Carpentaria

by Alexis Wright

  This was the reason why Desperance needed an active policeman, an ideas man, someone like Truthful, who felt this was the big breakthrough in his years in the town. It required a lot of guesswork to know what was going on about the place now. So, since supposition was the prerogative of the police station, it was part of Truthful’s occupation to be Will’s second-guesser. Once Will Phantom heard about Kevin that would be it. He would come there as large as life, reeking for revenge. Truthful secretly surmised in his acts of seducing Girlie, that Will Phantom would not expect anyone to think he would turn up at his father’s house. Truthful thought he possessed a brave idea. He would be waiting when Will arrived. Ideas were very fashionable in Uptown at the moment, and he felt he had his ideas down pat. He was betting his last dollar on it.

  The days passed full of cringe for Uptown, winding themselves up by watching Truthful’s mad driving to Norm Phantom’s house. The whole town rested on their fearful beliefs, pondering and waiting for a showdown of sorts. Would Will Phantom pick and choose what goose among them was going to cop it – a house fire, a fight, intimidation, terrorism?

  Everyone in town knew the story, that Norm would not have a bar of Will, and so far, he had been the only person who could crush him. He had told the big-head off. He wanted nothing to do with him. Called him a no-good mongrel breed, talking about land rights and all of that crap. Yes! Norm told him what Uptown wanted to say, ‘We don’t want any of that Southern black rights activism stuff up here.’ Would Will Phantom return? Nothing would stop him now his father was away. Truthful did not rate a mention, for nobody would be able to defend themselves against the stash of guns and ammunition everyone knew Will had hidden somewhere in that monstrous tin castle they could see down the road. The great speculation about the explosives and equipment he had in his possession was dragged out of memories, and talked about again with interest bordering on paranoia, with new links to terrorism. There were things missing down at the mine every time there was a stocktake.

  Word grew that Will Phantom even knew how to assemble an atomic weapon. He had stolen uranium in the area, from the locked-up mine at Mary Kathleen. He had just slipped over the fence and helped himself. It was idiotic thinking, for it was not possible. The uranium mine of Mary Kathleen, some few hundred kilometres away, was sealed, fenced, locked, and guarded. But who knows? Who knows these things anymore when people are living in such a complex world, and people do not talk, do not negotiate a fair deal, do not live by the rules, and will do anything to get what they want?

  Blah! Blah! Blah! So on and so forth. People talked of the many foreign boats mixed up with the mining. They surmised a lot. For who knew what shipload of stuff Will had smuggled from black rights sympathisers, from pirate ships bobbing up and down in the moonlight, just kilometres off the coast? Anything! Anything! Moored there while the stuff was rowed ashore probably. Anyone could see for themselves what was really going on, they claimed. He was going to create his own race war up in the Gulf. Everyone knew that. Knew one had to be very careful with surface appearances, especially with a place like Norm Phantom’s, which could be mighty misleading looked at from the other end of the road.

  ‘Idiot! Bloody idiot!’ Girlie could churn Truthful around, like wringing him fingers-first through her old Simpson washing machine, while dragging him out at the other end, smack flat and drained. The sisters could tell that she was plain itching to stir him up. Ever since what happened to Kevin, she had become obsessed about old man Joseph Midnight knowing everything. ‘He sees everything! Doesn’t he see everything?’ The hundredth time. Every passing night, for half the night, the two older sisters had listened to her talking about old man Joseph Midnight.

  Now, sitting in the kitchen, Janice and Patsy, both with great bags under their eyes and barely mobile because of Girlie’s pacing around during the night, wondered why Girlie, who was so quick to see everything, had not noticed the colour draining from Truthful’s face as she yelled his inadequacies at him, straight across the kitchen table.

