Carpentaria (28 page)

He wanted to tell Patsy that, while her head was bent so low and almost touching his, but it would be better to choose Girlie because she listened to whatever he had to say, understood his lingo, even while both of them knew that he was talking stupid again. But his head kept throwing itself from side to side and he could not stop it. The more he tried to control himself, the more upset he grew, and his stomach tightened with the vomit which kept coming up the back of his throat, and he was struggling to stop himself from choking again. Even in the midst of all of this, Kevin was determined, because Will said he should hold on, because he was going to come back and get him. That life was going to be really alright, Kevin thought, slipping past the faces staring down at him. He wanted to be with Will; he always wanted to be with Will.

‘Can’t you see what you stupid people have done. I don’t want any of you girls around here anymore, you hear that? Bring nothing but trouble. For heaven’s sake, can’t you useless idiots see he’s going to die like that, he is going to die,’ Norm was crying loudly, almost in Patsy’s ear, but she took no notice.

‘Patsy stop it,’ Girlie demanded. She was frightened and nauseated by the smell. She thought she would fall on top of Kevin if she could not get out of the room.

‘You are useless, useless, you are all useless,’ Norm cried, tears running down his cheeks, as he unbuckled the straps and grabbed Kevin, pushing him up into a sitting position and holding him tightly to stop the convulsions, until the choking sounds subsided.

‘You know, this must be the worst day of my life, seeing my poor friend like that, poor bugger, Elias,’ Norm said to his daughters when Kevin had calmed down and fallen asleep. Girlie made a pot of tea and they sat around the kitchen listening to Norm talk despairingly about the day being worse than anything he had been through in his entire life – cyclones, his wife walking out on him, the lot.

‘A storm at sea was better than this. Trapped for days with a broken leg in a swamp full of crocodiles. Malaria too, and don’t tell me you can’t get malaria in this country. Your Mother never believed anything except her own self. Even when she left – it was a celebration of good fortune. I said good luck to her. I felt like I won the lottery. I felt plain bloody rich compared to this.’

The girls ignored him. They were thinking up ways of talking to him about the body. They had to get rid of the body because it would eventually end up being tied to the family. It was still out in the yard.

Absentmindedly, Girlie tapped the teaspoon –
rat-a-tat tat
, over and over on the table. Norm told her to stop it; it was making him feel mad. She kept tapping. Finally, Norm grabbed the spoon from her and said he had made the decision for the family. ‘We got to tell the police.’

‘You can’t tell the police,’ Girlie snapped. It was not the end of the day, nor the final decision. It was just the start for Norm Phantom’s daughters in dealing with their father.

‘What are we going to tell the police, “Someone put him in there”?’ Janice said. ‘“Who do you suppose put him there?” They’ll say you did. That’s what they are going to say.’

‘We got to tell them we don’t know because that’s the truth, the start and the finish of it,’ Norm replied.

Girlie was pouring more tea into her cup but did not notice that it was splashing over the table. As far as she was concerned, although she never said so to her father’s face, he brought them shame. He got accused of being a murderer or being mixed up in one after another of the strange deaths in Desperance, or whenever anyone died. She already suspected him of having something to do with Elias’s death. She kept asking herself how well she knew her father. How many times was she and the rest of the family, not counting the big brothers because they were big champions around Desperance, who loved a fight, but the rest of them, weren’t they the object of ridicule in the town because of him?

What happened when she and Janice and Patsy were abused by the other idiotic families from over the other side of town? Well! In a nutshell, no one intervened, not even the policeman who liked to watch women fight from a distance, when the big ugly cows struck, ganging up on them in broad daylight, in the middle of the main street with pieces of broken bottles and whatever else their slack-arse hands could grab to use to fight the Phantom sisters. What did the bystander do? Well! He just watched. It was a circus, that’s right, a circus for white people, hanging around like dogs to watch black women fighting. She had lost count of the number of times she had been chased out of town, like a dog, by those mongrel cows with their beer cans and bottles they hurled at her back for target practice. Then, after a few days, with a smile on their nasty faces, they said hello, as if it all never happened. That was what black sluts do as far as she was concerned and she had the scars to prove it.

