Oh! Magic big time. A land full of tricks. The sea full of spirits. Poor land woman devil Gardajala. The sea woman, whose name must not be mentioned because she might be listening, far out at sea, was spinning herself into a jealous rage. She was almost cyclonic, if you could believe in the power of her magic. She canvassed and corralled her armies. Her movement was slow. The low cloud band radiated out a sea of mist that had already touched her old enemy Gardajala by the time Norm woke from his sleep. And all the while, all poor old Gardajala could do was to raise herself up into a wirriwidji whirly wind to throw her spiteful hand full of dirt at the sea.
Everyone in the Pricklebush knew of the poisonous countries out at sea, places where it was too dangerous for a man to go, where the spirits dwelt, like the Gundugundu men who were even more dangerous than Kadajala, the white-man devil, and those of the unhappy warring spirit warriors of the old wars. Gundugundu spirits, if riled up enough, could kill a man straight out in the middle of their stormy wars – not just leave him halfway crashing into the ocean like what happened to Norm Phantom. The movement of Gundugundu was always swift. Faster than a fish or bird. No living person would be capable of seeing them with their eyes.
Only the old people blind in the eye watched them flying through the air inside of cyclones. Those old people used to tell stories to their families when the cyclones were about. Perhaps their stories were an invention of their imagination whenever they got a funny feeling under their skin, but whatever it was, it was uncanny how they always knew when someone was going to die in mysterious circumstances by a bolt of lightning. One would never know if it was the will of God, or whatever was out there in those waters of the oceans, but everyone in the Pricklebush expected to hear the news before someone died of mysterious circumstances during a cyclone. So say: Oh! No! They never walked to pick up souls. They got legs alright, and feet too, but funny thing that, because they do not use them, maybe they can’t but just fly about instead. Once a child asked if they had any shoes. Some did. Some wore something on their feet. Sometimes these spirits had to travel over land, travelling many hundreds of kilometres to carry out their ghastly business, but still, they never used their legs and feet to walk. Whenever they came to kill, it all happened in a split second. Afterwards, utter calm was restored.
The boat was stuck fast in the sand where the ocean had dumped it on the previous day. Now, as another king tide built deepening trenches over the sand, Norm failed to notice the water encroaching around the sides of the boat and those watery arms cunningly drawing back enough sand to steal it. Norm heard a small voice telling him to save the boat, but he refused to listen to voices, just as he had refused to listen to the sound of his stomach telling him to eat. Instead, he prayed for matches. ‘God help me to make a fire. I got to have a fire tonight to keep those devils away.’ The small voice said he would make the fire if Norm would help to move the boat up onto higher ground. But Norm refused to acknowledge the voice. ‘You got to light a fire first before moving the boat,’ Norm said, puckering up one side of his lips that indicated he wanted the fire lit back up towards the bush, without turning his head around to look at it.
Suddenly – Norm thought he was becoming even more delirious – the aluminium boat was moving. ‘Hold up,’ Norm grunted, but his movement was slow and weak. As he struggled to get to his feet, he saw that the boat was not being moved by the incoming tide, but through the efforts of a small five- or six-year-old boy with his head bent to the back of the boat, struggling to push it higher up the beach. ‘Hold up, Will,’ Norm said, instantly recognising the boy as his own son, but the child ignored him. Norm looked at the boy who was knee-deep in water, desperately pushing with all his might. Norm could not believe it, for there was Will, as though all those intervening years had not passed. Now, on his feet, somehow with the restored strength of a man half his age, Norm was able to help the boy until the boat was lugged higher onto the beach.
Once again, the old man’s weakness forced him to sit down on the sand, where he slipped into the luxury of his wandering thoughts which were more alive than the busy boy. Yet, undeniably, he could see for himself that the boy was real live flesh and blood. ‘You are a good boy, Will, always a good boy,’ he said, but the boy was not listening. The boy, with his brown skin, covered in sand and dried sea salt, and wind-swept brown hair, had leapt into the boat, and was rummaging around through the plastic containers.
‘Can I use these?’ he asked Norm, while holding out some fishing line and hooks.
‘Sure, Will,’ Norm smiled, ‘run off quick smart and get the rest of them kids to help you.’
The boy looked at Norm for a moment and said, ‘Alright, I’ll get us some fish.’ Then without hesitation he was off, running up the beach, leaving Norm looking at the waves and saying half-heartedly, ‘And tell your Mother I am here too.’
The afternoon passed by as the sun receded lower in the horizon, until finally the clouds became blood red, and the water looked as though it was on fire. Norm thought Will ought to be coming back any minute now. It would not be easy to have to find him in the dark. His old impatience of his children returned, and triggered his grumbling about how they never listened to what they had been told. ‘Well! I have told him. Told him many times about how much those devil-devils were looking for good-looking kids like him in the night.’ He began to hear the devil woman’s voice crying and singing as she moved through the bushes behind the sand bank. She complained about how her family would just turn up whenever it suited them: But you are not like proper family. You don’t know what love is.
‘He’s a good boy. Always listens to me,’ Norm tried to reassure himself, ignoring the bush woman. He looked up the beach where the boy had gone, half expecting to see the rest of the family coming back. The expectation of seeing his little children rollicking around as they always did gave him pleasure. He held the joyful memory and took greater pleasure wiping aside all the whispering doubts in the back of his mind, questioning what was real: saying the boy was false. Not Norm though, he chose the best times as his parable. Sand, sun, happy family. It freed him from the impossible future that showed no easy path to the home he had left.
Life was good waiting for the children to come down to the beach, and he found himself promising this and promising that. Everything would be good from now on. Everything. It was so good to start again, to be given one’s time over – another chance. The waves kept roaring in, and old Gardajala started up in her windy song, singing, There was nothing as foolish as a silly old fool who lost his boat, lost his wife and lost his house, his children too, and what is he going to do, sitting by himself, lonely by himself, and coming by himself, to me. She could make a singsong all night out of nothing. He knew other women like that.
Over his head, she blew treacherously taunting words in her wind. He had ducked for cover behind the boat, when all at once, he saw her long hair blow out of the bush in a gigantic whorly wind, carrying a solemn haze of red dust, large flocks of sea birds, and seagulls, in among clouds of white down feathers from the rookeries in the swamps over the sand rise.
