Taboo

by Kim Scott

  *

  That which had been a fence post and which Wilfred had earlier made hover at the campfire was now in the room with them. Upright, the impassive face stared just above their heads and shoulders. It had been rubbed smooth, and glowed in deep streaks of dark ochre and honey. Beside it a human spinal column – more likely plastic than bone – was balanced on a pelvis made of some other carved timber and shallow, concave stone.

  Wilfred and Milton were leading the men through some exercises. The men and women remained separate for the dignity and comfort of both.

  ‘Lot of strength comes from your hips and your upper legs,’ Milton said. He had been a tent boxer, and now he bent his legs and pivoted.

  ‘This what we’re doing, like yoga,’ Wilfred said.

  ‘Like in boxing,’ said Milton. ‘You gotta know yourself properly.’

  ‘Not your soul, just now.’

  ‘Only your bones and flesh. Your breath. The sinews and the little muscles under your skin, they all connected up hanging onto your bones.’

  ‘So make it easy for them. Relax. Know what that means?’

  The men, as with the women, were not a particularly athletic group. Some were skinny, some overweight.

  They lay on the ground. ‘Means let the flesh melt, feel your bones on the floor, the bones within. Go loose in the sockets, in the joints. Feel the sinews and the cords of muscle let go.’

  ‘Feel all yourself, not just those little bits you always got your hand on.’

  There was even more laughter in the women’s group, enough to help even Tilly relax and feel less anxious. Kathy led them through the movements. ‘Like some wadjela do in yoga,’ she said. ‘Like in tai chi, in Pilates and at the gym too. Little bit.’

  Opened up and bending backwards from a kneeling position, lower legs on the floor, Tilly felt space opening in her chest, her skull, her sinuses. Moved into the positions they spoke, and felt spaces within of which she was unaware, and how the bones of her skeleton worked like levers. Her vertebra balanced lightly one on the other and when her head moved the body followed, like a puppet; not one of those cloth ones, but the other kind with rod and strings.

  *

  There was a roster of sorts, who was on cooking, who cleaning, that sort of thing. Kathy was in charge.

  ‘Damper; it’s not real blackfella food, is it?’

  ‘Well . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t, then it was. Now it is. So are hamburgers, doughnuts, spaghetti . . . All the things we Noongars eat, now. That’s our food. Don’t have the great big farm like we used to have, our own country; used to harvest with fire, that fire-stick farming.’

  ‘So, what we having tonight?’ Beryl wondered if it was kangaroo, naming that animal in the old language.

  Kathy smiled. ‘No.’

  ‘The boys got one the other day, unna?’

  ‘Yeah, but we’ll use that for the Peace Park. Stew. We’re catering too.’

  Tilly went to the fridge. She jumped back when she opened it, claws and tails and reptile tongues!

  Beryl looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not lizards again!’

  ‘Well, maybe we can have lizard stew at the Peace Park too you reckon?’

  *

  Doug walked within sight of their campfire and screen as daylight was fading. He saw the sheet was white with light, but no images, and a bunch of people sat around the fire, looking at it.

  Then two hands were silhouetted on the screen, sharp shadows shifting their shape, that clever way some people knew, showing first a face in profile, then a dog, a parrot. A comical parrot at that; feathers spiky, wings outstretched, squawking gibberish.

  The people by the fire were calling out a response, again in that language. Must be Nigger Lingo, Doug told himself, inordinately pleased with his secret vocabulary. Stupid Nigger Lingo. Tilly wasn’t with them. There was open space between the campfire, the ablution block, the room where she was sleeping. No chance to speak to her, or grab. Bitch.

  Then different silhouettes appeared on the screen. An axe. Knife? Spear. A sequence of shapeless sticks. Voices called out in some unfamiliar language as each appeared.

  Human figures on the screen, walking. Puppets? One seemed familiar, somehow.

  ‘Dougie,’ a voice called.

  ‘Dougie. It’s Dougie.’ Hoots of laughter.

  Did they say his name? What of him did they see in that shadowy image?

