Taboo Read online

  Wilfred leaned against the brightly painted bulldozer, his back to Tilly. He must’ve sensed her approach. He didn’t look around.

  ‘Cunts. They’ve ripped it up.’

  Tilly had never heard him swear. As he turned to her she saw both his surprise at her presence and that there were tears in his eyes.

  A voice, faint on the wind: ‘Wilfred. Tilly. Come up here. Tilly, Wilf, it’s here.’

  The others were waving from the top of the slope. Come here, come here.

  And so, lifting heavy feet from the soil, they resumed their journey.

  ‘We gotta keep going. No tears, her up there tells me. She’ll kill me if I go weak.’

  Despite their slow tread Tilly thought she might rise, and skim above the lifting grains of sand as if something was lifting her, buoying her.

  A very small crowd stood on the granite that capped this worn hill. The wind handled them, tousled their hair. In the distance, the corrugated iron roof of a new homestead shone brightly in the sun, and the creek bed was a dark line curving by collapsed and rusting iron sheds, and the old stone house they’d visited yesterday. From here they saw Dan’s place also, the other side of some trees, further around the hill.

  ‘He dunno this place, even his granddaddy never knew this place.’

  ‘See where the kangaroo lay.’

  Gerry pointed with his lips, nodded his head; he widened his eyes, looking pointedly at the sheet of rock upon which they stood, and not far from their feet.

  Tilly looked for the leaping silhouette of a kangaroo, expected to see something like the image on Qantas planes and tea towels but saw only a shapeless, dark mark on the rock.

  Pa Wilfred sat down on the ground. He leaned over on his hip and one elbow, scratching his chest with the other hand, and with his head held peculiarly upright.

  ‘You alright, Pop?’

  ‘You ok?’

  ‘I’m just resting, my dear ones.’

  ‘Like a roo, unna.’

  Nita snorted dismissively. ‘And somewhere here,’ she said, walking away a few steps. ‘Look. Tell me what you see.’

  They saw a series of circles waning, and waxing again; lichen-encrusted, flaking a little at the edges, exfoliating as granite does. One small, shallow pool of water within the series shivered in a sudden gust of wind.

  ‘Know this story, Tilly?’

  Nor did most of the others.

  The homestead and assorted sheds and machinery seemed like toys so far away. The creek bed snaked across dull brown and stubbled earth, disappearing as it reached a remarkably straight line marking where farm land became Forest Reserve. The old burial ground was along that creek bed.

  Nita spoke a little in the old language, the words and sounds of which Tilly was only beginning to recognise. Impatiently, the old woman pushed a strand of grey hair away from her mouth and said, ‘Kangaroo and the moon.’

  It must’ve been a little wind that lifted grains of sand from the ground around them, but not from that dark patch where the rocks had been ripped from the earth or from this sheet of rock upon which they stood. At their feet, circles in rock.

  ‘So the kangaroo says to the moon, I’m gunna die. I’m gunna die.’

  And so would Tilly and Wilfred and Nita and Gerry and all the rest. Their bodies might be splayed on this sheet of grey rock; flesh suppurating, picked at by the birds, flesh lifted and falling away. The sinews and tendons, at first tightening, would slowly allow the bones to ease apart. Released, and neatly ordered in some semblance of what they had been, those bones would crack and turn grey in the sun as the earth rose around them.

  ‘But the moon don’t die, see? Comes back all the time, young and strong again.’

  ‘Like us,’ someone said.

  The moon was a sickle, sickly. Sick. Almost not there.

  ‘See, Tilly?’

  Gerry pointed again at an irregular, dark patch near the series of waning circles in the rock and beside where Pa Wilfred had earlier so ostentatiously rested.

  ‘That’s the mark – the mark exactly – roo leaves in the dirt when he been sleeping a long time. When he come back same place every day to sleep.’

  Pa Wilfred had been teasing her when he sat on the rock that way.

  ‘He wanted to help you see it.’

