There was this about Sydney Cove, Rooke thought: at the end of every summer’s day the nor-easter came through, as dependably as if someone out in the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean were paid to open a window. The forest-covered promontories seethed under gusts of wind that darkened the water to gunmetal grey.
Rooke considered destroying the notebooks. He would make a copy that would omit any entries which could be misunderstood and burn the originals. He got as far as sitting at the table and opening a new notebook, but could not make himself go on. To read the entries with an eye for what could be distorted would be to distort them. He would enter that coarse way of looking and be dirtied by it. Making an expurgated version of the notebooks would kill them. Like a stuffed parrot, they would be real, but not true.
When he saw Barringan threading her way down the rocks, Boneda calling kamara, kamara, and Tagaran a shining figure in the sun, he was glad. But he was also aware of something else in his heart. Could you want something, and dread it at the same time? Some powerful conflict of feelings in the vicinity of his chest made him unable to return her greeting.
Today it seemed the children did not want to crowd into the hut. Tagaran went in, though, and as he followed her he could not stop himself looking up at the ridge, dreading to see Silk’s dapper figure.
Tagaran went straight to the corner, removed the handkerchief draped over the end of the musket, and picked it up. He put out a hand to stop her, but she had already got it snugged into her shoulder and her finger was already against the trigger. Now she was pretending that she knew how to squint along its length.
Where had she seen that done? And why had she waited till now to try the thing?
The memory of that first day on the beach came into his mind, clear as an engraving in a frame: Weymark demonstrating the power of the white man’s weapon and himself laughing at the surgeon’s blunt description of what a musket ball might do to a man. Rooke had not really been amused. He wondered now what had possessed him to laugh.
News of that display would have travelled from tribe to tribe. Tagaran had most likely heard of it. Was she thinking of that picture too?
He smiled in a discouraging way, took the gun from her, put it back in the corner.
But she picked it up again and stuck her finger in the end of the barrel. She was asking, What makes the shot come out?
The governor had given orders that the marines never let the natives see that it was necessary to put anything into the gun. ‘They must think it is the thing itself, that its effect is as immediate and simple as that of their own lances,’ he had said. ‘For the safety of all of us, do not let them see the loading of it.’
So Rooke shook his head, held up his thumb and asked her what it was called. She was not to be distracted. Her insistence today seemed different from her usual curiosity, when she might want to know how the lid came off the inkwell or what the buckle on a shoe was for.
Or did it only seem different, because of that new shadow over things?
Finally, because he found it so hard to refuse her, he thought to go halfway. Against both his orders and his own dragging reluctance, he got down the bag of shot and emptied a ball out into his palm. She snatched it up, felt it, weighed it and tried it with her teeth before giving it back. Rooke loaded it into the muzzle, wadded it down.
He watched her face, intent on the movement of the ramrod in and out. He could see that she had forgotten that he was kamara. For the moment he was nothing more than a conduit for the knowledge she wanted.
His hands knew the movements of this ritual so well he could have loaded the gun with his eyes closed. In Portsmouth they had drilled endlessly, the sergeant calling out the actions one by one. It was incredible to Rooke now, but he had seen in the gun only a marvel of logic and mechanics.
On Tagaran’s face he saw an echo of that fascination, and wanted to say, There is nothing to admire here.
He hoped the palaver of loading and wadding the shot would be enough, but Tagaran was not fooled. She pointed to the pan, the duckbill hammer, the flint, demanded to see what they all did, so he showed her how the hammer struck the flint and made a spark. But still she knew there was more, and that it lived in the little bag up on the shelf.
With ceremony and much appearance of care, he opened the bag and shook out a little powder into his palm. He put the pinch of powder on the pan, but did not do the essential thing; there was no powder behind the shot to spit it out along the muzzle.
At least in the letter of the law, he was still on the right side of obedience.
She followed him outside. He expected the women to be there sitting as usual around their fire, Boneda and the other children running about the rocks and up and down from the water, but for once they were nowhere to be seen.
