The Swan Book Read online

  In those nightly pilgrimages they heard the Monteverdi vespers sung over the droning of ancestor country. The winds whistled through the buildings, and through the skies, she was able to see that many swans were gathering in each ancient breath, and their flight formed landscape through the perpetual rain.

  Yes, the swans were multiplying, nesting among flooded trees, reeds and swan weed, and had already overfilled ponds in the abandoned botanical gardens and a small lake in the city’s zoo, then the city’s shallow lakes where they were breeding along the bays, gullies and inlets.

  At night, squadrons of swans flew up and down the brown-coloured river that cut through the city, and Oblivia sensed they were in training for something even they had not quite anticipated. She thought that they were trying to tell her something. The thought shifted around in her mind – floated here and there while it grew, and then she was tossing it around something big, throwing it about, slamming it against the wall of her brain, until it became something ugly and angry, too hot to hold, too tough to manipulate and examine, the thing that she was too afraid to recognise – that not only was there was a lack of communication in her ‘so called’ marriage, feelings of betrayal, manipulation, and abandonment were the goal-posts where havoc scored inside her head.

  The thought stuffing up her mind made her angry, and she tramped on in the nightly parade, unable to concentrate on the swans flying up and down the river. Well! What was the problem? Obsession. Television wife. She started to ask herself questions: Why was she always in a hurry for someone she only saw on television? Who she only knew through the television? Where each image was a portrait of a happy marriage? Even she believed it. And whenever she saw herself on television, she could only explain herself in sketches of what she appeared to be – the image presented, rather then remembering her actual presence as Warren Finch’s wife, and always, forgetting the details of ever being with this man who was her husband. She could not remember him – had no idea, even what he looked like unless she saw him on the television. But none of these things mattered really. What really mattered was that she could not admit to herself that Warren was using an impostor. Of course, the Harbour Master kept explaining with the impact of discovering nuclear energy, the big high and mighty Warren Finch doesn’t want to be seen with some complete myall like you for a wife. She is the pretend wife. Not you at all. But, Oblivia wouldn’t believe it. Could feel it in her bones that she was the television wife. She promised herself, the Harbour Master and the monkey, she would prove it.

  Of course they wanted to know how she was going to do that. But her mind slipped, went slack, played tricks on her and, without the steam to propel the thought, she again concentrated on the swans, following them with poetry running through her brain, The swan has leaped into the desolate heaven: That image can bring wildness, bring a rage to end all things, to end…The swans continued the circuit and she followed while she thought less about the apartment, and more about the need to keep up with flight. They were communicating with her about flight, long flight, not about Warren Finch who was living it up elsewhere – resuming life as usual as the head of state of a dilapidated country in a dilapidated world.

  The monkey had changed too. It decided to move out of the apartment because it had become too dirty. He had heard the girl talk about seeing poor, neglected monkeys in the zoo. He became very excited and left quietly in the middle of the night when the Harbour Master was asleep in front of the television. He went to the zoo and unlocked the door to the monkey house. From then on, he was the head honcho of a dancing troupe of monkeys that went to live as fugitives in the cathedral in the city, amongst the almond and fig trees growing from crevices in its sandstone walls. Free at last, the monkeys were popular buskers in the city malls. Always cashed up to pay the street children for protection.

  The Harbour Master stayed home sulking about the monkey becoming independent and the apartment being emptied of swans. He sat on the couch. He was in rough seas with the Panasonic television that blared old cricket games in the apartment night and day. Games that had been played years ago, and in-between the news, where he could watch Warren Finch’s face growing older every day. But there was no great satisfaction in watching someone grow older. Well! Not the face that never reached the destination of fulfilment, where Warren’s continuing triumphs – each seemingly more glorious than any before – were always sensed as personal failure.

  Yes, the Harbour Master still preferred to glare at the television. It was as though he was trying to steer the whole darn spectacular life of Warren Finch from the couch, propelling him along blasphemously, while hollering over some invisible howling rain, You know, people can talk and talk about how they are going to save the Aboriginal, world, ditto people…it goes on all the time, always wanting to save people who would rather talk about how they want to save themselves. When are you going to start thinking straight about that, Mr Warren Bloody Finch?

  Well! Let’s end the bad vibes with the cricket bats and kneepads that were all flying about the room. Why be so unhappy? Any of Warren Finch’s newest major concerns were challenging to the old Harbour Master. He always had to prove how he had seen better, or knew about something that was absolutely more amazing in some off-beaten track of the world to laugh about. Still! You could not avoid the fact that Warren’s life was being lived at a higher percentage elsewhere with the glamorous ‘promise’ wife, the First Lady of whatnot, than being wasted in hanging around, and minding reality in a swan-filthy apartment.

