Carpentaria (36 page)

‘Maybe tomorrow then.’

Norm watched the boy hurry away up along the beach where the wet sand was firm and hard, and turn over the sand dune before disappearing into the dark bush of pandanus palms and mangroves dotting the coast.

Norm brushed away the proud feelings. What was the use of it? he thought, when he knew that mixing up with the other side was what causes problems, like all their rotten luck, ever since the families started mixing up together. He knew who to blame for that. Angel. No, not the seagulls or any other kind of angel doing good deeds like saving lost fishermen. Norm meant that woman, Angel. For years he had watched her bringing trouble into their home. Saw with his own eyes how she established her kind of lazy example. He knew how kids watched the Mother. They knew. He remembered telling her many times this would happen but she ruined her kids anyway, before walking off without even saying goodbye to anybody because she could not be bothered. Her choice, and he cried wishing he could bring her to this place for a minute to actually show her how she had ruined their lives. Life was just full of bad luck, bad luck, bad luck. If she could see this child, she would know straightaway that it was her fault.

Norm rose to his feet. He wanted to fight somebody. He wanted to fight her. She must have heard him because she came back to fight. Norm started throwing his weight around the beach while Angel was throwing her weight around in his mind, swinging her hips in his face, a blade of sweet buffel grass hanging from her lips. The green stem stuck through her teeth bobbed up and down while she cursed him. Diseased salt fish she called him. Doors slammed around her. It reminded him how she loved slamming doors. He noticed he had even conjured up his frightened-eyed children onto the beach too, to watch.

Doors opened in the transparency of images while others slammed shut as the couple pursued each other throughout a house that now consisted entirely of doors. In one of these doors, Will blocked the entrance. Norm had momentarily frozen when he saw the anger in Will’s eyes before he turned his back and walked away. The door slammed behind him with an earth-shattering din. Another door flew open. He looked to see Will again. The anger perplexed him. He needed to see it again to make sure he had really seen it at all.

The doors were as if they had been strung inside a malfunctioning weather clock with the fairweather lady and the rainy man. In and out. One went in while the other came out. Nobody knew how the weather would turn out. Norm was amazed with the revelation. It was just like life. Here he was. He would have to start again. This he would do by building himself a new home.

He started to pull everything he had left to his name out of the boat: plastic containers, oars, rope, some fishing tackle and hooks, a knife. Together he stacked them neatly on the beach in one spot. Not satisfied, the stack was shifted and restacked several times. He struggled to roll the dinghy over on its back. Next, he pulled it around side on to the sea to create a windbreak. He looked at the oars, but with the thought of something happening to them – snapping unexpectedly under the weight of the boat – he decided they were too precious to use. A sudden flash of pain flew through his chest. It reminded him of how he could die just from thinking about what could go wrong. What was wrong with devouring life like a big meal? ‘People did it,’ he thought, while deciding what to use instead of the oars, ‘people like Will for instance. I suppose he never got a bellyache from eating too much bad apple.’

Old rope, old rope, he decided. He glanced at the various shapes and sizes of logs and bits of driftwood scattered over the beach from the storm. There were trunks of magnificent trees, uprooted pandanus palms, mangled mangrove trees. The discovery was just beginning. There were whole rainforest trees that had the soil eroded from their root systems by excavating floodwaters and tidal surges. Norm estimated that these had floated down mighty rivers from countries halfway across the world. They had been thrown out alive into the seas, and now, had washed up on scores of foreign beaches like exiles. Finally, all trees landed on this shoreline where the spirits waged their gloomy wars.

There were plenty of strong limbs from branches to be found, to rig up a prop to lean against the side of the upside-down dinghy. He eventually lay down and went to sleep and dreamt of the Milky Way. In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he travelled along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.

This was a dream full of rich thoughts of spectacular places. The sea he saw was full of depressing wars, heavy with dark shadows of things he was unable to determine. There were no broken lines. Each place had its own star, and he knew the only safe route as he travelled, had to be full of brightness which would only be revealed in dreams. No broken-down man, one who had lost the belief in his own strength, should follow any route until he saw the stars illuminated in his dreams like streetlights, safely showing him the direction to travel.

