by Lia Hills
I rubbed the grey stain with my boot. If the belief that Jed had gone back to his ‘country’ was what was getting her through, what right had I to shatter it?
‘He loved you,’ I said. ‘That much I know.’
Nara slid to the floor. Crouching beside her, her son stroked her face with his small fingers.
77
The business of grieving took over. Nara needed to see people. I needed to walk. There was urgency in the air when I arrived at the store, people speaking in hushed voices as if they were gathered outside a place of worship not business. An old man was sitting on the ground outside, his head dropped to his chest. A dog sniffed at his bare foot, prodded the cracked heel with its nose. The man was moaning to himself, his body so collapsed in on itself it was as if he’d been robbed of his skeleton. I looked away, but there was no comfort to be found in the graceful careening of a magpie lark.
Inside, Errol joined me in front of the chocolate stand.
‘Terrible business,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Worst thing about the job – especially when it’s someone young. Barely started in on life, and boom: it’s all over. Crying shame.’
From outside, the sound of wailing so similar in pitch to what I’d heard the night before that it had to be the same voice.
‘Can’t stand that,’ said Errol, gritting his teeth. ‘It really rides my nerves. Where I come from, well, you keep it to yourself. No use making it worse than it already is, getting yourself all worked up. You know what I mean?’
I riffled through the chocolate bars as if the remedy to the morning’s events lay hidden there.
‘You after something special?’ asked Errol.
‘Jamaica Rum. Old Gold.’
‘Don’t stock it.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I know someone who likes it, that’s all.’
‘I can order some in,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to get a lot of extra stock in anyway with all the sorry business that’ll be going on. You watch, there’ll be carloads arriving before you know it, family from all over the place – Muti, Docker, Pukatja – and they’ll be needing to be fed.’
I checked his face for any hint of profiteering, but he looked more exhausted at the thought of it than anything else.
‘Where’s sorry camp?’ I asked.
‘Out past the football field,’ he said and waved his hand in the general direction. ‘Where those old dome tents are.’
‘I wondered what that was.’
‘Not a very nice spot for it,’ he said.
I pictured the waterhole, its towering red walls.
Errol leant in. ‘And it’ll probably only get worse,’ he said. ‘The bloke who ran the store before me told me it gets pretty messy out there, all the dogs hanging around and no proper toilets. And once they settle in, they can be there for a while. Months sometimes. The last place I was working …’
‘I should be getting back.’
He looked at me sideways.
‘I’ll get on with my orders, then. Jamaica Rum, you said.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Closest thing you’ll get to a drink round here. You look like you could do with a dram of something to pickle that cold of yours.’ He laughed. ‘I caught a whopper when I first moved out here. They got a whole different breed of bugs. Got some eucalyptus oil, if that’s any help. It’s over with the cleaning products.’
‘Cheers.’
I located the oil. Joined the queue. Two women were bent into the same reverent hush as the ones I’d seen outside, their bright floral tops incongruously cheerful. Thelly was holding out her hand waiting to be paid, her wrist limp.
The other woman sighed, a furtive glance pitched in my direction. Thelly sighed too, her open palm jiggling.
I dumped the bottle at the end of the counter and walked away, Thelly watching me go.
Outside, the old man was still in the same spot in the sun, head bent, the dog at his side jerking mid-dream. I needed to get back to the house, or maybe go to Thaddeus’, anywhere, anything so that inertia didn’t set in. But I could feel it like a magnet concealed beneath the dirt, rooting the old man to the place where he sat, rocking slowly back and forth. Restraining me too. Allowing me only to watch as a willy-willy travelled down the main street.
It halted for a moment to collect the rubbish at the base of the bin, whisked a chip wrapper into the air, spun it mercilessly, leaves nattering against each other as if that were the true sound of wind. And again, the wailing, coming from behind the school this time. Though it could’ve just as easily been emitted by the sky, the kind of protest you hear when a front is on its way.
