The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  I assumed all the women were looking away when I did, but I didn’t dare peek at anything, not men, not women, because I didn’t want to see what I shouldn’t see. I only wanted to please everyone, because after all, I was an appeasing person, and probably always would be. I must resign myself to that. But that time, the ‘everyone’ I wanted to please included the spirits, because if any spirits knew I was peeking, it would be sure to be the angry ones.

  The men disappeared into the night, and the women lay down in their blankets. Dora told me to sleep next to her. I found I was lying on the outside of the group. Other women looked around at me and smiled, women I’d never talked to before. I suspected I was a human wall, because if there were bad spirits around, surely they wouldn’t attack a white person.

  We slept, and despite the cold hard ground just a blanket’s thickness away, it seemed the most profound sleep I’d ever had, the sleep of my life, a sleep close to the sweet ease of death, but lulled by the soft air and the quiet breathing around me of hundreds of women. I woke twice, the first time to hear the men still singing. They were a long way off, away towards the almost-hills, over towards my right.

  The second time I awoke, it was barely dawn. Birds began early there, in that last burst of cold when the night made its last grab to possess the earth, to freeze it into submission, before it surrendered and faded away. It was the moment before bird calls. A mist hovered over the blanketed bodies of the women, writhing into the distance above the flat earth. I’d never seen a mist in the desert before, wrapping its white angel wings around the boulders, frosting even the folds of my blanket. When I moved my head to another part of my pillow, the cloth was damp. Everything around me was still, the sand, the humped bodies of women under their colourful blankets, even the air. The ceremony was over, the fires had died. Like the toddler in my arms last night, I was spellbound, watching the desert dawn, the hovering angel mist. And then I heard it.

  I’d never believed in the miraculous. People had told me about miracles they most fervently believed in and I’d nodded my head appeasingly, but secretly my mind searched for an ordinary explanation. There was always one nearby. Later that morning, I was to doubt what I heard, as I always have doubted myself. Later that morning I said: I must’ve fallen asleep and dreamed it. But at dawn when I heard it, I thought exactly that: I must be dreaming. I even pinched myself under my blanket, right on the outside of my left thigh. I pinched so hard, the next day there was a bruise. But despite all my efforts to deny it, I experienced the miraculous. This is what happened:

  I’d sat upright in my blanket, the better to see the silent mist. Ice had crackled in the folds. I’d picked up a sliver of ice. And then I became aware that the ordinary world had a membrane across it, hovering above it like mist. On this particular dawn, the membrane broke apart. From under its tearing white tendrils a sound emerged, a sound like nothing I’d ever heard, like nothing I will ever hear again. The sound was singing. But who was singing?

  The women were sleeping under their frosty blankets. And the men were sleeping off to my right, away off near the almost-hills. The singing came from somewhere else, over to my left, from where the sun would leap up any minute to stripe the sand with gold. I thought: it’s an echo from last night! A delayed echo! Then I reasoned it couldn’t be an echo, because there were no boulders or even trees to bounce an echo back to me – besides, it was too close, too immediate, too intimate. It wasn’t male singing, nor female singing. It was a chorus, a whole chorus of voices, yet not voices, the sound was somewhere between a hum and the whining of wind. But the morning was perfectly still; there was not a breath of wind, not the slightest breeze. There was just the rise and fall of a chorus of not-quite-human voices arising out of the dirt.

  I tried to reason it through: this was an ancient people, ancient beyond the ken of my culture, a people who’d been performing this ceremony every year for tens and tens of thousands of years, the same songs, the same movements, the same words, all exactly the same. Everyone knew every detail of the ceremony, everyone knew how to instruct me: ‘You look this way, you look up, Kate, then you look this way’ – even the watching audience was part of the dance, century after century.

