Heat and Light (10 page)

I eat fried fish and salad. The islands are blue shapes in the distance. The group is performing a ceremony by the water. I sit by myself.

Julie comes over to me. ‘Are you okay?’

I nod. ‘I’m a little better. It’s just … Julie … how can we sacrifice … Have you met them? Hinter … and Larapinta?’

She nods in understanding. ‘They want this, too.’

‘Larapinta reads,’ I say.

She touches my shoulder. ‘This is for them.’ She points at the ceremony by the water. I look at Uncle Ron and the others. I see that they are holding petals of native orchids. They are dropping them into the sea.

After this and when everyone is fed, Uncle Ron talks about the approach and strategies again. It will happen tomorrow. I know what I have to do.

When Julie drops me off at the ferry terminal, guilt flashes across her face. ‘I bet you’re wishing you never got back in touch with me.’

I shake my head.

She continues with a sideways glance at my mother, ‘You don’t have to do this. You can go back to your life.’

‘How can I go back? How can I unknow what I know now? I’ve been in the dark for far too long. I know who I am now. I know what we have to do.’

She hugs me. My mother also hugs me goodbye. Both of them wait and wave me off.

I find Larapinta at the hidden slice of the beach, by the rotting jetty. Her roots shoot out when she sees me, her face shows some glint and when I reach out to her she entwines our fingers together.

I tell her I know what they are. They’re my old people. They’re spirits of thousands of years.

‘So if you’re back, it means you are with us,’ she says.

‘Yes, tomorrow.’ A shake starts in my knees and she comforts me until it stops. She walks me home and I lean on her. She tells me she kept the secret to protect me. She doesn’t know how they, as jangigir, came to be in the form they are in, but they know their purpose.

The house already smells musky and feels strange after my long day away from it. I turn on the lamp on the bedside table.

‘Let me make you something to eat,’ Larapinta says.

‘I don’t need …’

‘Yes, you do. Sit down.’

I hear the sounds of her roots tapping against the kitchen tiles, her flowered fingers opening drawers, fixing the cutting board. When I open my eyes I see she has made me an artichoke sandwich.

‘Thank you,’ I say.

‘You are too tired.’

I eat sitting across from her. It is almost impossible to get food down.

‘Why don’t you run away with me?’ I say. But I know it’s damn near foolish. Now, without me, without her, without us, there is no ancestral country, there is no Ki, there is no Moreton Bay.

But we have rooted, here, in this room, because anything outside means loss, and losing one another is like the cutting of history, the shredding of encyclopaedias.

I wait for her to say something, something that will be so very unhuman and unemotional. And she does, she talks logically about the weather: which way the wind will blow tomorrow to get them on course. I tell her to turn around and look at the window as I take off my clothes. The blinds are open and there is only darkness outside. I see her pale reflection in the window, and I see my own breasts as I pull off my tank top. We make eye contact as I step out of my jeans.

The kiss is like a crash. Without her hand – supporting my head, my neck, my shoulders – I would have whiplash. She puts her mouth in the flat between my breasts. Rubs her cheek against my nipple. I feel like all I can hear in my head is a speedboat travelling through water.

The sheets are cold when we find ourselves on the bed. She does not say one word and her eyes are like glow moths attracted to the light.

‘I’m not human,’ Larapinta reminds me. ‘You never used to let me forget it.’

In the early hours of the morning, when I walk out of the house I have been living in these past few weeks, and shine the torch across the street, I see that the trees have started to shed their leaves, and the yellow flowers stick to my feet as I walk by. I stop outside the house with the pick-up truck and walk over to the passenger’s side. A few hours earlier I had dropped in and asked if I could borrow the truck, and my neighbour had given me the keys. Now I start it up and head for the coloured buildings, the Science Centre. I’ve eaten my last custard tart, and it wasn’t perfect. It was a bit too eggy and the pastry had crumbled in my bag.

Larapinta left last night to gather the jangigir. She told me I had been very helpful in not giving the jangigir the formula for a week, as it had been designed to make them weak and docile. By today they will be at full strength. Larapinta has left me her e-reader, and she took no weapon. I know she has abilities and qualities that are not yet known to me, and I naively hope these would be enough so that we might see each other again.

