Black Mirror

by Gail Jones

  Tilly’s correspondence returned quickly and in two separate parts. The first part was a parcel with a note attached: Tilly had stolen a stereoscope when she left my father’s employ, had always felt guilty, and was now returning it. The stereoscope looked rather like a pair of opera glasses; two shafts of silver held with a wooden handle, and arranged at an angle which endowed images with three dimensionality. There was a neat boxed set of small strips of narrative — tiny little photographs with one-line captions — that could be affixed to the viewing frame. The stereoscope Tilly returned had a story-strip already within it:

  Frame one: Portly rich man in opulent drawing room, possibly American. Wallpaper, ferns, paintings, chaise longue. Rich man to servant girl, coy and pretty: ‘Why my beauty, how long have you been our cook?’

  Frame two: Rich man steals kiss: ‘Oh you naughty man!’

  Frame three: ‘You bashful little creature’, chucking her chin.

  Frame four: ‘Hands! Hands! What does she mean?’

  The man’s wife (one supposes), fierce, statuesque, is pointing angrily. He is looking in the mirror above the fireplace, and imprinted on his back are two floury handmarks.

  Tilly wrote: I wanted this so badly, I couldn’t leave it behind. It belonged to your father.

  When I think now of Tilly’s theft the word dolorous attaches to it; it carries the sadness of servants, heavy, righteous, saturated with bleak longing for something possessed casually by others. I wonder too about her relationship with my father: how long, how often, whether it started before my mother died. In my memory Tilly figures as woeful and shrill, with alarmed upstanding hair and red eyes like a debil-debil. But this must be unkind. In any case, her letter was rather piteous.

  I also wonder whether I saw the stereoscopic stories as a child, since those hands are one of my important symbols. You see them everywhere throughout my paintings. White hands. Cameo hands. Hands like thin clouds on the verge of erasure. That Tilly was my father’s mistress was unsurprising, but the line hands, hands, what does she mean? and those melodramatic hand prints, tell-taling something anterior, those astonished me. It was like a dream returning with spontaneous understanding: une vague de rêve, the Surrealists call it, a wave of dream.

  The second part of Tilly’s correspondence was a letter. Tilly wrote that she had known my chauffeur father well, and had always been fond of him. They lost contact when some of the household moved to the goldfields, and had not seen each other for several years. When they met again, in Melbourne, William had just returned from a trip to the goldfields, where rather belatedly he had learnt of Rose’s death. He entered, Tilly said, a long period of depression; he became thin and spectre-like; his skin was blue and pallid with its lack of substance, and he had rings under his eyes so that he looked bruised and old. It was only then that she heard of the love between Rose and William, and of the child, and the severing, and the promises of reunion. At length William decided to return to London, where he had lived as a boy. He wrote to her from there, sending word of his work, and his marriage, and the birth of his new daughter. At some stage William stopped responding to Tilly’s letters: she assumed he was caught up in his London life and family. She had printed out the London address boldly and underlined it.

  Write! she instructed. He will love to hear from you.

  Sometimes I wonder how indeed I resisted writing, or what fear prevented it. In all lives there are these inexplicable pauses and hesitations. Lost chances. Failed words. Untimely hush. But when I arrived in London to enrol at art college the prospect of meeting my lost father was suddenly irresistible. I took the address dear Tilly had passed into my keeping, and found the house, and the green door, and the number painted on it, and behind the green door lived a diminutive pop-eyed widow, who clearly knew who I was, but did not want to admit me. I stood at the doorstep in silvery drizzle and the woman — her name was Flora — told me blankly of my father’s death.

  Nine years ago now. A tram. A tram killed ’im. We ’ad a loverly funeral, all carnations and ribbons.

  She spoke in an East End accent and did not blink or avert her gaze, as though she was challenging me to contradict her with refutation of William’s death. Behind her, in the dim hallway, appeared a tall young girl I assumed to be my half-sister. She too stood still, watching me. Light from behind her illuminated a crescent of fuzzy curls. I could see lumpy dark-coloured furniture with crocheted covers, and a standing lamp of dirty parchment. In the low-wattage light of the front room everything looked secretive, sad and only partially disclosed.

