The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  The breeze tugged at the glossy paper. But Nara’s mouth remained as unmoving as always, unable to tell me what I needed to hear. I threw a stone at the water. Felt a degree of pleasure at its predictable trajectory. The plonk as it entered.

  Behind me, I heard a rustle.

  I slipped the photo back into my pocket. Studied the ridge that ran along the top of the bank, the corrugated earth. Nothing there – grass triggered by the breeze maybe, by a brain not long dredged from dreams.

  Then, from above the ridge rose the tips of ears.

  Golden.

  Twitching.

  Vigilant as radars.

  I got up slowly. Sensed how exposed I was, the day well clear now of the imprecision of night. No more than a few metres away, two dingoes sniffed the air, their tails muscular arcs. I was downwind, but they’d seen me. They tensed, a beauty to them, wild but still with the memory of being domesticated. And for a moment they were joined at the nose. Glistening black muzzles. Pelts the colour of sand. Then they pulled away, two dogs again.

  I took a step.

  They crouched.

  The larger dog bowed, maybe once more drawing on memory.

  And then they were running, each in a different direction. It was tactical, one east, one west, a sound like galloping as the sun breached the tree line, the highest leaves of the river gums shot red.

  Tactical, yes.

  What I needed, I reminded myself, was others with who to split the risk. To keep the world, the silence, the chaos of it all, from getting the better of me. It was an unwritten rule, one that belonged to a greater logic. We’d heard it, said it, so often it became a dictum. Never go into the desert alone. But Jed had. He’d flouted the law. Paid the ultimate price.

  By the waterhole I heard footfall, but this time there were no dingoes, no Ziggy either, only the sun reaching across the slick surface. And for a moment everything was sluiced in the same gold – leaves trunks water feathers – somehow brethren.

  Then dawn tipped over into morning.

  34

  Alice sprung out of not much, with little warning apart from the signs – including ones about the Liquor Act – that we were about to arrive in a city. The MacDonnell Ranges, a stunning natural barrier to the south, looked as if the desert had rolled over and revealed its backbone, its vertebrae still rich with blood.

  ‘Mparntwe,’ said Ziggy, shifting in her seat. ‘That’s the Arrernte name. Caterpillar country.’

  We drove through suburbs dotted with bare-faced rocks, a horde of kids playing in the shadows of a graffitied monolith. Houses huddled, backed by expanses of empty land, palm trees lending a tropical mood despite the dry. A council worker rode a mower across an obscenely green oval.

  Ziggy scanned the parked cars as we passed a supermarket, Larapinta IGA. A sign out front read, It comes with the Territory.

  In front of us, an old blue Ford with shot suspension hugged the bitumen. I overtook it, checked out the driver, her black arm dangling out the window. Glanced at the faces in the back seat, all women, all wearing hoodies, but none of them resembled the photo. They looked away. As we shouldered other vehicles, I checked a few white faces too. Clung to a mad hope: that people could be modified by the presence of another, like the surface of water by a trawling wind.

  ‘Take a right,’ said Ziggy.

  We headed south, through Heavitree Gap, the rocky breach between the ranges via which everything was funnelled. The road followed a wide dry riverbed, maybe the one where Thornton filmed those scenes from Samson and Delilah, I thought – the ones under the bridge. That film had shocked me. Something about how foreign but familiar it had felt. And one moment in particular had struck deep: Samson cutting loose and dancing on the lit verandah like a man unleashed.

  ‘What’s it called?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The river.’

  ‘The Todd,’ she said, fat river gums testimony to the presence of water.

  A group of Aboriginal people sat cross-legged in the sandy bed, two men, three women. They wore beanies and jackets even though the air pushing through the window was warm. We were going too fast to get a good look at them.

  ‘Left there,’ said Ziggy, pointing to a bridge that straddled the dry bed.

  I followed a sign towards Ross River, the properties bigger than in town. More palm trees, another caravan park, a water tower on stilts, then something like open road again. The Eastern MacDonnells continued as jagged and rusty as on the western side.

