Taboo

by Kim Scott

  Smoke wreathed the grins and teeth of these brothers, rose from their whiskers and through their hair. Gerry said he was not going to start those old habits again.

  ‘Found the Lord?’

  ‘Nah. Better than that.’

  They turned away. Lowered their heads over the bottle and bucket.

  ‘Only a bit of weed. A bit of green. Not the other stuff.’

  *

  Gerald sat in the doorway of the shed as the others walked away. He breathed lightly, his anxious heart pattered. Their feet crunched gravel spread so thinly between asbestos fence and asbestos house that weeds had punched through. Fibro, people said now, not asbestos. Fibro and weatherboard.

  Bougainvillea erupted on the fence, lunged at the house and, falling, made an archway. Beyond, at the bright end of the driveway, a car grumbled left to right. Gerry heard the sound of the small stones flicked by its tyres and saw the two pedestrians turn, and also exit stage right.

  This little house, this shabby backyard of weeds; a child’s bicycle, a rotary clothes hoist. It felt an enormous space. The big old sky above.

  Gerry sat in an old school chair. Metal frame, wooden seat. The sun warmed him. He realised he was smiling.

  Get some work. Or an education. Find a way to stay off the stuff. After all, he’d managed that inside, more than twelve months now.

  Natural, wanting to celebrate at such a time.

  He scratched himself.

  *

  He’d only been inside a few weeks this time. A parole issue, that’s all. It had been a disappointment in a way, because on his previous stint his cousin had been running ‘culture classes’, ‘workshops’; whatever you wanted to call them. A long timer, Uncle Jim. Wirlomin boys had looked up to him, and those attending the classes had been mostly his own nephews and cousins and grannies. Another member of the extended family sent Jim wordlists, genealogies, language and songs and stories and photos and stuff he was putting together with old boy, Jim’s dad. One of the screws was helping, even. Jim had had that knack of enlisting people, women particularly.

  They were teaching themselves, in prison of all places. They’d memorised vocabulary, and listened to recordings of family, most no longer alive. Had sat around a whiteboard in their baggy greens while Jim played recordings and – there was no getting around it – lectured them. A pyjama party for grown men, but no party food, no women, no grog. Not so many laughs. A barren room.

  Jim’s father died. It was best he never saw his boys turn up at the funeral in chains and prison greens. Would’ve hurt him. His voice was on lots of the recordings.

  Then Jim himself was gone. Had they only played at respect, in that prison cell, listening to Jim? Jim did go on and on.

  It was true what people said: every old one left a hole in the world when they died, when they took language with them. That old language was a world itself, and one by one the words let you in. But individuals who could connect you to it, re-introduce you, they were necessary too. Someone needed to step into Jim’s shoes.

  Gerald used to lie flat on his back on his cell bed, and let what they called a dead, extinct language roll through his skull. Move his lips and tongue, say the words out loud. Let them reshape him from the inside out. That was under a low ceiling, a prison cell. Now he had this big sky, this fresh breeze.

  A woman appeared. Nita. Aunty Nita. Nan. Old Girl. A childhood memory: her cold hands and the first time – a boy looking into her upturned eyeballs – he knew himself a lone consciousness, a single self.

  The bougainvillea spilling over the doorway had concealed her so she first appeared as a bloom among the thorns and clinging vine, and then the blank gaze of her sunglasses turned to him, her long grey hair lifted in the breeze, and her attention reached out to him.

  The face was expressionless, open to the world, her chin lifted. She held her arms slightly raised, a little in front and out to each side and the hands palms down. Her tread was very light, and – no doubt her blindness was part of it – there was something tentative about it; a distinct moment when the foot remained poised in the air, not yet committed to that necessary next step.

  Gerald walked toward her, his footsteps softly crunching, stopped a few metres away and bid her good day in the old language.

  ‘How are you, Gerry?’

  In the old language, he told her he was well.

  She tilted her head to one side. ‘You talking language, now. Proper blackfella, unna.’

  He agreed with her, again using the old people’s tongue.

