Corroboree (61 page)

‘What?' asked Eyre, in an unsteady voice. ‘Who told these stories? How do you know about me? Who said these things?'

Chucky stopped skipping, and touched his curls respectfully. ‘Are you Mr Walker, the great explorer-man?'

Minil smiled. ‘This is Mr Walker.'

‘Minil is my cousin, sir, from New Norcia mission. Many people here in Albany know her, sir. All of her family work at the Old Farm once, with Mrs Bird!'

‘But how did you know that she was with me?' Eyre repeated.

‘A ship, sir, from Adelaide. Everybody in Adelaide thought you were dead and gone, sir, dead and gone. You were all the talk! Then some Wirangu came to Adelaide,
sir, and said that you had gone off to the west with Minil, and with Winja's people. Then there was great excitement! You have been in all the newspaper, sir, my missis told me.'

At that moment, an elderly white man came walking down the street from the house where Chucky had been hoeing. He called, ‘Chucky! Chucky! What are you doing, talking to those people? Get back to your gardening at once!'

Chucky piped up, ‘But this is my cousin Minil, Mr Pope; and this is Mr Walker, the great explorer-man!'

Mr Pope stepped gingerly across the puddles and up beside Eyre's horse. He frowned at him through his spectacles. ‘
You
are Mr Eyre Walker?'

‘Yes, sir,' said Eyre. He suddenly found that there was a sharp catch in his throat.

‘But, you are dead, sir,' said Mr Pope rather bewildered. ‘The news came by ship from Adelaide that you had been lost between Woocalla and Fowler's Bay.'

‘I am not dead, sir,' said Eyre. ‘I am only tired. This girl and I have ridden and walked all the way. I believe it is something over nine hundred miles. We have just arrived.'

He couldn't say any more. He burst into tears, and sat on his horse sobbing with exhaustion and emotion. Mr Pope looked up at him worriedly for a moment, and then took hold of his horse's bridle, and gave him his hand to help him dismount.

‘Since you are not dead, Mr Walker, I suppose it is incumbent on me to welcome you to Western Australia,' said Mr Pope. ‘Come along, let me help this young girl to dismount, and we will see what we can do for you. I believe Mrs Pope has some fresh mutton pies just out of the oven.'

Eyre was shaking; and so was Minil, as Chucky and Mr Pope helped her to slide off her horse. Eyre said, ‘I believe I could do with a glass of beer, if you have any.'

‘Beer? Yes. I think we can furnish a beer.'

‘Thank God,' said Eyre. And then, to Mr Pope, ‘And thank you, too, sir.'

They were taken back to Mrs Pope's kitchen; hot and whitewashed and snug; where Mrs Pope heated up large bucketfuls of water for them to bathe, and Chucky laid the kitchen-table for them and served them with pies and boiled potatoes and beer, although Minil drank milk. They were both too stunned to say very much, and they sat huddled together at the end of the table like refugees from some appalling disaster, and in return the Popes gave them a respectful amount of room, partly out of sympathy, partly because they were so impressed at what Eyre had done, and partly because both he and Minil stunk of rancid pelican grease, and filth, and sodden kangaroo-skin.

After they had eaten, Mrs Pope took Minil to bathe outside in the shed while Mr Pope poured out a basinful of hot water for Eyre on the kitchen flags. Mr Pope drew up a kitchen chair, and lit a pipe; and said, ‘As soon as you feel refreshed enough, we ought to take you to see some of our local dignitaries. It would hardly do for me to keep you to myself.'

Eyre turned his back on Mr Pope as he washed. Mr Pope puffed away for a while, and then said, ‘Some bad scars you have there, if I'm not being too personal, Mr Walker.'

Eyre looked down at his chest, patterned with the purplish welts of
ngora
, and at his circumcised and subincised penis. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘We had some difficult times in the desert.'

He finished soaping himself, uncomfortably aware that although he had been welcomed back into white society for less than an hour, he had already denied his Aboriginal kinship for the first time.

Later, when he was washed and shaved, and dressed in one of Mr Pope's Saturday suits, which felt impossibly huge and baggy, and which seemed to weigh on his body like a heap of woollen blankets, Eyre was taken to shake hands with the neighbours; and then Mr Pope suggested they visit Albany's town hall, and make themselves known
to everybody there. Eyre was tired, but curiously elated, and he agreed.

‘Minil should come with me,' he said.

