The Oldest Song in the World

by Sue Woolfe

  ‘But you owe everything to me!’ he cried. He was standing so close, I realised how puny I was against him.

  Nevertheless, I managed: ‘That’s probably true.’ Before he could say another word, I headed out the gate.

  Chapter 23

  Only one troopie was parked at the clinic. I heard Sister inside, telling Gillian off for something. I opened the driver’s door silently. It barely creaked on its hinges. The clinic door was flung open. I froze. Gillian happened to come out holding a bin. She didn’t notice me. I turned the ignition key. The troopie roared. Gillian spun around, took in the sight of me as the driver and dropped the bin in astonishment, paper spilling.

  She glanced back over her shoulder at Sister’s voice.

  ‘She’ll kill you!’ she hissed. The bin clanked down the driveway.

  ‘Come with me,’ I hissed. ‘I’m recording the song.’

  She wavered. She decided.

  ‘OK,’ she said. She ran over, hiked up her straight-skirted nurse’s uniform and, almost bare-legged, clambered in.

  ‘Fast,’ she said. She thought to slip down below the level of the window, just in time.

  ‘Want to keep my job, if there’s a job to be kept,’ she said as Sister, alerted by the engine, poked her head out the door. Sister opened her mouth to shout at me, but she was suddenly as ineffective as she feared, silenced by the motor that I gunned.

  ‘She’ll want to send the spare troopie after you, but Adrian will need it,’ said Gillian. ‘And she’s bound to demand the police come after you but they’ll only laugh.’

  ‘Collins just told me that the old singer’s at the outstation and about to die,’ I said. ‘It’s Tillie.’

  ‘So it’s now or never,’ said Gillian.

  We bounced along the shortcut, across pasture land, across long shadows.

  ‘Want me to drive?’ she asked. ‘It’d be more legal.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘So I might as well enjoy myself.’

  She leaned back, kicked off her shoes, planted her bare feet with their squared toes up on the dashboard.

  ‘Got the recorder?’

  I dared to take a hand off the wheel and pat my pocket.

  ‘Always, these days,’ I said.

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take?’ she asked. She fished a pack of peppermints out of her pocket, poured a jolting pile into her hand and threw them into her mouth.

  ‘Open up.’

  She poured another pile of mints into my mouth.

  ‘Maybe half an hour,’ I said, sucking and crunching. ‘Maybe all night. Depends.’

  I asked her about Sister’s daughter and found out that Sister always took her to desert settlements.

  ‘She could have fun out here but she can’t play with other kids. Fears anyone touching her, loud noises, all sorts of fears. Just a computer nerd.’

  ‘Do you think I could visit her?’ I asked. ‘She might enjoy my parsing software.’

  Gillian laughed. ‘If Sister ever forgives you!’

  We parked outside Tillie’s house and waited at the gate, as Adrian taught me to do. Tillie’s daughter was sitting cross-legged in front of a cooking fire in her yard, but the ashes were cold. She looked up, and smiled as she recognised Gillian.

  ‘Hello, Carmen,’ said Gillian.

  Carmen gazed at me, then smiled slowly.

  I showed her my recorder.

  ‘Mother,’ I said in her language. ‘Sing.’

  She nodded slowly. She must’ve been waiting all that time, since before the letter hung on the university noticeboard, since E.E. Albert decided that I was the one to send, since I came here almost four weeks ago.

  ‘Where’s your mother?’ Gillian asked her in English. She spoke with the easy assurance that at least some of her English would be understood, at least the important words. She’d have learned that assurance from Adrian.

  There was a table in the yard, a door on empty flour tins. Otherwise the yard was empty. There was no rubbish piled against a back fence, trying to free itself to blow across the desert, because there was no back fence.

  ‘On the verandah?’ Gillian peered around. It might be rude in their culture to peer like that, but whites were excused a lot because of our ignorance of their manners. There were mattresses on the verandah, with a tumble of blankets, but otherwise, just a broad stretch of cement, red with desert dust. ‘Or inside?’

