Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  ‘Bloody this and blast that about the ozone layer,’ Mrs Angel Day lamented in her heyday as Queen Bee of the household, after yelling across the rooms of the house for the confounded radio to be turned down. Norm Phantom refused to listen to people complaining. In his quest to find answers to his theories, he was addicted to news on his radio. Constantly twiddling the volume knob, any news item about the hole in the ozone layer would be blasted to a crescendo through the house. For he had a puzzle: ‘Was the chorus in the fishroom a new strain of crickets caused by the hole in the ozone layer?’ He told his wife such a thing had never happened before. He asked the question: ‘Could mere crickets, normally a curse to mankind, have developed the ability to chirp through the noise barrier?’ A thousand times he had asked her: ‘What do you think?’ For Mrs Angel Day, the sound the crickets made was like listening to plates smashing. ‘What do you think?’ Such goings on in one ear and out the other, drone, drone, meant nothing to her. She said she did not give two hoots, but the sound was driving her mad, and he could stuff any stupid scientify ideas he got from city people talk up his butt. ‘They wouldn’t know about here would they? If they did we wouldn’t be living here like this, would we?’ Norm excused his wife for not acquiring a modern sense of refinement, such as a fine ear for the kind of music he liked listening to. She said the crickets were mutants addicted to inhaling those chemical fumes he used for tanning, ‘Gone mad, like yourself!’ Explaining further to prove her point, she proclaimed, ‘They don’t live anywhere else in the house, do they?’ This was the truth.

  Norm kept his old ventriloquist cockatoo away from the workroom, in case it learned to chirp like the crickets. The bird was regarded as a genius for its unusually quick knack for picking up sounds. ‘Mark my words, you keep that bird of yours away from there otherwise I’ll guarantee you this one thing Norm Phantom, his little pile of bones will be licked clean by every baldy old camp dog in Desperance to kingdom come.’ Mrs Angel Day, as the old people referred to her in those days, had threatened many things on numerous occasions, more than her other veiled threats about leaving Norm which she finally did, although not on account of the crickets. She always started off or ended her threats with an added conjecture – ‘Mark my words,’ and you better believe it, sooner or later, she did whatever she threatened.

  In the early days when Mrs Angel Day ruled the roost in the Phantom household, reigning supreme out in the front yard, she often sat in a pram kept from her last born which she had converted into her chair. This was the spot from where she complained to the old people about the loud chirping noises of the crickets. She said it would drive her to divorce one day. The old people said the noise must be too great for her nervous constitution. If she ever saw her husband pass by, an occurrence which was not frequent, she complained to him, saying it was always left to her to save the marriage: ‘If you had any sense you’d shut up your noise.’ Veiled threat! Veiled threat! Norm always felt she was insinuating that he was personally responsible for summoning up all the devils that came into her life. ‘Inadvertently you might be,’ she claimed, and the old people looked away. ‘You will ruin our marriage by your ignorant inadvertent.’ ‘You’re hearing things,’ he told her. In truth, she did blame Norm for all of their bad luck, often stringing out piece by piece all the things that had gone wrong, starting from day one, New Year’s Day a long time ago, when they first met. ‘What New Year’s Day was that?’

  Norm Phantom did not remember any New Year’s anniversary. Every time she mentioned it, it was like a slap in the face, but he never told her that she was wrong about the date. He let it be a reminder to himself of her infidelities. Instead, he accused her of having a disease she had picked up: ‘Must be from one of those other men you were with before me.’ He furthered his claim by announcing to the old people sitting around pretending not to notice what they were arguing about, that she had passed the disease onto her children when they were born. ‘What disease?’ she retorted, although not denying her experiences before Norm. He told her it was a disease which makes people too sensitive to sound, where they turn into maniacs, they become like police. He said he would not have been surprised if his children wanted to become jarrbikalas.

  Norm Phantom went around telling the whole world that his family had some rare disease which made them overly sensitive to noise, although he claimed they were ‘stone deaf when a man wanted some simple thing done to help him around the place.’ At the time Norm was spreading false facts about his family’s hearing disabilities his good friend Elias was one of the few who disagreed with him. Elias claimed it was not logical that the entire family had hearing problems. He told Norm he did not know what he was talking about, because anyone who was half deaf in one ear and stone deaf in the other, was going to hear less than a person with normal hearing.

