‘And for those ten years … I can’t leave the shire? Nobody can make me leave the shire?’
‘It is a grievous imposition, I know, sir. But the theft of a boat …’
‘Shit!!’ Bridget Wray exclaims. Her mouth is open and she is staring at His Honour. The happy fictional future she thought Merv had described to Em just to keep her from fretting, those whitely-lied tomorrows she knew that he himself couldn’t believe … they had come true. It was like he had said: there was no Australia. A partisan had come home to his people. Bridget Wray shakes her head in wonder at this new world that has suddenly swept aside the one she had known as real for all her years.
Everyone in the court is watching her as she stands, holding Em to her bosom, kissing her head. ‘Goodbye, honey. Have fun. Your dad was right. He’s a king. You’re a princess. When you get back to the boat get out of those pjs and put on your blue dress. You’re going to a parade.’ She hands Em to Merv and as he takes her he smiles at Bridget sheepishly. She smiles back and shakes her head. ‘I must seem pretty stupid to you.’
Holding Em in the crook of one arm he reaches out and lays his fingers on her arm and tells her, ‘No. Shit no, Bridget. You’re from where the rain falls.’ He shrugs. ‘We’re from where it doesn’t. We’re … Egyptians.’ She looks around the makeshift courtroom at the jury, the spectators, everyone smiling, hugging, shaking hands, happy. Happiness is always beautiful. And the happiness of these people should be beautiful to her. But she knows it is sucked from a reservoir of happiness in her own people that, like the water, has flowed south.
Of all the people in the makeshift courtroom only the Judge and Merv Rossiter watch Bridget Wray leave. She is crying noiselessly, tears running down her face spotting the bosom of her borrowed dress. People respect this young woman’s grief, a private matter, some broken love or some sad leaving; perhaps she has fallen in love with the girl, or, maybe, with the man. They look away, allowing her tears to be her own. But she is not crying for the girl or the man. She is crying because she has just found out Australia doesn’t exist. And she has always loved Australia.
The spectators at the back of the courtroom close in on Merv to offer congratulations. They shake his hand and pat his shoulders and pat Em’s back and touch the backs of their fingers on her arms. At first the jury stays in place, not knowing if it is likewise freed by Merv’s verdict, or whether it is still part of some ongoing official process. But soon one, then another, watching His Honour for reaction, edge out of their seats and surround their man. They are congratulated by the spectators for their verdict. ‘Well done.’ ‘Well done.’ ‘Copped his right whack.’ ‘You did good.’ Having risen from their beds this morning, expecting another day moving sprinklers and watching dog races on TV, they feel buoyed and worthy, having successfully performed a duty at which others might have failed. They saved a good man from the clutches of that succubus Queensland.
Merv and Em are at the centre of a ruck of celebration. ‘Merv, let us buy you a beer, man.’
‘Yeah, let’s celebrate. This is a day in the town’s history.’
‘This is a day in the state’s history.’
‘Let’s go to the pub.’ The crowd, with Merv and Em trapped inside, moves noisily out the door and down the street to the pub. TV reporters Merv doesn’t seem to see joust at him with microphones asking questions he doesn’t seem to hear. The legal people gather their folders and papers and take their seats in the black vans. Tipstaff pour the water from the frosty jugs onto long-dead geraniums in fractured cement pots at the door of the Mechanics’ Institute. The court is adjourned. The black vans pull slowly out of town, shards of shining modernity headed south.
The front bar of the Yellow Bend Hotel is jammed with townsfolk whose day has been made rousing and memorable. They raise glasses and toast their man. Then they raise glasses and toast the jury. Graziers and mechanics and retirees and shopkeepers shout rounds of drinks while inarticulate men make short speeches to grinning circles of drinkers.
Em, holding a lemonade and sitting in the crook of Merv’s arm, is told by a thin, unshaven man who has come to shake Merv’s hand and thank him, ‘He’s a hero, your dad. A great fella. We all thought it. But he did it. He actually did it. That’s something. Actually doing it.’ Many people tell her similar things as they shake Merv’s hand. None of the people in this bar have made a fortune on this new water. None of them were included in the hysterical forward selling of megalitres that went on downstream around Bartel. But they have heard rumours, and they know that place is now a gilded shire, a sort of Camelot brought into being by this one man. The landowners here with water allocations secretly lament that they didn’t think of the sting themselves. Some stare at him admiringly across the bar, and others with a kind of loose regret and jealousy. The procession of devotees keeps on coming, looser and drunker by the half hour. There are tears and toasts and then the mighty cyclonic descent of a TV chopper into the vacant lot across the road from the pub. This hushes the bar and Merv takes the glass from Em’s hand and puts it on a table and leads her out the door.
