Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  When was it then, Anna’s trip to see the Vision?

  Anna is thinking now of her younger self. How old was she, then? Twelve? Thirteen? And how in any case does one register or assimilate such events?

  It was already quite hot, the sun a bubble of poured gold, when they set out together. Anna and Uncle Ernie strapped hessian water bags to the handlebars of their bicycles, checked their modest cribs and tied on hats; they stood high on their pedals to make a speedy start.

  The air was burning, pure, clarified somehow. She remembers that black cockatoos — swift visitants — swooped in a criss-crossing farewell.

  At first it was possible to cycle side by side. The ground was dry and firm, the paths through the old pocked diggings familiar, and they rode slowly, chattering. Gidgee Lake was only ten miles to the north, out in the desert along a disused railway line, and both anticipated an easy time of it. But as the sun rose higher they reached a territory of stones and double-gees and treacherous pits of sand, and began to cycle single file, pushing hard into the red country, their breath becoming audible, strained and tired. Anna could see Uncle Ernie’s hairy legs, and the sweat beads sparkling on the back of his neck. Flies clustered in dark insignia on the checks of his damp shirt. She was secretly unsure if she could keep up with his pedalling, but wasn’t a sissy or a sooky bubba or a grumble-bum slow-coach, and would die rather than complain. Yet she saw him moving further and further ahead and her thighs ached and her two lungs felt contracted and seared. She could feel sweat running in a trickle between her new little breasts. At last Ernie paused and called out:

  Anna, hey; how about a spell?

  And Anna shouted back: ‘Bout bloody time!

  Uncle Ernie smiled. He stood beside his bike as he waited for Anna to join him. Then said, mock-serious:

  And don’t you speak your bloody French round me, young girl.

  They drank greedily, like animals, in a motley patch of shade.

  Water, Ernie sighed. A bloke could get lost in it.

  When they came at last upon the salt lake it was vaster than Anna had expected, but Ernie’s description was true: it was like shivering glass. And it included a second dimension, a vague and spectral duplication, hanging low in the sky. Anna squinted against the glare and saw the whole world dissolve into a system of pink-coloured reflections: boundaries were indeterminate, surfaces were vitreous, no image stood alone. Tiny trees dangled upside-down beneath the floating lake, and others reached up from the earth in a twinning gesture. The air was crystalline and strange, the light gleaming as mirrors.

  What a Vision! said Uncle Ernie.

  Anna turned to look at his ugly scarred face. It was silver, bright. He held his hand to his brow in a squinting salute.

  Yes, Anna responded. A Vision. Yes.

  She had never seen so many horizons at once. Nor this precise pink tone dispersed around the sky. It was another kind of knowledge.

  The air vibrated as if waves of sound moved through it. It was nothing Anna could hear. Nothing within her range. But the vibration existed. She felt it trouble the surface of her skin and enter the spaces of her body. Trees were jerking their heads in the easterly wind, smokebush trembled and salt crystals lifted and spun. Somewhere, up high, bird wings were beating and for some reason Anna felt like standing with her arms outstretched.

  Ernie and Anna were quiet together for a long, long time, subordinated by awe, by loveliness, by who-knows-what.

  Cycling home they stayed closer to the railway line and the going was easier. Uncle Ernie slowed his pace but was silent and preoccupied; Anna was too exhausted to speak. Her fair skin burned with salt and sun. She felt her body had been blasted by whatever it was she had seen.

  When, after five miles or so, they spotted an abandoned fettlers’ camp on the other side of the line, Uncle Ernie insisted that they cross over to visit his mate Chook, from the mines. Anna protested and grizzled, but knew already that old men are especially lonely, and that they share their loneliness in these casual and stringent meetings in which, it seemed to her, they talked in nothing but the past tense.

  There were four single-room camps of blank austerity: a stove, a canvas bunk, and walls of rusty corrugated iron full of nail-holes and gaps. Chook was the only occupant and rose from the bunk, a lumbering figure in brown shadows, scarcely half-alive.

  Anna could see that her Uncle Ernie was shocked.

  I hardly reckernised ya, Chook, ya dirty old bugger.

  Chook was apologetic.

