Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  78

  Early in the morning, with the Thai boys safe, Val suggested Frances travel with her beyond the town. They needed a break, just a day and a night. Even one night sleeping on earth, and under stars, did you good. Not all the way north to Wiluna, to her Country, almost six hours away, but halfway, just up the road a bit, sliding into the desert, back to space and light, and far from Enid, and the town, and the adamant noise of the Super Pit.

  Enid stood with arms folded, watching them pile provisions and swags into Val’s old Fiat. Frances saw her anew: she looked less tough now, and old, and held her elbows as if holding a broken body together. Sleep had flattened her perm and she seemed somehow asymmetrical. On impulse, Frances returned to offer a hug. Enid accepted her stiffly.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ Frances whispered.

  ‘I could die, for all you care,’ Enid replied, and offered a frog-like stare that told her niece she was a disappointment. She stood her ground, firm in her conviction of neglect. Frances watched her dwindle in the rear-vision mirror as they pulled away.

  They headed due north up the Goldfields Highway. Val drove fast and confident, she was rapt and preoccupied. The journey was the centre of a new frame of knowledge: they pushed into acacia country, mauve and red; they aimed for the vanishing point of the spearing road. Together, side by side, neither spoke a word. In the buzz of the car, in the absence of traffic, moving through what looked to Frances like empty and invariant land, she fell into a kind of slumberous reverie. Nothing focused occurred to her; it was impressions she passed through. The faces of her grandparents and her heartless aunt, the fig tree at Midas Street, and the reconfigured backyard, Will, ashen with pain, his face slipping away. Her bad dream still pestered, casting a veil over her thoughts, of the woman on fire, all flapping alarm, and the forsaken dog, howling.

  She was crowded with presences before the world returned. From the moving land and the light, an emu materialised. It headed at speed for the car, swerved and turned away, fluffing its barrel body, jolting its stick legs, loping with wide strides and a rocking toy run. In unison, Val and Frances called ‘oh!’ but the incident needed no comment; both lapsed again into silence. It was a relief to have death or accident averted. Roadkill lay everywhere, strewn to remind them: mashed flesh and torn fur. A wallaby flat to the tarmac, steaming with new blood, and crows lifting grisly and stained from their feed.

  When Val turned off the highway, passing through the sparse town of Menzies, Frances at last asked, ‘So, where are we heading?’

  And Val replied, ‘You’ll see.’

  Lake Ballard was a vast salt lake, fifty kilometres long and twenty kilometres wide. Frances had heard of it but had never visited. The Fiat turned onto red gravel and they skidded along, moving through Yilgarn flatlands of mulga and spinifex. Old fence wire lay twisted along the edge of the lake, the sky was all glare, the wind a low flex.

  ‘Wangkathaa mob,’ Val announced, ‘this is their Country.’

  Country was flowing towards and around them. Respectful of traditional custodians, they drove slower now, and with caution. Val hummed something under her breath and gripped at the steering wheel. It was an invocation, perhaps, a ritual request or a greeting. What place was this, that needed her voice to give them permission?

  When they drew alongside the lake, at the western end, Frances was at first uncomprehending. It may again have been the apprehension of scale that confused her. Space, light, these were newly expansive.

  The shore fringe, of dried mud, was orange-red and pricked with grasses in the midday light, but further out lay a white salt plain as far as the eye could see. There was a sparkle to the crystals and an illusionist distortion of distance, utmost, incalculable, like sky itself. When she left the car, taking her place among the elements, Frances saw human forms here and there, spread randomly across the lake. Alone, not in clusters, they were skinny abstractions of the locals, whose bodies had been scanned, reduced and remade iconic. She remembered the details: the sculptor was Antony Gormley. This was his art installation of standing figures at the lake. She was halted, as Val was, at the edge of revelation and searched the distance to observe how still a body might appear. It was a function of statues, surely, to make still and commemorate, to model endurance.

  Val stepped beside her. ‘Women’s Dreaming place, this one.’

  Frances waited for more information, but none was forthcoming. She felt too shy to ask and knew by now that there was purpose and delicacy to Val’s withholding. It seemed she saw a further lake, with other, more credible figures.