Outside, around the corner on the side verandah, Barwon is drinking a one litre bottle of Coke; the thing massive in his hands, he is waiting for a police vehicle to take him back north. A cop sits nearby on a bench seat watching him. Merv lays a hand on Barwon’s shoulder. ‘You been in touch with your mother, to let her know you’re okay?’
‘I already phone my mum. She gone feral sayin’ I run off and need a good beltin’. She thinkin’ I drown. I tell her, “How I drown? Me? How a river man drown in his own river?” She all mess up laughin’, then cryin’, then laughin’ an’ shit. An sayin’ how she worry so much an’ I’m a unholy little bastard who need the shit beat out of me.’ He smiles then and turns his head away while he catches himself. ‘That’s jus’ her sayin’ … you know … whatever.’
‘She loves you,’ Merv says.
‘She never said that. An’ I never said she said it.’
Merv holds his hand out to Barwon. For a moment the boy thinks it is a joke, and he looks at the white man suspiciously before tucking the Coke bottle under his left arm and tentatively extending his right hand and shaking Merv’s hand solemnly.
‘Maybe you can come and visit us some time on our farm.’
‘Maybe. You got motorbikes?’
‘No. I haven’t got motorbikes.’
‘Das cool. I jus’ sing some bigfella Kwakasaki up ’f I wan’ him,’ Barwon smiles.
‘Barwon, thanks for sailing with us, brother. And thanks for the water.’
The boy looks up warily, his eyes thinned. ‘Thought you reckon it ain’t me an’ I’m fulla blackfella bullshit.’
‘You make it hard for a bloke to admit he’s wrong.’
Barwon smiles as wide as a boy. ‘Hey, you think you the only ones got parades ’n’ shit for you? I get to Dickenson the town’ll party me up for a month. They be tellin’ little kids bout Barwon. River man. It’s deadly bein’ a river man.’
‘It is.’ Merv nods and smiles. ‘It is. That is … I reckon it would be.’
Em and Barwon stand before each other not knowing how to say goodbye. Only the sadness of the moment making them realise they’re friends. He extends his hand to be shaken and she stares at it, moves her own hand forward slowly, before stepping quickly to him and hugging him. With his arms at his side and his face gravely set for the duration he allows her to do it. Letting him go she kisses his cheek and whispers, ‘You didn’t make the river. We did.’
‘You gotta get her a cat or somethin’, Merv. She need a cat or somethin’ to look after. She hard, dude.’
‘Daddy,’ she turns to her father, ‘I would like a cat. But he didn’t make the river.’
‘Well … he was out in the middle of a dry riverbed singing for a river when one turned up. That seems like making a river to me.’
Barwon feels supremely important. ‘Not everyone can unnerstan’ how rivers are made.’ He winks at Merv.
‘Only us river men. Get that Emma-girl a cat.’
‘Bye, Barwon.’
‘Bye, Merv. Bye, Em.’
‘Bye, Barwon.’
The water has been rising up the yellow cliffs during the court case and the aftermath celebrations. So when the police sergeant leads them from the hotel to The Party Animal it is now tethered near the lip of the cliff, floating on a level with the town. Merv passes Em across the gunwale to a policeman on board who sets her down on deck. ‘We’re going to pilot the boat till we’re in Bartel and we can give it back to its owner. And we gotta get you inside the shire for the terms of your probation, too,’ the cop laughs. The sergeant unties the boat and heaves at the prow with his chest and jumps sprawling aboard the foredeck. ‘Okay, then … Bartel,’ the cop piloting the boat says. He laughs again.
Barwon is standing black against the front of the white pub with his cop alongside him. Em waves to him and he raises his hands beside his head and steps a brief choreography and points at the river, then drops his hands and laughs, swayed back, then doubled over, laughing.
