Carpentaria (61 page)

Come hither fish, come sea spirits, demons, marine monsters. He would have to learn about all of them if he were to survive. He would have to chart nautical routes in his mind. He would have to start remembering the journey of the heavens, all of the stars, breezes, just like his father, Norm Phantom. He would have to comprehend the feeling of water beneath the weight of his island and make its currents his map. In order to know, he would have to become a scholar of the sea, then one day, he would set off to find her. He would take his raft and float away on it, searching, searching, until the moment their eyes met. Or until it sank.

The island home was, give or take, a kilometre in length after the final unhinging of those parts which, after bidding Adios!, violently crashed to the ocean floor. Flocks of birds came and went on their seasonal migrations. They seemed to accept the drifting structure as a new land.

The nests they constructed with the bones of dead fish and droppings eventually covered the entire surface in a thick fertilising habitat, where over time, astonishing plants grew in profusion. Bobbing coconuts took root and grew into magnificent palm trees. Seedlings of mangrove, pandanus and coastal dune grasses came with the tides, other plants blew on board as seed, and none withered away. A swarm of bees arrived, as did other insects, and stayed. All manner of life marooned in this place would sprout to vegetate the wreckage. A peanut that had floated for perhaps a decade landed one day and grew so profusely it became a tangle of vine-like stems reaching out over the surface to find crevices in which to sink.

A single rotting tomato containing an earthworm settled in the newspaper-lined base of a plywood fruit box, and grew. Within a season, tomato plants inhabited the island like weeds. The worm multiplied into hundreds and thousands of worms. The worms spread like wildfire into every pokey hole of rotting rubbish and soon enough, a deep, nutrient-rich humus covered the entire island. Well! What have you? Peach, apricot, almonds, all grew. Guava, figs – fruit that came with the birds, stayed, and grew into beautiful trees. A wasted banana root survived for months in the sea until it settled on the island where it sent up one big fat shoot after another, in between a mango tree and the figs, then drooped with the weight of large bunches of fruit.

So! Did Will notice? Was he happy? Yes, he was. He was a practical man in a practical man’s paradise. He had food, shelter, and his catchments of fresh water were always full to the brim. He grew strong and healthy pursuing his numerous daily tasks. His mind grew with the information he stored inside his brain. Unflinchingly, he ordered the patterns of water beneath him. Daily his mind sifted the information. He was able to recall each day he had been at sea, from the time he began living on the island. He developed a keen eye for the movement of the stars, staying awake to sing the Fishman’s ceremonial song cycles all night, from the raising of the star across the eastern horizon to the setting of the big
maliwi
star in the west. Then he would sleep. These were the rhythms of his life which he lived through like lines of poetry.

When the rhythm changed with the seasons, he would stop measuring star movements for the current flow, or move through endless days of charting the flight of birds. Then, like these changing rhythms, he would switch the activities of his daily life. Sometimes, he would concentrate solely on the measurements he kept of the many species of trees on board, his vegetable stock and other vegetation, such as grass, flowers, weeds. After he had completed his measurements, he would spend the remaining hours of the day working on the boat he was building, out of found objects, salvaged timber, on top of a raft, the place where he lived.

Inside this roped, nailed and wired structure, he kept his precious possessions which he had accumulated from his salvage operations, tunnelling down into the depths of the pontoon island itself. Inside his shelter, he had stored fishing lines which had taken him hours, and sometimes many days to untangle; little boxes of precious hooks, nails, tools he had made himself; and dried foods under sheets of plastic. His worst nightmare when he spent the first night on the birthing wreck was how to save himself if the pontoon disintegrated. Now he was able to reign safe in the knowledge that the raft he had made himself was ready, in case of any emergency, which would force him to vacate the island.

In his little world he cooked sometimes on bits of salvaged iron while being careful not to use up his precious supply of driftwood, a mountain of it already stored, even while driftwood was plentiful. Everything was bountiful. If he went looking for driftwood, his hand only had to reach down into the shallow water and as though a magical spell had been cast, the treasure would be his to hold. His thoughts were wishes granted to the island. Any fear had a reality too, but Will was too preoccupied with surviving in those early months to become fearful. He lived on hope, little things such as food and water, simply to keep himself alive.