  ‘Not a cartoon kangaroo.’

  No, no, of course not.

  Someone suggested they visit the homestead. Nita and Wilfred knew of the man there, remembered from when he was in nappies and they were themselves children. He was a boy when they went away to the mission. Maybe they would go knock on his door. The twins and Tilly had met him, and they’d stayed at the old homestead.

  They began to walk back to the vehicles.

  ‘Tilly,’ Wilfred called after her. They were left alone.

  Ahead, they saw Gerry lean to the ground. Pick something up, or did he leave something there?

  The old man held out a hand, thumbnail up. He pointed to the partial disk at the base of his nail; the white crescent showing clearly against his dark skin.

  ‘Moon rising in you too you know.’

  In Tilly’s thumb; like the daytime moon above, but growing.

  Wilfred showed Tilly what Gerry had left in the paddock: a stone from the ocean.

  The engines grumbled and sighed, gravel crunched and popped under the tyres. A crow called scornfully at their backs.

  WELCOME

  Dan exited his doorway – our doorway, he would have preferred to say – the hushing, reluctant screen, its baggy mesh billowing with the movement. He stepped just far enough to avoid the arc of the door’s passing, kept his back to it, waiting for the sound of it clicking shut.

  Forty years he had been going through this door. And the house before that, at Kokanarup? It was here that he and Janet had made their life together. Nurtured children. Made the farm a business. Children gone now. Janet too.

  By the time the door closed he’d usually be halfway to the shed, boots kicking up dust. The dogs stood ahead of him, waiting, stranded, enquiring heads turned back over their shoulders.

  Dan held out his arms, and the little dogs ran back and leapt, one two, into his embrace. He smiled, gruffly; not quite begrudging the smile, but surprised and not trusting the circumstances that triggered it. Janet’s long absence, he knew, had made the dogs anxious. He patted them with callused hands. Stiff-fingered and sun-splotched hands. Rough hands, Janet used to say.

  Janet’s skin was smooth and unlined beneath her clothes. Touched by his young man’s hands.

  The little birds in their cage. They chirruped and tut-tutted him. Where is our woman?

  The dogs pressed into him.

  They might die of the absence, he thought. It happened. Separation anxiety; it was real enough, he could vouch for that.

  He felt her presence behind him and turned. Could see nothing.

  Janet would have been thrilled to see Tilly. And to have Aborigines coming onto the other property, for them all to talk, to share their minds and to see if they might find their way forward together. She’d been the driving force for the Peace Park, the plaque and all that . . . For their children, she said. For the town. For us.

  Us.

  Their son did not care to return.

  What did his son do? He thought of the young man he’d once seen in King George Town, how he’d recognised something in the body language and, overcome, had looked away. It may have been an apparition.

  Dan never used to think about history at all, even though he knew of the family’s association with the . . . killing. He’d always known about that. Massacre? There were so many lies. He never really thought the Coolman family – Tilly’s family too it seemed; such a coincidence, or was it God’s will? – he never thought of them as linked to all that. Except, perhaps, if he looked close and deep, he fel
t that they should be grateful they were spared. They had fitted in well enough. He remembered the old women, sisters. They were midwives, good mothers. Keep to themselves, people used to say, as if they were relieved. We made them keep to themselves, Dan realised. There was an old couple used to help with the shearing, when he was a very young child.

  They must’ve all been related to the people that were shot and killed. Stranded, marooned at home.

  Janet would not have been surprised.

  The door clicked, set him in motion and, as if on invisible rails, he went to the shed. The smell of diesel and gravel so familiar he rarely noticed it.

  The sky was stark and blue. The moon barely there.

  Was that people on the hillcrest other side of the creek? Tiny, stick figures because of the distance, barely seen against the sky. They could be drawings. Blackfellas . . . He looked at the ground, and stayed that way for a little while.

  Looked up again. One figure, maybe. A tree? He dropped his gaze a second time, looked up again. Nothing.

