Though anyone can (could) walk out here from the town in a couple of hours, the breakaways are not visible from Outer Maroo, screened as they are by the slow rolls of the land and by scruffy shawls of acacia, mulga, gidgee, and stunted gums, all of which the fire is now busily slurping up. A ferment of migration surrounds me, swift and silent: kangaroos, wallabies, snakes, lizards, birds: the rats leaving the sinking ship.
Emus, a pair of them, pick their awkwardly delicate way out of the scrub, beaking at insects, necking the low trees, heads moving in concert with such weird dreamy grace that they seem to be engaged in a pas de deux all on their own: two balled-up furry little birdskull ballet dancers, nothing but eye, gliding atop their long-legged necks. And now my scent reaches them. They stand stock still, shocked. They draw their long necks up to full outrage. The necks begin working in panic, and the delicate legs keep time, dancing a few steps this way, a few steps that, frantically indecisive about their line of flightless flight. The birds look both comic and poignant. I count to twelve before they finally decide on a direction, their feathered skirts bouncing like tutus.
The strange is normal here.
Ethel is singing now, a low crooning sound of quarter-tones, of no tones, of tones from an unknown scale.
‘This place has been sung, Jess,’ she says complacently, for the Nth time. ‘This place has been and gone before, and now it has been and gone again. You done for, Jess.’
‘Good riddance,’ I say. ‘I been wanting to shed this skin.’
Ethel laughs and shakes a finger at me. ‘Snake lady,’ she says. ‘Maybe you’ll be Jackamara woman next time, Jess. But Outer Maroo’s been and gone.’
The Second Coming and the Second Going, I think, and the bushfire is going to burn until kingdom come.
My kingdom has come, Oyster said.
My name, said someone else, is Ozymandias, kings of kings . . .
Out here, where the lone and level red sands stretch as far as the eye can see, I feel as though I could be the sole and final reference point for the very idea of dates and maps and language, such poignant ideas, all of them, such brave little stratagems, at once so frantic and clever and ridiculous in their attempts to get a foothold on chaos. They are like candles lit by the devoutly desperate in a church. I should know: ex-novice and ex-mapmaker, both; ex-government surveyor. That time of my life (the surveying time) ended unexpectedly and very suddenly. I could pinpoint it on a map with my geodimeter if I still had one. The geodimeter emits light waves that hit topographical obstructions and bounce back to the watching eye which measures: and here is the exact location of the translation of Jess Hyde from one incarnation to another: a summer night, more years ago than I wish to recall. I could take my spirit level and set up my plane-table on its tripod, and I could shade in the landforms of death and rebirth very precisely: at Roma, cattle-trading town in central Queensland, a few driving days’ east of where I am now; a day of seismic collision, of incompatible strata meeting head-on and buckling and violently giving way.
Not for the first time in my life; not by a bloody long shot.
I look at these various bits of my self and my history, all of them floating about me, all simultaneously correct and present and buoyant (time being, as it seems to me here, the warm bath in which I am immersed; though that is a crazy image, bath, in a place where the idea of water is a shimmering trick on the empty salt-panned bed of the Sea of Null). But here they are, like so many soap bubbles drifting by: my gypsy childhood; the convent years (oil and water, those two). And here I am, later, with government trappings and expensive equipment, no wiser, always trying to map my way backwards to the fateful fork in the road.
Out here, there can be no illusions: whatever calibrated surveying instruments and theodolites may say, all the tables and taxonomies and charts are flickering wishes, nothing but tapers signifying a desire to impose order on the ungovernable, signifying an undying and touching faith in magical thinking, which is what mapmaking is. Here is Hercules, spooning out the ocean with his shell; and here are the rest of us, dipping into the sloshing wake of random violence, galaxies, deserts, city states, continental plates run aground, world wars, childhood, droughts, nebulae exploding, cups of tea, parents, teachers, surveying instruments and charts, flags, nations evolving and devolving, ancient hatreds, ancient fears, ancient passions ceaselessly renewed, apocalyptic fantasies, millennial dreads, city by-laws, earthquakes, inundations . . . here we are parsing and labelling and taking topographic readings and turning on the radio and looking at our clocks and making love.
