The Drowner Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  the drowner

  Robert Drewe was born in Melbourne and grew up on the West Australian coast. His novels and short stories have been widely translated, won many national and international awards, and been adapted for film, television, radio and the theatre around the world. His latest novel is Grace.

  ALSO BY ROBERT DREWE

  Fiction

  The Savage Crows

  A Cry in the Jungle Bar

  The Bodysurfers

  Fortune

  The Bay of Contented Men

  Our Sunshine

  Grace

  Memoir

  The Shark Net

  Non-fiction

  Walking Ella

  Plays

  South American Barbecue

  The Bodysurfers – The Play

  As Editor

  The Penguin Book of the Beach

  The Penguin Book of the City

  Best Australian Stories 2006

  ‘The romance of bringing water to the desert is at the heart of this ambitious and kaleidoscopic novel, beautifully written in prose as slippery and sensuous as the life-giving liquid itself’

  THE AGE

  ‘Exquisitely sculpted, a fable sinuously woven with verbal allusions … the novel shimmers with compelling images and impressions, flexible as water’

  COURIER-MAIL

  ‘This is a novel which beguiles with water’

  THE TIMES, London

  ‘A starter for the title of Great Australian Novel’

  THE AUSTRALIAN MAGAZINE

  ‘An ambitious piece of work … subtly and intriguingly handled’

  TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  ‘A marvellous world-class novel … magnificent, compassionate and subtle … Watch the awards lists’

  SUNDAY TIMES, Perth

  ‘A “literary” novel that is also compulsively readable’

  THE WEST AUSTRALIAN

  ‘It is not often that you read a book for which you have little else but admiration and praise. Richly detailed, superbly crafted, The Drowner confidently brings to history and myth the gifts of a first-class storyteller’

  CANBERRA TIMES

  I want to express my gratitude for the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship which enabled this novel to be written

  ROBERT

  DREWE

  the drowner

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Australia)

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1996

  First published in paperback by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd 1997

  This edition published by Penguin Books Australia Ltd 2001

  Offset from the 1997 Picador edition

  Text copyright © Robert Drewe 1996

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  The characters and events in this book are ficticious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  ISBN: 978-1-74-228348-7

  penguin.com.au

  CONTENTS

  The Art of Floating Land

  Spa Water

  Woman Kissing Cockatoo

  Blackwater

  Entropy

  Studio Portrait with Bicycles

  The Lunatics’ Douche

  Marionette Joyeuse

  The Reservoir

  For my mother and father

  and for C,

  of course

  If I were called in

  to construct a religion

  I should make use of water.

  PHILIP LARKIN

  The man must not drink of the running streams,

  the living waters, who is not prepared to have all

  nature reborn in him—to suckle monsters.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU

  Life

  a little water

  a few words on the tongue.

  BERNARD NOËL

  They met first in the bath.

  This is the feeling, the smell, the sound, of their bodies colliding in the bathwater.

  The water is ten degrees over blood temperature. Mysterious, flattering light falls from above. Their heads swim in alkaline gurgle and babble. Then her yelp and his spluttering apology echo off the pillars and ceiling while billowing bodies titter and flirt around them.

  Experience it again, this portentous warm accident. His innocent blind lunge, only half-swimming stroke, half-stretch, but too vigorous and vulgar for these languid, ghostly wits.

  Plat!, he strikes female flesh, soft yet resilient, jumps up too fast, hair streaming in his eyes, and overbalances against her, the second, inexcusable, slithery bump causing her indignant gasp.

  Relive the humid confusion. She shoots upright in the bath, an emphatic statement of wet bathing smock, breasts and thighs. Then, amazingly, answers his embarrassment with an action of her own: a brisk performance of recovered poise. She sinks backwards under water, spears up through the surface, forehead elegantly tilting back, eyelids closed, hair dropping in that effortless dark sheen. Now strokes herself upwards from the chin, elegantly wiping the moisture from her flushed cheeks and forehead, smoothing her impossibly sleek head. Wet linen pasting to her body.

  And now they’re eye to eye in the bathwater, like characters from one of history’s sensual asides. Their own awesome and intimate atmosphere—lavender, alkali and sweat, all trapped and activated by the steam—envelops them.

  This is in the bath, in Bath. Early July. Hot yellow lilies grow along the river between Bath and Bradford-on-Avon. A strange summer of hot flowers and foreign, hot-climate birds. A small green fortune-telling parrot, a swan black instead of white. A season of hot theatrical declarations …

  Now he turns his mouth away from something thin and slippery on a spoon. Someone dabs his forehead. Memory fevers easily erase the arrowroot or sago taste, the hessian wall against his cheek, the pub hubbub, the thick red air. But the camels’ bubbling roars, the incessant jangling of their harness bells, their endlessly shifting, rising, dropping silhouettes are harder to dislodge.

