Carpentaria (26 page)

Away from the house, Will felt great throbs of sadness vibrating through the rain from Norm’s grief when he discovered Elias. The rain fell over the saltpans and over the sea for hours that night, then Norm heard the oars swashing through the shallows, as Will rowed out to sea.

Last Wishes…

T
he fishroom never kept the silence of the dead. For years Norm Phantom knew this. Peculiar things happened in his workroom where he competed with the spirits of who knows what, to make fish from the sea come back to life, to look immortal. To hang in schools by the dozen, suspended in oceans of air, stranded, attached, much like himself, unable to swim off into distant horizons. Mortality did not belong in this room.

Occasionally, he lamented that one day he would die, and saluted his premature epitaph,
Who would look after all of this then?
Oh! Sad. His was the lot of an isolated man. The twin in his isolation: quiet, unassuming, humble pie. Was it any wonder such a man would make other peculiar claims too? After hours of laboured work, when finally holding in his hands the masterpiece, he claimed it was not he who had created it. Why would he make up such a story the old people said: Listen! Who did he think he was kidding? He was kidding himself. Everyone knew the hours of toil Norm Phantom put into creating his fish. Desperance being what it was, a modest place, humble people believed in real facts. Only real facts created perfection. So it was. People were not fools.

When nobody believed the story spread by Norm Phantom about not being the maker of his work, he kept his beliefs to himself. These were the fascinating secrets of the fishroom. Secretly, Norm remained convinced that others helped in such exquisite creations, something much more powerful than himself. A supernatural master artist who created miracles, a dalliance of God consuming the room as an experimental studio, a type of exposé for life in the decaying world, where the air smelt like a beach.

In this bewildering scenario, Norm acknowledged himself only as being the original creator of the workroom. This was true. It was through a glimmer of thoughts like that, that Norm realised what had really happened to the room he had built with his bare hands. In a fascinating growth, when the preciousness of the new fades with no one noticing, the room had changed, evolving into something else. Inexplicably, without messing about, in came and dwelt a powerful spirit with grander goals, a perfectionist who spat dead lizards of scorn at human beliefs of what was perfect, who loved to play ‘touch up’ with a humble man’s work. So, Norm Phantom, with such gorgeous ideas flooding his mind, was able to skirt around the true origins of his genius – the twin unfetching forces of envy and competitiveness, matters that often sustained him in dealing with his family. Plain old truth was undeniably becoming the diminishing factor in his work with the fish.

The seeds of thought can be very enterprising. Once, when very weary in the middle of the night, and while still stooped in his intricate restoration of each colour-drained minute scale of a king trevally back into silver, one at a time, so as to have the job completed by the morning, for a common ‘madman’ who did not deserve to have caught such a magnificent fish, Norm had been disturbed by the light flickering, pulsing like a heartbeat.

Steeped with ideas so enormous they could be tracked as chaotic enterprises, matrices of chaos, and suspecting the reason why the light was pulsing, he began to understand that the room was like a pickpocket, robbing people of their memories. Norm accused the room of becoming a hoarder of other people’s secrets of the heart. What he saw for the first time that night was as real as anything he had ever seen in his life; it opened his eyes, and from then on, he was able to see other things in the room. As the room matured, Norm saw it was bending inwards, steeped with the weight of holding one miraculous discovery after another. It occurred to him that all truths were being accumulated. Poor truth sucked straight out of the minds of all the unrighteous people who came to admire his handiwork. Sometimes, the room appeared to be absorbed by quietness, as though it was reading its secrets. He continued his work, and paused, when he heard the rustling of a page turning inside the walls.

Over time, Norm preferred not to take his eyes off his work until it was completed. He merely blinked when he heard the room working, and carried on, rather than have to endure the time lost from a distraction which served no purpose. He especially did not want to see what other people thought stacked up around the room like bundles of newspapers. Finally, with the last dab of paint drying on his trevally, Spanish mackerel, long-whiskered catfish, codfish, whatever, with the same single-mindedness, Norm Phantom renegotiated his way out of the workroom through the crowded space.

