True Country

by Kim Scott

  ‘They were crook, they just looked at me. Just lying there, looking at me. The family was there of course. They apologised and promised they’d pay for the beer and the lock, bring Brother Tom’s bottles back, and donate a week’s pay to the mission.’

  Billy just nods, keeps nodding. He has no voice here.

  ‘I went with Moses and old Sebastian straight over to Gerrard’s place and sorted it out so that we can get the money taken straight out of their wages, before they get it. They’ll be in church now for a week or two.

  ‘What can you do? Call the police? Again? For what? They didn’t say who else was in with them. Milton we know. Most of them, probably. Bloody Alphonse.’

  Billy sips his beer. ‘Alphonse?’

  ‘He’s a disappointment to me, that one,’ says Father Paul. He looks at his fingers tapping the can. ‘The trouble with Alphonse, with a lot of the people here, is that he doesn’t want to push himself. It’s no good for him here, it’s too easy to just slip back. No, not back. That seems impossible. But it’s too easy to, to fall. Maybe one day he’ll get on the council, and get the pick of the vehicles and charter fights out when he wants ... He’ll get lazy, a worse worker. I wanted him to go away, but ... And now, look at him shacked up with Araselli. And her. She’s one of the ones the builders have had over there.’

  ‘Araselli?’

  ‘Yeah. But see, I’m being paternalistic again. I’ll be glad to go on sabbatical ... Look what we wanted to give these people, and now ... What can you do, eh? I don’t like what I do, have to do. We have just taken things away.’

  The empty can is crushed in a powerful hand.

  Billy saw Milton at school next day. Milton was relaxed. He had helped collect up the bottles for Brother Tom and he was going to church every morning and evening. Father Paul had heard confession from him.

  Not Just Madness

  And Beatrice? What was the world like now, for her? Most of the time she seemed as if in a trance. Eyes large, rocking rocking herself, and her ears filled with her own sounds. A roaring in her head, torrents of blood rushing like the river at home; eddies and whirlpools of thick blood; blood spilling over bone seeping into sandy flesh. And a thudding, like footsteps of giants pursuing her endlessly. Great hairy beings, their feet pounding, worst at night and early morning.

  It might be that sometimes she felt squashed flat and fat like the plasticine puppets you sometimes see on television, and unable then to correctly move even a finger, or lift a heavy foot from the ground so much did it weigh. Her facial features were disappearing into a swelling face, flesh closing over her eyes, over her nostrils. While the black sky grew higher she was crushed beneath it like a figure in a comic strip, the ink running from the top of the frame.

  Another time she became pale and thin. A grey mist hazy world. She felt pain when a breeze brushed her thin brittle limbs, when her clothes touched her skin, and she made the tiniest careful movements lest she snap something with the mere leverage of feeble straining muscles.

  Voices rushed around her, a cassette tape speeding up and about to break, spinning tighter, screeching at her, voices of enraged cartoon chipmunks and ducks, but grown large and shouting spittle into her face. People rushed toward her in a video fast forward, and then went past, or away, and rapidly became tiny figures shooting away down long corridors. Nurses’ uniforms walked to and away from her, the fabric noisily scratching and grinding. Doors slammed and echoed as if the room was a steel drum. But then in all this frenzied din a door would suddenly slam, silently. Silence would begin...

  She found that by concentrating she could change her perception from fast to slow, and vice versa. But she then went from one extreme to another, and could not halt as she went desperately past the correctly paced world. So she went from gross to brittleslender. And from a frenzied rushing world to one in slow motion where speech became a succession of spastic groans and she helplessly watched events occur. Watching waiting for a cup to fall, watching it fall slowly unable to move to catch it, watching it fall waiting for it to hurry up and reach the floor, watching it break into pieces, counting the pieces as they bounced, waiting for them to reach the floor again, again.

  Sharp things moved inside her body, through her blood, stabbing inside her foot, shoulder, stomach, head.

