by Anna Krien
Robbie grinned. ‘Don’t you dare fucking laugh, ranger.’
He snorted, the zinc on his face cracking.
Robbie was about to ask where he was from, but two shipping containers appeared in the distance, EVERGREEN stencilled in white on their sides.
‘They’re in those,’ he said, and they pulled up alongside the hulks, which had rust wearing the corners. Out of the car the heat hit again, sweat immediately trickling down the backs of Robbie’s legs. Jack unlocked a chain and heaved open the door of the green container, carving a semi-circle in the red dirt. Sunlight poured in and Robbie saw row upon row of clear plastic tubs, stacked to the ceiling, each filled with postage parcels, Tupperware containers and ziplock bags. Inside these were dirt, crumbly rubble and chiselled rocks – pieces of Uluru – all looking as though they had been chipped off a sunset.
‘Jesus.’ Robbie stepped inside, her sneakers making a dull thud. She could see a thin, precarious path between the tubs. Then there was a beam of light as Jack shone a torch over her shoulder.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you down the back.’
She moved aside so he could lead the way. They went about twelve metres and stopped, shining the torch at a wall of wooden crates stacked with big red rocks.
‘The largest is thirty-two kilos,’ he said. ‘A couple in Adelaide said they’d lifted it into their campervan back in the eighties. Thought it would look good in their garden.’
‘They posted it back?’ Robbie said in amazement.
Jack laughed. ‘Nah, they left it out the front of a gallery in the middle of the night with a note. No names, of course.’
He put the torch between his teeth and carefully levered a couple of tubs free, then walked back towards the sunlight with them. ‘You want to have a look?’ Without waiting for an answer, he prised off the lids and pulled out the contents. There were parcels from all over Australia and overseas: Berlin, London, New York, Montreal, Moscow. Robbie gazed at the foreign postmarks. Plastic bags of sand; rocks wrapped in tissue paper; notes, mostly brief, some lengthy and paranoid, but all with I’m sorry handwritten, some laboured over in large print letters, others in elegant cursive.
Robbie wondered how the crumbly orange rocks and red dirt had fared in the northern light. She pictured the small, grim London apartment she had lived in three years ago. She had struggled with the light there and spent much of her residency painting European landscapes, which were exact in form but mismatched in colour, light and shadow. ‘Hideously so,’ said one of the professors. There had been much blunt talk about her lack of skill, the immaturity of her craft. ‘Naive,’ said one well-known artist in a sneering tone.
Robbie had been unnerved at the time. She considered reverting to her usual forms – collage, sculpture and video art – but found she was hooked on fucking up the European light. She persisted, feeling lonelier and lonelier. Her snow was slightly yellow, like frozen piss; her lakes amber; her English oaks marbled white, red and pale green. ‘Hideous’ was perfect, she realised. The landscapes were lurid, sickly. She called the paintings The Acclimatisation Series. Now, gazing at the sorry rocks, Robbie wondered if they’d dimmed in the European light. Had they been placed on windowsills? She unfolded a letter and read aloud. ‘I had such a special time at Uluru that I wanted to take a piece of it home with me. I didn’t know it was wrong and I hope you can forgive me.’
Jack sniffed. He was sitting on the ground, not minding the ants. ‘How could they not have known?’ he asked hotly. ‘It’s written all over the place – it’s on the website, on the signs around the rock.’
Robbie had wondered when reading up on Uluru who had written the signage, the rangers or the Anangu people. ‘The website is pretty lame, if you ask me,’ she said. Jack looked at her, surprised. ‘I mean, please respect our wishes,’ Robbie continued, ‘it’s so, I don’t know . . . ’ The word ‘pathetic’ came to mind, but she didn’t say it. ‘And what about the climb?’ she asked instead, referring to the hundred or so metal poles two white men had jackhammered into Uluru fifty years ago, along the eastern flank, threading a chain to make a railing for tourists to hold so they could clamber to the top.
‘What about the climb?’ Jack said.
‘Well, why don’t they just shut it down?’
Jack bristled. ‘It’s not as easy as that,’ he replied.
