Benang Page 2

  I accepted the books Grandad had mailed from this or that book club; classics, instructive manuals of one kind or another, best-sellers ... I read them all.

  There was nothing else to do. Like many isolated youths, reading was a great comfort to me.

  I knew Ern was a reader, but it was only in the later years of his life that I became aware of his interest in local and family histories, and realised he had always kept notes, worked to a plan, documented his activities and research.

  Grandad was very insistent that I achieve well at school, and I was still very young when I brought home a report which indicated that I was not achieving to my potential, was somewhat lazy. Grandfather said nothing as he stood beside me reading it but, having accomplished that, he suddenly struck me to the ground and delivered a kick which sent me sliding across the floor. It was a startling violence, and as I lay there curled up in shock he told me I was to stay in the room and study for the duration of the school holiday. I was relieved to be left alone.

  It was many years later that I crept through Aunty’s bedroom/office so as not to wake her, and into the dining room. White plastic tablecloths, stainless steel, grubby lace curtains and grey light. The old fellow, Uncle Will—who I dimly remembered from a time before I came to live with my grandfather—was the only one in the room. Grandfather had told me I was not to call this man uncle.

  The old fellow motioned me over to where he sat very straight, eyes twinkling, and with his damp hair combed back along his scalp.

  ‘How those girlfriends of yours?’ he asked.

  His comment caused me some anxiety. I had been sneaking out in the evenings to see a girl. She had an adopted sister, and the two of them were remarkably close and supportive of one another. One or the other of them had said, ‘But just imagine, what if we were twins.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘you look nothing like each other, and...’

  They laughed a little, were patient with my dimwittedness. ‘But just imagine, Harley, if we were twins.’

  We did more than imagine. Perhaps I was merely following in the steps of my grandfather and father. It was the stuff of male fantasy, but I have come to believe—despite how I strutted and flattered myself at the time—that there was far greater intention, passion, and—yes—even love implicated in our intimacies than the three of us knew. And I remain exceedingly grateful, because since then...

  Well, all of this will become clear.

  Uncle Will said, ‘She looking for her family, is she?’

  I did not reply. Will was smiling, but he seemed nervous.

  I was at what Grandad referred to as a most dangerous age, and can’t say what caused him to become so lax over those long summer holidays. Perhaps he was preoccupied with his latest business partner, who I recall only as another new ‘Aunty so-and-so’, or it may have been that Uncle Will covered up for me. Whatever the case, had he known the extent to which I had freed myself from the timetable set for me, my grandfather would have said I was like an oarless boat adrift on a wide sea.

  But, at that most dangerous age, I in fact had an oar—or something very like it—secreted away in my trousers. In return for accounts of my exploits Uncle Will had made himself a wonderful accomplice, and when I let him know—after all, I was isolated, I was proud, and I had to tell someone—that the girlfriends and I were...

  Please forgive my coyness, but how can I summarise all this, having now started?

  Uncle Will, with a knowing smile, said, ‘No wonder you look so tired.’

  I asked for his help!

  And it was in the subsequent search for the biological family of one of my girlfriends that so much trouble began, and led me to reconsider who I am.

  Raised to carry on one heritage, and ignore another, I found myself wishing to reverse that upbringing, not only for the sake of my own children, but also for my ancestors, and for their children in turn. And therefore, inevitably, most especially, for myself.

  funerals

  How lonely I was at my father’s funeral. Gravel rolled from beneath my feet as I skidded and stumbled toward the grave. I remember thinking that there should be more bodies, there were not enough bodies. Why just the one? There should be more.

  I was full of self-pity. Is that normal for a murderer at his victim’s funeral?

  A small crowd circled the grave, heads down. The breeze plucked an orange flower from a tree and, setting its tiny propellors spinning, carried it toward where I saw the distant blue ocean, and an island with the sea blossoming white against its edge. A few faces I recognised floated before me. Glittering, brittle stars fractured my vision.

  How is it possible for me to say how I feel, how I felt? I can say that the chain on my wrist was heavy and uncomfortable. I can say that I remember trying to place it over my shirt sleeve to protect my skin. I can say that I felt the shame of it, and that I wanted to ignore the man at its other end, but if he pulled me one way then of course that was where I must go. And my grandfather was there, at my other side. Showing his support, you think?

  When the first of the real aunties reached for me, those two men pushed and pulled me away from them.

  And so it is very curious—oh yes, it is curious, it is paradoxical, it is strange, it seems all wrong in every way for me to say it, but ... that chain may have helped pull me back from the edge of our grave.

  Driving back to the remand centre the road dipped suddenly where there had once been a creek, and my stomach lurched. At the time there was only that gut feeling, but now, initially, I might explain it by way of dusty archives.

  The Inspector for Aborigines and Fisheries’ diary describes the pool where that creek once joined the river: Acres and acres of mullet, he said, their tails sticking out of the water. He wrote of how the dew saturated both banks, and how the fish seemed to move from the river into the milky mist which lay over it. The river, said the inspector, was very full, and rushed to and from this pool in its bend on the way to the harbour. The inspector also wrote that he was after a gin who, with a bunch of very fair children, had been reported as camping and hunting along the river. It was the nineteen twenties, long decades before I was born. It may well have been my family, generations back, out of their territory, running to escape.

