Death of a River Guide (32 page)

But a short way down the cliff face he stops and can find no more footholds or handholds. As terror takes over he realises he is unable to go back up, and so he clings to the cliff only five metres below the crowd of punters gazing down, knowing he looks ludicrous and inept, terrified that he might at any moment fall to his death, and tormented by Derek's pleas from below for Aljaz to come down and rescue him.

The Cockroach also hears Derek, hears him cry out that the tea-tree trunk is fraying. He realises that they have lost valuable time and that Aljaz has frozen. So he turns and begins the descent down the rockface, slowly, cautiously. Aljaz watches him. He's good, thinks Aljaz, his shame rising in a hot flush. He's good. The Cockroach gets down next to Aljaz and quickly, with a measure of contempt he makes no attempt to disguise, shows him a route back up to the shrubbery.

‘You should have told me you couldn't climb.' Aljaz slowly climbs back up, his humiliation complete. About ten metres from Derek, the Cockroach, now visible only as the top of his head, runs out of rock to climb. He tries two different approaches to get to Derek, but fails and has to turn back. A third route gets him down to the same level as Derek but about six metres distant from him. The Cockroach talks to Derek, calms him down, gets him to hug the rock like it is his mother, to find tiny niches in which to rest his feet and take some of the stress off the fraying tea-tree trunk.

‘Here.' Aljaz turns around. Rickie is back with the rope, his face bright red and flecked with foamy spittle. Aljaz ties the rope off to the firmest tree he can find and leans out on the rope, testing his weight against the tree and his knots. He climbs down the rope through the steep bank of shrubbery to the cliff edge, where he yells down to the Cockroach, then throws the rest of rope down in the Cockroach's direction. The rock is greasy with the rain and he wonders how the Cockroach can climb on it at all.

The Cockroach grabs the rope, wraps it around his body, then crabs it onto his emergency climbing harness. Then he kick-jumps himself off the cliff face, bouncing around to where Derek hangs onto his life by the fragile strength of a small tea-tree trunk. As he comes close to Derek he sees that the tea-tree is half pulled out of the rock crack it has spent a century or so extracting life from, and that its trunk is fraying badly under the strain. Two hands, one bloodied from the fall, hang onto the shrub, and from below the Cockroach hears the horrible rapid pant of a man who knows he may be about to die, smells the sharp ammoniac scent of true terror.

 the Cockroach 

The bastard's going to die on me, thinks the Cockroach, and he panics. With this panic all his strength seems to abandon his body and he feels weak and unable to do anything. He is no longer sure if he will be able to rescue Derek. But he pushes the panic back down and just looks at the slimy rock, looks closely at its lichen-etched forms, looks at its small cracks the width of his lips in which tiny myrtle and pandanus seedlings, their leaves near waxen in their green rainwater-beaded perfection, flourish around miniature hardwater ferns, a small world, complete and wondrous unto itself, looks and marvels as he slowly works his way across to Derek.

The Cockroach hears Derek pray between panting breaths. ‘Our-
eh
-father-
eh
-who-
eh
-art
eh
-in-
eh
-heaven,' he hears.

‘Derek,' says the Cockroach but Derek does not hear, for he is too intent on praying to God to deliver him from his peril. His panting prayer disintegrates into a rapid gobbling lament.

‘Mygodmygodmygodmygod.' As if the repetition of His name will invoke His reality, will summon His omnipotent presence into existence to take Derek in His arms and rise with the warm updraught flowing from the rapid to the path above.

‘Grab hold of the rope,' says the Cockroach over Derek's prayers, ‘and we'll climb back up together.' Derek ignores the Cockroach, as if such a diversion might diminish the strength of his appeal for divine intercession. Now he simply calls for
Godgodgodgodgodgod
, like a hungry seagull desperate for a crust of bread.

‘Grab hold of the rope,' says the Cockroach a second time. He eases himself behind Derek and by placing his arms under Derek's shoulders takes some of the fat man's weight. ‘Derek,' says the Cockroach, ‘listen to me. Grab the rope. Please.' Derek slowly turns around and his eyes, those large locust eyes wet with tears, look into the Cockroach's as if he is looking at death. Derek's head shivers more than shakes Derek's refusal.

‘I believe in God,' says Derek. ‘I do. I believe in you, God.'

‘Listen to me, Derek,' says the Cockroach. ‘You've got to do it.'

Again the shivering head. ‘No. I will do whatever you want of me, God, but spare me.'

‘You've got to grab hold of the rope!' shouts the Cockroach.

