Carpentaria (33 page)

A world without end,
Amen
…

Whispering prayers, Norm Phantom awoke at dawn on his second morning at the gropers’ place to a seascape locked inside a heavy mist. The birds had lifted high into the skies and were nowhere in sight when he set his lines for fishing. The day was good, fine weather, and Norm had decided he would fish first, replenish what the birds had eaten, before he left on the long journey home. Phew! Behold! Valuable time failed to blemish a stubborn man who decided he needed fish from one part of the ocean and no other. His mind was made up, and once the task of fishing was under way, lines dropped, there was really no stopping him. The journey back would just have to sit around and wait it out with the fishing, where time stood still. Norm Phantom’s time was a spectacular clock which rang the alarm once he caught enough: exactly ten lines bearing a large snapper each, more than enough to last a few days, after throwing a few back into the ocean, after hours of boring
andante
breeze, then it would be time to go.

It was a funny day because the mist, godamn it, did not lift, nor did the fish bite. Norm sat patiently in his boat rolling with the waves all day long and waited for a line to move. The oars idled, he lost track of time, the captain did not row away.

On the third day there was still no sign of fish and scarce movement in the hunched figure of Norm, dispassionately waiting over his baited lines while looking off into the misty distance of hidden wilderness. The sea now a divine limbo under a membrane of whiteness, undecided how to create a new day. Norm felt sure of the movement of ocean swells underneath the boat, still rocking very steady in his map of the rhythms of the south-east winds passing from the other side of the globe, while he kept a pinpoint image of his exact location. Otherwise in the stillness and quiet, he looked like he had died; no fish tugged on the dead lines. No surface waves rose for the absence of localised winds. He saw nothing through the murky grey waters aswelling.

Obsessed with a single mission, he hissed through closed lips, ‘Give me the bloody schools of sardines.’ He remained adamant fish would come sooner or later; they had to for this was an ideal spot. He kept watching for the large predator fish herding the bait fish. In a location such as this, they become locked in a terminal corral, but where in the sea could they be?

Not one fish of any size, large or small, appeared above the surface under his hawk-eyed surveillance. There was a detectable sea swell changing in the deep water currents many fathoms below, but Norm, the sea king of fishing in the Gulf, did not notice anything happening at all. He was deciding, if not how morose he felt, whether he was experiencing the loneliest and longest day of his life.

He cut his hair, hacking chunks off close to his skull, with the sharpened edge of his fish gutting knife. Staring down into the water, not noticing the fast moving current, he watched the long strands of his hair, then his whiskers, fall into the water, and the indeterminable pattern of their floating away. The sea, occupying his thoughts, reminded him of how life is always haunted by death. How off-guard had Norm Phantom been when the dark shadow of the sea lady engulfed him – nobody would ever know.

The mist lifted rapidly, as though the grand curtain had been swiped apart by a magician who in his unexpected performance, banished the broken pieces of small ethereal clouds off into the sea. With the horror and shock of her unexpected arrival, Norm flinched at the wind driving him in his shoulder blades with the inhuman heaviness of two very strong hands. First, she pushed and kneaded, willing him to
stand up
, shaking the boat. Her invisible touch she replaced with a bolt of static electricity which dipped his every movement into her stinging body. A crackling feminine wail ran around him, embracing him, coaxing compliance to her desires. There was no denying it, the voice of the wind was relaying her needs, and could easily have been deciphered, even by the silly old fool Nicoli Finn, if he had been alive to hear it. Norm did stand, still as a statue, and looked into the sea as she beckoned for him to leap
. The fine sea birds have made an opening just for you
, she hissed.
Leap.
Each time she repeated the word, it rang like the echo chamber of an enthusiastic audience at a spectacular performance of the wizard magician, cheering on the faint-hearted volunteer to his act,
Leap! Leap! Leap!

