Benang

by Kim Scott

  Barely hanging onto freedom, unsure who they were, they kept to themselves. Tommy took his new wife, the baby, the kids and me among them, to the pub. Shy—perhaps embarrassed by his pride—he pointed to a yellowing photograph on the wall. It was his own boyself, straddling a shark on the sand of the beach.

  We lived at Uncle Will’s small property, just outside of the closest town, Gebalup. And it is from there that I recall the shout which shut me up. My aunty yelling. Uncle Will, sudden like that, in the dark of early morning.

  There was a swamp among the white sand which used to call me; a quite different call.

  It was definitely shouting and violence which shut me up, made me withdraw like a mollusc into its shell.

  Tommy, his young and so timid wife with the children coming one after the other so quick. And that somewhat older one; myself.

  We found a home—a shell to hold us. It was a timber-framed house, perched above the ground, and unfinished to the extent that only in the narrow passageway, kitchen and one other room was the flooring completed. Dad nailed branches across the doorways of the other two rooms at such a height as to discourage us from venturing into them. The floor joists spanning these rooms made a grid across the space from wall to wall and above the drop to the dirt below. Each floorless room seemed as if moored—but only just—to those joists.

  I used to climb over the doorway branches, and balance on the spans of timber. It was quite a fall to the soil below.

  I felt like that once again as I wrote this story of ours; as if I was poised in space, precariously supported. Particularly when I wrote of my father, with the very many gaps, the many things I did not know about him. I knew him when I was a child, and spent only a few days of my teenage years with him. The last time I saw him he tried to explain why he had let Ern take me away.

  And then I killed him. My father, that is. Ern I helped keep alive.

  Tommy got a job with the Main Roads Department which meant he was away from home for two weeks at a time. He used to bring home joeys which had survived their mothers being shot, or been rescued from the destruction of land clearing on a massive scale. We hung them in pillowslips in our warmest rooms, but they always died.

  Once he brought home a pup to be a guard dog. It was a mongrel, he said. A dingo with just enough domestic dog in it to bark and yelp.

  The yelping was very loud.

  It was because the bitumen road was so warm, I suppose.

  It was the sound of extreme distress, shall I say? Put it like that?

  I ran out into the sun, and saw spatters of blood leading from the road, across the dry front yard, and to our rainwater tank. The tank was built on a thick circular wall of ironstone, and there was a small opening in the wall which led into a cave-like space.

  The yelping was a howling now. A nightmare sound.

  A car was stopped just past where the blood trail began. The car’s brakelights went off, and the wheels of the empty trailer bounced as it accelerated away.

  The mother was peering down around the side of the house. When the car left we went and peered into the space—that tiny cave—below the rainwater tank.

  The howling, pale shape which we could barely discern in there must be our dog.

  The blood on the soil was drying, and as each little puddle coagulated its edges contracted, pulling grains of soil to its centre.

  On the Main Roads, Tommy started digging. Learnt about leaning on a shovel. He was bored, until they showed him how to use a grader. The blade pared back the earth, pushed a wave of earth to one side of the smooth tender ground it left behind it. The soil, the stones, lay in the sun, drying and fading. There were pegs stabbed in a line, in order to be followed and to show how deep to peel.

  Tommy sat within the grumbling vehicle, and vibrated with it. He put the wheels on a lean, and yet he stayed perpendicular. A cigarette, hand-rolled as he drove, dangled at the corner of his lips.

  A truck sprayed water, sparkling and profligate, dampening the wound along which it drove.

  They cut and pared. They softened. They sealed with bitumen and brushed away the stones so that traffic might better rush along.

  Rain bounced on the new road, and rushed away to streams running either side of it.

  At night the guideposts reflected like the eyes of animals, and by day there were carcasses which stiffened and stank, but the posts remained, and only occasionally teetered from their upright stance.

  The men worked in gangs, and camped in iron huts. Their meals were prepared for them and at night they sat around the fire, drinking and talking.

