To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  Had she read somewhere that it was safe to drink a little sea-water in emergencies like this? Or was it the other way round – that sea-water was always dangerous, never to be touched? Oh, the things that one forgot; the things that one should know. How to light a fire, for instance, without matches. Which shellfish to eat and which to avoid. Which wild berries were food and which were killers. How to trap birds. How to hunt animals. How to catch fish without a hook and line or net.

  The explorers of years past had gathered dew from the grass in the early morning; they had eaten grass and rats; the roots of grass and the seeds of grass.

  ‘My great-grandmother was an Aboriginal. She knew where to look for food; she knew where to find it. Perhaps it’s still in me. Perhaps it’s something that will wake up. Wouldn’t it be strange if it did?’

  She looked at the backs of her hands, at her fingernails, at her arms and feet and toes. She had a white girl’s body, a white girl’s skin, a white girl’s mind and a white girl’s instinct. Nothing of the Aboriginal was left; it had been bred out; it had been lost in white generations. What a shame.

  A heritage such as that could have saved them. Then what could her mother have said about that? Then what? Then she might have forgiven her husband for the alien blood in his veins.

  Should she give it a try? Should she walk into the bush and try to remember, try to stir up the past? Should she perhaps lie with her heart to the hungry ground and wait for the awakening of the instinct that would lead her to the roots and seeds and pith of plants that had nourished those distant generations of primitive men, to the honey ants and wild bees and tiny animals and fat white wood grubs and to sources of water underground?

  Perhaps it was worth a try. If she didn’t try she’d never know. But if the instinct did awake, how would she explain it to Gerald, to Jan, to Colin? Particularly to Gerald. His feelings about that sort of thing were so fiercely formed, yet so contradictory. His feelings argued with one another. They were the feelings not so much of a boy but of a man set in his ways; his father’s feelings, probably. The Hennessys, she suspected, thought not so much as individuals as a clan.

  Perhaps she should not try it.

  Hesitantly, she walked on towards the headland. Rocks lay out there where the land met the sea and great breakers were crashing over them, and beside her was the land itself, shrouded by woody, twisted trees. She didn’t even know what sort of trees they were. And grass too; clumps of stiff grass. (Species unknown.) And dryness, brittleness; not exactly desolation, but there was a feeling of immense and deep distance, of singing silences over a vast and uninhabited land. Flat land it seemed to be, a coastal plain too harsh for men.

  She climbed into the headland rocks, electing to stay back from the sea. There was danger out there in the eddies, the spray and foam and exploding surf. She came on to a grassy prominence almost as hard on her feet as the rocks, and moved across its brow until the coast continuing beyond came into her view.

  It was as vast and as featureless and depressing as the land behind her. At least it was at first, for at first she could not see it all; but suddenly she saw a line of boulders stretched into the sea; a line so straight and purposeful that only the hand of man could have put it there. It was a breakwater, a harbour for ships!

  Carol was spellbound. A pain hit her in the middle like the blow of a fist. Her mind, in frantic disorder, suddenly drove her back across the headland to wave for the others, to shout into the wind, to scatter the gulls over her head. She shrieked into the north but nothing was there to hear her. The beach was empty, quite empty, for as far as the eye could reach.

  She ran back to the other side, excited and confused and laughing, and scrambled down through the rocks and slipping sand, twice dropping her stockings and shoes, then running when she reached the flat until there was a stitch in her side that caught her breathlessly somewhere between agony and joy. She had to stop, her body twisted to one side, panting, her impatience with herself a peculiar sort of pleasure. ‘Oh, Carol,’ she groaned, ‘a stitch at a time like this.’ And she hobbled on towards the breakwater, towards the unmistakable channel that betrayed a tidal stream, perhaps even a creek from the inland flowing down to the sea.

