The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘Make it fast,’ he said. ‘I’m a busy man.’

  He took off the tea towel from his grey head and laid it on the kitchen counter.

  ‘It can wait,’ I said.

  Truth, I saw, was a great silencer.

  Chapter 20

  ‘It’s time,’ Adrian said through my door.

  I was still in my dusty tracksuit, at work on parsing.

  ‘To take me to her?’ I was out the door already.

  ‘To take you to my pink river.’

  As I went to the toilet, I saw the bruise I’d made deliberately, purple now, halfway between my knee and my hip. I didn’t tell him about the bruise.

  It was a pink river of sand, almost a harbour of sand, so wide that I had to strain to see the far bank, then off up river and down river, off to infinity. Above us, pink geese-shaped clouds strained, necks outstretched, across a mauve sky that faded into a blue so full of light it seemed to hold silver foil behind it. The gums were so startlingly white in this pink land that they jolted the eye as they leaned into the river, as convivial as children, asking for food. Even the wrinkles in the gums’ white bark were lit by pinkness. Then there was a shift in the sky, from pink to orange, and everything became lit now with pink-and-orange, and I wasn’t sure if the light was from the sky or the reflection coming off the sand. My hands were lit by the pink-orange light, and the white evening-gowned trees glowed.

  Adrian sat on the sand, his knees bent, hands grasping them.

  ‘I thought you’d like it.’ He was facing me, looking up. He paused. ‘Nothing like the river you’re used to,’ he said.

  ‘My river?’

  For a moment I was winded, the breath taken out of me entirely. I was trying to remember when I’d forgotten myself enough to speak of my river to him, the river that was always in my mind. For a terrible second I thought I might have murmured too loudly while dozing on the long trip into town, or when I’d been very tired at the dinner table. Then I thought: perhaps he’d seen my photos after all, that first journey.

  ‘My river?’ I hedged.

  ‘Ours,’ he said.

  I sat on the sand, which was surprisingly cool under my bottom. I bent my knees like his, clasped my hands around them like his.

  ‘Ours?’ I repeated. I could scarcely hear my own voice for the hammering in my heart.

  ‘Remember when my mother cut our hair?’ he asked.

  When I was silent, he added: ‘You don’t remember?’

  I couldn’t speak.

  ‘She was good with the scissors, she’d trained as a hairdresser, don’t you remember?’ he asked. ‘She’d carry out the kitchen stools to the back path where no one would see us, and we’d have to take our shirts off.’

  I found something to say. ‘Why?’

  ‘You don’t remember this?’

  He didn’t wait for my answer, he’d given up on me, as if he had to do all the remembering for both of us.

  ‘So she wouldn’t have to wash the hairs off our clothes. She had no washing machine, remember. Anything that saved washing. So after the haircut, we’d just shake ourselves like puppies. Or dunk each other in the river. We both had to stare straight ahead at the tree to see if the eagle landed to steal eggs, that’s what she’d say. “Watch out for the river eagle,” she’d say.’

  ‘What did the river eagle have to do with it?’

  ‘I used to think it was so I wouldn’t sneak a look at you. But that wasn’t it. Watching out for it made our heads face the front. She’d do your hair first, working around the stool. You always were fussy, yours had to be higher than your ears and your fringe had to be level with the tips of your eyebrows. Mine was even more of a job because I liked my head almost shaved. Then she’d go back to you because the wisps took a while to drop and she had to get it even. I’d peep at you when you got off your stool. You looked specially made, like the template of all girls. Perfectly formed like a doll.’

  His hands moved on the sand, though not near my hands.

  ‘You had such pretty nipples. Like pink snowflakes.’

  It was almost like a blow, a body blow, this revelation of his sexuality. I flinched under it.

  ‘I remember nothing about haircuts,’ I said.

