Sound (10 page)

Dancer took Weed out shooting. She walked ahead with the gun slung over her bare shoulder and Weed picked through the scrub that was so much taller and different to her own country. The small red-berried bushes looked familiar but she knew not to eat them. Dancer reefed at some reeds and examined the tubers. Weed nodded at her. Dancer broke away the roots from the foliage and stuffed them into her bag.

The sealing crew were one day's sail from King George Sound, Jimmy told them, when he put into a tiny cove at the end of a long, wild beach. The cove was harboured by a granite outcrop. Beyond the sweep of loose sand blown along the bay by the sou'-westerly, an estuary lay quiet and black among the paperbarks. While Everett and Neddy filled the water barrel from the spring, Billhook carried the net over his shoulder, corks bouncing against his bare back, and swam it out into the centre of the inlet, hoping for bream. Swans honked and took off in a flurry of black water and feathers, all red beaks and flashes of white under wing.

Dancer and Weed crossed the dunes, Dancer snatching at the reeds in the hollows as they passed. They walked over the brilliant white sand towards the peppermint forest. They arrived inside a bubble of green; a cool, scented grove, the fallen leaves making a soft, damp floor in the hollows and sprinkled with the purple flowers of a twining pea-like plant.

One of the groves smelt of roo and Dancer stopped to examine some scat. She had only shot – too small to bring down
a boomer. She shrugged and looked up the hill to where the big gum trees grew. If it were anything like her home, that hill would be where the sea eagles built their eyrie, with an eye to the ocean and the inlet alike.

Dancer had shaved her head the previous night, cropping her woolly locks close to a berry fuzz but leaving a ring of hair that bounced like possum fur. Her black scalp shone through the bristles. She'd removed her wallaby frock on board and thrown it over her sleeping skins. Now her only adornments were the strings of tiny Vandiemonian shells at her throat, her belt of several layers of hair string, a powder flask, a pouch of heavy shot, a gun and her bag.

Cockatoos worked red gums in black, shrieking mobs. Dancer and Weed stopped on the edge of the forest to watch them as they ripped away grubs from shaggy bark, or clawed at the gum nuts and pulled the seeds from their casing. Dancer whispered that she had not seen so many birds like these before, and Weed nodded.

Dancer poured some shot down the barrel of the gun, tamped in a wad and primed the frizzon, closed it down. One shot, she had, before they took off. She raised the gun and sighted the densest mob of birds. The shot boomed through the trees. They saw the leaves splash with sunlight, sprayed with pellets. The birds rose in panicky clusters, shrieking into the sky. Weed cried out and Dancer stroked her head, grinning.

Three, four cockatoos flapped in the reedy undergrowth beneath the trees, their heads in the dirt; a crimson flash of striped tail feathers. Weed climbed a tree to retrieve the fifth bird. Dancer walked about the reeds, picking up the flapping birds and snapping their necks. She fumbled in her bag for her knife and cut down some vines and tied them around the birds' feet, slinging them together in one bunch.

They walked back through the still peppermint forest and over the dunes where wind whorled middens and skeletons of ancient and yesterday's feasts into busy little pockets. The birds' wings swished against Weed's side. The roar of the sea and the wind hit them at the last dune. They stopped at the spring to drink, the hard sand around the seeping water busy with the men's footprints. Weed looked at Dancer's bag. She gestured that she wanted to look inside.

Dancer smoothed the white sand to a blanket or the sheet of a sail. She put her bag down. Made from the hide of a whole kangaroo, its shoulder strap was the animal's hind legs, the body was the body of the kangaroo and the flap that covered the opening was the kangaroo's neck. Dancer had sewed the sides with the sinew from the same kangaroo's tail. It made excellent sewing, she explained to Weed in a creole of Pallawah and English, strong and easy to split into plenty of ply. Weed nodded seriously and fingered Dancer's work. Then, item by item, Dancer laid the contents of her kangaroo bag on the sand blanket.

