Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  It was a world, the child found, populated with many strange men. When she walked in the town with Ruby and Lily-white, men would often hail them with incomprehensible messages, and seemed somehow always on the verge of misbehaviour. They shoved their hands deep into their miners’ pockets. Winked. Leered. Sometimes they burst out laughing at their own private jokes. One day a returned soldier exposed himself in the lane: he stood absurdly at attention, with one hand cradling his genitals and the other raised in salute, and sang out:

  Reckon you’d like a bit a this one, ya fuckin darkie fuckin gin?

  Lily-white averted her eyes, tightened her grip on the children’s hands, and pushed carefully past him. There was a guttural spitting sound behind them, and a parting obscenity.

  Is he a debil-debil? Victoria had asked, fascinated by what she had seen.

  Nah, said Lily-white. He’s a sick man. In the head.

  She touched her temple, which was moist with sweat. Her eyes were large and lustrous and inflected by fear. She raised Ruby up onto her hip and they hurried away, slowing only when they met a black man, one of Lily-white’s people, further up the laneway and resting in a shadow. They spoke to each other in their special way, then Lily-white laughed and continued home. When Victoria glanced back the second man waved; he was kindly looking after them. He was wishing them well and safe.

  Because Aborigines were, on the whole, banned from the centre of the town, and lived mostly in shabby camps around its outer fringes, Victoria saw them moving down laneways, traversing the town in concealment in their small friendly groups. It was as though the town possessed secret passages and a world constituted by margins. When she thought of it Victoria imagined a double cartography: the laneways were a kind of net beneath which the mine-shafts invisibly ran, but these routes did not match up and this made a complicated pattern. It pleased her to think in such terms, of enigmatic routes and spaces, of mazed complications. She loved too the dappled and penumbral aspect of the lanes, so much nicer than pitch-darkness with its doomed-looking miners, and the way you could peer through picket fences and Mexican creeper into everyone’s lives, and watch people on the dunny, and find cast junk, and garbage, and sad broken things.

  But there are also memories of the laneway that have always disturbed her. A butcher up the road gave away his unsaleable bits of meat, so she had seen black people pass by carrying sheep’s heads and horse’s heads and other objects, obscured, in dripping hessian bags. This sign of their deprivation: the mucky scraps of butchered animals. Even when Victoria helped Lily-white smuggle tea and flour over the wall to her friends — there was a lovely starburst of hands reaching upwards to receive it — this image, this grisly image, did not quite dispel. A sheep’s head, under an arm, its fat eyes staring, its neck especially bloody and slimed with viscera.

  And it was in a laneway, too, that Henry blinded Lily-white.

  Victoria was somewhere else, sitting in the dirt with the infant Ruby, and Henry summoned Lily-white to identify the lizard he had stabbed. He had pinned it through the gullet with a stick, and left it there, squirming. As Lily-white bent down to examine the creature, Henry pulled out the stick and then suddenly pushed it, like an arrow, through Lily-white’s eye. She seems not to have howled — at least Victoria and Ruby didn’t hear her — but came stumbling past, holding her face, which was gushing matter and blood. Her body was already acting blind, with one arm outstretched before her, and her movements anxious and uncertain, as though the world had been redefined in an instant by its impediments and obstacles. She found her way to the kitchen, and as the screen door banged Mrs Murphy’s voice rang out: Christ-Almighty! Christ-Almighty! Ruby, in a delayed reaction, burst into tears. Victoria took the child onto her hip, carried her inside, and there they watched Mrs Murphy — who continued murmuring, all the while, Christ-Almighty, Christ-Almighty — tend their wounded mother, Lily-white, whose left eye was entirely split open and gone, whose beautiful face was ruined forever, and who was so very still and submissive beneath Mrs Murphy’s large mottled hands, that the girls knew this was something calamitous and wholly irremediable.

  Henry entered and the screen door banged once again. He lifted a pitcher of milk from the sideboard and tipped it into his face.

  That night Mrs Murphy seized Henry — though he was almost eleven years old — and dragged him to his father’s room to punish and berate him. Without knowing it, she used the belt that had been made from the skin of an Aborigine’s back.

