Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  Eyre stood where he was, saying nothing.

  Christopher watched him, and at last said, ‘Would you like some tea? I could get some fresh.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Eyre. ‘I think I’d like that.’

  Christopher clapped his hands smartly, and the door of the cottage opened and out came the boy Weeip. He wore a cream linen sailor-suit, although he still kept a woven headband around his hair for decoration. He looked at Eyre cautiously, and then bowed his head. ‘Welcome, Mr Wakasah.’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Eyre, ‘welcome yourself. I see you’ve found yourself a comfortable billet with Mr Willis. How are you?’

  ‘You’re very well, aren’t you, Weeip?’ Christopher interrupted.

  ‘Yes, sah, very well. Prays beetroot God.’

  ‘Bring us some fresh tea, would you, Weeip, there’s a good chap?’ said Christopher.

  ‘And buns, sah?’

  ‘Eyre?’ asked Christopher.

  ‘No thank you. No buns for me,’ said Eyre. He watched Weeip go back into the house, and then raised an eyebrow at Christopher.

  ‘It’s everything you think it is,’ said Christopher. ‘An innocent young savage who asks no questions and will do anything I require of him.’

  ‘Have you given up Daisy Frockford?’

  ‘Of course not. One must still have lady companions to take to dinners; although I must say that I’ve been invited to precious few since I’ve been back. Being a hero may be one thing; all fine and good; but being a hero’s helper is of no distinction whatever.’

  ‘You are jealous,’ Eyre chided him.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’ve told you I’m not. I just wish that I’d never gone along at all. I wish I’d never set eyes on you; or that damned Joolonga; or Dogger; or Midgegooroo.’

  ‘Or Arthur Mortlock?’ asked Eyre. ‘We mustn’t forget about poor old Arthur.’

  Christopher made a face to show that he didn’t particularly care to talk about Arthur Mortlock. But Eyre said, ‘It was an odd thing, you know, about Arthur.’

  ‘What was odd?’

  ‘Well, despite the fact that Joolonga claimed to have killed him with his pointing-bone, he suffered the symptoms of a man who had swallowed a quantity of corrosive sublimate. You know, the vomiting, the diarrhoea.’

  ‘I don’t really wish to be reminded,’ said Christopher.

  ‘Well, nor do I,’ said Eyre. ‘But, it was still odd. And the oddest thing was that when I went through my medicine-chest, I discovered that my bottle of corrosive sublimate was empty; although I had used none of it during the journey.’

  ‘In that case,’ Christopher retorted, ‘it seems to me that the likeliest explanation is that he inadvertently poisoned himself. He would have drunk anything, that man. Methylated spirits, horse liniments. A yoxter like him wouldn’t have cared.’

  ‘I can’t see anyone drinking corrosive sublimate on purpose,’ said Eyre. ‘My God, the smell of it alone would have put him off. Apart from the bottle, which was ridged, and clearly marked corrosive poison.’

  Christopher drummed his fingers sharply on the table. ‘I’m afraid the mentality of people like Arthur Mortlock is a closed book, as far as I’m concerned. And even if you were to open it, you would probably find that it contained nothing but blank pages.’

  ‘You’re being very unkind to him,’ said Eyre.

  ‘The man was a scoundrel; a ticket-of-leave man, on the run. He could have had all of us arrested and hung.’

  ‘Christopher, why on earth are you so nervous?’

  ‘Nervous?’ Christopher demanded. His face was grey and glistening, like an oyster. ‘Of course I’m not nervous. Why in the world should I be nervous? I haven’t been very well, that’s all, since coming back from that expedition. I was down with influenza for two weeks, and the doctor said that I was quite fortunate not to go down with pneumonia.’

  ‘Luckier than Arthur, then,’ said Eyre.

  Christopher said, ‘I have no desire to talk about Arthur. He was a low scoundrel, that’s all; and whatever happened to him, and however it happened, he got only what he deserved.’

