Shell

by Kristina Olsson

  We’ll sleep like stones, Will said.

  And when she woke in the dark night and walked out, she saw it was true, they were peaceful as babies. Their men’s features subsided and gentle, returned to those of boys. Their bodies soft and vulnerable. It was this she couldn’t bear, not their laughter or their openness, but their goodness. She went back to her bed, pulled the spare pillow close, lay staring at the window, her own eyes staring back. There were no stars, she could not consult Acrux. She was alone with it, her own face, fearful but open, so she let the thought come. Is goodness, she asked silently, retrievable? Not theirs but her own. Because of course they’d run away from her. From the empty space where she should have been.

  Instead, she’d been with Henry.

  The affair had begun while he was still a senior reporter. She knew he was married; but in the environment of the newsroom it mattered less than it should. It was, they felt, an affair of the heart. But they both knew the score. Hearts or no, it was what it was: illicit, secret, charged. He would not leave his wife. When he became chief of staff it only served to heighten the risk and the obsession; time was more scarce, but they shared the intricate and unnatural world of the newspaper and for both of them, no one else would do.

  Of course, word got about. Telephonists and secretaries narrowed their eyes when she passed. But when a new female cadet did the same, turned away from her in groups, refused to address her directly, she felt burned, chastened, diminished. Even then she felt more hurt at the censure of women. If a man found out it didn’t surprise her when he looked at her a certain way, and though she felt cheapened by it, she didn’t feel ashamed. The women’s looks burned shame into her. But none of it was enough to make her stop.

  They’re jealous, Henry would joke as they lay together in cheap hotel rooms at lunchtime, or an hour at night after the edition went to print or the occasional late afternoon.

  But Pearl knew it was something much deeper. Part of it was cynicism: the assumption it was sex for advancement. When in fact the reverse was true: Henry bypassed her for jobs that should have been hers, just to be sure. But there was something else she couldn’t quite locate. Some unspoken rule had been broken, one the women themselves had concocted. It came, Pearl thought, from their own deep-seated frustration at the world. That much was obvious, their anger at men and their own inferior place. Regardless of it all, she despised them.

  How dare they. She sat on the edge of the bed, its hollowing mattress, and lit another cigarette. Exhaled extravagantly. The slats of the venetian striated the night, the sky smeared behind dirty glass. Fucking little North Shore saints.

  Minutes earlier she had knelt over Henry as he quietly came onto the handkerchief he always kept at the ready. He’d groaned, laughed, said Jesus. Now he was silent, propped on a pillow, the handkerchief still spread on the rise of his stomach.

  So righteous and chaste. Pearl handed him the cigarette. They’re probably home tatting, embroidering doilies for their glory boxes.

  Henry blew smoke towards the ceiling. It’s because you’re good at the job. One of the best reporters we’ve had. His eyes on the smoke that didn’t quite dissipate but hung in the air like a question. And lovely. They wouldn’t care if you were ugly.

  Pearl turned to him, frowning. No, she said. It’s something more. I mean, do they look at you as if you’re the devil when you walk into the room? It’s something about me as, what? She stared at the pattern on the quilt, swirling vines of cabbage rose or some such. As a sexual being. It’s okay for you to be sexual, to like sex, even to sleep with the staff. Because you’re a man.

  And because I’m the boss.

  She thought about this. Only partly that. Took the cigarette back, examined it, looking for some kind of reason or explanation. Then put it to her lips. I give up.

  She stubbed it in the ashtray on the bedside table, dropped the damp handkerchief beside it. Then lay her head on his chest, closed her eyes for the brief moments before he would rise, wash semen from his belly, re-button his shirt and his suit. Becoming once more the responsible chief of staff, going home to his sleeping wife after another big day of news.

  But weeks after this conversation, they’d slipped up. There was no time for the handkerchief. Or they didn’t allow it. Later, that was what Pearl told herself: it was an act of love and passion, they were helpless before it, overcome. How else to relieve the nagging fear, or the suspicion that Henry had been willfully careless and she had not stopped him? Had not wanted to dilute his pleasure, risk his displeasure, by making him stop and withdraw. Still, even in the moment, and those that followed, they knew what they had done. Every second that ticked by was laced with it. They’d been stupid.

