The Swan Book

City Swan





The fiery woman worked her fingers to the bone to get into the girl’s brain, as though this was where one removed grime, salt, vegetation, blood of dead animals, lice, and whatever thoughts about having different origins she had brought into the house. Big Red, that was her name the woman said, after she had found the girl asleep in the corridor. With her sleeves rolled up, the woman joyfully prepared a more proper wife for Warren than what he had arrived with.

The girl had slept against a wall with the cat, and dreamt of a river walled up with knotted debris composed of words describing tree trunks, branches and leaves that had been washed away by previous floods. She knew it was not a safe place to stand against the wall breaking up in the flooded backwaters where volumes of words kept spilling over her head. Submerged and struggling, she bobbed up to surface every now and again, while swimming through schools of coppery red fish that were larger than whales jammed right to the steep banks of the river.


It was mid-morning when Big Red had transformed the girl with enough hot baths to convince herself that she had found the true colour of the girl’s skin. She styled the girl’s hair, contouring her wild golden-tipped brown curls to remain close to her head, and coiled the rest into a bun at the base of her neck. She painted her fingernails cream. The wedding gown was next. The girl was thinner than expected and not as tall. She knew to expect her to be dark, not that dark, but the colour was fine for the cream silk that had been ordered. Now the dress itself did not fit.

She hissed between teeth filled with pins, cursing Warren for having created a monumental problem by wanting so many things to be done like this. A wedding gown from Italy! What next? It was the bride’s job to give her measurements. How would he know? And he should have given more warning if he wanted to leave it to somebody else to organise everything for him. Hold still! Don’t move an inch. The girl dared not breathe. Yet! Yet! My dear, she sung finally, saying she would build Rome with her bare hands in a day if she had to. Why? Because, she explained, Warren deserved to be happy for all he has to put up with. And with a pin she would stab the girl if she did not make Warren a happy man.

You are a very lucky girl. This is going to be the happiest day in your life. I hope you know that. So, don’t mind me. Who am I to complain over a simple little thing like not having the dress as perfect as it should be?

Finally, the dress clung to the girl’s body and the cream silk with embroidered lilies fell down to her ankles, and Big Red who found it hard to believe in miracles, admitted Warren had chosen the right dress. Unbelievable! Who would have thought you could put the bush where you come from into a frock. The girl looked into an oval mirror and saw herself like golden syrup in a cream dress with the same colour arum lilies of the land of the owls, and gloved hands. She looked grand, said the children applauding their mother who was gushing with pride. Red said Ethyl looked exactly like a fashion queen from a magazine. A miracle, she said to Warren. And don’t you do this to me again. Warren looked at the girl. He looked relieved. He embraced the woman strongly. It was plain to see that she meant the world to him.


Oblivia felt like she had been turned into a dolled-up camp dog and vaguely nodded to the question of whether she took Warren Finch as her husband to love and obey etcetera – since what did it matter whether she said, I do to Warren Finch, or f*ck you arsehole if that was what she was supposed to think, and who was no less of a stranger in the room to her than anyone else there staring at her. Did it matter? Not the idea of marriage. This was the whole point with Oblivia, long after the house had filled with guests who greeted the red-headed dragon woman profusely as they entered. The man who officiated the marriage wore a tight black snake suit that could have been a boa constrictor strangling him. His face was sickly grey. He looked as though he had seen a ghost. Perhaps he was a ghost, Oblivia thought – she even thought it was funny, wondering whether she was really in some other reality, and if this was what the ghosts of white people did all the time, getting married, saying I do, promising the world and whatnot. She wasn’t going to be anybody’s slave. Whilst the marriage celebration proceeded with colour and glitz, the only strange person in the room was Oblivia with her girlish thoughts. But, you have to understand, said a woman-expert on Indigenous affairs in a small gathering of like-minded among the guests, this marriage will cement bonds with these people. It is their law. He will need to keep his principles on his road to ultimate power.

You need to understand something about Warren, Big Red confided in the girl. His friends are important business people. Born rich. Men of old traditions lodged in other parts of the world. They give money to his work. They want a separate voice to hold sway in this country. Do you understand? Only her eyes in degrees of openness indicated which of the cleanly shaven men embracing Warren mattered, while his own cleanly shaven face touched their own. They were either like people cast out in the desert or close-knit, like blood brothers. The girl followed Big Red’s eyes, like a ribbon from her hair that had caught the wind and flew along an invisible current through the house.