  I could only explain it this way: beneath my body was the red sand rippled with the prints of feet, the prints of bodies. The sand teemed with life and with death. It was crisscrossed with the footsteps, the bones, the spirits of this ancient people, their knowledge of each other, of their ancestors, of the animals and people they knew, and still commemorate. The very grit held their songs. Wrapped in my grey blanket, I’d been sleeping on the past, their bones, their stories, their ancient history with this ancient red earth, their songs. The very dust was rich with who they were.

  All around me the old earth was singing, a rising and falling hymn to whom I did not know – a song that wasn’t quite music but was more than sound, a rising and falling like the sea, like a cloud, like the slow march of humanity, like the inevitable, majestic movement of a river.

  These people and their ancestors had taught the old earth to sing, I reasoned. Or perhaps, this most ancient earth had taught them.

  By then the ice had long melted to nothingness on my fingers. It seemed that I lay awake for hours, enchanted by the song, but perhaps it was only minutes in that timelessness. I fell asleep at last in the midst of the earth’s song. When I woke, the sun was fully up, and the women were on their feet, gathering up their blankets, speaking quietly to each other.

  I blinked sleepily, not sure what was expected of me.

  ‘Come,’ said Dora. She was standing above me.

  I had no words to tell her about the singing of the earth. Perhaps, one day, I would. Perhaps it would come as no surprise to her. Perhaps it sang to her.

  We folded my blanket together, taking two corners each. As we moved, long side to long side, corner to corner, short side to short side, I felt that I could give any amount of love to this woman, I loved her large warm accommodating body, her contained, quiet authority, I loved even the way I couldn’t predict her. But love wasn’t what was wanted of me, though I hadn’t worked out what was. And I wanted to thank her for the evening, but I didn’t know how.

  Her friend Daisy came over, and led me to a car already crowded. I shared it with a dozen other women I didn’t know, who sat on each other’s knees and wriggled over in a friendly way to make a little space for me to sit on the vinyl, not on another person as they were doing. Perhaps they knew how stiff and formal whites were. There was hardly any chatter, just smiles and a sleepy silence. I was dropped off first, a courtesy, I thought. They stopped right at my gate.

  ‘Sleep now,’ one of them said in English.

  As I stumbled out, my blanket caught on the door, and in my struggle to free it, someone helped and everyone giggled, not at me, but in sympathy.

  The next night Adrian knocked on my door.

  ‘I’m not going to make the medicine forest wait for bureaucrats to decide whether to accept the paperwork,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a mate in Alice Springs who’ll help us immediately. But he said the plants have to be picked before sun up and driven in right away. Want to come?’

  I sat up.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ I said.

  I practised silently: I came to find out if your mother planned their deaths.

  ‘It’ll have to wait,’ he said before I could continue. ‘I’ve got to get the plants and come back to the clinic to help Gillian and Sister. A big day of health checks.’

  I’d taken to going to bed in a tracksuit. It allowed me to walk out of my room, ready to go anywhere. Life here seemed to demand it. Now, all I needed to get ready for the journey was to splash water on my face, clean my teeth, go out to the kitchen and get water and pick up a box of apples that Daniel had brought from Alice Springs. Adrian was at the front door, holding large wooden trays for the cuttings, laughing at my sleepiness. I was always bewildered by the changes in his mood. I laughed back,
but hesitantly.

  Out in the dark air, we drove around from house to house, picking people up. Everyone was smiling and laughing as they climbed in, and soon there was a whole troopie of older women and young girls and children, some of them snuggled in their bright blankets on the floor.

  ‘Is this legal?’ I whispered to Adrian as the sixteenth person climbed in.

  ‘It’s the most popular thing I’ve ever done,’ he whispered back.

  Everyone slept on the three-hundred-kilometre journey through the dark bush to the medicine plants. I watched the headlights tunnel through the darkness, and saw how the track in the early morning light slowly became apricot gold, then tomato red.

  In that huge distance we passed through two pastoral leases. I climbed out and opened the cattle gates, and closed them again. After my second gate, Dora and Mandy were laughing. They repeated what Gillian had told me when I was first here, that they used to say ‘City Girl!’ when I fumbled the locks.

