Swallow the Air (8 page)

The coins rolled under my slipping fingertips like greasy piano keys. It was three bucks sixty for hot chips at road stops so I had to break the twenty, which left me with more shrapnel sweating in the thrashing heat of day. Long, straight, flat, sea of black, its end a blur of hazy refuge. Caressing the road from either side, open unchanging grassland of scattered trees like bunyas. The few branches and leaves hovered over cattle, casting broken shadows that let in most of the light shine. The land a basin of scorched anguish.

A summer storm cloud swerved onto the gravel shoulder; grey dust swept across the paddock of saline orange orchids and blankets of white mini daisies. A man made up of forearms, winched himself out from the swung-open door of the ute.

‘I'm heading to Wyalong, need a lift, kid?'

‘Lake Cowal – goin that way?'

‘Yeah, we'll get there.' He threw his stubble chin toward the passenger side. ‘Get in.'

We drove the melting road for hours. Gary told me about his wife being pregnant and how happy they were, how they'd both grew up in Wyalong and left years ago only to return. Now they have a house out here and a butchery in West Wyalong that his family have run for so long that he can't remember, and how he once hitched and he knew how hard it was and he's also happy to help people out, also it makes the drive go faster, having someone to talk to and all.

‘Hey, you like music?' He didn't need an answer and pushed the tape in with his fat thumb.

‘Van Morrison, mate, a bloody legend.' He puffed on his belief. ‘You know it?'

Pain fled from the box I stored it in. ‘Brown Eyed Girl' would be my crucifix, my funeral song. Memories of my mum cruising the coast road, her thin dark forearms resting against the buslike steering wheel, the afternoon light flashing between trees against the deep bone dents of her eye sockets. Me, riding the front seat and staring
out at the wide blue ocean, shy and hoping to catch a glimpse of a whale. The humpbacks would travel up the coast to give birth and then in the summer, with their new calves, would slowly shift back down in the warmer Pacific, playing and feeding along the deep stretch from Sydney to Woonona. Mum's stories were sad, she could only whisper their importance, instead she'd show you them, take you there. She'd show you Byamee, she'd show you his work, how it was made. Whale swimming the cool currents, cursing jellyfish, still angry about losing his canoe and being tricked by the other animals. The whale had held his pain, like Mum had. And like I have.

My mum's half-decent sing-along voice bellowing through the Kombi,
you're my brown-eyed girl ... and we used to sing.
The words were always sung like a testament to the memory, song lines to ease her absence, knowing the impermanence of our company, saying
I'm still here.

‘Yeah, I like Van Morrison, always heard it as a kid, that and Archie...'

His unknowing eyes smiled at me.

He lit his stories with the red brevity of match-heads. The one about his old mum who'd broken
her hip a couple of years ago, never ageing as gracefully as they'd wished. The docs gave her pethidine for the pain. Pethidine to morphine, morphine to more pain, gracing her instead with addiction.

I listened as he took me to her bedside, one last tear dribbling like ripples in slow rapids over sun-burnt pastoral lines. Happy lines, sometimes sad.

He fumbled along the dash, finally spitting flint onto cigarette to mask his bloodshot eyes. He shook the pack toward me like offering black jellybeans. Our conversation gently evaporated with the smoke rings like halos over hurt. The whale held his pain, like Gary had.

‘They call this place
Bland Shire –
can't half guess why.' Gary choked on his lung and laughter.

Through the sun-etched windshield, brown heritage buildings with bodgie white stone trimmings stood like dead boab trees. Women in high-waisted stonewash jeans and tucked-in blouses gathered outside the school gates, digging their hands in tight pockets, laughing and flipping their big floppy fringes about.

‘People never leave places like this, they stay the same – same neighbours, same friends, same
shops, same small-town bullshit. Should change once the mine goes through, few new faces wouldn't hurt ... Lake Cowal's about twelve k's.' He spun the wheel and we kept on down the highway, watching moths meet their deathbeds against the glass. ‘Give ya me number, can stay with me and me missus, we'd be happy to have ya. She cooks a bloody good roast that woman!'

