Act of Grace

by Anna Krien

  But when she left the centre an hour later, the pictures were scattered over the street, some caught in spiky shrubs, others trodden into the dirt and covered with footprints. She’d been pissed off, bending to pick them all up, calling out the kids’ names to come and help her. None of them did.

  ‘They didn’t do the pictures for them,’ Eileen explained to her later, ‘they did it for you. Did it to please you.’ Robbie frowned, not in the mood to be soothed. Eileen grinned. ‘I’m not saying it to make you feel better. What I’m saying is, think about it, Robbie: what does Photoshop mean to them? You can’t be angry at them for not seeing the point.’

  Robbie pressed her palms to her temples. ‘I guess not,’ she said. ‘But, Eileen, how the hell am I meant to do the sorry rocks? The board – the fucking board – they said the community has to be involved, but no one wants a bar of me.’

  ‘I know.’ Eileen sighed. ‘You’re going to have to give it time. Give people time to trust you. There’ll be something sooner or later, a flashpoint – always is – but you’ve got to trust the process.’

  ‘Mooney said I had three months.’

  Eileen laughed. ‘No one ever has three months. He’s bullshitting you. Just wait. Give it time.’

  But Robbie wasn’t used to waiting. When she could, she borrowed Eileen’s ute to go out to the containers and document what was there. She set up a table and chair in a shady spot and took photos of each parcel – the letter, if there was one, and the sorry rock – later uploading it all to her computer. Often at night, she’d click through the images and stare at the rocks, bits and pieces stolen from the red landscape, poring over people’s handwriting.

  When I learned about the history and treatment of Aboriginal people, Emily W. wrote from Sydney, I felt so guilty for taking a small piece of Uluru home with me. Robbie wished the woman had been brave enough to write her full name and address. She wanted to ask Emily W. exactly what she had learned.

  She grew attached to the rocks. Felt for them each time she shut the door on the shipping container, had eerie visions of them glowing like embers in the dark. They had, against all odds, found their way home, but whatever memories they held, wherever in the earth they belonged, too much time had passed. Even here, they were lost.

  On one of these visits, a thumb-sized rock tumbled into her palm from a padded parcel containing no note or return address. One side was dimpled and burnt-orange, the other side grey, just like the geologist had said. When it was time to pack up, something about that rock tugged at her. Robbie slipped it into the pocket of her shorts and carried it back to the community. This felt like a transgression, the rock hot against her skin, for she knew without asking that bringing it, tiny as it was – insignificant, really – through the national park gates would be against the elders’ wishes. When she got back to her unit, she pressed it into her palm, a voice telling her to return it to a plastic tub in the darkness. But she didn’t.

  *

  Bert was sucking on ice cubes when she approached, a mug of them on the ground beside him. He sat in the shade of a scribbly gum, leaning against the trunk, not minding the long lines of ants that traversed the outline of his check shirt.

  ‘Hi,’ said Robbie. Bert looked up. One of his eyes, she realised, had a bluish membrane, probably trachoma. His dark skin was dusted white with scales. ‘My name’s Robbie,’ she said, urging herself to keep talking. She shifted so he didn’t have to look into the sun. ‘I’m living here for a while.’ Bert turned his head, following her shape. ‘I’m doing the sorry rocks project,’ she added. She wasn’t sure if he knew what she was talking about. He was thin, his clothes hanging loosely on him. His stockman’s pants were dusty around the cuffs, the waist tied with a leather belt. He looked about as clean as a man could be out here. Robbie wondered who helped him, if that girl she and Eileen had seen with him did.

  Robbie looked at the cages. ‘Is one of those dogs yours?’ she asked, and Bert’s eyes followed hers. She wondered how much he could see. He smiled and shook his head, saying something, his words muddy to her ears. Robbie felt like an idiot, and although she had been getting somewhat used to that feeling, she didn’t like it. She hadn’t anticipated that the different languages would be so prevalent. She was no good at learning even the most rudimentary phrases, and couldn’t tell the difference between dialects.

  ‘He says it’s hard to say which one,’ said a voice. Robbie looked up to see the girl, with a fresh batch of ice cubes in her palm. She tipped them into Bert’s mug and he smiled and spoke, the girl nodding. When he finished, she looked at Robbie. ‘The dogs, they been with us since they were pups.’ Bert nodded, his body rocking. ‘Some things,’ she said, ‘they have been one way for so long, it’s hard to separate them.’