  Initially, all she wanted to know was whether he was getting any closer to catching those mongrels and when he never answered her, Well! that was that. It was they who had to eventually serve him some food because she refused. ‘Yer can go hungry,’ she claimed, eating in front of him, filling her own big mouth with a half piece of toast at a time. The moon sisters watched his olive-skinned face fade from red, to storm-sea grey. They thought it uncanny how the colour perfectly matched the corrugated-iron walls of the cramped kitchen. ‘Old man Joseph Midnight will be able to tell you, I am telling you,’ Girlie prattled on with a full mouth.

  ‘Then why don’t you ask him?’ Truthful finally barked at her like a dog breaking into her cruel world. The sweat running down his face sprayed over the table. Girlie jumped out of the way with her plate. She grabbed her cup, grinning now from ear to ear. She had at last found the crack, exposed the wound, forced him to feel her pain. There was no room for little boys around her world. ‘Go, Truthful.’ Thinking he could just suffocate himself with his own tongue which was already swollen up with bundles of lies stuffed inside his mouth. No wonder he could not talk. But Girlie could grab someone’s tongue and shake it around just by using her bare words.

  Then, with the bigger sisters sitting and eating, trying to pretend nothing was happening, she noticed he was clamming up again. ‘Anyone hear anything?’ He put his finger to his lips, indicating to Girlie, she should do the same. Truthful looked as though he had seen a ghost. He had seen old man Joseph Midnight coming out of the mud along the side of the road outside of the Phantom place this morning, as he drove down the road. He had been seeing Joseph Midnight sneaking about just about everywhere he looked lately. This morning, the old fella just stood there staring, mud dripping everywhere, and when Truthful looked at him, he told Truthful he was a bloody idiot.

  The dismayed sisters sat quietly like little mice sipping tea, and again, were suddenly surprised to notice how his thick lips were trembling, as though he had just come out of a fridge, or was seeing ghosts, or both, and thought, perhaps he had lost his marbles. They kicked polite circumspection reserved for visiting white people out the door, and Patsy and Janice stared straight into his face, to observe his radically changed personality more closely. Only Girlie, continuing on regardless, seemed to be reaching his lost state of mind. Who wouldn’t, with her screaming abuse at them from across the table? The bigger sisters lent in to take an even closer look at his face. His heavy hooded eyelids were twitching uncontrollably as he stared into space past Girlie.

  Again, Truthful saw the images which had overtaken his car at dawn. It happened when he had started driving out on their road, and at first, he thought he was losing his eyesight as he stared ahead at the fuzzy, lighter, paler-coloured road and countryside ahead. It looked as though there was a fog ahead, but soon, he discovered it was not a fog at all, only by then, it was too late to turn around. He could clearly see he had driven deep into spider webs as high as the vehicle. A thick sheet of white surrounded him. Perhaps Truthful had never seen such a thing before, but it was an old story that sometimes happens overnight when a cloud of travelling spiders drop onto land from the sea wind, and start building their webs the height of house walls. Ingeniously, the spiders work at night, flying through the air as they attach their silver webs to anything with height: electricity poles, fences, long grass, prickly bush trees. The fat-bellied creatures sat in the middle of their webs, while their long, sinister legs spread like lethal weapons, and looked like stars as big as saucers. He drove on, slowly, foolishly he thought. A multitude of spiders crawled through his brain. He did not know what to do. He could not go back: he did not want to go back. He was locked in: he had to drive forward for there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to turn around.

  Without anyone to tell him what to expect, Truthful could never have realised how densely packed together those webs were. The car became thickly coated with layer after layer of the silky, film-like threads. Soon
, he saw nothing in the whiteness, except the webs stuck on the windscreen with the angry spiders caught between their nests. There were spiders crawling all over the car and he quickly wound up the windows. He killed those that had got inside with the local telephone book, and within minutes, locked in the airless car and loaded down with humidity, the perspiration started to pour off his body.

