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Richard Flanagan was born in Tasmania in 1961. His novels Death of a River Guide, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, Gould’s Book of Fish, The Unknown Terrorist, Wanting and The Narrow Road to the Deep North have received numerous honours and are published in 42 countries. He won the Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North in 2014.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Trapped within a waterfall on the wild Franklin River, Tasmanian river guide Aljaz Cosini lies drowning. As the tourists he has been guiding down the river seek to save him, Aljaz is beset by visions horrible and fabulous. As the rapids rise, Aljaz relives not just his own life but also his country’s dreaming.

ALSO BY RICHARD FLANAGAN

to Majda

my rock my love

Who Present, Past & Future sees

Whose ears have heard,

The Holy Word,

That walk’d among the ancient trees.

William Blake

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called ‘visions’, the whole so-called ‘spirit-world’, death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.

— One —

AS I WAS born the umbilical cord tangled around my neck and I came into the world both arms flailing, unable to scream and thereby take in the air necessary to begin life outside of the womb, being garrotted by the very thing that had until that time succoured me and given me life.

And not only because I was being half strangled. For I was born in the caul, that translucent egg in which I had grown within the womb. Long before my damp rusty head was crowned between my mother’s heaving flesh as I was painfully pushed out into this world, the caul should have ruptured. But I miraculously emerged from my mother still enclosed in that elastic globe of life, arriving in the world not dissimilarly to how I am now to depart it. I swam within a milky blue sac of amniotic fluid, my limbs jerking awkwardly, pushing with futile gestures at the membranes, my head obscured outside the sac by the wreath of umbilical cord. I made strange, desperate movements as if condemned always to see life through a thin mucousy film, separated from the rest of the world and the rest of my life by the things that had until then protected me. It was and is a curious sight, my birth.

I didn’t know then, of course, that I was about to be exiled from my imperfect circle, itself just exiled from its own enclosing circle, Mama’s womb, the walls of which suddenly, less than a day before, began moving most violently and extremely. If I had been forewarned of all the troubles that were so soon to befall me I would have stayed put. Not that it would have made any difference. The walls pulsed and pushed solely with the purpose of expelling me from a world about which I felt nothing but good, and against which I had done nothing bad, unless my continued and vital growth from a few cells to a complete person can be construed as some aggressive action.

The roof and floor of my world worked ceaselessly from that time onward, the power of each movement more powerful than the previous, like a tidal wave gathering size as it skips over each new reef. To such a violent determination I, of course, could not do other than acquiesce, allowing myself to be battered up against the narrow walls of the birth canal, my head squashed this way and that. And why this indignity? I had loved that world, its serene pulsing darkness, its warm sweet waters, loved the way I could effortlessly roll this way and that. Who brought light to my world? Who brought doubt to my actions that were once innocent of reason or consequence? Who? Who started me on this journey I never asked to begin? Who?

The midwife quickly and expertly unravelled the cord, then pushed her thumb into the caul as if she were Little Jack Horner searching for the plum and, ripping her thumb upwards toward my head, burst the bag open. A small deluge of fluid fell upon the dusty floorboards of that small room in Trieste and made them as slippery as life. A scream followed. And laughter.

Mama kept the membranes. Later she dried them, for the caul that a baby is born in is considered to be of the greatest luck, fate’s guarantee that neither the baby born within the caul nor the possessor of the membranes will ever drown. She was going to keep them to give me when I was an adult, but in my first winter I fell badly ill with pneumonia and she sold the membranes to a sailor so that she could buy me some fruit. The sailor had the membranes sewn into his jacket, or at least that was what he told Mama he planned to do with them.

After my birth that night all those years ago, the midwife – who was known by the magnificent name of Maria Magdalena Svevo but whose true name, which she hated, was Ettie Schmitz – switched off the harsh electric light and opened the shutters, now that there were no screams of the agony of a woman giving birth to fall upon the ears of those in the street outside. The pleasant autumn night air and the stench of the Adriatic flowed in, that peculiarly close European smell of millennia of war and sadness and survival, and this smell battled with the open bloody smell of birth that scented that little bare room, with its draped blanket for a door and its crumbling plaster walls and its solitary silverfish-sanded picture of the Madonna touching a bleeding heart with the outstretched fingers of her right hand. Ah, those fingers! So perfectly long and soft and silky. So unlike Maria Magdalena Svevo’s short battered pinkies.

Maria Magdalena Svevo got down upon her knees and with those rough worker’s hands and a rag began scrubbing off what blood and birth fluids had not yet seeped into the floorboards, the stains of which, she mused, were an archive of human life, a record written in fading blotches of blood and wine and sperm and urine and faeces of the progress of life from birth to youth to love to disease to death. As Maria Magdalena Svevo scrubbed, my mother watched her large round back rock back and forth, a half moon silvered by the light of the full moon that filled the room of my birth with its peaceful illumination.