  Robbie gazed at the dogs. Some of them looked vicious, with battered, scarred ears, their teeth locked in permanent snarls, while others stared forlornly from the car wrecks, chins on paws. She tried to imagine them as pups, one slung under the arm of this girl when she was little.

  ‘I’m Robbie,’ she said, putting her hand out.

  The girl smiled shyly. ‘Viv,’ she said, shaking Robbie’s hand.

  Bert made a noise, gesturing to his lips with his finger. Viv put her hand in the pouch of her hoodie, took out a plastic pocket and pinched a shaggy clump of tobacco. She rolled a cigarette expertly. She put the cigarette on his bottom lip and produced a lighter. Bert puffed quickly, his face lost in a swirl of smoke.

  ‘So, I’m doing the sorry rocks project,’ Robbie said again, this time to Viv. The girl shrugged, still watching Bert. Robbie tried not to be annoyed. ‘Can you tell Bert?’ she asked Viv. ‘Tell him I’m doing the sorry rocks project?’

  Bert began to cough and Viv waited for him to stop, then spoke in language, Robbie catching the words sorry and rocks. When she finished, Bert shrugged as well, and went back to staring at the dogs, puffing on his cigarette. Robbie forced herself to stay put. She glanced at the dogs. ‘When do you think the shooters will come?’

  Viv smiled as she said something to Bert. He laughed, a dry sound that rattled from his chest. He spoke fast, his hands moving animatedly. Viv listened, then said to Robbie, ‘They did come. Early morning yesterday, but Bert wouldn’t let them take the dogs. Said he’d cast a spell on their testicles.’

  ‘Really?’ Robbie said.

  Viv nodded, her eyes light with laughter.

  ‘And they believed him?’

  She shook her head, snorting. ‘Course not. White men. But Bert scared them off. They didn’t want to start anything.’

  Bert made a ring with his fingers around his neck, looking at Robbie as he spoke. ‘He remembers,’ Viv explained, ‘when our people had shackles put around their necks and were chained together.’

  Robbie tilted her head. ‘Really?’ she asked, trying to guess how old Bert was. ‘He saw that?’ Bert pointed to his eyes and nodded. He put his finger in the dirt, talking as he drew first with his fingers, then with his knuckles.

  ‘He remembers the tracks the chained men made,’ Viv said, ‘how they had to shuffle, the drag of their feet, same as the track of an injured animal.’

  He spoke again, and Viv stiffened.

  ‘What?’ said Robbie impatiently. ‘What did he say?’

  Viv’s features set and she suddenly looked older, tired. ‘He said they didn’t chain up the women, figuring they didn’t need to, that they’d just stick with the men.’ She got up off her knees, shaking the dirt and ants. ‘He says they were wrong. They should’ve chained up the women too.’ She glared down at Bert and said something to him Robbie couldn’t understand, but then she translated it. ‘I told the old bastard he could get his own ice cubes today.’

  Bert grunted as she stalked off.

  Robbie stood awkwardly for a while next to Bert, listening to him crunch on an ice cube. She had planned on asking for his advice on the sorry rocks, if he had a vision for them. ‘Well,’ she said instead, ‘see you, Bert.’
/>   *

  It was the middle of the day when the children came to get her. They called her name from outside the gate to the units, and she fumbled in the heat to unlock it, hands slick with sweat. ‘C’mon, Miss Robbie!’ yelled Lenny, the leader of the pack, pulling her arm.

  ‘But it’s the middle of the day,’ she said lazily, sheepish about wanting to return to her cool unit.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s too hot,’ Lenny said, and his mate Bingo did a wheelie on his BMX.

  ‘Pool’s closed,’ the kid called. ‘Brix’s pissed at us.’

  The group collapsed in giggles. Robbie let them pull her across the street, into the scrub and through a hole in the cyclone fence. Grasshoppers sprang out of the spinifex as they ran. Robbie tried to get her bearings but soon gave up, focusing on keeping up with the kids. Lenny was at the front, wearing his footy jersey. A girl was dragging a boogie board, and it flipped up behind her. She slowed, and Robbie came level with her. ‘You aren’t worried about the tourists?’ she asked, panting.

