by Sue Woolfe
‘Was the old lady there? My old lady?’
‘Everyone was there.’
‘How can you do this to them?’ I demanded. ‘Ruin this chance for their language to be preserved?’
‘Only city whites think that sort of thing is important,’ he said.
‘Collins thought it was.’
‘Not enough to stay to help you.’
He walked away.
That afternoon, in my room, I tried to make sense of my recordings by using Toolbox to parse the language, as E.E. Albert told me to do, one syllable arduously after another, unsure what syllables belonged to what word.
Daniel passed by my open door just as I’d turned up the recording to full volume, putting my ear to the speaker.
‘Getting anywhere?’ he asked sympathetically.
‘No!’ I shouted over it. Because he kept standing there, I replayed to him the phrase I’d been listening to over and over again, then I turned it off. ‘This word seems to have five syllables but there might be another one in there somewhere,’ I mused.
He came further into the room and lingered. Encouraged, I turned the recording back on and inched forward.
‘You brought me luck!’ I cried. ‘Hear that? It’s a conjunction! I’ve found a conjunction! Don’t know which, but it’s a conjunction, for sure!’
‘You mean, like “and” or “but”?’ he asked, trying to enter into my triumph.
‘Maybe I was beginning already to doubt it!’
‘You’d need to add to or contradict ideas, wouldn’t you?’ he reasoned. ‘What a milestone! When you find a few things, will you teach me?’ he added. ‘I’ve always wanted to learn Djemiranga.’
‘You have? That’s music to my ears,’ I said, smiling up at him.
‘I’ll bring you a cuppa, spur you on,’ he said. But Adrian called him, and he hurried away, the tea forgotten.
It was two hours before I’d figured out the grammar of one short phrase though I didn’t have a clue about its meaning. I was relieved when the battery ran out.
I began filling in my journal with the little I’d achieved. There seems to be no definite article, I wrote. Without the air conditioning, the heat made me sleepy. I fell asleep over my work.
‘Do you remember when I got this scar?’ you ask.
You’re standing near my red sofa, my bed for sleepovers at Diana’s house. You’ve switched on my bed lamp. I move over for you, you get in, and I’m delighted to have the strip of warmth that’s you beside me. You snuggle under my blankets.
‘There are seagulls cawing,’ I say happily, knowing I will always remember this moment, whenever I hear seagulls.
But you explain that the scar isn’t on your finger, it’s on your thigh, on the inside. You pull down the sheets to show, but arrange them modestly around your crotch. You’re like an angel with a wisp of genital-covering cloth on one of the frescoes my father longed to live near, and there’s the scar.
In the circle of gold from the lamp, the scar’s embedded into your skin, the same shape as the scar on your slender finger.
‘Touch it, it doesn’t hurt,’ you say.
I watch my dream finger, my touching finger, my hand with purple veins almost breaking through the skin-like slats of water-rotted timber floating just underwater.
Then I panic, and I forget about your scar in my panic.
‘They’re not my hands, I don’t have hands like that,’ I say. ‘Those hands are an old person’s hands.’
I say it aloud. My voice breaks through the surface of my dream.
I woke to a commotion outside in the front yard. A group of people had gathered at our gate, a family of women and children holding long thick sticks, and Daniel listened to them, his head bent deferentially. It came to me that he deferred out of a deeply felt acknowledgement of others.
Just then Adrian drove up.
Even though my errant body leaned towards Daniel, I could’ve just got on with my work. But once Adrian arrived, I simply had to go out into the yard. It was impossible to be apart from him, he’d magnetised all my thoughts for years, since my childhood. I’d never been much more than a mere splinter of lead waiting to cling to him.
‘Jimmy Thatcher’s out of jail,’ I heard Daniel tell him.
Adrian dive-bombed out of the troopie, all pale blue shirt and energy. ‘Out of jail!’ he shouted.
He left the car door open in his agitation, though the donkey was munching grass in the gutter nearby. It ambled over to the troopie cabin and gazed in, sniffing hopefully.