Robbie looked at him with disdain. ‘Please don’t climb Uluru. We worry about you and we worry about your family,’ she said, repeating the text on the government’s Parks Australia website. ‘Who wrote that?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I mean, surely no one gives a fuck if a climber gets hurt? If anything, it would serve them right.’
Jack stood up and began to snap the lids back on the containers. ‘What are they meant to write?’ he asked in a flinty tone.
‘I don’t know,’ Robbie said. ‘Maybe something like, “More than 20,000 Aborigines were killed in Australia’s frontier war, thousands more displaced, then displaced again, kept on the fringes of townships, starved, had their children, their children’s children, taken away, their cultural links severed. Many still face inequitable hardship and poverty today. They are three per cent of the population, so democracy isn’t very fucking helpful. Don’t be a cunt and climb Uluru, but if you do, after reading this, we hope you fall into a crevice and die a miserable death.”’ Robbie took a deep breath, a satisfied look on her face. ‘That could work.’
Jack stared at her, his eyes hard. ‘Well, that sounds like a fun visit.’
‘Who said it should be fun?’ Robbie took the tubs from his hands. ‘I’ll do this.’ She balanced the containers and carried them inside, fumbling without the help of Jack’s torch. She was trying to stack them properly when she heard the clunk of the metal bolt and had a vision of the ranger locking her in there. She left the containers on the floor and hurried towards the light.
Jack’s face was blank as he lifted the metal door and closed it behind her. It was hot, the sun beating down. In silence, they got back in the car. Robbie’s head was beginning to ache. She felt a pinching sensation behind her eyes. She needed more water; her bottle was empty, but she refused to ask Jack if she could refill it from his cooler in the back seat. Instead she looked out the window, silently chanting at him, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.
*
‘It will eat you up,’ Robbie’s mother had warned her once, ‘all this anger. It ate your father up and it will do the same to you.’
‘Well, I’ll go do some yoga then, shall I?’ Robbie snapped, and without telling her mother, she did, and stretched impatiently for an hour in a drafty scout hall. A woman at the front told the class to focus on their breath, to be mindful, reminding them to stay in the present, as if the past and the future were just lists of things already done and things to do. It had enraged Robbie. It felt honest, her anger. Still, during a visit with her father, she appraised him, considering what her mum had said, whether his anger had eaten him up.
She remembered a time in their kitchen, before they knew he was sick, when he had set the table for dinner and un-set it, putting everything away before they’d even sat down. ‘Silly duffer,’ Claire said as she mashed the potatoes. Robbie’s father seemed perplexed, but Claire and Robbie just laughed. So many signs – but they didn’t yet know how to read them. Outside, in the courtyard where their father had rigged up a hoop for Otis, there was the repetitive, ever-present bounce of the basketball.
When they were seated that night, Otis perching his feet on the ball under the table, Robbie asked their dad if he had ever met his mother’s people. She had been thinking about it, but it must have come out of the blue for their father, judging by the way his head shot up.
Danny was silent for a minute, chewing, his jaws working back and forth. ‘They said I’d been “turned inside out”,’ he said finally, and added, ‘They said I had no claim, I was only there for money, and the whole time they were smoking my cigarettes.’ Claire frowned, but he didn’t n
otice; he was staring at something behind Robbie, so intently that she turned to look, but saw nothing except last year’s calendar on the wall. ‘I told them to fuck off,’ he finished. ‘I said I’d rather be white than a black prick.’
‘Danny!’ Claire snapped.
He startled, realising what he’d said. ‘Oh, Jesus – sorry, kids,’ he said. The basketball rolled out from under the table as Otis and Robbie stared at their father. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘It was a long time ago. I was messed up, angry.’
It was Otis who broke the silence. ‘You smoked?’ he said, making Claire laugh. It was his job in the family, Robbie realised later, to pierce the tension.
Danny grinned at Otis, reaching over to pat him on the head. ‘What an idiot, hey?’
Still, Otis couldn’t fix everything. They should have known then that something was wrong. That Danny was losing his grip. He was like a sealed room filling with water, unable to stop his thoughts lifting from where he had set them down. Later, much later, when they knew what was happening, Robbie became scared for her father in these moments, for it was the remembering of the present that seemed to hurt him the most: it was like the yank of a hook in his mouth, his eyes clearing with the realisation that he’d lost them.
