The Swan Book Read online

  In her dreams she struggled to find a lifeline to grip. No safe anchor in the exploding water, where the chaos was so terrifying, the girl jumped out of her sleep. The car was still travelling, and it startled her before she remembered where she was.

  The headlights flashed over telegraph poles beside the road, an endless line running behind them, which in her mind began forming a swan map of the country. She could imagine the swans flying above the wires strung across the poles in their slow migration along the Dreaming track from another age, while heading the journey up to the swamp. Now, she began fretting for them. Occasionally, the lightning lit up a landscape wild with wind and she remembered how the swamp drummed with rain in nights of storm.

  In the relentless movement of travelling through a rain that had captured the country, her world became shrunken, pieces of memory flew off, became eradicated, until even the polluted slicks running across the swamp had disappeared into nothingness. She sensed everything known to her had disappeared and blamed herself. Had she really negated her responsibility for the greater things in her care? She could not ask what had happened to the swans. Would not ask to be taken back just to see whether they were safe. Her stomach had no momentum for pushing words into her mouth so that she could speak to anybody. She would have no words sophisticated enough to say to high-up kind of people like these men. Outside the claustrophobic car, the never-ending rain was falling heavily, so even if she had spoken, nobody would have heard.

  Warren Finch slept in the front seat. He had fallen asleep from the moment they started out, but the three bodyguards talked on through the journey. A thick haze of cigarette smoke danced around in the car, and they sat in this smoke like genies squashed in a lantern. The three men talked non-stop about how things happened a lot to them while working for Warren Finch, and listening to them, you would think that they had never known any other life. They had never been born. Never had a home. Never had a family.

  The girl fought the sound of these voices that talked on and on about things she did not understand. It became more and more difficult to stay awake, to remember the road, to count the signposts, her only way of finding the way back. She lost track of her calculations – the categories slipped into lesser numbers, and were forgotten. Now, she thought she was becoming delirious from imagining devils monotonously speaking in the talk of the bodyguards.

  In lightning strikes their faces looked freaky. Nobody looked real with their skin replaced by a watery substance trapped in opaque layers of silicon. The lightning convinced the girl that these silicon remnants of ancient waters must be spirit genies that had decided to dress like men and were now working for Warren Finch, and pleasing his every wish. The girl wondered whether he knew of their true identity. It was no wonder that his pugilist scholars could do all manner of tasks, far more than any normal men. This was why Warren Finch was not sitting up awake in the front seat wishing to be rich and powerful and a genius. He already had his three wishes.

  Who uses up their three wishes? A wish for this and a wish for that in each puff of cigarette smoke filling the car! The girl thought the sleeping man was running out of wishes, and she tried to imagine where the genies would live after he set them free. When that happened she would get her wish too. She would steal the magic lantern car and drive it straight back to the swamp to calm the swans swimming aimlessly around the hull. She would arouse the paralysed huddle on the foreshore with heads tucked under wings, waiting for death.

  In her dream, a migrating swan moved rhythmically through the night as it passed across the changing landscape while following the lights of the car below. It glimpses Warren Finch sleeping in the front seat, and caught off guard hits the power lines and flips in flight. With wings faltering it ascends disoriented higher into the sky and spins off towards the stars while struggling to breathe. Oblivia was slowing down her own breathing too. Hardly breathes at all now, she is in a flight to death. She slips into unconsciousness while following the broken swan flying off through the darkness. Then the swan is pushed aside by the Harbour Master walking towards the car from a long way off and suddenly he is in the back seat of the car, where he squashes himself on top of the two men and the girl. Oblivia wakes up in fright, opening her mouth wide as the Harbour Master punches her hard in the chest. He is pushing air through her lungs, while squeezing the wrist of each of Warren Finch’s men in turn, until they are in so much pain, they are forced to wind down the windows to let in some fresh air, allowing the rain to belt into the car. Stupid girl, he says, and he remains in the car throughout the journey, watching the rain and taking note of the country, making it almost impossible for anyone to move in the back seat, especially Oblivia, who remains calm. Warren Finch kept sleeping, but the genies felt spooked by a foreboding in the car, a heaviness that stopped the talk, and made them think seriously about why they had bothered taking this journey right now, at this time of year, the stupidity of the whole trip really, and why they were not somewhere else instead.

  Owls in the Grass

  The Grass Owl has always been regarded as one of Australia’s scarcest owls, rarely seen and with only a handful of nest records, yet here was a concentration of birds, with evidence of multiple nesting.

  The girl finally discovered where the three genies lived. After travelling many hours they reached a night world where men in singlets ruled lonely roads. Sweaty men yelling out over radio and satellite phones to each other to dig out the rulebook: That one written in hell. From then on it was hell on earth on this lonely single road, a highway stretching a thousand kilometres over the heart of the country.

  This was the place where the mind of the nation practised warfare and fought nightly for supremacy, by exercising its power over another people’s land – the night-world of the multi-nationals, the money-makers and players of big business, the asserters of sovereignty, who governed the strip called Desperado; men with hands glued to the wheel charging through the dust in howling road trains packed with brown cattle with terrified eyes, mobile warehouses, fuel tankers, heavy haulage steel and chrome arsenals named Bulk Haul, Outback, Down Under, Century, The Isa, The Curry, Tanami Lassie, metal workhorses for carrying a mountain of mining equipment and the country’s ore.

