Swallow the Air (10 page)

I have jagged recollections. Sharp paper clippings that I remember. I could burrow into another time, or by chance be harked back, and I would stand in our old backyard searching the fence line, naming the things that remain, in the nook of my head. Against the fence I could trace back to someone's face, their mouth, their eye socket, their ear. I tried so many times to find my mother's, but I could only pretend to recognise her, her real face is lost.

And I would come to the jacaranda tree, its dogwood trunk writhing through the palings. Heaving in all its purple-belled loveliness. My eyes would find first its feet, entangled roots rigging from fence poles underfoot. Sometimes the other trees' roots would be so invading that they would splinter plumbing, unbloating reservoir. Though the jacaranda shared its ground.

The lean body of the trunk breached over the backyard. Fishbone fern leaves like tinselled brush, rows of ordered confetti concealing its embryo limbs within. Its milky coffee skin. After summer the tiny leaves would be washed in mustard through the wind and fall, back to the earth, feeding its roots, and that entire hidden body would be exposed. It stayed naked for a lot of the year, until I only remembered its familiar bareness. Then one day, maybe home from school, or early in the morning peering at the tilting sun and cloud stream, there would be a single tiny green bulbus, with the smallest speck of mauve at its end. Bubblegum dipped.

It was a sneaky arrival, never witnessed, a wondrous secretive thing. And then day by day, as if the beans had spilt and the tree had nothing left to hide, handfuls of clustered trumpets dressed its boughs. As more purple emerged in the deeper spring, others would ballet downward to the grass. I would scoop up armfuls and scatter the bells over my bed, their wet collapsing petals blotting blankets and carpet. And then there would be none, no evidence of its beauty, only the watery stains of a visit. And later the entire
cycle would enfold again, a slow gentle process, like the wearing out of shoe soles.

One year, in the jacaranda's bleakness Mum had strung a tyre-swing onto its fattest branch. I remember swinging from its rubber ring a few times, sort of rocking sightly back and forth. She took it back down the following year, revealing a bruise-worn elbow where the tree-swing roped its wing. We decided to let the jacaranda be, and marvelled from the back door or the grass instead. Too delicate to be touched.

It's a sacred bloody pest.
It isn't meant to be here, I hate it, too pretty, she'd say, threatening always to chop it down. Though I once found her eyes glue and she almost smiled at its gifts, a bouquet of blue jays, the most beautiful thing in the entire street.

It's an odd thing, a backyard, a little strip of nature, a little reminder of the rest of it, elsewhere. A little piece of earth – a garden, a few trees, a clothesline and a fire pit maybe. Somewhere for the sun to hide.

It was summer when she went away, early December I think. The jacaranda would've still been in bloom, toward the end of a cycle. And
they say that they found her there, lying under that pest of a tree. I imagine she made peace with it then, or just gave in. I imagine her among the spread of purple. Jacaranda petals and blood, softened and returned.

How quiet it would've been, how beautiful.

The moon tows the tide in and out twice a day forever. When I come home the tide is flowing in, when I reach it, when it draws in across the purple slate beds of the point, through the rain and across the grit sand, soaking under my feet, salt bubbles burst at my shins. Then, I know that I am home.

We don't need words. I can smell it. I can feel it. The raindrops are gentle and cold, the beach is empty, only the salt smell of the ocean air and freshwater clouds fill the space. The wind is blowing nor-easterly, yellow and red flags flutter further down the beach, huddling no one into the safety. Gulls cruise the air, scanning the shoreline and dunes; I'm not sure what they're looking for. They have waterproof feathers, I imagine. I pull my hood down over my face.

The ocean is sad grey, except in the shallows
where the water is pearl and when a wave peels up you can catch the beautiful jade flashing milky through the lips. A secret. The shore-breakers tumble up the banks, tossing sand through their whitewash waves. The headland is foggy in the distance. Behind me, the escarpment is just a flat silhouette.

As I walk up toward the beach entrance, across the little raindrop dimples on yesterday's footprints, and feel the gritty warm-wet sand carry me. As the starburst eelgrass clusters roll like tumbleweeds off the dunes. As all the salt hits me. I know what the word really means, home.

My mother knows that I am home, at the water I am always home. Aunty and my brother, we are from the same people, we are of the Wiradjuri nation,
hard water.
We are of the river country, and we have flowed down the rivers to estuaries to oceans. To live by another stretch of water. Salt.

Even though this country is not my mother's country, even though we are freshwater, not saltwater people, this place still owns us, still owns our history, my brother's and my own, Aunty's too. Mum's. They are part of this place; I know now that I need to find them.

I could run away again, I could run away from the pain my family holds. I could take the yarndi, the paint, the poppies, and all the grog in the world but I couldn't run from the pain and I couldn't run from my family either.

When Billy and me lost our mother, we lost ourselves. We stopped swimming in the ocean, scared that we'd forget to breathe. Forget to come up for mouthfuls of air. We lost trust because we didn't want to touch something that was going to fall away. Like bubbles, too delicate, too fragile, too brief.

