Carpentaria (63 page)

‘The sea could part and a man could walk on water.’ What was more, he told her before she was even born, his own two good eyes actually saw the phenomenon explained in the white man’s Bible.

‘I was walking if you please, straight out of a world that belonged to marine creatures and what have you swimming about in sea water, who had made enemies of men in the history of the Dreamtime. But, that wouldn’t happen to you because you do not know these stories. God don’t make miracles happen for people with bad blood filtering through their veins.’

She asked why he thought that, and he said it was because he knew blood like anything, just like a forensic scientist. She had certain behaviour which was from having bad blood. The truth of the matter was that Norm believed someone like Joseph Midnight did not have real blood. It was gammon blood. Thin blood. The kind of weak blood which could not tell fortunes, or make predictions about the future, and could not have premonitions such as if someone was dead or alive, calling out for people to go and find them. So, all that was not thick blood. Thin blood was uncomfortable on the sea. Having had all the time in the world to study what he was talking about, he told her he was thankful to God for this opportunity to justify his beliefs. He said he reckoned the Almighty had only put bad blood in a mangy dog to handicap it in life so it could not do anything to save itself from living worse than a dog. Fuming, she said nothing. She just chucked a few things around instead. He said if it was God’s will, he would have to listen to her talk her mad talk until the cows came home, and he reckoned it was the devil’s lingo that goes on talking shit, non-stop. Under the circumstances Norm Phantom thought he ignored her the best he could, but understand: he had a predicament to overcome and needed her help.

Mad talk, was what Norm called her while he worked. Listening to her hurrying him along all day long so she could go and find Will: ‘Whatever happened to Will, we’s got to go quickly and find him.’ He was sick and tired of hearing her. He had to think about his own sanity too or he would go mad, so he pretended she did not exist. She begged him to listen to her and she began to have illusions – claiming to be possessed of dreams where she saw Will standing in the distance, trying to reach them. Then she would retell the dream, every detail caressed and described, until hours would slip by and the dream would still be there scraping at nothing and shooting up through the old man’s nostrils like sand, suffocating him, flowing through him like boiling water, until he, unable to stand it any longer, dropped his tools and hurried away. She would cry all day long that she had seen the white wash of Will’s junk pile island floating further away. Norm said he had not heard of anything like it and he believed he had heard a lot of things in his lifetime about things you find on the sea. Things a girl like her would never even be able to dream up. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I never seen a thing like that before and I don’t suppose I am ever going to either.’

What surprised him even more was how she could describe the floating island in every last detail as though she had been involved in its construction. Piece by piece, she was able to describe the angle, position and degree of measurement in the pile of junk, like a carpenter. She told him of the pieces that came from buildings in Desperance which were wedged into the island. Even bits from his own home she described and he became annoyed with her crazy ideas that the town was gone. When did that happen? She said she saw dead people trapped inside the island as well. It was a strange story which mystified Norm. Sometimes the waves rolling onto the beach spill their stories right at your feet. But she did not have one dream to explain whether she had fallen from the sky or not. He could not let her fool his judgement. This strange dream was to entice him to go looking for Will. She was off her head. He would not let himself be enticed by her. Intrigue will not get you anywhere and Norm knew he had the boat to finish working on. He doggedly worked on regardless, so they could be where they were now.

So on and so forth. It ended with Norm, Hope and the grandchild well inside their voyage, journeying with lee tides, on a route plotted through the Milky Way sky. Since she was constantly in his face, it felt different to travelling alone for Norm Phantom, who never cared for company at sea, except one or two he claimed, but he was blowed if he could trust other people. How she niggled him but what choice did he have? He was no stranger to vigilance and with so much ample time to spare with this extra burden to bear, he immersed himself in a ridiculous-looking search for any clue whatsoever that would prove there and then, that there was a clandestine presence on board trying to do away with him. Remember you do not always see what you seek.

