all) tomb-palace, but Limini and Pixr irrepressible, I said, ‘I’ll try
and call Kolissa, if I may.’
‘I was going to suggest it,’ he said.
I placed the call without difficulty, excepting the incredible
delays. Nature and reasons for communication? Personal greeting
to contractual spouse following three month absence from
Otzapoc. (Wait, cup of coffee, attempts at conversation.) Reason
for absence? To collect funds held by friend on Greenball. (Wait.)
Call permitted. Hi Kolissa, love. (I felt strange.) How was she? I
was fine, staying with some real nice people, with a ride down
already arranged when it became possible. I spoke of Orry and
Fiormaria. I said I loved her. I spoke of incidental things. And
then, goodbye, all my love always. The message fled away on the
tardy wings of light.
Later — oh, later, another eon for Sesemene’s shell to endure in
Jagging
225
serenity while I waited — a reply came. Kolissa’s voice. She was
fine, a bit bored with the work. So O rry and Fior were dug in on
Greenball. Would they ever leave the place? She herself had lived
the cloistered life in my absence. The hospital people were nice,
good fun, mostly. She was well, never better. She loved me, couldn’t
wait for my return, loved me. And goodbye. We had said nothing of
revolution or archaeology.
From then on I could not sit still. Pacing from room to room at
his luxurious camp. Playing chess with himself. Talking flippantly
or philosophically with Praliya. And fooling around, teasing, horsing with Limini and Pixr. Oh, their Great Walls of China teeth!
Pacing and wanting, reading late at night and wanting, wanting
Kolissa. But who said Jahenry couldn’t pull off a civilised bloodless
coup — and Berlit get a villa in Terengay for his not compulsory
but highly recommended retirement? W'here had all those hel-
meted booted black-goggled gun-packing rapists come from? I felt
slightly ashamed.
The day came a week and a half later when Praliya, Limini and
Pixr all kissed me goodbye, Pixr in tears and me promising to try
very hard to get back to see them bringing Kolissa, me warmed by
this love and the love I was returning to, and Fainey-Juveh flipping
Sleezy and me round Trivash’s slagball to the freighter. Then up
and away, the old joy pum ping through my veins, the old jagging
joy, joy of the jag, another world dropping away beneath me
(Limini and Pixr, Praliya and strange Claudian Fainey-Juveh, will
I never see you again?) (Sesemene I’ll not regret, but you’ll be with
me always), Kolissa, Pm coming back at last . . .
Jag on . . .
Gone, gone, those lovely people, and all that strange stuff. Gone.
G’bye. Goodluck to you and me.
The Interior
A tale o f outback rapture
©
DAMIEN BRODERICK
Oh, the dreams they have, the women.
All their dreams come true here, if they work at it.
Sally loves insurance. She’ll never make another meal (John only
used to pick at it, anyway). There are laws to learn, statutes and
actuarial tables. W here would we be without those hands waiting to
catch us?
Elaine’s going to drive the tram she conducts. Fares will shortly
be abolished. A flat tax, devised by Jane, makes that silly system
uneconomical.
Dianne goes to meetings and is snide and loving by turns. Who
understands her piercing intelligence? Who warms to her caring?
Perhaps she will open a house for marginal loonies, outside the
system.
All these things have come to pass here in the desert, in the hot
gusts and new oceanic rains of the city of Restitution.
One or two of the blacks get drunk. They like living out there in
their filthy humpies. There are always a few deadbeats, after all.
Paradise can hardly be summoned by legislation.
In the morning the red land is darkened halfway to noon, in the
west, by the shadows of the pyramids we put here.
Angela climbs the struts, putting on muscle mass now she’s given
up her nervy anorexia, climbs pantingly the four kilometres to the
bloody top and cocks her Leica, squinting cunningly at the
readouts. This is magic. It is her soul she captures, sucking it into
226
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227
the banging nanosecond aperture. How she sighs. Here and there
gawk people in family groups. She grabs a snap. How hard it is to
breathe at this height. Still. Bliss.
Yvonne looks after her fractious daughter and on the tea-table
edits books. In Restitution she has an official post but is permitted
to work at home, of course. There is no point in Yvonne’s friends
complaining that she is not director of the firm. H er gift is the
sensitive nuance of text.
Jackie is the firm’s top dog, and rightly so. She loves it, though it’s
exhausting. They never see one another; Yvonne spends a fair bit of
time keeping up with it all on the phone.
Lucy is a mogul of information. Jenny engineers the data flows.
Neither of them digs ditches or washes babies’ bums. There are
babies squalling and snorting and radiating cuteness all over the
hardy grass when it’s not too hot, but none of the babies belong to
Lucy or Jenny, or Russell or Damien or Bruce or John or plenty of
the others. It’s not totalitarian in the desert. Laurie’s m ountain is
not a pyramid, in fact, but a wedge, a hollow concrete-lined earthworks higher than the M atterhorn. It’s eighteen hundred kilometres long, splitting the continent at longitude 130 degrees,
from the Great Australian Bight to the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf up
north.
