The Oldest Song in the World Read online

  But the forms turned up the very next day. I had to pass a test.

  ‘Do you think I should do this test?’ I asked the head librarian. At that moment, I decided that I would do the opposite of what she advised.

  ‘Definitely not,’ she said. ‘You’re not the type for university.’

  I had to go to a special building in the university. As I passed a group of actual students, I hoped they’d comment approvingly on me to each other.

  In the test I found myself able to remember all sorts of things I didn’t know I knew. My mind was suddenly like the river eagle flying over my life, swooping down on succulent baby crabs before they scuttled away to their holes in the mudflats. Perhaps I might turn out to be an interesting person, after all.

  It was only as I addressed the envelope to send back to the woman that I found out her name: she was E.E. Albert. So I found myself at university. I chose her course, linguistics, a word I could scarcely pronounce. It didn’t sound very promising, not like other subjects I saw listed which made me feel dreamy – psychology, philosophy, ancient history. I chose linguistics to be near her.

  You’d think I’d have gone to see her immediately, you’d think I’d have made myself a cabin in the corridor outside her very door, but every time I went to visit her, my hand fell away just before I knocked. Partly it was because the door was labelled Dr Elizabeth Edna Albert, not E.E. Albert. She wasn’t mine after all. Partly it was because I was jealous of the other students, who seemed to have more access to her thoughts, the way they so ably wrote down everything she said in a vast old-fashioned theatre with raked seats. She was one of those lecturers who still felt allegiance to her academic gown, black with crimson edges to show her fellowship with an ancient tradition of learning. Her booming voice was filled with certainties, not at all like that warm, probing, encouraging woman in the library. She drew on the whiteboard a cross-section of the human mouth and throat, with esoteric labels like ‘the glottis’. I knew she was mistaken, I knew that mouths were enticingly warm and moist and filled with kisses and words and food and drink, that a mouth wasn’t anything like this diagram. It wasn’t until we were filing out of the lecture room that I realised the two identical bumps I’d drawn above a downward tube were tonsils.

  But the worst was the reading list she gave us, for they were the sorts of books that in the library I’d thought could cause my expiration. I argued with myself that she wasn’t to know that, but the list seemed a betrayal.

  So I made no headway with them, and I couldn’t visit her until I had.

  As the months went by, I knew I had to take action. I began with the first book on the list, and borrowed it for the longest time we were allowed, which was a week. By week’s end, I’d got through the first page fifteen times and couldn’t have told her what I’d read. I returned it and waited for the librarians to put it away, then I scurried back and borrowed it again, resolving that this time I’d bribe myself with an adventure when I got to the end of every chapter. I spent time planning the adventure instead of reading: Adventure Number One, to find some stranger in a bar and sleep with him. I hadn’t given in to my old sex addiction for a long while; but now, to continue as her student, I must. I put the book in a big tote bag and went to a bar and propositioned the first man I saw who leaned on the bar counter in a lonely way. He was endearingly chubby with lanky hair and he had a way of laughing that made me laugh too. I told him I’d sleep with him just as soon as I’d read a chapter of the book in my bag. ‘It must be erotica! Let’s read it together!’ he kept saying. I took them both home, him and the book. We all got into bed together, him, me and the book. His body was rounded and furry like my memory of a childhood teddy bear. I loved the weight of his furry thigh on me as he slept, holding me in his arms. I hardly closed my eyes for two nights, the hours swelling in delight, becoming playthings. Perhaps, I thought, this will continue. The book toppled on the floor and didn’t get opened.

  I’d been determined when my demented father finally died his lingering death to find love, an anchoring love, as he’d always put it. Diana had been his. So I’d left the river, and worked in a city job filing and scanning dull documents, in a grey air-conditioned office smelling of white plastic machines. I felt like those machines, waiting for someone to bring me to life. Suddenly there were crowds of people all around me but I didn’t know how to be with them, and no one knew or cared how to be with me. Every time I went to the tearoom, people much more senior than me came in, whispering confidences to their friends, and oblivious of me, because I was too unimportant to be visible. I’d hurry out, my teacup slopping in humiliation. From that moment on I swore a lifetime of revenge on people who made me feel invisible.

