Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  Couta Ho’s voice trails off and she looks away, out of the window of her home, past her front garden to the laundromat across the road, the lights of which have just come on. She realises that it is almost entirely dark in the room and gets up and draws the curtains and switches on the light. As Couta Ho moves around her, Maria Magdalena Svevo speaks because she feels she ought, not because she wishes to.

  ‘It must have been very hard,’ she says, and immediately it is obvious that she hates herself for trying to put any gloss on what this woman feels.

  ‘Hard?’ asks Couta, sitting back down, feeling this small word in her throat. ‘Yes,’ she says, considering it, lending some dignity to Maria Magdalena Svevo’s comment, as if one inadequate word is about as good as any other inadequate word. ‘Yes, it was hard.’ But the idea of hard is too small, the word ‘hard’ too insignificant to begin to approach what Couta carries within her. The closest approximation she can give to what she feels is her story, and Maria Magdalena Svevo realises she has interrupted that story and that she was wrong to do so. ‘Hard,’ says Couta, ‘you could say that.’ And then her gaze returns to the green laminex table top and she sees that their mugs are empty. ‘Another cuppa?’ asks Couta.

  In the kitchen Maria Magdalena Svevo hears the tap running, hears the old chipped blue porcelain jug filling, the jug being plugged in, the snap of the power point being switched on. The electricity zaps and sparks in the loose fitting in the old jug, and then the fizzing gives way as the element begins to rumble deep down. And Couta resumes her story, her voice now tired and distant.

  ‘Aljaz said I was to stop going to the cemetery except on the anniversary of her death. I thought, Maybe Ali is right. Maybe I do think about Jemma too much. Maybe I was sick. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. It didn’t really matter to me what I did. If it made Ali feel better about things then I was happy enough to do it. I enrolled in a wool-spinning class. But the first night when I got in the car I just drove straight through the city and there I was, back at the cemetery. That’s how it started. Each Tuesday night. Out I’d go and I would feel sort of happy, and Ali was happy that I was happy. And I was happy because I was going to see Jemma and Ali was smiling.’

  ‘So you never went to any of the wool-spinning classes?’ Maria Magdalena Svevo asks.

  ‘No,’ replies Couta over the sound of water being poured into mugs. ‘It just gave me time to go down to the cemetery to see Jemma.’

  And Couta Ho laughs at her small deception. She stands at the table holding a mug of instant coffee out to Maria Magdalena Svevo with her left hand, while she cradles her own close to her chest. She raises the mug to her lips - those small, soft undecorated lips - has a sip and continues a little smile at the memory of it all.

  ‘Didn’t you worry that Aljaz might twig to what was going on?’ asks Maria Magdalena Svevo.

  Couta places her coffee on the table, sits down, and entwines her hands in the mug’s handle. They face one another across the table, but neither looks at the other, just at the table’s surface, at the swirls in the coffee, at the stains and crumbs on the table.

  ‘Well, I did,’ says Couta after a time. ‘Yes, I did.’ She takes a sip of her coffee but as she does so she keeps her hands tightly clasped around the mug, as if she is in the midst of a blizzard and the hot mug is her only source of warmth. She puts the cup down but her hands stay tightly wrapped around it. ‘I worried that if he found out he would be furious. The wool-spinning course went for twelve weeks and by the end of it I was getting worried that Ali would work out what was going on. So I went to a shop and brought two lovely hand-knitted jumpers made out of home-spun wool, one for Ali and one for Jemma. They cost a small fortune, but money hasn’t really meant a lot since - since back then. Anyway, I got the right size for Jemma, because she would be two come the next month, and the lady in the shop said a two-year-old would get a good twelve months’ wear out of it before it became too small. I got home that Tuesday night and gave Ali his jumper. He was thrilled. “I told you,” he said. “See how it has helped to get things back in perspective?”’

  Maria Magdalena Svevo laughs. ‘He never realised?’

