Benang

by Kim Scott

  I had gone to see Tommy, this time, in my teenage years, as part of a trip with my girlfriends.

  My girlfriends? How tangled this story is, the explanations required, and I don’t wish to speak too much about this, these others involved. In my ignorance, I was led by a girl and her adopted sister. They had been searching for, and found, the adopted one’s mother. We had thought she would have Aboriginal family, and it turned out to be so. Her mother was descended from country in the north of the state, and had ended up with a Nyoongar, a man named Cuddles.

  I had just learnt to make love with this girl and her sister. The three of us laughed together, could share silence. In our innocence we were happy for her, with her, and in fact her mother was delighted to meet her. She had other children, they all embraced. There were all these relations to meet.

  The Cuddles family knew of my own father. ‘Tommy Scat? He’s a Coolman, unna?’

  And my girlfriend’s biological father? They didn’t know. The Cuddles family said they hoped it was not Ernest Solomon Scat. The man had a reputation, they said.

  Timid and timetabled—perhaps even sly—I nevertheless returned to my grandfather and confronted him.

  ‘He can’t be so bad,’ I remember saying to the girls on the long bus trip back. I remember moving to defend him against their accusations.

  I put it to Grandad—this Ernest Solomon Scat—that my father and I were the only ones he had claimed. Why?

  I was his product.

  The girls had left me with him. Of course. I cannot blame them.

  ‘Your father?’ Ern snorted. ‘You’re nothing like him. He’s some sort of throwback, all right. I made you mine.’

  I think I just yelled at him. ‘Shutup. Shutup. Shutup.’ Something similarly articulate.

  ‘Get out.’

  The old man got to his feet. He moved very slowly, but as fast as he could. I let him come to me.

  He grabbed my hair.

  ‘Ow.’

  Swung a fist at me.

  ‘Get out of it.’

  I took hold of his wrist, loosened his fingers from my hair.

  He was cursing and striking me. I skipped away, a couple of steps, and he stumbled and almost fell.

  What could I do? Couldn’t run; pride, you know. Couldn’t hit back, felt it would be wrong to lay him out that way.

  I grabbed his car keys, and found myself in the middle of my grandfather’s front lawn, a series of fences one behind the other for as far as I could see, as if I was at the centre of some field of trick mirrors, yet not reflected at all.

  There was dew on the grass. A streetlight held me, and it blazed and crackled in the moist night air. Grandad came at me, his fists bunched, arms swinging.

  ‘I don’t want to ever have anything to do with you, ever again. Not you, not any of your family.’

  He said it. His business partner—the latest ‘Aunty’—repeated it for him. His neighbours, leaning over fences and out of windows, said it. Shame shame be off with you.

  I hate to remember this. How I was crying. It was the tears, I suppose, or something, but I looked up, and there was only comforting darkness, while all around me bounced thorns of light.

  Grandad’s fists struck me, feebly. I held his wrists in my hands and stepped back, and the old man fell. He was on his knees before me, still clawing, still trying to hurt me.

  I went to help him to his feet, but he screamed at me like a child.

  I could not strike him. I was too soft to put him down.

  With my face in his I thought I might kiss him, thought I might scream.

  I sprung away from him effortlessly, and in one bound was beside his car where it was parked in the driveway.

  He was on his feet again, stumbling at me, gnashing his teeth, practically foaming at the mouth. His pale fists waving like lilies.

  I watched his hands slapping the windscreen, watched him tug at the door I’d locked.

  The car started, and I let it purr.

  Grandad’s pale and haggard face was pressed against the glass beside me. I winked at him each time I touched the accelerator, curled my lip and made the engine roar.

  When I released the clutch the car lurched forward instead of back. Something crunched, I heard glass breaking. I laughed and whooped for the old man’s benefit, and then reversed carefully.

  I wanted to make the tyres smoke and squeal, and so it was with embarrassment that I kangaroo-hopped away.

  My father.

  I collected the girls and drove to see him once more.

