Silences Long Gone Read online

  There are five of them. There’s Margot Dwyer, who’s a recurring kaleidoscope of R.M. Williams’ brightest dyes. She has a red cowgirl scarf holding back her hair. She says hi to me and rolls her eyes at me about our previous meeting’s drunkenness. She introduces Richard Finnes, the National Social Resources Manager of BBK, she says. He’s wearing a fine wool Italian suit which is either a kamikaze-brave grab at style or just a show of confidence that he’s high enough up in a big enough company never to have to live more than a minute of his life out of conditioned air. He takes my mother’s hand and holds it so my mother’s facing him and says, ‘Mrs Furphy,’ and looks in her eye for something weak or something untrue. But doesn’t find it apparently, and so tells her, ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  Then there’s the three Kunimara. Three representatives of the aboriginal community. When I was a boy aboriginals were only allowed in town on Saturday mornings. In those days I doubt any one of them had ever entered any of the little cubes of conditioned air we lived in and carried with us wherever we went. Now … here they are. It seems somehow shocking to me, like it must seem somehow shocking to her.

  Daphne Shackleton has just flown down from Broome to represent the Western Lands Council at this meeting. She’s about fifty and chipmunk-cheeked out soft and round like her metabolism was built for drought and starvation and heat and severe climatic cycle but now gets bureaucracy. She’s wearing a bright red dress. She introduces herself and then introduces Pearl Guriwerd and then introduces Barry Campbell of the Kunimara people, she tells us.

  Pearl Guriwerd is dressed in a white shirt and an old tweed skirt. She says soft hellos and smiles apologetic smiles at us that burst and fade like a pulse.

  Barry Campbell is untidy in scuffed shoes and dirty jeans and a green cardigan and long tangled hair and beard streaked with white. He carries himself over-important, chin high, shoulders back, little beer belly pushed forward. His whole shape is moulded by a hundred Black cunts low-breathed at him by strangers and the fight that followed his then question of What sort of black did you call me? What sort of cunt? All his pride is right up front now, so people know he’s got it and they don’t fuck with him and he doesn’t have to go through the hassle of fighting them to prove he’s got it.

  He stays standing when everyone else sits. Looks straight at my mother with almost a sneer of disappointment. ‘Thing with you white people is, the most harmless lookin’ of yous always causes the biggest shitfights,’ he says.

  ‘Now, shut up now, Bay,’ Pearl Guriwerd tells him. She slaps at his jeans from where she sits. Daphne Shackleton slits her eyes at him.

  ‘Bullshit shut up. I’m an old shit-stirring abo radical and she might as well know that right off,’ he says.

  ‘You a guest,’ says Pearl Guriwerd.

  ‘I’m not a guest. You got the wrong guest. She the guest. ’Less she’s a Kunimara I never heard of.’

  ‘No, ‘I’m not any unheard of Kunimara,’ says my mother. ‘I’m one of God’s children, just like you. Would anyone like a cup of tea or coffee and some fruitcake?’

  ‘I’m no God’s child. No fruitcake for me,’ Barry Campbell tells her. The others all nod and yes-please for coffee and cake so my mother goes out to the kitchen to get it ready and the two black women start in on Barry Campbell about getting things off on the right foot and holding back on the language and being non-bloody-provocative and not denying he’s a God’s child immediately a Christian says he is one which he knows is just a red rag to a bull Christian like this woman here is. He tells them to get fucked right there and Richard Finnes winces and says Hang on, hang on, people, didn’t we agree I’d state your case first up. Well, let me have my say, he says, and I think we can get things rolling along. He makes rolling motions with his hands over a wide smile.

  My mother comes back with a tray with what’s left of her wedding Wedgwood on it to hold the coffee and cake. The Wedgwood is white with a navy and gold band around the top. The pattern is called Marquis and Dad used to say of it that even if it was too dainty to eat off at least it was a lesson in nobility and a lesson in spelling.

  I help her serve out. She slices the fruitcake thin. It’s still frozen in the centre and when the knife strikes frozen glace cherries they push on down in front of the blade taking gouges from the cake and breaking it up. It’s a mess and she apologises for it.

  ‘That’s all right,’ says Daphne Shackleton. I never see a homemade fruitcake look any good and I never taste one taste bad.’