  Doug turned his back, walked away from the laughter.

  Perhaps only the eyes of Wilfred and Kathy followed his departure.

  The caravan park later in the evening was sporadically lit, TV screens and shadowy figures flickering, detached voices. That little group near the fire had gone. Their lights were out.

  *

  Earlier that same day, Dan had held a sheep between his legs and drawn the knife across its throat. The beast barely struggled, though it continued to kick fitfully even as the flow of bright blood slowed. Dan was an old man, he straightened stiffly, and reached for a large hook that hung near him, attached higher again to block and tackle. The hook was dark metal, darkest at the tip, and as the carcass rose into the air its head hung loose and blood dripped into the soft soil at Dan’s feet.

  He shooed the dogs away and pulled at the fleecy skin so that it came off in one piece, the flesh starkly white beneath. Paused, bagged the bulging, coiled intestines and the organs and his brother – it was idiosyncratic, both the way they worked as a team and their methods – then had it all within the skin ready to carry away.

  ‘Save the liver, brain and that?’

  ‘Do we eat that stuff?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  Dan was tiring. His brother Malcolm helped him move the beast to a dark and heavy workbench built against the outer wall and here they completed the butchering, separating the body into its parts for cooking . . . The swarm of flies around them grew, but the men worked efficiently. Closed the lid of a large, plastic box. The brothers’ hands were streaked with blood and small pieces of flesh, their fingernails darkly lined. Together, in silence, they walked to a water tank. There was a cake of soap on the corner of the tank stand. The brothers handed it one to the other, carefully; it never slipped.

  They carried the box of meat to a stone shed with a corrugated iron lean-to holding the refrigerator. The first area was gloomy, but well organised. Then they stepped up through a door in the stone wall, and into a much larger space, heavily enclosed but for a huge rectangular opening on the far wall. From one corner, a raised and fenced-in quadrangle extended almost like a stage, and a long-unused shearing harness, dulled by dust, hung nearby. The two men did not notice the smell of old sheep shit, of lanolin and dirt, but it reassured and comforted them.

  The brothers paused, each turning on their heel to look around the room and, though they sighed a little at the clutter and the thick layer of neglect, it would easily accommodate twenty or so people. Malcolm moved aside a bucket, some tools and a few hessian bags from a particularly gloomy corner. Dancing, sunlit motes showered him as he wheeled an ancient barbeque toward his brother.

  ‘There’s a gas bottle we can use, I know there is.’

  ‘If they turn up. If they stay.’

  ‘I’m pleased, so pleased. If only Janet . . .’

  Their footprints remained in the dust, the pattern of the last sole clearly delineated. Voices clear in that high and stone-walled space. ‘Now, this Tilly of yours . . .’

  GRAVEYARDS

  Today they would visit some more sites, Ruby pronounced, and meet with Dan Horton and his brother on their property, the ‘massacre farm’. First, they would go to the springs near the river mouth.

  The bus and utility pulled up together in the unsealed car park of a straw-bale house – or was it a café? – perched at the ed
ge of where land tumbled away down a steep, grassy slope.

  ‘Springs here feed into the river,’ Wilfred said. ‘Flows kind of inland lot of the time; our old people followed it to the main river, and up to where we’ll be later today.’

  Below them the water snaked away from where it pooled among gnarled paperbark trees in the ancient dunes. A profusion of reeds in the foreground, at the base of the slope, and no real edge of water to be seen.

  Gerald climbed the fence.

  ‘Plenty of snakes,’ Milton said as Gerald walked down and among the reeds.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A woman walking quickly toward them. She stiffened, pointing. ‘What’s he doing?’

  They watched Gerry pushing his way among the thick reeds, stomping his feet, hoping to frighten the snakes away. He crouched for a moment and then, as the woman repeated the question, straightened and turned to walk back to them, almost as if he’d heard her question despite the distance between them.

  She owned the café, the woman told them. She wondered what a busload of people were doing pulled up in the car park, bypassing her business, and climbing over her fence. It was not a strong fence, not a fence made to hold a crowd or keep a people away.

