by Sue Woolfe
‘Then when I got home, because my orientation to him had changed, I’d use a different affix to describe where he and I had been standing when he touched me.’ I stopped, checked her face again; it was still watching my fingers. So I rearranged the photos, this time in a circle. ‘And if she told me to go and tell my grandmother about it, and my grandmother was over by her fire –’ I moved the photos into a straight line, ‘I’d have to use a third affix because my orientation to him had changed again. If then I was sent to tell her sister, who was gathering berries nearby, I’d have to use a fourth affix. I’d have a constantly changing map in my head as I described what the man had done, which I suppose any speaker in any language would have subconsciously, but this language is meticulous about it – it’s so meticulous that in a car, a speaker wouldn’t just say “move over” not even “move left”, they’d say “move south-south-west”, adding one of a dozen points on the compass. It’s considered uncooperative or childish if you don’t use it. It might’ve come about because they were always travelling in a vast and hostile place – you’d have to be meticulous about where you saw a goanna egg or a bird looking at a tree root for witchetty grubs.’
I took a breath and worried whether I’d remember the proper places for her photos.
‘Sorry,’ I said, blushing all over again.
But she was sitting back, beaming.
‘That’s one way to explain it,’ she said.
‘Am I looking for that?’ I asked, pleased. ‘You footnoted it in your book. I followed up some of your references.’
I didn’t add that I’d been killing time in the library, hoping to catch the handsome man when he came on duty at the borrowings desk, which happened to be in sight of my desk. But I got absorbed and forgot where I was until it was too late. By then he was chatting to a girl much prettier than me. But that didn’t matter, because I’d given up sex.
‘You’re the student I thought you were,’ she smiled.
Warmth bounced between us across her desk. Her approval was like a warm liquid poured right down into my body. I was almost panting with relief.
‘I’ll get this done,’ I said, a little incoherent now that I was basking in her smile once more.
‘I’m sure you will,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell them you’re coming, Kathryn.’
This with only the slightest inclination of her head towards a note on her desk of my name and student identification number.
‘Could you call me Kate from now on, tell them that Kate is coming – Kathryn seems to belong to my childhood, to my old self, and I’m turning over a new leaf –’ I was thinking ahead, thinking that perhaps I needed a disguise.
‘Of course,’ she said. She amended the record, and beamed at me.
‘This mission will turn me into the perfect student,’ I said. I could’ve sat there all day and all night basking in her smile, but she got up.
‘Were you alone in your childhood?’ she asked me. ‘Is that how you developed your unusual mind?’
I didn’t want to talk about that childhood. I was the only one left who remembered. Me, and, of course, you.
I couldn’t help myself blurting: ‘Can I ask – who chose me?’
‘Haven’t I made that clear? Me!’
The film music began again in my head. Chance had taken my life, and turned it around.
Far off across the quadrangle, the pealing of carillon bells argued with us all.
I took one last look at the framed photos on her desk, still awry, and pushed against each other. They were all taken in the inner city, and the only person in them was her. She was surrounded in all of them by well-fed cats, only very well-fed cats.
In preparation, first I had my long blonde hair cut – it had always been long, right from when Diana stopped cutting it, suddenly, as if I’d done something she disapproved of. I kept growing it, hoping she’d get exasperated and pick up her scissors like she’d done in the old days – but something was finished, something was broken. In the city, my long hair had become a veil, something to hide in. I looked down at my ropes of hair on the beauty salon floor.
‘You needed that off!’ said the hairdresser. ‘Now you can start a new life.’
I had it coloured raven black, and my sandy eyebrows dyed to match. I had my fair freckled skin sprayed a golden brown.
‘How long will the tan last?’ I asked.
Her gaze at my nakedness wasn’t flattering.
‘Six weeks. Is that long enough to impress someone?’
‘Plenty,’ I said.
I bought black-framed spectacles with clear glass in them. I considered a prosthetic nose but feared I wouldn’t be good enough at fitting it, not every day, every hot morning.
Then I rang the man I’d tried to read the textbook with, and asked in a voice I couldn’t stop from trembling to meet me in the bar where we’d first met.
‘But I’m back with my wife,’ he said.
I sighed. I’d had one last vestige of hope, that he’d say he couldn’t live a single day more without me – then I’d be able to refuse E.E. Albert’s demands, and instead lie all summer on the beach with him.
‘There’s something I need to check with you. It’ll only take ten minutes,’ I said.
So I sat in the back of the bar with a newspaper folded up in front of my face as if I was short-sighted, and a drink beside me. When he appeared at the door, my heart leaped in the way it had before, but it seemed to go back to a different place inside my chest. He made a self-conscious, dramatic entrance, framed by the doorway, the light behind him, his elbows a little turned out from his body as if to allow for the width of his chest, which I reminded myself was fat, not muscle. I lowered the newspaper. He threw his long hair back and I watched his eyes travel over the bar, over me. He decided I wasn’t there, bought the bartender a whisky, drank two himself, and left.
My disguise seemed excellent.
