by Peter Docker
Jack stops.
‘You wouldn’t wanna get too far away from your boys, Jack ... No telling what might happen...’
Jack looks to the speaker. Young James is like a king brown snake that’s been sleeping all winter, storing up venom, and is woken by the sun and an unpleasant vibration against his belly.
Jack stands his ground and turns his eyes on me.
I can see him clearly through the greenish ultraviolet protection glass of his helmet. He hasn’t changed a bit. He should be handsome still, but the ugly shit inside him is really starting to show on his face. I catch myself wondering the same about myself. Why do I never look in the mirror? Am I frightened that I’m worse than Jack? It’d serve me right for thinking I’m a better man than him. He surely thinks he’s a better man than me.
He’s trying to read me. ‘Conway.’
I’m trying to read him through the UVP. ‘Jack.’
‘Now why aren’t I surprised?’
He doesn’t really want an answer. He’s always needed an audience, though. He hasn’t thought of anything smart to say. I change my mind and decide to answer him.
‘I’m not surprised to see you either, Jack.’
‘Come and have a chat, Con man.’
‘Are we going for a morning trot? Or a gallop?’
There is a moment before the brothers get my meaning. It’s like a wave curling, that moment that suspends time, when the wave peaks, hangs and then crashes. There are giggles all around me. The brothers are laughing openly at the jodhpurs now.
Jack spins on his heel.
‘A nice canter, perhaps?’ I offer up meekly.
Jack strides back to the guarded doorway, speaking to his troopers out of the corner of his mouth as he goes. ‘Get em both out. Separate em.’
And then he disappears through the metal door in the tank wall.
The Water Board trooper on the end turns and stares at me. He raises the visor on his riot helmet. I see his black eye from last night. He doesn’t look happy. Small but dangerous.
‘Come on!’ he says through gritted teeth.
‘Come on Aussie, come on, come on,’ one of the brothers sings under his breath. The trooper doesn’t take his angry grey eyes off me but strides out to our right, to where this other young brother is standing on his own. He’s only fifteen or sixteen and a bit unsure of himself. He is frozen like a roo in a spotlight. We all are. It’s the weapons. We know that these troopers will kill us all. It’s happened before. And the truck bearing down on him is the angry little trooper, with the black eye from last night. Before we can move or even make a sound, Black-Eye-From-Last-Night clubs the youth a terrific downward blow with his weapon on the head and neck. The others troopers have read his intentions exactly, and as the young Countryman crumples into the red earth floor, their rifles are already coming up to aim at us. We see their fingers push off their safety catches. Our eyes zone through the drama of the big picture to read the details that we need.
‘Come now!’
A nasty thrill thrums down my spine. I should’ve stepped out before. That young lad took the hit for me. I try to keep this feeling at bay so I don’t lose my focus. It’s done.
Mularabone and I step away from the group and walk out towards the troopers. I’m a couple of steps closer and I’m going to get to the trooper first. I can hear Mularabone thinking, ‘He’s gonna go for a hit, bruz.’ He probly hears me thinking, ‘Yeah, bruz.’
I know it’s coming because everything has already begun to go in slow motion. If I fight there could be a bloodbath. I know what these type of fullas are like, the Water Board troopers, I mean.
But I can’t go down. He’s holding the rifle across his body. His left foot is forward. He’s gonna butt-slam me in the face. I hold his gaze. There is an almost imperceptible movement from the toe of his front left foot. Here it comes. I’m going forward. Straight at the threat and under it to my right side. The butt of his weapon slips past my face, and I’m in close now and low, with both my hands I’m grabbing his arm and yanking hard in the same direction as his own momentum. He’s overreached and is easily pulled off balance. He goes past me and lands in a heap, dust flying, at the feet of one of his trooper mates. Mularabone and I do not stay our pace and are both past him and heading for the door by the time he can get to his feet. The inmates erupt with cheers and howls of delight, Countrymen and rednecks alike. We’ve done this move before. It’s exactly the drill to overrun a fortified or dug-in position. But now we have no grenades or automatic weapons to do the damage inside the wired-up perimeter.
I’m almost at the door when the troopers’ nightsticks slam into my head, neck, and back.
