The Swan Book Read online

  Weisenheimer pushed on.

  Warren, I can guarantee you as real as I am sitting here that we do not have anyone around here who would even remember this promise wife arrangement.

  He encouraged others to say something to end the matter, and they did.

  You do not have to go through with it, Mr Your Highness. You should feel free to marry someone else and we give you our full blessing our boy.

  Yes. This is what people do now because the Army is in control here for the Australian Government punishing us people. We still live in punitive raid times. They do not worry about the promise. We just get married with the controller’s permission.

  No! No! No! The minder called Dr Doom fired the shots in a deep operatic voice of the likes you would hear in the Teatro la Fenice in Venice; a soaring ghostly phoenix roaring, that as sure as hell did not belong in this swamp. The boom killed free speech in an instant. Meandering talkathons were pronounced dead. There were no other cards to play except Warren’s, and he had placed those squarely on the table. Men like Doom made many people wonder whether there were other Aboriginal people coming up through the education system who could use their voices like that.

  Still, what was pretty much the vox populi of wishes in Swan Lake became grist for eyeballs bouncing back and forth, where they looked up from the bottom of a Rio Grande chasm between one of these super humans and the next. Warren Finch’s eyebrows rose, and he transformed himself into television Warren with legs stretched out under the table, but nobody copied his behaviour. It did not matter to them how much Warren Finch was relaxing because it just felt like intimidation. They knew that feigning to be relaxed was one thing for the champion peacekeeper of the world, but this type of person does not travel out of his way, just to reach a swamp and settle for rejection, be bluffed by diversions, or just plain mucked around. His relaxed state only emphasised his intransigence and he casually restated what he wanted, with a smile: The law is the law. He simply wanted what was his to claim from an agreement made between families, of Our nations, he said.

  It should not be that hard to understand.

  But nobody told us, somebody nervously chanted.

  But nobody told us? Warren’s sauna-soaked minders whispered, in mocked shock. The pressure-cooker room was not to everyone’s taste.

  You had to give it to the bosses of this swamp for being true masters of their own game. They were not going to be duped by anyone walking in off the street so to speak, or more factually, coming in off the road like some unannounced hobo Black fellow, and aiming to rip the dirt from beneath their feet. They knew what people like this try to do. He was making a claim on their traditional land. They dug their heels in. Claimed no knowledge of the letter. Claimed there was no misunderstanding, and the reason being, they were always kept in the dark. Nobody could blame people who were kept ignorant to whatever was going on behind their backs. A few words on a mobile phone? Blah! Meant nothing. It was not a letter they received. You can’t receive letters on a telephone. Never heard of such a thing. They accused the financial controller: Ask him! He never spoke to any of us Aboriginal people.

  The fuming controller’s many freckles looked like a nest of redback spiders about to burst as he shouted that if anyone wanted to make an appointment to get information about themselves, his office door was always open. Wasn’t that true? He yelled at each of the people he pointed to around the table. In the end, a mumbler spoke into his chin and called the controller a rude man. The controller was uncontrollable. He had lost the letter, but it was plainly obvious that no harm had been intended, so the meeting agreed on the spot that such an agreement might have been cemented between two families, and the good news was that the misunderstanding could be put right. A likely name was whispered, that matched Warren’s information about a family promise he received a long time ago at the bedside of his dying father.

  The financial controller took Warren aside, outside the building, over on the lawn, far from the meeting, to be discreet. The girl you are looking for is called Oblivion Ethyl(son), Ether(son), something or other like that. The Aboriginal Government was betrayed by Weisenheimer who could not keep his mouth shut for a minute about anything. They always knew that she had been promised to Warren Finch so they had banned promised marriages. She lived down on the hull. And everyone knew why she was there.

  Very unfortunate business they say. She was interfered with. (Sigh). But that happened a long time ago mind you. Long before I arrived here.

  I already know about that. Warren Finch snapped – his words slamming against each other. Back inside the office, he saw the flinching and twitching, but he smiled like he had hit the jackpot, and the meeting resumed admirably, with everyone getting on with polite letting bygones be bygones.