When she disappeared out to sea to find her opponent, he was again surprised when he looked down the beach for the boy. What came instead of children after the dust, feathers and birds, was the screeching of a lone cockatoo flying up the beach towards him. It reminded Norm of his bird Pirate. ‘Where’s your flock, boy?’ the bird hollered out its question, like so, whenever he clapped eyes on Norm walking out of the house in Desperance. The bird fell out of the wind like a little spirit. The little black eyes peered at Norm. It looked and looked, until suddenly it announced matter-of-factly, in a flat voice, ‘What are you doing?’ Less feathered than Norm remembered him, the bird’s remaining feathers, enough for flight, were covered with filth and oil.
‘Hello old boy, how did you get here?’ Norm said, putting out his hand for the bird to come to him.
A spray of sand went flying through the air as the boy landed smack bang between them. The bird jumped back in fright.
‘What the hell you go and done that for?’ Norm asked as he retreated his hand with its twiddling fingers.
‘You leave him alone,’ said the boy running to swoop up the bird in his arms.
‘You are handling him too much with your filthy hands. No wonder his feathers are falling out,’ Norm said, chastising the child’s dirty fish-oil-stained shorts and fish-smelling body.
‘No it aren’t.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘No it aren’t.’
The boy ploughed back up through the sand towards the bush where the whirlwind had passed with the bird perched on his head. The sea wind blew down over the top of them. Funny sort of kid, Norm thought, briefly watching the boy, reasoning it was not like Will at all to start behaving like that. A half an hour would have passed before the boy came back down the beach, bird still sitting on his head, carrying a blue plastic bucket. When he reached Norm, the boy plonked the bucket down in front of him, then he took his own place in the sand some distance away.
‘Nice fish,’ Norm said, looking at four charred-baked barra covered in fire ash stuffed into the bucket. ‘You want some Will?’
The boy looked at Norm, shook his head with the bird on top, and sat waiting for him to eat.
‘Where’s Mum?’ Norm asked eventually, after he had eaten one of the fish. He felt nauseous from eating too fast.
‘None of your business,’ the boy replied.
‘Course it’s my business, your Mum’s my business, that bird on your head is my business too. And, you are my business.’
‘Bird aren’t yours.’
‘Look Will.’
‘And I aren’t Will either.’
‘Oh! Then who am I if you are not Will.’
‘Malbu, I don’t know who you are, and my name is not Will either.’
‘Old man am I? What’s your name then if you are not Will either?’
The boy points to the sky and says, ‘Bala.’
‘Since when did that happen?’
‘That’s my name Malbu – my Mum and Dad called it to me.’
‘Your Mum and Dad eh! And their name?’
‘My Mum,’ whispered Bala. ‘Well! Her name was Hope and me Dad is Will Phantom.’
Norm stopped eating. He placed the fish back into the bucket. He looked hard at the boy. He did not know Will had a child but then, why would he know anything? Who told him a thing anymore? Of all the things Will had to go and do to the family. ‘I am going to kill that bastard when I see him.’ Yes, Norm decided on the spot, Will had gone too far this time. The old hostilities jumped from his heart into his head. Instantly, there was no sign of Will in the child anymore. Only the family resemblances from the other side stood out, as clear as day, he was surprised he had not seen it straightaway. ‘I must have been mad,’ he mumbled, unable to stop the words coming out of his mouth. He was staring at the child as though he was looking Old Midnight in the face.
The boy moved back out of reach, sensing the poison pouring out of the heart of the old man for whom he had cooked the fish. He thought the fish might have been one of the poisonous fish, like the puffer fish. He glanced in the bucket just to make sure he had not made a mistake. He edged further away just in case the old Malbu grabbed him because he might be a Gundugundu man, or some other devil-devil from the sea. He might have been the one who killed all of the fish along the beach. The small boy was reminded of his Mother’s voice: ‘Stay away from all strangers here Bala.’ He knew he had to be careful and he should not have fed the old man. She said they had to hide from the bad people because they might be devil-devils in disguise. He had asked her to explain what was disguise. She said anyone he did not know. But he thought the old Malbu looked very sick. That was why he fed him. He contemplated how he was going to take the bucket away from Malbu because he needed to keep it.
He knew his Mum would be mad if he lost the bucket. She had said they could not afford to lose anything. He did not want to make her angry. It was only that he was lonely that he helped the old man, old Malbu, because he sat on the beach and did not move. He had watched him all day and when he did not move, he had been convinced he could not walk. It would be alright he thought to make a friend of Malbu. Even if they were friends just long enough to see what he could use from the boat, because they needed things like fishing line and hooks. Then the old man could go back to the sea.
Norm saw how frightened the boy was by the way he had become withdrawn. He was the living image of his father – Will the capable: ‘Will the fucking stupid who went off with that stupid slut Hope from the other side. Living dandaayana.’ The thought of mixing their blood with his, was like a hex. His face twisted up into a knot. But the truth, terrible in its reality, was that any dandaayana people could produce a child that looked like the pride of the Phantom breed, which was what everyone thought of Will, until he went stupid. Norm considered how his own flesh and blood was the worst kind of mongrel who went around looking for trouble, until he caught the dandaayana people’s disease which he claimed must make you stupid. Now, way out in the bloody woop woop of Christ knows where, sorry Lord but it was true, Norm told himself, ‘I finds some kid who happens to be my grandchild.’
‘Give me the bucket Malbu,’ Bala demanded, standing up in the sand, with his hand out ready to snatch the bucket and run off with it. Norm gave him the bucket and thanked him for the fish.
‘I will bring you more tomorrow,’ Bala says, relieved it did not require a fight.
‘Alright little fellow, you do that. You can take some more hooks and line from the boat if you want too.’
‘Maybe tomorrow then.’
Norm watched the boy hurry away up along the beach where the wet sand was firm and hard, and turn over the sand dune before disappearing into the dark bush of pandanus palms and mangroves dotting the coast.