Nine: Boxed In
I’m in a much smaller cell. A box more than a cell. I’ve been in these metal boxes before. These cells are defence issue. I’m cuffed to the metal bench The Sarge used to call ‘the couch’ with more than a hint of irony. Like the walls, floor, and roof, it is plain metal, buffed but dull. Like my captors. My head is aching. Pulsing like a molten lead jellyfish; like coming up those stone steps only hours ago, my mind trying to compute what the uncles said. I know there is a part of me that recognised the conversation. But there is a dark cloud obscuring memories of my father. For the coming ceremony down south – it makes sense of the Countrymen wanting to smash the power of the Water Board. To smash it, not with guns, with something more lasting. The ceremony will make the venture not about diminishing the invaders, but about increase for us. The ceremony in the south will surely be held at a place of increase. What about what was not said? Who is looking for us? How do we escape the Water Board, and operators like Jack? I’ve never taken part in a Countryman ceremony in my life. My mind is jumping about the place like a half empty drum of fuel in the back of the ute. I’m tired and hungry.
My right hand is cuffed down tight but my legs are free. I slip my buttocks down the bench, carefully slide my right arm down onto the couch, and place the outside of my elbow down flat on the metal. The metal is already beginning to lose its overnight coolness. I allow the movement of my arm to pull my shoulders and then my head down, taking the weight across the back of my shoulders; and I lift my pelvis and push my legs and feet up over my head so that I go into a full headstand on the couch, braced against the back wall. I close my eyes and listen to the deep song of my head-throb. As the blood rushes into my head and my energy centres are inverted, the throbbing rises in pitch. It rises until I think I can feel my brain beating like my heart, rattling around in the bone cell of my skull. I wonder if my heart is resting for a moment, letting my brain keep the blood flowing, or maybe they’ve swapped and my heart is having a good think. And then it is like the tide is going out. I stand on the shoreline of breath, and watch the pain gently receding from me. I see it as the tide going out. Only it isn’t the clear blue waters of the Indian Ocean – but some dark oily liquid of unknown derivation. When the pain recedes there is nothing on my beach. Just the pain oil-stain. A few small rocks. A metal box slowly warming in the morning sun. How strange it feels to be in this metal box on the beach of pain. These cells were designed to be picked up and dropped by helicopters. That was years ago, before the helicopters stopped flying. A moveable jail. The Sarge always said, may his soul find rest, that the trouble with the Water Board, the trouble with the Eastern States was that they began as a penal colony and just can’t grow out of that jailer mentality. Here they are, putting us in jail, and not giving us access to our own Country, our own water. Time isn’t a straight line. Isn’t even a circle: kind of orbs that intertwine across universes and dimensions. This is what the uncles were talking about.
The metal door slides back, and Jack steps in. He’s changed into desert fatigues. The UVP cloth composite hangs down to obscure his face. His hands are gloved. He looks like a zombie trooper. Even though I’m inverted, I know it’s him from the way he holds his shoulders: reminds me of someone.
I squeeze my eyelids to blink away the sweat. When did I start sweating? The box is
getting hot. Or is it my pain? Or my fear?
Jack quite deliberately takes off his hat, and with it the UVP, revealing his face. In the confined space I can smell the grog on his breath. The diffused smell of that liquor circles my heart like a pack of dogs, hungry and wild. I have to really concentrate to keep myself here in this moment with Jack, and to keep out those memories and half-forgotten dreams crowding in on me, salivating like those starving dogs. Jack’s eyes stay hidden behind his shades. He appears surprised to see me. Maybe just taken aback to see me upside down. He stays in the doorway. Maybe he’s worried about me launching myself off the wall in a kicking attack.
‘You stink, Conman.’
‘You going soft, Jack?’
He smiles at my jibe. His shades are thick and chunky but I can still feel the hate burning behind them. Everyone’s hatred takes a different shape. Jack’s is an insolent child sitting inside the rim of his eyes. The Insolent Child of Hate is doing something with his hands: fishing, or, no, maybe it’s a yo-yo. I can still make out the movement through the dark glasses.
Jack loves his luxury but perversely envies my wretchedness. He’s never had anything to believe in: just the warm and soothing false bed of comfort.
I slowly disengage from my headstand and allow my body to retrace its steps until I’m sitting back down on the couch, looking at Jack.
‘What are we going to do with you, Conman?’
‘Who? You and your Eastern States mates?’
