Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  The Pricklebush mob saw huge, powerful, ancestral creation spirits occupying the land and sea moving through the town, even inside other folk’s houses, right across any piece of the country. Nothing but no good was coming out of puerile dreams of stone walls, big locked gates, barred windows, barbed wire rolled around the top to lock out the menace of the black demon. Pricklebush decided the Uptown boundary must be a gammon one. Then the folk Uptown showed their boundaries which they said had been created at the beginning of their time. The town boundary they showed the Pricklebush mob was there and there, on paper. To prove what they were saying, they said it was invisibly defined on the surface of the earth by old surveying methods, methods long in the grave with the original surveyors, when the original pioneers came along and developed the town.

  When the name Masterton, the new name given by an infamous State government to change the name from Desperance, appeared on all the modern maps, along with contrary degrees of latitudes and longitudes to the old methods, the locals of Uptown said by their actions – a two fingers V shaped in the air – Go and get stuffed. The town kept all of their nicely painted Desperance town signs up and waged an intense battle with the disinterested proletarians of the Main Roads Department whenever they arrived in town with an arsenal of sign-making equipment, along with government trademark ‘silver bullet’ mobile living quarters to spend a few days erecting more Masterton signs.

  The enraged residents would band together in full force for the town. They took on the appearance of red-faced ogres who threw buckets of verbal abuse and other things, while those government workers who were full of nonchalance, sat around and did nothing until it was time to go away again. The workers just went on humming through gritted teeth, Keep remembering, pay day on Friday. Desperanians ripped down any new Masterton signs the workers managed to erect and in the process of acting out purposeful community pride, they hammered into the ground many more signs along the side of the road into town just to make sure no one would mistake Desperance for the name of some past his use-by-date Southern politician who wanted to plant his ego in the minds of the future generations. Pricklebush complied, by saying they too vomited at the thought of Masterton, to please Uptown.

  With all the official road maps to Masterton regarded locally as some place different, strangers only had a snowflake’s chance in hell of ever finding their way around these parts. Nah! Nah! You got the wrong map, buddy, lost souls were told as they limped up to the single petrol station selling Shell only. Uptown never liked to talk much to strangers. The impasse between the town and the government led to a high road mortality rate in the red never-never land.

  You is in hell, Pricklebush could have told them travellers, but name the traveller or the one single tourist who ever goes to the Pricklebush for a piece of advice. And as far as the local hierarchy of Uptown were concerned, but never posted anyone down South a letter about it, their town remained Desperance, named after the founder, Captain Matthew Desperance Flinders. Needless to say, no one in Uptown accepted the fact that Flinders was a prize fool to go about saying he discovered a deep water port that turned into a dustbowl when the river changed course, and a century would pass before the giant serpent ancestral spirit made that track again.

  Uptown people said all people were born without lands and came to the new world of Desperance carrying no baggage. When you think of all this philosophy, it was easy to see how momentum was building up amongst the wet throng on the beach watching Elias Smith, a vision splendid, walking in from the sea. Their teardrops joined the showers of rain which had started to run down their faces. People became full-hearted, loving the memories of their personal histories, even if it was an aberration from a history only as old as the cemetery down the road.

  But alas for Elias, it was not an even-tempered day to be taken on the wings of angels, even if he had been saved from drowning amidst the lure of a sea churning and rolling with storm-shredded seaweed and meadow grass. He could have stayed many fathoms down on the basement of the ocean floor amongst the remains of ancient shipwrecks, lost forever to the tranquil music of thousands of bits and pieces of chipped and broken china – sugar bears, yellow chickens, spotted dogs, and pink babies of lost cargo, hanging and clanging against each other, all over the reef ledges in an otherworldly abyss.

