Heat and Light (3 page)

Hot Stones

Thirteen is the age that makes you. I lived in the Hill End Road house with my mother and grandmother. When I complained about no electricity, or that the toilet was outdoors, my grandmother said, ‘Colin, look,’ pointing to the grasslands that surrounded our property and the mountain they held. ‘You are living and breathing on country. This makes you my very special grandson.’

When dinner had been prepared and I’d eaten with my usual ferocity, I would sit eagerly by my grandmother’s side and wait for her yarnin’ time. Even when I could barely keep my eyes open, I put my head to the floorboards and listened.

As the only child in the house, I liked when my cousin Amy came to visit with my uncle, and we would nick the quad bikes at the car shop on the corner and race through the flats. The bikes never had much fuel, so we knew we could only go so far – our perimeter was the most-times empty creek bed or Magpie Rock.

I knew we were both itching to go further, knowing that when we got home, Amy would have to go before dusk, back to the city, and I would be thinking about school the next day.

School and the other kids was still something I was negotiating. My father had come from Ireland so I wasn’t very dark. When I passionately shared a few of the stories my grandmother told me, the other kids called me half-caste. It didn’t really stop me, though; I even spoke up in English class, because the teacher was talking like we weren’t even here before, and I got kicked out and had the whole oval to myself until lunchtime. I made a nest out of the twigs. I was the sort of kid who couldn’t stop touching the earth, sculpting it with my hands.

That was when I saw Mia. She was beautifully brown. Her face was brown and her arms were brown and her legs were brown. She was walking with her adoptive mother – they had come through the gate at the bottom of the oval. I gathered up my bottle caps and put them in the pockets of my shorts and scrambled over the banks and followed them. I knew I should have made myself known and helped them find their way, but I straightaway felt embarrassed that I wasn’t in class. They would smell the cigarettes on my breath and think I was a delinquent. Plus Mia was dressed all pretty, too, shiny black shoes and white socks. Too flash for us Murris here.

They disappeared into the school office. After lunch I saw she was in my class. I rushed home and told grandmother, ‘There is another black kid in my class! A girl!’

Grandmother said, ‘Go easy. I have to see if we’re related, first.’

Mia had come from up north way. I talked with her and found she tolerated my humour. I shared with her half of the biscuit that my mother packed me.

While we were sitting under a tree I felt a sharp sting on my leg and said I’d been bitten. ‘Probably a spider or something,’ I said, rubbing the red mark on my knee. She looked down at my leg and laughed. ‘That’s an ant bite.’

We hung out after school. I took her to see the places I took my cousin, and we found our own places, too.

One of these places was the small steep hill near our property. It crawled with a sort of shrub and was a challenge to climb. Mia was new to the terrain, and often stopped to touch the leaves of certain trees. I was used to her slowing us down. She pulled one of the dry vines out from under the small plant. The plant had little round berries, the colour of bush tomatoes, except they were fuzzy.

‘These look like what we have at home,’ Mia said. She was excited by it. ‘The old women, they told me about it. They use it for bush medicine.’

‘For what?’ I asked.

‘Headaches, toothaches, all kinds of things. When a girl has her period, too.’

I blushed for some reason and even got my shoelaces caught.

I noticed that Mia liked to draw in class. When the two-week anniversary of our meeting came around I got her a book –
The Art of Drawing Trees
– from the flea market at the showgrounds.

I’d say I was in love. My heart burned and my stomach dropped into my pants.

She was ballsy and she was fast. We raced each other. Her legs were like stalks – and she had the skinny Murri ankles. She beat me still.

She came home with me most afternoons, when we were tired and hungry. We sat on the floor drinking ginger beer and I was in bliss having all my favourite people around me. Mum and Nana loved her as much as I did.

Mum and Nana were in the kitchen cooking chicken. Knowing dinner was a long way off still, Mia and I were planning the route for a race. It was going to be from the creek to Magpie Rock. Mia felt for the dusty curtains behind her and put her head outside; her nose twitched.

‘Is it going to storm?’ she asked when we stepped outside.

One side of the sky was blue and the other was black, so it could go either way.