‘Where is Mauberry, where is Boneda?’ he asked Tagaran, but she was not interested in the question, only in seeing what he would do next with the gun.
There was something a little odd, a little unsettling, about the emptiness of the place. Lucky, though, he supposed. The noise he was about to make would have frightened the babies.
Tagaran wanted to stand next to his shoulder, but he made her go back a few yards. She watched, huge-eyed, as he pretended to aim and pulled his finger against the trigger. The flint fell against the steel, the spark fell onto the gunpowder in the pan. She jumped back at the bright flash and screamed, but it was more delight than fear.
He could feel his face stiff around the feelings the sound awoke in him.
‘There,’ he said, swinging the gun down from his shoulder and standing it butt-up on the ground. ‘I have shown you everything, does that make you content?’
But she had not been taken in. She knew he had made noise and light, but that the shot was still in the barrel.
Just for this day, he could have wished her stupid.
With gestures that an imbecile could not have mistaken, she showed him what she wanted: to see the lead ball—she picked up another one to demonstrate—hurtle itself out of the muzzle.
He would not. The noise and the flash were part of the allure of the machine, like fireworks or a person getting a note out of a tuba. But to shoot a piece of metal out of it that could penetrate a shield or a human body and expose the shambles within: that was of another order of experience, another language. What it said was, I can kill you.
He did not want her to learn that language. Certainly not from him.
‘No. I will not. Bial. Bial.’
She pouted and cajoled and wheedled. Then she turned to the sulks and called him tamunalang, one who refuses, or, he supposed, a churl.
He thought at first it must be a game: Tagaran gets her own way. But still she insisted, grabbing the barrel of the gun and pushing it at him. He was sickened by it: this innocent wanting to play at death.
He thought she must see his misery at handling the gun, at being reminded that he was a soldier, his profession violence. Why did she insist?
‘No! Do not ask, I beg you!’
For this appeal he had no Cadigal words. He had never before had to entreat her.
He snatched the thing away from her and put it behind him, out of her reach, then took hold of her wrist to stop her taking it again. Her arm was as thin as a twig, but strong. He could feel the sinewy power of it.
‘Come, girl,’ he cried at last. ‘Do not insist! I have said no!’
He could hear the anger in his voice, and she heard it too. She answered it with a flow of vehement words, spitting them out at him. He let her go and she took a step back. They watched each other. Suddenly it was no game.
He was bewildered. He had never thought to use his strength against her, or to speak to her in anger.
He watched her face, tightened against him, half hidden by her hair, her chin obstinate. He did not understand what had happened, except that it had to do with the wretched gun. He might as well have let it off. Something had been bent out of shape by his anger as surely as it would have been by shooting.
She turned away towards the door. He took a step after her.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said to her back. ‘Parribugo. Will you come again tomorrow?’
She spoke without looking at him.
‘Kamara, goodbye.’
What a terrible word that was. He could not say it in return. It was a word like a knife.
‘Parribugo. I will be here. Parribugo!’
But she had gone. He watched her climb up the track, her long skinny legs moving tirelessly over the rocks. He was waiting for her to turn around. He would wave for her to come back. He would run up the track to join her.
But she did not turn.
When she had gone, Rooke sat down on the side of his bed. His legs were trembling and he could feel an obstacle in his throat, as if part of him were trying to get out.
The smell of gunpowder still hung in the air from the pinch he had exploded for her. The smell made him feel panicked and muddled.
Why did Tagaran want to know how to fire a gun?
He found his mind suggesting an answer. How would it be—just to speculate—if Tagaran had been chosen by the natives to learn the language of the great-distance-off-people? To learn their ways? Even, perhaps, to make sense of the marks on paper that were so significant to them? To understand all their private inner workings of intellect, custom, belief and feeling?
And, perhaps, to find out how the guns worked. Their powers, their limitations. How they might be countered by men with spears and wooden shields.
A clever child like Tagaran was the perfect choice: quick to learn, but innocent. Curious, full of questions, but only a child. He thought of the way she absorbed words on a single hearing, made sense of entire sentences with amazing speed. She had learned more than she had ever taught him.
