The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

  ‘Mate,’ he said, like a man about to offload some homespun wisdom.

  He climbed onto the bench, his toes gripping the metal handles of the drawers, prehensile as a gibbon. With no butter, the bread tore, the crust separating like a rotten windowframe as he lifted it by the corner and wolfed it down.

  ‘You’d better not be allergic to peanuts,’ I said.

  No parroting this time, his small teeth already sunk to the gums in doughy bread. His feet drummed the cupboard door, a clear rhythm.

  ‘Ssh. You’ll wake the others.’

  ‘Ssh, ssh, ssh,’ he repeated like a leaky valve.

  He studied me, eyes drifting from my mouth to my throat to my mouth again, and for a moment I was reminded of my sister’s son, Braydon. The one who swung without warning between intense focus and withdrawal. His teacher had advised Kelly to get him tested, find out where he was on the spectrum, like he was some kind of divergent colour. Kelly had left me alone with him one afternoon while she’d taken the girls to the cinema, though I’d never been sure whether it was because she needed a break or if she was giving me a crash course in fatherhood.

  Roopie leant over and turned on the tap. Observed the water thundering into the sink. I still needed to piss.

  ‘Precious stuff,’ I said, turning off the tap. ‘Be back in a minute.’

  He shook his head as I walked away.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Bread.’

  ‘So, you do understand?’

  ‘Bread. Yes.’

  ‘In a minute. I gotta take a leak first.’

  He jumped down, almost fell to his knees. Tailed me, his feet slapping on the floor.

  ‘Wait here, all right?’ I said, closing the door behind me.

  But it didn’t stay shut for long. His eyes moved from the raised seat to my unzipped jeans, the irises larger than the whites.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Shit.’

  I was going to have to watch myself or he’d end up with a colourful repertoire. I looked down the hall, but there was no sign of Nara or May – no way I was taking a piss with the kid in here.

  ‘Back to the kitchen,’ I said, spinning him around and doing up my fly.

  He resumed his perch on the bench, monitored each part of the preparation of his sandwich with the fastidiousness of a foreman. Once I was done, he held out his hand.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Num-num-num,’ he mumbled, tucking in.

  ‘What did you say?’

  The direct question cut him off. But I could still hear it, the num-num-num – the sound so childish, so familiar, dredged up from out of nowhere. Salted rice and the tail end of la grippe du desert. A spoon jabbed against my lip. The silliness of a man babbling to another man the kind of encouragements usually employed by coaxing mothers.

  ‘What can you tell me, little man?’

  The boy squinted, tweaked my sleeve with his toes, but whatever it was he had to offer was secreted by a lack of language and years.

  ‘Roopie,’ called a voice from the doorway.

  Nara was leant against the jamb in the same clothes as the night before, the same black beanie. Her son went to her and she pulled him into her stomach, unleashed a flood of Pitjantjatjara. She massaged her forehead with the back of her hand.

  ‘Back in a minute,’ I said, slipping past them.

  The toilet door stayed closed this time, though I kept an eye on it.

  Roopie was leaning against the kitchen wall when I got back, flapping his arms as if in some not-too-distant past they’d been used for flight.

  ‘You talk,’ she said, shaking the water from a spoon she’d rinsed beneath the tap.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Last night. I heard you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Bad dream?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t remember.’

  She dug out the last of the peanut butter with the spoon. Sucked on it.

  ‘How old’s Roopie?’ I asked, shifting my weight onto the other foot.

  Nara put the jar on the bench. ‘Three.’

  ‘He’s small.’

  I folded my arms over my chest. Jed had headed north a little over two years ago – the calculation was a no-brainer – but something in me didn’t want to accept it. Nara straightened to her full height, taller than any of the women I’d ever known him to be with.

  ‘His father is in Pukatja,’ she said.

  ‘Pukatja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I’d seen the name on a map Lou had shown me: a community south-west of Uluru, over the border in South Australia. Pukatja was a return to the old name, though many still used the mission one, Ernabella.

