The Last Pulse Read online

  A group of Yangarna boys is watching from behind trees on the riverbanks above. They are stifling laughter and aping Barwon’s dance. To them his pantomimes of rap and animal mimicry appear as something a drunk might perform to his mates for a laugh, or a maniac to his phalanx of imagined admirers. The kid is a serious weirdo. He has painted himself with piss and mud. Being the river man again. Always the river man. What a tool this Barwon is. What a doofus. He’s been watching way too much Harry Potter. Look at him casting his spells. Even if there was such a thing as a river man and he could sing the river to life, who would elect a buck-toothed rat like this Barwon? They shake their heads and make screwy motions with their fingers beside their ears and clench their fists and make dick-pulling motions to one another to show he is beyond help and mad and a wanker.

  They are Rhino Cullers and Stone Warriors, and like Barwon, they have been forced to retreat from the town by their drunk parents and have followed the riverbank upstream, skirmishing, rushing ahead, ambushing one another from behind saltbush and shooting at each other with their sticks from behind trees, stopping to squabble about who has been hit and who hasn’t and who is a lying fuck and who isn’t. Stopping to thrash a dead cow with their sticks drumming hollow off brittle hide taut over a frame of ribs, jamming one rifle in its mouth and one in its arse and popping automatic fire from one end of its shrivelled carcass to another, then pissing on it, before moving on upriver again looking for some rhino to shoot.

  Above Barwon on each riverbank they spring from behind the trees. From their many hours of Stone Kill and Rhino Cull they are adept at ambush. Barwon is caught in a crossfire. They begin to shout insults.

  ‘Barwon, you tool.’

  ‘Hey, shitboy.’

  At this first shout he stands straight, drops his arms by his sides and becomes silent. His magic world falls away. Not the river man now. He looks up, seeing he is trapped, and begins to rub the mud drawings from his chest with his palms. The boys are ranged along both riverbanks staring down at him laughing. ‘Where da water, magic man?’ they shout down at him.

  ‘Hey, Harry Potter.’

  ‘Nice dance, boy.’

  ‘Show me tha water, foolboy.’

  ‘At’s great dancin’, boy. If you tryin’ get a poofter boyfriend.’

  They point their rifles and fire, shouting ‘Pookpookpookpook …’ in emulation of the rifles of the Stone Warrior game in the Club Hotel. But fake bullets shot at a fool caught dancing like a girl by himself in a river prove to be an exasperation. One Stone Warrior takes his rifle from his shoulder and grasps it by the end, whereupon it magically becomes a boomerang, and he hurls it down at Barwon who ducks as it scythes past over his head. Another boy makes a boomerang of his rifle and throws it down at Barwon and it hits him in the back, knocking him to the ground. All the boys then turn their rifles into boomerangs and spears and they are hurled at Barwon, some hitting him, some helicoptering past, some spearing into the sand around him. He can’t even object. All punishment is due. He has been caught at unforgivable foolery and a great price will be exacted, he knows.

  He balls himself up in the sand of the riverbed half enjoying the throbbing wounds to his face and ankle and thigh. Even wishing he had more wounds. A thousand more. Wishing a spear had pierced his skull and sent his brains out and made the Stone Warrior army sorry and frightened. Because the pain of his three wounds is not nearly enough to douse his humiliation at being caught singing to the river. The shame at having elected himself to the exalted position of river man. It is as though he has announced himself the Second Coming of Jesus or Harry Potter. He sees the long times of disgrace ahead. ‘Don’t disrespect that Barwon or ’e moonwalk your pissflow backwards out ya mouth.’ ‘Hey, Barwon, I’m thirsty. Sing me a couple of Cokes here, eh.’ It’s shameful enough to have believed the stories and songs of the old people, but to have elected himself as river man, a holy figure in the Yangarna lore, when he is just and only a loner without friends … well, he might as well be dead.

  And will they kill him, he wonders? When will they stop? Not before he is brained and wounded beyond repair. His face is pressed into the coarse river sand and he is peeking up at the bank from beneath the crook of his underarm. The boys are running back and forward on either bank gathering sticks to throw, throwing anything they can find that can be thrown. He watches them from beneath his arm. Sticks clatter down, every now and then a hit is scored and a boy will throw his hands up and dance victoriously shouting, ‘Rhinocide, Rhinocide.’

