by David Brooks
He had been writing what he called a Secret History of Australia, or at least had been making notes for it when not caught up in his correspondence and what he sometimes ironically referred to as his political work. The whole country had been occupied, he explained to her, long before white men came. A whole civilisation, and not aboriginal alone, though the greatest part was theirs. White men had been washed off ships in the south, or been shipwrecked, well before the official discovery of the continent; the cave paintings showed them. Portuguese, from caravels over four hundred years ago: someone had even found the keel of one half-buried in the dunes on a beach in Victoria, and he was convinced, from signs in rock-paintings far up the coast, that there had been others, wrecked on the Reef. The paintings told of how the shipwrecked and abandoned sailors had interbred, and how they had taught new things. There was a story amongst the aborigines farther down the coast, that the limestone caves that riddle the Great Dividing Range connected so extensively that it was possible to go almost all the way from Moe – he showed her the map – to Katoomba underground. He believed that, if ever one could get down into them – if ever he could find someone who still knew the secret – he would find that the cave paintings told stories of travellers, and that some of those travellers were white men, journeying from one end of the country to another in search of others like themselves that they had heard rumours about. In the west there were the coves of pirates, Englishmen who raided the Dutch in Batavia, and the wrecks of other ships blown off course as they made for the East Indies, and in the north there had been actual colonies of Javanese fishermen and trepang gatherers, even once – as a correspondent at Sydney University was trying to prove – a colony of Chinese at the far edge of the empire of Genghis Khan, with its own governor, its own administration: a whole town, an outpost made of wood and paper, that, hit by a cyclone or burned by raiders, had vanished without trace, except in the stories and legends of the aboriginals, or transmuted in their paintings.
But the only empire that this land itself had ever acknowledged, he said, was an empire of the spirit, not of things, and that empire – a fallen one now and ragged, the land full of its refugees – was aboriginal. To support this, as the second autumn was closing, he took her to see what he called the Lost City, the ghost-town hidden by the bush around them. She could not have said what she expected – some overgrown stone constructions, perhaps; perhaps some part of the labyrinth of caves – but it was nothing like the things she saw: disappointing things, from one perspective, but that was not the perspective that he offered. He showed her shell-banks like the one Andrew had shown her, and that she had later seen on the river behind Hoburn – not one but many, on every beach, in every cave around them – and explained that they were kitchen-sites, or middens, from generation after generation of shellfish eaters. He showed her community places and sacred places, rock-carvings, burial grounds, circles of stones, eerie and powerful, where initiations were conducted, and as he led her from one to the other he took her along trails that these people had used, though he told her not to think of them as trails but as alleys, lanes, main streets, even highways, if you could consider that a highway could be a footpath of migration as the tribes moved from one place to another with the seasons and the patterns of hunting and ripening of things. He stooped, to show her that what she thought were stones were in fact implements, or the pieces left when implements were made. He stopped on one of the broad, flat rock-shelves at the near end of the beach, to show her that the runnels were not made by nature. He went around them at low tide with a piece of soft, lighter-coloured shale, rubbing it in the grooves to colour them, then asked her to climb to the top of the low headland above and look down: to see a whale, a dolphin, and what could only have been a ship – but what ship was it, or was it the memory of many? – etched into the rock by people who had gone about the grooves just as he had done, hundreds of times before. And these, he said, are only the shapes we recognise. Who knows what else we might find, if only we knew how to read?
When she asked him how he had found these places, had the aborigines told him, he answered yes, most of them had been shown to him, but there were others that they would not tell him about, and you couldn’t blame them – perhaps they had forgotten them themselves – and that he had had to feel out on his own, learn to sense as he moved around. The paths and the spaces themselves seemed to tell you. A sixth sense almost, often also physical, a faint bristling on the arms, the spine, or a kind of ghost music that you heard, or made in your own mind, as if the surroundings were pulling it out of you. Once you felt or heard it you began – sometimes, not always – to find evidence. There was a place, he said, up on Point Clear, a hard climb and fairly remote to the immediate area – you would have had to make an expedition to it, a pilgrimage – and perhaps that was the reason. A small, strange, open space amongst the tall trees, with thick forest and dense undergrowth about it on all but the ocean side, which although itself hidden by the trees gave you a view for many miles up and down the coast. And there was grass there, green and even, as if it were regularly tended, soft as a baby’s hair, and a heavy, oppressive smell of dank and rot. You had a watched, uneasy feeling whenever you sat there. No one would speak about it; perhaps no one else knew until he had mentioned it.
‘You mean at the settlement, at Disaster Bay? Those are the people who’ve been helping you?’
‘Yes, a few of them, a few of the older men. But it’s hard to know how much they know or don’t know. Sometimes when I mention something they will talk very freely. At other times they look at me as if they don’t remember, or have no idea of what I might be talking about, but I notice that those places – the things I have mentioned to them then, when they will not tell me – seem to be the freshest and most recently visited.’
