16. Dreaming.

The meeting with Crocodile changed everything. Halley knew he should be resentful of the people for not coming to his aid but his emotions wouldn’t respond to the thought. What he really felt was exhilaration.

The hands that greeted him on the bank were welcoming and the smiles and laughter were of congratulations rather than derision. A coolamon of water was brought and the mud and shit washed from his legs. He stood naked amongst the crowd of naked black men who bustled round to slap his back and smile into his face.

The smiles and congratulations were genuine. The incident with Crocodile had been a wonderful entertainment but it was also an event of significance - a kind of natural initiation. The Karundi had seen for the first time evidence that Halley might be a man similar to them. There’d been a glimpse of spirit.

From a Karundi point of view, restraining Manu from going to the rescue had been an act of respect and Manu recognized it immediately.  To interfere would have diminished the experience and demeaned the man. As it was, they had stood witness while Halley had been allowed to experience the full power of the forces of life around him. The experience was beneficial - a watershed moment.

It wasn't a proper initiation.

A proper Karundi initiation was a long, drawn out affair. Until about the age of ten Karundi boys were allowed to run free with almost no discipline except for the loving guidance of the entire group. Then at the age when boys stop playing in mixed groups and want to form gangs with other boys. When they start to form strong muscles and have an excess of energy. When they become willful and rambunctious. When they’re a real humbug - that’s when the men take them to bush-camp to begin growing them up.

 Growing a boy into a man is the central element of men’s business. It’s secret, sacred and tapu. It’s a process carefully designed and monitored to take a pampered child through the transformation of a second birth. It’s carried out by a second father in stages and over years. Very little of the teaching is passed on through words. The boys are guided through a series of experiences of contrast and change by skilled guides who adapt the process to suit the child and the circumstances. It's an experience filled with drama, fear and exhilaration - and pain.

There’s no exam or certificate at the end of the procedure. The obvious scars, loss of a tooth or absence of foreskin are neither signs nor mementos of the course but simple by-products. It’s over when transformation has taken place – when a grown-up man emerges to be re-integrated into the group at a higher level. The scarifications on his chest might bear indelible witness to his experience and his new status but the real achievement is in his new awareness of his responsibility to the society and his relationship to the world.

Clearly, this level of achievement was unavailable to Halley but the Karundi could see the first step of a transition.

Normally his personal space was a perimeter of two yards but now he was in an elevated state of being. He took comfort in the sensation of skin on skin. He marveled at the warm smoky smell of the celebrating crowd pressing round him. The blue of the sky was a miracle. He lost all sense of himself in the glory of just being alive.

This euphoria, though it seemed to go on for an infinity, lasted only half an hour. In that time Halley had the distinct sensation that everything was either understood by him or understandable to him. There was nothing that he didn’t or couldn’t know. Now he saw the Karundi, not as primitive savages clinging to the margins of life but as brilliant philosophers holding the key to the central joy of existence. 

This profound omniscience was so comforting that it engendered an equally strong belief that it wasn’t the least bit important so he didn’t bother to explore it.

It was, of course, an epiphany – an insight into the divine – and within half an hour Halley abandoned it in favour of investigating the mosquito bite at the back of his left knee. He became aware of his nakedness and rushed to cover himself. After an hour he found the company of the celebrating blackmen and the mystified whitemen extremely tiresome. He retired, weary and slightly depressed, to his tent.

The sight of his gargantuan bed intensified the sense of melancholy. He saw how he must appear to others - a vapid, silly child-man. There was a sickening sense of vertigo as he realized the cheap and childish perspective that had brought him to this place and this moment – an ego-driven adventure game played out with real lives. This one single meeting with Crocodile had created a terrible problem for him. It had washed away every perspective and foundation supporting his worldview, purpose in life and sense of self. 

Rushing in to replace it came – nothing.

He was astounded that the brief flash of understanding that had smashed the façade of his own personality could be held as knowledge and accepted with equanimity by these people he’d considered savages. What made it worse was the fact that such understanding seemed to be forbidden to him.

The problem, of course, was caused by the difference in the set-up of their thinking machines.

