The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  It was cooler inside. On the left of the large room were dozens of paintings, some suspended from trouser-hangers on racks, some piled on tables. Other articles were also for sale: jewellery, baskets, woven cushion covers with similar designs to the paintings. To the right there were about a dozen people working at tables, a few cross-legged on the concrete floor, one man wearing a cowboy hat, the brim painted bright yellow. He coughed as he turned his canvas a hundred and eighty degrees, sand scraping beneath. Down the back, a woman laughed out loud. Wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, the stick she’d been using to paint writing in the air. Most of the others worked in silence.

  I nearly walked on a painting I mistook for a mat.

  An old man with a limp wandered over and sat beside it. Swept crumbs from the corner of his mouth with his thumb before selecting a paintbrush from a forest of them in a jar of grey water. He dabbed at a glob of red paint on a plastic lid, added a little of the water to it. Continued a line of dots that ran diagonally across the canvas as if he’d paused in a conversation.

  Ziggy waved to a white woman who seemed to be running the place. She put down the feathers she’d been handing to a thin-wristed lady who was poking them into the edge of a basket, the arched feathers forming a swirl around it like water eddying, and joined Ziggy beside a pile of paintings. They stood close, their shoulders touching, didn’t speak loud enough for me to hear. The woman leafed through the pile and selected one out, laid it on a table in front of Ziggy, who tilted her head and pulled a wad of notes out of the front pocket of her jeans. She counted out a number of hundreds and handed them to the woman, who rolled up the painting and put it into a cardboard postal tube along with a sheet of paper.

  ‘Seven sisters,’ I heard the woman say.

  The old man working cross-legged on the floor snorted. His hands were splattered with the same dirt colours as the canvas, as if he was painting himself in. I squatted beside him.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  His eyebrows shot up but he didn’t say anything. I could’ve asked him what the story was – why the footprints that traversed the right-hand corner of the painting were white – but my question felt too pointed. Unsolicited.

  The light suddenly dimmed.

  A woman was standing in the doorway, long limbs tapered by the sun. Her thongs scraped on the sandy concrete as she entered, a hood concealing her hair. She whispered something to the manager, glanced at me, a brief but probing look. There was something familiar about her.

  My hand went to my back pocket.

  The photo was there. Had been since the night before, Nara’s face blanched in my torchlight as I’d studied it, the batteries eventually giving up the ghost. There was a rule about images of the dead, but Nara was alive, at least as far as I knew.

  The woman flicked her hand at the manager, long fingers raised and spread, maybe annoyed, maybe asking something. Pitjantjatjara land the sign had said, but I knew next to nothing. About the people sat painting at the tables. About the place where Nara came from – her language, her beliefs. The life that Jed had entered.

  ‘I like trees,’ said a voice from behind.

  An old woman smiled at me and pointed to the canvas she was working on, her finger gnarled as a mallee root. Two trees with fat white trunks leant towards each other, none of the dots present that dominated most of the other paintings. She wore a gaudy hand-knitted beanie, kind of hippie, her hair as white and corkscrewed as sheep’s fleece. She didn’t look away when I moved closer, but I was aware of my own discomfort. Stretched my shoulders in an attempt to shake it off. Twenty-first century, I reminded myself, though in the back of my mind was the fact that I’d been way more relaxed around the Tuareg we’d met in the Sahara.

  ‘Piipalya,’ she said.

  I nodded, though I had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Piipalya. River red gum.’

  ‘Nice.’

  ‘Yeah, good one, that one.’

  She adjusted the painting so that I could see it better, threw me a quick glance, and I got the sense that behind the encouraging smile lay one hell of an entrepreneur.

  ‘Were you born here?’ I asked, the question coming out of nowhere.

  She shook her head and tapped a wet tree with the tail end of her brush.

  ‘Father’s country, uwa,’ she said.

