Taboo

by Kim Scott

  The light was coloured with smoke. Or was it sand? Tilly could smell smoke.

  ‘Musta been bushfire not far.’

  ‘No more, not with this rain.’

  The driver must have exhausted himself with talking. He fell back into silence, and now the passenger had regained his voice.

  ‘Wanna cone, Tilly? You smoke? Don’t mind if I do?’

  She did not answer immediately; he turned back to her.

  ‘No, I don’t mind. No, I don’t want any.’

  Because then she might be shivering with fear again. The feel of the dog collar, the dry dog food in her mouth. Doug yanking the leash.

  The car was slowing. Passenger Gerry wound down his window, and exhaled smoke. It was shredded in the roaring wind.

  ‘Cut through on the gravel?’

  ‘Yeah, roadworks ahead anyway.’

  Dust churned behind them.

  ‘Save us twenty minutes, half-hour maybe.’

  The car skated sideways, maintaining momentum but heading for the ditch. Then straightened suddenly. Inside the car their heads moved from side to side like loose puppets.

  ‘That’s clay. Musta had more rain here.’

  The driver nodded grimly, slowed. Tilly had begun taking driving lessons. She kept an eye on him. He was the sensible one, she thought. He’d rolled his sleeves. She saw the number 1 on his forearm. And also on the arm of the drunken passenger, who wore his shirt inside out. For all she knew they could be swapping their shirts every time they stopped.

  Just a stupid schoolgirl, that’s all she was. Trusting herself to drunken twins. She had reason to trust one of them, but probably not the other.

  She said nothing.

  Her cakes had been eaten. She stuffed the empty container into her school bag.

  *

  Yet another dead kangaroo lay stiff on the edge of the bitumen road, its forelimbs pointing straight at the sky, head to one side as if coy about death. Tilly did not smell its scent. Had never known that smell, nor seen a kangaroo as big or as dead as this one. Even now saw it only through a screen, like in a movie. A boring movie.

  ‘Old fella said drop in today, unna?’

  ‘I’ll ring him.’

  ‘Thought you said it was our country?’ said Tilly.

  A grimace the only reply.

  They came onto the bitumen again while he was on the phone. An intersection. The passenger pointed – unnecessarily – to the right. ‘Away from town,’ he said softly to himself.

  ‘Right then, Mr Horton. We’ll see you about twenty minutes, just past the crossing.’

  He hung up, turned to his twin. ‘You know the turn-off?’

  ‘About seven k’s this side of Kepalup,’ Tilly said. ‘I googled it before,’ she said in response to their look. ‘I didn’t remember it. Don’t remember nothing of being here.’

  Sand lifted from the paddocks and rolled in billowing waves across the road and into the dense scrub on the other side. Rose again like smoke. The many stiff and leathery leaves coated in dust. More and more of a certain small tree, crowding.

  Rain came in a fine mist. Bathing the plants, thought Tilly. Refreshing them.

  One of the twins spoke. ‘This is your country, Tilly. Our old people lived here.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Coming into it now. More of this.’ He pointed to an untidy, blue-grey and large-leafed plant. ‘Tallerack. See ’em best at night.’

  Gerry belched and, leaning toward his brother, turned to Tilly in the back seat. ‘Not many blackfellas been here for a long time, since nearly everybody was wiped out . . .’

  Tilly said nothing. She was here when she was a baby.

  ‘Taboo,’ said the other twin. ‘But you been here and nothing happened.’

  Tilly’s brow wrinkled. She was, it seemed, returning with one, perhaps two, drunk, stoned and distant relations.

  They slowed, turned left into a narrow gravel and sand track. Immediately the trees closed around them so that only now and then was there a glimpse of sky.

  ‘Ok,’ she said aloud.

  *

  In years to come Tilly will dream this entrance again and again, blending details as her experience and imagining increase, building on details that, recalled and examined, wither to something threadbare when she wakes, an irritant scratching the inside of skin.

