The Bone Clocks

“The Noongar. Wadjemup, they called this island. Means the Place Across the Water.” She sniffs. “For the Noongar, the land couldn’t be owned. No more than the seasons could be owned, or a year. What the land gave, you shared.”

Holly Sykes’s voice is flattening out and faltering, as if she’s not speaking but translating a knotty text. Or picking one voice out from a roaring crowd. “The djangacame. We thought they were dead ones, come back. They forgot how to speak when they were dead, so now they spoke like birds. Only a few came, at first. Their canoes were big as hills, but hollow, like big floating rooms made of many many rooms. Then more ships, more and more, every ship it puked up more, more, more of them. They planted fences, waved maps, brought sheep, mined for metals. They shot our animals, but if we killed their animals, they hunted us like vermin, and took the women away …”

This performance ought to be ridiculous. But in the flesh, three feet away, a vein pulsing in her temple, I don’t know what to make of it. “Is this a story you’re working on, Holly?”

“Too late, we understood, the djangawasn’t dead Noongar jumped up, they was Whitefellas.” Holly’s voice is blurring now. Some words go missing. “Whitefella made Wadjemup a prison for Noongar. F’burning bush, like we always done, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. F’fighting at Whitefella, Whitefella ship us to Wadjemup. Chains. Cells. Coldbox. Hotbox. Years. Whips. Work. Worst thing is this: Our souls can’t cross the sea. So when the prison boat takes us from Fremantle, our soul’s torn from out body. Sick joke. So when come to Wadjemup, we Noongar we die like flies.”

One in four words I’m guessing at now. Holly Sykes’s pupils have shrunk to dots as tiny as full stops. This can’t be right. “Holly?” What’s the first-aid response for this? She must be blind. Holly starts speaking again but not a lot’s in English: I catch “priest,” “gun,” “gallows,” and “swim.” I have zero knowledge of Aboriginal languages, but what’s battling its way out of Holly Sykes’s mouth now sure as hell isn’t French, German, Spanish, or Latin. Then Holly Sykes’s head jerks back and smacks the lighthouse and the word “epilepsy” flashes through my mind. I grip her head so that when she repeats the head-smash it only bashes my hand. I swivel upright and clasp her head firmly against my chest and yell, “Aoife!”

The girl reappears from behind a tree, the quokkas beat a retreat, and I call out, “Your mother’s having an attack!”

A few pounding seconds later, Aoife Brubeck’s here, holding her mother’s face. She speaks sharply: “Mum! Stop it! Come back! Mum!”

A cracked buzzing hum starts deep in Holly’s throat.

Aoife asks, “How long have her eyes been like that?”

“Sixty seconds? Less, maybe. Is she epileptic?”

“The worst’s over. It’s not epilepsy, no. She’s stopped talking, so she’s not hearing now, and—oh, shit—what’s this blood?”

There’s sticky red on my hand. “She hit the wall.”

Aoife winces and inspects her mother’s head. “She’ll have a hell of a lump. But, look, her eyes are coming back.” Sure enough, her pupils are swelling from dots to proper disks.

I note, “You’re acting as if this has happened before.”

“A few times,” replies Aoife, with understatement. “You haven’t read The Radio People, have you?”

Before I can answer Holly Sykes blinks, and finds us. “Oh, f’Chrissakes, it just happened, didn’t it?”

Aoife’s worried and motherly. “Welcome back.”

She’s still pasty as pasta. “What did I do to my head?”

“Tried to dent the lighthouse with it, Crispin says.”

Holly Sykes flinches at me. “Did you listen to me?”

“It was hard not to. At first. Then it … wasn’t exactly English. Look, I’m no first-aid expert, but I’m worried about concussion. Cycling down a hilly, bendy road would not be clever, not right now. I’ve got a number from the bike-hire place. I’ll ask for a medic to drive out and pick you up. I strongly advise this.”

Holly looks at Aoife, who says, “It’s sensible, Mum,” and gives her mother’s arm a squeeze.

Holly props herself upright. “God alone knows what you must think of all this, Crispin.”

It hardly matters. I tap in the number, distracted by a tiny bird calling Crikey, crikey, crikey …

FOR THE FIFTIETH time Holly groans. “I just feel so em barrassed.”

The ferry’s pulling into Fremantle. “ Pleasestop saying that.”

“But I feel awful, Crispin, cutting short your trip to Rottnest.”

“I’d have come back on this ferry, anyway. If ever a place had a karma of damnation, it’s Rottnest. And all those slick galleries selling Aborigine art were eroding away my will to live. It’s as if Germans built a Jewish food hall over Buchenwald.”

“Spot the writer.” Aoife finishes her ice pop. “Again.”

“Writing’s a pathology,” I say. “I’d pack it in tomorrow, if I could.”