by Sue Woolfe
‘What does it matter, which house it is?’ I asked.
They both looked around at me.
‘Bureaucrats,’ spat Adrian.
‘Not all the houses had up-to-date insurance,’ Daniel persisted. ‘This one mightn’t have had.’
‘You shouldn’t have told them about the fire!’ cried Adrian. ‘We could’ve thrown up another house, you and me and a few blokes.’
Daniel paused, astonished. He seemed to shrink under Adrian’s fury.
‘You let me down over this!’ Adrian cried.
When Daniel spoke, his voice was low. ‘I’ll go and look again for the paperwork.’
‘You’ll cordon it off first.’
Adrian stalked off into our house, pulled off his boots, lay on the sofa with his hand over his eyes, and fell asleep. I showered, changed into clean clothes, made a salad for lunch that might be only for us, or might also be for insurance agents from Alice Springs, and a pot of tea in the small teapot. I carried it out to the verandah, along with two cups. I sat gazing at the blackened house.
After a while, Daniel came down the street from the clinic.
He slumped down on a white plastic chair, entirely forgetting to wipe it clean.
‘You stayed out,’ he said, in that stumbling way people have when they can’t think of a way to start a conversation that’s necessary to them. I kept staring at the smoking house.
‘We had to sort things out,’ I said.
‘Being at the river helped?’ he asked.
‘Being in the bush always helps,’ I said. ‘But if we’d come home earlier, we might have caught it,’ I added after a while.
He’d finished his tea before he said: ‘He’s not right to blame me.’
‘He’s exhausted. In shock,’ I said.
‘It wasn’t insured,’ he said.
I poured more tea into his cup.
‘Things might unravel from here,’ he said.
We sipped our tea.
‘When you’re next taking patients into town, can I come too? Adrian has at last told me who I’ve got to record. It’s Tillie.’
‘Tillie! I’d never have guessed. Of course,’ he said.
‘You didn’t know it was Tillie?’ I checked. I wanted to believe in his empathy, I wanted to believe in him.
‘Not a clue. He plays things so close to his chest. And Collins never mentioned it. But I was always busy, never had much of a chance to talk to Collins. Always wanted to, but things here, as you know, are often flat out. And the women wouldn’t have mentioned it to me.’
Just then an unfamiliar troopie came down our street, with two strangers in the front seat. Daniel put down his cup.
‘They got here fast! Wake Adrian,’ he threw over his shoulder. ‘It’s not a good look, that the clinic manager sleeps on his sofa while Rome burns.’ His voice was bitter with irony.
He ran out to the road and hailed the troopie as it rattled away down the street. The driver looked out the window, saw Daniel and backed up in a cloud of dust. I went inside and woke up Adrian, then served lunch.
‘There’s enough for us and our visitors,’ I told Adrian.
‘We’re feeding them?’ he grunted.
‘It might sweeten them up,’ I said.
He sat down at the table and began loading his plate.
‘Don’t you think we should wait?’ I asked him.
‘I didn’t invite them,’ he said.
‘What do the people think?’
‘I wish you’d call them the mob! That’s what they call themselves! You sound like someone at a Darwin garden party. “The people”.’
Another barb. But all I said was: ‘I think they use it as a plural.’
When he looked uncomprehending, I explained: ‘“Mob”. Like our “s”. Book, books. Troopie. Troopies.’
He wasn’t listening.
‘To answer your question, the mob think it’s boring,’ he said. ‘All this outrage over bits of paper.’
He shook salt on his food, slammed down the salt shaker and rubbed sleep out of his eyes.
‘It was probably an arsonist. A white arsonist. Someone who knew it was the one house uninsured. An enemy.’
‘An enemy here wouldn’t have access to our records,’ I argued. ‘You mean some government official who wants to destroy you?’
He was already scraping his plate clean.
‘You’ve made enemies at the school,’ he said. ‘You know Bruce and Craig are mates, and Bruce wanted to do me in. What have you done to Craig?’
