At night he slept, half curled up in the cramped space in the middle of the boat in a puddle of stagnant water. Although his body felt sluggish in the heavy air, his mind was as attuned as a wary night bird passing his boat. Even the slightest movement of water breaking with a fish surfacing would awaken him in fright. ‘What’s that! What’s that!’ he called out, half asleep, ready to abandon ship. And from the other end of the boat in the darkness, Elias said calmly, ‘Relax, go back to sleep, it’s nothing.’ Unfortunately, once robbed of his sleep, he could not sleep. Instead, driven with annoyance, grumbling that it was alright for Elias to be calm – he did not have to come back alive – Norm would start rowing again in the middle of the night, navigating by his memorised map, following the star of the fish.
He would row into daylight, his mind absorbed with directing his monotonous labour, until a startled cry from a seagull winging close to his head, ricocheting off every surface of the sea plain, echoed like madness through his mind.
Elias’s version of the argument, which altered and swayed in many different directions over the years, was based on seeing Angel Day walking to the rubbish dump in the summertime. Elias said he was not blind, he knew what he saw. All the Pricklebush people living on the edge of town were sloshing around like wild pigs in ankle-deep mud to get anywhere all along the roads in town, after the heavy Wet season rain.
The world was no longer under the spell of the monochrome grey-coloured Dry season. The land was covered with flood plains alive with frogs calling to each other in waves of sound running across the atmosphere, closing to absolute silence near to the magical footsteps of Elias, before resuming the pitch of the highest decibels behind him again.
Next, Elias used the brighter paints on his palette to portray the scenario, describing how he had watched her moving in the mist and long grass like an angel, a spirit no less, along the path, skipping to avoid the puddles. Elias was not taunting Norm. He spoke frankly without any realisation that the truth of the lost wife was painful for his friend. The way Elias spoke about Angel astonished him because his wife had never been angelic.
The way Elias spoke of what he saw was no secret, not something he had seen alone, because everyone in the Pricklebush felt haunted whenever she approached them, like a hummingbird, in the bush, along lonely paths on the outskirts of the town. She was the one who made people scratch their heads and say, ‘What kind of woman was that?’ To many others, she was a memorable, marvellous sort of woman who printed herself on your mind with red lipstick, while you watched. Elias said she was too good for sure. He had stood by the side of the track like a stupid man, he said.
‘Hello Elias, Norm is already down at the boats,’ she purred catlike at Elias gawking at her again, then rolled those luxuriant brown eyes, and just like the queen she was, she floated off.
Norm paused at the call of a seagull. His mind floated back to the thoughts that had preoccupied him in those days. All of the many preparations he was engrossed with, even for such a small sea craft. The inconsequential trappings to ensure survival. Elias never worried come rain or storm, while Norm was forever moving about with his all-weather jacket over his head for shade, checking equipment from one end of the boat to the other, fanaticising over hairline cracks becoming gaping holes overnight. ‘You never used to be like that, fret, fret. I reckon you live in the ruins of married life.’ Those were Elias’s true words about his good friend Norm. Norm threw Elias’s words back now as an accusation, ‘How come you were saying things like that about me?’ Elias looked him back squarely in the eyes and kept on staring, until Norm answered for him, ‘Why didn’t you ask me that when I was alive?’ Norm mumbled he would have, but he did not want to cause an argument, so, ‘It did not matter.’ Unable to continue this argument with itself, his mind slipped back to the days of golden yellow, and boats of capillary red, when a man walked home when he felt tired.
Norm moved awkwardly, his legs severely cramped from the long journey, and checked the four fishing lines hanging over the side of the boat. He changed the bait with pieces of flesh from a small shark he had been saving from his catch from the previous night. ‘See!’ He showed the lines to Elias before throwing them over the sides again. Looking into the spot where the lines were sinking into the blue-green depths, he saw his companion following, the manta ray with its greying form moving through the depths of ocean below. Norm became intoxicated by watching the prolonged movement of the suspended ray. The creature moved so tantalisingly slowly by suspending itself in the drift of tidal movement. He no longer cared to stay above. His vision slipped into and out of the waters, breaking the surface so many times, he became lost in time.
