Death of a River Guide (29 page)

Then there was the Blockade, the battle to save the Franklin. He had walked into the greenie camp at Strahan, intending to join the blockaders. A woman with a smile as wide as those once stitched onto the faces of rag clowns, a woman he did not know, came up and hugged him. He walked out of the camp. Thinking, These are not my people. These are not my people. He did nothing.

The rapids grow larger and run longer. What is a hundred-metre rapid in low water now runs three times that length. Too high, thinks Aljaz, too high.

And around them the hills begin to turn into mountains as the gorge begins to bank up around them, like a wave picking up height and power the closer it moves to shore.

Deception Gorge, thinks Aljaz. And he laughs. And then stops laughing.

Thinking:
Too high, too high
.

 

Aljaz walked the streets of Hobart aimlessly, wandering through the old town's streets, past its small stolid buildings of the state which were without ambition but retained a dour intent, past its dingy shops more akin in their emaciated displays to the shops of Eastern Europe before the wall came down than to those luxurious displays of the mainland. The whole town was poor, desperately poor, and he saw it in the eyes of the tracksuited hordes that walked by him and he smelt it rising from the gutters.

He tried not to look at his reflection in shop windows. It means nothing at all, he thought, remembering what Maria Magdalena Svevo had told him, because I'm nothing. It's just an
idea
.

It means nothing. And on he walked.

Aljaz walked and walked. Finally he stopped, looked up from the pavement and there it was. Without intending it, without even desiring it, his feet had finally brought him back to the home of Couta Ho for a second time since his return. He stood at the gate and stared up at the doorway. The paint - that he had painted one hot long-ago summer - was now peeling away in big blisters from the weatherboards. It had been a prosperous burgher's house once. It probably wasn't even so bad when old Reggie Ho had bought it. Now it was dilapidated. Would he go in or wouldn't he? For a second time he turned and walked away.

His guts felt bad again. He felt like a drink real bad and he had in his pocket a flask of rum that he had bought earlier in the day, after visiting the undertaker. But he did not open it. He did not. He walked on.

So I watch Aljaz continuing to roam the streets of Hobart, seemingly without purpose, yet his feet follow a path that his eyes and mind are blind to but that is known to his soul. So I can see that it was not coincidence, though it must have seemed entirely that way - indeed, I can truly say that it felt entirely that way - that after a great deal more walking, walking that took him through not only much of Hobart but also through that afternoon and much of that evening, Aljaz found himself standing outside a pub, wondering whether or not to go inside, nervously fingering a still unopened rum flask in his pocket.

Inside, he thinks, there will be the unavoidable problem of being recognised, of having to explain the last eight years. And he isn't drunk enough for that. He looks up at the colonial brickwork of the old pub, now painted Irish green, and remembers the story Harry had told him about William Lanne - King Billy Lanne - the so-called last of the so-called full-blood Tasmanian Aborigines, a whaling man who worked the southern seas upon the
Runnymede
, who had died on the top storey of the pub in 1869. When his body had been taken to the hospital, a local surgeon by the name of Crowther snuck in and cut Lanne's neck up its nape and pulled his skull out and placed a white pauper's skull in its place, then crudely stitched the mess back together. Later in the same evening another doctor, Stokell, turned up with the same aim, only to find to his dismay that he had been beaten, so he contented himself with chopping off and stealing Lanne's feet and hands for the Royal Society. The skull brought the surgeon scientific credibility, for there was much interest in Europe in the phrenology of supposed inferior and degenerate peoples. When very drunk, Harry would sometimes sing a song that swept the Hobart pubs at the time:

Now Aljaz knew why Harry had sung it.

Will he go in or won't he? The pub is old and decrepit and still witnessing knife fights and broken-bottle battles. Upon its walls had once been pasted Governor Denison's proclamation of 1848 forbidding fiddling and dancing because of their subversive nature. Will he go in or won't he?

And then before he could decide, before he could weigh up the pros and cons, he was stepping up through the narrow doorway, pushing past fat women in black mini-skirts and skinny men in large leather jackets. No one recognised him and Aljaz laughed at his own absurd vanity in thinking anyone any longer would. Through the shifting, steaming jackets, and past gloomy coats that leant to try and hear what they cared nothing to hear, past the eyes making all sort of motions but in which it was impossible to read anything, past the slack wet lips mouthing betrayals and the dancing dry lips, cigarette chapped, shaping inanities, beyond the smoking shuffling bar crowd jostling so close they rubbed shoulders and backs and buttocks but still managed to preserve their individual cell-hells of isolation - beyond all that, shattering the darkness, were shards of light in which a band could be discerned, sweating and playing, and no one seemed to care enough to listen. The lead singer was balding and had a paunch, the lead guitarist older and fatter with a mane of lank red hair. Behind them was draped a tatty Aboriginal flag. The lead singer introduced their next song. ‘This is about Shag's sister who just left Tassie.' Shag, Aljaz surmised from the direction in which the lead singer waved a beer that rolled in small waves back and forth between the walls of its glass until it inevitably spilt upon his hand, was the lead guitarist. ‘Why she leave, Shag?'

Shag stepped up to the microphone, looked over towards the lead singer, smiled, coughed a ball of static, and said, ‘Because she reckoned Tassie a shithole.' And as abruptly as the smile had appeared on his face, it departed. ‘Because,' said Shag, ‘she reckoned there was no hope here.' When Aljaz heard the sound that then screeched forth from Shag's guitar he knew what Shag was playing upon that guitar, knew that fat old man wanted to make those strings scream:
If you leave you can never be free
.