When I get there, Paradise Parade is warring. Walls compress into the ground, rooftops twist over levelled clay, fences warn me off, pipes penetrate cement blocks, toilets sit beside sinks in the air. Yellow machines have paused for a while, waiting for the cloud sky to give way. Few houses remain. The crows begin to nest.

‘When ya gunna get this fuckin fence fixed, Aunty?'

I holler into the back window as I slip through the broken palings, laughing. I jump the stairs in
one leap and enter the back door. Aunty leans against the cupboards, pouring a longneck into a glass. She sees me, and she sees the beer that she's holding in her shaky hand. Her back hits the cupboard doors and she slides down onto the lino, the bottle drops, and beer swims and soaks into the peepholes in the floorboards.

Aunty is crying, I cannot stop her crying.

‘It's all right, Aunty, sit up, sit up.'

Billy comes out of the lounge room, leans down and hooks his arm under her shoulder.

‘May, wherev you been?' Aunty sobs. ‘Oh girl, I'm gone, movin' out, they kicking me out.'

Billy holds out a bucket of his arms for her wet face. He looks up at me. He's back, all eyes and face. I can tell he's clean. My brother smiles.

Aunty is crying. I cannot stop her crying.

The house, even through wall plaster that crumbles with the absence, is still home. I sit at the kitchen table. It feels good; it feels right for the first time in a long time to be home. The table still parades its paradise years; I flick my thumb through the changes, tablecloth over tablecloth. I count a dozen or so, some stuck to each other, some rotting. Soft felt, crumpled mouldy lace,
linen and sticky stiff plastic. I remember coming to visit with Mum on the times when Aunty'd bought a new tablecloth. It was almost exciting, just watching her pull it out of the shopping bag, unwrap its packaging, shaking it out in the kitchen, the smell of raw plastic. Flowers. Fish. Stars. And still, a country paddock of everlastings print the tabletop, wine and fallen ashtray stains. The same as when I'd left.

‘Let's go buy a new tablecloth, Aunty!'

Billy shifts his eyes from my hand as he speaks. Aunty looks at him, a bundle of pickled skin in his arms, she looks at me. Smiles.

‘Yeah? A nice new one, eh?'

‘Yeah, Aunty, an orange one,' I add.

‘A bright fuckin orange one!' she yells and slaps her palm against the floor, laughing.

‘That'll show em lovies, Aunty ain't goin anywhere! Not with a tablecloth to wear in!'

She laughs excitedly, but it is too much. The water rises and cries.

I look out the window, toward the gulls diving between the air currents. They dance. The clouds give way to the sky, the wind has changed its course and from here the ocean is clear, waves
peel across the glass, clean and hollow, spray dances off their paring lips. Falling silver rains on the afternoon bluegum sheet. The water rises and cries.

Specks of black wet-suited bodies paddle, gliding toward the next set. They always go for the second wave, the second wave of the set, swarming for that ride, to stand for as long as possible.

An excavator starts its smothering engine over the torrent of each barrel. Over the sun. Over the blue. And I wonder, if we stand here, if we stay, if they stop digging up Aunty's backyard, stop digging up a mother's memory, stop digging up our people, maybe then, we'll all stop crying.

Thank you, Sue Abbey, a wonderful editor and a beautiful friend; Madonna Duffy and UQP for being more than just publishers; Janet Hutchinson for pulling everything together; Peter Bishop and Varuna – The Writers House.

Much respect to Frank Moorhouse, Steve Kinnane, Fiona Doyle, Sam Wagan Watson, Nick Earls, John Harms, Dan Kelly, Larissa Behrendt, Judy Atkinson and Mick Martin for inspiring wisdom and encouragement.

Thanks to Reon and the Fisher family, Jenny, Nick, Michele, Cristen, Melody, Trent, Mark and Sam and Tina, Eliza, Simon Mumme, Luke Beasley, Dave Lavercombe, Patty, Owen, Courtney, Shannon blakboy, Shane and Jeremy for giving constant time, love, patience and laughter.

And thank you to my family, Mum, Dad, Tania, Billy and Andrew, Brenda and Mick, Nana and Pop.

To the Aboriginal families of Mundra this saying brings either comfort or pain. To Nana Vida it is what binds the generations. To the unwilling savant Archie Corella it portends a fate too cruel to name. For Sophie Salte, whose woman's body and child's mind make her easy prey, nothing matters while her sister Murilla is there to watch over her.

For Murilla, fierce protector and unlikely friend to Caroline Drysdale, wife of the town patriarch, what matters is survival. In a town with a history of vigilante raids, missing persons and unsolved murders, survival can be all that matters.

The stories – of the camp, the boy and his snake, the shooting – told and passed on, offer a release from the horrors of our past. As Nana Vida says,
‘That's the story. I let it go now.'

Home
is a powerful novel from an author who understands both the capacity of language to suppress and the restorative potency of stories that bridge the past and present. Young lawyer Candice sets out on her first visit to her ancestral homeland. When she arrives at the place where her grandmother was abducted in 1918, her family's story begins to unfold and Candice discovers the consequences of dark skin and the relentless pull of home.