Norm brushed away the proud feelings. What was the use of it? he thought, when he knew that mixing up with the other side was what causes problems, like all their rotten luck, ever since the families started mixing up together. He knew who to blame for that. Angel. No, not the seagulls or any other kind of angel doing good deeds like saving lost fishermen. Norm meant that woman, Angel. For years he had watched her bringing trouble into their home. Saw with his own eyes how she established her kind of lazy example. He knew how kids watched the Mother. They knew. He remembered telling her many times this would happen but she ruined her kids anyway, before walking off without even saying goodbye to anybody because she could not be bothered. Her choice, and he cried wishing he could bring her to this place for a minute to actually show her how she had ruined their lives. Life was just full of bad luck, bad luck, bad luck. If she could see this child, she would know straightaway that it was her fault.
Norm rose to his feet. He wanted to fight somebody. He wanted to fight her. She must have heard him because she came back to fight. Norm started throwing his weight around the beach while Angel was throwing her weight around in his mind, swinging her hips in his face, a blade of sweet buffel grass hanging from her lips. The green stem stuck through her teeth bobbed up and down while she cursed him. Diseased salt fish she called him. Doors slammed around her. It reminded him how she loved slamming doors. He noticed he had even conjured up his frightened-eyed children onto the beach too, to watch.
Doors opened in the transparency of images while others slammed shut as the couple pursued each other throughout a house that now consisted entirely of doors. In one of these doors, Will blocked the entrance. Norm had momentarily frozen when he saw the anger in Will’s eyes before he turned his back and walked away. The door slammed behind him with an earth-shattering din. Another door flew open. He looked to see Will again. The anger perplexed him. He needed to see it again to make sure he had really seen it at all.
The doors were as if they had been strung inside a malfunctioning weather clock with the fairweather lady and the rainy man. In and out. One went in while the other came out. Nobody knew how the weather would turn out. Norm was amazed with the revelation. It was just like life. Here he was. He would have to start again. This he would do by building himself a new home.
He started to pull everything he had left to his name out of the boat: plastic containers, oars, rope, some fishing tackle and hooks, a knife. Together he stacked them neatly on the beach in one spot. Not satisfied, the stack was shifted and restacked several times. He struggled to roll the dinghy over on its back. Next, he pulled it around side on to the sea to create a windbreak. He looked at the oars, but with the thought of something happening to them – snapping unexpectedly under the weight of the boat – he decided they were too precious to use. A sudden flash of pain flew through his chest. It reminded him of how he could die just from thinking about what could go wrong. What was wrong with devouring life like a big meal? ‘People did it,’ he thought, while deciding what to use instead of the oars, ‘people like Will for instance. I suppose he never got a bellyache from eating too much bad apple.’
Old rope, old rope, he decided. He glanced at the various shapes and sizes of logs and bits of driftwood scattered over the beach from the storm. There were trunks of magnificent trees, uprooted pandanus palms, mangled mangrove trees. The discovery was just beginning. There were whole rainforest trees that had the soil eroded from their root systems by excavating floodwaters and tidal surges. Norm estimated that these had floated down mighty rivers from countries halfway across the world. They had been thrown out alive into the seas, and now, had washed up on scores of foreign beaches like exiles. Finally, all trees landed on this shoreline where the spirits waged their gloomy wars.
There were plenty of strong limbs from branches to be found, to rig up a prop to lean against the side of the upside-down dinghy. He eventually lay down and went to sleep and dreamt of the Milky Way. In his dreams, he began sorting out the star patterns, viewing one then the next, after which he jumbled them up and waited, while some tumbled back into place, others slightly realigned themselves, and he travelled along the new settings, memorising his route, then way into the heart of his sleep, the way home.
This was a dream full of rich thoughts of spectacular places. The sea he saw was full of depressing wars, heavy with dark shadows of things he was unable to determine. There were no broken lines. Each place had its own star, and he knew the only safe route as he travelled, had to be full of brightness which would only be revealed in dreams. No broken-down man, one who had lost the belief in his own strength, should follow any route until he saw the stars illuminated in his dreams like streetlights, safely showing him the direction to travel.
His dream died as soon as he started to follow the track. He had passed the lit road, and into the darkness, he became fearful of what lay beyond the first corner. The what-ifs. Hell if he went forward or backwards panicked him into wakeful vigilance of the sea. Although the night was not waiting for him, his thoughts of dying in his sleep from the fear of his own dreams kept him awake. When he finally fell into a deeper sleep, thoughts lingered of distant storms circling him as though they were strapped over his back. He saw the warriors of the spiritual wars using their mighty lightning weapons to jump across the skies and bolt into the earth where the dead people raced up so they might grow into waves as high as towers. The towers became barricades in his seaward journey. Constantly, he saw himself thrown into paths of diversion chosen by these barricades, forcing him to float around in the life of an exile in a sea maze, who knows where.
In the morning, he was woken in a startled state by his own coughing and the horrible, familiar sound drilling into his brain. Listening to the rain and the waves crashing, he recognised the screeching of the cockatoo. The bird was sitting on top of the dinghy just above him with its white angelic wings stretched wide and flapping wildly in the breeze. ‘So you must be my bird after all,’ Norm said, although he wished it was otherwise. The bird poured life back into the soul but made you forget your dreams. When the bird spotted Norm’s interest, it broke into the loud-mouthed lingua franca it had learnt in the Pricklebush. For a moment Norm thought he was home, until he realised tears were falling from his eyes, and the cause of his coughing was dense smoke. He had almost cried, for on the sand in front of him he saw the remains of a fire, and in the ashes of a log that had burnt all night, the unburnt bits were still smouldering.
For a long time he sat looking at the fire, throwing bits of dry sticks in to get it started again. If he could keep the fire going, he would be able to look after himself forever. Or at least, for as long as it takes either to die or survive. There would be no need to go running to the no-good son to save him, wherever he was, who could have at least checked on his own father’s health. ‘I could be dying you idiot.’ Never mind about giving the likes of him any thought. Now, with the fire, Norm reasoned, while rubbing his hands together, he would be able to catch whatever he wanted: fish, crab, prawn, plant and animal from the bush, and cook it. He reassured himself as he surveyed his surroundings that from what he could determine, a man could get real strong in this place.
