Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  She was practising Surrealism. She was a child who knew that horizons swung and that the look of things converted, and understood that marvellous conjunctions reconfigure the ordinary as excitement.

  If there is a beginning to her artistry it is in these recapitulations: the windrush, the planeview, the exploration and expansion, all conjured with the cheeky mightiness possessed by a small girl.

  When Victoria was five years old Nurse Tilly deserted her.

  One year, Tilly said. Your father promised one year.

  She had eyes perpetually strewn with filaments of blood. She was a ragged thin woman, two thousand miles dislocated. Her velvet carpet bag — large enough, Victoria thought, to hold a dead baby — was passed to her through the tight wood-framed window of the train. She wept-in-buckets, hysterically, and then she disappeared. She was carried away, holding her hat, in a south-west direction, so that she could catch a boat and travel back to the sound she left trailing behind her: Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne. Victoria watched the last glimpse of her hand, and the tear-stained handkerchief palely waving.

  Tilly’s leaving was like a memory of something else. Feelings scooped out. Some part of her was agape. Victoria lay in bed, missing her, listening to the sound of ore crushers and air compressors rumbling in the night. Whatever unfolded now was filled with empty black light. She wondered what blindness was like. Or being buried alive. She thought about the Midas mine but found it unimaginable.

  (v)

  Because the whole world was at war Mr Herbert Morrell, widower, mine-owner, fat-man of absurd notions, continued to deplore nations but resented, above all, the disruption to his industry. Gold profits were in decline, good workers were daily disappearing to enlist (seduced by handsome men in khaki with plumed hats and horses), and the mines were full of Enemy Aliens all plotting revolution in conspiratorial huddles or stealing gold by the tonful in their mouths and their shoes. Dalmatians. Croatians. Hordes of soon-to-be-scourged-Hun. Herbert arranged the importation of British timber-workers from the south, but most were unsuitable for mine-work or could not be persuaded to stay. (They spat up dust and cursed; they had never seen such a darkness.) So the Enemy was invited back and Herbert postponed once again his return to Melbourne in order to guard over and secure his underground empire, three times the length — he told everyone — of the Eiffel Tower.

  He woke choking at night, his sheets a winding tangle. Herbert Morrell, Voisin pilot and international capitalist, feared the unions and their incessant talk on the topic of ventilation. In the underground men advanced against the earth itself, creating air, like little gods, where none had been before. At the stope they worked with jackhammers and shovelled ore onto trolleys, or now and then planted dynamite in the rock face, and hid as it blew. Dust billowed along the tunnels, insidious and death-dealing. It embraced them like a shroud, with a perfect grey entwinement. In the poor ventilation the miners sucked up silica, and when they stopped for a smoko they hacked as they coughed. Their chests were all corruption, eroded and wounded. So there existed a whole technology of air assessment: anemometers, metometers, konimeters and flowmeters; and then there were those men in ill-fitting suits, like the residue of a nightmare, like deep-sea divers, who descended, armed with instruments, to calculate the dangers of the air. They measured dust and the possibilities of cut lungs and phthisis. They lumbered in slow motion into a darkness studded with men’s eyes, and dealt with miners keeled over from poisons and fumes.

  Herbert Morrell liked to stand, boss-like and imperious, and watch his workers as they stepped into the metal cage. The labourers, the skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen, the machine miners with giant forearms and backs like heavyweight boxers. Crooks and larrikins all. But he was also secretly impressed by their evident bravery. That necropolis down there. The massive threat of pure earth. And he knew too that they hated him and wished him dead. When he looked into their faces murder looked back.

  It was the war, of course, everything was the war.

  Somewhere else in the world was a much larger necropolis, described in gory detail and with maps in the Weekly Miner. The rowdy town had sent off entire divisions, and the news was of trenches, explosions and men gouged open by bayonets, their guts forever foreign. Everyone spoke of fronts and casualties, the Suez, the Dardanelles. Unspeakable barbarities blossomed like poppies in conversation. Someone’s brother had his face entirely blown away. Rats the size of kelpies gnawed at the hearts of strewn corpses. There were trenches like wounds, filled to the brim with flooding blood.