These are all very close friendships. Big Red smiled even more stiltedly and self-knowingly at the wives who politely kissed both Warren’s cheeks, fingers lingering suggestively as they slid a gloved hand across his cheek. She said nothing about those close friendships. Red said they were rolling in money. Most of which is the laundered profits of exploiting natural resources which has wound every cent of its way around the globe many times before it lands in this multi-coloured fashion parade, my dear.

The girl watched the kissing, hugging and laughter to congratulate Warren for marrying his beautiful promise. They glanced over to her, smiled, gave a small wave. You see how they love Warren? They are also very important benefactors who will see to it that Warren becomes the head of this country. Do you know what a benefactor is? I suppose you don’t. They give your husband a lot of money to help him become the most powerful man in the country. Not that he isn’t already. I am not saying that. Red looked at the girl strangely, and saw there was nothing one way or another disturbing her, so taking a deep breath and with a sigh of relief, ended the commentary: Well! Whatever!

Warren smiled amicably, briefly, politely to hear snippets of important news among these high-profile advocates of worthy causes, human rights, moral judgement, espousing correct answers for saving the lives of Aborigines, displaced people, freedom of speech, endangered species, the environment. And in fact, Red said, Between them all, all of them have enough causes to cover the entire planet. You think they could bloody well save it.

He drifted easily into careful quotes that one would expect from a happy groom, and to the varied questions of friendly media profilers. They smiled with great appreciation each time he spoke. He locked eye contact. It was impossible for the women journalists to break from his gaze until he freed them. The politicians, old hands at the artistry of seduction, cautioned a compromising situation, by ushering Warren aside. They spoke in hushed tones to fill the moment by clinking glasses to honour his peculiarly bizarre but honourable marriage whether they thought it was exploitation or not, the thing was, it was a novel idea indeed.

The matron Red eyed her special guests sarcastically, and was scathing in telling Oblivia about how they all wanted to know about customary law practices now: See how they are staring at you? Look at them biting at the bit to say that they have always acknowledged arranged marriages. See how they are pulling Warren aside? Read their lips: Oh! Warren, What does it mean? Will this work? Last week they all wanted to outlaw it. You watch: They will be racing and falling over themselves to get back to Canberra in the morning to dust the cobwebs off that old 1970s customary law report and scratching their heads to figure out how to be first to bring all your old laws and practices into legislation which they had previously outlawed to death. That’s what they are all whispering about over there. Trying to be honourable. Such hypocrites. All of them. Fancy trying to justify oblique practices from another culture they know nothing about and wanting to build it into the normal practice of Australian law. But what can you say? Men from the mountaintops will always come down to the molehill to conquer it. That will always be the vice of the conqueror.



The tables were festooned with red fish, octopus, squid, oysters and silver urns overflowing with prawns, crayfish, salmon and all other things cooked red from the sea. A line of waiters queued at the door with platters of steaming roasts and vegetables under shining silver lids. It was a banquet, more food than the girl had seen in her entire life, and the sight of so much food for one meal made her nauseous, and unable to eat. Inside her loneliness, she felt the pangs of hunger the night she had raided the fishing nets in the swamp, and had not found a single fish. Then, she lost track of the number of cattle, pigs, sheep, and poultry slaughtered, and vegetable fields that had been raided, the sea emptied, and all of this – deteriorating into the guts of seagulls eating the rubbish.

She had no guests of her own. Even old Aunty and the Harbour Master had boycotted the wedding. The girl stared blankly into a world where hungry swans flew around the house in a frenzied flight of destruction. In the melee of crashing and swans’ hisses, the huge birds strike at food off dinner plates and attack the banquet. Strangely, other things fall apart in her mind too, because somewhere far off beyond the house and wedding music and guests milling in talk she could hear the single cry of a swan gliding down a lonely river calling for its mate. She turned pale. This was old Bella Donna’s story of the swan flying with a piece of bone in its beak.

The neck of a motionless swan lay limp on the bank of the river so far away. Its mate flew on and on, and the girl could hear the swan’s wedding song coming closer as other things began to take shape before her eyes, and Warren’s guests became swans. Their clothes were transforming into swanskin with feathers of glitter and shine.

It was a funny old world the girl thought, seeing people too preoccupied to notice their own metamorphosis. They were too busy thinking about the proper way to smile at a promised wife first lady who stared back at a room full of swans. Oh! My God! She smiled at the busy swans preening one another, and again, gliding across the glassy room to the music of Johann Strauss. Oh! My God! The girl had been captured in the blissfulness of being a bride. Look at her! She danced towards the swans flying through the air – and then, crying as they faded away, was unable to accept that they could have changed back suddenly into Warren’s guests.


