by Sue Woolfe
But a few minutes later, all three sisters emerged.
‘Beautiful teeth,’ said the nurse to me as they went. ‘Like last time. They hunt animals and gather berries. But you’d know that.’ She assumed the women didn’t speak any English and perhaps she was right.
‘Could you go and find us more patients?’ she asked me, but when she saw my bewilderment, she pointed across a clearing towards the edifice I’d noticed before.
‘Will anyone be there?’ I asked, fighting shyness at the thought of meeting strangers.
‘You don’t normally come out here, you clinic mob?’ she asked.
‘Not me,’ I said, blushing. ‘Just Daniel and a doctor.’
‘It’s a big humpy,’ she laughed. ‘It’s home to about twenty people. Surely there’s someone there with a toothache.’
I walked across reluctantly to what I then discerned wasn’t a rubbish heap at all, but a collection of the pretty bough shelters they often built in the area in an emergency – for the funeral when I first returned here, for example. And, when a car broke down, I’d often seen mothers get an axe out of the boot and chop down four young forked saplings and erect a shelter within minutes for the children to play under. But these were covered more formally, with carpets and the usual colourful nylon blankets, and on the top were clothes and cooking pots with blackened bottoms and bins that once stored shop-bought flour and sugar, all out of the reach of dogs and children. As I stood at the entrance to the edifice, I found I was gazing into a long meandering room of about head height that seemed to change both its direction and width every few metres, so that I was in fact looking at many rooms, perhaps family sections, shadowy but not dark. Even from where I stood I could feel cool air because the humpy faced away from the sun and towards any breeze. The red dirt floors were so neatly swept I could see the furrows of a stick broom. More collections of rags, perhaps clothes, hung on ropes inside. Everything was orderly, as orderly as anything I ever saw on board a boat on the river. But what took my breath away was that in every room, women, and occasionally a man, sat cross-legged on the swept floors painting colourful pictures on large canvases.
The nearest woman looked up at me.
‘Teeth,’ I said, pointing to my own, smiling. ‘Dentist. Teeth doctor. In caravan,’ I added, pointing.
A few other women looked up, smiled, but looked down and continued painting, utterly absorbed.
I went back to the caravan and reported to the nurse.
‘We came on the wrong day,’ she said. ‘I just heard that there’s a famous artist due. He’s coming to collect his paintings.’
She mentioned the name.
‘His paintings?’
‘Why not?’ She laughed. ‘It’s what happened in the Renaissance in my country. He’s like Michelangelo and Rossetti. They had studios of assistants, too. These women paint in his style and name. He’ll come out and check and collect the paintings, probably just like those famous artists did.’
At a loss, I went and sat in the shade at benches erected for people to wait for a turn at the one public phone booth. Two women walked up. One put her money in the slot and dialled a number on the phone. Her friend sat with her back to me, but threw over her shoulder: ‘You a doctor?’
I was surprised to hear English.
‘No.’
‘A teacher?’
‘No.’
‘Where’s your country?’
‘Sydney.’
Her body edged a little more to face me, so I felt I could question her.
‘You grew up here?’
‘Near here. Only my kids grew up here.’
‘It’s good here,’ I said. I was learning not to say that the country was beautiful. It didn’t seem to be what was said. Country was your homeland, almost like your body, or it was dangerous, or it was good. No one seemed to call it beautiful, or be astonished at its colours or its flowers.
She smiled at me. She was very pretty, surely not any older than me, with round cheeks and long hair covered elegantly in a veil, though when I looked more closely, I saw that the veil had been a boy’s white singlet.
Minutes passed. We looked together at red dust, the stunted trees, leaves, and the dentist’s van. I didn’t know what she saw, but her quietness made me wait.
Something did happen. She laughed fondly.
‘The camel,’ she said.
‘It’s crazy?’ I asked, because of her laugh.
‘It wants to eat bread,’ she said.
We were being quite chatty, though not by white standards.