  Eyre considered asking Christopher straight out whether he had poisoned Arthur; but then he thought better of it. After all, back here in Adelaide, it did seem rather improbable that Christopher should have murdered him. What possible motive could he have had? Perhaps Arthur had made homosexual advances to him, and Christopher had poisoned him as a punishment; but Christopher was not ashamed of his inclinations, and had made no secret of them, even to Eyre. Therefore, the motive could not have been blackmail either: a threat by Arthur to reveal that he was a catamite.

  Eyre decided to hold his peace; and so when Weeip brought the tea, and poured it out for them, they discussed nothing more than Eyre’s journey across the de ert, and even this was done awkwardly and with an exaggerated lack of interest on Christopher’s part. At last, after half an hour, Eyre stood up and held out his hand.

  ‘I have to get back. The artist from the Illustrated Post wants to make a drawing of me.’

  Christopher shook his hand, and nodded. ‘Being a hero has its chores, no doubt.’

  ‘You won’t lose touch altogether, will you?’ Eyre asked him.

  Christopher said, ‘Of course not. But you’ll be very busy, won’t you?’

  ‘Never too busy to talk to a friend.’

  ‘An erstwhile friend,’ Christopher corrected him.

  ‘Well, whatever you like,’ said Eyre.

  Eyre retrieved his bicycle and began to wheel it away. He turned once, but Christopher had picked up his newspaper again, and was making a big show of ignoring him. All right, he thought; if that’s the way you feel; and he mounted up and prepared to ride off.

  At that moment, however, Weeip came running up to him.

  ‘You drop your kerchy, Mr Wakasah.’

  ‘That’s not mine,’ said Eyre, peering at the crumpled handkerchief.

  ‘No, sah, I know sah. But I have to bring it to speak to you, sah.’

  ‘You want to speak to me?’

  Weeip glanced anxiously back towards the verandah, but Christopher was still ostentatiously absorbed in his newspaper.

  ‘Can you come tonight, sah; at seven? Then look in the second window at the back.’

  ‘What? What for?’

  Weeip said anxiously, ‘You will know then, all about Mr Mortlock, sah. Bless his hole. Please come. Then you see. Mr Willis is good to me, sah; take care of me. Please come. Don’t blame him, sah.’

  Just then, Christopher looked around to see why Eyre hadn’t yet bicycled away; and Weeip crammed the dirty handkerchief into Eyre’s hand, and ran back towards the house. Eyre, baffled, waved the handkerchief at Christopher to show why he had been delayed. Christopher gave him a half-hearted wave in return.

  Eyre made his way back into Adelaide quite slowly. He was puzzled by Christopher’s prickly behaviour, and yet not completely surprised. Upsetting Christopher was not like upsetting a man-friend. It was like distressing a lover. But what could he possibly see through the second window at the back at seven o’ clock in the evening, which would explain everything about Arthur Mortlock? Had Christopher really had anything to do with Arthur’s death, or not? And even if he had, what could be discovered by creeping back in the evening, and looking through his window?

  He was so preoccupied that he allowed the front wheel of his bicycle to get caught in a rut in the road, and he staggered and hopped on one leg and nearly fell off.

  Thirty-Eight

  There was one more visit to be made; and this visit more than any other made Eyre understand that the purpose of his journey across Australia had been accomplished. For while he had failed to discover the inland sea; and while he had failed to bring back a medicine-man to bury Yanluga; he had been initiated into an Aborigine tribe, and could therefore bury Yanluga himself, according to the proper rituals. And as for the inland sea; well, Captain Sturt himself could go and look for that, if it really existed. The seagull
s had been flying north, but then they could have been seeking nothing more than moth larvae, or a swampy patch on the salt-lake where worms could be pecked; and perhaps that was all that Captain Sturt would find.

  Eyre talked to Lathrop Lindsay’s secretary, at his offices on Morphett Street; and Lathrop Lindsay’s secretary talked to Lathrop Lindsay; and Lathrop Lindsay sent back a message saying that there would be no objections of a material nature if Yanluga’s body were to be exhumed from its resting-place next to Lathrop Lindsay’s favourite horse, and re-buried according to tribal rituals. In fact, a complimentary article would appear in the following day’s Observer, praising Mr Lindsay for his ‘humanitarianism and religious liberality’.