  A tram, Flora repeated. It was a tram as killed ’im.

  I remember peering into the house half-expecting my father to materialise. It did not seem possible I could learn of his death on the day I had at last decided to meet him. I wanted to ask for details, or to see a photograph, but words stuck in my throat. The tall girl in the dim hallway, looking so like an apparition, drifted slowly towards me. Her face was a nest of light. Her eyes were enormous. I reached past Flora and placed my address in her daughter’s open hand.

  I was damp, clammy and washed yet again by grief.

  You would have liked my youngest sister Frances. Flora refused all her life to see me again, but Frances and I were good friends until she died fifteen years ago of cancer of the breast. We shared sisterly secrets and the same-shaped faces. She worked as housekeeper for a Catholic priest, and never married; yet neither did she disapprove of my life or my sequence of partners. And she loved me, I think, as I loved her, with gratitude for the discovery that had rendered us each less alone. In London we met regularly for tea and shopping (and she liked it when I wore my feathers in public — the cat-called remarks, the consternation, the stares), but I could never persuade her to visit me in Paris. You’re the arty one, she used to say. It was a relationship that was curiously imperturbable. Nothing unsettled it. There is a deckle-edged photograph taken on a footpath in Leicester Square, and you can see the solidarity of feeling that existed between us, the Surrealist show-off, madly feathered, and the prim-and-proper housekeeper with her handbag clutched anxiously over her crotch. We are both smiling radiantly. And we both share a glorious and sisterly likeness.

  Frances once confided to me that she had a life-long ambition to appear as an extra in a Hollywood movie. She wanted to be, she said, a face carried forward into history in some incidental, irrefutable and time-defeating way; not important or even speaking, but incorrigibly visible. I loved her when she told me that. Since her death I have sometimes imagined that I spot her at the cinema, there, in a glimpse, in a brief screened resurrection. In movies we seek in the pallor of those giant faces the netherland of our own lost ghosts. We seek — don’t you think? — the vehicle of the face. The transporting light.

  Of our father Frances remembered a long shape in a winged armchair, and a certain, but definite, circlet of embrace. It was a memory Flora maintained she was too young to recall, but Frances insisted was true.

  The shape of him, she said. Just the shape of him persists.

  And I remember a man who stood outside in the front yard, called out my mother’s name, and then sat on the earth with Lily-white, intently weeping. An emblem of tranced and concentrated grief. We talked often about our father with just these traces. A shape and a grief-stricken waterfall of tears.

  But you are wondering, aren’t you, about my mother’s death? You are wondering what Tilly’s letter might have revealed.

  How do I tell you this? How do I unconceal?

  I suppose as a child I had always assumed that my mother committed suicide. With the discovery of the journal I decided that she was lovelorn and wholly despairing, and that the silence that gathered around her death was consolidating some private or public shame. Even Henry, my brother, didn’t know how she died, and spent his childhood developing more and more barbarous theories. But her death was in fact a simple accident. A simple, appalling accident.

  She had leant forward to adjust her hair in the long
mirror above the fireplace, and the fine fabric of her long dress had brushed into the fire. It was something gauzy and light; something very beautiful flared up and killed her. The fire swept towards her face so that she became a bell of flame.

  It was sudden, Tilly wrote, all so very sudden. Mrs Murphy was there, and Tilly, and I, but none of us saved her. My mother, Rose Morrell, just ignited before us. She flew around the room in a terrible panic, fanning her own death, flapping her arms like a bird and screaming for her body. In her flight she knocked over objects and shattered a vase. The whole room responded to her agitation; she was possessed, overtaken, flames shot upwards from her shoulders and the piled dome of her hair. Mrs Murphy tore down a curtain and threw it like a net over the flaming woman, and we leapt on her, Tilly wrote; we all three leapt upon her. To smother and to save the flaming woman. The woman. Your mother. Your mother, Rose Morrell.