  ‘You reckon that’s our lingo?’

  He said he did, and went to her. They embraced, lightly. She accepted his peck on the cheek.

  ‘You happy, Gerry?’

  ‘That old me’s not who I am now, Aunty. Language, the old culture, that’s what Jim showed me.’

  ‘If it helps, my boy. Good. But those young girls, Gerald?’

  ‘They’re safe, Aunty. Don’t start that. I never did nothing; that was Gerry, you know that.’

  ‘You working?’

  ‘Will be, but gotta camp coming up. Workshop. Back to country.’

  ‘Getting paid?’

  ‘Not about the money, my aunty.’

  ‘In prison, you one of the dancers there last NAIDOC, unna?’

  ‘Singer, Aunty.’

  ‘What’s it stand for anyway, that NAIDOC?’

  ‘National Aboriginal and Islander Day of . . . committee of . . .’

  ‘You go? NAIDOC Ball?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You ever been to a ball, Gerald?’

  ‘No.’ Gerry spoke again in what he believed was the old people’s tongue, then: ‘That’s the real me.’

  Nita raised an eyebrow; a surprising gesture for a blind person, at least for those that did not know her.

  ‘Yeah. Giving up all the other shit . . .’

  What did the old girl mean by her little smile? Holding her face up all the time like she thinks she is a holy person.

  ‘I know my problem.’ Gerry kept speaking. ‘Drugs. Violence. That’s not who I really am.’

  ‘You gunna get in touch with her, Gerry?’

  ‘I am. That’s what Jim wanted.’

  Nita stood there, head nodding.

  ‘You always been good with words and promises, Gerry.’

  ‘More than just words, Aunty. You never knowed the real me. Nobody knows.’

  She just kept nodding her head.

  ‘Was my brother, that last time.’

  Her blind eyes stared.

  Gerry gestured goodbye, mouthed the words at her, went away like she wanted him to. Started the long walk down the driveway. He remained proud of himself.

  There might be a bus. He could maybe cadge a lift. No. He was gunna walk. There was no need to rush. Old people, they used to walk. Eat only good food. Be together around a fire under the same old sky he was under now and he could be right in their world – be right inside and among and part of, like breathing the air or a fish swimming in water or a child beginning to dream in their mother’s tongue and the world springing more to life each day . . . He could live and find himself in the language, in the stories, the songs and all that. Not in books. His land was his book. These were the very thoughts he’d entertained and cultivated in his prison cell.

  Gerald sighed. Looked along the road. A car went by.

  He walked on the edge of the road, where the bitumen crumbled a bit, along a strip of gravel and weeds. Bottle tops, cigarette butts and wrappers of various kinds. Throwaway bits of people’s lives.

  Houses and cars, the weed-tufted gardens, the snaking hoses and kids’ toys.

  Gerald walked between houses he’d known forever, and some that were new to him, fresh brick and tile with carports and two or three crammed where there’d been just one.


  People had good houses now. All sorts of help to get ahead, to get to where you could scratch and struggle with the white people. Join the assimilationists.

  A footpath. A weedy gap between it and the road on his right. Footpath the other side too. Someone walking there, staring straight ahead. Houses either side, blankly staring at one another.

  The shabby shopping centre. The laundromat, once its social centre, was closed. It must’ve been a phantom dryer he heard, spinning.

  *

  Once he’d followed a schoolmate along here. Pioneering family, he told them all, though both his mum and dad worked at the TAB. Kid stole money from his mum’s purse. Bought a big bag of lollies, a plastic shopping bag meant for groceries but filled with jelly snakes and chocolate buttons, with coloured sugar in all the shapes of domesticity: teeth, babies, cigarettes, bottles, cars, pets . . .

  Primary school years. Gerald the youngest in the group trailing behind the TAB kid, scrambling for the sweet things he threw over his shoulder. The kid threw lollies onto the roofs of shops, a bus stop. Sugar collected in gutters. He kept walking. Some of the others were jumping to try to see what was on the roofs; one began shinning up a drainpipe.

