The Girl with No Name Read online

  Firstly, she pounded the grass with the rock.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘Make ’im soft,’ said the girl, ‘so ’e can burn.’ With the edge of a piece of stone she made a nick in the side of one of the sticks, and sharpened one end of the other. Then she placed the nicked piece flat on the ground, with a little wad of the softened grass just underneath it. Holding the first stick firmly under the side of her right foot, she placed the second stick upright with the sharpened end resting in the nick she had made in the other. She held the upright stick between the flat of both hands.

  ‘Might be I can’t light ’im,’ she remarked, glancing up at Matthew. ‘We don’t do it much.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘ ’Cos we got ’nother kind matches!’ she laughed.

  Matthew watched while the girl, concentrating hard, twirled the upright stick back and forth between her open palms. The flat of her hands started at the top of the stick, pressing downwards, and after a number of rapid twirls they had moved to the bottom, whereupon she quickly shifted them to the top and started again. The idea was to keep up the friction and downward pressure on the stick. The girl frowned and breathed hard with the effort.

  After a while, a tiny wisp of smoke rose from the friction point between the two sticks, from where a fine black powder fell onto the wad of grass. The girl stopped twirling, quickly picked up the wad and bent her head over it, blowing gently. Then she looked at it and shook her head.

  ‘No good,’ she said.

  ‘It didn’t catch?’ The girl shook her head again and got into position to try once more. This time she spat on her hands before she started. As she rubbed her hands fast back and forth, her whole body tensed and the thin, hard muscles of her arms stood out. She clenched her teeth and breathed rapidly.

  Again the wisp of smoke, and the smouldering powder. Again the girl stopped rubbing and blew into the grass, coaxing. She shook her head.

  ‘Let me have a go,’ said Matthew, sure he would be able to lend that extra bit of strength. ‘You hold the bottom part, and I’ll do the twirling.’ He sat in front of No-name with his legs crossed, and worked the upright stick as she had done. But he found it was much harder than it looked. After several sets of twirls his arms were aching, and there wasn’t the least sign of smoke.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the girl cheerfully. ‘You can do it next time.’ Matthew put the sticks carefully into the top pocket of his shirt, intending to practise later. He leaned back on his elbows.

  ‘You still haven’t told me your name,’ he said to the girl. She dropped her eyes, and seemed embarrassed.

  ‘I got no name,’ she said at last. Matthew looked at her disbelievingly.

  ‘You must have a name. Everyone has a name.’ The girl shook her head. ‘One woman did pass away,’ she told him. ‘Same name like me.’ A light flashed in Matthew’s head.

  ‘You mean people can’t use that name any more?’ He remembered hearing about the custom of changing names that were the same as that of a deceased person. ‘So what do people call you now?’

  ‘Kumunyjayi,’ said the girl after a pause. ‘That mean like, no name.’

  ‘No name,’ said Matthew thoughtfully, not game to try pronouncing the unfamiliar word. ‘That’s what I’ll call you: No-name.’ No-name laughed shyly.

  ‘Are we far from Goanna Gorge?’ he asked No-name.

  ‘Little bit far,’ she said. ‘You want me to show you?’

  ‘Yeah, I wish you would. I left all my things there, and if I don’t go home today my parents will have a search party out looking for me.’

  No-name nodded. She stood up straight. Matthew got up too, feeling a bit awkward to be dependent on a girl younger than he was. But this was no time to act smart. He needed No-name’s knowledge.

  To Matthew’s surprise, the girl did not lead him back the way he had come, but cut across country.

  ‘Is Goanna Gorge this way?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ The girl threw out her arm in front of her, pointing with her hand extended vertically, inclining her head slightly to line up her sight. ‘That way.’ The words sounded like ‘Darray’.

  Matthew looked hard in the direction she was indicating, but could see nothing to distinguish that part of the landscape. He wondered how she knew. She seemed so confident, he did not for a moment doubt her. He simply followed.

  three

  No-name

  The morning, like every morning in the bush, was bright with promise. The sun was now well up, and the chill had gone out of the air. Matthew almost felt like singing.