  I remember none of this. I remember no mother ignited with sparks sweeping around the room, no mother-shape beneath a curtain, no flesh smell, no horror. It is all in darkness. Tilly claims that I cut my hand on a shard of vase and was preoccupied at the time with my own small bleeding. Perhaps this explains it. Or perhaps, even then, I was too unloving and egotistical.

  My mother Rose, tended by Lily-white, lived on for three days longer, but died in extremity. Her skin was entirely burned. Her condition was wretched. Towards the end Mrs Murphy put a damp cloth to Rose’s mouth to muffle her constant hopeless moaning. To close off the breath that was agony to her. To save us all from the horror of unconcluded burning. She pressed hard, with both hands, until Rose sank into silence.

  (Christ-Almighty, forgive me, Mrs Murphy would have said.)

  Lily-white sang, and cut at her forehead with a stone.

  The funeral was huge, with everyone attending. Tilly wrote that I wore a new dress of black linen, which Mrs Murphy had sat up sewing throughout the night. And that a red sand storm, a willy-willy, blew up halfway through the funeral, causing mourners to squint, and cover their mouths and cough and splutter, so that the proceedings had suddenly to be crudely hastened, and everyone fled, eyes streaming, to avoid the obliterations of dust. A morbid haste attended my mother. Just as Mrs Murphy could not wait for Rose Morrell’s autonomous death, so mourners fled the ceremony of her interment before the coffin was lowered. They covered their eyes, Tilly wrote, because the grit was so blinding.

  … Do you know, by the way, what became of Brauner and Desnos?

  The painter Brauner was a strange man given to grotesque presentiments. He painted a series of self-portraits, beginning in 1931, in which he depicted himself cruelly with one mutilated eye. In 1938 his eye was in fact destroyed in a fight at a studio party. He committed suicide on exactly the day he had announced, years earlier.

  Robert Desnos, who wrote Surrealistically at will, and produced love poetry of incomparable delicacy, ended up in the prison camps of Buchenwald and Terezine. He died of typhus just a few days after his release. He died unpoetically.

  I mourned them both and remember both of them clearly.

  And my mother, Rose Morrell? Why do I speak of her with such abraded and tired generalisation? It was like peering into the tunnels of a stereoscope, and seeing only the still, black-and-white frames Tilly had attempted to draw for me. It was unbelievable. It was a mean deception.

  All my life I have tried to paint her back into existence. All these images. All these figures. I was attracted to the Surrealist promise of figuring out. This or that conjunction. An umbrella here. A pair of lips there. The correct superimposition or renegade object. But I learned gradually that it was a crass and over-explicit form. It was the rapture of the visible, artistry with too many, far too many, lights on.

  Perhaps, after all, it was Lily-white I was missing. Am. Am missing.

  Black Mirror Story 2

  It was 1927, I was seventeen years old, and I had arrived back on the goldfields to discover my whole world lost. Ruby and Lily-white were gone, Miss Casey was gone, Mrs Murphy was an old woman, with nowhere to go, who sat at the kitchen table with her chin in her hands and her grey hair straggly and her eyes unalert, waiting to die. We offered each other what comfort we could, and tried to find chores and diversions to fill our long days. Mrs Murphy brewed endless cups of pale-coloured tea and sedulously attended her small garden of herbs; I took to my drawings and my paintings and my fantasies of escape.

  How can I describe what altered in me with the discovery of Rose’s journal? I was already an errant and lonesome young woman, a firelighter, a reprobate, a laughing-stock at school; now I felt myself newly orphaned. In her cuneiform disguises, embossed with ampersands — for somehow I apprehended her indivisible from the style in which she wrote — I both found and relinquished my mother for the very first time. The journal summoned an admixture of recovery and grief: I loved her, and I wept.

  After the war I met a woman who had one arm blasted away, and who kept reaching, so she said, to brush hair from her face with the destroyed lost arm. It felt like that: impossible. It was like a phantom limb asserting lost presence. I felt spooked and disfigured by incompletion.

