The Clay Dreaming

by Ed Hillyer

  Bripumyarrimin means ‘The one from Brippick Station’.

  He hasn’t any other name than that, a name without No meaning. No true name. No true name for which he is qualified. He is the one from Brippick Station, a man without a name. And a man without a name isn’t any real sort of man at all. Unfit for ceremony, unfit for company, only fit to be ignored, he is still considered a boy – tji-tji, a child – a child in a man’s body.

  Team all gone now. No more cricket. Nowhere left to run, to hide.

  He is the last.

  Boraingamin, all is ashes. Brippoki’s fire has no heat in it, only sadness. Back and forth the trains scream past, back and forth.

  To cheer himself Brippoki plans for a feast of joogajooga, fresh pigeon, served on a broadleaf platter with a side of lily root, and, as an appetiser, baked tadpoles on grass.

  He clears a narrow path through the mallee scrub down to the creek. One hundred paces in from the water’s edge, he constructs a bush break of foliage, behind which he crouches in readiness. As the sun goes down, birds swoop down for an evening drink. For ease they follow the line of his clearing. The whirr of wings warns of their approach. A branch suddenly appears, thrust into the flight path. A bird drops stunned at his feet. He takes it up and breaks its wings.

  Brippoki catches three birds in this way.

  Breaking larger sticks over his head, he builds up the fire. He uses his barb to pierce a small hole in each pigeon’s belly, and hooks and withdraws the entrails, closing the aperture with a wooden skewer so that the juices are retained whilst roasting. Feathers singed off, the birds are broken apart and thrown on the fire to cook. Their entrails make for a tasty snack, an accompaniment to the tadpoles.

  He knows a woman’s work well enough, but in all his grown years Brippoki has never known their company.

  Brippoki presented Sarah with the scorched carcass of a plump, fresh pigeon. She offered him a serving of the supper she had prepared. Both share and gift, put to one side, were then politely ignored.

  Sarah found Brippoki’s choice of evening-wear not so very indecent as it had been on the previous night. He wore only a few feathers in his hair, daubs of red and white on each cheek, and a necklace that seemed fashioned from hollow stems of reed. A lambskin chamois concealed his manhood; flesh, against flesh.

  She served the tea. Taking her time, and with that same searching look often met in the mirror, Sarah studied the face of the stranger in the candle. She searched in vain for the least vestige of that mild serenity once observed there.

  Despite his ash coating, Brippoki glowed slightly with the sheen of perspiration. For the first time ever in Sarah’s experience he appeared to be short of breath, showing every sign of a man whose blood was overheated.

  He grasped at the proffered teacup and drank it down with urgent gulps, somewhat obviously burning his throat, more thirsty than wise.

  Steadily, Brippoki calmed. Pacing the room a while, he eventually settled – thankfully beside the unlit fireplace, rather than in it. She joined him.

  The evening was warm, as the day had been. Neither Sarah, playing host, nor Brippoki, her guest, made the slightest attempt at small talk. Instead they sat together in comfortable silence, slowly perfected – worked at these last two weeks – their relative degrees of modesty shyly endured until arrival at this mutual, wordless accord; finally able to enjoy one another’s company.

  To spend a fireside evening reading quietly, else aloud for amusement, was such a very normal activity; the closest approach to domestic habit Sarah might hope for. At this, the very height of her flight of fancy, their present situation amounted almost to a vision of married bliss. It differed only in certain particulars.

  ‘Thara,’ said Brippoki, fetching a worm from between his toes. ‘Tell story roun’ the boree log.’

  She said, ‘You first.’

  Although she had carried her notebooks when she came to sit in her chair alongside, they remained deliberately unopened. Sarah laid them aside.

  Brippoki didn’t immediately respond to her challenge. She, however, had sufficient strength of purpose to maintain her silence. By looking every now and then down at her books, she encouraged in him the very letter of reciprocity. He owed her that much.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, following a lengthy pause, ‘tell me something of your home, in Australia.’

