The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  I held her hand, and thanked her. She was about to go.

  ‘How do you cook kangaroo?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re eating kangaroo?’ she asked.

  ‘Shouldn’t we?’ I asked. ‘I was going to cook it for Dora’s family.’

  She sighed, looked up and down the road for inspiration, and then said softly: ‘I used to.’ It seemed an admission she didn’t want someone to hear. But she stirred herself.

  ‘Here, they seem to dig a trough in the ground, burn a fire inside, then lay the kangaroo on the hot coals, so it’s like an oven. Sometimes they put a sheet of corrugated iron on top. Don’t know what they used instead of iron in the old days. But I don’t suppose you’d be up to doing that.’

  I recited her alternative recipe:

  Put oil in a pan and heat it, then drop in the kangaroo and sear it for a few minutes, flip it over and sear it on the other side. Then turn down the heat and sprinkle soy sauce or tamari over it, cover, and cook gently for a few minutes. Take it off the heat while the meat is still pink inside, and let it rest.

  ‘The builder had a point,’ I said to Adrian and Daniel as we ate the seared kangaroo and mashed potatoes and all the fresh vegetables I could find in the shop. The electricity had come on just at the right moment. We ate without Dora’s family, who still hadn’t turned up.

  ‘He shouldn’t have had to build all the houses alone. He should’ve been given trained assistants, who could buddy up with his local apprentices,’ I said.

  ‘He can’t have allowed for that in his quote. He would’ve tried to undercut everyone, to get the job,’ said Adrian. ‘That’s the trouble with new chums.’

  He ate quickly, like someone who’d grown up in a hungry family of half a dozen brothers, but I knew there’d been no brothers in his house. It was hard for him to wait until everyone was served, and he was often wiping his plate clean with a slice of bread before Daniel and I had started eating.

  Now he clattered down his knife and fork and jumped up to get pineapple juice from the cupboard. He tipped up the tin and drank straight from it before he noticed our eyes on him.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, wiping his hand against his mouth. ‘Anyone want some?’

  ‘Not now,’ laughed Daniel meaningfully, creaking with laughter again, but Adrian noticed nothing.

  All afternoon he’d been arranging for patients to go to town, which person could drive because their licence was current, and what to do about petrol because the clinic owed the shop money and the shop was the only place to buy petrol; the lack of cash was the fault of the accountant in town who was overworked and should be sacked except that he knew the entirety of the clinic’s financial history. In the end Adrian calculated how far the troopie could go on the petrol it had, and organised that his friend in town would fill a jerry can with petrol, get in a taxi with that and a thick novel, and wait at the given point for the ailing troopie.

  Against these important arrangements, table manners counted as nothing.

  ‘Don’t worry about that builder,’ said Adrian as he left the table. ‘A bad workman always blames his tools.’

  Now I’m back at our river, remembering how my father, the handyman, waits for the high tide and heads off in our boat down the river to your mother. He stands in the stern and steers our little boat with a nudge of his knees, while the boat’s prow rears up like an eager dog sniffing the way, and around him the light falls, dazed.

  ‘It’s taking him a long time to fix up her house,’ my mother says behind me on the step. She never seems these days to change out of her grey chenille dressing gown. She’s come to watch me untie the last rope for him. In my memory, her voice has a peculiar ring to it that makes me turn around, away from the light into which my father’s disappearing. I’m not reporting enough, I’m letting her down, that’s what her voice says.

  ‘There’s a lot wrong with her house,’ I lie. ‘Worse than ours.’

  She goes inside and takes up her post on our old sofa, which has broken belts underneath which Dad will fix up one day, he says.

  I’m marooned with the wrong parent. I’d much rather be visiting the glowing Diana. But I’m sorry for my mother, so I tell lies about Diana’s weatherboards falling off the side of the house, a collapsing ceiling, and windows that won’t open. ‘And Dad’s slow because he has to do things the long way round. He hasn’t got modern tools. Only what’s in their old toolshed.’