She wanted to see the place on Point Clear, and on a mild morning in early winter set out without telling him, for fear that he might not wish her to go. It was hard to see where to commence the climb. Except for the rocky area right at the tip, where the ocean had pounded it clean and the cliff was almost sheer and unassailable, the bush about it was dense, just as he had said, and the slope steep and in places almost vertical. At one point a meagre stream trickled from a break in the scrub, fanning out and staining the sand. There was a sharp, forbidding smell, but also a kind of gully there, and it seemed a logical place to start. She broke through the vegetation with her arms raised before her to prevent twigs scratching her face or spiderwebs catching in her hair. A few yards in from the beach the slope increased dramatically and she had to clamber up slowly, pulling herself gradually higher and higher by the roots, trunks and low branches of the weak and often rotten bushes and saplings clinging to the thin soil that covered it. At one point she came across a narrow ledge, almost a trail, and encountered only feet away a large echidna sheltering under an exposed root, curled up and doing its best to pretend that it was asleep, one eye watching from beneath an almost-closed lid. At another, a few yards higher, something rustled in a bush near where she had just placed her hand and, losing her grip in fright, it was all she could do not to slip downward. But it was only a small, dark, ruffled bird, that scrambled into the bush beyond, probably far more frightened than she was.
When at last she reached the top she found it much as Fryer had described. The grass in the cleared space was so soft, so even in height and so very nearly in an exact circle that she felt someone must have looked after it, although in this very freshness there was an untouchedness that argued otherwise. It made her think of graves. It was strange that even the wallabies had not cropped it down, as they did any new grass about the beach and other forest clearings. Yet here there was no spoor, nor any other sign of them, as if something warded them away. There was a log across the centre – he had not mentioned that; perhaps it had fallen since he had been there – and as she sat there to look out at the ocean she saw, veining the grass at her feet, the most delicate ground-creeper, with hair-like tendrils and minuscul
e red berries. Just as she stretched out her fingers to touch one, however, something trickled on to her right eyebrow and, thinking it a drop of dew from one of the trees, she reached up to brush it away, only to find herself bleeding – a branch, scratching her forehead, must have broken the skin without her noticing. She felt cold, uncomfortable, as if she should not be there. She sat only a few minutes longer, watching the ocean through the trees, hearing nothing but the sound of the breakers on the beach far below, then left, doing all she could think of to leave no trace of herself. At the foot of the cliff again, having found part way down a ridge that made the rest of the going far easier, she bent to scratch an itch on her ankle, and discovered there a leech so fat with her blood that it dropped off almost of its own accord.
That evening she told Fryer of her climb. He appeared hardly surprised, only keen to hear her impressions. When later, however, as she prepared for bed, she was irritated by something on the lobe of her ear and found an insect there that she could not dislodge, and went in to him to ask for a pair of tweezers. He glanced at the spot and told her that it was a tick, and that these could be dangerous, that parts could lodge under the skin and even enter the bloodstream, causing illnesses that could prove fatal. He asked her whether she had worn a hat when she climbed, and when she said she had taken it off and left it on the beach, thinking it would only get knocked off in the scrub, told her to kneel down at his feet with her back to him. Adjusting his chair, moving the oil lamp on the desk so that its light fell directly onto her, he removed the tick from her earlobe and then, almost strand by strand, began to search through her hair.
For over half an hour she knelt there in the yellow light while his fingers probed, the only sound the occasional slow exhalation as a breath, long held in concentration, was released. Gently, when he had finished, resting his hands momentarily on her shoulders, and slowly, as if he himself were waking from a trance or had to choose carefully every word, he told her that she should examine herself that night, carefully, without her clothes, since such insects could also fall past collars or cuffs, and to tell him if she found anything, if she needed any help.
That night, very late, she woke from a dream of weeping, to find herself weeping truly. She did not know why. Something had changed or been dislodged, and a weight or balance had shifted. At various moments through the rest of the winter and on into spring she found herself longing for the touch of his hands.
There were patterns, rhythms within each of them that the other did not always register or understand. Early and perhaps inevitably they had exchanged the broadest outlines of their lives, and in the commerce of their days and evenings offered or revealed a thousand other small details. But it is possible, given certain other circumstances, to live one’s entire life in a small valley or a forest clearing by the sea, absorbed by its processes, without exploring or perhaps even realising the mountains that lean over it or the ranges of which they might be a part. She knew that he came from a wealthy grazing family, that there had been several children, that instead of the land he had chosen or had had to choose a life of school teaching, and that after twenty-six years he had been forced to give this up. She suspected that Mrs Biggs’ explanation of the latter was not the entire story and that, while there had probably been drunkenness, the war too had had something to do with it: his opposition to it, his writing about it in the newspapers, his refusal to encourage his students – the sons of wealthy graziers – to enlist, his work, since, against conscription. And on his part he knew that her mother had died when she was still very young and that her father had raised her on an isolated farm in the mountains, with his own mother’s help; that when the old grandmother had died he had decided to keep trying by himself, and to keep the child with him.
But there is knowing and knowing, and always information withheld. When the day after he had probed her hair so carefully, so attentively, he had walked in to Hoburn and come back drunk and stayed out all the day following, it alarmed her to think that she herself – that tenderness – might have had something to do with it. But even if that had been so it could only have been a part. Sometimes it seemed to be something in the mail or in the newspapers that sent him away – news of the war, for all his opposition to it, had a particular importance to him – but as likely as not it was also something deep within himself. She read one day, in an English novel, a description of Melancholy, and thought that this might explain him, but even that came to seem too simple.
