by Sue Woolfe
‘You are not going to kill him,’ roared Sister.
Boney, still stalking his prey, paused long enough to shout again, not to Sister but to Nick: ‘I kill you.’
He continued to stalk his prey and Nick continued to retreat.
Sister boomed: ‘That nurse looked after your brother.’
Unheeding, he advanced on Nick.
‘I kill you,’ he shouted at Nick.
‘If you kill him, he can’t nurse you any more,’ shouted Sister.
Boney’s steps paused, just momentarily, and his head jerked over his shoulder to the silly fat woman.
‘I kill him,’ shouted Boney that time to her, but also to the desert, to the silence. ‘I not kill him dead.’
Understanding came to me. I jumped up, though no one noticed my sudden movement, and edged closer to Sister.
‘He doesn’t mean it,’ I shouted.
No one noticed a shout from another silly white woman.
Nick, on the other hand, hadn’t glanced at Sister, hadn’t slowed down, and suddenly he had gained the door of the clinic, which was swung open by Gillian, who’d been inside watching every moment. Boney hadn’t calculated on this. Nick ducked inside, and Gillian banged the door shut after him and locked it.
Boney paused.
Sister registered Nick’s escape and turned back to Boney.
‘You should be ashamed,’ she roared.
Boney’s powerful body almost collapsed, after all that he’d demanded of it, after all the bravado of a young man. He leaned on his nulla nulla as if it was a walking stick, panting, remembering that after all, he was an old man.
‘You shame,’ he cried. ‘You white shame. You shame! Shame to you!’
‘Me?’ Sister’s voice squeaked, but she forced it into a roar again. ‘I’m the Sister here. I say what goes on here. I diverted the plane to save your brother. I saved your brother!’
‘You shame,’ cried Boney, recovering a little in his anguish, now struggling to stand erect and upright.
‘What have I got to be ashamed of?’ shouted Sister.
‘You take kids, say bye bye to my brother. Here!’
He banged the troopie door with his nulla nulla.
‘Kids. Kids here.’
The insistence was unmistakable. He was banging the cabin seat through the still-open door. ‘Here.’
Sister, despite her years in the bush, foolishly imagined that Boney’s rage was something like hers. Or perhaps it was because she’d spent years making people in her own image. She breathed out, she beamed that, despite it all, this black man had noticed her white rules, had respected them.
‘Yes, it was wrong. Absolutely wrong. Nick broke the rules,’ she said still loudly but in conciliatory tones, so that everyone could hear. ‘Kids aren’t allowed to ride in the troopie when it’s an ambulance, you’d know that and you’re right. No kids in the ambulance. I’d already reprimanded him and I’ll do it again. No kids in the ambulance.’
‘No,’ shouted Boney.
He struggled with the impossible white language, with these uncomprehending white people.
‘Skeleton my brother. We elders –’ he pointed to the sky, surely to the plane now winging its way to the hospital. ‘My brother and me, elders. My brother, dead. You take kids to plane here –’ He banged the door again. ‘You don’t take me.’
It was as if the air was stilled. As if the whole community bowed its head at the way he’d been shamed. He was spent. He turned, and limped up the red street to my house, past the group of young men who’d been watching respectfully, past the dogs, past the open doors. Everyone looked down, no one peeped out, and no one watched his retreating back as he stumbled with the nulla nulla. Not even the dogs called to each other. Even the desert was in awe of him.
But Sister was not one to be gripped by awe. She banged loudly on the locked clinic door.
‘Nick! Come out this second and park this troopie where it’s supposed to be!’ She yelled. ‘Right now. Come out!’
I found my legs shaking and went back to sit on the bench.
After a pause it was Gillian who emerged, not Nick. She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t look at Sister. She walked past us both, intent only on re-parking a troopie that was in the wrong spot. She didn’t acknowledge Sister and, for once, Sister decided not to notice.
I went back to Gillian’s house, and, thankful we had electricity, made lunch carefully, roasting chicken legs from the shop, and steaming frozen spinach. But when Gillian came home, she merely toyed with the food.
