‘No?’
‘No, there is no problem here.’
‘What happened then?’ he asked, just to show the Council men he was on top of the job.
‘Ah! I fall over.’
‘How did you fall then?’
‘I fall over.’
‘Where?’
‘Fall over?’
‘What?’
Everywhere Truthful asked the question, he received a grand demonstration of hand movements. ‘Hmmm! Oh! My. I am feeling no good! No good at all today! If you had any sense you’d run us up to the hospital like a good boy.’ Truthful had the woman with what was left of the white dress with him. Angel came straight up to her with outstretched arms, and hugged her, but it was full of hate.
The Council men and women too, following Truthful into every household in the camp, looking on in mock silence, gave knowing looks to one another of a familiar: Nudge-nudge! Wink-wink! If you please! What’s he been up too, jumping over the back fence at night already? Look at the familiarity if you please. What was the world coming to, when the police force had no power over these people? Acutely embarrassed by his lack of progress, and overhearing the whispering behind his back, Truthful terminated the sideshow with a demonstration of Brisbane Valley cop briskness by saying he was arresting the first likely suspects to catch his eye. The bemused Council people crowding around, uninvited, huddling to avoid bodily contact with anything inside the Pricklebush home in case they picked up something quite dreadful, and having had an eyeful of poverty chipped at Truthful: Let’s take em and take em, get em off our backs, bloody mongrels are a prime nuisance to everyone anyhow. Send these two little buggers off to a reform school or something. That will show them who’s boss of this town.
It is true that silence has a cloak because it covered all of those little tin humpies all day after the official people went back to minding their own businesses. Normal Phantom sat at his kitchen table glaring at Angel whenever she came into the room. Neither spoke. He knew what had happened. And she was not repentant, not one bit. There was no end of her fussing over her statue, cleaning it, looking at it, examining the cracks and chips, helping herself to the full range of Normal’s fish paints, making a pride of place for it in her bedroom. The day slipped into an even quieter night with no lanterns lit. The Pricklebush wore the total darkness of cloud cover.
Once the dawn broke, Normal Phantom stepped out of his house to go down to the boat. It was then he felt the eerie quietness, a stillness he found difficult to place, where even the birds did not sing. And no sign of his bird.
He was expecting retaliation, and he looked around up in the branches of the trees to find his bird. As he surveyed the surroundings, something struck him as being out of place, a surreal quietness: silence had replaced the noise of children’s crying, families arguing. The Phantom family was on its own. The other families had moved during the night. In complete and utter silence, they had picked up everything they owned, and moved to the other side of town. That was when the war of the dump caused the division, and people realigned themselves, Eastsider or Westsider, and that was that. The Phantoms lost whatever near and dear or distant relatives they had, except some old people who refused to move. No one else wanted to put up with another minute more of what they called Mrs Angel Day.
The war of the dump burst apart the little world of the Phantoms and their related families. Everyone in the Pricklebush from elder to child, Eastsider to Westsider, injured and uninjured started bringing up their faded memories of the ancient wars, to be renewed with vigour and the hard evidence of all facts. Everyone now knew of someone in their families who had been assigned to make the long pilgrimage over their vast lands which occupied dozens of cattle stations, where they travelled in clapped-out vehicles, near and far within their tribal territories, to seek out their very old senior Law people. The old people were always elusive too, never being where they should be, when their relatives turned up.
‘Well! Where’s old White Whiskers?’
‘He must have gone that-a-way.’
The challenge was to be always on the move, following the old ones travelling their country to at least a thousand sites they knew by memory. It was a test of how good they knew the country before they were able to find old White Whiskers waiting for them. Every family had to know the story of the past. Know, to go about their separate ways, by reclaiming land from fighting long ago.