‘Well,' said Mrs Pope, fussily tying her bonnet, ‘the poor lamb's fast asleep now; and I think it better not to wake her, don't you? And you
are
the explorer, aren't you? The achievement has been yours; and yours alone.'

‘I couldn't have done it without Minil,' Eyre told her.

‘In that case, she should be proud to have had such an appreciative employer,' smiled Mrs Pope. ‘Where are my spectacles, Frederick? Have you seen my spectacles?'

‘I wasn't her employer,' said Eyre, although Mrs Pope wasn't really listening to him. ‘I was her—'

He looked away. Outside the front door of the house, some of the neighbours had already gathered, and he could hear them chattering loudly; and some of them were whistling and cheering. Mr Pope's neighbours must have spread the news to all the surrounding streets, because the excitement sounded considerable; and there was the sound of running feet on the puddly road, and the rattle and creak of carriages.

‘You were her
what
Mr Walker?' Mrs Pope asked brightly, staring at him with her milky-blue eyes.

Eyre said, ‘It doesn't matter. I suppose things are rather different in the outback.'

‘I should say so,' put in Mr Pope. ‘Now, listen to that hullaballoo outside!'

‘Come on,' said Eyre. ‘We mustn't disappoint them, must we?'

Mr Pope opened the front door, and there was a burst of cheering and clapping; and it looked as if the whole street was packed from end to end with people, tossing up their hats and singing and dancing, and waving Union Jacks. There was even a one-man band there, with accordion and knee-cymbals and a dancing monkey.

When Eyre stepped out into the Pope's front garden, there was a deafening roar of welcome and enthusiasm; and he stood bewildered for a while until Mr Pope raised
one of his arms for him, as if he had just won a fisticuffs match; and then the crowd screamed and whistled and cheered again. Two young burly men came in through the white-painted gate, and grinned, ‘Come on, Mr Walker, we'll chair you!' and between them they lifted Eyre up on to their shoulders, and carried him right into the middle of the throng, so that the men could grasp his hands and slap at his thighs and the ladies could blow him kisses.

Then, in spite of his shouts of protest, they bore him off down the street, and across the market-place, where more people came running out to see what all the cheering was about.

They took him down to the docks, where stevedores in their brown aprons and peaked caps put down their bales and their grappling-hooks and applauded him as if they were opera-goers at the finale of
Cosi Fan Tutte
. ‘He's arrived! He's alive!' That was the cry everywhere. ‘He's arrived! Eyre Walker's arrived!' And nobody seemed to care whether he had discovered the inland sea or not; or whether or not it was possible to drive cattle from Adelaide to Albany, or sheep from Albany to Adelaide. All they cared about was Eyre; and his extraordinary journey, and the fact that he had walked and ridden all the way across the treeless plains of Southern Australia to arrive here alive.

He was finally allowed down to the ground outside the steps of the civic hall, where he was greeted by one top-hatted official after another; shaking hundreds of hands; and where even the loudest of speechmakers was unable to make himself heard over the cheering and shouting. From out on King George's Sound there was a dull, pressurised booming; one boom after another; and that was Her Majesty's naval supply ship
Walrus Bay
according Eyre an eleven-gun salute, followed by four ruffles on the drums.

He was showered with flowers; and then taken inside the civic hall for champagne, and more hand-shaking, although the crowd outside refused to go away; and after
a while an impromptu silver-band struck up with ‘My Lily and My Love' and ‘Dragoons'.

The editor of the Albany newspaper came up at last, in a tight-fitting blue coat, and a yellow-checkered waistcoat, with chestnut moustaches perfectly waxed into points.

‘Well, Mr Walker, my name's William Dundas, of the
Albany Mail
. What an achievement.'

Eyre felt battered and out of breath, and said, ‘You'll excuse me if I sit down.'

‘Of course,' said Dundas, and drew him out a chair. Eyre sat down, and a smiling man in a very high collar poured him some more champagne.

‘I'm surprised that I seem to have excited so much interest,' said Eyre.

‘Well,' said Dundas, taking out a small cigar, ‘You're a hero now. A genuine hero, in a country that's rather short of heroes. You mustn't blame us all for making rather much of you.'

‘There is no route from Adelaide to Albany suitable for stock,' said Eyre.

‘Bad country, hm?'

‘The worst. Desert, mallee scrub, mud. No running water for over eight hundred miles.'

