Demons (17 page)

But after that it all went completely off the rails.

When the painters arrived the following Tuesday a small group was already gathered
out the front of the house. They were all black. One of them, a well-dressed young
woman, explained to the painters that she was a lawyer and that the house was off-limits
because of a land-title claim currently underway; they would need to remove themselves
from the site and check in with the developer: they would certainly not be doing
any work here today. The painters left. The police arrived. The Aboriginal lawyer
explained to them how the man inside was exercising his right to sit down in the
land of his forebears and that the police would need to cast their judicial net
a bit wider than mere ‘trespass’ if they wanted to stay involved. The police went
away to confer.

About a week later, the electorate officer pulled Payley aside and told him what
was going on and how the local paper was planning to run a story the following Monday.
Payley cleared his social calendar and went out there on Saturday morning for a look.

Well, as you can imagine. There were about a dozen people now camped permanently
in the front yard—still just dirt and building rubble with a portable toilet to one
side. There was a hand-painted sign—
Always Was, Always Will Be
—strung along the fence
and a black, red and yellow flag tied across the front window. Payley explained to
them who he was, and how he was therefore the one probably best positioned to listen
to their grievances. To that end, said Payley, he would like to talk to the gentleman
inside. One of them got on their phone and made a call and told him to wait.

Payley stood on the footpath. He was wearing his suit and the day was already hot;
the sky blue, the sun fierce, he could feel the sweat gathering under his arms. He
let his eye roam over the landscape that made up, let’s be honest, a big part of
his electorate, and he wasn’t sure he liked what he saw: scrappy paddocks with new
houses going up in them, bulldozers parked in front of mounds of dirt, shiny cars
cruising the streets and circling the courts and gathering at the display suite back
there at the roundabout. My country, he thought. The protesters in the front yard
were all watching him, quietly, with vacant stares—someone somewhere had a radio
on, previewing the football. Then he saw a flash-looking red hatchback coming down
the street.

It was the Aboriginal lawyer, dressed in a sharp skirt and jacket and knee-length
black leather boots. Payley told the lawyer who he was but this didn’t seem to impress
her. She explained the situation and the legal precedents on which it was based.
The old man inside—she kept calling him ‘Uncle’—was exercising his basic human rights
and until these rights were tested in an international court of law she was not sure
what Payley, as a local member, could do. He tried to explain to her how parliamentary
democracy worked, how the couple who had bought the house in good faith from the
developer were as much entitled to a sympathetic ear as her so-called uncle, and
as their duly elected local member he was that ear. It is always better to avoid
the courts if we can, he said, and he explained how as a Labor man he was certainly
alert to her cause and the deeper issues underpinning it but that he also believed
in the power of honest conversation. I should at least, he said, have the opportunity
to hear your uncle state his case.

By now the Saturday house shoppers were beginning to cruise the streets of the estate:
whitebread Aussies, Chinese, Indians, Africans, Middle Easterns, all slowing down
or stopping to look. The lawyer led Payley to the front door and opened it. He expected
it to be cool inside but it was in fact hot and stuffy, with the air an oppressive
mixture of cooked food, fresh paint, plaster, plastic and human breath. The air conditioner
wasn’t connected. All right, she said, he’s in the lounge room, and she went back
outside.

Payley could hear the radio in the front yard and muffled voices coming from somewhere
inside the house. He passed a room in which people sat cross-legged in a circle playing
some kind of board game: a few of them looked up. He walked further down the hall,
past another room, this one with kids lying on their backs on mattresses with their
game-screens held right up to their faces, then past the kitchen with something
simmering on the stove. It was an open-plan house with a big living area out the
back and a small paved courtyard that stopped abruptly at a treated pine fence. The
living room was bare except for a double mattress and blanket in one corner. It was
on this mattress that Bartleby was sitting.