  Norm was annoyed by Elias’s insult and retaliated, saying if a man could not remember who he was, then surely he was not in the position to make sound judgements on any other matter. Norm was so fully convinced of his own superior hearing in spite of his inability to hear most normal sounds, he decided on the spot to write out another attachment to his many scribbled last wills and testaments he kept in a locked toolbox. In front of Elias, he plonked on the kitchen table an inch-high pile of ‘last wishes’ to be performed after his death. He wrote with a heavy hand, another document with a biro running out of ink, in broken traces of red writing that tore through the ruled page. ‘Upon his death,’ Norm declared, ‘his eardrums be gouged out by the police, butcher or any nurse, anyone (up to performing the request), except the one connected with the underneath date (namely Elias Smith),’ then he instructed – ‘Put em into a sticky-taped clean plastic bag.’ Instructions followed for the package to be covered with clean ice in a six-pack esky (which should be big enough), and stored in a cool room at the hotel or the butcher shop, until the arrival of the mail plane. ‘Then send the lot to science,’ he finally scrawled at the bottom of the page.

  It was Angel Day whose wishes came true. After a devil of a windstorm made the final decision, blowing south-south-west by eighty degrees, the fishroom was rebuilt away from the house, at the end of the twisting snake of a long and rusty corrugated-iron corridor that remained featureless, and provided no windows.

  Another requiem was being chanted when Norm discovered the body of Elias in the fishroom. In fact, it was the intensity and loudness of the sounds made by the crickets that had brought Norm running through the house, down the long corridor, with a million wild thoughts running through his mind. Scenes of death surrounded him. The music was so strange. The sound tumbled through his heart, mingling pulsing blood with the music for the dead.

  Norm froze the order of his reality. He struggled to maintain the surreal fresco of fishermen coming to collect their trophies. It was a day when he had to get the tanning fish skins ready to mount. He had a lot of work to do. With the requiem sounding like engines drumming, he felt his hands shaking as he fumbled to open the door. The sound did not stop as it normally would have when he entered the room. A cold shiver ran up his back, around his head, flashes of nightmarish times spent in hazardous seas jumped in front of his face. In the midst of the wreckage of all these storms, now racing through his mind, he looked around the room, suspecting his family, expecting to see a little pile of white feathers, the cockatoo dead. The mere thought abhorred him, and then he was surprised to see creeping into his mind the banned son, the one whom he never thought about anymore. He stood uselessly, searching, knowing it was pointless to push the unwanted away. The treachery felt in the room was profound, but the obstinate father let him remain.

  He needed to check the skins, and as he tried to walk over to the tanning baths, only his eyes responded, darting warily to left and right in time with the flickering phosphorescent light overhead, while his mind became more disoriented with the noise whirling him into a vortex of blue-black clouds, spinning with his memories.

  His legs felt disconnected from the rest of
him as though they were walking ahead of the rest of his body. With his long arms, he reached for the bench to stop himself from falling heavily on the ground, only to feel his hands land on something soft. Under them he saw the crumpled bags he could not remember seeing before, not lately, or ever. His eyes caught sight of a putrid coral trout and in disgust, he immediately pulled his hand away. As he looked at the rotten fish in the bags in a stunned silence, he immediately thought someone was playing another trick on him. Similar things had happened before. Stupid sorts of people would turn up with old fish with an expectation that he could work miracles. He would look his admirers in the eye and say that there was no one on earth who could make their wishes come true. Had they ever come across such a person? Someone better them himself? A person who went about converting rotting decayed bodies into jewels? He threw their fish in the stinking bin at his front gate.

