Butterfly Song Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  butterfly song

  Terri Janke is a descendant of the Meriam people of the Torres Strait Islands and the Wuthathi people of mainland Australia. She was born in Cairns and now lives with her husband and two children in Sydney, where she runs her own legal firm specialising in Indigenous cultural and intellectual property. She has written widely about these issues, and her short stories have been published in Island and Southerly. Butterfly Song is her first novel.

  TERRI JANKE

  butterfly song

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2005

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Text copyright © Terri Janke 2005

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Design by Debra Billson © Penguin Group (Australia)

  Cover images © Cary Wolinsky/IPN; Paul Edmondson/Getty Images; Burke/Triolo Productions/Getty

  Images; Photolink/Getty Images; Rosie Barkus/Kapu Kreations, Torres Strait; Gladys and Mial Bingarape;

  John F Janke; author photograph by Amanda James

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

  Janke, Terri.

  Butterfly song.

  I. Title.

  A823.4

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the

  Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  978-1-74228-000-4

  To my mother, Joanna Jaima:

  from a mother’s song

  a child finds her own voice

  And in memory of my grandparents,

  Modesta and Kitchell

  They say if you live on an island for too long, you merge with it. Your bones become the sands, your blood the ocean. Your flesh is the fertile ground. Your heart becomes the stories, dances, songs. The island is part of your makeup. The earth. The trees. The reef. The fish. The music. The people. The sun, moon and stars surround you. You are only part of the integral world called life. You and those who follow you will always be a part of it.

  They say that when you leave, the sounds of the waves stay with you. The smell of the sea is a constant, never-ending reminder. The island calls you, and your children, and their children. It will beg for you to dream it, and know it, forever. No matter where you or your children travel, the island is home.

  I arrive late one afternoon towards the end of 1992. The sun sits low in an orange sky. A slight breeze makes the palm trees sway. My dress sticks to the back of my legs as I walk down the gangplank. Waves splash at the sides of the jetty. The boat lolls. The water is like a living gemstone, green and blue with shades of light. I can smell the ocean, salty and sweet. In front of me the island lies like a marine animal, the edges soft and flat, rising up to a hill.

  This is my first time on Thursday Island, but it feels familiar because I’ve heard so much about the place. TI, they call it. It’s in the words of that old song my mother sings at parties. ‘TI, my beautiful home …’ She’s never lived here, but her parents were born here. She has clung to that connection, although she’s never spoken much about their life and how they came to move to Cairns.

  I wonder what it would have been like for my grandparents living on Thursday Island, before the war. I imagine my grandfather diving in the open sea for pearls, or playing his guitar under a frangipani tree. I can see my grandmother, Francesca, walking down the street on her way to church. I dream of what life might have been like for them. I romanticise it totally. It’s probably more likely they were working hard – the wild pearling days were ending. Then came the war in the Pacific, and the whole place was full of soldiers. I can only dream, because I will never really know.

  When I was a kid I asked my mother why her parents left Thursday Island.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Was it during the war? Did they leave with the evacuation?’

  ‘I’m not sure. They were in Cairns before the war, I think.’

  ‘How come you can’t tell me?’

  ‘Don’t pressure me for answers. You’re giving me a headache.’

  Mum says she was too young to remember. She was never told, and now that they’re gone she can never really know either. That’s why I was so surprised when she called and asked me to come here.

  ghost guitar

  Sydney, 1992

  ‘Tarena, I’ve been trying to call you all day.’ My mother

  sounds upset.

  ‘What’s the matter? Mum, are you okay?’

  ‘You’ve got to help me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was sitting down to watch the television when I heard the biggest noise. I looked up to see the old guitar had fallen off the wall. It landed so strangely, Tarena. Right in the middle of the room.’

  ‘It was just an accident, Mum. The hook must have fallen off.’

  ‘No, it was still on the wall. And there was no one else in the house. I think it was a calling.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A calling from my father, I mean. He was trying to tell me something. It was his guitar, you know.’

  There is silence.

  ‘Mum, are you okay?’ I ask again. Her father has been dead for over forty years.

  ‘Yes. It’s clear what I have to do.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Uncle Ron is having a tombstone unveiling on Thursday Island. Your Granny Penny will be there too.’ Granny Penny is my grandfather’s youngest sister, the only living sibling of my grandfather. ‘Will you come with me?’ Mum’s voice is the one she uses when she is trying not to be vulnerable. When she wants me to do something for her.

  ‘Can’t Clarissa or Shane go?’

