The Swan Book (23 page)

The cattle bells roll, and remind her of Aunty Bella Donna of the Champions singing sacred texts to unlock the terrifying memories of her people. Again and again, by ringing the bells she brought them to life, legendary heroes that stretched right back through the ages to the time when wisdom-singers like
Wainamoinen
of the
Kalevala
were walking their land,
swans came gliding from the marshes…came in myriads to listen…

The same old oracle was everywhere, even in the dust of rats. This time, Bella Donna was quietly singing the poetry of Ludwig Rellstab's
In der Ferne – In the distance – of fleeing one's home broken-
hearted,
hearted
, from Franz Schubert's S
chwanengesang D.957
. Hovering! Somewhere up in the sky! Asking the breezes to send greetings to a time when women stitched those white and golden swans in treasured embroidery that became heirlooms, before they fled along broad rivers towards the sea where white soot-stained swans were nesting in the burnt marshes.

Warren Finch did not stay asleep for long. The genies were too full of enthusiasm, divined more song and talked of seeing so fine a starry night.
Hey! Girl, look at that
, they called Oblivia frequently, constantly checking to see where she was as she stood in the darkness. They kicked rats away, and their laughter swirled about with the wind.
Hey! Girl, did you see that?
The car produced bounty – food, cooking utensils and bedding, more than anyone could have imagined would fit in its boot. A campfire was lit. Meals were cooked. Aromas filled the air. Wine and water appeared as though they had been divined from the windy earth itself.
You will feel pretty good while you are on this country, Boss
, they reassured him. He was on their land.
It fills you up with life. All the energy you need. You'll see.
The men exchange knowing looks. There is no need to speak. They all belong to the same game. They know what Warren Finch has to work out before they go back to the city.

Let's go, jila nungka,
Finch said flatly to Oblivia, after he had eaten every piece of meat on his plate. She had not eaten, or as Warren guessed, refused to eat. He could see hatred in her eyes, and felt how tense she was, but he took her by the hand, pulled her to her feet from the ground where she had been sitting near the fire, and led her back to the car. In this moment of pulling her away from herself, she knew he would overpower her life. Even the sensation of his hand touching her had sent her back into the tree in her mind.

Once Warren had left with the girl, the genies chatted lightly about city women, international woman who called him up night and day. Now therein lay the mystery: She was not in the
same league. They had seen enough of her on this journey to know that he must be regretting his mistake. She was just a kid. Well! She certainly looked and behaved like one.
What did he think was going to happen once they got back home?
Anyone could have told him not to go around picking up ‘damaged goods' girls from dysfunctional Army-controlled communities like the swamp. Main thing being that bloody place was her homeland.
The man's got enough troubles
. What was he thinking? The girl was overcome with shyness and here they were, a thousand kilometres away, and she would not even look at them, let alone speak.
What he went and done now is a wrong thing
. They knew how lightly he treated women, but thought he understood which women had any chance of standing up to him. Well! That was too late now. He had laid the idea of ‘worldliness' at the feet of a recluse. Who knew what was the matter with him?
He's gone too far.
They did not have to say what each of them already knew, that they could not fix this problem. It would not be like having a ‘small smart chat' to one of the city women he was tired of, who he wanted to go and get lost.

I am so tired
, Warren told her, after he had driven a short distance from the camp the genies had made for themselves, and threw his swag on the dirt.

Come here and let's get some sleep,
he said, pulling the trembling girl towards him, onto the swag, and into the blanket of dust swirling over them. The surrounding bush smelt of the rats that were rushing through the grass whining for food, which made her believe they would attack once she fell asleep. She felt nauseated by the closeness of this other person, but surveying the surrounding darkness, she saw that there was nowhere to escape in the dryness of the strange country that frightened her. Forced to lie together in the cold, locked for warmth like sheltering animals against a windbreak he had erected with the canvas of the swag against the car, his arms wrapped around her made her feel that
she was in the grip of a snake. She listened closely to the dry grass and shadows of scrub being rustled by the wind, singing stories and laws that she would never know, and knowing this single thing about being its stranger was like having the weight of the world on her shoulders. This was the kind of weight she carried to stop her from sleeping in this country. Whenever she drifted off to sleep, she would instantly be re-awakened; just by the simple fact of knowing she should not be there, and knowing that rats crept all over the ground searching for food. She felt the country's power. Knew it could kill her.