Halley, largely because of Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727), lived in a scientific world consisting of when, where and what – time, space and objects. These dimensions were not concepts but immutable realities - linear, mechanical and manageable.

When was in a line from yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Where was in a line from here to there.

What was in a line of priority from here and now to there and then.

The scientific world is an empirical world. It’s observed, weighed, measured and allocated relative importance.

To take a scientific approach to the world, you have to stand outside of it as a separate individual.

The Karundi thinking machine allowed for this kind of operation – this crocodile in this river at this moment – but they found this mode uncomfortable, crude and limiting. For them, the world was ever immediate and conceived in a broader context - each where existed inside of an everywhere, each when was part of an everywhen and each thing was an example of an everything.

Each one was an expression of everyone.

To conceive in this way made notions of individuality and personal ownership unnecessary and trivial. It was a form of transcendentalism minimising concepts like greed, regret, pity and shame.

To conceive in this way was very difficult unless you were born and initiated into it.

To conceive in this way was to have dreaming.

15. Snake tattoo

 The interior of the little round caravan was gloomy and thick with a dead rat smell that must’ve been coming from outside. She could only stand straight in the middle section and the thought of being confined made her desperate to stretch. She pushed the tiny slide window open and sucked deep breaths of fresh air. There was the distant sound of the tinny megaphones – look at this one.. 

He’d be out on the boards now, green robe, hands taped, showing off the footwork.

She remembered exactly the first time she saw him. It was the Armidale show, New South Wales, 1958. She was a dancer then. She’d always liked the older blokes, didn’t know why. The moustache had a lot to do with it – not the David Niven type – more the Errol Flynn. Flynn had been a boxer too. What was it about a moustache? A thin little line of clipped black hair? Just the thought made her blush.

She thought to light the lamp but decided against it. People took it as an invitation and she didn’t want to be seen right now. Most everyone would be at the showgrounds but there was always a few stragglers in the caravan park. She couldn’t sit on the step for the same reason.

She pressed the side of her face against the wall to catch a glimpse of the lights. They were parked at the sideshow alley end and she could catch snatches of a fairground speaker – I feel so broke up I wanna go home.

As she moved the shade a slash of light came at an oblique angle and caught the red and blue on her arm. She made the movement and watched as if it had nothing to do with her. The snake writhed in a sinuous movement and she dipped her wrist to make it look as if the head on the back of her hand was sniffing the air. She was twelve when her father took her to get it. She needed a drink.

She ducked her head and rustled round beneath the sleeping child to find the hidden bottle, took a good slug of the rum and remembered there’d be tobacco too. She found the tin and rolled herself a smoke.

Living dangerously. He always won his fights but he was one of those who had to take punches. Sometimes it made him quiet but sometimes it made him mean and she was already in the shit with him.

The rum warmed her belly and provided momentary relief from the anxiety transforming it to resentment. It was his lie in the first place. She’d latched on to it though. It was their secret and their bond. For four years they’d managed to live in denial. Never mentioned it. There were no distant relatives, no such thing as common-law adoption.

And now there was someone sniffing about.

She took another slug on the rum to fortify her against the admission. Somewhere back on the track was a grieving mother. Get a grip.

When he came through the door he was still in his robe and boxing boots. He was way too early. He grabbed the bottle from her and took a deep hit.

“It’s the cops,” he said, “we gotta go.”

In the back seat she wrapped her arms around the little boy as they idled the stolen car and the stolen caravan out into the night. The tattooed snakehead rested on his chest. He was five.

(c) 2012 Ray Lillis

14. Born leader.

It’s unusual for all the boats of a prawn-fishing fleet to leave port at the same time because it’s unusual for them to be in port at the same time. But this was an unusual day. At ten o’clock when Wild Bill, Neil and the five crew-members of the Osprey were ready to set metaphorical sail on the morning tide, the river was choked with trawlers.

In order to cast off the lines and make for the mouth of the river and the open sea, they would have to move six boats all tied abreast of the mother-ship. These boats weren’t moving because other trawlers were anchored in the stream fore, aft and abeam of them. There was barely ten yards of free water in the middle of the river available for maneuvering. Not only that – some skippers and crews were still ashore. Others hovered uncertainly in the traffic jam waiting for some kind of order.

