Carpentaria (59 page)

‘Hey! Tap! Tap! You inside there? You heard about my story sonny?’

‘Call out and say if you know what is good for you from my little story I tried to tell you one time but you never come back to see me.’

This was one old woman in her multi-coloured beanie cap retelling her story. Will recalled seeing her again, clear as day, dragging a Sunshine milk tin across the dirt in the exact map of the river. He remembered how the line in the ground went about its intention, moving slowly, right up the winding river. Her voice snapped: ‘Remember that time?’ Nobody had seen a cyclone acting like that before. Even Will was old enough, that time, to witness the storm mass moving away down around the bends of the river, searching for a Law breaker she said, that had caused the creation spirit to come after him. As the cyclone moved on it gathered more and more strength from following along the flat surface of the river so it never died out like it should have, once it hit the high country. This particular cyclone, winding through the hills, caused widespread floods and ripped out ancient rivergum trees, and thousand-year-old fig trees from the riverbank, and what was left of those trees was thrown away like bits of grass that landed flat as a tack kilometres away in the spinifex. The poor river looked like it had been bombed. Then, the cyclone found the man it was looking for. He was hiding in a town which had never been hit by a cyclone before because of its being too far inland. He thought he was safe there, but the cyclone went ahead and wrecked that town to smithereens and worse, and in all of the wreckage it left behind, only one person died. It was the Law breaker.

Will felt the cyclone was attacking the building, ramming into it like sledgehammers, trying to tear it apart, as if it was looking for him, or someone else. He was convinced that there was someone else in one of the rooms at the end of the building driving the wind to them. A magic man or cats. He envisaged the back of a man who was bending over, performing a ritual with wreaths of rain grass to bring the storm to them, who in his heart of hearts Will guessed was old Joseph. He kept reminding himself it could not have been old Joseph, because he was in the truck being driven to the hills. Nobody like old Joseph would have made it back through the storm. A tap on the louvres and Will spun around, ‘You know they say he is a witchdoctor.’

‘Who?’ asked Will.

‘Old Joseph. Who do you think I was talking about?’ some old person with a beanie shouts his Pricklebush truths.

At this point, believing the building was doomed, that the walls were about to fall apart, Will could actually hear a man chanting the storm-making ceremony, and besides, he heard Norm’s voice roll through the ceiling, telling his night-time stories to children in his straight forward voice that told no lie. Low and humble. ‘Tell it low and humble.’ A voice capable of drowning out the storm racket with incantations inciting Will not to fly to where the white lilies bloomed in the swamp, no matter what the orchestra was playing.

Continuously, thinking of his father, remembering him, Will found he was now imitating someone who had condemned all else he had made of his life outside the Phantom household to irrelevancy. He kept remembering a time when he listened and tried to memorise every word Norm had said to him as a child, and wondering why. Was his life irrelevant if he could barely remember it? Will considered the old people’s prophecy. What goes around, comes around, the old people always said:
The father calls the son home. Sons sail home in ships of nostalgia.
It made him think of the Fishman, the man he had come to consider as his father, now a fading memory of a handshake. Time and the huge distance of country each had travelled had created its own sense of forgetting. It was as though the older man had released some magic hold he had held over Will and returned him to Norm, whom Will watched while standing on the shore of some unknown beach.

Norm was busy working and Will watched from the distance, too far away, but looking through rows of silver fish hanging from lines erected on poles across the beach with smoke rising through them. Reminded of a scene from his past life, Will thought of himself watching his father from a distance in the dimly lit workshop under rows of silver fish dangling from the ceiling as though they were swimming in air. He called out to Norm as though he had just returned home after a short absence away. ‘Hey! Dad it’s me Will. What are you doing?’ The big man in black singlet and shorts did not look up, but continued working.

