The Last Pulse

by Anson Cameron

The crowd begins to clap slowly, building louder, and people begin whistling and some stand followed by others until only the deeply invested few who have forward sold their souls remain seated. Cheers bounce hollowly off the weatherboard ceiling and meet with more cheers loosed by the thickening throats of the congregation. A community moment, men and women melding into a large soul called Bartel. We will not sell out. We will stand and fight. September rain is a magician’s mirage, and people stomp their feet while the Mayor calls, ‘Quiet, please.’

  By the time this tumult has played out and people are seated again Merv is standing, wearing stained khaki shorts and a holed and faded shirt, with the microphone in his hand, looking around flaring momentary smiles at various people to say hello. He picks Em from her seat into his arms as if for comfort. The fragile misery on his face and ghostly presence of his self-hanged wife and the who he is otherwise in this town and the daughter so sadly motherless in his arms all add to hush the hall to hear what he has to say. ‘Bushy, first of all what you said on family was great. And then, Russ, you got a way with words, and wow, you preached a sermon. I respect all that both you guys said. In fact I respect what everyone’s said here tonight. Family. And community. Our town here. Our world. It’s all true and well put and nothing I say could do it more justice.’

  He swaps Em and the microphone from arm to arm. ‘But really, shouldn’t this be about whether this big rain is really going to fall in September or not? That’s the important thing. If it does, then the people who’ve sold water are rolling in clover. If it doesn’t they’re up a stump. And vice versa for the people who haven’t sold. These are important decisions. So I just wanted to stand up and publicly deal myself out of it. To say not to trust the vision I had. If I trust it … well then … I trust it. But she was my wife, she was my heart and soul, and I don’t believe she’d lie to me.’ He smiles apologetically. ‘So I would trust it, wouldn’t I.’ The smile disappears as he says, ‘But you people have got no reason to believe it.’ People are leaning toward each other to whisper questions. Faces are screwing in concern and wonder. What is Merv going on about? Has the man, in his grief and his loneliness, lost his marbles here?

  ‘I know some of you have heard rumours of my vision round town because of certain people,’ he hefts Em in the crook of his arm, ‘shootin’ their mouths off at school. I know your kids have come home from school with news of what I saw. The dream, well … not a dream, it wasn’t like any dream I ever had. I wouldn’t downgrade it by saying dream. But anyway, whatever, I hear people have been taking serious stock in it and I just want to publicly say, “Don’t.” I don’t endorse the bloody thing. I never even wanted word of it to get out. But certain people,’ he hefts Em again, ‘buggered that plan. Thing is, I don’t know what it was or if it means anything and I don’t say it’s an insight or a foresight or a foretelling or an anything at all apart from a bloke with misery messing with his mind.’

  Merv stops speaking and sucks low breaths between his teeth to damp down his nerves. Looking around at the people he says, ‘I see some confused faces, so I better explain real quick for those of you who haven’t heard about it. Jana came to me in a … in what was most likely just a mental thingamy and not a real vision at all.’ He shakes his head to ward off the emotion gathering in his voice.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, all.’ He puckers his lips and waggles his jaw and begins to speak softly, nodding his shaggy head, regretting having risen into vehemence. ‘It was only a simple thing, anyway. No more than ten seconds. So it’s not like chapter and verse from the Bible. I was driving into town, November, the day of the clearing sale on Thelangeree. I bought a fire pump. So, yeah, anyway, it was before this Professor Sawyers ever came back to town. Yeah, anyway, I’m driving in to town. Right? And … next thing … pow … I’m at the local footy grand final, which as we know is mid-September. But this wasn’t like any footy final this town’s seen in living memory. It was Bartel versus Murray Bridge – and it was pissing rain, water lying across the oval and the players head-to-toe mud. And in the coach’s box for Bartel was this Clancy Sawyers and he’s wet as a shag on a rock and smiling, real happy.’ Merv smiles briefly at the memory and in imitation of the professor’s smile, before becoming solemn again. ‘But most startling of all … up there,’ he raises his hand and waves the microphone at the sky beyond the roof, ‘was one of those green and silver rainbow type aurora things … and in it was a picture of the face of Jana.’ He sucks a few deep breaths. ‘Smiling. Smiling down she was. And nodding. Her face in the sky.’ As Merv pauses to compose himself Em leans toward his ear to say something and he squeezes her to shut her down. ‘Oww, Daddy.’