  Yeah, well. Put it there, Ernie.

  He extended a hand for shaking and Anna saw then the terrible aspect of his condition: his flesh was loose and transparent like a man draped with cloth, and his colour deep blue and speckled, unearthly in its ruined and obvious dereliction. His voice chafed and whistled as he talked, and he was seized almost immediately by a loud fit of coughing.

  Bloody hell, said Uncle Ernie. Why doncha move inta town?

  Chook, abashed, wiped his dribbly mouth.

  Mate, I wouldn’ be anywhere else for quids. It’s quiet. I do me prospecten. Boil me billy when I want. So what brings you to Paris?

  Been gawken at the lake like kiddies at the pictures. Me an Anna. On the bikes.

  Chook leaned over awkwardly and shook Anna’s hand. She was appalled at her own sensation of disgust and almost checked to see if his skin had flaked onto hers. Then she sat down on her hand so that she wouldn’t have to wipe it, and stared at the red dirt floor, feeling ashamed.

  Uncle Ernie and Chook rolled narrow cigarettes and crouched on the bunk close together, smoking and yarning. Chook talked of his time on the Perseverance mine and Ernie joked about mutual mates from the old days. They had peculiar names: Robbo, Stretch, Leftie, Sid. Anna tried not to listen. The past was another country. Old people’s country. When finally they left, Uncle Ernie simply said:

  Miners’ complaint. The dust. Lost his ticket two years ago.

  It sounded to Anna like the formal announcement of a death. They pedalled away from it, that man there, dying in the shadows. Anna’s body was in a dream; her burnt legs rode and rode on without thinking. As they reconstructed their rhythm and found a side-by-side track, they began to exchange, in an instinct of mutual comfort, their small repertoire of comic songs. Anna liked all the naughty ones:

  There’s a place in France

  Where the ladies wear no pants

  And the men go around

  With their dicks along the ground.

  Ernie began to chuckle. Black cockatoos re-appeared and darted to greet them.

  When Anna thought of the Vision later that night, she could also remember Chook, waiting for his death. The two were indissociable. She had an impulse, a shameful impulse, to wipe clean her hand. She realised too that what she had seen was incomprehensible. The place was not her place. And the sound she could not quite hear was not her sound. It was like hearing an amorous murmur or a prayer in someone else’s language.

  One day, out of the blue, Uncle Ernie said:

  Here’s another Vision, luv.

  I was five years old, an out at the pits, with me dad. He was dryblowing soil, and I remember the shudder of the frame, sifting the dirt, an the dust, blowing away, an the pause as he sifted carefully in the gravel for gold specks and nuggets. We heard a sound, a rough drone, louder and louder, and no one knew quite what it was. Miners all round downed their tools or popped their heads out of shaft-holes to take a quick squiz. It was a plane, a biplane, one of the very first in Australia. I thought it was magic. I whooped for joy and started runnen all over the place, like a mad crazy thing, lookin straight up at the sky. Coulden believe me eyes. A plane. Just like in the papers. An then, guess what? A hat floated down. A little girl’s bonnet. I could see green ribbons spinning, an it was slow an it was puffed, like a miniature parachute. An it floated into my hands, green ribbons an all. What a Vision it was. I was that darn thrilled.

  Anna remembers her girl-self thinking: They’re everywhere, the
se Visions; you just have to wait; you just have to look.

  JEWELS

  ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’ — but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?’

  (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

  1

  This is Victoria’s house. It is a two-storey detached house in a leafy street in Hampstead, unremarkable on the outside — the requisite chain of roses, the heavy iron gate — and chosen for its proximity to the Underground railway.

  Not for the transport, says Victoria, God forbid. But the sound and the trembles. I love the extension of space the trains seem to conjure. And the way they faintly disturb and shudder the buildings. You can feel reverberations beneath the soles of your feet.

  What wish is this, Anna wonders, to cherish the sensation of lives extinguished in collapse? She thinks again of Ernie’s description of the earth beginning to slip. Men leapt towards walls as stones fell over them. A whoosh of air and billowing dust unrolled along the shaft, indicating subsidence, or perhaps death, or perhaps a final closing in.

