Benang

by Kim Scott

  When Tommy came home—four days each fortnight—we used to go camping. During the time Dad was away Uncle Will, or someone we called Uncle Les, used to come to chop wood and keep an eye on us. It was a neighbourhood of violence, which never touched my mother, whether because of the uncles I never knew.

  Uncle Les, I found out in my adulthood, was another Nyoongar man stranded like my father; washed up, as it were, although not quite so alone. He lived with a family of black sisters and a white father, and my father spent a lot of time with one of the sisters. Perhaps they hoped Uncle Les would make an alliance with Dad’s own white wife. But Uncle Les was very shy, as was my timid stepmother.

  Uncle Jack explained it this way: ‘I think, when Tommy went home, in town there, then he maybe didn’t feel he was a Nyoongar no more. His wife was never too comfortable with Nyoongars. He was a split man. Because of the childhood he had. Like, if he’d been brought up with family, proper family, or even with any family. But all he saw was Ern pressing down on people like us.

  ‘And brought up that way—his mother dead, no brothers and sisters to her, and kept away from us.

  ‘Yeah, he was Nyoongar all right, even if he married a wadjela, even if he had a wadjela dad. Did you ever hear him sing?

  ‘Around the campfire, get a few beers in him. And he sang at the end of year functions, a few times.’ Uncle Will was nodding in agreement. ‘A deadly singer. Like you.’

  They both looked at me. Ern was staring, too. They wanted me to do my thing, to hover in the smoke, turn this way and that, and sing whatever it was I had taken to singing at such times.

  I realised my father was very nervous, half-crouching to see into the mirror like that, and running his hands back along his scalp.

  He had a bottle of beer beside him, and was singing snatches of song. Grinning to himself, at his wife and kids. Me too. It must have been the same week I have written of above.

  What was he singing?

  Trumby was a ringer

  A good one too at that,

  He could rake and ride a twister

  Throw a rope and fancy plait.

  He could counter line a saddle

  Track a man lost in the night

  Trumby was a good boy

  But he couldn’t read and write.

  Oh, I sang this nonsense in the smoke, for three old men.

  Tommy sang it in the spotlight, and loved it there. The light on him. He looked out over bodies dancing about, and the tables beyond them where so many blokes were jammed, getting drunk. Only a few Nyoongars. There was the law—even though it had apparently recently changed, minds and hearts had not—but who’d dare use that against him, anyway? He could be Italian, maybe Indian. Or just good-looking.

  There was Will, on his own, in the crowd.

  Tommy never felt ashamed, never really felt shy. Spoilt? Maybe he was a bit spoilt, because of those early years with his mum, and being brought up by his grandmother, whatever the troubles he might have had at the boarding houses and Aunty Kate’s.

  Tommy was singing. He could let songs fill him, and nevertheless transform them so they came out new, as if they were his.

  People wanted to talk to him. He tried to be modest, but really, it was hard. He was swelling, blossoming with pride and with the attention he was getting. The women looking at him, giving him a smile, and their men just getting drunker, flush-faced and sullen.

  It was the last song, this Trumby. A Slim Dusty song. They sang a lot of his songs around the campfires, but not this one. He had written the words on a large piece of paper, and placed it on the floor beside the microphone stand.

  Tommy was so proud when he sang. Mid-song, this last song, he started changing some of the words. It was a song about someone not being able to read and write, and here he was, Tommy Scat, reading so well he was changing it even as he sang.

  Tommy was a singer,

  As solid as a post

  His skin was black and his heart was white

  And that’s what matters most.

  He couldn’t change it quick enough. Only the first line.

  Tommy kept his smile. He kept singing, but he was thinking of those words. He thought of how few of the men from his own gang, the Nyoongar gang, were here tonight. Lester, on guitar behind him.

