Death of a River Guide

by Richard Flanagan

  It was a terrible and piteous time. They had remained and they had endured. But so had their fears. Children denied their parents and invented new lineages of respectable free settlers to replace the true genealogy of shame. The descendants of the convicts and the blackfellas became service-station attendants or shop assistants or lorry drivers or waitresses or clerks, if they were lucky. No one spoke. No one spoke. For a century nothing was heard. Even the writers and poets were mute to their own world. If possible they left, though with an insistent phrase sounding in their ears that would never depart.

  If you leave you can never be free.

  Ticket-of-leave men in their hearts, granted a pass permitting travel but never the freedom to leave, wherever their bodies ran their souls remained forever shackled to the strange mountainous island of horrors at the end of the world. And now Shag’s guitar is back where it began, except now it is not merely a statement but a question and an accusation and a statement all bound together. Shag makes the strings shriek, because Shag wants so bad to be free, wants so bad for his sister to be free, and he can only free them both by playing this dim terrible memory.

  If you leave you can never be free.

  And he plays and plays that crappy old guitar, and the singer is crying and bellowing. As if all the island’s weird agonies were their own. As if it all were more than flesh could bear, and yet flesh had borne the weight for a century. The drummer has come to life and is pounding out the beat and the bass guitarist is just keeping his line going as strong and hard a counterpoint as he can to Shag’s riffs and the singer’s screams. The smoke-swirled bar has gone strangely quiet and they are all listening and wondering why they weren’t listening before and what it is that aches so much to listen to now.

  Aljaz goes to leave. He feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns around. In the dim haze he is at first unable to distinguish who it is. Until he hears her voice.

  Saying: ‘Long time no see, Ali.’

  And him grasping the rum flask in his pocket in surprise, searching for adequate words and only mumbling, ‘Long time. For sure.’

  And him then smiling.

  Saying: ‘Couta. Couta Ho.’

  Nine

  There was never any doubt in either of their minds that the baby was dead and, watching it all over again, it is perhaps this that lends the whole scene its particular melancholy. I see it pretty much as I saw it all then, as disconnected episodes which had the terrible misfortune to involve us, and me thinking, It is a mistake, a dream, a vision of horror from which I will awake - little knowing it was condemning me to thirteen years of a waking sleep. I see Couta shaking Jemma, Aljaz kissing Jemma all over her face as though there is some magic button that might so be activated, Couta dialling the ambulance and not remembering the number, he giving Jemma mouth to mouth, she dialling more wrong numbers, he saying, ‘Jemma will not die, Jemma will not die,’ and Jemma already dead, Couta running into the garden to get the neighbour to ring, but never reaching the neighbour’s, just screaming in the backyard, ‘Help, help, please help us,’ he saying, ‘Jemma will not die,’ and holding her in his arms as he had done after she had first been born, and Jemma already dead, the two ambulance men, one for each month of her life, just watching; the older one trying not to cry, the younger one lost, and he, the younger one, finally taking the dead baby with an infinite gentleness and cradling her as if she were his own newly born and departing through the front door, Jemma’s left foot dropping from its swaddling and leaving me with the most enduring memory I have of her: a puffy shin and yellow knitted woollen bootee, and us sitting in the ambulance with those who give life, and the nightmarish smells and the small yellow-light lit darkness of the hospital bay and Jemma already dead, and the people filling the house saying they were sorry for what had happened and those on the street, whom we knew, not saying anything but looking elsewhere as if life were forever and Jemma had somehow sullied their belief in their own immortality, and me wondering who had gone and why the world had changed and seeing only a puffy shin and yellow knitted bootee, and the funeral and the priest saying, ‘Let us give thanks for Jemma’s life,’ and me standing up and yelling, ‘Jemma will not die, she will not die,’ and people crying and Jemma already dead.

  Everything else of her - finding her in the cot, her baths, her lying on the bed gurgling, her birth - goes out of my mind as the mortuary door closes, not to return to me till now. I had not wanted Jemma: she was an accident, Couta during pregnancy not the woman I had spent the last three years with, Couta after the birth centred upon Jemma and me feeling some selfish shithead who failed to give her the space she now demanded. My resentment culminated in this terrible moment and I felt this death to be some punishment for having not wanted Jemma. Couta had grief. I had guilt and a memory of a puffy shin and yellow knitted woollen bootee.

  I did not feel grief. I did not feel anguish. I felt as if some substantial part of me - my legs, my arms - had been cut from my body and thrown away. How could I grieve the loss of myself? I did not grieve. I began running as if in search of this missing limb, as if I might find it lying somewhere upon a roadside and then bring it home to Couta, and everything would once again be whole and in its home and as it should be and always had been, the circle unbroken. I did not grieve. I could not.