  ‘Your sister is working on Lindeman Island. And your brother, he’s got some important soccer trials on.’

  ‘But I’ve got my last exam tomorrow.’

  ‘You can come the day after that.’

  I say it quickly: ‘Okay, I’ll come.’ I know the trip will mean a lot to her.

  But after I hang up I think how worried I am about the exam. And I wanted to focus on looking for a job, but who knows, I might not even pass. I promised Serge I would w
ork the summer at the restaurant. He will throw pots and pans around when he hears I can’t.

  Later, I call Mum back. ‘I’m not sure it’s a good idea for me to go. I want to get a job and I’ll need my results. The uni will send them here.’

  ‘Tell the university to send your results up there. It’ll be good for you, Tarena, and besides, I’ve already booked the tickets.’

  ‘Mum, that must have cost a fortune.’

  ‘I put it on my card. I got discount flights, so they can’t be changed. You might have to help out with the cost. It’s just really important that you come.’

  So that’s that. Too late to change my mind.

  ‘And one more thing.’ My mother’s voice rises at the end of her phrase. ‘Your Uncle Tally is coming too.’

  Uncle Tally has never left Cairns. He has never flown on an aeroplane. He has never left his house. He has lived in that house for the past thirty years.

  ‘But, Mum, Uncle Tally won’t –’

  ‘He says he will, and I’m sure he will.’

  ‘Ten minutes to go.’

  My blue pen moves as fast as a saltwater fish, like my thoughts now. My right hand is attached to my body. The hand is pushing the pen. The pen is moving across white pages, leaving words on and around the lines of the exam book. I have in my head an image of flowing water. Cool, flowing water dispersing into the space inside my brain. The saltwater fish becomes lighter and lighter until it merges with the sea. It’s almost at an end, my last exam.

  ‘Five minutes.’

  Number five for staying alive. Five years of law school will end in the next five minutes. I remember when five minutes was a long time. To try to hold your breath. To concentrate on being quiet in the classroom.

  ‘Pens down.’

  I hand in my exam book. The other students are already talking to each other, going through the post-mortem, what they think the real answers to the questions are. They sound a lot different from my answers. I refuse to listen. I’m out of the exam room and sitting at the uni bar within quarter of an hour.

  Next morning, I’m in a rush to get to the airport. Dressed in my usual black, I look at my reflection in the mirror. My hair is pulled back off my face, tight and flat. There are red marks around my eyes. Last night I stayed out too late and drank too much. I have a hangover. I feel like a large bloated toadfish.

  On the way to the airport, the taxi driver asks me where I’m from.

  ‘I live in Sydney now but I’m from Cairns.’

  ‘Sydney people are always running around like machines. They get into the cab, they give me a heart attack just looking at them. People aren’t machines, you know.’

  What sort of machine would I be? A sewing machine, perhaps. One of those old black ones with hand-painted flowers on it, mounted on a wooden base. Or a washing machine, forever on spin-dry and in need of a service.

  stingrays

  In transit, 1992

  The couple next to me are holding hands. The man wears a Hawaiian shirt and his wife has pink sandals with matching nail gloss on her toes.

  ‘We’re on our honeymoon,’ the man tells the flight attendant.

  ‘That’s fantastic, congratulations. Where are you off to?’

  ‘Dunk Island,’ says the wife.

  ‘It’s absolutely beautiful, you’ll love it there.’ The flight attendant stands and faces the back of the plane. ‘I don’t like doing the safety demonstration,’ she says. The voiceover and video come on. She indicates where the emergency card is, where the exits are, the breathing mask, and where the life jacket is stowed under the seat.

  Later, we are served lasagne with green beans and potato on the side. I think of what Serge would say if he saw this meal. He would shake his head. He would never mix potato with lasagna at Madonna’s Mirror. No way, that wouldn’t be authentic Italian cuisine.

  The attendant takes our trays away and soon the man next to me falls asleep. He snores loudly. The woman is watching the movie. It must be soppy because I can see her wipe her eyes with the serviette we got with our meal. I am listening to the hits of the 1970s through plastic earpieces. I remember most of the songs and some of the names of the singers and bands. In those days I always had my ear tuned into my pocket transistor radio. In those days radio didn’t seem to have as many commercials.

  The words fall from my mouth just like they did when I was a kid. I forget that I am on a plane, and then I remember that I am returning to the place I left so many years ago.

  The plane descends over Cairns. A metal wing cuts through the streaky blue sky. A hot arrow of light shoots forward. Abundant greenness covers dark mountains. Clouds, thick and wet, cling to the peaks. To the right I can see islands, white sand, mangroves, and green-blue water tossed with white foam.

