Carpentaria (48 page)

‘Of course they got a reason…’ Will was about to explain how the good neighbour policy worked to kill opposition, but Midnight cut him off.

‘You know I sent the boy down to your father with a note one time,’ he said.

‘What happened?’ Will was surprised. The two senior men of the opposite clans never spoke, or acknowledged the other existed. Their language had no word for compromise. Was this a signal of defeat? He looked closely at the old man to see where the trickery lay in the creased features of his face. No, in the lie of the land, nothing good could have been packaged in this gesture. Norm had never forgiven Will for having a relationship with Hope. And Will knew that Bala was old man Joseph Midnight’s treasure, so it was a strange thing for him to say he wanted Norm to look after the little boy after the police came looking for Hope.

‘Suppose he never wanted a bar of it. That little fella walked down that road over there and all of them frogs over on Westside just stopped croaking on the sides of the road, just to watch what was going to happen. Well! From what we heard, they saw what was going to happen. That old bastard did not have enough guts to recognise his own blood. So I had no choice. Now, I blame him because all of this would not have happened if he could have helped his own flesh and blood.

‘You know what the mean old bastard did to his own grandchild? No? Nobody would have told you. Well! He just looked around on the ground, can you believe that? And the next minute, he picked up a stone and threw it, picked up another – threw it, and another. Threw it all at the little fella like he was someone’s dog to get rid of. So, good little fella, he just turned around and come on home. All of them frogs on our side were that glad. All along the road! Well! They never even stopped croaking for one split millisecond when he come past. They were that happy to see him they made themselves dizzy with excitement cheering him on.

‘Oh! I wish my little baby was here now and all of these things never happened. I am left with the worse life now. I tell you Will, if I wasn’t old and decrepit like I am, I’d be coming with you. And I blame Norm Phantom, nobody else, and soon as I am well enough again I will be going over to confront that dog straight to his face. Square up. Everyone will be asking then, “What happened to that big hero Norm Phantom?” And I’ll just be saying, “He’s gone away. You won’t be seeing him anymore”.’

Will listened to Joseph’s wishful rumbling – so on and so forth. He wished he could offer credence to Midnight’s story, even when he could imagine it as being the truth. True, when Bala was born, there had been silence. Not one sound from Westside – no shouting out, no rejoicing, no herald singers singing ‘a child is born’. No one said, let bygones be bygones. No one measured the possibility of the child, who could be the adhesive needed to create peace between the two groups. So, instead of joy, Will thought, stones were thrown of the literal kind. This was where the ambiguity lay in Midnight’s story. There were no stones to be found on the claypans over Westside. Only sick in the gut people complained about stones. Whitefellas dreamt of stones. And children thought stones were magical.

Will Phantom was soon far away. Alone, on the ocean, he had become a one-man search party to find his wife and child. He sailed impatiently for several days, after having had no difficulty in finding the currents old Midnight had told him to ride, and finally, he had the low, flat isles in sight. The previous night he had felt the changes of movement in the water – the slower flow, the rise of the water, which pleased him. Now, he sighted land ahead. The number of sea birds increased until he felt that every bird in the world was heading towards the same destination. Their piercing calls became louder and deafening until the familiar sound of the ocean had been drowned to a murmur.

Occasionally, Will felt he was becoming disoriented. It was difficult not to be overcome with curiosity, and unconsciously, his eyes would be drawn to look skyward at the low-flying feathered clouds that swarmed noisily through the skies. His stomach lurched and he felt his mind slipping into a state of dizziness from which he could only escape by concentrating on the sea. The low string of islands were just as old Midnight had told him. ‘Bit like mangrove forests – same colour as me boat – good place too,’ Midnight had explained. By this he meant, there would be good hunting and good camouflage.

