ONE EVENING IN THE DRIEST GRASSES IN THE WORLD, A CHILD WHO WAS NO STRANGER TO HER PEOPLE, ASKED IF ANYONE COULD FIND HOPE.
THE PEOPLE OF PARABLE AND PROPHECY PONDERED WHAT WAS HOPELESS AND FINALLY DECLARED THEY NO LONGER KNEW WHAT HOPE WAS.
THE CLOCKS, TICK-A-TY TOCK, LOOKED AS THOUGH THEY MIGHT RUN OUT OF TIME. LUCKILY, THE GHOSTS IN THE MEMORIES OF THE OLD FOLK WERE LISTENING, AND SAID ANYONE CAN FIND HOPE IN THE STORIES: THE BIG STORIES AND THE LITTLE ONES IN BETWEEN. SO…
Normal Phantom turned away from the glory of the storm clouds lacing the sea, to look in the eye, grab by the horns, all the grey-coloured calamities of a man’s life. Behold the sight of welcome home, embedded in the never-ending rattling corrugated-iron shanty fortress, built from the sprinklings of holy water, charms, spirits, lures acquired from packets of hair dye, and discarded materials pinched from the rubbish dump across the road.
This was Number One house. Normal Phantom’s house was the first blackfella place built on the edge of Desperance, before the two warring nations, one with, one without land, ended up circling the whole town. The structure of the house was a tribute to far-off monuments representing noteworthy moments of history.
His marriage to Angel Day had climbed the crest of a mountain of misgiving, and, ‘only when she had gone’, was he able to understand that the woman had always been a hornet’s nest waiting to be disturbed. After three decades of shared life, such a single, independent thought was a total revelation to a big man like Normal Phantom.
The house was a hornet’s nest, like Angel Day, and Normal spoke of it as if it were her. The house had been inadvertently built on the top of the nest of a snake spirit. He always blamed her for that. From day one, he knew and always said, ‘This house makes my bones ache.’ He told her how he felt something was wrong, how he could feel something coming from under the ground into his bones. He only spoke to deaf ears. But he knew whenever he left the house, he would instantly feel as though he had unshackled himself from the weight of a sack strapped over his back. Then, when he came back, he felt as though he had been hypnotised into thinking that he would never be able to move away from its field of gravitation again, even if he willed himself from it. Perhaps some day he would be stuck forever. So what? He should have told someone who cared.
He knew such a phenomenon existed, because each time he left, it was harder to pull himself away from the house. ‘Move,’ he told her, but if she had heard anything he said, she gave her usual response to the movement of his lips and in her flattest voice said, ‘No way.’
‘I was born near lilies so I must see lilies,’ she once told him, calmly pouting towards the waterlilies growing in the swamp at the back, and once that happened, not even a grappling pick would have plied another word about the matter from her own sweet lips.
To be fair, Angel Day had looked around for days before choosing what she called ‘her spot’, if anyone could be so blatantly shameless to go around thinking they were so high and mighty, to just pluck out a spot for themselves in the bush and say, ‘This is mine.’ Well! Our Angel did that and got away with it. The spot she chose was amidst a grove of prickly pear thickets, right next to the mosquito-swarming swamp. She said she chose it because it was a private place not seen from the road. Afterwards, still all hot and bothered from searching up and down the countryside for her house site, she parked herself.
The first six children born had sat beside her under the shade of a snappy gum until she erected a more permanent shade with two blankets. This was all she owned, but it was good enough. She told Norm, when he returned from the sea next time and found her there, that she would not move again. He retaliated by not speaking to her for days. While those two fought out their differences, the whole family lived their daily lives under the blankets, six months of cold winds, then heat, followed by rain blowing left, right and centre down on top of them, again and again, until? Until there was peace. Norm did nothing, not a single thing, to help her to build a roof over their heads – as if that would stop Angel Day from doing what she wanted.
He caught bream fish if he felt like it: he did no more, and no less. If there were no fish, he expected her to provide, which she did. The whole of Uptown rallied over that poor Aboriginal woman struggling under a tree with her children, condemning Normal Phantom. If he thought there was going to be an end of it, he was wrong. She, smarter than a snake, plied enough work out of pity to permeate the pure, undiluted quintessential essence of herself into that ground, much as she used magic to erect a home from scraps.
Angel Day always claimed the spot where she forced Norm to continue building their house was the best place they had ever lived, because all she had to do was walk across the road to the rubbish dump, and there she could get anything her heart desired – for free. She thought the dump was magnificent, as anyone dirt poor would. The way she talked, you would have thought she was a very rich woman, and it was nothing for her to walk back and forth to the dump two dozen times a day to cart back pieces of sheet iron, jerry cans, bits of car bodies, pieces of rope, logs, plastic, discarded curtains and old clothing. She got the family through the Wet as dry as a bone. Diligently, she undertook the chore of checking for leaks, making alterations, choosing the right bits and pieces from her pile of accumulated junk which she leant, tied or stitched to the original blankets, until she ended up with an igloo made of rubbish.
Norm fretted, saying, Blah! Blah! This and that. Saying that he thought his children had disappeared forever in amongst the piles of old clothes stored inside their dark, dank dwelling. Constantly he called them, ‘Come outside,’ so he could see them, lest they were tricked by the lurking snake. She never heard a single word. She was busy with blood on her bare hands from extracting nails from rotted timber. The six little children helped her by sizing the nails, bolts and screws. And months passed by.
Norm was still a young man who either wanted to be out at sea fishing, or else riding wild horses on the spinifex-covered high plains, working with the cattle. Away jobs in the stock camps. Oh! Those were hard but fair days that was the truth. Working with cattle, grown men whipped the living Jesus out of other grown men but who cared? He looked at all this newfangled activity of self-sufficiency being built on sheer stubbornness and said to her his final word, ‘Let’s go back to the river country.’ He loved the sound of the clear waters running through petrified forests hidden for millions of years beneath the gently calling sounds of fronds dangling down from the old palms and fruit-giving date trees lining the river. But Angel Day had crossed the bridge. She had no jolly intention of leaving. Look! Can’t you see the pile of riches she had accumulated? Was all this for nothing? ‘How would I be able to move all of this down there?’ she replied.
