the low-lying clouds; two more each clung to a powerful leg, and the fourth thudded away in the vee. Wooreddy could see only the cropped head of the woman and not her face. The ghost stopped his thudding between her legs and fell limply on her body for a minute, then jerked away, knelt and got to his feet. The doctor noted with interest the whiteness of the ghost’s penis. He had accepted the fact of their having a penis – after all they were known to attack women – but he had never thought it would be white. He filed this probably useless piece of information in his mind and watched on. The ghost hid his unnatural organ in his pants, then reached for the arms of the woman. The one holding them, possibly eager for his turn, released his grip and she had her arms free. She did nothing. Experimentally, the other two loosened their hold on her legs. She remained still. The three stood up and watched as the fourth jerked out his pale, bloodless penis, knelt, and lunged forward.
‘Hey, Paddy, leave a bit for us,’ one yelled. The sounds drifted up to Wooreddy. He wondered about the grammatical structure and idiosyncrasies of their language as the rape continued.
‘Arrh, Jack, got her all loosened up. Now she’s just lying there enjoying every minute of it’, Paddy finally grunted up, spacing the words to the rhythm of his body.
Wooreddy wondered if the ghosts had honorifics and specific forms of address. Perhaps it was not even a real language? – but then each and every species of animal had a language, and so it must be! The kangaroos, possums and even snakes – and though it was not universally accepted, the trees and plants – all had a language. Even the clouds and wind conversed together. Some gifted men and women could listen and understand what they were talking about. It was even debated that such men and women could make them carry them to see a distant friend and after return them to their starting point. It could be true, for he knew that the whole earth murmured with the conversations of the myriad species of things and to understand what they were saying would be to understand all creation.
Paddy finished with a grunt and got off and up. Another took his place while Wooreddy wondered about the necessity of covering the body with skins rather than grease. It was the way of these num and could be compared with the strange custom of the North West Nation where women did not crop their hair. He thought about how different peoples held and shaped spears. Variations based on the series of actions of holding and sharpening which were individual to each person, and as they were individual to each person so were they to each nation and even community. Another num came and went – to be replaced by another.
The circle circled while the day flowed towards the evening. Wooreddy knew that he and his family had to leave soon if they were to make the camping place by nightfall. He was beginning to find the rape a little tedious. What was the use of knowing that the num were overgreedy for women just as they were overgreedy for everything? He could have deduced this from the record of their previous actions and they did appear fixed and immutable in their ways. At long last the rape ground to an end. The num without a final glance at the sprawling woman walked off to a boat Wooreddy had not noticed drawn up on the beach. They got in and began rowing across the bay like a spider walking on water.
A few minutes after they had left, the woman got to her feet. The doctor parted the mists of seven years to recognise the youngest daughter of Mangana grown into a woman of seventeen years. She looked a good strong female with the firm, squat body of a provider. Unsteadily she managed a few steps, then stood swaying on her feet. Slowly her face lifted and her dull eyes brightened as she saw Wooreddy standing in the undergrowth. She glared into his eyes, spat in his direction, then turned and dragged her hips down to the waves subsiding in the long rays of the sun setting in a swirl of clearing cloud. He watched as she squatted in the water and began cleaning herself. Then he turned to his wife, told her to follow him, and waddled away with Trugernanna’s glare, that dull then bright gaze filled with spite and contempt, in his mind. It upset him and dispelled his numbness which, fortunately for Wooreddy (though he often didn’t realise it) was not the impervious shield of his theorising, and could be easily penetrated. Why had she looked at him in such a way? After all it had been the num who had raped her. He would never do such a thing! He thought on as he waddled along in that peculiar gait which had earned him the name, Wooreddy – ‘duck’ – and finally concluded that it was a waste of time to try to divine anything about females. What was important about Trugernanna, he recalled, was that she was a survivor. This was what made her important to him – though she did have the body of a good provider!
The track ended in a clearing at the side of a long sweeping bay. Here he found Mangana much the same as seven years ago. He sat alone, smiling into his fire. Wooreddy waited until the older man glanced up and beckoned to him to sit. He sat and waited. Mangana looked across and smiled, not a smile of greeting, but one of resignation. To the old man’s despondency over the loss of his first wife had been added that caused by the loss of a second. Now he filled Wooreddy in with the details, using the rich language of an elder. It was part gesture, part expression, part pure feeling allied to a richness of words moulded together in a grammatic structure complex with the experience of the life lived. It was a new and full experience for Wooreddy. The white cloud sails bulged, fluttered like the wings of birds and collapsed in a torrent of rain; a baby boat crawled from the strangeness of its mother ship-island; tottered across the waves on unsteady legs; dragged its tiny body up onto the shore – and reached out insect arms to Mangana’s mate. Charmed, she enticed herself to it; charmed, she wanted the insect arms around her and her own arms around the soft body; charmed, she let herself be enticed by the infant-boat to the terrible mother-ship. Many legs walked the child to it and Mangana’s wife was taken along to where the sails fluttered like seagulls, and flew out to sea. The loss of the mate was conveyed by a terrible feeling of emptiness, of the lack felt by the absence of a good provider not filled by the presence of a single young daughter, fickle and strange with the times and often not to be found and not to be managed. Mangana took up the subject of his daughter. With a finger he painted in the soft ashes at the edge of the fire her symbol and her actions.
She spent too much time watching the num and being with the num. From them she received ghost food, two whites and a black: flour, sugar and tea. He himself had acquired a taste for these strange foods since he rarely hunted and relied on his daughter for provisions. He projected the death of a son at Wooreddy. They lived through it right to the final ashes. Mangana left mental pain to wander in physical pain. He relived the time he had been washed out to sea. His water-logged catamaran sagged beneath his weight and every wave washed over him. All around him the surge of the sea, the breathing of Ria Warrawah. A num boat came sailing along. Ghosts pulled him from the clutches of Ria Warrawah. This affected him even more than the other events as it involved a contradiction: why had the num, who allegedly came from it, saved him from its domain? Unable to formulate a theory to explain this, he now felt that he belonged, or at the least owed his very life, to the ghosts and thus existed only on their whim. They had claimed his soul and sooner rather than later would take it if he could not create a nexus to prevent them from doing so.
Mangana declared with more determination than he had so far shown: ‘The num think they have me – but an initiated man is never had. He knows how to walk the coloured path to the sparkling path which leads to where the fires flicker in Great Ancestor’s camp. There they are forbidden to come, and even now I am building up my fire there.’
Wooreddy nodded. He knew that the older a man grew the more he received and found. Sometimes the old ones had so much knowledge that they could make the very earth tremble. It was even rumoured that they could fly to the sky-land while still alive. Respectfully he kept his eyes lowered. Here was one of the last elders of the Bruny Island people famed for their spiritual knowledge.
‘My daughter, she is yours when I go,’ the old man said suddenly to him, smiling with a humour which showed that he knew a little too much about Trugernanna – and about Wooreddy!
Wooreddy lifted his head in surprise and lowered it in confusion. He tried to mask his thoughts from the old man. Thankfully Lunna
