Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  Than the chemical analysis revealed the man had been killed straight out. Analysis came back, not quick smart from the hospital, but saying anyhow, This man was killed with the worst poison, 1040. 1040? 1040! Everyone knew about 1040. Word got around about 1040, saying it was being made locally – Aboriginal-style. Will remembered the endless string of people coming to their house, standing around in the yard with Norm, speaking in whispers with the palms of their hands capped to the side of their mouth, as if it would block the kids from hearing what they had to say, that someone with this 1040 was well and truly up to no good. At the time, people would arrive one after the other and he could still feel their presence radiating fear around the yard, and saying whatever they had to say to Norm.

  The yard was the place where all theories about the mysteries in life were tested that, later in life, Will would reconstruct as he struggled to remember the stories of the old people on the road with the Fishman. That 1040 someone, it was whispered, might have run away now to somewhere else because he knows he is in trouble with the law, but, it could be he is still around, trying to make people weak with poison. I saw him in my dream and he was the death angel who looked like swarming bats packed together, taking the shape of a giant bat shadow flying across a starry sky in the middle of the night, crooked and zigzagging, like lightning, then he shook himself out flat to make himself appear in front of you like a human being with sly, downcast eyes.

  Even if the 1040 killer stopped doing it for a while, you cannot be too careful – He might say he is finished fighting with you, but you never know, he be friends with you for awhile – Oh! good way, but not really. When you are not using good eyes for looking, not thinking about anything, he will put something in your drink to make you get weaker and weaker, then you die. Always watch this. Then people stopped coming over to the Phantom place.

  These were the reasons why Norm Phantom had always told his children never to let anyone get them a drink even if it was only water, because it could be the 1040 killer giving it to them. Norm believed there was only one fundamental principle for longevity and this was never to depend on others. This he would suddenly announce to his children out of the blue – ‘Because, who could you trust, eh? No one really.’ As children, Will recalled the deep impression his father had on each of them, as someone of such total adroitness they were convinced he could fathom anything he chose from the depths of life. His children should have been in the forefront of survivors in this wicked world with a father like Norm Phantom to guide them. His persona, his aura, lived constantly in their line of vision, constantly diverting, even hanging around in their sleep, always ready to catch the bad dreams.

  Dream and reality blurred, of children standing on the foreshore watching their father fade over the sea horizon only suddenly to turn back, coming never close enough, to hand signal an almost illegible message. Other times, they were distracted, when suddenly he would appear behind the backs of people he did not like, using hand-signal language at a rapid speed to say whatever derogatory stories he wanted about them, to the utmost embarrassment of his children. Never trust this bat-eyed dog. Tell this smelly piss trousers to get going. HE IS AS USELESS AS A BROKEN-BACK SNAKE. Tell him to piss off. The banter of hand language subsided only when he got them to do what he wanted.

  Their place was guarded by black angels. Will remembered being told that by the old people who said when it was a good clear day, they saw plenty of these angels going about the place clutching their javelin weapons, looking for the snake that stuck to the place like glue. Will said they were hawks. Blessed or cursed, or whatever Norm Phantom believed, his face was unnatural, almost as black grey as the head of a fish he once caught. The old people called it worry for the snake. Will did not believe the snake lay in the ground under their house. The snake he once saw was the living atmosphere. Its body stretched from horizon to horizon, covering each point of a compass, and encasing them all. His father looked in all the wrong places, for the air flowing in and out of his nostrils was the snake. Will dismissed the vision, but he could call it up, if he wanted to.

  Will sometimes saw the dead people who sought out his father in the workshop. They were local people mostly, coming over as soon as they found themselves becoming dead persons, frightened, not knowing what was going to happen to them. They could show up, in person, or else send someone else instead to grieve for them. Norm had as little time for the deceased as he had for the living, telling one and all: ‘What you want to come here whingeing for? Am I God? I am not God, so go to your church, you idiot.’ It could have been that Norm talked too much to himself without realising it. This was what he said he believed. He claimed he never knew the difference. He did not know whether those people turning up in his life, popping around his place to have a good old cry, or telling tales, were either dead or alive.

  So, once, he chased all the illusions, apparitions, spectres, persons of the otherside, off his prickly bush patch, and back up the churned-up, mud-dry road and through the main street of town as though it too were an illusion, a town that never existed. Who knows what anyone thought about seeing him chase nothing, telling it to go to hell. Did he stop, come to a halt, like an exclamation mark, when everyone of good nature shouted at him to stop as much as the spinster aunts, agitating like tarted-up Pekinese dogs because he was frightening the children? No, he just kept on running like middle-aged men do, with his green stick, until he was two steps short of entering the other side of town. Once, Will recalled, following his ghosts, Norm did momentarily stop to ask, ‘Did you hear that pin drop?’ It was no wonder the whole town thought Norm Phantom was mad. Forever calling him to explain himself: ‘Don’t you go snobbing me Norm Phantom,’ one of the aunts shrilled, her voice cracking the air like a whip.

