Outside the window the silver grey Mulga frosted the entire property. They were a weary and wistful looking tree that could not be budged once the hard bark had taken root in the deep red soil. The young couple had built their homestead in from the road among the sharp gidgee stumps. All summer the dead wood burnt into the shapes of rams heads and lizards.
Her husband Johnny had been out on an adjoining property helping with the mustering and hadn't come back. Her eyes were rimmed and dark as she thought of the fate of lonely wives who chose to wed and live on the river plains. It was as if the olive grey distances of the place endlessly engulfed her and that a long soundlessness lapped at her breast like wind that blows the dust particles, bringing to her daily chores its painful surf of heat and silence.
Judy stood by the wooden cot where her child slept, thinking that her sister was off checking the mail at the property boundary. She had her hand gently placed over his mouth. It was done as if to create yet more silence both inside and outside the spacious house. They were both sinking into it, the endless time.
From beneath the baby's plump white belly the slow wriggle from side to side began. His little arms and legs flicked as if striking out. There was no sound. He was trying to swim away, her hand blocking his airways. But Marla had arrived back early and now stood behind them framed by the doorway. At first she didn't call out to Judy. Instead she just watched as her perception adjusted to the present moment. She fled into her own mind. This seemed to occur in slow motion.
The tiny bird had hopped directly into the path in front of them, onto the red clay. 'It's beautiful,' Marla said. 'It's a chat,' Judy replied shifting the baby higher into the pack. They live on the property. They're a desert bird. They call them crimson-breasted nuns.' Neither woman could move and the baby was quiet. 'Why do you think that is?' 'I dunno. They live in silent places.' 'It's beautiful isn't it?' 'Yes, he's extraordinary, almost not of the earth. I'm wondering why he doesn't fly away.'
The feathers were awash with scarlet and lemon. It had come as if directly from the faint pink eggs, speckled with black, sepia and red brown. The musical chat lights up the harsh grey land into the glistening moisture of recently fallen rain. Nomadic native honey eaters, they hold the news in their thin black beaks like flutes. They are the canaries that sing the beautiful song of the desert. The notes are released as a high metallic chime called out in flight, that can shift and suddenly become certain and mellow after rain, as the land grows soft and rich.
Was it the baby's helplessness and her power over a situation? Judy didn't want the child to be hurt. She just wanted to perpetuate struggle from something weaker than herself. Yet because babies were so helpless and frail, the darkening of their lives so early in the picture began to kill them off inside. The alleviation of fear was momentary. In reality this was like releasing air from a balloon or the smash of delicate glass after being gripped too tightly. It was over quickly and then the deflated sensation of fear and failure and, if worst came to worst, the point of no return.
Eight seconds must have passed on the oven clock with no sign of Johnny or of the situation ending. Marla was petrified. Each shadow from furniture cast inside the house stretched across the polished floorboards, like cat's claws coming towards her shoes. Then a dog outside barked once. Judy startled and the child expelled the thimble of air from his nostrils as her grip was released. It suddenly seemed as if the sun had risen very quickly and the rooster had crowed.
Marla stepped back from the scene. She crept away fom the bedroom door and stood in the huge sunroom. 'Judy!', she called, 'Judy, come quick, something's up!' She feared that it was already too late. Judy appeared at the door without an answer, her eyes glazed over and sleeves rolled up, as if she was about to do the dishes. She was somewhere deep within her own wooden land. It was like someone had punched her in the mouth until she had fallen in. Something had entered her psychic landscape. 'It's a snake,' she said. 'He barks like that when it's a snake. I'll get the gun.'
'It was a good idea to get out of the house for awhile. Don't you think?' 'Yes. I haven't seen a chat in ages. It's a beautiful bird,' Judy said, 'they've seen more of this land than we'll ever see.' 'You should come out more often. Bring the girls.' 'I can't. There's so many snakes.' 'But just look at him. He loves it out here,' Judy said, sweeping up the baby's light brown hair, so his pale white forehead was exposed, as soft as butter. 'Is he still asleep?' Marla asked. 'No, he's just quiet.'
The size and shape of the riverside property can only be determined from the air we breathe in or imaginary maps. At ground level its atmosphere and how the weather impacts upon it, are what affects the psyche of the observer. What is inside it and outside it gradually comingle, until your psyche becomes the property and the property becomes your psyche. It's the kind of place that taps you on the shoulder one afternoon and tells you what to do.
