by Gail Jones
Nor, as it happens, did he learn the art of skating. He confessed to a superstition — that if he learnt to skate, he would die.
Victoria said: I met Jules’ mother, Hélène, about a year after the war. I had hoped that she might have some news of his whereabouts. But she had been in a concentration camp, and was still exhausted and wasted. She looked nothing like the photograph that Jules had kept of her, but had white hair, pale skin and a gaunt and self-absorbed look. I thought the surface of her skin seemed dusty and moth-like, of a substance that might deposit powder if I accidentally brushed at her cheek. For some reason, too, Hélène was almost deaf, so that she curled her hand, like a bony shell, to try to catch at my words. So we spoke of her son, my lover, in a kind of emotional sign language. I gestured and gesticulated, drew diagrams in the air. At one point I found myself miming ineptly the movements of an ice-skater to show that I knew the story of her courtship. She looked puzzled for a second or two, then burst into tears.
I felt brutal. It was a mistake. Skating into her grief, like that.
5
It pleased Victoria enormously that they had grown up in the same town, and she made Anna draw a map to show exactly where she lived. Anna sketched out a clumsy filigree of streets and landmarks, and placed a tiny cross where she envisioned her house. Then Victoria seized the pen and grandly X-marked hers, and Anna realised that this X was the ‘palace’ of her childhood. It was the largest house in town, a huge building of sandstone behind a looming high wall. Through the iron-work gate you could glimpse camellia-bushes in brass urns and long shady verandahs with gloomy French windows: but that was all. No one she knew had ever been inside it. And Uncle Ernie, who knew everything, said he knew nothing about it. The kids at school said a loony old man lived there, one of the mine bosses, they thought, some rich old bugger; someone had seen a man in a metal wheel-chair, wild, demented, shouting obscenities at nothing. But it was generally so still and so quiet, an encapsulation of secrets, that as a child Anna imagined its only inhabitants were ghosts.
Tell me about your house, Victoria said.
There is not really all that much to tell. It was one of those miners’ cottages made of weather-board and corrugated iron — just like all the others. We had geraniums out the front, and behind a shed, and a dunny, and a large pepper tree shading almost half the backyard. I spent a lot of time, at any case, at my great-uncle’s house, which was much more ram-shackle and very poor. The walls were all lined with filter-cloth taken from the mines, so it smelt profoundly of earth and trembled when the wind blew. Somehow I still manage to confuse the two, so that when I think of our house, where I lived with my father, I think as well of the sweet, earthy smell of the filter-cloth, and the walls stirring and fluctuating with each breath of wind.
Anna is remembering waking up there, having stayed overnight, and finding her face in the moonlight and her child-body alert. The walls were membrane and rippling: it was like sleeping inside a body. Anna found this a comfort. She lay peacefully, quietly, watching the silver screen of night shivering before her, watching the forces that play in thin air between waking and sleep.
What about your house? Anna asked.
So unAustralian! Victoria exclaimed. And so fucking full.
I was kept inside so much I think only of its interiors. Each room had high ceilings with plaster roses, and ornamental lights made of Venetian glass. We had Louis Seize cabinets full of curios: statuettes of Carrara marble, Bohemian bowls in amethyst, fancy objects wrought in gold and a collection of reliquaries in ivory. On the walls hung embroideries from various nunneries in Europe, and a series of ostentatious and rather ugly oil-paintings, including one of my grandmother, looking rather grim, in a décolleté gown. The furniture was heavy, of dark and exotic woods — rosewood, ebony, walnut, mahogany — and the floor was hard and shiny with polished Brussels squares. There were also, I remember, many animal skins, and on the floor of my father’s study lay an entire polar bear, with a set of sharp teeth and two bright staring eyes. I was afraid of the stare and for several years of my childhood believed that the bear came alive when I slept. My brother’s room contained a collection of swords, displayed in careful arrangements on the wall, and in my room there was a collection of antique dolls, some of which scared me because they had no eyes at all. The strangest object in our house was a stuffed giraffe — or at least the stuffed neck and head of a giraffe — which stood about six foot high in the corner of the drawing room. It had a friendly face which I liked to talk to. My brother boasted that he had cut off its neck with a sword, but I knew for a fact that my father had bought it, on one of his trips abroad, in London, somewhere in Portobello Road. I remember that when a governess came to the house to teach us — I was about six or seven years old — one of the very first details of French I learned was that giraffe is a feminine noun and bear is masculine. Like many children I misunderstood, and thought that the world was invisibly sexed.