  But poor Elias was temporarily blind. His eyes stung from the night of lashings by the sea, and were made worse, as he walked through the waters into straight winds blowing out to sea from the south, dense with the choking smoke from bushfires clogging the atmosphere. One can only dream if things could have been different. If he wished for good luck, he might have taken a closer look at those gobsmacked people huddled in the misty drizzle, standing there doing nothing to lift a finger to help him. He might have been better off not feeling so good about himself. Wiser, if he had felt less like a miracle escaping the fate of becoming an ornament of bones, dressed in algae, for little fish to swim about in.

  If God had shown grace, Elias would have seen all the Pricklebush mob hiding about in the long grass, and like one of those big hammerhead sharks out there in the water, cruising up and down by the beach, instantly recognised the fear in the eyes of the mob of people huddled on the beach. A hammerhead shark would have seen the real way those people looked at strangers. Elias by crikey, being half drowned, was no excuse. You should have seen it written up there in thin air above those people’s heads, that if towns like this were granted three wishes a day, they would sharpen up whatever God blessed them with like knives for brains, and as quick as you could say, Bob’s your uncle, stab one another in the back, including Uncle Bob if he was around.

  A wiser man would have dived straight back into those grey milky waters and swum off with the receding tide, straight back over the twenty-five kilometres of mudflats he had come from, and be gone and done with it. He should have thought about that like the edge people, who know off by heart how deluded will-o’-the-wisps from nowhere reigned in a glorious separateness from all other humankind. Elias should have said, Hey! It’s just a tiny, whimsical seclusion of xenophobia, just like all the other isolated apostrophes along the claypan horizon.

  Since no one in the entire local history had ever seen anyone actually walk into town from the sea, and the miracle was appreciated by everyone gathering to watch, the old people worried about Uptown’s ability to cope with their uncertainty about new things coming into their lives. It was normal for their approach to fluctuate between confused joy and confused woe and on this day it was no different. He could have been what? An angel carrying the message of the one they called the Almighty? A ghost, spirit, demon or sea monster? Or a man? The closer Elias came, the more the little cloud of people moved backwards to higher ground. Even the edge mob, standing way off in their Eastside and Westside camps in groups of their own with their black heads high above the long grass, could hear those Uptown folk describing to each other the vision splendid as a marvellously hideous other kind.

  As morning wore on, the old people witnessed the cloud of Uptown, now unconsciously grouped in the shape of Australia, speaking more wholeheartedly about the apparition in ghostly terms. Yes, it was true that they were saying what they thought, even acknowledging the ghostly phenomenon in realistic terms. Their children, covered in play mud, looked as though they were part of some kind of ritual. Their ears, tuned like radar, burst wide open when grown-ups said they were witnessing the emergence of an aquatic aura, a God-sent water angel.

  Without shame, married too, emm! emm! Shocking messages scurried along the long grass tracks about what those besotted women were saying, watching his thighs. Oh! Oh! Look at that! What a sight those golden thighs made, wading through kilometres of shallow weedy waters, leaving a little feathery trail behind his knees. Heavens only knew what thoughts were luxuriating in depraved minds about the faraway look in his ironic Slavic eyes. The old people had to duck down, look away in shame; they just looked quickly through the long grass at those women with sneaky
eyes. They gave long, slow whistles to one another through the grass, as they watched the mirage of hot air building overhead, spelling nothing but trouble, rising through the cloud like it was spurting out of the mega-sized chimney stack of a mine with a very large processing plant. Tell everyone their men are blind, the old people hand-signalled each other above the grass. If black could blush, if only. But the steam-making women standing on the beach, downright proper, respectable Uptown women, could not escape the spell the mariner had cast on them, simply from looking at his bare thighs walking through water.

  Oh! Of course it pained the hearts of the old people who had to witness those sad women quietly remembering hot nights of childhood imaginings, when parents once read them European folktales, where gentle horses went clipperty-clopping through the stories of mist and fading images of other lands and lullabies. Where appeared from fog, the lone male skater, gliding effortlessly over a white ice-covered lake with edges surrounded by sodden reeds, and moaning elm trees drooping heavy with spirits wrapped in cloaks of snow.

