Overhead, the heavy clouds moving their empire south began raining steadily while Will eased his way down the side of the wet hill sure-foot on slippery rock, carrying Elias over his shoulder. Father Danny, wet to the gills, was repairing his four punctured tyres as fast as his heavy weight allowed. From the side of his eye, he caught sight of movement through the rain but the strangeness of the form did not interest him as he laboured over the tyres. He kept working, lost in thought, counting the minutes of the heavier rain moving up ahead, miles away over the coast, to hit places in the claypans where he envisaged the rising waters would spill over the yellow river road and turn the whole plains country into an inland sea. Who would get through then?
‘Should have known I’d be paying for something connected with you,’ the wet, and now muddy priest mumbled nonchalantly at Will, from under the chassis, where he was lying, as he continued denouncing the car for being a useless bucket of tin. Will could hear more than he could see of the struggle under the car to keep the jack from sliding and the car from falling on top of him.
‘And if you got a problem, don’t bother me with it, or bother me with any of your futile excuses about why this happened or that happened. I’ve had a bucketful of lies already today. Look! Stay there will you? I’m not talking to you! I am talking to this bloody car here before the bloody jack slips. So what’s your problem this time? God! This used to be a safe place before you lot started arguing and mucking around with that bloody mine. And another thing, since you are here now, you want to tell me why you got a dead man hanging over your shoulder? Are you going to tell the police about it? No, don’t bother, I don’t want to know, young troublemakers! I bet you can’t even be bothered in your thick skull about going to the police. Well, I won’t be burying him if that’s what you want unless you go through the proper channels, so don’t come pestering me to do it.’
Father Danny hurled himself out from under the car with the grace and noise of a wounded elephant. Will said nothing. He never spoke much to the priest anyway, never saw eye to eye with his religion. Instead, he took the liberty of easing Elias’s body and his sacks across the back seat of the car. The priest took no notice, preferring to concentrate on removing the tyre from the wheel rim at the rear end of the car. He told Will to get a move on and help him with fixing the tyres if he wanted a lift, so they could get the hell’s name on the road or they would both be swimming to Desperance.
‘Double blast for that helicopter, hey, son?’ the priest said mockingly, in a better mood, when twenty minutes later, he threw the tools back in the boot of the car. The car was ready to go.
The car flew up the road drawn like a straight pencil line through the flood plains. The priest kept his foot flat down on the accelerator. His dexterity and control over the steering wheel belonged to an inhuman kind of power, Will observed, but it did not matter, if he succeeded in keeping the car on the road while slipping and sliding from one side of it to the other. Meanwhile, they both saw that the floodwaters, spreading across the flood plains, would soon obliterate the road.
‘Perhaps,’ the priest hissed as he lunged over beside Will’s ear, in order to be heard over the engine and rain, ‘perhaps, it’s going to take the combined force of you and me, camaraderie, my friend, an esprit de corps between two men, to get us through. What do you think, Master Will Phantom? You reckon we can trust in God to get you home?’ Will chose silence. Let the holy man talk his legs off. The land was full of spirits which might help the heavenly power of the Irish to tilt flat land and push the Valiant home. He thought of the dead man spread across the rear seat of the black car, stared ahead at rain splashing the yellow waters, feeling the cool air moving across the flood, and that was enough satisfaction, to be on the road home.
Father Danny said he felt good. Will thought the mud-caked priest was pumped, spurred by the success of getting the car back on the road, a triumph in dire conditions. The monologue rolled on and on, as Father Danny spoke with enthusiasm about the craftsmanship of the humble Valiant and the ingenuity of the lone traveller on bush roads. Will searched for the watery road across kunbulki – flat country. He felt the silence. The priest did not see silence by acquiescing to silence. For him, the land opened his crammed mind. ‘Out here a man can get a chance to let some of the good ideas escape into the wilderness,’ he claimed. He proceeded with a stunning commentary about the potential of bush mechanics, their ability to get through any crisis, and what he would have done if he had been travelling without this tool or that.
‘The question is, would a man cope? Would, for instance, an ordinary man, not an astronaut, someone scientifically trained, but a practical-minded ordinary man from the bush, if he became stranded on the moon, have the potential to make his way back to earth?’ It was because the potential of bush people was underrated that this kind of research was not being done.
Will, at this point, became mildly interested in the talk, linking what Father Danny was talking about with the old people’s stories of Uptown. Periodically, Uptown folk claimed they had been taken away by UFOs and had, somehow, either been placed back in their homes, or scanned their way back through the galaxies, simply by applying the cut and thrust of practical bush skills. Will said nothing and let the talking Valiant swim its way through the floods. Always sceptical of Father Danny’s theories, he would not allow himself to become a captive audience, like his parents, and all the others who listened and watched, waiting for the legs to fall off a chair.
