She shrugged. I know less with every year.
He squinted at the setting sun. For a long time I wanted everything to be perfect. I thought it was just about effort and skill. He stopped, afraid of saying too much. Of what he couldn’t say in English, not properly. How his glasswork had flowered into complexity, a way of shaping his yearning, of what he saw—the lakes, the shore and its paths, rain, snow. His liquid world. The terrible strength of water and of glass. Their fragility and beauty. I was just a child then, he shrugged.
Later, in her bed in a room that held the sound of the sea, he woke to find her eyes on him. Lying on her side, head propped on her hand. They looked at each other until she said, quietly: Nothing can come of it, Axel. Just this. Skin. Amnesia. She let her head fall to the pillow. It’s nice. That’s all.
He was dulled by sex and sleep. Amnesia? The word out of context, dragging at his brain. Then: You mean—a way of forgetting?
Yes. She yawned, her hand on her mouth and then on his chest. They spoke gently, as if there was a child in the room they did not want to wake.
Axel looked up at the ceiling, closing a hand over hers. For me, he said, it’s the opposite. With you my body remembered itself. As if it was—He turned his head to her. Fully conscious. Even my hip bones. My eyelids.
She frowned. Aren’t you conscious at your work? She thought of his fingers and hands, their delicate negotiation of her body and of the materials and tools of his trade.
Yes, of course. But only of the work, what it asks, what it demands. He paused. It’s different.
She thought about this. The thin curtain lifted and fell, an echo of his accent; the words settled on her skin. On the weight of her legs and shoulders against the sheets. She closed her eyes and turned to him. They slept.
In the morning they drank tea at a table by the kitchen window. Pearl tipped a matchbox end to end, looked out to the garden through narrowed eyes. She wore a permanent squint, Axel thought, wore it even in her sleep. At first he had taken it for interrogation, or an analytical attitude to everything from a government policy to a blade of grass. But perhaps it was not aggression so much as uncertainty. It gave her a fierceness she might need in a newsroom, but some men, he knew, would look her in the eye and see a challenge there, a glove thrown down. Jonas in the casting yard, for instance, would want to take her down a peg before she even said hello.
He smiled to himself: the local slang he’d absorbed.
What?
He shrugged. Odd expressions. Your language. Sometimes I think you have to learn it twice. English, and Australian.
But she was blank, quiet, a child pulled too early from sleep. So he kept his voice low. When I was very young, he said, I used to dream in words. No pictures. In the mornings I would tell my mother: älva, bil, ljusstake. Elf, car, candlestick. If she asked what they did I couldn’t say. Instead I would spell them out. His finger moved on the table, making word shapes. He watched her, followed her gaze. She didn’t speak. Tell me your earliest memory, he said.
Her eyes on the wood of the tabletop, as if his words were inscribed there. First memory. Her fingers on the matchbox. Tip, tip. Then she looked at him. Or first sense? Not sure they’re the same.
Seconds of silence as Axel sought the difference. But before he could answer: The smell of urine, mine, some other child’s. A sheet with a diamond pattern. A late storm—she glanced to the window—and the sky, split with light.
The word light held by the ticking air between them. Then: My father, she said. Her voice trancelike, removed. Leading me away from the smell and the crying.
Axel looked down, unsure he was meant to hear. It was as if she had told an old secret, or pulled something hidden from beneath the bed, so old she barely recognized it. He stilled the urge to touch her. Looked past her to the hallway, to roses on old wallpaper, faded, pale. There among them, his own father’s face.
For a long time I thought I’d dreamed that. The sheet, my father.
He waited.
It took ages to find the right questions. Eventually I asked him about that place, that smell. Had I made it up? He hesitated, my father, and then he told me. You had another life for a while, he said, you and your mother. Before I met you. Before you chose me.
Axel looked quickly around him, imagining the conversation in this kitchen, the child, the man. The shadows of other children.
There was only one answer I wanted. It was the only one he gave. He said, you are mine, as much as the twins are, Jane, the boys. My Pearl. Haven’t you always been?