Goodness! Those were modern days, and Angel Day was a very rich woman, too good now in comparison to the years she had spent living, eating and sleeping…where? in a swag? Oh! Those were the good old days Norm dreamed for. Her fortunes were growing out of hand. She now possessed dozens of Heinz baked bean tins and pickle bottles full of nails, loose screws and bolts. She became a genius in the new ideas of blackfella advancement. Bureaucratic people for the Aborigines department said she had ‘Go’. She became a prime example of government policies at work and to prove it, they came and took pictures of her with a Pentax camera for a report.
The old Pricklebush people said what Angel Day had was purely magical, it was true, but sorry to say, of no benefit to anyone. This led them to say privately that she had acquired a disease from making her life out of living in other people’s rubbish. Who knew what kind of lurgies lurked in white trash? The dump was full of disease. And the Pricklebush said, If she had any sense, she ought to stay right away from the rubbish dump. It was of no benefit to anyone if she had magical powers to make her more like the white people.
At the same time, there was no sense in denying the truth staring them in the face because there evidently was some: the great magnanimity given to Angel Day by the haunting spirits residing in the smelly residue, deep down in the gloomy, slime-dripping serpentine caverns of the dump. The ponderous, thinking people among the Pricklebush jumped to her defence, Who was Normal to say he wanted to live elsewhere, under a log with a bit of rag, worse than a dog? Angel accused him of chucking rubbish in her face. She said he did not think properly. When she told him he made her stomach sick just by thinking she should go and live like a dog in the bush, he replied: ‘You sure it is not the snake keeping warm there? Can’t be anything else.’ She was not listening, she was a genie counting her nails like a millionaire, drawing the world to her beck and call like a queen, mind you.
Poor old Normal Phantom, he caught a lift and took his soul down to the river country by himself, and when he returned weeks later, she had one basic room erected. ‘You can’t come back,’ she told him, unless he helped her. The old people intrigued, buttoned their lips and whispered: ‘She has airs for a woman.’ The stand-off was to last one minute with Norm. ‘Alright then. You won’t see me for five years.’ She was not a complacent woman, the old people remarked. His ultimatum was over-the-top, so she claimed. So it was final. He walked back up the road, all the children were crying. She ignored the whole scene and continued working on the nails as though he did not exist.
Normal Phantom kept his promise. He went to sea and stayed away for five full years. When he returned, after the storms, he had his own small fishing boat. He had inherited his father’s memory of the sea, and he walked straight up to Angel Day, and told her in the face that he was prepared to hang around. He said there was too much water under the bridge to have to go around fighting his wife all of the time. Why waste his breath? In any case, the spot she had chosen was now just across from the driftwood piles thrown from the sea. She accused him of coming home smelling like a catfish but that didn’t stop child number seven being born: Kevin.
Angel was on her way to the rubbish dump palace where her seagull sentinels sat in the thousands on dead foliage, cardboard boxes, rusted iron, slashed tyres, pink plastic purses and cheap whatnot, guarding for nothing a humpteen amount of untold treasure.
It was Angel Day’s palace, so she thought. The other Pricklebush women said she thought of herself only, since that dump belonged to everybody. Oh! If that was so. It should be said that sometimes light breezes turned sour as lemons, as they did on that particular day. Back in the bay, where Normal Phantom was working on his boat, was the one place of tranquillity on earth left, where total ignorance reigned. Those idly watching Normal working, while taking little notice of him, scrubbing or something up and down along the side of his sea vessel, would have been mesmerised by the purity of peace and goodwill that belonged to the simple man out in the warming sun, trouser legs rolled up to the knees half covered in tidal mud. A leisurely job scraping the summer-dried fish guts from his paint-weathered boat, his head down to the work, wondering about painting the boat some fancy colours – capillary red, or a kingfisher’s azure blue, or sunflower yellow. Oh! The good old days. What a memory. A reminder of the showing-off days when men were men, and the fish were plentiful, and boats never dreamt about the colour of camouflaged grey.
Angel walked on towards the rubbish dump away from the children left asleep in their beds. She wanted to be alone with the seagulls who waited on guard while others followed, flapping quietly in her wake. Occasionally, one would flutter above her head for several moments, emitting small squalls, telling her secrets, reminiscing, reciting little prayers recalled from prior reincarnations, before, and just as suddenly, swinging off into formation again to rendezvous with the flocks following in from behind. After having spent the night roosting in the precinct of low-lying headlands and the swamp marshes of low tide, these large groupings of birds joined the ones already waiting, noisily parcelling out their prized scavenger lots for the day.
The morning jostling at the tip grew more infectious, as increasing numbers of birds squawked and screeched with their beaks open wide at one another, or flew above in threatening circles. Angel walked through it all, as if it was nothing. The mist was still heavy, and she went about her business, tearing apart the piles of rubbish delivered to the dump over the weekend.
The steamed contents smelt high. Her followers gladly tore apart the rotting scraps from the dinner tables of Uptown – Oh! Yum! Fish and chips, steak and chips, sausages and chips. Angel paused for a collection of well-used children’s storybooks, and sat down on the ground to gather them up into a pile, all of the little picture books, pages flung open halfway through the adventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland. She flicked through the books with her thin childlike fingers. The blue-eyed gulls hovering, watched with disdainful interest, over her shoulder. They were just as engrossed as she was with the fantasy lands created in faraway places, of icy winters, cool forests and the paradise land of the rich people. Eventually, she placed the books carefully into the bottom of her sack so they would not become damaged. She had more to do. Ahead of her there were many mysteries to be discovered in the piles of fat green bags.
With the mist lifting, it would soon become too hot. She could already feel the sun piercing down on her head. The humidity was thick in the air. A light frown crossed her face. The crease in between her eyebrows was deepening with the thought of her chaotic life.