  When Anna arrived on her first day she could not believe that the woman she sought lived in such an ordinary house in such a complacent suburb. She stood patiently in the rain, waiting to be admitted. In the cage of her umbrella Anna was aware that her shabby shoes were filling up with water. She felt clownish. Ludicrous. But when she was at last admitted, passing under a portal hung with Indian embroidery, shaped in triangles studded with small round mirrors, she entered a collection of rooms not ordinary at all, but re-fashioned by the use of screens and props, some of which seemed to have been left over from stage sets or carnivals. It was a group of rooms which so theatricalised its tenant that she ought to have swept about in larger-than-life gestures. If she had been able, Victoria would have pirouetted like a ballerina, but she was old and frail, and mostly confined to the couch.

  She indicated a screen to her left which was punctured with star shapes and covered with curling, streamer-like lines.

  Cocteau, she said, and swung away again, pointing with both arms now, as though she had become a compass fixed on its invisible magnet, to a painting of her own, Waves With Wings, Illimitable. It was an image of orange-coloured waves, neither desert nor sea, or perhaps both desert and sea, which buoyed floating trinkets: champagne glasses, an open fan, a perambulator in which lay a sleeping black baby, a childish crown-of-gold from a fairy-tale storybook, two eyes released from a somewhere face, a tiny shape of Australia, brilliantly scarlet, and, at the very centre, a human foetus, translucent and striated with patterns of veins. Above the orange sea hung two very large dark wings, slightly indistinct, suggesting they were in fact a shadow of unseen wings, somewhere much higher, nearer the sun.

  This was not a painting Anna remembered seeing before.

  Then Victoria swung again, redirecting Anna’s gaze. She leant sideways to embrace a shop mannequin of a man, life-sized and draped with kewpie dolls hanging from ribbons.

  Jewels! she exclaimed. Meet Monsieur Jules!

  She kissed the face of the mannequin and flicked at a doll, setting it swinging.

  Mwah! a kiss of cocktail-hostess artifice.

  And can I get you a cocktail? Tea? Cakes?

  Victoria looked arch and ironical, but stood poised, her feathers shaking, fixed by a spotlight of her own imagining. The room hung around her like a gigantic decoration. Appliquéd shapes on bronze-coloured curtains. New Guinea carvings arranged in a circle. A series of bicycle wheels and machinery strung randomly from the ceiling, by different lengths of wire. In this room Victoria was large and impressive, and in the face of such display, of such habitual exhibitionism, Anna felt as if she was composed of water, leaking in slow puddles into the Persian carpet. Her saturated shoes swam at her feet. Her umbrella dangled.

  You look like the wreck of the Hesperus, Victoria declared. Something the bloody cat dragged in!

  Of those early meetings Anna remembers their per-formative aspect. Now, accustomed to this peculiar room, she can better disentangle the impression of circumambient screens and images from the woman who circles slowly and arthritically within them. Her head-dress of swan’s feathers makes her appear tall and archaic, like some excavated goddess. And though fatigued, Victoria is also restless. Anna scrutinises the details of the old woman’s body, her thin blue wrists, the folds of her neck: she has a slow but firm and definite energy. She will go on for ever, Anna thinks.

  After the London exhibition, Victoria continued, Leonora Carrington and I went together to hear public lectures on Surrealism. She too had been at the New Burlington opening: her eyes were glossy with what she had seen. We were girlish and silly. We laughed at our own artistic inebriation, tilted our heads backwards and roared in chorus. Leonora Carrington’s throat was pearl. Her long black hair swept like waves. In a teahouse, I remember, she raised up her teacup, summoned the waitress with an air of magisterial complaint, and announced in comical French-accented English:

  But zis teacup, ma petit bon-bon; she is not covered with fur?

  She held the object aloft seriously, just for a minute, in order to suspend the waitress in miserable confusion. Then she roared with her horsey, aristocratic laugh.

  The first lecture we went to was Herbert Read’s. He stood awkwardly on a spring sofa as he talked on Art and the Unconscious. Dreams. Automatism. The rich latency of things. Later we heard Breton, Eluard and Hugh Sykes, all proclaiming.

  But it is the Dali story I want to tell you.