  All of this happened on the water’s edge, after Captain Nicoli Finn – someone else from Uptown who also claimed to have originally appeared in Desperance from out of nowhere – had said he had discovered the person walking in from the sea. Finn was an old man, a local feature on the foreshore landscape, whom Uptown commonly referred to, not by his actual name, but as a thing: The crazy whatever! On the day of the discovery that changed everything in Finn’s life, he was engaged in his usual surveillance of the coastline that was now temporarily relocated right next to the town because of the king tides.

  Finn was all rigged out in his crazy clothes. A get-up of full, winter serge, the olive-coloured uniform of the Australian army he slept and worked in, which was commonly regarded as a public health problem. Perched crookedly on his long, oily, greying hair was his sergeant’s cap. He could have been called, Look at him, which was what perspiring people habitually whispered in dismay behind his fly-attracting back. But when they were smart they avoided looking at Mr Finn, especially on days that were scorchers, so as not to break out in a terrible prickly heat rash themselves.

  Since Finn remained oblivious to most things, he never noticed how the long spells of humidity in the air made his unkempt, dank-smelling uniform a home for hundreds of nestling moths visiting Desperance after the rains. The invading insects left numerous holes behind when they moved on to chew up more of what he wore, before spreading their larvae like couch-grass pollen wherever he walked around town. Until one day, Uptown made it their business to formally thank Finn for the permanent plague of moths besieging the town.

  Finn’s career of undercover work, which he claimed he did as an enlisted soldier for the Australian army, was uneventful until the day Elias rose out of the waters. Every day he followed a set routine. When he proceeded on ‘operation’, he would set off very early in the morning on his ‘secret’ orders to the water’s edge, whatever its current distance was from town. He was commonly seen as a blob moving in the early morning fog-filled atmosphere covering the land that stretched right out into the sea to hide the horizon between earth and sky. Head down, with a stern expression of concentration stretched across his lips, he marched on up the beach in search of signs to report to army intelligence. He was fastidiously particular about filling the requirement of his cover, by pretending to be a madman in army uniform, but for all and all, he was the inventor of confusion about his actual line of work, and it was hard to know if he was a habitual liar, or really did work for the army. He created a foil by collecting all of the empty bottles lying about the water’s edge. These he would neatly and painstakingly stack until they produced giant-sized walls of amber glass at the back of the Fisherman’s Hotel. Anyone could go and watch him sitting at the plastic table on a chair in front of the walls of bottles. This was where he ate the counter dinners the hotel gave him for free.

  Before the day Elias came and things changed, Finn’s cover was so strong that he could elicit spiteful scorn as easy as you could click your fingers, wherever he walked in town. The women hated him: Don’t look, pretend you’re not looking, but there goes that old madman wasting his life again – just like a general fool. Uptown matrons, who once looked like kewpie dolls, now voluptuously overfed to sustain their elephantine memories, whispered out loudly behind his back just to spite him from across the street. You could feel their jealousies moving up and down the streets of Desperance, leaving you breathless for days.

  Silly old Finn never gave two frigs – he kept on walking, no, he did not walk, he shuffled in a zigzag fashion from one side of the footpath to the next on Main Street, bent with whatever hawks he had shot while hunting alone on the beach slung over his shoulders. Shooting hawks was a useless preoccupation and Finn spent a lot of time hunting the skies for them. The sun-frocked matrons in their sun-bleached dresses shuffled by, blood draining from faces like dried pears at the mere thought of having to cross right next to him on the footpath, and as they did, snubbing him with jaws atrembling and eyes glaring ahead.

