Carpentaria (47 page)

‘This is the only safe place left,’ old man Joseph Midnight kept repeating to himself, as he wandered in and out of his old bit of a lean-to home. The structure of tin and plastic, in an ongoing state of disarray, stood behind the brand-new house the government had given him free – lock, stock and barrel – for cooperating with the mine, but which he said, ‘Was too good to use.’ His relatives, resigned to the fact that the old man was beginning to lose his marbles, took no notice. Midnight was an example of what would happen to themselves one day. It was what they would also do for staying alive so long – the last flicker of life was like this.

Old Joseph had stopped walking over to the town. It had been his daily habit for decades and an inspiration to his clan. He refused to look after himself. He had no food. He just left it up to whatever relatives were around to make sure he got something to eat. They scolded, plonking a sandwich or a plate of stew on his lap. ‘Well! What’s the point of being alive if you are not prepared to look after yourself properly.’ Grumbling and moaning about everything, and no thank you, mind you, they finished up saying, ‘You are nothing but humbug, old man.’ One square meal a day was not worth being spat on he told them, and they hurried away, bloated with complaints, ‘Who cares about being loaded down with the old bugger anyway.’ He was like lead, that empty seashell, called relative. Yet, they were so morally obligated, conscience could not be unlinked and unravelled from family matters even on Eastside.

Old man Joseph Midnight, heard speaking to his dead relatives as though he too was already dead, said his kinfolk were not worth two bob. ‘Look at us – we are just invisible people around here.’ Watching him talking to the wind blowing through town back to the sea, the kinfolk said he had lost his soul.

Nobody chewed the fat over there, and no one used a smidgen of brain, to fathom old Midnight’s mind. The poison flowed on like contamination into the river. Nothing stopped the talk of poison outside the fish and chip shop either. Such as Fishman’s people saying Elias was dead. Found dead in his boat, they said, on top of a dried-up lagoon. What kind of talk was that?

‘Man should be horsewhipped until he lay dead,’ he growled, waving a hand of dismissal through the air at the imaginary listener following him in and out of his pathetic hovel. He spat towards the new house whenever it caught his eye. He was suffering the unrelenting pain of a wrong decision. For days, he had been unforgiving of himself, for it had been his own snap decision, made without thinking. He never gave himself time to think. ‘Why should an old man have been left to make a decision like that. Why couldn’t somebody else have made it? Why send his whole world away?’ He was speaking about his grand-daughter Hope and her child Bala whom he had sent away to sea with Elias Smith, hiding them during the night in Elias’s boat, under a tarpaulin. No one but Elias knew they were there, when Elias had walked away from Desperance at dawn, pulling his boat behind him to sea.

Old man Joseph Midnight had waited, bent low down on the beach, on the night before Norm had set to sea with Elias’s body. He looked out for the robot, Gordie, who was still alive then. He was alert for anything moving in the shadows – terns, hermit crabs, and sea snakes all moved along the beach. Occasionally, he would give an affectionate rub of pride over the side of his old, tin boat, only newly painted mangrove green.

Old man Joseph Midnight had one hope. He knew once Will heard about Hope and Bala, he would go looking for them, because if there was still some good in the world, and heavens knows it was rare, it was the love between Will and Hope, and their little boy Bala. Will Phantom had arrived, soundlessly, in a borrowed car. Slipping along the foreshore through the darkness, checking which boat he would take, Joseph caught him by surprise. Speaking in a gruff tone, he was a heavy smoker after all, Joseph’s voice came from somewhere close by, ‘I knew you’d be wanting a boat, and I owns the only one going to last the distance you be tracking, so just so you didn’t go about helping yourself to what’s not yours, I told meself – I’d better sit it out here for a while, and wait for when you decide to come down. You make sure you look after this boat properly.’ Will nodded, throwing his gear on board, as he began preparing old Joseph’s boat in readiness for the sea. ‘It’s the only decent thing I’ve got left, you sabie me?’

