Carpentaria (58 page)

‘So how come you’re still here?’ Will asked, clearly puzzled by the barman’s seemingly clear-minded decision to stay, then, seeing the ropes tied to the bar, he understood. It was actually true, Will thought, remembering the women who told love stories about Lloydie worshipping a mermaid locked in wood. They said it was true romance and he thought they were joking. Of course, he was staying with his mermaid. Will looked at the wooden planks, then he had to look away. Had the wind affected his vision? For some strange reason, he saw movement inside the wood. There was a full-grown woman inside the wood, moving like a trapped fish, as though she were trying to swim free.

He looked again to make sure, then turned away again because he could see Lloydie was watching, and could sense the man was becoming suspicious of him. Theirs was a private reunion and besides, he could see the water level inside the building was getting higher. Will moved behind the bar, ignoring Lloydie’s silence as he sipped his glass of beer.

Very quickly Will grabbed whatever food he could salvage and threw everything into an empty green garbage bag – sandwiches wrapped in gladwrap plastic from the glass cooler, cellophaned pies from the heater, drinks from the fridge, packets of chips and peanuts. He saw a mailbag floating in the water which he emptied, then threw the green bag inside it and slung the lot over his back.

‘Alright! I am going upstairs. You coming, or you going to stay here?’ Will asked, looking at Lloydie, who he could see had no intention of going anywhere. The water was now shooting through whatever cracks it was able to penetrate to get inside the closed bar. It crossed Will’s mind just how easy it was for water to find its way inside a concrete building. He knew the glass windows would burst soon with the weight of the water but it did not seem to make a difference to Lloydie. He was set to stay.

Will was on his way out of the bar when he looked back and saw that Lloydie was starting to tie the rope around himself as he lay on top of the bar. It would not take much to tighten the ropes and he would be stuck there, even if he had a change of heart about where his mermaid would take him, it would take too long to untie the ropes again.

Will tried to open the back door but it refused to open with the weight of the water banked up against the walls and shooting through the cracks. Will felt a cold flush of perspiration run down his body. For a moment, he thought of the door bursting open with the strain and the water pouring into the bar. He had to get out quickly and he shouted back to Lloydie, if there was another way to get upstairs.

‘Get the ladder in the store room.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Over at the back of the bar, there is a little folding ladder, get it, and look up to the ceiling in the corridor just near the door here. There is a trapdoor. Force it open.’

In no time Will had the trapdoor unbolted and the food bag upstairs. ‘You coming?’ he hollered through the noise back down to Lloydie. When he got no response, he shouted, ‘The whole place will be flooded once the water breaks through.’

When Lloydie did not respond, Will had to decide whether he should go straight back down and free Lloydie of his ropes, or let the man be. He realised that even if he could get the ropes off him, he was unlikely to leave. So he brought up the ladder.

The top floor of the building had been constructed of timber decades before Will had seen the light of day. The ageing wood that creaked with the sound of dryness as the temperature rose in the summertime, now groaned with the 180-kilometre winds and rain lashing the building. The galvanised roof whined, and wind roared across the north-facing verandah, and through the north door to the coast. Like an open-mouthed animal in pain, the wind roared through, and the noise shot down the corridor to the door it had forced open on the south-facing verandah.

Will slipped over the wet linoleum, holding on to the door of each bedroom, until he reached the north door and forced it closed. He went about closing windows left open, or closing the doors to rooms where the windows had been broken. He went back to the trapdoor once he felt he had secured the building sufficiently and called down to Lloydie. Repeatedly, he shouted down to the ground floor until his echo jumped back at him. He could see little into the darkness but he heard the water and realised that it had broken into the building and the whole of the bottom floor would now be under water. The water would be covering the bar. Lloydie had stayed until the end. He listened and heard nothing, so he closed the hatch. The signs of darkness were increasing in the building, and he waited, chewing quietly on whatever he pulled out of the bag.

