Secrets…
Thousands of dry balls of lemon-coloured spinifex, uprooted by the storm, rolled into town and were swept out to sea. From the termite mounds dotting the old country the dust storm gathered up untold swarms of flying ants dizzy with the smell of rain and sent them flying with the wind. Dead birds flew past. Animals racing in frightened droves were left behind in full flight, impaled on barbed-wire spikes along the boundary fences. In the sheddings of the earth’s waste, plastic shopping bags from the rubbish dump rose up like ghosts into the troposphere of red skies to be taken for a ride, far away. Way out above the ocean, the pollution of dust and wind-ripped pieces of plastic gathered, then dropped with the salty humidity and sank in the waters far below, to become the unsightly decoration of a groper’s highway deep in the sea.
Wild weather was happening all around Norm Phantom, as he rowed through the darkness, pushing with all his strength over the breakers of the tidal surge, taking his clever thoughts with him. His mind had a certain kind of craziness of not caring what happened to him. People said that, but people were wrong, because Norm Phantom was one of the most calculating men on earth, second to none when it came to self-preservation, who normally set out to sea under the cover of a storm.
Those big pretenders sitting in their long grass camps were not in the slightest bit astonished when he told them that those who searched for his secret fishing places had failed. Lucky! Lucky thing! Too Lucky! They knew the names of the old white people in Desperance who had sat around miserably for many wasted years, trying to translate the secret conversations Norm had with the heavenly spirits at night. They will never know. Those white folk believed that if they could learn how to translate the voices of the stars, their sons would be safe at sea too. They would become invincible, like Norm. Their boats would never return empty, bringing back fish from one end of the street to the other as in the heyday. A little bit of luck was what was needed for the town to rejoice in fish once more. The old people respected Desperance custodians because they felt sorry for them. The graveyard in the sea was full of their sons.
Everybody knows that there are big groper in the Gulf of Carpentaria, but those that joined Norm Phantom on his journeys were the ones nobody else had ever seen. Norm told the old people how he could camouflage himself as a big fish, fooling the local pirates of Desperance when he disappeared over the waves. The old people said he must have sprayed the robbers with Mortein fly spray, to divert them off of his tracks. It was a very tricky thing to do, they claimed.
When Truthful went with Girlie Norm had remained seated at the kitchen table brooding about the possibilities of life – if only he had his way. He mumbled something about how it felt as though a foul air had departed. ‘What did you say?’ He ordered his mute tongue to speak. He willed the words jammed in his throat to come out of his mouth, roll around the kitchen, roll down into Girlie’s bedroom. He waited for the words to break through, the words saying he wanted to kill Truthful, to put his body parts into a bag and run off as quick as he could to feed him to the sharks, and that was the truth of the matter. He waited while watching his daughters run around the yard picking up what should not be blown away, closing windows and doors, preparing for the dust storm to hit. He could kill the cop, but the words stopped him from doing it.
Patsy and Janice looked once or twice in the kitchen as they ran around the house. Both knew that if they were not living at home, their father would just sit there, while the wind blew its merry way through the house, taking the lot. He let the house go when they were not around to clean it. He let his daughters sleep with a cop. He let so many things happen. Norm thought they could think whatever they wanted, for it would be a sweet day if all of them got out of his house. The truth was, when Truthful had left the kitchen with Girlie, Norm was incapable of moving. He was immobilised in the glue of his own blood, pinning him like a dead weight to his chair where he wrestled with murder, while the law of the Ten Commandments held his body captive.
Truthful had left the room mumbling something about reality. He knew the father played his part, second by second, with enormous intrigue and secrecy. He had watched Norm sit at the kitchen table, uninvolved, detached, immorally complicit, thinking he knew about cat-and-mouse games to outsmart a cop.
Norm’s thoughts on the other hand had been running in a different direction, sifting through the pores of the many different storehouses in his mind. First was the obvious truth of resignation. He would let the white man get what he wanted; wasn’t it always the way with Truthful, growing fat with his own greed, getting whatever he could to gorge himself with? Then, two, he sought someone to tell him it was alright to kill a white man. Where was the Fishman? He knew Mozzie was in town but he still had not come over to see him. He had been half waiting for Mozzie since he heard his cars driving around town. Even now, he was half expecting him to turn up. Mozzie knew how to get to the heart of the matter. He would tell him if he was right about what he felt he should do, play it straight, or play around the back. Well! Why doesn’t he come; he should know something’s up, Norm reasoned, tapping his cup, since he had not gone in search of Mozzie when he hit town like he normally would. Mozzie should realise something was wrong. It seemed that a man could be lying in bed half-dead, waiting for someone to turn up. He had forgotten that Mozzie never came to his place anymore.
Norm thought Elias’s body was most likely Will’s doing, since the girls would have been correct about that. Norm knew it was not his imagination why the cop, watching like a hawk, was in the house. He recaptured a past scene in the kitchen, seeing Will’s fury exploding, kicking his way out of the house, reversing at breakneck speed back down the road he had just arrived from, and screeching to a halt in a ball of dust, to yell, ‘Watch the cop, man!’ Then, with not a moment to lose, foot dead on the gas – that was Will, and the last time he was ever seen around the traps.
Will drove off, leaving the family staring at his dust trail. And somehow, maybe it was because there had been no chance to finish the argument, no resolution, no reconciliation, Norm wanted to help the cop to hunt his son down. Norm knew himself to be a naive man, and too intoxicated with his passion for the sea to abandon it at Will’s request. He believed the world would look after itself, infatuatedly, against the odds, because it always did and because the white world cared little about people like Norm Phantom. Norm still pictured him packing and firing his words like bullets, ‘You are wrong, man. You want to take a reality check on the situation, man.’ Norm remembered those words, very insulting, new words around these parts. He frequently had a chance to think about what Will said, so much so he often used his son’s handful of words on others, to be impressive in an argument. This was what memories are made of. Things like Will’s blue ute, left on the outskirts of town heading south. The abandoned car was still there like an ornament on the roadside. A piece of memorabilia, dedicated to the history of the Phantom family, which the father refused to tow home.
The Fishman was in town but where was he? Words were like water sweeping by, taking the memories of Will away. Well! Will was never a proper son. Norm sneered at the oncoming storm; if Girlie did not kill the cop soon, then he might just about do it himself. He pictured the two of them, he and Truthful, out at sea. ‘Would you want to go fishing tonight son?’ It could easily happen – an accident. He had taken Truthful out enough, though not far, never too far, because he judged a man’s seaworthiness, what he was worth out there. The trips inside the shallow water line, not journeys, were far enough to get him off his back about fishing, time enough to give Girlie a chance. He could have taken Truthful twelve hours out to sea to find the body of Elias, and just as they both looked down in the water and saw the body lying on top of a shallow undersea ridge, it would be then that Truthful would stand up in the rocking boat to get a closer look, saying, ‘Where? Where? Keep it steady,’ and these would be his last words before he fell, after he had leant too far over the side, just as Norm leant across to pull him back, the boat unbalanced on Truthful’s side, just as they were floating on top of the groper’s den. Unfortunately, things happened too fast, the cop was drowning at sea, dropping quickly into the depths with the heavy force of his overweight body, fully clothed in uniform, his mouth open in the absolute shock at seeing passing pictures of himself drowning. Truthful would think someone else was holding a slide show of his death, click, clap, and Norm saw himself, many hours later, stricken with regret, apologising to Girlie. Norm had finally relented to the kind sea, and he was unable to reach down far enough into the water to bring Truthful back.
He opened the kitchen door again to let in the fresh air of the dust storm, so he could look at the wind flying past. He was waiting for that tall, skinny man with the untidy rat-coloured hair to come along. Gordie had inherited the tin combat hat that had once belonged to the madman Nicoli Finn, before he was found belly up and picked at by every fish in the bay, way out in the low tide. The ladies of Desperance said Nicoli died fighting like a soldier. The few witnesses attending the annual picnic day had watched Finn in his final encounter, but said afterwards, even though they had talked about what they could do, and had even decided to take a closer look, they decided to keep walking along the beach kicking the seashells out of the way so as to appear as though they were not watching his birds. At the wake they said: He was pretty particular about his birds you know. The witnesses said Finn was fighting the hawks which kept diving at him, diving out of an ordinary blue sky, just like missiles. Someone remembered remarking at the time while Finn was doing his work: This is what the war must have looked like. The old maidens attending the picnic could only imagine what took place in a war, just as they wondered to which unfortunate battle in what corner of the globe their knitted socks and blankets for the national war effort had been dispatched long ago.
Officially, he was doing his own business, and the maidens said they were not to get involved in someone else’s affairs, even if they should have, for it would have been improper to interfere in a man’s work, and they had grown fearful that if they had interfered, they could have done nothing to prevent the attack, and what if the hawks started attacking them? Saving Finn was a job for the police, they remarked without offence. What was being asked of them was a job a decent wife would do if Finn had been sensible enough to acquire one. Well! He was dead now and useless to anyone.