  The financial controller finished the meeting by limply saying. She shouldn’t be down there all by herself anyway.

  You got our backing Warren. We vote for you all the time here. There was a line formed and everyone took their turn to clearly state their allegiance to Warren. Whatever he thought was good enough for them – anything would be okay – a few cattle? And just like that – they personally acquiesced as though the girl had never existed.

  The brolgas outside wished to dance all day, but the day was gone and now they too were walking away into the night. The swans overhead sent a few peals of their toy trumpet calls through the dust, and continued flying down the swamp to the hull.

  Swan Maiden

  The moon was hidden behind the cloud of swans swarming over the swampy lake, where in the darkness, thousands hissed as they dived at the water and stabbed their beaks around Warren Finch in a rowing boat heading towards the hull. Battalions of swans swooped at the boat. Warren Finch could feel the warmth of their soft bellies as he brushed through their barricade.

  One thing leads to another, and before the girl could really understand how to think like an adult, a complete stranger had boarded the hull. The man said he was looking for her.

  The girl was fearful of the oars moving through the water and the noisy ruckus from the swans. She thought it was the owls she had heard earlier calling across the water. Now her invisible life had been split apart by a strange man’s presence in her home, and in that moment of visibility she felt ashamed of how she looked.

  You must be the swan maiden. His voice teased. She met him with a knife in her hand. He was still excited about how he had been challenged by the swans. How romantic! It amused him to cast himself into the story found across the northern hemisphere of the hunter who captures a mythical swan maiden in a marsh. He removed the knife in an instant, simply by reaching out and taking it from her hand while she was still in shock. Don’t hesitate if you want to kill somebody, he said. You want to do it straight – Pow! Slam! Into the heart. Get it over and done with – just like that.

  She looked away, but remembered hearing a voice once that was similar, and tried to understand the circumstances of how she had heard it. She could not remember because a flood of stories, swollen and submerging under their own weight rolled into waves that pushed her further away from its memory, until finally, the whole heavy weight of remembering collapsed, and she felt as though she was suffocating in her own life.

  In these images returned from the past, there was the face of a small girl urging her to run, to become once more the story of when she was alone, sleeping inside the tree. But Warren Finch’s gaze was like ice. A wall of ice in the way of running! His eyes held its glare. She heard him saying that her solitary life on the hull had now finished – a girl should not be living alone in this place. She did not want to hear him. It was not safe, he said. He looked her up and down like a cattle buyer. Not right. She was running away through the path made in her thoughts to the tree that stood clear in her mind. But stories were switching themselves around like rope thrown out in a crisis, and in the midst of trying to grab a story to save herself, the reality of swans called from outside in the sea of blackness around the hull. They remin
ded her that the tree was destroyed, there was nowhere to run. The swans’ clamorous trumpeting made her realise that nobody ran from Warren Finch. Already, he possessed her life.

  He liked to view people like an X-ray machine – technical, and without emotion, as though this was the way to examine the function of an asset. She looks deranged. Unhinged. She still acts like a child. But she must be about eighteen, nineteen, even twenty. What’s wrong with her. She can’t always be like this. The girl felt sick in the stomach. She was like a lizard trying to disappear down a blocked bolthole. Was it worth opening her eyes to see if she had succeeded, if neither he nor she existed? Working quickly, she installed the spirit of Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions, but the loud-mouthed Harbour Master returned too. He said she must be joking. He laughed: How can her memory rescue you, girlie? He warned her to get away from the past. The girl fought back by reciting, in Bella Donna’s high-tilting voice, the many swan maiden fantasies that have vanquished men who hunt swans. She screamed the story of the hunter, that of a fisherman, another of the man in the woods – of their capturing swan women that always eventually escape. Stories she knew well about escaping. Screams these into Finch’s face to cover the sound of his voice.

