Carpentaria (45 page)

The dismayed sisters sat quietly like little mice sipping tea, and again, were suddenly surprised to notice how his thick lips were trembling, as though he had just come out of a fridge, or was seeing ghosts, or both, and thought, perhaps he had lost his marbles. They kicked polite circumspection reserved for visiting white people out the door, and Patsy and Janice stared straight into his face, to observe his radically changed personality more closely. Only Girlie, continuing on regardless, seemed to be reaching his lost state of mind. Who wouldn’t, with her screaming abuse at them from across the table? The bigger sisters lent in to take an even closer look at his face. His heavy hooded eyelids were twitching uncontrollably as he stared into space past Girlie.

Again, Truthful saw the images which had overtaken his car at dawn. It happened when he had started driving out on their road, and at first, he thought he was losing his eyesight as he stared ahead at the fuzzy, lighter, paler-coloured road and countryside ahead. It looked as though there was a fog ahead, but soon, he discovered it was not a fog at all, only by then, it was too late to turn around. He could clearly see he had driven deep into spider webs as high as the vehicle. A thick sheet of white surrounded him. Perhaps Truthful had never seen such a thing before, but it was an old story that sometimes happens overnight when a cloud of travelling spiders drop onto land from the sea wind, and start building their webs the height of house walls. Ingeniously, the spiders work at night, flying through the air as they attach their silver webs to anything with height: electricity poles, fences, long grass, prickly bush trees. The fat-bellied creatures sat in the middle of their webs, while their long, sinister legs spread like lethal weapons, and looked like stars as big as saucers. He drove on, slowly, foolishly he thought. A multitude of spiders crawled through his brain. He did not know what to do. He could not go back: he did not want to go back. He was locked in: he had to drive forward for there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to turn around.

Without anyone to tell him what to expect, Truthful could never have realised how densely packed together those webs were. The car became thickly coated with layer after layer of the silky, film-like threads. Soon, he saw nothing in the whiteness, except the webs stuck on the windscreen with the angry spiders caught between their nests. There were spiders crawling all over the car and he quickly wound up the windows. He killed those that had got inside with the local telephone book, and within minutes, locked in the airless car and loaded down with humidity, the perspiration started to pour off his body.

He found it difficult to breathe. He panicked, inside his brain he saw millions and zillions of cellular neurons popping around like white baby spiders. The creatures raced into each other, creating old man Joseph Midnight’s face, twisted with anger, staring at him and calling him an idiot, then pulsating away into a void the size of a pin hole, only to be recreated speeding towards him again, even quicker than before.

Another crazy thing happened to Truthful. His body became weightless, and with all his might forcing his fingers which felt like rubber, he held on to the steering wheel, to stop himself from floating away. A lulling voice, whispering inside his head, kept telling his body he was going to die. But dying by asphyxiation was not what his body wanted to do. He struggled against the weightlessness blowing him towards the dead relatives assembled in a little huddle in the flowing white distance.

Remarkably, at this point, fate had a little something to give Truthful. His body repulsed the ailing brain. The energy must have come out of his soul, for his hands locked like clamps around the steering wheel, and his feet turned into flattened lead on the floor of the car. His left foot was still planted on the accelerator, and he literally flew out of that road.

Normally, Truthful would have agreed with Girlie. If you ever want to find out about anything in your vicinity, you have to talk to the mad people. She had always said this, although more often in the previous days: ‘They know the deepest and darkest secrets of this place.’ But nobody knew what Joseph Midnight knew, and everyone knew what Girlie would never know. It was an eye for an eye. A black for a white. It was just starting. The fathers of those louts who bashed Kevin were openly boasting to Uptown about putting a nigger down for Gordie. Kevin was paying for the memories, for being smart once, from a family with airs about themselves, for Will Phantom.
Open slather, open slather
, came the whispered words which kept repeating themselves when he picked up the phone in the middle of the night, while another voice gave the warning,
Stay out of it Truthful, it’s open slather now.

