17

  People were scrambling over rocks towards me, yelling to me. I felt only numbness. I was unable to swim or acknowledge them as they rushed to me. My gear was somehow all ripped off me. I was naked. My body washed out of the waves and caught in a large eddy swirled towards the shore.

  I remember staring at a slow-moving paisley of white river spume around my body and my body one more spiral unravelling. I must have floundered or swum, but I don’t think so. Someone was dragging me into shore. I discovered I could not stand. My legs didn’t work. An arm didn’t work. There seemed to be people everywhere, movement all around me, excited words, serious words being quickly exchanged, important decisions being made, and yet at the same time everything seemed still and serene, as if the world and everything in it had stopped. Arms picked me up, held me, but I was only vaguely aware of them, of my shame; I was suddenly very conscious of being naked, of my shrivelled, tiny cock and aware that there was nothing I could do about it, that the glistening bronze stones and boulders studding the river were still and the water was not and I was not sure I was alive or if this was a dream and I was already dead, a lie of the mind in which I was being carried up a steep incline, through dense rainforest and then I was atop a cliff and hovering next to it a helicopter into which I was half passed, half thrown over the abyss into arms that wished to hold me.

  None of it meant anything. Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the rapid and I knew all this—my rescuers, the chopper, my nakedness—was just a hallucination, the most bitter of sweet dreams.

  18

  I never really talked to P— again. P— saved my life and I had nothing I could say to him. There was no enmity nor the slightest hint of a quarrel. We just stopped mixing. I saw him a few years ago on Bruny Island and told him I was sorry for that. He seemed to understand. Any form of gratitude for having your life saved feels inadequate and false. P— is not a man for false emotion. Perhaps that was wrong of me. Some things though are large, too large for any of us.

  I saw J— one night in a crowded pub. I had been drinking and I tried to tell her how she had helped save my life. Perhaps I had been drinking too much or perhaps J— had. Perhaps it was impossible to explain. I told her but I could not explain any of it. I wanted to thank her. J— was kind and perhaps she understood or perhaps she didn’t or perhaps no one can. Perhaps no one can ever understand that you are here but not here, that there is a moment that bisects your life—cleaves your life in half to be exact—when you are leaving and know if you do leave you will never return.

  I had returned.

  That was all.

  It was a solitary, incommunicable knowledge. Finally, we smiled at each other and left, ending as we had begun so many years before, in mutual incomprehension.

  19

  Everything and everybody became to me as if seen from a vast distance, as if they were inscrutable inexplicable insects doing inscrutable inexplicable insect things unaware that the very next moment they might be swatted or squashed. I had stopped seeing people as people. For the longest time I was still far above the river. I liked people who didn’t want to talk about it. Because there was nothing to talk about. There were no words. That’s the thing about words: they are not the same thing as life. We just pretend. And I couldn’t.

  20

  I went to see places I had thought I would never see again. I went to see people I thought I would never see again. It was such a comfort to be allowed to sit in their homes, I sat in their small kitchens, their tired lounges, their blighted backyards and said little or nothing, warmed by the immense human goodness of others. I was astonished by the small everyday acts of kindness too easily dismissed as everyday.

  I was astonished and soothed, and for the first time I heard their stories of love that existed beyond their asides and anecdotes and opinions, that resided in their food and drink and worn chairs and scratched tables and in their touches, their stolen looks, their averted eyes. It’s a comfort it’s a blessing, as my mother would say. No comma. The indescribable warmth of laughter the incandescent human comfort of being alive with others. The blessing of everything that lives everything that lives is holy.

  No comma no commas ever a world without punctuation fences gates trespassing signs for a time that’s where I lived there a borderless world there with stunned gratitude there

  After a time these feelings faded.

  I fell from the sky.

  Commas returned, full stops. And with them fences, partitions, borders, the razor wire of relationships. But the memory stayed. The memory never left. Life thrills to life.

  21

  The doctors came and went. It felt more out of human curiosity than medical need, and fair enough. They were young and keen to know what it was like. I had no idea. I had been choppered to the mining town of Queenstown, not far from Rosebery where my mother first had read me stories of adventures on rivers in that little bungalow’s bedroom around which rainforest now gathered. I had been alive and now I was dead dreaming I was alive, or I was alive dreaming I was dead dreaming I was alive.

  Mmmm, I said, mmm.

  I was an object of interest having survived, but having survived there was little demonstrably wrong with me. As far as the doctors could see, I was alive, not dead, and I would live. The wounds would be stitched, the problems with my legs and hands—the damaged nerves in my limbs, one leg and one hand as good as useless—these were transitory and would recover soon enough. My head was another matter, still stuck screaming in a distant wild river, but that was of no consequence. The nurses talked a little. There were questions about my leg injuries. There was curiosity about what it was like. I didn’t know. I was still there. I do remember one doctor talking in an animated way about a corpse still in the hospital morgue, the kayaker who had drowned the week before on the Franklin. He wanted to see my leg wound, now stitched. The dead kayaker, he said as though staring at a spider in a bottle, had exactly the same leg injuries.