  The only good thing was that the Uptowners did not know what to do about certifying black people, and claimed they had learned to live with ‘harmless’ insanity. It was part of the North. Although their town was very old, the Uptowners never knew what demons were being chased. Nobody living in the middle of a war zone knew it existed. Even in a war of extreme intensity which had been conducted with such a high level of intelligence it had lasted at least four hundred years. But that was Uptown.

  Will lingered, looking over to where Elias sat, thinking about the town, about being back home. He was beginning to feel as though he had never left being Norm Phantom’s son, who had gone against the conventions of the family and their war. He broke the rules. It was the first time in history, or so it seemed to all and sundry in the Westside Pricklebush. Could it be that he was different? It did concern him to have flaunted responsibility without conviction. Why did he not cart the ancestral, hard-faced warrior demons around on his back as easily as others in his family were prepared to do for land? They were good people, and the old people were bent over, so stooped with carrying their load of this responsibility. He had asked himself, and again now in the workshop with Elias: ‘It was good enough for them, why isn’t it good enough for me?’

  Will sighed deeply, gave the bench a final light tap before leaving the workshop. He knew he had already failed the obstacle course, had slid down this track many times before, wasting time on a futile examination of his conscience, knowing there was no answer. It was just no use trying to feel remorse for letting others carry their war, his war, an inheritance that belonged to him, as much as he belonged to it. He could only give a clinical glance at the proudly worn combatant scars of his relatives when they boasted of the battles in the middle of Desperance. Will carried no scars, only the dark brown birthmark straight down his left leg. The old people recorded the reappearance of familiar old family scars in the newborn, so that four hundred years worth of events could be remembered in stories of ground battles, sea battles, and not forgetting the air battles either, they claimed. Don’t ask how, the old people said, just because it was widely recognised that the white man invented aeroplanes and the black person was believed not to have had aeroplanes. And a good jo
b too, because you never know if they are going to land at any right place, except probably, into a big mining hole in the ground; you go into it and that will be that. Don’t trust engines. Trust your intuition and of course you will see Aboriginal people flying themselves around and no reported crashes yet.

  They said Will’s scar came from such a battle that took place in the skies with sea eagle spirits over the Gulf sea, long before he was born.

  Away from the house, Will felt great throbs of sadness vibrating through the rain from Norm’s grief when he discovered Elias. The rain fell over the saltpans and over the sea for hours that night, then Norm heard the oars swashing through the shallows, as Will rowed out to sea.

  Chapter 7

  Something about the Phantom family

  Last Wishes…

  The fishroom never kept the silence of the dead. For years Norm Phantom knew this. Peculiar things happened in his workroom where he competed with the spirits of who knows what, to make fish from the sea come back to life, to look immortal. To hang in schools by the dozen, suspended in oceans of air, stranded, attached, much like himself, unable to swim off into distant horizons. Mortality did not belong in this room.

  Occasionally, he lamented that one day he would die, and saluted his premature epitaph, Who would look after all of this then? Oh! Sad. His was the lot of an isolated man. The twin in his isolation: quiet, unassuming, humble pie. Was it any wonder such a man would make other peculiar claims too? After hours of laboured work, when finally holding in his hands the masterpiece, he claimed it was not he who had created it. Why would he make up such a story the old people said: Listen! Who did he think he was kidding? He was kidding himself. Everyone knew the hours of toil Norm Phantom put into creating his fish. Desperance being what it was, a modest place, humble people believed in real facts. Only real facts created perfection. So it was. People were not fools.

  When nobody believed the story spread by Norm Phantom about not being the maker of his work, he kept his beliefs to himself. These were the fascinating secrets of the fishroom. Secretly, Norm remained convinced that others helped in such exquisite creations, something much more powerful than himself. A supernatural master artist who created miracles, a dalliance of God consuming the room as an experimental studio, a type of exposé for life in the decaying world, where the air smelt like a beach.

  In this bewildering scenario, Norm acknowledged himself only as being the original creator of the workroom. This was true. It was through a glimmer of thoughts like that, that Norm realised what had really happened to the room he had built with his bare hands. In a fascinating growth, when the preciousness of the new fades with no one noticing, the room had changed, evolving into something else. Inexplicably, without messing about, in came and dwelt a powerful spirit with grander goals, a perfectionist who spat dead lizards of scorn at human beliefs of what was perfect, who loved to play ‘touch up’ with a humble man’s work. So, Norm Phantom, with such gorgeous ideas flooding his mind, was able to skirt around the true origins of his genius – the twin unfetching forces of envy and competitiveness, matters that often sustained him in dealing with his family. Plain old truth was undeniably becoming the diminishing factor in his work with the fish.

  The seeds of thought can be very enterprising. Once, when very weary in the middle of the night, and while still stooped in his intricate restoration of each colour-drained minute scale of a king trevally back into silver, one at a time, so as to have the job completed by the morning, for a common ‘madman’ who did not deserve to have caught such a magnificent fish, Norm had been disturbed by the light flickering, pulsing like a heartbeat.

