Carpentaria (5 page)

Good luck to him one supposes, for he cleaned up with his shares and with the spoils, means and wherewithal, he reinvented himself, from somebody driving around the outback’s dying towns and Aboriginal camps on pension day, selling the necessities of life for a profit of three to four hundred per cent after costs. A quid to be made. But just how could one uneducated man, a man just like themselves, make so much money in his lifetime? It was unnatural. Anyone could have done it, he joked, if he had been half smart about prices by collecting drought-time cattle properties like lollies, paying unpaid debts.

Bruiser spoke of being the epitome of the self-made man, and the ‘self-made 24/7 man’ angle was slotted into his utterings to other Desperanians during Australia Day, May Day, Picnic Day, Pioneer Day celebrations where he had the right to speak, right through, down to the demands he made of politicians whose colleagues heard his booming voice on the phone in the hallowed halls of southern parliaments.

The old people in the Pricklebush said the story about the money of hell was different, because Bruiser had unnatural scars that looked like someone had welded an extra skin to his body. They had observed the extra piece of skin that ran from his skull down the left side of his face, along one side of his body, down to his feet and back again, running up the back this time, right up to his skull. Was that unusual? Darn right! Everyone in the Pricklebush thought so. Some of the old ladies were more than curious and yelled out whenever he came down to the Pricklebush camps – ‘Hey! How come the devil stitched you up like a pod?’ Bruiser was sensitive about his scars and ignored their questions. So they spread the word he was an alien, though wisely no one dared say such a thing to his face. You would have to be nuts to say anything like that to Bruiser.

Bruiser said he had seen everything as far as he was concerned and there was only one motto to life. ‘If you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, then it’s no bloody use to you.’ It brought the house down as usual. This was how the town would size up the problem of Aboriginal people squatting behind their houses, he explained with a loud clap of his hands, encouraging others to do the same. He said the government should put the Abos to work and he would write a letter to every politician this side of the black stump telling them exactly that. He nutted out how this employment policy would work. He said they would do what he did to make a living. ‘Put them to work making keys so they can lock their food up somewhere and not have to share everything they get with their families.’ He explained that when he was a hawker the one thing everyone wanted was keys – ‘There was real money in keys.’ Number two, he explained, ‘They should be forced to make bathtubs, like the old tin ones, so they could take regular baths.’ And number three, ‘They should be sent back to the cattle stations and made to work for nothing, board and keep, that’s good enough for them if they aren’t interested in making money to get ahead like everyone else.’

Bruiser got a huge round of applause and after a bit of rumbling about the government doing nothing, someone suggested that they needed direct action. Once Bruiser got the meeting stirred up, he went out the back with a few of his cattlemen friends to enjoy the fresh air and partake in some liquid refreshments, to keep them charged up to go back later on, and finish off the meeting. Although how it ended up, they stayed outside making themselves so pickled and pie-eyed, nothing mattered anymore. What was strategy? This left the new town clerk, Libby Valance, a man accused of neither being local nor understanding the region and its values, to chair the throng.

Yet Valance was educated in local government, and had been given the job in the first place because he was considered to be sensible. He addressed the meeting in his fine voice which reached no higher than midway, by saying that it was his Christian duty to take a more civil line of approach in advising what a town could do with its citizens. No way, voices were beseeching,
Why couldn’t we just? Bulldoze the crap out
of those camps, flatten the lot?
Why not? ‘Well! The last time the Council did it,’ Valance explained, ‘they just started rebuilding, because they had nowhere else to go.’ So! The meeting went on.
Make them go, there
must be somewhere else they can go, why do they want to come here for
anyway?
Those of the Pricklebush mob who had taken up the offer to attend the meeting listened, stunned again by how they had been rendered invisible, while Valance continued, ‘It is because they have a right to be here just like anyone else.’ Bruiser, having come back inside, responded with the following salient points on behalf of all indignities: ‘Huh! Think they do. Then they should live like everyone else then. Right! Let’s go tell ’em.’

