‘Who?’ asked Will.
‘Old Joseph. Who do you think I was talking about?’ some old person with a beanie shouts his Pricklebush truths.
At this point, believing the building was doomed, that the walls were about to fall apart, Will could actually hear a man chanting the storm-making ceremony, and besides, he heard Norm’s voice roll through the ceiling, telling his night-time stories to children in his straight forward voice that told no lie. Low and humble. ‘Tell it low and humble.’ A voice capable of drowning out the storm racket with incantations inciting Will not to fly to where the white lilies bloomed in the swamp, no matter what the orchestra was playing.
Continuously, thinking of his father, remembering him, Will found he was now imitating someone who had condemned all else he had made of his life outside the Phantom household to irrelevancy. He kept remembering a time when he listened and tried to memorise every word Norm had said to him as a child, and wondering why. Was his life irrelevant if he could barely remember it? Will considered the old people’s prophecy. What goes around, comes around, the old people always said: The father calls the son home. Sons sail home in ships of nostalgia. It made him think of the Fishman, the man he had come to consider as his father, now a fading memory of a handshake. Time and the huge distance of country each had travelled had created its own sense of forgetting. It was as though the older man had released some magic hold he had held over Will and returned him to Norm, whom Will watched while standing on the shore of some unknown beach.
Norm was busy working and Will watched from the distance, too far away, but looking through rows of silver fish hanging from lines erected on poles across the beach with smoke rising through them. Reminded of a scene from his past life, Will thought of himself watching his father from a distance in the dimly lit workshop under rows of silver fish dangling from the ceiling as though they were swimming in air. He called out to Norm as though he had just returned home after a short absence away. ‘Hey! Dad it’s me Will. What are you doing?’ The big man in black singlet and shorts did not look up, but continued working.
Will heard his voice resounding back to him like a slap in the face, which he instantly put down to the fact that his father was still not talking to him. No communication. Will repeated these words to himself as he tried to decide what to do next to catch his father’s attention. But as he stood on this foreign beach, his hurting ears listened only to the deafening roar of the cyclone. It was impossible to be heard in the disorientation of eardrums bursting under pressure; where his vocal cords could not form words loud enough to be heard. Nobody would hear him. He could not even hear himself. Norm continued his work, gazing down into a forty-four-gallon drum, stirring it with a big stick. Will assumed he was making his fish tanning potions again.
Waves crushed onto the deserted beach, and eventually, after several minutes had passed, Will saw Norm take his stick from the drum and head towards the surf. As he scanned around he noticed there was other movement on the beach, and turning to get a better view of what was submerged beneath the clouds, he saw Hope. She was alive and dressed in the same black singlet and shorts as Norm, only these were several sizes too large for her thin body. Not believing what he was seeing, he blinked. Could clouds play tricks with his eyes? When he looked again and saw it was her, he called. But it was just as with Norm, she could not hear him, and she continued on her way. She dissolved in the clouds that covered the water where the waves hit the beach. Then, when he saw her again, she was walking carefully through the clouds, placing one foot in front of the other. He moved through the fish rows to get closer, he did not want to disturb her, in case she slipped, and fell into the water beneath the mist.
He watched her walk out towards the sea, above the water, moving very carefully, and when the cloud cover shifted slightly, he saw the grey sea water. She walked on top of the boiling water through the roll of the incoming waves. He was surprised that he was not shocked, but he was adamant in his resolve which only made him his father’s man. He would stay unbelieving of any passing images and realities except his own, sitting against a wall ready to collapse under the tidal surge of the cyclone. With an increasingly heavy heart, he watched her spirit going back into the sea. It was like another nightmare, trying to keep her in his sights, yet the more he tried to get to her, he was unable to find a way through the never-ending rows of fish. ‘Hope, wait up,’ he yelled, but it was hopeless. She never heard his voice. However gusty the wind, he saw she kept her hands held out from her side, and in each palm she balanced a red glowing ball. Flares. Flares, she had flares, he thought, thinking they were all alive. It was a sign. She. Norm. Bala? Where was Bala? He had to be somewhere and Will looked again, saw clouds surrounding the beach, then he saw her again.