  ‘Then …’ Merv says hoarsely into the microphone. ‘Then this is all gone and I’m driving into town from the Thelangeree clearing sale, just like I was and just where I was. Same spot on the road. And I haven’t driven off and hit a tree, so this thing that seemed to take so long must have been an eyeblink.’ He shakes his head. ‘How I actually came to see Professor Sawyers in this vision thingy before I ever saw him in the flesh … I don’t bloody well know or understand. The fact I saw Jana in an aurora thing before I’d ever heard about any of his aurora australis malarkey … I don’t know that either. I don’t know. It’s a head-spin. And I can’t explain it. Who knows how such a thing could be?’ He shakes his head trying to fathom it. This done, he looks around at the faces of his neighbours, from one person to the next gravely. ‘But I’m sure as hell not trying to tell you it isn’t only my messed-up mind playing dramas on me. Don’t, for Chrissakes, punt on my vision. I don’t ask you to and I don’t want you to.’ He is imploring them now, and the hall is muted with embarrassment at the passion he is showing.

  ‘Seeing rain in September,’ he adds as an afterthought, ‘well, anyone could do that. It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.’ He rubs his temple with the microphone sending bristly amplifications firing from the stage speakers.

  ‘Yeah … I’m forward selling water. But Jana was my bride. She was all that ever lived in my heart … until this one.’ He hugs Em to his chest. ‘And I can’t believe she’d lie to me about the future of me and Emma. But I don’t want you people punting your farms on my vision. I’m a flaky bastard and no genius, and it’s pretty bloody unlikely a vision of future events would be given to me instead of, say, the Mayor or the Premier or someone important. That’s all I came here to say. I don’t endorse the bloody vision I had. Rock-hard real and colourful as it was … I’m not saying it wasn’t just my heart stuffing with my head.’ He’s staring at the ceiling when he says this, far away in that incredible vision of Jana, wonder lighting his face. ‘I came here tonight to debunk my vision, not to support it,’ he whispers into the microphone. ‘Thank you.’

  He hands the microphone to the young woman employed to ferry it around to the divergent opinions. No one quite knows what to make of his speech, but it has sucked all conversation from the room. A light applause breaks out to thank him for coming here to try and save them from the seductive danger of his vision. A widower, heartbroken and delirious, carrying a motherless child. He eases his way past knees to the central aisle and begins to walk from the hall.

  Only after he has passed them do the people in each row lean to each other and ask, ‘What was all that about?’ ‘Cut him some slack. He’s still grieving.’ ‘The bloke’s gone troppo.’ ‘He should get help.’ And they make jokes to lighten the moment. ‘He could have give us the result of the grand final. I’d put a couple of bob on that.’

  Merv walks the aisle to the door clutching Em closely and nodding at friends as he passes. They nod back solemnly as at a sick and suffering man, then smile brightly at Em as her bewildered face appears over his shoulder.

  Outside on Ral Ral Avenue, dim streetlights reflected in glass shopfronts and peppercorns heaving in the wind, Em asks her father, ‘Did you really see a ghost of Mummy in the sky, Merv?’

  ‘I sort of did, Em. You know how you can sort of see things when yo
u really need to?’

  ‘But you didn’t tell me about Mummy’s ghost. And I didn’t tell anyone about Mummy’s ghost. And you said I did tell people about it.’

  ‘That … That’s because I needed you to tell people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Mummy’s ghost is worth more to us than Albert damned Einstein now.’ He hugs her and she squirms for release.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Yeah. Who?’

  From inside the town hall they can hear shouts and jeering as the debate rises again from the awkward doldrums of Merv Rossiter’s personal delusion.

  Anyone who had been treated so badly by God, Government and Queensland and who knew the outcome of a race before it was run would be crazy not to bet on that race. The shire of Taringa-Bartel laid its money down. A few sage widows growing citrus on small river blocks who had lived long enough to know other droughts refused to be caught up in the gold rush. A few devout Christians, refusing to put faith in false prophets, didn’t believe in Merv Rossiter’s epiphany and held onto their money. A Doubting Thomas here and there held out against the shire-wide expectation of a jackpot. But by and large the shire bet everything it still owned on Professor Clancy Sawyers’ scientifically predicted flood.

  Because, they told each other, the science, as far as they understood it, was real and sensible and the professor could point to precedents and patterns too explicit to ignore. None of them said to each other that they were laying their money down because Jana had spoken to Merv. No one said that a wife reaching through the darkness from beyond the grave to save her husband and daughter was a great and gracious sign from God that simply could not be ignored. Modern people don’t put faith in silly visions of that kind.