Truthful knew that after the attack on Kevin, no one was really interested in harming the three petrol sniffers accused of killing Gordie. Why would they bother with kids who had cooked their brains so badly they felt nothing? Truthful knew most of the town did not even think the petrol sniffers had it in them to go and kill Gordie. But! It did not stop there. The phone at the police station rang all hours of the night and day, a different whispering voice most of the time, with more warnings,
You come near our boys and we will hang you
. A chill ran down his spine every time the phone rang. At night, he lay in the darkness thinking how the town had managed to mould him into the shape they needed, so he had nothing to fall back on when something like this happened. Nothing could happen: that was the dilemma. This was it. End of story now.

On one of the nights following the arrest of the boys and the incident with Kevin, Truthful had just started to settle down again after the phone had stopped ringing for the last time. Sleep drifted in and he started to dream. In the dream he heard someone knocking on the door, but he decided not to answer, until the knocking grew so loud, he went to the door to see who it was.

He turned the lights on and stood at the doorway looking at the rose garden, deep red roses were blooming, but to his surprise, there was nobody there. When he looked past the darkness to the streetlights on the other side of the road, he saw stray dogs sniffing the rubbish bins. He glanced over the town, just to check whose lights were still on, to pin down where the nuisance phone callers could be coming from. He made a mental note of those houses where lights were shining. He was half asleep, yet he walked around the yard, checked his car was locked, and went back inside, closed the door, flicked the light switch, and turned around.

The only reason he was able to see in the darkened office was because there was moonlight shining through the windows. The police station was full with Aboriginal people crowding through the building. He became very frightened. Their skin was grey. Whenever he blinked, the place seemed to become more crowded. He stayed pressed against the door. He thought if he were to move, the people might see him. There were so many jostling bodies, jammed up against him, that he could feel the closeness of grey shoulders under his nose, and see that the shiny greenish substance covering their skin was a sea slime that felt cold and sticky whenever the jostle accidentally bumped into his face and arms.

The smell of the sea was never far away in Desperance. Except during the Dry, when the sea returned to its normal shoreline some twenty-five kilometres away. Even then, the breeze carted its fish smells back to town. Now, Truthful smelt it like old dead fish guts. He remembered his Italian Mama’s stories about the ghosts of dead people coming to haunt you.

Moments later, in panic and with a racing heart, Truthful thought,
What of his prisoners, the three boys?
‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ He found himself speaking as though he was a ghost himself. He pushed, shoved, inched his way through the throng, thinking faster and faster, if the boys could see them too, then maybe, he was not dreaming. It felt like an eternity to reach the back of the building to the cells. ‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ Slowly, like a cloud moving, the grey spirits drifted aside.

‘What say they are not alright?’ Truthful started to become worried about the boys. He could not move fast enough now. Tristrum and Luke Fishman, aged ten and twelve. Aaron Ho Kum, aged eleven. When the flogging stopped, they had scooted under the table away from Bruiser, and huddled against the back wall, petrified, waiting, for the screaming might come back and take them again. Truthful felt his thoughts thrown through the air by a huge force, crushing back at him through a million possibilities he kept rejecting, saying: ‘They are alright.’

Luke was the oldest, and he tore the T-shirts into strips, tied the knots, and carefully examined whether each length would be long enough. The other two boys watched his hands work in the moonlight and said nothing, and then he had everything prepared. They just followed Luke into the darkness and into the light beyond, up on the blue sea, swimming under a cloudless summer sky. Truthful believed he could have reached them in seconds but his body was lead, his head was like the sedentary oleander beside the jail, betrayed by his mind. It was betrayal all round. The boys were dead. Their shredded T-shirts were the first thing he saw. Three strands hanging taut from the cross bar at the top of the bars across the front of their cell. ‘Say it’s not true,’ Truthful said, speaking to the spirits, and just as suddenly as he had been alone before, he was alone again. There was nothing in the building but emptiness and silence.

