The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  We heard a troopie’s brakes crunch outside at the front of the clinic.

  ‘Out!’ said Gillian. She jumped up, ran to the back door and yanked it open. I grabbed my now-empty casserole bowl.

  ‘Thanks for the lunch,’ she said loudly. ‘You’re a good mate. Set me up nicely for the afternoon.’ Then she whispered: ‘If she doesn’t believe in Western medicine, she mightn’t believe in anything Western. So she might be living out bush. Or on one of the outstations.’

  Chapter 11

  By six o’clock the family still hadn’t arrived, but Gillian had invited us all to her home for coffee. She had the little two-bedroom house. The other house of five bedrooms was crammed with the older nurse, the doctor and Nick, a male nurse who’d brought his wife and two children to the settlement, all because, she confided, Adrian didn’t want her to infect his staff with her rebellious ideas.

  ‘Come just for half an hour or so, to meet someone,’ she’d said.

  ‘We’re meeting someone!’ enthused Daniel. He went to his room and came out buttoning on a shirt with a paisley pattern. ‘I hope she’s pretty.’

  In the candlelight he seemed more vulnerable than ever.

  ‘Where have you been keeping that shirt?’ I asked. He laughed back shyly.

  ‘It’s a special occasion.’

  ‘How do you know it’s a she?’ Adrian asked, eyeing him and sensing our attraction, for that’s what it was, sexual attraction. But I’d given up that old life.

  Adrian found a clean shirt in the pile of washing on the floor, found the iron, dusted it down, took a new collection of biros off the newly cleared ironing board, and only when he was plugging the iron cord into the power point, did he remember that an iron needed electricity.

  We’d watched him, bemused, because we were accustomed to him commanding the world; it was as if he could make the electricity obey him. Now we shared a glance, silently knowing this about each other.

  ‘Dampen it down and put it on. It’ll dry less crushed,’ Daniel advised him.

  We admired the effect together.

  ‘It’ll be like having your own personal air conditioner,’ I said.

  Daniel creaked about that.

  ‘It might seem like we’re in the desert but I’m off to a café in Newtown,’ he said. ‘I’m going to order the cheese cake. Double serving. With cream. Might shout you both.’

  Just then, the lights burst back on.

  ‘Damn timing,’ Adrian swore.

  A second later, the phone startled us by ringing. Gillian asked to speak to me.

  ‘Could you come over now?’ she asked. ‘Just you?’

  Then she whispered: ‘Can anyone hear me?’

  I walked to my bedroom with the phone.

  ‘Not now,’ I said.

  ‘I organised this for you. She’s coming. Sister. She’ll know, if anyone besides Adrian does. But be careful. Watch your words.’

  I stood outside her door and I heard an odd noise, a crackle, a momentary impress of a small weight on the floor, another crackle, almost a sneeze.

  ‘Wait a second,’ called Gillian. ‘I’ve got to be careful.’

  The door swung open just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Unlike our house, when her house was constructed, the builders faced it the right way around so the lounge room was the first room you went into, not the laundry, so you didn’t have to call out greetings against the swishing of the washing machine. It made her house seem sophisticated.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked. Then I saw it.

  As if we were in the khaki scrub of the desert, a tiny joey bounced in graceful arcs across her blue nylon carpet.

  Gillian laughed at my astonished face.

  ‘Some children were teasing it, so I bought it off them for twenty dollars,’ she said. ‘But I’m frightened I won’t be able to keep it alive. I need you to help me feed it.’

  ‘Tell me how to help,’ I said.

  It bounded to her and she held it still and sat on the sofa with it on her knee, wrapping it up like a baby in a blue plasticised blanket from the clinic designed for incontinent old people. The joey peeped above the folds, its eyes too large for its face, its head jerking as if it was trying to catch flies.

  ‘Pass my backpack,’ she said, indicating where she’d dropped it beside the sofa. She’d brought tins of milk from the clinic for the joey, and a syringe. So that was the weight I’d seen her carrying up the road.

  ‘I shouldn’t have asked you how to cook a kangaroo,’ I said apologetically.

  ‘How could you know?’ she said.

