Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  There’s another ballot in six months. As relief gave way to an old pessimism. She tipped back water, refilled the glass.

  He won’t be in it. Suze was serene in booze, sure of herself, infuriating.

  While Pearl began to leak at the edges, emotions fragile as wet paper. She was determined to be bleak. And next year both of them, Will too.

  It won’t happen. Suze looked her in the eye, or tried to. He’s only up for one ballot, Pearl. She emptied her own water glass, lowered it. Quit this shit, sweetheart. You’ve had good news.

  Pearl squinted across the table. Well. You know me, she said. Hell, since I was ten. A grimacing smile. Old catastrophe thinking.

  Suze leaned in, whispered. There was a catastrophe, love. No wonder you feel like that. She refilled her water glass. You were still a child when your mother died. We’d only just put away our dolls. Remember?

  That one with the weird hair. I used to dream she came to life.

  We were starting to outgrow things, toys, skipping. Even our mothers. Their old-fogey ways.

  Pearl said nothing, so Suze went on. We wanted different lives to theirs. We used to sit around at school and tell each other how much we hated them. She leaned forward. Pearl, are you listening to me? It was a terrible time to lose your mother.

  It was after seven. Axel slipped quickly through the Mercantile’s public bar, hoping to avoid Mrs. Jarratt—call me Olive—and make the bathroom before the other men. The various moods of Olive Jarratt were hard to predict. In the days after he arrived she’d stood back from him, regarding him as she would a wild creature that had wandered into her bar. Watched him from a distance, kept her conversation to a minimum.

  You’ll get your tea every night, she snapped out the first time they met. Axel was diverted by her nostrils, which flared after every few words. Full board, except for lunch.

  He’d been in the country just four hours. Tried for courtesy. Full board, he repeated.

  Yep, she said levelly. All found.

  He gave a twitch of a smile, a half nod, and didn’t move from the patch of swirling orange and brown carpet inside the front door.

  Mrs. Jarratt sighed. You get your breakfast and your dinner here, she said loudly, as if he was deaf, indicating behind her to a room with plastic-covered tables and a sideboard stacked with white cups. Your room cleaned once a week and your sheets. The rest—she looked him up and down—you do yourself.

  He dropped his eyes to his shirt and khaki pants, to check all was in order. But Mrs. Jarratt had already turned away. He watched her haul her bad leg towards the bar. Plenty of caffs in town to buy your lunch, she said, chin to her right shoulder. Probably a canteen down there at the Point.

  But after several weeks he realized he’d passed some unspoken test. She relinquished her customary abruptness and began to speak to him in a monologue, comfortable with his silence. Would materialize beside him at any hour and resume a conversation of her own invention, on various subjects he rarely understood. Out of politeness he would nod, attempt an expression of interest and after five minutes feign an appointment or a headache. Now he took the stairs two at a time, praying they wouldn’t squeak.

  He saw the letter as he unlocked his door. Blue airmail envelope, King Gustav Adolf on the stamp. On the back, Mor, in her plain hand. Nothing else. He placed the letter on the table; made himself wait until he’d showered, pulled a razor around his jaw and upper lip. As if she could see him. As if she was physically here, looking him over to make sure he was all right.

  His room was plain: single bed, iron-framed, beneath a window that looked out over William Street. A small table and chair, a cupboard of dark wood, rough mat on the floor. Someone, a previous tenant he assumed, had left a wooden crate in the corner and two postcards tacked to the tongue and groove: Hong Kong Harbor jostling with sampans, the Empire State Building. He would stand in front of these, smoothing back lifted corners, seeing his father between the sails of the boats, or walking up 104th Street. Hands in his pockets, whistling perhaps.

  Suze leaned across the narrow table. Listen to me, Pearl. This isn’t your fault. You didn’t start the war in Vietnam and you didn’t invent bloody conscription. She grabbed her hand. And you can’t save them from everything.

  Pearl blinked and swallowed the sob rising in her throat. Only Suze could do this, pull tears from a well she thought was dry. She was sober now, or close enough. She pressed her lips together, bent her head. Then dragged a sleeve across her cheeks. I owe them, she said.

