‘I suppose it should be comforting that you’re punting all your profits on your forecast being right.’ She sips her coffee.
‘Then again,’ her husband scratches at his Adam’s apple, ‘if it rains and crops grow, you get ten per cent. If we believe you and we plant and it doesn’t rain … then I spose you’re long gone and no skin off your nose.’
‘Except, I can’t get long gone, can I. I’m a nationally known figure. If I make a prediction here and it fails and people are hurt by it, the country will hear about it. I’ll be held up to ridicule and contempt. Don’t worry, I’ve got skin in the game.’ The professor makes his hands into pistols, one aiming at the man and one at the woman. ‘If you sign the contract I’m going to tell you of a rain event my research has revealed. Precisely when. And precisely how much. And it’s a rainfall that will make the river run so you’ll be able to irrigate from it, too. You can base a season on it, don’t worry. You think I’d try and pull some con based around one future date and just hope by some great miraculous coincidence it might rain the very month I said? Go and Google me. You’ll find, whatever they say about my recent controversies, I’m not a stupid man.’
‘This is like selling us the winning Tattslotto ticket for ten per cent of our prize,’ she observes.
‘It is a bit.’ He lowers his pistols, palms flat on the desktop. ‘Of course, I could be wrong.’
‘We’ve got nothing to lose but ten per cent of crops we don’t have,’ she says.
‘Except the cost of sowing those crops and it not raining,’ her husband ventures.
She looks at him. ‘What would not sowing them cost?’ He nods and she turns to stare at Clancy Sawyers, blinking at him in an uneasy assessment. ‘Give us a pen.’
And that’s all it takes. The Lappins signing away ten per cent of their potential crops to Professor Clancy Sawyers for a forecast that tells them of a great rain and a flooded river in the September coming. A stampede is started by one flighty beast taking a few panicky steps, another animal is sucked into that space by the current of fear that conjoins the consciousness of the herd until it’s all panicked bleats and straining hamstrings and flashing rumps and rising dust as animals flee at maximum speed with their noses pressed hard to the arse of those in front wishing they were in front, and the noses of their friends probing their own arses behind.
As the Lappins walk out, smugly smiling, in possession of the keys to the future, the Smiths walk in. September, the Smiths are told, for ten per cent of their harvest. As the Smiths walk out they are forced to step around a queue that stretches a hundred metres down Ral Ral Avenue to Glenda’s Vietnamese Bakery and Pho Café, meaning the backmarkers in the queue, though aggravated that their fellow citizens have stolen a march on them, can at least sip lattes and nibble spring rolls while they wait.
Professor Clancy Sawyers’ problem is he only has one story to tell and it isn’t protected by copyright. He’s telling all his eager new clients the same thing. September. September. Two hundred millimetres in September. This never-ending drought ends with enough rain to make the Darling and hence the Murray flow in September. How did he not think this news would run across the district like smoke?
The Rennies, Julie and Barry, are only his fourth clients, and as he is seeing them to the door Barry looks outside and says to him, ‘Professor, don’t worry, Jules and I are going to abide by the secrecy clause in the contract. Jules and I are cool with it. We won’t tell anyone. But how are you going to sell this news again? You’ve sold it, what, four times now? Susie Lappin’s the biggest gossip this side of Mildura. Mandy Smith’s Presi dent of the Parents Association at the primary school here. This is big news. Fast news.’
It is big, fast news. And by the time the Rennies step out of Clancy Sawyers’ office it has reached the queue, which has started to dissolve, its components meandering away as if they were only on that footpath by coincidence and not really queuing to see Professor Clancy Sawyers at all, and every component of that queue that never was is whispering to itself, ‘September. September.’
Clancy Sawyers smiles vaguely at this surreptitious evacuation as though it’s only to be expected. You can’t sell people a thing they can get free. Unless it’s bottled water, he chuckles. But, anyway, not rain. Rain they assume they own. Which is what got us into this predicament in the first place. Oh, well. He has a tenth of four yields from four properties. That’s a start. That’s something. And he is anyway a professor, a man-of-science, and the big pay-off for him will be seeing his theory proven true. At which time the doubters who said reading the aurora was akin to reading chicken entrails will come to him cap-in-hand asking for the key to the future and wanting to know how he does it.
