Death of a River Guide (26 page)

I can see Old Bo and I can see the freshwater lobster telling a new story, and at some point the two have merged so completely I am no longer sure whether a lobster is rowing the boat or Old Bo is telling the story. Then the punt they row disappears into the night light of Macquarie Harbour. All sight and sound of them is gone.

I thought I had a handle on this vision thing. At the beginning, watching myself being born - fine. Watching the early days of the river trip that led me to this mess - fine. Even watching what turns out to be my father losing his thumb whilst pining years before I was born - fine. And I can understand seeing my childhood and all that business with Couta, but now I just feel myself getting more confused. Having drunk animals tell stories, personal stories, I ought add, about yourself and your family, then getting too drunk to continue - well, it's wrong. Visions ought be given you by some divine being, not bantered about by a mob of pissed marsupials and their mates. But these visions, they proceed as a series of abrupt images, being told to me by any number of people and animals, and the connection between one and the next is never stated or obvious, and now the visions all seem to be happening together, invading each other's worlds.

Which is perhaps why I am not surprised when Aljaz and the Cockroach and their party of punters fail to notice the hospital ward replete with heart monitors, drips, and stainless-steel tea trolleys that protrudes out of the rainforest and sits upon a beach, as though a modern hospital ward is as much a part of the river rainforest as a myrtle or a sassafras. Why nobody on either raft waves to Harry, who lies there upon the hospital bed. They just paddle on.

A nurse enters the ward from a copse of manferns.

‘Your wrist, Mr Lewis?'

Harry looks up in surprise, his pleasure in watching and smelling and listening to the Franklin River in flood broken by the question.

‘Your wrist,' she repeats. Harry looks up at her young face, upon which a smile briefly glimmers outward like the rings around a stone falling into water and then is lost, as she places a thermometer under his tongue. She finishes taking his pulse and wraps the blood pressure tourniquet around the slack, wrinkled skin of his arm. Harry feels embarrassment at the young nurse looking at such flaccid skin wrinkling over the withered waste of his arm, when once the arm had been strong, its strength evident in its taut suppleness, the forearm and bicep revealing individual muscles pulling up and down with the slightest move of his hand. Now - and the thought leaves him weary beyond despair - now it is the arm of an old man, soon to die. He feels the need to say something in explanation.

‘Life is the cruellest of boxers,' he says.

Again the brief, glimmering smile. ‘Yes, Mr Lewis.'

Harry continues to try and explain what it is that she ought know, almost a warning to her of her own mortality, of the fallibility of all flesh, even her most beautiful of flesh. While she knows from her work that all people are mortal, her youth prevents her from realising - beyond as an abstract, academic point - that this great truth also applies to her. ‘Yes, it is,' he says. ‘It gets you in a corner as you grow old, on the ropes, and there is no referee to call a halt. And it hits you and it hits you again and again. And when you slump there is no referee to say enough is enough. There is no referee to say you shouldn't kick a fella in the guts and in the head when he's down. But that's how it is. Life just keeps kicking you until there's nothing left to kick.' The nurse looks down at him as she unstraps the tourniquet, and pulls her mouth back in mild frustration.

Harry sees the great mountain ranges creasing around the river, wrapping around him, sees the rainforest, sees the river rising, feels the moist heaviness of the air upon his face, smells the scent of peat.

‘Don't cry, Mr Lewis,' she says. ‘Please don't cry.' She is about to say that it can't be as bad as all that, but her medical knowledge tells her that it is. She feels warm breath upon her back and turns to see Dr Elliot, the young registrar in whom she is more than passingly interested. Dr Elliot has overheard the conversation. He takes the nurse aside and whispers to her under a large myrtle tree.

‘I think we might up Mr Lewis's morphine. He seems in a great deal of pain.' And then, ‘Friday night - that new Thai restaurant in Barracouta Row.' She smiles her agreement.

Harry envies the young nurse and the young doctor their sexual communication, the way their flesh is so alive it has a life separate and independent of their minds, to the extent that small movements contain messages that are read by the other body in a rising excitement that can only be sated by their coupling. He might have even hated them for their sexual vibrancy, but he was as beyond hating for such reasons as he was now beyond loving.

Harry relapses into his solitary world of pain. He had never imagined old age would be like this, but then he had never really imagined what old age would be like. To the extent that he had talked about it in the past and had reflected upon the condition of those he knew who were old, he had presumed there would be some pleasures to be had, that he would feel satisfaction at having achieved some things of which he was proud. But on his deathbed he can only despair of so little achieved, of so many opportunities for friendship and love missed and dissolved in the minute trivia of daily living, and his final time approaches not as an autumn but with the sharp and fearful damp coldness of a mist rising on a winter's nightfall. He feels alone, terribly alone. Life seems to him to be the promise of pleasures unfulfilled. He looks upon what he knows of the world and finds it sad, sad, sad, and no longer has the confidence of youth to declare that the world can be remade better and kinder. There seems to be too little love and too much hate. He feels naked and the world and his life his own to wander through for a few short moments that stretch to infinity. In both he sees only desolation. There is nothing to look forward to, little to look back upon. He thinks what he would do if he had his life again, then thinks that he has no desire to have it again, that once was too hard and has worn him out so utterly that he wonders if he will even have the energy to die. He feels only an overbearing tiredness, which in the end eclipses even his capacity to think, and then, after that, his desire to dream.

