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

wonderful state of invisibility. The world had no place for me and I saw it in all its ludicrous, crazed ways but it did not see me, and I would have to say there was a strange freedom in this. Nor did the world see all the bad things and the evil things and the wrong things, nor those who suffered accordingly. I am not saying I objected or even cared. I just felt a slight sense of slippage in the world and it made me laugh, which seems to me more preferable than crying. So my invisibility at events is nothing new, nor even anything unique. It is only being able to transcend time that now gives my invisible spectating the curious power of a vision.
    These visions come to me in all manner of curious ways. I can no longer be entirely sure whether my eyes are open or closed, but it does seem that I am looking at a sweep of bubbles rising up from God knows where, and sometimes one bubble grows and grows until it has taken on the form of a face, and that face is the beginning of the vision. At other times the faces simply appear from nowhere and are vast, huge apparitions and I seem to be able to see all the gorge below me, but all the gorge is filled with the immensity of that face as it begins to talk. Whether they come as bubbles or manifest themselves as vast entities, the faces are more often than not curiously distorted at the beginning, as if shrouded by the passing of time. They do not depart from me in the same manner. Sometimes they dissolve into new images, while at other times I slowly, dimly become aware that I have not thought or felt or seen anything for a period of time that may only be a few seconds or may be an infinity.
    My strange torment blurs the whiteness of the rapid before me into vast emptiness, and sings the emptiness full of a new colour: blue.
    An immensity of blue. Sky-blue. A fleck, a piece of fly shit at the centre of this vast emptiness. A fleck of fly shit upon a sheet of blue glistening satin. Moving. And there, me, moving with it.
    With what?
    A boat.
    A small boat. A small wooden clinkered boat known as a punt, lovingly built of planks of Huon pine impervious to the worm and to rot, seven a side steamed into perfect shape and trenailed and caulked into position by old Gus Doherty - no finer piners’ punt builder there be on all the west coast of Tasmania, one pound sterling per foot of punt for his craftsmanship and this boat fifteen of the king’s finest for old Gus, beamy as buggery for heavy loads and square sterned and square bowed for riding the rapids, laden with hessian bags of chaff and flour, onions and spuds, wooden crates of jam and butter and sugar. A dog asleep on top of the mound of sacks. An axe and a crosscut saw at the bottom of the boat. A man rowing the punt, his mind as empty and as vast and as still as the inland sea called Macquarie Harbour that he is rowing his punt across, heading it toward the wild rivers, the rainforested rivers, where his axe and saw will work in rhythm in the damp and the humid closeness and the heavy sweet smells of the peat-created wet earth, among the myrtles, craggy and towering and bearded with hanging festoons of lichens, cracked and scabbed with fluorescent orange fungi, among the scented leather-woods, among the pungent lime-green sassafras whose aromatic leaves make women want men (or so men who want women say), among the crazed pandannis, emaciated elongated trunks betopped with pineapple heads of thrusting leaves, among the celery top pine and the lemon-tasting whitey wood and the spiralling native laurels; there his axe and saw will work in rhythm in the damp and the humid closeness and the heavy sweet smells of the peat-created wet earth, to fell the waxy whiteness, the wet-cheese coloured, the prized, the Huon pine.
    More precisely: I am observing my father as a young man heading off to work.
    Â Harry, 1946 
    After a time, a long time, he came to the river mouth, and after a further time the mouth disappeared and the inland