Heat and Light (2 page)

I have one photo of my great-grandfather. He has long hair in his face. In a photo taken at the mission, he sits on the right. They had put the king plate across his neck. I wondered if he had got used to the weight, the way it clanged to his chest when he walked.

He had made friends with one of the whitefellas high up, Malcolm, who recognised him as an important man among his people, this helped out the family quite a bit. My great-grandfather would bring mob together at this Malcolm’s place and they would sing. All English songs. Malcolm taught my great-grandfather to read over one summer and so he was keen to show his favourite daughter, Marie, when he went to visit her in Brisbane.

I have been told the story a number of times of my great-grandfather walking alongside the road on his way to the town, when Malcolm’s car pulled up alongside him. Malcolm stuck his head out of the car and asked, ‘Where you going, mate?’

‘See my daughter.’

‘We got the new track, mate. I’ll get you on. Lot faster.’

The railway was spanking new, and it glistened in the sun. He stepped on the train. Wind in his hair. A free pass was unheard of. Though this was the last time he took it up. The next few years, while he could still walk, Zahny Zahny was known for walking along the railway lines, not catching the train.

Marie and Pearl were the closest in age, and were like salt and pepper shakers, opposites, but always together. Zahny Zahny tried not to show it, but they were his favourite daughters. When the children were growing up he made sure they knew certain things. In spring, stone-grey seeds floated in the breeze and spread across the reddened dirt. He told his daughters not to pick up the seeds. Those who could not understand would say that they were dispersed by the wind man.

~

One cloudy day when Jimmy wasn’t around the men called Pearl out of the back. ‘Let’s go out to the lake,’ they said. ‘A good day for it, ducks like getting wet.’

The lake was a dark place in town folklore, a sinkhole for small children and women. A euphemism for many things. I’d heard from their conversations that the wildfowl flew more on cloudy or rainy days, even though Goh liked the visibility of the sunny days.

They told Pearl she had to come along, ‘We’ll wait until you finish here. Right outside. Bring your gear and we’ll walk down.’

Pearl’s dress was a warm orange-red with a geometric print. It must have been new. The group finished their pies and walked out as early as I’d ever seen them do. It was only 12 p.m. Three hours until knock-off. I wondered what Pearl was going to do until then.

When they were out of sight, Pearl turned to me and acknowledged me for the first time. ‘Can you come?’

I blinked for a few moments. She continued to stare at me with her dull eyes. That’s when I knew what was going to happen explicitly. They were going to take her there, away from the protection of the store and Jimmy and they were going to attack her. And I would be there to know it.

~

After I talked that last time to the shopkeeper, I shot straight through, kept going down the highway. I went to the family property near Casino, halfway between somewhere.
Hune Hill
is what the sign said. I remembered the house a little bit from staying there a few times when I was younger. Grandmother Marie lived there with my Aunty Irma and my cousin Colin.

At the front of the property was an assortment of wild dogs tied to trees, and old raggy goats. It was raining. Aunty Irma came out in her nightie and ushered me in. The rain only touched my boots. Aunty hadn’t seen Colin, who now lived in Sydney, for as long as I hadn’t, so she was happy to see me, and more than willing to tell me about my grandmothers.

Marie was very surprised when her sister came to her to tell her she was pregnant. From the curse, and all the years that had passed, she thought Pearl couldn’t have children. She hadn’t seen Pearl for a long time. Marie watched as Pearl’s belly swelled and she walked the stairs of the house holding her back.

It had been understood from the very beginning that Marie would take the child. The baby, when it came, was ugly, huge, as if it had waited there, in Pearl’s womb, all of her adulthood. Pearl left the baby boy, a few hours old, and Marie quickly learnt to hold it as if it was hers.

~

At 3 p.m. I looked out of the window to see the three men standing with bags by their boots. They were dressed in camouflage and looked slightly ridiculous considering the weather. Their waterproof pants made their legs look like parachutes. They looked at Pearl’s bright dress.

‘Why you wearing that?’

She shrugged.

‘You dumb bitch, we’ll see how you go.’

I followed them down the streets. I had the advantage of knowing the town and the paths very well. Pearl was in front. Goh coughed on occasion and Bandit smirked. I saw them look at each other and communicate a shared want they could not say out loud.