The sound of a human voice, even if it was his own, seemed to help Father Danny’s concentration on the road. ‘Watch out jurrbu, jurrbu – hole in ground here.’ The priest spun the car, righted the outcome, and the oratory continued into a lecture about road bandits – heavy vehicles loaded with mine machinery headed for the mine, using the road, who thought they had the right to take over a man’s right of way. ‘There were laws that protected the public user of public roads,’ he said while the car slid and Will looked at Father Danny, who did not seem to notice. ‘It’s what happens when men lose sight, lose their vision, of democracy. Power, that’s what destroys democracy, education used to destroy the rights of other people. It’s gone too far this time Will, too far, this mine, using technology to control people. Very unwise. They cannot crush people just because they have the power to crush the landscape to smithereens.’
So many good words were wasted that day as Will Phantom stared past kunbulki and into the past itself.
It was still raining and even though still afternoon, appeared to be almost night-time when Father Danny dropped Will off with Elias’s body at the bridge on the edge of town. He roared off into the lights. The first place he was going, he told Will before they parted, was straight to the police station to tell Constable E’Strange he had a fat lot of complaints to lodge about mine staff attacking him on the road. Will thanked the priest, then set off into the darkness, camouflaged in his mud-stained clothing by the dense olive-green undergrowth of prickle bushes.
He skirted along Eastside, then passed Uptown, past others camping on Westside, staying out of sight, carrying Elias, until he reached Norm’s place, where he moved unnoticed through the shadows of prickle trees at the back of the house. The house was quiet, and Will, knowing his father was able to identify a person approaching the house from the distance of a kilometre from the sound of their movement, was pleased there had been no one around in the late afternoon. He made his way to the old man’s fish workshop which was separated from the house, although it was an extension to the fortress itself. Both buildings were joined together by the long crooked corridor constructed of corrugated iron which appeared always to be half finished by not having a roof. He laid Elias’s body and the sacks down on the dirt floor of the workshop. ‘I will have to leave you here with the old man,’ Will whispered to Elias. He knew his Father would want to look after Elias himself. It was the reason for bringing him home.
In the golden half-light Will gazed around this familiar, favourite room. Soon
, without realising what it was that was happening to him, the faint odours of chemicals that had hung in the workshop forever, robbed him of the years of absence and troubles. Like autumn leaves, bad days fell away as though the genius of the room could not retain them. Will became tantalised by the seamless possibility of rushing widdershins back into boyhood habits, seeking the latest piece of magic his father was working on. It was here in the amber womb that each member of the family had come to lose themselves in their father’s world of fantasised hidden treasure, as they watched Norm intricately creating fish jewels of silver, gold and iridescent red, greens and blues.
‘We used to spend a lot of good times here, didn’t we old man?’
Will talked on, whispering to Elias while gazing around at the walls covered with fish. Norm Phantom had been given the great skill of robbing the natural function of decay, by the act of preserving all species of local fish, and the walls of the room were covered with mounted barramundi, coral trout, bream and salmon. Will studied the crowded rafters which were decorated with hundreds of butcher’s hooks, and from each hook hung preserved fish in gleaming silver attached to a strand of fishing line, three or four to a hook. The dangling fish in the workshop always appeared more alive than dead. Hours had been spent by the family watching Norm patiently scraping out the guts of fish, boning the flesh like they imagined a surgeon would have done, and they went Oh! and Ah! when eventually Norm held up the bare fish skin for inspection. There were secrets inside Norm Phantom’s head about the plants pickling in bottles lining the shelves. The liquids he brewed came from the plants he collected in night journeys in the grassland bush. He used the juices sparingly to tan the thin skin of the fish specimens given to him by all kinds of people – redneck fisherman, rich businessmen, politicians, scientists. What do you reckon mate? All kinds of people turned up at Norm’s rusty gate to drop off some fishy thing wrapped in newspaper.
Norm unwrapped the fish at the gate, quietly studied it, and after several minutes, he would say so if he felt he could do something with it. Even the guardian angels hovering in the skies above were in awe of Norm’s decision to return life to dead and rotting fish. Norm waited for the response as though it did not matter to him while the stranger’s money antennae shot up, eyebrows twitching with excitement, to haggle what was fair: ‘Ten dollars ought to cover it.’ World-class professionalism, Leonardo Da Vinci for a bargain. How will we know you will finish the job? Norm might have done the job for nothing. His mind was light-ages away, mingling with the axis of symmetry in the spirit of the dead fish. Only craftsmanship could resurrect what lay stinking in his hands. The kids, running with the men to their cars, overheard the fishermen feeling hard done by, slamming the car door behind them, grumbling as they observed the Phantom kids. Well! You don’t want to be ripped off by them either.
Will ran his hand haphazardly through the open bag of horsehair used for stuffing his father’s fish. He loved the texture of the hair, and for a split second, an old habit wiped away the years of their disagreement, and the time returned when horsehair would be washed clean and dried by him until it shone for his father’s liking. He stood examining, inside an enamel basin, the skin of a barramundi soaking in the tanning mix. He moved by, passing his hand over bottles of preservatives, sealers and lacquers. He remembered how Norm would give him the task of patiently stitching the skin together around a mould of the horsehair. His small fingers had become so adept to using a needle and thread, he was able to make the stiches so small and tight, the seam was invisible to the naked eye. Will studied his hands now, fully grown, and wondered with light mirth, how his father’s huge hands achieved the task of an elf. Afterwards, Norm spent many hours and several days to paint the fish with painstakingly steady movements with a small paint brush.