  That river still feeds into the harbour, but how little I knew of my ancestors’ tongue then, how that river had dried up. But not completely.

  The Nyoongar name for that harbour is Merrytch. Meaning dew, or dewdrop. But the word is similar to a word for penis, and also very similar to the word for mullet. Mullet, penis, dewdrop; they share the same root-word.

  There are no more acres of mullet there. But there is still dew, and the sea still breaks over the island I saw from the cemetery. The river still flows, although it now floods the shallow harbour with pesticides. And what of my penis, its dewdrop?

  I appreciate your concern, and that you remain with this shifty, snaking narrative. I am grateful; more grateful than you know, believe me.

  As I was saying, the remand centre. There was a court case, certain charges were withdrawn, and I was acquitted of the death of my father and once again handed over to my grandfather’s care.

  We moved to the quiet and tiny coastal town of Wirlup Haven. Uncle Will helped us make the place comfortable.

  Grandad had his plans. What he would bequeath me. The house I would renovate with him, the local and family histories we would write. Your forefathers, he said...

  I was still ill. It is difficult to appreciate the way a cultural and spiritual uplift can affect one. And then he had his first stroke.

  success

  Uncle Will, Grandad, me at sixteen years of age. It was like ... things had suddenly finished for me. Scarred, fragile and empty, I was still recovering from what I realised was no accident. My grandfather was observing me in such a way— scientific he would have said; lecherous, say I—that it was impossible for me to feel at ease.

  At times, I confess, I just wanted someone to be proud of me.
Anyone. I felt defeated, and guilty, and even wondered if it was Grandad I’d betrayed.

  We drew up a timetable. He was always pragmatic, my grandfather. Of course he was not without vision—I’m thinking of his lofty ambitions for me—but he had always stressed the value of timetables and a systematic approach to problems. The setting of goals. The importance of his heritage.

  So, as I said, we drew up a timetable. First, my recovery. Then later, the renovation of the property. He was going to retire here, he said, and wanted to leave me something.

  ‘Try to think of your father’s death as an unfortunate necessity.’ Really. That’s what he said.

  From the way he talked I knew he’d already begun drafting advertising leaflets. ‘What we want here,’ he said, ‘is a small bed-and-breakfast place for the well-heeled, for those who wish to escape the hurly-burly, to relax and forget. We have pristine beaches; turquoise waters and white sand. Granite outcrops. We can offer the history of the place’s pioneers, explain how once there was an unofficial port where the enterprising Mr Mustle welcomed the whalers, sealers and other adventurers in the very earliest days of settlement. They used rum for currency...’ And so he went on. Adventure, enterprise, vision.

  Tap tap. I began chipping the render from the stone walls of the old house. I hesitate to mention it; in the context of this story it may seem so dreadfully symbolic. But what can I do? It is the truth. Tap tap. There were many walls to do, and I was doing only a very little at a time. I was very listless, but the task, the tools I was using, and the fragments of render I stuffed in my pockets kept my feet on the ground.

  Grandad disappeared into his study each morning. Uncle Will visited occasionally, and I tap-tapped on not knowing, even then, what to say to him. He cooked our meals, and afterwards I watched television.

  I worried that Grandad was right. That I was a success.

  Tap tap. Uncle Will tapping me on the shoulder, interrupting my reverie. I carefully put down the hammer and chisel, shook the hand he offered me.

  ‘I’m going away,’ he said, softly. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. ‘I left something in your room.’

  I watched him walk away; his tall, thin body held so very straight, and each foot lifted and placed so very precisely. He walked like some sort of bird. He was not really my uncle. He was only my father’s cousin. A hand waved from the car as he drove away.

  Tap tap. Fingers on the keyboard now. Long after then.

  After some time (weeks? months?) of that tap tapping, of house cleaning, of meal preparation, of working in the garden and performing all those necessary domestic chores; after some time of this I found myself drifting along the passage to my grandfather’s study. I lacked the confidence to even allow myself to think it, but I wanted evidence of some sort. I wanted confirmation of my fears, what my father and the girls had told me that last time.

  The room was neat and well organised. Quite apart from anything else I did it was probably my lack of order, and how I disrupted his, that made the old man rage so in the months to come. Well, as best he could anyway.

  I found myself hovering over sets of documents, things filed in plastic envelopes in rumbling drawers and snapping files. Certificates of birth, death, marriage; newspaper clippings, police reports; letters (personal; from this or that historical society); parish records; cemetery listings; books, photographs...

  Photographs. As before, I shuffled idly through them. I was careless, letting them fall to the floor. Various people, all classifiable as Aboriginal. There were portraits arranged in pairs; one a snapshot labelled As I found them, the other a studio photograph captioned Identical with above child. There were families grouped according to skin colour. And, sudden enough to startle me, my own image.

