Of Ashes and Rivers that Run to the Sea (16 page)

My mum wants to go to the convent for morning tea so she can introduce me to the nuns. I don't want to do this because one of my pet hates is religious bigotry and from what I've experienced, Catholicism has a star-studded cast of bigots. They offer love and peace by being brutal and hateful. They preach kindness to their neighbour while they practise intolerance towards everyone who doesn't come in line with their fundamentalist beliefs. Now who does that sound like, I wonder? But I indulge her whim and off we go. My mum tells me that the tea room has two tables, one for the nuns and one for visitors, so when I pour my tea I deliberately go and sit at the table where some nuns are already seated so I can piss them off. My mum is already sitting at the visitors' table and I call out to her and point to an empty chair on the other side of the
table where I'm sitting. I can see the cogs turning in her brain. Does she ignore me or does she ignore the rules? The nuns don't know where to look because they know I am openly defying their laws about sectarianism in their tea room. I find it strange that a form of apartheid exists in this mission that is teaching the blackfellas that everybody is equal in the eyes of God. But not in the nuns' tea room.

I'm waiting to be put in my place so I can tell them to get fucked but it doesn't happen, they just sit there and make some very small talk between themselves to show that they are in control. Mummy opts to stay where she is and not disrupt the status quo any more than has already happened, she definitely isn't a risk-taker, this mother of mine. So I help myself to one of the nuns' biscuits. Well, I'm assuming they're the nuns' biscuits because they are on the nuns' table. By now the nuns' attempts at conversation have fizzled out so I strike up a conversation with the one next to me. I ask her what her real name is and why she decided to become a nun and if she had any pets when she was a kid. She gives me a sideways glance like she's looking at the devil incarnate and I give her a big friendly grin but then my mum has me by the arm and is pushing me out the door.

Mummy is really grumpy and stalks along in silence, her walking stick clacking on the ground with each step of her gammy leg. We are heading to somewhere else in
the religious precinct. I am starting to worry that she is taking me to father whats-his-name to have my confession heard after my insolence in the tea room but we pull up at a door where there are some other ladies waiting. Mum tells them about the tea-room incident and they all glance at me from time to time as she carries on like I'd spat at the Pope or something. I hear footsteps approaching and turn to see one of the nuns from the tea room. It's the one I tried to strike up a conversation with and again she avoids my gaze and unlocks the door.

It's a room full of second-hand clothes. Mummy and the other women start rifling through the stuff like they were going through the Boxing Day specials in Myers. Mummy already has a few dresses over her arm and is eagerly scrounging for more. I tell her another person has sweated onto those clothes and maybe some kid has pissed or shat or wiped their snotty nose on them as well but this makes no impression on her and she tells me to have a look for something to wear when we go hunting in the mangroves. When I tell her no, she tells me not to whinge about the mud stains on my clothes then. Well, okay, I did whinge once or twice but I'm fine about the mud stains that will never come out of my shorts with the frilly bit on the bottom and the white cotton halter-neck top that makes my boobs look bigger. I'm okay with this because I can continue to wear them into the mangroves and save my other clothes from the same fate.

When we get home mummy pulls out some tops and skirts like the ones she wears and gives them to me. I can't refuse them so I stuff them at the back of my shelf. But the day I wear them is the day I lose all self-respect and I'm not going to let that happen.

Mummy has decided I need to learn how to cook the way she does. I tell her I can make toast and boil an egg but to her that's not real cooking. I need to learn how to make proper things, she says, like stew and damper. But I don't seem to have the touch for it.

‘Like dis,' mummy says in exasperation as she deftly rolls the dough and manoeuvres it into a nice neat shape like a cowpat. I try again but somehow my hands aren't doing what my brain is telling them to and I'm afraid of burning myself when I put the damper on the coals to cook. The latent heat radiates up into my face when I bend down near it and I feel like my eyebrows are crinkling up like when you stick a match to some hair. This is scary stuff. I remember a kid in my school whose face looked like it was melted because she'd fallen into
a fire when she was little. This could happen to me if my big flappy dress gets too close to the flames. Mummy has a stove but she doesn't use it, she prefers to use a fire instead. She just uses the stove to store things in to keep them away from the ants and flies, like sugar and flour and hunks of raw meat. I have a few more goes and end up with something passable but it isn't good enough as far as mummy is concerned and she tutts and stalks off to make a cup of tea.