He felt certain that it must have been the boy. Norm guessed the little fellow had come back in the night and made the fire to keep the devils away. This was good. He was a good boy. Where was he? Norm looked up to the bush but saw nothing except the pandanus palms now laden with red nuts which he had failed to notice before, and further down the beach, closer up to the water mark, thick mangrove swamps stretched into the sea. It was low tide over the mudflat. The view was empty and lonely. Surveying the broad stretch of its circumference, Norm looked out for the boy; so long as he did not show up with his Mother. Even the blessing of a night’s sleep was insufficient to soften his resolve never to set eyes on the parents as long as he was able to breathe air. The plan was short-lived. Norm strolled off down the beach in search of the boy.
‘Bala,’ he called several times up to the bush, but received no answer except a lonely silence. The copycat bird called, ‘Bala,’ and Norm watched it fluff its chest feathers. It occurred to him that if he followed the bird, he might be able to find their camp. He would not go into the camp itself. It would be the last thing he wanted to do, to go about inviting himself to his son’s place. He decided if he found the camp, he might go nearby, stand off in the bush where he could have a bit of a look. See what sort of turnout they got themselves, these invisible people.
Norm knew that Will could look like a pandanus tree if he wanted to hide. He knew how to melt away into countryside. In a flat stretch of claypan, Will could flatten himself out behind the clumps of yellowing grasses and become caked mud all afternoon while a search party walked all over him. Norm knew there were police searching for Will, shame of the family. The government were after him too and you do not go around playing with the government – mucking them up. ‘It was not dangerous,’ Norm thundered, pushing Will out of the yard. ‘It was plain stupid because nobody can change the government.’ Norm had often heard some government politician talking about Will on the radio. He remembered listening to all the talking voices describing Will Phantom as a curse to the Gulf who had to be stopped, and Norm agreed. He empathised with the tone of the voices he heard over the radio talking about the trouble Will was causing to everyone in the Gulf, and in the State of Queensland, and the nation, by stopping business at the mine. ‘They sound the same as me,’ he said happily. ‘We all want to kill the bugger.’
Always trying to save the world, well, look where it got him. Norm turned and surveyed the emptiness of his surroundings and the cloud-filled sky. This was where you end up from trying to stop the mine and ordinary people from doing their work. He wished the people from the radio station had come around and interviewed him about Will because he would have told them everything they wanted to know. He would have told them it was not only the white people who wanted to kill him. There were Aboriginal people who wanted to kill the bugger too, including his own father. Go ahead police. Go and find him and lock him up.
‘I made you somewhere to stay old man,’ Bala said when he arrived.
‘Ah! Bala! I am alright here, I got to stay here and mind the boat.’
‘No Malbu, it is too dangerous here. We got to get off the beach and hide the boat now,’ Bala said firmly.
The boy started to kick sand over the fire but Norm tried to stop him by reaching out and pushing him away. The little boy was too quick, ducking and weaving himself from Norm, keeping on the other side of the fire, kicking more sand over the fireplace until he had smothered the smoke. Then he went around the back of the boat and knocked it down flat.
‘What did you do that for?’ Norm yelled at him in an angry voice.
‘Shh! Listen! Be quiet. This is a quiet place. Always quiet. Always hide.’
The boy pointed out to sea, then pointed up to the sky out at sea, and brought his arm down and around until his hand slapped down on the boat. He gave Norm the serious look of Will Phantom, who spoke with the gravity of the final word on any matter. ‘Shh! And pack up, Malbu, cause I got to take you away from here.’
‘You put that boat back up you little bugger, go on,’ Norm demanded.
The boy ignored him and started to pick up a plastic container but Norm pulled it back and placed it in the neatly paraded belongings of all he had left in the world.
‘Where’s that father of yours anyway? He should have come down to see me. When I see him I got words to say to him. You tell him to get his black arse down here and tell me what he is doing here, because I am waiting and I am sick of waiting. I don’t know what they are going to say the world is coming too, when I tell them a little boy is going around telling his old grand-daddy what to do.’
‘You are an old man but you are not my grand daddy because my daddy said he is one smart man, even if he is not talking to us, and sometimes he only talked rubbish anyway. I know one thing for sure, you not smart, Malbu,’ the boy did not mind arguing back as he snatched for the plastic containers. He was talking his head off just like his father: diverting while trying to make a grab at any of the old man’s precious belongings. He was determined to make off with the pieces he snaffled, until there was nothing left for Norm to stay around for.
‘What you say about you Daddy? Him saying what? If his name is Will Phantom then I am his Daddy. You tell him to come down here at once because I want to talk to him.’
‘You prove it first.’
‘How am I going to prove it? You just do what I tell you, that’s what,’ demanded Norm, feeling hungry. He had not eaten yet and the situation was becoming annoying, and he would be telling Will straight out as soon as he clapped eyes on him just what kind of Mother he had given his son. ‘Fancy yourself now stuck with one of those Wangabiya dandaayana kind. Where’s their manners?’ The boy was like an animal. This was what you get when you do things against your family. He would tell him that.
To search for their daily food…
Squadrons of sea birds from rookeries in the swamps flew low over the beach, then gradually ascended into the cloudy skies across the low tide mudflats towards the darkened sea. Simulating his grievances with the world, Norm Phantom lay prostrate in the sand in a statuesquely comic pose, wishing he were dead. Bala was thinking of leaving the old man lie there with his battered dinghy forever. The birds flew around performing single loops before dropping down like projectiles onto the mudflat. Slightly distracted by their performance, the child reminded himself to scan the skies for the bad men. The old man had created a dangerous situation for them. Whatever interest he originally had of befriending the old man was fading. Even the possessions he had snatched seemed useless. Each would only have a limited life. Fishhooks break. Fishing lines end up snagged. He was not interested in lugging around the plastic containers or the Pepsi bottles. He was tired of carrying things around.
