Sherif was simultaneously denying Prim in Arabic to the two or three young men inspecting his papers. ‘No, I am not her man.’ Two denials by both parties. One more, thought Prim, and she and Sherif would match St Peter, who denied Christ thrice.
No, all three of them assured the men, we do not work for the infidel rebels from the South. We are going to Alingaz, to look after people’s health.
Further out there were not any towns, but a desert of clay. At one in the morning, however, they came to a checkpoint as they entered Kassala province. Thirsty, they noted the border tea-house with lanterns attached to its poles. Again they had to show their sheaf of permits. Overhearing their conversation, some nomads, who had been camped opportunistically near the tea-house, came up to the truck, tall men in grey-white clothing. Even Prim could tell they spoke Arabic roughly – it was not their native tongue. They were Shukriyah nomads, semi-settled around waterholes drilled in the years of hope, the 70s and 80s. There had been government clinics all along this road once, which had since been closed because the Sudan was tyrannised by debt, could not earn enough foreign currency, and had the continuing folly of the Southern war to pay for. The nomads were powerless people and yet they moved with a dignified gravity, wearing huge crusader swords belted at their waists, and daggers thonged to their ankles.
‘One of them has a sick daughter,’ Sherif briskly told Prim and Erwit. A man went off with swaying gait and carried back into the light a bare-headed child, a girl of perhaps seven or eight. Her eyes were closed, there was a look of subtle pain on her face and her breathing could be heard. Sherif felt the child’s forehead, fetched his medical kit and, putting on his stethoscope, slipped its head under the girl’s galabia and gravely listened. ‘Ai-ai-ai,’ he said to nobody. ‘Pneumonia. Nothing to be done!’ Nonetheless he gestured that everyone was to follow him into the tea-house.
The proprietor looked a little uneasy as the half-dozen nomads crowded in, but was partially reassured when the urbane Sherif ordered chai for all the company. The child looked very ill by the lights of the tea-house. Prim sat and drank sweet black tea, convinced that in spite of its heavy quotient of sugar, it was the right drink for the climate, bringing out an astringent sweat which was the best response to the heat.
Sherif frowned and brought out of his kit a card of broad-spectrum antibiotics. ‘Give your daughter two of these now, with tea, and then one in the morning, and one at evening. They will help your fakir’s good magic.’ For even in the cities the ill went to fakirs for help. ‘Go on, open them.’ The man obeyed him, releasing two pills from the foil, and forcing them into the child’s mouth. The child sucked hungrily at the tea. ‘She should have a drip in,’ Sherif told Prim and Erwit.
Then, with bows and shokrans from the entire tea-house company, Sherif, Prim and Erwit went back out to the truck and the warm vinyl of the seats, Erwit and Sherif taking, according to the protocol most likely to appease checkpoint officials, the front.
Again on the road, Erwit – jovially swinging the wheel – began to imitate in Arabic the nomads’ accents. For the first time on the journey, Sherif laughed. ‘The Shukriyah speak Arabic the way the Cockneys speak English,’ he said. ‘The Kababish sound like the Irish. The ones up around the Red Sea Hills, the Beja – they sound like Glaswegians.’
‘Which of them sound like Australians?’ Prim asked.
‘No one around here,’ said Sherif. ‘You have to go far out to the west, to Darfur, to the furthest Shendi village, to hear anything so outrageous.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Prim, and there was a salutary burst of laughter in the truck.
Now their lights penetrated apparent nullity, and it reduced Prim to sleep. She woke with an arm numbed from the pressure of the flanges of the door-frame against her shoulder. Sherif was driving and Erwit was napping in the front seat. She saw Sherif’s set shoulders. He was utterly watchful as the sky to the east shed bluish light across this country of desert rubble. So, while she slept, they had passed through Kassala and its rocky nobs of mountains she had wanted to see, since she knew from pictures they resembled mountains in Central Australia. They had now turned north-east into a further wasteland. She watched her lover’s back and head as the earth became very quickly golden. She peeled her lower right arm away from the seat and sat upright, reaching out to put a hand lightly on the nape of Sherif’s neck.
‘Who is that?’ he asked, not taking his eyes off the single lane of tar which bisected this absolute landscape. ‘Is that a mouse, or is it a grasshopper?’
