The Last Pulse Page 11

  She strokes upward toward yellow light. Breaking the surface she pirouettes and finds the boy is up, swearing and yelling and thrashing the water to keep Merv away. The man is alongside the boy trying to take hold of him. ‘…’kin’ hell, bro? Get away. Get away. You try to kill me, you bastard.’

  Seeing the boy is conscious and can swim Merv backs off and treads water alongside him. ‘I didn’t hit you.’

  ‘Some bastard clunk me one, eh. Who done it?’

  ‘Sorry, Barwon,’ Em calls from the back of the boat. ‘You were stealing my fish.’ She is holding the front of her t-shirt in her fists, her face pouted and blinking, trying to buy sympathy. ‘You shouldn’t have fallen in. It was only a bring-you-to-your-senses bump.’

  Barwon says quietly for Merv and Bridget Wray to hear, ‘That girl needs a intervention order. She got some domestic violence.’

  ‘I love you, Daddy,’ Em calls. A surefire way to assuage his anger.

  ‘The boat’s drifting,’ Bridget Wray says. She strikes out for it with a loping freestyle and Merv swears shit and begins to swim for it too, windmilling in her wake. Barwon follows, not wanting to be left behind, using an invented breaststroke, keeping his head always above water.

  The Party Animal has swung broadside to the breeze and is being heeled and shunted along in the rippling water moving away from the swimmers through the dead trees. They stop, first Bridget, legs sinking, then Merv thrashes up alongside sucking urgent breaths, and Barwon sliding along on his self-taught stroke.

  ‘It’s no good,’ Bridget Wray says. ‘It’s moving too fast. It’s getting further away.’

  Merv rises in the grey water on scissoring legs and cups his hands to his mouth. ‘Throw the anchor over, Em. The anchor. Up the front deck. Throw it overboard.’ They watch Em nod and wave and hear her high voice calling something in reply. She skirts the cabin edgily, hips pressed to the portholes round the wale gangway to the foredeck.

  ‘That’ll stop her. The anchor’ll stop her,’ Merv tells them. ‘You two okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m real good. Always tip top after some bastard try and ’sassinate me,’ Barwon says.

  The anchor is a triangular Danforth of galvanised steel, heavy enough to hold a party of thirty revellers at a scenic location on the proudly flowing Murray River that once was. It is seated in a bay moulded to its own dimensions in the foredeck and its line feeds out from a locker beneath. The three swimmers watch Em brace, a leg either side of the burrowed reluctant thing and pull on the chain and not move at all and heave and not win an inch and throw her head back in effort like a statue of effort, locked in the struggle forevermore and no inch won or lost, until eventually, and give her her due, she tries, she really tries, eventually she sits beside the pointed ugly thing still lodged in its den and Barwon and Bridget Wray wonder what she is doing, but Merv knows she is crying and that what they have witnessed is a girl’s full and best effort and when that is given it is right to sit and cry and wait for your father to come.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ Merv says. ‘What she doin’?’

  ‘She’s crying.’

  ‘Well, shit.’

  They watch her drift, The Party Animal revolving, fore, aft, fore, aft in a line away through the trees on the wind, it touches one and is spun in reverse, slowly moving on.

  They swim to a tree and cling fingertipped to its slimy trunk and then move on to another which has a fork into which they can boost Barwon. He perches on a wide woven platform of sticks and twigs half a metre thick and painted white by the biannual birdly ablutions that once rained here. ‘So now I’m a ibis,’ he says. ‘And that Em piss off on us.’

  Bridget Wray swims to another tree and likewise climbs and perches on a podium of whitewashed woven sticks, and Merv soon inhabits a third. They are in an abandoned rookery of the straw-necked and Australian ibis and for a quarter mile in any direction the grey leafless trees standing close in the lapping water are weighted with nests. In each tree, just above the waterline, a man-sized saucer of criss-crossed sticks slowly year-by-year unweaving because the architects of this city are no longer called here by water. Those floods annulled in a ministry a thousand miles north and this plethoric wingly genesis undone. Chicks no longer calling to one another as their bald wings flap yearning for the air and the world.

