The Waterboys

by Peter Docker

  I hear myself screaming. Jack swivels quickly and, using his turning momentum smacks me across the mouth. The blow snaps my head sideways but I keep screaming. Jack is facing me now and screaming himself, screaming into my face, screaming through his cat-got-the-cream smile. My head feels light and cold, there is blood seeping through the dressing and running down my neck.

  The cruiser races through the trees and over the lip we go. The gunner at the front swings his big weapon to bear.

  Ahead of us in the shallow valley there is a mob of people near their morning fire. That moment is like a photograph. Uncle Birra-ga is looking up and straight at the camera. Straight at me. Aunty Ouraka is over the fire. There are a couple of Countrymen sitting a bit apart and a big group of Countrywomen and kids on the far side. There are two little girls skipping up the hill towards us.

  Then they are all gone.

  The valley is empty. There is no one there. Not even a fire. The little bit of smoke in the sky maybe drifted in from somewhere else.

  Jack is speaking frantically on his headset.

  The cruiser comes to an abrupt halt.

  I lean forward, straining against my bonds. ‘Watch out Jack! It might be a trap!’ I yell, and then I’m laughing like a madman.

  Behind us the other two cruisers fan out. Now they’re nervous. Not so sure.

  Jack is talking.

  Our vehicle starts to edge forward.

  ‘Watch out! Watch out! We’re going to be killed by savages!’

  Jack turns and glares at me.

  ‘Dangerous women and children! Killers!’

  Jack is pointing a handgun at me now. I see in his eyes that he is going to kill me. That insolent child that lives in his eye is positively quivering with anticipation.

  I go silent. I slump. Slump silently. Jack wants to see my fear. I try to look as terrified as I can. I’m not sure if he believes me but he doesn’t fire. When he turns away from me again I have to really concentrate hard to stop myself giggling like a schoolboy who’s been told off in front of the class. I know enough about men to know that Jack will kill me under such circumstances, despite someone high up looking for me. Out here, I mean. Not back in the Water Board compound. The rules have always been different out here. In the scrub. In the desert.

  I’m slumped like a sullen teenager. I’m bored and disinterested in everything around me. I’m looking over Jack’s shoulder without much interest. I’ll be bored with whatever we find. I’m thinking about telling Jack that this massacre is boring, they haven’t even killed anyone yet. I look down at the trooper’s uniform they’ve put me in. We haven’t even killed anyone yet. Yeah, that’s what I’ll say.

  Then the front of the cruiser disappears as though driven into some invisible curtain. The driver panics and slams on the skids and the big vehicle slides to a halt. Ahead of us, we can see the Countrymen again. Now ya see em. Now ya don’t. Now ya do.

  The last of the mob are disappearing into a hole in the earth. Someone has put the fire out with an extinguisher. They’ve gathered up everything and gone. Gone down into the earth our mother.

  ‘Fire!’ screams Jack.

  The gunner leans on his trigger and the big weapon explodes in his hands, killing him instantly. Jack is thrown backwards out of the commander’s seat and lands heavily on me, swearing and cursing. He is still holding his handgun. He pulls his UVP balaclava down, pushes off me, and jumps down from the cruiser. Jack takes off towards the mob, hopeful for a shot. From the earth in front of us rises up a young man. He is shirtless and holds a nulla-nulla in his left hand. It is Young James. He’s disabled the machinegun with some kind of plug he slipped into the barrel as it came through the projected image. That’s a cool head.

  Jack is lifting his weapon to fire when Young James knocks it from his hand in an underhand blow. Jack goes into a martial-arts stance. Young James smashes his front knee and down he goes. Jack is looking back up the hill now. He can see the other two cruisers waiting, full of armed men. But they can’t see him. The mob are using a hologram projection system to mask themselves. Jack half gets up and opens his mouth to yell orders. Young James can read his thought as surely as I can. The next blow collects Jack on the side of the head and he goes down hard. Young James looks up at me.

