The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  He took my arm playfully.

  ‘Did you like that, linguist?’

  ‘It’s appalling!’

  ‘I meant I named the era when people used “lubra” and “gin”.’

  I think of you at the end of the jetty, your shirt too short for your growing body. Your shirts can never keep up with your growth, we can never keep up with you, you’re so upright, slender, alone, defiant, self-righteous.

  I shade my eyes from the sun, anxious on the grass of your mother’s lawn, the lawn she insists on growing though it’s next to the crackling mudflats.

  You’re about to dive in the river.

  ‘Don’t,’ I plead. You’ve told me there was a shark circling the jetty that afternoon.

  Your face is tight. You dive in.

  I sit on the rocks and wait for you to surface. You know I’m waiting. You’ll stay under as long as you can, to frighten me, hoping you’ll frighten us all, hoping you’ll have an effect on us, hoping we’ll change the way you want us to change, waiting for the high tide for my father to take me home. Hoping I’ll never be sent around to spy on your mother and my father again, there’ll be no need because your mother will give him up.

  As we opened the front door, I heard the gate creaking behind us.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ said Daniel kindly to me. ‘You have first bathroom.’

  I’d just squeezed toothpaste on my brush when there was a knock on our door. The bathroom was close to the front door, so I put my brush down on the sink and found I was ushering Dora and Boney in.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ I said. I looked out into the blackness they’d come from, but I saw nothing up and down the street, just houses sleeping under the streetlights.

  Inside, they were both already sitting on the sofa.

  ‘You’d probably like to go to bed,’ I said. ‘There are your mattresses and clean sheets. Will I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Kate, we had no dinner,’ Dora said.

  I was tired and thinking slowly. ‘Because you had no electricity?’

  Adrian bustled into the kitchen in an overcoat that served as a dressing gown, and gave me a scorching look.

  ‘Why aren’t we looking after them?’

  ‘We ate all the kangaroo,’ I remembered.

  ‘We’ve got bacon and eggs and toast. And electricity for about twenty minutes. Hurry up.’

  He turned on the TV for them. They sat on the broken sofa. He came into the kitchen and watched me cook.

  ‘I’m hurrying,’ I said. I turned away, angry with my sleepiness.

  ‘The bacon’s burning,’ he pointed out, rescuing it.

  They were hungry and came to the table as soon as I slid the eggs onto the plates.

  ‘What are we going to drink?’ asked Dora mopping up the last scrape of egg with her toast. She didn’t look at me as she said it, so in my sleepy state I took it as a philosophical question about humanity and its thirst. I worked out slowly that it was part of their politeness, not to ask me directly.

  ‘I forgot,’ I said. ‘Forgive me.’

  So I made mugs of tea and served it. Adrian disappeared.

  ‘Where’s the milk?’ Dora asked into the room. ‘Where’s the sugar?’

  This time I knew immediately it wasn’t a philosophical question. Daniel and I didn’t take milk or sugar in tea. It took me a while to find a packet of sugar in the pantry, and a packet of UHT milk.

  As I forced my eyes to stay open, I saw that Boney lifted his mug with perfectly shaped fingers, his silky skin burnished to almost purple black. Against the ordinary laminex table, his arm was moulded perfectly like a Greek god’s, the way a young white gum bough seemed moulded to perfection against a blue sky. From somewhere, perhaps his stockman days, he’d learned to keep his little finger aloft, though he pushed aside the small bread and butter plate as a contrivance he didn’t need, and buttered his toast on the tabletop.

  ‘Tea,’ he said, indicating his cup, which was by then drained. I watched him struggle with memory, and then add: ‘Please.’

  I was moved by his struggle, and made another pot.

  ‘Get my blanket from the verandah,’ said Dora to the room.

  I went outside into the stillness. Dora’s blanket was bundled up where she left it when she came in, perhaps out of politeness.

  When I brought it in, she said to the room: ‘Mend my blouse.’

