He knew her terror. It was the fear of a child that even the rats sensed and were scattering in frenzy. What was he to do with her world? This was when he realised that he would never be able to reach her. Hadn’t he given her a fair go? He had built a dream as complex and ingrained as her own, but where he knew that his would keep pushing him out in the world, she would always dig a hole to hide in. She was still the girl in the tree. Untouchable. Rolled up in a tight ball like a frightened echidna. Yes, it was easy to decide not to touch her. Perhaps he never would. What did it matter? Nobody would accuse him of being a paedophile or a rapist. Number one rule of his forefathers. What could he do? He drifted off into half-sleep like he always did, while thinking about a mountain of crises in any country that sprung to his mind, and through the wee hours of the night, he would spin by the world’s troubles, resolving crises one by one, intervening step by step in other people’s fortunes or misfortunes, in his dreams.
When the wind dropped, all she could hear was his breathing resounding through the sounds of owl fights, and screaming rats. Above them, she thought she saw spider webs being spun on fine threads that ran down from the power lines and across to the low-growing mulga trees. These enormous webs were being woven thicker and thicker and spiders were flying through the air in search of places to anchor their threads, as though setting a trap to encase them during the night. She lay flat beside him as he slept, and drifted into sleep with the thought of touching the walls inside her tree, and dreamed of a struggling swan enclosed by Warren’s icy body while Old Bella Donna sang from afar – A swan with a slither of bone in its beak.
The dawn landscape was grey and solemn as it revealed a silent vista of mostly grass and sparsely scattered scrub, until the baying of cattle echoed in a chain reaction that sallied back and forth from the distant horizons. When the sun rose, the cattle had already broken through spider webs and gathered around the two sleeping figures. She was in a cathedral of Law where marriages were always honoured but she would not honour hers. The morning air felt cold. So were her thoughts, vowing that nothing would spring from the dirt of this ground.
You will learn that you and I are going to stand for each other as the only ones we can trust, so never forget that I am your best friend, and only friend, Warren said, preparing to leave, and added – always serious – You remember that, and that will be the main thing I will want from you as a wife.
She looked at the landscape – a vista of sameness in every direction – and knew that this was why women went missing on journeys with their husbands. They were lost forever. This country would devour anyone walking in it that did not know it. Only local people would know how to move through it. A voice she recognised was surfacing: Look around here. She thought this wedding country was the home of stories about women thrown overboard, cast out, abandoned, those bodies lost in wiyarr spinifex waves.
Isn’t it a great country, Warren said, already flowing into the day ahead, and pushing aside the troubling dreams that had come to him during the night, where he had met himself as a dead man, disoriented, weak, and his ghostly face full of disbelief, while being supported by the genies through the streets of the city, and he had watched as they walked on, to a grave he would be buried in.
Swans mate for life: that was what she thought. And if a swan loved its mate, then what would make one kill its mate as she had seen once in a sudden and vicious attack, alongside the hull? It was a silent death. There was no such thing as the dying swan call. It died without sound. She had no sound either, and knew what it was like to be without sound. This country would never hear her voice, or the language she spoke.
The genies’ camp was a mess. Their smart clothes were abandoned over the ground, their pots, pans, and swags spread in a chaotic palette. Encircling it all, dead rats in their hundreds lined the periphery. Swarms of blue Lycaenidae butterflies, unusually massing in one spot, flew above the heads of Drs Hart, Mail and Doom who were now dressed in their oldest bush clothes, that might have been buried for years under clumps of spinifex. The three men were busy with the fire, creating breakfast, and totally oblivious to the blot they had created on the landscape. Welcome home, smiled Mail. Oblivia looked around at their camp. It looked as though they had not moved from their position around the fireplace from the previous night. They were listening intently to a distant magpie, just jarrburruru absorbed in its song.
Hear it? A Thessalian maiden no doubt, Doom said. A slight smile of appreciation spread across his face as he spoke to Warren Finch.
Warren nodded casually. He began poking the fire with a stick to send up the flames. His mind was set on the black billycan steaming with the aroma of tea and with pushing away the shock of seeing his dead face in a dream, which was still clear in his mind. Oblivia noticed Dr Doom’s face softening, the hardness of the day before had disappeared. He looked like a boy staring into the distance, locked into studying the structure of the magpie’s tune. After a while he stood up, and faced the direction of the songster. He whistled the song perfectly. The bird replied. A song war continued until the bird flew from twig to twig across the ground to investigate, and seeing how it had been tricked, flew off.
Would you like to have some owl’s eggs? Snip Hart asked her. He had been squatting beside the fire, stirring a large fry pan amidst the smoke, but had come over and spoken quietly while handing her a plate of food. She looked away in disgust. She was not eating owl eggs. Eat it, Warren demanded in a voice that made her wince at the ferocity of it. Her eyes rested on the wanderings of a rat daintily sniffing over each corpse of its dead friends. It touched the tips of grey bloodied fur with its nose as though it was searching for a faint breath of life or a ticking heart, before moving on.