How do I know such things? Maria Magdalena Svevo, who had untangled the cord from my neck, laughing, and who had continued to laugh about it every time she saw me ever after, told me only a little about my birth, so it cannot be from her. And Mama told me almost nothing. She didn’t even bother to tell me that I was born in Trieste until I was ten – after we heard the news that Maria Magdalena Svevo had nearly died there in somewhat comic circumstances upon a return trip to her home. Two drunk students had accidentally ridden their moped into her at the market. It was generally considered to have been typical of her strength and stubbornness that whereas the two students died within twenty-four hours, the octogenarian Maria, after spending three months in hospital, returned to Australia in better health than she had left it. But then, as my father Harry often said, she always took more than she was given.

When Mama paid her the standard fee for assisting in my birth, she felt underpaid and on the way out swiped a bottle of prized whiskey – my mother’s only bottle of whiskey, which she had gained in consequence of a night of lust with my father. That, and her unwanted son, me, was all she had at that point obtained from my father, who was then serving time in a nearby prison. My mother frequently lamented she would have been much better served if Maria Magdalena Svevo had taken me and left her the whiskey. Maria Magdalena Svevo laughed at that too.

‘You Cosinis are all the bloody same,’ she would say. ‘You get given the gift of life and what happens? You want to throw it away! Your mother wants to give you away, and you were so unwilling to come into the world that you tried to strangle yourself the moment you saw daylight at the end of the canal. Huh!’ And with that she would resume smoking her cigar, a vice she shared with my mother, from whom she was not above nicking the occasional smoke.

‘She is only lessening her own life and prolonging mine,’ Mama would say of such petty thefts, ‘and for the fact of having to spend less of my life in her company I am truly grateful.’

Which was less than honest, for in all truth they revelled in each other’s company but were loathe to admit it. When Maria Magdalena Svevo did buy her own cigars, which was but rarely, she bought an obscure Austrian brand that came packaged in a cardboard box embossed with the double-headed eagle. ‘The last flicker of the empire,’ she would laugh as she took the final delicious fruity draught of smoke from the butt end of the cigar before stubbing it out. Her favourite subject of conversation was the pleasure of the last cigar. ‘How many people never know that pleasure of the final smoke? Cigars, cigarettes, the principle is the same. Tell me, how many, Aljaz?’ She always made my name sound soft and beautiful. Sometimes I even fancied she took some pleasure from feeling my name gravel up her rutted and tarred throat to slowly billow from her bloated lips in clouds of smoke. ‘Ali-ush, Ali-ush, Ali-ush,’ she would incant like a nursery rhyme to no one in particular, and I would look up and smile and sometimes she would see me, smile back, and resume her monologue on smoking.

‘Then on their deathbed they smoke first one, then another, then another, never knowing which is the last smoke before death, and being therefore unable to savour that last fragrant moment of taste.’ She would point her huge cigar at me, waving it like a conductor’s baton, to make her point. ‘And that is why, Aljaz Cosini, you must make it a point to give up smoking at least once a year – for then it is an annual pleasure to be looked forward to and long remembered after. Like taking the waters.’ She would tap the double-headed eagle cigar box, wink at me knowingly, and laugh. ‘Like empires renouncing wars.’ I understood almost nothing she said, but it all seemed to remain with me, embossed on my brain like the double-headed eagle on that cardboard box, vivid, meaningful, if one could only understand what such things meant.

Maria Magdalena Svevo had innumerable stories about her last cigars. Some she spoke of fondly as great and memorable moments of romance or tragedy, others as times of small pleasures taken easily, remembered lightly. There were the melancholic last cigars, such as the one she smoked on the day she left Trieste to go and live in Australia, sitting on the balcony of the pension of her despised son-in-law Enrico Mruele, looking at the sun rise one last time over her beloved home town. She would recount most movingly how her tears dropped onto her hand and ran from there onto the cigar, adding a bitter briny after-bite to her last taste of smoke. There was the amusing last cigar she had when she and Mama got jobs at the jam factory on the Hobart wharves, putting labels on the jam tins. The butt went into a tin of pineapple and melon jam. Maria Magdalena Svevo was a woman for whom quality was everything and she very much loved the Australian phrase ‘Sydney or the bush’, which summed up much of what she thought about life. Why had she put the butt in a tin of jam that would be opened by some poor housewife in the new and hyperventilating Australian suburbia? ‘Sydney or the bush,’ she would reply, burnishing the phrase with dark smoke as she spoke. ‘The jam they made was shit. People ought not be so foolish as to buy it. Either make good jam or don’t eat it at all. That last cigar was my warning to the good Australian people upon this matter.’ She would draw her right hand into a fist and throw a few jabs with the cigar jammed in between her fingers, a smouldering knuckle duster, to dramatise her final point. ‘Good jam (jab) or no jam. (Jab) But never that shit. (jab) Sydney or the bush.’