  The nylon of her flowery top rustled in the folds of her armpits. She smelt of wood smoke and sweat, a pervasive animal scent that filled the room. I was no stranger to it – the market in Tamanrasset where Jed and I’d buy supplies had been a raw mix of goat skin and charcoal burners and the piss-reek of urea excreted via the skin in a place where evaporation levels were among the highest on earth, my jeans so rarely washed they could’ve walked between those laden stalls of their own accord – but still, it made me uneasy. Like something was amiss.

  I ran my finger under my nose. Took in my own smell, the gut pleasure of it, like a kid who farts into his cupped hand, inhales, knows who he is. A distant lemon tang from the shower I’d taken at Mina’s masked it a little. The photo smelt of nothing – I’d held it to my nose long enough while the ventilation shaft whirled to be sure of that. I shoved my hand in my back pocket. Felt its sharp, coated edge. Looked over to where the woman had been talking to the manager, but she was already gone.

  ‘Father’s country,’ repeated the woman with the painting. ‘Uwa. Out that way.’ She waved at the window closest to us, the flesh of her arm a wing.

  Through the dusty glass I could just make out a skein of geese, a fluid V, the point indicating south. I tracked their progress as she returned to her painting. Wondered how long it would be till I too headed in that direction.

  Followed the homing instinct.

  32

  Emu bush proliferated, desert-lovers, olive green and little more than the height of a man. The last thing I remembered was crossing the state border into the Northern Territory, the sign announcing new limits: maximum speed of one hundred and thirty kilometres an hour, fifty-three and a half metres the length for a road train. And somewhere as I’d coasted into sleep, a tree with bottles hanging from its branches instead of leaves – green, brown, transparent – caught between seasons.

  The car was stopped, the engine still running. Standing in front of a group of boulders was Ziggy, her back to me, her shadow riding the bumps of vegetation. She turned, a camera where her eyes should be. Took a photo of the car. I looked away. In a tree on the other side of the road were weaver birds, their globular nests like knots in a muscle.

  ‘Playing tourist?’ I asked as she walked towards my open window.

  ‘Can you see it?’ She pointed at a rock that towered above the sandy plain.

  ‘Kind of hard to miss.’

  ‘Not the rock itself. Take another look.’

  I squinted, my sunglasses fallen somewhere down the side of the seat. Looked more carefully at the rock. The afternoon sun highlighted every ridge, every fracture in its grainy surface.

  ‘It’s like a face,’ I said, pulling myself up in my seat. ‘A woman’s face.’

  Ziggy flipped through the images on her screen, held the camera low enough for me to see. She had a whole gallery of them, rocky profiles against a backdrop of sky. An old man’s battered jawline. An open-mouthed boy. A sleeping dog.

  ‘I’ve got more,’ she said, sweeping her fringe out of her eyes. ‘I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.’

  She got back in the car and gripped the wheel. On her middle finger was a large opal ring, a captive ocean of blues.

  ‘You were restless,’ she said.

  ‘Did I say anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I sometimes do.’

  ‘Your secrets are safe,’ she said, reminding me of what Mina had promised, as if the desert were a place of confidences, safeguarded by the usual lack of echo.

  Vehicles emerged from wet patches on the horizon, thin black silhouettes with pointy legs, the water evaporating as soon as we drew nea
r. There was no road kill, the only wildlife birds. Lone ones.

  I looked at Ziggy.

  ‘Mina told you, didn’t she?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s why you are going to Alice.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe nothing will come of it,’ I said, ‘but sometimes you just go with an idea ’cos you’ve got nothing else.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’

  Ziggy leant forwards and stretched her back, sunlight fixed in its curve. I pulled the photo out of my pocket. Smoothed it against my thigh.

  ‘I’m hoping to find this woman,’ I said, holding the photo up.

  She glanced at it. Returned her eyes to the road.

  ‘She knew your friend?’

  ‘Yes. It’s not much to go on but it’s the only lead I’ve got.’

  I wedged myself against the door. On the side of the road a man was pulling a high-tech cart, a fly net obscuring his face, his origin.

  ‘Where you staying in Alice?’ I asked her as the guy shrank in the side mirror.

  ‘With friends, this side of the Gap.’

  ‘The Gap?’

