The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  Minutes later Bridget Wray rises from the steam that is welling up from below decks. Em can hear the boy singing a song in a strange language in the shower. ‘He comes from Dickenson,’ Bridget tells them. ‘The bridge we went over back there. And those old buildings and aerials we saw.’

  ‘Well, what are we going to do with him?’ Merv asks. ‘This old banger can’t go back upstream against the current here. And we can’t just set him down in the bush. We won’t get near the edge of the water, anyway.’

  ‘He can come with us,’ Em ventures excitedly. ‘We saved him. He’s ours. Or he would be washed away. He can come with us and I’ll teach him to have manners.’ She wrinkles her face, wondering, having seen what sort of boy he is, if this is possible. ‘I’ll be his teacher and I’ll teach him to read and write. And to play Mix ’n’ Match. He’s a horrible boy, but we should try to like him and make him good. He’ll swear at us and not want to do all the things white people have to do. But soon he’ll start to love us when he sees how good we are. We’ll teach him songs.’ Her speech has been getting more excited and faster as the idea turns to words. Now she stops and looks grave. ‘We will adopt him.’

  ‘He belongs to a family, Em. He’s someone’s kid. He’s not our pet.’ Merv has a kettle on the butane stove. When it begins to whistle he places tea bags in four white enamelled mugs and pours the water.

  ‘We’ll give him back one day,’ Em says. ‘But not too soon. The longer we have him the more surprised they’ll be to get him back and the more happy they will be. So we should keep him for … a week.’

  ‘A week?’ Merv hands her a mug of tea.

  She blows its surface steaming into the cool air. ‘Or until we’re sick of him.’

  When Barwon emerges he is dressed in his own wet shorts and a t-shirt of Merv’s Bridget has dug out for him. It is so large his face is set hostile to ward off laughter. Merv hands him a mug of tea. ‘I hate tea,’ he says, taking it and sipping.

  Em steps up to him and holds out her hand, telling him, ‘I’m Emma. But everyone calls me Em.’ They shake hands with farcical dignity, him glancing at the adults to see if this is some kind of joke. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Barwon.’ He looks at her with a measure of distrust, weighing her, still unsure what sort of creation she might be. ‘You ’member where you was yesdee?’ he asks.

  ‘Do I remember where I was yesterday?’

  ‘’At’s right. Do you?’

  ‘Yes.’ She wobbles her head to show the ease with which she remembers yesterday.

  ‘Well, what happen, then? Tell me … three things.’ He raises three fingers and pouts his lips, challenging her to come up with some evidence she existed back then.

  ‘Breakfast, lunch and dinner,’ she smiles.

  ‘Hey, every day got all that.’

  ‘What did you do yesterday, then? Three things that aren’t breakfast, lunch and dinner,’ Em asks.

  ‘Hey, don’t go worry ’bout me yesdee. I was still me yesdee and kicking roun’ town and people give me respect. Say, “Hey look, that there that Barwon. Check him out, he’s cool as, eh.”’

  ‘I tell you what, Barwon, we can’t get you to dry land here. But next time we come to some safe place to drop you we’ll let you off there. Okay?’ Merv hands him a Mars bar, which reignites a brief hope in Barwon that maybe these dudes are genies at his service. He tears its wrapper off with his teeth and bites into it, asking, ‘Where you guys goin’?’ Barwon shields his eyes from the setting sun to look at Merv at the wheel of the boat.

  ‘South Australia. Me and Em are South Australian. Bridget here is from Queensland. You know Queensland?’

  Barwon nods. It’s a place he’s heard people damn. ‘Course, eh.’

  ‘We found her in the river, too. She was floating in a toilet.’

  Barwon looks at Bridget Wray with a sad grimace. Disappointed in himself for inventing a woman that would go voyaging with turds as shipmates.

  ‘Who knows what sort of critter we’re going to pick up next,’ Merv says.

  Barwon looks at him. ‘How long you reckon you been in this boat, eh?’

  ‘We’ve been on the water for many days, Barwon, my curious friend. As I said, we’re taking this native of Queensland here to a more civilised and gracious land.’

  ‘Oh, leave him,’ Bridget Wray says. ‘The boy’s nearly drowned. Don’t scare him with all your crap about states and water. And if you don’t mind me saying so, his welfare and peace-of-mind is probably better served by his remaining ignorant of your identity, mission and recent subversive recreations.’

