Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea

by Marie Munkara

  Mummy’s box that I have ended up carrying has gotten quite heavy by now so I ask where a trolley can be located. She ignores me as we head into the hardware section where an axe and a billy are dumped on top of the box whose arse-end is threatening to give way along with my arms and legs. I plonk it on the floor and sit down beside it in protest while mummy keeps going. A rather hideous blanket is displayed on the wall and as mummy scans the shelves for more stuff, I study it closely to see if the misshapen and deformed tiger on it is yawning or roaring with pain. Now that was a mistake, wasn’t it. Mummy spots it and grabs one from the shelf to add to the growing pile in the box. At her shrill insistence all within hearing range flock to view this macabre spectacle and grab an ugly blanket for themselves. I spot Louis and wave him over as my arms are about to give way from carrying the groceries.

  ‘Mummy ready now,’ he says cheerfully as he picks up the box and heads for the cash register where she is waiting for us. I am feeling really grumpy after lugging that lot around but I say nothing, telling myself we are going home now and it’s alright.

  The checkout operator who, mummy explains, is my kinship sister, runs the items past the scanner at high speed and flings them into the box. Then we are presented with a bill that is hugely disproportionate to the amount of groceries. Mummy displays her usual nonchalance but I am flabbergasted. There is an uncomfortable silence until I realise that sister-girl on the cash register and mummy are waiting for me to pay up. Louis has cleverly disappeared and I disbelievingly reach into my bag for my wallet and hand over the money. Although I’m not happy about it, I know my embarrassment at saying I didn’t have any money would have been far worse for my ego than paying up. And I know this is something I need to get over if I don’t want to find myself constantly broke. I think they’ve worked out that I don’t know the rules and they are going to exploit this fact until I learn to play the game and say I don’t have any money like everybody else does.

  3.

  There was a community meeting yesterday to vote on whether the club should be open to everyone over the age of eighteen, and mummy and I are waiting for Louis to get home and tell us the verdict. When I come out of the loo he’s there with a big grin on his face. They voted yes. Despite all the to-ing and fro-ing and the expected opposition from the religious quarter, it has been passed. I ponder the possibility of vote-rigging and corruption among the ranks of serious-faced council board members (including Louis) who would have had the last say. But how can you be bribed in a place where there is no such thing as personal possessions, where everyone shares and owns what everyone else does? If you buy a new car you can count on one hand the number of times your arse will get to sit in the driver’s seat before it becomes public property. If you buy a washing machine you always end up washing your clothes by hand because the machine is going twenty-four hours a day with everyone else’s stuff in it. Like mummy’s that ended up by the road for rubbish collection with someone’s clothes still in it after it gave up the ghost. But in the end does it really matter how the decision was reached because now I don’t have to sit at home and watch my mum and brothers head off to the club without me and then watch them stagger home afterwards. And if I’m going to have to listen to their drunken arguments afterwards then at least I can join in.

  Monday comes. It’s 3.30 pm. I know this because mummy’s circadian rhythm has unfailingly sent an alarm to her brain telling her to arise from her afternoon siesta and have a shower. She is now waiting for me to do the same because today I am going to the club for the first time. I fuss over what I am going to wear while mummy taps her foot impatiently, she doesn’t care about the store being open late but it seems that the club is a different matter.

  We arrive and it feels like a carnival as new patrons pour in through the gates at opening time. I follow mummy inside to her favourite spot in the corner where she sits next to the wire grating where she can catch the breeze. In the middle is an enormous sacred tree that the club, or the Nguiu Ulintjinni Association, has been built around. There is a hole where it pokes up through the roof and unfolds into a beautiful big canopy, while underneath there is sand surrounded by a concrete border where the old men and their dogs sit. Mummy explains that we have to buy beer tickets and present them to the bar. When I ask her why, she tells me that the white publican thinks the blokes serving behind the bar might rip him off so if one cashier sells the beer tickets the publican has only one person to keep an eye on. But even with the camera rigged up over the cashier, it doesn’t stop them from folding in a few undetected free ones when they hand over the drinks, and with the cashier being mummy’s nephew, my immediate family never pays for the total amount we receive. There are no stubbies or cans, everything is on tap, and we get served the beer in plastic cups so they can’t get broken.

