The Last Pulse Read online

  ‘Who?’ Em asks.

  ‘The people who live where the rain falls. The people we bombed.’

  The water slowed that night and the boat drifted untended as Merv slept on the deck with the ruined citizenry of a dying town still haunting him. In the morning he was cast unconscious in the bottom of the boat and Em alone with a line over the side fishing and talking to the fish she was going to catch. She didn’t hear the screams until they were almost out of earshot receding upstream. She looked down at Merv, wondering whether to wake him, or even if she could. She cupped her hands and shouted to the woman in the floodwater that her father was passed out with a dizzy spell, but when he woke they would come back. They shouted across the water a few times and Em didn’t know if the woman heard or understood. Because after the first few sentences she couldn’t hear or understand anything the woman was shouting.

  The Party Animal bumps sidelong into a tree sounding like a gong and tips alarmingly before swinging downstream. Merv opens his eyes to see Em looking down at him scowling. ‘Seasick,’ he croaks. He gets to his knees and rocks back onto a chair, dizzy and bilious. He is sweating and mops his face with his sleeve. Em is still scowling. ‘Seasick,’ he says. She shakes her head. The Party Animal is spinning downstream revealing the full brown flood rotating around them. The water has risen over the riverbanks and is out across the plains among the saltbush and leopard wood and black box. Em sits down before him. His head is throbbing pain. ‘Seasick,’ he says.

  ‘There is a woman floating in a toilet in the water and we have to go back and save her because she’s screaming.’

  Merv pouts his disbelief.

  ‘I told her you were knocked rotten by a dizzy spell and we’d come back when you woke up.’

  ‘Knocked rotten by a dizzy spell. What did she say about that?’ His voice is hoarse. He stands and leans over the side of the boat and scoops water onto his face, gasping and drinking.

  ‘She said how long does your dizzy spell normally last and I told her it depends if it’s from one bottle or two.’

  ‘Oh. The dizzy spell unmasked as a binge. What did this sheila say then?’

  ‘She said you come back and save me from this flood and I’ll save you from your father.’

  ‘She can stay in the dunny.’

  ‘But I promised her we’d go back. Her toilet is stuck on a tree.’

  ‘What type of woman goes boating in a toilet? She must be a mental patient, or something. I think we shouldn’t get mixed up with her.’

  ‘She’ll sink and she’ll drown.’

  Merv sees Em has dug her heels in. ‘Yeah, yeah. Damn. All right.’ He goes to the back of the boat to the twin Evinrudes and begins to pump fuel into them. ‘How long ago did you see this toilet woman?’

  ‘She’s only around that corner. I woke you up by smacking your feet when we were away from her. I didn’t want her to see you wake up if you were going to be sick.’

  ‘You go in there and fry two eggs for me. And toast and coffee.’ He starts the engines and moves quickly to the cabin and the wheel, wincing at his movements.

  Merv doesn’t know if he will find a woman floating in a toilet. He thinks it unlikely. Em is given to fancy and has invented women in stranger predicaments and might have invented this woman just to serve as conscience to him, to make him know he is watched by wifely, harping figures, even out here. Probably, he thinks, after they’ve rounded a few bends, Em will tell him the woman’s sunk and drowned because he got drunk and couldn’t save her. And she’ll watch him suspiciously to see how this tragedy of his own making sits with him.

  So when he sees the portaloo up against the tree with the water harrying and shaking it and a young woman up out of its top like a sprung jack-in-the-box, he says to Em, ‘How the hell …?’ The woman is flicking at the water around her legs as if trying to keep some aquatic critter away from her.

  ‘I think she’s in poo,’ Em explains.

  ‘Amen …’

  When the woman hears their engines she begins shouting and waving and Merv waves back to tell her it’s okay, he’s seen her. He moves the boat upstream, closer and closer to the sinking toilet until the bow of The Party Animal touches it and the woman scrambles up out of it onto the The Party Animal’s foredeck and begins stripping off her clothes and cursing Merv. ‘Where have you been? Drunk in a boat with a kid. What kind of man are you? I’ve been floating here all night.’ She is down to her bra and panties before she stops and turns away. Merv and Em stare at her.

