Clancy of the Overflow, page 11
Flora taught the girl English, table manners, courtesy, as well as reading and writing. She learned those skills swiftly too, and as a reward was allowed to take a crust of damper out to the black stallion. She still seemed fascinated by it. The horse tolerated her too — possibly, Flora thought, because the horse instinctively knew the native girl was the only person there who could not ride a horse, and so would never threaten it by trying to make it obey.
Flora did not dare let the girl accompany Maria on her walks, in case she escaped. Maria must forgo wandering in the bush and teach the girl to dress, to serve at table, how to milk a goat and cow, how to make butter and damper, though she acquired few other kitchen skills, little else beyond boiling a pudding, which every time the girl seemed to think a miracle as it was turned out of its bowl. Rose had no talent — and little interest — in cooking.
But she adored Clementine; spent hours teaching her to walk, feeding her and sponging her dresses clean. How could she not love Clementine? thought Flora.
For Clementine was enchanting: running rather than toddling, crawling when her small legs failed, for she could crawl faster than she could run. Clementine could say Mama, Papa, Auntie Maria and Rose now too. She called Ezekiel ‘Grandzac’. Flora had tried to correct her, but Ezekiel shook his head, for once grinning with true pleasure. ‘If my granddaughter thinks I’m a Grandzac, I ain’t going to stop her sayin’ it.’ Ezekiel’s accent too had changed in the past year. She realised he now made no attempt to sound like anything but the guttersnipe he had once been.
Fine clothes did not make a gentleman. Ezekiel had given up even the pretence.
But Rose was a triumph. How could Maria have thought it best to leave her be? Every day the native girl learned something new. She managed sewing within a few days too, first of all the simple hemming required to take up Sarah’s too-long aprons till they fitted her, then the more complex task of altering dresses, and washing them once she had learned what she initially seemed to think a hilarious habit of repeatedly pushing clothes around in water — it was the only time Flora had seen the girl laugh, except with Clementine — then hanging them in sunlight, the constant, glaring sunlight of Overflow.
For it still did not rain. For the first few months Flora was unaware of the significance of this. Rain had been a nuisance all her life. Flood had — temporarily — ruined her husband’s family and was severely curtailing the life of her own family, as her father and brother informed her in the letters that reached Overflow six months after they’d been posted, indignant that the debts her father had thought he might run up for the rest of his life remained unpaid.
And still it did not rain.
There had been no lawn around the homestead when she had first arrived — even the horse, cow and goat pens were beaten dirt, the animals fed hay or corn cobs. But slowly the hills lost their grass as well. The men left the comfort of their huts to take the stock further out to feed, camping with them each night, with firearms to ward off dingoes. The treetops became even skinnier, casting almost no shade, their few drab olive-green leaves turning pale brown. Ezekiel’s mouth grew thinner, his expression grim.
Only Clementine made him smile, toddling after him, her bottom bulky in a napkin, dressed in frilly smocks and small shoes ordered by catalogue. She had a habit of placing her small hand in Ezekiel’s for him to steady her as she ran five or six paces before falling on her bottom, laughing up at him until he too laughed, throwing her up till she squealed with joy. Flora even found him once cradling the child in one brawny arm, explaining the process of shearing to her and how to best judge a ram — a process not at all suitable for a lady to hear and which, thankfully, Clementine was too young to understand or repeat.
But the experience made Flora even more desperate to remove her child and herself — and Rose — from Overflow. The language the men used, even in her hearing, was appalling. She needed the discipline of a good nanny too: one who would teach her to sit straight in a chair, her body two inches from the back rest; who would enforce the discipline that a young lady — even one who had only reached her first birthday — did not speak to adults until spoken to and should sit with knees together and hands in her lap.
Maria did not even see the need for such teaching; nor, it seemed, did Clancy, and certainly Ezekiel did not either.