‘Don’t wait ’til the migar n maral,’ my grandmother would say to me. ‘Don’t wait until the thunder and lightning.’

Mia was wincing at the first sign of moisture dropping from above.

I goaded her. ‘You scared?’

She gave me a hurt look, and mumbled something about having to get home. She disappeared into the darkness. And even though I would see her again the next day, I was devastated and I went to bed cradling her scent. The storm didn’t even hit.

What I didn’t get was how the other kids treated her at school. Where they treated me with an acceptance sharpened by a respectful weariness, every class was built as a game around laughing at her. Mick Hammer called her names I didn’t quite yet understand. And Mick’s likely girlfriend, Emily (it wasn’t official yet), said she was dog ugly.

Mia was still herself in class and Mum would say to her, ‘They’re just jealous of your looks, bub.’

Mia didn’t talk of the family that she might have had and might have known. She loved her guardian, though Mia said she was always telling her not to do things. Mia would imitate her to a tee; ‘Mi, speak English! Mi, don’t swear, Mi put your shoes on, Mi don’t eat that.’

One day Emily came to school unable to talk because of a toothache. She was struggling with it and she would have to wait ’til the weekend to go to the dentist.

Mick held her hand as if she was dying. When they walked from class to class everyone stared at the way she held her mouth like it might fall off. On the third day of this, Mick said, ‘Can anyone help her?’ My mother was a nurse before she raised me, and the women in town often called her up to ask her things, but there was no way I was going to help Emily.

Mia surprised me with her benevolence when she whispered, ‘Those berries we saw on the hill, Colin.’

Mia went back there without me and got a handful of the berries off the tree. The next day she walked up to Emily on the playground. Emily looked at her suspiciously. Emily was the one that had started the trend for all the girls in our grade to not go within ten metres of Mia, and walk fast when walking past her, which meant that Mia was always by herself when the girls and boys were split up. If one of the girls forgot, Emily would snort her horse-like giggle and say, ‘Oh, you got fleas now.’

Emily must have had the toothache so bad because when Mia said, ‘Here, put these in your mouth, they will help. Don’t swallow,’ Emily looked left and right and accepted them in her hand. When Mia lingered, Emily opened her nasty mouth and said, ‘What are you looking at, dog? Get away from me.’

I took Mia away and said, ‘Why did you help her?’ Mia just shook her head.

Before the next class, I went to have a smoke in the out-of-bounds area behind the stand-up shacks. Mia, like always, refused to come when I went for a smoke.

When I got back to the classroom, everything had changed. I learnt Emily had had an allergic reaction, her mouth and her whole face had swelled up, and she was taken to the hospital. Mia was in the principal’s office. When the teachers scolded her, called her evil, she said nothing and looked down, refusing to make eye contact. She looked like she was smiling to herself. It infuriated them further.

But when she saw me afterwards, she was upset and said quietly, ‘I didn’t mean to. Wasn’t gammon with her or anything. You know that, right? I got ’em confused.’

I kicked at a stone in our path. I was angry. She was suspended for a week and I wouldn’t get to see her. The principal said he showed some leniency in not expelling her because the next school was an hour away.

I walked her home. We were a street away from her house when we both turned around at the sound of a car zipping behind. It was Mick Hammer and his crew, his brother, Ant, driving. They screamed at Mia as they went past, and screeched the car to a halt in the middle of the road.

The shriek made my chest heave. I started to walk right around the car, though Mia wasn’t following.

‘I just want to ask if she’s okay,’ Mia said.

‘No,’ I said, dragging her. ‘C’mon.’

We were almost running when we stepped off the road. I didn’t get her going fast enough for her not to hear Mick’s spray; he yelled he was going to kill her. We raced each other to her house; I let her win and she knew it.

‘When am I going to see you again?’ I said, forlorn and not out of breath. I stared up into her honey-brown eyes.

She must have known I wanted to hug her because she folded her arms across her chest. ‘We’ll meet every day at the hill, okay? At four.’

‘You better,’ I said.

‘No doubt ’bout it.’