‘But Elias has gone,’ Norm kept repeating to the sea lady, as though it was his duty to correct her. He stood in the rocking boat, steadying himself while he argued with her, half captured just by acknowledging her existence, while from the sensible part of his mind slipped an ever fainter desire to go home. After so long alone talking to himself, he enjoyed the sound of a womanly voice. He of course longed to go with her to look for Elias, already knowing if he found Elias he would leave her, jilt her, leave her flat. He even saw how comfortable he would look, reliving his story, how he escaped the sea lady, back at home together with Elias. But he still denied himself abandonment to her body. His wily stubbornness to fight against lust was exhausting.
Stop making excuses
, listening to her hiss on uncontrollably.
See those warriors coming! Look right and left! This is their fighting ground! Go now! Save yourself! Jump!
She made the sea heave.

Heavens only know how he managed to keep standing in the rolling boat, but his body, wavering with the rolls like a spring, somehow maintained balance, while every last bit of his bodily strength planted his feet to the bottom of the boat. She shoved him roughly in the back again, before containing him in her embrace when he looked like falling, then changed tactics by whispering in his ear about the old wars of the families. She was high speed, like an adding machine rattling off the local history of centuries in minutes, exact time, precise location, whose boundary it really was, the reason why others thought it was theirs, then explaining again and again, by going back over time in endless forays, the mistakes of each battle.

She knew too much. Naming the people involved, the pain and suffering inflicted, who fell, what misunderstandings lingered on and grew again like cancer, she was a running account of battles which had gone on for centuries. Minutes later she called him
War Lord
, and started naming his battles, showing him a celebration of his life in pain
,
while intertwining the speed of her dictation by whispering the way out, an escape from the same family wars continuing on and on and on.
Go on now, come out of the way of the unhappy dead, be with me.

Her tidings were bereft of glory. Could she have lied? Norm tried to understand the barrage of her verbosity by choosing at random, names to slot into rows in the crossword puzzle of forgotten history. As the puzzle grew larger, forming new offshoots, she would jump in front, too smart like, trying to squeeze in her own words, but Norm knew the game better and would keep crossing her out with the right word. He understood perfectly that the winds were coming from two directions now – south-east and north-west, colliding in squalls, after the mists had long ago been blown apart. She continued trying to distract him by calling out the names of all the dead people he had ever known. She described the battles they were now waging with each other in the afterlife. He succumbed. Her knowledge was greater than his own. She had condemned him as a person of ignorance. She had crippled his mind. Defeated, he saw a new truth in himself. He was just an old sailor of such lackadaisical efficiency, he could no longer see the seasoned helmsman. In truth, he was dependant on a captain to navigate the way home, and in great peril of losing his life.

More was the pity, the old fishing men at Desperance would say, to find a fisherman at sea acting like a gambler losing the game, after he became too greedy for fish. Sad loss for a sort of person who had lost track of the end of the day. You hear of the ones addicted to fishing who could not leave the fishing hole, not knowing when enough was enough. These fish gamblers never knew when to stop. Well! It was the truth of the matter.

The story goes that those doomed men became lost in a sea boiling with dense schools of large fish – like salmon on the run, balling the bait schools. So, they followed the dark patches like clouds in the water. It was the worst kind of fever, following fish night and day for days, pulling fish in, throwing them on the pile, stacking up more and more. By the time their overloaded boats sank, even the birds had become fat. They sank with their boats, craving with their whole heart and soul the odour of rotting fish gut. There have been some fish gambling survivors. You got to pity them, the ones you see hanging around Desperance with that funny, faraway look on their faces – like a stuffed mullet. They skulk around looking like flea-bitten dogs, running from corner to corner, hiding behind fences and in other people’s yards, escaping from no one because they think someone is trying to stop them heading back to sea. It was hardly surprising to see their crying and gnashing families rushing up and down the Shire Council’s roads, swinging around their long sticks, trying to chase their crazed relative away from the boats. Do not feel pity when you see a family flogging the fish gambler half unconscious. Don’t waste your breath calling the government who own all the essential services like social welfare in cities down South. No one can shake the magnetic forces put in a fisherman’s skull by the sea woman.

