The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

  Merv knows Clancy’s sister too, from out the Pooncarie Road. A woman who lives alone with her daughter and her daughter’s husband on a citrus block. They ask after each other’s family, but it’s not long before the topic is drought, climate, and Clancy’s new role in the town. ‘Not meaning to be rude, but, you’re going to help us how exactly?’

  ‘I’m going to try and tell you what the future climate might be here. Make a model of future seasons. So you might adapt your agriculture and lifestyle. Be ahead of the curve, as it were.’

  ‘There’s a curve? You believe in climate change?’

  ‘I believe in empirical data. I’m a scientist. I create the stuff, so I’d be a bloody fool not to.’

  Merv holds up his hands defensively. ‘Fair enough. Fair enough.’ His face forms a question, forehead wrinkling and lips pushing out. ‘But if I was to drop in to your office, like I see your advert in the local rag says that I can … then, you know, what? What are you going to do for me?’

  ‘As a private consultant I’d like to think I can tell my clients something about what weather to expect.’

  ‘Long term weather?’ Merv raises his eyebrows. The holy grail of rural prophesies. ‘Forecasts.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clancy says softly. ‘Long term forecasts.’

  ‘Like knowing the future. Knowing something that doesn’t exist yet.’

  ‘Except parts of the future do exist. The blueprint of the whole wooden labyrinth of a red gum is writ in a tiny seed. I believe, in the same way, the blueprint of future weather is also written, and readable.’

  Merv is quick to admit to him, knowing him a mystically learned man, that all they know around here is they know less than they used to know and that for local farmers this country has changed and they don’t know it like they once did … not any more. Nor do they know what’s coming next. They’re mystified as to what to put in the ground and when to put it in. ‘We don’t know if planting this crop or that one is pissing money away or not. We used to know. Or if we got it wrong we didn’t get it too wrong. But now, we’re sort of like the new blackfellas. The world we know is ending and another one coming and we can’t see what it looks like any more than a blackfella could have imagined a printing press or a brewery. Blokes round here don’t know whether to sell up or suck the pipe,’ Merv tells him.

  ‘Bong?’ Professor Sawyers asks.

  ‘Exhaust,’ Merv tells him.

  ‘Oh. How ghastly. Aren’t there professional trauma counsellors or some such thing in Bartel? People who can talk to you about ways of coping?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. The Liberal government sent us two of those. Nice young buggers. A bloke and a sheila. Psychologists with certificates. Trained in how to get through to the other side of … bad feelings.’ Merv takes off his hat and runs his finger around the inside and flicks the sweat to the cement footpath where it spots the drift of red sand. ‘Seems like a wrong idea of a premise to me, though. There might be no other side to this. That is, if the other side is rain and winters and days of downpours and floods and green paddocks. If we knew there was another side … well, course you can hang on. Course you can cope.’ Merv points at the sky. ‘But has it changed forever? Maybe. I’m beginning to think maybe.’

  Clancy Sawyers sips his latte and lays it back on the tin tabletop softly as if not wanting to make a noise. ‘Hopefully I can help there. Knowing the future is, really, no more than knowing the reaction of one thing to a change in another thing. If you can observe the change that will indicate and predict other changes, that’s the secret.’

  Merv puts his hands deep in the pockets of his work pants. ‘And can you? Have we got any more rain coming? Ever?’

  ‘Mervyn …’

  ‘Merv.’

  ‘Merv, I’m a professional climatologist and meteorological consultant with two little miracles to put through private school. I wouldn’t be doing the right thing by them if I could foretell a windfall of immense proportions and I just give that information away on the street?’

  Merv eyeballs the professor. ‘Do you have a windfall to give away?’

  ‘Come and see me.’