And at that moment he sees his long-dead uncles Basil and George walking toward him. ‘Get the load off your feet, Nugget,' says George. He sees his mother Rose coming toward him, a very powerful feeling it is, and she says, ‘I love you.' He sees the river advance toward him. But it is no river he recognises. He sees two large old stringybark gums burst into flower in the middle of a blizzard, and as they do so, a miracle take place. The trees stretch and unravel toward the sky, unfolding into blossom, and as more of the cream-coloured flowers appear, the gum trees begin to float and then soar into the heavens. He sees Old Bo and Smeggsy, and Old Bo says, ‘Carry the boy gentle, Smeggsy.' Harry opens his eyes.

But he is no longer in his hospital bed.

 Ned Quade, 1832 

He is in a punt being rowed by a freshwater lobster talking with Old Bo's voice. They have just emerged from a bank of gentle, fleecelike snowclouds when he spies far, far below the airborne punt a solitary figure upon a remote alpine moor. Old Bo the lobster is yakking away.

Saying: At the end only Ned Quade the stone man and Aaron Hersey remained. The others had passed on in the manner they had agreed upon before the escape, such desperate measures accepted as the corollary of the world they were fleeing. When it came to the moment of truth, only a badly fevered Jack Jenkins had not fought it, asking for half an hour alone to make his peace with the Lord. None quibbled that the alternative of returning was preferable. Aaron Hersey and the stone man sat around their campfire, gaunt-faced with exhaustion and terror, knowing whoever fell asleep first would only momentarily reawaken before being committed to that ultimate rest beneath the vast gorge of the southern night sky. In the event, it was the stone man whose eyes closed first. He rocked back and forth where he sat and his eyelids closed though the rocking continued. Aaron Hersey eyed him nervously, knowing this might be some trap. But after some minutes it was clear that the stone man was asleep, perhaps somehow thinking in the back of his mind that because he was still sitting upright and still rocking that therefore he must still be awake. He was not. But the moment that Aaron Hersey went to kill Ned Quade more or less as they had killed their three fellow escapees, cleaving his head open like a blighted turnip with the axe they carried, the stone man's eyes fluttered open. They eyed each other off, the stone man sitting, Aaron Hersey standing in front of him with the axe poised to fall.

‘I seen some things,' said Aaron Hersey, not moving, axe held high.

The stone man said nothing.

‘Seen barefoot men chained to a plough in place of oxen. Seen a woman in Hobart made wear a spiked iron collar and her head shaved for lying with another woman, raped by redcoats and lags alike. Seen a native woman with child shot down like a bird from the tree in which she hid. I even seen a boy buggered by an entire chain gang, the constable holding him down.'

The stone man said nothing.

‘Bad things mostly,' continued Aaron Hersey. ‘Don't remember being bad myself before being sent out here. Maybe I was. Maybe it was always there and just needed this for it to come out. Don't remember exactly why I was transported any more. But they must have had their good reasons for doing it to me. Maybe not even a good reason but a bad reason. But there must have been a reason. There would have been. That I know for sure.'

The stone man's eyes were rheumy with tiredness.

‘So many bad things,' said Aaron Hersey, ‘that have been my punishment, and me a part of them bad things. Which is why it is right I have been punished and why it is right because there was this reason.'

‘Reason,' said the stone man, ‘is the evil fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.'

Then, with a movement both rapid and violent, the stone man lunged at the legs of Aaron Hersey and toppled him face first into the coals of the fire. Hersey screamed and rolled out of the fire, but not before the stone man had wrenched the axe from him and with it struck a fiercesome blow to the head.

The grey milky matter of Hersey's brain flowed forth and formed a gritty gruel with the dead coals at the edge of the fire. The stone man finished Aaron Hersey off by hacking through his neck. It takes a lot to kill a man though. Hersey did not fight, yet nor was it straight away that he stopped breathing, and his breath and blood guttered through the rent in his neck for some moments, steaming and hissing as it splashed the coals below. Then Ned Quade stood up and looked into the speckled darkness and he felt beyond fear and beyond weariness, and felt all the wretchedness of this earth arise within him and he wished it he and not Hersey who had died so.

He stripped the corpse and hung it upside down from a tree by its trousers to let it bleed. While it so hung, Ned Quade cut it open and disembowelled the body. He built the fire back up and upon it grilled the heart and the liver, but such was his hunger that he ate them before they were properly cooked. He travelled with renewed energy all that following day and the day after that, carefully rationing out Hersey's limbs to last him until he reached the New Jerusalem. Upon a huge button-grass plain thick with black wallaby turds he came across a mob of natives and he raised the stick upon which he now hobbled and made as if it were a musket and he about to fire upon them. He was not so distant from his fellow countrymen that they did not understand the meaning of his gesture and they ran away, dropping a possum carcass in their haste. This he took with him and continued on, back into rainforest, in the reaches of which he grew so dispirited that when he passed out of it, back into the higher country, he stopped next to a King Billy pine tree in which he prepared to hang himself by his leather belt. The mood passed, and after two days he arose from where he lay beneath the tree and staggered off. Ned Quade continued to hope that he would find the coast and there a boat in which to get away from Van Diemen's Land to New South Wales and from there make his way to the New Jerusalem.