  I can see mummy has positioned herself well as the route to the main bar is on her right so she can scan who is going past and scab beer tickets off them as well, even though she already has a roll secreted in her handbag.

  When I protest about the deceit of her secret stash mummy explains that this is being smart not selfish and everyone does it. She manages to scab four tickets off a smiling young man and then sends me off to the bar with two tickets. It is bedlam but despite the crush of humanity there is still some sort of order as people wait for their turn to be served. There are five men pulling beers behind the bar including one of my aminays but the smile is soon wiped off my face when he refuses to serve me and tells me that no granddaughter of his is going to become a drunk if he can help it. He then proceeds to tell the others not to serve me before stalking off and serving someone else. I know there is no point arguing with him so I turn to go find Louis to get the beer. But my cousin Fabian is right behind me, so I slip the two tickets into his hand and head back to mummy.

  I arrive back to find Aunty Ruthie sitting next to mummy. Apparently aunty’s had a fight with some woman and knowing that this woman is a drinker will probably be there today. She has decided that it’ll be safer if she sticks with mummy who, I’ve been told, can hold her own in a fight if she has to. I sit down and aunty immediately launches into her latest drama.

  ‘An she wooden let me get up, she flog me proper!’ says aunty, who had been caught in a compromising situation with someone else’s husband and was most indignant at the punishment meted out to her. ‘She got no manners, dat one.’

  ‘Kwa, she proper cheeky orright,’ agrees mummy.

  At this point I’m distracted by my kinship father Clarence giving me two beer tickets. Thanking him I return to the conversation to find aunty giving mummy a blow-by-blow description of her beating.

  ‘An ere too,’ she says, pointing to somewhere on her back, ‘an ere, an ere she flog me big time. An she got proper filthy tongue dat one.’

  ‘Oh goodness,’ replies mummy in her most injured tone of voice while she rubs aunty’s hand consolingly.

  ‘Don’t you think she had a right to be annoyed?’ I venture. ‘It was her husband you were caught with.’

  Mummy and aunty look at me like I’m mad.

  ‘Karlu, not after what she did to dat woman from Ngukurr’s usband,’ mummy says, her voice rising with indignation. ‘Dat woman got no shame, she big hole dat one.’

  Suddenly the woman turns up from out of nowhere and starts yelling at aunty. Apart from ‘slut’ and a few other choice expletives the rest is an incoherent babble. I recognise her from the shop and mummy always smiles at her but she isn’t smiling at her now. Aunty, never one to take anything sitting down, takes a massive swig of beer, hands her cup to mummy, stands up and gives the woman a big shove. She promptly crumples into a heap on the floor and then aunty is on top of her with her hands around the woman’s throat repeatedly banging her head against the concrete floor. At least the woman has stopped yelling now, although the strangled noises issuing from her mouth are getting me worried. Having seen aunty’s temper in action I know better than to try to stop her so I keep well back from
the two women so they can have their space.

  Suddenly with no warning it’s on and our corner erupts into a massive free-for-all. Mummy is wildly swinging her walking stick and kicking people while I’m trying to get aunty to release her hold on the woman’s throat before she passes out. I abandon this idea as the toes of my left foot are crushed by mummy’s left clodhopper and then immediately stomped on by her right one, my howls of pain mingling with the noise of the crowd who are milling around and egging them on, including cousin Fabian who has our drinks. Aunty has finally released her hold on the woman and is cracking some other poor victim across the back with a milk crate while another is trying to unsuccessfully pull her skirt that’s been dragged down to her knees back up to her waist where it belongs. Mummy’s walking stick whacks me with a resounding blow to the ribs while the milk crate comes hurtling from out of nowhere and skims past my head.

  I’ve had enough and attempt to squeeze my way through the melee on my hands and knees before I get seriously injured. But suddenly it’s over as quickly as it began and the crowd disappears around me in a wave of trampling feet while I am foolishly left on my hands and knees in the empty corner looking up at the face of the cop from Milikapiti. I look around just to make sure, but no, even mummy with her gammy leg has stampeded off with the others and left me alone and defenceless. There is only a full-time police presence on Melville Island and the cops visit Nguiu every fortnight to do car regos and paperwork and the like, and he had to be here today of all days.