  Among the ten or so boys Barwon can see from beneath his armpit is an older kid named Eddy Guyan. As Barwon watches, Eddy drags a branch the size of a bazooka to the lip of the bank and holds it in his hands with its end resting on the ground. He will have to grasp this massive stick with both hands and spin around and around before letting it go, as if he is throwing the hammer. Other boys stop to see what Eddy will make of this effort. They begin to comment, some doubting he’ll get the thing airborne, others barracking for him to launch it. ‘Carn, Eddy. Blast ’im deadly, eh.’ He puts a hand out and makes gestures to hush their barracking so as he can concentrate on this giant’s task. ‘Watch a King Kong mudderfucker go to work, you turkeys.’ He begins to limber theatrically, to bend his knees and crack his knuckles, showing off now that everyone is watching. They begin a chant, ‘Air … dee, Air … dee, Air … dee.’ Barwon knows if this thing lands on him it will break his bones, but there is nowhere to run, and he has, anyway, called this vengeance upon himself with his dancing and pride. Eddy takes the bazooka in his hands and is about to start his spin when he sees something in the distance that closes down his smile and puts a small boy’s sorry pout on his face. He quickly flips the bazooka away from himself and puts his hands behind his back to deny they ever held it or that he was ever going to launch such a thing at Barwon. And he looks down at his toes in the dust and up at the thing he saw and down at his toes again and says apologetically, ‘I ain’t throwin’ nothin’, eh. Just a joke, eh.’ The other boys are at first mystified at the sudden pacifism that has come over Eddy. ‘What the fuck, Eddy?’ ‘Come on, bro.’ Until first one, then another, looks away up the dry riverbed to see the thing Eddy has seen. Then they drop their sticks just as Eddy dropped his and put their hands in their pockets and behind their backs as suddenly smitten with innocence as Eddy was. They look down at their toes and then glance back up the river and look down at their toes again. Away up there in the miraging day maybe, just maybe, a dark stain of magic is blooming on the sand.

  To see water creep around the bend of a dry riverbed, essentially to see a river reborn, is a unique vision. But not spectacular. Unless you have willed it yourself with a secret song you invented. Or unless you have said such a thing could not be done and stoned the fool who tried. The arrival of a river then is exciting and frightening. If you have willed the river alive you are the river man. If you have stoned the river man you are in line for a series of chastisements got up by God himself.

  The water comes nosing here and there, darkening the earth, filling the chequerboard cracks, bubbling and moving on, carrying seed and debris and death and stink, a rolling herd of cadavers at its forefront. Steady, inevitable and heartening. The river keeping her promise to all the things that have held on that she would one day come again for them. And behind the water all life follows. The avocets and whistling kites, tomorrow the blossom and bees and the water rat and long-necked turtle and the Paroo lily. Inside a week this place will swell with sap and hum the fevered tune playing upstream now.

  The boys on the riverbanks watch the water come with their mouths open and their eyes bugged wide. This river, dry all their lives, begins to tumble toward them like Biblical vengeance. They have ambushed and abused its king and protector … and here it comes now. A flood. None of them are above thirteen years and Queensland has not freed a flood in their lifetimes. The river is flowing.

  In this day and age of digital wonders in which the most compelling local li
fe form is the digital rhinoceros that plots and schemes and must be butchered with green rays while adults laugh and swear at each other in the pub … Barwon, stupid, kickaround, mash-his-face-in-the-dirt Barwon, has called up a flood that is giving off a hundred varied wet rippling, rushing and folding sounds and that stinks like a new world from which the oceans have just receded. This is what the world’s first day must have smelt like.

  They stare down at the skinny boy revealed as a wizard. What will he do now? What will he do with this thing he has conjured? As the water reaches him it divides around his sandbar leaving him on an island mid-river. He looks up at his attackers ranging the riverbanks with their hands behind their backs and sees them frozen, gobsmacked, watching the water and him, alarms blaring in their heads as great preconceptions about his idiocy reverse away into holding pens making room for new true admirations. The new truth has arrived; that Barwon is a type of boy wizard you usually have to buy a ticket to see.