It was only when I turned away that I saw her house had been pelted with shit. I drew my eyes away from the sight and to the letterbox on the street – it was crowded with envelopes. I opened them all. Some had already been opened but stuffed back in. It must have been weeks’ worth. Hate mail. Mia hadn’t told me.

By the next day I had forgotten about Mick and the others, I was dreaming of my life with Mia. The curve of her neck, those legs on show. In the classroom I observed the other girls and wondered why I didn’t feel the thump like I did for her.

When the bell rang I slapped my backpack on and ran to the hill. I was there until 5 p.m. before I realised she wasn’t coming. She must have only been around me because of proximity. Now that she didn’t have to anymore she had no interest.

Even Mum’s warm shortbread didn’t help. My grandmother said, ‘Cheer up, grandson. You are too young to be looking backwards.’

I retired to my bedroom early, surprising both of them.

I heard my grandmother tread labouredly to my door. ‘Don’t you want to hear a story tonight? Mum has a pie in the oven.’

‘No stories,’ I said.

The call at 9 p.m. sat me up. Nobody ever called us. No one else in our family paid their phone bill, our rellies just showed up at the house and didn’t let us know they were coming.

My mother was whispering and when she saw me her eyes got smaller.

‘What is it?’

‘Go to bed, Colin. I’m going out. Stay with Nana and I want you to do everything she tells you to do.’

I stood tall. She saw I wasn’t going to move.

She said, ‘Mia hasn’t come home …’

Our headlights found Mia’s shirt, floating like a dollar note in the dust and mist of the night. We stopped the car and her guardian got out first. The way she ran down the bank I knew she had located Mia. I shut the door against my side when I got out, but the sharp and immediate pain paled to the thwack of the horror I got when I saw Mia bent over herself in the grass.

At first it was like I didn’t understand why there was so much blood. I thought the leeches had got her. They were bad down there in the swampy area. As my mother moved past me to Mia I registered the mud on her cheeks and underneath her eyes. Her stomach was raw skin and there was blood growing on her jeans.

We raced to the hospital, surged through the Emergency doors and were hit with a buffer. The white women whispering, ‘Rape doesn’t take priority to heart attack. You’re going to have to sit down.’

I snatched the television remote from the woman, pulling it apart like Lego blocks and smashing it under my feet.

Mia was making her first noises of hurt. And the woman kept whispering, ‘They’re all crazy, twisted, that’s right. Out of control.’

I heard that when they asked Mia, ‘Who?’ she closed her eyes and started to tremble.

It was a few days until I got to see her in the hospital room. Mia wouldn’t look up at me, and I was afraid to get too close.

I knew it was the best thing for Mia to move away, but for a long while, all through high school especially, I thought about her dying every night. I couldn’t shake it. As soon as I could I left the mountain and the stories behind.

Years later, when I did find myself missing it all, prodding for a former version of me that wasn’t sculpted in anger – what do they say in Sydney: Aboriginal men are always angry – it was maybe too late; my grandmother had gone and my mother was an old woman who had turned timid. The Hill End Road house of generations had been sold and the mountain was out of my mind’s eye. I wasn’t a bush boy anymore, not a bush man. I had been in Sydney for almost a decade. I had stopped ticking the box. I thought, what’s the point? By then I had seen Mia at least three times: on the Parramatta train, in the Chinatown food court and dancing in a flash club on Oxford Street. She told me if I was going to make my way back home I’d better do it soon before the dust had covered my tracks.

Skin

Outside, a rosella perched shyly on the edge of the bird bath. Marie watched her daughter, Irma, light up when she saw the bird, and she stumbled towards it. Marie soon noticed there was another rosella there, a smaller one. Irma’s hair shone a bronze colour. She and the pair of birds coexisted in the outside space in the shade for the afternoon. Marie looked up after every shirt she folded. There was something about seeing your darling when she didn’t know she was being watched. She felt Irma close to her skin. The sun interchanged. Irma’s mouth moved against her cheek, speaking words into the passage. Her thumb rested between her lips and nose.

Evidently an afternoon often changed quickly in the valley. The air wolfish, the sky pale lilac, growing dark too soon. Irma lifted her head when her father spread out of the screen door and told her to come inside. Griffin had his arm around her shoulders as they came in together.