  ‘I blew it when I was about thirteen. You would’ve been about seven. You already had a cute indentation down here –’ he drew a line between his nipples. ‘I said something stupid, like, “She’s getting breasts!” and Mum said quickly that you must be cold and to go and put your shirt on. She stopped being your hairdresser after that.’

  He reached for my hand and touched it, though it lay beside him as flat as an oar.

  ‘If I’d kept my big mouth shut it might’ve gone on forever.’

  We sat in silence. Around us the bush settled into night.

  ‘In your mind, do you talk to me?’ I managed to ask after a while.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  ‘Like I do,’ I said incoherently.

  ‘I had a shock at first, thinking maybe I recognised you. You were always such a mouse! Why didn’t you let on it was you?’

  ‘There was a lot of sadness in our families.’

  ‘You should’ve disguised yourself!’

  I sighed.

  ‘At any rate, you’d never be able to disguise your wrists.’

  I was stiff with surprise, even as he lifted my left hand.

  ‘I’d know your wrists anywhere. You remember – I was always watching you doing things with boats and ropes? Diana made me teach you. You were an awful pupil. I blamed the way you were built. Especially your hands. I used to wonder in particular at your wrists, your ulna. I looked it up in the dictionary, it was so different from mine. You looked like you’d break. You’ve always been built like a small giraffe. Uselessly. Then, and now, a giraffe.’

  I was flushing with heat, with confusion.

  ‘Did you come here to check up on me?’ he asked.

  ‘You know why I came,’ I said. ‘To impress my university. I’d been doing badly and wanted to make it up.’ I swallowed. ‘What’s more – my life since you left never made sense. I had to settle something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’d been everything to me. You and Diana. Suddenly you disappeared, as if you’d never existed. I wanted to know who Diana was. Who you were. What happened to my mother. What happened to Diana. She was almost my mother, too.’

  He was moving his hands impatiently on the pink sand.

  ‘I hated your father,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry – but I was so jealous! One night after they made love, it seemed, the whole night long, my mother moaning for more – I decided to get back at her and go looking for my real father. He cleared out before I was born. It was good for me to leave all that behind.’

  ‘Did you find him?’

  ‘No one remembered him.’

  We both sighed.

  ‘I came back to the river, years later. I didn’t stay long.’

  ‘There’s something I’ve got to settle, something – the real reason –’ I said, almost shouting above the persistent hammering of my heart.

  ‘What real reason?’

  ‘When –’ I paused, I was so close to the pain, I could scarcely speak.

  ‘When – what?’

  ‘When you came back to the river, when you didn’t stay long – when did you leave?’

  ‘When did I leave? I stayed just a few hours.’

  ‘But when?’

  I was dizzy. I tried to reason it out: he wouldn’t know my suspicions, unless he was guilty.

  ‘I’d planned to stay with her, repair the past, that sort of thing,’ he said, after a while. ‘But when I got there, all she’d do was rant about your mother. I’d never even met your mother!’

  ‘But Diana hadn’t either, till the last day.’

  ‘She was beside herself,’ he continued. ‘Apparently she’d asked your father for the thousandth time to leave your mother and come and die in her arms, that’s how she
put it, die in her arms. And he refused. Said he owed it to his wife, to die with her nursing him.’

  I decided to tell him.

  ‘I came to your house, as soon as your mother and mine had gone off in the boat,’ I said. ‘But you’d left.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  I couldn’t speak.

  ‘I left Mum at dawn, when the tide was high enough,’ he said, not noticing the words that were blocked in my throat. ‘She took me to the station. But I shouldn’t have. I should’ve stayed. My lasting guilt. I could’ve prevented the death. Deaths. Somehow.’

  ‘When, exactly?’

  I lay down on the pink sand, limp with tension.

  ‘When what?’

  ‘When exactly did you leave?’

  ‘I don’t know why you keep asking that. But all right – we were so ruled by tides. It was one of the year’s big highs. A 1.98 tide, I remember. Remember? We didn’t have calendars. We had tide charts. I was so relieved to leave her, I’ve remembered that little detail all this time. I was counting the minutes before I could go. We left on the rise. If it had been a normal tide, we wouldn’t have been able to get out in time for the train, and I’d have had a chance to reconsider.’