  In Parliament House in Canberra in the Federal Environment Minister’s office with its water-blue carpet and wallpaper themed on blooming acacias, all set about with paintings of happy lakes, muscular rivers, eternal forests, vivid reefs and an original bronzewing pigeon lithograph by Gould, a meeting is in progress to discuss the astonishing movement in the water market caused by a rural community in the east of South Australia, a place called, ironically, the Riverland.

  The Minister, Dafydd Miles, is a Welsh Australian, a flagrantly camp man, no taller than a boy of ten, theatrically effete in his mannerisms and dressed as elegantly as a Milanese magistrate. Just the sort of adversary to effortlessly wrong-foot farmers, who find him alien on every level. His rural opponents are so preoccupied with not being homophobic, racist and sizist when speaking to him they become constrained, passive and as tongue-tied as they would talking to some delegate from an intergalactic civilisation just stepped from a flying saucer. The most any of them feel they have achieved when they leave a meeting with him is not to have stared openly at him and cleared their throats and spat.

  He has two advisors sitting in front of him, Townes Simpson, his Murray-Darling Buyback Consultant, and his Budgetary Officer, Maria De Morelli. Leaning back from his desk the Minister folds his hands behind his head and slowly tilts his chin at De Morelli to go ahead and talk.

  ‘Minister, if the price of water dropped to, say, nothing, for argument’s sake, the total payout to the farmers would be, as it stands now, in the hundreds of millions. And if they go on selling the way they’re selling it might rise into billions. But that’s worst-case scenario.’ She fixes her dark eyes on the Minister’s own, blinking pinkly behind round lenses, to emphasise the truth of her figures. ‘If the price of water is higher in September than the price they’re selling it at now, then they have to supply us with water at a loss. We get the water and we make money. And you’re the golden boy in cabinet,’ she smiles. ‘So … it might be a chronic net-loss scenario. But it could be an enormous windfall.’

  The Minister nods. ‘Yes, I understand that, Maria. I get the mechanics of the market. I just don’t understand why they’re punting it. This is like Poseidon nickel. Some completely off-the-wall speculation. The Bureau of Meteorology tells us El Nino has a grip on eastern Australia with no end in sight. No chance of decent rain. And these people taking these forward-selling contracts have access to the same information we do. If the price of water stays at what it is now – and why wouldn’t it? – this will wipe out just about every cocky in the Riverland. And they know this.’ He leans forward and hovers his hands, stumpy fingers splayed, just above the desktop. ‘Yet they’re taking contracts like it’s some kind of fire sale.’ He turns to Townes Simpson. ‘Townes? What do your spies tell you?’

  Townes Simpson and Dafydd Miles have risen through union ranks together, Dafydd as the leading light of a new, inclusive politics and Townes as his aide-de-camp, a symbiotic relationship in which the Welshman’s charismatic effect on the inner-city public has been underpinned by his friend’s tireless backroom politicking. They are old friends and have, on occasion, kissed the same guy. Today Townes is wearing a lilac shirt, an azure suit and a smugness Dafydd recognises. A theatrical moue and one eyebrow cocked and his hands interlaced across his chest to let the two people watching know he is the keeper of some delicious truth. Dafydd Miles wonders to himself if Townes wore this shirt to coordinate with the truth he’s about to tell. Will his news be a purple affront to good taste and logic? ‘Minister, the people of the Riverland are in the thrall of a charlatan,’ he says happily, unlacing his hands and picking invisible lint from his pants leg.

  ‘This being a Christian country, I think most people are,’ the Minister observes. ‘But tell us, who’s theirs?’

  ‘Oh,’ he affects shock. ‘You Godless Taffy faggot. But, yes. Who’s theirs? The shire of Taringa-Bartel, in an age of science at the beginning of the third millennium, has hired itself a climate consultant and he’s convinced everyone it’s going to rain in September. Big rain. A flood. Price of water through the floor.’

  ‘Yes?’ the Minister smiles. ‘Who is this Nostradamus?’

  ‘A climatologist of some note.’ Townes’ eyes sparkle, a thrill running through him to keep the Minister in suspense.

  The Minister’s smile drops. ‘Some note? How much bloody note? He couldn’t be right, could he? Who?’

  ‘Emeritus … Professor … Clancy … Sawyers.’ Townes claps his hands.

