The Swan Book Read online

  Edgar Mail continued talking, You should remember that anyone can be a habitual colonist perpetually in search of difference to demystify myths, always trying to create new myths to claim as their own. The girl could hear the old woman and the Harbour Master chuckling somewhere in the air above them, telling her to forget about what that man was saying. What would he know about the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas back in 1697 when a white man first saw your mythical black swan swimming about over there in Western Australia, who had always thought black swans were evil and never really existed? Did he stand back and not touch, believing he would be doomed on a shipwreck for taking a black swan?

  You know, most of these eggs will hatch but when the food runs out in the summer, the rats will perish, and so too will most of the owls, Edgar Mail said lamely, while looking at Snip, who looked at Doom. The girl began to think about how she was going to disappear into ghost country, just like the girls who never returned. She looked out over the ocean of grey-green grasses and thought of how Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions had spent years looking across oceans to stop herself from dying at sea. The Harbour Master reminded the girl that it was very difficult, impossible really, to survive if you never existed.

  The genies kept talking about Oblivia’s name.

  Immya Wake. You are kidding me. Nobody has a name like that.

  No. No way man.

  You tell them, Warren laughed, looking at her. The girl felt as though she had been stripped in broad daylight. She looked away while trying to decide where to run, but there was no place to run. The plains country was already a coffin for brides.

  That’s not a good joke comrade, Snip snapped.

  Yes! You are right, Warren replied. Swan girl, I know your name is Ethyl. Will always be Ethyl. I don’t know who gave you that other name. But from now on it’s going to be Ethyl, short they tell me for Ethylene Oblivion. A beautiful name really, Ethyl.

  The genies wanted to know where that name originated.

  The girl stalked off, spitting all over the ground as she went.

  Warren Finch liked her spirit. She was a good hater. He smiled as though he was pleased with his new possession. The girl did not go far before she realised that she wanted to live, and this dead face Warren Finch was bloody well it, so when Snip commanded, Stop. Stay dead still until I come to you, she froze on the spot. All she hears is Warren’s voice, talking again on the mobile phone.

  Snip Hart charmed snakes. Snakes are my thing, he laughed as he appeared without a sound beside her: Not yours I can see. He urged her to pick up the snake coiled on the ground directly beneath them. She remained glued to the spot, full of hate for the man’s continual speaking, leaning back and forth, taunting the snake to lunge.

  Come on. I am right here, he urged. The girl felt the serpent eyes staring right into her mind. She felt the sensation of its glare and the immediacy of her fear travelling back through its nervous system, pushing its strength down though the muscles of its body, and from there her fear sat like a spring in readiness, as the snake prepared to strike. Snip waited. Shh! he whispered. Perspiration ran from her forehead onto the snake’s shiny head and over the black beads of its eyes. The snake lunged. Her blood raced to the spot where it would bite before Snip Hart swung the snake up off the ground and into the air by the tail. It hung from the top of his up-stretched arm, struggling for freedom.

  He smiled: See how simple it is? He gave her a pat on the shoulder as he walked past to show the others. Snip was an expert on desert snakes. It was his country. The girl thought that the snake had not seen him because he was invisible to it. He was already inside the snake. It had only concentrated on striking her. Snakes were also numerous, Edgar Mail explained to Oblivia as they walked, because all the unusual climatic changes which were creating plagues of insects and rodents, also increased the numbers of species that fed on them.

  You just have to be quick, Snip claimed, as if snake-catching was an ordinary skill that people needed to know to be able to walk in a country like Australia. Oblivia continued watching him as he walked ahead while trying to discover whether he really was invisible to snakes. In the sun, she was soon hypnotised by thoughts of hands that moved from running down the body of a snake and examining owl eggs, to hands she pushed away at night.

  Snip Hart was fast. He plunged his arm straight down a hole in the ground, or a spinifex tunnel, and grabbed a snake. He announced the measurements and weight in breaking news, while noisily tapping the results into his computer with one hand, and with the other holding the snake. Afterwards, when he finished with each snake, and before releasing the writhing creature, he stared into its eyes to speak lovingly to it in simple words describing its numerous points of beauty, its measurements, and stroking it, he successfully seduced the creature into limp submission in his hand. In its hypnotic trance, he said, it only dreamed of loving this land. How many sexual encounters he wondered, had this snake experienced. Ten? Edgar Mail guessed, fingering the length of stubble on his face while studying the size of the creature. Twenty, by its size, reasoned Snip. Then he laid the creature on the ground, where it stayed motionless, and walked away.

  There is a lot to learn about owls, Mail claimed dreamily in camp at night. He was singing his curiosity to the country and asking the ancestors for their reasoning, as he built his thesis on the plague of rats. Not the type of thing you could learn in one day in a place where samples of the biosphere in a vast stretch of the country were being carried through some of these creatures we were examining. How do you explain their special stories of origins and creation, return and renewal, which are as new as they are old?

