The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  He got out of the troopie and looked at the front wheel, the rain instantly flattening his grey hair to his skull, his curls to his forehead, his pale blue shirt to his chest. I stopped crowing about the seatbelt, moved to capitulation by his muscular chest.

  ‘It’s another blowout. Can you get up on top of the roof and throw me down the spare wheel while I take this one off?’

  I was scared of heights but I wasn’t going to be humiliated the way he’d humiliated Gillian. I braced myself and climbed nimbly up the troopie’s ladder, and though the wet roof dented under my weight, I planted my feet carefully and somehow I didn’t slip. I threw down the tyre, careful not to hit him with it, and climbed down, holding my breath that I didn’t ruin it all by falling off the ladder.

  Adrian was bent over the wheel, undoing nuts. Still trembling, I hid it by fossicking for an old dirty blanket under one of the jacked-up troopie’s seats – folded probably by dependable Daniel – and held it over us both as an umbrella. He glanced up at me, smiling, preoccupied.

  ‘You don’t have a clue what you’re doing, do you?’

  Now my pride tumbled, but I was immersed in holding the blanket.

  ‘As a linguist,’ he pursued.

  ‘It’s my first time in the field,’ I mumbled.

  ‘You know what I think?’ He didn’t wait for my answer. ‘I think you’ve only come out here to impress someone –’ he was too busy to notice my blush, ‘some tutor or lecturer. I don’t think you care about what happens to the mob or their language. You’re a compassionate, sweet-natured person but you’re overruled by someone else’s agenda. That’s why I’ve got no hesitation in changing that.’

  His face was engrossed with the nuts he was tightening. He handed me the wrench without glancing at me. I thought: I could kill him with this.

  ‘There’s no point hitting me,’ he said. ‘You need me.’

  You are always flagrantly abrasive and tactless. There are boys at school whose older brothers have promised to avenge them by killing you. My father promises the same, but secretly, gnashing his teeth only in front of me.

  I’m always white-hot in your defence.

  ‘He’s honest,’ I say. ‘He says what he thinks.’

  ‘Who cares what a whippet like him thinks,’ my father says.

  ‘Diana,’ I say.

  Even her name brings a deep colour to my father’s cheeks.

  ‘Ah, Diana,’ he says.

  Now I looked down at the greasy rag I was holding for him.

  ‘You like having us in your power,’ I said to Adrian.

  ‘That’s true,’ he said.

  We got back in the troopie just as the rain stopped. We opened the windows to dry off. Then I slept, and woke as we were coming into the settlement. It was midnight. All the lights were out, but the sleeping houses were watched by a giant, benign but very distant moon.

  I was sleepily walking into the house when he suddenly said: ‘They’ve given you a bush name already. They don’t normally do that so fast.’

  He seemed pleased with me, and with himself.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ngadju. It’s a bird they love, that leads them to water. I don’t know why they’d call you that.’

  I clapped my hand over my mouth: I suddenly remembered that he shouldn’t have told me, he’d explained that. But all I said was: ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You were walking towards them and I heard them say “Ngadju!” and I’ve often heard them call a bird that. A little, insignificant grey one.’

  ‘You hear what they say, after all!’

  ‘They’re my life.’

  We were in the kitchen. He opened the fridge door, bending, finding the pineapple juice.

  He turned his head towards me.

  ‘You got it because they love me, of course.’

  He made a face over the juice. ‘Funny – this seems off. It’s probably the fridge.’ He shut the door and poured the juice down the sink.

  ‘We’ll deal with that in the morning.’

  Chapter 9

  ‘You’d better come to the funeral,’ he called through the bedroom door in the morning. ‘If you don’t, the mob might think you’re hiding.’

  I was instantly wide awake.

  ‘Is my old lady dead? You’ve kept me from her and now it’s too late!’ I threw open the door. ‘You realise what you’re responsible for? This game you play –’

  ‘It isn’t her funeral,’ he said gently.

  I crumpled with relief, then remembered what he’d just said.

  ‘Hiding?’

  ‘When someone dies here, someone else is to blame.’

  ‘A white person blamed? I could be blamed?’

