Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  Before she moved him she went to the nearest nurse. If he’s had his pills, she said, I’ll get him some Milo. Settle him into bed.

  Sometimes they would grizzle at her for interrupting routine, but they rarely objected. Pearl looked at her watch; they were running late, medications were usually done by now. The nurse, young, tired, looked from her list towards Patrick. She didn’t smile. Yep, all right, she said. But not too hot. And get a bib.

  Pearl translated this as Thank God yes you do it but don’t get me into trouble. She mixed the warm drink in the kitchen and returned to Patrick without the bib. She pushed his chair to the window. Pressed his hand around the mug, then hers on top, and raised it to his lips. He blinked slowly with the pleasure of it.

  She watched his face and knew she couldn’t speak the words she had come with. And neither could she lie outright. She spooned the milky granules into her father’s mouth and said she was sure she’d soon have news of Jamie and Will. Got a lead on them, at last. But Patrick’s eyes were blank. Only his mouth moved as he ground and sucked the bits of chocolate. Scallywags. Why are boys so bad at letters? Eh? Did he understand what she was saying? Had he even heard her? For one elongated moment she felt he hadn’t, that the numbness had widened between visits, gouging more of the Patrickness from him. Dadda? Louder, though she hadn’t meant to be. Reckon you might see your boys soon. A hand on his cheek.

  He swallowed. Then his eyelids fluttered; perhaps he understood.

  Tell me about your father.

  It was the end of a warm day, but a breeze had come in from the sea and he’d walked with his face raised to it, and to the paling sky. Some evenings were like this: the vague threat of emptiness. It was easy here to feel without a compass, that there might be a hidden edge you could walk over, blind, and disappear. Now his eyes sought something to fix on. He did not immediately answer her question.

  Below the cliff path the ocean was a giant’s chest, bronchial, heaving itself over rock. They’d climbed up from Coogee in the strengthening wind, both quiet. Her hair whipped at her neck, at her face; he wanted to scrape it back, hold it, hold her. But she walked steadily forward, unaware.

  He blinked into uncertain air. So much he didn’t know. Could not remember. I was only a child, he said.

  There were flashes of memory, snapshots smeared with color, with sound. Walks in the woods, his father naming trees. Crouching to the petals of early spring, or fluted ice on a stream’s edge, the music of water melting. These were not images he could easily call up. Rather they would come to him unbidden, unlooked for, and often unwanted. They made him uneasy. He would try then to summon others, earlier or from certain times, and these weren’t memories so much as points of color, or pleats in the air. Some were insistent: his tenth birthday. His father’s face grave, his unknowable eyes. Just that, his face. And a child’s intuition of change.

  He liked to walk, he said. He started taking me out with him when I was just four or five. He wasn’t a man who spoke much, and I was a quiet child. But I loved those walks. He slowed his pace to mine and we went along together for miles like that. His words spoken in the same rhythm as his feet, moving him forwards and backwards in time, his thoughts shuffling between the boy and his adult self.

  Every now and then he would say, how are the legs? Or point out a rabbit or a deer. He’d know when I was tired, so I never had to complain. He must have felt it in my movements or my breathing. But he wouldn’t say. He’d just find a tree for sitting under, or a good outlook, and say it was time for a pipe.

  He was aware of Pearl keeping step with him, her deep concentration. There was only the sound of the sea, its regular breathing, and birds. Gulls. And crows, black as night, that swept into trees, settled. He dug his hands into his pockets, shrugged.

  Lately I’ve wondered if he might have preferred a different kind of son. Perhaps a boy who liked ice hockey, or was clever with algebra, or played practical jokes. Like Per. He was always in trouble for something, climbing the chimney at the cement factory, throwing rotten eggs at the women as they came to work. But I wasn’t that sort of child.

  Pearl had been quiet, listening, but now she said: He didn’t disappear because you were the wrong boy, Axel.

