Wild Cat Falling (2 page)

I'm not interested in the old blackfella but I always get a bite if I mention him.

I get up from the table and she notices my clothes.

“Looks like you've been wriggling through that drain pipe again? You haven't been with those dirty Noongar kids I hope?”

I shake my head and grin.

“It's no joking matter,” she says. “If we get seen with that mob we'll be chucked out of this place quick smart.”

“Some of the white kids play with them.”

She starts packing up the plates. “That's different. They belong on the white side of the fence. You've got to prove you do, and don't you forget it.”

Mum's always at me about this Noongar mob, though some of them seem to be related to us in a vague way. A few of them are as light coloured as herself, some even as near white as me but most of them are pretty dark skinned. None of them are real aboriginal, though sometimes a full blood relative will drift in to the camp, stay for a bit, and get on the grog with them. This kind never seems to stay long though. They just appear and disappear, except the old rabbit trapper who sticks around but lives in a camp on his own.

Most of the Noongars drift round the place too. Some of them go off on seasonal work — picking apples, digging spuds and odd jobbing at harvest and shearing time, but there are always some in this outskirt camp and when the workers come back they all get on it properly till the money runs out.

The Noongar kids are supposed to go to school, and the Welfare blokes are always chasing them up. A lot of them get shoved into missions and homes, but somehow there are always plenty who manage to dodge out — not the same ones all the time — but usually enough to have some fun with.

I bring in some wood for the fire. “There's a cricket match on in the school grounds,” I say. “Can I go and watch?”

“All right. But look out you're home in good time for dinner.”

I dart off and make for the stock pens across the railway line. I hear the Noongar kids shouting and laughing a long way off. They are playing follow- my-leader along the pen tops, wobbling and balancing and falling off.

“Hullo!”

“Hullo. We've been waiting ages. Thought you must be back in that old school or something.”

“Nope. It's still holidays. My mum kept me yacking.”

“Making you clean up that la-di-dah house, I s'pose.”

Another one chips in. “That's what my mum reckons about a house. ‘Not worth the bloody trouble,' she says.”

The boy is bigger and darker than me and I am a bit afraid of him.

“Yes, it's pretty mad,” I agree. “But Mum likes it so we have to live in it.”

“My mum reckons she's stuck up because she married a white chap and has another white man on her now. But she weren't no better than the rest of them before.”

“She went to school and got educated,” I say defensively.

“So what,” he comes back. “My mum went to the same mission only she don't get stuck in no Department house like a cocky in a cage.”

Another boy says: “I wouldn't mind the house but damn going to school. What's the good of it anyway?”

“My mum says you've got to go or you can't get on.

“Get on where?” asks the first boy.

“Search me,” I say. “Get a job I s'pose.”

They look at me with dark and doubtful eyes.

“Aw, let's get moving,” I say. “What're we going to do?”

“Go after birds and rabbits. We got some gings.”

This is attractive but they would probably not be back till nearly dark and Mum would ask questions.

“What say we catch gilgies? I've got a gidgee hidden down the river bank. There's some real big ones this time of year.”

The others are not so keen on this.

“Let's go to the silos,” another suggests, “and slide down the wheat.”

This is attractive too but if I'm caught with these kids it might be all up for Mum and me. “Some kids were copped for doing that the other day,” I lie. “They got sent to clink.”

“Yeah,” says the big chap who is about as scared of trouble as myself. “Let's get over into the bush where no one'll bother us.”

We straggle across the line and into the trees. The kids fill their pockets with little stones and trail about spotting birds and aiming without success.

“My old uncle,” says the big chap, “I seen him drop birds with stones plenty times. He made a spear once too and showed me how the abos used to bring down kangaroos.”

“I saw a real bush abo once could throw a boomerang,” another kid says. “He had thick scars cut on his chest and arms.”

“What for?” I ask.

“He reckoned they did it to all the abo boys to make them tough.”

“Bet it must have hurt.”

“They got trained up to it. The kids played who could keep live coals the longest in their hands or on their arms and legs and after a bit they got used to it and didn't feel the pain hardly at all.”

One of the kids lends me his ging and I fool around with it a bit. A rabbit scuttles out of the grass and we all yell and get around it. I put a stone in the ging and let fly. I don't expect to hit it but it flops down and the big chap picks it up and bangs its head against a tree. The others shake my hand and hit me on the back and the big chap holds the dead rabbit out to me.

“It's yours,” he says. “You knocked it down.”

“No,” I say, “I don't want it. We got plenty rabbits home.”

I haven't seen a rabbit killed since that time in the cemetery. Mum had gone there with me and some old native woman to put flowers on my brother's grave. He was only a baby when he died and it hadn't meant much to me until this time standing beside the oblong rain-leached heap of gravel and sand. Then this rabbit bounced out of the scrub and the old woman picked up a stick and battered it. I looked down at the dead animal beside the wilting flowers in the jam jar and suddenly burst out crying and hid my face in my mum's dress. We had rabbit stew that night.

I get home late. Mum asks where I've been. I tell her just mucking about with some of the kids from school, but she knows I'm telling a lie.

“You want to stay with me, son?” she asks.

I nod and look at the floor.

“They'll take you away like the rest of them,” she says.

“No!”...

My voice ripped out in a scream that hurled back the familiar bareness of the cell. A key mercifully grated in the lock. The door opened. The fourteen days were done.

