On his way to work the harbor glittered, a lazy malevolence. On days like this, in winter light, something pushed up beneath his skin and he shivered, as if the harbor itself had risen in him like a tide. On good days he could turn away, obliterate it; other days he felt his throat fill with it, his nostrils. At these times he spent hours alone in the shed at Bennelong Point. Poked and prodded at the forge without intention. Only in sleep could he lose the odd texture of his thoughts, the fear that rippled through them.
Since the election, he had begun to read the newspapers assiduously, hunting out stories about the opera house. And to gauge the temperament of the city, its mood. At home there had always been newspapers, and even as a youth he’d learned that it wasn’t just the stories and how they were written, or the headlines, but the placement of them, how photographs were used, advertisements. The weight given to each. There was a texture to the pages, a sense that you were in good hands, or not, and it translated to the texture of the city. A kind of beat. But here during the election campaign and ever since, the papers had become vehicles of fear.
The men he’d heard on the site reflected it. People who had never met the architect or examined his work had these opinions, outlandish, unrestrained. Through the papers—one or two especially—politicians on both sides invited the whole country to be pessimists. They outdid each other daily in their claims: the costs have blown out, we will slash them; it is taking too long, we will make it faster; the project requires scrutiny, we will investigate. The unions are out of control; we will control them. And worst, the architect has lost touch. He is overpaid, an elitist who can’t solve the building’s problems. We will change that.
Every day, this fight for the worst.
For consolation, he went to the Botanic Gardens every lunchtime and lay on the grass, looked to the sky. He missed his mother. Her face above the steam of the soup pot when he came in from school. Or reading to him in milky light. As a boy he would sit close to her and run his finger down her thick yellow plait, tracing the weft of hair, in and under, over and under. Her calm. No, more: something he couldn’t articulate and would not, in any event, admit. He had not yet loved a woman as he loved her. It was simple enough and had not disturbed him until now that he was far from her, and unsure when they would meet again. He tried to wipe the picture of her, the tears she’d almost choked on as he left, not crying. She’d held him hard and pulled away, her hands fluttering at his cheeks, one moment, two. Then she was gone. He thought of her life, the shape of it, without him. An unfinished square, perhaps, grief rushing in through the gap.
In his memory, she always smelled of snow. Would walk out in all weather. But in spring they would take their bikes and ride for days. In their panniers just one change of clothes and the cinnamon buns she made for her brothers. There would be berries along the way, and water, a friend’s cottage; he was never hungry. They pedaled the quiet roads of the flat country, beside meadows of clover and rape, and he was only surprised by hills the first time. After that he would wait for them, for the joy of breaching the top behind her and waiting, watching his mother’s hair stream out as she flew down the other side. She would stand up on the pedals as she reached the bottom, laughing into the air. Something about that sight, her straight back, her shirt like a sail, made his child’s stomach tumble. He kept watching her as his own bike leapt forward and his face met the spring wind. But he didn’t need to. For Axel, that moment she tipped back her head would go on forever. He could replay it at will for the rest of his life.
When his deep bleakness finally lifted, the season had turned. Along with his work schedule: he was weeks behind. In the mornings he blinked into amber light. Rain cleared the quay, and a cool wind surprised him, slipping under his shirtsleeves and goosing his skin. Leaves crisped beneath his feet. Every day at Woolloomooloo and at Bennelong Point, he hoped for a sighting of the architect. A meeting, a discussion, even the coincidence of being in the same vicinity.
I’m afraid it’s not likely, said Jago, pouring coffee from a thermos in the lunch shed. There’s been a falling-out with the engineer. Axel frowned. They have argued, my friend. Disagreed. Some say it is fatal for the project.
They said that about the election, Axel offered. But we go on.
Jago shrugged and pushed out his bottom lip. At any rate, he said, the architects and engineers no longer pass freely through each other’s spaces. The door has been bricked up. It’s like a very painful divorce.
Axel felt nausea burrowing in his stomach. Surely, he won’t stay away. This is his building.