The grey sea creature willowing below carried his subliminal mind on its back, absorbing those captured thoughts of Angel Day walking out of a submerged track in the sea towards him. She walked out of the water not far from the boat in a dazzling ray of sunlight, and she walked away, back on the track that led to the rubbish dump. Norm gripped the vision, staring straight through reality to watch her for the first time that long-ago day when Elias had seen her. Looking so closely into her face, he was astounded at its clarity. He was shocked to see a secret intimacy residing within her. He had never before seen this face from her childhood transcending through the travesties of their life together. He thought he had never seen her before. She walked with a tranquillity and a beauty that was her normal face, but which she had carefully folded up and stored away, saved only now for stolen occasions of when she was completely alone. He felt ashamed to be hiding behind the long grass, peering out with the grasshoppers, slipping along behind her, following on the path of what happened on that very last day he and Elias had cast the peaceful spells of being just simple men working on their boats.
It had been a very ordinary day of whiling away the time when suddenly the blue nylon line ran straight across the water, and Norm Phantom was propelled out of his daydreams. He was being challenged by a fish of great strength that held the end of the line taut after it plunged into the depths, as though it had turned itself into a rock. The strange object in the distant sea line that he had been watching still edged its way through the water, slowly bobbing like a balloon, moving against the slight breeze blowing across the sea from the mainland. Norm scanned the surface, vigilant, yet far too preoccupied now with the sun hanging low in the sky, as he struggled with his first catch in what had become a long day.
The war raged on for what seemed like hours between the old man weakened in his travels, and the fish, the long, narrow, silver body of a giant Spanish mackerel, spinning through the water with one of Norm Phantom’s lines hooked into its mouth. The fish sprang out of the water, twisted in the air to eye Norm with the hateful vengeance caught fish have of men, and ran the line flat chat – twang, twang, back and forth, from one side to another, cutting through the thousands of little bait fish that regularly swam in the shade underneath the boat, and like a great trickster, twisting the half-dozen spare lines into a single knot.
Afterwards, success was not great. The perverse deep-rooted sea man’s euphoria did not etch deep in his bones. Instead, he felt humiliation wash over his skin, exposing him as a marauder of the sea, a stranger in a strange place. He felt vulnerable in his little boat. Self consciously, he used his knife in a butchering act to gut the fish, then he noticed the strange shape of a giant stingray, as big as the boat itself, flying across the sea like a passenger of the wind.
The sun sitting low on the horizon threw its bright rays across the water which simulated liquid gold. The tantalising phenomenon moving towards Norm reflected a blinding light, as its ploy to distract his scrutiny, while it scrutinised him with predatory eyes. Several times Norm was forced to avert his own eyes to the safety of the sun-glistening waters, or more guardedly, to the shining silver of fish blood swimming around his feet. Yet, drawn back time and again, he would lift his eyes above the shield of his tiny world on the vastness of water to capture another glimpse of the giant cr
eature’s hypnotic power. Drowning in his distractions, Norm suddenly looked across at Elias as if remembering he was not alone after all, and saw the dead man smiling at him. ‘If you are in charge of our little journey Elias, you better start telling me what we are going to do now,’ Norm said, relinquishing control, no longer sure if he ever had control. He ate some of the raw fish flesh, staring around like an animal, waiting for another animal to eventuate, to steal his food. He heard fingers clicking. He looked around and there was nothing. But it was enough. He found what he had mislaid. He saw the route of their journey laid out in his mind, from woe to finish line, and knew he was again on track.
‘Right! Right! Right! So if this is the case…’ Norm spoke softly this time to Elias, without ending his speech, as if Elias was also studying the same map he was looking at. He must never question his vulnerability to the elements of the weather again. He looked across the sea, this time he could see wind and storms held in the arms of the saltwater spirits, which had always been there, all through this journey to the graveyard of the men of the sea.
