Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  Standing tall, resembling an exclamation mark on the putrid-smelling beach, Norm Phantom had no idea where he was, except that he was as inconsequential as the millions of dead fish strewn with other decaying marine life at his feet. No more, no less, and as futile and forgotten, but he could not accept that this was how it was; he was screaming, with all the ravenous sea birds gathered in their tens of thousands in a white flurrying cloud up and down the misty beach, ‘I am not one and the same as…’ Dead fish. Dead fish. The two words were locked in his throat.

  The stillness of the wet bush behind him reached out like an open mouth over the edge of the sand. The sense of foreboding that he interpreted as his doomed fate made his blood run cold. He dared not enter its domain, at least not yet. Who knew what ghosts of women walked slowly through the bushlands? There but not wanted, but there so cheap, it was almost stupid not to take the offer. He visualised their taunting bodies opening and closing, lips moving and unable to hear their words. He looked out to the sea and the opening and closing of the clouds.

  There had never been a moment in his life he thought, as pointless as it was now. Over the top of the deafening bird cries and the occasional sound of distant thunder, he berated the cruel contradictions of the sea gods, the spirits of the heavens, for keeping him alive. What twist of fate was there in being dumped in a hideous graveyard, this pointless massacre of life? He spoke with arrogance and irritation of his safe arrival, calling it a joke – pure and simple, as though he could talk his way out of the present, remake the past, and order the future.

  ‘Sea! You listening to me at this moment I am speaking to you? You are full of cruelness, you are like women, you sea! Have you finished with me yet or what?’

  In reply, the sulky waves barged forward, banged, thumped and dumped their debris further up onto the beach. He jumped out of the way but it was his right to censure the sea. Though he was very weak and feeble from his ordeal, and overcome with emotion from what he had endured, it was his right to say something. So what if he had lost some of his marbles in his screwed up head? ‘I know what I am saying,’ he hollered. So with a screw loose here and there, he flounced around the rotting carcasses as though he could not smell their sickening stench. His eyes bulged unnaturally from the sockets where his dehydrated skin clung to the crevices of his bones. The wretched shorts and singlet he wore the night he rowed away from Desperance were now torn to shreds. There was no harm in letting off a bit of steam. It felt right to let all the old sea phantoms know that a man like Norm Phantom, even reduced to a mere skeleton, had more important things to do with his life than being dumped ungraciously on a place that might not even exist. He had heard of these places before. Men caught in limbo, who were condemned to live on and on in uncharted, empty patches of the sea.

  The mighty sea heaved and sighed. Waves regardless of talk crashed on the beach. The wind whistled past overhead. The sea birds sang their songs here and there in their nooks and crannies late in the afternoon. Surveying the beach like a fugitive searching for a possible escape route, Norm muttered on, convincing nobody but himself of his deeply held convictions about his close relationship with the sea. He was not like other people. Plunderers! Rioters! Tyrants! So the good friend of the sea lamented his misfortune under his breath, of being locked in like a prisoner, of being reduced to a little man.

  In this state of mind he started to see signs like neon lights sitting on signposts jutting out from the ocean. Road signs the equivalent of those on the highway south of Desperance – Drive Slow. Slow Down. Cattle crossing. Seasonal flooding to be expected. He read all the signs and tried to interpret them as messages from the spirits. He watched tiny insects devouring rotten fish flesh and he interpreted them as messengers, or disguised spirits. He deferred to a guardian angel looking over his shoulder – an old bearded image of himself that could have been his own shadow. He thought of the clagginess of the claypan soil, and was drawn to particular specks of sand on the beach which he thought might have originated from Desperance. Each speck was as insignificant as the other. He aligned the specks into a map for it was his normal way of understanding the world. His eyes darted from one sign to the other, as he tried to link them into a lifeline, a map which would give him reason.