  You owe yourself, Suze said. Plucked up her bag and tapped Pearl’s shoulder. Let’s go.

  They walked through rain-slicked streets towards Lorenzo’s. Suze’s choice, and it took Pearl by surprise. Suze hadn’t been to a meeting in months. I like the cause but not the people, she’d shrugged when Pearl pressed her. They linked arms and walked without speaking.

  Axel pulled a comb through his hair. Not wanting to sit in his room or force down the bitter brew that was the price of conversation with other men downstairs, he tucked the letter into his shirt pocket and walked to Lorenzo’s. The consolation of real coffee. He’d discovered it within days of arriving: Italian, too strong, but amid the accents and faces of Lorenzo’s Bar on Saturdays he cared less and less. He began to dream the aroma, beans in a grinder, the smell rather than the taste in his mouth. It had been like this at home: the smell of coffee had seeped into the curtains and rugs, baked into the walls by a fire that, in his memory, was always lit. Though it wasn’t, not in summer, he knew that.

  At night the bar was noisy and alive in a way it never was in the mornings. The barman ground beans and tipped his head towards a door at the back. Meeting, he said.

  Axel sat at a low table with coffee and schnapps, stirred sugar around in the cup. Picked up a Herald discarded on a chair. Yesterday’s, but no matter. He challenged himself to read to the end of a whole page without stopping at a word. But there he was again: snagged on a phrase, the letters impossible, his lips moving soundlessly over and around shapes that sat on the page like sharp stones in his path. “Thespian.” He ran his fingers over the letters, his tongue refusing the “th.” Eye and mouth conspired: he couldn’t pronounce it so he couldn’t understand it. Stupid. He gave up on the word, took a mouthful of schnapps. Browsed photographs instead. Then pulled out his letter.

  Min älskling—always the same beginning. The one he used too: my darling. Each day Aldous lies by the stove and mourns. His tail lifts and drops when I come into the room, his eyes follow me but his head doesn’t move. Until the clock sounds three, the chimes soft as his paws on wood, and he is up and nudging my knee for the walk we take each afternoon. Can he count? Those chimes like a finger pressing, one, two, three.

  Axel lowered the airmail sheets onto the open newspaper. Tipped his head back, eyes to the ceiling, where Aldous and his mother moved against planes of deep color, green, yellow, and then abruptly into white. What might have been fields and snow was just this, a background to the fine detail of his mother’s coat, her skirt and boots, the hairs of Aldous’s tail stiff with alertness and joy.

  Of course, he misses you too. So we walk. Last week there were snödroppar beneath our feet, but they are all of spring so far. Fresh snow yesterday, and it stayed into the day, on branches and paths and chairs so we couldn’t sit out, Aldous and me, and I wanted to, even in the weak sun. I wanted to sit and breathe in brand-new air, feel the seasons change.

  I imagine you there, Axel, in air that must be just like this. New. A place where surely change is daily, unremarkable. Is it? All that sun and warmth, it must make people brave. Make them kind.

  His eyes went to the dark rectangle of the window. An old conversation: when Axel first went to study in Stockholm, at Konstfack, he and his mother had talked about art and change, how the best artists, the way they thought, could impact on the smallest thing, on every part of life. When you go into a place, his mother said one day, look closely at the buildings, their windows and doors, look for
paths along a river, or the seafront. So that people can walk by the water. So they can look out. And in the woods, so they can look in. Seats beneath trees. Places for children to play. Do the doorways have overhangs, shelter from the rain, the snow? Or for your old mother—she raised her brows, mocking—to rest on her way up the street? She’d turned to stoke the fire. These things make people kind, Axel. They lift their spirits.

  Axel didn’t need to be told. He’d sought out all these things early here, as he looked for the form his glasswork might take. He looked at what was there, but mostly he looked for what was not there. For the missing or the denied, at what might be hidden. This habit, he knew, was born in him. He came from a place where shapes and contours had more than one meaning, and where the language of myth was the language of every day. In places all over Sweden, in Norway and Denmark too, the line of a hill might be the ceiling of the underworld, graves dug deeper than memory and ordinary to the eye. They were not hidden but ingrained in perception and outlook. No hill was just a hill.