The dense grey-green mangrove forests lining the beaches, stuck out of the water, all the way back towards a sandhill. In between the mangroves rose clusters of cycad palms –
Cycas angulata
, like spirit camps, like sentries with their windswept heads staring out to sea. In the shallow waters, the colour became greyer. Will could not remember seeing sea water like this before, but he kept on steering the boat towards the islands. Later, he realised that the islands were composed of clay, and this caused the discolouration of the water similar to how the Gulf waters around Desperance used to be. Before mining. Very soon the blue of the ocean was left far behind him, with his thoughts of what Midnight had foretold. The imminent expectations of land Will had carried across the ocean now became an invasion of optimism, similar to his experience in the desert, burning his body with thirst, hunger and love.

He rode the boat over the breakwater towards one of the dull grey-green islands. With the boat steering quickly towards the shoreline, he started to notice in the shallower waters breaking onto the beach, an unusual amount of rubbish. Glistening in the sun amidst flocks of seagulls, there were dozens of white plastic cordial containers bobbing along the coastline. Will recognised these as an ominous message from the guardian spirits of the place. It was not a sign he had expected. Midnight had not warned him of any of the dangers associated with his old ancestor’s land.

Now at the end of his voyage, he felt as though he was holding his breath in melancholy anticipation. The solitude at sea had been a time of reflection, where he had thought about his life, and a future that could be with, or without Hope and Bala. Heading towards land, he thought optimism had evaded their past, and it had eluded his vision of the future. No good had come of any of their lives. It was these thoughts that were abruptly broken when a final wave threw him onto the chaotically crowded beach. The island had been overtaken by nesting pelicans, watching him with angry-looking eyes, and wherever he tried to cut a path through their nests, their necks lunged out and he saw wobbling up to their mouths, little lumps of sound, travelling and stalling, until breaking out of their beaks into a long, deafening screech. Thousands of the white ghostly birds hovered over the islands, moving like noisy clouds as they filled the next part of the air space while abandoning the last. Later in the darkness, he would see the moonbeams illuminating the birds like white lights, and when the breeze shimmered against their wings, the night droned away as though the whole planet was alive with the sound of Indian tabula and clay drums.

Everything he sensed about the place said that he should leave immediately, so he went back to the beach and thought about what he should do. Nobody could inhabit the islands, which were very small, but he had to be sure. He towed the boat further along the beach until he found a thick grove of mangrove trees by the side of a small creek. He secured the boat under the trees and prepared to wait until darkness fell. He caught some mud crabs and cooked them over a small fire.

In mid afternoon a storm moved onto the coastline, with the same sense of impatience as Will, and within seconds, the clouds burst and the rain fell. Relieved, Will quickly took the opportunity to walk, in the rain, through the nesting birds, which were now too drenched to be bothered with him passing by. As he had thought, the island showed no signs of fire, nowhere Hope might have stayed, nothing that showed anyone had ever lived on it.

He went back for the boat and moved to the next island and then the next, collecting nothing but gashes on his legs from the strikes of angry birds. After two days of searching, he rowed across to a larger island. It was still raining heavily through clouds that touched the water as he came in to the beach. The island was the last in the group of five. He secured the boat just before dawn.

There were fewer nesting birds to bother him as he walked through the rain, and the poor wretched birds that remained glued to their nests had their heads buried under their wings trying to keep dry. He saw a lot more of the puzzling plastic bottles bobbing along the shoreline. He thought they might have come off a ship, a loose container from Asia perhaps, fallen into the sea. Once opened, the container had released thousands of bottles which floated to the surface and drifted, until they had been driven onto the islands. It could have happened a long time ago, or it could have been only a few months. It could be that simple, the bottles were caught in the waters running around the islands between the foreshore and the breakwater over the reefs.

Will stopped dead in his tracks when he heard the tenor. A voice, lush, rich, Italian, had suddenly broken into a full operatic song, just a few metres from him. Blast! the bottles, he thought. Someone’s trick – Midnight’s? Rain, snappy gum foliage and high grass separated the slow, melodic singer, from where Will stood, dripping wet. He was astounded by his own carelessness. Elias, Norm, Midnight, Fishman – all sprung into his mind. Taught by experts. What would they say? How could anyone be so stupid? He had not been paying enough attention. He had been too sure of there being no one else around.

