Carpentaria (30 page)

Hundreds of the big gropers surged towards the boat, until in the moment when they looked like colliding, the fish had pulled away, creating a foaming sea in their wake as they sank back into the depths of the ocean. Norm had often thought about what happened that day. It was the memory which had come flooding back to him as he sat at the kitchen table, ready to destroy the world around him. The memory fought off the devils until Norm saw what Elias had wanted. Elias had come back to tell Norm to take him home.

Norm knew if he mapped the route well, he would reach this spirit world, where the congregations of the great gropers journeying from the sky to the sea were gathered. The gropers would wait for Norm before they moved on, far away under the sea, before returning to the sea of stars, at the season’s end. He was still feeling annoyed about the girls burning the fish. The coral trout belonged to Elias’s spirit and rightfully, they should accompany the dead man on this journey into the spirit world. Having to take Elias away without his belongings did not prepare him well for this other world. He knew it was the wrong thing, if Elias went without his fish. He cursed. The wind that had been ready waiting for him died and there was an incredible stillness. It had to be a sign, as though the wind had refused to take them, Norm thought. So there he was, standing out there in the water in the middle of the night, sweat running down his face, all that work for nothing.

Norm trudged barefoot back up the beach, back towards the house to collect the old fish. He felt like a fanatic, a madman, searching for a precision that did not exist in his terrible obsession with fish. He realised he was out of time halfway up to the house, but he kept going, dodging around the back of several piles of driftwood, almost crawling along on his belly so that Gordie would not detect his movements. He expected Gordie would turn up at any second, he could picture the long, lanky streak running almost, coming in to check.

As he retraced his steps inside the house, he knew he now had only minutes to leave in order to follow the course he had charted for himself. He knew if he set sail any later, the seas would be giving the wrong signals, the tides would be wrong, he would not be able to recalibrate, and after that, whatever he did would bring him further askew.

The white dog, happy he had returned, was following excitedly behind him. He thought he had disturbed Kevin, but the lad was just talking in his sleep, talking to Will. Norm knew it would not be long before Kevin was up and about. Truthful was still in a deep sleep – it would be so easy to smother him. He reached up and pulled down about six of the silver fish and four coral trout that were hanging from the ceiling, and put them into the bags that had come with Elias.

Norm threw the bag of fish into the boat and pulled the boat out to deeper waters, just as he had watched Elias do on the day he had set off, leaving Desperance for good. The coolness of the water was refreshing on his skin after working in the humidity of the hot night. He set course by the star of the fishermen that was setting low in the northern horizon. Then he climbed on board and started rowing away as the cloud cover again returned blackness to the remaining night.

A steady rain fell while Norm rowed into the tide racing over the seagrass meadows of the flat sea. Once again, his thoughts turned to the Fishman not coming to see him. In the darkness, he felt Elias’s presence, sitting at the end of the boat, looking at him, as he usually did on their way out fishing in the good old days. Before the kids grew up, before the madam of the house caused her trouble, and the Fishman came and went as he pleased.

‘You remember that, Elias?’ he said, speaking softly, as though the dead man had been listening to his thoughts. This had never happened before in the ups and downs of the in-between years. ‘Fishman always came around, didn’t he Elias?’ There was no answer, and Norm rowed, hissing his story in the rain, ‘Despite the sheer irresponsibility of it all, she drove off with him.’ He remembered both of them, Mozzie and Angel, huddled like a couple of teenagers, in the huge expanse of the back seat of the main man’s flash car, driven by the membership.

‘It ended for me on the day she ran off with the Fishman, Elias,’ Norm said on the forward lift of the oars. ‘28 January, 1988,’ swinging the oars back. ‘You know why I remember it?’ Swoosh. ‘It was precisely four p.m.’ Swish. This was the time of day when he most vividly felt a loss of heart. ‘It was a hot, hot day to remember.’ The hot wind had been blowing it was true. He had circled the date in green on the calendar, and fourteen years later, the same calendar with the Snowy Mountains stream picture remained on the wall as a reminder to the family.