I get out of the vehicle casually. If anyone’s here, if anyone questions me, I’m a little early for work this morning because I missed yesterday. It’s quiet. I shine my way to the door. My heart flutters when I wave my security pass at
the signal. To my relief it flashes green and unlocks. I twist
the handle. It is dark inside and I don’t bother turning on the lights. I get on a computer and log in – then do what Julie has told me. Her computer code gets through the security walls and into the camera system and shuts it all down. Julie said it will act as a temporary glitch and last an hour. They have these glitches all the time, so it won’t be too suspicious. I set the stopwatch on my phone.

The security on all the doors has also temporarily lifted. I walk quickly into the lab and get the new formula they have been developing. The one that will kill the jangigir. I carry all the formula out using a trolley I found in the bays. I go out the doors and load the formula onto the truck. It will go straight into the sea and dilute harmlessly.

I think our resistance has a chance. The plan was moulded around defence and attack. My part is to disable their systems, and take the weapons they would use against us, including the research and the recipe for the formula. Larapinta and my uncle have developed a plan to lay siege to Ki Island and abolish the infrastructure, using the combined forces of men and jangigir. I hope we have the numbers.

I drive the few extra hundred metres to the building next to the Science Centre, the orange one, which was the hospital and security base. I know that I can’t expect there won’t be people here and I’m worried about finding company. I have dressed like a security guard, white shirt, black pants. My hair’s tied back under a hat. Hopefully, they won’t look closely enough at my badges. I swipe myself in and keep my head down as I walk down the hallway. I pass a few people working with their backs to me. I have memorised the building’s layout from the map one of my uncle’s friends has given me. I sneak down the next hallway and into the storage facility opposite the medical supply room where they keep the weapons. I get in the room, take out my torch, and obtain three pistols and a weight of ammunition. I put it all in my bag, the company one they gave me when I started. There are five other pistols, more than I thought, and I remove the firing pins the way my uncle has showed me, pocket them, and place the guns back. Then I walk the hell out of there.

The bag is already getting heavy. Sweat is dripping from the hair pressed under my hat onto my face and into my ears. It is a miracle that I run into no one before I reach the door. In the car park I get into the vehicle, lying the bag down on the passenger’s seat, and hit the engine. As I shoulder out I see in the rear-view mirror a worker come out and look at me.

When I get to the ferry terminal the boat is already there, a worn ferry that my uncle has got his hands on. It has been painted with one of my father’s designs and his signature is lopsided on the cabin. I know it moves twice as fast as the old tinny. My relatives, mostly burly dark men with biceps I’m jealous of, quickly come up and offer to help transfer the formula. They take the guns with a sense of urgency.

My uncle stands in the prow holding onto the bowrail, his grey-white beard swinging in the breeze. He seems to be waiting for me to come to him.

I have promised Julie and my mother that this is the last of my involvement. That I will sit down here on the metal chairs and wait for the next ferry to the mainland, due in seventeen minutes. In that time, even from here, I will hear the sound of the jangigir overcoming the guards on Ki and ripping up the underwater wires and machinery. They will form a circle protecting Ki Island. And the people aboard the ferry will enter that threshold, holding the guns, just in case. I want to be alongside them. I look at my stopwatch again. More than half an hour has passed. I walk closer to the ferry and call to my uncle. Then see a movement out of the corner of my eye.

In the clear water behind the ferry I can see them. They are everywhere. Stretching out as far as my vision reaches. And then I know there are as many behind them. The brown reeds of their hair are all that is showing. They move in formations, in shapes similar to the last letter of the alphabet. Larapinta is one of them. There must be thousands. I step onto the ferry and stand next to my uncle. The water is rising around us and I can feel the force in the leaping waves and what we’re about to do.

LIGHT

Strike Another Match

The blackfella fashion here is contagious. Kitty wears a flanno over a blackfella T-shirt with a long floral red skirt and Dunlop volleys. I ain’t looking too flash like them mob here, even the little fellas with their basketball caps and mismatched sneakers. My glamour does not translate in desert country, red stains down the seams of my white pants. I need a hat to replace this crowding sun. The memory intrudes of the summer I spent with one married woman, a redhead, name buried because she is famous, or she lives her life with famous people and she is only famous by default. She rubbed sunscreen down the insides of my arms. I know you don’t burn, honey, she said. But I want to see you protected. Now, I think she did have a slight American accent, but I didn’t notice it often. I remember asking her if she was born in my city, and she answered perplexed. I’m from Dallas, honey. She left marks on me despite my gritted teeth because I had fallen for as many women that year as I had stopped for fuel and it was proving costly. They all tried to denounce their relationship status as little more than an old faded tattoo easily covered, but married was not what I was looking for. Tell you what, I still don’t know what it is I’m looking for but Alice is a good enough place to start. I feel like walking in a straight line through the desert with a metal detector pointed to the ground.

