by Lia Hills
A dog nibbled my shoelace, which had come undone. Cowered when I pulled away. I pictured the trajectory of my message back along the road to Kata Tjuta, past Uluru, up the Stuart Highway to Lou’s kitchen or somewhere in Alice. Ziggy receiving it. A loose smile, or maybe a frown.
Wondered whether to add, Miss you.
But then I was dialling, listening out for the moment when her voice would be in my ear again, implausibly real.
‘Hello?’
‘Ziggy?’
‘Hey, Saul. You made it there?’
‘Yeah. Had a problem with the car but … it doesn’t matter. I don’t have much credit on my phone card but I just wanted to speak to you.’
‘Yes?’ She was listening, anticipating, something intimate about the silence that I didn’t want to breach.
‘I found Nara,’ I said finally, returning to my original script.
‘That’s good. I was worried you might get there and find things had changed.’
‘She wasn’t home when I got here, but she turned up the next day.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Strong,’ I said, the word coming to me without thought. ‘Though I’m not sure what she makes of me.’
‘Give it time.’
‘I guess.’
‘It’s probably not easy for her either.’
‘You’re right. Things just got off to a strange start. She’s been pretty welcoming. They all have, considering.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Thanks. Hey, I better go before it cuts out.’
‘Sure.’
‘I miss you,’ I said, aware of how much easier everything could be with her standing here rather than at the other end of the line.
‘Me too, Saul.’
‘I’ll speak to you soon.’
The phone clicked, her voice gone. One of the dogs licked a bare patch beside his balls, red raw, and threw me a look that the moment construed as empathy.
‘It’s a fool’s game,’ I assured him.
I looked around me. Nara had explained that this Ngunytjima guy lived beyond the store, out towards the cemetery that could be reached by a different track to the ranges than the one I’d taken the day before. There was a column of smoke over towards the ranges, whether managed or wildfire it was impossible to tell. Closer by, smoke was issuing from behind a fence. It cast a man-sized shadow, a thought labouring: memory as an echo of an event. But the desert was a place without echo, I reminded myself.
The fence belonged to a green house, its colour more at home in temperate rainforest than out here. Four men were positioned around a fire pit. Unlike me, they all had hats on. I recognised one of them as the driver who’d picked me up the other night, who I now knew was called Cliff. He was hauling a kangaroo out of the flames, its limbs stiff, tail a rigid curve. He hurled it onto a piece of corrugated iron and began beating it with a wattle switch, the singed fur falling from the skin.
The gate was open and, before I’d had time to think about it, my feet were conveying me to the fire. The men nodded as I approached, eyed my two sidekicks, who’d taken the liberty of following me in.
‘Palya?’ asked Cliff.
‘Palya,’ I replied, gradually getting the gist of how versatile the word was, sometimes a saluation, other times, everything okay?
The dogs sniffed the air, copped a whiff of the cooking meat, but Cliff sent them scarpering with a stone. The heat had shrunk the roo’s skin around its mouth, its teeth protruding into a macabre grin. With a stick, Cliff broke the legs at the joint, revealing white bone. Stripped the sinew from the tibia and laid it on a rock, beside which two crows battled over some morsel they’d scavenged, their talons aimed but never locking.
A man with a huge belly and a chequered shirt raked the fire, killing the flames. His raking uncovered a bed of embers, the radiant heat competing with the sun. I stepped back and nearly tripped over a large branch behind me. Wind cajoled the ash, deepened the red of the coals. Carried with it the stink of burnt hair and cooked blood that settled in my nostrils with the potency of a warning. The kangaroo looked bigger, more muscular, than the two I’d seen in the back of the ute that night.
Like a man casting a net, Cliff threw it back on, straight onto the coals. He buried it with the rake till only the paws and its head and the skinned legs protruded from the ash, the stripped bones glistening in the sun, white as teeth.
‘How long?’ I asked.
The guy in the chequered shirt pointed with his mouth at the marsupial now defined by its extremities.
‘Hour, bit more,’ he said.
