Rooke had learned some of the names of the women who visited with the children. At least, he thought the words he used were their names. Barringan was the fine tall woman who had come to the hut on the first day and was Boneda’s mother, or perhaps his aunt, he had never got that quite straight. The old woman, clearly a person of authority, was named Mauberry, but Rooke privately thought of her as Nanna, because her cut-and-dried certainty about everything, as well as a wry humorous look, reminded him of his grandmother.
These women, and others who came only now and then, greeted him when they arrived but then established themselves with the babies around the fire some distance away. They busied themselves making fishhooks from curved shells, and fishing cords from bark. They held the stringy fibre up and named it for him—dturaduralang—mostly, he suspected, to laugh at the way he tried to say it.
He remembered his sisters as babies, but they were always swaddled in garments and wrappers like parcels, lying in the wooden cradle with only their faces and fingers showing. As far as he knew, they had never sprawled naked across their mother’s bare thighs as these infants did. It had shocked him the first time, but now he wondered whether this was what a lap was for: to make a living cradle so that a child could abandon itself to sleep.
On some days it was Warungin who led the little procession down the rocks. The children kept at a distance while he sat with Rooke on the ground outside the hut. Sometimes it might be half an hour before Warungin said a word. If Rooke tried out some of his new vocabulary, or held up an object wanting to know its name, Warungin would make a minute adjustment of his position but say nothing. He did not seem to find silence awkward.
For Rooke it was like looking into a peculiar sort of mirror. Among his own kind, he was the one who made others uneasy with his silences. It was humbling to learn how to do nothing more than sit.
Sometimes Warungin arrived with other men. Then Rooke sat like a child, wordless and ignored, while they talked too fast for him to catch any sound that made a word he knew. In the company of other men, Warungin lost his sternness, and embarked on extended stories for the entertainment of the others. He was a mimic of great accuracy. More than once Rooke recognised Major Wyatt, his bristling indignation perfectly captured, or poor Gosden with his nagging cough.
He wondered whether Warungin also entertained the men with an imitation of the way Mr Rooke’s mouth groped for the shape that would make some new word.
Now and then Warungin arrived ready to give Rooke a language lesson. He laid out on the ground all his tools and weapons: the barbed spear, the smooth-tipped spear, the four-pronged fishgig, the sword-like length of wood with the oyster shell gummed into the end. Item by item, he taught Rooke the names. Dooul, the spear with two barbs. Wudang, the bone point of a spear. Yelga, the barb of a spear. Yara, to sharpen the points of a muting or fishgig. Rooke had his notebook beside him, his pencil in his hand. He knew, by some indication he could not put his finger on, that Warungin did not approve of the writing-down business. But he was patient, repeating the words and holding up the objects until his pupil understood.
When he gathered the weapons and stood to leave, the children came over. Tagaran, Worogan and Boneda were nearly always there, and sometimes two other girls confusingly alike and possibly sisters, called Tugear and Ngalgear. There had been such hilarity at his attempts to sort out the two that Boneda actually wet himself. Rooke was interested to see that this caused no embarrassment. It was simply the crowning touch to the comedy, and a tribute to it.
He sat with Warungin as a pupil, he exchanged a few words with the women out of courtesy, he enjoyed the company of the children, but it was with Tagaran that he had conversations. She never came to see him by herself, but the other children soon tired of the games with words the two of them played. They had no patience with the way Rooke was not content to understand, but had to have a thing repeated often enough to write it down. After a time the others drifted away and left Rooke and Tagaran alone together.
Somehow, he did not quite know when it happened, she gave him a name, kamara. It meant my friend, he gathered, something of that kind. He did not know whether she had heard the English using the word comrade, or whether by chance the words were alike in the two tongues. There was so much he did not know.
Tagaran was the eldest of the children, but that was not the only reason she was so clearly their leader. In every situation in his life, Rooke had seen that there were people with a power of personality that gave them effortless authority. It was not to do with rank or position: the governor lacked it. Rooke did not possess it either, he knew that about himself, but Silk had it, and so did Gardiner.
And so did Tagaran. It was more than intelligence, though Tagaran’s understanding was like quicksilver. It was more than assertiveness, though he watched her rapping out orders to the other children. It was a quality of fearless engagement with the world.
She never tired of giving him words, or of learning the English in exchange. Like Warungin, she was a vivid mimic and seemed to love the moment of seeing him understand.