  ‘Sorry. I was asleep,’ he explains.

  ‘Unconscious.’ Her voice is softer now, her anger ebbing. ‘Does this boat have a shower? I’ve been floating in sewage.’

  ‘Yeah. We can smell that. Shower’s down here. How’d you get out here in that thing?’

  She turns to face them and her nipples are hard, making Merv blink a kind of staccato confusion of lust and propriety.

  ‘I was at Karoo Station yesterday and their dam broke. There were explosions. I’m lucky to be alive.’

  Merv can feel Em looking at him. ‘We were wondering where all this water come from. Weren’t we, Em? We were thinking a cyclone further north must have done it.’

  ‘No. This is all Karoo water. Something happened there. Some accident.’ She runs her hands across her stomach, flicking water away. ‘Can I have a shower?’

  Merv backs the boat off the tree and middles it in the stream. Slapping Em’s hands on the wheel he tells her, ‘Keep it away from trees.’ He ushers the woman below deck and gives her a towel. ‘You’ll have to wear my clothes. We don’t have any others.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m Bridget.’

  ‘Merv.’

  Above decks he takes the wheel from Em and puts an arm around her. ‘You did it,’ she says. ‘She thinks it was an accident. But you did it and she was blown up.’

  ‘We’re not going to tell her that, Em. Okay?’

  ‘You nearly drowned her. You should say sorry.’

  ‘Em, do you want this woman to be frightened of us? And hate us? If she thinks we blew up the dam she’ll think we’re crazy and she’ll be afraid. We don’t want that. But now, if we don’t tell her, she’ll like us because we rescued her. And we really did rescue her. And that makes up for, you know, nearly drowning her. Where would she be now without us?’ He nods at his daughter.

  ‘At her home.’

  ‘No. Back there in that dunny.’

  ‘No. At her home. The dam wouldn’t blow up without us to blow it up.’

  ‘Now listen to me, Em. What happened at Karoo, to their dam, we don’t know a bloody thing about it, okay? We don’t know this woman and why she was there.’

  But Em is back in Bartel at the parade in their honour. A bubble with the image of her smiling father on it emerges from a bassoon; as it floats past her face she blows air on it gently so it won’t crash into her and pop. Merv feels her breath run through the hairs on his forearm. She has her ways of coping, her ways of hiding from plain mean life for a while. Same as he has whisky.

  He climbs along the outside of the cabin to the foredeck and is going to pick up Bridget’s wet clothes but thinks better of it and kicks them overboard. Better she stays dressed in his clothes, a beneficiary of his largesse.

  When Bridget comes on deck in Merv’s jeans and shirt Em smiles at her and looks away so she doesn’t laugh.

  Merv asks, ‘They okay?’

  Bridget holds the jeans out at the front. ‘I need a belt.’

  Merv unbuckles his and draws it through the denim beltkeepers of his jeans and hands it to her and she runs it through the keepers in her own jeans and buckles it, bunching them around her waist. He folds the top of his jeans over to tighten them. ‘I made you some noodles. Here.’ He hands her a bowl with steam rising off it. She sits and begins to eat, sucking noisily.

  ‘Can you take me back to Karoo? People will be looking for me. No one knows what happened to me. They probably think I’m dead.’

  ‘I can�
�t get The Party Animal back to Karoo. She wouldn’t do it in this current. And we don’t have the fuel.’

  ‘Do you have a phone? I need to make a call.’

  ‘No reception out here.’

  ‘Shit. We’ve got to stop somewhere. How far’s the next town?’

  ‘Weilmoringle.’

  ‘We’ll stop at Weilmoringle.’

  ‘There’s nothing at Weilmoringle. Typical Queensland shithole. Probably slide right past it without seeing it.’

  ‘What, then? What’s next?’

  ‘Collerina.’

  ‘We have to stop there, then. How far?’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s nothing there, anyway. Typical New South Wales shithole. Blink and you’ve gone past it. Bound to be evacuated, in any case.’