  ‘Drought here, too,’ Val added. ‘But it’ll rain pretty soon, and then it will change.’ She sniffed at the wind, lifted her face, and closed her eyes. As if summoning, she said, ‘Then water birds will appear, and little shrimp, which hide under the salt in the dry, sometimes for years, like they’re asleep.’

  But for now there was no rain, only a sodium crust to walk upon. Between the statues the women could see tracks of footprints, so that earth showed through as a human trace. Frances knew the pigment: it was burnt sienna. All those minerals down there, iron, nickel, gold. All that whitefella wealth.

  ‘I knew you’d like it,’ said Val, though Frances had made no comment.

  They climbed a neat hill that reminded Frances of the cover of The Little Prince, a hemisphere, like half a planet, in the middle of nowhere. From the top they stood in the salty wind and looked afar. Before them, beneath the white glaze of the sunlight, lay asterisk on asterisk of fanning trails, the footprinted patterns of earlier visitors who had tracked between the statues.

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Fifty-one.’ Val knew. ‘Some are way, way out. Poor lonely buggers. We’ll set up camp and walk on the salt when the sun is a bit lower.’

  Frances began to yield to this new composition of the world. There were no other campers and no tourists or visitors anywhere. Val and Frances had the lake to themselves. Though winter, it was mild, and the sun was sharp and clear. The salt might have been snow, for all its supernatural dazzle.

  They gathered wood, made a fire and boiled a billy. Val poured the tea into enamel mugs and they sat idly drinking and swatting at flies. When the sun slid a little, they ventured together onto the lake, walking with care, almost ceremoniously, as the surface demanded, feeling the crunch of salt crystals, watching their footprints form unevenly in a trail behind them. Each statue was modelled on the same humble abstraction; the women had breasts on sticks, like alien pods, the men had long, thin penises, half-upstanding. There were one or two children. All stood with their arms held slightly away from their bodies, as if caught in a posture of pleasant surprise. Frances found them puzzling. She and Val wandered a few kilometres into the white distance, keeping the hemispherical landmark in view. Sun flare and the gaze of a circling hawk. The figures manifest, stark, and thinned again by refraction.

  When the women trudged back, pulling their long shadows, there was not much to say: this was the slow astonishment of landscape made art, and neither felt the need to express their responses. Out there, the only sound was of their breath and the wind, and the sky above was a noiseless infinity.

  What was Frances thinking?

  That she was incapable of thought but needed to feel where she was. That her tender puzzlement would likely increase and persist. That Val had bought her here for cultural instruction, and to move her beyond grief. She felt a gratitude she was unable to express and found in her own silence a necessary subordination.

  Val, apart and pensive, had begun humming again. Her murmurous voice blew like dust around her. Every now and then she moved into words, but they were her own words, they were Language, they were of Martu Wangka.

  The sunset was vermillion. Clouds massed at the horizon like an omen of fire, then unrolled in purple skeins, and streamed windswept above their heads. Below, the statues looked uncanny, then receded into darkness. As the stars appeared Val made a dinner of damper and fried eggs and they sat cr
oss-legged on a strip of canvas close to their fire. When the temperature dropped, they crouched under their swags, holding together as one body.

  They cleaned their boots with sticks and banged them together. Set them beyond the fire in a neat line of four. Removed big stones, swept with a branch, cleared the hard ground for sleeping. They would keep the fire going all night. They would lie close like lovers for warmth.

  79

  In the middle of the night, Val woke Frances to show her the stars.

  This Frances already knew, or thought that she knew: how the desert night blazes.

  But Val was pointing and speaking and instructing once again, and through her half-awake fog Frances heard, ‘Pleiades, this one, whitefellas call this one Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. We have this story too; we have our own Seven Sisters. That big hill we stood on, that’s the oldest sister. Six more sister places out there, long way, across the lake.’