This time, she was moving out into deeper water, yet still walking on top of it, very carefully, she had to be balancing on something like a thick sea rope, used for big boats, held taut, just below the surface. He never saw it at first, but there it was, barely under water, and Hope walking on top of the water splashing against the rope. She was heading towards a boat painted green, and using the big rope securing it to land. This was the safe boat of his childhood rocking in the surf just as it had done before: Norm’s boat. Anchor down, staring at it slipping along the sand, through the green seagrass, where a thousand bubbles caught his eye. Under the sea a strange phenomenon heralded Bala’s face of all things looking up towards the light from below the surface of the water, where bubbles followed in a procession from his closed lips. His brave little boy’s small hands seemed terrifying, drenched of colour, clasping a moving rock covered in slime.
‘Hey! Dad. Over there. Look!’
Will waved his arms frantically and Norm continued his work. ‘God! He’s drowning,’ Will tried to yell into the silent wall of this world, when suddenly, the surface of the waves broke through with Bala on the back of a grey sea fish. The boy swung himself from the back of a huge groper onto the ship’s rope and ran along it after his mother, and Will watched them, she first, fading from view into the clouds. It was all over in seconds, but Will was still running through rows of fish, and realising, he could run forever and more rows would take the place of the ones he had passed.
With his lungs bursting, he stopped, and returned to the darkness from his dream. He knew he would run through all of the fish nets in the world and never find what he was looking for, as he would always run, but never fast enough, to catch up to his past. He relived the vision and made a pact. He would find them out in the sea somewhere. But doubt still raised its ugly head and compelled him to check the boat. Hunched into the wall he sat studying the vision. He looked underside, side on, from under the water with a stingray’s eye, while gliding across the sand. Doubt saw algae in the place of green paint. Algae flowed in long green hair underneath the hull and along the rope, it hung limp to the boat’s side, and inside, a garden of green flourished. Norm had waded out to the waist-deep, grey water.
Will waited for the moment and when the clouds parted with the next gust of wind, his eyes surveyed the beach. Out in the water, he saw his father stirring up the mud with his long stick. Very quickly, he realised what Norm was doing. He had been there before and watched his father in exactly the same way. In the same place. Norm and Elias had taken him there fishing. The three of them had spent days fishing on the open sea. Will was told he was going nowhere when he asked repeatedly where they would end up. Normally he would be told what fishing reef or hole to look out for. Norm had sat on the beach doing nothing after they had come into land. He watched the waters. Elias did everything with Will tagging along. Elias hunted, fished, fetched water, cooked so that they could eat. Norm sat on the beach. Will watched his father’s bare back, sitting still in the same spot in the morning after he had woken up next to Elias, who slept with his back to the beach, protecting them both from the blowing sand. Will saw that Norm was watching majinmaja, the fish hawk, hover, dive and fly off to its nest. Waiting he said, ‘S
ee what majinmaja’s doing?’ Yeah, Will said he would stay and watch too. ‘No you go with Elias.’ Why? He always watched majinmaja at sea. ‘Help Elias.’
The fish hawk came back and caught another fish and went away. All day it was the same. Then Norm suddenly got up and went into the waters. He remembered Norm stirring up the water in a corner of the headland. He had waded out in the same way and spent most of the day, and the night, stirring up the clay mud and sand. Elias said nothing when Will asked him what his father was doing. ‘None of my business, yours neither. You and me are here for one thing, to fish for fish.’
