Townes is relieved his Minister has accepted the windfall. He’d been worried he might be suspicious of the bad publicity that will inevitably come with closing down a whole agricultural shire. But he’s happy, and with the expanding possibilities of the sting, becoming ecstatic. ‘Townes, did you put on that gorgeous lilac shirt just to break this news to me? Is it a Thomas Pink? It looks like it.’
‘What other shirt would I wear on such a red-letter day?’ he takes a shirt-cuff between thumb and fingers and rubs the weave.
‘I myself, by a spooky clairvoyance or intuition, am wearing a Nino Carlibre suit of fine Italian wool in which to countersign the Riverland’s death certificate,’ the Minister says smiling.
Maria, who has sat enjoying the celebratory interplay between the Minister and his old friend, is suddenly struck by a thought. ‘You know …’ she ventures. ‘I don’t want to be a killjoy, but when September comes and no rain and these farmers have to buy water at a thousand dollars a megalitre to sell it at five hundred, and … you know … suicides and whatnot … it won’t be long before some conspiracy theorist suggests Clancy Sawyers and this office are in some kind of collusion. You’ve been seen sitting alongside him in a zillion pressers. You can’t blank that out of the public’s mind. Even though we denounced this solar wind thing as junk science, they’ll say we sent him into Bartel as our agent. To fool the farmers.’
For a moment the Minister is lost wide-eyed in the bifurcating possibilities of this thought. Then, when these are played out, his face lightens with elation. ‘How … insanely … beautiful. A rumour. Clancy Sawyers my agent in a fantastic con designed by me. If the caucus believes I’m shrewd enough to depopulate a countryside of water-greedy hayseeds with a cut-rate sting like this, I’ll be Prime Minister inside a month.’ He stops and touches his fingertips to his chin, worried. ‘But what if no one floats the rumour?’ He tilts his head and smiles. ‘We’ll start it ourselves. I might even pay old Clancy to accuse me of being in cahoots with him, which I will, of course, vehemently deny. Oh for Christ sakes, Townes, you sluggard, fetch a bottle of something fantastic, we’re purging kulaks here.’
‘Yellow Bend Hotel, Mike speaking … yes … yes … no … radio what? … Sydney that is, is it? … No they’re still in there. No verdict yet … Judge Ray Dennis, I’m told … Righto, ring back this arvo maybe … good-oh.’ The phone in the front bar of the Yellow Bend Hotel has been ringing all morning. Firstly a reporter from the ABC, followed by a journalist from The Sydney Morning Herald and then the Brisbane Courier, then some woman from Channel Ten and then another city paper Mike had never heard of from a city he distrusted.
Yellow Bend is a yellow crumb-spill of sandstone buildings atop a yellow cliff on the northern bank of the Murray River in South Australia. It is kept alive by newcomers fuelled with optimism, and it leeches that optimism from its newcomers and breaks them financially and spits them back at the world. This place being so small and on such a beautiful bend of a big river anyone might be able to succeed at life here, they think, with a few tourist cabins or a houseboat or two, and given that the neighbours are pretty low-level individuals and easy to outwit, and given that the roads from Broken Hill and Mildura and Adelaide are getting better year by year and must surely bring tourists. But the river isn’t big any more. It hasn’t been big enough for some time to float a houseboat or draw a tourist.
The Yellow Bend Hotel is whitewashed and sits brightly atop the yellow cliff, a beacon to passing fishermen. A Southwark Bitter sign spins slowly on the roof flaring on and off with morning sun. Mike Jeffries, the publican, is about halfway through having his optimism leeched and being financially broken before being spat out by Yellow Bend. He has been here three years. And never known such a turbulent day as this.
