The Drowner Read online

  ‘The audience got a good chuckle out of the babbling brook.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘At Ham panning for gold. There are no streams in the goldfields. No rivers.’

  ‘A minor geographical point.’

  ‘Not at all. That’s the whole reason I’m here. Why we are here. The complete absence of streams in the desert is why we are in this place, why we are sitting here on this ferry now.’

  ‘The drama is the important thing.’

  ‘Drama. You’ve never considered what it is that I do, have you? What engineers do?’

  She looks at him steadily. Her face is expressionless and the dark masks her eyes. ‘Tell me what it is you do, Will.’

  His takes a deep breath and speaks very slowly. ‘We change the order of things. And that is as dramatic as life gets.’

  She stands up then. A strange smile is on her face. ‘An ant changes the order of things. A cabbage. Even an actress.’ Then she moves away from him, like any good actress, into the patch of light spilling from the saloon.

  She sits on a bench and takes out the tarot pack from her evening bag. The light spills on her bare shoulders and collarbones. Her hands are hurriedly shuffling the cards and starting to spread them on the bench.

  ‘No!’

  He is beside her quickly, scooping up cards. Her hands flap at him in protest, her voice is guttural with rage, a growl, but he gathers them up in several swift movements and throws them over the rail into the black water.

  Chopped up jellyfish and white cards glistened in the moonlit wake of the paddlewheel. He smelled algae, and hops from the brewery. He looked back at the lights of the receding town, the lights of the hotel of tipsy first-nighters. The kingfish lamps of fishermen glinting on the far bank. The stark mound of Mount Eliza rising up behind them.

  ‘I’m surprised the tarot didn’t tell you I’d do that,’ he said.

  Jellyfish and tarot cards swirling off together in the dark. She looked at him like the bitterest enemy.

  ‘Why did you come here with me?’ he asked.

  ‘To escape.’

  ‘And have you?’

  She kept staring at the expanse of river, at the tarot cards streaming in the wake. Her hair was out and blowing across her face like a veil.

  She is feverish. The fever has come back, with its own insistent reveries, its own point of view.

  The memory of him rising from the river of her childhood. His face and shoulders running with duckweed and reeds. King Neptune. Laughing and chasing her, going too far with his snuffling snatches, grabbing her before she can reach the bank. Snorting laughs and bubbling lips catch her, bury their scratchy Neptune beard in her neck and cheeks.

  Is it now, the present, as they walk down the gangplank and he follows her from the jetty, along the sand and silently into the river? Yes, it’s while she’s wading heedlessly out into the black water. Careless of the nips and stings of crabs and cobblers. Needing to cool her fever. Ignoring her soaking dress and leading him into the river.

  Anyway, it’s with great ease he peels the dress from her, pulls her close, lifts and surprises her, enters her in the shallows of the river.

  His pushing is cold, then warm. It sluices water into her. Is she willing or unwilling? Both. Is she to live or die in this moonlit water? Does it matter?

  So not helping or hindering, just floating with the moon in her eyes, bouncing in the small waves they make. Meanwhile curious blowfish gently nibbling. Jellyfish sliding against her sides, flounder spinning away like saucers, mullet flicking by. She feels each particle of algae clinging to her skin. Her hair floating in the tide. In the thick coolness her bones feel straight and light. Water inside her warming to the temperature of her blood. She and water. Part of each other, like the river subtly joining the sky.

  While he clasps her thighs and keeps her hoisted on to him.

  She can hear him sobbing I love you beyond her bobbing breasts. That boy Will from the Roman bath inside her.

  Withdrawing, he is phosphorescent as he stands.

  The remainder of that night he spends by her bed with glasses of water and damp towels. When her heat swings to convulsive shivering he brings her blankets. When she vomits and voids her bowels he washes her. When she settles he gently plucks shreds of seaweed from her pubic hair and specks of algae from the down of her face.

  Her eyes regard him seriously as he tends to her.

  ‘I love you,’ he says. The second time in hours, or ever.

  ‘Yes.’