  A fresh water creek? A river? A wide stream up which launches and small ships moved back and forth? Where people on this hot Saturday morning would be drifting idly in little boats, trailing lines in the water, fishing the sandy bottom? A port for livestock? For export beef? Or bringing in supplies for a scientific expedition? Men looking for oil perhaps, or prospecting for minerals? Was Bruce right all the time; was there a town back in there, upstream? But no single possibility did she pursue. The only thing she cared about was the fact that they were no longer lost. Not lost at all. People were here. There’d be help to bury Jim, a proper place to bury him; medical attention for Bruce. Food and water for all of them. A telegraph station or a wireless to send news to their parents. Excitement fragmented her thoughts; had them rushing in all directions; clouded her mind. It was her imagination that saw for her. Her eyes saw only in part.

  She came breathlessly to the edge of the tidal stream, thirty feet or forty feet wide, and already the salt swell was running inland back into an area of surprisingly dense growth, into a tangle of boughs and roots and foliage in places low enough to meet the water. At first sight it was a jungle, a shock, a steaming wilderness, a swamp, screeching with bird life, humming with insects, crawling with reptiles, as though flashed suddenly and thunderously on a screen in a dark theatre. But the sound was an illusion; the sound wasn’t there, except in her own head.

  Carol was bewildered and her panting gained the immediate depth of a moan of despair. But it was a breakwater; it was a port. Her eyes traced the boulders out to sea, thousands of boulders built into a wall. But there were breaches in it where storms had smashed through; breaches that no one had repaired. And there were no buoys for ships to moor, no little boats at anchor, and the jetty was derelict. The jetty she had seen was in truth a few piles long abandoned, encrusted with shells, draped with weed, standing like broken columns, like broken monuments eroded by time, mysteriously growing shorter then longer as the swell heaved past. There was something about it now that expressed a finality, an isolation and a hopelessness that she had not known earlier. This was a dead place; a place where men had failed or perished; not a place to which men sailed but from which men had sailed away.

  She felt desolate, marooned, cast away. It was a load upon her, a great weight upon her. ‘Daddy. . .’ she choked, and stifled the word.

  But upstream something was taking her eye, almost speaking to her, repeatedly, as though trying to attract and hold her attention, until finally she saw what it was: an arrangement of overgrown rocks, perhaps a wall.

  Almost at once she felt faintly uneasy, as though the wall were a living thing or a personality that she should at all costs avoid. But it drew her, first commanding her curiosity, then her steps. Flowers were growing there; the first flowers she had consciously seen. Leaves were there, different kinds, the kinds that one might expect to see where plants had been placed by men. But all was overgrown, feverishly overgrown, straggly, wild, neglected in a way that the untouched native bush never appeared to be. This was a dead place, dead for perhaps a century; remembered only by ghosts.

  It was a wall all right – there were four walls, partly fallen down, formed of beach stones plastered together with crumbling lime mortar, enclosing a tangle of rotten wood and long grass; fallen timbers, once rafters perhaps, once a roof over unknown men. Traders? Settlers? Stockmen?

  On the stone lintel, over the doorway, was carved a date: 1874.

  Carol stared at it, half guiltily, as though she had been ordered not to.

  1874.

  Oh, a long, long time ago. Long before her own time, long before her parents’ time, way back in the unreal days when her great-grandmother had been young; days that had happened outside of Carol, beyond her. Before Carol. Another world en
tirely; but spinning through time on this beach.

  Frightened people, were they? Or fearless and tough, dressed in coarse flannels as thick as boards, with wide hats, and scarlet kerchiefs knotted at their necks. Rugged voices. The laughter of men; echoes of that odd and raucous laughter that she could never accustom herself to. Or was there then the same sagging stillness as now; the same beat, like a dying heart-beat, of the ocean on the shore?

  Carol bowed her head and squeezed shut her stinging eyes.

  13.

  Birthday Present

  The three children didn’t cry any more. Even the tears on the inside – that didn’t show on the outside – had dried up. In a way they had grown harder; in another way weaker. Colin, in particular, was drawn and unnaturally pale. It had been something of a humiliation to discover that Jan was physically more able than he was; her body was deeper and broader. Her body didn’t creak and groan, didn’t seem to seize up, didn’t seem to suffer pain from digging or from dragging heavy weights.

  ‘Mark,’ Colin panted, ‘maybe you’d better go to Gerald.’

  ‘That’s not a job for a little kid. That’s not fair.’

  ‘Please, Mark.’

