Free Sorry by Gail Jones

backs off the honey ants – popping their sweet abdomens in the cavities of their mouths – while she watched them, pleased. Mary never ate the honey ant herself; it was her creature, hers.
    In the western desert, said Mary, there were still some blackfellas who had never yet seen the kartiya , people, her people, dressed only in hair-strings and feathers and treading lightly across the earth. They carried water bags of red wallaby skin, spears and digging sticks. They knew everything, she said, everything about the world, every big important thing, and every single little thing.
    Perdita thought a great deal about these people, wondering what they knew. The big questions. The other questions. She had seen a desert man in Broome once, sitting propped against a tree, looking lost and alone. He had scars in raised lines cut into his chest and wore a bright ornament of pearl shell around his neck, threaded on hair. Nicholas had pointed him out and said he was an important man of Law. He knew things , her father said, that he would describe and uncover.
    Sometimes Mary, Billy and Perdita would sit in a triangle, facing each other, for no reason at all but to feel the wind on their faces and wait, utterly still, until bird-life visited them. There were flaring budgerigars and sulphur-crested cockatoo; sometimes there was a hawk, lazily circling, or a fleet cloud of bush pigeon, heading towards the sun. Perdita learned toignore the flies clustering in the corners of her eyes, or on the picked ugly scabs of her elbows and knees. She learned from Mary that if you lick stones they colourfully shine – agate, chrysoprase, rose-coloured quartz – that if you put your ear to the dirt you can hear footsteps miles away, and buried life going on, somewhere underground, that there are waterholes, jila , hidden in the desert country that the kartiya , the whitefella, will never see. There was an entire universe, she was discovering, of the visible and the invisible, the unconcealed and the concealed, some fundamental hinge to all this hotchpotch, disorderly life, this swooning confusion. For Mary there was authority in signs Perdita had never before seen; there were pronouncements in tiny sounds and revelations in glimpses. Vast, imperishable life was everywhere apparent; accretion, abrasion, the unthwarted growing of small things. The stars were there all the time, Mary said, outstretching her arms; we just couldn’t see them all the time. This seemed to Perdita an amazing notion. She thought of stars adjusting, each night, their luminous arrangements, then effacing, disappearing, hiding behind day. Why had she never known things like this before? She wondered what God was, and whether he was there, or necessary.

    One night Perdita woke from deep sleeping to hear strange sounds. The door of her father’s room was ajar, so that a wedge of thin sallow light streamed in towards her bed. Perdita rose and half-asleep walked to peer through her father’s doorway. Nicholas was hurting Mary. She saw the humped form of her father’s back and heard him grunting and pounding, and she could hear from the shadow beneath him the sound of Mary softly weeping. Perdita was not really sure what it was that she saw, what night vision had visited, bent into shapes and sounds,a dream perhaps, uncertain, askew, incomprehensible. She retreated to her bed. She did not want to know. She turned her face to the wall and shut her eyes tight.
    What witness was this, that Perdita could not bear to contemplate? What palpitation of the heart, what sense of panicked strangulation, was she suppressing behind her tightly closed eyes? Perdita was frightened. The night was dark. With her eyes closed there was an extra darkness she could sink her witnessing into.

7
    Just as Stella had the railway station booming within her, Nicholas, Perdita thought, might be said to have a war inside him. After the Battle of Britain he talked more frequently of