by Self, Will
An old woman – her face squaw-fat and dog-alien to Natasha, her breasts shrivelled – took the luscious kardia to one side, to her own private patch of dust, and showed her some undistinguished grey stones. ‘These,’ the old woman said, ‘are solidified dingo-urine chunks, not only congruent, but concomitant, in their texture and colour, with the rain clouds, which at this very moment are rising up in the thermals to the east, over the Barkly Tableland, cooling and making rain. You might say – if you were mechanistically inclined, although I, of course, am not – that I was causing this rain to fall by shifting these stones in the palm of my hand.’ But of course, to Natasha this merely sounded like a lot of cheek-sucking, palate-slapping and uvula-clicking, with the occasional ‘ngapa’ and ‘yaka!’ thrown in for added incomprehensibility.
Then there was a bustling among the people and they upped and went towards another old woman who came, distractedly wandering, across the road from the direction of the police post, her red skirt dragging in the orange dirt. Natasha and the kid hung back, but the postgrad went to the fringes of the group, then returned to where the duo stood, in the short spike of shade flung down by a dead tree. ‘There’s been an accident over at Hermansberg,’ he told them. ‘Some of this mob’s relations have been killed. Ute rollover.’
‘Did the police tell that woman?’ Natasha asked.
‘Nah – police don’t know no-thing,’ said the postgrad. ‘Anyway, it only happened half an hour ago. Come on, we best go back to the house, this isn’t our business.’
But in the car, the kid, evidently believing it to be his, said seductively to Natasha, ‘It’s telepathy. They know these things telepathically. Hermansberg is hundreds of clicks away – ‘
Natasha told him to shut up. The postgrad looked at her approvingly, his eyes narrowing in the rear-view mirror, as if noticing her for the first time.
The postgrad was friends with a mob of young men – black lads grown unbelievably fat on white bread. Most days he’d drive them all the way into Tennant Creek, where they’d spend their sit-down money on grog. They’d buy their grog, then return to the postgrad’s guvvie house at Stearns where they’d smoke yarndi and play country and western on electric guitars. This was, after all, cattle country. While the band played on, the kid, Natasha and the postgrad did trivia quizzes in puzzle rags they found in Tennant. Did them addictively. They also played Trivial Pursuit, disdaining the use of the board, simply running through the cards, asking each other the questions. The postgrad had the Baby Boomer edition of the game.
During that week Natasha began to seduce the postgrad. The kid was desolate; he could see what was happening even if the older man couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Natasha impressed the postgrad with her unwillingness to be taken in by anything, the people’s gammin, or the kid’s, or anyone’s. That and the fact that she never, ever, not even once, complained about the heat, or the flies. Natasha sensed that the postgrad had incomplete information, but he still had far more than she did. He knew something she wanted to know, although she had no idea what it was. The postgrad was tall and limber, with a triangular head and very green eyes. His cheeks were pitted with ancient acne scars; so deeply scored it looked as if some loony chef had once grabbed his face in lieu of Parmesan – and grated it. He wore sarongs in the house and filthy Stubbies when they visited the people. In the chirruping night, while the three of them did trivia, drank beer and smoked weed, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor of the house, his bare knee touched hers.
On thirsty Thursday there was no point in going into Tennant – there’d be no grog for sale. Hence it was a good day for the initiation rehearsals. In the evening the rainbow serpent turned down its dimmer switch – from yellow, to orange, to violet, to grey. The trio spruced themselves up, then drove the kilometre to the people’s camp. Here they found the dogs-who-were-almost dingos, shouting for their wargili their cousins – out in the bush. They also found a rough oval of dust, defined by the people from the surrounding dirt. And they found the people themselves, chatting, chewing piltjuri, smoking, discussing prices at the store – for all the world like the congregation in an orthodox synagogue. Which is, of course, what they were.
The kid and the postgrad took their places in the oval. Natasha went with the women to the other side. From out of the grey dusk came pubescent boys and older youths, in pairs, their skinny legs scissoring together then apart, their feet kicking up the dust. They wore random bits of sports gear – one a singlet, the next some trainers, a third some shorts. They hoedowned to the sound of boomerangs clacking, one on another, big, black boomerangs carved from hard mulga wood. Scary, potent, ceremonial, each one a darkly affirmative tick. Pair after pair of initiates came scissoring into the oval, did their thing, broke the rhythm and, laughing, with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like football players when the whistle has blown, made their way out of the oval.
