The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘You probably know the singer,’ I said.

  I was immediately comfortable with him, as if I’d known him for years, with his feathery eyebrows and his full lips that seemed assessing and thoughtful, the way they bloomed and crinkled with his thoughts.

  ‘I’ve never heard anything about this ancient song,’ he said. ‘Well – I wouldn’t, would I, being only a man! But Adrian would know.’

  ‘He must,’ I said. ‘He invited me. Well, Collins invited me, but Adrian signed the letter.’

  ‘Adrian plays things close to his chest,’ he said and looked away, embarrassed. I felt that something about the turn the conversation had taken was awkward for him. I didn’t want to make him awkward with me.

  ‘Would you like to see your room?’ he asked, to change the subject.

  He led me to a stark room with barely an object in it except a mattress on a double bed, a little stool, a table and chair and a big cupboard with a lower door and an upper section. There was a large window that seemed to face on to a street, judging by spots of light showing through the slats in a Venetian blind.

  ‘I’ll be able to sit here and work,’ I said, more for something to say than any clear idea of just how I was going to go about my work.

  ‘I’m very proud you’re staying with us,’ he said shyly.

  When I looked surprised he said: ‘Whites come out here with all sorts of silly projects, but they never honour the people’s antiquity. Even if that’s not exactly the university’s aim.’

  Now it was my turn to be shy. But all I said was: ‘There’s a lot of cupboard space for one person.’

  Daniel nodded, but pointed to the upper cabinet.

  ‘Don’t open that door. Adrian’s stuffed it full of papers,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit of a hoarder. If they tumbled out, they could kill you. We wouldn’t want your important mission to end up like that!’

  I liked him saying we, as if he had a stake in it.

  ‘What papers? Newspapers?’ I asked.

  ‘He cleaned up the place, and for once cleared his desk in the clinic – I think it was to impress you.’

  We both laughed. I was relieved at his creaking-door laugh. I couldn’t get a crush on someone with a laugh like that.

  ‘I thought he’d sorted things out at last,’ he continued. ‘Then when I was looking for a report, he confessed he’d taken everything holus-bolus, wads of paper, and jammed it all up there.’

  He mimed someone staggering under the weight of a toppling tower of paper and throwing it into a cupboard.

  ‘Just like this!’ Creak. Creak.

  This time, I could laugh uproariously with him. There were almost tears in my eyes, to find I was so easy with him after the hours of tension with Adrian. I was revelling in his admiration of my mission. And he was comical, it was true. He repeated the action again, and we both doubled up in laughter. Then he stopped laughing.

  ‘I’m not criticising him,’ he added quickly, his charcoal eyebrows becoming a worried line wriggling across his forehead. ‘He’s my good friend. I wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t invited me when I left the mining company. It’s just that the desert affects people in unexpected ways.’

  He smiled in a self-deprecating way, his lips turned down.

  ‘I’m sure it’s doing funny things to me.’

  As we walked back out into the corridor, Daniel pointed out his room. It was the only other bedroom.

  I found myself staring at a messy room with a large, unmade double bed with red and navy blue sheets cascading onto the floor in what seemed to me a seductively masculine way. Out of the force of habit, I glanced at him, but there was nothing that suggested he was gauging me as a possible bedmate. However, I said, ‘But there aren’t any more rooms! Where does Adrian sleep?’

  ‘Outside,’ he answered.

  He pointed out the window to a mattress on the sand, with white sheets glaring in the moonlight.

  ‘You don’t have enough room for me in this house! Why don’t you put me up somewhere else?’ I asked.

  ‘There are only two other clinic houses, both full – well, not really, but Adrian didn’t want you to share with his staff,’ he said. He paused awkwardly again. ‘To be explicit, there is a third house, but Adrian won’t let anyone stay there. He wants everyone to know that it’s empty because the government won’t fund us a second doctor.’

  ‘So in the meantime he makes do with a mattress on the ground.’

  ‘He thinks the locals love him for it.’

  ‘And do they?’

