by Lia Hills
But Ziggy was pushing me back, her hands gripping my face now, holding it still.
‘No, Saul.’
‘Why not?’
‘There’s a desperation in you,’ she said, her eyes locked on mine. ‘Right now, you look like you could eat me alive.’
And she was right, I could’ve. Eaten her alive and kept moving. Fucked my way through. I’d known people like that, though before this moment I’d never known what had been the turning point.
I felt my arms go slack. All of me. It took everything I had to keep standing.
‘Ziggy.’
‘Everything’s going to be okay,’ she said, letting go of my face.
42
Back at the house, Alec’s HiLux was parked beside Lou’s old Outback. I slid my Sub in beside hers like it was some kind of reunion, monitored the sound of grit hitting the paintwork as I turned the engine off.
‘Looks like rain,’ said Ziggy, pointing above the ranges, the clouds the colour of an old bruise.
‘Rain in the desert,’ I said. ‘Best kind.’
She headed for the house, a small willy-willy sidling along the ground behind her like a faithful dog. Kicked her thongs off at the door. I followed her in.
Lou and Alec were seated at the kitchen table. Alec was leafing through a pile of plant books; Lou was on her laptop, one hand on the keyboard, the other on her belly.
‘Hey,’ she said, holding her hand out to Ziggy.
Ziggy took it, kissed the palm.
‘Lou, listen, I’m sorry about yesterday,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t thinking clearly.’
She closed her laptop. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I mean, not really, but given what you’re going through, I understand. You got a call.’
‘From who?’
‘Nara’s sister.’
‘Her sister?’
I hadn’t thought about the fact that there’d be family, others who’d known Jed. In truth, I hadn’t thought that part of it through at all. I’d been so focused on Nara, the photo, a woman alone in front of a dune.
‘What did she say?’
‘You can go out there, to Ininyingi.’
‘Ininyingi?’ I said. ‘You sure?’
‘Normally you’d need a permit, but if someone in the community invites you, then it’s okay.’
‘Was Nara there?’
‘No. But her sister had spoken to her, or someone had. From what I understood, it was Nara’s idea.’
I shot a glance at Ziggy. She came over. Put her hand in the small of my back.
‘This is great news,’ she said.
‘I’ll leave tomorrow. That is, if it’s okay for me to stay another night.’
‘No problem,’ said Lou. ‘But you and Ziggy are on dinner. I’m exhausted and I’ve still got work to do.’
Alec ran his finger down a page of the book closest to him, but I definitely caught a grin. Lou grabbed her laptop and headed for the door to the study, her arm brushing mine as she passed.
‘How did she know to ring here?’ I asked her.
‘I left my number when I rang back yesterday. I didn’t think anybody would call.’
‘I’ll be more careful this time.’
‘You have to remember,’ she said, so close to me now I could smell her dreads, ‘they are people just like anybody else.’
The sentence nagged at me. Something about the they. I couldn’t help feeling that with Lou I was always avoiding contagion from someone else’s blunders. But if she hadn’t called back, I wouldn’t have got this second chance.
Lou disappeared into the study, Alec springing to his feet as if her presence had sidelined his own needs.
‘I have to check the quandong seedlings,’ he said. ‘This wind is a killer.’
‘Need a hand?’
‘No. But maybe later, with the buffel grass in the back paddock.’
‘Sure.’
He headed out the front, which left me and Ziggy, and the humming of the fridge.
‘You thought you wouldn’t get to see her,’ she said.
‘And maybe it won’t do any good.’
‘But you have to find out.’
‘Yep.’
‘I would. I’d do exactly what you are doing.’
Ziggy tipped her head to one side as if listening out for something.
‘There’s something I need to say to Lou,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
The study was lit by a horizontal window, a large painting on the opposite wall of a swirl of leaves. Lou was standing by a table set against the mudbrick, her back to me. Smoke rose around her, gave her body an ephemeral quality. She turned when she heard me enter, her face withdrawn as if I’d intruded on a thought whose source lay elsewhere. My intention had been to thank her for what she’d done – even admit my fear about the effect my visit might have on Nara – risk whatever Lou’s response might be. But the look on her face suggested it was better to leave it till another time.