  I dredged up the word in Djemiranga, so it was like an echo: ‘Inside?’ It seemed more polite in her language.

  The woman, assuming I had more language than the odd word, as if she thought I was deliberately so monosyllabic – child-like, I remembered, if one didn’t use the travel affix – spoke to me in Djemiranga while she got nimbly to her feet. She was still smiling, so whatever she felt about the long delay since her request, she wasn’t showing it. Her bare feet raised little clouds of dust.

  I scarcely had time to take in the central room, its cement floor bare of furniture, of clothes, or anything but red grit, its bare walls, darkened with children’s prints of gleeful hands, before we were led into a room shrouded by blankets nailed up against the window light. There, on an old-fashioned mattress of the type that was covered in a black-and-white striped fabric, lay my singer, her old dress puckered up to her knobbly knees, her only comfort a blanket lying beside the mattress. Outstretched, she was almost the skeleton she was about to become.

  Her daughter bent over her, took her limp hand, and gently spoke to her, again and again, calling to her, calling, calling, Djemiranga words I didn’t know, perhaps her bush name, the name that whites aren’t told. We stood on the other side of her.

  ‘Is she in a coma?’ I whispered to Gillian. I hadn’t thought of Gillian’s expertise in medicine when I invited her, not till that moment.

  Gillian shrugged. ‘We might be too late.’

  Carmen, never quite taking her gaze off her mother, told me many things, but she spoke so quickly that I couldn’t understand any of them. I heard the word for ‘not’, for negating, and I thought she was saying that her mother could not hear any more, could not eat, could not speak.

  Gillian knelt down, smiled at Carmen as a request for her permission, then felt the old woman’s pulse and put her head against the old woman’s withered chest. She looked around at me.

  ‘She’s still with us – just.’ She raised the old woman’s head ever so carefully, and went to give her a sip of water from the bottle.

  ‘No,’ said her daughter.

  She held her hand out for the bottle. Gillian handed it over, expecting her to lift it to the woman’s lips and fearing it might make Tillie choke. But Carmen had done it many times that day, perhaps many times in the past hour. She lifted the water to her own lips as if she wanted a drink – but no, she didn’t swallow but bent over her mother’s face, brought her own face so close that they were almost kissing, and allowed a few drops of water to dribble from her mouth into her mother’s mouth. The simple, practised gesture brought tears to my eyes. We waited through a moment of terrible suspense. Water ran down the old woman’s chin, as if she’d been rained on. Then we saw her old throat moving, swallowing. The daughter bent over again, and again fed her mother the water. The mother again swallowed. Carmen looked around at us and spoke, though again, what she said I couldn’t understand.

  ‘Can she eat?’ Gillian asked her. She mimed eating. ‘Damper?’

  Carmen shook her head: no.

  ‘This way?’ Gillian mimed food passing from Carmen’s mouth to her mother’s mouth.

  Carmen nodded no.

  Gillian sat back on her heels.

  ‘Her singing days are over,’ she said to me. ‘Everything’s over, or nearly.’

  On my knees as well, I looked between them, at Gillian in her uniform, at the resigned, patient, middle-aged daughter, at the dying woman.

  A word popped into my head. It seemed an order, but Dora had taught me that orders aren’t necessarily impolite – besides, I
couldn’t manage any complicated language.

  ‘Sing,’ I said to Carmen in Djemiranga.

  Carmen looked startled.

  ‘What are you saying?’ asked Gillian.

  ‘I’m asking Carmen to sing,’ I explained.

  ‘Carmen won’t know the song,’ said Gillian reasonably. ‘That’s the whole problem, isn’t it, that the song hasn’t been passed on.’

  ‘But she might have heard some of it,’ I argued. ‘In her childhood, maybe. Just a line or two.’