  Adrian appeared at the door with my bag, my workbag slung on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s for dinner, Daniel?’

  ‘There’s trouble,’ said Daniel. There was a crease of worry between his eyes, which I then saw were dark brown, almost black to match his eyebrows. ‘But at least we have a roast in the oven.’

  I heard Daniel tell him that the two girls left behind were nieces of a very powerful woman though she wasn’t of these parts. They had rung ahead of us complaining to her that we’d left them behind. Graeme, a newly arrived great-grandson of Boney, one of the elders, had told Daniel that on behalf of the traditional owners of the settlement, Adrian was to be sacked.

  Daniel reported all this rapidly.

  ‘But no outsider speaks for everyone,’ said Adrian quickly.

  ‘He felt he could,’ answered Daniel. ‘No one contradicted him.’

  ‘These bullies, they’re always coming in from the cities and disrupting,’ Adrian said to me. ‘The people are so gentle, they’re entirely vulnerable to bullying.’

  ‘It won’t be the first time,’ agreed Daniel. ‘But this bloke really means business.’

  ‘But Skeleton likes me – he trusts me – he’s told me, “Adrian, you’re a good man”.’

  ‘His grandson’s claiming you abandoned the girls,’ said Daniel.

  There was a pause.

  ‘They weren’t wearing watches,’ I remembered. Both men glanced at me and looked away, as if I’d said something irrelevant.

  ‘Where are the girls now?’ asked Adrian. He hadn’t put down my workbag. ‘Silly girls. Scared of getting into trouble, so no doubt they lied. But everyone knew we arrived back late because we waited for them. Are they safe?’

  Daniel said they were staying in town.

  ‘Sleep now and we’ll drive in at first light and bring them back,’ Adrian told him. ‘The mob always waits at my friend’s,’ he added, turning to me. ‘The girls will be safe there.’

  ‘What about the sacking?’ asked Daniel.

  Adrian said nothing, but turned to me again.

  ‘Hotheads are always sacking,’ he said.

  ‘Graeme is an important relative,’ Daniel reminded him, deferentially, but with such warning in his voice, it delicately brought into question Adrian’s belief in how far Skeleton’s love might go. Adrian breathed, stared at Daniel, then decided to ignore him.

  ‘Is this hothead a medicine man?’ I asked, wanting to be helpful again.

  Both he and Daniel turned to gaze at me.

  ‘Is he?’ Daniel asked Adrian.

  ‘The hothead – he might want these people to abandon your health clinic and go back to their traditional ways of health –’ I began, but I wound down because of the angry silver flash of Adrian’s eyes. The air conditioner seemed to change to a new note so that it sounded like an old-fashioned train hoot. But I was in the desert hundreds of kilometres from a train.

  ‘Do they even believe in our medicine?’ I asked.

  I turned to Daniel for help. His beautiful eyebrows were in jagged lines. He laughed uncertainly. Creak. Creak.

  ‘It’s true that they don’t seem to believe in the germ theory,’ said Daniel to Adrian, as if he was pacifying him, so I realised that there’d been an ongoing argument about this.

  ‘You’d need a microscope to believe in germs,’ I said. ‘It’d seem a fairy story otherwise, I suppose. Tiny creatures –’

  Adrian interrupt
ed. ‘You’re missing the point. They need our Western medicine. They’re prone to terrible sicknesses, and our medicine works. He’d have sacked me not because of a belief about traditional medicine but because he wants the ambulance to go hunting.’

  Daniel told him that people had been coming in to the clinic very anxious about what would happen. That seemed to cheer Adrian up.

  ‘They’ll soon see what’s going to happen!’ he said.

  He turned to me.

  ‘You have a nice warm bath and I’ll make up your bed,’ he said generously.

  His ricocheting between sweetness and anger confused me, and I feared I’d be more appeasing than ever.

  Ian was never like that – was he?

  ‘You’d be tired too,’ I said politely.

  ‘We’re used to it. We do the trip twice a week or more,’ he said.