  Mmmm, I said, mmm.

  At one point I was him, cold and marmoreal white in the morgue. Every other time I closed my eyes though I was just me, back, screaming, trapped in the drop drowning. It was extraordinary: I shut my eyes and I was immediately in another world. The pain was real, the cold was real, the water all over me was real, the deafening noise of the rapid real, I was forever wet and chilled to the marrow, and the terror was absolute. The only thing that wasn’t real was the hospital. The hospital was no more than the tormenting dream of a man who had died in a river.

  The sensation of being trapped was not a nightmare but an inescapable, perpetual reality. My uncontrollable fear was in the nature of undeniable knowledge, as real to me as the doorhandle you turn, the chair in which you sit, the bed in which you lie. The only escape was to open my eyes and, once opened, not close them. I was dry and safe and warm and alive if I could only believe it. I could not. Therefore I was dying or dead, both of which were far more plausible and believable to me.

  When exhaustion did finally take hold and I began to doze off, I would come to screaming and screaming until I was given drugs and fell back into darkness until the river returned. To some extent, I never lost that feeling. The flashbacks lessened. But they never stopped.

  Against the doctors’ advice I left the following day. The duty doctor wanted me to take a wheelchair but given I had to catch a bus that wasn’t practical. My brother had sent some money to a local clothes store. Attired in cheap labourers’ pants several sizes too big and a flannelette shirt, I staggered out on crutches as best I could manage, dragging my faulty leg and holding up my pants with my worthless right hand jammed in a pocket. As I hobbled along the main street to the bus pick-up, past rusting corro and rotten timber hoardings, the beat-up and decaying buildings of that dying mining town, I remember only the brilliance of the light.

  22

  I am trying to tell the story properly. For many decades after, I didn’t. Or couldn’t. I didn’t tell it at all, which is its own untruth, or when, very rarely, I did, I would fumble the details which for so long I had tried to forget. It seemed to demand of me something I couldn’t give or say or be. When I went to talk about it I was back there or rather there was here, and time had collapsed, and once more I was a screaming worm outside of myself. It was that way with me for many years.

  I wrote my first novel not about what had happened. I wrote it to exorcise what had happened. In any case, I didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know I had died. I didn’t know it could keep happening. Only time would reveal that.

  For decades after, I kept returning to the Franklin until I had run it seventy or eighty times, until I could no longer remember how many times, and every time I had nightmares for the preceding weeks, nightmares that didn’t stop until we passed that rapid, and only then would I feel I had stared something down within me that had to be faced in order that I might live again. That I return should perplex me. But it doesn’t, not after I have passed that rapid.

  I am an old clock that once a year has to be reset to know what time is.

  23

  I met a woman in a bar one night who told me she had slept with the lead character of my first novel. She’d never met the author but she had heard he wasn’t much of a bloke.

  I said I’d heard similar things.

  ‘An arsehole,’ she said.

  ‘An arsehole,’ I said.

  ‘Strange,’ she said, ‘how differently things turn out in a book, even when they are just the same.’

  ‘Strange,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I am trying to tell you,’ she went on. ‘I knew him, the one the arsehole wrote his book about. I slept with him. He wasn’t worth a book. He wasn’t worth a beer coaster. He was a joke. But it was him, no doubt about it. Except he never drowned.’

  Another woman rang me one day, angrily accusing me of having stolen her story for the book, demanding I tell her how I knew the exact details of how her best friend had died. How?

  That’s life.

  After that, I knew that the truth wasn’t the truth even when it was. After that, I understood that lying about your book is, at worst, more entertaining than telling the truth and is, at best, more truthful.

  After that, I remembered the advice T—, the famous writer, gave me many years ago after my first novel was published: make a mask and wear it. ‘Wear the mask and you’re safe,’ he said. ‘Wear the mask every day you are in public and never let them see your face.’

  24

  My mother and father never asked me anything about what had happened. For that I was grateful. I had no words anyway. All I had was an inescapable silence that filled me and protected me. They were glad I was alive and that was that. No more, no less.

  A few years later I won a scholarship that was seen to be prestigious and which would see me go to Oxford in Britain which was then still called Great. I went home to break the news to my parents. My mother was cooking in the kitchen and was pleased, if hardly overwhelmed. She suggested I tell my father who was out back in the garden because he would be interested. I found him doing what he mostly did as he grew older, turning compost with a fork, lost in thoughts and memories. I said I had some news. Without turning around he said that was good. What was it?

  I told his already hunched back.

  He kept on forking his compost.

  ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster,’ he said finally, reciting Kipling, ‘and treat those two imposters just the same.’

  I waited for something more, but there was nothing.

  I was alive and I wanted to live. What more was there?

  He forked the compost with short jabs that belied his age. I stayed waiting at his back.

  I watched the grass clippings and the little sticks he spent hours cutting up with his secateurs being turned into the darker fecund peat, the worms writhing, the steam, his arms still working in a resolute if weakened way, the slow yielding of one thing to another.

  And I started to laugh.