On the other hand, the townsfolk of Desperance could not make heads or tails out of why they were being sandwiched between Aboriginal people, not only living on either side of them now, but setting up two camps without even saying to anybody what they were doing. All of those families that moved over to the Eastside to get away from the Phantoms, had walked noisily through town in the middle of the night. Everyone had been in a state of high agitation, with loud arguments taking place about the decision to move, Should’ve, shouldn’t’ve, all to the rhythm of cyclone fences being scraped with heavy fighting sticks by some of the youths. People were complaining to each other about the weight of their ragtag belongings, while children zigzagged all over the street with their laughter and cries being heard everywhere. What did it matter to try to hush all the little children since that many dogs in tow, stirred up by the scraping sticks, joined in the racket by running up and down the fences of white people’s homes barking their heads off or leaping up and throwing themselves against the tin walls while trying to get over the fences, and equally with the town dogs inside doing the same, trying to get out? None of this racket worried their owners. Nor did the straggle-taggle give one iota to the peace and quiet of the town. Whatever! Nevermind! as if the town with all of its laws and by-laws for inhabitation did not exist. It was as if they could not care less whether the townsfolk, woken up with all the noise, switched on every single light in their houses in the middle of the night, and stood silently in the front yards, gobsmacked, comprehending they were in the middle of a riot.
Word quickly came back to Norm about what they were saying down at the Council. The town was up that quick smart, nice and early in the morning, looking out around their front yards again, as if searching for order, trying to locate some sense of normality, and the main street was normal, as though nothing had ever happened in the night. Everyone of the white skin jumped into their showers and scrubbed themselves hard for this was what high and mighty powerful people did when they felt unclean, before running out the door, where they went straight over to the Council to talk about the uproar.
Everyone was up in arms even before the meeting got started. This was the normal way they talked straight. No, no coloured person was ever going to forget about this incident of lawless carrying-on like they owned the place. A whiff on the gossip grapevine said who was to blame. ‘It was bloody Normal Phantom. Wouldn’t you believe it. So what then? The man is incapable of handling his wife. What then? Teach him that’s what. Well! We will teach him what’s what.’ That year, Normal Phantom had no chance of winning citizen of the year, nor forever perhaps.
The bell was tolling, ringing non-stop for half an hour, but Normal Phantom never responded to the sound of bells. When no one in the prickly bush camps saw the Phantoms getting involved in Uptown business, they also ignored the bells. The Phantoms only went into town when the bells rang for the sea. Normal said that was the only important reason for ringing the bell, because what happened to the sea affected every single one of them. ‘We are the flesh and blood of the sea and we are what the sea brings the land.’ This was not a sea matter, so no adult person from the Pricklebush went running to see what they wanted.
Yes, there was plenty of worry. Worry straight for Uptown. The Council had a string of evening meetings so everyone could come along and have their voice heard. It was like living in a democracy. Paranoia was the word that best described what took place inside of the squashed Council chambers. Everyone had a story to tell about some Aboriginals who they saw sitting under a tree thinking about lighting fires. Some Abo
riginals were seen pushing up into Uptown itself – abandoned car bodies to live in. You could see Aboriginals living in them behind the fences at the end of their backyards even. Aboriginals were thinking about setting up another camp. The net was not working. What was happening to the net? Wasn’t the net supposed to be there for the purposes of protecting the town against encroachment from people who were not like themselves?
‘Ya mean coons?’ Sanguine-voiced, the local mayor was speaking. A big, beefy, six-two, no-fuss man, who liked to call chalk chalk, or night night. That was his motto. He overshadowed the town with his power.
‘Excuse me, Mr Bruiser, Mayor, you don’t have to talk like that. We are just saying that they are an eyesore, so what are you going to do about it?’