  Professor Sawyers’ Meteorological Consultancy is in the old John Deere dealership in Ral Ral Avenue. The adjacent yard where the shining green leviathans once posed is just broken blue road-metal covered in dockweed and Salvation Jane and faded cans and wind-rattled plastic bags now. He sets his desk out in the big showroom fronting the street, nothing to hide, an honest man for all the world to see. Surrounds it with his map drawers, filing cabinets, two printers and a scanner. The linoleum is dark grey with pink flecks at the rear of the room and sun-leached dull beneath the big outward tilting window up front. Two framed, faded posters of John Deere harvesters sit either side of the door that leads out back. This large room of bare linoleum is covered with squared footmarks where desks used to sit and black rubber skidmarks where chairs slid in and out from them. Ancient signs of a working office that silently emphasise the solitary nature of Emeritus Professor Sawyers’ work and ideas. A man alone in a big room with a theory that has been described on national TV by the Federal Climate Minister Dafydd Miles as, ‘Unproven, unlikely, and boasting a worldwide advocacy of one.’

  He has bought himself an espresso machine as a vote of confidence in his consultancy’s future and it sits on a small table by his desk. The echoing room begins to smell of coffee rather than engine oil, which seems a kind of legitimacy.

  While waiting for his first client, a notional and perhaps non-existent being, he works away at his theory, receiving satellite photos of the aurora australis from NASA and running visual algorithms across rainfall events below thirty degrees south, and storing all the data to be played over and run alongside coming weather for various geographic study areas. Searching for patterns. A certain brightness, duration and colour in the aurora means a certain strength of solar wind and will mean a certain weather for a certain area in the future. And the boundaries of all these variables are wide, but his incessant data collection is shrinking them. For the first time he includes the Bartel region in his data collection and projections. Pretty pictures of polar skies pile up on his desktop, most defaced with questions written in black marker pen. Does this particular sequence of illuminations correspond, somewhere down the track, with a weather pattern in a particular place? A mountain of data to be cross-checked and compared and him now without an assistant or a laboratory. This is a type of hellish heaven for a type of mind that likes to be suspended over a desktop and a mystery at the end of a long curvature of spine aching with the glow of discovery.

  Having worked at his theory for a month focusing it on the local Bartel region Clancy Sawyers thinks he has found links between a certain aurora and rain here in the past. He believes he has detected an emerging pattern made of past light and coming rain. But he waits in vain for his first client. Until, eventually, he realises no one person in the shire of Taringa-Bartel is going to be brave enough to make the leap of faith and walk in here and buy his new science. Though they probably pray at church on Sunday, no one wants to be the coward who breaks ranks and actually bows down before a witch-doctor and asks for his help.

  When Jamieson’s Hardware Store opens on Wednesday morning Clancy waggles his fingers at the young guy with a nose ring behind the counter. ‘Do you stock sandwich boards?’ he asks.

  ‘Like a cutting board? For sandwiches? For the kitchen?’

  ‘No. No. Those A-frame signs you sit outside a shop to write messages on.’ Clancy mimes the A-frame with his fingertips together and his elbows splayed. ‘“Today’s Special: Pot and Parma. Ten Dollars.”’

  ‘You mean a footpath sign?’

  ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘Yeah. Aisle three.’

  Clancy chooses a blackboard sign and buys pink chalk to go with it and sits it outside his consultancy on the footpath and gets on his aching knees on the footpath and rests on his haunches and thinks a few moments, working his lips in and out, before wr
iting in capital letters, GOOD NEWS. BIG RAIN. BUT WHEN? He swivels the sign rattling pop-rivets through a hundred and eighty degrees and writes the same thing on the other side.

  From his desk drinking coffee he sees people stop and read the sign and look about as if they are being watched, the butt of some hidden camera stunt, before walking quickly away, smiling to show they aren’t fooled. Has he written this message on this sign because he knows, like any veteran reader of the tarot or the stars, that good news sells? Or has he found something in the Southern Lights? Others stop and confer, laugh, shake their heads before moving on. Some stand before the sign and mull on it like they might on serious news, and Clancy thinks several times one of these people is going to reach down and rub out his message with their bare hand, this subject being too grave to joke about. But they do not. People from the other side of the street squint and point out the sign to each other. Cars and utes slow and some drivers honk their horns and pump their fists in mock celebration.

