The Wounded Sinner

by Gus Henderson

  ‘Aw, Mumma, that’s not fair!’ She folded her arms across her chest, pouted and stamped her feet. ‘Jaylene always gets to stay home. I ’ate her and I ’ate school and I’m not goin’!’

  ‘Listen, all of you. No one is going to school today, okay. I’ll ring Marie and say we won’t be coming in. There’s only a few days left of term. Early holidays, okay?’

  ‘Aw, Mumma, you said I was goin’ to help you.’ Jaylene’s disappointment was palpable.

  ‘You’re all going to help, even Nadine, so stop fighting and get dressed.’

  There was an excited dispersal of kids. Milk dripped off the kitchen counter and pooled on the floor. The people of the morning show had kept talking through the mayhem, still smiling, unperturbed.

  Jeanie changed Little Albert and took the nappy to the bin. She sat back on the bed. The tea and toast were cold.

  —

  There is no small amount of illusion attached to the outback. It is, for people throughout the world, and indeed for many Australians, a place of mystique built up by skilful pens and brushes into images of myth and legend. Crooked Mick of the Speewah, the gun shearer, ate a sheep for breakfast. Clancy won hearts drifting from station to station. A young rider, called simply ‘the Man’, galloped headlong down a mountain in a fearless pursuit to get the job done. And Ben Poulson sat in his underwear on his tiny back porch, feeling seedy and rolling a cigarette with some difficulty.

  It was 8:15 and for Ben the morning was half-gone, swallowed up somehow into the vacuum of spent time, never to be seen again. He sipped black tea from an enamel mug for no other reason than he thought it was expected of him. Image: it was nearly everything. God had shaped his face with the use of a small hatchet, or so he told people. His ruggedness epitomised a collective ideal; however, this morning the features of his cragginess sagged a little and the pores ran with sweat, his essence wrapped in the folds of a raging hangover. Bile kept rising in his throat, bringing with it no good thing.

  He could take today off but sure as eggs someone would want tyres or need something fixed. That was the problem with the world: it always needed fixing. Planet Earth hurtling through space with bits and pieces flinging off everywhere: a puncture here, a crack there. Thank the Lord for Ben Poulson. Christ, he could just about fix anything.

  ‘’Cept this hangover. Jeez, it’s a beaut.’ Ben tossed the dregs of his tea out into the untidiness of his backyard, an unfenced sea of red dirt and grass tufts all the way to the shunting yards. He looked up into the shroud of a pale blue summer sky getting hotter by the minute and driving the flies to a greater intimacy. Ben stubbed out his cigarette. Even before the last of the smoke had cleared his lungs, he hawked up an oystery wad of phlegm and cursed the day he started smoking. He cursed women, too. He cursed their brokenness, their stubbornness, their stupidness. Inside the house, the telephone rang. Ben Poulson was an important man in this town. He could fix anything.

  —

  ‘Is it all right if I pay you on Thursday?’

  ‘What? He’s left you with no money, again?’

  ‘No! He … I just didn’t expect the battery to die on me.’ Jeanie looked on while Ben fitted the strap over the battery and tightened the leads to the terminals. ‘But I can pay you now if you want.’

  ‘Thursday will be fine. You know that, Jeanie, don’t you?’ He pulled the bonnet down with a clunk. ‘Well, see if it starts. Then you lot can be off to school.’

  ‘We’re not going to school!’ Georgina, arms folded as usual, happy and victorious.

  ‘Oh, so where are you going?’

  ‘It’s secret women’s business.’ Jaylene appeared with Little Albert in tow, nappyless, free.

  Ben just gave her a glare, his eyes like tiny, greasy caul-drons. Bubble, bubble … ‘Start her up, Jeanie!’

  The motor cranked over but wouldn’t start. She tried again and again, hoping it would kick to life, hoping it wouldn’t. Providence was her mistress.

  Ben shook his head. ‘Could be the injectors. Get a cuppa on and I’ll take a look. Shouldn’t take me much more …’

  ‘Try again, Mumma. It’ll start this time.’ Jaylene spoke, eyes closed, face skyward. The other four children clustered around her in a group of anxious uncertainty.

  ‘Go on, Jeanie, give it a go, but I can almost guarantee it …’

  It bucked, and coughed, and chugged to life. Burnt diesel shot out the exhaust in toxic black clouds and the kids raced around excitedly. Jaylene pumped the air and performed a little victory dance. She looked at Ben and smiled.

