The Last Pulse Read online

  ‘More than a quarter mill?’

  ‘I’d love to, Sal. But wait for my speech. If I tell you before I tell the Brisbane media it’ll piss ’em off. They got to be treated right.’ A silver limousine is crossing the dusty floodplain toward the marquees. ‘The Minister’s here, Sal. Gotta go.’

  Just then he sees a B-double stopped way out on the levee where it has no business to be. What type of bloody idiot could get so lost he ends up driving along a levee in a B-double semi-trailer? He calls to Gerald who is a kid out here on exchange from Warnhurst Agricultural College in Cornwall, England to get some experience of big cotton and, quite frankly, as useless as tits on a bull. Gerald is dressed in a stripy blazer and white trousers as if he were dolled up for some Eton pudding-eating contest. ‘Gerald, see that idiot out there with the truck?’

  ‘I do, Mr Auster,’ Gerald nods eagerly to show he can see the idiot especially well.

  ‘That fuckwit’s lost. Do you know the place well enough to direct him back to the home paddock? To admin?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then do it, would you, Gerald. Tell him Reg Auster says, Piss off out of there as quick as he likes.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  The people here are proud of Minister Bridget Wray, for she is a local girl. But they also feel a mild disquiet in her presence, for she has got above them climbing the Stairmaster. Since becoming the National Party rep and being elected as the Member for Warrego and being included in the Queensland Government cabinet and being appointed Minister for Environment and Resource Management and moving to Brisbane she has become … thin. She went away a waddler with a yearning to scratch a few local backs. She has come back an habitué of the gymnasia of Brisbane and presents like some sort of slave of the personal trainer and cruelly shapes herself to make others look dowdy. Many men here drink a carton of beer a night while their women challenge and defeat a sponge of one hue or another. They feel snubbed by a daughter of the district whose heart is no longer a ruby in a vault of adipose tissue.

  Up the slope she comes at a bound in her pantsuit, with her man-secretary trailing. She extends her hand to Reg and they shake for the cameras. ‘Welcome to Karoo, Minister. We’re honoured you could come.’

  ‘Great to be home, Reg. What a lovely day for it.’ He squires her across the plastic sward greeting the locals. They eye her up and down. Well, yeah, she is a bit thin, but then, she’s done the right thing by us. That’s got to be admitted. She hasn’t forgotten where she comes from. She’s about to cede us another ocean. She knows which side her bread’s buttered.

  The nascent urge to piss. Just a rumour of discomfort in the urethra, it doesn’t portend anything too critical at present. But still, a distant siren, coming closer. A soft ache that nags at the mind as though it were the flickering pilot-light of some illness. An ache that if ignored will bring you undone via some embarrassment. An unseemly bolt for the dunny with a gush of contradictory excuses left floating in your wake as people raise their brows and look at each other and smirk. A spotting of the pantsuit. Sweat on the brow, legs crossed, while a pastor enters the third trimester of his eulogy for the dear departed. A public figure can easily be brought undone by wayward ablutions.

  One of the first lessons you learn in public life is to piss early; piss often; piss before stepping out; piss even when you don’t need to piss, because you will need to piss at crucial moments if you don’t piss needlessly in advance. Drain yourself, desiccate yourself, wrinkle the brow and push, wring the bladder.

  More and more urgent, that urge to piss, until you’re talking to the Mayor about local employment opportunities and instead of agreeing, ‘It’s a scheme that can’t miss,’ you say, ‘I’d scream for a piss,’ which could never happen, but is anyway the sort of stupid thing you think about when your need to piss is becoming all-encompassing and you should be concentrating on mayors and schemes of employment. So. To go to the toilet now, or sit through all the speeches and congratulations in this marquee while the urge screams like a fire truck that has come to a screeching halt outside your building with firemen leaning from its cab hailing you with a megaphone.

  Minister Wray leans to her man-secretary and whispers, ‘How long will Reg’s speech go? How many minutes?’

  ‘Told me twenty, give or take, Minister.’

  ‘Damn.’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Great. I’m going to duck out to the little girls’ room before my reply.’