A small delegation, made up of representatives from Uptown and the black busybodies who went along to these popular Council meetings, came over one afternoon, to have a word with Norm Phantom. It had never escaped Norm’s notice that somehow Uptown had encumbered him with the title with all of its glory – leader of the Aboriginal people. They said they wanted him to get those people who had moved out of Westside, and were now living in abandoned car bodies and their makeshift camps behind people’s housing, to start living like white people, if they wanted to live in town.

‘Couldn’t give a stuff about them,’ Norm grunted, still bent over his taxidermy efforts on a giant prawn.

The Uptown prospect, Cilla Mooch, an Aboriginal man learning how to shape himself into a white mould with one of those perpetual traineeship work-for-the
-
dole programs spread over the length and breadth of Australia in the name of economic development, worked in the Council office. He stood next to Valance, and as it had been predetermined by the Council, was the voice in this delegation. Norm Phantom might reason with someone of his own ilk. Moochie spoke in broken English.

‘You know?! That what’s what they is saying about you and all. Saying you started all of this town camps stuff springing up here and there for we mob. Saying they got to stop it. Show a bit of respect for the place. Place belonga Desperance Shire Council. Stop the place looking like an infestation of black heads and what have you.’

‘You sound like a fuzzy wuzzy, Mooch. Aren’t got anything to do with me and talk English,’ Norm muttered irritably, still engrossed with the delicate operation on his prawn with a toothpick in one hand and a large magnifying glass in the other. Norm always remembered the prawn. He did not attempt many, but this one was a special creature. Rare, for it only lives in the crystal clear waters away in the gorges of his father’s father’s country. Unique for its size.

Norm had hoped by saying little, the insignificant white ants would disappear and let him get on with his work. However, too little was too late. It was not to be. ‘Whatya doing around here for Moochie?’ Full of grace, Angel Day stepped into the fishroom. She said she was nosing around to see what all the talk was about. She had torn herself away from the statue of Mary, which she had now repainted in the colour of her own likeness. She had examined pictures in the children’s prayer books and after considering every detail of what needed to be done, she believed she knew how to restore the statue. Every bit of her time and attention had been given in its reconstruction, which had now departed from that of its familiar image, to one who watches over and cares for the claypan people in the Gulf country. Improvisation with Norm’s fish colours and textures resulted in a brightly coloured statue of an Aboriginal woman who lived by the sea. The work had taken her several days. She had not even noticed that the other families had left, or believed it was possible when Norm blamed her for their leaving.

‘If they gone, then they’ll be back,’ she had told him flatly, as she did to the delegation who had come from Uptown to confront Norm. She said she thought they would not have the wherewithal to go setting up camp on the other side of town. ‘Where’s the water? Anyone mind telling me that? No tap? No tap! So how are they going to get water from them mob then?’ She looked the delegation over with her cold eyes, waiting for a response, and when no one dared to offer her a peep, she sighed heavily and launched into her attack.

‘What you people worried about then? Stupid, you people. You want to think about things if you got any sense. Isn’t it, they going to get sick and tired quick smart when they have to keep walking ’bout this other side of town to cart water for themselves?’

The delegation turned their attention away from Normal to Angel Day, who engaged them further in discussion about the water situation for the itinerants, as she called them. Norm could not help but be impressed with her ability to mislead people. The delegation looked at her talking down to them with awe written across its faces. Where did she get it from he wondered?
Itinerants
was not the language of the Pricklebush.

Some people in the delegation began talking about how they had carried the cross of Jesus to protect them. ‘We prayed to God to help us today and we carried the big crucifix along to shield ourselves.’ Those who wore them around their necks, proved their point by dragging crucifixes out from under their clothing and displaying their crosses to each other, as though the gesture would provide them warmth, and secure them from the wrath of God, which they suspected hovered over Normal Phantom’s household. Holy smoke! It was hot. Angel was not amused by the religious posturing Uptown always used to get its own way. Norm watched her run back into the house, listened with the others to her footsteps on the tin floor of the corridor, and suddenly she burst back in the room, brandishing her statue, held up high above her head as she danced around the delegation like a strutting pigeon. It was a transfixing sight. The delegation was shocked by this spectacle of irreverence for their religion, some even recognising the statue, and were about to say: ‘I know where that came from,’ but were speechless. All eyes followed the Aboriginal Mary, bobbing past them, jumping back and forth. It did not trouble Normal. He tried to concentrate on his work while there was still light left in the day. He knew what Angel was capable of doing, or thought so.