The four clients who have signed up to buy his forecast have paid to believe his theory. And they do. Signing over ten per cent of their next crop to the professor has made that crop come alive and they can see it waving in the breeze reaching for the immemorial star from which it draws energy. They can hear the rumbling and murmuring of herds of harvesters as they ready to begin their migratory circumnavigations of vast fields of grain. They see teams of pickers scurrying up and down ladders amid dark green trees dotted with oranges and unhitching bags of oranges and releasing oranges gushing like doubloons into wooden bins. They can barely get to sleep at night for running green scenes of plenty through their minds’ eyes.
These four families are only the first of the maverick professor’s tireless propagandists. No one who has lived through a decade-long drought is able to contain a vision of great rain to themselves. A shire-wide choir of optimism starts singing the story. September. Eight inches. And those who hear it repeat it, with embellishments. The prediction of a flood becomes a flood. Rushing through the gridded streets of Bartel and washing from shop to shop and house to house and crossing the yellowed sporting fields and bare parks into the countryside … the fevered truth of a happy future. The world will right itself next year and our children will know the good times we knew. The years we owned boats and drove freshly manufactured cars and sent our children to celebrated grammars and colleges in the city to be educated are returning. We will not be defeated and walk off. We will not break with our dead who lie in these cemeteries. We will not take our children as refugees into the cities and become commuters and office workers and live cheek-by-jowl with neighbours like the city people do. We are not like the originals. This empty blue sky is not an infertile eternity and we are not blackfellas whose world is done. Not yet. Not ever. A rain is coming. In September. Deluge enough to undo the dull chaos of drought we have lived through.
Was this hysteria? A vulnerable community in the thrall of a charlatan? Yes. Most definitely yes … if it doesn’t rain in September. But if it does? If cerebral thunderheads swell above this plagued land and drop enough water to wash this drought into history alongside other terrible apocalypses … then, no.
The Langford family have been on the lower Darling for four generations, each of these generations schooled at Scotch College and Melbourne Girls Grammar. They own a large citrus orchard just upstream of Bartel. Big iron gates fronting rows and rows of dark green trees bearing no fruit now.
They have twelve thousand megalitres of permanent water rights but no current water entitlements from the Darling River. You can’t pump from a dry stream and for ten years they have only been allocated High Security water, enough to keep their trees gaspingly alive, but not bearing fruit. Henry Langford has recently been forced to take out another mortgage to keep the farm running. He used it to pay school fees, believing educated children had a better future than farmers.
This morning he looked in through the kitchen window of their red brick homestead and saw his wife, Kate, at the kitchen sink with her head lowered and tears falling, cutting through the white foam that floated on the washing-up water. She had her eyes closed and was talking quietly and earnestly. For a moment he wondered who she was talking to. Then he realised she was praying. His mouth opened slig
htly with the impulse to shout out to her. But there was nothing to say. What did he have to offer as a substitute to prayer? If she was desperate enough to beg to fairies, who was he to deny that pale hope? He wondered how long she’d been secretly praying over the dishes. And he recognised, that with things the way they were, there was a kind of psychological legitimacy in prayer, though he was sad she had resorted to it. It seemed like defeat. But watching her also empowered him. If she, an atheist, or agnostic, a practical woman anyway, had begun to pray, to grab at improbable bonanzas, then he had a right to throw in his lot with Clancy Sawyers.