In between our sentences, she traced a shape in the dust on the bench beside her with a graceful finger. The shape was a rectangle. She drew a diagonal that could be a plant, because her fingers feathered out in curving shapes towards each corner of the rectangle. I was astonished at the symmetry of the design, but she wasn’t satisfied, she rubbed it out, and began again in more dust on the bench, trying the same pattern but from another side, with less leaves this time. She rubbed that one out, and then she did a third, and a fourth. It came to me, judging by the beauty of the drawings, that I might be sitting beside a serious artist, perhaps even a famous one. But I knew not to ask her name. She sat gazing at her last picture, satisfied, and then she looked up at me as if she’d forgotten her surroundings in her musings, and was surprised to see me there. Something about her slow-focusing brought the question out of me.
‘Is there,’ my voice said, ‘an old lady who sings the old songs? There’s a special song. Whites call it the “Poor Thing” song. It’s only for women. From the Dreaming.’
She looked away. A crow landed and called plaintively. We both looked at it. It was as if she hadn’t heard. Whatever had been between us, I felt I’d destroyed. She looked at her etching, at the sky, at the bench, at the crow, at her friend on the phone. She rubbed out her latest etching, deciding it displeased her after all.
I was ashamed of myself. I’d betrayed Daniel. If it got back to Adrian, Daniel’s job could be jeopardised. I’d failed myself, I’d failed him. He wouldn’t want me as his friend any more. I put my head in my hands. Why had I spoken, why, why couldn’t I hold my tongue? When was I going to learn that lesson?
Adrian, I decided, was right in another thing: I didn’t understand Aboriginal people. I was full of city needs, like the sacked builder, demanding that everything move at my pace, everything follow my values.
In my shame, I became aware of the voice on the phone.
‘2500,’ I heard in English, in single digits, and then the rest of the sentence was in Djemiranga. She mustn’t be talking to a white person, because the only English was the digits – I knew the lack of numbers in Aboriginal languages – and she must’ve been talking money. She seemed excited, as if she was negotiating in hope. Then, a little less excitedly, I heard, ‘2000.’ Then, despondently, ‘1800,’ then, sadly, ‘1600.’
She put down the phone.
‘1200,’ she murmured to her friend, the artist beside me. They walked slowly away together towards the big humpy, their shoulders rubbing against each other in a consoling way. I wished every time I was disappointed, I could walk away from it with such a friend, rubbing shoulders. I wished I had a friend now, who I could tell my conflicts to, my betrayals. I could of course talk to Gillian, but I couldn’t even begin to explain my past.
Suddenly Daniel was by my side.
‘We’re to pick some people up, and I’ve got to go and get Tillie,’ he told me. ‘But I mustn’t carry her, being a bloke. Can you help?’
We drove to her front yard. Tillie was lying on a bare mattress and her daughter, herself a middle-aged woman, crouched by her side. Her daughter gestured that I should take her mother’s legs, while she held her mother under the arms. But the old lady sagged in the middle, a dead weight. It felt as if we could break her in two. Her sons stood by the fence, impassively watching, arms crossed. Daniel stood with them. I wanted to ask for their help, but suspected that would break a cultural code. Li
ke Daniel, probably they were not allowed to help. The old lady stirred on her bare mattress, turned her head and groaned. Her sons spoke to each other, and went away so I thought they were abandoning her – but then they were back with a tabletop that was really a door, and they handed it to Daniel, who handed it to me. By lifting her first to one side and then the other, her daughter and I slid the door under her mattress, and then we could lift her, door, mattress and all, into the troopie, and lie her on its floor. For a second it flitted through my mind that Tillie could be my old lady, but in Daniel’s presence, I didn’t dare think further.
