The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  The road veered around the base, the red walls so dominant now that you had to look up to see the sky. I pulled up in a car park, minibuses and cars from most states and both territories assembled in straight lines against the low wooden barrier. An Asian tourist group, all wearing the same khaki fly nets, were heading for the base of the rock. Minga, that’s what Lou had said the locals called tourists – Pitjantjatjara for ants.

  I checked out the map I’d been given when I’d bought my ticket at the entrance gate. To walk around the whole thing would take hours I didn’t have, but I could manage what they called the Mala Walk and still get back to Yulara, the small township servicing the tourist trade and government agencies, before dark.

  A couple of Italians dressed in full-body skins and orange sports glasses were peering at the start of the climb, one translating for the other.

  I stood behind them, read over their shoulders.

  We the Anangu traditional owners have this to say. Uluru is sacred in our culture. It is a place of great knowledge. Under traditional law climbing is not permitted.

  I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans. A part of me wanted to climb, no doubt about it. To see where I’d been, where I was going, to be at the top of the centre. But I couldn’t. It was an old argument, one Jed and I’d had too many times on the road. About the legacies of history, small acts of resistance, the liberating force of basic human decency. Even though you’re not a Catholic, you wouldn’t shit in the Vatican, right?

  The Italians tightened their shoelaces and stepped onto the rock. Their transgression felt somehow personal – spoke to something I couldn’t name – and for a moment I considered grabbing hold of the short one’s arm and hauling him back down. Giving him an earful. But then he smiled at me. His left incisor was dead, a grey peg in a clean line of white, and suddenly we were all flawed and flailing creatures. Ones who make crap decisions standing at the base of a monolith.

  He nodded at me and I only just stopped myself from waving them off.

  A gritty path led off to the left, mercifully devoid of tour groups. The sun still packed a wallop despite the advance of the afternoon, and a couple of flies trailed along for company, one particularly interested in the recesses of my ear. The Mala Walk circumnavigated the base, hugging its flanks, shaded by mulga and desert oak and bloodwood, according to a marker. Caves were eaten into the rock, some covered with paintings, others with their ceilings blackened by millennia of soot. In a couple of places there were signs asking you to refrain from entering or taking photos.

  Three French backpackers coming the other way interrupted a wagtail that had taken up residence on a bench, its mechanical chirp cutting across their Gallic commentary.

  ‘Bonjour,’ said one of the girls, flicking back her hair.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I answered, as if the lingua franca in such a place was up for grabs.

  The path continued around the base till it reached a metallic walkway leading to the waterhole at Kantju Gorge. Only a wedge of light was visible at the top of its high walls, the rip line between rock and sky, not a cloud in sight. I leant against the railing. Bugs skated across the pool’s surface. A wind rose, sucked by the heat of the walls, a long black stain descending the length of the gorge like a lizard’s tongue.

  Something disturbed the water.

  I heard it but saw nothing, the ripples spreading out, reflected onto the rock behind till it seemed that the rock itself was rippling, breathing, the whole thing kind of trippy. If you sat here long enough, I thought, you’d enter another hydrology. Water is sacred, read the sign.

  I headed back towards my car, hunger gnawing at me; that and the thought of my last beer for a while. Lou had been quick to point out that Ininyingi was a dry community.

  I passed a tour group wedged into a wave-like cave. I picked up the pace, happy to have a head start, but noticed that the Aboriginal guide was telling a story, though he rarely spoke in English. Beside him, a guy in a blue cap translated.

  ‘They came from the west,’ said the translator. ‘Walked to Uluru to invite the Mala people to join them in a ceremony. But the Mala people refused because they’d already begun their own.’

  The Aboriginal man held his hand up, then suddenly his shoulders dropped, his bent arms raised and parallel to the ground as he swivelled, each movement measured, jaunty, like a dance. When he spoke, his voice was lower now, half spoken, half sung.

