The Last Pulse Read online

  ‘Shit, Em. Leave it where it is. Don’t you ever touch that gun again. You’ve shot the Minister.’

  He turns and kneels above Bridget. Em climbs the ladder and joins him. From head-to-toe no blood at all attends this mysterious death and Em frowns at her and reaches out and flicks her nose hard with her index finger. Bridget sucks breath and sits up on her elbows, alive again. Wrinkling her nose she blinks at Merv. ‘You are the worst fucking father.’

  ‘It just went off,’ Em explains.

  Merv stands and shouts at the police, ‘We’ll set the Minister down on the bank when we’re safe away from you. Go back up to Queensland.’

  ‘You got a little girl there?’

  ‘An undersized gunslinger of the worst variety. Dressed up as a little girl in a sick attempt to confuse the authorities. You try to board us it’s going to mean a gunfight.’

  The officer at the wheel of the launch creeps it forward, his face locked in concentration, trying to think his way through the coming fight to see if it might turn out well. Bridget rises on shaky legs and waves the boat away. ‘Piss off. I’m okay. Only way I’ll get hurt is if you make this into a situation. These two suck in a situation.’

  They leave the police launch sitting still in the water, the police negotiating with them by megaphone and their arguments shrinking and warping to small spastic entreaties as they become distant. They make upward of thirty river bends before the helicopter arrives just after dusk. Merv ties The Party Animal to a red gum and they watch the copter zigzag from one side of the flood to the other moving upstream searching for them.

  The Darling is a lightning-strike of life through a dead country. At anchor Merv looks up through the sparse foliage and skeletal branches of a tree defoliating year-by-year in its dying, as are the numberless trees along this river and the thousand billabongs that lie adjacent that were once intermittently joined by flood and made part of a whole. Trees still grand in architecture but reduced in splendour. Each reminding Merv of a gothic cathedral with its stained glass windows put out by war. In years to come when their architecture has fallen to ruin their grey columns will remind travellers of an ancient civilisation past and gone and its many citizens dead and its majesty only available to archaeologists and fabulists.

  He stares at the night sky through the branches; stars and starlit clouds and the glowings of far galaxies, and a helicopter black against all this, hunting, coming and going, hovering like a night wasp. The Party Animal is grey in the grey water and floats invisible and the copter has endless water to cover and is soon away downstream watching the head of Merv’s flood as it plunges south. Searching for this thief who stole a wave to ride it home through a desert.

  Merv watches the copter go and sucks at whisky in an enamel mug. He will never get to South Australia, he knows. But the water will. The water will flow past his front door and the river will rise until it creeps out into his garden and the orange sand loam will darken to red and the dead roses Jana planted will be washed at their trunks and his drought-dead vines will have their roots soaked by the swirling deluge.

  Some of his neighbours will be saved by it. They will lift drinks on twilight verandahs and toast the silly bastard Merv and thank him for the water. For the brief postponement of the death of their own farms. Soon enough people upstream will build their dams again and catch the water that was the river. But this year we will raise crops and run stock and have a vintage and the towns will come alive one last time with dances and football seasons and petty crime and love.

  Below deck Bridget tucks Em into her bunk. The girl is asking questions of the woman and the woman questions of the girl. The girl has had her thoughts confirmed that the thing her father has done isn’t right to all people. And may not be right at all. The woman has found out that they have come from a drought-broken vineyard in South Australia with the intention of blowing that dam and riding its water back home. She finds it suspicious and frightening that she, guardian of Karoo’s fortunes, she who has bequeathed the bay of plenty upon the cotton empire, could find herself a prisoner to this man, this bankrupt dreamer and terrorist.

  But she feels more troubled for Em than herself. This little girl is under the charge of a mad-brained bear of a father who sees himself on some last glorious ride in defence of his people. Probably he has his own death planned, or at least imagined. Likely it will go spectacularly wrong in a sad way that will involve his daughter, as it nearly did today.