  They had begun the descent to the tiny arc of Gordon’s Bay, where wooden boats rested on shingle. The water gentler here, shushing like a mother with a crying child. His legs moved him past it as if they were not his own.

  Axel? You don’t really think you made him disappear?

  His own breathing crashed in his chest. Her hand on him now, shoulder, arm, and it pulled him back to the past. His father’s absences, the sour air in the house when he returned, brittle. His mother was different then, preoccupied, no longer his own, soothing the air around her husband. Axel would be sent to his grandmother.

  Into the curve of Clovelly then, across a platform of rock, and once more the reassuring crack of waves, like the clatter of dropped porcelain.

  Sometimes I wished him away, you see. Wished he hadn’t come home. We were happy without him, my mother and me.

  The words fell into different air; they had come up to the cemetery, a sea of old stones and grass waving between them. He turned to face the ocean, the sightlines of the dead. This surely would console you as you buried your beloved: their infinite view across moving water, its maternal harmonies, and at night the chatter of stars. Pearl stood beside him, squinting through blades of sunlight to the uncertain horizon.

  Once, he’d watched as his father moved heavily through the room wearing the backpack he used for their walks. His boy’s heart leapt. He was half out of his reading chair before he realized: his father was going out alone. He paused only to take down his coat from the rack; the door sighed and clicked shut. Axel’s book slipped from his hand. He stared at the back of the door, as if it wasn’t quite solid, as if his father might materialize through wood and steel and retrace his steps back through the house, laughing at his own magic. Saying: The snow’s stopped, get your boots! But the door was just the door, and the ordinary air fell back into the room.

  He needs the quiet, Axel, he needs the whiteness. His mother’s voice from the dinner table, where she sat mending his father’s shirt. He turned to her, bent to the task. And the trees. Her needle pierced cloth, came up, went in again. She made a knot in the dark cotton, sliced it with scissors. He has been far away. And seen hard things. She looked at him across the room. I think, she said, he’s trying to save us from that. From what he can’t forget.

  Now Pearl took his hand and they turned away, up the rise. As they trod the haphazard tracks she stooped to pull frail flowers hidden among long grass. Then she walked ahead and bent to a grave on the landward side of the rise. Tore at errant weeds and grasses there, tossing them to the side, and pressed her palms to flatten the ground. Scattered the confetti of petals.

  Amy Erin Keogh. Beloved wife and mother. Left us 18-7-1947, aged 36. Forever missed.

  She stood and backed away then, paused for a moment. Turned to walk through the field of old gravestones arranged on the slope like rows of rotting teeth. He followed at a distance, letting her be. Finally they reached the cliff path and a projectile wind; it pushed the ocean towards them, caught hair, salt, leaves. But still he heard it, something whispered like a secret, or perhaps it was the wind dissolving words: My brothers have joined the army. He turned his head, as if they’d flown past him. Expecting the dead to wail.

  Later, as they lay on their backs in the flat, hands held, he waited. But she would say no more about it.

  In the morning rain coated the window, blurring the world. Moisture gathered at its edges, swelling into thin streams that turned the glass delicate, ornate.

  Pearl said: How often did your father go away?

  He took so long to answer that she assumed he hadn’t heard. She turned her face to him.

  He spoke then as if he was not fully awake, though they had been lying together silently for long minutes: I don’t know. Of
ten, I suppose. I learned not to notice. I was content at home with my mother. When she pressed him his face became clouded. His voice barely sounding in the room.

  Did your mother search for him? Did anyone?

  I suppose so.

  Axel?

  The room listened. Finally: I don’t remember. I was only ten.

  Axel stared through the misted window, where the world moved in smudged outline and nothing was absolute. And relaxed, breathed. He might have said more then, might have slid beneath her question and spoken of earlier years, different years that, like the world beyond the window, were incidental, arbitrary. What I do remember—he might say—what I remember meticulously, is the year before my father disappeared. The year of my tenth birthday. It was my lucky number, ten. The day I was born: November ten. Our house: 210 Assarsgatan. It became my measure of things, more than, less than.

