by Sue Woolfe
We wandered in the sort of silence that’s almost love. I pointed out to him a festoon in the russet soil of turquoise weed and, hidden in a crevice from the sun, a tiny yellow flower.
‘Most flowers out here are yellow or purple,’ he said. ‘I wonder why.’
I wondered if he missed the rigours of science, now that he was engulfed in Adrian’s chaos. I didn’t know how to ask him, not yet. There seemed so much I wanted to ask him.
He pointed out a bush that whirred by my legs.
‘It looks like wild lavender,’ he said. He bent and pulled at its leaves. ‘It smells like lavender. Here –’ He shared the leaves with me, holding them up to my nose. ‘Do you think it is lavender?’
We both stroked the leaves in a sort of wonder. Green budgerigars in a flock flew by so unexpectedly they seemed like a sudden clotting of the air, and so low, Daniel almost had to duck.
‘I don’t know,’ I said softly. ‘Perhaps.’
He threw the leaves away. It was like throwing the moment away, resolutely. He’d made a decision, I dimly thought, about me, about our connection, probably to do with his loyalty to Adrian. But I had no idea if he felt any attraction to me, except that his hand returned to his side when it could so easily have strayed to mine. He moved in respectful silence with Adrian and with me, a man, it seemed, without ambition for himself. It felt ennobling to be with him. I became less anxious, less self-engrossed, less fixed on the past. Some people are ennobling, and I hoped, that in being near him, he could ennoble me.
The budgerigars lifted away up into the sky, all the while crying or perhaps singing, in a swoop of green bellies.
Daniel mentioned he had to be up early, to go back to one of the outstations. He had to help a visiting dentist, and take Tillie, an old person, to respite care in Alice Springs.
‘How can you help a dentist?’ I asked. ‘Pass him the drill? Give injections?’
‘I just talk people into having their teeth fixed,’ he laughed.
‘Aren’t they eager to have them fixed?’
‘Does anyone ever want to go to the dentist?’ he asked.
‘There aren’t appointments booked?’ I asked.
‘I told them last week, I tried to book them – not times of course, just “after breakfast”, “before lunch” – but who knows when lunch is, or breakfast, or if a meal is going to happen?’
I walked on, musing on how difficult it was to stop thinking in a city way.
‘Could she be out there, my old lady?’ I asked.
He said hesitantly: ‘They’re very traditional there because they still hunt. They haven’t a shop to buy food.’ Then he took a quick breath, and looked away.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘Can I come?’ I asked. ‘I could help you find patients.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Please don’t ask me to go against Adrian.’
We walked into the deepening darkness.
‘Adrian doesn’t want you there,’ he said at last. ‘He told me that specifically. He doesn’t want them studied.’
‘I’m here because he invited me,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he said.
He deflected to something that was for him an easier subject.
‘Have you done something to offend him?’
‘I offend him,’ I answered. ‘Gillian tells me she does too.’
Every day I examined my disguise. The blonde roots of my hair weren’t showing through yet, my eyebrows were still black, my skin was only slightly less bronzed, and I was careful to wear my spectacles every day.
He laughed fondly.
‘Gillian’s a mischief-maker – in the nicest way, of course.’
Walking behind Daniel, I found a bird’s nest, flattened by its fall but still intact. I carried it home two-fingered, fearing lice. It seemed like an artwork, with its lacing and twining and weaving. It brought to me a sense of the extraordinary; like a creature on the moon might feel when it came across signs of humans.
‘My girlfriend says she’s coming out the weekend after next.’
Loss hit me like a thud.
‘Your girlfriend?’
‘I hope you’ll still be here. She lives in Alice Springs. Sometimes I see her when I go in.’
‘Sometimes?’
It was ridiculous, this sense of loss. I’d come all this way, this journey after all these years to find Adrian, and now I wanted to monopolise any stray man who happened to share his house?
‘She’s an artist. She wants me to leave here – but I can’t.’