  But Finn’s life changed for the better as he stood in his mud-caked army boots on the beach that early morning when the mist was just starting to lift, and the air was still full of red haze. It was at that precise moment of the red morning, when he would commence firing, wasting army bullets on a group of hawks circling above the sea, as he always did, that he had first noticed the miracle. The birds too must take credit for their part in Finn’s miracle. Finn was affected with the dero shakes, wobbling one way or another to steady his position, as the hawks, looking down at him, casually flew out of range. It was a game the birds played with the army captain, flying in and out of range, up and down, occasionally one fell foul – a fluke hit – but for years they knew he could not aim straight enough to save himself. It was while he was jerking himself around in a haywire frenzy to keep up with the birds, screaming at them to keep still, switching the rifle’s sights from straight up to the sky to dead level with the horizon, that he made the discovery.

  For a long time he watched the man walking across the mudflats through the muddy waters choked with reeds at high tide. Finn knew the lie of the land, and he watched Elias making detours past the decades of half-submerged car bodies – Holdens, Fords and semi-trailers laden with mud, homes of crabs and gluttonous man-eating sea fauna. Finn wondered why the man seemed unaware that it was the season of the box jellyfish with their long, stinging tentacles invisibly spread across the surface of the water. The man walking through the calm looked almost spiritual to Finn who stood transfixed to the spot, like he too was made out of clay.

  Poor Finn. Crocodiles, sharks, gropers, stingrays, box jellyfish, stonefish, hundreds and hundreds of the invaders of childhood dreams swam around his mind. He heard his head pulsating with voices reminiscing over every single tragedy in Uptown fishing or beach picnic history. Voices saying they could remember it all, as though it only happened yesterday. Living next to the sea was like having tragedy for a neighbour. He watched, half expecting the waters to swirl at any second into a bloody vortex of the man being devoured by a giant sea carnivore. Until just as suddenly, as if out of the blue, Finn tell yourself, a distant military voice boomed from his memory, fright was not right, or expected of the one and only Australian Army defence force personnel for miles around. At that, Finn climbed onto the top of one of the dumped, empty diesel drums left lying around, for a better view through the sights in his rifle, in case he had to shoot.

  He swore on oath afterwards that he had even heard music rising out of the waters from a pedal organ playing to him as clear as day. It was God’s music, he had said, and softly started to hum the bits he could remember. Everyone recognised the piece as Handel’s Messiah, exactly as Beatrice Smith played it on her pedal organ in the solitude of her house, whenever she was overtaken by spiritual light-heartedness.

  The Captain could not contain himself any further and decided he would have to share the news with the whole town. Forgetting his
limp, he ran straight through the mud up to the middle of town, arriving exhausted and out of breath, but still able to muster the herculean strength required to yank the rope of the town’s new bell into full ear-piercing peal, without permission. The large bell had, within months of its arrival, become rusted from the thick salt-moistened air, where it hung from its steeple on the neat, front lawn of the new Council Chambers.

  The first response came from Libby Valance, the big, plump town clerk who really should have been the one to ring the bell in case of emergency. Unless, of course, on those days he felt down with the weight of middle age and heavy humidity, he wanted someone else to do it.

  ‘What are you doing with my bell, Finn?’ Libby Valance hollered as he came, striding in slow motion across the lawns, to stop Finn yanking the rope.

  Finn stopped and stared, then ran off back towards the sea, unable to speak, gesturing with his arms for Libby Valance to follow.

  In no time at all, with the children yelling out about Santa Claus coming to town, everyone in town was heading down through the yellow grass towards the beach. The children who had been drilled since they were just toddlers in nappies to the heavy ding-donging bell, charged out of their homes, knocking each other out of the way, and ran, yelling out, ‘What is it? What is it?’

  The kids stood close to the edge of the waters to watch the strange man walking across the kilometres of shallow mudflats before they joined the deeper waters of the ocean behind him. ‘He’s got mud-curls,’ they yelled, and the women who had been transfixed by the sight of his bare thighs replied in muffled voices, ‘That is because he is a miracle.’ It was the first time anyone in town had seen anyone with dreadlocks.