Making love . . .
‘I love the way you laugh,’ Major Miner says, ‘when you come,’ and it’s like all the stoppered years popping like a champagne cork, I can’t stop, I’m rolling over and over and over, green grass and wattles and the hillsides of childhood, the railway embankments, the silver lines flashing and flashing and I’m bound like an arrow for the promised land.
‘My dad,’ I say, gasping, and gurgling after my dizzy voice, ‘my dad was a . . . dad was a . . .’ and the Major is laughing too, it’s infectious, the way my dad’s laughter was. You couldn’t stop them once they got going, those ganger crews. ‘My dad was a railway ganger,’ I gasp. ‘He used to take me . . . he used to let me ride . . .’ and I can feel the rush of the trolley again, the bliss of it, the see-saw squeak of the ganger’s drive-handle, the men pushing, sweating, singing, swearing, laughing, cursing the blisters, cursing the relentless up-and-downing, adoring the speed, the trolley swallowing the straight silver lines and spitting them out again behind, the sheer rush of it, the heaven of it, the wild mad funnel of laughter that whooshed us along.
‘My dad and my mum,’ I say, ‘were utterly disreputable. We were railway gangers, railway gypsies, we lived on the run.’ I adored them. I adored those untrammelled days. It seems to me now that we passed our days and our nights in laughter, but of course there was violence too, and shouting, and fights, bottles broken, bottles thrown, and singing, and hunger and booze and cheap greasy food, and the telling of stories, and fights, and love. They thumped me and hugged me. I had bruises and kisses, I suppose, by equal dose. I was happy. I loved it, I loved it. I loved the way love unrolled his swag in those makeshift camps and passed the bottle and the fags around, I loved the body warmth, the singing, the men and women rolling and humping under blankets, the campfires, the billies boiled, the stolen jumbuck barbecued, the drunken sleeping all in a heap.
Major Miner says, wondering: ‘I never once heard you laugh in Outer Maroo.’
No, I think. No.
‘It’s too far back,’ I explain. ‘It’s too hard and too far to get back there. All the bridges were blown up.’ Until now, for some reason. Until him.
The gangers’ camps are on the other side of self-consciousness, before I understood social disgrace, before I had been reclaimed, saved for school, cleaned up in the convent, before I had been introduced to shame.
‘My clothes were always filthy, and stiff with sweat,’ I tell him. ‘Hard as a board. I was a dirty little ruffian.’ Maybe that was the shortcut the senses took: the sweet sweat of love, the delectable, leathery, mining-and-explosives fug of Major Miner’s skin. I stroke it, I nibble it, I bite. ‘You’re so delicious,’ I tell him, laughing again. ‘My nut-brown man.’ I was so happy in those dirty sweaty days. So happy. ‘I almost never get back there,’ I sigh. ‘Not even in dreams. It’s too far. Except with you.’
I was a little savage, people said; a saucy little six-year-old tart with wicked eyes. ‘Be careful,’ I warned Major M. ‘I was the sort of kid your mother warned you about. You never know what you might catch from me. I’m a risk.’ I smoked. I swore like a man. From time to time, I had lice in my hair. Don’t touch her, other parents warned. I knew what fucking was; I saw it all around me every night, the bodies heaving and whooping with joy beneath a blanket, the stars above. Afterwards, my mum and my dad would let me crawl into the hot sweaty space between them. They covered me with kisses
. The brown grass pricked me through the groundsheet. The cover was stiff with love.
‘God, you’re wild. You’re wild,’ Major Miner laughs. ‘You’re like a young girl, a wild child.’
‘You’re done for, now,’ I warn him. I’m hungry, I’m starving, I can’t stop. ‘Kiss of Death, that’s me. You’re marked now.’ I’m afraid of waking, afraid of not finding my way back. I want to stay dirty and dank, I can see the flash of railway lines, this is where I belong. ‘My true colours,’ I gasp. ‘They’re indelible.’
‘Hallelujah,’ he says. ‘Hallelujah, glory, and amen.’
I can’t stop laughing.
We’re disreputable, I think, with the world burning down. No tact. No respect for social conventions. Just like my disgraceful mum and dad.
