The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  There are moments when you hear a whole chunk of the world sliding into place. I was almost dizzy with the sound.

  ‘So,’ I attempted to reason, ‘the only way for the children to know these stories is by your husband telling them.’

  She didn’t need to agree, and we both knew it in the silence.

  ‘And the stories tell people how to live? About what’s important?’

  ‘The stories tell them.’

  ‘Your husband told these stories in Djemiranga because Djemiranga says things that English can’t? That English has no words for?’ I struggled with the admission, though it was something I already knew, that a white language didn’t map on to theirs. But now I was realising the implications – why had it taken me so long? That a white language, my language, had a lack. ‘That English has no ideas for?’ I found to say.

  There were times in the settlement when I could imagine that the very dust of that ancient land seemed to be listening, the dust full of bones of generations straining to hear, the bones of generations that have lived before us, the dust stained red with the living, the learning how to live, of tens of thousands of people over tens of thousands of years.

  ‘So your children must learn English for when they go to the cities, but they also must hear your husband’s stories in Djemiranga for living in their country?’

  ‘The children must hear the stories to live,’ she said.

  ‘That’s why the Education Department,’ I added, ‘the government, pays your husband to be a storyteller, not a toilet cleaner. Because someone in the government understood this, there was a boss in the government who understood how essential it is that your husband tell the stories.’

  ‘Craig told him to clean toilets.’

  ‘Instead?’

  There was such a long silence then that the darkness seemed to enter us, and fall into our hearts. Her face was becoming harder to see. The children seemed to sense that something was over, or completed, and wandered back to the group. I was wondering if I should go, if I was being dismissed. Then suddenly she said: ‘That Craig, and that cheeky teacher, they don’t like black people. They hunt black people away.’

  It was my turn to repeat. ‘Hunt black people away from their school? From their stories?’

  Someone called her, and she stepped towards the voice, but turned back to me to say: ‘They hunt us away.’

  Chapter 17

  I walked home through the darkness.

  I tucked myself into my bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I got up and felt my way to the kitchen in the dark, for the power was off again. I found some old bread and gnawed it, anxiously listening out for the sound of a troopie. I didn’t want to face Adrian and his certainty, and the questions that still tormented me. Today I’d been almost a barbarian, almost destroying unique knowledge. I was no better than cheeky Craig.

  In bed I drowsed at last. There was the scrape of footsteps, many footsteps on the front verandah, and I heard voices speaking in English. Adrian’s rather high-pitched voice rose above the scraping.

  ‘They’re eager to take you out bush and show you.’

  I pulled the covers over my head. But a knock came on my door.

  ‘Kate, Kate, are you in there?’

  ‘I’m asleep,’ I said.

  ‘Please come out and look after our guests,’ he asked.

  All the lights were on, all through the house, so it must’ve been our turn for electricity.

  I swung my legs out of bed, straightened my clothes and went out to the verandah in case a local family was there. I was blinking as I found a group of white people from Alice Springs. Two introduced themselves as nutritionists, two were power workers come to repair the generator and one, Vanessa, was an academic studying the way plants were used in the old days. They laughed as they explained that they’d all met on the road when one of the cars had lost its steering and mounted an embankment.

  ‘Death traps, those roads!’ chorused the nutritionists. Now they’d arrived and knocked on doors but no one had answered.

  ‘The CEO was told we were coming,’ said one, a power worker. ‘Don’t you whites talk to each other?’

  ‘As little as possible,’ Adrian answered cheerily.

  ‘We heard your CEO knew fuck all about the generator,’ said the power worker. ‘It wasn’t in his job description. When he did check it, he was only doing yous all a favour.’

  ‘It never ceases to amaze me, why the locals put up with the hopeless whites,’ said Vanessa. ‘They’re stoics.’

  ‘They wait for the idiots to leave – and that always happens,’ laughed the power worker. ‘I reckon they’re waiting for us all to get lost – just get back in our dinky little sailing boats and fuck off to where we came from!’

