Death of a River Guide (28 page)

Once the house had sparkled. All its humble accoutrements, second-hand, or the unwanted property of others given away, had glistened like well-fed cats and the house had looked as if it were loved. Most items in the house were patched, but patched and mended so thoroughly that they came to possess a quality that things merely purchased from a shop could only pretend to, qualities of authenticity, of age, and of character derived from having been remade first in the imagination of Sonja and Harry and then remade by them in the real world. There was the chair with new bracing, the saucepan with a carved wooden handle replacing its broken plastic handle, the old power hacksaw blade honed into a knife blade to replace the broken kitchen knife. Then Sonja died. Then Harry's heart broke.

Then when the arms of his favourite vinyl armchair began to split, Harry did not strip the vinyl off and reupholster it with some offcut material bought cheap from a warehouse as he formerly would have done. He did nothing until the splits were so bad that the stiff maroon vinyl, curling upright in sharp shards, began to irritate his resting foreams when he sat there drinking, too lost to even bother to turn on the TV. Then he went outside to the shed, found some electrical tape and taped the splits up. When the electrical tape in turn began to stretch and curl he simply ran more and more over the top of the old. And as it was for that armchair, so it was for the rest of the house. Repairs became unnecessarily destructive. He liquid nailed a rattling window so that it no longer opened; fixed the loose fridge door by putting two self-tapping screws into the fridge, one in its door, the other in its side wall, then making a rough hook latch with a piece of coathangar wire to connect the two. So it went. Apart from his weekly barbeques for phantoms, nothing could animate Harry.

Aljaz found some Turkish coffee in the freezer and made a pot of
turksa kava
for them both. He brought the pot and two demitasse cups into the lounge-room where Maria Magdalena Svevo sat slumped in the old maroon vinyl armchair, the arms of which were a tapestry of criss-crossing red and yellow and green electrical tape rising like humps on a camel's back. When Aljaz entered the dark lounge-room he was shocked because there seemed to be no person sitting in the armchair, only a lurid purple and green tracksuit that looked as if it had been tossed there. Not until an arm moved and a lighter flared was her face and its inevitable accompaniment, a cigar, illuminated. For a moment he thought some spectre was animating the tracksuit.

‘What are you staring at, Ali?' she asked, the rasp of her voice emphasising the heavy accent she still carried.

‘Sorry,' said Aljaz. ‘Just getting used to the light.'

He poured the coffee and passed her a cup. She took the cigar out of her mouth and laughed. ‘You know, it's a funny thing …' and she paused and sat up and took a sip of the
tuiksa kava
, then put the cup down and took another draw on the cigar. ‘Your father, he was a true-blue Aussie and he only ever drank
turksa kava
. He learned that from us. But your mama, she couldn't be bothered with it. She drank Nescafé.' She smiled. ‘She learned that from Harry. She said the
turksa kava
was too much trouble. She said the Nescafé was easier.' Now it was Aljaz's turn to smile. But he didn't say anything. He sipped his
turksa kava
. He sensed that she wanted to say something more. Maria Magdalena Svevo continued. ‘They were good people. Who else would sponsor me out as an immigrant, then let me live with them here all those years?' She suddenly yanked the cigar out of her mouth, brushed her tongue with the back of her hand, and stubbed the cigar out in an ashtray. ‘Agh! Even the smoke tastes bad tonight.'

Aljaz looked across at the old woman and realised he could trust her, an emotion he experienced rarely. ‘There are a lot of things I wished I had talked to him about,' said Aljaz.

‘There always are,' said Maria Magdalena Svevo.

‘If he could talk he might tell me what I should do now,' said Aljaz.

‘There is no wisdom in the grave, Ali. None.' Maria Magdalena Svevo looked at him and wondered. And then spoke again. ‘I wonder whether it is my place to tell you things that your father should have told you when he was still alive. And I think, If I don't, who will?' And so she told him, though only in the briefest way, the story of how Sonja had fled from Yugoslavia to Italy in the early 1950s, how she had met Harry in Trieste, and how Harry had shortly afterwards been imprisoned for smuggling by the Italian authorities after his partner turned informer. Harry did two years before being released. Aljaz, conceived in the short time between Harry and Sonja's initial meeting and Harry's imprisonment, took his mother's name of Cosini. What was initially a source of shame for Sonja - not being married, her child a bastard - later became her greatest pride. There was a perverse streak in her character, and though she permitted Harry to sponsor her as an immigrant to Australia in 1958 with the toddler Aljaz, and though she consented to live with Harry, she refused his entreaties to marry, saying that it was all too late, and now that she had borne the shame Aljaz could carry her old family name in the new world with pride.

And at this point in the story Maria Magdalena Svevo broke down.

Aljaz attempted to take the conversation into less troubled waters. ‘See we've got new neighbours.'

‘Ja, the Maloneys,' said Maria Magdalena Svevo, ‘an Aboriginal family.'

‘They were all out the front drunk when I came home,' said Aljaz with no particular rancour, then paused. Maria Magdalena Svevo looked up, then looked back down at her runners. Aljaz felt unbelievably tired. He continued talking for the sake of saying something. He felt angry, he didn't know why. He wanted to talk about his father, but something seemed to have come between them that wouldn't permit talk about Harry. He continued talking in the way that men on the farms and on the building sites had talked when they hadn't wanted to think, when they had talked enough about car engines and footy and cricket and had to talk about something without betraying what they felt or thought. He thought of Harry, how he wanted to see him just once more, wanted to talk to him once more. Wanted to ask him how had the world grown to be this way, so hard. He was angry that Harry had been unable to warn him. But he heard himself saying, for want of having anything to say, heard himself saying, ‘Bloody Abos, eh.'