After Finn died and Elias left, poor Gordie inherited the mantle of neighbourhood watch. Gordie was magnificent. You could watch him, always with a compass swinging around his neck, and a hammer in his hand, in case he had to tack down the net. If he did not have these things, then you would have to think something was wrong, something was out of order. Gordie forgot nothing. He was good at his job. The best. When he became the official watchman for the town he taught himself to walk fast, first by running, then gradually slowing the running until he got it down to a trot, and from a trot, to a fast walk. Had to. He had to circumnavigate the town every three hours come rain, storm or nothing. And be better than Finn, who had a background in surveillance.
With the storm under way and Truthful ensconced out of sight in a tryst with Girlie, Norm waited for the moment Gordie would appear, striding his way across the horizon. He had seen him pass earlier in the night. The cloud cover was heavy, hiding the light of the moon, but the white dog had groaned in its sleep when it heard the passerby crackle the stubble grass underfoot. More intently, Norm watched again at midnight when the clouds had lifted and the moonlight shone like a torch. He watched for Gordie’s eyes on the prowl.
Once he saw Gordie was heading back towards town again, marching on a track through the salty marshes near the beach, Norm listened for the startled sea birds squawking as he approached their nests. He quickly gathered his sea gear together. Matching the extraordinary quietness of the night bird in the blackness outside hopping past the house, he moved past the bedrooms of his sleeping family. Truthful snored peacefully. Norm paused outside Girlie’s room before continuing to the fishroom. He returned, carrying his fishing tackle, then paused once more to see Kevin, still sleeping.
Outside the house he picked up Elias, and along with his gear and fishing tackle, swung the body over his shoulder. He moved off towards where his little aluminium boat was moored in the shallows, where the murmuring sea with its incoming tide kissed the shoreline. An owl was speaking to the night. These were the only sounds. With the thought of going on a long ocean trip after being on land so long, Norm felt light-headed, but he packed the boat and was ready to leave within minutes. ‘We’ll go together, just like old times,’ Norm told Elias, as he pushed the boat further out on the water. Repeatedly he told himself it was the right thing to do. He was not too old. He could still do the journey.
He had taken Elias to the gropers’ place in the middle of the sea before, and had been surprised that Elias already knew of it. The gropers started to rise in the water all around the boat, mingling closer and closer than they had ever done in all of the years Norm had gone on this pilgrimage. Norm had been sure that there was communication between the fish and Elias. Then, he saw the gentlest expression on Elias’s face as he looked up from the water. It was a child’s face, smiling at the look of Norm’s concern. Elias turned back and slapped his hands under the water.
Hundreds of the big gropers surged towards the boat, until in the moment when they looked like colliding, the fish had pulled away, creating a foaming sea in their wake as they sank back into the depths of the ocean. Norm had often thought about what happened that day. It was the memory which had come flooding back to him as he sat at the kitchen table, ready to destroy the world around him. The memory fought off the devils until Norm saw what Elias had wanted. Elias had come back to tell Norm to take him home.
Norm knew if he mapped the route well, he would reach this spirit world, where the congregations of the great gropers journeying from the sky to the sea were gathered. The gropers would wait for Norm before they moved on, far away under the sea, before returning to the sea of stars, at the season’s end. He was still feeling annoyed about the girls burning the fish. The coral trout belonged to Elias’s spirit and rightfully, they should accompany the dead man on this journey into the spirit world. Having to take Elias away without his belongings did not prepare him well for this other world. He knew it was the wrong thing, if Elias went without his fish. He cursed. The wind that had been ready waiting for him died and there was an incredible stillness. It had to be a sign, as though the wind had refused to take them, Norm thought. So there he was, standing out there in the water in the middle of the night, sweat running down his face, all that work for nothing.
Norm trudged barefoot back up the beach, back towards the house to collect the old fish. He felt like a fanatic, a madman, searching for a precision that did not exist in his terrible obsession with fish. He realised he was out of time halfway up to the house, but he kept going, dodging around the back of several piles of driftwood, almost crawling along on his belly so that Gordie would not detect his movements. He expected Gordie would turn up at any second, he could picture the long, lanky streak running almost, coming in to check.
As he retraced his steps inside the house, he knew he now had only minutes to leave in order to follow the course he had charted for himself. He knew if he set sail any later, the seas would be giving the wrong signals, the tides would be wrong, he would not be able to recalibrate, and after that, whatever he did would bring him further askew.
The white dog, happy he had returned, was following excitedly behind him. He thought he had disturbed Kevin, but the lad was just talking in his sleep, talking to Will. Norm knew it would not be long before Kevin was up and about. Truthful was still in a deep sleep – it would be so easy to smother him. He reached up and pulled down about six of the silver fish and four coral trout that were hanging from the ceiling, and put them into the bags that had come with Elias.
Norm threw the bag of fish into the boat and pulled the boat out to deeper waters, just as he had watched Elias do on the day he had set off, leaving Desperance for good. The coolness of the water was refreshing on his skin after working in the humidity of the hot night. He set course by the star of the fishermen that was setting low in the northern horizon. Then he climbed on board and started rowing away as the cloud cover again returned blackness to the remaining night.
A steady rain fell while Norm rowed into the tide racing over the seagrass meadows of the flat sea. Once again, his thoughts turned to the Fishman not coming to see him. In the darkness, he felt Elias’s presence, sitting at the end of the boat, looking at him, as he usually did on their way out fishing in the good old days. Before the kids grew up, before the madam of the house caused her trouble, and the Fishman came and went as he pleased.
‘You remember that, Elias?’ he said, speaking softly, as though the dead man had been listening to his thoughts. This had never happened before in the ups and downs of the in-between years. ‘Fishman always came around, didn’t he Elias?’ There was no answer, and Norm rowed, hissing his story in the rain, ‘Despite the sheer irresponsibility of it all, she drove off with him.’ He remembered both of them, Mozzie and Angel, huddled like a couple of teenagers, in the huge expanse of the back seat of the main man’s flash car, driven by the membership.
‘It ended for me on the day she ran off with the Fishman, Elias,’ Norm said on the forward lift of the oars. ‘28 January, 1988,’ swinging the oars back. ‘You know why I remember it?’ Swoosh. ‘It was precisely four p.m.’ Swish. This was the time of day when he most vividly felt a loss of heart. ‘It was a hot, hot day to remember.’ The hot wind had been blowing it was true. He had circled the date in green on the calendar, and fourteen years later, the same calendar with the Snowy Mountains stream picture remained on the wall as a reminder to the family.
‘No, you are wrong,’ Elias’s deadpan voice came back through the night, the way he usually spoke to Norm while they were fishing, back to back to each other, waiting for a bite. Elias had never budged from his belief that it was a different day. The 27th day in January 1988. It was ten a.m. A hot bugger of a day. Angel was walking, her shift made of some fine material, he did not know what, clinging against the front of her body as she walked in the hot air. The wind was that hot it made your blood boil. Piles of rubbish at the tip had combusted into roaring fires. People were fainting in their houses in the middle of the morning. Oxygen was draining from the atmosphere.
Everyone was perishing for rain. There were people who were too breathless to speak, but Angel had spoken to him. She said in her dismissive, flat voice, in her usual manner of speaking to the likes of Elias, men who did not stir her feelings in the right way, that Norm was already down looking at the boats. Elias had argued that he too, would always remember that day because he had marked it on his own calendar. It had a picture of two galahs sitting on a perch, screeching at each other. He had kept the picture because it reminded him of the occasion. Norm remembered seeing her thin frame of a body in that dress, walking in the mist along the track through the wastelands, heading towards the rubbish dump. He refused to believe Elias. He argued vehemently that in January of that year, high tide was at precisely four p.m. in the afternoon, the same as the day Angel left, so this was why Elias had to be mistaken. The argument lasted for days on the sea. This was fishing with Elias. He rowed on.
Devoid of blue, a strangely coloured creature was man, the intruder, who ventured at his own risk into these faraway, watery domains of the ocean…
It was a long journey Norm Phantom had set upon into a world that by day belonged to the luminescence of the ocean and above, to the open skies, and by night, to the spirits who had always haunted this world. They say this faraway place belonged to the untamed spirits of fishes, women and sea creatures. This was the realm of mischievous winds and other kinds of haughty souls from above. Who goes there? the quiet wind asked. The following wind answered. It said there came a man of pain and another, who looked disinterestedly at the world as though it did not exist.
The sea wind following Norm along in his little boat was a spirit of intemperate disposition, who woefully blew little gusty breezes for days and passed through the night playing nocturnes that droned over the waves, or else, left, running away from the toiling seafarer in its wantonness, searching for a wild idea on the other side of the world. On those days of hot calm, the air was heavy with a humid clamminess that drove Norm half crazy. Everything on the boat felt damp. As he rowed on, looking back at Elias all day long, he started to detect a grey mould growing over the dead man’s face. With no escape from the sight of Elias’s face, he watched for the spread of new patches of mould advancing over his friend’s body.