Out along the red brick walk under the corrugated iron verandah he goes to his study. There, surrounded by black and white photographs of Langfords on antique tractors and on heavy horses, he sits down at his desk and takes a disposable lighter and small cigar from his top drawer and unwraps the cigar from its cellophane and lights it and draws on it deeply and looks at the thing as he blows the smoke out. ‘That is good,’ he says. ‘An old friend.’ A slight dizziness. He hasn’t had a smoke in over a year. With the cigar clamped in his teeth he takes his laptop off his desk and puts his feet up there and logs on to the website of Waterfind his water broker and places forward water supply contracts for twelve thousand megalitres of water at five hundred dollars a megalitre to be sold on 15th September of that year.
His phone begins to ring. He knows who it is and he empties the smoke from his mouth slowly before answering it. ‘Yes, Guy … I know, son, I know … well, I’m hoping the price’ll be a shitload lower then … you can call it a punt. I’m going to call it a forecast … yeah, I’m sure, Guy … listen, you going to place the order, or not? … Dafydd’ll buy it and do something green with it … I hope I know what I’m doing, too … Righto, mate. Hooroo.’
After he hangs up the phone he picks up his tin waste paper bin and drops his burning cigar in there and the thing hisses momentarily as he vomits on it. Then he begins silently rocking in his father’s desk chair and it a sawing quintet of loose joints describing his shifting weight. The study door opens and Kate stands there called by the smell of his cigar. She’s washed her face, brave, no hint of her own tears or prayers. Seeing him holding the tin waste paper bin amid the reek of cigar she asks, ‘What have you done?’
‘Punted the farm.’ He hunches his shoulders in resignation, then smiles.
‘You sold water?’
He nods.
‘How much?’
‘I saw you praying in the kitchen, Kitty. One good harvest won’t answer that. Won’t even go close. Water’s the only way to make real money now.’
She walks over to him and puts her arms around his neck from behind and lays her face against his. ‘One last roll of the dice.’
‘Hope the old bugger knows what he’s talking about.’
‘Yeah. Solar winds … Solar bloody winds …’ She begins to laugh gently, a kind of letting go that crosses into him, and makes him laugh too. Wet-eyed laughter. ‘It sounds like bullshit to me.’
‘Gotta be bullshit.’
Farming men and women all around the shire receive their daily email bulletin from Waterfind and double-blink at this extraordinary transaction before guessing what has happened. Some bastard has punted on the flood. Sold water into Dafydd Miles’ future water market at half-a-thou-a-meg in September, hoping the flood will materialise as the professor has predicted it will. Hoping there will be so much water the price will bottom out to nothing and he can buy those twelve thousand megalitres for that nothing that he has already sold for … six million dollars … six million dollars!! … to the Federal Government. But if it doesn’t rain, if the flood doesn’t arrive, if the drought still has the river by the throat and the price of water has risen further, he is locked in to a contract that will finish him. He’ll have to buy the water at, say, seven-hundred-dollars-a-meg so as to honour his contract and sell it at five hundred. An all-or-nothing gamble. Farmers who have ridden the drought down for ten years break into smiles. They like the idea. Backs to the wall, they are ready for drastic, exciting wagers. Buying water at forty bucks a meg and selling at five hundred doesn’t just save the farm, it speaks of holidays in France and beach houses and boarding schools.
The farmers of the Taringa-Bartel shire begin to ring their water brokers and lock in to forward water supply contracts for the coming September.
The Bartel Town Hall is crowded with restive farmers on folding chairs, an overflow of people standing up the back with their arms crossed on round bellies, wide-legged for weighty discussion. The clothes of the men are faded, holed and stained. The clothes of the women are brightly small-town stylish. On a stage at the front of the hall five councillors and the Mayor are seated facing the crowd. Their faces are pained. They have papers in their laps and had been taking notes, but have stopped now the meeting is careering out of control. Called to discuss the disquiet caused in the community by recent forward water sales, the meeting has split into two groups – those who have forward sold water and those who haven’t. There is great animosity in the room. People are heckling across the hall at each other. Standing and pointing just long enough to shout a hostile sentence before dropping back into the crowd.
The Mayor tips her microphone to her mouth. ‘Please, please, everyone, can we wait for the microphone before speaking.’