  Brippoki remained quiet for a little longer time, and then, rising, began ever so gently to caper and mime. He turned his back to her, and for a minute or so nothing seemed to be happening. She saw the musculature shift in his narrow back, as his blade bones slid from his shoulders. Then, as his hands rose into view, Sarah saw that his fingers were joined at the tips. His arms continued up above the level of his head, until nearly at full stretch. Excitedly, she perceived what was perhaps an attitude of prayer – and to a god of his, not hers.

  Shuffling his toes by tiny increments, he gradually rotated, a groaning song issuing from deep inside his throat. Turned almost completely, he lunged forward with an explosive breath.

  His neck cricked, ever so slightly. ‘Kurura. Comepella,’ he said, smiling pleasantly. ‘Bring, bring, up Langanong-joruk, Longerenong.’

  Brippoki pointed, his eyes growing wider.

  ‘One Big Ant-hill Creek,’ he whispered.

  ‘Ant?’ queried Sarah. ‘Ant-hills?’

  ‘Murry,’ he assured her. ‘Big! White ants!’

  Sarah frowned a moment, before feeling she understood. He meant termites. She had read vivid mentions of them, in Leichhardt’s Journal among other places. His actions had described one of their extraordinary nests. She resisted her slight disappointment – no religion yet, unless Aborigines worshipped termites.

  Brippoki looked her way only infrequently, and when he spoke it was in broken sentences, spread across great pauses – deliberate, and thoughtful.

  ‘Big…’ his arms rose and fell, describing a great arc ‘…cities.’

  Brippoki’s knuckles at tapped his temple, and he made a ‘toc, toc’ noise with his tongue.

  ‘Hollow inside,’ volunteered Sarah, and he nodded.

  His mouth began working without making any sound. He appeared to spit into his hands, before smoothing them onto some imagined surface, creating castles in the air.

  Brippoki repeated the cycle of actions, touching various of the objects around the room. Whenever he lacked the English words, Sarah nominated terms according to his suggestive shapes and gestures – a parlour game of charades.

  Wood, they fed on wood, wood and…sand, to make their rock, stone, no… clay…clay, through the chewing of their jaws, clay that hardens into stone, strong enough to defy a…‘karko’? Spade, it looked like.

  The nests became vast networks of little passages and cells. The sounds Brippoki then made, in addition to the twinkling of his fingers, perfectly suggested countless thousands of busy bodies, working unseen inside their mound.

  ‘White ant nest filled him ants murry different kind. Workers, building…no wings, no eyes.’

  ‘No eyes?’ gasped Sarah. ‘They’re blind?’

  ‘Not need eyes,’ Brippoki reasoned. ‘Neber leave nest.’

  He then marched on the spot and saluted.

  ‘Soldiers?’

  ‘Thojers,’ he approved. ‘Liket workers…’

  No wings for flight, no eyes for sight, but via gesture he conveyed their big, strong jaws and enormous great heads, flat at the front, which looked very frightening to all the other insects.

  ‘Him bite hard,’ he said, ‘when dey pight!’

  Still other kinds he mimed were feeble creatures, with bodies – he pointed at the old map – pale yellow, and – he took up four pieces of paper – winged.

  ‘Him made, gibbit young ones tucker special way,’ he said, lip-smacking over the sugar-bowl.

  More highly developed, they had eyes and wings, the only class to ever leave the nest.

  ‘Come out nest,’ Brippoki shook his head, ‘neber go back
.’

  Those that left their homes, never returned.

  Shut up in a special cell, right at the centre of the nest, was the queen.

  Sarah began to suspect his purpose.

  The queen grew from a winged insect, fed on a diet of special food.

  ‘Royal jelly!’ Thara exclaimed.

  ‘Uah,’ agreed Brippoki. ‘Liket choogar.’

  He took an extra spoonful for good measure, and stirred it into his tea.