In the wall in front of her, the mortar between the bricks had been scratched away, an inverted T, something shoved in the gaps. I moved closer, Lou’s eyes on me. The crevices between the mudbrick had been filled with small scrolls of paper. The smoke was coming from a bowl, its surface covered in dot painting. Inside, a burning plant. I frowned, the scene familiar. Remembered where it was that I’d seen something like this before: scrolls of paper – white, blue, the colour of parchment – pushed into cracks. In Jerusalem, at the place known as the Wailing Wall.
‘Prayers?’ I asked her.
‘Stories,’ she said. ‘The ones I can’t hold.’
On the table were slips of paper in a neat stack, a black pen laid across them. Ziggy had told me about Lou’s job on the way to the gap. That she worked mostly with kids who’d seen the kinds of things no kid ever should. How she’d held off getting pregnant, partly because of the demands of her work, partly because the world she saw was often so shitful she didn’t want to bring a child into it. But Alec had convinced her. Not with words, but with his relentless removal of the buffel grass. His slow regeneration of the land.
‘What are you burning?’ I asked, the smell pungent, unfamiliar.
‘Arrethe.’ She waved a hand at the painting, the swirl of leaves. ‘Bush medicine,’ she explained.
She took a twig covered in thin greyish leaves from a box on the table and added it to the bowl. A flame leapt hungrily towards her hand. As I watched her scoop smoke and bring it over her head, I wondered if the ritual was Arrernte, or a blend of something traditional to this place and what she’d brought with her. At the Western Wall, I’d seen a man press his forehead so hard against the rock it had left its imprint in his skin.
‘Is mine there?’ I asked, pointing to the stories, smoke trailing through them like fingers come to remove them, one by one.
Lou nodded. Put her hand on my shoulder.
‘Yours and Nara’s,’ she said.
43
The kitchen was empty, an open packet of lasagne on the bench, the sheets splayed like a winning hand. I found Ziggy curled up in a chair on the balcony, a blue scarf looped around her neck, a book in her lap. She nodded to the chair opposite. I sat down.
‘So, how did it go?’
‘No bruises. What you reading?’
‘Rilke,’ she said, holding the book up, Das Stunden-Buch printed on the cover.
‘The Book of Hours. Nice.’
‘You know some German?’
‘Enough to order a weiss beer.’
‘Go on.’
‘No way. Your English is way too good to inflict my terrible accent on you.’
Ziggy tucked her foot under her. Lifted her face towards me.
‘Do you know what I thought, that first night I met you at the club?’ she asked.
‘Bloody tourist.’
She laughed, loud enough to disturb a wagtail edging along the railing. It had only been five days since I’d pulled up at the Italian miners’ club desperate for a drink, but it
felt like a small lifetime.
‘After,’ she said. ‘When you said that thing about opal being trapped water. Remember? I knew then that we would do something together.’
‘Come with me,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘To Ininyingi.’
Ziggy unfurled her legs, placed her feet on the ground. She’d come this far with me, it made sense for us to continue together. But I could see in the way she was looking beyond me into the garden, maybe tracing the wagtail’s flight, that, once more, I’d be going it alone.
‘It’s okay …’
‘Saul, this is between you and Jed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know.’
I got up, walked over to the railing. The ranges were scorched orange in the slipping light. She was right – I did know, had known all along. In a way this was the last journey we’d take together, Jed and I.
Ziggy reached out her foot, tapped the floor with her bare toe. How was it that with a simple gesture she could make me believe that once all this was done, some kind of equilibrium would be possible again? That she might even be a part of that future?
‘Tomorrow, then?’ she said.
‘Looks like it.’
‘I’m not great at goodbyes.’
‘Me neither.’
‘Crazy, really, when we’re both always on our way to somewhere else.’