When a baby cried over at the fire with the women, she explained breado tunga, she cries for bread. When Rooke gave her some—the greater part of his dinner, but he did not tell her that he would go hungry—to take to the child, she pulled out the dough with a word he understood to mean soft, easy for a child to eat, as opposed to the rock-like crust which she explained was hard, in the sense of difficult to break.
Tagaran gave him the words for belly, for back, for skin, for a boil on his arm, another that might have been finger or fingers or hand. He learnt the word for grass and for sand, or perhaps it was dust or dry earth. He wrote down the words that seemed to mean what, or what’s this, as she held up his clasp knife, and the words that seemed to be show it me, or let me see, when he opened it and then closed it. When Boneda trolled a block of wood along the ground and the other children threw pebbles at it, she told him it was karagadyera. The block? The action of trolling? He was not sure, but wrote down the word.
He abandoned system, using a pencil for greater speed, scribbling open the door and I set it on fire and the armpit, or perhaps it was to tickle; Tagaran and Worogan were laughing too much to explain. In his haste he jotted down only as much of the English as would let him remember later what he intended. When the talk turned to the sun—Tagaran complaining that he was shading her from its warmth—out of habit he jotted down the astronomer’s circle-with-dot. Under the press of so many words, his pencil split and she watched with the closest attention as he bound it together with string.
It was not the way he was used to working. Even the swiftest planet gave a man plenty of time to be sure, and to be neat. To work like this, not stopping to think, was a giddy exhilaration like drunkenness.
Language went in both directions. Without the benefit of notebooks or pencils repaired with string, the natives not only knew many words of English, but had already made them part of their own tongue, altering them as their grammar required. Bread was now breado, not simply borrowed but possessed.
When he heard himself do the same thing one day he felt as if another boundary had been left behind. Warungin, in teaching mode, had brought along one of the throwing sticks called womera. He showed Rooke how he had recently replaced the shell blade—the kaadian—gummed into the end. Kaadianmadiou, he said, and Rooke wrote it down: kaadianmadiou, I kaadianed it. Having written it, he realised what he had done. I kaadianed it: a sentence hitherto unknown to English. He was not simply learning another language. He was re-making his own. A boundary was being crossed and erased. Like ink in water, one language was melting into another.
Tagaran ran into the hut one afternoon, goose-pimpled all over, drops of water sparkling on her skin and in her hair. Rooke got up from the table but she pushed at him with a wet hand.
‘Ngyinadyiminga!’
He could see that she was saying, You stand between me and the fire! and got out of her way. She turned around and around in front of the flames, shivering, a purple tinge to her lips. He threw on more wood and blew at the fire until it blazed.
‘Bogidiou,’ she said, and he thought automatically, from bogi, to bathe or swim, therefore, probably I bathed or have been bathing.
‘My dear child, it is not weather for bathing!’
He knew she could not have understood precisely, but saw that she caught the tone: a big brother who thought he knew best. Just as Anne would, on being advised to wear her warmer but uglier shawl on a cold morning, she gave him an exasperated look.
The fire was roaring in the chimney, but she was still shivering, so he took his jacket from its peg and put it around her. For an instant he felt her narrow shoulders under his hands, felt the life of her, her breathing self, right next to him. Then she twirled like someone dancing a minuet, taking hold of the collar of the jacket as she did and handing it back to him.
Straight away he regretted that momentary touch on her shoulders. He might think of her as his sister, but Tagaran was not his sister. He wanted to explain, I have a younger sister you remind me of. But then thought, was that enough to justify such familiarity? If some native man, Warungin for instance, had come up so close to Anne, and put his hands on her shoulders, what would he feel?
He stepped back.
‘I am sorry.’
It was perhaps not too late to rescue the moment. He hung the jacket on its peg, taking rather more time than the action required, and took up a position near the door, as far from her as the hut allowed.
She performed another turn in front of the fire and stopped with her back to it, looking at him. He saw her thinking, her eyes going to the jacket hanging against the wall, the man standing with his arms folded at the other end of the room.
‘Goredyu tagarin,’ she said, and went through a performance which included the fire, and the jacket, and herself shivering, from which he understood her to mean that she would become warm more quickly if she remained naked.
Which was correct, he realised, and showed more understanding of the logic of wet skin and the heat of a fire than did his own world of endless garments. Her explanation told him why she had twirled herself out of what had almost been an embrace. But he saw that she was explaining something else too. She had seen his unease and understood its cause.
