by Mudrooroo
I never had clean beach sand to play on when I was a kid. In fact never saw the sea before I was nine, so I used to build things out of mud. I can see myself now squatting in a comer of the big paddock, small and thin and brown in my patched khaki pants and shirt, lost in the creation of a remembered town. I always built this same place, shaping walls of mud, doors and roofs of bark, and all around among untidy lumps of mud I made tower things from sticks above holes in the ground. In my mind’s eye the houses were all painted dazzling white, and the big hotel on the comer was red brick with a cast iron balcony and corrugated iron roof. The other things were mines and slag heaps and poppet heads, and stretching away from them I would see the spare desert scrub shimmering to a flat horizon and the whole land panting with heat under a bleached blue sky.
When the other kids found me they used to laugh and break up my mining town. Then I began building towns full of white goblins and I stamped them into the ground in a rage.
A kid comes yelling along the beach and loudly displays a cut foot to his fussing mum. She carts him to the water, washes off the sand and takes a tin of sticking plaster from the pocket of her beach gown. The kid stops yelling and runs off and I stretch myself out on the sand remembering that day I cut my own foot on a jagged piece of glass. I yelled too and my mum got a handful of cobwebs from a corner of the house and put them over the gash. She had some idea about cobwebs. I don’t know. Anyway the cut stopped bleeding and she tied it up but I went on snivelling to hold her sympathy.
“You’ve got to learn to be a man,” she said. “It’s a tough world and there’ll come a time you won’t have a mum to come crying to.”
I shut up then and I felt a sort of shiver of dread like always when I thought of being taken away from her. That was the day Mr Willy took me out with him. A good day. I lie on my back, one arm across my eyes and remember it. . .
A slow-moving cloud of dust shapes itself into a horse and cart. Now it is close enough for me to make out the red face, white hair and fierce moustache of Mr Willy. He is over seventy but he jumps off the cart like a young fellow.
“Hullo, Mr Willy. You taking me along with you today?”
“Yes, kid, today’s the day.”
Mum is watching from the doorway, her long black hair hanging in two plaits almost to her waist. Her face is shining with pleasure and she is so beautiful I feel a lump in my throat.
“You’re taking him?” she calls. “Sure he won’t be a nuisance? Come in a minute and I’ll get you some bread and jam to take along.”
“Mind the horse,” he says, “while I have a word with your mum.”
It is a long word. I watch the horse as its big mouth feels around for the grass and its yellow teeth munch steadily and the heat of the summer day beats down. At last Mr Willy comes out alone. He has a satisfied look and a parcel of lunch wrapped in newspaper.
“Come on, son. Hop up.”
I swing myself into the cart, my legs dangling over the back.
With a “Gidiap” and a lurch we move off at last and when the horse breaks into a trot I have a job to keep from sliding backwards. I don’t mind this though, I’m just so pleased when Mr Willy takes me out. A nosebag full of chaff, a waterbag and two axes in leather holders bounce around in the back with me. We go real fast. The cloppetty hoofs and the rattly wheels make a kind of song.
We turn off down a rough side track with trees and shrubs pushing in on either side. About a mile along Mr Willy stops the cart, gets down and hangs his coat over a branch. He unharnesses the horse, puts on its nosebag, and gets the axes out.
“You can go off and play, son. Not too far though. I’ll give you a holler at dinner time.”
“Can I climb the hill?” I ask.
“You can try,” he laughs. “Be careful though, it’s pretty steep.”
I feel grown up. He would never let me try before. I scramble through prickly scrub and between huge boulders. The hill rises sharply now and my eyes measure the distance to the top. I grasp at branches and hang like a monkey, searching for footholds. It is a real hard climb for a kid and I am panting when I get to the top. I fling myself down, my chest heaving, my hands and legs scratched and stinging. A warm wind soon dries up the sweat. I get up and look into the valley, away, away down. The big boulders seem like pebbles from here and the trees like shrubs. The horse looks no bigger than a dog, the cart like a toy and Mr Willy like a sort of insect as he swings his axe. I am king of the castle on the highest mountain in the world.
Sunlight glints from the axe head and its sound echoes against the hill. A tree comes slowly, slowly down, rises as if trying to struggle up again and then hits the ground with a final thud. The Willy insect clambers over the branches and begins to lop them off.
Hilltop eyes do a circuit of the countryside. A haze of smoke marks the position of the town but I don’t like this town and look the other way. A kangaroo bounds out of the scrub around the foothills, then a man appears carrying something in his hands. I screw up my eyes against the glare and I see it is the old blackfellow who sometimes calls on my mum and gives her rabbits or kangaroo. The things in his hands must be his rabbit traps. He has never really talked to me. Just smiled and said “Good day” and walked quietly away, so I don’t know his name. He doesn’t look scarey, but some of the Noongar kids say he is a magic man and is as old as the sky, and that they have seen him talking to snakes and kangaroos.
I hear a cooee and look down the other side of the hill. The insect man is shading his eyes with his hand trying to spot me up here on my mountain top.
Oh well, the king must go down now and have some bread and jam. He is hungry anyway.