Norm suspected that nobody else could possibly be aware of where the unexpected heaviness had come from, the heavy breathing people said they felt in the room, which they said was swimming against their skin. Norm kept the room’s mad secret from other people. For those who had experienced its weight, the fishroom was the one pitiful place in the whole of Desperance where most other people, except family members, were eager to leave, unknowingly with less. All manner of people, usually oddball fishing men of all walks of life, from all places of the globe, made similar excuses to let Norm get on with his work –
Think I caught old so-and-so’s flu again
. He had heard people say it a thousand times. They said they preferred not to interfere with the great artist at work. The old people never went inside. They said they did not like to go inside strange houses.

Norm saw unsuspecting people, uncomfortably but impulsively, give up their tight-lipped family secrets which had been passed down through the ages. What poor people! Especially those that did not even know they had been carrying the secret knowledge of generations passed. Well! They spilt the beans to the fishroom. One time, Norm told the old people he had a dream about the room. He told them that every house had a spirit, and in his house, the spirit’s brain lived in the fishroom. The few who heard Norm talk about his theory said it was too far-fetched, but Norm argued that once the spirit consumed the original room, it became the likeness of the room itself. In fact, it was a complete replica of the original room. His story was too strange even for the old people, who in return, accused him of making up stories to frighten them away. Norm kept thinking his own thoughts anyway. He said nobody could stop him.

It was during this time of realisation, a haunting that the old people wanted nothing to do with, that Norm had become distracted from the calling of his art. He felt he had lost something. He felt he had lost his touch. He spent more time listening to the hawks harking above the roof. He said he was too distracted to conspire against death with his fish. He lost faith. He was wasting time casting his eye around the room and seeing the walls watching him with a sustained look of amusement. The fish from the sea just remained plain dead. Work was never finished. Decay and rot began to take over. The room taunted him and everywhere he saw death, robbed by the years, now laughing in his face. Great schools of fish conjured from the sea were sent scattering in every direction through the cyclonic air. Norm fled the room, running through enormous weights of water to drown his conscience in the hub and tub of a psychotic Pacific ocean collapsing through eons of compressed time.

A truce was made however, and whatever Norm did to re-create life in the fish he preserved, it was amazing. His fish looked like priceless jewelled ornaments. Each piece was better than the last. He became a master known throughout the land. This was the reason why people came from all directions of the world to Desperance to have their fish preserved. Yet, no matter how masterful he was, he knew the ever-watchful other-worldly spirit had more work to do. It remade the fish more beautiful to the eye, casting a replica of colour through the empty nail holes in the roof, shining where the dazzling rays of sunlight, hitting onto the scales of fish, left them forever glistening silvery gold on colours of green, grey, blue and pink.

Years passed with the winter winds blowing south-easterly in weekly rhythms after midnight. Like nobody else, Norm loved the grand old composer, the rapturous melodies which swam along the tin walls of the corridor from the house to the fishroom. The music arrived in the middle of the night and tapered off after midday. The breath of music at this time of year made the old people camping on the cold ground outside move their blankets as far away as they could from the house. They said the house was haunted. They did not like the old star in the night working close by to where they were camping because it was flaunting the afterlife. Norm sang
Gloria
, alongside the old composer conducting his mass choir of crickets that sang
Glory! Glory!
in time with the rattling walls. The crickets, part of the fishroom’s metamorphosis, lived in the dark, musky, fish-smelly environment. Packs of these creatures had moved into the room in magic droves, having come out from under a maze of stubby grass and leaf litter in the bush, to live in the nooks and crannies of dark places inside the walls, behind jam jars full of chemicals, or under benches groaning with the weight of plastic baths full of fish-skin tanning fluid. Dozens of the gleaming fish hanging off the rafters sang eerie songs in shrilled, mezzosoprano voices that floated out of their mouths from the crickets’ hidden nests, from deep inside the fishes’ horsehair bellies.

