A lake of white water, not a mirage, lay far ahead. This was where she saw the swans. Black wings swirled down from the clear blue skies to skid across the water. The girl thought it was her dreams catching up with her, coming back in the daytime. She needed to run to see if these were her swans but knew not to, to watch from a distance the swans gliding on the white water, while I glide swanlike…I glide and glide. From the sides of her eyes she saw the hurdles. Warren Finch would see she had not forgotten the swamp. She never knew how the genies would react.
Questions surfacing in her mind about leaving ran from the girl, and disappeared into the vista of the white sea. She felt homesick, a terrible yearning to go home. She ran towards the swamp that wasn’t there. The swans saw her coming over the salt, and before she had a chance to come anywhere in reach, they snapped loose her spirit from theirs, and took to the air. She watched until they were out of sight, flying further ahead, in a south-easterly direction.
Warren watched her run. Sure! Sure! I’ll be there. He spoke loudly into his mobile phone. I am ready. Let’s do it. His words caught her, ran along the surface of her arms as she ran, and as though a net he threw had unfurled over her, she realised in this moment, that she was attached to him. She would never escape, even if she ran forever from a world that had fallen apart.
Doom tried to console the girl about the swans flying away. They were not your swans. They are free birds. They belong somewhere else. She felt residues of bad luck lurking inside of his voice. It was his bad luck that the swans had sensed, why they had flown. Around their feet, a little breeze picked up grains of salt with dead grass and carried these along, signalling the owls to start their retreat, back towards the east coast for the summer. Most would not reach their destination, Doom said sadly. So much work done for nothing. Why breed? He knew that they would all be gone that night.
Hare stew.
Meal fit for kings. And a queen. Eat before the lizards steal it.
The Milky Way lit the landscape, and Snip took the girl away from the campfire to give her a lesson about the night sky. I think you will like it. There is something pretty special up there tonight. She had learned a lot about the alignment of the planets from him. The genies often pointed to the path in the west where Venus would fall earlier each night, until in the winter nights it was Mars that was the first to fall. Remember! Winter rains will fall on this land, and in the middle of the night, a cloud of mist will descend to touch the earth.
Remember to come back here, Snip said, as they stood on a hill, staring at the sky.
The thought of returning seemed unlikely. She could not imagine how it would be possible.
These are the methods of positioning yourself for finding South, he said, explaining that they were in the galaxy of the Milky Way that rose like smoke from the horizon until its river of stars ran directly above them. Their light rebounded off the salt and it was this phenomenon that seemed to make the stars shine more brightly. He showed her how to position where she was by drawing a line through the Southern Cross and joining it to a line drawn to the halfway point from The Pointers. This will form a V for you, and from there, if you draw a line down to the horizon, you will know where to find South. Or another way, he explained, was by forming the same triangle by drawing an imaginary line down from the brightest star in the sky, Canopus, and across from the star Achernar which sits low in the southern sky.
However, this is not what I really want to show you, he said, taking her hand, and pointing her fingers along with his into the northern world of the sky, he drew along the stars the outline of a swan in full flight.
Do you see it?
She nodded, seeing the swan’s long head arching down towards earth.
That is the constellation of Cygnus, the Swan. The star of its tail is a supergiant named Deneb. Look for it up along the Milky Way. If you can find it in the sky, you will be able to follow it North, until the weather becomes warm again.
She continued looking at the swan’s changing position, wondering how she would remember to find it again.
Don’t always look in the same place. He will move across the sky. Remember you will only see Cygnus at the onset of winter. Just like your swans I imagine.
In the darkness with a dying fire, they waited for the final moment when the earth opened the spinifex grassland abodes and the hands of the spiritual ancestors released the owls like pollen into the skies. The swooping waves of owls flew over their heads, the young travelling eastwards with their parents in a colony of thousands.
Men may do the same one day if they fear too much. Imagine it. Imagine a dust cloud travelling right through this country. Snip’s voice was almost a whisper, and in that moment, the clouds heralding the cool change appeared from the east, travelling in a westerly direction.
While the girl and Warren slept, the genies were searching for a few stray owlets in the spinifex. Doom said there had to be one or two that had not fledged. He promised one for Oblivia to keep as a pet. In the morning I will have one for you, he said. She thought of this owl while sleeping in a low-lying valley filled with white flowering lilies that shone in the starlight breaking through the clouds.
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.
In the distant mirage beyond the houses, Oblivia saw the green and white service station. The sight of the green roof became a thought to reach, not of running away, but taking back her life. He knew her thought as she looked off in the distance, and said: It won’t pay to go over there. You will find that this is a pretty rough joint. We will wait here. The plane won’t be long. His mobile phone rang once, twice, and three times before he answered it. Yep! Right! He seemed relieved to be leaving. She could hear him talking about the plane’s arrival time and then the droning off in the distance. She listened to the sky too – for the heartbeat of swans flying, and for a few moments of panic, caused by the thought of being forcibly pushed onto the plane by Warren, she was again standing on the shores of the empty salt lake. Only the warmth of the swans remained where they had rested on the ground covered with low-growing tussock grass and saltbush.
Within moments of the blue aeroplane landing they were gone. Only the deafening howl of the engine could be heard as it flew above the saltbush landscape, over the salt lakes, and into another world. There was nothing but clouds, and the frightened girl thought how the clouds would look around the mountaintop of the old woman’s homeland, and thought she should have asked the old woman a question about clouds, because she did not know: Who spoke of great seas of clouds where wind was eddying under the crevices?