He had begun by thinking of Tagaran as a resource. He thought he had appointed her his teacher. He had been made too confident by his own ambition.
Brutally, he made himself face the last thought: he had been flattered by her friendship.
Now, to put it plain, it seemed that he was the one who had been used.
It hurt to have been taken for a fool. But that was not the pain in his throat, the constricted feeling, as if he were no longer sure how to breathe. The hurt that was choking him was that she had not enjoyed his company, after all. She had valued him only for what he could give her.
Which was how he had begun by thinking of her. Until now, when it was perhaps too late.
The next day, after the noon readings, Rooke set off up the track. At the top of the ridge he did not go down towards the settlement but in the opposite direction, towards the bay on the other side, the one called Long Cove. He had often seen the smoke rising there, and Tagaran had told him how the cockles and thick mud oysters loved the still water of that narrow bay. Once he had gone with her as far as a big rock from which the camp could be seen: a couple of bark shelters, a patch of cleared earth, a fire. She had made it clear that he should not go further, and he had not insisted. He had thought there would be other days, other opportunities.
Standing beside that rock today he could see that the cove was empty. No smoke rose from the mound of coals on the cleared space. The huts were still there, but empty.
He felt a hollowness within, as if he had mislaid something and might not find it again.
He sat down on the rock that was the boundary between his world and Tagaran’s. The sun had already left the deep fold of the cove. The water was black, the mangroves sombre, merging with their reflected copies.
The ridge on the other side of the cove was about to hide the sun. The earth was rolling on, carrying with it the speck of life that was Daniel Rooke. Whatever took place down here among the rocks and the trees, where human beings stumbled through their days in confusion of spirit, the earth continued to spin on itself and to draw its gigantic ellipse. Its urge to fly out into space was precisely balanced by the inward pull of the sun. Whether an individual could see it or not, the sun was always blazing, always pulling, and the earth was always held by its mighty hand.
The water shifted, two ducks crossed from one point to another. Somewhere on the far bank, a bird was making the same sound over and over—whik! whik! whik!—as steadily as a man counting sheep through a gate. Out in the centre of the dark bay, a circular ripple formed that multiplied out and out, ring after perfect ring.
All this was nothing but surface for him: surface without meaning. He could hear the bird, see the ripple. That was all. It was no further than a dog might understand.
In Portsmouth he knew—so well he had forgotten ever learning it—that when the leaves of the plane trees became yellow and leathery it meant that the weather would soon be cold. When the moon was ringed with a luminous pearliness, the next day the sea would be hurling broken water against the shingle. The fact of the leaves or the moon connected to other facts, each linked in the vast web of nature’s logic.
In New South Wales, he could not see how things were connected to any larger meaning. It gave life here an oddly disjointed and tiring aspect, like moving through the world blind.
Tagaran knew the inner ligatures of this place in the way he knew those of Portsmouth. She would be blind there, he supposed, as he was here.
She had asked him one day to tell her about the place he was from.
‘A harbour, like this one,’ he said, and pointed to show her.
He had looked across the water towards the land of the Cammeragal and could see it as Portsmouth Harbour, looking over to Gosport.
‘A little way across from shore to shore, like this.’
She had listened solemnly and looked where he was pointing.
He remembered the boy he had been at her age, and all the afternoons he had spent on the stony beach under the Tower, chilled through and through but dreading the return to the Academy. That boy had dreamed of beginning all over again, of a place where things could start from zero, not haunted by all those earlier failures. To be without words had been part of that dream. Now, on this wild point of land in this most distant of continents, that childish longing had come to pass. He had marvelled at it, a miraculous naked rebirth.
‘A good place,’ he told her.
Why had he said that, when it was not true? When you only had a few words to exchange, that was what happened. Truth needed hundreds of words, or none.
She had nodded. She thought she understood, but how could she? He had not tried to explain how it had really been, how it was to be lonely among your own people.
