Heat and Light (9 page)

The light on is a curiosity. Maybe someone forgot to turn off the lights before they evacuated. It is orange, like the bulb is high-voltage.

I find a vantage point where I can see most of the island and the sea stretched around it. I stay there as long as I can, but what can I do? It’s a dying place, more or less. The beauty is dying – all around – the industry is strangling it. The wires they are putting under the sea and the water they will pump away will destroy all of this.

There is a groping sense of relief that I feel something: for this place, in this place. My country. My dad’s country. But this relief quickly turns into a bitter sense of loss and regret, almost self-loathing in despair.

Later that day as I’m rowing up the island, close to the dock, I overhear an animated conversation. Two voices. I approach hesitantly. Larapinta is talking to Hinter, their backs to me. They are speaking in language. It sounds like Indigenous language. Larapinta is singing. Her voice is a rush in my ears. I cling to the reeds. When the boat drifts further forward and Larapinta sees me she stops. I try to make sense of what I’ve just witnessed.

At first we speak to each other like the other night didn’t happen. Though she carries her weight around me. I want to question her about the language and what she was singing, but she chooses this moment to let her shoulder clip mine, and her lips to brush against my hair.

I look at the others, who aren’t watching. I ask her if she’s coming in the boat.

‘Not today.’ She keeps looking over at Hinter and the others. I think sometimes they communicate telepathically. I think she doesn’t want me to know something. I don’t know what’s happened.

When, after my shift, I go back to the island and Larapinta is not there, I suddenly feel this furious rush; I had wanted to ask her about the language. I pick at the dirt under my fingernails and wait awhile, but she doesn’t show.

Milligan has made me a coffee. Normally it would look like a nice gesture, but Milligan’s sadistic. I don’t usually drink coffee anyway, it makes me anxious. As I predicted, it wasn’t an onya meeting. He started off with saying he didn’t see any progress with me.

‘You’re distracted. What is it? You can tell me,’ he said. ‘You’re slipping off the plate, Kaden.’

I tried to reason that everything was fine.

‘If it’s them taking the formula, we can get Jack out there with you.’

‘They’re taking their formula,’ I lied.

I haven’t been going out regularly since last week, and I don’t give them the formula in the way I used to. I talked to Larapinta, I told her about the increase of chlorine and she said they had been feeling a difference since taking it. Larapinta and the others worked out for themselves it was a trick; they agreed they didn’t want it. They have started to wean themselves off it gradually. I’ve been covering it up, tossing the remainder in the sea and watching the dark streak it leaves. From talking to Jack in the lab, I know the shit would eventually kill them, and they’ve been developing another, more vicious substance, that will kill them faster.

Milligan says, ‘I know you’re connecting with them. But you’re putting it ahead of your job, it’s distracting you. I hired you because I thought you could handle the pressure. People trust you. You make them listen.’

I had to stop myself from crying. I knew I could easily walk out of there, walk off the job, take it from there. The coffee was weak, it tasted like soap suds. I let the meeting draw to a natural close, let Milligan know he had made his message clear, and then I left for the day.

My dad gave me a language name. Kaden means orchid. Dad would paint flowers when he wasn’t painting dots. He never stopped. It was always the next one. But sometimes he gave himself the time to do the flowers. Maybe a Sunday afternoon, I was home and he was in the backyard. Mum said she wanted to call me Sylvia, Dad had won after a best-out-of-five in dominoes, four to one. I’d like to think my fate was more than just chance. Why did Dad have to name me in a language I don’t know? It was insult to injury. Julie says that her dad speaks a little of their grandmother’s language to her. I wonder if my dad would have, or did.

From the art, Dad’s estate, Mum and I have enough money to live comfortably, with no worries. Though why would Mum move from our family house, and why would I not try to make a decent career for myself?

Dad was already pretty well known in the Brisbane scene for his glasswork before Tanya Sparkle became President. He had a few paintings showcased in a little New Farm gallery when an art critic tapped him on the shoulder and told him that’s where the money was. Just around when all those reforms took place, the government set up Yarapi, and they enlisted Dad straightaway. Dad and my uncles must have thought it was a good thing at the time, Brisbane’s first Aboriginal art gallery. But it was only the start of things, here and around the country. It was a factory. They had the artists working twelve hours a day to produce. And the art didn’t belong to them, not at the end of the day. The money started rolling in and Dad’s art was commissioned everywhere – they wanted his art in parliament house and on planes and footy shirts. I watched him wade into the public side of things, the interviews, the appearances. It wore him down pretty quickly, the expectations. A few years later they also started the generational thing. The children of this generation of artists were worth a lot, like the offspring of a racehorse.

