Isabelle the Navigator

by Luke Davies

  The bar was set a full eight centimetres higher than my last jump when, grazed by my heel, it had wobbled for what seemed like a minute. But new methods invoked new hopes. I came in for the run-up, trying to remember the Toby Collins method of flight. When I leapt towards the jump I felt like the mountain goat in Kimba the White Lion.

  I left the ground, felt all my muscles strain. The exhilaration of floating was a revelation, a new world opening out. I actually felt myself move towards the sky. It blazed blue across my vision, a wild blur of hemisphere. As I sensed my shoulder clear the crossbar, I arched my body backwards. And your feet, lift your feet. I was finding my way in the world, through the air. Resplendent in my red T-shirt, awash in the ecstasy of that temporary weightlessness, I sailed through the H of the high jump. The horizon tilted and for a brief instant the brown streak of the administration building crossed my line of vision.

  I landed in a roll on the soft blue pads and bounced my way back onto the ground. I threw my arms in the air and grinned at Mrs Paul. ‘One more time! Higher!’

  ‘One more. Then that’s it.’

  Each time up there, I felt a vast and giddy serenity. Anything was possible. The world could not contain itself. Four flights later, I knocked off the crossbar at 1.18 metres. The unrequited love for Toby Collins—he was two years older than me, centuries at that age, and we never even spoke—would soon fade, but my anti-gravity talents were quickly noticed. The affair with high-jumping would last a long while yet, though ultimately it would be ocean and not air that would capture my heart.

  They were supremely physical years: a blur of sports events, my body stretching and growing. A new kind of kind arrived when I was thirteen. Suddenly one day I felt wetness in my underpants. It was the last class of the day. The sun came in the windows at an angle through the gum trees that rustled outside in the slight breeze; Mrs Beck seemed dappled and indeterminate, far away at the front of the room.

  At first the wetness only registered as a secondary thing. Seconds later there was nothing in that room but myself and my awareness of blood.

  During the week I had felt queasy a couple of times, and twice had noticed a spot of red on my underpants. I came up with a bizarre theory to help me ignore what I knew to be coming; I theorised that somehow, on two separate occasions, something microscopic and sharp—possibly a fragment of glass that had found its way into the washing machine and then into my knickers—had cut me down there.

  Put me in a school uniform again, put me back at that moment, and nothing, nothing at all is clear but the unmitigated fuzziness of everything. I felt I was swooping endlessly, at light speed, towards a blackness not even the light could reach. It wasn’t terror, but a kind of wave, a moment of coming to. A realisation. I am bleeding. I’m sitting in the science lab and I’m bleeding.

  How much blood was there? I had no idea, no previous experience to gauge by. I didn’t want to touch myself. I didn’t want to look. I shifted uncomfortably on the stool. I had to get out. I imagined that behind me the blood might be dripping over the edge of the stool. I stood up and moved purposefully towards the door, glancing back to confirm that the stool was dry and clean. I was already halfway across the room when I raised my hand and said, ‘Miss! Miss! I have to go to the bathroom.’

  In the locked cubicle I hitched up my dress. I stood with my legs slightly bowed, like a cowboy’s, and I pulled the elastic of my underpants outwards and peered in at the thin, arrow-shaped stain of red. I sniffed the air, not sure if such a thing would have a scent. My panic rose again. How quickly was I bleeding? How fast was it spreading? I knew about tampons and pads, but no-one had talked about this, not my mother, not any of my friends except for Caroline, and we were like the blind leading the blind. Certainly not my mother. This was 1982. Perhaps it’s different now.

  Finally I touched myself. I brought my hand close to my face and stared at the mucousy smear of red, not as bright as I’d expected. I pulled out fistfuls of toilet paper from the roller, squashed it all together, crammed it into my underpants, pushed it against my wetness. I felt a little more secure now. I knew that even if blood flooded out, I’d be all right for a while.

  I left the toilets, walked to the office and got some change for the phone. I had to ring my mother, even though the idea made me feel somehow ashamed. As I dialled the number I remembered Tess saying she had a busy day and would not be home. There was no answer.