‘No, you are wrong,’ Elias’s deadpan voice came back through the night, the way he usually spoke to Norm while they were fishing, back to back to each other, waiting for a bite. Elias had never budged from his belief that it was a different day. The 27th day in January 1988. It was ten a.m. A hot bugger of a day. Angel was walking, her shift made of some fine material, he did not know what, clinging against the front of her body as she walked in the hot air. The wind was that hot it made your blood boil. Piles of rubbish at the tip had combusted into roaring fires. People were fainting in their houses in the middle of the morning. Oxygen was draining from the atmosphere.

Everyone was perishing for rain. There were people who were too breathless to speak, but Angel had spoken to him. She said in her dismissive, flat voice, in her usual manner of speaking to the likes of Elias, men who did not stir her feelings in the right way, that Norm was already down looking at the boats. Elias had argued that he too, would always remember that day because he had marked it on his own calendar. It had a picture of two galahs sitting on a perch, screeching at each other. He had kept the picture because it reminded him of the occasion. Norm remembered seeing her thin frame of a body in that dress, walking in the mist along the track through the wastelands, heading towards the rubbish dump. He refused to believe Elias. He argued vehemently that in January of that year, high tide was at precisely four p.m. in the afternoon, the same as the day Angel left, so this was why Elias had to be mistaken. The argument lasted for days on the sea. This was fishing with Elias. He rowed on.

Devoid of blue, a strangely coloured creature was man, the intruder, who ventured at his own risk into these faraway, watery domains of the ocean…

It was a long journey Norm Phantom had set upon into a world that by day belonged to the luminescence of the ocean and above, to the open skies, and by night, to the spirits who had always haunted this world. They say this faraway place belonged to the untamed spirits of fishes, women and sea creatures. This was the realm of mischievous winds and other kinds of haughty souls from above. Who goes there? the quiet wind asked. The following wind answered. It said there came a man of pain and another, who looked disinterestedly at the world as though it did not exist.

The sea wind following Norm along in his little boat was a spirit of intemperate disposition, who woefully blew little gusty breezes for days and passed through the night playing nocturnes that droned over the waves, or else, left, running away from the toiling seafarer in its wantonness, searching for a wild idea on the other side of the world. On those days of hot calm, the air was heavy with a humid clamminess that drove Norm half crazy. Everything on the boat felt damp. As he rowed on, looking back at Elias all day long, he started to detect a grey mould growing over the dead man’s face. With no escape from the sight of Elias’s face, he watched for the spread of new patches of mould advancing over his friend’s body.

At night he slept, half curled up in the cramped space in the middle of the boat in a puddle of stagnant water. Although his body felt sluggish in the heavy air, his mind was as attuned as a wary night bird passing his boat. Even the slightest movement of water breaking with a fish surfacing would awaken him in fright. ‘What’s that! What’s that!’ he called out, half asleep, ready to abandon ship. And from the other end of the boat in the darkness, Elias said calmly, ‘Relax, go back to sleep, it’s nothing.’ Unfortunately, once robbed of his sleep, he could not sleep. Instead, driven with annoyance, grumbling that it was alright for Elias to be calm – he did not have to come back alive – Norm would start rowing again in the middle of the night, navigating by his memorised map, following the star of the fish.

He would row into daylight, his mind absorbed with directing his monotonous labour, until a startled cry from a seagull winging close to his head, ricocheting off every surface of the sea plain, echoed like madness through his mind.

Elias’s version of the argument, which altered and swayed in many different directions over the years, was based on seeing Angel Day walking to the rubbish dump in the summertime. Elias said he was not blind, he knew what he saw. All the Pricklebush people living on the edge of town were sloshing around like wild pigs in ankle-deep mud to get anywhere all along the roads in town, after the heavy Wet season rain.

The world was no longer under the spell of the monochrome grey-coloured Dry season. The land was covered with flood plains alive with frogs calling to each other in waves of sound running across the atmosphere, closing to absolute silence near to the magical footsteps of Elias, before resuming the pitch of the highest decibels behind him again.

