Gradually he saw that everything was mediated by water. As if he looked through it to or at the world, making it more substantial, more able to be apprehended. That, he thought, is what he wanted from this: to find and hold the memory of water.
So he began to go more and more to the glass shed. He was happy there. He entered not just the room but the feeling of the glass. The qualities of it a comfort to him, the glass itself a place to enter, an atmosphere, a room. Here no one spoke of his father. As if the mention of him might disturb the thin membrane they survived beneath, all of them. The caul of safety and silence they had made or submitted to, he didn’t know. Or couldn’t remember.
His memory had been cleaved in two.
Summer, January 1966
She stepped into the new year as if it was a dark new country, full of unfamiliar scenes and air. Time stretched out, week after week, each one a trapdoor to fall through. Potentially. She wanted to see her brothers.
There’d been one phone call, both of them exhausted, vague. The training was hard, day and night, in all weather. Yes, they’d let her know. Yes, they’d ring their father. And they did call Patrick at Christmas, their voices manly through the phone according to the young nurse who held it to Patrick’s ear. They didn’t call her and she wasn’t surprised. The things Patrick did not know, could not ask.
Two pieces of her “Affront” series were scheduled for the summer break. Tennant and Dark. Judith had given her the news as she would a surprise Christmas present. People have more time to read in the holidays, she’d beamed.
No one will read them in the holidays. Pearl smiled as she walked away. Have you noticed circulation numbers in January? She was meant to feel grateful they were even getting a run. Back at her desk she pulled out the file and knew she would not write the others.
When she finally heard Jamie’s voice down the line her blood ran hot and cold. Joy and trepidation, and in the end it was just that: he’d be out soon on a Skippy flight to join the 1RAR. But Will wouldn’t. Same wrist he broke up north, Jamie said. Came down hard on a training run. He was unlikely to go at all.
When will you? she asked.
No date, he said. And paused. Strange now to go without him.
When he rang off, she called Suze. Unable to face an empty flat after work. My last art students have graduated, Suze said, come and celebrate. She gave Pearl an address in Surry Hills. They’re young, but they’re interesting.
It was close to midnight. He looked at his watch, startled by the numbers, the minute hand relentless. Time had detached itself from the room, from him, the hours atomized. He looked around, walked to the windows, saw the compacted hours of stillness outside the glass. Perhaps it was he, Axel, who had detached himself. What was it that Pearl had said? It seems like you’re there, but are you? He looked again at the watch face. It was meaningless. The second hand drifted between numbers, began again. He raised his eyes to the room and knew his mind had been temporarily lost.
But no, there were no visions, no ghouls sweeping in from the harbor, no tremors. He slumped in a chair, held up his palms; steady, dry, familiar, brushed by grains of sand and color. Blue, from the work he’d been at so blindly and for so long. That was it; he’d been blinded by his own vision, his own eyes. Hadn’t noticed time gather itself in the room and bolt. But now his body felt it, all the hours and minutes he’d spent, in his fingers and hands, in his back, in his eyes. He angled his glasses from his face and propped them on his knee; rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Took up his glasses again and circled the lenses with his handkerchief, felt his breathing slow with the rhythm. Then stood, walked around the table with its small, hard-worked pieces, covering them with sheets. Triple-locked the door on his way out.
No night shift tonight. Was there a strike? He walked quickly around the shells, checking. They glowed ethereal in the darkness. He’d been sure, since the night he’d seen the architect, that he would see him there again. If he only knew his schedule, his timing. He stepped around the cranes and glanced beneath the podium. No one. Loped towards the gate. Behind him the building hunched in the thick dark like a tired animal, slumped in sleep. He skirted around lengths of plywood boxing. The air from the harbor was clean and cool and encouraging, and though his limbs were tired he set off towards home as if he’d just woken from restful sleep. As if he was happy.