There’s a little, unpretentious shrine in Artarmon in the house
where Laurie Hogan used to eat his breakfast before he went off
each day to work for the Willoughby Council. That was in the big
depression, before we got the rains started here.
You can stand in the desert and see the snow up on the plateau.
No wonder Angela is shivering, protecting her delicate camera
lenses.
Not all the aborigines are shickered, naturally. Most of them
work inside the Hogan, where it’s kept cool. When you have those
big nukes churning out the juice, airconditioning’s no problem. O f
course, the sheer mass of dirt helps keep off the desert sun.
The canal is on the western side, where the precipitation’s forced by
the Hogan’s upward jut. Gillian sails there with her cousins. She
leaves the portapak at work and lies there in the afternoon sun,
adding melanin to her goldy skin.
Kim Phuc smiles across the lapping water at her from a dhow.
She’s got enough melanin already and keeps her face shaded, soft,
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Damien Broderick
fresh, lovely as a dream of courtesans. No jellied terrordrifts.
There’s romance and self-discovery in the sacred places of the H ogan. U nder its colossal fin the bones of fifty thousand years lie, tenderly held.
Rirette yawns delicately behind five exquisitely coral nails,
musing spitefully on on
e hundred and eighty thousand farms,
averaging two thousand hectares apiece. And hurls with vicious
force one of the bottles from the table at her side. Fish-breeding
farms have been made feasible by the 1100mm of rain forced onto
the desert from the high trans-oceanic winds, all God’s plenty
watering Restitution and the other forty-seven new cities of the
inner plains, the secret places of the roo and emu. It is a whisky
bottle, which splinters the glass and polished wood of her favourite
clock, falls unharm ed and gurgling to the white pile carpet.
The slowly spreading rust stain holds her attention with a horrid
fascination; just once she sobs. Laughter strains her throat eventually, hysterical perhaps, stretches her face and does not stop. How empty her life must be, even here.
Surely none of these men wish to drive great hot machines, run
with sweat, scratch whiskers matted on exhausted faces, leave their
babies unhugged for hours each day. O ut come the babies in
shaded strollers, and Jean sits in the high, shaking cabin to shove
tonnes of earth while Peter and Klim listen to the kids’ demands for
eccentric purchases at the supermarket: no milky products for this
one, nothing fibrous for that, special fish-pond-grown supplements
for the third.
Claudia dances so hard her menses are confused and pinch her.
Carey chops vegetables into a wok.
Len listens to the complaints of the distraught, Berys organises
their troubled lives for them, drawing up lists. She has all the
details on file for their benefit. Each remembers the old way of it, in
the city, under the screw, with the yellow gasping sky and cockroaches sauntering in the kitchen. In Restitution there is no grease on the stove, and it is our tendency to eat in excellent Chinese
restaurants where the children do much of the serving.
When Ki-in-jara arrives at the door, an hour later, Rirette’s ruined
clock is in the tidy, all the tiny shiny cogs and springs panned up; a
The Interior
2 2 9
Venetian statuette stands in its place, a Persian throw-rug covers
the tawny stain.
Ki-in-jara is not unsophisticated. Through her glowing beauty
(opposite of his dark) he sees her misery. Lightly he kisses her,
comes without a word of greeting into her house.
‘You are the mythic heart of Australia,’ she whispers to him.
She touches, without pressure, the welts of his burkan markings,
the totemic whipmarks which score his face.
Somehow, here in Restitution, they make a harmony; every
meeting is a new unfolding, a new wonder, a fullness of joy. W hat
can he guess of her emptiness, he who is so full of the joy of life?
‘I need you,’ she tells him. Yes, he knows that, but how can he
know that her need is so different from his?
For Rirette, drifting here in the concrete, nuclear-lighted and
air-conditioned halls of the Hogan’s six trillion dollar flattened
truncated pyramid, Ki-in-jara is, she understands, the final glimmer of meaning in life.
W ithout him is . . . well, death. She plans to cut her throat and
bleed as quickly as possible into the snow.
Up at the Top End, the man-made mountain swathes through tropical jungle screaming with birds of mad hue. In the dead heart, there’s stone and willy-willies and tiny blue flowers when the rare
rains come, every hundred years, though the Hogan’s going to
change that. The wind there drones like a corroboree of blacks
blowing ancient blues down the misery and power of their hollow
didgeridoos.
We love it here, by and large.
She who is empty listens, in their talking, and his voice speaks for
both of them. He has not come like a savage clad for the desert,
naked, his woomeras and boomerangs clacking at his belt of wallaby skin. She hears only one part in ten of what he says and what she hears infuriates the sick, tormenting thing inside her, but his
voice is beauty and life and strength and a promise (if she can only
find it at last) of meaning.
