First Person Read online

  Fuck fuckn two-tooth! he’d cry. Fuck hogget, fuck brisket, fuck corn beef, fuck the fuckn clerks.

  His hatred of their purported meats extended to his name for the sorry drones of clerkdom: silversiders. Any evidence of silversiders—such as a column shift—tended to bring on bad behaviour in Ray.

  Late that night we turned at some speed from a city street into an alley to park prior to going to another bar. At the alley’s far end the darkness suddenly lit up with flashing blue and red lights—a police car waiting in hiding for just some quarry as us. The stolen Valiant, a space capsule of hashish fumes and forgotten ’70s songs, filled with their spotlight and an accompanying sudden panic. As the police car began advancing towards us, Ray crashed the unfamiliar floor shift with its odd gear placements into what he thought was reverse.

  He hit the accelerator, and the Valiant roared as Ray dropped the clutch. But instead of reversing at high speed out of the alley, the car, its Impala floor shift mistakenly jammed hard into first gear, reared up like a wild beast and flew straight at the police car. The police, fearing a maddened frontal attack, braked hard, threw their car into reverse and began heading back up the alley with us now in seeming pursuit. We careered after them, Ray madly braking while attempting to crash the floor shift out of forward, our heads whiplashing backwards, the Valiant fishtailing, brakes and tyres shrieking, gearbox cogs and flywheels grinding.

  Ray found reverse, the car roared and shuddered once more, and, our heads whiplashing forwards, we backed at high speed out of the alley and into the lights of oncoming cars. Somehow we missed a collision, and had already crashed through our first red light when we saw the police car now out on the street, lit up, siren blaring, and in pursuit. Ray switched off his headlights and we ran several more red lights, slaloming our way through late-night traffic. We lost the police car near the wharves. We dumped the Valiant behind the old jam factory there and walked back to the bar, where Ray promptly lost a fight with three bouncers. When I took him to the hospital to be stitched up, he demanded we swap pants. His were bloodied and torn, and he worried that he might not look respectable.

  Ray beat up his enemies, strangers and people who met him when they shouldn’t have met him, which is to say any time after ten in the evening, except on Sunday when he had a roast at his mother’s. There was some open wound in him that was also for women a beauty that frequently dazzled them. And when they discovered that he wasn’t what they had thought; when he sought escape through betrayal, in bed with their flatmate, friend, sister, or, once, mother; when they saw him—as he did one night—put two nightclub bouncers through plateglass windows, they finally understood. He was not mouldable. He was nice but he was not nice.

  He was like that and he was like all the stories told about him, and he was not like that, for he was also fun, and kind, and oddly gentle. Life was to him a constant source of wonder. He wanted to touch, fuck, hit, lick, taste everything. His fridge freezer was full of dead birds—booboks, hawks, pardalotes—that he had found and kept to look at when he was bored. He was moved by the fine quilting of feathers, the slow merging dapple of colour, the form of a beak, and what it all might mean. He longed to be able to fly. He would sit at his kitchen table, thawing owl or eagle before him, searching their defrosting wings, their dewy tails and their chill torsos for a key to that mystery, as if he had lost something precious that he might yet still recover.

  There was goodness in Ray. I am not sure exactly how much, but it was there. He just didn’t like it all that much—what he was and how he wasn’t. I was reading Jung, who said that inside every alcoholic is a seeker. Inside Ray, though, was only more Ray. And it was hard to say what Ray was when he had no idea himself. Maybe he was a seeker, sort of, when he wasn’t pissed or stoned or whacked out on everything he could swallow and sniff and snort and mainline. He was a boilermaker–welder who read Hermann Hesse. He was a man who thought he could fly. He was a hypocrite and a bastard. He was, in the final analysis, inexplicable.

  And he was my friend. My best friend.

  Sometimes he would moan how his head felt as if he’d lost a live electrode in it, the type that went white-hot when he welded with them.

  Can you smell it? he would say, abruptly grabbing me by the shirt with both hands clenched. It’s ripping back and forth inside my brain. Can you smell it? he would snarl. And then, flushed face up against mine, he’d yell, CAN’T YOU FUCKN SMELL IT?