  ‘This isn’t like white culture, where a mother might be blithely humming a song while she does the washing-up, and the children overhear it,’ said Gillian, speaking with passion and certainty. ‘These songs are shrouded in secrecy. They control things, they’re magic. That’s why men mustn’t hear them. That’s what I was telling you, it mustn’t fall into the wrong hands. It could even put the wrong listener in danger. Tillie must’ve been through the ceremonies and earned the right to sing it. For whatever reason, Carmen didn’t go through the ceremonies. She may regret it now but she has no right, not even to ever have heard it –’

  We were interrupted by a sound. We looked around. Carmen was leaning over her mother, so that she was almost lying on top of the old woman. At first I thought that she was feeding her mother more water. I could only see the side of her head, her profile against the old woman’s. She seemed to suck air loudly in through her teeth in a way I hadn’t heard before. Then, from her mouth came not water, but what seemed to be almost a wail. She was wailing for her mother’s death, I thought, but suddenly the wail changed note, then became a rhythm. There were words I almost recognised amongst what I heard as a stream of sound.

  Carmen was singing.

  I turned my recorder on. At least, I thought sadly, I’d record this fragment of a daughter’s memory. At least that would be something to give E.E. Albert for her belief in me. And the Dean, of course.

  Carmen paused, took a breath, kept singing. I was checking my recorder, checking the digital numbers, so I wasn’t quite watching what happened next. What I was aware of was another sound, a creaking, breathless, whispering but more practised sound. I whirled to see.

  From her bare mattress, the old lady had begun to sing. I watched her throat, not taking in water then, but giving out her song, the song she had been born to sing. Her voice swelled, she found her notes, it was like no music I’d ever heard except for the night of the ceremony. It wasn’t just notes she was singing, she was singing a song full of remembered words, and perhaps amongst them was the ancient grammar that might or might not have changed, that might tell whites many things about her language, the way of life of her ancestors, about their ancient beliefs. Daniel’s face and his words flashed through my mind. The oldest surviving song!

  The old woman paused, took a rattling breath. I thought she was going to stop, but no, she kept going, more notes, a new stream of notes and words. Carmen’s voice had dropped away, perhaps she didn’t know any more, perhaps she was ashamed or fearful of the little she knew, but her job was done. Her mother kept singing. Gillian reached over to me and held my hand. I dared to reach across the old woman’s body and hold Carmen’s hand. Tears were sheeting down all our faces.

  There was a movement in the old woman’s legs, more than a twitch, almost a jump.

  Gillian started, almost jumped as well, and mimed to Carmen to help her lift the old singer’s body.

  ‘No,’ Carmen said.

  ‘We must help her up,’ whispered Gillian over the singing.

  Carmen explained in Djemiranga that Tillie couldn’t get up, couldn’t walk – I followed that much, and then I lost the sense. But the old woman’s legs still jumped. It was as if she was already walking over her country, though she was lying on her back. We had no choice but to lift her, we all lifted her, but one of us could easily have done it on our own, for she was such a slight, pitiful weight, scarcely a human weight at all, she was more like a long, heavily boned, fragile bird. We all yearned to help this fragile bird to fly. We all put our arms around her.

  The song faded. Perhaps it wasn’t the end of the song, perhaps it was just that the old woman couldn’t make the huge effort to stand and sing at the same time.

  Then, another miracle. She was lifting one emaciated, bare arm. We all looked to where she was pointing. She was pointing to the window with its blanket, to the yard, to the light, to the sky, then growing dark. We carried her, somehow upright, to the verandah. She winced away from what was left of the light, as if it was a slap, then, blindly, put her leg forward, to take a step. Everything in her creaked.

  We lowered both her feet to the floor. With all of us holding her, she took another step, creaking so much that it would’ve drowned out her singing, but her song had ceased.

  Her daughter cried out, her daughter didn’t want her mother to walk, to make that huge, that fateful effort. But the old lady was oblivious to us all. She could barely see us, could barely see anything but the light, and her eyes were screwed up against it. She took another step, then another. Gillian loosened her hands from around the old woman’s body. I did as she did, though I was fearful that Tillie would fall to an instant death. They somehow made it off the verandah’s edge, they were in the yard, walking in the dust, with only Carmen holding her upright. They moved slowly, gingerly to the back of the house, where the endless desert rippled away into the purple sky of dusk.