With a little scratch under his salt-laden hair which was forever itchy, Bala estimated that his own gear would last awhile, and all he had to decide to do was to run away. The old skeleton man? Well! He would leave him. He could live or he could die. Most probably he would die soon. The child thought the man would probably die when the next high tide came rushing in with a storm. Either today, he thought, or tomorrow. It did not matter, for he would die. And if not by the sea plucking him right off the beach; well, he would die when the bad men returned. Bala felt cold. He could already feel the presence of the other men sneaking along the bush line when it became dark. If the old man was just sitting out on the beach like a sitting duck; well! they would sneak up until they captured him. He thought of his Mother again and he felt scared and wanted to run. She had warned him to leave no signs for the bad men, and here was old Malbu with his boat tilted on its side, like a big shiny beacon. Its storm-scoured underbelly would be seen from the sea, and if they came flying in a helicopter again, Bala knew they would see it easily from the air.
‘You want some duck?’ Bala finally asked.
‘What duck?’
‘I’ve got a duck if you want it.’
‘Well! Alright, you get it then and we can cook it together if you like.’
‘I’ll get the duck if you promise to help me make you another camp.’
‘And what about your Father, will he come there too?’
‘Maybe, I’ll have to ask him and see what he thinks.’
‘Did he tell you I take fish from the ocean and make them dance in thin air? I bet he didn’t tell you I am the best fisherman that ever breathed, or that I can talk to the birds for company, and I follow the tracks made by the stars so I never get lost, and sometimes, I go away fishing and never come back until people forget my name?’
‘He told me you make your family cry and if you know all of those things then how come you got lost?’
‘You go and get the duck.’
Bala stalked off, straight back up over the sand dune, and disappeared into the bush. On his way, the child thought about the possibility of finding a wondrous old man in someone like Malbu. Was it true he could follow tracks made by stars? He must have lost his power to make people cry.
Malbu reminded Bala of a lot of things. One night, when he was out in the boat fishing, his father told him, if you know the stars you can always find your way home. Since that time he always looked at the vast network of stars at night. He was already teaching himself so that by the time he grew up he would know how to travel in the skies. But as for mixed-up Malbu, who got washed up in the bad storm that carried off half the beach, threw up dead fish, and stranded dugongs to dry out and die on the sand, Bala believed he was lucky to be alive.
Of course he did not know what he was going to do about Malbu, since he thought Malbu was an idiot. If he knew his way by the stars like a magic person, he should have been able to drive storms away too, shouldn’t he? At least the old man was too stupid to be one of the bad men. If he had been sent by the bad people he would not have mentioned his Mother because he would have known she was dead. All of his questions came with quick answers. If Malbu was his grandfather it did not matter because his Dad said they had to be alone, and his grandfather made his family cry.
All he wanted was for his father to come back so he could tell him what had happened. He wished he never found the old man who made him think too much. He wished the old man had not come at all, because up to now, he had been alright just looking after himself. It had been pretty easy because all he had to do was what his Mother had told him – keep out of the way of anyone. Now, angry with himself, he located and tried to frighten as many roosting birds as he could find, while lamenting how he now had to get food and water not only for himself, but carry it all back for the old Malbu too.
The pandanus bulalula palms and she-oak trees closed in behind the boy with a swish, as though the bush wished to conceal him as he walked through the yellow green grasses that stood a metre tall. His feet were hardened like any bush animal’s to tolerate the scorching ground littered with burrs, and he passed on, upsetting nothing, completely unnoticed by the peewee birds and crows resting in the silent melaleuca trees and paperbark woodland, decorated for Christmas with bouquets of red mistletoe flowers and the sleepy olive vines of wild medicine and maloga beans.
As Norm watched the boy tramp over the rise, he considered following him into the hinterlands of the island. The moment passed. He had no courage to explore its unfamiliar territory. Instead, listening to the crows culk and chuckle to each other, he understood they were talking to each other over vast distances. Perhaps they had the whole island under surveillance. Their sounds only emphasised how much he did not know. How to interpret his feeling of the presence of the many spirits which belonged to this place? The crowding over the sand dune made him feel as though he had arrived on the outskirts of a town, full of anxiety and anticipation. Yet, in reality, the landscape gave the impression of being a dead country. Something that belonged to no countrymen. He felt incapable of deciphering between authentic vision and what he had falsely created for his own benefit.
He sensed that only the sea claimed this land. Inside the bush, whatever powers – dangerous, malevolent – were crowding on the other side of the sand dune, he believed had originated from the sea. Terrible truths tumbled from his mind. The night sounds of souls divesting themselves, were possessed, without shame, with a yearning for the roar of the ocean. Underneath him he felt the sand was full of the sea’s malevolent powers. A poisonous country sapping his strength. More and more he dreaded its hinterland. Things had to be different. This was not his destiny.
Norm thought it was just like Will to have made a pact with the devil spirits so as to settle his family on such a place. Nobody else would have thought of such a haven. With no other logical explanation for his being dumped by the sea in the same place, Norm assumed he was being punished for Will’s dalliance. In his imagination, a man thrown off course in a storm that should have killed him, should have at least been allowed to end up anywhere. There was the whole world for goodness’ sake. Why the same place as Will? Well! So far, with his son Bala, so far.
Thinking about Bala, Norm grew more positive about his own circumstances. How could he explain Bala? It occurred to him that Bala was in the realm of God’s providence. And he suddenly realised why. Of course. His fingers snapped automatically: an action of forgotten years which even surprised him at his age. He knew it. He would have to look after the boy, because the boy was alone, there was no Will and no Mother either. He now understood why the child kept coming by himself and avoided answering any requests to bring his father. He saw the child’s face looking out to sea, something of Will in his face, something unexplainable, the look of fortitude which only belonged in the faces and eyes of seasoned soldiers.
So, where were his parents? Why was the child alone? He wished he could be wrong even though he knew differently. He felt the truth in his bones. Anxious again with the disturbance of thunder, he half expected something terrible was going to happen to them. In a flash, Norm saw a large hawk swooping down, talons, hooks, before these snapped through his back. Through sickening eyes he saw the sea underneath spin by until his release: a fall into a bloodied nest. The vision vanished.
Norm surveyed the seascape, closely examining every bump in the ocean, out past the birds wading in the distance of the outgoing tide, to the breakers and beyond: anything that showed signs of moving. His eyes scoured from one end of the beach to the other. The skies were growing fuller with thick clouds quickly passing over the coastline, punctured by flights of birds returning to the rookeries. It would not be too long before it started to rain again. Norm was in two minds whether to wait on the beach for the boy to return, or to start moving the boat up over the sand dune before the storm arrived.