  The little track slipped aside at the point the bitumen road, rushing elsewhere, begins to curve. There is an older bitumen road that cuts across this curve and, although overgrown with tough and cheeky plants that have reasserted themselves there, you can still pick out the hard smooth surface, and follow it on foot. Between the two strips of bitumen there are three waterholes set in granite. Thin slabs of stone still cover each of them. And the water, dark and cool, gathers there from rain running down the rock. One of the waterholes is never dry, not in the longest of summers. Fed by a small spring, the dark, cool water brims, cusping at the stone edge.

  It is easy to become lost in such reverie. To immerse oneself, to drown. Tilly had been rushing behind two who were drunk, were tripping or otherwise shifted in their selves, and then everything tilted, was sliding away. The very quality of sound changed. The tyres settled in the dirt, broke a thin crust of damp sand. Sand clung to the tyres, was flung away, dispersed. Grey sand, grey mist, drizzle, a grey forest of small trees that, standing close to one another and with their limbs folded compactly at the same angle, might have been a company of soldiers, a silent crowd breasting a fence line, spilling over it and shuffling closer and closer, halting in the instant before a glance found them. Jam trees.

  Passenger Gerry, very serious, gave the old word for the tree. Another belch.

  A sweetly scented timber, jam tree. There are many kilometres of fence posts made of this tree. Grey posts in straight lines, rammed in the earth, strands of wire linking them, the top one barbed. A hard, dense timber. Strip away the bark, and see colours swirl cream and dark chocolate on every limb.

  Tilly: ‘What?’

  ‘I said very important tree for us, Tilly. Rub the ash on the babies, put it in graves. Tapping sticks too.’

  ‘Seeds, and gum to chew on,’ his twin continued. ‘At the workshops, you’ll see . . .’ He said the words for the old instruments fashioned from local trees.

  Gerrard looked at his brother. Tyres whispered on the sand and gravel.

  Tilly mouthed one of the old words he’d used.

  Tilly felt herself lighten as they crested a rise and the forest opened up. The trees were taller and more widely spaced, their warm and light-coloured trunks reaching to an expanse of sky. Then they dropped from the crest into the shadows again.

  ‘Meet him at the grave.’

  ‘Horton?’ asked the other twin.

  ‘Same family, eh?’

  ‘Yeah, must be the grandson or great-grandson or something. Ancestor the killer cunt, s’cuse me, Tilly.’

  ‘You been here before?’ said Tilly.

  ‘Nah, not us.’

  ‘The man we’re meeting, what’s his name again?’

  ‘Dan. Dan Horton.’

  ‘That’s who I was fostered with?’

  ‘Yeah, your dad said.’

  ‘Was it here, this place, or one of their other farms?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘The old house, I think.’

  A house squatted on the other side of the creek they were approaching. Made of stone blocks and mortar, and so white it might have been bone, its two dark, blank windows looked across a sloping expanse of brittle, yellow grass to the creek. The new iron roof was a dazzling contrast to the messy clutter of old corrugated iron sheets, rusting machinery and tangled wire that surrounded it.

  A four-wheel drive utility was parked beside the house. Its taillight brightened, and it moved away,
distorted reflection trembling in the window glass. A loose sheet of corrugated iron banged in the wind. A door knocked again and again in its frame. Nearby, a nest of dugites coiled and twisted together, moving slowly in a shaft of sunlight that sliced the gloomy cold of the stone well around them.

  The car turned just before the creek crossing, and disappeared among the trees.

  TWO BIRDS NOW

  Tilly’s car came down the last slope; tyres splashed in the shallow river and left brief, damp prints at the edge of the creek bed before being immediately coated with sand. Tiny rivulets caused by the disruption disappeared almost immediately.

  Tilly saw the white utility parked just off the track. An old man stood beside it. Pale as a ghost and with two tiny dogs at his feet, he held out one arm to indicate an even smaller track. His clothes were faded and worn, a pale blue towelling hat pulled low on his head.

  They parked.

  The dogs strutted, bristling, toward the twins and Tilly. Gerald (so far as Tilly could guess) stepped toward the man with his hand held out. ‘Mr Horton.’ The dogs shied away from him, took shelter behind their owner.

