Death of a River Guide (27 page)

Did he die? I wonder. Or did he, somewhere out there in his delusion, in the middle of that river, did he find the stockaded town of his dreams? Whether it was when an Aboriginal spear pierced his heart that he saw it rise up in front of him, or when he lay exhausted in the scrub, still alive but with the insects already eating him, his tongue as hard and dry and cracked as a convict's clog in his mouth, whether it was then that he heard the clamour of free voices making merry and saw Mother Lucky arrive and press water to his lips and take him to the New Jerusalem, I do not know and I have not yet been shown. But perhaps somewhere out there he saw freedom and its cost. Perhaps there is to be found somewhere between here and China the remnants of a stockaded town in which some records exist that show Ned Quade to have been, if not mayor of Parramatta, then at least an important underling to Mother Lucky. And I wonder, Who are these people, these poor people I see live and die, whose lives are so wretched that they feel death in this manner preferable to living, who see death in this manner redemption itself? And dreaming begins to reassert its power over thinking, and once more I see Ned Quade lying in a wilderness, his clothes rags, his ankles festering wounds, the iron collars enclosed in new and thicker collars of flies eating his suppurating flesh, their maggots being born in what is left of his emaciated body. And Ned Quade hears a drumming, a martial drumming, announcing an imminent and important arrival. The drumming grows louder and more insistent.

The stone man has lain for two days without movement. He knows now he is dying. For when he looks up from where he has lain on the bank of a rain-swollen river which is too deep and swift to ford, at the base of a ravine too great to scale back up, he sees a wooden punt being rowed through the evening sky by a ghost and a lobster, and a spectre peers out from the stern and stares down at him as if he knows him. The punt is coming toward him.

From far above Harry watches the stone man as he dies.

‘Pay no heed,' says Old Bo, ‘that's just the ghost of an old lag you're seeing.'

‘A phantom,' says Smeggsy.

Harry looks back up and over to where I am floating in the night sky next to the punt. We go to talk but the clouds envelop us both and we are again, as always, lost to each other.

‘A real deadflog,' I hear Smeggsy say.

‘A right flogger,' I hear Old Bo reply.

‘A rum 'un,' I hear Harry retort.

Harry shrugs his shoulders and looks back earthwards at the dying stone man.

 Aljaz, 1993 

I hear a distant retching sound as the oak skink throws up. In the faraway apricot-coloured clouds of late afternoon I can just make out a punt disappearing over Mt Wellington, and behind it two tables of animals, now mostly sodden or singing or feuding, save for a few of the black cockatoos and the goanna who are playing cards.

And at the head of Barracouta Row, looking down the narrow street at its humble houses, I spy Aljaz. The street still smelt of the old wharf and its poverty, but it was changing. There was an antique shop at one end and a Thai restaurant at the other. But the family home looked much as it always had done - a dilapidated wooden house with a verandah that sat almost upon the street, so small was the front yard. Nevertheless there was still a front garden. Harry's front garden precisely outlined the contours of his heart. It was a wilderness of weeds and a few plants that had been there even before he and Sonja had moved in. And in the middle was the most beautiful and large rose bush, wild, overgrown, and sagging with heavy crimson roses.

Aljaz knocked on the weather-beaten front door, though he knew that with Harry in hospital there would be no answer. He wandered down the side lane to the little backyard, and there it stood, Harry's great creation, Harry's barbeque.

Where the house was humble, the barbeque was magnificent, a giant edifice of brick, broken glass and beer cans set in concrete and terracotta piping, with terrazzo slabs for meat and salads and drinks and whatever else needed somewhere to rest. It stood three metres high and at least as long. At its centre was a wood-fired grill, but the barbeque encompassed many more functions than that of simply grilling meat, encompassed functions of a diverse culinary, spiritual and historical nature. It drew upon the old Australia Harry had grown up in and the old Europe Sonja had grown up in, combining something of the elements of bush building with southern European shrines and gravestones. Sitting out to one side at head height was an old clothes dryer, repainted in sky-blue, gutted of its innards and now used as a dry-smoking cupboard, connected by galvanised piping to an old firebox at the base of the barbeque. Into the firebox would be placed she-oak or myrtle and a slow fire started, while in the smoker dryer would be placed kangaroo and trout and salmon and trevally and trumpeter and eels and wallaby and pork salamis, and out would emerge the most delectable smoked meats. Hanging from hooks screwed into the barbeque's rear wall at different levels were green and pink plastic Décor pots in which red flowering geraniums and pink flowering pelargoniums and cacti of all colours flourished and hung in festoons. At the heart of the barbeque, immediately below the grill, was an oven formed out of a kerosene tin set in adobe. Beneath the dry mud-insulated oven was an alcove, replete with ducting for the smoke, in which a fire would be built to heat the oven from which emerged Harry's bread, large round loaves broader than a man's chest, made in the same manner he had learnt from Boy all those years ago. Next to the oven was a smaller alcove lined with green cider bottles laid sideways, in which Harry put his dough to rise and Sonja left her pots of milk to sour into yoghurt. Set into the brickwork behind the grill were the purple pearly abalone shells gathered by Harry in his years as a fisherman's deckhand, the work which he had taken up upon returning to Australia. The shells were arranged in a circle, in the middle of which were two three-inch nails driven into the mortar. Hanging from one nail was a pair of barbeque tongs and from the other a sea eagle's skull that Harry had found many years before, small and delicately shaped. The various ducts rose to the top of the barbeque, where their smoky breath was released into broken terracotta pipes that ascended the rear wall at various heights, giving the barbeque the appearance of some crazed Baroque premonition of a Wurlitzer organ.