‘Quite breezy, isn’t it?’ he remarked, closing both doors behind them.

‘I can hear it,’ Marie said. She put the washing basket down and bent to touch a piece of Irma’s hair, stuck to her cheek.

‘You hungry, darling?’

Irma nodded, still mute in her imaginings.

‘Dinner will be ready soon.’

Their son, Pete, had found the dog and held it across its belly like a teddy bear. He had spent most of the day in bed with a head cold. Marie picked up honey from the woman, June, who lived around the corner, and spun it into strong tea. Pete didn’t like hot drinks and let it cool on the bedside, so when she fetched his empty mug the honey had sunk to the bottom like sand in the ocean.

When the weather turned this way they were reminded of the thin structure they lived in. The plates in the cabinet shook for three minutes. Griffin moved quickly to shut every window in the house, so what resulted was a closed feeling, a whirling sound that haunted a part in Marie’s consciousness, an old anxiety, not forgotten.

The gust passed and Marie and Griffin and the children went out the back to look at the foggy calm. When her sister Pearl came wading through the long grass, her hands on the hips of the ironbarks, part of Marie was unsurprised to even call out, ‘I knew the wind would bring you.’ Griffin and Marie hurried down the slope to help her – she was a dirty weight, belly protruding in her sweaty white dress, mud on her knees.

‘My goodness,’ Marie said, rubbing Pearl’s cheek in an effort to warm her, for as usual her skin was parched.

Pearl said, ‘I need to eat.’

‘Oh, love, of course,’ Marie said. ‘I’ve got a pie in the oven. I’ll bring a piece to you.’

They helped her up the stairs and into the house. Griffin set her down in the armchair with a blanket on her knees. He got a bucket for her to soak her bloodied toes. Marie conjured from the kitchen a thick piece of meat pie, a tall glass of freshly squeezed apple juice and a cup of tea, and put it in front of her.

The children sat silent on the floor, eyes on Pearl. Pearl ignored the children, their names didn’t pass her lips; she had forgotten them. Even they saw she was pregnant. Her breasts squirmed out of her dress.

‘Not the pie, then?’ Marie said. ‘A boiled egg?’

Pearl agreed to the egg, hard-boiled, and small cut squares of pan-cooked bread. She ate while Marie got the children ready for bed.

Marie bathed Pearl. Naked, Pearl was excess skin. After the initial surprise of her size, she was beautiful as she always was, a different beauty now. She was full with a fluid whistling under her skin.

Pete’s gruff cough came through the wall, a cough that seemed older than him. Marie tested a smile on her sister. ‘A boy? Or a girl? I wonder.’

Pearl’s face remained blank and Marie let all talk of the baby fold, the where, when, who. She bit her tongue at the need to say how wonderful it was to be a mother and to tell her sister how her life would change. Pearl didn’t seem like she wanted to be pressured with this sort of talk. In the morning, Marie would see if Pearl wanted a doctor. There might be a problem finding someone to see her. They’d have to make do. Pearl had come to her for a reason.

After the bath, Marie dried Pearl, starting at her ankles, moving up her legs to her waist. Pearl’s shoulders were high and tense. She said there was no need to dry her hair. Marie set her up in Irma’s bed. Pearl’s webbed feet reached the wall. Pearl spoke bitterly of her backache, and the sleep the baby had taken from her.

‘I am going to look after you,’ Marie said. She paused, and reached out to rub Pearl’s stomach. ‘The two of you.’

Pearl bit her nails like she had when she was a child. Her lips were blistered.

‘It will all turn out fine.’ Marie patted her again.

Griffin was in bed when she got to their room. He gave her a look that she knew he had been saving until they were alone.

‘I thought she …’

‘I did, too,’ she said.

‘Is she going to stay here?’

She nodded.

Griffin nodded in agreement. ‘I wonder where she’s been all this time.’

‘I won’t ask her. Not yet. She’s been through a lot.’