  I’d eat home-made lunches in a meagre triangle of a park outside the office block, sitting on a bench on a green lawn with meticulously clipped edges, and chewing carefully in case something about my sandwiches might betray me. If work colleagues strolled by, I’d take another bite and seem to consider some weighty, knotty problem that demanded solitude and a furrowed brow. In fact, I’d learned over the time I’d been alone, which sometimes seemed forever, to protect my solitude even while it shamed me, so that if a colleague did shout Hi, I’d only nod, because what if, after all this yearning, the colleague found I had nothing to say? Sometimes I wondered if there was a medical condition where people had no words inside their heads.

  On the way home, I shopped for little packets of food in a supermarket where no one spoke to anyone else because it was assumed everyone was hurrying away to their families. I walked home with my head bent, too, so anyone would think I had a lover there, like a light unfurling down a tunnel – that was how I imagined the man, it was always a man, waiting for me. He’d have pulled on a sweater, something in soft grey wool with carelessly bunched sleeves and his cuffs undone, he’d be padding about in my apartment in his socks, and tapping long fingers on my dining room table as he gazed out the window watching for me at the traffic lights. Sometimes as I hurried I would begin to believe he really was there, this man with a listening face, head bent to mine as he considered what I said, and afterwards we’d make love, true love. But the shadowed stillness of the lonely apartment would always rush up at me like a resentful yapping dog when I opened the front door.

  Yet I had company of a sort. The walls of my apartment were so thin that I knew all about my neighbours. I knew when they awoke in the morning because I could hear their alarm clocks, and I knew the exact ripples and explosions of their snores, and the exact time of their shaving because of the chinks of shaving mugs on bathroom benches, and the exact pitch of joy and pain when they made love. When I first moved in, I forced myself to say hello once a week in the lift to a stranger, since everyone stood so close, but every time my shy voice had been drowned in the lift’s asthmatic creaks and sighs, for all the world like the old kangaroos back home when drought forced them down to our place.

  I became a flirt, in the deliberate, industrious way that thin, awkward women must who haven’t the breasts to do the work of searching for love. As a matter of course I flirted unflinchingly with every man I met. I’d flirt on my deathbed, I began to think. I’d flirt with the doctors, hoping one would fall in love with me. I’d even flirt with the angels if I was allowed. I knew that there was to be no flirting with God.

  But flirting leads inexorably to sex. Even while the furry man slept, I counted the men I’d slept with, my fingers one by one tapping the silent sheet, like a child doing a difficult addition in the hope of impressing a teacher the next day, though who my teacher was, I wouldn’t have been able to say. It seemed to me that a morally good person would remember the names or at least the faces of the men she’d slept with, and in what sequence their faces had hovered near to, usually above, her own. I remembered a thin muscular neck here with a gold necklace slipping on it, a wide-nostrilled nose there, but then the faces blurred. All I could remember clearly was my longing for transformation, and afterwards, when they left, an ap
palling loss. Remembering an exact number, at least, seemed proper, if not faces. But on one counting I remembered seventeen, on another, twenty-three.

  It was a sort of counting of sheep, although I was a shepherd hoping to find out that her flock was small.

  I wasn’t quite sure if I had to include my husband in the count. He was the first man I’d slept with. I’d met him in a bar and got pregnant on our first night. He’d been excited at the prospect of having a child – a son, he was sure. He’d have someone to take to football games, he said. We married within a month, scarcely knowing each other. I took his name, eager to put an end to my childhood. Then I miscarried, and our marriage fell apart. It seemed he hadn’t wanted me at all, just his child.