There were the tragic last cigars, such as the one she smoked at Mama’s funeral, the ash of which she flicked into the grave as the priest intoned, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ This is a last cigar to which I can personally bear witness. The priest halted and his eyes rose in disgust. Everyone stopped looking into the grave and looked around at Maria Magdalena Svevo. She wore a black dress and a black hat with a sweeping brim in a style that may have been fashionable in Trieste in the 1930s. Certainly in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1968, it was not fashionable. On anyone other that Maria Magdalena Svevo it may well have looked ludicrous. On her it looked grand. From under that sweeping brim, her half-shaded eyes – those large dark brown eyes set so deep in wrinkles they looked like the half-soaked muscatel sultanas with which Mama used to make stritzel – with these extraordinary eyes, into which you felt if you dived you might never again surface, she fixed the priest with one of her most fiercesome stares. For a short fat woman, Maria Magdalena Svevo could look ferocious. She had, at such moments, what can only be called presence. In her sing-songy Triestino accent she said in a most commanding voice ‘“Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher. All is vanity.”’ And with that, flicked the stub out of her hand. ‘“One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.”’ The glowing stub rose and fell in the most marvellous arc before all our assembled eyes, a smouldering spiral of smoke descending into the grave. When our collective gaze rose back up from the grave, it was to see Maria Magdalena Svevo’s high heels (that she had bought especially for the occasion) swivel and Maria Magdalena Svevo stride off.

Ah, Maria Magdalena Svevo, would that you were here now, as I lie drowning, here of all places, on the Franklin River, looking up through aerated water at the slit in the rocks, above which I can make out daylight. It is not very far away, that daylight, and I would, if you were here, tell you how much I want to reach it. Sydney or the bush. Life or death. There are no other choices.

It makes me laugh to think that after all your smoking it is me rather than you who will die of lung failure. My lungs no longer feel like gigantic balloons burning up with a fierce fire. Well, that is not entirely correct, they still feel that way, but it no longer worries me; indeed, my mind has become entirely separate from the pain and is drifting in strange jerky motions like the air bubbles I can see above me, darting first this way, then, as if seized by some powerful magnetic current, tumbling the opposite way. Like those bubbles, my thoughts seem to have no specific direction, as much as I try to fix them on one point and move them along the path it indicates. The fire in my lungs I observe like a campfire in the receding distance, and my mind passes on to matters of much more immediate import, matters which, if they are still incomplete, if I remain unable to follow through, I still at least see with a clarity that I never possessed at the time they took place.

And immediately I am unbelieving. I say to myself, This is not possible, I have entered the realm of the fabulous, of hallucinations, for there is no way that anybody stuck drowning could experience such things. But contradicting my rational mind is a knowledge that I was never previously aware of possessing. And the rational mind can only reason against that knowledge: that the spirit of the sleeping and the dying in the rainforest roam everywhere, see everything; that we know a great deal more about ourselves than we ever normally care to admit, except at the great moments of truth in our life, in love and hate, at birth and death. Beyond these moments our life seems as if it is one great voyage away from the truths we all encompass, our past and our future, what we were and what we will return to being. And in that journey away our rational mind is our guide, our mentor. But no longer. The rational mind is not persuaded by the knowledge – my knowledge – that everything I am seeing is true, that everything I see has happened. No matter. They may not be the facts of newspapers, but they are truths nevertheless. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. But what connects the two? What remains? What abideth in the earth forever?

I have been granted visions—grand, great, wild, sweeping visions. My mind rattles with them as they are born to me.

— Two —

LET ME SAY that I am not surprised by this vision business. Not in the slightest. As far as I know, it runs in the family. Harry was forever having visions, mostly at the end of each week of hard drinking of cider and cheap riesling with Slimy Ted, his old crayfishing skipper. At his weekly barbeque, to which fewer and fewer of us came because of his increasingly erratic and drunken behaviour, Harry would address a whole range of animals who, apart from a few stray cats and mangy dogs, no one else could see, but whom Harry claimed greatly enjoyed the event and with whom, on occasion, he claimed blood relation. Cousin Dan Bevan, whom some members of the family claimed to be mad but who nevertheless was undeniably family, who could cure warts just by looking at them and who bit the tops off whiskey bottles before downing their contents in a few gulps, also saw things, although he saw them not only at the end of a bottle but also in the shape of warts. He saw all sorts of things, both bad and good, and around the Forth district in which he lived, his reading of local warts and carbuncles was treated with some seriousness. On Mama’s side, her mother had the third eye and read fortunes in the dregs of turkish coffee and by this method foretold that worms would crawl out of Mama’s stomach, which was more or less what happened. Of my fate my staramama was much vaguer: she only saw a bird wheeling in the sky.

So let me say that I am not surprised by this vision thing. But I am not sure if any of it adds up to much. I mean, what use to me is a vision of a bloody bird? Does that help me to work out whether I am fated to live or not and, therefore, whether I ought be struggling to survive or not? No, I can tell you it doesn’t. A vision should give you some answers, shouldn’t it? But all I see are more questions. It’s not right, I tell you, it’s crook and it’s wrong. But I am not surprised by that either. Life has only ever been a constant puzzlement to me, so why should I expect death to suddenly make a whole lot of sense?