When the warder took me back to the Juvenile Section I found I had become a hero to my mates. Even the screw became a bit human and gave me a cigarette. I was a little colder and a little older, more a part of the prison and its atmosphere, part of the grey cloud that dismally envelops it. This atmosphere got me down when I first came in but now it had become part of me. I became an emptiness gas-filled with the grey cloud.

After solitary the prison accepted me as I had never been accepted outside. I belonged.

 

 

I pick up the towel and rub myself dry but there still remains the peculiar smell of the yellow prison soap. You get used to it, but it emanates from us all, strong as vomit stink.

I follow the other soon-to-be-ex-cons into the cell-like room where our clothes await us. It is here that we were initiated into jail life and for the first time donned the grey uniform of belonging. It has the last touch of outside when we come in, the first touch when we leave. It is a sort of despair and expectation depot.

Our citizen-of-the-world clothes cringe in shadow one against the other as though anticipating the jeers in store for them. They have been tailored on a prison wage, modelled in the latest style of years gone by and made of the choicest cloth available. Blue serge that has the habit, much like its wearers, of picking up bits of fluff around the streets.

I choose a suit that looks more or less my size and put it on. The mirror reflects a person I take to be myself gazing back blank-eyed. Critically I examine the image: the figure tall and slim, the face, neither handsome nor ugly, and the skin, due to lack of sun, now no darker than olive shade. The suit is not as bad as I expected and appears to be a good fit. Either a convict is finding joy in his work or I, after eighteen months, have lost my clothes sense. Anyway, it will do until I can acquire something more suited to my taste. The people I know outside go in for clothes. They call themselves Progressive Dressers — and I have influence enough to borrow at least a shirt and a pair of jeans.

I comb my hair as best I can. It is in a crew-cut ordered by the chief warder. He must have read that bodgies wear their hair long and decided to do his bit in the fight against juvenile delinquency. Or maybe he remembered the Samson story.

I am dressed and ready to go, but we still have to wait until the screw condescends to open the door. Waiting gives me time to think about the future and toss up whether I will swing on with the gang again. I can take them or leave them now. It's amusing in a way, after being born at the bottom of the world to find I have worked myself up such a long way. I frequent the best bodgie hangouts now and sleep with white girls if I want them — great kicks. . . .

Clunkity-clunkity-bang. Clunkity-clunkity-bang. . . . Blank-faced teenagers sway to the delinquent beat, gyrate and shuffle, losing their souls to it.

Black, black cat where are you going to go?

Black cat, so black cat when are you going to go?

Been sitting here all night,

It really ain't right,

You gotta go to be in the know.

A roll of drums, and the band rests. Lights swell and show up the youth's face. False insolent face with the bleak eyes of ain't-got-nowhere-to-go.

He sweats in the stuffy hall, half suffocated by the hot reek of powdered bodies and heavily oiled hair. The mob swirls aimlessly about. One or two stop to speak to him and he answers shortly.

The band begins again. Four tight-trousered youths with gleaming electric guitars sway in anticipation of the drums and lay down a steady beat. The bass guitar clunks, the others twang and they're off.

The youth puffs on a cigarette, carefully protecting his new clothes from the ash. Smoke spirals float up and fade into the ceiling haze. The lights dim and a girl appears in front of him. Dark eyes hollow in a pale face, short ash-blonde hair. Her smeared mouth twists.

“What a drag this place is.”

His eyes drop to her blouse. Small breasts. Real neat.

“What place isn't?”

She sits next to him and they watch the dancers.

“It's helluva hot, and those cats still dance.”

“Mad! I saw a black cat once, it ran round and round until it dropped dead. Real crazy.”

“Crazy.”

She is restless and he sees that her forehead is damp.

“Want to get some air?”

“My date's pissed off somewhere. I guess it's all right.”

They circle the floor and escape to the river bank.

She takes his hand as they stumble across the grass. Overhead the dark sky is filled with stars and a cool wind moves in the trees. They sit and he feels her body against his.

It's too much of a drag to do it now and not worth it. Sex is such a bore sometimes. All the same he feels her breast and she does not protest. It's too peaceful for anything except talk.

“Got some money yesterday and bought some new threads.”

“They're terrif. I saw them in the hall. Must have cost a bit?”

“They did, but I'm a Christian and God provided me with the cash. It was a sort of debt.”

“How do you mean debt?” she says.

“Church bored me crazy when I was a kid.”

She seems impressed. “Hey! you didn't rob a church?”

He nods. “Donation box. It was a pushover.”

He tells her how he came into the Cathedral the night before. A few people praying but no one noticing him. He slipped through a small door up the stairs. A grill barred his way to the choir gallery, so he sat down and waited until someone came to lock up the church. He went down then — pretty spooky it was. Only the sacristy lamp flickering a tiny light and shadows moving everywhere. But he had a small torch.

“I nearly knocked over St Anthony, but I begged his pardon and asked his help. He gave me the wink where I would find the box. It was there right enough and dead easy to crack. The jemmy made a bit of a noise wrenching off the lock, but nobody heard — except God, and He wasn't interested. It was a regular lucky dip — quite a few greenbacks and a pocket full of coin.”

“How did you get out if it was locked up?”

“Easy. There was a door bolted from inside. I found that out to start with, see. It was a dark night and nobody could have seen me leave.”

“You're game,” she says. “You must have needed the money pretty bad to dare God.”

Ain't no God no more, no more.

There ain't no God no more. Yeah!