So this is why he’d held back with me – and I’d thought he’d been attracted to me but was loyal to Adrian! How vain, how self-engrossed I’d been!
‘That’s hard,’ I managed to say.
As we crossed the road to home, the streetlights were already on.
‘We’ve got electricity for a while,’ I said, deliberately steadying my voice despite my shock that seemed to be exploding along my veins.
‘Bruce confided in me he doesn’t know how to fix it,’ said Daniel.
I managed a laugh. ‘You make even Bruce trust you?’
‘He’s lonely. It’s said three sorts of whites come out here – the mad, the mercenaries and the missionaries.’
‘Which are you?’ I teased, to cover my sadness.
‘Look – a scorpion,’ was all he said.
It plodded over the road with heavy feet. I told Daniel it had the determined fury of a headmistress in heavy shoes marching down a school corridor to catch a girl who’d rolled down her socks to show off her ankles.
‘You were a girl like that, weren’t you?’ said Daniel a little wistfully.
‘Was your girlfriend?’
He laughed, a little embarrassed.
‘No – or at least, I don’t think so.’
I was pleased that he wasn’t sure.
‘What’s her name?’
‘Anastasia.’
I burst out: ‘She must be beautiful with a name like Anastasia.’
‘Very,’ he said, in a voice no warmer than usual. ‘Waist-length blonde hair, fair-skinned.’
I wanted to childishly blurt: But I’m like that too! But she probably had curling golden locks, a sculptured, symmetrical face with eyes blue as the sea, eyelashes like stars, full lips that demanded to be kissed, a slender build with long glamorous legs and full breasts – did she have full breasts? I’d begun to lose faith in the ability of large breasts to guarantee love. Perhaps I wasn’t sure about her breasts.
‘And her painting?’
‘She’s good – she paints traditional landscapes. Her hero’s Turner – she does wild, marvellous skies, with the sort of clouds you could walk in to find lands that no one’s ever known.’ I could tell from a dreamy note in his voice that at that moment he was with Anastasia, considering the way she saw skies. ‘She feels very unfashionable, she can’t compete against all the concentration on Aboriginal art here. She wants to leave the Territory, go south.’
We always took our shoes off at the door.
‘Let’s make dinner right now before we lose the electricity,’ I said.
‘I’m a misfit, probably,’ he said as he chopped vegetables and I browned kangaroo steaks I’d bought frozen from the shop. ‘That’s what’s wrong.’
I hoped he was thinking about what was wrong with Anastasia, but I didn’t dare ask more.
We had dinner out on the verandah – al fresco, we joked.
We hadn’t settled anything about me going with him to the outstation. In the early days, I would’ve pushed it, but something about this place had taught me to let things take their own course. The sky seemed huge, portentous, dark and steely with rain – a Turner sky, I almost said.
‘What would you do down south?’ I asked instead, unable to leave the question alone.
He shrugged. ‘I’ve reinvented myself before.’
‘But you had to. This time would be because someone wished
it of you.’
As we lounged back afterwards with glasses of tonic water which we pretended were laced with gin, he said: ‘Adrian thinks he’s indispensable.’
‘He’s bombastic,’ I cried.
‘The trouble is, with his energy, his anarchy, his self-absorption, his determination to get the job done whatever it takes – he might be right. He might be indispensable.’
He stood and collected our empty glasses.
‘I can’t go behind his back about the outstation. He’s done too much for me, giving me a job out here. I’m sorry.’
I made myself cast down my eyes to examine the laborious progress of an ant across the floorboards, stumbling over red dirt caught in the cracks.
I washed up, while he had first turn at the bathroom, by candlelight now. He came out, brushing his teeth, his mouth foaming with toothpaste, the candle on the floor lengthening his face.
‘After the outstation, I have to come back here before I go into Alice.’ I wanted to ask if he was seeing Anastasia when he was in Alice, but he was continuing: ‘You could come out with me, if you keep it a secret, and I could drop you off back here.’