The only sound was the high tide lapping on the beach. It did not seem possible that they could have hung themselves. The cell was not high enough and when he saw their feet slumped on the floor, he could not imagine how they could have done this to themselves. Yet nobody had come into the building. He would have known. They were sleeping on the floor when he checked before going to bed. Now they were dead, and he preferred to believe the opposite, and cried out to them: ‘You are tricking me.’ He checked each of their wrists for a pulse, and in resignation, closed their vacant eyes. Still, he was hopeful, he thought they were children. Children playing a game, ‘Come on,’ he said, and there was the usual, useless shaking for life to come back.

Now, he could not remember if he had checked the cells before going to bed. Of course he had. Didn’t he always make the last check on the cells, even when they were empty? He was not sure anymore. Perhaps it had been the day before. Or the day before that. He ran to his desk to check his records. Thank God, he thought, the records were there. He had been checking, but still, he doubted himself. This time he had trouble pushing away the thought that he had falsified the records. He told himself he was only creating misunderstandings. Very much on duty, he went back to the cells and took the boys down. One by one he placed them back on the floor where they had been sleeping the last time he saw them. It had only been an hour ago. He would have known. Three people living under the same roof cannot die without you knowing it. Things were going to be better in the morning, he promised. ‘What a breakfast.’ A feast he would prepare for his boys with his own two hands.

‘There’s his car now,’ the gossipy people were gathered in a kind of protest on the corner next to the Fisherman’s Hotel, and were looking across the street at the police station. There were big-bodied people standing in the hot morning, with skins becoming redder, and every now and again, another would announce that for no reason, he had felt the cold shivers. Then others would announce how they felt faint. It was hard waiting when there was an awful stench coming from the police station, drifting down the street and all over town.

‘He mustn’t have a sense of smell,’ said Carmen, the middle-aged, tightly permed blonde proprietor of the fish and chip shop situated right next to the police station. ‘And did you hear the dogs howling?’ Who hadn’t heard the dogs howling all night! They never stopped howling. Carmen had been complaining of the stench of something dead coming from the police station for days. She felt vindicated now that other people felt the same way she did. It was Carmen who started the street-corner protest when she came across the street to the pub and told Bruiser to tell that Truthful to clean the place up, before she made a formal complaint to the Council.

Inside the police station, Truthful was in another world. It looked like he could flip in any direction. Old man Joseph Midnight came along, and said he had looked through the window across the road, and seen that idiot cleaning around his jail all fastidiously, looking after the three little petrol sniffers, who were already dead. Nobody heard what Midnight said, since nobody ever paid him any attention. Midnight said he had seen four hot dinners sitting on the policeman’s special table, which he had moved into the cell for them. Their food was still steaming on the plates.

When Bruiser finished his last glass of beer for the morning, he went outside the pub, stretched himself, and yawned as though he were a bear coming out of its den. He told Carmen and her street-corner gang that he was going over to the station to check on the situation. Three times he knocked on the door and everyone could hear him as plain as day, but Truthful did not answer. Undeterred, Bruiser walked back across the street, said nothing, got into his car, and completed a mud spraying wheelie right across to the police station. This time he did not knock. He just walked straight in after his rifle blew the lock clean off the door.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he asked Truthful, after he walked in and saw what the cop was doing. Truthful did not answer, he was in a daze. Bruiser very quickly understood that the man was off with the pixies – tending dead bodies like that. He stood well back, sickened with the overpowering smell of death. Trying to stay calm, he watched Truthful moving each stiffened body. He was moving the boys from their upright position, leaning against the front part of the chairs where they had been arranged around the dinner table, and carrying them, one by one, back to their bunks, where he gently placed a blanket over each.

‘They are dead man. How come they are dead?’ Bruiser knew he had made a mistake as soon as he had spoken.