by Lia Hills
The town was a black cross of bitumen surrounded by unpaved streets, some of them less straight than others, winding their way through dwellings and clumps of spinifex, maybe three or four houses off each artery. And beyond that, dune country, undulating and red. Two or three kilometres to the south lay ranges, the rock dull brown, muted by dust and space, the rugged line of its summits like a torn edge.
The first building, apart from the houses, turned out to be a shop. It was painted red, a long mural covering it from end to end, a series of dot circles and winding lines and animal tracks, the words Ininyingi Store painted on a white plaque. Out front, a shiny sign advertised a new type of Magnum.
Two men sat on a bench, their backs against the wall. One wore a cowboy hat, his hair protruding from the edges grey and curly, his face so black it could’ve been drawn in charcoal. The other guy had his eyes closed. A walking stick lay on the ground beside him.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Hello,’ replied the man in the hat, and he made a clicking sound like he was summoning a horse. ‘Shop open,’ he said and flicked his finger towards it.
‘Thanks.’ I nodded.
A chain and a huge padlock hung off the metal mesh of the door. I fiddled with the bolt that secured it, the tang of the metal reminding me of a gate we’d had at school, the one intended to keep us out of the bike shed at lunchtime. Beyond it was a covered enclosure, the other end barred by the same kind of door. Three women sat on plastic seats surrounded by boxes of shopping. A baby was asleep in a collapsible pusher beside the youngest, who looked still in her teens. The child’s head lolled on its chest.
I pushed my way through the fly strips, almost ran into a young guy coming the other way. A ball-shaped speaker dangled from his neck, emitting some kind of rap, the sound so distorted the language of the lyrics was impossible to decipher. He eyed me for a moment, his top lip layered with fine black hair. Didn’t smile back.
The store was dim after the baldness of the sun, a small office to the left, a sheen of red dust challenging the whiteness of the venetian blinds that covered its window. Beyond the checkout there were three aisles. I headed in. Most of the shelves were stocked with tins and packets – the basics, without the usual glut of choice – along with fluoro work gear and floral shirts hanging above a pile of plastic shoes. The prices were twice what you’d find in the city – except the soft drink and boxed fruit juice, I noted, as I grabbed a bottle of orange juice out of the huge humming fridge. The frozen kangaroo tails were roughly the same price they’d been in Coober Pedy. I checked the pharmacy section for the saline product, but there were only tampons and jars of Tiger Balm and small bottles of antiseptic. Made-in-China sewing kits. Generic brands of painkillers. In the rush, I’d left my first-aid kit back in the car.
Most of the aisles had somebody in them. Bare feet and thongs shuffled. Women chattered. And there was the same smell as in the art centre I’d visited with Ziggy: sweat and dog and campfire.
At the checkout, an old woman was frowning at the cashier, who was holding her hand up, gold rings on every one of her fingers.
‘You’ll have to use another card,’ she said. Her white shirt had the austerity of a uniform. ‘Explain it to her.’
A girl who looked like she was the old woman’s granddaughter nodded at the cashier. Rested her hand on her grandmother’s shoulder and spoke into her ear. The old woman flicked her hand skywards, left her shopping on the counter – a loaf of bread, a tin of pineapple, two cans of lemonade – and walked out. The fly strips closed lazily around her cracked heels. The cashier went to push the items to the side, but the girl paid cash for them. Slipped the change into the pocket of her shin-length basketball shorts. Without a word, she followed the old woman out.
I joined the queue that had suddenly formed as if in solidarity. In front of me, a little boy fingered a tray of sour straps and peeled one off, his mother whipping him onto her hip. The brightly coloured strip hung from his mouth like a worm from a bird’s beak, his dark chin stippled with sugar. He grinned at me, buried his face in his mother’s chest, his bare foot hooked into her back. The cashier gave me a knowing smile. It subsided as she said, ‘Three dollars,’ and held out her hand with a degree of enthusiasm that went with her accent, urban not rural.