But the room danced with French champagne, chatter and music, and as guests were introduced to the girl, she found the sense of their humanity enticing. Warren’s guests had learnt about poverty from not being poor themselves, in places where you did not hear the screams and yelling of help. Their words could stay on a flat horizontal plane from one end of the spectrum to the other in speaking about the emotions of the world. Well-fed speech was flexible, versatile, and heavily pregnant with a choice of words that could be tilted with enough inflection to win hearts regardless, so when she listened to Red, she had to remember they were actually oppressors, capable of slipping down to the bottom of a fetid well to destroy whoever got in the way of their success. She shook their hands just like they might have been swans.


In a room celebrating the glory of the country through political manoeuvres, there were no genies. This thought had struck her like lightning, and when Warren caught sight of her she froze. He patted the arm of the person he was speaking to, excusing himself to collect her. His arm guided her from one person to the next, circling the room in farewells, while she wanted to walk away. You are supposed to be a trophy wife, Warren whispered into her ear and capped it with a light kiss. He was obviously thrilled by what he overheard from his guests.

This is astonishing. He actually went ahead with it.

Married his promise wife.

Someone said he just went straight in and took her from a bush camp where she was living in squalor with ducks and what have you, and she had been raped and everything. A really violent place where children were neglected.

No!

Well! No one can be too surprised. That’s the kind of thing Warren would do.

I agree. He has always been a man who will stand by a principle.

But she was half mad when he found her.

Was that when she was living in a tree or something?

They say she didn’t even know her name.

Why? I never heard of someone not knowing their own name.

Well! It is true. Not all people are the same.

Bullshit! We are one country here. We are all Australians. All equal. No one is any different.

Well! If you don’t believe it, go and ask her what her name is.

Oblivia overheard too. She felt strange, and could not understand why he had taken her away from her home either. It is just games, Warren said, squeezing her hand and smiling at his friends. Why would people play these games? Her head felt as though it was being whisked around inside a sphere tugged by swans circling the skies and narrowing in their search to find her.

Finally, they were back where they had begun, walking down through the pine trees where white mist rose through the foliage, and a violin was playing Edgar’s grass owl rhapsody. She stopped to listen, and the music grew louder as it spread through all of the trees. Warren held her arm firmly. She pushed him away, trying to break free, she wanted to go back.

Where? Where do you want to go to, he said, while he maintained his grip on her arm.

Where is he? Edgar? she thought, trying to pull away.

Don’t be stupid. Come on. Let’s try to dignify the occasion. At least you should be capable of doing the few simple things you are supposed to do. Who put on that music? Listen! See! The music is being piped through the trees. That’s all.

The girl struggled to look back, and strained to hear the music as it faded into the background of the farewells of guests crowding around them. Red’s big lips smiled broadly. All eyes were on Warren as they wished him well, showering him with embraces in a wave that lifted the bride into the car while shadows flew overhead. But! Just when she thought the swans had arrived, the shadows disappeared from the curls in the mist, and then, it was sunshine. There was nothing but blue skies as the door closed, long before the violin finished playing its serenades.


Driving away, Warren happily chatted about the simply marvellous wedding to the driver he called mate, or to whoever else was on the other end of the mobile phone which was ringing constantly. Wasn’t it great, Ethyl? Every call he included her, to back up what he thought about his marriage. Yes, she loved it, didn’t you Ethyl? Warren’s voice went on squashing her thoughts of salt lakes, spinifex and owls. She had lost the battle to preserve Edgar’s music in her head.

The phone rang like an alarm bell interrupting her thoughts, to dominate the past, to insist the future be heard. She felt that the voice on the phone belonged to a snake. The marriage belonged to his viperous world. Then he was arguing with the phone. It means nothing…Something! Something? Believe me it means nothing. He looked out the window as he spoke, and she wanted to scream at him to stop robbing people of their thoughts. She hated how he killed silence.

She was certain that he had intentionally stopped her from hearing the music, just as he made certain that she would never reach the point from where her emotions would overtake his plans, to leave him somehow, to return to the swans. He reached across and touched her arm and she flinched in that instant as his voice drew her back into his world.

Warren smiled and said he had a little present.

Don’t you want to know what it is?

He waited until she looked at him before he handed her a small red coral box. It was carved with tiny birds with fat bellies that were larger than their wings, and each bird looked up with golden eyes.


Go on, open it. The slightest touch to the clasp on the side of the box released the lid which sprang open, and sounded a tune. It is from Swan Lake the ballet. I thought you would like that. Inside, on its bed of silk, lay a silver ring. She looked at her left hand with the gold wedding band that sat loosely on her finger.