He walked around the quay to Cadman’s Cottage. Had made the top of the stairs behind it, one foot lifted to the next step onto the street. His body in motion, so he felt, later, that the explosion had lifted him off the ground. A solitary lamp lit his way, and the beam of light itself seemed to move, splintering like a firework and then reforming itself. Initially he thought: a collision. Bus or tram, something big. But the street was nearly empty. A constellation of thoughts ignited around him. If it wasn’t a vehicle. If there was no ship at anchor. If it was behind him then . . . Panic hurled itself up across the steps and through his body; he turned like a clockwork figure and leapt back down, running before he knew he was, back down the quay.
Pearl left the party in Surry Hills without any clear idea of the time. Late. That was what her eyes registered: the streets empty, the houses quiet. Christ. She’d have to walk halfway home before she found a cab. Stars smeared the sky above the terraces. Milky Way: it looked different in the quiet. More obvious. But there were faint flares of lightning above the horizon and the air felt electric. Unless it was the homemade wine. The Italian boy had pressed her to taste it, topped up her glass when she turned her back. The wine was rich, lovely, and the boy good-looking. She’d laughed off his approaches; he was only seventeen. That’s what she’d said. Or eighteen? I’m the age of consent, he’d smirked in a broad Australian accent.
She was aware of her stilettos, chiming on bitumen like an invitation. Tried to step softly. Unsuccessful. Felt in her bag then for her mother’s hatpin, buried in a side pocket. It was a sentiment, not a precaution, that’s what she’d told herself, but now she fingered it as she entered another darkened street. Stepped up her pace.
Later, she would be uncertain of what came first: sound or feeling. Or if both swelled together into the sudden heat that rose in her body, a flash of danger she felt first as the street, the ominous dark, before the stars shattered around the impact of thunder. Only it wasn’t. She stood still, not falling. This confused her too, that the impulse to drop, to minimize herself, had failed her. The sky reassembled itself. It was not thunder. And it emanated from somewhere around the harbor. She was suddenly sober. Pulling off ridiculous shoes. Running at full pelt towards Hyde Park.
A knot of people at the fountain. She stopped, caught her breath. Tugged someone’s sleeve. Some kind of explosion. The boy had a Beatles haircut and bad teeth. A big one. Could be the opera house.
She turned and yelled, waved her hands. Whistled as a cab slid into view. She leapt into its front seat. Opera house, she breathed, close as you can get. All the way down Elizabeth Street and onto Phillip she prayed to the god she didn’t believe in. Axel Axel Axel. Past the Police Museum and she could see: fire engines and police screaming towards the Point. Here! she snapped as the cab neared Customs House, opening the door before it stopped. She pulled pound notes from her purse. And ran.
He rounded the quay with no notion of how he’d got there. No longer himself but an assembly of muscle and bone. The first sirens screamed and he ran faster. Trying to see the source of the sinister orange glow, the flames. A fire truck behind and another coming. They screamed over and over: the glass the glass the glass. It might have been inside him.
He reached the Point and police already gathering. He breathed, smiled: the opera house was as still and quiet as a chapel. He laughed then, bent over his knees, sick with relief. It wasn’t the building. When a police officer approached, Axel said, I work here. The officer shrugged and walked away. Well, you can’t tonight. Then looked back, cocked his head towards the south. Could be more, we’re closing it off.
On t
he road around the quay, blue uniforms, fire engines, people running against her. She pushed past them. And there, two hundred yards away, crouched in the glare of search beams and street lights, the shells of the opera house, their clean lines untouched by disaster.
Sirens cut into the air; their screams relieved her. She was not imagining, then. Couldn’t be: somewhere to her right, another, softer blast of sound. Thunder growled. A bright flash that might have been lightning, or might have been in her head, her ears.
Now a wall of blue uniforms. She dug around for her press pass, slipped past the police. Telegraph, she said to one. What is it? He glanced at her and said: Explosion on a vessel, round past Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. And turned away. Over his shoulder: Stay behind the lines.
