Cicada Read online

  A single cockatoo circled against the red-banded walls as though there were an invisible gate preventing it leaving. Trevor swam across the deep greenness, feeling the cold from the depths of stillness, and he knew the water here was as ancient as the walls. He pulled himself onto a ledge where the cockatoo moved from foot to foot, watching him. He walked the length of it and returned to a thin opening, just a crack in the wall, and peered in. It was too narrow for his wide shoulders. He ran his hands down the smooth walls and looked for a sign, a dropped piece of bark or strands of hairs. He laughed at himself. Am I searching for a shadow that has been too slow to move?

  He knew they had been there.

  There was no other way from the ledge but back through the water. He made a shallow dive, why he didn’t know; perhaps he was afraid of the powers that might be there. He returned to the platform, swimming quietly as he towed the raft with his swag and firewood.

  He sat as darkness came, watching the flames and their shadows in the water and on the walls. For the first time since he had left the homestead, he let himself think of Jawandi Jurulu. Jurulu had shown him and John a place like this in the Durack Range. Jurulu was quiet that time, except he was singing some kind of song, just audible, a murmur. They stayed on a rock ledge and fished as the sun passed over the wedge of sky above. John taunted Jurulu, saying that he was a no-man because he wasn’t fully black, wasn’t white. Jurulu replied that his father and mother were saltwater people. He said his mother, she ate too much white flour that made her skin a bit white and when he was djinganarriny she ate white flour again so his skin was not full black. John rolled over with laughter and Jurulu laughed with him. Jurulu kept talking, his eyes dreamy, saying that his totem, his jaarinji, was the turtle and his place was a shell midden far away in saltwater country. John hissed out the words between loud guffaws. ‘So you are a turtle then?’ Jurulu grinned at John and replied that yes, he was.

  Trevor stood up. The colour of the water in the twilight troubled him. It was the colour of the morning sky before the sunrise. It was the colour in Jurulu’s eyes as that day began. Jurulu hadn’t resisted as the stockmen slung ropes around his waist, through that polished belt he was proud of. They dragged him to the homestead. William ahead on the motorbike rising in his seat as the bike jumped over small bumps, his rifle high as if he was going to war. War. Trevor walked back and forth, seeking solace in quick glances into the depths of the water as though it would comfort him. Instead it frightened him and he did not know where to look, and the thoughts kept coming.

  They threw Jurulu up against that old bush fig. John was ready to shoot but William insisted it was his right. There was the bird, so close. It was white, a seagull sitting on the ground. It called out then was gone, not even a fleck in the sky.

  He should have stopped William. He didn’t because it was normal, the shooting of men. Anyone who was not on their side, not their colour, not their religion. Shoot ’em all.

  Trevor looked at the sky and the stars were the shots in the night. The Turks came, trying to steal the horses as the desert wind whipped the sand from the dunes against their robed faces and the guns in their belts. He shot them fair in the face. Five of them with the Enfield. The killing rifle. Shoot ’em all.

  A split second between the shots. He inserted another clip but the others had run. He had turned to see the horses staring at him. They would never trust him again.

  Trevor tried to turn his thoughts away from death. Tried to make his mind blank. White. And out of the whiteness came Wirritjil. He could not keep her away and he did not want to. She was carrying her dilly bag and smiling, he could see her missing tooth. She spoke to him with her shy question. ‘Marra yitja pakumakirrem?’

  He was transfixed by the shyness of her eyes and the boldness of her words, her angular shoulders and straight neck, but most of all the smile that played around her lips. She laughed and repeated the question.

  ‘You sleep alonga me?’

  He stopped his thoughts and looked at the thin opening in the wall again and tried to climb the cliff next to it. It was smooth and difficult to get a handhold. He dived back through the cold green, slicing in defiance through the ancient spirits. He rode his horse away, up and out of the gorge, as the sky lightened, winding around rock buttresses to a plateau dotted with straggly snappy gums and red pebbles. He crisscrossed the country and camped in savannah land with tall grass. He did not know why he went or where he was headed.