  Everyone reacted, some in amusement, some in alarm.

  ‘Have dinner with us,’ Adrian said placatingly to someone, perhaps to all of them. ‘But I must get to the clinic, see what’s happening over there. Kate will cook – won’t you?’ he added to me.

  ‘Should we bring our stuff in?’ Vanessa asked me.

  Behind them were their dust-emblazoned troopies.

  ‘Perhaps leave it till you know where you’ll sleep,’ I said, becoming a hostess again. ‘Would you all like a cup of tea?’

  ‘We’re longing to clean up,’ said another.

  ‘Of course, come in,’ I said.

  The kitchen was suddenly bright with chatter. As Adrian left, he turned on the washing machine.

  ‘Can it wait?’ I asked him in an aside. ‘People will want to hear each other talk. And it’s a bit inhospitable, doing housework when you’re entertaining.’

  ‘But I’m a very busy man and must use any downtime,’ he argued. ‘They’ll appreciate that. They know how hard I work. They can open the lid and see it’s my clothes, not yours.’

  ‘They’re not going to open the lid of their host’s washing machine!’

  By the time everyone had showered and changed into clean clothes, three chickens from the shop were roasting in the oven on a high setting, and I’d begun a salad and a dessert. The washing machine ground all through the dinner until the power cut out. Later I opened the lid and there was just one lonely blue shirt, drowning.

  Vanessa, the academic, was excited. ‘Tomorrow they’re going to show me how they traditionally made flour out of bean pods. That’s before a white man’s shop with tins of white man’s flour.’

  ‘Damper’s very popular here,’ I said.

  ‘Damper-making on an open fire is an ancient skill when you have to make the flour first from beans,’ she said.

  ‘Make the flour,’ I repeated. I thought of their nomadic ways. ‘Would this bean flour have been stored?’

  She nodded.

  ‘They made flour out of grass seeds as well as beans,’ she said. ‘We’re just finding all this out. It’s new knowledge for us.’

  Adrian had returned for dinner, and everyone crowded around the table.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Vanessa suddenly turned to ask me.

  I told her.

  ‘But I can’t find the singer,’ I said. I was ashamed to admit it in front of an academic who seemed perfectly able to do her research, whereas I was so mired. I busied myself putting the chickens on the table, crisp and brown.

  ‘Doesn’t Adrian know who this woman is?’

  ‘If he does, he’s not telling,’ I said, trying to make it sound like a joke.

  Vanessa’s eyes moved between us, gauging whether or not it was a joke. After all, he was her host. She decided it was funny, and laughed.

  ‘Why don’t you come out with us tomorrow? The grandmothers will tell you what’s what, who’s who.’

  Just then, the chickens on the table oozed grease.

  ‘I might stick to vegetables,’ Adrian said with distaste. He helped himself to a plateful, though the others hadn’t sat down.

  ‘It’s hard to approximate city food out here,’ Vanessa said kindly. ‘Even custard goes brown bec
ause of the dust.’

  In the morning, Adrian stopped me just as I was heading towards the bathroom.

  ‘There won’t be a seat for you in the cars,’ said Adrian.

  ‘Vanessa asked me to come,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve donated the use of a clinic troopie and I don’t want you taking a place that could be used by an Aboriginal woman.’

  ‘Then I’ll go in Vanessa’s car,’ I said.

  ‘The places there are needed as well!’ he said.

  ‘You can’t tell your guest who to put in her car,’ I said.

  He was unusually cranky, and I worried he’d found out about the outstation. I wanted to ask him if Daniel was staying another night in Alice, but now was not the time. Perhaps it would never be the time.

  I needn’t have argued with him about cars. We drove only two kilometres along bush tracks, four or five cars, with the donkey lolloping behind in a friendly way. Vanessa stopped when we saw bean trees, with their long hanging pods, like a child’s yellow ribbons tied to the branches. But when the children ran to a fruit tree heavy with tiny purple currants, grabbing handfuls, it was decided to let them collect the fruit first, before the hard work began of making flour. The children scrabbled excitedly in the dust.