  When the pregnancy was confirmed she held the news close, walking with it, sleeping with it for days until she told him. And when she did, in a crooked side street in Woolloomooloo where he’d parked his car, there was no surprise or horror in his eyes. Only a fleeting sorrow, or so she thought. A look you might adopt for any bad news. What can I do? he said, and she heard the tone of inevitability in his voice, realized he was speaking as if it was already decided. That there was only one thing to be done.

  He was right, of course. Then why did she hate him in those minutes? She sat next to him and felt her body fill with a revulsion and an anger that surprised her. She wanted to strike him, spit at him. So this is what you are, she wanted to say. Just a pillar of male flesh, impotent in all ways but one. What do you mean, What can I do? You can climb inside my skin and feel it from here, feel the life there and know you have to discard it. Willfully, violently, excise it. A part of you. A finger of flesh that already had a brain, eye sockets, a heart. That was imprinted with Henry’s or her own likeness, in flesh or temperament. To say nothing of her own flesh, the webbing between the two. The terrible procedure itself.

  Nothing. When the words emerged they themselves were lifeless, gray. Just sign off on my sick leave next week. Tell people I’ve got the flu.

  When she walked away, hands in her jeans pockets, shoulders set, she was calm. An odd relief washed through her: that was that then. It was over. Done.

  Suze knew a woman in Newtown. Pearl didn’t ask how. Or if she trusted her. They walked together through the grubby back streets on a cold winter morning, quiet, both women eyeing their feet as they carried them forward, each step heavy with dread. But Pearl had decided days before: she’d be composed, businesslike. It was a task to be done and got through. A lesson. She would never be so stupid again. As she walked beside Suze she was aware that part of her had flown to the roofs of the buildings they passed and was watching her bodily self with interest. Noting detail and feeling—she, the woman in the green woolen coat, walked a dank street. Imagining a scene: an anonymous room, a smell of disinfectant. Where another woman, aproned, faceless, cleaved flesh. Her gimlet eye.

  But as they reached the back gate of the terrace house—no more rough or ramshackle than its neighbors, perhaps less so—she froze. Women die of this, she said stonily, her hand on the sharp end of a paling. She didn’t look at Suze. Tell me, what is it that kills them?

  Hemorrhage. Beside her Suze was still. She spoke plainly. Septicemia.

  My mother died of septicemia.

  I know.

  Pearl shivered in the long green coat. Her top lip beaded with sweat. It wasn’t her mother’s death that consumed her but her life, her choices. Pearl was alive because of them. She knew then she would take one self, her bodily self, into the house, into the room, and subject it to whatever was coming. But another would emerge. Her better self, her surviving self, to be rejoined as soon as the other had finished its business inside. She raised her chin, opened the gate. In this way she knew she would survive.

  Later, as she lay bleeding in bed, she clutched a hot water bottle to her belly and tried to imagine the ache and pull and slice as just period pain, no worse. But she wept with the humiliation and the relief and the grief of it, glad her mother was not alive to kno
w. Amy Keogh would not have been harsh, would not have judged or blamed. She would have been startled, as Pearl was, and horrified, knowing that what had been prized from her daughter’s body was more than a lump of blood and sinew. It was part of the girl who had waited at the gate, the one who sang to her brothers at bedtime. The smart, optimistic one, who nevertheless believed in souls. It was that girl, as well as her body, who would not be the same again.

  In those first two weeks she barely left the flat. Lay like an obedient patient in her bed, trying to hear the sea. The elongated shhhhh, a mother soothing her child. The loudest sound a baby heard in the womb, someone had told her, was the whoosh of its mother’s blood. Had her scrap of a fetus, fingerless, blind, heard the regret, the treachery in her own blood? She read and slept, watched rain sluice down the bedroom window.

