The commemorative match in Victoria Park, between the ‘Qantas’ Aboriginals and Clive Lloyd’s eleven, was a modest affair, a sober success. The bespectacled and ageing panther gathers the ball at extra cover and returns it, straight to the wicket-keeper’s gloves, with an effortless flick. His young teammates do the running for him, giving away the odd ‘overthrow’ on the bumpy daisy-dusted turf. The Aboriginals conduct themselves in the accepted all-purpose style, that could mean a team of cigar-chewing Dutchmen, headhunters with filed teeth, or morally stunted mercenaries going anywhere to chase a krugerrand.
A knot of local black kids, in the tea interval, picked up the rudiments of boomerang throwing: the blade held upright, spun twisting into the wind. They returned the following evening, to drop an incautious grey squirrel from a plane tree; and to watch while it was chewed — then abandoned — by a yelping levy of over-fed pooches.
My son was restless. Cricket was not his game. It was too far away. And too cold an afternoon. I had seen as much as I needed. Conscious of the sacrilege, we set off for home before the game was concluded. I did not witness the end of Clive Lloyd’s brief innings.
VII
In Meath Gardens, off Roman Road, the hands of the clock were edging to attention at midday; a group of fit, dark-skinned young men, in green blazers, stood over a hole in the ground, practising late cuts and cover drives with their rolled umbrellas. A publicity girl from Qantas, who had miscalculated — by one — the number of buttons to leave undone on her starched blouse, was fending off the attentions of the sole representative of the English Press, a papillous ‘stringer’ from the East London Advertiser.
Edith Cadiz, in a startling white raincoat, had detached herself from what she was seeing. She leant against a pollarded English elm, and looked across the insistent wave-pattern of the reclaimed graveyard to the allotments. The dull grass was like a coarse hospital blanket too hastily pulled over a corpse that refuses to shut its eyes. Edith tightened her grip on the Eliot. She ‘heard another’s voice cry: “What! Are you here?” / Although we were not.’ If she had painted this scene she would have omitted herself altogether. She reached for her dark glasses: believing, like a child playing hide and seek, that if she could not see, then nobody could see her. She was no longer an actor in anything she was forced to observe. Men, she decided, could never aspire to play any role but the audience. She remembered St Pauclass="underline" ‘Their mouths were like open graves.’ She knew that Triscombe would come, but that is not what she was waiting for. The notebooks were all filled: her presence was no longer necessary. She wanted to read them, one by one, to Triscombe; so that he would be fatally infected. The story would stay with him, and — in time — he would die of it. Gentle, westward-drifting rain lacquered her fine red hair to her skull. She was unaware of it. Let this scene finish. Return once more to the Fournier Street refuge; to Roland’s basement kitchen. The pine table, the red coffee pot. A cigarette. Make a performance of it, pass the burden.
Triscombe’s black Jaguar came through the arched entrance gate, with its weathered heraldic shields, its eroded script, Victoria Park Cemetery 1845; and drew up, shy of the ceremonial site — engine running, windows steamed over. Two council gardeners rested on their spades, waiting for the signal, and calculating the precise amount of overtime they would earn. They had a small side-bet running on whether the eucalyptus would last a month.
The dog, Gelert, once Triscombe’s guardian, lay at Edith’s feet, scarcely breathing; his pelt heavy with the rain. He was faithful to whoever fed him. The dark darkened. Commuter trains hissed and clattered on the elevated railway that marked the boundary of the field. Sparks were struck from the overhead wires. The Victorian headstones had been broken up, carried away, incorporated into municipal building projects. The ground was shaken by its agitated past. It was humped, pocked, pitted: lacking a glossary of the original names. The memorial site elected to remain anonymous, remembering nothing. A seismic disturbance had gashed the earth, so that the dead walked free. They clustered in the feathery trees. And the trees bore it: mutilated into eccentricity, dense with voices, wind-serving. They took on strange ancestral forms. They were cartoons of abdicated tribal power.
Morkul-kua-luan: only the Spirit of the Long Grass knew King Cole. Rogue eddies whirled from the speed of the railway; seeking animal heat, untwisting the vines and insipid clusters of green that masked the allotment. A recollection of rage surfaced among the Qantas cricketers: the stone of their hearts broke open, and fell from them. They stood with their fathers; they were men. They made a circle around the hole where the tree would be planted.
Triscombe lumbered from the car; a leather-jacketed researcher, up on his toes, to keep a golfing umbrella over the great man’s streaky pate. Ever the politician, Triscombe squinted through the rain to identify the weightier journalists, the position of the video cameras and the microphones. Nothing! He evidently had all the pulling power of a flatulent concrete poet. He had drawn two gardeners who were scowling at their boots (selfevident members of the electorally unwashed), and a dozen sullen — and disenfranchised — darkies. Was it for this that Triscombe had been sitting for ten minutes in his car, pumping himself to give his blessing to King Cole, for his voyage through the Dreamtime. There was no going back. Why had he bothered? There was no ethnic percentage in Abos. Now that he thought about it, he convinced himself that there weren’t any in Hackney. We had everything else: Blacks, Indians, Pakis, Turks, Kurds, Greeks, Yids, Fascists, Pinkos, Greens, Gays — but hardly an Australian of any type. A few back-packing antipodean dykes got into the schools; but they moved on fast. And good riddance. No, this was all a bad mistake. Or worse, a miscalculation. His firebrand eloquence would have to be spat at the wart-decorated flasher with his notebook — who might turn out to be nothing more than a peculiarly unselective autograph-hound.
Then Triscombe noticed Edith. That eucalyptus hole, he thought, will never be big enough. He whispered something to his researcher.
He plunged — fists flailing, loose strands of hair flicking the faces of his small audience, like a cow’s tail chasing flies — straight into the heat of the matter: the slaughter of a whole people, sacred innocents, keepers of the dream, by rapacious and sadistic land thieves, backed by puppet governments and megacorporations. He named names. He spoke of genetic mutations, ancestral sites poisoned for millennia; of enforced sterilization; drink-sadness; deaths in custody. He described back-country cells that looked like abattoirs. He poured out all the well-rehearsed routines his researcher had fed him over a leisurely breakfast of kidneys, burnt bacon, and fried bread that dripped white grease when he pressed it with his fork. And it was all true. But because he was saying it that truth was lost. He merely participated in the crimes; and, by naming them — without heart-directed anger — he softened their edges, generalized them to impotent rhetoric. The tree-planting had become a second burial for King Cole, a display.
Now Triscombe was sure. He was aroused by the false demons of his well-crafted performance. He was excited by the extinct emotions he had touched within his hidden self; and he had to disguise the physical manifestation of that excitement by immediately plunging his hands into his trouser pockets. He was genuinely moved, both by the tragic stupidity of genocide, the termination of a non-renewable human resource, and by the solitary courage of Edith Cadiz. He was inspired, but his solution was extreme. He wanted to — as he saw it — arrange a marriage: between the spirit of King Cole and the warm body of his former mistress. He wanted Edith to be buried alive.