  Eyre went along that afternoon with four hired Aborigines and several shovels, and in an unexpected drizzle, they dug up Yanluga’s coffin from beneath the gum-trees, and laid it on the wet grass, and opened it with a pick. Yanluga lay inside, crouched like a huge spider, half-skeletal, his eyeless face grinning at the Bible which had been interred beside him.

  ‘The Bible,’ said Eyre, picking it up. ‘And yet all of this poor boy’s religion was told by word of mouth, and painted on rocks.’

  The hired labourers stood around in their soaking-wet shirts and stared at him uncomprehendingly. They were city Aborigines; black boys who had learned to make a living by scrounging from white people; selling rubbish and clearing out stables. They knew very little about tribal myths, or what had happened during the dreaming. They had already become what Yonguldye had feared all Aborigines would one day become; inferior white men lacking in tribal knowledge, or any of the skills of survival. With them, all the ancient crafts would die away in two or three generations. Some of the languages and myths had already been forgotten, or erased by epidemics of tuberculosis brought ashore by white settlers. A whole way of life was dying, and Eyre knew that the funeral he was giving Yanluga was only a personal gesture that would have no effect on the greater course of history.

  The coffin was carried to a sacred place close to the reed beds on the River Torrens, where black-and-white cows grazed, and the gums twisted into the water. The rain had cleared but the soil was still heavy and aromatic and damp as the Aborigines dug Yanluga a grave. After an hour of excavation, Eyre and one of the boys lifted the corpse out of the coffin, and then set it down on a bed of branches at the bottom of the hole, its knees drawn up in a sitting position. The body was so light and brittle, Eyre could hardly believe it had once been human. One of the hands broke off as Eyre was bending it into the ritual position, and the finger bones burst out from the tightened skin like seeds from a pod.

  Eyre cried out over the grave, loudly and unembarrassed, the lamentations that were due to a dead warrior. One of the labourers joined in; and for almost twenty minutes they cried and keened together over the corpse that had once been Yanluga. Then they covered the crouched-up body with earth, and brushed his grave with twigs and branches, and lit a fire beside it. The labourers had been paid to keep the fire burning for a week; and Eyre would revisit it from time to time; and say the prayers that would ensure Yanluga’s eventual arrival in the land beyond Karta, the isle of the dead, to join Ngurunderi.

  ‘Yanluga,’ said Eyre, quietly. Across the river, the cows moved slowly through the long grass. ‘Yanluga, you have led me to discover things that I never believed were possible. You have shown me a world that I can still scarcely comprehend. But I promise you that I will always keep faith with you; that my brotherhood with the Aborigine people will never be broken, not until the day I die; and join you beyond the sunset.’

  He stood there for over an hour, while the fire smoked and twisted in the early-afternoon wind. This, more than anything else, seemed like the end of the journey. He took off his hat, and closed his eyes, and said the words of the funeral prayer which Winja had taught him, during the days of his engwura.

  ‘You will live beyond the stars,

  You will live in the land of the moons.

  Happiness and friendship will always be yours.

  And the laughter of those you left behind will always rise to you.’

  At last, he left the graveside, and walked back along the path which would lead him to Adelaide. The rain began again, suddenly: a scattering of silver droplets on the dark earth track. The coinage of sadness, the currency of repentance, and the specie of tears.

  He had booked a room at Coppius’ Hotel; and during the early evening he moved his belongings there from Mrs Crane’s notions shop. By half-past-six he was both tired and hungry, and thinking of dinner at the Rundle Street Restaurant. But, as he undressed to take a bath, he remembered what Weeip had said, about going out to Christopher’s house at seven o’ clock.

  He was undecided. If he were to dress again, and risk missing his dinner, he could probably get out to the racecourse and back. But the Rundle Street Restaurant closed early; as most restaurants did; and if he came back very late, he would be lucky to get even a bowlful of warmed-up broth.

