The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘I assume that you went to the supermarket for anything that needs topping up?’ he said. ‘That’s if you’re going back out with me?’

  ‘I don’t need anything – that’s if I’m going out with you,’ I said.

  ‘Have you checked plane times?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll just go down to the airport and wait,’ I said.

  ‘You’ll have to take a sleeping bag. There’s only one flight a day and you’ve missed it,’ he said triumphantly.

  Then it was I who disobeyed all the rules that Diana had so painstakingly instilled. I put my elbows on the table as if they were heavy baggage I could no longer bear to hold and, wrinkling the white damask tablecloth, I rested my head in my hands.

  E.E. Albert, if I’d been a better student, would I have made the right decision? I thought.

  I grimly decided to stay in the hotel one more night, and fly back to the city on tomorrow’s plane. I no longer wanted to find out if this man was my Ian. If he was, he’d transformed into someone I didn’t like. If he wasn’t, I’d live out my life in the knowledge he was lost. At least I tried, I said, though that gave me little comfort.

  And the recording of the song? I was doing that solely for E.E. Albert – and, of course, for the Dean. Then I thought of the realisation Daniel had led me to, that it might be the oldest surviving song in the world. That frightened me. It seemed too much to live up to. I wasn’t the sort of person who’d know what to do with something as important as that.

  There was a knock on the door of my hotel room. I knew it was Adrian. When it suited him, he could knock on a door the way he touched people’s arms, almost a caress, a respectful stroking of the wood.

  ‘I could show you something wonderful if you come back,’ he said through the door.

  I sat up.

  ‘The old lady?’ I asked. ‘That’s all I want to see. That’s what I came for.’

  ‘My river.’

  ‘Your river?’

  ‘My river,’ he repeated.

  ‘That dried-up river?’ I demanded. ‘That’s not a river! That’s a joke of a river!’

  I was sounding petulant, a child angry that a river wasn’t flowing.

  ‘My river is pink,’ he said.

  I opened the door.

  ‘Why do you think I’d be interested in a pink river?’

  ‘You’re a coastal type. I’ll show you, as long as the rain holds off. Want me to carry your bag?’

  ‘To the singer?’

  ‘Soon. I want to help you,’ he said in his sweetest, most melodious tones.

  And so I capitulated. Because of the promise of a pink river, I followed him out to the troopie. But this time, I carried my own bags.

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  ‘I’ll sit in the back,’ I said when we reached the troopie.

  But that would mean the girls would be obliged to sit next to Adrian, and sitting beside a man wasn’t right, even if it was a man they knew.

  So I did what he wanted and climbed into the front seat and we drove through the suburbs of Alice Springs, which I valued more now, the neat houses and neat backyards, no shadowy overgrown places, no places for the errant heart to wrestle with its secrets. No places for the errant heart at all.

  Adrian talked to me as if nothing untoward had happened in the last few minutes, as if I hadn’t done an about-face. He said that Daniel would wait in Alice to collect the new clinic staff. Whereas he, Adrian, would return to the settlement immediately with the girls, their saviour.

  Did he spend all his time scheming?

  We stopped at a little house in a quiet side street.

  ‘The house of my friend,’ he said, and as I hung back shyly, he added, ‘Come in.’

  The girls were sitting in a dim lounge room lit by the flickerings of a TV set, nursing their babies and drinking cups of tea. I greeted them, and they turned their solemn black eyes on me, and then looked modestly down.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked them in his kindest voice.

  They nodded, stood up, gathered their blankets and bags and filed into the back of the troopie.

  ‘They don’t do small talk,’ Adrian reminded me.

  I swung around to check on them. Some impulse inside me was stronger now.

  ‘They’re not putting on their seatbelts,’ I told him.

  His silver eyes bulged with resentment.

  ‘Whites are always demanding these things. You just don’t think it through,’ he said. ‘Some of the mob have to travel in the troopie with skin groups they’re not supposed to be with, so they need to face whatever way they like, and seatbelts don’t let them do that.’

