Carpentaria (34 page)

Lying there, too injured to move, unable to lift his face into the screeching rain, Norm only saw patchy clouds resting low on the water, whenever the rain eased. Occasionally, he saw large flocks of sea birds travelling in the same direction. Even in the storm, he knew the birds would not lose their orientation. They would re-route and head for land, and sometimes when he looked closer, he could see that the birds were actually sailing with the wind, barely working their wings, as though they were being blown along.

Many hours had past since the storm had started and every time Norm closed his eyes, over and over, wanting to sleep, he struggled to stay awake. Remembering to pray, he started reciting the Act of Contrition, ‘Oh! My God We are sorry. Forgive us our trespasses,’ and then he stopped. Church had been a long time ago. Pausing momentarily, he tried again to recite the prayer, before stopping to linger once again on the perplexing word
trespass
. Trespass had been a big word in his life. It protected black men’s Law and it protected white men. It breathed life for fighters; it sequestered people. The word was weightless, but had caused enough jealousies, fights, injuries, killings, the cost could never be weighed. It maintained untold wars over untold centuries –
trespass.
Trespassing was the word which best described his present situation, and it occurred to him that he was wrong to have taken this journey with Elias in the first place. He should have just let the girls dispose of the body. Yet he called, ‘Push the boat Elias and don’t worry about me.’

But he could not stay awake, and the last thing he saw spinning through a labyrinth of maritime tunnels was himself. He knew at once that he was entering a spiritual country forbidden to all men and their wives and their children’s children. In his dream he saw himself, as if looking from above, in the aquatic seafaring vessel called
Trespass
. As he watched the boat, he saw himself gliding along with the wind-driven current in a straight line. He passed place upon place where people once lived in the sea. All were devastated but each destination in turn propelled him into another, while pushing him further away into stranger places that had once existed. Each of these sacred places was wretched of hope, yet somehow capable of snatching the faith he himself had difficulty in holding, until he felt so depleted he knew neither where he was, or how to retrace the route he had been taken through to navigate his way home.

If he hoped to find his way back, he knew his hopeless task was to visualise and commit to memory the multitude of landmarks. An unfamiliar voice pointed out that these were the wrecked artefacts of an ancient past fossilised in parts of the sea where the likes of people living, who ought to leave well enough alone, should never have ventured. What he saw he knew should never have been seen again, but all the while, he was unable to turn his head and look away. He heard the names of places in a harsh language which was both strange and uninviting. Passing through the tunnels of the watery labyrinth, he noticed the sides were lined with a flowing substance not unlike slime, but when he looked closer, he saw these were ancient webs. The longest broken threads of these webs joined others in an entangled mass. They reached out like tentacles attempting to ensnare the boat as it passed through their half-woven sacs. He envisioned himself entombed in their secret places of antiquity. Forever, until one day his spirit began crystallising into a towering wave where the trade winds meet locked in battle. In this future of eternity, he lived on as a fighter of wars that were never resolved in life by becoming a death spirit, a thing so strange, it was perpetually salvaging little pieces of humanity by preying on lone seamen such as he once was himself.

Norm awoke suddenly, startled by a breathless sensation of drowning in his dreams. The rain had eased, and the little aluminium boat continued to move at a rapid speed, as though being pushed by the invisible hands of the sea on and on in its flow with the currents. Norm knew he was moving in a north-easterly direction, and there was nothing he could do. All he could feel was that Desperance was now a long way south-west from the direction of the flow. Sometime in the night, the wind dropped suddenly, and the world seemed a better place. For a further two days the boat drifted with the movement of the north-east flowing currents. Whenever Norm had the strength to try the oars, he would attempt to row, but found he could not against the will of the sea. Each time, his oars would lie flat on the surface, and would be swiftly wiped back to the side of the boat. Norm knew it was hopeless for him to change course for Desperance.

Throughout the day, he trawled for fish, and was able to catch enough trevally to start eating regular meals again. When the sun was overhead, he sat with his jacket over his head for shade, even though the heavy clouds stayed close to the waters. Sometimes he quietly sang country and western songs as though borrowing well-used treasures from his house. While he was lost in the music he visualised each of his children growing alongside a particular piece. Otherwise for the life of him he could not remember what any of his children looked like. Always he took careful notice of the movement of birds reappearing over the sea, observing their direction, where they were heading, where they had come from. Then, on the third day, he was awakened by a sound he had long forgotten. In the first dull light of morning spreading across the waters, there were several green snakes streaking across the skies. As the formations moved closer, he was relieved to see many birds flying towards him. ‘Land! Yes! Land! Where are my oars?’ He knew at once that these were only common old seagulls, but they were like the angels of the sea. He was glad to see them, now he knew land was not far away. Quickly he began to row. At last, across the rise of the dented prow, as the boat rode the first breaker over the bar, he was able to see a spectacular cloud of mist sitting on top of the ocean. The surrounding waters were encased in the silver rays of sunlight. Soon, he was over the next, then others, until the boat slid through the shallow waters up onto the beach.

Standing tall, resembling an exclamation mark on the putrid-smelling beach, Norm Phantom had no idea where he was, except that he was as inconsequential as the millions of dead fish strewn with other decaying marine life at his feet. No more, no less, and as futile and forgotten, but he could not accept that this was how it was; he was screaming, with all the ravenous sea birds gathered in their tens of thousands in a white flurrying cloud up and down the misty beach, ‘I am not one and the same as…’ Dead fish. Dead fish. The two words were locked in his throat.

The stillness of the wet bush behind him reached out like an open mouth over the edge of the sand. The sense of foreboding that he interpreted as his doomed fate made his blood run cold. He dared not enter its domain, at least not yet. Who knew what ghosts of women walked slowly through the bushlands? There but not wanted, but there so cheap, it was almost stupid not to take the offer. He visualised their taunting bodies opening and closing, lips moving and unable to hear their words. He looked out to the sea and the opening and closing of the clouds.