  He looked at himself in the cheval-glass in the corner of his hotel-room. Well, he thought, there’s no point in beating about the bushes; do you want dinner or do you want to know who murdered Arthur Mortlock? The thin figure in the long white combination underwear stared back at him seriously. It looked like a figure that could do with dinner. But then he had never taken very much notice of what images in mirrors had to say for themselves.

  A chilly wind had got up as he bicycled out towards the racetrack again. It was prematurely dark now; and there were random spots of rain flying in the air. He hoped very much that he wouldn’t meet up with a drunken Aborigine, or one of the cosh boys who occasionally attacked evening travellers. His journey had left him nearly two stones lighter than when he had set out, and he was still decidedly weak. Captain Sturt had called him ‘all horns and hide’, which was how local farmers described a starved yearling.

  At last he reached the racecourse, and left his bicycle on the ground, its front wheel still spinning. He could see the lamplight shining through the orange calico blinds of Christopher’s house from quite a long way away, silhouetting the branches of the grove of gums in which it was set. The rain clattered harder against the bushes, and something rustled and jumped; a bird or a joey or a dingo pup. Behind the mountains, the sky was oddly light, where the rainclouds had begun to clear, but here it was still dark and still furious, and the rain was sweeping down even more noisily. Wet and hungry, his collar turned up, Eyre made his way around to the back of Christopher’s cottage, and trod as stealthily as he could through the unkempt garden, lifting his feet up like a performing pony so that he wouldn’t trip up in the weeds.

  He reached the side of the house, and leaned against it, breathing hard. More rain poured down, and the guttering at the back began to splatter into the rain-barrel. Eyre took out his watch and peered at it by a thin crack of light which penetrated the cottage’s blinds. Two minutes to seven o’ clock. He had only just got here in time; although so far he was at a loss to see how he was going to be able to look inside the house, with every single blind drawn. His stomach gurgled, and he was beginning dearly to wish that he had never come. Let Arthur’s death remain a mystery, he thought. So much of what had happened in the outback had been without reason or explanation; as if it were a mysterious land with physical laws of its own. How many times had explorers returned baffled from Australia’s interior? It was a continent which defied normal interpretation, a land of superstition and inverted logic. Perhaps Arthur had done no more than fall victim to that logic, and a destiny which this upside-down country had been keeping in store for him ever since he was born.

  It was seven o’ clock. Eyre could hear talking inside the house, and the shuffling of feet on the boarded floors. But another five minutes passed, and still the blinds remained tightly closed. He decided to give Weeip only two or three minutes more, and then leave. The rain had become steady now, steady and cold, and he was shivering.

  He was just about to move, however, wh
en the blind closest to him was lifted by an inch, and a pair of dark eyes peeped out into the night. It was Weeip. Eyre waved his hand quickly, and Weeip blinked to show that he had seen him. Then he disappeared from the window and went back into the middle of the room; but left the blind slightly raised.

  Eyre was tall, but not quite tall enough to reach the window. He felt around in the long wet grass, and at last found a wooden fruit-crate which had been left beside the rain-barrel. He upended it, and cautiously stepped up, gripping the window-sill so that he didn’t overbalance backwards.

  The window was partly steamed up, but Eyre could still see clearly into the room. It was a bathroom, very spartan, with a bare floor and a rag rug, and an old-fashioned zinc tub, the kind of bath in which Marat had been assassinated. Beside the bath was a tall enamelled jug, full of freshly steaming water. On the far wall was a crucified Christ, in bronze.

  Weeip was kneeling beside the bath, naked. His penis was erect. He had filled the bath with hot water and now he was arranging the soap and the towels. Almost immediately, as Eyre watched, Christopher walked in, wrapped in a striped Indian robe, maroon and green, the kind which travellers were offered for sale whenever their ships docked at Trivandrum or Colombo. He said something to Weeip, touching the boy’s shoulder, and then walked across the room and back again. At length he leaned over, testing the water in the tub, and smiled. Weeip stood up, and Christopher reached down with his wet hand and clasped his erection, rubbing it up and down two or three times and then laughing when the boy shivered.