  Madonna santa! Why do I feel this? Why do I feel as if I am being destroyed by history? As if the past is some snake venom that is paralysing me limb by limb, organ by organ, slowly tearing my mind apart piece by piece? I, who felt I had lived in a country beyond history! Who had no future and wanted no past! I never asked for these visions, was content to remain ignorant about who I was and where I came from. I might have been a confused mess, but at least I only had myself to hate for it. And now there is all this past welling up, cramming me from all sides, pushing me further down into the Cauldron, forcing more and more water into my lungs and into my mind, and I don’t want any of it, because what good does any of it do? I should have ended up like Harry, an old pisshead slowly dying over many years, serving up banquets to animals that he never saw for the rest of the week. Not having my face endlessly washed and scrubbed by this tide of the past.

  And yet why did he cook all those tons of rissoles and fish over the years for ghosts?

  Maybe he did know something I never guessed he knew. But what does it matter if I know or if I don’t know? The past is a nightmare and I want to wake up and I can’t. I was happy in my way, running from all this - for now I can see this is what I quite rightly was running from. Who in their right mind wants to own up to all that? Why would you want to admit to all that? And what’s the antidote to this snakebite of the past? Love. Of whom? Of what? My pain in my guts is back, but now it is the only pain, like my guts have blown up to become my entire body and it is all burning. Beneath the river I am being consumed by the most terrible fire. Am I being left to burn eternally?

  Then, amidst these all-consuming flames, I see flags.

  Burning flags!

  And standing above the blaze is Couta Ho, and then, rushing in from her side is Aljaz, and he is grabbing the unburnt and partly burnt flags out of the fire and stopping her throwing any more upon the fire. And he is asking her are you crazy or what? She says nothing. Aljaz continues his rescue of the multi-coloured code flags, hosing the fire out, and saves almost all, save for seven of the numeral pendants with which Couta Ho began the fire. He tries to talk to her, but Couta Ho says nothing.

  It is seven weeks after their chance meeting, seven weeks since he had gone with Couta to her home after that night in the pub, both falsely believing it arose out of a camaraderie that could be carried lightly, like an emblem of a past friendship, rather than from a true love. From an enduring love. She had not taken him into her bed, nor had their intimacy gone further than sharing a spoon to stir the sugar into their respective cups of coffee, and he too aware that even this was more than he had a right to ask for.

  How could I have asked for more? As if I had any right t
o be beneath the sheets with her. But that evening I saw that thirteen years had not ended our love, that I loved her and she loved me, that our love had gone into another country beyond the borders of physical desire.

  And this love so terrified Aljaz that with his coffee only half drunk he had abruptly got up, said his farewells and left.

  Now is the first time since that evening Aljaz has been able to face visiting Couta. She still wears her black hair pulled back in a ponytail, but whereas it once made her look stylish, now it seems to accentuate her age. She has put on weight, more than he has even. Her face, though still little wrinkled, presages a severer, sadder middle age in its squarer form and floury skin. Her movements, once so definite and strong, have grown short and shaky. Her hands, he notices, those hands which once so resolutely pulled him toward her so many years before, now move with a quick diffidence. Her clothes are less individual, more mainstream department store, as though the youthful joy of using clothes to define her own small place in the world has passed, and she now dresses simply for comfort and modesty. She still wears large golden gypsy earrings, but they are tarnished and no longer glint when light plays upon them. He realises with a shock not that she is old, for he is prepared for that, but that he too is old. He wishes they could have shared this ageing together, wishes he could grow old and wrinkly and round and bone-sore with her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Aljaz.

  ‘I kept them till now,’ says Couta Ho, pointing to the flags, ‘then I thought, What was the point?’

  ‘I should have come earlier,’ says Aljaz.

  ‘It’s all past,’ says Couta Ho.

  It’s pathetic to watch, really. More precisely: I’m pathetic to watch. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. She says nothing.

  He looks down at his feet. He recalls the various flags and their accompanying messages. He delves in the soggy steaming black mess to finally lift up a still-smoking flag showing a white cross upon a blue background. So he stands before her, a most ludicrous sight to behold, waving a flag above his head.

  ‘My vessel is stopped and making no way through the water,’ says Couta Ho, reading the flag’s message. Aljaz nods. Couta Ho smiles. Couta Ho, for the first time, laughs.

  She makes coffee and they sit down at the kitchen table, the same green laminex table that was there when he lived with her. The house’s exterior belies its interior, which is, thinks Aljaz, so very Couta - pieces of ordinary suburban furniture and bric-à-brac which, anywhere else, would seem entirely ordinary, but in her juxtaposition of their laminex greens and vinyl reds takes on some special quality, at once homely and exotic. Aljaz, preoccupied with these and other thoughts, does not speak.

  The nervous silence that had attracted Couta Ho so many years before was now almost unbearable. She filled the emptiness that lay between them with her halting words. She talked sketchily about her failed marriage to Phil, about her job cooking counter meals at a nearby pub, on these and other subjects about which he raised polite questions. Then the conversation stumbled. After a long time of looking and feeling awkward and neither saying anything, after a long time making clumsy smiles, with the sounds of coffee being drunk and the TV next door seeming too loud and then too silent, Couta Ho spoke further.