But relief gave way to a new terror now. The danger was not only in the explosion itself, in shrapnel and debris; it was in rolling waves of sound. This had happened in the war, she knew, and more rarely and precisely in places like the one on the Point: where a voice might erupt and pierce the air on the ecstatic, high points of a single note. A note that soared endless, gripping air and breath—until the splinter and starburst of a glass, symmetrical, perfect.
She ran on until metal reared, a fence, a barricade. As she reached it, a hand on her shoulder. Axel. His breath short from running, his face strange. He was staring past her; she turned to more police, some of them undercover, they were easy to pick. Among the white shirts and brown trousers, Ray. Murmuring to a cop next to him. They were all straight-faced, expressionless. Ray looked just like they did.
She spun back to Axel. This made her dizzy; the world tipped. When she opened her eyes he was gone: running past the containment line towards the gate of the opera house. There was a shout from the police. She watched as Axel angled away from the blue uniforms, moving faster now, a lone figure against the rearing building. This transfixed her, his ghostly image, so she didn’t notice, not at first, his track towards the water. Not until he was there, at the edge, until he lifted his body into a perfect curve, a line to match the shells glowing silver above the mayhem, and speared into the harbor.
Her hand jerked from her ear to her mouth.
He emerged to light, brighter than it should be, in splinters and shards. His body heavy in the water, dragging. But that was all it was, a sensory effect, transitory. A feeling like any other; it could be expunged with movement. The thing was: not to stop. He must reach his glasswork, use his hands to stop the shattering. It was Utzon’s glass now. Axel paused, caught his breath. The water was dark, but the sky glowed orange. He lifted his arms, over and up. Kicked.
He’d discarded his shoes but not his watch. Flung them away as he pushed towards the end of the point. Unbuckled his trousers with one hand while the other beat against water and his legs kicked them free. He swam more easily then, a laboring stroke that was somewhere between breaststroke and the crawl the locals had made their own. His breaths came hard.
Pearl’s legs moved before her brain caught up. Sudden thunder, knives of lightning and the trees in the Gardens turned livid. She ran towards them and into the sharp arms of police. Fuck off! Later, she will say that fist met eye socket without her conscious thought. That a man had gone into the water without his own volition. She had to get to him. But now her head was locked in a vise of hard muscle, and there was Ray, hands in pockets, calmly watching as they cuffed her. Their eyes met as she was dragged away. Kicking. She was surprised at the first word that came to her: Quisling.
There was a moment when the rain came and the whole world was water. A confirmation. Or a baptism, it didn’t matter. He stopped stroking and felt it; the pull, the surrender. More lightning and it would be easy, in that fluorescence, to concede. The harbor lit from within. And he was tired. But then the deep percussion of thunder. His mother’s face. He kicked. Arms pushed away, pushed away water. He scrambled up and onto the rocks at Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. Ran.
Rain had turned the surrounding gardens silver, leaves indistinct. The glint of water, grass, trees. A collision of joy and terror; he could save him, couldn’t he? If the glass was intact. If it had survived, so would Utzon. The trees in shadow, flick, flick, flickering, his legs pneumatic now, they pump over moss and leaf, barely touch the ground. He is above, he is flying. And all the time the dull flames on the edge of his vision. Don’t look around, keep to the course.
The sky lowering. Faster. In his head now the story of Utzon’s children. Running, like him, through a forest of trees to meet the train, to meet their father, to tell him the good news. He had won the competition. He would build the opera house. Their legs flying over the forest floor.
Leaf. Dark water. Sky. The harbor not the harbor but a huge animate thing, black. It spoke to him and listened to him in turn. The dark folding in, but he is almost there, he feels the nearness of it in his feet and his hands, in his mouth, where the words wait, swelling out of him, thickening on his tongue. Here I am! He will let them fall into his father’s face, lighting it with triumph. With joy.
Woolloomooloo Bay in peopled darkness. All eyes on the fire dying in the water, on the outline of a vessel, smoldering not so far from the wharf. He slipped into the shadows of the shed. No key. None was needed; a side window had cracked and shattered. His stomach turned. He cleared the glass and crawled inside.