  ‘Well, have a nice day, Jeanie. Let me know if you get into any trouble, okay? I’ve got my mobile with me all the time.’

  ‘Thanks, Ben. I really appreciate your trouble.’

  ‘No trouble at all.’ He walked towards his ute and stopped to pat Nadine’s head. ‘I’m really takin’ a shine to these kids.’

  Nadine made a face. ‘You smell like beer.’

  Softly, ‘And you … Never mind.’

  Ben drove away and thought it had been a shitty start to the day.

  The ageing Landcruiser drove up Memorial Drive and came to a halt beside the cemetery gates, their sculptured elegance misplaced in this part of the country. Jeanie Bayona had spent the three-kilometre journey briefly lecturing her children on graveyard etiquette, the dos and don’ts of respect for the sleeping dead. Now that they were there, she wondered if the dead really gave a damn at all, whatever the kids might do or say. The occupants were certainly dead and their spirits more than likely took flight to other places shortly after their demise. That left just a body, a spent shell, buried six feet under the earth for reasons purely olfactory: wild animals would not smell the scent of a rotting corpse at that depth. Neither would a human. Jeanie was relieved by that, for she had been told by her foster-father that nothing smells worse than a dead person.

  ‘Ee-ew! What stinks?’ Georgina led the four older children through the cemetery gates. It was an unmistakable odour, as much a part of the bush as living itself.

  ‘You, Georgie!’

  ‘Shut up, Jaylene!’

  Jeanie was taking Little Albert from his car seat. ‘Don’t start here in the cemetery, girls. Have some respect.’

  ‘Something’s dead, Mumma. We’re gonna have a look.’ They raced off, carefully skirting the obvious graves in a series of zig-zagging manoeuvres and athletic hurdles. As they approached the northern corner of the graveyard, several crows flew off, their breakfast disturbed for the time being.

  Jeanie followed them in, pushing Little Albert in a stroller up the avenue of red flowering gums. On either side, past the trees, were rows of graves unmarked save for the cast-iron plot numbers, the occupants now just names in a register: not even a memory. She walked between the plots of those long gone to who-knows-where. Perhaps, before they passed, they’d heard that glorious rumour preached with a reverential sincerity, that hope of eternity, one way or the other. The dead, though, say nothing: not one says a word.

  A movement in the scrub on the other side of the southern boundary fence caught Jeanie’s eye. An old Aboriginal woman was busy pulling away at the branches of a stunted acacia and placing objects in a calico bag that was slung about her neck. She didn’t seem to notice as Jeanie approached the wire, and moved on to another bush, engrossed in her toil. It was clear to Jeanie this woman wore the stains of a different existence, all dust and sweat and smell from the past somewhere. And from somewhere else, far off, kids laughed and squealed, making play with death, storing up the intangibles of life.

  The old woman momentarily stopped her work and looked across at the sound of the children. She was startled to see Jeanie staring at her from behind the fence and she stared back, black eyes anchored in yellow seas, rimmed with red around the shorelines. Hers was a face of too many yesterdays, not enough tomorrows.

  ‘Hello, Auntie. I didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing?’ The woman bent down again to resume her work. ‘I’m Jeanie Bay
ona. Maybe you knew my father?’ Jeanie cupped her hand to her mouth, wondering if the woman had heard her. ‘Auntie! Maybe you could help me? Do you speak English?’

  ‘’Course I speak English! Wad you t’inking? You speak English an’ you as black as me!’ She began crossing a tract of raked soil separating the cemetery from the scrub. Jeanie could see now that the old woman hobbled slightly as she walked, favouring her left leg. ‘I don’ ’ear too good dese days.’

  ‘Your foot looks pretty swollen.’

  ‘Is plenny sore, dat one. But don’ worry,’ she said, tapping her good leg, ‘I got ’nudder.’ Laughter squeezed out and caused her to jiggle about. ‘’Sides, don’ like ’ospitals. You call me Auntie, orright?’

  ‘Okay, Auntie, I’m Jeanie Bayona. You may have …’

  ‘I knew dat man. ’E was my cousin. ’E’s from Barren ’ills, dat man.’

  ‘Can you tell me about him? About my mother?’

