The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  Alec deferred immediately to Daniel.

  ‘Angepe,’ he said.

  ‘Angepe,’ I repeated, sensing a gulf in me that might be breached by this kind of knowledge.

  Once we were done with the curry, I collected up the plates and washed them under the tap of the reservoir built into the back of Alex’s HiLux. Used a little of the river sand as a scourer, part pragmatism, part nostalgia for the way we’d scrubbed our dishes on our passage through the Sahara.

  The wind travelled up the dry bed guided by the same course the water usually took. From the south-west. From the direction of the border, a connection made now, no matter how tenuous or fraught.

  By the fire, Daniel and Alec were folding themselves into the same joke. Daniel wheezed, tears squeezed out of his eyes with the pad of his thumb, while Alec inhaled his laughter in short bursts, staccato, as if giving in to it would burst his guts. I stacked the plates on the metallic tray of the ute and positioned myself once more beside the fire. Kicked a fallen ember back into the fray. I had no idea what had got them going, but whatever it was it rose with the chasing smoke and entered me, loosening, till I could half believe that a place was just a place and no moment in time weighed more than any other.

  Daniel gestured for me to sit, the air bitter as it invaded the open strip in the back of the chair. His face was ablaze, reflecting the drama of the flames, as was Alec’s, their features given their full dimension: what was different, what was the same. The crow was not quite done yet, the leaves above us lending the wind a voice, the whole world with something to declare.

  ‘Do you know a place called Ininyingi?’ I asked Daniel.

  He pressed his heels deep into the sand. Cleared his nasal passages.

  ‘Not my country,’ he said.

  40

  We cooked breakfast on the fire before setting out, the sun a white orb above the range as we whipped along Namatjira Drive, the occasional gum tree rising amid the mulga and buffel grass, a double white line the sole reminder there were others on the road. Alec tapped the steering wheel to a rhythm only he could hear, his shoulder-length hair girlish as the air from the open window riffled through it. Daniel was leaning forwards in the passenger seat, taking everything in, his bony fingers wrapped around the grab handle. Civilisation was marked by the whistle of a text. It was from Ziggy, letting me know she’d taken my car into Alice, that she was at the market. I leant against the driver’s seat.

  ‘Can you drop me in town?’ I asked Alec.

  He nodded. ‘I have to go through there anyway,’ he said. ‘Daniel’s staying at his daughter’s place.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Daniel, obviously pleased by the prospect.

  I texted Ziggy to make sure she’d still be there.

  We turned off after a petrol station, drove down a succession of suburban streets, till Alec pulled up out the front of a single-storey house, the garden a riot of flowers and jagged cacti. Obviously horticulture ran in the family. A couple of kids piled out the front door, one heading for a trampoline by the side of the house, the other staring in my window. His hair was shaved on one side, both of his eye teeth missing.

  ‘G’day,’ he said, his eyebrows launched in a high arc.

  ‘G’day.’

  Daniel eased himself out of the car. Didn’t take anything with him except his coat. When he poked his head back in to say goodbye, I felt like saying something to him – to acknowledge the privilege of being taken out on country – but he wasn’t a man of words. I nodded to him. He nodded back.

  With me riding shotgun now, Alec headed into town, across the Stuart Highway, the Gap to the south. He dropped me at the end of Todd Mall, across from the tourist office.

  ‘Can I leave my gear in your car?’ I asked him as I got out.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks for asking me along.’

  ‘Pleasure.’

  He nodded and drove off in the direction of the river, the swags in the back like bodies still slumped in sleep.