There was one summer where Dad sold his first million-dollar painting to buyers in Russia and went from one side of the country to the next talking about art he had no passion for, art that was supposedly his cultural expression but had become something that ate at him. That was the summer we lost him. A few days after he came home, Mum found him in the bath, fully dressed. An overdose, the doctors said.

By the afternoon I’m sitting next to Julie at the bar and know she’s also thinking about her father. Our fathers were best friends, and family men. Julie reveals to me her times spent with her dad on Ki when he told her things – like that the old people who have gone are still in the land.

She has admitted to me the real reason she moved back home was her dad is dying. It is a cancer he got from inhaling paint fumes in those gallery spaces.

‘How long does Uncle have?’ I say, quietly shaken, even though he’s been poorly on and off. I put my arms around her and it is a natural thing, we know each other enough for this now.

‘We’re not sure. Maybe six months. Maybe more.’ She wipes the tears from her eyes. ‘Hey, it was your mum, you know.’

‘What do you mean?’ I say.

‘It was your mum who stopped them making me an artist. Enlisting me. She protected me from them. The agents and the suppliers. And I think she did the same for you.’

I nod, and look at the screen above my head, the news headlines flashing in red.

‘God, Tanya Sparkle,’ Julie says. ‘Enough is enough.’

I drink my cider. Julie has a fancy-looking mocktail. We’re close enough to exchange smells: her, mint and paw-paw lotion – me, sweat and burnt wood.

‘We’re fighting them,’ Julie says.

‘What?’

She blinks her blue eyes again like she regrets her words. ‘My dad. Uncle Theo. All of us mob.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Because you’re the government,’ Julie says. ‘Who you work for.’

‘I’m family,’ I say. ‘I’m not one of them.’

Julie puts her hand down hard on my shoulder. ‘I know.’

‘What are you going to do?’ I ask.

Julie turns around, scours the other people, as if worried they will hear us. ‘Not here. Come on.’ She drags her clutch off the table.

‘Where are we going?’

She holds out her hand for me. ‘Are you coming? Dad’s expecting you.’

Her car is parked just around the corner in a little alleyway. Julie drives us up the highway to Caboolture. When we arrive, Julie walks me to the gate and keeps me at the letterbox. She goes in and a minute later I see him at the doorway.

He is wearing pyjamas and slippers. There is a gap between his teeth you could slide a yo-yo in, and the sun shines through. His hair is unexpectedly silver. Behind him Julie gives a nod of her head and I stutter forward, suddenly aware of the nerves fuzzing my legs.

We greet each other and he kisses my cheek, ‘So nice to see you, niece.’

Inside he has a television on; I haven’t seen one for years. He has been watching one of the
Alien
movies. We sit down on the couch. We catch up on the last few years of our lives. I don’t ask him about his health, and he seems to make a conscious decision not to talk about it either.

He coughs. ‘Julie tells me where you work.’

I look down, not sure on how to answer. Is he disappointed in me?

‘The
sandplants
,’ he says. ‘Them mob.’

I lift my eyes from the movie and look at him, then Julie. ‘I heard them speaking language.’

Uncle looks directly at me and speaks naturally in the same language, and I feel goosebumps up my arm. ‘Jangigir,’ he says then.

I stumble over my words. ‘Are they … Indigenous?’

‘They are our old people. Spirits. Something happened when the dugai brought the sea up. They rose with it.’

I look over at Julie.

My uncle continues. ‘Their knowledge goes back, big time, bub. They’ve helped us piece back our language. And they’re going to help us stop this—’ He points to the television, which has changed to the news, Australia2 the lead story once again. Tanya Sparkle’s red face in close-up.

‘We are going to fight. We are the Traditional Owners. We’re going to secure our islands so they can’t be harmed. Starting with Ki.’

I feel a strong flutter in my gut.