There had never been a moment in his life he thought, as pointless as it was now. Over the top of the deafening bird cries and the occasional sound of distant thunder, he berated the cruel contradictions of the sea gods, the spirits of the heavens, for keeping him alive. What twist of fate was there in being dumped in a hideous graveyard, this pointless massacre of life? He spoke with arrogance and irritation of his safe arrival, calling it a joke – pure and simple, as though he could talk his way out of the present, remake the past, and order the future.

‘Sea! You listening to me at this moment I am speaking to you? You are full of cruelness, you are like women, you sea! Have you finished with me yet or what?’

In reply, the sulky waves barged forward, banged, thumped and dumped their debris further up onto the beach. He jumped out of the way but it was his right to censure the sea. Though he was very weak and feeble from his ordeal, and overcome with emotion from what he had endured, it was his right to say something. So what if he had lost some of his marbles in his screwed up head? ‘I know what I am saying,’ he hollered. So with a screw loose here and there, he flounced around the rotting carcasses as though he could not smell their sickening stench. His eyes bulged unnaturally from the sockets where his dehydrated skin clung to the crevices of his bones. The wretched shorts and singlet he wore the night he rowed away from Desperance were now torn to shreds. There was no harm in letting off a bit of steam. It felt right to let all the old sea phantoms know that a man like Norm Phantom, even reduced to a mere skeleton, had more important things to do with his life than being dumped ungraciously on a place that might not even exist. He had heard of these places before. Men caught in limbo, who were condemned to live on and on in uncharted, empty patches of the sea.

The mighty sea heaved and sighed. Waves regardless of talk crashed on the beach. The wind whistled past overhead. The sea birds sang their songs here and there in their nooks and crannies late in the afternoon. Surveying the beach like a fugitive searching for a possible escape route, Norm muttered on, convincing nobody but himself of his deeply held convictions about his close relationship with the sea. He was not like other people. Plunderers! Rioters! Tyrants! So the good friend of the sea lamented his misfortune under his breath, of being locked in like a prisoner, of being reduced to a little man.

In this state of mind he started to see signs like neon lights sitting on signposts jutting out from the ocean. Road signs the equivalent of those on the highway south of Desperance – Drive Slow. Slow Down. Cattle crossing. Seasonal flooding to be expected. He read all the signs and tried to interpret them as messages from the spirits. He watched tiny insects devouring rotten fish flesh and he interpreted them as messengers, or disguised spirits. He deferred to a guardian angel looking over his shoulder – an old bearded image of himself that could have been his own shadow. He thought of the clagginess of the claypan soil, and was drawn to particular specks of sand on the beach which he thought might have originated from Desperance. Each speck was as insignificant as the other. He aligned the specks into a map for it was his normal way of understanding the world. His eyes darted from one sign to the other, as he tried to link them into a lifeline, a map which would give him reason.

The bush was still with the late afternoon lull from the wind, yet it still felt as though it was full of wild women slowly walking back and forth as they watched his progress on the beach. He needed to be heard over the silence. It was as though the sheer marvellous miracle of bringing human speech though silence had overwhelmed him. He talked and talked, telling the most fantastic of stories about himself. When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours, and it jumped at the chance of revenge. Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. The sand cut into his face like attacking ants, forcing him to close his eyes, yet this did not stop him. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance. Sea mist poured in from the ocean to salt his wounds. The taunted waves threw themselves higher up onto the beach as though they were the bottom lip of a mouth sulking, trying to reach out to him. The bush line trembled in anticipation. Plying the sea with words was a strange game but wiser men have done the same. Men tend to judge nature’s efforts to save them.

The industrious guardian angel of good sense strenuously urged Norm to move away into the bushland. In its catlike mimic of a bowerbird, it cited the industry of ants, as well as the clever beetles turning over the putrid sand, the crabs darting from hole to hole – ‘Go,’ it said, uselessly urging him to retreat to the bush. He refused to listen to a shadow, for he believed he had formed his own map of the signposts forecasting his future. Finally, he collapsed on the beach, where he sat with his strangely protruding eyes watching the waves roll through the night, too afraid to turn his back for one minute from the ocean, least the rough wave, hiding in the black night, leap out and take him.

Or had he become possessed by the sea’s mesmerising monotony of endless waves rising and falling, slap like they did, onto the beach? A fearful scene was unfolding under the roll. Just metres away in the murky grey waters, rolling with dead fish and their relatives, the sand, and slime-coated shells, he saw a city of faces which belonged to dead people staring at him through the undertow. Where even over the din of the waves crashing, and the intermittent raucous cries of squabbling birds trying to sleep, he heard windy voices seducing him into the trap for which he had been waiting.

Out yonder, in the deeper waters, the sea woman was lurking around, waiting for him in the seagrass meadows swaying backwards and forwards under the water. This was what happened; sea men knew she could be the size of an ordinary woman or she could make herself as big as the sea itself. When he was a boy long ago he had dreamt what she looked like. He saw her running about in the ocean of Desperance with hair longer than her body reaching out around her like the poisonous tentacles of the box jellyfish. And her grey skin, coarse and hard was similar to the texture of a shark, although not clean like a shark. She was covered with sheer green-blue slime that clung and hung from her body like the lace which she had collected from her jaunts, in the slime-filled caves along the ocean floor.

So the night passed into day with Norm Phantom still ensconced on the beach as though he had settled there permanently to live. His first decision was to stay on the beach to guard the boat. He neither ate nor drank as he guarded the only piece of insurance he had of leaving the land he had been thrown on. His mind hung onto limbo, a delicate branch, as leafless as it was devoid of trust.