  ‘I’ve never been there,’ I said, as if the place was the key to what she’d said. ‘I’ve only seen it on a map.’

  ‘You like maps?’

  ‘Sure. They’ve saved us more than once.’

  Her jaw tensed, again that squareness, a finger picking at the edge of the beanie.

  Roopie shuffled over to her, grabbed at the bump of her breast barely discernible beneath the hoodie. She may have been taller than the others, but she had that same mix of strength tempered by vulnerability. As if love could conform to type.

  As if the world could perform such symmetry.

  A son in return for a man’s life.

  59

  When I travelled, one of the first things I’d do when I arrived in a new place was stake out a bit of territory. Sometimes it’d be a seat in a café, set myself up as a regular by my second cup of coffee. Sometimes it would be a particular tree under which I would sit in view of my tent, read a book, collect a few thoughts around me like someone might put up a paling fence. It was the only antidote against an otherwise loosening spell – the kind of trance that could convince you that you needed no one, no place, that your freewheeling made you invincible. That sense of invincibility had nearly got me killed, both of us, and on more than one occasion. Riding blind into the sun near Timimoun. Sweet-talking my way out of being shot by a rogue sergeant in Mali. Deep down we knew that there was a fine line between daring and a death wish – so fine that the only thought in that wavering moment was whether this would be a spectacular enough way to die. That the way we lived was a form of madness. But distance, risk, novelty sanctioned it, nudged us forwards, forever onwards. We were nomadic. Believed our very survival depended on it. Though there was no real rhyme to it, other than the constant negotiation of that thinnest of lines.

  Often that seat in a café, the shade of that tree, were what kept me on this side of it.

  In Ininyingi, it was Nara’s verandah.

  I was sitting there, giving Voss another bash, when two of the old women I’d met the day before arrived. The shorter one nodded to me, then called out to Nara, her voice gravelly with age but still strong. Roopie exited the house first, his Spiderman t-shirt swapped for a pair of Hulk shorts and a bright pink sweatshirt. Someone had even had a go at grooming him. He was followed by May, then Nara, who was carrying a towel. Nara introduced the two women: Inti the tiny one with loafers, Faith with her breasts beneath her flowery top reaching almost to her waist.

  I patted my chest and said my name.

  ‘Saul,’ repeated Inti, her tongue clicking as if recalling some association.

  The women sat down on the tangle of blankets lying on the verandah. Whatever they were talking about seemed important. May led the conversation, the tips of her fingers brought together on one hand in a gesture I’d once seen a guy in Italy use to tell someone to watch his step.

  Nara waved for me to follow her into the house. Beside the TV was a pile of canvases I’d noticed that morning when I’d rummaged through my pack for something half clean to wear. Each canvas was about half a metre across, a border of raw canvas left around the edge, the black base coat lapping into this space. Nara shuffled them together like an oversized deck of cards and passed them to me. Carrying a carton, she headed back outside and pointed to a space
between the blankets. I put the unfinished paintings there, the source of the patches of colour on the concrete no longer a mystery.

  May reached over and leafed through the canvases till she found the one she was looking for and brushed sand off it with the back of her hand.

  Nara handed around small tubs of paint, negotiations made as the women redistributed them according to colour. In the centre she placed an old ice-cream container full of brushes and bamboo kebab sticks. These were also picked over, Inti selecting a thin-tipped brush with a snort of approval.

  ‘Kapi,’ Nara said to Roopie, and handed him a paint-splattered jar.

  He took off around the side of the house and I followed. He positioned the jar underneath the tap and tried to turn it on, but I’d screwed it tighter than he was used to and it resisted his attempts. Roopie let go of the tap and scowled at it. His fingers squabbled with mine as I loosened it enough for him to manage it on his own.

  The water thudded into the jar and onto the sand, threw up globules of red that stained his legs and my jeans. He lifted the jar up and attempted to hold it in the stream, the water rebounding over his sweatshirt and his shorts and his hair till he was soaked. He whooped. Slapped his feet in the puddle, his hips jerking.