He puts the phone back on the wall-cradle gently as a grenade, so as not to set it off, but it rings again anyway. He lets it ring twice before huffing defeat and picking it up and handing it to the nearest drinker, Barry Long, who has lived these many years in this front bar watching the rising galaxies in his beer and the passing tinnies on the river and regaling new townsfolk with stories of old townsfolk leeched and broken. He takes the phone. ‘Barrie Long … yes this is the Yellow Bend Hotel … A long-term resident, yeah, if that’s a joke … Which Channel? Seven was it? You’re late to the party. You blokes asleep at the wheel, are youse? Channel Ten chopper just landed and Nine have been here since dawn. They got a food van set up handing out hotdogs to the locals … Course you can land a chopper here, Yellow Bend is flat as a shitcarter’s hat … I don’t know how the trial’s proceeding exactly, they’re speakin’ a language, a legalese, can’t be understood by no one here, so I come back to the pub to handle media interviews for the town … No. There’s no one else to speak to, just about everyone else in town is on the jury … yeah there’s police everywhere … I wouldn’t even bother comin’ if I was you. Channel Nine and Ten already got you beat to the story and the ABC have got a chick with big Bristols here, too … Bristol Cities. Titties. Jesus. Righto, bye.’ He’s chuckling as he hands the phone back across the bar to Mike who hangs it gently on the wall. ‘Channel Seven. I told ’em the ABC beat ’em to the punch with a chick with massive norgs.’
In truth there is no media in Yellow Bend yet. But they are en route. They have scrambled and are racing each other from major regional hubs in helicopters and broadcast vans. Nationally recognisable TV journalists in new akubras are on their way. Because an arrest has been made.
Only Merv is awake in the night when The Party Animal, motoring slowly on the outback waters of the Darling, enters the high banks of the Murray. Normally at this junction of these two long rivers the grey water of the dry north would turn right and begin to braid with the clear, dark water of the green south. But this flood has come into a desiccated land and is flowing both upstream and down along the low drought-thinned southern river, lit by moonlight and shining like quicksilver.
Merv turns The Party Animal right, west, heading downstream for South Australia and Bartel, and goes to the gunwale and scoops a handful of water and holds it above the river, letting it spill through his fingers. He begins to cry, then. For Em, and for his neighbours, for all his own people, and, though he wouldn’t admit it, he also cries at his own heroism. Before dawn he will be in South Oz. The water is there already, he knows. Whatever happens to him now is of no account. The water is among his people. Now he knows how Butarak must have felt. A lightheaded indifference to his own fate. A breath-shortening bravado. Come on, you sons of bitches. What’s it matter now if you shoot me down? You can’t turn back the water. You’ve lost. My death doesn’t change that. My people have drunk the water and are free.
He scoops more Darling water from the Murray and lets it fall diamonding, for his eyes, in the moonlight. He is, for a moment, that indigenous warrior. He has brought water for his community and his own death is the right price to pay. Won’t Australia now see the folly of new dams and new claims and of endless greed? And won’t it step back from annexing nature’s cycles to run its greedy dreams? Won’t it now, for a generation at least, take account of the people who live downstream … the people who live in the future?
He mops his eyes and shakes his head to clear that vainglorious thought and goes to the wheel and pushes the throttle forward adding revs to the Evinrudes, raising their growl, speeding for his home state.
A veneer of mist is writhing on the water and dawn light made gold by its long westerly reach through the sky is colouring the yellow cliffs and making the pub at their rim shine white as a shrine. Pelicans are gliding upstream on the water surface in pairs.
Yellow Bend. He has been through here on fishing trips, drunk at this pub, sat round fires on the bank here and laughed with other men. He is in South Australia. So when the heavy fibreglass cat edges out from the bank of the river below the pub he steers toward it and slows his engines and waves to its crew and puts his hands up to let them know there will be no fight, no th
eatrics with hostages, no claims of innocence. The journey is over.
When the boats nudge into each other two police jump aboard The Party Animal and one asks, ‘Mervyn Rossiter?’
Merv nods and smiles.
‘You’re under arrest. Turn around.’ Merv turns away, placing his hands behind his back and is handcuffed and the cop doing that job blurts an approximation of his right to remain silent while the other cop pilots The Party Animal toward the landing place below the town.