Let me also say that I am not even surprised to be here drowning. I knew it could only end badly when Pig’s Breath first rang and offered me the job. Even the Cockroach knew it would end badly. Why did I take the job anyway? Madonna santa, as Maria Magdalena Svevo was inclined to say in moments of ill temper. Madonna santa. The hard ones upfront. How can I answer that? Things have never really gone right for me. As they say, it’s all written in the book above so why should I give a bugger why I took the job that led to this when I can blame anything? I was gone for a long time before this little number came up. Let me tell you. I mean, where do I begin? The family? The church whose walls wept blood? The school that taught people to run backwards? My father who used to hold big barbeques for ghosts and people who had never even been? The baby and all that bad bloody business? The bedspread with the tear stain that wouldn’t wash out? Couta Ho’s crazy code flags? That bastard Pig’s Breath? That idiot Gaia Head? I get a bad feeling in my guts just thinking about it all normally, but at the moment there are so many other pains crowding around my body I just don’t care. Nothing ever really seemed that important to me, not since Jemma’s death. People worry about how their hair looks, or what other people think of the colour they’ve painted their house, or, as I was once asked by a woman, what size doily to put on her washing machine. But you will understand me when I say that if you are drowning none of these things seems overly important. And I am drowning. I don’t care whether your hair is done or not done, whether your house is painted or not, or whether you even have a house or a washing machine to place a doily upon. Granted I ought to. I’ll give you that, but then I’ve always been easygoing. Lazy, some might say, but I wouldn’t agree. Or maybe I would. All that they say about me being lazy, about being a drifter, about having no future, about not knowing what I want out of life, maybe it is all true.

The only difference now is that I no longer have to put up with all those bastards crowding me, making me want to leave, to run, to piss off out of there as the saying goes. I could even get used to where I am now, enveloped in rushing white water, if it didn’t plain hurt so much. Where do I begin? Maybe with what I am seeing at this moment. Because it makes me feel funny, what I am seeing. Because I have never seen such things, least not in the way I am seeing them now. It’s like a movie, right? Except that I have this one vision and it stays there while all these other things happen around it. And right at this moment, this is how it presents itself.

First. A smell. Of flood – of earth eroding, of peat washing away, of rainforest heavy with rain. More precisely – for though lazy, I have always admired precision – more precisely: the energetic stench of decay. Then. A sound. The roar, the tumult of sounds of a river breaking its normal banks, crashing through the low-lying shrubbery, forming large rapids where none existed before; of sheets of rain driving like blows of an axe into the guts of the gorge.

Then, breaking forth from a bizarre low angle, a ray of light shining up the gorge illuminating a world otherwise cast in darkness by the black rain clouds above. The water reflects a white brilliance. From where I am watching, the mass of glistening white is momentarily blinding. It takes some time for my eyes to adjust to this whiteness and recognise the river. The Franklin River. A world pure and whole and complete unto itself. Neither rubber condoms nor rubber tyres nor tin cans nor dioxins nor bent rusting chrome reminders of the cars they once graced nor any of the other detritrus of our world seem to abide here. This is an alien world. This is the river. Rising in the Cheyne Range. Falling down Mt Gell. Writhing like a snake in the wild lands at the base of the huge massif of Frenchmans Cap. Writing its past and prophesying its future in massive gorges slicing through mountains and cliffs so undercut they call them verandahs, and in eroded boulders and beautiful gilded eggs of river stone, and in beaches of river gravel that shift year to year, flood to flood, and in that gravel that once was rounded river rock that once was eroded boulder that once was undercut cliff that once was mountain and which will be again. And then I see them. At the top of the whiteness two red rafts, each bearing people, each person craning their eyes earnestly over the rapid, down which they are now to fall.

— Aljaz —

In front of that white brilliance, there is a rock. A huge, sloping rock the size of several houses, flanked on one side by a sheer cliff and upon the other by a waterfall. And nine or so people and two red rafts pulled up on that rock. But I can’t make out the people’s faces. They are hard to clearly see in the pattern of the myrtle leaves that dance in the swirling water before my eyes. The people are gathered where the boulder edges the waterfall, and they are staring at an arm that rises ghostlike out of the waterfall only a few metres from where they stand.

Like a spotlight in a theatre, the low ray of sunlight illuminates the arm, further emphasising its ethereal nature. The people on the rock observe in fascinated horror the way the fingers of the hand open out into the ray of light as if in question, stretch as far as it is possible for such extremities to stretch, and the fingers shiver and as they do so the hand pivots around the wrist, roaming its small and tightly circumscribed sunlit world, searching for some hope it might grasp. At the point where this mesmerising moving limb rises, the waterfall has not begun its absolute drop, which is a metre or two further downstream. Here the fall is a maelstrom of wild, confused falling water. And jammed between submerged rocks, stuck underneath that furious water, is a man to whom this arm belongs.