‘You’re in shock,’ I said evenly. But he’d put my heart in turmoil.
We heard heavy footsteps on the verandah. Daniel brought in the two men, both large, red-faced balding men, both with bellies spilling out of white shirts and barely buttoned away.
‘Rotten roads,’ they said, almost together. ‘They need grading.’
‘You did it fast,’ I agreed, trying to make my voice pleasant and welcoming.
‘We flew part way up, then borrowed a car,’ one said.
I poured them iced water and they sat down, thanking me. I served salad.
‘You think it was arson?’ asked Adrian.
‘We’re here to investigate,’ one said. ‘Can’t jump to any conclusions.’
‘We should be able to tell this afternoon,’ the other said.
‘How?’ I asked.
‘Where it started, how it burned,’ the first man said. ‘It’ll probably turn out to be an electrical fault. That happens often enough in the bush. Cowboys out here pretending to be electricians. Think they can get away with murder. Sometimes they do.’
‘Heard you had trouble with your electricity,’ said his mate. ‘Then you got it fixed and kaboom!’ The sound of their salad-munching could be heard, I was sure, all over the settlement.
That afternoon there was such a willy-willy of red dust that it spiralled higher than the telegraph poles, and all over the sky was a haze of red dust. I could see no further than the gate. Then the wild wind split a grey cloud and white Old-Testament-prophet light streamed through it down into our yard, lighting up the clothesline as if it, of all the earth, should be granted the honour of being singled out.
Lately, I’d taken to sitting on the verandah, working on my recordings, watching people go by, watching the weather. Large black ants scurried to mock my slowness, almost instantly outlining the shape of things – verandah posts, the verandah edge and the chairs beside me. Even the table was ant-outlined. A well-fed dog I didn’t know wandered into the yard, watching the sky with me, licking my hand. Rain began falling in thick drops, almost like jelly.
Daniel strode home from the clinic to get some papers.
‘Out here, storms often come to nothing,’ he said.
Birds began their exploratory peeping noises into the stillness – though it was more like a throat twitching. Drk drk drk. Everything seemed to come to a standstill after rain here – insects hid under leaves, dogs hid under houses, the donkey waited under a tree. Then the rain swooped again, in wild bird swoops of sound.
Two girls I recognised from Libby’s house walked past. They stopped at the gate, nudging each other.
‘Come in out of the rain. Have a cuppa,’ I called.
They came timidly over the red yard, which would soon, because of the rain, be furred with tiny green weeds, I knew that by now.
They stood hesitantly, not daring to mount the verandah. One waited for the other to speak.
‘Want a cuppa?’ I asked.
The older girl, Rayleen, struggled with rain-saturated black hair and something she wanted to say.
‘At least come out of the rain,’ I said.
They paused, then, both using their right leg first, they mounted the verandah together.
‘I’ll get you both a towel,’ I said. I was about to get up, when Rayleen spoke.
‘The white men. They punish us?’
‘Punish! What for?’
‘The fire.’
I sat dow
n.
‘Did you light the fire?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm so that they’d make a confession, if that was what was on their minds. It wasn’t.
‘No. But the government doesn’t like Aboriginal people. Now, trouble. Maybe –’ she had to find a way to express the enormity of the threat, ‘maybe the government takes our land away.’
So that was the problem. That’s why they’d come.
‘That’s not how it works. If someone set the fire, that person will be punished. Only that person. But if it was just an accident, no trouble at all. OK now?’
That set the girls talking in Djemiranga, while I strained to follow. I had the impression that Rayleen was explaining it to Kathy, the other girl. ‘So,’ I continued, pleased that I’d eased them enough so that now they sat down on the chairs. ‘I’ll go and get cups, and towels.’
I turned off the computer and went inside, humming to myself. I’m getting the hang of this, I thought. This would be my first real friendship. I’d be able to explain white ways to them, and they’d be able to tell me about their ways.
