Carpentaria (31 page)

The war raged on for what seemed like hours between the old man weakened in his travels, and the fish, the long, narrow, silver body of a giant Spanish mackerel, spinning through the water with one of Norm Phantom’s lines hooked into its mouth. The fish sprang out of the water, twisted in the air to eye Norm with the hateful vengeance caught fish have of men, and ran the line flat chat – twang, twang, back and forth, from one side to another, cutting through the thousands of little bait fish that regularly swam in the shade underneath the boat, and like a great trickster, twisting the half-dozen spare lines into a single knot.

Afterwards, success was not great. The perverse deep-rooted sea man’s euphoria did not etch deep in his bones. Instead, he felt humiliation wash over his skin, exposing him as a marauder of the sea, a stranger in a strange place. He felt vulnerable in his little boat. Self consciously, he used his knife in a butchering act to gut the fish, then he noticed the strange shape of a giant stingray, as big as the boat itself, flying across the sea like a passenger of the wind.

The sun sitting low on the horizon threw its bright rays across the water which simulated liquid gold. The tantalising phenomenon moving towards Norm reflected a blinding light, as its ploy to distract his scrutiny, while it scrutinised him with predatory eyes. Several times Norm was forced to avert his own eyes to the safety of the sun-glistening waters, or more guardedly, to the shining silver of fish blood swimming around his feet. Yet, drawn back time and again, he would lift his eyes above the shield of his tiny world on the vastness of water to capture another glimpse of the giant creature’s hypnotic power. Drowning in his distractions, Norm suddenly looked across at Elias as if remembering he was not alone after all, and saw the dead man smiling at him. ‘If you are in charge of our little journey Elias, you better start telling me what we are going to do now,’ Norm said, relinquishing control, no longer sure if he ever had control. He ate some of the raw fish flesh, staring around like an animal, waiting for another animal to eventuate, to steal his food. He heard fingers clicking. He looked around and there was nothing. But it was enough. He found what he had mislaid. He saw the route of their journey laid out in his mind, from woe to finish line, and knew he was again on track.

‘Right! Right! Right! So if this is the case…’ Norm spoke softly this time to Elias, without ending his speech, as if Elias was also studying the same map he was looking at. He must never question his vulnerability to the elements of the weather again. He looked across the sea, this time he could see wind and storms held in the arms of the saltwater spirits, which had always been there, all through this journey to the graveyard of the men of the sea.

He now understood the travelling phenomenon he had watched was the sorrowful woman, a cursed spirit of death who had come to find them. ‘Can you hear her Elias?’ That night, he was convinced he could hear her cries in the wind whistling across the waters, that her cries were curses in a language that was foreign to him. He knew what the old people said about her. In the long grass they would hear her wails coming in from the sea, or even from land along the beach, if they listened closely at night. The old people said if you could hear her way out at sea, she was warning those who heard her to stay away. No fisherman would ever actually see her because she would make herself
moonba
to them, yet Norm knew what he was looking for. He had an image of a white flowing hair witch, whose very skin he knew was like slime, and off her body trailed seaweed for clothes.

Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it
decorum
– the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being, alongside spirits for neighbours in dreams. In the local stories handed down through the generations, the sea woman was a death angel. She appeared from nowhere in her endless search to take men back to her dark, empty world in the deep waters at the bottom of the ocean. Norm knew what this world looked like because he saw it in his dreams.

On the floor of all oceans was a world overgrown with a forest of living black coral. It was a place that harboured a final darkness, where light never penetrated, and where men who were captured through some form of bewitchment, lived for the rest of eternity, pulled and tugged, while suspended in the streams of water running back and forth across the globe. The old people always spoke of this limbo world, where fish never seen by man were really spirit women who lived and swam through holes in the captured man’s ribcage, and perpetually fiddled with his brain to make him forever yearn to be rescued.