  ‘But you have been in a rollover –’

  He sighed.

  ‘OK, they’re the same skin –’

  He asked the girls to belt up, and they complied.

  But I ruined any sense of victory by crying out: ‘The shop!’

  ‘What about the shop?’ he asked, starting the engine.

  ‘Skin’s why they wait outside the shop!’ I said.

  ‘Don’t chatter any more,’ he replied snakily. ‘I need the trip to figure out the right thing to say back at the settlement.’

  ‘And the pink river?’ I asked.

  ‘In the fullness of time,’ he said.

  ‘Like telling me which is the old dying lady?’ I asked.

  We drove for hours in silence. In the back, the girls dozed, and I dozed too. The satellite phone attached to the dashboard jolted me into wakefulness.

  ‘I didn’t think that thing worked,’ said Adrian. ‘Pick it up.’

  Through the static I made out Daniel’s voice, asking me to pass on to Adrian the news that the new nurse hadn’t arrived.

  ‘Bugger. We’ll have to ask Gillian to come back –’ Adrian began, then he glanced at me, Gillian’s confidante. ‘Tell Daniel to hold on.’ He braked in such a cloud of dust that it enveloped us and plumed in front of us like smoke. He pushed open the door into the smoke, strode out into it and turned his back on me. I wound the window down quietly.

  ‘Say I’ll give her one more chance! No more mutinies! … Blast and damn Jesus Christ,’ I heard him mutter as he climbed back into the cabin.

  As if it heard him, there was a clap of thunder and a flash of lightning that lit up at least a quarter of the huge dome of sky and zigzagged in a quivering but uncompromising white line to the earth.

  ‘How awful to be where it landed,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody’s out there for hundreds of kilometres,’ he said. ‘Only cows. And the odd roo.’

  Then the rain came. It’d been ahead of us for hours, grey clouds dribbling down a white-grey sky. Now in the headlights the rain blew directly towards us, so that it seemed it wasn’t raining on the entire breadth of the road, but directly in front of our lights, just for us. I broke our silence by saying that to him and he turned off the lights, to show me how foolish I was, again. The whole desert was lost in rain; rain swooping so densely that there was no mulga, no rocks, no sand, no earth and no sky. No us, no desert. We were all one.

  I was comforted by rain, as I always had been. Rain is kindness to a troubled heart. Rain says you can put it off for a while, this problem, this thing you don’t want to do, and nobody will condemn you. They’ll say: ‘Oh, of course you couldn’t do it: it was raining!’ The rain seemed to ease him too.

  ‘I’ll show you very soon, but some other time,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pink river.’

  ‘You read my thoughts,’ I said.

  ‘I often do. You’re very transparent.’

  ‘What else have you divined about me?’ I tried to sound casual.

  He glanced at me, and changed the subject.

  ‘When I drive with them, they’re looking out the windows all the time. You don’t.’

  ‘What’s to look at?’

  ‘Everything. It’s their home. How many trees are fruiting together and how far they are from the ro
ad and from home and whether they’re worth spending expensive petrol driving to, and where bush turkeys might be hanging out.’

  ‘Like going past the shops in town?’

  ‘Not to mention birds,’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘To them, birds aren’t just ornamental, they’re useful. There’s one that tells them if strangers are approaching, because strangers used to be lethal. There used to be a lot of violence between groups, before whites came.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I read, you know. Accounts of nineteenth-century men digging up fractured skulls, pre-whites. It wasn’t all sweetness and light out here.’

  ‘Whose accounts?’

  He shrugged. He seemed about to say something else but he had to steer up and along an embankment because the road had deteriorated into crevices and rocks.

  ‘The roads haven’t been graded for a while,’ he said as an understatement. ‘Only the mob uses them. And a handful of whites. Why would a government spend money on grading?’

