The Last Pulse Read online

  But this place was forsaken when the water stopped coming and the lake dried up and the cool breeze it gave off ceased to blow. It became a peculiarly Australian joke, a water resort, a line of beach houses harbouring a flotilla of cobwebbed speedboats, in a desert.

  Now the water has returned in such abundance the road from Broken Hill is closed and the shacks are still standing empty, with their legs in the flooded lake and water all around as far as the eye can see and the dust-covered boats bobbing at dock beneath them, nuzzling against their foundations.

  The crew of The Party Animal look on the long strip of shacks in silence, as they might at a corpse. Even the children recognise some retreat of civilisation here, some ebb of humanity. Perhaps they have seen ghost towns on TV. Merv pilots the boat toward them, singling out a shack with a ‘FOR SALE’ sign on its front deck. As they get closer they can read, ‘$55,000 O.N.O. What Better Place To Sit And Wait For The Water?’

  ‘Why does it say that?’ Em asks.

  ‘Jesus Christ, you a bozo. The sign was here before I sung the river to flow again. It was all dry here, then. Ain’t that right, Merv.’

  ‘Sure is, Barwon. You ever see a magician whip a tablecloth out from under a whole table load of stuff? And leave the stuff, vases and bowls and cutlery all standing there? That’s what Queensland did to these people. Let ’em build holiday houses around a lake, then whipped the lake out from under them.’

  Barwon nods. He’s heard much talk during his short life about the perfidy of Queensland and the death of the river. ‘But their Queenland magic only seconrate magic, eh. Look here now plenny water. They make me Mayor if they was any people left here.’

  ‘Let’s spend the night here,’ Merv says. ‘After our night in the nests I reckon we could use a night in a house. Who’d like a night in a lakeside holiday house?’ No one answers. The place is so clearly a party interrupted.

  They tie The Party Animal to the front deck and climb the stairs. The shack isn’t locked, its simple furnishings not worth that caution. A couple of bedrooms, and a bathroom-laundry all off a large kitchen-living room, the threadbare carpet starting where the kitchen stops, the whole space hung about with calendars from Barich Bros Service Station in Broken Hill, the same bikini girl in various red rocky landscapes. Opposite the kitchen sliding glass doors open onto a deck looking across the lake. Many birds in the distance.

  Merv wades knee-deep beneath the shack and turns on the gas so they can cook and have hot showers. Then, working around the antique, dust-covered speedboat that floats there, he searches among the standard junk that accumulates under houses, the gas bottles, tyre tubes and kayaks bobbing in the shallow water, the carpet rolls and garden tools mouldering and rusting. Dead barbecues and eskies with many bullet wounds. Until he finds a jerry can half-filled. He cracks it and sniffs and it is petrol. Repeating the search beneath shack after shack, he finds enough morsels of fuel here and there to refuel The Party Animal and fill his jerry cans.

  Upstairs in the shower Bridget is washing Em’s hair amid the stale-smelling steam of tank water, using an ancient cracked and yellowed soap made of lanolin. ‘You have got the most beautiful hair. Did your mother love washing it for you?’

  Em stands with her head lowered and her eyes squinted shut in the soapy downpour, talking through the runnels of water falling from her face. ‘Of course she did. That was her job. Don’t you even have any nieces whose hair you can wash?’

  ‘Well, I do have nieces. But I never knew what fun washing hair was. Maybe when I get home I’ll become their official hair washer.’ Bridget Wray lathers Em’s tresses, enjoying the touch of her, the grip of her skull, running her fingers across her small ears and even down across her cheeks and jawline and massaging her neck. Enjoying Em’s trust in her and need of her.

  ‘I didn’t think you did know about hair washing. You’re a bit rough. But that’s all right. I like you doing it anyway. You can wash my hair until you go home and ask your nieces. Or if you have girls yourself, then, they will be baby girls and we can both wash their hair if I come to visit you.’

  ‘You think you’ll know me when I have girls? How do you think you and I will stay friends after this boat ride?’

  Em thinks about this. ‘You’re an adult. And adults can do things they want. So you have to be in charge of it.’

  ‘Okay. Okay, I’ll be in charge of it.’

