TRACKS
Looking back now, from this vantage point of detachment and distance, she thinks she can finally see her `Kate' part. ‘Kate’ was her inner potential, her capacity to love and to like, to give and forgive, her capacity to explore the greater possibilities of life without precondition, without anxiety, without suspicion. Kate was the small outline of her being on the soul-matter of the universe. Kate was her spirit. It was probably Kate who had sought out Margaret Wadinye.
Margaret was from Milang, south of Adelaide on the edge of Lake Alexandrina, even today a kind of wildish place, a sky place, a crossing place for the cloud-men, for the pelican-women, for the faint remaining echoes of the Great Water Dreaming. Margaret was about Kate’s age, and had two sisters to watch over. Margaret was careful with friendship, and nursed a private rage. Margaret was aboriginal. At that time, when days were younger and perceptions clearer, `aboriginal' was in the same context as `tall' or `noisy' or `fast', a kid-description, of being, of how you were, not what you were. Kate was skinny, Chook was a ratbag, Margaret was aboriginal. Margaret was also — she supposes she has the eyes to see this now — naturally spiritual. She had a depth that Kate then lacked.
There was a row of old pines along the Florence Street side of the Girl’s Home, with a loose mat of needles under them, rich with earthy composty odours, and among them nuts from the fallen-open pine cones. This was Margaret's own Quiet Place, which Kate respected, and here she would retreat, a shadow among shadows, and collect the pinenuts, and maybe listen to the wind sigh in the branches.
Kate would often pass by the perimeter of Margaret's private world, but slowly, looking in, waiting, until one day Margaret looked at her, in a manner that suggested the door may be open. So Kate walked in. Sat down. Said nothing.
After that they collected pinenuts together every Saturday afternoon for a while, still not saying much at first, either of them, just quietly picked through the litter, putting the nuts in a jam tin. One day Kate touched Margaret’s arm, and cleared away the needles from a patch of soft earth.
She made one small, and what she thought was, a perfect paw print.
"A cat ... ", she suggested, about the only right-sized animal she could think of.
"Nah ... a cat's like this ... ", and with a deft touch Margaret’s fingertips made a catprint appear beside Kate’s. It was subtly and immaculately different.
"That one's more like a possum ... ", was all she said.
Kate was impressed, and wanted to know more, an instinctive curiosity, about possum-things, and cat-things.
"Where'd you learn that ... ?"
"At home ... "
Kate remembers the way she said `home', the clarity, the certainty, the fidelity she attached to it. It wasn't about a house, or an address, or even an assembly of people, it was the place of her natural belonging. But, not knowing where the proper manners, where the conventions of this might lay, Margaret’s conventions, Kate broke the first rule of institution life — Never Ask Another Kid Their Story.
"Where's y' mum then ... ?" (Funny how it's not "Where's your dad", or even "How did you get in here", but "Where's your mum"). Margaret hesitated, as if weighing up two equally uncertain Uncertainties.
"Mum's home at Milang. The police and welfare come and got me and me sisters one day. Mum tried to hide us but we got found and there was lots of screamin’. All the women wailin’ like hurt birds. We was driven off in a truck and they told us we was goin’ to school..."
She went quiet again, added only --
" ... it was me Mum taught me the tracks ... ", but then it was Margaret who broke the most important rule of all, the pride-and-survival rule — Don't Feel Don't Cry. She let a little choky sob get away.
She wiped the dirt off clean, and swept the pine needles back over it, like maybe she was angry at Kate, or at least sorry she'd shown her, and went on gathering the nuts. Margaret never opened the door to Kate again, but sometimes allowed their eyes to meet, at safe distances, at times of her own choosing. Of all the children that Kate now remembers, Margaret Wadinye she remembers the clearest.
© T. R. Edmonds 2008
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