The Swan Book Read online

  How do you do? When the controller stopped speaking, each of the councillors got up from his or her seat like sovereign kings and queens of the place, and went and shook Warren’s hand, and his minders’ hands, and returned to their seats.

  My associates, Warren said briskly. This is Dr Snip Hart. Dr Edgar Mail. And Dr Bones Doom. Then Warren paused, to check whether his audience was still listening, and continued slowly. Dr Hart here has a doctorate in hagiology, mythology and oneirology. Dr Edgar Mail holds a PhD of palaeontology, palaeoecology and ontology. Dr Doom has many doctorates too, of ornithology and oology. Mystagogy. Musicology. In other words, you might say between them, they are pulsatory omniscientific, very scientific! Scientists in the laws of two ways, in all of the things a black man needs to know about today’s world in the bush up here, down in Heaven, or Paris whatnot, to make music.

  All hands gripped the tear-stained table, though not the sceptic Weisenheimer. Only his eyes had not glazed over from Warren’s music about Black science, but it did not seem to matter for the whole room was experiencing bedazzlement. How it felt to feel grand. These people agreed that they felt close to God! Real close actually. They smiled to be amidst so much omnipresence – the omelette of ology words floating gaily in the breeze of the noisy fans, and then dissipating featherlike, over and over in the ear en route to the brain cells.

  Play something nice Edgar, Warren said quietly, when no one could break from the word net that had been thrown over their heads; and now even furthering the sense of amazement and pure wonderment, the one called Edgar it turned out, was a musician as well. The Swan Lake Government men and women looked like statues under the appraisal of those soft, pale brown eagle eyes of Warren Finch studying everyone in the room.

  Sure, Boss, Edgar said. I’d love to play.

  Edgar was a tall and beautifully proportioned, strong-boned, golden-brown-skinned man with a face so flat and smooth, it made him look like the brother of an owl. He cradled an old wattlewood violin in his arms as though it was a spirit creature and then, the silence in the room was broken by a long melody. The music softened his smoothly shaven face, and the sounds floated away like moths flying off softly to clear away any residue of hardness in the room, and with their little hair-coated legs, to coax gentleness back on the faces of those gazing on the musician angel. The music flowed outside, past the boomerang monument clapping thunder and lightning, and over the swamp and into the hull where the girl and the circling swans outside were listening to the sounds from faraway, like the murmurings of owls spreading across the distant range country of ancient cypress trees and coming up through the stillness of a freezing night.

  This music of far-away places poured through the building and the call of owls seemed to come from every angle over the swamp. The swans swarmed into a giant serpent formation on the water. The brolgas rose in skittish, frenzied flights up into higher altitudes to escape the owl-like sounds floating below them. The music drowned the sounds of barking dogs, and inside homes there were small children imagining it was flowing from the pumpkin flowers on the rampant vines which interlaced the buildings and covered them with large green leaves. In the Swan Lake Government chambers, the men and women of the government saw themselves swimming in medicines with the thought of the three doctors. They had never had a real doctor visit before. Never had a real doctor stationed there.

  The sweet violin music kept blurring the here and now, and more of the fantastical escaped from minds usually locked in despair, even bringing back memories of the Harbour Master whose responsibility he now chanted to all the black consciousnesses sitting around the table, telling them to continue keeping a watchful eye on the sewers of thought.

  The heads of the old spirits popped up from the manholes in their minds to see the travelling music passing by the cornerstones of memory. Lights were switched on. The despaired room spun with too many thoughts! But only thoughts, after all, of oodles of money from Shangri-La! Fancy that! Fancy sending three doctors to the swamp on fish and chip night. Oh! Man! Hear the gratefulness rising. Thank you! Thank you! Now black consciousness could see fat cattle everywhere in the room. Who mentioned cattle? The feast of music stopped suddenly. Warren Finch’s voice had a way of slamming the door on any more thoughts about poor health, and people needing to eat a bit of fat steak, and having doctors galore arriving way out here in the sticks to do some good. Forget the cattle!

  I am looking for my wife, Warren said it once more in plain English, and since no one spoke, he sat back with a slight smile on his face and continued to sift the room with his eyes.

  Warren knew he had shocked these simple people to the core, by talking about a wife when no one thought he had one. The noise from the fans now paralysed anyone’s ability to think in the room, but quite honestly, there was nobody in Swan Lake who would even resemble the wife of someone as important as Warren Finch. Swan Lake Government now thought outside of their own beloved homeland, something they rarely did, and tried to imagine Warren Finch’s big life elsewhere – overseas, looking for his lost wife in a European café – at another Swan Lake in a Mozart setting in Austria, or a beautiful model wife in Paris swanning around as she should, because these were places they thought any wife of his would belong.

  He kept checking his watch to quicken the thinking in the room about how to respond to his demand to find his wife. Now think fast, and forget the cattle. There will be no cattle for you.

  The financial controller Weisenheimer was not easily intimidated. He did not care for Warren’s attitude and asked several pointed questions.