Those were the golden days, when he could visualise himself, almost ready and able, almost setting sail as soon as his boat was ready. He lived on wishes for a very long time. He taught himself through his many routines of measuring how to navigate the seasonal currents, but then it occurred to him, that the movement of the currents was only taking him in a circle far out to sea. The skies had been telling him this for months, but he was stupid after all, because he had refused to see.

He only had himself to blame but who would have thought his faithful patterns could change, and begin to contradict each other. Instead of rationalising the changing reality he was confronted by, he doggedly continued measuring the rise and fall of the stars. Even the moon affirmed his now-monumental suspicion that his island home had been caught in a sphere of oscillating winds and currents. The question now was how would he ever return? He had no certain answer. One day a huge green turtle tried to pull its heavy body onto his island. He killed it while it was still struggling to come aboard and he ate from its body. Afterwards, he thought the only certainly he had in life was the ghost boat mooring at night in his dreams. More and more frequently the green boat invaded his sleep. Eventually, it came by every night and he would be awakened with the ringing of a fog bell, always heralding the arrival of the ghost boat from afar, in familiar and unfamiliar landings.

Alas! In these dreams he saw himself as the eternal watchman, on guard, waiting for the little vessel to materialise through the darkness. He listened to the oars breaking the water and creaking in the oar rings. He waited, even though he knew what to expect, when out of the darkness the empty boat glided in to land. The repetitiveness of the dream frightened him into believing it to be true. There were occasions when he was so sure he had heard the ghost of the green boat calling by, that he went searching the shoreline of his island in the moonlight. His attempts were futile but that did not wipe the elusive vision from his mind, and he longed for its arrival in his dreams as though it was his only reason for living.

Every night it was the same. Dreading sleep, but overcome by deprivation, he would dream again of the green boat, which never landed when he went looking for it. Will grew suspicious of the dream. For the life of him, he could not comprehend why anything could be so close and not close enough. Real! But never real enough? He searched high and low for a malingerer on board his island. Down in the wet cavities of the wreckage he prowled looking for whoever, or whatever sorcery was tricking him to fret for his unreachable goal. The search became his main occupation. He completely forgot the chronicles written in his mind.

Instead, eager to put an end to the mystery of the green boat, he searched everything just in case his dream had misled him. He was a man who needed more prayers than a million Christians could pray. There was a list a mile long of mysteries to be solved now before he could even dream of leaving the island. So, what if the passenger on the green boat had landed and was hiding somewhere on his island? One day, he decided to perform a funeral service for the unconsecrated souls he believed were imprisoned somewhere below in the hope of finally laying them to rest. He improvised on bits and pieces of memory from church services he had been to in Desperance, but that night in his sleep he heard the night bell ring as clear as day and when he searched the darkness, the green boat slid in to land, and when it did not fade away, and he was able to pull it in by hand, he saw the boat was empty.

So, melancholy started to grow in the island’s rich fertile atmosphere and competed for life just like any other seed planted on the island. In time, Will’s gloom grew increasingly morose with ideas of space. The distances began to multiply into improbable journeys. Travel? How could he travel? His mind ran wild with the question until he got to the stage where it was almost inconceivable to contemplate his journey back to the Gulf of Carpentaria. He felt stranded and claustrophobic. Even though the island shone brightly with happiness and blooming, he never noticed anymore. He shunned its solitude as a prisoner grown old with incarceration. He longed to be in a better place, elsewhere. Days were now spent looking longingly at the sea to the west. Other places grew more fabulous in his mind, while the island became a dungeon.

One day while sitting seaward and looking towards the western horizon, he began to muse over his future. With his happiness destroyed, he now viewed the island as a temporary structure which would break apart in the first storm. He sincerely believed that the total destruction of the island was only a matter of time. Will Phantom’s days had turned bleak and his routines became perfunctory efforts performed with little care.