  Merv lays the shotgun barrel out the toilet window at the rear of the shack resting it on the sill with Barwon peeking over the sill beside it, whispering, ‘Get stuck into ’em, eh, Merv. Hurry up now, man. They be take off by the time you get ready. Open up on ’em. Come on. Shit, slowman.’

  Merv shoots into the flock of hardheads swimming behind the house, both barrels emptied and burring an ellipse of water through their midst before their wings are unfurled and the flock explodes skyward leaving six floating dead or flapping brokenly atop the water. He unropes the dinghy tied beneath the house and he and Barwon row it toward the ducks, the boy leaning out and snatching them up, wringing the neck of each. As they approach the last it flaps across the water unable to lift into the air, stopping when the dinghy stops, moving when it gets close, its head lowering sleepily into the water and rising again at the approaching oar-splash. Merv lays down the oars and gives it another barrel. The water flinches white all around it and the bird is still. ‘Rhinocide, right there,’ Barwon says. Merv rows to the orange tree behind the house and the boy picks half a dozen oranges, dropping them into the boat with the lifeless ducks.

  Merv guts and plucks the ducks on the verandah overlooking the lake, Barwon throwing their heads and viscera as far out into the water as he can and holding the feathers high into the wind and releasing them and watching them fall spinning to the water. Picking the down from his sticky fingers he flicks it to the air and it floats out across the lake on the breeze.

  Merv splashes oil in a camp oven and lays the headless ducks inside; quartering two of the oranges he throws them in before pouring a bottle of the house-owner’s red across the puckered blue-white flesh of the birds and bombing them with halved potatoes and sitting the camp oven on the stove top with a blue ring of gas flame fondling its underside.

  With the arrival of the water the many small animals that were living beneath these buildings have risen into the ceilings and a timpani pawfall and claw-scratch can be heard overhead and occasional hisses and snarls leak through the plasterboard. ‘We should fire some shots up there quiet them bastards down,’ Barwon says.

  Merv stops and looks at him. ‘Barwon, we are not going to fire any guns at this person’s ceiling. Okay?’

  ‘Okay, then. But keep it handy case they start comin’ down here.’

  Em finds a Monopoly board and begs Barwon to play with her. ‘It’s fun. It’s about who owns all the things and who gets all the money and is the winner. You can own hotels.’

  Barwon is sceptical. A hotel is just a place for adults to get drunk and fight as far as he knows. He runs his palms back and forth over his bare knees. ‘You kill the enemy dudes?’

  ‘You don’t kill anyone. You sell them things.’

  ‘Gotny guns, this Monplee?’

  ‘It’s not a guns game.’

  ‘You don’t shoot no one?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m not playin’ then, eh. Sounds borin’, eh.’

  Em begins to beg, and Barwon, having a younger sister, knows the only end to this please, please, please is when it turns into her sulking and then she won’t lend him her bike or help him feed the dogs and the easiest thing to do is play her damn game and beat her at it so bad he can tease her about how bad she is at it so she’ll never ask him to play it again.

  But when they sit cross-legged on the thin carpet to play the game he finds it has many moving parts and many puzzling rules that seem to favour Em and that seem reminiscent of rules that have stymied him elsewhere in life and he can’t seem to make any headway toward victory by force of will and can
’t figure out how to cheat at it yet. The dice always seem to land his racing car token in hot spots where he has to pay electricity bills and go to jail. And then Em holds the dice up to her lips and gives them a little pep-talk, ‘Please, please for a seven and if I buy Oxford Street I will never make Barwon pay to land on it.’ Of course given a Christian type lie like that Fate falls for it hook, line and sinker and gives her her seven and she buys Oxford Street and quick as a flash raises hotels and motels and makes Barwon pay through his scrawny arse because, she says now, it is the rules and it wouldn’t be playing the game properly if she didn’t make him pay. The whole shitty fix seems like life back in Dickenson to Barwon, and he is tempted many times to move his racing car token on with a silent song of the type with which he made the river flow and The Party Animal return. To chaperone his silver car with an incantation past the dangers of Go Directly To Jail and past those outrageously expensive hotels she has on Mayfair and Park Lane. And at one point he does perform a sotto voce incantation in order to blast double-sixish through her real estate minefield but his magic backfires so badly with a three and a two that it lands him smack bang on Oxford Street and then in jail and he has to pay all his money to Em in rent and she tells him, that’s it, he’s lost, when your money’s gone you’ve lost. And he says, yeah, that’d be right. You whiteys makin’ a game where the white girl ends with hotels and the blackfella ends in jail. He points down at his racing car token sitting atop the bars of a jail cell window, an innocent prisoner sent into custody by the unexplained dictate of a stone-faced cop. ‘Why I even in jail? Go directly to jail no reason? Oh, I see this before. “No reason” a pretty common crime where I come from, eh. I should have know how this game turn out.’