Darkness fell. The fire was banked up. The dancing and clacking and chatting went on and on and on. Hours passed. Natasha saw the postgrad get up and disappear into the shadows – presumably to take a leak. She followed. She saw him standing over by a tree with his back to her; when he turned, straightening the leg of his Stubbies, she walked towards him. ‘Take me for a ride?’ she asked.
‘A ride?’ he snorted. ‘But where?’
‘Oh . . . anywhere,’ she said, took his arm, and led him to where his mudicar hunched by the side of the track. Through the windscreen Natasha could see a few tired flies bedding down amid the unanswered mail he kept stashed on the dash. The postgrad had gone native – even though he didn’t know where it was.
Besidethe mudicar was a brand-new Toyota people-carrier, and leaning against it were a pair of fresh-faced Midwestern kids, with apple cheeks, blond DAs, white short-sleeved shirts with button-down collars, and grins so broad their teeth gleamed like burning grates in the night. ‘Howdy Gary!’said one of the Mormons – for that’s what they were – to the postgrad. ‘Initiation rehearsal going well?’
‘Oh, y’know, not so bad. Lotta the old fellers can’t be here, though. Dunno why.’
‘Gee – well, I guess they’ll be going all night just the same,’ said the other Mormon, who was taller, but otherwise – to eyes such as Natasha’s, saturated in the strange individuality of the people – indistinguishable from his companion.
‘S’pose so,’ Gary replied, swinging himself into the car.
‘Good evening,’ said Natasha to the Mormons, as she got in on the other side.
‘Good evening ma’am,’ they chorused.
Gary started the mudicar and they drove off. ‘Who the fuck?’ laughed Natasha, but Gary was inured to all the lost tribes in this place, and merely observed, ‘Mormons. They’re not bad fellers. Gotta dispensary down the track. Helpful guys – not too pushy. Not like plenty of the fundamentalists. They can be fuckin’ evil.’ He pulled two tinnies from the Esky and cracking one passed it to her. ‘So, where d’you wanna go for this ride, then?’ No innuendo – the man was immunised against it. He could’ve been a Mormon himself, Natasha reflected.
‘When we were on the bus up from Alice’ – where were these words coming from? – ‘I saw a man get off about a hundred kilometres south of here. In the middle of the bush. An aboriginal man – ‘
‘It’d have t’be,’ Gary cut in, wheeling the big car up on to the track, heading south. Natasha described the man she’d seen, his preposterous white Stetson, his shades, his air of possessing complete information.
‘That’d be Phar Lap Jones,’ said Gary.
‘Take me to where he was going.’
Gary coughed, spurted beer, swerved the car so abruptly they rocked together, thigh on thigh, breast on chest. ‘Jeezus, girl – you gotta be fuckin’ joking!’
‘Why?’
‘He’s only about the biggest fuckin’ man in this whole slice of the Territory. Noone – and I mean fuckin’ no one, excepting his manager – would ever even dream of going near Phar Lap’s country. Y�
�know those big fuckin’ boomerangs I keep in the house – the black ones?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Walbiri punishment boomerangs. They’re hard fuckers. The men’d hold me down and bash me with them here, here, here, here and here.’ He pointed to his deep clavicle, the points of his high shoulders, his elbows, his prominent hips, his big bare knees, rammed against the sticky vinyl dash. ‘Then the women would hitch up their fuckin’ skirts and piss all over me. And besides,’ he continued more comfortably, back on the logistical grounds, ‘it’s way out in the bush. There’s dirt only two-thirds of the way – and that’s bad dirt; after that, nothing. And this isn’t even a 4WD. It’s outta the question. Outta the fuckin’ question.’
‘But we could go some of the way, couldn’t we? The moon’s coming up and I’d love to see the bush under it. That wouldn’t be such a shlep, would it?’ Shlep – where did that come from?
‘No – s’pose not.’
