The Crying Place

by Lia Hills

‘That he only trusted two people in his life, and you were one of them.’

  ‘Really? Shit. He never told me that. Did he tell you who the other person was?’

  Nara nodded, looked me clean in the eye.

  ‘Me,’ she said.

  65

  The women came back. Inti. Faith. Nara’s sister Amanyi, who lived next door but seemed to have a preference for Nara’s verandah and its makeshift studio, though she talked more than she painted. May emerged from the back room only once the heat had entered the house, as if her body required the collusion of the sun. And they brought their children and various other relations; even a couple of men dropped in. Something was going on that afternoon, a ‘meeting’, though I kept out of the conversation. None of my business.

  Seated on a piece of foam beneath a motley eucalypt, I gave Voss another go, rivalled though it was by such a procession of humanity. Managed half a page before hunger joined forces with all the other distractions. There’d been a packet of Monte Carlos in the kitchen last time I’d looked, pushed to the back of a cupboard by my less-munificent self, reminding me of all those years spent in share houses – the guy who’d kept the mudcake his mother sent him every birthday in an esky under his bed, the angst over communal phone bills.

  In the lounge room, Roopie was trampolining on the bighearted couch, Mandela watching him, calculating his every move. I tried to remember what day it was, whether he should’ve been at school. Mandela had his arms up, a perimeter around the younger boy, reminding me of what Nara had said: kunpu, strong one. The kitchen was empty of people, but the Monte Carlos had already been reduced to a trail of crumbs, the wrapper torn and gaping on the bench. I tried the fridge, but all that remained was a margarine container. About half of it was left. I’d been hungry enough once in DRC to suck clean a sachet of the local margarine that had a supernatural resistance to melting, but that was DRC. I returned the tub to its shelf.

  Nara came in, looked into the cardboard box I’d brought with me from Alice, but it too was as barren as the Nullarbor.

  ‘Family,’ she said, filling an empty Solo bottle from the tap.

  ‘I’ll go to the store.’

  ‘Okay. Roopie needs milk.’

  I picked my way through the mob on the verandah, May holding court. My boot caught on the loose binding of one of the blankets and I almost fell, pictured the whole lot coming with me – paintings, brushes, ladies, baggy-nappied babies, the jar of rinsing water. A kid screamed. Somebody laughed.

  The store was busy, cars parked out the front, a couple of new four-wheel drives and others that had seen better days, a few bombs that wouldn’t pass a roadworthy. Some of the people I hadn’t seen before: a group of men collected in the shade of a tree, one guy kitted out in a brown suit and trilby like he was about to go on a date. There was a definite air of expectancy; even a pair of galahs were preening themselves on a branch above the rusty ten-gallon drum that posed as a bin. Inside, Errol was unpacking a carton of salt and vinegar chips.

  ‘Morning, Errol.’

  ‘Morning.’

  ‘It’s like Grand Central Station out there. Is something happening today?’

  ‘Something’s always happening,’ he said. ‘Just need to keep your ear to the ground.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He pressed the last packet of chips into the bulging shelf and walked over to me. Leant in. He smelt of Old Spice and the chalkiness of bore water.

  ‘Canberra mob are coming today,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The white HiLuxes’ll be convoying in before you know it, like the bloody mafia they are. The meeting’s set for noon, at the shire office. People will be coming out of the woodwork. I’d lie low if I was you. Those government types aren’t keen on white faces when they’re doing business with the mob. Got myself in trouble up in the Cape, reminding people they’ve got rights. They probably had my phone tapped.’

  He tensed his jaw as if readying himself for the faceless bastards conjured by his memory.

  ‘What kind of meeting?’ I asked.

  ‘About the leases.’

  ‘Errol!’

  The cashier was shoving a credit card in and out of the machine, punching buttons as if she’d been betrayed.

  ‘Coming!’

  He waved a finger at me. ‘Like I said, better to make yourself scarce till it’s all over.’