I looked up, the usual faultless blue troubled by a few clouds to the west. Others were forming in the south where not long ago there’d been none, amassing like obedient sheep. Ngangkali, I remembered from the dictionary, rain clouds, the promise of moisture in the air as if the ground and the trees and my skin had merely forgotten about it for a while, the desert only an idea. Maybe it would rain. Maybe that finger of dust would reach into the clouds and coax something from them.
‘Saul?’
Thaddeus was walking towards me, a weathered Akubra pulled down around his ears.
He frowned. ‘I guess you’ve heard the news,’ he said. He looked across at the man sitting in the dirt. ‘Old Leo. The boy was his grandson. I hate to see him like that. He’s one of the senior law men.’
Thaddeus closed his eyes and massaged his forehead, each stroke culminating at the bridge of his nose as if he was summoning a cure to that point. The lids flickered open. ‘Be back in a minute,’ he said.
Thaddeus strode over to the old man, his gammy knee dictating his gait. With difficulty, he squatted beside Old Leo and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder, but only the dog responded, licked him gratefully on the wrist. Thaddeus spoke, his mouth close to the man’s ear. Checked Old Leo’s face and tried again, but his attempts at resuscitation were met only with stillness. He hauled himself up. Walked back to where I was standing.
‘I’ll go and get his daughter,’ he said. ‘That is, if she hasn’t already gone out to the camp. How’s Nara doing?’
‘Okay I think.’
‘It’s the accumulation – can play havoc. No time to recover.’
The dog barked at the willy-willy, which was travelling again. Snapped at an airborne wrapper like it was an attacking bird, was briefly airborne itself. But the old man remained a statue.
‘A monument,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘That’s what he’s doing.’
‘He can’t bear it, is all. He adored that boy.’
‘You don’t understand.’
Thaddeus scratched his chin; it looked to be working up a beard.
‘You should be getting back to the house,’ he said. ‘Sounds like that lurgy you picked up is getting worse.’
‘What about you? Will you be going out to sorry camp?’
‘At some point. I know the family well. And there’s a skin connection.’ He put his hand on his hips. ‘Saul, it wouldn’t be right.’
‘I know.’
‘I see what you’re thinking. The appeal. But you have to find your own way, you understand?’
I nodded.
Thaddeus brought his fist to his mouth. Spoke into it. ‘Your own way,’ he repeated.
He turned to look at the dog that had ramped up its bark. It was facing south, ears vigilant, its muzzle tracking the progress of the willy-willy, which was headed for the ranges now. A spiralling pink column the height of a man.
78
The door was open when I got back, the verandah deserted except for its community of blankets. I waited. Braced myself for Roopie to come flying out and tackle me. But the house was quiet, the only traffic a crow pecking at its shadow by the fence, a car in the distance wrestling with deep sand.
I knocked. Regretted it instantly. Was already halfway to the kitchen when Nara emerged.
‘You’re back,’ I said.
‘Not for long.’
‘You sure it’s okay for me to stay here?’ I asked.
Without Nara here, or Thaddeus, or Cliff, maybe it was time to move on. To build on what had been started with the torching of my car. The possibility of an after.
‘Uwa,’ she said, reaching for a blanket on the couch, the same one she’d been carrying the day she’d walked through the gate, a photo I’d carried halfway across the nation brought to life.
‘Did he ever go to sorry camp?’
Nara nodded. ‘But he was different mob,’ she said. ‘They do things different. Lost a lot of the old ways down there.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Tasmanian Aboriginal.’
‘He wasn’t …’
I stared at her, a thought struggling against the rest of the noise in my head – could he have made it up, to ingratiate himself with Nara, with the people of Ininyingi? But the Jed I knew was not capable of such deception. So why the fuck hadn’t he told me? And what did it mean? What bearing did it have on the kid I’d grown up with, the man who’d been the closest thing I’d ever known to a brother?
‘I didn’t know,’ I confessed, the shame of it like a knife in my gut.
‘What?’
‘He never told me he had Aboriginal blood.’
Nara frowned. ‘Palya wiya,’ she said.