The storm had passed, and remnants of moonlight cut through the dark. Axel stood, hands useless at his side. The glasswork was whole, its shape intact. Still he could not breathe, waited for light to glance over its curves. And there, along its shimmering flank, its textured surface so clean, so hard-won, a crack like a whip mark, a scar. Fine as a fresh knife wound.
The world split open. His legs turned to liquid. He opened his mouth and didn’t hear himself cry.
They were all wise in retrospect. Ray and ASIO, the setup: they’d all suspected. But didn’t say. Pearl knew: they felt the same way she did, naïve, ashamed. Blown out of the water, she said to Bridget and tried to laugh. They sat on benches in a cell that smelled of vomit and phenyle. So much for instinct. Now she was more unsure than ever: who could be relied on, who was real. Suspicious of everyone, chiefly herself.
They weren’t surprised to find themselves in the lockup. Though Brian couldn’t account for Axel, who had been brought in before them and discharged, they were told. What was Sweden doing here? he said. Broke the police lines, Pearl shrugged. They thought he was one of us.
It took twenty-four hours for their bail to be posted. Some elderly woman, the sergeant said. He peered at the charge sheet. Name of Olive Jarratt.
Outside they turned to Pearl as if she, like Ray, had been in disguise. What do you mean, his landlady? But Pearl was already turning away. Her wrists tender from the cuffs, the smell of sweat and disinfectant on her. She caught a cab to The Rocks.
February 1966
In his memory there is just this: the fire, the water. His body in its hold. The darkness. There was nothing in the water, was there, Axel? Pearl held his hand, his arm, as she sat by his bed in the Mercantile. Words had left him again; she spoke to him, for him. Only you. And you came out.
Pearl had expected an older version of Axel but the man she met at the door of the shed was brown-haired, gray-eyed, his face pale after two days of flying. He shook her hand formally and she saw the resemblance then, in the way he held himself, the tilt of his head. Together, she and Lars stepped into the glass shed.
The sun had moved to the windowless side, so she flicked on the light.
And stood without moving. Before her, a vision: a crystalline boat, narrow, and it shimmered in the air as it might in water, suspended low from the ceiling on fine steel wire. As long as a lifeboat, or more, but tapered at each end, part canoe, part longship. It was shot through with the colors of the harbor but at different angles it seemed transparent, so the observer looked through a spectrum of blue, or saw a blue of their own making. Pearl stood still, a breath caught in her throat. The beauty of it. The astounding lines, the su
rface so tactile she had reached her hand out to rest on its curve without realizing. The warmth a surprise. She looked to Lars to find him weeping.
To rescue, he said. To reclaim.
At eye level, the shapes within the cavity might be floating, submerged by flood or tide. A ragged piece from a celestial map. A clock face undulating in brine. Two figures, arms outstretched, reaching or floating in embryonic fluid. Sleeping. Drowned. Other shapes, indecipherable as sea wrack, weightless as dreams. Each altered with perspective, with the angle of sight, each more than the sum of their parts.
Above them, across the body of the boat, a pair of oars, broken. Made not from glass but some fragile wood, petrified. Or was it? Pearl wasn’t sure. They might be fossilized, ancient. Broken oars. Their shape, the jagged surfaces where they were torn apart, suggested a journey interrupted, a violent elision. Or some potential unmet, a promise not kept. Loss.
But the blue: cobalt? Pearl couldn’t say. It was piercing or soft, glowing, depending on the angle of light and where the observer stood. How it was seen. Ethereal, perhaps. Otherworldly one minute, and in the next—a step this way or that, eyes open or squinting—utterly of this place. In its ambiguity, part transparent, part reflective, part shimmer and translucence, Pearl could hear their conversations, hers and Axel’s. The uncertainty of glass, of its substance, how it destabilized perception and truth. The boat was at once a vessel and an element in itself, born of fire and water and ash, of salt. As humans were.
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