Where There's Smoke (21 page)

Yes, she laughed. And the emus. They're vermin down this way. I remember, from when I was here. You never think, you know. But people would drive up close behind them, like he said, and you can hear their legs knocking the roo bar. They run right over the top of them. You can kill a lot of emus that way.

They came to where the creek was coarse sand, the banks almost like dunes. And like the sand of a city beach after a party, this was covered with footprints, and more.

Wow, lotta roos, and emus.

They studied the prints.

Lizards … Plenty of life about then. Tiny prints of birds. Snake.

Grass and shrubs had drawn circles around themselves where they touched the ground with the wind.

The spring is this way.

They made their way around tussocks of spiky grass, banks of reeds and still pools of water. Sometimes a thin stream could be seen winding from one pool to another, but mostly the pools, like themselves, were isolated, united only by the lay of the land, the otherwise dry creek bed.

And then there was a low wall, less than waist-high, of rocks cemented together to make a small well.

See?

The water was clear, cold. Small bubbles rose to the surface, and a circle regularly rose, swelled in a smooth curve, gently broke. Something beneath the surface, something held within the water's skin, needing release.

Forever brimming and spilling over the wall, water ran down the stone and became a tiny stream pushing through the damp sand. Sometimes it disappeared, but where the gravel track vehicles used to get to the homestead it was calf-deep, and several strides wide.

It persisted, sometimes unseen, running from pool to pool, now whispering:
Baalap nitja ngoordiny nooketiny.

They slept here.

A very fine steam of water pushing grains of soil aside, following the way water had always flowed, keeping a little path for itself.

*

Imagine, the man said, what it was like.

It was all those prints in the sand got them thinking this way. And the bubbling spring, of course. They followed the creek bed, often glancing up toward the unseen homestead.

They never camped too close to water, said Leanne.

Oh?

Well, mozzies and midgies for one thing. And where kangaroo and that would come and you wouldn't want to scare them.

The many different footprints in the sand.

And not to foul the water, I guess.

Except maybe for a special occasion, a ceremony or something.

But of course they were only guessing. Only imagining.

And so they walked back up the slope to the homestead: solid stone warming in the sun, windows overlooking that bubbling spring somewhere at their backs. They packed up. It was a long drive back to the city. Home.

Barely over the crossing, the wheels dripping water from the shallow creek, the man said, Look.

A mallee hen.

Oh. Thought they'd gone.

No. Remember, he said last night.

He slowed the car, stopped. The mallee hen stood before the car, facing them.

Hey! The woman was pointing. Another one.

A second mallee hen stood a few metres away, looking at them. Warren opened the car door, and the mallee hens turned and nonchalantly trotted deeper into the stunted, jam-tree forest.

Might be a nest, a what they call it …? A mound.

Warren was out of the car, following the same small track the mallee hen had taken. He imagined the mallee hens' nest close by, that towering mound in a clearing. Twigs caught at his clothes, and he had to bend, crouch a little, but no matter, the pad was clear enough. He turned to see the way he'd come and already could not make out road or car. It would be easy to get lost in here. Lost in his own country. Shame, if he let that happen. It was very grey among these trees, trees not so much larger than him, grey with the bark and the heavily filtered light, and each tree spiked with bare twigs. The forest floor was sand and leaf litter. Pads, like the one he had followed, ran in different directions but too small for him to follow. As he turned to make his way back to the car, he saw an irregular shape on the forest floor. A tiny clearing, and the shape was … Oh, it was the size of a grave, and seemed to glow, a sort of pale, almost phosphorescent grey-green. The shape of two bodies turned to one another, perhaps. He bent, and plucked at the tiny plants. Rubbery almost, resilient. A lichen of some sort? A piece came easy from the soft earth and he slipped it into the pocket of his shirt, and rushed back along the way he had come, ducking, crouching, surprising himself with the sense of something like panic in his breast.

The woman's face lightened when she saw him emerge from the trees.

We need to be moving, to get home by dark.

That was amazing.

The Wartons said they were coming back, mallee hen.

Yes, but two! And they didn't want to run.

Well, they're nesting I guess. A couple like that.

I thought I might find the nest. Nothing, but. Thought I was gunna get lost, soon as I got off the road.

He started to tell her of the strange flower, but they were interrupted by emus – heads tall, high-stepping, leaning on one another – racing across the road not far in front of them. The birds ran up the soft bank, soil flying behind them, and then were gone, had melted into the yate trees gathered at this corner of the road.

Vermin, they call them here. Something they don't really want.

They drove into a tunnel of trees: tufts of leaves and the bark peeling back from thin, strong limbs.

Emerging, they glimpsed the black strip of bitumen, and the sky opened above them as they arrived at the gate. Two eagles perched there held their gaze. Opened their wings and lifted themselves heavily into the air, insisting.

