The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  He drove up exactly on time with a troop carrier full of black people sitting sideways on the seats in the back, and two in the cabin with him, and medical equipment in boxes strapped to the top along with boxes of food – and there was my suitcase and my workbag. I worried that the people in the troopie would be like him, all expecting a linguist to speak Djemiranga, and then there was a new worry – what was I going to say to them on the seven-hour trip across the desert?

  But at least I’d be able to listen to the sounds of their language.

  Adrian – I had to start thinking of him as Adrian – jumped out of the troopie cabin and came towards me.

  ‘Where are the girls?’ he demanded.

  ‘What girls?’

  He groaned. ‘Haven’t you been with them?’

  ‘No.’

  I looked up and down the street, but it was empty.

  ‘Have they been here, and gone?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ashamed that all I’d been concentrating on was him. For years, it was him I’d been concentrating on.

  He sighed, because I’d failed to be useful again, and strode around to the back of the troopie, flinging open the door.

  ‘You’d better get in.’

  I peered into the gloom, into an unexpected smell of cooking smoke and fat and fried chicken. He pushed my box of food in between people’s legs. There was a lot of wriggling to make space for me. Once I was in, we were as tightly crammed as the books in E.E. Albert’s bookcase. No one greeted me. I expected Adrian to introduce me, but no one spoke, neither him, nor the passengers. One of the women smiled at me, but everyone else looked down. They didn’t seem to notice me. Next to me was a mother with a runny-nosed child on her lap. And so I made my next mistake. I assumed it would be embarrassing for her to have a child with an unwiped nose in front of all these people, looking just like the pictures of Aborigines on TV of people sitting in the dirt, with never a chair in sight, and children with unwiped noses. I fossicked in my handbag for a clean tissue. But when I held it out, she didn’t seem to notice. Perhaps, I thought, she didn’t approve of tissues, perhaps she used cloth handkerchiefs, much more environmentally sound – but I couldn’t help her there, I didn’t have a cloth handkerchief – and perhaps she didn’t even know what a tissue was – so in the air, I dabbed the tissue under two imaginary little nostrils. Still no response. All the adult faces were impassive, their eyes downcast. Only the eyes of the children followed me, large, brown and somewhat alarmed. Only then did I notice that all the little children had streaming noses. I poked the tissue up my sleeve as if that was what I’d intended all along, despite my ridiculous sketches in the air, and glanced up to see Adrian in the mirror, laughing at me. I looked away, feeling chastened, but bewildered.

  He’ll be thinking, the linguist from the city, she knows nothing! Later he was to work into a conversation that his doctors said that the mob seldom have colds, and suspected that the practice of not wiping babies’ noses was useful.

  Adrian drove around the town looking for the young women, so I got to see Alice Springs again and again, its glinting rows of shop windows like those in any other small city, its diesel-stained bus interchange with tired white people holding plastic bags bulging with sticks of celery and toilet rolls, its cafés with scatterings of always white coffee-drinkers under canvas umbrellas that attempted to look like Paris. I realised that we kept returning to the window with its display of cough mixtures.

  By then darkness was settling in and the streetlights were glowing, casting shadows on places that before had been laid out for the sun’s inspection and now were becoming secret, turning in on themselves, becoming sinister.

  ‘We go?’ he asked all the passengers, gesturing north. A few replied in English, ‘Yes!’ but the other replies were in Djemiranga. The English ‘yeses’ became louder.

  Shouldn’t we wait for the girls? I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to make another mistake.

  We drove out of town, and within five minutes we’d passed a petrol station with a large sign warning that it was the last before the desert. The streetlights petered out, and the vast stretch of sand and the night took over. Everyone gazed out the windows, and I wondered whatever they could be seeing. Sometimes they pointed out dark shapes to each other but it all just looked like undifferentiated scrub to me. The moon was full and speeding beside us, quite low, just clearing the tips of the scrub. There were half a dozen children on board, all plump and complacent, and none of them crying. I was to wonder at how calm they were, again and again.