Still he felt awkward. In fact, he knew he was blushing. He could feel the warmth coursing through his blood, beating out against the skin. He turned to the table and made something of a to-do of getting the notebook and pen out and writing.
Goredyu tagarin, I more it (that is, I take more of it) from cold. That is to take off the cold. At this time Tagaran was standing by the fire naked, and I wished her to put on clothes, on which she said, Goredyu tagarin, the full meaning of which is, I will or do remain longer naked in order to get warm sooner, as the fire is felt better without clothes than if it had to penetrate through them.
This was longwinded, but by the time he had finished, his blush had subsided and Tagaran was no longer shivering.
She went with him to the small hollow he had cut below where water seeped out of the rock. Rooke dipped and poured, and when Boneda ran up, wanting to know what was going on, he let him dip and pour until the kettle was full. In the hut he put the kettle on the fire and the children saw straight away that he needed more twigs—they knew the same thing his grandmother had told him, little sticks burn the hottest—and they had the fire blazing and the water heated in short order.
He took it outside to the stump on which his enamel basin sat next to the rain gauge. He had wedged a stick upright into the stump and jammed his looking-glass into its split end, and now began the ritual of shaving, which never failed to entertain the children: the stropping of the blade on the leather strap, the making of lather with the shaving brush, the way the lopsided mirror caused him to tilt his head to one side as he drew the blade through the white foam. Worogan pointed to his nose, bare of lather.
‘Minyin bial kanga?’ she asked, why don’t you wash this part?
Worogan was laughing sideways at Tagaran. She had lost her shyness, and now he saw that there was some private joke on the subject of his shaving, or his nose, or the whole business of being cheeky to a man, or to a white man. He pushed his tongue into his cheek to tighten it for the blade, peering into the insufficient mirror. He knew he would never learn what the joke was, but he smiled, mostly with his eyes to avoid getting soap in his mouth.
When he had finished shaving he folded up the razor, wiped his face with the towel, and tossed the water out. Tagaran picked up the kettle and shook it, indicating there was a little left, and by gesture asked his permission to pour the water into the basin, then she plunged her own narrow hands into it. Against the white enamel of the basin her skin was sumptuously dark. He put his own hand down alongside hers: pink, somewhat freckled, unfinished looking, he thought, by comparison.
He took her hands in his and laved them with the soap and, to complete her toilette, he wet the corner of the towel and wiped her face. She watched him as he worked. Further than her face he was shy to go: a face was a public thing but a body, no matter how childish, was private.
He gave her the towel.
‘Wash, come, wash yourself.’
She took the towel and dipped the corner in the warm water as she had seen him do.
Watching her—her face showing every nuance of expression: surprise at the unaccustomed feel of warm water on her skin, wariness, the fun of doing this new thing—he risked a joke.
‘If you wash yourself often you will become white!’
He did not know whether she would understand the words, or his attempt to translate them into actions, making to wash his forearm and then holding it beside hers, the white skin against the brown. He thought it a good joke, the sort of absurdity a child would appreciate, and all the more entertaining because his own skin was so dead-looking compared to hers.
But she rubbed at her forearm with the towel a few times, inspected it, and flung down the towel in a pet.
‘Tyerabarrbowaryaou!’
He supposed she was saying something like I shall not become white!
She stuck out her bottom lip, pouted and postured, acting out despair. He was appalled, cursed himself for such a badly judged bit of tomfoolery.
Then she winked at him, and he saw that she was not acting, but overacting. He had made a promise as a joke, and she had taken hold of the joke and run further with it, giving it another twist that compounded its ironies.
When she saw his face clear with relief, she left off pouting and laughed with pleasure at what they had made together. He laughed too, astonished at it, so rich and layered.
But it left a taint of something else, a sense of the ease with which a thing could go wrong. He must be careful, he told himself. The rapport between them was easy, but he must not make assumptions. There was too much to lose, and not just the glory of being the first to speak the native tongue.
Afternoon was wearing into evening. Over by the fire, the women were picking up the babies and calling to the children. But Tagaran and Worogan were talking together and glancing at Rooke. Some scheme was afoot.
‘Matigarabangun nangaba,’ Tagaran said, and gestured, palm under cheek, finger pointing to the floor at her feet.
Nangaba: in that he could hear a familiar word, nanga, the infinitive of the verb to sleep. He already knew nangadiou, I slept, and nangadiemi, you slept. Was nangaba the future tense? Was Tagaran suggesting that she and Worogan sleep in the hut?
