Journey to the Stone Country (19 page)

They looked at the room. Annabelle said, ‘It’s incredible.’ She turned to him, ‘This doesn’t surprise you, does it?’

Bo said, ‘I don’t see what’s surprising about it. Them Bigges never knew they was gonna die out so quickly. They thought they was founding a whole new civilisation. But they’re gone. All them grand people are gone. They’d be sorry to see this.’ He nodded at the shelves. ‘These books any good to you?’

Annabelle said, ‘What an incredible vision it must have seemed to them then.’

Bo said drily, ‘Yeah.’

She reached and stopped him from attempting to remove a book. ‘It’ll break off,’ she cautioned him. ‘This whole thing’s a termite nest.’

He looked again and laughed. ‘That’s it!’ he said. ‘Them old white ants appreciates a good book.’

‘I’m going to record it,’ Annabelle said. ‘Room by room. Every item. All these titles. Everything.’ She looked at him. ‘What do you think?’

‘Record it for what?’ he asked sceptically.

‘It’s enormously significant.’

‘It’s just the old Bigges place.’

She said steadily, ‘It’s important.’ She could feel them disagreeing.

‘Who to? A bushfire’ll come through here one of these days and all this’ll be white ashes by morning. You’ll see them little green shoots of black wattle poking up through the ashes within a month.’

‘Remember what Susan said when we were having dinner in the servo at Bowen? She said the way to save the Ranna Valley from being dammed would be if we found a site of national importance down here. Something to get the attention of the Council on Monuments and Sites, she said. Do you remember?’

Bo said, ‘Yes, I do remember. But I don’t think the Bigges’ old place was what Susan had in mind.’

‘She’s never been down here. She didn’t know about any of this. Everything’s here,’ Annabelle said, looking around the room. ‘From the beginning. This library’s intact.’ About to say something more, she hesitated . . .

He looked at her. ‘What?’ he asked.

She said carefully, ‘In these cultural surveys I believe the Burra Charter rates early European remains as just as significant as Indigenous remains.’

‘That’s politics,’ he said, dismissing the idea. ‘Anyway, this don’t seem intact to me. I don’t rate books you can’t read
intact
. You ask Arner his opinion. That boy likes to read.’

‘The titles are all here. It might be a unique record.’

Bo took out his tobacco and began to roll a smoke. ‘It’s just the past,’ he said. ‘This stuff ’s all done with.’ He licked the paper down, his gaze sliding over her as he bent and lit the smoke, examining her, maybe wondering about her and learning something of her he had not understood before. He dropped the lighted match on the floor without shaking it, just as he had at Burranbah in front of the mine man, like a provocation to fire, watching the small yellow flame gutter and die among the desiccated rubbish, a curl of blue smoke rising from the blackened matchend. He sucked his teeth and looked her straight in the eyes, ‘If you want to record all this stuff, you do it. It’s a spooky old place and I don’t like it. I’m only telling you what I think.’ He turned to leave.

She said, ‘Bo!’

He waited, calm and relaxed against her rising anger.

‘Don’t go off like this. Please! We can talk about the idea, can’t we? It’s not so stupid, is it?’

‘If you’ve got something you want to do, you go ahead and do it. I’m not going to try stopping you. But I’m not doing it.’

She tried to keep her voice reasonable and calm like his, but her throat was tight with emotion. She wondered, as she spoke, if she were risking his dislike. ‘What about the stone labyrinths at the head of Verbena Creek that you told me about? The playgrounds of the old people? You want to preserve them, don’t you? The memory of them. They’re the past, aren’t they?’

‘That’s different.’

‘No it isn’t.’

He looked at her for some seconds, considering her, as if he was wondering whether it was worth trying to convince her. ‘That stone ground isn’t the past. Them stones are there for the future too. They don’t mean no less to me and Dougald than they meant to Grandma in her day, and to her grandma before that. Them stones don’t mean no less to the Jangga people today than they meant the day they was put there.’

‘And when was that?’ She wished she could let it go, but she couldn’t. It was always the same. If she were pushed she dug in her heels. Steven would walk away at this point. She was dismayed to realise that this was what Bo wanted to do.