  In the corner of my room, I didn’t notice before that Adrian had left on the little stool a clean folded towel that smelled of sunshine, just like Diana used to do when I visited, even though she would’ve known that my mother had sent me to report on her, on her and my father. It crunched my heart, that little folded towel on a stool. He must be Ian, carrying that part of Diana with him all his life.

  ‘To make you feel at home,’ she’d say, not knowing my home, nor my mother. She’d never even met my mother until that fateful day. My father had always successfully kept them apart.

  That little touch of Diana took me to the bathroom. I put my hand out to turn on the taps and found that they were partly eaten away by what seemed to be a white powder, the calcium from bore water. But in the welcoming stream of hot water, I realised I couldn’t decide that he was my Ian because of a folded towel.

  After dinner, Daniel began to clear the plates. I jumped up too. Daniel seemed to do housework as if he’d been born to it, so that I could imagine him at university meticulously scrubbing bench tops down after he’d analysed ore samples. Something, not only about the height, but also the swagger of Adrian seemed too big for the kitchen. I’ll please him by being like Snow White when she goes to live with the Seven Dwarves and helps keep house, I thought.

  ‘I’ll pop the dishes in the dishwasher,’ I said.

  ‘Dishwasher?’ Adrian shrieked, and even Daniel laughed. Creak. Creak.

  I blushed. Obviously these two bachelors didn’t approve of such indulgent city appliances out here in the desert. But I couldn’t stop myself from blundering on: ‘Of course, it’d be hard to get a repair man to come all this way – what do the people do out here when their appliances break down?’

  ‘Why don’t you take her to see the settlement?’ Daniel suggested to Adrian, searching in the silence for the sink plug, his face hidden.

  ‘Now? It’s so late!’ I said.

  I didn’t want to disappoint them, but I longed to be in bed, where I couldn’t make more mistakes.

  ‘It’s too hot to walk in the day,’ Adrian said. ‘Anyway, there mightn’t be many more opportunities.’

  ‘Will I go and get my phone?’ I asked. ‘For out there?’

  ‘There’s no coverage,’ said Daniel. When he saw my horror, he added consolingly: ‘Sometimes the landlines work.’

  I heard Adrian groan derisively as his heavy boots stamped out the front door, but I lingered in Daniel’s kind presence. In this shifting world, I needed kindness.

  ‘So we all rely on landlines?’

  ‘They,’ this with the smallest indication of his head to his right, ‘can’t afford a landline. Only the whites.’

  He flashed me a wry smile as the hot water tumbled into the sink.

  ‘So don’t get lost.’

  Adrian headed away from the lit streets, walked between houses that he pointed out belonged to the clinic and the schoolteachers, and strode out ahead of me into the desert, a man busy with his worries.

  In my exhaustion I didn’t notice which way we were walking, and though I remembered I should carry a bottle of water, I didn’t like to interrupt his momentum to run back for one.

  We were in a flattened landscape, with only small rises, and I made out a huddle of hills, far off on the horizon. I ran to catch up to him.

  A prickly bush burred against my bare ankles.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’ he said, and to my surprise he stopped, pulled a torch out of his pocket and bent down to examine it, crouching, totally absorbed. I suddenly became paralysed with self-consciousness, now that the man I’d thought of day and night for decades was here, beside me, attending to me, or at least bending to examine a plant for me. I didn’t know whether to crouch like him or to stay upright. Squatting would bring our heads close together, and that might seem too intimate. Besides, I was fighting back tears which I didn’t want him to see. After all my yearning, I had him to myself, here we were together in a vast desert. There was no Diana, no father, no mother to distract. There was only him and me. I had never felt so attended to, not by anyone. No one, in my whole life, had stopped the momentum of theirs, just for me.

  I must do nothing wrong.

  And now there was another, more disturbing matter. I had a problem inside my chest. My heart seemed to take on a life of its own; it seemed to lift from its normal place and move across my chest like a boat loosing itself from its anchorage and fleeing on a running tide towards the ocean. My heart had never behaved like this before. Then it seemed to float back, to its resting place.