  ‘You’ve never been to Alice, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Interesting place.’

  She lifted an eyebrow but no anecdotes followed. I’d heard plenty anyway over the years, most of which sounded like a cross between prejudice and legend, suburban dreaming. I was looking forward to measuring the folklore against bricks and mortar.

  ‘I was thinking I’d rather camp out tonight,’ she said as I reached in the back for the bottle of water. ‘I’m not ready for the city yet.’

  ‘City?’

  ‘They have traffic lights in Alice.’ She grinned.

  ‘Plural.’

  ‘Yep. The council wanted to put one at the roundabout in Coober,’ she said as she adjusted the visor, the sun about an hour above the horizon. ‘People told them to go ahead but it wouldn’t be there in the morning.’

  The rocks along the side of the road were large enough to throw shadows, long ones that created spiked corridors on the bitumen. They reminded me of a story I’d once heard about two rocks that guarded the gateway to the underworld, though I couldn’t remember if I’d heard it a long time ago or in the last few days. After all the flat, these forms came as a relief, yet at the same time I felt thwarted. I wanted red desert stripped bare. An empire of sand.

  ‘I’m always looking for that first dune,’ said Ziggy.

  I smiled to myself, sipped the water heavy with minerals. So she was a mind reader too.

  ‘Know a good place to camp?’

  She nodded, her arms stretched taut between her shoulders and the steering wheel.

  A smile rode her face as the road entered its own logic – the first gap, an opening in a range like a missing tooth; a dry riverbed where we stopped for wood, huge river gums surrounded by debris, great swirls of it, as if paying homage to the torrent that had washed it up there.

  Ziggy took the wheel again. Pointed to the logo in the middle of the steering wheel.

  ‘Pleiades,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what the symbol stands for. The Seven Sisters constellation.’

  ‘Like the painting you bought?’

  ‘Yes. It’s one of the longest songlines in the country.’

  She steered my old Subaru back onto the road. Kept it running at the top end of comfortable for its mid-eighties bones. Didn’t slow till we reached a turnoff marked Owen Springs.

  ‘Can I drive?’ I asked, the track that led off, lined with dusty mulga, tempting.

  ‘It’s your car.’

  We switched, left our belts off as we followed the track, the sun resting on my shoulder. There were sand patches, gratifyingly red, the occasional dip that I had to take slowly, my car pitching in and out with its usual wheezing grace. I shifted it into four-wheel drive. The long grass in the centre of the track whipped against the chassis.

  ‘Giving it a good clean,’ I joked, dust forcing its way through those holes each time the car suddenly dropped.

  Ziggy laughed, her hand gripping the dashboard, her body obeying the dictate of the track. Its jolt and sway. She loved it as much as I did – there was no doubting it. I could almost smell the pleasure on her as she touched my arm.

  ‘That way,’ she said, pointing to a smaller trail that led off to the left.

  A pair of parrots darted between huge red gums, green-bodied, black-faced. The sun was poised just above the tree line that bordered a large waterhole, all that remained of a river about the width of a two-lane road, the banks ten metres high in places and furrowed. Reminding me of the gueltas we’d come across from time to time in the Sahara – an oasis of a crease in the rocky hamada – the shock of abundance, of running water, after all the dry.

  On the other side was a white ute and a couple of dogs, a fire already lit, its smoke hitching a ride with the breeze off the water. Two women were positioned on either side of a black pot that hung over low flames, a hint of the witch to them, apart from their short-cropped hair. They didn’t wave, just rallied the dogs that were zigzagging at the verge of the bank.

  ‘Here,’ said Ziggy as we arrived at a clearing.

  In the middle of it was a stone-ringed pit, the earth packed hard, the remnants of a fire like charred bones. I pulled over and we got out. Found our land legs. Ziggy pressed her hands against a river gum, stretched her back like a waking cat while I checked for dead branches overhead. A couple of Indian mynahs squabbled over a hollow high in the trunk, small invaders.