She turned the light off and got into bed. She was careful not to shift too much next to him to get herself comfortable. It was an old mattress, and you could get stuck into a groove. It went quiet. A few moments later, Griffin added, ‘I’m more worried about the children.’

‘They will get to know each other. Fine, you will see.’ Already Marie was turning towards the side of the bed. ‘I’m going to check on her.’

‘Marie?’ Griffin called her.

‘Yes?’

‘Come ’ere.’

She put her head against his chest and he brought her hands into his. He let go of her for a second to adjust himself under the sheet. He then moved her hand to slide into his pants.

‘Yes,’ he said. He sighed deeply.

‘Is this the right way for you? The best I can?’

‘A bit … yes.’

She repeated her movements for a few minutes.

‘Hang on,’ he said, springing up. ‘I think I need to go. I’ll be quick.’

~

Adopted into the Martin family in a house in Bardon, Griffin had never known his birth family. He had skin like pencil, thick eyebrows, and was large handed and awkwardly handsome at seventeen. He had gone to a private boys’ school and been chosen to represent his country in the national school cricket championships. At seventeen, boys were men.

He had to travel down to the coast to represent the school for a function. He no longer remembered what it was for, or any detail, just that when he drove away from the function he got hopelessly lost. That night he was alone for the first time, without his team or his parents. His father was a doctor and his mother was a nurse and they had wanted to go with him, but that night they were both working and Griffin had said, insisted, that he didn’t need them there.

His father had just bought him a car. A red Datsun. It was hard luck he couldn’t find his way back. His new car, he soon realised, had a temperament that wasn’t cooperative. He began to smell something and looked through the window at smoke pummelling from the engine. He stopped the car by the side of the dirt road and got out to inspect the bonnet warily. He didn’t know what to do – wait or go find some help. He didn’t have the slightest idea of where he was. It was dark. The streets led nowhere.

Griffin walked for a while, looking for a house or someone he could ask. He saw a light in a park. There was an Aboriginal family grouped together, food cooking over a fire, and he was hungry. They saw him standing there. Marie, fifteen, was the one prodding the fish with a stick. The fire was a colour he had only seen in zinc. He walked forward. That image marked his life. Marie, a dust-coloured girl, fed him fish in a park.

When he took the piece of fish from her she glowed with the fire as she smiled. He saw the dark corners of her eyes, and he smiled, too. The fish tasted taut and sinewy, with a layer of sweet oil, the juices dripping down his chin.

Brought back to life by these first few bites, he saw Marie’s sister. She lay out in the grass, neck elongated, under an ironbark tree, humming to herself. When she moved to look at him, he turned away.

Marie’s cousins and brothers came with him to the car. Nocturnal like all youths, they were wired for the late hours, and rowdy, stirring the empty streets. This was their territory, Griffin understood; they didn’t need a sign or paperwork.

‘That can’t be your car!’ they said, rushing to it excitedly, stroking the smooth red top. They laughed and joked with him as if he was one of them. These muscly dark boys pushed the car down the street to the service station. There was no room left to touch an inch of the car, so he walked beside them, feeling foolish at first. On the way he told them something about himself: he wanted to play cricket for Australia.

‘They’re not going to pick you,’ Marie’s brother, the age of an uncle said. ‘No black’s ever going to get on the team.’

Griffin’s dad would have disagreed with him. He told Griffin he would make it. He’d been bowling Griffin out the back since he was a toddler. At the service station, Griffin called his father to pick him up.

When he came back out the fellas shook his hand and said, ‘Come over here anytime. You know where we are.’

One of them stood forward for the group and said, ‘You like our sister, eh?’

Griffin felt his face turn plum.

‘If you hurt a sister of ours, there’ll be trouble.’ They exchanged wild smiles.

When Griffin got back to Brisbane and told his family of his encounter; they did not like it.

‘They are not your sort,’ his father said firmly.

In conversation with his parents, Griffin agreed with their interests, looking down into his tea. He told them only what they wanted to hear. But the minute his car was fixed he was down the highway again.

He soon lost count of the times he stood by Marie’s door, and she came out, always smiling, looking like the first time he’d seen her. Marie’s family made sure there was no chance he was related, and they weren’t breaking rules of kinship. It was a two-year courtship, in which time they were never left alone together, even chaperoned to the cinema by Marie’s Aunty. They were married in a church in Mudgeeraba.