  At first he’d looked for shapes as Utzon had. In nature and in the structures built for families, for communities, for deities. Kronborg, the Mayan temples and their stepped platforms, their sculpted levels linked to make a meeting place between heaven and earth. So Utzon said, at any rate, and Axel had understood at once. It was not about religions so much as narrative and sacredness, the ways the earth was inscribed. The Mayans had their own way of communicating this, ways of passing their myths one to the next through ceremony and story and the grandeur of stone.

  He thought of his mother treading her own stories through the forest, and knew those ways were missing here. Australians appeared to have no myths of their own, no stories to pass down. He’d read about the myths of indigenous people, the notion of a Dreaming and the intricate stories it comprised. He wondered if Utzon knew these legends, their history in this place. Had he known anything of Aboriginal people when he designed his building? As he sat down and drew shapes that could turn a place sacred? Turn its people poetic: their eyes to a harbor newly revealed by the building, its depths and colors new to them, and surprising. Perhaps that was what the architect was doing here: creating a kind of Dreaming, a shape and structure that would explain these people to themselves. Perhaps the building was just that: a secular Bible, a Rosetta stone, a treaty. A story to be handed down.

  If people would bother to look. If they’d bother to see.

  From the room at the back came shouting and laughter, words shuttling back and forth. The language of debate, earnest, blasphemous; sentences ran together in waves over his head so he had no hope of comprehending. Only the occasional bullshit/fuck that or volleys of hooting laughter. It all made him queasy. He turned the pages of the paper, ignoring the “th” word but wishing once more for someone beside him, prompting him as his mother had, her hand on his face, turning it towards hers and sounding the word, her mouth careful, particular over a j or a z or an a. She would smell of whey, cardamom, snow.

  The streets were suddenly cool after days of heat. They walked down Broadway towards the city, heels hard on the cooling pavement, pulling cardigans to their chests. The early dark lapped at buildings and faces, deepened the layers of sky. Pearl felt the occasional rub of her friend’s shoulder against hers, caught the wheaty scent of her hair, consoling as summer grass. You can’t save them. She didn’t believe her. Suze was an only child, with the insouciance of someone who’d been the sole focus of family worry or care. Their friendship had been made solid by this difference; they’d never had to compete.

  Suze was the day to Pearl’s night, a child of wind and air. She’d walked through her days with an absence that drove teachers wild; fey, untroubled, bright. She flourished beneath the benign neglect of parents who loved her but largely ignored her. Pearl had fallen in love with their American accents, the calm of their household against the chaos of her own. The exotic smell of their kitchen—goulash and Welsh rarebit, curry and shortcake—became the smell of them. Suze was born exactly nine months after they’d landed in Sydney; there was no hint of America about her. She’s an Uzzie, her father would say fondly whenever Suze uttered anything about America. McCarthy can’t get her. A wide smile beneath his beard. She’d grown up without the obligation of worrying or caring too much. Pearl knew it made their friendship all the more miraculous.

  Outside Town Hall station a man crouched in a ragged blanket, his hat upturned before him. Evening, ladies. The voice battered but his eyes were bright, mad, the gaze out beyond their faces and into the dark. They were caught in a funnel of people around the entrance, moving them forward. It didn’t matter. Pearl stopped, spun around, shuffled back. Dug in her pockets and bent to him, wrapped his fingers around a pound note.

  Suze was quiet as they fell back into step. What? Pearl glanced towards her.

  Seconds ticked by. There was the click and scuff of their heels on bitumen. Finally: That old man, Suze said. What did he say to you?

  They slowed their pace towards the corner. He said, thanks sweetheart. Will you marry me? Pearl laughed softly in the air between them. But Suze was blinking, her lips pursed.

  He’s all right, you know. The headlights of cars caught and released them, tires pressed over the wet road. Pearl turned. Suzy? People look out for him.