Take it, he encouraged, and then put the ring on her finger.

This is for the right hand, he said, adding how he had had it made especially for this day. She looked at the design. Two thin bands were separated by crescent moons that encased a small silver brolga, and a swan.

Do you like it?

It is very nice. Thank you. She imagined that she had spoken politely, like Red, but said nothing. She wished the mobile phone would call so that the voice of the snake would sit between them.

I have another little present for you, he said. In case you are thinking about where all of this is heading, you need to know one thing. You will never be going back to where you came from. I will tell you the reason why. It no longer exists.

Oblivia looked straight at him.

His smile was victorious now, having conquered her indifference at last. Simple! The place does not exist anymore. There is no time for places like that. So I did them a favour. I had the place closed down the day we left. Listen!

He tapped the phone, held it to his ear, and spoke. Is everything ready? His voice was cold with authority. A shiver ran up her back. Then he placed the phone to her ear. She listened. The countdown finished, and then, a male voice said, Do it: Now! She heard the explosions whistling through the receiver and vibrating down her fingers. She had to hold the rattling phone away from her ear, but even over the noise of the moving car, could hear the piercing sounds of everything that had flown to the sky. Warren’s face had hardened. She had only seen men around the swamp using their physical powers to destroy. How could this man destroy something so enormous that contained her world? All she saw was a very fine looking man in the suit he had chosen for his wedding day. His thumb silenced the mobile and after taking a deep breath, he placed it back in the pocket of his jacket.

That was for you, he said at last.

What is for me? That? What do you mean? The words did not surface, but the sound of her voice rose through a bottleneck as though gasping for air.

They had not protected you. Nobody did. You know it is true or deep down in your heart you do, just like I know it. Their job was to protect you. That was the law. He took her hand with the ring, and twisted it around her finger, and she saw a third bird, an owl, and she could not understand how she had missed seeing it before, but instantly, she felt calmer, emptied, as though nothing remained of herself which had been scattered far away.

So it’s very simple. Really. Anyone would understand why places like that cannot exist. It is what the whole country was thinking – even if the Government was never prepared to do anything about it.

What will happen to them – those people? He asked the question for her. She imagined the swans agitated and frightened by the panic of people being cleared out of their homes. Flying off. Their flight shifting in clear blue skies from the sound of the explosions, the black columns of smoke chasing them away. What would happen if they had continued swimming around the hull, confused, waiting for her to return? Did he destroy the swamp and the swamp-people too?

They had two choices. Either being moved into the nearest town where they would have to learn to live just like everyone else. Or, being returned to homelands where their real laws and government exist. There will be no Army looking after anybody anymore. Stupid idea in the first place. Intervention! Safer futures! Can’t for the life of me see why stupid thinking like that has lasted a century.

What if they don’t like it there? What if they go back? Again, he felt the need to frame questions on her behalf, to explain his apocalyptic decision. She was still thinking about the swans and about what would happen to her, if she could go back, and if the swans were not living there anymore.

What if, what if? What does it matter to you, or us? They only have themselves to blame. But if you want to know: Everyone on earth is obliged to live a life without endangering somebody else’s life. I work at trying to make people safe. Why do you think I went up there? I wanted to have a look. See what the place was like for myself. That was how I found out that I was right all along from the time when the old people told me about you. I had already known that you were to become my wife when I saw what had happened to you. I knew about the arrangement our families had made from a long time ago when I was a boy. You know, I could have closed them down a while back, but I just wanted to make sure, and I needed to go and collect you, and in any case, it was better to do it this way. You have a future ahead of you now. They were doing nothing to change things by themselves for the future so they had given up the right of sovereignty over their lives.

She only half listened, without having any idea of what he was talking about. His boring words went in one ear and straight out the other. Bloody sell out! There were two others in the car. The old woman. Old Harbour Master. Both sitting in the front seat with the driver. They were discussing this matter too. Who does he think he is? God! Where did he learn about bombing people’s homes? Where does he think he is? A war zone. In Afghanistan? That old war! How long has that been going on for? Does he still think he is in Europe or America? Doesn’t he know this is Australia? Who gives him the right to decide on other people’s sovereignty? The old woman was saying how her bones would be blown up now, and she would have to go and find them, Let me get out of this car, then she disappeared.