  He was trying to put aside his thoughts, the reality telling him to walk away, his ego telling him everything would be fine. She’s fine. She’s okay really. It is all this. This place. How would anyone feel? Nothing that can’t be handled with a bit of care. It will be fine.

  He would make it so.

  The thing about a levee is the way that it breaks apart with too much flooding. This was the type of thing that excited the Harbour Master about taking over the scene. He had to come into Oblivia’s mind and see what was happening, to sort it out, and he burst in and asked the girl what the hell was going on. What on earth are you thinking? He was in full swing for musings, and told her to stop digging into the ground. Your roots are piss weak! Won’t grow in this soil. It’s got no seed. Can’t grow it. His voice invaded every crevice in her mind, from knowing the girl did not know anything about God or the spirits or the Holy Ghost, and knowing she was too exhausted to dig around for any more old stories.

  What is his name? Warren asked about the swan hunter in the story she was trying to concentrate on. She does not know, shit! The Harbour Master was the boss and she was trying to hear what he was saying. Warren interjected constantly. Then he asked kindly: Would the hunter ever return the swanskin? The question puzzled her. She did not know if the swan wife would survive without her magical swan cloak in a place where her kind of story about swans belonged.

  Either the girl escapes or not! The words jam in her head. Drum beat to erase the existence of Warren Finch from her mind. But droning wings from clouds of swans drum fear louder, insisting that she Get him out of the hull. The breeze caught by their frenzied wings flowed along the soft-feathered breasts and bellies of these boats that glide in the sky until finally, the wind rushed inside the hull and whooshed the girl into its embrace.

  Are you awake? he asks, speaking loudly. His fingers click – Ethyl! Is your name Emily, or is it really Ethyl? He casually walks around the hull home, still with the knife in his hand, while glancing at the shabby books stacked on top of each other, or lined up in shelves, others that lay open on the pages of treasured passages, on which he reads a few lines to discover something of the girl’s intimacy with the swans. He flips pages with the knife and reads at whim wherever his finger rests on a page, and in the silent room, only the sound of flicking pages is heard as he moves to another passage.

  He continued reading and the girl looked away. She was ashamed. Her head screamed for this invasion of privacy. There was a complete casualness in his approach as he moved on, And they fade away in the darkness dying. Chinese poetry of swans, Baudelaire’s swan poem, and those on the floor in foreign languages he casually moved aside with his shoe. Then he looked at her as though she would tell him why these books were on the floor and why she had chosen others to read.

  Finally, he looked at the messy room and saw that she conducted her daily life like a child. They exchanged looks as though each was vermin. She was a frizzy-haired, stick-like kid – ought to be a young woman, but dressed in a rainbow-coloured T-shirt and baggy, grey shorts. The girl thought of escaping but under his gaze she was petrified, and incapable of lunging past him and out the door.

  You are Em-i-ly Wake, or are you somebody else? he asked, looking at her again as though she could be of mild interest to him. She did not know the name. Never heard of it before. It occurred to her that this stranger could tell her who she was, the identity she had sought by searching through words written on a page. Em-i-owake. She tried to say that her name was Oblivia Ethylene Oblivion, although generally, she thought Em-u-awake was something someone had said to her once.

  Go slow Warren, he said quietly to himself, while simultaneously checking the time on his watch. Do you know who I am? My name is Warren Finch. He asked if he could sit down, and sat down anyway on the only other chair, on Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions’ side of the table. This surprised her. She never used the chair. It still held the essence of the old woman’s authority. He told her to sit down too if she wanted. There was no warmth in his voice but the girl slid sideways onto her chair. Her gaze travelled over the floor and out the door to the swans calling and thrashing and rushing through the water. She did not hear a word he was saying.

  The swans swarmed in their panicky flight around the hull – great wings flapping wildly, as when they were alarmed by predators on their territory, and the great white swan that had haunted the swamp for old Aunty’s spirit.