The lacquer of pink sweat over his grin. He had the kindest smile I'd ever seen. I thought he could easily knock me out with his huge arms, but I knew he wouldn't.

‘Yeah, thanks, see how I go, might want to stay waterfront for a while...'

Gary interrupted my daydreams of Windradyne, pointing at the sky of dark cool water shifting across a lake, brolgas skimming along its surface, sunset, sunrise reflecting.

‘You know about the mining compound, ha?'

‘Nah, what?'

He nodded toward the entrance. ‘You'll see.'

We pulled up in front of the barbed fence that wrapped itself around the plane of grass and small bush. Gary shone headlights on high beam against the big glossy sign.

‘They're gunna do it, can't stop em. About three thousand hectares they're gunna dig. Gold you see, money makes the world go round, kiddo. Big guns like these guys, little guys like us, can't budge em, and not even the black fellas out there at the blockade can stop em, saying it's a sacred site and all...'

‘Where's all the water?'

‘Water!' He grunted an absurd laugh. ‘Last time that
lake
had water I would have been not much older than you. There must be water somewhere under there though; otherwise they wouldn't dig, hey?'

‘Yeah, thanks for the lift, Gary.'

‘No worries, kiddo, you give us a phone call remember. Only a phone call away, we'll come pick ya up, ok.'

He dropped the scrunched up piece of paper and five dollars in my hand. We exchanged silent goodbyes as he slammed the gearstick into reverse and left.

The afternoon sun smothered its rays among the saltbush, honey grass danced in the skylight. A slaughter of crows and resident bats swept the expanse of sky. The crows surveyed decay. Even in the fighting city air they still bred. The bats would soon die; the crows began to nest.

Mum's stories would always come back to this place, to the lake, where all Wiradjuri would stop to drink. Footprints of your ancestors, she'd say, one day I'll take you there.

I walked around the dusty imaginary rim, dragging my fingers through the wire net. A fire was being smoked from the western side like smoke rings, halos over hurt. A large plastic banner wrapped over the path of my hand. I stepped back and watched twilight devour its paint.

Forty thousand years is a long time, forty thousand years still on my mind...

The church gave her the name Isabelle. Her mother gave her the name Galing, which means water dreaming. She is an elder, and that means she has a responsibility to protect what belongs to her people. To teach. She's been living at the place where they make all the white laws for the country, the Parliament House. She said all those years ago they declared an embassy, a part of government that was dedicated to her people. She lives between the embassy and this blockade at the lake where we met. Her mother's land and my mother's land.

The mining company want to leach cyanide underneath the saltbush land. Issy says that they make a blockade and stay there for as long as it takes for them company shareholders to back out, for company to leave, take their fences, their electricity, take all their machines and
generators and leave. Take themselves and don't come back.

Issy says they don't understand that just because you can't see something, don't mean it's not there. She says that under the earth, the land we stand on, under all this there is water. She's says that our people are born from quartz crystal, hard water. We are powerful people, strong people. Water people, people of the rivers and the lakes.

They look at the land and say there is nothing here.

wiray
– no

dhuray
– having

We laugh at that, it is our little joke.

Because we've got plenty, she says, smiling.

Issy smooths her wiry hair with an open palm, gently. Hair the colour of ash, and under the gaze of flames she seems alight. Her face is a pool of small pulses, bumps and folds, lines taking us which ways. Her eyes are small slivers and they shine like fish scales. They are lucid and kind, but almost feverish as she speaks.

Issy says that the lake works like a heart, pumping its lifeblood from under the skin. She says there are many hearts, and with them,
many valves and veins. This, she adds, as smoke dances across her shadowy lips, is all life.
murun.
Everything is part of the heart, everything is water, and when we listen closely we can hear the shifting beneath us, the gathering above us, and within us a churning.

She says that they want to dig up the hearts, free out the veins, dam up the values so they can live. Hungrily. With gold and steel towers. She says they are building high to get closer to father sky, closer to heaven. It doesn't work, she grins, and they will always fall. The jewels will go back to the mother eventually.

She takes a saltbush branch from the coals and draws a circle in the dust.