  ‘A bad workman blames his tools,’ my mother says.

  ‘Haven’t you heard that?’ asked Adrian. ‘It’s an old saying. I thought you linguists knew everything about language.’

  He looked pleased with himself.

  ‘I might dig a vegetable garden and get seedlings next trip to town,’ said Daniel. ‘We could have fresh vegetables every day, to go with Kate’s cooking.’

  ‘I’ll be gone soon,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve always meant to have a vegetable garden,’ he smiled. ‘You’ll be the inspiration to get started.’

  Creak. Creak.

  I was getting fond of his laugh. I laughed too.

  That night he lit a fire to burn off the weeds, which, he said, had spread from the nearby pastoralist’s lease.

  ‘See,’ he said. ‘I’ve already got the shape of a garden. When you’re back in the city, you can think of us eating the vegetables you inspired.’

  Chapter 10

  In the morning I was woken by a phone call ringing through the house, so it must’ve been our turn for electricity. Gillian asked if I’d like to go for a walk with her. I made my eyes focus on my watch hand. It was only six o’clock.

  ‘I’ll go and have a coffee to wake up,’ I said, not wanting to get up, but wanting to be friendly.

  ‘No time,’ she said. ‘We’ve got to walk before the sun comes up. Bring your hat in case we’re late.’

  ‘Late?’

  ‘It’s too hot out in the sun by seven.’

  Adrian had had breakfast and was gone, I could tell by the breadcrumbs and smears of butter on the bench, and the troopie keys missing from the hook. So that was why she’d felt free to ring me.

  ‘Adrian’s already hard at work,’ I told Gillian when she appeared.

  ‘He’s like that every morning when patients have to go into town,’ she said. ‘Haven’t you noticed? He was up at five knocking on everyone’s doors. No one has clocks on the wall or watches, so they need his knock. They come out of their houses immediately and silently, like sleepy ghosts, wrapped in their blankets and with their children, and sit in the troopie.’

  ‘They’re silent because they’re sick?’

  ‘They don’t do small talk, Adrian says,’ she said.

  ‘Of course.’

  I seemed to be a very slow learner.

  We walked off the road and through the space between the clinic houses. She pointed out the second doctor’s house, a little set apart from the others.

  ‘It’s a shame you can’t stay there,’ she said. ‘It has the best view. Of the desert, of course.’

  ‘I could pretend it was the sea.’

  Indeed, all around us the red desert looked like the sea in its serenely wrinkled expansiveness.

  ‘Do you remember in primary school we learned that the old explorers hoped for a great inland sea?’ said Gillian, as if she was reading my thoughts. ‘I often wonder if they were going on reports about here when it floods. The salt lakes look like sea.’

  I looked back at our footprints on the ripples of sand, like a wake on a river. Gillian carved a line in the sand with the side of her shoe. It was like making a wound in the earth’s skin. Under it was even redder soil.

  ‘All the time,’ she said, ‘the great inland sea was hiding from them, just a few metres underground.’

  Not only do I believe that our stay in the Bay of Shadows is temporary, but our stay in Australia. My father speaks with such yearning about Europe and its frescoes, I believe we’ll be leaving any day now, before the owner comes back. We’ll take Di
ana, of course, and you, and we’ll all live together happily near a fresco of richly robed figures with pale bodies and solemn faces too lofty for mundane worries. Here my daydream fades a little around the edges, like an old fresco, since I know we’ll have to live in a real house with sofas and basins and taps, and arguments between my mother and yours, but it’ll be lit by the blues and crimsons and purples and golds of a fresco, or at least, by the idea of a fresco.

  ‘When are we leaving?’ I ask my mother several times over the years.

  ‘We’ve got nowhere else to go,’ my mother says.

  Geography’s the only subject at school that interests me, and only the geography of Europe. I want to be of use in our new life and so I memorise every river in Europe in alphabetical order. I never learn the rivers of my own country.

  One day, I mention our imminent departure to Diana.

  ‘It won’t be for a while,’ she says.