Old Joseph told Will how he had been listening through the grapevine, people talking – after he had disappeared from the Fishman’s convoy at the lagoon. ‘Knew you was coming home. That was good enough news for me when I heard it. Made an old man’s heart feel good again knowing you might be coming home soon.’ He had waited at night down by the green boat for several hours after darkness had fallen and when Will never arrived, the cloud of doom had resurfaced and he growled at the wind, which was his way of talking to his useless kin, who in all other matters, he preferred to have nothing to do with.

‘Stupid buggers – lot of them. No use to a person at all – never have been. Thought they were too good to learn anything from me – Righto then. Not one of them knows one single thing about the sea to go looking for their sister or the little boy. Idiots.’

From a borrowed car, Will unloaded into the boat the gear he needed to take to sea. It was simple fare, several water containers, fishing gear, some canned food, spare clothing. The old man gave him the directions to the safe place in his far-off country – a blow-by-blow description sung in song, unravelling a map to a Dreaming place he had never seen. ‘I grew up in the hard times – not that any bugger cares.’

Will knew. The stories of the old people churned in his guts. He responded in the best way he could to show his affinity, ‘Inhumane treatment, I know, Pop.’ Yet, old man Midnight remembered a ceremony he had never performed in his life before, and now, to his utter astonishment, he passed it on to Will. He went on and on, fully believing he was singing in the right sequence hundreds of places in a journey to a place at least a thousand kilometres away. ‘Sing this time. Only that place called such and such. This way, remember. Don’t mix it up. Then next place, sing, such and such. Listen to me sing it now and only when the moon is above, like there, bit lower, go on, practice. Remember, don’t make mistakes…’ The song was so long and complicated and had to be remembered in the right sequence where the sea was alive, waves were alive, currents alive, even the clouds
.

‘Will, remember, you will only travel where the sea country will let you through.’

It was only then, while old man Joseph Midnight was watching for Gordie, he whispered the story of what happened to Hope after Will had left town, on the run with the Fishman.

It was clear both had the hunter’s instinct, a stillness, and compelling eyes that saw through darkness. Both kept an ear listening for any sound, as unconsciously alert as the hunted animal or fish needed to be, while listening for sounds from up to one kilometre away – past the Fisherman’s Hotel, past the rubbish tip, past the last moored boat, past the hovering seagull ghosts simmering in the light of the moon. Tonight, they heard the sound of sea water lapping at their feet on the edge of the beach, while in the distance, timber creaked as moored boats rubbed against one another, and there was the constant ringing of a small bell on board of one as it bobbed in the ebbing flow of the tide. Further out, they could hear the engines of the barges travelling to the ships waiting in the deeper waters for the ore from the mine.

Occasionally, they heard the sound of heavy machinery creaking before sailors yelled, then the droning of ore loaded into the bulk holds. Out there in the bay, it was a noisy night with ballast waters ejecting into the still waters. Nature too, splashed from fish jumping out of the shallows. Constantly, dogs barked at the moon. Close by, a barn owl hooted its stanza. The channel-bill cuckoos disturbed one another, up in the skies, shouting in a frenzy of old man’s crackle.

‘But what happened!’ Will whispered, with urgency in his voice. He needed to hear the story once more, pushing old Midnight further, quicker, while knowing in the end he would have to run with the boat for there was little time left to take the tide out. He needed to capture their life, Hope’s and Bala’s, to see everything he had missed. There had been no outside communications with either the East or Westside camps while he was away. No telephone to pick up. No one to take messages. No way of getting back. Will knew Hope could not have left on her own accord and found him. The separation had been complete. ‘Pack it in ice,’ Fishman told his crew was the best way to handle the heart. He said his heart was the perfect model they could mould themselves on if they wanted, if they had problems handling separation. Will tried to imagine how Hope managed alone. And old man Joseph Midnight talked, gently telling the story again, but quicker, as though he thought he might be sprung upon any moment by the elusive Gordie, slithering through the grass line behind.

‘Well! I got word, that’s all. That the police were going to arrest Hope after those fires. They couldn’t find you. They found all of those who fell off the bridge when the Fishman’s convoy left town. All the others, they were frisked and searched at the crossing. They kept thinking you were still hiding around the place so they started saying that she was involved with you, even that it was your hand involved in burning down the Shire Council, after the big problem with the pipeline.