  And then we must’ve left the tar, for we were driving on a dirt road across the desert. I thought of it not as theirs, but as E.E. Albert’s desert, for it was her book which first made me imagine that dry, dry land. Somewhere on that first journey there was a bump, and a cry went up from all the people on board as the drench of headlights picked up a kangaroo bounding away, its backbone a row of small white knuckles. I wondered if the words I heard meant ‘Chase it!’ for suddenly Adrian turned the troopie around to search the road, but the animal was bounding off into the endless darkness.

  ‘Let’s get it!’ he shouted, and we lurched off the road, up a bank, and raced over what seemed to be an endless plain, mowing down thin young saplings that dared to rear up in the white glare from the headlights and dashing over humps of long grasses and bumping over hillocks, with the red ground leaping up to meet us and falling away under our speed, and the women around me in the back of the troopie bumping in their seats and trying to shield their children’s heads from hitting the roof, and the men in the front shouting excitedly and gesticulating directions. I wished I could get out my recorder, but it was on the roof.

  ‘We’ve lost him,’ Adrian called out and slowed down and did a sharp U-turn to a murmur of disappointment. Something in our load loosened its ties and toppled in the speed of the turn and spilled out on the plain. Adrian braked and leaped out, but not like any other person might: he held onto either side of the door frame, bundled his legs up beneath him and, all balled up, jumped out, suddenly a schoolboy dive-bombing his mates in a council swimming pool on a steaming summer’s day. He hit the hard ground with a thud which didn’t seem to deter him, and bounded off.

  In the glow of the headlights, I realised it was my workbag that had fallen, and panic grabbed me. My photos were in it, my photos that my last-minute reading said I should bring with me, so I could prompt conversation with people, so I could say, ‘Look, this is my country.’ So that they would talk about theirs and, hopefully, that would lead me to the singer. But the photos were of the river, and if this man was the Ian of my childhood, that was his country too – he could so easily recognise the photos of the river, our river!

  But if he noticed, he didn’t pause, and just pushed my papers and books back into the bag and zippered it up.

  I must take more care, I must stop being careless, I told myself as I had a thousand times.

  He swung up the ladder to secure my bag on the roof, and coming down he broke the quietness inside the troopie by calling out through a window: ‘Five more hours, Kate, and Daniel will have made us a nice hot dinner.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, damp with relief, and moved by his concern for me. I promised myself as soon as we arrived, I’d hide those photos inside one of the books I’d brought – he’d never open them. I hadn’t for months! And only show them to people when he was far away.

  I didn’t think then about what a maverick he’d become, charging off over the desert like that in an official car that no doubt came with all sorts of regulations about its use. All I thought about then was the promise of a nice hot dinner, and his melodious voice. I fell asleep, and dreamed the dream I was always dreaming.

  You’re bounding down the jetty, Diana’s jetty.

  ‘Look, something’s on your line,’ you’re calling to me. Your voice is breaking as if you’ve got a cold, but that can’t be right, you’re never sick. Your silver eyes have the river light in them,
the river just before the storm, just before the wild winds come and then rain explodes on our roof.

  I look away from you and there’s my river floating blue and silver beneath the jetty, just as it always does.

  ‘You’re daydreaming again! Go on, you’ve caught something, pull the line up.’ You speak condescendingly because I’m younger than you, the years gape irretrievably between us. ‘Don’t you know anything? You’re old enough to know when to pull up the line. Here, give it to me –’

  But I don’t hand it over. Instead, I’m fossicking for words for my deepest dread.

  ‘Is Diana sick and not telling?’ I ask.

  There’s no one else to ask. Only you.

  You stay where you are, your arm in the air above me. It’s as if the question has paralysed you. You don’t reach over for my line. Time goes by. Fish jump around us. The line tugs and slackens. The river eagle swoops and skims on the mirror of the bay and brakes with a thrust of its body and a swish. Ducks sail by like toy boats.

  ‘Pull up the fish,’ you say at last.

  ‘Why was she screaming last night?’ I ask again. ‘She did it last time I stayed as well. Did you hear?’