  The girl led him in a more or less straight line, deviating only to skirt hills and boulders that lay in their path. Once, she stopped to examine some tracks in the sand at her feet. Matthew came alongside and looked down.

  ‘Goanna, fresh one,’ said No-name, and set off walking fast after the tracks. Matthew followed. Suddenly the girl broke into a run, and Matthew caught a glimpse of the goanna running for all it was worth through the spinifex. No-name was after it, Matthew hard-pressed to keep up. The girl pulled up sharply, and fell to her knees. She started digging fast with her hands at a hole in the ground. In a few moments she grabbed at something and, with a wide swing of her arm, pulled the goanna backwards from the hole by its tail and held it up for Matthew to see. The goanna hung stiff in the air, its tongue flicking, eyes frightened. With her free hand No-name grasped the goanna around its neck and held it upright, then ran her hand down its body, feeling its scaly yellow abdomen with her thumb.

  ‘Fatfeller,’ she said, appreciatively. Then, before Matthew had time to comment, she had it again by the tail and with an expert flick of her arm had dashed the animal’s head twice against the ground. She inspected it to make sure it was dead, then handed it to Matthew. He took it a little reluctantly. Its head was bloody, its eyes closed, and its long narrow forked tongue flopped out.

  ‘You like eating goanna?’

  ‘Never tried it,’ said Matthew. ‘What’s it like?’

  ‘Good meat,’ said No-name, getting up. She started off again without even taking her bearings, or so it seemed to Matthew, who had lost his sense of direction in the course of the goanna chase. He strode along behind, carrying the goanna by its tail. It swung as he walked, and its tongue flicked against the side of his leg, leaving streaks of blood on his skin.

  No-name wore her clothes as if she hardly knew she had them on. Her dress hung loosely on her lean body, bunched at the waist by its tie-belt. When she ran after the goanna, and even when she knelt on the ground digging in the sand, she paid no attention to her dress, not even making any attempt to protect it from the dust. Matthew thought of some of the girls at his school, and the way they preened themselves, conscious all the time of how they looked. Their clothes were always the latest style, and none of them would have been seen in a shapeless dress like No-name’s. Well, I like her for being so free, he said to himself, already in his mind defending her from criticism.

  At one little hill, No-name pointed over to the right. ‘My camp that way,’ she said. ‘You want to look?’

  ‘Why not?’ Now that Matthew knew he was safe, he didn’t need to hurry back. He felt curious about his new friend’s life, and wanted to learn more about her.

  No-name led Matthew off to the right, where she had pointed. Some distance away a stand of trees guarded the foot of a low hill, and it was towards these that the young pair headed. The morning sun was now higher in the sky, and Matthew luxuriated in its warmth. In spite of his sleepless night, he felt energetic and suddenly happy.

  As they approached the trees Matthew noticed an old utility parked under one of them. Near it a sheet of green canvas, almost hidden by the bush, was rigged up like a tent. Smoke rose nearby from a fire he couldn’t yet see. It wasn’t until they were within a stone’s throw of the camp that he spotted someone moving about. A woman carrying a metal bucket came out from the shadow under the canvas and walked in the di
rection of the smoke. No-name called out to her: ‘Eh!’ The woman stopped in her tracks and shaded her eyes to look towards them. Suddenly Matthew felt shy. ‘My granny,’ the girl told him.

  They drew close to the elderly woman, who seemed not at all surprised to see them. She put her bucket, half-full of water, on the fire and straightened up.

  ‘This is Matthew,’ said No-name, and the woman smiled and nodded as if she already knew him, and took his hand lightly in hers. The hand felt odd and Matthew glanced down at it. The fingers were bent and out of shape, like a claw. Matthew thought of leprosy and had to fight an impulse to withdraw his hand.