  Dreams come and go, or come to a halt, as had the crickets, as though a certain shocking vibration had simultaneously struck their antennae. The alarming silence was almost as deafening as the piercing high-pitched orchestra had been. Norm looked around him, convinced something terrible had happened, and knew in that instant, that there was someone in the room looking at him. This was when he saw Elias, recognising him straightaway, profoundly ghostly, enveloping them both in death, then disconnecting, as his heart cried out loudly with the pain of being torn apart. His friend sat slumped against the wall. Norm cried from the pit of his stomach, like a lost creature of the earth, until the end of all things roared from his mouth.

  The tragedy did not end there. It had only just begun in the Phantom family that day when Elias had come home. ‘Look! A felony! Look! It’s a bloody felony that has been committed against Elias,’ Norm screamed repeatedly at the three sisters, his daughters, who had come running, jostling each other like getaway thieves through the corridor, and thinking their father had had a heart attack. The youngest brother, Kevin, was still strapped to his bed, thinking his father was being killed by the ‘othersiders’. He hollered incoherently and jerked the straps around like a madman to free himself. His mouth became full of froth and he cursed his sisters in a stream of spit, but was ignored. Easily exhausted, Kevin ended up moaning long, breathless guttural sounds, as though they would break his captivity. No one came to untie him.

  Janice, Patsy and Girlie stood there in the fishroom, staring in absolute puzzlement at their father’s outrageous behaviour. They were speechless – He wasn’t having a heart attack. Then they saw he was pointing to a man sitting on the floor against the wall. In the wildness of the moment, seeing a dead man with skin tanned to the colour of old parchment, long muddied, hair tangled with twigs and grass, none of them recognised it was Elias. Girlie said it looked like one of those mummified Egyptians you see unwrapped in a foreign museum for a television documentary. None saw it as male or female. They looked blankly at each other, ignored Norm who was still screaming about felonies, then saw the decaying fish. Together they thought aloud, ‘Evidence.’ Then Girlie said, ‘P-O-L-I-C-E in capital letters. The police will be coming here.’

  Knowing that the whole town already suspected their father of being a murderer, they talked rapidly about how to get rid of the fish, how to get rid of the body, how to rid the workroom of all traces of evidence. None of the daughters went near the father, who was now leaning in a slump over the workbench. All three were apprehensive about what they thought in the presence of their father.

  They stood well back. With a long piece of wood, a disused oar, Norm swung around wildly in the room sending the tanning fluid splashing through the air. The crickets were silent. The sisters were relieved. Patsy said, ‘Let him do it if he wants to. If he wrecks anything, at least it will be his own things, not ours.’

  Then the sisters worked fast, even Janice who was complaining she did not want to miss Oprah Winfrey. They ran back and forth across the room, avoiding Norm, who, even though exhausted, occasionally swung the oar at them. Then they raced up the corridor, through the house, past Kevin who was told to shut up, and out the front door. Minutes later Norm was distracted by the suffocating smell of burning rubber.

  When he looked out of the window to locate the source of the smoke, his heart felt as though it had jumped into his mouth. He saw the blaze of fire and billowing black smoke pouring off the molten blue bucket dancing on top of Kevin’s collection of play tyres which were being twisted around like a hurdy-gurdy in the intensity of the heat. He ran out of the room, cursing the stupidity of the incredibly long twisted corridor, then through the house, ignoring Kevin, who intensified his feeling of being a cursed man who had been dealt another blow of stupidity by his family: they were destroying the evidence.

  ‘It’s the bloody evidence. What do you think you are doing with that?’ he yelled. ‘You idiots.’ The girls ignored him. The fumes of burning plastic and rubber were continuously refuelled as they threw more and more metho onto the flames. He lunged vainly, trying to grab the metho bottles, as each daughter sidestepped out of range.

  ‘Put it out, put it out,’ he roared at them, but, it was as though he was not there. ‘What a bunch of no brain idiots,’ he could not believe it. He banged his fists together. Girlie looked, but took no notice. She had just seen the monkey beating his fists without his tambourine. He shouted, furiously stressing each syllable, saying he could not believe the mongrel breeds he had brought into the world. They took no notice and kept looking up the road in case anyone was coming. Where were the fishermen – why hadn’t they come? He looked up at the black smoke to see which way the wind was heading, if it was heading towards town, and sure enough, it was just as he expected. The black smoke was being picked up by the south-easterly breeze, which was sending it like a giant black worm, straight into Desperance.