The girl could not understand what the genies thought the reason was for spending most of the night killing rats. They told Warren that these were plague rats, were attracted to the light of the fire. There was blood on thick sticks of wood resting on the ground beside the fireplace, right next to the king-sized frying pan filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs. She tried to guess how many owls’ eggs had been taken from their nests and looked at the landscape of spinifex kinkarra and grasslands, where nothing much grew higher than a metre off the ground. The girl tried to locate where owls would nest in those plains where there were no significant trees, except mulga. She remembers owls nesting in the ghost ships on the swamp and she gets up and feels that she is starting to walk off towards home, which feels very close in her mind, but Warren makes her sit on the ground. The plate of food is placed in her lap. He repeats this exercise a number of times before she realises that she is not going anywhere.
Well! So many rats, so many owls, and all night, ‘The tremulous sob of the complaining owl…’ Bones remarked excitedly, his face covered with grey dust. In an authoritative voice, he explained that they were sitting in the best place in the world right now to see owls. Man! We are right in the middle of a plague of rats that are multiplying in droves. Never seen anything like it before. He explained that the rats had migrated in strands of millions flowing inland through the desert. In their wake, large flocks of native grassy owls had followed them, and the Tyto capensis grass owls, he explained, were also quadrupling in numbers each time they bred. The food supply was so good – different, unusual, changed weather patterns are causing it. Well! It was like sitting in the middle of a feast, said Doom, speaking knowledgeably about the extraordinary phenomena – a million to one chance they were lucky to witness. He had been visiting places like this for years, waiting for this to happen.
Yep, Snip added, Don’t forget the owls were attacking the moths attracted to the fire as well and I think…
Yes, of course, Doom interjected with science talk, But I don’t think the fire was a consideration in the mind of swarming rats being chased by owls.
My friend! Who knows the workings of a rat’s mind, Snip replied.
I thought that was our expertise: to know a rat when we see one, Doom laughed, but
Mail took a more serious analogy about predation in a natural feast or famine occurrence.
Vigilance! My friend. It was only sheer vigilance – the nature of our ancestors, that had saved us from a storm of vermin.
Snip said he agreed because he felt Mail really possessed the mind of a genius, and laughed. In a way, he said, I really equate that brain of yours Mail with a high tech microscope. Someone, who could without hesitation, and with the least bit of prompting, easily cast his mind back through time in a matter of moments, to situate himself inside the brain of the first man and recreate his prophecy.
And the reason? Ancestry. It all boils down to the connective tissue of heredity. A miracle that is not restricted to time. The brain is a marvellous organ.
You are one of a kind, brother, Mail laughed.
This whole thing was one of a kind.
One continuously ponders the puzzle of life, Warren said with a deep sigh.
Of course, genius is always hard to ignore, Snip said, with a wink.
Exactly. The reason why Tyto capensis and Tyto alba were nesting like flies around the spinifex.
The souls of women, Warren reminded them, and looked at the girl who was still staring at her plate, unwilling to eat strange food.
You had better eat. It will be another long day.
The return to the highway commenced with a greeting from a blue-eye crow. It was crying next to its squashed-in-half mate left in the middle of the road. Warren stopped the car. The bird tried to defend itself as Warren sought to befriend it. Quietly, he moved closer, holding out his arm, then the bird did a very strange thing. It leaped onto his outstretched hand and onto his shoulder, while crying aah-aah-aah, and began chuckling its secrets into his ear. He asked questions, calling it a wise bird, for wise it was with age from the colour of its eyes, and then, he consoled it for its loss. The bird responded well to his voice, for it did another strange thing to demonstrate its ability to communicate its feelings to human beings. It began to mimic lines from that famous old ABBA song – Money, money, money, it’s a rich man’s world – which its ancestors perhaps learnt from listening to a truckies’ roadhouse jukebox where they had spent decades pilfering scraps, and which the bird now sung repeatedly in so many Aahs. He sang, and the genies sang, and the bird was almost beside itself.
The girl wanted to keep this lonely bird. Warren saw her moment of vulnerability and in that instant, she received his first lesson about what he meant by friendship. He sent the raven back off to where it belonged, into the northerly wind.
The day was spent examining owls’ nests. Their vehicle had been left beside the road covered with Army-issued camouflage netting. Warren and the genies took great care to ensure that the vehicle would remain undetected, and had walked back along their wheel tracks off the main dirt road to buff up the grass.
They travelled on foot, walking into the vastness of low vegetation plains surrounded by smooth, tussocky hills. The work was hard. Dust rose with each step, filled the air with each breath of wind, and fell to settle in their hair, over their skin and in their clothes. They looked as though they had crawled in it, but they had blended into the country, and were indistinguishable from it.