  She held up her strong arm to show a rip in her blouse, the threads almost plaintive, barely covering her smooth black skin. I paused, struggling with myself. I reasoned: she might have no thread or needle in her house. I always had to search for needle and thread in my own house. Besides, no one might ever have taught her to sew. But I also thought: no one’s going to order me to mend clothes.

  ‘In the morning,’ I said. ‘We’re due to lose our light,’ I added, trying to make my refusal more amiable. ‘And you’ll need another blouse to wear while I do it. Otherwise my needle might scratch you.’

  She said nothing.

  I pointed to the corner, to change the subject.

  ‘Pillows?’ I offered.

  But no one responded. Perhaps the word was unfamiliar. Perhaps they didn’t use them.

  ‘Good night,’ I said, hopefully. I went to the bathroom to finish brushing my teeth. In the heat of the night, the toothpaste on the bristles was already dried up.

  Next morning, I heard the troopie roaring outside, and saw the figures of patients waiting. I quickly dressed and found Adrian eating cereal in the kitchen. He told me today was the farewell lunch in Alice Springs for the lover of his artist friend. I felt bereft; I quickly turned aside, as tears sprang into my eyes. ‘What about me?’ I wanted to say. Through the window I saw Daniel raking the ashes in the vegetable garden, making black stripes in the red soil.

  ‘If you get me a bucket of water,’ Daniel said when I went out, ‘your garden will be just about ready. Ask Adrian to bring some dynamic lifter out from Alice.’

  ‘I’ll ask him nothing,’ I said.

  Daniel was preoccupied digging a ditch around the perimeter of the planned garden. I was to fill it in with the water. Soon he was standing on an island, which shrank as the sides caved in. I laughed, forgetting my worries.

  ‘You’ll have to jump to safety!’ I laughed.

  He dug a little more, then, as his island shrank even more, he leaped, hands held above his head like a star.

  ‘Tonight your garden will be ready for planting,’ he said.

  He told me he had to go to one of the outstations today. Patients were waiting. Adrian, ready to leave, was watching us, hands on his hips. With Daniel nearby, I felt braver.

  ‘What about the psychopath?’ I burst out.

  ‘My friend needs me,’ Adrian said. ‘Besides,’ he added cheerfully, ‘he won’t attack a white.’

  ‘There’s no knowing what a psychopath will do! I might just be an innocent bystander.’

  ‘You’ve got the nulla nulla. It’s beside the front door.’

  ‘She’s no match for a psychopath, even with a nulla nulla,’ said Daniel. His charcoal-sketched eyebrows were raised at Adrian. ‘I don’t think she should be left alone,’ he dared to say.

  But Adrian laughed, strode out the yard, gunned the motor and disappeared.

  ‘Gillian’s at home if you need her,’ said Daniel. ‘She’s got today off.’ He drove off in the other troopie.

  Dora had left the house, but I’d scarcely put the kettle on when she returned and plopped down on the sofa. She put a bulging plastic bag on the floor.

  ‘Make me tea.’

  ‘I’m just about to make a pot,’ I said, determined to be a better hostess than last night.

  I busied myself in the kitchen – luckily we had electricity – but popped my head around the kitchen door.

  ‘Teach me how to talk your way,’ I said.

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘I’ll record you talking,’ I said. I ran to my bedroom and brought back my recorder. Sh
e eyed it.

  ‘I need money for my family,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you twenty dollars an hour.’

  I was thrilled and proud. At last I felt like a linguist. I’d be able to tell E.E. Albert, I’d be able to say I paid for the language, just like the fieldworkers of old I’d read about (I hadn’t, I’d only heard of them in one of her lectures).

  But she was looking out the window, which I then saw was hung with red dust and the redder nests of wasps. Cobwebs in the corners of the glass were red hammocks for brown insects. Around the windows there was red dust on each row of besser blocks.