  ‘Mine used to look good,’ my mother tells her. ‘When it was served up fresh and not frozen. But all my food’s frozen now I’m here alone.’

  Richard Finnes gets to his feet with coffee in one hand and frozen cake in the other. ‘Mrs Furphy,’ he nods at her. ‘Jack,’ he nods at me. ‘We’re not here today to put the company’s point of view.’ He points to himself with the cake and shakes his smiling head. ‘Which I know you already know. Or to go over our moral or our legal ground – which is high, by the way–I think you’ve seen enough legal correspondence to know that, and I think we know what use you have for legal correspondence,’ he laughs. ‘We’ve come here today,’ he waves his hand at all the people who have come, ‘to try and help you understand the cultural dilemma you’re causing for the Kunimara people,’ he waves his cake at those who are Kunimara and are having the cultural dilemma. ‘Who are great friends of ours and have certainly had dilemma enough over recent years – cultural and otherwise.’ He takes a chew of frozen cake.

  ‘You see, for the Kunimara people there are certain sacred and Dreamtime sites hereabouts that you’re … well … despoiling by your presence.’ He looks sorry and pouts at my mother for pronouncing her a despoiler.

  In the middle of his pout there is a knock at the door and someone comes old-fashioned yoohooing down the hall and into the living room. Yoohoo. Yoohoo. Yoohoo. A fat man appears.

  It’s my mother’s journalist-champion Charles Wadlow. He apologises for being late and says he’s got engine trouble. Always got engine trouble, he says. He’s immense in a too-small Hawaiian shirt. Orange and green scenes of surf and tropical foliage are taut across him. He’s bald and from right up on the shine of his head to his bulging, sandal-strangled feet he’s wet like only the truly massive get wet by heat.

  ‘Engines hate me,’ he says. He introduces himself to everyone as a friend of Belle’s, bowing at the women. He turns to my mother. ‘Is this all they sent, Belle? They don’t look any match for a woman with your cardiac problems to me.’ He laughs and points at Richard Finnes and says, ‘You were saying something. Don’t let me interrupt. And don’t bother with a recap. I’ll catch on.’ He pulls up a seat and pours himself a coffee and takes a handful of cake rubble.

  ‘I was just going to hand over to Pearl here to state her case.’ Richard Finnes points his cake at Pearl. ‘The case of the Kunimara people. So …Pearl.’ He sweeps his cake at her.

  Pearl stands up and unrolls a square of canvas she’s been holding. Lies it on the coffee table right over the uneaten cake and Marquis Wedgwood and holds its ends so it doesn’t roll itself up again.

  ‘Here, let me help,’ says Charles Wadlow, and he puts a Marquis cup on three corners and a saucer on the fourth until it’s nearly flat, only humped up by a piece of frozen fruitcake underneath it.

  ‘I want to show you this here map,’ says Pearl. The canvas is about a metre square, dotted with reds and yellows in a grid of circles linked by black lines. There are no geographic features.

  ‘This is a map?’ asks Charles Wadlow.

  ‘Yeah. A map,’ Pearl nods. ‘A Dreamtime map.’

  ‘Do you need this hill here?’ He waves his hand over the hump in the canvas made by the plate of cake beneath it.

  ‘No,’ says Pearl.

  ‘Good,’ he says. He slides his hand under the canvas and takes out the cake and begins to eat it.

  Pearl waits for a while, watching him. Then she turns back to the map. ‘This is a map of t
he whole north-west country. This how my people see this country. See these circles,’ she points at one, ‘they stories. The lines connecting them show where one story start and end and another one start. Now this story here,’ she touches one near the centre of the map, ‘this circle is where we are now. This place here. It’s a whole story to us that explain this land to us. Explain every rock, explain every river, explain every waterhole, explain every hill...’cept the fruitcake hill,’ she turns and smiles triangles of broken teeth at Charles Wadlow and he smiles back raisins and glace cherries and yellow dough and tells her the fruitcake hill needs no explanation it just needs a sip of something to wash it down and he takes a drink of coffee.

  She goes on. ‘The stories on this map tells us about the rivers and waterholes and rocks and how the rainbow serpent and the Wandjinas give birth to ’em and to us as well. These stories all too secret to tell you, but it tell us Kunimara how we part of the land here. And this story don’t have any white fellas in it. And if the country have white fellas in it here it make the story a lie. Make our Dreaming a lie.’

