From the verandah doorway he saw the roaring water towering towards the horizon of the open sea. Only the hotel rose out of the flood as a bizarre, twisted, island abode of the Gods. On the rooftop, sea birds were packed so tightly under the heavy canopy of dark clouds, it gave the appearance of a giant white flower full of red beaked seeds. The old wooden verandah had collapsed in the winds and now hung like a shirt collar around the building. Listening to it moan and creak, he thought it was a wonder it had not collapsed altogether.
The longer he looked down in the waters the more he felt like letting go; to fall into its universe. He was sure that at any moment he would see the movement in the racing waters of some living creature, someone alive, and he almost allowed himself to fall. So convinced he would find his destiny in the floodwaters, as though the waters were beckoning him, urging him to believe he could simply drift along in the direction of where the waters were moving, until he saw Norm’s green boat.
And Will Phantom was right to think he was lucky, leaning his skinny body out of the building, barely holding on to the doorway, and not caring if he fell, because any second he knew he could simply let go, with full certainty of falling straight into the destiny he had prescribed for himself. He had not figured fate, when the top floor under his feet suddenly moved. The floorboards had been shaken so violently, he was sent flying into the floodwaters. He hit the water hard, went under into the billowing yellow waters, where he rolled blindly in vacuo with the dead of the deep, before being returned in a frenzy of breathlessness to the surface. Somewhere, in all of that water sweeping him towards the sea, he was able to turn to see what had happened to his little oasis.
He saw not a hotel left far behind but a small castle for the recreation of spirits. This new reality had nothing to do with the order of man. There was no town of Desperance. It was gone. A monster followed him instead. The houses, the loading port, the boats and cars, every bit of every so-and-so’s this or that, along with the remains of the pipeline for the ore from the mine, and even the barges and cargo snatched up by the cyclone had travelled inland, and were coming back. Every bit of it had been crushed into a rolling mountainous wall that now included the hotel where only moments ago, Will Phantom had been standing.
It was at this point he realised how history could be obliterated when the Gods move the country. He saw history rolled, reshaped, undone and mauled as the great creators of the natural world engineered the bounty of everything man had ever done in this part of the world into something more of their own making. Was he shocked? Bugger the hotel, he thought, it could go with the rest. The bulwark of the spirits rose from the waters, and he saw nothing monstrous or hideous in this new creation taking shape, moving, rolling, changing appearance, and beauty in its strident crashing back into the water.
The sight of the devastation was nothing short of salubrious as far as he was concerned. The macabre construction resembled a long-held dream of the water world below the ground where the ancient spirits of the creation period rested, while Aboriginal man was supposed to care for the land. He wrestled with thoughts of the future. When the waters receded what man would walk to the salt marsh to scratch the surface? What man digging under the surface, under layers of silt, would announce the discovery of the devil’s polluted palace? Then his view was gone.
He went swirling back into the flow of the water and all he could think to save himself, was what would happen if he got caught in a snag. What if he became entangled in the lines of barbed wire fence strung across some boundary? When the monstrous palace following him would catch up, and drag him under, what then? It seemed like ages before he had a chance to look back at the colossal architecture of the storm. But it was gone. Again and again, repeatedly, his eyes searched for the castle but only waters followed in his wake.
Wish whatever…
What a catastrophic requiem took place in those floodwaters racing out to sea. Listening up high, he swore there were hundreds of God’s angels singing: Gloria in excelsis Deo. Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. The waters poured dead fish. Sodden spinifex grasses. Sticks. Green wood. Branches. Plastic. Plastic Malanda bottles. Green bags tied up with rubbish. He drank the stinking air manufactured by the porridge of decaying fish and gladly, the nauseating stench touched him. Blue and orange plastic sheeting formed a never-ending maze through which he was effortlessly poured. In the mayhem of buoyant bodies, bloated animals floating by touched him ever so lightly. Green frogs resting on the dead hailed him: Vale! The herds. Poor nanny-goats from the goat farm. Farewell! Bruiser’s cattle and horses. Say goodbye pack of dogs. Pussycats. Chookie fowl. Sad day for the animals of the bush. Kangaroo, wallaby, wild boars. Feral cats. Marsupial mice. Pelicans. He eyed every bit of the ghostly brown froth and bother heading towards him with outstretched arms, purposely wanting to draw him to its huge, smothering body.