  ‘How long?’ I ask.

  ‘Maybe his lifetime,’ says Diana.

  I pick at the new paint on the door he’s done recently, where a hardened dribble wanders.

  ‘People dream,’ says Diana. ‘So why don’t you fill in the time learning useful things? Like when the next running tide is. They’re the dangerous ones.’

  Gillian was changing the subject. ‘So Adrian invited you here?’

  ‘Collins did. The letter was from Collins, but with Adrian’s signature.’

  ‘He loves Collins. He’d do anything for him. Everyone loves Collins.’ She paused. ‘Except his enemies.’

  ‘Who are his enemies?’

  ‘Bruce and Craig. They think he despises his own culture.’

  Then, in amongst the paddymelons like small pumpkins, the squashed soft drink bottles and lolly wrappers and empty tins of Tom Piper stew and the clumps of blue-grey dung from the donkey and the low bushes too sparse to be scrub, often drying to a little spray of tufts clotted with red sand, Gillian found a pair of baby’s trousers. They had once been white, but now they were red.

  ‘Out here everything turns to red dust. Only the little buttons are still white,’ said Gillian. ‘Like little moons that won’t set.’

  She told me that the local people didn’t seem to view rubbish like we did. She’d seen old thongs recycled as bats for children’s balls, and old tins used as cups – just like in their old, nomadic days, she said, when everything could be recycled.

  I found a car battery, by now only vertical layers of silver lace dusted with red, like a Lilliputian building with many floors and high windows. She found two little high-heeled play shoes in pink plastic, one on its side, as if the wearer had just thrown it off.

  ‘They’re branded “Life”,’ Gillian pointed out. ‘Like a message, though I can’t work out what the message is,’ she laughed. ‘We’d better go back,’ she added. ‘Sun’s getting high.’

  The morning was becoming stripes of colour – brown in the leaf litter on the ground, mauve in the soil, green in the mulga. After the rain there were clumps of mushrooms, grey, no bigger than the nail of my little finger, with petals suspended on long slender stalks. Worms had made wriggling paths, like the meanderings of city drunks, but the movement was always onward. In that light, even the indentation of their paths raised a shadow.

  She said suddenly: ‘I come from round here.’

  ‘From the desert?’

  ‘No. Further south.’ She mentioned a town near the state border. ‘I mean, my people do. I mean –’ she was walking fast, as if she wanted to run away from the thought, get it over, get back to ordinary life, ‘my mother was told on her deathbed that her great-great –’ she counted it on her fingers and added one more, ‘great-grandmother was Aboriginal. Four generations ago. Mum died in shame! Because of that, I didn’t tell anyone. But one day Dora said, “We know you.” They can always tell. They can recite generations of families. I said nothing, I just laughed. Then last time I was here, I told Adrian. That’s why he’s mad at me.’

  ‘Because –?’

  ‘I suppose he fears that they’ll accept me more than him. But I don’t think it counts. So long ago.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ I said.

  ‘Lucky?’ She stopped in surprise, and pushed her hat back to gaze at me, though sun streamed into her eyes. ‘I wish you’d told my mum that!’

  ‘I’d love to belong.’

  She put her arm lightly around my waist.

  ‘Do you –’ I began to say, her arm warm around me while we were walking. I changed the direction of the question. ‘I find myself, despite my outrage, my fury, my exasperation, capitulating to Adrian. Do you know what I mean?’

  She laughed. ‘He’s my boss. But I know what you mean.’

  On the way home the sun was so high we had to tip our hats to shade our faces. We cut through the schoolyard and I stood on a pile of bricks and peeped in the school windows.

  I found I was looking at a library.

  ‘It’s such a mess,’ I told her. She didn’t want to dawdle.

  ‘I’ve got to go home, and get ready for work,’ she said. Her faded green t-shirt was stained with perspiration from her neck to her waist, with circles where her bra had absorbed the damp. She lifted her arms and smelled under them.