  Ziggy indicated a dirt driveway leading to a wire fence. I pulled into it, Ilwempe written in mosaic letters on a plaque attached to the gate. She held it for me as I drove through, her stomach bared as she reached over to do the chain up and I glimpsed a tattoo, something tribal. I followed her, the car almost stalling at the pace at which we moved, till she snatched at a leaf and disappeared behind a peppermint tree.

  The place was an oasis – desert oak, mulga, ghost gums, a few exotics. A rabbit-proof fence led to a further section of the garden, a couple of acres, maybe more. I parked up beside an old HiLux, scratches the length of its paintwork, an even more battered Subaru Outback flanking it. Beyond, the house was mud-brick and two-storeyed, the façade left raw. Ziggy was crouched beside the HiLux massaging the chops of an old German shepherd, its muzzle grey.

  ‘Hey, Caliph, hey, boy,’ she crooned.

  The dog repaid her in licks.

  A woman got up from a bench on the verandah, her arm supporting the small of her back. Long dreads were held in place by a headband, her skin was deeply tanned. South American, or Israeli maybe.

  ‘Hi,’ she said and hugged Ziggy. She left her arm loose around Ziggy’s waist as she glanced at me.

  ‘Lou, this is Saul.’

  ‘Hey, Saul.’ She nodded, her hand massaging her rounded stomach, a strip of it visible beneath her black t-shirt.

  ‘Nice place you got here.’

  ‘Thanks. You guys look parched.’

  We followed Lou inside, the blue of the corridor deepened by shadows, the walls lined with large square canvases. The dog followed, its nails clacking on the brick floor. A guy was sitting at the kitchen table, his shoulder-length hair so white that for a moment I thought he was albino. He stood, tall and the kind of lean that comes from hard work. Yellow coin envelopes were lined up on the table, each with something written on it in black texta.

  ‘Alec,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  I shook it, noted the calluses. The fact that we were roughly the same age.

  ‘Saul. Amazing garden. Must be a lot of work. You plant the whole thing?’

  ‘Most of it. Though a lot of the big trees were already here. A friend helps me with it.’

  ‘You a botanist?’

  ‘No. Labour of love.’

  He shot a glance at Lou, who was filling a steel kettle in the sink. Ziggy was leaning into her shoulder, fiddling with a dread, speaking in a low voice. They both swayed.

  Alec returned to his envelopes, names written on them – Wild passionfruit, Desert quandong, Old man saltbush. He tipped the contents of one into the palm of his hand, stirred the seeds as if searching for a bad one.

  Ziggy came over, the dog shadowing her.

  ‘Lou says it’s all right for you to stay here if you’d like.’

  I was about to say no – from the moment we’d arrived, I’d been getting the feeling that Lou was only tolerating my presence. But the morning’s revelation, about splitting the risk, was still clear in my mind. Besides, Mina was right. It was not a good time to be alone.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll get my stuff.’

  35

  Alec hacked at the hard earth with a force born of conviction. Behind him was a grove of palms and a huge ghost gum, its smooth trunk glossy, the gravel path that connected it all a white snake. He bent over and pulled up an offending clump of grass. Raised it up and shook loose the dirt.

  ‘Buffel,’ he said. ‘Bastard plant.’

&nbs
p; Its tapered leaves were studded with purplish seed heads, its roots hair-like and knotted. Alec laid it on the ground in full sun.

  ‘I want to plant here so I’m clearing this bit by hand.’ He pointed to a fenced-off paddock. ‘But out there, I’ll hit it with glysophate. Suffocates the buffel grass, but leaves the soil intact.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘Once it’s gone, the natives come back. The seeds are still there, lying dormant.’

