The Middle of Nowhere

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “Nah. My old woman need no man. She standed under coolibah tree. Best way.”

  Once again, Comity could only wonder at the magic of the Outback, where ancestors petrified into rocks, and trees shed magic onto women and made them pregnant. “That is wonderful, Fred. That is what I shall do, if ever I want a baby.”

  “Only way. One and alonely way.”

  “Fred. Wake up, Fred. In the story; why did Curlew curse Mopoke so he could never go outside?” Comity had finally found a rockpile and managed to climb astride Horse.

  “Mopoke kill all Curlew chicks.”

  “Well there you are, then! Papa never killed anyone. He cannot be curlew-cursed, can he?”

  “Fred, listen. Listen, Fred. How old are you?”

  But Fred did not know. “Oldest I ever gonna be,” he said, and sobbed. Comity did not know whether it was from pain or regret at all the birthdays he would never live to see.

  “Fred. Fred, listen. Why—?”

  Fred dropped his forehead against her back and sighed. “Less talk,” he said.

  “More talk,” said Comity ruthlessly. If Fred stopped talking, then his soul might slip from the horse when she was not looking.

  But this time it was Fred who asked the question. “You gonna venge me, lilly-pilly? Make boots?”

  “’Venge you? On Mr. Hogg? Of course I will. I promise. I will make boots, Fred, I promise.” She even knew the recipe; they had talked about it while Fred ground pituri leaves between two spoons and Comity made lemonade. Take emu feathers and the blood of a whole emu and stick the feathers together into boots. The boots would help you hunt down your enemy. “I will follow him and follow him. He will never escape me. I will do a revenge for you, Fred, I promise on my honour.”

  “Drink be good, Mrs. Pinny,” said Fred, who had begun to confuse Comity with her mother.

  Syrupy with weariness and slick with sweat, Comity easily slid into the role. “When we find water, we shall light a fire and find those eggs parrots lay in the spinifex…and form a plan. A plan is most important, Fred.”

  But Fred already had a plan, didn’t he? He was planning to follow in the footsteps of his mythic hero Yooneerara, all the way to the home of the Creator of the World.

  “Fred. Fred, sorry to disturb, but what should I do when we get to Altjeringa?” she asked. She knew it sounded selfish and bleating and she was ashamed to mention it. There again, it was a question, and she had to keep the questions coming.

  A flicker of the old Fred surfaced. He gave the question what thought he could spare. “You go to ghantown,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Ghans like fat womans. Everybody says.”

  Comity was horrified and bewildered. “But, Fred, I’m not fat!”

  “So? You be safe there.”

  It made no sense at all to Comity. She lapsed into silence, imagining herself in the hands of murderous heathens who hated her because she was not fat.

  “Too far,” said Fred suddenly. Comity had thought him asleep, but Fred had been checking his non-existent map, and the distance to Altjeringa had overwhelmed him. Maybe a thousand, maybe a thousand thousand songs lay between him and Altjeringa. Drawing breath enough for one song was hard, what with the hole in his shoulder and Horse’s jarring gait.

  “Altjeringa is not so very excellent,” he said in a voice intended to sound scornful. “Let us rise and go even unto the Land of the Moon. That’s verily a bang-on place.”

  “Sounds nice,” said Comity, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. “Is it far?”

  She was relieved to hear that the Land of the Moon lay just over the horizon – relieved to be spared the trek to somewhere that did not exist, even if it meant going somewhere else that probably did not exist either. It was a wonder more people did not go to the Land of the Moon, because apparently it was beautiful, with grassy hills and valleys watered by streams and strewn with flowers where Moon Bahloo dipped low to kiss his children goodnight before setting off across the sky. “Bahloo is fine, jolly chap,” said Fred. “He take me along with him, eh? Not let his dogs eat me? He got two damn big dogs.”

  “He will say, ‘Suffer little Fred to come unto me’,” said Comity. “Then he will let down a rope and say, ‘Come aboard thou good and faithful fellah’.”

  But part of her wanted to cry. Not because she did not believe in the Land of the Bahloo, but because her friend, the fearless, resolute, decided Fred, had given up on Byamee-the-Beginner-of-all-Things-and-Time, and settled for the moon instead.

