Carpentaria (62 page)

F
ar out at sea in gentle swells, a catboat lolled through forty days and nights of good fortune, while the wise man, Norm Phantom, steered the rudder and never slept. He spurned the night’s call for men to drift away into the arms of a merciful sleep.

All the lucky countrymen on dry land slept soundly in their whatjamajigs: far away from the old town of Desperance on their bits of dog-chewed foam, which flew them around at night to any place in the world they wanted, cheap – for free. Rain-sodden blankets rolled dirt-poor old people on the ground. In your dreams, if you thought they were going back to Desperance again. They were not like Norm Phantom, losing so much sleep in the process to get there as quick as he could. Lucky dreams leave behind asphyxiation and pneumonic coughs, hunger and the rest of it. They were skidding through twilight along a moonbeam’s golden gleam, or a star’s silvery reflection, into the dreamworld deep under the black ocean of time to fall home on a fossilised, ancient, primeval lake in the Gulf of Carpentaria. If people thought about things like this all day it might cause one hell of a fight about land and all kinds of things.

Very different indeed for Norm rowing over the shadowy surface where sleeping men sunk into deadly illusions. Not him though. He could last forty days and nights without a wink of sleep. His eyelids were not half hooded as they were during the day when the sun would beat straight down on the little green boat struggling along with a breeze in the sail that might have been blown by a mouse. At night his eyes popped open, becoming wide-awake saucers like a nocturnal owl, if you noticed him sitting out there in the sea, on the cross bench of that bit of a boat, watching the stars, navigating the way home.

The amazing thing was, on the fortieth night at sea, Norm was so close to his stranded son Will Phantom, it was a wonder he had not seen him. Only four kilometres west of Will’s sinking flotation. Yet, who could quibble with distance? An inch is an inch on a ruler though it measured forty or four kilometres, whichever way you looked at it.

Norm did not sail merrily along to his prescribed destiny, nor fortunately, feel aghast with being lost. These were waters foreign to him but he felt comfortable, just as if he was at home with the brightly lit stars above him. Quietly, he sailed, because he was a quiet person, routinely occupying himself with whatever he had done every night of many, many years of his life when he communicated with the night sky travelling east to west, across the celestial sphere.

The bright Southern Cross which had long ago abandoned Jerusalem, now sat low above the horizon to the west. Having a mind for the memory of all names, Norm also knew the formation as Crux Australis, whose brightest stars bridged a waterhole where a giant rock cod lives, a dark patch in the sky known as the Coal Sack. He then looked across and saw Delta and Gramma Crucis, the Pointers – Alpha and Beta Centauri. Elias must have been close by, because Norm felt as though he was up in these heavens, travelling with them. He looked at
Kudawedangire
– Pleiades, or the Seven Sisters. Yes, Orion – the hunter was there, already starting to appear in the eastern horizon. He also instantly recognised the slant in the line of three stars of the Saucepan which he knew spills the rain in January. Earlier, he watched Orion’s killer Scorpio prowling around in the western sky. Soon, soon, he said to himself, knowing when he could clearly see the hunter’s two dogs, the big canine and the little Canis Minor, he would know he should have reached Desperance a long time ago. But, it was visible crossing inside of Sagittarius, where he saw the planet Mars, and he talked to the constellation about how pleased he had been with the mild-flowing currents.

Occasionally, he would look down at Hope who was sleeping on the deck boards. Although she slept fitfully, she had not moved since the planet Venus rose in the evening sky. With her head down, looking in the bowels of the boat lest there were reflections on the water, she said she could not look at
Yidimil
. Norm believed she must have told a different version of this same story a million times to Bala. He could not look at the evening star or any
jinkiji
. Rubbish! What a load of bullshit. Where did you hear that from girl? Ah! Cock and bull story. Every word she spoke could have come out of old Joseph’s lying mouth. Ever heard that old imposter say a truthful word? Oh! How Norm Phantom wished he could glue that mouth shut. Who would believe anything Joseph Midnight had to tell anybody? Eh! Good job! Save the peace. Let her sleep.

