Swimming on Dry Land

by Helen Blackhurst

  Dad nods. ‘I think she’s special. Do you?’

  I give him a kiss goodnight and tell him to leave the door open.

  The room is nearly empty when I wake up; all the big boxes have gone. I lie in bed listening to the sounds coming from the kitchen: hushed voices, cups or plates being put down. Dad creeps in for another box. When he notices that my eyes are open, he says, ‘Come on, lazy bones. Mr M’s waiting for us.’

  I get dressed as quickly as I can. ‘Are we driving back to Adelaide today?’ I ask him, as we go into the kitchen.

  ‘Tomorrow. Early morning.’ Dad bites into a piece of buttered toast Susan has made him.

  ‘You look nice,’ I tell her, because she does. She is wearing a sun-brown buttoned up dress and small clip-on earrings.

  After we’ve finished breakfast and tidied up, Susan waves us off. She says she’ll see us later. Me and Dad drive over to the hospital in the yellow van. Everything looks so clean after the rain, as if someone’s painted over the whole town in shiny nail polish.

  The nurse with the ponytail remembers my name. ‘Hello, Monica,’ she says. ‘How are you today?’ She smiles at Dad. Her teeth are really white. ‘Dr Marshall said you’d be coming. You’re his first visitors.’ Her ponytail bounces up the corridor in front of us. ‘Let’s hope he’s awake,’ she says, pushing open a set of double doors. It’s not a room; it’s another long corridor with beds down either side. I don’t see Mr M at first. The nurse stops and talks to one of the doctors, who gives her a clipboard to carry. Some of the people in here look really sick.

  Mr M is in the second to last bed on the left-hand side. He’s propped up on a stack of pillows, wearing a pair of green hospital pyjamas that make him look a bit like Grandpa. He’s a lot thinner than Grandpa though; you can see all the bones in his face.

  ‘You’ve got visitors.’ the nurse says to Mr M. She pulls the curtain around, winking at me. ‘Bit of privacy.’

  I jump onto Mr M’s bed and hug him over the sheet, but he screws up his face as if it hurts, and the nurse tells me to get off.

  ‘He’s not quite ready for that yet. Go gently with him,’ she says, straightening his sheet before she leaves.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I ask him.

  ‘I knew you’d come,’ he says.

  Dad and Mr M say a few words while I look in his cupboard. It’s empty. I wish I’d brought him some flowers. Some of the other patients have flowers. All he’s got is a plastic cup of water. The drawer is empty too. Then I remember the present at the bottom of my rucksack. While I’m looking for it, I find the bag of sandwiches we forgot to eat. The cheese has gone slimy and smells a bit, but I slip them into Mr M’s drawer anyway, in case he gets hungry.

  ‘Here you go,’ I say, putting the wrapped egg on the sheet near his hand. I have to help him open it. He holds the egg flat on his palm, then closes his fingers and flips his hand over. BAM – the egg disappears, just like magic. Dad laughs; he thinks it’s a trick. The next moment, Mr M makes the egg appear again.

  ‘How did you do that?’ I ask him.

  He just smiles.

  Dad is nodding as if he knows. ‘I’m going to get some coffee. Can I get you anything, Mr M?’

  ‘No, mate. Thanks.’ He says thanks really loudly. The man in the end bed with the tube up his nose turns his head and looks over, twisting his mouth as if he’s trying to smile.

  ‘That’s Gordon,’ Mr M says, waving over at the man. ‘Got attacked by a wallaby. Punched his lights out.’ He laughs; it’s so funny the way he laughs, like he’s hiccuping. He has to stop because it hurts. Dad pulls the curtain back as he goes. And I flick Mr M’s bedside light on and off, to check it’s working.

  ‘Why did those men hurt you?’ I leave the light on.

  He rolls the egg around in his hand, bringing it up to his nose to smell it. ‘Thawurr babarlthang,’ he says, smoothing his thumb over the wavy wood-lines. Sometimes he says things I don’t understand. ‘I’ve got a story for you.’

  I nod. ‘Georgie thinks you’re BLAST,’ I tell him.

  He smiles again. His teeth are broken and some are missing altogether – not like the nurse’s teeth.

  ‘Don’t you worry about your sister,’ he says. ‘She’s alright where she is. You’ll be right too.’

  ‘Is it about the Rainbow Snake?’ I ask.

  ‘You’d better see if you can borrow that chair from Gordon.’

  I go over to the man with the nose tube. He’s got two chairs at the side of his bed and no one is sitting on them. He reaches out his fat hand and I shake it. His skin feels squidgy, as if it’s full of water. I let go really quickly. One of the nurses helps me drag the chair across to Mr M’s bed, and I sit down. ‘When will you go back to Akarula?’

  ‘Sometime and never. As long as our tree still stands, we’ll be welcome.’ Mr M has told me lots of stories, mostly about the Rainbow Snake, who made the rivers, and Baiame, who did almost everything else. Baiame and the Rainbow Snake are sort of the same, only different. The one about the sea is my favourite. I think I told you that Red Rock Mountain is the place where the Rainbow Snake sleeps. Well another thing I didn’t say is that whatever grows and moves on Red Rock Mountain is part of Rainbow Snake’s dreams. I don’t know if that’s true, but it might be. Mr M believes the snake is real. He also believes that the tree he sits under in Akarula is not really a tree; it’s a relative of his, like Grandpa, only older. I told him once that I wouldn’t want to be a tree – too boring. We were sitting right underneath his tree when I said that. He laughed and told me to shush, in case his relative was listening. I said I was sorry to the tree. I think it heard me too.

