by John Clanchy
‘Yes, but what’s it for?’ Luisa persists. ‘To tie the sticks?’
‘No,’ the woman shakes her head and smiles. ‘That secret one.’
‘But, Nala, it must be for something.’
‘Can’t tell. That secret one, like all this one here.’ And as she says this, she turns and it’s like she’s speaking to the Rock itself, to the cave behind her, the hollows, the water. ‘That one tie you to the Earth,’ she says, and because of the way she keeps saying this one and that one and never points directly, I have no idea whether she’s talking about the Rock, or the caves behind her, or the water and the trees, or even the white string, or what.
‘That way,’ she says to me, ‘you know which country you bilong.’
‘Oh, I see.’ When I don’t, really. Or only sort of.
‘We’ve got to go now,’ I tell her then. ‘Our friends are coming back soon, they’ll wonder where we are.’
‘They’re up there,’ Luisa says. ‘See, Nala, they’re climbing on the Rock.’
Once again I get it all wrong. I expect the woman, Nala, to be upset by this, people climbing all over the Rock.
‘Minga.’ She laughs, and can see the climbers apparently without even shielding her eyes.
‘What’s Minga?’ Luisa asks.
‘Minga that liddle one.’ She points not to the Rock but at a spot on the ground with her bare toe.
‘Ants?’ Luisa says. ‘You mean ants?’
Nala looks at me. ‘You got cig’rette?’
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t smoke.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke,’ Luisa says, and – even with her – I’m suddenly unclear whether she’s talking to me or the woman and expressing concern for our health, or is just laying down the law generally. ‘It gives you cancer.’
‘Maybe I not give her back,’ the woman says, putting a restraining hand on Luisa’s shoulder. ‘Maybe I keep that one and you gotta buyim back.’ She smiles. And I smile back. I’ve played this game many times before, with Maria, one of Mum’s students from Chile. Maria was in jail and tortured under Pinochet. Her daughter’s still back in Chile. Whenever Maria comes to the house and I’m there, she grabs me by the arm and won’t let go. ‘I’m taking this one with me,’ she always says to Mum. ‘This is my daughter. This one belongs to me.’ Sometimes she hangs on and hangs on for ages, long after you’d think the joke was over. ‘Good,’ Mum always responds, ‘you can take her now.’ ‘I mean it,’ Maria says. ‘I take her with me.’ But Mum only laughs, just like this woman Nala does now, when I say:
‘I’ve only got five dollars.’
‘Pive dollars?’ She pretends to be shocked. ‘That all? That won’t even buy six-pack.’
She lets Luisa go then, and Luisa climbs back, reluctantly, through the strands of wire.
‘Have a nice ceremony, Nala,’ she says, and waves. The woman looks after her for a moment, then waves back. The white cord is still wrapped around her wrist and fingers. She turns and bends to pick up the bundle of sticks and flowers. She looks suddenly huge from behind, bent like that.
‘She seems very nice,’ I say, peering at Luisa out of the corner of my eye. I have no sense of what Luisa’s thinking. The down on her dark cheek is golden as we come out of the trees.
‘They might be back by now,’ she says, having apparently forgotten the woman already. ‘I’m dying to see Sarah.’
And so in the end it’s me who’s left. Dying to know.
‘Where are you from, Luisa?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Your family. Like, my father’s from Greece. And I lived there for a while before we came back to Sydney.’
‘Well, before,’ she takes my hand, ‘we lived in Moree.’
‘Mor-ee? But before that?’
‘I don’t remember before that, but Mum says Dad came from somewhere else.’
‘But you don’t know where?’
‘Lismore, I think.’
‘Oh,’ I say, and leave it. You can’t just keep repeating, And before that? And before that? because it could be only her grandparents are from India, or Sri Lanka, or wherever they come from, and not her parents at all. They could even be born here.
‘Look,’ she cries then, and releases my hand. ‘There’s Sarah. Sarah,’ she calls, ‘Sar-ah!’
And runs towards her friend, leaving me trailing behind her.