It was a dreadful noise, but there was something in it that even then I recognised. Now I know it was not a new song, but a song I had unknowingly carried within me for a long long time. But what was it? Once more I hear the lead singer, shouting, screaming, joining Shag's guitar. Even back there in the bar Aljaz felt compelled to watch the singer's hands, outstretched as if he were being electrocuted, watch the fat of his face wobble and his forehead sweat and the few thin streaks of hairs that crossed it grow wet with exertion. He screamed it out until he looked worse than some animal in agony. He was no longer singing for the crowd or for the lousy money those behind the ringing till would give the band at the end of the night. Nobody in that bar knew, but I know it now. That he was not even singing for himself. That he was singing out of himself and out of his soul and out of a memory of loss so big and so deep and so hurting that it could not be seen or described but only screamed about.

Away from the crowd, hearing his screams and shrieks here in my oppressive solitude, my mind fills with a vision of when the English first arrived and the land was fat and full of trees and game. Had the loss begun at this time? When the English first saw plains so thickly speckled with emu and wallaby dung that it looked as if the heavens must have hailed sleek black turds upon this land, when they first saw the sea and the vast blue Derwent River rainbowed with the vapoury spouts of pods of whales and schools of dolphins swimming beneath. From that time on, each succeeding generation found something new they could quarry to survive. First the emu disappeared, then the tigers, then the many different fishes and seals and whales and their rainbows became rare, then the rivers were stilled under dams, then the trees, and then the scallops and the abalone and the crayfish became few and were in consequence no longer the food of the poor but the waste of the rich.

I wonder whether the memory of loss was carried with those who had originally peopled this land. Had it begun with them fighting for the land because, although they knew they belonged to the land, the English had an idea that a single man could own land for his own advancement? Had it begun with this idea of the land not as a source of knowledge but as a source of wealth? Was it this: the white imagining, which grappled with and overwhelmed the black knowledge by claiming as its own the land that lay at the root of the black knowledge? Or was the memory of loss carried with those brought here in chains, ranked up like horses and sold out to the planters to plough the island they now called Van Diemen's Land? Or was it something the convicts and blackfellas shared, that divided them yet might one day bring them all together?

The singer picks up the microphone stand and slings it across his back, wearing it as if it were a crucifix. He sways dementedly, arches his head back and screams once more. His screaming comes from the heart of the loss and his scream pierces even this water around me now and fills it and fills me with the keening and lamenting and praying of all who filled the island prison as convicts, all those miserable bastards, all my poor forebears.

And then something rises up from these furious waters, and the singer's scream and the scream of the past and my own agony become one and the same. More than a vision, it is an all-encompasing madness which I cannot escape. The Van Diemen's Land that bubbles like boiling blood in my brain was not a world, nor even a society. It was a hell. Who would seek to change hell? I witness how the most ambitious only sought to escape it, by boat if possible, by death if desperate. I see how many convicts died, by their own hand, by the hands of others, by sickness. How many more felt something within them break that could not be fixed by conditional pardons nor healed by time, and they knew it could not be fixed or healed and they knew themselves to be somehow less. And after the English government stopped sending convicts and after they stopped sending the gold to pay for the upkeep of the convicts, the island entered a long winter of poverty and silence.

Nobody spoke. Unless it was to lie, nobody spoke.

The singer screeches now, and where his screech becomes so high pitched that it can no longer be heard, there is the most terrible silence. A silence that takes its form and its energy from a lie.

The lie that the blackfellas had died out. That the ex-convicts had left the island for gold rushes in other countries. That only pure free white settler stock remained. Like all great lies there was some truth in these assertions. A great many blackfellas had been killed, even more destroyed by the physical diseases and spiritual sickness of the Europeans. A great many ex-convicts availed themselves of any chance to leave the island prison, so many that the prudish people of the colony of Victoria passed a law forbidding them to emigrate to that land. But at the end of it all most blackfellas and convicts remained on the island, sick with syphilis and sadness and fear and madness and loss. And when the long night fell they slept together, some openly, some illicitly, but whether they slept together out of shame or pride or indifferent lust the consequence was the same: they begat children to one another. But the lies were told with sufficient force that for a good many years even the parents remained silent, and whispered their truths only occasionally, and then only in the wilds where no one could hear, or in the depths of drink when no one would remember.

It was a terrible and piteous time. They had remained and they had endured. But so had their fears. Children denied their parents and invented new lineages of respectable free settlers to replace the true genealogy of shame. The descendants of the convicts and the blackfellas became service-station attendants or shop assistants or lorry drivers or waitresses or clerks, if they were lucky. No one spoke. No one spoke. For a century nothing was heard. Even the writers and poets were mute to their own world. If possible they left, though with an insistent phrase sounding in their ears that would never depart.

If you leave you can never be free
.

Ticket-of-leave men in their hearts, granted a pass permitting travel but never the freedom to leave, wherever their bodies ran their souls remained forever shackled to the strange mountainous island of horrors at the end of the world. And now Shag's guitar is back where it began, except now it is not merely a statement but a question and an accusation and a statement all bound together. Shag makes the strings shriek, because Shag wants so bad to be free, wants so bad for his sister to be free, and he can only free them both by playing this dim terrible memory.

If you leave you can never be free
.

And he plays and plays that crappy old guitar, and the singer is crying and bellowing. As if all the island's weird agonies were their own. As if it all were more than flesh could bear, and yet flesh had borne the weight for a century. The drummer has come to life and is pounding out the beat and the bass guitarist is just keeping his line going as strong and hard a counterpoint as he can to Shag's riffs and the singer's screams. The smoke-swirled bar has gone strangely quiet and they are all listening and wondering why they weren't listening before and what it is that aches so much to listen to now.

Aljaz goes to leave. He feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns around. In the dim haze he is at first unable to distinguish who it is. Until he hears her voice.

Saying: ‘Long time no see, Ali.'