Anna was silent. She thought of the sandstone house, gigantic and secretive, X marking the spot where all that treasure lay hidden. She thought of animal skins, eyes, a wall of crossed swords. Then she remembered something. She had awoken in the night afraid, suddenly afraid, to see indistinct shadows flitting across the filter-cloth, and had called out to her uncle. He came at once, treading softly in his dressing gown and slippers. A hurricane lamp blended his face with darkness.
Pray for me, Anna said, so that I can fall asleep.
He sat on the edge of the bed and whispered softly: Hey Jesus, how about it? Bring sweet sweet sleep to my darling darling Anna.
Then he kissed her lightly on the forehead and added heretically: Mathew, Mark, Luke and John, hold the horse while I get on.
I know what you’re thinking, Victoria said.
No you don’t, Anna replied. You really don’t.
They sit together in the living room of the Hampstead house. Anna gazes at a screen Victoria claims she stole from Cocteau. It is perforated with star shapes and cloud drifts and is beautifully celestial. Nearby is a figure which apparently represents Jules; it is a shop mannequin from the 1950s, adorned with kewpie dolls sprinkled with glitter and wrapped in layers of bridal netting.
You really don’t, Anna repeats.
In the loose and unreliable concatenation of tales that formed her knowledge of her father’s past, Anna knew that he had grown up with Uncle Ernie; he had been adopted in the city after his parents had been killed in a car accident. The stories were incomplete and over-exposed, bright traces undetailed, bleached out by time, impressionistic, fugitive, vanishing even as they were recalled. There existed a single snapshot from someone’s Box Brownie: Uncle Ernie holding a boy of three or four on his shoulder. Uncle Ernie and Griffo. The simplicity of the image was like an allegory: I hold you; you are held. Man and boy are both wearing similar white shirts: they are equally bedazzling, and a trick of light accentuates their radiant complicity. And though in the photograph Uncle Ernie is still quite young, his face is already ugly and disfigured by scars. This feature, beside the shirts and the unscarred child, adds to the allegory of love and light a terrible vulnerability.
Anna too could remember being carried in his arms — very young, drowsy, wounded and weak — after she had knocked herself unconscious with the returning seat of a swing. She woke to his concern and his gentle endearments. His eyes were swollen and it was clear that her uncle had been crying.
You’re back, he said simply. Thank God you’re back.
Anna had touched the welt on her forehead which throbbed and stung like a burn.
Don’t, said Uncle Ernie. I’ll see to it. I’ll fix you.
His tobacco-stained fingers combed her tear-wet hair. His strong miner’s arms were a cradle she rested in.
Afterwards Anna’s mother raged and swore.
Stupid bastard, Ernie! You should have watched her more carefully.
Uncle Ernie was downcast. He held open his hands as if to say silently: it just happened, M
aggie; I swear it just happened.
Anna felt then the cruelty of her mother’s recrimination and an ungovernable surge of love for this man, this tender tobacco-stained uncle, now miserably inspecting one by one the cracked buttons of bone that linked out of sequence his mustard-coloured cardigan.
Later Anna listed out for herself the reasons she adored her Uncle Ernie.
He told stories. Like her father, Uncle Ernie worked in the mines, but unlike her father, he liked to tell stories. Murders, thefts, faulty explosions. Fortunes gambled and fortunes lost. Acts romantic and acts maniacal. Honeymoon catastrophes. Filmstar chit-chat. Maniacs. Lottery winners. Men blown out of cannons. When he was asked about his disfigured face he had no tale to tell; he became shy, averted his eyes, and Anna learned not to inquire. His face sealed over a secret that could not make itself a story.
