Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  Governor McConnell had written to Eyre and added dryly, ‘I expect you to be able to report within a few weeks that you have been able to apprehend the native they call the Ghost of Emu Downs, the fellow Biranga.’

  The Ghost of Emu Downs, thought Eyre, as he looked down at Biranga’s broken body. Some ghost. Wawayran came up with a wet rag, and Eyre took it, and knelt down again, and began carefully to wipe away the pipe-clay that encrusted the dead Biranga’s forehead and cheeks.

  The face that appeared through the smeary clay was startlingly calm, as if the man had died peacefully and without fear, in spite of his terrible injuries.

  It was also an unusually cultured-looking face, almost European, although the forehead and the cheeks were decorated with welts and scars, marks which Eyre recognised as those of a warrior of the Wirangu. Eyre hesitated for a moment, and then peeled back one of the man’s eyelids with his thumb. The irises were brown; although not that reddish-brown which distinguished the eyes of so many Aborigines. Carefully, Eyre pushed the eyelid back. He was not squeamish about touching dead men: he had touched so many, and some he had embraced.

  He suddenly became aware that Charlotte was standing close behind him, looking down at the body.

  ‘Charlotte,’ he said, ‘this is not a place for you.’ But there was very little hint of admonition in his voice. He knew that she had to look; that she would not be satisfied until she did.

  Charlotte said quietly, ‘He could almost be a white man.’

  ‘Just pale, my dear. Some of them are. Sometimes it’s caused by disease. Poor food, that kind of thing. I’ve seen some Aborigines who looked like snowmen.’

  ‘Snowmen,’ Charlotte whispered.

  Eyre stood up. ‘Come away now,’ he said. There’s nothing to be done. I’ll have to make a report to the governor; and perhaps a note to Captain Billington, too.’

  Charlotte stayed where she was, the warm wind blowing the hem of her cream-coloured dress into curls. ‘Do you think—?’ she began. But then she stopped herself, because she had asked the same question already in her mind, and so many times before, and the answer had always been the same: that she would never know. The desert does something to a child. It makes a child its own; as do the strange people who walk the desert asking neither for food nor for water; except what they themselves can discover from the ground.

  Eyre had explained that to Charlotte time and time again, in different ways, perhaps to prepare her for this very moment.

  She turned and looked at him, and there were so many anguished questions in her eyes that he had to look away—at the lawns, the kangaroos in the distance—at anything that would relieve him from the pain which she was using like a goad—forcing him to face up again and again to the most terrible secret of his whole life.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ he said. Then he reached out his hand, and said, ‘Come on. Come away. There’s no profit to be had from staying here.’

  ‘I always thought—’ she blurted; and then she took a breath, and controlled herself, saying in a wavery voice, ‘I always thought that he might have survived somehow, and been taken care of. I mean—why else would they have taken him? Except for money perhaps, and they never asked for that. I always imagined that he might have grown up amongst them; and lived a happy life, for all that had happened. Even Aborigines can be happy, can’t they, Eyre? You know them better than I do. The men, I mean. They can be happy, can’t they?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eyre.

  He took her sleeve, but she twisted away from him, and looked down again at the body lying in the lawn.

  ‘He looks so contented,’ she said. ‘They killed him, and yet he looks so peaceful. As if he were at home, at last.’

  Eyre frowned towards the Aborigine who had brought Biranga in; and thought of what he had said. ‘He didn’t even put up his hand to save himself. He was just standing, sir; just staring.’

  He said to Wawayran, ‘Make sure this fellow gets buried; soon as you like.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Then, ‘Please, sir?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, sir, the burial, sir. Christian or Wirangu, sir?’

  ‘This man’s a Wirangu, isn’t he?’

  Wawayran didn’t answer at first, but stared at Eyre in a peculiar way.

  ‘He’s a Wirangu?’ Eyre repeated, sharply.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, then, give him a Wirangu burial.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Charlotte had already returned to the house. Eyre stood on the lawn for a moment, undecided about what he should do next. Before he could turn away, though, one of the black boys came towards him with his hand held out, and said, ‘Mr Walker, sir, this was found in Biranga’s bag.’

  Eyre peered at it, and then picked it up. It was a fragment of stone, carved and painted with patterns.