At night he slept, half curled up in the cramped space in the middle of the boat in a puddle of stagnant water. Although his body felt sluggish in the heavy air, his mind was as attuned as a wary night bird passing his boat. Even the slightest movement of water breaking with a fish surfacing would awaken him in fright. ‘What’s that! What’s that!’ he called out, half asleep, ready to abandon ship. And from the other end of the boat in the darkness, Elias said calmly, ‘Relax, go back to sleep, it’s nothing.’ Unfortunately, once robbed of his sleep, he could not sleep. Instead, driven with annoyance, grumbling that it was alright for Elias to be calm – he did not have to come back alive – Norm would start rowing again in the middle of the night, navigating by his memorised map, following the star of the fish.
He would row into daylight, his mind absorbed with directing his monotonous labour, until a startled cry from a seagull winging close to his head, ricocheting off every surface of the sea plain, echoed like madness through his mind.
Elias’s version of the argument, which altered and swayed in many different directions over the years, was based on seeing Angel Day walking to the rubbish dump in the summertime. Elias said he was not blind, he knew what he saw. All the Pricklebush people living on the edge of town were sloshing around like wild pigs in ankle-deep mud to get anywhere all along the roads in town, after the heavy Wet season rain.
The world was no longer under the spell of the monochrome grey-coloured Dry season. The land was covered with flood plains alive with frogs calling to each other in waves of sound running across the atmosphere, closing to absolute silence near to the magical footsteps of Elias, before resuming the pitch of the highest decibels behind him again.
Next, Elias used the brighter paints on his palette to portray the scenario, describing how he had watched her moving in the mist and long grass like an angel, a spirit no less, along the path, skipping to avoid the puddles. Elias was not taunting Norm. He spoke frankly without any realisation that the truth of the lost wife was painful for his friend. The way Elias spoke about Angel astonished him because his wife had never been angelic.
The way Elias spoke of what he saw was no secret, not something he had seen alone, because everyone in the Pricklebush felt haunted whenever she approached them, like a hummingbird, in the bush, along lonely paths on the outskirts of the town. She was the one who made people scratch their heads and say, ‘What kind of woman was that?’ To many others, she was a memorable, marvellous sort of woman who printed herself on your mind with red lipstick, while you watched. Elias said she was too good for sure. He had stood by the side of the track like a stupid man, he said.
‘Hello Elias, Norm is already down at the boats,’ she purred catlike at Elias gawking at her again, then rolled those luxuriant brown eyes, and just like the queen she was, she floated off.
Norm paused at the call of a seagull. His mind floated back to the thoughts that had preoccupied him in those days. All of the many preparations he was engrossed with, even for such a small sea craft. The inconsequential trappings to ensure survival. Elias never worried come rain or storm, while Norm was forever moving about with his all-weather jacket over his head for shade, checking equipment from one end of the boat to the other, fanaticising over hairline cracks becoming gaping holes overnight. ‘You never used to be like that, fret, fret. I reckon you live in the ruins of married life.’ Those were Elias’s true words about his good friend Norm. Norm threw Elias’s words back now as an accusation, ‘How come you were saying things like that about me?’ Elias looked him back squarely in the eyes and kept on staring, until Norm answered for him, ‘Why didn’t you ask me that when I was alive?’ Norm mumbled he would have, but he did not want to cause an argument, so, ‘It did not matter.’ Unable to continue this argument with itself, his mind slipped back to the days of golden yellow, and boats of capillary red, when a man walked home when he felt tired.
Norm moved awkwardly, his legs severely cramped from the long journey, and checked the four fishing lines hanging over the side of the boat. He changed the bait with pieces of flesh from a small shark he had been saving from his catch from the previous night. ‘See!’ He showed the lines to Elias before throwing them over the sides again. Looking into the spot where the lines were sinking into the blue-green depths, he saw his companion following, the manta ray with its greying form moving through the depths of ocean below. Norm became intoxicated by watching the prolonged movement of the suspended ray. The creature moved so tantalisingly slowly by suspending itself in the drift of tidal movement. He no longer cared to stay above. His vision slipped into and out of the waters, breaking the surface so many times, he became lost in time.
The grey sea creature willowing below carried his subliminal mind on its back, absorbing those captured thoughts of Angel Day walking out of a submerged track in the sea towards him. She walked out of the water not far from the boat in a dazzling ray of sunlight, and she walked away, back on the track that led to the rubbish dump. Norm gripped the vision, staring straight through reality to watch her for the first time that long-ago day when Elias had seen her. Looking so closely into her face, he was astounded at its clarity. He was shocked to see a secret intimacy residing within her. He had never before seen this face from her childhood transcending through the travesties of their life together. He thought he had never seen her before. She walked with a tranquillity and a beauty that was her normal face, but which she had carefully folded up and stored away, saved only now for stolen occasions of when she was completely alone. He felt ashamed to be hiding behind the long grass, peering out with the grasshoppers, slipping along behind her, following on the path of what happened on that very last day he and Elias had cast the peaceful spells of being just simple men working on their boats.
It had been a very ordinary day of whiling away the time when suddenly the blue nylon line ran straight across the water, and Norm Phantom was propelled out of his daydreams. He was being challenged by a fish of great strength that held the end of the line taut after it plunged into the depths, as though it had turned itself into a rock. The strange object in the distant sea line that he had been watching still edged its way through the water, slowly bobbing like a balloon, moving against the slight breeze blowing across the sea from the mainland. Norm scanned the surface, vigilant, yet far too preoccupied now with the sun hanging low in the sky, as he struggled with his first catch in what had become a long day.
The war raged on for what seemed like hours between the old man weakened in his travels, and the fish, the long, narrow, silver body of a giant Spanish mackerel, spinning through the water with one of Norm Phantom’s lines hooked into its mouth. The fish sprang out of the water, twisted in the air to eye Norm with the hateful vengeance caught fish have of men, and ran the line flat chat – twang, twang, back and forth, from one side to another, cutting through the thousands of little bait fish that regularly swam in the shade underneath the boat, and like a great trickster, twisting the half-dozen spare lines into a single knot.
Afterwards, success was not great. The perverse deep-rooted sea man’s euphoria did not etch deep in his bones. Instead, he felt humiliation wash over his skin, exposing him as a marauder of the sea, a stranger in a strange place. He felt vulnerable in his little boat. Self consciously, he used his knife in a butchering act to gut the fish, then he noticed the strange shape of a giant stingray, as big as the boat itself, flying across the sea like a passenger of the wind.
The sun sitting low on the horizon threw its bright rays across the water which simulated liquid gold. The tantalising phenomenon moving towards Norm reflected a blinding light, as its ploy to distract his scrutiny, while it scrutinised him with predatory eyes. Several times Norm was forced to avert his own eyes to the safety of the sun-glistening waters, or more guardedly, to the shining silver of fish blood swimming around his feet. Yet, drawn back time and again, he would lift his eyes above the shield of his tiny world on the vastness of water to capture another glimpse of the giant creature’s hypnotic power. Drowning in his distractions, Norm suddenly looked across at Elias as if remembering he was not alone after all, and saw the dead man smiling at him. ‘If you are in charge of our little journey Elias, you better start telling me what we are going to do now,’ Norm said, relinquishing control, no longer sure if he ever had control. He ate some of the raw fish flesh, staring around like an animal, waiting for another animal to eventuate, to steal his food. He heard fingers clicking. He looked around and there was nothing. But it was enough. He found what he had mislaid. He saw the route of their journey laid out in his mind, from woe to finish line, and knew he was again on track.
‘Right! Right! Right! So if this is the case…’ Norm spoke softly this time to Elias, without ending his speech, as if Elias was also studying the same map he was looking at. He must never question his vulnerability to the elements of the weather again. He looked across the sea, this time he could see wind and storms held in the arms of the saltwater spirits, which had always been there, all through this journey to the graveyard of the men of the sea.
He now understood the travelling phenomenon he had watched was the sorrowful woman, a cursed spirit of death who had come to find them. ‘Can you hear her Elias?’ That night, he was convinced he could hear her cries in the wind whistling across the waters, that her cries were curses in a language that was foreign to him. He knew what the old people said about her. In the long grass they would hear her wails coming in from the sea, or even from land along the beach, if they listened closely at night. The old people said if you could hear her way out at sea, she was warning those who heard her to stay away. No fisherman would ever actually see her because she would make herself moonba to them, yet Norm knew what he was looking for. He had an image of a white flowing hair witch, whose very skin he knew was like slime, and off her body trailed seaweed for clothes.
Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library chock-a-block full of stories of the old country stored in their heads. Their lives were lived out by trading stories for other stories. They called it decorum – the good information, intelligence, etiquette of the what to do, how to behave for knowing how to live like a proper human being, alongside spirits for neighbours in dreams. In the local stories handed down through the generations, the sea woman was a death angel. She appeared from nowhere in her endless search to take men back to her dark, empty world in the deep waters at the bottom of the ocean. Norm knew what this world looked like because he saw it in his dreams.