  We both tried to squeeze a drop of the milk into the joey’s tiny mouth, with me holding the dropper, and Gillian holding the joey. But the joey’s mouth clamped shut, and the syrup ran down its body. In the struggle, we leaned into each other. I slipped my hand between Gillian’s arms, right under the jutting of her breasts. As a child I used to lean into Diana like that, when she taught me how to sort out weeds from plants, her soft body supporting me. I wondered if women in older times used to touch each other unapologetically and easily like that, discovering a comfort in holding a sick child or caring for old people, probably in the laying out of the dead, getting babies to take the nipple, even feeding a joey. I was aware of how aloof from other women I’d become in my circumscribed city life. Even that very day out my window I’d glimpsed the undulating bodies of a family of women exhausted by the heat and lying together in the afternoon shade on a verandah, and my heart had strained with loneliness; I’ve always lived as if I’m rehearsing the solitude of death.

  ‘I tried to save a joey last year,’ said Gillian, interrupting my thoughts. ‘But I put it on an electric blanket one cold night and overheated it. I don’t want to be responsible for another death.’

  The joey at last chanced to open its mouth and, chuckling, we slipped in some milk, then more. It shut its mouth and bounded away, up on the sofa, pausing to nibble crumbs it found under the cushions.

  ‘My Weet-Bix,’ said Gillian. ‘I must’ve dropped them there while I watched TV. We should put it to sleep now,’ she added.

  So we bundled it into a cardboard box, its legs at odd angles like sticks.

  I laughed. ‘The boys have dressed up for a pretty stranger!’

  Gillian got out cups and a packet of biscuits for her visitors just as there was a knock on the door that made the joey’s legs jerk in the air, but the blanket settled and was still. The door was pushed open, and slammed, and Sister stood there, gazing at us both.

  ‘Have you heard the news?’

  We both jumped up in alarm.

  ‘What’s happened now?’

  She was a large bottle-shaped woman though her unlined face showed she was only in her early thirties at most. Everything about her was authoritative; her huge breasts commanded the room. She wore a white uniform so plastic I had the feeling that it’d been wiped clean of all sorts of human suffering, drip-dried overnight in the shower and put on the next morning, ready to face more pain. She made few concessions to femininity except that she wore on her pocket a little green badge with gold writing saying ‘Sister’. I wondered whether the locals who could read English imagined she was claiming to be one of the family.

  Gillian introduced me.

  ‘You haven’t been in a community before?’ Sister said. It wasn’t a question but a statement.

  ‘Does it show?’ I asked laughingly.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, without laughing.

  Just then Adrian, Daniel and the new doctor, Dr Lydia, all crunched across the front yard at the same time.

  Dr Lydia had arrived at the settlement in the troopie with Sister, and it was her first time. She was dressed expensively, as if she hadn’t left the city. There was something private-boarding-school about her. Her hair was swept back into a bun like a cameo portrait of a well-born English lady. She had candle-wax skin so pure its subdued sheen was like creamy velvet. A silver necklace tangled nonchalantly in the string of the workaday stethoscope s
he wore around her neck despite being off-duty, and insisted on transforming it into jewellery. We all gazed at her beauty when we thought no one was watching.

  ‘Nick’s on his way,’ Daniel said. He and Dr Lydia stood at the door waiting. Nick and his little wife from Singapore were coming up the road, he in a brown turban, she in a white silky dress and white high heels that sank with each step into the red dust, so her progress was slow and he had to wait for her to catch up.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ said Gillian.

  Everyone did, except Sister, who continued to stand, despite the friendly way Gillian patted the sofa cushions.

  ‘You should all know that men’s business is going on and women mustn’t wander around the desert or they’ll get attacked,’ she announced as soon as Nick had arrived and his wife was arranging her flared white dress on the grimy sofa. I nodded to them both, not daring to greet them while Sister held the floor. Nick translated what Sister had said to his wife, who cried out, holding her hands up to her carefully curled hair in alarm.

  ‘But the men here are so gentle. They wouldn’t hurt a fly!’ said Gillian.