  The TAB kid was pleased and so very full of his power, scattering sweet and desirable things, controlling the little crowd.

  One of Gerald’s older cousins went up to him. Grabbed his bag. Hit him a few times, laughed at his tears and jeered his stumbling departure. Then passed handfuls of lollies around the triumphant circle that remained.

  Gerald was halfway into town already.

  Traffic came past as if set in motion by a distant machine at small and irregular intervals. Whoosh. Whoosh. Like explosive exhalations. The sound got on his nerves. Kept him edgy. He walked past buildings – big boxes – all along the highway, bright red yellow blue beige boxes too, with large letters screaming at him. A hill of shabby houses rose on his right, granite rocks and tufts of grey trees here and there among them. To his left, the land continued to slope, flattening to become sports fields. When he was a child it was a Native Reserve here. Before that, a camping ground.

  Pa Harry Hopetown in a shabby greatcoat, sitting beside a smoking fire, slipping among paperbarks and mosquitoes. A big drum of methylated spirits, the shaking cup and pale cordial within.

  The summer easterly blew in Gerald’s face. Blew, he reminded himself, from ancestral country, from where the sun forever rises. Even today, even with lowering clouds like this.

  Gerald’s lips moved. He mouthed some of the words he’d got from his dead family and his brothers in prison.

  His feet took him across the slope a little away from the top of town, paths only used by poor pedestrians, by single mothers and little children. Ex-crims too, obviously. He went by the back of supermarkets and trucks shovelling merchandise into shopping malls. A community radio station. A panelbeater. The drab rear of a video store, no longer in business. Skirted around the old cemetery. Lots of white people, but no Noongar ever buried there. Remembered that girl grinding her pelvis against his, fucking among the bones. Dead people never scared him. No old massacre was gunna keep him from his real home.

  He was tiring already. Didn’t walk much lately. He cut across a deserted stand of petrol bowsers, a school further up the hill, an empty squash court on his left. Buildings from his childhood, from before he was born.

  Walking toward the beach, he detoured into another huddle of small brick bungalows. Knocked on a door.

  Last night, his last inside, Gerald dreamed of Kokanarup.

  The door opened, and his mirror image greeted him. No, not quite his mirror image. This version had particularly glossy, bloodshot eyes, the teeth were not so strong, the lips looser. This doppelganger’s skin was mottled and greasy. His twin smiled silently, stepped back to let him enter the room.

  ‘Only weed,’ he said. ‘Bit of weed’s alright. Bit of green never hurt no one.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I need somewhere to stay and you owe me,’ said Gerald. ‘Again.’ And he stepped across the threshold.

  DEPARTURE

  The city’s Central Bus Station was built upon the principle of a large shed and, except for the enormous windows on one wall, barely disguised as such. Inside, a vast grey plain of concrete was enlivened not only by the dancing dust motes and large, sparkling rectangles of sunlight on the floor, but also by firmly anchored patterns of bright plastic chairs. A schoolgirl entered the building and, veering widely around the chairs, paused at a vending machine. The machine accepted her money, gave nothing in return.

  The woman behind a pane of glass marked Enquiries looked away. She touched her stiff hair, pursed her bright lips and tapped the keyboard before her. Small particles of what seemed to be skin flaked from her cheekbones.

  A would-be passenger, clutching at baggage and clothing, stumbled into the building as if pushed. Hissing, the doors closed. Outside, a hot wind continued to moan and twist in the angles of the building. The schoolgirl, Tilly, perched at the very corner of one platoon of chairs, and bent her head to her electronic device. Voices in her skull competed for her attention; she did not hear the wind, the doors; had not even heard her own footsteps.

  Again the doors parted and an old woman stood between them, holding herself against the buffeting wind and beckoning two small children to join her.

  The woman was perhaps seventy years old, the children of primary school age. Each child – a boy and a girl – had a bright backpack. The woman wore loose, colourful layers of clothing and her abundant hair was tied back, silver curls spilling against her skin. She looked around the sunlit departure room and saw Tilly, in pleated private school uniform and hat. Tilly pulled her sleeves down past her wrists, and wrapped her legs around one another so tightly that they might have been woven together and the one loose shoelace the only thing awry. Her eyes were fixed to her phone, and tiny speakers pressed into her ears. Her fingers danced and her lips moved as she breathed some internal voice.