  Suze moved her head from side to side. Slowly, as if there was something she didn’t believe, or couldn’t understand. It’s not him, she said, it’s you. You shame me sometimes, girl. She sniffed, threw her arm around Pearl’s shoulder. They walked wordlessly through the light gauzy air of the town.

  There were more people in the back room than Pearl could ever remember. It was almost wall to wall. The ballot’s spooked everyone. Bridget shrugged when Pearl found her. And there’s talk Renshaw will call the election.

  They fought their way to the bar. Male eyes on Suze, her long unruly hair, angelic eyes. Pearl handed her a scotch and leaned in close: Don’t mention Jamie. Suze frowned. Just don’t. She smiled and steered her back towards the group of women.

  They came in halfway through Bridget’s sentence . . . the ones who get investigated? Those girls at Wanda Beach. Like it was their fault. Eyes wide above her glass. Like it matters what sort of girls they were, what school they went to. They bloody well had a right to be on the beach, whatever time it was.

  Della shook her head slowly. Yeah, well I’d love to be able to walk around the harbor or down the beach at night, but no way. She waved her glass around. It pisses me off but I’m scared. She shrugged. I admit it.

  See? Bridget barked. We move through the world in a different way. Men don’t think twice about walking in the dark or leaving a door unlocked, a window open. It’s fucked.

  Pearl thought about her solitary walks home from the ferry, often late. The bodies of those girls in the dunes, the sand claiming them. If you never went anywhere alone, was that acquiescence? If you relied on one man for company, for protection, for sex?

  So weird, she said. You take responsibility for yourself and you’re suddenly culpable, asking for it.

  In the lull that followed they could hear pieces of conversations from the bar, from the back of the room. There was, Pearl knew, a wellspring of intention, a thousand plans for action. But even here, even tonight: the ennui she’d felt in the days before the ballot. It crept along her veins, made her blood sluggish. The mere mention of another demonstration made her tired.

  Therese came to stand beside her. Personally, she grinned, indicating a loose group of men inventing slogans nearby, I don’t go anywhere without my hat pin.

  Then Suze spoke, quiet, even. Something in her tone made them all turn. There are parts of a man, she said, that will shrink at the sight of this. Pulling a bright red penknife from her jeans pocket.

  Sputtering laughter. The women dispersed then to join other knots of conversation; Suze kissed Pearl’s cheek and left to catch a cab.

  Within an hour, the room felt too moody, its jokes and spats exaggerated, edgy. Pea
rl slipped out, needing food—peanuts, anything. Moved through the crowded front bar, scanning the room, nodding at familiar faces. Special Branch hadn’t bothered with Lorenzo’s yet, though she’d seen them weeks before, skulking behind trees during a gathering at the Domain. But there, in the corner, someone unfamiliar, alone with his newspaper. Wire-rimmed glasses and the face of a boy. Thatched blond and intense, bent to his reading as if his life depended on it. Or as if he didn’t have one.

  From the back room came a general shuffling towards the street. Therese suddenly beside her: Coming? she said. Party in Darlo.

  Meet you outside. Her eyes on the blond boy. He was older than Jamie, younger than she was. There was something in the tilt of his head, the line of his back.

  She moved towards him, doubling around behind his chair. Dipped her head to his neck—Are you hiding, comrade?—and he raised his head without turning. But when he stammered an answer she felt it immediately—his voice, the smell of his skin, and moments later, his eyes—the bolt of pleasure, the kick in the belly, the flush of heat that came with wanting.

  It had taken only a minute, two. The door behind him opened to a spill of men and women and noise. Words and phrases barreled into the air, shattered around him, so that Axel, trying to listen, felt partial too. An old fragmentation. He dropped his head to his newspaper, the consolation of still pictures, sentences in print.

  Later it would be her voice he remembered, and her eyes. Or rather, a sense of being seen. They’d spoken but they hadn’t met. Their few words might fit into a palm, rubbed with a thumb, tossed up to feel their weight. Why then did he feel a transaction had been done, a proposal made and agreed to?