  ‘What you doing?’ I joked. ‘Tap dancing?’

  He gave me the dumb look my comment deserved. Then he walked away, jar held to his chest. Water still thundered from the tap. A widening river foamed through the sand.

  ‘Oi, Roopie,’ I said, but he’d already rounded the corner of the house.

  I cut the flow. Red grains quivered on the surface of the small pool and were reabsorbed.

  Back on the verandah, the women were already at work. May, despite her size, was sitting cross-legged in front of a canvas, one foot splayed across it. She dipped the blunt end of a stick into yellow paint and, making small dots, added to a series of what looked like pathways leading between white circles. Faith worked fast, a red circle in the centre soon surrounded by four brown arches, big chunks of colour. A quick look at the other paintings suggested that she was laying a base. On her right hand she wore a thick silver ring, luminous against her black skin. She leant over and pointed the end of her brush at a section Inti was working on and said something. All the women nodded.

  ‘Uwa,’ agreed May, wiping an eyebrow with the heel of her hand.

  She added black dots to one of the pathways, a deep pink underlying everything, maybe earth, maybe sky. Roopie was watching me, his foot resting against the blue wall of the house, the wet patches on his sweatshirt like a map of unnamed territory. My shoulder still ached from where he’d jumped on me that morning so I ignored him when he gestured for me to come over. Giving up on me, he crawled between the women and reached for a brush, but his hand was quickly batted away. May spoke to him in a low voice and he settled beside her, his head nestled on her foot, the rim of her heel craggy.

  Nara was also bent over a canvas, the side of her hand leant against it as she painted a circle inside a circle. Overlaid in different shades of blue, circles in other colours were visible too – gold, green, white – the concentricity, its repetition, making it appear as if the canvas were breathing.

  ‘She always paints the same thing,’ said Nara, pointing to May’s canvas.

  With the end of her stick, May outlined the series of circles. I counted them, remembering what Ziggy had told me about one of the longest songlines in the country.

  ‘Seven sisters?’ I asked, sitting down beside Nara.

  ‘Sisters, uwa,’ confirmed May.

  She straightened her back, swayed to the side. Bent once more over the canvas, her body having performed a loop. Her black skirt was flecked with paint, the points of colour against the dark cloth like a mad galaxy, a smear where she’d cleaned the end of her stick a comet with a fiery trail.

  I leant back against the wall. Rotated my shoulder a couple of times, monitoring the progress of the pain up through my neck and the right-hand side of my scalp. The sun flared off patches of bare concrete. I rubbed my fingers across my eyelids, detecting the sand collected there. When I opened them again, May was watching me. She flipped her chin at me as if to ask, You all right?

  ‘Uwa,’ I said.

  She dipped a brush in red paint. On her lip was a green lump about the size of a five-cent coin that hadn’t been there before. I tried not to look at it, but it was so globular and the colour of cud. Roopie stirred and she opened her mouth to soothe him with words, revealing the gaps between her teeth, her tongue prodding the lump. With her spare hand she pulled it off her lip and, rolling it between her fingers, placed it behind her ear. Faith watched this too and said something to her, causing May to fish around in the pocket of her skirt and pull out an old shoe polish tin, which she handed to Faith. Faith removed the lid, pinched some of the green powder inside it and placed it on the inside of her lip, moulding it with the end of her finger. Inti refused the tin when it was offered to her.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Mingkulpa,’ said May. ‘Bush tobacco.’

  I raised my eyebrows and the women laughed, Inti wheezing then breaking into a phlegmy cough.

  ‘We get it that way,’ she said, flicking her hand in the direction of the ranges.

  ‘Right,’ I said, grateful they didn’t offer me any.

  Nara was mixing dark green paint with a little black, the blend murky and bruise-like against the transparent plastic of the paint pot lid.

  ‘Who taught you to paint?’ I asked her.