  ‘Right. Did you see the portaloos? Down the mod-grass path beyond the cars. You want someone to show you the way?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll find them. Just be a mo.’

  The Minister creeps, bent and smiling, between the tables out the side of the marquee. People smile back quizzically. The Chairman is speaking. Once outside she heads down the plastic lawn path onto the floodplain where she can see the tops of three portable toilets in the scrub.

  Reg’s amplified voice echoes out of the marquee across the plain. ‘A further enhancement of Karoo’s position at the head of the development of Australia’s burgeoning cotton industry as well as Queensland’s pre-eminent position in that industry. So I hope you’re all wearing cotton today and none of those horrible carcinogenic synthetics.’ He pauses as an ululation of laughter drifts from the marquee.

  A hundred metres out along a track below the levee discreetly hidden in the scrub and sheltered behind a shade-cloth screen are three portaloos hired from Looxury Hire in Dillandbundy. Minister Wray waits at a small distance as a woman emerges from one. ‘All yours. All yours, Minister. All vacant.’ The woman smiles and Minister Wray fights an impulse to thank her.

  The portaloo has a translucent roof that sheds green light onto her skin. Sitting there watching her bare thighs green as the Hulk she can hear Reg speaking in the marquee quite clearly. ‘An additional … 250 thousand megalitres …’ Though this was the exact size of the water grant that had been rumoured, people cheer loudly with whoops and finger-whistles on hearing it confirmed. The Shire of Dillandbundy just got richer.

  Minister Wray hurries to finish. The announcement of the size of the water grant will be the climax of Reg’s speech. She must be on hand to respond and to take congratulations.

  She is buttoning her pants as the first explosion woofs through the scrub and shudders the portaloo and shrapnel pounds and rattles against its side. She grabs the hand-basin for balance. Dirt begins to rain down on the translucent roof, blacking out the interior. A second, closer explosion bangs the portaloo like a gong and it tilts and falls on its side as she scrabbles for the door catch in the sudden darkness, whimpering on all fours as the sewage begins to wash back out the toilet from whence it was placed and rises in foul tide around her.

  The marquees are uprooted tumbling across the plain like storm-borne barns, comet-tails of Akubras and table napkins sucked along in their wake. Suddenly naked to the sky, the twin congregations of celebrating Queenslanders are revealed as two hundred replications of dread. Bruegel might have painted this. Round-faced villagers with their lips drawn back over yellow teeth and their piggy eyes showing extensive cowardice, each one of them hurriedly beseeching the Lord’s forgiveness for buggery, theft, incest … a smorgasbord of wrong. Thankfully the brown fog of the explosion comes rolling over them before we can see more. But we should not forget the moan that comes rising through this dust is made of a thousand fetid confessions. Were we somewhere else in Australia this moan would be made of sweeter communications. But we are in Queensland.

  People begin to call to each other through the dust. Most are on their knees, coughing. Some lie on their backs with the mystery of this Armageddon storming through their minds. They cannot see the breach in the levee nor, through their confusion, can they divine what has happened.

  ‘Reg? Reg, are you okay?’ someone shouts.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘What about Dougal? Where’s Dougal?’

  ‘I’m here. Where’s Loris?’

  ‘I
’m blind. I got mud all over me. What was that? Was that a bomb?’ They turn toward Loris in the brown fog. He has said what they were all about to think. ‘Have we been bombed?’ shouts someone else. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘A bomb?’

  ‘Two bombs.’

  ‘Where’s the Minister?’

  ‘The Minister?’

  ‘Minister?’ a man shouts.

  ‘Minister?’

  ‘Minister Wray?’

  ‘Where’s the Minister?’ the man asks.

  ‘Missing.’

  ‘She went to the little girls’ room.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘She needed a leak.’

  ‘The portaloo? The Minister was down there below the levee?’

  ‘That’s where the explosions came from.’

  ‘I’m just going to lie here.’

  ‘Who is?’

  ‘Me. They’ve killed a Minister.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘I don’t know. Arabs.’

  ‘God. They might be all around us with guns. They might be coming for us.’

  ‘It wasn’t any Arabs. It was the guy with the truck.’