He knew he had to eat, although he never felt hunger, and he tried not to notice that he was not alone on the top floor of the building. He remembered the strange sounds of his childhood, when his family had joined the rest of the town inside the hotel while a cyclone passed over the coastline in the vicinity of Desperance. Everyone had waited out the storm crowded together in the humidity of the closed building, and he shuffled around uncomfortably, looking for the place where the ghosts came in, until he found a pocket of fresh air jetting its way through a crack.

Sitting at the end of the hallway, he listened to the roar of the water rushing by outside. He heard it lapping the floorboards. He waited. It was still high when the wind dropped. He did not move. It was pitch-black and he could not see a thing, but he felt other presences in every creak and slamming of objects in the building. He was certain there were others nearby. In his mind, he saw the drowned seafarers of the town coming down to the pub, walking around the building, visiting. He felt the fear of being a child again, hiding behind the wall of the fishroom, listening to his father talking to other men about what happened to all those dead fishermen lost in the sea when a cyclone came. The coolness of the wall touched his ear as he pressed against it, anxious to know what had happened to the dead men.

People say when a humble man really listened and looked past the obvious, then he might fly with music into the unknown. Norm’s voice rolled on like waves themselves pouring out the tales of what he had seen at sea and his fathers before him. So, Will’s ear by the wall heard it was alright to die a lonely death at sea because a cyclone will always show you the way home. Those lost souls lying down there in their lonely watery grave, many fathoms deep, were thrown up from under the sand, like seaweed plucked from the floor of the sea in a giant waterspout of the ancestral serpent. Nowadays, even drowned sailors were sucked out of barges down in the cargo holds in the dead grey waters of poisonous mine ore.

Lord only knows he always kept watch, Norm said, when he saw the waterspout coming before the rain. For his life he headed in from the sea, and sometimes, just managed to come into the river mouth in the nick of time. Tied up in the mangroves, he saved himself many, many times from going up in the waterspout heading up the river. This was no mumbo jumbo either because other fishing men caught in the rain, never saw it coming to save their souls. Their boats were picked up and thrown kilometres away, and those who survived, who landed back in the exact spot – boat intact – said they were lucky to be alive. So, Norm warned, he stayed where the mangrove fish hid, watching those dead fishing men being spun up into the clouds themselves, and Will imagined his father watching them spin around up there, making pacts with the ancestral being over the sea, until the giant vortex of thundering water travelled over towards the shoreline of the beach, and threw them into the walls of water, perhaps twenty metres high, heading like hellfire into Desperance.

Far into the night, Will sat against the wall, waiting, listening to the deafening winds, rain and flooding waters converge, like sheets of powerful energy attacking the building. But he was never alone. The lost seafarers continued tramping about the building throughout the night. Will heard them moving around through the bar below, laughing at their fate, falling over furniture and picking it up and throwing it against the walls and tramping back into the rooms where they used to sleep. He knew when the waters receded, the sea would reclaim its dead folk and they would be gone before daybreak.

When the big God almighty spirit…

In that wild night of deafening madness, where a moment of sleep was exchanged for another moment of wakefulness, Will Phantom thought a devil had made its haven in his mind where it rolled around, like a dog in dirt. He craved to walk outside into the deluge to escape a world that seemed to be falling in on him; he was overcome with a desire to rip off the bare shell of his being so that he could walk away free from thoughts that were so oppressive, he felt like he was going mad. But somehow, in this madness, a plan was hatching. Other ideas emerged from the twisted wreckage of his brain. Something that resembled an escape plan was fighting its way through the catastrophic imagery like a flea. The plan seemed easy, but it too was slippery to hold, for it resembled something of a truth. So, he lingered. He sought justification. Surely, he questioned, there had to be something wrong with somebody searching for a wife and child he practically could not even remember? This was the problem of being a man of constant vigil. They were people he barely even knew.

No answer could be found to the potent question he had posed for himself, but he searched his soul for it and in doing so, a quietness finally came to him. Will Phantom may have had the skills of a wizard from all his thinking, which went inside the land itself, for all of the old passed-away people he had ever remembered had journeyed back to town, and he saw them assembled in the rain outside on the verandah. He saw them through glass louvres –
You have news Will Phantom
.

