He paused his story, took the last of the throwdown into his mouth. ‘That’s why so much drinkin, drinkin, drinkin. That’s why so much anger, you know? You musta see it in Sydney there; ya know what I’m talkin about. Well then these people never get to talk and it builds up inside em, it just want to get out and when it does it destroy em and they get locked up in the prisons with all that pain they gotta listen to, alone in they prisons, all the memories chokin em in they sleep. No one to talk about it, no one ever want to talk about it. And they die, kill em selves, then those governments just put another number, nother cross on they list. Lockin up bloody young fellas, why we have prisons? So they don’t have to think about it, about people’s problems, we don’t have to do anything bout it. They still tryin to do it, kill off us fellas, that always been they plan, now they do it quiet, crush em, slow. Ya see the problem is, us fellas still seen as second-rate person, still treated like they don’t matter. Bloody millennium come and gone and they still can’t treat our people right. We seen forty bloody millenniums, our people, and they government give us credit for that? Only when it suits them, when they gotta show all them tourists. This country, this government and them bad churches, they all one evil, ya know, they all workin with each other. You probably sitting ere thinkin I’m just crazy old jackeroo, don’t know what I’m talkin bout! You know what, maybe I don’t know what I’m talkin bout, I sure as hell would like someone to tell me I’m wrong. I wish someone would just tell me I’m wrong.
‘See dat, there Betty comin, go an catch her.’
He points across the road at the car pulling in to the driveway.
I jump up and grab my bag. ‘Thank you, Uncle.’
‘That’s ok, girl, go on, go ask for your family, ya find em.’
I turn and start running across the lawn, ‘Hey, young lady, take your hat off for old Betty, ok?’
‘Ok.’
I run across to the cement drive and slow down as I near the people grabbing groceries from the car boot. An older woman notices me. I know it’s Betty. I take off my hat. We say hello as we nod to each other.
‘My name is May Gibson; I’m looking for some of my family, the Gibsons?’
Betty cradles the bag of packet food between us as the younger men slink past carrying slabs of beer under their arms. ‘Gibson. You know Lake Cargelligo?’
‘No.’
She turns to the skinny woman in the car, telling her the street name. The woman nods.
‘My daughter Jo, she take you there, the only Gibsons left I reckon, love. Quick jump in!’
The engine kicks over and Betty waves to us both, a trying smile on her face and soft eyes that turn away as we leave. Seemed all so perfect, so right.
Country
The house is white. It sits on the square of ruby sand and clipped grass, a few metres back from the short fishnet fence and the camellia bed. A narrow path creases from the gate to the peppermint door, which is shaded by a candy stripe awning. The street smells of mothballs and farming. This, they say, is the Gibson house, the only Gibsons left.
My knuckles rub at the mesh of the screen door. I know I should knock, but my hand is scared. This is not how it is supposed to be.
Inside the house is quiet. A dog is barking from one of the yards. I move my fist across to the doorframe. I knock. A woman comes to the doorway; she has a glass in her hand, lemon lime, a cigarette cropped from her finger’s edge.
‘Hello there?’
‘Hello, I’m looking for the Gibsons.’
‘Yes, that’s me, me and my husband, who are you, love?’
‘May Gibson.’
‘Hold on, I’ll get the keys.’
She comes back to the screen, snips the lock, tumbling the keys, and opens the sketched wire onto our difference.
We see our difference.
‘Percy. Percy love, come here.’ Her eyes stray over her shoulder. ‘Hold on a minute.’
She disappears and I want to get out of there.
It’s too late; he is here under the candy aluminium awning. The spitting image of Mum. All skin and hard face.
‘Who are your parents?’
‘June Gibson’s my mum.’
‘June, little June, last time I saw June, she would have been this tall.’ He points a cigarette to her height above the ground.
‘Come in, come in ... May isn’t it?’
‘Yep.’
‘Dotty, Dotty, this is May, my ... well I suppose, well I don’t know who you’d be to me ... June’s mother was my aunt, so spose you’re my cousin too or something.’
He scratches his head, dropping ash onto the thick milky carpet as he lowers his cigarette out toward the chair. ‘Sit, sit. You want some cordial, May?’
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘Well, little June, hey, ahh jeez ... where is she now?’
‘She’s gone ... I mean, she’s dead.’
‘Ahh shit, how long.’
‘Six years.’
‘It’s funny when you said gone I thought ya meant walkin, you know travellin, cos her mother, Alice, your grandmother, my aunty, she was a gypsy, all your Gibson family, lots of gypsies.’
‘Spose you’re gypsy too, ha?’He looks at my small backpack and down at my feet. His lip crawls cruelly. ‘What d’ya want anyway love, ya come here for money, ha? Like your grandmother?’
‘No.’
‘No? Well what ya come here for? Where’d ya come from anyway?’ His voice is louder and intruding.
‘Wollongong, sort of. I came here, well I don’t know really, not for friggin money though!’
‘Gotta a bit cheek too, ha?’
‘I’m not the person you’re lookin at me like, I’m not a criminal.’
‘Never said you were, love. Not for money, ha? I believe ya. Spit it out then, I got golf in a minute.’