  Fortunately I had some money that she’d given me to buy a few groceries. The bell to end the school day would ring in five minutes. I didn’t want to talk to any of my friends about this. Maybe Caroline, who was my best friend, but she was away from school today. I felt that the world was a huge metallic place.

  My father couldn’t help me. He was the magic man. I loved to sit in his arms, my head cradled against his chest, soothed by the rise and fall of his breathing as he watched TV in his favourite armchair. I placed my ear against his chest in the same way—with an expectation of mystery— that I would listen to a seashell. I imagined that oceans of wisdom were swirling inside him. But he couldn’t help me here, doctor though he was. This was blood. This was something new.

  I felt strange but strong as I strode from the school. It was a late spring day in Sydney and everything was in bloom, giving off a profusion of musky perfumes and a sense that the air was beginning to become heavy, as if preparing for the long sticky summer ahead. It was the kind of day in which I had always felt as light as air, jumping from the bus and running with Caroline through the back streets to our homes. At such moments even my school uniform seemed like an exquisite thing, a fabric made from wind and weightlessness.

  But now it seemed that the world was heading in one direction (light) and me in another; a direction that was both lighter than air and heavy as blood. The future, I guess.

  At this time of the afternoon the horseshoe of shops that formed Melton Street Mall was all but deserted. A few old ladies pulled vinyl shopping carts and one or two bored-looking young women pushed babies in prams. In the pharmacy I was relieved to see that the chemist on duty was a woman. A young girl, only a few years older than me and wearing a starched white uniform, crouched near the doorway unpacking a carton of eyedrops onto the shelves. The shop was empty of customers.

  ‘Hello there,’ said the pharmacist from behind her raised platform.

  I hadn’t thought about what I was actually going to say. I felt my jaw lock tight. ‘Um, tampons and pads,’ I murmured.

  ‘Just here.’ The woman pointed to a shelf.

  I wanted to get out of the shop and home as quickly as possible, but I didn’t know what to buy. And how far up should a tampon go? What if it wouldn’t fit? What if I couldn’t do it? In magazines I had read, there were more ads for tampons than for pads, so I figured that more women used tampons. I thought there must be a reason for this, that somehow this meant they were better.

  I took a packet of each. Later, in the luxury of my own bathroom, I would work out what was best. I placed the packets on the counter. The pharmacist rang up the sale and gave me my change. I could feel where the toilet paper was a little wet against the inside of my thigh. I looked up at her.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ she asked. ‘Do you know what to do?’

  I said, ‘Yes,’ and shook my head, ‘No.’

  ‘Mind the shop for a moment, Trudy,’ she called to the assistant. ‘Come with me.’ She led me quickly through the back of the shop, past the storeroom and into a tiny bathroom.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ she soothed. She stood facing me and placed her hands on my shoulders. She was a stout woman of about fifty, with wavy blonde hair and kind crinkles around her eyes. ‘It’s your first time. That’s all right. The first time can be very frightening.’

  She wanted to comfort me. I wanted her to go away. I wanted to be alone with the technical details. I picture myself standing forlornly in that bathroom; it was really just about blood, about inconvenience, and yet it was an event of pure spirit,
in that the future, when thought of, is always abstract.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it, dear,’ she said. ‘I’d just use a pad if I were you. It’s easier. There’s a little pamphlet inside the packet that shows you what to do. It’s very simple. You can decide about tampons later.’

  Walking home, I tried to piece together all that I knew about menstruation. It wasn’t much. I knew that once it began it would continue, regularly, for at least thirty years. I knew it was silly, but I pictured somehow a reservoir inside me, a thirty-odd-year allotment of menstrual blood. I wished I knew how much blood to expect: would it just keep flowing all day, or would it come in one deposit and dry up? I wanted to ring Caroline; I knew it hadn’t arrived for her yet.