  4

  What did Ray want? Suzy asked when I got off the phone. I remember I took a few moments to understand what had been said, and what on earth it might mean.

  Ray wanted me to talk to his boss, I said.

  Australia’s most wanted?

  Yeah. That one.

  The crook?

  I guess so.

  The crook wanted to talk to you?

  Yeah.

  Isn’t he in jail? After that huge manhunt?

  Not yet. I mean he was, and now he’s out on bail.

  What’s the most wanted want with us?

  He wants me to write his memoirs. Ten grand.

  Suzy seemed unimpressed.

  He’s a crim, she said.

  It’s a job.

  What’s that mean?

  Ten grand, I repeated. Six weeks to write it.

  Ghost write?

  I guess so.

  And you said no?

  No.

  Good.

  No, I mean, I didn’t say no.

  What did you say then?

  I said get your publisher to ring. I’ll talk to them. I mean, I wasn’t talking money with a con man who ripped the banks off seven hundred million dollars.

  So you’ll do it?

  How could I say I was flattered? Excited? That I felt, well, alive? For the first time in so long: alive.

  I don’t know, I said.

  And I didn’t. I was just buying time. Was ghost writing a good look for someone who wanted to be taken seriously as a writer? I had no idea. I waited up till midnight for the publisher to call, but no call came. I didn’t know what to think. My novel had reached the point where it needed form, but day after day at that desk in that narrow corridor of a room no form presented itself. It was a jellyfish pretending to be a white pointer. Suzy had gone to bed some hours before, but she was still awake when I finally went to bed.

  He was what I thought, I said, rolling her belly over for her. Just a con man talking shit.

  What Ray always said he was.

  I guess so.

  So why’s Ray still his minder, then? That’s as crazy as you two trying to kayak Bass Strait.

  From downstairs came the sound of the phone ringing.

  God, who could that be at this time of night? Suzy said.

  It was Ray.

  I can only speak for a minute, he said when I finally got downstairs and picked up. I gotta get back to him. You going to do it?

  Is it for real?

  For sure it’s for fuckn real, Ray said.

  I don’t know, I said. If his publisher rings I’ll know he wasn’t full of shit.

  You should do it, mate. Be good for—

  There was the sound of the mouthpiece being muffled, Ray yelling something to somebody, and then he was back on the line.

  Gotta go, Kif, he said. I just wanted to say one thing. Do it, but just don’t trust him. You understand?

  No. Not really.

  Don’t tell him anything about yourself. You understand?

  No. Ray—

  Give him nothing. Don’t let him in.

  And before I could ask one of the several questions that now came racing into my mind, the line went dead.

  5

  We did these things to see what lay beyond fear. We discovered an addiction that was hard to break. We discovered the meaninglessness of physical courage, along with its ease and its wild pleasures. We found within ourselves a certain cruelty, the cruelty of the strong, one more illusion that would be finally shattered by Siegfried Heidl. We lived li
ke reptiles, sleeping, resting, waiting for those moments when we could be fully alive. The rest was feigned nonchalance, drink, drugs, sex, pushing the night.

  A Tasmanian newspaper ran a photo of us kayaking Cataract Gorge in full flood with the caption, The Suicide Twins. It was a joke, albeit one consistent with our behaviour to that point, which had established us as people who would shoot any rapid on any river, no matter how big and frightening. That’s how we ended up lost in the New Guinea Highlands.

  I was twenty-one and Ray twenty-two when Ray organised—if that is not too strong a word for Ray’s capacities in this regard—an exploratory kayaking expedition on a wild, remote river in the New Guinea Highlands that was known as the Colorado of the South Seas. No one had ever attempted running it. The trip was funded largely by the third member of the expedition, Ronnie McNeep, who at the time was doing okay running dope for the Trimbole family, driving a Monaro with a bootload of weed fifteen hundred kilometres from Grafton to Melbourne and back once a week. Ray assured me and Ronnie of three things: that in the far New Guinea Highlands it would be the dry season and the river thus low and the rapids not too large, that the trip would take seven days, and that he had all the maps we needed. When we finally made our way to the top of the river it was the middle of the monsoon, the river was flooding, and the rapids huge.