  The shards of eggs from which the last generation emerged to fly forth into the world are sprinkled in the nests. Faded now, bone white chalky shavings of portable wombs in a shit-white city of nests that unweaves, stick-by-stick, and drops away year-by-year. This flood is silent. The ibis, evolved to breed biannually, have suffered years pass without the siren song of a deluge calling them and the species is gone into the past, into the biosphere of memory and museums inhabited by the dodo and the auk.

  The three humans perch shivering in their nests above the water. They are not more than twenty metres from each other, though cold makes each feel abandoned. As the sun sets both Bridget Wray and Merv talk to Barwon to reassure him. ‘We’ll be right, Barwon. One of those helicopters will come hunting us soon and instead of hiding we’ll wave the buggers in. Hot baths and hot chips they’ll give us.’

  But the helicopters and the search, if it continues, are spread over a thousand kilometres and these three castaways are as isolated as polar explorers.

  ‘Are you too cold, Barwon?’ Bridget asks. ‘How cold are you? I’m pretty damn cold. If I swam over to your nest maybe you could hold me to keep me warm.’

  ‘You not comin’ inta my nest an’ cuddle me. You stay over there your own nest. I’m all right.’

  ‘What if three of us got into one nest?’ Merv asks. ‘It’s going to be a cold night.’

  ‘I seen you lookin’ that Bridget’s arse. I know right away you thinkin’ to get in her nest.’

  ‘Hey. That’s enough of that,’ Merv says.

  ‘Well, you want to make a sexy nest, make a bastard without me.’

  ‘I’m coming over to your nest, Barwon,’ Bridget Wray declares. ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘I kick you out when you get here.’ But when she swims across and, treading water holds a hand out to him, he helps pull her up into his nest. Through the dusk, as swallows rummage the low sky for insects, Barwon and Bridget Wray sit side-by-side, arm, hip and thigh shivering against each other. Then in the dark with the cold bearing down she moves him between her legs and he sits there with her arms around him and his head on her chest.

  The night stretching before them, Merv tests a song to see if it might open the way forward. Bright Lights, Big City. He puts the Jimmy Reed growl on the words to make it a real song, but when he stops singing it dies abruptly and they listen for any human sound and none comes. A spattering of frog-croak and the high static of bats.

  ‘I woont be singing if I’s you,’ Barwon says. Merv doesn’t answer. ‘Is that a song bout Em?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was about your baby an’ I thought she’s your baby.’

  The ghostly double-gong of the mopoke drifts to them. ‘I hope she’s okay,’ Merv says softly.

  ‘She aright. Shit, ol’ fella, she better than aright. She got a party boat, hot water ’n’ hot dogs and Pirates of the damn Cranbean on the DVD. We wet as shags perch up here. She aright, eh.’ Bridget Wray hugs him. ‘Hey. Don’t bother with that,’ he warns her.

  ‘There must be boats on this lake,’ Bridget Wray comforts Merv. ‘Someone will find her. And what harm can come to her?’

  ‘There’s about eight different ways a girl can start a fire on that boat when she gets hungry or cold.’

  Sitting in his abandoned nest Merv’s brain burns all night with the fires that might light up that boat. Bridget Wray and Barwon rock gently and drift in and out of sleep, woken by spasms of shivers and him whispering to her, I’m freezing deadly, and her whispering back that the night is nearly over. Sometimes to unfreeze his blood Merv stands in his nest and stamps his feet cracking sticks and flaps his arms in unintentional mimicry of the
birds now gone.

  But due to mean-spirited gods the spin of the world stalls and the sun is mired on its far side and day never comes and night is eternal entropy and colder and colder and in its thrall all things will die. Shivering is a sort of blinking vision of death, and during the night Barwon sobs as his teeth chatter and Bridget Wray hugs him tighter. Periodically Merv stands and stamps and flaps his arms just to move his blood through his muscles. An alien avian in a city of abandoned nests looming against the stars with his arms beating the air forlornly for flight. They chuckle at Merv, Bridget squeezing Barwon, and him, the cold being so brutal, no longer taking offence.

  Nearing dawn it occurs to Barwon that being able to sing up a river he is likely also able, with a song or chant or some really hard wish-thinking, to reverse the flow of the water that has taken their boat away and to bring it back to them. What sort of song might reverse the flow of water across this great dead forest? A silent internal song, or a song voiced and acted? He begins with a silent chant, a Yangarna corroboree song repeated and ululated through his eyes out in the direction The Party Animal disappeared. But it doesn’t seem right and it doesn’t seem powerful or legitimate and not a muscular magic that might return a boat to its rightful owner. So he begins to whisper a soft song, ‘Hey … yiii … iii … iii … ho … wow … oww … oww,’ while he reaches out with his skinny arms and hands and beckons come hither at the night where the boat went, reeling it in on a line of song.