  Not understanding what is being said apart from being aware he has been called ‘ignorant’, Barwon feels a need to reassert himself. ‘You people thinkin’ you know all about all this ’n’ that, eh?’ He points at Emma. ‘You thinkin’ you eat breakfast ’n’ them other two meal yesterday?’ Emma nods. ‘You didn’t.’ He points at Bridget Wray. ‘You thinkin’ you from Queensland?’ She nods slowly. ‘You not.’ He points at Merv. ‘’N’ you thinkin’ you a big boat captain fella from South Australia.’

  ‘Pretty big,’ Merv agrees, nods.

  ‘’N’ you not either.’ He shakes his Mars bar around at them, still bedazzled at himself for bringing all this into existence and now a little peeved at being their creator and not only not receiving homage but being called names. He stamps his bare foot on the aluminium deck. ‘You all think you know everythin’, but you fellas don’t know a bullshit rumour from a crap festival in horse-shit town. Yangarna people got some bigtime ways here older’n’ all these trees and this whole place all round,’ he helicopters his hand at the landscape. ‘An’ you, and you, an’ you … you should just think who you are and think maybe you aren’t who you think you are ’fore you come humbuggin’ at me and call me ignorant and all, eh.’ His three listeners are balanced between amusement, astonishment and alarm. ‘I got songs can make shit happen,’ he assures them. ‘You should treat me important. Maybe I’m a undiscover bigfella, eh.’

  Merv sweeps his arm toward the boat’s wheel, ushering Barwon forward. ‘You like to take over the captaincy, your highness.’

  ‘No. You do it. You been doin’ pretty good.’ And with that he sits down and begins to cry, for it’s a weight on anyone’s head the inventing of rivers and being chased up a tree by your own river and then inventing people too, by mistake, and being treated off-hand by those people and having to assert yourself and then being offered captaincy of a boat and not knowing how to drive one even when you invented it from nothing. And, anyway, he wonders why the Rhino Cullers didn’t ever come with the cops and if his mum is looking for him right now, calling and about to amp up to swearing and before long, as the water, his water, creeps into town, crying when she knows he is washed away. He begins crying heartily when he thinks on all this.

  Bridget Wray leads him below decks to the forward bunkroom where the two bunks run together at the boat’s prow and she lays him in one and Em climbs into the other so their heads are close and while Bridget Wray lies alongside the boy and holds his head to her shoulder Em begins to tell him of Bartel and their vineyard, which is slightly nettling to him as he invented her and doesn’t know this history and can’t work out whether it’s bullshit or even where she gets it from.

  ‘Our home is called a Livingstone Hedge,’ she tells him. ‘There was grapes and vines for making wine. But we don’t own it any more because some son-of-a-bitch banker who never worked a day in his life does. All my stuff is still there, though. We’re going home on this holiday on this river to pick it up. I’ve got a dog called Rough and the neighbours are looking after him. We’ll pick him up, too.’

  When the boy becomes enagaged by Em’s story Bridget Wray thinks it best to leave them. She climbs up on deck.

  ‘My dad was a vintner who made wine. But now he’s got to go to jail for making a river,’ Em tells him.

  Barwon turns to look at her and his eyes widen, staring at her green eyes, which a
re bright even in this dark cabin. ‘You can go to jail for making a river?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah. But I’m going to be able to visit him.’

  ‘How he make the river he make?’ Barwon asks.

  ‘I’m not allowed to tell.’

  He wipes his tears. ‘Which river he make?’

  ‘Well … This one. But don’t tell anyone. He made this river so we could go home on it.’ She stares at him close, his whitely blinking eyes and big lips twitching thoughtfully.

  ‘He’s a big liar, your dad. A big, big liar.’

  ‘He is not.’

  ‘If he’s sayin’ he made this river he is.’

  ‘He is not.’

  Barwon lifts his head and props it on his forearm in his palm. Em sees he still has grey river mud spotted about the edges of his face. ‘How he make it? He sing it?’

  ‘Sing it? You’re cuckoo. Cuckoo … Cuckoo …’ she begins to chime.

  ‘How he make it, then? If he made it. You see him make it?’

