Carpentaria (60 page)

His memory grew fainter the harder he tried to remember, while the noises of the building seemed to penetrate not only his mind, but to grow toxic inside his body. Downstairs, bar stools, chairs and tables rattled against each other in the flooded hotel. Bottles smashed against the walls. The noise made him think about Lloydie’s fate; was he still roped to the bar, or had his dream of being taken away to sea with his mermaid been fulfilled? He knew he would have to go downstairs and check. The roof continued its non-stop rustling. Rain pelted it. The floorboards creaked in every closed bedroom. The roar of the sea showed no mercy. There would be no letting up. No respite for quietness. There was noise in the movement of water flooding back to the sea carting the wreckage with it. All passed over the flooded land groaning with the remains of buildings, boats, cars, trees, rocks, electricity poles, fences, cargo from fallen ships, plastic consignments scrambled like licorice allsorts and dead animals. All this rolled along, slamming together in the water, just like it had on the beach in his dream. A beach plastered with waste, brown stinking froth and foam where a cyclone had struck. Will was too shocked to move from the realisation of his father’s payback to the town.

Of course they had survived, Will agreed with himself, yet argued the toss. It seemed unimaginable that all three of them – Hope, Bala and Norm – were together, and having survived the catastrophic cyclone, were preparing to leave. He jumped to his feet, speaking out loudly in his excitement – ‘It was time to leave.’ He ran to open the doors of the bedrooms he had closed the night before, to let out the noise, not stopping to see what happened behind him, the escaping pussycats scrambling over the slippery corridor, a flock of swallows flying frantically up and down in the hallway in a futile attempt to exit the building. It was only much later he would realise he had seen the skin and bone person. A real nomad countryman, living like a gipsy. The sort of person who could avoid being seen by dissolving himself into a wall if he had to. They were the people who drifted silently in and out of the bush, never speaking to anyone outside of their group. Somehow, just as silently, this group had drifted for cover to the hotel, climbed upstairs, and each had sequenced their being into rumples of clothing, bundles of nothingness, in a room of its own.

He stalled at the end room, where he imagined he heard the chanting of Midnight. Although the room was now silent he sensed the macabre power of the old man lingering behind the closed door, and a chill ran through him. At first, he did not want to open the door because he thought he might see a ghost masquerading as old Joseph sitting there. Yet, he had to know, so very carefully he turned the handle, and was just about to say, ‘Good morning old man,’ so sure he had been that he would see old Joseph sitting there frightening the Jesus out of him as he eased the door open. The room was empty. Yet whoever had been in that room, Will felt the malediction of his presence, and knew he was about to faint as the sweet smell of trampled, wet fresh grass overcame him. He slammed the door shut. He ran up the other side of the row of bedrooms, opening doors, without taking a breath until he reached the door to the verandah to the north, and opened it.

The grey cloud of swallows, a thousand pairs, in an instant of surreal flight flew through, and before he realised what had happened, they had disappeared into the clouds. Will sighed loudly in the space of the damp, feathered air left by the birds. He inhaled the fresh sea wind speeding inland with the clouds, while thousands of sea birds headed out to sea. He watched them while he thought about his dreams until, moments later, he believed he had struck gold. Of course, he had it at last. Out of nothing, he was grasping the eluding pieces of the escaping dream. Now, cried out to the drowning north lands. Over and over his voice spread, sending a shiver down the columns of birds heading overhead.

His eyes recaptured the direction of the beach with the swaying fish left out to dry. He knew Norm was preparing to leave. Hope and Bala were going on board. She carried blue-rimmed fire to show the way for Bala to follow her out into the fog where the boat was moored in the deeper waters at the end of the rope. Everything was fine because they were with Norm, and he would bring them home through the storm.

And all he had to do? All Will believed he had to do was to ride the outgoing tide and find them. Yes! Yes! Yes! Meet them halfway. He would go. ‘I am leaving now – I swear I have already left.’ First though, he would go down and tell Lloydie what had happened to him. He felt good. He could not remember feeling so good. It was good to be alive and he would go right down and find Lloydie and tell him that. Mermaids do not live in wood he would tell Lloydie. He would say it nearly cost him his life. ‘Knock on wood, Lloydie. Get a life,’ he yelled down through the open trapdoor. Water answered instead, as it crashed against the walls and sent the spray up into his face.