Cliff flipped his hand at the wrist, which I read to mean more or less.
They squatted, lit cigarettes, passed the lighter between them, but there was nothing about the way they wrapped their mouths around the yellow filters, all eyes on the pit, that told me whether I should stay or go. Cliff chucked a rock at an approaching dog, shouted something at it, dropped into a calmer voice. I took advantage of the distraction and crouched beside him. He shuffled along to make room. Held his hand parallel to the ground as if pacifying it too.
Arms resting on my thighs, I relaxed into everything. The spiny shade of the mulga. Men collected around a fire. The smell of tobacco on a warm afternoon. Even the dogs’ lustful braying. And, for a moment, the compulsion to keep moving left me.
I inhaled deeply and let it all go. Sensed myself assembling moments of stillness like premises to an argument.
The wind stalled in the trees.
A shining white tibia.
The roo sighing amid the coals.
Sorry sits heavy with this one, May had said, and maybe it was true – I’d lost few people in my life and most of them had been old, their time due. I wasn’t well versed in handling death. Our family rarely talked about it, even when it happened. It was as if the mere mention of mortality would call it in, a low rushing wind. I lacked the skills, the rites. Was making it up as I went along. But here was a place where there were rules and practices – not mine, though there was a strange comfort in their existence. It felt like I was being guided.
Cliff leant forwards and prodded the roo’s charred head with a stick.
I rose.
Pondered the glint of light on bone.
‘Do you know where Ngunytjima lives?’ I asked him.
61
Ngunytjima’s house was divided into two sections: a silver train carriage Cliff had called ‘the Bullet’, and a small stone building that served as an outhouse, a rusting tank clinging to its side. Bougainvillea stretched over both structures, a unifying hot pink. Above the door to the carriage a quote was hand-painted in black. Isaiah 43:19, it read: Panya ilytjingkana iwara palyani nyura wankaru ankunytjaku. Mununa ailuru pulkangka uru karungka ukalingkunytjaku palyani.
Out front, on one side was a rock garden – stone stacks, a geode, a fossilised bone that looked like it belonged to a lost breed of megafauna – and on the other a contorted numberplate beside a row of planted rods, a bumper bar bent into an alien creature. The two plots were separated by steps leading to the door of the train carriage, as if the monuments of nature and man required separate quarters.
I opened the gate, braced myself for the onslaught of a dog, but the composure of the front yard remained undisturbed. There was no path bar the one formed by overlapping shoe and footprints, not a single clump of grass. The only colour, apart from the bougainvillea and the red of the ground, was a chip packet that had got snagged on the bumper bar. Music was playing inside the Bullet – something classical I couldn’t place that suggested running horses. A wagtail chirruped from a rock stack by the steps, vaguely secretarial.
I knocked. Stepped back into my shadow. Inside, the rat-a-tat of a man clearing his throat.
The door resisted, then swung inwards. Standing there, with his blue shirt hanging open, was a man with a wiry beard and deep creases in his face as chronometric as tree rings. A white man.
‘Ngunytjima?’ I asked, attempti
ng to conceal my surprise.
‘Expected me to be a blackfella, did you?’
‘Nara said you were a friend of hers, so I thought …’
‘Bet you thought you weren’t racist, either.’
‘Fair call.’
He hitched his shorts, his hips not much to hang them on. On his right thigh was a large birthmark, a branded continent.
‘The name’s Saul.’
‘Thaddeus. Ngunytjima’s my bush name. I answer to either, when I’ve a mind to.’
I held out my hand and he took it, nothing limp fish about this guy.
Closing the door behind him, he came down the steps and waved a finger at two plastic seats shaded by the bougainvillea, its papery petals strewn on the ground like oversized confetti. He eased himself into one of them, his tanned legs speckled with white spots where the melanin had given up the ghost.
‘Gammy knee,’ he said. ‘Accident twenty years back, over near Lake Amadeus. Dry’s good for it. Last time I went to the coast I got that close to chopping the bloody thing off. Came back quick smart. Arthritis is the devil’s own.’
