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.

13. Impression management.

Wild Bill woke to the smell of toast. Now that he and Neil were back to the bachelor life (Bill’s wife and son were still in Port Headland), they had returned to the domestic routine established by years on the track. Neil, who never missed a sunrise, always prepared the breakfast - four slices of toast with plum jam and a cup of tea. At first Wild Bill had objected to this arrangement because of the element of servitude but gave up on it when he realized Neil wouldn’t be happy any other way. 

He gave up on trying to change the menu for the same reason. 

The kitchenette was empty of course. Wild Bill new that Neil would be outside somewhere building or rebuilding a net as a kind of morning meditation. Wild Bill didn’t know much about meditation but he sure could’ve used some right now. A gnawing discomfort agitated in his stomach and he knew exactly what it was. Tonight he was going to be tested.

He knew the eyes of all the skippers and crews would be on him when he led the fleet for the first time. The eighty odd boats of the company fleet and sixty odd independents were waiting to see if this big-time blow-in on his fancy mother-ship could walk the walk.

He was wondering about that himself. The Gulf of Carpentaria is a hundred and sixteen thousand square miles of water. Somehow he had to find prawns, and he hadn’t so much as wet a net yet.

This was tiger-prawn season and the fishing’s done at night. He had given the skippers the drill about how to proceed once prawns were found. They all had their positions port, starboard and astern - all very practical but for Wild Bill – all very theoretical. The skippers who’d been kissing up to him for good positions had given him good information about the most likely areas for prawns but after that he was on his own.

He finished his breakfast without remembering a single bite and went to find his brother.

Outside the last stragglers on the dawn shuffle were making their way back to their own beds. Neil had never seen so many early-risers. The position of the accommodation meant they were smack bang in the middle of the four centres of infidelity – the single-women’s quarters, the single men’s-quarters, the wharf and the caravan park. His cheerful nature required him to wave when he recognized a face and he was perplexed that everyone seemed to be busy examining the ground. 

Minge Kerrigan hurrying from the wharf towards the single women’s quarters, anxious to avoid Neil's wave, bumped into Esky Ellis who was stumbling from the caravan park to the wharf. Toothpaste Lucy was on her way back to the caravan park from the single-men’s quarters. To avoid eye-contact with Minge and Esky she had to loiter by Wild Bill’s gate.

“Good morning,” said Wild Bill.

1969 was the year that the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman (1922 – 1982) published Strategic interaction, not so much a definition of a natural law as an analysis of the way we act with each other. He came up with the term “impression management” and the notion that having a conversation with someone is actually a theatrical performance where you play both actor and audience. 

A Goffman conversation is a situation where each tries to give a good impression of herself to the other as an actor and to assess the other’s acting performance as an audience.

Toothpaste Lucy’s problem was that she couldn’t think of a credible storyline for being there at that time – aside from the truth – I’ve just been over the single-men’s quarters fucking the new electrician.

Not that anyone had asked.

The problem was compounded by Neil’s insistence on winning the attention of Minge and Esky.

“Hello, hello,” he said.

Now that these two were drafted into the play the complexities were exponential. An ensemble cast of five, on a limited stage, with no props was being challenged to improvise some socially acceptable script.

1969 was not a great year for the performing arts - the academy awards nominations for best picture: Oliver (Mark Lester), Funny Girl (Barbara Streisand), The Lion in Winter (Peter O’Toole), Rachel Rachel (Joanne Woodward) and  Romeo and Juliet (Leonard Whiting, Olivia Hussey).

Minge Kerrigan was no Olivia Hussey. She was in a panic. She’d just come from the Costa Rica and a night of passion with Toothpaste Lucy’s boyfriend, Back-ache Barry. He'd told Lucy he had to stay on board to lag a pipe. 

Minge was grateful when Esky offered up an opening line.

“Beautiful day,” he said.

“Oh yes,” said Minge. “I love it first thing in the morning.”

“You fucking bitch,” said Toothpaste Lucy and they began to fight.

Wild Bill and Neil decided to head for the relative sanity of the boat.

12. Visitors

Halley woke just before dawn. The night’s sleep had been fitful and he didn’t know why. Actually it was for two reasons – he had disrupted his own circadian rhythms with two days of sulky daytime dozing – and - finding himself an object of ridicule was hurtful and disorienting. 

A lifetime near the top of the social ladder had led him to believe that he possessed innate dignity but apparently these people couldn’t see it. It wasn’t polite to point and laugh at a person – especially him. For their next visit he decided to wash, shave and wear his best suit and hat to see if that might rescue the situation.

The first shafts of light were cracking the sky and he heard the first tentative calls of the dawn chorus as he dipped his hands into the water barrel – empty. He looked around at the shapes of his companions sleeping on the ground. Conway was half-hidden under the stores platform. The Edwards boys were spooning beside the ashes of the fire and Manu was nowhere to be seen. Halley took the decision to fetch his own water. How hard could it be?