If she was afraid of the evening star, Norm quickly discovered, she was afraid of the morning star as well. When she woke up before dawn, without fail, she looked east until the star set in the west. ‘Hey! Look at that over there,’ he would exclaim, pretending to see something in the direction of the star, but she would appear not to hear him.

She again told him she only talked of truths, such as there being a death in the marriage if someone looked at this star. ‘J’sus! Well! I’ll be,’ he teased, encouraging her to argue some more with him. What had occurred to Norm was how her beliefs, so different to his own, were so tied into cause and effect. In her defence she listed every death of a spouse she had ever known. People die. It was not unusual. ‘Yeah, what about so and so, didn’t he die?’ And another, so on and so forth. ‘So, how can you tell someone looked at the stars?’ he would ask out of interest. The script was important to Norm Phantom. While he sought change he wanted her answer not to change. She would say of course you could tell because she had been told that was what happened. ‘I suppose ya old grandfather told you that, eh?’ Yes, that’s right. Good! Norm Phantom loved the wall.

Even so, he was surprised to discover how afraid of the sea she was. He had never seen a person so frightened of sea water. On the first night after they had left the island, from the moment the air grew cooler on the skin with the onset of dusk, she had become more and more silent. She said the coolness in the night air was like dead people touching her. He watched each night while she would try to cover herself and Bala with a piece of canvas that she used for shade in the day. The little boy twisted and turned restlessly all night long while she continued reorganising their cover. Her nocturnal hiding ended when finally, the morning star went down to the sea in the western horizon.

No heart and no patience with any of her imaginings, Norm told her to keep her wild thoughts to herself. She said she would. It was her problem. She said she knew it was her problem. Did anyone ask him to interfere in her problem? They needed to save themselves first. ‘We are not fish, you know.’ She said she knew they were not fish. ‘I am not a simpleton.’ Norm said nothing. He had no need to speculate about the genes of the Midnight clan. ‘You are a good boy Bala,’ he called.

Throughout those mild nights on their journey back to Desperance, while all Hope dreamt of was to be reunited with Will, Norm used the advantage of clear skies to practice his astronomical calculations. Sitting in the quietness of the night, he would use his fingers at arms-length level with the horizon in front of his eyes to calculate fractions of movement in the daily change of his guiding stars. This was the only way he was able to affirm his calculations for the distance of their journey. But she refused to look up to the night sky, saying she was frightened, in case someone might die. He had drawn many maps of the skies in the sand for Bala and tested him with questions every day before their departure. Whenever he looked at Hope he felt annoyed at her pig-headed beliefs. He knew if anything should happen to him, Hope would not be able to finish their journey. She would change course and head for the wilderness in the ocean looking for Will. He only hoped one thing. When she killed herself with her father’s stories, and if Bala had not perished along with her, the boy would remember what to do to survive.

Quite often in the night at sea she cried in her sleep. Distracted, he would look down at his daughter-in-law, sigh, and say – ‘Quiet now
.
’ Then, before continuing his nocturnal preoccupation with measurements, he checked the child had not been woken. She huddled the child like a frightened pup from nightfall. Her face vulnerable. She was the first person from the other side Norm Phantom had a chance to look at this close since his eyeballing days with her grandfather, Joseph Midnight. Vulnerability, the delicate, girlish face of the enemy. Never singular. Plural. And all he had left. The weak enemy was no explanation of how this girl who could cry all day long had somehow survived the sea. Alas! Norm, do not search your mind again, for however she had come to be alive at all comes to naught against your parallels. Stay blinded. She possessed a razor-sharp mind for others to see. Sandstorms blew inside his head, to which she was oblivious. Unfettered by old men’s thoughts, she huddled her son. The boy who too did not look into the sky. Who would if he saw his mother fall from the sky and disappear into the sea.

When they found her after the cyclone, walking through a mountain of rubble and bubble of foam that lined the beach, she claimed nothing of the sort of falling from the sky had ever happened to her. She said she was just out, having a bit of a walk. She said she had no memory of ever falling anywhere and on that first encounter, she had even turned around, and started accusing Norm of coming onto the island uninvited as soon as she had turned her back for five minutes.