‘Any toilets around here?’ I asked, handing her the coins.
‘Errol!’
I stepped back as she served the next person, a teenager with a Lakers singlet and an eruption of acne on his left cheek. A sign by the till read: Strictly no children served during school hours.
The door to the small office opened. A man about my father’s age stepped out, a portion of his cheek smooth from where a cancer had been removed. He was wearing a freshly ironed shirt and belted shorts and long socks, like a visitation from the fifties.
‘Yeah, mate, what can I do you for?’
‘I was just asking if there are any toilets round here.’
‘Not public ones. There is one out back I s’pose you could use,’ he said, hooking his thumb in the direction of a door framed by boxes.
‘Thanks.’
Errol frowned. ‘Where you staying?’
‘I was meant to be staying at Nara’s house, but she’s not there. Don’t know where she is, do you?’
‘Nara? She’s the one who was with that whitefella before he cleared out.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Friend of yours, was he?’ Errol thrust his chin forwards. ‘She hasn’t been in here for a few days as far as I know. You seen Nara today, Thelly?’
He glanced at the cashier, who was packing four loaves of white bread into a cardboard box. She shook her head.
‘Don’t know her really, except by sight,’ he said, scratching his ear. ‘Not much of a talker, that one, from what I’ve seen, but I haven’t been working here that long. Had a shop up north, in the Cape.’ He halted, as if something about the memory evaded description.
Behind me, I could hear Nara’s name amid the steady flow of Pitjantjatjara, the rest of the words lost on me, but not their tone. I turned around. A woman’s voice trailed off, her eyes fixed on the shoulder of the woman beside her. Somebody giggled.
‘Round the back, you say?’
‘That’s right. Just watch the boxes. Got a new load in the other day and haven’t had time to unpack it all.’
‘Thanks.’
Errol put his hands on his belted hips and leant forwards. ‘Everything all right? You look a bit … under the weather.’
‘Things haven’t exactly turned out the way I hoped.’
‘Been there, mate.’
I took a step in the direction of the toilet, but he wasn’t done yet.
‘Don’t worry, she’ll turn up eventually. Lot of movement in places like this, you see, people coming and going – family business, sorry business, that kind of thing. Makes it hard to know how much stock to get in. One minute the place is like a bloody ghost town, the next it’s swarming with blow-ins rousing because we haven’t got their favourite brand of butter. Do a roaring trade in anything sweet, of course, though we’re trying to introduce a health food line – nuts, fruit bars, that sort of thing. Working with the lady at the health clinic. Tell you what, she’s solid that one. Taken a fair bit of flack in her time, but in for the long haul. Gotta admire it.’
He gestured for me to join him beside a stand of potato chips, his voice dropping a tone.
‘I blame the missionaries. Before the missions it was all bush tomatoes and roo meat – lean and healthy they were. But now look at them, poor buggers. Half the old fellas are on dialysis, stuck up in Alice getting treatment or having to go back and forth. It’s a crying shame. And don’t get me started on religion. You’ll see them hanging around the church down past the aged care place, the ladies especially, sitting in a circle, singing hymns with the dogs joining in. They had plenty of their own culture, you know, in the old days, but it’s nearly all gone now. Flaming missionaries. Sugar and God – now there’s
a legacy.’
Errol put his hands in his pockets, relaxed into righteous indignation. Ziggy had a less clear-cut view of the missionaries. According to her, they’d done a lot to document language and, whatever their failings, had fought for local communities’ needs against the homogenising force of government policy. But Errol didn’t strike me as a man to revisit his opinions. He threw me a twitchy smile, as if my lack of outright consensus boded betrayal.
‘Anyway. Like I said, round the back, careful of the boxes.’
‘Thanks.’
He touched his hand to his forehead.