‘Yeah. You’d think we’d have got the hang of it by now.’
Ziggy stroked the cover of the book. ‘Leave early tomorrow. It’s a long way, especially on your own.’
‘I will,’ I said, already picturing the long stretch of road I’d need to retrace to reach the crossroads to the west, though without her this time.
‘But I’ll be back,’ I promised. ‘I’m the one who always returns.’
tjukuritja
the markings of the Dreaming on the land
Pitjantjatjara language, Western Desert
44
A story is like a river. It has a source. It has its tributaries, some as far-reaching and expansive as memory, others a thin trickle, so tenuous their influx is barely noticed. Some stories arrive like torrents, unpredictable and short-lived, whereas others are always there, broad and slow-moving and dependable, their undercurrents barely detectable on the surface. Rivers connect, intersect, go underground. They give life, enable a place to thrive. And when they reach into dry lands, they often peter out. More often than not, the Dreaming tracks follow the movement of water across the continent – its arteries, its springs and wells – marking the existence of rivers that only run in times of plentiful rain, such as the Finke, south of Alice, one of the oldest river systems in the world. Usually a string of waterholes beginning in the MacDonnell Ranges, when heavy rain falls they reconnect, and the Finke starts its long journey towards the Simpson, where it’s eventually absorbed by the sands – except on rare occasions, when it merges with the Macumba and continues all the way to Lake Eyre.
Huge red river gums crowded the dry bed of the Finke as I pulled in at the rest area-cum-campsite about a hundred k’s south of Alice. There was a mix of government four-wheel drives and the usual nomadic households: dust-fringed camper trailers and shiny caravans. The drop toilets smelt of long-hauled shit, the corrugated roof distending into the heat of the morning as I dumped a load, my guts still acclimatising to bore water. On the other side of the door, someone was telling a story about a family who’d flipped their car on the Tanami, their water tank perforated in the accident, gushing into the red sand until all they were left with was the contents of a Dora the Explorer bottle. The storyteller, a slouching woman about my mother’s age, nodded to me when I exited.
I rejoined the road. It felt wrong to be heading south, to be retracing my steps. Near Stuarts Well, the road passed through an oasis of ghost gums, a Brahman cow stood by itself in a dusty paddock, its fleshy hump carving through the rising heat. In the back of my mind, like some kind of reprise, were Mina’s words. Is not a good time to be alone.
‘I’ll be right,’ I said aloud, picturing Ziggy as she’d waved me off, Caliph faithful beside her.
At the roadhouse at Erldunda, another hundred k’s down the road, I topped up my tank and ordered myself a polystyrene box of fried stuff. The woman serving was a paradigm of efficiency, managing the giving and taking of commands like the general of an army rather than a minor citizen posted on a crossroads.
Outside, I sat at a picnic table with my lunch, the only condiment the stink of diesel. The square-faced pumps were peddling Opal, a low-aromatic fuel introduced a few years earlier to combat petrol-sniffing in remote communities, when the death toll shoved a few pollies out of their comfort zone. I bit into a drumstick that off loaded its juices onto my chin, battled a storm of flies.
‘Cattle country,’ said a guy leaning against a Pajero. ‘Brings them out in droves.’
‘I’m getting used to fighting for my food.’
He dragged on a cigarette his whole face puckered around it.
‘Heading south?’ he asked.
‘West.’
‘The Rock?’
‘Beyond it, actually.’
‘What ya driving?’
‘An old Subaru.’
‘Should be right. How many spares ya got?’
‘One.’
‘Risky,’ he said. ‘How far you going?’
‘Near the border.’
‘Oh, yeah? Got yourself some work?’
‘No. I’m going to visit someone.’
‘Not really visiting country. First time up here?’
‘Yeah, though I’ve been in deserts before.’
‘Deserts.’ He frowned, like there was something fishy about the plural. ‘Well, take it easy, then. Hear it hasn’t been graded out there for a while.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Your skin, mate, not mine.’