The river water is slower now. The Party Animal has slipped behind its headwaters. They are moving toward Bartel, the Riverland, all the people they know. Merv recognises river bends he has camped on since a boy. Men now dead sitting beside night fires, and the cod nosing around the baits they’ve set.
Merv wanted Em to see what the world could be, what it was in the full flush of its youth. He wanted her to see a live river become a flood. To know that God and Noah spoke for an old world but not for this one. That here when a flood is foretold we do not build an ark, we procreate, sow seed, burst our banks, drink our fill and feel the full width and splendour of a green season. Here a flood is a pulse in the life of the land. He wanted her to see this one last pulse and was willing to steal it for her.
Running over and over in his head is the thing Manolo, his husband, whispered to him as he left their Yarralumla home that morning. They hugged at the door and Manolo put his lips to his ear and whispered, ‘You didn’t really think this country was ready for a taffy-faggot PM, did you? Even one with an arse like a Michelangelo marble?’ And Manolo cupped his arse in his palms.
And the thing about it is he really did believe that. And not in any passive, momentary way either. He had imagined that future in such detail it was like having written a novel, and imagined it so often it had become as real as his past. A layered memory of many visits. He even had a sexy pre-Islamic Revolution Persian hand-knotted angora rug chosen from the Commonwealth storage facility to roll out in the PM’s office.
The sudden erasure of that fully realised future has left him confused, as if he were the victim of a hoax. He has been watching the water on satellite for a month, moving sluggishly down the river like a clot along some artery, knowing when it reached the shire of Taringa-Bartel and turned into gold his dream of being Prime Minister was dead.
When he arrives at The Lodge and is ushered into the Prime Minister’s office there are empty coffee cups. They’ve already had their meeting. They’ve already locked into positions and decided his future. The PM is sitting behind her desk in a black brushed silk coat with a shoulder-wide wizardish collar. She nods Dafydd Miles unsmilingly to a chair. The Treasurer is in an armchair over by the French windows with the light behind him and an ankle up on a knee, engrossed in a report on his lap. The Attorney-General, sitting in front of the PM’s big turpentine desk reading her phone, nods hello at him without looking up.
‘Hello, Hillary, Georgia, Norman.’
‘So, Daf,’ the PM says. ‘I guess Fairfax journos have been ringing you all morning about water buyback schemes. They’ve been ringing me. The first rumble of an approaching shitstorm, I believe.’
‘Prime Minister, I suppose I took a punt buying so much water. Yes. But the odds were right. We couldn’t be beaten. I didn’t know the fix was in.’
‘But … it … was,’ says the Treasurer from his backlit anonymity.
‘Get fucked, Norman,’ the Environment Minister snaps.
‘Get fucked? I am fucked. Turns out to be about as much fun as I imagined, being fucked by one of your mob.’
‘Norman, we will stay nice here today,’ the Prime Minister points a finger at her Treasurer. ‘This isn’t Parliament. This is us. Inner sanctum. Still inner sanctum.’
The Treasurer’s silhouette nods slowly.
‘One of your mob?!’ the Prime Minister repeats. She shakes her head. ‘For godsakes, Norm.’
The Environment Minister continues. ‘Prime Minister, talking to my legals, they assure me these water contracts, if they’re part of a massive fraud, are null and void … not legally enforceable.’
‘If they’re part of a fraud,’ the Prime Minister repeats, ‘that would be nice. Then we’d just look stupid, but wouldn’t have the arse hanging out of our strides. Georgia,’ she turns to the Attorney-General, ‘give Daf the legal news on fraud.’
The Attorney-General unlaces her fingers and grips the arms of her chair and pouts pityingly at Dafydd Miles as if at a child she doesn’t want to punish. ‘We’ve had the Federal Police and ASIO in Bartel since the dam blew and flags went up on your … speculations. The people there aren’t involved in any fraud. All that can be said of the people of Bartel is the smartest of them fell for some junk science peddled by your onetime climate consultant, and the dumbest, that is, the majority, sold water because the guy who later blew the dam told them he had a vision in which his dead wife told him it was going to rain in September.’ She holds her hands up semaphoring wonder. ‘As amazing as that all seems.’
‘Clearly,’ the Prime Minister says, ‘both of those are stupid reasons to sell water, punting your future on unproven science and ghostly visitations. It’s about the dumbest thing I ever heard. But it isn’t fraud. The people sold the water in good faith … based on the Southern Lights and housewives therein. They punted on rain, not sabotage. The contracts are legally binding and taking a whole shire of gullible cockies to court won’t change that.’