They drove out west on a clean dirt road which was like a river, running between the silver-nitrate trunks of eucalyptus, its sandy surface shining in the moonlight. How could anything so negative be so beautiful? At twenty clicks they stopped and fooled around a little in the front seat of the car, but as he reached for her red centre, Natasha stopped him, got him to drive on some more. At thirty-five clicks she helped him get his swag out of the trunk and spread it on the floor of the wadi. She found herself with no qualms at all. No qualms about crossing her arms and pulling the faded, flowery dress she wore over her head. No qualms about advancing, open to the man, open to the world. And he – he found himself ensorcelled entirely. Buggered and bewitched. Sure, she was beautiful, with her long, blue-black hair, and her all-over moth’s-wing skin, and her silvered limbs and her hungry mouth and her fingers here, there, everywhere – but this was more. This was passion as art and magic. Passion forging a destiny under stars that hung from the inky sky like bunches of inconceivably heavy, lustrous grapes, dusted with the yeast of eternity. She lost herself entirely as he abandoned himself inside her. And in losing herself, she took him with her, crying, ‘Me-shugg-en-eh!’ Where could that have come from?
They drank more giggle juice, and in gassy spirits she persuaded him to motor on along the wadi. At forty clicks the road ran out in a sandbank and they were almost bogged. Better for them both if they had been. But Natasha coaxed Gary, and Gary coaxed the mudicar, which growled across the flood-plain, betwixt the stands of savage thorn scrub, which loomed slowly by. They drove at walking pace by the light of the moon.
At fifty clicks she helped him get out the swag again and unroll it. Then she took his scraps of clothing off and lay him down. If anything this time their intercourse was even more strange, here in the deep country, while unicorns crashed through the brush by their thrashing legs. ‘Oh you rnensh!’ she said, stroking his rough head. ‘You mensh!’ For he was a man of fine qualities, the postgrad. A good driver in the bush, with an excellent sense of direction.
When they were finished, and he slept on the ruckled slab of canvas and blankets, Natasha filled two empty beer cans from the canteen and left them by his triangular head. She walked on with the rest of the water through the moonlight, her rubber soles crunching on the tough grass, skating on the tiny ball-bearings of impacted earth, oblivious to the thorns slashing at her ankles. After an hour or so she reached a low escarpment, and threaded her way up it, through narrow defiles of rocks so cracked and spalled and smoothed they were like the backs of a school of porpoises. Gaining the summit she saw it, spread out below her, just as Mumu had described it to her. Phar Lap Jones’s country.
Trees with tall straight trunks were spaced with sinister regularity, between small pools of absolute circularity, beneath a canopy of utter impenetrability. Natasha could see the first few curved lips, calling her in, but beyond it only the deepest darkness. Unafraid, she quickly descended and strode between the first few trees, marvelling at their natural artificiality. The water in the pools was oily black, but when she dabbled her naked toes in it she found it to be cool, not viscous at all. So cool, it could only be a relief to bathe in it, to plunge her hot, drunk head into it. To let this strange silent place, sober her up. Perhaps for ever?
The edge of the pool felt – to Natasha’s bushed, deserted hands – marvellously machined. As if a curved mattock blade had sliced it. On the inky meniscus of the water the end of her dangling mane lay like the legs of an insect. Her black outline faced the darkness below, which but poorly reflected the darkness above. She leant down and down and, eyes wide open, plunged in through the ceiling of the room, noticing first the chain that fell away below her for three feet. An oily, black chain, liberally dusted and entwined with a flex like a caduceus, which led to a bell-shaped shade – saving that from this, precipitate perspective, the shade was round. Then Natasha peered past the shade and saw first a windowsill, and far below that a swatch of Manhattan street life, pedestrians milling like hatted bugs, cars soundlessly trundling, and the canopy of a building across the way. Only then did she take in what was in the room itself.
Directly below and slightly to the right of Natasha’s vantage was the wide grey oblong of . . . a desk? Yes, a desk, with a grey steel surface. A desk, because at its edge was an onyx penholder, the old-fashioned kind with conical sockethousings set in ball joints. A desk, because of a fan of papers, some about to fall off. A desk, because of a black, buttoned box – an intercom? – to one side. A desk, because there was a man on it. A big man, naked save for an unbuttoned silk shirt. A naked man whose naked foot was pressed against the black box. A naked man, whose ass rested on the desk blotter.
