Black Marks on the White Page

by Witi Ihimaera

  Then he thinks of June-Mee, and the taste of her lips, and how June-Mee is right here.

  Michael looks at the bill. He can afford it.

  WHALE BONE CITY

  From Praiseworthy

  ALEXIS WRIGHT

  1

  Since he, sometimes been called big time, named Aboriginal Sovereignty, young hope dream and all of that emotionally charged asset language of the modern day, say he bin finished up one time for all times from the Cause Man Steel family like rubbish dump sort of dead discarded thing on the face of the earth by disappearing into the mighty ancestral shark infested ocean around here. And what say this same boy — one time, caused his people to gulp in the throat, feel badness in the head for a long time for where so yo go, by really abbreviating his life span into a complete zero, millivolt, flashgun millisecond, micro scale thing — full stop milliwatt, and whereforth, his eighteen years ended up like some shit piece of holy smoke in the imagination, from him being snuffed out into nothing by suicide wishing for himself. To get to the point, as dead as a doormat somewhere in that old spirit dust haze hanging around over the sea, and you know what this kind of thing resulted in? Well! Fool people, it resulted in a proper dead fella the people henceforth say for the northern provincial Aboriginal township of Praiseworthy — right! And in the shock of the terribleness, there was no scrap of fuss.

  Nothing made out of some personal genius thinking by Aboriginal Sovereignty. Well! So all right, maybe he thought God got room for him in his camp in Heaven.

  Say though bro, it was not like that, and that dust lady must have taken him …

  And he became precipitation, like virga …

  Might be true! Might be anything. Anyhow he killed himself dead.

  What happened to the lungs of country then?

  Was the country’s law heralding a message to we from out of the windpipe of storms blowing up over the sea?

  Useless brains, what was the cultural comfort in losing Aboriginal Sovereignty then?

  Marginalized spacey people can you say something about this?

  Go on. Have your pick of stories from any empty wide-open field in the brain. There were what? What you say? Empty tin cans. Heinz baked bean tins and all that rolling in the ocean. Could have been something like that.

  Search around in the dirt. Scrape sand aside with your foot. See if you can find Aboriginal Sovereignty’s killer there. Someone might have murdered him.

  He took a journey to the Dreamtime.

  Look! Did any useless brain cells fall out over the matter?

  Why fuss? Huh!

  2

  No fuss.

  All the surly dust, widespread in the atmosphere, had lain over the country of perfect youth suicide nights in Praiseworthy. The haze rises in the afternoons, settling the dust far out to sea, while beneath, treading lightly through the water, another child of Praiseworthy was leaving the butterfly country, that enormous brownish-red, white and olive winged tipped Lepidoptera eternally unfolding its wings for flight. Aboriginal Sovereignty had left, like those other little children who had already gone over previous weeks and months. Elders frowned, were pretty overwhelmed, turned their backs, and were left philosophising in whisperings and what have you, about how children were being led astray from culture, influenced by the white hand that was a local esoteric shorthand word meaning government help.

  So! What happened to Aboriginal Sovereignty? You could ask the question in a thousand different ways. All the why. Why? Why? Was anything gone for all times? Nah! They don’t talk to me. Immemorial sacredness violated? Nope! Heaven collapsed? Didn’t see it myself personally. What ends, ends. Who knows? Was there a sharp dip in the humanness, of the modern sine qua non in this region of the anthropocene?

  The answer? Blanket no. Couldn’t see it myself.

  Of course you could not see it. Fools! Nothing was blessed! No promises fulfilled. There were no mass performances of trumpets blaring te deums, or drums rolling Handel’s royal fireworks with wind ensemble, nor anything else magnifying any significance of God’s will filling up the void where these children walked.

  3

  Ancestral stories abound this country, they move, dance around in their own time.

  And out of this normality, air and salt was blown this way and that across the wings of pure white birds flying like angels above heaving seas, out there in the direction of where Aboriginal Sovereignty went. Further out, amidst the tempest of cyclones gnashing each other, fish fly out from the ocean. All was astir out there.