  The bush was still with the late afternoon lull from the wind, yet it still felt as though it was full of wild women slowly walking back and forth as they watched his progress on the beach. He needed to be heard over the silence. It was as though the sheer marvellous miracle of bringing human speech though silence had overwhelmed him. He talked and talked, telling the most fantastic of stories about himself. When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours, and it jumped at the chance of revenge. Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. The sand cut into his face like attacking ants, forcing him to close his eyes, yet this did not stop him. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance. Sea mist poured in from the ocean to salt his wounds. The taunted waves threw themselves higher up onto the beach as though they were the bottom lip of a mouth sulking, trying to reach out to him. The bush line trembled in anticipation. Plying the sea with words was a strange game but wiser men have done the same. Men tend to judge nature’s efforts to save them.

  The industrious guardian angel of good sense strenuously urged Norm to move away into the bushland. In its catlike mimic of a bowerbird, it cited the industry of ants, as well as the clever beetles turning over the putrid sand, the crabs darting from hole to hole – ‘Go,’ it said, uselessly urging him to retreat to the bush. He refused to listen to a shadow, for he believed he had formed his own map of the signposts forecasting his future. Finally, he collapsed on the beach, where he sat with his strangely protruding eyes watching the waves roll through the night, too afraid to turn his back for one minute from the ocean, least the rough wave, hiding in the black night, leap out and take him.

  Or had he become possessed by the sea’s mesmerising monotony of endless waves rising and falling, slap like they did, onto the beach? A fearful scene was unfolding under the roll. Just metres away in the murky grey waters, rolling with dead fish and their relatives, the sand, and slime-coated shells, he saw a city of faces which belonged to dead people staring at him through the undertow. Where even over the din of the waves crashing, and the intermittent raucous cries of squabbling birds trying to sleep, he heard windy voices seducing him into the trap for which he had been waiting.

  Out yonder, in the deeper waters, the sea woman was lurking around, waiting for him in the seagrass meadows swaying backwards and forwards under the water. This was what happened; sea men knew she could be the size of an ordinary woman or she could make herself as big as the sea itself. When he was a boy long ago he had dreamt what she looked like. He saw her running about in the ocean of Desperance with hair longer than her body reaching out around her like the poisonous tentacles of the box jellyfish. And her grey skin, coarse and hard was similar to the texture of a shark, although not clean like a shark. She was covered with sheer green-blue slime that clung and hung from her body like the lace which she had collected from her jaunts, in the slime-filled caves along the ocean floor.

  So the night passed into day with Norm Phantom still ensconced on the beach as though he had settled there permanently to live. His first decision was to stay on the beach to guard the boat. He neither ate nor drank as he guarded the only piece of insurance he had of leaving the land he had been thrown on. His mind hung onto limbo, a delicate branch, as leafless as it was devoid of trust.

  That night, a mist crept over him while he slept on the beach. This was when he heard the devil woman Gardajala singing out from the bush. If he had been awoken by her lewd song he did not know, but he had seen her eyes shining like two golden coins – like dollars – as she stared at him through the grass on to
p of the rise. She kept crying how much she wanted him to come up there to her, but he was stalwart, steadfastly maintaining his repugnance as he eschewed her enticements. She was like no other woman he had ever heard, calling her sexual innuendo without shame. ‘You don’t want me, old woman prostituting yourself, I am crippled up, dried up like a prune,’ he called back, in a mocking voice, speaking back at the bush like one of the old senile men of Desperance’s Fisherman’s Hotel.

  But she kept on crying out loud for him, saying he was going to crack, saying maybe he wanted to go up there and keep her warm. ‘Quiet woman!’ Come on, just one night, just until dawn. ‘You got no shame. Quiet or you will stir up herself over there in the sea watching.’ The bartering for her desires to quench his, and his to quench hers, went on until he could stand it no longer. He could almost feel his hands touching her body covered in yellow grass where she lay waiting for him. Miserable in his physical needs of lust, hunger and thirst, he strapped his hands over his ears, as he forced himself to recite over and over, ‘Don’t go thinking of her, don’t go thinking of her.’ Faster and faster he sang his little lines, at such an exciting pace, while pressing his hands hard onto his ears, and she in return begged faster, and he cried singing faster and thinking of her, wanting her, and she cried, until their ecstasy was consummated. Then, they both curled up in foetal positions on their earth beds, hers of grass, his of sand, and went to sleep.