Bird squalls calling up the rain could be heard coming out of the clouds, as well as the occasional throaty sound similar to an old man clearing his throat. It was the channel-billed cuckoo heralding its arrival from its long flight overseas: And people died useless deaths. People who were fishing people, people who grew crops, people who had families and told each other stories. Norm shook his head. He had heard the stories a thousand times. He had to concentrate on the bird squalls warning of the drop of pressure in the atmosphere. Somewhere out at sea a swell was building and might turn into a tidal surge. Norm expected the incoming tide would be affected by the winds and the power of the storm. It would bring in the surge and it was going to be high.
Still, the wise weather birds hovered stationary in the air like beacons out over the tidal flat. Their heads turned in the direction of the oncoming storm. All he could do was wait for their judgement. One by one, the birds dropped from their hovering positions, noisily signalling squalls to the others below, and took flight. This meant one hell of a storm was heading directly towards the coastline. Anxiously, Norm scanned the rise hoping the boy would appear. ‘Why did he not see the clouds running inland?’ The skinny-legged foraging birds were lifting off the tidal flats and quickly returning inland. Soon, they were joined by other birds flying back from places further offshore.
From far out at sea, the big, black frigate birds flew in, travelling at great speed. He estimated they were flying at one hundred miles an hour. They were getting out of the way. The low clouds of densely-packed white birds flying towards him as they made their way inland had assumed the supernatural appearance of the spirits. Norm had never seen anything so spectacular or beautiful as this flight of the ancestral beings of the sea. Their flight was so low, each time one of these clouds came towards him, Norm had to bend over to avoid a collision.
Weighing up demons, Norm was convinced that the spirits lording over the sea were a much worse fate to relive again, than the devil woman and her cronies living in the bush. So, placing a length of rope around the top end of the empty boat, he dragged it up over the sand dune. He knew the last straw, a moaning wind, or even a lesser howling wind, would be sufficient to pick up the boat like a toy and throw it around the beach.
With the boat settled amongst the pandanus, he returned to the beach to collect the remainder of his fishing gear and the oars. He looked for the boy. The clouds were even more ominous with lightning shooting spears that exploded back and forth across the skies. Norm dragged the boat further inland where the bush was denser, and its hanging branches closed like doors behind him. He tied the boat against a large eucalyptus and stacked all of the containers inside. He made a place for himself and the boy to shelter out of the winds behind the secured boat. Every now and then he went back down to the beach to wait for the boy to come, but still there was no sign of him. Perhaps the boy had decided not to come back. It was hard to tell. The wind was now howling in from the sea and the flying sand was cutting into his body. Norm knew he had to take cover. Maybe his father was around after all, and took the kid off some place else. As long as he was safe, thought Norm. He headed for cover, struggling over the sand dune, until he reached the boat.
Bala was in the swamp when the storm struck the coastline. He had heard the birds coming back to the rookeries, but having made spears from the spearwood trees in the swamp, he was intent on stalking a group of ducks. At first, the wind made the waters ripple, and then it blew faster until the slender trees were bending to ground level. Water poured down the sides of every rise, down from the low hills, through the gullies and into the swamp, and very quickly the knee-deep water was up to the level of his neck. The boy struggled to keep his head above water and stay afloat in the deeper waters that were pouring through the swamp in a flood. The swamp soon became a wide river roaring though the bush as it found its ancient path down to the coast to join the sea.
Meanwhile, the tidal surge had overtaken the mudflats, as its grey waters moved in faster and deeper to drown the mangroves and slap itself against the sand dune. When it could go no further, the waters poured back to the sea, forming a wave that grew as it came rushing back to force itself against the sandbank, and again reaching its pinnacle, retreated. Each time this happened, millions of tons of sand were carried back in the roll. As Norm listened to the deafening roar of the sea stripping into the sand dune, he knew the sea would eat its way through the sandbank and tear into the bush.
The boy had quickly lost his foothold in the flooding, and the dumularra floodwaters hurried him swiftly away through the bush. Rushed along with everything else, he saw branches, trees, hollow logs – the boa constrictor snake hanging off the top of a platform of leaf litter. He had lost the duck he had caught. He reached out for tree branches, but no sooner had he gripped a hand full of leaves or a branch his weight and the speed of the flooding waters pulled him away.
The jackhammer waves tore further into the sandbank. Norm, forcing his way through slapping branches bent over by the sheer force of the oncoming wind and rain beating into his face, unable to see further than a few metres ahead, struggled to crawl up to the top of the sand dune. He looked down at the clawing waters and saw nothing else. He knew that the other side of the wall had been torn down and at any moment, if he did not move fast, the rest would topple. He rolled down the dune and ran.
The lashing rain tore at his hands as he worked as quick as he could to untie the boat. Panicking, he roped the plastic water containers, while pouring out enough of the stored water to decrease the weight inside the dinghy. He hauled the loaded boat through the wet eucalyptus and melaleuca bush, in his desperate bid to find higher ground.
Soon, he realised he was struggling to stay in front of the little boat as it slid easily over the wet leaves. Hurried by the gale force of the tailwind, both he and the dinghy flew through the flattened bush side by side. Broken branches and snapped trees bustled past, sometimes crashing over them, before stumbling on. Each of these flying objects resembled the yinbirras. These were fairy-like people the good storytellers told about the strange Yanngunyi tribe whose true home was beyond the sea.
The yinbirras, they said, were related to all of the tribes. These Yanngunyi were people who lived beside other real people, and even though you could hear them going about their daily business, shouting at each other to listen, they would not let anyone see them because they ‘did not want to be found’, or ‘made civilised’. Or something else could have happened to these half-deaf fairy creatures. The old people hotly debated the fate of the Yanngunyi. Envoys were dispatched to debate theories throughout the Gulf of Carpentaria. They even went back and forth between East and Westside camps to talk about the latest ‘so-called’ glimpses of the yinbirras. The old people of Westside remained resolute however, that sometime, no one remembered when, because no one was keeping a look at the clock, those people simply disappeared into the wilderness of life. Why? Because they did not want their histories contaminated with oppression under the white man’s thumb.