All this direction when you thought that the bush was directionless and all your visions were only a touch of the sun. The cosy homestead is merely a sliprail that you tread upon towards a greater destination. It is a destination greater than a combination of properties and greater than the sum of all the winds that have passed through the stands of Mulga. The homestead may be the warren of a sturdy brown wombat, but it also has locked inside its interior the stride and muscular spring of a loose kangaroo.
Mainly the property homestead is a displaced shell inhabited by stories. The children and family are inside with the air conditioner, Imparja television, a gidgee log fire, the radio and the relentless weather approaching from all directions, getting the house trees down with a heat that drops and settles onto everything or that freezes the structure with dew. How much sympathy does the weather have for a flock of quarrions, particularly the weaker ones?
Marla thinks of the birds in heavy downpours and on cold nights. How steadfast was their civilisation compared to ours and how does the weather perpetually knock them down and lift their wings like roof tops in a cyclone? Was there a central core or merely a series of vulnerable layers between things inside and out? What would happen if that layer was removed and the two worlds that were separated by the fabric of the house finally met? Would there be a winner and a loser? Or would a new way of existence be found?
'Marla?' 'Yes.' '... About this morning.' Marla was silent. 'I knew you were there. I saw your reflection. You saw everything ...' 'I guess I did.' 'Are you going to say anything?' 'I don't know.' 'Well, what were you thinking?' 'I didn't know what to do.' 'You watched for awhile.' 'I guess I did.' 'Why didn't you try to stop me?' 'I don't know.' ... What the hell got into you? That's what I was thinking.'
Judy pointed to the small scarlet bird. Both women were suddenly very old. They smiled in the strong sunlight. There was something about the orange scarlet colouring of the bird that enabled it to absorb all the sadness of a lonely landscape into its tiny breast, then to shine that emotion back out into the world like first light. The chats had flown to the property in the morning in flocks the size of bee swarms. They had absorbed so much sky and sun that they were warm and high. All past and future were banished into that small wild heart of the present. There was something odd and fantastic about the bird, that neither woman could get a grasp on.
The fact was that there were two varieties of chat, the tangerine and the crimson. Yet this particular bird held both colours on her small bright breast, as if two birds had become one and the colours had maintained the brilliance of two lives, rather than becoming a murky brown. She was so big and universal in orientation that neither woman would have been surprised if her heart was double the size of a normal bird, or if there were two hearts beating inside her breast instead of one. The bird was nothing short of miraculous. Suddenly it appeared as if all time had stopped.
'Do you think chats kill their own offspring?' 'Only when there's a good reason. Then maybe, I dunno.' 'Not everyone makes a good mother ...' 'You're doing your best.' 'I've just got to do a bit better.' 'I bet that bird's a good mother.' 'Perhaps she is, perhaps she's not. Maybe we should just sit here for a while and see if she speaks to us. We might learn something.' Both laughed. 'What am I going to do Marla?' 'I guess - I'd get help. I wouldn't do everything in isolation. No woman should have to do that.'
The removal of the first layer of fabric would mean the death of the homestead. The children would be absorbed by the weather, as vulnerable as lambs in a heavy frost. At each removal there is the risk of invasion. Nothing leaves anything else alone for long, if at all. We are each invading the space of the other and fighting to maintain identity within a territory. Even when this is not the case and we are stagnant, we fight to maintain what little we have left.
We are as replaceable as the bush birds who spend all the long day doing it. The stronger and more beautiful the call, the more ferocious and dominant the territory which has to be maintained. We call out our small territories at each other while we breathe. We are all infants with some degree of inside pain, longing for a bright place in the sun. This placed us in the position where we always held back in order to protect something, even after gaining new ground. We had something to lose and we knew about it.
We have to place something between us and the outside world, because we are so small and helpless and because the world is so large and powerful. It is strictly non-sympathetic and that is why we have to place our skin here to protect us. We are as individual as sand particles. We build the layers of the castle before the rain and tides.
I want to give the sun my sympathy and receive its sympathy in return, but it was merely my desire to have it so. That is a landscape where everything sympathised and cooperated with everything else. Where was the sympathy out here? Was it merely our own protection and preservation that we should work towards? Is that why we hardly had any sympathy at all? It seems that we learnt too early about the world and all its non-existent sympathy.
What things on earth had sympathy and what things didn't? The weather didn't appear to have sympathy, then again it never needed to be protected. It didn't rely on anything aside from itself, so sympathy was not necessary. The weather simply moved across many properties where women were lonely without their husbands and operated as an independent and lonely force. The earth on the other hand needed the weather and was reliant upon it.