The girl looked at the passing buildings – the black and grey concrete statues lining the footpaths. She could feel the cold dampness coming off each building as they drove on. It was the same feeling of fear she had had from the abandoned dogs savagely sniffing through the sedge grasses while circling the swamp, huddling the black-feathered chaos until the water was red and putrid from the smell of rotting flesh and wet feathers. Inside a small pocket of bravery hiding in the crevices of her brain, she imagined herself being united with the swan ghosts flying away from the massacre. It was the only way she could wish herself out of this place. The brolgas would just leave naturally and rejoin the masses further east – back in Warren’s country – and dust off their old rookeries.

What about the genies? Haphazardly, she held up three fingers to his face, and waved her other hand around, and blew mouthfuls of air.

There are no genies. Genies don’t exist. The things you see here are what exist. Nothing else. Trust me and I will show you everything you need to know.

Oblivia winced at Warren’s denial, and stared at her three fingers while slamming them into her other hand.

Where are they then?

I told you they have been moved to town.

The owls? All the eggs we counted? Those men?

Very casually he lent over and covered her face with his. The Harbour Master raised his eyebrows and spat in disgust, A kiss to seal a dream with…Look! Girl! He’s got lips like Nat King Cole. She started to disbelieve herself. Her memory was unreliable. Why would she have travelled over salt lakes? She had beaten the odds. Had not been left to die in the bush. She lived in this city with a rich man. The wedding seemed like a daydream. The red-headed family were just ghosts of people from storybooks that she thought of meeting one day.

She remembered Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions once saying that no story was worth telling if no one could remember the lesson in it. These were stories that have made no difference to anyone. Old Aunty was fading away forever. But…even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered. Ah! The truth was always forgotten. She was in a car with a stranger.






Gypsy Swans





In amongst grey city buildings as solemn as each other, and at the end of silence, they reached a laneway of old and rundown buildings, to stop in front of what Warren Finch called his home.

He called it The People’s Palace.

The first thing Oblivia noticed about the building was the iron bars lacing the windows and the single door of the shopfront. The building was a cage. It reached up to the sky like a giant finger that had come out of the ground to orchestrate the heavens. Cold winds flew down the street with sheets of rain. The building frightened her. Would she be locked inside its guts? Like the women locked in the guts of Country?

In the grinding rain there were many poor people in shapeless brolga-grey coats milling around the laneway, who stared sideways through the limp wet hair falling down over their faces. Some held out their hands for money, but then withdrew them quickly, and passed by without raising their heads. Underneath their hair, some stared at her from the corner of their eyes. Theirs was a primeval kind of surveillance, like wild dogs. She pretended not to notice how wet the people were who slept against walls, some standing, and others lying under pieces of cardboard while styrofoam and plastic rolled over them in the wind. They lay on the concrete sideways with an ear to the ground, as if trying to hear the stories that lay underneath. Oblivia did not understand then that what they were really listening for was the hint of another tidal surge flooding in the sewers below the city. Harbour Master looked around, then bent down and put his own ear to the concrete footpath and said Warren Finch’s home was a piece of shit. These people threw venom from their souls at him. A woman walked by with a pink towel wrapped around her nostrils and mouth, and stared at the bride. The air is bad here girlie, she muffled.

They stood in the rain as Warren unlocked the cumbersome gate and the heavy green door with apparent ease, giving the impression that he knew the building well. Welcome to my home, he said.

Is this a shop? she thought, picking up the voice of Dean Martin singing along with the Harbour Master, Well! It’s lonesome in this old town…I am going back to Houston, Houston, Houston.

No, this is not a shop. It is a place. That was all he said.

They stepped inside a lantern-lit world of water gardens and concrete ponds from which rose enormous antique fountains, while overhead roaming in mist, were large and colourful puppets of birds, dragons and people with wings that swayed from long strings attached somewhere in the ceiling. In this idyll of constant movement, jets of water spouted in the air from wrought iron or brass horns carried by larger than life cupids, giant maidens and young men, or spurted out of the beaks of enormous swans and geese, and from lotus flowers, or from the mouths of frogs and dragons. Whenever the water reached its zenith, it loosely and noisily fell into a Klangfarbenmelodie of music, dropping into the multitude of shallow ponds, from where it was sucked into pipes, then spouted back up into the air again, taking with it Dean Martin’s song of what it was like to be going home, to Houston…

In this crowded space, where eyes swung hocus-pocused through the kaleidoscopically fantastic creation, there was even more drama unfolding, with statues of ancient Greek men and women watching on with faces of wondrous serenity over ibis, eagles, the imagined animals of fairytales, and giant lions with heavy manes that lay on the floor with heads upright, staring into the distance. Wherever there was space not taken up by the human ability to marvel in its imagination, ropey plants, palms, aloes drooping and stringy battled to survive in the atmosphere of wetness and dimness, by stretching half-starved stems towards whatever light came through the windows.