  In the morning he followed a ridge of sandstone and came to a jumble of rocks. He stopped. There was not a sound. The world seemed to be holding its breath. He dismounted and walked into the shade of an overhang of rock.

  A twig snapped and a blue-tongued lizard ran close to his feet. He jumped. He felt the gaze of someone else, of something else. He turned. Several haloed mouthless men stared at him through black eyes. He walked backwards, afraid the painted figures might reach for him.

  The heat simmered and there was a sudden hum in the air. Cicadas. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? He calmed himself and sat in the dust breathing quietly, wondering about the figures in front of him. He felt he should go, but felt drawn to another place, he didn’t know what that place was or how he should get there. He sat for a while, listening, looking.

  He smelt smoke and heard the voices, sharp, back and forth, hunting. He stepped out from the overhang and saw in the distance tall men with long spears and throwers, and women carrying paperbark sacks, some with babies on their hips and others holding laanturrji and clubbing sticks. They moved quickly, absorbed in their work. A hunter stopped and looked his way. Trevor thought for a few seconds that he should ride and meet them but he did not know how they had been treated by whitefellas. He moved quickly to his horse and rode away, dodging the trees and the anthills.

  He returned to the ledge and turned the raft over and over. The crimson finches flittered at the edge of the water and he wished he knew what they knew.

  Wirritjil and Emily lay on the sand next to the water. The birds were quiet, listening.

  ‘Turtle man. Him has ’em mirta.’

  ‘Shield?’

  ‘He strong. He bin love lizard man’s ngulngal, lots ’em jilikum.’

  ‘How many children?’

  ‘Turtle man bin take ’em away.’

  ‘The woman and the children?’

  ‘Lizard man big mob, angry, chase ’im.’

  ‘Did they spear him?’

  ‘’E use ’em mirta.’ Wirritjil lifted her laanturrji in front of her like a shield. ‘He bin run fast, go datta sea.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘He hide ’em ngalil, jilikum, one fella mirta here, here.’ She put her laanturrji in front and then at her back like a turtle shell. ‘All one dey swim away.’

  ‘Did the woman die? What about the children?’

  ‘Dem—’ she nodded her head westwards ‘—datta sea.’

  Wirritjil looked up and stood suddenly. There was a smell of smoke that did not come from their fire. The lorikeets swept over their heads, bunched up and screeching.

  Wirritjil gathered her implements, twirled grass into a circle and put the laanturrji on her head and began walking.

  They went miles into the high savannah country towards a sky full of smoke. They stopped after coming through a dense patch of low gums and high grass. In the distance several Aboriginals came through the open grasslands in the direction of the pool. They were fire hunting as they moved, burning small patches and collecting the escaping lizards and snakes.

  ‘Worla,’ whispered Wirritjil.

  They skirted around the Worla people and made camp. Emily was pleased she had walked the journey without help.

  She wore grass sandals but she could put her foot down without flinching. She felt strong. In between the white trunks of the snappy gums, beyond the grasses bent with the breeze, a serrated red ridge was stark against a shining blue sky. It was good to be in open country again. She listened to the land as they rested;
the rustle of dry leaves, the swish of long grass, and the smacking of lips and low thud of the kangaroos as they passed close by. The calls of the parrots and water birds were gone, replaced by the melodies of the bush larks and the chatter of the grassland finches.

  Wirritjil walked around the ashen grasses of the hunters’ fires. She gathered a burnt snake and a small lizard that the Worla families had missed and kept walking westwards. They reached a rock formation, a sandstone ridge shaped like a wave of water. They walked in the shadow of the wave until the rock disintegrated into jumbles of big boulders. In the centre of the rocks was a small pool, deep green and ringed by ribbon grass. By it stood a single white gum. Behind and up from the jumbled rocks was a large overhang. Wirritjil called out in words Emily didn’t understand. She approached the overhang and stopped and called out again before climbing and disappearing into the shade. Emily followed. She drew her breath sharply and then was quiet as she saw the beings on the wall with big eyes and circles around their heads but no mouths.