‘When they asked whether I was your woman, I didn’t like to say no.’
‘Oh well,’ said Sherif, ‘this is the republic of double talk.’
‘When will we be citizens of the republic of single talk?’ she asked. Before Sherif could reply they saw through the beautiful, unhazed light of the first of the day that a truck had run off the strip of tarmac and lay unevenly on the stony earth. Across the strip of tar itself, the limbs of fallen camels were indolently and hugely strewn. This was indeed a phantasm of the dawn. Sherif slowed the vehicle, and Erwit stirred as the Toyota made its way amongst the camels’ legs and huge necks. There were two females and a young, smaller male felled there.
From behind the flung-open door of the truck appeared a thin Sudanese man. He began to draw his hands together with what looked to Prim an exaggerated motion, from far wide of his body to a joined-together gesture of pleading in front of his face. There seemed to be tears on his cheeks.
Sherif said, ‘He has killed all three of them, silly bugger, speeding at dawn.’ The man rushed in front of the Toyota, making his gestures of prayer. Sherif needed to stop or swerve. He chose to swerve.
‘Take him on board,’ Prim said, and could not keep reproof out of her voice. ‘He probably just wants to go to Port Sudan.’
‘There’s nothing you can do,’ said Sherif. The man wailed and beat at the side of the truck.
Erwit said, as if it were Newton’s Law, ‘He must pay for the camels or be punished. We cannot save him from it.’
‘You can’t mean this,’ Prim told Sherif. She could see the camel-killing truck driver, receding yet still pleading in their wake.
‘If we help him escape we would be liable,’ Sherif explained. ‘The owners would meet us on the road back. They have large swords. You saw that.’
His tone caused Prim to remember her otherness and she felt lost in a foreign nation. Sometimes, lying together with Sherif she forgot she was not an African woman. She suffered only occasionally revelations of who she really was, and it was always, as now, a painful and sharp experience.
‘The girl with pneumonia might die too, and her father could wait to ask you why your medicine failed.’
‘But he would accept that,’ said Sherif accelerating, the truck-driver fast becoming a dot.
‘How much does a bloody camel cost?’ Prim asked.
‘Up to £3000 Sudanese,’ Erwit told Prim.
‘He wouldn’t get a thousand pounds a year for driving his rotten little truck,’ said Sherif like a stranger. ‘Our friends will cut his arm off.’
‘Oh Christ, is that what you want?’ said Prim.
‘No. But he could escape. He could go to the South.’
The poor creature was left kneeling behind them, on the edge of the great mound of camel meat.
‘This bloody truck belongs to Austfam,’ Prim told Sherif. ‘You go back and let him in!’ But no matter what her commands or pleadings, she could not bring Sherif to turn around.
‘How dare you treat me like this!’ she cried.
Sherif said, ‘So is it your authority or the truck-driver you’re concerned about? Every fool knows you slow down at dawn. Camels are always on the way to wells in the mornings. Would Austfam pay for those camels?’
‘It doesn’t have a mandate to,’ Prim told him.
‘Exactly.’
He seemed at that instant a stranger to her, a petulant man on the edge of disappointed middle age. It
was as if, conveyed by fax from Dimp, a virus of distancing had entered the air between them.
Prim had been correct in guessing that Dimp’s confessional faxes were landing in the tray of Austfam’s fax machine back in Khartoum, and pooling, like a rich centre of infection.
TO: Prim Bettany, Austfam, Khartoum
AT: 249-11-46951
FROM: Dimp Bettany
AT: 61-2-9550 3763 (NOTE NEW NUMBER!)
DATE: March 5 1990
Darling Prim,
I’ve signed a six-month lease on a minute cottage in Poldene Street in Redfern. The number above is for phone as well. Not that I’ve been here much as yet. I’ve been to Los Angeles for a week, and am just back this morning from that soul-sapping overnight flight. I called into Bren’s to collect mail – no, he wasn’t there at the time – and found your chastising note waiting for me.
All the way back home I had a window seat beside two nice Los Angelino gays on their way to the Mardi Gras. Unlike me they had a great calm, sitting very upright and very relaxed. Secure in each other’s love, but maybe that’s just my reading. I felt a kind of envy, as I always do now when I see the real article. But then I’ve made my bed, as you’ll no doubt tell me.