  Maybe I’m still drugged cause all I can think about is seeing Young James yesterday in the tank. But even as I’m blinking in slow motion, I’m thinking that can’t be yesterday, as all these other vague yesterdays are yapping at my heels like camp dogs, hungry and hairless. Maybe those yesterdays are fiction, planted in my mind by Jack. I remember watching the footy with me mates, and drinking beer, and there was a huge fight right on the siren. Fuck, we laughed. Then I’m down south, arriving at the Darbal Yaragan river mouth in Nyoongar Country with Captain Fremantle. But that was three hundred years ago. The possibilities of yesterdays are endless. It’s the tomorrows that are the most hammered down.

  Down in the valley, Mularabone stands up, too. I knew he couldn’t be far away from such a brilliant high-tech defence for the bush camp. He looks bad. His whole head looks puffy and swollen. He is holding some bush medicine against his side. He smiles at me. I try to stand and am yanked back down by my cuffs. Jack is messing with my head. He wants me to feel guilty. Whoever tells the history positions the emotions of the receiver. I tell myself it’s the drugs they’ve given me to excite my paranoia. I breathe.

  The mob turn and move down to where the fire was, and quickly disappear into the earth. I want to be with them. I’m on the wrong side. This Water Board trooper’s uniform puts me on the other side of history. Maybe that’s what my history dreams are about. Putting history right in my head. Showing me which side I’m on. If there is such a thing as different sides, different worlds, different views of history. Of now. I brought these killers here today. This is what Jack’s history-telling will say. The photos will always show me in this Water Board uniform. Lies are easy to sell, said The Sarge. It is the truth that is hard to swallow. I breathe.

  The driver revs the engine and reverses. The projection is gone and all we’ve got is the empty valley with no morning fire and a lot of Djenga with unfired weapons.

  The troopers run down and grab Jack and get him onto a stretcher. He hasn’t moved a sniffle. Young James really cracked him one. They get Jack into the back of the cruiser. They leave me handcuffed up on top and turn around and head back. As the three armoured cruisers turn to head back, I see Mularabone standing in the shadow of a twisted tree. There must be another hatch there. He’s trying to send me his strength. I reach out to him with my spirit. He watches me. I am free. He is chained. No. I am chained and he is free. Then the woman from Uncle’s mural cavern appears at his side. Our eyes meet across the space. She makes a hand signal to me, two fingers almost pointed at me, then gathered in a basket back to her breast: I’m coming for you. That hand signal travels across the space and lodges in my breastbone. I put my hand over the place where it lodges.

  I twist my head and look back to them until they are indecipherable shadows in the tree line.

  Dreaming 44: The Disappearing Track

  I’m walking. Barefoot now. Red dust. Desert. My muscles are dog-tired. It’s only my bones moving me around. Something way ahead of me is pulling me toward it. Like there is a cord attached to me, drawing me steadily toward the never-getting-closer horizon. In my mind the cord is a single strand of unbroken spider’s web that would shine with dew if it were early morning and stretch out before me like a tiny silver airborne highway with no end in sight.

  I see no web. No dew. Just my feet moving rhythmically under me.

  Is the cord attached to my eyes? They feel free. I tell myself I could flick them from side to side and look around if I wanted to. I just don’t want to. So I gaze ahead unwaveringly with my soft and free eyes.

  Is the cord attached to my heart? My heart feels uplifted; alive at least, pounding merrily away in the front of my chest, thumping out a beat for my feet to follo
w, the rhythm that ties me to all other living creatures, to this land, this greatest of all the instruments. This is not a heart with encumbrances.

  Is it my gut being pulled? My soft eyes drop to observe. Posture appears fine. Bones stacked on top of each other. Belly seems fine.

  But there is something. Past my belly, where I am looking now, at my feet – all is not well. I watch these feet lift and place down, push off, lift, and place down for a few cycles as I search for a clue to the wrongness. I look up again. Everything appears to be normal.

  I notice the heat, beating down on me in waves and pulsing up at me in great shimmers from below. The horizon. Never getting closer. Fine. No birds or animals. Pretty quiet. Fine. My track. Fine.

  How can there be a track in front of me? I haven’t walked there yet. But there it is. A perfect set of my own tracks stretching away to the never-getting-closer horizon. I look down to see my feet carefully and nonchalantly placing themselves in their own print, push off, lift, and into the next one.

