The Swan Book (27 page)

But the valley became a box when clouds settled on the hills, and very quickly it was filled with an overpowering perfume pouring into the air from thousands of flowers. Sometime during the night her lungs ached for fresh air, and this was when she heard Warren moving away. Very silently, he was slipping away into the night, but she thought it was already morning and they would be going back to join the others.

Shh!
he said, and left. Her tongue failed to form words to ask him where he was going, and she watched him walking further away into the night. He did not return, and she was unable to prevent herself from falling back to sleep as the heavy putrefied air swallowed her into a nightmarish dream. Those boys from long ago emerged from the ground. It had happened suddenly with the ground swelling and growing around her until she was covered in total darkness, but she knew them instantly, knew what they were doing – she had not killed them in her memory. She remembered their closeness to each other, in touch, smell, and breathing. Of being joined together with them as firmly as a ball of animals rolling over wet ground. She saw through them as they were falling in, over, above, coming through her in sepia-coloured waves of brown, grey and red. They rolled in desert wind over the surface
of the land, and down the green and yellowing spinifex smothering the hillocks that rose and fell into valleys of lily-coloured skin, and over the distances of salt marshes.

The landscape had closed over with mist, and the perfume of the lilies under the mist was suffocating even the flowers. Her arms and hands pushed at the fumes but she was unable to reach fresh air higher up, and succumbing to the intoxication, she crawled away towards her memory of the tree. She reaches the tree in this state, and falls back into the safe darkness to hide. From the shadows of her dream she sees the swans lifting off again from white water, pushed upwards by vaporised hands reaching out of the lake. They have been rejected, pushed away by the country from her outstretched arms.

She was coiled inside the tree in a dream, and when she woke, she could see the valley surrounded by hillocks decked by clouds.

Better get ready. We will be leaving soon.
Warren spoke slowly but firmly, as if to a child, and the way he watched her, she thought he had been in her dream. She felt violated by the way he continued to stare at her with his eyes moving over her. Perhaps he had watched. It seemed that he knew what had happened. Perhaps it had not been a dream.
You better eat something first,
he said, handing her a piece of damper.

She ate the brown bread that was made from seeds and bulbs. It had a sour bitter taste under the salt that had been added to the dough before it went into the ashes
. Take your time,
he said, after noticing how she was struggling to swallow each piece. She washed the lumps down quickly with cold tea. She watched him doing the same. They left empty-handed. Whatever had been brought in with them, the pannikins, swags, simple things like the tin billy, were left behind.

Soft light filled the lily plains with William Blake hues in the first light, which was like looking at the living museum of another time surviving in the arid landscape. Warren told her that some people saw these flowers as a fragment of life from another era, when there might have been a different language that once described the wetlands and rainforest in the heart of the country, before it disappeared.
This living fossil was all that was left of those times,
he explained. She knew it was a ghost place. Closer to the eye, groups of pale green, firm fluid-filled stemmed flowering plants luxuriating in their freshness opened their petals. Each stem had stormed through to the surface from a large swollen bulb that grew at least a metre deep in the red soil. This garden of lilies rose to the surface he explained, only if water lay long enough to soak through this dip in the landscape after heavy rain. The flowers open. She thinks the petals are like the wings of old Aunty's white swans. He asks her if she is all right. She nods. She can look after herself.

Warren Finch and the girl walked through hills, the ones that were called the great bodies of the spirit men moving through the land.
What about the others?
she tried but failed to ask Warren as she kept looking back to where the genies had been camping.