  ‘But they’re swallowing dirt,’ I said to Vanessa.

  A memory came to me of a picture postcard of Greek villagers shaking olives down from trees on to a blanket tied to the branches and another blanket waiting below on the ground.

  ‘Have you got a picnic blanket in your boot?’ I asked Vanessa.

  When she nodded, I rummaged for it, then, asking the children to clear me a space, I laid it out.

  This caused much discussion amongst the women. I thought: they’re praising my Western ingenuity. This will start a new tradition. Perhaps they’ll even name it after me: the Kate Method of Fruit Collecting.

  The women called to Vanessa. I thought: they’ll be telling her how useful it is to have me around. Perhaps they’ll be asking if I could accompany them every trip, to contribute Western ideas.

  Vanessa came over to me.

  ‘Kate, the ladies don’t want you to be hurt, but they’re asking me if you could take your blanket away,’ Vanessa said.

  ‘Take it away?’

  ‘Apparently the dust cleans the fruit.’

  ‘Cleans it?’

  ‘I didn’t know either. As I told you, we’re just starting to learn desert ways.’

  As I sheepishly folded up the blanket, she explained to me about bush tomatoes. In the old days, they’d been stored and dried, and eaten as a staple food. But when whites processed and bottled them, people complained of gut-ache. She’d recently discovered that there’s a toxin on the tomato skins that rolling in sand in the traditional way had removed.

  ‘The sand might be removing toxins on the currants as well,’ she said. ‘But they’d love to use your blanket to harvest the beans.’

  No one seemed to mind my mistake. They smiled when I handed over the folded blanket, and laughed and chatted as they pulled the pods off the trees in clutches, and threw them into the blanket.

  I heard high-pitched, excited children’s laughter. Adrian was coming towards us, the only man present, carrying a bin for scraps, and trailing a couple of kids who vied with each other for him to piggy-back them.

  When he caught sight of me, he glowered. I blushed a little; he would’ve seen my latest mistake.

  The donkey was ambling through the group. When a little girl picked up a stone to throw at it, Adrian grabbed her and carried her over his shoulder to his scraps bin, while she screamed and hooted.

  ‘I’ll put you in the bin if you throw rocks at the donkey.’

  Her friends were doubling over with laughter, their white teeth flashing.

  You deign to be my playmate that last day, as if you’ve changed your mind about me. We fish side by side and you don’t criticise me; we row in your boat, one oar each, and when I hit your knuckles with my oar, you only laugh.

  ‘Clumsy little one,’ you say, but fondly.

  We swim and for once you don’t outdistance me, but backstroke with me, watching the eagle, willing it to come down and swoop above us, and we float on the tide, like big leaves. I keep waiting for you to get tired of me and leave, but when I flop on the bottom step of your jetty exhausted, you tell me to change steps. You are on the top step.

  ‘You’ll get washed away by the tide. Come up here.’

  I look up. You are taking up most of your step.

  ‘No room.’

  You wriggle over to make room. When I don’t move you add: ‘It’s less splintery up here.’

  ‘No splinters down here.’

  ‘You don’t want to hurt your lovely body.’

  My lovely body. My lovely body. I am glad to lie face-down on the step, to hide my blushing in the warm wet wood. You’ve mentioned what has become between us – another forbidden word. My body.

  ‘Come on.’

  I can’t move, I don’t dare, for what my body might tell you. You’d know, you’ve lived longer, a whole six years longer than me. Lovely. Body. Body. Lovely. The words ring out into the air, then circle me with shame and confusion. I think: inside lovely is the word love. Does that mean that you love me? Does that mean you dream of me, that you’re waiting to be lovers one day with me? Does it count, what’s inside a word? That love is inside lovely?

  I am shivering with thought.

  ‘I can keep you warm up here,’ you call down.

  My voice is muffled by the wood, by the slap of the river against the pylons.

  ‘I’m hot.’

  ‘Come on.’

  Diana calls us for lunch.