There were cats asleep on pedestals, mantlepieces, steps and shelves, and any place free from being sprayed by mist. The cats watched Warren Finch with yellow eyes as he led the way. A brighter light came on from somewhere above, and when the girl looked up, she saw a break in the clouds passing over the glass dome roof. He led her to a wire cage that belonged to another century. It surrounded the elevator that he explained was a masterpiece of engineering. A bloody marvel that still works perfectly even after practically two-and-a-half centuries, he claimed. It must have been the pride of the city when it was first built. He pressed the dirt-and-grease-coated brass button that shone on the mark where fingers had been pressing it forever. Bloody impressive! She saw him quiver momentarily, while they waited for what did seem like forever, for the lift to come. It slowly descended, whining with pain, until suddenly falling the last metre with a thud. A manlike creature like those she had just seen on the street outside, pushed open the concertina door, and said very slowly: Hello, Mr Flinch. You’re back.

Hello Machine. How have you been? Pretty good? Meet the Missus. He did not mention her name.

The man grunted and said that he had nothing to complain about. He looked at Oblivia with old dog-type eyes for a split second, and then continued looking at the floor. By the time the lift had struggled several floors up to the top of the building, he had managed to say Hello, Mrs Finch. The fountain garden far below was bathed in yellow lights that reflected off the water, but looking down made her feel dizzy. Beside the lift were several flights of dimly lit steps. In the darkness, Warren placed a key into a door with the number 59 barely visible, screwed onto it. Inside, he switched on the lights and walked through the rooms.


Everything works, Warren said, while striding around the apartment that looked as though it was never used. She was given a quick demonstration of electric appliances: stove, fridge, jug, toaster, microwave, washing machine, television, radio. Rubbish: Left nightly outside the door. Water: Hot and cold shower, bath, basin, kitchen sink. Toilet: How to flush. Cleaning: Broom, mop, bucket, wipes. Cleaning liquids: Kitchen, Bathroom, Toilet, Laundry, Floors. Clothes: There were some spare clothes left in the wardrobe. He slid a glass door open and she could see a line of clothes hanging for her. Shoes on the floor. Underwear in the drawers. He continued on, and quickly explained what she could and could not do in the apartment, which he said was, yours now. Frequently, he called out lists of instructions with: You must promise me that you will remember. Then he emerged from the bedroom, bags packed, one in each hand. The mobile was calling but he did not answer.

Her eyes had been glued to the images changing on the television until it occurred to her that the mobile was still ringing.

I will call them back in a minute, he said, and looking at her for a moment as he tried to remember something he had to say, he continued: I will try to get back on the weekend.

Her eyes were now fixed on the bag in his hand. Warren could see her face locking into meltdown, another panic attack, and thought he better say something to her, before she destroyed the place, or stopped him from leaving. Yes, that would do it. He would explain his work to her – where he had to go.

Sometimes Canberra. That’s the nation’s capital. I am in government you know. Sometimes the world. Anywhere. My parish is the world. Wherever I am needed in the neighbourhoods of power. That is where I work: where I do business. Your business is to stay here and be my wife. Machine will look after you.

It was his words that described hugeness that helped her to realise how powerful he was, and her lack of power, in a place that she did not know.

Just ring the lift if you need anything. You can trust him so don’t worry about asking. You will be good company for Machine. He is a good man and he does a good job. He broke the slight awkwardness in his voice by looking at his watch to confirm his departure.


Look! He said impatiently, I have got to go right now to catch the flight. This is something you will have to get used to I am afraid. I have to go tonight because I have been away too long and I have a lot of very, very urgent work to do, starting first thing in the morning. Look! I will call you.

Then he left. She heard him talking to the man he called Machine on the other side of the closed door, and shortly afterwards, the slamming concertina gates, then the rumbling noise of the lift wobbling back down its own neck, and the whining sound of creaking ropes fading further away.

She now belonged in the menagerie of exhibits artificially created by the weirdo named Machine. That was how the Harbour Master described the situation.

From that moment of silence, Oblivia would be waiting for Warren to come back.


