The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  I look at my hand on the bulb in surprise, for my father has long, tapering fingers, and I have my mother’s hands, short and stumpy. I don’t know how to tell her that.

  ‘Your father holds my heart in his hand,’ she explains. ‘He’s always squeezing my heart.’

  Kookaburras have been making the krkrkr they do before they burst into laughter, as if they have to clear their throats and arrange their vocal cords while they consider all the absurdity in the world. Mocking laughter now erupts all around us. Then they stop abruptly or they stop in my memory of that moment, in case they miss a word we say. There are many things to listen for, many things I should say to Diana, gazing at the rubber bulb, but these moments come so quickly, like a cricket ball or a meteorite is said to, so that all you can do is reel with the impact. Minutes later, or years, it comes to you, what you should have said or done. Perhaps you only know how to react when childhood’s over or, at least, when all the things are finished that could’ve been changed.

  Take your heart away from him, I should say to Diana. You’re hurting us all. My mother, your son, me.

  I should say: You have your son’s heart in your hand.

  Such simple words, but I don’t know how to say them, even how to think them. I should say that I’ve inherited my mother’s hands, I’m from her, part of her, not part of Diana. I should say: What about my mother’s heart in your hand? Don’t you know you’re squeezing the life out of my mother’s heart?

  But I say nothing. I don’t love my mother enough, though I have her hands. Not at that moment, not when it matters.

  I should say: You have your son’s life in your hand, and there will come a moment when he won’t allow you to squeeze his heart any more.

  I should say: You have mine as well, and my whole life, for all the days I am on this earth.

  I should say: Have you no shame, to do this to us all?

  But I merely look down at her hand as she shows me again how to work the bulb. For the first time, I notice that though she’d painted her nails red, blood red, this morning, the red paint is already coming off in chips. Her chipped nails seem plaintive, as if a party is over.

  But still I say nothing. Nothing at all. It’s one of the burdens of childhood that a child has no words.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ Adrian asked.

  ‘I’ve been building fires all my life,’ I shouted. ‘You’re treating me like a fool.’

  ‘Not out here, you haven’t,’ he said. ‘Not to burn the whole night.’

  ‘It’s as if a fire must be made in a way that only you know, in a shape only you approve of,’ I shouted at him.

  He didn’t shout back. He just talked gently, beguilingly, sweetly, as he did when he’d pushed me too far.

  ‘It’s got to blaze all night, to keep poisonous snakes away.’

  I rallied for one last attempt.

  ‘Where did you learn this only way to make a fire?’

  ‘From them,’ he said, glancing over his shoulder back to the Aboriginal settlement. ‘They’d know. They’ve been doing it for a long time.’

  He added: ‘It has to keep us safe while we make love.’

  I threw down the log I’d been holding.

  ‘Finish it yourself.’ I stalked off into the darkness alone.

  ‘If that’s what you want, we’ll go for a walk up the riverbed,’ he said. ‘Together.’

  I hurried in front. Everything was black, black soil, black trees, black sky, though I knew I was walking on pinkness. There was no moon, only stars.

  ‘See with your feet,’ he said, catching up with me. He tried to divert me by telling me how when the river came into flood, he saw the head of the river creeping across the desert.

  ‘There are only seven permanent waterholes in this desert,’ he told me, enjoying teaching me again. ‘The river engulfed everything in its path. I was sure little animals must’ve drowned, they’re so unused to a body of water. There are stories that the mob knew when it was coming, they’d know to get out of the way, they’d put their ear to the earth and hear its approach.’

  I couldn’t resist him, I never could.

  ‘The river makes a noise?’

  He shrugged. ‘This riverbed has all the attributes of a river.’

  ‘Except for water,’ I spat.

  We walked back to our fire together, which by then was roaring. He sat and tried to pull me down beside him but I went to the other side of the flames.

  ‘There seems to be a glow over there, near home,’ I suddenly noticed.

  He groaned theatrically. ‘You’re lucky I’m with you. You’ve got no sense of direction at all. You’re pointing south and we’re east.’