  ‘I could live here,’ said Ziggy, a dried leaf caught in the crown of her hair. ‘Maybe I’ll hide out here if they come looking for me.’

  ‘Reckon they will?’

  ‘They haven’t yet.’

  Behind her, a pair of black cockatoos followed the course of the dry riverbed, flew tandem, the sun winking between trees on the opposite bank.

  ‘It’s not the first time you’ve been in the desert, is it?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Me and my friend, the one who died, we travelled to the Sahara together. We went to other places too, but somehow that trip was defining. I’ve been thinking about why that was as I’ve been driving up here.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet, though I reckon it had something to do with how we were forced to rely on our own resources. It was like a testing ground.’

  Ziggy nodded, stared out at the waterhole.

  ‘What would you miss if you had to leave?’ I asked her.

  ‘Some of the people I’ve met. And the things that scare me most, and thrill me at the same time.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘The space. The silence. Though it’s never really silent, is it? That’s just part of the myth.’

  I watched her lean back into that thought as if it required more room than she’d allowed it. She had a way of putting things that spoke to questions still only half formed.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked, pivoting.

  I listened, wanting to give a name to whatever it was she’d heard. A shrill whistle cut through the foliage of the river gums with the same acuity as the remaining light, descending in pitch. It was a bird, easy, but what kind? A nest-stealer? Predator? Prey? The cry rang out again, but it was unfamiliar. Called up nothing from a lifelong bank of sounds.

  ‘Whistling kite,’ said Ziggy, her head tipped back.

  Both of us scoured the sky, the blue waning from it, returning to the prism.

  ‘If I wrote a poem about this place, about this part of the world,’ said Ziggy, ‘I would only use nouns.’

  She pointed to a dead tree. Marked the flight of a large raptor as it passed between the white branches. Hung from its beak, some kind of kill.

  ara wanani

  to follow someone’s way

  Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert

  33

  I woke to black and white. Pushed my face i
nto my jacket and tried to regain sleep, but dawn was already insisting its colours, and there were birds, choirs of them. Only Ziggy’s head was visible, her cheek creased, but I could imagine the rest of her. The inert body of the sleeping. A dream jerked at her face, and for a moment I thought I recognised it, the way its plotline played out on her forehead, as if the place had aligned what we dreamt.

  Quietly, I hauled myself out of my sleeping bag. Dragged on my jeans that smelt of fire and damp, my jacket still warm from functioning as a pillow. It was cold, very cold, the cinders white with ash. I walked to the waterhole to take a leak, not too close – a hangover from Boy Scouts – a conversation going on between the banks. Mynah birds. Parrots. The city coo of a pigeon. A whipbird, its cracking echo. Mist rose from the surface of the water in wraiths, and off the ground where my piss landed.

  Ziggy still asleep, I squatted in front of the stone circle and blew into my hands. Positioned a couple of sticks over the cinders in the hope they might take in my absence. The sun was not far off and I felt a similar urge to be on the move.

  I followed the track that led to where the waterhole was at its deepest, the tip of my boot catching on a rock, my legs not quite day-worthy. In the distance, the slow roar of a road train took a full minute to make its approach and departure, sound the gauge of distance, particularly at this hour, before other forms of measurement kicked in.

  The deepest part of the waterhole was still, milky, reflections on its smooth surface creating an inverted world, one in which all the colours were dulled. I sat in an alcove of the bank and waited for the sun, my breath tangible as it escaped between my cupped fingers. Something leapt. Dived before I could make out what it was, a ripple spreading out from its point of entry, making squiggles then cubes of the trees. The pair of black cockatoos flew overhead again, connecting dusk with dawn.

  I slid my hand into the pocket of my jacket and pulled out the photo, already worn from the journey so far.

  There were things I felt compelled to do and, in the past, this had been enough – the compulsion, the movement. But the stain of the sun dispersing across the horizon reminded me I was no longer sure of anything. We make assertions about reasons, make assertions about cause. That one thing will lead to another and all will become clear. But what if Nara didn’t want to see me? Didn’t have any answers? What if Jed was no longer a part of who she was?