  Lily-white was different, after that. She grew rather solitary and silent and walked awkwardly, with a slight tilt to one side. More than blindness assailed her; half her spirit seemed gone. She was afraid of Henry and her fear conveyed itself to Ruby, who put up her hands to her eyes whenever he approached. Henry enjoyed this, and teased her, making jabbing gestures in the air, and he so swaggered with his power to intimidate and scare that even Miss Casey grew afraid of him and stopped demanding schoolwork. Through her employer she arranged to have Henry sent to boarding school early, and on the night of his departure there was such rejoicing in every female heart in the house that Victoria thought that the roof of the house would lift off, or some other bewitching sign materialise to express or betray them. No one waved at the train. And Henry spat at them from the window.

  He had been gone a couple of weeks when a crate arrived one day from faraway Egypt. Mrs Murphy and Miss Casey unpacked it together, oohing and aahing in chorus as each foreign object was divested of its straw. There was a framed photograph of Herbert Morrell posed in Nubian dress (looking larger and more florid than Victoria remembered him), at which Miss Casey exclaimed, and sighed, and rested her hand flatly over her bosom above her starched beige blouse; and another of the Sphinx, its effaced features eerie. There were pots with inscriptions, a leather pouch of piastres, and rolls of fabric worked finely with designs of silver and gold. And below these, in extra straw, was a series of mummified animals: a heron, a cat, a small stretched-out snake, and then finally Mrs Murphy withdrew a mummified baby. Its face and hands were revealed, and it was an inadmissible object, of quite a different order to the other souvenirs that surrounded it. It was black-skinned, almost ebony, in its extreme desiccation, and its features had sunk inwards, stretched taut on resilient bone, so that it looked truly less like a baby than some miniature adult, shrunken, or perhaps tortured, by an unknown extremity. It was sheathed in a kind of rag of disintegrating cloth, with black hands holding it like kitten claws, clenched in on themselves. Its eyes were closed tight, with tiny lashes just visible.

  What a sweetie! chimed Miss Casey. How very quaint! And peculiar.

  But Mrs Murphy was repelled (Christ-Almighty, she whispered, crossing herself, criss-cross), and Lily-white, who had been watching the unpacking from a distance by the giraffe near the curtains, closed her one remaining eye and turned away.

  Later, when it was night, Lily-white came for Victoria. They stole outside — she remembers an orange full-moon resting low on the horizon — and took with them all the mummies and a large iron spade. Lily-white carried the Egyptian baby close to her body, and seemed unable to speak. They chose a spot in the lane, a little way from the back of the house, dug a hole, and buried the mummies, one by one. Lily-white lit some gum leaves and swept veils of smoke over the graves, and then sang a song in the voice that resembled sorrowful moaning. The orange moon rested in her single eye. She looked tired and altered. Fearful of debil-debils. She was worn down by these white people and their barbaric predilections.

  In bed later on Victoria tried to comfort Lily-white, but was instead thinking, for some reason, of those clothes hanging bodiless in the coffin-like wardrobe, and the strange man, the visitor, calling out her mother’s name. For months she had been unable to bring herself to ask. But now, lying with Lily-white and speaking very softly so as not to awaken Ruby, she put her lips close as a kiss to the woman’s dark cheek.

  My other mother, she said. Where is she, Lily?

  Lily-whit
e drew in a breath, half-dozing, and answered slowly.

  She gone, your mother. Gone to her spirit. Somewheres. I dunno.

  Is she dead, Lily?

  Yeah, Viccy, yeah. Your mother dead. Maybe in whitefella heaven. Or in her spirit place. Somewheres.

  It was a relief to hear it. Victoria nestled in the dark triangle Lily-white had made with her arm, and they snoozed together, very close, each exhausted by sorrow, and by burial, and by untimely grief.

  (vi)

  Herbert Morrell was perhaps lost somewhere in Egypt; in any case he stayed away for several years. Miss Casey, poor Miss Casey, who was faithfully waiting, and under a romantic delusion of considerable profundity, grew unhappy and tetchy and talked to herself over cups of tea; her red hair became straggly and her beige blouses less laundered. But for the rest of the household it was a peaceful time. Ruby was suddenly a feisty little girl; Victoria discovered paintbrushes and brushed open her visions; and Mrs Murphy, time-moderated, was less stern and almost lovable. Only Lily-white remained exactly as she was. Her wounding had fixed her forever in a moment of distress, and left her there, marooned.