They have other things to do. We will see them later,
he replied simply and to the point, no differently than how he normally spoke to her. He looked as though he had aged, grown old on this trip. She kept thinking something was not right, that something had happened to them, and she kept looking back with growing concern as the distance grew greater. But only the old voices of Aunty talking to the Harbour Master could be heard coming from behind her, through the sound of the ground breathing, casually talking behind Warren Finch's back. The Harbour Master said he was pretty sure the genies never existed. He had never recognised them as real people. They had come out of a brass lantern from
the Middle East as far as he was concerned. The old woman crowed on about the men on the boats she had seen murdering each other out of rivalry and jealousy over women.
Oh! Yes! I saw it all. All the time you know. Did you cause this?
The old woman was talking loudly, starting to accuse Warren of every travesty, until she got around to what she really wanted to say,
you killed those nice boys
, and the girl looked away from Warren who was telling her to keep moving, because she was thinking that he had murdered the genies too. The Harbour Master became silent because the old dead woman's ghost was putting things in the girl's mind about Warren Finch.
Girls were always thrown overboard – I told you about that. Girls were left to die in the bush. You know the public payphone really only rang sometimes
…
Unwept girls, all killed by their husbands.

The Harbour Master turned controversial, snubbing Bella Donna's ghost, which was raving on like a mad woman about how the Aboriginal killer husband Warren Finch would end up killing Oblivia too,
because he was already proving his true colours by killing the genies
. The Harbour Master swung away from the old woman's spirit every time she came close to him, calling her,
Liar
.
What you think all Aboriginal men are violent or something?
He poked his bony face in Oblivia's while walking backwards in front of her as she walked ahead of Warren Finch. In the end, the Harbour Master spurted out everything in his head through hissy spit:
You know something? Warren Finch only saw Doom, Mail and Hart, dead on the ground. He didn't kill them.
He makes a fist with his hand and with the index finger pointing from it like a pistol, he waves his arm around in the air, while calling over his shoulder to the old woman raving behind him to shut the fuck up about Warren Finch and warning her to stay away from them, and walking backwards quicker to stay in front of Oblivia's face he releases more spit-hissed words, and on he goes:
They were killed instantly – BANG! BANG! BANG! No mucking around. Just smack, smack, one shot each was enough.
Knocked their lights straight out
(clicks fingers)
– knocks them flat in their sleep.
Oblivia was really frightened now. She stared ahead and walked even faster as though she thought the only way to stop hearing the Harbour Master was to walk through his frightening face, and all the while she was looking around for old Aunty and old Aunty was calling from somewhere behind,
wait for me
, and all the while trying to convince herself to ignore the healing man's powers, for that's right, no man would take over her mind. But the old Harbour Master was relentless and was using his bony fingers to jab her in the chest, and on and on he went in his tirade about the deaths he witnessed – while telling the old woman to
git out of their country
, that nobody else saw what happened, not even that idiot-features Warren bloody Finch.
You want to know who did it? Not that gutless wonder Warren – he didn't do it – look at him? There's no way in the world that a slack-assed cunt like him could kill face-to-face. He gets other people to do his dirty work. You want to know what I saw? A mob of assassins who killed them! All of them came running, hooded, and disguised in Army fatigues through the scrub but I saw them.

Oblivia looks side-on across the haze-covered spinifex as though she fully expected to see soldiers from the swamp following them, but all she sees through the
wiyarr
is Bella Donna's ghost straining to drag things out of the ground and calling for them to wait for her, and Oblivia thinks she must be digging up the genies, or she found some dead girls, and this makes her heart pound even harder and she walks faster and hears the old woman's voice reciting –
So mastered by the brute blood of the air…Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? –
and she tries to walk through the Harbour Master who looks where she looks, and he walks backwards quicker, but ignores what the old woman was doing and he continues talking right into Oblivia's face as though he is taunting her to use that half-dead tongue of hers to shout at him to get out of her way.
There must have been dozens of those blokes running amuck
with their revolvers with silencers and whatnot, and sneaking through the spinifex with infra-red search-lights strapped onto their heads. Like combat soldiers. Yes, just like soldiers in some war zone, although who knows if they were soldiers or not – I just don't know for sure what they were, or if they were from the whiteman's hell. Could've been from the swamp. They could have been anyone, just like you or me, or more like me than you because you would be too gutless to kill anyone, just like you are too gutless to speak. Alright then! They didn't know ‘someone' was looking at them through the darkness with my own infra-red night-vision binoculars eyes
.