He went over to Mauberry and Barringan at the fire, trying to explain, to ask, to confirm the rightness of it. Yes, they agreed, Worogan and Tagaran would sleep in the hut of Mr Rooke. There was much hilarity. He had no hope of following their shouted comments but was pretty sure that they were about him. It was perhaps as well that he did not understand.
The novelty of spending the night in an unfamiliar place was something he recognised. Perhaps that was universal among children. Even he had begged to spend the night under a canvas awning in the slip of garden behind the house in Church Street.
Until recently Daniel Rooke had felt all of a piece with the child he remembered himself to be. Now that little boy seemed an entirely different person from the man waving goodbye to a group of laughing naked women and their plump brown babies with no more sense of the strangeness of the scene than if they were his neighbours in Portsmouth.
He shared his food with the girls, although he thought they ate more for the novelty of it than any pleasure. Indeed, there was not much pleasure to be got out of stale bread and a little broiled salt pork. But he made sweet-tea—they exclaimed at the fact that he put the leathery leaves in the kettle and steeped them—and he understood them to say that they used the leaves too, and gave him the name of the plant, or perhaps the leaves, or perhaps the infusion: warraburra. They thought that to drink it out of teacups was the most amusing and extraordinary thing.
He sipped his own cup of warraburra. He had grown more fond of it than real tea, enjoying the way its faintly aniseed, faintly astringent, faintly sweet taste left him refreshed, his spirits somehow clearer.
It was the oddest pleasure to have these two staying with him. Had he ever played host before? He could not think of an occasion. He had expected many things of New South Wales, but not that he would learn to keep house and entertain guests.
Where in the hut did they wish to sleep? In front of the fireplace, of course. Worogan lay down on the mat he had there and curled herself towards the warmth, but Tagaran pointed to the blanket on the bed, unmistakably a command, so he spread it out for them on the floor. Worogan was not sure, but Tagaran made her get up so they could lie on it together. She was such a bossy child! He hoped he would never find it necessary to refuse her anything.
They curled up side by side, and he sat at his table and opened his notebook, turning to W and recording warraburra, sweet-tea.
But Tagaran sat up.
‘Boobanga,’ she said. ‘Boobanga kamara!’
He saw from her actions, that this was a request: Cover me with a blanket, my friend!
He did not think she would like the feel of the rough wool against her skin, so unused to any covering, but he was not going to try to explain. Tagaran would have to find out for herself about blankets, just as he had discovered for himself, that night under the canvas awning, that it was cosier in the house. His father might have had the same contradictory feelings as he did now: a longing to protect, and an imperative to stand aside.
He took his second blanket and laid it over the two girls. He had not been comfortable under the canvas in the garden at Church Street, but comfort was not the point. The point was that Tagaran wanted to feel the very texture of the white man’s world.
The girls lay quietly and he went back to the notebook. How would he record the joke that he and this child had shared earlier in the afternoon?
Tyerabarrbowaryaou, he wrote, meaning, I shall not become white.
That might be correct, but it did not begin to capture what had happened.
This was said by Tagaran, he added, after I told her if she washed herself she would become white, at the same time throwing down the towel as in despair.
This was an improvement over the bare translation, but left out all that was important about the moment. What had passed between Tagaran and himself had gone far beyond vocabulary or grammatical forms. It was the heart of talking; not just the words and not just the meaning, but the way in which two people had found common ground and begun to discover the true names of things.
But how did you write down truth in a notebook, when the truth was far more than the words or the actions? When, even in English, he would not know how to express the thing that had passed between them?
To somehow convey that drama on a page, he supposed he would have to do as Silk would. He would have to be willing to go beyond the literal, to take words into some place where they were no longer simply descriptive, but had a life of their own.
Well, he was not Silk. These words could carry none of the life of the exchange. The only reason for recording them was that they would allow him to remember. For the rest of his life he could read these words and be transported back to this here, this now. This happiness.
He got his greatcoat down from its peg, stretched himself under it on the bed, and took up Montaigne. Of Thumbs. He had read his few books so often he almost knew them by heart, but he always enjoyed Of Thumbs.
At night the hut always felt as if lost on the edge of space. Surreptitious scratchings and rustlings from outside had the effect of deepening the silence and intensifying his solitude. There were nights out here when he lay in the dark feeling as if he were the only human on the face of the earth.
With the girls alongside him, the space within the walls was transformed. The embers of the fire cast a steady radiance. Tonight, as never before, the hut was a cosy vessel coasting along on the currents of night.