  She falls asleep through the lions’ first roars.

  Too late for him to sleep. The sun comes over the ranges as he starts his ramble along the shore. Swans appear from the pink edge of the horizon, skim into the shallows and settle on the spit. Low tide. The spit is fully exposed, the water so shallow he wades out a hundred yards into the channel before it’s deep enough to swim, then it’s suddenly so deep he can’t touch bottom. The flutter of sails. Yachts pass. Then fishing boats and flat-bottomed timber boats hauling sandalwood. A pelican’s heavy belly passes over him. Below, cold currents twist around his ankles. A childish tremor of fear says her ghosts are whispering down there. He can’t bring himself to open his eyes under water, to look down into the depths.

  She is still sleeping peacefully when he returns, and when he leaves on the ferry for the Department of Public Works.

  At the next low tide he has a vast expanse of time to study the growing contrast between the white of the sand-spit and the black of the adjacent bungalow. He stands in the bow on the evening ferry home. In the absence of the verandah light, the house is submerged by the dark mass of bamboo and paperbark trees.

  He has never heard his feet go up the steps before. Clattering through echoing rooms.

  What signs of her existence in the trellised bungalow by the Swan River? Do these count? The bamboo opium pipe, a cool soapstone statue, some tangled hairs on the dresser, a ball of screwed-up notepaper. They do not say Angelica.

  His shaking hands unfold the notepaper that his brain says her hands have touched so recently. But no message is revealed. Only a couple of mocking shorthand squiggles.

  That night he wakes from unhappy dreams, his searching arm and leg finding wide, cold space. A start of sudden dread. The shock increasing as he remembers.

  The bed still smelling of her fever. His face in her pillow inhaling the dampish indentation of her head.

  He gets up and inspects the house, every cool, empty room. Just in case. Maybe she’s frowning over her tarot at the dining table. There are sounds of life in the house. Cockroaches scuttling, river rats tunnelling in the soft limestone of the foundations. In the ceiling, possums scratch and thump. Stale, malign nature.

  On the verandah he fills a deckchair, facing the dark hump of Mount Eliza on the opposite shore. Nodding imperceptibly. Grasping at straws. Thinking that if the ferry was running at this hour, and if someone on deck, a particular young woman, was looking in the direction of the bungalow, she would see the verandah light and consider it welcoming.

  He waits two days before walking down the hill from the Department of Public Works to the Palace Hotel.

  The suite is the grandest in the hotel, with dual balconies on the top floor corner overlooking both St George’s Terrace and William Street. At noon, in his best dark suit, it’s not hard to march along the corridor and enter the rooms behind a chambermaid carrying linen.

  The famous actor is sitting on the sofa in his shirtsleeves and braces drinking a pre-lunch gin and quinine water and reading the West Australian. He doesn’t look up, even as Will shoos out the maid and closes the door.

  ‘Where is Angelica?’

  Ham looks up then. A mutual thrill, a charge, runs between them. He slowly removes his glasses and says: ‘Dear boy, you have ten seconds to leave here.’

  He has never seen Ham wearing glasses before. An undershirt shows at his neck. He notices there is no shoulder holster. He smiles.

  ‘This is n
ot a play. Where is she?’

  In a rustle of sliding newspaper, Ham stands then, the sky and river merging blue behind him, and rocks on his toes. The room is quiet. From the street below comes the rumbling of beer kegs being trundled from kerb to cellar.

  ‘My dilemma is whether to lay criminal charges against you or just shoot you.’

  ‘Please yourself. I must see her.’

  There is a closed jarrah door to one side and he moves towards it and reaches for the handle.

  ‘She is not here,’ Ham says, producing the pistol from somewhere and firing it.

  He knows instinctively she is there, even with the noise in his head. Or will be there when he opens the door. Although his right hand clutching the handle is shot through, his reflexes continue to turn it and open the door on to the sight of her standing in a white nightdress just now being patterned with his blood.

  His own ghostly face stares at him from the bedroom mirror behind her. He notices his hand only because of its effect on her. There are prominent veins there, and his hand is spraying her body and the room between them.