  ‘I could help you get along,’ said the foreman, who knew Jock Mustle. There was a new gang being formed. An employment initiative. The new gang was to be made up of Aboriginal men, and Tommy could join them as Leading Hand.

  The dog would not let us near it. Our mother knew no one, was too timid to ask, and we had no money for such a thing as a veterinarian.

  We left food and water at the entrance to the dog’s stone kennel, but it was some days before any of it was touched.

  Dad came home on a weekend, and the dog limped out to meet him. It was thin, and black blood was caked between its back legs and across its stomach and chest. The car, or perhaps only the trailer, must have driven across its testicles while it lay sleeping on the sun-warmed road.

  I suppose it fully recovered, I only know that it was still limping several weeks later when I met my grandfather for the first time, and went to live with him. But before that I had impressed my family with my ability to turn blue.

  Yes, as perhaps befits one of a coloured minority, I turned blue, my limbs jerked, and I spat and tore at my siblings, whose arms, whose flesh and bones held me tight.

  blue me

  Perhaps it was hearing of this trace of blue which aroused my grandfather’s interest in me above any other of those countless offspring of his. His curiosity about colour, about the remnants of it, the dilution of it. His interest in genetics. Perhaps it was this sort of detached interest; that of the scientist, with his trained mind and keen desire...

  I recall reading of a man who, sometime around the advent of electricity, received an electric shock and it was said that he turned blue, and remained so for a very long time. The mosquitoes were afraid to bite him, and the orgasms he experienced and delivered were ... Well, he attracted a lot of interest.

  Who knows, my grandfather may have had some similar experience within his own family. He may have wondered if this blueness of mine was, to use his language, a throwback to an ancestor. Perhaps he had also read of the incident with electricity. All I know is that it certainly aroused his ... curiosity.

  While I was ill and listless he investigated me most rigorously.

  of water and ice...

  At one time Tommy had the use of a good sized boat. I don’t know how we got to have it. He had asked Ern for the money, but Ern never gave any.

  He took me out onto the ocean with him, because I was the only one old enough to go, I suppose. It was a little before my drowning.

  I cut mullet in two, and we baited the many hooks along a rope which my father tied to a series of rusting drums and left spread out across the ocean beside one of the islands. After a few hours we returned, and I remember leaning over the side with a knife to free stingrays too big for us to take aboard, and how the sharks piled up in the boat.

  There’s a Nyoongar word for island—kurt-budjar—which roughly translates as ‘heart-land’. Out there between headland and heartland the sea was grey, and on this windless day it was thick and had a dull sheen to it and our little boat floated on the surface of regular, rolling mounds of energy. Sea birds, their wings tucked in, rose and fell with us, waiting.

  We pulled closer to the island, and listened to the sound of sea exploding on granite. Whether headland or heartland, the land loomed impossibly solid and real as we moved into its shadowy protection. We heard the wind roar in blowholes, the salt water falling in heavy drops, and the bi
rds calling as they wheeled and dipped and soared.

  Closer to the mainland we trailed a lure, the boat moving slowly, and a gull swooped into our wake, then could not fly away. It moved heavily in the air, and made jagged lines of flight. I hauled it toward me, observing its struggle, the way I arrested it with the line, until I had it an arm’s length from me, and the line was taut between us.

  The motor vibrated in the boat’s timbers, in me. We had to raise our voices to talk. If we talked.

  Clouds touched the sea, and fine rain or mist moved around us; changing shape, reforming as we chugged our way through it. Rain, clouds, sea; all grey.

  It came from the sea, and out of all that various and shifting damp stuff. It came out of torn clouds, came low above the sea, came with its long wings stroking, creating itself out of shreds of mist, fine ribbons of cloud, the so slow falling rain. A huge white bird, its wings cupping the damp air, appeared, was gone, back again, gone.