‘Just wanted to know about my family, you know, the Gibsons, where they come from and stuff. My mum, she told me loads of stories and stuff and I just was expecting to find, I dunno, some family or something...’
‘Stories, ha! What do you want to know? Where ya get ya skin from, ya tribal name, ya totem, ya star chart, the meaning of the world? Thought us Gibsons’d give ya the answers, ha!’
I back toward the door.
‘Nah nah, look here.’ He waves me back to sit. ‘Look.’
He balances the meeting out on his knees, asking his hands for words.
I interrupt the silence. ‘It’s all right, I’ll just go, sorry.’
‘Nah nah, listen, sit down.’
‘Your grandmother she left this place, went looking for something, some kind of meaning, something that wasn’t the mission, or the tank, or the farming or something. She came back here once, thirty years later, my father, her brother, didn’t even recognise her at first, standing on the porch with a bunch of kids hanging off her hands. Your mother, she was one of them. She wanted money. I remember she was desperate, sad. Some drover, white fella, name of Jack or something or other had messed her around. We gave her some money, and a feed and a bed. And then she took the kids with her and left. That was it.’
My thoughts drifted off to Mum, when she was going crazy, telling us about a man called Jack, I remember she used to say he was the first white man to destroy us. ‘Not the last,’ she would say, stuck on the words. ‘Not the last.’
I wanted to be free of them – I wanted pride instead.
‘What about like, growing up here, like learning from your old people and stuff?’
‘You’re just like your grandmother, you know that? But she knew it. She died of hope, you know that? The thing is, we weren’t allowed to be what you’re looking for, and we weren’t told what was right, we weren’t taught by anyone. There is a big missing hole between this place and the place you’re looking for. That place, that people, that something you’re looking for. It’s gone. It was taken away. We weren’t told, love; we weren’t allowed to be Aboriginal.
‘I got a good life now.’ He nods at
the TV, hiding welled eyes, and then at the furniture, the thick carpet, Dotty sitting at the table, smoking. ‘Stories, ha! Your mother probably read em from books, plenty of books if ya want to learn.’ He shakes his head at his knees, huffs and lifts himself off the armchair. He makes a point of looking at his wristwatch. ‘I got to go to golf now, nice to meet you, May. Dotty will make you something to eat if you want.’
I do not cry, my eyes are hardened, like honeycomb, like toffee. Brittle, crumbling sugar. He puts his hand out toward me; we shake hands, a pact that I won’t be here digging up his past when he gets back.
And I’m not.
The highway breeze is thick and hot from the truck’s cab. Earth spins up in little tornadoes over bare grazing fields, clouds tumble from the east into purple storm, the birds leave for cover, their wings gracing wind. And day leads night, headlights stretch over the glass, and pass. Eventually I will be there. At the shoreline, we need to talk.
And it all makes sense to me now. Issy’s drawing in the sand, boundaries between the land and the water, us, we come from the sky and the earth and we go back to the sky and the earth, bone and fluid. This land is belonging, all of it for all of us. This river is that ocean, these clouds are that lake, these tears are not only my own. They belong to the whales, to Joyce; they belong to Charlie, to Gary, to Johnny, to Issy, to Percy, to Billy, to Aunty, to my nannas, to their nannas, to their great nannas’ neighbours. They belong to the spirits. To people I will never even know. I give them to my mother.
The driver says he’s going for a shower and said we’ll be back on the road straight after. He pulls the big trailer into the truckstop. I swing down out of the cab and close the door above my head. In the service station I walk the chip aisles, bringing back flashes of Cheapa Petrol and then of the Block – of that big place of family, Joyce, Johnny, everyone.
I scan the pretty white faces on the magazine covers, and down to the stacks of newspapers that I’d never read. And then, it was as if my world slipped through the hands I’d only just found. The newspaper broke the news, as hard and as real as it needed to be. BOY, 16, DIES IN POLICE CHASE. The photo of Johnny was magic, one of old Joyce’s off the wall. He had the biggest grin spilling across his face, his Wu-Tang hat hiding all the beautiful dreaming in his head.
I couldn’t cry for Johnny now. I’d only be crying for the harsh words that I’d said when I left. He died at least with that perfect dream, that perfect paradise, that perfect Thursday Island in his mind. He could go fishing now, cruising the strait, like Mungi, I thought – peacefully forever, over our crumbling skin, through this shifting water.
The Jacaranda Tree
I have jagged recollections. Sharp paper clippings that I remember. I could burrow into another time, or by chance be harked back, and I would stand in our old backyard searching the fence line, naming the things that remain, in the nook of my head. Against the fence I could trace back to someone’s face, their mouth, their eye socket, their ear. I tried so many times to find my mother’s, but I could only pretend to recognise her, her real face is lost.
And I would come to the jacaranda tree, its dogwood trunk writhing through the palings. Heaving in all its purple-belled loveliness. My eyes would find first its feet, entangled roots rigging from fence poles underfoot. Sometimes the other trees’ roots would be so invading that they would splinter plumbing, unbloating reservoir. Though the jacaranda shared its ground.