  Why would your wife be here? Where did she come from? You can see for yourself that this Swan Lake Government is highly managed, and we know all the people living here. After all, and as you know yourself, this is an isolated community controlled by the Army. Everyone knows who comes here. Don’t you? Weisenheimer only expected nods from his people. He intended to keep the meeting from entering into the known nightmares of bad terrain and talk about cattle. He had had a gutful of Aboriginal whingeing and complaining.

  But a discussion erupted. It turned into genuine interest about the lost wife. Everyone tried in vain to remember anyone who might be his wife – names of famous women, movie actresses she might look like, as well as trying to recall whoever had recently turned up. No! Not Really! There had been no ladies leaving or arriving for many, many months. Only dead people leave. Only babies arriving. That’s all, if we are lucky!

  Still! It is really hard to remember everyone who turned up on our doorstops, who was looking for someone else by running away from who they should be living with, and taking care of, like they are supposed to do. Or something. You know, my Sir, said Mr No One At All, as the delegated speaker of the Swan Lake House.

  The discussion took a strange exploratory route, analysing the blocked tributaries of Western matrimony, and being a distinct Nation themselves and people of the longest surviving culture in the world, they had become world-wise at studying such marriages. They favoured a cynical critique, where each member of the Swan Lake Government had their own peculiar but excellent first-hand knowledge about other people’s relationships; the warring spouses, neighbours, or adult children, and numerous family dealings with bad marriages in countless Western soap operas. They presumed the right to ask questions, when a husband comes looking for his wife, you have to think whether there is anything good in marriage?

  Was this the bloody butcher’s shop? The abattoirs? Nobody hesitated or blinked an eye at the fact that Warren Finch wanted to collect a piece of meat. He hardly noticed the fakery in the cynicism in their enquiring about his personal affairs. Mr God Sir. Well! Who didn’t suffer in marriage? Mr No One At All asked. If Warren worried about his wife, so what was the mystery in that? He could join the club of broken marriages in Swan Lake. There was a bad smell in the room circulating with the fans, as if a very fat rat had died in the ceiling. The smell reached down the nostrils and mixed with the fish dinner into a nauseating retch
but the Ministers for Government seemed unaffected, used to problems like that, and asked if the putrid smell was still there to avoid Warren Finch glaring at them. And someone, probably the controller, changed the subject by bluntly asking: What wife?

  So what does your wife look like? It was insulting for the minders to hear anyone speaking to Warren Finch as though they were talking to a piece of scrap. The retorts came thick and fast. What was wrong with you people? Don’t you know who you are talking to? You are speaking to the Deputy President of Australia here. This man is so highly respected abroad, they call him Deputy Right Excellency, Deputy Mr President of Australia. Show a bit of respect!

  Warren held up a gracile hand in a gesture that was like a blessing given by a holy man. This was the hand frequently seen on television news from countries throughout the world. It was the very hand that had stopped atrocities and made peace amongst war-torn peoples. The hand was loved throughout the world. Here though, it simply meant, enough was enough! The ghostly Harbour Master panicked in his ethereal heaven somewhere up where the rat smelt in the ceiling, and stirred-up extra doubt in the room: Does he really stop destruction?

  The question about his wife was a difficult one to answer without resolving what residual similarities lay between him and the people of Swan Lake. They could only answer him by asking what old bridge still existed between them and this top Australian? Did it mean if they spoke plainly to him that they were Australian too? Or, were they really invisible in anyone’s language no matter what they said, and would remain un-Australian for loving ancient beliefs of their traditional lands too much. All history had to be tested in these questions. Why? All history needed to be addressed in their answers. So what wife was he looking for?

  A wife, a wife, in any case, might end up being a piece of meat. Someone who might have been called Does it matter, then asked a simple question really, and very politely, What’s her name then – your wife?

  I sent you people a letter, Warren snapped, while checking the time once more on his watch, and blimey, he kicked his brain for wasting time.

  Honestly, nobody remembered receiving a letter: Can you tell us what was in the letter? Weisenheimer asked.

  It was explained in the letter. Warren Finch said – full stop. He was in no mood to explain what should have been read in a letter.

  Was it that impossible to read a simple letter? He was clearly annoyed that these people were trying to force him into talking about what was really, after all, a delicate matter. His minders thought so too. A man of his position expected to have things organised properly. It happened that way everywhere else on the planet, so what was the trouble with this place? Why could one simple thing not be done right in this place of all places – his homeland? You want to tell me if someone wants to play around with me here? He suspected the financial controller was lying. If you are running the show you must have seen the letter.

  The meeting waited while some clerk was called up to the office to find the letter. Meanwhile, Warren looked miserably around the building at paper piled and paper strewn, and then blankly at one of his minders who immediately left the building to make a call on his mobile phone to an office so far away from everything abysmally slack-assed that he could see in the dismal swamp, and cheerfully spoke to the real world of Heaven, where things happened with a single snap of one’s fingers, where people could not run fast enough to do things properly. When he returned, the minder reported that the letter had been sent a long time ago and there had been no reply. The two-line, three-short-sentenced letter was now emailed to the mobile phone that was passed around the room, so everyone could read the contents of Warren’s letter.