  ‘We’re the Traditional Owners here,’ said Gerry as he returned.

  ‘Custodians.’

  ‘Oh, well, I don’t know about that. This is my land. I mean . . .’

  ‘Yeah, we know what you mean,’ said Beryl.

  The woman turned, a little startled at what appeared to be a female wrestler stepping toward her, cracking her knuckles.

  ‘I can’t have you all tramping down . . .’

  ‘We’d get bitten by snakes in there,’ Wilfred cut in. ‘That’d be no good for any of us.’

  ‘I never been in there myself,’ offered Milton.

  ‘No one much been here for a long time,’ said Kathy, ‘’cause of the killing.’

  ‘Oh, you mean . . . Are you here for the Peace Park?’ the woman asked, brightening.

  ‘Yeah, we’re artists,’ said Wilfred.

  ‘Presenters,’ said Gerry. ‘Performers.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ the café owner said, ‘I can’t help with the land or the terrible things that happened here, but what about a cup of tea for you all, on me?’

  When they got to the café, Tilly trailing behind, Doug was already seated at a corner table. He looked down at his cup.

  Wilfred was telling them about a time he came here with an archaeologist; some survey or other. They’d pulled into the car park and the archaeologist got out of the car and froze! She’d just stood there, gaping. ‘Thought she was going to wet herself,’ said Wilfred. ‘She reckoned the car park – compacted, scraped, machines running all over it – she said the car park we standing on is all those bits of stone; you know, those flakes and whatever left by people sitting around chipping stone edges and points, yarning.’

  Doug had raised his head for a moment, captivated by Wilfred same as everyone. Then looked at the floor, as if there were things might suddenly be seen there.

  In the car park, they picked up little pieces of stone and showed them to one another. Doug waited a few minutes for them to leave. He scuffed his soles across the car park, and his spinning tyres made a thin hail of stones.

  *

  They drove for a long time, went up the hill of Kepalup and left it behind again until, eventually, the bus pulled up at a one-lane bridge crossing the river.

  Milton pointed out a set of remarkably clear prints in the red mud at the road’s edge, and gave them a word of the old language.

  ‘Echidna,’ said Gerald to Tilly. She saw the mark of some creature, some other, the toes like satellites of the palm, a foot-like-a-hand print.

  They walked through a fringe of trees, and then in single file along a narrow path beside the river, to where a granite sheet sloped into the water.

  The older ones sat themselves down on the warm rock beside the still, sky-full river, and the paperbarks stood in the shallows the other side. ‘Go on a bit,’ someone said. ‘Round that bend.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Not used to walking, you know.’

  ‘Our old people walked along here, this a path for them too, heading upriver. Carrying some of those stones – remember that place the other day? Telling those same stories, these same words.’

  A couple of them were singing that same old song now, weaving pieces of it together; weaving reeds and leaves too, some of them.

  Tilly kept on with the Gerrys and a few of the others. The group widened, drew back into line again as the path narrowed. Tilly was happiest alone, near the back, and keeping the others in sight. She glanced behind at regular intervals.

  *

  They emerged onto blood-red slope that led to a cliff face marked with struggling shrubs and crumbling yellow and white rock. The solid rock under their feet had the look of something that had once flowed. Near the base of the slope, trees and shrubs waited at the edge of a tight, looping bend in the ancient river.

  ‘Old campfires and all up there,’ said Milton, pointing to groves of tall trees along the top of the cliff. ‘Nice under them.’

  ‘Heard about this,’ said Gerry, and led them across the lower slope away from the river and into a wide trench that narrowed as it entered the very slope itself to form two vertical, human-sized surfaces.

  Their hands moved along the walls, which crumbled at their touch and moistly clung to their hands. Tilly dug her fingers in the deeply coloured earth and stepped back, her hands full of stuff the consistency of cosmetics, handfuls that might blend with sandalwood and jam-tree smoke and be rubbed into the skin. Tilly smeared it across her forearms and hands.