  She kept staring out the window, as if at something she’d never seen before. A warm breeze lifted the dust on the road outside and jangled the gum leaves. A group of women walked by, their arms around each other in a lacework of conviviality. I guessed that the silence meant something – perhaps that I should offer more money. I offered thirty dollars and, when she still stared out the window, forty dollars.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  With her I learned the words for colours by showing her things of various hues, and discovered to my surprise that there were only four: red, white, green and black – no blues, no yellows, no pinks, let alone turquoise and purple. She taught me the word for home, which literally meant camp – so that when she said ‘Go home’ in Djemiranga she was actually saying ‘Go back to camp’. I was charmed by that discovery; she didn’t return my smile. We began on the names of relatives – grandfather, grandmother, auntie, uncle. This was much more complicated than I’d anticipated. It depended on whose auntie, whose grandparent, which bloodline or no bloodline. Even the word for the simple English ‘we’ seemed to have thirty variations, depending on who was speaking and who was included. Then I was astounded to find that there was no word for ‘or’.

  ‘How do you weigh up arguments without an “or”?’ I blurted.

  She looked down.

  I wished I’d bitten my tongue.

  ‘Do you know any songs?’ I asked to change the subject, or rather, to bring it nearer to my pressing concern. ‘Women’s songs?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  She was about to burst into song.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. I started the recorder again. She sang for several minutes. I was elated, thinking: Look at me, E.E. Albert; I know how to do this, after all! I’ve got it! I can go home now!

  ‘This must be a very old song,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘From your great-great-great-grandmother?’

  She looked down again. Perhaps I was embarrassing her.

  ‘Maybe from the Dreaming? Is it the “Poor Thing” song?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  I was a little deflated.

  ‘I’m looking for a woman who sings the “Poor Thing” song,’ I said.

  She looked down again, and then glanced up at me.

  ‘I go to the shop for food for my family now with the money,’ she said.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, getting up. Perhaps I didn’t know how to do this at all.

  As she left, I noticed the bulging plastic bag was still slumped where she left it.

  I hurried after her.

  ‘Do you need this?’ I asked.

  ‘My washing,’ she said. ‘Do my washing. Hang it out.’

  Her family’s clothes seemed too intimate to touch. But we had electricity for the moment, and a machine, which she probably didn’t have, so I had to do it, and do it now. I couldn’t put it off while I dithered. I carried the bag to the laundry and, holding on to the plastic, dumped the bagful in the tub. I put in detergent and switched on the machine.

  But my mind was whirling. I went over to Gillian’s house and asked her to make me a cup of tea.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked.

  I slumped on her sofa like the plastic bag of dirty washing. I noticed how calm the room was.

  ‘Where’s the joey?’ I asked.

  ‘Adrian took it into town to a wildlife refuge. At least that was what he said he’d do. For all I know, he might let it out into the bush. He’s a law unto himself. You’d have noticed.’

  She poured hot water into the mugs.

  ‘I’ve got problems with my perfect man,’ she said.

  We both sipped our tea miserably. I was too anxious to enquire about her problems, and told her what had just happened to me.

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ I wailed. ‘I’ve got to make up for 200 years of massacres, murders, rapes, genocide, slavery, humiliation, contempt. The destruction of a culture. Two hundred years of white bastardry.’

  ‘That’s a tall order,’ said Gillian.

  ‘From the moment our boats arrived in this country, we tried to wipe them off the face of the earth. I’ve got to be different.’

  Her letterbox mouth opened to confide in me.

  ‘She bosses me, too, even in the clinic. I keep hoping Sister won’t notice that I’m doing exactly what Dora says!’

  ‘I should look after her. I should be thrilled to make her food. I should be thrilled to mend her blouse. I should be thrilled to hang out her washing. I should do everything she asks, and more,’ I said.

  ‘But people don’t respect you if they can order you around,’ said Gillian.

  ‘But these people? Do we know them? How do they really think, these people who have thirty words for “we”?’

  ‘I wish I’d been taught the language of my great-great-great-great-grandmother,’ Gillian mused. ‘Then we’d understand –’ she waved her hands in the air, ‘all this.’