‘Daddy?’ Em, in mauve flannel pyjamas and night-hair, walks slowly across the afterdeck to him and puts her arms around him and presses her face against his belly. ‘I knew you would be in trouble, Daddy. I knew all the stories you told were just whoppers. Those Spainyards stories weren’t true, were they, Daddy? And how we were the Aztec ones. And those ones about the parades and you being the King and all those ones … and the Russell Crowe ones. They were just whoppers, weren’t they, Daddy. Just old whoppers.’
‘I was mistaken, Em. They weren’t whoppers. I was just wrong. That was just how I wanted it to be, so I made it that way in my mind. Sometimes when you make the future one way in your mind it comes true … and sometimes it doesn’t. And you never know if it will or if it won’t.’
Em looks up into Merv’s face. ‘I’m going to keep making the future in my mind to be parades and medals.’
‘It might be time to stop that, Em. It might be time to start thinking … of other … more likely … stuff …’
‘Yeah, like jail ’n’ shit,’ Barwon says. He has risen from below deck and is standing pot-bellied and wire-limbed in his footy knicks with his hands on his hips as righteous as deity.
‘Who are you?’ a cop asks Barwon. ‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Who’m I, Jackboy? I’m a river man’s who’m I. And you better get ’em cuffs off Merv, ’cause he only think he a part of this. But he a accessory after the crap, not a perp.’ Barwon smiles at Merv. ‘He a fungooley dickhead, but he not a perp or a bigman. Take off his cuffs, he just a bloke caught up my song. I sung this to come back.’ Barwon points overboard at the water ‘Ol’ Merv got no bragging rights on this.’
‘He’s mad,’ Em explains to the stunned policeman.
‘Hey. You want me tell the Jacks you try an’ kill me?’ Barwon lowers his voice and behind his hand says to the nearest policeman, ‘Don’t turn your back on her, eh. You be overboard talkin’ to the yabbies an’ ya head crack open.’
Bridget Wray has dressed hurriedly in her mufti of Merv’s farm clothes and is watching unhappily from the doorway down to the cabin. This is the moment she has foretold, Merv’s comeuppance, in all its clumsy sadness. She goes to Em and takes her arms from around her father and picks her up. ‘I’ll take care of her until your family arrives. Who will I call?’
Merv shrugs.
‘Who?’ she asks.
‘There’s no one to call.’
‘Jesus Christ, Merv …’
From the landing place, holding an elbow each, the cops march Merv up the steps cut into the yellow cliff and through the town. Locals semi-leeched and partially broken, wearing shorts and singlets and leading small mongrels on short walks, stand and stare. And people watering brown lawns stand and stare and call at their houses so others with grey and turbulent hair can rise from greasy sheets to come and stare. The cops march him into the Mechanics’ Institute, its front door held open by a policeman who has been standing there in his shirtsleeves with his arms crossed on his chest in the early cool of the morning.
Twenty minutes later three black SUVs with darkened glass drive into town from the south and come to a stop out front of the Mechanics’ Institute behind the police cars already parked there, and their inhabitants let the dust roll on and the air clear before they crack and slide the doors. And among the sundry sharp-dressed aliens who alight from these pimp-wagons and begin to stretch and jape with one another are a sharp-faced woman in long black robes and a red-faced man in long black robes and a clear-cut dignitary, judging by the deference shown him, also in long black robes but with the additional magnificence of a white swallowtail collar, the points of which reach down to his mid-chest. The clear-cut dignitary is handed a steaming cappuccino, though there isn’t a café open for a hundred kilometres, and, having both hands full, in order to take hold of this mysteriously birthed beverage he places the thing he is holding in his left hand on his head. The townsfolk had been silently speculating about this thing as either a dead animal or a stuffed toy. But it is a wig of the kind the irrigators of dead lawns and the walkers of pound-dogs have seen before in moments of stress and heartbreak. It is a wig worn by a Judge.
