The Oldest Song in the World Read online

  Dedication

  To everyone who taught me

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Other Books by Sue Woolfe

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  In an open-air café in Alice Springs, beside a river that was nothing like my river, there was a blue-shirted man in his forties, reading, but I wasn’t sure it was him. Oh, I’d known I wouldn’t see the young man who was my every second thought, the boy on the mudflats with the silver river nibbling at his thin amber feet, always about to swallow him, always about to take him away from me forever, but this man was old, surely too old. His wild hair that once fizzed into blond curls was now a grey ponytail held in an elastic band, his face was scrunching into double chins – surely that wasn’t him. I paused, waiting to see his eyes, if his eyes were the silver I remembered. But he didn’t look up. He wasn’t curious about me. He didn’t seem to be waiting; he was absorbed only in his reading.

  I sank into the nearest white plastic chair, reddened with dust and pooled with crackling brown leaves curled up like foetuses. I leaned my trolley bag against the chair, and hooked my workbag around the handles. I’d just flown three and a half thousand kilometres from a cool southern city, unprepared for the menacing sun that argued with my certainty. It said: you were a fool to have come.

  A waiter called through a hatch from inside.

  ‘Want a menu?’

  He wasn’t going to leave his air conditioning until he had to.

  ‘Just coffee. Short black,’ I said, appeasingly, as if its shortness might be less trouble. I was always appeasing. Though one day, very soon, I promised myself, I’d find a way to change.

  I moved my chair under the umbrella, and then I made my first discovery about the desert: the air seemed remarkably cool whenever there was a small circle of shade; as if the air, as conciliatory as me, was trying to make up for the heat. I repropped my bag and looked anywhere but at the man. Of course it wasn’t him. I wished I’d suggested we meet in an air-conditioned hotel lobby.

  Black women passed the café at that moment, their red, purple, pink and yellow skirts swinging over thin brown legs and bare feet. As they trod, I glimpsed pink soles. They seemed so vulnerable, the pinkness of those soles. I listened to the way their voices rose and fell and paused, and tried to hum along with the rhythms. I was doing quite well, considering the heat. She surely would be impressed that I was already hard at work. Da-da-der, da der, der.

  At the university, she’d been suspected of an irregularity because of me. She’d taken a risk with me, and I’d got her into trouble. That’s why I was here. Though that wasn’t entirely true, of course. Perhaps not true at all.

  The café owner had called his establishment ‘The Waterfront Café’ and the joke made me cranky. The last time this was a waterfront must have been in the Ice Age. Huge trees grew in the corrugations of the river’s dry bed, like trees sprouting out of a brain, a dried-up brain. Even the riverbed made me cranky.

  My river, in my memory, always floats silver with a promise that it would bring drifting into my reach something I longed for, or that it would drift something painful away. Although that had failed me, too.

  Suddenly, it came over me again, the terrible loss of that childhood, that river, those people, that luminous woman, that almost transparent boy with the silver eyes. That loss hit me like a blow on the plastic chair in the heat, and it almost felled me.

  The stranger at the far table turned a page. Even paper crackled in the heat. I wished he’d look up. People can’t change silver eyes. Oh, his eyes might’ve faded, but surely something would’ve remained, something of that strange silvery fire.

  I’d met the woman who saved me at a suburban library when my job was to gather up books people had left behind. It had got very dull, picking up books, hundreds of books covered the way libraries cover them, with worn blue or maroon covers, the titles and authors almost faded to invisibility. I was only ever allowed to work in the non-fiction section, amongst the serious, boring books – or that’s how I thought of them. I found myself wondering how dull a book could be without causing the expiration of the reader. At least it’d be something to do, it’d be a game to find this out and, since no one else was around, the guinea pig would have to be me. I took to secreting away from the sorting shelves the books most likely to cause my expiration and, when the librarian was busy, I’d open them and wait to cease breathing. In this way I lumbered through the opening chapters of The Descent of Man and The Meaning of Meaning. If anyone were to notice me, I planned to claim that I found the books irresistible. As indeed, in my boredom, I did.

  But after weeks, despite having the sensation that my heart was slowing down, I was still as strong as a horse. One afternoon I came across A Critique of Common Postulates: Our Indigenes, authored by somebody pompously cloaking their identity with initials: E.E. Albert. I set myself up in my corner, checked that the head librarian was trying out her new eyeliner in the Ladies, and I must have been reading for a good half hour when a sensation prickled me. Someone was watching.

  I wheeled around.

  ‘What’s it about?’ a voice asked. It belonged to a woman around the age that Diana would’ve been. She was red in the face as if she’d just been scrubbed, she was motherly hipped and very buxom, so I felt reassured she wasn’t some library administrator come to check on me. They were always skinny with caved-in chests, which meant, poor things, that they didn’t have many opportunities with men, I believed, or had to work harder to get them. But I had given up love affairs, and mentally slapped my hand.

