Death of a River Guide (31 page)

Couta's hand came across the table and ruffled Aljaz's thin red spikes of hair. ‘Not much of that mane left,' she laughed. He laughed a little too.

‘Why did you cut it so short?' she asked, knowing it betrayed something of his self-loathing and wanting him to admit to it.

‘Easier to wash,' he said, with the briefest flicker of a smile to warn her away from further such questions.

‘Sure,' she said, and he momentarily and unintentionally fixed her with a stare that frightened her, such was the emptiness she saw in his blue eyes. ‘Sure,' she continued, looking away, ‘lot easier for sure.'

‘Do you ever think it could have been different?' he asked in a voice so matter-of-fact it angered her, for he knew what the answer was.

‘What do you reckon?' she said. ‘Anyway, it wouldn't make it easier for me to think it,' she said, looking down, fiddling with her nails, ‘so I don't.' And then Couta turned her head back up so that he would see her face, which was now serious and sad, so that he would understand her, and she said, ‘In fact, I don't even want to talk about it.' And he realised that, long ago, without knowing it, like a child with something precious that it mistakes for a toy, he had broken what had held them together. And the shattered pieces could not be remade into a single item.

Aljaz remembered how he had once thought there would be plenty more women after he walked out on Couta, and that he would just take his time and pick the one he liked most when he was ready. There had been more women. But he felt about none of them the way he felt about Couta. And he never felt that any of them understood him the way Couta had understood him. Some had liked him for his front. But Couta had known his fear and his darkness and she had loved him in spite of them. That he never found again. And now it was too late.

‘Do you ever think,' said Aljaz, ‘that maybe you only get one or two chances in this life?' And before Couta even tried to reply Aljaz was talking again. ‘And that if you throw them away, then that's it?' Now it was his turn to look downwards. ‘You know what I mean? You get given a chance and you think there'll be plenty more of them. But there aren't, and if you just piss them up on the wall then life gives up on you.' Couta looked down at him, her expression unchanging. She knew what he meant and didn't want to acknowledge it. ‘You know what I mean?' asked Aljaz for a second time. ‘You don't get a second chance.' And he turned his head away, because he knew it. That it was too late. He wanted so bad to say he loved her, but he knew it would not be right, that it would somehow introduce an insincere force between them. It was too late, and all they had left was this moment of peace together.

His head jerked up. He looked at her and she saw what she had never before seen: that he was a frightened man. He looked up at her and he said the one word neither had said all that evening. He said, ‘Jemma,' and halted.

Then he said, ‘
After
Jemma,' and halted a second time.

And then he said, ‘I woke up one morning after Jemma and, I didn't mean it, believe me Couta, I never meant it, but I jumped up and ran and ran and I never could look back.'

At the end of that night they lay down in her bed to sleep. Not to make love but to sleep together one final time. That night was a conclusion for Couta, a moment of contrition for Aljaz. At Couta's invitation Aljaz was to stay on in her house; he preferred its living domesticity to the dusty memories that gathered at Harry's home. Perhaps in this new-found domestic order Aljaz sought some refuge from the fray of reality that so frightened him, though now I can see that the chaos of reality, beginning with Pig's Breath's phonecall a few days later, was only too soon to reassert itself and, like the river, carry Aljaz with it.

But I am not seeing that phonecall: I am seeing how at the end of that night they lay down in her bed and she pulled an old white bedspread over them. Even in the gloom Aljaz noticed how extraordinarily white the bedspread was, with the exception of a large yellowing blemish. And so I see them, both now asleep lying on their sides, two tarnished spoons. He clutching her, clutching her so tight, as if a gale were blowing around them threatening to uplift and part them forever if he did not hold on to her. The house and then the bedroom seemed to dissolve, and soon even the bed ceased to exist. He felt only they existed, that all around were the most wild and savage beasts with deformed faces and evil souls, which would destroy them both if they parted, which waited beyond reality for them and would consume everybody unless he could just hold on. When she moved he seized a new hold so tightly that she complained. But still he held on, and he saw them riding on clouds above an ocean of fiery torment, together safe from its waves of flames. As long as he held on, as long he felt the warmth of her flesh and the pulse of her body breathing in and out, as long as he could hold his nose into the flesh of her back and smell her, he was safe and free from the fear he knew would return when they inevitably parted. So he lay on his side shivering and she, with an arm behind her back, pulled the white bedspread up over his shoulders, and as she did so his eyes caught the ancient amber stain. He momentarily thought the stain contained some image, some revelation, some moment of truth, and he almost cried out at the horror and the beauty of it, but then the sensation passed as abruptly as it had arrived and he curled like the frightened animal he was into the back of Couta Ho. When she asked what was the matter, he was unable to say, but just spooned into her back, his body shaking, his nose smelling the sweat upon her flesh, his fear as total as it was unnameable.

So they slept, so they slept.

 the Churn 

I'll tell you something. It's not a vision. It's something I saw before I started having visions. Before I even started to drown. Watching Aljaz and Couta sleep together reminds me of it. Sometimes when I sleep, I am privy to a bad dream.

Sometimes in my sleep I see a terrible flower of death: its stamen stone, its petals water foam variegated with blood, one man disappearing into the foam, another, a different man, arising from the foam. And that different man is me.

Couta Ho says, ‘It doesn't mean anything,' Couta Ho says when I sit bolt upright in bed, cold and sweating and shivering and shitting myself.