  I hear this sound. The insistent whine of a truck in low gear. My head swivels to see what is behind me. There is nothing on the sand. No mark or sign of me having passed by. As each of my feet lift out of my prints, the prints dissolve into the desert and are gone in a moment. Maybe two hundred metres behind me there is a truck. It’s one of those ten-tonne water trucks, sprinkling water out the back to keep the dust down. Behind the wheel is that big ugly redneck bastard with his black-rimmed Coke-bottle glasses and his handlebar moustache, humming some obscure tune, with his rifle laying within reach on the empty seat beside him.

  Thirteen: Talking With Rednecks

  The lift doors open. Rough hands grab me and drag me out. The doors close again behind me and the lift makes its way back to the surface with a jerk and a whine.

  I hear them talking over my head, but I can’t tune in, too bone-tired and spirit-weary. Here I am, swallowed again by the earth our mother. But now her womb is not bursting with the warm blood of life but is cool and dry and hard, and stinks of fear and death. Maybe she can no longer nurture us. The privations of the Water Board crawling over her red earthen flesh and sucking her dry have left her without the means or the desire. Or maybe she is still warm and moist and bursting with life, always warm and moist and bursting with life – but I’ve come in on a hypodermic – and she thinks I am foreign matter. Soon she will make antibodies. And they’ll come for me.

  I open my eyelids to let in a tiny sliver of light. We’re in an underground cavern. Maybe old diggings. I’m against the rock wall. Down past my feet is the platform where I was dragged from the lift cage. There are drag tracks in the dirt that lead into my prone body like freeway ramps. There are a few lights up high on the walls but it is generally pretty dim. The cavity in the rock is big and there are small groups of people everywhere.

  There are two men squatting near some blankets loosely stacked against the hard rock wall.

  ‘He’s dressed as a trooper, he could get baccy sent down.’

  ‘He’s a fucken trooper. Let’s just hurt him.’

  ‘You used to be a trooper.’

  ‘And you can see how well they’ve treated me?’ the second man spits.

  Shit. I know that voice: Blood Nut from the Tank. How many prisoners does the Water Board have being shuttled around their chaotic system? It’s not only the mob in the refugee camp that needs to be freed.

  I glance up through my slitted eyelids to notice the dim light touching his flame-head. He glances in my direction and I squeeze my eyes closed: a child playing hide and seek, trying to wish away the forty-tonne tanker bearing down on him.

  I hear Blood Nut moving back over to me. His meaty fingers grip my shoulder and he shakes me like a rag-doll.

  ‘Eh! Shareholder! Wake up! Wake up!’

  I open my eyes slowly and peer out from my hazy pain daze.

  ‘What?’

  ‘We dragged you in.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Are you a trooper?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Got any baccy?’

  ‘Side pocket,’ I say, with no real memory of how it got there, or how I know.

  Blood Nut rummages in the pocket at my thigh and pulls out the small pouch. He peeks in like a five-year-old looking inside his Christmas present.

  ‘Enough for a couple,’ he announces with glee.

  He pulls out my papers and rolls three thin ones. He passes one back to his mate and hands one to me. I put it in my mouth, prop myself up and accept his proffered flame. We all inhale.

  ‘I’m Mitch. This is Torby.’

  I nod at both of them. There is a strange silence while we smoke and look out into the chamber at the other prisoners.

  Then their eyes snap back to me in unison.

  ‘What’s ya name, Trooper?’ asks Blood Nut.

  ‘I’m not a trooper.’

  ‘Let’s call him Trooper,’ offers Torby.

  ‘That all right by you, Trooper?’

  I try to manage a smile. They both look away, satisfied.

  I look out as well. I’ve never seen so many white people in jail. People are wrapped in blankets or sitting close together for warmth. There are a few arty fires in drums, surrounded by frail-looking men warming their hands. I feel the bandage which still holds the flesh to the side of my head. It’s why he doesn’t recognise me.

  ‘They catch ya stealin water?’ says Torby.

  ‘The water is ours,’ I say.

  For the second time both their heads snap around to face me with the precision of dancers. Or maybe soldiers.

  ‘Who told you that?’ asks Mitch the Blood Nut, moving in on me.

  I push myself up a little higher, and pull hard on my thinnie. I want to look him in the eye.

  ‘Them that look after it.’