  ‘Now we say, City Girl knows those gates!’

  It surprised me, the beauty of their precious medicine plant, its blue-grey leaves the colour an artist might choose against the red soil. But many bushes looked alike to my untested eyes. When we finished clipping the top-most leaves of one bush and moved to another, Rosa said: ‘No, not this one. This one.’

  I examined the leaves closely but they still looked alike.

  ‘Wrong bush,’ Rosa explained in English, laughing.

  All around the women were gathering sheaths of the right bush to take to their families.

  At first only Adrian and I worked on the cuttings. He clipped the tips of each branch with nail scissors, passed it to me and I poked it in the soil. Nearby, Dawnie was taking the opportunity to teach a group of younger women to track. She noticed me and politely switched to English.

  ‘Here it landed.’

  She pointed out the extra pressure in the sand of the first claw, tried to tell them in English why that was important to know but switched, with an apologetic smile to me, to Djemiranga. She talked to them a long time, with the girls squatting around her, eagerly quizzing her.

  This was their sort of school, I thought.

  ‘Hurry,’ said Adrian, seeing me trying to follow the talk. ‘The sun’s coming up.’

  He explained that the plant boxes had to be taken in to Alice Springs on the ambulance, which was to leave at lunchtime.

  I went back to poking tiny cuttings in the soil.

  I’d been concentrating so hard it was a shock to look up and see that the rising sun was already striping the red desert with yellow. Where a boulder blocked the path of the yellow light, the desert was creamy-grey.

  ‘Work faster,’ said Adrian. ‘It isn’t the time for looking around.’

  Dora heard him.

  ‘I help,’ she said. She crouched beside me at the cuttings tray. Adrian said he’d hand her every second clipping.

  ‘Little, little,’ she said in surprise as he gave her the first tiny cutting. She rolled it around in her hand. Perhaps she was wondering why we were using such tiny cuttings, but she didn’t ask and I couldn’t explain, though I knew if I was her I’d wonder. However, we laughed as our hurrying fingers touched. My laughter was about shyness. I didn’t know what her laughter was about; for a moment, I wondered if black women always laughed in the delight of being close, or whether being so close to a white woman was for her the surprise. But when we brushed fingers again, I found I could laugh more easily with her.

  Working with her, it seemed to me that I was connecting to something much bigger than me; even with Adrian’s impatience when I fumbled, I was filled with a rush of warmth for Dora, for the plants, for this red earth, for this moment.

  Other women offered to join in. Adrian found another clipper in the toolbox under the seats of the troopie and taught Dora to clip the leaves, while the others helped me bury the tiny cuttings in the soil.

  ‘Not too close together,’ Adrian warned.

  Then we found we were working in bright sunshine.

  ‘Too late now. Home, everyone,’ called Adrian. ‘We’ve got to hurry.’

  Everyone crammed in the troopie again, brandishing their sheaves of the medicine plant.

  ‘How do you use it?’ I asked my neighbour about her sheaf. She smiled at me and passed on my question to her neighbour.

  ‘We –’ she said, and mimed grinding for a long time, ‘and cook it in oil.’

  There was much laughter and chatter. I handed apples around. Despite the jolting, I dozed. Into my sleep, a familiar song trailed.

  ‘One hundred green bottles hanging on the wall.’

  I woke to find everyone singing, mature women and young girls alike, all chorusing it, a counting song that perhaps the older women had learned in their days of being maids in the households of pastoralists.

  ‘One hundred green bottles hanging on the wall,

  One hundred green bottles hanging on the wall,

  And if one green bottle should accidentally fall …’

  But as they came to the fourth line, ‘There’d be …’ the song and the merriment jolted and stopped. I was about to tell them the next number, but I felt that would be insulting. If they wanted me to tell them, they’d ask. I saw Dora’s lips moving and her fingers counting. I wondered if she was remembering her girlhood.