  He found it difficult to breathe. He panicked, inside his brain he saw millions and zillions of cellular neurons popping around like white baby spiders. The creatures raced into each other, creating old man Joseph Midnight’s face, twisted with anger, staring at him and calling him an idiot, then pulsating away into a void the size of a pin hole, only to be recreated speeding towards him again, even quicker than before.

  Another crazy thing happened to Truthful. His body became weightless, and with all his might forcing his fingers which felt like rubber, he held on to the steering wheel, to stop himself from floating away. A lulling voice, whispering inside his head, kept telling his body he was going to die. But dying by asphyxiation was not what his body wanted to do. He struggled against the weightlessness blowing him towards the dead relatives assembled in a little huddle in the flowing white distance.

  Remarkably, at this point, fate had a little something to give Truthful. His body repulsed the ailing brain. The energy must have come out of his soul, for his hands locked like clamps around the steering wheel, and his feet turned into flattened lead on the floor of the car. His left foot was still planted on the accelerator, and he literally flew out of that road.

  Normally, Truthful would have agreed with Girlie. If you ever want to find out about anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people. She had always said this, although more often in the previous days: ‘They know the deepest and darkest secrets of this place.’ But nobody knew what Joseph Midnight knew, and everyone knew what Girlie would never know. It was an eye for an eye. A black for a white. It was just starting. The fathers of those louts who bashed Kevin were openly boasting to Uptown about putting a nigger down for Gordie. Kevin was paying for the memories, for being smart once, from a family with airs about themselves, for Will Phantom. Open slather, open slather, came the whispered words which kept repeating themselves when he picked up the phone in the middle of the night, while another voice gave the warning, Stay out of it Truthful, it’s open slather now.

  Truthful knew that after the attack on Kevin, no one was really interested in harming the three petrol sniffers accused of killing Gordie. Why would they bother with kids who had cooked their brains so badly they felt nothing? Truthful knew most of the town did not even think the petrol sniffers had it in them to go and kill Gordie. But! It did not stop there. The phone at the police station rang all hours of the night and day, a different whispering voice most of the time, with more warnings, You come near our boys and we will hang you. A chill ran down his spine every time the phone rang. At night, he lay in the darkness thinking how the town had managed to mould him into the shape they needed, so he had nothing to fall back on when something like this happened. Nothing could happen: that was the dilemma. This was it. End of story now.

  On one of the nights following the arrest of the boys and the incident with Kevin, Truthful had just started to settle down again after the phone had stopped ringing for the last time. Sleep drifted in and he started to dream. In the dream he heard someone knocking on the door, but he decided not to answer, until the knocking grew so loud, he went to the door to see who it was.

  He turned the lights on and stood at the doorway looking at the rose garden, deep red roses were blooming, but to his surprise, there was nobody there. When he looked past the darkness to the streetlights on the other side of the road, he saw stray dogs sniffing the rubbish bins. He glanced over the town, just to check whose lights were still on, to pin down where the nuisance phone callers could be coming from. He made a mental note of those houses where lights were shining. He was half asleep, yet he walked around the yard, checked his car was locked, and went back inside, closed the door, flicked the light switch, and turned around.

  The only reason he was able to see in the darkened office was because there was moonlight shining through the windows. The police station was full with Aboriginal people crowding through the building. He became very frightened. Their skin was grey. Whenever he blinked, the place seemed to become more crowded. He stayed pressed against the door. He thought if he were to move, the people might see him. There were so many jostling bodies, jammed up against him, that he could feel the closeness of grey shoulders under his nose, and see that the shiny greenish substance covering their skin was a sea slime that felt cold and sticky whenever the jostle accidentally bumped into his face and arms.

  The smell of the sea was never far away in Desperance. Except during the Dry, when the sea returned to its normal shoreline some twenty-five kilometres away. Even then, the breeze carted its fish smells back to town. Now, Truthful smelt it like old dead fish guts. He remembered his Italian Mama’s stories about the ghosts of dead people coming to haunt you.