Countless times, the girl stood in front of the large glass windows of the apartment, as she would do numerous times in the future. What did she watch? Cold rain mostly, that fell on the sun-deprived walls of the buildings across the laneway while she daydreamed about how she would escape through the mazes stacked in her mind – thousands of unknown city streets and distances across the country too great to be imagined, to return to the swamp – imaginary flights that always fizzled into a haze-land between the here and then that stopped her every time. She followed the routes of rainwater pouring through the moss and black lichen that grew in profusion down the shady walls, or dripping melodically like piano notes onto the drooping foliage of fig trees, banana trees, tropical trees and ferns growing from cracks in these buildings. She watched dark-hooded people drifting into the lane to sleep. Those who formed a huddle for security at night, then left in the morning. Sometimes, she would be awakened in the middle of the night when she heard people screaming King Billy, and she rushed to the window to watch dark shadows scattering though the waters flooding in the laneway, the old drought-buster spirit when tidal surges flooded through the sewers into the lower, poorer, and central parts of the city, usually at times when violent hail storms from cyclonic weather struck the coastline. She watched the people from the lane moving away, or sheltering from the rain and hailstones under pieces of cardboard and plastic, or standing around for hours in floodwater, holding their belongings to their chests, until the waters subsided.


Old Bella Donna’s books about swans wrapped in fishing net were left on the table like a souvenir. Oblivia had found the package one night while roaming around the apartment after she had woken startled from a nightmare taking her to the brink of madness. Her common nightmare of being caught in the improbability of returning or leaving, of being locked in this moment forever, and there it was on the table. Had Warren come back? She froze, looked into the shadows, then started searching the place with the kitchen knife while the Harbour Master was winding her up so fast, urging her on to kill the useless prick if she found him, that she was racing around in a frenzy like a mad woman cut loose. The books could have been a wish come true. Washed up from the tracks of dry salt lakes. Hauled through the clouds outside the window. She had missed the genies tapping on the glass, to grant her wishes if she had any more to make.

The Harbour Master kept calling Warren Finch a f*ckwit for leaving them all in this dump of a place. He was itching to leave. He said he had seen her bloody books in the vehicle where she had left them. On the edge of the salt lakes. The books smelt of the hull. If she touched one, or picked it up, images of being in the hull flashed through her mind.


Somehow, the books became good company. Pages were flicked over, and lines recited, and reflected upon: The wild swan’s death-hymn took the soul of that waste place with joy. Was this wasteland the swamp? She left the books on the table, and touched them frequently as though they were her friends. She sang over and over, a chant, her lonely incantation to the swans flying over Country, All the black swans sail together. She moves on, finds another thought – He who becomes a swan, instructs the world! This swan could spread his wings and fly where his spirit takes him, and Oblivia imagines the past disappearing in this flight to a frightening anticipated unknown future. Shakespeare’s Sweet Swan of Avon! What a sight it were…where a Mute Swan, or Whooper Swan, flying ten-thousand leagues, had taken the old swan woman’s people across the sea. But her mind turns away from that vision, and returns to anticipate how her own black swans from the swamp were moving over the country she had travelled, and listens to them singing their ceremonies in flight, and she holds this thought in her mind because it soothes her, instructs her in endurance and perseverance.

Days passed and weeks turned into months of not knowing how she could continue reminding herself of the home she had been taken from, a place that no longer existed in the way she remembered – Now, when you awaken, remember the swan’s last dance. As quickly as she tried to reconstruct the swamp in her mind, the quicker the images of watery slicks consumed the hull, capturing the earthed lightning of a flock of swans…and the rotting abandoned hulls flew away in the wind from a world fallen apart. It was not safe to have thoughts that were now wavering into forgetfulness until all that remained were vague memories too hard to hold. She no longer felt safe thinking about the hull. Slowly but surely, her life had become anything Warren Finch wanted it to be, the Swan I tempted with a sense of shame…and he was already doing that by not coming back.


In the middle of the day Oblivia watched the liftman from her window, when he was down in the narrow lane, right where the water was gushing out of the pipes carrying the water flooding from the top of the building. His shoes are wet from the windswept rain, but he continues emptying the rainwater from their bowls and feeding his cats. They follow his every move despite not liking the rain falling on their fur, because they are hungry. They are mainly orange marmalade cats; black and grey brindle cats; black and white cats. Soon, they are just wet cats. He judiciously supervises the feeding ritual to ensure that each cat manages to grab a bit of food.

Machine reminds her of Warren. The dominant, stronger cats are often discouraged from being too greedy with a swift kick from the tip of his boot. Other times, when in a hurry, he does not bother emptying water from the bowls. On these occasions, he just throws scraps of meat all over the laneway and wherever a bit lands, the cats rush towards it, and it all ends up in catfights. He watches for a moment or two as though he finds pleasure out of the spectacle of fur and claws, then he turns his back and saunters off towards the street entrance to the building. Other times he seems to be sick, and just empties tins of congealed cat food onto the ground in the running water. Then afterwards, he picks up all of the tins and carts them away in his rubbish bag.