  Silence settled on us.

  ‘We can’t become lovers,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’

  He came over and put his arms around me and I sank into the pressure of his pink galah chest on mine, his strong shoulders against mine, his nipples against mine – his chest was so wide and deep it seemed it could enclose me, thigh to thigh, knee to knee. Our feet found a resting place between each other’s, perhaps we even touched toes inside our shoes. I tried not to think of how he’d feel pulsing inside me.

  ‘Anything further would be dangerous,’ I said.

  Unexpectedly, irrationally, I thought of Daniel. It was Daniel I wanted to be with, it was Daniel who felt like my home.

  I shivered. Adrian disentangled himself, then went to the troopie and found a pillow and a tarpaulin. We lay down on it and he arranged it over us. He noticed one of my feet sticking out, and covered it up, endearingly. We held each other, merely held.

  ‘Marry me,’ he said sleepily. ‘Aboriginal way. I’ll keep you. You can make me food and a garden. Run chooks. Do womanly things. The mob will love you for that. In the morning, you’ll – I don’t know – you’ll paint. You’ll wake me. We’ll have breakfast, you’ll walk to the shop for, I don’t know, milk. On the way back you’ll hold babies, their babies.’

  Even in the black night, I knew that the sand around us was still invisibly rosy.

  ‘Not ours?’ I asked, but he didn’t hear.

  I put my head on the pillow beside him and wept for the babies, the other women’s babies, and mine which I thought I’d never have.

  ‘I didn’t get divorced,’ I told him, but again he didn’t hear.

  ‘Women will visit you and sit on the verandah and drink tea with you. When I come home for lunch they’ll fade away because they’ll know what a man wants of his wife. Sometimes on weekends one of them will invite you to go out to a special place. They’ll love you, that you left the city to be a desert woman with me and live with them.’

  In his voice I heard his longing, like mine for Daniel.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the old lady earlier?’ I asked.

  ‘Because I fell in love with you on first sight, and I wanted to keep you near me,’ he said easily. ‘We’ll sleep near each other, get used to each other, tonight.’

  ‘Go to sleep then,’ I said.

  I turned my back to him and allowed him to curve his body into mine, so we were like spoons in a drawer. He cupped my breasts.

  ‘I should patent this position,’ he said.

  I accepted his cupping hands. I lay watching the black sky, a garden of flowers of light.

  Then he stirred, and said sleepily: ‘You’re not the sort of woman an ordinary man would choose for here. But that’s the point.’

  ‘I’m not?’

  ‘I’m a rare man.’

  He had fallen asleep again. I gazed at the moon, now a full moon, beyond the very toes of my feet, the sort of moon that was considered romantic. But it seemed to be glaring at me, showing up my faults.

  It was too difficult trying to reason; I drifted asleep. Cold woke me. The fire that would last all night was dying. I wriggled up, moving his hands away and being careful not to wake him with the crinkling of the tarpaulin, for now I was sure I didn’t want him to be my lover, ever. I limpe
d across twigs to put another log on the fire. Cold hit my bladder and I pushed my feet into my sneakers to go out into the desert for a pee. I was too cold to unlace them, so I walked inside them but on my toes, like a young girl in her first clumsy pair of high heels. That feeling of being young, vulnerable, unknowing, made me see that he was right, that I am odd. When I’d been a child at school, I had no friends, just people I tried to hang around with so the bullies wouldn’t single me out. I felt the bullies could see something I couldn’t see, something dark and horrifying. Bullies to me in those days were the seekers and finders of truth.

  Tears were flooding my eyes. He seemed to be able to find and finger the hurt inside me, the hurt of not being the person I should be. Even E.E. Albert hoped I’d be someone else, someone she wanted.

  For years, I’d felt unlovable, that I was a burden to every man I slept with.

  All that I understood as my pee sank deep into the dry ground, watering it. I ran back, almost stumbling, and wriggled back under the tarpaulin again, against his warmth. It was then that I noticed that the moon had moved; it was now above my chest.