  His heart was white? He wished he hadn’t said Tommy. He thought of his own not-black skin. How the first challenge was ‘ding’ or ‘dago’, and only later, if real malice was called upon, the other words where we would say ‘Nyoongar’. And the colour of his heart, after Aunty Kate’s, and with a father like Ernest Solomon Scat? He thought of his mother, grandmother. The real people, he always thought. Who I am.

  He sang all the better. As if the only proof of who he was, was this.

  Oft times I think how sad it is

  in this world with all its might

  that a man like Trumby met his death

  Cause he couldn’t read or write

  couldn’t read or write...

  The crowd drifted away. The women who had smiled at him went home with the men they had arrived with. The musicians packed away their instruments. My father folded his voice within himself, I suppose, folded his lyrics up, packed it in. He sang in the bathroom at home, sometimes. When he was drinking, he always sang. And he sang in the car, when he was in a good mood. But he never again sang like that, never again put on a show of himself before that sort of audience.

  My family, at the end of which line I dangled, learnt to read and write very early on. My great-grandmother signed her own marriage certificate. We have certificates, of marriage, death, birth. We got caught that way, on paper.

  Harriette is there, apparently telling the inspectors pursuing her brother, Sandy, that she is not under the law pertaining to Aboriginal Natives, that she needs no exemption papers. See, she married a white man. Of course she tells him, quarter-caste. Says, not half-caste.

  And then, what of me? A taint? It would be always enough to pull me into line, if needed, depending who I mixed with.

  You can meet a death, just knowing the paper talk.

  I worried, I considered myself. Taking on my grandfather’s words, trying to save us that way. Saving us because I thought I could read and write so well that I should be able to find my way out of even here.

  We had moved. This house had floors, and was at one edge of a state housing area, and at the bottom of the slope which ran from the school. Across the street from our house there was an expanse of soft-leaved bush surrounding a swamp, and beyond that you could see the blunt roof and high smoking chimneys of the superphosphate factory. To the east was the rubbish tip, beyond that the Natives Reserve.

  Many of our neighbours were those attempting to negotiate that ultimatum delivered by the likes of my grandfather: ‘Be a white man or nothing.’

  We often had two or three younger Nyoongar children staying with us, apart from my three step-siblings. Uncle Jack would arrive with them in his arms. ‘Tommy, you got a job, your missus is good with kids.’

  On this occasion, there was just the one, Kenny, a boy about twelve months old. He was a chubby little boy, just learning to walk, and I—perhaps because I was the eldest, and he the youngest—took to him. His mother had got into some trouble or other, and was unable to care for him, temporarily. If he was related to us through Ern, or was even a child of my father’s, it was never said. He was a dark-skinned child, a fact I mention here because—after what happened—it contributed to the grief my father must have felt, and the different pressures he came under.

  Deep gutters of stone lined each side of our street. All of us kids used to play there, the littlest ones using it as a water slide.

  The dirty tributaries rushing.

  I walked in a little creek, it was a long day’s drive from home. My father said he used to come here as a boy. Land-based whalers used to call here, he told me.

  The water I walked in came from a spring, and usually runs in not much more than a trickle to the sea
. I had little Kenny on my back; although I was so young myself, I liked to carry him around and he was a very small child. It was a winter’s day, and the sea was all blue and black surfaces, slapped and chopped by a little wind. Kenny had his chin on my shoulder, and we looked into the creek, at my feet moving in it. There had been a lot of rain, and the creek ran in twisted cords and sinews of energy. It was brown with run-off, but I could see veins of silver within it, the like of which—only a child—I had previously only noticed in the whirlpool of water running down the drain of my bath.

  I walked with the bush and the spring at my back, up to my calves in the creek, and feeling the push and pull of its brown sinews and fingers.

  The little creek sprang from the bush and rushed across the white beach as if it were made of thin ropes woven into a narrow horizontal plane, and Kenny and I looked through it to the wet, creamy sand which took and held the imprint of my foot. Kenny stood beside me, and I took his hand. The water was up to his thighs, and it was running fast.