Now Jack’s smile is gone. His face is blown clean like a desert dune, just the fishbone ripples to show that some force of air has passed that way.
‘Don’t think I won’t do what I have to do,’ he says.
‘Are you threatening me?’
‘This is serious.’
‘You don’t have to do anything.’
‘You know I do, Conman.’
‘I know you will. You choose to.’
Jack takes a breath. He gives his head an almost imperceptible shake. I wonder if he is trying to shake something off, or allow something to settle on him more completely.
‘History is history,’ Jack says.
‘Whose history?’
‘There is nothing between us, Conway.’
I keep looking at him evenly. I know he’s right. There’s nothing between us. Look at him there in his Water Board fighting rig – our ancestors worked so hard to keep this Eastern States thinking from corrupting our community. I can’t keep the scorn out of my eyes.
Jack is holding a small remote control. He taps it with the finger of his right hand. Suddenly my jaw clamps down, my muscles thrash, and my joints rattle like train tracks. The electric shock throws me to the floor. I look at Jack’s boots. Notice the rubber soles.
‘What do you reckon?’ he is asking me.
At least he’s enthusiastic about something.
‘It’s new,’ I say, struggling for control of my tongue.
‘My idea.’ Jack positively beams. ‘Got the idea up on the islands. They converted it for me.’
Prack! Snapple! Cop! The charge pulses through me again.
Fuck, it’s a weird pain. I’d rather be hit.
‘I’d rather be hit,’ comments Jack.
I wrestle my tongue back to the floor of my mouth and breathe in through my nose.
‘Jack. Are you angry with me because I saved your life?’
Jack rips out an extending baton with his free hand and smashes it into my right shoulder.
‘Or because now you owe me?’
The baton thuds into my other shoulder. Jack folds up the baton and sheathes it.
‘You stole my trucks.’
‘I didn’t know they were your trucks, Jack.’
‘Ya fucken know now.’
‘Do you think I did this to hurt you, Jack?’
‘Do you know how much shit I’ve had to take for those trucks?’
‘Ya gotta expect to lose a few trucks.’
Smash! Frapple! Strop! Another charge hacks through me. I can’t get my eyes open now. It feels really bright in here. So bright. I hear his voice in my light-bathed pain cloud. I try to get my eyes open but can only manage a tiny crack against the streaming light. He is a huge blurry silhouette. Like the god of the setting sun.
‘It’s not about the trucks, Jack. And you know it.’
‘What?’
‘Who sent you to get us?’
Now I’ve really got his attention. The Insolent Child that lives in his eye is having a fit, raging around inside that eyeball like he’ll destroy the place.
‘Who is looking for us, Jack?’
‘Just me.’
‘You’re a bad liar. Which is funny, you’ve had a shitload of practice.’
He takes a couple of steps and slams his right boot into my guts. I should’ve let him die when I had the fucken chance. He grabs my hair and lifts up my head. He leans in close to me.
‘He can’t get you if I don’t tell him I’ve got you!’
‘Who?’
‘They don’t know what it’s like out here, dealing with your kind.’
‘What do they want with us?’
‘Doesn’t matter, does it?’
‘That’s why you can’t kill us.’
‘He can have you when I’m finished. If there’s anything left.’
He hits the remote again. His whole countenance shakes as the charge goes through me, as though he is generating it out of his own body. He’s trying to restart my heart. Stop my brain from pumping the blood. Stop my liver from thinking. The Insolent Child is swinging his outside leg back and forth from all the excitement. He’s a fidgety little bastard.
‘I’m going to hurt everyone you have decided to side with against your own people. Starting with Mularabone. Hurt him good.’
‘Don’t you mean hurt him bad?’
‘And you’re gonna take me to them. I’m gonna kill them all.’
I try to manage a smile. ‘Fuck, Jack – I thought you were gonna kiss me.’
He punches me in the face. A short, sharp blow. Kind of wakes me up a bit.
‘Jack, you sound like an Eastern Stater.’
‘And you look like a white man.’
