Death of a River Guide (10 page)

 young Aljaz 

The tableau freezes at the moment Aljaz ought arise back out of the river spluttering. I realise that unlike then I am not now going to resurface, maybe never again open my big wet gob and gobble up huge gulps of beautiful air. Perhaps up there on the rock above they still half expect to hear a shriek and turn around to see me dance a soggy polka before them, as if it were all only part of a joke that ought not be taken seriously. It is an old trick, this playing the fool for the customers to divert their attention from their genuine worries. Or not even a trick, but a recognition that the whole thing, the entire trip, is so contrived, so idiotic, that an idiotic act is the only adequate response to the circumstances. I would like to say, looking back on my childhood, that I consciously resolved to always present myself as an idiot to a world I found idiotic, that from the moment Maria Magadalena Svevo sliced my umbilical cord with her green-handled kitchen knife I had already come to the conclusion that this world was one not worthy of trafficking with.

But it wouldn't be true. It is true that as a child I found the company of Milton, an adult idiot with an early Beatles haircut that predated the early Beatles by some years, far more congenial than that of either purportedly normal children or purportedly sensible adults. Milton had a big nose, an even more aquiline number than my own snoz, and he looked somewhere between a battered, crazed John Lennon and an enlightened Mo out of
The Three Stooges
. Milton and I would sit around the Hobart bus depot hanging out together, watching the busy shoes and legs of busy people go busily back and forth to destinations that seemed to us without purpose or reason. Milton would catch slaters and ants and spiders and we would place them in the gutters next to which clankered up the big diesel buses. We would watch the insects' funny hasty movements, going first this way and then that, there being no reason for any direction because a filthy big bus would suddenly career over the top of the insects, ending their pointless harrying journey forever. And then Milton would laugh his crazed half-horse half-snort laugh, then sometimes he would cry until I could find him some more insects to watch.

There were grand, wild stories explaining Milton's idiocy. That he was fathered by Edward VIII while on a secret mission to Australia during World War II. That he was descended from a family whose line began with a flagellator who had been cursed. That the government had used his mother for secret tests while she was pregnant during the war. But the truth behind my idiocy was more prosaic. I was deaf, unable to talk because I was unable to hear much beyond the deep vibrations of the bus engines and Milton's laugh.

But these thoughts are getting ahead of my vision: of a small boy with a mop of wild red hair standing alone in the middle of a bitumen playground, which, along with the state school he attends, lies beneath the level of the highway that runs past the school's northern border. The boy is small for his age, smaller than the children who play around him, who play hide and go seek, who play chasings, who play British bulldog and kick the footy. While the other children's eyes are fixed upon each other, his eyes stare at the sky. And I know what that child is feeling, not because that child is me, Aljaz, but because I am watching not only the movements of the boy Aljaz's body now, but the movements of his heart and soul.

The boy Aljaz feels himself new. He feels his world around him to be alien. Sometimes he closes his eyes and then reopens them quickly and all the playground looks to be made of angles that make no sense. I say his world, but he feels nothing in it to be his. Everything belongs to everybody but him. The world has not shaped itself around him yet, nor he around this strange place lit by the cavernous sky with the china-blue light. He looks at the clouds in that sky, watches them wander past himself and where he is rooted by his body. He thinks that perhaps it might be possible to learn to fly like the comic characters. He thinks it might be just a matter of will and magic, like learning to walk and learning to talk, both events which he remembers clearly. Of the two, talking had been the harder. No one had understood him. He would say sweet things, beautiful things, funny things. People would look at him quizzically and then with pity. He didn't want pity. He wanted conversation. He wanted to be understood. After a time his knowledge of words grew greater and greater. He now listened to the way in which words were used, the way one word could carry so many different meanings, how every word could be a tree full of fruit. But when he asked questions he was answered only with a quizzical shake of the head. Harry and Sonja worried that their son was simple.

‘Perhaps it was inevitable that he would be damaged goods,' Harry said one day, saying it in front of Aljaz, thinking their simple son would not understand.
Damaged goods
. Aljaz had grown angry with the way no one understood his words and would burst into terrible rages, screaming and thrashing around the floor. Sonja took him to the doctor, who discovered that he was not simple but deaf, his idiot's speech the consequence of hearing words only as shadows of sounds, as vibrations through the skull. According to the doctor the deafness was the result of an improperly treated pneumonia at an early age. The child was not so deaf as to be unable to comprehend, but deaf enough that his speech was severely impaired. Aljaz's ears were operated upon. The operations were successful and his speech improved.

I see the boy, now older, still smaller than his fellow schoolmates. And I can hear what the schoolmates are saying to the small boy. They are calling him wop and dago and greaser and Jewboy. He is hurt, but none of it hurts like the hurt of the time when he discovers that everyone in the class has been invited to Phil Hodge's tenth birthday party. Except him. Forty-one girls and boys. ‘But not you, Cosini,' says Phil's younger brother Terry. ‘We don't have wogs,' says Phil's younger brother Terry, smiling. ‘Especially not snotty red-headed wogs.'

