by Gail Jones
Poor bugger, they say, missus pissed off, left im high an dry, an with the kiddie too …
Anna’s invisibility enables her to hear such things. She watches the old fossickers and listens to their thoughts, and knows they describe in their own ways the varieties of forsakenness.
But now Anna and her father are working together, checking the traps. Of a dozen traps, ten are full. They release the bodies of the rabbits and gather each one into a hessian bag. The small corpses are limp and warm, some punctured by the narrow jagged teeth of the traps, and all carry the stench of wasted blood. Flies in lazy dozens stir around their work. Anna has flies in her eyes and can see them clinging in massed groups on the back of her father’s shirt. She does not mind the trapping, but she hates the lingering flies. Sometimes she strikes at them, shooing, and they rise up in ominous clouds. She carries smokebush to wave at them, and to hold off the bloody-death smell.
When they pause for their small meal, in the thinnest slice of shade, Griffo unpacks and portions the food with slow and deliberative movements; then suddenly he says:
She’s not coming back, you know.
He kicks at the ground with the toe of his boot, setting off tiny detonations of dust. Then he squats and shifts four thick slices of bread into alignment.
I know, Anna replied. (Although she hadn’t.)
It is a shocking moment because Griffo begins to weep. He is almost immediately embarrassed and wipes his teary face with the back of his hand; then he spits into the dust, as if to spit out his tearfulness. It is the only time in her life Anna ever sees her father cry, there, with ten dead rabbits, on a hot Sunday morning, and the lingering tunes of blown hymns still playing in her head, and the pestering flies, and the dank smell of musty hessian, and the stronger pungent smell of fresh animal blood, and the anomalous taste of condensed milk, infantile and syrupy, still delicious and sticky around the corners of her mouth.
She leans forward and kisses her father lightly on the cheek. He flinches and looks away.
Riding home they catch sight of a pack of wild camels which buck away into the far blue distance, screaming. Their forms rock and jerk, like something wounded.
Anna listens to her father’s breathing as he pedals the bicycle. She holds the bag of bloody rabbits close to her chest. A stain appears on her dress: she rubs it with spit but it does not seem to fade or disappear.
At home father and daughter perform the ceremony of skinning, up the back, in the woodshed. Griffo demonstrates how to remove all the fur in one action, peeling it back from the body like a glove, inside out. Beneath their skin the rabbits are startlingly red. On their shiny bodies, small as foetuses and terrible in their exposure, lies a sinuous network of dark blue veins. Anna and her father clean the skins and stretch them in the sun to dry, nailing them with little tacks to planks of old wood. The shape of rabbit skins, Anna knows, is the shape of her father’s sadness. The stumpy legs are like arms, reaching up to catch something missing.
Her whole world is like this: analogies, sadness, the hush evoked by a shape. She looks at her father’s boots in the corner of the shed, their frayed laces tied together, their blunt toes communing, and even these seem weighted with his particular misery. She looks at his hands in the act of flensing rabbit skin. They are dirty hands, with nicks and scratches, hands ever busy with chores that do not need explanation. When he has finished Griffo wipes his knife on old newspaper and cleans his bloody hands with a scrap of rag, but through neglect or distraction or self-preoccupation does not, not once, meet his daughter’s gaze.
Victoria will say later that what is remarkable is not that they grew up in the same remote town (her epithet for which is always blazing), but that they both understand the power of vanished things.
Vanished things, she proclaims, are the basis of all art.
Yet Anna secretly disagrees. It is presence she finds entirely compelling. The red bodies of skinned rabbits: their absoluteness, their quiddity. The memory of blood on her fingertips, her father’s quick knife, and the small stain, a dark ruby, left at the end of the day.
