Dead Americans (4 page)

It was desperation, nothing more, he knew. Chances were that in the morning he would be back to wishing that Sarah would simply walk into his office off the street, which was worse than looking through detective novels for answers. In truth, he knew what he should do, which was to call the county’s office, tell them what happened, and have them send someone who had dealt with this kind of thing before. He wouldn’t, though. He couldn’t. Not yet. The two girls had dug under his impersonality, his purposeful deadening of emotions in relation to his job and, as he drove through the darkened Bale Street on which he lived, he knew that he would not be able to let it go. In fact—

He stopped.

Literally.

He jammed his foot on the brake and jerked his truck to stop half way up his driveway.

There, in front of his squat, tin roofed, dark house, sat Sarah Currie. She was on the cement stairs, a thick backpack next to her, and a series of cigarette butts at her feet. She was wearing brown and orange, earthy colours, and no black; but there was no time to linger over that realization than the quick, subconscious note he made, because as his truck stopped, as the lights illuminated her, she rose to her feet, taller than what he imagined, and with a small, black pistol in her hand. Upon seeing that, there was a moment, just one, where before he turned the engine off, before the lights flicked off, he thought that he should put the truck in reverse. He should stomp on the gas, call Steve, get the gun he left locked in his office and . . . but he didn’t, even though he knew she had killed her sister, even though he knew it possible that she could kill him, he didn’t.

His hard soled shoes hit the gravel. “Sarah Currie,” he said, trying to place as much authority in his voice as he could. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“I know.”

“You want to put down the gun?”

“No.” She sounded controlled, confident, unphased by his tone. “Stay by your truck, too.”

“Okay.” He put his palms out, fingers wide, projecting as little threat as he could. “How did you hear I was looking for you?”

“I heard you.”

“Heard?”

“Yes.” She had yet to raise the gun, but he noted that her feet kept moving, agitated. “It was all I heard today.”

Taking a step forward, Williams said, “Your Mum—”

“She’s not my mother!” Sarah cut him off loudly, her right arm, the arm that held that gun, twitching suddenly, and causing him to tense, to halt his second step. “I could hear you, Sheriff. Hear you in your office, in the street, in your truck, wanting me to come and see you. Pleading with me. Telling me to walk through the door, to hand you an answer.”

Unable to say anything else, he said, “This is not my office.”

“No.” She smiled, a queer, disconcerting smile. “I have some choice over what I do now. I have some free will. You’re not—”

“Sarah.”

“Amanda,” she said. “I was going to say Amanda.”

“She’s dead.”

“I know.”

“You.” He paused, then mentally shrugged, took another step forward, and said, “You killed her?”

Sarah’s strange smile evaporated and a frown, a tiny turn of her lips, a sign of genuine regret, emerged in its place. “Not on purpose. She—she wanted to hurt herself so badly. She wanted to punish herself. It was after the gig at Jacob’s, because of that. It was meant to go differently!” She shook her head. “She was so sure of that. She knew it. She
believed
it. We weren’t meant to be booed off stage. We were supposed to be loved—but when that didn’t happen, she blamed herself. She hadn’t believed enough, she said. It made her so angry.”

“I heard that was you.”

The regret flashed away: the eye in her emotional cyclone. “Yes. I suppose you did.”

He continued forward, slowly. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on here? Why no one remembers you?”

“No.”

She shot him.

Once, then twice, but not, he thought as he fell, not a third time.

“I don’t need people to tell me what to do,” he heard her say. “I don’t need their thoughts in mine, not now. Without her around, there’s no one to force people to remember me. No one to force me to remember things I never did. To feel things I never felt. Do you know what that’s like? When she was angry, I was angry. When she hated someone, I hated someone. She got to be free of it, but not me, no. No. It was like she really did just make me up one day to be everything she didn’t like about herself.” She was standing above him now, and he looked up, looked at her from where he sat crumpled in the gravel, but could not really see her. His focus was on the blood flowing from his stomach, on the difficulty he had swallowing. But her smile, that queer smile from before, returned to her face as he looked up and it was, even distracted as he was, he was sure that it was the sign of her derangement, of her broken psyche, of the reason why she killed her sister. “No,” her voice was muffled, and it seemed that she was answering him, but he hadn’t spoken, for once, he hadn’t. “That’s not true. She really did make me up, to be what she couldn’t be. So she could make that music that no one liked. That was the crazy part.”