  As the water rises in channels on either side of him Barwon’s own amazement becomes fear. He is scared by his own power. It’s as if he’s the President with that red button on his desk he can push to end the world. He’ll have to be careful what he does from now on. Careful what he wishes for and dreams of. His deadly shit could flood the world or crush buildings. For a moment it seems too grand a gift from the spirits that they single him out to be this Holy Boy, a boy who can call up a river and change the lives of a people. He is scared and humbled and has an impulse to deny his gift, to denounce the event as coincidence or mirage.

  But by the time the water has reached him, has actually coldly touched his toes and has carried his Barbecue Shapes bobbing away downstream, his conception of the event has changed. No. He made a river. So. So, shit, eh. So. So it’s really his gig to be this magic dude who can tap into ancient powers and make rivers. So, well … stay cool is the major thing. Step up and accept the gig. I am the fucking river man.

  He looks up at the stupefied Rhino Cullers and Stone Warriors lining the banks above him and slowly raises his arms in the air, his hands made into fists he begins turning in the calf-deep water, eyeballing both banks. He points at first one boy and then the next, shouting at each of them, ‘Throwing sticks, eh. You sorry now, eh.’ He points at Marty Quail. ‘Throwing sticks. At me.’ And another boy. ‘Throwing sticks … an’ now look at the big fuckin’ water here flowin’ big from my dance, eh.’ Just to let them know firstly how paltry their life’s work is compared to his, and secondly, that they have made the grave error of throwing sticks at a mighty personage who can dance a river out of an unbreakable drought, and they are, in light of this, in an eternity of shit. ‘Chucking sticks. At the man who made this no bullshit miracle.’

  The boys variously shake their heads or shrug or wave or semaphore placatory gesture to let him know it was all a joke and they didn’t mean it and, hey, aren’t we all brothers? All Yangarna? In league against every other bastard?

  There is a branch of the river flowing either side of Barwon now, and the waters of each are corrugated with an urgent current. Still looking hard at the boys on the banks he strides purposefully through the brown thigh-deep water covering his sandbar heading for the north bank. It rapidly becomes too deep for him to stand. He climbs back onto the bar again, mid-river, uncertain. He strides out for the south bank and is defeated by that channel as well. Trapped in the rising brown water. He can swim, but not in this urgent flood with its grinding driftwood. Climbing a sapling that has grown on the bar during the drought he stands in its fork and holds himself along its thin trunk. The little tree bends sideways and Barwon swings himself around to its upper side. ‘Hey. You fellas get me some help, eh,’ he shouts. ‘Get me a boat, eh. ’N’ hurry up.’

  They nod and give him the thumbs-up. Eddy shouts, ‘Hang on, bro. We get the coppers.’ Another shouts, ‘Don’t worry, Barwon, eh.’ On both sides of the river boys weave back into the saltbush and run for town. And on the first half of their journey they are intending to get the coppers. It’s a race to see who will be first to bring the news. But somewhere between Barwon and town that little river man’s magic begins to fade, and they slow to a trot as it dawns on them they are going to have to explain why Barwon was in that river and explain too about his cuts and bruises, and explain that Rhino Cull and ambush are legitimate forms of play and good harmless fun, even if Barwon ended up drowned. And they figure with olds never listening to a full explanation before jumping to conclusions and delivering whacks and backhanders that they will probably get a mighty kicking for Barwon’s predicament … if they were involved. Maybe they’ll go to jail. Because, being dead, or even being only nearly dead but still escaped-by-the-skin-of-his-teeth, he will be loved up as a precious little dude and no blame will attach to him.

  These thoughts, or part of these thoughts, go through every boy’s head as they approach town. Nothing is said. But their pace slows until, on the outskirts of Dickenson, in the field of car bodies and sheet iron, they are walking, their faces stern with indecision. What was a rescue turns into a reluctant dawdle such as a dog will adopt when called by an angry master. The cops don’t believe in ‘Fate’. The cops believe in ‘Culprits’. The boys break into twos and threes. Nothing said. Then they find themselves alone, drifting home. They enter their homes quietly, and go to the darker reaches, the private haunts, unused rooms, deep cupboards, sheds and water tanks, the small worlds boys inhabit.