  Well! Wasn’t that just typical, just typical.

  At this point the electricity suddenly stopped flowing from the malfunctioning power station down the road, and the fans rumbled to a halt. There was sweat in the room. The Army mechanic, who had gone away fishing for the weekend with ‘neglected’ children, would not be able to fix the problem, Weisenheimer announced. He was uncontactable. Finch had now clearly had it up to his eyeballs. What use was a mechanic if you can’t even contact the bugger when you haven’t got any power?

  Well! You tell me? Who is the boss? You, or the flaming mechanic? Finch glared at the controller. Or who the parents are around here? He was now counting the bad vibes, all falling like dominos. All the ammunition! He was a master at pinpointing incompetence. Unlike beef cattle, this was what fed the belly of Canberra, the paradise hungry to shut down the Indigenous world. A bloody lost letter, and the lost wife, now the lost power, plus the smell of a dead rat in the ceiling, who could dream of what was coming next? The question of Warren’s lost wife quickly became a lengthy in camera discussion in the full-blown humidity of the tropics in the closed room where swarming mosquitos were playing noughts and crosses on exposed skin.

  So it was in this inner sanctum of the swamp’s Aboriginal Governmental Nation, which was trying to find a pleasing resolution, while Warren Finch was simply wondering if they were even worth saving at all. Then, the last-straw cold tea circulated to the meeting by a young girl – long after she had responded without much enthusiasm to repeated loud, clicking fingers by Weisenheimer, because she was too busy ear-dropping at the closed door and dreaming that she was Warren Finch’s wife – blasted the lid off politeness. No tea tipped the balance.

  She was a promised wife. A promised wife? Ah! Now that was different. This is very different to what we were thinking. Sorry, but we didn’t think about that, because we don’t do that kind of thing here anymore. It died out years ago. Nobody wanted to continue with this old law. The old elder said this straight out because he said he was nobody, and not just because everyone knew that a discussion of a highly contentious issue like this might end badly by the end of the night.

  One of the older women said she had been a promised wife. Another woman said that she was more concerned about how the township kept moving by itself, and if this moving around of people kept going on, soon there would be so many of them, they would be living off their traditional country, and something needed to be done about this. The controller urged the meeting to think very carefully about what Mr Finch was talking about. He too wanted to hear the truth about the lost letter that might explain the reason for such a highly prominent person in the Australian community behaving this way – like what the locals would gleefully think was a deranged hobgoblin sent by Canberra to personally annoy him, so of course he asked: What age would this ‘so-called’ promised wife be? He wanted to know if Warren required a child. Was it a virgin? What hymn sheet were they to sing?

  The Aboriginal Government men and women saw all kinds of awful ramifications for Swan Lake and stayed quiet. Actually, they knew the reality of his request, but Weisenheimer was on a roll, becoming emotional – nothing would stop him. Now he lost the plot by asking a lot of questions on behalf of his people’s welfare:

  Why did you come here like this, making these demands of us?

  Why didn’t you just come here with good intent?

  What about those doctors? Why were doctors being wasted as bodyguards? We need doctors here to look after the sick people. We’ve got plenty of sick people here.

  Yes, Warren Finch could have gone anywhere he liked while he was busy out saving the world, other than visiting the people who needed him most, his own people in Swan Lake. And! Gosh! A man like Warren Finch was too busy, he did not need a wife.

  So why come here and bother the little people on a Friday evening when people needed to be home relaxing after a hard week and eating their dinner while it was hot?

  Warren Finch had obviously thought the whole thing through – start to finish – beforehand. He had come to collect his wife and expected a wall of silence, but he knew he would push on through the night if he had too, and he was digging in. He was prepared to get no sleep for days to get a result, and knew the ramifications of naming his mission.

  Dr Hart, Dr Doom and Dr Mail, his long-t
ime minders, who always thought that they knew everything there was to know about Warren as his closest confidantes, now exchanged questioning looks. Warren Finch already had all the women he could ever want. Didn’t he have some sort of long-term relationship with somebody in Canberra? What about Marcella of Milan? Wasn’t he seeing a Maria in Warsaw? It was hard to keep track of the women in his life. Why would he want to do this? What kind of wife was he thinking of?

  Names, names, names, Warren continued, clicking his fingers impatiently. It was only a simple name that a person needed. This was a reciprocal agreement and it must be honoured, said one of the ex-boxer-type minders. His minders were quick to take up the thread of what was news to them, while not knowing how a promise wife fitted into Warren’s grand plan, in which he had always been honest enough to admit that he had no time for wives. The painful issue was prolonged further by excuses from the Swan Lake Government suggesting it would be happy for the promise to be annulled. It was time to go home. Time for bed. But it was up to him to make the final decision since they knew the families involved in the first place were now deceased.