  Chapter 9

  Bala, the child of hope

  Oh! Magic big time. A land full of tricks. The sea full of spirits. Poor land woman devil Gardajala. The sea woman, whose name must not be mentioned because she might be listening, far out at sea, was spinning herself into a jealous rage. She was almost cyclonic, if you could believe in the power of her magic. She canvassed and corralled her armies. Her movement was slow. The low cloud band radiated out a sea of mist that had already touched her old enemy Gardajala by the time Norm woke from his sleep. And all the while, all poor old Gardajala could do was to raise herself up into a wirriwidji whirly wind to throw her spiteful hand full of dirt at the sea.

  Everyone in the Pricklebush knew of the poisonous countries out at sea, places where it was too dangerous for a man to go, where the spirits dwelt, like the Gundugundu men who were even more dangerous than Kadajala, the white-man devil, and those of the unhappy warring spirit warriors of the old wars. Gundugundu spirits, if riled up enough, could kill a man straight out in the middle of their stormy wars – not just leave him halfway crashing into the ocean like what happened to Norm Phantom. The movement of Gundugundu was always swift. Faster than a fish or bird. No living person would be capable of seeing them with their eyes.

  Only the old people blind in the eye watched them flying through the air inside of cyclones. Those old people used to tell stories to their families when the cyclones were about. Perhaps their stories were an invention of their imagination whenever they got a funny feeling under their skin, but whatever it was, it was uncanny how they always knew when someone was going to die in mysterious circumstances by a bolt of lightning. One would never know if it was the will of God, or whatever was out there in those waters of the oceans, but everyone in the Pricklebush expected to hear the news before someone died of mysterious circumstances during a cyclone. So say: Oh! No! They never walked to pick up souls. They got legs alright, and feet too, but funny thing that, because they do not use them, maybe they can’t but just fly about instead. Once a child asked if they had any shoes. Some did. Some wore something on their feet. Sometimes these spirits had to travel over land, travelling many hundreds of kilometres to carry out their ghastly business, but still, they never used their legs and feet to walk. Whenever they came to kill, it all happened in a split second. Afterwards, utter calm was restored.

  The boat was stuck fast in the sand where the ocean had dumped it on the previous day. Now, as another king tide built deepening trenches over the sand, Norm failed to notice the water encroaching around the sides of the boat and those watery arms cunningly drawing back enough sand to steal it. Norm heard a small voice telling him to save the boat, but he refused to listen to voices, just as he had refused to listen to the sound of his stomach telling him to eat. Instead, he prayed for matches. ‘God help me to make a fire. I got to have a fire tonight to keep those devils away.’ The small voice said he would make the fire if Norm would help to move the boat up onto higher ground. But Norm refused to acknowledge the voice. ‘You got to light a fire first before moving the boat,’ Norm said, puckering up one side of his lips that indicated he wanted the fire lit back up towards the bush, without turning his head around to look at it.

  Suddenly – Norm thought he was becoming even more delirious – the aluminium boat was moving. ‘Hold up,’ Norm grunted, but his movement was slow and weak. As he struggled to get to his feet, he saw that the boat was not being moved by the incoming tide, but through the efforts of a small five- or six-year-old boy with his head bent to the back of the boat, struggling to push it higher up the beach. ‘Hold up, Will,’ Norm said, instantly recognising the boy as his own son, but the child ignored him. Norm looked at the boy who was knee-deep in water, desperately pushing with all his might. Norm could not believe it, for there was Will, as though all those intervening years had not passed. Now, on his feet, somehow with the restored strength of a man half his age, Norm was able to help the boy until the boat was lugged higher onto the beach.