  I laughed with him ingratiatingly because of his pink river.

  ‘Did you grow up in the Territory?’ I asked him.

  He steered around a pothole.

  ‘Look!’ he said. It’d stopped raining, or perhaps we had driven out of it. A line of brown camels slinked by, heads high, majestic in their gait, as measured as if they were a trained dance troupe.

  ‘They were brought out here by Afghans before the roads went in,’ he told me. ‘Now they’ve gone feral, tens of thousands of them.’

  He slowed down to let me watch.

  ‘Their necks strain forward like figure-heads on the prows of old-fashioned boats,’ I said, then I wished I hadn’t spoken. Keeping silent about boats and rivers was harder than I’d thought.

  He didn’t react, he just reached down to the little shelf in the door beside him, pulled up a bottle of Coke and took a sip, without offering me any. I’d watched him often do these prevaricating things to play for time, pour himself a drink, yawn, stretch, to organise his thoughts, perhaps his lies.

  ‘And you – where did you come from?’ he countered instead, speeding up now that the camels had veered away from the road.

  I knew when I agreed to come here that I’d have to make up a plausible story, but I’d continually put off thinking about it. I’d never been forthcoming about my childhood, not to my short-lived husband, nor to my shorter-lived lovers. I never wanted to tell them about Diana, or even about how after the funerals I stayed with my father while he slipped deeper into dementia and death.

  Now that the moment was on me, it was too late to make up anything; besides, his energy seemed to demand utter spontaneity. I found a way to half tell the truth.

  ‘I’ve spent a lot of time in Sydney. The inner city.’

  I described the house I’d glimpsed on E.E. Albert’s desk, E.E. Albert’s house. I made it mine, and that gave me a comforting glow. I described tall buildings and apartment blocks with noisy cement staircases and walls emblazoned with graffiti. I added cats.

  But as I talked, I was thinking about the river.

  It makes us seem important, our river. Living near it is like living in the muddy forecourt of a great monarch, waiting for his visit. For whenever we’re doing the dullest things – collecting kindling, hoeing the vegetable plots, pumping the water to the top tank for the gravity feed, setting the fishing lines, checking the crab pots, cleaning out the droppings of the possums and the leaf litter from the gutters – there is the river, shining silver again, sliding majestically into the sea, sliding majestically back to the mountains.

  It isn’t till I hide in the city that I discover how puny I am, how mired it seems I will always be in low, muddy tides.

  Adrian nodded as I talked about the city. He wasn’t interested in things that didn’t directly concern him, so I thought I’d succeeded in distracting him.

  ‘You’re wondering how I came to be out here?’ he asked. I almost jumped, I was so startled, and I was glad that his silver gaze was on the road. He wasn’t noticing me, I believed.

  ‘I came here when I first left the city –’

  I couldn’t wait. I blurted, ‘Why Gadaburumili?’

  He paused. ‘Why not?’

  ‘The desert’s very big.’

  ‘I was offered work in a settlement not far from here, that’s why. I did council stuff – the sort Bruce is paid to administer. Organising rubbish collections, helping with welfare payments. Sometimes I fixed houses – I’d rather work with my hands, or with people. Not this desk stuff.’ He flashed a rueful smile at me.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I fell foul of Bruce’s equivalent.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Why do you want to know? Just an old bloke topping up his super. Usual story. The desert’s full of incompetent CEOs. The good ones are legendary.’

  He steered around a ravine in the road.

  ‘So I ended up at another settlement where the hunting grounds had been ruined by cattle, and the old knowledge was dying out and the mob was starving. They live such short lives. In that settlement, my best friend – he was my age and I watched him die a long, slow, horrible death –’ his voice broke. ‘He was robbed of forty, fifty years of life.’

  He struggled with his voice, and raised his hand to brush away tears that were sheeting his face. When his hand went back on the steering wheel, I put mine over his for a moment.

