A Long Way From Home

by Peter Carey

  I did not see the cricket ball, nor did he intend me to.

  ‘Catch,’ he cried, and flung it hard. ‘Howzat?’

  Lord, it stung my hands, but I returned it casually, as if assaults were nothing to a man like me.

  ‘I wanted a natter with Mr Hangar.’

  ‘Gone mate,’ he said, considering me in a more friendly manner.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘he’s going to get his brakes fixed before he leaves.’

  ‘He said the exact same thing to me, mate,’ he said, hamming up his response to this ‘coincidence’. ‘That was our point of contention now you mention it. Fucking amazing. I said to him, what do you think this is, a service station? Of course he’s a servant of the Queen, and I don’t mind feeding him, and all the grog he wants but I’ve got a business. And he wants a free mechanic? I’ve got two mobs on their way to Broome. Five hundred beasts. Eight miles a day. Five men to a mob. You know how many windmills we lost in the last wet? That’s my bloody day, mate, putting oil in windmills, and not a useful man left here.’

  ‘Where is Mr Hangar?’

  ‘I didn’t see the point of detaining him. He left you this to mail to Perth. Good luck with that mate.’

  It was a contract for me with the Education Department of Western Australia. Sign or don’t sign, didn’t matter, not to me.

  ‘It’s Sunday. Alidai-taim tudei,’ he said mockingly, using the only Aboriginal language I would ever hear him speak.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You might want to give your house a sweep. Go to the store, sign out what you want, and don’t complain about the prices, they’re decided in Melbourne. Get some mozzie coils. Set yourself up at home. Ask the house girls to show you the school. That was a nice catch,’ he said. ‘You’ll fit in, I reckon.’

  Did I look so easy? He would not be the first man to make that mistake.

  The schoolteacher’s residence on Quamby Downs, like the burned out Redex car, like so many other pieces of machinery, windmills, generators, wells, so much failed whitefellah endeavour, stirred in me an immense melancholy and this was heightened by the more personal leavings of the previous incumbent, the single dusty shoe by the front door, the open can of ‘Two Fruits’, its rim gone black with feasting ants, the trove of whisky bottles hidden in his chest of drawers, the wind-up gramophone with – no records – its needles spilled across the floor. Beneath the bunk I discovered The Complete Stories of the Great Operas which, like his dirty postcards, was black with mould, a victim of the wet season.

  I found a broom and redistributed some dust. I drew water from the tank and scrubbed the filthy sink. I opened the refrigerator, and found the source of that sickening smell: rotting meat from which I fled, dry-retching.

  Carter was not at the house to receive my complaint, and instead I was interviewed by the so-called house girl, Alice Thompson, all of fifty years of age, with sharp shrewd eyes and stick thin legs. She had no shoes, but was dressed in a spotless floral dress and Sunday hat and pin.

  ‘Kerosene bin finish,’ she said when I had explained the rotting meat.

  ‘No, it’s the refrigerator,’ I said. ‘It’s broken. Bad meat.’ She gave me to understand she would fix it.

  ‘But I think you’re on your way to church.’

  But church was trumped by white men, it seemed, and when she met me at the teacher’s residence her church hat was missing and she carried a scrubbing brush and a heavy bucket of steaming water.

  ‘What about church?’ I asked although clearly there would be no church and she would drag out the putrid mess of meat and carry it, dripping, to the outhouse.

  It was a kerosene fridge, of course, and it had run out of fuel and Doctor Battery had already been called to do what was necessary to fix it although, being Doctor Battery, he would artfully avoid any part of that operation he thought beneath him.

  ‘You strong one?’ was his first question of me, and I thought he was contrasting my indolence with the house girl’s hard labour.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s shameful.’

  Crabbing sideways in his distinctive style, the good Doctor carried a kitchen chair to the middle of the room. ‘This old leg no good.’ He grimaced as he sat.

  ‘Too many young wife that fellah,’ Alice said.

  The old man bestowed on her a roguish smile. ‘I plenty strong,’ said Doctor Battery. ‘Three wives,’ he said to me.

