Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  Some people in the delegation began talking about how they had carried the cross of Jesus to protect them. ‘We prayed to God to help us today and we carried the big crucifix along to shield ourselves.’ Those who wore them around their necks, proved their point by dragging crucifixes out from under their clothing and displaying their crosses to each other, as though the gesture would provide them warmth, and secure them from the wrath of God, which they suspected hovered over Normal Phantom’s household. Holy smoke! It was hot. Angel was not amused by the religious posturing Uptown always used to get its own way. Norm watched her run back into the house, listened with the others to her footsteps on the tin floor of the corridor, and suddenly she burst back in the room, brandishing her statue, held up high above her head as she danced around the delegation like a strutting pigeon. It was a transfixing sight. The delegation was shocked by this spectacle of irreverence for their religion, some even recognising the statue, and were about to say: ‘I know where that came from,’ but were speechless. All eyes followed the Aboriginal Mary, bobbing past them, jumping back and forth. It did not trouble Normal. He tried to concentrate on his work while there was still light left in the day. He knew what Angel was capable of doing, or thought so.

  What she had to say was long and hard: ‘We are decent people here, my family. We make no trouble for anybody. So why for you want to come down here making trouble for we all the time? I tell you how I won’t stand for it; I can’t even stand you people. I don’t want you murdering types around here bothering my family all the time, you hear me? Covering up for someone who even tried to murder me once and other atrocities as well going on. If you mob come back here again, (she paused to think), I’ll tell you what I will be doing. I will be pressing that many charges through the legal service for Aborigines for attempted murder, that’s what. And while I am at it, I will be suing the town as accomplices to a conspiracy to have my person killed and the persons of my family murdered before they were born, and for damages for the ones who were born. Goodness knows how we can’t sleep at night as it is with the worry. I don’t know how much money you’ve all got in the bank, but you will be paying who knows what for damages. It might even cost the whole town. I have already spoken long distance on the phone to my lawyer and he said it might be a pretty good test case. Watertight even, so what do you think about that, hey?’ Under heavy cloud cover which brought on a premature nightfall, the Uptown delegation looked at each other through flashes of lightning in the fishroom, and were shocked, like the suspended school of silver fish from the sea, jumping up and down in fright.

  Normal remembered feeling that there had been no end to Angel’s obsessive behaviour since she laid her hands on the statue. She had even placed it in the bedroom looking onto their bed, so he could not be bothered sleeping there anymore. She had forced him to live in the fishroom, which she now took over, with half the town having a heated argument in there as well. The cockatoo screeched its head off in the storm outside as it flew around, circling the house. Then, to cap it off, the crickets were stirred into wakefulness, and began their choice of music. Ears pricked and prickled to hear the foreign, shrilling sounds of Handel’s oratorio in full orchestra. The delegation listened for a short time, and this strange and severe sounding improvisation must have taken the cake, because there was a mad rush to leave via a rubble of disorientation, and rumble, as they raced over the puddles on the corrugated tin-floored corridor.

  Normal, forced to become part of the excessiveness of his home, helped the disoriented delegation outside into the storm, where they set off up the muddy road to Uptown, hoping to find their way home in the darkness. Until, that was, lo and behold, Mayor Bruiser turned up wet and blind drunk, and when he got the drift of Angel’s argument, he started to kick the air and shout into the kitchen doorway, that he was not going to have a bunch of blacks tell him what to do with the town.

  Bruiser could see Angel Day inside, still carrying on about lawyers, and laughed drunkenly, ‘Here’s a woman who still likes a good poke. Don’t you like a good poke Angel?’ He started to tease the Christian man Valance, ‘Go and ask her if you can have a go.’ When she ignored him the mayor started taunting her about the times he chased her on horseback down to the creek until her bony legs gave up. ‘Oh! Don’t be bashful, you remember me.’ Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground then raped them. He had branded them all, like a bunch of cattle, he gloated.

