The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  He looked back at me for corroboration, then at Beth. I had a sense they were turning a corner, and he was making it public right now, their farewell. I felt for her, thinking of my imminent loss of Daniel. But she couldn’t allow a farewell. She spoke brightly.

  ‘One more chance. You must give them one more chance. Let’s try your new plan of driving around the houses before school and picking them up. I told you that I was happy to do the driving.’ She looked at me. ‘He wants so much to rescue them.’

  ‘No,’ he said flatly.

  ‘No?’ asked Beth.

  He turned back to his computer.

  ‘I can’t do it to my children.’

  It was as if Beth had been slapped. The vivacity went out of her face, like a light turned off. Her shoulders hunched. Her chest seemed to collapse inward. Then, as he found a patch of poor phrasing and pounded on his computer, she moved across the room to look out the door to the schoolyard, where the woman still slumped.

  Clearly hoping Libby could hear her, she said loudly: ‘It’s English they’ve got to learn. Our language. Not theirs.’ She turned to see the effect of this on him. But his muscles, unaware of her gaze, moved with his typing.

  To us both, she added: ‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ Then, even louder: ‘It’s one thing for them to retreat out here, as if they’re the Amish. But it’s another to hold their kids back!’ Then she was yelling: ‘They’re part of the wider world and they shouldn’t hold their kids back!’

  I went up to Beth and put my arm around her shoulder. It was bony and unresponsive.

  ‘Is she waiting for her child?’

  ‘She’s waiting for her husband. Quentin. What a name – where do they get these names from? Hasn’t anyone told them no one’s called Quentin nowadays?’

  ‘Perhaps fashion doesn’t –’ I began desperately, for I was fearing that Libby could sink further into distress.

  ‘He’s as useless as his name but our bosses in their ivory towers have ordered us to employ him. Who got to them, to make such a mad, bureaucratic decision? He’s uneducated so what’s he good for? We told him to clean the toilets every day and you know who ends up doing it? Me! He doesn’t go near the toilets! He’s useless! Useless.’ By then she was shouting so frenziedly that Libby looked around.

  ‘Don’t,’ I begged.

  But now she was yelling directly at Libby, while in the background Craig pounded his fury.

  ‘There’s no point waiting for your husband! He’s not in the toilets!’

  Ashamed to be standing near her, I walked towards the door.

  ‘I came to tidy the library,’ I said. On the verandah, I turned. ‘How should I arrange the books?’

  Beth, red-faced with fury, shrugged.

  ‘We only use it as a place to send the kids for time out,’ she said. ‘None of them read. They wouldn’t know what a book was.’

  Pity made me try to distract her once more.

  ‘I still haven’t found my dying singer,’ I said quietly.

  It succeeded. She turned.

  ‘Haven’t you?’ she asked. ‘That must be hard for you.’

  I said, keeping my eyes on the curling lengths of her hair, still almost fairy floss: ‘Such a pity, not to be able to save the “Poor Thing” song from extinction. I was thinking –’ I was rambling, but surely E.E. Albert would try to reach out to Beth if she were here, ‘it’s possible the poor thing of the song is a mother who’s having a long vigil through the night as she watches her sick child die, or a woman unable to marry the man she loves.’

  Beth, nodding, turned away, secret tears in her eyes.

  ‘Perhaps she found her love too late,’ she murmured.

  I spent the next hour rearranging books into the Dewey system I’d tried to learn before my life took this direction, and dusting the shelves with tissues from a box on a table. I put the rubbish – the lolly papers, the ice-cream sticks, and the empty drink bottles – into a cardboard box I’d found thrown on the verandah. It was very calming, the arranging of books, even in a desert where no one wanted them. I’d become a reader of stories when Ian left the river, and learned to love holding books, their rectangular compactness, their smell of dusty, ageing vivacity, the sense that in your hands you’ve got a flight to some better place where people like you are understood.

  As I worked, memory surged over me, again and again.