  A sprinkler flickered lazily on the next-door neighbour’s lawn, its rotating prongs sprouting a lovely looping pattern on the neat green. Something landed on my arm and I went to brush it away, but the flash of colour caught my eye: a red ladybird. I lifted my forearm closer to my face. The red of the beetle was a candy-coloured red, brighter and harder than my blood; it seemed to bounce the sunlight away from it. My blood was part of a more permanent and brooding world. So much had happened in an hour: this, too, was a presage of the future, that life could hold within itself such concentrated energy.

  Around thirteen my mind kicked into gear also. I became an adult twice, in a sense. I discovered poetry; it’s like some kind of virus that good teachers help you catch. There were never enough anthologies. It was wondrous, this world where words pierced the surface of things, a bigger world than I had known or imagined. The reading of poetry excited me more than listening to the music I loved. I didn’t try to write it; I understood that it came from a realm that drove the mind further and better than anything else. Then I came across novels for grown-ups, as opposed to the class sets, so full of moral messages, that we used to be given; and my horizons expanded even further. In 1982 in the fiction section of the school library it began when I found The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. The copy had last been borrowed in 1971. Not only did I ache with the sadness of the book’s events, but it almost broke my heart to think of the book itself, the object, the copy, its lonely vigil of years upon the shelves. And the great loss of all those students who never borrowed the book between 1971 and 1982. I would think, too, of the dust motes that floated through the locked silent library during the endless summer holidays. And every book yearning for its union with a reader. And it seems from then on I did nothing but read for many years. Read, and attend sports events. Eventually the reading took over. I remember the state championship selection rounds for the high jump when I was seventeen years old. I remember the sinking realisation that my heart was not in it. Competition no longer stimulated me. It was connection, depiction, perception, the recording of events that I wanted.

  On my sixteenth birthday Dad bought me a Pentax. Another new world, photography: the trapping of light and memory and time, an endeavour so heavy with the sad grace of its own nostalgia, it can barely support its own weight. The notion that the earth too is weighed down with hundreds of thousands of tons of photos of itself and the things that happened on it—that holidays and people’s memories do not exist except insofar as they exist on film— did nothing to hinder my furious energy as I joined the photography club at school and became, at last, an Artist. My Year Eleven major work was called ‘Ecosystems of the Sidewalk Cracks’—a series of studies, taken with a zoom lens, of the weeds that grew in the footpaths of my suburb. I printed the photos in black and white then hand-coloured and framed them, drawing complex arrows and informational text on each print, which was accompanied by detailed, mock-botanical reports of the landscapes, including potted histories of the miniature aliens who inhabited them. More than a decade later, with that same Pentax, I would record the texture of the stonework and masonry of the buildings of Paris, fine details of cornices and lintels and statues (but never the full statues)—everything just graphs of light, life at its most abstract, as I wandered full of anxiety and the absence of Matthew Smith. It is funny how details can help us so much, and how things begun in jest can come back and make more sense than ever.

  It helps to focus. Later my father would focus on science, as his mind began to go. Perhaps it bought him extra time. I took on all my endeavours obsessively, driven from an early age by the sense that every minute, every detail, counted. Too much of this may not be so good. When you let things go, the relief is immense. For Dad the immensity was death, so it’s hard to say how much he knew, in life, about relaxing. There is said to be a state in which tension disperses through the shoulder-blades, through the cortex, and evaporates in the benign air. It’s long been my intention to live there.

  For a long time, anyway, the high jump was like the road home. I loved to win, of course—there was a pure thrill in that. But it was not the main event. The thing for me was the weightless moment high up in the sky when the mind was blank and empty—empty of all detail, you see—and the whoosh of the wind was all that there was.

  And how, I came to wonder, as I went through a particularly moody period of angst during those teenage years (I was listening to The Cure a lot; they were big at the time), was it possible to feel love with an empty mind? For if the mind was empty, then it was empty of love too. In the high jump there was no world but the world of air that I—my body—moved through. High above the crossbar in that moment of time smaller than a blink, my awareness of my own self disappeared. Making room for everything: everything felt, heard, learnt, known. Love was all that existed then, a joyful sense of vertigo and my love for Tess and Tom.