*
Jack and Robbie didn’t say a word as he drove back past the airport turnoff, following the sleek bitumen road as it wrapped around Uluru and tailed off towards the remote community. They passed a large road sign that warned drivers without a permit to turn back, and then another that declared they were entering an alcohol-free area. The gate appeared, along with a cluster of large trees. Jack got out and opened the gate, drove through and stopped the car again. Robbie unhooked her seatbelt, but he exited quickly and closed it himself.
‘I could have done that,’ Robbie said, breaking the silence between them, when he returned.
‘Plenty more opportunities,’ he said, not looking at her.
The road turned to gravel and Jack drove slowly, winding down his window to wave to people in the distance. A woman in a pink T-shirt and a sarong was hanging clothes on a line, while a child near her rode a wheeled office chair down an incline, slamming into a fence before dragging it back up again. The houses were grim, built from grey blocks, like the toilets at sports ovals. A few were painted dark green, others orange. Some windows were boarded up with plywood offcuts, and the odd wall had been done in a mural, one a landscape painted in the style of Albert Namatjira, with bluish light cast over red rocks and purple outcrops, and the long, sculpted trunks of ghost gums in the foreground.
They passed a man kneeling in a front yard, swinging a pick-axe into the dirt, and another gazing into a car engine, bonnet propped up with a broom, tools on a towel beside him. One yard had a lemon tree, while most had cars on blocks. Some of these were just metal skeletons skinned for parts, while others seemed to be waiting, for a sought-after part maybe, to make one more 800-kilometre round trip to Alice. Mattresses were laid out under trees, stripped of their linen and chunks bitten from the orange foam. Patches of dirt sparkled with glass. Plastic bags rolled and curled and clustered against metal fences. Robbie tried to suppress a feeling of panic.
She had dismissed Mooney and the board when they suggested she visit the remote community before committing to the project. She said she’d travelled widely and seen her fair share of confronting places. Robbie grimaced now, remembering how Mooney had smirked. He’d nodded, let her have her way. But she hadn’t been totally naive; part of her hadn’t wanted to see it first in case she got spooked.
On the road in front of them, a kid in nothing but shorts was dragging a cardboard poster. Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher stared out at her, holding a pistol. Her Jack stopped next to the boy. ‘Hey, Lenny!’ he said, and the kid grinned, coming closer and staring in at Robbie. ‘Where’d you get that?’
‘The tip!’ the boy replied, whirling it around so they could get a good look. ‘Cool, hey?’
Jack smiled. ‘Sure is.’ He turned off the ignition and pulled out the keys, taking one off and holding it out to Lenny. ‘Hey, Len, this is Robbie,’ he said. ‘You wanna go open up the gate for her at the workers’ units?’
Lenny nodded, his face serious. He took the key and ran off, the poster bumping behind him as he cut through the front yards.
‘He’s cute,’ Robbie said, forgetting herself as she watched him scamper around car wrecks. Jack shrugged, starting the car again. Robbie saw that the street ran in a loop, spitting you out the way you came in. In the shade of a thin tree, she spied a group sitting in a circle, each with a fan of playing cards, a couple of toddlers nosing around among them.
‘Normally you’d see a heap of camp dogs everywhere,’ Jack said, and his voice was friendlier. Robbie felt annoyingly relieved. ‘They wouldn’t even move for you,’ he continued. ‘You’d have to drive round them. But most have been put over there.’ Jack pointed to a row of metal cages back near the fence line.
‘Why?’ Robbie asked, leaning forward. She could see the shapes of the dogs, tails flicking at flies.
‘We had a group of vets fly in last week to do a check. They marked most of them to be put down.’
‘When are they going to do it?’
Jack gave a half-smile. ‘That’s the million-dollar question. Turns out the Territory won’t cover the extra cost, so they’re planning on using local shooters instead. The vets, they were pissed. Pretty gullible.’ He looked at Robbie. ‘Nothing in Central Australia gets euthanised.’
He stopped the car next to a group of units separated from the rest of the community by a tall metal fence. Lenny was standing, proud and antsy, next to the open gate. He ran around to Jack’s side, holding out the key.
‘Give it to Robbie,’ Jack said. ‘It’s hers.’
