Corroboree

by Graham Masterton

  ‘As well they might. Now, let’s have a look at those sandy-white heels of yours. And make it quick! I’ve lost enough sleep tonight as it is!’

  ‘You can’t do this,’ said Eyre. ‘Mr Lindsay, listen to me. Those dogs will tear him to pieces before he can get halfway across the garden.’

  Lathrop continued to squint along his musket-barrel. ‘There are several things you don’t understand, Mr Walker; and one of those things is the meaning of justice. What you are seeing now is justice. The wronged employer gives the ungrateful servant the opportunity to leave his property as expeditiously as possible. You won’t find one magistrate who won’t congratulate me for my fairness and my magnanimity.’

  ‘You windy old fraud!’ Eyre shouted at him. ‘That’s a boy’s life you’re talking about! Now, put down your gun, tie up those dogs, and let him be.’

  Lathrop turned back to Eyre with his face already darkening with anger. He poked the muzzle of the musket at him, and said, in a shaking voice, ‘You, Mr Walker— you, Mr Walker—you by God have crossed me just once too often. And let me remind you that I could blow your brains out where you stand, and still be well within the law; because you’re a trespasser, sir; an illegal interloper; and a known eccentric.’

  ‘Don’t you dare to wave that gun at me,’ Eyre told him; but at that very instant, on the other side of the ha-ha, Yanluga twisted around and jumped to his feet, and with his head down began to run towards the distant shelter of the gum-trees.

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ shouted Lathrop. ‘You see! You see what I mean! Doesn’t that show you! Isn’t that it! The guilty ones always take to their heels! Captain Henry—the dogs, Captain Henry!’

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Lindsay,’ acknowledged Captain Henry, and whistled through the gap in his front teeth, a weird, loud, rising whistle that gave Eyre the irrational sensation that something was flying through the air towards him, like a boomerang. The greyhounds barked, and pranced, and Captain Henry called, ‘Koola! Koola! Taiyin! Koola!’

  ‘No!’ shouted Eyre; but Lathrop lifted his musket and discharged it in the air. There was a flat, ear-slapping bang; and a flash; and a sharp smell of gunpowder. Lathrop reappeared through the swirl of smoke with a look in his eyes that was so piggish and menacing the Eyre couldn’t find the words to curse him. Instead, he turned to look across the lawns to see if Yanluga had managed to outrun the dogs.

  Yanluga had almost reached the gum-trees; but the dogs had gone rushing off after him as soon as Captain Henry had given the word, and now they were only two or three yards behind him, swift as Yanluga’s own shadow. Eyre breathed to Lathrop, ‘By God, Mr Lindsay,’ and hobbled down the side of the ha-ha, and then up the other slope, making his way as quickly as he could manage to the end of the garden. Under the trees, where the bone-white moonlight couldn’t penetrate, it was difficult to see what was happening; but for a moment Yanluga’s running silhouette was outlined against the pale bark of a large gum, followed hotly by the bobbing heads of the dogs.

  ‘Koola! Hi! Hi!’ whistled Captain Henry, off to Eyre’s left.

  Yanluga reached the trees. Eyre could hear his bare feet sprinting across the dry, crackling bark. Then, instantly afterwards, the rush of the dogs. With a high-pitched shout of effort, Yanluga leaped up and grasped an overhanging branch; first with one hand, dangling for a moment, and then with the other. Two of the greyhounds jumped up at his feet, but he kicked them away, and then tried to swing his legs up so that he could work his way even higher into the tree, suspended underneath the branch like an opossum.

  ‘Yanluga!’ Eyre shouted, through swollen lips. ‘Yanluga, hold on!’

  ‘Now then, Mr Walker, sir,’ called Lathrop, from the far side of the ha-ha. ‘Don’t give me any trouble.’

  Eyre turned around, staggering on his lacerated leg. Trouble?’ he yelled, almost screeching.

  Yanluga was grimly silent, struggling to edge his way further up the blistery bark of the tree, while the dogs sprang and hurtled just beneath him. He had almost reached an elbow in the branch, where he would be able to perch well out of the reach of the greyhounds’ jaws. Eyre had limped within ten yards now, and bent down painfully to pick up a dry fallen bough, to beat the dogs away. ‘Yanluga!’ he called again. ‘Hold tight, Yanluga!’