I nodded, such a flood of words after so much teased-out conversation confronting.
He gripped the kneecap as if it risked coming unhinged.
‘Saul, eh?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And you know Nara?’
‘Friend of a friend.’
‘Smart girl, that one. Doesn’t miss a beat. Best student I ever had.’
‘So you’re a teacher?’
‘Tutor would be a better word for it. Picked up a few things here and there. Hard not to, unless you’re wandering round with your eyes and ears stitched up.’
‘You speak Pitjantjatjara?’ I asked, nodding at the quote above the door.
‘Not as well as I should. Can pull out a little Pintubi and Arrernte when I have to. Most of the old fellas round here leave me for dead though, and the ladies. Ambulant bloody dictionaries. If they were down in Melbourne they’d give them a ruddy professorial chair in languages, except I doubt if anyone in those varsities knows their Yankuntjatjara from their Luritja.’
‘Probably not. Did you say varsities?’
‘Hmm, you caught me there. Born and bred on the Canterbury Plains, just south of the Rangitata.’
‘So, why here?’
‘C’est une longue histoire, if you’ll pardon my French.’
Thaddeus ran his tongue along his bottom lip as if measuring whether I was worth the spit. A lizard sidled round his thonged feet. Thrumming his nose, he tilted towards me.
‘I came across the Tasman in ’64. Landed in Sydney mid-Jan and wondered what the hell had hit me; hottest, most humid bloody day I’d experienced in my life. There I was, gobsmacked and dripping at Circular Quay with only a fistful of pounds in my duffel bag and so wet behind the ears you could sink wells there. Circular Quay sounded to me like the kind of place from where you could unlock the world – I always did have an ear for homophones. That was before they built the Opera House, of course. What a poncy building that is. If you ask me, they should shove it off the end of Bennelong Point and let it sail away to Norway, or wherever that bloody architect was from. Or Blighty – a reverse invasion. Ha! Attach Canberra to it while they’re at it, the whole bloody geometrical disaster that it is.’
Thaddeus leant back into his irreverence as if it was an old friend.
‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘Where do you hail from? Don’t look like you’re down from Alice.’
‘Tassie.’
‘Right. Know a joker called Jed, do you?’
I shifted in the chair, thought about letting its creak stand as an answer.
‘We went to school together.’
‘And the rest, going by the look on your face. He all right? Nara took it pretty hard when he cleared out, but they mostly do in the end. Even the good ones. Sometimes it’s the guilts, sometimes they get wind of something they can’t handle, and before you know it they’re hightailing it out of here. Which was it?’
‘Nara said everyone knew.’
Thaddeus cocked his head as if listening out for something. Towards the cemetery, a buzzard pitched on a thermal.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Sure.’
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘I thought you didn’t …’
‘Son, right now you look like someone just cut your liver out with a pitchfork, so either he’s gone or something diabolical happened to him.’
‘Both.’
‘That’s why you’re here?’
Thaddeus scrunched his eyes closed and lowered his head. Leant forwards on his left knee, avoiding the gammy one. He smelt of liniment, of eucalypts after the rain.
‘Don’t know if you’ve been told this already,’ he said, ‘but round here it’s not proper to use the name of a person who’s died. It’s a question of respect – for the dead, for those who get left behind. Not prolonging or amplifying the grief.’
‘Sure.’
‘And there’s a word people use instead for anybody who has the same name as someone who’s died.’
‘Kunmanara,’ I said, remembering something else Ziggy had told me.
‘Done your homework, I see. He was like that too. Had a feel for how things are done, a bit of a chameleon. But I guess you knew that already.’
I nodded. It felt strange to be talking to this man I’d only just met about things I’d learnt over years. But there was relief in it too.
‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘the whole arrangement makes sense. Once you no longer have a voice in this world, the name you answered to should be withdrawn from the language of the living.’
Thaddeus rubbed his scraggly chin. Obviously this wasn’t the first time he’d thought about it.