  Angel Day came out of the house with a billycan full of boiling water and threw it at Bruiser’s voice in the dark, but missed. She went back into the house and the delegation could hear her stomping around the kitchen, throwing things around, screaming out how she was looking for a sharp knife so that she could slit Bruiser’s neck from left to right. What was left of the embarrassed delegation stood around in the rain. Next thing, Norm came flying out of the house threatening the Mayor with his boning knife, screaming, ‘I got this to make you shut up, you dog.’ With the knife swishing back and forth, Norm backed Bruiser through the mud, out of the yard. Bruiser moved away but kept yelling, ‘I’ll be back later and I will fucking get you, Norm Phantom.’ With that, the deafening sound of squawking seagulls took over the court with a loud crack of thunder, so everyone looked up, and when lightning illuminated the skies, they saw that there were thousands of the seagulls gathered overhead, hovering above the Phantom’s house, and right back up the road towards Desperance.

  In an era when people were crying for reconciliation, there was fat chance that day. The little delegation started walking back to town, heads bent like wet seagulls in the stormy rain, away from the troubles of the Pricklebush. Every now and again, someone would tell Bruiser to come to his senses because nobody was going to risk their lives in that monstrosity ramshackle deathtrap of a house. So forth and so on, he was pulled along with the little throng, all muddied up to their knees, unable to untangle himself from the glue of their humiliation.

  These matters were not helped by Angel Day, even though Normal had pushed her back into the house, for she kept slinging on about conspiracies, and letting her foul mouth go forth like a Cape Canaveral launch, full of the most slanderous truth or half-truth she could muster from every nook and crevice of her brain, and directed to and then from Bruiser downwards, as she bade them farewell. Normal could have slapped her hard across the face. Everyone was egging him to do it: Go on, go on, you tell her to shut the fuck up, but instead, for he had calmed down a lot, he forced his hand to hold the boning knife pinned to his side. What a hostess. Angel Day was too much for a mild man the likes of one who only wanted to work on a prawn.

  Chapter 3

  Elias Smith comes…and goes

  Once upon a time, not even so long ago, while voyaging in the blackest of midnights, a strong sea man, who was a wizard of many oceans, had his memory stolen by thieving sea monsters hissing spindrift and spume as they sped away across the tops of stormy waves grown taller than the trees.

  The mariner, robbed of fear, his navigation birthright and his good sense, did not call to his God, but cursed the raging sea in the foulest language of his homeland. Unheard by the tempest, an austere cyclone called Leda that came this way from across the seas in a once-in-a-hundred-year storm, the man chased after her black wind to recapture his memories. Like a man possessed, he flew through towering banks of waves whose crests collided and rolled with the spirit clouds of the heavens above. Open-mouthed waves roared with thousands of others in that terrible, deafening nightmare of the troubled sea, and rolled poor old Elias Smith down into the crushing depths of hell before throwing him back up again, flinging him to and fro. And he? Mouth agape, hoarse throat yelling nothing but silence, he kept on chasing the black wind before losing his memory forever.

  It was in those precise moments when Elias Smith was fighting hopelessly to save his identity, when his loss became absolute, that another unusual thing happened in this pa
rt of the world, that was far away from everything else. Lightning forked up from the sea, springing out of the mouths of sacred underwater locations along a straight line heading many kilometres in a southerly direction, towards the coastline, until the last arm of the white golden fork went straight up the trunk of the lightning tree of an important Dreaming story hereabout. Fortunately for some, unfortunate for others, the tree was growing in the small coastal town of Desperance, tucked away in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

  There was nobody alive who could claim to have seen this strange thing happen before, but history was repeating itself, because this was the ancient story of the prodigal coppiced tree standing there, in the middle of town. A tremendous thunderclap exploded above the tree. It came from deep inside the world of those black serpent clouds and even from far away, people said later on, as word filtered back, that they too had listened to the haunting echo of the thunder rolling back to the sea. Finally, when the thunder had faded away, a wind full of sand whistled over the coast from the sea bringing with it the hardest rain ever imagined, and afterwards, all time stopped.