  The Street Serpent

  This was not all you will see in the city, this junkyard from where swan flocks ascended into the heavens, and flew the brisk breeze amongst swallows and pigeons up where ghosts shouted down: What a load of rubbish! But the swans overcrowding in the botanical gardens were edgy with hunger. They searched for swampy waters and found nothing. These old luckless things could only return to the abandoned sprawl of overgrown gardens, to roam among the butterflies and insects. A place that served no purpose to city people who grew nothing, but ate their food from packets. They called this sprawling greenery a flippen and friggen untidy mess! And saw no point to having this old-fashioned, overgrown park in a city where there were people starving – better off living off the Government, and safer on the streets, like those living in the lane.

  You could watch people like that walking by the old city’s botanical gardens that made them think of a nursery rhyme for children, of still believing the city’s legendary story that this tangled mess of brambles was the home of an overgrown Lepus europaeus called the hare king, but otherwise ignoring the place, applying the same sense of invisibility usually given to anything useless, obscure and made redundant. This landscape was once prized throughout the world as having the richest library of the most precious, rare and extinct flora on Earth.

  The people in this city did not regularly use words like once upon a time for being nostalgic and remembering things, but once, when it was hoped that the bad weather would change back to normal climatic patterns, the city had also hoped that the historical richness of the site would never be lost. Whatever was within man’s power to save his environment was done for the rare old trees, flowers and shrubs, but in the end the struggle to save greenery seemed meaningless. The long drought killed kindness in hardened hearts. Then, when the drought was replaced by soddening rains, year in and year out, the canopy grew into an impenetrable wilderness too dangerous to people, and the precinct was just another place locked up forever.

  Oblivia ignored the rusty old signs. What were signs to her? These ones were wired all along the fence of wrought iron. She did not bother reading the warning of the dangers of entering, or notice what the penalties were for trespassing in neglected areas such as these old botanical gardens. The signs that might have once stopped homeless people squatting, now robbed the city’s memory of the gardens. Who in the street life of the city would guess why such a wasteland had ever been created? It was as though places of antiquity had lost
their usefulness to those who lived for the moment, the here and now, and where the gates were forced shut by boa-constrictor thick renegade vines, wound like a monster’s woven carpet throughout the wrought iron lacework.

  The swans circling in the sky above the neglected gardens guarded the green leafiness of their island in the city, while people who had come from other parts watched the phenomenon like it was a thing of wonder. The Chinese people, who had long lived in the city, praised each sighting of swan flight for its momentary beauty, and called the swans hong in their own language. A story floated around the Greek side of the city, of likening the swans circling the island of wilderness to a long ago belief of a mystical island surrounded by white swans where Apollo was born. These were all poor people’s stories. A good feeling was left in the air from seeing swans, they said. The air felt lucky. Even – prosperous. Safe. Warren Finch was in the city. Everyone felt in a blood-tingling way that something big was about to happen.

  All of the broken birds had been set free from the apartment in The People’s Palace, and now, in the botanical gardens, Oblivia was watching the assembling swans swarm in numbers so vast they blocked the moonlight. But this freak of nature plagued her. When had her swans bred? Where had time gone? How many seasons of swans’ breeding had passed by and she had not noticed? How long had she lived in the city?

  This was the reason why she never went to the genies’ magic shop any more. It was not just that the owl never returned once all of the swans had been released, or even that the owl’s memory had receded from her mind as silently as its flight. It was how she had been kept captive, while time had been stolen from her in those long nocturnal journeys following the owl around the streets with a swan under her arm. Now she knew there had been many seasons of swan-egg cradling and cygnets reared which signalled above all else, that she had spent more time in the city then she had ever expected.

  The girl had not even thought about saying goodbye or sayonara to Machine, nor said yunngu, that she was going away for good, nor a simple ciao to the Harbour Master. Leaving was leaving. Nothing more than a curious unemotional response – a flatness of spirit for the flight inward when being removed from places, as it had from being pulled off the hull and before that, from the tree. She left Machine to piss around in his own fairytale. Left him mooning over his cats. The Harbour Master? Left imagining why his monkey had just trucked off for nothing, and to blow his mind away with whatever took his fancy about Mr Fat Cat, Indigenous leader of the country, Warren Finch on television.

  She had just kept walking, barely noticing the network of overgrown hedges reaching for the sky inside the wrought iron fence surrounding the botanical garden. When she was far away into the park steaming with early morning mist, she no longer heard the skin and bone dogs barking on the street outside. The street kids and their dogs still followed her from the lane as though she was some kind of reclusive ghost kid, just like an Aboriginal tinkerbell fairy. Would she lead them somewhere? That was the thrill of it all.

  But now, outside the botanical gardens, they held back and just hung about on the footpath, too augured in dusty city mythologies of what lay beyond the gates – where they heard thousands of noisy myna birds pealing hotly at one another from orange aloe flowers growing all over the place like weeds, and flying aggressively through the dense undergrowth. Their dogs panted for water beside the legs of their owners, while all the while the ghosts from the park were out there in the street in broad daylight, whispering scary stories close into the ears of the children about this and that, but mostly about the troubles of dark nights in this wilderness, and scaring the dogs stupid too.