Shyly, Lenny went back to Robbie’s side and held out the key.
‘Hey, thanks so much, Lenny,’ she said, taking it. ‘Gee, you were quick.’
Lenny grinned, looking her in the eye. ‘Like a cheetah,’ he said, grabbing the poster from the ground and taking off.
The units were made from the same bricks as the houses but painted white. In the sunlight, they shone like igloos, the red sand drifting up against them. She saw a dog lying on one of the shady verandahs, flanks twitching, safe inside the fence. Jack put her bags and speaker on the ground, then stood beside her, holding the hat she’d flattened and punching it back into shape.
Robbie blushed. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said.
The ranger smiled. ‘I’m sure you didn’t mean it,’ he replied, poker-faced.
*
Robbie’s unit was well equipped. There was air-conditioning, a television, a toaster, an electric stove, a washing machine, a microwave and a kettle. It took her half an hour to unpack. Outside the light was finally yielding, and she sat on the verandah, whistling to the dog. It was the colour of wheat, and it got up slowly, stretching before coming over. She scratched its head for a while, stopping when she heard the swing of the gate, and watched as a woman juggled an enormous ring of keys before snipping the padlock. Then, with a warm smile, the woman waved and strode towards her.
‘Robbie,’ she said, her jewellery tinkling like music as she walked. ‘It’s Eileen.’ Robbie stood and smiled back. They’d already spoken on the phone. ‘I’ve been working with desert mobs for almost two decades now,’ she’d said in a raspy voice then.
She looked exactly as Robbie had imagined: mismatched and colourful, overdone with pendants, bangles and earrings. She’d pinned her hennaed hair loosely in a bun so that tendrils hung out, catching around her face, becoming stuck on her bright red lipstick. ‘C’mon,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you the arts centre.’
Robbie followed Eileen to the road and up a path leading to a tin building the size of a small aircraft hangar. It had a row of windows around the top, near the roof, covered with chicken mesh. A small building had been added on the side, adorned with paintings of emus, snakes and lizards. Again, Eileen got
out her enormous keyring. When she slid open the glass door, the familiar smells of acrylics and glue and wood shavings embraced Robbie.
Eileen showed her where she stored the finished canvases, in a small locked room. ‘Most of these are pretty standard,’ she said, ‘piecework, mostly. More like practising the craft. But they sell. I’ve found it’s only every few years or so that an artist out here creates something extraordinary. There’s a few of those in there.’ She pointed to the metal drawers. ‘Clancy Mann, Riley Jones, Daisy Williams. There’s a kid, too, Charlie, seventeen. Major talent; major risk, too. I’ll show you when there’s more time. I’m trying to find the best buyer for them.’
There was a rattle on the sliding door. ‘Hey?’ came a man’s voice, and Eileen sighed. ‘Hi, Bert,’ she called, walking back to the main room. Robbie followed, seeing a thin older man at the door in brown pants, a blue shirt and a pair of massage thongs. A stockman’s hat was pulled low on his brow. Eileen started pulling boxes from the shelving, sifting through stacks of canvases. ‘You know I’m not allowed to do this, Bert,’ she said, voice muffled as she searched.
‘Hmph,’ replied the man, shifting impatiently. He glanced at Robbie.
‘Hi,’ Robbie said nervously, and he looked away.
‘Hmph,’ he said again, seemingly bored by the sight of her.
‘Here’s one,’ Eileen announced, holding up a scrappy-looking painting. She walked over to him. ‘This is your signature, isn’t it?’ But the man didn’t look; he just took the painting and very slowly walked out to where he’d parked a little beaten-up red Mazda. There was a girl in the passenger seat.
‘Grumpy old bastard,’ Eileen said, watching him ease into the driver’s side and toss the painting into the girl’s lap. She sighed and started to flick off the lights around the large room, disappearing briefly to lock the smaller rooms.
When Eileen had slid the doors shut, Robbie asked about the old man. ‘Bert, bloody Bert,’ the arts manager said, seeming to wrestle with whether she ought to say more. Eventually she shrugged, giving in. ‘Bert has an unhealthy obsession with those camp dogs. The ones meant to be put down soon. You seen them?’