  This is nothing unusual,’ he said. ‘It is only a spiritstone.’

  ‘But what it says, sir.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The boy pointed to the patterns and the pictures. The stone says, this is the mana stone which will be carried by the one spirit who comes back from the world beyond the setting sun; and by this stone you will know that it is truly him.’

  Eyre turned the stone over and over in his hand.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, at last. ‘I saw something like this before, once upon a time.’

  ‘Well, sir, if Biranga was carrying the stone, do you think that was the spirit who come back from the world beyond the setting sun?’

  Eyre looked at the boy, and then laid a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Do you believe in spirits coming back from the land beyond the setting sun?’

  The boy hesitated, and then said/No sir.’

  ‘No, sir,’ Eyre repeated. Then, ‘Neither do I.’

  And the time will come when a dead spirit visits the earth from the place beyond the setting sun, so that he may see again how beautiful it was.

  Many will be frightened by the spirit’s white face; but he will be befriended by a simple boy, who will guide him through the world.

  In return for this kindness, the spirit will try to teach the boy the magical ways of those who have passed into the sunset.

  However, he will forget that the boy is only mortal, and in trying to teach the boy how to fly like a spirit, he will cause the boy to drop from the mountain called Wongyarra, and die.

  And the spirit in his grief and remorse will seek out the cleverest of all clever-men, and will give him the magical knowledge of the dead; so that the clever-man may pass the knowledge on to every tribe; and to every tribesman.

  And in this way the grief of the spirit will be assuaged; and the tribes of Australia will be invincible in their magical knowledge against men and devils and anyone who wishes them harm.

  And this will be the beginning of an age that is greater and more heroic than the Dreaming.

  — Nyungar myth, first recorded by J.

  Morgan in Perth, 1833, from an

  account by the Aboriginal Galliput

  One

  There was an extraordinary commotion at the Lindsay house when he arrived there on his bicycle. Mrs McMurtry the cook was standing on the front lawn screaming shrilly; while upstairs the sash-windows were banged open and then banged shut again; and angry voices came first from the west bedroom and then from the east; and footsteps cantered up and down stairs; and doors slammed in deafening salvoes. Yanluga the Aborigine groom scampered out of the front porch with his hair in a fright crying, ‘Not me, sir! No, sir! Not me, sir!’ and rushed through the wattle bushes which bordered the garden, like a panicky kangaroo with greyhounds snapping at his tail.

  Eyre propped his bicycle against a hawthorn tree and approached the house cautiously. Mrs McMurtry had stopped screaming now and had flung up her apron over her face, letting out an occasional anguished ‘moooo’, as if she were a shorthorn which urgently needed milking. The front door of the house remained ajar, and inside Eyre could ju
st see the bright reflection from the waxed cedar flooring, and the elegant curve of the white-painted banisters. Somewhere upstairs, a gale of a voice bellowed, ‘You’ll do what I tell you, my lady! You’ll do whatever I demand!’

  Then a door banged; and another.

  Eyre walked a little way up the garden path; then took off his Manila straw hat and held it over his chest, partly out of respect and partly as an unconscious gesture of self-protection. He was dressed in his Saturday afternoon best: a white cotton suit, with a sky-blue waistcoat with shiny brass buttons, from the tailoring shop next to Waterloo House. His high starched collar was embellished with a blue silk necktie which had taken him nearly twenty minutes to arrange.

  ‘Is anything up?’ he asked Mrs McMurtry.

  Mrs McMurtry let out a throat-wrenching sob. Then she flapped down her apron, and her face was as hot and wretched as a bursting pudding.

  The mutton-and-turnip pie!’ she exclaimed.

  Eyre glanced, perplexed, towards the house. The mutton-and-turnip pie?’ he repeated.

  ‘Moooo!’ sobbed Mrs McMurtry. Eyre came over and laid his arm around her shoulders, trying to be comforting. Her candy-striped kitchen-dress was drenched in perspiration, and her scrawny fair ringlets were stuck to the sides of her neck. In midsummer, cooking a family luncheon over a wood-burning stove was just as gruelling as stoking the boilers of a Port Lincoln coaster.

  That’s not Mr Lindsay I hear?’ asked Eyre.

  Mrs McMurtry snuffled, and sobbed, and nodded frantically.