  Daniel was in the hall. He’d just arrived back from Alice, grubby, sweaty, slouching in exhaustion. Nevertheless, he summoned himself to defend me.

  ‘Don’t frighten her.’

  ‘Mind your own business,’ Adrian snapped at him. It was the first time I’d seen him unpleasant to Daniel.

  ‘It’s hard enough being out here,’ said Daniel, ‘without being scared.’

  ‘What’s hard about it?’ Adrian snorted, but he relented enough to say, ‘Everyone’s expected to be there.’

  ‘Everyone? My old lady? She’ll sing?’

  ‘Remember? She can’t sing her traditional song in front of men. Even you know that. That’s why you’re here – isn’t it?’

  He went away.

  ‘It’s true that everyone will be there,’ said Daniel quietly to me. He went into the bathroom, and then I heard a yelp.

  ‘There’s no hot water! I bet it’s bloody Bruce again.’

  ‘How can the CEO have used up our hot water?’ I called, but he couldn’t hear me.

  Daniel came out in a towel. Water was still running down his tanned chest. He looked both strong and vulnerable. I was always moved by the vulnerability of men. Suddenly, my bowels seemed to squeeze together.

  ‘I hope you had a shower last night,’ he said to me. ‘There’s no electricity.’

  ‘The water wasn’t hot,’ I remembered.

  Just then Adrian returned. He’d been to the clinic.

  ‘The generator’s broken down. I’m off to see what I can do.’ He glanced at Daniel’s near-nakedness, and strode out of the house.

  ‘I won’t be able to have breakfast!’ said Daniel.

  ‘I’ll go out and make a fire in the yard for a cuppa for you,’ I said to Daniel. ‘Maybe fry some eggs and bacon.’

  ‘I’ll get dressed and make a damper for us,’ he offered, cheering up. ‘The local ladies taught me how.’

  He headed towards his bedroom, and then doubled back.

  ‘No, I should make the batter first. It’s better if it’s had a chance to sit.’ He grinned. ‘That bit about sitting is from my mum.’ Creak. Creak. He laughed his unoiled creaking-door laugh.

  ‘I’ll stay and learn how to do it,’ I said.

  But it was really because of his bared and vulnerable chest that I sat on a kitchen stool to watch him as he mixed the batter.

  ‘No egg to stick it together?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t,’ he said. He grinned at me, enjoying himself. ‘I suppose eggs would’ve been luxuries. It’s all in the mixing.’

  Creak. Creak.

  He threw in a sprinkle of salt.

  I’d often sat in Diana’s kitchen watching her mix a batter, her beating action controlled by her powerful wrist. But he put his whole forearm into it, his upper arm muscles flexing.

  ‘This is a show of strength,’ I laughed.

  ‘I was hoping you’d notice,’ he laughed.

  Suddenly Adrian was between us.

  ‘I hoped you’d follow me,’ he said to Daniel.

  Daniel kept beating the mixture.

  ‘Got to keep the momentum going,’ he said.

  ‘I need help figuring out how to start the generator,’ said Adrian, a little nettled.

  ‘What’s wrong with using a key?�
�� asked Daniel, still not giving Adrian his full attention.

  ‘Bruce has gone off to Alice with the key.’

  ‘There’s no spare?’ Daniel was then putting his entire body into the beating, bending from his waist.

  ‘That’s lost.’

  ‘Isn’t anyone else trained to do the power?’ I asked Adrian.

  ‘There’s Russell, a black man, Bruce’s assistant, but he’s in Alice too,’ explained Daniel.

  ‘They’re friends, gone off for a holiday together?’ I asked.

  Adrian leaned on the working board, groaning. ‘You and the crazy things you come out with! Do you ever think before you speak?’

  He prised himself up and draped his arm around my shoulders. It was quite a considerable weight, the weight of him.

  ‘Russell’s been gone a month,’ he explained in a comically slow voice as if he was speaking to a simpleton. ‘Doing whatever the mob does in Alice. Bruce has gone in for the weekend, doing whatever whites do to paint the town red.’