A cascade of rocks and gravel slide down with me. I leave a path of destruction and rip the seat out of my pants.
The billy is boiling when I get back to the cart. Mr Willy flings in the tea leaves and pours the steaming brew into my battered enamel pannikin. I pile it up with sugar and sip cautiously between large bites of bread.
“Get a good view from up there?” Mr Willy asks.
“The whole world,” I say.
“Hmm,” says Mr Willy and shakes his white head. “The world’s a big place, son.”
“I know,” I say. And I feel it is a good and wonderful world.
The sun is midway down the sky and the trees are all cut into suitable lengths for loading. I help Mr Willy stack the cart and harness the horse between the shafts again. I get on the top of the load, Mr Willy sits up in front and the cart sways out on to the track again.
“Had a good day, son?” Mum asks.
“Yeah, it was mighty,” I say. “I climbed to the top of the big hill and who do you think I saw?”
“How should I know?” she asks.
“The funny old black man with the rabbit traps.”
“You didn’t go near him I hope? You didn’t talk to him?”
“Why not?” I ask. “What’s the matter with him?”
“He’s a bit mad,” she says. “I said you were never to talk to him.”
I can’t kid her any longer. “Arrr, Mum. I was right on top of the hill and he was down near the bottom. He didn’t even see me.” . . .
“Mummy, Mummy. Come and look at our castle. Isn’t it beaut?”
A woman looks up from her magazine with bored eyes. “It’s lovely darling.”
I sit up and she smiles across at me as though we two grown-ups share a secret about childish fantasies. I suppose she expects me to smile back, but I scowl. She suddenly sees me as a stranger and stares coldly at the darkness of my skin. I run my eyes over her legs, her hips and her breasts. She glances down, assures herself that there is nothing showing and looks distastefully into my sullen face. So what? If she rejects me, I rejected her first.
I drift away past the little groups, looking for a place to myself.
four
Someone else has thought of the same thing. She lies stretched out in the sun and her skin is golden-brown. Swell doll. Long and slim with fi
rm small breasts tightening the fabric of her white swim suit. I realize that jail has not killed my sex urge.
I can’t tell whether she has noticed me behind her big sun glasses, so I light a cigarette and think of something to say to make the scene. The sea supplies the mood music, a cool noise with a throbbing base melody. I fling away the cigarette and flop down, at a loss for an opening. She does not stir. I watch her and fake that she is a princess wrecked on some barbaric shore and I am the hero about to rescue her. How corny can you get? She’s only a half-naked chick asleep on the beach within an hour’s walk of the jail.
I take off my shoes, socks, coat, ludicrous tie and cheap shirt and stretch out a few feet away. It gets boring after a while.
I say, “Hullo!”
No reply.
“Like are you dead, or only in a Yogi trance?”
She moves.
I say the “Hullo” word again and she lifts her head to peer at me behind the disguise of her dark glasses. Then she raises herself on her elbow. My appearance must be registering. She could be the sort of person who finds me interesting. Sometimes they do, but the majority wouldn’t help me up if I fainted. If she doesn’t like the look of me she can move off, but why can’t she say something? The silence is getting on my nerves. Only sometimes I get this feeling I want to talk and make someone understand the way I think. Of course people never do. Mostly they cut me off after the first few don’t-care words and start handing out stupid advice and I just freeze up inside. Still, I have this tiny hope that some day someone will listen and nearly understand.
She says “Hullo,” but she sounds like cold.
I say, “It’s a nice day for the beach.” Standard cliches are all right for a start.
“Wonderful,” she says.
She sounds educated and I have to let her know her type doesn’t impress me.
“Wonderful to have time to loaf, isn’t it?” I say. “Not a care in the world.”
“Haven’t you?” she asks. “Good for you.”
“Not so good,” I say. “I’m one of the permanent unemployed unemployables. No rich family to bludge on either.”
“Too bad,” she says, glances at her wrist watch and begins to flick the sand from her legs with a towel.
I can see she’s going to get up and go away. “Sorry for being such a drag,” I say. “Just felt I’d rather like to talk to someone besides myself for a change.”
She stops flicking the towel and gives a kind of half smile.
“I know. Get bored with myself sometimes too.”
I feel suddenly annoyed. As if a girl like her could understand about the way I feel.
“You don’t know anything. You haven’t just got out of bloody jail.”
If she’s going away, I might as well make my mark with her. I wait for the look of shocked surprise, but for all she registers I might as well have told her I’d just come off an innocent little river trip.
“So now you’ll be able to run home and tell them you’ve met a real live jailbird.”
“That’ll rock them for sure,” she says and stifles a small yawn. “How long were you in?”
“Eighteen months, this time. Breaking and entering.”
She takes it dead pan.
“Sounds as though you’re used to it anyway. How long until next time?”
I shrug. “Who cares?”
“Can’t be so bad if that’s the way it is,” she says.
“It kills the time.”
“What do you do in there?” she asks. “Besides crack stones and skite about your jobs?”
“Aw . . . eat, sleep, swap dirty yarns, read paperbacks, cut pictures of naked women out of magazines. They’re supposed to arouse desire.”
“And do they?”
“Usually. It was only a drag though.”