  My father raised his eyebrows when he walked out to the car. ‘Flash. Aren’t you the lucky one then?’

  But he didn’t want to talk, not just then. Not about his father. He didn’t want to talk, I could tell.

  He said we should go fishing, in an estuary around the coast which was closed to such practices. ‘Doesn’t apply to us though,’ he said.

  It was very dark when we got there. The moon was setting and we saw how high smooth cloud made a pelt for the sky. We walked into a tunnel of scrub, and suddenly it was so dark I could not see my father before me, or even a hand in front of my face. I was scratched, clawed, touched by something, but could see only the pale glow of the path at my feet.

  We came out of the tunnel and the moon had gone, but the expanse of gleaming sand before us showed where the bush began again, but not detail or shape of any kind.

  We entered the scrub once more, and this time the path was wider and the shrubs lower. I followed the sound of my father, and the vague, only sometimes human shape discerned against the gleaming, sandy track as it wound through an apparently homogeneous darkness.

  My father carried the net upon his shoulders. It was folded into a metal tub and cushioned by a sheet of tarpaulin.

  ‘We won’t need long.’ He knotted one end of the net to a paperbark branch at the water’s edge. ‘What about you swim it out, eh?’

  The water rose, warm over my nakedness. I held the tub with one hand, using it to help me float, and fed the net out with the other as I frog-kicked away from shore. My father’s crouching form melted into the darkness. I could only guess that it was a straight line I swam.

  The cloud cover was dispersing, there were stars, and I tried not to disturb the surface of the water too much because of the violence it did to the sky’s reflection. I was held, I floated, but the vision of swimming in the rippling heavens, and the warmth I floated in, conspired to disorient me.

  I could count a few corks marking the net and saw what must have been white sand at the estuary’s edge. Perhaps that was a couple of paperbarks defined by their pale, vertical lines and the absence of stars where their leaves would be.

  My father whispered across the water to me. ‘We got a couple already. Follow the net back.’

  When I had wrapped clothes around my wet self, my father handed me a rope attached to the line of corks, and I felt the tremor as another life struck.

  ‘We’ll go back to the car, and...’

  He fell silent, and across the little space between us I felt him tighten.

  ‘Fuck it. Quick!’

  He was hauling the net in. I sprang to help, was clumsy. We rolled the net up in the tarpaulin, I grabbed the tub and ran after him.

  The sound of a boat’s motor was clear now.

  ‘Into the scrub.’

  We looked out from among a tracery of reeds and leaves and thin limbs to where a light was bobbing above the water.

  A spotlight, a launch.

  The beam swept the low bush, and we ducked as it swung over us. The scrub and us must have appeared the same, even under the spotlight.

  The boat’s grumble was louder, then passing.

  My father heaved the net back onto his shoulders, and we began jogging again, keeping well behind the boat.

  The spotlight bounced in my vision. I heard my father panting. I was the younger.

  ‘You want me to take the net?’

  ‘Shh. Ditch the tub.’

/>   I swung the tub around, released it, and continuing the motion, was running again.

  The boat returned, and once more we hid. The boat was close, came closer, slowly. The motor fell silent, and we listened to the tiny bow wave die, the boat settle in the water, the small waves of its wake lapping the shore. The spotlight speared where we had come from.

  ‘A tub.’

  We heard them speaking. My father’s hand was calm on my shoulder.

  Once again it left us, and once again we ran. And then my father fell, as I have written.

  He told me he was fine.

  We made a fire deep in a hollow among the dunes, and cooked the fish. ‘No good trying to get out now with the ranger snooping,’ said my father. The small fire pulled us to it and, silent, we stared into the glowing embers of its heart. The impenetrable and spiky darkness of the dunes comforted us, as did the net of stars so close above our heads.

  The embers shifted, the fish fell apart in our hands. We wiped our hands on leaves and our clothes, and when we touched the inlet, breaking up the night sky’s reflection, star-fire followed our hands as we moved them in the dark water.

