by Lia Hills
‘Palya.’
At Nara’s house, no one was around, the front door unlocked, her bedroom door still shut. I shoved some apples in a bag and filled a bottle with water, found my keys skulking at the bottom of my pack. Cliff was leaning against the steering wheel when I came out, the engine still running.
‘We stop at the store to get some petrol first,’ I said.
Cliff shrugged. It was the least I could do, especially as he was going out of his way.
The store was quiet out front, except for a couple of teenage girls bent over a mobile phone. Errol was on the register, a bandage wrapped around his right thumb. He unlocked the bowser inside its metal cage, followed me back in when I was done.
‘You’ll be lucky if it hasn’t been stripped to its bones by now,’ he said, handing me my receipt.
‘You reckon?’
‘Nothing lasts long out there.’
‘I better get a move on then.’
Cliff was still sitting behind the wheel. He gave the ute a good rev as I jumped in, and I felt my blood surge. This was good. Heading out. Together. Doing something that needed to be done.
We retraced the track we’d taken five days before, Cliff with his elbow out his window, mine sticking out the passenger side, like a pair of ears. There wasn’t much talking, just the occasional reference to a track that led to a place I hadn’t heard of or to an outcrop that had a name.
‘Walawuru,’ he said as we passed a rock-strewn hill, though there was no eagle in sight.
But I didn’t question him. The way he spoke didn’t invite it. The words were like the thumps against the chassis – a soundtrack to movement. Sometimes he’d smile to himself, and I’d look out the side window and grin at the endless clumps of spinifex, as if we were all in on the joke.
‘Good car, that one?’ he asked me, like we could already see it.
‘Like an old friend.’
‘Uwa.’
The track seemed so different in reverse and in daylight that I didn’t realise how close we were to the car till Cliff flicked a finger in the direction of a stand of desert oak. I gripped the dash. Tried to see what was left.
‘Shit.’
Cliff rolled the ute into the shade and switched off the engine. Screwed up his nose. ‘We a bit late,’ he said.
Our dust masked everything for a moment, then fell away.
The tyres were gone, the drum brakes, exposed now, showing their age.
I got out. Took in the damage. Both the bonnet and the back were wide open and the driver’s window had been smashed, the glass like shiny teeth in the sand. The petrol cap had been thrown into the ashes of the fire that looked like it had had a second life.
I circled the wreck of the car I’d bought while I was still in my first year of uni, the two grand scraped together from whatever had been left over once I’d paid for food and rent and a few pots at the uni bar. It’d got me to lectures, but it had also taken me to parts of the island, and later the country, that I’d never visited before. Had been transport. Bed. The setting for a few seductions and more than one dark moment. Was possibly the most enduring candidate I had for a home. And now here it was – stripped back and plundered.
‘Nothing much we can do here,’ I said, sticking a finger into a slash in the back seat.
Cliff was behind me but I didn’t turn around. I felt sick. Pissed off. Somehow removed from it all. I heard a rustle in a branch and looked to see if it was the bowerbird, also returned. Maybe it had seen something, knew who was to blame. Could sound it out – the whole crime – with its gift for imitation. But it was only a finch, a pair of them. And if I was honest with myself, this was what I’d expected. How many rusting monuments to the limits of human ingenuity had I passed on my way out here? Maybe the desert was a fitting burial place.
‘Still sucks,’ I said, slamming the door.
Cliff was standing beside me now, hands sunk in the pockets of his baggy jeans.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘Yeah. Thanks for bringing me out here, anyway.’
He nodded, and I hoped he didn’t feel responsible in some way. That would only make it worse. The best I could offer him was a brave face.
‘I’ll check the glove box,’ I said, ‘see if there’s anything I can salvage.’
‘Uwa.’
The photo was still there, no worse off than when I’d last seen it, the Nara captured in it different to the one I now knew. Last time I’d looked at it I hadn’t even known she had a son. My torch was gone, but the ownership papers and the manual hadn’t been touched. I grabbed them, along with the photo and Jed’s CD.