  Snakes winked at her, tongues flickering before slipping behind doors, into briefcases and boxes.

  Faces changed as she spoke to them. She couldn’t trust. Faces even changed from human to animal. Limbs grew out of walls, pockets, clipboards. Smiles held knives in their teeth. An offered hand became a fist or boot which struck. Eyes detached from faces and became glaring groups, satellites spinning around her head and flashing blue bolts of hatred.

  She watched the sun fall from the sky each day, and catch in the fork of a tree away past the car park. It stuck there, bleeding its colours until dark.

  One night she saw the moon tumble across a cloud torn sky. It fell and spilled over two figures lying on the grass far below her. In the morning she saw that sculpture there.

  Stella returned to Karnama. She thought she was going mad, and would, for sure, if she stayed with Beatrice in that hospital with all them strangers.

  She had got fat, and couldn’t smile any more.

  And, at last, people told her that someone did sing her daughter, because she did not do the proper thing after Walanguh’s death. Fatima should have told her.

  Amazing?

  Them doctors should have been able to tell about Beatrice, them with all their brains and soft hands and smells.

  They called us. We fixed it. Good for them that they asked us, and let us. Some of the old people went down to that hospital; Samson, Fatima, Moses...

  The doctors let them stay in the room with Beatrice. They slept on mattresses on the floor, and nurses brought food to them.

  They fixed her up. So, there are other ways, and other brains too, even if they may be going away, dying, these days.

  Billy got hold of a newspaper, and they read it at the school. Some of the kids read it aloud to the old people:

  GIRL SAVED BY BLACK RITUALS

  An amazing series of rituals to rid a dying black girl of a tribal curse was carried out in one of Perth’s major hospitals.

  The girl was believed to have been cursed by Aboriginal elders.

  A clinical psychologist became concerned that the child had been ‘sung’ and arranged for the Aboriginal tribal elders to perform an exorcism on the comatose child in Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital.

  Being ‘sung’ is a ritual similar to the so-called pointing of a bone.

  The elders, from the Kimberley, visited the child three times. The child has returned to her community and is fit and well.

  The old people laughed, and told them there were many things they knew and understood that other ones did not. But Stella, she was not laughing. She got her daughter back all right, but that little spirit inside her, it pass away. Finish. People could see. She was small now.

  Break In and Out

  Franny has a new cassette. Moses has been out to a conference in Derby and has brought it, and a new Walkman, back for him.

  He sits alone in a room, unseeing, the music swirling in his head, raising his spirits through some strange capillary action. Absorbed, looking in, he could be a mad zombie boy, with one lens of his spectacles smeared with glue and melted plastic and masking tape.

  Elsewhere, kids throw stones and break the windows of the houses under construction, a basketball beats against a backboard, bodies spear into the water at High Diving, and eyeballs at the card game shift.

  Those eyeballs and cards shift, and there is the sound of voices running like a river, then louder with excitement and rapid laughter, soft again. Dark hands quick, grubby cards rested on thighs, hairy bellies splitting shirts, scratchings and shiftings for comfort. Time drifting slowly with them. Who’s there? Milton and his missus Annie, Moses too. Stella, happy with these moments, and the new one growing ins
ide her. Raphael, Samson, Gloria, lots of people.

  They’re all playing under the big tree among the huts. It’s Friday afternoon, and everyone’s got their money and work’s stopped. The children have also been paid for their work at the mission garden. They run around with lollies and cool drinks and, despite their sticky fingers, leave wrapping paper, money, coins and bottle tops trailing behind them. Not hands enough to hold such wealth. The video games out on the dusty cement have bodies clustered before them like fruit; limbs, heads, eyeballs, and fingers bunching coins blossom from the screens.

  Gerrard and Jasmine are slung out in their office chairs, their paleness glimmering in the dark room. There is sweat on their grimy skin, and the whirring electric fan bullies the hot air and swirls the aromas of absent bodies around them.