In the morning, the three of them had watched the trail of discoloured water drifting away. Years later, Fishman had told him in his raspy voice, which he claimed was from singing too much country and western, that Norm was in a storm-making place. ‘He was singing up the spirits in the water, boy, to make storms for his enemy.’ Even though the Fishman never went to sea, he mentioned an itinerary of site places along the coast for making storms and counter storms powerful enough to wipe out the entire enemy. ‘However,’ Fishman explained after naming several hundred sites in a geography he had never travelled, ‘I don’t know all of these places. But some do. Your father knows, because he can fly through storms like an angel.’ Fishman sighed. Reluctantly, he had admitted more than he normally would about other people being more powerful than himself. ‘Just one or two, you know. You are always going to have some fellas and women who must have swapped their blood for magic. No, it is right. They only got magic running through their veins. Me! I only got a little bit of both. But they can be wherever they choose.’
Will knew how impossible it would be, trying to find any of the locations he had memorised from Mozzie’s long list of names. He already knew some of those places were many kilometres inland in the Dry season, but became the beach, when this land joined the sea in the Wet. Other special sites formed part of a sandbank out in the sea. A place only visible certain times in the right season, and if you knew the right tide to choose from at least a half-a-dozen tides and currents all circulating about in the bay of the Gulf. Or, maybe, you would only reach this place at night, if you knew how to navigate by stars. Mozzie said all this travelling at sea was very dangerous activity and this was the reason why he stayed away from salt water. ‘You got to be more than traditional. You got to be mad as…a magician. You got to be a fish…a wizard to find any of those places. Me! I am ordinary for dry dirt.’
The discoloured water was drifting, and just briefly, Will saw it clearly enough to distinguish it was heading east – towards Desperance. On seeing the tongue of water, Will knew he had to remember where the place was, he had to see the beach, to become patient, in the hope he would see it again. Yet his attempt to remain calm disappointed him. He felt he was drifting out of the dream, because once again, he heard the chanting in the room at the end of the corridor, and the sound of water running through the bar below was even greater than the winds and flooding outside. He forced the fish hawk to come back to that day, and watched it hover and dive for fish, pushing through take after take, until finally, he could see the bird working along the movement of the current. This time, he remembered something different about the beach he had glimpsed between the clouds while looking for Norm. In that instant he had been surprised to see Norm standing out in the water. Something had been different about the beach. Now it was too difficult to recall what it was.
His memory grew fainter the harder he tried to remember, while the noises of the building seemed to penetrate not only his mind, but to grow toxic inside his body. Downstairs, bar stools, chairs and tables rattled against each other in the flooded hotel. Bottles smashed against the walls. The noise made him think about Lloydie’s fate; was he still roped to the bar, or had his dream of being taken away to sea with his mermaid been fulfilled? He knew he would have to go downstairs and check. The roof continued its non-stop rustling. Rain pelted it. The floorboards creaked in every closed bedroom. The roar of the sea showed no mercy. There would be no letting up. No respite for quietness. There was noise in the movement of water flooding back to the sea carting the wreckage with it. All passed over the flooded land groaning with the remains of buildings, boats, cars, trees, rocks, electricity poles, fences, cargo from fallen ships, plastic consignments scrambled like licorice allsorts and dead animals. All this rolled along, slamming together in the water, just like it had on the beach in his dream. A beach plastered with waste, brown stinking froth and foam where a cyclone had struck. Will was too shocked to move from the realisation of his father’s payback to the town.
Of course they had survived, Will agreed with himself, yet argued the toss. It seemed unimaginable that all three of them – Hope, Bala and Norm – were together, and having survived the catastrophic cyclone, were preparing to leave. He jumped to his feet, speaking out loudly in his excitement – ‘It was time to leave.’ He ran to open the doors of the bedrooms he had closed the night before, to let out the noise, not stopping to see what happened behind him, the escaping pussycats scrambling over the slippery corridor, a flock of swallows flying frantically up and down in the hallway in a futile attempt to exit the building. It was only much later he would realise he had seen the skin and bone person. A real nomad countryman, living like a gipsy. The sort of person who could avoid being seen by dissolving himself into a wall if he had to. They were the people who drifted silently in and out of the bush, never speaking to anyone outside of their group. Somehow, just as silently, this group had drifted for cover to the hotel, climbed upstairs, and each had sequenced their being into rumples of clothing, bundles of nothingness, in a room of its own.