  Frances lay on her back, facing the stars. She was conscious of a cold wind that made the fire start and flicker, and Val reaching for a dry branch to feed and revive it. She felt a soft luminosity touch her, and shapes, and stories. In her sleepiness she was free-floating beyond her body, thinning out, disappearing, spreading into the dark.

  ‘They ran across the lake, they hid in rock holes. You can see where one of the sisters fell; her breasts and her face shaped the earth.’

  Frances waited but learned nothing more. Again, Val was speaking her mother tongue, as if she’d forgotten her companion was an ignorant whitefella. Or possibly this story was only made true in Language. There would be another time to ask. There would be a reclamation. Val’s voice was low like a lullaby, sweet and low, and Frances was carried, and pacific, and fell back into the bosom of sleep.

  When she woke, near dawn, there were grey kangaroos very close—ten, eleven she counted—grazing in peace near the edge of the lake.

  Val gestured. ‘Shuush.’

  They lay together, half-frozen, on the cold hard ground. When Val leant over and pushed a thick branch towards the cooling fire, the kangaroos looked up together, unanimous. All lifted a little, turned their pert ears, held their small forelegs tremblingly still. One of the smallest made a single bobbing hop. They were tense now, but curious.

  A whisper. ‘Kirtikirti, grey kangaroo.’

  Val drew her swag close to her body and tried to huddle back to sleep. Frances lay on her side, feeling stiff and sore, watching as gradually the kangaroos lost interest and returned to the graceful moves of their concentrated grazing. She saw how they bent to the earth, then raised up to chew, how they tilted down to move forward, then tilted up, then again down. Now they were less bothered. Now, chomping away, they ignored the strangers.

  Frances watched the kangaroos in a contented drowse. Their faces seemed to her particularly benevolent. The air was blueish, breath-like; the wind had dropped away. She could hear the faint rustle of dry grasses blowing.

  It was fully light when she saw that the kangaroos had gone. Close beside her, touching, Val sounded a gruff snore. Frances swung herself upright and blew on her hands. She patted her cold arms and held her swag like a cloak. Carefully, she stoked the fire and balanced the billy in the coals. Woodsmoke, another somnolence, and the sweet smell of char.

  Calm, bright now. Tea, they would share tea. They would walk again on the salt lake, flashing in the morning, its lit bowl holding up figures already dissolved in mirage.

  80

  The return journey was chatty. Val loved the comic dimensions of the statues at Lake Ballard.

  ‘You pick your day, and no one’s there. You can visit the tribe of skinnies in peace.’

  She was laughing, throwing her warm voice out the window. Driving fast in the wind. Her face vivid in the light.

  In response to questions she revealed a little more of her past. No, she didn’t have children, but big mobs of kin, black and white, scattered all about. She had a man once, good bloke, strong in the Law, but he was killed out droving, an accident, when his horse fell on him. She still wouldn’t say his name aloud, though it was long, long ago.

  But the stars, the naked skinnies. Of these she easily spoke. The woman stars becoming land. The transfer of heaven and earth. Things known and foreknown.

  Both felt their spirits lifted. Both wished to talk. There was openness, confidence and a calm, jokey tone.

  Emboldened, Frances asked, ‘So, will you take me to your Country, round Wiluna way?’

  Val’s face clouded. They were in a blur of journeying. Silence stretched between them as Val considered. ‘Not now, too soon. Not in your sorry time.’ Her gaze fixed directly ahead. ‘You have a lot to learn. And you need time, real time.’

  There was a complication here; it was a rebuke and a criticism. Frances shifted in her seat and looked out the window. After such kindness, such intimacy, she was surprised that her request had been so firmly denied. Perhaps she’d assumed too much. Perhaps she was hungry, too, like a kid who wants more of something forbidden. Perhaps she’d wanted to possess what was not hers to possess.

  ‘But those kangaroos, eh?’ Val was changing the topic. ‘A good feed there!’

  And she was laughing again, and her words were flying: stars, kangaroos, sisters, skinny tribe. She slowed her driving to catch the thread of an idea. The earth grew nearer, and the sky.

  ‘I’ll think about it. Country.’

