Shell

by Kristina Olsson

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  For Sharon Olsson

  and for

  Jill Rowbotham

  Sandra Hogan

  Marg O’Donnell

  Kay Smith

  Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure our heart.

  —Marcel Proust, Time Regained, in Remembrance of Things Past

  Sydney, November 1960

  The day the great man sang, heat blazed in haloes over Bennelong Point. This is what Pearl will remember, later, this is what she will say: that his voice turned the air holy. Men, sweat-slicked, stood with bowed heads or hung off scaffolds, swatting at flies and tears. Few looked at the singer; they needed all their senses to hear. Needed their whole bodies, skin and eyes and hearts, to absorb what they couldn’t say: that sacredness had returned to this place. It flowed through them on a single human voice, through their bodies and the building that was rising beneath their hands.

  Pearl stood with the other journalists, and watched the men grow luminous. Wept as she understood: that it wasn’t just the building or the place Robeson had sanctified, but the labor. The valor of it. The modest hearts of workers. In his songs, in the faces of the men, was every story she had ever tried to write. This one too. She closed her eyes as the voice trailed away. Words formed and crumbled in her head, insubstantial. She gripped her notebook and forgot to write them down.

  March 1965

  She walked towards the quay in opalescent light. The city closed down, prosaic, the horizon grubby with clouds and promising nothing. It was like this sometimes: as if Sydney was within her, an idea she carried around, vaporous, unexamined. Until, on evenings like this, it revealed her to herself. She was hollowed out, impervious. As torpid as the streets.

  Usually, the city was enough: a scoop of bridge as she rounded a corner, the harbor shattered by sunset. Her friends in the back bar of Lorenzo’s talking of protest, of marches, the poetics of action. She loved these nights, the conversation and argument, the taste of insurrection. They made her brave. From the Telegraph building to Hunter Street she would be optimistic, glad. The fight rising in her at the door of the bar, the defiance she was born to.

  But tonight the air was precarious. All sandstone shadow, smudgy. She thought that time was like this too, a spongy edge, imprecise, as close and as far as memory. As her dead mother’s face. The world had turned her a year older in summer. In four years, she might die. Her mother had died at thirty-six; the calendar led Pearl towards it like a dirge badly played, like this vagrant shadow she moved through, that moved through her. As if she was porous, as if there was no substance to her at all.

  She recognized it now. Fear, familiar as a friend, precise as a knife. Not of death, though for years it was what she expected: to suffer as her mother had. This might be worse, this prospect of slightness, of falling short. She’d felt its weight since she was fourteen—there would be two lives to live, the one she was given and the one her mother lost. As if loss could be recouped somehow, her family restored. As if she could save them.

  Her day had begun as they always did: with the smell of newsprint and the faces of boys. There, among bold headings and columns of type, they waited: serious, smiling, patient. She ignored them at first, skimming headlines and leads. Turned pages on the potential in their eyes. But each day one, at least, forced her hand. A frantic calculation: how old, what suburb? An ache in her, whatever the answer; her brothers were there, in every young man who passed in the street, stepped off the ferry, gazed out from a page of the Telegraph.

  Today it was footballers. Preseason training, so they still looked coltish and soft, a bunch of local lads mucking around in the park. One reached for a pass with a thief’s intent; she’d leaned in until the photograph blurred, until the face was no longer Jamie’s as he swiped the milk money, or Will’s as he eyed the twins’ toast.

  Six years. With each one, her fear grew: they wouldn’t know her. She wouldn’t know them. Boys changed, grew jawbones and beards. Their eyes: had they sharpened with their faces and their sorrows? Had the small soft bodies she’d helped feed and wash grown hard against the memory of her? Or would they still hold her shape in new muscles in their arms and their legs, in the hands they’d once placed against her cheek at bedtime: Sing to us, Pearlie? They’d been two and three when their mother died, adolescents when she’d seen them last. Now they were men. Or nearly. Who may not want to see her at all.