  Later, of course, it would intensify: distances, volumes, heights, and depths. Multiples of ten, divisions. A way to contain the world. But before that birthday the number was merely one of the clues he assembled for reassurance, part of the pattern he was making himself from. He was, that year, beginning to see that self in the world. Tentatively, but as a definite shape that moved through the landscape, visible and solid. He had begun to sense the power of his own volition.

  Beside him, Pearl closed her eyes, opened them, closed them again. The rain was a weight now against the window, pressing in. It might be safe to speak, to try out words in certain sequences, careful, testing the air between them: his early days in the glass shed, the intimation that it would be his life, would save him. How he hadn’t known the work of it then, the making of a watery reality, a solidity, fluid made hard so it could be held in the hand. The power of it, the consolation. He knew only the feeling of transformation, a kind of magic, worked by his own hand. It was the elementary, the ordinary, the danger, the heat, not just on his skin but within him. When he first broke a piece, shattering a perfect globe, he gathered up the glass and kept a shard of it in his pocket, carried it with him for years.

  His mother had been surprised by his devotion to the glass world, his uncles too. The old glassmakers had understood, even when he was a child, that Axel’s life would be one of the mind. That he would not be encouraged to join them. Lars had found it difficult to accept. He’s the only one, he’d said to Axel’s mother when her attitude became clear. Then get married, she’d said evenly. Have your own son.

  But Axel had chosen for them. And later, Lars would smile and say, See? It was in him. He chose it. I knew he would. Axel, listening, watched his mother shake her head. How much free choice is there when something is all around you? she asked her brother. When it seeps beneath your skin and enters your heart in stealth? He didn’t choose, Lars. It was there, waiting, too obvious.

  Lars had shoved his hands in his pockets, rocked back on his heels. Then the glass chose him, he said.

  So in the years that followed, Axel kept on at school but spent every holiday with his uncles, and many weekends. He never spoke to them of his father. That might disturb the thin membrane they survived beneath, all of them. This caul of safety and silence they had made or submitted to, who would know? When he was in the shed he thought of nothing but the glass. He entered not just the room but the feeling of it. The qualities comforted him, this hard, hard thing that could be strong enough to contain heat and wind, that could reflect or change light—it eats light, his teacher would later tell him—but at the same time was so fine it could be shattered by a voice. By shock waves traveling a kilometer through the air, more.

  For Axel the glass itself was a place to enter, an atmosphere. A kind of membrane too, a thin protective shell. An insect casing, the hull of a bark boat. A shelter where no one could get you.

  Spring 1965

  And he says, “What’s wrong with you? You young blokes are all the same. Good jobs, good pay. Live in the best country in the bloody world.” And he sticks his finger in my chest—John jabbed a forefinger towards Ray—and he says, “You oughta be proud to be called up, defend your country. You oughta grow up.”

  The party was a celebration: Bridget’s boyfriend had been thrown out of home. News traveled fast; people stood shoulder to shoulder, music twisting through the maze of rooms that was Della’s flat in a crumbling house in Potts Point. In the lounge John laughed as he told them, the fights, his father’s fury. Bridget leaned away from the shouts of encouragement and said to Pearl: He cried that night. His father called him a coward.

  Pearl reached down to a side table and filled her glass from someone’s flagon. Let me guess. He’s a veteran.

  Bridget nodded. Though the party was just a couple of hours old, she looked weary. It won’t change John, he won’t register. They leaned against the wall and drank. My father’s the same, Bridget said. It’s like being young is some kind of crime.

  All the young men in the room. Clean-shaven, most of them, hair cropped and boyish. Pearl glanced towards the back door. Was that part of the unease about Utzon, one of his crimes? That he was young, especially compared to those lined up against him. And good-looking. It was hard to avoid the face of the architect; it smiled or grimaced from the pages of her own newspaper several times a week. The face of a young interloper, brilliant, handsome. The country’s run by stupid old men, she sighed. Ugly too. She looked at Bridget. They burst into loud, choking laughter, wine spilling from their mouths and hands. As they subsided Pearl wiped her sleeve across her mouth, looked out to the warm dark. Wondered if Axel would come.