She moved on, gracefully climbing through a hill of vegetation which she recognised from somewhere in town. She had seen the council men putting a chainsaw straight through the overgrown oleander hedges that concealed the goings-on in the offices and houses belonging to the Town Council’s very important staff. Truckloads of hedge clippings headed to the dump while under the cooling fans the Town Council debated whether to erect a giant something or other in the middle of town. Could it be the world’s biggest stubby, or the world’s biggest town drunk? The two truths of the matter were abandoned, by their choosing instead to lasso in icons of the sea. Whereas other more fetching images were uttered – Choose the biggest fibreglass barramundi, or the biggest concrete groper imaginable – some preferred the steel-spiked wild boar celebrating Abilene, or the biggest lead-framed bull – a brown Brahman, or a fantastic Santa Gertrudis bull with a blazing star in the forehead – which would light up the main road like a beacon at night. Either would distinguish the town. But what about a miner with a pick? It was such a hard choice. Angel Day had no idea of the debate since no one spoke to her about the issues of Uptown. She just climbed through the official vegetation, still uptight with confidentiality because it gave away no town secrets to her. But they should have asked people like Angel Day. She often spoke about the absence of God in Desperance and the need for him to make his appearance in Uptown to redeem the cursed with his light.
The branches with olive-green limbs and limp leaves felt cool against her skin, so Angel Day moved on through the lot, just to reach the pile of green bags underneath. When she established a position where she could balance herself inside the branches, she sat there in the shade, concealed from the rest of the world. One by one she opened the bags, checking to see what was worth taking. All there was were sheets of white paper which she thought had probably come from the Council office. She did not read them because she was not interested to waste her time examining the rates and whatnots other people owed to Uptown.
Angel Day might have been surprised if ‘official’ papers did not intimidate her to the point she could never read them without her heart pounding. Even her fingers felt shaky, just to touch officialdom, as she pored through the refuse. If she had scant interest, just enough to flick through leaf by leaf, even taking a cursory glance at the contents, she may have been fortunate to stumble eventually across correspondence relating to her own family and how their poor state of wellbeing was becoming an issue, for the Council at least. Especially ‘the house’ the mother built. All the fringe people thought it was such a good house, ingenious in fact, and erected similar makeshift housing for themselves. Why couldn’t they have waited for a government grant? But pay no neverminds for hooraying Angel Day for economic independence. Mrs Angel Day’s dream house was considered an eyesore by Uptown. All of them humpies popping up all over the prickly bush would have to go. Those eyesores could not live next to the dream of the big Santa Gertrudis. Fibreglass, steel-spiked, ironclad monuments preoccupied the Town Councillors, and they were using plenty of ink and paper recording what they had blabbered to each other.
What else was life for except just for coping, nothing else, so why be bothered reading what white paper says only to make it worse? She knew what white persons had to say just by looking at them, particularly the ones who wrote official papers. She called them gammon.
Lost amongst these piles of discarded papers, she was left with a sense of melancholy the more she touched them. Nothing seemed promising for Angel Day and her treasure bag. At least she could sit in a shady nook amongst the dying oleander hedge cuttings. Then, suddenly from out of the rustling papers, she discovered a large black mantelpiece clock with a cracked glass cover. Carefully, she pushed the paper away. The clock had come from the mayor’s office. She could not believe her luck, not only that the clock had been thrown away, and she had found it, but the key to wind it was still in the back socket. She wound the clock and smiled. It worked.
Convinced that the Council people had discarded the clock because it was too old-fashioned for the new modern office building, Angel Day now had to choose what she could discard from her potato sack. Decisions, decisions, she mumbled to herself, sorting tins and bottles to make room for the big shiny clock. Then, recovering from the excitement of finding something so valuable at the rubbish tip, she realised the danger it would bring. She peered outside her shelter, scanning around to see who else might be walking about. She asked herself, what if she encountered the Council men who drove the rubbish truck? They would accuse her of stealing the clock and drive straight up to Constable Truthful’s office to report her. She considered the likely consequences of sitting around like a stuffed mullet at the police station.
A vision of the Magistrate’s face found its way into her little oleander nook. Come back at night he warned. Come back at night and get it. She looked around, considering where to hide the clock, knowing the wild pigs owned the dump at night. She thought of asking Norm to bring her back when he went hunting for the pigs, but she did not feel comfortable with the idea of walking around in the bush with him during the night. Half of the contents had been emptied from the bag for the clock. To leave without it was a betrayal of the future she was already imagining in which the Phantom children would be going to school on time. No one in the Phantom family would be guessing the time anymore from where the sun sat in the sky. In the new sweet life, the Phantom family would be marching off to bed at the correct time, just like the school thought was really desirable, then they would march off to school on time to do their school work.
With the clock in the bag, she was preparing to leave her little world of white paper and decaying foliage, when something else caught her eye. First of all she saw the base of the statue with a handwritten date – 1947. It had to be broken she thought, as she pushed the rubbish away, but found it was not even cracked, as she inspected a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue looked old and the paint was chipped in places. Angel thought Norm might have some spare paint she could use to repaint the statue, particularly where the lines of gold and silver had disappeared on the cloak. The Virgin Mary was dressed in a white-painted gown and blue cloak. Her right hand was raised, offering a permanent blessing, while her left hand held gold-coloured rosary beads. Angel Day was breathless. ‘This is mine,’ she whispered, disbelieving the luck of her ordinary morning.
‘This is mine,’ she repeated her claim loudly to the assembled seagulls waiting around the oleanders. She knew she could not leave this behind either, otherwise someone else would get it, and now she had to carry the statue home, for she knew that with the Virgin Mary in pride of place, nobody would be able to interfere with the power of the blessings it would bestow on her home. ‘Luck was going to change for sure, from this moment onwards,’ she told the seagulls, because she, Mrs Angel Day, now owned the luck of the white people.