  Our headlights shone on a circle of tyre marks behind our car—my grandfather’s car.

  ‘Been and gone,’ chuckled my father. ‘Hope they didn’t get too tired waiting.’

  The scent of the smoke, the images of fire, fish scales and close stars were still about me—more real than the soft dashboard lights—and so when the ranger’s car parked across the road brought us to a halt, the sudden silence, the spearing torch, the contrast between my reverie and this sudden, silent darkness frightened me.

  The ranger came at us along the beam of our headlights. Cold air rushed in, and our own lights were extinguished.

  I handed the ranger the keys. We listened to his footsteps circle the car. Doors opened, and we got out while he searched beneath our seats. He found no sign of fish, no net.

  ‘A lovely night,’ said my father. ‘We been walking under the stars, on the white sand. Listening out for night birds.’

  The ranger did not smile. He turned away, releasing us.

  ‘See ya,’ called my father, cheerily.

  He looked at me. ‘Might leave it a few days before we go pick up that net, I think.’

  He sang as I drove us home.

  As we pulled over outside my father’s house, the two girls came running and opened the back door.

  ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  They had told Dad’s family what they had heard about Ern.

  ‘But you...’ said one of them, addressing my father. ‘Why? You let him take Harley?’

  ‘Yes. Why did you, Dad? Why did you do that?’

  So my father stayed in the car, rather than going in to his family. And we talked.

  I was driving. It was difficult to look at him, to look any way other than forward. We wore seatbelts, of course, so only our heads and eyes could turn. We should have stopped, embraced.

  I looked ahead, at the road. He occasionally looked at me—I could see from the corner of my vision—but mostly stared out the window on his side. Tried to explain. He was young. He tried to do what was right. Obligations. Wanting what was best.

  I drove badly. I saw the girls in the rear-view mirror. They also looked away from one another, stared out their own windows.

  I kept driving. Dad was talking, rambling, trying to explain. He thought it was for the best. He was young. He did the fractions talk; half-caste, quadroon ... that sort of stuff. He talked racism, oppression, genocide. He talked defeat, isolation, loneliness. He talked of who he felt he was.

  He was gunna retire from the roads, just go fishing for a living along the coast. As we must always have done, he said. Keep looking for relations, find out more and more about his place. He talked and he talked, and a lot of it made no sense to me, back then. He said maybe he should have got himself a different woman, a black woman, and had really dark kids. Maybe it wasn’t too late.

  And I just kept heading vaguely east. We hummed along, and night closed in. Headlights drilling into the dark before us.

  My father pulled his seatbelt away and hunched over. He slid from his seat and onto the floor, and huddled there, taking less space than I’d thought possible.

  We stopped, but didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t breathe, he felt numb. The silence beside the road, out there in the bush, in the night, was disturbing. Dad muttered at us that he was okay, but agreed that we better get him to a hospital.

  I drove on, faster now, comfortable with the business of driving. Again, he unbuckled and slid from the seat. He seemed to have folded on himself, somehow, and was no more than a bundle of clothing from which one hand emerged, turning at the wrist in an ambivalent gesture. This way, that way; thumb and index finger offering alternate directions.

  There was a sickening smell in the car.

  I hated him. I wanted to kick him. I wanted to get him to a hospital. I wanted someone to save me. I was scared and so I drove faster, wanting to compress time and get there, now. I wished we had not come so far.

  We were slipping along, gliding, and I followed a broken white line as it revealed itself to me, snaking this way and that under the headlights. Red eyes white eyes watched us pass.

  In the rear-view mirror, a spot of light, and then darkness again as we dropped into a valley.

  Next time it was closer, blue light flashing. We heard its wail.

  I did not have the time to stop. The girls, as I asked, leaned from the windows and tried to indicate, by pointing and waving hands over their heads to represent a siren, that we needed an escort, that this was an emergency.

  We did not know the car had been reported stolen. The police could not see my father. The pursuit car touched its front bumper against the back of our car, and nearly spilled the girls onto the road.