When they went into the bushland with their gear, the decoys they carried began to weigh them down and they walked slowly – all three were unfit or weak. Pearl carried nothing and walked easy. I noticed she had slipped off the clogs she wore at work and was barefoot.

When the lake was in sight I stopped to find a vantage point. I found the old wooden lookout that had been there since I was a kid and surveyed the surroundings below. The men stepped out and surveyed the area and where they would set up the blind. Pearl half-turned; her eyes found me and she nodded in recognition. The little flecks of light flicking up from the lake caught their expressions and I felt I could see them perfectly. The men crouched to set their plastic painted decoys down in the mud. From where I was, the decoys looked quite lifelike. Pearl had found her spot a little bit further down, closer to where I was. She also knelt and opened her hands, and I saw she had made a grass duck, out of reeds. It was beautiful.

Bandit looked – his mouth gaped for a moment and then he laughed at her creation. I couldn’t help but share his sentiment, as remarkable as it was, there was only one.

They stepped back thirty metres or so into the vegetation and started to get their gear out of the bags. George handed Pearl a shotgun. ‘Don’t miss,’ he said. And they put on their gloves and face masks, and held their calls and their guns. Pearl stood straight and stripped her dress off, spread out her arms and slipped off her undergarments.

‘Shit,’ George said and they exchanged a placating look between the three of them that made them carry on as if nothing had happened.

With her feet, Pearl covered the red garment with leaves. Bandit gave a nod to indicate the start of their hunt and they widened their stance.

Pearl put the call in her mouth. The wind picked up and melded with her hail call, a long, low note. The wind began to pull at the tassels of the lake, and I held my hair in place. The wind shuddered the ten or so decoys the men had laid out, and they fell down in a row.

The men swore loudly but Pearl kept calling. She went to a new call – a rapid round of short, sharp notes. This is what the men in their conversations at the shop had called a feed call, when a hen has found food. I heard the ducks above, and I looked up to see their formation swooping down. The mallards slowed their wings and came towards the outstretched Pearl like a train to a station. There were at least two dozen. Pearl raised the gun and fired. But nothing was shot. The mallards landed unaffected around her. She looked down, confused, at the gun.

That’s when the camouflaged men made their move. With their masks they looked like executioners and that’s what they were. They grabbed Pearl by the shoulders. Goh on the left, George on the right and Bandit at the front.

I got to my feet but there was nothing I could do. Though the wind, as always, was on her side. The gale swept back – it was a wind that bit – and George let go. He flailed his arms out and toppled backwards into the lake.

In the confusion Pearl got away and then she was running and Bandit and Goh were chasing hard and I could not see everything exactly. The heat from the day had carved a dull headache in my mind.

~

On the way home I find a lover, in a hotel in a one-street country town. She smells like apricots and is too pure for me. I started surfing when I realised I needed something to quell my undiagnosed sex addiction. When I go out to the beach it’s usually to clear my head from anyone muddled up in there. Mystery does not always equal desire, and for every woman I’ve been with there has been one who turned me down. Like that Fleetwood Mac song, women, they will come and they will go.

This woman doesn’t turn me down. We giggle as we pay the clerk for a room upstairs. As she unlocks the door I search her hands for a ring or tattoo or some sort of sign that will remind me that she is not mine. She is the kind of girl I would have thought about being with when I was younger and hadn’t yet fucked up a million times. She gardens and she volunteers at the school near Hune Hill where lots of my mob went. She says she will take me to see the farm where she lives and show me her orange trees. They are the biggest oranges, the size of basketballs and they taste like love.

‘Will you cut them up for me?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says, slipping off her singlet top.

‘And take the skin off?’

‘Of course.’

We take the covers off the bed and she gently puts her hand on my chest and drives me back onto the mattress. She lowers herself and her legs come around my waist – I squeeze her ankles and we kiss like we’ve kissed each other before. How can it be that I don’t feel the weight of her. That there is no taste on her tongue. No drug, no cigarette, alcohol or coffee. I thought she’d taste like apricots or oranges. I’m getting sick, it might be the flu I’ve resisted all winter. Because I can’t continue. My breath is ragged and the shapes and colours of her are blurring.

~

I found Pearl lying on the ground a long way from the lake. She had called me there with her whistle. She looked half-dead.