  ‘When they returned to the west,’ said the translator, ‘the men summoned a huge dog-devil, Kurpany the shape-shifter, to destroy the Mala ceremony.’

  A woman with a flat arse threw me a glance, reminding me I hadn’t paid for the pleasure. I focused on the guide whose palm was raised, gesturing to features in the rock, above, to the side. He spoke as if he too was translating, paused often, one word repeated till it stuck. Tjukuritja.

  ‘Luurnpa, the kingfisher woman, saw Kurpany and tried to warn the Mala people,’ said the translator. ‘But they wouldn’t listen. Kurpany attacked and some of the people were killed and turned to stone.’

  The woman nudged her husband. Any generosity she might have once felt towards the world had obviously long since departed, along with the natural colour of her hair. I nodded a quick thanks to the guide, and left.

  Back in my car, window wound down – bugger the flies – I watched Uluru trade colours with the sun as it set.

  The road back to the township snaked through dune country, my headlights blanching the spinifex, no buffel grass as far as I could tell. As I drove, I kept looking over my shoulder, and at every move, I knew where it was. The desert oaks – reduced to silhouettes – poised in groups on the plain. Juveniles. Old growth. Heedful as ancestors.

  46

  That night I dreamt the way a man might run a marathon, aware of everything around him though only as a backdrop to his feat, surrendering to the belief that everything that is begun has its end. Never was my body visible to me, only my hands – pale palms, sunburnt fingers – annotating the story, sometimes falsifying its meaning. It was all dominated by The Rock of course, red and looming, but no longer celestial. During the night it had switched origins. The refracted ripples on its surface were voices made of water and light, and every which way I turned they followed, like the eyes in a painting, like Kurpany the shape-shifter who’d become bark, bird, grass, dog as he’d raced across country, never forsaking his true self. A mamu. A ghost. A word running like a subplot beneath everything.

  Tjukuritja.

  Tjukuritja.

  The markings of the story – of the Dreaming – on the land.

  47

  I was woken by the sound of slamming doors. Boots on grit. The grumbling of cranky kids accompanied by the harsh whispers of their parents as they packed up their campers and minivans and raced to catch Uluru in the pending light. I rolled over and tried to rustle some heat into the feathers of my sleeping bag. Normally I’d have avoided a campground, displaced suburbia that it was, but in the national park it was that or a choice of wallet-worrying hotels and my funds were already running low. Petrol prices in the interior were a killer.

  The pre-dawn exodus was followed a few hours later by the second wave once the sun had tipped over the dunes. For those who remained, the pilgrimage to the showers was soon in full swing. The men who trailed past my car all seemed to be discussing whether they’d climbed it or not and how close to zero it had hovered overnight, gadgets compared in an on-the-road version of out-teching the Joneses. A boy peered through the window at me still in my sleeping bag, a V-shaped scar on his forehead. He stuck an affable finger up at me before being whisked away by his scowling dad, though it was difficult to know which of us the father disapproved of most.

  I crawled out.

  Downed a handful of dates and a bottle of orange juice that still possessed the night’s chill.

  Followed the sandy path to the ablutions block, where guys were lined up before the bank of mirrors, razors poised. I hit the showers but they were solar
and I was the last in a long stream. To top it off, I dropped my soap and it went skidding into another cubicle. It didn’t come back.

  ‘First world problems,’ I muttered to myself.

  Two guys were talking by the basins, one Australian, the other French, going by his accent. The French guy was saying something about the Grand Ergs. I turned the water off.

  ‘It’s not like here. The Sahara is a real desert,’ he said, though the word sounded more like desire.

  Back at the car, I rearranged my gear: the tinned food, the ramped-up first-aid kit, the spare that I’d forgotten to check before I left, the dictionary Lou had lent me in a fit of solidarity. I placed the shell opal Ziggy had given me in the glove box beside the photo. Under the passenger seat, I noticed a green shopping bag. I hauled it out. Remembered why it was there.