  Eventually, I’d got as exhausted by sleeping with strangers as if I’d fallen out of a boat and had to swim to shore for years, not knowing how to call for rescue, not knowing if I had any right to be rescued, or if rescue was possible. I told no one, and there was no one to tell. I knew men would say, ‘You must’ve had a good time,’ and even in conjuring up this comment I blushed in the dark, because wasn’t that why I’d had sex with so many men, seventeen or twenty-three, to have a good time? I should’ve had a good time. A proper person would have. But that was the trouble. Certain experiences leave you emptier than ever.

  So I deliberately stopped flirting, and kept myself uneasily in check, resigning myself to waiting like an office machine.

  Then I went for an interview for the job in the library. At least books would talk to me – some of them, at least.

  And then E.E. Albert arrived in my life.

  On the third night with the furry man, just when I was beginning to hope it’d last, he told me he was married.

  ‘That hurts,’ I said. I was embarrassed to admit it, for somehow, like my mother, I always felt in the wrong.

  He turned his back.

  We were in bed. I got up and showered, and cried under the rush of water. I didn’t know how to matter to him; I’d never known how to matter to anyone. Some people are very good at mattering to others. Even if their only problem is being held up in traffic, they could make others weep for them.

  I fell asleep from weeping, but when I awoke, I reached out for him. There was a long moment while I remembered why his space was cold. I hoped against hope that he’d just gone to the bathroom. But the front door was ajar, the street outside was wet and grey, a dismal drizzle was settling like a cloud over the garden, the front fence, the footpath, a drizzle that felt it had set in and would go on forever. At first I thought he’d stolen something, and panicked for days when I mislaid an earring, a new blouse, a screwdriver. After a few days the gap he’d left closed over, like paint does in a tin. Whatever he’d stolen, I couldn’t name, and the unreadable library book remained unread.

  I took it back and borrowed it a third time, then a fourth. That time, the librarian checking it out was a classmate of mine, in fact a man I often sat near to admire his handsome profile and muscular shoulders. He looked at my record of borrowing and asked, sardonically, ‘This book’s a favourite of yours?’ I blushed with shame, from my toes to the roots of my hair, for my ineptitude.

  In fact, the unreadable book convinced me I didn’t belong in the university. When my classmates boasted that they’d got to the end of the reading list, I took to hiding in the toilets until the next lecture. Amongst the tinkling of the cisterns I had to admit I’d come to the university not to find out about the world, but to get again that warm delicious wave of excitement merely about me. It was like a small child’s longing for home.

  Chapter 2

  When you put something off, when you say: ‘I’ll do it next week’, then the week further on seems acceptable, and then the next week further on seems fine as well. But then suddenly you can’t do it because you’ve left it too long. So I couldn’t visit E.E. Albert.

  One day, however, after the semester-end exams, I got an email message from her that broke this cycle: Come to my room.

  I feared the worst. My time was up. Now she was going to find out that I wasn’t interesting at all.

  I even put off going for a few days until she wrote again: Did you get my message?

  I knocked at the door, and she opened it, Dr Elizabeth Edna Albert. However, this time she looked almost like my E.E. Albert again, not a forbidding stranger in an academic gown, but a comfortable woman in street clothes – a long grey checked skirt that ended in girlish blue shoes, and a blue twinset whose cardigan hung almost to her knees.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, indicating a chair on the other side of her desk in a friendly way. But from the way she leaned back and tucked her hands under her weighty breasts, I knew what was coming was serious. Then I noticed that her library wasn’t at all friendly: around us books were crammed on shelves grimly, pushing against each other, not letting any others in, and a few orphaned books sprawled sideways on top of the others. There were also piles of books on the floor waiting to be auditioned, hoping to make it one day onto the shelves.

  She came to the point immediately after we’d both enquired about each other’s health. There’d been a notice on the board for weeks bearing a most unusual request: that the university send a woman student linguist to a desert Aboriginal settlement in the Northern Territory, to the hottest part of the country, at the hottest time of the year, in the long summer break, all to record the song of one old woman. Only a woman was permitted to hear the song, so only a woman could record it. The notice by now was hanging by one pin. No one had volunteered to go.

