by Sue Woolfe
His touch on my arm was disarmingly intimate, now that his anger had passed.
‘You’re talking in your dream,’ he was saying.
I opened my eyes, icy with fear that I’d given myself away.
‘What did I say?’
‘Nothing interesting.’ His silver eyes laughed at me. ‘You sleep sweetly, like a child,’ he said.
Out the window of the troopie was a suburban street without red dust and dilapidated houses, just tall buildings and gleaming shops and a cement footpath, the busy supermarket, and new cars without rust dashing by.
‘Why wouldn’t you point out the old singer?’ I asked.
He ignored me. ‘We’re in Alice,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken my staff to the best hotel. They’ll stay overnight before they fly out. The new staff are already here waiting on my orders. If we go back to the settlement –’ he emphasised ‘if’, ‘Daniel will take them in the second troopie. Right now, I’m off to my friend’s to stay. You can wait in a hotel the clinic has an arrangement with. It’s pleasant enough –’
‘I won’t,’ I said.
‘It’s clean,’ he said. ‘No swimming pool, that’s its only problem.’
‘I won’t stay,’ I said.
‘You know someone here? You can make your own arrangements? Or –’ he laughed, ‘do you fancy a park bench?’
‘I’ll fly home,’ I said.
‘There’s no need,’ he said. ‘The sacking is just a hiccup –’
‘Your sacking isn’t my problem,’ I said. ‘My problem is you. You’re making my job impossible.’
He paused. ‘We see your job differently, you and I.’
He inflamed me with rage.
‘How you see my job,’ I said, ‘is immaterial. I’ve been sent to record a dying old lady and you won’t even tell me who she is!’
He said, evenly, reasonably, in his sweetest voice: ‘I’ve watched, over the past twenty years, many academics study my mob.’
‘Your mob! You own them?’
‘I hate the way academics breeze in, get the bit of information they need for their careers, leave and never come back. That’s not what my mob want – they want whites to be like family, to return. Yet whites notice nothing but their own little patch. They say their information’s going to a good cause, but it’s only a good cause for them, never for my mob. And yes, they’re my mob because I’m one of the few who protects them and stays with them, without any benefit.’
‘You get a wage!’
He ignored me.
‘My way, you won’t be able to do that. You’ll have to get to know them. Oh, I’m ready to give you any advice, I’m always helpful, I can’t be faulted on that –’ He paused. ‘But I’m not going to let one more academic exploit them. I’m afraid my new policy starts with you.’
‘So when will I know them enough?’
‘It’ll be clear to both of us.’
‘I’m not going to have you hold my university to ransom.’
‘You can stay, or not. Up to you.’ He got out of the troopie, but with my bags.
‘Leave them in here,’ I said.
‘You can’t stay in the troopie. I have to take it in for a service. Your bags will be in the hotel lobby. You can order a taxi to the airport from there, or you can stay.’
He shut the door behind him. I watched him go into the hotel lobby, no doubt making arrangements for me. I sat in the troopie. I listened to the ticking of the hot engine as it slowly cooled. I felt myself to be the child that was always inside me, the child that never grew beyond that silver river, beyond the day he left. Sometimes, many times in the past decades, I’d admitted I was no older than that child.
After a while he emerged empty-handed, heading back to the troopie. I got out. I walked past him in silence and into the lobby.
I’ll ring E.E. Albert and ask her what to do.
That thought gave me enough determination to take my bags to my room. Unexpectedly, I sobbed with relief when I locked the door behind me, unzippered my toiletries bag and set up in the tiny bathroom my toothbrush, toothpaste and nailbrush, in the very order they’d been in at home, snapped on the TV news, and hung two pairs of trousers up in a wardrobe so flimsy that the hangers rattled. I shut the door, and reopened it to make sure that I hadn’t sent the trousers sprawling to the floor.
Then I fell onto the cool comfortable bed without washing or changing out of my dusty clothes. Sometimes a mattress seems to caress you, to allow you to confide in it all your wearisome weight and exhaustion. So it was with that bed.