  I walked along the mall, keeping an eye out for Ziggy. The shops were mainly aimed at the tourist trade, though the art galleries looked like they catered to the well-heeled, large dotted canvases hung in even larger windows. Down the middle ran the market. There were food stalls – Vietnamese, deep-fried, gourmet barbecue – and stalls selling Chinese-made souvenirs or handicrafts from developing nations. Billies and camp ovens. Desert-hardy plants. One guy selling fossilised teeth and rock samples, whatever could be dug up and sold. The people were also a mixed bag. Hippy types, all Thai fisherman’s pants and nose rings. Well-shod backpackers doused in labels. The grey brigade, with their pastels and three-quarter-length pants, seeking small gifts for their offspring. Not many Aboriginal people were about except the ones selling paintings on the lawn outside the council building, canvases spread on the grass.

  Ziggy was nowhere in sight.

  I stopped at a second-hand bookstall. The books were laid out according to genre, a boxful on local themes and language, their pages curling in the full sun. I looked through one carton but nothing stood out, except a picture book called The Giant Devil-Dingo. On the cover, the dog’s tongue protruded like a flame, embers for eyes.

  The stallholder finished up with a customer and came over.

  ‘Looking for anything in particular?’ he asked, pushing back a shock of grey hair that suggested past tragedy.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘There’s a good one on the history of explorers,’ he said, sizing me up, maybe catching a whiff of last night’s campfire.

  He fished through a box and pulled out a thick volume. I took it and flicked through the first few pages, still too bush-bound for anything like conversation. Sturt was there, high-booted, standing beside a dray that may have been used to transport that boat. I put the book down.

  ‘How about Australian fiction?’ the vendor suggested, but thankfully he was distracted by a woman in a white sun visor, in desperate need of the latest Nora Roberts.

  I browsed through the fiction box – in my hasty packing I’d neglected to bring a novel for company, a sorry oversight. There were a couple of Maloufs I’d read a long time ago, a signed hardcover copy of Carpentaria, a Randolph Stow. Two different editions of Cloudstreet, both well-thumbed. A clutch of Patrick Whites. I hadn’t read White since uni, where I’d treated him like eating bony fish – good for you, but just too much work. There was an old paperback edition of Voss, the cover black with a white etching of a man in a slouch hat. A Sidney Nolan drawing it said on the back. Also, the true record of Ludwig Leichhardt, who died in the Australian desert in 1848, suggested Voss to the author.

  I gave the man the eight dollars pencilled on the title page, headed for a quiet place under a tree. I opened the novel to the first page, the paper yellowed along the top. Like the explorer that had inspired its story, exposure to the elements had taken its toll, and for a moment I fantasised that the book had gone along for the ride, slipped into Leichhardt’s saddlebag; that there was a reciprocal bond between the two, the fictionalised version and the one that had had fatal consequences.

  Over by the council building, an Aboriginal woman was attempting to flog a painting about the size of a serviette to a couple of middle-aged men in fluoro sneakers. Barefoot and woolly-haired, the woman was yelling at them, her long arm so thin at the wrist that when she flicked her hand at their uninterested faces I half expected it to snap. She caught my eye, and for a moment I thought she’d come over, but she seemed intent on staking her claim to that particular patch of grass. She waved at a blond backpacker passing by, iridescently Scandinavian. He scuttled away, a remorseful smile on his face.

  I returned to the book. Fought the urge to go straight to the end, to find out what the desert had claimed from Voss – whether it was his mind or his body that had succumbed first. As I flicked through it, a line leapt out at me.

  … but in that landscape, in that light, not even memory provided a refuge.

  I’d known that ki
nd of light – exposing, revelatory – the desert as much a landscape of the mind as anything physical. Always calling you in.

  ‘Morning,’ said a voice from above.

  It was Ziggy, a cardboard tube under her arm. She’d returned to jeans and t-shirt.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘What you got there?’

  I held the cover up, but she shrugged, not recognising it – a story about another German finding their way in the desert.

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘Another painting,’ she said, prising the lid off the tube. ‘It’s by an artist from Santa Teresa, a community south-east of here. I’ve been looking for something by her for a long time now – something small. Her work’s quite expensive.’

