MONITOR

There’s a lot of debate over whether these are racehorse goannas or bungarras or Gould’s monitors. They look similar. Some say they are one and the same thing. They are all monitors. Some even call them sand monitors, though they are wrong in this. The parchment intagliated yellow, prehensile claws that reach across the eras like hands deprived, but knowing what they want. The way the tail does or doesn’t curl, that arboreal inclination or a preference for sand. The sleek but rough-andready body. So much is in the skin, she thought.

Mary stayed indoors during the summer, or went out covered from head to toe, no matter how hot. People assumed she’d become religious, living alone and in isolation for so long. The truth was no doubt a mixture of some kind of inherent withdrawal that amounted to spiritual vocation, but also the brutal reality of having had so many skin cancers burned from her overly white skin. Those years of rounding sheep and fencing. When she’d inherited from her parents – after their car accident – she managed it alone, and did the work with Danny, or Black Dan, as the other white farming families called him. Young, strong and reliable, they’d say, with something almost approaching approval. They did not approve when she took up with Black Dan. They did not approve, either, of Mary spending so much time in the sun. Not because of the cancer – they didn’t really know or care much back then – but rather because such white skin is to be treasured, to be filed away for breeding and archival purposes, a legacy of origins, an insurance against country’s merciless assimilations.

Mary and Dan worked the farm for a few years before Dan said he’d had enough. Now she was on her own. There was a lot to it, but Mary tried not to think about cause and effect, pushing the trauma as far back, as deep down, as she could.

Dan could chase down a bungarra. He’d lift it by its tail and show her. Mostly, she thought, they just stand still and fix on you, when you approach, but a sudden move and they’ll shoot off, even climbing trees. Her father had shot them. For no good reason. Most of the farmers in the district, and their wives, would swerve their cars to hit a snake, but few would bother a bungarra on the edge of the road. Her father, though, was vengeful against anything that didn’t bear profit. He hated the sight of what came out of the land without his conjuring.

Dan told Mary that the bungarra was his totem animal, and though it made good eating he wouldn’t eat it. She would have liked to forget this as well, but she occasionally saw these monitors darting and scratching about the farm. They favoured a breakaway area of bush in the far northern corner of the property, where they had built an empire of burrows. Yes, an empire.

When the farm was broken up because she could no longer manage, Mary kept the breakaway block, though it was a long way from the house. It had no cropping or grazing value, which went against the grain of her upbringing. Locals thought her retaining it was confirmation, as if any was needed, that she was losing touch, or even going senile. The thing was that the breakaway block edged the rapidly expanding town of Y, and developers had long had their eye on it. Pressure was at first subtly exerted on Mary, then somewhat more heavy-handedly. She resisted, without explanation.

Mary’s crisis was more straightforward. The monitors were out in the summer heat, and she had always enjoyed hanging around the breakaway, watching them. Now she got out there rarely, and then so covered that she felt a prisoner in the open spaces. The contradiction was hard to handle. Perversely, on an intensely hot day after the harvest was in, and the town no longer smelt like a bread oven, she covered herself entirely in white robes, hatted and veiled, and went out to the breakaway at noon. There was an extreme fire warning and it was tinder dry. She even worried about her robes as they rustled and caught on the scrub: could the friction make sparks? It was a compulsion to be there, and she was prone to compulsions.

That’s when she came across the firebug, lighting matches and blowing them out. When he saw and heard her approach, he didn’t budge an inch, didn’t flinch. Just kept lighting matches and blowing them out.

She screamed a muffled scream through her veil. ‘What are you doing?!’

The teenage boy laughed. ‘I am the son of the man who would unland you …’, as if that was all that was necessary. Explanation in itself. He spoke in a private-school way, she recognised. A city boarder home for the holidays. A pompous high achiever.

‘Stop with those matches, you’ll burn the district out!’ She could sense even the green of the jam trees, the rough bark of York gums, and deadwood encrusted by termite mud-work bending to the flame. Their and our fatal attraction, she thought slowly as her brain raced with fear. She’d always had two speeds to her personality: her heart beating fast and her thoughts rushing, then another layer that seemed to move slowly, almost indifferently, at its own pace.

‘True,’ he said nonchalantly. Lighting another match and letting it burn down and into his fingers. ‘It would please my father, though.’

‘It wouldn’t please anyone and you’d spend a good time in jail,’ she said, shaking. ‘No, you’d be burnt to death along with the rest of us.’

He hesitated. Stopped lighting matches and said, ‘You are a strange-looking hen.’ He seemed proud of his word choice. ‘Dad said you were like an old hen – he was right, and he rarely is, so I’ve got to give him his due.’

Mary pulled off her hat and veil, exposing her fair hair and white skin to the furious sunlight. ‘Get off my property! I will call the police.’

‘You do that,’ he said. And wandered off towards the gravel road and town, without looking back.

A monitor appeared. Mary watched it, feeling her skin burning. She wanted to cry but couldn’t; the heat had taken the moisture out of her body.

Back home, Mary went to ring the police, but then changed her mind. She felt ill from sunburn and exposure. She rang the property developer. She knew him and yet didn’t know him. He had rung her and written to her and pleaded and threatened. She was holding up the evolution of the town. Mary rang him, and the son answered. ‘Who is it?’ Locating the voice, she hung up.

The following day she covered herself and went to the breakaway, again at midday. The firebug was there, watching a monitor as it stood still, raised on its front legs, watching him, eye to eye. She went up close and watched the monitor as well. ‘There’s something inside this one,’ he said, without moving his gaze.