  Thought you were a Christian, said Horse, her bony spine sagging. Moon Bahloo indeed. He’s not in the Bible.

  “It is what Fred believes that matters. Not what I believe,” she told the horse. And, for the first time, she wondered if this was true. Should she not break it to Fred that he was a pagan – a nice pagan, but a pagan? What if his soul jumped up to the moon, and it turned out to be just a lump of rock, and he had to come down again? Fred hated to be made to look stupid.

  We’re all going to die of thirst out here, observed Horse dismally.

  “Not while there are zebra finches!” said Comity, and straightened her own backbone. For flying across her vision – in ones and two, then in fives and tens – was a dizzy flicker of black-and-white birds.

  And zebra finches are a sure sign of water.

  Within ten minutes, Horse scented water herself. She broke into a trot that pulled the reins out of Comity’s blistered hands. Then the ground itself began blistering into mounds and hummocks that were the colour of bruises. A hundred steps more and the landscape broke out in a rash of flowers and mulga thickets. Beside shallow pools made turquoise by a host of budgerigars, white-backed swallows had built their mud nests overhanging the water. There were squat trees with corellas bobbing among their branches. As a change from the flies that had peppered every step of the way, there were dragonflies now, and bees.

  The difference was so marked in Fred that Comity knew he mistook this place for the Land of the Moon. His spirit was dancing, expectant of some great magic.

  “If you are going to leap up to the moon, you must eat a good supper first,” said Comity bossily. “We shall wash your hands and then I shall cook dinner.” It did not matter what she said, Fred’s attention was somewhere else.

  Cook supper? First she had to find some.

  A black duck took one look at her and flew away. The parrots hereabouts did not lay their eggs on the ground.

  She knew Fred would dig for frogs, but how do you kill a frog, even if you manage to catch one? Or force fat white grubs between your lips and chew on them and swallow them down your throat?

  That boy is dying, said a bush turkey, strutting by.

  “But he might get well if I cook you and give him food.”

  You can try! said the turkey, and ran off, as laughing and shrill as Loud Lulu.

  She watched a butcher bird bring down a pretty little pipit and impale it on a twig, then break into cheerful song, tilting its head this way and that, choosing just where it would stick in its beak and rip open the pipit. “Die, Mr. Hogg!” said Comity and threw a rock at the butcher bird. Miles wide.

  The goanna was a mistake, plain and simple. She saw a movement in the corner of her eye, threw a rock, and killed the lizard stone dead by accident.

  She gathered a fistful of seeds, but it felt like tipping a handful of grit into Fred’s mouth.

  “Koppi unga,” said Fred. What did it mean? What did he need her to do?

  “Food for Fred be nice, Jesus,” said Comity. “I know he’s not a Christian quite, but you have to be nice to people different from you and forgive them if sometimes they steal things…” And that got her thinking about the stationery store and porcelain insulators and fine wire…

  …which was how she came to make a fish-hook-and-line out of stolen wire, and catch three fish. Piling grass and twigs around them, she set it all aflame with the flint lighter. She threw the lizard on the fire too, but not to eat. “Goo
d on you, Jesus, sir,” she said, and was momentarily ready to overlook the business of the tiger snake. They ate the fish skewered on her ancestral knitting needles.

  In the end, though, the goanna made Fred happier than any food.

  On the side the bullet had entered, his neck muscles had grown rigid and he could not turn his head, but his hands groped blindly for his dillybag. Spilling it on the ground, he felt about for the contents, and suddenly Comity remembered him talking about some ancestor who had rubbed six stones with lizard fat…

  “Kurlang,” he said, mouth rigid and pulled out of shape by the muscles in his neck. “Djanak kurlang! Kert-kert.” Seeing her blankness, he made a titanic effort to muster English words; it was like digging for frogs. “Sons! I want sons, lilly-pilly! To remember Fred!” Tears ran down the creases of his face.

  Somewhere during the ride, or in getting down from Horse, the dillybag must have torn a little. The cartridge cases and five of the stones were gone; only one smooth pebble lay beside the shrivelled bandicoot baby and the remains of the stolen wire. Comity did not tell Fred this. Keeping to his blind side, she allowed him to see her rubbing that single stone over the greasy skin of the burned goanna until it was almost too slippery to grip. As Fred’s ancestor did in the Dreamtime.