Caught in the sphere of the sea lady, Norm saw, over in the distance, ghostly dark waves moving like haunted spirits. In the air he heard a melancholy swishing monologue humming and drumming the advance of the front moving helter-skelter towards him, while up in the skies, its spiral disappeared into the heavens. Norm, centre stage, prepared himself, for he was a brave man, and he was warrior-like, in readiness to face her army of mourning ladies.

He remembered the old people watching these clouds from the long grass along the shores of Desperance and turning away, they always asked the same old question,
Say! Do you know who they are boy?
Yes! Norm knew the widows. They belonged to a lifelong premonition – one which linked his destiny and theirs: the eternity of the disappointed dead travelling in the seasonal storms of the summer monsoon. Watching these clouds in their haphazard race around the skies, he saw their glorious watery costumes of mourning colours lined with silver sprays that looked like torn lace, decorated with little unstitched pearls.

Each widow rose to wail in majestic heights, showering him with teary froth, as they tore forward with the faster north-west winds. The haunted spectres loomed higher and higher into the skies until they could no longer hold their dignified pose, and collapsed down on themselves with a spectacular and extravagant chain of lightning and thunder above his head. Norm applauded. Bravo! he called appreciatively to each dramatic gesture. Salty tears poured from his windswept eyes. Each flawless performance made space on the celestial stage for a throng of others, each as large and foreboding as the other and with as much power to whip up even more exciting winds.

By executing the dwindling south-easterlies, these new winds produced in Norm a lightness, a spring in his step, he would have run if he was not in the middle of the ocean. For half a year, particularly in their peak, the south-eastern winds had roared through the cracks of houses after midnight, looking to snaffle humanity from sleeping people’s hearts. Now this dying force, outnumbered and outflanked, could only fight back with the weapons of those Desperance homes: so many disappointed dreams and the doomed tenor’s song of unrequited love. Oh my! Norm reminded himself he had better stay alert while sizing up the strength of the storm, unless he wanted to be remembered as a theorist who drowned in his own daydreams. This was how the opposing trade winds interlocked in war, blew the top off the lid, and out would fly the navigator’s mental map of the groper’s travel line.

The storm intensified. The currents resulting from the two opposing trades colliding with each other lifted the surface waters to look like an enormous wart jutting out from the sea. Norm locked his arms around the steel seat of his boat while it rolled and tumbled into the lull. He prayed as his body smashed down on the bottom of the boat and swore, before tumultuous lashings of sea water tumbled over him. He had moments to spare when the boat rose rapidly out of the water, and only enough time to gasp a mouthful of air which he fully expected would be his last, when the boat tilted to ride out the next wall of water, before falling again into the watery dungeon below.

He could have been an ant on a leaf for all that it mattered. Hours went by and his body felt as though it had been broken into a hundred pieces, his flesh pulped into a bloody mash. He screamed for Elias, ‘Come and get me brother, I don’t want to die alone,’ but could not hear the sound of his voice. Reverberating back in his ears, was the thunderous crushing of waves exploding one after the other. Over and over he was thrown up or thrown down, but his arms stayed locked to the boat. He thought perhaps he was already dead but through his spirit, in some bizarre twist of fate, was destined to remain conscious of everything that was happening to him.

Through hoarse lips swollen with bruises, he tried to whisper, forcing words to form in a throat that felt dry as a desert stone from taking in too much sea water. The effort stuck like a ball that was lodged painfully in the back of his throat. ‘Take me,’ he whispered when the words finally came, willing Elias to come, and believing he would just slip away. What faith he had, listening hard, convinced he had heard Elias tapping under the floor of the boat. Yes! Yes! Elias had come back but could not do anything to help him, Norm knew, Elias was there, trying to come aboard to help him.

Finally, the legions of warring spectres ceased fire, the waves dropped, the storm subsided, and in the skies, the viper’s box sprang open. The victorious north-west winds, still crazed into conquering the seasonal change, blew the heavy rain in horizontal lashings that blistered through the sea. Norm lay broken and semi-conscious in the salty waters on the floor of the boat. His body throbbed, his skin was raw to the flesh, and his ears remained deafened by the sound of the world into which he had intruded. He shifted himself with relief out of the stinging sea water, as he felt movement underneath his little boat driving him away with great speed.