Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  ‘boat sinking,’ woman cries.

  jump in water orange life jackets, many drown, small boy drifting.

  uncle, family, brother me at lesbos, greek islands, flee from soldiers. ‘they take to refugee camps, not good,’ uncle says.

  arrive athens, thousands starving in streets.

  uncle insistent, ‘must keep moving.’

  we head for macedonian border. i open book and talk to maori boy, matiu, ‘will you be my friend?’ when i arrive new zealand maybe i become maori boy too, not just kiwi boy.

  go by foot long way long. at gevgelija, peoples fight guards, armed. through wire, running running.

  ‘don’t let go,’ brother says, holds my hand.

  thousands on train, crowded, cross at tabanovce, then exodus serbia long way long.

  arrive hungary border, police water hoses to stop us gas make eyes cry.

  brother, uncle and family go over and have good fortune. uncle finds man takes peoples in truck in dark truck dark. must use last money in trouser cuffs to pay.

  ‘get in, quick, get in,’ uncle says. ‘make no noise, be quiet as mouse.’

  truck motor starts.

  door locks. soon we will be safe in austria.

  truck stops.

  very very tired.

  will work very hard, save money. brother take me, go new zealand, mother father follow soon.

  ‘when is soon?’ i ask brother.

  he holds my hand. ‘soon is soon.’

  blue sky, green country, no war. people very good peoples. many sheep, maori do haka, go the all blacks. be good kiwi.

  ‘go fishing eels with you, matiu,’ i whisper, ‘i meet your family, you meet mine, we not just syria family or kiwi family, eh bro. sit with you on marae, eat from hangi, poke out tongue, laugh together, laugh and laugh and laugh.’

  all this, when the door opens.

  ‘WE MOBS GOT TO START ACTING LOCALLY. SHOW WHOSE GOT THE DREAMING. THE LAAAW.’

  from Carpentaria

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  WILL HAD ALWAYS HALF expected that if he had been captured, the mining company bosses would queue up to have a look at the kind of person who would destroy a mine. The very same newsreader had called this kind of person the most feared of the North. But the red-faced Graham Spilling he had once seen on the television was not the kind of man who would be coming posthaste to the hangar in the light of day. The irony was, men like Spilling did not kill other men. Only the person, perhaps inebriated enough to turn into another kind of human being, like Frankenstein, could temporarily find courage to instruct the cold bloodedness of killing. Wasn’t it in the dead of night when good people go about their dark deeds?

  One becomes more confident when one’s not alone, and somehow, this was how Will felt. An odd sensation that made no sense, yet it would not leave him alone. There was no rationale in the stupidity of thinking others — what others? — would come to help him. Even though he had not heard any movement, he was convinced the Fishman and enough men were outside, waiting for his signal. Now he saw a different perspective on his arrival at the hangar when he was thrown from the helicopter. The Fishman’s two thieves were lying flat in the grass next to the shed when the helicopter had taken off. Through the dust he had seen them raise their heads from the grass. Hands signalled, questioning what had happened. Then when his eyes followed the flight of the kingfisher, now retracing its movement, taking notice of the whole panorama of spinifex to the foothills, he saw the subtle movement of other men from the convoy stationed in the distant hills on the other side of the fence. They were back-up for the thieves scouting the hangars for an overnight operation. Will knew if they were still around, then the rest of the convoy would be down at the lagoon. What was new? They were short of fuel.

  Will looked for the kingfisher but it was now nowhere in sight. He kept an ear on the radio in the background, listened as the weatherman read the weather report. A cyclonic build-up in the Arafura Sea. Will grew interested, remembering an earlier report of a cyclone sitting off the opposite coastline, east of Cape York Peninsula. He could hear the words — low-pressure system building into a depression heading in a southeasterly direction along the Arafura Sea. This surprised him. What had happened to the cyclone off the Cape? Nothing. The weather report ended. It must have been in his dreams.