  Where was the guidance from elders? It was the cruellest fate for children of bad weather times, whose brains had been clogged with mysteries of their own making, more than you could imagine – where would you believe? The skies were haunted with the ghosts of swallows and pigeons flying about. Among the throng of children out there on the footpath, their Mohawk-haired leaders of skin and bone were swearing black and blue at their mad dogs snapping at the air. These animals saw invisibility better than anything real, and everything untrustworthy, while all the while, they went on lurching madly about on their chains.

  Well! What would you expect? This was not an ashram out on the street. Theirs was a city that bred the jumpiness of sissy-girl boys who normally saw ghosts flying about – right above the streets. They always pointed out the ghosts travelling through the mist and smoke rising over the city – and even travelling procession-like in the sky trains of diseased bats. Well! Lucky virus bats were asleep. They were dangling upside-down through several groves of trees in the old botanical gardens.

  And what of the Aboriginal girl they followed? That skinny thing in dark trackies, hoodie covering her face with the swans flying around her? Well! If you think like a sissy-girl, then she was not real neither. They saw her as a spiritual ancestor because they knew what an Aboriginal looked like, since they were modelling their subsistence as it were, albeit only on junk food, on the country’s original inhabitants. She was their backfill now.

  Erratic, unexplainable weather makes you feel no good in the heart, and this was how they felt about Oblivia with the ghost swans that seemed to multiply into clouds when they flew in the night. They talked about how she was the first Aboriginal spirit they had ever seen, the only way any could return as far as they knew from the total cleansing of the city of all those people ‘rounded up’ and impounded in the North country in the old days, many years ago.

  The dogs continued barking although Oblivia was now far away in the undergrowth with the fluttering butterflies, leaving the whole shebang kid-and-dog thing chasing one another up and down the footpath in the bedlam of yelling and dog howls. Those darn dogs, uncontrollable if not kept properly tethered to their chains. Dogs more wild for chasing ghosts than anything else, driven mad by the smell of swans and bats. Oblivia ignored the noise and kept going. Soon, she would not hear the little war with other gangs converging on the footpath.

  Hey! What’s happening sissy-girls? We were here a long time first.

  What is a long while? Ten minutes?

  There were rules about standing your own ground, even if you were a sissy-girl when anybody could be hookin’ em and trickin’ a good gang.

  Hey! Wait youses.

  Nah! Let that blackfella fairy go. She’s ours. Not yours. We will fight you for her if you like.

  Come on then…

  The river of bats streamed over the battle on the footpath without noticing a thing, and kept flying towards the epicentre of the darkened parklands. The colony had come from city suburbs where it had flown the previous evening at dusk to find gardens with fig trees loaded with ripened fruit. Down below their roosting trees, Oblivia continued to crawl through tunnels in the undergrowth that foxes had once clawed apart to chase the aged hare king. She passed several grassy fields trampled by the swans, and finally arrived at the grasslands where the colonies of swans were gathered around a marshy lake infested with insects. Who knows the truth, but it was in these grasslands where swans had preened themselves and slept in waves with long necks curled s-shaped over their backs, that life seemed the cleanest, and where the air filled her mind with a sense of peace.

  She ignored the bats snoring in skeleton trees, to listen to the conversation of the swans’ agitated whistling, and swinging necks lunging and hissing, before falling into quietness, when suddenly, the cicadas roared from the treetops. The alarm radiated over the entire precinct of the abandoned jungle of undergrowth and sprawling treetops. The butterflies of blue, yellow and black jumped in midair. The swans scrambled, tumbling with quivering wings spread, fanning the rising mist to take off, and in a stormy rush, all were gone.

  The Harbour Master was bone-idle, sitting up there in the apartment of The People’s Palace, and actually minding his own business in his smelly old singlet and shorts when all of a sudden, a news flash appeared right there on the television, and he saw the assa
ssination.

  Those people in charge of television programs should think about what they are doing to an old man. Poor old thing was shaken. Who had been half asleep and dreaming about Rigoletto, and half watching an opera program on the ABC. When he saw the assassination he instantly felt sick. Soon, all there was to see on the television was news replayed a thousand times about the assassination. This was the fact of the matter. Warren Finch had been shot in the streets of the city, and his life was fading.

  The old Harbour Master’s face was concrete grey and motionless, but his head was spinning. He was like the rest of the world – spellbound and compelled to watch hours of repeated footage about Warren Finch’s life on news media television.

  He thought that he saw the girl-wife, a glimpse of somebody that looked like her anyhow, running beside the ambulance trolley that was carrying the heaviest public life in the world as though he weighed nothing. Bodyguards he recognised as those genies threw themselves in front of cameras to shield anyone getting a proper view of Warren Finch. All seemed to be lost now. All lost. But somehow in all of those thoughts of loss that now blanketed the world, something extraordinary happened when a burst of energy filled the apartment. Could it possibly be? Warren at last visiting…The apartment felt as though it had become alive.

  A sensation of phenomenal energy swishing around madly – horizontally bouncing from one wall to the other, and each time it passed, cold air slapped the Harbour Master across the face until he had been struck countless times.