On the floor of all oceans was a world overgrown with a forest of living black coral. It was a place that harboured a final darkness, where light never penetrated, and where men who were captured through some form of bewitchment, lived for the rest of eternity, pulled and tugged, while suspended in the streams of water running back and forth across the globe. The old people always spoke of this limbo world, where fish never seen by man were really spirit women who lived and swam through holes in the captured man’s ribcage, and perpetually fiddled with his brain to make him forever yearn to be rescued.
Another little wind blew an old green rubbish bag into the boat. Norm guessed it must have flown hundreds of kilometres, whirling its way across the water from Desperance’s dump. Believing it to be a second omen, a curse from someone in Desperance, someone from the Pricklebush mob on the other side, he kicked the tattered plastic overboard in the darkness, as though it was something alive, a Goddess woman who came flying low across the sea. When it blew straight back into his face, he read the change as a sign telling him that there were wild winds beginning to pour back into the Gulf from the north-east, bringing more storms.
Norm carefully watched the green form spiralling around the boat, once, twice, each time as if it wanted to land and attach itself to him. With his arms flailing aimlessly at the plastic thing in the night, he told her straight: ‘Don’t you come here.’ Oh! Yes! What a thing. He was convinced this was a sorceress of a wife. A witch who had borne his children and then behold, in front of his very eyes, walked off, wilfully wrecking their marriage. He heard her rustling as she hovered between them, whispering secrets to Elias – ‘Norm’s lost at sea.’ Then the wind turned, and she flew back with it towards the coast. With her departure, Norm felt a heavy shadow passing over him. It was the change coming, and he told Elias in a low, steady voice to get ready. ‘Make out nothing’s happening. Brace yourself man.’ The sea remained as flat as a tack but Norm waited. The wind did not turn into a storm and the boat sat in the flat, humid sea with Norm, sticky and hot, returning to the last dying days of his marriage.
So far, the journey had taken Norm more than two weeks of rowing all day long, living on raw fish, and drinking rain water he collected on a sheet of plastic made into a hollow dam. He stored the water he captured in soft-drink bottles. Then, knowing the place where the gropers lived was drawing closer, he stopped worrying up the storms as he journeyed through the humidity and flat seas, realising that all these obsessions of what was not right, were metaphors for his failed marriage.
One clear morning, Norm knew he had reached his destination, when he caught a glimpse of a groper swimming with his huge back fin clear of the water, no further than twenty metres away. He waited, watching while it swam over to the side of the boat. Once, Elias had told him that the groper was the descendant of the giant dinosaur. Norm did not know whether it was true or not. He had other stories. Their whole area was covered with megafauna once upon a time, Elias said. This he explained was millions of years ago, before it stopped raining, and the claypans were covered with rainforest. Elias explained that when you went around parts of the country thinking you were walking on rock, it was really fossilised tree stumps from those times. The rainforest trees were massive, he said. It was hard to imagine. Norm saw both these worlds wherever he looked at one.
Elias said it was not hard to imagine at all, for he had seen such trees somewhere, but he could not remember the places he had travelled. Norm knew there were fossilised bones of the ancestors of gropers and other animals being found by the palaeontologists and flown by helicopter out of the country by the bag load. These old bones which had lain with the ancestors for millions of years, were being stuck together again with araldite and wire, and covered with fur so all Australians could visit them in museums to see what these creatures used to look like.
The Fishman was full bottle about the palaeontologists, so he came along too, saying to Norm it was only natural for Elias to say those things, for the groper was a creature that used to have legs for walking on land, but it returned to the water to live sometime millions of years ago after a drought. ‘We are having the same drought right now,’ he said, sniffing the air for temperature. Norm and the Fishman had once watched a groper die. Fishman patted the dry skin of the creature, and called it the giant Queensland groper, Promicrops lanceolatus. Norm was amused with the Fishman’s knowledge of science. Fishman smiled, and said maybe it weighed nearly a ton, and joked, ‘All that scientify stuff is easy. You could learn it in a day.’ Norm knew the Fishman picked up everything he knew, foreign languages, cooking, taste in music, just from listening to the broadband radio. He declared, ‘The radio has been my education.’
The creature had lain on the beach motionless. Norm looked at the tyre marks of a Toyota four-wheel drive vehicle. It had winched the animal out of the water and up onto the beach. They had sat down on the beach beside the animal. Perhaps they were waiting for it to die by keeping it company.
Well! he just goes on looking at you. He just goes on breathing and breathing through his lungs, pumping steadily, waiting. Its body had dark mottlings of brown and grey, which slowly, over time, dried out. The animal took on the appearance of being coated with thick armour, with its hard little eyes on either side of its broad head, still staring. ‘I can feel him staring right through me,’ Fishman said at the time. The white fishermen from the mine were hacking the flesh off the body of the groper with an axe. ‘He takes a long time to die.’ Meanwhile, they heard the animal grunt with the torture of each blow until its heart, buried deep inside its massive fleshy body, caved in to its long, agonising death. Norm knew other stories about the groper coming from the Dreamtime and continuing its story along the tracks in the sea which he had followed for Elias. And other kinds of stories about bad luck.
The old people would say never go to sea with a fisherman who had killed a groper. Everybody will tell you that. Better to let the groper live, or his ghost will live in the dreams of the fishermen who killed him, and when they go to sea, he will know what is in their heads, but he knows more about the sea than any fisherman, so he will be able to steal their luck away. This was the only way the spirit of such a colossal fish would ever go back to the sea.
The groper hole was in an abyss, an ancient reef crater of a sea palace, a circular fish city full of underground caves where the huge fish liked to live. A place where they could have returned to from the land in ancient times like the palaeontologists say, or skies if they flew like the elders say in the Law of the Dreamtime. Millions of years ago, what was it like? Remember! Were skies blue then?
Once before, Elias had brought Norm to the ocean’s pavonazzo which shone from the depths to the surface with the colours of a peacock’s tail. It was where the gropers had lived for centuries and even though they swam together, lived solitary lives in their own separate caves.
The groper caressing the side of the boat was instantly recognised by Norm as one of his friends who swam right up to his beach in the night, calling him to go fishing with them. ‘Well! I’ll be darned,’ Norm said, awestruck perhaps, that he would actually reach his destination. He began whistling Auld Lang Syne of all things to the creature who had once been his groper’s friend. Elias had become misguided like a fool into the politics of Uptown. He was far too busy to go fishing, too busy for the sea. He abandoned the lot, everything he knew, just for Uptown. Then it was just Norm, instead of Elias, who set off following the gropers along their sea tracks until they were out on the reefs. There, they would leave him behind while they herded up the reef fish, holding them in a tight circle around his boat, allowing Norm to spear as many as he wanted before releasing their hold.
There were other times on strong moonlit nights, when the giant fish swimming in packs would lead Norm up the river estuaries of yellow waters with the tide, to show him something special, places anyone would want to see, where the prawns were running in their millions. Ahead, the gropers swam in a semi-circle formation, trapping the prawns in snags of dead trees piled up by floods near the riverbank. These big fish living in schools of several dozens, contentedly stayed around Norm, then, without any visible sign, they would leave for the sea. Norm watched them swimming off quickly, knowing it was time for them to follow sea tracks which did not belong to him.
Relieved that he had not set out on an aimless journey, Norm followed the giant fish guiding him, steering him along a corridor above a steep underwater canyon. During this last phase of the journey, he had rowed most of the night, knowing he was nearly on top of the abyss where the fish lived, and the place from where they left to go on their spiritual journeys into the skies. Now he knew this was real again.
He noticed a different breaking pattern in the current line and when he touched the water, felt its temperature had risen. He thought he saw glimpses of the giant spirits as they clung, swimming closely to the sides of the underwater chasm. He imagined them looking up to the spirits of dead people twinkling as stars in the night ocean of the skies. While looking straight past Elias, he saw where the green-coloured water of the sea was beginning to swell as though there was something huge moving under the surface, forcing the water to surge up over the underwater reefs. Then, still many hundreds of metres away, he saw the sun spreading and hovering over the swell, the flashing, lit wings of all of the sea birds. Orienting his eye through the glare, he saw the birds diving into giant schools of sardine fish and returning to the sky.
More gropers appeared, following the side of the boat; their fins cut through the water and in their wake, they left small trails of swirling water. Many of the sea birds, after noticing a place to rest from their hovering in the hot breeze, flew in to land on any available surface on the boat. They assembled in large numbers, squabbling over space, forcing Norm to brush them off as fast as they would land. Norm was overjoyed. He swept the birds away with his hands, while still trying to row to keep up with the gropers, happily telling Elias he had found the right place.
‘So, here we are old friend. Here we are and we actually made it. I brought you home.’
Norm gradually stopped rowing, contented to look on, while the sea swelled into life with the assembling gropers ploughing together through the water, vying for space next to the boat. He thought how remarkable the big fish were as they swam to join in with other groups, until many hundreds were clustering. Strangely, it reminded him of the Pricklebush families gathering at funerals. Even though the day was growing hotter and stiller with humidity, it did not lessen Norm’s exuberance. He felt joy flooding from his heart. He swooshed away the white seagulls hovering between him and Elias and cried out, so far from land, ‘This is paradise.’ The birds lifted themselves up from the water and floated through the hot thermals like angels high up in the skies where the night meets the Milky Way. What say, he thought, considering he too could possibly fly. If he went back to Desperance or not, it did not matter, for in this place, he felt alive again. He had brought Elias’s spirit to his final resting place while discovering man could do almost anything if it was meant to be. Even knowing he was an old man in reality, he could go to sea again and again, if he could still read the signs.