  ‘Still drink?’ she asked.

  ‘Not for three months,’ he lied, and she knew it. But it was not that bothering her.

  Couta felt above all else an overwhelming feeling of falling into a void when she saw Aljaz. And she did not wish to fall. She felt as if she had walked a wire since he had left her so many years ago, and that she had learnt the art of walking that tightrope alone. It is too late for this, she wished to say. Don’t you understand, she wished to say, too much has happened to me and you were not part of it. You were not here. She wished to say also that she hated him for taking her love, squeezing it all out of her like a lemon, living in her house and then leaving, running, when things got hard. But she said none of it. How could she tell him he had no right to come back into her life when she had been the one who, at the pub, had asked him to visit? She could cope - had coped - with him leaving. But him returning, that was so hard she wasn’t sure if she were strong enough to bear the burden.

  He was different, but the same. Still quiet, still bearing politeness as a shield to his shyness. And she unequal to it, vulnerable and opening up to it, without being able to tell what he was thinking or wanting. She remembered many years ago old Maria Magdalena Svevo, for whom Couta Ho would sometimes buy cigars, lighting one up, inhaling deeply, then asking how Aljaz was, and Couta Ho telling her how he had left and how she wondered if she would ever see him again. And Maria Magdalena Svevo responding by quoting from Ecclesiastes. Maria Magdalena Svevo had no truck with the church, saying that anybody who lived through the war in Italy couldn’t have, and she had a generally low opinion of the Bible, which she described as a minestrone of opposing flavours. But of Ecclesiastes she had an altogether higher opinion, and she knew it by heart, and would sometimes quote from it, as she did this day. She took the cigar out of her mouth, coughed up some phlegm, let it slide back down her throat, and then leant forward.

  Saying: “‘All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.’”

  ‘I’m sorry about Harry, Ali, I really am,’ said Couta. ‘He was a real nice old man.’ She patted his hand with hers, once, twice, then moved it back to her side of the table.

  Then they had some more coffee and Aljaz began telling Couta Ho his story. And once he began, which was hard, so hard, he could not stop, for he had to tell her it all, had to tell her everything, and all he had was this one story to tell everything with, and not until he stopped would he know whether it was possible to tell everything with only this one story. He detailed the endless casual jobs, the small towns and the big suburbs and the endless roads and the flushing airports, an inventory of despair. How he had ended up prawn trawling up the Cape - a small boat, an arsehole of a skipper and his wife, just the three of them in the long heat. Not that Aljaz minded. For three years he stuck with it. The skipper talked all the time and his wife and Aljaz just listened and worked. That was good, just trying to make his mind as empty as the edge between the sea and the sky. For a time. Then the skipper kept asking questions. More and more questions. So Aljaz went over to West Oz, down to Esperance to see an old friend. She had a new bloke, a surfboard shaper, but she was still nice to Aljaz. She let him stay there for two months, and sometimes they would talk a little, but when he stopped talking so did she. She was kind, Rhoda. Always was. Then he worked in the wheat. Then he came back here, but he thought he might head back north when summer was finished.

  Then he told her what Maria Magdalena Svevo had told him.

  ‘But you always were different,’ said Couta, and then she pondered a moment before speaking again. ‘Maybe it’s just being able to name the difference.’

  They sat on opposite sides of the laminex kitchen table. The lights of the laundromat across the road had gone out following its closure some time earlier and the room seemed dim. They sat formally, as if it were some form of interrogation, or, more precisely, a confession - she thinking of the years they had been apart and what might have come of staying together, he thinking of how his time without her seemed so desolate. He had fallen low, not to the bottom, he had seen enough to know it was possible to go down a lot farther, so desperate that you sold yourself to anybody and did anything, so needing that you would risk all busting into houses and nicking a telly or a video for which you might get a hundred dollars total. He had avoided that, and that was something, but it wasn’t a lot and it didn’t seem much to be proud of, just this not having done this and not having done that. There wasn’t much he had done. There were few, if any, friends from those years. He had once thought that you went on making friends, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Sure, he knew plenty of people, but he was wary of them and distant with them. They weren’t fr
iends. There was no money and no possessions, but he didn’t care about that. It was the lack of being anything, of being part of anything, of belonging anywhere. He had fallen and, having fallen, he was fated to suffer ever greater indignities and adversities. And this is the essence of what I now see: Aljaz feeling himself doomed and Couta Ho knowing it beyond the the power of her love to redeem him.

  Couta’s hand came across the table and ruffled Aljaz’s thin red spikes of hair. ‘Not much of that mane left,’ she laughed. He laughed a little too.

  ‘Why did you cut it so short?’ she asked, knowing it betrayed something of his self-loathing and wanting him to admit to it.

  ‘Easier to wash,’ he said, with the briefest flicker of a smile to warn her away from further such questions.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, and he momentarily and unintentionally fixed her with a stare that frightened her, such was the emptiness she saw in his blue eyes. ‘Sure,’ she continued, looking away, ‘lot easier for sure.’