‘Do you ever think it could have been different?’ he asked in a voice so matter-of-fact it angered her, for he knew what the answer was.
‘What do you reckon?’ she said. ‘Anyway, it wouldn’t make it easier for me to think it,’ she said, looking down, fiddling with her nails, ‘so I don’t.’ And then Couta turned her head back up so that he would see her face, which was now serious and sad, so that he would understand her, and she said, ‘In fact, I don’t even want to talk about it.’ And he realised that, long ago, without knowing it, like a child with something precious that it mistakes for a toy, he had broken what had held them together. And the shattered pieces could not be remade into a single item.
Aljaz remembered how he had once thought there would be plenty more women after he walked out on Couta, and that he would just take his time and pick the one he liked most when he was ready. There had been more women. But he felt about none of them the way he felt about Couta. And he never felt that any of them understood him the way Couta had understood him. Some had liked him for his front. But Couta had known his fear and his darkness and she had loved him in spite of them. That he never found again. And now it was too late.
‘Do you ever think,’ said Aljaz, ‘that maybe you only get one or two chances in this life?’ And before Couta even tried to reply Aljaz was talking again. ‘And that if you throw them away, then that’s it?’ Now it was his turn to look downwards. ‘You know what I mean? You get given a chance and you think there’ll be plenty more of them. But there aren’t, and if you just piss them up on the wall then life gives up on you.’ Couta looked down at him, her expression unchanging. She knew what he meant and didn’t want to acknowledge it. ‘You know what I mean?’ asked Aljaz for a second time. ‘You don’t get a second chance.’ And he turned his head away, because he knew it. That it was too late. He wanted so bad to say he loved her, but he knew it would not be right, that it would somehow introduce an insincere force between them. It was too late, and all they had left was this moment of peace together.
His head jerked up. He looked at her and she saw what she had never before seen: that he was a frightened man. He looked up at her and he said the one word neither had said all that evening. He said, ‘Jemma,’ and halted.
Then he said, ‘After Jemma,’ and halted a second time.
And then he said, ‘I woke up one morning after Jemma and, I didn’t mean it, believe me Couta, I never meant it, but I jumped up and ran and ran and I never could look back.’
At the end of that night they lay down in her bed to sleep. Not to make love but to sleep together one final time. That night was a conclusion for Couta, a moment of contrition for Aljaz. At Couta’s invitation Aljaz was to stay on in her house; he preferred its living domesticity to the dusty memories that gathered at Harry’s home. Perhaps in this new-found domestic order Aljaz sought some refuge from the fray of reality that so frightened him, though now I can see that the chaos of reality, beginning with Pig’s Breath’s phonecall a few days later, was only too soon to reassert itself and, like the river, carry Aljaz with it.
But I am not seeing that phonecall: I am seeing how at the end of that night they lay down in her bed and she pulled an old white bedspread over them. Even in the gloom Aljaz noticed how extraordinarily white the bedspread was, with the exception of a large yellowing blemish. And so I see them, both now asleep lying on their sides, two tarnished spoons. He clutching her, clutching her so tight, as if a gale were blowing around them threatening to uplift and part them forever if he did not hold on to her. The house and then the bedroom seemed to dissolve, and soon even the bed ceased to exist. He felt only they existed, that all around were the most wild and savage beasts with deformed faces and evil souls, which would destroy them both if they parted, which waited beyond reality for them and would consume everybody unless he could just hold on. When she moved he seized a new hold so tightly that she complained. But still he held on, and he saw them riding on clouds above an ocean of fiery torment, together safe from its waves of flames. As long as he held on, as long he felt the warmth of her flesh and the pulse of her body breathing in and out, as long as he could hold his nose into the flesh of her back and smell her, he was safe and free from the fear he knew would return when they inevitably parted. So he lay on his side shivering and she, with an arm behind her back, pulled the white bedspread up over his shoulders, and as she did so his eyes caught the ancient amber stain. He momentarily thought the stain contained some image, some revelation, some moment of truth, and he almost cried out at the horror and the beauty of it, but then the sensation passed as abruptly as it had arrived and he curled like the frightened animal he was into the back of Couta Ho. When she asked what was the matter, he was unable to say, but just spooned into her back, his body shaking, his nose smelling the sweat upon her flesh, his fear as total as it was unnameable.