  ‘I had to hide. But I heard the bang and saw the dust all fly up and heard the people yelling and screaming. They were Queensland people, so it didn’t matter.’

  ‘What all this dust and this yelling bullshit?’

  She cranes her head at Barwon and shepherds her whisperings toward him with the palm of her hand. ‘There was a dam and he blew up the dam because it had the river in it. The whole river was curled up inside. Then he blew up the dam wall and the river unwinded down out of the dam. That’s how the river got out.’

  Barwon scowls to ponder this awhile and licks his lips, before nodding and agreeing with her, ‘That’s how I done it then. That’s okay. That’s one way.’

  ‘That’s how you done what?’

  ‘Made the river go. My dance made him to do what he done. So he done it and he the one go to jail. But I done it really. That’s good. That’s a smart way.’

  ‘Cuckoo … Cuckoo …’ she chimes.

  ‘You only a kid. And you a whitey white kid, too, eh. Whitey white kid and all the grapes and bankers bullshit in your head. Thas all right. You can’t help it, eh.’

  She is silent while she thinks of a way to reset this baffling conversation. ‘What’s the name of where you live?’

  ‘Dickenson.’

  ‘Is it a town?’

  ‘Course it is.’

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘Don’t have to do nothing, eh. ’N’ don’t have nothing to do.’

  ‘Did it happen to your dad the same? The Queensland took all the water and killed your town so son-of-a-bitch bankers owned it?’

  ‘You got so many questions. Your dad a cop and your mum a teacher?’

  ‘My dad’s a vintner.’

  ‘A vintner.’

  ‘Of grapes.’

  ‘I seen some grapes once. In the Friendly Grocer, through the bars. They tiny. Shit. How a man jus’ do grapes for a job?’

  The Party Animal is trawling slowly through a forest of skeletal grey trees. Each kid has a fishing rod with a line angling back through the boat’s white-bubbling wake. On the end frozen stumps of fish finger that thaw and crumble in the water’s drag and need constant replacement. The flood has burst west off the river here into the Menindee Lakes and swept up those curdle-green puddles in a grey-brown flush and is lying as far as the eye can see out there with birds flying in from mysteries of distance. Mud slumbering carp freed from green stinkwater cells and lifted into a buffeting stratosphere of water are snapping at the floodtide of fly and grub rafting on its surface, their bellies filling and the smorgasbord writ on the watertop in rings growing and abutting each other and intersecting endlessly. Fish freed from famine feeding frenziedly. And what is this speeding square-arsed fishy morsel shitting bread-crumbs in my eyes?

  A fish as big as a spaniel sucks Em’s stump of fish finger into its mouth and is hooked and its thrash of panic travels to Em through the line and rod and she squeals and her thrash of panic echoes back through the line and rod to the fish and Barwon drops his rod clattering to the deck and snatches Em’s from her. ‘Here. You too small. You be pull in.’ He begins to hack the rod at the air like he’s chopping wood, leaning out over the water, winding on the downward stroke and then pulling upward with his torso. ‘Come on, bastardboy. You met old Barwon now. You a big bastard, too. You plenny big.’ His arms jerk in the fish’s thrashings, his small biceps stretching and bunching and his body hauled forward at the hips.

  Merv cuts the engines and comes to the stern. ‘Slowly, slowly. You try and race him in and he’ll snap your line. Play him.’

  ‘Don’t you tell me play him. This fish not playin’. This a crocodile style bastard.’