The fish completely surrounded the little tin boat, and it was any wonder to Norm that they did not bump into it. Initially, citing Acts of Contrition, and other prayers for the Stations of the Cross, Norm anticipated hell instead of heaven, after the moment where the weight of the milling fish would collide into and capsize the boat. The fish nudged the back of the boat through the water while Norm sat and watched, looking sadly at Elias, in the knowledge they would soon be parted forever. Finally, the fish moved away, creating a circle of clear water around the boat. Norm waited for several minutes, not sure of what to do next or what would happen. The fish did not move, and even while delaying the inevitable, he knew that he had to let Elias go.
‘So, it’s time old mate,’ Norm said, as he balanced himself in front of Elias to untie the ropes holding him in place. During his journey, Norm had become quite nimble as he moved around the small vessel, as though he had always possessed a corklike buoyancy with the movement of water. ‘It’s time for you to go home.’ He remembered the coral trout and undid the lid of one of several plastic containers kept behind the ends of their seats for storage. The fish in their bags were emptied from the container and Norm placed them in Elias’s folded arms. Then he lifted his friend, knowing he had to let him go, but not wanting to either, because once he did, he knew he would be alone. Betrayed by feelings of loneliness, and a sadness which was only half reserved for Elias, he sat holding the body. He could feel Elias’s spirit resisting his hold. Very carefully and reluctantly, Norm lifted Elias over the side of the boat and placed him into the strangely calm emerald green waters. Elias sank deeper and deeper, gently through the giant arms of water waiting at every depth to receive him, until finally, Norm could see him no more. Then he knelt down in the water on the floor of his little boat, and prayed for Elias, and was thankful he had brought his spirit safely to his final resting place.
In time, when he looked up again, he found himself alone. All the gropers had departed and the day was almost gone.
An unusually early darkness fell over the ocean on the day of Norm’s burying Elias at sea…
How quickly the day had passed, and how incredible it seemed that burying Elias could have taken all day. Norm Phantom lay on the bottom of his boat reflecting on all that had happened. He longed for sleep. It occurred to him that perhaps the day had not passed quickly, and the eery half-light was actually his own eyes failing to see clearly, after weeks of water-reflected glare.
‘Have you thought you might be going blind?’ he asked himself, warning himself while staring upwards at the clouds, but too tired to care. He thought of the stingray’s efforts to send him blind for invading its territory. It had made him its prey. Deliberately it had lingered within his vision throughout the day. Yes, deliberately making him stare into the glare, while it waited for the sun to fall low enough in the sky in an attempt to blind him by its reflection. Ho! Man overboard. Who? Where? You, you idiot who’s yelling out mad. Poor Elias had called. Don’t fall prey to the stingray. He knew he would have to be more careful if the stingray came again, or else no one would call Man overboard. No one would hear, not even himself. He would fall overboard, trying to chase after its smile.
They say the devils sitting around at sea could swim through a fishing man’s mind like a virus, waiting for the perfect opportunity, in which very carefully, a devil switches your thoughts for his. Thinking about the sea could turn a man mad, although there were other things too that could change the look of the world, an old man’s eyesight was not that reliable. He would be flat out seeing a dollar on the ground, Norm thought of himself crossly, for being old, looking at his white beard which ran through his fingers. Perhaps he would not make the journey back to Desperance this time. Exhaustion crept over him, entered his blood, and he could feel its flow pulsing through his body like lead. He settled down for a long sleep. He was overcome by the emotion of the final farewell to his one trusted friend. He told himself he would rig up and set sail tomorrow.
He was wrong. He should have set course home immediately and rowed away. Millions of small fish were journeying south underneath his boat. Near and far, the waters rippled with moonlit silver as they passed by. Norm did not notice this, nor their crowded bodies nudging his boat, as if signalling him to leave. He took no notice of the watery spirits in the distance to the north-west throwing themselves up from the sea as they warred with the warlords of the skies. He should have left straightaway while he thought of sleeping.
If he viewed the threatening skies or felt the fleeing fish, he refused to acknowledge the warnings. His whole being flowed away, rolling in the slight south-east swells which were both familiar and lulling, while he slept. Through his exhausted mind rolled an incoherent jumble of pictures, of guiding stars, sea currents flowing from all points of the compass, crossing the route of the sun. He grabbed from the forest of stars, selecting gliding currents from bundles of spears, and sun rays stacked for choosing as he began plotting, jigsawing bit by bit to form an imaginary nautical map for the journey back to Desperance. It was all he had to do, all it was going to take, and in the morning, or later on in the night, after sleep, he would be on his way.
He slept fitfully, forced to a state of wakeful consciousness sifting and sorting time, place and current. Sleep finally evaded him because his mind was alive, it was electrifying inside his head, where the sea kept dividing itself into greater and smaller horizontal and vertical columns, forming tributaries as thick as the matted hair of the universe, from where all manner of ocean currents were flowing, full to the brim with floodwaters. As he walked in this place, searching for an escape route, streams of water were running in every direction as though it was the history of his knowledge crisscrossing itself until it formed a watery spiderweb, a polygon structure tangled with all of the local currents he ever knew in his mind, all tracks leading home.
Sleep finally arrived through a state of restlessness reminiscent of the meandering of an ant moving endlessly and abruptly, this way and that, through its world in the dirt. With each sharp clap of thunder he was drawn from dreams where he half expected to see Elias springing up from the depths below, as he imagined him trying to force his way through the water’s surface until it tore apart. Norm could feel his heart racing as he watched the desperate face of Elias continuing his struggle to come back to life, while he in turn gasped for air on Elias’s behalf, and battled to keep his own head above the surface. Then, drawn to the sight of Elias’s hands gripping the side of the boat while trying to haul himself dead and all over the side, Norm woke himself up, just to escape his nightmare.
Peering into the moonlight he saw it had been nothing except large fish, a queenfish, a jewfish, a snapper, flying through the water and hitting it again side on with a thud. It was nothing compared to the sound the ghostly squawking seagulls made, and when he opened his eyes more fully, there they were, dozens gathered on every available space in his boat again, white wings lifting off with his slightest movement; and, white wings landing again, all of them, sitting there like angels staring at him.
Norm felt pains gathering in his chest, pushing his body in on itself. Glory be to the Father – he thought he was going to die, or else what? Already dead in the escort of angels? A beautiful prayer he liked, reaching the end – As it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, he called out in his sleep, only to be awakened again minutes later and again. The birds were ferocious and helped themselves, fighting like unscrupulous beggars at the full larder, gobbling down all the dried strips of fish from the Spanish mackerel hanging over the sides of the boat.
After a time he fell asleep again. He dreamt he watched the stars fall deeper through the water, where their light lit up the watery world of the gropers’ palaces. He looked down into the depths, through the effects of water moving to and fro with the waves, until he saw the abyss that descended down the many levels of a Mesozoic bluff. The deep hole could have been the result of a Dreamtime volcano, or a meteorite the size of a mountain, or a city that had sunk deep down into the earth.
Every layer of this world was covered in sea gardens of coral, coloured all shades of red and pink, and glistening green sea vegetables, amidst olive seagrass fields waving in folds in the currents. A fish lives far better off than a dry old blackfella from Desperance, Norm Phantom considered, looking at this spectacle. He saw himself walking through these quivering gardens, searching for Elias, but all he found were bluey-green lobsters and crayfish mooching. They froze like little statues as soon as they saw him approaching, walking how a fisherman walks – guarding his every step, and singing out – Elias! Elias! Well! It was none of their business. They were only crustaceans darting under cover in his wake, exchanging fright for flight, escaping quickly, slipping back down into their burrows.
Awoken by the scuttering and scurrying of small creatures escaping with his dreams, he looked over the water and saw the big tank fish – gropers swimming together in congregations of fifty or more like dark clouds arriving from the distance. As each group moved upwards, they surfaced loudly in volumes of water, raising their bodies high out of the sea, which were splashing down like waterfalls behind them. The creatures did not stop when they reached the highest level they could before falling back into the sea. Norm wiped their salty spray from his face, as he studied them swimming through the ocean of air, to ascend into the sky world of the Milky Way. They became specks in the sky until they were so far away in the distance, they became a cloudy blur in the celestial heavens of stars and spirits.
Afterwards, the only disturbance they left behind were little eddies in the water that made the boat roll more frequently. Norm, drifting in and out of sleep, caught a glimpse of the fish become stars shooting back in the skies, and finally, the night caravan moving further and further away on its journey. He knew at once Elias was up there with them. Gone thank goodness in another form than the old hunched-back dead man who would have gone off to heaven carrying the basket cases of Desperance along with him. Elias was taking the journey back to his own country, or the place he wanted to call home. Norm was ecstatic with his generous vision of Elias. He knew for the rest of his life he could stop looking out for him. He would no longer resemble a man. He would be like a star. A man like a star. Fish stars. Numerous reminiscences slipped by in Norm’s search for the sign which would distinguish Elias and make him clearly visible for all times. Nothing happened. The book had been closed on their friendship. So, by jingo this was it. Nothing left, except the wretched shell left behind in sun and sea-salt worn-thin cotton clothes who wondered if he were a man.