My head, jammed between the rocks, can no doubt be made out from the large boulder above. No doubt. The blue of my guide’s helmet and the planes of my face visible to those looking down through these few centimetres. (How many? Seven or eight or nine? What does it avail? I’m a bee’s dick away from those people and that beautiful air they breathe and I can’t reach it or them, or them me.) But my body, snagged in the rock, wedged into the black water below, would be visible to no eyes. To those staring down, desperate and impotent, I probably look like John the Baptist when his head was brought to Herod on a plate. Funny thought, that. Funny that even funny thoughts can happen when you are dying. Maybe the humour is part of the horror.

And then it strikes me: the site of my death, albeit in a small and humble way, will become a tourist monument. And this idea – this revelation – amuses me. Here in my agony I’m about to be enshrined as part of the joke. I suppose I have become part of the bloody joke. This idea is too much for me. I burst out laughing. And as my laughter empties into ever smaller bubbles and rushes away to join the other bubbles in the current, I involuntarily try to breathe in. Water rushes into my mouth and courses down my throat.

And when that sensation washes through me, it washes me away. Not my body, no, but me, takes me elsewhere, to another time, another river. No, the same river, but so gentle, so kind, so warm, as to make it seem an entity from another world. And now I recognise it – this place where we enter the river and start our trip. The Collingwood River Bridge. It must be six, no, five, five and a half days ago; it was then, and there. There, it is me, standing at the edge of the river. When I look back at myself all that time ago I see only a stranger. But it is me. I can pick the gawky hooked nose, with its eaglebeak-like profile, and the body – yes, the body – there is a giveaway if ever there was one. My god, will you just get a goosey gander of that! It is my body, I can see that now, short, stumpy, but I don’t feel the revulsion to it now that I felt then. Then, I hated its combination of scrawniness and flab – wherever a guide should have muscle I had more loose flesh the colour of dripping. But looking at it now it seems more than perfectly adequate for the purposes of living. It can walk on both its legs with an admittedly awkward and somewhat comic lope, more like a baboon than a person, but walk nevertheless those legs do. And the arms are fine for picking things up and putting them down and all the other armlike functions they must perform. As for the face, well it breathes without effort.

To think that a man who breathes without effort would have as his major concern whether or not the customers who have paid to come on this trip will think the less of him because of a slightly chubby waistline. It is amusing. I ought laugh.

Most interesting is that none of this nervous vanity is apparent. Nor his customary shyness. He seems relaxed and confident, his dishevelled appearance generating confidence in his customers, who marvel at his nonchalant approach. As for the piss-flambeaued face – well, I think it a not uninteresting face. It lacks, it is true, the boyishness of his fellow river guide. It is a desolate visage, all sallow angles and stubbled, strangely high cheekbones looking as though they have been cable-logged of most of the vital signs of life and further eroded by the passage of time, and, like a clearfelled mountainside, not without a perverse attraction. An eroded black-bedrock wasteland of a face, relieved in its monotony only by the large nose that sits like an abandoned mining tower over the desolation it inhabits. So splendidly large I am compelled to wonder if the face has been bred only for this feature, while the rest of its aspects have been allowed to degenerate. Why is there something fascinating in that face? Maybe it’s because in its early traces of broken purple lines, in its dirty teeth, in its lank red hair, in its darkness, there is something suggestive of experience and suffering. Perhaps even knowledge.

And those eyes burning, a jagged blue. Like the blue heart of the guttering yellow flame of an oxyacetylene torch as the gas is being switched off. Red haired, dark skinned, blue eyed, big nosed. Strange. And unsettling. Vulnerability and doomed pride and very large nostrils.

I watch in fascination as this Aljaz Cosini squats down, puts his hands in the creek, lays his body near parallel with the ground, then slowly lowers himself, taking the weight upon his arms as though he is beginning a pushup. His head disappears into the river. Beneath the water’s surface Aljaz opens his eyes and looks at the shiny brown and gold river pebbles beneath him. The light falls through the water as it does through the air, in shafts created by openings in the all-encompassing rainforest, falling upon the rocks beneath to give the entire river its red-gold glow. As he looks he opens his mouth and takes a draught of river water into his mouth and lets it feel its cool way down his throat. I watch him think that no water tastes as good as water drunk like this. I watch him wonder what it would feel like to be part of the river. As his thin red hair floats back and forth like kelp in the slow current of the shallows, I watch him think that perhaps it would feel like this. Then think, or perhaps it wouldn’t feel like anything at all. Then think perhaps this is what he likes best about being down the Franklin, the ditch, as the guides call it. The way the mountains and the rivers and the rainforest care nothing for him. They feel him to be neither part of them nor separate from them, neither want him to be there nor want him to go, neither love nor hate him, neither envy nor disparage his efforts, see him neither as good nor bad. They have no more opinion of him than of a fallen stick or an entire river. He feels naked, without need, without desire. He feels enclosed by the walls of the mountains and the rainforest. He feels, for the first time in such a long time, good. Perhaps this is what death is, he thinks. A peace at the heart of an emptiness.