They were pure people and the storytellers said they were black angels. It amazed him to see them running past him through the bush. Some were quick runners, faster than any kind of ordinary person he had ever seen before in his life. He kept moving as quickly as he could to save himself, but all the same the yinbirras sent cold shivers running right up and down his spine. Not that he was frightened of them, or the bush woman Gardajala, he was far too preoccupied for her. What kept screaming through his head was the fact that he was on the land, beyond the sea. The yinbirras too kept running, but tried to distract him by calling out to him in their strange tongue. He looked behind and saw others running along in the same direction as him, normal people, women and men carrying their children, and old people being helped along by the younger people.
There was something even stranger in the way that they ran, it was as though they glided through the bush, but perhaps he was doing the same because he felt light and the boat felt even lighter. People appeared on both sides of him, and when he looked behind because the boat felt as light as paper, he saw some young men were actually pushing the boat from behind. A fish-faced old woman with eucalyptus leaves strewn through her wildly flowing, wet white hair, sat in the boat. She gave him a toothless smile although he could see she had a look of sheer terror written as plain as day, all over her face. While shielding his own face from the rain, he tried to call out to her over the thunderous sea slamming all of the world’s rubbish into the sand dune.
‘Wanyingkanyi ninji nanagkurru jila?’ What are you doing there? And she, like a queen, said grandiloquently, ‘Wawaru. Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ Her voice had a guttural sound as though a tree had spoken. Then she said things to him in a language he did not understand. She looked as though she was quarrelling with him, and when he kept looking at her and not understanding a word she was saying, she gave up. Instead, still scowling, she wiggled her fingers at him to look ahead if he did not want to fall over. Her action excited Norm’s curiosity even further, for when she wiggled her fingers, he believed he saw fresh green eucalypt leaves spring from their tips. The leaves immediately flew through the wind and several hit him in the face. He smelt her astringent aroma, and when he was stung in the eye, he instantly turned his head back to the direction he, they, she, the wind and rain were heading.
Now fully focusing his attention ahead of him, and following the others running through the bush, and believing that they must know where they were going, since he knew he had no clue at all where he was, he hoped to reach the high ground. Then, through the sound of waves crashing in the distance, a chorus of voices was calling him, something like malirriminji wadara Malbu, old prickly bush humpy man. They knew where he was from. He felt he was in the middle of another nightmare. He had to turn around, just once, to see his tormenters. Now the boat was crowded with old fish women who bared their open mouths at him. He guessed that there had to be at least twenty crammed together like sardines, hissing him on. To his disbelief and incomprehension, for he knew that together, they could not have weighed a kilo, because it cost him nothing to carry them. These women were also dressed in muddy clothes scattered with leaves and foliage fallen from trees, as though they had just risen from the wet ground where they had been sleeping.
He turned briefly to check how clear his path was ahead, to be sure there were no trees to smash against, and when he looked back, he yelled, ‘Wanyimba?’ They did not change their expression or respond, and he screamed at them again, ‘Wanyimba?’ What’s wrong? ‘Wanyimba?’ Finally, their gaping mouths found voice, which was the sound of total fear: an ear-piercing primordial roar that pierced him to the core of his bones. Again, the finger wiggling began, ‘Kurrkamarra,’ many mob, with the leaves springing out of their fingertips, and as he was about to shield his eyes, he saw that this time they were pointing directly to the ground, Looking out for safetyness, they seemed to be saying, and when he too looked down, he saw the bad bari waters creeping along the sides of the boat. Now, he knew he had to travel faster, run faster from the bari waters, run in the direction the others were going even though he felt as though he was breathing in the rain, running out of breath, and to keep ahead of the boat, which was moving faster again with the young men with heads bent, pushing from behind.
The sea waters had overtaken the bush, and in every direction he looked, water was running across the land. He tried to see ahead, to see if they were coming to higher ground but visibility was limited because of the rain. It was hard to tell, perhaps the ground was rising slowly above sea level. They seemed to be reaching nowhere. He thought that his guardian angels, this ghostly tribe, would run forever. Perhaps this was the only way to escape the tidal surge. Perhaps they were taking him to the Gardajala woman of the bush. He almost felt if he turned around, he would actually see her sitting in his dinghy, a finger resting on her cheek, ironically contemplating his fate. He was so convinced that she was staring at his back with her icy eyes, he heard his heart thump over the thunderous roaring of the sea, until he almost collided with a tree.
He ran on, not knowing how much longer he could last. The island could not be that large. Or had he underestimated its size? Was reality larger and parable truer? What if all of those old hags back there in the boat were Gardajala women? And what if he had mistaken their look of horror, when in fact what he saw was his own face reflected in theirs, like wet mirrors. His pain chased away the thoughts which strangled his mind. Still, he saw no sign of hilly country ahead, not a single rocky outcrop, nothing but flat country. His throat felt it was on fire and his lungs would explode. He did not have much more left in him to run.
Through the soles of his feet he searched to feel changes in geography, telltale signs of gravel indicating they were moving to higher ground. Nothing changed however from the pacified softness of sand, and his splashing through the rising waters pulsated in rhythm with his heartbeat. He started to feel that there was no hilly country on the island, the ghost people were running nowhere. Was he being run to death? He had joined a dying race. His fear terrorised his legs with numbness. There was nothing he could do to prevent the heaviness of his body slowing his pace.
Finally, Norm caught his first glimpse of something happening up ahead. The bush people were not running anymore. They had come to a slight rise, not large in space, but it seemed to be holding out, just metres above the flowing waters. He saw that there were about thirty or forty of these phantom people huddling and shuffling together, while the rain fell over them, like it does over leaves in the bush.
The little sea of people became quite volatile when they saw Norm trying to pull his boat up to the higher ground with his cargo of old women still sitting there. Several of them began running towards the boat while screaming and gesticulating at the men who pushed the boat from behind to help them. They literally dragged the old women from the boat and Norm watched in stunned silence as he saw that they were dressed in what looked like sodden, inflorescent compost heaps where the rain ran through the crumpled leaves, bush blossoms, tangled strands of grasses and twigs before splashing down onto the muddy ground. It took several people to lift up each of the women, who in return complained bitterly about their undignified treatment, and a fusillade of leaves flew everywhere off their person, while they were half dragged, half carried in an undignified manner to the higher ground, to join their kinfolk.