  One early morning a weak sun, sickly yellow, spilled into the room, and she pushed herself up and through the back door. Her bare feet pressed into wet leaf mulch beneath the trees in the yard, a rich compost of decay and renewal. The earth shed its skin, she thought, and ate itself. In the thin air each step released the thick, organic odor. She stopped, breathed, recognizing it: the smell of her own body as it discharged its pathetic cargo. Every day for two weeks, as part of her lived and part of her died. But she would not cry.

  As her body mended she looked around the flat and was filled with a revulsion for the dusty, the grubby, for the worn and moth-eaten. Filled buckets with hot water, scrubbed walls and floors and pushed a cloth into cobwebbed corners. Wiped and polished windows. Stood on stools to sweep ceilings. Pulled lost and forgotten things from the darkened recesses of cupboards and appraised them: cracked cups, ugly vases, a too-small cardigan, broken-heeled shoes. A pile for the bin and one for St. Vincent’s. Dragged rugs into the sun. Remembering her mother’s methods, she scrubbed soap into them on the ground, then hung them on the hoist and hosed them hard, watching with physical pleasure as dirty water streamed away into rivulets among the blades of grass.

  Once she would have listened to the wireless as she worked, her ear primed for news bulletins. But found she had no appetite for the world. Instead she played records, Ray Charles, Peggy Lee, turning up the volume so their voices filled her head and infused the air. At night Suze would come and they would lie in her bed and talk, switching to Louis Armstrong or Paul Robeson, the depth of bass and compassion soothing her to sleep. Once, Suze had found an older Robeson in the stack, one of Patrick’s. She lowered the needle and climbed back in beside her. “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” Pearl had turned and curled into Suze like a baby and, winded by its beauty and grief, she cried.

  In the morning she caught the ferry to the city with her brothers for the troop transport to Kapooka. Their faces to the wind and the brine, sun in their eyes. Pearl said: You bloody well better call me. And tried to smile. Or—she stopped, grimacing over the impossibility of the moment, the day. Of their faces, here now and then gone. The irony: when they disappeared this time, she might prefer not to know where they were.

  In the glass shed light played over the casting frame like a bow over an instrument. A violin, a cello. Points of light, delicate, struck the surface of the glass, picking out strands of deeper color, the miniature shapes and figures within. Axel remembered what his teacher had said: glass swallows light. Eats it. Then redirects it, diffuses it, throughout the vessel. Bertil Vallien, not much older than Axel was, but already a master. An intellectual and a craftsman, a man who thought his way in. Axel had tried to emulate him in his approach to material, to experimentation, the preponderance of narrative and myth.

  Now he sat back with coffee and wondered again what Vallien would think of his work. The master had been on his shoulder the entire time, that was undeniable. When you’re at your best, he had said once, you are just the instrument of your thoughts and courage and all you’ve seen, all you’ve refused. Then what you create is better than you are. As the light thinned and the shed fell into shadow, he felt suddenly unsure. Felt he was not even close to it: a piece of work that was better than he was, better than the sum of him, of all his efforts. The sense of doubt dragged at him, but he was no stranger to it. He thrust his legs out and reminded himself: this fear was part of the process, and useful. But at this moment he could not let it win.

  The evening wore on and he kept working. Time passed in scraping, polishing, fixing, and then experimenting with the arrangement of the various items to be encased in the glass. Here or there, this angle or that. He placed and replaced, moved an inch and took it back. Occasional sounds echoed from the empty heights of the shed, the rows of louver windows below the roof. As he worked he thought of his mother, of the emptiness around her, the snow that disguised and revealed in turn. The sounds it obliterated, those it sharpened: voices, singing, weeping. He saw her moving around the house, in the kitchen, at the window, curled up before the fire with her books. On a good day stepping into her skis, pushing off towards the village or out across the field path to visit her own mother or Tove, friend of her childhood, who grew flax and potatoes near Orrefors and—thrillingly for young Axel—always kept a whole pig salting in a bathtub in her cellar. Tove, his mother said, liked to do things the old way.

  It was Tove who made the celebratory spettkåka for his tenth birthday. She spun rings of potato flour batter around a conical mold and baked them, then wreathed the tower in sugary frosting. Every birthday with a zero an important marker now; when he turned twenty, his father had said, there would be akvavit for toasting. Axel had cut the top layer of cake and watched his father, how he fought for composure; his smile evaporated with the coffee and singing and he trembled when his wife touched his arm. But on this day her smile was only for Axel. He chewed the sweet dough and wondered when his father would go away again, back to his work.

