Death of a River Guide (20 page)

‘Who the hell are youse?' she asks.

Ruth introduces Harry to Ma and tells Ma of Harry's plight. Ma wanders off, then returns with a Dutchman who skippers a tramp steamer that carts apples to Europe. The skipper takes Harry into Ma's smoko room out the back of the pub and looks suspiciously at his right hand with its flap for a thumb. He says nothing. He turns his back, goes to the cupboard, opens it, searches around, then turns and without warning throws an egg at Harry. Harry catches it in the cup of the four fingers of his right hand.

‘Okay,' says the Dutch skipper, whose name is Gerry and whose speech is idiosyncratic Euro-Hollywood. ‘Okay. I owe a few of the greenbacks to the Ma for eating candy in the candy store, so okay. Hell, why nit, eh? Here to Naples. That's the racket. You cook and wash. Ja? Hell, let's do it, buddy. Okay? Why nit? Ain't this life one hell of a big crapshoot?'

Ain't it just, thinks Harry, ain't it just, whatever the bugger a crapshoot might be. No matter. Harry believes in fate, in somebody having his number up there and there not being a dam thing he can do about it. So even though he has never harboured any desire to travel, a job's a job, and he accepts with equanimity the prospect of steaming out of Hobart the following morning to a place that may as well be the moon for all it means to him.

Harry looks at the Dutchman dressed in his best suit of white cotton. A dapper man. A travelled man. Harry thought of travelling as something you did with the army if you were unlucky enough to be caught up in a war. But he had been without a job too long and any job was better than being on the dole. Now he was a little drunk and he wanted to wake up tomorrow and know that he was going somewhere, rather than drifting. Harry proffered his thumbless hand to shake his acceptance.

‘What part of England is Naples in?' Harry asked as they shook hands.

A gambler is almost always a fatalist, because they accept both the good and bad throw of the dice as equally inevitable, and believe there is nothing they could have done to avoid that fall of the dice. If Auntie Ellie hadn't been such a powerful anti-gambler Harry could have ended up with a terrible problem with the dogs and the nags, because he would have lost and lost and simply thought that it was fate and that there wasn't a dam thing he could do about it. But Auntie Ellie had indoctrinated such a fear of gambling in his heart, he found even buying a lottery ticket mildly sinful. Harry, however, was a gambler with life. Which is, I suppose, why he ended up in Trieste.

Upon arriving at Naples some months later, after a hellish and gruelling trip, he is there abandoned by Gerry, who takes on a load of illegal refugees whom he can pay even less to crew the boat. Harry accepts the offer of an ex-GI called Hank. Hank looks like an emaciated Clark Gable and talks like Mickey Rooney. He has a burnt-out
pension
full of Japanese sewing machines he has got through a deal with a buddy, who is part of the occupation forces in Japan. Harry knows nothing about sewing machines, nor about Italy, nor can he speak Italian, but he does, according to Hank, have a winning smile. And winning, says Hank, is everything. ‘I don't like losers,' says Hank. ‘Are you a loser, Harry?' The expression ‘loser' is as new to Harry as the concept. He pauses, a little unsure as to what to say. His entire world had shaped itself around the song of loss.

‘I am not sure I've got anything left to lose,' he says after a time. Hank smiles and slaps him on the back.

Harry had never thought of being a salesman. He had seen the travellers who stayed overnight at Hamers with their cheap suits and soft hands. He had no desire of ever joining their ranks but he had no work, and this, after a fashion, was an offer of work. And whether it be good or bad, Harry believes that this is the job intended for him, and in the end there is for Harry no decison to make. The deal is simple. With his payout from the boat, Harry buys twenty sewing machines and secures an option on twenty more. ‘Where do I start?' asks Harry.

‘South of the city,' says Hank, eager to rid central Naples of any potential rival, even one as self-evidently witless as Harry.

I can't bear to watch this any more. If it were a movie on TV I'd hide behind the couch or go and make a coffee, because this fatalism is just so bloody irritating. Maybe because it reminds me so much of myself. I dunno. But how can someone be so resigned to whatever happens? This is my father I'm seeing, for crying out loud, not a frigging jellyfish. I should be able to do something, get him that job at the Empire Hotel, help him in some way. It just seems too unfair to watch people's lives like this and not be able to do anything. I try and summon another vision, but as I try and obliterate this helpless Harry from view I hear him say something entirely unexpected. He says one word. He says, ‘Trieste.'

‘Trieste?' says Hank, shocked. ‘What the hell ya mean, Trieste?'

In the kitchen of the tramp steamer there had been a wall of postcards from around the world. One in particular had taken Harry's fancy. It looked somehow familiar. With its houses clustering on hills, and its harbour, it looked a bit like Hobart. ‘What is this?' he asked Gerry one day. ‘Trieste,' said Gerry. ‘Full of weird guys and weirder dames. Slovenes and Croats and Krauts and wops. Nit a nice place. One hell of a jive-jointing dump for a continent but what the hell, eh?'

What the hell. Something was born in the mind of Harry Lewis as he looked at that curling postcard, something that went beyond his normal acquiescence to the river of events and was to lead him to my mother and to the matter - the no small matter, as far as I am concerned - of my conception.

‘Trieste,' repeats Harry. ‘That's where I'm going with my sewing machines.'

Hank pauses, then shrugs his shoulders. ‘Have it your way, buddy,' he says. ‘That's the wonderful freedom of capitalism.'

Harry smiles at Hank.