  The Enquiries woman shuffled toward the glass doors, a hand flicking at the wrist to gesture that the old woman and children must move away from the doorway. A bus pulled up and, as it lowered itself with a subdued hiss, its door sighed open. Elderly passengers stepped cautiously onto the kerb and, seasoned campaigners, looked around for alternatives to the glossy woman and sliding glass doors that confronted them.

  A little group of bodies had attached itself to the belly of the bus, and watched the beast being gutted. Another group began to gather to see it stuffed again.

  Tilly turned at a touch and, skilled by habit, unstoppered her ears. Dangling the tiny speakers in one hand, she put her head to one side, and politely performed: Yes, what do you want?

  ‘Where you from, bub?’ asked the silver-haired woman, keeping an eye on the children’s ascension into the bus.

  ‘Here,’ said Tilly. ‘From my mother’s belly.’ Faltered. ‘Well, I used to live in . . . I’m at boarding school.’

  The school’s name was emblazoned across her small frame: on the round straw hat, the tie, at one breast. Her shoes were sensible shoes, neatly polished; her socks smooth, and folded at the ankle.

  ‘I’m Gloria,’ the woman said. ‘Gloria Winnery.’ Her eyes moved to the windows of the bus. Tilly wanted to step around her but could not.

  ‘Who’s your family then?’

  ‘Oh, my mum is white.’ It was dismissive. ‘She passed away.’ Tilly glared at the older woman, and continued on to prevent any more questions and to get it over with. ‘My dad was Jim Coolman.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’re that Wirlomin mob.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Surprised.

  ‘You poor thing, losing both your parents.’

  Tilly gave a little snort. ‘I only met my dad this year.’ She looked past the woman to the bus. The silver-haired woman’s attention moved to the children, who had claimed their seats and were now
pressing against the glass. Tilly danced around the coloured shawls, the silver hair and waving arm. ‘See ya,’ she said, glancing back from the steps of the bus.

  ‘Where you headed, bub?’ Gloria called after her.

  From beside the driver, Tilly called, ‘Kepalup,’ and kept moving.

  Seated near the back, unpacking phone and earbuds, Tilly allowed Gloria a little wave. The old woman was clutching her hands to her chest, as if distressed. Tilly wasn’t feeling so wonderful herself.

  She put her bag on the seat between herself and the aisle and leaned against her reflection; beyond that was the rush and flow, the spiky, shape-shifting world of traffic lights, of shouting signs, of corners of glass and brick and steel, of vehicles merging and separating; people were fragments and shadows in tilted panes of glass and scattered shards of sunlight. Tilly’s fingers gripped each shirt cuff; her fingernails were gnawed to the quick. Smoothly, with the practised ease of a nervous reflex, those raw fingertips found the text from her Uncle Gerry:

  Hi Tilly get Esperance bus to lake grace 2moro. Someone will pick you up there for the camp. Gerry.

  She’d replied, Ok, and a phone call from Nan Kathy had sorted it. Gerry was her dad’s cousin, Noongar-way; connected by generation from an apical ancestor, as the legislation speaks it. Before he passed away her dad had as good as asked her to make this trip, go to this camp. ‘For me,’ he might as well have said. ‘For all of us.’

  Tilly told herself it was nice of the old woman (Gloria?) to be concerned about her, but she’d rather she wasn’t. One of the children at the front of the bus turned, waved to Tilly. Did they know about the taboo, too?

  She caught the driver’s glance in his rear-view mirror. Closed her eyes.

  *

  Already, several of the passengers had turned to look at her, some more than once. In some cases, they had gone to some trouble to do so, and smiled reassuringly. Tilly did not feel comforted. People had told her not to see hurt where there was none, not to be paranoid. Trust yourself. Even Gerry had said it. Love yourself. Be grateful.