I also read. I downloaded Toolbox. At last, but too late, I became a student. I was suddenly able to concentrate as I hadn’t all year, despite the fact that I was to be met in Alice Springs, the nearest town to the dying singer, by Adrian, head of the health clinic, and maybe my childhood love. E.E. Albert made all the arrangements.
And so, in the Waterfront Café in the middle of the desert, I explained myself and my life to you for the thousandth time.
The sun had shifted. I stood, moved my chair, sat in the new shade. I was to be driven out to the settlement, find the old woman, get her trust, record her, and then go home, back to E.E. Albert’s warm approval. It’d be easy, surely, just the effort of a few days, yet the university had sent me there for a whole month. I could only think that everyone was allowing for the unforeseen. Things can change in the desert, E.E. Albert had said, although she admitted that she’d never been there. She’d never got further than Alice Springs. Reading about it was enough, she’d said. She was a book person.
I didn’t think the black women passing by would be speaking Djemiranga, the language I was heading towards, but mine would surely be a little like this, with family resemblances, as we linguists call it. (If I kept repeating that, I’d come to believe myself: ‘we linguists’, meaning myself and E.E. Albert.) Her friend, or perhaps it was her sister, could be asking her a question: I mimicked it, humming, Da-da-dum da. I was so engrossed in my humming that I didn’t notice that one of the women had broken away from her group.
‘Welcome to my land,’ she said, her face wreathed in smiles.
‘Your land,’ I repeated, so startled that I thought like the city person I was, and so made my first embarrassing mistake. I looked around for which might be her land. I had no memory of passing a fence. There was only the annoying non-river in front of us, and a tarred road beyond, with a scattering of houses, and the inane squawking of chooks nearby as if they were trying to remember what was on their minds.
‘Is it all yours?’ I asked, eager to be friendly because it would take me away from my memories. These were the first real-life
Aboriginal people I’d ever been near.
‘My mob’s land,’ said the woman. She held out her hand and I took it, more a grab than a shake, and I captured it too long, so that the woman had to slide it out of my grasp.
‘From up there,’ she said, making a graceful gesture with her reclaimed hand, and her body bent in the gesture’s direction, almost as if she was listening to it. Her skirt swayed around her bare calves as she bent. I noticed her bare toes, the way they gripped the ground, untroubled by twigs and small stones. It was as if she worked the entirety of her foot, whereas mine, always encased and hidden away in stiff shoes, could only have one purpose and that was to clamp me down.
‘From the mountains?’ I asked, suddenly aware that I had no idea how near or far any mountains might be. Perhaps the water ran underground, and swelled every now and then to the surface in small ponds. Why hadn’t I looked at a map? That’s what any proper scholar going to a remote community would’ve done; they would’ve looked at the lie of the land. Why was my mind always anywhere other than where it should be?
The woman didn’t answer, but looked back over her shoulder to her group.
‘Where does it end?’ I asked. ‘Your land?’
She gracefully gestured again, but in the opposite direction, anxiously this time.
‘Thank you,’ I said, realising that the conversation had run its course, like a waterless river. ‘It’s a beautiful river,’ I lied.
She swayed in her intent walk as she headed to her group. The waiter arrived with my coffee. It slopped against the sides of the tiny white cup, and the grains looped like veils. The waiter plonked a menu down as well.
‘The wife thought you might be hungry, after all,’ he said. ‘They only feed you rubbish on the planes. The eggs are from our own chooks.’
His lips opened lopsidedly, which gave him a confiding air.
I looked at the menu politely, though it was too hot to think of food. He was dressed in an old, shapeless yellow t-shirt and grey shorts fanning out in a star-burst of wrinkles from his crotch, but there was a starched white serviette over his arm. I imagined his wife ironing its sharp folds and arranging it just as he stepped out the door.
‘Sugar? We only have it in little packets because of the flies.’
‘No sugar, thanks,’ I said.
He was glad of a chance for a chat, I could tell, the way he propped his bottom against the neighbouring table, which slid slightly under his weight, and he swayed but didn’t topple. He gripped the table firmly with both hands. We both pretended not to notice this.
‘We’re starting a cabaret tonight under the stars, all you can drink,’ he said. He leaned the upper half of his body forward. ‘Nothing cultural.’ He laughed and took a chance with his balance and my beliefs, holding up a hand and making a halt sign with it. ‘We don’t do cultural.’
‘Culture’s fine by me,’ I said.
He laughed because he thought I’d misunderstood.
‘I mean a particular sort of culture. We don’t do that.’ He paused, waiting for me to get his meaning. ‘Are those people bothering you?’ he asked.
The Aboriginal women had sat down in the dust at the perimeter of his café, which was marked out with rangy little potted bushes, and were chattering as they unrolled canvases covered with paintings.
‘No, not at all. I’m fine.’
‘Often tourists don’t know how to take them.’
‘Oh, I’m fine,’ I repeated.
He took his folded serviette and ruined the impression his wife meant her ironing to give by wiping the sweat off his face.
‘I can tell them to move on,’ he offered.
‘Oh, no, really, I was charmed –’
But he was turning and calling out: ‘Eileen, get going. Off you go.’
He flapped his serviette towards the group as if he was swatting at flies.