  Time stopped tick-tocking, because there was too much moisture in the air and it had interfered with the mechanical workings of dozens of watches and clocks that ended up jiggered, and afterwards, were only fit to be thrown down on the rubbish dump.

  In the morning, the drowsy people of the little town of Desperance unbattened the hatches with an enormous sigh of relief, because all they had copped from Leda was a dry storm. They had been awoken by the eerie feeling of hearing complete silence for the first time in their homes, and they were out of bed in a flash, long before the cursed town’s roosters started to crow. Noticing every clock had stopped ticking the time away, the townspeople flicked on the radio. Everyone listened in silence to the weatherman’s voice saying the potentially destructive Leda had passed by the coastline, but she had raged like a madwoman, causing havoc for all the ships in the area, one hundred kilometres away out at sea. Though the town felt the joy of escaping the full force of the cyclone with winds up to 225 kilometres an hour, an uneasy feeling developed. They sensed something else hung heavy in the air. They were suddenly struck with a single idea, a sense of hopeless prognostication that before too long there would be another ominous piece of bad luck, because all bad luck happened in threes – the storm, the clocks, so something else was sure as hell going to happen to them. It was hard to describe how the anxiety intensified through people’s bodies after they had awoken to the strange sensation, for everyone quickly collapsed back into slumberous dreams of aching bones, which ripened the next day into change-in-weather influenza.

  The static electricity hung in the air, so in the morning, when Uptown people awakened again with woolly mouths and runny eyes, they were completely startled to find that everything they touched gave them a little shock, but this did not stop them from going around touching this and that, like the charged fur of a whining dog, or a startled domestic cat, just to see what would happen. All askew, and sticking out like porcupine needles, were the big, mutton-chop sideburns of every man, black or white, in the entire district, who had unconsciously modelled himself on the image of Elvis Presley.

  This strange occurrence of the static electricity was a part of the unsettling state of things even before the soot-stained kettles blew their whistles in all those humid kitchens nestled across the flat lands. Moribund householders sat wondering what in the hell’s name was going to happen to them in the end. Even before a single sip of tea from a rose floral china cup, or any old tin pannikin with the scratched initials of the owner’s name on the side, or plastic mug, or heavy earthenware cup of fawn and brown, had reached dry lips, bringing some life and sense of propriety back into the bleak faces of all who dwelled safely within this world of Uptown, everyone knew something was amiss.

  It was not a funny thing at all for any town that believed itself to be swathed in the providence of good Christian beliefs from the Bible, to be reduced to the basest feelings of primordial insecurity. And what was more unsettling was the spine-chilling realisation that such a mighty town like Desperance might have no power at all, if it came to the crunch. Not a single bird had begun its morning tune, and on top of it all, as daylight came, everyone could see for themselves that the world had turned red. When they looked at their own fair skin, it was another shock to their lives to see their skin was red.

  Everyone local by nature ventured out of their houses. They were trying to understand what was happening, for everywhere they looked, they saw trees, the landscape, grass, even the sea water had taken on hues of red. No one had ever witnessed such an abnormal sunrise, struggling through the cover of misty cloud and haze of smoke coming from those fires in the inland bush, further south from Desperance. It was such an extraordinary kind of day. The cloudy-coloured sea was high and brought king tides several kilometres inland. Sea water lapped at the town edge. Waves pounded the flat lands. The broken clocks were compared and it was established that, for unknown reasons, all local time had stopped at precisely eleven minutes past midnight. And the wise around town said, This was interesting indeed.