4
After her first meeting with Victoria, Anna took key number three from Mrs Dooley, who smiled with her Irish eyes and nodded ratification at such a pleasant lodger, so quiet, so clean, so methodically coming and going, Australian, too, where her nephew lived, with that heat and all, and the no-snow Christmases, and the kangaroos, and the desert, and the black people with pointy spears, and does he write to his dear Aunt, his closest living relative, who loves him like her own, does he give a toss or care at all, such a fine lad, really, and a good-looker too, and a bit of a boy, and cheeky, but so very far away, so far far away. Anna smiled back politely, made excuses for men, then took her brass key upstairs to room number three, entered, sighed and threw herself on the bed. She lay there beneath the window which comprised two rectangles of floral lace, so that it cast vague netted shapes across the surface of her body, as though she were a bride, or a fish, or a freshly skinned rabbit. And in this state of shadow-play, this blurry transformation, she thought about her very first interview with Victoria. Her room was filled with the noise of London traffic — motorbikes accelerating, buses decelerating, honks, screeches, bald tyres on a wet surface — and Anna lay with her eyes closed, feeling depressed. She had flown twelve thousand miles around the curve of the globe to meet a woman wearing swans who did not want to talk to her. They had drunk tea, eaten cake, and engaged in shallow conversation about the English weather. Victoria was polite, evasive and having second thoughts; she dismissed her visitor after only twenty minutes.
At first Anna was tempted to give up her task. She knew in her heart the crankish ambition of biography, its overweening possessiveness, its latent collusions, its disrespect for the irreducibly copious life. Yet she was drawn to assert — unprofessionally — her personal connection; she wanted to relocate herself as the twelve-year-old girl who had pressed a library book of reproductions against her chest as though claiming a lover, the girl who saw in a glorified moment the scattered atoms of her baffled life reassemble as paintings. Anna decided she would write a letter and reveal that they grew up in the same town.
We share images, she will write. What could be more intimate? The desert. The mines. The search in darkness for gold. Do you realise how fantastic and implausible and ordained is our meeting?
Seduction, she thinks; so much depends on the right words.
Tell me about Jules, said Anna. (She pronounced the name carefully.) Tell me something about Jules.
Ah Jewels, me Jewels, me darlin’ Jewels, Victoria chanted.
She affected a broad accent to remind Anna of their new understanding. Jewels, Jewels.
She met him in London, early in 1936. She was almost twenty-six years old and in flight from her brother and father. A colonial. Lost. Still believing in Mother-countries. Victoria was a student at the Amédée Ozenfant Academy, posing as an artist. She had classical aspirations and enjoyed the ritual of it all, the artists-in-studios, arranged in an equidistant circle around a shivering model, leaning forward, daubing, leaning back, squinting, wiping fingers on rags stuffed down the front of childish calico smocks. This effete choreography. This slow-motion dance of spectatorship. The decorously whispered encouragements and emendations. One day, in their smoking break, she was seized with impatience, and left the studio to walk across the city to visit the British Museum. It was a rainy spring day and she made her way briskly, without an umbrella, through the back-streets of strewn garbage and swimming shadows. The British Museum was, and still is, her favourite London site; its Surrealism, she claimed, consisted in its presumption of peep-showing the world’s everything. The combination of universalism and in congruity thoroughly delighted her; she thought of it comically, as worlds-in-collision.
Victoria moved through Manuscripts and Medievalism, through Glassware and Chinoiserie; but she was heading as usual for the rooms of Egyptian antiquities. She liked to roam among the forest of
standing sarcophagi in that tombish atmosphere in which everything old is rendered entrancing and serious. The light was umber, dull, but there were illuminated showcases of glass with exquisite trinkets and oddities — perfume jars from the Middle Kingdom, small toys of eroded ivory, tiny Anubises, Thoths, statuettes of Isis. Jewellery of carnelian and lapis was arranged in the bodily configuration of wearing, with looped necklaces and earrings where necks and ears should have been, amulets and rings indicating invisible arms and fingers. Something in this decorative advertent logic, Victoria found immensely sad. She had not yet discovered her own aesthetic, or developed her own comprehension of things. She would simply stare into the cabinets, moved and perturbed, and only later realised that she wanted something implied.
