Part 12 (1/2)

Tagaran pointed to the cut, as if he could not see it, or could not understand that it hurt.

'Didyi murri!' Something like, it is very painful!

Rooke could not stop himself thinking of that other back he had so recently seen.

Had Tagaran seen it? He thought not. But something about her manner told him that she had heard about it. He could not meet her eye.

She told him the story again, with even more dramatic gestures. Her voice was shrill with outrage.

Then she watched him.

Rooke knew what she wanted. She wanted him to ask questions: Who did this to you? Why? Where is he now? She wanted him to join her in indignation, to put on his jacket and stride away to the settlement to deal with the white man who had beaten them.

But there was a heavy place inside him, where the event was sitting undigested like a piece of bad food.

'Ngia muri yurora,' he said, I am very angry.

But he knew that he did not sound angry. What he heard in his voice was a dragging reluctance, a withholding.

'Ngalariwa?' Tagaran asked, with us?

'No! No, of course not with you!'

It was such a wrong idea that he looked at her in surprise. Meeting her gaze, he saw that she had asked the question to make him look at her.

'Kamara ngyini piaba?' she asked, kamara will you speak?

He had never thought that he might wish to understand less.

This exchange was not a language lesson. It was a conversation. For the first time, he and Tagaran were on the same side of the mirror of language, simply speaking to each other. Understanding went in both directions. Once two people shared language, they could no longer use it to hide.

'Nganawa?' he said. To whom?

'Charlotte birang,' she said, to the person belonging to Charlotte.

Not Brugden, then, but one of the sailors. He imagined himself being rowed out to Charlotte, asking to see the captain. Sir, some man from your s.h.i.+p has beaten three native girls, I wish you to discover and punish him.

The captain would look at him. Really, Lieutenant? Native girls, eh?

Some sailor or other would be brought up from below, would stand wooden-faced, the way they were taught. He would have the story ready about how he had gone ash.o.r.e and the girls had stolen his bread, or his pipe.

He could imagine the scene, but not himself in it.

The girls were a tableau of brown limbs and angled faces and eyes watching Lieutenant Rooke trying to imagine the impossible.

'Yenaraou bisket?' Worogan said. May I go and fetch the biscuit that is still left?'

He thought he had managed the business of giving them biscuit while leaving a fragment for himself, but they had not missed a single thing. Not about the biscuit. Much less about the fact that kamara was not going to stand up for them.

He got the piece of biscuit and tried to amuse them by grimacing and grunting, trying to break it and failing-it was rock-like, he did not have to pretend-until he picked up the hatchet from beside the fire and chopped it into three.

Worogan and Tugear were willing to be amused by his playacting. He was waiting for Tagaran to forgive him.

As he gave her some biscuit he pointed to her finger.

'Murra bidyul?' he asked, hoping this might mean finger better?

'Bial, karangun,' she said, shaking her head and making a face. Not better but worse, he supposed. Still, she seemed to have accepted that sympathy was as far as he was going to go.

When they had finished their morsels of biscuit, she made a great show of playing hostess, introducing the others to various mysteries of the hut that were new to them. She demonstrated how you made a spark with the flint, showed them how you sharpened the hatchet with the whetstone, she opened the box to show them the s.e.xtant. She wagged her finger in warning not to touch and pointed up. As she herself had done the first day, the two girls looked at the s.h.i.+ngles, and he watched her give out a stream of words the meaning of which he was pretty sure was close to, No, silly, not the roof, the stars!

There were few enough objects in the hut for him to be aware of her avoiding the one in the corner behind the door: his musket. In the absence of enough pegs and shelves, its muzzle had made a convenient spot for him to hook small items of clothing. Most of the time he could forget that it was a weapon, but now he was aware of it there, and of Tagaran ignoring it.

Then Tugear said something and they were off, suddenly, like a flock of those chattering birds that came down to the gra.s.s and then all took fright at once.

He watched them clambering up the rocks. Near the top they turned and waved.

'Goodbye! Goodbye! Goodbye!'

How they seemed to love the sound of that word.

He waved until they had disappeared over the crest of the ridge, and even then went on standing there, looking up.

When he went into the hut he could no longer avoid a glum awareness of failure. What Tagaran had wanted was impossible. He tried it in his mind again: going out to Charlotte, knocking on the door of the captain's cabin, the man looking at him. Native girls, you say?

Impossible.

He thought that Tagaran knew all along that it was a test he would fail, and she had forgiven him. It only confirmed something that she understood already. In this, as in so many things, she was ahead of him.

They all knew what he had turned his face away from: like it or not, he was Berewalgal. He wore the red coat. He carried the musket when he was told to. He stood by while a man was flogged. He would not confront a white man who had beaten his friends.

He had been pretending that it was not so. A world existed here in his hut, a world he shared with Tagaran and the others. It was on another orbit altogether from the one he shared with his own kind. But a man could not travel along two different paths. Tagaran knew that. Now he knew it too.

The gloom that had fallen over his day was a fact he had until now denied: that the pleasure he found with Tagaran cast a shadow. He had been brushed by its wing this afternoon, just a touch. It would return. What he shared with Tagaran was the greatest delight he had ever known. But bound up with the delight, inseparable from it, was a universe of impossibility.

There was this about Sydney Cove, Rooke thought: at the end of every summer's day the nor-easter came through, as dependably as if someone out in the endless waters of the Pacific Ocean were paid to open a window. The forest-covered promontories seethed under gusts of wind that darkened the water to gunmetal grey.

Rooke considered destroying the notebooks. He would make a copy that would omit any entries which could be misunderstood and burn the originals. He got as far as sitting at the table and opening a new notebook, but could not make himself go on. To read the entries with an eye for what could be distorted would be to distort them. He would enter that coa.r.s.e way of looking and be dirtied by it. Making an expurgated version of the notebooks would kill them. Like a stuffed parrot, they would be real, but not true.

When he saw Barringan threading her way down the rocks, Boneda calling kamara, kamara, and Tagaran a s.h.i.+ning figure in the sun, he was glad. But he was also aware of something else in his heart. Could you want something, and dread it at the same time? Some powerful conflict of feelings in the vicinity of his chest made him unable to return her greeting.

Today it seemed the children did not want to crowd into the hut. Tagaran went in, though, and as he followed her he could not stop himself looking up at the ridge, dreading to see Silk's dapper figure.

Tagaran went straight to the corner, removed the handkerchief draped over the end of the musket, and picked it up. He put out a hand to stop her, but she had already got it snugged into her shoulder and her finger was already against the trigger. Now she was pretending that she knew how to squint along its length.

Where had she seen that done? And why had she waited till now to try the thing?

The memory of that first day on the beach came into his mind, clear as an engraving in a frame: Weymark demonstrating the power of the white man's weapon and himself laughing at the surgeon's blunt description of what a musket ball might do to a man. Rooke had not really been amused. He wondered now what had possessed him to laugh.

News of that display would have travelled from tribe to tribe. Tagaran had most likely heard of it. Was she thinking of that picture too?