Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

Author:Richard Flanagan [Flanagan, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: nepalifiction, TPB
Publisher: Random House Australia
Published: 1994-11-19T18:15:00+00:00

Harry

I watch Aljaz go to say something but I can’t hear what it is. I see Sheena shake her head. I see Rickie begin to move off toward the thunderbox but then he too is lost to my sight as the whole scene fades away. My mind is in any case already elsewhere. I am wondering not about what will happen to them on the river, for I know all too well what fate awaits them. But it’s what I don’t know that I wish to see. And I want to know how the hell Harry came to be in Trieste in 1954. I mean, it was so out of character for him. After returning to Tasmania with Sonja and me all those years ago he never left the island again, as though Tasmania were a world total and full in itself. Which for him it possibly was. And he never ceased to find wonders within it, new and marvellous for both him and everyone he shared them with. Even as his drinking slowly dulled his mind and dimmed his spirit, as though his body were a lamp and his soul the diminishing fuel, even as his heart guttered in the torrent of drink daily falling upon it, he still found time to express wonder, be it at his bizarre barbeques, or be it in his occasional forays into the bush, fishing and hunting.

I remember the way he used smile. How he would bow his head slightly, as if a little embarrassed. How the corners of his mouth would curl slightly upwards. I remember these things now in the hope of exercising some control over this capricious river of visions, in the hope that it might show me why my father ended up in Trieste. The river, as ever, does not explain. But it does show me some things I never knew.

A vision at first most mysterious comes to me.

The crossroads. Night-time. Sky black. A man in raindarkened trousers and an ancient black bluey coat. Once his father’s bluey coat. Now worn and old. And, in the incessant rain, wet and cold. It wasn’t meant to turn out like this, I can see him thinking as he pulls the steaming damp collar of the bluey up around his face. It shouldn’t have ended like this. Black lapels pulled hard against wet cheeks, ruddy with chill through the small white clouds of his breath that envelop his face.

Whose cheeks? I look harder, closer into the river, scan its fleeing waters intently. And finally I recognise them.

Harry’s cheeks. Harry’s face, empty of anything save his ongoing belief in fate determining everything and him having no control. Too many deaths and none expected. Him meant for the mincer and surviving and Old Bo not. Auntie Ellie not. Daisy not. Boy not. Rose not. Him meant for the mincer and surviving. But a thumbless man is a man unable to chop and saw and he has to leave his beloved rivers and head wherever work might be had.

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