He looked up as if distracted by the sky.
‘In my head I still use his name,’ I said.
‘Only natural. You get used to it eventually,’ he said. ‘The way things are done. And if you allow yourself, you can see the truth in most of it. The hair cropping. The sorry cuts. Burning the belongings of the deceased. It’s about respect, like I said, but it’s also about not calling back spirits that need to journey elsewhere, so they don’t become trapped, get stuck in limbo. Ghosts have appetites too.’
Thaddeus’ eyes flared. He still had a lot of hunger in him for an old man. His confessions, the shrewd blue of his stare, were unnerving.
‘How long you planning on staying?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know yet.’
‘I only came for a year.’
‘Yeah? What happened?’
‘Fell in love.’
‘Who with?’
‘With what is more the question.’
Thaddeus clasped his hands in front of him as if the answer might be contained there.
‘I think the women have had enough of me hanging around,’ I said.
‘Why do you say that?’
‘May asked why I wasn’t with the men.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s nothing personal. Men with the men. Women with the women. Skin with skin. Been like that forever, since way before our lot turned up and started playing God. Could be they’ve just had enough of you crashing their ladies’ afternoon, splendid as it is.’
Thaddeus grinned and looked up at the sky again, his Adam’s apple oddly prominent, as if there was something unspoken stuck in his throat.
‘Now there’s a word that doesn’t get enough airing,’ he said.
‘God?’
‘Hell, no. Splendid.’
‘True. So what does that mean?’ I asked, pointing to the Isaiah quote above the door.
‘I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.’
Thaddeus closed his eyes as he recited the passage, drawing from memory not translation, then he said it again, this time in Pitjantjatjara, his tongue bending to the strange consonants till he sounded more like Cliff or Nara than any white guy I’d eve
r met.
He opened his eyes and looked at me. ‘Kind of my motto,’ he said. ‘Even if I didn’t make it up myself. There’s promise in there, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a sense of taking responsibility.’
‘Responsibility?’
‘No avoiding it.’
I looked down at my hands.
‘I should get going,’ I said. ‘The store should be opening about now.’
‘Right. Come back if you like. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Sure.’
Thaddeus eased himself out of the chair and held out his hand. Shook mine differently this time, more like Nara and the women had.
‘He was a good man, Saul, good as they come. It’s a sorry loss.’
Letting go of his hand, I searched his eyes, a little wilted with age but unflinching. Something about him reminded me of my father. A taming of sentiment. Or a decency minted in rooms where women had rarely been allowed to enter.
‘I should’ve taken better care of him,’ I said.
62
The engines of our bikes ticked in unison as they cooled in some kind of metallic duet, Jed’s Suzuki the same blue as the enamel teapot that warmed on the coals. The other men in the circle were mostly Berbers or Tuareg, their clothes a mix of Western and the roomy djellaba. All of them wore a cheche of one colour or another, drawn over their mouths. One of the men’s skin was tinted from the unset dye of his cheche, the indigo that had led to the label les hommes bleu – the ‘blue men’ Sebastián had told us about, who’d sounded like they belonged more to the world of fable.
We were all sitting in the lee of a truck. Rain had fallen upstream the night before, rushed its way south, inundating beds that had lain dry for months, sometimes years. The road below us, which dipped through a palm grove, had been overtaken by the surging oeud. Sitting behind Jed was a manky camel that farted like it breathed, with contempt. It was clearly more put out by the delay than the rest of us. We’d been on the road for months and, apart from Tamanrasset, had rarely stopped for more than a few days in each place – Béni Abbès, Timimoun, In Salah, Assekrem. And now we were on the way to the small town of Abalessa to visit the fourth-century tomb of Tin Hinan, the legendary ancestor of the Tuareg. Though really, we just wanted to know what it was like. To stand at the exact place where the sealed road ran out and there’d be nothing but desert between us and places that distance had shrouded in myth. Timbuktu. Adrar des Ifoghas. Other places we didn’t know the names of. That may never have been named.