  I bought the milk for Roopie, a packet of biscuits, a tray of frozen lamb chops, more peanut butter. A Mars Bar. A tray of vegetables sweating beneath cling film – three potatoes, some chopped pumpkin, one small branch of broccoli, a manky-looking carrot for a whopping six dollars fifty. Obviously there was more than one kind of mafia in town. I grabbed two loaves of bread from the freezer, a third for good measure, only white to choose from.

  Errol loaded it all into the empty chip box, his thick fingers making economic use of the space.

  ‘Almost noon,’ he said, as if he was Gary Cooper.

  On my way out of the store I nearly tripped over an old man. He was lying on the concrete, eyes closed, sleeves pushed up, the hair on his arms the colour of spinifex. He rolled over, spine in the sun, adjusted a jacket scrunched under his head. A band of sweat ran around his battered cowboy hat, had left tide marks. Two boys watched him from their vantage point on a wooden bench as they sucked on red icy poles, the dust on their feet like socks. A snore sent them into hysterics. The old guy swiped at a fly in his dreams.

  The Mars Bar I polished off before I reached the house, though I saved the last bite for Roopie. Made us both a few sandwiches before a group of kids, cousins of some sort or another, invaded the kitchen. Nara was deep in conversation on the verandah, so I figured the best place to make myself scarce was at Thaddeus’.

  When I arrived, he was out the back of the Bullet, filling a reservoir at the base of a garden bed planted with silverbeet. I’d seen it before, at Alec’s, but also on a friend’s farm in Tassie. Wicking. A system based on water evaporating up through the soil.

  ‘How you been?’ he asked, turning off the hose.

  ‘Yeah, all right. Nice veggies.’

  ‘Price of food round here, you need to grow your own.’

  ‘I know. I’ve just been to the store.’

  ‘They’ve got you on the grocery run, have they? You’ll need to watch that. The Lord giveth and the family taketh away.’

  Thaddeus moved the hose to another garden bed, this one filled with tomatoes, and turned it on again.

  ‘Ngunytjima. Is that like a skin name?’

  ‘More a bush name,’ he said, pinching off a dead leaf. ‘Makes me a part of the fauna. Though Thaddeus isn’t a bad name to have round here, what with all the other saints and apostles. We got an Ezekiel and an Isaac and a Jude.’

  ‘And an Ambrose.’

  ‘I see you know your hagiographies.’

  ‘Not exactly. There was a St Ambrose church near where I was living in Brunswick a few years back.’

  He laughed, hitched up his shorts. The shirt he had on was unbuttoned to the waist, the skin loose over his stomach, though you could see that he’d once been well-built.

  ‘What about Thaddeus?’ I asked, as a cabbage moth settled on one of the beets.

  ‘Patron saint of lost causes.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘Regular prophets my parents were. Destined from the moment they sprinkled holy water on my head. The day I was baptised, apparently I stared so hard at the priest that I spooked him. Not the devil’s mark, just my father’s son. He never spoke, you know, well hardly ever, but he had a stare on him that could strip paint. My mother said he communicated in different ways, and after forty-seven years together I reckon she should know. He was a farmer – wheat, mostly. He’d sit there eyeballing his land like they were speaking a secret language, his hands clasped over a manuka staff. We all respected that, kept quiet when he was around, but once he was gone for the day, the house would riot. I had four sisters who could talk the ears off a
row of corn. It was like they were making up for him. Balancing out the percentage of noise our family inflicted upon the world.’

  Thaddeus flicked away the moth.

  ‘Saul, eh? All that’s missing is the road to Damascus and a blinding epiphany. Only kind you’ll get round here, of course. Heart of brightness, if you’ll allow a loose borrowing from Conrad.’

  ‘What does that make you, then?’ I asked, nodding at a bucket of tools. ‘Kurtz with a trowel in his hand?’

  Thaddeus laughed, the kind of measured guffaw that sounded like it was reserved for insults dressed up as humour. Maybe I’d gone too close to the bone. But then he took his hand off his hip and tapped my shoulder.

  ‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I’m doing everything I can to make sure my last words aren’t, The horror, the horror!’

  ‘Know the feeling.’