Yes, of course he will be here. Mondays and Thursdays, as he’s been doing. But you can see why he keeps to Pittwater—there are no distractions there. No one demanding, complaining. Not even a telephone. He held out his hands, palms up. I can understand it.
As they walked out into the sun, Axel remembered the question he had come with. What is a nondy plumber? The impossible word felt like jelly on his tongue. Jago made a face; he was as mystified as Axel himself. They stood near the old glass shed and turned the word over, testing it for variations. It consumed the rest of the lunch break. In the end they went to Armand, who always kept a pocket-size dictionary with his tools. The three men frowned over the small print as Armand’s finger traced the entries for n. Finally: nom de plume! Jago’s heels left the ground. Nom de plume, he said again, pleased with the sound. An alias. A false name.
Later Axel dialed the Telegraph from a phone box near the quay. When the telephonist asked for his name he said carefully: Mister Jansson.
That evening, eating fish and chips in her kitchen—Pearl rarely cooked, he soon realized, and there was no privacy at the Mercantile—she asked him about his choice of name. Laughing through greasy lips. Why that one? You can’t even say it. The sounds and letters his tongue refused, like “th.” His j was like a soft y.
Jansson? It’s a common name at home. Pronounced the same as yours, except for the first letter. He peeled a strip of thick yellow batter from his fish. And it was a name my father used, sometimes.
In his job?
Yes. Because it was ordinary, like Olsson, or Persson. And easy for people to remember. He changed the subject then. Mr. Jansson called to apologize. Not for his name. Because it took him so long to call. Axel chewed fish, slipped a sliver of bone from his tongue. He supposed things were a bit, well, difficult for you. Because of the phone. He looked at her. He thought you might need some time.
They were sitting side by side, but still he could see the cloud that passed across her eyes, a visible trace. Then it was gone. She licked her fingers. Only to settle my fury, she said. Not much you can do about Special Branch. To his blank face: Police who spy, fabricate evidence, tell lies.
He coughed. Were you afraid. Like so many of his questions it sounded flat, like a statement.
Not afraid. She ran a finger over the rim of her glass. No, that’s a lie. Of course, I’m afraid—they’re thugs. But I’m more angry than scared. And a bit jumpy. I catch myself looking over my shoulder on the ferry or walking home.
As if you are being followed or watched. He smiled at her. You must be a very dangerous person.
They sat quietly, drinking the beer he had brought, wrapped in newspaper like oversized sweets. Next door a door banged shut, and minutes later, music. The Rolling Stones. Pearl’s foot tapped out the rhythm. She said, Have you made any progress?
He frowned, inclined his head.
Your glasswork.
Oh. Were her words oblique? He decided not. Yes, he said. He tunneled into language, trying for the right expressions. When they came he spoke them slowly, his tongue feeling for truth. But I find it hard to read this place. Sometimes I want to turn it upside down, shake it. Or get a shovel and dig.
She turned her glass in her hand, ran a finger through condensation. To look for what? She glanced sideways at him, but his eyes were on the wall, as if something might reveal itself there.
I’m not sure. So much is surface h
ere, even people. Perhaps it’s the sun. Perhaps— He shook his head. What I want to know is: what is beneath it all, beneath the skin, beneath the city. He took a mouthful of beer. It’s strange to me. More questions than answers. But then, it’s always like that.
It was difficult to explain. These cool days in Sydney, the occasional fog, were like Sweden in early spring. At this time of year, more than any other, history shuffled closer, a ragged old man in the cold, telling your fortune for a kronor. The melting snow left fields tender and exposed, before the first flowers and spring grasses. A thin crust between this season and those long passed. Between this world and the last. Or the next. Stones and rocks glowed with damp, and it was easy to see his ancestors moving among them.
The bare, cold ground also revealed once more the mounds and clefts of ancient villages and lives. In the still cool air, their lines clear and sharp as if drawn by a blade. Sometimes the spade or plow turned time with the earth, striking metal in primitive shapes, rock hewn to weapons. The shape of a hull. Once, Axel had come upon a long, curved notch in new grass, the land dipping and rising as if it were merely another place to play. He sat down in it, feeling the dimensions of its life and of those it carried. His own. A boat spearing through waves. He saw the hollow it made in still water, the paths it carved in the sea, and felt time melt like late snow, the pull of the past, a confusion of hours.
