Lieutenant (14 page)

She went with him to the small hollow he had cut below where water seeped out of the rock. Rooke dipped and poured, and when Boneda ran up, wanting to know what was going on, he let him dip and pour until the kettle was full. In the hut he put the kettle on the fire and the children saw straight away that he needed more twigs—they knew the same thing his grandmother had told him,
little sticks burn the hottest
—and they had the fire blazing and the water heated in short order.

He took it outside to the stump on which his enamel basin sat next to the rain gauge. He had wedged a stick upright into the stump and jammed his looking-glass into its split end, and
now began the ritual of shaving, which never failed to entertain the children: the stropping of the blade on the leather strap, the making of lather with the shaving brush, the way the lopsided mirror caused him to tilt his head to one side as he drew the blade through the white foam. Worogan pointed to his nose, bare of lather.

‘
Minyin bial kanga
?’ she asked, why don’t you wash this part?

Worogan was laughing sideways at Tagaran. She had lost her shyness, and now he saw that there was some private joke on the subject of his shaving, or his nose, or the whole business of being cheeky to a man, or to a white man. He pushed his tongue into his cheek to tighten it for the blade, peering into the insufficient mirror. He knew he would never learn what the joke was, but he smiled, mostly with his eyes to avoid getting soap in his mouth.

When he had finished shaving he folded up the razor, wiped his face with the towel, and tossed the water out. Tagaran picked up the kettle and shook it, indicating there was a little left, and by gesture asked his permission to pour the water into the basin, then she plunged her own narrow hands into it. Against the white enamel of the basin her skin was sumptuously dark. He put his own hand down alongside hers: pink, somewhat freckled, unfinished looking, he thought, by comparison.

He took her hands in his and laved them with the soap and, to complete her toilette, he wet the corner of the towel and wiped her face. She watched him as he worked. Further than
her face he was shy to go: a face was a public thing but a body, no matter how childish, was private.

He gave her the towel.

‘Wash, come, wash yourself.’

She took the towel and dipped the corner in the warm water as she had seen him do.

Watching her—her face showing every nuance of expression: surprise at the unaccustomed feel of warm water on her skin, wariness, the fun of doing this new thing—he risked a joke.

‘If you wash yourself often you will become white!’

He did not know whether she would understand the words, or his attempt to translate them into actions, making to wash his forearm and then holding it beside hers, the white skin against the brown. He thought it a good joke, the sort of absurdity a child would appreciate, and all the more entertaining because his own skin was so dead-looking compared to hers.

But she rubbed at her forearm with the towel a few times, inspected it, and flung down the towel in a pet.

‘
Tyerabarrbowaryaou!
’

He supposed she was saying something like
I shall not become
white!

She stuck out her bottom lip, pouted and postured, acting out despair. He was appalled, cursed himself for such a badly judged bit of tomfoolery.

Then she winked at him, and he saw that she was not acting,
but overacting. He had made a promise as a joke, and she had taken hold of the joke and run further with it, giving it another twist that compounded its ironies.

When she saw his face clear with relief, she left off pouting and laughed with pleasure at what they had made together. He laughed too, astonished at it, so rich and layered.

But it left a taint of something else, a sense of the ease with which a thing could go wrong. He must be careful, he told himself. The rapport between them was easy, but he must not make assumptions. There was too much to lose, and not just the glory of being the first to speak the native tongue.

Afternoon was wearing into evening. Over by the fire, the women were picking up the babies and calling to the children. But Tagaran and Worogan were talking together and glancing at Rooke. Some scheme was afoot.

‘
Matigarabangun nangaba
,’ Tagaran said, and gestured, palm under cheek, finger pointing to the floor at her feet.

Nangaba:
in that he could hear a familiar word,
nanga
, the infinitive of the verb
to sleep
. He already knew
nangadiou
, I slept, and
nangadiemi
, you slept. Was
nangaba
the future tense? Was Tagaran suggesting that she and Worogan sleep in the hut?

He went over to Mauberry and Barringan at the fire, trying to explain, to ask, to confirm the rightness of it. Yes, they agreed, Worogan and Tagaran would sleep in the hut of Mr Rooke. There was much hilarity. He had no hope of following their shouted comments but was pretty sure that they were about him.
It was perhaps as well that he did not understand.

The novelty of spending the night in an unfamiliar place was something he recognised. Perhaps that was universal among children. Even he had begged to spend the night under a canvas awning in the slip of garden behind the house in Church Street.

Until recently Daniel Rooke had felt all of a piece with the child he remembered himself to be. Now that little boy seemed an entirely different person from the man waving goodbye to a group of laughing naked women and their plump brown babies with no more sense of the strangeness of the scene than if they were his neighbours in Portsmouth.

He shared his food with the girls, although he thought they ate more for the novelty of it than any pleasure. Indeed, there was not much pleasure to be got out of stale bread and a little broiled salt pork. But he made sweet-tea—they exclaimed at the fact that he put the leathery leaves in the kettle and steeped them —and he understood them to say that they used the leaves too, and gave him the name of the plant, or perhaps the leaves, or perhaps the infusion:
warraburra
. They thought that to drink it out of teacups was the most amusing and extraordinary thing.

He sipped his own cup of
warraburra
. He had grown more fond of it than real tea, enjoying the way its faintly aniseed, faintly astringent, faintly sweet taste left him refreshed, his spirits somehow clearer.

It was the oddest pleasure to have these two staying with him. Had he ever played host before? He could not think of an occasion. He had expected many things of New South Wales, but not that he would learn to keep house and entertain guests.

Where in the hut did they wish to sleep? In front of the fireplace, of course. Worogan lay down on the mat he had there and curled herself towards the warmth, but Tagaran pointed to the blanket on the bed, unmistakably a command, so he spread it out for them on the floor. Worogan was not sure, but Tagaran made her get up so they could lie on it together. She was such a bossy child! He hoped he would never find it necessary to refuse her anything.