  She stepped up her pace towards the harbor. That morning, as she closed the sports pages, her contact had called. The phone shrilling in the early quiet of the newsroom. Her heart flapped in her chest; it could only be one person, though he usually called at midday, when the newsroom rang with noise and adrenaline. But when she lifted the phone his voice was no different: soft, subterranean, as if it flowed over pebbles. There’s a bus at six thirty. One sentence, the call over before it began. She held the receiver hard against her ear. Sometimes he paused before he rang off, and in that gap she could see him, hunched at his desk, lips parted over what was unspoken. His pale bureaucrat’s face flushed with the euphoria of risk.

  A current of anticipation bolted through her, but she lowered the receiver slowly. As if his breath was contained there, all he had to tell. What have you got? she wanted to say. Is it the date, the time? But back in its cradle the receiver was mute, the Bakelite dull and indifferent. So was the fashion feature unfinished in her typewriter. She glanced at its plain sentences, its tedious tone. Lifted her fingers to the keys. A cigarette burned down beside her.

  Now she crossed Pitt Street in a pulse of office workers, the last of the light in her eyes. Turned up the hill to Macquarie Street for the pleasure of old buildings, the Mint, Sydney Hospital, Parliament. Then the library. Below her the new ribs of the opera house reached up, bleached bones against the paling sky. The building failed to lift her tonight; it looked like something broken, too difficult to fix. Perhaps, as some said, it would never be finished. Her father might be pleased; a monument to politicians, he’d said, peering at the sketches in the Herald years before. But Pearl had looked at the artists’ impressions and even then felt her heart shift. Look carefully, Da, she’d said quietly. Maybe it’s a monument to us. But like some in the newsroom—mating turtles, they laughed, a collapsed circus tent—he wouldn’t be swayed.

  At the top of Bent Street she looked left and right. Sat at the bus stop until her man appeared, tie loosed, hands in pockets as arranged. A middle-aged public servant, his countenance dulled by routine. Expressionless. She stood then, and as he came up beside her she tilted her face to the sky. Even so she knew his lips barely moved as he spoke, pressing lightly over brief syllables. Melbourne, he said. Next Wednesday. Tenth of March.

  He took out a handkerchief, wiped his face as if to clear some residue, a letter or noun that might betray him. Glanced at his wristwatch, then turned and walked away. Pearl watched him go. His suit ancient and loose, the pants shiny with wear. Chifley wore his suits until they were threadbare, her father once told her. People loved him for it, the old prime minister: his humility, his insistence on staying with them. Unlike the new one. In this way Patrick Keogh expressed his hatred for Menzies without having to say his name. It was like a code of honor, an act of resistance,
this un-naming. So Pearl had learned her politics by inversion, always the positive rather than the negative, the heroic rather than the bastard. It gave her an optimism that couldn’t survive her childhood. In that moment at the bus stop, she hated Menzies more viciously than her father had.

  A bus appeared on the other side of the road. It snorted and swallowed him, the man in Chifley’s suit. Pearl stood in the vacuum and watched the bus disappear. The date ticked dangerously in her head. Tenth of March. Just over a week. In eight days the first marbles would roll, the first ballot for conscripts for Vietnam. Menzies claimed otherwise, but they all knew: it was a lottery, a deadly one, and if you were twenty and had the right birthday, the right number on a marble, you’d win a free ride to the war.

  Jamie was twenty. And might have the right birthday. And next year, so might Will.

  The harbor was a spill of darkening water. She sat on the grass at the end of the quay and watched the sky absorb its own color. Tried to catch the precise moment when daylight switched off. An old challenge, and she never won; tonight she turned her gaze from a lumbering ferry to find the city already faded, shrinking into shadow. When she thought of her brothers this was just as she saw them, their shapes retreating, faded to gray. Their faces refusing to be fixed.