  My mother often complains that I don’t chat enough. ‘Open your mouth,’ she says. ‘Be company!’ So I stand one-legged while she worries aloud about stains on Dad’s shirts and whether it’d please him if she ironed the tablecloths, as Diana probably does – ‘Does she?’ she asks, but she doesn’t want to hear the answer – ‘That’s why he goes to her, because she’s a better woman than me, I’m the dreamy type, always was –’ and I say ‘Huh-huh,’ waiting for the fall in her voice that means she’s petering out, so I’ll be able to go to my room and drag out from under my bed a story that has no cognisance of betrayal. A story that promises one day I’ll live amongst people whose hearts aren’t breaking in a way I can’t mend.

  In that neglected desert library, I still thought of the pages of an opened book as being like arms, ready to enfold me.

  By the time I’d stood all the books upright and put them into a semblance of a system, I had a leftover pile of books that were too large to fit in the shelves. They weren’t really books, I decided, resentful of their size, they were only home-made and clumsy, with bright plastic film over cardboard covers, and yellowing pages rippling with badly stuck down photos. They didn’t fit into the system I’d created. I was annoyed at them as if they were petulant children – just someone’s amateurish effort, not real books. I was wondering if anyone would notice if I hid them in the cardboard box and took them to the rubbish tip. In that desert library, who would know or care? The makers of the books were probably white and long gone. I picked them up to throw them away, but at the last second the top book slid on its shiny plastic out of my hands and onto the floor, flipping open. As I retrieved it, I stayed on my knees, surprised. Here was a photo of the track Gillian took on walks into the desert, here was the humpy at the outstation with its pile of black-bottomed cooking tins on the roof, here was the tree outside my window. Here were people squatting at fires, women holding little children, women gathering bush fruit, men coming home from a hunt with kangaroos proudly slung around their necks, like fur stoles. I sat down in an armchair that puffed red dust, and leafed through the pages. The text was entirely in Djemiranga, whose grammar was my daily struggle. I picked up another book, and another. I couldn’t guess the plots of the stories but when I looked again at the covers, I saw that they said, both in English and in Djemiranga: Stories of Our Dreaming 1, Stories of Our Dreaming 2, and so on, right up to Stories of Our Dreaming 10. They all said, in both languages: ‘As told by the storyteller, Quentin.’

  A chill came over me, there in that steamy library. I realised slowly and guiltily, that these books I’d been about to throw away were not the least important books there, but the most important. I’d been about to throw away what might be unique stories of that country, possibly stories of that tribe, possibly stories as old as the song I searched for. I’d planned to extinguish unique stories from a culture not my own. I’d been like a barbarian sacking the libraries of the ancient world.

  I lay back in the chair, relieved that a book had flipped open as if it was a living thing, warding off my attack.

  To make amends, I cleared most of a shelf of ordinary printed books, and displayed the home-made ones as the centrepiece. Perhaps in the distant future when a literate child found them, they’d relish anew their own people’s ways.

  And there it would’ve stopped, except that as I walked home, I passed Libby in her front yard, sitting with a group of women and children. They didn’t seem to notice me, although I’d learned by then that the people were very observant, though they never even seemed to glance. They were able readers of body language, as Adrian said.
Behind them was her dilapidated, three-walled, one-room tin house. The open side of the house faced discreetly away from the road, so that it was like a proscenium arch but there was only desert for an audience. In the front yard was the usual tabletop made from a door resting on empty flour tins, and mattresses lay on the cement porch, along with a sheet of corrugated iron heaped with ashes. There were mattresses spilling out on to the porch. I’d been told by Adrian that the assistant teacher lived there with seventeen relatives.

  ‘So her family should get one of the new houses the builder’s made,’ I’d said.

  He’d immediately fixed me with one of his silver glares.

  ‘The elders decide these things.’

  Confused, I’d dropped my gaze, blushing because again I’d offended him.