They curled up side by side, and he sat at his table and opened his notebook, turning to
W
and recording
warraburra,
sweet-tea
.

But Tagaran sat up.

‘
Boobanga
,’ she said. ‘
Boobanga kamara!
’

He saw from her actions, that this was a request:
Cover me
with a blanket, my friend!

He did not think she would like the feel of the rough wool against her skin, so unused to any covering, but he was not going to try to explain. Tagaran would have to find out for herself about blankets, just as he had discovered for himself, that night under the canvas awning, that it was cosier in the house. His father might have had the same contradictory feelings as he did now: a longing to protect, and an imperative to stand aside.

He took his second blanket and laid it over the two girls. He had not been comfortable under the canvas in the garden at Church Street, but comfort was not the point. The point was that Tagaran wanted to feel the very texture of the white man’s world.

The girls lay quietly and he went back to the notebook. How would he record the joke that he and this child had shared earlier in the afternoon?

Tyerabarrbowaryaou
, he wrote,
meaning, I shall not become white
.

That might be correct, but it did not begin to capture what had happened.

This was said by Tagaran
, he added,
after I told her if she washed
herself she would become white, at the same time throwing down the towel
as in despair
.

This was an improvement over the bare translation, but left out all that was important about the moment. What had passed between Tagaran and himself had gone far beyond
vocabulary
or
grammatical forms
. It was the heart of talking; not just the words and not just the meaning, but the way in which two people had found common ground and begun to discover the true names of things.

But how did you write down truth in a notebook, when the truth was far more than the words or the actions? When, even in English, he would not know how to express the thing that had passed between them?

To somehow convey that drama on a page, he supposed he
would have to do as Silk would. He would have to be willing to go beyond the literal, to take words into some place where they were no longer simply descriptive, but had a life of their own.

Well, he was not Silk. These words could carry none of the life of the exchange. The only reason for recording them was that they would allow him to remember. For the rest of his life he could read these words and be transported back to this
here
, this
now
. This happiness.

He got his greatcoat down from its peg, stretched himself under it on the bed, and took up Montaigne.
Of Thumbs
. He had read his few books so often he almost knew them by heart, but he always enjoyed
Of Thumbs
.

At night the hut always felt as if lost on the edge of space. Surreptitious scratchings and rustlings from outside had the effect of deepening the silence and intensifying his solitude. There were nights out here when he lay in the dark feeling as if he were the only human on the face of the earth.

With the girls alongside him, the space within the walls was transformed. The embers of the fire cast a steady radiance. Tonight, as never before, the hut was a cosy vessel coasting along on the currents of night.

He had chosen the place with solitude in mind but he was pleased, for once, not to be alone. Perhaps he was not, after all, such a solitary soul. That was something about himself that he had not known before. Had it always been there, but never brought to life by the right circumstance? Or was something in
the air of New South Wales changing him?

He had only read a page about thumbs when he saw Tagaran raise herself up on an elbow and call softly to him,
kamara
, her face creased with sleepiness.

‘
Minyin bial
nangadyimi
?
’ he said carefully. Why don’t you sleep?

‘
Nyimang blanket, kamara
,’ she answered.

Did she say,
Put out the blanket?
It was as he had thought. He got up and began to pull the blanket away. Worogan slept on, but Tagaran grabbed it and glared at him in surprise and indignation. He watched her face register a cascade of thoughts.

‘
Kandulin!
’ she said and pointed. Candle!

It was the light that was keeping her awake.

It was so unlike her to make a mistake in speaking that he made a joke of it, bending down towards the blanket and puffing as if to blow it out. She smiled, acknowledging the game.

‘
Tariadyaou
,’ she whispered.

He recognised the form of the past tense, and some part of a word he thought meant something like
mistake
. Was she saying,
I made a mistake in speaking
?

‘Yes,’ he whispered back, looking down at her face, very childlike with the blanket around it. ‘But you know, to err is human.’

His father had said such things to him, in just the tender tone he heard in his own voice now. She could not understand those last words, he thought, but she closed her eyes for sleep.

He arranged himself under his coat again and blew out the candle, smiling at the idea of
putting out the blanket
. It was unlike Tagaran to make a mistake, but it was equally unlike himself to think to turn a mistake into a joke.

Well, it might be unlike Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, but for the person she called
kamara
it seemed to come as naturally as breathing.
Kamara
must have existed all this time, he thought, but without the remarkable chance of the arrival of Tagaran, he would still be voiceless.

He lay on his side listening to the soft sounds of the embers creaking and collapsing, and the girls’ innocent unaware breathing. He could see the curve of their joined silhouette swelling and subsiding. One of Tagaran’s arms was flung out from beneath the blanket, the hand palm-up, the fingers loosely curled around air.

He felt—what was it?—a warmth was it, in his chest? He could not locate it or name it, but knew it was to do with Tagaran being under his roof, that trusting hand turned up towards him.

The light from the embers had faded to nothing. The hut was as dark as blindness. In a short time he knew that a full moon would rise. As he had done on so many other nights, he got up and wrapped himself in the greatcoat. Tonight he would not watch the moon as an astronomer, but as any other man might who could not sleep. He felt his way over to his table and the shelf above it, got the brandy bottle, poured a glass mostly by sound, and took it outside.

The world was darkness upon blackness. Only the harbour was a different, shifting blackness. No one but an astronomer who knew where to look would have seen the modest glow on the horizon. He waited, used to sitting in the dark until a light appeared in the sky where he knew it must. The brandy warmed him: poor brandy, he tasted the harshness of it, but it was a pleasure he did not often allow himself.