  But he doesn’t believe me when I say I don’t know anything about the fight. ‘True. I was just sitting there minding my own business,’ I say as he makes his coffee and sits down.

  ‘Well, what’s this then,’ he says, indicating my bleeding toes and the bruised egg growing in the middle of my forehead.

  ‘Oh, I was born like that,’ I say. ‘In fact, you should see the two interesting growths on my chest.’

  He smirks and is about to say something but changes his mind and picks up his car keys instead. I had been hoping that he’d take me back to Melville Island and lock me up in the nice air-conditioned cells and feed me three prison meals a day for hindering justice or obstructing him in his enquiries; it would have made a nice change from the circus at mummy’s place. But no, he has to go to the barge landing to pick up his offsider and after telling me that he’ll be arresting me again real soon so he can check out my growths he drops me off at mummy’s place.

  4.

  I am overjoyed when Louis tells me that we’re going fishing with Uncle Stanley Bushman. But although I have been sailing on yachts in open water with my older brother Keith and love nothing better, I feel a gnawing sense of apprehension when I see the rough little tin boat that Louis turns up with from down the road. We then pull up at Aunty Ursula’s place and I sit on the big green turtle shell in the front yard that has been polished by countless arses sitting on it while we wait for Uncle Raymond to re-coil the pull-start rope and put the outboard motor back together again. Then we’re off to the barge landing where Mario and Uncle Stanley Bushman are waiting with the rest of the stuff. We dump it all on board and I jump up the front because I’m the lightest then Mario fires the motor up and we’re off.

  Speeding over the waves I forget about my initial concerns about the boat. After all, it’s not taking on water, so I settle back to enjoy the scenery. We take a course towards Paru on Melville Island and then past Buchanan Island before heading in a south-easterly direction towards Cobourg Peninsula. We cruise around a bit while they show me landmarks such as the place where an old dugout canoe sits on the edge of the bush on a beach, and where there is a permanent supply of water even in the dry season. Then we reach a reef where uncle says he goes turtle hunting and we pull up and drop our lines. They all catch a fish and I don’t care that I don’t because it’s wonderful out here on the waves under a cornflower-blue sky.

  But when we’re ready to move on and Mario fires up the motor it only sputters and dies. No worries, we’ve only run out of fuel, but when Louis reaches for the fuel can and discovers it’s empty I feel a gnawing apprehension in my stomach. Some dickhead has loaded an empty fuel can into the boat instead of a full one and no one is owning up because they know they’ll be thrown overboard for their stupidity. I personally think it was Mario but he’s a master of excuses and has made sure that his artfully woven account of the lead-up to the boarding of the boat ensures no blame can be laid at his door.

  Despite our predicament the blokes are quite jovial. I still can’t work out why these things don’t piss them off because they really piss me off, but if they are pissed off they certainly aren’t showing it. They continue to fish. No rod and reel here, just hand lines with hooks for my brothers and a stick with fishing line wound onto it for uncle. The crude implements haven’t been a problem though as they’ve caught some beautiful jewfish and a scrumptious-looking coral trout.

  Louis is part-way through consoling me because I haven’t caught anything yet when he gets a tug on his line. He stands up to stretch his legs and starts to wind in his line, but then it goes limp. He winds in the slack and leans to ash his cigarette over the edge of the boat when there is an almighty tug and Louis goes head first into the water. He comes up grinning, wet cigarette still in his mouth, and is about to pass the reel to me when a look of shock passes over his face. He throws the reel into the boat and literally flies out of the water. ‘Tartuwali,’ he gasps and his eyes point to somewhere beyond where I am sitting in the bow. My blood freezes and my head shoots around expecting to see a mighty fin cutting a wake through the sea straight towards us but all I see is empty ocean. I turn back and am about to swear at him for giving me a fright but the look on his face tells me that he’s deadly serious.

  The two remaining lines are quickly wound up and all eyes are now focused on the water.