  ‘It’s not for us to make them be like us, or at least like we ought to be. You people always want to make them like ideal whites, not like the whites you really are.’

  He’d stood, screeching his chair across the floor, then stalked out and banged the door.

  Daniel and I had taken to washing up together, our arms mirroring each other’s in the simple repetitive movements, like dancers’ arms, as we watched the warm night blacken the window panes. Daniel wiped while I washed, and his tea towel looped like a veil that could hide my shame after Adrian’s barbs, or like a hammock that could gather me in, but it would be to cling figuratively with him – someone also at Adrian’s mercy, I saw then, also floundering in the eddying currents of Adrian’s convictions, passions and assumptions, that all who were near him must share them or be ridiculed. It seemed Daniel’s fate, like mine, was to be enchanted by Adrian, but frustrated in that enchantment, and constantly threatened by rejection. I still didn’t want to admit that the glowing Ian of my childhood had become this contemptuous derider, or worse, consider that he might have always been this way, and I clanked dishes noisily all the way down the dish rack.

  ‘Adrian’s got a lot on his mind,’ Daniel had said, throwing the wet tea towel over the confusion of things that again were taking over the ironing board. ‘Bruce almost ran him over today.’

  And so, as always, we began the familiar process of reconciling ourselves with the disappointment of Adrian, so we’d remain enchanted.

  ‘Bruce! Why?’

  Daniel had sat down and leaned back on his chair, so that the front legs lifted alarmingly off the floor. ‘Adrian told him off because of the power cuts. So, when Adrian was crossing the road from the clinic this morning, Bruce revved his car and headed straight for him. Adrian had to jump over a ditch to safety.’

  I’d sat beside him, still holding the dish mop, my head close to his in case Adrian was on the verandah, so close I felt the heat of his body.

  ‘Bruce wants to do him in?’

  Daniel had lowered his voice.

  ‘I caught Bruce snooping around, asking Mandy questions. Be careful what you say at the school. Bruce is always visiting Craig.’

  ‘But Adrian has nothing to hide! He’s just –’ I wound down, ‘an innocent with paperwork.’

  He’d looked at me with one of his lop-sided smiles.

  ‘Many people would be only too happy to get rid of him.’

  For a moment, I’d felt a rebellious flash of sympathy for his enemies.

  ‘He has enemies in high places,’ I’d said, remembering Dr Lydia’s words.

  But now as I walked home from the school, I longed, as I had many times in the last weeks, to be alone in my room. I was so far from all that I was sure of, except that I’d never been sure of anything at all. Confusion and bewilderment, that was my home, my family.

  They were all in the ground, those people I loved. There’s only you and me who remember, and to you, the memories are as deeply buried as Diana, my mother and my father; deeper perhaps. I’d lived in the hope that one day patterns would become clear, for if there were patterns, there was meaning. But that has never happened. Why ever did I think that I could see that river more clearly in the desert? I should give up now, I thought, and leave, go back to the city, and wait quietly until I die.

  Just as I neared home, something called to me, like a bird in my heart. I looked up at the biggest tree in the settlement, the one in the book, the one I could see from my window. I paused. The bird had made me pause, as if it knew about humans, as if it was a spirit, not an ordinary bird. Because of the bird, I turned. I walked back up the red dusty street, as if my feet were leading me, or the bird. I could go past Libby’s house and pretend I was walking back to the shop, as if I’ve forgotten to buy something, if anyone was curious. But no one was, or at least, no one seemed to notice me. They were all looking up at the bird, which I couldn’t see, and talking. Perhaps it was an important bird to them, one of their totems, one that foretold the future. My feet or the bird kept deciding for me. My feet, or the bird, veered me from my course towards the shop, my feet went over towards Libby’s fence, though what I hoped to happen, what I was going to say, I didn’t know. I stopped. I waited there for words to come, my eyes downcast. Or for her to come. After a while, I heard a soft swishing of her skirt, her feet padding the earth. She was coming over.