‘Might as well head back,’ I said, turning to Cliff.
But he wasn’t there. He’d disappeared behind the ute. Was fossicking in the back, the sound of metal on metal reminding me of the kind of world we were dealing with here. He returned carrying a jerry can. Not the one he’d filled with water. He held it up to me, the smell unmistakable. From his back pocket he took a lighter.
‘Malpa,’ he said, and for a moment I couldn’t remember what it meant, and even when I did, it took the smell of the petrol to rouse me, to make clear what he was getting at.
Malpa, friend.
He wasn’t talking about my car. Not only. A line had been drawn, a connecting one, across time and space. Mechanics and flesh.
I took the jerry can and flipped the lid. Sent out an arc of petrol across the steel blue body, tipped it through the smashed window. Sluiced the remainder onto the bonnet and watched it trickle into the sand. Remembered, years ago, wiping dripped unleaded off the bodywork with a rag at the garage on Clarence Street – chuffed owner of my first vehicle – never dreaming that it would all end here.
Cliff was holding a mulga branch, its leaves tinder-dry. He passed the lighter beneath it and it caught instantly, a leaf surging like a match lit, smoke swelling through the flames. He went to pass it to me.
‘Wait a minute,’ I said.
I squatted. Sank my hands into the sand. Tried to scrub the petrol off, to wash them, like the Tuareg had shown us, before eating, before prayer. And for a moment, I was in another desert. Another man standing behind me.
‘All right,’ I said, taking the branch from Cliff, the heat intense enough to make us squint.
I looked at him to see if he was going to say something, or if there was anything I was meant to do, but his hands were back in his pockets, his eyes on my stripped car. It looked naked. Vulnerable. Strangely defiant.
I threw the branch.
Flames rippled across the bonnet, rose up from the sand.
Tore like a snake invading every orifice, taking possession, purifying as it went.
I stepped back and looked at Cliff. He nodded to me, like there’d been some prior agreement. That this was why we’d come out here. No other act could fit these circumstances. Like the placing of a wreath, or the lighting of the boat before you pushed it away from the shore.
Flames leapt from the driver’s window, the industrial stink of burning plastic rivalling the petrol soaked into my skin. I wiped my hands on my t-shirt. The Paris–Dakar symbol – a faceless man in a cheche – stared back. It was the t-shirt I’d found at the boarding house. The one that had belonged to Jed.
I took it off. Held it to my nose. But it was too long ago.
Cliff was watching me but it felt okay. He’d handed the moment to me when he’d handed me the jerry can.
I moulded the t-shirt into a ball.
Aimed.
Tracked its trajectory as it flew messily towards the flames.
I want to be thrown to the wind in a place like this, Jed had decreed, and I hadn’t been there to stop them, the day of his burial – maybe it wasn’t even my right – but here I was now, in some crude way, honouring a friend’s wish.
Black smoke billowed, pumped into the sky, a small explosion pushing me back to where Cliff was standing, his boots rooted in the sand.
I found my stance too, front on to the f
lames.
Hands sunk in my pockets like him.
And together, the two of us, we watched it burn.
73
Our dust chased us into Ininyingi, the town as empty as it usually was when the store was closed for lunch. Cliff drove straight to his place, where we found the boy lying on an old couch on the verandah.
‘Thanks,’ I said, as we got out of the ute.
Cliff nodded.
Adjusted his hat.
On the way back, we hadn’t spoken of the burning. The flames had said it all. I was wearing a checked shirt he’d found in the back of his ute. My shoulders tugged at its seams.
‘I’ll wash this before you get back from Alice,’ I said.
‘Best one, that one,’ he said, grinning at the colours faded to a ghost of themselves.
The kid hauled himself off the couch and came over, wiping his eyes. His nostrils flared as he approached us. No doubt I still stank of petrol.
‘So what’s happening in Areyonga?’ I asked Cliff.