She turned on the TV, although there were only talk shows.
‘Sister’s demanded Adrian come back from town,’ she said. ‘Not that it affects you.’
We looked at the TV because it was easier than talking.
Sister knocked on the door.
‘Adrian’s granted us a plane into Alice Springs. We’ll leave mid-afternoon, so we get to Alice in the light.’ She saw me listening. ‘This is how you teach these people. Leave them, let them think about it. I’ve contacted Adrian and he agrees.’
‘Can we stay at a hotel with a swimming pool?’ asked Gillian.
‘Of course. Pack your bikini.’ She paused, then startled us both by adding, ‘I might pack mine.’ It was very easy to forget she was our age.
‘But what if there’s an accident here?’ asked Gillian.
Sister was roused to anger.
‘People have to learn not to be violent. Nick could’ve been killed!’
‘No clinic because of one man?’ I asked.
‘There are many men here. You saw them standing around. Not one of them moved to defend Nick. So we’re showing them. It’s solidarity.’
‘They mightn’t have read their Karl Marx,’ I dared.
I was rewarded with a quick but wry smile from Gillian behind Sister’s back.
‘Their what?’
Why was I such a coward in front of this woman? When I argued with her, my voice clotted, even my brain almost clotted in terror.
I said, trying desperately not to sound as if I learned it in my one week’s reading: ‘Boney said “kill” and then said he didn’t mean “kill dead”. There are lots of words for “hit”.’
She was so large and trenchant and vehement. But I struggled on, my voice thick with daring.
‘What I’m trying to say is, if English isn’t your first language, maybe your fourth or fifth, which you only use on official occasions, and you’ve been lying in wait for a psychopath, while your brother, the elder of the community, is dying, maybe in all that turmoil, you’d get your English confused. They’ve got sixty-seven words —’
‘What’s confusing about threatening murder?’ she shouted.
‘I’m saying that maybe he was only threatening to hit Nick. And he got his English mixed.’
She was one to recover fast.
‘He was going to hit Nick? He was going to hit one of my staff? So you’re telling me that my staff have to put up with being hit? I haven’t time for this nonsense.’ She sniffed. ‘Go back to your books.’
She turned away.
‘Gillian, come back to the clinic and help close it down.’
I told Gillian I’d drive them all to the airstrip. If I didn’t, Sister would’ve had to ask a local person to bring the troopie back, but she wasn’t talking to the locals, so she reluctantly agreed. Gillian told me that with an averted face. She didn’t want to be in trouble for being my friend.
I picked Sister up at the clinic, and then, because by now she also wasn’t talking to me, she told Gillian to direct me back to her house. I was surprised, because Sister wasn’t the sort to leave something behind. I pulled up at her gate. She went inside and emerged leading a young white teenager I hadn’t glimpsed before, who followed her to the back of the troopie and clambered inside. The girl greeted no one, though everyone greeted her as if she was a much younger child, and was eager to be helpful stacking her many bags along the seats – a computer bag and four ba
ckpacks in various sizes and shades of pink, all labelled. Until that moment, I imagined that Sister had no family.
Daniel, sitting beside me in the cabin, didn’t meet my eyes. Dr Lydia gazed out at the desert. Sister held a sole prim backpack on her lap, as did everyone else.
Gillian had forgotten to follow Sister’s instruction to bring the airstrip gate keys, so despite the frigid atmosphere, the barbed-wire fence around the airstrip made us work together pulling the lower and upper wires apart for each other in a diamond shape. Nick’s children ran around, delighted at the game. Sister declined to let me part the barbed wire for her.
‘Gillian?’ she ordered.
But she couldn’t persuade her daughter to step through the diamond shape. She was forced to explain, though not looking at anyone in particular: ‘She doesn’t trust diamond shapes.’