“That all you did?”
“I had to sweep out the library and used to smuggle books out of there. Real highbrow stuff — classics, psychology. And semi-religious books for intellectual sterilization. They had the best stuff under key in the staff section but I managed to pick the lock. Got a bloke to smuggle me in a little kerosene lamp and rigged my blankets so the screw couldn’t see the light. Read nearly all night.”
“What did you make of the psychology?”
“Plenty. Learnt I’m a manic depressive, neurotic, psychotic, schizophrenic — the works.”
She seems interested. I’ve hooked her.
“How much education did you have?” she asks.
“I went to an ordinary school for a couple of years,” I tell her. “There I learnt the art of survival against mob rule. Then I got copped for stealing and I was sent to a home where I was educated in the simple techniques of crime and learnt to survive the harshness of Christian charity. In the Noongar camps I learnt the art of being completely unexploitable and of sabotaging every make-believe effort to improve the native’s lot. I also learnt to take raw alcohol and raw sex. In jail I graduated in vice and overcame my last illusions about life. Now I know that hope and despair are equally absurd.”
“Is there anything left?” she asks.
I shrug. “Excuses I suppose. I still have enough intelligence to make excuses for myself. I can say that the prison warped my mind, that when I first went in I still had some vestige of childish faith. Or I can put it down to my colour, being born under the curse of Ham and all that jazz.”
She seems to be looking at me more closely than before.
“Maybe you couldn’t see I was coloured through those things you wear.”
“You don’t show it much, except in the way you move. More supple than a white boy. I might have taken you for Mexican, maybe. Or Southern European.”
“My mum was half-caste,” I tell her, “but my dad was white. He was a prospector. I was born on the goldfields. Don’t remember it much except it was good there. After he died mum came to the wheat- belt. She thought we’d have more chance there, but it didn’t make any difference.”
A brawny surf-lifesaver type passes along the sea front and her eyes follow him. The bitch isn’t listening to me, not that I expect her to be interested.
“Well, where do you go from here?” she asks suddenly. “I mean — I suppose you’ve got to do something between this and your next time in.”
“Sure,” I say. “Get drunk, feed a few juke boxes, have a few girls till my prison pay runs out.”
“Then what?”
“I’ll be lucky to be out that long.”
“You mean you’ve planned to do a job straight away?”
“I never plan ahead. I just wait for life to happen to me.”
“But they can’t put you in until you deliberately break the law.”
“You haven’t got a clue,” I tell her. “They make the law so chaps like me can’t help breaking it whatever we do, and the likes of you can hardly break it if you try.”
“How do you mean?” she asks.
“For one thing. We make the only friends we have in jail, but if we’re seen talking outside we’re arrested for consorting with crims.”
“What’s to stop you getting an ordinary job?” “Plenty,” I say. “The complete absurdity of it for a start — tearing your guts out in some mechanized rat cage. No thanks.”
“So you’ve never tried to get a job?”
“Sure I did, but I wasn’t in the race. Who wants a shiftless native when he can get a big up and coming Dago to work for him? After a few tries I resigned myself. Prison was the only chance I had of three meals a day and a decent bed.”
“You know,” she says, “the trouble with you is you’ve got intelligence but no guts.”
This gets under my skin. “You reckon it didn’t take guts to get where I am?”
“Does it take guts to get copped so you can bludge on the taxpayer?”
“I never tried to get copped,” I say, “not yet, that is. I suppose you don’t reckon it took guts to pinch a car and leave it outside a police station?”
She l
aughs. “You can call it guts if you like.”
“I got clean away with that and a few other things and I worked my way right up with the gang.”
“I get the picture,” she says. “From outcast native to big time bodgie. Success story.”
“Sure.”
“And having climbed the social ladder to this dizzy height what now?”
“Who cares?” Which is what I always say when questions begin to bore me.
“The gang maybe. I expect they’ll be glad to see you back.”
I shrug. “It was swell being in with them until I made it to the top. They looked up to me then because they had no brains and no ideas and now I’m bored to hell with them.”
“Well, if you’ve got any guts you’ll give them away and start again.”
“I’m too old now,” I say.
“How old?” she asks.
“Nineteen.”
“Practically Methuselah.”
“Too old to laugh or cry any more. So old my bones ache.”
“That’s inactivity,” she says. “Look here, you want to get yourself a pair of bathing trunks, get into the sea, run along the sand, lie in the sun.”
“And then,” I say, “something new will happen for me? A volcano of fresh hope will erupt for me? ”
“That’s up to you,” she says.
I feel the old bitter taste of resentment in my mouth. Nothing ever up to them. Only up to us, the outcast relics in the outskirt camps. The lazy, ungrateful rubbish people, who refuse to co-operate or integrate or even play it up for the tourist trade. Flyblown descendants of the dispossessed erupting their hopelessness in petty crime. I glare at her with concentrated hate. I want to wither her glib white arrogance with biting scorn, but I can’t find the words.
“Well you should know,” I say. “I suppose there’s plenty times you’ve been cold and hungry and afraid. So I’ll take your advice and join the Lifesavers. Maybe they’ll teach me to swim so I can save myself.”