He would have been in his seventies, at least, with a mop of white hair and a long
white beard, his hands arthritic claws, the lines on his face carved as if out of
black stone. He was blind, or almost; when Payley entered the room he could see Bartleby
turn his head and look vaguely in his direction but his eyes never focused properly
on him. They had a milky sheen. Payley hung in the doorway until he was sure the
old man was at least aware of his presence and wouldn’t be scared by his voice. He
introduced himself as the recently elected local member of parliament. I’ve come
for a visit, he said, to see what’s going on—there are all sorts of rumours, as you
can imagine. Bartleby was still looking through Payley. He didn’t speak. Can I sit?
asked Payley. He took his silence as a yes and sat cross-legged opposite—he’d never
discussed things with a blackfella before but he figured that’s what you do.

So anyway, said Marshall, going on, there they were: Payley the backbencher in his
suit, Bartleby the blackfella in his old track pants and hoodie. Payley started by
saying that, basically, there was a problem. A young couple had paid a lot of money
to live in this house, hard-earned money, he said, money that doesn’t come easy these
days, and clearly they were upset that a group of people who had paid
no money
—no
money at all—were now living in it instead. You see how this might seem unfair? Bartleby
didn’t answer. It is the dream of every young couple to own their own home, said
Payley, to make a nest—the woman is expecting a baby—and you can see just by looking
around at this estate here which is almost entirely pre-sold how many young couples
are looking to make a nest and how many houses and estates we’ll need to satisfy
them. We can’t just let anyone in to take these houses, they’re not here for the
taking, they’re a reward for hard work and frugality.

Bartleby had his head cocked to one side, as if one ear heard better than the other.
Payley left a decent pause; Bartleby filled it.

Now I’ve sat down, he said, I won’t be getting up.

That was it—and even these few words sounded like they had struggled to get out.
His voice wavered, his lips barely moved. (That’s what made me think of the Bartleby
story, said Marshall, and how this guy was him.)

Yes, said Payley, I understand how you’ve sat down, but you see my problem? We can’t
all just sit down where we want when we want, that would mean anarchy. Some places
you can sit down, some you can’t; a public place, you can sit down there, most of
the time, with some exceptions, but a private place, you can’t sit down there without
permission. Do you understand? Payley was treating him like a child because he was
acting like one. To get permission to sit down here, he said, you would need to go
through a whole lot of processes—I won’t go through them with you, they would make
your head spin—with the purpose basically of getting permission to sit down from
the person who bought and therefore
owns
the property you want to sit down in. That’s
what ownership means.

It was only then he realised some of the others in the house had gathered in the
hallway at the far end of the living room to listen: young kids, a couple of young
women, a middle-aged man. (The middle-aged man was the only one, thought Payley,
who looked properly black, the others looked more or less white to his eyes—the kid
with his face poking out from behind the middle-aged man’s leg for all intents and
purposes
was
white.) I am explaining to Uncle here, he said, turning, about ownership,
how someone has already bought this house and to sit here like this, like Uncle is
doing, is unfortunately against the law. At last one of the women spoke. She had
broad hips and a wild head of hair. Uncle, she said, are you all right? This fulla’s
the one who doesn’t belong here, not you, she said. Payley could see he was up against
it, so he tried another tack. Come in, he said to the woman, come and join us, I
have nothing to hide. On the radio out the front, very faintly, he could hear the
sound of the siren to start the first quarter of the football and the distant roar
of the crowd.

The group in the hallway all trooped in and lined themselves up behind Bartleby
along the glass wall that looked onto the courtyard. Payley now realised that more
people were behind them, backed up into the hall, black people, or black people of
various shades, and white people too, hippie types. By the time they had lined themselves
up with the others there were at least twenty people in the room.

Listen, all of you, said Payley, beginning to raise his voice, I sympathise with
what you’re doing here, I understand the concept of prior ownership, I’m not stupid,
but you’re going boots and all into something you really don’t understand. There
are
processes
, comrades, which everyone has to go through. I’ve just explained this
to Uncle here. The colour of your skin or the shape of your eyes, this doesn’t matter;
there are forms you have to fill in and sign, documentation you have to provide,
payments you have to make. I’m sorry, but the state government is making nearly fourteen
thousand dollars stamp duty out of the sale of this place: who here is going to come
up with that sort of cash? You have to do the paperwork, he said, if you want to
get anywhere in this world.