Other things touched him too, and the madness went on and on…
On and on the floodwaters raced until receding far out in the ocean waters. It was there, during the night, that Will was washed onto a wet, slippery object. He did not know what he held on to in the darkness but it kept him afloat. Then he flinched. Something alive touched him and the sensation of fear he had felt in the floodwaters, again overcame him. He struggled out of the water, by clawing into the slipperiness, and climbing, not knowing if he was crawling onto the body of a sea serpent. He clawed higher and higher, slithering over the oily surface of whatever lay below him, unable to stop, while wave after wave lashed him, trying to pull him back. The clouds broke, the new moon shone its halo of peace. Relieved for such an absolution of light, he looked down to find he had been dumped onto an extraordinary floating island of rubbish.
While the serpentine flotation rocked in the waves, the sum total of its parts rubbed, grated and clanked together, as it became more tightly enmeshed into a solid mass that squashed every inch of oil and stench out of the dead marine life it had trapped in its guts. Will listened to the embryonic structure’s strange whines echoing off into the darkness, then, he realised the enormity of those sounds was familiar to him. He was astonished and then weakened by the feeling of helplessness, that a man feels, hearing the sounds of labour. He felt like he was an intruder to be clinging to a foetus inside the birth canal, listening to it, witnessing the journey of creation in the throes of a watery birth.
Whenever moonlight struck again through the clouds, he saw the moonbeams reflected off a multitude of hovering seagulls. Their bodies shone far away like glints of silver glitter. He imagined the new island stretching for many kilometres. He was full of wonder at its destiny, intertwined now with his own. He pondered how he might live indefinitely on the wreckage beneath which he imagined was a tightly jammed composition of barges, ship’s hulls, fishing boats, prawners, plastic containers, timber and whatnot.
Perhaps, he thought, if he became practical, since he was not wise, he could survive if he conserved rainwater in tanks and whatever cavities he might find on the surface. He knew he would have to work hard to find where the waterholes were and secure them from the birds and from contaminating sea water. Next day! In the morning! He decided to build himself shelter from the elements. Of course! Naturally! The cloud cover would eventually lift, and if he did nothing, he would be exposed to the sun. When the ‘low’ had blown away, he would salvage material to build his own boat to find Hope and the boy. One day? Soon! Soon!
Come hither fish, come sea spirits, demons, marine monsters. He would have to learn about all of them if he were to survive. He would have to chart nautical routes in his mind. He would have to start remembering the journey of the heavens, all of the stars, breezes, just like his father, Norm Phantom. He would have to comprehend the feeling of water beneath the weight of his island and make its currents his map. In order to know, he would have to become a scholar of the sea, then one day, he would set off to find her. He would take his raft and float away on it, searching, searching, until the moment their eyes met. Or unt
il it sank.
The island home was, give or take, a kilometre in length after the final unhinging of those parts which, after bidding Adios!, violently crashed to the ocean floor. Flocks of birds came and went on their seasonal migrations. They seemed to accept the drifting structure as a new land.
The nests they constructed with the bones of dead fish and droppings eventually covered the entire surface in a thick fertilising habitat, where over time, astonishing plants grew in profusion. Bobbing coconuts took root and grew into magnificent palm trees. Seedlings of mangrove, pandanus and coastal dune grasses came with the tides, other plants blew on board as seed, and none withered away. A swarm of bees arrived, as did other insects, and stayed. All manner of life marooned in this place would sprout to vegetate the wreckage. A peanut that had floated for perhaps a decade landed one day and grew so profusely it became a tangle of vine-like stems reaching out over the surface to find crevices in which to sink.