  ‘I’m Gerry Coolman; rang you earlier.’

  ‘Yes of course. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘My brother, Gerrard. People call us both Gerry – makes it easier.’

  They looked to Tilly. She was by the car, looking away from the little dogs that pranced around her, yapping. Dan Horton called, ‘Blacky. Whitey.’ The dogs ran to him and one, two, leapt into his waiting arms.

  He bent, and they jumped to the ground again.

  ‘Tilly? I don’t suppose you remember, from when you were a baby? My wife and I, you were our foster-child.’

  Tilly shook her head, no.

  ‘’Course your mum took you back soon as she could, soon as she was well again.’

  He moved to embrace her, but Tilly held out a hand, and so they shook hands rather formally, with the careful courtesy of diplomats. Dan tilted his head, moved his eyes. ‘The grave is this way.’

  A small clearing. Paint flaking, a picket fence more grey than white. The concrete block above the grave plot had broken midways as earth subsided. Butterflies of light on the ground. Carved into a timber cross:

  William Horton. 1848–1881. Killed by natives.

  ‘That’s what this place is known for these days, I’m afraid. And what happened afterwards, as you know. My wife, rest in peace, always wanted to work with you people to do something about that.’

  Jam trees swayed and brushed against one another. The sheoak whispered. A bird made a harsh and sceptical noise. Wispy clouds rushed across the little patch of blue above them.

  ‘Nothing about all the Noongars killed then.’

  One of the twins lifted a hand, almost reached for Tilly as she moved away; the other touched Dan Horton’s arm. The three men stood for a moment, then followed the girl down a thin path.

  Pools of water were scattered like islands in the dry, coarse sand of the creek bed, with rocks and tussocks of reeds at their edges. Between them were banks of sand, deep and soft and difficult to walk in. Their feet fell easily, sank, were difficult to lift again. Dan led them to a firmer way that wended between the pools, and mostly they kept to that.

  Occasionally, between trees, they saw the old white stone farmhouse further up the slope of the dry paddock.

  ‘There are so many different stories about what happened here,’ said Dan.

  ‘Took turns going out with a Winchester,’ said one of the twins.

  ‘Some say scores killed, but the paperwork . . .’ Dan hesitated.

  ‘Poisoning the waterholes,’ said the other twin.

  They walked as a group, one or the other stumbling when they strayed into deeper sand. Trees lined either side of the creek bed.

  Then they came to a place where the creek bed was a little wider and, on a flat sheet of rock near its centre a circular stone wall, not much more than knee-high and about two metres across, brimmed with algae-thick water.

  ‘Needs cleaning out,’ said Dan. He lifted long strands of green muck with a stick, flicking it onto the ground around them. ‘My grandfather built the walls around it.’

  Tiny rivulets of water ran across the rock, pushed aside grains of sand, disappeared.

  Dan cupped his hands and drank from the well.

  ‘You can drink it. Hard water, but perfectly ok. Stock thrives on it.’

  The sand around them was dimpled with many more prints than their own.

  Gerry, turning, taking a step here and there, pointed to the prints in the sand. ‘Look at this.’ He breathed with the old people, let their sound move in him. Looked at Tilly. ‘That’s our language. Kangaroo. Racehorse goanna. Porcupine, you say echidna. Look.’ He pointed to the footprint of a bird, and named it in the old language. ‘Crow,’ he translated. ‘He must’ve took off.’ The single footprint, then nothing.

  Gerald placed the heel of his hand on a patch of clear sand, touched his finger to the soil a few times and made a tiny, perfectly formed footprint. Then he named a specific spirit creature, basically human but miniature in form.

  ‘That’s clever, that is,’ said Dan.

  Tilly saw that some of the plants had also left prints in the sand, patterns where the wind had bent their tips to the soil, and repeatedly moved them to and fro.

  ‘Can we sleep over some time?’

  The men looked at Tilly, surprised.