‘I swear.’
He turned.
I called out through the shut door: ‘But what would I do out there?’
‘Help me,’ he called back.
I couldn’t help myself from crying into my pillow, like a spoilt child. Every shy smile, every generous gesture of his flitted through my mind. He’d not only been my advocate to Adrian, but to myself. He was the one who’d said: ‘I’m proud you’re staying with us.’ He was the one who’d pointed out that I was searching for the oldest surviving song.
Though I’d come here for Adrian, the desert had revealed what an anchoring love might be – from a man in love with a beauty called Anastasia.
Part Three
Chapter 15
In the morning, I heard him shower. I stumbled out into the hall.
‘You’re coming?’ he asked.
I nodded. He seemed crestfallen.
‘I was hoping you’d sleep in. Promise me,’ he said, ‘promise not to ask about the singer.’
I promised again. He seemed to reconcile himself to my presence quickly.
‘Pack food,’ he said. ‘I told you how traditional it is. There aren’t many houses. People went there a while back for a funeral and never returned home, even though it has no shop. They live like they did in the old days – almost.’
‘Why do they love it?’
‘It’s their ancestral country. That’s what matters.’
Daniel drove carefully, far slower than Adrian would’ve done. With his air of wistful playfulness, there was something toy-like about the troopie, as if it wasn’t an ordinary four-wheel drive, more like a huge billycart.
‘Can I drive? Just for a while?’
‘It’s not insured for you to drive.’
‘Even Adrian said that.’
‘I’m relieved to hear it!’
I laughed. Daniel glanced at me, and smiled.
‘I agree, that’s a surprise,’ he allowed himself to say about his friend.
That day, something happened to my way of seeing things, perhaps because of Daniel, perhaps because I feared my days with him were coming to an end. As we drove down the orange-red road, red as home-grown tomatoes on the vine, all around us was the waiting, the stillness. It was a country that invited drifts of the imagination, I thought, as Daniel steered into a pastoralist’s land to dodge a pond stretching from one side of the road to the other. The lower branches of the mulga looked manicured, I thought, as if eagles had swarmed over them and, hanging upside down, had bitten off each branch as a hairdresser might chop hair, even perching afterwards on a nearby tree to check that each group of branches now made its own neat semi-circle against the sky. Or perhaps a sky-borne herd of cattle had come along afterwards, neatening up the edges.
‘When I first came here I wanted hills,’ I told Daniel.
‘Hills are easy places for the soul to hide,’ said Daniel.
‘Soul?’ I looked at him in surprise.
‘Remember I told you I used to take my mum to church?’ He drove back onto the road. ‘I’m trained in science but the desert changes you,’ he said softly. ‘It’s like in physics – you can’t both observe it and be in it at the same time. Out here, you lose your objectivity.’
‘So we don’t know we’re going crazy?’ I laughed. But he didn’t.
‘Do you know how the people see this country?’ I asked.
‘Not really. You’d need their language. And maybe you’d need to be born here. There are dangerous places where no one’s allowed to look. If they’re laughing and talking with you and aware of you, they’ll say: “Don’t look, Daniel!” with real terror in their voices. Then, at other times, I imagine they think whites are immune to the spirit dangers. Maybe to them we’re still white ghosts in a way.’
He added, glancing out my window: ‘There’s a sacred track over there. It’s part of a track where women danced.’
‘When did they dance there? I’d like to see them dance again,’ I said. ‘Adrian said that no women’s ceremonies out here have survived. And I said: “how would he know?”’
He laughed. Creak. Creak. His laughter was so endearing. Had it changed? Had I?
‘The dancing I’m talking about – that wasn’t in this lifetime. In the Dreaming. The whole area was crisscrossed with tracks, song lines, and people had to know the songs and the dances to cross safely into the territory of other tribes. Singing the right song was like a passport, like getting immunity. The dancing women’s track goes a long way. I’ve heard of it going hundreds of kilometres.’