The lean body of the trunk breached over the backyard. Fishbone fern leaves like tinselled brush, rows of ordered confetti concealing its embryo limbs within. Its milky coffee skin. After summer the tiny leaves would be washed in mustard through the wind and fall, back to the earth, feeding its roots, and that entire hidden body would be exposed. It stayed naked for a lot of the year, until I only remembered its familiar bareness. Then one day, maybe home from school, or early in the morning peering at the tilting sun and cloud stream, there would be a single tiny green bulbus, with the smallest speck of mauve at its end. Bubblegum dipped.
It was a sneaky arrival, never witnessed, a wondrous secretive thing. And then day by day, as if the beans had spilt and the tree had nothing left to hide, handfuls of clustered trumpets dressed its boughs. As more purple emerged in the deeper spring, others would ballet downward to the grass. I would scoop up armfuls and scatter the bells over my bed, their wet collapsing petals blotting blankets and carpet. And then there would be none, no evidence of its beauty, only the watery stains of a visit. And later the entire cycle would enfold again, a slow gentle process, like the wearing out of shoe soles.
One year, in the jacaranda’s bleakness Mum had strung a tyre-swing onto its fattest branch. I remember swinging from its rubber ring a few times, sort of rocking sightly back and forth. She took it back down the following year, revealing a bruise-worn elbow where the tree-swing roped its wing. We decided to let the jacaranda be, and marvelled from the back door or the grass instead. Too delicate to be touched.
It’s a sacred bloody pest. It isn’t meant to be here, I hate it, too pretty, she’d say, threatening always to chop it down. Though I once found her eyes glue and she almost smiled at its gifts, a bouquet of blue jays, the most beautiful thing in the entire street.
It’s an odd thing, a backyard, a little strip of nature, a little reminder of the rest of it, elsewhere. A little piece of earth – a garden, a few trees, a clothesline and a fire pit maybe. Somewhere for the sun to hide.
It was summer when she went away, early December I think. The jacaranda would’ve still been in bloom, toward the end of a cycle. And they say that they found her there, lying under that pest of a tree. I imagine she made peace with it then, or just gave in. I imagine her among the spread of purple. Jacaranda petals and blood, softened and returned.
How quiet it would’ve been, how beautiful.
Home
The moon tows the tide in and out twice a day forever. When I come home the tide is flowing in, when I reach it, when it draws in across the purple slate beds of the point, through the rain and across the grit sand, soaking under my feet, salt bubbles burst at my shins. Then, I know that I am home.
We don’t need words. I can smell it. I can feel it. The raindrops are gentle and cold, the beach is empty, only the salt smell of the ocean air and freshwater clouds fill the space. The wind is blowing nor-easterly, yellow and red flags flutter further down the beach, huddling no one into the safety. Gulls cruise the air, scanning the shoreline and dunes; I’m not sure what they’re looking for. They have waterproof feathers, I imagine. I pull my hood down over my face.
The ocean is sad grey, except in the shallows where the water is pearl and when a wave peels up you can catch the beautiful jade flashing milky through the lips. A secret. The shore-breakers tumble up the banks, tossing sand through their whitewash waves. The headland is foggy in the distance. Behind me, the escarpment is just a flat silhouette.
As I walk up toward the beach entrance, across the little raindrop dimples on yesterday’s footprints, and feel the gritty warm-wet sand carry me. As the starburst eelgrass clusters roll like tumbleweeds off the dunes. As all the salt hits me. I know what the word really means, home.
My mother knows that I am home, at the water I am always home. Aunty and my brother, we are from the same people, we are of the Wiradjuri nation, hard water. We are of the river country, and we have flowed down the rivers to estuaries to oceans. To live by another stretch of water. Salt.
Even though this country is not my mother’s country, even though we are freshwater, not saltwater people, this place still owns us, still owns our history, my brother’s and my own, Aunty’s too. Mum’s. They are part of this place; I know now that I need to find them.
I could run away again, I could run away from the pain my family holds. I could take the yarndi, the paint, the poppies, and all the grog in the world but I couldn’t run from the pain and I couldn’t run from my family either.
When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves
. We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we’d forget to breathe. Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air. We lost trust because we didn’t want to touch something that was going to fall away. Like bubbles, too delicate, too fragile, too brief.
When I get there, Paradise Parade is warring. Walls compress into the ground, rooftops twist over levelled clay, fences warn me off, pipes penetrate cement blocks, toilets sit beside sinks in the air. Yellow machines have paused for a while, waiting for the cloud sky to give way. Few houses remain. The crows begin to nest.
‘When ya gunna get this fuckin fence fixed, Aunty?’
I holler into the back window as I slip through the broken palings, laughing. I jump the stairs in one leap and enter the back door. Aunty leans against the cupboards, pouring a longneck into a glass. She sees me, and she sees the beer that she’s holding in her shaky hand. Her back hits the cupboard doors and she slides down onto the lino, the bottle drops, and beer swims and soaks into the peepholes in the floorboards.
Aunty is crying, I cannot stop her crying.
‘It’s all right, Aunty, sit up, sit up.’
Swallow the Air Page 8