  Daniel was pulling the fork out of the bowl to test the thickness of the batter mixture. He was satisfied, and offered us both a lick of the fork. Adrian refused it but I accepted, my eyes downcast.

  ‘Watch Bruce put the blame on Russell,’ Daniel said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  Adrian groaned, but Daniel didn’t mind explaining.

  ‘Bruce should’ve been checking that generator once a day. That means about thirty checks he’s missed since Russell left.’

  He tested the batter with another fork.

  ‘It’s done.’

  ‘Are you going to come and help me?’ It was more a demand from Adrian to Daniel than a request.

  ‘I’m having a well-earned bit of R and R,’ said Daniel to him. ‘Showing off my cooking skills.’

  ‘Medications could go off in the clinic,’ said Adrian, his face glowering.

  ‘I suppose the damper’s ready for a well-earned rest too,’ said Daniel. Creak. Creak, he laughed.

  ‘Put your shirt on first!’ said Adrian, and slammed his way out of the house.

  ‘I didn’t know there was a dress-code here,’ Daniel called after him, knowing he couldn’t be heard. But he went, head lowered guiltily, into his room and came out buttoning, on a shirt.

  ‘I’ll set a fire before I go,’ he said. ‘The way the mob does. Just twigs and dead spinifex. It’s probably its resin that does the trick.’

  He laid down half a dozen twigs and a ball of spinifex which happened to be blowing about in the road, and lit a match.

  ‘Faster than the stove,’ he grinned.

  I watched him, surprised at how economical the technique was. In my fires at the river, I’d have used a lot more wood.

  He returned half an hour later, just as the fire had died down to its ashes, and he put the damper straight in on top of them, without a baking tin.

  ‘Adrian’s got the generator going. I’ve never asked him, but he must’ve had a good father – a real jack-of-all-trades,’ he said.

  I couldn’t tell Daniel that the jack-of-all-trades was my father.

  By mid-morning, Adrian had fixed the generator enough for half the settlement to get power for two hours and the rest of the settlement to get power for another two hours, more or less. Daniel, hailing the grease-stained Adrian as a hero, offered him a chunk of the warm damper, once he’d brushed off the ash, or most of it. I pretended not to notice that some ash seemed cooked in.

  ‘Wouldn’t touch stuff like damper,’ said Adrian.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ demanded Daniel.

  ‘Got my figure to watch,’ said Adrian.

  I almost said that dampers hadn’t hurt Daniel’s figure, but I stopped myself in time.

  I followed him and Daniel quietly out into the hot street to the funeral. We’d all had cold showers, and we were dressed in white shirts, he and Adrian in black trousers, me in a black skirt.

  I had my recorder in my pocket.

  ‘The funeral,’ Adrian threw over his shoulder, ‘is for an old lady who had a heart attack doing what she loved the most. She went hunting despite the doctors warning her about a weak heart.’

  We walked on in silence.

  ‘Going by the funerals, death seems to have a different meaning to the mob than to us. You don’t have to be solemn like in our funerals,’ said Adrian. I saw that his white shirt ballooned around his belly in a holiday way.

  ‘What happened when you got back here?’ I asked.

  ‘A group of elders was waiting for me. I said that there’d be no clinic without clinic staff, and no one would work without me because I’m the manager. Dora came forward and said “You must come back!” Everyone laughed, and so it was agreed.’

  I wanted to say that there had been a meeting after all, but I held my tongue.

  ‘Who’s Dora?’ I asked. ‘Was she running this non-meeting?’

  ‘Dora’s very powerful,’ said Adrian, sighing because he had to explain. ‘She’s married to Skeleton’s brother, Boney, who’s on daily medication.’

  ‘So she’d believe in white medicine,’ I said.

  ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘They look at our diagrams and nod and say, OK that’s how the woman died. But Collins said they ask the bigger question.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Why she died.’

  I walked struggling in the heat and new confusion.

  ‘Were they relieved you’d got the power back on?’ I asked his back.

  He told me that it didn’t affect many people.

  ‘If they don’t keep up to date with their bills, Bruce turns their power off anyway,’ Daniel told me. ‘A lot of people have no power.’