  ‘I have to knuckle under,’ I said. ‘For the sake of our race, and hers.’

  ‘Why don’t you come over and stay in my spare room?’ suggested Gillian.

  ‘I’ll go right now and get my things!’ I said.

  ‘I’ll walk you over,’ she said.

  As we crossed the street, she added: ‘Do you think she mightn’t mean to order you – do you think it only sounds like an order? You’re the linguist and all, but once when I complained about Dora’s bossing, Collins said that to them it doesn’t seem rude.’

  Her words had a ring of truth, that awful sense of truth when you see beneath the surface to how complicated and contradictory the world is. She was right: I was a linguist, and Collins was my leader. It probably was a language misunderstanding. I stopped in the middle of the road, bowed.

  ‘But all languages have polite ways of asking for something – last night she was so polite, it was bewildering. Today, she only had to think: what’s the polite way to say this? But politeness might mean something different for us than for them, this mightn’t be about politeness at all …’ I wound down. ‘Maybe I should try again,’ I said.

  I stopped just outside my gate.

  ‘I’ll stay and protect them. How am I going to feel if this psychopath hurts them?’

  ‘How are you going to feel if he hurts you?’ Gillian asked.

  ‘If I’m hurt, that’s the price a white has to pay,’ I said grandly.

  ‘You’re not going to be much of a protector with that nulla nulla. Can you even lift it?’ She paused while I nodded no. ‘Just give them the run of the house. The house is what will protect them.’

  As I went inside, I heard that the washing machine had finished, or perhaps the electricity had cut out. Dora was at the kitchen door, her shopping in the stiff, large brown paper bags that the shop provided. I was just about to tell her that I’d start cooking dinner right away when she said: ‘Hang out my washing.’

  Gillian stuck her finger in my back again, a reminding jab. Because of that finger, I couldn’t let myself down, not in front of Gillian. I pointed in the direction of the front yard.

  ‘Dora, the line’s out there.’ Then I told her that I was going to stay with Gillian. ‘But please use the house as much as you like.’

  I held out my key.

  ‘Please lock up when you leave and when you stay through the nigh
t, and even in the day. So you’re safe.’

  Dora accepted the key silently. I couldn’t tell if she was angry or surprised. Then we turned and left.

  ‘You did right,’ said Gillian as we crossed the road again.

  ‘But I let everyone down!’

  I’d barely unpacked my bag in Gillian’s spare room when there was a knock on the door. I heard Dora asking for me. She was there with her granddaughter, Wendy. She held out my door key.

  ‘You lock up,’ she said. Gillian, still at the doorway with me, jabbed me again in the back.

  I swallowed.

  My mind was a tumble of memories; of my mother, of Diana, of the river. Of you. Of my grief at Diana’s death, my grief at my mother’s. Of my anger at them all. I’m a little child again on the river, wanting to sail down the silver river away from my father’s sexual passion, from Diana’s sexual passion, from my mother’s despair, from the terrible curse and threat of sex.

  I didn’t know what to do, how to think about Dora, how to think about anything. Nothing in the city, nothing in the paltry life I’d led, nothing in what I’d read, in all the movies I’d seen, nothing in my grief about you, nothing, nothing had prepared me to know what to do. Then words came.

  ‘Wendy,’ I said, turning to her granddaughter, ‘would you mind going back to my house and locking up for your grandma?’

  Chapter 12

  I woke to morning light through the curtains, and remembered that I was in Gillian’s house. I stretched out my legs under the sheet.

  Someone, probably Adrian, for he seemed to keep close control on all matters except paperwork, had chosen for that room old-fashioned chintz curtains with swirls of pink and yellow roses in full bloom, gathered like the long skirt of a giantess onto the waist of a curtain rod and falling in folds to the carpet. It was a strange choice for a man in the middle of the desert to make, I thought dreamily, and suddenly I was wide awake, remembering Diana’s chintz curtains in her sunroom looking out to the river.