His dream died as soon as he started to follow the track. He had passed the lit road, and into the darkness, he became fearful of what lay beyond the first corner. The what-ifs. Hell if he went forward or backwards panicked him into wakeful vigilance of the sea. Although the night was not waiting for him, his thoughts of dying in his sleep from the fear of his own dreams kept him awake. When he finally fell into a deeper sleep, thoughts lingered of distant storms circling him as though they were strapped over his back. He saw the warriors of the spiritual wars using their mighty lightning weapons to jump across the skies and bolt into the earth where the dead people raced up so they might grow into waves as high as towers. The towers became barricades in his seaward journey. Constantly, he saw himself thrown into paths of diversion chosen by these barricades, forcing him to float around in the life of an exile in a sea maze, who knows where.

In the morning, he was woken in a startled state by his own coughing and the horrible, familiar sound drilling into his brain. Listening to the rain and the waves crashing, he recognised the screeching of the cockatoo. The bird was sitting on top of the dinghy just above him with its white angelic wings stretched wide and flapping wildly in the breeze. ‘So you must be my bird after all,’ Norm said, although he wished it was otherwise. The bird poured life back into the soul but made you forget your dreams. When the bird spotted Norm’s interest, it broke into the loud-mouthed lingua franca it had learnt in the Pricklebush. For a moment Norm thought he was home, until he realised tears were falling from his eyes, and the cause of his coughing was dense smoke. He had almost cried, for on the sand in front of him he saw the remains of a fire, and in the ashes of a log that had burnt all night, the unburnt bits were still smouldering.

For a long time he sat looking at the fire, throwing bits of dry sticks in to get it started again. If he could keep the fire going, he would be able to look after himself forever. Or at least, for as long as it takes either to die or survive. There would be no need to go running to the no-good son to save him, wherever he was, who could have at least checked on his own father’s health
.
‘I could be dying you idiot.’ Never mind about giving the likes of him any thought. Now, with the fire, Norm reasoned, while rubbing his hands together, he would be able to catch whatever he wanted: fish, crab, prawn, plant and animal from the bush, and cook it. He reassured himself as he surveyed his surroundings that from what he could determine, a man could get real strong in this place.

He felt certain that it must have been the boy. Norm guessed the little fellow had come back in the night and made the fire to keep the devils away. This was good. He was a good boy. Where was he? Norm looked up to the bush but saw nothing except the pandanus palms now laden with red nuts which he had failed to notice before, and further down the beach, closer up to the water mark, thick mangrove swamps stretched into the sea. It was low tide over the mudflat. The view was empty and lonely. Surveying the broad stretch of its circumference, Norm looked out for the boy; so long as he did not show up with his Mother. Even the blessing of a night’s sleep was insufficient to soften his resolve never to set eyes on the parents as long as he was able to breathe air. The plan was short-lived. Norm strolled off down the beach in search of the boy.

‘Bala,’ he called several times up to the bush, but received no answer except a lonely silence. The copycat bird called, ‘Bala,’ and Norm watched it fluff its chest feathers. It occurred to him that if he followed the bird, he might be able to find their camp. He would not go into the camp itself. It would be the last thing he wanted to do, to go about inviting himself to his son’s place. He decided if he found the camp, he might go nearby, stand off in the bush where he could have a bit of a look. See what sort of turnout they got themselves, these invisible people.

Norm knew that Will could look like a pandanus tree if he wanted to hide. He knew how to melt away into countryside. In a flat stretch of claypan, Will could flatten himself out behind the clumps of yellowing grasses and become caked mud all afternoon while a search party walked all over him. Norm knew there were police searching for Will,
shame of the family
. The government were after him too and you do not go around playing with the government – mucking them up. ‘It was not dangerous,’ Norm thundered, pushing Will out of the yard. ‘It was plain stupid because nobody can change the government.’ Norm had often heard some government politician talking about Will on the radio. He remembered listening to all the talking voices describing Will Phantom as a curse to the Gulf who had to be stopped, and Norm agreed. He empathised with the tone of the voices he heard over the radio talking about the trouble Will was causing to everyone in the Gulf, and in the State of Queensland, and the nation, by stopping business at the mine. ‘They sound the same as me,’ he said happily. ‘We all want to kill the bugger.’