When she was gone, he lay there on the gravel, dying.

No one had come to him, but even though he found it difficult to focus, he wasn’t surprised. They should stay inside. They should stay where it was safe. Still, he thought. Still, if one of those people in any of the blurry-lit houses could call an ambulance, that wouldn’t hurt . . . but he did not say it. What did it matter? He wouldn’t die with gritted teeth like Amanda Currie. There was no reason for him to do so—and that, he realized, there, the end of his epiphany, the final part, was why she had dug under his skin. The intensity that everyone had spoke of, her desire to be a musician, it was there, even in death, marking her as something she had lost; but he had no such thing to lose. He had so little, in fact, that he could not even be bothered to crawl painfully to his truck, to radio for the ambulance. By turning his head he could see the outline of the bumper, the dent in the metal from where he’d hit a pole, parking, a little drunk. No, it really didn’t matter. Inside the house was empty. One bed still made. One not. Photos still in their dusty place. He could not grit his teeth if he tried.

But.

But.

But what, he thought dimly, the sound of an ambulance not yet reaching his ears, what if that deranged girl was right, what if, through simple force of belief, you could change the world around you?

What then?

In his dreams, he had always been Mark Twain; awake, he had always been Samuel Clemens.

It had been so since the day he had first used the pseudonym. At first, he thought of it as a warning, but the first dreams had been sweet like the Missouri summers of his childhood, before his father’s death. There was a rare quality to them, and he awoke refreshed and invigorated and filled with the kind of joy that not even the most vivid memory of his childhood years could supply; of course, as time continued, not all the dreams of Mark Twain had been so pleasant, but even the nightmares provided him with a substance that nothing in the waking world could provide him.

And now, at sixty, asleep in the White Horse Motel in Sydney, the small, grey haired man no longer felt the slightest sense of warning as he dreamed.

It was natural, normal, as familiar as the shape of his hands. It simply
was
.

Mark Twain dreamed:

He stood on the wooden, creaking docks of Sydney Harbour. It was early evening, and the sky had been splattered with leaking orange paint, while in front of him was an ocean of closely packed, swaying hulks: rotting old troop transports and men-o-wars, their masts and rigging stripped away, the remaining wooden shells turned into floating prisons that had, one hundred years ago, marred the Thames in a cultural plague.

The Eora watched the arrival of the First Fleet from the shores of the Harbour, and were told by the Elders that they had nothing to fear from the great ships: they held the spirits of their ancestors, reborn in fragile white skin. In response, the Eora questioned and argued, but the truth, the Elders said, was inescapable.

Look closely
, they whispered,
and you will recognize the members of your family.

But how?
the Eora demanded with one voice.
How can this be true?

The Elders never hesitated with their response:
They have sailed out of the Spirit World itself.

The Harbour has never been a welcoming birth for immigrants. Since the day the English landed and changed its name from Cadi to Sydney Harbour, this has been the case. The cultural wars that have been fought along its banks and throughout Sydney’s streets for over two hundred years have left their mark on the heart of our great beast, and the signpost for this is the Harbour. Yet strangely, the literary acknowledgement of the Harbour’s significance does not begin in the journals of the naval captains who arrived with convicts, or in the diaries of the Irish or Chinese, but in this book you are holding now, Mark Twain’s
A Walking Tour Through The Dreaming City:

‘Sydney Harbour is shut behind a precipice that extends some miles like a wall, and exhibits no break to the ignorant stranger. It has a break in the middle, but it makes so little show that even Captain Cook sailed by without seeing it. Near by that break is a false break which resembles it, and which used to make trouble for the mariner at night, in the early days before the place was lighted. Any stranger approaching Sydney is advised to take heed as the entrance is the only warning the city will offer on its nature; that it is filled with false hope and false promise, and that it and its citizens will break anyone dreaming who is not natural to it.’

Twain understood Sydney, in some ways clearer than those who have lived in it, while at the same time being incredibly naïve about certain aspects of it. However, he understood the importance of the Harbour, and it is from here that he launched his dissection of the city, altering it forever. It might appear strange to an Australian that such an important change in Sydney’s history would begin in an American’s book (and published one hundred years after the first Englishman stepped foot on the soil), but after shaping the city and its political climate, historians and academics alike have been forced into recognizing Mark Twain’s legacy for years. The reader only has to walk down George Street, and into the floating mass of American culture that is presented in signs tattooing
McDonalds, Nike, Subway, Taco Bell, HMV Music
, and
Borders
onto his or her subconscious to understand the very basics of the argument.