  Land gently rose either side of us as we entered the harbour’s channel, and the mist was clearing. Shrubs sprouted from smooth flanks of granite, water dripping from my eyebrows.

  ‘Sea-eagle. Must be sick,’ coughed my father.

  All of us—the child I was thought this—all of us made of water, ice, drying in the sun’s flame.

  calling, and choosing

  We were humming and rattling along, shrouded within a rushing wind just above the surface of the sealed earth.

  For some reason Uncle Jack was with us. He often helped arrange that my mother take in very young children for a while, when their own mothers got into some difficulty or other. Sometimes, these children were related to my father through Ern’s persistent efforts to breed us out, fill us with shame; all that rationalising to disguise his own desires.

  We were all humming, singing; sometimes it was even the same song. The kids were all in the back of the old Landrover, either on the hard metal bench seats of its perimeter, or lying on top of the canvas and blankets which reached almost to the roof of the cab. There were a lot of us, perhaps that was why Jack was there. My father’s wife was the only woman.

  My father—Tommy—was in a good mood. Someone farted, and everyone started teasing me, saying I must be going rotten. My father farted loudly, pulled the handthrottle, and stuck his bum out the window as he was driving along.

  ‘This is what you gotta do if you fart in the car.’

  It looked a very uncomfortable position. Some of us went red in the face, wanting to attempt such a position ourselves.

  We turned off the bitumen, and bounced and lurched in dust. All the windows were opened; dust in, dust straight out. We were speeding, and kept just ahead of the spiralling confusion of dust behind us.

  Fence posts zipped along each side of the road, and stunted blue-grey mallee grew away in one dense coat, with here and there tufts of trees or growths of rock. In one direction clouds lowered themselves onto the peaks of distant ranges.

  We turned into a sandy track, closed a sagging gate behind us.

  ‘Mustle’s property. Don’t worry, I’ve sorted it with him.’

  Now we drove slowly, and trees and shrubs each side of the road dragged at the vehicle’s side.

  It was mallee and dust and fence posts and we were ascending, I think, the most subtle of inclines. The track was sandy, and the vehicle slewed occasionally but less and less as we gradually slowed, adjusting to the terrain. Three emus ran before us on the sandy track; two parents, and a young one. They stayed on the track, running ahead and flicking sand as their long knobbly toes gripped and flung. They did their knock-kneed thing for us and then turned off into the scrub as they tardily realised how fast we were and that this path which was helping them run, helped us even more. Roos bounded through the scrub parallel to us, and met our gaze each time their heads looped above the bush.

  Another gate. An old farmhouse, sagging chimney, windows bare and expressionless. A glimpse of sea?

  We stopped at a boggy patch. It must have been a spring that made the ground soggy like that, a soak. The bush was closer, taller, leaves greener on flaking black bark. The shade was good, because we were hot and stale from sitting in the vehicle. The moist air was crowded with flying, biting specks. Dad fiddled with the wheels and checked out the car. He walked through where we’d drive. We had a drink of water, and a run around and a pee.

  Us kids sat on top of the roof-rack as the Landrover crawled around the top of a hill. Our heads cleared the scrub, and we were looking down, down a slope covered with grey-blue growth, tight and coiled. Far away at the base of this long muscular slope, a pool of dark-sky-blue showed where the creek rested as it twisted its way to just short of the sea. The sunlight sank into the water, and reflected just the one heavy star back at us. It was shady down there, we could tell; cool and moist. We saw the white sand of the beach between river and sea.

  There was a hut at the track’s end. It was a very small one, only used in the salmon season, and built among shelves of stone in the lee of the hill and a rocky point which tumbled out into the ocean. I could see a couple of islands, far enough away to be dimmed by the sea haze.

  The sand was soft and fine; it squeaked when we walked on it. It was so glary in the middle of the day that it made you go inside yourself and people were just black shadows dancing. We splashed and swam in water that was as salty as tears. Crisp waves swung in from the point and folded themselves upon the rocks, upon the sand, around the children. The waves rolled us children to shore.