  A crescendo of dead – the carcasses of splattered or bloated bullocks and native animals lay over the sealed or unsealed corrugated roads, where the eyes of dingoes and curlews gleamed in the headlights.

  The genies stopped frequently to check the road kill. Hunger filled the car. The girl watched as they collected those still with a trace of life: small rodents, mangled rabbits, various marsupials, broken-back snakes, a bush turkey, a smashed echidna. All of these bloodied, broken creatures still warm, were thrown in the back seat of the car. Along the way, the Harbour Master decided he could no longer be bothered staying in a car loaded with road kill, so he got out, and walked off somewhere out there on the open road.

  You could only expect to arrive in the most isolated destinations like this after midnight, one of the genies murmured to the others in the car, after driving hour after hour through flat and wide country to reach a place where the winds collided and spun the soil into clouds of dust. Home at last. The genies walked off into the bush. They spoke to the country. Let the country know they had come home. Who the sleeping man and the girl were in the car.

  The genies constructed a campsite on ground thick with rats, and smiled whenever they passed the terrified girl sitting in the car watching the earth move with their footsteps. Child! Pretty rats. Ratus vilosissimus. Bush rats! The air was dry and smelt of dust, rats and the heat of many days that had stayed in the ground. The rats scattered in rolling waves at every movement while scurrying in and away for all the fur and offal thrown to them by the genies preparing the road kill for the fire. Doom, Mail and Hart could not put aside something that had been niggling them ever since they had arrived on their country with the girl. None of them knew the stories from her country. They did not know anything about her, not
hing of what she held within her, or the spirits of the law stories that she now brought onto their own territory. How would they know how these stories connected both countries? What other questions should they be considering if her stories did not connect with their country, not even one story-line connecting their lands together, if that was possible? They did not know. And the girl? She had not spoken a word and as far as they knew, she was not able to speak.

  These questions started to haunt them, and it seemed as though the ancestors were already asking them to consider the consequences of trespassing spirits, and how they connected themselves to land and to her, and what knowledge they would turn to on this country. They were not senior story-men, nor in positions of authority as elders holding the law of the country on which they stood. Not like Warren, still asleep in the car, who was a senior lawman with much authority on his own country.

  Well! It was pretty serious stuff to worry about, and they thought Warren was stupid for bringing her along in the first place with the excuse of using all of that promise marriage stuff – where did that come from? And simply by glancing from the girl and at each other, they agreed being back on their country was going to be one hell of a sobering-up exercise for each of them.

  Since they were already calculating the cost of having her on their country, each man instinctively understood how these things work; of being responsible for looking after the girl. It was pretty obvious to them that there was something different about her – not because of Warren, but her strangeness made them feel uneasy, and convinced them that she had spirits looking after her. This was the thing that they had felt in the car, and now the whole mess of not knowing what to do about her continually bothered them. It was because of their foreboding about what they did not know about her, that they were already thinking about leaving, and realising if they continued thinking like this, it would get to the situation where it would be impossible to leave, because if not today or tomorrow, any one of them could suddenly be seized, and driven into that state of impossibility. Leaving would become a rock hanging around their necks. Leaving would become tied to a sense of foreboding, seen as being riddled with bad luck, where anything could go wrong with the whole situation of watching, caring, and thinking while they went about their scientific work on the environment – the annual task, the one small important thing that they had been asked to perform by their own nation. Now, instead of the work being a joy, with a sense of respect, and honouring their country, they would always be waiting…watching and waiting while nothing happened, until their own berserk, cart-wheeling prophesying was fulfilled.

  The dust rose like shadowy priests wandering through the darkness. A celestial haze stirred up by the cattle. The cattle called to one another in response to their leaders, collars swaying around their necks ringing their bells. The girl was too frightened to leave the car, but Doom ordered her to get out. Don’t be stupid. Nobody is going to hurt you. Blood boils in her face as she stands back in the shadows, too afraid of becoming lost and disoriented as rats scurry in and out of the ghost bush, where darraku was everywhere, and feeling that kundukundu scrub devil reaching out with the wind, and she feels him scratch, kurrijbi all over her body, scratching along her arms and legs, he ensnarls her into the foliage.

  The cattle bells roll, and remind her of Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions singing sacred texts to unlock the terrifying memories of her people. Again and again, by ringing the bells she brought them to life, legendary heroes that stretched right back through the ages to the time when wisdom-singers like Wainamoinen of the Kalevala were walking their land, swans came gliding from the marshes…came in myriads to listen…

  The same old oracle was everywhere, even in the dust of rats. This time, Bella Donna was quietly singing the poetry of Ludwig Rellstab’s In der Ferne – In the distance – of fleeing one’s home broken-hearted, hearted, from Franz Schubert’s Schwanengesang D.957. Hovering! Somewhere up in the sky! Asking the breezes to send greetings to a time when women stitched those white and golden swans in treasured embroidery that became heirlooms, before they fled along broad rivers towards the sea where white soot-stained swans were nesting in the burnt marshes.