Another little wind blew an old green rubbish bag into the boat. Norm guessed it must have flown hundreds of kilometres, whirling its way across the water from Desperance’s dump. Believing it to be a second omen, a curse from someone in Desperance, someone from the Pricklebush mob on the other side, he kicked the tattered plastic overboard in the darkness, as though it was something alive, a Goddess woman who came flying low across the sea. When it blew straight back into his face, he read the change as a sign telling him that there were wild winds beginning to pour back into the Gulf from the north-east, bringing more storms.

Norm carefully watched the green form spiralling around the boat, once, twice, each time as if it wanted to land and attach itself to him. With his arms flailing aimlessly at the plastic thing in the night, he told her straight: ‘Don’t you come here.’ Oh! Yes! What a thing. He was convinced this was a sorceress of a wife. A witch who had borne his children and then behold, in front of his very eyes, walked off, wilfully wrecking their marriage. He heard her rustling as she hovered between them, whispering secrets to Elias – ‘Norm’s lost at sea.’ Then the wind turned, and she flew back with it towards the coast. With her departure, Norm felt a heavy shadow passing over him. It was the change coming, and he told Elias in a low, steady voice to get ready. ‘Make out nothing’s happening. Brace yourself man.’ The sea remained as flat as a tack but Norm waited. The wind did not turn into a storm and the boat sat in the flat, humid sea with Norm, sticky and hot, returning to the last dying days of his marriage.

So far, the journey had taken Norm more than two weeks of rowing all day long, living on raw fish, and drinking rain water he collected on a sheet of plastic made into a hollow dam. He stored the water he captured in soft-drink bottles. Then, knowing the place where the gropers lived was drawing closer, he stopped worrying up the storms as he journeyed through the humidity and flat seas, realising that all these obsessions of what was not right, were metaphors for his failed marriage.

One clear morning, Norm knew he had reached his destination, when he caught a glimpse of a groper swimming with his huge back fin clear of the water, no further than twenty metres away. He waited, watching while it swam over to the side of the boat. Once, Elias had told him that the groper was the descendant of the giant dinosaur. Norm did not know whether it was true or not. He had other stories. Their whole area was covered with megafauna once upon a time, Elias said. This he explained was millions of years ago, before it stopped raining, and the claypans were covered with rainforest. Elias explained that when you went around parts of the country thinking you were walking on rock, it was really fossilised tree stumps from those times. The rainforest trees were massive, he said. It was hard to imagine. Norm saw both these worlds wherever he looked at one.

Elias said it was not hard to imagine at all, for he had seen such trees somewhere, but he could not remember the places he had travelled. Norm knew there were fossilised bones of the ancestors of gropers and other animals being found by the palaeontologists and flown by helicopter out of the country by the bag load. These old bones which had lain with the ancestors for millions of years, were being stuck together again with araldite and wire, and covered with fur so all Australians could visit them in museums to see what these creatures used to look like.

The Fishman was full bottle about the palaeontologists, so he came along too, saying to Norm it was only natural for Elias to say those things, for the groper was a creature that used to have legs for walking on land, but it returned to the water to live sometime millions of years ago after a drought. ‘We are having the same drought right now,’ he said, sniffing the air for temperature. Norm and the Fishman had once watched a groper die. Fishman patted the dry skin of the creature, and called it the giant Queensland groper,
Promicrops lanceolatus
. Norm was amused with the Fishman’s knowledge of science. Fishman smiled, and said maybe it weighed nearly a ton, and joked, ‘All that scientify stuff is easy. You could learn it in a day.’ Norm knew the Fishman picked up everything he knew, foreign languages, cooking, taste in music, just from listening to the broadband radio. He declared, ‘The radio has been my education.’

The creature had lain on the beach motionless. Norm looked at the tyre marks of a Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle. It had winched the animal out of the water and up onto the beach. They had sat down on the beach beside the animal. Perhaps they were waiting for it to die by keeping it company.