‘Family,’ he said, though the boy looked away, suggesting there was some other purpose to his journey. ‘Wife’s sister there, and my two little daughters.’
‘I didn’t know you had kids.’
‘I got three girls,’ he said, nudging the boy. ‘Wangka pulka.’
They both cracked up, Cliff throwing his head back.
‘Too much talking,’ he translated, picking up his hat, which had fallen. ‘But one in Melbourne now.’
‘Melbourne?’
‘Uwa, at that big school there. I been to that city once. Played at a big concert. Sydney too, and Adelaide.’
‘Real jetsetter.’
He cackled and stroked the beginnings of a beard, the whiskers white in patches. He was a good-looking man, no doubt about it, even if a few of his teeth had seen better days.
‘You go to shire office,’ he said. ‘Sometimes they got jobs. We go hunting when I come back. Malu. Roo. Uwa?’
His voice was persuasive.
‘You never know,’ I said.
Cliff patted me on the shoulder. Maybe he thought I’d be the one to stay. That, like Thaddeus, I could find some kind of peace here, a way to balance friendship with the demands of the world.
He fished his keys out of his pocket, flicked them through his fingers to something like a tune. Kicked the front wheels each in turn. They seemed to pass muster.
‘Palya?’
‘Palya.’
He half waved, half saluted as he climbed into the cab, the boy following him, a lanky shadow. The engine kicked over, rattled in its cage.
‘Drive safe,’ I said, tapping the roof.
With a grunting rev, they drove off, and I watched them go, one hand shielding my eyes, the other restless by my side, so easily seduced by motion.
74
The Bullet shone like a new coin against the red sand. A song was piling out of the open window, overpowering the birds. The voice was a woman’s – nasal, no musical accompaniment – a dustiness to it, a mix of strained vocal cords and cheap technology. It reminded me of a song I’d come across in a cyber café late one afternoon in Accra. After three months in West Africa I’d been suffering from a bout of homesickness, the kind that can leave you feeling rudderless, and my googling of Tasmania had led me to the first-ever recording made of traditional Aboriginal singing anywhere in Australia. It was of Fanny Cochrane Smith, the last known fluent speaker of the Palawa language. The recording had been made on a wax cylinder by Dr Horace Watson, a member of the Royal Society of Tasmania, in 1903, in his backyard in Sandy Bay, just two years before her death. You could hear the rotation of the cylinder. The scratchiness, as if time itself was etched into the wax. Fanny’s voice descending as she began to sing in the old language. Guttural. Haunting. High-pitched and cadenced as a preacher as she said, I’m the last of the Tasmanians.
I waited till the song was finished before I knocked on Thaddeus’ door.
Another started up, this time even more plaintive, as if something was being held just beyond the singer’s reach. It was quickly turned off. Standing in the open doorway, Thaddeus was drying his hands with a tea towel that looked like it doubled as a mechanic’s rag.
‘Come in,’ he said, stepping backwards.
‘Thanks.’
‘You all right?’
‘Think I’m coming down with a cold.’
‘Common.’
‘So they say. What were you listening to?’
‘A woman I knew, back in the seventies,’ he said, folding the tea towel over the oven handle. ‘How are things over at Nara’s place?’
‘All right, I guess. I just saw Cliff.’
‘How’s he doing?’
‘Yeah, good. He took me out to my car. It was trashed, so we torched it.’
‘That would explain the smell,’ said Thaddeus, frowning. ‘And the ash in your hair.’
I tipped my head forwards and brushed it.
‘So now you’re without wheels,’ he said, looking at me like I’d been robbed of speech.
‘’Fraid so. Cliff offered to take me to Alice, but there are still things I need to settle here. He’s going via Areyonga. To see his wife and kids.’
‘Not his wife.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She died a few years back.’
‘You sure?’
‘Remember it well. Sad business. Diabetes, some problem with her medication. It nearly killed him. He stayed in that house for months, wouldn’t leave, no matter how much people tried to coax him out. Her sister came and got the kids in the end, took them back with her to Areyonga.’