Real Moment

When I was growing up in Hervey Bay, the closest I got to a Real Gay Moment was when Maria Hapeta put a kiss on the Christmas card she gave to me.

High school was counter-intuitive to me. All I wanted was to fish and swim on my grandmother’s country in the best hours of the day. But I had to go to classes and mix with white kids, and think about ‘what I wanted to do’. So many decisions. I had gone to a Murri primary school. Now at high school I was the only black girl in my grade, though some kids were Maori, like Maria. People asked me why I didn’t hang out with the Toby boys. I told them it was because they thought killing frogs was cool.

I didn’t find out ‘what I wanted to do’ until I was fifteen. School was keeping me up at night. I was often awake in the flat hours of the morning, trying to ‘find myself’, or whatever, by eating cheese rings and playing Justin Timberlake just loud enough in the living room. On one of these evenings I turned on the TV and, surprisingly, SBS was working – our television was notoriously two-channel, which was why I never brought any of the white kids home after school. It was a French film, black-and-white, about two actresses living poor in Paris, trying to get a break. Don’t bother looking for it, I’ve searched many times over the years. One of the main characters was honey blond and the other was brunette. The brunette was a lesbian, I know this because they walked into a pub and one of the men pointed at her and yelled and the subtitle came up with the word ‘dyke’. I tried to look it up in the dictionary, but I knew what the word meant. For some reason, the video recorder had been left on, by my brother maybe, and it filmed the movie almost entirely. That whole week, I would re-watch the film in the early hours, convince myself I wanted to be an actress, like the brunette. I watched the scene in the bar closely: the brunette walking in with her motorcycle boots and opening her jacket, her lips pursed as she looked at another woman standing in the corner, the way she turned her head to the man as he said that word and drew her eyes down as if she had been slapped.

I moved to Sydney after high school, getting into the second-tier acting college. Mum and Dad had come around to it by then, and anyway, there isn’t much you can do to stop a hell-bent eighteen-year-old. I enjoyed my study in a dull sort of way, but I really enjoyed Sydney more than anything else, the clear harbour, the quiet old streets in The Rocks and the fast-moving people always around me. I was walking there one time in the afternoon and I literally stopped at the sight of two short-haired women stepping out of a cafe holding hands across the road. The taller one turned to the other woman and brushed her hair to the side, and then they both leant in for a kiss that was obstructed by the sudden traffic spilling down the lane. In a second they were gone; I wasn’t even sure if they had gone in the direction of the city or harbour. All I knew was that I was shaking, and had come to the realisation that this was part of the reason I had come here.

The next few weeks I tried to leapfrog myself into the unknown. I stood outside the clubs on Oxford Street, and was rejected entry because my only form of ID was a student card. I went to the bookshop, which was still open (I couldn’t comprehend a bookshop being open at 10 p.m. – in Hervey Bay, bookshops didn’t exist). I was overwhelmed by the gay titles everywhere. I made my way to the lesbian section and scoured the shelves, my attention caught by butch and fem cowgirl erotica and
101 Lesbian Sex Positions
. I timidly opened one up, my mind exploding at the stories spilling from the page.

I glanced at the register. The girl was tattooed with wide-rimmed glasses. She gazed back at me. I looked down at the book again, my breathing heavy. There was no way I could leave the store with this book, or any on that shelf. I walked out, red to the neck, passing a group of well-dressed arty types. I wouldn’t go to Oxford Street again. Instead, I began to breakfast at one of the sidewalk cafes in The Rocks, even though I could only afford the croissant with a coffee, in the hope that I would see those women again, or girls like them.