So now I’m off on my own, as I predicted I would be. It’s necessary, but I know you don’t believe that. Just in case you wondered, I have not called Benedetto! I don’t mind you wondering.
I do, however, mind you calling my dear friend and ancestor Jonathan a fool. Sure, he’s a human, and thus he’s your average fool and automatic liar. What do you want of our lying species? I am enchanted by the tenor of my ancestor’s journal, simple as that, and I’m not going to apologise for the fact. It’s not a matter of his or my morality. It’s more a matter of the intimacy of it, and the attempts at honour! I began by thinking he was relating an idyll, a pastorale. But then there was this extraordinary frankness about the threat from the evil at the edges, at the edges of the landscape and the edges of his own soul. The touching way – I think it’s touching anyhow – he finds it hard to do pure business in an impure world! And he doesn’t name things bluntly and directly, but in his earnest style he seems to want to tell the truth. On the one hand a modern person might suspect him of telling less than the truth about ‘the Moth people’, to use his own term. On the other, as his tale progresses, he does not save himself from blame or self-reproach. In this he is a halfway reliable narrator, surely.
If you kept a journal, I bet you’d be subtly self-justifying, yea even the moral Amazon, Prim! You’d be sneaky about it, too. You’re not a screaming sinner like me and Jonathan. But I have to ask, doesn’t it touch you at all to find this pilgrim, Jonathan, so tormented amongst the gum trees and boulders? Don’t you want to go back and offer him comfort, as our Jewish great-granny did? Aren’t you glad he found her, to give him a little solace?
Anyhow, at the end of it and within those limits, I trust this voice, and you should trust it too. Of course you’re not up with me yet. I’ve read the lot, and so am far behind in transcribing – I’ve spent my time doing a treatment, a rough screenplay and provisional budget.
What was I doing in Los Angeles you ask. Well, I need a lot of money for this film – or a lot by Australian standards. The preliminary budget I did tells me I won’t get out of this with much change left from $15 000 000 Australian. And the rule of the universe is that those with the real money, development and production, are least likely to go for this story.
For one thing I’m getting an expensive writer: Hugo Ventriss, the Aussie Peter Weir used to write Dos and Taboos. It won all sorts of prizes, got five Academy Award nominations. Hugo won the Golden Globe for the script, and the film got the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Not bloody bad. This Hugo – a tall, solid fellow, built a little like Benedetto – is very successful, a phenomenon. He’s a playwright really, sees himself in those terms. I met him at a party at the Australian Film and Television School, where he had come to make a graduation speech. Anyway, I approached him with the good old Dimple sashay and gave him my phone number scrawled on a scrap of paper. He studied it with a sort of gracious care. And he looked up excited. After we’d been through the normal ritual dance over Enzo and its abiding influence on him and everyone else, he asked me did I want to go out for dinner. He didn’t mean with various student film makers in a Chinese restaurant. He meant dinner. I told him I was married, though every time I said it I’d remember that berserk annulment. Oh yeah, he said in a resonant voice. I read about it. Aren’t you married to that rich guy – D’Arcy?
I admitted it. Oh bugger, he said like an old-fashioned boy at a dance.
I told him that, like everyone in the room, I had some material. But unlike the rest of them, I’d let him write it only if he begged me. On top of that, I was prepared to pay him what the Americans would.
He laughed like an honest journeyman. He was still willing to listen, but in that frank, boyish way. Priapis, the god of the donger, had as much to do with his tolerance as did the Muses! But too many students and others wanted to talk to him, so I did end up in town eating a plate of pasta with him. I narrated my little arse off, and I could tell I had engaged his imagination – writers are easily enthused if you tell them a tale, and here was wool and convicts and the Moth people and betrayal. I haven’t transcribed everything for you yet, so you don’t know half the betrayals! And I built up the role of Durra too, the Ngarigo ‘king’, and the Felix experiment.
I told him that if he gave me his agent’s number, I’d approach him, pass on my treatment and the transcripts I have. If he had any enthusiasm for the material – and I wanted him only if he felt driven to write it – we would proceed to contract, and I’d pay him 5 per cent of budget.