  Couta begins to laugh too at the absurdity of it. ‘I know,’ she says. She laughs some more. ‘It is funny. Now. Looking back on it, it is funny.’ Couta seems mildly shocked at the thought of any humour coming out of that time, and the idea of any of it being funny amuses her as much as the joke itself. ‘It is funny, isn’t it? I mean, I’d forgotten - this is true, I swear it, you won’t believe this - I’d forgotten to cut the tag off the inside of the neck. So there he is, pulling it on, and I saw it and I thought, Oh my god, what is going to happen now? But he never noticed a thing. I cut it out the next day, before he got home from work. He seemed so happy with his jumper and he told me about his plans for us to go on a holiday to Queensland the next summer. I said it all sounded wonderful and we sat up in bed for ages talking about what we would do on holiday. Then he started to kiss me on the back and wanted to make love. I didn’t care because I couldn’t feel anything, anything good or bad. I just lay there, still, and thought of the moon. That’s how I felt, big and empty like the moon, like nothing could hurt me any more.’ Couta looked up at Maria Magdalena Svevo. ‘Funny that I am telling you such private things. Because before, I would never have dreamt of talking to other people about such things. You remember what I was like. But now, what does it matter? If people know nothing or if they know everything, what does it matter? All I know is that Jemma was here and now she isn’t.’ Couta rested her cheek on one hand, looked down at her mug and swilled the remaining coffee around with her other hand. ‘Anyway, I think Ali was a bit disappointed. He didn’t say anything, but, well, you know how those things are.

  ‘The next morning after he had gone to work, I drove down to the cemetery and put Jemma’s jumper on her grave so that she would have it. I folded it neatly, the way it was in the shop when I bought it. I remember where I left it. It was on the top left-hand corner of the plaque. Funny, the things you remember. I remember the jumper, where I put it, how I folded it, but I don’t remember Jemma. I mean, I do remember her, but not how she looked, how she moved, how she cried and smiled, how her hands moved, those sorts of little things. That was all gone. I’d look at our photos, but when I closed my eyes all I could see was the photos, not Jemma, not outside the photos. I’d try and try but it was like it was all gone. Except once. The night after I took the jumper to her grave.

  ‘That night I slept real well, the first time I had slept properly since Jemma died, and I dreamt Jemma had grown into a little girl and she was this beautiful two-year-old running around the park in that jumper - and it did fit beautifully, like I knew it would. She ran into my arms and I could hear her laugh and I could feel her little body hot from running, and she said to me, ‘I love you, Mummy.’ And I said, ‘Now, make sure you don’t get your new jumper dirty.’ Couta laughs again and then her mouth draws up and her cheeks draw in and her mouth goes to open but no words come out; nothing comes out except some choked sobs.

  Maria Magdalena Svevo takes Couta’s hand. ‘That’s a good dream,’ she says.

  ‘Is it?’ asks Couta and she withdraws her hand slowly. ‘I don’t know. I read this book once and in it - I’ve always remembered this, I don’t know why - one character says how it’s the dead people who won’t let you go. That’s true, isn’t it? I’ve always remembered that. It’s the dead who won’t let you go. Anyway. I … I never went back after that.

  ‘It was not long after that we broke up. There was no real reason, but it was like the thing that had held us together had snapped. Do you know what I mean? It was like it was broken and nothing could fix it.’

  Couta looks Maria Magdalena Svevo in the eyes for the first time that day. Couta’s face is confused. She is obviously at a loss to explain the final part of her story.

  ‘But the funny thing was, he never knew it was broken until I told him. That is a funny thing.’
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br />   And she looks back down into her coffee cup, at the way the electric light above is reflected in its small blackness. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Maria Magdalena Svevo looks on and says nothing. Then she reaches down into a plastic shopping bag she has brought with her. The plastic scriffles as she delves within to finally pull out a parcel wrapped in brown paper and baling twine. Maria Magdalena Svevo places the parcel upon the table.

  Maria Magdalena Svevo unties the twine and spreads out the brown paper. There, neatly folded and covered in a scattering of clove dust, is the tear-stained bedspread. Maria Magdalena Svevo puts her hands beneath the bedspread, lifts it up, and proffers it to Couta Ho.

