Death of a River Guide Read Online Free

black water below, would be visible to no eyes. To those staring down, desperate and impotent, I probably look like John the Baptist when his head was brought to Herod on a plate. Funny thought, that. Funny that even funny thoughts can happen when you are dying. Maybe the humour is part of the horror.
    And then it strikes me: the site of my death, albeit in a small and humble way, will become a tourist monument. And this idea - this revelation - amuses me. Here in my agony I’m about to be enshrined as part of the joke. I suppose I have become part of the bloody joke. This idea is too much for me. I burst out laughing. And as my laughter empties into ever smaller bubbles and rushes away to join the other bubbles in the current, I involuntarily try to breathe in. Water rushes into my mouth and courses down my throat.
    I feel faint.
    I feel as if I am dissolving.
    And when that sensation washes through me, it washes me away. Not my body, no, but me , takes me elsewhere, to another time, another river. No, the same river, but so gentle, so kind, so warm, as to make it seem an entity from another world. And now I recognise it - this place where we enter the river and start our trip. The Collingwood River Bridge. It must be six, no, five, five and a half days ago; it was then, and there. There, it is me, standing at the edge of the river. When I look back at myself all that time ago I see only a stranger. But it is me. I can pick the gawky hooked nose, with its eaglebeak-like profile, and the body - yes, the body - there is a giveaway if ever there was one. My god, will you just get a goosey gander of that ! It is my body, I can see that now, short, stumpy, but I don’t feel the revulsion to it now that I felt then. Then, I hated its combination of scrawniness and flab - wherever a guide should have muscle I had more loose flesh the colour of dripping. But looking at it now it seems more than perfectly adequate for the purposes of living. It can walk on both its legs with an admittedly awkward and somewhat comic lope, more like a baboon than a person, but walk nevertheless those legs do. And the arms are fine for picking things up and putting them down and all the other armlike functions they must perform. As for the face, well it breathes without effort.
    Without effort!
    To think that a man who breathes without effort would have as his major concern whether or not the customers who have paid to come on this trip will think the less of him because of a slightly chubby waistline. It is amusing. I ought laugh.
    Most interesting is that none of this nervous vanity is apparent. Nor his customary shyness. He seems relaxed and confident, his dishevelled appearance generating confidence in his customers, who marvel at his nonchalant approach. As for the piss-flambeaued face - well, I think it a not uninteresting face. It lacks, it is true, the boyishness of his fellow river guide. It is a desolate visage, all sallow angles and stubbled, strangely high cheekbones looking as though they have been cable-logged of most of the vital signs of life and further eroded by the passage of time, and, like a clearfelled mountainside, not without a perverse attraction. An eroded black-bedrock wasteland of a face, relieved in its monotony only by the large nose that sits like an abandoned mining tower over the desolation it inhabits. So splendidly large I am compelled to wonder if the face has been bred only for this feature, while the rest of its aspects have been allowed to degenerate. Why is there something fascinating in that face? Maybe it’s because in its early traces of broken purple lines, in its dirty teeth, in its lank red hair, in its darkness, there is something suggestive of experience and suffering. Perhaps even knowledge.
    Perhaps .
    And those eyes burning, a jagged blue. Like the blue heart of the guttering yellow flame of an oxyacetylene torch as the gas is being switched off. Red haired, dark skinned, blue eyed, big