  Love and Loyalty

  AND IT WAS EXTRAORDINARY, THE FEELING OF LOVE IN our little family. (Extraordinary, too, that possibly I had it all wrong.) I knew nothing but safety and warmth. That seems all the more extraordinary now when I consider my mother’s growing up. She was born into the great gulf left by John Carter’s disappearance. The wonder to me is not that she made it through at all but that she made it through so relatively intact, so vibrant. So free of bitterness and so empty of resentment. Though later she would know all about regret.

  There is wonder to me also in how my mother could view Constance with such tenderness and compassion. Perhaps it was only tolerance. I know that Tess’s teenage years were a sterile time of endless ‘tasks’, afternoons of sewing and cooking and cleaning, a time of dark foreboding, when everything was done in claustrophobic proximity to Constance. Tess was even banned from joining the youth group of the local church. It was a potentially dangerous place; boys could be there under false pretences. The Cold War was outside, was everywhere. The world seemed to be held together by not much more than anticipation of looming catastrophes.

  And like the ugly duckling, my mother did nothing but remain still, and patient, for a long, long time. This level of patience is inconceivable to me; I could barely ever wait for tomorrow. But the sixties emerged and the light began to rain down upon the century. The beautiful John F. Kennedy had a face that glowed out at you from the newspapers. My mother had waited out the years, and then, without rancour for Constance, she glided towards the future, and love, and loyalty, and Tom Airly, my unbearably handsome father.

  And everything started so beautifully. And later it all went so wrong. Why am I not surprised at this? It’s hardly as if I’m writing a mystery here. And yet it’s all a mystery. If I could find someone to blame, perhaps I could get angry. Anything would be better than this sadness, this sense of regret for events that were never mine.

  Of course, there’s no prerequisite for a Constance to make things off-balance. Much of what I remember is made up of breezes on which there float the scents of jasmine, and golden evenings with Tom and Tess. It is not all darkness. But Constance: that was a darkness.

  There were no gaps in those vast monologues that constituted her entire world. They were solid blocks, dense with matter, like buildings. I was no more there to her than any of the rest of us. I was a sounding board against which to hear bet
ter the echoes of her own voice. From an early age I began to resist going to her house. There was a darkness around her, unpenetrated even by the television’s glow. I would sit and listen, captive as a babysat child; later, I was reluctantly captive again, as an adolescent on compulsory visits.

  ‘The cyclone! Well, how could you possibly be prepared? When the war was over, it was hard to believe that anything bad could ever come again. That long, long war, and all the men away. John Carter—let me tell you, he was handsome—came to visit me in the dress shop in 1942, in April.

  ‘“I’m off to fight the Japs,” he said, “but when I come back, I’d like to marry you.”

  ‘Just like that. Three years later I was nineteen, going on twenty. The Yanks dropped the bomb on Tokyo and then the bad half of the century was over and the good half began. The bad half and the good half. Do you get what I mean? But I was wrong! I had it exactly the wrong way round. John Carter came back. We were married in January of 1946, four years after he proposed. Well, he had me then, and off he went again. How was I to know how things worked?

  ‘I saw him for four months of that year—a month in Sydney, three on that horrible island, without even a proper house—and I came back to Sydney for Tess to be born, and the cyclone came. I wasn’t even there at the time. Thank God. But it swept into my heart and uprooted everything. And then what’s left? The stillness. And Tess with no father.

  ‘He didn’t die, you see. No palm tree crushed him, no sheet of corrugated-iron roofing decapitated him. He chose the cyclone to flee. I mean, it was the event that set him free. All those letters, all those excuses—not long now, my darling… it will all be ready soon… soon, dear Constance… the boys are working hard on the bungalow—and then the cyclone and then one letter and then I never hear from him or see him again. Someone from the copra company told me they thought he’d mentioned America. After a couple of years I stopped looking. Why bother? He didn’t want us.