Men and women are waving their hands for the roving microphone. When they get it they rise and speak brokenly, with passion. Their loyalty has been called into question. A young farmer, his anxiety apparent by his crisp striped shirt and slicked hair, has the microphone. ‘You people have put the whole future of Bartel at risk. You say it’s nobody else’s business what you do. But if all you who’ve punted on water go belly up, where does that leave us? A town has a critical dynamic. Fall below that and it dies. We’ve all seen it happen before. Shelbourne, Balamere, Kynstrom … This selling water should’ve been a community decision. That’s all I say. A community decision.’
‘Bullshit,’ people shout. ‘Not true.’
A woman is handed the microphone and speaks with her voice shaking. ‘Listen, why am I the first person in five to be given the microphone who has forward sold water? Has the council got an agenda here? Because we’re not getting a fair hearing.’
‘You got the bloody microphone and all you can say is you not getting the microphone. Sidown,’ a man shouts amid laughter.
Her piece said, the microphone is taken from her and passed to an energetic blackly bristled man in a black-and-yellow Tigers cap who has been up and down to tiptoes and back waving his hand. He holds the device out and looks at it fearfully as one might at a handgun, before slowly moving it to his lips and blowing at it. ‘Phrrhh, phrrhh … Okay. Righto.’ He nods. ‘We all got families of our own to look after. And they’ll go the same way as some families already have if we keep goin’ on like this. This town’s lost people to the drought and it’ll lose more. Nothin’ surer. And I care for the town. Four generations of Striblings here. My grandfather owned Bartel’s first menswear store. I got nowhere else.’ He shakes his head slowly. ‘But, when it comes down to it, it’s not my job to look after the town. Lookin’ after the town’s too big a job for me. My job’s to look after my family. If I’ve taken a punt on water it’s nobody’s business but my wife and kids.’ The people who have forward sold water clap and shout encouragement.
‘Yes.’
‘Bloody oath.’
‘Hear, hear.’
‘Absolutely.’
Hearing this he plumps down into his seat, holding up the microphone to a nearby man dressed in sun-faded blue with unruly grey hair and an outdoor face. This old man stands and rubs his chin in a pincer of thumb and forefinger, working at his eyes as if in some massive act of memory. ‘Listen, Russell, with due respect to you, and your … circumstances, and you know we were all here deeply sorry for your … circumstances … You guys selling the water … I gotta say I don’t blame you. I haven’t blamed you and I don’t. I don’t see th
e need for all the bad feeling in the room. These are tough times and we’re all looking for a way out. Shit, I feel like forward selling myself. The temptation’s there. But ask yourselves if you’d’ve done it a couple of years ago when we all had a bit more money and we weren’t all worn down by the drought. Ask yourselves.’ He nods as if they have asked themselves and then agreed with him. ‘You wouldn’t have punted on something like this. This isn’t farming. It’s gambling. Are we gamblers? Or farmers? This is bullshit. It’s crazy. It’s a symptom of depression or defeat. It’s giving up is what it is … if you want to know. You say it’s a business decision. But based on what? Some silly prick who was arseholed from his own uni for believing the very belief you’ve punted your future on. This is a suicide. It’s a sort of group suicide. And we all’ve seen enough of that already from this drought. You’ve just talked of family, Russell, and very movingly, too. But to my way of thinking you got it wrong the way you were saying family’s only husbands, wives, kids, and brothers and sisters and blood.’ He stops to rub his face again, this oratory being a burden and a pain. ‘To my way of thinkin’ you’re my family. So is …’ he points randomly, ‘Lindy Warhurst over there.’ He points again. ‘And Paul Reeves.’ He moves his pointing finger further. ‘And Lee Teague.’ His voice is shaking now and the man is shaking, too. ‘I think the town is family,’ he whispers at the microphone. ‘That’s what I think. And I think anyone selling water on a speculator’s whim is selling out the family. You guys crash and we all crash … family together.’ The old man holds the shaking microphone before his face to see if there is any more to be said to it, then shakes his head and sits down.
The Last Pulse Page 15