At college things were more than fine. I had made friends with quite a few Koori students, Jai and Annie in particular. Jai was from Newcastle and had been a good water-polo player until he quit for dancing. He was quick with his humour, having a one-liner for everything you might say to him. Annie was quieter, like me. She was a Wik woman, who sometimes cooked traditional food when she invited us to her flat. The best thing that happened was that Jai decided he needed a new computer, so he gave me his old one for a folded fifty-dollar note and a few drinks at the social society. It was my first computer, and I spent a wealth of time on it. I started with a Google search of lesbian erotica. After hours, I would lie back on the bed with my hand underneath me.

Even though I had good friends, I was lonely in my closeted, un-acted-upon existence. This settled a little bit when I found out Jai was bisexual. I would go with him to his performances on a Friday night at the theatre, and it would be crawling with young queer boys. I would sit there by the outdoor stage and watch Jai talk to them. He was such an easy talker, he never showed fear of the unknown. I was there every Friday night, although as far as I could tell, the only queer attendees were male. I was very hopeful, the way I scoured the crowd every week, just as ambitious as my regular attendance at that cafe in the Rocks.

Whenever I went home for a week and saw Mum and Dad and my older brother, I’d be hit by a surge of homesickness to think that I would have to go back to campus. On the first night, Dad would make his mean fish stew, and after eating we would go for a walk along the beach. Most of all, it was never cold. My legs browned, though I only wore jeans in Sydney anyway. Even though I loved to be home, I felt distanced from my parents a little bit, uncomfortable even. Mum didn’t ask if I’d ‘met a boy down there’, but her friends did. I considered telling my brother I thought I was queer. It was funny because I’d always expected he would be the gay one. In primary school he dressed up in my ballet outfits and developed boy crushes on action movie heroes. He played homo-erotic pranks on his mates in the football team. Now he was engaged to a very nice Samoan woman who worked for Queensland Rail and got our family free travel. I didn’t feel like I could tell him – only five years ago it seemed like none of this would happen. I was so happy for him but I felt an impending nervousness about going to their wedding. All my Aunties would be like, ‘It’s your turn next, bub.’ I did want my turn at love, but not in the way anyone in my family would expect.

In a grade eleven drama assignment, I had been grouped with Maria Hapeta. I had liked her since grade seven, though we had drifted in and out of each other’s social circles by then. When she called me over to be part of the group, she gave me a wide smile and I blushed. We developed a script as a modern response to
Romeo and Juliet
, and because there were only girls in our group, I was elected Romeo. This always happened to me. Must have been my arms and my height and how I took out the whole swimming carnival every year. It started way back in primary school when I was made Sporty Spice instead of my preference, Baby. Maria was an obvious Juliet. Her skin was shiny like cellophane paper and her teeth were like shells. I was nervously anticipating this one scene we wrote in, where Romeo rolls up to Juliet at a petrol station in a beat-up Corolla and tells her she’s pretty hot. Then Romeo, or me, kisses Juliet, or Marie, before being busted by Juliet’s father who threatens to fix him up.

We had done this peck thing in rehearsals, though I assumed we would go for it fully in the presentation for the class. Working with Maria got my blood jumping. She was so sweet to me, and she didn’t have to be. When the day came I ironed my shirt and slipped breath mints in my bag. But Maria would not kiss me. She did an elaborate neck trick so it looked like we were lip-locked, but no contact was made. Even though none of my classmates mentioned it, I felt so shame afterwards, so much so that I contemplated quitting drama.

Jai, Annie and I started a mentoring program for the younger Aboriginal students that came through the arts and performance school. In general, I was surprised about how switched-on and confident these first-years were from the get-go. Most of them had grown up in Sydney and wore flash jackets and dresses and stuff. I had come down from Hervey Bay with one pair of Target jeans and a handful of paint-splattered T-shirts.

My lecturers were really pushing me to do my best. With such a small group, some of the projects were quite emotional. I did a lot of performance pieces about being Murri. When I was up there on stage, I sometimes looked into the crowd, which often just filled the first two rows, and I wondered if there was someone out there for me.

In the end, after three years, it was in a grocery store that I met her. I had finished my degree and it was my last shop before I left for home on the weekend. My mum and dad were ecstatic about me coming back. Annie had got a gig lined up straightaway and Jai was staying on, but I had worked out I would go back to Hervey Bay and try to find some kind of work there, at least for the time being.

She was different from most of the people in the store, as she wore workers clothes and her red hair was up. We passed each other a few times in the aisles. I tried not to look at her, as I did with most straight-looking women I found attractive. I had this feeling that they would
know
, by my look, and be disgusted. She came up next to me while I was choosing mints for the plane trip.