What was it like to be Tagaran? To walk about the woods barefoot and naked, as easy as he had been on Church Street?
He looked over his shoulder but he was alone on the hillside. The urge was irresistible, like hunger or thirst: to unbuckle his shoes, peel off the worn stockings, and stand barefoot on Tagaran’s earth. His feet were as white as those fat caterpillars that were found here among rotting wood: vulnerable, weak-looking. He took a few wary steps along the track, then he was jabbed in the heel by something sharp enough to make him gasp. When he looked he saw it was only a piece of twig half the size of a toothpick. Was that how little it took to prevent him from walking in Tagaran’s feet?
All his life he had liked his own company better than anyone else’s. But now he was full of unease, like being too hot or too cold, or hungry or thirsty. It was none of those. It was that he was no longer sufficient to himself. There was one human, of all the humans on this spinning globe, whose company he longed for.
That was an education for a man who thought he knew most things.
He had been foolish, standing on his dignity as a soldier of His Majesty. He should simply have shot the damned thing off, and let her learn from it whatever she chose.
Back at the hut he got out the notebooks that contained their conversations. They were small enough that they could be covered by his hand. Shabby and insignificant, they were the most precious things he had ever owned.
He did not expect her to return. What was recorded on these pages was all he would ever have of her.
He opened one at random. There was that first, ebullient entry: Marray—wet. He could remember the triumph of it. He had been so satisfied with himself, he saw now, that he had even put a full stop.
He was chilled by the confidence of those entries. How misplaced had been his triumph, how wrong the dogmatism of that full stop. Marray. Yes, it might have meant wet. It might have meant raindrop, or on your hand. It might have meant dirty or mud, because the drops on his palm had made mud out of the dust that had been there. It might have meant pink, the colour of that palm, or skin, or braided line of love, dearie, the way the gypsy woman at Portsea Fair had once told him.
But written down like that, with its little full stop, the possibility of doubt was erased. The meaning would never be questioned again. What had felt like science was the worst kind of guesswork, the kind that forgets it is a guess.
And, of course, he knew now that marray did not mean wet, but was an augmentive, something like very.
When the boy ran off, that first day, Tagaran had said yennarrabe and he was sure it could only mean, He is gone. He could see now that he had wanted to understand too quickly. He took up his pen, dipped it in the ink and turned the full stop into a comma, adding: the English of which is not yet certain.
He turned to the long entry which Silk had read, and relived all its awkwardness. 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.
Ingenious as this interpretation of Tagaran’s words had been, it was not correct. He saw that, although gore was to warm, goredyu could very well be a different word altogether.
There was room between the lines for him to admit to his error. This is a mistake. Goredyu signifies something else. Gore, to warm.
He had thought himself superior to Silk, who was innocent and smug in his belief that there was a precise unambiguous equivalence between words, and that one could exchange them as one might trade a Spanish dollar for two shillings and five pence. Now he saw that he had done the same. He had made these lists of verbs, these alphabets, these pages stretched like a net: other inflexions of the same verb.
But learning the Sydney tongue was not like that. Both the language and the act of learning had burst out of the boundaries he had tried to put around them. Proof of that was what he had just done. The press of the unknown had made him invent a new language, even newer to him than the Cadigal tongue: the language of doubt, the language that was prepared to admit I am not sure.
What he had not learned from Latin or Greek he was learning from the people of New South Wales. It was this: you did not learn a language without entering into a relationship with the people who spoke it with you. His friendship with Tagaran was not a list of objects, or the words for things eaten or not eaten, thrown or not thrown. It was the slow constructing of the map of a relationship.
The names of things, if you truly wanted to understand them, were as much about the spaces between the words as they were about the words themselves. Learning a language was not a matter of joining any two points with a line. It was a leap into the other.
To understand the movements of the celestial bodies, it was necessary to leave behind everything you thought you knew. Until you could put yourself at some point beyond your own world, looking back at it, you would never see how everything worked together.
In company with Tagaran he had glimpsed how everything found its place with everything else. He was afraid that was all he would ever have: a glimpse.