The next thing we try is stew. I'm okay with cutting up the onions and potatoes and carrots but I can't touch the raw meat and when I try to pick it up with a fork the feeling of stabbing it makes me gag. Mummy tries to put it into my hand but I scream and jump back out of the way of her bloodied hands. Then she gets the shits with me because before I use anything she has touched, I pick it up with a dish cloth and scrub it with hot soapy water to wash off the blood she has transferred from her hands to the utensil. In the end she makes the stew while I watch. Afterwards I ask her to wash her hands so she doesn't spread any more blood around the place but she ignores me so I go around wiping door knobs, light switches and anything else I think she's touched. She asks me how I haven't died of starvation yet but I ignore her.

I am starting to feel that nothing I ever do is good enough for her. I can't hunt properly, I can't weave properly, I don't make the tea properly. I wonder if this is
what mothers all over the world are like. It occurs to me that my black bush one and my white city one are remarkably similar in some ways.

While the stuff is cooking I sit watching her, wondering what must be going through her brain.

‘Did you want me to come and stay here with you?' I say petulantly. ‘You're always so grumpy.'

‘You nebber ask me,' she says tetchily like I've struck a raw nerve.

And mummy is right, I didn't ask her. And I have never asked her how she felt about her three-year-old child being taken from her life and a twenty-eight-year-old stranger waltzing back into it again. I assumed that we would take up where we left off but I realise now that the years have been too long and the differences between us too many for that to occur.

I ask mummy why she didn't take her promised husband and be done with it instead of carrying on with my father. She would have known the implications of getting herself pregnant to a non-black man. But, she says simply and without emotion, ‘I gave you life.' I can't argue with this. Yes, she did give me life and despite some crappy obstacles, it is my responsibility to do the best I can with it and it's up to me to learn from this and stop whingeing. It's then that I know I have to make peace with this tiny part of the universe in the Northern Territory. I don't have
to feel guilty about my lack of skills and I don't need to resist everything so hard because I'm just a human being after all.

But I can't stop thinking about what mummy and I were talking about and I feel different now. Not the sort of different where you wake up one morning and the world has changed. But the different where you feel like you've fallen down Alice's rabbit hole and you've crawled out the other side dazed and confused, with sticks and leaves in your hair and dirt on your face. I feel sort of wary like a baby chimpanzee that's been captured and given to humans to bring up. Like the baby chimp there's still a little piece of something in my heart that no one can reach because it lives deep down inside me. I think this family wants to take the something out of my heart and make me black, just like the other family wanted to tame me and make me white. I know that nobody is interested in the parts of me that don't concern them. The white parents aren't interested in the pre-assimilation black bits because they wanted a white girl with black skin. And my real family don't want to know about the post-assimilation white bits because they think I'm a black girl with a white heart. I know that I've disappointed them all. The anger from the white parents. The pitiful looks from the black. The fretful and all-consuming silences from them both. I wish I could open the doors to my mind and let them
in, so they could see the world from my eyes and forgive me for not being able to fit their expectations. But I can't because this journey is all mine. I don't want the days when they brush me aside because I can't get it right. I want there always to be beautiful days when the space between us is full of light and love.

But it's hard work trying to be the person that everyone else wants me to be and I'm getting really tired of it now. Despite the fact that I am biologically a member of this family, at the end of the day I know I am not the complete package. I don't quite belong here because I am not black enough. There are already a few mixed-race people living in this place. Not in my family though, I am the only one. But it didn't take long to work out the difference between them and me – these other coloured people were born and have lived in this place all their lives and I haven't. I don't have the same knowledge in my head as they do and my family does. I don't think the same, I don't act the same. I am not the same. And it's exactly like this with my white family. As far as my white parents are concerned I am not sufficiently like them either. But they don't realise that there is no stolen and there is no lost, there is no black and there is no white. There is just me. And I am perfect the way I am. And I know now that I have to leave this place because I've learnt all I can for the time being and this lesson is over now.

So how do I end something that I thought was just beginning? It's easy. I make a plan and say goodbye and continue my journey down another road that will lead back to this one every now and then. But it will never stop here, it will only pass through.