  God’s truth! How unlucky can a man be? Norm knew the whole town would be standing out on the street, looking up the road towards his place. Everyone would be wondering – What the heck was happening! Why was Norm Phantom burning tyres? Why was he burning them in a big bonfire in the middle of the day? They would be surmising to each other about what he was trying to get rid of. In a small town like Desperance, people knew about burning incriminating evidence. Anybody with any sense burnt tyres at night-time like the mining company.

  The black smoke stretched out, spreading across the rooftops, and the soot fell onto the white-painted walls of the houses of Uptown. Phones rang, ringing, matching thrilling voices, exclaiming to each other their indignities against Norm Phantom for doing this to them. It was thrills for everyone. Norm Phantom knew there was a certain drill that operated against him amongst the houseproud, double-chinned maidens. The busybody matriarchs were quick smart, already jamming the telephone line, calling up the nice Constable about those Aboriginal people in the humpies over on the west side of town. They were at it again – burning rubber. ‘Could you be a dear and go down there and see what you can do about it, Love?’

  Janice, Patsy and Girlie worked on in a haze of fumes, possessed by the mesmerising height of the flames; still ignoring Norm, they stoked the fire to even greater heights. Suddenly Norm noticed the big daisy chain dress was missing; Big Patsy was nowhere in sight. His heart slipped a beat, then another. He yelled at Girlie and Janice to find her. He thought she had been engulfed by the fire. His chest tightened, he felt he was going to have a heart attack. But Patsy returned. Now he could see her struggling towards the fire with the body of Elias. Norm tried to stop her by pulling her back from the fire, and almost collided with Janice. With a panicky voice, she told him to get away from the body.

  ‘We have to get the police,’ Norm shouted, pulling at each of their clothing, trying to haul them back from the flames.

  ‘No, get away from us,’ Janice said, shaking herself out of his grip.

  ‘The police will be involved, you can’t stop it. They know.’

  They edged closer towards the hideous bonfire. Norm was unable to hold back the two big women working with all of
their weight against him. They would burn all of the evidence, Patsy said, and that would be the end of it. He could almost taste their anticipation that all would be well again.

  ‘Burn the evidence? You can’t burn the evidence. What are you, an idiot? You can’t burn Elias like that,’ Norm tried to tell her, in disbelief that they were calling Elias the evidence, a man who was like an Uncle to them. ‘Who do you think you are talking about?’

  ‘Get out of the way, Dad. Just you keep out of the way,’ Patsy kept saying, trying to push past her father, while he held her in a headlock.

  Girlie ran back into the house after she heard Kevin making an almighty racket on the corrugated-iron wall next to his bed. When she went rushing into his room, she saw him shaking his head violently from side to side, hitting the tin wall each time with a horrible loud thud. His baffling eyes were staring into space. She knew he could not see her when he became lost in this other nightmarish realm. Nobody knew Kevin’s world anymore. She felt sorry for her brother. She saw white froth and vomit all over his face, falling back into his mouth and nostrils. Kevin was drowning in the stench. Seeing his face had turned purple, she knew they had to untie him very quickly and get him into an upright position. It was not the first time the family had almost killed Kevin by tying him to his bed. Each time only sheer good luck had saved him when someone got there in the nick of time. Soon enough, they were all trying to save Kevin, while Elias’s body was left on the ground, out in the yard.

  ‘I told you you shouldn’t go around tying up your brother. I told you I never liked it,’ Norm reprimanded Patsy, as she struggled to undo the straps that were tightly buckled across his chest, stomach, thighs and ankles. Kevin wanted to speak to them but his mind felt ancient, as though it needed to come back across the mountains of a million years, to learn many languages, to be understood. He wanted to tell them he had seen Will, who had also crossed the mountains and come back to them. Will had come to visit him from the graveyard of a thousand sailors in the sea. Kevin had grown up believing that Will was dead because no one would mention his name in the house. He imagined himself searching an armada of war ships becalmed on a flat sea, searching the faces of those long-forgotten sailors, trying to find Will.