So they slept, so they slept.
the Churn
I’ll tell you something. It’s not a vision. It’s something I saw before I started having visions. Before I even started to drown. Watching Aljaz and Couta sleep together reminds me of it. Sometimes when I sleep, I am privy to a bad dream.
Sometimes in my sleep I see a terrible flower of death: its stamen stone, its petals water foam variegated with blood, one man disappearing into the foam, another, a different man, arising from the foam. And that different man is me.
Couta Ho says, ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Couta Ho says when I sit bolt upright in bed, cold and sweating and shivering and shitting myself.
And I turn and touch the warm skin of her cheeks with my cold fingers, and my teeth chatter and my head shakes.
‘It don’t mean a thing,’ Couta Ho says, and after a time she makes me lie back down and I fall asleep under the flowing softness of the tear-stained bedspread.
But now my bad dream has possessed me and it will not leave and Couta Ho has gone. Everywhere I look, I see it. And what I now see with it is the worst, the very worst, of my bad dream made flesh and reality.
They are already in the heart of the gorge, at the Churn waterfall, the lead-in rapid too big to shoot. They rope the boats round the rapid’s edge to an eddy immediately above the waterfall, and there organise the portage up and around the cliff face. The punters are shocked at the steep scrabble up the side of the cliff carrying gear. They are annoyed at having to undertake such arduous physical work, but relieved to be off the flooding river, back on dry land. So they set to without enthusiasm and without anger, following Aljaz and the Cockroach, who, in the manner of builders’ labourers carrying loads of timber, sling the heavy food barrels diagonally across their shoulders.
A scream. Then cries. ‘Help! Help!’ Short, urgent, desperate. ‘Aljaz! Cockroach!’ Aljaz and the Cockroach drop their heavy barrels and start running, brushing aside scrub and confused punters with their gearbags as they force their bodies back up the steep gravel slide, as they climb up the small rock chimney, as they run along the track. The cries grow closer. ‘It’s Derek!’ Then another voice. ‘He can’t hang on much longer!’ Near where the track turns to head back down the mountainside they see him.
‘O Jesus,’ says the Cockroach. A third of the way down a near vertical rockface is Derek. He is hanging on to a lone tea-tree, whose spiny root, not even a wrist thick, long ago embedded the plant into the cliff face. Looking straight down, not much of Derek is visible. A tea-tree trunk, two hands grasping it, the top of a red whitewater helmet. A punter’s helmet. Framing the red circle of his helmet is the waterfall that lies twenty metres below. ‘Fucking idiot,’ says the Cockroach. ‘How could he manage to fall off this track?’
‘He didn’t,’ says a nearby punter. ‘His gearbag fell and he tried to fetch it and then he fell.’
‘He’s still a fucking idiot,’ says the Cockroach. But even as the Cockroach curses he is getting ready to rescue. He reties his flip line as a climbing harness. ‘Where’s the longline?’ he asks a punter. And before the punter can answer the Co
ckroach screams, ‘Where’s the fucking longline?’
‘In the raft down at the end of the portage trail,’ says Aljaz.
‘Rickie,’ the Cockroach yells, ‘go get it! And run, fucking run like you’ve never fucking run!’ The Cockroach turns and yells reassurance to Derek far below. ‘Don’t worry, Derek. We’ll get you out of this, mate. Just don’t rock round down there.’ Aljaz feels his breath hot and hard and fast racing out of his nostrils.
A protracted half-cry, half-yell climbs the cliff face and is just distinguishable from the roar of the waterfall. ‘What’s he saying?’ asks the Cockroach.
‘He’s saying he can’t hang on much longer,’ says Sheena.
‘Jeezuz,’ says the Cockroach.
‘You’ll be right,’ yells Aljaz. ‘Don’t look down. Look at the rock, at the patterns in the rock, and think of that shithouse porridge you had for breakfast.’
The Cockroach pauses, looks along the track in the vain hope that the runner will have already returned with the rope. ‘Are you going to go?’ he asks. ‘Or me?’
Aljaz feels fear rise within him like a fist pushing from his bowels up into his throat. As lead guide he ought to be the one who attempts the rescue. He is out of practice, unfit, and his old fear of heights is stronger than ever. But he knows there is no choice. He says yes, thinking the Cockroach means who will go down the rope. But the Cockroach doesn’t mean this. He means who is going to climb down the cliff now, without the rope.