Not only would her family be able to tell the time, and be able to tell other poor outsider people like themselves what the time was, but they would also be prosperous. They would become like the white people who prayed and said they were of the Christian faith. This was the difference between the poor old Pricklebush people and Uptown. This was how white people had become rich by saving up enough money, so they could look down on others, by keeping statues of their holy ones in their homes. Their spiritual ancestors would perform miracles if they saw how hard some people were praying all the time, and for this kind of devotion, reward them with money. Blessed with the prophecy of richness, money befalls them, and that was the reason why they owned all the businesses in town.
The seagulls, lifting off all over the dump, in the mind-bending sounds they made seemed to be singing a hymn, Glory! Glory, Magnificat. The atmosphere was haunting, with steam rising from the ground, hovering birds in every direction, and she simply appeared from nowhere, walking out of the oleander. Fugitively, she searched around for potential robbers with her magical brown eyes, checking every angle for movement in the distortion of haphazard, mass waste. She hurried, carrying the statue and the potato sack, eager to escape before the Council men started work in the slow-moving truck. She did not expect to see so many other people from the Pricklebush walking about so early in the morning.
Her movements had startled the otherwise peaceful scene where dozens of others from the Pricklebush had ensconced themselves under cardboard boxes, pieces of corrugated iron, inside forty-four-gallon tar barrels, or broken parts of abandoned water tanks. Suddenly, people appeared from everywhere, poking and pulling everything apart, tilling the dumping ground. Children were playing in the puddles, parents gossiping, others walking about with their bags full up.
Angel Day, queen herself, surveyed their stares and started abusing first. She started it. ‘What are you all staring at me for?’ Her voice had no problem emptying the contents of other people’s lives in the rubbish and calling it nothing. Angel stood her ground. She just started yelling out in a very open manner what she liked, to all and sundry: the same kind of things she called other people all the time around the house.
‘Hey! What are you people doing here?’ she hollered. ‘What’s wrong with you people? You people don’t belong here. Who said you got any normal rights to be hanging around here? On other people’s laaand for? Just taking what you want, hey? What about the traditional owner then?’ Her voice radiated like shock waves all over the dump. Well! Most people had heard that argument before. Angel Day was mouthing off again about the poor old traditional owner being bypassed – once again. And this time, it must have been an unlucky day, because they were having naught of it. You could hear all those people sucking in their breath. Angel had no shame causing all of that trouble. She was a hussy, first class, the old ones had heard people whispering about Angel while she went on her way, cursing them for nothing, as though she was the keeper of other people’s lives.
Goodness knows so much happened then. It was hard for two eyes to keep up. Those poor people were pretty upset, and Angel had no intuition about other people, none at all. All those grim faces were just glaring at her but she did nothing. After several moments the air broke like dynamite. The air broke clean: We can’t help that, Mrs Who-Does-She-Thinks-She-Is. This came out of the mouth of someone who had picked up straightaway that business line of hers of not belonging here. She called out for everybody to decide who she thinks she is. There was going to be a war, good and proper. Gravelly morning voices sounding like someone was jumping up and down on their lungs shouted back, She’s bloody nobody, that’s what.
Everyone started slinging off about who would want to belong there anyway? The place was a mess. The place was too full of fighting all the time. Everyone was moving forward, screaming at each other. Then they started taunting, throwing sticks and stones at the ones trying to defend the peace. Nobody listened to the other because everyone was either that mad in the head or did not care whether they were defending the peace or not. Each was well and truly sick of it. Sick of Angel Day.
One big woman, dressed in a big white dress: Well! She looked like the white cliffs of Dover, and it was she who did most of the shouting, spitting out incoherent words, on and on, like she was never going to stop. She was yelling through spit, asking who that woman thought she was: The bloody nobody. When Angel Day said the woman looked like a fat white pig eating up the traditional owner’s country, the woman said she was going to fix Mrs High and Bloody Mighty, once and for all. What happened then was the war started again. Imagine that. Precarious modernity squashed by hostilities dormant for four hundred years, and Angel Day started it up again over an old clock and a statue. Probably all wars start off by a bit of taunting like this.
Everyone began picking up weapons the ancient way, arming themselves with whatever they could lay their hands on. People and children were running around, picking up lumps of wood, iron bars, or else brown beer bottles picked up and broken along the neck. Everywhere, all you could hear was the sound of bottles being smashed. When all the memories of that day had faded away, that sound of glass smashing still haunted everyone.
You see, all the alliances had to be weighed up then and there and on the spot. People who had been getting on well, living side by side for decades, started to recall tribal battles from the ancient past. It was unbelievable, but Angel Day was standing there oblivious, hugging her statue, and telling people to get off her land. There were little black flies swarming all over her face but she took no notice. Nobody had seemed to notice the fly squadrons soaring into the air as though struck by an electrifying volatility; as they swarmed up, they were drawn like magnets to the hot smell of human skin, and thousands buzzed around people’s faces.
The old people believed in phenomena as great as this, and said the flies had been drawn up through the centuries to join the battle. They claimed the spirits would never let you forget the past. They drew lines in the dirt, calling people out from the shadows of complacency, Get it straight where you belong. People must have felt the chilly spike prodding them to arm, to prepare them to add another chapter in the old war. Otherwise they might have never known how to go to war in the way of the old people. Living in harmony in fringe camps was a policy designed by the invader’s governments, and implemented, wherever shacks like Angel Day’s swampside residences first began to be called a community. The old people wrote about the history of these wars on rock.
Now, centuries later the poor things had turned up with nothing fancy, not one of them weighed down with the spoils of war to live in the Pricklebush, yet carrying a heavy weight all the same. Angel Day’s heart was big and ignorant in those days, but she believed she filled the shoes of Normal’s grandfather, who had been the keeper of this land. No one entered these parts without first speaking their business to the keeper, and to her mind, she was it. She welcomed those who walked heavy with the inheritance of antiquity stashed in their bones. Pride swelled up inside her when she saw those with a landscape chiselled deep into their faces and the legacy of ancestral creation loaded into their senses. She guarded those whose fractured spirits cried of rape, murder and the pillage of their traditional lands. Over time, they all became fringe dwellers living next to the rich white man’s municipality, all squatting next to Angel Day’s lake, on her so-called land, where she reigned like a queen over her dominion. And the domiciated? Well! They ignored her.