Aljaz smiled.

And there, sitting to the side of Harry's barbeque, in Harry's favourite chair, an ancient metal tractor seat mounted upon a ball joint on a steel pole, there she was. She had changed a little in the years they had not seen one another. Her hair had gone from grey to white, and she had exchanged the widow's weeds of old Europe - the black dress and black cardigan - for the widow's weeds of new Australia - a shiny green and purple tracksuit, complete with white lightning stripes and the words
ACTION AEROBICS
. While one hand rested upon her glossy tracksuit pants, the other placed a half-smoked cigar in her mouth.

‘The last cigar?' asked Aljaz.

The tractor seat creaked as the ball joint swivelled slowly while she turned. She looked at Aljaz as though she had been expecting him for some time.

‘No,' said Maria Magdalena Svevo. And then Aljaz knew for sure that he was too late.

 

At the funeral parlour they took Aljaz to see his father's body. ‘We encourage people to look at the body of the loved one,' said the undertaker. ‘It helps with the grieving process.' What grieving process? thought Aljaz. Is what I am feeling a process? It struck him as the most curious thought, that his feelings might be some sort of emotional locomotive, calling at all stops between the departure point of death and the destination of - well, whatever the destination was meant to be. Happiness, perhaps. Whatever that meant. Calling at all stops - guilt, anger, remorse, reconciliation. He looked at the vases of flowers on little stands, at the cheap prints of waves and sunsets that even department stores had stopped selling, the overall décor stuck somewhere in the early seventies, all yellow floral wallpaper and vinyl furniture. He looked at the burnished and stained wood walls of the coffin, at its elaborate shiny brass handles, at the studded plush velvet of its interior. It seemed a waste, all that work, all that elaboration and decoration, whose only destination was the wet earth. He wondered if they still made the coffins in the workshop out the back of this mock lounge room, or if the undertaker bought them in pre-made, perhaps imported from Asia. Probably pre-made, thought Aljaz, as he ran his fingers along the edges of the coffin. It ought be Huon pine, he thought. Now that would have been appropriate. But then he thought how Harry would have hated that, would have thought it a stupid waste of fine timber. Bury me in plywood, Harry would have said. He should have talked to Harry about such things, thought Aljaz. He should have come back and talked, full stop. There was so much unsaid, too much undone. Aljaz's eyes retreated to the handles, which he fingered, feeling their weight, watching the perspiration of his hands mark the immaculate brass. Then he took an involuntary and audible deep breath, a shudder of a breath, and raised his head and looked back into the coffin, at what lay between the stained and burnished wood, at what was cushioned by the studded plush velvet. What grieving process? thought Aljaz. Could that be him? Could that be him?

Aljaz looked up from his father's body.

‘But I am not grieving,' he said in reply to the undertaker. Grief, as Aljaz knew it, bore no relation to this terrible vortex of emptiness into which his body and soul had collapsed. The undertaker, who was younger than Aljaz, smiled slightly, then remembered himself and stopped. No one had yet taught him the proper response to such a statement.

Back out on the street Aljaz felt without will or capacity to move. He lacked the sense to even decide which direction to walk. He saw a newsagent across the road and went into it, though why he did not know. Inside the newsagent he just stood, not moving, not picking up magazines or putting them down, just standing. He realised people were beginning to look at him. He stared down at the magazine rack but saw nothing. ‘Excuse me, sir,' said a woman behind the counter, ‘can I help you?'

‘My father's dead,' said Aljaz before he knew he had spoken. The woman looked at him as if he were mad. ‘He died. Last Friday, he died. Bowel cancer.' There seemed to be a need to verify what he had told her. ‘They've got him in a box,' said Aljaz. The woman looked around for help. He pointed a finger in the direction of the rushing cars outside. ‘Across the road. A box. A bloody box.' Aljaz knew he was crying and that everyone in the shop was staring at him. He stood as still as a statue, not because he was nervous or apprehensive but because he had no energy or will to do anything other. ‘Is that a life?' He moved his head around and looked at everyone, their magazines and papers dropped to their waists, staring at him as if in a nightmare, this ring of staring, uncomprehending people, and all of a sudden he was frightened, so terribly frightened. ‘Dad,' he said as he cried, and he raised his head up high and looked hither and thither for the familiar smell and sight of a giant parent, and then, in the manner of a child who has become separated from his parent and is fearful of ever seeing him or her again, he spoke again, his voice this time a cracking pant. ‘Da-d?' and then, ‘
Dad?
' There was no answer. He dropped his face into his hands and shook his prayer of loss into his cupped splayed fingers, and now the word came out as a lament. He said the word five times and each time it came out of his mouth in a voice so thin and stretched and weak and aching it seemed to have travelled a million miles and a million years to be heard. Then he raised his face from his hands and, his face still shaking, he surveyed the newsagency and saw that everyone in the ring was quiet and watching him and his quivering head and crazed eyes. Then he turned and, still trembling, walked out.

 

Back home, Maria Magdalena Svevo looked tired and old. She seemed to have shrivelled in the years he had been away. Her wrinkled face reminded Aljaz of a dried apricot. Never tall, she now seemed tiny, most of her feisty bulk having disappeared along with something of her spirit. She had always been hard, and now the hardness was like flint. They sat inside the old family home, amidst its dust and smells so sweet and evocative that every draught brought a rush of memories to Aljaz. It was all much as he had remembered it, except even more beaten up and broken, the carpet even greyer.