  The day he had left old Midnight and taken his boat to sea he had heard the report of a cyclone hanging south-southeast of Cape York, somewhere in the Coral Sea. What happened to that? The weatherman ended with a short statement about a tidal surge due to the cyclone activity in the region. Will closed his eyes and saw the tremendous fury of the winds gathering up the seas, and clouds carrying the enormous bodies of spiritual beings belonging to other worlds. Country people, old people, said it was the sound of the great spiritual ancestors roaring out of the dusty, polluted sea all of the time nowadays. Will believed this. Everyone clearly saw what the spirits saw. The country looked dirty from mining, shipping, barges spilling ore and waste. Something had to run a rake across the lot. ‘You really got to watch your step now,’ old man Joseph Midnight warned when Will had taken the boat out. His voice had crawled over the water to Will. ‘Last couple of years, there was one every few weeks, another cyclone jumping around. Whoever heard of that before?’

  Jesus Christ! There was water piling up in the skies. Then nothing. The weather report was over. Stuck in an empty hangar a couple of hundred kilometres from the sea, Will imagined all the satellite activity hovering over the Gulf. Spies of the world zoomed in onto a pimple on your nose, or knew what you were saying in the privacy of your own home. Was anyone looking at Gurfurritt? If someone spied on the weather, why not provide more information about what was going on? Rich men paid for foreign cargo ships from the four corners of the globe to anchor in the Gulf to transport ore.

  It was high tide. Will knew how the tides worked simply by looking at the movement of a tree, or where the moon crossed the sky, the light of day, or the appearance of the sea. He carried the tide in his body. Even way out in the desert, when he was on the Fishman’s convoy, a thousand miles away from the sea, he felt its rhythms.

  This feeling for the sea had been inherited from Norm, and Will began to think of his father on his journey with Elias. I hope you make it to the old world. But of course he would make it. Will scowled at his weak sentimentality over his father who never bore his children’s burden. A saltwater man who insisted he belonged to the sea like fish. I’ll weather the storm. So said the veteran of the mother of all storms, invading the hangar out of the blue, to this wasted luxury of his son, reminiscing what was once upon a time: If the natural forces get me in the end, it will be on the flippen land. Never the sea. I bet my life on it.

  Puzzled, irritated by the commonsense madness of his father’s hick-town philosophy, Will twisted about on the chair, muttering to himself: ‘If you’re dead, you’re dead, no need to bet on that.’ But the memories of his father were not done with Will’s thoughts, even in this moment of crisis. Norm Phantom was keen to show his son, whom he had not spoken to in years, something else from the past. The little list. The list, boy! Did you remember to bring the list? How a man could come back to collect his winnings, if he did not keep his little list of fools in his back pocket: who owed him money, so forth.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ The Fishman’s men had been trying to attract Will’s attention.

  ‘Dunno. Throw a stone and see.’

  Someone hit Will on the leg with a small stone to bring some sense into his head. Now he saw two men from the convoy standing by the door smiling at him. Then the mobile phone rang.

  ‘Chuck,’ the yellow-haired man spat his name into the mobile. He had come out of the kitchenette and was standing somewhere to the back of Will in the hangar.

  ‘What? A fire. You got to be joking … Alright, I’m on my way.’

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Graham said there’s a fire over this way. Stay here, watch him, C
ookie. I’ll look around.’

  The next moment Chuck returned, running to grab the fire extinguisher, and ordering his mate to get the other fire extinguisher on the wall next to the doorway. Ignoring Will, both quickly disappeared.

  The Fishman’s men had come prepared. Knives were produced to cut Will free from the chair. Within seconds they were outside the shed again and, looking back, sensed that Will was of two minds about going with them. ‘You mad, Will?’ They had only moments to get out of the place, and Will was holding them up.

  ‘Give me a knife,’ Will ordered, but no one listened to him. ‘Fuck you! Give me a knife or I’ll kill you. They killed Hope and my boy. I am going nowhere, I swear to God, until I kill them. So give me the fucken knife.’

  Moving around the benches, Will saw a tyre lever, grabbed it, and headed out the door. The two lads felt blood draining from their faces: this was supposed to be easy. They looked at the fire down at the last hangar. The flames were arching out like waves and black smoke billowed into the atmosphere.

  ‘Look, man, I know how you feel! But those arseholes are dead already. They’re gone, man, I swear it, because as true as God I am standing here, this whole place is going to blow, as soon as the fire reaches the pits. Come on, we got to take you with us, fuck you, or we are going to die in this mongrel place. Look up there and see the friggen fire for yourself, man. Come on, man, or we will kill you ourselves.’