  ‘Why did he want to kill the Minister?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Once you’ve killed a Minister other people are nothing. I’m laying here. I’m just laying here pretending to be dead till the cops arrive.’

  ‘He didn’t know she was out there. It was the dam. He blew the dam. Listen.’

  Sightless in the brown air they crane their necks to listen. Through the ringing in their heads they feel as much as hear the immense slide of water, like a planet wafting dreamily by on some rare orbit, an ocean sluicing past, curling and kissing and lapping at the earth as it goes.

  Eleven wet seasons are trapped in the catchment bay. Five floods. A harvest of twenty-three immense storm cells that have fallen over eleven years is gathered together behind the levee and now sent out into the world. Through the breach, a stampede of water, indignant to be imprisoned and kept from its historic journey. The starting gun fired, it is galloping across the grey dirt and chasing furred things treeward and farm utes homeward and pushing livestock up against fences and grabbing boughs and troughs and rolling vehicles and generally behaving like a soldier home from the war on leave; no gentle caress here for my lover the river. No, a rampant lust-mad rush, the abstinence of many moons bursting at last.

  At the front of the water, receding into distance down the course of the Culgoa River, is an avalanche of things being doused, tumbled, smashed and made mobile, a vast flotsam deluging downstream; LandCruisers and spray tanks and felled trees that had been piled for burning and old stock troughs and feral goats and staff amenity portables and piles of corrugated iron and shipping containers and super bags and garbage and the guests’ cars and seed hoppers and the ploughed earth made mud and made mobile at the chocolate forefront of the charge.

  The gates hang from bore-pipe uprights as thick as a man and they are each fifteen metres wide with a suspension cable reaching out to their mid-point and on one in wrought iron is ‘KAROO’ and on the other is ‘STATION’. They allow the passing of enormous graders and dozers and they announce, with Texan hubris, that you are entering a place of gargantuan ambition where Empire Builders and men of Big Ideas roam. Merv slows at the gatehouse and his dust rolls over the man there in his khaki shorts and shirt and his Aviators who has walked out to meet him.

  ‘What you got for us?’ he shouts up at Merv over the truck engine.

  ‘ANFO.’

  ‘From South Australia? We get our ANFO from Rocky. Frawlins.’

  ‘That’s where I’ve come from. I was takin’ it down to Port Augusta. Got a call divertin’ me here. Frawlins rig on the way here from Rocky shit itself in Roma and they tell me you gotta have ANFO, like, now. So they diverted me.’

  The gateman scans a sheet on his clipboard, shaking his head. ‘I don’t even have a Frawlins rig booked in for today.’

  ‘Mate, I was told to bring this here and I brung it even though I’m gunna have to go back to Rocky and fill up again for me bloke in Augusta who’s gunna get his ANFO two days late and be pissed off.’

  ‘Righto, righto. Follow the signs to admin. They can deal with you if they don’t wanna let me know what’s goin’ on.’ He points up the drive with his clipboard.

  Merv had studied Karoo on Google Earth, leaning into the screen following its tracks and levees and its checkpoints and administration centre, watching its fields flood and drain, its cotton grow and be harvested. All the while he whispered godly threats of cataclysm while looking down on this evil ranch from space. ‘Crack it there and there … Whole damned abomination washed away … Repatriated. Re … patriated.’

  He drives out now along the Main Levee South Road, Em crouched at her window and staring at the bare chocolate-coloured fields laser-ploughed and planted for cotton that run out into distance as far as she can see. A grooming as big as a shire and as exact as architecture. A forest of cotton is planned to flourish here. ‘All stolen,’ her father says aloud. Em doesn’t ask what is stolen. She is used to snippets of Merv’s internal conversations surfacing into the quiet of the day. They are beyond interpretation. She continues tuning the radio up and down the dial to find a song that isn’t just a paranoid yodel against city folk and fast women.