  The woman came over and stood beside me, touching the book’s cover as if she might like to read it, too.

  Something about the way she then looked at me, her face tilted on one side as if it was pinned up by a star, made me take a breath and I began to talk, not about expiring but about the book. Here I have to remember what had happened to me while I’d been reading, even while my index finger had felt hopefully for a faltering pulse. I’d experienced a dizzying phenomenon familiar to more sophisticated people but never before to me: it was as if, while I read, I’d been looking down the barrel of a microscope, and not only looking down it but travelling down it – I could almost hear the echoing of my breath as I slid down it, down down down, to land like some errant bacterium on the book’s microscope plates. I swear, as I read, I’d heard the whistling of the desert winds and the scrabbling of tiny insects in the grey scrub, just as E.E. Albert had described, and the receding thud of a startled kangaroo, and I’d wondered, without stopping to check, if the sounds were coming from the book’s pages, or from inside the library. I’d smelled the native ti-tree, its perfume stronger in the scorching dust at midday; I’d shivered as the sand under my feet chilled to a frozen powder at night.

  So despite my confusion, I found an answer for the woman standing beside me: I explained that the
book said that Indigenous people were misunderstood because their language led them to see their homeland, the desert, in a way totally different from the Western world, or perhaps what they’d done was to invent a language which reflected what they knew – in any case, their language was part and parcel of their world and their beliefs – and non-Indigenous Australians assumed, because city people saw other things, city things, that Aboriginals were dull-witted, whereas they weren’t.

  ‘For example?’ she asked.

  To my surprise, I found I could keep going. ‘Well, in their languages, they don’t have a future tense –’

  ‘Not at all?’ she asked. ‘No idea of the future?’

  ‘Not the distant future,’ I corrected myself, because I realised that this was a person who mightn’t accept my usual sloppiness, ‘but the near future – nothing further than halfway through next week. So, if you don’t have words for the future, you probably don’t think about it. At least, not clearly. Of course, many people dispute whether the limits of your language are the limits of your world. That’s a much-discussed theory.’

  I paused then because I’d remembered this line straight out of the book, without quite understanding it, but as she nodded, its meaning came to me.

  ‘It makes sense, doesn’t it!’ I said. ‘In a sort of way. You can’t think clearly about things you have no words for.’

  ‘Perception’s a strange thing,’ she said.

  I thought about that for a moment. I thought about Diana and my father and a suspicion I’d long been harbouring, almost without knowing it, that Diana’s beauty might’ve just been the way I saw beauty – and my father, of course. Her skin was amber, like a felt lampshade with a light under it. Definitely not my mother’s taste. No one before this stranger had ever brought anything like that so clearly to my mind before, no one had reached in and touched an unfocused suspicion that had nudged against the walls of my insides, pulled it out onto the surface and put it into words.

  Then I remembered I was in the library talking when I should’ve been tidying up, and looked around guiltily.

  ‘Maybe you don’t think about the future when you’re living hand to mouth in the desert,’ the woman beside me said.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, unsure, because where I lived was in the past. To cover my confusion, I turned to the front page where there was a photo of a group of near-naked men and women, the women carrying plump children on their hips, the men holding weapons. ‘They’re not skinny, are they?’ I said. ‘They lived well. The book says so.’

  We examined the photo together, admiring the desert babies, almost like the children in a Rubens’ portrait.

  ‘I suppose they had to think enough into the future to plan to walk to where the good food would be,’ I said. ‘The future would be very connected to the past.’ I startled myself by adding: ‘Maybe ours is, too.’

  She was nodding, her eyes on me, thinking along with me.

  ‘But anyway –’ I continued, because I really wanted to keep her with me, this person who could think along with me, thinking was usually such a lonely thing to do, and those eyes on me were crinkling with warm approval, like two dark lagoons I could dive into, lagoons in the mountains and ravines of her face, ‘without an idea of the distant future, it probably means that you wouldn’t think of putting things by for the future, like possessions, you wouldn’t need possessions for some future time.’ I turned back to the photo. ‘See how they don’t have much to carry around, just their babies and the spears – so you wouldn’t need a manager to organise the possessions you didn’t have, or figure out systems to store them like people have done in this library.’

  I paused because the head librarian had tried to explain about Melvil Dewey and his system till she was blue in the face, she said, because I was such a slow learner. I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain Melvil Dewey to the woman because I was still getting it wrong, especially when there were lots of digits behind the point, or lots of digits and no point, or lots of digits and letters and a point and a second line of digits – I was always putting books in unfindable places. Readers often complained.