‘Thatcher told them at the jail he had to visit Dora’s family for cultural reasons and the authorities believed him,’ said Daniel.
I heard the family murmuring in Djemiranga, and fleetingly considered running in for my recorder, but this wasn’t the moment to be a linguist. It never seemed to be.
‘He’s three hours’ drive away,’ said Daniel. ‘But –’ he indicated the sticks, ‘Dora’s made a nulla nulla for everyone.’
One of the children proudly held up a stick for Adrian’s inspection, a heavy piece of a bough from a tree, white because it had been so newly carved, with a long point at one end, like a giant sharpened pencil.
‘That means business,’ said Adrian appreciatively to Dora. He showed it to me for my admiration.
‘But can you use it?’ I asked him.
Adrian trod on my toe.
‘An impressive weapon,’ I said.
‘Dora, come and sleep at our house,’ he said. ‘Thatcher won’t look for you here.’
‘I’ll bring Boney and Susan and Wendy,’ Dora said.
‘Of course,’ Adrian said. ‘Bring the family. I’ll drive you back to your house so you can pick up your blankets.’
Inside, Daniel told me that two years ago Thatcher had been jailed for drunkenly stabbing Boney in the ribs near his heart for an old, imagined slight. Now he’d been let out on parole, pleading family business, and rumour said he was heading towards the settlement. Dora had good reason to suspect the family business was a plan to kidnap one of their daughters, a very beautiful young girl who’d caught his eye.
‘Some of these judges are so eager to do the right thing, they lose their common sense,’ Daniel said, and this was a criticism so unusual to him and his good nature, I guessed he was repeating Adrian’s beliefs.
In my room, I sat down on the bed and got ready to record. At last I’d be able to do my job. I wasn’t permitted to go to the community but the community was coming to me, and Adrian couldn’t object. I might be able to record them all through the afternoon. The front door opened and I started in excitement, but then I heard it slam. Daniel’s door closings were gentle and tentative, but Adrian’s slams were adamant, especially in the middle of the night. He seemed to have no respect for the slumber of the household. I didn’t remember him as a door slammer. Diana would never have allowed it.
Now he came into my room abruptly, filling my room, holding the nulla nulla.
‘Where’s Dora? Are they following you?’ I asked.
‘They’ll come in their own good time. We owe it to them,’ Adrian said. Then he added, ‘I want you to make Dora welcome. I’m courting her friendship. She could be very useful to me. Come and help tidy up.’
He told me that Boney had worked with his brothers as a stockman on this land when it first became a pastoral lease, and Dora had worked as a maid in the homestead.
‘Dora’s nulla nulla – do you know how to use it?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in the bush twenty years.’
‘I don’t,’ I said.
He laughed at me.
‘Shouldn’t we tell the police?’
‘They’re four hours’ drive away,’ said Adrian. ‘Between their station and here, there are many more urgent problems.’
He lifted the nulla nulla and hit the air with it as if it was a cricket bat.
‘Isn’t this a gesture of trust in me!’ he said. He lifted it upright above his head with b
oth hands. ‘It’ll be good for keeping the dogs off. They’ll think I’m even taller than I am.’ He saw the recording gear. ‘Don’t use that today,’ he said. ‘Don’t turn their distress to your advantage.’
The rhythm of housework eased us all in to a new familiarity. Daniel was asked to come over from the clinic and help. We tidied up the living room to make space for the family to sleep. Daniel found a place for all the objects that’d been pushed into the corners. The collapsing paddle pool we gave to passing children, who yelped with glee as they ran away with it. The photographs were bundled into a cupboard in the living room. We dragged mattresses out from the storage cage on the verandah, and made them up with the sheets from the clean washing that still lay crumpled on the floor. I folded the extra sheets.
‘Where will I put these?’
Adrian waved his hand in the direction of a cupboard next to the washing machine.
‘The linen cupboard of course.’