Leanne and Warren burst into laughter, craned their heads to see the birds spiralling up into the grey sky. In moments they were enveloped in a sound like rushing tyres on bitumen, inside the wind like a car driven at speed.

Kedalak ngaytj K— ngoordiny nooketiny kaat kwetj darapin bardlanginy

Nighttime I (massacre site) lay down, slept, head bone inside travelling.

SANDTRAP

LIAM DAVISON

Ross McLennan wakes to the sound of crying. It is 4.21 in the morning and he waits for his wife to stir. She is curled away from him on the far side of the bed and by the time he accepts that she has not heard and won't be attending to the sound, he has realised that the time has long since passed when their children cried in the night. His daughter no longer lives in the same house. Her room – it is still her room – is filled with things they no longer need. The old computer is in there, and the boxes the new one came in. There is a leather coat, hardly worn. The crying doesn't stop.

His son is eighteen years old now. He works late at the Caltex to fund his studies. It worries Ross McLennan that his son is crying at 4.21 in the morning and he gets out of bed and walks down the hallway to his bedroom door. He leaves the light out so as not to disturb his wife, though why she's not awake already to hear their son crying he can't say. The moon is nearly full and the bathroom, when he passes it, is filled with cold light coming through the frosted window glass. He wraps his arms about himself.

He pushes open his son's bedroom door and sees him lying – a man now, almost as big as himself – on the single bed. It occurs to him that he doesn't know what to say. Or do. It's been a long time since he has held his son. He looks at his broad back and his man's arms hanging over the edge of the bed. Then he realises that the sound of crying is not coming from his son's room at all but from somewhere else. And it frightens him, he doesn't mind admitting. There is no one else in the house except his wife still sleeping in his own bed. He closes the door on his son's breathing and sees how the whole inside of the house now is bathed with the pale light shining through the windows. He stops outside the door to his daughter's room.

She is not here anymore. He reminds himself of this. She is on the other side of the country working with people he doesn't know, living in a house he has never seen. His beautiful daughter. He leans closer to the door. The crying sounds like something breaking. How, he wonders, can people sleep through such a noise. He pushes open his daughter's bedroom door and sees, in the wash of moonlight that fills the room, the old computer at the foot of her empty bed, the empty boxes piled as he had left them. Even her smell has gone. The leather coat is folded on her chair.

From her window he can see the trampoline on the back lawn and the square of yellow sand beside it, still there after all these years. There is, he knows, an identical square of yellow sand in the garden of the house next door, not visible now even with the light of the moon. He had assumed children when they'd first moved in. Expected them. Their own children, even then, were too old for sand.

‘We'll move it,' they had said. ‘Cats.'

Yet here it is, still here. The same as next door.

The crying comes from nowhere in particular. It is neither soft nor loud. It seems to be both inside the house and out and he peers through the glass to see if there is any sign of movement in the backyard or in the trees that separate the houses from each other. He should wake his wife, he thinks, and talk to her. But instead he stays there at the window, looking out into the night, listening.

His neighbour is a man who plays golf for a living. He has seen him standing in the yellow sand on his side of the fence practising his swing. Chipping balls. Not children then, he'd thought. Golf. He makes his living teaching people the correct way to strike a golf ball. There is a demand for this. He makes a good living from it, his wife had said, which had surprised him. Then, when he'd thought about it, it made as much sense as anything else people might do with their lives. He had taught also, many years ago, in a school for boys and he supposed there might now be one or two of them – grown men – who thought of him occasionally and remembered something that he'd taught. Perhaps.

In the eight years since they moved here he has never exchanged more than twenty words with his neighbour. Which is fine. They wave or nod. Once, he returned a golf ball that had strayed.

His neighbour used to live in the house they live in now. Their home. He knows this because of the sand, but also because his wife has spoken to him about it and discovered that he used to rent their house when he still lived with his own wife, but that is a long time ago now. A long time. They spoke about the sand and golf and about the cats which he admitted were a problem.

‘If I had my way,' he'd said, ‘they'd all be trapped and killed.'

Sometimes he thinks of his neighbour living in his house, standing in the bathroom where he stands in the morning to shave and clean his teeth, looking out the same windows he looks out now. He thinks of his neighbour's clothes hanging in his wardrobe.

One night he thought he saw him sitting at the kitchen table in the half-dark, leaning forward on his elbows as though to speak. It scared him then, like the crying scares him. There is no explaining it. Noise travels, but this was something different.

He wonders, did he use his daughter's room to store his clubs?

He leaves her room and closes the door behind him. From where he stands, he can see the humped shape of his sleeping wife in their bed and hear his son's breathing at the other end of the hallway. And from somewhere else, the crying. He walks to the back door, opens it and steps out into the night.

The crying is louder now, still from no particular direction. The backyard slopes away from the house to what used to be a creek and is now a gully of reclaimed land. Sounds carry along it from a long way off. There have been times when he has heard whole conversations as though people were talking in his own yard. Once, he remembers, he heard his daughter's voice calling out, only to find she was visiting two blocks away.