  ‘Hello, you,’ she says. She doesn’t seem the least surprised. ‘Are you all right?’

  He feels insane. He laughs and swings his numb hand like a club and blood fans out over the bed.

  ‘It’s not as if I use my right hand!’

  ‘He takes extreme measures for me,’ she says.

  Her mouth moves uncertainly. The hair that tipped the river’s surface, that hung down her naked back as she waded, has been cut short. She stands, motionless, for a moment and then brings a towel for his hand, wraps it up and kisses him lightly on the lips.

  ‘You need a doctor.’

  ‘You have blood on your face,’ he says. ‘Are you coming back?’

  She wipes her face on a hotel pillow. Her smile is sad, her mouth still set in a crooked line. Now he notices her pallor under the smears of blood. Her eyelids are pink and swollen and she seems not so much smaller as more concentrated.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nods, then shakes her head.

  ‘Life is too dramatic, Will.’

  The big men come into the room then, two thick-armed cellarmen in their leather aprons, with Ham hovering behind them, and they bundle him down the corridor and down the back stairs, swearing at the blood on their clothes, and throw him out into the hot noon street.

  The Chief is a formidable sight cantering on his grey hunter out of the dawn mist. Through the shallows and across the spit, scattering swans before him. A thin and straight-backed six-footer, all his control coming from his hips, the early sunrays shooting off his spray, he looks something of a centaur.

  The bungalow is built on fine river sand, and the way the drumming hooves make the walls reverberate and the windows rattle, a cavalry regiment could be charging up. One of O’Connor’s young daughters rides behind him on another grey. As they pull up, the horses are snorting and streaming with sweat and water, rolling their eyes at the first roars and the sudden whiff of carnivores.

  From the verandah, from the chair where he sees the sun come up every morning, Will watches them walk the horses up to the house.

  He stands in the doorway, his mouth without moisture, his head aching. He has no choice other than to go outside into the new light. Another day. A steamy haze lifting over the water. On the jetty, black shags meditating like nuns. On the spit, swans drying their wings in the breeze. Odd, the whiteness they hide under their wings. He goes barefoot down the steps carrying his bandaged hand in front of him like a shield.

  As Chief O’Connor dismounts, Will sees his fine cordovan leather riding boots are stained by spray and salt. His daughter’s face is pink from exertion. It’s a twelve-mile ride along the bank from their home by the river mouth at Fremantle.

  ‘Good to see you up and about,’ O’Connor says, as if he were just a neighbour dropping by.

  He nods. ‘Good morning.’

  ‘Can Bridget and I trouble you for a cup of tea while these fellows take a breather?’

  So civility forces him to break his firm intention and lead some human beings inside his house. A place of soured dreams, leaden auras, this bungalow whose absent spirits echo in his head.

  If he wasn’t just happening to be riding by, it was certainly O’Connor’s habit to start the day with an early morning ride and, in summer, a bathe in the surf. He often spent much of his workday in the saddle.

  Indeed, first in Ireland and then in New Zealand he’d found a good horse essential to the job. And during the early stages of his steamship harbour at Fremantle, when dickering government funding was restricting his staff numbers, he’d appointed himself engineer in charge of construction and was on site, on horseback, most of the day.

  He’d brought in limestone by cart, and granite by night train from quarries in the Darling Ranges, and built long protective breakwaters north and south of the river mouth and protruding out into the Indian Ocean. Then he’d built a bridge and railway line across the river. He blasted and dredged a channel thirty feet deep through a rock bar across the river mouth which had defied engineers and planners for seventy years. He had the bucket-dredge Fremantle working twenty-four hours a day, six days a week, and his submarine blasting had the property owners of Fremantle screaming for peace and compensation. His harbour works finally covered three miles of land, river and ocean and he patrolled all this territory and construction on horseback.

