Free The Clay Dreaming by Ed Hillyer Page B

conversation, grunting their responses with a surly sort of civility. Swamped by extravagance beyond their experience, they were simply overcome.
    Stout Twopenny, encircled, took questions from the curious crowd.
    ‘Are there no Aboriginal women?’ a body asked.
    ‘Course!’ spluttered Twopenny. ‘Course it true! Dem all back ’ome.’
    ‘Are you married, Mr Tuppenny?’
    Twopenny looked down at the shiny floor and shook his head.
    ‘Then you are a stray tup?’
    This rudeness was howled down.
    ‘When I see me first whitepella,’ offered Twopenny, ‘many whitepella…I think you only men. Dem ’ave no gins . Makes no sense, men come all dat way alone, without wimmen to gather mirka and to puck .’
    The gathering is bemused. ‘“Puck”?’
    ‘Puck!’ repeated Twopenny, his hair a woolly triangle.
    Bill Hayman intervened. ‘Use your loaf, Twopenny,’ he said. ‘These good people don’t want to know about things like that.’
    ‘Oh,’ they cried, ‘but we do!’
    ‘No,’ said Hayman. ‘You don’t.’ He led Twopenny aside, still conferring. ‘When speaking in a foreign tongue,’ said Hayman, ‘betimes we must needs employ greater restraint than that accorded to us.’
    Twopenny screwed up his face. ‘Boss,’ he said, ‘you talkin’ shit.’
    Lawrence watched as a grey-haired old spy, without so much as a by-your-leave, openly conducted a microscopic study of Red Cap’s face and form. Bloody ‘ethnologists’ – they had already had to deter one from taking measurements at Malling.
    At the opposite end of the hall, towards the enormous fireplace, fizz was found in the new descriptive nouns the Aborigines had coined concerning various European animals. Rabbits, for instance, were ‘stand up ears’ or ‘white bottom’; pigs, ‘turn ground’; and cockerels, ‘call for day’. For others, they arrived at simpler solutions: cattle were ‘boo-oo’; sheep, ‘ba-ba’; and horses, ‘gump-gump’ or ‘neighit’.
    The nation’s greatest minds, arm-in-arm with her most glamorous aristocrats , took up the Christy Minstrels’ standard ‘Merry Green Fields’, with its distinctive verse-chorus.
    ‘With a boo-oo here, and a boo-oo there,
    Here a boo, there a boo…’
    A fat man bursting out of his dinner-suit waved to Lawrence.
    ‘The place is become a barnyard!’ he called. ‘Tell your man there!’ He pointed at Red Cap.
    ‘Tell him yourself,’ retorted Lawrence. ‘He’s quite capable of understanding.’
    The ethnologist, if that was what he was, still loitered. The fat man, however, raced on past. Red Cap wisely melted away into the crowd.
    The grey-haired spy broke his silence. ‘D-d-dashed impertinence!’ he stammered.
    ‘Red Cap is his own man,’ said Lawrence.
    ‘I refer, sir, to yours ,’ the spy said. ‘I expect and therefore excuse his .’
    ‘Lord Hogg’, meantime, ‘oink-oink’ed here, there, and everywhere for all he was worth – doubtless a very large amount. Lawrence realised he might have judged too hastily. This new attack, alas, was a different matter.
    The spy closed with Lawrence – a wounded old lion, dangerous malevolence lurking in his rheumy eye. ‘A wild, untameable restlessness is innate with s-s-savages,’ he said.
    ‘They are not savages,’ insisted Lawrence.
    ‘Savages they are, and savages they shall always re-…always remain.’
    They stood toe to toe. Neither had the advantage of height, but Lawrence began to quail before the older man’s belligerent aspect.
    ‘A puh-person’s race can explain and justify almost anything,’ the man spat. ‘D-D-Doctor James Hunt, Puh-president of the…of the…’
    Moustaches flecked with a stutterer’s spittle, he settled for holding out a printed card.
    Lawrence already despised such items. He studied the curious pyramidal emblem inscribed there – a triangle inverted within one larger, to produce four smaller triangles of equal proportion. In heraldic style, each of these contained a