He now understood the travelling phenomenon he had watched was the sorrowful woman, a cursed spirit of death who had come to find them. ‘Can you hear her Elias?’ That night, he was convinced he could hear her cries in the wind whistling across the waters, that her cries were curses in a language that was foreign to him. He knew what the old people said about her. In the long grass they would hear her wails coming in from the sea, or even from land along the beach, if they listened closely at night. The old people said if you could hear her way out at sea, she was warning those who heard her to stay away. No fisherman would ever actually see her because she would make herself moonba to them, yet Norm knew what he was looking for. He had an image of a white flowing hair witch, whose very skin he knew was like slime, and off her body trailed seaweed for clothes.
Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it decorum – the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being, alongside spirits for neighbours in dreams. In the local stories handed down through the generations, the sea woman was a death angel. She appeared from nowhere in her endless search to take men back to her dark, empty world in the deep waters at the bottom of the ocean. Norm knew what this world looked like because he saw it in his dreams.
On the floor of all oceans was a world overgrown with a forest of living black coral. It was a place that harboured a final darkness, where light never penetrated, and where men who were captured through some form of bewitchment, lived for the rest of eternity, pulled and tugged, while suspended in the streams of water running back and forth across the globe. The old people always spoke of this limbo world, where fish never seen by man were really spirit women who lived and swam through holes in the captured man’s ribcage, and perpetually fiddled with his brain to make him forever yearn to be rescued.
Another little wind blew an old green rubbish bag into the boat. Norm guessed it must have flown hundreds of kilometres, whirling its way across the water from Desperance’s dump. Believing it to be a second omen, a curse from someone in Desperance, someone from the Pricklebush mob on the other side, he kicked the tattered plastic overboard in the darkness, as though it was something alive, a Goddess woman who came flying low across the sea. When it blew straight back into his face, he read the change as a sign telling him that there were wild winds beginning to pour back into the Gulf from the north-east, bringing more storms.
Norm carefully watched the green form spiralling around the boat, once, twice, each time as if it wanted to land and attach itself to him. With his arms flailing aimlessly at the plastic thing in the night, he told her straight: ‘Don’t you come here.’ Oh! Yes! What a thing. He was convinced this was a sorceress of a wife. A witch who had borne his children and then behold, in front of his very eyes, walked off, wilfully wrecking their marriage. He heard her rustling as she hovered between them, whispering secrets to Elias – ‘Norm’s lost at sea.’ Then the wind turned, and she flew back with it towards the coast. With her departure, Norm felt a heavy shadow passing over him. It was the change coming, and he told Elias in a low, steady voice to get ready. ‘Make out nothing’s happening. Brace yourself man.’ The sea remained as flat as a tack but Norm waited. The wind did not turn into a storm and the boat sat in the flat, humid sea with Norm, sticky and hot, returning to the last dying days of his marriage.
So far, the journey had taken Norm more than two weeks of rowing all day long, living on raw fish, and drinking rain water he collected on a sheet of plastic made into a hollow dam. He stored the water he captured in soft-drink bottles. Then, knowing the place where the gropers lived was drawing closer, he stopped worrying up the storms as he journeyed through the humidity and flat seas, realising that all these obsessions of what was not right, were metaphors for his failed marriage.
One clear morning, Norm knew he had reached his destination, when he caught a glimpse of a groper swimming with his huge back fin clear of the water, no further than twenty metres away. He waited, watching while it swam over to the side of the boat. Once, Elias had told him that the groper was the descendant of the giant dinosaur. Norm did not know whether it was true or not. He had other stories. Their whole area was covered with megafauna once upon a time, Elias said. This he explained was millions of years ago, before it stopped raining, and the claypans were covered with rainforest. Elias explained that when you went around parts of the country thinking you were walking on rock, it was really fossilised tree stumps from those times. The rainforest trees were massive, he said. It was hard to imagine. Norm saw both these worlds wherever he looked at one.