She nodded.
Where are your sisters now, your brothers?
Pearl lit a cigarette and exhaled, waving away the smoke and the question. So he was startled by what came next. Lost them all. Her eyes, her voice once more her own as she told him.
Six children, and a mother dead from blood poisoning. A father drunk on grief. Pearl the eldest at fourteen, unable to stop the disintegration, the scattering to homes and orphanages. The baby taken by her mother’s youngest sister and the twins, even at eight, had each other. It was the middle ones who suffered. She told the story as if reciting from a school text. The words cold stones in her mouth.
She kept repeating two words, “the welfare,” as if they were obscene. This confused him. In his mind “welfare” translated to benevolence. Food for every child, warmth, medicine. Dignity. I don’t understand, he said, his hands in his lap.
She raised her eyebrows. No, she said, it’s different where you come from. Here it’s the people who take your children away. For being poor.
Homes, he heard. That were not like homes at all. Her brothers had fled the beatings and the loneliness. But I’ve got to find them now, she said flatly, before the army does.
More questions flared in him but he kept them to himself. They sat in silence. Then she pulled the empty cups towards her. Without looking up she said: And you, Axel. What’s your wound?
He blinked at her, tilted his head.
The thing that hurt you.
His face was a shutter that opened and then closed. I’m not sure—
My mother died when I was fourteen. She ran a finger over her forehead. See? You can read it on my face. That’s how it’s always felt.
His hands cupped together in his lap. Oh. Fourteen. His fingers laced on the table. You need her then.
There was the raw blue of sky and one bird, crying. She said, Yes, I did.
He let her words settle. The weight of them. Then: My father is missing, he said.
He told her about the work his parents had done in the war. Bringing Jewish people out of Europe. The White Bus movement, the Danish Brigade. Some vague and forgotten member of the Swedish royal family, doing deals with Hitler to free Jews from the camps. Clandestine meetings and voices he could hear from his bedroom, someone in the spare bed for a night and then gone. His father away for a week, a few days, and then, after Axel’s tenth birthday, not coming home at all.
I’ve never heard of the White Buses. She eyed him as if he’d made it up.
He didn’t flinch. No one—how do you say it?—made a song and dance. How could they? There were so many who were not saved.
Pearl plucked the cups from the table and pushed back her chair. Yes, she said. He heard her behind him at the sink, refilling the electric jug. He might have imagined it, but he felt the air turn raw, jagged.
Sweden was neutral in the war, she said. He could hear the click as she plugged in the jug, turned it on.
Her voice came to him as a soft echo, bouncing off the wall she faced and the familiar innuendo of others. He let it remain there between them, let the seconds tick away. Then: Neutral, yes. Which was not as easy as you might think, he said. And not as straightforward.
He dropped his hands to his lap, turned his face to the window. A bird hung there, its angle improbable, as it sought the syrup of crimson flowers bunched along a branch. The tree burned with color. Axel didn’t know its name. He was still disarmed by the notion that
flowers grew on trees here rather than in the ground. He walked home some evenings beneath galaxies of red and yellow and ivory, navigating his way by them, cluster and constellation.
What is this tree? He turned as she spooned instant coffee into mugs. The odd brew another new experience, not wholly pleasant.
A cursory glance over her shoulder. Callistemon, she said tartly. Common bottle brush.
But Axel found their spiky plainness beautiful, the messy flowers steadfast in the wind and sun.
Pearl put the coffee in front of him and turned away. Got a meeting this morning, she said. I have to make a call.
Later, this is how she will remember it. The telephone on the hall table, her hand along its curve. The wind stilled, bringing the rush of traffic closer, a dog’s bark. So she might have imagined the click when she pressed the phone to her ear, a noise she will recall as one brief pipe of a cicada and the ear’s expectation of more. It was that expectation, an absence of sound rather than a silence, that turned her stomach. She was barely aware of returning the receiver to its cradle. Stared at it, and at her own hand, as if they might be contaminated. She turned to Axel and said: My phone’s been tapped.