  Once again, the old man’s weakness forced him to sit down on the sand, where he slipped into the luxury of his wandering thoughts which were more alive than the busy boy. Yet, undeniably, he could see for himself that the boy was real live flesh and blood. ‘You are a good boy, Will, always a good boy,’ he said, but the boy was not listening. The boy, with his brown skin, covered in sand and dried sea salt, and wind-swept brown hair, had leapt into the boat, and was rummaging around through the plastic containers.

  ‘Can I use these?’ he asked Norm, while holding out some fishing line and hooks.

  ‘Sure, Will,’ Norm smiled, ‘run off quick smart and get the rest of them kids to help you.’

  The boy looked at Norm for a moment and said, ‘Alright, I’ll get us some fish.’ Then without hesitation he was off, running up the beach, leaving Norm looking at the waves and saying half-heartedly, ‘And tell your Mother I am here too.’

  The afternoon passed by as the sun receded lower in the horizon, until finally the clouds became blood red, and the water looked as though it was on fire. Norm thought Will ought to be coming back any minute now. It would not be easy to have to find him in the dark. His old impatience of his children returned, and triggered his grumbling about how they never listened to what they had been told. ‘Well! I have told him. Told him many times about how much those devil-devils were looking for good-looking kids like him in the night.’ He began to hear the devil woman’s voice crying and singing as she moved through the bushes behind the sand bank. She complained about how her family would just turn up whenever it suited them: But you are not like proper family. You don’t know what love is.

  ‘He’s a good boy. Always listens to me,’ Norm tried to reassure himself, ignoring the bush woman. He looked up the beach where the boy had gone, half expecting to see the rest of the family coming back. The expectation of seeing his little children rollicking around as they always did gave him pleasure. He held the joyful memory and took greater pleasure wiping aside all the whispering doubts in the back of his mind, questioning what was real: saying the boy was false. Not Norm though, he chose the best times as his parable. Sand, sun, happy family. It freed him from the impossible future that showed no easy path to the home he had left.

  Life was good waiting for the children to come down to the beach, and he found himself promising this and promising that. Everything would be good from now on. Everything. It was so good to start again, to be given one’s time over – another chance. The waves kept roaring in, and old Gardajala started up in her windy song, singing, There was nothing as foolish a
s a silly old fool who lost his boat, lost his wife and lost his house, his children too, and what is he going to do, sitting by himself, lonely by himself, and coming by himself, to me. She could make a singsong all night out of nothing. He knew other women like that.

  Over his head, she blew treacherously taunting words in her wind. He had ducked for cover behind the boat, when all at once, he saw her long hair blow out of the bush in a gigantic whorly wind, carrying a solemn haze of red dust, large flocks of sea birds, and seagulls, in among clouds of white down feathers from the rookeries in the swamps over the sand rise.

  When she disappeared out to sea to find her opponent, he was again surprised when he looked down the beach for the boy. What came instead of children after the dust, feathers and birds, was the screeching of a lone cockatoo flying up the beach towards him. It reminded Norm of his bird Pirate. ‘Where’s your flock, boy?’ the bird hollered out its question, like so, whenever he clapped eyes on Norm walking out of the house in Desperance. The bird fell out of the wind like a little spirit. The little black eyes peered at Norm. It looked and looked, until suddenly it announced matter-of-factly, in a flat voice, ‘What are you doing?’ Less feathered than Norm remembered him, the bird’s remaining feathers, enough for flight, were covered with filth and oil.

  ‘Hello old boy, how did you get here?’ Norm said, putting out his hand for the bird to come to him.

  A spray of sand went flying through the air as the boy landed smack bang between them. The bird jumped back in fright.

  ‘What the hell you go and done that for?’ Norm asked as he retreated his hand with its twiddling fingers.