  ‘There,’ says Uncle Stanley Bushman. ‘Tiger shark.’ I can’t see anything as I’m now sitting on the bottom of the boat with my eyes closed, cursing them for getting me into such a mess. I’ve seen Jaws and I don’t want to die today. Then I open my eyes only to see their gaze slide across the boat as our big toothy friend swims below us and out the other side. Their eyes follow it and then Louis says it’s turning again. I am about to tell him I don’t need a running commentary when I see a big triangular fin cruising gracefully past in an anti-clockwise direction. It is perfect and strangely beautiful. Mesmerised, I watch it circling for another half-lap of the boat until it glides under the water and disappears. Suddenly there is a spine-shuddering jolt as it bumps against the side and we briefly list to the right before our trusty old tinnie stabilises itself. I feel a bit shaky now. Some seagulls fly over and I wonder if this is going to be one of the last things I’ll see and look down only to find the dead fish looking at me instead. Crap.

  Uncle Stanley, Mario and Louis sit quietly but I notice their eyes are wary as they roll cigarettes and pass the tobacco pouch to the next person. Although I’ve never smoked in my life I’m tempted to ask Uncle Stanley if I can have one too, just so it distracts me and gives me something else to do apart from shit myself. But I stay silent. I’m guessing that the shark could take a big bite right out of the middle of the tinnie if it wanted to and there’d be nothing we could do about it. I wonder if it can detect our beating hearts in the boat. Four hearts beating a wild primordial drumbeat while the world continues to turn oblivious to our predicament. I’m wondering if It is a He or a She and if it attacked us would I have a moment to touch this creature before everything I knew was gone. I would want to feel its skin and look it in the eye if I could, just to let it know that I wasn’t succumbing completely.

  Nobody says anything, we just wait. I don’t think I could say anything anyway as my throat has constricted to the point where nothing much is getting in or out. Then Louis is explaining to me that it’s only checking to see if we’re alive and edible, when it does it again, but this time harder and I feel the front end of the boat lift
out of the water and then slap back down again. Things are getting decidedly uncomfortable and Uncle Stanley crosses himself. This relieves the tension and I try to laugh but only manage to croak instead while the others tease him about not seeing the inside of a church since he was baptised. But our levity is short-lived as the whole huge fin and the top of its back breaks the surface only metres from us. It’s striped and it’s longer than the boat by at least a metre and a half and then after a few more laps it glides into the depths again. We all freeze and hold our breath waiting for the worst to happen but it must have gotten bored with us or has spotted something better to eat and it doesn’t come back.

  I’m getting burnt to a crisp but there’s nothing I can do except keep my arms wet with sea water which stings like crazy and put the fishy-smelling bucket over my head to stop the sun from frying my brains. Suddenly Louis cocks his head to one side like he’s listening. He can hear a boat coming. I strain my ears and then I can hear it too. We look in the direction of the sound and there in the distance we see it heading our way. As it nears, the blokes start waving madly. The people, countrymen from Melville Island, wave madly back and cruise straight on past.

  ‘Come back!’ we screech in disbelief to their dwindling boat, but to no avail.

  ‘They must be smoking that wupunga,’ says Uncle Stanley in disgust. I smirk to myself. From what I hear he doesn’t mind having a puff of the stuff himself.

  Dusk is falling and Uncle Stanley has given me the last mouthful of our drinking water. It has been sitting in a plastic soft-drink bottle in the sun all day and tastes like formaldehyde but I don’t care as I savour its wetness. We can’t play ‘I Spy’ anymore as we’ve run out of things to spy, unfortunately the choices to be made in a boat drifting in the ocean are very limited even in two languages. Then we hear a boat approaching from the south. It heads straight for us and it turns out to be the boat that passed us earlier. It heaves to and its driver explains that they had gone to the Cobourg Peninsula to rendezvous for an illegal grog run from the mainland then they were going to come back for us. No wonder they were in such a hurry. I can see Uncle Stanley biting his tongue because he’d love to give them a good telling-off for not stopping when they saw us, but when they pull out a beer everything is forgiven. We tie our boat to theirs and then we pile into it and off we go again. Drinking our beer we tell them about the goings-on of the day, full of bravado now that we’re not shitting ourselves and afraid we’re going to die. They tell us they are doing a grog-drop on Melville Island first and then heading to Nguiu. Now that we’re being rescued, we don’t care what they do as long as we get home.