No one could be trusted. Pearl knew this in her body. But it had bloomed into consciousness with her mother’s death, when a cleft opened up between her and safety. Suspicion calcified in her limbs. It had taken a long time for them to unclench, for any optimism to return. Loosen up, one boyfriend had said when she was nineteen, we’re not all bad. She wasn’t convinced, but something in his tone had nudged at her. It was, she saw too late, his unencumbered childhood; he had no reason to be fearful, no reason to distrust. He anticipated only safety and goodness, expected it in the world and in others.
She sat on a bus and looked at faces sliding by on the street. Her lips pursed over her own naïveté. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? All these people on the footpath, on the bus: they would vote for a government without rigor or compassion, applaud when young men were sent away to war. Or when spies were turned on neighbors, shadow people who dealt in secret dossiers and threats. They were all cheats and liars, and worse: they had turned her fearful again, paranoid even, terrified of what might be next.
Part of her, she knew, would be forever stuck at that moment in the flat. The shock that had registered in her body, as if the dull carpet she stood on had been alive, electrified. Now she shrank against the window with her forehead to the glass and saw the city flicker past, reduced to scenes, each one unknowable now, a façade. The women with their shopping bags, the men in doorways. She hated them for it, all of them, for what she’d felt as she stood there, gripping the telephone. The cleft reopening, her whole body sliding towards it.
She got off the bus near Central. It was early, so she wandered into the station. She loved the open canopy of the vaulted roofs, the benign light. And there was safety in the air of the country and interstate platforms. They were consoling in their intimation of distance, of elsewhere. The threshold between here and there. She sat down on an empty seat on an almost empty platform and let other places and other lives ghost along the tracks in front of her, around the ornate steel above.
Three children slumped resentful on a nearby bench. Crumpled shirts and too-big shorts on the boys but below her plain skirt the girl wore patent leather shoes. Red. Her legs stuck out straight from the seat and she stared down at the shoes, the miracle of them. The boys shoved and shouldered without conviction, their faces pale and tired. But something in the girl had been wakened in the shine of the patent leather. Pearl watched her and knew: the little girl was seeing herself there, some bright potential, for joy or beauty or something larger than what she had or what she was.
The knowledge caught in Pearl’s throat, stung her eyes. She watched this girl but saw another, years older but the look was the same, staring into a window at Mark Foy’s, where dummies wore dresses a mother might wear, or that a daughter might ask to, and expressions that might tell her what she most needed to know. What a woman might be.
At twelve she’d watched Amy for ways to be a woman a man would love. Sideways looks at the cut of a skirt, the colors in blouse and ribbon. Her hair tied this way or that. The way she arranged her features as she pressed pastry on the table—the thinness of that pastry, the movement of floury forearms. The shape of her lips when she sang to the baby. Or gathered the washing in.
Pearl listened and saw. Even then, there was something in Amy that repelled and frightened her. She couldn’t acknowledge or name the thing; it lived alongside the love that burned in her as she watched her mother at the treadle machine or bending to kiss the boys. She grew to fear the love she saw reflected in her, a love that could relinquish volition and accept servitude, daily. The dailiness of it. Her mother’s anger, simmering, subcutaneous, hinted at where it might lead.
At twelve Pearl had resisted the surrogate role she was meant to assume as the eldest. Though it was hard with Jamie and Will who, at one and two, had been displaced by the new baby at their mother’s breast. Could find nothing to compensate, unlike the twins. Then, or later. It was for them that she’d made her decision. That was how it felt. A week after the funeral, when the gulf of grief, kept shut by the flurry of arrangements and visitors, had opened at their feet. One day she was at school writing a composition on the Commonwealth, aware that no one in class could bear to look her in the eye, and the next she was tying her mother’s apron around her waist, hooking marbles out of Jamie’s mouth, the baby howling on her hip.
A note was sent to her father: was there no alternative to Pearl’s leaving school? The girl was bright. She might go far.
