Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  The more practical-minded amidst the crowd announced they were going to find a boat to rescue the man. Regardless of all else, they said, ‘Obviously he will need rescuing.’ They went off, the young men itching to partake in something like a sea rescue, the older men trudging through the mud, half knowing already it was going to be a futile attempt to find a boat in working order.

  The trouble was that nobody went out fishing during the monsoonal season. All except Norm Phantom, the only real nautical man of these waters, and he was already out somewhere fishing the estuaries. It was the Wet and the town’s boats were sitting up idle on blocks having repairs done. Every motor had been taken apart, and left lying about on old newspapers in one hundred greasy pieces inside the fishing sheds around town.

  At the waterfront, prayers were remembered and the crowd, some kneeling, said them out loud – Our Fathers, Hail Marys, Glory Bes, Acts of Contrition. By the time the man arrived safe on dry land, the talk on the beach had gathered to the height of wonderment. It was amazing. They agreed that nobody had ever seen anything like this before. For once something good had happened. Anybody’s wishes could come true. What a day. The town stood well back in a circle staring at the man lying face up on the sand and ordered: Give him room. Give him room. You could tell from the look in their glassy eyes that they had placed the richness of prophecy squarely on this man’s shoulders. It was only logical, on the face of things, something good had happened, but underneath the mask of appreciation, there was also a pot of apprehension bubbling away in their brains.

  Time passed. ‘For God’s sake you got to tell us who are you?’ Libby Valance, beckoning and pleading on behalf of the town, tried to persuade the unmoving man to speak. The man did not speak. He asked in every way he knew to entice a reaction. Suddenly, several others piped up, since they could not help themselves, and answered Libby Valance’s question. They said he was a saviour. The town clerk spun around and looked at them in disbelief. Libby prided himself in being educated. Blood drained from his abnormally red face. His wife, Maria-Sofia glared at him so hard, he bit his tongue and said nothing.

  Libby Valance did not give up. He kept trying to work through the lunacy talking in the background, squatting with his portly stomach slumped on his knees, balancing himself awkwardly next to the man lying face up on the foreshore. He tried to be a comfort. A long time passed. The sun shone directly above the beach and Libby thought he was being singled out. How could the sun just shine on him? He was determined to keep his interrogation up until the matter was finalised. The wet man could not answer, but continued breathing heavily and seemed in a state of total confusion.

  Yes, who are you? irritated Uptown mimicked, losing patience. They wanted to go home. The whole situation of the perfect man lying before them, exposed on the beach, presided over by hovering, plump Libby Valance in sweating black, was just too perplexing a matter for anyone’s mind to chew over. They told Libby to get on with it because they wanted a good answer there and then.

  Since Libby was useless, all eyes began casting around, looking for someone else to speak to the stranger when a voice said, ‘Get the bloody law and order man.’ All eyes fell onto Constable E’Strange, same name, Truthful: someone whom they had previously written off as more than useless. The Constable stood back, observing everything and everybody in his own tranquil way, loving the fact he was living in Desperance, and being totally ignorant of his reputation. Tut-tut! Poor bugger, a black hand signalled from the long grass: Come quick and have a look at this. The kids ran their index fingers in a circle around their ears.

  Radar! Radar! All disgrace for poor Truthful. A policeman without a good pair of local ears? Perhaps it was best to be incapable of picking up all the whispering tongues hissing behind your back. More than a few years ago, the Constable had arrived in Desperance but the truth be known, nobody had use for a policeman anymore, so E’Strange had became very comfortable sitting down there at the police station doing nothing thank you very much. In his abundant spare time, the mild-natured law enforcer had created around the grey besser brick building beautiful rose gardens that Uptown women now liked to walk in and admire. He spent hours honing up his hoon town bribery skills with withered plant cuttings, to crash the treasured plant collections of all those slack-cheeked Uptown matrons. They had even strolled down to the police station in broad daylight to help him transform the barred cells into a hothouse for Ficus elastica and Monstera. The plants grew into jungle proportions of twisted vines. It had not occurred to Truthful that if the need arose one day, there was hardly any room left in the building for locking someone up.