  So when was it, exactly, that Mrs Murphy began taking the girls with her to the moving pictures? She would gather up her bobbled and scalloped grey shawl, pin it in the centre with a golden brooch featuring two clasped hands, then simply announce their excursion. It was somehow always a surprise. At the Lyric Picture Palace, sitting either side of fat Mrs Murphy, cosseted by fuzzy darkness and loving every minute, the girls saw a completely new empire of signs. Faces and gestures made startling by the elimination of colour, bodies moving about with unnatural speed and jerkiness, mute declarations, tormented bold posturings. Victoria adored the laminated quality of the images, and the intervals of printed dialogue, always flowery and in exclamation. No one was impassive and no one ever stayed still. Life was racy. Middles were disastrous. Endings were happy. The women were all gorgeous and the men all handsome. They saw heroines with large eyes swept away on ice floes, bounders and cads grabbing women by the waist, evil men with moustaches, zippy chases in cars, daredevils in biplanes, trains out-of-control. They saw Rudolph Valentino kiss smouldering brunettes with tiny dark mouths and quivering presences. How the auditorium roared: it was such commotion! The miners in the back hooted and stamped their feet like thunder, so that the sound of the piano was completely inaudible, and Mrs Murphy, overcome, put her hand up to her mouth. Christ-Almighty, she declared to herself, smiling.

  At home Victoria replayed the pictures. She was always the star, and everyone fell in love with her. Ruby was given only minor roles — she was after all still little and easy to boss — and together they walked around in accelerated fashion and practised virtually their own version of cinema-melodrama. Victoria was clever at paroxysms (of desire and death); and Ruby was a mimic of such skill she seemed able to be anyone, and could cry and laugh and fall over on cue. They even copied the convention of scenic punctuation: Victoria held up little cards with dialogue and flowers drawn on them, and they both stood still for a moment while their imagined audience read.

  Rosetta: Save me, my darling Duke!

  Duke: This very minute, my darling Rosetta!

  Heroine swoons. Falls into Duke’s arms. Victoria embraces her sister as she rapturously crumples.

  Victoria Morrell looked directly into her sister’s black eyes, and saw there the answering lights of a comparable ardour.

  There were many different darknesses; even Victoria knew that. There was the darkness she had heard about, deep under the ground; there was the darkness of the cinema, pierced by a cone bearing images; and there was the town at night, into which, movie-crazy and Lyrically besotted, she sought out adventures. For a time she snuck out on Saturday nights, sometimes waking up Ruby to accompany her, just to peep into lit windows and spy on other people’s lives. The two girls discovered that they were completely invisible: on Saturday nights everything carried a specifically adult visibility. In the pubs sweat-stained men bent and swayed — some had been drinking since the end of their short shift which finished at noon — and they became fluid-looking and indefinite and seemed aquatically sealed there, with the rows of bright bottles and the cedar piano, and the embattled-looking barmaids with rolled-up sleeves, sealed there in a queasy dank bubble of drunkenness, broken only — and it was a kind of shattering — when someone stumbled outside into the night to vomit or cry. (The girls held their noses and felt no pity at all.) There were the houses, too, small huts of ridged tin where light streamed out in little channels from rusty perforations, huts with women left alone nursing their babies by lamplight, and a goat tethered in the backyard, or a leashed barking dog; and the larger houses, mostly quiet, but for the occasional Rexanola gramophone or an argument or bash-up. There were sheds in which men in tight circles played card games in European, and the Glide-Away Roller Rink where couples, still with their skates on, smooched in the shadows along the outside walls. Trams slid past, all rectangular illumination, and over everything hung the incessant rocky rumbling of the mines.

  Beyond the main street, tucked away, were rows of tin brothels, which Victoria found particularly captivating. Some of the women sat in doorways beneath lamps shaded by scarves, and they were posed spectacularly, like criminals or film-stars. They wore flimsy garments of elaborate femininity (beads, laces, boas of feathers) and their faces were made up so that they all bore identical expressions. Ruby and Victoria watched them apply lipstick and smoke cigarettes, then flick the butts into the bushes when a man came along. Neither girl knew exactly what these women did, but they appeared rosy-coloured and splendid, hieratic as sphinxes. In Brookman Street there existed a Japanese brothel; and these women were even more fantastically strange. There were only glimpses as they opened the door to a customer or moved in the backyard with a lamp to the toilet; but Victoria was in love with their rice-powder paleness and their dark lacquered hair, and the way they shuffled in the long pleats of their rustly kimonos. She and Ruby would climb the picket fence and simply wait; and then out into the darkness one woman eventually came, her white face bobbing like a petal on a wet black bough, her small lamp guiding her and perfectly steady. The sky arching above, the round face, and the glimmering lamp. It was a lovely thing, it was an apparition.