Griffin’s parents had a section of the house for them, and they moved in. On their wedding night, they drove quickly down the coast when they heard the news that one of Marie’s brothers had died by electrocution. This brother had told Griffin, just before the wedding, that he was part of the family now.

A short time after they married, Marie heard her father was getting close to returning to the earth. As the eldest daughter, she would be the one to look after him while he died. Griffin would not deny her that. They moved to Hune Hill. Griffin’s car wasn’t the prized possession it had once been, with scratches and dents on the side. He had stopped playing cricket, and, not long after the conception of their first child, enlisted in the war.

~

Over the next months, as she looked ready, Pearl became increasingly agitated. She lay in the bath, the only place she felt some relief.

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she said to her sister.

‘We can handle it,’ Marie said.

Marie took care of her sister, responding to any requests. Her darling Irma was her little helper, assisting her with the meals and the garden while Griffin worked long hours at the butcher shop.

Pearl said sometimes she thought the baby would kill her. She had gotten so ill-proportionally big that she could no longer use the front or back door of the house. She got in and out for an occasional smoke, or for a wander into the bush, through the kitchen window. Marie had given up wondering why this was easier for her. She watched Pearl put her bottom down on the ledge, tilt her hips, and push her feet forward. Perhaps the doorways didn’t invite her path. Her body was moving to the ironbarks – called by a mysterious pre-natal rhythm. Marie made sure the windowsill was clear of clutter: kitchen utensils, matches and children’s teeth. She kept the window open.

Every day Marie felt distressed that she lacked the knowledge to help her sister. She tried to remember how the old women had helped to deliver her own children. But all of her children had come early, quickly, and much of it was a blur. It was clear this baby of Pearl’s was late. When she felt the baby it had turned, ready for delivery. She thought it could be dead until it moved unexpectedly under her fingers. Without acting on the old people knowledge, or white medicine, she was helpless. They had tried everything. Marie had walked with Pearl for hours at a time each afternoon, tracing their tracks through the dry, dull earth, and maintained morning massages and cups of herbal tea.

Leaving Pearl in the bath, Marie and Irma went for a visit to the cemetery. The girl was like her; the toxins in the house weren’t doing her good. She hinged on emotion. They walked through the scrub up the hill. They said this place was a lightning point because of the history here. She made out the small white sticks in the ground. The Kresinger circle. Here was where her unborn and stillborn babies also lay, with their ancestors’ bones.

There was a bench under an ironbark tree. She sat Irma on her lap, pressed the warm back of her head against her breast. She could see the whole valley from here. She spoke low, the words that she knew rumbling through, the wind making a part. Irma was serious in concentration with her, in connection.

She didn’t feel lighter as she usually did talking with the old people. There was no sudden clarity. She saw Irma’s fist around something.

‘What have you got, my baby?’

Irma opened her hand to a small finger lime. ‘Can we go home now?’ she whispered.

‘Yes, we can,’ Marie said.

On the way down from the hill she saw finger limes everywhere. She picked them up and carried them in her skirt. She had seven. Irma skipped ahead of her, the backs of her feet peppered black.

Marie put down the handful of fruit on the kitchen bench. She thumbed her way through an old baking book. Pineapples and other fruit can induce labour, she had read once, and here she read it again. On the next page was a baked key lime tart recipe. Cooking was a calm in chaos – passed on by the women who had shaped her – Marie had learnt to solve problems with method. By the next morning she had organised as best she could a foolproof ensemble of ingredients. The kitchen was her base while Irma and Pete were at school, Griffin was at work and Pearl was resting in the bath. She opened the limes, used the juice and skin, a scatter of macadamia nuts from the tree out the front, cream, avocado and honey. She set the tart in the oven. It had pale and mysterious energy, pulsing there. She watched it with great anticipation. She did not tell Pearl of her exact plans, but hoped her sister would start to smell the tart from where she lay, ridden in the bathwater, and a comforting mystery would take shape.