  Saying: ‘If two lie together, then they have heat, but how can one be warm alone?’

  Seven

  Suddenly my eyes snap open and all sight of the ancient bedspread is immediately lost in the rushing river water. And returning with the water are the sensations of my agonised body, but I shall not dwell upon them. I shall not. To cut out the groping pain I concentrate on my outstretched arm. I can feel that whereas my arm was formerly covered in water to a point a little beyond my elbow, now only my hand and wrist seem to feel the chill of the air. Which means the river has risen a good twenty centimetres or so. Which means what little hope of rescue has further receded as the river grows more wild, the waterfall more ferocious.

  Somewhere beyond the bubbling blackness a building begins to take shape: a house. More precisely, a home. A sky-blue shack made of tin. And now I see where that home sits: in the crabbed and cracked port town of Strahan, which in turn sits like a crusty skin cancer on the flesh of south-west Tasmanian wilderness. Nearby to the sky-blue shack, the railway station. I seem to have little immediate place in the happenings that boil up in front of this vision, but then it is perhaps those things most distant from our conscious mind that are most central to what we are. Least that’s how some might put it. Harry would have said that if you want to follow a footy game, never watch the pack but the loose players at the edges.

  Auntie Ellie, 1940

  The town had seen the smoke of the small mountain locomotive, specially imported from Switzerland, for only forty years or so when, on an unusual day (unusual because the sun was shining) after a slow and long trip through the rainforest over mountain ranges and down the remote, wild King River Gorge, a scrawny dark child with a big nose got off at that railway station at the end of the line. He was greeted by a small, heavily powdered woman with a hairy chin and a somewhat old-fashioned dress, who bore a pram in front of her. In her mouth was a smoking clay pipe. Though the sun was shining, there was inevitably, this being the west coast of Tasmania, this being the first piece of land that the roaring forties smash up against after thousands of miles of empty ocean, there was, inevitably, a sky of black clouds. But beneath the clouds a low winter sun shone from the west, and it lit the dark child and the powdered woman puffing her clay pipe, and the pram, as if they were a tableaux made by the elements purely for their own pleasure. Though the boy had only ever heard of her, this small, oddly attired woman seemed immediately familiar to him as he embraced her and then kissed the baby in the pram. She picked up the cardboard box bound with string which the boy carried, put it in one end of the pram, and, hand in hand, she pushing the pram with her free hand, they walked off toward the town’s centre.

  The town looked battered and tired, like a once corpulent man dying of cancer caused by good living; the skin, once taut with fat, now hanging limp in sad, loose folds. Large, formerly elegant houses where once a family with pretensions to a rising status had lived, were now decrepit and rundown, occupied by several struggling, spatting families.

  I watch the recent past of this place like some crazy speeded-up film; watch how European progress arrives with the mineral boom of the 1880s and 1890s like a vast wave washing over the wilderness, transforming the west coast and leaving funny little towns like Strahan, the strange flotsam of deflated dreams and broken hopes. I watch the vast wild land of the west of Tasmania suddenly fill with people. Throughout its vast rainforests I watch them: prospecting, logging, laying waste to huge tracts of forests with massive fires. At the height of the great boom, in the year of federation, 1901, the mineral wealth of the west flows out through its ports, and flowing in like a king tide are the supplies and equipment and pimps and whores and speculators and sly-grog merchants and those desperate for anything, but chiefly a job, or failing that a dream, all bound for the land they briefly call Australia’s El Dorado. In that year of self-congratulatory speech making, the town of Strahan boasted a population of two thousand. The film begins to slow further and further until it almost stops in the year 1940, when the town of Strahan has perhaps a quarter of its former population and is showing no sign of growing and every sign of shrinking further, perhaps ending up like so many other short-lived mining towns on the west coast, whose proud brass bands, Oddfellows Halls, Mechanics Institutes and footy teams had all proved as transitory as a westerly scud, whose grandiose hotels and smelting plants had disappeared into the peat of the rainforest that had already reclaimed the towns of Pillinger and Crotty and Lynchford and Teepookana.