He purged the butt beneath his boot and nodded at a bus pulling in. It sat high on its wheels, looked like it could handle a rough track.
Its passengers, all Aboriginal, disembarked. Peeled off in the direction of the toilets and the café.
‘Bush bus,’ said the guy. ‘From Docker to Alice. Half of them’ll be pissed by sundown. Poor bastards.’
I didn’t meet his gaze. He walked around to the back of his car and checked the boot handle, before turning back to me.
‘Make sure you’re where ya going before dark. There’s a bit of livestock out that way.’
‘Will do.’
‘Enough casualties on these roads as it is,’ he said and got in. Gave his engine a gratuitously deep-footed rev before driving off, south, in the direction of Coober Pedy.
Uluru 264 km announced the six-legged sign as I turned onto the road.
Lasseter Highway.
A gutful of warnings had settled hard on all that grease, and a weird fatigue was gaining a hold on me. I’d only been driving about ten minutes when I spotted the guy hauling the cart. I tried to remember how many days it had been since I’d last seen him, events playing havoc with my sense of time. Tried to imagine what it would be like to know the road that intimately. To feel its heat climbing through your boots while you watched a buzzard hunt down a finch, with neither speed nor mechanics to distract you from its death throes. To attempt, one step after another, to swallow all that space before it swallowed you.
I swerved to avoid the first road kill I’d seen all day. A huge kangaroo was lying on its back with its paws crossed, its head tilted back. A red smear on the bitumen. The claws black and curled, nagging at me. Something to do with mercy.
Another sign announced the approach to Uluru, though this time the Aboriginal name had been graffitied over in white spray-paint, only an explorer’s tag remaining.
Ayer’s Rock.
I couldn’t remember when I’d first heard about it. To me it had always been like the moon – a place I knew people had visited, but otherworldly, a celestial body somehow become earthbound. As a kid I oft
en pictured it as a giant navel protruding from the desert sands, most of its body buried beneath. About the same time as I started leafing through library books looking for photos of its shadowy flanks, the area was handed back to the Anangu – though, back then, I didn’t have a clue how partisan geography could be.
A flat red lozenge rose solid above the ripple of vegetation. Except it was the wrong shape, more like a volcanic protrusion. I geared down, took a better look, a sign for a lookout correcting the mistake I figured I wasn’t the first to make. Its vertical folds surrounded by a skirt of scree, Mt Conner had an air of being still in the making, not quite done. In the pictures I’d seen of Uluru it had always looked fully formed. Inevitable.
I leant forwards to allow the sweat to dry from my shirt. Opened the window a little, the air taking hold of the cloth, whipping it like a flag.
Not long before Curtain Springs, the trip counter hit three thousand, the sun a wedge in my lap, much of the vegetation a thirsty shade of olive. This was dune country. The desert oaks multiplied, spindly in the afternoon heat, their needles knuckled and drooping. Almost forlorn.
A split mirage shimmered off the tar.
I stretched and yawned.
And at every rise I predicted that on the other side it would be there.
45
When I’d climbed the Ruwenzoris, those mist-clad peaks had called to me like some Ugandan version of Mount Olympus, rife with the rumblings of gods long since downgraded to myth. I’d put it down to altitude sickness. To the fact that the higher we got the less sleep there was to be had. When we’d reached Margherita Peak, at a little over five thousand metres, there was nothing to be heard but the creaking of the glacier and the ubiquitous wind, the Congo Basin below – briefly glimpsed between the clouds – too far away for us to hear. I’d returned to base camp, certain that mountains didn’t speak.
But this was a rock, a single slab, the type of massive geology that could worry your beliefs. It loomed. It unsettled. Defied every photo ever taken of it. And I felt somehow proud, as if by virtue of being born in the same country I’d had something to do with it. As I passed the rammed-earth Cultural Centre, I remembered what Ziggy had said about people regularly sending back pieces of Uluru that they’d souvenired, claiming their mementoes had brought various forms of wrath upon them, a pile of guilty rubble accumulated in boxes in the admin buildings.