  ‘Ninety-nine,’ she found suddenly, and there were cheers.

  ‘Ninety-nine green bottles hanging on the wall,

  Ninety-nine green bottles hanging on the wall,

  And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

  There’d be …’

  And they all fell silent again. I was astonished at how much tension there was in the air. Something very big seemed at stake.

  ‘Ninety-eight!’ Dora at last called. There was acclamation and they were singing boisterously again. Then Mandy helped her at ninety-seven, ninety-six, all the way down to ninety-one. The two quavered at ‘ninety’.

  ‘Ninety green bottles hanging on the wall,

  Ninety green bottles hanging on the wall,

  And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

  There’d be …’

  Another pause held the air. Again Dora’s voice suddenly rang out. ‘Eighty-nine!’

  They all laughed, proud of her, it seemed, and they were off again, counting down through the numbers, but when they sang to ‘eighty’ there seemed as to be more than two voices, there seemed to be four or five.

  But it was left to Dora to remember ‘Seventy-nine!’

  Then there was more happy, boisterous singing.

  Dora and Mandy still needed to supply ‘sixty-nine’, but there were more voices at ‘fifty-nine’, and even more at ‘forty-nine’, so it seemed as if the whole troopie was beginning to learn the pattern. Now there was a sense of absolute determination to get to the end of the song.

  ‘Twenty green bottles hanging on the wall,

  Twenty green bottles hanging on the wall,

  And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

  There’d be …’

  Someone tried ‘ten-ty’ but Dora shook her head.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly.

  To everyone’s relief, after a long pause, she found ‘nineteen’.

  She hesitantly led them through the teen numbers, paused dramatically at ‘twelve’, found ‘eleven’ after a long pause and much counting on her fingers, and there was a cheer when she led them to ‘ten’. A few voices helped her down to five, but the whole troopie joined in and shouted triumphantly four, three, and two.

  Everyone, even the little children, shouted:

  ‘One green bottle hanging on the wall,

  One green bottle hanging on the wall,

  And if one green bottle should accidentally fall

  There’d be no green bottles hanging on the wall.’

  Then they all were turning to me, faces lit with wide beams, and I couldn’t do anything else but burst into loud applause. Tears str
eamed down my face.

  ‘Wonderful!’ I shouted. ‘Wonderful!’

  ‘Thank you for your work,’ said Adrian afterwards.

  ‘It wasn’t work,’ I said.

  ‘This morning, the women loved me.’ We were in the kitchen. He had just showered, and he was wrapped in a yellow bath towel, his shoulders wet but still streaked with red dust. ‘And you, too,’ he added, grabbing a tea towel to sop the water from his grey ponytail still in its band.

  ‘For what?’ I asked, pleased to be included in their love.

  ‘For caring,’ he said.

  ‘But do they believe the cuttings will grow?’ I asked.

  ‘Whether they do or not, they saw I cared.’

  ‘They wouldn’t doubt that about you,’ I said warmly.

  ‘Much of what I do, maybe that’s just ordinary white stuff to them,’ he said. ‘What whites ought to do for them in exchange for taking their hunting land. But this morning, that was out of the usual, and they saw us as actually working for them. I’m part of the family now.’

  ‘Who started the ten green bottles song?’ I asked, explaining I’d been asleep.

  ‘Dora,’ he said.

  ‘I had a feeling they were showing us something,’ I said.

  ‘Reciprocity,’ he said. ‘It’s better than thank you, isn’t it?’

  There, in the kitchen, with a towel around him, and a tea towel on his head, I said to myself: Now.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ I began. The words bulged in my brain.

  I came to find out why you left, I should say.

  But truth has many layers. That sentence had only one. I should also say: I came because I’d always longed to love you, because I wanted to be permitted to love you, I wanted to believe that you knew nothing of what was going to happen, I wanted to know if Diana killed my mother. I wanted to know if it was just an accident.