Harry said hurriedly: ‘I was talking to one of the Crow people today. What tribe do you belong to?’
Toowoomba regarded him with surprise in his eyes. ‘What do you mean, Harry? I’m from Queensland.’
Harry could hear how foolish his question sounded. ‘Sorry, that was a stupid question. My tongue has a tendency to move faster than my brain today. I didn’t mean to . . . I don’t know a great deal about your culture. I was wondering if you came from a particular tribe . . . or something like that.’
Toowoomba patted him on the shoulder. ‘I’m just teasing you, Harry. Relax.’ He laughed quietly and Harry felt even more stupid.
‘You react like most whities,’ Toowoomba said. ‘What else can you expect? It goes without saying that you’re full of prejudice.’
‘Prejudice?’ Harry could feel himself getting irritated. ‘Have I said anything—’
‘It’s not what you say,’ Toowoomba said. ‘It’s what you unconsciously expect of me. You imagine you’ve said something wrong, and it doesn’t occur to you that I’m intelligent enough to take into account that you’re a foreigner. I don’t suppose you would be personally offended if Japanese tourists in Norway didn’t know everything about your country? Such as your king being called Harald.’ Toowoomba winked. ‘It’s not just you, Harry. Even white Australians are hysterically cautious about saying something wrong. That’s what’s so paradoxical. First of all, they take our people’s pride, and when it’s gone they’re scared to death of treading on it.’
He sighed and opened his large white palms. Like turning a flounder, Harry thought.
Toowoomba’s warm, deep voice seemed to vibrate on its frequency, rendering it unnecessary to speak loudly to drown all the noise around them.
‘But you tell me something about Norway, Harry. I’ve read it’s supposed to be very beautiful there. And cold.’
Harry talked. About fjords, mountains and people living between the two. About union s, suppression, Ibsen, Nansen and Grieg. And about the country to the north that saw itself as enterprising and forward-looking, but seemed more like a banana republic. Which had forests and harbours when the Dutch and English needed timber, which had waterfalls when electricity was invented and which, best of all, discovered oil outside its front door.
‘We’ve never made Volvo cars or Tuborg beer,’ Harry said. ‘We’ve just exported our nature and avoided thinking. We’re a nation with golden hair up our arses,’ Harry said, not even trying to select an appropriate English idiom.
Then he told him about Åndalsnes, a tiny settlement up in Romsdalen Valley, surrounded by high mountains which were so beautiful that his mother had always said that that was where God had started when He was creating the world, and that He had spent so long on Romsdalen that the rest of the world had to be done post-haste to be finished by Sunday.
And fishing with his father on the fjord early in the morning, in July, and lying on the shore and smelling the sea – while the gulls screamed and the mountains stood like silent, immovable guards around their little kingdom.
‘My father’s from Lesjaskog, a little settlement further up the valley, and he and my mother met at a village dance in Åndalsnes. They always talked about moving back to Romsdalen when they retired.’
Toowoomba nodded and drank beer, and Harry sipped at another grapefruit juice. He could feel the acidity in his stomach.
‘I wish I could tell you where I come from, Harry. It’s just that people like me have no real connection to a place or a tribe. I grew up in a hut under a freeway outside Brisbane. No one knows which tribe my father came from. He came and went so fast that no one had time to ask. And my mother doesn’t give two hoots where she comes from, so long as she can scrape together enough money for a bottle of wine. Being a Murri will have to do.’
‘And what about Andrew?’
‘Hasn’t he told you?’
‘Told me what?’
Toowoomba withdrew his hands. A deep frown settled between his eyes. ‘Andrew Kensington’s even more rootless than I am.’
Harry didn’t question him any further, but after another beer Toowoomba returned to the topic.
‘I suppose I ought to let him tell you this himself, because Andrew had a very special upbringing. You see, he belongs to the family-less generation of Aboriginals, the Stolen Generation.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s a long story. Everything revolves around a bad conscience. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century the politics surrounding Indigenous peoples has been governed by the authorities’ bad conscience about the terrible treatment we’ve received. Just a shame that good intentions don’t always lead to good results. If you want to govern a nation you have to understand it.’