Always trying to save the world, well, look where it got him. Norm turned and surveyed the emptiness of his surroundings and the cloud-filled sky. This was where you end up from trying to stop the mine and ordinary people from doing their work. He wished the people from the radio station had come around and interviewed him about Will because he would have told them everything they wanted to know. He would have told them it was not only the white people who wanted to kill him. There were Aboriginal people who wanted to kill the bugger too, including his own father. Go ahead police. Go and find him and lock him up.

‘I made you somewhere to stay old man,’ Bala said when he arrived.

‘Ah! Bala! I am alright here, I got to stay here and mind the boat.’

‘No Malbu
,
it is too dangerous here. We got to get off the beach and hide the boat now,’ Bala said firmly.

The boy started to kick sand over the fire but Norm tried to stop him by reaching out and pushing him away. The little boy was too quick, ducking and weaving himself from Norm, keeping on the other side of the fire, kicking more sand over the fireplace until he had smothered the smoke. Then he went around the back of the boat and knocked it down flat.

‘What did you do that for?’ Norm yelled at him in an angry voice.

‘Shh! Listen! Be quiet. This is a quiet place. Always quiet. Always hide.’

The boy pointed out to sea, then pointed up to the sky out at sea, and brought his arm down and around until his hand slapped down on the boat. He gave Norm the serious look of Will Phantom, who spoke with the gravity of the final word on any matter. ‘Shh! And pack up, Malbu, cause I got to take you away from here.’

‘You put that boat back up you little bugger, go on,’ Norm demanded.

The boy ignored him and started to pick up a plastic container but Norm pulled it back and placed it in the neatly paraded belongings of all he had left in the world.

‘Where’s that father of yours anyway? He should have come down to see me. When I see him I got words to say to him. You tell him to get his black arse down here and tell me what he is doing here, because I am waiting and I am sick of waiting. I don’t know what they are going to say the world is coming too, when I tell them a little boy is going around telling his old grand-daddy what to do.’

‘You are an old man but you are not my grand daddy because my daddy said he is one smart man, even if he is not talking to us, and sometimes he only talked rubbish anyway. I know one thing for sure, you not smart, Malbu,’ the boy did not mind arguing back as he snatched for the plastic containers. He was talking his head off just like his father: diverting while trying to make a grab at any of the old man’s precious belongings. He was determined to make off with the pieces he snaffled, until there was nothing left for Norm to stay around for.

‘What you say about you Daddy? Him saying what? If his name is Will Phantom then I am his Daddy. You tell him to come down here at once because I want to talk to him.’

‘You prove it first.’

‘How am I going to prove it? You just do what I tell you, that’s what,’ demanded Norm, feeling hungry. He had not eaten yet and the situation was becoming annoying, and he would be telling Will straight out as soon as he clapped eyes on him just what kind of Mother he had given his son. ‘Fancy yourself now stuck with one of those
Wangabiya
dandaayana
kind. Where’s their manners?’ The boy was like an animal. This was what you get when you do things against your family. He would tell him that.

To search for their daily food…

Squadrons of sea birds from rookeries in the swamps flew low over the beach, then gradually ascended into the cloudy skies across the low tide mudflats towards the darkened sea. Simulating his grievances with the world, Norm Phantom lay prostrate in the sand in a statuesquely comic pose, wishing he were dead. Bala was thinking of leaving the old man lie there with his battered dinghy forever. The birds flew around performing single loops before dropping down like projectiles onto the mudflat. Slightly distracted by their performance, the child reminded himself to scan the skies for the bad men. The old man had created a dangerous situation for them. Whatever interest he originally had of befriending the old man was fading. Even the possessions he had snatched seemed useless. Each would only have a limited life. Fishhooks break. Fishing lines end up snagged. He was not interested in lugging around the plastic containers or the Pepsi bottles. He was tired of carrying things around.