  They stayed there, silent, until the day was nearly dark. They found a sandy camp on the other side of the white gum and in the morning they hunted for lizards and found nothing but old bush pears, wrinkled and dry on the outside but inside a thin leathery layer of sweetness. Emily drew the figures from the wall in the sand. She put some sideways, another on a snake as if riding it. That was what she had seen.

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Dem cloud mens, ngarrangkarni.’

  ‘No mouths.’

  ‘Pinarri.’

  ‘What is that??’

  ‘’E know.’

  ‘Know what?’

  Wirritjil just nodded.

  ‘What’s ngarrangkarni?’

  Wirritjil waved her hand to the sky and in all directions. Emily didn’t understand and they tried for some time to talk but it didn’t make sense to Emily. Wirritjil didn’t want to talk anymore.

  The next day they walked for many hours and Emily kept asking questions. Wirritjil would answer only in her language.

  Emily punched her on the shoulder. ‘Tell me. Tell me in English. You learnt English at Moola Bulla. Speak. Why do we teach you anything?’

  Wirritjil turned to her. ‘’Im ngarrangkarni, Wandjina make ’em all.’

  ‘That means nothing.’

  Wirritjil looked away.

  Emily put her hands on her hips. ‘It means something. Tell me.’

  ‘Ngarrangkarni.’

  Wirritjil kept moving. She stopped at a spring covered in water lilies and collected a vinelike plant that had a milky sap. They came to a pit of soft stone, a man’s height and width, among the rocks. The walls were orange in colour, gouged with tomahawk cuts. Wirritjil used her digging stick like a wedge and broke off large clumps, picking at different shades of colour. She nested the laanturrji heaped with clay on a ring of grass on her head. They saw lizards but Wirritjil was reluctant to chase them. Emily couldn’t catch them and she glared at Wirritjil’s back as the Aboriginal woman continued her march.

  At their camp near the solitary white gum, Wirritjil mixed the ochres on a rock. She pounded the vine and added the lighter clay to the sap to make a white paste. She daubed them both with colours in zigzags across their faces and down to their breasts and then dotted their shoulders in white.

  ‘Wirrilijkel.’ She smiled.

  She drew orange stripes down their legs and added white dots on their thighs in a pattern to the knees. She gathered starry bursts of red-stemmed yellow-tipped flowers from a bloodwood tree and placed them in her belt and added more in the strings around her upper arms.

  A crescent moon sailed low in a cloudy sky, hazy with the moisture of the night. Wirritjil threw leaves and wood on the fire and the flames leapt high. She danced, chanting and waving branches of the bloodwood blossoms in circles. Emily covered her face but could not escape the haunt of the chant and rhythmic footfall of Wirritjil’s dance. She peeked out at the swirling light and dancing shadows and picked up the digging sticks to tap in beat. The night came into her and she rose and followed the dance. Lightning came and with it the haloed, mouthless figures diving and flying in the clouds. Wirritjil settled into a regular chant that could not be broken. All night they danced and when morning came they covered themselves in leaves and slept.

  The next few days they rarely spoke. Emily saw things she had never noticed before: a lone bee followed by another at a great distance, a new bud, the ants slower than usual, the sprout of new shoots in response to the moisture in the air and the birds telling each other stories. She searched the bloodwoods and the woollybutt trees for sugarbag and saw the circle of a bee, a dead branch, an opening with a waxy surface. She laughed in delight to know all these patterns around her.

  They returned to the pool. There were new ashes.

  ‘Dey go datta way,’ said Wirritjil and extended her palm upwards to the north.

  It was quiet. The finches had disappeared. The flying foxes had folded themselves in their black cloaks, their eyes tightly closed against the day. The wirrilijkel sat motionless in the trees and the purple-crowned wrens sipped at the water without a sound. It was as if every animal was waiting, watching. The waterfall was only a trickle. All was still and everything sweated. High above a raptor circled.

  ‘We go.’

  ‘Fitzroy?’

  Wirritjil nodded and they were both quiet as the wirrilijkel alighted on the rock near the waterfall and peered at them.

  In the morning they climbed downwards, making their way easily through the rocks and the narrow ravine and tunnel. Wirritjil saw the campfire ashes and continued along the ledge to where it curved back into the rock.