  ‘Besides, I didn’t come out here with a mission. Not at all. Though I can’t say one didn’t find me from time to time. You can’t just get lost in the flow here like you can in the city. From what I’ve seen, city folk spend half their time spinning stories about how important what they do is, and the other half keeping busy enough to never doubt it. Out here, that kind of poncing gets tested three times before breakfast. People who come here with an answer for everything usually leave wondering what the hell the question was.’

  Thaddeus studied me with the same gaze that only moments before he’d trained on his tomatoes.

  ‘Reasons are slippery things,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But you’re still hoping she’ll be able to tell you something.’

  I nodded, sunk my hands into pockets.

  ‘What is it, son?’

  ‘She makes me feel calmer.’

  ‘Hmm. A woman can do that.’

  ‘She seems to have a better handle on it than I do.’

  ‘It’s not a competition.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘You gotta do what you gotta do,’ he said as the moth landed once more on a leaf. ‘Most people would’ve just gone to the funeral and considered themselves done with it. But then three years down the track you’re waking every night in a cold sweat with a shrinking sense of something not quite finished. Of obligations shirked.’

  I flinched. Watched Thaddeus uproot a weed, convinced that his straight talking had something to do with his father’s silence.

  ‘Nara started young,’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She lost her mother when she was six, in a car accident. She was there, thrown clear when the car rolled out in the desert. Her uncle was killed too, and her older brother. Nara was the only one who survived. They found her sitting in the sand, watching over the wreck.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Shit, indeed.’

  ‘I saw the scar on her arm.’

  ‘Scars aplenty round here. Just take a walk down to the cemetery. Too many young kids, people dying before their time. I’d have lain down and never got up if that’d happened to my family. Almost have a few times.’

  Thaddeus gripped his chin and sighed. I couldn’t help wondering what his connection was to this place, why he stayed. A man his age would normally be off playing bowls with his mates, or tearing around with a caravan and his missus, taking in the country before it was too late. Enjoying the fruits of a lifetime of toil. The Bullet was about the furthest thing from a retirement home I could conjure.

  ‘Bloody resilient lot,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Humour and ritual – better than drinking yourself into oblivion. Though there are a fair few who’ve taken that route too and wound up in a hell far darker than the one they imagined. You try waking up spreadeagle in the sand in fifty-degree heat with your brain shrunk to peeling point and the light stabbing into your eyes like it’s made of titanium.’

  ‘Sounds like you’re speaking from experience.’

  ‘Shame can send a man into a spiral.’

  ‘Shame?’

  ‘Mm. But then you realise you’re no bloody use to anybody like that,’ he said, clucking his tongue. ‘So you get up and shake the dust off and do what you can. No man burdened with guilt ever put a sure foot into the future. Do you hear what I’m saying?’

  Thaddeus blinked hard, and I sensed there was a constant relocating with him, between the historical and the personal. He grabbed a knife from the bucket and cut some silverbeet off at the base of its splayed white stem. Held it up to me like it was an olive branch. And I took it, the rubbery surface of the leaf as multifaceted as a brain.

  ‘Want to come inside?’ he asked. ‘I could murder some of these greens.’

  ‘Sure.’

  He cut off a few more stalks and I followed him in. It was even warmer inside, the air-conditioner by the entrance silent. There was a couch, a table and, lining the far wall, a kitchenette, complete with a microwave that looked like it dated back to a time when kids still did nuclear drills at school. The bedroom I took to be behind a wall made of thin panelling, an unframed dot painting stuck to it with masking tape. On a scarred wooden board, Thaddeus chopped the beets, threw them into a pan, where they sizzled and wilted. I sat at the table, a retro formica job with a metal strip around the edge. In a box at the far end were some old tapes.

  ‘What are those?’ I asked, noticing that there were more on the far side of the room, some in plastic stackers, others arranged in boxes.

  ‘Recordings.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Songs.’

  ‘What sort of songs?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘One of those missions that tracked you down?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  Thaddeus pulled the pan off the heat, placed it on top of a trivet in the middle of the table, an old brake disc, the kilometres measured in concentric grooves. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand and threw me a glance, once more weighing me up. Ran his finger over the row of cassettes and extracted one. Wiggled it free like a loose tooth.

