by Kim Scott
‘Their children were like my own brothers and sisters and look what they gave me,’ she said, her eyes falling and her hands sweeping from breasts down, hands like a conjurer’s, showing clothes, herself all dressed so prim and tight. ‘And an education,’ she said, speaking proper. Educated.
‘And your grandfather did the same for you. Where would you be without him?’
What could I say? I stood on my side of the flyscreen door, and said nothing. I nodded. I kept a hand on the door handle, lest I suddenly rocket off into space.
It is the sort of experience that made it very hard for me to look up family. To find each of them, almost without exception, forgetful. Some were boastful, some were frightened, and all of them only partially alive. I don’t know how my father managed to do it. I understand why he kept himself apart from everybody. I understand, but it is not something you choose.
The last time I saw that Ellen—aunty, mother, stranger—her mouth was wide open in astonishment at the sight of me drifting, blowing like a leaf in the wind away from her front door, across her front fence.
And why did my father seek to reconnect himself? Why do I?
When I was a boy, a little boy and too young—or so some might think—to be able to remember it now, my father came to collect me from his grandmother.
She was living in an asbestos and iron shack at Wirlup Haven, at that time a dusty and almost-ghost town which seemed stacked together of cast-off shells. The house she lived in had chicken wire stretching across the space between it and a skeleton fence. There was a rusty, leaking rainwater tank. Vines sprang from the ground and clawed up the wire, which sagged in places with passionfruit and melon. Vines reached out toward my father as we pulled to a stop.
Though not much more than a baby at the time, I swear to you that I saw how Tommy’s grin linked with that of his grandmother across the valley of silence rendered by the ignition key. The car door slammed. The old woman called his name, and I felt the vibrations of her voice.
An old man came coughing out of the doorway behind her, and spat. The phlegm rolled in the dirt. Tiny red rivers ran from watery blue pools and through the yellow of his eyes. He was not a Nyoongar.
‘Peter, this is my grandson. I’ve told you about him. He’s Harley’s father.’
‘Yeah. G’day.’
‘G’day.’ The stooped man hawked, spat.
‘I’m gunna marry a woman. She’s pregnant to me,’ my father said. He and Harriette watched Peter slump back into the house.
‘It’s a white woman. Not the mother of this one.’ My father indicated me. ‘But I’ve told her about him. I can take him.’
And as we drove away, my father and I, as we disappeared from her view, Harriette fell to the ground. She died before we were up to the speed limit of the open road. She died as quickly as that.
There is a photo of her holding my father and his sister. They are both very young children. She has her arms around both of them, and a dark hand grips my father by the wrist. Presumably Ern took the photo as some sort of trophy.
I thought that her death must somehow be my fault. My isolated father and I apparently turning our backs on her, my father—who had been so all on his own—was running to a white woman, going to make a white family, as Uncle Will and her daughters had also done.
Uncle Jack looked at me quizzically.
‘Nah.’ A long, drawn-out negative, to reassure me. Uncle Will was silent.
mother
It may be that a reader is wondering about my own mother, especially in such a story of men, with silent women flitting in the background; and I almost wish I were one of those pioneers with coloured ribbons to pull and bring the girls running. For different reasons, of course.
In my early drifting, especially when I was still finding my place, I often wondered about my mother. My biological mother. It was one of the reasons I went to visit my Aunty Ellen. There were very many Aunty Ellens, and how was I to know which might be she?
I confess to you that I lost the courage to keep inquiring that way. And for the many maybe-my-mothers, too, it was not easy to have a maybe-my-son turn up, knocking, inquiring, asking questions which led, snakingly, to answers they did not want to give or try to find. Not when there were other children clutching at them—some of them now grown-up and accusing them of this or that. And other children means other fathers, and all the trouble that can bring...
But I know of the mother, if not who or where she is now. My mother. Confusingly—but that is reality for you, how it will not fit the neatness a story requires—her name was Ellen.