Shush, shush, shush. The large shiny red pontoons of the raft they will use to navigate the river begin to inflate as the doctor from Adelaide with the expensive purple polar-fleece jacket and the white legs like an emu pushes the foot pump up and down.

Shush, shush, shush. I watch myself encouraging him in his labours and revelling in my insincerity. ‘Great job, Rickie, great job. That’s the way.’ It’s not the way, but Aljaz knows it is better that someone else does some of the work than he do it all, even if they do it badly. ‘Stick with it, Rickie.’ I watch Rickie give a purposeful smile, watch him feel wanted and needed and appreciated.

‘To finally be here at the Franklin River,’ shush, shush, shush, ‘you don’t know how much it means,’ says Rickie. Shush, shush, shush.

‘A stiff back, bad food, and weak bowels, that’s what it means,’ says Aljaz, and I see that this Aljaz is something of a comedian, that he sees his role as much one of entertaining as of guiding. I see that his customary shyness finds a cover in theatrical exaggeration.

I watch as this Aljaz slowly looks up from the river at the bush that forms around its banks and I watch him smile. I know what he is thinking at this precise moment: he is happy to be back at last upon the river, back upon the lousy leech-ridden ditch. Around him, the myrtles and sassafras and native laurels and leatherwoods mass in walls of seemingly impenetrable rainforest, and in front of him flows the tea-coloured water of the river, daily bronzing and gilding the river rock a little further.

I know he is smiling at the punters, who, despite their protestations to the contrary, despite their assertions that this is the most beautiful country, are already feeling a growing unease with this weird alien environment that seems so alike yet so dissimilar to the wilderness calendars that adorn their lounge-rooms and offices. It smells strongly of an acrid, fecund earth, and its temperate humidity weighs upon them like a straitjacket of the senses. Wherever they turn there is no escape: always more rainforest, and more of it irreducible to a camera shot. No plasterboard walls or coffee tables are to be found to act as borders, to reduce this land to its rightful role of decoration. Not that they don’t try, and almost always at the start of a trip there is at least one customer who shoots off a roll or two of film in nervous excitement. But for Aljaz, this place that they feel to be moving behind them, causing them to sometimes give an anxious look over their shoulder, for Aljaz this place is home.

‘What a one we got here,’ whispers his fellow guide, the Cockroach, pointing at the large accountant from Melbourne. ‘He looks a real goose.’

‘Like a . . .’ says the Cockroach, and I can see him searching for the appropriate animal with which to compare the gauche and arrogant accountant, ‘like a fucken . . .’ But the precise analogy eludes him. ‘What’s his name anyway?’ whispers the Cockroach.

‘Derek,’ Aljaz replies, then further pondering upon Derek’s form, says, ‘praying mantis.’

‘Yeah,’ says Cockroach, then, ‘no’, says the Cockroach. ‘No. Almost, but no.’ The Cockroach thinks again, then says, ‘Like a locust, that’s what he’s like, a fucken locust.’ And the analogy is entirely correct.

Derek looks like some strange creature that is far too big to be a human, his large pupils at once oddly sensitive and entirely inhuman, capable of suggesting both an emptiness and a certain greed. His nervous hands are rarely from his mouth, to feed it food or cigarettes, and below that bulky body those ludicrous stick legs clad in luminous striped-green thermal underwear.

Aljaz turns and heads up a side track, where in early summer they put bees to harvest the nectar of the leather-wood trees that dapple the rainforest rivers with their white flowers as if it were a wedding and their petals confetti. He feels good. Even his guts, for the first time in such a long time, even his guts don’t feel knotted and aching and lurching themselves in readiness for another diarrhoeic discharge. I watch Aljaz change into his rafting gear, dressing in an unhurried fashion, enjoying once more putting on the various bits and pieces. First the bathers, then the long-john neoprene wetsuit with its vivid fluoro-green slashes. Aljaz likes the feel of the wetsuit around his body. It lends him an illusion of strength and purpose. Next layer: the thermal tops, then the bright white and blue nylon outer jacket they call a cag, and finally the lifejacket, bright purple and replete with sheath-knife upon one shoulder, whistle and brightly coloured anodised aluminium carabiners and prussic loops upon the other. Ah, the old carabiners. The customers ask their guides why they wear them on their bodies, and in a condescending tone the guides explain their high and serious purpose; how it is that the carabiner might save all if they become caught in the middle of a flooded river and the guides have to set up pulley and rope systems to get to shore. But the truth is they look dramatic, they lend the necessary sense of danger that instils both fear and respect among the punters – fear of what is to come, respect for the guides on whom they must now depend. It is a visual lesson that talks of life and its smallness. The guides wear the carabiners everywhere, like Mexican revolutionaries with bandoliers, bit players in an extravagant theatre of death. It is all part of the joke. Around his waist Aljaz wraps his flip line, three and a half metres of rainbow-coloured climbers’ tape, buckled with yet another carabiner. Upon the side of the flip line he crabs a throw bag. And upon his head goes the crash helmet. Like some luminous and savage tropical insect he returns to his customers.