So we all pulled up the wire more or less in a rectangular shape, and then Nick’s wife thought to step through herself, turned and held out her dainty hands for the girl’s. The girl glanced up at the kind face gravely, deciding whether to trust it or not, despite the shape of the wire being so recently a diamond. Everything about the girl was grave, her face raw and shiny with scrubbing, her hair squeezed tightly into a ponytail so not a strand would disobey. For a second I imagined Sister at her age. Then the girl made her decision to trust the barbed wire, and stepped through. She looked down again at the ground, every second in our company a torture, clutching, white-knuckled, the brightest pink computer bag. We all picked up her other bags.
The airstrip was a long stretch of tarmac hedged on either side by tall weeds. There was no building, just a box to hold the flares that lit up the strip at night. Two black women with babies strolled down from the settlement to watch the plane come in. A toddler swung a gecko by its golden tail. His mother laughed, proud in front of everybody that he’d caught his first animal. Sister turned her back ostentatiously.
‘What if Thatcher chooses tonight to come?’ I whispered to Gillian as they lined up to get weighed, on ordinary household scales, to check that the plane could hold them all. As I spoke, Sister stepped on the scales, sending the indicator whizzing all around its clock face.
‘A wonder it didn’t break,’ murmured Dr Lydia.
Then it was the turn of Sister’s daughter. She’d been hanging back, letting everyone else go before her. She obviously didn’t trust scales either, gazing at them wide-eyed as if the machine was a living thing. Her mother pleaded, the pilot explained uselessly that his regulations said he wasn’t to fly until everyone was weighed, but again it was Nick’s wife who made a game of it, taking the girl’s hand and standing beside her on the scales. They almost toppled, and everyone laughed, including the girl, her face suddenly beautiful. Because they were both so tiny, somehow they both fitted. The pilot did a quick calculation – he had already weighed Nick’s wife – and the moment passed.
‘She knows how to manage her,’ Dr Lydia whispered to me, as Sister supervised the pilot, to his irritation, about weighing the bags. ‘She’s a specialist in autism.’
‘She was working out here?’ I asked, surprised.
Dr Lydia nodded.
‘Being a wife,’ she said, pulling her mouth downwards.
The pilot paused at the girl’s multitude of pink bags.
‘Sorry,’ said Sister.
The pilot sighed. ‘We’ll manage,’ he said.
‘Keep staying in my house if you like,’ Gillian whispered. She resisted kissing me goodbye. ‘Just a handshake,’ she mouthed.
‘Or stay in mine,’ said Dr Lydia, not whispering. ‘And keep the lights down. You’ll be safe from the madman if no one’s quite sure whether you’ve gone off with us.’ She took me aside. ‘Warn Adrian he’s got enemies in high places,’ she whispered. ‘I have no love for him but – forgive me – I can see you do.’
I flushed, even more so when she touched my hand gently.
‘Are you coming back?’ I whispered.
‘Into this hornet’s nest?’ she answered, without whispering.
Sister decided against noticing and became preoccupied in taking her daughter’s hand and coaxing her into the plane. Nick’s wife took her other hand.
‘The plane’s our friend – remember?’ I heard Sister tell her daughter.
Her voice had a new tone – a mixture of gentleness, sadness, pleading and embarrassment, almost as if she was a child and feeling the grown-ups would blame her for something she’d done, or omitted to do. For the first time, I felt she could almost be my sister.
Chapter 13
I examined all the clinic houses. There was a certain satisfaction in weighing up the merits of each house; how soft the beds were, how effective the air conditioning was when the electricity worked, what bottles of sauce were in the fridges. At last, feeling defiant, I chose the forbidden house, the unused second doctor’s house. I discovered it was already set up with bedding and kitchen utensils. I was relieved it didn’t have chintz curtains. I sat in the living room with the blinds down and only a torch musing over what I’d seen. At the end of the porch there were slats of lattice, and, when I peeped out the door, people in the dusty road seemed between the slats like puppets, for the slats disjointed their normally graceful movements.
About midnight, I heard a noise. I checked the wind’s shadows in the yard past the mulberry tree drooping with fruit. But it wasn’t the wind; a pale shirt gleamed almost blue amongst the waist-high grass of the front garden, then a figure moved to the porch. I gasped. But there was a knock. It was Adrian. I opened the door. He kissed my cheek.