The jealous part of me could have kept going but I helped her. I felt a bunch of guilt that I hadn’t done anything. And I had been one of those who had talked about her at school, and after I finished school, I had helped in outcasting her. She had come here to the town for a fresh start and she hadn’t got it. I got her up and walked her to the lookout where I know she stayed for a time.

~

So much is in what we make of things. The stories we construct about our place in our families are essential to our lives. My father still won’t say anything about it. He refuses to admit that Pearl is his mother. I make him have a break from the painting and sit him down at the kitchen table and try to convince him to accept the truth. I guess he doesn’t want to know that his mother didn’t want him, and all of the other things she was. But I think she was a fighter. I think there is a lot of struggle in our family and she has passed on that strength. I don’t know yet if she’s alive or dead, at peace or not, but I know she deserves to be a part of our family’s history. The woman at the pie shop left me with this last piece of information.

~

The next day when I turned up for work I heard that the bodies of all three men were found. All three of them had heart attacks, but somehow they linked it to Pearl. More rumours began to circle around the traps, about her shame and how when she was young the wind man had taken her ability to have children.

It was a few years until I figured it out. She had transferred the curse to me, by blowing the spores into the whistle and calling me with it.

I don’t get people wrong. I knew she was trouble.

~

I feel the old woman’s fury ripple through me. And then I look at the wooden call in my palm. There’s a tiny grey spore sticking to my finger. The old woman had done it. She had cursed me back.

Soil

Amy Kresinger leant back in her chair – with one hand to her temple and the other clutching the phone at a little distance away – and said her first words of the conversation, ‘I don’t want to talk about Colin.’

She said so in a final, reasoned way that she thought might sway her father away, but he was an ex-Navy officer who in retirement read Russian spy novels by the dozen, a skilled, primed negotiator.

‘Please, Amy. Just put it to the board,’ he said in a soft tone reserved just for a father with a daughter as his only child. ‘At the next meeting, please.’

Amy ran the ATSI Youth Development Centre in Chermside. She said, ‘He can go somewhere else. There’s more places.’

She shouldn’t have answered the phone. She was on holiday in Maleny. She had a nice room looking out into the hinterland. The only sound she’d heard outside this morning had been finches and honeyeaters.

The woman who ran the bed and breakfast had looked at her funny, like they always did, when it was just her and she didn’t have a kid in the back seat. Though she seemed nice and helpful and kept out of Amy’s way. She let Amy know of the spa outside, and how to fill in the breakfast sheet.

Her dad was still talking and she felt her stomach coil. ‘We haven’t even seen him, Dad. It’s been twenty years,’ Amy said, tapping her feet in frustration. ‘He doesn’t identify.’

Colin had been living in Sydney ever since he left to go to university. Amy thought about what must happen when Colin was at a bus stop and someone called out, seeing the Bundjalung in him, do you have any smokes, bruz? Colin would probably look the other way, smooth his suit. Now that she’d thought about it, it was likely he didn’t even catch the bus, it would be beneath him.

She didn’t know why Colin had come up out of nowhere all of a sudden. The forms had been sent through by email. Colin’s mum, Aunty Irma, had been on the phone to Amy’s dad, Charlie. Amy had immediately thought Colin probably just wanted to get the housing loan.

Her father said, ‘Why won’t you help your brother–cousin, Amy?’

‘Don’t do that to me, Dad.’ She sighed.

Her father had gone all sentimental in his old age. ‘Just because they’ve gone away. It’s our job to bring them back.’

As president she had made strict rules about who she accepted, it wasn’t just anyone. They must know who they are and they must be living as who they are. With those whose applications were rejected, she didn’t use the terms that some of the others did, ‘coconut’, and so forth. She understood it was easy for some of their mob to be white and project a whiteness. She imagined it was easy for them to live out their lives this way. And one day it might click, when they needed a job, a house, a surgery. Too easy. I’ll be black now.

The people in the Murri unit might say, ‘Where you from? Haven’t seen you around.’

He might stumble out a family name or a language group or vaguely describe an area that had some significance in an earlier life. He’d pray they didn’t see right through.

When she got off the phone she felt an upsurge of guilt and pulled at her cheek. Her father had succeeded in tripping her up about it.

They weren’t blood cousins. She had found out later in life they didn’t share the same grandmother. Her grandmother had killed her own brother by electrocution. That was what they did to each other in her family, she guessed.