‘They want us to be self-governed. But we can’t end up like the TSI mob.’ He pauses to clear his throat. ‘They want to segregate us. Cast us out for good. Everything that this President has done has drifted us – blackfellas and whitefellas – further apart.’

Julie touches his arm. ‘How about I make us some tea. Kaden probably doesn’t want to hear this all at once.’

‘She needs to hear it. She is one of us.’ He coughs.

His phone rings and Julie picks it up off the mantelpiece. ‘It’s Hinter,’ she says, not answering it.

‘Tell Hinter to call back – Kaden is here.’

‘Hinter? How are they part of it?’

Uncle says, ‘they are our numbers.’

‘And they’re happy, they’re happy to do that?’ I say.

He nods. ‘Of course.’

I realise that they are the sacrifice.

‘We’re taking back the islands. Ki first. Larapinta will call them at nightfall,’ he says.

I feel a pang at her name. Why didn’t she tell me?

He continues. ‘We need you to log in, put a temporary roadblock on the surveillance.’

‘So this is what it is.’ I look over at Julie suddenly. ‘You put me up to this, didn’t you? It’s all been leading to this.’

‘Kaden.’ Julie tries to calm me.

‘Don’t.’ And I wrestle out of there with tears on my shirt collar.

My stomach is empty. I feel I will never eat again. I catch a cab to my mother’s house. Somehow she knows what I need. Space. In the dark of my old room.

They want to kill them. Send them out as warriors. I won’t be part of it. They had this perfect plan, with me as the pawn. My own family. Why didn’t they show any interest in me before? Only when they wanted something. For so long I’d been alone with all these questions about who I was and I hadn’t even realised how much I was hurting. I was empty. Not able to connect with anyone. And then, under the strange, intense circumstances, I was drawn to Larapinta; somehow she had understood me, she made me want more for myself. And now I would lose her.

I let the evening slip, and then the next morning, knowing full well I’ve missed work. My mother leaves me a fruit and nut bagel, toasted and spread, by the door. Next time she comes she gives me coffee with cream stirred in. I take the coffee, but apologise about the bagel, still on the plate.

My mother gives me one of her T-shirts. White, it stretches when I pull it over my head and is too tight across my breasts. I hear her humming to herself above the radio advertisements as she sweeps the floorboards. I think about how well she looked after Dad and me.

The calendar on the wall shifts in the wind. Mum has turned the room into a sewing room. The calendar is only one month behind. Mum, old-fashioned as she is, has put in dates, like people’s birthdays. I’m surprised that there are some dates from my dad’s side of the family. When I was growing up, here in this bedroom, the sound of the cars on the highway sounded like the ocean. I know the ocean now. I know Ki. I take a breath in, shut my eyes. I do want to stop what they’re doing to Ki. Any loyalty I had to Milligan or the corporation has long ceased. From the beginning I’d known there was something more, and now I know the truth.

My mobile phone is out of battery so I don’t know if Milligan tried to call me when I didn’t show up this morning to pick up the formula from Jack. How long until they cancel my security pass, break into my housing, put my name and photo on high alert? During my time there, I haven’t exactly stayed under the radar, perhaps like Uncle and Julie might have wanted me to for their plan to work. Maybe I’ve already been labelled a radicalist, being AWOL today, particularly with my family background. Any longer and they might figure it out. All of it.

Sometime during the day I step out of the dark like a white-capped mushroom, to make a phone call.

My mum looks at me in surprise when I come out. We sit down at the kitchen table. ‘Julie called. A lot of times. I told her you were asleep.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Should I have not told her you’re here?’ Her brow is wrinkled.

‘No.’ I touch her hand with my own.

‘I’m worried about you,’ she says.

I ask to use her phone. Julie answers on the first ring.

Her voice is strained, ‘Kaden,
cuz
, I’m …’

‘I’m in,’ I say.

Julie picks me up an hour later. Mum also comes with us. Our mob is gathering on the foreshore at the Cleveland esplanade for a barbecue. A good feed, with good company. My family, many of whom I haven’t seen for years, like my Uncle Theo and his seven children, my cousins. Some of them have their own children. I look over at my mum, who is reuniting with Uncle Theo’s wife, Sunny. There are more families: Aboriginal, Islander and non-Indigenous. Hugh and his family are there.