Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan Read Free Book Online

of the rapid as it was at higher levels, but simply an exposed mass of warm rock undercut by erosion. Within these undercuts were sieves of sticks and logs through which a trickle of water gently splashed. When the kayaker drowned there would have been nothing gentle about the sieve. He would have been tumbled into it by the force of the river, as if he were a leaf being hosed off a pavement, and his body would have slammed into the slot and jammed there. Face pressed up against the sticks, his shoe or life jacket snagged upon a branch, powerless to free himself, he would have remained for some days, his face slowly turning from florid red to the soft white of wet dead flesh, pinned by the onward rush of the water until such time as the river ebbed enough for his body to be found and retrieved.
    The ammo boxes unsnapped and half a dozen Nikons and Canons were unleashed upon the wet rocks in the mid-distance, to capture upon film the place that once ensnared a human underwater until he breathed no more. They stood in a semicircle around Aljaz. Where exactly did he drown? they asked. How exactly did he drown? Neither Aljaz nor the Cockroach were comfortable with the questions. Both had rafted enough to know that some day it could be one of them, or, worse, one of their punters. ‘He opened his mouth and filled it with water,’ answered Aljaz. And smiled. The punters looked askance at each other, then looked away in embarrassment and stopped asking questions.
    From the bank Aljaz and the Cockroach continued to watch the punters examine and document the site. ‘I wonder if the tourist industry pays his family a commission,’ said the Cockroach. ‘Fighting against the water to live is one thing. But fighting against becoming a tourist monument - that would be impossible.’
    â€˜Like Queensland,’ said Aljaz.
    The guides gazed upon the death site, unknowable, inscrutable behind the blackness of their sunglasses, behind the whiteness of their zinc-creamed lips and cheeks and noses. Like greasepainted clowns whose whole act was at once a denial and a celebration. The Cockroach smiled. ‘If they can do that to an entire state, one bloke doesn’t stand a chance.’
    Aljaz turned around. ‘No wonder the poor bastard gave up the ghost.’ And laughed. He felt a liking for the Cockroach. The punters, like mosquitoes, returned. Their guides’ smiles vanished and their white lips returned to an autistic straightness.
    â€˜Incredible,’ said Marco.
    â€˜Bloody interesting,’ said Derek.
    It was as if the kayaker’s life had been pointless and his drowning only meaningful as a photo opportunity for the tourists who would follow. As if the beauty of the place was born with his death.
    Madonna santa! Could that be me? Could that be me?
    I watch Aljaz pretend not to hear. I watch him raise his eyes to the sky and stare through darkened lenses at the thin clouds that drift into the narrow space permitted them by the mountain ranges that flank Irenabyss Gorge.
    Thinking: Rain is coming .

  Three  
    Of course, although I can see all these things in my visions, including myself in days gone by, nobody in my visions can see me. I am simply invisible, like I have been invisible for such a long time in my life. The world changed, rolled on, the weekend papers and women’s magazines and TV talk shows and the talk radio full of what was now the fashion and what wasn’t, of who was changing things and who had power and who was in the process of losing power. The movers and the shakers. But I was never part of that. Though I was in constant flight, something about me was essentially still. The world rolled on but without me on it. I watched in disbelief. All of it. Its wars and its famines and its children selling themselves off Fitzroy Street and its old women beggars being hustled away by security guards from the shopping plazas, so that the old women too could enjoy this