Stan Bruiser was a straight speaker and was such a popular mayor for Uptown of Desperance, that for ten straight years, he had been voted its citizen of the year. It was rigged, some said of the voting box in the Council office. But be what it may, tampering with a ballot box was no great sin when conspiratory theorists worked with no proof. Bruiser, now fifty-six, was a prosperous cattle man, with Elvis combed-back hair and sideburns, dyed the colour of a Santa Gertrudis. He was a hawker by trade until his change of luck due to a foray into the Australian stock market, after he picked up a hint late one night on the radio in the mining-boom seventies. Next day, he piled his last quids in the stock exchange on a tin-pot mining company that struck it rich in Western Australia. So very quick, he was rich.
Good luck to him one supposes, for he cleaned up with his shares and with the spoils, means and wherewithal, he reinvented himself, from somebody driving around the outback’s dying towns and Aboriginal camps on pension day, selling the necessities of life for a profit of three to four hundred per cent after costs. A quid to be made. But just how could one uneducated man, a man just like themselves, make so much money in his lifetime? It was unnatural. Anyone could have done it, he joked, if he had been half smart about prices by collecting drought-time cattle properties like lollies, paying unpaid debts.
Bruiser spoke of being the epitome of the self-made man, and the ‘self-made 24/7 man’ angle was slotted into his utterings to other Desperanians during Australia Day, May Day, Picnic Day, Pioneer Day celebrations where he had the right to speak, right through, down to the demands he made of politicians whose colleagues heard his booming voice on the phone in the hallowed halls of southern parliaments.
The old people in the Pricklebush said the story about the money of hell was different, because Bruiser had unnatural scars that looked like someone had welded an extra skin to his body. They had observed the extra piece of skin that ran from his skull down the left side of his face, along one side of his body, down to his feet and back again, running up the back this time, right up to his skull. Was that unusual? Darn right! Everyone in the Pricklebush thought so. Some of the old ladies were more than curious and yelled out whenever he came down to the Pricklebush camps – ‘Hey! How come the devil stitched you up like a pod?’ Bruiser was sensitive about his scars and ignored their questions. So they spread the word he was an alien, though wisely no one dared say such a thing to his face. You would have to be nuts to say anything like that to Bruiser.
Bruiser said he had seen everything as far as he was concerned and there was only one motto to life. ‘If you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, then it’s no bloody use to you.’ It brought the house down as usual. This was how the town would size up the problem of Aboriginal people squatting behind their houses, he explained with a loud clap of his hands, encouraging others to do the same. He said the government should put the Abos to work and he would write a letter to every politician this side of the black stump telling them exactly that. He nutted out how this employment policy would work. He said they would do what he did to make a living. ‘Put them to work making keys so they can lock their food up somewhere and not have to share everything they get with their families.’ He explained that when he was a hawker the one thing everyone wanted was keys – ‘There was real money in keys.’ Number two, he explained, ‘They should be forced to make bathtubs, like the old tin ones, so they could take regular baths.’ And number three, ‘They should be sent back to the cattle stations and made to work for nothing, board and keep, that’s good enough for them if they aren’t interested in making money to get ahead like everyone else.’
Bruiser got a huge round of applause and after a bit of rumbling about the government doing nothing, someone suggested that they needed direct action. Once Bruiser got the meeting stirred up, he went out the back with a few of his cattlemen friends to enjoy the fresh air and partake in some liquid refreshments, to keep them charged up to go back later on, and finish off the meeting. Although how it ended up, they stayed outside making themselves so pickled and pie-eyed, nothing mattered anymore. What was strategy? This left the new town clerk, Libby Valance, a man accused of neither being local nor understanding the region and its values, to chair the throng.
Yet Valance was educated in local government, and had been given the job in the first place because he was considered to be sensible. He addressed the meeting in his fine voice which reached no higher than midway, by saying that it was his Christian duty to take a more civil line of approach in advising what a town could do with its citizens. No way, voices were beseeching, Why couldn’t we just? Bulldoze the crap out of those camps, flatten the lot? Why not? ‘Well! The last time the Council did it,’ Valance explained, ‘they just started rebuilding, because they had nowhere else to go.’ So! The meeting went on. Make them go, there must be somewhere else they can go, why do they want to come here for anyway? Those of the Pricklebush mob who had taken up the offer to attend the meeting listened, stunned again by how they had been rendered invisible, while Valance continued, ‘It is because they have a right to be here just like anyone else.’ Bruiser, having come back inside, responded with the following salient points on behalf of all indignities: ‘Huh! Think they do. Then they should live like everyone else then. Right! Let’s go tell ’em.’