He had chosen the place with solitude in mind but he was pleased, for once, not to be alone. Perhaps he was not, after all, such a solitary soul. That was something about himself that he had not known before. Had it always been there, but never brought to life by the right circumstance? Or was something in the air of New South Wales changing him?
He had only read a page about thumbs when he saw Tagaran raise herself up on an elbow and call softly to him, kamara, her face creased with sleepiness.
‘Minyin bial nangadyimi?’ he said carefully. Why don’t you sleep?
‘Nyimang blanket, kamara,’ she answered.
Did she say, Put out the blanket? It was as he had thought. He got up and began to pull the blanket away. Worogan slept on, but Tagaran grabbed it and glared at him in surprise and indignation. He watched her face register a cascade of thoughts.
‘Kandulin!’ she said and pointed. Candle!
It was the light that was keeping her awake.
It was so unlike her to make a mistake in speaking that he made a joke of it, bending down towards the blanket and puffing as if to blow it out. She smiled, acknowledging the game.
‘Tariadyaou,’ she whispered.
He recognised the form of the past tense, and some part of a word he thought meant something like mistake. Was she saying, I made a mistake in speaking?
‘Yes,’ he whispered back, looking down at her face, very childlike with the blanket around it. ‘But you know, to err is human.’
His father had said such things to him, in just the tender tone he heard in his own voice now. She could not understand those last words, he thought, but she closed her eyes for sleep.
He arranged himself under his coat again and blew out the candle, smiling at the idea of putting out the blanket. It was unlike Tagaran to make a mistake, but it was equally unlike himself to think to turn a mistake into a joke.
Well, it might be unlike Lieutenant Daniel Rooke, but for the person she called kamara it seemed to come as naturally as breathing. Kamara must have existed all this time, he thought, but without the remarkable chance of the arrival of Tagaran, he would still be voiceless.
He lay on his side listening to the soft sounds of the embers creaking and collapsing, and the girls’ innocent unaware breathing. He could see the curve of their joined silhouette swelling and subsiding. One of Tagaran’s arms was flung out from beneath the blanket, the hand palm-up, the fingers loosely curled around air.
He felt—what was it?—a warmth was it, in his chest? He could not locate it or name it, but knew it was to do with Tagaran being under his roof, that trusting hand turned up towards him.
The light from the embers had faded to nothing. The hut was as dark as blindness. In a short time he knew that a full moon would rise. As he had done on so many other nights, he got up and wrapped himself in the greatcoat. Tonight he would not watch the moon as an astronomer, but as any other man might who could not sleep. He felt his way over to his table and the shelf above it, got the brandy bottle, poured a glass mostly by sound, and took it outside.
The world was darkness upon blackness. Only the harbour was a different, shifting blackness. No one but an astronomer who knew where to look would have seen the modest glow on the horizon. He waited, used to sitting in the dark until a light appeared in the sky where he knew it must. The brandy warmed him: poor brandy, he tasted the harshness of it, but it was a pleasure he did not often allow himself.
The merest sliver of moon was a line of light along the horizon. As he watched, it rose until all but the last fraction of its circumference was free. It spread out along the horizon and seemed to flatten itself, clinging to the earth as if reluctant to rise.
It was simply an effect of the atmosphere, but how odd and interesting that the human mind should be so constructed as to find it a thing of beauty. Knowledge of why it happened only made the sight more lovely. He was willing to sit transfixed, the mosquitoes whining around his ears, until the instant where the stretched liquid parted and let the moon sail alone through indigo space.
Tagaran had praised him again that day: kamara budyeri karaga, she had said, kamara speaks well. He liked the way she called him kamara.
There was a particular sly mocking glance that she shot sideways at him when he was being slow. Other than his sister, Tagaran was the only human in the world who trusted him to be able to laugh at himself.
Perhaps this was what it was like to have children of one’s own, and move with them in an atmosphere of easy playfulness. He supposed that one day, like most men, he would marry. If he did, and had those unimaginable children of his own, he would remember this. He tried to picture himself telling them the story. Then one night the two native children slept in my hut.
He thought there might not be any words for what was happening between himself and Tagaran. Like the language of the Cadigal that he was learning, word by half-understood word, the language of his feelings for her was beyond his reach. He could only step forward blindly, in trust.
Perhaps it was the brandy, but in the eerie wash of moonlight he sat content to the point of euphoria.