‘I believe in God the father, in Jesus Christ His son who on the third day rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of God the father almighty, and who on judgement day shall -'

The Cockroach interrupts Derek's prayer with a scream. ‘
Grab the fucking rope!
'

Derek begins to cry anew, and as his body heaves with his blubbering the tea-tree root gives way some more. The Cockroach gives up his bullying and tries desperately to calm Derek. ‘All right mate, all right, she'll be okay, just stop crying, you'll be all right. God's with us, believe me, God's with us. If you just stop crying.
Please
.' Derek looks at the Cockroach with a new trust and confidence.
Jesus
, thinks the Cockroach. The Cockroach ties himself off, so that he can fall no farther.

‘You understand?' says the Cockroach to Derek. ‘I wrap this harness around your body. Then I connect that harness to the rope. Then I climb back up. Then we haul you up. Hang on tight, for Chrissake.' Derek looks blankly into the Cockroach's eyes. The Cockroach is not even sure Derek has understood what he has just been told. ‘You ready?' asks the Cockroach. Derek nods. ‘Just don't make any sudden movement, okay?' Derek has no fight left in him: life or death, he is equally ready to take the hand fate deals him. Unable to manoeuvre himself such that he can tie the flip line around Derek as a proper climbing harness, the Cockroach has to make do belting the flip line around Derek's fat waist, connecting the two ends with a carabiner.

Then, as a safety precaution, before he does anything else, the Cockroach connects Derek with himself by clipping their two harnesses together with a carabiner. Derek immediately lets go of the tea-tree. The Cockroach yells, ‘
Hang on to that root for Chrissake!
' But it is too late. The Cockroach screams, ‘
No!
' but Derek has let go. The Cockroach thinks, Jesus, now we're really going to die. They fall two metres, and the Cockroach shuts his eyes and his body goes loose and he thinks, This is how it ends. But it is only the rope sagging and the anchor tree loosening until the new weight is fully absorbed. The Cockroach comes to his senses and shivers with fear. And as they bob in space he looks down at the waterfall falling through the massive boulders below and wonders if you would feel anything at the moment of impact.

He feels the tree to which the rope is anchored move slightly with their combined weight. He realises Derek is hanging only by his harness. ‘Put your arms around my neck,' the Cockroach says to Derek. And just as Derek starts to move, his body begins to topple. His forearms immediately lock around the Cockroach's neck and his legs wrap around the Cockroach's waist. The Cockroach feels as if his neck is about to break with the strain. The Cockroach locks Derek in a bear hug. It hurts, it hurts like hell to take this fat man's weight with his neck and arms, but if he lets go the fat man might fall to his death. Locked in this curious, awkward embrace they swing in space above the waterfall, softly bouncing into the rock.

A human metronome slowly marking time against a cliff.

‘Why me?' asks Derek. ‘I'm only a tourist.'

Then, for no reason, Derek suddenly goes frantic. He pulls with all his might at the Cockroach's neck, trying to clamber up him as if he were a ladder. ‘No!' yells the Cockroach, but Derek's wild scrambling overbalances the pair of them and their embracing bodies swing from a vertical to horizontal position. The Cockroach feels himself sliding out of his own harness as they topple. Instinctively he throws his hands up to grab the rope to stop them both falling. And for no reason, insanely, at the moment the Cockroach lets go of Derek, Derek, as if feeling he has been betrayed totally, also lets go. He throws his arms outwards, as if crucified, lets go of the Cockroach and topples backwards, slithers out of his harness, and falls.

Falls through the air. Falls fully ten metres. When Derek's body slams, back first, upon a round-topped boulder below, there is no sound discernible above the noise of the waterfall. The Cockroach watches Derek's body as if it were an insect shell, as if it were a clump of earth limply sliding off the boulder into the waterfall, at first slowly then quickly, leaving no trace in the foaming turbulence. The Cockroach is surprised at how little he feels at this precise moment, thinks how he will have the rest of his life to feel and at this moment he is glad to not feel.

 Eliza Quade, 1898 

Let's get one thing straight. Now. Here and now. I have no desire to be here. Drowning, that is. You might think I am resigned to my fate - well, yes, perhaps I am, but that's not the point. Even if I accept that I am going to drown, that doesn't mean that I want to drown. Or that I won't struggle against drowning. I have never been one to accept what fate has dealt me, which has proven unfortunate, given that life has always been beyond my control, and I, limbs flailing in protest, have always, despite my protestations, been swept and bowled along by life until I got jammed at this point. A full stop at the end of the river.

You might think that I am rabbiting on too much when I should instead be concentrating on a way out of my plight, looking for some way I can physically lever myself out of this watery trap, trying, perhaps, to flex my body different ways to enable it to slip out.
Trying. Perhaps. Possibly
. All my life was
trying, perhaps, possibly
. And none of it made a jot of difference. For here I am where I was always intended, always fated to be. Put yourself in my shoes (so to speak - I can feel that mine were swept away by the river current some time ago) and recognise that the physical battle has long been lost. Perhaps these frantic, crazed meanderings of my mind, these visions, perhaps these represent the ultimate plane of conflict. Perhaps these visions are my precarious path back to existence.