He had carried that memory with him into adulthood, its possibilities across oceans and hemispheres. This is what he wanted to tell her: that he looked at what was there, but mostly he looked for what was not there. If only he could express it. This search for the missing or the erased, at what might be hidden.
There is a word, he said, struggling for it. The residue? Yes. What people leave behind. Their traces.
He turned his face to her; she nodded. Yes.
You have an ancient culture here too. I’m trying to learn something of it It isn’t easy.
I’m afraid, she said, that we’ve nearly destroyed it.
He was quiet for a moment. Yes, he said finally. Where is the Aboriginal in Sydney? It’s like a picture you’ve painted over.
She cocked her head, thinking. We have painted over it. Layers and layers, obliterating them. I’ve never thought of it like that before. As if it’s all still there, those old lives and ways. Under these, under ours.
He shrugged. A whole picture. There must be. A city under the city. And we walk over it every day.
They finished their fish in silence. Axel was aware of her eyes on him. As if he wasn’t who she thought he was. He yawned. Apologized. Then: Let’s go to bed, she said, plucking fatty paper and cold chips from the table, wiping trails of salt.
In her bedroom he pulled off his shirt and singlet. Stood at the window, waiting. Outside, the ocean breathed its spiced air; in, out. There was no horizon; the stars were lit vessels, fishing boats, yachts, container ships, tacking across the dark. No sound. Only the waves, the low growl as they gathered, heaved to shore, heaved again.
He felt her arms slip around him, her face pressed to his back. Closed his eyes, turned to her, his hands finding her face. Her shoulders, her hips. She was already naked, her own hands busy with his belt, unbuttoning him. Undoing him. He shuddered as she sank to her knees.
Winter unnerved her. She shrank beneath it, small and childlike; her flesh absorbed the cold, her bones ached. At bus stops or waiting for the ferry, she stood stiff, arms wound about herself, chin tucked into a scarf. Her whole body charged with resentment.
All through her childhood, it had been like this. She was never warm enough. The others hadn’t complained, not the twins, nor the little boys running barelegged in shorts. Still, in that first winter at the convent, the old bricks breathing frost, she’d taken thin rugs from a storeroom and hidden them beneath their beds in the boys’ dorm. Don’t tell, she’d warned them, feeling bad for the other boys. But not bad enough. Wrap them around you under your blanket at night. Don’t let them show. If they were cold, she knew, she’d feel even more exposed.
It was a bit the same now. The wind and their absence made her feel skinless and crazed. She saw them everywhere: on trams, in doorways. On the street she searched the faces of men, their coloring, their hair. There were days when she saw them, was sure of it. Her skin sparked with anxiety and fear as she followed a glimpsed profile, pursued a face in a queue or a crowd. She wanted to approach strangers and say: Have you seen my brothers? No, I don’t know how tall, how thin. I don’t know what they weigh. They’re just boys who look like me.
She walked quickly through the public bars she passed, full of hope and dread. What kind of men would they be in these places? One late afternoon, a man leaned in the sticky light of the doorway, a child tugging at his sleeve. Come on, Dad, please. Tears smeared her face. But the man’s voice was graveled with drink. Soon, he said, looking straight ahead. Get home now. A pause, then: Now, I said! It was a growl. Before I belt ya.
It took Pearl three seconds to pass them and only one to recognize the look in the girl’s eyes. The love and hate of all daughters of drunks. She’d never considered herself one of them, even in the lost year after her mother’s funeral, when Patrick sat at the kitchen table every night and drank and cried. It was the younger ones who needed him then; they had no idea how to behave. He was silent at times, angry at others. Mostly, he ignored them all.
But he had never raised a hand to them; they had never been smacked. Patrick abhorred the idea of an adult striking a child. Even in that terrible year, as he doused his pain with booze, he had got himself to the school and lashed the headmaster with his tongue. Jamie had wet his pants in prep class, had come home with the marks from a nun’s ruler. You think a belting will stop him missing his mother? Patrick had brought the headmaster’s own ruler down hard on his desk. Thwack! He’d laughed as he told Pearl later how the man’s fat arse had lifted off the chair, how he’d farted in fright.