  And the heat, of course. Sweating on his stretcher, he half-consciously claims the temperature and transforms it again into that Roman bathwater just warmer than their bodies, into the sharp pink ovals of h
er cheekbones, her lip-beads of moisture. Comforting, and strangely slippery, too, like mercury on his fingertips.

  Heat’s bearable, but cold’s for schizophrenics and would-be suicides. During the cold sweats once (last night? last century?) he’d heard her arranging the Lunatics’ Douche for him.

  At the time he was shouting Christmas carols and Afghan cameleers’ orders to scare the insects off him. He couldn’t believe his ears when her Portia voice interrupted.

  A clear and ringing enunciation, as if she were playing to the gallery of the Royal.

  ‘A column of cold water two storeys high must fall on his head. Cold water the weight of ice. Stupefaction should last at least one hour.’

  That crystal voice of love. And dulcet shards of—what—the other?

  Delirious, he still knew the douche as treatment for the worst delusions. One pulse beat, two, and then the column hit him like a stalactite, a sword of water. At the impact his red-nippered bull ants scattered, the needling march flies took off mid-bite. Those glassy tones and noisy pictures in his head splintered and fell away.

  He surfaced from tinkling depths of polar-green. Shaking his head and shivering, he looked around the tent for her. Of course she wasn’t there. Only the pale, exhausted nurse, red dust in the down of her cheeks and forearms, who flicked his imaginary insects off him and sponged away his mess.

  Now the nurse trickles real water, though condensed—tepid and brackish—into the corner of his mouth.

  ‘What month is it, Mr Dance?’ she asks. ‘What year?’

  He’s fumbling at a vest button, peeping inside. ‘You know,’ he whispers evasively. What a strange accomplishment, these rosy blossoms on his chest. More today, or less?

  ‘What place is this?’ she perseveres.

  He edges his mouth towards the water cup again, but she withholds it until he answers. A few pieces of the crystal voice tinkle in his ears, his temples still flicker from the douche.

  ‘Whatsaname.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She gives him the water anyway.

  THE ART OF FLOATING LAND

  HE IS A TINY BOY being carried down to feed bread crusts to the ducks in the Avon when his father shows him what drowning is.

  Only nettle high, thistle high, riding in his father’s arms in a burst of sun warmth across the squire’s field and down to the river. Swinging over the stings and prickles fringing the bank, high above the squire’s strange horned, coughing sheep and their loose droppings. Feet drumming against his father’s stomach, his father’s nose in his hair, his cheek, and both of them babbling sweet rhymes of tickles and nonsense.

  ‘Look,’ says his father, and suddenly squats and points at dirt.

  A loamy line meanders across the grass. A mole tunnels in the river bank. Already it has dug so close to the water that a fine stream turns away from the river, trickles through the molehill, and down the gently sloping field. This waterprill spreads thinly, a pace wide, about twenty paces long. The earth is parched from the dry winter, but wherever the water-prill runs everything is green and fresh.

  So he was told anyway. So many times he’s sure he remembers it. The story of the mole. How the first drowner discovered how to govern water. This was the four-hundred-year-old secret of Wiltshire and its clear streams.

  Warmish water streaming through light chalky soil lying over fine flint and gravel. This is a heaven for drowners. This is his father’s life. But what he remembers vividly from that day is the nettle-eating sheep. Their pale, dead goats’ eyes, mad, skewed horns and old men’s hawking coughs. In his memory the sunburst fades. A veil of thick white rain falls on the dark sheep and greying fields. It patters on the elms as they whip and sway their branches to the fall. Blackbirds sing sharply in the wet trees. Everything looms and shivers above his head.

  His father brings water on to the land at will, and takes it off again. Arthur Brabazon Charles (‘Alphabetical’) Dance floats water meadows. Alphabetical Dance loves swift water the way some men love horses. To hear his proud murmurings about his floating lands you would think he was referring to his feathery-haired son and babbling daughter. He calls his work ‘my little drownings’.

  People are respectful of these other creations of his. He’s an artist, a craftsman, a personage. Everyone—the squire and the parson, even the most authoritarian miller—defers to the drowner’s judgement. Alphabetical Dance knows the soil, the subsoil and whatever lies beneath. Just as he knows the contours of the land, the slightest deviation from level and the location of each deviation. He knows the streams and the sounds they make, and the river water, too—its colours, speeds, temperatures and consistencies, and all the different regions it passes through. He understands a river all the way back to its source—the spring, the rain, the dew, the darkening nimbus. He knows the relationship of earth and water.