* *
‘What about these various activities?’ Mr Jackson had said to me at one point during the inquiry. ‘Climbing the Rock, walking in the Olgas …’
‘Kata Tjuta,’ I told him. ‘The Olgas’ real name is Kata Tjuta.’
‘These activities,’ Mr Jackson ignored me. ‘Were the two of them always together then?’
‘I can’t remember, Mr Jackson. Once you get back home, everything gradually gets mixed up in your mind.’
‘Just focus on one thing at a time, then, Laura,’ Mr Murchison said. ‘That first morning everyone climbed the Rock. Were they together then?’
‘No. No, they weren’t. I remember now. Toni was with Mrs Harvey. Mrs Harvey said Toni was to stay with her –’
All right, all right,’ Mr Jackson said. ‘Don’t get excited.’
‘But it’s true. Mrs Harvey kept Toni at the back to help her look after the smallest girls while they went up. And Mr Prescott was right at the other end of the line – at the front, I mean, with the biggest boys. So the whole group was between them.’
‘This was going up?’ Mr Murchison said. He wasn’t looking at me, he was doodling on the pad in front of him. It was weird, he’d drawn these three large circles on his pad and he was slowly filling them in by pressing the nib of his pen onto the page, and then lifting it sharply off. Leaving all these black dots, like a desert painting. ‘What about when you got to the top?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and I couldn’t tell either if I was blushing.
‘You mean you didn’t see Toni up there?’
‘I mean, I didn’t go. I didn’t climb with the others.’
‘Whyever not?’ Mr Jackson said.
‘One of the Year 7s didn’t want to go, and she couldn’t be left by herself, and Mrs Harvey didn’t want to waste one of the teachers with her.’
‘So you stayed at the bottom with her,’ Mr Murchison said, and he’d stopped pressing with his pen and making dots for the moment and was looking at me with his watery blue eyes. He didn’t blink once, though, just looked, and I found it impossible to guess what he was thinking.
‘Yes, Mr Murchison.’
‘Well, that’s no use,’ Mr Jackson complained.
‘I think it’s commendable,’ Mr Murchison said. ‘In the circumstances.’
‘Quite, quite,’ Mr Jackson said. ‘But it doesn’t help us. In our circumstances,’ he said sharply at Mr Murchison, who’d gone back to doodling at that stage, and was giving no sign that he’d heard him. Mr Jackson looked at his watch again, and he was the one getting agitated then because this was all taking so much time and we still hadn’t got to the point. And we all knew it.
‘So,’ he said, ‘in the morning you went to the Rock. And after that … ?’
The Cultural Centre is on the road between Uluru and the Resort, about a kilometre from the Rock, and it has all these exhibitions of Aboriginal arts and mostly painting and carving, but there’s a café as well, and all these neat alcoves and theatres where you can hear talks or sit and watch videos about the Rock and the people who live here and land rights and their ceremonies and that – though not the secret ones, of course, like the ones Nala was talking about, or initiation or anything.
Outside the shops and the galleries, there are demonstration areas where you can watch the women making ceramics or glass in the fire and painting on cloth or enamel and burning decorations into carvings of wallabies and snakes and lizards and all sorts of animals, but you can’t take any photographs of that. And I wondered if it was because they were worried people would steal their designs, but Miss Temple said
it was more to do with processes of reification and the appropriation of the identity of the Other, so we didn’t ask any more questions about that, though Toni whispered, ‘The appropriation of the identity of the Other what?’ In the end, I decided the women just didn’t want all these white kids they’ve never seen before taking their photograph.
There’s one area, not far inside the Centre, that’s full of Aboriginal tools and weapons and things, and these are called artefacts. And twenty-five kids go in there at a time and listen to a short talk by a ranger and are shown the artefacts and how they’re made and what they’re for, and that. And I hear the talk once and I stay on to hear it again with Toni’s group, not because I didn’t understand it the first time, but because the ranger is Jason.
‘And this,’ he says at one point, ‘is a typical artefact from around here.’ He’s holding up a white rock that’s all chipped in the shape of a knife and its edges are white and sharp and almost glow in this gloomy space. ‘It’s made of quartz,’ he explains, ‘and you can see the flaking – I’ll pass it around in a minute – where they’ve chipped away the outside stone to form the blade.’