I laughed when I opened it because it was full of tools.
‘On the shelf – can’t you see?’ he said, glancing over at me.
I stood perplexed, wondering where he meant. He took the folded sheets out of my hand.
‘There,’ he said. He’d balanced the sheets on a pile of new copper bath taps. He touched my elbow.
‘Most things are easy, you know.’ He took his hand away. We both downcast our eyes.
There was a knock on the door, more of a banging really. I opened it. There was a swarm of dusty little boys with uplifted faces, huge brown eyes and skins slightly darker than their eyes.
‘Met, met, met!’ they shouted together.
Adrian came to the door.
‘None!’ he shouted and ran at them, chasing them in a joking way so that they escaped, yelling with laughter. He closed the gate and returned.
‘Who’s met what?’ I asked.
‘Meat,’ he said. ‘They’re hungry.’
I felt abashed.
‘We should’ve given them some,’ I cried.
‘Have you noticed the prices at the shop? They’re selling half a lettuce and a tomato for ten dollars,’ Daniel said.
‘Can’t you complain about that?’ I asked them.
‘I do! But there’s not only whites on the shop board, but blacks, city blacks, Westernised blacks who need the money, or say the settlement needs the money. And who am I? Just a white do-gooder,’ said Adrian.
I went back to tidying the ironing board, finding places for pins, needles, paperclips. Adrian stopped me as I took the troopie keys to hang them up in the kitchen on a hook.
‘Don’t tidy them away,’ he commanded.
I dropped them clanging into the sink.
‘Why not?’
‘We’re always using them.’
‘Isn’t it better,’ I asked, ‘that they always be on the hook?’
Without a word he picked them up and put them on the hook.
‘Just don’t get carried away,’ he said, smiling at me with some fondness. He added, jokingly, ‘Never know when we’ll need the troopie to run away.’
Daniel looked proudly at the cleared spaces.
‘I’ll vacuum now,’ he said.
‘You can’t. No electricity!’ Adrian and I chorused together, and laughed at our synchronicity, and high-fived each other.
In the evening when we had our turn of electricity, I charged my batteries. Adrian was at work with a needle and thread and scissors, cutting front pockets off a new set of matching blue shirts he’d bought in town.
‘Such a contrivance,’ he said. ‘Stitching useless pockets on shirts.’
‘Where are you going to put your money and credit cards and keys now?’ I asked.
‘Don’t need them out here.’
‘But you mightn’t always have this job,’ I said.
Daniel had been immersed in reading a scrap of old newspaper that he’d brought in from the floor of the troopie. It was covered in dirty footprints, which he brushed away to peer at the print. But when I uttered the words, they both looked up at me.
‘Rescue is on its way?’ Daniel laughed, to lighten my gaffe.
Creak. Creak. His unoiled-door laugh.
‘I mean, one day you’re sure to live in a city again,’ I said. ‘One day. A long way off.’
‘After all, like it or not, we’re whites,’ Daniel said.
To my disappointment, Dora and her family hadn’t arrived by dinner. About ten o’clock I gave up waiting and went to bed, secretly worried that Adrian would knock on my door and demand that I give up my own bed, saying, We owe it to them. I’d come to love the silence of the night in my room with the stars twinkling like Christmas lights would be in the city by now. I looked out the window and saw his bed in the front yard. He’d moved it almost out into the road, so he’d be better at keeping a watch out for Thatcher. Above him, dry desert lightning speared the black sky like nulla nullas.
I woke up excited, but the family still wasn’t there in the morning. Without power, I built an economical little fire in the yard, the way Daniel had shown me, and boiled the billy.
‘What’s happened to our visitors?’ I asked when Adrian came back from the clinic.
He shrugged theatrically. ‘Things take their own time here, I told you that,’ he said. ‘Go to the shop and get them food. Eggs, bacon, white bread.’
I was pleased at that. It was customary for famous linguists to pay their informants with cigarettes. I’d much rather pay them with food.