  The two young men, no more than eighteen apiece, dressed in grey shorts, baseball caps, with Bob Marley staring from their Rasta-coloured T-shirts, worked simply to the letter of the Fishman’s orders. They were still wearing workingmen boots supplied by the mine. A lot of the young men in the Fishman’s convoy had done their stint in the mine, looked around, seen how it all worked, then walked off with their mining helmets and boots as souvenirs. Both still had their cigarettes hanging from the sides of their mouths, while they used the iron-fisted grit of their fathers to persuade Will to get the hell out of there.

  The fire spread quickly across the grasslands, throwing long red tongues down to the south. Will looked at the black smoke billowing into the sky. He tried to see through the wall of smoke to locate the two mine men with their fire extinguishers, but could not penetrate the curtain of blackness. The only thing that was clear was flames reaching up into the sky at the far hangars. It looked like a giant candle, a millennium flame. A wind of intense heat forced Will and the two Bob Marley faces to flee.

  ‘Come on, Will, get a fucking move on,’ one of the lads said, maintaining a firm grip on Will’s arm. The second lad did the same on the other side and they ran dragging Will along with them. They kept looking back over their shoulders as they ran, stumbling along through the spinifex and grass and gravel, seeing if anyone was coming from the mine, or if they were seen. Looking ahead at the distance to reach the fenceline, each knew, until they were over the fence and into the scrub land and hills, they would be in full view of the mine men when they turned up in their vehicles.

  ‘Let’s hope the bloody lot goes up in their bloody faces,’ one lad said to the other as they ran, knowing it might be their only chance, if the bloody lot went up. But when they looked back again, the yellow-haired one and his mate were running after them.

  ‘Split up,’ Will said. ‘Take the left and right, and I will take the centre, go low.’

  ‘Do you know where the opening is, Will? Head to the left, one hundred metres. Remember that.’

  ‘Get going. I know where it is, get going.’

  The three peeled off in their different directions. The two young lads were looking around. Where was the backup? The whole operation had begun with several dozen men who had slipped in earlier, spreading themselves all over the mine site, to do ‘a good job’. It was to have been a pilfering exercise on a grand scale, pure and simple. Then they got word: Fishman had changed his mind. The teams had come in the previous night. They moved on the fuel tanks, syphoning petrol into jerry cans which had to be carried over to the fenceline and into the bush on the other side towards a waiting vehicle. They had spread around. ‘Have yourself a shopping spree, tools and equipment — for the road.’ Freezer raid, the Fishman had ordered. Usual thing. Raid everything.

  ‘Man! Where in the fuck are they?’ one lad screamed across to his mate. ‘Where’s the bloody backup, mannn? Jesus!’

  Guns were being fired. The two lads heard the strange sound for the first time in their lives as the bullets whistled by, inches past their ears, and both yelled, ‘Duck, man, they are shooting at us.’ Both ran faster, bolting for their lives like jackrabbits, and Will, where was he? They had seen him disappear into the ground like he was made out of thin air. And they did duck, unbelievingly, as they ran, seeking cover behind every clump of spinifex, as though dead spinifex could shield anyone against bullets. But that was what they did, and kept doing, with no backup at all, not even looking back to see that glorious fire tonguing down to the underground storage tanks, nor knowing there were only moments to go, and they would be all feeling what it was like to be blown sky-high, if they did not make it out over the fence and into the hills.

  Fate and precious moments are tied up together, and as the saying goes, What goes around comes around: the yellow-haired man tripped. Instantly, his head was split open at the temple by a rock that had, up to that moment, lain on the ground, embedded in soil that was thousands of seasons old, untouched by humankind since the ancestor had placed it in this spot, as if it had planned to do this incredible thing.

  Rock and roll, it was unbelievable to have seen what happened. Will had been so close, waiting to take what rightfully he claimed, and the man was running straight for him, and only Will saw what was about to happen, saw the rock was ready, waiting for this moment. Instantaneously, it was as natural a reaction as you would expect, but he felt cheated, you know. He had even thrown himself towards the man to try to break his fall. It was too late, a snap, how quickly a driven man could be defeated. Will had no idea a rock could rob him of his revenge. He stood, arched over the dead man in a moment of foreboding, watching the blood pouring out of the man’s head all over the ground, the glorious yellow hair now tainted red and covered with dust, wishing he had the power to bring the dead man back to life. Where was the justice in this? The murderer struck dead, died instantly without pain, and went on to eternity with the look of peace on his broken face. And there was the stone, still there, unmoved.