Oblivia thinks he is tricking her and tries not to look at his eyes and continues to look around for Army men, although she cannot hear the old woman any more who she figures must be still trying to dig up bodies, but the Harbour Master goes on about how good his infra-red vision eyes were.
I saw the whole thing coming, just like silly Warren knew it was coming, only difference is a person like me can dream wherever I want to go, whereas Warren Finch, he's a dog! Well! Look at him. He has to call someone on that mobile of his to tell him what's going on and he hides somewhere else.
The Harbour Master paused to pay his respects to the genies,
I really and truly hope you good boys haunt the living daylights out of some of those buggers. Come back and haunt Warren Finch too if you like. Yea! That would be good.
And he continues berating Oblivia,
That's the reason why your-suppose-to-be-husband Warren bloody Finch was acting strange last night. I saw him sneaking around in the night too. He knew there were people wanting to assassinate him. He heard their vehicles. You better lay low, I am telling you girl, if you are going to keep hanging around with that idiot. He will get you killed before too long. You can bet on that. That's why you will never see those good fellas again. Really decent blokes too they were.
Oblivia was listening now and walking normally, so the Harbour Master slowed down, but continued talking, and whenever he spoke about Warren, pouted his lips in his direction.
The coward Warren disposes of the bodies quick smart. Buried his staff members in the bush. Hardly dug
a hole deep enough for any of them. You would think he'd do something better for his mates. Shallow graves. Real shallow. Better get a rifle too if I were you. You are just another staff member. Remember that.
The Harbour Master blamed Bella Donna's ghost for killing the genies. He really had it in for her.
You know how she needs to kill off any strong black people. It gives her strength,
he claimed.
Yulurri! Murderer! Yulurri! She led the assassins right up to them like a bloody big road train heading through the bush with an arrowhead marking the spot just in the front of where those three boys were sleeping. Didn't know what struck them, it was strange seeing it happen – real quick like that. You don't want to think about her any more if she is going to cause trouble like this. Get rid of her from your mind. You don't need her now.
The Harbour Master looks back, and although the old woman's ghost was nowhere in sight, he tells her to git away from them.
Get away from Australia. Yulurri! We don't want you overseas ghosts here.

At the end of the day of walking and the Harbour Master's tirade to Oblivia, they reached a sandy river overgrown with the vines of paddy melons laden with fresh yellow balls of fruit. A flock of white corellas stared with black beady eyes as Warren Finch and the girl passed by, then continued gnawing with sharp pointy beaks on the paddy melons held in their claws. Families of bush ducks flew from out of the reeds on the side of a dry riverbed, where there were still ponds of water from the flood after the rains of months ago.

Across the river the next morning, Oblivia was alarmed to see that there was a small rural township of less then a dozen unkempt houses painted in every combination of bright primary colours, flash blue, red, green, and yellow. All was quiet, and it seemed as though these houses had been willed to appear like a playful whim in amongst the spinifex, and if you turned your back, would disappear. Oblivia saw
that they were close to the roughly cut airstrip that ran through the thickets of saltbush where, the evening before, Warren had taken an interest in walking along its length and kicking the dirt runway with his feet. She noticed that he did not use his mobile phone now, and this made her feel even more vulnerable, unsure of what was going to happen to her, and of the possibility they would be seen by strangers in this town without his genies to guard them.

She could not help staring at the houses.

Just people,
Warren snapped, as though he knew she was wondering about who lived there.

What kind of people? People. People, who are more interested in talking to their white daddy and granddaddy graves about selling cattle, horses, or people for that matter; they work at the petrol and diesel service station over there. Mostly used by cattle trucks.
He spoke impatiently as though speaking to a child. She knew that he did not want to speak to her. Did not want to answer questions. The town was silent. It looked deserted.