  When returned servicemen began to linger pitifully in the streets, men armless or legless or crazy with mustard gas, men unmanly with tears and displaying embarrassing disabilities, Herbert saw his projected economic empire on the brink of collapse. New Britain was more and more implausible, and his schemes overall more remote and futuristic. Herbert hated the way limbless men still wore their khaki uniforms, folded back, flapping and pinned up where the arm or leg used to be. Henry was fascinated, and stared after them, snidely commenting; but Victoria always averted her eyes. For her the wounded, the amputees and the distraught insane were a new order of things, intercepting her understanding. She saw damage as adult. She almost feared the future.

  Herbert retreated to the Bayley Club — surrounded as it was by a thick sandstone wall — to drink gin from Italian crystal and listen to mine-managers talk money-language.

  If Herbert was lonely it was only the shape of his wife that he missed. He had enjoyed encircling her waist with his arm, or finding her entrance under the covers to take his pleasure. It had been a logical marriage, two shapes in coalition. For a while he used Tilly, and then, until the workers spoke of it, he visited the Japanese brothel in Brookman Street. He was pleased by the anonymity of the women’s faces; under their solemn white masks of oriental face powder, with their hair a uniform dome and their costumes full and modest, they were almost as blank and unspecific as his wife had seemed. To him women were an outline, the cipher of an equation. He pulled at the pointy corners of his Belgian waistcoat, fiddled with the brim of his Spanish felt hat, and chose a woman at random. Something in their interchangeability excited him — and the way they closed their comma-shaped eyes as he moved above them. Sealing themselves up in their own private Orient.

  Now the black woman, Lily-white, whom Rose herself had hired — a mission girl, compliant, well-trained for housework and general slavery — became the outline that Herbert Morrell, mine-owner, desired. Against war-stories and dreams of dusty strangulation, against men with flapping absences and the murderous intent of his workers, he held this narrow dark body, a body in whom he imagined every uncivilised simplicity. Contemptuous of her race, he nevertheless believed Aborigines the custodians of some secret and defining essence, some nocturnal mystery. He ruminated Darwinian and relocated his misgivings. Lily-white was almost not there, a symbol he banged against. She was a vault of differences. A treasure he wanted unburied.

  So it was that after Nurse Tilly suddenly departed, and the walking wounded began to appear incomplete and khakied in the streets, and everything, everything, carried a quality of derangement, Victoria noticed in their house the quiet presence of Lily-white. In the past the black woman had slept beneath tin in the backyard, and worked mainly in the garden, a shadow variegated by leaf-light. Then she one day appeared in Tilly’s old room, apparently invited, and began to roam through the house as though it were another kind of garden.

  She touched objects very lightly, as if they were petals. She sniffed at the glassware and porcelain, and looked deeply into the brittle and unstamened hearts of Venetian lamps, fashioned unnaturally in the shapes of European flowers. She scuffed at the carpet with bare feet, treating it like dirt, and found patches of each room, those least well lit and beyond the glassy stare of stuffed animals, in which to seek her rest. And at night, missing stars, Lily-white would creep from Tilly’s room or Herbert Morrell’s bed and lie with her head on the window-sill or stretched across an open
doorway.

  Victoria saw her there, and spied.

  Even now she tells lovingly of their first night together, and it is a kind of dream-story, an evocation, a condensation of intuitions.

  Moonlight poured in on the face of the woman, whose eyes were fully open and fluid like oil, and whose face was coated with silver so that she shone like water. She lay on her back, motionless, with her two hands splayed open on the oval mound of her belly. Formal and composed. She had thin wrists and large feet and an aura of strict inwardness, and the whole room, it seemed to Victoria, was caught up in a pause of tensely held breath. Victoria was unafraid, but still she hesitated. She stood hidden and silent, rolling the hem of her night-dress up and down in a scroll; until at last she whispered as a greeting the only word that would pop into her head:

  Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne,

  It was the saddest, most indefinite word that she knew.