‘What are you laughing at?’ he asks, laughing too.
‘My mum,’ I splutter. ‘The first time they tried to take me away. The way she mimicked them, the way she . . .’ It’s like whooping cough, this mad kind of mirth. It spirals into a place where no oxygen is. It leaves you blue. ‘The way she . . . the way she . . . and the way they . . . They were ladies from the CWA. They wore hats!’
‘Ssh,’ he says. ‘Sshh . . . you’ll choke.’
‘And gloves!’ I gasp. ‘Gloves!’
‘Shh.’ He cups his hand between my legs, gently, as though stillness starts there. This is where peace begins, his hand says, and the lovely smell of him is all mixed up with railway lines and dirty sleeping bags and the tang of brown grass and burrs.
‘She told them to fuck off,’ I say, soberly. ‘She put a billycan lid on her head, like a smart little hat. She said: “My kid’s worth ten of your frilly daughters, and she knows more than any kid who goes to school.” She held her sheep-gutting knife in front of her. “You’ll take her over my dead body,” she said.’
I can still feel the rush of it, the triumph, the way they shuffled backwards like scared ewes. I saw the names they called her in fizzing lights, like skyrockets. Slut. Floozie. The Whore of Babylon. ‘Whore of Babylon yourself,’ my mum said, indifferent, brandishing her sheep-gutting knife. They were magic words to me, every one of them; abracadabras; open sesames. I would flash them in whispers like scimitars, like flaming swords. I would say them like prayers. I thought the railway ganger’s life was very heaven.
‘We were free as wild wallabies,’ I say. ‘Free as brumbies.’
We were feral. We were untamable.
I knew that I would always be safe; that I would only have to lay about with my sheep-gutting word. Whore of Babylon, I would say, and enemies would curl up at my feet.
‘But you were taken away, weren’t you?’ Major Miner says. ‘In the end?’
In the end.
In the new beginning.
Over their dead bodies, more or less. And taken too far to ever get back.
There was a dream I used to have, a nightmare: two sets of railway lines, two gangers’ trolleys, neither one of them equipped with brakes. I am on one of them, pushing, pulling, pushing the see-saw handle. The other trolley passes like a meteor. ‘Jess!’ they call, whipping by. ‘Dad!’ I scream into their slipstream. ‘Mum!’ But we are racing further and further apart at the speed of light.
I play jacks on this headland, on the lip of my private mesa. I’ve been doing it for years, walking out here, taking my totems out of their hiding place, putting them back again. I amuse myself by tossing and catching three objects, all found within a stone’s throw of where I sit: one is a fossilised mussel shell, its butterfly wings perfect and intact and touching each other with the delicacy of two hands folded in prayer. Inside the carapace, I suppose, is the crouching mussel (possibly opalised, but I cannot bring myself to break open the flawless shell-halves to see); also inside, no doubt, is a petrified memory of the time when an ocean washed this rock. The second object is a long thick sausage of ossified dinosaur shit; and the third is a beer can, crumpled, its four Xs bleached faint in the sun. More than once, out here, I have laughed out loud, and then huddled, appalled, at the dreadful sound of my laughter bouncing back from the silences.
Time is a joke, I think. It rushes by like a railway ganger’s trolley and goes nowhere. It makes no sound.
Out here, there is almost a kind of menace to the silence, which is not so much golden as burnished with a frightening immensity. There is always a fine rufous mist in the air . . . no, not mist, moisture being one of the many absences, but the air nevertheless has the appearance of mist, the particles of red earth lifting themselves in thermal updraughts, drifting, wisping about like rust, floating down again, coating saltbush and gidgee, coating the mind so that ridges of thought become visible, showing up like welts or like maps drawn with a finger on a dusty ledge.
The vastness of the silence frightens all of us, I think. Everyone feels compelled to make a mark on that silence, to fill it with evidence of passage. That is why people have always clustered in railway gangers’ camps, or in Bernie’s or in Beresford’s or in the Living Word. They are making noise: joyful unto the Lord, etcetera, or merely comforting, or merely raucous. They do it to reassure themselves.