It is hard to determine how sides were forged, but when the fighting began, the blood of family ties flew out of the veins of people, and ran on the ground just like normal blood, when face and limbs are cut like ribbons with broken glass, or when the body has been gouged with a piece of iron, or struck on the head over and over with a lump of wood. Angel Day did not fight because she was still hugging onto her statue and encouraging the human explosion to take hold. It was like sinking an anchor. ‘What about the traditional owner?’ She was still screaming out her esteemed rights. Maybe she did not register the carnage. The woman who looked like the white cliffs of Dover, whom the fighting had carried some distance away, picked up the voice of Angel Day screaming, and looked over at her with a perplexed look, then walked out of the fight, straight back over to where she had originally challenged Angel, and wrestled the statue away from her.
The children, their bodies twisting in and out of the maze of adults at war, were wondering what was going to happen next. They rushed in like frantic butterflies to be next to kinfolk bleeding, or to others falling on the ground and not moving again. Young Will Phantom was running with his brothers and sisters to protect his mother from the big woman whose eyes were protruding, as she wrestled with the statue splashed with blood. The woman acted like she was possessed by a demon, whose body continued to use all of its strength on one thought alone: to secure the statue into a position to slam Angel Day off the face of the earth.
Young Will Phantom thought quickly. He ran home as fast as his ten-year-old legs would carry him, rushed into the kitchen and grabbed the cigarette lighter left lying on the kitchen table, then ran back to the dump. Any stack of papers he could find, he lit. He lit the dry grass around the edge of the dump so there was fire spreading over the claypans in every direction. Black clouds billowed straight through the dump. The smell of burning grass and debris was suffocating, and everywhere people were coughing. Very soon, people could be seen moving through the dense smoke, helping others through the burnt grass and back along the path with smouldering smoke on either side. Nobody spoke as they limped by as fast as they could, passing others, helping to cart injured relations home. Then, when the alarm was rung in town, they scattered.
Seeing the black smoke rising from the dump, everyone started to hear about the big fight going on. They all wished they could have killed Angel Day, walking with her statue and surrounded by her kids, following her home. The fire brigade, already moving slower than a month of Sundays, became bogged on the muddy road to the dump just two minutes out of town.
The Pricklebush around the Phantoms’ place was silent when the policeman arrived to investigate, followed by half of the Uptown Town Council on foot, after they came through the waterlogged road. They claimed it was their business to find out what caused the fire. It was a wasted trip at the taxpayer’s expense, because nobody living around the swamp had seen a thing. Maybe, the fire was just some old log smouldering over the weekend and caught alight. It was a strange thing to say. All the same, the young cop Truthful said he could not help noticing a lot of injured people everywhere he went. He got to asking: ‘What happened to you then?’ While his entourage waited in anticipation for a different answer. ‘Just an accident, sir, no problem.’
‘No?’
‘No, there is no problem here.’
‘What happened then?’ he asked, just to show the Council men he was on top of the job.
‘Ah! I fall over.’
‘How did you fall then?’
‘I fall over.’
‘Where?’
‘Fall over?’
‘What?’
Everywhere Truthful asked the question, he received a grand demonstration of hand movements. ‘Hmmm! Oh! My. I am feeling no good! No good at all today! If you had any sense you’d run us up to the hospital like a good boy.’ Truthful had the woman with what was left of the white dress with him. Angel came straight up to her with outstretched arms, and hugged her, but it was full of hate.
The Council men and women too, following Truthful into every household in the camp, looking on in mock silence, gave knowing looks to one another of a familiar: Nudge-nudge! Wink-wink! If you please! What’s he been up too, jumping over the back fence at night already? Look at the familiarity if you please. What was the world coming to, when the police force had no power over these people? Acutely embarrassed by his lack of progress, and overhearing the whispering behind his back, Truthful terminated the sideshow with a demonstration of Brisbane Valley cop briskness by saying he was arresting the first likely suspects to catch his eye. The bemused Council people crowding around, uninvited, huddling to avoid bodily contact with anything inside the Pricklebush home in case they picked up something quite dreadful, and having had an eyeful of poverty chipped at Truthful: Let’s take em and take em, get em off our backs, bloody mongrels are a prime nuisance to everyone anyhow. Send these two little buggers off to a reform school or something. That will show them who’s boss of this town.
It is true that silence has a cloak because it covered all of those little tin humpies all day after the official people went back to minding their own businesses. Normal Phantom sat at his kitchen table glaring at Angel whenever she came into the room. Neither spoke. He knew what had happened. And she was not repentant, not one bit. There was no end of her fussing over her statue, cleaning it, looking at it, examining the cracks and chips, helping herself to the full range of Normal’s fish paints, making a pride of place for it in her bedroom. The day slipped into an even quieter night with no lanterns lit. The Pricklebush wore the total darkness of cloud cover.
Once the dawn broke, Normal Phantom stepped out of his house to go down to the boat. It was then he felt the eerie quietness, a stillness he found difficult to place, where even the birds did not sing. And no sign of his bird.
He was expecting retaliation, and he looked around up in the branches of the trees to find his bird. As he surveyed the surroundings, something struck him as being out of place, a surreal quietness: silence had replaced the noise of children’s crying, families arguing. The Phantom family was on its own. The other families had moved during the night. In complete and utter silence, they had picked up everything they owned, and moved to the other side of town. That was when the war of the dump caused the division, and people realigned themselves, Eastsider or Westsider, and that was that. The Phantoms lost whatever near and dear or distant relatives they had, except some old people who refused to move. No one else wanted to put up with another minute more of what they called Mrs Angel Day.
The war of the dump burst apart the little world of the Phantoms and their related families. Everyone in the Pricklebush from elder to child, Eastsider to Westsider, injured and uninjured started bringing up their faded memories of the ancient wars, to be renewed with vigour and the hard evidence of all facts. Everyone now knew of someone in their families who had been assigned to make the long pilgrimage over their vast lands which occupied dozens of cattle stations, where they travelled in clapped-out vehicles, near and far within their tribal territories, to seek out their very old senior Law people. The old people were always elusive too, never being where they should be, when their relatives turned up.