  So I said at last the words I’d rehearsed.

  ‘I came to find out what you knew.’

  ‘You’re right. I should’ve suspected. I was too self-engrossed,’ he said, hardly noticing me.

  ‘What could you have done?’

  ‘Calmed her down. I don’t know. Disabled the boat, maybe.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have known her intentions,’ I reasoned.

  ‘Do you know what time she picked up your mother?’ he asked and then I knew that he was completely innocent, that he had nothing to do with their deaths, that he was as much in mourning as me. I was ashamed of my suspicions, of the years I’d thought so badly of him.

  ‘About an hour after the tide turned. They would’ve been heading towards the pylon when the tide was rushing out,’ I said.

  ‘She always said the running tide was the one we should be wary of,’ he said.

  ‘Terrible rips there,’ we said together, in chorus, a line she taught us long ago.

  We sat in sad silence.

  ‘Do you think she planned it?’ I asked.

  He shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps she wanted to punish me for leaving.’

  After a while, he went on: ‘What she hated most was that your mother knew how to keep him.’

  ‘But he loved Diana. She was –’ I swallowed, ‘his anchoring love. He always said that.’

  ‘But he chose to die with your mother.’

  I sat up, and leaned into him. After a while, I said: ‘Was my unassuming mother more potent than we thought? Like these people here? Unassuming but potent? You think they had a fight on the boat? Diana and my mother? Over who should nurse my father?’

  ‘Would your mother have fought her?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Diana could get beside herself with jealousy,’ he said. ‘I’d seen her jumping up and down with rage, like someone possessed. She wanted to control everything, and here was something outside her grasp. You know what I think: she got beside herself with rage, and didn’t keep her eye on the pylon.’

  We were both sitting in the same way, bending forward in our pain, like twins.

  ‘I don’t think my mother meant to murder yours. I don’t think she intended suicide. I think it was the rips. There are some things in nature no one can control.’ He laughed. ‘Not Diana. Not even me.’

  He was sitting so close to me, I could almost watch the cells of my skin reaching out to him like tiny hands. I turned and found his mouth meeting mine. Fat, generous kisses. Healing kisses that promised that nothing would ever hurt so much again, sweet, moist kisses that lulled. Like a river, full of promises. I pulled away from him.

  ‘I haven’t been flirting with you, have I?’

  ‘Why ask that?’

  I couldn’t tell him that it was a problem I’d had ever since he left.

  ‘Why did you change your surname?’ he asked.

  ‘I got married. I wanted to put my past behind me. Why did you change yours?’

  ‘I wanted to put my past behind me too,’ he said.

  ‘I tried to deceive you,’ I admitted.

  He caressed my face.

  ‘So you could try loving me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Admit it; that’s why you’re here.’

  As he kissed me again, our lips felt plump with emotions we had no words for. He’d planned that kiss. As he cupped the back of my head with his palm, my bird-like heart dropped out of its cage again. It was a long, long kiss, a drink after a long walk through an endless desert.

  ‘We both needed that,’ he said.

  I pulled away again.

  ‘Why have you been so nasty to me?’ I managed to ask.

  ‘When I recognised your wrists, I got angry. That you came after me. But you said nothing.’

  ‘What should I have said?’

  ‘You should’ve said: “I suspect you murdered both our mothers.” You should’ve said: “I’ve always been hopelessly in love with you.”’

  He’s loved you all the time, I thought.

  Then it came easily to me. I held him. I held him for the sake of those poor tormented people. I held him for my own sake. We lay down on the pink sand, holding each other, two children lost in a mysterious dark forest.

  Sex crackled between us. I tried not to notice it, but it was like forcing an exuberant dog to lie down. I couldn’t give into it, I mustn’t.