‘Bloody this and blast that about the ozone layer,’ Mrs Angel Day lamented in her heyday as Queen Bee of the household, after yelling across the rooms of the house for the confounded radio to be turned down. Norm Phantom refused to listen to people complaining. In his quest to find answers to his theories, he was addicted to news on his radio. Constantly twiddling the volume knob, any news item about the hole in the ozone layer would be blasted to a crescendo through the house. For he had a puzzle: ‘Was the chorus in the fishroom a new strain of crickets caused by the hole in the ozone layer?’ He told his wife such a thing had never happened before. He asked the question: ‘Could mere crickets, normally a curse to mankind, have developed the ability to chirp through the noise barrier?’ A thousand times he had asked her: ‘What do you think?’ For Mrs Angel Day, the sound the crickets made was like listening to plates smashing. ‘What do you think?’ Such goings on in one ear and out the other, drone, drone, meant nothing to her. She said she did not give two hoots, but the sound was driving her mad, and he could stuff any stupid
scientify
ideas he got from city people talk up his butt. ‘They wouldn’t know about here would they? If they did we wouldn’t be living here like this, would we?’ Norm excused his wife for not acquiring a modern sense of refinement, such as a fine ear for the kind of music he liked listening to. She said the crickets were mutants addicted to inhaling those chemical fumes he used for tanning, ‘Gone mad, like yourself!’ Explaining further to prove her point, she proclaimed, ‘They don’t live anywhere else in the house, do they?’ This was the truth.

Norm kept his old ventriloquist cockatoo away from the workroom, in case it learned to chirp like the crickets. The bird was regarded as a genius for its unusually quick knack for picking up sounds. ‘Mark my words, you keep that bird of yours away from there otherwise I’ll guarantee you this one thing Norm Phantom, his little pile of bones will be licked clean by every baldy old camp dog in Desperance to kingdom come.’ Mrs Angel Day, as the old people referred to her in those days, had threatened many things on numerous occasions, more than her other veiled threats about leaving Norm which she finally did, although not on account of the crickets. She always started off or ended her threats with an added conjecture – ‘Mark my words,’ and you better believe it, sooner or later, she did whatever she threatened.

In the early days when Mrs Angel Day ruled the roost in the Phantom household, reigning supreme out in the front yard, she often sat in a pram kept from her last born which she had converted into her chair. This was the spot from where she complained to the old people about the loud chirping noises of the crickets. She said it would drive her to divorce one day. The old people said the noise must be too great for her nervous constitution. If she ever saw her husband pass by, an occurrence which was not frequent, she complained to him, saying it was always left to her to save the marriage: ‘If you had any sense you’d shut up your noise.’ Veiled threat! Veiled threat! Norm always felt she was insinuating that he was personally responsible for summoning up all the devils that came into her life. ‘Inadvertently you might be,’ she claimed, and the old people looked away. ‘You will ruin our marriage by your ignorant inadvertent.’ ‘You’re hearing things,’ he told her. In truth, she did blame Norm for all of their bad luck, often stringing out piece by piece all the things that had gone wrong, starting from day one, New Year’s Day a long time ago, when they first met. ‘What New Year’s Day was that?’

Norm Phantom did not remember any New Year’s anniversary. Every time she mentioned it, it was like a slap in the face, but he never told her that she was wrong about the date. He let it be a reminder to himself of her infidelities. Instead, he accused her of having a disease she had picked up: ‘Must be from one of those other men you were with before me.’ He furthered his claim by announcing to the old people sitting around pretending not to notice what they were arguing about, that she had passed the disease onto her children when they were born. ‘What disease?’ she retorted, although not denying her experiences before Norm. He told her it was a disease which makes people too sensitive to sound, where they turn into maniacs, they become
like police
. He said he would not have been surprised if his children wanted to become
jarrbikalas
.

Norm Phantom went around telling the whole world that his family had some rare disease which made them overly sensitive to noise, although he claimed they were ‘stone deaf when a man wanted some simple thing done to help him around the place.’ At the time Norm was spreading false facts about his family’s hearing disabilities his good friend Elias was one of the few who disagreed with him. Elias claimed it was not logical that the entire family had hearing problems. He told Norm he did not know what he was talking about, because anyone who was half deaf in one ear and stone deaf in the other, was going to hear less than a person with normal hearing.