  The resting black woman turned her face slowly. She seemed to have known all along that Victoria was standing there.

  Come, she said. Not even needing to beckon.

  They lay together in the embrasure, looking out at the night. The sounds of the night-shift rumbled over them, the crushing, the machines. Lily-white leaned close to smell the lavender in Victoria’s hair, and the little girl, without knowing why, felt an impulse to weep. But then the woman spoke softly and asked her a question:

  That long-neck, she said. What animal is that?

  So Victoria took a deep breath and told her all about giraffes, and about Africa, where every single person is black, and about elephants and lions and deserts and jungles, about hippos with yawning mouths and pygmies with bows and arrows. It was as though she saw it all from a Voisin, extra-vivid and with speed. Images from story-books unlocked as she spoke aloud and found, fantastically, the special words to describe them. She filled the sky with her very own African confections. Exaggerated. Lied. Spoke like a mini-imperialist, creating a whole continent to suit her fancy. And when she finished Lily-white had fallen asleep beside her. Victoria felt euphoric. She rolled and unrolled her hem and looked up at the stars.

  Victoria’s childhood, like all others, has jarrings, arrested moments, bright distillations, and then long grainy spaces, fast-motioned and faint. She cannot at all remember when Ruby was born — she must have been seven or so, and old enough to notice — but Lily-white’s baby was suddenly alive and present, affixed to her chest in a cosy bundle. Its eyes were all ink, its placidity remarkable; it was one of those babies everyone leant towards as though drawn by a new form of magnetism. Victoria let the new infant clutch at her fingers and rest her face sideways upon her shoulder. She loved its milky musk scent and its repetitious burbling. And when Lily-white permitted her to help with bathing, she knew at once that this act was a shared celebration.

  My sister, my Ruby.

  The tutor, Miss Casey, was also an instant presence, possibly arriving around the same time. She was freckled and French-speaking (with a smattering of rough German), and since she refused adamantly to live in a house with a black woman and her bastard, was installed, to the children’s vast relief, in a large dusty room at the Australia Hotel. Mrs Bossy Boots was forever, from before the Voisin, just as father, Herbert Morrell, Midas-owner and famously wealthy widower, was permanently petrified as an absolute and unknowable emblem.

  In this household there was a tough circuitry of affections. The cook Bossy Boots Murphy seemed to hate the children — Henry for his surliness and Victoria for her evanescence — yet she had a soft-spot for Lily-white and the joined-on baby, and could be heard cooing lowly and lovingly, like the pigeons she resembled. She bobbed Ruby on her bosom, kissed the top of her head, whispered lots of feathery and bird-sounding endearments. Miss Casey, on the other hand, was smitten by Herbert Morrell — the children smirked when she blushed and went girl-silly in his presence — but she also disliked Henry and Victoria and was punitive and mean. She thought Lily-white an animal, despised the baby, and sought unsuccessfully the company and indulgence of Bossy Boots (who disapproved her evident designs on the master and would not, over-my-dead-body, have this upstart girlie elevated, never-ever, never-ever, to mistress of the house). Herbert Morrell liked his daughter, but could not abide his son. He thought him gormless, a dullard and cowardly to boot, a fact confirmed when it was only Victoria who could be persuaded to ride in the biplane. And Lily-white, whose feelings seemed otherwise wholly reserved for the ink-eyed Ruby, knew too of Victoria’s specialness and grew slowly to cherish her. The boy Henry existed as an emotional isolate, his heart a stone. He spent his childhood waiting to leave for boarding school.

  When she reminisced Victoria spoke above all of Lily-white. When she unfolded the screens she kept folded within her, when she peered, through perdition, at those according and disaccording surfaces, she saw again and again that particular face.