As they ferry the gear down to the river Aljaz notices that Sheena, the dental asistant, takes and gives things only with her left arm. Her right arm seems to move not at all, seems to hang there like a hinged stick. ‘Excuse me,’ asks Aljaz, ‘but have you hurt your arm?’

‘This is a very physical trip, Sheena. You have to paddle a raft for ten days, carry heavy loads . . .’

‘I am not saying you ain’t.’ Aljaz halts. What is there to say? She is there. It is his job to get her down the river. Somehow.

‘Look,’ says Sheena, but before she can go on Aljaz interrupts, saying what he has to say.

‘It’s fine. Don’t worry. You’ll have a great trip. Just let me know if ever things seem a bit hard.’

Afterwards he goes over to the Cockroach, who is tying gear frames into the rafts, and tells him the story.

‘He’s not supposed to take people who don’t meet the necessary physical requirements,’ says the Cockroach, referring to Pig’s Breath.

‘Fit enough to sign the cheque. That’s Pig’s Breath’s sole physical requirement.’

They look down at the river’s edge where Sheena is working, ferrying gear with her left arm from the trailer to the raft. There is about her something so determined that it makes Aljaz mad.

‘Why the hell did she decide to come on the trip? She ought to have had the sense . . .’ He shakes his head.

‘I had a polio victim once,’ says the Cockroach. And laughs. ‘Nice bloke, actually.’

‘I’ll take her in my boat,’ says Aljaz without enthusiasm. ‘I suppose she’s my responsibility.’

They finish tying the gear frames into the middle of the inflated rafts and begin to load up. I watch as Aljaz stands in the boat and calls for the gear in its correct order. First the big black plastic barrels full of food, each weighing in excess of sixty kilograms. It takes two punters to carry a barrel, but a guide must be able to carry one by himself. Aljaz grabs a barrel and feels its immense weight and wonders how he will ever be able to lift it. I can see that Aljaz is badly out of condition. But such things are simply matters of will. The customers believe they are weak and in this instance must act prudently. Aljaz, to the contrary, must look strong and fearless, whatever he knows himself to be, however weak and frightened he might feel inside. It is a charade that is necessary to sustain the whole trip. It is the antidote to fear that spreads like a contagion if it is admitted by a guide. There is a sad lesson in this: people must believe, even, if it must be so, in a lie. Without belief all is lost. And yet, like all blind faiths that seem to go so much against the evidence of reality, they in turn foster their own truths. As long as no fear is acknowledged, great things are possible and the punters are capable of feats of endurance and courage of which they never believed themselves capable. And so Aljaz lifts the barrel onto his shoulder, swings it around and gently deposits it in the cradle formed by the gear-frame netting. Beneath the load I can see his face smiling and laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The beginning of the trip takes on something of a carnival atmosphere. A bottle of cheap rum is produced and passed around. All have a swig, some giggling at their boldness, others affecting a nonchalant air, pretending it is something they do regularly in their daily lives as accountant or nurse or merchant banker or public servant. The bottle comes to the Cockroach. He has already had a joint with Nino the busdriver in the dusty solitude of the empty microbus and is half stoned. The Cockroach drains the bottle, gives a yelp, and grabs Sheena and begins dancing with her on the river rocks. He lifts her up in the air and sweeps her through the air, carrying her into the river, in which he gently lets her down. She staggers to her feet and with her good arm slaps the Cockroach on the face. The Cockroach hasn’t anticipated such a response and falls backward.

Aljaz goes back to loading the rafts. On go the waterproof personal gearbags, brightly coloured in blues and greens and reds. On go the additional bags with tents and tarps and cooking equipment. On goes the hard vegetable bag, allowed to swill around at the bottom of the gear frame. On go the ammunition boxes full of first-aid kits and repair kits and punters’ cameras. On go the ropes and spare carabiners and carabiner pulleys and rescue throw-bags and bailing buckets, all clipped on at various points to the frame. On goes everything ten people need to survive for ten days in the wilderness.

I can see that Aljaz likes the beginning of the trip – it gives him certainty, it brings order to the chaos of his thoughts. It gives him tangible fears, real fears. Will the food stay dry for ten days? Will the customers get through safely? Will none burn themselves? Or drown? That is always a great, Aljaz’s greatest, abiding fear. That he will lose a customer on the ditch. It is so easy, it happens so smoothly. Violent death can come with a deceptive grace; so quick, so effortless, so silent, that it is not immediately apparent what has taken place. People turn around thinking that the person is perhaps standing behind their back about to surprise them, whereas they are not playing an elaborate joke, they are dead. Simply dead. A revealing phrase in itself – death is not the complex matter life is. At least not for the dead.