This, then, is some kind of portable justice arrived suddenly in town. A few of the locals, on seeing the wig go on the dignitary’s head and transform him into a Judge, drop their garden hoses and tug on their dog-leads and wander away as rapidly as an aimless saunter might be performed and still be considered an aimless saunter and not a flat-out scarper. Others with less unanswered iniquity on their slate move toward the Mechanics’ Institute, wondering aloud what in the blazes is going on. And twelve of these townspeople, who have been filtered from their less honest neighbours by their willingness to walk toward judiciary, rather than scarper at its arrival, are dragooned by the police to become a jury. Won’t take more than an hour or so. And you’ll be paid sixty dollars a head for your trouble.
The Judge sits at a table on a low stage at the front of the room and beneath this table are two others, one for the defence and one for the prosecution. On each sits a frosty water jug, and many manila folders and piles of paper. At one table the sharp-faced lawyer is conferring with the defendant, her client, Mervyn Rossiter, who sits alongside her. At the other the red-faced prosecutor is moving sheets of paper from one pile to another.
The Judge, seeing Merv sitting handcuffed with his hands behind his back, points to a policeman and then at Merv and says, ‘Get the darbies off the defendant, constable.’ Merv stands and is freed from the handcuffs, ‘Thank you, Your Honour.’
Along the left-hand side of the room, sitting on folding chairs, and enfiladed by beams of sunlight from two high windows framed with swallows’ nests, is the mind-boggled, press-ganged jury made of retirees and farmers all semi-leeched of optimism and nearly financially broken. They are annoyed to be snatched thus from their daily round; but also chuffed to be chosen to sit on this famous case, for it has become clear to them now who he is, this man, this defendant, in his baggy blue shorts and long-sleeved shirt daubed with grey river mud. This is the guy who let the flood go. This is the guy who stood up and stuck his finger up at Queensland and Big Cotton. This is the Merv Rossiter who, around here, is thought of as Ned Kelly was once thought of in Victoria.
One by one the jurists begin to wink and smirk and pantomime love at Merv to let him know he is among comrades, in safe hands, a feted brother in a brotherhood of the likeminded. A woman in a lime-coloured house frock who hasn’t had time to put her teeth in before high office plucked her from her crepuscular trance, smiles hollowly at Merv and makes a circle of her thumb and forefinger and brandishes it flagrantly at him to tell him things are A-OK. He smiles at her. He smiles at all his co-conspirators on the jury as they flash assurance at him. The fix is in, they are telling him, sit back and enjoy the ride. Let’s see what these pricks in their horsehair wigs spouting their heretofores and henceforths can do against the will of a free people, who are admittedly half-leeched and partly broken, but nonetheless still capable of mulish independence in the face of authority.
Some few curious townsfolk poke their noses in through the door and the Judge ushers them in and points at a gaggle of folding chairs and bids them be seated and then raps his knuckles on his table, calling the whole musty, dusty, hastily assembled court to a mystified silence.
‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we set up this court here today in your town because things are a bit of a mess downriver. There’s a bit of a furore, quite frankly. A su
rfeit of jubilation amid which justice might be hard to come by. The accused,’ he points at Merv, ‘is thought rather too well of for justice to be blind.’ He nods at them slowly. ‘Any of you need to take notes the tipstaff will now be handing out notepaper and pens.’ Each member of the jury accepts the paper and pen and some begin to take notes to whatever depth of understanding they have of this strange day and some sit back confidently, their minds steel traps needing no scribblings to aid recall.
‘The defendant is charged with the theft of a motor vessel, to wit The Party Animal, from the town wharf at Bartel in the state of South Australia on May 29th 2010.’ The jury is puzzled at this. They had each supposed Merv faced larger indictments, to wit the vaporising of a major cotton project in Queensland and, rumour has it, the kidnapping of a Minister in that state’s government. Perhaps theft is only the first charge. The court is starting with paltry infractions and leading up to terrorism.
The Last Pulse Page 17