  Brippoki then puffed out his cheeks and, body distended, pretended to swell to enormous size. The queen, she looked like a large, fat grub with a tiny head. Trapped inside her royal chamber, far too swollen up to move, she laid thousands of eggs every day, the workers labouring hard to bring her enough food. Her only function was to lay more eggs. She was the mother of all termite brothers and sisters.

  ‘All dipperent,’ said Brippoki, ‘all same.’

  The ordinary white ants died every day, but the nest and its queen did not die.

  ‘Immortal,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Immortal. It means they never die.’

  Brippoki shrugged.

  ‘We not know how long queen live,’ he said, ‘but must die, some time.’

  Sarah fiddled with the tea things, replenishing their cups.

  For a time it appeared his wicked fable was done with, only for Brippoki to continue. By all of his various ways and means he explained how the winged insects, flown from the nest, were like seeds from a plant…starting new nests.

  ‘White ants go ebery place they want,’ he said, stirring. ‘Eat it all up inside. Eat the wood,’ he stamped his foot, ‘t’ make their clay, turn it stone.’

  Draining his cup, he rose to take hold of the nearest chair by its legs.

  ‘Eat their way up,’ he said. ‘Eat their way in.’

  His hands ran up and down either side of the chair.

  ‘Don’t see ’em,’ he said. ‘Happen ’pore you know it! One day… Pok!’

  Broad lips parted, he poked a finger right through the wicker of the seat. Sarah might have protested, had she cared in the least for any of the furnishings.

  ‘Insides all gone,’ he said. ‘Eaten away. Eberywhere, toc, toc…’ he searched for the new word ‘…hollow.’

  Brippoki fell silent.

  Well, that had given her plenty to think about.

  ‘Me talk longa you plenty pella,’ Brippoki announced.

  Replacing the chair, he sat back – on the hearthrug close to her feet – and somewhat definitively folded his arms.

  ‘Mouth belonga me, shut up,’ he said. ‘Mouth belonga you openpellow now.’

  Sarah detected a hint of mockery in his rounder pronunciation, just as he closed up his mouth, seemingly for good.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, quite sincerely, and opened her notebook.

  It was her turn to spin the yarn.

  CHAPTER XLIII

  Monday the 15th of June, 1868

  THE MARK OF CAIN

  ‘Thy father is a chieftain!

  Why that’s the very thing!

  Within my native country

  I too have been a king.

  Behold this branded letter,

  Which nothing can efface!

  It is the royal emblem,

  The token of my race.’

  ~ ‘The Convict and his Loubra’, traditional

  ‘Our hero,’ Sarah smiled, ‘has just been granted pardon for his crimes.’

  After a short prayer for my delivery I took my leave of my dear friend Gilbethorpe, and went to the Governor to return thanks for his mercy to me. The Governor received me as if I had been one of his own children. I was sent on board His Majesty’s Brig Lady Nelson, where I remained till his excellency was pleased to order me to stop at New Zealand with one of the natives, till he call for me on his way home to Britain.

  But the wind blew up so hard when the Governor came on the coast of New Zealand that the ship could not reach the land. I now being left in the isle of New Zealand, I took my travels in the country, where I was treated with every kindness by the inhabitants. No man that is really weak in his heart need be afraid of living among the New Zealanders, they being the only heathen country that I ever found as detests that abominable act which so many has being committed in all parts of the world. I mean the twenty-ninth Act.

  The New Zealander says if he has no children that he is without God’s blessing. This is one reason they take ten wives, so that if one misses, the other will hit. Also they say if they go to work in the morning eating or drink, that the crop will be blighted if any person commit any filth on the land that is tilled. He is momently put to death. For they say that if they eat of any thing out of that ground where the filth of their bodies lie they all will die.

  Brippoki nodded sagely, appearing to approve.