And I turn and touch the warm skin of her cheeks with my cold fingers, and my teeth chatter and my head shakes.

‘It don't mean a thing,' Couta Ho says, and after a time she makes me lie back down and I fall asleep under the flowing softness of the tear-stained bedspread.

But now my bad dream has possessed me and it will not leave and Couta Ho has gone. Everywhere I look, I see it. And what I now see with it is the worst, the very worst, of my bad dream made flesh and reality.

They are already in the heart of the gorge, at the Churn waterfall, the lead-in rapid too big to shoot. They rope the boats round the rapid's edge to an eddy immediately above the waterfall, and there organise the portage up and around the cliff face. The punters are shocked at the steep scrabble up the side of the cliff carrying gear. They are annoyed at having to undertake such arduous physical work, but relieved to be off the flooding river, back on dry land. So they set to without enthusiasm and without anger, following Aljaz and the Cockroach, who, in the manner of builders' labourers carrying loads of timber, sling the heavy food barrels diagonally across their shoulders.

A scream. Then cries. ‘Help! Help!' Short, urgent, desperate. ‘Aljaz! Cockroach!' Aljaz and the Cockroach drop their heavy barrels and start running, brushing aside scrub and confused punters with their gearbags as they force their bodies back up the steep gravel slide, as they climb up the small rock chimney, as they run along the track. The cries grow closer. ‘It's Derek!' Then another voice. ‘He can't hang on much longer!' Near where the track turns to head back down the mountainside they see him.

‘O Jesus,' says the Cockroach. A third of the way down a near vertical rockface is Derek. He is hanging on to a lone tea-tree, whose spiny root, not even a wrist thick, long ago embedded the plant into the cliff face. Looking straight down, not much of Derek is visible. A tea-tree trunk, two hands grasping it, the top of a red whitewater helmet. A punter's helmet. Framing the red circle of his helmet is the waterfall that lies twenty metres below. ‘Fucking idiot,' says the Cockroach. ‘How could he manage to fall off this track?'

‘He didn't,' says a nearby punter. ‘His gearbag fell and he tried to fetch it and then he fell.'

‘He's still a fucking idiot,' says the Cockroach. But even as the Cockroach curses he is getting ready to rescue. He reties his flip line as a climbing harness. ‘Where's the longline?' he asks a punter. And before the punter can answer the Cockroach screams, ‘
Where's the fucking longline?
'

‘In the raft down at the end of the portage trail,' says Aljaz.

‘Rickie,' the Cockroach yells, ‘go get it! And run, fucking run like you've never fucking run!' The Cockroach turns and yells reassurance to Derek far below. ‘Don't worry, Derek. We'll get you out of this, mate. Just don't rock round down there.' Aljaz feels his breath hot and hard and fast racing out of his nostrils.

A protracted half-cry, half-yell climbs the cliff face and is just distinguishable from the roar of the waterfall. ‘What's he saying?' asks the Cockroach.

‘He's saying he can't hang on much longer,' says Sheena.

‘Jeezuz,' says the Cockroach.

‘You'll be right,' yells Aljaz. ‘Don't look down. Look at the rock, at the patterns in the rock, and think of that shithouse porridge you had for breakfast.'

The Cockroach pauses, looks along the track in the vain hope that the runner will have already returned with the rope. ‘Are you going to go?' he asks. ‘Or me?'

Aljaz feels fear rise within him like a fist pushing from his bowels up into his throat. As lead guide he ought to be the one who attempts the rescue. He is out of practice, unfit, and his old fear of heights is stronger than ever. But he knows there is no choice. He says yes, thinking the Cockroach means who will go down the rope. But the Cockroach doesn't mean this. He means who is going to climb down the cliff now, without the rope.

Aljaz goes to say that he is no climber, which he isn't, but stops, torn between his fear of climbing down the cliff and his greater fear of being seen by the Cockroach and the punters as a coward.

‘Now?' says Aljaz. ‘Without a rope, don't be bloody mad.'

‘The fucking rope's five fucking minutes away,' says the Cockroach. He jerks a contemptuous thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cliff. ‘That silly prick isn't going to last that long. If he doesn't give up the ghost, that bloody tea-tree will anyway.' Aljaz looks around, hoping to see something that might help him. There is nothing. ‘I'm going down,' says the Cockroach. ‘Now.'

‘No!' Aljaz suddenly shouts out of shame, surprising even himself. ‘No, I'll go.' And before he has even finished speaking he has started to climb down the steep band of shrubbery that flanks the cliff.

God, what have I done to deserve this?
It is interesting, watching now, how none of Aljaz's fear is apparent to the punters, who see him quickly and machinelike begin his descent of the cliff face. But Aljaz has no choice, and that, he thinks, is perhaps a mercy. For he knows he cannot act upon his fear and say, ‘No, you go, I'll stay here where I feel safe.' If the punter dies it will be his fault. He looks sideways and sees the waterfall and feels ill. He looks back up at the half-circle of punters gawking at him and wonders why on earth any of them have any confidence or trust in him at all. He feels like saying, ‘You fools, can't you see I'm as shit scared as you?' But instead he adopts his professional nonchalance, smiles and says, ‘We'll have him back up here in no time.' Down he goes, trying to forget his vertigo, marvelling at how duty can overwhelm fear. Perhaps this is what soldiers ordered into battle feel, thinks Aljaz. Whatever will be will be.