  No one remarked about the way the air smelt of putrid salt from the odour of stinking corpses washed off the stagnant floor of the ocean and dumped nilly pilly at their doorsteps. They were only interested in speaking about how lucky they were that the Christmas decorations in town had not been ruined. They regarded it as a very strange miracle to see that all the nativity pieces the Town Council had placed in every front yard for free, could and did survive the galing winds of Leda. She had given the whole town the heebie-jeebies just listening to her whistling her ghostly crying. But the relief was, she had not singled them out.

  After a spot check was completed, the damage was regarded as minimal. At least a dozen plastic reindeer statues had been blown down South to kingdom come, while for some unknown reason, the brightly-coloured plastic Santas still sitting upright in sleighs had remained. What was even more noticeable to the drowsy-looking residents was that all the big puffs of cotton-wool snow that had adorned the tops of every fence post in town were hanging limp and sorry-looking. At first glance it looked as though the town had been dragged through a blizzard. However, all said and done, the entire population, the heart of which claimed to be very Christian-oriented, felt fortunate and humbled that the cyclone had not struck the town or any of its residents. They regarded their luck as a late Christmas present, in spite of everything else, from the invisible one called Almighty, and claimed He must have listened to all the feverishly whispered prayers that were said across town throughout the previous night.

  But, before the prayers of thanksgiving could be sent to the Almighty for not causing a catastrophe, danger signals struck again. Word of another miracle began spreading like wildfire from the kids running up and down the muddy street with heart-stopping excitement. What? What? said the people who never listened. Listen! Please! These little kids! The children, full of natural innocence from the obsessive parental protection that was the most endearing thing about Desperance, were yelling out how Santa’s sleigh must have fallen out of the clouds in the storm. Parents yelled: Come back here you kids!

  One youngster who stopped to speak, said: ‘He is coming, so all you people you better come quick and have a look at Santa Claus, because he is walking if you please from the sea, coming straight towards Desperance.’ Christmas was too much. High time to be getting over Christmas – it makes parents go mad. Next, a galloping pantomime of people began running through the mud with arms flying, chasing one another, and going after those naughty kids to get them to come back.

  The truth was that the town’s locals had flocked down, in droves mind you, to watch the stranger who had long white hair and beard, walking in the sea. As they stood together on the foreshore, no one had a clue from what anchorage the mariner might have originally pulled up his anchor and set his sail. This truth was just a mere speck of dust in the minds of Uptown, and the speck was roaming, gro
wing into something else altogether. Uptown being different to everyone else, never let the truth stop a good story from circulating around when there was time to chew the fat.

  The chitchatting was like a strong wind along the foreshore. The people of Uptown talked and talked and never cared two flaming hoots if anyone was listening, and there were people listening. There were the old Pricklebush people who kept the chronicles of the land hereabouts since time began. They were talking in lingo about the huddling of the house flies they were noticing up along the beach. These old people were saying how paradoxically foolish of Uptown with their airs and fancies to equate this miracle with the beliefs of the original founding people of the seaport of Desperance. You only needed to take one look and you could see yourself that most of them white folk, about twenty or thirty adults and twice the children standing up on the high ground there – a half a foot above the new sea level – were hand-me-down generations who were nothing like a patch of the original stock: And thank goodness for small mercies. You could have counted on one hand who amongst Uptown had even been on the sea.

  These people are not any good. They don’t believe in God, the old people explained, because knowing the seas, even far from the Great Southern Land, they referred to the seafarer as a descendant of English gods.

  They don’t even remember their own religion.

  All the Uptown white folk stood well back from the water’s edge because if you could read their thoughts, you would know how frightened they were of sea water. This was how it should be: water could jump right out and suck anyone in the undertow of blackness and a terrible death. Up high then, they gathered, all nodding and gesturing self-righteously to each other in their fashionable proclamations of how they could recognise straightaway any old so-and-so who lived by the sea. You could hear their voices wafting in the wind westward down the beach, saying things like the old sailors would, like – Even anyone, even every child of the Port, could recognise a sea man when they see one coming.