  Mitch the Blood Nut grabs me by the throat and pulls me up to him. We both drop our thinnies.

  ‘Do I know you?’

  Torby goes to grab our two discarded thinnies. Mitch sees him move and instantly drops his hold on me and gives Torby a ‘don’t argue’ shove in the chest. Torby and I hit the deck at the same moment and Mitch scoops up the two thinnies.

  ‘I thought youse were finished wiv em,’ says Torby.

  Mitch scowls at him and restores the thinnies to his mouth, and then to mine. We both drag in the smoke, looking at each other.

  ‘What sort of man would try n take ya thinnie before ya finished?’ says Mitch.

  We smoke.

  ‘What if the Countrymen are right, Mitch?’

  I pitch my question like the ultimate slow ball and it hangs in the air for an eternity. Mitch is considering what I’ve said. This is all I can hope for. How can he still be loyal to the system that put him here? How can we not be on the same side? I should just shut up. I can’t help myself.

  ‘The water belongs to the Water Board,’ Mitch says. ‘The Company owns the Water Board. It is the Company. If you’re not a shareholder you don’t deserve shit.’

  ‘Are you a shareholder, Mitch?’

  Mitch looks at me like I’m a maggot crawling out of his mother’s corpse. He spits a dark globule onto the rock dust floor. ‘We got duped. In the East, the white man took everything, lived like gods, and gave the black man nothing. For hundreds of years.’

  ‘Listen to yourself, Mitch. The “black man”? What the fuck’s that? That’s not our language. Fremantle said no to that. They brought that. The Water Board. And what they did over East was fuck the Country up. The Country and the Countrymen. They stopped all ceremony, brought in European farming large-scale, and poisoned the rivers.’

  ‘That’s bullshit. Propaganda shit,’ says Torby.

  ‘Did Jack tell you that?’

  ‘You know Jack?’ asks Torby.

  ‘Jack’s a legend,’ says Mitch.

  ‘He’s my brother.’

  ‘Whadaya doin down here, then?’

  ‘What are you doin down here?’

  ‘Rotting.’

/>   ‘Yeah, well, me too.’

  I suck on my cigarette. I’m talking social political history with Mitch the Blood Nut who wanted to rape me a week ago, or however the fuck long ago that was.

  I’m suddenly thinking of old Captain Fremantle. Once his heart has been opened to the spirit of the Country, and he’s felt the power and serenity of the oneness of all things – how does he sell it to a couple of hundred armed Englishmen, whose stated aim is to annex this land for Empire, and all get fucking rich in the process?

  My head is all over the shop. Maybe Jack has dumped me down here to hide me from whoever’s looking for me?

  Mitch and Torby finish their thinnies. They stub them out and watch me take my last drag. Always been a slow smoker. I stub out my thinnie. Blood Nut stands. Torby follows. They look at me. Maybe they expect me to stand. I just keep looking out.

  ‘Goin for a walk,’ announces Blood Nut. As if I give a shit.

  ‘Righto,’ I say, hoping to get the right subordinate tone. It satisfies them. I lie still. My right hand retrieves the hand signal from the woman from Uncle’s mural cave from its breastbone hidey hole and caresses the movement – two fingers almost pointed at the subject, then gathered back to the chest in a basket of fingers: I’m coming for you.

  Ghost of History: Planting Tears

  I wake before Fremantle. We’re curled up like dogs on a little sandy beach. In front of us a freshwater stream tumbles down from the sandstone rock to form a pool. We are shirtless. Our swords are gone. Captain Fremantle’s pack is open beside him; the top of his leather-bound journal protrudes from the canvas bag. As I watch him, he too sits up. I can see that like me, though stiff from being unused to sleeping on the ground, he is refreshed and alert. Up behind us there is a three-foot lizard moving down the rocks. His head moves from side to side, his tongue flicking out to taste the air. He is completely unhurried and untroubled. He heads straight for the journal sticking out of the canvas bag, and tastes it with his tongue of deepest blue. He walks on top of the journal with his clawed feet and pauses. His eyes are small and dark, his belly skin has a deep fold running the length of his body; he’s still got plenty of growing to do in this skin. He flicks out his tongue again and heads off.