  ‘I’ll tell you where to find your old lady,’ he offered suddenly. ‘If that’s what’s still important to you,’ he added.

  I waited, silenced, except for the thumping of my heart. I was terrified, now that he was at last telling me, that I’d fall deaf, that he would be struck dumb, that I wouldn’t be able to register such precious information.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘She’s gone in to respite. Daniel took her in the other week. He can tell you where she is.’

  ‘Tillie! Did Daniel know it was her?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, I breathed.

  So I would ask Daniel to take me in. Daniel, who’s calm, reasonable, patient, truthful. I didn’t have to worry. If Adrian did one of his quicksilver changes of mind, I could still go to Daniel and say: take me to her.

  The old lady from the outstation, I thought, but managed not to say. I was ashamed that I hadn’t intuited it was her, that day when I lifted her into the troopie. I was ashamed that I’d still thought like a white, expecting that the singer of the oldest surviving song would be regal.

  ‘Why haven’t her relatives contacted me?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You’re just another white to them. A nurse, perhaps. Why should you be anything special to them?’

  ‘Don’t people ask why I’m here?’

  ‘They accept you because of me.’

  Then everything changed. Just like that. In an instant. Because of something said mildly, even though he’d said such a thing many times, in many ways.

  I moved away slightly. My sexual attraction to him died.

  ‘We should light a fire,’ I said. ‘Or we’ll be cold.’

  It was easier to get up and drag logs and sticks into an untidy pile than to think.

  ‘Aren’t we being extravagant?’ I asked as he dragged a huge log that was most of a lightning-struck tree. ‘This isn’t the way they do fires,’ I added.

  ‘I’m building it to last all night,’ he said. ‘I want to sleep with you.’

  I didn’t speak. I worked at building the fire. All I was doing was building a fire, I wasn’t thinking, nor feeling, I was just putting one stick on top of the other. And again, the fragile peace between us shattered.

  ‘Not that direction,’ he said. ‘Crossways.’

&nbs
p; I kept doing what I was doing.

  ‘Crossways,’ he repeated. ‘So the fire is concentrated here.’

  Of course he was right. I pulled the logs around so they were at diagonals to each other but his gaze was making me nervous, which the leaping flames were revealing, I was sure. I couldn’t refuse his wishes because I was too polite, but worse, because when he chose, his melodious voice dragged my skin towards him, and winkled out the love I’d carried all my life for him.

  ‘I know what I’m doing. At the river, I burned off a thousand times,’ I tried to say. ‘I set fires every winter night.’

  He ignored me. ‘Place that bough like this, not like that,’ he said, miming boughs with his arms.

  I attempted to follow his directions but the structure fell apart. His inspection of my work was making my lip twitch, and a tic was starting on my left eye which I longed for the darkness to hide. When on his order I yanked out a thick bough, it shot up a shower of sparks. His voice was so insistent, I was a prisoner inside it. He made it clear that he’d wait all night for me to build the fire in the way he wanted. I remembered a schoolteacher with a beguilingly soft voice making me try to trace the function of f (x) through a labyrinth of logic that everyone else in the class could see. ‘We’re happy to wait for you all through our lunch break,’ she’d said, while the class hooted with scorn.

  ‘You should start again,’ Adrian said.

  But there were too many boughs to take off and change and I was flustered, clumsy, unable to follow his orders, even if I’d wanted to.

  ‘Stop ordering me around,’ I said.

  Was this another thing he’d inherited from Diana? Is this really why he had to leave her?

  On your boat there is a rubber bulb at the end of the fuel pipe from the fuel tank to the engine. One day when the boat won’t start, Diana explains that there’s no petrol in the engine, and shows me how to make the fuel flow into it.

  ‘You put your whole hand around the bulb, and squeeze,’ she says, explaining that the squeeze empties it of air so there’s room for the fuel.

  ‘It’s like your father’s hand, your hand,’ Diana says as she watches me try.