  And I imitate her: ‘Oh oh oh oh oh.’

  ‘Shut up! They’ll hear!’

  ‘What’s wrong with them hearing?’ I cry. ‘Is she going to die?’

  Your voice is flat, you’re staring at the river.

  ‘They were –’

  In your heated pause I suddenly know the answer, you’re going to say the forbidden word, the forbidden thought, I can’t bear what you’re going to say, even the noise of the word as it comes out of your mouth. Fucking.

  I can’t bear it that you say it. Not you. It’s a word that mustn’t be spoken between us, a feeling that mustn’t be noticed.

  Before your face has turned towards me, I’ve thrown down the fishing reel and, despite my new pink shorts and striped t-shirt from Diana, I’ve dived into the river. I sink through green swirls lit by shafts of gold sunshine to the soft grey bottom of the river, my river, to the tiny fish and crabs, to the busy fish traffic that hurtles towards me and around me, as if I’m just a boulder in the way, and then my body shoots itself up to the surface and I don’t look around until I’m halfway over the river and heading for the deep channel where the sharks swim. Only then do I pause mid-stroke. I look around. You’re holding my reel. A silver fish is thrashing on my hook. You dislodge it, throw it back, and stalk down the jetty, away from me, always away from me, away, away.

  Chapter 4

  I woke up, still mouthing the word. Fucking. Perhaps I’d been saying it aloud. I often thought I’d been saying it on the mornings at home when I woke from dreams but there, it didn’t matter. Now, three mothers in the troopie turned together towards me and smiled at me. I made my dry lips smile back.

  Just as Ian – I must remember to call him Adrian (so many mistakes could betray my true identity) – had told me, there’d been rain recently in the desert, and in the headlights, the puddles on the red road reared up into the windscreen like an upside down drench of blood. The headlights picked out cattle, not kangaroos, not any more, and they moved reluctantly and sleepily at the sound of our horn. They were elegant, unhurried creatures, road-coloured, their exact outlines only clear when they moved aside and stood framed by the black bush.

  At last a little township lit up the sky with orange neon, and I hoped we’d stop for a drink or chocolate or hot chips but there was to be no stopping. No one spoke to me, or to anyone else. I needn’t have worried about how to make conversation. Another uncomfortable, cramped two hours and suddenly there was gravel spitting under the tyres, a windmill’s silver blades glinting in the moonlight and there glowed a town with tarred streets and rows of houses and ordinary streetlights. I was so astonished I cried out: ‘Where are we?’ and dark sleepy faces turned to gaze at me. Someone said a word I couldn’t catch, which I later realised was the way they pronounced Gadaburumili, nothing like the Anglicised way E.E Albert had pronounced it, which caused me some disquiet, but then she never claimed to speak Djemiranga, or any other language, she was a specialist only in Aboriginal affixes. Ian – no, Adrian – pulled up at an unexpectedly suburban house, bigger than the others, and said he’d bring in my bags when he’d delivered everyone, but for now, I was to go inside.

  ‘My little bag?’ I asked fearfully, but he nodded no, he wasn’t going to hold up everyone while I fussed, he’d bring them both in at the same time.

  My legs could barely straighten after the journey and, stumbling, I walked through a rusted gate, across a front yard of sand with no path, over a wide cement verandah, through an open front door, past a laundry and bathroom and down a hall that could be in a suburban house anywhere. Then the hall turned a corner and I was in a large open room crowded with two sofas that sagged so much they were like self-supporting blankets, several plastic fawn kitchen chairs, a large TV set, a music player, piles of videos and DVDs and a slow-combustion stove that must’ve seldom been lit because its top was piled with a jumble of car parts, and somebody had playfully put a stopped clock inside it amongst the hills of grey ashes. There were large, clear spaces of carpet with bundles of things in the corners, as if someone had begun tidying up but had lost heart and just shoved everything sideways. I saw a paddling pool, inflated but slowly caving in and empty of water, and inside it, jeans crumpled the way they were when the wearer stepped out of them – the leg holes upright like wells – and a pile of newly washed sheets dumped beside them. In another corner there was an ironing board that mustn’t have been used recently for ironing because it was covered with a mess of old newspapers, paperclips spilling out of boxes, pens, rubber bands, pegs, car keys and a brown apple core. Over it all wafted the hot, salty, welcoming smell of roasting meat.