‘Then how on earth did you survive? What did you drink?'

‘I'm beginning to wonder. But, there are springs if you know where to find them. Muddy pools of water that you have to dig for. In extremes, you can dig for frogs.'

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I never had to do it; but I was told about it. There are certain frogs that retain water in their bodies. You can dig them up and squeeze them out, if you're really thirsty.'

Dundas reached into his pocket for notepaper, and a pencil. ‘Did the Aborigines teach you how to do that?'

‘They taught me many things,' said Eyre.

‘And what would you say was the most important thing that they taught you?'

Eyre lowered his head. The champagne had already
begun to make him feel drunk; what with the noise and the jostling and the music, and the sudden sense of suffocation he felt, enclosed inside a room after months of living in the open air.

He said, haltingly, ‘The most important thing that they taught me was that the white man's way of life is blind, greedy, and completely lacking in spiritual values. They taught me that there is magic in the world, and mystery; if only we can be humble enough to commune with our surroundings, and to respect what God has given us.'

Dundas tapped his pencil against his thumbnail. Then he glanced behind him to make sure that nobody was listening, and leaned forward, and said to Eyre in a cologne-smelling undertone, ‘Listen, Mr Walker. You must be very tired after your journey. Perhaps a little lightheaded. I think it might be a good idea if I made sure that you got back to wherever it is that you're staying; and that you didn't say very much more about magic or mystery or spiritual values. You're a hero now. If I were you, I'd take full advantage of it; and play it for what it's worth. And if I were you, I'd think twice before I upset people. You won't change them, after all, no matter
what
you discovered in the outback. Tell them how you were taught to squeeze frogs. Tell them how you roasted emus, and how you ate lizards. That's all very fine. Guaranteed to make the gels shudder. Good dinner-party stuff. Fine newspaper copy. But don't try to convert them with all this talk about greed, and blindness, and whatnot. Doesn't go down well.'

Eyre was silent. A fat woman with a coarse English accent and a very purple dress came up and kissed him, without being asked, right on the nose. ‘You're a
hero
! she squealed.

Eyre raised his eyes and looked at Dundas with tiredness and resignation. Dundas shrugged, and twiddled at his moustache.

‘Yes,' said Eyre. ‘I'm a hero.'

When a carriage returned him at last to the Pope's house,
Mrs Pope greeted him on the doorstep with the news that Minil had gone. There was no message; nothing. She had told Chucky that she had gone to see her relatives at Swan River.

Eyre opened the door of the bedroom where Minil had been sleeping that afternoon, and stepped inside. The bed was crumpled, the sheets twisted. He sat down on it, and traced with the palm of his hand the wrinkles that her sleeping had made.

‘
Minil
,' he whispered to himself, in the dusk of that room. He looked towards the window; and outside, in the blueness of dusk, he saw a gum-tree dipping and waving in the north-westerly breeze. She had left nothing behind, only these twists and wrinkles on the bed. He sat there for a few minutes, trying to think of her; but somehow he couldn't quite remember what her face looked like, or how she felt, or even what she had said to him, the very last time they had spoken.

He got up at last, and went to the window, and looked out. Mr Pope came into the room, smelling of tobacco, and stood there for a while, and then said, ‘Is everything all right? Mrs Pope tells me that the blacky girl's gone.'

‘Yes,' said Eyre, without turning around. ‘Everything's all right. And, yes,' he said, ‘the blacky girl's gone.'

‘You'll want some supper, then,' said Mr Pope. ‘Chicken casserole do you, with dumplings? And how about a beer? I'm glad of the excuse, to tell you the truth. Mrs Pope doesn't usually allow me a beer, not until Saturday. But, you know, seeing as how it's a special occasion.'

‘I suppose it is,' said Eyre. ‘Yes, you're very kind. I'll have a beer.'

He arrived back in Adelaide three weeks later on the merchant-ship
Primrose
; which was laden with grain and ironware from England. The people of Albany had given him everything he might possibly have needed; from a constant supply of French champagne to shoes and shirts and tailor-made coats. When he had left King George's Sound, more than half the population had turned out to cheer him and wave him goodbye, and sparkling maroons had been fired into the grey July sky. Now he stood in the wind on the
Primrose's
poop, dressed rather formally in a black tail-coat, with dark grey britches, and a two-inch collar, with a black tie, and a pearl stud which had been presented to him by the Albany Commerce Club.