What she had to say was long and hard: ‘We are decent people here, my family. We make no trouble for anybody. So why for you want to come down here making trouble for
we
all the time? I tell you how I won’t stand for it; I can’t even stand you people. I don’t want you murdering types around here bothering my family all the time, you hear me? Covering up for someone who even tried to murder me once and other atrocities as well going on. If you mob come back here again, (she paused to think), I’ll tell you what I will be doing. I will be pressing that many charges through the legal service for Aborigines for attempted murder, that’s what. And while I am at it, I will be suing the town as accomplices to a conspiracy to have my person killed and the persons of my family murdered before they were born, and for damages for the ones who were born. Goodness knows how we can’t sleep at night as it is with the worry. I don’t know how much money you’ve all got in the bank, but you will be paying who knows what for damages. It might even cost the whole town. I have already spoken long distance on the phone to my lawyer and he said it might be a pretty good test case. Watertight even, so what do you think about that, hey?’ Under heavy cloud cover which brought on a premature nightfall, the Uptown delegation looked at each other through flashes of lightning in the fishroom, and were shocked, like the suspended school of silver fish from the sea, jumping up and down in fright.

Normal remembered feeling that there had been no end to Angel’s obsessive behaviour since she laid her hands on the statue. She had even placed it in the bedroom looking onto their bed, so he could not be bothered sleeping there anymore. She had forced him to live in the fishroom, which she now took over, with half the town having a heated argument in there as well. The cockatoo screeched its head off in the storm outside as it flew around, circling the house. Then, to cap it off, the crickets were stirred into wakefulness, and began their choice of music. Ears pricked and prickled to hear the foreign, shrilling sounds of Handel’s oratorio in full orchestra. The delegation listened for a short time, and this strange and severe sounding improvisation must have taken the cake, because there was a mad rush to leave via a rubble of disorientation, and rumble, as they raced over the puddles on the corrugated tin-floored corridor.

Normal, forced to become part of the excessiveness of his home, helped the disoriented delegation outside into the storm, where they set off up the muddy road to Uptown, hoping to find their way home in the darkness. Until, that was, lo and behold, Mayor Bruiser turned up wet and blind drunk, and when he got the drift of Angel’s argument, he started to kick the air and shout into the kitchen doorway, that he was not going to have a bunch of blacks tell him what to do with the town.

Bruiser could see Angel Day inside, still carrying on about lawyers, and laughed drunkenly, ‘Here’s a woman who still likes a good poke. Don’t you like a good poke Angel?’ He started to tease the Christian man Valance, ‘Go and ask her if you can have a go.’ When she ignored him the mayor started taunting her about the times he chased her on horseback down to the creek until her bony legs gave up. ‘Oh! Don’t be bashful, you remember me.’ Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground then raped them. He had branded them all, like a bunch of cattle, he gloated.

Angel Day came out of the house with a billycan full of boiling water and threw it at Bruiser’s voice in the dark, but missed. She went back into the house and the delegation could hear her stomping around the kitchen, throwing things around, screaming out how she was looking for a sharp knife so that she could slit Bruiser’s neck from left to right. What was left of the embarrassed delegation stood around in the rain. Next thing, Norm came flying out of the house threatening the Mayor with his boning knife, screaming, ‘I got this to make you shut up, you dog.’ With the knife swishing back and forth, Norm backed Bruiser through the mud, out of the yard. Bruiser moved away but kept yelling, ‘I’ll be back later and I will fucking get you, Norm Phantom.’ With that, the deafening sound of squawking seagulls took over the court with a loud crack of thunder, so everyone looked up, and when lightning illuminated the skies, they saw that there were thousands of the seagulls gathered overhead, hovering above the Phantom’s house, and right back up the road towards Desperance.