  Smoke hung in a seam on the far horizon. The rust earth fled away. The car was their private enclosure. Val turned to smile. Frances responded. In the Fiat they were close again, and again reconciled.

  81

  It was the first time for many years that Frances had entered her grandparents’ bedroom, now Enid’s, and what was remarkable was how little it had changed. She felt a sensation almost of homecoming and returning to an earlier era, preserved only, as if by forgetfulness, in this single place. Unlike the front room, the bedroom had no pinkish alterations or lost family objects. There was still the old washstand and pitcher, the same large, uneven bed. The walnut wardrobe, a prized possession, still loomed darkly against the wall, matched by a sturdy, though worm-eaten, chest of drawers. A single spindle-backed pine chair stood in a corner. The curtains too were the same. Frances remembered Else sewing them when she was a child, watching her push sprigs of an English flower in long rows through her Singer treadle, her feet rocking, her hands gently pulling and guiding, the painstaking way she held up and inspected her work, bringing the cloth close to her face, peering. Through the window was a stretch of picket fence and a Mexican creeper, hanging on for the winter.

  From the wardrobe Val had retrieved a cardboard box of letters, photographs and papers. She had coaxed and chided, and at last Enid, defeated, had said yes.

  They sat in a row on the bed as Frances sorted through the box. There were keepsakes—a stiff pressed-flower posy, such as might have been worn to a dance, Fred’s military medals of service and his RSL badge, the tiny plastic phial of gold dust he’d kept tucked in his shirt pocket. In a tobacco tin were five of Fred’s hand-rolled cigarettes. What a pang Frances felt, seeing the frail paper tubes, recalling his hands, the deft twist, the satisfied lick at the end. In another tin lay a Claddagh ring and a heart-shaped locket. Here was the missing wedding photograph of her grandparents, with the couple adorned, as was then the custom, with hand-painted rosy cheeks. Nell and Frances had once found the rosy cheeks hilarious. And there were letters, some between Else and Fred, that Frances would one day read. Both wrote SWALK on the backs of the envelopes; she was not sure what this meant. There were two more letters from the solicitors, seeking contact and more information about their father. Near the bottom of the box there was a letter from Japan, sent in 1952 to a woman called Violet Friedlander in Coolgardie, then, in a larger envelope, sent on to Fred.

  Frances sifted the objects and papers with her fingers, vaguely disappointed. She was not sure what it was she had hoped to find. Unprepared to read her grandparents’ words—these carrie
d a force field of privacy and prohibition—Frances retrieved the Japanese letter. She opened the inner envelope and read the letter to Violet aloud.

  Dear Respected and Honourable Mrs Violet Friedlander.

  I ask your forgive me send this letter years after the Pacific War. It has taken long time to find your address from the Canberra office.

  Your son Marty was my good friend in Japan. He taught me English. Still no good I know but I learn with his memory.

  Now is peace time and Marty said we speak to each other.

  Now he is gone I am speaking to you with this letter.

  Marty was brave and very kind. His death is a hurt. I think Marty every day.

  I send my respects to tell you Marty was a good man who wanted peace.

  Your Obedient Servant,

  Takahashi Hideo

  This was a mysterious note. The women had no idea who Marty Friedlander was, or why Fred might have been sent the letter intended for Marty’s mother. They sat in silence.

  Frances folded the letter, put it back in its two envelopes, and replaced it in the box. She felt an immense sorrow, but for no apparent reason. It was the heartfelt simplicity of the old-fashioned prose. It was a single sentence: His death is a hurt. The present tense seemed to her heavy with undiminished grief.

  Her grandparents’ bedroom—Enid’s—was steeped in brownish mottled light with a yellow tinge. Fleetingly, she felt time past as a dimming intrusion. (Where was Else’s tortoiseshell hand-mirror, Frances wondered.)

  In another envelope were photographs, stiff and faded to tangerine. The first was of Enid and Mary as little girls. They stood posed in white sunlight in a scorched front yard, clutching identical dolls. This was the history of something still unspoken—that there had once been a loving bond and a shared attachment. And at this moment, possibly only a photographic moment, the sisters conveyed a striking likeness.