  No! Don’t tell them anything. Wait until I get back. Warren on the other hand, had spent most of his day ignoring the world of rats, owls and snakes, and was still answering and making calls on his mobile phone’s secure link. He spoke to people across the world in their own languages. He chatted to all of the policy-makers he was interested in, and lastly, told his men that there were people trying to find their location, and continued to speak calmly, while fetching Oblivia back from another attempt to walk off in a halfawake dream, or having to duck from her sudden outbursts of arms swinging to either punch or scratch him, or avoiding another round of aeroplane spitting. Ah! Janybijbi nyulu julaki jabula! Naah!

  Well! People will be looking for you, Edgar Mail said, already knowing. It was always understood that Warren Finch’s life was lived in danger. He was simply a wanted man. Everyone wanted a part of him. To put it mildly he was a saviour, and we know what happens to saviours. Threats were continuously being made on his life. This time, the threats were so serious, he was advised to think about his future security by old untrustworthy, O.K. Corral Horse Ryder, if he wanted to stay alive. Yet Warren and his men believed that this was simply how he had to live. In their world, it was hard to know what was sound advice, or what contained a threat, or what was just someone crapping on in their mind. It could not have been any different, and Warren relished each challenge, where he would constantly be dealing with trouble, and out-smarting anyone in the world who wanted to take a shot at him. It was these threats to his life that became the reason, the modus operandi for Warren’s elusiveness, where nobody really knew or understood where he was. He led people into believing what he wanted them to believe. So routinely exercised was this art of illusion in fact, in a puff of the genies’ smoky haze, Warren Finch could will himself to be anywhere in the world, instantly in flight to another country, instantly appearing in another part of the continent, or regularly popping up on the television all over the place, while all the time, it was assumed that he was still living normally, like other people. His artfulness in disappearing and reappearing was so strange, that as the swamp people had believed he was somewhere else, he could still make you feel that you had never seen him – that he was never there at all. This was why they were out on the genies’ country. A bushland so vast in its sameness, that only the traditional owner could read the
subtle stories of its contours. This was where they always took Warren to work out strategies to fend off the latest round of would be assassins.

  Let them wait. I am having a break. Want a bit of time to think things through.

  Warren kept a lot of the information he had received to himself. Business. Policy. His security. The seriousness of new threats to his life. It concerned him after all. He would deal with the waiting game for others to strike first. Keep punching – just like he had told the girl.

  Stay as long as you want, Edgar agreed. You are in charge. But you better keep it in mind that the longer you are away, the more difficult it is going to be to take control when you get back.

  Nothing to worry about, Warren said. There is nothing they can do without me. I am not even back in the country as far as anyone knows.

  I am just saying there are things happening in the country right now, Mail warned. Might do better with your presence, that’s all.

  I know that, Warren said in a tone of voice that made it clear that he did not want to be reminded of having other responsibilities: What we are doing here. Finding out what is going on in the country. This is more important right now.

  The genies smiled and continued relaxing on the ground next to the fire well into the night, drinking tea, their eyes upwards, searching the star world. Nothing Warren said was of any consequence to them. His fingers rang up and down the girl’s hand while she froze for what felt like a dead man touching her, and he thought of his own death march to the grave. The onset of owls screeching aroused quiet academic discussion which grew into an argument about a single pitch once heard, the purest of sounds, and whether this was an owl signalling its territory, or something else altogether – a voice from the spirit country.

  Edgar Mail took the violin out of its case. He tuned it slowly as his fingers worked on the yellow wood instrument shining from the light of the fire. It softly responded to his touch while he listened, until suddenly, he began playing the melancholy tune of owls calling through the stillness of night. The music created ripples in the rhythm of the owl calls as he replied to their sound with his own composition. Near and far, the owls replied. The music was theirs. Edgar was almost in a trance as he walked around the camp with his violin and drifted away into the darkness of the surrounding spinifex with rats parting in haste to create a path, and his music calling and responding to the instructions of the owls.

  He was playing like the old powerful chants of bringing up the country. Law music. The music was unearthly, but belonged to this land in the same way as the chanting of ancient songs and the sound of clap sticks beating through the night. The music now contained joyfulness, sometimes dropping suddenly into a barely audible lullaby, then out of this calm, it would suddenly grow again in pitch and rhythm until another and another crescendo was reached. Finally and abruptly, Edgar stopped playing, too exhausted to continue. He would have to remember the music. He said what they had listened to was the beginning of the first movement of music to grass owls in D flat major.

  The nights in this windy landscape were spent with the law spirits who were travelling the country to scrutinise the marriage of plagues – keeping the balance where insects, rodents, snakes and owls were breeding. Warren Finch wanted the ancestral world to create the balance in his marriage. He whispered into her ear that this was the way he wanted the land to see them. Oblivia moved away as though he was already a ghost. She saw the infestations of the day were still exactly the same at night. She was back in the tree in her mind. Safe there. Worse than ever: scribbling that silent language in the air. In truth, Warren was becoming convinced that for whatever reason he had taken the girl in the first place, it was not going to work. Even the act of consummating it seemed a waste of time. When he looked at her all he saw was a child. You can’t have sex – make love with a kid. She was scared stiff of the sight of him. Terrified when he touched her. His face, to her, was contorted with death. That was how she dreamed at night beside him. He saw clearly that it was beyond his power to change her, but by morning he would see the day afresh as a challenge to be met to make his marriage work, just like he tried to make everything else work, whatever the challenge, because to him, that was what life was all about.