He used a cricketing metaphor. Five per cent would knock some of your rake-off to leg, he said. It’s one of those, eh? Burning a hole in the old creative duodenum. Are you really called Dimple?
I told him I was, and he said, Shit. Fair dinkum eh? He told me then he preferred to write plays. Plays got produced, whereas the studios paid him to write screenplays that never got made. He said, I write the first draft and then I go off jet-lagged across the Pacific to some meeting in Burbank or Universal City and some idiot holds up the script in his hand and tells me that he doesn’t see what’s at stake between the bloke and the girl. And why don’t we give the hero this pet bloody parrot? Everything goes to hell from that point, he said, and he satisfies no one, least of all himself, and the film isn’t made. He said, I don’t know why I’m complaining. Faulkner and Fitzgerald warned the whole world of writers what would happen if they took the Devil’s candy.
I said, This will get produced. I tried to blaze with zeal, though I didn’t even have the development money. I said, If I don’t get development cash on that scale, I won’t trouble you further. And he said, Okay. But 4 per cent of budget will be fine. I don’t want to feel too beholden to you. Then he laughed in a way that gave me hope.
I got a call the next day from his agent, a Londoner, now domiciled in Sydney, named Max.
Hugo got $700 000 US for his last American screenplay, he told me, expecting me to faint.
I think I could run to that, I told him joyously. It is wonderful to surprise these people.
Look, he said, no offence, but it’s a long time since you produced anything. I presume your husband’s underwriting this one?
I told him to presume again. That made him really nervous. He wants me, when the time comes to contract Hugo, to present a bank statement. He doesn’t want to start Hugo off on what looks like a generous payment, and find there’s nothing left in kitty when he’s done the real work.
This is what I promised: $200 000 on contract, $150 000 on delivery of first draft, with a bonus of $50 000 if it was delivered in three months, a term which balances creativity with urgency. The rest of the money is to be spread over subsequent re-writes and polishes.
My, you are keen, said bloody Max.
Then I bought an economy ticket
to Los Angeles, even though I knew Bren wouldn’t have blinked if I’d used one of the corporate credit cards and gone in comfort. I believed I would talk them round in LA the way I talked Hugo round.
But I’m afraid it’s proved a pretty dismal trip. I’ve got to find Hugo’s $700 000 somewhere, and a few thousand for me to live off while I’m putting the thing together. If I can get provisional commitments of production money from a studio that would be the key – the rest of it could be raised in Australia, by way of the usual tax dentist investors, or else through the Film Finance Corporation.
In Los Angeles, in the ‘business’ – that’s the first mistake, that they call it a business, as if it’s like making tractor transmission boxes or computer hard-drives – there are loads of people willing to buy me breakfast, drinks or dinner, and to say, No, I’ll pay. Your treat when we make a movie in Australia. I met with production executives from Miramax, the crowd I really want to back me. I tried Savoy, and people whose cards I have from Fox, Universal, Sony. In the abstract they all want to put money into a picture produced by me in Australia. They’ve told me this in the past. But it always turns out to be any picture except what I’m proposing at the moment. But they all loved Enzo Kangaroo! Jesus, yes. They were just talking to Martin Scorcese or Sidney Lumet or Milos? Forman or Sydney Pollack, and it’s his or their favourite film of all time. You Australians have a lot to teach us! Blah, blah.
One of the problems I have is that the word has reached across the Pacific from Sydney to California, and it’s become one of those aphorisms these people ‘in the business’ like to fall back on, Aussie frock dramas are officially passé. American audiences don’t get ’em. They’re even going off the British frock dramas as well. And settlers and Abos? No one really gets that stuff!
So now I’m back home in my little house which I love and enjoy greatly. But no one’s given me any development money. I’m looking out at brazen Sydney light, at the tangled roofs of Redfern terraces. The alternative is repentance, and then back to the art gallery-cum-dormitory which dear old Bren considers home. How can I turn back to a man who spent more time buying his mobile phone than he spent condoning my purchases of Australian glories, of Blackman and Boyd, of Whiteley and the great Fred Williams? Fred Williams saw the continent as I wish the film to see it, with its glories and its secrets seemingly there, behind the veils of trees, waterfall, boulders.