In the early morning, Norm woke to the startled cries of the seagulls. He pulled his jacket over his head to keep the light away from his face and lay there inert, deciding whether he felt exhausted from dreams, or from too little sleep. Above the harsh awakening, the vivid memory of the Groper exodus stayed clear in his mind, until the deafening racket of squawking birds resounded in his ears, echoing as though the sound was being slapped back from distant hills.
Peering out from under the jacket, he was shocked to see an even bigger assembly of birds had gathered on the water and in the skies since yesterday. As far as his eye could see, more and more birds filled the skies. The surrounding sea had turned almost stark white with the huge flocks that had assembled on the waters, lolling to the slight rise and fall of the flowing waves. As he stood up and clapped his hands the birds flew off his boat, but instantly came back. Then he understood and said, ‘Kangolgi.’
It was the time when the migratory birds were coming back to the coastline of the Gulf, some travelling on to other parts of the country. Above the travelling birds he now saw the long morning glory cloud of the Wet season looming over his boat. Any local knew instantly what the long tubular cloud was. Stretching from the western to the eastern horizon so low in the sky, Norm thought it might touch him as it descended to the horizon of the sea. Now it occurred to him that the birds were travelling along a special route made from the evaporation left by the heat in the cooling atmosphere by the trail made by the big fish on their journeys into the sky world of summer. The cloud band would soon evaporate, but would return again and again in the morning, until the air became saturated with the humidity of the gatherings of enormous storm clouds. Then when the heavy rains finally stopped and the waters became calmer the following year, the big fish would return, as was the natural cycle of things.
A world without end, Amen…
Whispering prayers, Norm Phantom awoke at dawn on his second morning at the gropers’ place to a seascape locked inside a heavy mist. The birds had lifted high into the skies and were nowhere in sight when he set his lines for fishing. The day was good, fine weather, and Norm had decided he would fish first, replenish what the birds had eaten, before he left on the long journey home. Phew! Behold! Valuable time failed to blemish a stubborn man who decided he needed fish from one part of the ocean and no other. His mind was made up, and once the task of fishing was under way, lines dropped, there was really no stopping him. The journey back would just have to sit around and wait it out with the fishing, where time stood still. Norm Phantom’s time was a spectacular clock which rang the alarm once he caught enough: exactly ten lines bearing a large snapper each, more than enough to last a few days, after throwing a few back into the ocean, after hours of boring andante breeze, then it would be time to go.
It was a funny day because the mist, godamn it, did not lift, nor did the fish bite. Norm sat patiently in his boat rolling with the waves all day long and waited for a line to move. The oars idled, he lost track of time, the captain did not row away.
On the third day there was still no sign of fish and scarce movement in the hunched figure of Norm, dispassionately waiting over his baited lines while looking off into the misty distance of hidden wilderness. The sea now a divine limbo under a membrane of whiteness, undecided how to create a new day. Norm felt sure of the movement of ocean swells underneath the boat, still rocking very steady in his map of the rhythms of the south-east winds passing from the other side of the globe, while he kept a pinpoint image of his exact location. Otherwise in the stillness and quiet, he looked like he had died; no fish tugged on the dead lines. No surface waves rose for the absence of localised winds. He saw nothing through the murky grey waters aswelling.
Obsessed with a single mission, he hissed through closed lips, ‘Give me the bloody schools of sardines.’ He remained adamant fish would come sooner or later; they had to for this was an ideal spot. He kept watching for the large predator fish herding the bait fish. In a location such as this, they become locked in a terminal corral, but where in the sea could they be?
Not one fish of any size, large or small, appeared above the surface under his hawk-eyed surveillance. There was a detectable sea swell changing in the deep water currents many fathoms below, but Norm, the sea king of fishing in the Gulf, did not notice anything happening at all. He was deciding, if not how morose he felt, whether he was experiencing the loneliest and longest day of his life.
He cut his hair, hacking chunks off close to his skull, with the sharpened edge of his fish gutting knife. Staring down into the water, not noticing the fast moving current, he watched the long strands of his hair, then his whiskers, fall into the water, and the indeterminable pattern of their floating away. The sea, occupying his thoughts, reminded him of how life is always haunted by death. How off-guard had Norm Phantom been when the dark shadow of the sea lady engulfed him – nobody would ever know.
The mist lifted rapidly, as though the grand curtain had been swiped apart by a magician who in his unexpected performance, banished the broken pieces of small ethereal clouds off into the sea. With the horror and shock of her unexpected arrival, Norm flinched at the wind driving him in his shoulder blades with the inhuman heaviness of two very strong hands. First, she pushed and kneaded, willing him to stand up, shaking the boat. Her invisible touch she replaced with a bolt of static electricity which dipped his every movement into her stinging body. A crackling feminine wail ran around him, embracing him, coaxing compliance to her desires. There was no denying it, the voice of the wind was relaying her needs, and could easily have been deciphered, even by the silly old fool Nicoli Finn, if he had been alive to hear it. Norm did stand, still as a statue, and looked into the sea as she beckoned for him to leap. The fine sea birds have made an opening just for you, she hissed. Leap. Each time she repeated the word, it rang like the echo chamber of an enthusiastic audience at a spectacular performance of the wizard magician, cheering on the faint-hearted volunteer to his act, Leap! Leap! Leap!
‘But Elias has gone,’ Norm kept repeating to the sea lady, as though it was his duty to correct her. He stood in the rocking boat, steadying himself while he argued with her, half captured just by acknowledging her existence, while from the sensible part of his mind slipped an ever fainter desire to go home. After so long alone talking to himself, he enjoyed the sound of a womanly voice. He of course longed to go with her to look for Elias, already knowing if he found Elias he would leave her, jilt her, leave her flat. He even saw how comfortable he would look, reliving his story, how he escaped the sea lady, back at home together with Elias. But he still denied himself abandonment to her body. His wily stubbornness to fight against lust was exhausting. Stop making excuses, listening to her hiss on uncontrollably. See those warriors coming! Look right and left! This is their fighting ground! Go now! Save yourself! Jump! She made the sea heave.
Heavens only know how he managed to keep standing in the rolling boat, but his body, wavering with the rolls like a spring, somehow maintained balance, while every last bit of his bodily strength planted his feet to the bottom of the boat. She shoved him roughly in the back again, before containing him in her embrace when he looked like falling, then changed tactics by whispering in his ear about the old wars of the families. She was high speed, like an adding machine rattling off the local history of centuries in minutes, exact time, precise location, whose boundary it really was, the reason why others thought it was theirs, then explaining again and again, by going back over time in endless forays, the mistakes of each battle.
She knew too much. Naming the people involved, the pain and suffering inflicted, who fell, what misunderstandings lingered on and grew again like cancer, she was a running account of battles which had gone on for centuries. Minutes later she called him War Lord, and started naming his battles, showing him a celebration of his life in pain, while intertwining the speed of her dictation by whispering the way out, an escape from the same family wars continuing on and on and on. Go on now, come out of the way of the unhappy dead, be with me.
Her tidings were bereft of glory. Could she have lied? Norm tried to understand the barrage of her verbosity by choosing at random, names to slot into rows in the crossword puzzle of forgotten history. As the puzzle grew larger, forming new offshoots, she would jump in front, too smart like, trying to squeeze in her own words, but Norm knew the game better and would keep crossing her out with the right word. He understood perfectly that the winds were coming from two directions now – south-east and north-west, colliding in squalls, after the mists had long ago been blown apart. She continued trying to distract him by calling out the names of all the dead people he had ever known. She described the battles they were now waging with each other in the afterlife. He succumbed. Her knowledge was greater than his own. She had condemned him as a person of ignorance. She had crippled his mind. Defeated, he saw a new truth in himself. He was just an old sailor of such lackadaisical efficiency, he could no longer see the seasoned helmsman. In truth, he was dependant on a captain to navigate the way home, and in great peril of losing his life.
More was the pity, the old fishing men at Desperance would say, to find a fisherman at sea acting like a gambler losing the game, after he became too greedy for fish. Sad loss for a sort of person who had lost track of the end of the day. You hear of the ones addicted to fishing who could not leave the fishing hole, not knowing when enough was enough. These fish gamblers never knew when to stop. Well! It was the truth of the matter.