  ‘Poor old man,’ said Alice. ‘Young Olive bin reckon she better get some young fellah do the job.’

  This lewd taunting continued back and forth for some time before I understood the subject. The refrigerator could not be easily refuelled. First someone would have to shift it to the centre of the room. Not Doctor Battery it would seem.

  ‘You strong one Billy,’ he said to me.

  Alice scrubbed the pale pink suds laughing and shaking her head.

  But if I was being taken advantage of, I didn’t mind at all. I would shift this one, no matter what it weighed. I would follow instructions to scrape and clean the lamp unit. After that I learned how to trim the wick, light it and move the monster back into its place without tipping it over.

  ‘Next time I fit a hose for you,’ said Doctor Battery.

  Of course there would be no next time. I would be long gone by then.

  ‘Put him juice in the tank,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow feed him from this side.’

  Alice left and returned with a sheet of plywood on which she had bread and marmalade and some glistening butter all of which she balanced on the chrome-legged kitchen table. She poured me strong black tea and added sweet condensed milk. She insisted I draw up a chair to eat and waited until I did.

  Meanwhile I could hear Battery going through the empty bottles in the bedroom dresser. I told Alice she did not need to serve me. She shook her head and grasped the knife and smeared the canned butter on my bread. Her fingers were very dark, and dry and worn. She caught me looking, and then suddenly she smiled, and a moment later her whole face collapsed and her mouth opened and she howled.

  Doctor Battery came rushing back. Alice abruptly composed herself. Something very odd was occurring between them. Battery required I step outside and I resisted.

  ‘Come with us,’ they said, each of them, together and separately.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Alice and laid her wet hand against my cheek.

  Her smile made no sense.

  There was no shade, no relief. Not even the house garden had a tree, and there was the Punka Wallah with his ink black eyes staring at me from the laundry door.

  A few broken stones marked our path which otherwise was no different from the bare earth all around it.

  ‘Where does this lead?’ I asked. I thought, what do they wish to do to me?

  ‘You’ll see.’

  The fierceness of their purpose did not fit the circumstances.

  I decided it would be convenient to have a toothache and Carter would have to take me to the dentist and that would presumably require a town and then I would get a bus or a ride. I would be OK, I thought. I placed my hand on my jaw, in anticipation of my tooth erupting.

  5

  You went behind my back, I did not say to Titch directly. I did not ask, what do you think I did with him, with Bachhuber? What lies did Dunstan tell you? Are you aware that your so-called mate, the mongrel, pressed his thing against me in the dark?

  I was your wife, promised until death.

  You were my husband. You took my money to bookmakers in Craig’s Hotel.

  In the end there was my sister, only she to understand. My husband waited in the car, thinking I was talking to our kids but it was just me and Beverly. We can never see the future.

  6

  Down south I had been a man of great authority. I had never seen a gunyah but (Off he goes) knew it as an Aboriginal word for a small temporary shelter made from bark and tree branches, with a standing tree usually used as the main support. In Quamby Downs a gunyah was called a
humpy and was not made of bark but of rusting corrugated iron and cardboard. You could not stand up in a humpy. You could not wash inside. You had no bathroom, nothing but a single standpipe in the camp, sulphurous bore water, pumped by the clanking Southern Cross windmill. In the wet season the humpies leaked but then there would be a creek and swimming hole to wash in. Now when the kids rolled down the creek bank they came to a stop on waterless sand.

  I said my tooth was hurting but no-one seemed to hear. The changing wind delivered smoke and the stink of cooking bones and offal, the only portion of the station’s beef provided to the camp. I sat in the hot dirt ashamed of my cleanliness, hoping to never know the texture of that fat bellied goanna, presently lying across the coals. Alice touched my wrist with the back of her hand and I thought, if not money, what does she require? She stroked my hand and the kids brought me strip maps from the crashed Peugeot # 62. They wanted autographs. Ah, I thought, so that is it.