  Inside was the blue t-shirt I’d found on the floor in Jed’s room.

  On the front was a stylised picture of a Tuareg, a cheche wound around his head, DAKAR written underneath in the same chunky design. He’d bought it second-hand at the market in Tamanrasset, a relic from the days when the Paris–Dakar rally used to stop over there on its way through the desert to Mali and Senegal. It had holes along the seams from the rigours of all that hand-washing, of rarely being taken off, an orange stain on the sleeve from a tagine we’d eaten on our way back through Essaouira. It smelt of the boarding house; of another desert.

  I slipped off my own t-shirt.

  Put on Jed’s.

  Loaded the last few things into my car.

  The CD with the word Kulini written on it in black texta was sitting on the passenger seat. I pushed it into the player. Turned the key in the ignition just far enough to give it the juice it needed. Shut the door to block the rumble of a guy testing his generator. On the way up I’d listened to the CD more than once, the hum of the road as an underscore, or in the quiet of night. But it was always the same. White noise. The slide of a finger across a nylon string. A woman clearing her throat. The song, followed by seven others, all in language I couldn’t understand.

  But never his voice – not that I could detect, no matter how close I put my ear to the speaker now, his t-shirt riding up my back.

  Not even a sound to suggest what man he’d become.

  •

  I drove around the ring road to which the town clung, a grassy tract in the middle about a hundred metres across. Headed to the supermarket for a few last supplies. The stocky woman at the checkout scanned my meagre purchases – some outrageously priced bananas, a copy of the Centralian Advocate, a Mars Bar and a roll of gaffer tape to patch the holes in the floor of my car.

  ‘Do you have a resident’s card?’ she asked, toying with the lanyard around her neck.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, unsure what it was that made her think I was a local.

  It’d take a certain type to work in Yulara, purpose-built and twenty k’s from why everyone was really here; to make it through the blistering summer. Of course, the true locals lived on the other side of Uluru, on the site of the old town, the one where a dingo had dragged Azaria Chamberlain out of a tent and split a nation. Mutitjulu. Same name as one of the waterholes at the base of Uluru. According to the park’s visitor guide, muti meant knee.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, taking the paper bag she handed me, no plastic allowed.

  At the turnoff, I pulled off to the side of the road.

  South to the Rock.

  West to Kata Tjuta and beyond.

  By mid-afternoon, all things being equal, I would be in Ininyingi.

  I adjusted my rear-vision mirror. Checked the fuel gauge even though I’d just filled up. As a kid I’d often volunteer for things that scared the shit out of me, especially if the event was to take place in the future, by which time I would have miraculously transformed into a far gutsier version of myself. For some reason I believed that by the very act of putting my hand up I could will this metamorphosis. As if all it took was movement.

  And here I was again. But this time there was no Jed beside me telling me I’d cream it, half convinced, half alert to what was actually at stake.

  In my rear vision loomed smoke, a great billowing column of it.

  Without indicating, I headed west.

  48

  Kata Tjuta loomed ahead of me. Kata, head, tjuta, many. Known as the Olgas when I was a kid, dome-shaped and rusted red, their sides were stained with black watermarks like Uluru, striation evidence of the lean of the rock, pushed over by some geological event. In there somewhere was the Valley of the Winds, like something out of Tolkien, advertised in all the promotional material. And beyond that was where the desert truly began, the one that ignored zonal categories and margins of rainfall and laid its claim in the mind.

  I passed a black stump.

  Had to laugh.

  The road wound between desert oaks, tall and spindly like the Mala people in my dream. Past warnings of floodways, though there was no water in sight. Alec had said there were brumbies in the area and, in plague proportions, feral camels, descendants of those cut loose nearly a hundred years earlier by Afghan mahouts ordered to slaughter them once their services were no longer required. The cameleers – unable to put to the knife such faithful beasts whose only crime was that they’d become technologically obsolete – had stayed on and had families, merged with a world that did not honour their skills, their tin mosques reclaimed in most part by the sands.