All of his former hard work in building the boat became gaunt, repetitive checks for structural weaknesses. He became possessed with the idea that the boat was unseaworthy. He had already decided the journey was an impossibility. At four o’clock in the morning he would wake up terrified when he saw himself, in a boat full of holes and the water gushing in, as though it had been constructed with straw.

The night on his island turned out to be an extraordinarily masterful playwright, anxious for Will to fall asleep, impatient for the blood red curtains of his mind to burst open. Another grand play, another brand-new scenario of horror. This gifted corner of Will’s mind was a wizard. A genius able to conjure up his innermost fears, as quick as a magician could take a rabbit from a hat. In the end, Will believed his nightmares would kill him. He decided he would avoid sleep altogether. He would become a master in undoing any act of sorcery against him. He set to work on his plan. Nail after nail began to fall out of its hole at the slightest touch on his boat. As he held each nail in his fingers and examined it, it would snap into rusted flakes the moment the least bit of pressure was applied to it. Looking at the pile of rust he had gathered, he realised he was doomed to a hermit’s life on the island. He confirmed his fate when he started checking the joinery. The wire binding he had so meticulously woven at the joins, now also disintegrated, and all that was left underneath were trace-mark stains of rust.

He strove on until he eventually found what he feared would most stop him from ever leaving the island. The timber, piece by piece of his beautiful, almost seaworthy creation was crumbling apart with white ants. Could you believe it? Where did these mongrels come from? Will Phantom plundered the island for white ants. He dug like a ferret with his bare hands until blood poured from his fingers: Until he proved the island itself would crumble with termites. A dream come true! More or less a nightmare. This nightmare saw the island fall to the bottom of the ocean at four o’clock in the morning. He sat around relying on the idea of being saved. Others would save him he believed. There was a relentlessness in his belief in salvation. Of all the bits and pieces of uncharted land or floating objects that nobody cared about in the world’s ocean, he wished his would be found.

He sat forever scanning the horizons for ships passing on the high seas. Sure enough, in days and months, many ships and boats appeared. He saw passing container ships laden with ballast and others returning heavy with ore. Each ploughed through the high seas on its own charted highway, all equally oblivious to his floating piece of rubbish. His dim, life-wearied eyes saw passing pirate ships and boats trading in human traffic. Desperate boat people crowded these nightmarish vessels but they were not interested in looking at wreckage as they passed by so close he could see their eyes scanning. They only had eyes for a safer place from wherever they had come.

He saw faces scarred by the knives carried in the hands of pirates who stood in front of the half-clothed and naked, slashed wretchedness of victims they had imprisoned. Wherever they were to be jettisoned, no one in all likelihood regarded his island of wreckage as a place for them to go. Watching them pass by he felt asphyxiated, as though there was not enough air in the atmosphere for all of them to share. Through their vacant eyes he saw a kaleidoscope of nightmares. Could he, or could they, believe all nightmares belonged to him?

On these occasions, the spirits of the people returned in dreams, breaking waves in their ghostly boats, through images which grew more distorted, as though the island was surrounded by the mirrors of a travelling sideshow, and it was not until these victims of catastrophe were falling upon him that he recognised their fate. He was told they were dead people on their way to hell. Was this hell? Was this hell? He screamed out in such dreadful fright when he woke up from these dreams, longing and crying for the eyes without hope to disappear forever.

The salvation he awaited was a stranger’s voice. A sailor, fisherman, or coastal surveillance officer shouting, ‘Ahoy! Land oy.’ And he? He saw himself running for what was left of his stockpile of salvaged clothing rotting in the high humidity, and putting something on to make himself decent for his rescue. What could be otherwise? The plan of his rescue had been rehearsed in repetitive, alternating visions of the preferred future. Oh! How he would run up and down the shoreline, waving his arms, shouting,
See me! See me!
And thinking, for it crossed his mind: What would he be? What would the discoverers call the sole inhabitant on his sinking oasis: a native? But the only real discovery being made was by the flocks of seagulls, settling in greater numbers each day, until they reached vast proportions, taking over every nook and cranny on his floating island of junk.