The toilet was trackable by its scent, the lid long gone, a rust line leading down to water jaundiced by the bore or piss. I took a seat. Shat pellets in small series, the fallout of being so frugal with my water supply the day before, my head sunk into my hands like Luther on the crapper waiting for an epiphany. And come it did – maybe the result of Errol’s moralising – but with the saturated force my bowels lacked.
It began, We make assertions about reasons, make assertions about cause, that one thing will lead to another and all will become clear. The first time I’d had this thought was back at Owen Springs, by the waterhole – the core of its logic was geographically located. But now, here I was. In the toilet at the back of a store in an Aboriginal community, half the mirror gone, the mouth of the tap so calcified it had teeth. No closer to an answer about why he did it.
Maybe something other than work had brought him here. Driven him north. But what?
The water ran off my hands and arms like blood onto the grubby porcelain. The rutted cake of soap was doing a fine job of shifting the dust that clung so fiercely that it could have been mistaken for the natural colour of my skin. At least I could be clean. I watched the stained water slide down my face. Sensed the epidermis already contracting from its heavy mineral content.
‘What the fuck are you going to do now?’ I asked the remaining half of the mirror.
But my only reply was the brief inflation of a cobweb stretched across the small reinforced window not wide enough ajar to let out the stink.
Back in the store, the queue had evaporated. A woman was microwaving a meat pie near the entrance. The baby on her hip teethed on a sachet of tomato sauce, shuddered with pleasure at the notched edge. The cashier was on her knees, working her way through a box of biscuits with a pricing gun, stacking them in precarious piles. Errol was nowhere to be seen, though the venetians parted briefly as I made my way out.
54
Back at the house, the only fresh footprints were my own. My gear, huddled in the corner, looked like it hadn’t been touched either. I sat on the bed. Heard the creak in the springs. Saw a magpie lark watching from the edge of the verandah.
By the ashes of an old fire, a white feather was swept airborne, rose phoenix-like.
It spun on its axis.
Leapt the fence.
There was the tap by the corner of the house, I reminded myself, and a pile of wood not far from it; and the store, and my book, at least three hundred pages left, and the ranges – maybe no one would mind if I took a walk over there around sunset, when the rock would begin its slow morph from brown to red. And this evening, I could take that mug back and see if there wasn’t an extra place around the fire. Tell them why I was here, if anybody asked, if the flames threw light on things. Or maybe I’d just explain about my car and where I’d left it, some of the other places I’d been to. Ask them about where they’d been. Vehicles they’d abandoned in the desert. Other casualties.
Over towards the ranges, a wedge-tailed eagle hovered motionless as if pinned to the sky, and I tried to remember what Alec had said, about the Arrernte name and what message they were meant to bring. But nothing came, only a glimpse of Alec wrangling with buffel grass, the way he’d laid each plant out to die. Besides, I was in Pitjantjatjara country now; another language, another world, as Lou had said.
I fished around in my pack for the dictionary she’d lent me, the plastic bag she’d put it in already overlaid with dust. Went straight to the back where the birds had their own section.
‘Walawuru,’ I read out loud.
Under W in the Pitjantjatjara section I found a drawing of a wedge-tail perched on a branch, an eye towards its name. Its eggs and fledglings were a meat source, I learned, but there was no explanation of the word’s meaning.
The eagle continued its circling.
Reminded me of that afternoon on the summit of Bishop and Clerk. Maria Island. Year Twelve biology camp. The Tasman churning against the cliffs below, I’d stood mesmerised while a wedge-tail had soared and banked with breath-stopping grace, absolute master of its realm, the sky unbroken, the sea a medley of white foam. And in that moment I’d felt an almost irrepressible urge. To dive. To feel the Tasman spit and fizz against my face, only to rise up again and claim the thermals.
The latch of the gate clinked.
Standing there, clutching an armful of blankets, was Nara.
I knew it was her, even though she was wearing a beanie and her face was half buried in the bedding. There was something about her that I recognised, though she bore little resemblance to the photo I’d carried halfway across the country. Her long blue skirt, black hoodie, the blankets were flecked with leaves and seed heads, dust holding everything together like gesso.