‘But he seems so together.’
‘He’s got a darker side to him,’ said Thaddeus. ‘One you don’t see much. Started the grog running just after his wife passed away.’
‘Cliff? You’re kidding me.’
‘Unfortunately not.’
Thaddeus slumped onto a wooden chair. There’d been a box in the back of Cliff’s ute the night he’d picked me up, I remembered, pushed behind the bodies of the dead roos.
‘He’s had a few close calls with the law,’ said Thaddeus. ‘And of course folks around here aren’t happy about it, being as it’s a dry community.’
‘Why don’t they put a stop to it then?’
‘It’s not that simple.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘People are dealing with years of strife. And there’s a lot of politics and family obligations, not to mention the field day the media would have if they got wind of it. Another bloody drunk Aborigine.’
Thaddeus rolled his eyes. Tapped the table with his finger.
‘He doesn’t have a fatal flaw, you know,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I get the sense that’s how you carve up the world, Saul – those whose flaws will lead them to an inevitable and tragic end, and those whose won’t.’
Thaddeus leant back. He wasn’t done, but whatever else he needed to say seemed beyond his reach for now.
I sat myself down on the other chair, ran a finger along the spines of a box of cassette cases, all of them dusty and scratched and recorded in 1978.
‘What got you started?’ I asked.
‘Eh?’
‘The songs.’
‘Oh, those. Got stories too, hundreds of them.’
‘The woman, the one who was singing – is she a friend of yours?’
‘I suppose that’s the word you’d use.’
‘Does she live around here?’
‘Nah, long gone now,’ he said, the memory rousing him. ‘Ina was one of the old ones. Born under a bush, didn’t see a white face till she was already in her twenties. Had a laugh on her that could convince God himself to give up his wicked ways. Figured one day she’d done her dash, must’ve been in her eighties – just walked out towards the horizon and never came back. At least that’s what they say. I was in Alice, getting root canal.’
‘Would you play it again?
’
‘No, son. Can’t do that.’ Thaddeus picked up an empty case. ‘Sometimes I think I should just burn the lot,’ he said. ‘There’s stuff here that only certain people are supposed to hear and I’m not one of them. Do you understand what I’m saying? I thought I was doing the right thing, but it’s that momentum, you see, the mission that takes over, whether you sought it out or not. You fall in love with an idea, a thing, a person, and it’s like it becomes your country. The only place you feel safe.’
‘Your country?’
‘Mm. If you get what I mean.’
‘I think I’m starting to.’
Thaddeus rotated the case on its edge. It advanced with all the grace of a square wheel.
‘It’d be a tragedy if the wrong people got their hands on these.’
‘That’s a hell of a burden,’ I said.
‘Jed used to come here too, you know. He was fascinated by these recordings, was always pestering me to play some for him, like what he was looking for was stored on one of those tapes. He was riveted by anything to do with the old ways.’
‘What else did he talk about?’
‘Life here, his travels. And he had a fair bit to say about the women he’d had in his life – how the way you treat someone you love is what defines you.’
‘Sounds like him.’
‘He was pretty serious about Nara, you know. I think he believed there was something numinous about their relationship – that if they could transcend race and culture and history, they could be anything. The fact that she’s a ngangkari probably played into it.’
‘Nara’s a ngangkari?’ I asked, leaning into the table.
‘Has been since she was little. Ask her about what happened the day her mother died, out there beside the wreck.’
‘I don’t think I could. Not yet.’
Thaddeus hauled himself up. ‘Fair call,’ he said, heading over to the fridge. He offered me a stubby of ginger beer, as close as we were going to get. Took one for himself. It fizzed as he opened it.
‘I saw her father doing some kind of treatment on her the other day,’ I said. ‘Back at her place.’
‘Good man, Kata. Got a lot of time for him.’
‘He was massaging her stomach, doing this thing with his hands. Sort of in a prayer position,’ I said, showing Thaddeus how Kata had clasped his palms together.