In many ways it was a terrible journey. After the ninety-ninth time he had torn the boat and its contents apart in his mind in the course of a day, he told himself to be patient. Never give up! That was the spirit of the man. While it was not clear as day, Norm truly believed there was someone else on board who could possibly be Joseph Midnight chasing his own blood; stranger things were known to happen. He told her how somebody could downsize to the tiniest reminder of himself, as any enemy worth his salt would: Oh! Yes! Laughing his head off inside a matchbox or whatever. He had heard about these things, but she said it was news to her.

‘What did you bring on board with you?’ he would ask Hope a hundred times a day, and receive the same answer if she was in the mood to speak.

‘I told you I brought nothing with me and I aren’t going to tell you again,’ she would snap at him in her rediscovered vicious sharp tongue when it suited her.

She told him to stop talking to her. She said she could not be bothered listening to his silly stories anymore. Well! He did shut his mouth but it did not mean he let the feeling he had in his guts go to rot. His mind raced around like a fast car and it was telling him one, two, three: they might never reach Desperance if he was not careful. So, he watched her sleep on her secrets and hoped his God would hand him a key. But miracles did not automatically happen to anyone unless they already had the key. Elias was a miracle. He had walked out of the sea. But how could she have fallen out of the sky? He could tell she was no miracle and he would tell that to anyone. Someone had given her a key.

Ah! Bala! Mellowing at the thought, he looked down at his sleeping grandson with his skinny limbs tucked around him like a ball. There, he only saw the country of sea people, yet he realised that as the reality of biology would have it, the otherside was flowing side by side with Westside in that child. Disadvantage and advantage: what could this bring? Very special care would be needed to keep an eye on this child.

He looked through the darkness of the sea and, saw very clearly that Will was not going to be easy to find, no matter what Hope tried in her bag of tricks to lure him on in her search. In his heart of hearts he knew she could not guide him to Will because she did not come from the sea. He knew they could not sail on forever. There was no trust between them. The currents were changing and soon, the Wet season would bring the cyclones again and he felt certain, if this happened, who knows where they would end up. Back where they started? On the other side of the world? Would they become Elias in reverse, condemned to live the remainder of their lives in a purgatory of revisiting, duplicating the wars of all the peoples through the ages of time?

For many days he had felt a jingling of hot blood running through his veins, and he recognised a sensation he knew already, of the sea dragging him towards home. He knew they were close now, and he felt it as though he was nearly there. Soon, soon, he kept telling himself, riding out the curse in his gut. And, he waited, watching for the moment when the star of the giant fish would disappear low over the sky, directly above Desperance. This was the star that Elias had been following for years until one fearful night, he lost his boat in a storm. The old mariner had called the star
Fomalhaut
, the brightest in the constellation of Piscis Austrini which followed the water carrier’s jug of Aquarius. Norm knew it too as the star of navigators, or the Southern Fish. It was the groper who swam from the sea at certain times of the year to the sky and down again, falling back into the shallows of its groper’s hole.

This was it. Ahead, just to the south…the fish sank. On seeing the star sink into the sea, he pinpointed the location. Now he knew he was very close to land. He would navigate the coastline back to Desperance in the morning. He dropped the sail, and relaxing for once, he waited until dawn. In this utter quietness of becalmed waters, he heard the distant sounds of frogs all calling together from the land. He listened more intently and was surprised how these amphibians could be heard so far out at sea. Even though he remembered how densely the frogs populated Desperance, it seemed to him as he listened more carefully, that there must have been an extraordinary explosion in their numbers in town this year. Ah! The good rains, he thought. It seemed logical on that still night, sitting there at sea, that the breeze should carry their song to him. He wondered if Sinbad the Sailor had returned home voyage after voyage to such joy. So! Sweet was the song of frogs, he could not believe it was this sound he had missed most of all in the time he had been away.

When he saw the first faint light silently rising at dawn, Norm scanned the sea to sight land to the south. What he finally saw was not what he was looking for. There was no sandbar. There were no mangroves. Yonder no tree country. Through the red light of dawn, he saw the shores of a flattened landscape which the cyclone had left in its wake. Hope and Bala were now awake, and the three of them stared at the low, flat mark along the southern horizon. Bala said it was a big, yellow snake. Hope said nothing. Norm told them they were very close to Desperance.