  It was early July and still very hot. Dali entered the gallery wearing a deep-sea diving suit decorated all over with plastic hands. There was a radiator cap on the top of his helmet, a fancy jewelled dagger lodged in his belt, and he led a pair of panting, unhappy Borzoi hounds. Edward James, who was Dali’s English manager, followed carrying a billiard cue to serve as a pointer for the illustrations. There was a pulse in the air: beat-beat, beat-beat. The gallery was so sweltering and so poorly ventilated the air throbbed with the fan-beat of programs and hats. Expirations of all kinds were apparently imminent. Women mopped with handkerchiefs and put the backs of their hands against their cheeks to test their own temperatures. Men, all imitating my beloved Jules, ran their index fingers around the insides of their shirt collars or worried fussily at neck-scarves and bowties. I remember that Leonora lifted her hair from her neck, shook it breezily, then let it drop. Lifted and dropped. In retrospect I endow this gesture with ravishing grace. The necks of women and men, their points of exposure and enclosure, continue to excite me.

  We sat together and watched Salvador Dali asphyxiate. Behind the circle of glass he gulped like a goldfish. His muffled voice became weaker, his face was lobster, and he began to flail, drowning in air. Wild gestures requested the removal of the helmet, and the audience was aroused by the expectation of disaster. Edward James tried to unscrew the wingnuts of the helmet but they would simply not budge. The hounds exposed enormous tongues and panicked and tangled. James tripped, Chaplinesque. When he recovered he used the billiard cue to assault the helmet, and with the assistance of another man finally released Dali’s head from its deadly aquarium. The audience sat with mouths open: inhaled fish-like, collectively.

  And would you believe it? Salvador Dali continued his lecture. He talked in Spanish-accented French with incomprehensible intensity on the subject of paranoia and the Surrealist rage against death. Leonora took notes. But I was distracted. A single plastic hand had detached in the flurry, and lay on the floor, orphaned, at the foot of the diver. It was white, child-size and appeared immaculate.

  This body-piece, my Anna-tomical, was my sign, my wonder. I saw the beauty of things in dislocation. I saw the asterix of every hand. And I saw my own hands, glimmering, white and open before me, as though for the first time. As though fabulously new.

  Victoria paused.

  Single-handed, she joked. I became a Surrealist single-handed.

  Her laugh was throaty and full and Anna joined in. But her drifting mind had sn
agged on an earlier sentence: I saw the asterix of every hand.

  The Paris Victoria arrived in: less a city of monuments, than one of marvellous conjunctions. Her own face, astonished, appearing on glass surfaces.

  She bore in her eye the principle of convulsive beauty: together and correspondent existed type-writers, aeroplanes, purple hyacinths unfolding, the fur collars of large women trapping droplets of water, cigarette smoke, velotaxis, old men weighted by sandwich boards, telephone receivers (ringing loudly or sitting silent), café names writ effulgent with electric lights, marble columns, kerbside garbage, gargoyles on the verge of effacement, the lit faces of patrons leaving a crowded cinema, lampposts, stairwells, wind-blown hair, the dark and deadly-looking night-time canyon of the Seine.

  She linked arms with Jules Levy, held him preciously to her, and met the city, jamais vu, hyperaesthetic. It was a reincarnation.

  A woman passes by with a corsage of parma violets, pinned to the lapel of a dun-coloured jacket, and Victoria exclaims as though she has never seen violets before.

  In front of the Hôtel de Ville, in the cloudy square, children are riding a golden and fancifully decorated carousel; their smiles flash with each up-down circle they travel in. It is incomparably festive. Victoria almost weeps.

  An Algerian — she supposes — is tending with blackened gloves his brazier of chestnuts; he bends forward and blows at the coals, ever so gently, re-positions the chestnuts, one by one, and then lifts his gaze to nod inquiringly in Victoria’s direction. Above him a green Metro sign is blooming. A small dog, chinchilla-like and dressed in flounces, is dragged past her, sniffing. Jules buys just one paper cone of roasted chestnuts and they share this modest meal, encased in novelty.

  In Victoria’s mind everything here is wrapped in cellophane: Paris crackles; it is shiny; it is her own bright faceted gift.