  When we reached the edge of the sea, the sand suddenly fell away. The rushing creek must’ve tripped me. I was tumbled and handled roughly; sand, white water, bubbles. I clutched Kenny to me, felt him struggle furiously and slip from my grasp, and then I saw the surface of the sea far above, the clouds and sky beyond that.

  I could not swim. No one had ever taught me to swim. I tried to sprint along the sand, underwater, and reach the shore that way.

  I ran. I did not think of Kenny. I jumped to the surface to draw breath, and tried to run further along the ocean’s floor. Not far enough. Did it a second time. I thought I saw Kenny, limbs flailing, bubbles growing in a long line from his mouth to the surface. A surface which was higher again above me, like broken glass floating, and it took a long time for me to get there, that third time, to that membrane between myself and air, that sky. I sucked in air, water too.

  I am dying. I was dying.

  My father was fishing in a dinghy out behind a rock, which we called an island. He was out of sight of the shore, but not so far away. A few hundred metres.

  He said it was the cry of the gulls that told him. He heard their crying, their screaming, their agitation. The brown rock he had anchored the dinghy behind was patterned with their droppings.

  He started to row back to shore. He rounded the island, saw the mother running to and fro in the shallows, my brothers and sisters close together, looking out to sea. The mother—who could not swim—wading into deeper water. He heard her voice calling with that of the gulls.

  The pastel bubble of my shorts floated between him and the shore. I was silent, suspended from that bubble.

  Tommy dived into the sea, and afterwards said he saw his shadow among other dark shapes moving away. From the shore they at first thought, shark! but it must’ve been dolphins. He didn’t see anything of a baby, of that child Kenny. Didn’t even know what had happened.

  He kicked off his rubber boots, slid from his jumper, and with one arm plucked and threw me into the boat. He thought he heard my bones break as I landed. My skin was split open.

  Only on the shore did he understand that Kenny was gone. But I was not breathing, my heart only just there. My father breathed life into me, the others ran to and fro in the shallows. Blue and black flecked sea. Wet and pale flesh. The brown and silver-cored sinews running across the sand.

  The mother, some of the children stayed behind, just in case, you know, the baby...

  A sister and brother held me, and we were flung together, apart, as the car slid on gravel corners, bounced through shrubs and up over the soft shoulder, wheels spinning motor roaring, and onto the sealed road. We were inside the wind, and bitumen rubber just touching.

  I am pale enough to turn blue, and it was a blue light which flashed and so it was a very blue me indeed whose limbs jerked, and who spat and tore at my bony, sharp siblings.

  When the cop pulled past on his motorbike, and went to weave in front of us, Dad swung the car at him. Dimwittedly, glaring through his adrenalin at the gesticulations, the contorted faces, the helmeted one slowly realised what was happening.

  He went before us wailing, wailing; a racing vanguard for my nearly hearse.

  I imagine my father with a boy-in-arms, kicking at the doors which swing wide and open. He and his boy are damp, scale and blood-caked, like two born from the sea. He calls down a corridor, shouting into the hospital, his voice splitting into many, branching this way and that to bring calm, competent people gliding toward us.

  My father trailed them, trying to explain the decision he’d made. The son in his arms—but not breathing. The baby, gone.

  Years later, Uncle Jack tried to explain to me what happened while I was still unconscious in the hospital. Some people were very angry, of course. They never found the body. How could Tommy just leave it like that? He was just looking after his own kid. He made the wrong choice.

  Uncle Jack and some older people went to see Tommy and my stepmother, to try and help. They understood, too, how hard it was. But Tommy and his wife would take no more little ones to look after.

  Uncle Jack also told me how, at my father’s wedding—it was in a registry office—the bride’s mother had noticed Uncle Jack.

  ‘Oh. Oh. Oh, of course, Tommy...? Is he...?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. They don’t have throwbacks.’ Yet another voice of authority, in the shape of the father-in-law, who had read Neville’s newspaper articles; or perhaps even made his own contribution, seen with his own eyes.

