Carpentaria (3 page)

She moved on, gracefully climbing through a hill of vegetation which she recognised from somewhere in town. She had seen the council men putting a chainsaw straight through the overgrown oleander hedges that concealed the goings-on in the offices and houses belonging to the Town Council’s very important staff. Truckloads of hedge clippings headed to the dump while under the cooling fans the Town Council debated whether to erect a giant something or other in the middle of town. Could it be the world’s biggest stubby, or the world’s biggest town drunk? The two truths of the matter were abandoned, by their choosing instead to lasso in icons of the sea. Whereas other more fetching images were uttered –
Choose the biggest fibreglass barramundi, or the biggest concrete groper imaginable
– some preferred the steel-spiked wild boar celebrating Abilene, or the biggest lead-framed bull – a brown Brahman, or a fantastic Santa Gertrudis bull with a blazing star in the forehead – which would light up the main road like a beacon at night. Either would distinguish the town
. But what about a miner with a pick?
It was such a hard choice. Angel Day had no idea of the debate since no one spoke to her about the issues of Uptown
.
She just climbed through the official vegetation, still uptight with confidentiality because it gave away no town secrets to her. But they should have asked people like Angel Day. She often spoke about the absence of God in Desperance and the need for him to make his appearance in Uptown to redeem the cursed with his light.

The branches with olive-green limbs and limp leaves felt cool against her skin, so Angel Day moved on through the lot, just to reach the pile of green bags underneath. When she established a position where she could balance herself inside the branches, she sat there in the shade, concealed from the rest of the world. One by one she opened the bags, checking to see what was worth taking. All there was were sheets of white paper which she thought had probably come from the Council office. She did not read them because she was not interested to waste her time examining the rates and whatnots other people owed to Uptown.

Angel Day might have been surprised if ‘official’ papers did not intimidate her to the point she could never read them without her heart pounding. Even her fingers felt shaky, just to touch officialdom, as she pored through the refuse. If she had scant interest, just enough to flick through leaf by leaf, even taking a cursory glance at the contents, she may have been fortunate to stumble eventually across correspondence relating to her own family and how their poor state of wellbeing was becoming an issue, for the Council at least. Especially ‘the house’ the mother built. All the fringe people thought it was such a good house, ingenious in fact, and erected similar makeshift housing for themselves
. Why couldn’t they have waited for a government grant?
But pay no neverminds for hooraying Angel Day for economic independence. Mrs Angel Day’s dream house was considered an eyesore by Uptown. All of them humpies popping up all over the prickly bush would have to go. Those eyesores could not live next to the dream of the big Santa Gertrudis. Fibreglass, steel-spiked, ironclad monuments preoccupied the Town Councillors, and they were using plenty of ink and paper recording what they had blabbered to each other.

What else was life for except just for coping, nothing else, so why be bothered reading what white paper says only to make it worse? She knew what white persons had to say just by looking at them, particularly the ones who wrote official papers. She called them gammon.

Lost amongst these piles of discarded papers, she was left with a sense of melancholy the more she touched them. Nothing seemed promising for Angel Day and her treasure bag. At least she could sit in a shady nook amongst the dying oleander hedge cuttings. Then, suddenly from out of the rustling papers, she discovered a large black mantelpiece clock with a cracked glass cover. Carefully, she pushed the paper away. The clock had come from the mayor’s office. She could not believe her luck, not only that the clock had been thrown away, and she had found it, but the key to wind it was still in the back socket. She wound the clock and smiled. It worked.

Convinced that the Council people had discarded the clock because it was too old-fashioned for the new modern office building, Angel Day now had to choose what she could discard from her potato sack. Decisions, decisions, she mumbled to herself, sorting tins and bottles to make room for the big shiny clock. Then, recovering from the excitement of finding something so valuable at the rubbish tip, she realised the danger it would bring. She peered outside her shelter, scanning around to see who else might be walking about. She asked herself, what if she encountered the Council men who drove the rubbish truck? They would accuse her of stealing the clock and drive straight up to Constable Truthful’s office to report her. She considered the likely consequences of sitting around like a stuffed mullet at the police station.

A vision of the Magistrate’s face found its way into her little oleander nook. Come back at night he warned. Come back at night and get it. She looked around, considering where to hide the clock, knowing the wild pigs owned the dump at night. She thought of asking Norm to bring her back when he went hunting for the pigs, but she did not feel comfortable with the idea of walking around in the bush with him during the night. Half of the contents had been emptied from the bag for the clock. To leave without it was a betrayal of the future she was already imagining in which the Phantom children would be going to school on time. No one in the Phantom family would be guessing the time anymore from where the sun sat in the sky. In the new sweet life, the Phantom family would be marching off to bed at the correct time, just like the school thought was really desirable, then they would march off to school on time to do their school work.

With the clock in the bag, she was preparing to leave her little world of white paper and decaying foliage, when something else caught her eye. First of all she saw the base of the statue with a handwritten date – 1947. It had to be broken she thought, as she pushed the rubbish away, but found it was not even cracked, as she inspected a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue looked old and the paint was chipped in places. Angel thought Norm might have some spare paint she could use to repaint the statue, particularly where the lines of gold and silver had disappeared on the cloak. The Virgin Mary was dressed in a white-painted gown and blue cloak. Her right hand was raised, offering a permanent blessing, while her left hand held gold-coloured rosary beads. Angel Day was breathless. ‘This is mine,’ she whispered, disbelieving the luck of her ordinary morning.

