21

Darren Brown felt the rhythmic rattle of the train as he travelled home, past Parramatta to the outer western suburb of Mt Druitt. He flicked through his notebook but his thoughts kept coming back to the glow with which Tony Harlowe spoke of his daughter. Raw envy ate at him.

Since dropping out of university he had moved back to his mother’s place, the house he’d grown up in. With three of his seven brothers and sisters now out of home, the three-bedroom house was not as crowded as it had been when they were all under one roof. Back then, it was bursting at the seams, rowdy and raucous and there was no privacy.

His mother was on a pension. Money was scarce and, in this environment, resourcefulness was second nature and they made do with little. His father had died in an accident while working on the railway and Darren had no memory of him. He often wished he had a father - one who would watch him play football and congratulate him after the match, who would talk about him with the same pride that Tony Harlowe spoke about his daughter.

His mother had borne his four youngest siblings with two other men. Both had lived with them sporadically but through drinking or disinterest had never wanted to take on the role of father to Darren. Simon, his eldest brother, was the next best thing. He was charismatic, popular but always getting into trouble. He was very protective of his brothers and sisters but quick to anger if threatened and was easy to goad. He was always getting into fights and the local police came to know him by sight.

It was different in the school holidays when his mother would put him and his siblings on the train and send them to Brewarrina to stay with his grandmother. Baagii, they called her, using the old language. Dozens of cousins and a few uncles would fuss over him, take him fishing, out shooting kangaroo or to the local cricket matches. Baagii’s house was crowded with its rooms filled with glassware, photographs and porcelain. The ornate light fittings, dark wallpaper and coffee and tan patterned carpet made the rooms feel even more cramped but everything was always neat. He and his brothers and sisters would sleep in the two rooms, on the couch and lounge room floor, the back verandah and in the old abandoned caravan in the back yard.

These were chaotic times with gangs of children playing games, off to the riverbank or having some kind of adventure. Baagii required them to be home for breakfast and dinner but left them to their own resources in between, knowing the fear of her wrath would be enough to keep everyone on the straight and narrow.

But Darren always sought out her company in the evenings or would play cards with her in the late afternoons. She would tell him stories about her days as a young girl fruit picking with her family and living by the river.

‘Tell me the story of how you met my grandfather,’ he would ask.

‘Again, little Mudhay, my little possum?’

He would nod furiously. He never tired of hearing it.

‘Well, he came into town with the boxing tents. He used to work in them and people would pay to fight other men. Your dhaadhaa was the best fighter they had. He arrived in town on the eve of our big dance. Me and my friend Alice had been in Main Street buying some ribbon for our hair. He smiled at us as he walked past and we smiled back. He turned and came back to us and said “Hello, Ladies.” But we were shy, brought up right, and we wouldn’t tell him our names.

‘He asked around and Tommy Hall said, “One is Joan and the pretty one is Alice.” He said to them, “Well, you tell Alice that I want to dance with her at the dance tomorrow night. Tell her I want the first dance and I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Well, we got the message and Alice was all giggles and I was right surly as I liked him too, his being so handsome and all.

‘But Alice was my friend and I could hold no grudge against her. We spent a lot of time getting ready that night, doing our hair and putting on our dresses. I’d made mine and it was blue with little flowers on it. I know ’cause I still have it packed up in the closet. Well, we get to the dance and there he is, handsome as I remembered him, and he strode right over to us and put his hand out to me and said, “Alice, I believe you owe me this dance.” I was so surprised and so happy at the same time. I had to tell him my name was Joan and he said, “Tommy told me the pretty one was Alice and I thought he meant you. You’re the prettiest girl I’ve ever seen.” Well, I fell in love with him that night and we were married two months later on my eighteenth birthday.’

Darren loved hearing the way his grandmother laughed as she told the story. His grandfather had died before Darren was born from a heart attack while he was chopping wood. ‘He was a strong man with a big heart and we never knew it was a weak one,’ his grandmother would say.

There was a photograph of Darren’s grandfather that he loved to look at. Fresh-faced, dark-featured, dark shiny hair, in his boxing shorts, gloved hands pulled to his face.

The racism in Baagii’s town had startled him. Being called ‘coon’, not being served in the shops. Once, when he was walking back with two other boys, a car slowed down and the men in it called them ‘dirty little niggers’. ‘We’re going to hang you from a tree. Here, have a shower, you dirty little niggers,’ they had taunted. And then Darren felt the pelts of spit. He had been petrified but, after the men had spat at them, the car roared off.

He knew that the same prejudice existed in the city. The children at his school would call the Aboriginal kids like him ‘coon’, ‘nigger’ and ‘boong’. He knew that his mother often complained about the way in which she had been treated by the bank, the shopkeepers and the welfare workers. She also said that if Darren’s father hadn’t been black, they wouldn’t have been so slack in making sure he was safe. ‘They always give the dangerous jobs to the blacks,’ she would say.

When he started high school, the form master, Mr Hestelowe, seemed to take an interest in him. One day towards the end of his first year he had taken Darren aside. ‘Why don’t you stick to your studies?’ he asked. ‘You get good marks when you apply yourself.’

Darren shrugged.

‘You never do your homework.’

‘I find it hard, sir.’

‘You need to apply yourself.’