  Alec allowed the pleasure of this to occupy his face fleetingly, then returned to his work. I thrust the shovel he’d lent me into the base of one of the tufted clumps, followed it with my boot. The muscles in my back and my hamstrings welcomed the stretch after all that sitting, enjoyed the camaraderie of labour. The hint of a battle. Alec’s shirt and jeans were sand-coloured – he almost disappeared in the cloud of dust that rose around him as he dug, his white hair as fine as a child’s. There was something about him I liked already, a tenacious gentleness pitched against the harsh. Every now and then he passed me a bottle of water, irrigating me like one of his plants. And he talked, his sentences brief and punctuated by his striking spade. Explained how buffel had most likely been introduced in the saddles of Afghani cameleers, the grass used to stuff them in their homelands. Exploited by cattle men as a quickly adapting fodder, it had colonised the desert, overrunning the indigenous spinifex to the point where people often mistook it for native.

  His blade connected with a stone, sent out a metallic clink that carried as far as the ranges and back again. He straightened, surveying the holes we’d dug. The uprooted buffel grass lay drying in the sun, scraggly corpses.

  ‘One day,’ he said, the spade slung over his shoulders, a soldier at ease.

  ‘One day,’ I affirmed.

  A rustle came from the direction of a fig tree. My first thought: dingo.

  Alec put his hand up to halt me and pointed at a low-lying shrub. I looked but saw nothing except the lurch of a shadow, the tremor of leaves. Alec clicked his tongue then whistled something classical, Haydn maybe or Bach. The first few notes of the melody echoed back from the bush.

  ‘Western bowerbird,’ he said, crouching. ‘Chlamydera guttata.’

  It hopped out from behind the foliage, its feathers spotted. Head cocked, eye a bead, it made a new sound, dead ringer for a camera shutter.

  ‘Akerrke,’ he said.

  ‘Akerrke?’

  ‘The Arrernte call it that because of the sound it makes – that is, when it’s not imitating something else. Most bird names come from sounds.’

  The bowerbird did a fine rendition of a gate being opened, accurate to the point that I almost turned to see if someone was coming. Alec placed his hand on the ground, slid it closer to where the bird was investigating a piece of shiny quartz. I remembered hearing something about their acquisitive habits from my grandfather, who was a bit of a twitcher. Nature’s kleptomaniacs, he’d called them.

  ‘Each species has a meaning,’ said Alec as the bowerbird flew off.

  He jumped to his feet, forehead shiny, his hair tucked behind his ears. There was a guilelessness to him, like a boy not yet initiated into the convolutions of truth.

  ‘Did you come here to do research?’ he asked.

  ‘No. I’m trying to find someone. Someone who’s supposed to be in Alice.’

  ‘You’d have to ask Lou about that. She knows everyone.’

  ‘Thanks. I will.’

  He looked down. Tugged at a buffel shoot.

  ‘If you see a striated pardalote,’ he said, shaking the dirt off the buffel’s roots, ‘it means an old friend is coming.’

  As he laid the grass in the sun to die, his face slid from disgust into something close to pity.

  36

  Dinner was in the oven, some kind of slow-cooked one-pot wonder prepared by Lou, whatever spices she’d thrown in wafting as far as the wide balcony on which we all sat. Alec leant back in his chair, his eyes trained on the ranges, his beer clutched to his chest. I did the same. The last silts of the day were settling in the sky, the ghost gums stained pink, a lone bean tree standing above a hoard of red seeds. In the centre was a water feature, Lou’s work, a mosaic basin and a rolling glass ball, the water lit blue from beneath. I rested the mouth of the bottle against my lip, the antiseptic of drying eucalypt leaves vying with a lemon-scented gum. Remembered reading somewhere that paradise came from an old Persian word for a walled garden in the desert.

  Lou and Ziggy were sitting at a long table, their bodies also facing the view, but they were looking through a sketchbook of Lou’s. I’d caught a glimpse of it earlier, in the kitchen. It seemed to be mostly drawings of people done in black ink, though not figures isolated on a white page – they were surrounded by trees and bushes and animals: snakes, goannas, emus, a dingo.

  ‘Ziggy tells me you’re looking for someone,’ said Lou, closing the book.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I know a lot of people here. I might be able to help.’

  ‘I have a photo,’ I said. ‘I’ll get it.’