  It is a wild morning wind that flies around Praiseworthy from these seas. At this time of year the atmospheric shimmering rustled and bustled with so many stories of colliding twigs, dead leaves, cigarette butts of the dreamers, pieces of puppy dog-ripped-up foam mattresses, a thousand winds-shredded plastic shopping bags, tin cans rolling, loose corrugated sheets of iron carrying some clinging ants on a magic ride through space, and the red dust — all dancing across the horizon. This was a tiring wind. You would have turned your back to it, put speed into your step to be out of it, hastened in doors, shut the house, windows closed, because this wind spreads more than rubbish. It’s a lonely sound that gets in your ears, and it makes you feel isolated in its din of whistling, banging and slamming houses, rattling windows, making the roof creak, as its gale force brings the ancestors home. Again! Yes again, the old people of the past crowding around outside, swishing around the streets looking for something, trying to rip the town apart with things flying everywhere, while looking around at what in the hell was going on inside the heads of these people of Praiseworthy.

  You even start to hear small startling voices get real smart in your ear by dropping a line here, or sinking a line there from old country stories — fishing in the sea of Praiseworthy modernity, trying to hook ancient linage in the people of this place. They remind you of what it feels like trawling for fish hiding in flotillas composed of millions of empty beer cans, but nothing would reach the suffocating stories reminding you about me and me about you, while somewhere else in the wind-consumed town, an old granny cloth moth lady who lies in her bed on the ceiling while pretending to die makes her presence felt in the little wind gusts that blow into her house through cracks under the door, in tiny holes in the ceiling, for that morning’s plebiscite, to see which children were gone.

  Then, all of sudden dead set in the deafening blustering and buffeting howls through town, everybody saw her ring-eyed wings staring down from the ceiling, and heard her voice screeching as though it was coming though tinny loud speakers that could be heard above the sound of the TV blasting in the lounge room. The old woman who was nearly dead, was going on and on about this recent suicide. Why wasn’t the moth quiet? Why was she repeating for what seemed like hours, Why he been gotta die that Aboriginal Sovereignty? But he was not even frightened of dying you heard yourself speaking back to her, sort of trying to reassure the fallen moth who was dying on a foam mattress on the floor, and you say that she should only be thinking about herself now and not be getting bothered about the worry of politics or anything else about the humanity of Praiseworthy, even though you feel pretty silly realising that you were only speaking to yourself.

  But there was nothing on Earth that was going to becalm her, not now with the rush of Praiseworthy people spilling over one another to get inside her mind, and telling the old moth, Shh! Up! Be quiet. But the wind kept pulling at her voice, and it was frightening. You could hear her all around town frightening people, especially the children screaming at the moth’s ring-eyed wings staring at them.

  We done it. All blaming themselves for Aboriginal Sovereignty committing suicide. Why he been picked out? And straight from a clear conscience the truth you say like other Praiseworthy people would say, We did not know anything about it.

  Must of been something, that old woman amplifier broadcast crossed hundreds of kilometres of sand and bush to reach every bit of humanity she could find. Must have been dragging him out to sea. Her hosti
le big mouth made you ashamed. You real gammon type people you are. And you thought, what is she blaming me for, I had nothing to do with Aboriginal Sovereignty’s death.

  This wind makes you feel like you are going mad, and you start to wonder why that old cloak moth woman was cruel, and why was she blaming the whole town for something when that boy had made up his own mind, and had decided to take his own life for his own reasons, and which were his own private business. You like the lightness of being an individual like white people, to be in a personal space where you can no longer feel the totality of culture, or feel any of its depth of connectedness, or of being reminded how you are related to the total country, but it was no good thinking you wanted to be something else while some old lady who should have been busy dying herself was still screaming at you to listen to all this business about suicides which you know nothing about anyway because it was not related to the new individual you — it was the government’s job you say, so you feel like telling her to go to hell. She goes on and says: You got to tell me why this fella got to die. Why he got to been give up his life for, and you gammon people. She was so full of scorn, and reckoned, You been think about heaven been open up and grab Aboriginal Sovereignty for God? You are wrong about that one, and I cannot hear you people crying for that boy, or children crying. Something wrong about this place. Then after hours of this howling, the wind always stops. Dead too, the moth. Conscience, when it finally comes, it goes.