The seeds of this gift (or curse, depending on your stance) have now been passed onto you, dear reader, with this new edition. In these pages, you will find the finest chronicle of English occupied Sydney, which began when the first of our chained ancestors stepped onto our shores, and the birth of the new Sydney when the most American of Americans began his tour.

And yet, still, the meaning of the Harbour and Sydney has not changed in all that time. It is as if it is immune, or purposefully resistant to anything that arrives. The result of this, is that time has only crystallized the fact that Sydney has never welcomed immigrants, never welcomed the poor, the hungry, or anyone who is in need, and that this mentality spreads throughout the country from here. It is a sad fact in this new millennium that examples are easy to find: Detention Camps that spring up as barbwire islands in the dusty sea of outback New South Wales, fattened with immigrants who have fled less fortunate countries than ours, are just one example. But then perhaps Twain, for all the change he brought, knew that this part of Sydney’s nature would not change. After all, it was he who wrote that ‘Satan made the deceptive beauty of Sydney’s Harbour, which is available for all to witness on shore.’ It is a sentiment that anyone who has lived in Sydney will find familiar.

Pemulwy, the scarred, black skinned Eora warrior, climbed into the thick arms of a eucalyptus tree. There, he watched his dead brothers row into the ocean on ugly, unsuitable boats, and fish.

The warrior had never doubted the Elders before, but he did now. He could do nothing but. On the ground, beside the grey eucalyptus, lay his spear, tipped with the spines of the stingray; while out in the ocean, the dead dragged one of the great fishes from the water.

The creature was huge and grey and sacred. It had been—and would ever be—since the Eora and other tribes had begun telling the story of the ancient fisherman Jigalulu. In the story, one of the stingrays gave its life to the fisherman so that he could fashion a spear to kill the great shark Burbangi, who had murdered his father and brothers
[1]
.

Yet, from his perch, Pemulwy watched the dead kill the stingray with a knife, and later, in the evening, watched them cook and eat it.

The Elders told Pemulwy that the dead, being dead, could do as they wished with the fish, but he disagreed. It was not just an insult to the Spirits, but an act of supreme arrogance that told the warrior that the dead did not care at all for their kin.

But it was not a solitary act.

Perhaps worse happened during the day, when the dead would take the young Eora, take their food, and take their land, giving them nothing but coloured ribbons and blankets that left them ill in ways that none had ever seen before.

Finally, on the branch of the eucalyptus tree, watching the dead eat the sacred flesh of the stingray, he was forced to answer why they acted this way.

The answer was simple:

They are not my kin.

They are invaders.

He followed the long, twisting gangplank that looped around the hulk, showing him the rotting and discoloured frame of the ship. Below him, the water was still, and pitch black, and emanated a menace that caused Twain’s old legs to tremble whenever the planks he stepped on groaned beneath his weight. Half way around the hulk, Twain knew that he did not want to continue, but his feet would not stop, and he found himself muttering in disgust to them and making his way onto the deck.

The deck was ragged, empty, and filled with invisible spirits: the till turned left and right, spun by the hands of an unseen and pointless sailor; above, the remains of the rigging flapped, trailing through the air as decayed streamers and confetti; while the cabin door to the captain’s quarters was twisted off its frame, and hanging on one hinge, the glass window shattered, leaving jagged points into the middle. Twain walked on rotting planks and passed broken railings that were circled with rusted chains.

It was a parade of death, cheering him towards the hulk’s rotting belly with relentless determination.

The smell of unwashed bodies, urine and feces overwhelmed him when he stepped onto the creaking stairs that led into the ship’s belly. Had he been anywhere else, he was sure he would have fallen, or even vomited, so tangible was the odour; but instead he continued down the stairs, one step at a time.

At the bottom of the stairs, the smell grew stronger, and the air had a heavy quality to it, but the belly of the hulk itself was empty. He had expected to see hundreds of men and women, sick, dying, and generally pitiful, huddled together, but instead he found only a thin pool of black sea water and the disintegrating ribs of the ship.

And, in the far corner of the hulk, the shadow of a man.