  She is surprised to find her fingertips touching the girl’s jawline. Bridget Wray is a career woman, childless, and unsettled to be feeling motherly toward this girl. She wonders if it might be a sign of aging, the taut spring of ambition that runs her spine becoming fatigued, weighted by gathering maternal inclinations. She takes her hand away. ‘Do you have a mum?’

  ‘No. She got fed up being in the drought and had a heart attack and went on ahead.’

  Merv lies along a bench seat with his enamel mug resting on his belly. He practises his revenge on Jana by imagining all the beautiful women he might have had instead of her. He imagines living happily with Olivia Landy, kissing her neck and laughing with her. And lying in bed alongside Sandy Newman. But the logical slap-down that defeats every imagined romance with every one of these women is Em. If he’d had any of these other women he wouldn’t have had Em. Jana triumphs over her rivals even in his unlikely retrospective daydreams, using Em as her weapon.

  Coming up on deck Bridget Wray sits across from Merv. The breeze and water flow south in sync rustling leaves and lapping water on the hull of the boat. ‘You like a whisky?’ he asks.

  She shakes her head in the dark. ‘So you came up with the idea of blowing up a dam. What was your idea after that? Where did you think this was going after that? If I hadn’t lucked into your arms you’d have been arrested today. You wouldn’t have even got out of Queensland.’

  ‘I got a girl as a hostage.’

  Bridget has an edge to her voice. ‘You brought your daughter to use as a hostage?’

  ‘We all got to pull our weight.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘A fake hostage. Jesus. I wouldn’t hurt her.’

  ‘You don’t think all this,’ she waves her hands at the world in the dark, ‘is hurting her?’

  ‘She’s watched our way of life die. And me turn into who I am now. Then her mum killed herself. So I think in her scheme of hurt this little boat ride isn’t too much.’

  ‘She said her mum had a heart attack.’

  ‘Well, try telling a little girl you found her mum hanging in your workshop.’

  Bridget Wray is quiet awhile, letting that sentence fade, before asking, ‘But where does this go? Where’s the end? The end of this is she loses you, isn’t it?’ He is silent.

  ‘Her mother wasn’t a great mother, I don’t think. Never much for making meals and plaiting hair. She read stories. That was good. She liked the simple, happy stories of when Em was real small. When Em got older and the stories got truer, or more grown up, she stopped reading to her. That tells you about Em’s mother. She closed sad books … left sad men and sad places behind. She did yoga and read horoscopes, always had something to keep her from the sharp point of every day. She was an up person. The smallest thing could be a sign that life was about to get better. A rose bush blooming. Eagles nesting near the house. But big optimism is hard to maintain. It wears you down. And after a while, deep in the drought, the happy books and horoscopes and signs must have all seemed like lies.’

  Merv sits up and pours whisky into his mug and leans over the side and dunks its lip in the water and takes a sip. ‘Darling water. Mud and gum leaves. In other countries I guess they like clear mountain water.’

  He holds the mug out to her and she takes it and drinks. Whisky and dirty water.

  ‘Culgoa water.’ She hands him back the mug.

  ‘That’s the difference between you and me. You think there’s two rivers. I know there’s one.’ He takes another drink. ‘You wo
uldn’t have heard of Butarak.’

  ‘Who?’ she asks.

  ‘Butarak. Aboriginal chief from near where I live, down south of the lakes.’

  ‘What lakes?’

  ‘Salt pans now. The Menindee Lakes. This was back in the early eighteen hundreds, when they were opening the area up. This is way before Burke and Wills passed through on their way up to die on the Cooper.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of him. What about him?’ Bridget lies on cushions on the aluminium bench seat watching the stars drift back and forth across the sky as The Party Animal swings on her rope in the current.

  ‘Okay,’ Merv says, ‘it’s a story about water. To show that water stories are all about the same thing, and it’s not water.’ He looks over at her, a handsome woman lying in the moonlight. ‘This is about a war that’s been going on for thousands of years along the Darling. They didn’t call it the Darling, of course; different tribes had different names for all different sections of the river, like we do, you Queenslanders and us downstream. Some tribes lived along the river and some tribes lived out on the plains away from the river. When times got tough, drought, bad seasons, the plains tribes moved in closer to the river and the river tribes fought them off, tried to scatter them back onto the plains. People would have you believe today the originals shared everything with each other in some kind of high wise way. But that’s just making them something else but human. They were as stupid, greedy and territorial as we are. And the river was worth fighting for. A ribbon of life through a hard land.