  ‘Someone has to, sometime. I lived here when I was a baby and nothing happened. No evil thing. No devils, no taboo thing, I mean. My father wanted me to come back here, meet you.’

  Dan looked at the twins; who looked at one another, then to Tilly.

  ‘But Tilly we never lived here then, with you,’ said Dan. ‘Not this place.’

  They kept walking. We are all descended from Adam and Eve, Dan was saying. He seemed to insist.

  They followed a line of old posts that led from the creek, past the house and continued over the crest. Wire dangled from some of them, and porcelain conductors were displayed like small trophies well above the heads of this little bunch of ambulating onlookers.

  ‘The old telegraph line,’ said Dan. ‘Put that through in the 1870s. About the same time the Hortons, about the same time our family,’ he glanced at Tilly, ‘settled here.’

  ‘Noongars used to climb up and grab them conductors, chip them away for spearheads,’ said Gerald. ‘Before . . . When there was still a few here, living their own way.’

  ‘Maybe they wanted to listen to what people were saying,’ said Tilly.

  A couple of corrugated iron sheds stood away from the house. Dan led them to one that, leaning against a solid stone wall, gave the impression that it was part of a much more soundly built structure. They walked among the gloomy iron, through the stone wall.

  ‘Old shearing shed,’ said Dan, proudly. Light flooded in a great wash through a large opening in the other wall, but did not dispel the gloom and shadows in corners, and behind drums and tarpaulin and a heap of tyres. There was a timber floor, a timber railing coated with dust. On the wall a saddle, a yoke. Beneath the dust, the rotting timber and rust, they could smell the years, the sweat and lanolin. Strong roof timbers spanned the space so high above their heads.

  ‘A convict built this. A stonemason.’

  They walked to the house.

  ‘Maybe you’re not so interested in the buildings, white man’s heritage and that?’

  ‘No problem, Mr Horton. We appreciate your trouble.’ Gerry winked at Tilly behind Dan’s back.

  Dan paused; he placed his finger into one of a series of holes in the mortar. ‘This must’ve been made by a spear. See, several of them. Aborigines attacked the house.’

  ‘You reckon? Like an attack, an uprising?’

  ‘But, another time, I’ll show you waterholes on
the property.’

  Gerald gave him the old word for such rock waterholes. Tilly understood this was for her benefit.

  ‘Yes. Well. And there’s a soak, that’s all walled in with stone. They must’ve done that. I never thought before, but the Aborigines must’ve helped build that, don’t you think?’

  His listeners murmured agreement.

  ‘We used to find stones, grinding stones at our property a little downriver. They’d stand out, because different rock. Must’ve come from a little spot down near the river mouth, we reckon.’

  ‘The reef there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I know that spot.’

  The windows reflected figures circling the house. Poking it. Turning their backs. The glass was old and flawed and the people it showed were also distorted, and there were many more than four. Again, a sheet of corrugated iron clanged in the wind. A door knocked in its frame. A window rattled. The wind dropped for a moment, and then dust rose and the dry yellow grass hissed as another gust came rushing up from the creek bed.

  ‘There was a bit of a cellar, but they filled it in in my grandfather’s time. Snakes kept getting in there, apparently.’

  About fifty metres away, a broken wall of stone, a dip in the earth, a vexed tangle of blackberry bush.

  ‘An old well there. Dry now. There were always snakes there; couldn’t get rid of them. Keeps us all happy this way, know where they are.’

  They gazed at the small ruin. No one moved toward it.

  ‘But, like I say,’ continued Dan, ‘come to tea with me some time. Tonight? You’ll need to go back on the bitumen, head back to Kepalup just a few kilometres. You’ll see the road – Horton – named for us. You’ll see the letterbox. Stay and have a look around meantime. If you like.’

  *

  The white utility disappeared into the trees of the creek crossing, and they saw it emerge again, following the track up the opposite slope. Again it disappeared, and soon they did not even hear it.

  A cockatoo jeered.

  ‘Go back to that spring, walk along the creek?’ suggested Tilly.

  ‘Sure thing, boss,’ said Gerry. ‘You go all shy there for a bit?’