  He glanced back at my startled reaction, and went on, ‘They make do by cooking outside, as you know, and going to bed when it gets dark. There aren’t many TVs, and no one reads.’

  ‘And hot water?’

  ‘Some have no water – let alone hot.’

  But Adrian hushed me because we were turning a corner into an empty space between the besser block houses, and the noise of a crowd was upon us. On the outskirts was a ring of parked cars with children bobbing inside, eating snacks out of silver packets. Inside the ring were rows of people sitting on the ground, men on one side, women on the other under a bough shelter, with four forked boughs supporting a roof where mulga branches had been thrown, lacy with leaves already dead in the sun. There were many rows of old women, and I lost heart. I’d never find her by chance.

  ‘They’ve all been doing sorry business,’ Adrian said. ‘In the clinic, they came in to smoke away the bad spirits, with white paint smeared on their faces.’

  I saw a group of white people across from where I stood with Adrian and Daniel – Craig, Beth and Dudley, who Adrian whispered was a teacher living and working at one of the outstations. Daniel waved to the new clinic staff. Amongst them, to my relief, was Gillian, chatting to an elegant stranger in a white coat – so she must be the new doctor. I smiled across at Gillian when Adrian wasn’t looking. She grinned back, and stood behind another nurse, an older, short woman in a white uniform. Gillian gesticulated behind her, like a lit-up pointing hand in a shop window: ‘Crazy prices’. The nurse looked around, and Gillian quickly rearranged her face and explained something to her – probably that a grub had been crawling in her hair, from the way the nurse combed her fingers through it.

  A four-wheel drive arrived, a coffin on top loaded with a festivity of green roses, purple daffodils and yellow hydrangeas.

  ‘How did they dye flowers those colours?’ I whispered to Daniel.

  ‘Plastic,’ he whispered back, and Adrian shushed us.

  A young but authoritative man, perhaps a preacher, stood up in front of the crowd.

  ‘That’s Graeme, the man who tried to sack me,’ whispered Adrian.

  I’d imagined a mean-looking man, but Graeme was large and strong and good-looking. He spoke in Djemiranga – he had to shout because the microphone wo
uldn’t work without electricity – and I surreptitiously turned my recorder on. Then the chief mourners, all women, clasped each other in a circle and sang in Djemiranga to the tune of ‘All to Jesus I Surrender’.

  ‘Collins translated this,’ Adrian whispered to me.

  ‘Is my old lady one of the singers?’ I whispered back.

  He didn’t reply.

  Graeme started speaking in English and I turned the recorder off. His sermon drifted in the heat like dust, the familiar English words of salvation, the cross, Jesus. Young boys riding around the outskirts of the crowd on bicycles listened intently, their front wheels wobbling. Children played quietly, and a mother bared her breast to suckle her chubby, naked baby. The donkey ambled behind everyone, its lips stretched amiably, peering into the parked cars, but bumping its nose on the glass as the children inside rapidly wound up the windows. At last it saw a car without any windows and its amble hastened to a trot. The singers began another hymn, again in Djemiranga, and I switched the recorder on just as the donkey was poking its head into the car, showing the children inside its long yellow teeth. The oldest child bravely pushed at its protruding, obstinate nose, hoping by this means to propel the entire baggy fawn body of the donkey backwards out of the car as if it was a rigid stick, but the donkey wouldn’t step backwards. Instead, its head concertinaed into its neck and it let out a whole raft of cries and snorts, high-pitched, descending. The children yelled and the donkey brayed again. Another child reached over and pushed open the car’s back door and banged it on the donkey again and again, puffing red dust out of its ragged hide but still the donkey didn’t move and its brays were making the hymn’s second verse incoherent while the congregation craned to watch. There was a guffaw behind me from the white builder I met – how many days ago? three days ago? – with his waist-length ponytail. Then a tall black man strode across the dust and thwacked the donkey’s ragged carpet rump, and at last it gave up and backed away.

  When the service ended and the people got in cars to drive out to the burial ground, I walked back to the house. Adrian accompanied me until the turn-off to the clinic.