  A trail of large droppings was pressed into the rough surface of the road. Excremental proof. And then I saw one, the crest of its hump darker than the spinifex in which its head was thrust. It looked up. Ripped at the leaves of a tree with its square muzzle, its lashes scandalously long. The perfect filter. At the sound of my car, others broke camouflage, a whole caravan. With a lurch, the one by the spinifex joined them, hips jaunty as it strode away.

  The road skirted the southern end of Kata Tjuta till I got so used to the rise and fall of those huddling heads it was hard to shake the idea they were coming with me. By the time I reached the turnoff, the domes were only a kilometre or so to the east, but I was in no mood for sightseeing. They weren’t going anywhere.

  I pulled over and got out. This was the furthest west I’d ever been in Australia, I reminded myself, as if the point to it all was actually cardinal. Before me, the bitumen had a ragged hem, gave way quickly to dirt. There were circles in the sand where cars had turned around and gone back.

  The road to Docker River, or Kaltukatjara as it was called in Pitjantjatjara.

  A sign announced that it was one hundred and ninety kilometres to the border, another that a permit was required to continue. Mine was in my glove box, printed out by Alec after he’d shown me how to apply for it online. I’d never travelled on a road in Australia that required a permit. I got the logic of it – that you wouldn’t drive across someone’s property without permission – but couldn’t help feeling pissed off by the restriction. This is my country, loitered in the back of my head.

  I climbed back in. Leant on my inner redneck. Checked the patches of gaffer tape that were having a hard time sticking to the floor, no matter how much I’d tried to clean off the dust.

  Next stop, Ininyingi.

  Nara.

  Something that might resemble an answer.

  The road was the width of three lanes, the bloke back at Erldunda right about it not being graded for a while. I rode the edge to avoid the corrugation, floated in the sand that had collected on top, wary of the rocks that could be concealed beneath it. Of the detritus of long-haul traffic: a shredded tyre, a wine bottle, the rusting disc of a hubcap spotted almost too late.

  A soft patch sent me skidding to the middle.

  I quickly sought out the edge again.

  The road slipped from a rumble to a hum, corridors on each side where other vehicles had had enough of the endless shaking and opted for the uncertainty of the fringe. And beyond, the mulga so predominant you couldn’t get a sense of the surrounding land, tracks leading off in di
fferent directions, few signposted, a car belly-up to the sun. To the south, termite mounds reached from the ground like dirty fingers, an old top-loading washing machine beached on the verge, a cautionary tale.

  A truck came over a crest, its huge tyres channelling the fine red sand like a plough gutting the earth. Road Train warned the sign above the bumper, black on yellow.

  As I entered its wake I flipped everything closed, dust incoming at my feet, the gaffer tape having already worked itself loose. Held my breath and squinted. It was like passing through a sandstorm, the sun a bright smear, everything else muted and claustrophobic and blasted by airborne desert. It had happened to us once on the bikes, taken us completely by surprise. By the time we’d emerged we were sand people. Desert creatures.

  A whistling kite arced across the first scrap of muddied blue, a bird guide.

  I turned the wipers on, cleared myself twin ridges through which to see the world.

  Over another rise was a white ute, parked at an angle on the side of the road – obviously the road was travelled more than I’d thought. The driver’s door was open, a man standing one foot in, one foot out. His cap was turned backwards, his face as black as the scorched bark of the desert oak behind him, not the only sign of a fire having recently passed through, burnt debris scattered in the sand.

  I slowed and looked for signs of breakdown – a jack wedged beneath the chassis, sump oil, the extra-terrestrial green of radiator fluid – but there was nothing. No raised hand. No symptoms of distress. Leaning against the bonnet was a boy, a teenager, his hair bleached blond, whether by the sun or a bottle I couldn’t tell. Lanky arms jutted from his baggy singlet. He monitored my approach. Looked more focused on the cloud I was kicking up.