  On the ninth day, having somehow survived the largest rapids any of us had ever seen, two days after our food had run out, Ronnie and I demanded to see the maps. We were standing on a gigantic boulder scree above a large waterfall into which the entire river vanished, perplexed as to what we might do next, smoking the last of our New Guinea cigarettes, nine-inch durries tailor-made from pages of old Sydney Morning Heralds. The tobacco was coarsely shredded and tended to flare wildly on the first few puffs. Behind gouts of flame, wreathed by our smoke, a vast jungled gorge shimmered. It was one of the most beautiful places on earth. And I would have given anything to be somewhere else, anywhere else, that might be safe.

  Ray produced a single greasy photostated page. Its header read “Jacaranda Schoolboy Atlas.” It showed at an absurdly reduced scale an entire country. At such a scale it was more an idea of a country, a visual notion, than a map you could use to determine place and distance and likely time left on the river. But still, in the straits we now found ourselves, even an idea would have been helpful, bar one detail.

  Ray? Ronnie McNeep said, tapping a finger on the bottom of the page. It says here—Irian Jaya.

  Two large jungle trees—roots, trunks, canopy—washed over the waterfall and emerged in pieces far below.

  So? Ray said, flames rising around his nostrils as he lit up and inhaled.

  Ray, Ronnie McNeep said, we were—last time I looked—in the New Guinea Highlands.

  Yeah—well?

  Ray, Irian Jaya is the left-hand side of the atlas. New Guinea is on the right.

  So?

  It’s like, you know, next door.

  Ray stared at Ronnie.

  Breathe, Ronnie, Ray said, exhaling a dark smoke wreath.

  The country next door, Ray.

  I understand that, McNeep. But so fuckn what?

  Ray, you photocopied the wrong half of the atlas.

  And? Ray said.

  I am not sure how to explain something that is explained, Ray. We are not in the same fucking country as the fucking country we’re fucking in.

  But Ray on occasion wasn’t even on the same planet.

  We made it out fifteen days later, having survived by begging sweet potato and corn from Stone Age villagers for whom we had to perform demeaning tricks in return, humiliations such as leaping off rope bridges high above river gorges in our kayaks; singing for their amusement; letting their children touch our white skin, something they had only ever heard of in stories; or letting their old people wear our plastic whitewater helmets and gaudy lifejackets. The villagers were gracious, generous, and bemused. We were desperate, stupid, and stunned by their kindness. Without it we would have been dead. By the time we finished I nevertheless had tropical ulcers and malaria; McNeep, malaria, hepatitis and giardia; and Ray a rising good humour.

  A few days after we escaped that river alive, Ray and I were, late in the evening, walking out of the Chimbu Lodge Disco in Mount Hagen—a large, grass-roofed hut in the New Guinea Highlands guarded by bouncers bearing pump-action shotguns, something others may have interpreted as a worrying augury. We had been befriended by a Chimbu called Michael who had taken us there. It was a purely local nightspot, which is to say no whites ever went.

  Inside the Chimbu Lodge Disco was a carefully stratified confusion of tribal and late-twentieth-century mating rituals. Along one wall stood Chimbu women, along the other Chimbu men. The dance floor was largely empty. A DJ played a melange that segued from Scottish bagpipe music to “Ave Maria” to Madonna and back to more bagpipes. The only common denominator seemed to be that all the music was western. Michael, Ray and I left with some Chimbu women.

  We walked straight out into three near-naked Chimbu men holding axes and dressed, as they frequently were, as Stone Age warriors, with painted faces, feathered headgear, and wearing only what was known locally as arse grass. When we went to walk through them they blocked our way. They stood there before us immobile, implacable, their painted faces expressionless. We smiled, we muttered a few words of greeting, but they said nothing. Instead they just kept chewing betel nut, their fiery red-stained mouths occasionally opening to reveal an ochry hell inside.