She was another of Ern’s domestics. Young, only a few years older than Tommy. Ellen. Her voice was soft, and—who knows?—perhaps it was she Mr Neville had in mind when he wrote;
the young half-blood maiden is a pleasant, placid, complacent person as a rule, while the quadroon girl is often strikingly attractive with her ofttimes auburn hair, rosy freckled colouring, and good figure, or maybe blue eyes and fair hair...
I suppose it was hard to keep a particular person in mind after all those women, all those boys, all those years.
As I see it, what we have to do is elevate these people to our own plane...
Ernest was working hard, still, as always. Thinking ahead, planning. He got home in the evenings, smelling of beer. This is long before such a word as ‘networking’ was in use. Tommy saw him in the mornings mostly, at breakfast. Ernest glared at eggs bacon toast tomato as the maid’s knife sliced for him. Tommy observed how his father hid behind the steam rising from his cup, how his lips gripped the cup, and how his eyes followed the maid.
The maid, the girl, my mother—yes, Ellen was her name—kept to her room when she could. On Sundays, when she had the day off, Tommy used to go in there and open her wardrobe. He liked to run his hands through her underwear, and read her letters.
In this, at least, I recognise how I am so like my father. The business with the letters, I mean.
My father. His name was Tommy, and he was about, oh, sixteen years of age, or thereabouts, by my reckoning. And he was working with our Uncle Will. Uncle Will—in Ern’s eyes—was a wonderful example of the sort of absorption which could be achieved with the right kind of help and encouragement.
My Uncle Will did not take his own children to see their grandmother, and his wife had emigrated from postwar Germany which meant her family was too far away. She and Uncle Will were making their own way, from a fresh start. Both of them with nothing behind them. There was equality, there was justice.
Uncle Will was shooting kangaroos for his living. He had dogs and rifles. He shot the animals, cleaned them up a bit and delivered them to another man who sold them in turn.
Tommy and Will had both shot their first kangaroos under the instruction of Harriette, sneaking on their bellies to where they could see the animal’s liquid eyes. They had run with the dogs, and clubbed the cornered roos, evading the grasping arms and lethal kick. But this was different. Uncle Will had the use of a rifle with telescopic sights. It was an anonymous sort of slaughter.
Tommy and Will—my father and my uncle—found a hilltop above where the roos would come. The day was one of soft rain, the wind blew into their faces. They made a little shelter for themselves, and waited.
Each kangaroo loomed large in the shooter’s eye. The shooter exhaled, squeezed the trigger; the animal dropped. The rest of the roos heard nothing. They bounded away a little, momentarily startled, but then resumed their grazing, uncertainly hopping around the increasing number of corpses which surrounded them.
These killers were unseen, unheard. The roos could not smell them, but detected only the peculiar scent of their family’s blood coagulating. The shooters scanned the animals, sorted them, claimed those they wanted.
Perhaps the dogs became impatient with such hunting, resented their redundancy. Perhaps Tommy startled one of them, somehow. Whatever the cause, a roo-dog turned on him and, when Tommy thought about it later, seemed to snarl only
after its teeth had sunk in. Its jaw enclosed his thin thigh, and it shook him so that he sprawled. Uncle Will swung the rifle like a club. A bullet, noisy and unintended, went whistling into the scrub. The noise—combined with the blow to its head—convinced the dog to let go of Tommy. Uncle Will hoisted the boy to his feet, and gave him his shoulder. The dogs slunk behind the strange-legged couple as they made their way to the car.
Uncle Will pulled up near the doors of the hospital. ‘You’ll be right, eh? I’ll stay out here, just in case.’
Will watched the boy struggle with the weight of the heavy doors. The same doors Tommy would come crashing through years later, once again blood-splattered, and with a blue son in his arms.
Tommy awoke in the dark of night. His leg was throbbing with pain, and he needed a piss.
There seemed to be rods of pain connecting the holes where the dog’s teeth had entered either side of his thigh. Now, if they had not then, the holes seemed to meet. He was hot. He crawled from his room, and got to his feet using an upside down broom as a crutch.