  I looked up the road, not directly at her because I was learning, so slowly was I learning, to downcast my eyes. She stood near me. I didn’t know if she was looking at me, but she was waiting.

  ‘The school,’ I said, and petered out. ‘I went to the library,’ I floundered. ‘I saw books.’

  She waited.

  ‘Books made – about here.’

  Her waiting made me blurt.

  ‘The teacher is cheeky,’ I said. I’d heard Adrian use the word ‘cheeky’, and the implications seemed immediately understood.

  There was a long silence. She looked up the road with me, at the dust and the local children walking to the shop for ice-creams, and up to the tree where the bird called again.

  ‘The headmaster is cheeky too,’ I added.

  After a long silence, I said: ‘It’s very bad for you, for the people, for you all, that they’re cheeky.’

  The bird flew away. People spilled out of the tiny house, like the mattresses had. But they didn’t seem to be listening to us, they were just people watching a bird as it faded into the sky.

  ‘In the library, the books of stories, the covers say: As told by Quentin. Your husband. They must be your husband’s stories.’

  I struggled to make it clear to myself.

  ‘I didn’t know that he’s a storyteller. Perhaps the headmaster and the teacher, perhaps they don’t know either. And perhaps whites don’t know why that’s important.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Storyteller,’ she repeated.

  I was encouraged. At least she was joining in. That meant we might have a conversation. That’s how conversations seemed to go here, with a lot of consensus, as Adrian had explained, a lot of repetition, and not the driving wind behind them that I was used to.

  ‘However,’ I said, carefully, ‘Someone’s written down the stories he told. In your language.’

  ‘Not my husband’s stories. They’re the old stories,’ she said. ‘My husband was taught all the stories. The old men taught my husband.’

  ‘They’re dead then, these old men who taught him?’

  ‘The old men are dead,’ she said.

  I tried: ‘No one made up the stories?’

  The question is met with silence. Perhaps it was an incomprehensible question.

  ‘The stories are from the Dreaming?’ I tried again.

  ‘The stories are from the Dreaming.’

  So then I knew that Quentin didn’t make up the stories, in the way I was used to, with an author who’s responsible for making up a story from scratch.

  ‘Someone wrote down what your husband said,’ I said.

  ‘Collins wrote down the old stories that my husband tells,’ she said.

  ‘But they didn’t really need to be written down, with your husband here to tell them. Why did Co
llins write them down?’

  ‘White people,’ she said.

  She tried again to explain something she couldn’t quite fathom.

  ‘White people need books,’ she said.

  ‘But you have storytellers instead,’ I said – and now I was reasoning it out to myself, ‘to pass on the stories. And after your husband, one of the children whose life work it is, will pass them on. Storytellers, not books, are essential here.’

  I felt exhausted with the realisation. I wished I could sit on the ground. But that might break the moment, and I mustn’t do that.

  ‘Because –’ she cast around, looking back at the group, ‘that’s the only way the children know the stories.’

  ‘Are any of the old stories translated into English?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ To her, the question seemed to be irrelevant. ‘We all speak Djemiranga,’ she said. It might not have occurred to her that whites couldn’t read stories written down in Djemiranga, or even that whites might want to. Her people, after all, didn’t send missionaries to us. They weren’t interested in changing us, as we were in changing them. Till that moment I’d thought that was because they felt that we were the victors and they were unimportant. Now I wondered if the pretty tourist guide in Alice Springs had been right when she’d suggested that maybe Aboriginal people thought their stories were none of our business.

  ‘There’s a big mob of stories,’ Libby offered suddenly.

  A silence followed so long that the children stood up from the blanket and came over and leaned on her, looking up at me with huge solemn black eyes.

  The children’s presence seemed to bring more words out of her.

  ‘Everyone listens to my husband’s stories.’

  She looked down at the children and gravely told them what she was saying, or at least that was what I thought she was doing. They seemed in their nodding to be as old as the old men now dead.