Well! he just goes on looking at you. He just goes on breathing and breathing through his lungs, pumping steadily, waiting. Its body had dark mottlings of brown and grey, which slowly, over time, dried out. The animal took on the appearance of being coated with thick armour, with its hard little eyes on either side of its broad head, still staring. ‘I can feel him staring right through me,’ Fishman said at the time. The white fishermen from the mine were hacking the flesh off the body of the groper with an axe. ‘He takes a long time to die.’ Meanwhile, they heard the animal grunt with the torture of each blow until its heart, buried deep inside its massive fleshy body, caved in to its long, agonising death. Norm knew other stories about the groper coming from the Dreamtime and continuing its story along the tracks in the sea which he had followed for Elias. And other kinds of stories about bad luck.

The old people would say never go to sea with a fisherman who had killed a groper. Everybody will tell you that. Better to let the groper live, or his ghost will live in the dreams of the fishermen who killed him, and when they go to sea, he will know what is in their heads, but he knows more about the sea than any fisherman, so he will be able to steal their luck away. This was the only way the spirit of such a colossal fish would ever go back to the sea.

The groper hole was in an abyss, an ancient reef crater of a sea palace, a circular fish city full of underground caves where the huge fish liked to live. A place where they could have returned to from the land in ancient times like the palaeontologists say, or skies if they flew like the elders say in the Law of the Dreamtime. Millions of years ago, what was it like? Remember! Were skies blue then?

Once before, Elias had brought Norm to the ocean’s
pavonazzo
which shone from the depths to the surface with the colours of a peacock’s tail. It was where the gropers had lived for centuries and even though they swam together, lived solitary lives in their own separate caves.

The groper caressing the side of the boat was instantly recognised by Norm as one of his friends who swam right up to his beach in the night, calling him to go fishing with them. ‘Well! I’ll be darned,’ Norm said, awestruck perhaps, that he would actually reach his destination. He began whistling
Auld Lang Syne
of all things to the creature who had once been his groper’s friend. Elias had become misguided like a fool into the politics of Uptown. He was far too busy to go fishing, too busy for the sea. He abandoned the lot, everything he knew, just for Uptown. Then it was just Norm, instead of Elias, who set off following the gropers along their sea tracks until they were out on the reefs. There, they would leave him behind while they herded up the reef fish, holding them in a tight circle around his boat, allowing Norm to spear as many as he wanted before releasing their hold.

There were other times on strong moonlit nights, when the giant fish swimming in packs would lead Norm up the river estuaries of yellow waters with the tide, to show him something special, places anyone would want to see, where the prawns were running in their millions. Ahead, the gropers swam in a semi-circle formation, trapping the prawns in snags of dead trees piled up by floods near the riverbank. These big fish living in schools of several dozens, contentedly stayed around Norm, then, without any visible sign, they would leave for the sea. Norm watched them swimming off quickly, knowing it was time for them to follow sea tracks which did not belong to him.

Relieved that he had not set out on an aimless journey, Norm followed the giant fish guiding him, steering him along a corridor above a steep underwater canyon. During this last phase of the journey, he had rowed most of the night, knowing he was nearly on top of the abyss where the fish lived, and the place from where they left to go on their spiritual journeys into the skies. Now he knew this was real again.

He noticed a different breaking pattern in the current line and when he touched the water, felt its temperature had risen. He thought he saw glimpses of the giant spirits as they clung, swimming closely to the sides of the underwater chasm. He imagined them looking up to the spirits of dead people twinkling as stars in the night ocean of the skies. While looking straight past Elias, he saw where the green-coloured water of the sea was beginning to swell as though there was something huge moving under the surface, forcing the water to surge up over the underwater reefs. Then, still many hundreds of metres away, he saw the sun spreading and hovering over the swell, the flashing, lit wings of all of the sea birds. Orienting his eye through the glare, he saw the birds diving into giant schools of sardine fish and returning to the sky.