A num's flint, a white man's flint, for lighting fires and guns. Several gnarled lumps of reed roots. Two needles made from the leg bones of tammar, flattened at one end and sharpened at the other. Dried sinews of roo tail, rolled into a neat hoop and tied off so they wouldn't unravel. Lumps of resin – tree blood. Dancer patted her stomach and rolled her eyes, showing Weed that she should eat the resin when she had a crook belly. A stone the size of a cockle shell. It was hard and pocked and lay heavy in Weed's palm. Dancer pointed to the sky. “Star,” she said. Two knives. A metal knife whose blade felt like the star stone, and the knife that Dancer made herself from very hard wood, with a kangaroo's tusk embedded in gum. The tusk was filed sharp and she used it for scraping skins. She told Weed that it was a better knife than the white man's steel for scraping skins but
not as good for other tasks. Two digging sticks she showed her; sharpened at one end and worn smooth and oiled by Dancer's labouring hands at the other.

Finally she brought out a possum pouch and from the furry pocket she removed three back bones; too small for a kangaroo. Dancer put the vertebrae on the possum pouch with her slender fingers, so they didn't touch the sand. Beside it, she lay her tooth, pointing to the dark gap in her mouth. Then she lay smaller bones into the soft fur, tiny vertebrae, blackened by fire. Even the child Weed could hear Dancer's heavy silence and she knew not to reach out and touch the relics.

Then Dancer began talking in her language. Knowing the child may not understand all her words, she stroked the white sand into swatches and marked it with her knuckles or finger tips as she talked. She told the little girl the story of how she came to the islands to live with the white men.

She told of the day she was stolen. When she was not really a grown woman and the worst thing she had in her life was hating her sister for her lucky betrothal to a man that Dancer loved. Her jealousy made her hateful, made her behave in a cold way to her favourite sister.

So they sat apart in the sand this day, bare bottoms chafed by middens of shell and crunchy dried kelp. They gathered the tiny shells: pointed cones and blue with the skin of the sea. Where the little mariner shells washed into the high tide eddies, beyond the black rocks where the inlet flushed out to sea; that was a good place to sit and gather and gossip and work, yes.

Babies scattered the high tide harvest with their little fists. Some of the other women chanted, sang and laughed. They picked at the shells, finding the perfect one that shone in the sun and threaded them onto stiff, dried strands of kangaroo tail sinew.

Bommies surged over submerged rocks just offshore, making white hills in the bay, and the wind was hard that day. Sheets of sand blew along the beach and stung Dancer's skin. Babies screwed the sand into their eyes and their mothers showed them how to make tears and wash them away.

Dancer's sister threaded the shells onto sinew and tried to draw Dancer's attention but the cool silence from Dancer held her away. So she kept threading, breaking tiny holes in the outer lip of the shells with a fish spine, then poking through the thread. The little shells sat at angles to each other in a neat rhythm, in and out, in and out, like the spine of a snake. The shells caught the sky and reflected the silvers and greens, an undersea journey in something the size of Dancer's little fingernail. The older women were swathed in them. Dancer and her sister had two strands each. Now Dancer wrapped another strand around her neck and tried to tie off the sinew. She asked one of the women to help her, and her sister, who wasn't asked, looked on.

After the necklaces were wound around so many necks and tied off tight, they rose and dusted the shell fragments and sand from their bodies, leaving patterned marks in their skin. Clatters of tiny sea creatures and their jetsam fell to the sand. The older women slung babies over their shoulders and inserted their chubby limbs into furry pouches. Dancer and her sister carried the bags full of shellfish. Their feet plunged into the deep, course sand. Older children struggled behind them, their hair blown into urchin spikes.

The two sisters climbed the rocks first at the headland and picked up the salt lying crystallised in small bowls of stone. Dancer's body felt scorched and fragile against the stone, after the soft sand. Her monthly bleed made her flesh tender to the hardness of the granite. They filled empty barnacles with sweet flakes of salt, put them in their bags.

The women caught up with the sisters. As they rounded the last boulder before the next beach, Dancer's sister laid her hand upon the stone, as though she were patting a beast. Dancer looked at her hand, her pink, pearly fingernails and gentle knuckle wrinkles against the orange flare of lichen. She saw the curve of her sister's breast outlined by the wild sea and her round little stomach. The nasty creature within Dancer surged again, trying to fight its way out.