  Halfway through the morning with the day tending hot Aunty Lara James comes hauling herself down the footpath, a cloud of grey hair over black eyebrows on a lined face, her sun-mottled hands gripping the rubber handles of her walking frame like some ancient biker. She stops and reads the sign with a darkening expression. From inside his office Professor Clancy reads her desiccated lips. ‘But when?’ she mouths. Before answering herself, ‘But when,’ in disgust. She clumps over and opens his heavy glass door, chocking it wide with her aluminium frame. She had been a friend of his mother’s and knew him as a boy and followed his career through the media. ‘When, then?’ she asks, shaking a forefinger at him and a wattle of flesh swinging beneath her arm.

  ‘For specifics you’ve got to book an appointment, Mrs James. Or you can buy my bulletin. Either online or in hard copy.’ He waves a stapled sheaf of A4 paper at her. ‘But good news, be assured.’

  ‘I hope you aren’t taking advantage of people in hard times, Clancy.’

  ‘Mrs James,’ he chastises her. He lays his bulletin on the desktop before him. ‘I’m selling something real.’

  ‘Well it sounds like bullshit, if you’ll excuse the French. But you were always a clever fellow. So I suppose you’ve got something up your sleeve.’

  ‘Science, Mrs James.’

  ‘Yes. I hope so.’

  She waves and places her hands on her walking frame and bends her arms as if to heft it out of the doorway; hesitating a second she asks sharply, ‘When? I’d like to know when.’

  ‘You won’t tell anyone?’

  ‘Loose lips sink ships.’ She nods her head agreeing not to tell.

  ‘September. Not a word.’

  ‘Not a word,’ she confirms. She lifts her frame from the doorway and the door closes behind her. On the footpath a man and his son are looking at the sandwich board.

  ‘Why doesn’t he just tell us?’ the boy asks.

  ‘September,’ Lara James says as she reaches down off the tiled step at the footpath with her aluminium frame. ‘Apparently.’

  Clots of spectators have formed and disintegrated and reformed all day outside the old John Deere dealership to look at and discuss Professor Sawyers’ sandwich board. Occasionally a farmer with his face set hard will walk from the board to the sloping window and raise a hand to it to darken the reflection of the streetscape and look inside through that hand shadow at the wizard, or the liar, at his work. He is there, back and forth between two computers, making notes on many different pages, large photographs spilling from a large printer and him pinning them on a cork board at the back of the showroom. Classical music seeps from beneath the door and occasionally he conducts it. He is busy at some mysterious work, his grey hair coiffed above his forehead and plastered back behind in the manner of some superannuated rockabilly.

  Three o’clock and Professor Clancy Sawyers hasn’t yet gone for lunch, not wanting to answer the questions of the people en masse, nor to break the spell his sign has cast over the town. Let the mountain come to Mohammed. Wait here. They’ll come. Christ, someone must be willing to pay to answer the question. They’ll come.

  The husband knocks and holds the door open for his wife. They are dressed to meet a professional man, he in a sports-coat and tie and she in a smart frock topped with a navy poplin jacket. Clancy Sawyers doesn’t know much about selling himself to the world, having lived on campus all these years, but he supposes people don’t jazz themselves up to meet a charlatan. So he figures these people have read his sign and gone home and got into their best threads to meet him because they are ready to believe in him. The mysterious powers of a sandwich board. Shit, he thinks, I’ve crossed over from the sacred world of science to the whorehouse of advertising.

  ‘Hello,’ he crosses the large showroom to meet them, shakes both their hands. ‘Professor Clancy Sawyers.’

  ‘Susie Lappin. And this is my husband, Michael.’

  ‘G’day, Professor.’

  He sits them in front of his desk. They are in mid-life and trouble has settled on their faces irreversibly, citizens of a dead world. He finds it hard to think of them as ever having been laughing children. Her hair and her capacity for courtesy have thinned. She looks straight into the professor’s eyes. Michael Lappin stares, smiling softly, at the posters of the harvesters on the wall, animals remembered from a pre-drought Eden, extinct now in this district.