  Barwon tells himself he didn’t really try singing his way to victory properly, anyway, and that the spell he cast was just sort of mental doodling and not really a concentrated legitimate invocation. And having, in double-quick time, been made a pauper and imprisoned and forced to surrender to an eight-year-old girl, he dignifies his loss and his captivity and assuages his pain by telling himself this silly game was too small a concern to use his powers on. And it makes him feel good that he didn’t unleash his magic on such a whitey white board game with its end already made up before the first dice was ever thrown and the whole damn thing a copycat pisstake of life. A little tart like this Em, bragging to her daddy now, wouldn’t last a minute at the Rhino Cull.

  Merv sets the formica kitchen table with cutlery and serves the ducks out, one to each plate, carving the flesh from Em’s and covering it with gravy, surrounding it with potatoes. He opens another bottle of the household red and pours a glass for Bridget Wray and one for himself, sniffing at it and pronouncing it Victorian crap with its shortcomings redeemed by it having the incomparable bouquet of stolen goods.

  After the simple meals served on The Party Animal the duck is rich and tasty and Barwon prods and explores his with both knife and fork and finding bone wherever he prods he finally just picks the bird up in both hands and chows down on it side-mouthed using his canines and molars to strip the flesh with the gravy painted wide around his face.

  Bridget Wray and Em are swapping glances, laughing at him. ‘Any good, Barwon?’ Bridget asks.

  ‘You a celebrity chef, Merv. A in-jail-for-no-reason dude don’t expect celebrity chef tucker like this.’

  ‘Thanks, Barwon.’ He looks at Bridget Wray, her face dropping out of laughter and becoming troubled with the mention of jail. ‘What’s wrong?’ Merv asks. ‘We’ll have you home soon enough. We’ll be back in my home town in a few days.’

  ‘I don’t know. I should feel worse than I do. I’m kidnapped, a manhunt going on for me in three states. And I’m sitting here laughing, eating wild duck and drinking stolen plonk with my kidnapper.’

  ‘I ent kidnap you. I invent you. I ent a kidnapper.’ Barwon says this holding his duck either end like a corn cob and twirling it searching for meat.

  Staring at this strange boy, Merv says, ‘The upside of being a hostage is, you can forget about your responsibilities. Sit back and enjoy the ride. We get to Bartel there’ll be wild celebrations and the people will crown me King and I’ll demand that they not touch a hair of your head and that you be pardoned. I’ll tell them you’ve seen the error of your upstream ways. I’ll hand you over to the cops and they’ll fly you north to your home state, whose name we will not speak at this happy feast. There will be wild celebrations at your return. Probably a parade with all those little ticker tapes fluttering down out of high buildings thrown by schoolkids granted a day off school in celebration. People will feast on mangos and bananas and whatever else sacred foods you covet up there in the tropics and run the juices of these fruit through their hair and over their loins. You will be returned with a hugely increased majority. Almost certainly elected Premier of the state, I wouldn’t wonder. And for the rest of your life you can dine out on seafaring tales of when you were kidnapped and borne along on the great southward deluge, a righteous flood through a southern desert, shackled to the mast and at the mercy of the mad Crow-Eater water-emancipator Merv the Megalitre.’ She stares at him, smiles faintly, recognising this is all being said to hide from Em the reality that is coming. He takes her smile as cheerfulness and smiles back at her and fills both their glasses.