  Warren Finch did not stay asleep for long. The genies were too full of enthusiasm, divined more song and talked of seeing so fine a starry night. Hey! Girl, look at that, they called Oblivia frequently, constantly checking to see where she was as she stood in the darkness. They kicked rats away, and their laughter swirled about with the wind. Hey! Girl, did you see that? The car produced bounty – food, cooking utensils and bedding, more than anyone could have imagined would fit in its boot. A campfire was lit. Meals were cooked. Aromas filled the air. Wine and water appeared as though they had been divined from the windy earth itself. You will feel pretty good while you are on this country, Boss, they reassured him. He was on their land. It fills you up with life. All the energy you need. You’ll see. The men exchange knowing looks. There is no need to speak. They all belong to the same game. They know what Warren Finch has to work out before they go back to the city.

  Let’s go, jila nungka, Finch said flatly to Oblivia, after he had eaten every piece of meat on his plate. She had not eaten, or as Warren guessed, refused to eat. He could see hatred in her eyes, and felt how tense she was, but he took her by the hand, pulled her to her feet from the ground where she had been sitting near the fire, and led her back to the car. In this moment of pulling her away from herself, she knew he would overpower her life. Even the sensation of his hand touching her had sent her back into the tree in her mind.

  Once Warren had left with the girl, the genies chatted lightly about city women, international woman who called him up night and day. Now therein lay the mystery: She was not in the same league. They had seen enough of her on this journey to know that he must be regretting his mistake. She was just a kid. Well! She certainly looked and behaved like one. What did he think was going to happen once they got back home? Anyone could have told him not to go around picking up ‘damaged goods’ girls from dysfunctional Army-controlled communities like the swamp. Main thing being that bloody place was her homeland. The man’s got enough troubles. What was he thinking? The girl was overcome with shyness and here they were, a thousand kilometres away, and she would not even look at them, let alone speak. What he went and done now is a wrong thing. They knew how lightly he treated women, but thought he understood which women had any chance of standing up to him. Well! That was too late now. He had laid the idea of ‘worldliness’ at the feet of a recluse. Who knew what was the matter with him? He’s gone too far. They did not have to say what each of them already knew, that they could not fix this problem. It would not be like having a ‘small smart chat’ to one of the city women he was tired of, who he wanted to go and get lost.

  I am so tired, Warren told her, after he had driven a short distance from the camp the genies had made for themselves, and threw his swag on the dirt.

  Come here and let’s get some sleep, he said, pulling the trembling girl towards him, onto the swag, and into the blanket of dust swirling over them. The surrounding bush smelt of the rats that were rushing through the grass whining for food, which made her believe they would attack once she fell asleep. She felt nauseated by the closeness of this other person, but surveying the surrounding darkness, she saw that there was nowhere to escape in the dryness of the strange country that frightened her. Forced to lie together in the cold, locked for warmth like sheltering animals against a windbreak he had erected with the canvas of the swag against the car, his arms wrapped around her made her feel that she was in the grip of a snake. She listened closely to the dry grass and shadows of scrub being rustled by the wind, singing stories and laws that she would never know, and knowing this single thing about being its stranger was like having the weight of the world on her shoulders. This was the kind of weight she carried to stop her from sleeping in this country. Whenever she drifted off to sleep, she would instantly be re-awakened; just by the simple fact of
knowing she should not be there, and knowing that rats crept all over the ground searching for food. She felt the country’s power. Knew it could kill her.

  Every sound convinced her that his bodyguards, the genies, were in the bush waiting for her to run. She does not trust any of them. But how could they be lurking around, when from further away, she could hear them singing the country through the night, their voices resounding in the wind gusts, and echoing through the landscape, as though there were many others singing with them. Her instincts keep telling her to run, she cannot stand being near him, feels like death to her, but fearing he would kill her, she remains frozen, barely able to move. Whenever she moved slightly, even to breathe deeply, his grip tightened. But he slept easily: the songs travel with him, and he carries the spirits of homelands inside him. It makes him strong: the hands of the ancestors are in his own, acting in unison.

  She lay very still in the hope that he would stay sleeping even though she did not want to be left awake to listen to the sounds of the country. She hears the sharp cry from a rat and imagines that a snake is killing it, and this convinces her that she is sleeping on miya-jamba, snake ground. She imagines snakes are everywhere and hates the place, and is hot from panicking to be off the ground. The thought of rats and snakes infested through every centimetre of this piece of country makes her growing hatred for Warren Finch grate that little bit harder, and she is desperate to move, but just when she wishes to kill him and reaches around to find a rock to slam into his head, forgetting to fear she might touch a rat or a snake instead because she can’t see a thing in the darkness, or that he will wake up and see what she is doing and kill her instead, something happens. She forgets to act – either to run off, or to kill him. She has changed her mind? No, that was not it. Her mind changes itself. It is at war with action. Fights decisions. She forgets to act when memories quickly regain control of her brain, and instead of fighting, she escapes with a flood of thoughts running back along the song-lines to the swamp, and the language inside her goes bolting down the tree with all the swans in the swamp following her.