The small boy quickly learns that he must fight back, no matter what the odds. No matter that he will day after day lose and come back into class after lunch with torn shirt and bleeding scratches. For he knows that when the circle forms around him and they start to spit on him, when they start to shove and the shoves turn to blows, that he must strike back. Even when they have him down on the hot black bitumen of the playground and a few hold him while others kick, even then he knows that he must keep flailing with whatever limb they have forgotten to pin or that he can momentarily wrest from their grasp, must keep on fighting because they can only win if he gives up. Day after day the circle hits him, punches him, kicks him, spits on him and chants, ‘Grease and oil change! Grease and oil change!' Rubs steaming golden chips' white potato pulp in his bright red hair and chants, ‘Blondie! Blondie!' And he never gives up, and he never cries in front of the circle, not even when the teacher after lunch complains about the smell of his hair, and upon examining his head orders him to the sick bay to wash it immediately, shaking her head and saying under her breath, ‘Those migrants' hygiene …' Not even then, when his face burns with the pain of the total and utter humiliation of his pitiful plight, does he cry or give in.

Nor, curiously, does he assert the fact that half of him is Tasmanian. Because he is proud, because he believes that people ought accept him for what he is, without him having to invoke half of his parentage in order to deny the other half. He simply refuses to accept their estimation of him as being less than them. He is joined in this refusal by one other child, Adie Haynes. Adie, like Aljaz, is an outsider. He is quiet around the other kids, who call him Coon. Adie doesn't look that black. He is about as dark as Aljaz. ‘But we're blackfellas, see,' he tells Aljaz. ‘I dunno why that makes me different. But it does.' And he, like Aljaz, seems to be in a state of permanent war with all the other school-kids. In Grade Four Adie leaves school because his family is heading back north. Aljaz plays with Adie the day Adie's family pack up and load an ancient Austin with their possessions, and he laughs when Adie puts on his snorkel and goggles for the journey in a back seat crowded with five other children so that he won't have to smell their farts. ‘See you, brother,' says Adie and turns and disappears into the mêlée of the back seat, to resurface behind the parcelshelf like a skindiver in a submersible bell, a smile evident even through the scratched dirty glass of the window and snorkel mouthpiece.

Looking back upon it now my childhood seems to have been a series of farewells. Saying goodbye to relatives going to live and work on the mainland where people were said to be happy and believed that tomorrow would be even better than today, saying goodbye to my aunts off to be interred in cemeteries. It all begins with saying goodbye to Adie that day and watching him wave furiously out of that rear window, his face obscured by a pair of goggles, and it all ends with saying goodbye to Couta Ho and leaving myself many years later.

The day Adie left I was so upset Harry decided to take me for a drive. Harry's drives were without purpose: more precisely, they were circular journeys which the path of the new main roads and highways seemed only to frustrate. Every tree stump, every ageing gum tree sitting alone in a paddock, every derelict wooden hut - looking half pissed, leaning like Slimy Ted at angles that seemed to defy gravity, supported only by blackberry vines and an almost human tenacity - every vista that looked away from the road, seemed to be cause for another of Harry's interminable stops. We would all empty out of the battered Holden EK stationwagon - we being Maria Magadalena Svevo, Sonja, almost always a couple of cousins, of whom I have an unending supply - mess about in the roadside cutting, then head off into the bush with Harry beginning stories like this:

‘Never had the story straight from Uncle George, but I do know that Auntie Cec always maintained …'

Or like this:

‘Well, it was here that your Uncle Reg was had up for poaching with Bert Smithers and Reg and Bert both played stupid in court, playing up Reg's harelip and Bert's cleft palate so bad that the magistrate declared them imbeciles who could not be held responsible for their actions and let them off and after …'

Or like this:

‘Beyond them paddocks there, back where the Ben begins to rise up there, that's where the cave that Neville Thurley and your grandfather lived in for two winters while they were snaring possums early in the Depression …'

The stories went on and on. Harry's was a landscape comprehensible not in terms of beauty but in the subterranean meanings of his stories. The new roads were not made for such journeys, but, as Harry put it, were simply straight lines to get you from A to B as quickly as possible, which was, he maintained, the way only fools travelled. The old roads built along the routes of carriageways, that more often than not were cleared widenings of old Aboriginal pathways, were the roads Harry seemed to like best. But he also made do with the highways, stopping the car at the oddest points to get out and chat about such places as the site where Father Noone - he of the magical powers - had frozen an adulterer to the spot. The man had, as Harry would say, been fooling around, and Father Noone had been speaking with his wife inside the now long-vanished hut of a house and had stepped outside to remonstrate with the faithless husband, who awaited Father Noone bearing evil intentions and an axe above his head. Just as the husband went to cleave Father Noone's head apart like a melon, Father Noone uttered his immortal words: ‘You will stay such until ere the sun sets.' So the poor man did, frozen to the spot, arms and axe immobile above his head, until night fell. And to this day there remains a piece of barren ground where the luckless adulterer so stood. At this moment in his story Harry would point downwards and sure enough, there it would be, the piece of barren earth. Year after year we returned, listened to the same story, and at its conclusion looked earthward and nothing ever grew there.