Aljaz goes to say that he is no climber, which he isn’t, but stops, torn between his fear of climbing down the cliff and his greater fear of being seen by the Cockroach and the punters as a coward.
‘Now?’ says Aljaz. ‘Without a rope, don’t be bloody mad.’
‘The fucking rope’s five fucking minutes away,’ says the Cockroach. He jerks a contemptuous thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the cliff. ‘That silly prick isn’t going to last that long. If he doesn’t give up the ghost, that bloody tea-tree will anyway.’ Aljaz looks around, hoping to see something that might help him. There is nothing. ‘I’m going down,’ says the Cockroach. ‘Now.’
‘No!’ Aljaz suddenly shouts out of shame, surprising even himself. ‘No, I’ll go.’ And before he has even finished speaking he has started to climb down the steep band of shrubbery that flanks the cliff.
God, what have I done to deserve this? It is interesting, watching now, how none of Aljaz’s fear is apparent to the punters, who see him quickly and machinelike begin his descent of the cliff face. But Aljaz has no choice, and that, he thinks, is perhaps a mercy. For he knows he cannot act upon his fear and say, ‘No, you go, I’ll stay here where I feel safe.’ If the punter dies it will be his fault. He looks sideways and sees the waterfall and feels ill. He looks back up at the half-circle of punters gawking at him and wonders why on earth any of them have any confidence or trust in him at all. He feels like saying, ‘You fools, can’t you see I’m as shit scared as you?’ But instead he adopts his professional nonchalance, smiles and says, ‘We’ll have him back up here in no time.’ Down he goes, trying to forget his vertigo, marvelling at how duty can overwhelm fear. Perhaps this is what soldiers ordered into battle feel, thinks Aljaz. Whatever will be will be.
But a short way down the cliff face he stops and can find no more footholds or handholds. As terror takes over he realises he is unable to go back up, and so he clings to the cliff only five metres below the crowd of punters gazing down, knowing he looks ludicrous and inept, terrified that he might at any moment fall to his death, and tormented by Derek’s pleas from below for Aljaz to come down and rescue him.
The Cockroach also hears Derek, hears him cry out that the tea-tree trunk is fraying. He realises that they have lost valuable time and that Aljaz has frozen. So he turns and begins the descent down the rockface, slowly, cautiously. Aljaz watches him. He’s good, thinks Aljaz, his shame rising in a hot flush. He’s good. The Cockroach gets down next to Aljaz and quickly, with a measure of contempt he makes no attempt to disguise, shows him a route back up to the shrubbery.
‘You should have told me you couldn’t climb.’ Aljaz slowly climbs back up, his humiliation complete. About ten metres from Derek, the Cockroach, now visible only as the top of his head, runs out of rock to climb. He tries two different approaches to get to Derek, but fails and has to turn back. A third route gets him down to the same level as Derek but about six metres distant from him. The Cockroach talks to Derek, calms him down, gets him to hug the rock like it is his mother, to find tiny niches in which to rest his feet and take some of the stress off the fraying tea-tree trunk.
‘Here.’ Aljaz turns around. Rickie is back with the rope, his face bright red and flecked with foamy spittle. Aljaz ties the rope off to the firmest tree he can find and leans out on the rope, testing his weight against the tree and his knots. He climbs down the rope through the steep bank of shrubbery to the cliff edge, where he yells down to the Cockroach, then throws the rest of rope down in the Cockroach’s direction. The rock is greasy with the rain and he wonders how the Cockroach can climb on it at all.
The Cockroach grabs the rope, wraps it around his body, then crabs it onto his emergency climbing harness. Then he kick-jumps himself off the cliff face, bouncing around to where Derek hangs onto his life by the fragile strength of a small tea-tree trunk. As he comes close to Derek he sees that the tea-tree is half pulled out of the rock crack it has spent a century or so extracting life from, and that its trunk is fraying badly under the strain. Two hands, one bloodied from the fall, hang onto the shrub, and from below the Cockroach hears the horrible rapid pant of a man who knows he may be about to die, smells the sharp ammoniac scent of true terror.
the Cockroach
The bastard’s going to die on me, thinks the Cockroach, and he panics. With this panic all his strength seems to abandon his body and he feels weak and unable to do anything. He is no longer sure if he will be able to rescue Derek. But he pushes the panic back down and just looks at the slimy rock, looks closely at its lichen-etched forms, looks at its small cracks the width of his lips in which tiny myrtle and pandanus seedlings, their leaves near waxen in their green rainwater-beaded perfection, flourish around miniature hardwater ferns, a small world, complete and wondrous unto itself, looks and marvels as he slowly works his way across to Derek.