It was vulnerable, therefore sympathy for itself may have developed and it may have developed sympathy for others. We are like insects being battered on the earth's thin shell, Marla thought, gathering her weariness about her. Yet she truly loved the sun as it warmed her shoulders and back. Then it betrayed her by burning her skin to cancer, so then she didn't love it. But as soon as it suited her, she loved that sun again. If only this world would let us love it like an infant. Instead the desert sun waits to dry up her blood. It only leaves behind the wood, glass and bone. It doesn't distinguish between blood and water, between animal pain and the flow of a river.
The black swallows had slapped their muddy nests together under the ceiling of the front verandah. In summer Johnny and his drunken mates slept out. Here they had the vision of stars that swept across the night sky, without the intrusion of mozzies and flies brought in by the heifers and scraggy sheep. 'It was a snake,' she said. Judy held the gun in a relaxed fashion as the big king brown slid under the house. She had let the snake go again. 'Thank you for doing that,' Marla said. 'I don't know about thank you.' She leant the gun up against the side of the house.
'It will kill one of my children one of these days. I can't let them outside because of those bloody things.' 'She won't come in,' Marla said. 'I think she was pleased to get away.' Marla spoke as if the snake was obedient and predictable. Yet each day the big snake got closer and closer to the house and now it was beneath them all. Inside Judy felt a dog-tired weariness that hadn't allowed her to blow its life apart. Yet every day it was she who must work this place to maintain her territory for herself and her kids. Often there was victory but it always wore her down. Sometimes it was simply best to exist without a reason.
There seemed nothing else she wanted to do and no purpose in life but to keep living. Women have to walk out or get left behind. Women leave the room with their babies who become loud. One small squeal during a talk, a movie, a concert or a lecture and they leave the room. They leave to be with their baby's noise that is not required. The world must be silent for the adults and if babies cry and scream, the mother and child will leave the room. These newborns wail out their appetites with no regard for the silence of adults with their weary lives and frayed nerves.
It is best not to test the limits of so-called civilsation with the cries of a baby. Sometimes they squeal like small piglets as if their cheeks were pinched, or a safety pin was pricking into their chubby legs. There was always a good reason for what a baby did and never a good reason for mothers to collapse a so-called civilisation with the sound of a baby crying. 'That's just like us to be polite and under strain,' Judy said, 'we left the room of society permanently and now we're out here in the red country. Your childrens' cries don't disturb anybody out here and neither do your own.'
'Another cuppa when we get back?' 'Sure.' 'That would be great.' 'Thanks for helping me out. I want it to be finished. I've hated myself over it.' 'No worries,' Marla said, 'One other thing ...' 'Yes?' 'Does Johnny suspect anything?' 'No, at least I hope not!' 'It's the last thing he needs, on the verge of this drought we're having.'
Judy thought about Johnny's exhaustion and the kelpies chained to the shelter of a tin drum and how they would be shot if they barked at night. A couple had their throats kicked in, so they couldn't bark. She thought about her enjoyment of the land's unbearable silence and the muffled wriggling silence of the baby struggling for breath. In a way she wished that he would just perpetually wriggle for hours without consequence and that she could watch. She sat with the two girls on the back step looking out into the scrub. It had turned golden and was very dry beneath the retreating sun. The shadows lengthened and in fact the whole landscape was lengthening as if stretching itself forth into maximum light and warmth before the oncoming dark night.
Judy was a fit judge for the world. It meant that each time she judged others, which she did often, she judged herself. But do you think that stopped her judging? No way. She wanted this world cleaned up and her own insides cleaned up along with it. It was like she had to clean up one in order to clean up the other and she was starting with the world first. That's why Judy cleaned the house and then gently placed the duster over her baby's face. Later she felt bad. She felt like inflicting violence upon herself.
She felt like shoving the duster down her own throat with its big stick and choking on it. She wondered if anyone had ever choked themselves to death and whether their own fight for oxygen would really allow them to successfully complete the job. For really she loved her son so much that she would rather kill herself than touch him again. Even when she was not touching him, it was inside her forever that she had and both would somehow always know that. Ever since the day of the incident, there would always be that smell of fear between them.
Once the bird had hopped off into the saltbush, Judy unstrapped the baby from the pack. Both women looked down onto his tired bright face. Marla thought about her sister and the child. The fact that Judy was bigger than him and that she enjoyed exercising that power in an unhealthy way was wrong. If not rectified this would occur again. Later when he is bigger he would be angry towards her. He would be like a rocky ocean inside, a shipwrecked tide that is unpredictable and swelling in its own subterranean confusion.