A single rotting tomato containing an earthworm settled in the newspaper-lined base of a plywood fruit box, and grew. Within a season, tomato plants inhabited the island like weeds. The worm multiplied into hundreds and thousands of worms. The worms spread like wildfire into every pokey hole of rotting rubbish and soon enough, a deep, nutrient-rich humus covered the entire island. Well! What have you? Peach, apricot, almonds, all grew. Guava, figs – fruit that came with the birds, stayed, and grew into beautiful trees. A wasted banana root survived for months in the sea until it settled on the island where it sent up one big fat shoot after another, in between a mango tree and the figs, then drooped with the weight of large bunches of fruit.
So! Did Will notice? Was he happy? Yes, he was. He was a practical man in a practical man’s paradise. He had food, shelter, and his catchments of fresh water were always full to the brim. He grew strong and healthy pursuing his numerous daily tasks. His mind grew with the information he stored inside his brain. Unflinchingly, he ordered the patterns of water beneath him. Daily his mind sifted the information. He was able to recall each day he had been at sea, from the time he began living on the island. He developed a keen eye for the movement of the stars, staying awake to sing the Fishman’s ceremonial song cycles all night, from the raising of the star across the eastern horizon to the setting of the big maliwi star in the west. Then he would sleep. These were the rhythms of his life which he lived through like lines of poetry.
When the rhythm changed with the seasons, he would stop measuring star movements for the current flow, or move through endless days of charting the flight of birds. Then, like these changing rhythms, he would switch the activities of his daily life. Sometimes, he would concentrate solely on the measurements he kept of the many species of trees on board, his vegetable stock and other vegetation, such as grass, flowers, weeds. After he had completed his measurements, he would spend the remaining hours of the day working on the boat he was building, out of found objects, salvaged timber, on top of a raft, the place where he lived.
Inside this roped, nailed and wired structure, he kept his precious possessions which he had accumulated from his salvage operations, tunnelling down into the depths of the pontoon island itself. Inside his shelter, he had stored fishing lines which had taken him hours, and sometimes many days to untangle; little boxes of precious hooks, nails, tools he had made himself; and dried foods under sheets of plastic. His worst nightmare when he spent the first night on the birthing wreck was how to save himself if the pontoon disintegrated. Now he was able to reign safe in the knowledge that the raft he had made himself was ready, in case of any emergency, which would force him to vacate the island.
In his little world he cooked sometimes on bits of salvaged iron while being careful not to use up his precious supply of driftwood, a mountain of it already stored, even while driftwood was plentiful. Everything was bountiful. If he went looking for driftwood, his hand only had to reach down into the shallow water and as though a magical spell had been cast, the treasure would be his to hold. His thoughts were wishes granted to the island. Any fear had a reality too, but Will was too preoccupied with surviving in those early months to become fearful. He lived on hope, little things such as food and water, simply to keep himself alive.
Those were the golden days, when he could visualise himself, almost ready and able, almost setting sail as soon as his boat was ready. He lived on wishes for a very long time. He taught himself through his many routines of measuring how to navigate the seasonal currents, but then it occurred to him, that the movement of the currents was only taking him in a circle far out to sea. The skies had been telling him this for months, but he was stupid after all, because he had refused to see.
He only had himself to blame but who would have thought his faithful patterns could change, and begin to contradict each other. Instead of rationalising the changing reality he was confronted by, he doggedly continued measuring the rise and fall of the stars. Even the moon affirmed his now-monumental suspicion that his island home had been caught in a sphere of oscillating winds and currents. The question now was how would he ever return? He had no certain answer. One day a huge green turtle tried to pull its heavy body onto his island. He killed it while it was still struggling to come aboard and he ate from its body. Afterwards, he thought the only certainly he had in life was the ghost boat mooring at night in his dreams. More and more frequently the green boat invaded his sleep. Eventually, it came by every night and he would be awakened with the ringing of a fog bell, always heralding the arrival of the ghost boat from afar, in familiar and unfamiliar landings.