  The dogs spun around and around in a yapping frenzy; jumping up at Yanluga like vicious grey fish in a turbulent sea. One of them tore at the back of his shirt, and Yanluga beat at its snout with his hand. But that was all the other dogs needed. One of them sprang up and seized Yanluga’s wrist in its jaws; and even though Yanluga shouted and thrashed, the dog hung on to him, its body twirling and swinging in the air, its sharp teeth deeply embedded in his flesh. Another jumped up, and then another, ripping at Yanluga’s arm and shoulders. Yanluga held on for one more agonising second, and then dropped heavily to the ground with a cry more of hopeless resignation than of fear.

  Eyre came limping forward, swishing his stick fiercely from side to side; but he was already too late. The dog which had first caught Yanluga was worrying and tearing at his wrist, and at last tore the boy’s hand right away from his arm, in a grisly web of tendons, and snarled and tossed it. Another dog ripped at Yanluga’s thighs, so that the flesh came away from the bone with a terrible noise like tearing linen; and it was then that Yanluga started to scream—a high, warbling scream.

  ‘Off! Jesus! Get off, you devils!’ Eyre shouted at the greyhounds, and struck out at them with his stick. But they had caught the smell of fresh blood now, koola or Aborigine; and a few glancing blows on the back weren’t going to be enough to drive them away.

  ‘Off! Get off! Get off!’ Eyre roared at them; and one of them turned for a moment, so that Eyre could catch it a smart blow at the side of the head, and knock it aside. Savagely, it went for Eyre’s arm; but Eyre struck it on the shoulder, and then the spine, and yelping it staggered and collapsed in front of him. Shuddering with anger, inflamed with pain, and with Yanluga’s agonised screams tearing inside his mind like a fast-growing thorn-bush, Eyre hoisted the bough vertically upright, hesitated, and then brought it down in a piledriving blow right on top of the dog’s skull. With a crack, the dog’s eyes were squirted out of their sockets, and its head was smashed into fur, bone, blood, and a grey cream of brains.

  The ferocity of the remaining five dogs was unabated. Eyre saw Yanluga lift the bloody stump of his wrist in a last attempt to beat them away; but they had already torn open his shirt, and tugged the muscles away from his ribs, and now one of them was stepping backwards, snarling and shaking its head, trying to free itself from a garland of yellow-purplish intestines. Another had torn off most of his scalp, and half of his ear; while a third was chewing and tugging at the rags of his penis.

  ‘Ngura!’ Captain Henry commanded, from a little way across the lawns. ‘Hi, hi, hi! Ngura!’

  The hounds were satisfied now. Bloody-snouted, trailing liver and muscles and intestines behind them, they bounded across to Captain Henry and laid their prizes at his feet. He patted each of them; and then commanded again, ‘Ngura! Back to your shelter!’

  Eyre stood still for a moment or two, and then let his stick fall to the grass. He knelt down beside Yanluga; and quite magically Yanluga was still conscious, still alive, and staring at him out of bright red haemorrhaged eyes. His stomach gaped open, and his insides had been draped out for yards across the garden, so that he looked as if he had exploded. But he was still gasping a few last breaths; and his lips still moved.

  ‘Koppi unga,’ he whispered.

  Eyre said, ‘What is it? Tell me, what do you want?’

  ‘Koppi unga,’ Yanluga repeated. His eyes were like those of a demon.

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Eyre told him, miserably.

  ‘Ah …’ said Yanluga. He was silent for nearly a minute, but Eyre could hear him breathing, and hear the sticky sound of his lungs expanding and contracting. ‘Water …’ he said.

  Utyana was now standing close by, and when Eyre turned a
round, he silently handed him a leather bottle full of warm water. Eyre shook a few drops on to his fingers, and touched Yanluga’s lips with them. Yanluga said, with great difficulty, ‘You are my ngaitye, my friend. You must not let them bury me here. This is important to me, sir. Do not let them bury me here, or take me to the hospital and cut me up. Please, sir. I shall never join my ancestors from the dreamtime …’

  He coughed, a huge spout of blood. Then he said, ‘Please sir, find the clever-man they called Yonguldye, he will bury me … Please. If I can call you friend.’

  Eyre said huskily. ‘I will find the man they call Yonguldye. I promise you. Do you know where he is? In Adelaide?’

  Yanluga stared at him glassily.

  ‘I have to know where to find him,’ Eyre repeated. ‘Please, Yanluga. Is Yonguldye in Adelaide?’

  Yanluga coughed again, and then again. Lathrop had walked up to them now, and was standing watching over them with his gun crooked under his arm. ‘Chap’s gone, I should say,’ he remarked.