‘I don’t understand.’
But I did, or at least I was trying to imagine – how it would seem to her if he’d kept it a secret. Or maybe she understood better than I ever could, why anyone would do such a thing. The cost. The reverberations.
‘I have to get ready,’ she said, putting the blanket by the door next to a bottle of water.
‘Are you taking Roopie with you?’ I asked, sure of one thing: that I didn’t want to alone right now.
‘Uwa.’
‘What about May? Is she going too?’
‘Mm. She wants to be with the mother. Help her with the other kids.’
Nara rubbed one palm across the other, recalling how Inti had held up May’s hands as proof.
‘Thaddeus told me you’re a ngangkari,’ I blurted.
She looked away, and I sensed it again, that I was not quite welcome – an outsider among outsiders. Soon she would leave for sorry camp, everyone would, and I’d be left here, alone again, though this time not by choice. The desert was a big place, but it could crowd a man if he wasn’t careful. Make him feel there was no space for him. Or that there was so much space that no matter how far he roamed, he’d never find comfort again, not even between four walls. That the desert, once breathed, was always inside you.
‘Saul.’
Nara was watching me, head cocked to one side, eyes scrunched like she recognised me – my failings, my gravest fears. Had Jed told her so much about me? There were things he’d kept from me, but maybe between them there’d been no secrets. Or was it the ngangkari in her coming out, an inherited clarity?
‘I’m all right,’ I said.
‘You look … scared.’
‘I’ll be fine in a minute. Just need to get my shit together.’
I snorted back snot. What she’d just told me about Jed, Cliff’s accident, this fucking cold – it was all messing with my head. And that thing Thaddeus had said, about the accumulation. So much loss. How it could play havoc.
She touched my arm with her right hand. The same one that had taken the rock and tried to smash the grief out of her – that had rubbed tears from Roopie’s eyes the only time I’d seen him cry.
I grabbed her wrist.
Held her hand to my stomach, her palm open and pressed against my shirt.
She didn’t resist. Didn’t say anything. Make it better, I willed, suck out the pain or, even better – if it’s possible, if such things exist in the world – do what needs to be done so that I can carry him with me, here in my gut.
Nara stared at me, her long fingers wedged against my ribs. But I could feel nothing. No lessening, no amassing, only the protests of a stomach in need of food. Maybe it was me. Maybe she wasn’t what Thaddeus had said. Or, worse still, this was all there was. A man. A woman. The hollow fact of what they’d lost.
She tried to pull her hand away, but I tightened my grip, my fingers unable to let go, wringing her bones till she cried out.
I released her.
Pulled back.
Smacked up against the wall, the space between us dense as if something had been summoned to it, allowed to enter.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘Fuck!’
Nara rubbed her wrist as I stood there hating myself, the light in the room diminishing. Someone was at the door. Blocking it.
It was May, Roopie’s small hand in hers. She looked from Nara to me and back again. Observed the way Nara was cradling her wrist in her hand. Between the doorframe and the boy was a narrow gap, and I felt it beckoning.
May spoke to Nara in Pitjantjatjara, her tone soothing, her eyes never leaving me, as if certain of my crime though not its content. But I was incapable of defence. Only the type that had served me so often, my breath coming now in short gasps.
The boy’s shoulders I held as I pushed past him, steadying.
The women I left untouched.
79
Old Leo was gone, maybe rescued by Thaddeus or the daughter, only the imprint of where he’d collapsed remaining in the sand. The dog had been replaced by others, a patrol on the move. Their trot was synchronised, their noses to the air as if a fight was in the wind. I waited in the shadow of the store till they’d passed, the sun tight-fisted. Got going again. Delegations were moving between houses, the morning’s news manifested in slumped shoulders and harried looks. Nobody stopped me – yet another whitefella on his way out.
I followed the same track as I’d arrived on that night with Cliff and the boy, the same one we’d taken to rescue my car. On a road like this you could find a reason – somewhere in the ridges bred by the passage of vehicles or the shadows thrown down by the mulga – a claim for continuing the way you always had, or its foil.