  On Moonlight he was a familiar figure to the labourers and tradesmen building the new harbour. And also to the colony’s fishermen and coastal traders, boat builders and timber haulers. Always cantering along the breezy shore, or fording the river where the sea and river tides came together, even plunging into the sandy surf to inspect the progress of the harbour dredging or the breakwaters.

  He liked to sit on his horse on the headland and eat a ham and pickle sandwich, share a Mount Barker apple and relax by watching water mingle with other water.

  As a boy he’d ridden to hounds with his uncle, the master of the Meath hunt. Riding had brought him pleasure ever since. He had the Irish love of a good horse, and the firmness and gentleness to persuade Moonlight, even the more reluctant Prince, to climb a gangway to board ferries for works inspections on Rottnest and Garden islands. He enjoyed hunt club picnics and race meetings. Only this spring, carrying twelve-stone over a two-mile course—and his familiar colours of shamrock green overlaid with Irish harps—Moonlight had won the Fremantle Hunt Club Cup.

  But, as Will had guessed, this morning’s ride is not just for the fizz of river spray and horse sweat on his face. While they sip their tea the Chief is eyeing the bandaged hand.

  ‘Three weeks now, isn’t it? How is it healing?’

  Will makes a noise, in disgust or maybe self-pity. Anyway it seems to come from him.

  ‘I can’t write or draw plans.’ He looks down at his bare feet. ‘Or even tie my bloody bootlaces.’

  ‘You can walk and talk, can’t you, and drink beer and make decisions?’

  In the early quiet of the verandah a biscuit snaps in the O’Connor girl’s teeth.

  ‘I want you to be site engineer for the pipeline.’

  Still Will doesn’t speak. During the night he’d had an opium dream of Angelica. Her eyes and lips were turned down at the corners. He’d brought her gifts of precious jewels to make her smile. In the dream he felt protective and patted her cheeks to cheer her up. So exquisite was the skin of her cheek against his fingertips it made him cry with awe and pleasure. Stroking her was such a thrill he couldn’t stop. Even when his hand began to bleed. She didn’t smile, but neither did she leave. She stayed. He stroked her until eternity with bleeding fingers and was almost content.

  When he tried to wake, he felt split in two. One part of him wanted to wake, the other didn’t. Eventually the waking man made the sleeping one grip a sharp-edged diamond in his palm so the pain would wake him. He came to with a start, of course. Thinking: The season of the play is
over. She’s really gone.

  In this state of flux he feels as if he’s dying every minute. Something of his substance constantly falling away. He finds it hard to take in information on other topics. How long has O’Connor been speaking?

  ‘Pretty soon those bandages could come off. I want you to take the pipeline to the goldfields.’

  They get up to leave soon after. Will sees them off, asking himself if he feels any different than before they came. Worse, if anything. See, that was the trouble with human contact.

  As he gets back on his horse, O’Connor calls out: ‘Don’t be too flattered, son. This is a raw place. The bastards are gunning for me. I have a lot on my plate and I’m too short of engineers to waste one.’

  They ride off past three Aboriginal boys skylarking and splashing off the spit. O’Connor waves cheerily to them. The smallest boy, the only one wearing trousers, is learning to swim in the shallows by doing the dead man’s float. Will flops down on the sand and allows the early sunlight to fall on his skin. For some minutes he watches the boy practising the dead man’s float. Time and again he stays face-down in the water for only a second or two before jumping up, spluttering and hitching up his soggy trousers.

  He’d learned to float in the Avon. He remembers his father’s patience on a summer afternoon. Curious cows peering from the bank. Swallows skimming the surface after gnats. A kingfisher’s flash of blue. The squelch of mud beneath his hands and knees so loath to release their grip.

  Let us gather by the river.

  Dead man’s float: the first sign that water requires not only mastery from humans but surrender.

  Sitting there on the damp sand, he suddenly removes the bandages and a sickly smell flies out. His fingers are swollen and the hand is puffy and white, as if too long under water. His scar shines like sun on a shilling.

  He tries out his fingers. Of course they are too stiff to move. Still half-cupped, frozen around the shape of the handle of the bedroom door in the suite in the Palace Hotel.