Looking straight down, Natasha contemplated the flatly surreal juxtaposition of the flange of the man’s ass and the cut-off leather corner of the blotter. His penis lay, purple and glistening, in a rick of ginger pubic hair. Spots and smears of semen dotted and dashed his broad belly. His face was averted to hold a conversation with someone obscured by the shade. Someone who said, ‘And you wanna know why?’ in her Mumu’s tones, but half an octave higher, then moved out from below the lampshade. Blonde hair swept up and then rolled over bare shoulders in a wave which had recently witnessed a storm. Those shoulders were flushed pink. She bent, puckering deliciously at the hip, to pick up from the wooden floor a tangle of tan stockings and black suspenders, and Natasha could see, protruding from the deep ravine of her buttocks, the glistening spike of the woman’s pubic hair.
‘Why?’ said the man on the desk.
‘Because neither you,’ the young woman down below came fully into view, turning, hopping up, so that her rump was supported by the edge of the desk where the man lay, ‘nor your fucking pen,’ she arched to reveal her opulent breasts, her round belly, lifted one, long leg up, and bending it loosely across the other thigh, began to thread the foot into a roll of stocking, ‘has big enough balls.’ In the middle of the woman’s handsome face was a prominent keel of nose, to either side two steady, grey-blue eyes. In a big painted mouth a thin white cigarette burned, the smoke looping up lazily towards Natasha. Natasha couldn’t help but admire the insouciance of this young woman, who, so clearly, had recently been fucked over. Natasha, who was perplexed by her sense of kinship to this vision. Natasha, who recoiled as a coil of smoke from the past curled into her open eyes.
And in a whirl of limbs on the forest’s floor, Natasha had time to think of explanations – fatigue? the strangeness of the place? weak beer and strong weed? or had Gary perhaps spiked her with an antipodean psychotropic of rare exactitude? – before her hands grasped the lip of another pool and the momentum flung her face-down into another world.
Natasha’s lovely face projected from the unlovely grey surface of a dormant video screen. Below her on the stridently artificial desert floor, her Mumu – recognisable, instantly, by her thick wool tapestry-effect overcoat, her not inconsiderable bulk, her canvas Barnes & Noble book bag, her shoes like collapsed Cornish pasties, her prominent keel of nose – sat awkwardly askew, her l
egs curled to one side, one arm acting as stanchion, the other bringing a filter cigarette to her generously sour mouth. Mumu was in conversation with a white Stetson, the brim of which tipped up and down with wizardly emphasis, while from below came the clicking drone of blackfeller blarney. What could Mumu be doing here? Natasha might’ve asked herself. Why was she in conversation with the man who had got off the bus, the man Gary had called Phar Lap Jones?
Natasha might’ve asked these things – but she didn’t. Visionaries, notoriously, are quite free from ratiocination and devoid of insight. Visionaries’ prideful minds are, so often, like parted lips, ready to be filled by King Stuff. Natasha could’ve homed in on the Walbiri punishment boomerangs that lay on the false desert floor, and queried what exactly it was that they were affirming, these dark, sinister ticks. She didn’t. She lost concentration and her eyes wavered to the far side of a hundred feet of cracked white mud, to where a panel of desert horizon had been rolled back, revealing a swatch of the Thames’s north bank and a slice of Unilever House.
And all the rest of the night, Natasha Yaws pitched and yawed on the forest’s floor, rolling in visionary ecstasy from pool to pool, lying in awe and shaking her face from world to world. In one she saw the blond head of the elder brother she’d never known smashed all over the asphalt, while within her breast swelled dark truffles of inherited racial prejudice. In a second she jealously witnessed Virginia Bridge, dimly remembered from her own childhood, sound her Yahoo Mumu with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking through Houyhnhnm teeth, saying, ‘Lily, really, I mean to say, you can’t expect me to go on treating you for chronic bronchitis if you aren’t prepared to give up smoking. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know the facts . . .’ In a third, Natasha saw the arms all out at angles like the limbs of trees. Winstons and Pall Malls and Camels and Luckys and Newports, all fuming away wherever these particular people congregate. And heard the lustful burr of her Mumu’s voice: ‘Is it going to take that long?’