  Even now, Truthful did not recognise the vibes of the town against him. He just saw himself as part of the crowd. He had forgotten he once had a passion for crime. ‘Oh! Leave him,’ some woman said in a dry, acid voice, typical of the North. The word around town was not nice. Whisperings in the ear claimed he had been left to his own devices too long. It was plain to everyone that Truthful was not really interested in Elias lying face up on the beach, a complete stranger who had not said, nor satisfied anyone, if he were friend or foe to the town.

  Truthful kept checking his broken gold Rolex watch, guessing the time. He longed to go back to his office, where he spent his working hours undertaking a personal rehabilitation course with a tax-deductable, mail-order counselling service which promised a one hundred per cent success rate at the end of thirty-six months at very little cost to his pay packet. At times, whenever he appeared out of nowhere, down among the edge mob in the prickly bush, trying to make friends, he would purge his conscience to the old people. ‘I am trying to make a new man of myself,’ he explained. He talked about spiritual journeys, including self-hypnosis, exorcism, self-analysis. I’ll kill the bastard if he tries any of that shit on me, echoed the old people after he left. Above all, the Pricklebush people were scared about what would happen to them after being apprehended by Truthful. But listen! This man built for dealing with trouble said he had moved a long way from being a thug copper from The Valley in Brisbane. He said people from the prickly bush should think of him as a friend, like a true, rural gentleman cop. He said he was even thinking of changing his surname to Smith like everybody else in Uptown.

  The situation in Desperance might appear bad on the surface but the law did not fall into tatters just because a Southern Queensland Valley cop could not fill the shoes of the old sergeant when Jay Smith passed away. A good man Jay, who had spent sixty-one years one month dedicated to the police service without missing a single day’s work until, after having apologised, he dropped dead. What a resignation. Everyone talked about it. Now, the numerous dynasties of Smith families kept lips zipped about the town’s sins. The town had ways and means to deal with pub brawls, rape, robbery, assaults, family violence and fraud among themselves. So, up until now, with it being obvious to everyone that Libby was doing such a balls-up of a job, Truthful was free to stand about, looking on with the rest of the crowd gathered around the man on the beach.

  You could see how oblivious he was when the glaring started and the whispering began. A plethora of worries! A deluge of ill fate! There was no joy to be had in not having a proper policeman, and the algae man was still lying on the beach, and all of that hot sun was making people think weak thoughts and voices were raised. Well! Now everyone up the beach from the Pricklebush in the long grass could hear the consternation of Uptown and how they could go on.

  What if the man is dangerous, contagious, riddled with all kinds of incurable diseases, a violent maverick, or a murderer or a foreigner trying to gain illegal entry?

  What if he is a maniac and a menace?

  What if he is a spy collecting data on our confidential capacities to defend ourselves?

  What if he is an alien?

  Uptown was running on hot air because everywhere else on earth was sweet: they were changing guards at Buckingham Palace but nobody in the world cared what happened to Desperance. Nobody could laugh at these things becau
se aliens were a serious consideration and the town had stories about these aliens that could send a cold shiver down your spine. There were real people who could tell you the stories of how they had been taken away for weeks on metallic-disc spacecraft with red lights flashing across the sky, and who knows, they said when they came back, if aliens were invading the whole countryside. There was so much space in the Gulf, no one would ever know. Those stolen people who acted very sane when they spoke about their adventures, acted like a rabid dog the next.

  It was hard to get your mind together when anything could land on the flat lands of the claypan country, and why not? The world was turning upside down, everything was coming apart when you expect to see red days, boatloads of illegal people, sea angels, unhappy spirits of dead people, stinking dead whales, even truckloads of contaminated fish, turning up on the foreshore of Desperance. Now, a man had walked in from the sea.