  Mark knew what it was all about. He’d seen Colin like this before; grey, wrung out. Colin worried the family on occasions.

  ‘Go on, Mark,’ Jan said. ‘I reckon it should be you, too.’ She thought, mistakenly, that she knew what was on Colin’s mind. Col was pretty deep at times; cunning in a way. He could see ahead.

  ‘Aw, swipe me,’ Mark said, but he went.

  On the way he stopped to talk to Bruce. (Mark could be cunning, too.) Perhaps he could use Bruce to solve his problem. ‘How’s the book going?’ he said.

  ‘Drying out all right, I think, though all the glue’s come unstuck. We won’t be able to read it when the wind’s blowing!’

  ‘What about the wireless? Col says.’

  ‘Dry. But I’m blowed if it works.’

  Mark scratched his itchy head with a distinctly nervous mannerism. ‘Comin’ to the service?’

  Bruce seemed to stiffen, seemed to hunt around for something to say. ‘It’s hot. I’m melting. They could pour me into a can. Guaranteed Pure Bruce Dripping. You tell ’em to come and shift me before I get sunstroke or something.’

  ‘Comin’ to the service?’ Mark repeated doggedly.

  For a moment Bruce seemed angry, then looked away to where he had smoothed a yard or two of sand and drawn a map of Australia with a twig. He had marked in the borders of the States, the great inland lakes and all the coastal features that he could remember. He didn’t answer Mark’s question. ‘It’ll be a start,’ he said instead, ‘to work out where we are, though I reckon we’re in the tropics somewhere; yeh. But everything’s back to front. The sea shouldn’t be in the west; and where are all the palm trees and everything. I mean, after all, we couldn’t have flown right across the country to Western Australia. Unless that’s why the wireless doesn’t work. Perhaps we’re too far away to hear anything at all. Or we could be here —’ he put a finger on the Gulf of Carpentaria. ‘But I don’t see how we could have got that far, either. But we are in the tropics, you know; that’s why it got dark so quickly last night.’

  ‘Be a sport,’ said Mark. ‘Answer me.’

  ‘How can I go to the service?’

  ‘Perhaps Gerald will give us a hand and you can hop between us? Then you’ll get out of the sun.’

  Bruce stretched a leg. It wasn’t all that painful, not really; it was better than it had been an hour or two ago. He’d been thinking of crawling into the shade, anyway, and would have done except for a streak of cussedness. First of all he wanted Jan to be absolutely sure that he was suffering. He had a feeling that she still didn’t believe him. Maybe if he did hop all the way, grunting and groaning, Jan would be conscience-stricken. ‘O.K.,’ he said, ‘you get Gerald to help and I’ll come.’

  Mark went on and sat a few feet from Gerald, just above the line reached by the incoming waves. After a while, Mark said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Gerald, and he didn’t sound too bad; almost friendly. ‘Bruce wants to go to the service,’ Mark said, ‘and I need your help to get him there.’

  Gerald didn’t look at him, but turned his face enough for Mark to catch his profile. He looked all right from the side; much the same as always. ‘Service? What’s that?’

  ‘We’re going to have one. Jan’s going to say some prayers. She’s pretty good at that sort of thing.’

  Gerald turned his head away again and seemed to sag from the shoulders, as in fact he did. Far away, on the curve of the beach, he could see a tiny figure that must have been Carol coming back. ‘For Jim, I suppose?’

  ‘Like Col says, we’d want it done right if it was for us.’

  ‘I don’t know that I see the point.’

  ‘Well, we’ve dug a grave an’ all. It was awful hard, Gerald. Not the ground, I mean. You know, diggin’ a grave.’

  ‘Yeh, but what’s the use?’

  Mark choked. ‘He’s in it! It’s his grave.’

  Gerald had had an idea that they had found him. He was not surprised, though he made out to be. He looked Mark in the eye. ‘You should’ve told me. Someone should’ve told me you’d found him.’ And that was true enough. He’d wanted them to ask him for help, but they hadn’t done so. He’d wanted someone apart from Carol to show an interest in him. He didn’t like being on his own, being out of things, but he had wanted the move to come from them. After all, it was his birthday and he’d saved all their lives. They’d all be dead like Jim but for him.