  Bridget Wray is lying in the sun on the foredeck cupping her hand before her mouth to catch her breath in fascinated disgust at the curdled scent of Nasi Goreng two-minute noodles she ate for breakfast. An idle irky pleasure. She is thinking about the people back home. Do they believe she has drowned by now? Or been murdered by this man? The rising star of state politics, the new svelte face of free-market capitalism in Queensland. Her picture would be all over the Courier Mail and probably The Oz and maybe even the interstate papers as well like the Sydney Morning Herald and that pinko Age they have in dark stone Melbourne where the trees drop their leaves in winter. Where would the newspapers have gone to get the photos? Christ. Hopefully not the official photos of the swearing-in of the new ministry, where her mouth was panicky and lipless and her eyes screaming self-doubt. Maybe those gym photos on her Facebook page. Her hurdler’s Lycra-clad arse. No. Not gym shots to tell of a tragedy. Not gym shots for a hostage situation. They would have gone to her parents for photos. Graduation photos. Family scenes. Laughter at Christmas. The happier the photos the deeper their portrayal of this tragedy. How are Mum and Dad coping? Mum, so proud and dumbfounded at her being a politician. Her little girl who had spent days alone in the school library, now striding along on the nightly news with files clutched to her breast and a wake of PAs and minders hustling to keep up with her. Mum taking refuge among the rose bushes on Parliament Lawn at my swearing-in like some grass-hut native brought to a royal court. Dad would be sitting in front of her now, nodding his head slowly and patting her hand, unable to find any words to convey the vastness of their predicament but a softly breathed reminder to pray. Pray, Myra. We can only pray. The nod of the head and the pat of the hand and the softly exhaled, Pray to Our Lord Jesus Christ. The same beaten benediction for the death of a dog or the end of the world.

  How long has she been on this boat? Would Queensland have had her funeral? A state funeral, surely. At St John’s Cathedral? A dull ringing of bells over the city and the lunchtime pedestrians stop inside a minute’s silence. A people regarding their sandals and thongs in reverence and grief. Inside the cathedral a choir of boys sing the last note of ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’ and the parliament is weeping as the Premier ascends … No. The Premier sits chin raised bravely, lips jellying, in the front pew. The Prime Minister ascends the pulpit to deliver Bridget Wray’s eulogy. A woody sorrow-bound silence, leather soles ponderously climbing wooden steps, incense smoke coiling high in the window-stained light, sobs of her mother, sisters, aunts, father … indeed, the whole congregation is sobbing in whispers, grief of a nation a cappella.

  The Prime Minister taps the microphone with a forefinger, testing for life, and hearing those taps thrice-boomed and twice-echoed to the mourners leans down and says quietly, ‘Bridget Wray …’ he chokes, looks about himself and up into the vaulted stratosphere for composure. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just so …’ Again he looks away into the heights of the cathedral. And comes back much restored, speaking loud and bluff, ‘Bridget Wray’s legacy is one which leaves us awed, and those among us who loved her … proud. But the question that hangs unanswered, unanswerable, on such a sad day is … what might she have achieved given the years rightly due to her? Might this incredible young woman have … STOLEN MY FISH?’

  ‘Daddy.
He stole it. It’s on my fishing rod.’

  Em snatches at the rod and tries to pull it back from Barwon. Bridget opens her eyes and stands, looking over the cabin at the wrestling children, the rod whipping starboard and port through the air. She wipes her tears to unwarp the world. A flush of embarrassment at having arranged such a grand funeral for herself. The Prime Minister? Unlikely. But then …

  ‘Hey, sistergirl, they all my fish. Where you think all this water ’n’ shit come from, eh?’ Realising she can’t overpower him Em lets go of the rod and takes up the rectangular tackle box, one hand at either end, and crashes it down on his head. Barwon goes over the side into the grey water in a garish rain of leering rubber lures, clandestine iron hooks protruding from their fluorescent bellies. They patter down on the water’s surface where he disappeared.

  ‘Hell, Em.’ Merv snatches off his Blundstones, watching the water. No sign of Barwon. ‘Hell.’

  ‘We’re putting him back,’ Em says. ‘He’s a robber. We don’t want him.’

  Merv dives and kicks down along the boat’s cold wake feeling for any touch of flesh or wash of current made by the panicking boy. Bridget Wray is over the stern almost as fast, open-eyed underwater, the mawkish majesty of her funeral replaced by a yellow-grey blindness through which she grits her teeth to see. She pulls with her arms down into darkness, the yellow dulling black. A needle in a haystack a boy in a lake. Sentenced to gulp great unconscious breaths of water by his need of air. Suck a sleeping lungful of the stuff and you’ll never surface, never hear words or birds again, never feel warmth, you’ll sink to that earth newly become mud and rest on that plain newly become lakebed. Oh, God. A boy dead and a girl the killer. Barwon and Em. A tragedy, sad coming and going, awful from either end, and … Splashings break into her underwater thoughts. Someone is on the surface. Is it Em, now feeling guilty and mimicking the adults in trying to save the boy? If it’s Em overboard Bridget must get to her.