I remember the way he used smile. But this smile was somehow different, as though for once he had actually done something he wanted to do.

 Couta Ho, 1993 

I am ready to absorb the details of Harry's trip north, to watch his adventures and seek to understand his responses - sometimes stunned, sometimes bemused, often delighted - to the strange land he found himself in. I want to observe how others saw this curious one-thumbed stranger. But I am not going with Harry. As much as I want to, try as I might, I am not going with him. I am already far, far away from Italy in that faraway time, dropping down into a city, into a street, over a laundromat, across the road and into an overgrown garden, the shapes of which are beginning to be lost in the dimming light of late afternoon. Facing the garden a sitting-room window illuminated by an unshaded electric light. Within the sitting-room, beneath the electric light, sit Couta Ho and Maria Magdalena Svevo.

I can see them, but they can't see me. Maybe that is why I suddenly flail my fists out at them both, like I sometimes used to throw a few punches out late at night in pubs here and there. Years ago now, let it be added. So that someone would notice me and say, Brother, you are part of this world and we do care about you and what you think and feel, and your thoughts and emotions do matter; you are not nothing. But of course no one ever said such things. They either snotted me or I snotted them, or more often than not we both succeeded only in snotting each other with no clear winner or loser. Whatever, the result was always the same. People laughed and jeered and drank on regardless. Because the people I was hitting were as invisible as me. Because we were all phantoms who had lost something central and we roamed the earth like haunted spirits trying to find that something, and we all ended up lying on the pavement outside, trying to staunch the blood running out of our mouths and eyes with our ragged sleeves. I brawled more when I was younger, when I thought it would somehow render me solid and whole. But I think it would be a good five years since I last blued, because I've lost even the hopeless ambition of forming a tunnel to the real world with my rolling fists. But at this moment something within me snaps, and I cannot help but throw a few blows at Maria Magdalena Svevo and Couta Ho. Of course nothing happens. Thankfully, nothing happens. My blows simply pass through their heads, my fists and arms only a violent intention without substance.

‘I better be getting on,' I hear Maria Magdalena Svevo say as my body shrieks in agony from the sudden wild movement of my arms. Maria Magdalena Svevo stands up and walks over to a framed photo that hangs from the wall. It shows a small baby girl. ‘She was a lovely little baby,' she says.

‘Jemma was beautiful,' replies Couta Ho, ‘but you know the funny thing is …' Couta Ho's voice begins to quaver. She goes to halt it, to stop it, to push it all back down, but then she stops, lowers her heads, pulls out a handkerchief, and when she looks back her eyes are streaming with tears and she just keeps on going as if they are normal, without embarrassment. I can see that Maria Magdalena Svevo thinks there is something beautiful about this, but she cannot name what it is. Perhaps she feels that it is a moment of honesty and trust and that perhaps there are not very many moments such as this in a person's life. She continues to stand.

Couta Ho keeps on talking.

‘After a while after Jemma died, Aljaz came to think that I was too obsessed about it all. He said I needed to get my mind back on other things and stop being morbid. He meant well. I suppose that was how he coped with things. He trained harder, ran for miles and miles every night. He didn't think it did to dwell upon such things. “Why can't you be normal?” he'd ask. “Why can't you just be normal like everybody else?” “Because we're not normal,” I'd say. “Because this thing has changed us and nothing is normal any more.” “The baby's dead,” he'd shout. “Dead, don't you understand.” And I'd scream and cry and say, “Maybe Jemma is dead, but she's not gone, she'll never go, whether you want her to or not. She's part of us, whether you want her here or not.” Silly things like that, I'd say. Silly things. But that's what I thought. It was then that Ali suggested I should take some classes of an evening to give me something other than the baby to think about. Ali always liked activity. “An active body is a healthy mind,” he'd say. Jesus, can you believe it? He got into triathalons as well as his football, and he was always trying to do as many things as possible. Like his baby has just died, but it's as if - if he can just wear out enough Reebok rubber, if he can just make his knees hurt more than what he hurts inside, then it'll be okay. “There's just not enough hours in the day,” he'd always say. But for me there were too many, hours that just had to be endured.'

Couta Ho looks up and realises that Maria Magdalena Svevo is still standing up. ‘I'm sorry, Maria,' she says.

‘Don't be sorry,' says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Nothing to be sorry about.'

Couta Ho apologises, says she will stop talking, and asks Maria Magdalena Svevo to sit down while she gathers herself.

‘Don't stop talking,' says Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Unless you want to.' So Couta Ho continues.

‘Everyday I'd go to the cemetery to see Jemma's grave. She's buried down Kingston, in that modern cemetery down there where they don't have headstones, only plaques that sit in the lawn in neat rows, and everyone has to have the same size plaque. They bury all the babies together, in the same row. I don't know why, they just do. Some people try to make their plaque look a bit different from the others in the row by leaving some of their baby's favourite toys. It breaks you up to see that, you know, just these rows of babies' plaques, every second or third one with a little plastic doll or toy, just simple things like that, a Big Bird toy or a toy car or a teddy bear or that sort of thing, out there in the rain and cold and no one to pick them up and play with them and hold them …'

Couta Ho's voice trails off and she looks away, out of the window of her home, past her front garden to the laundromat across the road, the lights of which have just come on. She realises that it is almost entirely dark in the room and gets up and draws the curtains and switches on the light. As Couta Ho moves around her, Maria Magdalena Svevo speaks because she feels she ought, not because she wishes to.