  ‘You wouldn’t need mayors and councils to administer things,’ said the woman. She kept nodding and smiling, and I kept finding more to say to her, so she’d stay with me and keep this warm feeling going.

  ‘Or shops,’ I said.

  Each thing I thought of to say seemed like a victory. I’d been a thin awkward child with round shoulders, my parents said, definitely not the sort of person anyone noticed when I entered a room, so for years I’d wondered if I was invisible, and could with impunity pick yellow crumbs of sleep out of my eyelashes or adjust my panties under my skirt in public. Even when I’d been in a school play, walking across a bare stage as a donkey, I wasn’t absolutely convinced I could be seen.

  ‘You wouldn’t need administrators!’ the woman continued, as if she really was aware of me standing right there beside her. I was beginning to feel so noticed.

  ‘Or cupboards to put the things in that you didn’t have. Or shelves or drawers!’ I said. ‘You’d be very different from what the book calls Westerners,’ I added, pronouncing the word self-consciously because I’d just now read it in E.E. Albert, and I’d only used it before about movies with heroic men on galloping horses and pretty singers in saloon bars – but I’d noticed that the author’s word had an extra bit on the end. The woman didn’t wince, so I went on: ‘You’d have very different worries from people who lived in the one place all the time, like farmers have to.’

  Now I could tell the woman what Diana had taught me when she showed me how to sow summer vegetables in the spring, and winter ones in the autumn.

  ‘Farmers have to gather seed and sort it so they know which seed is which and from what year, and ways to store it through the winter. And they have to stay where the soil is good. Nomads don’t have to think about that.’

  ‘So you’d have no worries?’ she asked. ‘You’d be a happy savage?’

  ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘You’d just have different worries. Like, knowing what trees fruited when, and where, and how to get there without roads or footpaths, and when fish spawned and snakes were born and eggs were laid, and because you don’t write things down you’d need to teach someone else to remember these things, maybe in songs, and what to do if no one wants that job, no one wants to learn the knowledge, and you can’t write it down.’

  The kindly woman brought me back to where I was by putting her finger to her lips. The head librarian had returned from the Ladies’ with black-rimmed eyes, and was glaring at me.

  ‘That isn’t in the book,’ the woman said. I should’ve noticed it wasn’t a question. But I was enjoying myself too much. I wished I could tell her that this conversation was the most interesting thing that had happened to me in years, but I didn’t.

  ‘This isn’t the sort of thing every young woman muses on,’ she said. ‘Are you studying this in a course?’

  I was so startled, I forgot to whisper.

  ‘Not me! Never! I just clear up books after people leave.’

  The head librarian began clearing her throat meaningfully. As if we were conspirators, the woman gestured that we should go out to the lobby. Without a thought, I followed her outside, I was so unmothered.

  ‘Why are you reading about this?’ she asked as soon as we were leaning against the wall.

  I blushed. Her question brought me back to my ordinary life.

  ‘I like to know things,’ I thought to say. It was sort of true.

  ‘What an interesting young person!’ she said, and suddenly excitement swept through me, a delicious wave of possibility about myself. No one had ever thought of me as interesting before, no one at school, no one in my childhood, no one in all my thirty-six years of living. They’d always thought of me as someone who’d forgotten to do this thing, or failed to do that. Or made a mess: ‘Kathryn, was it you who made this mess?’ they’d say, until I got to hate my very name.

  But to be
thought of as interesting – ah, then! It’d make up for not being beautiful like Diana, it’d make up for not doing well at school, it’d make up for my disaster of a love life. I wanted to stay in the company of someone who thought me interesting, so she’d keep making this delicious wave go through me. She might be right. I might be interesting, after all. It was almost like falling in love, except I was falling in love with myself.

  ‘Ever thought of studying, to find out things?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I blurted. ‘Study’s boring.’

  Then I stopped, because I shouldn’t have said that; the good impression I’d been making up till then was ruined. Now she’d find out that I wasn’t interesting at all. But she seemed lost in her own thoughts.

  ‘At a university, for instance,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not the type for university,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to see if that’s really true?’ she asked.

  I said no again but she didn’t seem to hear. She fussed about what month it was, and whether it was too late in the year, and slowly I realised she meant too late to enrol in a university course. I was disappointed at this turn in the conversation, and all my excitement faded away.

  ‘I’ll have to go inside,’ I said, trying not to show how I felt. ‘I’ll be in trouble.’

  ‘I’ll send the forms to the library,’ the woman said.

  Afterwards I had to tell the head librarian what I’d been talking about. She snorted. She was ten years older than me and often snorted.

  ‘The woman’s probably mad,’ she said.