But even if Pearl had passed on the note, Patrick Keogh was beyond replying. It wasn’t just the grog, not then. For a while he simply lost the capacity to translate the world around him. He knew his girl was clever; he loved her quickness, the way that, even at twelve or thirteen, she’d known how things stood. The inequities of life. But his own loss had blinded him to hers; he could not see that her world had collapsed into itself, vanished in a day: her mother, her schooling. But Pearl was not blind to her father. She saw him diminish, shrink before her eyes.
He’d never been much of a drinker. A glass of beer before his dinner at night, two on Fridays. A skinful at parties, yes, for the courage to sing “Molly Malone” and “The Black Velvet Band.” His face tipped up like a choirboy. But the voice in his throat had the longing and loss of Limerick ground up in it, a fine slurry, her mother would say, kissing his eyes when he’d finished. Pearl, in a corner with the babies, watched the other women wanting to.
That face again, just weeks after the funeral. Some nights he would look at her with the eyes of a child who wants something but is afraid to ask. Or hasn’t the words. But she was too tired, too needy herself. If she’d still had her religion she might have named it, spoken it for him: mercy. Might have found it in herself, and gone to stand behind him in his seat at the table’s head, put her arms about his neck. Consoled him with stories, with songs.
But by nine o’clock she was all used up. Goodnight, Da, she’d say, throwing a tea towel over the clean dishes in the rack and plucking the last empty bottle from his hands. Go to bed now. This turning herself into someone else each day. This fight, as she spooned the porridge, pulled singlets over small heads, stirred the copper, to be what she had to be: immune to her previous self. To her plain, untroubled girlhood.
Still, even without the drink, Patrick would have been unable to respond to the teacher’s note. Pearl knew it, and understood that despite his pride, his plans for her future, her father was grateful for her decision. And that his gratitude was as big as his shame.
When her mother’s sister offered to care for the baby, Pearl looked at Jane asleep in her cot and wept for the first time.
Sitting at the station now she could only look back at herself with pity. Because it was whimsy, she’d only played at being a woman. Imagined it, dreamed it. Even at thirty-two she was still dreaming i
t, still trying on womanhood as she had her mother’s hairbands, regarding herself in the mirror. As if the glass was regarding her, and might speak, saying yes, yes. Or perhaps, not yet. Despite the clever blond boy she’d taken home the previous night and just abandoned, without ceremony, outside her flat.
She glanced again towards the children nearby. Beyond their heads the row of clocks moved on. The boys found the energy to argue and the girl cried out, her head tipped back. Mum! And a woman at the magazine stand turned. Pearl stood, pulled at her skirt and walked from the platform. Stepped into the current of people moving towards the station entrance.
Ray was lounging against a stone pillar. He fell into step beside her. They’ve bugged my phone, she said into the arched sunlight. It was particled with shadow. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his head jerk sideways and then back. Let’s get a drink, he said. Dug his hands in his pockets as they walked. Autumn sun slid over awnings and paths. He steered her towards Elizabeth Street, and as they approached the bar he said, Timing’s interesting.
She stopped on the footpath in a drift of fallen leaves. Aware only of the sound of her voice, a low hiss in the air. Why? She swallowed. What do you mean? A breeze picked up, leaves flipped around her feet. There was nothing else, just the bladed edge of the world, tipping.
He turned his face towards her. Just heard. Troops to Vietnam. Conscripts too.
Blood avalanched through her veins, taking voice and words. The air stilled. Finally: When? An undertone, ice sliding through water. She stepped across the leaves and waited, her back to him, so when the answer came it might have been from anyone. Soon, he said.
May 1965
The Sydney and its cargo had slipped silently out of the harbor just after midnight. No crowd to farewell them, no wives or girlfriends. No official salutation, no music or flags. Just the southern stars to steer by, and the sky’s southern stars. But as the ship met the mouth of the harbor, a banner, the length of five men end to end, whispered from the shimmering cliffs: “YOU GO TO AN UNJUST WAR!” A silent battle cry from the powerless, the mothers and sisters and aunts. But the ship ghosted past, eyeless, blind, nosing the Pacific Ocean, grinding its passengers north.
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