  At seven she pushed herself up and walked to a phone box on George Street. Dialed a number inked onto her hand. Ray. Her closest ally in the group. An hour later, in the dim light of the back bar, she listened to him announce the ballot date as if the leak was his own, as if he’d conjured it, as if he’d worked the contact himself. A seam of quiet triumph in his speech. It had to be like this, she knew, to protect her and the contact, but she hated Ray for whole minutes, for the fidelity of his voice, the conviction in his eyes, how plausible he was. She looked to the ceiling, sickly yellow with smoke, and then to the floor. Closed her eyes against what would follow: the murmurs and barks of outrage, the calls for placards and protests. It felt suddenly predictable. Empty.

  Voices rose and fell. Disembodied, they took on a menacing quality, as if they’d emerged from the rough darkness she’d walked through, the grubby streets. A dog’s warning growl, a tubercular cough. Then Brian’s unmistakable snarl: For fuck’s sake, what did you all think? That they’d cancel because we didn’t like it? She opened her eyes, turned to look in his direction, watched him lunge at a beer jug and refill his glass. We all knew it was coming, he said, accusing the room. Now it has.

  The air fell momentarily still. Then, as if at some signal, it became fraught, the voices charged with adrenaline. Usually, Pearl’s voice would be with them; instead she glanced to the door, longing to leave. She could not feel what they felt: the charge of energy beneath the anger, the excitement. It was paradoxical and familiar—they would all say the draft was criminal, a bastard act, but in truth the news enlivened them, validated them. She’d felt something similar in the newsroom when reports of a disaster broke. A crackling intensity, almost erotic in its heat and rush. And a collective sense of purpose, of responsibility: to translate a world confirmed again as incoherent, random, impersonal.

  She inched sideways, dipping her head, making herself small. Tonight nothing felt impersonal or random. For Pearl, the news had assumed human faces: Jamie’s, Will’s. Standing there, she’d realized. That’s what they wanted, everyone here: the human faces of conscription. If her comrades learned about her brothers, knew their names, they’d fall upon them as surely as a journalist would. The movement needed emblems. Examples. Real men, not numbers; flesh and blood.

  But they didn’t know about them. And wouldn’t. The decision hardened in her: Jamie and Will would not be used. She was surprised by the strength of her own conviction. No one would know, not here, not at work. She had a sudden image of Henry at the news desk. Sleeves pushed up, eyes narrowed to a looming deadline. She would not tell him about the boys, and she would not give him the leaked ballot date. The decision sat heavy in her stomach, but there were old scores to settle. She looked away to the back wall now, as if her thoughts were traitorous and might be visible, might be read.

  The temperature in the room had turned feverish. Plans were made, tasks allocated. She had to leave before her face or her silence betrayed her. She skirted the discussions and made for the door. As she reached the back hallway a voice followed her, male, drunk: Another leak, Lois Lane. A cough or a laugh, she wasn’t sure. Baby, you keep screwing Superman.

  She was almost ready for him. Without turning she said calmly: Keep screwing yourself. But the coward was gone.

  She stood at the rail of the ferry, pulled her hair into a band against the wind. Gulls shrieked in their wake: too late, too late. To one side of her a young man pressed a transistor to his ear and a woman slipped a foot from her shoe. Brian’s words rang in her head: What did you all think? That they’d cancel because we didn’t like it? Yes, she’d wanted to say. Yes. A part of me thought it couldn’t happen. But the gulls kept crying the truth: she’d known for months that it would, they’d all known. In the years since her mother’s death she’d found a mechanism for forgetting, a lever that turned her blood cool. She felt it in her body: it switched one Pearl off and another on, a girl without history or conscience. A girl unencumbered, trying life on for size. But in three words, tenth of March, her history had spoken back.