  No man must sleep with his wife in time of putting the grain in the ground. If a man goes nigh a woman when she is sick, it is death. Every man delivers his own wife of her children, for which he and she do not handle anything that they eat for eleven days. They are fed, or eat off the ground. They must not come under the roof of any house that has been consecrated by the priest for the said time. They both stop in the open wilderness, where every woman in that country goes to be delivered. And at the time appointed the priest goes and takes the child, and the mother and father follows him together with all their friends to a run of water, where the child is dipped three times under the water, and then is named. Then the father and mother are free.

  They say that after death the soul ascends to the top of a mountain that is in that country, and moan in a most dreadful manner for leaving this earth, with their face towards the sun rising. After which moaning, they say the soul descend through this mountain under the bottom of the sea, where all of them are in a most horrid style torturing one another’s souls. This mountain has been a volcano, but the fire bursting through the bowels of the earth some depth below the surface of the water, the whole body of the sea came in and put the fire out.

  ‘At the bottom of this page,’ Sarah explained, ‘was drawn the crude outline of a volcano. Like a triangle, but with a hole at the top…you know what a volcano is.’

  ‘Uah,’ he grunted.

  ‘I suppose it to mean a volcano, and it contains a sort of prayer or lyric within, interrupting the rest of the text on that page. No prayer or song I know of.’

  ‘Tell me song,’ urged Brippoki.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I was going to. I was just…

  while

  I live.

  I

  must do as I

  Can.

  I must die.

  But still to thee

  Most merciful God

  Repeat my mournful song.

  She took a second look at the arrangement of words on the page. It resembled the ziggurat steeple atop St George Bloomsbury, a stone’s throw distant.

  ‘That was it,’ she said. ‘Shall I…?’

  ‘Uah.’

  There is only one way of ascending it. That is by taking one particular fish directly it is caught and stripping the flesh off the bones raw, and put it to your nose. You can then go to the top where there is a round hole, and as you walk round it you can see into the bowels of the earth, as far as your sight will go. It strikes the most greatest horror on the human mind of any sight that was ever seen on earth. It appears like a furnace come to its full heat. The New Zealanders call this hell. They all say that night and day they have seen souls on their road for this place of punishment, after departing from the body.

  At these sundry details of Maori custom and belief, Brippoki had been variously nodding or shaking his head, and sometimes tugging at his beard. As Sarah read on, the shaking of his head became more violent. She badly wanted to ask after Brippoki’s own beliefs in these matters, in particular about what happens to the soul after death. Wary of scaring him away again, however, she bit her tongue.

  They say the soul is lik
e our shadow. This I believe by seeing my own stand before me one dark night.

  Brippoki’s lips curled back and he started to gibber. His whole body quivered. The risk of him flying out of the window was already very grave. Sarah could only press on.

  They say a man and woman fell from Heaven on that isle. This was the beginning of their generation on, and the man and woman had a great many children. And when the children grew up, the first part of them run away from their father and mother, each boy taking with him a girl. And when they had got a long way in the country they all counselled together what they should do if their father came after them and found them out. The eldest was for killing the old man. The youngest said:

  – No, my dear brothers and sisters. Don’t let us kill our poor old father. But I tell you what let us do. Let us disfigure our faces with frightful marks so if ever our father finds us out he will think we are all devils, or at least he will not know us. And as I am the youngest, if I can bear the pain I am sure all of you can.

  So the eldest marked the face of all his brothers and sisters that was with him, and the youngest marked the eldest. There were fourteen of them, seven boys and seven girls. And they settled in such a remote part of the country that it was by their reckoning 30 years before the old man found them out, after they had left him. But as they say, their father knew them all by the marks they brought with them into the world.

  And when he returned home he took the rest of his children and showed them the marks on their finger ends, and told them the meaning thereof. And also he told them he should soon die and go to Heaven, and at the end of the world he would bring all of them to Heaven with him, telling them at the same time they must not be frightened at their brothers’ marked faces whenever they should come to war against them.