Every sound convinced her that his bodyguards, the genies, were in the bush waiting for her to run. She does not trust any of them. But how could they be lurking around, when from further away, she could hear them singing the country through the night, their voices resounding in the wind gusts, and echoing through the landscape, as though there were many others singing with them. Her instincts keep telling her to run, she cannot stand being near him, feels like death to her, but fearing he would kill her, she remains frozen, barely able to move. Whenever she moved slightly, even to breathe deeply, his grip tightened. But he slept easily: the songs travel with him, and he carries the spirits of homelands inside him. It makes him strong: the hands of the ancestors are in his own, acting in unison.

She lay very still in the hope that he would stay sleeping even though she did not want to be left awake to listen to the sounds of the country. She hears the sharp cry from a rat and imagines that a snake is killing it, and this convinces her that she is sleeping on
miya-jamba
, snake ground. She imagines snakes are everywhere and hates the place, and is hot from panicking to be off the ground. The thought of rats and snakes infested through every centimetre of this piece of country makes her growing hatred for Warren Finch grate that little bit harder, and she is desperate to move, but just when she
wishes to kill him and reaches around to find a rock to slam into his head, forgetting to fear she might touch a rat or a snake instead because she can't see a thing in the darkness, or that he will wake up and see what she is doing and kill her instead, something happens. She forgets to act – either to run off, or to kill him. She has changed her mind? No, that was not it. Her mind changes itself. It is at war with action. Fights decisions. She forgets to act when memories quickly regain control of her brain, and instead of fighting, she escapes with a flood of thoughts running back along the song-lines to the swamp, and the language inside her goes bolting down the tree with all the swans in the swamp following her.

He knew her terror. It was the fear of a child that even the rats sensed and were scattering in frenzy. What was he to do with her world? This was when he realised that he would never be able to reach her. Hadn't he given her a fair go? He had built a dream as complex and ingrained as her own, but where he knew that his would keep pushing him out in the world, she would always dig a hole to hide in. She was still the girl in the tree. Untouchable. Rolled up in a tight ball like a frightened echidna. Yes, it was easy to decide not to touch her. Perhaps he never would. What did it matter? Nobody would accuse him of being a paedophile or a rapist. Number one rule of his forefathers. What could he do? He drifted off into half-sleep like he always did, while thinking about a mountain of crises in any country that sprung to his mind, and through the wee hours of the night, he would spin by the world's troubles, resolving crises one by one, intervening step by step in other people's fortunes or misfortunes, in his dreams.

When the wind dropped, all she could hear was his breathing resounding through the sounds of owl fights, and screaming rats. Above them, she thought she saw spider webs being spun on fine threads that ran down from the power lines and across to the
low-growing mulga trees. These enormous webs were being woven thicker and thicker and spiders were flying through the air in search of places to anchor their threads, as though setting a trap to encase them during the night. She lay flat beside him as he slept, and drifted into sleep with the thought of touching the walls inside her tree, and dreamed of a struggling swan enclosed by Warren's icy body while Old Bella Donna sang from afar –
A swan with a slither of bone in its beak
.

The dawn landscape was grey and solemn as it revealed a silent vista of mostly grass and sparsely scattered scrub, until the baying of cattle echoed in a chain reaction that sallied back and forth from the distant horizons. When the sun rose, the cattle had already broken through spider webs and gathered around the two sleeping figures. She was in a cathedral of Law where marriages were always honoured but she would not honour hers. The morning air felt cold. So were her thoughts, vowing that nothing would spring from the dirt of this ground.