We drank tea and gazed across at the ruin of the second doctor’s house.
‘Our uncles been singing this rain,’ one of them said.
For a moment my mind supplied a missing preposition. You sing to, sing about, sing with, sing at, sing under, sing over.
‘Singing,’ I repeated.
They nodded.
‘They sang up the rain?’
They said nothing. Perhaps what I’d said made no sense.
We drank tea.
‘Only white trouble,’ Rayleen mused, still savouring her relief. ‘Not trouble for us.’
‘A missing paper is making trouble amongst the whites,’ I agreed.
‘My father said, why whites believe in paper? White culture not important enough to remember? Our culture important, so we remember.’
‘You remember for generations. Maybe since the Dreaming,’ I said.
They nodded solemnly.
‘Would you like me to bake you a cake?’ I asked. ‘You come back in a while, you can eat cake. Chocolate?’
They talked to each other in Djemiranga, and Kathy nodded to Rayleen.
‘We have shower?’ Rayleen asked. ‘No water at home.’
‘The water’s not connected at your house?’
‘Doesn’t work. Hasn’t for –’
She swept her hand away from her body in a long gesture.
‘Why ever not?’ I asked.
‘Bruce,’ they said together, as if his name explained everything.
‘Does Bruce know?’
They giggled again.
‘I’ll get you towels,’ I said.
I heard them laughing and singing as they took turns to shower. Their happiness and our new friendship eased my foolish heart. I turned on the oven and mixed a batter for the cake.
I wondered if all women remember their mothers when they’re doing these things their mothers did, turning on the oven in readiness, finding the right-sized bowl to mix the batter in, beating the yellow yolks into their transparent whites until they thicken, stirring in the sparkling white crystals of sugar, shaking in the flour that showers the working board like fine confetti and has to be wiped away, the sequence of stirring the batter, buttering the pan, pouring the batter into it, feeling the heat of the oven with the hand and setting the cake tin onto the warm shelf, sweeping the flour dropped on the floor into little white hills afterwards. But it wasn’t my mother who was behind every move, it was the amber Diana, for her knowledge and her breasts and her laughter and her flirtatious eyes, and for her murderous jealousy. There between the oven and the table, as I swept up, I wrapped the tea towel around my face and crouched on the floor to be nearer the ground for that sad loss of them all.
‘Are you OK?’
I looked up to see Daniel; he was crouching next to me.
‘It’s about you and Adrian, isn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘No.’
He went to the drawer and found a clean, folded tea towel and passed it to me as if it were a handkerchief.
‘Adrian and I grew up like brother and sister,’ I wept.
‘What?’ he cried out. ‘I never guessed! He’s luckier than I thought. To be like your brother.’
‘Lucky?’ I gazed at him in the midst of my tears. ‘Him? I was the one who was lucky. Not him. I was ordinary. He was,’ I ran out of words, ‘extraordinary.’
‘It’s true that he’s still extraordinary,’ said Daniel, ‘but also extraordinarily lucky to have grown up with you.’
It came to me again how little I knew Daniel.
He startled me by adding: ‘Is that why you stayed out last night?’
‘It’s why I came here,’ I said.
Something seemed to settle in him. He stayed crouching beside me, his legs sticking out, like a giant frog. I shook with a fresh burst of sobs, and he took the tea towel out of my hands to wipe my face again.
‘It’s why I’ve done everything I’ve ever done,’ I said.
But next to his warmth my crying seemed to ease, as if it wasn’t the deep well of grief it’d always seemed, as if that well had begun to dry up. As if grief was finite, as if it could wane.
‘Could you be in trouble too?’ I asked him. ‘Might you get the sack?’
He shrugged. He’d accept his fate, that shrug said.
‘You’ve tried your best,’ I said.
‘So has Adrian.’
There came a new burst of laughter from the bathroom. I looked towards it and the girls’ laughter seemed to slant down the hall in the same way the rising sun had done on the morning we picked medicine plants. The hallway seemed to be a striped pathway of gold.