  ‘But surely Mr Lindsay wasn’t due home until Friday week!’

  ‘Well, mooo, he’s back now, aint he; came back this morning in the blackest of humours; too hot, says he, and nothing to show for a month’s dealings in Sydney but expenses; and he kicks the boy for not grooming the horses as good as he wanted; and he kicks the dog for sleeping in the pantry while he was gone; and then he shouts at Mrs Lindsay for letting Miss Charlotte dress herself up like a fancy-woman, mooo, and for walking out without his say-so, with only the boy for chaperone; and then he sees that it’s mutton-and-turnip pie, and what he says is, mooo, what he says is, “I hates the very sight of mutton-and-turnip pie, so help me,’ that’s what he says, and he tosses it clean out of the kitchen window and upside-down it lands plonk in the veronica.’

  Eyre took his hand away from Mrs McMurtry’s sweaty shoulders and wiped it unobtrusively on his jacket. He looked towards the house again and bit his lip. This was extremely bad news. He had wanted to tell Lathrop Lindsay about his freshly flowered affection for Charlotte in his own particular way. Mr Lindsay was unpredictable, irascible, and no lover of ‘sterlings’, those who had newly arrived from England, or what he called ‘the burrowing class’, by which he meant clerks and salesmen and junior managers. Mr Lindsay had a special dislike of Eyre, and not just because Eyre was a ‘sterling’, or because he worked as a clerk for the South Australian Company down at the port. He disliked Eyre’s manner, he disliked Eyre’s smartly cut clothes, and he very much disliked Eyre’s bicycle. It was probably fair to say that he disliked Eyre even more than he disliked mutton-and-turnip pie, and for that reason Eyre had wanted to prepare the ground for his announcement with ingenuity and care. He had already run two or three useful errands for Mrs Lindsay; and advised her where to find a reliable gardener, one who could conjure up English primroses as well as acacia. And back at his rooms on Hindley Street he had stored up five bottles of Lathrop Lindsay’s favourite 1824 port-wine, which he had obtained in barter from the bo’sun of the Illyria in exchange for two nights’ use of his bed, and an introduction to a benign and enormously fat Dutch girl called Mercuria.

  Now all this expense and inconvenience had gallingly gone to waste; and Eyre cursed his rotten luck.

  ‘I never saw Mr Lindsay in such a bate,’ protested Mrs McMurtry.

  One of the upstairs windows was lifted again. Mrs Lindsay leaned out, white and fraught, with her primrose hair-ribbon halfway down the side of her head.

  ‘Mr Walker!’ she called, breathily. ‘You’ll have to make yourself scarce! My husband has come back, and I’m afraid that he’s terribly angry at Charlotte for having stepped out with you. Please—you must go at once!’

  At that moment, another window opened up, on the other side of the house. It was Lathrop Lindsay himself, crimson with indignation.

  ‘What’s all this calling-out?’ he demanded. ‘Phyllis!’ Then he caught sight of Eyre standing in the garden with his hat over his heart and he roared incontinently, ‘You! Mr Walker! You stay there! I want to have a word with you!’

  His window banged down again. Mrs Lindsay waved to Eyre in mute despair, and then she closed her window, too. Eyre took two or three steps in retreat, towards the garden gate, but then stopped, and decided to stand his ground. If he were to flee, and pedal off on his bicycle, he would never have the chance to walk out with Charlotte again. He had to face up to Mr Lindsay; one way or another. Not only face up to him, but win him over.

  My God, he thought. How am I going to convince a snorting bull like Lathrop Lindsay that I could make him a suitable son-in-law? He cleared his throat, and wiped sweat away from his upper lip with the back of his sleeve. Mrs McMurtry had stopped mooo-ing now, and was staring at him with her hands on her hips with a mixture of suspicion and pity.

  ‘He’ll eat you up alive,’ Mrs McMurtry told him. The last fellow Charlotte walked out with, Billy Bonham, he was a new chum like you; and Mr Lindsay cracked three of his ribs with a walking-cane, so help me. And he was a lot better connected than what you are.’

  Eyre gave her a quick, dismissive scowl. She hesitated, huffed, and then flounced off back to the house, swinging a cuff at Yanluga as he re-appeared through the shrubbery. ‘Sterlings and Abbos,’ she grumbled. ‘Bad luck to the lot of ‘em!’