  We turned to our right but four more warriors with axes materialised out of the darkness to block our escape. And when we turned to the left, several more had appeared on that side. We were surrounded. Ray smiled. The exotic nature of the evening was finally devolving into the more familiar contours of a Friday night at a Tasmanian pub, replete with the customary late-evening brawl. The idea seemed to hearten him immensely. For me, it bespoke a not unreasonable terror.

  I don’t think they like us being with their women, I whispered.

  The difference in place and culture—the difference being that here people were routinely, or customarily, killed—eluded Ray.

  So?

  Maybe we should tell the girls to go.

  No, Ray said. I want a fuck. And I want a fight.

  The circle began tightening around us in what felt an inexorable noose. More warriors assembled, so that the circle was now two deep. Not for the first time in Ray’s company I sensed the likely prospect of imminent death. The girls—wiser than Ray—had meanwhile melted away, and Michael with them. Ray seemed not displeased though to have at least half of what he regarded as an ideal evening come to fulfilment. He turned to me, face flushed with excitement.

  Get your back up against mine, Kif, he said. You take the four on the side, I’ll—

  It’s not fucking Friday night in Hobart, I began—but I was cut short by a wild roar. Out of the darkness, revving hard and driving at accelerating speed straight at the ring of warriors there appeared a pair of dim headlights, and sitting above them in the cabin of an old Toyota six-ton flat tray truck was Michael waving wildly to us. One warrior went down as the truck glanced him, and the others momentarily scattered. We saw Michael’s terrified face in the truck cabin yelling at us to jump on the back as he sped by. Ray—abruptly ripped to his senses—and I threw ourselves onto the flat tray and hugged its splintering boards.

  Some of the warriors gave chase and began catching up. Michael dropped the low-revving diesel into second gear, but our speed was too slow for the change and the truck too low geared, and in consequence, rather than picking up speed, we lost it, and the warriors gained more ground. One Chimbu man was within touching distance and only Ray getting to his feet and kicking him away stopped him clambering on board. We hit a downhill slope, the truck finally accelerated, and we sped away into the night as rocks thrown by the warriors bounced off the cabin, one hitting Ray on the head on a ricochet.

  The rest of that evening and the next two days we spe
nt hiding in a hut twenty kilometres distant from Mount Hagen, watching a tribal war play out in a valley not far below. At one point a man went to the river with a bucket. A dozen warriors followed him and, from our distance, seemed with their axes to have hacked him to death.

  6

  We should have taken all these things as warnings, but we were young and read them otherwise: as incentives, as proofs, as charms.

  And so when Ben Coors, a mate, was getting married in Sydney and we couldn’t afford plane tickets, it seemed obvious to us that we would kayak Bass Strait, the three hundred or so kilometres of ocean between Tasmania and Australia, and, on making it to Australia, hitch from Victoria up to the wedding in Sydney. Really though, we wanted to do it because no one ever had and everyone said it was impossible, that it was a death wish.

  And that seemed the grandest joke of all, and therefore irresistible.

  But what happened in Bass Strait wasn’t a joke. A Force-Nine gale blew up, our boats sank, and for fourteen hours we were alone, tossed around a huge, wild sea clad only in lifejackets and t-shirts. We tried to hold on to each other, but the waves—moving mountains—just picked us up and tore us apart. The last I saw of Ray was a dot vanishing over a distant wave crest.

  Later, people said we looked like idiots. We did. But what does anyone who didn’t live it know? We also nearly died out there, and out there is really out there, so far fucking out I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make it back, so far out that maybe I went over to the other side for a time and maybe—truth be told—maybe I never made it back.

  To die alone?

  To die alone.

  As waves shrieked around me, as I was swept up and down a vertical sea fighting to keep my head above water, I found myself in the land of visions, of derangement, of transcendence and a solitude so terrible, a terror of dying alone so overwhelming, that it still brings on in me a prickly panic thinking about it.