‘We don’t need a date for when them stones was put there,’ Bo said evenly. ‘Dates don’t prove nothing.’ He gestured around the room. ‘This place is all dead and dried up. You can see that just looking at it. Being a bit sad looking don’t mean it’s worth keeping. Them white ants are doing the job here now. It’s dead wood to them little fellers. This is finished. Its days are over. The Bigges aren’t coming back for their stuff.’

‘In its way, this is no different to the playgrounds,’ she insisted.

‘It’s different and you know it’s different.’

‘No I don’t.’

He drew on his cigarette and examined it. ‘I’m not going to argue with you.’ His voice was calm and easy. ‘But them playgrounds is different to this stuff, and I’m telling you they’re different, and if you don’t believe me then I’m sorry but that don’t change the way I know it to be.’ He made to go then stopped again and gestured at the floor. ‘You watch out for them old man brown snakes in here. I seen a shed skin back there in the hall. These old places are full of furry little creatures them browns love to hunt. It’s just like Christmas dinner for them snakes getting inside a house.’ He turned and stepped out of the room and was gone.

‘I’m not afraid of snakes,’ she called after him. It was not true. Snakes had always terrified her. She knew he had warned her, however, against an unpropitious sign more than against the venom of the king brown. She heard him spit as he cleared the vestibule. Her heart was beating hard and her throat was aching with tension. She could hear her father telling her, ‘You stick to your guns, Annie!’ She wanted to go after Bo and tell him she agreed with him and would be as happy as he would to see the old Bigges homestead burned to the ground. But it would be a lie. She cared about the remains of that old life and couldn’t bear to think it might be utterly lost to the future. She realised then that in the tension of the moment she had forgotten to ask Bo where George Bigges’ photographic plates might be stored. She wondered if she was making a mess of things. She stood by the bookshelves for some time not knowing what was the best thing to do, thinking hard about Bo and her feelings and what she was really doing down here at Ranna with him. But there were no answers. Nothing was clear. Could that be it, then? she wondered. Were their pasts too similar and yet too different for them to understand each other? Was he thinking of her now as a typical squatter’s daughter? Bigoted and racist? He was so utterly sure of himself, so certain of his values . . . But then she had thought of Steven in just this way. Wooden, she had called him. She could hear herself accusing him now, ‘You’re like a block of wood!’ Was it men, then? Their exasperating moral certainty? She closed her eyes and breathed. She rejected the idea. She had to reject it. It was repugnant to her. She hated to think she might ever become one of those women who saw the same qualities in all men and who were for ever barred from any trust or intimacy with them. She did not want to have reached the limit of her relationship with Bo. Not yet. She couldn’t bear the thought.

She felt horribly confused.

She had not felt so confused since she was a student.

She looked at the books again, bending to read the titles. The two volumes of Apuleius’
The Golden Ass
shelved alongside the six volumes of Edward Gibbon’s
History of the Decline & Fall of the Roman
Empire
, their calf spines intact, as if the grand old volumes could be taken from the shelves and their stories read again. She thought of Thomas Carlyle boasting of reading a volume of Gibbon a day for six days when he was a young man. Such scraps of knowledge would be utterly foreign to Bo’s mind. He would see no value in them. If she were pressed, she would not be able to explain their value to him for herself. But the value was there all the same. She was sure of it. It was a sense of things being linked, and of these links reaching back in time, perhaps even to her own origins. There was something precious about these seemingly insignificant connections. If you lost too many of them, surely you lost your sense of who you were. You lost your culture. She defended the precious little links in her mind against a charge of their insignificance. In doing this she recognised uneasily that she was also defending the cultural significance of the Ranna homestead as being equal to the significance of the playgrounds of the old Murri people. It disquieted her a little to find herself adopting such a position, as she was not convinced of its rightness. It was not a matter, however, of weighing the evidence dispassionately, but of responding to an emotion. Bo’s playgrounds might have a prior claim, but could she believe in them emotionally for herself? Her defence of Ranna was based on a gut feeling. It was a conviction she couldn’t deny through reasoned argument. Was it then, she wondered, nothing more than a prejudice? Is that what such gut feelings really were? Nothing but the irresistible force of prejudice? The kind of thing people get steamed up about. What might there be, she wondered, in Bo’s mind that would be just as foreign to her, just as prejudicial to her understanding, as her piece of Thomas Carlyle trivia would be to him? She could not imagine. But there would be things. She was sure of it. She was breathing hard, as if she had been running, her emotions charged. She tried one of the Gibbon volumes. It was cemented to its neighbours. Gibbon was a lost book. She straightened, doubting herself suddenly. Might the world not be just as well off without its memories of Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle? She decided there could never be an answer to such a question. She just knew it would trouble her to turn her back on this house without doing something to help preserve it. Or at least to record its contents. If she did nothing the lost opportunity would haunt her. It would be as if a drowning person had cried out to her and she had ignored them and gone on her way. Besides, she was itching to pry into the lost lives of the Bigges. She turned to the desk and was on the point of opening one of the drawers when there was the sound of voices and footfalls approaching along the passage.