  ‘All of them.’

  May shifted her foot, woke Roopie, who rolled off the verandah and went to sit in the sand. He drew circles with a discarded kebab stick.

  ‘Do you sell the paintings when they’re finished?’

  She nodded.

  ‘In Alice?’

  ‘At the art centre.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  She sighed and rinsed her brush. Pointed with its tip in the direction of the store.

  There was a sucking sound as May pulled her hand away from the canvas. She wiped the end of the kebab stick on her skirt and leant towards Nara, spoke to her, her eyes resting on me.

  I waited till May had returned to her work before asking, ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She wants to know why you aren’t with the men.’

  ‘I don’t know any,’ I said, leaning back against the wall, the sun brutal through my jeans.

  Though, of course, that was only half of the truth. I’d come to see her. To do whatever it would take to find out how a man can go from hailing life to throwing it away. And what any of it had to do with the desert, the Centre, with the way that circles laid upon circles can give the impression of breathing. And then there was the fact that their work – the way they were sitting there together – was somehow consoling.

  ‘Tell her sorry,’ I said.

  May’s tongue clucked as she dipped the stick into the black paint again. She’d understood me of course – I’d had enough evidence of that the night before – her English learned at mission school and during years spent in service, from what Nara had said.

  Roopie left his sandpit to join me against the wall. May watched him, leant over to speak to Nara once more, her voice even lower this time. I tried not to let it, but it was starting to get to me. Nara was using the pointy end of a stick to paint a rim of fine dots, and it was impossible not to see how good she was – the effect that layer upon layer so precisely executed had, the questions it posed about the static and the moving.

  Again, I waited till May was done talking.

  ‘Can you tell me what she said?’ I asked Nara.

  She screwed up her face, as if all acts of translation came at a cost. Threw a glance at May, whose toe was tapping out a rhythm.

  ‘She said, Sorry sits heavy with that one.’

  I slumped, unclear what she meant at first, before I remembered how the word equated with grief.

  May was humming under her breath. Inti
joined her. The notes stuck in her throat, disintegrated into a rasping cough.

  Nara flicked her wet brush, made a line of dark splotches on the concrete.

  ‘Go and see Ngunytjima,’ she said, pinching the hairs of the brush between her fingers.

  ‘Who’s Ngunytjima?’

  ‘An old friend.’

  60

  A couple of stray dogs followed me to the store, took a circuitous route between bits of rubbish and the trunks of trees. The chain was padlocked this time, no old men outside. The store didn’t open again until three according to the cardboard sign, the hours scrawled in green texta. One of the dogs snapped at the hind leg of the other. I rotated my shoulder. The painkillers would have to wait.

  Edge edge, taunted a galah from a battered eucalypt.

  It flew off, a dog’s muzzle monitoring its arc and that of the pink and grey squadron that joined it. And I could’ve followed it too. Hiked back in the direction from which I’d come that night, pressed up against a kid who’d smelt like animal fat. The women were sick of me – that much was easy to tell. Just one more whitefella rolling into town with a fistful of questions and not even the means to leave.

  Dogs flanking me, I headed over to the payphone opposite the store. Freestanding, a metal cage framed its back and its sides. I presumed it was the one I’d called from Lou’s kitchen that day, the scream returning to my mind, competing with the screech of the one galah that had stayed. I focused on the numbers written in texta on the board behind, a palimpsest of past calls. A few names were scratched into it, barely legible, one of them apparently a ‘slut’. The receiver was shiny in the sun.

  I fished around in my wallet. Found an old phone card I’d bought ages ago when I was in the north-east corner of Tassie and my mobile had kept dropping out among too many mast-sized trees. I inserted the card. I had only three dollars fifty left. Luckily the phone could do SMS. I punched in Ziggy’s number, my finger wandering over the silver keypad as I thought about what to write to her. How to encapsulate it all in one hundred and sixty characters.

  Hey Ziggy. Have arrived. Found Nara. Still sorting things out. Saul.