  Somehow the old woman freed herself from her daughter’s clasp, perhaps by a word I couldn’t hear, couldn’t understand. Just as Carmen let go, the old woman’s body drooped, but though she collapsed, like a rag doll, she didn’t fall, she was down on all fours. Carmen helped her again to her feet, looking around desperately at us for help. We started forward, but the old woman was crawling on all fours, on her own. Then, somehow, she straightened, and walked. Carmen stood back, watching her mother. The old woman resumed singing. She walked, singing, one foot slowly after the other, into the desert. Carmen hovered, at a distance, silently, reverently.

  Gillian looked at me, eyebrows up questioningly. I knew her enough to understand that she was wondering if I planned to follow them, to record the walk.

  ‘No,’ I decided. ‘This isn’t whites’ business.’

  She squeezed my hand.

  I switched off the recorder.

  ‘What’s over in that direction?’ I asked.

  ‘Her mother’s country.’

  Then it came back to me, something that I’d been told when I first arrived.

  ‘Her mother’s country yearns for her. She yearns for it, but it yearns for her.’

  ‘You translated that?’

  I shook my head no. ‘Adrian guessed what the song was about at the beginning.’

  Together we stumbled back to the troopie, our shoulders rubbing together, consoling each other.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ she said. ‘You’ve got a lot to think about.’

  Chapter 24

  We drove back to the settlement through the moonlight, a silver desert now, the silver of a much-used coin.

  ‘I’d like to stay on, if they’ll have me,’ Gillian suddenly said as we mused separately, but conscious of each other’s company. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m of no use,’ I said.

  After a few more kilometres, I asked: ‘Will Daniel stay on, do you think?’

  ‘That’s why he’s broken it off with Anastasia.’

  I cried out, ‘When?’

  ‘A few days ago. He said losing her was easier than leaving this country.’

  All around us the desert gleamed with silver light, as silver as ever my river had been.

  ‘I know what he means,’ I managed to say.

  We drove on and on through the silver world.

  ‘What do you think of Graeme?’ Gillian’s voice broke into my tumbling thoughts. ‘Don’t you think he’s a fine figure of a man?’ she added, and when I paused, trying to remember him, she prompted: ‘Graeme, who sacked Adrian last time.’


  I dragged my astonished eyes away from the silver to her face, also silvery around the nose and forehead, and her innocent letterbox mouth, though her cheeks had dark shadows.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He is.’

  ‘He keeps dropping into the clinic for a cuppa when Sister’s not around. What I’m trying to say is – would I be betraying Adrian to like him?’

  In her moonlit self, she seemed part of the desert.

  I floundered. ‘Does Graeme believe in Western medicine?’

  ‘No.’

  We drove on silently for a few minutes.

  ‘But what do you think of Graeme and me?’ Gillian persisted.

  ‘I know you’ll think, “Of course she’d say that” – but I think you should learn his language first,’ I said.

  ‘But his English is perfect.’

  ‘That’s not the point. You need to know what he means when he speaks English. And ask Collin Collins.’

  ‘Collins! So linguists are, on top of everything else, experts in romance?’

  ‘With their language, he’s probably as close to the hearts of these people as any white could be.’

  She dropped me off at my house. In my exhaustion I saw the signs of Adrian’s rapid departure – piles of paper still strewn around my room, piles of clothes abandoned on the floor. But my bed looked sumptuous. It had been made with sheets that promised they’d furl around me. I never make my bed, but tonight it was smoothly done, the end of the sheet folded down evenly over a light summer blanket, and with envelope corners. It came to me that he’d made it for me, just like he had when I first came here. A farewell present, to show he loved me. That simple, caring act brought tears to my eyes. So that I would think, after all, that I’d been wrong: that this is how he loved.

  But tears stop.

  I went to the toilet, made myself go to the kitchen, drank water to give myself time to think. Then, in case I slept in, I wrote a note to Daniel and left it on the table in the kitchen.

  My fault about the troopie.

  Out my window, Adrian’s mattress was still there, a white scar on the red earth.