A couple of other protesters had straggled in and joined the semicircle behind and
to either side of Bartleby. Payley was still sitting cross-legged on the floor, doing
what he thought was the right thing, communicating face to face with the elder, but
with all the others standing up—there must have been about thirty in the living room
now—he was starting to feel that whatever authority he had was being leached out
of him to the point where these people, quite clearly harmless in themselves, now
felt like a threat. He looked into their faraway eyes and seriously thought they
might spear him. He got to his feet—a badly executed stagger—so he could look at
them on the same level. But, having done so, he realised he was now towering above
Bartleby who, since he’d said that thing about not getting up, had neither spoken
nor moved.

Almost instantaneously, Payley felt thirty pairs of eyes looking down at the back
of Bartleby’s head as if they were asking him: Is this okay, this guy lording it
over you like that? I’m standing up, said Payley, gesturing with his arm to the group
and at the same time tilting his head sideways in the direction of Bartleby, because
I need to stretch my legs. I had an operation a little while ago and it’s still playing
up. He tapped the knee in question. So. I’m actually talking to you all. He swept
an arm out in front to show them what he meant. Of course I empathise with you, he
said, but what I’m saying at the same time is that you have to go about these things
the right way. You can’t just barge into someone’s house and take it over. Where
would the world be if everyone did that any time they liked? We’ve got to find a
way to live together, even if we don’t necessarily like each other all that much;
the important thing is to overcome our differences, see what unites rather than divides
us, if we are to live in a harmonious society, as we would like to do. That’s why
we have laws, he said, so we don’t scratch each other’s eyes out.

Now, he continued, I believe from what I have been told by your lawyer and from the
few words Uncle has spoken that you as a group wish to claim ownership over the land
on which this house is built and that you feel some entitlement, as indigenous people,
to be gathered here as you are in this living room with its marble benchtops and
state-of-the-art space-saving cabinetry, today. But
quicquid plantatur solo, solo
cedit
; whatever is annexed to the soil is given to the soil, as our whitefella law
has it.
Quicquid plantatur
: whatever is annexed. Can you as indigenous people enjoy
ownership of the land here without
ipso facto
claiming ownership over the house and
ipso facto
, therefore, enjoying it? The house was not here when your forebears walked
the land, so why should you now benefit from its comforts? We can’t turn the clock
back to a time when we and our houses and cars and shopping centres and shopping
bags were not here and we shouldn’t even try. We need to find a way forward. One
that doesn’t look back. I am absolutely an advocate for inclusion, Payley said, of
having all peoples share in the wealth of a lucky society, but inclusion means just
that, it means playing by the rules, doing your bit, you can’t have one without the
other.

I recently, said Payley, continuing, had an Iraqi man come into my office to plead
his case to be allowed to stay. Who do you barrack for? I asked. He didn’t understand
‘barrack’, I’m not sure he even understood ‘for’. Do you see what I mean? You will
always find me out there front and centre supporting multiculturalism, an
inclusive
society, but you will also hear me saying—I don’t apologise for it—that everyone
has got to pull their weight. Nothing is God-given, we’re all in the same struggle
against circumstances, we’re all trying to make something better of our lives. My
mum and dad couldn’t afford to send me to uni, I had to pay my way, I worked two,
sometimes three jobs, crammed my study in where I could. I struggled like the next
guy but I accepted the struggle. The laws of the land are always about finding compromise,
listening to both sides of the argument, making judgments based not on emotion but
fact. There is a young couple currently living at home with the man’s parents, the
young woman seven-and-a-half months pregnant with their child, in despair at what
is happening here and how their ownership of this house, as written and signed into
the contract of sale, is being questioned.