Hours later, after sailing further along the coastline, he was ready to bring the boat into land. The little tattered sail made of dried, salted shark skin caught a light breeze and quickly, the boat glided through the water towards land. Hope and Bala stared ahead at a landscape which meant nothing to them. Being used to the stoical silence of the salt-hardened face of Norm, they did not expect him to say anything about the wilderness they were approaching. Behind them, they did not see the look of caution on Norm’s face as he exercised great care with his right hand, steering the rudder.

The surface of the water was so smooth, it felt as though the boat was sliding over silk. Bala looked into the flowing seagrasses in the waters under the boat and when suddenly he saw the giant fish, he screamed with excitement. Norm looked over the side and both of them saw perhaps a hundred gropers swimming under the boat. The fish followed the boat through the deeper waters, until it hit the sand. Norm jumped over the side and towed the boat through the mud towards the high-tide mark, still more than a kilometre away.

With the boat secured on the wet land, Norm stared ahead, trying to survey the landscape for familiar landmarks. In every direction he looked he could not discover one familiar feature of Desperance. He turned to Hope and said absentmindedly, ‘Perhaps we will see something soon.’ For one moment, he had thought Hope might be questioning his judgement by her silence. Could he be wrong? ‘No! No! This is right. I was right,’ he mumbled, still confident that he had navigated correctly. They were home.

They began walking on the empty land. Ahead, there was nothing. Norm watched the excitement on the small boy’s face as he ran wild, pleased to be safe on land, and shouting for all he was worth at all the frogs jumping out of his way. Hope looked at the flattened moonscape but did not show that she had one skerrick of interest in what had happened to the town. Norm instinctively called Bala to him and he hoisted him on his shoulders, then walked ahead, tramping through the watery clay mud, towards the invisible town.

Somewhere, as he walked, Norm realised he could only hear his own feet slurping through the mud, and he knew that she was gone. He almost paused, almost stopped to look around, but he walked on. He wanted to call after her – demand she come back. Tell her she was stupid. He nearly let his temper fly. Every muscle in his body ordered him to go after her and drag her back. But each time he turned to go back, he was blinded by the sun. The intensity of its white light hitting the water, reflected back in his eyes as though a shield had been put up between him and Hope, forced him to turn back towards the land.

Unable to see anything except a blinding darkness, he held Bala tightly on his shoulders and stumbled on away from the sea, until the moment passed, and he opened his eyes into a reddish haze. He knew he could not interfere with other people’s dreams. He said nothing, not to upset Bala yet, and let her go. But he heard her fear, gasping for breath, running back to the boat. He heard the boat dragging through sand towards the outgoing tide.

It was at this point he started to believe in her and even how a woebegotten people like the other side could rise above themselves with audacity to discover hope in their big empty souls. He smiled, knowing she was going to find Will before it was too late with that crazy map she had inside her head. She could go. The journey was hers to chart. ‘Good luck to you girl,’ he said silently. ‘You bring him home.’

The red glowing waters around the boat began to swarm until the boat looked as though it was being propelled on the back of something solid through the water: the groper fish circling the boat, building up speed, crossing each other under the boat, picking the boat up and moving it back to sea through the surging flow of the changing tide. Hope rowed with all of her might with the outgoing tide. She was so blinded by her mission she did not see the gropers helping her.

In his heart, Norm knew he had no more journeys to make. Well! Not for the moment. He continued walking ahead, down his memory of the main street of Desperance. He was met by the bony, hollow-ribbed, abandoned dogs of the town that had run to the hills and back again after the cyclone. Now, having appeared from nowhere, they roamed along streets that no longer existed, searching for their owners. They did not bark or howl. The shock of the cyclone had left them like this: speechless, dumbfounded, unable to crack a bark. Unable to emit a sound out of their wide-opened mouths. Hurling a string of abuse, Norm sent them back to their invisible yards where they sat miserably, waiting for him to go away. He put Bala down on the ground and they walked towards Westside.