We drove off, with my feet near the old lady’s head. Then, down another dusty street, we saw people waiting at a doorway out of the sun. A young girl came forward carrying a baby. An older woman followed with blankets. The girl climbed in the cabin, and held her baby close while she turned her head towards her young husband, not looking at him, but acknowledging him by the turn of her head. He’d blonded the hair above his ears but the bleach had fought with his black hair and compromised on orange. He assessed whether there was space for him, swung himself in against her, and they both sat gazing at their baby asleep in her pretty, rounded arms. I thought, again irreverently, that their gaze was so devoted, they were almost like Mary and Joseph contemplating their child.
It came to me that in comparison to their love I tried to live on only a mite of emotion, like someone going through the world with eyes half-closed. It seemed I’d lacked not only the opportunity, but the courage to live fully.
The young woman’s mother was at the back of the troopie, struggling with its high steps. From inside, I held out my hand to help but she didn’t seem to notice. She turned her back to me, laid her chest down on the floor and kicked the air until she could wriggle her way in, just like a swimmer trying to get out of the pool at the town baths. Then a little child of about three clambered in after her and sat beside her cross-legged, watching me solemnly, despite my smiles.
I heard the ringing of Daniel’s satellite phone. He climbed out, listened, then ran back to the troopie.
‘Quick, I’ve got to get you home,’ he said, turning to me. ‘You know why!’
I slammed the back door. We roared towards the gate that led to the road, a gate that looked as if it was seldom shut by the way weeds had grown up around the fence posts. A crowd of women were milling there. A four-wheel drive had pulled up.
Daniel groaned.
‘We don’t need a traffic jam now!’
A town-dressed black man was talking to the crowd. People straggled over the road to listen, some of them holding rolled-up canvases.
‘Paintings,’ the woman in the back informed me in unexpected English.
The artist I’d sat with near the telephone booth was on the outside of the circle as we pulled up. She leaned towards my window, waving me to open it, smiling warmly, as if I’d ruined nothing. I tried to open the window but it was stuck.
‘Please wait while I get this thing open!’ I called to Daniel.
‘Sorry,’ said Daniel. ‘But I’ll lose my job.’
The crowd cleared for him, and he roared through the gate. In the rear-vision mirror, the woman was still gesticulating.
She could’ve had an answer to my question, I wanted to say, the question I’d promised not to ask.
It was almost lunchtime as we turned into the main street of the settlement. Suddenly, Daniel braked.
‘He’s beaten us back,’ he said, his voice a little higher than usual.
Down the road, a dusty troopie was parked outside our house. The doors were wide open; the way Adrian always left a troopie except when he was in town. It was as if he was always poised for flight, here in the settlement he wanted to save.
‘I’ll be in trouble. Quick, get out and walk home slowly,’ said Daniel and I noticed how his lower lip crinkled when he was worried. ‘No, that’s no good, he’ll guess you’ve been out there with me. I know. Go down to the school. So you’re coming from a different direction. Do something that’ll take an hour or so before you come home.’
I clambered out.
‘What will I do there? I haven’t got my recorder –’
The woman in the back threw out my hat.
‘You’re always resourceful,’ said Daniel. He thought to give me an encouraging grin and started up the troopie.
Chapter 16
I trudged down the street in the sun. I’d offer to tidy up the library that had looked so messy through the window. Doing that should take me an hour or so, and then I could innocently saunter home.
The schoolyard was, as usual, just furrows of sand to show that only the wind had been there – no children playing and shouting, no dogs, not even the donkey. No dark, curly heads to be seen through the windows. An Aboriginal woman sat alone on a bench under the shade of the tree, surprising me because people here seldom sat alone. I nodded to her, but she didn’t nod back, in fact, she was so deep in her thoughts that I wasn’t even sure she’d seen me. I thought of sitting beside her companionably, but instead I took the easier course and wandered shyly over to the staff room.
Craig came straight to the door, almost as if he’d been waiting.
‘I just popped in to see if I could be of use,’ I started to say. ‘Is there anything that needs doing? The library –?’
Craig shook his head.
‘You’ve come just in time to listen to my letter to the Department.’