Alas! In these dreams he saw himself as the eternal watchman, on guard, waiting for the little vessel to materialise through the darkness. He listened to the oars breaking the water and creaking in the oar rings. He waited, even though he knew what to expect, when out of the darkness the empty boat glided in to land. The repetitiveness of the dream frightened him into believing it to be true. There were occasions when he was so sure he had heard the ghost of the green boat calling by, that he went searching the shoreline of his island in the moonlight. His attempts were futile but that did not wipe the elusive vision from his mind, and he longed for its arrival in his dreams as though it was his only reason for living.
Every night it was the same. Dreading sleep, but overcome by deprivation, he would dream again of the green boat, which never landed when he went looking for it. Will grew suspicious of the dream. For the life of him, he could not comprehend why anything could be so close and not close enough. Real! But never real enough? He searched high and low for a malingerer on board his island. Down in the wet cavities of the wreckage he prowled looking for whoever, or whatever sorcery was tricking him to fret for his unreachable goal. The search became his main occupation. He completely forgot the chronicles written in his mind.
Instead, eager to put an end to the mystery of the green boat, he searched everything just in case his dream had misled him. He was a man who needed more prayers than a million Christians could pray. There was a list a mile long of mysteries to be solved now before he could even dream of leaving the island. So, what if the passenger on the green boat had landed and was hiding somewhere on his island? One day, he decided to perform a funeral service for the unconsecrated souls he believed were imprisoned somewhere below in the hope of finally laying them to rest. He improvised on bits and pieces of memory from church services he had been to in Desperance, but that night in his sleep he heard the night bell ring as clear as day and when he searched the darkness, the green boat slid in to land, and when it did not fade away, and he was able to pull it in by hand, he saw the boat was empty.
So, melancholy started to grow in the island’s rich fertile atmosphere and competed for life just like any other seed planted on the island. In time, Will’s gloom grew increasingly morose with ideas of space. The distances began to multiply into improbable journeys. Travel? How could he travel? His mind ran wild with the question until he got to the stage where it was almost inconceivable to contemplate his journe
y back to the Gulf of Carpentaria. He felt stranded and claustrophobic. Even though the island shone brightly with happiness and blooming, he never noticed anymore. He shunned its solitude as a prisoner grown old with incarceration. He longed to be in a better place, elsewhere. Days were now spent looking longingly at the sea to the west. Other places grew more fabulous in his mind, while the island became a dungeon.
One day while sitting seaward and looking towards the western horizon, he began to muse over his future. With his happiness destroyed, he now viewed the island as a temporary structure which would break apart in the first storm. He sincerely believed that the total destruction of the island was only a matter of time. Will Phantom’s days had turned bleak and his routines became perfunctory efforts performed with little care.
All of his former hard work in building the boat became gaunt, repetitive checks for structural weaknesses. He became possessed with the idea that the boat was unseaworthy. He had already decided the journey was an impossibility. At four o’clock in the morning he would wake up terrified when he saw himself, in a boat full of holes and the water gushing in, as though it had been constructed with straw.
The night on his island turned out to be an extraordinarily masterful playwright, anxious for Will to fall asleep, impatient for the blood red curtains of his mind to burst open. Another grand play, another brand-new scenario of horror. This gifted corner of Will’s mind was a wizard. A genius able to conjure up his innermost fears, as quick as a magician could take a rabbit from a hat. In the end, Will believed his nightmares would kill him. He decided he would avoid sleep altogether. He would become a master in undoing any act of sorcery against him. He set to work on his plan. Nail after nail began to fall out of its hole at the slightest touch on his boat. As he held each nail in his fingers and examined it, it would snap into rusted flakes the moment the least bit of pressure was applied to it. Looking at the pile of rust he had gathered, he realised he was doomed to a hermit’s life on the island. He confirmed his fate when he started checking the joinery. The wire binding he had so meticulously woven at the joins, now also disintegrated, and all that was left underneath were trace-mark stains of rust.
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