the stories with nervous laughter and nods and shakes of the head, meant to convey bewilderment at such horror but which was rather them affirming that Tasmania was as they had always conceived it in their ignorance, a grotesque Gothic horrorland - as if they knew the stories already, which really they already did. The Cockroach tells the stories for effect, not because he believes them but because he knows they are what the punters want, and his job is to satisfy their needs. Aljaz says nothing. Other nights on other trips he has told the same stories. They ought be honoured by their repetition and by their currency. But they are not and Aljaz dislikes them, dislikes telling them. What is there to say? It is too hard to say something different, to tell a new story that no one has told and to which he doesn't know the response of either the punters or himself. Those stories are too hard. They come from something too close.

I can hear a sobbing, a soft sobbing in the darkness, a swish of fabric. Thank God it's not Jemma but a tent on the Franklin. Aljaz is looking inside the tent, his torch light beaming upon the expansive sitting form of Otis, whose farmboy's body moves gently up and down with his weeping. Outside in the darkness the rain softly thrums the tent's taut nylon.

‘Otis,' said Aljaz, ‘what's the matter, mate?'

‘Nothing,' said Otis.

‘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, ‘poppa
dams
.'

‘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.