  Already she felt the swans becoming disconnected from her. They were marooned in flight, unable to break apart from their fear. She saw in their erratic and chaotic struggle their desperation to flee, and understood the very same nervousness running through her own body. They were trying to persuade her to leap from the hull and fly with them. No, they would not leave without her. She wanted to run but she faltered, kept hesitating, not fully comprehending the extent of the swans’ electrified sense of danger, the sudden readiness to lift in one synthesised movement greater than that of their predator from the first sense of a deadly strike in the water. But the eagle was already in the hull, and ready to swoop.

  I suppose you don’t know who I am, do you? he asked again, his eyes steady, ignoring the upheaval around the hull.

  Sit there. You and I have got some things to talk about. And bloody relax. I am not going to eat you.

  This was the first time she had looked a person straight in the face. She recognised his clothes. They belonged to rich people like the ones Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had described. The people she had chopped carrots for while they protested about the state of the world and all that. He caught her glance and his face softened momentarily, as though it amused him to catch the rat girl off guard. She looked away quickly.

  We are married already, equally co-joined through Country, Law, story. Our marriage marks a new epoch in our culture. Our challenge will be the lying reality. Something to overcome, Warren Finch told Ethyl(ene) (Em, ya, I, or u awake) Oblivion(a), soon to become Finch.

  The girl did not think so. She leapt the plank he had laid with words and dived into the sea tide in her mind – that big deep sea, where she struggled to hold her head above the surface. Around her swarmed old Aunty’s stories of thousands of drowning people blowing swan whistles, and the boys of long ago with their faces covered by white masks. They pushed her aside as they jostled in some kind of game, reaching up with their arms to snatch from the air a face, Warren’s face, so that he became one of them. The memories splashed everywhere, suffocating the air in a jostle of whistles. She saw the boys laugh from the blank space of their mouths. She felt relieved by hands pushing her down into the bowels of the giant eucalyptus tree where it was just stillness.

  Stupid to take nothing. Somehow, in his struggle to overpower any of her attempts to escape him
, Warren Finch had gathered up many of the books in an old fishing net she used to scoop up tiny silver fish bait that swam beside the hull. Apart from books, the only other things she took from the hull as he forced her over the side of the vessel were those tangled memories that filled her mind.

  The swans swam all around the dinghy, cooing to be pacified by her. When she did not speak to the quizzing eyes that needed to understand the stranger and her odd behaviour, their grey, black and white-tipped wings flapped frantically and they lunged with their long necks into the boat and bit Warren’s arms as he rowed.

  She would hear the swans in the swamp for the last time from where she sat in the back seat as the car drove off, hemmed in between two of his minders. Swans ran along the water in the swamp, and flew in a cloud that looked like a black angel lit by lightning, but receded into the distance and their bugling faded into the thunder and the skies dark with midnight storms.

  You can take it away, and with that, Warren Finch switched off his mobile phone. There was no need to speak. There was the journey ahead. He had just ordered the total evacuation of Swan Lake. The Army would do it. The whole shebang would be bulldozed that night. He imagined total annihilation. The swamp dredged. The unpredictability of seasons passing, weaving the light as he fell asleep.

  The girl watched from the road as the kilometres passed, noticed the vegetation changing from one geographical region to the next, while stacking objects in her mind. The woman’s voice on the radio was singing…Pick me up on my way back. How would anyone sing the particularities of 3003-4-5 cans, 51-2-3 abandoned car bodies, 600 road signs, 86 carcasses of dead animals where wedgetail eagles swooped down and soared upwards, 182 old car tyres? There were lowland territories of emus, swarms of budgerigars, twisting green clouds over spinifex kinkarra plains, isolated groves of old eucalypts, river crossings with ghost gums dikili, solitary murrinji coolibah trees around dry dips in the landscape, salt pans, salt lakes, forest stands of gidgee in dry grass, lone bottle trees and fig trees growing out of rocky hills, salt plains, landscape blackened from bush fires, kulangunya blue tongue lizards, or frog calls, diamond doves, runs of spinifex pigeons. She would remember it all, by repeating the list over and over again, as the number of sightings increased, until she succumbed to exhaustion and sleep.