  ‘Firs’ we ’ave breakfast. Get your kids, ’ey?’

  ‘Oh, we’ve already eaten, this morning.’

  ‘Dis is ngirriki.’ She showed Jeanie the contents of her bag. A mass of witchetty grubs struggled around like severed white fingers. ‘A … er … wad dat word?’

  ‘A delicacy?’

  ‘Yeah, dat’s it. Let’s get a fire goin’.’

  ‘You’re going to cook them?’

  ‘Or you can eat ’em raw.’

  ‘You can’t expect us to eat them!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’re grubs!’ Jeanie made a face.

  ‘’Course dey grubs! Dey blackfulla tucker, you know! Taste like chicken.’

  The old woman picked up a heap of small sticks and brushwood, enough for a fire, layer upon layer. Jaylene and the girls had finished their macabre pleasures and watched from their mother’s side.

  ‘Wotshee doin’, Mumma?’ Robyn, who still believed mothers across the world held all knowledge.

  ‘Making a fire. She’s going to roast witchetty grubs.’

  ‘Oh … eew!’ The younger girls made noises of disgust.

  ‘Is she goin’ to eat them?’ Robyn, again.

  ‘I think she wants us to eat them, too. Says they taste like chicken.’ Jeanie answered in a lowered voice. She didn’t want to offend the old woman, who had now lit the fire and was busy avoiding the smoke.

  ‘You lissen to me. It don’ matter if you eat witchetty or not. Some whitefulla eat witchetty but dey still a whitefulla. Is not gonna change your colour.’ She waited for the fire to die down and threw the grubs onto the coals. ‘Your spirit inside you. You got t’ lissen to it.’ The grubs sizzled. She looked at Jeanie. ‘Maybe you always gonna be a white girl with a black face, I don’ know.’

  ‘How do you know about me?’ The cold shadows of the past moved inside her like circling dogs, padding around on a desert of uncertainty. Even in the heat, Jeanie shivered. She looked across the graveyard and then back at the old woman bent over the smoking remains of the fire. Jeanie thought she might walk away, just get in the ’cruiser, drive home and start the day over again, no damage done. But somewhere inside … She cursed the clawed hand of belonging. ‘How … ?’

  ‘I know you seekin’ your spirit. D’ Dreamin’ is callin’ you.’ She flicked a grub from the fire with a stick, picked it up and blew on it through dark lips. ‘All d’ peeble talk about you. Our peeble, you know. We know you, from a liddle bebby. We always ’member you. You jus’ don’ ’member us. Der land is our mudder.’ She poked another grub in between teeth worn with age and still creamy white. ‘Dis dead place is sacred to der peeble ’ere about today,’ she waved her hand towards the cemetery, ‘but der ’ole land, our land, ’olds our peeble from Dreamtime. You know, bloody long time! Der spirits are callin’ you. Dey part of der land now, gone back to our mudder, der earth. Dey cryin’ out for you. Dat’s end of der story.’

  ‘I’m a Christian. I don’t believe in the Dreaming.’ Jeanie poked a stick into the ashes of the fire.

  ‘Yeah, dat’s your story. You ’ave a story. Spirit still callin’ you all der same, callin’ you back to your peeble, where you belong.’ Jeanie and Jaylene helped the old lady to her feet. ‘You, me, we’re ’lated, doesn’ madder wad we belieb. We still family.’

  ‘I don’t even know your name.’

  ‘My name is Nuala. In language ’ere means “beautiful”.’ She threw her head back in laughter. ‘Mos’ peeble ’round ’ere call me Auntie Peggy.’

  ‘Who named you Peggy? The missionaries?’

  ‘I don’ go t’ mission. Broughd up on Barren ’ills station. My mudder, she work’d dere for Mr Forrester. Plenny rich, dat old bastard, I tell you. She buried ’ere,’ a nod indicating some place in the cemetery, ‘and I will join ’er soon enough.’

  ‘What about my father and mother?’

  ‘Oh, dey work for Forrester, too. ’Ard man, dat fella. Big walypala, dat bastard.’

  ‘Might just drive out to Barren Hills, kids. What do you say?’

  ‘Sounds great Mumma. Anything but school.’ Jaylene answered for the girls, who were busily searing ants with sticks from the embers of the fire.

  ‘You come out, too, Auntie?’

  ‘Firs’ you take me back t’ town? My leg hurtin’ plenny.’