Amy and Colin got along well as children. He had grown up on country in the family house. She remembered the magnificent view, and how healing the air felt against her skin when she went there. Aunty Irma and her dad bickered constantly. He’d come over and fix the fence and the plumbing, and say, when are you going to get a new man? Aunty would flush and look sideways at Colin. Colin’s dad wasn’t in the picture. Amy’s mother died when she was nine and her dad had never tried to get a new woman.

As a kid, Amy had thought about her and her dad going to live with them – Aunty, Nana and Colin. But they started going there less and less when Colin turned foul as a teenager, and Nana passed away.

Now Colin was married with four children and worked as a high-school teacher. Of course they would live in the eastern suburbs, and drive a Pajero, and his kids would go to one of those schools that had never even seen a child who wasn’t white.

Amy stepped outside into the cool of the veranda and felt the bugs probing her sides. She was here in the cabin for two more nights. There were the markets and the shops and the cafes but she would be happy not to leave the accommodation.

She had got her dad off the line by saying, ‘Okay, Colin can call me.’ She’d admit she felt a pleasurable sort of anticipation at the thought of speaking with him. She imagined his unsure, surprised voice. She would tell him off real good, but she’d do it a clever way.

She met up with Colin in Sydney, one time, a lot of years ago, before he had the kids. She was there on a leadership conference. He had a girlfriend, she wasn’t sure if this was the one he’d ended up marrying or not, she hadn’t received a wedding invitation. Colin told Amy he’d take her out to dinner, with his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s brother. They’d gone to KFC. That was Colin, always cheap.

He’d told a story, perhaps it was to impress the brother. A racist joke, like one from the comments you see on Yahoo news. Amy had always thought they’d come from bored rednecks in country Queensland. Not from her own flesh and blood. It wasn’t even a good joke.

She was too shocked to speak before he got up and went to the counter to get another drink. She looked at the faces of the girlfriend and the brother, who looked completely pacified. They had planned to walk around Darling Harbour after dinner but she said she wanted to have an early one as she had to present the next day. That was it. The last time she talked to him. They were well into their forties now.

She saw a green tree snake glide along the path, its tongue flicking back and forth. She walked closer, observing its shiny skin. She’d always liked snakes, ever since she was a kid. Colin couldn’t stand them, even though he was the one who grew up out bush. She’d scared the shit out of him one Christmas, dangling a carpet python around her neck.

A few hours later, when she was fixing something for dinner, her phone rang. Unknown number. She picked it up.

‘It’s Colin,’ he said. He sounded very far away. ‘How are you?’

She held herself. ‘Not too bad.’

They were saying goodnight to their kids. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘No, that’s okay. What’s your wife’s name again?’

‘Kylie.’

‘Tell Kylie I said hi.’

There was an awkward pause, and then she decided to continue. She told him what she had told her father and the other members of the board at the centre.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘But I’m your cousin.’

‘It doesn’t matter, Colin.’

Another silence before he said, ‘I get it. What can I do?’

She hesitated. She had expected anger, not complacency. ‘You come back up this way for a few days. You meet with us. You bring your family. You see the old mob, too. You listen to them. You do this three times and we’ll see.’

He surprised her by saying, ‘Okay.’ There was a disturbance on the line. ‘We’re not children anymore,’ he said.

‘Yes, Col,’ she said. The childhood nickname, spilling out like oil. She wondered if he thought she had changed from the fourteen-year-old girl he had known so well. She wondered if he was disappointed in her, as she was in him.

He continued. ‘We have either succeeded or failed in getting over the horrors of our childhood.’

When she got off the phone she went back inside and got the breakfast card and the pen off the table and walked back out to the tree-flanked path. She thought she’d have the corn fritters and one piece of fruit, or maybe two. And the eggs, runny, with bacon and tomato. No bread. And what the heck, she’d have yoghurt and muesli, too. Drinks: how about a juice, but not just any juice, a pineapple one, and white coffee and black tea, but she’ll write a little note to bring the coffee out first.

Her father was a well-respected man, and his name had built a lot of her. He would most likely get his way, like he always did. She could see, she would give in: Colin would eventually get that seal off the board to use for good or bad. She hadn’t even asked him what he needed it for.

She saw the tree snake was no longer there. It must have moved while she was in her head. It had gone back to what was there, bark and leaves, the unfixed remainders of the ancient trees. If they were all remainders, how could they be picked apart from each other?