No one, he’d told the man, watching his forehead bead with sweat, do you hear? No one touches my sons.
But he’d softened about the nuns. Sitting there at the night table, the young ones asleep in their beds. Truth is, Pearlie, he’d said, prizing the cap from a beer bottle, they’re just passing on the pain. Most of ’em. It’s a cruel life for those young things. Pearl, plucking toys from the floor, remembered sour faces in black and white, stern in the schoolroom, throwing dusters at misspelling or chatter. Were they missing their mothers in Ireland or Perth? Did they cry in the night, as she did? Did they dream of boys, those young nuns, imagine their kisses, the feel of a man’s hand on their back as they danced? The drift of chiffon on their shoulders and thighs.
Now she reached the corner and turned briefly to check: the girl outside the pub was gone, the father too; they left empty silhouettes that might be Jamie, might be Will. Grown men, belligerent with loss or shame, shouting at a beloved child. She walked on through lowering light, the same refrain as ever in her head. If her mother hadn’t died. If the welfare hadn’t taken them. If she’d kept up her visits, not neglected them, left them lonely and vulnerable in that pitiless place. She was no better than all the men in hotel doorways. Indulging their own pain, blind.
July 1965
There was a note on her desk when she arrived: a profile of a visiting English writer. Born and raised in Sydney—Judith smiled from her editor’s chair—at least until she was nine or ten. Elderly now. But there’s a new book coming out, or a reprint or some such, you’ll have to check. She pushed a memo across the desk. You’re interested in these half-forgotten women.
An accusation, Pearl thought, raising her brows. What’s elderly? She looked at the note, frowned. Constance Shaw.
Never heard of her. Seventy? Judith was looking at the story list, scribbling notes. A curmudgeon apparently. Contrary. But better than anything else I’ve got for you here. She shuffled the other papers on her desk, dismissing her.
Pearl took the memo and stood. I don’t mind contrary, she said, and
went off to check the library for information.
The file on Constance Shaw was thin, most of the clippings old. Short pieces on the novels she’d published in America and England, one in Paris. Well-received, mostly. One profile noted her “short temper” in interviews, her refusal to give straight answers. Shaw was critical of what she called “the middle ground of England,” its irrational fears. In another story a reviewer mentioned socialism in accusatory tones; the word “cantankerous” was mentioned more than once. Pearl thought she might like her.
She called the number Judith had given her. Was about to give up, and then a voice, low but clear: Yes? Within a minute, perhaps, it was arranged. Come at eleven, the voice said. But no photographs, not today. Pearl rang off and looked at the clock. Ten-fifteen. Jesus. She threw notebook and pencils into her bag and ran for the taxi stand.
Balmain: Pearl watched through the passenger window as the suburb rolled by. Old, desiccated. It was as if handfuls of Sydney had been seized and scattered here, part handsome, part rotting, flotsam washed up on the shore at the bottom of Darling Street and blown up the hill. Everything and nothing was here, and none of it seemed to match: factories shouldered pubs and houses, lanes pushed up beside terraces and old metal works and down by abandoned shipyards and churches. And through the spires and chimneys and sprays of bougainvillea, past the gables and brick: flashes of blue, slices of harbor. She asked the cab driver to let her off near the shops, so she could walk among the clutter of buildings and noises to the address near Ewenton Street. Years ago, after the move to Manly, she would do this every few months, catch the ferry over, walk up and down. Looking for signs of herself. For a residue of beauty. This was where she’d run as a child.
Did it matter, the absence of beauty? If you grew up in unlovely streets, did you grow unlovely too? There was part of her still that could not answer no. A part that knew beauty counted, or at least the form of things. If you were born to the dailiness of the Eiffel Tower, the elegance of its leap, it would surely pierce your dreams, inform your earthly desires. Your ambition. Slipping silently beneath your young skin so you didn’t realize, not then, what had made you.
Shell Page 11