  ‘ ’E Jampijin?’ the old woman asked, smiling knowingly at her granddaughter, who went off into peals of embarrassed laughter and shook her head. Matthew smiled politely, and looked quizzical, waiting for No-name to explain the joke, but she didn’t. The old woman released his hand at last, and sat down on the ground, smoothing her full floral dress over her lap. Again Matthew was struck by that indifference to clothes. He couldn’t imagine his own grandmother sitting on the ground at all, never mind in the dirt without even a rug under her to protect her dress. No-name dropped down next to her grandmother, then held her hand out to take the goanna from Matthew.

  ‘You bin get lost,’ the old woman commented to Matthew.

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked.

  ‘We bin see your track all round, last night,’ said the woman. ‘Up and down, up and down you bin go.’ She laughed. ‘But too late we bin see. Can’t find you nighttime. We bin wait till morning time. My granny bin worrying for you. ’E bin take off early, look for you. But ’e bin find you all right.’ She laughed again comfortably, with a glance at No-name, and leaned forward to push the unburnt wood at the edge of the fire into the centre of the blaze. The water in the bucket was cloudy with tiny bubbles as it came close to boiling.

  So the girl had come especially looking for him. Matthew was beginning to understand that to people like No-name and her grandmother, the idea of getting lost in the bush was funny. They laughed, not unkindly, but with the same amused surprise with which he might laugh at someone of his own age who didn’t know how to ride a bike. He had seen how easily No-name made her way through the countryside, without seeming to take her bearings or consciously look for landmarks.

  Maybe it’s the same as me knowing my way around Perth, thought Matthew, not liking to believe he was short on brains. I was brought up there, and I suppose they ve spent all their lives around here. His father had been transferred north two years before. Even though people who moved north led more of an outdoors life, they still lived in town and only went bush now and then, usually on long weekends, to well-known fishing and camping spots. No-name’s people must know this whole country intimately; they probably used landmarks he hadn’t even noticed.

  Meanwhile, No-name had gutted the dead goanna, and was passing its body through the fire, holding it first by the head then by the tail. The body twisted and stiffened in the heat. As the flames singed the scales, the skin blistered and peeled. When the flames had died down and the fire was reduced to red coals, No-name leaned forward and used a stick to scrape a shallow pit at one side of it. With the same stick she rolled some of the red-hot coals into the bottom of the pit, and then laid the scorched goanna on top of them. She covered it with more of the coals and hot sand until there was nothing to see but a hump in the ground, with the thin tip of the goanna’s tail sticking out at one end.

  The water came to the boil, and the old woman picked up a packet of tea torn open at one corner. She poured a pile of the leaves into her cupped hand, and threw them into the bucket. The tea-leaves seethed on top of the water for a few moments, then she leaned forward and lifted the bucket off the fire and put it down beside her. When it had settled she poured in some unheated water from a billy. Meanwhile No-name brought three chipped tin mugs, a tin of dried milk and an open packet of sugar.

  While the tea was being prepared, Matthew glanced around the camp. On the ground under the sheet of canvas he could see several piles of bedding, as well as clothes, tools and various other objects in apparently random order. Two bare metal bed-frames stood in positions at some distance from the canvas. On the ground near the fire lay an assortment of tin mugs, plates and cooking utensils, milk tins, and a couple of upturned flour drums which looked as if they served as stools.

  Matthew wondered where the other occupants of the camp might be. ‘Do you live here?’ he asked No-name, trying not to sound incredulous.

  ‘Not all the time,’ she told him. ‘Only weekends and holiday time. My granny got a house in town too.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘Piyirnwarnti.’ Then, seeing he looked nonplussed, she added, ‘You know – Two-mile.’ Suddenly Matthew was embarrassed. Two-mile was one of the two small communities that used to be called reserves. Some people still used the old term, because for white people the community names were too hard to pronounce. The communities were places Matthew had always, without fully realising it, looked down on. He had never actually set foot inside either of them, but sometimes he had ridden past on his bike during his explorations of the town. He had gained an impression of broken-down cars and ramshackle houses with fires burning in the dusty front yards of many of them, and people sitting outside on the ground. The house he lived in, a prisons department house on the main road just out of town, was much bigger, cleaner and neater than any of the houses at the reserve looked from the outside. He took his own living conditions for granted because they were much like those of the other kids he mixed with. Most of them lived in government houses because of their parents’ work, with prisons, police, or the public service.