Will scrambled down into the darkness, lowering himself down, and the waters responded. He became caught in the whirlpool of muddy waters, and to save himself from being swept away, he grabbed around for a grip, holding on to the solid structures of doorways and corners, as he was propelled through the building. He clawed his way to where he assumed the bar once stood, and realised he was looking everywhere for Lloydie’s body, and searching for nothing, when he discovered the wooden masthead was gone. She had taken Lloydie away. They had gone in the outgoing tide. She had knocked against the door long enough to dislodge it from its hinges, and they had floated through, to join the wide wall of water heading back to the sea.

Navigating underwater, Will steered himself back towards the trapdoor. He surfaced for air, swallowed it, and forced his way back down to avoid being thrown into a wall, or knocked unconscious by the objects passing through the building. Swiftly he moved through the chaos of yellow waters. It seemed like an eternity had passed before he reached the doorway between the bar and the corridor, the door now missing, at the back of the hotel, where he surfaced. He pulled himself out of the water. Luckily the level of the water was high enough for him to reach the trapdoor opening, and luckily he was long-limbed and skinny enough, to be able to pull himself back onto the top floor. As he sat up there catching his breadth, he wondered what Lloydie’s mermaid looked like. She would look like a ghost swimming through plains of mustard yellow waters with a dead man roped to her back.

From the verandah doorway he saw the roaring water towering towards the horizon of the open sea. Only the hotel rose out of the flood as a bizarre, twisted, island abode of the Gods. On the rooftop, sea birds were packed so tightly under the heavy canopy of dark clouds, it gave the appearance of a giant white flower full of red beaked seeds. The old wooden verandah had collapsed in the winds and now hung like a shirt collar around the building. Listening to it moan and creak, he thought it was a wonder it had not collapsed altogether.

The longer he looked down in the waters the more he felt like letting go; to fall into its universe. He was sure that at any moment he would see the movement in the racing waters of some living creature, someone alive, and he almost allowed himself to fall. So convinced he would find his destiny in the floodwaters, as though the waters were beckoning him, urging him to believe he could simply drift along in the direction of where the waters were moving, until he saw Norm’s green boat.

And Will Phantom was right to think he was lucky, leaning his skinny body out of the building, barely holding on to the doorway, and not caring if he fell, because any second he knew he could simply let go, with full certainty of falling straight into the destiny he had prescribed for himself. He had not figured fate, when the top floor under his feet suddenly moved. The floorboards had been shaken so violently, he was sent flying into the floodwaters. He hit the water hard, went under into the billowing yellow waters, where he rolled blindly
in
vacuo
with the dead of the deep, before being returned in a frenzy of breathlessness to the surface. Somewhere, in all of that water sweeping him towards the sea, he was able to turn to see what had happened to his little oasis.

He saw not a hotel left far behind but a small castle for the recreation of spirits. This new reality had nothing to do with the order of man. There was no town of Desperance. It was gone. A monster followed him instead. The houses, the loading port, the boats and cars, every bit of every so-and-so’s this or that, along with the remains of the pipeline for the ore from the mine, and even the barges and cargo snatched up by the cyclone had travelled inland, and were coming back. Every bit of it had been crushed into a rolling mountainous wall that now included the hotel where only moments ago, Will Phantom had been standing.

It was at this point he realised how history could be obliterated when the Gods move the country. He saw history rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled as the great creators of the natural world engineered the bounty of everything man had ever done in this part of the world into something more of their own making. Was he shocked? Bugger the hotel, he thought, it could go with the rest. The bulwark of the spirits rose from the waters, and he saw nothing monstrous or hideous in this new creation taking shape, moving, rolling, changing appearance, and beauty in its strident crashing back into the water.