  Sister snorted. ‘How many times have you been out here?’ she said to Gillian; it wasn’t a question.

  ‘They are not so gentle to each other,’ Nick said. Although he was contradicting Gillian, he inclined his brown-turbaned head towards her in a polite way. ‘A grog-runner brought in alcohol last night, remember, and Dr Lydia stitched up three split heads.’

  ‘Well, they wouldn’t hurt a white fly,’ Gillian added.

  It was clear that to Sister most of what Nick said wasn’t worth listening to, and absolutely none of what Gillian said.

  ‘No more walks for you for a while,’ she told Gillian. ‘That’s an order.’

  ‘Tell your wife, no walks,’ she added to Nick.

  ‘I already have,’ said Nick. In English he said to his wife, to please Sister: ‘No walks.’

  Her eyes held on to his, questioning why he was talking in English to her, but accepting that he had an important reason.

  ‘I’ve just told her she must keep the children indoors,’ he informed Sister. They had brought out their little Singaporean-raised son and daughter to the settlement.

  ‘We don’t need punishment, as well as everything else we have to deal with,’ Sister said, sighing heroically. I caught Adrian’s eye, but he diplomatically kept silent.

  ‘The clinic has lost hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of vaccines because of the blackouts,’ she added for my benefit. But she’d been mollified by Nick’s obedience, and sat down. There was something almost comical about her youth and yet her middle-aged manner. She even sat down like an older person, as if she was expecting insurrection from her joints.

  ‘But what would the men have against us?’ asked Gillian.

  ‘Believe me, such stories are a method of controlling women. These people have a very different culture and you have to understand that,’ Sister told Gillian. ‘They don’t follow our ways.’

  Gillian poured tea into cups. ‘I need my walks,’ she said defiantly.

  We all sipped our tea loudly.

  ‘Who gave this warning to the clinic?’ Daniel asked. ‘It wasn’t Anna, was it? Because I heard her giggling with her sisters this morning.’ Daniel didn’t want to offend Sister, but he was obliged to suggest, ‘It might be just Anna’s idea of a prank.’

  He turned to me and explained that Anna was a twelve-year-old girl from a difficult family. I nodded because I’d already noticed Anna. All the other young girls, including her sisters, were enchantingly pretty, with turned-up noses and full cheeks under eyes leaping with laughter, but Anna had a pitifully plain face, and a heavy, ambling body.

  Sister exuded resentment like a puffing kettle at Daniel’s contradiction but she couldn’t object because Daniel wasn’t a newcomer.

  ‘The girl might think it’s funny to scare white women,’ said Dr Lydia.

  ‘I must repeat this warning to all of you,’ said Sister. ‘You wouldn’t know this yet, Doctor, but what we’re up against in this culture is extreme misogyny. In all the stories I’ve ever been told, in all their myths from the old times, the women are always punished.’

  I turned my cup in its circle on the saucer, not wanting to catch her eye in case she sensed my disbelief. Everyone else looked into their cups as well.

  Only Dr Lydia spoke up in her well-groomed voice.

  ‘The stories might not be a celebration of misogyny, but a warning to women to behave.’

  I was remembering being a child in a shouting schoolyard, staying cowed and silent while another child was bullied by a fat, older girl. But Dr Lydia had never been cowed by anyone, not yet. She met Sister’s eyes without flinching, her deeply set dark eyes gazing into Sister’s little fat-sandwiched ones, gauging her. In their small surgery the two women must have been contending with each other every minute of their shifts, and then they went home to a crammed clinic house.

  Sister sighed. ‘It’s living in the bush that’s the great teacher,’ she said. ‘Practical knowledge. Not book knowledge.’

  We all gulped tea.

  Adrian stood, anxious to change the subject before more tension erupted that he’d have to waste time calming down tomorrow, and even more anxious to have the approving eyes of the beautiful Lydia on him.

  ‘City people think that the men’s ceremonies are only for men,’ he said. ‘But the women are significant in them. The mothers – isn’t this beautiful? –’ we were all watching him in relief, ‘the mothers farewell their sons by pushing them forward with their breasts. Like this.’