Issy says that everything is sacred, inside the circle and outside the circle; she says that we should look after both areas the same. They are magic, she adds.

She takes the branch again and outlines the circle twice, each circle a little bigger than the other, and then she draws smaller circles from the first circle inwards. She makes another circle the same, next to it and joins the two with a short line. She says that we need to come back. Listen.

What are the other lines, I ask?

She smooths her hair again, pursing her mouth knowingly, and watches the light undo between us.

You want to find the Gibsons, you say? Then you will follow the Lachlan, tomorrow, follow Bila snake to Euabalong.

She gets up to leave.

What about this, I ask. Pointing at the snaking canvas.

That's just dust isn't it.

What are the lines?

Just dust too isn't it.

We're sitting around the pit in the backyard, the fire burning our shins and toes. Baking taut red skin. Mum pulls in from the beach on the bike, her boney fingers steering up the side of the house and into the orange backlight. Her crazy hair entangled in the branch's twig arms. As she leans the bike down she trips a little over her sandshoes and gathers the kindling again under her elbow. I notice for maybe the first time that she is so old, my mother, but she's still so young. A plastic bag stretches with a West Coast Cooler at the side of her thigh.

I loved fire nights. Most nights. We had a permanent fire pit, Billy and me dug out sandstone rocks and put them around the edge for sitting. Mum liked sitting on them, hanging her upper body over her knees, pulling out clumps of grass and melting them against the hot coals. When
she'd be telling us stories she'd carve out little lizards and lotus flowers and fish shapes in the rock stools. They were so pretty. I liked sitting on the grass, getting as close as I could to the flame. Billy would crouch at the fire, one leg bent under his bum and the other tucked in, his chin resting on his knee. He'd break the kindling with his hands, or if the branch was too thick he'd flop up and slam his shoe into its diagonal. His hair flinging as he snapped it into halves.

He'd show us how to feed the fire, making sure it never went out. My brother was so good with the fire, a delicate drop or nudge of each stick. He'd blow and talk to the coals, mumble at them, building a high tepee. Fussing over it, prodding and poking and caressing its belly. He'd sit back on his ankles and bend his elbows onto a sandstone rock, laying his body out across the side of the fire. Sometimes Mum would have a West Coast Cooler, I'd watch the white fizzing sneeze hiss and disappear in the warm air. Take a sip, ahhhhhh. Better.

The flames would lap at Billy dangling his fingertips over the fire. Mum warning. The night always stealing us, into twirling smoke and
constellations. Waiting for Mum to forget that it's a school night and be able to rave on about the days under the sun. We'd try to distract her all night, so she'd forget, ask her to tell us more stories, on and on until she'd start to doze off in the warm womb of the fire.

They were the best times, the three of us at the fire, laughing and talking over the top of the things we never talked about. Like that sad in her eyes or Billy's or mine. It was kind of funny, making everything seem more important than our hearts. But I suppose it
was
then. We were only kids anyway, nothing had affected us yet. It seemed like the only time Billy would talk, lots anyway.

I remember him being so excited about the canoe that he'd found in someone's footpath garbage collection once. He told us about dragging it across the lawns and having to lift the thing on his back when he came to a crossing. Him being so careful not to shatter the fibreglass shell. Billy talked about sanding it down and making a trailer for it out of our old bike wheels, so he could tow it to the beach and I remember him telling Mum about how he could go canoeing in the ocean
and catch snapper for dinner. He talked all that night about the canoe, and every night for weeks about how the trailer was coming along, and then eventually about his trips off the shore, how scary it was, but fun. All the awesome creatures he met below.

I remember he came back one afternoon, just past twilight, when the waves start to grey and blur. Mum had just got the firewood together when Billy cruised through the side gates, big grin on his face and a big fish in his fist, holding it by the tail. Mum was so proud, I remember, patting Billy on the back and shy laughing.

We cooked the snapper on the fire that night, fried on a skillet. It was the best night, just before Mum left us. Billy telling us about the brush with the big fish, how he saw humpbacks heading up the coast, sending the fish toward the canoe, about netting it up real easy. About the ocean, about the gifts, how happy he was. How happy he was. And I knew it too, he was. We were.