Storms came often from the sea. Particularly in summer. The season was no guarantee against their violence. She could see them building up during the day, a great bruise on the near horizon most often in the south east, growing larger, darker, crowding out the blue sky, pushing it back over the mountains. Often she watched them almost with relief, as the explanation of something that had been building up for days. At night sometimes, walking the beach, watching the distant lighthouse, she could see flashes of lightning far out at sea, coming closer. If she looked up at the right time, before it reached her, she would see the stars vanish just as the wind hit the trees. Once in late winter she had been woken, just before the rain hit the house, by a clap of thunder so loud it shook the earth, and a simultaneous bolt of lightning that lit the world like a blue, electric day, and she had lain there in terror for hours as the gale battered and clawed at the sand and sea and house and forest until all, in the roaring darkness, seemed to have become confused, indistinguishable. The heavy rain and great seas that this storm dragged after it continued for days. When at last the weather calmed and they could see again, half the beach had gone, great scoops had been carved from the land.
Now something similar was happening again, or was about to. All week the weather had been hot, muggy, overcast, closing them in, the whole beach one stuffy, intolerable, windowless room. Flies stuck to the skin and would not budge. The wind, when there was a wind, did not cool them but served only to throw dust in their faces or, on the burning beach, sting them with flying sand. At night the air itself was a hot, heavy blanket she could not throw off. And he too had been particularly restless, as if building toward a similar, answering storm. In the late morning of the day upon which the weather at last broke, without eating, without speaking, he set off toward the point. Now it was almost nine in the evening, still stifling, the last of the light long gone, and the lightning she had been watching for – had watched the shaft of the lighthouse probing towards – had finally begun, more frequent and dramatic than she had ever seen it before.
The thought of weathering out the storm alone alarmed her, but more so the thought of him drunk and oblivious on the beach somewhere. She had watched for him an hour in the dusk, and gone outside repeatedly during the evening to see what she could, but there was nothing. With luck he had stayed in Hoburn, where he had almost certainly gone, but she knew that this wasn’t likely. At last, standing on the verandah, in a great craze of the approaching lightning – the trees starting to stir with the first of the storm wind, the sea picking up likewise, and the tide rising – she thought she saw him, a thin, dark shape that had not been there when last the lightning flashed, a figure horizontal near the tide line some three or four hundred yards off toward the point. Not knowing what else to do, she set out in the pitch dark, sensing her way towards him.
He was soundly asleep, though he could not have been there long. In part by shaking him, in part by splashing sea-water onto his face, she managed to wake him sufficiently to half-coax, half-drag him to his feet and, supporting him with great difficulty, began to move him along the beach. He seemed to sober slightly as they went, but it may have been that the drink was not entirely responsible for his condition. Reaching the house, focussing the lamp upon him, she could see that his face was ashen, his expression at one and the same time rawly exposed and wounded beyond reach. He was ice-cold, although the night itself, wild as it had become, was still hot. She thought to make tea, to warm him, and left him slumped at the desk. By the time she returned he had stru
ggled to his bed and was lying across it still in his rain-soaked clothing, still ice-cold, unwakable.
It seemed crucial to get him into the bed, to warm him. As if he were himself and yet not, and she involved now in something no longer necessary to think through, she began to undress him, dragging off his heavy boots, his jacket, his shirt, his trousers, part rolling, part pulling him, wrenching free the bedclothes to be able at last to cover him, lying straightly on his side now, his head on the pillow. And then, as he still seemed unnaturally cold, looked still so ashen, and as it was going to be only a short time, a necessary thing to warm him properly, to see that he had no fever, she took off most of her own clothes also, and lay down beside him, and after some time was herself deeply asleep.
The rain arrived soon after midnight, and all night enclosed them. If one or the other stirred in the dark and realised where they were, what was happening, neither of them sought or had any longer the will to change it. Nor when they stirred again, together, in the drowsy first light.
Afterwards they had talked. That had been the problem. They talked – she talked – and nothing had been the same. They had never been so close. They were close. And in the heart of the closeness he began to chill, to move from her, as if he had seen something there that he had no answer for.
She had told him about the mountain, the real mountain within the story of the mountain she had already told him. She told him about her father. How she hated him, and had loved him; how confused these things were; how she had had to leave because of it. The confusion, the crampedness, the inability to breathe in all that rainforest, in all the heaviness of air. And she had told him at last, wrenching it out as if it were a thing there were no words for, about the child. Her child. At last. Even though all along she had known there would be a kind of death in telling him, even though she knew that she would have to cling to him now, so much more than she had clung already, having let go of the secret, having revealed the shame that could turn against her, that he could condemn, that anyone could condemn. And that the harder she had to cling to him – she feared this, because she too had turned away – the less there would be to cling to. As if needs sometimes could be so strong that no one could answer them. Like the small, bent creature herself, clinging, looking at her with eyes so wide open that they enveloped her, and terrified her, and left her no choice but to flee.