Carpentaria (25 page)

In the accumulation over time of hundreds of bottles, none labelled, lining the shelves, the startled-faced children watched Norm reach for whatever he wanted, without checking first if he had the right one. Somehow he could remember what he had stored down to the last bottle. It was like magic, and children talk. Phenomena like this was what interested the thoughts of the people of Eastside, the
jarrbikala
-policeman and the Uptown
kadajala
.

The family had lost count of the times that Norm had replaced the bottles, and restored the collection to its exact position, after the workshop was searched and his collections of poisons temporarily confiscated by the
jarrbikala
. When the policeman came, the Phantom kids cringed like the dogs, with their backs flat against the walls, trying to attain a powerless invisibility. Immobilised by fear of being seen, they listened to their thumping hearts race when they watched their father being taken away. Each time he saw his father leave the house with a policeman, Will thought it would be the last time he would ever see him. On these occasions he implanted the image of his father’s face in his mind, in case it was forever. He would always have the stoical expression on the face of his father leaving to remember, and being too frightened to think of the terrible consequences if this would be the last time they would ever see him again.

Will fingered the wooden workbench, running his fingers along where Norm had instilled in him as they worked the fish together to never have one thought, one vision. ‘One idea could get you into so much trouble, boy, you might never know if you are dead or alive for instance. Sideways, you always want to be looking out when someone serves you up a drink – might be a cup of tea or a glass of water. Never let them. They could be serving you up the worst kind of poison.’

His father had found a dead countryman once. He said he found him at the tip, when he smelt a human being rotting where he poked a stick around in the muck. ‘My country what are you doing here?’ Norm asked, angling for the man’s spirit to come forth and purge the wrong done, and when he got no answer, Norm had walked around in the putrid mud searching for clues, while a million flies, buzzing to and fro in one big black mass, never stopped following him. He was convinced, he claimed, that the flies tried to push him away. Perhaps they were hiding something. He kept waving the black demons away with his free arm and a stick from a bamboo thicket bulldozed from the artesian bore up the road, and dumped at the tip. Although the vile stench tried to pull him down into the palace of death, he continued blindly forward, choking back his vomit, until he stumbled upon a pile of dirty housewife’s kitchen rags and pieces of cardboard marked Cocoa butter, which he flicked away, and there he told police, he uncovered the corpse. The body was actually stirring about, and Norm, both repulsed at the sight and thinking it was the devil in personification, rising up to get him because he never went to church on Sundays, said, it was in those vital moments until he came to his senses that he believed the cadaver was floating off in midair. Then he realised it was riddled with maggots. ‘Get the police, run quick,’ Norm said he snapped at his children, who he claimed were with him at the time.

Well! Aren’t no business of ours
, that was what the police said. They said, through Truthful, it was not reasonable to expect them to muck around with anybody’s body in such an awful state of decomposition.
Other siders’ business
, that was what the muffled voices said behind the industrial masks, as the whole stinking lot, treated like any kind of animal carcass, was quickly and unceremoniously shovelled into a body bag, zipped inside of another and another, and air-mailed off that fast to a city hospital. ‘The police,’ Norm said with a spit reserved for whenever he referred to the police, ‘had spent that much time pursuing him just for finding the body, there could not be enough hours in a day for
squestion
this and
squestion
that. Well! They could have been out doing what the decent taxpayer paid them to do, catching the real criminals,’ instead of making him look like the guilty one. But some people said, it was no good what Norm Phantom could have done. So, throw enough mud – some sticks.

It was any wonder everyone started thinking Norm was a murdering criminal type, with the police just about wanting to marry up with him, by the way they were hanging around his property. Even his wife Angel Day started to get jealous of all of the attention Norm was getting. She threw things at the police when they came. She demanded to know what was really going on. ‘Your Mother is a very suspicious human being,’ Norm casually mentioned to Will at the workbench after the police had come cruising up and down, passing their place at all hours, staring in, searching the premises and then driving away in their police cars with bits and pieces of his hobby
. Whatever for, well, who knows
? Over the next few days everyone started putting two and two together and ended up with light bulbs flashing!
Forget evidence, forget police investigation, forget fact. Here we have forensic scientists in every household who had no need to surrender themselves to fact.
The Phantom household tried in vain to keep calm too.

Than the chemical analysis revealed the man had been killed straight out. Analysis came back, not quick smart from the hospital, but saying anyhow,
This man was killed with the worst poison, 1040
. 1040? 1040! Everyone knew about 1040. Word got around about 1040, saying it was being made locally – Aboriginal-style. Will remembered the endless string of people coming to their house, standing around in the yard with Norm, speaking in whispers with the palms of their hands capped to the side of their mouth, as if it would block the kids from hearing what they had to say, that someone with this 1040 was well and truly up to no good. At the time, people would arrive one after the other and he could still feel their presence radiating fear around the yard, and saying whatever they had to say to Norm.

The yard was the place where all theories about the mysteries in life were tested that, later in life, Will would reconstruct as he struggled to remember the stories of the old people on the road with the Fishman.
That 1040 someone
, it was whispered,
might have run away now to somewhere else because he knows he is in trouble with the law, but, it could be he is still around, trying to make people weak with poison
.
I saw him in my dream and he was the death angel who looked like swarming bats packed together, taking the shape of a giant bat shadow flying across a starry sky in the middle of the night, crooked and zigzagging, like lightning, then he shook himself out flat to make himself appear in front of you like a human being with sly, downcast eyes
.

Even if the 1040 killer stopped doing it for a while, you cannot be too careful – He might say he is finished fighting with you, but you never know, he be friends with you for awhile – Oh! good way, but not really. When you are not using good eyes for looking, not thinking about anything, he will put something in your drink to make you get weaker and weaker, then you die. Always watch this.
Then people stopped coming over to the Phantom place.