‘It’s not up to you Girlie,’ Norm snapped at her as though he had been reading her mind and it annoyed him that she lacked the nerve to tell him.

‘Police don’t care about our truth,’ Patsy spoke. She had vivid memories of putting together her Mother’s house again, and again, and again, after the police had rampaged through it to their heart’s content, with or without a search warrant. It did not matter because if the police had not done a thorough job, the white men from town came afterwards and wrecked the place. When that happened, they were flat out putting themselves back together, let alone the darn house their Mother had loved and forsaken all else for.

‘Police don’t care about our truth,’ Norm repeated in a sarcastic tone. He said they had to make them believe their story of what happened, because if they said nothing it would all fall back on them one day. ‘Just you wait and see.’

‘Anyone home?’ a male voice from outside disturbed the discussion in the kitchen.

‘Anyone at home? Anyone at home? There’s nobody at home,’ Pirate, the grease-coated cockatoo who had been carried to the desert to be blessed by a pope, called back from his perch in the cedar tree. The mean-spirited bird was plucking cedar berries and throwing them down onto the mess it had created on the ground, where the Constable stood, staring at the smouldering fire.

‘Well! What did I tell you? I knew this would happen,’ Norm said, almost whispering, in a tone of satisfied resignation.

‘You tell them nothing Dad, or you will get us all into trouble. Do you know who brought Elias here? Do you know? It must have been Will, that’s who,’ Girlie explained.

Norm looked straight into her face, ‘You’ve seen that bastard haven’t you and you didn’t bother telling me? If it was that bastard, too right I’ll be telling our friend out there, you just watch me.’

‘No you won’t Dad, I’m telling you Dad,’ Girlie stood her ground, ‘I don’t care what you think about my brother, your son, what you do to him is going to affect all of us.’

‘When was that bastard here?’ Norm demanded, glaring into Girlie’s face to force her to answer. It was this stubborn one who stuck up the most for her no good brother.

Girlie shrugged her shoulders, and he looked around at the others with blank faces, and saw that they were looking at Girlie for an answer as well. Before he could say another word, the Constable welcomed himself into the kitchen. He had become a fat man in his years at Desperance and was still looking for a woman suitable enough to become the wife of a country policeman. Yet his heartstrings tugged for Girlie.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Norm said, his eyes glaring at what his language called the
waydbala
jarrbikala
, whom he had never welcomed into his home.

‘Sorry, old man, but I did call out,’ Truthful replied, giving Girlie a sweet smile.

Girlie did not even look up, while her sisters went out of their way to make him welcome. There was a rush around the kitchen as the two bigger women hurried to make a fresh pot of tea, to heat the food, to clean the table, wash up, make a proper place for the Constable to sit down. Sometimes, Girlie thought, they would do anything so as not to talk to outside people. Norm and Girlie remained in their chairs, unresponsive to Truthful’s pleasant chatter. Neither had a thing to say, leaving Patsy and Janice replying – ‘Hah! Hah!’ or ‘Nope.’ After a couple of minutes the room fell into silence.

‘Quite a bonfire you got there outside,’ Truthful finally said.

‘If you say so,’ Norm replied.

‘Had a couple of phone calls, people complaining about the smoke, that kind of thing. So I thought I’d better come by and check it out.’

‘We lit the fire to burn rubbish, so what if the wind started blowing the wrong way, that is what the wind was doing around here for thousands of years before Desperance ever existed.’

‘Well! Love, I was just doing what I have to do, you know what some of those people are like,’ Truthful never liked getting off on the wrong foot with Girlie.

‘Then you go back and tell them what I told you as soon as you finish that cup of tea, okay?’

Janice went and stood at the kitchen door with her back to everything. She lit the first of many cigarettes she would smoke for the day. She watched the smoke still heading towards town but she sensed the change was coming anyway.

‘You can take your time honey,’ Patsy cooed at Truthful’s hurt face. She thought Girlie should consider her lucky stars, the cow that she was. She gave Girlie a mean look every time she stood behind his back, bending her body in so that her breasts touched his shoulders, while she topped up his teacup. Girlie looked back in mock exasperation. She felt like wiggling her own tits at Patsy but decided against the idea, as it might give the pig something to get excited about. She had always thought those two fools were meant for each other, if only they could see it.