  ‘What are you singing about?’ Bridget Wray asks him.

  ‘I’m singim’ that boat back ’ere, eh. I singimup one time … I singimup two time, no worries.’

  Bridget Wray accepts the boy’s need to feel he has some control so she urges him on. ‘Good. Get your aboriginal, indigenous dreamtime shit together, boy. Call that boat back here. And don’t spare the horses, I’m freezing.’

  ‘It’s not horses.’

  ‘No. It’s not horses.’

  ‘Shut up and let me concentrate my shit.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Hey … yiii … iii … iii … Ho … wow … oww … oww …’

  ‘What’s going on over there?’ Merv asks.

  ‘Barwon is singing the boat back here. Shut up and let him concentrate.’

  ‘If he sings the boat back here I’ll promote him to captain and I’ll cook him all the scrambled eggs and bacon he can eat.’

  ‘Shut up, ol’ Merv. That shit a distractin’ vision. Bacon an’ shit …’ There is silence awhile before Barwon sings again. ‘Hey … yiii … iii … iii …’

  She sits on the foredeck watching dead trees gliding past on either side toward her father, who is getting smaller in distance, making desperate arm signals to her. But what is he saying? What is he telling her? Soon he is lost from sight in the trees and she is drifting on. She spends the first hour of her exile sitting on the foredeck crying, occasionally stamping the aluminium skin of the deck with her feet and the boat gonging meekly, as a bell rung by a beetle. The dead trees move past, blackening ghoulishly in the twilight with their arms raised in menace. No noise but the slapping of wavelets on the hull and the shard-like chirrup of bats snatching gnats off the breeze. Then a stone-curlew’s mournful cry marks the end of the world. No girl can endure this alone. It sends her scurrying below decks.

  In the cabin she sits the first part of the night in darkness, vowing to take no comfort while her father and Bridget and Barwon are out there shipwrecked in the water and maybe dead or dying of cold and curlews. But after a brief eternity she tells herself it really won’t alter her father’s fate, anyway, if she just goes to the toilet, and then has a drink, and maybe something to eat. And how could it make Daddy any more drowned or stranded if she watched Jack Sparrow do some adventures?

  So she goes to the toilet and then turns on a light and gets herself a Chokito and lights the small butane stove and pours the wondrous granules from a silver satchel that, with steaming water added, alchemise into a chai latte of some lip-smacking nuance. She moves to the forward cabin with her steaming mug and her choco late bar and, as Barwon predicted, looks to Johnny Depp in his swashbuckling adventures for comfort. In her bunk the battle between the forces of good and evil, both real and cinematic, contend. Her dad, Barwon, Bridget … Jack Sparrow, Davy Jones and the Kraken. The terrifying fate of her father keeps interjecting into the movie. What ghouls is he surrounded by in this new lake?

  The drifting boat strikes a tree gonging loudly and Em ducks below the blankets because this is surely a galleon of dead men ramming The Party Animal and boarding her with knives between their teeth and monkeys on their shoulders. She stays under a long time while fear turns to fatigue and the soundtrack of Pirates of the Caribbean begins to narrate her dreams as she prays for the life of her father and those other two.

  The Party Animal drifts on under a staggering welter of twinkling stars, unpirated, unpiloted. Em sobbing and then sleeping while the fine-featured but dark-toothed Captain Jack Sparrow wins the girl, loses the treasure, loses the girl, wins the treasure, and just generally juggles the baubles of fortune while wearing a three-cornered hat.

  By midnight the vast deserts to the north whose airs have been corkscrewing upward on sunlight in myriad spirals throughout the day sucking air in from the coast have cooled. The thermal spirals having lofted stratospheric decelerate and come apart and the cooled air becomes heavy and begins to fall back to earth displacing the air below, pushing it back out toward the coast. The day-lit continent, having breathed in, is now a darkened land breathing out.