‘How do they do that?’ a boy asks.
‘With another stone. Like this.’ He brings the stone down in a sharp chopping motion against the quartz. The stones clash in the silent room.
‘They’d break it,’ the boy protests.
‘They do,’ Jason says patiently – and is so gorgeous in the lamplight pooling around him, and gleaming off the tools and the stones he’s handling. And he’s older, I realize, than I thought last night, maybe even nineteen or twenty, and it’s the thinness of his face and the slightly cheeky and shamefaced way he looks at you, not quite straight on, that makes you think he’s younger. But nineteen or twenty’s all right, because that’s how old Philip is, and he’s the only real boyfriend I’ve had, and the age did make a difference but only later on. Jason’s face, I realize as I watch him, isn’t nearly as formed or as finished as Philip’s.
‘But if they do break it,’ he’s telling the boy and still holding up the shining quartz blade, ‘then they just throw it away and start another one. There’s plenty out there,’ he says, and everyone laughs. ‘But they don’t smash as many as you’d think. After a while they get pretty good at it.’
‘Can you make one?’ a girl asks.
‘Yes, but not as good as this one. Careful when I pass it round, it’s very sharp.’
‘What’s the black bit on the end?’
‘Well, what do you think?’
‘A handle,’ I cant stop myself from calling before any of the kids can get it out, and it’s lucky that it’s dark because I know I’m blushing and Toni’s rolling her eyes at me and has her tongue pushed into her cheek like a giant gumboil has just blown up there.
‘Yes,’ says Jason and smiles at me over the kids’ heads. ‘Laura’s right, it’s a handle. Cos otherwise they’d be cutting themselves whenever they went to use it. It’s not just a knife, but it’s a scraper as well for cleaning skins.’
‘Skins?’
‘No, not their skin,’ he says, and the kids laugh again and it’s obvious they like him. ‘Animal skins, like kangaroos and wallabies and …’
But I’m not listening to him now because I’m still back there, hearing the echo of Laura’s right, and it’s taken me a second to hear it, but now I’m hearing it over and over, Laura’s right, it’s a handle. Laura’s right … and I’m saying to myself – hang on, how does he know my name, because I’ve never spoken to him and none of the kids has mentioned it, and I’ve only seen him last night and a few minutes ago. And I’m kind of pleased but also embarrassed and worried about this, and a couple of the girls are looking back over their shoulders at me and I know they’ve figured this out too, and are wondering, and probably worked it out sooner than I did. I don’t look at Toni because I know the gumboil will have become a giant tumour by now.
‘What’s the handle made from?’
‘Good question,’ Jason says. ‘Can anyone guess?’ And I look at the kids and not at him, and I’m determined not to say anything, even if I know, which I don’t.
‘It’s not plastic, is it?’ he says, and I realize he’s a natural teacher. ‘Cos they wouldn’t have that, would they? So, what is it?’
‘Rubber?’
And he doesn’t go No or Rubber?!, like most teachers or other kids would. Instead he says, ‘Well, think about it. Would they have rubber out here?’
‘No,’ Luisa says, ‘cos that comes from special trees. Like in Malaysia,’ she says, and I think I’ve understood then what I’d struggled to find out earlier about Luisa.
‘Give up?’ Jason says. They nod and some yell, ‘Yes,’ and he says: ‘You’ve seen spinifex, haven’t you? You know what that is?’
‘It scratches your legs,’ says Luisa. Who’s suddenly found her tongue. ‘It’s desert grass.’
‘That’s right.’ Jason pats her shoulder. His hand on Luisa’s shoulder for that brief second – the hand, the gesture – remind me of Nala’s.
‘The people here call it tjanpi,’ he explains. ‘They thresh the spinifex, like this. They bash it on a rock like this, you know like wheat?’