  ‘Its water was a mystery to the originals. It appeared at random, no rain to make it. No tell-tale weather patterns. That all happened way to the north. For them the river just ran and swelled, no telling why or when and no way to explain it except in retrospect like religions usually explain things. So they held that the water was sent by all those crazy rainbow spirits and whatever other gods they had.’ A flock of ducks passes heading downstream and Merv is silent listening to their wing-beats and their murmuring one to another.

  ‘They say back then, before white man and sheep, the river was so clear the originals spear fished in it swimming underwater with their eyes open. Their wars went on forever. Every drought meant the river tribes warred with the plains tribes. Spears and nulla nullas. Babies snatched, women taken, heads split open while their owners slept.’ Merv fills his whisky and dips his mug in the river and passes it to her and she sits up and drinks and passes it back and lies again along the seat on her side of the boat. She is not at all scared of him, she realises. Should be. But isn’t. He’s a simple farmer of a type she deals with almost every day.

  ‘Then one day Charles Sturt comes up the river in his white-painted boat with his men holding rifles and all that warring was over forever because here was a real Armageddon turned up in breeches and waistcoats. And what followed made the wars they once had seem fraternal and sporty. So, white man, you know … pretty much the curtain comes down on ancient civilisations wherever he surfaces. He wants it all, of course, and piece by piece he takes the river from the originals, forces them into the back country, away from the river.

  ‘The originals didn’t just wander around. Their journeys were spaced and calculated, you know. Their migrations were a response to conditions. They knew where water would be lying and what billabongs would be full and what billabongs they could reach in dry seasons and what they couldn’t reach because they were too far.

  ‘So, this Butarak the story’s about, he’s leader of a tribe and that tribe were out a long way from the river, hunting, headed for this billabong they knew on a dry creek we call the Jamieson that never filled from rain, but only ever backfilled out of the Darling. Queensland water, you’d say. A four-day walk to get out there from the Darling. The very furthest place a tribe could reach in summer. Game along the river had got thin so they were going to stay out there at the Jamieson billabong. It’s a risk travelling in this country in summer. You miss your billabong and you die. You get there and it’s dried up and you die. But as I say, Butarak and his people knew the land and knew the water.’

  Merv stares silently at the night sky jigsawed through the tree branches conjuring the pieces of the story for telling. ‘So. Women carrying piccaninnies, the men fanned out looking for game. The young kids were first to arrive at the billabong and after four days you can bet they ran down its bank at its water like – like kids – like kids do.’ Merv looks into his mug and sloshes his whisky and drinks. ‘One was killed and two were wounded with gunshots, never reaching the water. Skedaddled back onto the plain and hid in the saltbush and jabbered at their adults about what was there. Which was a party of men hired by the man who’d been granted a three-hundred-thousand acre lease by the Western Lands Council and didn’t want originals on it. Griffin, his name was.

  ‘This was a new tactic in the river wars, thought up by Griffin. He’d had a shitload of trouble trying to run the originals off his land, so his idea was to wait until they headed out to a waterhole or billabong that was too far for them to get back from without taking on water. And here they were. Height of summer. Big sun watching overhead, ready to stamp on any foolishness in the land. Don’t get caught where you shouldn’t be by the big sun. And now Butarak was caught where he shouldn’t be by the big sun and his whole tribe was buggered. Held off from the billabong by gunfire. No way to get back to the Darling without water. Water a hundred metres in one direction and a hundred kilometres in the other and no way to get to either. They got about a day waiting out there in the saltbush and leopard wood before they’re all dead.