  Once there was a young skeleton on the beach. I thought it was a shark because I could see bits of the dorsal fin with shreds of skin, but Unc said it was a dolphin and look, he said, here are its hands. Bits of skin and flesh still there.

  They are friendly, dolphins. They smile. They loop and wave. They used to be like pet dogs for people, and herd schools of salmon to where they could be speared. A man would stand by a big fire, tap his sticks, and sing them in.

  There was a big fire that night. My face got very hot, but only a few steps away it was cold again, and the stars lower. I was young enough to huddle in close with the others. The world seemed big, and out beyond the light was all cold fear and threat.

  Dad was picking up the others, one at a time, and shaking them to the bottom of their sleeping-bags. Like a joey, he said.

  ‘Eh, Tommy, don’t do that to the poor little buggers.’

  ‘Oh, we like it, Unc.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  He seemed angry, genuinely disturbed.

  ‘I knew some kids got hung up like that all night.’

  I wanted him to tell, but he wouldn’t.

  We dug ourselves into the dry seaweed high on the shore. The mother came and and lay with her own children. I kept a distance, and arranged my seaweed cushioning so that I could look up into the far away but so close night sky, and also see the fire and the figures around it. I heard their voices, and watched them passing the beer bottle back and forth, the red fire glinting warmly on the glass as it moved from flickering black hand to flickering black hand. The firelight made their hands thin like bones, separated at each joint. They sat there; black skeletons bundled in baggy clothes, and the fire danced lower, lower.

  In the morning there was a mist over the landlocked water. My father and uncle took me through the gap in the dunes to where the river waited. We stepped from the beach sand which barred the river’s way to the sea and onto damp, firm ground fringed by reeds and paperbarks. The dog trembled with excitement, now and then releasing a tiny whimper.

  We had a shotgun. The dog followed us, shivering its restraint.

  Unc rested the gun in a tree’s soft, paper-barked fork, and fired through the midges. At the bang the ducks lifted their wings, folded the air under them, and rose. The flap and flurry of wings faded with the gunshot, but one duck stayed, wing feathers whacking the water. Dad was naked and wading in among the reeds. He swam out to the bird. The dog started with him, but he sent it back and, before reaching
the duck, slipped beneath the surface and we saw the bird suddenly go under the surface and Dad’s head spring up in its place. He trod water, and held his arms high to break the bird’s neck. The sun must have risen quite high, because I remember how it shone on the duck’s plumage.

  We were building the fire again. Late in the day.

  ‘This is where we come from,’ Unc said. ‘Once. From roundabouts here to a fair way east, Dubitj Creek way.’ He pointed with a smouldering stick around the beach. The tip of the stick trailed smoke. My eye followed the curve of the beach, tracing the land south-east until it shrivelled into the distance of sky and sea.

  A little arc of grey smoke, disappearing. Purple-tinted white beach, scraggles of weed, dunes, the sea glowing, the darkening sky. Cold.

  Unc left one end of the net with us as he rowed away with the rest. I watched the net unfolding itself from the back of the boat. He went out, curved away to the right, and left the line of corks bobbing behind him. He came into shore again about fifty maybe a hundred metres around from where we remained, clutching the net. Then we all started hauling it in together.

  Go into the water, grab rope, mesh, cork. Walk onto the sand with it and you can lean right over and not fall. But sometimes, it’s nice to fall into the water, and then come up dripping, seeing your legs slide from the water, the long line of muscle, the bony knee. And go and do it again.

  The net got heavier and heavier. The fish were calling to us through the ropes in our hands.

  I have forgotten everything else but that weight, and the rope thrumming.

  I did not speak of any of these things to my uncles as we drove along the coast.

  Uncle Jack had worked on the same Main Roads Gang as my father. ‘That’s how he got a lot of his education as a Nyoongar,’ said Uncle Jack. ‘Elsewise it was only when he was a littl’n.’