‘Yes,’ the kids murmur, and one of the boys at the front accepts the knife from Jason and looks closely at it, running his finger along the sharp blade. Jason gestures for him to pass the knife around among the others while he’s explaining. ‘That way,’ he says, ‘you get rid of the chaff and then you heat what’s left till you get this dark gluey stuff. It’s called kiti, and you mould that around part of the knife and let it dry. And after a while, it gets hard like that. Can you feel how hard it is?’
The boy nods and passes the knife back to someone behind him.
‘So,’ Jason says, ‘it makes a good handle and you can grip it and you won’t cut yourself.’
‘But you can cut other people,’ the boy who first held the knife says bloodthirstily.
‘Yes,’ Jason says and grins, and there’s a gap, I see, on one side of his mouth where a tooth has fallen out, or been knocked out. ‘You can do it other ways as well. Some people mix in other glues, like tree resins, or bat dung.’
‘Yuk!’
‘It stops smelling once it dries. You put it in the sun for a few days.’
‘Laur-a. Laura’s right,’ Toni whispers in this soppy voice from behind me. She’s sidled across the room in the gloomy light while Jason’s been talking. ‘Sucks Philip,’ she says.
‘I don’t know how he knew,’ I whisper back. But I don’t look at her. Toni can still read my face, though I can’t seem to read hers any longer.
‘Well, I didn’t tell him.’
‘I know.’ I can turn then because she’s put her foot in it. ‘You didn’t stay round, remember? You disappeared.’
She puts her tongue out at me, but it’s not that that pulls me up, that suddenly makes me aware something’s wrong. It’s the silence all around me.
‘Well, c’mon,’ Jason is saying. ‘Someone must have it. Nobody’s come in or gone out.’
And I know immediately what’s happened.
‘There’s only twenty of youse in here,’ he says. ‘One of you must have it.’
‘Shit,’ Toni says through her teeth, and drifts back to the spot where Kirk and Billy and a knot of other boys are standing together and where she’d taken up a spot originally to keep an eye on them.
‘It’s valuable, it belongs to the people.’ Jason’s not angry so much – he’s actually really in control, or he seems it – but his voice has gone cold and hard, and I realize I’m feeling less embarrassed now than glad I’m not the one who’s taken it.
‘Well, who had it last?’ Jason demands, and I kind of register this is a dumb question because that’s the whole point.
Everyone’s standing very still now, and the room is totally silent. But the boys near Kirk and Billy, I can see, are cutting their eyes at one another. A couple of them are starting to look a
fraid.
‘I’ll give you one last chance.’ Jason waits, and the silence in the room makes me want to move or scratch my arms or shout or something. Anything.
‘Okay,’ Jason says, ‘nobody leaves.’ And some of the girls, I see, look round at Toni and me. We only have to give the slightest signal, their faces are saying, and they’ll all start running. ‘Everyone is to stay here until it’s found. Even if I have to search everyone myself.’
‘Can he do that?’ I hear a girl whisper, and I look over their heads at Toni, who shrugs back. For once even her face is not going – Ohh, that’d be nice.
‘Or get a security guard to help me,’ Jason says.
And I find I don’t like this – even though it’s not right that someone should have pinched the stone knife – and I don’t like how thin and rigid and cold Jason’s face has become in the shadowy space. And I know it’s just a trick of the lighting, but I look down the passageway then, to the open lighted area beyond, and search for a teacher.
‘Billy? Kirk?’ Toni says loudly in the darkness. ‘Have you got it?’
‘No,’ Billy shouts. ‘Why does everyone always think it’s me?’
‘There it is.’ One of the other boys points to a spot behind Billy. ‘There on the floor. There, see,’ he says, not moving himself.
Toni bends quickly and retrieves it. She holds it up. ‘It’s here,’ she says.
Jason’s smiling again.
‘No harm done. Someone must have dropped it.’ His voice says he doesn’t believe it. Nor does anyone else. ‘But maybe that’s enough for now,’ he says. And the kids are already moving out, strangely quiet, a bit confused, even though they know what’s happened, as far as the knife’s concerned anyway. A few of them look back and say, ‘Thank you,’ softly, to Jason.
‘You’re welcome.’ He smiles again, and begins to put the boomerangs and woomeras and shields back on the wall.