  Not that the myrtles and manferns were yet sprouting in the main street of Strahan. Not that a railway carriage yet stood suspended mid-air in the middle of the rainforest, as it did where once had been the town of Kelly Basin, in the heart of what once had been a busy railway yard. There a blackwood tree had grown up through the middle of an abandoned railway carriage, its broadening, rising trunk over the decades elevating the carriage a yard into the air, carrying the carriage with it in its exuberant journey toward the light above the forest canopy, so that the carriage now appeared to be flying in the midst of a steaming dank green profusion of tea-trees and vines and myrtles and celery top pines. No railway irons, no buildings, no material relics of the once muscular railway yard and the once bustling town remained. Nothing.

  Save for a carriage that flew in the rainforest.

  As yet, I can see only a few of the Strahan shops boarded up, and the boards are only a little green-slimed and rotted. The remaining shops boast window displays, however humble: half a dozen tins of IXL jam, stacked in a pyramid for so long that the labels have faded and started to peel; a few blowflies lying long dead at the base of a cardboard poster advertising ‘Monkey Soap - It Won’t Wash Clothes!’ Those that remain have decided to wait on, but there is a feeling abroad in the town of people having taken on the natural world, and of people having been found wanting, of having learnt something in the process, and that something related to their own impermanence and their own insignificance. Outsiders mistake it for a feeling of doom. But they are wrong. It is a feeling of humility. I know, for I can smell that feeling. It is the scent of peat. The town has been there for fifty years. It might survive another fifty. Or even another hundred. Outside the town there are creeks with fallen Huon pine logs in them, as old and as sound as the day they fell forty thousand years ago. Not that the people of Strahan know this. But they feel it. And each day they feel it more strongly, and it has the scent of peat.

  Half a mile before the town centre Auntie Ellie turned right up a small gravelled street. Near the top of the street they came to a dilapidated picket fence, through the gate of which Auntie Ellie turned. Harry followed, skipping occasionally to keep pace with her quick stride, along a gravel path, past a mass of tea-tree and button grass where once had been a vain attempt at a garden, and up a small bank to a cottage of tin, painted a bright sky-blue.

  When they got close, Harry saw that the tin was a form of corrugated iron with much smaller corrugations than that found on roofing tin. Parts of it had been patched with flattened kerosene tins, also painted sky-blue. ‘This is home, Harry,’ said Auntie Ellie, smacking the corrugated iron with the flat of a big hand. ‘Ripple iron, we calls it, best bloody building material this side of Gormanston. Don’t rot, don’t cost much, and always talks to you when it’s raining.’ And then she pointed an acc
using finger down the road toward a house built of brick. ‘Not like that rubbish, I can assure you, Harry.’

  Auntie Ellie had never trusted brick houses, not from the time she had first seen one at the age of ten near the outskirts of the town of Deloraine. She had stopped and gawked for so long that her mum, Dolcie Dossitter, had to cuff her quick smart around her ears. ‘Cut that out now.’ Dolcie looked up at the brick cottage with its neat garden of cabbages and cauliflowers and pumpkins out the front, and saw the lace curtain on the window to the right of the front door sweep away slightly. Then a circle slightly darker than the rest of the interior gloom could be discerned. A face. Looking at them. ‘Better bugger off quick,’ said Dolcie to Ellie, ‘otherwise they be thinking we’re after somethin’.’

  ‘But how does it stand up?’ asked Ellie as Dolcie shoved her in the back with the palm of her hand.

  ‘How the hell I know? Just get walking.’ And she gave Ellie another shove. This time Ellie started walking, all the while turning and looking back at the brick cottage.

  ‘But how does it?’ asked Ellie.

  ‘Them bloody whitefellas. I don’t know. Just stop lookin’ about and walk.’

  ‘Houses have big wood beams to keep them up. And one bit of wood is nailed or pegged into the next. I know that because I saw the uncles build the birding shed. But if there ain’t any beams, how does it hold up?’

  ‘Unless them little square red stone houses have the spars and beams inside, hidden behind, maybe that’s how it is done,’ said Dolcie, trying her best to persuade Ellie to move on before trouble struck.