  She lays her noodles aside and stands. The Party Animal rides above the bed of the Culgoa, its winding course through the flood defined by the walls of red gums on either side of them. The water is high enough for them to see out onto the saltbush plains. Nothing but a spread of floodwater out past the red gum and coolabah and further out on the plain into the desert oak and leopard wood and saltbush and black kites wheeling over the feast of retreating creatures at the rising water’s edge. None of the land around here looks owned. ‘Stop whenever we see any sign of civilisation. I need to get back,’ she says.

  ‘This is Queensland. We might not see any sign of civilisation.’

  She turns to face him. ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘South Australia.’

  ‘You’re a long way from home.’

  ‘We’re on a boat trip.’

  ‘Listen, I’m a Minister in the Queensland government. Planes will be out looking for me.’

  ‘Did anyone see you float away in your toilet, Bridget?’

  Em giggles at the mention of a person floating in a toilet.

  Bridget smiles at her and then says to Merv, ‘I doubt it. It was chaos. Everything was covered in dust. People screaming.’

  ‘Then they probably think you drowned. Probably they’re searching on Karoo itself. You couldn’t have got this far if you weren’t in a toilet.’

  ‘Put me down on that bank over there,’ she points at a hump of dry land.

  ‘That’s not a bank. It’s a shore. Of a rising sea.’

  ‘I don’t care. Put me down there.’

  ‘Minister, we’re in the middle of nowhere. Practically desert. If I put you down out here they’ll find your bones in my jeans. Be a mighty wonder to the forensic people.’

  ‘They’re looking for me. There’ll be planes.’

  ‘No one’s looking for you. They think you’re dead. I can’t believe you’re not dead myself and I’m looking at you.’

  ‘When I saw you floating in a toilet, I thought, “Yuck.” And I thought you must be yucky,’ says Em. Bridget smiles at her. ‘When me and Dad were driving up here we saw a man skateboarding across an outback. I thought you were mad like him. A person going down a river in a toilet.’

  ‘No. I was going to the toilet when the dam blew up.’

  ‘It’s still a funny place to be. No matter if the world blows up, or one of your uncles comes to visit when you’re on the toilet, it’s funny.’

  At twilight Merv slows The Party Animal and begins to look for a place to tie up. Some place on the plain out of the current. ‘Hard to know how far away from the river we should go. I don’t know if the water’s going to keep on rising or start to drop. If we go too far out there and the water drops we’ll be stranded.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on board tonight. Tomorrow, though, I’m getting off.’

  Merv looks over at her sitting on the gunwale seat. ‘You’re a Minister in the state government, you said?’

  ‘Minister for the Environment and Resources,’ she nods.

  He juts his jaw to think on this. ‘What were you doing at Karoo?’ he asks.

  ‘Touching the constituents. Winning some smiles. We were announcing a new water grant.’ She notices Merv stiffen, his face showing anger.

  ‘More water. How much?’

  ‘A quarter million megalitres.’

  ‘You don’t think that changes the river? You don’t think the river’s dying?’

  ‘An exhaustive environmental study was completed before we made our decision. It’s only flood harvesting. It changes nothing.’

  ‘Floods are this river. Floods are the only water from this river that ever reaches the ocean.’

  ‘The ocean? How did the ocean get into this? The ocean is thousands of kilometres away. The border is a hundred kilometres away. Our study finished at the border. This river finishes at the border.’

  ‘Your constituents finish at the border. And the people downstream?’

  She meets his anger with exasperation. ‘What people downstream? There are none.’

  ‘Beyond the border. New South Wales. South Australia.’

  ‘What’s your last name?’

  ‘Rossiter.’

  ‘Mr Rossiter, responsibility has been bestowed upon me by the people of Queensland to serve the people of Queensland. The people south of Queensland probably have their own governments, at a guess. Maybe they have cities and schools and they love each other like we do. But I’m not licensed to care. Any ounce of compassion or litre of water I gift to a foreign devil like you is at a cost to my people, people who empowered me to care.

  ‘I’d like to think I’m not an especially inhumane or uncaring woman. But I am a politician, and I serve an electorate. So from nine-to-five voters are realer than people to me. And no voters live south of our southern border.’ She puts her hands up to stop objections. ‘Fff, I know there are people living downstream. But there are no voters, no constituents, no babies to kiss or old folk to jolly along, no plaques to unveil, no projects to announce, no hearts to win, no hearts to lose, and thus no hearts.’