Twain’s feet splashed noiselessly through the black water, and the silence around him grew while the oppressive odour slipped away. He was not sure what was worse, as the silence filled his head like wet cotton, and weighed down his senses until the shadow revealed itself to be a black skinned man.

He was darker that any black man Twain had seen before; black like the water he stood in, he was naked and across his skin had been painted white bones. Yet, as Twain gazed at the bones, the paint became tangible, turning the bones solid. In response to his awareness, they began to move, shifting and twitching and cracking slightly while the man’s black flesh remained still.

Twain’s gaze was pulled away from the bones when a buttery yellow light filled the hull, illuminating a painting on the back wall. It had four rectangle panels, each panel located beneath the proceeding one.

In the first panel were two men and two women, one black and one white of each gender. The two women held babies, and wore white gowns with hoods, while the men wore trousers and shirts and had a dog beside them. The second showed an English Naval Officer (Twain did not know who) shaking hands with an Aboriginal Elder. The third panel showed an Aboriginal man being hung for killing a white man, while the fourth panel, identical to the third, showed a white man being hung for killing an Aborigine. It was, Twain knew, a message of equality, but it felt cold, and hollow for reasons he was unable to voice.

Finally, turning to the black man—an Aborigine—he said, “Is this your painting?”

“No,” he replied, the skull painted across his face moving in response, while his thick lips remained still and pressed tightly together. “It was painted by an Englishman for Englishmen, as you can clearly see.”

More confidently then he felt, Twain said, “It doesn’t have ‘English’ in big lights now, does it?”

“Look at their clothes, Mark Twain.”

Unnerved by the use of his name, Twain returned his gaze to the painting: in the first panel, as he had noted, all the men and women were dressed identically, while in the third and fourth panel, the dead Aborigines wore nothing but a loincloth and the painted symbols of their tribes.

“Equality and law rise from the English viewpoint,” the bones of the Aborigine said quietly, the tone laced with anger and resentment.

“That’s hardly a unique experience,” Twain replied, the confidence he feigned earlier finding a foothold in his consciousness.

“I am aware of this,” he said. “The Oceans of the Earth speak to me, and tell me of the English, and their Empire. And they tell me how it crumbles with revolutions, but that does not happen here, in Sydney. Other things happen here.”

Behind the Aborigine, the painting twisted and became alive: the white man stepped from his noose and shook hands with the officers, and they passed him a flask of rum. (Twain did not know how he knew that it was rum, but it was a dream and he knew not to question the logic of a dream.) In the top panel, the black man was beaten by the white man, and attacked by the dogs, while the black baby in the Aboriginal woman’s arms disappeared, and was replaced by a baby of mixed colour and heritage which began to fade until the baby was as white as the baby next to it.

“That’s a nice trick.” Twain’s foothold slipped into a vocal tremor as the scenes played themselves out in an endless loop. He cleared his throat loudly and asked, “What’s your name, then?”

“Once,” the Aborigine’s bones replied quietly, “I was called Cadi.”

Perched once again on a eucalyptus branch, Pemulwy, three weeks later, watched the skyline turn red and grey with flames and smoke. The cries of the dead pierced the night as they rushed from their tents to the wooden dwelling that held their food.

Pemulwy’s decision to fight the dead was not popular among the Eora. Elders from other tribes sent messages and warned him that the Spirits would be furious, and many warned that his own spirit, strong now, would not survive.

Last night, an Elder had sat in front of him and told him that he would die nine years from now if he followed this path, and that he would be struck down by divisions that he, Pemulwy, created in his kin. The words had rung disconcertingly true, as splits throughout the Eora were already beginning to show.

But he had no other choice. He was a warrior, and as such, he would fight the dead like any other invader into his land: he would strike their weakest targets: the houses where they kept food, and crops they were trying to grow. He would burn them, and then he would burn the men and women, and, finally, the land itself if required. Whatever the white beeàna
[2]
decided in response, he would also deal with.

He drew strength from the fact that a dozen other warriors, stretched throughout the bony trees and in the bush around him, also watched the fires. He knew, gazing out at their shadowed figures, that more would come after the night. Perhaps from the dead themselves.

He did not believe that any of the dead were kin, but around the Harbour there were black skinned men that he felt a faint kinship for. It was not unreasonable, he believed, to think that they might join him—and it would certainly assure some of the worries from the Elders if he could bring one back as a friend.