  Just short of midday Merv pulls the truck up on a levee alongside the main water storage basin at Karoo Station. He unties the ropes that fix The Party Animal to the top of the truck and takes one and ties it to the bull bar and strips off his clothes and clamping the other end of the rope in his teeth he swims naked out into the tan coloured water, shouting indecipherable falsetto nonsense at Em to let her know how cold it is. He breaststrokes the rope around a grey eucalypt standing drowned in the water and then back to shore where he hands the rope to Em and climbs out onto the muddy bank slipping and sliding and Em laughing at him. Wet and muddy he dresses quickly pulling on his boots over socks of mud. ‘Yuck,’ she says. ‘There’s mud inside your clothes.’

  ‘Mud inside your clothes feels good,’ he says. ‘I might start a fashion. Mud instead of undies. Mundies.’

  She laughs and pulls a face. ‘I won’t wear them.’

  He takes the rope back from her and climbs up on the truck and ties it to the bow of The Party Animal. Climbing down he picks Em up and puts her in the truck cab. ‘Move over.’

  He edges the truck forward slowly and the rope tightens around the tree and pulls the bow of The Party Animal off centre toward the water. They hear it scrape across the truck overhead. Merv looks up and sees it hanging over the side. As the boat begins to slide he guns the truck to give it some impetus and it lands with its bow spearing deep and a wash of water running up its decks and out its stern as it bobs up shaking off water like a dog. Merv moves the truck forward and The Party Animal is towed out around the tree and back to shore.

  ‘Is this our river holiday now?’ Em asks.

  ‘Nearly. But you don’t think this is a river, do you? This is a boring old dam. First I’ve got to make the river for our holiday.’

  ‘How are you going to make the river?’

  ‘Unmake the dam. Water doesn’t want to be a dam when it can be a river.’

  ‘What’s your favourite way water can be?’ she asks. ‘Mine is a waterfall.’

  ‘Well, waterfalls are cool. But a waterfall would crash and mangle us. I think a flood. A flood is a type of flat waterfall you can ride on. But it’s serious, too. It knows where it’s going and it’s determined to get there. Going on holiday on a flood is like going on holiday on an elephant. Nobody can stop you. All they can do is wave and take photos.’

  Em pouts and nods seeing the sense in travelling on a flood. ‘I’ve never seen a flood. Will we be on a flood this time?’

  ‘Indeed we will. You tidy up The Party Animal, because she’s shaken up from how we launched her. Pots and pans will be jumbled and the fish fingers will probably
be tucked up in your bed. And while you tidy up, I’ll organise this dam into a flood.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Merv stops the truck out on the main levee across the Culgoa floodplain and unhitches the trailer before driving on another three hundred metres and stopping the truck again. Sitting in the cabin he takes two sticks of gelignite from beneath his seat and using a wooden skewer pokes a hole down the length of each. From the glove compartment he takes a small wooden box. Inside, nestled separately in woodwool are two silver detonators resembling AA batteries. He takes them in hand and climbs down from the cab and from the truck’s underbelly takes a spool of electric wire and sits it on its stand in the dirt. Inserting the wire into one detonator he crimps down on it with his teeth before pushing the detonator into the hole in the gelignite. Moving very deliberately now he walks back to the trailer pulling the wire behind and it unrolling from the spool as he goes. At the trailer he climbs the ladder carefully, never letting the gelignite touch metal, and opens the top hatch and burrows the gelignite down into the fertiliser as deep as he can reach, wincing in the upwell of diesel fumes in his mouth and nostrils and eyes. He closes the hatch gently on the wire so as not to broach its insulation and breathes the clean air deeply.

  Back at the truck he splices another wire onto the main spool and climbs onto the trailer, treating the gelignite like a piece of the true cross. Opening the hatch he sinks the second stick of gelignite into the ANFO up to his armpit. Again he gently closes the hatch on the wire.

  As he is making his way back to The Party Animal, swinging the wire spool and it whirring and unrolling rhythmically in his hand, a teenager in a ute pulls up and climbs the levee to intercept him. The kid is dressed like a clown in a striped coat and white trousers and a pink shirt, his florid face white-goggled from wearing sunglasses. He walks alongside Merv for a while before asking, ‘’Scuse me, sir?’

  Merv squints at him, another paedophile deep in fog. ‘Oh fuck,’ Merv says. ‘A cretin shirt-lifter.’