‘Gee, Patsy looks after you,’ she said with a tightness in her voice to Truthful who was watching her every move, while she was just short of stopping herself saying, or haven’t you noticed, you overweight lump of shit.

Truthful responded with a smile which reminded Girlie of a crease in a turnip. He knew better than to get into a debate about anything with Girlie in front of the family. She was at it again, trying to palm him off with Patsy as if he was hard up for a woman. He knew ways of making Girlie scream for being mean to him. Well! She knew what she was asking for, he thought, if it was pain she wanted.

Norm stared at Truthful, while the room bristled with long unresolved tensions about dead bodies, finding someone to blame, how to classify the terms of victimisation, trashed homes and ramshackle bodies recovering from sexual abusers who wallowed with joy, like they were opening presents on Christmas day. Each of the daughters recognised the body language. Norm was sitting at the table, rigid, like one of his stuffed mullets. They raised eyebrows at each other – he was brewing again. Truthful was chewing gum.

Girlie looked at the clock on the wall and knew it was just a matter of minutes before the explosion would hit the room. They had seen it all before. First, he would slam his fist on the table, offer to give Truthful a full fist in the eye, abuse all of them, especially Girlie, whom he called the fornicator with no shame who slept around with a cop, and what have you. She would instantly react with a raucous laugh, and say
:
‘Can’t you say slut because that’s what you mean isn’t it? And that’s what the whole world calls a slut around here.’ She had already anticipated what he would do next – let the cat out of the bag about Elias, whose body was still in the yard. Norm would follow up by offering to challenge Truthful out the back. What suitable means of blackmail would it be this time? Acceptance into the family by endorsing the big ugly prick who was fucking his daughter? It never worked. Girlie knew the cop’s job and Truthful was the full box and dice. He would do his job, questioning and questioning until Norm became that rotten mad he would drag Will into the firing line, or all of them even.

Janice was still standing at the doorway staring at the smouldering fire, looking at Elias’s body through the black smoke, and anticipating how the whole town would once again become involved in the private lives of the family, when the anticipated smell of rain hit her in the face. She looked to where the rain was coming from, and saw a windstorm approaching from the south behind a wall of red dust.

‘Rain’s coming,’ she said, throwing the cigarette butt out in the yard. Turning back to the kitchen, her gaze met Girlie, and she said with her flat, matter-of-fact voice, ‘We better shut up.’

Janice had given the signal for Girlie who looked down at Truthful, looked directly into his snake eyes, while reaching over to tap the table with her hand directly in front of him, the only indication she wanted to give him to follow her to her room. Since he had managed to worm his way into the house, she knew he would hang around until he got what he had come for. Everyone in that kitchen knew he intended to stay the day, or night, or until he had got Girlie into her room. In the many months Truthful had been coming over to the Phantom household, if Girlie tried to ignore him, he just hung around the place for hours waiting until she gave in to the pressure he placed on all of them. It would have been a different matter if the boys were around town. Their presence would have made him leave them all alone.

But with Inso and Donny working down at the mine, Truthful felt free to come around whenever he wanted, as though it was his job to look after the family. Girlie sneered at Janice and Patsy as Truthful flirted with them about how he had become their man about the house. Swaying between his lust and his ability to keep on his toes, even revelling with pride in having a close relationship with such a capable man, he never forgot Norm was his prime murder suspect, and it was his job as a professional policeman to snoop around the locale. Oh! Yes!

A man like Truthful thought it might be kosher to have his fun, but he knew his job. He would solve the unresolved crimes in Desperance even if he had to die doing it. The waiting game offered the extra bonus for Truthful’s happy calculations. The handcuffs in his pocket pressing into his groin roused the sensation of good times ahead. He could almost smell the lucky break in Girlie’s perfume, the smells of her body mingling with his, knew luck was just around the corner. All he had to do was fuck the sister, sweet talk the others, become a top fisherman. If ever the scoundrel of the town, Will Phantom, became homesick, and came running home to daddy like the spineless cur he was, all the better.