‘Well! Where’s old White Whiskers?’
‘He must have gone that-a-way.’
The challenge was to be always on the move, following the old ones travelling their country to at least a thousand sites they knew by memory. It was a test of how good they knew the country before they were able to find old White Whiskers waiting for them. Every family had to know the story of the past. Know, to go about their separate ways, by reclaiming land from fighting long ago.
On the other hand, the townsfolk of Desperance could not make heads or tails out of why they were being sandwiched between Aboriginal people, not only living on either side of them now, but setting up two camps without even saying to anybody what they were doing. All of those families that moved over to the Eastside to get away from the Phantoms, had walked noisily through town in the middle of the night. Everyone had been in a state of high agitation, with loud arguments taking place about the decision to move, Should’ve, shouldn’t’ve, all to the rhythm of cyclone fences being scraped with heavy fighting sticks by some of the youths. People were complaining to each other about the weight of their ragtag belongings, while children zigzagged all over the street with their laughter and cries being heard everywhere. What did it matter to try to hush all the little children since that many dogs in tow, stirred up by the scraping sticks, joined in the racket by running up and down the fences of white people’s homes barking their heads off or leaping up and throwing themselves against the tin walls while trying to get over the fences, and equally with the town dogs inside doing the same, trying to get out? None of this racket worried their owners. Nor did the straggle-taggle give one iota to the peace and quiet of the town. Whatever! Nevermind! as if the town with all of its laws and by-laws for inhabitation did not exist. It was as if they could not care less whether the townsfolk, woken up with all the noise, switched on every single light in their houses in the middle of the night, and stood silently in the front yards, gobsmacked, comprehending they were in the middle of a riot.
Word quickly came back to Norm about what they were saying down at the Council. The town was up that quick smart, nice and early in the morning, looking out around their front yards again, as if searching for order, trying to locate some sense of normality, and the main street was normal, as though nothing had ever happened in the night. Everyone of the white skin jumped into their showers and scrubbed themselves hard for this was what high and mighty powerful people did when they felt unclean, before running out the door, where they went straight over to the Council to talk about the uproar.
Everyone was up in arms even before the meeting got started. This was the normal way they talked straight. No, no coloured person was ever going to forget about this incident of lawless carrying-on like they owned the place. A whiff on the gossip grapevine said who was to blame. ‘It was bloody Normal Phantom. Wouldn’t you believe it. So what then? The man is incapable of handling his wife. What then? Teach him that’s what. Well! We will teach him what’s what.’ That year, Normal Phantom had no chance of winning citizen of the year, nor forever perhaps.
The bell was tolling, ringing non-stop for half an hour, but Normal Phantom never responded to the sound of bells. When no one in the prickly bush camps saw the Phantoms getting involved in Uptown business, they also ignored the bells. The Phantoms only went into town when the bells rang for the sea. Normal said that was the only important reason for ringing the bell, because what happened to the sea affected every single one of them. ‘We are the flesh and blood of the sea and we are what the sea brings the land.’ This was not a sea matter, so no adult person from the Pricklebush went running to see what they wanted.
Yes, there was plenty of worry. Worry straight for Uptown. The Council had a string of evening meetings so everyone could come along and have their voice heard. It was like living in a democracy. Paranoia was the word that best described what took place inside of the squashed Council chambers. Everyone had a story to tell about some Aboriginals who they saw sitting under a tree thinking about lighting fires. Some Aboriginals were seen pushing up into Uptown itself – abandoned car bodies to live in. You could see Aboriginals living in them behind the fences at the end of their backyards even. Aboriginals were thinking about setting up another camp. The net was not working. What was happening to the net? Wasn’t the net supposed to be there for the purposes of protecting the town against encroachment from people who were not like themselves?
‘Ya mean coons?’ Sanguine-voiced, the local mayor was speaking. A big, beefy, six-two, no-fuss man, who liked to call chalk chalk, or night night. That was his motto. He overshadowed the town with his power.
‘Excuse me, Mr Bruiser, Mayor, you don’t have to talk like that. We are just saying that they are an eyesore, so what are you going to do about it?’
Stan Bruiser was a straight speaker and was such a popular mayor for Uptown of Desperance, that for ten straight years, he had been voted its citizen of the year. It was rigged, some said of the voting box in the Council office. But be what it may, tampering with a ballot box was no great sin when conspiratory theorists worked with no proof. Bruiser, now fifty-six, was a prosperous cattle man, with Elvis combed-back hair and sideburns, dyed the colour of a Santa Gertrudis. He was a hawker by trade until his change of luck due to a foray into the Australian stock market, after he picked up a hint late one night on the radio in the mining-boom seventies. Next day, he piled his last quids in the stock exchange on a tin-pot mining company that struck it rich in Western Australia. So very quick, he was rich.
Good luck to him one supposes, for he cleaned up with his shares and with the spoils, means and wherewithal, he reinvented himself, from somebody driving around the outback’s dying towns and Aboriginal camps on pension day, selling the necessities of life for a profit of three to four hundred per cent after costs. A quid to be made. But just how could one uneducated man, a man just like themselves, make so much money in his lifetime? It was unnatural. Anyone could have done it, he joked, if he had been half smart about prices by collecting drought-time cattle properties like lollies, paying unpaid debts.
Bruiser spoke of being the epitome of the self-made man, and the ‘self-made 24/7 man’ angle was slotted into his utterings to other Desperanians during Australia Day, May Day, Picnic Day, Pioneer Day celebrations where he had the right to speak, right through, down to the demands he made of politicians whose colleagues heard his booming voice on the phone in the hallowed halls of southern parliaments.