Will heard his voice resounding back to him like a slap in the face, which he instantly put down to the fact that his father was still not talking to him. No communication. Will repeated these words to himself as he tried to decide what to do next to catch his father’s attention. But as he stood on this foreign beach, his hurting ears listened only to the deafening roar of the cyclone. It was impossible to be heard in the disorientation of eardrums bursting under pressure; where his vocal cords could not form words loud enough to be heard. Nobody would hear him. He could not even hear himself. Norm continued his work, gazing down into a forty-four-gallon drum, stirring it with a big stick. Will assumed he was making his fish tanning potions again.

Waves crushed onto the deserted beach, and eventually, after several minutes had passed, Will saw Norm take his stick from the drum and head towards the surf. As he scanned around he noticed there was other movement on the beach, and turning to get a better view of what was submerged beneath the clouds, he saw Hope. She was alive and dressed in the same black singlet and shorts as Norm, only these were several sizes too large for her thin body. Not believing what he was seeing, he blinked. Could clouds play tricks with his eyes? When he looked again and saw it was her, he called. But it was just as with Norm, she could not hear him, and she continued on her way. She dissolved in the clouds that covered the water where the waves hit the beach. Then, when he saw her again, she was walking carefully through the clouds, placing one foot in front of the other. He moved through the fish rows to get closer, he did not want to disturb her, in case she slipped, and fell into the water beneath the mist.

He watched her walk out towards the sea, above the water, moving very carefully, and when the cloud cover shifted slightly, he saw the grey sea water. She walked on top of the boiling water through the roll of the incoming waves. He was surprised that he was not shocked, but he was adamant in his resolve which only made him his father’s man. He would stay unbelieving of any passing images and realities except his own, sitting against a wall ready to collapse under the tidal surge of the cyclone. With an increasingly heavy heart, he watched her spirit going back into the sea. It was like another nightmare, trying to keep her in his sights, yet the more he tried to get to her, he was unable to find a way through the never-ending rows of fish. ‘Hope, wait up,’ he yelled, but it was hopeless. She never heard his voice. However gusty the wind, he saw she kept her hands held out from her side, and in each palm she balanced a red glowing ball. Flares. Flares, she had flares, he thought, thinking they were all alive. It was a sign. She. Norm. Bala? Where was Bala? He had to be somewhere and Will looked again, saw clouds surrounding the beach, then he saw her again.

This time, she was moving out into deeper water, yet still walking on top of it, very carefully, she had to be balancing on something like a thick sea rope, used for big boats, held taut, just below the surface. He never saw it at first, but there it was, barely under water, and Hope walking on top of the water splashing against the rope. She was heading towards a boat painted green, and using the big rope securing it to land. This was the safe boat of his childhood rocking in the surf just as it had done before: Norm’s boat. Anchor down, staring at it slipping along the sand, through the green seagrass, where a thousand bubbles caught his eye. Under the sea a strange phenomenon heralded Bala’s face of all things looking up towards the light from below the surface of the water, where bubbles followed in a procession from his closed lips. His brave little boy’s small hands seemed terrifying, drenched of colour, clasping a moving rock covered in slime.

‘Hey! Dad. Over there. Look!’

Will waved his arms frantically and Norm continued his work. ‘God! He’s drowning,’ Will tried to yell into the silent wall of this world, when suddenly, the surface of the waves broke through with Bala on the back of a grey sea fish. The boy swung himself from the back of a huge groper onto the ship’s rope and ran along it after his mother, and Will watched them, she first, fading from view into the clouds. It was all over in seconds, but Will was still running through rows of fish, and realising, he could run forever and more rows would take the place of the ones he had passed.

With his lungs bursting, he stopped, and returned to the darkness from his dream. He knew he would run through all of the fish nets in the world and never find what he was looking for, as he would always run, but never fast enough, to catch up to his past. He relived the vision and made a pact. He would find them out in the sea somewhere. But doubt still raised its ugly head and compelled him to check the boat. Hunched into the wall he sat studying the vision. He looked underside, side on, from under the water with a stingray’s eye, while gliding across the sand. Doubt saw algae in the place of green paint. Algae flowed in long green hair underneath the hull and along the rope, it hung limp to the boat’s side, and inside, a garden of green flourished. Norm had waded out to the waist-deep, grey water.