  A voice was speaking inside my head. As I drifted, it had a chance to speak. It said: He loved you all the time. You’ve seen what love is to him. That was how he loves.

  I fell asleep again, and at dawn I had to arch my body to find the moon, then pale, behind my head.

  He awoke with a jump.

  ‘We must go!’ he cried.

  But just before he eased himself back into the troopie, he turned and put his arms around me. My own arms stayed by my side until he pulled at them, placed them one by one around his neck. I felt the familiar thump of capitulation. I nestled my head against his shoulders though my face streamed again with tears. His hair smelled like a dead kangaroo that’d been left in the sun. The smell seemed to rescue me.

  ‘Even your hair refuses to submit,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not happy?’ he asked in surprise. ‘You get a proposal and you’re unhappy?’ And immediately: ‘You’re not standing properly. Sag your knees, so we’re body to body.’

  And it was true. I didn’t seem to be able to put my feet in the right place.

  ‘I don’t think there’s room for me,’ I said.

  On the drive back, he put his hand on my thigh, and we drove holding hands, in something that felt like peace. The prickly spinifex glowed silver in the new sun, as if the moon was still up. I thought of how many times I’d been tricked by the beauty of spinifex. I told him that.

  He nodded.

  ‘The sun keeps bleaching away everything you count on,’ I said.

  He suddenly swung the troopie off the road, and charged across the plain, mowing down saplings.

  ‘My excuse for coming out here was to bring in a patient,’ he said.

  ‘A patient living alone in the desert?’ I asked, but suddenly we’d arrived in a clearing.

  In front of us was a group of lean-tos, maybe six, all with the blue smoke of cooking fires furling around them, and family groups watching over the cooking of dampers. They looked up, startled, at our approach.

  ‘Is Nick here?’ asked Adrian, dive-bombing out of the troopie to explain our presence.

  I got out too, hoping I could pass for a nurse, hoping I wouldn’t have to act as one.

  ‘Nick here?’ I repeated in faltering Djemiranga.

  But when they replied in Djemiranga, telling me the whereabouts of Nick, correcting me – I’d left out the affix and more besides – I couldn’t follow them. They laughed and gave up.

  ‘No,’ they told Adrian in English. They waved their hand towards the desert.

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Should we pursue him?’ I asked Adrian.

  ‘No,’ said Adrian sadly. ‘We can offer Western medicine but it’s his choice.’

  He thanked the people and got back in the troopie.

  One of the women came to my window and spoke in Djemiranga. I made out ‘fire’ and ‘Gadaburumili’.

  ‘She’s saying what I said – there’s a fire at home,’ I told Adrian.

  ‘All women have a rotten sense of direction,’ he said easily.

  He wasn’t at all in a hurry; on the way back he braked and pointed out a huge metal structure glinting behind the settlement.

  ‘Another job-creation scheme. I told you the desert’s littered with them. This one was for the mob to break in wild horses. You know the old men were once stockmen.’

  ‘And what happened?’ I asked, staring at the glinting metal.

  ‘The stockmen are in their nineties!’

  ‘And the young ones?’

  ‘Why would they want to?’

  ‘Did anyone ask them?’

  ‘The whites would’ve come out, put on a barbecue, a few people would’ve turned up, the whites would’ve been hot and bothered and complaining about the heat and the flies, and if all that was needed so that everyone could go back home and be comfortable was a cross on a piece of paper, these are obliging people. Someone would’ve obliged.’

  ‘Did the mob know what the whites were saying?’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘Did the whites speak Djemiranga?’

  ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Didn’t they bring a translator?’

  ‘Whites insist that the mob here speak English, and if they don’t, that’s their lookout.’

  Bits of a lecture from E.E. Albert that I had scarcely attended to were drifting into my mind.

  ‘The whites would’ve used abstract nouns,’ I mused.

  He looked impatient. ‘What?’

  ‘Aboriginal languages don’t have many abstract nouns.’

  Day by day, I was coming to understand E.E. Albert better.

  Adrian groaned. ‘Who cares about grammar?’