‘I looked in the library window and saw –’
But he wasn’t interested in what I’d seen; he led me into the room, to his desk which seemed, democratically, as modest as the two other desks in the room, clearly the desks of ordinary teachers – Beth, and Dudley from the outstation, who I’d glimpsed at the funeral.
‘I’ll read it to you,’ he said. ‘I’ve had it with these people shaming me.’ He sat down at once at his computer and began scrolling to the start, while I gazed at a framed photo of an improbably beautiful Asian teenager. But he roused himself, remembered to be gallant and reached over for another chair.
‘Sit down if you like.’
We were in for a long reading, I saw. He pulled over his cup, brimming with hot coffee with a white powdery scum on the top. I wondered if the powder was dust, or from the bore water.
A voice came from a corner in the shadows. I hadn’t noticed Beth.
‘It’s terrible, what they’re doing to him,’ she said, coming over. ‘You’d never know it was our Rejoice in Literature Day, would you? Fancy that – not coming to school on Rejoice in Literature Day.’ Her look towards him was full of tenderness, and the pink curls on her head strained towards him.
‘They’re breaking his heart!’ she added.
As when I first met them, Craig and Beth had a way of sweeping me into their preoccupations, as if I was a member of the family who’d just come back after popping out to the local shop for milk. I found myself wondering whether she was in love with him.
She added, looking out to the schoolyard: ‘That’s Libby, my useless assistant teacher. She’s meant to be helping me.’
‘She seems in trouble,’ I said, for the woman outside now seemed slumped on the seat.
‘She is! She should be preparing my charts, covering my books and mounting my photos. She’s paid to teach the kids to read in their own language,’ she answered. ‘Though why the government demands it, we don’t know. The kids are here so seldom they have no hope of reading even in English!’
‘You can’t expect anything of these people,’ Craig reminded her absent-mindedly as he used his spell-check on the letter. ‘Not even common decency.’
And then, while he kept scrolling, he told me that one of the schoolgirls, only fourteen years old, was being raped regularly. He named the girl and boy and the outstation I’d just come from.
‘They have a new baby? The boy has orange hair?’ I asked.
He glanced up. ‘That’s them. Reprehensible, isn’t it!’
‘But the boy is her hus
band!’ I cried. ‘They were in the troopie!’
‘You helped them?’
Beth glanced between us. Again, she seemed to draw strength from me.
‘They do marry straight after puberty,’ she told him, nodding enough for the two of them.
‘But that’s against universal standards! The whole world would condemn them,’ he said. ‘Remember the sports weekend?’ He turned to me, the letter forgotten for a moment: ‘People just threw their mattresses and blankets on the ground to sleep on later, and left them unattended while they went off to watch the football –’
‘Wait till you hear the next horror,’ Beth interjected.
‘And Sabah, my little wife, couldn’t believe her eyes – we saw the donkey standing on one of their mattresses nosing into a plastic bag of bread while it defecated – wait for it –’
‘On someone’s pillow,’ they said together, a choir.
‘Isn’t it terrible, little Sabah being exposed to that!’ said Beth to us both.
‘It was Sabah’s first drive around the community and she said it will be her last,’ said Craig, while Beth nodded at the wisdom of that strategy.
‘We’re parents of two little children,’ Craig decided to confide in me. ‘One’s twenty months old and the other’s just four months, and they’re both so smart! Already! Our baby can shake her rattle! And listen to it, wondering, “What’s making the noise?” And our toddler can talk the leg off an iron pot! You know what he said the other day? He said, “Daddy, I lub you always!” Imagine knowing about time at twenty months! We’ve bred a couple of Einsteins!’
It was as if just speaking about his children opened a door into a different part of his being. His voice had deepened, his back had straightened, and even his belly had flattened somewhat. I could almost imagine him being a husband with some charm.
‘I go back and help her out every lunchtime,’ dropping his voice, though Beth knew it already and nodded sympathetically. ‘She misses her mother, of course. I have to make up for her mother, imagine that! But we’ll have to leave –’ this to Beth. ‘We can’t raise our Einsteins in this filth, with these primitives.’