  The Party Animal’s journey slows and becomes still and then swings about on the turning tide of air and her journey is reversed and she begins to retrace her steps through the great dead forest of the Menindee Lakes. She passes by the same sere trees, touches the same snags and spins in antithetical circles. She nettles and wakes the same shags she nettled and woke in her first passing at dusk, so, as heads that lifted from under left wings and periscoped slowly left-to-right tracking her transit suspiciously before tucking under right wings, now, in this second passing, lift from under right wings and periscope slowly right-to-left as she floats past again back to whence she came. The shags watch her until she is gone once more before tucking their heads under their left wings.

  Being cold, and a distraught father and a broke farmer, Merv is awake watching dawn light the waters of the dead rookery when he sees The Party Animal come spinning ghostly slow toward them out of the ancient timber. He sits up straight in his nest, a chick watching its mother return. She will pass to the south by half a kilometre, he calculates. Clenching his teeth he eases himself into the cold water and begins to breaststroke toward the line of her trajectory. Once in front of her on her line he treads water and waits for her to come, then swimming round to her stern he hauls himself onto the gunnel-step and sits huffing, wiping water from his face and letting the urge to cry ebb. Down the stairs and through the galley he finds Em curled in the forward bunk asleep while Jack Sparrow duels beside her. He leans down and turns off the DVD and puts his face in the crook of her neck and breathes in her scent and shuts his eyes a moment, the very smell of love and his most beloved smell in all the world. He kisses her and she starts and opens her eyes. ‘Daddy.’ She sits up and they hug with her beginning to cry in sobs and he in silent tears. Knowing he has set them on a path on which they are bound to part, he now knows how hard this next parting will be. Hard on him, but hard on her as well. ‘Oh, Em. You little dill. Why didn’t you throw the anchor over?’

  ‘Daddy, it was heavy and it was stuck. I thought you drowned. Did Bridget drown? Did Barwon drown?’

  ‘No. They’re all right. They’re sitting up in a bird’s nest like birds. Like big, bald birds. We better go and pick them up before they start laying eggs.’

  These two birds are woken from light sleep by the boat’s engines and as they watch her come through the trees Barwon stands in the nest smiling victoriously. He ushers the boat in with his hands wailing his song
high into the dawn. ‘Hey … yiii … iii … iii … Ho … wow … oww … oww …’ Letting them all know who performed this miracle. Bridget Wray starts laughing and that laughter turns quickly to tears and she covers her face with her hands. Merv bumps the boat’s prow crackling into their nest and they climb aboard. If Barwon had any lingering suspicions that he was the father of this flood, then the miracle of the returning boat has defeated them. Even shivering and huddled with cold he is too impressed by his magic not to boast. ‘I’m a helluva river man gangsta dude, all I can say. You see that? You dudes see? How that boat an’ that girl get back here? I sing it in. I got powers of old ways, baby. This girl hit me on the head with a brick, but I don’t care I save her anyway, cause if you got the power you got to use it right and be thankful and no prejudice. She violent, but I give her a seconchance. Everyone deserve a seconchance, so I save her arse, eh. ’N’ it wasn’t even hard work for me. That only a little song for little boats. Shit. I got bigger songs ’n’ that. I got songs could … well look roun’ at all this water, eh. That’s my song done that right there.’

  Em steps forward and wraps her arms around him, his cold flesh making her know the seriousness of her crime and bringing tears to her eyes. ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Barwon warns her. ‘Everyone huggin’ me too much.’ He looks at Merv. ‘Don’t you get any ideas.’

  Bridget Wray hustles him below decks to the shower and in there among the hissing water they can hear him practising verses and phrases of songs that might refashion the world to his advantage.

  On the northern shore of Lake Menindee is Sunset Strip, a string of a hundred holiday shacks belonging to the people of the waterless town of Broken Hill a couple of hours drive away. Two-storey iron and cement-sheet weekenders, pieced together by miners using materials begged, borrowed and filched from the mine. Strung along a white sand shoreline, each has a deck overlooking what has been for a decade a bare lake bed. Before that, back when there was water, kids used to splash at the shore fishing for yabbies and yellowbelly, and paddle tinnies and swim. Further out on the lake speedboats pulled skiers through the desert. Out front of the shacks men and women stood around fires topped with sizzling meats, drinking and laughing, the ambient buzz of motorboats ratifying the ease of this eternal oasis.