In the night, when I woke on the cool hotel sheets, I switched on the bedside lamp and dialled reception, to be put through to E.E. Albert’s voicemail. I imagined her voice. I cleared my throat. I dithered.
I hung up. I rang back. I planned to say: You must stop thinking I’m interesting. I can’t live up to it.
I couldn’t say it.
Then I worried myself to sleep that her voicemail had magically recorded my thoughts.
My mother and I always expect the owner of our house to show up in the Bay of Shadows, to claim his house.
At first I try to persuade my mother to always let me put out an extra plate at mealtimes in case he should suddenly appear. My imagination is fed from a framed sepia photo found in a bottom drawer amongst dust and rusting paperclips. He doesn’t look like the sort of man who’d take kindly to finding a family using up all the spaces in his house. He has a sharp face that demands attention and his fist is clenched tight over his large stomach, as if he’s about to throw a punch, but in his other hand he holds a miner’s cap between his first finger and thumb, as delicately as a woman would. He’s standing with a group of Aboriginal people, all smiling. We can tell where the photo was taken by what he’s written on it. My mother has never heard of the place.
My mother says that in fact you could interpret his face as a worried one, and that in his clenched fist is maybe a fishing line, too fine for the camera to pick up.
‘All we can do for a while,’ she says, one day when I’m worrying about being a squatter, ‘is to look after his house, for everyone knows that a house likes to be lived in.’
Not that the house seems to agree. It sulks damply all winter and bakes all summer, it creaks through the black nights and ticks through the hot days, as if it’s an animal trying to throw us off its back, and all the while, mists lick through the gaps in the fibro walls with a prying tongue.
As the years pass and the owner doesn’t return, my mother takes to wondering aloud if he met an untimely end, perhaps in the house itself.
‘It does have that sort of feeling,’ my mother says, ‘as if we’re sharing the house with a ghost.’ She’s fighting depression, and often takes to her bed.
It’s a relief for me to be invited to leave our Bay of Shadows and go around the corner to stay at Diana’s house, even as my mother’s spy, to leave the reminder that we’re squatters.
Under what he’s written there’s a cross, which I worry is a sign of death, until my mother explains it’s a kiss.
Greetings from Gadaburumili, he’s written across the photo. Wish you were here.
Some time later, perhaps months, perhaps a year or two, I find it’s missing from the drawer. I try other drawers. It’s nowhere to be seen. I ask my mother.
‘Ask your father,’ she says.
When I ask him, his mouth sets in a thin line. I think: he’s thrown it away, because he doesn’t want the reminder that we’re squatters either.
There are so many mysteries in childhood, so much waiting for time to solve them.
In the hotel room, I slept beyond breakfast; I woke feeling porous and insubstantial. But when I stood under the shower, real dust from my body pooled in red-edged irregular circles at the bottom of the white tub, and refused to leave until I put in the plug and ran water, then flushed it out again. The red dust had made rusty spots on my clothes, so I put them into a washing machine in the hotel laundry, but when I hung them on chairs i
n my room, the stains stayed. I picked desert prickles from the insides of my sneakers.
I went to lunch and chose a seat by the window. Next to me was a table of American tourists and a guide with an Australian accent, long curly red hair and deeply lashed eyes.
‘Why won’t the black people talk about themselves?’ the American women were asking her as I examined the menu. ‘We asked about their ceremonies but they won’t say a word.’
‘Perhaps they don’t speak English,’ the guide replied.
‘But we heard them swearing.’
‘They might be shy.’
‘They didn’t seem shy when they were swearing.’
‘They mightn’t think it’s any business of whites,’ said the guide. She was keeping her voice professionally even.
‘But don’t they want us to buy their paintings?’
Beside the guide sat a very handsome teenage boy with smouldering black eyes and glowing copper skin, but something about the length of his face was European.
‘It takes a while to get their trust,’ said the guide. ‘I taught for a whole term on a community before I was given a skin name. That’s where Billy –’ she indicated the teenage boy, ‘came from.’