‘Yes, there is,’ she replied calmly, as if she’d known him all his life.

‘My dad hates them, ‘he said.

‘Mine did too.’

‘Before my dad sent me away to school I used to sneak up here and watch them for hours, ‘he continued. ‘I saw you then, sometimes, watching as well. I wondered why you never saw me. It was like you couldn’t see anything else but the goannas.’

‘Maybe I did see you,’ she ventured, though she realised she never had. He could be lying but she didn’t think so. It was something about those lit matches. The kid didn’t care. He had nothing to lose in the truth.

‘I know things about this place. It has its secrets.’ He turned to her now and the monitor fled. ‘In the network of burrows, there is the anatomy of a fall, the map of a town.’ She could see there was pain in his eyes. He was talking to himself. She saw herself in him.

‘This town is a town of hate and needs purging. My father says you are from one of the first families of the district …’

‘First white families,’ she half said. She studied him through her veil. He was tall, thin – she could tell this even though he was half crouching, half leaning against a York gum; maybe seventeen. Jeans and sports shoes, a black T-shirt. The clothes didn’t seem to fit the voice, but she was remembering the codes from a long way back. His hair was voluminous, and looked too heavy for his head. It had a streak of blond through the black that glared out in the light. Dan would have called it ‘holy man’s hair’. She almost laughed out loud, thinking: and Dan would have called that stuff on his face ‘bum fluff’. She felt grateful for the veil. But the boy was sharp, or sharp when it suited him.

‘You checking me out, old hen?’

She felt the redness that defined her features more than her whiteness. She was burning. Strangely, she liked the feeling. The inner heat of humiliation.

The boy leapt up and almost shouted, ‘Two things: my father and his cronies have a plan for getting hold of this land. They’ve cut a deal in the highest echelons, at the watershed of corruption. Not just with the shire – with the state government. You’ll receive a letter soon. Secondly, I know something about this place you don’t know.’

She no longer had it in her to register shock. She felt her senses awaken and she could hear the monitors moving in their burrows in the rip of the breakaway. ‘I can hear them,’ she said.

‘That’s it, now you’re getting it. Listen harder!’

She did listen. She joined him under the shade of the York gum – a tree so straggly that it offered little respite. ‘I need the shade – whatever shade I can get.’

The boy moved aside so she could benefit from the shade of the trunk. She nodded by way of thanks, and listened harder. Then she heard it. ‘He’s down there, isn’t he?’

‘… Yes, old hen, yes. His bones are as white as your skin, and as damaged. I heard the story when I was a small child; my grandfather told my father and he told me. That a white girl with a rich farm, that would be richer one day, was having it off with a blackfella – and that the other families of the district, The Five, as they’re known with respect and affection, the old white families, sent their sons to save you from yourself, to have a word in Black Dan’s ear, to suggest he go walkabout.’

She stood petrified, as still as a monitor under surveillance. Waiting for the spell to be broken so she could make a run for it. For the house and the shade and the cool, a long way away.

The boy persisted. ‘All we kids of the district know the story. Though what I know that they don’t, is that Dan never went far away. I found him, when I was a kid. I was trying to dig a monitor out of its burrow, to kill it and cook it, to see what it tasted like. I heard they were good to eat. I wanted to try it out. And as I dug, I found the monitor had woven its burrow into the shallow grave of a man. I came back each day after school and excavated a bit more until I had unearthed a whole skeleton. Around its wrist was a chain with a plate engraved: To Dan from Mary with Love.’

The day seemed to slow down. The oil from the eucalypts was heady.

‘That could save your bungarras from extinction,’ he said. ‘Or, if you like, I could burn the block out, and the whole town with it. Bastards, old hen, they’re bastards.’

Unable to absorb the import of what was being said, she noticed the boy starting to twitch, to grow manic. His voice sped up and heightened. He lost his posh accent and spoke as if he’d done time in a shearing shed. He started to cry. He fell to the ground. She knelt over him so her white robes sheltered him from the fierce sun.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘It’s okay.’ She pondered the reflective nature of her white robes, driving sun rays back to their source, breaking back out of the atmosphere. Too many get through, though, I won’t last out here.

‘They didn’t kill Dan,’ she said, ‘I killed him.’

The boy seemed barely conscious. She needed to get someone to help him, but she didn’t, she kept talking, calmly.

‘I shot him. It was an accident. We were just messing around, shooting at cans on fence posts. He was setting them up and I was adjusting the sights and the gun fired. It had been my father’s. He always said it was a useless gun because of the hair trigger. I didn’t know what to do. I just went numb. I left him where he fell. I went and sat in the shade of the verandah till I’d pulled myself together. Then I phoned a neighbour, who rang around the founding families, and they sent their sons, and their sons took him out here so he’d be somewhere that mattered to him. I never knew exactly where, but hereabouts was good enough.’

The boy’s breathing was growing fainter. But she had to finish.

‘I always look in from this edge, watching the monitors mark the land. They tolerate the sun better than any other creature. Dan was actually liked by them, by the Five. It was me they hated, but I knew they’d never betray their own. My skin is whiter than theirs. They need me.’

She collapsed on the boy, who was deaf with heatstroke. Her weight forced out his last breath.

When the fire came, it took out half the district. The developers left no trace of what had come before, and no two versions of the story made sense. The sun is hotter there than anywhere else in the wheatbelt. Parents carefully monitor their kids for skin cancers, but even so, they grow up with the skins of goannas.