  ‘Hurry up!’

  ‘Damn,’ you say.

  I leap up, nearly slipping because it’s true, the tide is coming up, I run up the steps between us, I jump over you and keep running. Your footsteps are thudding behind me.

  And now I reach for a memory of air rushing past me, of the silver ribbon of river and the long trunked trees suddenly hanging upside down from the sky, a firm grip around my waist, a boy’s body much bigger than mine, almost a man’s body. I remember a burst of joy at the sudden warmth of you, then terror, escalating terror. I reach for the memory of Diana’s laughter that becomes a yell –

  ‘Put her down, put her down!’

  But her voice is receding, the boy’s body is running and the scrub speeds past me, whipping against me, my legs, my arms, you’re running and jolting me and my teeth crash against each other with the jolts, and my father’s catching up with you, with us.

  ‘Put her down. That’s an order!’

  ‘He’s going to throw her in the river!’

  I scream.

  And suddenly my stomach empties itself all over my face, all over you, and I’m dropped thuddingly on the ground, and then there’s blackness.

  You’re that boy. You’re Ian.

  I sat on the red sand, winded, as if he had dropped me for the second time. I tried to reason: I’d been lying to myself, telling myself that my main purpose in coming here was to find the song. That was not my main purpose at all. It never was. There are times when what’s true creeps away, hunched down so you scarcely notice, and you live mired in the mud of lies. Oh, I could be self-righteously indignant that he wouldn’t show me the old singer, but I’d been living a lie, and perhaps, on some level, he sensed it. Not only a spy, but a liar. I’d always been a spy.

  I must break my silence, I must go to him and say – what would I say?

  I came to find out what you knew.

  I rehearsed the words so many times, they lost their abrasiveness, became reasonable. I came to find out what you knew, I came to find out what you knew.

  A breeze tumbled over the stilled landscape. That was how the landscape often seemed, as if a vast force had clutched it, and it dared not move. This was a country so ancient, so withholding in its secrets, that a breeze seemed a dramatic, rebellious act.

 
They were simple, little words, I said to myself, sifting sand grains between my fingers.

  I came to find out if you knew they’d die.

  Somehow the very puniness of the words deluded me that they were weightless, innocent as clouds on a summer’s day, innocent as red sand, innocent as the breeze now making the bean tree leaves clatter.

  I stood. I would walk up to him and say the tiny, weightless words: I came to find out why you didn’t warn me.

  I was interrupted by cries and laughter from the women.

  ‘Come, Kate,’ they called. They wanted to include me, and were waiting till I joined them to watch. Perhaps, with the blanket, they saw that I’d only been trying to help, being a typical white, thinking that we always know best, even about what they’d been doing for tens of thousands of years.

  Four women picked up the corners of the blanket and, walking towards the women on the opposite corner, made it into a package with the bean pods still inside. Then they put it on the ground and trampled on it, crushing the pods. With much merriment and many good-natured instructions to each other, they then unbundled the blanket and walked away from each other, holding it out again by its corners.

  ‘Like an ancient dance,’ Vanessa whispered to me.

  Now the blanket became a trampoline. They tossed the blanket up and down so the broken pods leaped and fell like tiny beings, to the noisy joy of the children. The chaff blew away.

  ‘Good wind today,’ I heard them exclaim in Djemiranga, and tears came into my eyes, because at last those hours frowning over my recordings were paying off – occasionally.

  Afterwards, in the hollow of the blanket lay only brown seeds.

  Adrian stood nearby, holding a baby. I could’ve gone over to him, but I didn’t want to interrupt him, or myself. And so, the moment passed. I didn’t speak.

  The harvesting and winnowing over, the women lit a fire to cook kangaroo tails, and they burnt the fur off it, rather than scraping it, just as Adrian had said. We sat on the ground for a barbecue, their style, with their relatives. Vanessa again called to me, and peered with me into the pile of seeds in the blanket. She pointed out that it’d take half a day to make what she calculated was half a kilo of bean flour – and the seeds were still not ground.