  Darkness thickened as they passed Bennelong Point. In starlight the new structure was a strange oceanic creature mantling the land. Each head turned to it, a gravitational pull. God help us, said the man next to her. But now Pearl could see how its new curves pulled at the water. She’d heard the first thing Utzon had done, before he thought about design, before he began to draw, was to consult the sea charts for Sydney Harbour. It made sudden sense: the building was marine more than earthly. From this angle, in this light, it was not a structure but an eruption from the sea. An act of nature rather than man, a disturbance. She stared at its massive base, a plinth for a sculpture or a ceremony, and thought about surfaces, the familiar faces of earth and water, what lay beneath. About the architect’s way of seeing.

  The ferry moved them on. Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, the finger wharves of Woolloomooloo. Garden Island. She counted them off, a prayer over worry beads, as the boat arced towards Manly. Then turned to see the last of the Harbour Bridge. As a child she’d thought some kind of magic resided there; that as her ferry slipped beneath the exact midpoint of the arching steel and concrete, she was at the fulcrum of a great mystery. In that very moment, caught, frozen, she might be altered. Might become steely. The grinning face of Luna Park soon told her otherwise: she and the world were no less ordinary, no less fragile. Still that vault of bridge and sky made it seem possible that her very cells might change.

  Nearly thirty years later, she could pinpoint the day they did.

  It was her first week at the Telegraph. She’d come to journalism late, after years of waitressing and night classes, the School Leaving Certificate she’d missed out on, courses in typing and shorthand. But her love for it was instant and profound. From the beginning she was obsessed by the process; the notion of a story, what it was, what it could do, the risk and potential of it. Ideas flared in her dreams.

  She’d tried to explain it to Jamie and Will. Work, she’d shrug when she finally got to the orphanage at Croydon, and it was true. The people she’d met, or interviewed: the Lord Mayor, Dawn Fraser. They sat on the grass of the boys’ playground and ate the Violet Crumbles she always brought, but their eyes were blank. Kick the ball, Pearlie, they’d say, and she didn’t resent it. They were children; they couldn’t know how it was. That walking into the newsroom was like an erotic encounter that made her forget everything else. Even them. In those early days, she couldn’t wait to start each shift. Had met each story and interview like a lover. Each new day made her skin spark, swelled her sense of herself. This new Pearl, enlarged by confidence, surprised her too. What she was capable of. Steeliness.

  They’d run away from St. Joseph’s before Jamie turn
ed fifteen. As if they’d lashed out in their loneliness and confusion, the lengthening weeks between visits. Even then, they had suspected: her new life was bigger than they were. They must have known they couldn’t compete. But couldn’t understand. Now, ten years after she’d first walked into the newsroom, she couldn’t account for it herself. Wasn’t she their Pearlie? From the day their mother died, the love she’d spent on them. She’d emptied herself, hour by hour, so there’d be no room in them for suffering.

  Before long they barely remembered their mother. A shadow figure, another baby at her breast. Then nothing. Only air stretched thin with crying, Pearl holding their father’s head against her. Then their Da’s ravaged face as he packed their singlets, their socks and coats into bags. And Pearl, her hands grasping theirs as they left the house, for the last time, though they didn’t know it then. Wave to Da, she said as they walked to the big black car, and they would never forget how shiny it was, how thrilling and terrifying to climb onto the back seat. Pearl between them, her mouth a straight line. Wave to the wood pile, the orange tree. And they did.

  She’d had one phone call from them after they fled, their voices turned manly to stop her worrying, or to stop her chasing them. A friend’s uncle ran cattle in Queensland, they said. They’d get work fencing or mustering, as laborers or roustabouts. You can’t ride, she reminded them, gripping the phone, trying for calm. They’d never been outside Sydney. The closest they’d come to horses was the milko’s mare, shoveling the steaming piles she left every morning into buckets for the vegetable garden. You’ll kill yourselves, she said.

  It’ll be great, Pearlie. Will laughed down the line. Jamie said, I’ll look after him. But Pearl knew who was likely the scared one, the one who’d break his bones. Look after yourself, Jamie, she said. We’ll write to you, they promised. Write to your Da, she said. But part of her—guilty, unexamined—was relieved.