  ‘Will! What the fuck are you doing? Keep running,’ one of the young blokes yelled back over his shoulder. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he yelled, ‘I never seen so much craziness in you, man.’ Seeing Will standing there looking at the ground, the young man was certain he would end up going back for him, just to appease the Fishman, and shouted: ‘You are going to get us all killed, fuck you.’

  Will heard and ran. Out in the open he looked back for the red-haired Cookie, but he was nowhere in sight. Will had missed the moment that the backup men with rifles in the hills had witnessed. In full flight, lifted in midair, Cookie kept running after his prey before he heard the piece of lead explode in his chest. His eyes jumped to the left, then to the right, as though undecided which way to go to hell first, before he sunk down into the spinifex.

  A dozen convoy men scrambling out of the hills, leaping down rocks, hands cut by spinifex, raced to the fenceline to open a hole in the wire. The fence was rolled back for Will and the two lads to run towards. It seemed as though the whole world cheered them, yelling: ‘Come on, come on, hurry, you can do it.’ Then, the cheering turned into a synchronised ballet of men risking their lives without thought for themselves. They ran out towards the lads, and finally, had the three snatched up by a sea of hands. Their lungs burnt with exhaustion. A human chain passed each of the three along up to the hills, until finally they were thrown down for shelter behind the boulders, in the fold of the ancestral spirit who governed the land.

  THE FIRE BURNED LIKE hell over there at the hangars, and even in the hills the air was that
hot, it burnt your skin. It felt like being in a furnace. Dust-dry hair turned into rust, stuck up straight and waved in the air, charged up to the hilt with electricity. Well! The moment came then, just how the Fishman said it had to be. And it would not have paid anyone to look back if they did not want to have their head blown off in ‘the process’. They were the Fishman’s favourite two words in those days.

  The day, all action-packed like it was, was now all said and done. The men of Mozzie Fishman’s dedicated convoy to one major Dreaming track stretching right across their stolen continent, were sitting up there on the side of the hill — like rock wallabies, looking down at what was left of Gurfurritt mine. Just looking, and turning the sunset crimson with their thoughts.

  A day at the mine had turned into a modern legend about travelling with the Fishman, and civil morality …

  What a turnout. Gee whiz! We were in really serious stuff now. We were burning the white man’s very important places and wasting all his money. We must have forgotten our heads. We were really stupid people to just plumb forget like — because the white man was a very important person who was very precious about money. Well! He was the boss. We are not boss. He says he likes to be boss. He says he’s got all the money. Well! We haven’t got the money neither. And now, all it took was a simple flick. A flick, flick, here and there with a dirt-cheap cigarette lighter, and we could have left the rich white people who owned Gurfurritt mine, destitute and dispossessed of all they owned.

  Straight out we should have been asking ourselves — Why are you not hanging your head in shame to the white man? We were supposed to say, Oh! No! You can’t do things like that to the, umm, beg your pardon, please and thank you, to the arrr, em, WHITE MAN.

  Somehow, though, everyone got carried along the humpteen tide of events, like, we must have swallowed one too many sour pills that morning for breakfast. Now, we were looking at the world like it was something fresh and inviting to jump into and do what you jolly well liked. That was how our dormant emotions sitting down inside our poor old hearts got stirred up by the Fishman when we listened to him talking in that fetching, guru-type voice of his, saying we gotta change the world order. Change the world order? Mozzie Fishman! He is sure enough a crazy man. Oh! We said that. But he goes on in his satirical slinging voice about what happened ever since that mine came scraping around our land and our Native title! ‘Well!’ he says. Us? He wanted us to tell him what that turned out to be! We were a bit cross with Mozzie standing up there, Lord Almighty-like on top of that rust bucket of a Falcon station wagon of his. It and all its white crucifixes wiped all over the car through the stains of red mud.