  The spettkåka lasted for months. His mother separated the layers and stored them in tins. They ate it with coffee, or at midday when, finally, his father went away. But it wasn’t long before they forgot it, and when it was clear his father wasn’t returning, his mother had other things on her mind. The cake was left to grow hard and rocklike, and when Axel happened upon it a year or more later, it had shrunk into itself like an exhibit in a museum, a dead thing you might find in the snow, preserved by cold.

  They met at Lorenzo’s to plan the big march and protest for October. Pearl sat with Bridget and Therese towards the back of the room, visualizing: the knock-off crowds in Martin Place, tired public servants trying to ignore anything that might impede their flight. The air fidgety, unsettled. What she’d give to be there, among it. Bridget looked at her and lowered her glass. You’re quiet, she said. Uncharacteristically. Pearl blinked into the gloom. There was a misery that washed between grief and guilt. A catalytic sorrow she recognized, as old as her mother’s grave, and still as dangerous. It arrived as anger, and she took it as an ally. She looked into Bridget’s face and might have said anything, as long as it dislodged the pain.

  Just visualizing the march. Pissed off I can’t be in it.

  She glanced towards Ray. Despite the energetic conversation and laughter around them he’d been silent too, and though that wasn’t unusual—he rarely made a lot of noise—tonight he seemed distracted, detached. He stood apart most of the time, she noticed, blowing smoke towards the ceiling, then staring at his shoes. And tired, she added. Sorry. She stood. Gathered bag and coat and drained her glass. Need some sleep. She looped around to walk past Ray, touched his shoulder, indicated the door. He turned and fell into step beside her without query.

  He said nothing as she led him up George Street and turned left at Argyle, climbing up past battered terraces and boarded shopfronts. Up through The Rocks, through its air of general disorder, its disheveled streets. At the top of the rise Pearl stopped, looked out to the harbor and the ferries, lit by the light of early evening. Across Sydney Cove to the bizarre silhouette that might be a bombed cathedral rather than an opera house. In her mind the uncertainty
around the building, its ambiguous place in the city’s imagination, had attached itself to Axel, his own mysteries and ambiguities. His way of being in the world.

  They walked on. Ray finished one cigarette and lit another. The others saw him as taciturn, she knew, but really it was only a refusal to be provoked. Instead this quiet, itself a prod for others to speak, to argue. He made room for that, she thought, for their intelligence. Only occasionally led an argument, or a call for aggressive action. A rare trait among men. So she was surprised when, as they sat on the grass on Observatory Hill, looking over the city and the harbor, he said: What would it actually take, do you reckon, to stop a troop ship?

  In the distance a ferry slid away from the quay, its lights festive against the deepening navy blue of harbor, of sky. The idea sounded new in Ray’s mouth, though Della had been talking about it for months. Depends what you mean by stop. She wrapped her arms around her knees, the evening breeze sparking her skin. Prevent, postpone, or just play havoc.

  His fingers picked at blades of grass. All the above, he said.

  She turned to look at him. His implacable face. Is this Della? What’s she up to?

  Dunno. He leaned back on his elbows. But she’s talking to people.

  You mean Brian.

  They both fell silent as the dark came down around them. The suddenness of stars. Then Pearl said: Block it with sailboats. Chain ourselves to the wharf. Her voice low in the cool, still air.

  They sat with the words between them until, by some tacit agreement, they stood and began the walk back down. Yeah. Ray’s face was turned to the bridge, the stream of car lights. But is it enough? Some biffo with the coppers and a few arrests.

  Pearl followed his gaze. The bridge leapt miraculous from one side of the harbor to the other. He was right. There was no risk in passive protest; and usually no result, except the scorn of the establishment. Disable its engines, she said evenly. Disable the wharf. Her own words surprising her. They hung in the air between them, solid as chain link; Pearl could feel them in her chest, her forearms, her wrists.