The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  I wanted to ask more, but I was distracted by the colourless glow from the township that beamed on everything with utter indifference, from the thin boughs of spindly, straggly gums to the scrub scarcely higher than our knees. It drenched us with no colour and took all colours from us, so that I had to ask him the colour of the ground we were trudging on.

  ‘Red,’ he said.

  ‘We could be walking on icing sugar,’ I said.

  ‘That’s true,’ he laughed. Sometimes he loved being the explainer, though sometimes he hated it, and when was I ever going to predict it? At least he seemed to have forgiven me for the head bump. His arm brushed mine, almost a caress. But of course he wouldn’t feel it like that; he had no knowledge of who I was, I was just a stranger, an academic here to do a job he didn’t particularly respect, it seemed.

  But the landscape broke into my confusion: it at least was without contradictions. I turned on my heel in a circle, and right around me, stretching in every direction into the almost-hills, was the flat desert.

  I observed to him that without mountains, everything was in silhouette. I didn’t have words to tell him that my mind was holding back from this landscape, arguing against it as if the landscape was a person, someone with preposterous ideas I couldn’t accept. For a start, it ought not to be so flat. There was just him and me and this flat land, this unending fierce sky. Only the sky could diminish us, and as yet it held only two stars. We were skyscrapers in that supine land. There was nothing to measure our thoughts against, except each other. That seemed enough for us to lose all perspective, to imagine that our thoughts were what really mattered in the universe. That could be dangerous.

  ‘When the mob visit the Top End, they don’t like it because of the trees. “There’s no sky,” they say,’ he told me.

  I exclaimed as he wanted me to. I saw in the no-colour light that his eyes were more expressive than they’d been in his young face, if that young face had been indeed his. Even the skin around his eyes now rose to talk, pouching when he was excited, and then the lower eyelids drooped.

  ‘The mob believes there are still people out in the desert who haven’t come in,’ he said as we walked on.

  ‘And are there?’

  ‘Who’d know? Perhaps they just want it to be so. Perhaps they want them to be there.’

  ‘Do the people resent us?’ I asked. ‘I mean us whites.’

  He nodded. He probably expected resentment when he’d first come out.

  ‘They’re a compassionate mob. The pastoralists here didn’t massacre their relatives, just –’ he laughed, ‘took their land and their livelihood. The kangaroos, lizards, snakes, bush turkeys – everything they lived off. They were allowed to keep their traditions because they didn’t interfere with anyone’s money-making, more or less, and that seems crucial to them – though the traditions are changing. When I first came to the desert, they did ceremonies all the time. Every time a plane flew in, for instance. Not any more.’

  ‘That’s why –’ I interrupted, about to remind him of my mission.

  But he didn’t wait. ‘That’s why, because of the loss of their hunting grounds, they expect us to hold them.’

  My other foot sank in the red icing sugar.

  ‘Hold?’

  ‘Look after them. The way they hold their land.’

  I felt the enormity of this statement.

  ‘You mean, hold them with government money?’

  He seemed to think this was a question so obvious it didn’t need answering, and walked on, though I had no idea if we’d turned a circle and were heading home.

  ‘You’ve never felt a need to learn their language?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ he said. ‘We understand each other’s body language.’

  ‘But there might be subtleties you’d be missing.’

  Why was I arguing with him? Was I just arguing against the fluttering of my heart? Or was it some deeper mistrust?

  ‘I miss nothing.’

  We seemed to slide down a fierce slope, unexpected in all the flatness, but I took little notice because I wanted to assert myself against his certainty.

  ‘For example, there might be women’s ceremonies you don’t know about,’ I said, falling and righting myself and falling again. ‘There’s a lot of places away from men’s eyes. A lot of desert.’

  ‘Women don’t have ceremonies here,’ he said. ‘They don’t rate.’

  There was such a gust of fury in his last sentence that I was lost for words. I stumbled over what seemed to be a kangaroo carcass with its heart ripped out. All that was left was a cave of a chest. I skirted around it.

  But now I’d recovered enough to reason.

  ‘Wouldn’t women’s ceremonies be hidden from white men? As this “Poor Thing” song seems to have been?’

  He didn’t deign to answer. But I made myself walk again in unison with him. After all, the quest was at stake.

  ‘Can you point out the old singer to me tomorrow? The “Poor Thing” singer?’

  Unexpectedly, a deeper darkness seemed to be creeping over the sky, a shadow shaped like a giant cloud. I’d thought the land couldn’t get any darker. So I was unaware that he’d moved away from me until I heard him call: ‘Come over here. Feel this.’

  I followed his voice, and he, whose eyes seemed better than mine, picked up my hand as gently as if I was a child, and put it on what seemed to be wood tightly bound with cloth. Then his mood seemed to change.

  ‘Your wrist!’ he said, running his finger across my wrist bone, bared by my lifted arm. His voice seemed higher, almost a shriek.

  ‘What about my wrist?’

  ‘Your wrist bone – your ulna.’ He jabbed my wrist, painfully. ‘It’s unusually prominent,’ he said.

  I felt condemned.

  ‘People can’t help their bones,’ I said.

  I tried to pull my hand away, but he kept hold of it and made me feel up and down the wood with its cloth wrapping. It was frayed and stiff with weathering on the top, but soft underneath.

  ‘Stop!’ I demanded.

  But he kept on, again and again.

  ‘Stop it!’ I repeated, suddenly afraid of him.

  He threw my hand down.

  ‘It’s just one of their old magic things,’ he said. ‘From last year’s ceremonies.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have touched it! You shouldn’t have made me touch it.’

  ‘You deserve to be haunted by bad spirits.’

  ‘What?’ I cried.

  His voice had become aggressive.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded. ‘It could still be full of magic.’

  ‘Still? You believe in their magic?’ he said contemptuously. ‘An intellectual like you?’

  ‘What I believe isn’t the point.’ I made myself say: ‘We should have respect. You should have respect.’

  ‘You think I don’t?’ Then he said, quietly, with the blackness of night in his voice: ‘Then I’ll let you find your own way home.’

  Chapter 5

  And he was gone. Just like that. I heard the crunching of his feet, and afterwards, nothing.

  At first I felt only relief, that his voice had stopped, and with it my constant questioning: Is it Ian? Does he look like him? Is that gesture familiar? What about that wrinkle down his forehead? That lift of his eyebrow? Am I sure? Why aren’t I sure?

  I stood, swaying with fear. I had no hope of following him in this inky blackness. Newspaper stories came to me, headlines:

  WOMAN LEAVES CAR AND FACES HELL

  NEW CHUM DIES OF THIRST NEAR HOME

  All the warnings I saw on billboards on the highway out of Alice Springs:

  Don’t leave your car.

  Don’t leave the road.

  Take water with you always.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d abandon me. Abandon! The very word struck into my soul. He abandoned me with such ease, just as he did all those years ago. Though it wasn’t me he abandoned then, b
ut his mother. Ever since I’d met him in Alice Springs I’d feared he’d reject me because of my lack of learning, my clumsiness. It hadn’t occurred to me he’d reject me because my bone stuck out too much.

  But now I had to cope with being alone in the desert at night. This desert wasn’t ordinary, accommodating earth to be trampled carelessly underfoot. Humans would only ever be a tiny part of this desert’s life and like a river in a running tide, it must be approached with a knowledge of its ways.

  I made useless promises. I would never come without water again. I would never forget to take my bearings again. I would never assume a companion wouldn’t abandon me. All that, I promised God, E.E. Albert, and me.

  Then the stillness settled down around me, the way I was used to it doing on the river, so that it seemed a living thing, as if not only must I listen to it, but it had stopped to listen to me – or perhaps it was my thoughts that had stopped whirling. I became purely a sensate being and realised that before this, my thoughts had been in the way.

  I’d had long training in this. My river had trained me. So I stopped thinking, as I did on the river, so I could sense beyond my body. At first it seemed there were no sounds, nothing at all, and then I heard a bird nearby, not in the air but on the ground, a heavy bird, I heard the skidding of its wings as it landed, its weight pushing into the sand. So it wasn’t a monster, and probably only a local bird, perhaps a bush turkey. Then I heard a quiet slithering, which stopped, so either the creature had gone or was holding its ground, wondering what sort of creature I was. I jumped because there was a sound like an old man clearing his throat, and then came the quiet, repetitive sound of leaves being pulled off a tree and munched in a business-like fashion. It was a serious muncher. I knew that noise from the river – it was only a kangaroo. I sneezed, startling it; it bounded away. Silence settled again until I made out what’d been there all along – the soft whistle of wind lifting sand and carrying it off, to layer it on ripple after ripple of sand, layers and layers of sand, kilometres of sand, a desert of sand lifting softly and settling into new ripples. And it was this sound, the quiet ocean of sand building itself all around me as it had done long before the first humans – Daniel would know how long – that finally calmed me.

  Weariness overcame me. I sat, casting my hands around and behind me, and finding no prickles, or any antagonistic thing that might bite or sting, I lay down on the red sand, which was cooling after the heat of the day. The black sky domed over me, deep, unending, inscrutable, but benign. Though it shed no light, it held no terrors.

  Perhaps I drowsed.

  There’s one other problem that tugs at my heart. I have strained my memory a thousand times, replaying the way Diana with her fixed grimace pulls alongside our jetty, leaning over to hold the bollard while my clumsy mother steps on board, pausing while the boat wobbles.

  I’ve searched that moment so many times, wondering where you are and what you know. I remember that just as Diana gets under way, the motor coughs and cuts out and she has to start it again, but between the stopping and the starting is the sort of silvery stillness that settles over a river with the ripples spreading out in circles, broken only by the sudden scudding of a pelican artlessly creating a shining wake, or the rainbow leap of a fish plopping back into its own ripples. And you? At that moment, if you are on the rocking dawn train, heading to the airport and then on the plane flying you like a bird back to where you’d come from, back maybe to here, to Gadaburumili – what knowledge do you carry in your heart on that journey? Do you know, do you even suspect that your mother intends to kill mine? If it was the other way around, whatever my disgust, I would warn you. I wouldn’t want my childhood playmate to face that terrible grief, that terrible abandonment. Why don’t you come to me and tell me?

  With my head on the cold desert sand, I made out a sound that seemed to come from deep inside the earth. I jumped up, panicking again. I wheeled around. I must find the house; I must find light and people. Perhaps the settlement was hidden behind a rock. I had no idea. I couldn’t even see my arm, let alone my watch.

  The vibration came closer and closer. Sounds travelled a long way here, as they did on the river. I walked, counting my steps, just a little way forward, six steps, then six steps back, six steps to the left, six steps back, a curious, blind dance. If I was walking through the bush near my river, there’d be vines and rabbit holes and snake holes and hillocks, but this flat country seemed as even as a cricket pitch. I comforted myself with this discovery: it was safer than home for walking in the dead of night. This made me braver: twelve steps forward, twelve back, twelve right, twelve left, and all the time, still no light; but the vibration came closer, closer. It was the crunching of footsteps. Human footsteps. That was when I realised that my worst threat in the desert was a fellow being.

  I cried out.

  ‘Going to stay out all night?’ Adrian’s voice asked. ‘I thought you might need some water.’

  I couldn’t see what he was holding out to me, but I stretched out my hand to feel a glass bottle that sloshed. I seized it and gulped the water down, even though I wasn’t thirsty. But he might abandon me again.

  ‘You haven’t thanked me,’ he said when I handed the bottle back. ‘Aren’t you going to thank me? I put off going to bed to rescue you.’

  ‘Thank you?’ I tried not to shout. ‘Do you treat all visitors like this?’

  ‘I don’t want visitors! This isn’t a theme park for tourists.’

  ‘I’m not a tourist, I’m here to record an old woman. And you invited me!’

  ‘You’re here to help your career. Everyone comes here to help their career.’

  I was so angry, I was almost lost for words, but I managed: ‘Who in hell are you to know it won’t help them? In the future, if they’ve lost their language, how do you know they won’t say to us: “With all your technology, why didn’t you help us record our ancient language?”’

  ‘But in the short term, you’ll write it up in some journal; the – what’s it called – the ancient verb – is that it? The ancient verb I’ve discovered.’

  I took a breath, surprised at how anger had given me sudden clarity.

  ‘My research isn’t just for people’s careers. It’s about –’ I searched in my heart for a feeling, the feeling that first attracted me to E.E. Albert’s world ‘– it’s about amazement.’

  At least he repeated it, though doubting it.

  ‘Amazement?’

  Now I had to justify it, I was incoherent. I knew in my heart I was saying something sensible, but putting words on this feeling took time.

  ‘We’re so resourceful,’ I managed at last. ‘Humans.’

  We were walking fast. I saw to my annoyance that again I’d fallen in step with him across the red icing sugar, which gave way beneath my feet with a crinkling sound. Then he seemed higher up than me, and I realised he was climbing a bank. I scrambled after him, and then through a thicket of scrub.

  ‘You weren’t lost,’ he said. ‘You forgot – we’d gone down into a creek bed. Why didn’t you see the light? – oh, you aren’t tall enough.’ He laughed, answering his own question to prove he was innocent, that being lost was entirely my fault, being short was entirely my fault, he could never be blamed. ‘Only a hundred metres from home,’ he added, for now we were drowned in ordinary streetlight. It was the closest he could come to an apology.

  I said nothing. I was determined not to even bid him goodnight, but at the front door, he turned to me, and said, his voice raised a notch, as if he was arguing in his head: ‘This is the most intellectually challenging thing that’s happening in Australia and I want to stay here. Nothing or nobody is going to stop me. I’m not going to be sacked.’

  I blurted angrily: ‘When are you going to point out the singer to me so I can go, and stop annoying you?’

  ‘All in good time,’ he said. ‘We both need sleep.’

  I knew in the pit of my stomach that his good time wasn’t going to be my good
time. Nevertheless, I fell asleep thinking of his freckled, slender hands soothing the sheets, wrestling the lower fitted one with its tight elastic band, tucking in the top one. I slept long hours. It’s very comforting to have a bed made for you, no matter how confused you are, how exasperating the bed maker is, no matter who he is. For the first time in years, I was curiously at peace.

  Twice I woke when there were knocks on the door. I heard Djemiranga, and I thought from the intonation that they were asking questions, if questions had a rising intonation in their language, as they did in mine.

  ‘I looked for them for two hours,’ Adrian answered each time, always in English. I imagined he was talking to different groups, assuming he knew what they’d been asking about. His voice was as soft, as reassuring as his bedsheets. There seemed to be many tones to his voice, all harmonising with each other, like his personality, which seemed to be many things at once. I didn’t remember that about my Ian. As his visitors talked, I wondered that he hadn’t asked someone to translate for him. That didn’t seem to be his way. He was trusting to his body language, to his conviction that he knew their body language, his trust that they loved him, and that love would carry him through.

  The third time I woke to hear three dogs barking. Then it seemed as if there were six dogs, then a dozen, and then a whole choir of dogs trying to harmonise, some sopranos hitting high notes, some deep basses, so it was a growling and a howling, a chorus that dwindled to become a train roaring into a city station. There was an odd yelp, as if one of the dogs had expected a second verse and launched into it and found itself alone, then a call from a human voice, something thrown, more yelps, then the desert took over, the desert of whirring insects, of small creatures hunting each other, of creatures living and dying, and of wind lifting and layering sand, of sand drifting and covering us all, until our concerns, our sadnesses and fears and triumphs and disasters and secrets had become desert too.