A small delegation, made up of representatives from Uptown and the black busybodies who went along to these popular Council meetings, came over one afternoon, to have a word with Norm Phantom. It had never escaped Norm’s notice that somehow Uptown had encumbered him with the title with all of its glory – leader of the Aboriginal people. They said they wanted him to get those people who had moved out of Westside, and were now living in abandoned car bodies and their makeshift camps behind people’s housing, to start living like white people, if they wanted to live in town.
‘Couldn’t give a stuff about them,’ Norm grunted, still bent over his taxidermy efforts on a giant prawn.
The Uptown prospect, Cilla Mooch, an Aboriginal man learning how to shape himself into a white mould with one of those perpetual traineeship work-for-the-dole programs spread over the length and breadth of Australia in the name of economic development, worked in the Council office. He stood next to Valance, and as it had been predetermined by the Council, was the voice in this delegation. Norm Phantom might reason with someone of his own ilk. Moochie spoke in broken English.
‘You know?! That what’s what they is saying about you and all. Saying you started all of this town camps stuff springing up here and there for we mob. Saying they got to stop it. Show a bit of respect for the place. Place belonga Desperance Shire Council. Stop the place looking like an infestation of black heads and what have you.’
‘You sound like a fuzzy wuzzy, Mooch. Aren’t got anything to do with me and talk English,’ Norm muttered irritably, still engrossed with the delicate operation on his prawn with a toothpick in one hand and a large magnifying glass in the other. Norm always remembered the prawn. He did not attempt many, but this one was a special creature. Rare, for it only lives in the crystal clear waters away in the gorges of his father’s father’s country. Unique for its size.
Norm had hoped by saying little, the insignificant white ants would disappear and let him get on w
ith his work. However, too little was too late. It was not to be. ‘Whatya doing around here for Moochie?’ Full of grace, Angel Day stepped into the fishroom. She said she was nosing around to see what all the talk was about. She had torn herself away from the statue of Mary, which she had now repainted in the colour of her own likeness. She had examined pictures in the children’s prayer books and after considering every detail of what needed to be done, she believed she knew how to restore the statue. Every bit of her time and attention had been given in its reconstruction, which had now departed from that of its familiar image, to one who watches over and cares for the claypan people in the Gulf country. Improvisation with Norm’s fish colours and textures resulted in a brightly coloured statue of an Aboriginal woman who lived by the sea. The work had taken her several days. She had not even noticed that the other families had left, or believed it was possible when Norm blamed her for their leaving.
‘If they gone, then they’ll be back,’ she had told him flatly, as she did to the delegation who had come from Uptown to confront Norm. She said she thought they would not have the wherewithal to go setting up camp on the other side of town. ‘Where’s the water? Anyone mind telling me that? No tap? No tap! So how are they going to get water from them mob then?’ She looked the delegation over with her cold eyes, waiting for a response, and when no one dared to offer her a peep, she sighed heavily and launched into her attack.
‘What you people worried about then? Stupid, you people. You want to think about things if you got any sense. Isn’t it, they going to get sick and tired quick smart when they have to keep walking ’bout this other side of town to cart water for themselves?’
The delegation turned their attention away from Normal to Angel Day, who engaged them further in discussion about the water situation for the itinerants, as she called them. Norm could not help but be impressed with her ability to mislead people. The delegation looked at her talking down to them with awe written across its faces. Where did she get it from he wondered? Itinerants was not the language of the Pricklebush.
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