These were the reasons why Norm Phantom had always told his children never to let anyone get them a drink even if it was only water, because it could be the 1040 killer giving it to them. Norm believed there was only one fundamental principle for longevity and this was never to depend on others. This he would suddenly announce to his children out of the blue – ‘Because, who could you trust, eh? No one really.’ As children, Will recalled the deep impression his father had on each of them, as someone of such total adroitness they were convinced he could fathom anything he chose from the depths of life. His children should have been in the forefront of survivors in this wicked world with a father like Norm Phantom to guide them. His persona, his aura, lived constantly in their line of vision, constantly diverting, even hanging around in their sleep, always ready to catch the bad dreams.

Dream and reality blurred, of children standing on the foreshore watching their father fade over the sea horizon only suddenly to turn back, coming never close enough, to hand signal an almost illegible message. Other times, they were distracted, when suddenly he would appear behind the backs of people he did not like, using hand-signal language at a rapid speed to say whatever derogatory stories he wanted about them, to the utmost embarrassment of his children.
Never trust this bat-eyed dog. Tell this smelly piss trousers to get going. HE IS AS USELESS AS A BROKEN-BACK SNAKE. Tell him to piss off.
The banter of hand language subsided only when he got them to do what he wanted.

Their place was guarded by black angels. Will remembered being told that by the old people who said when it was a good clear day, they saw plenty of these angels going about the place clutching their javelin weapons, looking for the snake that stuck to the place like glue. Will said they were hawks. Blessed or cursed, or whatever Norm Phantom believed, his face was unnatural, almost as black grey as the head of a fish he once caught. The old people called it worry for the snake. Will did not believe the snake lay in the ground under their house. The snake he once saw was the living atmosphere. Its body stretched from horizon to horizon, covering each point of a compass, and encasing them all. His father looked in all the wrong places, for the air flowing in and out of his nostrils was the snake. Will dismissed the vision, but he could call it up, if he wanted to.

Will sometimes saw the dead people who sought out his father in the workshop. They were local people mostly, coming over as soon as they found themselves becoming dead persons, frightened, not knowing what was going to happen to them. They could show up, in person, or else send someone else instead to grieve for them. Norm had as little time for the deceased as he had for the living, telling one and all: ‘What you want to come here whingeing for? Am I God? I am not God, so go to your church, you idiot.’ It could have been that Norm talked too much to himself without realising it. This was what he said he believed. He claimed he never knew the difference. He did not know whether those people turning up in his life, popping around his place to have a good old cry, or telling tales, were either dead or alive.

So, once, he chased all the illusions, apparitions, spectres, persons of the otherside, off his prickly bush patch, and back up the churned-up, mud-dry road and through the main street of town as though it too were an illusion, a town that never existed. Who knows what anyone thought about seeing him chase nothing, telling it to go to hell. Did he stop, come to a halt, like an exclamation mark, when everyone of good nature shouted at him to stop as much as the spinster aunts, agitating like tarted-up Pekinese dogs because he was frightening the children? No, he just kept on running like middle-aged men do, with his green stick, until he was two steps short of entering the other side of town. Once, Will recalled, following his ghosts, Norm did momentarily stop to ask, ‘Did you hear that pin drop?’ It was no wonder the whole town thought Norm Phantom was mad. Forever calling him to explain himself: ‘Don’t you go snobbing me Norm Phantom,’ one of the aunts shrilled, her voice cracking the air like a whip.

The only good thing was that the Uptowners did not know what to do about certifying black people, and claimed they had learned to live with ‘harmless’ insanity. It was part of the North. Although their town was very old, the Uptowners never knew what demons were being chased. Nobody living in the middle of a war zone knew it existed. Even in a war of extreme intensity which had been conducted with such a high level of intelligence it had lasted at least four hundred years. But that was Uptown.

Will lingered, looking over to where Elias sat, thinking about the town, about being back home. He was beginning to feel as though he had never left being Norm Phantom’s son, who had gone against the conventions of the family and their war. He broke the rules. It was the first time in history, or so it seemed to all and sundry in the Westside Pricklebush. Could it be that he was different? It did concern him to have flaunted responsibility without conviction. Why did he not cart the ancestral, hard-faced warrior demons around on his back as easily as others in his family were prepared to do for land? They were good people, and the old people were bent over, so stooped with carrying their load of this responsibility. He had asked himself, and again now in the workshop with Elias: ‘It was good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for me?’

Will sighed deeply, gave the bench a final light tap before leaving the workshop. He knew he had already failed the obstacle course, had slid down this track many times before, wasting time on a futile examination of his conscience, knowing there was no answer. It was just no use trying to feel remorse for letting others carry their war, his war, an inheritance that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to it. He could only give a clinical glance at the proudly worn combatant scars of his relatives when they boasted of the battles in the middle of Desperance. Will carried no scars, only the dark brown birthmark straight down his left leg. The old people recorded the reappearance of familiar old family scars in the newborn, so that four hundred years worth of events could be remembered in stories of ground battles, sea battles, and not forgetting the air battles either, they claimed.
Don’t ask how
, the old people said, just because it was widely recognised that the white man invented aeroplanes and the black person was believed not to have had aeroplanes.
And a good job too, because you never know if they are going to land at any right place, except probably, into a big mining hole in the ground; you go into it and that will be that. Don’t trust engines. Trust your intuition and of course you will see Aboriginal people flying themselves around and no reported crashes yet.

They said Will’s scar came from such a battle that took place in the skies with sea eagle spirits over the Gulf sea, long before he was born.