  ‘Of course, I will be a hero in South Oz, my home-coming a grand affair of bunting and twenty-one gun salutes and flyovers by airforce aces with their smiles distended earward by g-forces. Keys to so many cities will be granted me my pockets will jangle like a Dickens ghost, and the hands of many lovely ladies will be offered to me. The State Opera will compose and perform an opera in my honour, The Last Pulse it will be called, as in … this flood is the last pulse ever coming down this artery, the Darling. And on the left side of the stage there will be vines and crops waved by offstage extras pulling strings, and these will start to wilt when the sun beats on them, the wilting and keeling over performed by more string tricks and stagecraft. And on the right side of the stage will be me, played by Russell Crowe, and then a kettle-drum and cymbal explosion and around me a sudden uprush of smoke concocted, as all fogs, mists, smokes and onstage battlefields are, by the liberal slushing about of dry ice. And then across the stage a great wall of water, as lifelike a tsunami as ever was made by crackling cellophane hauled along by hidden strings. And with it there will be plenty of birds dangled from the roof by fishing line. Nature in abundance, you see. And then the cellophane tsunami will reach the crops, and once inundated they will perk upright erect, with more string tweaks from offstage, and then everyone will smile it up and dance around with their hands and happy faces pointing at me and revealing me as the biblical wonderboy who maketh the waters to flow. The orchestra will go apeshit with crescendo at this stage.’ He takes a drink of wine, nodding and blinking in surprise at the fine opera he has written and witnessed in his mind’s eye.

  Barwon is looking at Merv angrily. ‘That a nice show, eh. That a real good show. I like all that smoke and water, and them birds on strings are cool. But why everyone be looking at you like a wonderboy, eh?’ He shakes his head. ‘No one go for that shit. That a white-armband bullshit opera. Get that old Merv out of there and get Barwon in there. A river man, a million-year-old song and dance from when time was a baby, then the water poke its nose out from stage over this side,’ he throws up his right hand, ‘and shuffle back like a shy pup. But I sing some more an’ out she come again. I sing real hard into high power and she cross the stage all shiny an’ me backin’ off and singin’ her along after me. I be wearing plenty bling and a Lakers singlet. ’N’ then you got the truth an’ the star power. ’N’ that’s a show.’ He stares at Merv. ‘Russell Crowe too old an’ too white an’ too fat to play me. You know any other dudes in showbiz?’

  Merv shakes his head at the boy. ‘No. Only Russell. But you’re right, he’s a little porky, old, white and sane to play a skinny black kid who’s mad as a cut snake.’ He turns back to Bridget Wr
ay. ‘And if I was to endorse one political party or another it would be a democratic bonanza for them, and praps I’ll enter politics, strictly on a state level, mind you, ’cause I know my limitations and am pretty sure the people of the north wouldn’t vote me in as PM nor love me as their Governor-General. So I’ll probably just stick with being Premier of my state as you are of yours and, then, it’s likely we might even be leaders of our states at the same time and you and I in competition for federal funding and for this very water here that either belongs to you or to me. But if that is so, if we face off across the fractured politics of our farflung colonies, I know you will, thinking of our grand adventure together, and how Em and I saved your life, and how you came to know us and then, even … may I suggest … love us just a little, you will let the gigalitres come as they should by right of a million years passage.’

  She smiles at his rambling fairytale. Drinks her wine and holds it for him to refill. The kids seem at ease, in good humour, and she doesn’t want to trouble them by mentioning the real looming repercussions of Merv’s behaviour.

  She shakes her head at him and raises her glass in an unspoken toast. Go Directly To Jail, Merv. Do Not Pass Go. Cancel the flyovers from the F18s and unwrite the silly opera you composed in your own honour. As soon as we get out of here and back to settled areas Em’s childhood and your freedom ends. Poomf. Just ends. The moment I’m no longer a hostage the police will swarm on you and then paddy wagon, cell and courtroom. Charged with terrorism. And maybe in the courtroom you have some weird moment you see as glorious, you make a statement, I suppose, a champion of your people type thing, something Irish, A day will come in a greater court than this … but then prison. And the rest of your life with psychos with teardrop tattoos leaking from their eyes, freaks who pump iron all day to make themselves into massive freaks and who, having become massive freaks, need a cause for their new massiveness. Massive freaks whose lives are so suppressed and compressed the existence of a smiling farmer is an insult they must redress. A smiling farmer elbow-deep and v-necked in tan and otherwise white as paper. You’re a fool, Merv. You could have sold your farm, gone on a pension or the dole and lived in Bartel with Em. A Single Supporting Parent pension. Operas and flyovers and being the hero of your people is the sort of crap that runs through the head of an African dictator.