‘Yeah.’ He rose to his feet. ‘Just the way I talk to you, Beth.’
He thought I wasn’t the only ghost he could see. What Dad was saying made sense. So why was I still so certain that Catching wasn’t dead?
It was something to do with the story. Something in it told me she’d made it out alive … only I wasn’t sure what. Before I could think it through, Dad spoke again: ‘I thought I could help her. But we didn’t get here at the beginning. We got here when it was all over. We got here at the end.’
He was right that we’d arrived after the fire, the night the world exploded. But he was wrong about it being all over … for a reason I couldn’t quite articulate.
Then a voice from behind us said it for me. ‘Of course you’re here at the end. So what? It’s the beginning that hasn’t happened yet.’
I swung around to face Catching. She wasn’t wearing the hospital gown anymore. Instead, her long jumper had grown longer, flowing around her arms and legs to clothe her in green brightness. There was a glossy black bird perched upon her left shoulder. Crow. Sarah.
Living people couldn’t pop into existence like this. My heart sank.
‘You’re dead?’ I whispered.
She shrugged. ‘Just appeared out of nowhere, didn’t I?’
But that wasn’t a ‘yes’. It was a Catching evasion, one of her answers that wasn’t really an answer.
I’m not wrong. I’m not. I began to run through the story in my head, trying to figure out what had truly happened to her. But Catching wasn’t finished speaking to me yet: ‘Do you understand what the story was for now?’
To be heard. Except I wasn’t sure even Catching knew everything she’d been trying to say. But I knew what she’d wanted me to hear. And I knew she’d never been telling the story to Dad. ‘You told the story to show me how to move on.’
Catching waved in the direction of the home. ‘Crow saw you there, the day you came. She thought you might be trapped. So I put myself in your way, to find out why you were still in this side of the world.’
Crow tilted her head to one side, fixing a bright, hopeful eye upon me, like she was asking if I remembered her.
The crow on the rubble. The one that I’d waved at, not truly believing it could see me. ‘I remember.’
She preened and flapped off to land on a branch of a nearby tree. Dad tracked her path through the air with a faint smile on his lips; I could tell he was pleased to see Sarah Blue flying free.
Then he turned to Catching and said, ‘I promise you I will make sure Gerry Bell, and Charles Sholt, and anyone else who was involved in any way and is still alive is held to account. But you have to leave this to the police from now on.’
Why was he ignoring Crow? Catching’s glance met mine, and I saw the laughter in it. That was when I realised: Dad didn’t know.
‘Um, Dad? It wasn’t her.’
Dad gave an impatient shake of his head. ‘She can affect things in this world, Beth. I’m sure of it.’
‘It’s not that,’ I told him. ‘You’ve missed all the clues. Flint and Cavanagh were dragged out of a second-storey window and dropped into that drain from above. That was why the window was smashed, and why there was no broken lock on the fence. The firescreen in Derek’s house was knocked over because something came down the chimney. It came down small, but got big after. And the blade with the curve? It wasn’t a knife. It’s a beak.’
Dad’s mouth fell open. Then his gaze went to where Crow was sitting with her shadow stretching out behind her. A thing of claw and wing and bite.
He let out a startled exclamation and took a hasty step back.
Crow threw back her head and cackled.
After a second, Dad stepped forward again and called up at Crow: ‘I know you were failed by the police. I’m so sorry for that. More sorry than you can know. But you can trust me to do this, and you can trust Allie. You’ve stopped the Feeds. You’ve stopped the Fetchers. Let us deal with the rest.’
Crow stared down at him for a long moment. Then she bobbed her head in agreement. Dad’s shoulders sagged in relief and he pulled out his phone, striding away to make the call.
I looked up at Crow. How many times had I seen crows around town and never noticed that one was just a bit bigger and bit glossier than all the others? How often had there been mysterious gusts of wind at exactly the right moment? Crow had been there all along, trying to impart to me the gift of her hard-won knowledge— Wait.
Something about that thought had triggered a connection in the part of my mind that was still puzzling over the story. What was it? But I knew. Gift. Strengths! Everything came together, and I finally knew what had happened to Isobel Catching.
I glared at her indignantly. ‘You’re not dead.’
Something sparked in her eyes. ‘You reckon not?’
‘I know not. It’s all in the story. At the end, before you escaped, you found your way back to your self. You found your strength. But it must have been growing in you, all that time. It had already affected Crow. That was why she could scratch your arm, when she’d never been able to affect anything before. It was why I could only make a light explode after I met you. Because you touch different sides of the world at once, and it makes you a kind of … conduit.’
She didn’t say anything. But I knew I was on the right path. So I continued, ‘I think the story of the gifts of the Catching women goes like this: Your Granny could hold on to herself, and your Nanna could swim like a fish, and your Grandma knew how to endure, and your mum could see people who’d passed over. But you?’ I shook my head, still a little astonished by it. ‘You can walk all the sides of the world.’