I've never been able to ask mummy before about what happened to me and why I was taken away and it always felt like such an awkward thing to do. But today I've got some courage and I open my mouth and it all comes tumbling out and then floats in the air between us like a thick fog. Mummy is silent for a bit and then she tells me how the mission nagged her endlessly about handing me over and that it would be the best thing for me so I would get an education and grow up like a good white person because that's what the government wanted. But she said no. And then one day when she came home from her job in the mission laundry I was gone. She and my brothers' father Casmir Munkara went to see Bishop O'Laughlin three times asking for me back, and each time they were told they should be grateful for what had been done for me and were then sent packing.

I tell her how strange I think it is that the white bureaucracy took black women's kids away from them because they thought they weren't fit to be mothers and couldn't keep a decent home and then turned straight around and gave them their white kids to look after and their homes to clean. There didn't seem to be any intelligence behind this at all. We both agree that it doesn't make sense. Then mummy tells me how in defiance she would starch the nuns' underwear and habits when she worked in the laundry, just to get a bit of her own back. We laugh long and loud at this and my love for her grows as big as the universe. She goes on to tell me how they would regularly flood the laundry and make a big mess which got right up the nuns' arses, and how each day one person would sneak their own washing in while the others kept watch in case they were sprung. And Daddy Casmir who worked as a carpenter for the mission, although he took great pride in his workmanship would help himself to useful pieces of wood or tools and nails with no guilt whatsoever. His reasoning was that the mission had stolen me from him and mummy so it's not theft when you steal from a thief. I'm so sorry he passed away before I got back, I would have learnt so much from him. And it fills me with great joy to know now that my parents didn't sit by and let the mission take me away without a fight. I wasn't a kid that nobody wanted as I was frequently told by my white parents. My mother and Casmir loved me.

My mum knows the language of birds and every time she sees one she thinks it has a message for her. A message like someone is going to die or we're going to get a visitor or something lucky is going to happen, and when we get the predicted visitor and when mummy wins big money at cards I decide I want to learn this for myself.

She is surprised that I want to know about this stuff but nonetheless launches off with great enthusiasm about the different messages that belong to different birds. She also gives me a fascinating account of their various habits and where they like to build their nests and how. I've always wondered why the larger birds like the eagles and kites and ospreys have rough-looking nests that look like they've picked up a bundle of twigs and dropped them in a pile while the smaller ones like finches and honeyeaters
have delicately shaped and intricately woven nests.

‘Im beak an claw,' says mummy knowingly. ‘Jus im beak an claw.' Big beaks mean big nests and little beaks mean little nests. So it's all just a matter of what they can comfortably fit into their beaks and claws and weave together. That's very clever and makes sense and I can't believe I didn't work it out before. A deen deen lands on the front grass and calls out with its thin piping voice. In Victoria I've heard people call them rain birds and I ask mummy what their call means.

‘Im singing for rain,' she says. ‘Nussing else.'

The sand out the back under the African mahogany tree is the perfect place for bird-watching and I organise my folding chair and mummy's blanket and keenly scan the heavens for more of our feathered friends. But it doesn't take too long before we're disagreeing.

‘You didn't say that about brown kites before,' I say. ‘I think you're just making it all up as you go along.'

‘Nah, im different cos im sitting on la ground now,' says mummy testily. She is obviously exasperated at my lack of understanding. I think about this for a few minutes. So it's not as straightforward as it seems and there are many combinations and permutations to take into account. Like if the bird is airborne, sitting or walking, calling out while mobile or stationary, flying in a funny way, flying low to the ground, scraping its beak, hanging upside down. The list goes on forever.

A blue-faced wattlebird lands on my washing line and sings out in its shrill but melodious trill and then promptly shits before flying off. There is definitely a message in that and I ask mummy to decipher it.

‘Im just do toilet,' she says. ‘Nussing else.'

A brahminy kite lands on the edge of the roof above the kitchen and sits there watching us for a few minutes before it proceeds to sing the long and sombre song of the raptors. On it goes singing while mummy and I watch in silence. Then another one comes from nowhere and joins it and they sing together, a lingering and mournful song that chills me to the bone. They finish and on wings that sound like two hearts beating they fly away. Something important has happened here and I gather my thoughts before I look at mummy. She is still, her face in quiet repose.

‘What was that about?' I ask while I hold my breath. Something is telling me that I don't know if I really want to know the answer.

‘You flying away soon,' she says with her eyes still glued to the spot where the birds had been, her hands motionless in her lap. ‘You leabing dis place.'