‘Thank you,’ I told Daniel. I hoisted myself up, using his frog knees as a prop. I faltered as the warmth of his leg shot through my hand, up my arm, up and down my body. My errant vagina heaved; dampness fell between my legs. This was no time for lust, I knew, and anyway, whatever Daniel yearned for, a frivolous sexual approach wasn’t it. He wanted something deeper, more elusive. I knew all this as if it was written on the wall, as I walked away from him down the happiness-striped hallway. He wanted, like my father, an anchoring love.
I only remembered Anastasia outside the bathroom door.
‘Want me to put your clothes in the washing machine?’ I called to the girls, my voice breaking. I tried it again and this time I was stronger. ‘I’ll find you something of mine to wear.’
There was a pause in the giggling, and then Rayleen opened the door, her face fat with smiles, and shoved out a damp bundle of their clothes into my hand.
Daniel was following me.
‘What’s happening over there?’ I indicated the clinic, trying not to stand too near him and feel his heat again.
‘It isn’t good,’ he said, as if he was remembering another world. ‘I’d better get back.’
Afterwards I sat with the girls on the verandah to eat cake. They shook glossy wet curls out of their eyes.
‘We come every day after school?’ they offered. ‘We teach you language?’
‘I’ll make you a cake every day for that. Let’s cook it –’ they discreetly pretended not to see that my eyes were as wet with tears as their hair, ‘in a camp oven, out in the yard. You can tell me how. Not so very different from your mother’s dampers. Just a different flavour, and sweeter.’
The insurance agents’ troopie drove past.
‘Only white trouble,’ repeated Rayleen, watching my face for affirmation. I nodded.
Adrian was at the gate. He strode onto the verandah, his features taut.
‘Official people are driving out here tomorrow – they arrive at ten – they must think it’s so important that for once they’ll leave their comfortable homes before dawn! They want a meeting with the mob.’
‘The people don’t have meetings.’
A wrong note. I shouldn’t have taunted him. He was at the door. He wheeled around.
And in that moment, at the mention of the mob, it came to me that I should tell him what the girls had told me, that a rumour was inflaming the settlement.
‘The girls have just said –’
‘What are you doing with them?’
‘Having a cuppa,’ I said, trying to smile at them to make them comfortable, but feeling very uncomfortable myself. ‘But they said –’
‘Send them home! This is my house! I need my peace! What they say isn’t important! Send them home.’
They leaped up, Rayleen still with a slice of cake in her hand, looking between him and me, her eyes wide, Kathy with an open mouth full of chocolate cake. Adrian strode inside, slamming the front door behind him.
‘But they are important!’ I yelled at him through the door.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to them. ‘Come tomorrow. We’ll have afternoon tea again.’
They’d already stepped off the verandah.
‘Don’t take any notice of him. He’s in shock and exhausted.’
I went inside and found him lying on the sofa, hand over his eyes again.
‘How dare you insult them!’ I cried.
He was unrepentant.
‘You give everyone credence,’ he said. ‘They’re not important.’
I was just about to override him and tell him about the rumour they’d told me but he was in one of his vicious moods.
‘Besides, you won’t be able to make them your friends. You’re no good at intimacy. You try but it doesn’t work. People here are experts. They’ll run a mile from you.’
This is how he loves.
Stung, I wandered back to the verandah. I tried to switch my mind away from him. I checked my watch. It was just before five, just before office closing time. Looking back, I should’ve stood my ground with him, I should’ve gone back inside and insisted on warning him. Or at least I should’ve told Daniel. But it was easier to think about the lack of water in Libby’s house, and I let that distract me.
I was running away from my mind, which drummed: This is how he loves.
The council office was manned by a sweet-faced Aboriginal woman, and another on the phone. It was the first time in the settlement that I’d seen a local sitting in a chair. She pushed it out.
‘Bruce?’