  ‘So the task is yours.’

  I heard my backpack flop to the floor.

  ‘But I’m one of the worst students.’

  She nodded. ‘That’s why.’

  Her office didn’t have proper air conditioning. It was summer and the heat in the air was almost liquid. I felt compelled to keep talking, so I wouldn’t have to take her seriously.

  ‘Summer in the desert?’

  ‘That’s why the other girls won’t go. They’re spending summer with their lovers at the beach.’

  I’d have done that, too, in the old days.

  The desert loomed in my mind as empty of hope and joy as the car park of a shopping mall after closing time. A giant car park, the size of Europe. A void at the centre of our country, at the centre of our heart, instead of what should’ve been there, which was a wide blue bottomless ocean busy with grand and important ships of commerce plying from one far shore to another, and little storybook sailing boats bouncing over it, and tiers of houses gazing over it. That’s what it was like in proper countries, at their centres. My father had taught me it was something to be ashamed of, to belong to a country with a void at the centre, as if it revealed his own emptiness, and mine.

  My voice came almost in a squeak. ‘Why do they insist on living out there?’

  She sighed, decided the question was foolish, and reached across the desk to a pile of papers. She pulled out a letter.

  ‘The woman in question is dying. She might not last till the weather gets cooler.’

  ‘But doesn’t she know we’re whites? Why would she want a white woman recording her? Couldn’t she teach a daughter or someone?’

  ‘There may be cultural reasons why she can’t.’

  It wasn’t only E.E. Albert, it was the river I couldn’t leave, though I no longer lived beside it. And not for an empty desert.

  ‘Her daughter might have always refused to learn it. The song might have been handed down through the father’s line, so only her brothers’ children were allowed to learn it. Of course, there might not be a daughter at all. There might be only sons. Or nobody.’

  Curiously, her voice broke then, and she cleared her throat. I should’ve noticed that, and adjusted my ideas, especially about the ready availability of love for the big-breasted. I only thought about it in the months afterwards, the way she cleared her throat as if some strong feeling was obstructing her voice.

  ‘But shouldn’t you send someon
e who speaks her language?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s an endangered language,’ she said. ‘There are only a few hundred speakers. It’s true that whites have known their language for decades; an American linguist went there in the 1920s and learned it but kept his notes in his attic for twenty years; someone else went out in the 1940s and said –’ here she struck a pose to amuse me, ‘“It has all the marks of Divine Origin.”’

  We both laughed. My laughter was a little too loud.

  ‘Even the CIA’s been out there to see if it would be useful for a code,’ she added, and we laughed again. ‘Can you imagine? A language without our technology and hardly any abstract nouns!’ The very idea of the CIA’s misconception sent us both into hysterics.

  She seemed worried about our laughter, and got up and shut the door. Her academic gown flew out from its hook where it had been hanging, like the flurrying wings of a great bird, to remind me of her authority over my life, and then it settled down again to rest.

  She sat and leaned closer to me.

  ‘You’re in trouble,’ she said. There was a low intensity about her voice that made my heart thump with guilt. I hadn’t expected guilt. After all, I reminded myself, it was only me I was letting down. I wasn’t letting her down. She must’ve read my mind.

  ‘Your marks don’t look good,’ she said in the same low, deep voice. ‘Your essays are shoddy. Your exam papers are half-hearted. You’re heading for failure. I championed you because you seemed so full of promise, you seemed to intuitively understand so much – do you remember when we met?’

  ‘Every day,’ I breathed, her eyes on me.

  ‘Did I misunderstand you completely?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I breathed.

  ‘Your entrance test, your marks weren’t in the top band but I argued for you, I said: “This student is brilliant, she’s unused to the exam system, she doesn’t know how to present herself, let’s give her a chance –”’