  You must understand that I was wholly alone. In the town my family was completely despised. My father, ever-greedy, had failed to install safety equipment; he had tried to break the unions; he had hired thuggish debt collectors and armies of scabs. I had no friends at all and only Mrs Murphy to care for me. I longed for Ruby and Lily-white, but they had simply disappeared. They had simply vanished.

  Gone bush, my father said, with a contemptuous sniff. Gone fucking walkabout.

  He never spoke of them again. He returned to brothels and carried with him the air of a rejected lover.

  There was despair in everything. I wanted wings, or death. I thought that my life had stalled, and that everywhere, everywhere else, the world somehow continued unclouded and bright.

  And then, by strange fortune, by chance occurrence, I met them, the brothers Louis and Ernest Bell.

  Together they offered me for a short time a new kind of family. They were tender-hearted miners, who worked at the stopes, two young men who already had earth so ingrained in their hands that their life-lines and fingerprints were explicit and apparent. I remember they held them up before me: four hands. Exclamations. They were beautifully detailed, like copperplate etchings.

  One night I had been wandering the streets, peering into windows, trailing down laneways I had known with Ruby and Lily-white, when I forgot my spy-mode of disembodiment, and was struck by a bicycle. Louis was peddling, with Ernest sitting behind, and we all three came a cropper. I had gravel rash burning on my elbows and forehead, and a triangular tear in my cotton skirt. Louis, I remember, bent down to examine the tear, and rose up embarrassed; even under the dim streetlight I could sense his sudden arousal. Ernest was more shy; he hung back in the shadows.

  We went to their house, nearby, to clean up our wounds and share a pot of tea. I had never been in someone else’s house before, and I confess I was shocked by how little they had. It was a spare, iron cottage, two bedrooms and a kitchen and a small sitting room at the front; and within it cheap furniture of deal and tacks, covered over with turquoise floral-patterned cloth. There were four chairs and a lamp, with a shade of stencilled brown paper, and a shelf of plaster ornaments, a milkmaid and some dogs. A woman — their widowed mother Maude — leapt from her chair, raised up her hands in concern, then set about fussily tending our wounds. She bathed me first of all, dabbing at my forehead with strips of torn linen; then she bathed her sons. Her bowl of water grew pink with our mingled blood: the liquid tilted and swayed and caught the overhead light. A pink-looking moon. I remember this detail now because it seems so retrospectively expressive.

  I decided to lie about who I was.

  Ruby, I told them. I am Ruby White.

  Ruby White, she’s a bit of all right, Louis responded cheekily.

  Louis Bell was what in those days we called a fast worker. Before I left his
house he had persuaded me to meet him the following Saturday night, and we became lovers soon after.

  We met in the illegal tunnels children had carved into the slime dumps. Sweethearts of the earth, Louis Bell used to say. When I raised my skirt the first time I realised that he was as inexperienced as me: so in our earth burrows we were patient and careful with each other; we rolled pressed together in our worn-out blanket, with the musty scent of the mine dirt coating our exposed skin and catching in the nets of our negligent hair. Candlelight cast our young faces in gold.

  Call me Midas, I joked, moving the candle closer to his face.

  Louis had never heard the myth explained, so I told him my selective and vague version of King Midas of Phrygia, how he had won Dionysus’ approval and been granted a wish, how he had wished for wealth-beyond-reason so that all he touched became gold; and how he had transformed not only his food and his famous rose garden to golden objects, but his daughter as well.

  Bloody hell, said Louis in shocked response.

  I told how the spell was removed by bathing in a river, and how King Midas repudiated wealth and became a worshipper of Pan, the god of the woodlands.

  Excuse my French, Louis apologised.

  I held his golden head between my hands. He was my very first lover and he was utterly precious. In moonlight I would climb through the window of my bedroom, elated, delirious, scented with mine dirt.

  Eventually I told Louis Bell who I was. It made no difference, he said; he loved me just the same.