  ‘You write Uncle Redex,’ she demanded, and so I did and who could not be moved by those little boys, their smooth bright skin, running noses, their hope and shyness?

  All the camp had seen the cars in the Movietone newsreels, said Doctor Battery. They had projected the films in that Jesus place, a bough shed with a tin roof and spinifex tied to the chicken wire on the open sides. The projector had been carried in by Brother Max who showed films about Jesus but also newsreels and everyone laughed and clapped at the Redex cars rolling, leaping, thundering through. So this must be my added value.

  ‘Proper film star,’ Doctor Battery said, approximately. Actually, he said something like ‘him proper film star’ or ‘’im proper film star’ but I will spare you my own confusion.

  Alice excused herself for ‘second church’. I said I had a toothache and was given red sap to chew. When Alice returned Doctor Battery teased her about her bible. ‘Poor blackfellah don’t have a book. Jesus all mili mili, peipa, buk. That way, Alice? He better than mongrel blackfellah?’

  ‘Lochy you bullaman toilet,’ she said, and of course they had known each other all their lives.

  Alice rested her bible in her lap and touched my cheek and pinched my arm and watched to see how the blood fled the skin and then came rushing back. Her own black skin did not act like this, she showed me. That is, we were different. Obviously. Many people came to demonstrate this truth.

  Time passed, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. The Punka Wallah passed by, a wound-up clockwork engine, stopping only briefly to stare down at me. I put off my toothache. I took pleasure from the children playing. The wind changed, and brought the offal smell our way, and we shifted crablike beneath the weeping gum tree.

  I was prepared for discomfort and for boredom, but not what happened next.

  Imagine yourself a man at his shaving mirror. You know what you will encounter. But then you see, not your familiar reflection, but a stranger’s head upon your shoulders. You touch your lip, perhaps, frightened to see your finger reflected on a foreign face.

  Or, try another route. Imagine you look into a stranger’s face and see your mirror image – except that you are white and he is black. Would you not bite your hand, as I did, or prick it with a knife?

  Might it not, as my father would say, shake you up like salt and pepper, to see the most demanding emotion in a doppelganger’s eyes?

  ‘He bin wait long time la you,’ Doctor Battery said. The hair stood on my arms.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘He dream for you.’ (‘’E dream for you,’ to be precise.)

  Alice was crying openly. Doctor Battery wiped an eye.

  The doppelganger then spoke to me. If I did not hear him cleanly it was because I was afraid and I did not know there could be such a name as his, that it was the custom for half-caste children to be named, not for their fathers, but for things left lying in the dirt.

  ‘Crowbar,’ he repeated.

  ‘Willie,’ I said and we shook hands.

  Later I would know him as a camp fighter and obsessive card player with money to invest. Now, as his fearless smile made its first claim on me, I wished I could escape his eerie presence. His smile did not falter but his eyes welled as he laid his hand on my arm and then his slender fingers reached to my shoulderblade and I could not resist him or move away and when he arrived at my scar . . . what a jubilant cry escaped his lips.

  The bark at the bottom of the white-trunked trees was like cracked mud, like crocodile skin. Crowbar embraced me. Alice wailed and hit her head. Battery removed the rock from inside her grip. I thought, what have I done? Crowbar patted my cheeks. Women hit themselves and rubbed sand into their open mouths. Their faces were intense and folded. Their bodies bosomy and broad. Together with lean Alice they made a choir of unearthly grief and dug into my wounded shoulder as if it were a side of beef.

  Doctor Battery claimed Alice was my mother but of course I knew my mother.

  I said my tooth was hurting.

  I learned I had three mothers, here they were.

  But I was from Adelaide. I told them.

  No, I was not from Adelaide. That was not my country, this was my country here. I was born at the river by that bloodwood tree.I saw the tree, of course, but I also saw the sand, the discarded clothes, the sorry heap of corrugated iron, the starving yellow doglicking its sores.

  When the women had released me Doctor Battery placed his handsome hat upon my head and somehow that was a comfort. Crowbar instructed the kids to bugger off and the women to be quiet. Then the Doctor soothed me as if I were a brumby who would bolt and break a leg if he was not handled right.