Next, Elias used the brighter paints on his palette to portray the scenario, describing how he had watched her moving in the mist and long grass like an angel, a spirit no less, along the path, skipping to avoid the puddles. Elias was not taunting Norm. He spoke frankly without any realisation that the truth of the lost wife was painful for his friend. The way Elias spoke about Angel astonished him because his wife had never been angelic.

The way Elias spoke of what he saw was no secret, not something he had seen alone, because everyone in the Pricklebush felt haunted whenever she approached them, like a hummingbird, in the bush, along lonely paths on the outskirts of the town. She was the one who made people scratch their heads and say, ‘What kind of woman was that?’ To many others, she was a memorable, marvellous sort of woman who printed herself on your mind with red lipstick, while you watched. Elias said she was too good for sure. He had stood by the side of the track like a stupid man, he said.

‘Hello Elias, Norm is already down at the boats,’ she purred catlike at Elias gawking at her again, then rolled those luxuriant brown eyes, and just like the queen she was, she floated off.

Norm paused at the call of a seagull. His mind floated back to the thoughts that had preoccupied him in those days. All of the many preparations he was engrossed with, even for such a small sea craft. The inconsequential trappings to ensure survival. Elias never worried come rain or storm, while Norm was forever moving about with his all-weather jacket over his head for shade, checking equipment from one end of the boat to the other, fanaticising over hairline cracks becoming gaping holes overnight. ‘You never used to be like that, fret, fret. I reckon you live in the ruins of married life.’ Those were Elias’s true words about his good friend Norm. Norm threw Elias’s words back now as an accusation, ‘How come you were saying things like that about me?’ Elias looked him back squarely in the eyes and kept on staring, until Norm answered for him, ‘Why didn’t you ask me that when I was alive?’ Norm mumbled he would have, but he did not want to cause an argument, so, ‘It did not matter.’ Unable to continue this argument with itself, his mind slipped back to the days of golden yellow, and boats of capillary red, when a man walked home when he felt tired.

Norm moved awkwardly, his legs severely cramped from the long journey, and checked the four fishing lines hanging over the side of the boat. He changed the bait with pieces of flesh from a small shark he had been saving from his catch from the previous night. ‘See!’ He showed the lines to Elias before throwing them over the sides again. Looking into the spot where the lines were sinking into the blue-green depths, he saw his companion following, the manta ray with its greying form moving through the depths of ocean below. Norm became intoxicated by watching the prolonged movement of the suspended ray. The creature moved so tantalisingly slowly by suspending itself in the drift of tidal movement. He no longer cared to stay above. His vision slipped into and out of the waters, breaking the surface so many times, he became lost in time.

The grey sea creature willowing below carried his subliminal mind on its back, absorbing those captured thoughts of Angel Day walking out of a submerged track in the sea towards him. She walked out of the water not far from the boat in a dazzling ray of sunlight, and she walked away, back on the track that led to the rubbish dump. Norm gripped the vision, staring straight through reality to watch her for the first time that long-ago day when Elias had seen her. Looking so closely into her face, he was astounded at its clarity. He was shocked to see a secret intimacy residing within her. He had never before seen this face from her childhood transcending through the travesties of their life together. He thought he had never seen her before. She walked with a tranquillity and a beauty that was her normal face, but which she had carefully folded up and stored away, saved only now for stolen occasions of when she was completely alone. He felt ashamed to be hiding behind the long grass, peering out with the grasshoppers, slipping along behind her, following on the path of what happened on that very last day he and Elias had cast the peaceful spells of being just simple men working on their boats.

It had been a very ordinary day of whiling away the time when suddenly the blue nylon line ran straight across the water, and Norm Phantom was propelled out of his daydreams. He was being challenged by a fish of great strength that held the end of the line taut after it plunged into the depths, as though it had turned itself into a rock. The strange object in the distant sea line that he had been watching still edged its way through the water, slowly bobbing like a balloon, moving against the slight breeze blowing across the sea from the mainland. Norm scanned the surface, vigilant, yet far too preoccupied now with the sun hanging low in the sky, as he struggled with his first catch in what had become a long day.