  Epilogue

  1

  At night the beach rocks clattered, as the sea dragged the rounded cobbles out, drew breath, and then threw them back up the beach, so many clacking castanets. Each collapsing wave shuddered our shack with its slow sonic boom. As the sea lurched ever closer to where I lay in that vertical board hut behind the dune, a child of four in my cold bunk bed, on an old cotton ticking mattress with the two thin wool blankets our father allowed, it sounded like the end of the world.

  Every night I feared that the ocean would finally smash through the dunes and flood everything. How would we escape when the waves broke our frail little home apart as if it were no more than a sandcastle? As I lay there terrified, the world was moving. I knew when it came time I must move with it somehow if we were to live.

  The waves kept walking ever closer, drowning out any other sound and thought until sleep and wild dreams came and morning woke us and when we ran across the road, a rutted, bracken-lined track, and over the dunes, it was to discover, to my daily astonishment, that the ocean was once more far away, leaving a great expanse of silvered beach quietly glinting wonder in the early morning sun.

  2

  At one end of that long beach the Forth river entered the sea, its sometimes fatal mouth belying a gentle final strait. A few miles upriver, past the flats, was the town of Forth where, long ago, my mother’s cousin Dan Healy was said to have ridden into an Orange Lodge meeting on a horse, wielding a whip, ending the meeting and closing the Lodge for good. We had no idea what an Orange Lodge was, but we knew cousin Dan Healy was equally famous for his power of curing warts just by staring at them. Beyond the town the river valley steepened and there lay a weir where people had drowned and in which their ghosts were said to dance by moonlight in the white water.

  Some distance above that was a small shingle rapid, rushing water skipping over river cobbles, next to which I had sometimes camped and where, many years later, as a young man in the summer after I died, I returned as a ghost.

  When night fell, I threw my groundsheet and sleeping bag beneath my old EH Holden wagon and lay down, head and shoulders poking out from beneath the battered rear bumper bar. A dew soon settled on everything, even my face, so wet it was as if it had rained. After a time, I rolled on my side and closed my eyes. I lay that way for a long time.

  I thought of everything that had happened. In the depths of my soul there was simply before I died and after I died. I couldn’t understand why before I would say one thing yet feel its opposite privately, nor did I understand why that opposite private feeling so often also felt untrue. Before, I understood nothing about myself, nor my relationship with the world. After, at this very moment, the world appeared before me with an extraordinary clarity, as real as the rusting exhaust pipe next to my face, as the stars beyond. I wanted to live in this clarity forever.

  Yet I understood that this was impossible. Somehow the confusion, the falseness, the incomprehension not only of others but of myself, and all the pain these things brought, somehow this was also the very condition of living that would soon return. For now, it seemed enough—more than enough—to be for this one moment alive, to live this one moment that I knew would soon vanish but hoped might stay with me forever after, lodged deep in my heart, beside a river that moved for no reason and would not stop moving until it met the sea.

  3

  My eyes opened. I saw an infinity of stars above circling in a great parabola. As I watched I had the curious sensation that the Earth was rolling beneath me and me moving with it. The enormous velocity of the planet as it careered through space with the Earth’s movement was as real to me as if I were riding a wild beast. I heard—and this shocked me—the planet breathing in and out as if it were some living thing to which I was clinging.

  This sensation was so real I feared that now knowing it I might be spun off into nothingness if I did not hold on. I felt myself suddenly rolling off my groundsheet and onto the wet earth and throwing out my arms, digging my hands into the red basalt soil, clawing myself into it. I would not be thrown off the wildly moving Earth into oblivion. No matter how hard it tried to throw me off I was hanging on and I would never let go.

  I lay there, clutching the earth like a mad thing, panting, hearing it breathe, astonished, hearing myself breathing in response. I wanted to go forward as part of that great movement, I wanted to live every day as if every day might end back entombed in water. I wanted to waste none of it. And as the world continued rolling through space with me hanging on, I could not believe my good fortune.

  4

  When after Oxford I returned to the Franklin River, that ancient rainforest, those spiralling tannin waters, I was happy, and then, and only then, did I feel I had come home. I had got a job as a river guide and my first trip was on the lower Franklin. We flew by seaplane into the Gordon River and walked the old gold prospecting track cut by Charles Gould in the 1850s over the Elliot Range to the Franklin. The day was humid, the colours intense, the sky a most complete navy blue, the browns and greens of the rainforest steaming in some strange equipoise of complete decay and riotous growth.

  After some hours we crested a rise and we finally saw the Franklin far below, long, tranquil black stretches here and there ruffling white where the water raced over shingle banks. And I was so happy. I remember standing there, between those two rivers, and I see that I knew at that moment that I too was poised between my past death and my future life. M— was pregnant, I had run out of excuses about not writing, and it was time to begin. The rainforest steamed in the midday heat, we stood in the sun a few moments longer, looking at the faraway river, resting, perhaps we ate something or drank something, and I said little, too embarrassed or unable to express everything that swirled in my soul at that moment, and then gathering up what little we had brought with us, we began making our way to the water.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS