The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  Adrian woke up Daniel. ‘Hot chips?’ he asked.

  Daniel nodded, and fell right back to sleep.

  Adrian went inside the shop with the doctor. When they came out, laughing and talking like conspirators, both with hot chips in white paper bags, and a third bag for Daniel, the young doctor noticed me wide awake. He offered me a chip through the window.

  ‘Want to see my new painting?’ he asked. He didn’t wait for me to nod before he reached under the front seat, his hair behind a girl’s headband falling on his cheeks, and drew out a furled canvas, which he unrolled.

  It had a startling simplicity and beauty – great round whorls of colour which, he said, showed secret dreaming tracks.

  ‘Have you chosen the spot in your house where you’ll hang it?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ll hang it in my gallery,’ he said. ‘Cool, isn’t it!’

  He was pleased with my surprise.

  ‘I’m starting up a gallery in Perth with my girlfriend. We’ve collected four thousand paintings for it,’ he said. ‘Ready to go. You should get some if you go back out there. Don’t pay Alice Springs prices. Undercut the market. Take them a primed canvas and some paints. I paid $500, enough to keep the artist and her family for a couple of weeks. Bargain basement. This one should sell for about $5000.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of Adrian listening to the conversation. With a chip between his fingers he was gesticulating to me, pretending to slit his throat with the chip, his wind-up sign. But I wasn’t going to appease. I turned my back on his gesticulation.

  ‘That’s a bit of a gulf,’ I said to the doctor. ‘With what you paid her.’

  He didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘Oh, money means different things to us than it does to them,’ he told me breezily.

  He saw my reaction, and added: ‘They’re happy with very little, don’t you know? You’ll see. She was happy. Besides, she was grateful for my doctoring. Saved her kid.’

  ‘But the painting might’ve kept her and her family for a year,’ I argued.

  Adrian had no choice but to speak, his mouth full of potato.

  ‘Doctoring’s what you’re paid to do,’ he told the doctor. ‘That’s carpetbagging.’

  ‘But they love me!’ cried the doctor. ‘They give me paintings out of love! They wouldn’t sack me!’

  Adrian and the doctor glared at each other. Adrian wordlessly climbed in the back and the doctor climbed into the driver’s seat alongside Daniel, and sped down the dusty road so fast we hit our heads on the ceiling at potholes.

  Adrian’s silver eyes were flashing as he sat across from me. He hissed under the noise of the motor, ‘You put me in a spot where I had to reprimand him. After what he’s doing for me!’

  ‘But you’ve let him get away with it 3999 times!’ I said.

  ‘His paintings aren’t all from Gadaburumili,’ he said. ‘Anyway, the territory’s crawling with carpetbaggers. Stamp out one, a hundred more scramble over him to take their place. And by the way, how long have you been here?’

  I slumped in my seat.

  Adrian dozed on the seat opposite me. Sometimes he opened his eyes, checked out the window, and fell back to sleep. He must’ve been dreaming happily because when he woke, his mood had changed and he put out his arms to hold the baby.

  ‘Want a baby?’ he asked teasingly after a while, holding out the child to me.

  I quelled my resentment and took the little boy clumsily, but when I rubbed his back, my fingers glided with astonishment over the fine, smooth, moist skin. His mother had the same smooth finely knitted skin. The baby cried as I held him. He hadn’t cried with Adrian. My own eyes filled with tears again.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Adrian said, his voice so conciliatory, it almost melted my bones. ‘It will all go on, just the way it was.’

  In that sweetness, I felt the thump of capitulation again. I tried to resist it.

  ‘Nothing does,’ I said. ‘Nothing goes back to where it was.’

  ‘Toilet stop.’

  Adrian’s voice woke me up out of a deep dream in which I was falling off the sandstone escarpment that reared behind our house on the river, falling past dark trees, golden sandstone ledges, down, down, down. I woke to a clench in my heart.

  People were clambering out of the troopie, men off to one side of the road, the mother and baby off to the other, disappearing beyond the fringe of scrub. I stood on the heat of the road. I squinted at the sky, so stunned with heat its blueness had faded. I found myself walking beside Gillian.

  ‘I really felt for you back there,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’ We walked in companionable silence. I was relieved by her friendliness. Perhaps she could help me in my quest, I thought. As we walked I blew my nose, but my tissue came away red with blood.

  ‘That happens to me every time I come out,’ she said. ‘It’s the dry heat, such an assault on the body.’

  ‘But not for them?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re used to it. They probably suffer when they come south but in a different way. Watch out for those,’ she added, making a clear half-circle around some spiky spinifex. ‘Looks like it won’t hurt but it’s nasty. Like men.’

  We both laughed. I was smelling the red dust, the heat on it, the heat on that vast red, rippling ocean.

  ‘Out here it’s so dry that the wild horses, when they come into the settlement, learn to turn the taps on with their noses.’ She noticed the incredulity of my smile. ‘It’s true! I’ve seen them myself.’

  ‘What do you think will happen out there to the clinic?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m leaving, thank goodness,’ she said, heading towards two red boulders. ‘It’s not my problem. I work in six-week stints. Most of us do. Six weeks on, six weeks off. Though whether I’ll have a job to come back to in six weeks’ time remains to be seen.’

  She told me her home was in Port Augusta.

  ‘Is leaving home for six weeks hard for you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s perfect for my love life,’ she said. ‘Last time I went home, Mr Right moved in to live with me. He’s absolutely perfect. Except for his kids. I don’t like his kids. It’s good to get away from them. I’m going behind this bush,’ she added. ‘Why don’t you use that one over there?’

  I walked around the bush, to make sure I couldn’t be seen from the road.

  ‘There’ll be no traffic for a couple of hundred kilometres,’ she laughed. ‘On these dead straight roads, you hear the hum of a car ten kilometres away. Not used to this, are you? City Girl, that’s what they call you, I heard them. They call you City Girl.’

  ‘You can speak their language, after all?’ I asked excitedly.

  ‘No, they say it in English. They don’t speak much English, but they’ve learned that. City Girl! Fondly, I have to say.’

  I was reassured by her warmth.

  ‘You think they like me? Already? They don’t know me!’

  ‘It’s probably because they’re pleased Adrian has his girlfriend here.’

  ‘I’m not his girlfriend!’ I protested from behind my bush, my trousers down at my ankles.

  She came out from behind her bush zippering up her jeans. She was elegantly slender.

  ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were.’

  ‘Did he give that impression?’

  ‘I just assumed, I’m sorry. I didn’t think you were Daniel’s. Lovely guy, but he’s totally under Adrian’s thumb.’

  ‘Adrian’s his dear friend,’ I protested, pulling up my trousers.

  She laughed. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll break out one of these days.’

  She let the sentence fall away.

  ‘I’m neither’s. I’ve come to work,’ I said. ‘I’m a linguist. I’m here to record the song of a dying old woman.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked in surprise.

  ‘That’s the trouble, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But in the clinic,’ I added quickly, ‘you’d know who’s dying.’

  ‘No one’s
dying,’ she said. ‘A lot of people are sick but we’re doing well by them. Adrian hasn’t told you who it is? – Don’t!’

  I’d been charmed by the emerald green pincushion plants, as I thought of them, that tapered into feathery mauve grasses riffling in the wind like hair. Even in that midday sun they seemed moonlit, and I fondled them. Now I pulled away in pain, and saw that the emerald cushion was another manifestation of the spinifex spikes both Gillian and Adrian had pointed out earlier.

  ‘I warned you!’

  ‘Nothing here is what it seems,’ I said.

  ‘Why hasn’t he told you who it is?’ she asked.

  I spread my hands. ‘He said to wait till the time’s right. I’m worried how long that’s going to be. In fact –’ I wound down, changed course, ‘could someone show me through the clinic’s records? Could you?’

  ‘You’d have to look through the records of hundreds of people,’ she said. ‘And of course we don’t classify people under how sick they are. You can’t just type in “s” for sick or “d” for dying, you know. And the records are confidential. I’d get into trouble helping you. That’s if I ever go out there again. You might have noticed I’m not a favourite. It’s strange he hasn’t helped you –’

  The rest of her sentence was drowned in a hurry-up honk from Adrian.

  ‘He does get bees in his bonnet,’ she said. ‘I should know – I’m one of them.’ She laughed in a friendly way. ‘Maybe you are too.’

  ‘What’s he got against you?’

  ‘I told him something once. I shouldn’t have – my mother would’ve turned over in her grave. Made him go funny – I don’t know why. Jealousy maybe. That’s the thing about the desert – you get so lonely, you blurt. And you? What’s he got against you?’

  But we were nearing the road and when Adrian saw we were talking, his face darkened. I was beginning to know that look well. I feared that he’d read my body language and suspect my new plan. He ushered Gillian into the front seat to sit next to him now that he was the driver. The doctor and Daniel were to sit in the back with me and the Aboriginal woman.

  ‘Your job is to keep me awake,’ Adrian told her. ‘Not to gossip.’

  I dozed again.

  When I woke, we were a hundred kilometres out of Alice Springs. Here hills erupted without foothills, without warning, like a monster in my head, like something I was trying to forget that was refusing to be forgotten.

  I dozed again – and woke to an explosion. The troopie swerved, Adrian steered across the sandy ridge of the road, mounted a sandbank, pushed over low-lying scrub and pulled up just before we hit a tree.

  ‘It’s a blow-out,’ he called amiably. But his mood changed as he burst open the back doors and remembered me. It was as if the driving had soothed him till then. He searched under my feet for the toolbox and a jack.

  ‘You fix this up,’ he demanded of Gillian.

  ‘I don’t know how,’ she said.

  ‘You should learn. It might happen next time when you’re driving alone.’

  ‘I’m going home,’ she said sulkily. ‘And none of us might be coming back.’

  But he insisted. She jacked up the troopie, under Adrian’s impatient instructions.

  I stood nearby as she handed me the nuts, trying to get a chance to continue our chat, but Adrian stood his ground. ‘You’ve always depended on a man to do this, haven’t you?’ And when she’d finished, he told her to take the old wheel to the back of the troopie. She lifted it up.

  ‘Roll it,’ he barked at her. ‘It’s not a basket of wet washing.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, blushing a little, a little ashamed to be treated like this by the boss in front of everyone. Adrian stood in my way as I went to climb back into the troopie.

  ‘Don’t make her your best friend,’ he hissed. ‘I’m sacking her.’

  Nevertheless he handed her into the back of the troopie, an old-fashioned, courtly gesture meant to charm her. As he did, he spoke quietly to her. She nodded in agreement. Her eyes seemed attached to him, clinging to him. I knew how bewildered she felt. In the last day, I’d seen how quickly he could change. He touched her arm kindly, like a parent who’d roused on a child for its own good, then wanted to restore peace.

  ‘It’s your turn for a rest,’ I heard him say. ‘But rest, don’t chat.’

  It was an order, not a piece of advice. He slammed the door. Through the dust-encrusted back window, I watched him stride away. Red streaks had stained his blue shirt in a jagged pattern.

  I had to leave this place. I didn’t need to find out who he was. I didn’t need this puppeteer; I didn’t want to be one of his marionettes. It was just a matter of getting on a plane, flying home, admitting to E.E. Albert I was a failure.

  Inside, Gillian arranged a jacket against the wall of the troopie and lolled her head, shutting her eyes against the enquiry in mine, against his humiliation of her.

  The voice in my head started again, insistently. I’d explain to E.E. Albert that nothing was as it was said to be, that the assignment was made impossible by this man, that he who should’ve paved my way was making obstacles. It wasn’t my fault I’d failed, I’d say. It was impossible. Impossible. But the road sang under us. You’re a failure. A failure.

  I fell asleep alongside Gillian.

  I call it the Bay of Shadows from the moment my family first gaze at the decrepit row of houses on the banks of a river as brown and thick as old stew. It must’ve been raining for days, and I don’t yet know that rain turns the water from silver to sludge. I shiver, and wonder if it’s always chilly here.