  A boy. Wing-nut eared and freckled, he wore a school uniform, a tie, a toothy grin. He grinned like an idiot, like an innocent.

  Captions to the photographs; full-blood, half-caste (first cross), quadroon, octoroon. There was a page of various fractions, possible permutations growing more and more convoluted. Of course, in the language of such mathematics it is simple; from the whole to the partial and back again. This much was clear; I was a fraction of what I might have been.

  A caption beneath my father’s photograph:

  Octoroon grandson (mother quarter caste [No.2], father Scottish). Freckles on the face are the only trace of colour apparent.

  I saw my image inserted into sequences of three or four in which I was always at the end of the line (even now, I wince at such a phrase). Each sequence was entitled, Three Generations (Reading from Right to Left), and each individual was designated by a fraction.

  I was leafing through the papers, letting them fall.

  Breeding Up. In the third or fourth generation no sign of native origin is apparent. The repetition of the boarding school process and careful breeding ... after two or three generations the advance should be so great that families should be living like the rest of the community.

  A cough. Grandad at the door, leaning in its frame.

  Such an inadequate memory. What had my father tried to explain?

  I turned away from the old man and in a sort of controlled tantrum—oh, no doubt it was childish—I plucked papers from drawers, threw them, let them fall. I made books fly, index cards panic and flee.

  Occasionally, rising and falling in all that flurry, I paused to read from a book which had passages underlined on almost every page. There were a couple of family trees inscribed on the flyleaf. Trees? Rather, they were sharply ruled diagrams. My name finished each one. On another page there was a third, a fourth. All leading to me.

  Question marks sprouted in the margins of those diagrams, and I was sowing my own.

  Books everywhere, with strips of paper protruding from them like dry and shrivelled tongues.

  The need for both biological and social absorption. Dilute the strain.

  My grandfather was still in the doorway, now on his knees. One hand clutched his chest, while the other waved feebly at me. I remembered a similar scene, but this time did not flee from him but picked my way among the sprawling books, softly slowly stepped through rustling pages, so sharp-edged and so pale.

  Uplift a despised race.

  ‘Well, old man, fuck me white.’

  I helped him to his feet.

  I would like to say that I remember slowly falling, and how rectangles of white curved and moved aside as if they were sails, and I a great wind. But it was only paper, sheets of paper strewn about me.

  And it was there, in a dry and hostile environment, in that litter of paper, cards, files and photographs that I began to settle and make myself substantial. A sterile landscape, but I have grown from that fraction of life which fell.

  I understood that much effort had gone into arriving at me. At someone like me. I was intended as the product of a long and considered process which my grandfather had brought to a conclusion.

  Ahem.

  The whole process—my family history, as it turns out—appealed to Grandad’s sense of himself as a scientist who with his trained mind and keen desire to exert his efforts in the field investigating native culture and in studying the life history of the species, supplies an aid to administration. He just got lost along the way.

  It was the selective separation from antecedents which seemed most important, and with which Grandfather was a little lax. It was one of the areas where he had erred with my father.

  It was a part of the system used at the settlements and missions.

  Of course it is impossible to completely retrace the process. A hundred years is a hundred years is a hundred years ... Following my grandfather’s dictum, as with such an inheritance I am bound to, I will provide documents where I can. Let me assure you that I have been diligent. But remember, I had to look after an old man and—at least in the beginning—I wasted time on the house.

  So, I was busy. And then, as my awareness of my historical place grew, so did my desire for distractio
n.

  I had not wanted to write a book. It was Grandfather’s idea. The pleasure I first gained from it was through reading my efforts to him, sharing intimacies. He did not like it. And although disabled by his stroke, his eyes could still bulge, his face turn red. I would wipe spittle from his chin and, after putting him to bed and smoothing his pillow down, re-read the sections that had elicited the most satisfying—for me—response.

  Really, I wanted to prove myself his failure. Or, at the very least, a mistake.

  People should learn from their mistakes, right?

  I tried to explain that I needed time. After all, wasn’t it his own estimation that it would take generations for the plan to succeed? I had far less time than that.

  ‘You have me,’ I would smile at him. ‘Your living proof. Study me, Grandad, your conclusive evidence. Another one without a history, plucked from the possibility of a sinister third race.’ (In Grandad’s day, apparently, there were only the two!)

  I want to stress that I am not proud of my behaviour, but nor can I deny that I was very angry. Angry with my grandfather, his rigour, his scientific method, his opportunism, his lust. And so I am reluctant to begin with my grandfather, as if all I can do is react to him and his plans, as if I have nothing else.

  But even if that were true, is it such a bad thing, to begin with anger and resistance?

  ernest solomon scat

  My grandfather used to listen, awaiting the entrance of his younger self as I read to him. Knowing his impatience, I shook papers at him, flapped my arms and moved about the room which was already beginning to show the evidence of my fitful renovations. Mocking him, I waved his will, his titles and deeds, and hovered just beyond his feebly swiping arms. ‘What have I done to deserve all this?’