He decided his under-drawers would be sufficient clothing for the exercise, donned his boots without lacing, found a metal bucket and made his way to the river. He’d never been. He’d organized Manu and the boys to do the menial tasks but now he found himself quite excited by the prospect. It was bracing. He started to whistle a music-hall song he’d heard in London. Having established the melody, he began to quietly sing.

Oh dem Golden slippers Oh dem golden slippers

Golden slippers I’s going to wear because they look so neat..

If he’d known how many sets of eyes were on him he might not have added the exaggerated strut or flamboyant hand gestures he remembered from the wonderfully entertaining nigger minstrels – white folk imitating black folk imitating white folk. What fun!

He had no idea where Manu and the others might have gone to draw water but he found a break in the mangroves and a lovely stretch of grey-blue beach beside a little channel that ran right up to the bushes. The water was calm as a millpond. When he stepped from the red pebbly soil onto the grey-blue beach he discovered it was mud that gripped and sucked at his boots so he paused to fasten the laces.

The closer he got to the water, the deeper became the mud. It reached over his ankles and seeped into his boots but since the waters edge was so close he thought he should make the extra step or three. To take a step forward with his right foot he had to push down firmly with his left which sank even deeper. When he pushed down with his right to extricate his left, it sank deeper again. The mud came to mid calf and soaked into the linen twill of his drawers. When he got to a point where he might dip the bucket he was up to his knees.

Most of the eyes watching the scene belonged to the Karundi men. Manu was with them. He'd gone to meet them when he heard their confident approach. The men started to laugh again but were quickly silenced by the senior man. He made a sign by drawing together the fingers of his hand and tucking the thumb underneath to create a tubular shape. All but Manu knew what he meant.

In the water on the far side of the river, about a hundred yards from Halley, there were three dark bumps.

Crocodile was home.

They quickened their pace and urged Manu to do the same. They wanted to get a good view of this performance. Manu was still in the dark.

Halley managed to secure some water and, anchored by his legs, twisted his torso to place the bucket closer to the bank. He then tried to extract his left foot only to find that the action drove his right leg into the mud up to his crotch. He tried again but he was hopelessly anchored.

When it was clear that Crocodile was homing in and about eighty yards from the firmly glued Halley, the senior man made a yackai and the others took it up.

Halley’s first reaction was embarrassment. He thought he was being laughed at again. Then he realized they were pointing at something in the water. He couldn’t make out what it was but it must’ve been big – and fast. It made a bow-wave that raced towards him and a wake of six or seven disturbingly large waves streamed astern in a perfect  chevron.

Then Crocodile raised his head. It was huge!

Halley’s poor, tired body released an overdose of adrenalin which, instead of energizing him, had the opposite effect. All his strength deserted him.

Manu was stunned too. He’d never seen an animal that size. He made to rush to Halley’s aid but the Karundi restrained him. They were just twenty yards away on the firm dirt, all shouting and encouraging Halley to run. They were having a whale of a time.

Crocodile was forty yards away when Halley’s strength returned in a rush. He twisted his body violently toward the bank and made a desperate dive forward. The mud gave a little on his legs and he flailed his arms like a swimmer until he dragged his feet clear and was lying face down on the surface of the mud. His eyes bulged and his head craned around on his neck to keep the fearsome beast in sight.

If he’d had his senses about him he might have thought to stay in that position and skid his body across the top of the mud crocodile-style. But he was delirious with fear. As soon as his legs were clear he tried to stand and run. Crocodile was within twenty yards.

He drove with his legs and embedded himself in the mud again. He twisted around in terror. Crocodile was within five yards. His huge head with its cruel teeth was now clear of the water. Monstrous claws spread wide taking purchase on the mud. His baleful eyes were fixed on Halley.

Manu was dimly aware of the man beside him making some room to heft his ironwood spear but he seemed in no hurry. All the other men shouted encouragement like spectators at a football match.

Halley was held hypnotized while Crocodile slowly, relentlessly advanced. Halley saw the bucket now slightly in front of him. He grasped it with both hands, raised it high above his head and hurled with all his force straight at Crocodile's eyes. 

Crocodile caught it easily in his gargantuan maw and crunched it flat in his jaws. Huge teeth pierced the metal and he shook it like a dog shakes a rat. Gobs of mud flew everywhere and Halley was shocked into action. 

He turned and dived, withdrew his legs, stood and dived again. Behind him there was a fearful clatter and the earth was shaking. He knew Crocodile was inches away.

On the bank the Karundi were howling with delight and Manu was caught up in the excitement.

Crocodile was furious. A bottom tooth had wedged itself into the metal of the bucket and the handle had flipped over his nose.  He was smashing his head into the mud with alternate crashes but it wouldn’t dislodge. He rolled his great body in titanic anger and shook the earth.

Halley didn’t see any of this. All he knew was the immediate certainty of jaws clamping on his buttocks. His feet found firmer ground. He thrust his pelvis forward and drove his strangely angled body in a deranged sprint to welcoming hands on the bank.

He’d stepped out of his boots and his drawers were around his ankles.

He had, of course, shit himself.

© Ray Lillis 2012