You will learn that you and I are going to stand for each other as the only ones we can trust, so never forget that I am your best friend, and only friend,
Warren said, preparing to leave, and added – always serious –
You remember that, and that will be the main thing I will want from you as a wife.

She looked at the landscape – a vista of sameness in every direction – and knew that this was why women went missing on journeys with their husbands. They were lost forever. This country would devour anyone walking in it that did not know it. Only local people would know how to move through it. A voice she recognised was surfacing:
Look around here
. She thought this wedding country was the home of stories about women thrown overboard, cast out, abandoned, those bodies lost in
wiyarr
spinifex waves.

Isn't it a great country,
Warren said, already flowing into the day ahead, and pushing aside the troubling dreams that had come to
him during the night, where he had met himself as a dead man, disoriented, weak, and his ghostly face full of disbelief, while being supported by the genies through the streets of the city, and he had watched as they walked on, to a grave he would be buried in.

Swans mate for life: that was what she thought. And if a swan loved its mate, then what would make one kill its mate as she had seen once in a sudden and vicious attack, alongside the hull? It was a silent death. There was no such thing as the dying swan call. It died without sound. She had no sound either, and knew what it was like to be without sound. This country would never hear her voice, or the language she spoke.

The genies' camp was a mess. Their smart clothes were abandoned over the ground, their pots, pans, and swags spread in a chaotic palette. Encircling it all, dead rats in their hundreds lined the periphery. Swarms of blue
Lycaenidae
butterflies, unusually massing in one spot, flew above the heads of Drs Hart, Mail and Doom who were now dressed in their oldest bush clothes, that might have been buried for years under clumps of spinifex. The three men were busy with the fire, creating breakfast, and totally oblivious to the blot they had created on the landscape.
Welcome home
, smiled Mail. Oblivia looked around at their camp. It looked as though they had not moved from their position around the fireplace from the previous night. They were listening intently to a distant magpie, just
jarrburruru
absorbed in its song.

Hear it? A Thessalian maiden no doubt,
Doom said. A slight smile of appreciation spread across his face as he spoke to Warren Finch.

Warren nodded casually. He began poking the fire with a stick to send up the flames. His mind was set on the black billycan steaming with the aroma of tea and with pushing away the shock of seeing his dead face in a dream, which was still clear in his mind. Oblivia noticed Dr Doom's face softening, the hardness of the day
before had disappeared. He looked like a boy staring into the distance, locked into studying the structure of the magpie's tune. After a while he stood up, and faced the direction of the songster. He whistled the song perfectly. The bird replied. A song war continued until the bird flew from twig to twig across the ground to investigate, and seeing how it had been tricked, flew off.

Would you like to have some owl's eggs?
Snip Hart asked her. He had been squatting beside the fire, stirring a large fry pan amidst the smoke, but had come over and spoken quietly while handing her a plate of food. She looked away in disgust. She was not eating owl eggs.
Eat it,
Warren demanded in a voice that made her wince at the ferocity of it. Her eyes rested on the wanderings of a rat daintily sniffing over each corpse of its dead friends. It touched the tips of grey bloodied fur with its nose as though it was searching for a faint breath of life or a ticking heart, before moving on.

The girl could not understand what the genies thought the reason was for spending most of the night killing rats. They told Warren that these were plague rats
, were attracted to the light of the fire.
There was blood on thick sticks of wood resting on the ground beside the fireplace, right next to the king-sized frying pan filled with bright yellow scrambled eggs. She tried to guess how many owls' eggs had been taken from their nests and looked at the landscape of spinifex
kinkarra
and grasslands, where nothing much grew higher than a metre off the ground. The girl tried to locate where owls would nest in those plains where there were no significant trees, except mulga. She remembers owls nesting in the ghost ships on the swamp and she gets up and feels that she is starting to walk off towards home, which feels very close in her mind, but Warren makes her sit on the ground. The plate of food is placed in her lap. He repeats this exercise a number of times before she realises that she is not going anywhere.