  Lily-white, she said, had at first taught her the safe and dangerous spaces of the house. She was disturbed by the Morrell collection of stuffed animals, and believed white people violated any number of spiritual laws; that white people held nothing sacred; that some were actually devils. The space behind the curtain near the giraffe — Victoria’s special space — was designated by Lily-white particularly safe; and they would retreat there with the baby, sometimes to sleep, all three, as though they shared one body. Miss Casey learned to seek out Victoria there, and would drag her screaming back to the world of book learning.

  At some stage, when Ruby was a wobbly toddler — this is the only way Victoria can remember it — her father left for Egypt on some kind of prolonged visit. It may have been, she thinks, in 1919; in any case postcards arrived from Cairo and images of camels and pyramids were sent to Miss Casey, who read expurgated versions of their father’s travels to the children. She told only those details she thought would amuse them: vultures shitting messily on obelisks at Karnak, her father’s visit to the Crocodile Grotto at Samoun, with its mummies of snakes, crocodiles, eggs and human beings. The Red Sea. Dead camels. Amusing and stupid Arabs. Miss Casey put her hand flat to her beige blouse, and giggled and giggled.

  Victoria tried to imagine exactly where her father was, and in each version, concocted from the odd assemblage of images he had sent, he became lodged in a more and more peculiar land, some place where nothing sane or ordinary ever happened; some nation of pure extravagances. But it was good to have him away; the house was altogether more spacious and altered in tone. One day she crept into her father’s bedroom, hesitating even though she knew he couldn’t possibly appear, and began exploring. There were lots of men things: guns, riding boots, a cap and goggles for the old Voisin. A black belt he once told her had been created from the hide of a savage. Things with stories. Fearful things. There was a falcon in a bell-jar that followed every move. Objects made of teeth. Forlorn beasts stuffed and mounted and no longer in living existence.

  Then in a wardrobe she found an entire set of women’s clothes, hanging perfectly still and hidden in semi-darkness. They were elaborate garments, many with panels, embroidery and transparent attachments, and out-sized hats decorated with pink tea-roses or yellow gauze, together with shoes lined up beneath them in neat matching couples. These were her mother’s clothes. They were empty, lank and smelled like death. Earwigs scurried and moths lifted up: it was a little universe of soft and crushable creatures. Victoria stared for an instant, even touched the fluted sleeve of a cornflower-patterned dress, and then slammed shut the wardrobe. As she fled she saw her own face, peaky and child-androgynous, vibrate for a second in the crown-shaped mirror above her parents’ dressing table. She spoke to no one, not even Lily-white, of what she had discovered.

  It was not long after this that a strange man came to the front door and asked to see her mother. Victoria watched the scene from her place tucked within the folds of the curtains. It occurred to her, and for the first time, that perhaps after all her mother was somewhere still alive, and hidden away like her wardrobe of clothes.
Perhaps she was in a cave, or a mine, or inside some Egyptian sarcophagus. It was an appalling thought and one which made her tremble. The man was tall, thin, and spooky pale, and insisted on speaking personally to Mrs Rose Morrell. Mrs Murphy argued at the doorstep — pushing her pudgy body towards him like a hen — but the pale man became even more distressed and agitated. He flailed his arms and raised his voice.

  Rose! he called out. Rose, it’s me! (As if she was hiding alive in the house.)

  Please Moira, he said, begging Mrs Murphy. Please, Moira, please.

  Then Lily-white, who had been listening, emerged from the house, took the visitor by the arm and guided him gently into the garden. In a gesture of tender solicitude, she sat him down beside her on the gravel. Leaning close she whispered something, and the man let out a cry. He buried his face in his hands, shuddered and wept. Victoria had never before seen a grown man weep; and would never again see a man weep with such despairing abandon. Lily-white rocked back and forth, sang a song in her own language, and eventually the man rose, turned slowly, and walked away. Lily-white stayed there, singing, in the amber light of late afternoon, and it seemed to Victoria that her voice was full of plan-gent Melbournes. Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne, Lily-white sang.