They are also impelled to give voice to the things they must not speak of in public. Taboos, that is to say, ferment; taboos insist on being broken; they become compulsions; people need to scream them in secret. Nuns whisper them into the pages of their missals and in confessionals, and sometimes to the young girls in their care. The people of Outer Maroo tell their cattle . . . told their cattle. They told their sheep, they told the rocks, they told the mine shafts, they told the sky. Or they talked to me. Sooner or later, they all talked to me.
It is a curious thing, a self-imposed silence, the way it invites confidences and revelations, and the way it reveals some deep-seated belief that the mute are also deaf, and are possibly stupid, but are certainly innocent, and are a safe repository for secret things. Most people in Outer Maroo, I think, saw me (or rather, saw Jess Hyde, which is not quite the same thing) this way. Old Silence, they said. They thought of me as they would think of a wall or a boulder, or perhaps as a rock cavern in the breakaways: hollow, receptive, capable of the infinite absorption of sound, a black hole that gave nothing back.
This suited me.
It is, in fact, accurate.
I think of myself as a black hole whose visible edges are Old Silence. She was a sort of getaway outfit, a costume I stitched together hastily and stepped into one night in Roma, the only way out of a dead end.
Something happened. What goes around comes around. Here we go again, I thought dumbfounded. Where did it get me, all this measuring and marking and mapping my way back to what was lost? Where does a circle start? And where does it end?
I wanted to step off the treadmill.
I wanted to go off on a tangent.
I wanted to find the vanishing point where the parallel railway lines met, and I did find the one thing that my parents and the Sisters of Mercy had in common.
Like all of them, I went into Retreat. Silence swallowed me.
Sisters of Mercy. I haven’t thought of it before, the rich irony; and yet they are kin to Mercy Given (as well as being absolutely not).
‘Was it by force?’ Major Miner wants to know. ‘When they took you, I mean. Legal injunctions, police, that kind of thing?’
‘Believe me,’ I say, feeling queasy, ‘this end of the world is nothing compared to that one. For me personally, I mean.’
It was just as fast and violent, just as mad, just as bewildering and accidental: a drunken fight, a knife or two, and how could it be? But it was, apparently it was, apparently my father had killed a man he thought of as a drinking mate. ‘I’ll kill you, you fucking arsehole,’ he screamed, as witnesses testified. He could never remember later what the fight was about. ‘But I loved the fucking bastard,’ he kept saying. ‘I loved the stupid fucker.’
It was his unstoppable, garrulous, tale-telling self that did him in.
I’ll kill you, you fucking ars
ehole.
Findings: Intent to cause bodily harm. Intention to kill. Malice aforethought. Life sentence.
‘He could never even tolerate a tent,’ I tell Major M. ‘He hanged himself in his cell. And then my mother . . .’ Superslut in the billycan hat, the Invulnerable, the Whore of Babylon, my mother curled in on herself like a child and grieved unto death. ‘The shock, and the booze . . . they locked her away in Goodna to dry her out. She was in and out, in and out, between Goodna and the gutters after that.’
‘And so the nuns got you,’ he says, stroking me.
‘At least better than the CWA.’
‘Poor Jess. How old were you then?’
‘Seven.’
‘You must have hated them.’
I didn’t in fact. I loved the sweet order, the cleanliness, the sung vespers, the smell of books and learning, the contemplative silences, the headstrong intelligent women behind demure veils.
‘In a funny way, you know, they were like my mum. The other side of the coin. You couldn’t push them around. They would tell the Bishop to fuck off, though not in so few words, it goes without saying. And they doted on me, so of course I doted on them.’
I was the spoiled darling of the convent, just as I had been in the railway gangers’ camps; but an absolute abyss ran between my two worlds. There was a rift valley down the middle of every waking thought and every dream. I knew two different languages, one for railway gangers and one for nuns. They seemed to me to have not a single word in common.
Once a month, one of the Sisters (one of whom I was particularly fond) would take me down to Brisbane by train, and we would visit my mother in Goodna. ‘We pray for your mother, Jess,’ the Sister would say, and I would want to strike her. My mother doesn’t need praying for, I would want to shout. She’s worth ten nuns.
I would have to get away. I would have to lock myself into the toilet on the train.
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