  He kept reminding her that they would become friends. In the end you will trust me. That he should succeed in gaining her trust was important to him. The first goal he wanted to achieve. She was his last real link to a world he had severed, the attachment he had planned to keep. Sometimes she thought he was right. She would trust him.

  During the day whatever else he thought, he kept his distance, walking behind, always speaking to someone on the mobile phone. He knew that she had overheard some of these conversations. He said that these were just people he loved. People that he trusted. He depended on them for their safety. Yours too now, he added.

  Warren Finch did not sleep at night. In fact, the death dream returned the moment he dozed off on this country. He lay awake with their future – his future – weighing heavily on his mind. He had decisions to make, and he wondered whether it was worth taking the risk of continuing his political life. His death seemed to be the only future from it, and he kept revisiting the scene of being led to his grave.

  Could he bring her into that world? He tossed the question over and over, although he knew that it was not a safe decision to take her any further. She would need a lot of looking after that was for sure. He tried to push aside any imagining of what his life would be like with her. Couldn’t form a vision of it. Somehow, thinking about the future did not seem to make any sense as the night wore on. He was more familiar with having a rough ride in politics and doing it alone. Never thought about his own personal future before. Just the country’s future. It was his speciality. The only dream he felt that he could make real. This was the best way he knew of dealing with his enemies. As though making enemies was his life. He looked at Oblivia pretending to be asleep. Wondered how much longer he could stay, but confirmed in his own mind, that until he knew where the new threats were coming from, he would keep stalling his return. There were government security people on to it. They kept updating him. Getting closer, he had been told. He only trusted his own bodyguards: Hart, Doom, and Mail. They had been close for years. If they thought his life was in so much danger, so be it. They had agreed: We will take as long as it takes to deal with it.

  Tomorrow they would be out of this death country, and it couldn’t be quick enough. But what to do about her? It almost did not matter to him which way the wind blew. He was always ready to fall. Yet he knew she would not be able to take the blows, although she had given him a few, and continued to lie awake until dawn, knowing he would have to do something about it. She would struggle. For the first time in his life he had to admit that he really felt jinxed.

  The vehicle was left far behind covered with spinifex, where it melted into the landscape on the edge of the salt lake country through which they were travelling. The whole country could burn behind them if disaster struck, but the genies were not interested. They were born and raised on the land and they knew how to walk in it.

  Don’t look back, Edgar Mail said, surprising the girl as he whispered into her ear. We wouldn’t want to see you being turned into a pillar of salt.

  In the days that followed, they continued travelling further across the white sea. The defining landmarks of this salt lake country were small crags that jutted out here and there in the salt. These were the possession of spirit guardians travelling on a journey far away to important story places. The salt crust broke underneath them with each footstep. There was even more solitude in this place than in the spinifex country they had just left behind. They felt the presence of the enormous white glistening body that contained the quietness of a resting serpent spirit fellow who was listening deeply to hear even an insect perching on its skin, come there to recite its song. The landing of butterflies. The feet of a lizard pounding on crystals of salt.

  There were battalions of st
ink beetles crawling over each other and the salt. Plague grasshoppers jumped away at the coming of strangers. Moth storms swept across the lake. Crimson and orange chats whistled from the heath of spinifex, pittosporums, mulga and eremophila scrubs growing along the sides of the lake. The girl saw green twisting clouds of budgerigars crossing their paths at various times throughout the day. Up high, harriers and kites cried out as they glided in the thermals. To look back was to see fine salt crystals dusting over their tracks as little storms of salty filaments gurgled about in the desert air.

  That was during the day. The salt glowed at night, and the body of the lake moved differently when the ancestral winds lowered themselves from the skies and whistled eerily across its surface. The night spoke in dreams which took the wandering thinker far below the surface, to be jostled in a spirit sea populated with the salt-encrusted bodies of millions of grasshoppers, shoals of tiny fish bones, brine shrimps, larval fish like splinters of glass, colourless moths, seeds and stalks; grotesque bloated grunters, bony herrings, frogs, tadpoles and water birds that had perished in the increasingly saline waters, and been entombed when the water evaporated.

  The girl dreamt of swans, chaotically misshapen creatures frozen in death that were forcing their spirits through films of salt to reach her during the night. Had they come searching for truth, but found encasement? She awoke from dreams where her fingers were red raw from trying to peel away the salt to straighten the pinion feathers of the swans and let them fly.

  They passed through old times, coming through hillock after hillock covered in spinifex, of Country that had a serious Law story for every place, and of everything belonging to that place like family. The genies kept calling the names of these places which were thousands of years old, and which joined the Law stories of naming, titles of belonging, maps of exclusiveness that ran like this, throughout the continent. Oblivia kept quiet. Listened to the names. Tried not to think in case the spirits heard her and dragged her into their realm. She would not die on this country.