Trace and Mathew came and stood in the doorway, not joining her in the room but standing and looking in at her from the door, their expressions doubtful and curious. She saw that they were already together. Their shoulders touching. The physical contact uncomplicated and direct. In love, she supposed. As simple as that. Nature’s playthings. ‘Hi,’ she said.

Trace said, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Oh, just looking around. Amazing isn’t it?’

Trace said, ‘Aren’t you cold in here?’

‘It’s you. You’ve only got that damp T-shirt on.’

Trace giggled and they turned from the doorway and went on down the passage. Annabelle heard their voices, then the sound of a door closing. Their laughter came from the verandah. The hollow thump of Mathew’s riding boots on the boards. Then they were gone. The house was silent. She was alone. She took her mobile out of her pocket and switched it on. She would give Susan a call and tell her about the Ranna homestead. She would describe this room to her. Susan would support her. The mobile’s screen said
NO NETWORK COVERAGE
. She switched it off and put it back in her pocket. She was on her own. ‘Well I’m not going to just leave it,’ she said aloud. She stood listening. There was a sound with her in the room. She had been hearing it on and off for some time. Something shifting stealthily, behind the piano perhaps, easing its body weight. One of Bo’s old man brown snakes stirring . . . But the sound was not coming from behind the piano. It was in the air around her. Close by. She realised then that she was hearing the termites. She put her ear to the books and closed her eyes, listening. A faint rustling from within the volumes. A nervous suspiration, like a vast army of pilgrims shuffling across a landscape of infinite extent, persistent and continuous, embarked upon a journey-without-an-end in obedience to a restless urge to be on the move. Millions of white ants at their blind work, recycling the world and returning it to some kind of cosmic dust, heartless, unconscious and inert . . . She was holding her breath, listening, her inner gaze calling to her mind an image she had fixed there at university from Milton’s line in
Paradise Lost
,
Thick as Autumnal
Leaves that strow the Brooks In Vallombrosa
. Not the numberless dead, however, she had discovered, but the legions of fallen angels. Ourselves. She opened her eyes. She searched the shelves for Milton’s book. But the poets were not present on the Bigges’ shelves. She looked round the room once more then turned and left. She went down the passage and out into the bright afternoon. The sudden heat as she emerged from the side door. The purple bougainvillea blazing triumphantly in the thrashing sunlight, the dairy crushed beneath its imperial blossoms.

Arner was sitting outside the kitchen within the lilac shade of the overhanging buddleia. His huge hands, swollen like his father’s hands, clasping his bare knees. She raised her own hand in greeting, but he did not respond. Behind the lenses of his sunglasses no doubt his eyes were closed. Dreaming or meditating within the vast stillness of his body. She imagined him the queen of the termites, transmitting his mysterious purpose, donating meaning to the blind and wilful labours of his infinite tribe, dwelling in a dimension without time. There was an old friend, now dead, who would have understood him at once. A friend of Steven’s who had become more her friend. A Polish intellectual for whom Willy Brandt had been a protegé. A man of a former generation. A Jew who had survived the camps.
If fate is with you, why hurry? If fate is
against you, why hurry?
She could see him smile at the sight of Arner. She had only heard him say it once, but it had seemed as if this saying was his final conclusion on life. He was the only person she had ever known who was truly broken in spirit. He had possessed nothing more to give than the gentle ironies of his resignation. And it was these that had touched her and entranced her. She remembered him, the hollow space of his absence in her heart now. To love a person, then, is to love them for ever.