Maria Magdalena Svevo looked up again. ‘You know what an Aborigine looks like?' she asked.

Aljaz realised he had upset the old woman. He backtracked. ‘I'm sure they're all right.' He stopped. She said nothing and waited for him to finish. ‘You know what I mean.'

Maria Magdalena Svevo's reply was some time in coming. ‘No. I mean a real Aborigine. A dinky-di Aborigine.'

‘Well, I spose … sure.'

‘Harry never told you that either?'

‘Told me what? What is there to tell? Everyone knows. You know, I know.'

‘No. No, you don't know.' Her scrawny hands, so wasted and withered they looked like birds' talons, dug into the electrical-tape tapestry of the armchair's arms; her desperately thin arms tensed and she pulled herself into a standing position. She picked up her cigar and her stainless-steel Zippo lighter and relit the cigar, inhaled, then looked at Aljaz with a great, intense curiosity. ‘Do you?'

‘What are you talking about, Maria?'

But her back was to him and she was walking out of the room. Aljaz was reading a K-Mart catalogue when she came back in. ‘Here,' she said, ‘look here.' Aljaz looked up from the catalogue. Clutched in her bird talons Maria Magdalena Svevo held before him Harry's shaving mirror, which had been cracked for as long as Aljaz could remember. In it, he saw his sallow face reflected, the hairline crack neatly bisecting his image. She held it for as long as he could bear to look into it, and then longer.

Saying: ‘This is an Abo.'

 the fourth day 

Quiet.

Then the crash of scrub breaking and suddenly I see, half shoving, half falling out of the mirror into a mass of tea-tree, Aljaz and the Cockroach looking about for a route through the dense riverbank bush, scrub-bashing their way downriver to scout a rapid before shooting it in their rafts.

When they get near the rapid, the bank turns into a cliff and they have to swim down the side of the cliff hanging onto low-lying branches to avoid being swept downriver. Close to the rapids the cliff ends and they are able to climb back onto land and find a vantage point high enough to check the rapid. It is big, frighteningly big, nothing like the straightforward rapid it is at lower levels. They work out a line through the rapid to avoid the two major stoppers. Then they return by a long circuitous route behind the cliff to their punters who have waited in the rafts that are moored to the bank. Aljaz's body feels more comfortable, more in control, once he is back sitting on the rear pontoon of his raft.

‘All right,' says the Cockroach, addressing the punters of both rafts, ‘there is one line down this rapid, and if we mess it we're in big shit. So when Ali and I tell you to do something, do it, or we're all fucked. We're not playing around any more. This is serious.' The punters are uneasy. Up until today their river guides had seemed invincible, frightened of nothing, and it reassured the punters greatly. But this new river, these furious, confused waters that live in a wet and cold climate so dissimilar to their first balmy days on the river, this new river frightens the punters, and now, it is apparent, it also worries the guides.

Aljaz senses the unease. He tries to soften the Cockroach's message without lessening its import. ‘Unfortunately we have hit the river in a bad way,' he says, ‘and we just have to make sure we somehow get down and through this thing safely.'

When the rain comes no one comments, for it is expected and the depression at its arrival has already been met. At first the rain is light and occasional, then heavier and heavier, till it drums on the taut red hypalon of the rafts' inflated pontoons, till it runs in rills down all their faces, extinguishes what little conversation there is between the punters as it smashes down on the river. And beneath the rubber flooring of the raft both the Cockroach and Aljaz can feel the river halting its fall and beginning to rise. They feel the river rise in the way their rafts run, in the way they glide quicker on the flat, in the way little boils appear from nowhere, in the way the waves begin to crest over the top of the raft's pontoons, in the way eddies become more pronounced and powerful. They feel it in their arms, in the way their paddles grab harder onto stronger water and pull their forearms and shoulders. Aljaz feels it in his disrupted memories as they arrive at landmarks too quickly - first the Brook of Inverestra and then almost immediately Side Slip, and then they are in Inception Reach and they all feel it in their guts as a loosening unease. Once, not so long ago, none of the river's features had names, and Aljaz could not help but remember his early trips down the Franklin as a youth in the 1970s, when they experienced each day as a surprise, when people remembered the river as a whole, not as a collection of named sites that could be reduced to a series of photographs. But that was when the Franklin was unknown, when it was the province of only a handful who were interested in it for its own sake. Then the developers came to dam it and then the conservationists came to save it and word of this strange and beautiful river spread throughout the country. A great battle arose and ultimately the conservationists won. Part of their winning had been to name all the river's features, to render them citable and documentable by those who would never know them, and in that process of splitting the whole into little bits with silly names, Aljaz felt something of the river's soul had been stolen away. Aljaz hated all the hippie names - the Masterpiece, Ganymedes Pool, Serenity Sound. But most of all he hated that while they had done something, he had done nothing.

He could not help but remember how he had explored other rivers of the west, then watched them drown without helping them. He watched the Murchison River drown and he watched the Mackintosh River drown and he watched the Pieman River drown. He drove all the long way from Hobart by himself to watch the rivers begin to disappear on the first day the new hydro dams began to fill. Watched them begin to fill and their great gorges disappear and die and he cried and he drove all the long way back to Hobart and he did nothing. His was a memory of defeat only, and the most he felt capable of was bearing witness. So he watched, so he cried, so he tatooed all the blue and red feelings that arose within him upon his soul. I will remember, he thought as he drove all the long way home. But to what end?