  Then we were in town, with two, three, police cars at our back as we screamed and wailed around corners, the twisting streets. Houses and fences leapt away from us, trees bent over our path. The car bounced over kerbs, fishtailed this way, that.

  The explosion of one tyre going. Two. The car shuddered, convulsed. We were among the islands and concrete of traffic-calming devices. The motor and rims screamed, and there was a curtain of sparks between us and our pursuers as we ricocheted along the narrow way left to us.

  Flames in the air, explosions, shrieking. I had my foot flat to the floor; the motor screamed and the spinning wheels’ cry was shrill; we moved at maybe thirty k’s an hour, slipping and sliding on a molten surface.

  Sinking. We were slowly sinking.

  Cops opened their doors, and leaned out to make faces of mock horror; they called to us, and threw things; cans, handcuffs, boots and notebooks. They were laughing at us. I swung the wheel this way and that, kept my foot flat to the floor, made the motor scream; and we bumped along like a slow dodgem car in that narrow space between kerbs.

  My father’s head flopped about, and his eyes were wide.

  In the rear-view mirror, beyond the sparks, cop cars idled in pursuit, and the blue light intermittently washing over us all showed the girls repeatedly lost, repeatedly reappearing.

  I knew that I would have to shout to make myself heard. But who could listen? My father had slid from the passenger seat, and shrivelled to a heap of clothes and a single raised hand.

  There was that very bad smell.

  The car stumbled over a kerb, fell through a neglected rail, and tipped, at the top of some stairs, to the sea below.

  The car teetered on its front bumper.

  There was no moon, no wind. I saw a black sky peopled with stars, above and below me and—somewhere—the smudge of an island.

  A policeman grabbed the rear of the car, let go, and the car went up, over; so slowly, it seemed, bouncing down the steep slope. Figures flung from the windows. Free.

  I was gone. I saw that same car bubble and hiss in the sea below me.

  It was as if I were some creature
caught in transition from shell to shell, upon the open rocks, the torchlight slashing closer.

  You would think such things are endings. We all worried about that, in our different ways; Grandad, me, Uncle Will. At one stage, full of frustration and anger at my place in Grandad’s story, I wrote END, CRASH, FINISH into his skin. I poured black ink and ash into the wounds, and tended them carefully so that the skin would heal and seal the letters stark and proud.

  I read through his notes, and all I could do was work on his house by day, and tend him, treat him, tie him down and occasionally write a word or two in the way I have indicated above. ‘Here,’ I would poke and prod him, ‘quite white where the skin does not touch. This soft skin.’ And I sliced my words, not so deep, but just enough, as it were, to scar and tattoo him.

  Thinking again of his plans, his words, I added the lines of ink. How the dirty tributary joins the great river.

  I know it seems all endings, this. I supposed so, too, at the time and believed that I was writing only of death, of worlds ending, and I thought, too, that I must begin again. There was the crash, where I was maimed as our dog had once been. There was the funeral, where I was chained, and later given into my grandfather’s care.

  There have been many funerals since then, of course. My grandfather’s, for instance, where there was just my two uncles and I.

  At so many funerals I have felt lonely, that it was I who had already been dead longest, that I myself represented the final killing off; the genocide thing, you know. Destroy memory of a culture, destroy evidence of a distinctive people, bury memory deep in shame.

  Having survived genocide, what was left to me but to look, to think, to try to comprehend what led to this oh-so-near-to-death?

  At that first funeral I felt sorriest, really, for myself; the more so when Ern took me in hand—so to speak—and furthered his investigations, and probing. I’m so grateful that Uncle Will came to assist, and returned with further help.

  After Uncle Will’s death Uncle Jack took me to meet some relations. He rested his arms on the top of the steering wheel as he drove, so that he was sort of hunched over it. As if it was some sphere around his heart he was protecting. He looked into a middle distance as he spoke, sometimes turning to me so that I could just see the other eye behind the bridge of his nose for a moment before he turned away again.