  ‘So they warred with the hired guns, who were forted behind fallen trees with their backs to the water. What they had for war was spears and their men were shot down without ever reaching spear-throw. Laying out in the plain watching gunshot wounds bloom on his warriors for no gain Butarak knows his tribe and wife and kids and world is done for. Now this guy was a real loincloth original, but he had worked a few years guiding whitefellas up and down the river and he had some English. He stands up out of the saltbush and waves his hands high and calls to the gunmen he is Christian and an honest guy and loves the King. All of which was lies, but how else do you get to talk to a white man if you don’t share his god and king, you see. He needs to talk.

  ‘The shooting party’s led by a guy called Ralph Leutjans, a German who, when clearing originals petered out as an industry, went on to start up a winery outside Adelaide and became Mayor of Hahndorf. This Ralph waves Butarak in. Butarak, mostly naked, walks slowly down to the billabong and the clothed men stand and track him with their guns. Leutjans tells him stop there, just short of the water. Butarak tells him he knows the King is wise and King of the whole world but this far out from the river there aren’t many men nor much game nor many trees and it is thin country and he had assumed that the King might just overlook this far, hard place as a place beneath his dignity to rule.

  ‘Leutjans told him, No. The King was a meticulous King and had not overlooked this place and it was no special effort for him to rule it.

  ‘That is sad, Butarak tells Leutjans, for the King has other places, but we don’t. And he tells Leutjans that of all the terrible ways to die dying of no water is the worst and his children and women are begging to a great many spirits that have surrounded them in their pain and their despair, but he, Butarak, thought it better to beg to the white men.

  ‘Depends if you’re begging for an easy death or for water, Leutjans told him.’ Merv drinks whisky and passes the mug to Bridget Wray as he marshals his narrative. Purses his lips and looks around at the night.

  ‘This Butarak said to Leutjans that they were beaten and thirst was the devil and that all they wanted was a drink and that when the last man, woman and child had had a drink they would lay down their spears and surrender and march away in chains to whatever place Leutjans and the King decided.

  ‘Leutjans walked up to Butarak and held out his hand and Butarak had seen this ritual before and so he held out his han
d and they shook and then Leutjans told him that shaking hands was a powerful treaty that could not be broken and Butarak nodded his head sadly. He knew with that handshake he was agreeing to finish their way of life forever. That after the last of them drank they’d be chain-ganged away to some mission. But they were under a January big sun, dying of thirst. He had no choice.

  ‘He called to his people and they rose up out of the lignum and saltbush, the children clinging to their mothers. And the men stood their spears in the soil and came on without them, barehanded, heads hung down. Water, see. Water. “And you’ll kiss the bloomin boots of him that’s got it.” That’s Kipling.

  ‘The white men let them come to the water and the women and children lay on their bellies and drank like cats with their arses in the air and the men kept their dignity, stooping, using their cupped hands, taking it piece-by-piece. They slurped water until their bellies were swelled and Butarak oversaw their drinking and to the whitefellas he resembled a man allowing his horse first usage and they understood this. They leant on their guns, making remarks in a light mood of the women’s uncovered parts, happy a general massacre wasn’t called for.

  ‘When the originals had finished drinking the men began to drift up off the cracked mud bank into the saltbush and the kids fanned wide around the billabong rim and snaked off into the foliage and Leutjans said, Hey, hey, hey. What’s this now? We had a treaty. When you’d all drank your fill you were mine and no mistake.

  ‘Butarak looks at the water, puzzled like, and says, “Mepella not had drink.” And Leutjans tells him to go ahead and have his drink. And Butarak lays a hand on his own chest and says, “Mepella not thirsty.”

  ‘Leutjans saw he’d been tricked and shot Butarak down where he stood, and they got three or four of the others, too, before they ghosted back onto the plain. But they had drunk deep, and with their bellies full of water the Darling was within reach. They were free. They were gone.

  ‘That tribe lived as a tribe another three decades along the river. They’re still around today, here and there, dribs and drabs, in various river towns.’ Merv plays a drum roll on his ceramic mug with his shiny fingertips. ‘They wouldn’t be around if Butarak had took that drink. Wouldn’t exist. Wouldn’t be people at all.’