The kitchen lino was cool under his feet, but it was also slipping away from him. He was at the centre of a moving spiral, and so, not surprisingly, as the broom slipped, was falling. Fallen.
He saw Ellen above him.
‘I need a piss.’
He leaned on her. She waited at the door. Offered to help, and even with the pain he had to smile. They giggled as she helped him back to his room.
Ellen took the dressing from his inner thigh. His wounds were inflamed, oozing a clear fluid. She dabbed at them with her fingers. He found he was weeping. Silent tears of, what? Gratitude?
Tommy felt as if he was not there, as if he was not himself. Her hand brushed his swelling. He was throbbing, but not with the pain.
Ellen came to see him in the daylight, and Tommy found himself grinning like a child. Well, not quite a child.
‘Shall I check again?’
‘Oh yeah.’
He was wincing, but thought it should be he who asked am I hurting you, am I hurting you I don’t want to hurt you and in fact they were both asking it of one another. Tommy saw that it was she who had the tears in her eyes, and understood his father.
‘Your dad’ll sack me I reckon.’
So when my father found Ernest pushing this Ellen forcefully into the mattress ... Well, they fought. There was anger there. Tommy remembering the ropes on his mother, remembering the many girls and women; Tommy knowing a lust like his father’s, and, perhaps, love. He is my father, after all.
Tommy and Ellen ran. They went to Uncle Will, and kept going, and found Uncle Jack Chatalong on a reserve in the country. They went to Harriette, Tommy’s grandmother. And, somewhere, I was born. Native Welfare caught up with Ellen, and returned her to one of the holding pens, the settlements, the refugee camps, the reserves, the missions, whatever it may have been called. Harriette held me for a little while then, and although it is possible that I have visited my biological mother I only know—for sure—the next mother. The one mother.
ocean, roads
I was conceived, I believe, on a beach somewhere around Wirlup Haven. And, although not born there, I fell into Harriette’s hands.
But, no sooner had I begun to walk, to talk, than I was with a new mother, Tommy’s wife. It was not Ellen. We were living in the house of Ern. And Harriette, the old woman, as hard and tough as an abalone shell and holding the spirit inside her, was dead.
The new mother, Tommy’s wife? Well, Tommy was a young man, she was a timid and loving woman, smitten by him. When she became pregnant, Tommy might have taken the advice and money Ern offered, and gone away for a year or two—but for Harriette’s words. About all the white men who had done that, had turned their backs on their children. How unjust it was. Already he felt he had let her down by not being able to help my mother, and having to burden his grandmother with yet another child to protect from the likes of Ern.
So that must have been why Tommy was so defiant, and said, ‘I’m gunna marry her.’
‘You stupid little bastard,’ Ern said.
I was with Harriette and so I saw nothing of how, in the house of Ern, there was no privacy. How Ern would barge into Tommy and his new wife’s cramped bedroom, as if to prove he owned the place. The new wife could not even sit on the toilet and be at ease. Ern would open the door, and walk in on her, and not say a word of apology. He would look, turn nonchalantly on his heel, and walk away without shutting the door. Although not one of a coloured minority, she was—he’d say—white trash.
And of course I saw nothing of how Tommy worked for the city, and I saw nothing of the trucks, bulldozers, police wagons rumbling through the rubbish tip where he was moving rubbish around in a tractor.
It was Tommy, not I, who heard the machines rumbling and snarling, and—scattered among that noise—the cries of human voices. He started the tractor, raised the bucket, and climbed into it so that he might see. He saw humpies bulldozed into heaps, and aflame, and people—Nyoongars—being pushed into the police wagons. He hadn’t even known there was a reserve there.
The crammed police wagons filed by below him, and he tinkered with the linkages below the bucket, to fix his embarrassment. He saw a few who had escaped the police stealing away into the littered scrub.
Later in the afternoon he saw, atop one of the many mounds of rubbish which had been pushed together, a car body rocking. And the white flanks of one of his workmates backing out of it. The man turned and, pulling up his trousers, nodded at the derelict car body.
‘I saved her for you, mate. She’d be related to you, wouldn’t she?’