The old people in the Pricklebush said the story about the money of hell was different, because Bruiser had unnatural scars that looked like someone had welded an extra skin to his body. They had observed the extra piece of skin that ran from his skull down the left side of his face, along one side of his body, down to his feet and back again, running up the back this time, right up to his skull. Was that unusual? Darn right! Everyone in the Pricklebush thought so. Some of the old ladies were more than curious and yelled out whenever he came down to the Pricklebush camps – ‘Hey! How come the devil stitched you up like a pod?’ Bruiser was sensitive about his scars and ignored their questions. So they spread the word he was an alien, though wisely no one dared say such a thing to his face. You would have to be nuts to say anything like that to Bruiser.
Bruiser said he had seen everything as far as he was concerned and there was only one motto to life. ‘If you can’t use it, eat it, or fuck it, then it’s no bloody use to you.’ It brought the house down as usual. This was how the town would size up the problem of Aboriginal people squatting behind their houses, he explained with a loud clap of his hands, encouraging others to do the same. He said the government should put the Abos to work and he would write a letter to every politician this side of the black stump telling them exactly that. He nutted out how this employment policy would work. He said they would do what he did to make a living. ‘Put them to work making keys so they can lock their food up somewhere and not have to share everything they get with their families.’ He explained that when he was a hawker the one thing everyone wanted was keys – ‘There was real money in keys.’ Number two, he explained, ‘They should be forced to make bathtubs, like the old tin ones, so they could take regular baths.’ And number three, ‘They should be sent back to the cattle stations and made to work for nothing, board and keep, that’s good enough for them if they aren’t interested in making money to get ahead like everyone else.’
Bruiser got a huge round of applause and after a bit of rumbling about the government doing nothing, someone suggested that they needed direct action. Once Bruiser got the meeting stirred up, he went out the back with a few of his cattlemen friends to enjoy the fresh air and partake in some liquid refreshments, to keep them charged up to go back later on, and finish off the meeting. Although how it ended up, they stayed outside making themselves so pickled and pie-eyed, nothing mattered anymore. What was strategy? This left the new town clerk, Libby Valance, a man accused of neither being local nor understanding the region and its values, to chair the throng.
Yet Valance was educated in local government, and had been given the job in the first place because he was considered to be sensible. He addressed the meeting in his fine voice which reached no higher than midway, by saying that it was his Christian duty to take a more civil line of approach in advising what a town could do with its citizens. No way, voices were beseeching, Why couldn’t we just? Bulldoze the crap out of those camps, flatten the lot? Why not? ‘Well! The last time the Council did it,’ Valance explained, ‘they just started rebuilding, because they had nowhere else to go.’ So! The meeting went on. Make them go, there must be somewhere else they can go, why do they want to come here for anyway? Those of the Pricklebush mob who had taken up the offer to attend the meeting listened, stunned again by how they had been rendered invisible, while Valance continued, ‘It is because they have a right to be here just like anyone else.’ Bruiser, having come back inside, responded with the following salient points on behalf of all indignities: ‘Huh! Think they do. Then they should live like everyone else then. Right! Let’s go tell ’em.’
A small delegation, made up of representatives from Uptown and the black busybodies who went along to these popular Council meetings, came over one afternoon, to have a word with Norm Phantom. It had never escaped Norm’s notice that somehow Uptown had encumbered him with the title with all of its glory – leader of the Aboriginal people. They said they wanted him to get those people who had moved out of Westside, and were now living in abandoned car bodies and their makeshift camps behind people’s housing, to start living like white people, if they wanted to live in town.
‘Couldn’t give a stuff about them,’ Norm grunted, still bent over his taxidermy efforts on a giant prawn.
The Uptown prospect, Cilla Mooch, an Aboriginal man learning how to shape himself into a white mould with one of those perpetual traineeship work-for-the-dole programs spread over the length and breadth of Australia in the name of economic development, worked in the Council office. He stood next to Valance, and as it had been predetermined by the Council, was the voice in this delegation. Norm Phantom might reason with someone of his own ilk. Moochie spoke in broken English.
‘You know?! That what’s what they is saying about you and all. Saying you started all of this town camps stuff springing up here and there for we mob. Saying they got to stop it. Show a bit of respect for the place. Place belonga Desperance Shire Council. Stop the place looking like an infestation of black heads and what have you.’
‘You sound like a fuzzy wuzzy, Mooch. Aren’t got anything to do with me and talk English,’ Norm muttered irritably, still engrossed with the delicate operation on his prawn with a toothpick in one hand and a large magnifying glass in the other. Norm always remembered the prawn. He did not attempt many, but this one was a special creature. Rare, for it only lives in the crystal clear waters away in the gorges of his father’s father’s country. Unique for its size.
Norm had hoped by saying little, the insignificant white ants would disappear and let him get on with his work. However, too little was too late. It was not to be. ‘Whatya doing around here for Moochie?’ Full of grace, Angel Day stepped into the fishroom. She said she was nosing around to see what all the talk was about. She had torn herself away from the statue of Mary, which she had now repainted in the colour of her own likeness. She had examined pictures in the children’s prayer books and after considering every detail of what needed to be done, she believed she knew how to restore the statue. Every bit of her time and attention had been given in its reconstruction, which had now departed from that of its familiar image, to one who watches over and cares for the claypan people in the Gulf country. Improvisation with Norm’s fish colours and textures resulted in a brightly coloured statue of an Aboriginal woman who lived by the sea. The work had taken her several days. She had not even noticed that the other families had left, or believed it was possible when Norm blamed her for their leaving.
‘If they gone, then they’ll be back,’ she had told him flatly, as she did to the delegation who had come from Uptown to confront Norm. She said she thought they would not have the wherewithal to go setting up camp on the other side of town. ‘Where’s the water? Anyone mind telling me that? No tap? No tap! So how are they going to get water from them mob then?’ She looked the delegation over with her cold eyes, waiting for a response, and when no one dared to offer her a peep, she sighed heavily and launched into her attack.
‘What you people worried about then? Stupid, you people. You want to think about things if you got any sense. Isn’t it, they going to get sick and tired quick smart when they have to keep walking ’bout this other side of town to cart water for themselves?’