The sight of the devastation was nothing short of salubrious as far as he was concerned. The macabre construction resembled a long-held dream of the water world below the ground where the ancient spirits of the creation period rested, while Aboriginal man was supposed to care for the land. He wrestled with thoughts of the future. When the waters receded what man would walk to the salt marsh to scratch the surface? What man digging under the surface, under layers of silt, would announce the discovery of the devil’s polluted palace? Then his view was gone.

He went swirling back into the flow of the water and all he could think to save himself, was what would happen if he got caught in a snag. What if he became entangled in the lines of barbed wire fence strung across some boundary? When the monstrous palace following him would catch up, and drag him under, what then? It seemed like ages before he had a chance to look back at the colossal architecture of the storm. But it was gone. Again and again, repeatedly, his eyes searched for the castle but only waters followed in his wake.

Wish whatever…

What a catastrophic requiem took place in those floodwaters racing out to sea. Listening up high, he swore there were hundreds of God’s angels singing:
Gloria in excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis
. The waters poured dead fish. Sodden spinifex grasses. Sticks. Green wood. Branches. Plastic. Plastic Malanda bottles. Green bags tied up with rubbish. He drank the stinking air manufactured by the porridge of decaying fish and gladly, the nauseating stench touched him. Blue and orange plastic sheeting formed a never-ending maze through which he was effortlessly poured. In the mayhem of buoyant bodies, bloated animals floating by touched him ever so lightly. Green frogs resting on the dead hailed him: Vale! The herds. Poor nanny-goats from the goat farm. Farewell! Bruiser’s cattle and horses. Say goodbye pack of dogs. Pussycats. Chookie fowl. Sad day for the animals of the bush. Kangaroo, wallaby, wild boars. Feral cats. Marsupial mice. Pelicans. He eyed every bit of the ghostly brown froth and bother heading towards him with outstretched arms, purposely wanting to draw him to its huge, smothering body.

Other things touched him too, and the madness went on and on…

On and on the floodwaters raced until receding far out in the ocean waters. It was there, during the night, that Will was washed onto a wet, slippery object. He did not know what he held on to in the darkness but it kept him afloat. Then he flinched. Something alive touched him and the sensation of fear he had felt in the floodwaters, again overcame him. He struggled out of the water, by clawing into the slipperiness, and climbing, not knowing if he was crawling onto the body of a sea serpent. He clawed higher and higher, slithering over the oily surface of whatever lay below him, unable to stop, while wave after wave lashed him, trying to pull him back. The clouds broke, the new moon shone its halo of peace. Relieved for such an absolution of light, he looked down to find he had been dumped onto an extraordinary floating island of rubbish.

While the serpentine flotation rocked in the waves, the sum total of its parts rubbed, grated and clanked together, as it became more tightly enmeshed into a solid mass that squashed every inch of oil and stench out of the dead marine life it had trapped in its guts. Will listened to the embryonic structure’s strange whines echoing off into the darkness, then, he realised the enormity of those sounds was familiar to him. He was astonished and then weakened by the feeling of helplessness, that a man feels, hearing the sounds of labour. He felt like he was an intruder to be clinging to a foetus inside the birth canal, listening to it, witnessing the journey of creation in the throes of a watery birth.

Whenever moonlight struck again through the clouds, he saw the moonbeams reflected off a multitude of hovering seagulls. Their bodies shone far away like glints of silver glitter. He imagined the new island stretching for many kilometres. He was full of wonder at its destiny, intertwined now with his own. He pondered how he might live indefinitely on the wreckage beneath which he imagined was a tightly jammed composition of barges, ship’s hulls, fishing boats, prawners, plastic containers, timber and whatnot.

Perhaps, he thought, if he became practical, since he was not wise, he could survive if he conserved rainwater in tanks and whatever cavities he might find on the surface. He knew he would have to work hard to find where the waterholes were and secure them from the birds and from contaminating sea water. Next day! In the morning! He decided to build himself shelter from the elements. Of course! Naturally! The cloud cover would eventually lift, and if he did nothing, he would be exposed to the sun. When the ‘low’ had blown away, he would salvage material to build his own boat to find Hope and the boy. One day? Soon! Soon!