  One Saturday night, at the end of such an excursion, they heard above the regular mine noise the sound of fire bells. Everyone else was running, so they did too, Victoria holding Ruby’s hand and dragging her behind, and when they came at last to the fire it was both golden and disastrous. A crowd of assorted people stood in the street, some in their pyjamas and dressing gowns and one or two in roller-skates, and before them, exploding, was the Lyric Picture Palace. Its interior was lined with Baltic pine, and this made for an opulent and irresistible conflagration; the wood cackled and spat, the piano was ablaze, curtains had disintegrated in flashy display, and as they watched the walls leaned, then fell inwards, and on top of that the pressed-tin roof, embossed with lilies-of-the-field, crumpled in a spurt of brilliantly yellow flame. The firemen had withdrawn and patiently looked on from the sidelines, their tired faces burnished and their postures defeated.

  After a minute or so Victoria realised she was standing beside Mrs Murphy. The old woman was weeping quietly and clutched at her grey bobbled shawl. When they turned and left together Mrs Murphy was still too upset to scold, the girls too inflamed to settle and sleep. Victoria would have liked to sing Mrs Murphy one of Lily-white’s songs, one of those songs full of the sound of Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne, but did not know how. So instead she contemplated the streak of incandescence still distantly visible in the sky and added another darkness to her secret list, the darkness after fire.

  (vii)

  When, at fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in the city, Victoria could not believe the degree of cruelty inflicted on her. They all waved at the train, and everyone cried — Ruby was dramatically inconsolable — yet they did not call her back and did not chang
e their minds. She watched Ruby break away and chase the train the entire length of the platform, and the crowd was embarrassed by her ferocious shouts and the wretched force of her sobbing. As the train drew away she looked so very small: this sister, seven years old, her heart publicly breaking.

  Victoria knew nothing of girls her age and nothing of school life. The daily codes of the classroom were completely unknown to her. She wore a uniform, and was given books, but this was the merest disguise; they all somehow knew beforehand that she was an interloper, and ignorant. Her French, she discovered, was peculiarly accented and in some cases simply wrong, and her history — Miss Casey’s history — a handful of bizarre and disconnected stories, all romantically charged and over-supplied with red-headed lovers and tragic kings. Teachers chided her and other girls mocked. Victoria experienced the terror of social non-entity. It was the loneliest time.

  She will remember this period in two specific ways. The first was her friendship with Mary Heany, the large woman in the kitchen who might have been Mrs Murphy’s daughter, so neatly did she copy that body and those skills. She hung back in the shadows, outshone by her kitchen. The girls hated her too: she was a Mick, and overweight, and dumb, and a cook. Her face was coarse and ruddy, her fingers were like sausages. Victoria knew immediately that this woman would care for her.

  The kitchen was downstairs and at the back of the boarders’ building, and Victoria discovered one day that Mary actually lived on the premises: she had a modest room, airless and dank, and it was decorated, rather dominatively, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In this large-framed picture, which hung directly above her bed, Mister Jesus, miserably solemn and conspicuously underfed, pointed with a burning finger to his exposed glowing heart, which was miraculously externalised, as though he bore a kind of kitchen cupboard buried in his chest. Victoria was entranced by the oddity of the image, and by the woman, Mary Heany, who sat sideways on the bed, her chunky knees protruding, complaining of her sinfulness. (Mary had a boyfriend, a dock worker, who visited Saturday nights, just — as she put it — to bounce to heaven on her body.) In the brown light of the bedroom they traded stories of loneliness, and Victoria told her of gold-mines, and the Voisin, and Ruby and Lily-white. She told her of the blinding and the fire and the black Egyptian baby, even of the wardrobe of her mother’s clothes, which had begun to enter her dreams, stirring and blowing like wraiths, billowing into woman-shapes in a vague misty glow. As she gave voice to these things she cherished them all the more; it was perhaps, Victoria thought, like opening a secret cupboard and showing off your heart. Mary understood everything. Mary was wise and thoughtful. Mary was silent when necessary and spoke when required. And she enabled some kind of restoration: that Victoria might inhabit her surer self. In the daytime she wore a uniform and was a shape behind a desk; but at night, in Mary’s company, Victoria knew her own specificity.