  ‘Need a shower. It’ll probably be a cold one. But come to the clinic at lunchtime. Adrian and Dr Lydia are off visiting a pastoralist and Daniel and Sister are at the outstations, so we’ll have the run of the clinic. You can look through the records. Come in with a casserole just before the break.’

  ‘Why a casserole?’

  ‘So you look like my mate, just bringing me lunch.’

  I ran up to the shop – only the shop had electricity all the time now – and over a fire I made a stew that smelled of hope. Then the electricity came back on.

  When I arrived, the clinic was empty of people and Gillian had her feet crossed on a desk.

  ‘That’s them over there,’ she said.

  In front of us were four battered grey filing cabinets, one with a tuft of yellowed paper sticking out of a drawer. They were divided into boys and girls, men and women.

  ‘Aren’t the records computerised?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re in the desert,’ she laughed. ‘We’ve never had time to do that. We’ve only got computer records of people who’ve come in to see us since we’ve had this computer. Otherwise, past patients are in the paper files.’

  ‘That means only a fraction of the settlement is on computer?’

  She looked at my face. ‘I think we’d better eat.’ She got up to find plates and forks, which she rinsed. ‘Never know how carelessly the washing up’s been done,’ she said.

  ‘If the files were made so long ago, could the boys now be men and the girls women?’

  She nodded. She waved towards the cabinets with the paper files.

  ‘You might as well tackle the difficult part first,’ she said.

  I opened the women’s paper files, typed by an old-fashioned typewriter.

  ‘Are they arranged in order of age?’

  ‘No. Usually people don’t know their age. They don’t count time the way we do. Even the month – it’s just said that they were born on January first, and someone takes a stab at the year.’

  ‘In order of names?’

  ‘That’s hard too. When you think about it, all our systems are arranged for our culture, not theirs.’

  She explained that everyone had skin names that were inherited since the Dreaming and connected each person in ritualistic and ceremonial ways to someone else, to their ancestors, to the places they were responsible for, and to the stories and songs about them. I’d heard about this in E.E. Albert’s lectures, in what now seemed a different lifetime.

  ‘We put them under their English first names. It’s all we know. They do have English surnames, but it’s often all the one surname.’

  ‘Addresses?’

  ‘Ever seen a street name here?’

  ‘What age would be old here?’ I aske
d. ‘Fiftyish?’

  ‘Forty,’ she said.

  ‘So how do I find forty-something women?’

  She looked nonplussed. ‘Could be anywhere.’

  ‘So you can’t ask questions of these files?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Hasn’t anyone tried to? Like, what diseases are the most common? What do people die of? What age do they die? Don’t government surveys ask that?’

  ‘The way we keep records makes research impossible. Your research, for instance. Most desert clinics I’ve worked in, they’ve only got these paper records.’

  After half an hour of sifting through the papers, I’d found six women born forty or so years ago.

  ‘Where would the other women be?’ I asked.

  I read out their names and she listened to them, munching thoughtfully.

  ‘Do you think, if she’s dying, her relatives would’ve brought her in, so she’d be on the new records, the computer records?’ I asked.

  She reached over and helped herself to more meaty pieces from the casserole.

  ‘Try them.’

  ‘Can I ask questions of this system?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t that sort of software. Clinics in the Territory don’t usually have that sort of software.’

  ‘Aren’t they supposed to?’

  ‘No, we’re supposed to have this useless sort.’

  We sat back and gazed at each other, damp with heat and frustration.

  ‘Her family mightn’t believe in Western medicine,’ offered Gillian.

  ‘But they believed enough in Western stuff to want us to record her.’

  ‘That’s different. They’d appreciate what a recording of a song can do – the grandkids can listen to it, all that sort of thing. Whites are sometimes considered a bank. They might’ve asked because the family, whoever they are, doesn’t have a recorder that works. Kids might have trashed it. Technology here gets dust in it and grinds to a halt. Worse, I’m told, than water. Anything could’ve happened.’

  She pushed her plate aside and helped me search through the computer records, looking by gender and age. But there was no sign of an older woman who was very sick.