‘Shouldn’t I get them healthy food? Vegetables. Low-fat meat.’
‘They don’t eat our vegetables.’
‘I can make vegetables taste good,’ I said.
‘Remember? We’re holding the mob.’
I was about to argue that providing healthy food was part of looking after, but I decided not to argue for once. I walked quickly in the heat down the dusty street to buy the bacon and eggs and bread for our visitors, and reeled at the prices, as high as I’d been told. But because I felt adventurous, I bought fillets of kangaroo meat. Again, though there were just a few people inside the shop, whole families waited outside. I was pleased that I now understood this, at least a little. On the way home I passed the builder. He was ringed around with children, holding out a large document. I imagined he was showing them a house plan. He saw me.
‘I was sacked today,’ he called. ‘I’m off home.’
So that’s what it was, he was showing the children a map of Australia.
‘The call came from the government,’ he said as I came near. ‘They claim I haven’t taught my apprentices properly. But I’m a builder, not a teacher.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I can’t wait to get out,’ he said.
He turned back to the boys, and straightened out the map again.
‘That’s my country,’ he explained, pointing out New South Wales. ‘You know where that is?’ he asked the nearest boy, who shook his head no.
‘None of you know where New South Wales is?’ he demanded of another boy.
The second boy shook his head no, his eyes downcast. The others ahead of him in the circle looked down the street, or studied the dirt road.
‘They might know it as a Djemiranga name,’ I said. ‘They’d have relatives there. Maybe what matters is whose country it is.’
‘You need to know our names. You need to know what matters to us,’ the builder told them.
His gaze moved from one downcast child to the next in the circle. No one spoke.
‘See, if you don’t get your education, you’re good for nothing,’ he said. He looked around at me. ‘Isn’t that right?’
I had to take sides.
‘It depends what you think’s important,’ I said.
There was a pause. The builder glared at me. He’d done a thankless job, in relentless heat, he’d been humiliated by his sacking, and now a white woman had betrayed him in front of a ring of little boys. He folded up his map and used it as if it was a stick, pointin
g at me, condemning me, almost as menacing as he’d been to the dogs.
‘Our world is taking over theirs,’ he yelled at me. ‘And you’ve forgotten that in – what – half a week?’
The children’s eyes followed me as I walked away. It was a relief to get inside the house and shut the door. All was quiet. I put the shopping away and went to my bedroom, sat on the bed and took out my equipment with a pang. I was only a linguist, here to record an old lady’s song. Surely I would find her that afternoon. Or, if I didn’t find her that day, I’d beg Gillian for help.
I heard the front door open and shut and went out to find Daniel examining documents at the kitchen table with a worried air. He seemed to be doing a lot of that lately.
‘Something up?’
He pushed his wavy hair out of his eyes.
‘We might be closed down,’ he said. ‘The whole thing. The clinic.’
‘Closed down! The health clinic? But you can’t close a health clinic!’ I said.
‘Adrian hasn’t done the monthly report again,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
Daniel did a shrug that was a pale copy of Adrian’s.
‘He says there are more important things than making some little clerk happy.’
At that moment, the door opened and slammed adamantly. Daniel went back to his documents and I busied myself washing-up.
Dora’s family still hadn’t arrived by dinnertime. I decided to cook the kangaroo, and leave some for them if they turned up. Out the kitchen window I saw Gillian walking up the road after her shift, slowly, with a little backpack. I wondered why she needed to carry it when she lived three houses away from the clinic. I ran out to the verandah and hailed her.
‘Like a cuppa?’ I called.
‘I’m in a hurry,’ she began, but she leaned on the gate as if she was happy to stay a few minutes.
‘Who were you pointing out at the funeral?’ I asked.
‘Sister,’ she said. ‘She’s an old hand here, as she’ll tell you before she says hello. If any white knows your old singer, besides Adrian, it’ll be her. I’ll arrange something so you can meet her – but be sure to get on the right side of her. And stay on it!’