The whole village had turned out to wave their goodbyes and see the fun. What they saw was chaos. The skippers had momentarily adopted a misguided sense of discipline requiring the mother-ship to lead them from port. The radio buzzed with a cacophony of exaggerated and indecipherable jargon which all added up to one thing – “We don’t know what we’re doing. We’re waiting for you.”

Wild Bill turned the radio off and called to Neil on the deck to stand by the lines of the boats tied to the port side of the Osprey. He had the deckys cast off from the wharf and, with a deft twist of the wheel, throttled the powerful diesels – first ahead, then immediately astern. The big ship with its attachment of three banks of two trawlers surged magically sideways into the middle of the stream. He signaled Neil to cast off the boat lines. They drifted aimlessly into the tangle of complaining trawlers  as the big boat surged away.

Follow that.

The truth is the cloying neediness of his new band of followers was starting to get on Wild Bill’s nerves. It occurred to him that this bunch of bearded brawling, shagging wild-men might be a bunch of sissies. His viewpoint was, of course, colored by the sudden realisation that he now had responsibility for them.

It was never his ambition. He didn’t want to be a leader. The only reason Wild Bill found himself in this position was because the young Wild Bill thought that running away and going to sea would really piss off his dad, Old Bill. 

Old Bill had been in the ground (given up smoking as they used to say) for the last seventeen years and Wild Bill still hadn’t come up with a replacement ambition. He was feeling the burden of leadership.

Some fairly hefty thinking machines have been put to work on the notion of leadership because there seemed to be some kind of natural law at work. The Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795 – 1881) came up with “the great man theory”. He reckoned that all of history was made up of the doings of born-leaders – guys like Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), Muhammad (570 – 632) and Napoleon (1769 – 1821).

Then, polymath, Francis Galton (1822 – 1911) pushed it even further claiming that leadership was a property unique to certain extraordinary individuals who were born with it. It’s safe to assume that Francis claimed membership in that club – he was an anthropologist, eugenicist, explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist and statistician. A real clever-clogs - he was also a knight.

This didn’t stop, sociologist, Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) from calling bullshit on Galton’s theory, saying that leaders were a natural product of the social environment from which they’d sprung.

None of this was any help to Wild Bill even if he’d heard of it. Whether he was a product of the disorganized rabble now endangering each other’s lives in the Halley River or a mutant gene passed down by a belt wielding wharfy, it made no difference.

Besides, Wild Bill didn’t feel like a born leader.

When he was twelve and Neil was nine, Wild Bill cut through every second spoke in the back wheel of Old Bill’s bike with a pair of tin-snips. He concealed the sabotage by carefully rejoining them with dabs of grease.

He gleefully imagined the old bastard riding out over the steep gutter at the front of the house and falling on his arse when the back wheel collapsed. 

He and Neil waited and watched from behind the mango tree but nothing happened. Old Bill bumped over the gutter and continued on around the corner. Apparently the unsnipped spokes were sufficient to maintain the wheel’s structural integrity.

Old Bill continued his ride to work undisturbed aside from a faint hissing sound coming from somewhere behind. This sound was caused by the loosened spokes brushing softly against the rear forks of the bike but Old Bill didn’t know that. He barely registered the sound except to start thinking of snakes.

Just as he was pulling through the big gates at number eight wharf and waving to the rest of his gang, one spoke came adrift and jabbed him painfully in the back of the right calf. Old Bill was convinced he’d been bitten by a snake and shrieked like a girl. He started to pedal furiously to make a getaway and another wayward spoke pierced his other calf. He shrieked again, reached down to fend off the imaginary taipan and fell in a heap on the ground.

He bum-walked backwards for five yards before noticing the twisted wire wickerwork that was now his back wheel.

Thinking about it now gave Wild Bill some satisfaction but he doubted it was the work of a born leader. This leadership deal wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He was their boss but he was working for them. He had to do all the thinking and the worrying and, in the end, he had to answer to them.

Born loser maybe.