On the other side of the rise, Norm saw a river overflowing with the incoming king tide, and joined by all of the floodwaters gushing down from the southern foothills. Its incredible flow twisted around a hundred kilometres of stories the prophets had tabled in the scriptures of law, safely locked away in the vaults of their minds. Somewhere along the route the two floodwaters had converged. Norm knew not far north was the coastline, from where he had just escaped, and this was where the river would empty back into the sea.
The phantom men were bare chested and in assorted coloured shorts, much like himself, and it occurred to him, that they must trade with ‘real’ people somewhere. He tried to argue with them about the boat but they kept yelling at him in their strange language, and raising their hands up, gesturing exasperation to match the looks on their faces because he did not understand. Several of the men kept on rummaging through his belongings throwing things on the ground, until they found what they wanted. This was Norm’s anchor rope which was long enough for their liking. While still screaming instructions to each other, one of the men began to secure the loose end of the rope to the stern of the little tin boat. Norm stood watching, until he was lifted up like the old women, and under protest, half dragged to the boat.
Norm did not know what was happening with everyone yelling and screaming, and pointing down the flooding river. He was put into the dinghy, and whenever he tried to get out, hands sprang forth to push him back into a sitting position. He did not know what was expected of him as they launched him into the flood. The boat quickly took up speed as it moved through the metre-high foam gathered near the bank to join the raging torrent of yellow waters. About twelve men who were holding the rope, gradually eased out more of its length, slowly, knowing that if they let it slip too fast, the boat would turn broadside and overturn. Norm, unsure of what was happening, kept looking into the heavy rain falling between him and their serious faces, while his hands worked the oars, while he calculated how much rope he had stored in the coil.
The boat kept making its way down the river heading towards the sea in the storm. The men handling the rope were starting to look a long way away behind him. Soon, Norm saw that they were forming a human chain in the waters, while more and more people were coming down from the rise and joining the men, who were being dragged along with the flood. Norm saw the serious faces of those closest to him, and feared that it would only take one man to be dragged under, and they would all be dragged into the undertow.
He turned to save himself when the boat stopped suddenly, until he saw it had jammed in the branches of a lonely rivergum. He looked back at the men desperately trying to keep the human chain together, then he turned quickly to disentangle the boat from the tree. It was then, through the heavily pouring rain, he was able to see in amongst the branches and leaves piled up together, the boy. ‘God have mercy,’ he cried. ‘Let him be alive.’ He pulled the boat in amongst the foliage, but it was useless trying to get any closer. ‘Bala! Bala! Wake up.’ He called to the boy but there was no response. Norm realised he would have to leave the boat and climb over the rubble of foliage to reach the boy and untangle him.
When he was close enough, he reached out. ‘Come on Bala,’ he urged, but the child just looked at him and clung tighter to the branches. Norm started to pull him away from the branches, but the frightened boy struggled, saying he was staying with his Mother. Norm could see that Bala thought he was wrapped in his Mother’s arms, and it suddenly occurred to him that the boy believed his Mother was dead. Did this mean that Will was dead too?
‘I think your Mum wants me to take you now Bala,’ Norm said, speaking gently, while working to pry his little arms out of the wet branches. ‘She asked me, she said, “Grandad, would you mind coming to take Bala home now?” and I said, “Of course. I will make a good journey home for me and Bala.” I said to her, “We will be waiting for a little while until the stars come back and tell us the right way, and then we will go with the big fish, follow the big fish, straight through the sea, with the right wind coming our way, and we will be going straight home, fishing all the way.” And you know what she said, “That’s good, take Bala now and I will see you later and tell him that, tell him I will be looking after him.”’ Norm looked at the boy’s weak face with rain pouring over it, but he saw Bala was listening. Finally, he released his grip for a moment, which was enough for Norm to pull him back to the boat. As soon as they were both on board, the dinghy started to move backwards, while Norm rowed to keep it heading straight for the rise in the flooded river. As he looked across the river, he could see the chain of men struggling in the water to bring the boat to safety. One by one, they helped each other out of the water, while pulling the rope towards them.
‘The bad men took Mummy,’ Bala whimpered, as he sat locked between his grandfather’s legs, while Norm rowed towards land.
‘Then, I heard her screaming in the sky, and when I looked up, I saw her fall into the sea.’
It was Will’s voice Norm heard rushing back into his mind. His face, hard and defiant, snapped, ‘One day, Men will kill for this mine, remember that.’ Norm only saw the fury of an injured being. Moments before, a helicopter had buzzed over their heads. Its shadows fell over the house as though casting a bad spell on their relationship. Will had a contemptuous look on his face, full of what? Disappointment, or more: revulsion for a father who thought so little. ‘So blind,’ he had taunted, shaking his head. ‘And so completely satisfied with the status quo.’ Everyone knew about the security helicopters patrolling the district at regular intervals. All times of the day and night, the helicopters flew along their grids, throwing shadows across the Pricklebush. The memories passed. Norm looked down at the little boy’s head and cried in relief. Rain, tears, rowing the flooded river, he knew this was the solace of Elias: how he used his death to help an ignorant old man find his grandson, to rekindle hope in his own, joyless soul. He rowed.
The ghostly tribe was already leaving by the time Norm pulled the boat back through the foam. One by one, they had started disappearing through the flooding bushlands, most likely following their own familiar roads back to the hilly country further inland. They had tied the end of the rope to a tree. Norm left the boy in the boat and quickly pulled it along through the watery bush, searching in the direction where the strange tribe was vanishing into the rain ahead. In his mind, he had a vague plan to gain the highest ground before nightfall. If he could reach a hill, he would climb the summit and wait for the sea to stop ploughing into the coastline.
A summit had to be found. There would be no point moving after the skies turned dark, because the people he was trying to follow would have dissolved into the bush of night. He knew as soon as night fell he would never see them again and his memory of them too would be gone.