  She found Ray filling a tumbler from an unlabeled bottle on the kitchen bench. Held out her glass. They sat on the back steps, arms on knees, drinking, quiet. Then in the sobering spring air Pearl said: My brothers have signed up. Surprising herself. From behind them came slices of some facile political discussion—and I said you’re fucking joking. Holt’s a fucking idiot—and the odd bark of disagreement.

  Didn’t know you had any. Ray’s voice uninflected by anger or surprise or booze. He was always like this, come hell or high water. It made her aware of the volatility around her and her own disordered thoughts.

  Two. She pulled out her pouch. Didn’t even wait for the call. Just joined.

  That’s shit, man.

  She pinched out tobacco, fastidious. Tongue steady along the edge of the paper.

  And nothin’ from your man?

  She shook her head. The question seemed out of sequence, or time. She flicked him a look, but he was staring out to the night sky, smoking a tailor-made as if it was his last.

  There had been one telephone message, somewhere near the end of winter. The six-thirty bus has been canceled. She’d been hoping the call would contain information about training and departures, and had composed an oblique question, ready. There was a finality in his voice, and more, something that brooked no reply. It took a moment to understand: they were on to him, or were about to be.

  Fuck it. Ray’s head rocked forward with the force of the words.

  Pearl spread the fingers of her free hand in the air as if she was letting something go. Shrugged.

  There was a hand on each of their shoulders, sudden. Then we need someone else. Della squatted behind them, leaned in. The sweet and sour smell of rum. From this position neither Pearl nor Ray could twist around; they glanced at each other, the same question in their eyes. We need dates, Della said. Or they’ll humiliate us, like last time. She used their shoulders as levers and stood.

  The sentence sat among them, pulsing like a live thing. Della moved off, back through the kitchen and its charged air, voices loud with insurrection and dull with cheap wine.

  Busted. Ray stood. First rule of secrets: never talk with your back to a room. As he turned to go he said, You coming to the big march next month?

  She leaned her arms on her knees and lowered her head. You know I can’t, she said.

  Axel stepped through the door into unsettled candlelight and a roar of noise. Felt momentarily unbalanced, the ro
om pitching like a ferry on waves of sound. He stood still to orient himself; fought an impulse to flee. The room dipped and shifted, the faces unfamiliar and distorted by smoke and shadow. Beyond them a doorway and a lozenge of pale light. He’d drunk whiskey for courage before he left home, but now he clutched beer bottles to his chest and stepped across the carpet, trying for confidence.

  Hey, man. The words at his ear soft despite the thump of noise in the room. He turned to a half-familiar face, a grimacing smile in the gloom.

  Ray, the man said, without taking his hands from his pockets. An Australian habit, but still Axel’s own hand levered up instinctively, and then dropped.

  Met you at Pearl’s.

  Ah. He remembered. A cool afternoon and the surprise of her, sitting with a man under a tree in the yard. Sunlight fell through the branches. Axel had stopped in the driveway, but she’d caught his eye and smiled.

  Neither had moved as he approached. Pearl introduced them across the peeling cast-iron table, cigarettes and ashtray, a biro. Then and later she gave no explanation. A friend. Just that. Ray had left minutes later, and Axel lowered himself onto the edge of the fraying wicker chair. He wanted badly to ask, but of course did not. Pearl leaned back, closed her eyes. Stretched her bare legs in mottled shade.

  Axel lit a cigarette, tried not to look at her. Cast his eye instead to the back of the flats, anonymous wood and brick. He had never been in the yard, was surprised by space, this big spreading tree. An incinerator and a pile of grass clippings, a rotary line like every other yard he’d seen here, a rough garden bed edged by concrete. He leaned forward, rested his forearms on his knees, cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Overblown roses tangled with long grass. Profligate Sydney.