  He was staring at his workbench and thinking about driving to Hopetown, might even see how his recent guests had settled in, when he heard a car pull up; it was Tilly, those twins from the other day.

  ‘Hi Dan,’ the twins did the talking, ‘thanks for letting us stay the other day, and sorry we haven’t got back to you – bit too busy organising this camp, and getting ready for the Peace Park, of course.’

  ‘That’s fine. How’s it going?’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘It was great the other day.’

  ‘Yeah, thanks.’

  They were all beaming at one another. But what next?

  ‘You know, Dan, apart from being here for the Peace Park, we got some old stories – a researcher with us, got creation stories recorded with our old people, hundred years ago . . . We wanna reunite them with the landscape, bring the sounds back too.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘You said you knew some sites, on your property.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Someone told us there’s one, about the moon . . . got circles in rock of the moon waxing and waning . . . Do you know that one?’

  ‘Nah, sorry . . . Gerry. But I’m happy to show you more old waterholes, and anything that I do know, that might be interesting.’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  ‘We thought you might like to come back to camp and have a meal with us, meet some of the others.’

  ‘That’d be lovely. What, today?’

  ‘If you like. If it suits.’

  *

  Daylight seeped away. Tilly had her face against the glass of her door, was looking up to see the beginning of the night sky, a moon or perhaps an emu among the stars. She sat behind the driver, sealed within windscreen and rubber-lined doors, and the headlights of Dan’s car behind cast shadows within their own vehicle, showed the hair on the twin skulls before her, but their faces were lost in darkness, hers too, faces lost in the darkness where they stared. The radio droned quizzes, opinion, stale music. Tilly would have reached for her phone, used her own soundtrack against this night, but something stayed her. Now and then space opened up beside the road, paddocks touched with the feeble light of the moon as it tore itself free of the clouds. Then it must have been trees, because the darkness closed again, pressed up against the glass and made a tunnel and each side there were Cyclops’ eyes, red and white in a row. Tilly realised she was tiring. Tense around the shoulders and neck. They were running a gauntlet, pushed from behind, malevolence each side.

  Freed again, Tilly saw a light – a blue light, shapeless – in the paddock on her side of the car. It was some distance away. Curious, she stared. What? Tractor? No. It kept parallel, moved at the same height above the ground with no bump or even jiggle. Constant, equidistant, parallel. Yet they were travelling – she glanced at the speedometer – at 120, 130 klicks.

  Clicks.

  ‘Gerald, Gerrard,’ she whispered, not caring which one answered. Neither responded. She did not reach out to touch them. She spoke again. Nothing.

  She watched the light for what seemed a long time. Then, it disappeared. An indistinct darkness moved close once again.

  Figures leapt up either side of the road ahead, shone in the headlights. Ghostly. Insistently waving, their palms open and up.

  Gerald spoke something in their ancestral language, startling her. Then he gave the common name for the plant. ‘Tallerack.’

  ‘Same?’

  ‘Yeah see, belongs here, like nowhere else.’

  ‘Like us,’ said his brother.

  They were back, together again.

  A red glow at the driver’s lips. Smoke twisted in the green, the red, the blue of dashboard lights. His window went down. Air roaring, smoke gone.

  Tilly wanted some of that. Some obliteration, she thought, savouring the word in an unconscious denial of its meaning.

  The moon might have winked, was an eyelid closing.

  Gerry offered her something to smoke. She refused.

  She thought of the creek bed at Kokanarup, the smooth surfaces of water reflecting these stars. Embraced in stone, the water brimmed, and brimmed again. All along the river, scattered here and there in the gloaming sand, pools of stars shone and in a full moon light would be oozing everywhere. But not today, not yet.

  The car jolted, hit something. Startled, she glimpsed a kangaroo upside down against the stars, ghostly pink in the taillights of their car and the headlights behind.

  The warm body spasmed on the cold, starlit bitumen road edge.