  ‘This story,’ Mr M starts, ‘was passed down from the tail of the sacred river to the mouth of the sea.’ His eyes always glaze over when he’s telling a story, as if they’ve spun backwards and are looking inside instead of out. ‘It’s about the bora you folks call Akarula. Back then, you see, there were no houses. Our people lived under the sun, finding food along the lines sung out by our ancestors.

  ‘But one day we heard a rumbling that would normally have come from the sky, only it was the earth talking. We listened, lying with our ears flat to the ground, and while we lay there, many trucks arrived. When the trucks stopped, the rumbling stopped, and this was taken as a sign. These trucks were full of white fellas with picks and drills. They started making holes, digging up the earth and all its treasure. Our people made way for these new travellers, waiting to hear their stories and songs. In exchange for food, the travellers gave us small coloured paper, which we burned, but it didn’t last like wood, and soon the fires went out. One by one we were marched into the trucks, with promise of more paper, and driven away.’

  ‘Is this a sad story?’

  Mr M’s eyes turn outwards for a second. ‘Only one man, a man named Mali Ku, survived the rumbling. He stayed to watch Rainbow Snake and guard the bora. You see, the rumbling had woken her, and she was hungry; starving in fact. Mali Ku knew Rainbow Snake wouldn’t sleep again until she’d eaten. The first thing she came upon was a man, one of the hole-digging white fellas. She swallowed him up in one giant gulp.’ Mr M gulps as if he is the Rainbow Snake. ‘The man tasted bitter, the kind of bitterness that grows from being alone. Rainbow Snake very nearly spat him out, but, feeling tired, she slept again. It wasn’t long before the constant rumbling woke her a second time. Finding that her stomach was only half-full, she went in search of more food. This time she tried a woman. The woman was sweeter than the man; still there was a sad sourness in her blood that lingered like bad breath in Rainbow Snake’s mouth.

  ‘Once more the great snake closed her eyes. And her eyes would have stayed closed if it hadn’t been for the cries of a lost child. Following these cries, Rainbow Snake slithered across the bush until she found a small girl in one of the white fella’s holes, and so she swallowed her too, in the hope that the rumbling would finally stop and she would be left in peace. Do you know what the girl tasted lik
e?’ I shake my head. ‘Honey. Mali Ku watched all this in silence, knowing what he must do. When night fell and Rainbow Snake grew still, Mali Ku took a big knife and slit open the side of her belly while she slept. Blood poured out, turning the rocks and all the land dark red. The pain woke her up, and she opened one eye. When she saw Mali Ku standing there with the bloodied knife, she knew what had happened and hissed with rage. But the three lost ones had already pushed their way out of the hole made by the knife, and escaped into the bush. Only now they looked different. The half-digested magic of Rainbow Snake’s stomach had changed them into kangaroos. The lost ones went in search of their families, but their own people didn’t recognise them.’

  ‘It is a sad story. Does Mali Ku kill the Rainbow Snake in the end?’

  ‘At first Rainbow Snake was so angry with Mali Ku that she laid curses on his head, making the white fellas beat him. In her rage, she commanded the sky to wash away her enemies. The rain fell hard and long. Rainbow Snake cleaned her wounds in the empty bora and drank the rivers dry.’ Mr M stops for a moment and takes a drink from his plastic cup. ‘Finally satisfied that the rumbling had stopped, she slept again, looking like a large rock to some; to others, like a small mountain.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘It’s a story.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid the Rainbow Snake will swallow you?’

  ‘I’m afraid the earth will swallow us all one day. I’m bushed. This bloody medicine makes me dozy.’ He smiles at me before he closes his eyes. The egg is still in his hand. I watch the sheet go up and down as he breathes, until Dad comes. Susan is with him. She is wearing her white doctor’s coat.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she whispers. I wave goodbye to the man who got hit by the wallaby. He twists his face up again and lifts his fat watery hand.

  When we get outside the ward, Susan leaves us.

  ‘Where’s she going?’ I ask Dad.

  ‘To work. Did you have a good talk with Mr M?’

  ‘He told me about the kangaroos. Is it raining now in Akarula?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘That’s right.’ And then I remember. ‘There’s no one left to feed the birds.’ I don’t want to cry, but my throat gets lumpy when I think of those birds getting thinner and thinner like Mr M.

  Dad takes my hand and leads me over to the window by the reception desk. On the roof of the nearest portacabin there are a whole row of birds that look exactly the same as the pink and grey galahs in Akarula. I think about the time when Mum and Dad and me made fish shapes in the sand on Whitley Beach, and laughed until our faces hurt. I think about how I swung between the two of them: the sand trails from my shoes, our stretched-out shadows. A few of the birds take off; I watch them fly. And ever so gently, my heart bursts open.

  About the Author

  Born in Cheshire, Helen Blackhurst lives in rural Ireland where she works as a drama therapist and is involved in community arts projects. Her short story ‘That Snowman’, was published in The Stinging Fly magazine. Her debut novel, Swimming on Dry Land was written after a period of residence in Australia, and Helen has made several research trips to the area since her first visit, at one point working with a small group of aboriginal women on Elcho Island. She finds the vastness of the Australian landscape, in particular the remoteness and extremes of Arnhemland, Northern Territory, inspiring, and the history and current plight of the aborigines both fascinating and challenging.

  Seren is the book imprint of Poetry Wales Press Ltd

  57 Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales, CF31 3AE

  www.serenbooks.com

  Facebook: facebook.com/SerenBooks

  Twitter: @SerenBooks

  © Helen Blackhust 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-78172-291-6

  The right of Helen Blackhurst to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters and incidents portrayed are the work of the author’s imagination. Any other resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher works with the financial assistance of The Welsh Books Council