Darren didn’t say that the house was overcrowded, there was no space for him to do homework and it was noisy. The younger kids always needed attention and Simon always had some scheme or adventure.

‘You could stay back at school and do it.’

‘Aw, then all my mates would laugh at me.’

‘Not cool, eh?’

Darren shook his head.

The next day, in assembly, Mr Hestelowe had called him out. ‘Darren Brown, report to my office at the end of the day. You’re on detention this afternoon.’

Darren was fuming. He’d done nothing wrong and there was Mr Hestelowe just yesterday acting as though he was concerned about him, but today he was falsely accusing him, making a fool of him in front of the whole school. He came to the office, full of rage, when the final bell rang.

‘Get your books out and do your homework.’

Darren would stay back after school and do his homework under the pretence he was in trouble. His marks improved.

‘I noticed in your English essay you wrote about the way your mother was treated in the store when it was assumed that she was a shoplifter because she was black,’ he once said.

‘It’s all racist and people get away with it.’

‘It is illegal to discriminate against people on the basis of their race when you are buying goods in a store. There are laws against it.’

‘Well why don’t they work? We cop it all the time.’

‘It’s only in some circumstances and you have to bring a case,’ Mr Hestelowe explained.

‘Like a court case? We can bring a case?’

‘Well, you usually need a lawyer to help.’

‘A lawyer. Aren’t they expensive?’

‘They are. But I guess if you were a lawyer you wouldn’t need to pay one.’

Since then Darren would dream about it, imagine he was in court, just like it was on television. He would lay the story out to the judge and use his powers of persuasion.

But Darren didn’t go to university. He left school and started packing for the local supermarket. Mr Hestelowe had encouraged him to apply for university but none of his friends had gone and his brother Simon had said it was for wankers.

Six months later, his cousin, who had epilepsy, had a fit on a train station on his way home from work. The train staff took him to the hospital. The nurse on duty looked at his dark skin and concluded that he was drunk. The police came and took him to the lock-up and overnight he died in custody.

Darren’s anger at the injustice of what had happened sparked his interest in going back to study. He went up to the school and spoke to Mr Hestelowe who helped him to apply for special admission to university. He did a bridging course, and while that went well enough, once he had started the uni course found it was much harder. There was further disruption in the house when his mother fell ill and two of his sisters - sixteen and seventeen - both got themselves pregnant within three months of each other. His friends and Simon had viewed him with suspicion. ‘You becoming an uptown nigger?’ his brother would taunt.

Darren took on extra shifts to help his mother meet her bills and towards the end of the year he dropped out of uni before he was formally marked as having failed his courses. ‘Don’t worry,’ Simon would console, ‘you’ll be like us again now. We had nothing in common when you were doing that uni stuff. Not because we aren’t proud of you. But we just don’t understand it. Going to prison, we can relate to that.’

Not long after that, Baagii died and it felt as though his world had fallen apart. Darren became restless and angry, as though a ball of frustration had knotted inside him. When some of his friends mentioned a car trip to Canberra to join a protest about changes to the native title legislation, he jumped at the chance. He’d always liked hearing Aboriginal leaders speak. Tony Harlowe, Gary Foley, Michael Mansell - they had all come to speak at the university when he had been there and each had spoken in a way that he understood.

So he joined his friends to go for a weekend and found, at the Tent Embassy, a language of politics and a worldview that captured his anger, frustration and his desire for a better life for people like his mother. He found himself there for a week, then two, and then signed on as part of the lobby to get the Tent Embassy status on the National Trust as a significant historical site.

It had been a good distraction from the dislocation and the despondency he had felt when coming to terms with the loss of his grandmother. Baagii had believed in the spirits. ‘Don’t go near the river at night,’ she would warn. ‘There are spirits there. They eat little birralii like you. And if you go too far out of the town at night, away from the lights, they can get you then too. Not all spirits are bad though. The old people look over you, and the young ones who die too young have the most sorrow. They are the most restless. I always believed in ghosts but I didn’t start to hear them until after your dhaadhaa passed away. I started to hear them then. And you might think that is funny but I started to get messages from time to time from the dead to pass on to the living.’

‘Will you come and talk to me after you die, Baagii?’

She would laugh in her rich throaty way. ‘I hope that won’t be for a while yet, Mudhay.’ When she stopped laughing she would say, ‘When you hear the rain on the roof, that will be me, coming back to watch over you.’

Even now he loved the sound of heavy rain. He would find somewhere to pretend he was asleep - in a crowded house you had to learn how to escape the noise by simply closing your eyes - and would listen to the rain and try to work out what Baagii was telling him.

As the train pulled into the station, Darren thought of Rachel. Since that first time he’d seen her, she’d been on his mind. It must be the same feeling that his grandfather felt when he first saw his grandmother - that here was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, soft and pretty, but so refined. She spoke so nicely, ladylike. And was smart, educated. He’d not have thought to hope if she hadn’t found the snippet from Maynard for him. That she had remembered their brief conversation when he had delivered some phone messages and thought of him at least once again when she had seen the letter, gave him some cause to think he may have a chance with her.

His next meeting, and probably the last, with Tony Harlowe, would be in two weeks. He had to think of a way, between now and then, to ask Rachel out.