  ‘Alice is your mother’s sister, so she is your mother blackfellah way.’ If I were a horse I would have trusted that deep furry voice, the words all worn like river pebbles. Thus I learned my mother’s name. She had been Polly. She had been promised in marriage to Doctor Battery’s brother. She had been ‘plenty lively and up to mischief like a kid’.

  The boss at Quamby Downs was Big Kev Little in those years.

  He chose Polly to be a house girl. She was not paid wages, just flour and tea and sugar and calico to make a dress. She had been pretty happy, Doctor Battery thought. She was a proper ‘inside girl’, in the cookhouse first but then in the Big House, making beds and sweeping and in the laundry hut as well. Once the missus gave her a Sunday hat to wear. She liked the missus. Nothing bad would have happened except the missus did not like the wet season and she went back to her people for a holiday.

  Doctor Battery said that Big Kev did not care about right ways or wrong ways. He was the King of his Castle. He did exactly what he wanted. He shot a union organiser ‘by mistake’ and nothing happened. Likewise, it seemed, he had seduced or raped my mother. ‘Like they always did,’ said Doctor Battery.

  My stomach lurched.

  ‘Everywhere, missionary fellah, schoolteacher, didn’t matter. Whitefellah too greedy for our women.’

  ‘Your Dedi’ was what Doctor Battery called his brother (who was my uncle ‘blackfellah way’ and also my Dedi too). My Dedi had gone up to the Big House to tell the kartiya he could not pinch his wife.

  ‘I bin grow him up,’ he told the boss.

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Your mother. Your Dedi grew ’im up,’ he said.

  ‘You mean her? He raised her?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Your father grew ’im up. He put ’e brothers through Law. ’E mine.’

  ‘Polly was his?’

  ‘Yes. Your Dedi tell the kartiya: ’E mine, ’e promised one.’

  I will save any kartiya readers the inconvenience of learning the convention of Aboriginal English wherein a woman is called he (’e) and referred to as him (’im). Just the same, the guts of the story was not so hard for a stranger to comprehend: Kev Little was a king sitting on his pearl shell throne. He was a rapist and an abuser. He said he was so sorry for the misunderstanding. He never knew the girl was promised. What a shame. He had one more job for her to do and he would send Polly home in the morning and his best wi
shes and so on.

  The next day, Doctor Battery told me, Big Kev sent for my Dedi, my mother’s promised man. He said he had a sick steer over by the number 60 bore and he needed his assistance. There were hawks circling far away, so my Dedi saw that this was true. They rode three or four hours to reach the bore. And there was the beast, already dead, and the hawks tearing it apart.

  The boss then ordered my Dedi off his horse and shot him dead in front of witnesses who would not dare to tell. He never got off his horse, but ordered an uncle to cut the dead beast open and hide my Dedi’s body inside the carcass. My relations got him later during the muster, when they had to separate human bones from cattle.

  Doctor Battery’s face was like a stone. ‘By and by,’ he said, ‘you was born on the ground.’

  When I was born, I learned, my mother had dug a hole and put me in it. She covered me with a mud of ash and termite mound.

  ‘That’s what they bin do, this Law, this place. You blang this country. You bright skinned baby, she make you black like coal. But better be careful, Welfare might come and steal that baby, take him down south and bring you up a white man. Too much babies were pinched from here,’ said Doctor Battery. ‘There was always crying in this camp. You hear the mothers in the night crying for their babies and Kev Little come out on his verandah and fire his gun and tell ’em shut up.

  ‘You mother lost her old man, she not lose you,’ Battery said approximately, and all around me were her sisters who thought they were my mothers and they lived in squalor, without a bathroom or a shower or knives or forks or chairs and tables. They had seen me arrive on earth, they said, witnessed my body come slippery wet and wailing, into the world. I could not doubt them, but I still loved a mother who was a little white woman with grey hair who sipped pale tea from a glass cup, who scrubbed her kitchen floor with bleach.