His huge collection. Uncle Ernie, it seemed, collected everything. The world’s trivia and variousness enchanted him equally. Insects. Labels. Books. Old bottles. Cards with lewd ladies in preposterous poses. Defunct mining gadgets. Matchbox lids in the thousands. Nails. Bottle tops. Redundant tickets and pamphlets. His tiny house was cluttered with curiosities. Uncle Ernie would say: Collected willy-nilly and arranged higgledy-piggledy!
The hole in his body. Apart from his damaged face Uncle Ernie had a hole in the side of his body, a kind of slit, a crevice. For as long as she could remember Anna had been invited to place her hand into this fleshy mystery. Uncle Ernie would lift up his shirt and would say: Go on, then; feel me insides. The puckered skin held an inexplicable, bizarre invitation. She would touch his warm side, and tickle him, and then they would both laugh.
She could tell him things. Uncle Ernie listened. He liked to be told the gossip of school. He was interested that her girlfriends painted their nails with ‘Venetian Twilight’ and kissed the hips of Elvis Presley. Anna was crazy for a boy called Eamon Ahern; even this she confessed to Uncle Ernie. He treated the knowledge formally, with respect and seriousness.
Griffo was in the yard chopping Uncle Ernie’s wood.
Crack. Crack.
The axe split not only wood, but the winter air. Anna could see through the window the monumental woodpile, her father at his labours, the high-dive of the axe through a sky almost fluid. She thought how very old her father looked.
Then Uncle Ernie said: I was young once.
He slid a tray of hot currant scones from the open stove and placed them on the table in front of Anna. He was wearing a frilly white apron, had flour in his hair, and plucked each scone with his fingertips to set it quickly on a stand of wire.
Glory to behold, he announced, proudly.
Were you ever in love? Anna suddenly asked.
At eighteen. Head over heels.
What happened?
She left.
Uncle Ernie turned away.
Crack. Crack.
He took up the poker and stoked at the wood fire. Anna waited for more. When Uncle Ernie turned back to face her he had tears in his eyes.
Pathetic, he said, bloody pathetic.
Another secret that could not remake itself as story.
Head over heels.
The streets of Anna’s town were chartered in the 1890s in a breadth calculated to allow for the efficient turning of camel trains. Before the romantic jacaranda, the pink stone public buildings, the working-class houses of iron and wood, before the conglomerate gold-mines began to form and dominate, the place had claimed for itself a predisposition of space. The indigenous people, the Maduwongga, had myths to account for the amplitude of the desert, its landforms and weather; but the migrant miners, mythically bereft and excommunicated, worshipped wealth and industry: the vein, they called it. Occasionally, in intimation of something native, they thanked the spirits spontaneously when they ascended at the end of a shift, to find the sky in its right place and the desert air clear. Above-ground was a kind of second geography, a bright other-country.
When Griffo worked day-shift Anna would wait after school to watch the miners rise up, at exactly three-thirty, in their small steel cage. She noticed from the beginning that as they took off their hard hats there were always some who looked upwards to check on the sky. She would wait outside the gate and feel the earth tremble beneath her feet. If it was not the pounding of the ore battery shuddering internally, it was subsidence somewhere, an invisible cave-in. Anna’s body told her that the underground, with its no-colours and its no-sky and its no-escape collapses, was a kind of profanity. She searched among the dirty faces for the face of her father and prayed that he would be once again safe among them. In their earth masks the miners resembled a company of tragic actors; their eyes were glaring and huge, they had the look of men who are well-acquainted with rehearsals of the dreadful.
Anna sat on the crossbar as her father cycled home. She would say: Faster! Faster! and he would swerve and speed just to impress her. On the bicycle they were released from the fact that they had nothing to say to each other, and were united by wind and the spell of propulsion. Sometimes Griffo whistled and his notes sounded slippery and shiny as they blew up behind her. She liked the way his arms extended around her in protective brackets; she held her legs out from the spokes, braced herself against bumps and felt both grown-up and little all at once. She would imagine that they fled from the ghosts of dead miners who pursued cinematically, with arms rigid before them, fingers like tentacles and prefixed mad stares. These creatures could never catch up and always fell defeated, in a cumulus of dust.