  Knock on Alex’s door and see him in his office with his boy, constructing models for the boy’s projects which they send off to his correspondence teacher in Perth. Alex cursing the crackling two-way radio and the people here, and dreaming of when the telephones will be properly installed and he can communicate with his world.

  Liz and Annette similarly sit in separate houses, before separate televisions, linked up to a common satellite dish in their shared backyard. Thundering air-conditioners mean their televisions must be turned up loud, and the pink heads bare their teeth and shout at them from cosy metropolitan studios.

  Deslie and Billy walk along the hot red rocks beside the river, near the upper tidal limit, hoping the gorge will give them some of its barramundi, out of season and all. Billy feeling his schoolteacher authority slip away.

  At the card game Annie is winning. Money is gathering up in her lap, money piling up in the centre of the card players.

  The little kids are using coins instead of marbles for a game. They attempt to lob coins into a small hole they’ve dug a couple of metres away.

  Alphonse and his mother are screaming at one another. He’s bringing shame, what he’s doing, he can’t live with his rumbud, not here, doesn’t he care about anything or anybody, just acting anykind? Things are flying through the air at him, his mother’s hands slapping him, tears flooding. He grasps his mother’s shoulders. His father wades into the hot tears of the screamflooded kitchen and fills it further with threats and fists. Alphonse blunders, then, out the door, shouting, voices and tears tumbling through the open door behind him, making him stumble. He kicks at the dogs, their yelps arc up into the sun, its light all spears and diamonds to Alphonse’s eyes, sharp and glittering. He’s running down to the river. The sun is plummeting.

  Deslie and Billy see a figure running hard across the rocky fat, a spindly black figure against a vast blood-spattered eggshell sky. They drive silently back through the dust, a great silver fish changing colour on the tray behind them.

  Night-time.

  Moses sits on a narrow bed, drinking with his older sons. He’s a quiet drinker, maybe he’s teaching them. Some of them don’t drink. Franny there too, music still in his head.

  At the card game the firelight flickers on the mound of money tucked up in Annie’s skirt. A serious game, silent and quick. Bodies around fires, bodies sprawled before video screens, bodies coupling. Alphonse, who knows where? Out on the edge of the dark, tight with anger, clenching and clenching his fists, grinding his teeth. Araselli laughs about it when she hears he’s argued with his family. She’s a young woman, she don’t care any more.

  Stella lying in a room listening to Beatrice sleeping.

  Gerrard dining with Alex and his family, all wrestling with one another to show who has the most trouble working with the blacks.

  The builders haw-hawing, fizz-popping, slipping away and linking with the shadowy figures outside of the firelight.

  Late in the night Annie is rich. Araselli, wondering about Alphonse, returns with some of her friends from the builders’ camp. Later still, deep in night-time, Alphonse, all hollowed by his rage, numbed from the tense screaming of his muscles and sinews, approaches the community office. He crosses the basketball court, and the moonlight is strong enough to throw a shadow of the axe in his hand.

  So, there was big news the next day. Alphonse had smashed up the office, wrecked it; axed the doors, walls and desks; flung chairs and books, papers around the room. He threw artefacts onto the floor and trampled them.

  Billy saw Gerrard walking rapidly past the basketball court with muttered curses popping around him. Too busy to talk, his lips curled in a snarl, his belief in the ingratitude and dubious worth of the lazy bastards that live here now vindicated. Maybe he felt proud of his importance and the wise resignation in his voice when he spoke to the police.

  The police took shame-faced Alphonse away. Now he and Araselli must forget. The request for the police was, this time, so quick, that they had no time to gather together all the summonses for our young bucks here.

  Forms of Retreat

  Remembering this bad time, thinking back, we see that it started with everyone leaving here. No, not everyone. But many.

  Alphonse of course. The police took him away. He was with his family. They flew in, got him, he was gone.

  Annie and Milton chartered a plane, quietly, just for themselves, with all that money Annie won at cards. They went to Broome.