Either way, you’d have a chance.
Disturbed by my arrival, a wedge-tailed eagle launched from a dead tree. The force of its wings was audible, a feathered revving, the pump so muscular it was as if it was heaving against the sky itself. Dipping a wing, rudder-like, it veered west. It was heading for the ranges, their slopes rippled with mid-afternoon shadows suggestive of flanks, as if the rock were pelt, yet another animal poised to bolt at the slightest threat. The eagle settled into a thermal, its span greater than my height. Walawuru. Maybe the same one I’d seen the moment Nara had stepped through the gate with that armful of blankets – the moment I’d first doubted that the world belonged only to the living.
Beyond the blanched cross of a tree, the road split, dry arterials heading north, east, west, where Kata had taken me in the BMW. Worn into the track to the ranges was a deep rut. I kicked it, disturbed the perfect script of a tyre. A burst of dust hovered around my boot before being redirected by the wind, it too heading westwards, towards the gorge, as if that was where all roads led.
Places like that one, Nara had said, better to go with someone who knows. But Jed had gone alone – Kata had told me so – after he’d been shown the way. And sometimes Jed wouldn’t come back for hours, not till well after the desert had shrugged off its colours, the streetlights blinking to life in Ininyingi. But he’d always, always returned.
The sky herringboned, the eagle was now no more than a dark V. Soon it would be out of sight.
I took my bearings.
Craved a thermal.
The sun slid mercifully behind a cumulus.
80
There was a raggedness to my breath by the time I reached the point where Kata and I had parked. Our tracks were wind-worn but still visible beside the charred circle of stones. I bent over, hands on my thighs, my cold, the sun, the absence of water all having a go at my chest. Tried to cough it all free.
A cool draught emanated from
the gap that led into the gorge.
Straightening, I searched for signs of the eagle, but it had either reclaimed its nest or continued beyond the ranges.
The mark of my boot led away, eroded but decisive, and I followed it, past the perfume tree. The bush tomato. The spearwood where Kata had performed his mime. Some native tobacco, the kind used to help you forget your thirst. Though all it did was remind me that it’d been a while since I’d drunk anything, and for a moment I doubted the existence of the waterhole, as if it had been the product of wishful thinking.
As the track went deeper into the range, the red walls rose on either side, the sky a faultless blue roof, all of it primary, like entering a clean palette. I stooped to avoid the spines of an acacia, Kata briefly there with me, his hand held out like a radar.
Something scuttled to safety in the kangaroo grass.
And there it was, the opening to the gorge, the tops of the walls a band of orange above the shadow that made it feel enclosed. Architectural. Channelled wind rode through the river gum at the far end, rattled its lanky leaves, the waterhole waiting beneath its overhang of rock. The water lapped against its borders, its surface troubled.
I knelt.
Brushed away the fine layer of debris and drank.
Sluiced my neck and my face, the salt sending me back for more.
The water tasted of tannin, of the rock in which it had become trapped the last time rain had fallen. I sat back, the soaked front of my shirt dispatching a shiver despite the sun also being held in the rock. I dragged it over my head, wrung out the excess moisture, and placed it on a platform still warmed by the narrowing light. Two finches watched me. Seemed suspicious of all that flesh out in the open.
‘It’s just a little skin,’ I said, wiping my forehead with the back of my arm.
Beyond the waterhole, a crag in the wall looked like an old man’s nose: aquiline, scarred, persisting despite its wounds. And there were others, the rip line between the gorge and the sky a sleeping profile. Two boulders like crouched boys, cagey, their backs turned. Ziggy saw faces in the rock. She sought them out, recorded them. Eyes. Mouths. The embodied. The returned. But there was something to be wary of in the static. This was something I’d always known. Jed and I had talked about this, the night after we’d come down from Assekrem, leaving the monks to their solitude amid the towering volcanic cores. Love’s something you get on with, he’d said. Let it sit there and it’ll become a monument.