  Ah! Tell them country, how the little children were not frightened of dying, of killing themselves. Were they frightened of the world, or the future, everybody wants to know? Kids dream. Dreaming so much. Dreams were becoming legends now. Beneath all of that, gone to some place where they got to go, and becoming spirit children. When country speaks, memory is telling you the story of what happens, its voice low, putting all those sad stories back into your thoughts.

  4

  Something small enough did happen though in the middle of the night when Aboriginal Sovereignty had walked off into the sea, and finally in one last deep breath — puff, he disappeared into the dust. None of this would have happened if only the country was being read properly, like those old people read country across the land, yes, yes, yes, this and that, like reading a newspaper. The map of culture slept, while country’s censer wafted its whirling red haze further out to sea, even while spinning back on itself time and again that night, to see if Aboriginal Sovereignty was still coming through the glassy flat sea.

  All through the noisy night, hordes of insects screamed in the spear grass and monsoon thickets that flecked the coast, and if you looked from the reddened skies to what caused the squawking among the seagulls — thousands storming around in the darkness above the sea, and listened to where all those mongrel community dogs were racing around through the haze and barking uncontrollably at each other, you might have heard the news about Aboriginal Sovereignty killing himself. But wait a minute! The people of Praiseworthy were asleep after having been rocked into their nightly slumber while thinking that they were saints, and you probably would have believed this too, if you were hearing hours of hymn singers carrying on, on a nightly basis. Everyone had a choir singing in their head, in their backyard, and from others singing to God out in the streets until their voices grew too weary to continue, and then, the singing went on anywhere else where a loudspeaker could be plugged into an electricity socket, and a power board connected to leads for amplifiers and microphones. Well! Everyone woke up in fright and you could hear the yelling from a bunch of angry and not very pleasant people cursing the dogs, What! What! What is all this? Stop! Stop your friggen barking, you useless pack of worthless other people’s mongrel dogs.

  If you had heard the miracle of a volley like that, then you might have been a single fish jumping over the top of the Arafura Sea’s silver trevally leaping in a ray of moonlight squeezing through a crack of dust clouds. Seen how the fish were leaping in and out of the sea to see up into the back beach of red darkness, able to peer further into a patch of mangroves, and seen snake’s heads on the tip of each wing of the Attacus wardi floating through the air as giant brownish Atlas moths were awakened to the enormity of time about two in the morning, which was their hour anyhow, and were now fluttering about clumsily and slowly, and being blown about in breezy pockets among parched dust-coated vines in the sleeping monsoonal jungle. If you had been the trevally that jumped highest into that night before splashing back into the sea, you would have seen that there was one human being in this preoccupied, hymn-singing town of Praiseworthy who had actually witnessed the suicidal departure of Aboriginal Sovereignty.

  5

  Way over in the shadows of mangrove copses where the mud was full of scurrying hermit crabs, and mangrove butterflies, the blue tigers, orange wanderers, black and white crows, copper jewels that had been flittering about for blossoms all day and were now with wings folded asleep in their stories high up on the branches or trunks of trees, or had flown off to congregate on the walls of damp caves, and an odd sacred old saltwater crocodile hundreds of years old was murmuring, asleep in the mud — its spirit more invisible than visible; if you looked just in that one spot where the spirit of place might lie, before the whole suicide thing happened that might have been preventable, you might have noticed the witness. Shh! Look now, where those brownish-looking emperor moths were flying about over there. Syntherata melvilla, laying their eggs on a mangrove leaf. There he goes. Some fat little Ninja assassin kid sneaking about among the mangroves, who was silly enough to think he was so far out there from reality that he was invisible. The kid thought he was an assassin, who believed he had terminator powers to make people die. Why did he not wish to be an Australian politician, or a senator for the Praiseworthy’s vision, instead of being a killer?