  ‘So, for you, we’re parasites. Hangers-on. Welfare dependants that have attached themselves to Queensland’s belly. Victoria, New South and South Oz … a trio of tics. Three Mexicos that must be fenced, watched, denied.’

  When Merv stops speaking, rubbing his face to raise more thought, the sound of a distant motor builds into the silence. They both look upstream. A police launch is powering down the Culgoa toward them, putting black cockatoos to groaning flight. ‘They must have airdropped that thing. No way any boat like that lives on this river,’ Merv says.

  ‘I told you they would be looking for me.’ They watch it come until Bridget jumps up and begins to wave to the boat as it backs down, the revs getting close, its nose lowering to the water.

  ‘They’re not looking for you, Minister. They’re looking for me.’ He wraps an arm around her waist and holds a hunting knife up in front of her face with his other hand as the police launch slows, and with a dab of reverse sits ten metres off The Party Animal’s stern while its wake washes through them making her thighs flex against his for balance.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asks. Two large, red-skinned Queensland police dressed in khaki and one wearing an oil-spotted baseball cap and each with guns on their hips lean over the side of their boat taking this in, saying nothing.

  Merv shouts at them, ‘This is Bridget Wray, Minister for the Environment from your Queensland state government. And I think it should be your one and only aim today to get her through this safely. Unhurt. Nice woman like she is.’ He can feel the Minister’s body stiffen further at these words. The policeman wearing a hat takes it off his head and holds it before his belly to talk. ‘Please put that knife down, sir. If that’s Bridget Wray …’

  ‘I am Bridget Wray.’

  ‘Okay, Bridget Wray. We thought you was dead. Nice to see you’re not. Sir, you’ve committed an act of dangerous terrorism …’ The cop sees his mistake and tries to back away from it. ‘No. Look, no one’s hurt yet. Now we know the Minister’s okay, everyone’s accounted for with only a few bumps and bruises. No one’s hurt. No one got hurt back there. We’re not in an irrevers
ible standoff here. Not even nearly. So don’t put us in one. Put the knife down and we’ll talk.’

  ‘One man’s dangerous act of terrorism is another man’s inspired act of irrigation, I suppose,’ Merv says.

  ‘Well, you obviously got some grief with Karoo. And that’s okay. They didn’t see you comin’. You got ’em all right. You done your thing. So just lay down the knife, sir.’

  Bridget twists her head to see behind her. ‘You blew up the dam?’

  ‘I could do that,’ he shouts to the cops. ‘I could lay down the knife and go to a Queensland jail. Or you guys could try and jump me and make famous dickheads of yourselves. Famous officers who escalated a situation and got a Minister killed. Or you could motor on back up the river and leave us alone and the Minister here won’t get hurt. We’ll drop her off on the bank a little way down from here when we’re safe. Course, in case you fellas don’t know, we’re in New South now. So if the people who live along this river find out she’s the Queensland Minister for the Environment they might think the root cause of their degradation has been delivered into their hands.’

  Em, who has been listening below decks, has quietly taken and slid cartridges into the gaping barrels of her father’s double-barrelled shotgun and swung it closed, but can’t work out how to climb the steps from the cabin with a tool so large. She decides to loose a shot up out the door in the direction of the strange voices, then go up empty-handed and negotiate the use of the second barrel.

  The blast lays the coppers flat on deck chinning cold linoleum with their guns drawn. A hand reaches up for its throttle and the police launch begins to reverse away from The Party Animal, seemingly as an act of self-preservation, with no pilot visible. Merv drops his knife to hold Bridget Wray as she falls, despite him knowing she’s dead and can’t suffer further. He lays her flat and goes to the stairs and looks down at Em. Her face is criss-crossed by the fingers of both hands and white smoke coils between father and daughter. The gun is at her feet. The blast was an uglier thing than she’d imagined it would be so she lies about it. ‘I was getting it for you. It went off,’ she explains. ‘By a accident.’