  I didn’t see a man sitting on a kitchen stool until he stood and moved towards me, hand outstretched.

  ‘Oh – sorry – I didn’t notice –’

  ‘Have a good trip? It’s long, isn’t it!’

  I had no words for the trip, except that it’d seemed endless.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘You’re Kate! I’ve been holding off dinner for you! Do you know who I am?’ he asked.

  He was short, with a large mop of wavy blond hair, a ruddy face with thick shiny black eyebrows so feathery they seemed sketched on with charcoal, and a wistful way of looking at me slowly and appraisingly before his large generous lips became a quiet, friendly smile: the slight delay made me feel as if he was examining me and approving of what he saw.

  ‘A stockman?’ I guessed.

  He let go of my hand and laughed, in disappointment, I sensed, at my answer. I found I didn’t want to disappoint this slow smiler; but this was not the man my heart had waited for all those years. I had to quash the profligate flirt in me.

  ‘No, I just help Adrian,’ he said. ‘I’m Daniel.’

  He laughed, and I was rescued from flirting by that laugh, a strange creaking sound uttered without amusement, that became by degrees an uncertain teenage boy’s laugh rising like a question, though he must have been in his forties. A creaking-door laugh with a rise which made me uncertain – should I laugh as well? Confounded, I waited.

  Then neither of us could think of a thing to say.

  ‘What work brings you here?’ he asked at last. His lips were so thick, they seemed to get in the way of his words.

  ‘I’m looking for an old woman who knows an ancient song that only women are allowed to hear.’

  ‘How ancient?’ he asked, perhaps just to make conversation.

  ‘From the Dreaming.’

  He was immediately interested. When his smile broadened, his face was full of light.

  ‘That’s old!’ he said. ‘I used to look up hymns when I took my mother to church –’ there was a note of sadness here, and I wondered if it was about the loss of the church, or of his mother, ‘and I used to think Martin Luther’s hymns wer
e old. Then I found out there’s a song from ancient Syria that dates from 5000 years ago. But a song from the Dreaming! That could be when they first settled here – you’d know all this of course,’ he added politely, ‘but archaeological evidence puts that at about 50,000 years ago –’

  He saw my astonishment, and added, ‘Or it could be when the watertable dried up and they left for a thousand years or so – that’s more than 5000 years ago, going on current evidence – before the time of the Ancient Egyptians, and the evidence of course might change. Your song’s probably from the more recent time, but it might be from the first occupation, which would be astounding. About the time when humans first used language, and danced, and did art. Either way, that’s an old song.’

  He laughed again. Creak. Creak.

  I suddenly realised what he was saying.

  ‘You mean – I might be looking for the oldest song in the world?’

  ‘The oldest surviving song! That’s quite a quest!’ he said admiringly.

  ‘It is, isn’t it!’ I said, feeling important in his eyes, as I hadn’t in Adrian’s. I glowed in that feeling. We beamed at each other, warmth bouncing between us. It came to me that I could understand the way he thought, that he was far more sympathetic to me than Adrian. I became annoyingly attracted to him, because in all this lonely desert it was him, not Adrian, who valued my quest.

  The attraction forced me to admit: ‘My university’s not interested in its antiquity. Just its grammar.’

  He nodded with understanding.

  ‘Universities are like that,’ he said, one end of his mouth turning down. It felt as if we were sharing a confidence about the absurdity of the world in general, and universities in particular. ‘I did geology at university. What a disaster!’

  His voice altered, and I could tell he was speaking from his heart.

  ‘I drifted out to the Northern Territory with a mining company – after university it seemed a good idea – and then I got to hate the company and what it was doing to the land but I didn’t know where to turn – and, to cut a long story short – at last I ended up here.’