I’m sure Jack is trying to smile as he says this but his face muscles rebel against his heart and can’t quite make the right shape. This is like those white men who took the other path to my ancestors; those on the other side of our continent who couldn’t respect Law and Country. It is said they laughed as they watched the Countrymen dying in front of their eyes from the poison they put in the blankets and flour. As the strychnine threw the afflicted bodies into the terrible rictus of the dance macabre, and the screams would come, the white men would watch and laugh. But I see now from Jack’s face that it wasn’t real laughter, but the noise of a soul rusting away at high speed, being corroded at the source by greed and hate. This is the origin of the fidgety little bastard spirit that lives in his eye. Some type of memory, of passed-on pain.
‘Seriously, Jack: I really thought you were gonna kiss me.’
Jack’s hat settles back onto his head, the UVP covering his face. His boots turn and disappear from my sight. The door slides shut behind him.
I pull myself back onto the couch. Jack’s gone off to organise the drugs; I’m fucked now. The Sarge warned us this is how they roll, bless him. Ya gotta summon up something to resist. Something beyond the physical. If them uncles were right, I’ve gotta find the pathway. Stop waiting for it to happen to me. Gotta go after it.
What The Sarge was talking about – about holding out – wasn’t about not giving any intel you have; everyone will do that eventually. That’s why the cadres were set up in small cells that don’t know the big picture details – so you can’t give it up. The cell you are in is all you can give up. The Sarge, may his soul find peace, was talking about not being destroyed by the interrogation.
I close my eyes. Focus on my breathing. Focus on feeling myself in this cell. My body sitting here on this met
al couch. The light kiss of blood on my face, the dull sting of bruises down my back and legs. I breathe in. I breathe out. I do nothing. Allow my breath to come in through my nose. Out through my mouth. I’m spinning coatings around myself. Spinning from my deep web. The core. The spirit animal that cannot be destroyed. Will not allow itself to be destroyed. I know my totem is a spider. That I am descended from people who lived a totemic existence long before my ancestor arrived at the Darbal Yaragan river mouth, south in Nyoongar Boodjar. This is what Birra-ga was talking about. In the spaces around his words. And now that spider is spinning to protect me. I invoke her by speaking her secret name. Quietly at first and then I am singing the secret name over and over until the box is humming with her presence. With her power. Her power to weave across the worlds. Her power to weave across time, to weave the past, present and future into the same web, whichever comes first. The secret-name-song spirals up and out of my throat like a willy-willy. I sing a secret incantation that I didn’t know I knew. It is like I have remembered it from another time, from another life. To weave in the spirit and dream world with this one we can see with our eyes, touch with our flesh.
I breathe in. I breathe out. In. Out.
Rise. Fall. Wet. Dry. Black. White. Up. Down.
In. Out.
Waking Dream Memory: The Eyes of Spiders
I’m lying flat. The weapon in my hands still feels new. The feeling hasn’t become second nature yet. The Sarge says that will come. I’m trying not to grip the weapon too tightly. My hands are sweaty from the plastic and metal, and the new anxiety of guard duty. The responsibility has come down on me like a weight. The Sarge says that eventually it will be a fuel, the protectiveness for my fellow warriors. I’m ten metres higher up than the others camped in the little valley. I can just make out their sleeping forms in the darkness. The Sarge is at the back of the others in the small patrol. It’s quiet. So quiet. I could be the last person left on earth.
A shooting star catches my eye and I look across the hilly edge of our little valley. Then I see them. Five or six redback spiders as big as helicopters are picking their way slowly over the top of the ridge. My eyes flick to the top of the rising ground where I am, to see more giant redbacks. They move slowly and surely. They can’t miss us. It’s as if they know we’re here. Maybe they’ve smelled out my spider-ness, even in the darkness. They make no show that they’ve seen us but their line is so direct. I glance back at my sleeping comrades. They’re depending on me. But where there were bedrolls, the ground is empty. I quickly pick up movement just beyond. I see my comrades as spiders, too. The five daddy-long-legs with their oblong bodies and impossibly long spindly legs are backing away down the valley. The redbacks are still slowly converging on me from both sides. I can see the starlight glinting on their fangs and the tiny bristles on their long slender legs. The bright red marks on their backs don’t seem quite right. They are too uniform, like some kind of crimson insignia. I put my weapon into my shoulder and hit the ‘ready’ on the electric firer. The tiny red light winks at me. I am good to go. I take aim at the nearest redback. Our eyes lock. It’s not like looking into anything recognisable, but like staring into an unknowable chasm. There can be no exchange, no understanding here – just the emptiness of confrontation.