  From the hallway, I could hear the low tenor of Lou’s voice, though not the words. My jacket was on the bed in the room they’d offered me, a double mattress on the floor. On the walls were Aboriginal paintings, as in the rest of the house, but these were all small and simple, as if they’d been done by children. Maybe they had something to do with the work Lou did in Alice, I speculated. The photo was still in the pocket, a patina of dust fading its colours. I wiped it clean. The eyes stared back, hopeful tonight, for some reason.

  The talking stopped when I reached the balcony. I handed the photo to Lou. Ziggy moved in to take a look. The two of them passed it between them like it was a piece of evidence in a trial. I leant against the wooden railing. Resisted the urge to snatch it back. The waxing moon hung above the ranges like a discarded rib.

  ‘What’s her name?’ asked Lou.

  ‘Nara.’

  ‘Nara … ?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Is she Arrernte?’

  ‘Don’t know. Someone told me she was living in Alice.’

  ‘I’ll ask around. See what I can find out.’

  She put the photo inside the sketchbook she’d been showing Ziggy. I looked away. Despite the warmth the wind lifted from the earth, the temperature was dropping quickly.

  ‘Is she from here?’ Lou asked.

  ‘No, from some town near the border. Inin something.’

  ‘Ininyingi,’ she said.

  ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘I’ve never been there, but a friend of mine used to work out there a couple of years ago. It’s Pitjantjatjara country.’

  I drained the last of my beer. Remembered the sign on the way into the community Ziggy and I had visited. You are now entering Pitjantjatjara land. So that was where Nara was from, at least a corner of that place. I’d been skirting the edge of it all along.

  Over towards the fence line, an owl whooped in a ghost gum. The tree’s trunk was split into two smooth limbs, the point of separation an inverted V like a woman’s crotch. Sap in the crease had hardened into a bright red resin.

  ‘Does she know you’re looking for her?’ asked Lou, her hand rubbing her belly.

  I shook my head.

  Caliph yapped from his watching place on the verandah below us. He was joined by neighbouring dogs, a volley of barks sent back and forth. The owl whooped once more and took flight, one of its wings dominant, reminding me of the Harwood poem: how she’d been forced to end what she’d begun. Caliph trotted towards the fence that barred him from the ranges and pawed at the wire. From the next-door property came snarling, a weight thrown up against metal.

  ‘Dingoes,’ said Alec.

  As if summoned, the howls began, a half-circling, their passage blocked.

  Caliph’s growls broke into barks that were echoed back by the ranges, and for a moment it was as if he was warding off himself. Beside him stood the ghost gum, blanched even paler by a floodlight. Nam
ed by a botanist who had a sense of how something that reminded you of the dead could still thrive.

  37

  The copy of The Age on the table had a picture on the front page of a mining worker dwarfed by a super truck, his expression guarded. The money was good, but it seemed life was tough living away from friends and family, the defining flow of events. There’d been casualties. Cracks in the dream.

  ‘Sleep well?’ asked Lou, coming in.

  I nodded as she began pottering by the sink. Washing vegetables, chopping them into small pieces and placing them one by one into a juicer.

  ‘Help yourself,’ she said, pointing to a jar of muesli in the centre of the table.

  ‘Thanks. And thanks for letting me stay.’

  ‘No problem. We get lots of people coming through here. Alice is that kind of place.’

  ‘Where’s Ziggy?’

  ‘She went into town with Alec. She didn’t want to wake you. Said she had some business to take care of.’

  The clock above the stove reminded me that it was already noon. On the table, next to the newspaper, my mobile buzzed. I picked it up. Opened the latest message. It was from Kelly, reminding me that the funeral was at two. I read it twice. Bowed my head. For days I’d been thinking about writing a eulogy and getting her to read it in my absence, but I hadn’t been able to find the words. A eulogy was a final framing, and I wasn’t ready. Not yet. Even a text was almost beyond me. Love you, I wrote, and sent it. Hoped that she’d read into its brevity the magnitude of what I couldn’t say.

  Lou dried her hands and walked over. Handed back the photo of Nara.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and pocketed it. Felt a swell of relief.

  ‘I rang a few people this morning,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah?’