  Moments later, in panic and with a racing heart, Truthful thought, What of his prisoners, the three boys? ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ He found himself speaking as though he was a ghost himself. He pushed, shoved, inched his way through the throng, thinking faster and faster, if the boys could see them too, then maybe, he was not dreaming. It felt like an eternity to reach the back of the building to the cells. ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ Slowly, like a cloud moving, the grey spirits drifted aside.

  ‘What say they are not alright?’ Truthful started to become worried about the boys. He could not move fast enough now. Tristrum and Luke Fishman, aged ten and twelve. Aaron Ho Kum, aged eleven. When the flogging stopped, they had scooted under the table away from Bruiser, and huddled against the back wall, petrified, waiting, for the screaming might come back and take them again. Truthful felt his thoughts thrown through the air by a huge force, crushing back at him through a million possibilities he kept rejecting, saying: ‘They are alright.’

  Luke was the oldest, and he tore the T-shirts into strips, tied the knots, and carefully examined whether each length would be long enough. The other two boys watched his hands work in the moonlight and said nothing, and then he had everything prepared. They just followed Luke into the darkness and into the light beyond, up on the blue sea, swimming under a cloudless summer sky. Truthful believed he could have reached them in seconds but his body was lead, his head was like the sedentary oleander beside the jail, betrayed by his mind. It was betrayal all round. The boys were dead. Their shredded T-shirts were the first thing he saw. Three strands hanging taut from the cross bar at the top of the bars across the front of their cell. ‘Say it’s not true,’ Truthful said, speaking to the spirits, and just as suddenly as he had been alone before, he was alone again. There was nothing in the building but emptiness and silence.

  The only sound was the high tide lapping on the beach. It did not seem possible that they could have hung themselves. The cell was not high enough and when he saw their feet slumped on the floor, he could not imagine how they could have done this to themselves. Yet nobody had come into the building. He would have known. They were sleeping on the floor when he checked before going to bed. Now they were dead, and he preferred to believe the opposite, and cried out to them: ‘You are tricking me.’ He checked each of their wrists for a pulse, and in resignation, closed their vacant eyes. Still, he was hopeful, he thought they were children. Children playing a game, ‘Come on,’ he said, and there was the usual, useless shaking for life to come back.

  Now, he could not remember if he had checked the cells before going to bed. Of course he had. Didn’t he always make the last check on the cells, even when they were empty? He was not sure anymore. Perhaps it had been the day before. Or the day before that. He ran to his desk to check his records. Thank God, he thought, the records were there. He had been checking, but still, he doubted himself. This time he had trouble pushing away the thought
that he had falsified the records. He told himself he was only creating misunderstandings. Very much on duty, he went back to the cells and took the boys down. One by one he placed them back on the floor where they had been sleeping the last time he saw them. It had only been an hour ago. He would have known. Three people living under the same roof cannot die without you knowing it. Things were going to be better in the morning, he promised. ‘What a breakfast.’ A feast he would prepare for his boys with his own two hands.

  ‘There’s his car now,’ the gossipy people were gathered in a kind of protest on the corner next to the Fisherman’s Hotel, and were looking across the street at the police station. There were big-bodied people standing in the hot morning, with skins becoming redder, and every now and again, another would announce that for no reason, he had felt the cold shivers. Then others would announce how they felt faint. It was hard waiting when there was an awful stench coming from the police station, drifting down the street and all over town.

  ‘He mustn’t have a sense of smell,’ said Carmen, the middle-aged, tightly permed blonde proprietor of the fish and chip shop situated right next to the police station. ‘And did you hear the dogs howling?’ Who hadn’t heard the dogs howling all night! They never stopped howling. Carmen had been complaining of the stench of something dead coming from the police station for days. She felt vindicated now that other people felt the same way she did. It was Carmen who started the street-corner protest when she came across the street to the pub and told Bruiser to tell that Truthful to clean the place up, before she made a formal complaint to the Council.