‘And Elias, he was supposed to be guarding, looking after the place, so they said he must have stood by and did nothing when he saw you doing it. They had conducted their own investigation. I heard all about that bloody kangaroo court they had down at the pub. In the end, they told him to get out of town. After, they were still looking for blood, anyone’s. That was the reason why they were coming for Hope.

‘They had already started to torment her with questions and threats if she never told them where you were. The police never believed you went away. They was always thinking you was close by. The town was all revved up and harping on, “Nobody knows the trouble we got because of that Will Phantom”. Jeez! Here in town, down at the mine; I reckoned they invented half of it. Everyone reckoned it. I reckoned it too. I heard them saying things like, “Oh! Look! Fancy that, broken glass bottle left on the road. Bet Will Phantom did that”. Anything.

‘Some woman said it was Sunday instead of Monday and that was your fault too. Yo! Who in charge of changing time then? Bet Will Phantom behind it, that’s what. They even believed it when you said once that you could hide behind thin air around here. Well? Now you could have been behind every dust storm so they went searching through it, round it. “Where could he be?” Who’s going to find you first? So they come after Hope, just so they could flush you out.’

‘Well! Somebody killed Elias,’ said Will, running his hand through his hair, still unbelieving, but knowing he should have predicted all of this would happen. Life had no meaning in this new war on their country. This was a war that could not be fought on Norm Phantom’s and old Joseph Midnight’s terms: where your enemy did not go away and live on the other side of town, and knew the rules of how to fight. This war with the mine had no rules. Nothing was sacred. It was a war for money.

‘I know he is dead. Finished poor bugger. Fishman mob told me that,’ old Joseph’s timbre was breaking and becoming barely audible. Will could see how the old man had been worrying himself sick ever since he heard the news about Elias. Joseph went on, saying he did not know what he wanted to believe anymore. ‘You can’t go around burning things down Will, you should know that. A bloody waste of money that’s what that is.’

‘Hope was not involved in anything, Jesus Christ. None of us had anything to do with the fires in town,’ Will explained, as old Joseph watched him. ‘It was that fucking mine did that, and it’s their own money they wasted, so don’t feel sorry for them. They never worried about us when they were riding roughshod over our rights.’ Will kept his more worrying thoughts to himself. He decided not to talk to the old man about how much danger he thought Hope and Bala were in, if they were still alive. He did not say that he believed the mine had murdered Elias and set him up in the lagoon to trap him.

‘Would the mine want to kill Elias? He could of just died out there. Maybe.’ Old man Joseph Midnight stopped, as though unable to bear the thought of the consequences of Elias not completing his journey, if all three had lost their lives at sea. He turned to the new revelations from Will. ‘The mine people don’t want to burn down the Shire Council office and start all those other fires? They got nothing to do with the town. They must of had a good reason for doing those kind of things.’ His voice tailed off again. He did not want to understand if it all meant that in the end the hope for a better world had perished in the sea.

‘You mob,’ old Midnight said, following Will in his readiness to cast off, ‘talk all the time about some kind of new, contemporary world. New world – Blah! to that. What contemporary world? It’s the same world as I live in, and before that, and before that. No such thing as a contemporary world.’ Why should someone old like himself comprehend Uptown having reason enough for killing and burning amongst their own jellyfish white people? ‘I understand our mob having a go at each other,’ he said, referring to the old wars. ‘We got to fight each other until one day we might git sick and tired of it.’ What he really meant, Will knew, was that one side must give up and go away. It was the ultimate solution that neither side could resolve. Which would be the loser? It was the only way the fighting of the last four hundred years would finish.

‘The way I see it, white people treat each other nice way. That’s right what I am saying, init? Uptown got something – a good neighbour thing with the mine. No trouble. No need for trouble.’

‘It’s called a good neighbour policy, old man, and it means nothing. This town is being used, you know that? Used, and they are too stupid to see it.’ Will was annoyed and he wanted to set off.

‘Well! That’s not true. The way I see it, the mine has got no problem with the town and vice versa. I watch them all mingling, talking like they can’t get enough of each other. The mine put money into the town too – all the time by the looks of it. So there is no reason and you wrong at this this time, Will.’