  ‘Hey.’

  Dots and short lines of ochre marked Gerry’s face, and he was beaming at her. He held up an ochre-smeared finger, and Tilly let him dab it on her nose, her cheeks.

  Emerging ochre-patterned and lighthearted from that small corridor they almost walked into the other twin. Gerry One glared, turned his back and walked away.

  White ochre on their skin, red ochre on their palms.

  Light glinted in the depths of the river pool as if it were an eye, and trees and shrubs filtered small movements of air. Footprints formed in the vibrant earth.

  *

  Fine, misty rain; a rain that is like tears, that is like weeping, their old language says. The weeping ceased, the sky cleared and the bus pulled off the bitumen, heading for Kokanarup. This is a new word in that old tongue. It means something like ‘place of sheep; sheep issuing forth’.

  There was a momentary silence, a lull; a change in the sound. Fine gravel and sand clung to the tyres, and Tilly wasn’t conscious of hearing two thin strips of the road’s crust lifted by the wheels, but something opened and and . . .

  She remembered this gate, remembered leaving behind the same crowd of trees they were now entering . . . No eagles today. Cresting a hilltop, for a moment the trees fell back and they were almost in the sky, but then it was forest again and they were falling, falling. The bus splashed through the creek and onto a dry, bleached slope. The blank, lidded windows of the old stone house stared past them, and the bus rumbled right by the house and pulled up at a much larger building, made of the same rough stone.

  ‘I dunno about this,’ muttered Nita. ‘I never been here. It’s a bad place, I can feel it.’

  Ancient and rusting farm machinery was scattered between the buildings; spindly levers, spoked wheels, long drive shafts and circles of aging black rubber all mostly inexplicable to Tilly. She saw a graveyard, the spiky and skeletal remains marked with the colour of dried blood. Recognising a ploughshare, its cutting disks wedged in the earth, she saw multiples of herself leaning chest forward into each disk, frozen in the moment before being sliced open, the blade continuing on into the earth beneath. The dry and spl
intering grain at one end of a wooden axle was held within a circular band of metal; the axle itself part of a tilting two-wheel cart, the horse long since departed.

  At this end of the shed, a water tank rested knee-high above the ground, a rusted metal bowl of water below its tap and a cake of soap like a cuttlefish on the corner of the tank stand. There were drums, pieces of timber and rusted coils of wire; a trailer full of rubbish sat near the shed’s entrance, and an old and bulbous truck rested on wooden blocks the other side of the doorway, its bonnet lifted above a dark and dusty maw.

  Nita shook her head. Were such images in her rattled thoughts? She couldn’t see so well, but was a good listener. ‘Young ones want us to come here; why should I keep a bad sad story going? Not frightened, just getting old, that’s all.’

  Tilly touched the old woman’s bare shoulder, and startled her.

  ‘Oh. Cold hands.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Tilly wanted to reassure, to gift her love. Nita grabbed her hand.

  The telegraph poles stood mute like soldiers; the grass hissed and the wind rushed up from the creek bed.

  ‘I promised my mum I’d never come here,’ Nita said. ‘We gotta move with the times.’ The other passengers were filing from the vehicle, and toward where one of the twins and Milton waited with the two old farmers beside the entrance to the shed.

  Nita clasped Tilly’s hand tighter. ‘Tilly, dunno if I can get off the bus.’

  But the others could, and were. Kathy and Ruby told Tilly to go on ahead, they’d wait with Nita. Tilly walked behind Beryl and Wilfred and so Dan did not see her until she was right upon him. His face showed surprise, then pleasure at seeing her. The two tiny dogs watched from their vantage point at the top of the trailer’s pile of rubbish. Tilly stepped into Dan’s tentative arms for a moment; then, when his brother opened his arms, she held out a hand.

  ‘Don’t remember me, Matilda?’

  ‘Don’t remember nothing,’ she said.

  The group stood in loose formation, many looking outward and away from the two old brothers, studying the sheds and machinery and ruins, and their gaze wandered toward the distant creek.