  Thought was one thing, but if you saw what was happening in the mangroves you would have noticed other things about the assassinator. But then, who knows? You would have had to feel the power of country, know how you can get tugged into the stories it was creating, but hey! Who except the traditional owner wanted to weep from knowing that much about country now? Maybe you would rather just wish to deal with the facts, not about how the Ninja was hidden in the old skeletal city of bones, a sacred place spreading across the mangrove landscape that had originated from a pod of whales — maybe hundreds of them, who knows — who had once beached and died among the mangroves. That was one hell of a long time ago, of a time when these whales had been tossed across the world like peanuts by mighty waves in seemingly never-ending multiple cyclonic episodes. These big mammals were rendered powerless, and had been thrown around the skies like sticks. Then one big and frightening lightning ancestor grabbed them, and decided by whacking these creatures onto the sands of Praiseworthy to die amidst a congestion of plenty of other stories for this part of the world, she would give this big story about caring for the country to this mob, who in return, raised this assassin.

  This gift by the ancestor was why Praiseworthy people believed that the whale bone city was the biggest incident that happened on Earth to them, and that this ancient architectural marvel of all times, built in the creation period of time immemorial, was continually being moulded by the ancestors working with the waves crashing into the mangroves to cover and uncover the whales’ grave. There was a great consensus in Praiseworthy’s thinking people about how to create a tourist venture of the sacred skeleton city, to tell the other billions of people on the planet about this beautiful thing, of those ancestors still caring for the bone architecture with sand and rain blown in gale-force winds throughout summer to continually polish the bleached bones of thousands of years ago, which was long before the Australian government ever came along with its big dreams and ideas for creating a place like Praiseworthy as an asylum, a madhouse for the traditional owners, and ripping the life out of the country.

  Who knows what those old spirit whales thought about becoming a tourist venture, who you might have thought were rolling about in their graves
about having an assassin sheltering in their bones. Well! This was where you would have just seen in the stillness of the haze through flickering moonlight, among thick dark clouds of mosquitos and sandflies hordes, the outline of that fat little boy. The Ninja killer was busily slapping himself all over his body while trying to kill as many of the unrelenting insects as he could that were either stinging him or sucking out his blood. It was as if even these insects were trying to get this kid off the beach, teaching him properly for once, as though they were his actual parents, to get home to bed.

  Yes for sure he was the witness, Aboriginal Sovereignty Steel’s younger brother Tomahawk — A1 student with more brains than he knew what to do with, who was now prowling around with the stray pussycats hunting for crabs. The boy too clean for the feel of ancestral mud to be on his skin, covered in mosquito bites and sandfly welts from head to toe. If anyone had known that he had secretly code-named himself Ninja Assassin — the smartest kid in the school who was never a spot of trouble — no way, no one would have believed it. But trouble itself had sprouted all over the place, like grass seed after rain, in that kid loitering around in the dark.

  Tomahawk continued to stare out to sea, would not leave his desire. Could not. The boy was obsessed, and acting as though he had lost all control over himself, but Tomahawk knew that he had to be deadly sure this time, had to stand quite still, to remain undetected, to keep willing his brother to keep going. Why are you taking your time? You have to do it. You have to. Goodness, that Tomahawk keep wishing his brother to go further out to sea just so that his own dreams would become a reality, but the boy dared not think ahead of himself, not yet. He needed to resist the sensation of anticipating, of how he foresaw a phenomenal personal chain of events unfolding to reach its dizzy heights in his own lifetime. No! He had to resist thinking about his own ambitious plan to leave Praiseworthy for good — something that could not happen soon enough, and now for heaven’s sake, it was taking Aboriginal Sovereignty hours to end his life.