  Mangroves – like the mangroves I paddled through as a child with my father and my sister.

  I can see the beach where we used to go swimming as kids, in the colder months, before the stingers came out. I remember how my blue swimming togs always held a pile of sand in the crotch. Somewhere in the dunes I lost my red bucket. It was the day we deliberately left Nobby at the beach. The three of us kids cried a lot.

  Nobby was a stray mongrel dog that had moved into our house. Clarissa, Shane and I wanted to keep him. Dad said he was a bad dog because he jumped up and grabbed clothing, like Dad’s work socks, off the clothesline. Nobby also chased cars and gave the postman on his bicycle a hard time. So that day, we left the beach without him.

  The next weekend, when we went back for a swim, Nobby was still there, hanging around the car park. He looked very sad and dejected.

  Dad made us act as if we couldn’t see him. ‘Pretend he’s invisible.’

  Later, on the beach, we set up our picnic. Shane had just learnt to walk – well, really he went straight to running. Dad was having a swim and my mother was making sandwiches when Shane disappeared. We searched the beach and the car park and could not find him. Nobby was still there, so my frantic mother said to him, ‘Shane, help us find Shane.’ She had watched too many Lassie movies.

  Nobby barked and headed towards the estuary. Sure enough, Shane was there, within metres of the deep water.

  ‘We have to take the dog,’ my mother insisted.

  That’s how Nobby won his place in our family. To think that was around twenty years ago – but the beach looks just the same.

  The plane dips and circles. Below us are sugar fields and red dirt. I see buildings, houses, and yachts in the harbour. There’s the Cairns Base Hospital where I was born. A block from the esplanade is the Department of Education office where my mother worked as a young woman. I’ve seen old photos of her in miniskirts and headbands, standing with Aboriginal kids from the communities in Cape York, her beautiful young face looking barely older than some of the children.

  She used to tell me about that job. Meeting kids who had come straight from remote communities and putting them into carers’ homes so they could go to school. She made good friends with some of them. She met my father during this time and told me once that she always regretted not training to be a teacher. After she married she quickly had three kids of her own. Before she knew it, she said, it was too late to go back to study.

  On the melting tarmac I inhale the smell of the earth, aware of the humidity. I miss this place. Is there something calling me back? Cairns has changed, but so have I. And so has the world. It has, hasn’t it? Am I lucky to have left?

  I think often about the lives of my grandparents. Their day-to-day lives were restricted – where they could live, work, shop, study, go to the movies. They were forced to be invisible.

  I am wearing the black dress I bought from a boutique in Oxford Street. The dark sunglasses match my black strappy heels. Deliberately I have dressed to show everyone that I am cool, that I have made it. But really I feel like the eleven-year-old who left so many years ago.

  We walk inside to the airconditioned terminal. It’s a huge international airport now, wi
th cafes and shops. The honeymoon couple meet their shuttle-bus driver at the baggage collection. There are no signs for me. I am not stopping in Cairns now, but after the tombstone opening I’ll stay for a couple of days. I head off to my connecting flight to TI.

  Over the Pacific Ocean I fly in the small Datchet. At last I see an island, small, in the shape of a stingray. The dark circles of the outer reef surround the blue lightness of the inner reef. Through spidery clouds I see another group of islands and imagine I am watching a time-lapse film depicting the evolution of its beaches, trees and coral reefs. Perhaps this is the place where the first sea creatures dragged their sleek bodies onto soft white sands. Where they twisted their spongy heads and shook the salt from their fins, which turned into wings with feathers more colourful than coral. I can see them flying about, and the motion causes circles like the ones below. I am drawn into these circles within circles, rippling and blending into the green blueness of the Pacific.

  the newspaper clipping

  Thursday Island, 1992

  The plane lands on a thin airstrip. It loops around and heads towards a small grey shed. The engine slows.

  ‘Is this Thursday Island?’ I ask the flight attendant.

  ‘No, this is Horn Island. The ferry will take you across. There’s a bus waiting at the terminal to take you all to the jetty.’

  We pack into an airconditioned bus. I can smell the strong salt of the water, clear and green. The sun is going down. These waters were once full of ketches and other vessels, back in the pearling days. It seems strange that three of my grandparents were born here, and here I am visiting for the first time.

  On the main jetty my mother is waving with one hand. With the other she holds down her bright wraparound skirt as it flaps in the breeze. We hug, then she turns to the crowd of people standing with her.