  Comity closed her eyes and allowed sweet, golden imaginings to rise into her head like honey ants. And sure enough, she saw six stones hatch like eggs. Out of them came wisps of smoke – no, not smoke, but muscles and sinews and hanks of hair; faces and features.

  “One of your sons has a shield, Fred, can you see? And one has a digging stick, and one has a woomera and one has a dog and one has a book.”

  One was dressed in tree bark, one in a patchwork waistcoat, one a skin cloak, one in body paint and two in long coats of purple velvet.

  One was good at hunting, one singing, one telling stories and the fourth could speak to the animals. One knew the Morse Code, and the last…

  “…can fly!” exclaimed Comity delightedly.

  And to her genuine and total surprise, all of Fred’s sons were…crying. They turned their faces away (because men hate to be seen crying), then they walked around behind her, into a part of her mind where she could no longer see them.

  “They are all very handsome – like you,” she told Fred. “And they say they will take you up to the moon.”

  “They speak?”

  “No. But I understood. And if, when you get there, the moon is only rock, they will take you to Altjeringa instead.”

  Fred’s eyes focussed on her for the first time in a day. They were lively with light and admiration. “I saw nothing, lilly-pilly. Bulyakarak, you are, kubang. Bulyakarak.” It sounded like a good thing to be.

  An hour later, though, as the sun sank, Fred too must have caught sight of his sons, because he began to talk to them in a breathy whisper.

  “Allinger yerra-bamalla…mantanekin! Kulpernatoma! Yarrura? Windana? …Korr!”

  He seemed to be settling, subsiding like a house built on sand, like a verandah undermined by termites. He was troubled, too, by monsters he said were dogging their trail.

  “You said yourself, dear. There was nothing in the stationery store,” said Comity sternly. But Fred’s head was crammed with monsters, his eyes empty of daylight.

  “Arcoona, arcoona! Windana, Comity? Wayarn, Comity. Wija narani, Comity!”

  Closer and closer she leaned, as if closeness might lend meaning to the garbled words. She pressed her ear to his chest, as if his heartbeat might speak to her in Morse, but all she heard was a bubbling racket…

  …and then the whistling scream.

  Fred had opened his eyes and was staring past her at a Dreamtime monster. “Kadimakara! Thrunkkun! Go way! Thrunkkun!”

  Then she saw it too – saw the reflection of it in Fred’s red-rimmed eyes. It was not imagined: it was all too real. And it was towering over them, ready to strike.

  The camel came down on them, spitting and snorting, lips drawn back, jaws clacking together. It missed Comity’s arm but its teeth closed on her dress and it pulled her clear of the ground and shook her violently, then let go. Before she had even touched the ground, the huge head struck her in the chest and flung her through the air to land on her back.

  It knocked all the wind out of her. She would never draw breath again, she was sure – never have time to draw breath. The camel skidded on the spongy ground and turned – all kneecaps and filthy wool shag, its flaccid hump slumping to and fro. It realigned itself to stamp on her. Its back hoofs spread, its front ankles cracked together as it reared up. Its conjoined front hoofs took aim on her stomach, sharp and heavy as mattocks. Comity rolled aside until she collided with a rock. The hoofs sank into moss, and water droplets flew in every direction, turning to rainbows in the low light.

  She was vaguely aware of a second camel – a figure – a turban – a whip – and thought how everything Hogg had said about the ghans was true. The camel recovered its footing and reared up a third time. There was nowhere left for Comity to roll, and she had not even the breath to scream.

  With a thud that filled the air with dust and flies and tufts of wool, the camel’s silhouette suddenly shared the sky with another just as large. A hoof trod on her thigh. A frog squirmed past her face. The grunting was so loud, the hoofs so many, that she thought she was being trampled by a whole herd of camels. Her attacker crashed down on its side, legs flailing, stretching its neck, breath rasping, shrieking dementedly, rolling to and fro until it was able to roll back onto its knees. Scrambling to its feet, it uttered a belching curse and staggered away at an ungainly trot.