  ‘Nah, Miss,’ the girl said with a grin. ‘It’ll be too hot for them.’ The pink foam board kept bumping and catching, but she didn’t seem to mind. A desert skink zipped across their path and the girl swerved after it, but it disappeared down a hole. ‘Tjaliri!’ she yelled to the others. But they didn’t stop, Lenny calling over his shoulder, ‘Later! Later!’ The girl frowned, kicked up the dirt and started to run again.

  Uluru loomed close now, and the children tore up the wooden walkway to the waterhole. They climbed the railing and balanced on the top plank. Then they dived into the amber water, dragonflies flitting away.

  Robbie stood near the railing to catch her breath. From the water, the rock curved upwards, a tiger stripe running down where the waterfall had been. ‘Jump!’ Lenny yelled, the others splashing and laughing. Robbie climbed up shyly, trying to gauge how deep it was.

  The kids were watching her, their heads bobbing, sleek as seals. Feeling clumsy and hot, she flopped in, her T-shirt and shorts unsticking from her skin as she sank to the bottom. She opened her eyes and could see the kids’ legs kicking up a storm. She swam over, grabbing their feet. ‘Rah!’ she yelled as she jumped out of the water. They squealed, swimming off in different directions. They played like this for a while; then the children showed Robbie how they scrambled up the rock and leapt into the water, and how they perched on the railing, backflipping on top of one another. Robbie was barely able to watch, peeking through her fingers. Eventually she swam to the bank and lay on the mud, stretching her legs in the water. Lenny sat next to her, digging into the wet earth with his hands, levering out a fat, surprised frog. He played with it, then gave it to Robbie to hold, shouting when she let it, out of sympathy, hop into the water. He swam after it and soon all of them were chasing, the waterhole churning.

  Robbie lay back, not wanting to witness the frog’s fate. She stared up at the blue sky and the fiery flank of Uluru.

  *

  She’d looked it up, the neck shackles and chains. She wanted to find out if it was possible that Bert had seen it, followed the tracks of prisoners, that it wasn’t memory passed down. A photograph in 1935 showed a group of Aboriginal men in chains standing around a dead bullock, their crime. Central Australia was the location given. She came across another photograph taken in Queensland in 1942, of a lone Aboriginal man chained to a tree. In Queensland, she read, the practice was not phased out until 1960. She could not find when the same was done in the Territory. When she asked Eileen if she knew, the arts manager retorted, ‘Who says it’s been phased out?’

  Robbie took to sitting with Bert every so often on her breaks, usually sharing a bag of chips. He spoke sometimes, Robbie struggling to follow if Viv wasn’t around, but mostly they just sat in silence.

  It was Viv who gave her Bullant. ‘Bert’s idea,’ she said, calling Robbie into their house when she came past one day. It was clean, sparse, with a fridge, a table and three chairs. On the bench, a toaster and a kettle, jars of Vegemite and honey, a box of teabags. On the wall, a faded newspaper poster of the Aboriginal flag and a round clock, its soft tick filling the room. In the corner, lying on a length of foam, was one of the gubba dogs, with a litter of puppies sucking on her teats. A black pup was trying to push its way in, but the others kept kicking it away. Viv picked it up by the scruff. ‘Bert reckons you should have this one,’ she said, passing it over.

  Robbie was confused, holding the pup in her palms, trying not to hug it to her chest, knowing she’d be lost if she did. ‘I don’t know, Viv,’ she said. The pup started to lick her hands with its gravelly pink tongue. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to last in there,’ Viv said, gesturing at the litter, which had settled comfortably now the runt was gone, paws kneading a teat each. ‘Or out there,’ she said. ‘A black dog no good out here. He’ll cook in the heat. Bert says you won’t be here long, so you can take him back with you.’

  For a second Robbie tried to make sense of this. Did Bert mean she would be leaving earlier than planned, or was he just saying that her project was not very long in the scheme of things? And was what Viv said even true: are there no black dogs in the desert?

  It was a moment too long. The pup nuzzled in, licking her arm so that she instinctively drew him close, and then he was up at her neck, his paws hugging her. Robbie laughed and brought him to her face, smelling him. Viv grinned. ‘He no bigger than a bullant, hey?’