  That night in the broken drunk houses of the town these boys sit silently in the shadowy corners of their bare earth back yards, willing themselves invisible while their unconscious fathers breathe raggedly on sofas and their mothers drink cask wine and prattle at each other and laugh and smoke. And the boys don’t speak of what they have done to Barwon and what he has done. Barwon is gone now and perhaps their crime will never be known. The adults, when they wake sober, will assume he was a kid chroming down in the river, out of his head when the flood arrived and he drowned in a wondrous wet psychedelia. There’s plenty shit happens that oldies don’t need to know about and plenty conclusions they jumping to that aren’t even a mile and a half from true and right.

  In the dark, the water creeps up through the town and crosses the earth floors of the old sandstone buildings washing out young drunks sleeping rough and sending them home to their families swearing in confusion. ‘There’s water fucking everywhere. What sorta drought this is?’ The whole town is flooding. So of course citizens will be washed away. The Rhino Cullers, knowing now the full extent of this terrible flood, will, along with the rest of the town, accept the sad fact that it crept into town and stole Barwon.

  As The Party Animal comes around the bend Barwon knows instinctively it is a thing of his own creation. He nods and whispers, ‘Yeah, goodfella, Barwon boy.’ He knows that having conjured the river, he must therefore have conjured everything on it. The Party Animal, arriving so soon after the headwaters, must be part of the whole spell. Nobody of real flesh and blood is ready to cruise down a river sprung into existence by a song. They are part of the river he made. An hour ago he couldn’t have believed these people were made by him. But an hour ago he was not hanging on to a sapling with his legs being sucked at by a river he sung to life.

  Still, he hadn’t thought of making people when he danced and he had some misgivings about it now. He was suddenly father to these strangers and he felt uneasy, even guilty about it. What sort of people were they? Good people? Sons of bitches? What did he owe them? Or them him?

  The boat pulls alongside and a large man grabs him under the armpits and snatches him off the tree and places him standing on the deck. ‘Poor, waterlogged little bastard. What the hell are you doing in the middle of the river?’

  A shivering, scrawny black-skinned lad, he looks at them, a man, a woman, and a green-eyed girl. He studies them without bothering to speak. He isn’t happy to be called a poor waterlogged little bastard. Way disrespectful from some big-nosed dude he just made. Laying his head sideways Barwon looks
them up and down, a puppeteer checking the stitching and paintwork of his new cast members. He reaches out and touches Em on her cheek. She pulls away, unhappy to be touched by this boy while he’s staring at her as if she’s a freak. He pulls his hand back, too, unsettled that she does, indeed, feel real, and he has laid his fingers on a real unknown girl’s face.

  ‘You’re cold,’ the girl says.

  Barwon wonders if these people are his to order about or not. Are they in his power like genies? Slaves? Or are they free and wilful beings? What manner of mythic life has his dance brought forth? He must test their obedience. He nods at Bridget Wray, ‘I want a Vanilla Coke, eh. And some hot chips. ’N’ snappy, too, fuckin’ eh.’ He flicks his chin at her to send her on her way. She will either click her fingers and these will appear, the Coke frosty, the chips steaming, or she will hustle below to get them. Either way he will know more about these dreamed people than he did before.

  Except she steps forward and takes a firm hold of him by the back of the neck. He is struck by how real this one feels, too. But it goes to his credit, he supposes, the making of real-feeling people. ‘You need a hot shower,’ she says into his ear. ‘You’re talking like you might have hypothermia or a nasty case of entitlement. The medical authorities don’t prescribe Vanilla Coke for either.’ She pushes him firmly before her below decks. ‘Hey. Hands off, sistagirl.’ It is clear to him he has made wilful, uncooperative and bossy people in the style of his mother and aunts. If he’d just modified his dance a little, a shriek here or a wiggle of an ankle there, he might have had princess-slaves instead of these disappointing three. And no sign they can snap their fingers for takeaway food either. This is a shitty outcome. He decides not to tell them he is their maker, in case they beg for better circumstances, deeper magic or pocket money. Once they know he is their maker and able to sing up rivers and people, they are likely to want a whole shitload of stuff. He’ll play just like a boy for a while, until he gets their measure.