He stalled at the end room, where he imagined he heard the chanting of Midnight. Although the room was now silent he sensed the macabre power of the old man lingering behind the closed door, and a chill ran through him. At first, he did not want to open the door because he thought he might see a ghost masquerading as old Joseph sitting there. Yet, he had to know, so very carefully he turned the handle, and was just about to say, ‘Good morning old man,’ so sure he had been that he would see old Joseph sitting there frightening the Jesus out of him as he eased the door open. The room was empty. Yet whoever had been in that room, Will felt the malediction of his presence, and knew he was about to faint as the sweet smell of trampled, wet fresh grass overcame him. He slammed the door shut. He ran up the other side of the row of bedrooms, opening doors, without taking a breath until he reached the door to the verandah to the north, and opened it.
The grey cloud of swallows, a thousand pairs, in an instant of surreal flight flew through, and before he realised what had happened, they had disappeared into the clouds. Will sighed loudly in the space of the damp, feathered air left by the birds. He inhaled the fresh sea wind speeding inland with the clouds, while thousands of sea birds headed out to sea. He watched them while he thought about his dreams until, moments later, he believed he had struck gold. Of course, he had it at last. Out of nothing, he was grasping the eluding pieces of the escaping dream. Now, cried out to the drowning north lands. Over and over his voice spread, sending a shiver down the columns of birds heading overhead.
His eyes recaptured the direction of the beach with the swaying fish left out to dry. He knew Norm was preparing to leave. Hope and Bala were going on board. She carried blue-rimmed fire to show the way for Bala to follow her out into the fog where the boat was moored in the deeper waters at the end of the rope. Everything was fine because they were with Norm, and he would bring them home through the storm.
And all he had to do? All Will believed he had to do was to ride the outgoing tide and find them. Yes! Yes! Yes! Meet them halfway. He would go. ‘I am leaving now – I swear I have already left.’ First though, he would go down and tell Lloydie what had happened to him. He felt good. He could not remember feeling so good. It was good to be alive and he would go right down and find Lloydie and tell him that. Mermaids do not live in wood he would tell Lloydie. He would say it nearly
cost him his life. ‘Knock on wood, Lloydie. Get a life,’ he yelled down through the open trapdoor. Water answered instead, as it crashed against the walls and sent the spray up into his face.
Will scrambled down into the darkness, lowering himself down, and the waters responded. He became caught in the whirlpool of muddy waters, and to save himself from being swept away, he grabbed around for a grip, holding on to the solid structures of doorways and corners, as he was propelled through the building. He clawed his way to where he assumed the bar once stood, and realised he was looking everywhere for Lloydie’s body, and searching for nothing, when he discovered the wooden masthead was gone. She had taken Lloydie away. They had gone in the outgoing tide. She had knocked against the door long enough to dislodge it from its hinges, and they had floated through, to join the wide wall of water heading back to the sea.
Navigating underwater, Will steered himself back towards the trapdoor. He surfaced for air, swallowed it, and forced his way back down to avoid being thrown into a wall, or knocked unconscious by the objects passing through the building. Swiftly he moved through the chaos of yellow waters. It seemed like an eternity had passed before he reached the doorway between the bar and the corridor, the door now missing, at the back of the hotel, where he surfaced. He pulled himself out of the water. Luckily the level of the water was high enough for him to reach the trapdoor opening, and luckily he was long-limbed and skinny enough, to be able to pull himself back onto the top floor. As he sat up there catching his breadth, he wondered what Lloydie’s mermaid looked like. She would look like a ghost swimming through plains of mustard yellow waters with a dead man roped to her back.
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