Tommy wedged the bucket and front wheels of the tractor into the incinerator. He smelled the rubber burning and left black marks upon the bitumen as he roared away.
And neither was I present when Tommy put Ern’s house up for sale. I didn’t see the For Sale sign spearing the lawn.
‘When it’s sold, I’ll take you to see where I was reared,’ Tommy said to his wife. ‘Meet my granny.’
The real estate agent swore at Tommy when he couldn’t produce the title papers. And when Ern, arriving unexpectedly, hit his son the agent was satisfied.
‘You stupid little mongrel,’ said Ern. ‘You’ll be lucky to get anything of mine. What do you think life’s about? Just taking things you want?’
Tommy took Ern’s blows, as I would years later, but Ern was stronger then and Tommy had less help than I would find.
I do remember a home in a hollow among peppermint trees. I remember the smell of those thin leaves, and the insects hiding in the bark.
A sandy track led to a small shaded patch which overlooked the ocean, and where men smoked cigarettes and waited. They talked softly, squinting in the blue smoke and broken sunlight as their liquid eyes scanned the sea for dark clouds of salmon moving in the broken blue and green.
Fish, solid and silver, writhed in the seine net which a strong young Uncle Will and my boy father rowed around such a cloud. The two men had leaned into each stroke of the oars, the net’s corks tumbling to mark the great half-circle of their wake, and surfed in on a wave which reflected the foam in its face. They leapt out of the boat as it slid before the bouncing, tumbling, white water, and my father’s thin calves signalled for a moment as he lost balance, and then once again there was his dripping torso and wide-eyed face grinning, teeth bright. The net cramped the big fish close together, and the men’s quick strong hands tossed them onto the beach, even as the net tightened, even as the tractors came grumbling to haul it quick smart from the sea.
Then the boy-father, my uncle, all of the men were skipping, tripping, running from where the net had condensed all this life, and the fish were churning the water because a great thing—‘Shark! Shark!’ they called—shook and strained the net, which tore, loosened, and silver flashing fish spilled from it. Were gone.
Scales stuck to the men’s hair and skin as they stood among fish, guts, blood. Scales which were like mirrors or even
the sun itself, but fading, greying, flaking.
In such a mirror, say, I see a group of small children sleeping together.
Uncle Will said we went to stay with him. There’s a photo of us. Mother, father, my brothers and sisters—a bunch of us—and me indistinguishable from them, save if you care to look for such things, if you are of a mind with my grandfather or my one-time self, then perhaps I am an nth darker, there may be something rounder in my features. But we are the same people, surely. How would you differentiate us at such an age?
My expression is tortured, for such a small child. It must be because I am squinting into the sunlight.
Squinting now, I see—as if in one of those scales, as if swirling and growing out of such a curling, grey mirror—a rough curtain, and a wardrobe behind which a man and woman move noisily in the darkness.
I think I woke crying and it must have been the mother above me in the darkness. A male voice—my Uncle Will’s—‘Shut that bloody kid up!’ and the mother’s usually so timid hand hard across my mouth.
Is that why I have held my silence so long? Why I hesitate even now, thinking a shout must come from who knows where, and thinking that shout must be what is right, is far more authoritative than my own whispering, my own private snivelling?
I saw—I still sometimes see—a membrane far above my head, as if the stuff of one of those scales has stretched.
And I swear I hear screaming coming from beyond that membrane; or is it the call of gulls?
I am not swimming, but flailing, I am running in deep water, intent upon that surface above me. Ash falls upon it, and then the panic leaves me, and I resign myself to the tug and sway, and it must be my mothers fathers brothers sisters lovers floating in the growing darkness before my eyes, fading.
I am not an only. See, they float like me. There must be some ears this voice in my head speaks to. Must be.
So we fished. This is the 1960s, and there are many things happening in the greater world of policies and legislation, but down on the south coast there, my father and his Uncle Will—both men only tenuously citizens of their own country, both men filled with pride and shame—lived in their tents with their sunburnt wives and children.