The delegation turned their attention away from Normal to Angel Day, who engaged them further in discussion about the water situation for the itinerants, as she called them. Norm could not help but be impressed with her ability to mislead people. The delegation looked at her talking down to them with awe written across its faces. Where did she get it from he wondered? Itinerants was not the language of the Pricklebush.
Some people in the delegation began talking about how they had carried the cross of Jesus to protect them. ‘We prayed to God to help us today and we carried the big crucifix along to shield ourselves.’ Those who wore them around their necks, proved their point by dragging crucifixes out from under their clothing and displaying their crosses to each other, as though the gesture would provide them warmth, and secure them from the wrath of God, which they suspected hovered over Normal Phantom’s household. Holy smoke! It was hot. Angel was not amused by the religious posturing Uptown always used to get its own way. Norm watched her run back into the house, listened with the others to her footsteps on the tin floor of the corridor, and suddenly she burst back in the room, brandishing her statue, held up high above her head as she danced around the delegation like a strutting pigeon. It was a transfixing sight. The delegation was shocked by this spectacle of irreverence for their religion, some even recognising the statue, and were about to say: ‘I know where that came from,’ but were speechless. All eyes followed the Aboriginal Mary, bobbing past them, jumping back and forth. It did not trouble Normal. He tried to concentrate on his work while there was still light left in the day. He knew what Angel was capable of doing, or thought so.
What she had to say was long and hard: ‘We are decent people here, my family. We make no trouble for anybody. So why for you want to come down here making trouble for we all the time? I tell you how I won’t stand for it; I can’t even stand you people. I don’t want you murdering types around here bothering my family all the time, you hear me? Covering up for someone who even tried to murder me once and other atrocities as well going on. If you mob come back here again, (she paused to think), I’ll tell you what I will be doing. I will be pressing that many charges through the legal service for Aborigines for attempted murder, that’s what. And while I am at it, I will be suing the town as accomplices to a conspiracy to have my person killed and the persons of my family murdered before they were born, and for damages for the ones who were born. Goodness knows how we can’t sleep at night as it is with the worry. I don’t know how much money you’ve all got in the bank, but you will be paying who knows what for damages. It might even cost the whole town. I have already spoken long distance on the phone to my lawyer and he said it might be a pretty good test case. Watertight even, so what do you think about that, hey?’ Under heavy cloud cover which brought on a premature nightfall, the Uptown delegation looked at each other through flashes of lightning in the fishroom, and were shocked, like the suspended school of silver fish from the sea, jumping up and down in fright.
Normal remembered feeling that there had been no end to Angel’s obsessive behaviour since she laid her hands on the statue. She had even placed it in the bedroom looking onto their bed, so he could not be bothered sleeping there anymore. She had forced him to live in the fishroom, which she now took over, with half the town having a heated argument in there as well. The cockatoo screeched its head off in the storm outside as it flew around, circling the house. Then, to cap it off, the crickets were stirred into wakefulness, and began their choice of music. Ears pricked and prickled to hear the foreign, shrilling sounds of Handel’s oratorio in full orchestra. The delegation listened for a short time, and this strange and severe sounding improvisation must have taken the cake, because there was a mad rush to leave via a rubble of disorientation, and rumble, as they raced over the puddles on the corrugated tin-floored corridor.
Normal, forced to become part of the excessiveness of his home, helped the disoriented delegation outside into the storm, where they set off up the muddy road to Uptown, hoping to find their way home in the darkness. Until, that was, lo and behold, Mayor Bruiser turned up wet and blind drunk, and when he got the drift of Angel’s argument, he started to kick the air and shout into the kitchen doorway, that he was not going to have a bunch of blacks tell him what to do with the town.
Bruiser could see Angel Day inside, still carrying on about lawyers, and laughed drunkenly, ‘Here’s a woman who still likes a good poke. Don’t you like a good poke Angel?’ He started to tease the Christian man Valance, ‘Go and ask her if you can have a go.’ When she ignored him the mayor started taunting her about the times he chased her on horseback down to the creek until her bony legs gave up. ‘Oh! Don’t be bashful, you remember me.’ Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground then raped them. He had branded them all, like a bunch of cattle, he gloated.
Angel Day came out of the house with a billycan full of boiling water and threw it at Bruiser’s voice in the dark, but missed. She went back into the house and the delegation could hear her stomping around the kitchen, throwing things around, screaming out how she was looking for a sharp knife so that she could slit Bruiser’s neck from left to right. What was left of the embarrassed delegation stood around in the rain. Next thing, Norm came flying out of the house threatening the Mayor with his boning knife, screaming, ‘I got this to make you shut up, you dog.’ With the knife swishing back and forth, Norm backed Bruiser through the mud, out of the yard. Bruiser moved away but kept yelling, ‘I’ll be back later and I will fucking get you, Norm Phantom.’ With that, the deafening sound of squawking seagulls took over the court with a loud crack of thunder, so everyone looked up, and when lightning illuminated the skies, they saw that there were thousands of the seagulls gathered overhead, hovering above the Phantom’s house, and right back up the road towards Desperance.
In an era when people were crying for reconciliation, there was fat chance that day. The little delegation started walking back to town, heads bent like wet seagulls in the stormy rain, away from the troubles of the Pricklebush. Every now and again, someone would tell Bruiser to come to his senses because nobody was going to risk their lives in that monstrosity ramshackle deathtrap of a house. So forth and so on, he was pulled along with the little throng, all muddied up to their knees, unable to untangle himself from the glue of their humiliation.
These matters were not helped by Angel Day, even though Normal had pushed her back into the house, for she kept slinging on about conspiracies, and letting her foul mouth go forth like a Cape Canaveral launch, full of the most slanderous truth or half-truth she could muster from every nook and crevice of her brain, and directed to and then from Bruiser downwards, as she bade them farewell. Normal could have slapped her hard across the face. Everyone was egging him to do it: Go on, go on, you tell her to shut the fuck up, but instead, for he had calmed down a lot, he forced his hand to hold the boning knife pinned to his side. What a hostess. Angel Day was too much for a mild man the likes of one who only wanted to work on a prawn.