Will waited for the moment and when the clouds parted with the next gust of wind, his eyes surveyed the beach. Out in the water, he saw his father stirring up the mud with his long stick. Very quickly, he realised what Norm was doing. He had been there before and watched his father in exactly the same way. In the same place. Norm and Elias had taken him there fishing. The three of them had spent days fishing on the open sea. Will was told he was going nowhere when he asked repeatedly where they would end up. Normally he would be told what fishing reef or hole to look out for. Norm had sat on the beach doing nothing after they had come into land. He watched the waters. Elias did everything with Will tagging along. Elias hunted, fished, fetched water, cooked so that they could eat. Norm sat on the beach. Will watched his father’s bare back, sitting still in the same spot in the morning after he had woken up next to Elias, who slept with his back to the beach, protecting them both from the blowing sand. Will saw that Norm was watching
majinmaja
, the fish hawk, hover, dive and fly off to its nest. Waiting he said, ‘See what
majinmaja
’s doing?’ Yeah, Will said he would stay and watch too. ‘No you go with Elias.’ Why? He always watched
majinmaja
at sea. ‘Help Elias.’

The fish hawk came back and caught another fish and went away. All day it was the same. Then Norm suddenly got up and went into the waters. He remembered Norm stirring up the water in a corner of the headland. He had waded out in the same way and spent most of the day, and the night, stirring up the clay mud and sand. Elias said nothing when Will asked him what his father was doing. ‘None of my business, yours neither. You and me are here for one thing, to fish for fish.’

In the morning, the three of them had watched the trail of discoloured water drifting away. Years later, Fishman had told him in his raspy voice, which he claimed was from singing too much country and western, that Norm was in a storm-making place. ‘He was singing up the spirits in the water, boy, to make storms for his enemy.’ Even though the Fishman never went to sea, he mentioned an itinerary of site places along the coast for making storms and counter storms powerful enough to wipe out the entire enemy. ‘However,’ Fishman explained after naming several hundred sites in a geography he had never travelled, ‘I don’t know all of these places. But some do. Your father knows, because he can fly through storms like an angel.’ Fishman sighed. Reluctantly, he had admitted more than he normally would about other people being more powerful than himself. ‘Just one or two, you know. You are always going to have some fellas and women who must have swapped their blood for magic. No, it is right. They only got magic running through their veins. Me! I only got a little bit of both. But they can be wherever they choose.’

Will knew how impossible it would be, trying to find any of the locations he had memorised from Mozzie’s long list of names. He already knew some of those places were many kilometres inland in the Dry season, but became the beach, when this land joined the sea in the Wet. Other special sites formed part of a sandbank out in the sea. A place only visible certain times in the right season, and if you knew the right tide to choose from at least a half-a-dozen tides and currents all circulating about in the bay of the Gulf. Or, maybe, you would only reach this place at night, if you knew how to navigate by stars. Mozzie said all this travelling at sea was very dangerous activity and this was the reason why he stayed away from salt water. ‘You got to be more than traditional. You got to be mad as…a magician. You got to be a fish…a wizard to find any of those places. Me! I am ordinary for dry dirt.’

The discoloured water was drifting, and just briefly, Will saw it clearly enough to distinguish it was heading east – towards Desperance. On seeing the tongue of water, Will knew he had to remember where the place was, he had to see the beach, to become patient, in the hope he would see it again. Yet his attempt to remain calm disappointed him. He felt he was drifting out of the dream, because once again, he heard the chanting in the room at the end of the corridor, and the sound of water running through the bar below was even greater than the winds and flooding outside. He forced the fish hawk to come back to that day, and watched it hover and dive for fish, pushing through take after take, until finally, he could see the bird working along the movement of the current. This time, he remembered something different about the beach he had glimpsed between the clouds while looking for Norm. In that instant he had been surprised to see Norm standing out in the water. Something had been different about the beach. Now it was too difficult to recall what it was.