  The man on the beach took on the appearance of the surreal. The sun had dried the mud on his skin until it curled into creamy milk-chocolate-coloured flakes. The layers of seaweed and algae flapped with the slightest breeze. Little sea mites crawled through the litter and into the blisters, fêting on his raw skin. The big-eared children listening to the adults talking about aliens were shooed off right back to the school ground. Fetch the water bag, they were told. Which water bag? the kids screamed back, stalling, trying to be clever. The bloody water bag hanging on the school verandah. They were told to bring it back immediately with threatening gestures, And bring sandwiches for the man, too.

  Get it yourself, the little bullies answered back at their parents, who seemed to have forgotten it was a school holiday. They were reluctant to go in case they missed out on anything. They were ordered off again very smartly with Git, by fathers known to wallop a good punch. Off they went, racing each other back to town, collected food and water, and were back within minutes.

  The semi-conscious man’s skin oozed with blisters and putrid flaking skin. The circle widened because he really stank. His lips were swollen and chafed. His eyes were squinting from his long exposure in the sea and from all of the smoke coming off the fires. Finn, who had been pushed to the back, even by the children, because he was the town’s idiot, felt angry about how he had been ignored. He decided he was not going to act like a mangy dog at the back. Why should he? He was the one who guarded the coastline, why should he be struggling to get a look-in? The Pricklebush mob, watching Finn, was coming alive for him, hmmm! hmmm-ing, We want the army, they jived, elbowing each other and grinning. Everyone wanted to call out his name – Finn! Finn! Call out to get the man in the uniform up front there – but they didn’t. People got to know their place.

  Finn looked around at the noisy crowd. He was the only one among them who knew how to deal with the unexpected – refugees, boat people, any foreigners seeking illegal entry, how to apply mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to injured aliens. He was the only one who had a certificate of first-aid training for injuries received from being in a secret army camp. He pushed his way to the front, snatching the waterbag from a child. Yes, yes, Pricklebush cheered in their hearts for Finn. He sat down on the ground and held the half-filled bag to the man’s lips, that were cut like strands of cotton, and very slowly, tipped drops onto his tongue. After he considered that the man had drunk enough, he took small bits of mashed-up egg from a sandwich, which he placed in the man’s mouth. Everyone watched and waited, looking at their broken watches. From the corner of his eye, Finn saw Libby Valance pull Truthful aside to gee him up on how to interrogate his potential prisoner.

  Truthful moved in excitedly, after all he was the cop, but reluctant anyhow, because he was thinking about how he was going to have to move all of the plants from the crowded jail. He stood with his shadow over the man’s face, and started to ask random questions, like, ‘What ship did you jump, Mister?’

  ‘What ship did you jump!’ Shocked, Finn repeated very slowly and loudly the question back into Truthful’s face. He muttered on and on about jumping ships, about the pointless need for that kind of realism, about silly people needing to clutch the same old straws in moments of spiritual elevation given by the Lord himself. He couldn’t stand another moment of Truthful trying to muscle in, and he shouted at him, ‘Stand out of the way, civilian.’ The crowd approved, stood well back, and let Finn take charge.

  Finn gently asked the man again who he was, waited, then almost jumped out of his skin when the man smiled back and in a low voice said, he did not know who he was. He pointed weakly in the direction of the bushfires in the south, and towards the rain clouds far out at sea to the north that everyone was hoping would eventually bring in the rains to douse the fires. ‘I!’ was the only word he struggled to say into Finn’s ear now bent close to the man’s head. Those who heard, looked at each other. He got lured into a lost romance in the fish markets of Asia they whispered, You could tell by his accent. Finn smiled, ‘Of course,’ he kept saying for there was a communication, a very large outpouring of thoughts, flashing like torchlight into each other’s mind, a kind of osmosis that Finn understood perfectly. He suddenly remembered Saint Elias from the forgotten distant land of his own early childhood and exclaimed his annunciation out loud, ‘His name is Elias Smith.’