This was the time when there was total silence in the workshop. Norm painted, and the children watched over his shoulder, at the miracle he performed restoring the original colours with paints he made from ochre and plants. These, he said, were mixed using the secret measurements of life, and pearl shell crushed into a fine powder. All his painted fish possessed a translucent gleam of under-the-sea iridescence made from the movements of sun rays running through the wind currents. God creates God’s friends. The angels helped him, the children were told. Perhaps, Will thought, viewing a glistening coral trout’s ocean-blue dots, slowly spinning at the end of a thread, children were mischievous elves, while men with big hands were angels.
From time to time Will still thought about the childhood beliefs he had of his father. Sometimes while sleeping, he felt that his father went to live under the sea in his sleep, in a world of colours that normal people would never know existed. This image he sustained, of Norm living under the sea in his dreams, was the only explanation he had of why his Father was able to paint fish so delicately and true, as though it were his second nature.
In the accumulation over time of hundreds of bottles, none labelled, lining the shelves, the startled-faced children watched Norm reach for whatever he wanted, without checking first if he had the right one. Somehow he could remember what he had stored down to the last bottle. It was like magic, and children talk. Phenomena like this was what interested the thoughts of the people of Eastside, the jarrbikala-policeman and the Uptown kadajala.
The family had lost count of the times that Norm had replaced the bottles, and restored the collection to its exact position, after the workshop was searched and his collections of poisons temporarily confiscated by the jarrbikala. When the policeman came, the Phantom kids cringed like the dogs, with their backs flat against the walls, trying to attain a powerless invisibility. Immobilised by fear of being seen, they listened to their thumping hearts race when they watched their father being taken away. Each time he saw his father leave the house with a policeman, Will thought it would be the last time he would ever see him. On these occasions he implanted the image of his father’s face in his mind, in case it was forever. He would always have the stoical expression on the face of his father leaving to remember, and being too frightened to think of the terrible consequences if this would be the last time they would ever see him again.
Will fingered the wooden workbench, running his fingers along where Norm had instilled in him as they worked the fish together to never have one thought, one vision. ‘One idea could get you into so much trouble, boy, you might never know if you are dead or alive for instance. Sideways, you always want to be looking out when someone serves you up a drink – might be a cup of tea or a glass of water. Never let them. They could be serving you up the worst kind of poison.’
His father had found a dead countryman once. He said he found him at the tip, when he smelt a human being rotting where he poked a stick around in the muck. ‘My country what are you doing here?’ Norm asked, angling for the man’s spirit to come forth and purge the wrong done, and when he got no answer, Norm had walked around in the putrid mud searching for clues, while a million flies, buzzing to and fro in one big black mass, never stopped following him. He was convinced, he claimed, that the flies tried to push him away. Perhaps they were hiding something. He kept waving the black demons away with his free arm and a stick from a bamboo thicket bulldozed from the artesian bore up the road, and dumped at the tip. Although the vile stench tried to pull him down into the palace of death, he continued blindly forward, choking back his vomit, until he stumbled upon a pile of dirty housewife’s kitchen rags and pieces of cardboard marked Cocoa butter, which he flicked away, and there he told police, he uncovered the corpse. The body was actually stirring about, and Norm, both repulsed at the sight and thinking it was the devil in personification, rising up to get him because he never went to church on Sundays, said, it was in those vital moments until he came to his senses that he believed the cadaver was floating off in midair. Then he realised it was riddled with maggots. ‘Get the police, run quick,’ Norm said he snapped at his children, who he claimed were with him at the time.
Well! Aren’t no busi
ness of ours, that was what the police said. They said, through Truthful, it was not reasonable to expect them to muck around with anybody’s body in such an awful state of decomposition. Other siders’ business, that was what the muffled voices said behind the industrial masks, as the whole stinking lot, treated like any kind of animal carcass, was quickly and unceremoniously shovelled into a body bag, zipped inside of another and another, and air-mailed off that fast to a city hospital. ‘The police,’ Norm said with a spit reserved for whenever he referred to the police, ‘had spent that much time pursuing him just for finding the body, there could not be enough hours in a day for squestion this and squestion that. Well! They could have been out doing what the decent taxpayer paid them to do, catching the real criminals,’ instead of making him look like the guilty one. But some people said, it was no good what Norm Phantom could have done. So, throw enough mud – some sticks.
It was any wonder everyone started thinking Norm was a murdering criminal type, with the police just about wanting to marry up with him, by the way they were hanging around his property. Even his wife Angel Day started to get jealous of all of the attention Norm was getting. She threw things at the police when they came. She demanded to know what was really going on. ‘Your Mother is a very suspicious human being,’ Norm casually mentioned to Will at the workbench after the police had come cruising up and down, passing their place at all hours, staring in, searching the premises and then driving away in their police cars with bits and pieces of his hobby. Whatever for, well, who knows? Over the next few days everyone started putting two and two together and ended up with light bulbs flashing! Forget evidence, forget police investigation, forget fact. Here we have forensic scientists in every household who had no need to surrender themselves to fact. The Phantom household tried in vain to keep calm too.
Carpentaria Page 20