On that rainy spring day, the day she met Jules, Victoria was wandering in a desultory fashion past seated granite statues of dynastic families, when she saw a young man standing beside an upright mummy case, his face resting gently at the wooden chest. He blushed as he saw her approach, and sprang away.
A foolish impulse, he said, to listen for a heartbeat.
His accent was French and his manner endearingly abashed; he smoothed back his hair in a nervous attempt to recompose.
You must think me a madman, the poor fellow added.
Victoria chatted about something to cover the awkwardness, and then they walked together, like a couple, past the profiled friezes. She remembers that she glanced up at him and saw his face glide among images of kings and gods, dancers, musicians, slaves feeding oryxes. In this context he carried an aura of antiquarian gravity.
Jules Levy was a photographer from Lyon on a working holiday in London. He specialised in weddings. Most of his time was spent snapping at garlanded brides with orange-blossom and fussing mothers, stiff-looking grooms who fiddled with button-holed carnations, bridesmaids with laps full of cascading flowers. When Jules showed Victoria his photographs she was at once dismayed by their sameness, by the eradication in his images of love’s specificity. For on that day, in that museum, she could not have guessed him capable of mechanical reproduction. He seemed to her the very figure of romantic singularity. He seemed to her rare.
When they parted she followed him all the way to the front entrance of the museum, and watched as he pop-opened his umbrella and moved down the steps into the rain, sealing himself off in a circle of water. Near the iron gates — yes — he turned and waved. They had agreed to meet the next day, at 10 a.m., in front of the display of Canopic jars.
These are ceramic pots, Victoria explained, fashioned with the heads of animals and birds, within which the brain and internal organs of mummies are stored. Hearts, for instance. Canopic jars are jars of hearts, floating in the dark in a preserving fluid called natron. Jars of hearts, she said. Hearts. Just think of it.
Later she will realise that it was a quality of loneliness that attracted her. Even his photography was a way of marking himself off from the crowd, claiming the solitary safe space behind the glass wall of the viewfinder. But she had not expected the eroticism of his darkroom: bodies in such proximity, images quaking into existence, Jules’ high face scarlet as a flower.
He worked with an exacting concentration and diligence. Victoria liked the way he sank and swayed the photograph in its fluid, as though the action, not the chemicals, induced its development. Photography is nothing spontaneous but pure fastidiousness, calculation, timing, the achievement of tone. Victoria loved the drip of the tap, the smothered quietness. When Jules bent with a magnifying glass to examine a detail, she placed a quick kiss on his rose-tinted neck, and he would complain that she never let him get on with his work. It was a space overtaken by instincts matrimonial.
He kissed me on the hair:
Jules leant above me and kissed me on the hair. Strange fluids and emulsions scented the small room. In the red light his face was ardent, rich, artificial. Brides and bridegrooms were developing en masse around us and their images swung in hanging rows, like eccentric bunting. Veils were everywhere. Bouquets. Fixed smiles. And though the images had a formal obedient quality, and appeared in the folios as banal repetition, the effect of so many pegged precariously and still dripping wet had for me an arousing and aphrodisiac quality.
When Jules’ lips touched my hair I felt a flash bright as magnesium illuminate the dark recesses of my body.
How can I say this? I lifted my face, and willed him to develop me.
The year was 1937 and they had just moved to Paris. Victoria was a fringe Surrealist, selling nothing at all, and Jules supported them both with his anti-Surrealist reproductions of marriages. They lived in the 6th arrondissement, on Rue Gît-de-Coeur, in an apartment at the top of fifty creaking steps (the concierge said she loved the sound of footfall on each and every one, and sat in a rocking-chair counting, un, deux, trois, into her bosom); it had a small balcony festooned with streamers of ivy, and a window-box of orange and pink pelargonium. From the balcony they could see bookshops: Henri Bonnefoi, Livres et Périodiques Anciens et Modernes, André Minos, Relieur, Libraire, as well as the École Supérieure de Musique, the Salle d’Armes and the Café Le Gît-de-Coeur — which released plaited threads of coffee-scent and bread-scent to figure eight around their heads. At the end of the street was the stone quay and the piss-coloured Seine, and a glimpse, just a glimpse, of the Île de la Cité.