  She sat beside me, unfurled the painting on her knee. It was about twenty by thirty centimetres, the black base colour overlapping into the white border as if all it wanted was to break out, though the rest was a system of strictly coded lines and dots. Its appeal lay outside its sense of containment. She rolled it up again.

  ‘You hungry?’ I asked, the smoky porridge and leftover damper from this morning already wearing thin.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Had one already.’

  ‘Got some business to take care of?’

  She squinted at me. Returned my grin.

  ‘How did it go with Daniel?’

  ‘Yeah, good. He doesn’t say much, yet he kind of does. Reminded me of the Tuareg.’

  ‘My brother, Andreas, has always wanted to go to the Sahara. He tried to get me to go with him.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I told him this was the place I’d always wanted to come to.’

  ‘Because of Siegfrieda.’

  ‘Yes – and other reasons,’ she said, tapping the tube against her thigh. ‘There’s a place I’d like to show you.’

  Her face was open, exposed to the late-morning sun. There was no doubt about it, she had a way with light. I shaded my eyes, my mind loose, easily startled, that line still plaguing me … not even memory provided a refuge.

  ‘You okay to drive?’ I asked her.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, drawing my keys out of the pocket of her jeans.

  41

  We headed out of town. Past Flynn’s memorial, a huge red boulder balanced on a plinth. Overtook a signpost with H 110 marked on it – H for Hermannsburg, though someone had added ell. Ziggy had the window down, her hair caught in a vortex.

  She turned right at a road leading to a gap, the road sealed and snaking towards the northern side of the MacDonnell Ranges. Spinifex dominated, a knobbly patchwork of it, the mulga abundant. We passed a ranger’s hut, a village of shiny barbecues huddled amid ghost gums. When we reached the car park, Ziggy pulled up next to an information panel. I read it while she stowed the painting in the boot. It explained the stories of the waterhole, about giant Perentie ancestors, their sinews present in the cliff face.

  We walked along a path made by prisoners, according to a plaque. Past cork trees and flesh-coloured rock, needles of it like digits prodding the blue. Old crease lines leant north, evidence of the forces that had shaped the high walls of the gap.

  Ziggy pointed to a scree slope, tufts of pale spinifex among the boulders straight out of a Namatjira painting.

  ‘Rock wallaby,’ she said.

  White-chested and thickset, it had a line of dark fur running down its long snout. Its route blocked by a large rock, the wallaby negotiated it with an agility more mountain goat than animal of the plains.

  There was water in the riverbed below the path, green reeds thriving from recent rains. Rock faces reflected in the pools. The chasm narrowed, the walls leant in at a forty-five-degree angle, giving the sense that they could fall at any time. That falling was part of it.

  The gap was in full shadow by the time we reached the waterhole, the wind that rose off the surface cold and intrusive. Someone had constructed a line of rocks across a shallow section of the waterhole. There was the faint smell of piss from where some dickhead had relieved himself.

  Ziggy approached the water and crouched. Dipped her hands in and said something I couldn’t hear. There was a touch of the ritual in her movements. I waited till she was finished, the wind grabbing at her hair. The water lapped against the rock, making a sound like a moored boat. Lonely. Private.

  ‘Did you say something?’ she asked, her eyes squinting against dust.

  ‘No.’

  Focused by the gap, the wind increased in strength. Pulled at the edge of the water as if it would peel it away from the sand. Ziggy’s shirt clung to her ribs.

  ‘There’s something about how the water washes against the rock,’ she said. ‘It’s so intimate.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘It seems almost voyeuristic to stand here and listen to it, don’t you think? Except that’s not the correct word, is it? Is there a word that means listening without permission?’

  ‘Eavesdropping.’

  ‘But isn’t that only for people?’

  ‘Never thought about it,’ I said, except it wasn’t true. I had thought about all of this before. More than once. When the river would jostle stones at its edge. The way wind sounded when it travelled across dunes.

  ‘Maybe there’s a word for it in Arrernte,’ said Ziggy. ‘Daniel would know.’