He could hear them talking among themselves while the rain swept through their image, then once again, startled, awake, he told himself it was only the timber verandah moaning in the wind. Even if drenched to the bone, old people, he knew were too afraid to come into the white man’s building. So, still, their voices:
Oh! My boy! Really sacred one. Scared of that one.
The wind blew the rain with such a force it blew in all the cracks: it blew under each pane of glass in the rows of louvres, until finally, the glass exploded. Then in came an old, skinny, mission-educated woman dressed in a floral dress dirtied by her own country anyhow, and plonked upon her head one of those knitted beanie caps. Well! Why not? So, this woman would come skimming along in Will’s dreams too, because she had every right to grab her turn in a countryman’s dreams.

From faraway places, far off in realm of the Dreamtime, Will had seen her before, cascading along the floods, singing arias in her pluming voice for the nightmare cyclone, snapping fingers, recording the death toll of all living creatures in a ledger book. She cast a spell on his mind, spinning it like a ferris wheel until times and places became one. When he saw her coming he might have offended the old woman because he never called out, ‘Hey! Old woman it’s good to see you,’ or anything like that. He did not want to offend her now, and in a clipping voice, whether she heard or not, he demanded: ‘Don’t you notice me here old woman because I feel too sick and tired to talk to anyone right at the moment.’ Old woman could cast any kind of spell she wanted to, and it was best to have said nothing he realised, when she made a beeline straight for him. Say nothing. So, the baggitty old Queen of the Pricklebush world stood up there in front of him, and she stared down at him for some moments with her black rings around her eyes like weeping mascara. Then she tapped him on his foot with her hunting stick, and announced in a voice that plumbed his guts, ‘Countryman, hello.’

She reeked of turtle fat oil, and she said she had just returned from the sea, and it was good. She said her sons were proper, good hunters, unlike some other people because they had caught plenty of turtle to eat. Will knew this was true, listening to her speak the hoitie-toitie Queen’s diction better than the Queen herself. Listening to her, you would swear you were listening to the Queen’s Christmas message being broadcast from Buckingham Palace. The only difference was that she never looked like a real Queen dressed in pale lime paisley, like the Queen, but it did not matter; she was a queen anyway, and she said this to Will:

‘Remember the real people of the Gulf, those poor black souls living on heartbreak and worries in the Pricklebush because they know all about cyclones, unlike those copycat Uptown
dolce
vita
type of people sitting in comfortable armchairs expecting to acquire their ancestral ties with the sea by sitting on their posteriors watching television programs, and never going out to sea on any occasion to pay their respects, like the old people who were the backbone of the Pricklebush who did not mind paying their dues, and will tell you cyclones don’t come from nowhere, because there is plenty of business going on when cyclones come onto the country out of the rooftop of the world, like what is going on outside now from the most powerful creation spirits, who come down out of the skies like a tempest when they start looking for Law breakers.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Will wished her to be gone.

He tried not to sleep, but his mind kept travelling back into memories of the old people like the turtle woman of his childhood. Old wizards with wrinkled faces and kind expressions for children came by to look at Will. Their faces poking out of brightly coloured beanie caps tugged down on their head, with a pompom perched on top which bobbed whenever they talked, which delighted and fascinated all of the running and screaming Pricklebush kids, who got whacked with a stick, proper hard, for not listening. And if you sat long enough, looking closely into their eyes, you saw aglow the amazing world full of stories they told in competition with each other.
No, my boy, listen to me first. It wasn’t like that old fool told you. Never listen to him. He is only number one for a pack of lies. It was like what I am telling you because I saw it from the start to finish and he only know what I copied for him.
Old stories circulating around the Pricklebush were full of the utmost intrigues concerning the world. Legends of the sea were told in instalments every time you walked in the door of some old person’s house. Stories lasted months on end, and if you did not visit often, you would never know how the story ended. Will knew a lot of half-told stories and the old people looked desperate outside the louvres, competing over each other’s voices to end their story to him.