She grinned. The second actual smile I’d got from her today.
‘How do you do it?’ I demanded.
‘Dunno. How did you do it? You almost got to another side once. The one with the colours.’
For a second I wondered how she knew that; then I realised Crow must have told her. It had been Crow who’d been chasing me, after all.
‘That was different! I’m dead; I’m kind of supposed to be on that side. I’m not even properly here.’
She shrugged. ‘I’m properly everywhere. It’s all the same world.’
Which I guessed made sense if you could see all the sides the way she must be able to.
‘You coming with me, Teller?’ Catching asked. ‘Crow is.’
‘Coming where?’
‘I’m going to the colours. My mum’s there. I want to see her. After that?’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll stay in the colours forever. Maybe I won’t. I’ll decide when I decide.’
From above, Crow made a plaintive noise, shifting from one foot to the other in an anxious dance.
‘It’s all right,’ Catching told her. ‘Wherever we go, we’ll go together.’ Then, to me, ‘You coming or not?’
No. I have to take care of my father. But those words didn’t feel true anymore. Instead I said, ‘I have to talk to my father.’
Who at that moment was in the middle of what looked like a super-intense conversation with his boss as he gave her the details of what had been going on in this town.
‘Um. Just not right now.’
‘S’alright,’ Catching said. ‘We’ll wait.’
She strolled over to sit on the fallen log. I sat with her, and Crow flapped to a perch in a tree above us. The three of us watched as the clearing filled with police officers.
Dad was on and off his phone, talking to the city. Allie hung around the fringes, wanting to be available in case any local knowledge was needed, but not wanting to put herself into the midst of the investigation into her dead boss.
The morning grew warmer and the light brighter as the sun rose. And eventually there came a moment when I looked over at Dad only to find he was looking at me.
It was time.
I rose and walked away from the clearing, waving to him to follow. I kept going until we were well into the trees, where no one would hear Dad talking. Then I turned to
face him. Only I wasn’t quite sure how to begin this conversation.
He began it for me. ‘You’re leaving, aren’t you?’
Well, yes, I probably was, but I’d been planning to gently build up to that. ‘Um. Yeah. Catching and Crow are going to the colours. I thought I might go with them.’
‘But you’re worried about me.’
‘Hey, stop saying my thoughts before I do! How do you even know them?’
His eyes crinkled in amusement. ‘I know because I’m your dad. And I realise I haven’t been acting like it for a while. I’m sorry, Beth. It got so that I didn’t know how to go on living. I didn’t even think I should go on, without you.’
‘That’s upside-down thinking, Dad!’
‘I know. I can see now that what I’ve been doing …’ He shook his head, his eyes darkening with anger at himself. ‘It’s no way to honour who you were. Who you are. And I want to be someone you can look up to, Beth. I want to go on being your dad, even though …’
His voice broke. He sucked in a deep breath and continued, ‘Even though you won’t be here. I want you to know, wherever you are, that I’m a dad you can be proud of.’
There were tears running down his cheeks; down mine too. I knew I couldn’t stay, but that didn’t make it easy to go. This was hard, and awful, and it was making my heart twist in my chest. And I wanted something. I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything, ever. If strong emotions and Catching’s presence were the key to spirits being able to touch this side, then I had both.
I flung my arms around my father. And I was solid. He gave a surprised grunt and hugged me back. We clung on to each other for a few last, precious moments. Then I felt my solidity fading, and I let him go.
His face was crumpled again. But only around the edges. There was strength in the middle.
‘I love you, Dad. I’ll always be your daughter.’
‘I love you, Bethie. I’ll always be your dad.’
He turned away from me in a slow, jerky movement. Then he began walking, putting one determined foot in front of the other. As he went, he pulled out his phone and made a call.
‘Viv? It’s Michael. Listen, I was just calling about Grandpa Jim’s birthday – did you want me to bring anything to the party? Besides a present, I mean. Of course I’m coming! It’ll be good to see you.’
Aunty Viv was talking loud and fast, like she was trying to cram months’ worth of missed conversations into one phone call. I had no idea what she was saying and I wasn’t sure she was making much sense. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was Dad was speaking to her again.
What mattered was that he was showing me he was choosing the opposite of grey.
I kept watching until he’d disappeared through the trees. The second he’d vanished from sight, a voice said, ‘Ready, Beth-the-Teller?’
I spun around to face a girl with brown skin and brown eyes and black hair that flowed like a cloak.
Catching was standing beside her. She raised an eyebrow, and I realised she was waiting for an answer to Crow’s question.
‘I’m ready,’ I said.