  ‘I’d rather take you to the hospital. You need some antibiotics.’

  ‘Mebby bedder I need bush me’cine. You get moddercar an’ take me t’ town, okay?’

  ‘All right, if that’s what you want?’

  ‘Barren ’ills is a sad place for our peeble. Very sad place, dat’s all.’ She hobbled along until she reached the fence. ‘More lader, orright.’

  They all sat in the Landcruiser as it chugged back to town, Auntie Peggy in the front, kids in the back, chattering with excitement. Auntie Peggy had begun to sing in language, almost inaudibly at first and then gradually louder, her voice sounding like the rushing of many spirits, her eyes closed against the present world.

  ‘What’s she doing, Jaylene?’ asked Jeanie.

  ‘She’s singing the songlines, singing up the Dreaming.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘She’s praying, Mumma.’

  12

  Matthew lay there as the morning sun washed the grey from the night. The magpies had been singing out from the trees since early. Too early. Already there was the sound of footsteps tap-tapping on the pavement outside. It was a man’s tread. It may have been Tran, from up the road, off to catch his train. He was a commuter, an outwardly happy bloke, but soon to lose his face, his character, his personality, sucked away by the system. It does that to a person, that process of dehumanisation, for the participants in the daily grind. And outside, the growl. The throbbing artery of the Great Eastern Highway was beginning its daily ritual of drawing devotees to the bitumen altar: they come in droves, in motors of all kinds, in either direction, a mechanised monotony, the children of modernity. A car drove past Matthew’s window, an automaton at the wheel, no doubt fulfilling the obligations of life, and the relentlessness of a new day rolled around once more.

  Humans build cages for themselves, mused Matthew, even in Leonora. Despite its isolation, the little town was hemmed in by a perilous expanse of rolling scrub and sand, stuck as it was like a blister on the open palm of the desert. The town held those within in prescribed, fenceless enclosure; without was suffering and death. Unless you’re a blackfella, you don’t venture into the bush.

  Here, too, in Guildford, THE WOUNDED SINNER constricted him. He was bound by oath to look after his father and by honour to Jeanie and the kids. Both city and country had seized him, squeezing out the balm of life. He wondered how much more was left in the tube. The thought of love flew in through the open window; Matthew considered it for a moment then batted it away.

  He reached for his cigarettes. The packet was empty. Shit! It was a long walk to the shop. Maybe three hundred metres. Maybe he could do it before …

  ‘Get me up, Matthew!’
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  He wondered how much more he could take.

  —

  Vince had re-read Sophie’s note a hundred times or more. It sat on the kitchen table, a silent testament to the dashed hopes of two people once joined in holy matrimony – let no man put asunder. He couldn’t yet understand how it had come to this, an ending in the fine-point, blue-inked words on a square sheet of white paper: a two-dimensional outcome for a two-dimensional marriage. Foolishly, he had always thought it was more than that.

  He had slept fitfully on the couch, it being a ghastly faux-Renaissance five-seater of a red-and-gold-thread discomfort, but even that was preferable to sleeping alone in their bed. The phone had rung early. The pit of his stomach was not a good place.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Vince. It’s me.’

  ‘Baby, what’s goin’ on? Is Lukey okay?’

  ‘Look, I’m at Mum’s. We’re okay. I just need some space.’

  ‘I don’t get it. What’s happened? Is it another fella?’

  ‘Just don’t come over. All right?’

  The phone clicked. Vince was left holding nothing but emptiness and its weight was overwhelming.

  —

  Matthew sat his dad at the window and he pegged the curtain back sufficiently for the old man to get a view of his little triangular world. When one is young, the world is so wide but age condenses everything, narrows things down.

  ‘Is he still there?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The swaggie!’

  ‘Oh, the homeless person,’ replied Matthew. ‘Yeah, probably moved on.’

  ‘Go and check!’

  ‘I’m too busy to go and check, Dad. Whoever it was would have moved on to the park last night.’

  ‘Probably still there,’ he muttered. ‘We could be killed in our own beds, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Dad.’ Matthew turned on the laptop that sat, awkwardly conspicuous, in the far corner of the lounge room. Archie had argued against Matthew setting it up there. The radiation, you see, he had said, goes in through the ears and attacks the brain. Archie could only see the downfall of humanity through the breaching of cyberspace.