  She stops talking and looks almost apologetically at my mother, goes so far as to pout and flicker her eyes. My mother draws up a deep breath of Marlboro smoke. ‘What about last year? And the year before that? When it had thousands of white fellas in it?’ she asks.

  Barry Campbell pushes himself off the wall he’s been leaning on and bends over at her. ‘Them thousands of white fellas add up to a multinational, ‘n’ you can’t cut multinationals out of your Dreamtime story easy as you can cut old women out. Old women you can cut out about seven different ways.’ He leans back on the wall and takes a packet of Drum from his pocket and pinches some tobacco out and stretches it long in his pale palm and rolls it tight then goes for his papers and starts to swear under his breath and search under the remaining tobacco in his pouch as he discovers he’s out. He makes a dignified show of repocketing the pouch like his mind has changed on the charms of tobacco.

  My mother throws him her Marlboros and they bounce off his belly and onto the floor at his feet as he flinches and looks at her, then unlocks his knees for a slide down the wall to pick them up.

  I beat him to them. I pick them up and wave them at him and put them in my top pocket and tell him, ‘Bullshit. Shit-stirring abo radicals should be strong-principled enough not to smoke the tailor-mades of shit-stirred conservative whitefellas.’ And tell him, ‘You can get fucked if you think you’re going to smoke her cigarettes.’

  My mother tells me her sharpest, ‘Jack.’

  He pushes off the wall with his skinny arse as if to take a step, but he hangs there and stares instead as the women start in on him again and he gets his legs slapped through his jeans again. And it occurs to me that while he grew up in a third-world settlement never allowed in out of the desert to town except on Saturday mornings, which was a pretty rough place to grow up, I’d grown up in a mining town, only allowed out once a year on school holidays, and that was a pretty rough place to grow up as well, so between us we could probably put up a fairly dirty ruckus if the fighting moment were to catch.

  But it passes and doesn’t catch like most of them pass and don’t catch and we drop down the other side of the probability curve to where he’s just going to look tough at me in a promise that the time might come, smartarse, and I’m just going to look back at him and pat the smokes in my pocket. My mother raises her eyebrows.

  Then Charles Wadlow is on his feet which is a big enough move of man and tropical foliage to take everyone’s attention. ‘Steady, boys, steady,’ he tells us. ‘You’re amongst jerrybuilt furniture and old ladies here. Steady.’ He waves his hands around and says, ‘Let’s get back to what we came here for.’ And he points at Barry Campbell and points at Pearl Guriwerd and points at Daphne Shackleton and says, ‘Correct me if I’m wrong. But the way I read it you people were always nomadic. Only ever passed through here once in a blue moon.’ He stops and stares and gives them time to correct him if he’s wrong. They don’t say anything. ‘Why wouldn’t you do that now? Wander away from here and summer in another place. Ignore this fibro shack and ignore this old woman. Neither of which, I’m sure you’ll agree, have the look of permanence about them. Then roll back in here in a year or so and see how things are with Belle then. My friend Belle here,’ he waves his hand at my mother, ‘and I know she won’t mind me saying this,’ he smiles at her, ‘doesn’t have a lot of time left to her. Just wants what time she’s got to be here.’

  He looks around at them, taking a pinch of jowl-hung chin and hanging his bottom lip. ‘What I’m asking is why don’t you let her die here? Where she wants to be? It’s not likely to take too long.’

  They blink at him and shift their weight cheek-to-cheek and foot-to-foot with the mention of her dying. He feels the weight-shifting silence as a point well made by him and he pushes it. ‘Just be nomadic again for a while. Wander away for a while.’ He waves his hand out toward the window in a wander away. Then he uses the same hand to point at me. ‘Are you placing any claim on the land here, Jack?’

  I tell him no, don’t be stupid. He ups and outs his palms at us, ‘See there’s no hereditary entitlement claimed here,’ he says. ‘There’s only a woman who says it’s a sacred place to her … her home. And she doesn’t want to leave it.’ He waggles a finger. ‘Now I know what you’re afraid you’ve got here is a precedent. But you haven’t even got that if all of us shut up about it until it blows over … until she blows over,’ he points at my mother who nods and crosses herself and says Amen.