Dancer saw the boat and her sister stood, stiffened and alert, but very still.

A face rubbed out Dancer's view with her huge wild eyes. Another woman cried, “Ghosts! Num!” and the little children and women were all backsides and bobbing hair as they bolted back over the rocks towards the necklace beach.

A boat. Sand, just as it was everyday but marked now by a huge creature that had dragged itself from the sea. As big as a whale but made by men. A boat. Men's footprints crawled straight from the boat to the freshwater crack in the dune. It was not good that the sisters couldn't see the men.

Dancer knew what the red men looked like. She saw some when she was younger. Their noses came first, sniffing and pointed. They looked like strange animals and their eyes had nastied when they saw Dancer's aunties. Some women went missing after that and when they returned they wouldn't speak of what had happened to them. They never spoke of what happened, but as Dancer began her bleed, one of them quietly showed her how to fill her vagina with sand to protect herself if the Ghosts ever stole her.

Dancer stayed, thinking about all this, the men, where they were. Her sister stayed because Dancer stayed. They pressed themselves into the warm wall of stone, backs against the land, looked out to see and tried not to be seen.

Dancer smelt him first. He smelled like tree fruit when the little flies came around. He rounded the corner, head down like a sniffing dog and stopped short when he saw the girls.

“Whoa!” spurted from his bristled mouth.

He reached for a strand of Dancer's sister's shells and she shrank away. He reached out again and she turned her head. Dancer could hear them all breathing above the ocean's roar. She saw that he was curious and shocked, like she'd found him squatting over a hole in the ground, that she was the one to surprise him. Hair straggled out from beneath his woollen hat and despite the heat, he wore a jerkin of seal fur and long trousers. His nose was red and deeply pocked. He breathed sourly over her. Dirt cracked in his fingers. He bared mossy teeth at her and reached for her neck.

Then Dancer's sister screamed and jumped sideways away from the stone. Her scream brought the answering calls of the women but they sounded far away now, beyond the dunes of the necklace beach. The scream brought more men from around the stone. They did not look at the sisters' faces but straight to their breasts and thighs. Some of them laughed. One man clawed at her sister's neck and pinned her to the stone. Another grabbed Dancer's arm. The burn of his skin on her flesh reminded her of her angry father when she'd run away from her new husband the first time. He'd grabbed her like that too.

She pulled against the man's grip. She knew that her indecision, her stupid moment of stillness, could cost them both their lives. There were stories of these men raping women and cutting open their bellies, spilling their insides over the sides of the boats.

The sea surged into the crevice below. Her sister gurgled and tried to breathe against the man's hand. There were six of them now. Dancer knew the men would take them. She'd wished illness and unhappiness on her own sister for her lucky betrothal to the
beautiful man and now their throats were fingered by a cloud of ugly Ghosts. They were still Ghosts, even though their skins were red, underneath they were white like Ghosts. They were bloodless. All windburn and sun and underneath there was no blood.

The shells dug into the back of her neck and then clattered onto the rock. The man stood with his gang around him, her necklace in one fist. He lurched forward and took her body and lifted her onto his shoulder. She saw sky, then laughing faces, then the rock, then his back. It was the first time she ever felt her nakedness. Her head hung down. He wrapped his arms about her knees. When she hit back with her fists, another man grabbed them and tied them together with her broken necklace.

She could smell the rancid oil on the back of his shirt. Blood rushed to her face. He was carrying her across the rocks, her body flopping uselessly with every step. Someone laughed and slapped her bare skin, a stinging sound sharp in the air. They were on the beach now. Coarse grains of sand travelled through her vision. Shells. Dark, leathery coils of kelp.

A hard thump against the boat. Like stone, this wood. Dancer hurt already. Her sister landed beside her, her arms tied, her skin feeling cold despite the sun. They squirmed together in the bottom of the boat as men tied their legs together, their flesh pricked all over with salt and pain and fear.

The man who took her that day, his name was Johnny. The man who took Dancer's sister was called Cooper. They lived on different islands and Dancer never saw her sister again. After Cooper killed her sister with the gun, Johnny gave Dancer to Cooper and she had to go and live with him.