  Two magpie larks careened in at the same time, pecked at the hems of the waterhole with their bright orange beaks. As they walked, their heads bobbed back and forth like old-fashioned mechanical toys – something to do with the way that they saw, I remembered my grandfather telling me.

  Ziggy shivered. I went to unzip my jacket but she held up her hand.

  ‘I’m not cold,’ she said.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Behind us, a couple crunched across the sand, the woman in white shorts and singlet, gold Riviera-style sunglasses, the man in tight-fitting black. The language they spoke sounded Slavic, Russian maybe. The guy took photos in quick succession, barely aimed – of the water, the rocks above it, the woman in the pose of the mildly enchanted. Then they turned back towards the car park. The magpie larks chased them out.

  Ziggy moved away from the water’s edge, her palm pressed against her throat.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  She nodded, but it was clear that something had unnerved her.

  ‘People say the river is upside down,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It looks like it’s gone, but if you dig down, you’ll find it. It’s always there. It’s just waiting for the rain so it can run again.’

  ‘When you talk like that, you sound like Jed.’

  ‘Is that okay?’

  ‘It helps, I think.’

  And maybe it did. Substitution never really worked in the long term, but sometimes it could bridge the gap just long enough for you to make it to somewhere safe. Though this didn’t feel like a clear case of substitution. Ziggy was too much her own person for that.

  ‘He used to say this thing about understanding the river, but I was never really sure what he meant.’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t know what he meant either.’

  ‘You could be right. He’d do that. Make some big statement when he was uncertain about things, to still some deep fear. He once told me that without the river we were nothing. He was talking about the place where we grew up, the Derwent, but as soon as he was old enough, he was out of there. Rarely ever went back.’

  The wind dropped for a moment, then started up again, creating a tornado in the hair at the base of Ziggy’s neck. A plane rumbled overhead and I sought it out, one more interloper .

  ‘Maybe Mina was right,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That you’re looking for him. Chasing his ghost. In places. People. Is that what you’re doing, Saul? Trying to track him down, the bits that got lost?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

 
My hand went to my gut. It felt more like I was the one being tracked; what he’d said that morning at Assekrem echoing in my mind, as if all deserts were allied like oceans, the gap channelling his words. Stuff like this, it binds you. Binds you to people. To a place. But beyond the grave? He’d laughed when he’d spoken of haunting, and so had I. Where we came from, the world seemed too new for such talk, most of the suburb dragged up in the seventies. But of course, it had its past, one rarely mentioned, the only evidence the old church and the watchhouse, the convict headstones. A midden we’d once found by the river.

  I looked at the waterhole. It was almost impossible to imagine it in its raging state, a full-fledged tributary. Felt myself imitating the rock, directing everything towards that cleft of sun reflected in the water, the leaping white light ecstatic, on the verge of unnatural. It was easy to imagine a presence here – it had all the ingredients. Architectural rock. Directed light. Walls polished by millennia of flow. And the kind of silence that existed despite sounds.

  ‘Saul?’

  Ziggy was standing close to me. I hadn’t heard her approach. She reached up. Touched the back of her hand to my cheek. The wind whipped her fringe away from her forehead, her face thrust into full view. Green eyes. The fine hairs around her temple. She was hovering, I could sense it. Caught between a desire to step into whatever strange territory I was inhabiting and the instinct to pull back. Most people would just leave you there, I reminded myself, in no-man’s-land without a pass. But not Ziggy. There was something fearless about her, something I could trust. We’d be good together; we thirsted for similar things. And if I knew anything about desire – about love – it thrived on what couldn’t be had.

  I lowered my eyes, but then my fingers were pushing through her hair, gripping the fine bones of her face, my forehead pressed against hers. It was the only antidote. Skin, mouth, breath – they were arguments in themselves. I needed to know her, find out which point on her body would trigger her release. And more. If she was really as at home in this place as she made out she was.