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘Where’s the soup?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said quickly. ‘Why don’t you ask … ?’ I looked for a shop attendant.

‘There’s no one around.’ She smiled. ‘Short-staffed.’

‘Must be because of the end of uni,’ I said.

‘Are you a student?’ She looked so sophisticated. Red lipstick.

‘Ah, no.’ I cleared my throat. ‘I think I know where the soup is.’

‘I’ll follow you,’ she said. ‘It must seem funny, buying soup in summer.’

‘Hadn’t thought of it even.’

She continued. ‘We’re having a fire to celebrate the end of semester. It’s hard to think what to put on the fire. Soup works, I think.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘You’re a student.’

‘Finished now.’ She was balancing two zucchinis and a bag of lollies in her hand.

I hadn’t seen her around, but us arts mob more or less were quarantined from the rest of the student body. She followed me down aisle five, the pasta aisle, which looked promising.

She was saying, ‘I got a job just at the finish, though. Real estate.’

‘You like it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wish I spent more time on exams instead. Ah, here it is!’ She grabbed a tin off the shelf, smiling, suddenly excited. ‘Thank you! You’re welcome to come tonight.’

‘No worries,’ I said.

‘We’re in Bell Lane, babe.’

It so happened that Annie was going to the same party, which I realised when I met her for coffee, so she said she would pick me up. I wore new navy chinos, a white shirt and sneakers. We stopped at the bottle-o on campus and arrived at eight. There were so many people there. I saw the girl from the supermarket, whom Annie knew and introduced as Sally. She knew Sally from tennis. I looked at Sally’s calves, and I knew she would play quite well. She was wearing more casual clothes than this afternoon, short jean shorts and a tank top. The music was good, a bit of reggae. I noticed immediately that Sally had a lot of dykey friends. When I chatted to them I realised Sally had a girlfriend, a skinny, boyish girl wearing a stripy shirt.

One of the dykes was African, and her eyes lingered on me, making me nervous. She was very cool. At ten-ish a lot of people left for another party, including Annie, and Sally’s girlfriend. I had drunk too much and finally went to the bathroom, which was down the hallway. The African girl was washing her hands. We were almost trapped in the tiny sharehouse bathroom, wall to wall. She looked up at me and I mumbled something about coming back, leaving.

On the deck again I lay down in the hammock and soon Sally came and sat next to me. We talked about living away from family, tennis, and the power of the night. I told her it was my last in Sydney and she said she hoped it would be one I’d remember. Her body so close was making me dizzy.

I asked about her girlfriend, I’d forgotten her name, and why she hadn’t stayed.

‘Who said she’s my girlfriend?’ Sally replied, and she stared into my eyes until I pulled away and she smirked a little.

I barely noticed when she left for brief moments – to say goodbye to friends or get another beer out of the fridge or do something else related to being a host of a party. I only noticed when I realised we were the only ones left, and my watch said 2.30 a.m. She smiled warmly, her breasts pulled towards me, though contained in the singlet.

‘You got anywhere to be?’ she asked me.

‘Not really.’

‘My roommates have left for tonight. I should clean up, but I think I’ll wait until they come back in the morning. It was mostly their friends that made the mess, anyway. Girls are a lot tidier.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Would you like to go into my room? It’s cooler.’

I wasn’t warm, but I didn’t tell her that.

We went in and lay side by side on the double bed. She kicked off her thongs and pulled off her shirt, revealing a pink bra. I didn’t know what was happening. Then she leant over and started kissing me and telling me to take my clothes off – and in a rush we were naked and I was trying to breathe. It was what I had wanted for so long and I could hardly believe it, I kept thinking about her asking me about soup, and realised I hadn’t eaten a thing that night.

I looked at her in the pinch of the light. Her body was a perfect balance of soft and hard, of lean and curve.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked at one point.

‘Yeah,’ I stammered. ‘Just quiet.’

‘Well, that’s good, as I don’t want to talk,’ she said, and she brought my fingers to her slick opening and I gasped at the need of her. She was quick to come and she brought her still-shuddering body on to mine and rocked her pubic bone hard into me. I felt so warm my skin burned. I gripped her soft buttocks closer to me until I let out a sharp cry, followed by another. She rolled off me, we held hands and she fell asleep.