  As I dithered between bending and standing, my heart took off again; my boat-heart flew again across the lake of my chest.

  I half-bent, I half-straightened. I dithered, as my father had dithered all his life, except when he’d made the fateful decision to die in my mother’s arms, not in Diana’s. Finally, I bent – just at the moment when he straightened. There was a loud crack. We both reeled. We’d bumped heads.

  ‘Idiot!’ he yelled.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, as the pain eased, and glad that the night hid my blushing.

  He was clutching his head.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said again. In his pain, he’d dropped the plant as well as the torch and now he had to scrabble in the dust. I didn’t dare join him, for fear we’d crack heads again. He finally found the plant and the torch and held the plant out to me like a bouquet, red soil clinging to its roots. His voice had recovered.

  ‘When you come across plants like this, give them a wide berth.’

  I was almost panting. He turned and began walking. Again, I ran a little to catch up with him. After a while, we were walking in step. I changed feet, but I wanted our walking never to stop, though I couldn’t think of a thing to say.

  I tried to reason with myself. The heart does not take flight across the body. It’s tethered firmly like a boat to a jetty, even a boat in a strong wind, by muscles, bones, tissue. All that had happened was a visitation of my usual lust. I’d already taken too much notice of lust. And as for him, he probably gave that intense concentration to everything; probably he peeled an orange in the same engrossed way so that as he moved the knife, the whole world fell away from his awareness, and all he saw was the steel cutting into the orange skin.

  I trudged behind him, my feet unsure. After the rattling of the troopie for hours I wanted the peace of the desert but now he insisted on talking about the stars, telling me their Djemiranga names, but they sounded like odd English words, and I suspected he was mispronouncing them – even making them up.

  ‘Which direction are we heading?’ He wheeled around to quiz me. I found one of my feet sinking on uneven ground. ‘City people never know. You have to be able to work it out, in case you’re by yourself.’

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of going by myself into the desert –’ I began, but he was pointing to the sky, telling me how to find the South Pole by drawing a line from the centre of the Southern Cross to a rock fifty metres away. Straight afterwards, he tested me.

  ‘So, which way are we heading?’

  My eyes clawed at the sky. I wanted to pass any test he
set.

  ‘I don’t want you to get lost,’ he explained, and it came out of his mouth with such sweetness that my heart fluttered dangerously again.

  I found his previous explanation tucked away in my tired brain.

  ‘You draw a straight line down to earth from the Southern Cross,’ I recalled. ‘I’m to drop my eyes on a vertical to that rock over there,’ I said.

  But no, that was wrong, he told me I should’ve advanced the vertical from a point between those two stars, and that would mean south was that way, or perhaps it was north.

  ‘You’d get lost in the ocean,’ he said warningly, as if at this moment I was just setting out to go to sea.

  ‘I come from a city.’ I told him that lie.

  Remember how we never steer the boats on our river by north and south? When we take our boats out at night, only in summer is there enough light in the evenings to see to steer by. In autumn, winter and spring we steer not by north and south, and not by the stars, for ambient city lights drown them out, but by the shapes of the mountains against the sky. Diana shows us that, remember, when I am only six or seven, and you are thirteen or so. Diana shows us that this mountain is like a camel’s back, that one like breasts and, I secretly think, like her eager breasts, not the drooping, woebegone breasts of my own mother. So when I feel my way through the water in my boat, I don’t need eyes, it’s like feeling my own body under the sheets, as I sometimes do deep in the night when waking from a dream, yes, here’s my heart, yes, here’s my thigh. Because of Diana, our river is my body.

  We walked on. I was careful not to step in time with him, in case it prompted more heart flutters. I mulled over his sacking, worrying that it might have implications for my mission.

  ‘What’s an elder doing with a name like Skeleton?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t that disrespectful, to call him by a nickname?’

  ‘It’s not his real name,’ said Adrian. ‘Here, people belong to a skin group and have at least one bush name, and that’s private, so whites would never know it, and if they do, they mustn’t pass on the knowledge or the spirits will punish them.’