I put the dictionary down and got up slowly. If the world were two-dimensional, the eagle would’ve been right above her, my eyes telling me that it was anyway. And for a moment perspective seemed questionable as she shuffled forwards, her feet bare.
‘Hi,’ I said.
She wiped the back of her hand across her eyebrows and nearly dropped the blankets.
I rushed towards her, relieved her of one that was already dragging in the dirt. It smelt of smoke. Her long fingers adjusted her load, a slight stagger as she moved. I went to help her, but my hand hesitated, didn’t quite reach her elbow.
‘You okay?’
‘Saul,’ she replied, her voice deeper than over the phone.
Neither of us moved.
Out on the street, a willy-willy advanced, its red column reaching metres into the sky. It dragged leaves and air and rubbish in its wake, then suddenly collapsed as if it had never existed. Only then did I breathe out.
She looked like I felt.
Nara.
The woman Jed had loved.
Her fingers gripped the synthetic pile, fumbled, not quite sure of their load. Lip pinned beneath her teeth, blood glistened in a crack.
And then she was moving away from me, towards the house. Dust rose as if exhaled, the blankets joining the others in the corner of the verandah, a twig stuck to the shoulder of her hoodie. Her gaze took in the box of food. My backpack. The sleeping bag sprawled on the old bed like a dog dead to the world. There was a slowing, the wind lazy in the leaves of a gum. She pulled keys out of her pocket. Opened her mouth as if to speak, but didn’t.
The door required a shove before it opened. I caught a glimpse of a white wall and a poster before she turned to me, her eyes the ones in the photo, except there was a vastness to them, as if refocusing after staring into a long distance. She held out her hand.
I hesitated, and for a moment I was sure she’d withdraw it, but she moved closer, her long fingers pointed towards the ground. I took her hand in mine. Her skin was dry, her grip loose as she lowered her head. She said something, but a crow cawed. Eclipsed her words.
Nara let go.
Murmured, ‘Wait here.’
The door was not quite closed, but I didn’t look inside. I sat on the edge of the concrete slab and looked towards the ranges. The eagle was gone, flown to wherever it was that the wind and hunger took it. I let my head drop into my palms. They smelt of metal and soap and something more yieldingly animal. Through my fingers, I studied Nara’s footprint in the sand. Would she ask me to leave? And what would I do if she did?
There was the sound of water running, tapping the base of a metal sink, of its flow being
intermittently interrupted then turned off. The rattle of glass in a fridge door. Something being kicked. I batted at a fly that had moved from my wrist to my ear, but I was too late to prevent it from entering the house.
Nara was standing at the door, her neck wet, green thongs on her feet.
‘Bring your stuff,’ she said.
She held her arms out for the box of food and I handed it to her, glad of it. Her eye rested on a block of Old Jamaica chocolate I’d bought in Alice, a smile making brief passage across her mouth. So we shared a weakness.
I followed her in, saw a poster of an ochre-coloured horse with a white mane. It was running across green grass so perfect it was obscene. The house smelt desperately in need of air.
‘Put your bag there,’ she said, pointing to a rectangle of foam pushed up against the far wall, bites taken out of its sides.
To the left was a small flat-screen TV, a jumble of cables amassed around its stand, a couple of gaping DVD cases minus their discs. Beneath the poster was a black couch that looked like it had spent some time outside. More blankets.
I followed her to the kitchen. The bench was empty except for a plastic kettle, a stain around its spout, and two tins of peeled tomatoes. She took some bread from the box and found a jar of peanut butter in one of the cupboards. Made two sandwiches, the bread tearing at the drag of the knife, the kettle already on.
We took it outside, the food, the tea, and I tried not to measure each movement – to just walk and sit and eat. But she was the woman that he’d stayed here for, spent his last year with. There was so much I didn’t know. Didn’t feel that I could ask. Before I could stop myself, I was filling gaps with whatever came stumbling into my head.