The moon is almost full. He walks to the back of the yard and looks back at the house from beside the trampoline. The windows now are dark squares and he sees the door he has left standing open like an invitation. He should walk back up and close it he thinks but instead he stays standing beside the trampoline listening to the sound of crying. It is punctuated, he realises now, by soft sobs and could be coming from the house itself or from as far away as the end of the gully which runs for a mile at least before opening to the bay. He's heard that sound carries over water.

*

He remembers, years ago, when he was half the age his son is now, travelling in his father's car at dusk. They drove past the dockyards and customs houses at the top end of the bay along roads that have long since vanished and between long rows of windowless railway sheds built of corrugated iron. On the far side of a cyclone fence was a steel wall streaked with rust. It loomed above the car, blocking his view of the night sky so it felt like they were driving through a darkening tunnel. Ahead, he could see the skeleton frame of a black gasometer. He can't remember if they spoke or what time of year it was. He remembers his father had bought two bottles of beer and wrapped them in newspaper and the sound they made as they clinked together on the back seat of the car. Suddenly, the steel wall came to a stop and his view opened to the black water of the docks and beyond it a wasteland of disused warehouses. He realised the wall hadn't been a wall at all but the side of a ship and when he looked back he saw the word ‘Gdansk' in white letters through the rear window of the car.

They travelled on past the gasworks and the seamen's mission – a squat, dank-looking building with wire mesh windows – and across a single-lane bridge. Once across it, the dockyards slipped away and they drove past paddocks filled with weeds and thistles and the occasional pool of still water that caught the last light of the fading day. He sensed they were still following the curve of the bay, though when they arrived at the weatherboard house where his father would drink his beer with a man and woman who were not quite his uncle and aunt, he couldn't say for certain which way it was. There were no children at the house and he sat out on the front porch by himself looking back in the direction they had come. The street was lit with yellow light and there was a smell his father told him came from the abattoirs and tannery further along the road.

He sat there for a long time listening to the sound of a man singing. At first, he'd thought it came from inside the house and had thought how strange it was that his father would sing. Then he realised it was not his father or the man who was not quite his uncle but someone else a long way off in the night singing in a language he didn't understand. There was no music, just his singing. Then there was a shriek and the singing stopped.

When his father finished his beer and came out onto the porch, he placed his hand on his shoulder and said ‘Alright then?'

He didn't know what to say but he remembers his father left his hand there on his shoulder longer than he expected him to do and he didn't know whether to put his own hand there or to move away. Later, on their way back home, his father told him that sound carries a long way over water and the singing might have come from anywhere. The other sound, he said, would have come from the abattoir.

After all these years, he can still feel the weight of his father's hand on his shoulder.

*

He leaves the trampoline and walks up the side of the house that faces away from the gully. The crying is clearer now. It is so close it might be coming from himself. Through the trees he can see his neighbour sitting in the half-dark on the far side of the square of sand. He is leaning forward in a plastic garden chair, nursing his head in his hands and crying. Ross McLennan doesn't know what to do. He stands there watching. He should go back inside and shut the door.

His neighbour stops crying to take a breath then starts again. It is open and unashamed. Then he lifts his head and looks through the trees to where Ross McLennan stands. There is enough light from the moon for both men to see each other clearly. Ross McLennan doesn't move or avert his eyes. He holds his neighbour's gaze and sees his face streaked with tears, his wet lips trembling. They look at each other for what seems like minutes, saying nothing. Then Ross McLennan walks back the way he came. He goes inside and shuts the door.

He goes back into his son's bedroom where his boy is still sleeping with his arms hanging over the edge of the bed. He sits beside him and listens to him breathe. He stays there for a long time then places his hand on his shoulder and feels it rise and fall, rise and fall and wonders, would he wake if he took him in his arms and held him?

His wife stirs when he crawls back into bed.

‘What time is it?' she says.

‘It's early. 5.21.'

‘Did you hear something?'

‘Nothing,' he says. ‘Go back to sleep.'

*

His son is still in his bed when he leaves for work. He has showered and shaved. He has eaten breakfast with his wife. The morning is cold but the day promises to be fine. Already, the ti-tree is coming into flower and he can smell the salt smell coming off the bay.

‘Leave the back door open,' his wife says.

He walks up the side of the house and sees the plastic garden chair where his neighbour left it. The sand is raked smooth as though it's been freshly done, with the rake laid flat beside it.

He puts his bag on the back seat of the car and is about to get in when he sees his neighbour. He is walking towards his own car on the opposite side of the fence carrying his clubs. Ross McLennan could be in his car and backing out the driveway before his neighbour sees him. It would be safer, he thinks. But he waits. He watches his neighbour sling his clubs into the boot of his car. Waits for him to turn and see him. Their eyes meet through the painted trellis. Neither of them looks away.

‘Alright?' Ross McLennan says.

‘Alright.'