  Mark said, ‘It was awful getting him there, Gerald. Jan did it, and Colin and me.’

  So they’d sent Mark to him; hadn’t come themselves. Maybe they’d sent Mark to shame him.

  He couldn’t look Mark in the eye any more.

  ‘You’ll help me won’t you, please Gerald, to get Bruce there?’

  He swayed on to his feet and it wasn’t put on. He was weak and sore and terribly miserable and burning with shame. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’ll help.’

  ‘What’s that on the ground?’ said Mark. ‘You’ve dropped something.’

  ‘No I haven’t. Carol dropped it.’

  It was the packet.

  ‘Well, we’d better not leave it there.’ Mark picked it up. ‘It’s wrapped in birthday paper,’ he said. ‘It is yours, isn’t it?’

  Gerald shrugged.

  ‘And you haven’t even opened it . . . I had a present for you, too, but I lost it. It was a beaut tie, a real humdinger. Go on, open it, Gerald. See what she’s given you.’

  That was something else Gerald had wanted to do, to open the parcel, but something had stopped him.

  Mark thrust it into his hands. ‘Go on. See what it is.’

  Gerald felt awkward about it, but opened it just the same. The gift-paper wrapping had been quite wet when Carol had put it down beside him, but now it was brittle dry and tore with a crackling sound.

  ‘Is it spoilt?’ said Mark.

  ‘Don’t know what it is yet.’

  It was a small jewel case of white plastic, not much larger than a matchbox, and in it was a silver tie-pin in the shape of pilot’s wings.

  ‘Gee, whiz,’ said Mark, ‘that’s beaut.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it,’ said Gerald, ‘it’s nice,’ and felt bad about it. He had seen it in the shop window. He knew how much it had cost.

  ‘She likes you, doesn’t she?’ said Mark.

  Gerald’s lips became tight and he slipped the little case in his pocket.

  ‘It would have looked good with my tie. It was a real humdinger, Gerald. Mum picked it out. We had to take the first one back to the shop ’cos I picked that. Mum said trust that old skinflint to foist the rubbish on to a kid. Mum said it’d never do for the likes of Gerald Hennessy.’ Mark rambled on because he didn’t know how to stop. ‘Mum says you can pick what a fella’s like by the tie he wears; even if someone else has bought it for him,
Mum says. Do you reckon that, Gerald?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gerald. ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why, Gerald?’

  But Gerald was looking back to where Carol was coming along the beach. He hadn’t heard; hadn’t heard a thing; and Mark felt foolish and uncomfortable and went on his own to Bruce.

  ‘How’d you get Gerald to come?’ Bruce said.

  ‘Asked him.’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘Carol’s given him a beaut tie-pin.’

  ‘Crumbs,’ said Bruce, ‘I’d forgotten his present. Had a set of Indonesian stamps for him. Real beauties they were. Birds. On a first day cover and all. Never find ’em now, not with the tide back in and all.’

  Gerald arrived, obviously at a loss about practically everything. He couldn’t meet Bruce in the eye. He’d never been embarrassed in Bruce’s company before, because Bruce wasn’t that sort of fellow. You usually felt naturally free and easy when Bruce was around.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ Bruce said.

  Gerald’s smile was a thin one. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’ve lost your present.’

  ‘That’s all right. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘First day cover it was. A beauty. I’ll see if I can get you another when we get back home. Maybe the stamp shop will have another.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Gerald. ‘Whose wireless is that?’

  ‘Carol’s.’

  ‘Does it work?’

  ‘Dead as a bloomin’ doornail.’

  ‘Sea-water, I suppose,’ Gerald said, ‘in the batteries.’

  ‘I’ve dried ’em out. Everything’s dry. Perhaps we’re just too far from a station.’

  ‘It’ll be the batteries.’

  ‘Do you know or are you just guessing?’

  Gerald shrugged. ‘Guessing, I suppose, but I reckon I’m guessing right. How about you? Can you walk on that ankle?’

  ‘I reckon I can hop.’

  ‘It’s a long way,’ Mark said.