On her ninth birthday Uncle Ernie gave Anna her own bicycle. He took her into his backyard, instructed her to close her eyes, then wheeled it in, ceremoniously.
So you can fly, Uncle Ernie said. Try it, Anna.
He steadied the back of the seat as she learned to ride, watched as by gradations her body tottered, righted and balanced itself, and then learned slowly the negotiated posture of wheels. By the evening she was confident and flew off, a little shaky, into the purplish air. She pedalled into a series of private excursions through different skies — early morning silver, high noon cobalt, the lurid sky-palettes of sunsets and storms.
How glorious the wind was, now that she owned it.
In her flights Anna re-learned the qualities of her town. To the known triangle of her school, her house and the Midas mine she added other designs: the parallel hotels beneath whose dark verandahs she snake-shaped, and the looped route between the swimming pool and the fly-specked milk bar. There was also a pentacle pointed out by particular sites: the bakery next to the stables where she bought fragrant bread, the Aphrodite brothel, where she talked over the fence to the women, Mr Paul’s corner store, where she once-a-week bought mixed lollies in white paper bags, the movie theatre, that especial darkness, for Saturday afternoons, and Eamon Ahern’s house, to which she bee-lined, then circled, too shy, outside. Further out in a series of stretching arcs lay the race-course, the drive-in, the false mountains of ore tailings, larger mines with their poppet heads, the pock-patterned landscape of small shafts and claims and beyond that, more mysteriously, Aboriginal camps and the desert.
In this far-out region Anna felt transgressive. Sometimes she followed the railway line that extended to the other side of the continent, and when she reached the point at which shaft holes and machinery disappeared, she was given pause. The land flattened out, and the sky seemed so very domed and extensive that crow calls echoed, quavering, as though caught within a giant bell. It occurred to her that she could ride on her bike forever, but she always stopped. The air was scorching. Heat distortion caused trees to shimmer on the edge of invisibility. Hawks circled above and lizards skittered. Small spirals of sand lifted and spun. And so she always returned. She returned towards the noisy town which in this disturbing perspective of girlhood and reversal, also shimmered unbelievably. It was heat-wavy and barely credible in the distance before her.
Riding her bicycle seemed the antithesis to the dread she experienced at night. Against the ine
rtia of night terrors she pitched her accelerating self. She was known for her cycling skill and entered a daredevil career in which she would challenge gangs of tough local boys for races and dares down the steep inclines of the slime dumps and over the mounds of old mines. Plunge exhilarated her. She closed her eyes and surrendered herself entirely to gravity. She was courageous and stupid. Some of the boys bet secretly for her to win. They would pose for a moment, four or five in a row, intensely ready, then launch together downwards, yelling and unstoppable. Anna Griffin rode like one heroic. Once three boys ganged together and bashed her up in the laneway, just to prove her feminine and bloody.
(Crikey Moses! said her father when she walked through the half-lit doorway with a broken nose and a split lip and a stinging cut above her eye. Crikey Moses!)
The town council banned bikes on the slime dumps when a ten-year-old boy, emulating some mad crazy girl or other, raced across a terrain of dips and black shadows, and flew in a perfect high curve straight into the mouth of a shaft. He fell through the chicken wire of its opening and leaving his bike tangled above him, continued falling. When Anna heard this story she had a vision of the boy on his back, blinking his last moments at a circle of sky — against which was embossed the triangular frame of a Malvern Star bicycle.
After that boys chucked stones at her as she rode down the street. They knew. It was her fault. The show-off bitch. The smartarse moll.
Does X mark the spot? Victoria inquired.
Inevitably, said Anna.
She cannot release herself from the free-fall into mournful memories. After all these years she still feels guilty for the ten-year-old boy who rocketed head-first into the mouth of a mine-shaft.
Surrealist Piratical; what do you think of that for a title?