  ‘We read your sign. Outside,’ she points.

  ‘I think the whole town has. Would you like coffee?’ Clancy waves a hand back at his espresso machine. The woman shakes her head for both of them.

  ‘Well, we want to know. So we’re here on a business appointment to find out,’ she admits. Clancy notices the husband flexing his jaw and chewing his cheek.

  ‘I see I’ve got some convincing to do with this one,’ he says to her, pointing at the man.

  ‘Michael thought computers were a fad and mobile phones were a gimmick. I’d still be washing with a mangle if he had his way.’ She reaches out and pats her husband’s thigh. ‘How much does your weather forecast cost?’

  ‘How many hectares do you own?’

  ‘A couple of thousand. Five hundred dry land and fifteen hundred irrigated.’

  ‘What do you produce?’

  ‘Some potatoes, some rice, some canola, some citrus. We irrigate from the lower Darling. Not lately, of course.’

  ‘There must be a lot of money in those,’ Clancy nods, asking them to agree.

  ‘When you can grow them there’s money. When you can’t there isn’t,’ she answers.

  ‘So there isn’t,’ her husband adds. He rubs a palm up and down his unshaven cheek. ‘If your method of telling what the weather’s goin’ to do is so revolutionary, why’d the university …’

  His wife looks at him bitterly. This is an argument they’d settled earlier in the day and his raising it here is a breach of their peace agreement. ‘Michael, I think Professor Sawyers …’

  ‘He’s got every right to ask.’ Clancy holds his hand up to stop her. ‘And he’s right to ask.’ He nods and smiles at the farmer to let him know it’s okay.

  ‘I’m asking you to buy something pretty radical. I expect a few questions.’ He leans back in his chair, its springs groaning loud in the empty room. ‘The university and the meteorological world doesn’t deny my theory, as such. They simply say it’s not a theory yet. Just an idea. It’s a seed, but it isn’t a crop, if you will. They think it should grow and be a crop waving in the breeze before I sell it to the world. And that’s all right. But I’ve got bills to pay. And don’t all you farmers sell crops before they’re grown? Don’t you forward sell crops that might never be crops?’

  ‘So … you admit your forecast might be nonsense?’ the farmer asks.

  ‘It works. It’s real. But if I wait ’til it’s a fully fledged, fully fleshed, fully proven theory like Evolution or Newton’s Laws of Motion it’ll be too late for most people around here. From what I’ve seen in this district you guys need to get a grip on
things now.’

  ‘Sooo … your sign says big rain. How much and when and how much do we have to pay to find out?’ the man asks.

  Clancy pushes a sheet of paper across the desk at them. ‘That’s a contract setting out terms between my clients and myself. I’ll make you a coffee while you read it.’

  Across the road a crowd is milling, peering in through the plate glass window at the meeting underway in Professor Sawyers’ Consultancy. The Lappins have broken ranks with the rest of the community and are in there partaking of special knowledge and getting themselves a leg-up and head start on everyone else. The bastards. Rats who’ve decided the ship is sinking and swum to a lifeboat. What kind of scientific magic dust might this notorious man-of-science be sprinkling on their future? The whole town should have talked about this and made a decision as a community. It wasn’t for the bloody Lappins to charge in there and seek out alternative medicines.

  They stare across the road willing their vision to seep through the reflection of their own parked cars and on into Professor Sawyers’ Consultancy. Are they shaking hands in there? Are they laughing? Have they made a pact? Champagne corks popping? Is this guy for real? What do the Lappins know?

  She picks up the paper and turns it over front and back. ‘Just plain white for me. No sugar.’

  ‘Same for me. Thanks.’

  They read the contract. Professor Clancy Sawyers doesn’t want any payment for his forecast. He wants ten per cent of the profits of whatever crops they grow using his forecast. If his forecast is wrong and the crop fails he gets paid nothing. If rain falls at a fifty millimetre differential to the total he predicts, or if it falls outside fifteen days either side of the date he predicts, then he counts his forecast a failure and the contract null and void and he gets nothing.