  Drowning is complicated. Alphabetical Dance disciplines his water meadows into an intricate system of trenches, ridges and drains. They draw water from the river and transform it into a shallow, continuously moving film. This sheet of water has to nourish and protect the tender grass shoots without swamping them. Even when his ‘little drownings’ are complete, he stays vigilant. He looks out for frost. He studies the gradient of the land for minute shifts in level and angle. He watches for cloudiness, alert for scum. He must gauge the precise force behind the flow. Too fast means the grass roots will be washed away, too slow means stagnation. He depends on his eye.

  Before the first drowner, before the mole and its waterprill, Wiltshire farmers shared a quandary—winter hay was gone by March, and ewes and spring lambs needed food. Then the early drowners learned to control water, to divert it lightly onto the meadows to protect the roots from the cold and encourage growth. When the ground was wet enough, they sluiced the river back on course. From autumn through winter, they drowned the meadows, then dried them. When the first grass tips showed they drowned them again. Then in March they shut off the water for a month before the ewes and lambs fed on the new grass. When their normal pasture was ready, the sheep went to it. And the water meadows were drowned yet again, and left to produce an extra crop of hay.

  In the broad valleys between the downs this drowning and reviving has formed the rhythm of Wiltshire’s agriculture for four centuries. These intricate skills, passed from father to son, from master to apprentice, make up the ebb and flow of Alphabetical Dance’s days.

  These days early in his son’s third year are windy mornings of sudden bursts of birdsong, of sparrows flying with bent straws in the wind and rooks blowing in the sky. These mornings chilblains and wet feet don’t worry Alphabetical Dance. The wind rushes over the river and whips the thin hazels on the bank but in the breeze his cheeks stay warm.

  Everything is occurring as expected. The hedges are thick with tight buds, the fields show tender green under the yellow bents and fibres of last year’s grass. Dog-mercury carpets the woods. The river runs full and clear as a trout’s eye. The same force in his blood makes it sing.

  The happy hay of a toddler’s hair is in his nostrils as he sets him down. Optimistic lifetimes lie ahead as the little Dance boy, the drowner’s son, suddenly bold, runs up from the river through the new grass with his short skirt blowing before him, shrieking, laughing and scattering the sheep.

  In March all the frogs mate in Bullslease pond. On the spinach-green surface of the water float hundreds of frogs’ foreheads, eyes goggling, stern and seemingly disembodied, although the submarine part of each frog grimly grips his mate below.

  On the Sunday morning of the ceremony the boy starts awake, thinking of mating frogs. Mucousy occurrences below the surface. In his sleep he’d heard the cold chiming of under-water bells. In reality the bells are ringing at St Laurence’s across the river. The urgent bells, and the keen smell of ironing and boot polish wafting up from the kitchen, drive him from his bed to the window.

  He looks out along the valley of the Avon and across the downs. Small villag
es about a mile apart edging the banks of the river. The houses mostly of the sixteenth century, built in squares of flint and stone. Their thatched roofs, partly golden with yellow stonecrop, seem to quiver with wakefulness and anticipation.

  He sees smoke, or thinks he does. A cloud of gnats is rising in such a dense column over the river that people in the village, also mistaking it for smoke, are sounding the four church bells as a fire alarm. I’ll tell John Brown, I’ll tell John Brown, the bells seem to say, then Tom-my Lincoln, Tom-my Lincoln. (Wryer Baptists will later appreciate the irony of the bell alarm and the established Church so stridently heralding the biggest nonconformist gathering Wiltshire has seen in twenty years.)

  From the window the river fizzes like a fuse. The plume of gnats spirals up and down the Avon, a tornado of smoke. The bells keep ringing. Swallows dart and wheel into the cloud and people begin to line the banks.

  Will dresses slowly, watching the smoke, watching for the fire cart. White shirt and new black gabardine trousers, the damp scorched smell of the iron still on them. He has been told he should fasten the trouser legs with his bicycle clips to hold them down. The year before last his mother sewed stones into the hem of Sarah’s dress so it wouldn’t ride up in the water. And in the seconds during which he glances around the room for a mislaid bicycle clip—briefly recalling Sarah’s glowing face and rattling hem of pebbles—and turns back to the window again, the smoke has gone. Nothing to be seen but the small scattered villages and the grey-green wiothe-beds and the shoulders of the downs rising above them.

  The bells stop. Their reverberations fade. Sunday floods back and fills the silence. In the resumed buzz and twitter of a spring morning he slowly finishes dressing. No hope now that events might be postponed, that this Sunday of all Sundays might be thwarted by the burning river. He doesn’t share Sarah’s or their mother’s enthusiasm for religion. Sarah’s fervour amazes him—even zealously collecting picture postcards of her favourite ministers. Pinning over the bathtub a hand-tinted postcard depicting Mr Harold Thring Smiling While Preaching to remind her of being baptised. The preacher’s lips and hair gleaming orange. On bath nights Will flicks water at smiling, preaching Mr Harold Thring.