‘I once saw a woman who had drowned in the Zambezi,’ says the Cockroach. He is back out of the river, wet, still smiling, and is standing next to me in the raft, helping to buckle the netting down over the gear. ‘She was with another company, not ours, and she had fallen in and got tangled up with the rescue rope. By the time we turned up they had fished her out, but it was too late. She was already blue and they were giving her CPR. But they knew she was gone, you could tell the way they went through the CPR routine so calmly and efficiently, like they were preparing the corpse for embalming rather than trying to keep her alive. This punter on my raft turns around and says, as if he’s just seen a fish jump, he says, “She just drowned, is that what it is?” A stupid bald Pom he was. Of course she just drowned, her lungs just filled with water, I felt like shouting at him.’

But Aljaz hardly hears this story. His mind is elsewhere and I am with it. He is thinking how without the trip his thoughts take on a darkness he cannot overcome. Upon the ditch he can meet his fears, name them – Nasty Notch, the Great Ravine, the Churn, Thunderush, the Cauldron, the Pig Trough – and having met them, bid goodbye to them all. Without the trip his thoughts are beyond his control, and wander toward a divide that he can never see, the presence of which chills him to the bone. At such times he feels the workings of his mind hang by a few slender threads, and if they break he will be unable to do anything, unable even to get up in the morning, unable to do the simplest of things that people take for granted. Unable to say hello without bursting into tears, unable to talk to people without feeling his bowels being gripped by the most terrible fear, unable to meet with friends without experiencing the most horrifying sense of vertigo, that he might suddenly tumble and fall into the abyss.

‘Then suddenly,’ continues the Cockroach, ‘suddenly, some spasm of her muscles made her spew up all this water and they got their hopes back up for a minute. But it was too late. I knew that. Even the bald Pom knew that. She was a goner.’

Now I can see that Couta Ho had understood all this, that long, long ago when she said it would take time to heal but that time could never entirely fill in the hole, that she had said it not because she knew nothing better to say, but because she was right. For a long time I had been sick, and she had found me once and tried to stay with me, still as the moon. And I, like some errant satellite, had drifted away to return only when it was too late. Far, far too late.

— the first day —

I watch the river trip proceed in front of me. On the first day the river was so low they had to drag their rafts most of the seven kilometres down the Collingwood River, to the place where it ran into the Franklin. At such a low level, the Franklin at the junction was also little more than a dry creek bed studded with occasional rock pools. The first day was hard in every way for Aljaz. Physically it was a torment, because the punters had neither the wit nor the inclination to lift and drag the two rafts, each of which weighed hundreds of kilograms, so it was he and the Cockroach who had to do most of the labour. His body was unequal to the hard work. His soft hands burnt from where he pulled the nylon deck lines. His back knifed pain when he lifted the pontoons. They camped at the Collingwood’s junction with the Franklin, in the rainforest above a small shingle bank. The night was so clear they slept without tents and Aljaz knew that tomorrow, with no rain, the river would only be lower, their bodies stiff and bruised and their work even harder.

That evening they sat round the fire drinking billy tea and Bundaberg rum and watching the moon, waxing to near fullness, rise high enough for its light to silver the river valley. Their weary bodies felt bathed in mercury. The fire and the banks of rising rainforest were mirrored in the monochrome river as a dancing daguerreotype. They traded stories back and forth, the guides of river lore, of feats great and ridiculous, of floods that awoke them with a roar in the middle of the night, the river banking up around their tent before washing it and most of their equipment away, to deposit it at some point downriver atop a cliff, along with uprooted trees and dead snakes and devils. Of droughts in which the river was so low the rafts had to be dragged along the dry bed for four and five days before enough water could be had to float them. The punters’ stories tended to be smaller and sadder. There was Rex from Brisbane, who three months before had taken a large redundancy to leave his position with Telecom and now was totally lost. ‘I am only thirty-five,’ he repeated, ‘only thirty-five. What am I to do?’

‘Keep travelling,’ advised Derek. ‘With money you can see or do whatever you want. Every spare cent since the divorce I put into travel. What an age it is!’

No one else much knew what Rex ought do, except for Rickie, who said he had a very good broker with whom he could put Rex in touch come the end of the trip. Sheena suggested maybe Rex didn’t really have that much to worry about, but the others were more sympathetic.

There was Lou’s story of working as a crime reporter on the old Sun and being sent to interview a crim who had a contract out on him. The crim lived in a squalid bedsit in Fitzroy and only went out twice a day, once to shop at a Vietnamese store up the road, the other to eat tea at a Syrian café. ‘Why don’t you run?’ Lou had asked him. ‘Why don’t you just do a bunk and go to Darwin or Dubbo or somewhere they won’t find you?’ The crim sat on his bed the entire time and seemed gentle and pleasant. He agreed it would be the sensible thing to do, but life, he suggested, wasn’t always such a simple thing. ‘This is my home,’ he said. ‘I live here,’ he said. ‘And I’ll die here.’ So he did. Two days later they came while he was lying in bed and, as Lou put it, vitamised his head with shot.