  He strode around the lounge room, thrusting his chest forward, pushing imaginary boys. When no one reacted, he did another circle.

  Dr Lydia and I spoke at once.

  ‘Have you no reverence?’ she chided him. ‘You were privileged, surely, to witness it.’

  ‘How do you know this?’ I asked. ‘Without their language, are you sure it’s what you think it is?’

  I saw everyone glance uneasily between us.

  ‘Adrian’s been here quite a while,’ said Sister. ‘Even longer than me. I came out bush as soon as I graduated,’ she added, perhaps for my benefit. ‘He’s notched up his time. He certainly shows reverence, but amongst friends, he’s allowed to relax the rules.’ She was flirting with his rebelliousness.

  ‘Time could deepen misunderstanding.’ It was out before I could stop it.

  The corners of Gillian’s mouth turned down in warning, but too late.

  ‘Exactly,’ Dr Lydia said, smiling at me. ‘I’m sure as a linguist – I heard you’re a student of that profession – you’d have read a thousand times about fieldwork gone wrong. Prejudices becoming as firmly set as cement.’

  ‘You looked more like a pigeon than a mother,’ said Nick to Adrian, easing the tension, and the laughter was louder than he expected, so he beamed, and his wife caressed his arm proudly.

  It was Daniel’s turn to try to change the subject.

  ‘When is she arriving?’ asked Daniel. ‘The stranger we’re to meet? Before we lose the electricity?’

  ‘She’s already here,’ said Gillian, and jumped up to carry the joey’s box to the table for us all to see.

  Everyone crowded around, glad to marvel at the joey, blinking but on its back with its stick legs in the air, though everyone had seen many joeys before.

  Dr Lydia excused herself because she had to go to the outstations tomorrow, and we moved towards the door.

  Adrian said: ‘Gillian, can I have a word?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  I heard their murmur, and guiltily worried that he’d discovered that Gillian had helped me, but Daniel pushed me out to the verandah.

  ‘It must be difficult in the clinic,’ I murmured.

  ‘I’m expecting a murder any minute,’ he murmured back.

  ‘No sign of a psychopath,’ I said loudly, looking out at the streetlights, and then out to the rest of the
settlement shrouded in darkness. ‘Dora’s safe for another night, maybe.’

  Daniel turned his back on the house and walked to the gate. I followed his tall figure.

  ‘It’s not true about the attack?’ I asked.

  ‘We make the mob in our own image,’ he answered.

  A battered car, without a windscreen, passed. The front seat was full of children who hailed us excitedly, standing on the front passenger seat and almost toppling out.

  ‘They should be in bed,’ I said.

  ‘This is the desert,’ Daniel reminded me gently, and waved back. I decided to do the same.

  ‘Can you keep a secret?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘From next week no one in the clinic will be paid,’ he said quietly. ‘The little office clerks are withholding our funds. Adrian hasn’t put in the reports on time for months. That’s the news he’s breaking to Gillian.’

  ‘How late were they?’ I asked.

  ‘None are done,’ he said.

  ‘Can you do them?’

  ‘He never lets me. He says they’re historical records, and he writes essays instead of ticking boxes like he’s supposed to. Of course, there’s never time to finish the essays.’

  ‘Will you all be kept on?’ I asked.

  ‘It depends when Adrian chooses to finish them. And then he got Sister up in arms. The men refuse to have health checks but he’s bringing them in with bribes. Sister says the authorities will catch him and we’ll all go for a row!’

  ‘Bribing!’

  ‘With meat pies. And tomato sauce. Sister says it isn’t ethical!’

  ‘And is it?’

  He waved to another passing car.

  ‘As long as he doesn’t get caught.’

  Adrian came out of the house cheerfully.

  ‘Let’s get bedded down before the lights go out.’

  I was relieved at how cheerful he sounded.

  ‘When we were at a pastoralist’s today,’ he said as we crunched across the road, ‘his wife was complaining how much housework she had to do. I told her I know women who’d work for her. But she said she wouldn’t employ blacks. She said, “The lubras are filthy and the gins leave the gates open.” Her language was so mid-twentieth century!’