  Eyre said, ‘Yanluga, please. You have to tell me.’

  Yanluga’s face was grey now, like a grate of burned-out ashes. A large shining bubble of blood formed on his lips, and then burst. The smell of blood and bile and faeces was almost more than Eyre could stomach. It was the terrible odour of real death; and Eyre closed his eyes and prayed and prayed that God would take Yanluga out of his pain.

  Yanluga whispered, ‘Yonguldye is northwards, sometimes; sometimes west; Yonguldye is The Darkness; that is his name.’

  Lathrop said, ‘Chap’s raving. Think I ought to put him out of his misery?’

  Yanluga tried to lift his head. His last words were,’… kalyan … ungune…’ and then the blood poured from the side of his mouth like upturned treacle, and he died.

  Eyre stayed on his knees for a long time. Lathrop watched him, whistling ‘D’ye Ken John Peel’ over and over again, tunelessly. At last Eyre turned to him, and said, ‘You’ve killed a man. You understand that I’m going to have to report you.’

  Lathrop shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, Mr Walker. Chap was mine, you see. My servant. My responsibility. Welfare, board and lodging; discipline too. Chap disobeyed me. You know it for yourself, for you were a party to it. Hence, chap gets punished.’

  ‘You call this punishment?’ Eyre demanded, spreading his hands to indicate the gruesome remains which were twisted across the lawns.

  ‘I call it justice,’ Lathrop retorted. ‘And if I were such a stickler for punishment as you believe me to be, I’d have you reported for killing my dog. Lucky for you it was a slow one, long in the tooth. But that dog was worth £30 of any man’s money; and you’ve killed it; no reason; no provocation. Whereas this chap, why, only paid him £3.2s. 6d the year; worth a damned sight less than the dog.’

  Eyre stood in the moonlight, shaking. He was too shocked and too painfully injured to argue with Lathrop now about the value of a man’s life. He knew, too, that Lathrop would be given no trouble by the law. At a time when Englishmen were still liable to be hung for stealing a hat, blackfellows had no rights to life whatsoever. It was only two years ago that twenty-eight Aborigines had been murdered at Myall Creek; and the defence put up at the trial of the settlers who had killed them had been that ‘we were not aware that in killing blacks we were violating the law, as it has been so frequently done before’. Seven settlers had been hung; but the Myall Creek trial had done nothing to change the general view of Adelaide’s colonists that blackfellows were little more than indigenous vermin, filthy and primitive.

  Eyre said, ‘I’ll pay you for the dog, if you can accept recompense by the instalment. They don’t pay me very much down at the South Australian Company.’

  ‘Don’t let me see hide nor hair of you again; that’ll be recompense enough,’ said Lathrop.

  ‘One thing more,’ said Eyre. ‘I’d like to take this boy’s body with me. If your servants could find a box for him, I’ll come by with a cart in the morning.’

  Lathrop stared at him. ‘What’s your game?’ he wanted to know. ‘You can’t take that body; that belongs to me. What do you think you’re going to do with it? Sell it to the hospital? Or show it to the magistrate, more like.’

  ‘He asked me—just before he died—for a proper Aborigine burial.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A ritual burial, according to his own beliefs.’

  ‘That’s barbaric nonsense,’ Lathrop protested. ‘He’ll have a Christian burial and like it.’

  ‘But he wasn’t a Christian,’ Eyre insisted. ‘And if you don’t bury him according to his own beliefs, then his soul won’t ever be able to rest. Can’t you understand that?’

  Lathrop eyed Eyre for a moment, and then pugnaciously bulged out his jowls, like a sand goanna. ‘Captain Henry,’ he said, quite quietly.

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Lindsay.’

  ‘Mr Lindsay, please listen to me,’ Eyre urged him.

  ‘I have listened enough,’ Lathrop retorted. ‘Now clear off my property before I have the dogs let out again. Captain Henry, do you take out the pony-trap and take this gentleman back to his diggings, wherever they may be. Utyana!’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Clear this rubbish off the lawn before it attracts the dingoes. You understand me? Sweep up.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Captain Henry helped Eyre to limp over to the stables. Eyre stood against the stable gate with his eyes closed, his legs and his arms throbbing and swollen, while Captain Henry harnessed up one of Mr Lindsay’s small bays, and wheeled out the trap.

  ‘Captain Henry,’ said Eyre, without opening his eyes.