‘I’m sorry this all blew up,’ he said.
‘If you would only tell me which old woman I’m here to record, I could get out of here,’ I said.
There was a pause, he said nothing, he didn’t react. A muscle in his sunburnt neck twitched. I wondered if he could hear the twitching of my heart, since it felt as if a wind was blowing across it, like the wind across the desert out the back door, standing everything to attention, letting it fall, rounding it up again.
‘I had to go into town,’ he said. ‘After all, you’re not my staff. You’ve only just come here, of your own free will, sent by your university. And I didn’t really believe the psychopath would risk coming out. I always thought Dora was worrying unnecessarily. I didn’t think he’d dare. And I thought, maybe you’d learn something, living with Dora.’
I dared to ask, now that the desert wind had blown against my heart: ‘You always know what’s going to happen?’
He ignored that.
‘Come back home,’ he said.
His voice could still infuse my heart with irresistible yearning. He was Diana’s son and she’d enchanted us all – except my mother.
But I tried to resist.
‘Just show me the singer,’ I said.
He left.
For the next two days I worked inside the second doctor’s house, trying to make sense of the sentences I’d recorded – grammatical sense, at least. By now I’d become convinced that finding my singer depended on my work, not on Adrian’s help. I found myself staring out the window abstractedly, the one that looked into the street, and it was Daniel who I hoped would return from town. The psychopath didn’t arrive, and all was quiet except in my nightmares. I couldn’t remember them afterwards, except that the spaces of the empty house seemed to ring with my cries. At dawn on the third morning, I heard a troopie’s engine switched on, then off. I peered out. I knew that Dora’s family needed to go to town for a doctor so Adrian was probably taking them in and bringing back the new change of medical staff, and Daniel. The fear of the psychopath must be over.
I imagined Adrian ripping open a packet of Tim Tams in the lonely kitchen, unscrewing a large bottle of Coke so he’d stay awake on that long red road. I thought of that long red road, his fast driving, his regular blow-outs, his rollover. If he was taken to hospital, I thought, I’d lose any chance of finding out who he was.
I packed my nightie and m
y few clothes into a bag. I walked down towards Adrian’s house. Outside the gate, a troopie was parked, now with the engine running. I checked inside to see if it was scattered with roast chicken wrappings and empty plastic drink bottles, the sure sign that someone had just driven back from town. But it was clean, so someone must be setting out. As I came through the gate, a figure emerged from the shadows on our verandah, just outside our front door, a blanket piled beside her, as if she was about to travel. The figure turned away as she saw me, as if she’d been merely examining the clothesline in the front yard. But there was nothing to examine, only the droop of the empty line, and beyond that, the cyclone fence with its ruffle of rubbish.
It was Dora.
We hadn’t seen each other since she’d visited me at Gillian’s, and now she was between me and my front door. I halted. Something about her seemed too intense, imminent and brooding for me to pass by with an English ‘excuse me’. But my background, unlike hers, was full of small talk, crafted especially to ease over jagged situations. I’d observed that, for these people, to turn away was often a sign of discreetly absenting oneself from a situation or conversation, but I was still too European. I couldn’t mimic another culture, I couldn’t mimic their subtle ways. I simply couldn’t sidle past her. Small talk jolted out of me.
‘Off to town?’ I came up with. The words, perhaps the English silliness of them, acted like a lasso, and brought her to me, forcing her presence.
In the grey light, there was no flash of her eyes. She was looking down, examining the cement on the verandah. She seemed unable, at that moment, to move out of her culture and return the small talk, although I’d seen her at other times remember how to be again the young lubra, as she’d have been called in her youth, surrounded by English small talk in the vast kitchens and shadowy corridors and richly furnished rooms of a pastoralist’s house as she swept and cleaned. When I’d watched her speak in English, I’d had the impression that her whole being was twisted, even dwarfed in the banal murmurings of a foreign culture. It was probably why her English was reluctant, though competent.