Pin-lights on the Prime Minister’s phone are blinking. She blinks back at them. ‘Fairfax. Probably Rupert’s people by now, too.’ That blinking phone is a barometer telling of a precipitous pressure drop and the mighty shitstorm it portends.
‘The professor and the dam-buster may well be fraudsters,’ the Attorney-General ventures. ‘This whole thing might have been a scheme got up by them to save the town; the professor grew up there and the dam-buster forward sold water. If so, it’s a pretty bloody impressive scheme. Because every person in the shire won the lottery on the same day. And we’re the fools paying out.’ She nods slowly. ‘How much are we paying out, Norman?’
The Treasurer uncrosses his legs and leans forward to hold his papers high, catching the light coming in over his shoulder as if he needs to read the figures. ‘I dare say you’ve been watching the water market pretty closely, Dafydd. So this won’t be a surprise. This morning your dumb farmers are buying water for twenty-five dollars a megalitre, having already sold the very same water to us at five hundred. Meaning we’ve bought fifty million dollars’ worth of water for a billion dollars.’
Dafydd Miles sets his face firm. ‘We, my department and I, are the victims here. We’ve been ripped off …’
‘The Australian people pay us not to get ripped off. So getting ripped off breaks our contract with them pretty conclusively,’ the Prime Minister says. ‘And on first glance it looks like we’re just a bunch of suckers who got played, that we lost a billion dollars to a con. But it’s worse than even that. If we try and defend ourselves by saying we might have had all these farmers default on their contracts and thus bought their permanent water rights back, well … how does that look? We tried to cash in on the hard times of rural people and sell them up. The cities will hate us for having lost the dough, and the country will hate us for trying to mug Aussie Battlers doing it tough. The Nationals would have blown a fuse if we’d mugged these dumb bastards.’ She looks from one t
o the other of her ministers. ‘I can’t see how this could have turned out well, even without this Rossiter fellow’s flood.’
‘Okay … so I suppose you want me to resign.’ Dafydd Miles looks down at his feet. Laid beneath them is a sheltered workshop tapestry of garish royal blue and vermillion. He snorts as he ponders the horrible rugs politicians are forced to lay on their floors to appease the keepers of the handicapped. His pre-Islamic Revolution Persian hand-knotted angora rug would have looked wonderful in this room. At least there will be no more kowtowing to minorities in the post-relevant gloom where he’s heading. He shakes his head. ‘It took the Middle East a thousand years and race and religion to tie a knot of hate that can’t be undone. We’ve done it in a generation … using only water.’
Everyone in Bartel remembers the day the water came back. The return of the river. Fuzzy De Crespigney, who owned a thousand orange trees, greased and fuelled her pumps and spilt water from the river snaking dark down the bays between the trees and she went into town and bought her girls dresses and her husband, Dicky, a new Toyota. And she did this knowing the flood was stolen, and was the last.
Merv Rossiter, when he motored past that orange grove, smelt the wet earth and the citrus trees breathing out and remembered the sweet taste of those oranges from when he was a kid. How his mouth watered to hold one in his hand, hot from the sun. The bitter tang as he bit through the skin, the brief aurora of juice beads that exploded away and caught the sun, and the juice running down his chin onto his bare chest. To Em, who hadn’t known oranges grow, the smell was only mud.
As they motor past the De Crespigney place Merv sees Fuzzy wearing a bright red shirt sitting astride a dark green tractor twenty metres back from the riverbank at the edge of her trees. She waves to him slowly, trying to semaphore some deep message into the simple metronomic back-and-forth, like someone standing dockside, seeing a family off on a long voyage. Merv bows deeply from the hips, one arm folded across his belly and one across the small of his back. She guns the tractor sending twin shots of blue smoke rolling skyward in salute. Merv knows her sleepless nights tossing and turning at failure and financial ruin will be stilled with pleasant dreams, and maybe her waking will be enlivened with an early morning shag with Dickie as they ease back into the real world and find each other again. The thought makes him laugh out loud. Sex lives reigniting across the shire. Merv Rossiter, surrogate father to a thousand Riverland kids.
The Last Pulse Page 19