He glanced down, and saw his heart pulsating through the skin of his bare chest. Then, from the corner of his eye, he saw the singer, standing almost beside him, with a face full of expression, expectation, passionately glorifying the perfect day –
Ma per fortuna è una notte di luna, e qui la luna l’abbiamo vicina
. The big Italian was standing alone in the rain, arms open wide like one of his ancestral Gods. Rain dripped over his golden face. Pearl drops of rain rolled down his black beard. He was lost in his song: fortunately, his eyes were concentrating on his fingers directing the accompanying chorus – a family of singing magpies. The black and white pied birds were perched high in the branches of nearby gum trees.

Mine worker! Will recognised the blue uniform. Shit! Where were the others? He moved back behind the singer, and further back until he was safely out of sight, then he circled around to see why the mining company had people working out on the island.

The man was still singing, obviously alone except for the plastic bottles strewn everywhere, on the ground, in the grass, enmeshed in bushes and undergrowth like large, alien fruit. Will watched the bottles moving by, spirited along in the strong, gusty winds of the morning. The wind, cutting across the island, picked up the song and the plastic and carried them tumbling through the bush, finally rolling them down onto the beach and into the sea’s arms. Will was amused by his mistaken earlier scenario of a freak accident, where the bottles had bobbed up to the surface from a fallen container.

Whatever happened to vigilance? Will asked himself. The first and only rule he had learnt about the mine was that nothing happened by accident. The importance of being forever vigilant should have applied even way out in the middle of the Gulf, in a sea desert, in the middle of nowhere. Once, when he was a child fishing with Norm and Elias, they had seen roaming armadas of the world’s jetsam in flotillas that were like moving islands that you could walk on. As they had passed by, Will had seen thousands of screeching sea birds fishing off these sea-made apparitions which creaked and rattled as they moved along the circling currents of the Gulf. Norm and Elias ended the fishing and headed home to tell of what they had seen.

The mysterious flotillas washed around in the Gulf for months. Stories that knew no boundaries grew into epics of speculation. This really was news. A wise man’s moratorium was prescribed. Everyone was prohibited to go on sea journeys until the flotillas disappeared. The old people went around spooking everyone to stay away from them. They claimed they were made by mad seas. And when the sea was mad, dead men’s spirits got caught up in these phantom places. ‘Don’t look at what the sea has done.’ No one did, unless they wished to be haunted for the rest of their lives. Looking at the Italian tenor singing the country in a foreign language, making the land and sea sacred to himself, Will knew he was stupid to have thought in the old way, like a normal person of his own background. Mining changed the way people had to think about looking after themselves. If a man was to survive, he had to first think of what the mine was capable of doing to him.

So much for old man Joseph Midnight thinking the island was a safe place. Yet Will realised there was no point blaming an old man whose vision of the place was ancient. He knew his country in its stories, its histories, its sacred places better than the stranger now singing a love song to it. His time stretched over the millennia. How would Midnight know the speed in which everything had been changed at the hands of the mining company? It was far beyond anyone’s realisation. Will started to calculate the danger Hope and Bala faced, if they had made it this far, before Elias was murdered and ended up inland in the lagoon with his boat.

Nearer, as he moved through the bush, wet from the mist, he saw the tenor was serenading several rows of steel drums, half buried in the sand, covered with a net made of heavy rope and tangled with vegetation from the surrounding bush. Further back, he saw a canvas tent set up in the bushes next to the drums, and several fishing rods and tackle. He thought that perhaps the island had become a weekend fishing haunt for some of the mine workers. He needed to get closer to the drums. Water drums innocently registered in his mind. A storage site for fishermen.

The mine worker had his satellite phone attached to his belt. A guard, Will reasoned, who fishes. He started to scrutinise the site more carefully. It was small but open, grass flattened, intended to look like a weekend fishing place. The airborne coastal surveillance team flying past would not be interested – if they even had it marked on their flight paths. Wilderness fishing retreats on islands, which were not much more than wrecked reefs covered by sand and light vegetation, were popular with remote miners. You would have to bring water in. How? Boat! Helicopter! Will scanned for flattened vegetation, and looked to the skies. Everything was clear, only patchy clouds and sea birds hovered, but these did not flatten vegetation.