‘How do you know about this dancing track?’
‘It’s on a map in a book Adrian owns. Didn’t he show you?’
When I shook my head, he said: ‘He won’t do his job properly, and he stops you from doing yours.’
I thought, Daniel is my true friend. But all I said was: ‘I’ve been thinking I might open that cupboard. Just, you know, absent-mindedly.’
He almost pulled the brake on, so great was his anguish.
‘I shouldn’t have told you! He’s my best friend! I don’t want to shame him!’
‘Wouldn’t it help the clinic if Adrian cashed in those Medicare receipts?’ I puzzled.
‘Of course!’ said Daniel. ‘The clinic would get the money. But Sister would insist it go on medical equipment, and Adrian would insist on the second doctor –’
‘So the cupboard in my room is the too-hard basket!’
We both laughed in exasperation and guilty relief. Creak. Creak.
He drove on.
‘It’d be easy, if you were in Greece, to be conscious of the ancient times – Aristotle and Archimedes and Plato – but out here, what with all that’s going on, I keep forgetting there’s such antiquity – apart from the rocks, of course. You know that Gondwanaland, including here, is one of the oldest continents.’
He paused, then added: ‘Other continents broke off from Gondwanaland. That’s why there are some of the most ancient rocks on earth here. And, see over there –’ he pointed to a group of broken rocks glowing golden in the sun, ‘people quarried stone for thousands of years.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
‘Grinding stones,’ he said. ‘It was taken far and wide. Everyone wanted their grinding stone to come from here – it had spiritual power, they thought.’
At the outstation, Daniel was told that the old person he was taking into respite was asleep. He was to come back later.
‘Is she an old lady?’ I asked, suddenly excited. ‘Could she be my old lady?’
His face tightened.
‘You promised.’
He told me to wait in the troopie and he disappeared. I gazed around at the settlement. There were four besser block houses, each with a tumble of children’s worn toys in their front yards, alongside the remnants of cooking fires. Fifty metres away was a long
edifice I imagined to be a rubbish pile. The dentist had a shiny, well-kept caravan. A camel leaned against it, slowly munching, everything about its musculature slack. Its coat hung in tendrils from its belly, its sides were as flat as a book’s covers, its hump a bony cushion.
Daniel came over to me.
‘I have to clean up the room the doctors use when they visit. Someone’s been sleeping in it and it’s filthy. But there aren’t enough patients for the dentist – he has to meet his government quota. Would you help round some patients up? Something must be distracting everyone.’
‘Won’t the dentist tell Adrian I was here?’
‘He’ll just assume you’re some nurse from the clinic,’ said Daniel. ‘Act like Gillian.’
The caravan was divided into a tiny waiting room, with three women sitting on chairs, and a tiny surgery. I walked in just as the dentist’s nurse farewelled a family. The children rushed past me but paused long enough to jubilantly hold up new toothbrushes and new tubes of toothpaste for me to admire, their young mothers giggling behind their hands. Then the children dashed out and swung on the handrails above the caravan steps, yelping with joy. Even a tiny toddler clambered up the steps to swing upside down, holding onto the rail with bent knees like her older brothers and sisters. I started forward, but she held herself ably, the red dust earth two of her body lengths below.
‘Be careful,’ I gasped.
The nurse laughed at my reaction. She was dark-haired, with olive skin, red cheeks and a broad Italian – Australian accent.
‘They’re natural athletes,’ she told me. ‘Toothache?’ she asked one of the three women waiting, but the English word meant nothing and the woman shrugged.
‘Come with me,’ the nurse said kindly, and taking her hand, led her gently in to the dentist. ‘Here’s your next patient,’ she said to someone I couldn’t see. Her sisters followed her to watch.
‘I hope he doesn’t scare them off with the drill,’ the nurse confided in me. ‘Could you block the steps? To prevent her sisters running away before he checks them as well?’