  There’s a high aloof cliff beetling over the houses, punishing us for being what we are, squatters, making sure we’re cut off from the sun.

  My father says, ‘What about that one?’ His voice is hearty, although I’ve already begun to notice he uses that tone to get his way. He hearties us into what we don’t want.

  I look along the row, one house after another, one little more than a stone chimney, and one with all its window-glass broken and curtains lacy with age and a rain tank so rusty there’s reddish water pooling on the cement stand, buzzing with mosquitoes. One house has a wooden staircase coming adrift from the wall, leaning out dizzily into sheer blue air. One’s propped on foundations of bits of broken tiles and fibro, all so awry that the edifice seems to float. There’d be no escaping down the river when the tide is low because all the houses have front yards that are fields of mud, grey and thick with the twisted, sulking roots of mangrove trees, and popping like farts with the burrowings of tiny crabs whose eyes glint pleadingly up at me when I take a stick to explore their holes.

  I turn to follow my father’s pointing finger, hoping against hope that he isn’t pointing at the dampest, saddest, muddiest, smallest, most decrepit, most shadowy one.

  He is.

  ‘Perhaps it’s best to pick the worst,’ my mother says. She’s what everyone calls a soft touch. It makes me cranky. ‘Then the owner’s less likely to turn up.’

  ‘The tide will come in soon,’ my father says. ‘You’ll see.’ And he’s right. The tide slides across the mudflats in silver mirrors, and we hear no more from the crab families for a while.

  ‘Will it stay up?’ I hope.

  ‘No, but it will always return,’ my father says. ‘The good things are worth waiting for – eh?’

  He ruffles my hair, as if he means me. My father has charm. He’s a ne’er-do-well, that was what my grandmother, my mother’s mother, called him on her deathbed when I wasn’t supposed to hear. He believes, if only he didn’t have us to look after, he would’ve been an artist bound for great things. He could’ve lived in Paris or Vienna or London, the cultural centres of the universe, where his talent would’ve been appreciated. As it is, the one painting he’s sold was bought by Diana. When she heard he couldn’t pay the rent on our city house, she said: ‘Bring your wife and the child to the Bay, just round the corner from me. There are deserted houses there needing a bit of love and care.
Like I do.’

  My father, who no doubt believed he too needed a bit of love and care, tells me that last sentence much later, when he thinks I’m old enough. He never tells it to my mother.

  When I woke in the troopie, Adrian was beside me, touching my hand gently. I was back at the river, my river silvered by sunshine.

  My gentle mother, red-faced, yells at my father as he comes in the door one Saturday morning, back from a week of working at your mother’s.

  ‘You and this Diana! You have nothing in common! What do you talk about?’

  My father says, with triumph in his voice: ‘Nothing.’

  My mother, blanching, turns sobbing into the spare room she calls her bedroom.

  ‘They don’t need to talk,’ I hear her sob again and again, to my bewilderment. It takes me years to work out what she means.

  My father stalks out to our jetty to check the crab pots I’d put out, the way Diana has taught me.

  It’s true that not an earnest thought seems to pass between them, though they chatter constantly, Diana’s earrings dancing with every wobble of her double chin. Her hands tumble in the air for emphasis, and twinkle like wineglasses held aloft, for she wears rings on every red-nailed finger. My father’s eyes follow her twinkling fingers like a hungry dog when you move a biscuit through the air in front of its nose. Her voice finishes off his sentences, and his voice finishes off hers, as if they’re singing a duet, though, as my mother would say, with only nonsensical words like fal-de-lal and fol-di-didio-loh. I’m ten before I realise that if their thoughts lie side by side without speech, so too must their bodies in the darkened, frightening, silent spaces of her house.

  You know that I spend my visiting nights on your red dusty sofa, out on your verandah amongst the twittering, humming night world. You don’t know that I never dare go through the dark house to the toilet to pee in case I hear what I shouldn’t. I’m terrified I’ll wet the bed. I’m guilty about knowing what everyone pretends I don’t know; but worst of all, I’m guilty about being my mother’s spy.