  Yanluga came cautiously up towards Eyre, biting his lips in apprehension. He was only fifteen but he had a natural way with horses, a way of calming them and whispering to them. Charlotte said that she had once seen him whistle to a kangaroo on the south lawn; and freeze the animal where it was, head raised, and then walk right up to it, and speak to it gently, although she hadn’t been able to hear what he had said. He was very black, Yanluga, a wonderful inky black, with bushy hair and a face that defied you not to smile at him. Eyre’s mother would have called him ‘sonsy’.

  Only Lathrop Lindsay found Yanluga irritating; but then Lathrop found the whole world irritating; and not only because of his inflamed piles. Lathrop had been dispatched to Australia by the Southwark Trading Company as a polite but very firm way of telling him that his books were not in order; and ever since then he had fought a ceaseless and irascible crusade to re-establish his self-esteem, both social and moral. Lathrop spoke a great deal of God, and Mary Magdalene, and also of Surrey, which he missed desperately; but more usually of the natural superiority of those who were neither clerks, nor black.

  Yanluga said, gently, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Walker, sir.’

  ‘Sorry?’ asked Eyre. ‘What for?’

  ‘Mr Lindsay asked me, did I take you and Miss Charlotte out for rides, sir, and I said yes. And then he asked me, did we have a chaperone, sir, and I said no.’

  Eyre ruffled Yanluga’s wiry hair. ‘Don’t you worry yourself,’ he said, trying to be reassuring. ‘It’s better that you told the truth, in any case.’

  ‘Sir, one of my cousins knows Steel Bullet the Mabarn Man.’

  ‘Is that so? I didn’t think that anybody knew Steel Bullet—not to speak to; I thought he hunted on his own; and never let anybody find out where he was.’

  ‘I tell you the truth, sir. One of my cousins knows Steel Bullet, sir, and maybe if you paid enough money, Steel Bullet would come in the night and kill Mr Lindsay for you, sir.’

  Steel Bullet the Mabarn Man was a legend in South-Western Australia; and whalers had already brought tales of his horrifying behaviour as far east as Adelaide. He was an Aboriginal called Alex Birbarn, and he was said to possess th
e magical powers of a Mabarn Man—including the ability to fly hundreds of miles at night, and to change himself into anything he wished, such as a rock, or an anthill. So far he was credited with the murders of seventy people, and he was notorious for following kangaroo hunts, and making off with the kangaroo skin or sometimes the whole kangaroo before the exhausted hunters realised they had a thief in their midst.

  Eyre said, ‘I don’t want to kill Mr Lindsay, Yanluga. I just want to persuade him to be reasonable.’

  ‘Mr Lindsay never reasonable, sir. Never.’ He shook his head violently.

  ‘Well, yes, I know that, but what can I do?’

  ‘Call the Mabarn Man, sir. Steel Bullet will chop him up into very small pieces for you, sir. Please, sir. Everybody would be very happy to see you marry Miss Charlotte, sir. Especially Miss Charlotte, sir.’

  Eyre looked at Yanluga carefully. ‘Miss Charlotte told you that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘You’re not making it up?’

  ‘Honour of Joseph, honour of Jesus, honour of God who always sees us.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Eyre. He pushed a finger and thumb into his tight waistcoat pocket, and took out sixpence, which he held up for a moment, so that Yanluga could see the sunlight wink on it; and which he then tossed up into the air, and smartly caught.

  ‘You can do something for me, young Yanluga. You can go tell Miss Charlotte that I absolutely adore her; you know what adore means? Well, never mind, just say it. And you can tell her to meet me at ten o’clock tonight by the back fence, and not to worry about Old Face-Fungus.’

  ‘Face-Fun-Gus?’ Yanluga frowned. He was one of the better-educated Nyungars, but he found it difficult to follow what Eyre was saying when he spoke in his broadest Derbyshire accent.

  Eyre slapped him on the back. ‘Never mind about that,’ he said, impatiently. ‘Just make sure that Charlotte’s outside the back gate at ten. Tell her to dress warmly: it can get devilish cold at that time of night. But I’ll bring a blanket and a bottle of wine. Come on now, cut along, here’s Mr Lindsay.’