Ezekiel seemed happier after that year’s shearing; announced it a ‘good clip’, even if the new animals were far inferior to those lost. It seemed it would take time — even years — to improve the quality to get the price per bale they had achieved before. Even when it failed to rain all summer, except for brief showers that evaporated almost before they hit the ground, he made no objection when a note arrived addressed to Flora from Margaret Drinkwater.
Flora gave the man who delivered it threepence and told him to go around to the kitchen for a meal (both the money and the instruction seemed to startle him). She unsealed the note, read it and then abruptly sat down, suddenly weak with joy.
Respite! Respite from this desperate place at last.
The note asked if Flora would like to spend the winter in Sydney, where the Drinkwaters planned to rent a house. It even made the invitation seem like a favour to Margaret and not a rescue.
For the true purpose of this invitation was revealed in Margaret’s phrase in my condition my dear husband would be happier if I could employ the services of a competent midwife and doctor. Midwives there undoubtedly were in the gold-mining remnant township of Gibber’s Creek, only a half-day from Drinkwater. There was even a birthing clinic, but whether the nurse there was competent — or sober — Flora doubted.
‘Margaret has promised us the services of a nanny — the Winterbothams are spending a year in Europe and theirs did not accompany them. A most experienced woman, highly recommended. I will take Rose with us as nursery maid,’ she announced to Clancy as he did up the buttons of her dress the next morning. ‘She will be able to learn much more about how a well-run house operates. It will be good for Rose to see a city, and I have no doubt Margaret’s maid can teach her many things.’ She touched her braid ruefully. ‘Such as to dress hair in a more fashionable style.’
Ezekiel had made it clear that while he would give Flora a small allowance — enough for two new gowns, for tram rides or taxi cabs or tipping the servants — he was not prepared to pay the wages of a lady’s maid. A good one could command thirty pounds a year. Sarah had been paid fifty.
‘And she can lace your stays and do up your buttons until I come to visit.’ Clancy pressed a kiss onto the nape of her neck as he finished.
Flora endured the caress. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I would hate to have to ask Margaret’s maid or one of the household staff to help me. Do you know that Rose is reading quite fluently now? Maria has been teaching her numbers too.’
‘Really? I had no idea a native would be capable of reading,’ he said.
She looked at him indulgently. ‘You have lived in Australia all your life and you still have no idea what its natives might be capable of. The Ladies’ Guild in Sydney knew many natives with spotlessly clean cottages and the women able to read the Bible too.’
‘Goodness. Perhaps they might read Shakespeare next.’
She laughed. Somehow with the arrival of Margaret’s letter she had found her laughter again. ‘Which is more than you do, Horatio Clancy.’
They walked out to breakfast, arm in arm, just as Rose brought in the toast.
Chapter 16
Ant Eggs
Take ant eggs in the season when the two red stars sit next to each other at night. Place them in a coolamon of water. The dirt will sink to the bottom and the ant eggs will float. Scoop them and eat raw, or bake a paste of them on hot rocks for travel food or to take to elders who cannot journey to ant country.
OVERFLOW, 1877
ROSE
The girl who was now Rose even to herself — for it hurt too much to think of her real name, which belonged to her real life — sat behind the shearing shed and watched the black shapes between the stars slowly move across the sky.
Days in the white family’s house were a dream that did not make sense, governed by laws that had no meaning, but must be obeyed, for she had seen what guns did to those who did not obey the people with the strange pale skins, pink or off white like the new bark on gully gums. But when the lantern and the candles dimmed, the nights were hers. She only had to wait a finger’s breadth of star journey around the sky before everyone in the household and the workers’ quarters was asleep.
On her first night of freedom she had gone no further than the creek that dribbled its way towards the river. She waited. The night seemed to wait with her, the frogs silent; even the cicadas lost their shrill.
At last it came, its wings blotting out the moon and stars, till it perched on a branch above the creek. It didn’t speak — this was not the season for the powerful owl call. It simply sat and watched her. Even when she moved back towards the house, tired, it did not fly away.