  Steeped with ideas so enormous they could be tracked as chaotic enterprises, matrices of chaos, and suspecting the reason why the light was pulsing, he began to understand that the room was like a pickpocket, robbing people of their memories. Norm accused the room of becoming a hoarder of other people’s secrets of the heart. What he saw for the first time that night was as real as anything he had ever seen in his life; it opened his eyes, and from then on, he was able to see other things in the room. As the room matured, Norm saw it was bending inwards, steeped with the weight of holding one miraculous discovery after another. It occurred to him that all truths were being accumulated. Poor truth sucked straight out of the minds of all the unrighteous people who came to admire his handiwork. Sometimes, the room appeared to be absorbed by quietness, as though it was reading its secrets. He continued his work, and paused, when he heard the rustling of a page turning inside the walls.

  Over time, Norm preferred not to take his eyes off his work until it was completed. He merely blinked when he heard the room working, and carried on, rather than have to endure the time lost from a distraction which served no purpose. He especially did not want to see what other people thought stacked up around the room like bundles of newspapers. Finally, with the last dab of paint drying on his trevally, Spanish mackerel, long-whiskered catfish, codfish, whatever, with the same single-mindedness, Norm Phantom renegotiated his way out of the workroom through the crowded space.

  Norm suspected that nobody else could possibly be aware of where the unexpected heaviness had come from, the heavy breathing people said they felt in the room, which they said was swimming against their skin. Norm kept the room’s mad secret from other people. For those who had experienced its weight, the fishroom was the one pitiful place in the whole of Desperance where most other people, except family members, were eager to leave, unknowingly with less. All manner of people, usually oddball fishing men of all walks of life, from all places of the globe, made similar excuses to let Norm get on with his work – Think I caught old so-and-so’s flu again. He had heard people say it a thousand times. They said they preferred not to interfere with the great artist at work. The old people never went inside. They said they did not like to go inside strange houses.

  Norm saw unsuspecting people, uncomfortably but impulsively, give up their tight-lipped family secrets which had been passed down through the ages. What poor people! Especially those that did not even know they had been carrying the secret knowledge of generations passed. Well! They spilt the beans to the fishroom. One time, Norm told the old people he had a dream about the room. He told them that every house had a spirit, and in his house, the spirit’s brain lived in the fishroom. The few who heard Norm talk about his theory said it was too far-fetched, but Norm argued that once the spirit consumed the original room, it became the likeness of the room itself. In fact, it was a complete replica of the original room. His story was too strange even for the old people, who in return, accused him of making up stories to frighten them away. Norm kept thinking his own thoughts anyway. He said nobody could stop him.

  It was during this time of realisation, a haunting that the old people wanted nothing to do with, that Norm had become distracted from the calling of his art. He felt he had lost something. He felt he had lost his touch. He spent more time listening to the hawks harking above the roof. He said he was too distracted to conspire against death with his fish. He lost faith. He was wasting time casting his eye around the room and seeing the walls watching him with a sustained look of amusement. The fish from the sea just remained plain dead. Work was never finished. Decay and rot began to take over. The room taunted him and everywhere he saw death, robbed by the years, now laughing in his face. Great schools of fish conjured from the sea were sent scattering in every direction through the cyclonic air. Norm fled the room, running through enormous weights of water to drown his conscience in the hub and tub of a psychotic Pacific ocean collapsing through eons of compressed time.

  A truce was made however, and whatever Norm did to re-create life in the fish he preserved, it was amazing. His fish looked like priceless jewelled ornaments. Each piece was better than the last. He became a master known throughout the land. This was the reason why people came from all directions of the world to Desperance to have their fish preserved. Yet, no matter how masterful he was, he knew the ever-watchful oth
er-worldly spirit had more work to do. It remade the fish more beautiful to the eye, casting a replica of colour through the empty nail holes in the roof, shining where the dazzling rays of sunlight, hitting onto the scales of fish, left them forever glistening silvery gold on colours of green, grey, blue and pink.

  Years passed with the winter winds blowing south-easterly in weekly rhythms after midnight. Like nobody else, Norm loved the grand old composer, the rapturous melodies which swam along the tin walls of the corridor from the house to the fishroom. The music arrived in the middle of the night and tapered off after midday. The breath of music at this time of year made the old people camping on the cold ground outside move their blankets as far away as they could from the house. They said the house was haunted. They did not like the old star in the night working close by to where they were camping because it was flaunting the afterlife. Norm sang Gloria, alongside the old composer conducting his mass choir of crickets that sang Glory! Glory! in time with the rattling walls. The crickets, part of the fishroom’s metamorphosis, lived in the dark, musky, fish-smelly environment. Packs of these creatures had moved into the room in magic droves, having come out from under a maze of stubby grass and leaf litter in the bush, to live in the nooks and crannies of dark places inside the walls, behind jam jars full of chemicals, or under benches groaning with the weight of plastic baths full of fish-skin tanning fluid. Dozens of the gleaming fish hanging off the rafters sang eerie songs in shrilled, mezzosoprano voices that floated out of their mouths from the crickets’ hidden nests, from deep inside the fishes’ horsehair bellies.