There would be no shelter for him but the ghostly ship of his own psyche and a secret crew concealed in the shadows. Even if Judy never touched him again, he would know that she did for at least those few times, with the excellent memory of a baby who thinks in abstracts, but who never really forgets the important and frightening events. The mother had failed to be a nurturer and protector. She had remembered trying to be perfect from a very early age and ridding herself of corruption by hiding and praying.
But she couldn't hide from what was already inside her. It was as though the minute she was born, somebody held her nostrils together so her mouth would open and then dropped that tiny seed of the shadowy tree inside. Her life was wearied by its presence. Marla said, 'it's a choice.' But sometimes Judy was not strong or wise enough to make the right choices. 'I want to be wild and free but it's always a discipline,' she said.
Every day as she cleaned the house, it was recognised as discipline. Everything had to be done just so, the pillows stacked, her daughters hair brushed and their school lunches packed, her sandwiches cut, the washing hung out and her teeth cleaned in a certain way. Then when she headed towards the baby's room to change his nappies, the pressure seemed to build up inside her and she felt herself wanting to be undisciplined and uncanny.
She had only placed her hand over his mouth several times. Once the day after she had spent all morning cleaning the sunroom her outrage had frightened her. She put the baby in a day pack and began to walk out onto the property through the twisted gidgee logs filled with white ants and past the box trees and silver mulga. She felt so lonely and corrupted.
She felt sorry for the baby that filled her arms without a chance. What chance have you got when I'm your mother, she thought. She loved him but the old hell that grew within the primordial dark of humanity got in the way. She carried a big stick. February, snake season, she thought, being careful not to tread on any hollow logs or disturb the tinder brush. Mr Brown is still around and may be closer than we think. Some days she felt like everything was attacking her from the outside and the inside. Even her skin, through to the way in which she conducted herself with her husband, was a facade. Her organs and psyche were waging wars inside her.
Judy was being attacked by her own internal snakes, aside and apart from the wind and the sun. She stood still for a moment and sobbed for herself and her new child. 'We were both born to be broken down into nothing,' she said, 'and for him I'm aiding in that process, just as mine was aided in. I know I have done the wrong thing.' She is just another woman standing among the old dead wood in a dreary and hollow land. She is a burnt down house that has become the land itself. As we move up and away from her, she is as big as a crimson coloured chat.
Marla didn't like the fact that her sister could enjoy an infant struggling. She did not feel the same when she saw it happen to a lamb or a chick. The feeling was specific to human babies. No one would ever trust her around their children. This reaction was fear-based yet justifiable. It was like straight men thinking that gay men wanted to crack on to every single one of them, like there was no preference, no choice, no control.
Every infant wasn't necessarily at risk from her sisters. Something had to trigger it inside her. Judy didn't like the fact that it was inside her. It had been there ever since she was very young, as though her mother was right and she had been born a monster afterall. The odd little bird was so bright and distracting that it appeared to play tricks on the eyes.
Both women were now feeling somewhat exposed and worried, but they walked back to the house more relaxed than when they had left. Marla felt that she had betrayed the child in some way. To the baby it must have been a similar feeling to being bitten by his own teddy bear. When the things you trust turn on you suddenly and shriek or hiss and growl their nonsense, it is frightening and hurtful.
It proves that no matter how close we choose to cling, the thing we cling to cannot become us, cannot be trusted in our becoming. Everything is ultimately independent, its own little wild animal stranded and forming on this island archipelago. For the new baby it was just too horrible. He had no way of psychically surviving it. No way of tidying it all up inside his little heart. 'Tell me what do you do?' Judy asked exasperated.
'I think one day you may go too far,' Marla said. 'What are we going to do?' Both women looked out into the deep late summer daylight of the sun room where the girls were constructing a dollhouse amongst the blocks, crayons and textas, colouring-in books and general play things along the polished floorboards. The baby was oogling from the bunny rug positioned in a bassinet. 'I don't think I can trust myself with them ...'
Marla interrupted her, 'we don't want to get hysterical over this. But you've got to get help. I think you need to turn inwards. I think you should ride that monster down and bring it out into the light of day. This property is three hundred thousand acres. Why not just keep walking and see what comes of it? Take the children in your heart. I can come with you as far as you want. We should just do it, don't you think?' 'Yes. I think it would be a good idea to follow the chat,' Judy said, 'and if we haven't got the strength to follow it, then we can at least imagine it after it's gone.'