  The father-in-law said it authoritatively, and that had seemed satisfactory, but now; after the drowning, and thinking of their sister and daughter with that man, slaving for him, breaking up blocks of ice with an axe just to pack and send his fish, and he with his bastard from some other woman, and coon kids from who knows where, expecting her to look after them...

  The mother’s two brothers didn’t even knock, they just came bursting in the back door, glanced at the branches nailed to doorways either side of the passage, and kept coming. The dog barked, limping in their wake and struggling to get up the steps.

  ‘We’ve come to take our sister home, and the kids,’ one blurted out.

  ‘You can keep yours.’ The other one—a sensitive soul—tipped his head in my direction.

  The mother cried at them to go away, and come back when they were sober.

  Tommy grabbed a tomato sauce bottle and smashed it on the table. I thought the red sauce particularly dramatic.

  He brandished the jagged glass at them like a crazy man, and the sauce made an arc of thick drops and splattered across them. Tommy frightened all of us.

  One of the brothers sprang forward, and Tommy slashed his forearm open. The real blood was so much brighter, ran so much more freely, than the sauce.

  The brothers backed out. One of them kicked our poor dog down the steps again.

  It wasn’t much of a scene really, but—with the lingering sense that he’d betrayed people somehow, letting the baby go and saving me—all that must have made it that much the harder for Tommy, when Ern came for me. Ern and his scientific mind, wanting to see one experiment all the way through, to see irrevocable proof.

  Tommy, in Ern’s opinion, was unpredictable. Backsliding. Maybe with Tommy it wasn’t going to work, not even with Tommy’s kids even though he had married a white woman. But, the boy...

  He was clever at school (I was), he liked reading (ditto), drawing all the time (I do).

  Tommy must’ve known, he knew what Ern was like.

  He shouldn’t have let me go like that.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, that last time I was with him. ‘What could I do? I had a wife, four littler kids, it was hard for them. Ern had the money, the time. When he talked of a private school, and promised ... Everything was just too much for me.’

  Tommy handed me over to Ern, and it was many years before we met again. I soon found myself understanding some of my father’s long-ago critics; how he made the wrong choice, saving me.<
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  last but one

  It was the last time but one I saw my father. We didn’t talk much.

  We ran. I followed him and in that darkness I could not tell if it was his feet I heard thumping the hard sand or my own. He carried the fishing net on his shoulders, wrapped in tarpaulin. We ran along a narrow track, our footsteps a soft, fast rhythm, and the scrub around us unformed, coagulated darkness. It was a thin gleaming line, and we ran each twist and turn, crouching as low as we were able so that we would be hidden.

  I saw my father through the billowing of my own breath in the cold air. We paused, and he was a strange, misshapen thing ahead of me, against the stars; the net bulging where shoulders and head must be, legs merging into what must be land. Then he was off again. The intricate rhythm of our hearts, feet, breathing. His breath came hard, now. If I was his size I could carry the net.

  And then, in a patch of soft sand, he fell.

  I was looking down on him from far above, and he was a thin figure, limbs akimbo, outlined against that softly glowing patch of earth. Net and tarpaulin splayed from one hand, smudging two pale lines which parted the lumpy darkness.

  Then, up close. His breath a ragged and empty speech balloon.

  So close, not touching. I could see the pores of his skin. And my father, he put an arm over me, drew me to him, and we lay warm against one another as the searchlight sliced the night above us.

  I felt our warmth, saw and smelled the life of our mutual breath and heard, too, it slow and grow louder as the boat’s motor faded and left us.

  It was the last time but one I saw my father, and I had escaped my grandfather ... No, that is not quite right. ‘Escape’ is not the right word. I think it was simply that I had managed to ease away from my grandfather’s control because—as much as anything—he was confident that he had succeeded with me. Had made me, finished with me. And he was distracted by business concerns, developing a working relationship with a new partner, Aunty someone-or-other.