Over rooftops where the crows wait, she would often see right out to the grey bay where the clouds were chopped by wind. She listened to the sound of ferry-boat engines whining in the rough, and the jets that flew continuously over the roof tops, and she wondered whether Warren might be on board, antlike, up in the sky. In the street below, in the constant sound of traffic, she saw delivery trucks travelling back and forth to feed the city, as if the entire population of the country existed only in this place.

Sometimes, when the weather eased, and if she looked closely, out into the shadows of the greyness, she would often find the dark form of a fisherman huddled in his secret fishing place among the rocks along the edge of the bay. She watched the small motorboats slowly churning over the choppy water, where hunchback fishermen went back and forth, then as night fell, the boats moving between lanes of flickering red, green and golden globes, and a seemingly never-ending trail of bats travelling from one abandoned park to another across the city. Then she moved away from the window. Her daily routine was completed.


Warren Finch still did not return, and she did not wish he would come back. She started to believe that one day the view from the window would change. A plane might fall from the skies, straight into the deepest part of the bay in front of her, with his body still strapped to its seat. She waited expectantly, anticipating the time when she would become one of the hunchbacked people on one of the little fishing boats, with eyes blinded by a stinging sea spray as they searched the crash site.

The rain never stopped falling. Sometimes it fell so hard it was impossible to see the bay. The telephone never rang. She had placed the receiver on the table and left it there.


Oblivia avoided Machine like the plague. Never wanted to see him. She did not even watch him feed the cats anymore. She feared that one day he would knock on the door and she would have to answer it. Yet, the liftman did his job of looking after her. He regularly left groceries and money outside the door in a box along with the household and personal things she hardly used. She stacked the things left by Machine into a mountain as high as the ceiling until the construction tumbled. She restacked bath soap, tins of food, laundry detergent into a higher pile. Most of the perishable food she did not eat, she left in the rubbish bin outside the door, where more food was left for her.

One night she woke up thinking that Machine was searching through her rubbish somewhere in the building, some place where she imagined he lived in a den like an animal, and where occasionally she thought she heard a phone ring. She felt disgusted and threw her rubbish from the window into the lane, but always quickly afterwards, she would see him picking up every single thing she had dropped with a pointed stick, and dropping it piece by piece, after he inspected it, into a large, green rubbish bag. It was these little incidents that fed her loathing of the ugly man. Her mind grew fat on it. But she could not leave. She depended on him. And still she did not wish that Warren would come back.


Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would suddenly wake up to the sound of the concertina door of the lift slamming repeatedly in her head. She would run to her door and listen. Always watching the brass, hook-shaped door handle, waiting for it to turn. She thought Warren had come back. He had changed his mind. Then she heard slow, laboured breathing, and she wondered if each achievable breath would be the last. Instinctively, she knew it was the liftman on the other side with his ear to the door, listening to her – checking to see if she was still alive. She could hear Warren calling Machine on his mobile phone when the thought crossed his mind: Keep checking just in case she tries to kill herself. He could hear her heart pounding. The knife she slides across her hand is so sharp, that she often cuts herself. She tries not to breathe while waiting for the door handle to move. The blood falls from her hand. But he always leaves with his shoes dragging across the floor. The concertina doors open and slam shut. The lift begins whining back down to the lower floors.

It was only when the lift faded away that she would breathe normally again, but one night after he left she heard breathing coming back to her through the walls, in rhythm with her own breath. She now understood it was this sound that had brought Machine up to the top floor of the building. The sound flooded the apartment. She was too afraid to turn on a light, and went from room to room trying to find the sound, but it was coming from everywhere. It came from the air of her breath. The air was wrapping breath with breath.

Then she knew. She could feel the presence of their bodies, of beating wings from lean-chested birds, lightened from the long journey, with necks stretched in flight. The swans had arrived. Above the building they flew in a gyre that was lit intermittently by strobes of searchlights. All around, soft breast feathers fell lightly. The swans flew through the narrow lane outside the window, and upwards into the darkness, after their eyes had found hers. Their search had ended.

The swans flew around the building looking for a place to land. They tried to land on the roof then flew off towards the bay. Their numbers had grown. Along the way, the land had given up its swans from all the drying inland watercourses, swamps, man-made lakes and sewerage ponds, drains and cattle dams. The migration had assembled a black cloud that flew in the night on its long journey to find the girl.

But the swans were gone in the morning.