And so Rose knew. Stay, at least for now. Do what mistress and master told her, even if that meant ‘go to Sydney’, a phrase she did not entirely understand, except that it made mistress happy to say it and Master Clancy deeply uneasy.
For there was nowhere Rose might go. She didn’t need to listen to the conversation at the table to know that her people were gone. Some had been hunted by men from Drinkwater with guns. Others had been taken away in carts to a country called ‘reservation’, which she did not know. It was certainly far enough away for there to be no smell of campfire, no spire of smoke, no footprint, however smudged, to show her family was near.
The land was emptying of all she knew; it was crowded instead with men in trousers and women in long skirts and sheep which cleared the land more dangerously even than a hot fire so that, when the sheep had passed, the yams no longer grew again nor many of the other foods she had depended on most of her life.
Those in the white skins’ house ate so strangely, not when they were hungry, but when that clock box had its hands (that were not hands at all) in the places that said it was a mealtime.
And the food was all the same: sheep, if a sheep had died, or kangaroo, stewed so it lost any sense of how a kangaroo should taste; potatoes that were good and at least tasted mostly of themselves; limp cabbage that no longer seemed to be a leaf or anything one should eat; and corn that was truly wonderful, and which sometimes she sneaked away to enjoy properly behind the shearing shed, her teeth tearing at cob after cob. And bread, that had been strange at first — too high, too soft, unlike the lily pollen cakes or grass seed breads she and the other girls had made under instructions from the aunties, grinding the seeds then baking them on hot rocks.
She decided she liked the bread, especially with butter and piled with jam. Bread could be eaten sensibly, held in your hand, instead of using metal implements, which helped make bread seem more like real food too.
There were so many other kinds of food around them, good food, delicious, especially now, when the termite nests would be full of young and the bee colonies full of larvae, yet the man called Mr Clancy, Father or Boss complained about how little there was to eat, that the sheep must be kept alive, not eaten, despite their numbers making them an obvious source of fat food that should be culled before they ate the land to barrenness. Instead the men wasted shot and gunpowder on the ducks that flew above the shrinking river and nested at its edges, when she could have caught four of them easily with one dive under water, pulling down their legs.
She was not allowed to swim. She washed only her face and hands each morning in a tin basin, and her body with a wet cloth once a week. She stank. Mistress, ma’am, Mrs Clancy, Mrs Flora and just ‘Flora’ (each name was used for the same woman but by a different person, not strung together as they should be) bathed only in a tiny tub, as did Miss Maria, leaving a pleasant scent of flowers on their skin. The man with kind eyes called Clancy or Boss bathed in the tub too, but did not have the same kind of smell. But the other men . . .
Why did none of them swim in the river? It was there, carrying dirt away. Why wash in a tiny tub with all your sweat and dirt about you? Why live in heat when the river water was so cool?
Why? Why? Why?
She wanted to ask, but did not have the words, and when she did, was told it was not her place to ask. How could a girl learn unless she asked the aunties questions? But there were no aunties here. These people had gun power, but were even more ignorant than her.
But they were not all unkind. Mistress was kind, and Miss Maria’s eyes looked at the land almost as if she was one of the real people. Mr Clancy was kind too. She had seen pain on his face when he had chained her that first day of horror, and she had seen anguish almost like hers, as if he too was trapped, even if he wore no chains.
There were even truly sunlit times when Miss Maria would lift a finger to her lips and allow her outside for longer than the few minutes mistress permitted her in the mornings, while mistress and Miss Clementine slept each afternoon. When she looked at Miss Maria, Rose knew that she too longed for time hearing the voices of the bush and not the homestead, for of all the people with pale skins, only Miss Maria seemed capable of truly seeing, despite the strangeness of her face.
Sometimes too if the men were ringbarking or cutting wood, Rose could slip to the horse pen with an apple for the stallion, stroke his nose and whisper to him about how they were both prisoners, longing to be free.
