Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright

Author:Alexis Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Giramondo Publishing
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

10

So! You are saying it was pitch black as – in the nightmare? Black as. Darker than multiple cumulonimbus clouds. Saw them. Thousands of storm-maddened seagulls darting in the pudder wudder, flying through the plunder of thunder, through the bolting lightning forking in a sixty thousand lightning-strike storm. All dead really. Being slung about in the wind, and I am telling you a fact now, that I saw Aboriginal Sovereignty down there, floating facedown in that grass.

The outsider, the super cop with the medals on his chest, was big-noting himself about the law of the atmosphere like he was more gigapascal smarter than anyone else. The old people holding all the laws of atmospheric air pressure, and knowing theirs was a relationship of perfected symbiosis, had no time to argue with this fool, so whenever he talked to them, they did not listen to him. Ditto. He never heard a word of what they said either. All the misunderstandings flourished in either the stories they made up about him for a laugh, or the stories he made up about them to put cash in his pocket.

Anyway, they told him they owned the haze in all its manifestations through their traditional law title for this sphere of country from long before kingdom come, and all this was theirs all the way to heaven and hell…and more, cuius est solum eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos.

While Maximum Security lay with plaguing thoughts of failure and alone late at night in the swirling dust storm of his cobwebbed room, the spiders flecked in the floating dust particles, and flew neck and neck in crosshatched flight paths on their gossamer silken strands. As the night deepened, the nightmares worsened, and he thought how easy it would be in those vague moments in drifting sleep, if he could move around in his nightmares to find agitators pushing for the return of their Aboriginal Sovereignty. If only it could be that easy, to identify who they were, crush their insurrection, destroy their coups for all time, but this was not to be. Not in his dreams, where he saw something else altogether different in a blank grey canvas nightmare where he would begin to distinguish the enormity of what lay behind the vagueness of a multitude of components forming the uniformity of greyness, and through nights of continuing nightmare, began to realise there was a world of children moving across the greyness towards the sea, and committing suicide in Praiseworthy. He saw many children spilling through his dream as they passed in loaded lorries through his room, where all he could do was look up, and watch their white ghostly faces staring blankly ahead as they passed. The lorries moved further away, out of reach across the border of dreams in a procession without end, while he remained cemented to the ground, motionless in his dream, as though paralysed in its sea, its sky, and unable to follow where they were going. It was

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