Elias said it was not hard to imagine at all, for he had seen such trees somewhere, but he could not remember the places he had travelled. Norm knew there were fossilised bones of the ancestors of gropers and other animals being found by the palaeontologists and flown by helicopter out of the country by the bag load. These old bones which had lain with the ancestors for millions of years, were being stuck together again with araldite and wire, and covered with fur so all Australians could visit them in museums to see what these creatures used to look like.
The Fishman was full bottle about the palaeontologists, so he came along too, saying to Norm it was only natural for Elias to say those things, for the groper was a creature that used to have legs for walking on land, but it returned to the water to live sometime millions of years ago after a drought. ‘We are having the same drought right now,’ he said, sniffing the air for temperature. Norm and the Fishman had once watched a groper die. Fishman patted the dry skin of the creature, and called it the giant Queensland groper, Promicrops lanceolatus. Norm was amused with the Fishman’s knowledge of science. Fishman smiled, and said maybe it weighed nearly a ton, and joked, ‘All that scientify stuff is easy. You could learn it in a day.’ Norm knew the Fishman picked up everything he knew, foreign languages, cooking, taste in music, just from listening to the broadband radio. He declared, ‘The radio has been my education.’
The creature had lain on the beach motionless. Norm looked at the tyre marks of a Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle. It had winched the animal out of the water and up onto the beach. They had sat down on the beach beside the animal. Perhaps they were waiting for it to die by keeping it company.
Well! he just goes on looking at you. He just goes on breathing and breathing through his lungs, pumping steadily, waiting. Its body had dark mottlings of brown and grey, which slowly, over time, dried out. The animal took on the appearance of being coated with thick armour, with its hard little eyes on either side of its broad head, still staring. ‘I can feel him staring right through me,’ Fishman said at the time. The white fishermen from the mine were hacking the flesh off the body of the groper with an axe. ‘He takes a long time to die.’ Meanwhile, they heard the animal gru
nt with the torture of each blow until its heart, buried deep inside its massive fleshy body, caved in to its long, agonising death. Norm knew other stories about the groper coming from the Dreamtime and continuing its story along the tracks in the sea which he had followed for Elias. And other kinds of stories about bad luck.
The old people would say never go to sea with a fisherman who had killed a groper. Everybody will tell you that. Better to let the groper live, or his ghost will live in the dreams of the fishermen who killed him, and when they go to sea, he will know what is in their heads, but he knows more about the sea than any fisherman, so he will be able to steal their luck away. This was the only way the spirit of such a colossal fish would ever go back to the sea.
The groper hole was in an abyss, an ancient reef crater of a sea palace, a circular fish city full of underground caves where the huge fish liked to live. A place where they could have returned to from the land in ancient times like the palaeontologists say, or skies if they flew like the elders say in the Law of the Dreamtime. Millions of years ago, what was it like? Remember! Were skies blue then?
Once before, Elias had brought Norm to the ocean’s pavonazzo which shone from the depths to the surface with the colours of a peacock’s tail. It was where the gropers had lived for centuries and even though they swam together, lived solitary lives in their own separate caves.
The groper caressing the side of the boat was instantly recognised by Norm as one of his friends who swam right up to his beach in the night, calling him to go fishing with them. ‘Well! I’ll be darned,’ Norm said, awestruck perhaps, that he would actually reach his destination. He began whistling Auld Lang Syne of all things to the creature who had once been his groper’s friend. Elias had become misguided like a fool into the politics of Uptown. He was far too busy to go fishing, too busy for the sea. He abandoned the lot, everything he knew, just for Uptown. Then it was just Norm, instead of Elias, who set off following the gropers along their sea tracks until they were out on the reefs. There, they would leave him behind while they herded up the reef fish, holding them in a tight circle around his boat, allowing Norm to spear as many as he wanted before releasing their hold.
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