  *

  At the waterhole, she turned on her side to watch the kids. The frog was gone and Robbie hoped he was safely snuggled in the mud. Suddenly a loud, wasp-like sound came from the sky. Robbie and the children looked up: a black thing as big as a bird was hovering above them. It was a drone, Robbie realised. It came lower, blinking two red lights, and tilted slightly as it flew over the waterhole. The kids stared, their mouths open. Then a chubby boy screamed, and they started to swim in a rush to the railing, slipping over one another as they pulled themselves up. A girl struggled in the chaos, sobbing, falling back into the pool and swallowing water. Lenny jumped in and hauled her onto the walkway. They stood in a wet huddle as the drone reversed and swung back to where Robbie was sitting. It hung above her. She could see its lens, hear it click and whirr, almost lifelike in the way it peered at her.

  Robbie stared back furiously. ‘Fuck off!’ she yelled. Then a rock smashed into its side. Lenny whooped, pumping his fist in the air. Robbie scrambled back onto the walkway as the kids flung rocks and handfuls of sand at it. The drone wobbled, and they cheered, digging around for more ammunition, their faces fierce. Robbie put her hand in the pocket of her shorts, pulled out the small sorry rock without thinking, and pinged it at the drone, striking between its red-light eyes. It tipped, and then another rock smashed into it, the drone swerving before crashing into the water. Robbie and the children froze, watching it sink.

  Robbie swam in then and fetched it up from the bottom. ‘Run!’ she yelled when she surfaced, holding the black hexagonal shape aloft. On reflection it was childish, her telling them to run – it was silly to be scared of being told off – but in the moment they all turned heel and ran back across the scrub. Lenny laughed, clasping his sides as he ran, his cheetah legs wobbling, and soon they were all laughing, Robbie too, giggling and gasping in the hot, sticky air. They had to stop, stitches stabbing their chests. They sat on the ground, the laughing like an endless carousel. Whenever they settled, it took just one look between them to start it off again.

  When the laughter finally died down, Robbie lay on her back in the dirt, her wet clothes drying. Her dripping hair wallowed in its own muddy puddle. She closed her eyes as the kids yabbered to one another, jumping up to re-enact the rock attack, the decisive blow, and then the escape. Later, back at the community, she gave the broken drone to them, watching as they pulled it apart like a pack of cockatoos. It was at night, in bed, that she remembered the sorry rock she’d thrown, now at the bottom of the waterhole.

  *

  Robbie wa
s doing it again, running back over the scrub, though this time in the dark, trying to keep up with a group of teenagers, her orange speaker in one hand and Bullant nipping at her heels. She crawled under the fence that Viv held up for her. The boys had on backpacks that, as they hurried forward, clinked. Booze, Robbie figured.

  Reg led the way. When they reached the empty car park, Robbie thought maybe they planned to walk to one of the caves. But Reg went to the little white gate where the climb began. He opened it and started to make his way up the eastern flank, Charlie following, then the three girls. Jay stood next to Robbie. He was wearing a backpack like the other two boys. He held out his hands for the speaker. Nervous, she gave it to him. ‘What’s going on, Jay?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ he said, keeping the gate open with his foot. Bullant bolted in joyously, ignoring Robbie’s whistle. She didn’t move. She stared at the six teenagers. Reg was pulling himself up with the chain, while Charlie had sat at the bottom, next to the first metal pole, and was opening his backpack. Fuck, thought Robbie. Fuck. Charlie put on a pair of large goggles. Then he pulled out a long metal pipe with an orange tube, screwing it onto a butane canister. Fuck.

  ‘Guys!’ Robbie called, rushing forward. ‘Hey, Charlie! Stop!’

  Charlie froze.

  Jay moved to block Robbie. ‘You asked to come,’ he said in a low, surly voice.

  Robbie was panicking. ‘Yeah, but,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know —’

  ‘What did you think? That we were planning on getting pissed and stoned?’

  Robbie stepped back. She’d always thought of Jay as clownish – he often walked the community mouthing beatbox riffs – but now his face was taut with loathing. She dropped her shoulders, swallowed her pride. ‘Yeah,’ she replied. ‘I was thinking that. I’m sorry, Jay.’