Nevermind that she could not discount five days of absence because she said, she knew what she was doing. ‘What was that?’ he asked, wondering what on earth was wrong with her. She eyed him with Joseph Midnight’s eyes. She said that he was trying to steal her son away right under her nose. ‘I know you are playing around with his mind with all that mumbo jumbo stuff.’
Nobody would survive if they fell out of the sky?
He laughed and called her an idiot.

She laughed at Norm’s questioning like any normal person would, with a perplexed look naturally spread on her face, and because he was Norm Phantom, used to getting his own way, the more he questioned her, the more she tried to act normal. He became even more suspicious of her. So! A monster. This was what a low-life like Midnight produced. She raised her shoulders at him then hunched them together. Having thought of a new line of attack, she said she knew what was happening: he was trying to demonise her by connecting her to the spirit world of the sea. She said she felt frightened of him. So, she went away, camping in the rubble at night along the beach, where she stayed, sulking until things settled between them. Gradually, as the king tides began eroding the rubble that contained the pieces to fit the jigsaw of their salvation, she started to help Norm to salvage whatever he required to rebuild the green boat.

No great conversation of how, why, and so forth flowed between them since neither needed to speak to the other while they worked. The grey shale, granite calcite, embedded in the island energised them to toil like demons on Norm’s wrecked green boat. But questions sprung out of the natural geology. Would they sail back to Desperance so that each could return to their respective sides of town? The more Norm slapped and banged the boat into shape, the more his mind became possessed by the mystery of how Hope did not die at sea. Even if she had fallen from the sky, no normal person (which she was) could survive in the dangerous Gulf waters for very long. ‘Wasn’t that true, Dad?’ she mused, childlike to the core. Did anyone hear that? Liberties found new meaning outside of Desperance. The more they became acquainted, the more carefully he posed his questions to her, and the more her words danced back, with a lot of liberties too. Finally, one day, Norm could not stand it anymore. His nostrils flared with hot air and he snapped at her
:
‘How would I know anything? Me! I only got my education from reading the Christian Bible.’ Had he heard anyone giving her permission to step inside his family? Eh!

Well! For all it mattered, he thought the girl was stupid. He had tried to awaken her earlier in the night to show her the phosphorescence lighting the water. Another good sign to be in the presence of the ancestral serpent. What did you do that for? She clung to the inside of the boat believing any minute that the boat would be overturned and they would drown. He had to tell her it had gone away and eventually she became calm. He told himself he had to acknowledge that the girl was petrified of water and would very likely make his grandson afraid of water. So, without much contemplation over the matter, or bothering to consult her, he decided he would take Bala and look after him. The boy would not be left to live with simpletons. Other people could live alongside their chitchat if they wanted to and be blinded forever with stuff like that. He glanced past Hope and realised he still felt mighty angry all the same with whatnot now, with a child involved. ‘Whatnot got a mad wife because he can’t see straight.’ He hissed under his breath at the expanse of ocean, as though he was talking to his son. ‘Whatnot while I am alive I own my blood.’

One time, weeks before the sea journey, while they worked on the all-consuming, energy-draining reconstruction of the boat, he told her finally, ‘You’d be flat out remembering what happened yesterday let alone what happened days before.’ Again, she taunted, parroting his own words:
If you please how could anyone come walking out of the sea?
He never mentioned it again, because suddenly he thought of Elias watching him and it dawned on him, there and then on that strange beach of rubbish that rattled when the water rushed through it at high tide, that possibly a guiding hand was manipulating the strings, and they were nothing more than puppets. Someone blew the words out of their mouths. Some hand coalescing his mind created this unwanted episode in his life. He stared into that moving mouth, squinting with the glare of the sun, staring at that grotesque, talking doll who had words that flowed like a river.

But he knew if they were to leave the island, work must continue and they had to do it together. First he ignored her when she claimed that the boat was hers since she found it on her island. Then, just to break the monotonous chatter, he asked her if she believed in the Bible. She said: ‘No, naturally, I don’t believe in all of that whitefella stuff.’ He told her he believed in the Bible because the white people had prospered by believing in what the Bible had told them. ‘You remember the story about the sea parting for the people to walk through it? No? Of course you people wouldn’t know that story either, I suppose, because you people talk, talk, talk and you learn nothing.