  ‘Kardiya been here.’

  The word took Emily by surprise. It was from another world. Her world. She knelt by the ashes and touched them. She searched but could see nothing. She closed her eyes and heard nothing, but she felt a lingering presence, someone who came and wanted to stay. A shadow flickered and she opened her eyes as a cloud of crimson finches settled onto the discarded raft on the shore.

  Wirritjil stood with her hand on her belly. She felt the first movement of the child. A djinganarriny had entered her. She smiled as a white cockatoo rose in a sudden arc, coming towards her and curving away. The jaarinji of the child would be that ngamarriny, the noisy clever bird of white and yellow feathers. The kardiya who had camped here would be his father, his guardian, for it was he who must have encouraged the spirit child to come into this world. She knew it was Mister Trevor who had camped here. She wondered at the strangeness of the kardiya man, to chase her with a gun and also beckon to the djinganarriny.

  Emily dived into the water and came up gasping with the cold. Her heart pounded at the sudden jump she had taken, without thinking, into the deep water. She felt the warm surface and the very cold layer underneath and swam quickly to the shore. She was surprised too that Wirritjil didn’t want to enter the water. She dragged the raft from the shore.

  ‘You are a princess,’ she called to Wirritjil as she towed her back across the deep green water.

  ‘Wat dat?’ shouted Wirritjil.

  The ngamarriny followed them for a short time as they made their way downstream under a sky of crackling thunder. The bird wheeled back against the clouded sky and Wirritjil looked for rain in the north, for it would come as a great wave and wash them away.

  William sat in the feeble light of a small lamp. He pulled hard at the spear and gritted his teeth as the muscles ripped. William knew this was not a normal spear. It was a revenge weapon with barbs going both ways. It had torn the flesh as it entered his mid-thigh at an angle, travelling in front of the bone and emerging above the inside of his knee, lodging hard. He braced himself as he wriggled it sideways to loosen it, or grunted in agony as he tried to push it through.

  ‘They will be here soon. They will be back.’

  He put baking powder on the entry and exit wounds, stripped material around it in a figure of eight to brace it and, steadying the
shaft of the spear in one hand, limped up the slope to the house tank. He knocked on the tank. It was hollow, empty. He followed the line down the creek and studied the pump until the sun was too strong.

  He came again in the evening with a spanner and pliers.

  ‘It should be simple,’ he said to himself, but he did not know where to start. He sat by the creek as the evening shadows lengthened. The water was clear, it was low, flowing all year from the spring a mile away, until just past the horse yards where it spread out onto the plain, and the hungry dirt under the sun soaked it away.

  The water bubbled over the stones and around bits of fallen wood. William grimaced. It was singing a happy laughing song, laughing at him. He picked up a large rock and threw it hard. The water splashed high and there was a sudden movement in the darkening trees upstream. William held the pliers like a knife in front of him. He walked back up to the house, turning in slow circles, the spear jabbing in his thigh. He could hear that song, that song that seemed to come from nowhere. He took a wide track past the fig, afraid of it, not wanting to look at it for what might be there. He ran, the spear tearing at him, pulling at him; he glanced at the old tree and saw it, the body slumped on the fresh-turned earth. He made himself walk.

  ‘The tricks of your mind when you are alone,’ he muttered, ‘Emily, come back, please come back.’

  He hid in the house but as the second day became the third and the third became the fourth the shadows grew more terrifying. He saw the baby’s face, his eyes searching for his mother, only to feel a knife on his throat. He saw Emily in the moonlight completing his lines of poetry, not capturing the essence of what he saw, of what he believed. He didn’t know who he was. His poetry was truth. Truth was deceiving because it was hidden under the mash, the facade of life. The mash of life was what they must live. Therefore it was the truth. He shouted out, ‘Poetry is a lie.’

  He saw the native. In his mind he saw them exchange glances. Emily and a savage, not even a full-blood. A mongrel who had potent seed and he had not. There was no deception possible in skin colour. He could not lie to the Earl, could not say the child was his. The child would have been half wild, he could not have owned it, even controlled it. What he did was right.