I could see the eyes of one of the women tourists darting between the guide and the boy, the question trembling on her lipsticked lips: A term as a settlement schoolteacher and you got pregnant?
But politeness demanded she swallow it, so she tucked it away and licked her lips shut.
‘It only took a term?’ she said instead, and when everyone looked at her, she added: ‘To get a skin name?’
A bored, listless-eyed waiter came over to wipe an already gleaming glass so that he could stand and watch out the window. I watched with him. I glimpsed Daniel walking up the street carrying boxes. Daniel! It came to me that, away from the settlement, I might have a chance to persuade him to help me – after all, he believed in my quest. I remembered again his rush of empathy, his admiration. Why didn’t I think before of cornering him? But by the time I’d got to the door, he’d disappeared.
The waiter followed me.
‘Madam? This man is important to you? You want me to run after him?’
‘No.’
I sat back down and ordered a meal and a glass of wine, as if it could clear my reasoning and tell me what to do, and some time during that clear cold wine there was a familiar laugh on the street and I looked up to see both Daniel and Adrian walking up the road again, in the same direction, carrying more boxes. They were deep in conversation, Adrian talking, Daniel nodding. Daniel was far shorter than Adrian. My height. His thick mop of wavy hair gleamed in the sun. I must stop fancying him. He was a nodder, as Adrian wasn’t. It was Adrian I’d come to understand.
I thought: if I fell under Adrian’s influence, he’d make me into a nodder, too. I’d be just like Daniel.
I caught a glimpse of my face in the windowpane. It was a shock, my black hair, my olive skin. It came to me that my disguise mightn’t work for him. Perhaps that might explain his antagonism. But in the window, I scarcely recognised myself.
I tried to weigh it up. He was bossy, and that might fit, because Ian had been rebellious. But someone who’d worked in remote places with no whites to answer to, that might lead to bossiness in itself. He was self-centred, and Ian must’ve been, to leave Diana like that, but many people were self-centred. He had a scarred index finger on his left hand, and so did Ian – didn’t he? Was it on the left hand or the right?
I ordered another glass of cold clear wine and by its end I worked out that Adrian had calculated that if he brought a white woman to his house, he’d be more loved by the community – and their love seemed to be what he cared about most. When the old lady fell sick and he heard that Collins needed a female linguist, he’d have seen his chance.
By the end of the next wine I’d decided that there was no dying old lady, there was no ‘Poor Thing’ song, and there was no Collin Collins. I had to correct that when I recalled, over a black coffee brought by the waiter who seemed to be smiling more sweetly at me, that Collin Collins was an international linguist known to E.E. Albert, although of course not to me. Next, I suspected that Daniel and Adrian were lovers, and they needed a cover, who was me.
By the second coffee, when the waiter smoothed my tablecloth with broad brown hands and put two foil-wrapped chocolates by my serviette, I was sure that Ian had known that Diana was going to kill my mother, and hadn’t cared. He wanted us all dead.
As I left, the waiter offered me a comfortable seat in a sofa near the window. I could read the newspaper till he finished his shift.
‘Then I could show you the sights,’ he said.
‘No thanks,’ I said.
I went back to my room, lay on the bed fully dressed again and fell into a deep sleep.
When the phone rang next morning, I was so deep in a dream that I expected Diana’s voice, she who used to explain everything about the river and its habits – everything except about herself and my father. Did she ever consider what Ian and I would make of the two of them?
I reached my arm out for a clock, knocking over a glass of water. The phone stopped ringing. I wept for the loss of her, as I had many times. As if it heard me, the phone started ringing again.
‘You haven’t left,’ came Adrian’s voice.
‘I don’t make decisions fast,’ I said.
‘I’m going back to the settlement this morning,’ he said. ‘The mob have visited me. We’re in discussion. Are you coming?’
‘I’ll decide over breakfast,’ I said.
He rang off.