‘This is mine,’ she repeated her claim loudly to the assembled seagulls waiting around the oleanders. She knew she could not leave this behind either, otherwise someone else would get it, and now she had to carry the statue home, for she knew that with the Virgin Mary in pride of place, nobody would be able to interfere with the power of the blessings it would bestow on her home. ‘Luck was going to change for sure, from this moment onwards,’ she told the seagulls, because she, Mrs Angel Day, now owned the luck of the white people.

Not only would her family be able to tell the time, and be able to tell other poor outsider people like themselves what the time was, but they would also be prosperous. They would become like the white people who prayed and said they were of the Christian faith. This was the difference between the poor old Pricklebush people and Uptown. This was how white people had become rich by saving up enough money, so they could look down on others, by keeping statues of their holy ones in their homes. Their spiritual ancestors would perform miracles if they saw how hard some people were praying all the time, and for this kind of devotion, reward them with money. Blessed with the prophecy of richness, money befalls them, and that was the reason why they owned all the businesses in town.

The seagulls, lifting off all over the dump, in the mind-bending sounds they made seemed to be singing a hymn,
Glory! Glory,
Magnificat
. The atmosphere was haunting, with steam rising from the ground, hovering birds in every direction, and she simply appeared from nowhere, walking out of the oleander. Fugitively, she searched around for potential robbers with her magical brown eyes, checking every angle for movement in the distortion of haphazard, mass waste. She hurried, carrying the statue and the potato sack, eager to escape before the Council men started work in the slow-moving truck. She did not expect to see so many other people from the Pricklebush walking about so early in the morning.

Her movements had startled the otherwise peaceful scene where dozens of others from the Pricklebush had ensconced themselves under cardboard boxes, pieces of corrugated iron, inside forty-four-gallon tar barrels, or broken parts of abandoned water tanks. Suddenly, people appeared from everywhere, poking and pulling everything apart, tilling the dumping ground. Children were playing in the puddles, parents gossiping, others walking about with their bags full up.

Angel Day, queen herself, surveyed their stares and started abusing first. She started it. ‘What are you all staring at me for?’ Her voice had no problem emptying the contents of other people’s lives in the rubbish and calling it nothing. Angel stood her ground. She just started yelling out in a very open manner what she liked, to all and sundry: the same kind of things she called other people all the time around the house.

‘Hey! What are you people doing here?’ she hollered. ‘What’s wrong with you people? You people don’t belong here. Who said you got any normal rights to be hanging around here? On other people’s laaand for? Just taking what you want, hey? What about the traditional owner then?’ Her voice radiated like shock waves all over the dump. Well! Most people had heard that argument before. Angel Day was mouthing off again about the poor old traditional owner being bypassed – once again. And this time, it must have been an unlucky day, because they were having naught of it. You could hear all those people sucking in their breath. Angel had no shame causing all of that trouble. She was a hussy, first class, the old ones had heard people whispering about Angel while she went on her way, cursing them for nothing, as though she was the keeper of other people’s lives.

Goodness knows so much happened then. It was hard for two eyes to keep up. Those poor people were pretty upset, and Angel had no intuition about other people, none at all. All those grim faces were just glaring at her but she did nothing. After several moments the air broke like dynamite. The air broke clean:
We can’t help that, Mrs Who-Does-She-Thinks-She-Is.
This came out of the mouth of someone who had picked up straightaway that business line of hers of
not belonging here.
She called out for everybody to decide who she thinks she is. There was going to be a war, good and proper. Gravelly morning voices sounding like someone was jumping up and down on their lungs shouted back,
She’s bloody nobody, that’s what.

Everyone started slinging off about who would want to belong there anyway? The place was a mess. The place was too full of fighting all the time. Everyone was moving forward, screaming at each other. Then they started taunting, throwing sticks and stones at the ones trying to defend the peace. Nobody listened to the other because everyone was either that mad in the head or did not care whether they were defending the peace or not. Each was well and truly sick of it. Sick of Angel Day.

One big woman, dressed in a big white dress: Well! She looked like the white cliffs of Dover, and it was she who did most of the shouting, spitting out incoherent words, on and on, like she was never going to stop. She was yelling through spit, asking who that woman thought she was:
The bloody nobody.
When Angel Day said the woman looked like a fat white pig eating up the traditional owner’s country, the woman said she was going to fix Mrs High and Bloody Mighty, once and for all. What happened then was the war started again. Imagine that. Precarious modernity squashed by hostilities dormant for four hundred years, and Angel Day started it up again over an old clock and a statue. Probably all wars start off by a bit of taunting like this.

Everyone began picking up weapons the ancient way, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. People and children were running around, picking up lumps of wood, iron bars, or else brown beer bottles picked up and broken along the neck. Everywhere, all you could hear was the sound of bottles being smashed. When all the memories of that day had faded away, that sound of glass smashing still haunted everyone.

You see, all the alliances had to be weighed up then and there and on the spot. People who had been getting on well, living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past. It was unbelievable, but Angel Day was standing there oblivious, hugging her statue, and telling people to get off her land. There were little black flies swarming all over her face but she took no notice. Nobody had seemed to notice the fly squadrons soaring into the air as though struck by an electrifying volatility; as they swarmed up, they were drawn like magnets to the hot smell of human skin, and thousands buzzed around people’s faces.

The old people believed in phenomena as great as this, and said the flies had been drawn up through the centuries to join the battle. They claimed the spirits would never let you forget the past. They drew lines in the dirt, calling people out from the shadows of complacency,
Get it straight
where you belong
. People must have felt the chilly spike prodding them to arm, to prepare them to add another chapter in the old war. Otherwise they might have never known how to go to war in the way of the old people. Living in harmony in fringe camps was a policy designed by the invader’s governments, and implemented, wherever shacks like Angel Day’s swampside residences first began to be called a community. The old people wrote about the history of these wars on rock.