  ‘This one’s Nara’s grandfather,’ he said, handing it to me.

  The case was dusty and scratched, March 1983 written on the cardboard insert, and a name: Gilbert.

  ‘It was recorded not long before they moved here,’ he said.

  ‘To Ininyingi?’

  ‘Yep. He and Nara’s father were instrumental in bringing everyone back. They put in the claim, applied to set up an outstation, made it happen.’

  He waved towards the window. A cobweb thick with dust waved back.

  ‘What you’re looking at is the fulfilment of a dream,’ he said, ‘all raggedy edges and wind drift and people making the best of things. There was a lot of energy in those times, a lot of hopeful thinking. Nara was the first child born here – since the old days, that is. Bet you didn’t know that.’

  Thaddeus gave me a quick flick of his eyebrows. First born after the return to the homelands – it had a distinctly mythological feel. There was so much more to Nara than even my late-night photo gazing had managed to concoct.

  ‘Listen, I think I’ll give the greens a miss,’ I said.

  ‘I got mustard, the French stuff. Order it in.’

  ‘I should be heading back.’

  ‘She’s not going anywhere, you know, at least for the time being.’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘You want to be careful there.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She was with Jed.’

  I bit my lip, remembering the taboo – unsure where Thaddeus ended and Ngunytjima began.

  He stirred the beets, steam rising off them.

  ‘She may look like she’s doing okay,’ he said, ‘but I know her, she runs deep.’

  ‘I get that.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Thaddeus dropped the spoon into the pan. Something about my coming posed a problem for him – I could see that now. Maybe, like Lou, he’d seen too much shit go down, too many people get what they came for, no thought as to what th
ey left in their wake. Maybe it was something else.

  ‘You’re both in this,’ he said. ‘Hell or high water.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Thaddeus collected the spoon, the smell of chlorophyll rising from the pan, its gradual giving-in.

  ‘Be sure that you do, son. Be sure that you do.’

  66

  When I got back, Nara was sitting hunched on the verandah. An old man was bent over her, his head swathed in thick grey curls, his arms, exposed to the elbow, sinewy and covered with white hair. One of his hands rested on her shoulder, while the other massaged her stomach, pressing into it with a circular motion. Behind them sat Roopie, May and Inti, Roopie copying the actions of the man, kneading his own stomach like it was made of dough. Nara didn’t look up as I approached, though the man registered my presence with a glance that didn’t disrupt his work. He cupped his hands and pointed them briefly in front of his solar plexus, a quiet stream of Pitjantjatjara emitted from his mouth.

  I loitered in the yard till May waved me over, pointed with her mouth at a blanket by the door. Nara watched me sit, but her eyes seemed far away. Muttering, the old man flicked his hand as if ridding himself of something.

  ‘Ngangkari,’ said Inti.

  ‘Healer,’ May translated, the h all but swallowed up.

  The healer looked at me, tipped his head, and went back to his work.

  ‘May got ngangkari for babies,’ said Inti, taking May’s hands and turning them over as some kind of proof. May’s palms were smooth to the point of looking polished, the lines inlaid with black.

  ‘Uwa. Iti, tjitji,’ said May, pointing at Roopie, who had his hands cupped in front of him like he was holding something precious. Tjitji, I remembered from the dictionary, meant kids.

  The old man began sucking on Nara’s shoulder, her t-shirt pulled to the side. Her eyes on the ground, she remained still as he drew away and spat into the sand. The women chatted between them, obviously used to such a scene, Roopie so absorbed in his mimicry that for once he let me be. But it didn’t feel right for me to be watching.

  I nodded at May and headed inside, past the kitchen with its empty benchtops to the loo, worse for wear after the traffic from the night before. As I lifted the seat, the sun cut through the small window above it, lit up a network of spiders’ webs till they appeared also made of glass. There was something incredibly fragile about what I’d walked in on – the healer, his firm but attentive touch on her body, my even being here. Thaddeus was right. I needed to take care.