  The Minister leans forward excitedly. ‘Are you fucking kidding? Clancy Sawyers is telling these guys it’s going to rain?’

  ‘He is,’ Townes says happily.

  ‘Shit. Using his … aurora australis? Tea leaves and entrails?’

  Townes Simpson can hardly contain himself. ‘Tea leaves and entrails,’ he confirms, clapping his hands. ‘Big rain in mid-September, brought to you by tea leaves and entrails.’

  Minister Miles sits back in his chair with his mouth open, smiling as the possibilities bloom before him, and looking from one advisor to another. Clancy Sawyers had been his chief consultant on climate change until his dabblings in his own mysterious counter-science of solar winds had become public and his continued support of his radical theory had made his position untenable. The Opposition had made much of the magical thinking on which the Minister’s policies relied, then, and he was forced to call a press conference and fire Sawyers and distance himself from him and his theory. This was the press conference at which he declared Sawyers’ ideas, ‘Unproven, unlikely, and boasting a worldwide advocacy of one.’ He had trusted Clancy Sawyers, his science had been good and he came across on TV as appropriately professorial, no small thing as most professors come across as hostel-dwelling dweebs. But the man went spare when he was conned by a bloodsucking Filipina with a couple of brats to feed. The old bachelor’s faith in humanity took a dive when private school fees kicked in. Celestial fireworks began to speak to him like odes written by God across the night sky.

  ‘How did he suck these people in?’ he asks Townes.

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Dafydd. That’s a question about psychology, I think. How do you explain a gold rush? A mass delusion? Happy clappers and Southern Baptists? They’re desperate to believe. Cancer sufferers
’ll swallow frogshit if they’re told it’s a cure. The drought-stricken will, too.’

  ‘They’ve swallowed a ton of the stuff here.’ The Minister shakes his head. ‘That’s the only reason they’re punting their farms? His say so?’

  ‘That’s what they tell me. Once the first farmer bought water his neighbour didn’t want to be left out and then his neighbour and his best mate bought it and their lifelong enemy. Who wants to be the last person to stake a claim in a gold rush?’

  The Minister walks to the door and orders coffees for three, sits on his Hepburn modular sofa and crosses one leg over another and leans his head to one side to read the latest Waterfind newsletter on the laptop on the sofa beside him. He starts with the Water Market Summary, then the Top Dam Storages, the Top Allocations, the National Index Rainfall Summary. No one in their right mind should be buying future water in South Australia. ‘Everyone’s a gambler at the gates of hell,’ he says.

  ‘Yep,’ Townes Simpson nods. ‘That’s about it. The likelihood of a rain event in September big enough to profoundly change the price of water is point three of one per cent, the Bureau of Met tells me. Just won’t happen. El Nino locked on.’ He stretches his legs out, drinks his coffee, runs a fingertip down a pinstripe along his thigh. ‘They’re drunk. Drunk on hope. Gamblers this drunk are tossed out of casinos for their own good. Luckily we get to keep ours.’

  ‘You know what?’ The Minister looks around his office at the photographs of streams and trees, his gaze coming to rest on the bronzewing pigeon, and these aides-mémoires of the natural world fortifying his belief he is fighting for something true and pure. That he is the defender of the few relics left over from a plundered and razed Eden.

  He places his coffee cup on the sofa beside him and leans forward gripping his knees through his suit pants. ‘I’ve got endless sympathy for these people. You know, life’s dealt them a rough hand.’ He looks from the lithograph to his advisors. ‘But fuck them. They’ve tried to screw me. These pricks have challenged me to a game of poker, farms laid on the table against my career. We’re eyeball-to-eyeball. And they’ve gone all in. Well … let’s take the bet. All in. They want to put their futures on a thousand-to-one shot that a spastic monsoon will wander off its orbit and become lost in the southern latitudes. I take the bet. I don’t believe in spastic monsoons. This is the real world. If they want to make this half-arsed wager, then, let them. Sell them the water. I can’t be blamed if a whole community commits harakiri.’ He shrugs. ‘In fact it’s a godsend. We buy their water and when they go broke and the whole district is a clamouring bazaar of clearing sales we’ll buy the permanent water rights from the receivers and return it to the river and the lakes. Hundreds and hundreds of permanent water rights.’ He holds up his separately cupped hands and looks from one to the other as if he can see these treasures he has chased so long now made real and in his grasp. ‘Townes, we’ll get more water here in one district in one fell swoop than in all the piecemeal acquisitions we’ve been cobbling together across four states for a decade.’