  Oh! Light of day! It was alright to be the anointed one, the guardian, perhaps even the guardian angel of this melancholy coastal town of Desperance. Elias Smith had gotten up from the beach and survived. No matter it being a hot town with a freezer full of stored facts, local facts cherished as truths and permanently slung over all those stooped local backs of fishy-smelling people eating fried fish on Friday night in humidity-flooded homes of talking memories. Of misfortunes at sea in a storm, relived through the suffering of the surviving fishermen who moaned through rainy days that never stopped, while the landlubbers, dismayed over the cattle lost in flood or the following year’s drought, compared rain gauges like sad trophies, which was the only distraction to helplessly watching buildings destroyed by salt erosion and wind, if not, then termites, damp rot, or plagues of rats, grasshoppers or locusts. Sister! Brother! It was just calamity after calamity for Uptown. What else could a person expect before the reprieve of a lonely grave? And the manna from heaven? Schools of prawns and barramundi never where they should be. Why not then an answer to decades of prayers and religious devotion for things to be better? All for one and one for all for God’s creation in a place where the Lord’s hand was always at work in ways that often defied the comprehension of the local people. Why not then – a gift from God?

  Yes, it was like God had given Elias to the town. And it was true because they said: We prayed long and hard to the Lord for help.

  And prayers were answered.

  God gave us Elias.

  Over the years Elias came to live in Desperance, he would tell many stories about himself that rang true with the strong local beliefs of Uptown explaining how such a person who had been given gifts of prophetic dimensions ought to behave. ‘How else?’ he asked, after trying to intellectualise his own legend of being dispatched like a letter out of heaven into a storm and surviving all the atrocities of hell. But at the end of his high-faluting pontificating, Elias Smith was just like a normal man who found it impossibly hard to believe something special should have happened to him.

  ‘No! No! Go away.’ Sometimes he would sulk because homage piled on homage was like cream cake. A person can only take so much. Elias vented his spleen in secret places, screaming for mercy, for normality; he thought he was going mad. Correct the Pricklebush for saying they actually saw Elias Smith standing about on the claypan in the dead of night screaming his lungs out. Correct the old people coming back from a leisurely moonlight stroll for mentioning they saw Elias out there again, gazing at the mid-winter stars. He was a very strange white man, they agreed. They built an identity for the one he lost. All told, they said he was a man of ancient ways who was planning his escape route from Desperance. He told the Pricklebush elders he most definitely wa
s not.

  What were you doing out here looking like a madman then? they asked him. He told them he was adding new stars to his collection of novas and auroras. They also sat with him to count stars. Everything was hush-hush in the Pricklebush. No one ever told Uptown a single thing of what Elias was doing out on the claypan. You learn a good lesson when you get told, Oh! Yeah! And pigs have wings, huh? Invisible things in nature made no sense to Uptown because of their savoir faire in being Australians. Once, a long time ago when they first heard Pricklebush talk like this they kept them out of town for a long, long time. Can’t come in here if you want to talk mumbo jumbo like mad people, Uptown said. The old people they had tactlessly taken to calling simple-minded retaliated with a hundred months worth of evil curses and sorcery. In the end, black and white were both crawling on the ground in reconciliation. Both saying that they were plain jack of each other. So, the old people said, We have to keep it a secret.

  This was the reason no one said anything about Elias’s nocturnal flights of fancy. About seeing him lifting up his bony arms, outstretched palms level with the horizon, standing in one spot, swaying from side to side, trying to imitate the flight of a bird or fins of a fish. Whispers circulated only in the Pricklebush about how he looked like a crucifix ticking in the moonlight. And he would shrug sometimes, if anyone questioned him, as if he too found it difficult to believe in his own story.

  It was always a difficult time when Elias lost faith in himself. He was melancholy about being unable to recall memories about himself, for instance, his childhood – what of it, where had it been? He became despondent knowing he was not the same as normal people. It worried the Uptown folk sick right to the pit of their stomachs on the occasions of high humidity which marked his anniversary of coming to Desperance. This was when Elias would go around spreading his arms like wings of doubt, saying he didn’t exist, or even saying things like, ‘Why me?’ In town, it was considered strangely funny for a man to be questioning his status as a celestial being. You either are or you are not, and you are, they told him.