The Cockroach hears Derek pray between panting breaths. ‘Our-eh-father-eh-who-eh-arteh-in-eh-heaven,’ he hears.
‘Derek,’ says the Cockroach but Derek does not hear, for he is too intent on praying to God to deliver him from his peril. His panting prayer disintegrates into a rapid gobbling lament.
‘Mygodmygodmygodmygod.’ As if the repetition of His name will invoke His reality, will summon His omnipotent presence into existence to take Derek in His arms and rise with the warm updraught flowing from the rapid to the path above.
‘Grab hold of the rope,’ says the Cockroach over Derek’s prayers, ‘and we’ll climb back up together.’ Derek ignores the Cockroach, as if such a diversion might diminish the strength of his appeal for divine intercession. Now he simply calls for Godgodgodgodgodgod, like a hungry seagull desperate for a crust of bread.
‘Grab hold of the rope,’ says the Cockroach a second time. He eases himself behind Derek and by placing his arms under Derek’s shoulders takes some of the fat man’s weight. ‘Derek,’ says the Cockroach, ‘listen to me. Grab the rope. Please.’ Derek slowly turns around and his eyes, those large locust eyes wet with tears, look into the Cockroach’s as if he is looking at death. Derek’s head shivers more than shakes Derek’s refusal.
‘I believe in God,’ says Derek. ‘I do. I believe in you, God.’
‘Listen to me, Derek,’ says the Cockroach. ‘You’ve got to do it.’
Again the shivering head. ‘No. I will do whatever you want of me, God, but spare me.’
‘You’ve got to grab hold of the rope!’ shouts the Cockroach.
‘I believe in God the father, in Jesus Christ His son
who on the third day rose from the dead to sit at the right hand of God the father almighty, and who on judgement day shall -’
The Cockroach interrupts Derek’s prayer with a scream. ‘Grab the fucking rope!’
Derek begins to cry anew, and as his body heaves with his blubbering the tea-tree root gives way some more. The Cockroach gives up his bullying and tries desperately to calm Derek. ‘All right mate, all right, she’ll be okay, just stop crying, you’ll be all right. God’s with us, believe me, God’s with us. If you just stop crying. Please.’ Derek looks at the Cockroach with a new trust and confidence. Jesus, thinks the Cockroach. The Cockroach ties himself off, so that he can fall no farther.
‘You understand?’ says the Cockroach to Derek. ‘I wrap this harness around your body. Then I connect that harness to the rope. Then I climb back up. Then we haul you up. Hang on tight, for Chrissake.’ Derek looks blankly into the Cockroach’s eyes. The Cockroach is not even sure Derek has understood what he has just been told. ‘You ready?’ asks the Cockroach. Derek nods. ‘Just don’t make any sudden movement, okay?’ Derek has no fight left in him: life or death, he is equally ready to take the hand fate deals him. Unable to manoeuvre himself such that he can tie the flip line around Derek as a proper climbing harness, the Cockroach has to make do belting the flip line around Derek’s fat waist, connecting the two ends with a carabiner.
Then, as a safety precaution, before he does anything else, the Cockroach connects Derek with himself by clipping their two harnesses together with a carabiner. Derek immediately lets go of the tea-tree. The Cockroach yells, ‘Hang on to that root for Chrissake!’ But it is too late. The Cockroach screams, ‘No!’ but Derek has let go. The Cockroach thinks, Jesus, now we’re really going to die. They fall two metres, and the Cockroach shuts his eyes and his body goes loose and he thinks, This is how it ends. But it is only the rope sagging and the anchor tree loosening until the new weight is fully absorbed. The Cockroach comes to his senses and shivers with fear. And as they bob in space he looks down at the waterfall falling through the massive boulders below and wonders if you would feel anything at the moment of impact.