Why is he with her? It is duty, yes, vocation, yes, but for Ki-in-
jara it is a sad gladness and a love powerful as the deep voices of his
kin droning their strange sophistications in the departing deserts.
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Dam ien Broderick
Some of the women have children. As yet it is difficult to arrange
pregnancy in the men, but researchers from the Monash University Medical Centre are discussing its implementation and ethics.
A reasonable proportion of the women abide in the love of their
own sex. This is true also of a proportion of the men. Some, too, are
quite solitary.
Now Lee’s kids by his first association are grown, Irene and Lee
have started again with a baby of their own. Isn’t it nice to know you
can always start again?
Dianne and Damien are infertile, one of them by the knife.
Dianne exercises so hard that her menses have gone hay-wire.
Elaine and Bruce have a good num ber of pussycats.
Gillian eats no milk products. They make her sick. So her figure
remains ship-shape without effort.
Jenny can’t stomach the tiniest trace of farinaceous foodstuffs. It
causes a kind of mimetic global depression, not conducive to advising big business in the flow structure of their computer databases.
Ki-in-jara is pure, a virgin. Rirette, sated to the edge of emptiness
and death, almost finds satisfaction in him.
She looks at his face, at the dark, pocked planes, and his eyes are
light entire. She touches his strong hand with the exquisite m anicured fingers which hours earlier had hurled the bottle in useless passion at the void of useless living. She takes his hand and leads
him to the small oak table in the dining room, and rings a bell, and
the caterer fetches in their repast.
As they eat, his silence is as rich as his conversation.
The fowl they eat (swan, from the ponds), and the Barossa wine
in the crystal, and the joint with the dark coffee, are things shared.
Before Ki-in-jara came to her out in the desert, Rirette never
imagined herself other than a singleton, an isolate. She has been always Society, never her deep true self. In Ki-in-jara she has found a spiritual world opening beyond herself, a reverberation speaking to
her from the mythic centre of a continent as dry and empty, until
now, as her heart.
‘You hold open the door,’ she tells him, ‘waiting for me to pass
through it.’
She has never known love before.
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231
Nigel writes poems of love and hate, epithalamiums to the Hogan.
His daughter dances to the night, changing her hair. Many women
know Nigel.
‘Love,’ Ki-in-jara says, ‘is an echo, a pool where ancestors look up
into us. Love is a place we may rest. It is a return from one to the
other.’
‘Where have you learned these things?’ she asks him, touching
his scarred cheek.
‘One-sided love is a hurt,’ he tells her. ‘Love is a giving, and a
receiving. W hatj you ask for is comfort,’ he says, and she has never
heard this harsh truth from him before; it tears her. ‘W hat you need
is reassurance, and love.’ He is a solid warmth.
Ki-in-jara is not self-sufficient.
He needs to give.
She sees that he offers his soul and she is too terrified to enter.
Love is too big a thing, almost as myth, as the ancient place the
Hogan bruises with its monstrous new weight.
All her life her givings have been inessential, untrue, selfish:
witticisms, criticisms.
H is shadow moves over her heart.
And she is weeping, freed, in his terrible desert arms, all his
virgin desert mystery holding her, salt-wet tears like the great rains
which have begun to crash into the secret red heart of the continent, tears lifted from some distant ocean and set down pure, cleansing and burning her eyes.
Ki-in-jara holds her, and strokes her pale beautiful hair, and sees
that what the ancestors have told him is so, that she has been at the
verge of self-destruction, that he must call her to their waiting
places if she is to be spared the ruin which has been done to her.
Only native birds and flora are permitted here, in Restitution.
Pets, though, are allowed inside the Hogan. Another plague of
rabbits would be quite a set-back.
‘Rirette,’ Ki-in-jara whispers, ‘this is not all.’
Wonderingly, she gazes up.
‘Not enough,’ he says. ‘Love comes from the spirit, from the
Rainbow, from the sacred places, not from this world of machinery
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Damien Broderick
and images and babbling toys.’
She is not surprised to hear him speak of his ancient faiths, for
his people were nothing if not religious, but she is surprised to find
comfort in his words.
She draws back gently from his arms.
‘Take me, Ki-in-jara,’ she says, ‘if it is permitted, to your sacred
sites. I have . . . things . . . to think about.’
Later, in her dream, it is never anything like the truth.
They go down the gaunt pillared solitude of a European
cathedral, Rirette lost in a drift of years and incense. They stand in
the arc of the altar’s great stone tracery. They move into a pew and
kneel. H er heart soars. She recalls, in her dream, the aunt and
mother perfumes and the rustle of dresses and the crisp prayer
books of childhood. The golden voices, the smug faces, the hurt
Strange Attractors (1985) Page 32