  Love hadn’t affected his opinion of my work. But I continued: ‘So a lot of what the whites said wouldn’t have made sense. Abstract nouns. Like “economy” and “independence” and “the future”.’

  ‘Democracy,’ added Adrian.

  ‘You’ve got it!’ I cried, pleased that he’d remembered.

  He gunned the troopie. In through the open cabin windows came the stench of fire.

  ‘OK, so I was wrong,’ he said. ‘But it’s no worry. They’ll be burning off. They do it to make the grass grow again, and then the wild animals return to eat it, and to be killed and eaten. “The wild animals want to be eaten,” the mob says. The pastoralists call the police, but the police can never find the culprits. And since some police are Aboriginal, perhaps they’re sympathetic. After all, to people who care nothing about ownership, why should the pastoralists commandeer the mob’s hunting grounds?’

  We drove past a wrecked car on the side of the road.

  ‘I’m amazed local people accept the white’s right to run cattle,’ I said. ‘Any of these animals would make a meal for a week.’

  ‘There’s a dire history of the consequences of not accepting them,’ Adrian said ironically.

  The stench became stronger.

  ‘Wind up the window,’ he ordered. His voice was so cross, I took my hand away to do his bidding, and then I didn’t give it back. He didn’t ask for it.

  ‘You keep putting barbs in my mind,’ I said.

  ‘We won’t talk, then,’ he said triumphantly.

  I told him that Puig, an Argentinean novelist I loved, said that in couples there was always one who loves more than the other: the loved and the lover.

  He reached over and touched my breast through the fabric of my blouse. Despite myself, despite the fabric of my blouse, my nipple prickled out into his blunt fingers.

  He spoke to my breasts: ‘You’ll have to wait till she’s ready.’

  I laughed. ‘The body’s anarchic,’ I said.

  It was the wrong sort of thing to say: I so often nettled him.

  ‘You’re so needy!’ he burst out. ‘So spiritually needy! You’re all like this, you come here with a gap in your lives, in your souls, and you w
ant to feed on something. You’re parasites!’

  ‘And you?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m the loved,’ he said proudly as if something was settled. But nothing was, not yet.

  Chapter 21

  As we turned into the settlement, smoke was billowing, and there was a knot of people on the road.

  ‘Opposite the second doctor’s house,’ I said. ‘It looks like a meeting.’

  ‘They don’t have meetings,’ he said, sounding tired. But then all conversation ceased, for we saw that the second doctor’s house was just a smoking, blackened ruin. Only the steel posts were in place, and even they had buckled. The roof had caved in, the walls had gone, the floorboards had gone. There was just a pit where I had once slept.

  A few people looked around as we pulled up. Daniel emerged out of the crowd, and ran around to Adrian’s window.

  ‘There’s a problem with the paperwork,’ he said.

  ‘Who cares about paperwork!’ shouted Adrian. He dive-bombed out of the troopie, and headed over to the house. Daniel restrained him.

  ‘Not yet, it’s dangerous.’

  ‘Danger? Who cares about danger?’ Adrian demanded. He strode on. Daniel pulled him to a stop.

  ‘The paperwork! The insurers!’

  Adrian shook him off, but even he halted in front of the ruin.

  ‘How did it happen?’ I asked Daniel.

  ‘I woke up this morning and found it. I didn’t hear anything all night, what with the air conditioning roaring now the electricity’s back. Or smell it, till I opened the door. The fire was out by then and just smoking.’

  Adrian strode back.

  ‘You should’ve cordoned it off to keep the kids safe,’ said Adrian. He instructed me to keep everyone at bay while Daniel went for rope.

  Daniel stood his ground.

  ‘But the insurance – I got on to the insurers as soon as they started work. There seems a bit of a mix-up over which houses are insured. They can’t cope with the way we have no street addresses, and no street numbers. I wasn’t able to describe which house had the fire. They were counting houses on the plan and they couldn’t find a mention of this one. They’re on their way. They’re bringing out their plan. They’ll be here by late lunchtime.’