‘She’s a little drunk,’ he said loudly enough for her to hear. ‘It’s shocking, at this hour.’
‘The lady said she’s fine.’ A voice suddenly boomed from the far table.
The waiter’s serviette drooped.
‘She’s fine. They’re fine,’ repeated the blue-shirted man.
‘I’ve got a café to run,’ the waiter told him angrily. ‘I can’t have them scaring off my customers.’
Even from this distance, I saw that the man had silver eyes.
Chapter 3
For weeks after you left, for years after, I measured the date, even the time of day, against the last time I saw you. I grew up measuring it. ‘It’s ten days, it’s fifteen days, it’s a month, it’s ten months since your voice, it’s ten years. It’s been one decade, it’s been two, soon I’ll be into the third.’ There’d always been in my heart a quiet, sad anniversary.
‘You’re not Adrian?’ I managed to produce the name.
‘You’re the one from the university?’ the man called. ‘Why didn’t you say so before? I’ve been sitting around here, wasting my time and everyone else’s –’
‘I didn’t – I wasn’t sure – I’m sorry,’ I said guiltily.
He came over and stood, towering above me, arms crossed. Tendrils of curls had escaped his ponytail and frilled around his high forehead like a curtain around a stage, just about to open on a performance. He was a tall stocky man who gave the impression of unbounded energy and unhesitating authority, the way he stood straight-backed, with strong square shoulders and a wide deep chest above his slender waist, his slim jeaned legs tucked into tough, heavy-duty boots scratched by desert life to the colour of bones.
The waiter left, his head ducked between his shoulders.
Surely this wasn’t Ian. My Ian was always taller than me, but more slender, like a sapling that could fall over in a wind, not a man’s man, a boy caught somewhere between a girl and a man. There was no girlishness about this man at all. He was almost a cowboy in the way he’d swaggered over to me. Had the years taught him to act like that? No, surely a swagger comes naturally. But he did have silver eyes.
I couldn’t depend on silver eyes. Many people have silvery eyes; they’re not unique to him. And – the thought almost attacked me, almost made me slump back into my chair – was it really Ian who had the silver eyes? Or were his silver eyes just the river reflected in him, and might he have had ordinary grey eyes, or even hazel, or anything other than silver? Or, worse, did the silver eyes belong to another man, one of the seventeen or – admit it – twenty-three I’d slept with? Had I superimposed another man’s silver eyes on him, just as I’d always tried to superimpose him on all men – my thin man-boy standing skinny-legged on the jetty, the river moving beneath him, taking him away from me. We all have our own madness.
Perception’s a strange thing, she’d said.
This man was the wrong man. I’d made yet another mistake. I’d come all the way into this heat for the wrong man. I’d accepted E.E. Albert’s demands – and worse, the Dean’s – for the sake of this stranger. But of course, I’d had no choice.
‘I’m a busy man,’ he was saying. ‘You’re lucky I even made it into town. Often I make arrangements to come in, and then there’s a funeral out there, or a death, or a crisis, so I can’t. I’ve been promising to cook dinner for a friend here in town for a year and I keep cancelling it.’
‘I’m sorry I didn’t speak,’ I repeated, confused by his eyes and the heat. ‘Can I order you a tea? A coffee? I might have another one,’ I said.
‘Never touch the stuff,’ he said.
He turned at a noise and caught the waiter standing at his doorway flapping his serviette at the women again.
‘Has it occurred to you that a visitor might want to talk to them?’ shouted the silver-eyed man who might be my Ian to the waiter.
‘Do you?’ he demanded of me, eyes skewering me. ‘Do you want to talk to them?’
Everything about him was burnished with indignation and energy – those eyes, his mobile face, even his freckled skin. His energy was infectious; it flared off
his skin like smoke.
‘Of course,’ I said loudly, smiling, because I wanted to assure him we were on the same side.
‘She wants to talk to them!’ he shouted at the waiter. ‘She’s a language expert – what do you call yourself?’
He didn’t wait for me.
‘She speaks language,’ he told the café owner. ‘Will I call them over?’ This to me: ‘Then you can talk to them.’
‘No,’ I said. Something about his intensity and his eyes made me forget who I was.
‘Why not?’ he demanded.
‘I can’t,’ I said. As he looked impatient, I added: ‘I don’t speak their language.’
He laughed with incredulity, and his laughter became high-pitched.
‘But they told me they’d send a linguist!’
I was opening my mouth to explain, but he was interrupting again.
‘I’ve brought in one of our mob with cataracts. There’s a visiting specialist from Adelaide at the Alice Springs Hospital, but before he could do the operation, he had to test Brian’s eyesight with the eye chart. But Brian’s never been to school so he had no hope of reading an eye chart! When the doctor pointed to “L” and asked him which way the leg of the “L” goes, Brian didn’t know what he was talking about! The hospital as usual had no translator for Djemiranga, so the specialist couldn’t legally do the operation, and now I’ve got to take Brian home, still blind. It’ll be three months before the specialist’s back. So maybe you could translate! Maybe the doctor’s still at the hospital! Maybe they could reschedule Brian for tomorrow, you never know! How do you say, “Which way does the leg of the ‘L’ go?”’