The horse understood her, even though he was as foreign as the sheep. She was no threat to the big horse, did not smell or look like the men who had tormented him on the voyage out from India. She even tried climbing the fence and sitting upon the horse’s back, imitating the posture of the men she’d watched, the frightening one called Flanagan and Mr Clancy.
The stallion had been unsure at first — and so had she — but gradually she learned to let her legs hang loosely against his sides, keeping her heels away from his ribs, to lean forwards on his neck with her face close to his mane, and found to her surprise that he quietened when she did so, for both positions must have been familiar to him in his safe world of long ago.
Neither of them had known how easily safety and familiarity could vanish.
Other times in those precious tiny portions of freedom she walked up the hill behind the house, always looking, listening, for footprints or calls that might say her people had come back, that she could cast off the shoes Mrs Flora insisted she wear and join them. But there was never even a dust print to show they might be here.
And she had the gully too. The Overflow men did not come there, did not even know of it, seeing only a crevice between the rocks, the thorn bushes, the trickle of water that wandered to what was left of the river in its sand. But once through that narrow gap the gorge opened up, steep and rock strewn, the water trickling over the rock ledges, even now, for it was the sand that swallowed most of it, had swallowed it, the aunties said, since white men dug the river and the land upstream, as well as downstream, hunting for that useless sparkle called gold.
There was a pool. She did not know the pool’s significance — she had been stolen too young for that — but she knew it mattered. She also knew that it was strong, that every time she sat here, on the smooth warm rock around it, the pool gave her the strength to keep on going so that, somehow, she might be free, once her people returned from Reservation.
The sky had slipped in its vast circle. The owl flapped once, twice, then rose, its talons out. It grabbed the possum that lived in the tree called ‘apple’ behind the house.
The possum screamed. She heard its scream echo up the gully. She smiled. The owl’s young would eat well tonight.
And now she must go back in, to the small hot space shut off from the sweet clear complexity of the night air, for she must be up with the grey dawn to light the kitchen fire when the house’s inhabitants woke, instead of sleeping till her body’s need was done.
Why?
Because they had guns, she told herself. And because, just now, she had nowhere else to go, except to whatever Sydney turned out to be.
Chapter 17
Piperade
There are many versions of this dish, which is a sort of Basque omelette or scrambled eggs. Don’t bother to make this dish unless you have really good, rich squishy tomatoes.
Olive oil, 3 large onions, 4 red capsicum (can use grilled capsicum from deli), 6 cloves garlic, 10 large, very red, ripe tomatoes, 6 eggs, 1 bunch basil (leaves only), black pepper
Add olive oil to pan. Sauté chopped onion until transparent. Add sliced capsicum, cook for another 2 minutes, then add crushed garlic for 10 seconds, then skinned tomatoes (remove skin by dipping tomatoes in boiling water, then quartering them — skin will peel off easily). Cook for 10 minutes, stirring so the mixture doesn’t stick. Pour in beaten eggs and basil leaves. Don’t stir once the eggs are mixed with the vegetable purée; just shake the pan as vigorously as you can. Take it off the heat when the eggs are nearly set; don’t overcook.
Eat hot, with the pepper freshly ground over it.
GIBBER’S CREEK, MAY 1980
JED
‘So shhmy di e ellim?’ asked Sam, propped up in his bed in the rehab wing of the Gibber’s Creek Hospital, with Jed sitting on the bed next to him and Nancy in her usual armchair.
Sam wore a shirt now, with shortie pyjama bottoms hidden under the bedclothes. Jed had been unable to bear the sight of the pyjama tops after nearly a year of his coma, and now another since he woke.
His recovery had been slow and erratic, flickers of consciousness at first, each period growing longer. Yet he improved every day or, rather, he improved for four days, or seven, then went backwards again, his words slurring even more, unable to use his hands, perhaps, or move his legs and, for one terrifying day, seeing the factory around him, even though he knew Jed’s voice and was able to answer her to tell her that he knew where he really was, no matter what his eyes saw.