  Moses was driving out to Broome also. He had a big meeting to go to. He was taking Francis with him. That Franny, he was a spoilt one. It may be that Moses felt guilt for the bad way Franny was brought into the world.

  Moses didn’t leave until night-time. He didn’t want to take lots of people with him. He knew some would go and get drunk, run out of money, get homesick, fight or make some other trouble, and eventually ring the community here and ask for money to get a plane so they could come back to their home.

  So they—Moses and Franny—were driving through the coconut trees and on their way. But just then a big mob came running up between the houses where the big casino tree is. They were running pretty hard, some of them. Grim and quiet, some looking behind, the fastest ones slowing down and laughing nervously as they got to the vehicle. They said there was a devil-devil, maybe two even, hiding behind the casino tree, someone saw it. Who? Dunno. Maybe from that crazy woman’s house, the one she keeps in there. But they didn’t talk too much; just jumped in the back of the ute and said, ‘Drive.’ Their eyes had gone big and round.

  The people that got up early next day—it was young ones, the children—found money and cards all scattered in a trail going away from the tree and up to the coconut road. Some said that yeah, they saw the devil footprints near the tree. Yep, like a bullock’s foot, and there was also footprints with heel, toe, no instep; but it was all messed up pretty soon and no one could really tell.

  Anyway, the scared ones had a cold trip out, all huddled together on the back of that Toyota, with just one blanket between them. Raphael, Bruno, Paulie, Gemma, Scholastica and some others. But things got worse. Very bad.

  And Milton, who few out with his missus Annie, he was not really ready for holidays. But probably, because Alex was also going out, Milton was worried about having that woman—Annette, Mrs the Great—as boss. What about her? Dalek Woman. She like a robot in one of those films. Short, built, walking with little quick steps. Could be on wheels. Her arms straight in front of her pushing, pushing.

  She was boss of the school, once, for a couple of days when Alex had to go away to a meeting. Hard woman. She trundled into the community office, yelling at giant Gerrard that he was not to pay the school cleaners. She’d take their pay, she said, her voice angry but cold like a recording, because she did their work for them. No, really, she would give them their pay only when they worked. She told them not to bring their children when they were meant to be cleaning because they just made more mess than there was to start with. Her face went red like her lipstick and she was short-circuiting when she saw Annie bring her dogs into the room with the vacuum cleaner.

  When she was very angry her voice went loud and sharp like a saw or a rattle in a
car, and she made people want to sneak away, pull their heads down into shoulders and creep away. People took off their heads and hid them in their pockets so that they didn’t see or hear her, and so she couldn’t tell who they were.

  She thought people were her slaves. She told Milton to do too much weeding and to mow the lawn right to the edge of the fence. It was hot, man, you know. He didn’t come back to the school while she was boss.

  At school assemblies she looked more alive; smiled like a snake or a crocodile. Lots of teeth. She did have a friendly smile, when she gave the little kids the pretty bits of paper which had her writing and a little picture on them. The kids got one if they came to school clean, with combed hair and good clothes, and on time. Then, at the assembly, they stood next to her, with her hand clamped on their shoulders, and she told everyone who the good mums were too.

  Sometimes people watched her, crossing the grass of the schoolyard, coming to the shop in the late afternoon. She came in a dead straight line, lookingstraightahead, following the track from her house door to the store, holding money bunched in one upheld fist.

  ‘Shoo! Shoo! Off you go, you know you’re not allowed here now.’ She frightened the little kids away from the swings and they took off, running and tumbling before her as if she was pushing a minefield before her somehow.

  She got to the shop and most of us looked away, or maybe smiled shyly at her. Maybe get behind her and stick your elbow in someone so they laugh, or yelp, and she might turn and look at you along her sights.

  Gabriella called her Dalek Woman.

  Anyway, it was true, true for sure, that Milton did not like having her for his boss. So he and his missus, Annie, and the money, went away for a little holiday.