  The second camel watched it go, head erect in haughty contempt. Its rider cracked a whip at the departing beast, before sliding down to stand over Comity. His shape blotted out the declining sun so that he appeared to glow white-hot. Then he took off his turban and drew a knife.

  “Are you very much hurt, please? These wild ones are a bane. A big bane,” said the youth. “Their ancestors worked the goldfields, maybe. Some ran off into the Bush. Now there are wild camels all over.”

  He began to bandage her thigh with strips of his turban. “Low class stock, of course. The Australian camel is all-round better. We breed the best with the best. We get good camels. Good Australian camels.”

  Comity pointed and pointed, still mute for want of breath, mouthing, “Fred, not me! Fred!” And he searched out Fred, and Comity thought, Now he will cut Fred’s throat and it will be my fault because I told him Fred was there.

  When he came back, he blew life back into the fire Comity had lit earlier.

  She knew him. Comity had always supposed all ghans looked alike and that she would never be able to tell them apart. But she did recognize the boy who came with the camel trains to Kinkindele; the one who did not look away when she took receipt of deliveries. He had come with the piano.

  And he had not cut Fred’s throat at all. He had covered the wound with a wad of white cloth, and bound it into place. He had felt Fred’s thin wrist between finger and thumb and felt the flutter of his blood creeping about the passageways of his dusty body. But he did not answer when Comity asked, “Will Fred be all right?”

  His name was Moosa Rasul. Quartz Hogg had said all ghans were called Mullah. Fred said they were all called “whitefellah-with-string-hair”. But confusingly this one’s name was Moosa Rasul, son of Salaiman, and he lived in the ghantown at Calgo Crossing. This and his mastery of English and his extraordinarily clean clothes startled Comity’s terror into hiding. Considering how unfat she was, Moosa seemed remarkably friendly.

  He came to the mound springs, he said, to read the Koran and to think up poetry in his head. He was probably lying and would torture and mutilate and massacre her and Fred later, when he had more light to see by. But in the meantime she was too tired to do anything but listen to his plans for breeding the finest camels in Australia. He recited one of his poems to her too, and his voice bobbed up and down pleasantly, like a budgerigar in
a tree, but the poem was not in English, of course, so she could not understand it.

  “Is that Ghan?” she asked.

  “Punjabi,” he said. “One thinks we come from Afghanistan but this is most largely untrue. Most in Calgo are from India. The Punjab. Me, however, I was born in Australia. I am Australian.”

  “Like the good camels.”

  He smiled broadly. Even his teeth seemed to be spotlessly clean. “Like the best camels.” Behind them, his good Australian camel slumped to the ground like a ship foundering. Moosa leaped up instantly and ran to the saddle pannier and drew out a parcel wrapped in silk, and tucked it into the highest crook he could reach of a nearby tea tree – as though rescuing something precious from a flood. “High up. Always,” he said shyly.

  At sunset he washed in the spring pool and Comity heard him say prayers to his heathen god. Meanwhile, Fred, barely conscious, his head in Comity’s lap, waited for a late moon to rise so that he might hurl his soul into Bahloo’s arms for evermore. Comity said the Lord’s Prayer, put in a word with Jesus for her mother and father, and hoped that, despite what people said about Him, God secretly believed in the comity of nations. Horse wandered off to the far side of the springs to be out of sight of the camel. Horses hate camels, and to judge by the look on the camel’s ugly face, the feeling was mutual. Who did they say their prayers to? Comity wondered.

  When the night grew bitter, Moosa took the saddle blanket from his all-Australian camel and laid it over Fred and Comity, then curled up alongside his animal for warmth. He had not planned to spend the night away from home, but his patients would not withstand travelling in the cold – not on top of sunburn, shock and injury. He woke them before moonset, though, shortly before dawn.

  “Come. The day will be warm soon.”

  Comity tried to tell Moosa that Fred wanted to die here, at the mound springs, so that his soul might jump up to the moon, but Moosa seemed to have no respect for Fred’s wishes.

  “Would he not prefer to stay alive?” he asked, and went on constructing a travois by poking branches through the sleeves of his robe and lashing this hammock to the crupper of his camel’s saddle.