Crow held out her hand to me, and I took it. She used her other hand to grab hold of Catching’s and shouted, ‘Let’s run!’
So we ran, me in my yellow dress and Catching in green and Crow in black, three colours weaving through the trees. We ran as you only could run when you weren’t alive, or when you could walk between all the sides of the world. We ran without limits, getting faster and faster until we were flying with our feet on the ground.
Then Crow let go of us and launched herself into the air. Her body seemed to dissolve into colour, becoming every shade of black I’d ever seen, and a thousand more that I’d never known existed, swirling away into the sky above.
Catching threw back her head and laughed the first laugh I’d ever heard from her, a musical, husky sound that seemed to fill the forest. Then she leaped after Crow and became green, rising up to mingle with Crow’s black.
My turn. I went spinning into a leap and melted into yellow, becoming the love I had for my dad, my Grandpa, my Aunties and my Uncles and the cousins; and for Catching and for Crow.
Other colours came to whirl around us, shouting their joy in our presence and welcoming us home.
We found Catching’s mum, and mine, and Crow’s family too. We bathed in the clouds and sang in the sun and let the world paint our souls and our souls paint the world.
And wherever we went, we went together.
We are Aboriginal storytellers, but we are two voices amongst the many Aboriginal peoples and nations of Australia and we speak for ourselves alone; there is not a single Aboriginal story, nor a definitive Aboriginal experience.
In telling this tale, we were informed by two sets of stories that are the inheritance of Aboriginal peoples. The first set are stories of our homelands, families, cultures; the stories that speak to the connections which sustain us and which we sustain in turn. The second set are the tales that entered our worlds with colonisation; stories of the violence that was terrifyingly chaotic or even more terrifyingly organised on a systemic scale. Both sets of stories inform our existences, and thus our storytelling.
Ancient Aboriginal tales tell of an animate world where everything lives. This includes animals, plants and humans, but also rock, wind, rain, sun, moon and all other life in our homelands. As such, Aboriginal family connections extend beyond human beings to encompass all life. These connections can also reach past one cycle of existence to shape the next. For example, a person with a particular connection to dingoes may have been a dingo before, and will be one again. We drew upon this aspect of our understanding of the world in writing the character of Crow.
Aboriginal stories also tell of a non-linear world; one in which time does not run in a line from the past through the present and on into the future. All life is in constant motion, turning and rotating in relation to other life, and it is through these movements that the world shifts forwards or back. In the words of Beth’s Grandpa Jim: ‘Life doesn’t move through time. Time moves through life.’ And on this view of time, the extent to which an event is ‘past’ is not measured by the passage of linear years, but rather by the degree to which affected relationships have been brought into balance. Thus, the journeys of Catching, Beth, Crow and Michael Teller do not ‘advance’ because linear days pass, but because they are finding ways to heal. Each of them ultimately reaches a point of transformation where they move out of one cycle and into another. This is why Catching says to Michael, at the conclusion of the book: ‘It’s the beginning that hasn’t happened yet.’
Part of the processes of healing in the book are storytelling processes; as Catching knows, it is stories that get you through and bring you home. And the stories of Catching’s family include the heartbreak of the Stolen Generations.
The laws and policies of successive Australian governments that created the Stolen Generations began in the latter half of the nineteenth century and continued for around a hundred years. The Australian Human Rights Commission has estimated that between one in three and one in ten First Nations children were forcibly removed between 1910 and 1970, and that no family escaped the effects of forcible removal.1 This leaves First Nations families with the dual legacy of the terrible heartbreak of Stolen children, and the great strength it took to survive being taken or having a child taken from you. And it is by drawing on the resilience of her ancestors that Catching is able to survive when her own life is threatened.
The final step in Catching’s path to her own strength is shown to her by the experiences of her great-great-grandmother, a woman who lived through the hard days of the frontier and was robbed of all her choices. But Catching’s old Granny knew how to hold on to herself – with laughter, with love, and through her connections to her family and her homeland. All three girls ultimately find their way to themselves and raise up their voices to defy all that would diminish them, including the things they have internalised.
&nb
sp; And so the story begins, ends, and begins again with what always lay at the core of this tale: the enduring strength of Aboriginal women and girls.
Ambelin Kwaymullina & Ezekiel Kwaymullina
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1 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (now the Australian Human Rights Commission), Bringing Them Home: Report into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, 1997, Ch 2. Interested readers can find a copy of the report and other resources, including testimonies from Stolen Generations members, at bth.humanrights.gov.au.
Ambelin and Ezekiel Kwaymullina are a brother–sister team of Aboriginal writers who come from the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia. They’ve worked together on a number of short novels and picture books. Catching Teller Crow is their first joint young adult novel. They believe in the power of storytelling to create a more just world.
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