Death of a River Guide by Richard Flanagan

blurted. Now he was a man, now that he had the respect of his uncles as their equal, he immediately wanted back the woman ways allowed a boy-child, wanted to hug George’s belly and cry and cry. But that was not possible. So instead he focused his eyes on the coal-red tip of his rollie, inhaled to make it flame, and then closed his eyes as the smoke unravelled in fern coils in his mouth. He thought he saw his mother coming toward him, a very powerful feeling it was, and she said, ‘I love you,’ and then was gone. Harry opened his eyes and spoke in a slow and quiet voice.
    Saying: ‘Six days ago.’

  Four  
    I could, of course, be mad. That is a possibility. That is also a form of hope. If insane, this entire horror is nothing more than a delusion, a malfunction of nerve endings and electrochemical impulses. If sane, I am in true agony. In hell. If sane, I am dying. And being humiliated by memory at the same time. For I am none too happy with what this moving weight of water, this river is showing me. When I was a kid I wished for a set of x-ray specs like they had in the cartoons, that showed you the bird cooking in the cat’s mind while the cat croons sweetly to the bird, that showed the crook with moneybags for a heart who is telling the sweet old rich lady how much he likes her terrible cooking. I used to watch them with Milton, on the street outside Burgess’s electrical store where they had a grand display of televisions working in the front window, and everyone who didn’t have one of these new wonders - which was most of Hobart for a long time - stood in the rain and the heat and the traffic fumes, laughing and pointing and saying it was only a fad. Now my wish has come true and I wish it hadn’t. These visions are my x-ray specs - with them I see not the surface reality but what really took place, stripped of all its confusing superficial detail. Except what I see now exposed isn’t a cat or a comic crook. It is me. And I am not pleased about that, about the way the river is shoving my mind and heart about, pushing my body, forcing open parts that I thought closed forever.
    Because I could be mad, but I know I am not. And I know I can’t stop seeing what I am seeing, what took place back then - the bedroom filled with tears, which then spilt over into the small kitchen and the dingy bathroom and from there filled the bedrooms and the loungeroom, so many tears that we swam in them and began to drown in them. At which point I opened the door and the dam burst and out roared a river of tears, and being washed away with that river was me, to be taken in its turbulent waters in a crazy serpentine course through the next thirteeen years of my life all over this vast continent.
    A river of tears.
    Upon its banks, on a small beach of river sand, I spy Aljaz sleeping as the forest takes its forms and shapes for the day in the earliest of dawn’s dim light. Wet and pungent comes the smell of the damp black earth to my nostrils; of the forest dying, to be reborn as fecund rot and fungi, small and waxy, large and luminous; to be reborn as moss and myrtle seedlings, minuscule and myriad; as Huon pine sprigs, forcing their way through the crumbling damp decay, forked and knowing as a water diviner’s stick; as the celery top saplings, looking as if a market gardener had planted them there; as the small hardwater ferns and old scrubbing-brush-topped pandanni. Here, ensconced within the river’s waters I see it all, feel it all, sense everything that once was part of my recent life. It’s as if I am now lying there on the ground beside Aljaz on that morning so distant it seems impossible it was only three days ago. As if I too am beginning to drink the richness of that early morning into my body and soul. Aljaz sits up and sees that his sleeping mat and bag lie within the white sand perimeter of riverbank dried and kept dry by the campfire that lies at the hub of the