  They drove on. Who would have thought they’d drive so far, so long? Tilly remembered coming up the steep hill that formed the main street of Kepalup: the school, the supermarket, café, the little park next to the old town hall, the hill crest and the fork in the road. So warm and cosy in the car. Tyres humming. She remembered crossing the dry riverbed, and going through a gateway of two towering trees that leaned to one another from either side of the road. They will touch one day, though likely be chainsawed before then because what if a truck it is a safety thing the government must do those things and the glass was between her and the outside, the glass and the two men why did she think them boys the two in front of her driving why had one of them which one done that and then the other there was a fly or something buzzing puzzled you’d think by the glass and maybe the outside world rushing by so fast yet it had its feet firm on solid air it could not breathe . . .

  She could not breathe, and then he had loosened the leash and she did what he said, opened her mouth and one time it was dog biscuits, she leaned to the floor and took them in her mouth straight from the bowl or lifted her hips and begged and then so long as he gave her more and then with that it never mattered so much . . . He was so sweet at first and once upon a time, so sure of himself and the world and so strong could move like a dancer despite the bulk of him and his smile no hair on his head never liked it when the stubble came he had to shave each morning she saw him looking back at her from the mirror over his shoulder but straight ahead too and then he would bring her a cup of tea and open his hand and she took it and it was all good again she hated herself she loved him but it was not love but need for what he gave and withheld so she begged whatever he wanted. He dressed so well. His shining shaved head. His great bulk such a big, glossy man with a ring on his finger and he held her down and she would’ve killed herself . . .

  She awoke. The caravan park. The twins were opening their doors, leaving. She thought for a moment that as their feet touched the ground they would spring into the air and take flight, but no. She heard footsteps crunching, and then Dan walked past her car door, not even seeing her and all his attention ahead of him.

  And there, in front of the car, framed in the windscreen: a big, bald man, stepping out of her nightmare memories. Tilly wanted to crouch on the floor, hide behind the front
seat.

  *

  ‘Doug! My son, my son, who would have thought . . .’ That was Dan’s voice. The two men were shaking hands. And then quick as that the bald man whose name she did not want to form was at the car, opening her door.

  ‘Tilly. Tilly. Long time no see.’

  Holding out his big hand. A hand she knew so soft and smooth and strong it could hurt.

  Behind him, the Gerrys, watching. Puzzled. ‘Arsehole,’ one of them muttered, and stepped forward.

  Tilly waved them both back, waited, got herself out of the car. Then stood, thinking of running but no she was going nowhere. Tilly, Dougie, his father Dan and the Gerry twins: there was much silence, except for Dan. Dan was delighted.

  ‘But, you two know one another? Why, that’s wonderful. I would never have believed. Of course, back then, but Tilly, you were too young to remember . . .’

  ‘It’s good to be back, Dad.’ Dougie stepped forward, clasped his father’s hand. He smiled over his father’s shoulder at the rest of them, and his gaze held Tilly.

  Tilly looked to the trees beyond which she knew the ocean lapped the sand, and beyond again a continent of ice from where arrived this wind on her cheeks mingling with her own stale breath and the festering inside that was Dougie was Doug was something not easy to tell or remember. And her dead father Jim Coolman alive at the centre of it. As if she did not have enough to do, without this monster turning up.

  *

  Several hours later Dan sat in his car at the caravan park. The hire bus, large and white in the thin moonlight, some logo marking its flank, gleamed indistinctly. Behind it, caravans, chalets and tents filed among the shadowy trees. The motor ticked as it cooled.

  Doug had disappeared almost immediately after they’d met – some business, he told his father, someone to see, they would catch up tomorrow or the day after, soon – and Dan had remained at the camp to share a barbeque meal of . . . goanna, they said, and he saw it taken from the fridge, whole. Kangaroo too. Pleasant enough, but his mind was on his son, Doug. It was probably rude of him to keep bringing up the name of someone they did not know, and so of course they nodded politely and moved on to other topics whenever he did so. Something had upset one of those twins.