In this city of desolations and existential excitements, full of monuments and cigarette smoke and lost umbrellas and gloves, they laid down their hearts in a one room apartment, and slept together, entwined.
Even now, Victoria says, I still find the shape of his body in my bed.
Let me tell you, Anna, let me tell you about Jules.
There were two particular stories he loved to repeat. The first concerns the meeting of his parents, which he told in several versions, all inflected by the curiously fertile nostalgia that attaches to inherited family tales.
His mother was a Lyonnaise bluestocking, unusually tall and statuesque, and in 1910 she was working as a governess in London. On some kind of holiday break — Jules thinks it was in Scotland — she met his father, a young medical student, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. From a distance she had seen him skating along a frozen canal and as a non-skater was entranced by this peculiar vision: the top-half of a man gliding swiftly and like magic through an all-white landscape. He wore a red-chequered jacket and had his blue-gloved hands cupped over his ears to keep them warm. When later Jules’ mother spotted the skater walking in the street she exclaimed, quite spontaneously: Ah! but you have legs! They began talking and he offered to teach her skating, and thus, practising on ice, learning the mechanics of glide and the suave velocity of blades, she fell backwards, into his arms.
They would skate together in that quaint old-fashioned way, with the woman encircled, leaning slightly into the shape of the man’s body. Together the new couple reinvented movement; they discovered the rapture of arcs and the simplicity of speed. Locals would see them burst, arms linked, through enshrouding fog, aiming for a fabulous fast-motioned future.
But the skater was killed in the eighth week of the First World War. The war had sped him towards a flaming death. Somewhere in Belgium a young English doctor exploded and there was no recoverable body for his French widow to claim and bury. The governess gave away her skates and returned to Lyon, accompanied by her disconsolate three-year-old son.
Jules remembers vomiting all the way across the English Channel, and thereafter associating the rank smell with the toss of water. He lay on the bunk with his face downwards, terrified by the pitch of the ocean beneath him. And on the train to Lyon, he said, it was the sound he remembered; the clacker-clack of the line marked his safety-on-dry-land and his transport into the realm of completely-forgetting-his-father. It was an infant equivalence, a device, that he later regretted, as though what one recalls is a matter of will or contrivance.
Jules said that whenever he imagined his father he always imagined just a top half, as his mother had d
escribed. He thought of a torso, red-chequered and hearing-no-evil, sliding along a perpetually snowing horizon and moving with the supernatural ease of one already translated into spirit.
Whorls of ice, said Jules, marked the trail of my sliding father. That is how I see him. With whorls of flying ice …
The second story concerns a detail of his first visit to Paris. This too Jules told Victoria more than once:
Jules was about eight years old, confident of the future, and had decided that he would be a doctor when he grew up. He looked through old anatomy books that had belonged to his father, loving their surreptitious glimpses of the magical interiority of things — their line drawings of bodies rendered as systems of nerves, their depictions of bone shapes, their location of organs. He studied the symmetries and asymmetries of the inside world, and found there a clean well-lighted space, a tidy and entirely rational system. But on his first visit to Paris, something monstrous distressed him: he saw a display in the booth of the Anti-Alcoholic League on Boulevard Saint Germain. In the window were dried brains in various states of fermentation, all brown, diseased, appalling specimens, and Jules was nauseated and repulsed and subject to terrible nightmares. He dreamt that he performed operations on people’s heads in which he was required to remove their mucky brains with his two bare hands. Brown matter stained his fingers and he was unable to clean them.
Jules never drank alcohol and did not become a doctor.