  ‘Mr Walker?’ asked Captain Henry, softly, anxious that Lathrop should not overhear him.

  ‘Captain Henry, tell me what kalyan ungune means.’

  ‘Kalyan ungune lewin, sir. It means “goodbye”.’

  Four

  Mrs McConnell had already girded herself to retire to bed when Captain Henry brought Eyre back to his apartments on Hindley Street. She came out on to the front verandah in curling-papers and a voluminous dressing-gown of flowered cotton, her lantern raised high, like a lighted thicket of moths and flying insects; and a long pastry-pin swinging from a string around her wrist, in case it was blackfellows, or burglars, or drunken diggers.

  High above the roof of the house, the Southern Cross hung suspended, its two brightest stars, Alpha and Beta Crucis, winking like the heliographs of distant civilisations.

  Mrs McConnell said, ‘God in his clouds, what’s happened?’ and came down the steps to the pony-trap with her pastry-pin rattling against the banisters. Captain Henry climbed down from the trap and held the horse, while Mrs McConnell lifted her lantern over Eyre’s bruised and bloodied face.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ demanded Mrs McConnell. ‘Who did this? You, blackface, who did this? And no demurring.’

  Eyre said awkwardly, ‘It’s all right, Mrs McConnell. I was involved in an accident, of sorts. Fell off my bicycle.’

  ‘Fell off your bicycle into a passing tribe of cannibals, more like it,’ said Mrs McConnell. ‘Look at you, you’re bitten all over. Those are bites!’

  Eyre attempted to stand up and greet Mrs McConnell with bravado. He almost managed it; but his legs closed up like cheap penknives and he sat down very hard again on the pony-trap’s horsehair seat; and couldn’t manage anything more than a puffy, lopsided smile.

  Tie up that pony, blackface, and help me to carry the poor gentleman inside,’ Mrs McConnell told Captain Henry. Captain Henry did as he was told, and then between the two of them they managed to drag Eyre up the wooden steps, across the verandah, and into the hallway, where they laid him down on the brocade-covered sofa on which it was Mrs McConnell’s pleasure (believing herself to be quality) to keep all her visitors waiting, even her friends from the Sewing Circle.

  ‘You look regularly chewed,’ said Mrs McConnell. ‘It’s a wonder you’re still with us. Who did this, blackface? Who’s the folk responsi
ble?’

  ‘Not my position to say, madam,’ said Captain Henry, uncomfortably.

  Mrs McConnell brandished her pastry-pin at him, and Captain Henry squinted at it in alarm.

  ‘How about a crack on the skull?’ Mrs McConnell asked him. ‘And believe you me, when you’re cracked with this, you know it. Not like your clubs or your bangarangs.’

  ‘Please, madam, all I can say is that I work for Mr Lindsay, madam; and that this gentleman was hurt by Mr Lindsay’s greyhounds.’

  ‘Lathrop Lindsay? That bullfrog? Well, then, be off with you and tell Mr Lindsay from Mrs McConnell that he had better not take Hindley Street for a year or so; unless he fancies a crack on the skull with Chumley here.’

  Captain Henry gratefully retreated from the hallway; and out into the street, and turned the pony-trap around, and whipped up the pony with a high cry of ‘whup! whup!’ Mrs McConnell closed the door and came across to Eyre with a sweep of her dressing-gown, her forehead solicitously ribbed like a sand-dune.

  ‘We’re going to have to clean up these bites at once,’ said Mrs McConnell. ‘I remember a friend of Dogger’s, Mr Loomis, he was bitten by dogs and died of the lockjaw in less than a week. Can you manage to climb the stairs?’

  Eyre nodded; and with Mrs McConnell helping him, he managed to climb one stair at a time up to his room. He knew better than to ask if Dogger might not lend a hand. Dogger was invariably unconscious at this time of the evening, after three jugs of home-made beer. His snores were already reverberating across the landing, like a man giving poor imitations of a prowling lion. Mrs McConnell said, ‘Off with your trousers, Mr Walker; and I’ll fetch a basin.’

  Eyre hesitated, but Mrs McConnell said, ‘I’ve seen a few men in my day, Mr Walker; and I’m beyond embarrassment. There used to be a telescope at Brighthelmstone beach, you know, which the young girls used in order to spy on their young beaux bathing in the sea; and many a girl was saved from a disappointing marriage by being afforded a view in advance; although my aunt used to say that they were nothing more than so many whelks.’