  Until this moment, when he found himself forced to think about it, Matthew had looked on the people in the communities as completely different from himself. If they lived in poor conditions that must be how they wanted it. He had heard adults, his own parents among them, tut-tutting about the way Aboriginal people behaved, and how few of them held a job. Never before had he thought of the Two-mile inhabitants as ordinary people much like himself. Nor had it crossed his mind that they might have another side to their lives than sitting in the reserve or hanging around town.

  He looked at No-name and tried to imagine her amongst the other scruffy children he had seen playing in the yards with no grass.

  ‘Are you two here on your own?’ he asked then.

  ‘No. My mother here too, and my relations, but they gone walkabout.’

  ‘Walkabout?’ said Matthew.

  ‘Yeah, you know – hunting.’

  No-name dipped each mug in turn into the bucket, filling it with the rich black brew, and spooned powdered milk and sugar on top, giving it a vigorous stir. She handed one mug to Matthew, who couldn’t help looking a bit doubtfully at the chipped rim before sipping the tea. He seldom drank tea at home, but he could have done with a mug of it last night, to keep the cold at bay. He drank it now gladly.

  No-name’s grandmother unwrapped a cloth parcel lying on the ground beside her, and took out a large, freshly made damper. She broke off a piece and handed it to Matthew. She gave another to No-name. Then she took the remaining piece and dipped it into her tea before eating it. No-name did the same, and Matthew followed suit. He was never allowed to dunk at home. His mother said it was bad manners. He had once told her he thought this rule was putting manners before enjoyment, because most people liked to dunk. He did so now with the relish of hunger.

  ‘What for you bin walk round self?’ asked No-name’s grandmother suddenly. ‘Where your family?’

  ‘My family? They’re at home. I wanted to camp out by myself.’ Matthew hesitated before adding, ‘And I wanted to look for some rock paintings.’

  ‘Blackfeller painting? You bin findim?’ Matthew was relieved that the old woman wasn’t offended. On the contrary, she seemed pleased.

  ‘Yes,’ Matthew told her, livening up. ‘I found them on flat rock, like a wall.’ He
gestured upwards to give an idea of the height. ‘Do you know much about them?’

  ‘Very old, them painting,’ said the old woman, serious now. ‘Very old story, they gottim.’

  ‘What kind of story?’ Matthew was interested.

  ‘Old story, from before, long time. Before people bin walk round here. You know that kind story?’

  ‘I think so,’ Matthew searched his memory, but could think of nothing specific. ‘You mean stories about how things were made? Animals and everything?’

  ‘That right. Earlydays people bin puttim down story, they bin paintim, on rock. That painting still there today.’

  ‘Some of the paintings look new. The ochre looks fresh.’

  ‘Yeah, that right,’ the old woman said again. ‘When they getting worn out people renewim, keepim nice.’

  Matthew pictured generation after generation of artists maintaining the records of traditional stories. He tried to think of a parallel from his own experience. School teaching? He supposed that was the nearest equivalent. Generations of school teachers passing on the same rules of maths, say, to class after class of unwilling students. The comparison seemed unworthy of the artists.

  After a while, No-name took hold of the protruding tail and pulled the goanna out of the cooking pit, dusting off the ashes. It looked stiff and dry as it lay near her on the ground. No-name twisted off the tail and handed it to Matthew. She peeled the skin from the goanna’s belly, revealing a layer of soft yellow fat. With her fingers she pulled out a piece of the fat and ate it. Giving another twist she divided the body in two, and passed the forequarters to her grandmother.