Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

doing, or thought so.
    What she had to say was long and hard: ‘We are decent people here, my family. We make no trouble for anybody. So why for you want to come down here making trouble for we all the time? I tell you how I won’t stand for it; I can’t even stand you people. I don’t want you murdering types around here bothering my family all the time, you hear me? Covering up for someone who even tried to murder me once and other atrocities as well going on. If you mob come back here again, (she paused to think), I’ll tell you what I will be doing. I will be pressing that many charges through the legal service for Aborigines for attempted murder, that’s what. And while I am at it, I will be suing the town as accomplices to a conspiracy to have my person killed and the persons of my family murdered before they were born, and for damages for the ones who were born. Goodness knows how we can’t sleep at night as it is with the worry. I don’t know how much money you’ve all got in the bank, but you will be paying who knows what for damages. It might even cost the whole town. I have already spoken long distance on the phone to my lawyer and he said it might be a pretty good test case. Watertight even, so what do you think about that, hey?’ Under heavy cloud cover which brought on a premature nightfall, the Uptown delegation looked at each other through flashes of lightning in the fishroom, and were shocked, like the suspended school of silver fish from the sea, jumping up and down in fright.
    Normal remembered feeling that there had been no end to Angel’s obsessive behaviour since she laid her hands on the statue. She had even placed it in the bedroom looking onto their bed, so he could not be bothered sleeping there anymore. She had forced him to live in the fishroom, which she now took over, with half the town having a heated argument in there as well. The cockatoo screeched its head off in the storm outside as it flew around, circling the house. Then, to cap it off, the crickets were stirred into wakefulness, and began their choice of music. Ears pricked and prickled to hear the foreign, shrilling sounds of Handel’s oratorio in full orchestra. The delegation listened for a short time, and this strange and severe sounding improvisation must have taken the cake, because there was a mad rush to leave via a rubble of disorientation, and rumble, as they raced over the puddles on the corrugated tin-floored corridor.
    Normal, forced to become part of the excessiveness of his home, helped the disoriented delegation outside into the storm, where they set off up the muddy road to Uptown, hoping to find their way home in the darkness. Until, that was, lo and behold, Mayor Bruiser turned up wet and blind drunk, and when he got the drift of Angel’s argument, he started to kick the air and shout into the kitchen doorway, that he was not going to have a bunch of blacks tell him what to do with the town.
    Bruiser could see Angel Day inside, still carrying on about lawyers, and laughed drunkenly, ‘Here’s a woman who still likes a good poke. Don’t you like a good poke Angel?’ He started to tease the Christian man Valance, ‘Go and ask her if you can have a go.’ When she ignored him the mayor started taunting her about the times he chased her on horseback down to the creek until her bony legs gave up. ‘Oh! Don’t be bashful, you remember me.’ Everyone in town knew how he bragged about how he had chased every Aboriginal woman in town at various times, until he ran them into the ground then raped them. He had branded them all, like a bunch of cattle, he gloated.
    Angel Day came out of the house with a billycan full of boiling water and threw it at Bruiser’s voice in the dark, but missed. She went back into the house and the delegation could hear her stomping around the kitchen, throwing things around, screaming out how she was looking for a sharp knife so that she could slit Bruiser’s neck from left to