  Richard Finnes comes up off the couch with a stupefying breadth of professional smile. ‘Thing is, Mister Wadlow, people don’t shut up about things,’ he smiles. ‘So we would have a precedent. But,’ he points at the fat man, ‘we won’t have a precedent, because Ms Furphy isn’t staying.’ He goes right on wide-smiling as he explains the Kunimara people could remove her from their land tomorrow in a court of law if they wanted to go that way. They have not only the moral but the legal right so to do, he says. No question.

  Charles Wadlow wide-smiles back at him and says, ‘The courtroom scenario’ll never happen. For that to happen you’d first have to hand the land back to them with her in occupation,’ he says. ‘And news you were handing back land that was supposed to be white-fella-barren with old, pig-headed white women in residence would spread through the indigenous population so fast it’d make your head not only spin but ache as well and probably even stop it smiling for a while. Vast areas of land would close off to you. Leases you were negotiating would either break down entirely at the table or quadruple in price.’ He holds up four fingers. ‘No, you’re not going to hand the land back to these people with Belle on it and let them fight any legal battles. Because then you would have yourself a precedent. So … let’s not even talk about what the Kunimara people could do in court because you’re not going to let them go to court. You’re going to have to go to court yourself if you want any court resolution. But you don’t want to go to court against an ailing and bereft old woman in view of how the media … me,’ he points at himself, ‘will misrepresent and sentimentalise that legal battle.’

  ‘What’s your stake in this?’ asks Richard Finnes. His smile is gone.

  ‘Her husband’s scattered on the roses outside,’ says Charles Wadlow. ‘And her daughter.’ He shrugs.

  ‘Well that’s as may be. But they shouldn’t be,’ says Richard Finnes. ‘It’s a clear breach of the articles of tenancy that they are. From the moment its first sod was turned this town had a life-span dictated by the supply of iron ore. That’s why it never had a cemetery. It wasn’t a town for family roots to go down into. Never was. And if ashes et cetera have gone down into the soil here then they shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Still, there they are. Dug in deep she tells me,’ says Charles Wadlow. ‘Her husband. Her daughter, for goodness sake.’

  Daphne Shackleton leans forward at me and asks me where I stand on this. Do I think my mother is right or
wrong to stay?

  ‘I don’t know about right or wrong,’ I tell her. ‘I can’t work out who’s got spiritual ownership here. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for her to live out here alone. So I suppose I’m in your camp.’

  ‘I was born in 1926,’ my mother says. ‘Everywhere’s alone.’ She’s hunkered down deep in her grey vinyl armchair blowing smoke. She throws another packet of Marlboro at Barry Campbell and he catches them this time and opens them and lights up and makes an orgasmic show of sucking the smoke down deep into his person. Looking at me and shaking his head and rolling his eyes in pleasure and thanking my mother.

  Richard Finnes’ smile has resurfaced. ‘Listen, Ms Furphy–’

  ‘Mrs,’ she says.

  ‘Mrs Furphy,’ he says.

  ‘Important point,’ she tells him.

  ‘Certainly,’ he says. ‘Anyway, what I was going to say is … I’ve spoken to leading psychiatric people about you. They all agree your continued mourning is an illness and should be seen as such. They think with the help of friends and professional counsellors you might get well. But you won’t get well out here.’

  My mother stills and calms and looks around at everyone and lets her smoking hand fall to the armrest of her chair. She speaks softly. ‘Mourning? I’m not mourning. I’m remembering. And my remembering is no more than the Faith Jesus insists on.’ She lifts her smoking hand pointing toward the ceiling, toward Jesus. I wince. ‘Why won’t you see that?’ she asks. ‘How is it,’ she asks, ‘they’ve made their Rainbow Serpent so much realer than my Frank? Than my Molly, who died on the road outside?’ She’s picking little rayon balls off her slacks as she speaks, flicking them onto the floor. A rayon lint-ball fired with each question. ‘Did their Rainbow Serpent tell the same old jokes for years and laugh like a fool at them every time? Did arthritis trouble their Rainbow Serpent at night, from tightening three-inch nuts across iron-dusted thread all day? Was their Rainbow Serpent a chronic thumb-sucker for so long we had to fly her to Perth to have braces fitted on her teeth when she finally stopped and the orthodontist cost us our holidays for three years? These things happened.’ She looks at the women. ‘How is it you’ve made your Rainbow Serpent so real when I can’t get anyone to believe in my Frank and my Molly? I’d like to know how it’s done.’