The story goes that those doomed men became lost in a sea boiling with dense schools of large fish – like salmon on the run, balling the bait schools. So, they followed the dark patches like clouds in the water. It was the worst kind of fever, following fish night and day for days, pulling fish in, throwing them on the pile, stacking up more and more. By the time their overloaded boats sank, even the birds had become fat. They sank with their boats, craving with their whole heart and soul the odour of rotting fish gut. There have been some fish gambling survivors. You got to pity them, the ones you see hanging around Desperance with that funny, faraway look on their faces – like a stuffed mullet. They skulk around looking like flea-bitten dogs, running from corner to corner, hiding behind fences and in other people’s yards, escaping from no one because they think someone is trying to stop them heading back to sea. It was hardly surprising to see their crying and gnashing families rushing up and down the Shire Council’s roads, swinging around their long sticks, trying to chase their crazed relative away from the boats. Do not feel pity when you see a family flogging the fish gambler half unconscious. Don’t waste your breath calling the government who own all the essential services like social welfare in cities down South. No one can shake the magnetic forces put in a fisherman’s skull by the sea woman.
Caught in the sphere of the sea lady, Norm saw, over in the distance, ghostly dark waves moving like haunted spirits. In the air he heard a melancholy swishing monologue humming and drumming the advance of the front moving helter-skelter towards him, while up in the skies, its spiral disappeared into the heavens. Norm, centre stage, prepared himself, for he was a brave man, and he was warrior-like, in readiness to face her army of mourning ladies.
He remembered the old people watching these clouds from the long grass along the shores of Desperance and turning away, they always asked the same old question, Say! Do you know who they are boy? Yes! Norm knew the widows. They belonged to a lifelong premonition – one which linked his destiny and theirs: the eternity of the disappointed dead travelling in the seasonal storms of the summer monsoon. Watching these clouds in their haphazard race around the skies, he saw their glorious watery costumes of mourning colours lined with silver sprays that looked like torn lace, decorated with little unstitched pearls.
Each widow rose to wail in majestic heights, showering him with teary froth, as they tore forward with the faster north-west winds. The haunted spectres loomed higher and higher into the skies until they could no longer hold their dignified pose, and collapsed down on themselves with a spectacular and extravagant chain of lightning and thunder above his head. Norm applauded. Bravo! he called appreciatively to each dramatic gesture. Salty tears poured from his windswept eyes. Each flawless performance made space on the celestial stage for a throng of others, each as large and foreboding as the other and with as much power to whip up even more exciting winds.
By executing the dwindling south-easterlies, these new winds produced in Norm a lightness, a spring in his step, he would have run if he was not in the middle of the ocean. For half a year, particularly in their peak, the south-eastern winds had roared through the cracks of houses after midnight, looking to snaffle humanity from sleeping people’s hearts. Now this dying force, outnumbered and outflanked, could only fight back with the weapons of those Desperance homes: so many disappointed dreams and the doomed tenor’s song of unrequited love. Oh my! Norm reminded himself he had better stay alert while sizing up the strength of the storm, unless he wanted to be remembered as a theorist who drowned in his own daydreams. This was how the opposing trade winds interlocked in war, blew the top off the lid, and out would fly the navigator’s mental map of the groper’s travel line.
The storm intensified. The currents resulting from the two opposing trades colliding with each other lifted the surface waters to look like an enormous wart jutting out from the sea. Norm locked his arms around the steel seat of his boat while it rolled and tumbled into the lull. He prayed as his body smashed down on the bottom of the boat and swore, before tumultuous lashings of sea water tumbled over him. He had moments to spare when the boat rose rapidly out of the water, and only enough time to gasp a mouthful of air which he fully expected would be his last, when the boat tilted to ride out the next wall of water, before falling again into the watery dungeon below.
He could have been an ant on a leaf for all that it mattered. Hours went by and his body felt as though it had been broken into a hundred pieces, his flesh pulped into a bloody mash. He screamed for Elias, ‘Come and get me brother, I don’t want to die alone,’ but could not hear the sound of his voice. Reverberating back in his ears, was the thunderous crushing of waves exploding one after the other. Over and over he was thrown up or thrown down, but his arms stayed locked to the boat. He thought perhaps he was already dead but through his spirit, in some bizarre twist of fate, was destined to remain conscious of everything that was happening to him.
Through hoarse lips swollen with bruises, he tried to whisper, forcing words to form in a throat that felt dry as a desert stone from taking in too much sea water. The effort stuck like a ball that was lodged painfully in the back of his throat. ‘Take me,’ he whispered when the words finally came, willing Elias to come, and believing he would just slip away. What faith he had, listening hard, convinced he had heard Elias tapping under the floor of the boat. Yes! Yes! Elias had come back but could not do anything to help him, Norm knew, Elias was there, trying to come aboard to help him.
Finally, the legions of warring spectres ceased fire, the waves dropped, the storm subsided, and in the skies, the viper’s box sprang open. The victorious north-west winds, still crazed into conquering the seasonal change, blew the heavy rain in horizontal lashings that blistered through the sea. Norm lay broken and semi-conscious in the salty waters on the floor of the boat. His body throbbed, his skin was raw to the flesh, and his ears remained deafened by the sound of the world into which he had intruded. He shifted himself with relief out of the stinging sea water, as he felt movement underneath his little boat driving him away with great speed.
Lying there, too injured to move, unable to lift his face into the screeching rain, Norm only saw patchy clouds resting low on the water, whenever the rain eased. Occasionally, he saw large flocks of sea birds travelling in the same direction. Even in the storm, he knew the birds would not lose their orientation. They would re-route and head for land, and sometimes when he looked closer, he could see that the birds were actually sailing with the wind, barely working their wings, as though they were being blown along.
Many hours had past since the storm had started and every time Norm closed his eyes, over and over, wanting to sleep, he struggled to stay awake. Remembering to pray, he started reciting the Act of Contrition, ‘Oh! My God We are sorry. Forgive us our trespasses,’ and then he stopped. Church had been a long time ago. Pausing momentarily, he tried again to recite the prayer, before stopping to linger once again on the perplexing word trespass. Trespass had been a big word in his life. It protected black men’s Law and it protected white men. It breathed life for fighters; it sequestered people. The word was weightless, but had caused enough jealousies, fights, injuries, killings, the cost could never be weighed. It maintained untold wars over untold centuries – trespass. Trespassing was the word which best described his present situation, and it occurred to him that he was wrong to have taken this journey with Elias in the first place. He should have just let the girls dispose of the body. Yet he called, ‘Push the boat Elias and don’t worry about me.’
But he could not stay awake, and the last thing he saw spinning through a labyrinth of maritime tunnels was himself. He knew at once that he was entering a spiritual country forbidden to all men and their wives and their children’s children. In his dream he saw himself, as if looking from above, in the aquatic seafaring vessel called Trespass. As he watched the boat, he saw himself gliding along with the wind-driven current in a straight line. He passed place upon place where people once lived in the sea. All were devastated but each destination in turn propelled him into another, while pushing him further away into stranger places that had once existed. Each of these sacred places was wretched of hope, yet somehow capable of snatching the faith he himself had difficulty in holding, until he felt so depleted he knew neither where he was, or how to retrace the route he had been taken through to navigate his way home.
If he hoped to find his way back, he knew his hopeless task was to visualise and commit to memory the multitude of landmarks. An unfamiliar voice pointed out that these were the wrecked artefacts of an ancient past fossilised in parts of the sea where the likes of people living, who ought to leave well enough alone, should never have ventured. What he saw he knew should never have been seen again, but all the while, he was unable to turn his head and look away. He heard the names of places in a harsh language which was both strange and uninviting. Passing through the tunnels of the watery labyrinth, he noticed the sides were lined with a flowing substance not unlike slime, but when he looked closer, he saw these were ancient webs. The longest broken threads of these webs joined others in an entangled mass. They reached out like tentacles attempting to ensnare the boat as it passed through their half-woven sacs. He envisioned himself entombed in their secret places of antiquity. Forever, until one day his spirit began crystallising into a towering wave where the trade winds meet locked in battle. In this future of eternity, he lived on as a fighter of wars that were never resolved in life by becoming a death spirit, a thing so strange, it was perpetually salvaging little pieces of humanity by preying on lone seamen such as he once was himself.
Norm awoke suddenly, startled by a breathless sensation of drowning in his dreams. The rain had eased, and the little aluminium boat continued to move at a rapid speed, as though being pushed by the invisible hands of the sea on and on in its flow with the currents. Norm knew he was moving in a north-easterly direction, and there was nothing he could do. All he could feel was that Desperance was now a long way south-west from the direction of the flow. Sometime in the night, the wind dropped suddenly, and the world seemed a better place. For a further two days the boat drifted with the movement of the north-east flowing currents. Whenever Norm had the strength to try the oars, he would attempt to row, but found he could not against the will of the sea. Each time, his oars would lie flat on the surface, and would be swiftly wiped back to the side of the boat. Norm knew it was hopeless for him to change course for Desperance.