I packed, ready to fly back to the city, ready to drive back to the desert. I was in the breakfast room ordering toast and coffee when he walked in, and all over again I was sure he was my Ian, just walking into his mother’s kitchen, swaggering because he’s caught a big mullet, and Diana is squealing with pride.
He sat at my table without greeting me and ordered from the waiter – who seemed to have forgotten me as his possible date of last night – a breakfast of ham, eggs – soft – avocado and mushrooms. ‘No toast, no coffee but two pineapple juices,’ he said. ‘It’s good for the system,’ he told me.
‘I don’t need any,’ I said.
‘They’re both for me,’ he said.
I played with the sugar bowl.
‘Is the problem solved? Your sacking?’ I asked, trying to sound convivial.
‘Why do you think that?’ he asked.
‘You’re returning,’ I said.
‘The two girls are still here. I must take them back. But I predict I’ll be reinstated within twenty-four hours.’
He’d already said that over twenty-four hours ago. But I said, ‘Have the people had their meeting?’
He sighed. I knew from his sigh that he was going to launch into another exasperated explanation.
‘This mob doesn’t have meetings, like whites do,’ he said. ‘Whites find that strange, but they think whites are strange, always calling meetings which generate disagreement. They don’t like disagreement. They don’t disagree with each other. What they really say behind closed doors, who knows? But they don’t like speaking out, or being singled out. They call it shaming. We translate their word as shy, but the word means much more than our idea of being shy.’
He sat back, proud of his linguistic knowledge.
‘What’s the word?’
‘Words are mere details. I’m a big-picture man.’
‘The devil’s in the detail,’ I said.
‘Stop interrupting me! That’s why they don’t like democracy. It’s not just their problems with the word. Democracy makes families argue, and what they care about is family. Consensus is necessary for family harmony. It amuses and irritates them that white people are always having meetings. Whites are always talking, they say. Talking, talking. All the experts have written about that, Lieberman, Folds – who have you read?’
‘E.E. Albert,’ I said quickly.
; I became preoccupied choosing a jam for my toast from a little wire rack at the table: blackberry, marmalade or bush tomato.
‘What’s bush tomato?’
‘A jam from native tomatoes,’ he said. ‘Whites make it. They try to make my mob pick them, and for a while they do, but when they hand over a few kilos, they won’t go back to pick more. Whites say they’ve got no work ethic. But they have their own work.’
‘What work?’
‘Their lives. Their cultural obligations, relatives, ritualistic connections, rituals, and ceremonies. Doing our sort of work would make already complicated lives impossible. Very hard, for instance, to serve in a shop when a customer comes in who ritualistically you must avoid, or who you must share everything with.’
He was concentrating on eating mushrooms with his fingers. It came to me that he didn’t talk to explore ideas, he already believed utterly in his ideas. He didn’t talk to think aloud, but instead, to shine. Under my attention, he was shining, showing me how much he knew about his mob.
I didn’t shine.
We ate in silence. He ate sloppily, tearing off pieces of ham with his fingers and dipping them in the yolks of his eggs as if the yolks were tiny bowls of sauce. When he put his elbows on the table, egg dribbled down, streaking his pale blue sleeves with yellow.
Don’t you remember, how could you forget – Diana is a stickler for table manners – elbows off the table, don’t stick your elbows out like chicken wings, lay the knife and fork down side by side to show when you’ve eaten enough, don’t speak till your mouth is empty. I, who often eat alone, relish the rules. When my father first takes me with him to Diana’s house, she laughs at the way I eat.
‘She’s like a savage, a sweet little savage!’ she tells my father laughingly while fluffing my hair. ‘Doesn’t her mother teach her how to be a woman?’
There’s a look that passes between them in the silence that’s like lightning sizzling across a blackened sky.
With your manners, you couldn’t be Diana’s son.
‘I’ve forgotten city manners,’ he said, interrupting my thoughts, aware of my eyes on him. He was proud of that. He’d laid aside his own culture, or much of it, to be part of the culture of his new family, hoping to be a valued son.