The task of locating the nests of the grass owl was not easy. The nests were concealed at the end of tunnels constructed through the thick kinkarra spinifex grasslands. The genies walked in circles between each nest. Warren trailed behind. Oblivia always felt that he was watching her, just in case she tried to escape. She was seething with anger. She hated being watched, of knowing he was staring into her back, getting into her mind. She thought of ways of killing him once she had the chance. His phone rang. He was always busy on what the girl learnt was a mobile phone, capable of making calls from where they were, in one of the remotest places on the planet. Each time it rang and abruptly broke the silence of the bush, he would fall further back, while he talked into it. Sure! Not now. Speak to you later. Warren Finch, important or not, was determined to have this time on Country. He silently indicated five days tops with a show of his open palm to the genies when they looked back at him speaking on the mobile. They smiled. Agreed. He continued talking. Somebody else. You will have to cope. You can cope for a few days can’t you? A lot of hard talking had to be done to keep the world busy while he was away. How to finally topple that old goat Ryder once and for all? Take the reigns as the new President? March right up to what the country needed. It was time. He was saying how he wanted time to think, to prepare, to be ready for what was coming. How was he going being married and all? He repeats the question each time it’s asked. Fine! Right!
Keep hitting if it makes you happy, he said, whenever Oblivia decided to run back to take another slog at his face.
The genies always tried to mask the conversations Warren was having by talking about owls to the disinterested or disconnected girl – they could not decide which – by naming and describing the two-hundred odd species in the world. It became an endless conversation between the three men about the twenty or so types that included different barn owls, fishing owls, burrowing owls, wood owls, little owls like the one Picasso had as his sad pet. They discussed the Latin family names like Tyto, Megascaps, Bubo, Otus, but only Ninox and Tyto represented the nine different owls found in Australia. She learnt that barn owls could be used by farmers to control plagues of rodents as these owls were now doing out in the desert country. I am in rodent country, she thought while she turned and spat towards Warren. The three genies talked a great deal about why the owls had come from the east. What this meant. The ecology of the country had changed. Was this the Law doing something to the country? Then something changed. Words trampling her into the ground could also pick her up. She looked surprised to be told that each family of owls consumed several thousand mice and rats in a breeding season. Yep! Bones Doom commented, as though speaking for the girl’s silences. She glared at him. She did not want to know these things. These fellas will keep on breeding out here until they have consumed all the rodents, and then their own numbers will decrease, because most owls will not live more than a couple of years.
Such a large bird, very unlike the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo which might live for eighty or ninety years, explained the gentle Bones.
There was no owl’s nest passed before it received a thorough examination. The men never tired of their interest in how an owl had constructed its nest. With each clutch of eggs discovered, the find was welcomed by the genies as though a miracle had taken place, and chorusing, Doom, how do you do it man, you are a fucking genius. How many is that now? 12,001? 12,002?
The eggs were examined for number and weight, and each egg created serious discussion to judge its particular shape and age, held up like a diamond against the sun to examine the embryo forming inside, and then finally, enthusiastic thought was given to how each egg felt as though it was the first marvellous thing they had ever held in the hand. Oblivia thought all the nests were the same. Whenever she was the first to see a nest she did not volunteer the information. What did it matter? She could not be bothered that each nest consisted of six or eight eggs with a displeased sitting owl. Who cared? She wanted to go home. The urge to bolt through the spinifex overpowered her. Only the swamp loomed large in her mind. A vision now contaminated with the ghostly sight of Warren walking like a dead man. A vision that would not leave his mind either.
The information about the owls’ nests, including the level of anxiety to the disturbed owl, was recorded on pocket-sized computers. Doom was constantly reminded how painfully slow and tedious he was in his search to locate each nest in a fixed area, before the group could move on. It’s for science. Nobody knows anything about why these birds come to this place, or why the rats are driven here. The girl was desperate to go. Warren catches up with her each time she walks away. She knows that she slows them down even further. The work becomes slower. Always Doom gives the same answer, while sometimes glancing conspiratorially at Warren, the man on top of the nation who has up to this p
oint, always been in a hurry. Warren nods: Sure! Who hasn’t got time for science?
We were doing this all last night, Edgar Mail told the girl in a voice that was like an echo from distant spinifex groves, but there were other words burning inside of her: Stupid girls get into trouble. It was Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions’ voice. Stupid girls deserve to get what is coming to them. The Harbour Master was dancing across the plain, stopping every now and again to stare quizzically at the owl hunters whom he repeatedly called, stupid people. He and the old woman were both shouting over the distance to reach one another, reminiscing about the bad luck of the girls with weather-beaten bones that lay scattered in places exactly like this. The Harbour Master called it kinkarra nayi. The desert. Spinifex. Wiyarr! Wiyarr! Everywhere. What next?
They said their bones were like white chalk. Odd, how these bones were scattered around the ground throughout the spinifex. The girl’s stomach nods, rolls, and nods again. She saw prowling dingos with white bones in their mouths wherever the sun’s glare struck the horizon. The dead lady’s voice reminded her that all men wanted was sex, so how do you like that? It happened on the refugee boats. It can happen in the mulga too. The girl remembered there was an owl, a julujulu that once lived in the darkened hole in the roots of the tree. She had felt its soft feathers with her fingers. Now she was reminded of its softness.
The Swan Book Page 18