Throughout the day, he trawled for fish, and was able to catch enough trevally to start eating regular meals again. When the sun was overhead, he sat with his jacket over his head for shade, even though the heavy clouds stayed close to the waters. Sometimes he quietly sang country and western songs as though borrowing well-used treasures from his house. While he was lost in the music he visualised each of his children growing alongside a particular piece. Otherwise for the life of him he could not remember what any of his children looked like. Always he took careful notice of the movement of birds reappearing over the sea, observing their direction, where they were heading, where they had come from. Then, on the third day, he was awakened by a sound he had long forgotten. In the first dull light of morning spreading across the waters, there were several green snakes streaking across the skies. As the formations moved closer, he was relieved to see many birds flying towards him. ‘Land! Yes! Land! Where are my oars?’ He knew at once that these were only common old seagulls, but they were like the angels of the sea. He was glad to see them, now he knew land was not far away. Quickly he began to row. At last, across the rise of the dented prow, as the boat rode the first breaker over the bar, he was able to see a spectacular cloud of mist sitting on top of the ocean. The surrounding waters were encased in the silver rays of sunlight. Soon, he was over the next, then others, until the boat slid through the shallow waters up onto the beach.
Standing tall, resembling an exclamation mark on the putrid-smelling beach, Norm Phantom had no idea where he was, except that he was as inconsequential as the millions of dead fish strewn with other decaying marine life at his feet. No more, no less, and as futile and forgotten, but he could not accept that this was how it was; he was screaming, with all the ravenous sea birds gathered in their tens of thousands in a white flurrying cloud up and down the misty beach, ‘I am not one and the same as…’ Dead fish. Dead fish. The two words were locked in his throat.
The stillness of the wet bush behind him reached out like an open mouth over the edge of the sand. The sense of foreboding that he interpreted as his doomed fate made his blood run cold. He dared not enter its domain, at least not yet. Who knew what ghosts of women walked slowly through the bushlands? There but not wanted, but there so cheap, it was almost stupid not to take the offer. He visualised their taunting bodies opening and closing, lips moving and unable to hear their words. He looked out to the sea and the opening and closing of the clouds.
There had never been a moment in his life he thought, as pointless as it was now. Over the top of the deafening bird cries and the occasional sound of distant thunder, he berated the cruel contradictions of the sea gods, the spirits of the heavens, for keeping him alive. What twist of fate was there in being dumped in a hideous graveyard, this pointless massacre of life? He spoke with arrogance and irritation of his safe arrival, calling it a joke – pure and simple, as though he could talk his way out of the present, remake the past, and order the future.
‘Sea! You listening to me at this moment I am speaking to you? You are full of cruelness, you are like women, you sea! Have you finished with me yet or what?’
In reply, the sulky waves barged forward, banged, thumped and dumped their debris further up onto the beach. He jumped out of the way but it was his right to censure the sea. Though he was very weak and feeble from his ordeal, and overcome with emotion from what he had endured, it was his right to say something. So what if he had lost some of his marbles in his screwed up head? ‘I know what I am saying,’ he hollered. So with a screw loose here and there, he flounced around the rotting carcasses as though he could not smell their sickening stench. His eyes bulged unnaturally from the sockets where his dehydrated skin clung to the crevices of his bones. The wretched shorts and singlet he wore the night he rowed away from Desperance were now torn to shreds. There was no harm in letting off a bit of steam. It felt right to let all the old sea phantoms know that a man like Norm Phantom, even reduced to a mere skeleton, had more important things to do with his life than being dumped ungraciously on a place that might not even exist. He had heard of these places before. Men caught in limbo, who were condemned to live on and on in uncharted, empty patches of the sea.
The mighty sea heaved and sighed. Waves regardless of talk crashed on the beach. The wind whistled past overhead. The sea birds sang their songs here and there in their nooks and crannies late in the afternoon. Surveying the beach like a fugitive searching for a possible escape route, Norm muttered on, convincing nobody but himself of his deeply held convictions about his close relationship with the sea. He was not like other people. Plunderers! Rioters! Tyrants! So the good friend of the sea lamented his misfortune under his breath, of being locked in like a prisoner, of being reduced to a little man.
In this state of mind he started to see signs like neon lights sitting on signposts jutting out from the ocean. Road signs the equivalent of those on the highway south of Desperance – Drive Slow. Slow Down. Cattle crossing. Seasonal flooding to be expected. He read all the signs and tried to interpret them as messages from the spirits. He watched tiny insects devouring rotten fish flesh and he interpreted them as messengers, or disguised spirits. He deferred to a guardian angel looking over his shoulder – an old bearded image of himself that could have been his own shadow. He thought of the clagginess of the claypan soil, and was drawn to particular specks of sand on the beach which he thought might have originated from Desperance. Each speck was as insignificant as the other. He aligned the specks into a map for it was his normal way of understanding the world. His eyes darted from one sign to the other, as he tried to link them into a lifeline, a map which would give him reason.
The bush was still with the late afternoon lull from the wind, yet it still felt as though it was full of wild women slowly walking back and forth as they watched his progress on the beach. He needed to be heard over the silence. It was as though the sheer marvellous miracle of bringing human speech though silence had overwhelmed him. He talked and talked, telling the most fantastic of stories about himself. When the wind returned at half past ten at night, it was surprised to find him still talking after six hours, and it jumped at the chance of revenge. Sand flew up from the beach like little dust storms and wrapped around his fallen words as though it was picking up the rubbish. The sand cut into his face like attacking ants, forcing him to close his eyes, yet this did not stop him. On and on he continued, talking to the Gods, who had stopped ordering fate just to listen about the strange town called Desperance. Sea mist poured in from the ocean to salt his wounds. The taunted waves threw themselves higher up onto the beach as though they were the bottom lip of a mouth sulking, trying to reach out to him. The bush line trembled in anticipation. Plying the sea with words was a strange game but wiser men have done the same. Men tend to judge nature’s efforts to save them.
The industrious guardian angel of good sense strenuously urged Norm to move away into the bushland. In its catlike mimic of a bowerbird, it cited the industry of ants, as well as the clever beetles turning over the putrid sand, the crabs darting from hole to hole – ‘Go,’ it said, uselessly urging him to retreat to the bush. He refused to listen to a shadow, for he believed he had formed his own map of the signposts forecasting his future. Finally, he collapsed on the beach, where he sat with his strangely protruding eyes watching the waves roll through the night, too afraid to turn his back for one minute from the ocean, least the rough wave, hiding in the black night, leap out and take him.
Or had he become possessed by the sea’s mesmerising monotony of endless waves rising and falling, slap like they did, onto the beach? A fearful scene was unfolding under the roll. Just metres away in the murky grey waters, rolling with dead fish and their relatives, the sand, and slime-coated shells, he saw a city of faces which belonged to dead people staring at him through the undertow. Where even over the din of the waves crashing, and the intermittent raucous cries of squabbling birds trying to sleep, he heard windy voices seducing him into the trap for which he had been waiting.
Out yonder, in the deeper waters, the sea woman was lurking around, waiting for him in the seagrass meadows swaying backwards and forwards under the water. This was what happened; sea men knew she could be the size of an ordinary woman or she could make herself as big as the sea itself. When he was a boy long ago he had dreamt what she looked like. He saw her running about in the ocean of Desperance with hair longer than her body reaching out around her like the poisonous tentacles of the box jellyfish. And her grey skin, coarse and hard was similar to the texture of a shark, although not clean like a shark. She was covered with sheer green-blue slime that clung and hung from her body like the lace which she had collected from her jaunts, in the slime-filled caves along the ocean floor.
So the night passed into day with Norm Phantom still ensconced on the beach as though he had settled there permanently to live. His first decision was to stay on the beach to guard the boat. He neither ate nor drank as he guarded the only piece of insurance he had of leaving the land he had been thrown on. His mind hung onto limbo, a delicate branch, as leafless as it was devoid of trust.
That night, a mist crept over him while he slept on the beach. This was when he heard the devil woman Gardajala singing out from the bush. If he had been awoken by her lewd song he did not know, but he had seen her eyes shining like two golden coins – like dollars – as she stared at him through the grass on top of the rise. She kept crying how much she wanted him to come up there to her, but he was stalwart, steadfastly maintaining his repugnance as he eschewed her enticements. She was like no other woman he had ever heard, calling her sexual innuendo without shame. ‘You don’t want me, old woman prostituting yourself, I am crippled up, dried up like a prune,’ he called back, in a mocking voice, speaking back at the bush like one of the old senile men of Desperance’s Fisherman’s Hotel.
But she kept on crying out loud for him, saying he was going to crack, saying maybe he wanted to go up there and keep her warm. ‘Quiet woman!’ Come on, just one night, just until dawn. ‘You got no shame. Quiet or you will stir up herself over there in the sea watching.’ The bartering for her desires to quench his, and his to quench hers, went on until he could stand it no longer. He could almost feel his hands touching her body covered in yellow grass where she lay waiting for him. Miserable in his physical needs of lust, hunger and thirst, he strapped his hands over his ears, as he forced himself to recite over and over, ‘Don’t go thinking of her, don’t go thinking of her.’ Faster and faster he sang his little lines, at such an exciting pace, while pressing his hands hard onto his ears, and she in return begged faster, and he cried singing faster and thinking of her, wanting her, and she cried, until their ecstasy was consummated. Then, they both curled up in foetal positions on their earth beds, hers of grass, his of sand, and went to sleep.