  ‘So I began a store there. I bought a truck and drove out with dried goods – salt, sugar, flour, tea – the usual. I wanted to save them from starvation because I knew this culture was unique.’

  ‘But wouldn’t a store have changed the unique culture? Isn’t food and how you get it part of culture?’

  His anger was always sudden, like a blow I wasn’t expecting.

  ‘You think they should’ve starved instead? For the amusement of whites like you? We whites don’t live like we lived fifty years ago.’

  He put a layer of certainty over what was uncertain; it clung to all his thoughts, that certainty, like the powdering of red dust flying in the open window and already beginning to cling to the hairs on my arm.

  ‘You want to see them as they used to be, so you can be fascinated, so they please your Western sense of history? You say, if only they were still exotic!’

  I blushed, because indeed I had been wishing that.

  ‘But they are exotic, despite the changes and adaptations in their ways. It’s just you haven’t got the eyes to see. I’m forcing you to develop those eyes.’

  Then all the books I hadn’t read stood upright and condemned me. He paused for me to contradict him further, but I said nothing.

  ‘By then I’d become legendary – people still come up to me in Alice Springs and point me out to their children. The Gadaburumili people asked me to help them with their clinic. I knew this was what I’d been born to do. I wanted to stop the deaths, the illnesses, the wasted lives. I wanted to show that it could be done. And the settlement was dry, so I knew I stood a good chance. A chance to save them!’

  He glanced at me.

  ‘Do you understand me now?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Did you come out here alone?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you enquiring about my love life?’ he asked with a wry smile.

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. My heart gave an annoying bump. I hoped he couldn’t see how my shirt fluttered.

  ‘Thought so!’ he said, pleased at his intuition. ‘You see – you are transparent. There was a woman at the previous place but it didn’t work out. My fault, I suppose. I was still getting over my childhood. In my childhood –’ he took a breath and paused.

  ‘Things happened.’

  I cried out then, but I was saved by a sudden squall of rain boring holes into the dust of the road, making wild wind-blown zigzags on the windscreen, intersected by others, cancelled by the wipers, and instantly making new zigzags. I had to resign myself to waiting to find out who he was. Whether, under the surface, he
was who he seemed to be. The silence between us deepened but was crammed with thoughts. I hoped we were communing. The red road we were climbing was so furrowed with tyre tracks, it was like a child’s finger painting with red paint. I told him this. He nodded.

  ‘Was there a lot of sadness in your family?’ I asked after ten kilometres or so of silence, just the hammering of the rain that had begun again, and the swishing of the tyres.

  He glanced at me in relief that I’d given him this way out.

  ‘That’s one way to put it, a lot of sadness.’

  Parts of his face smiled independently of each other. The years seemed to have taught his muscles different contradictory lessons, and it was as if each set of muscles had to negotiate with the others. As if his eyes had learned different lessons from his cheeks and each had learned different lessons from his lips and from his forehead. So all of them, eyes, cheeks, lips, and forehead had to negotiate with each other and join in his smile one at a time, in their own time. It made me wait to see if his entire face lit up.

  ‘It was important to get away from it, up here,’ he said.

  There was another pause.

  He said confidingly, ‘It hasn’t followed me. I hope it won’t.’

  I tried not to swallow loudly.

  Then suddenly the troopie veered into the soft embankment on the road edge, narrowly missing the spindly trees, and to my surprise Adrian wasn’t struggling against the troopie’s veering, he was steering with it.

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  He put his arm out in front of me to stop my body falling forward. The troopie surged across the road and limped, then he got it under control, and braked.

  He grinned, pleased with himself.

  I whirled around to check on the girls and their babies.

  ‘A good thing that they were wearing seatbelts,’ I said. ‘They’ve slept through it.’

  He ignored me.

  ‘That’s how to handle a troopie!’ he said instead. ‘Did you see how I did it? A lot of tourists don’t know how to drive on these roads. You wouldn’t have known how. There are a lot of rollovers.’