The House of Breathing

by Gail Jones

  But none of the pictures changed disposition; the outcome of the argument—it was so very sudden, and even now it upsets me—was that Nina disappeared. Father said she had gone mad and was recovering in hospital, but I never saw her again after the drama of that day. I waited and I waited, waited even as the objects in her room were gradually sold or taken away, refusing the evidence of my own sad eyes. Without Nina’s presence, or rather with her absence, the room became intolerable. After a while I didn’t even bother to climb the stairs; I stayed down in the shadows and tried to forget she had ever existed.

  About a year later we moved to live in Lisbon, a move I have always attributed to my father’s guilt. New school chums would say, ‘Ah, Sintra, the castles!’, and I would respond with bravado fantasies about ghosts and warriors and screams from the windows. I would describe with accuracy the Castelo da Pena at the peak of the mountain, and then fill it to the brim with furious kings, headless saints, demented mistresses, spider-limbed heroes. I was extremely popular, as you can imagine. But all the while I was thinking of Nina’s room, of its pictures and vases and extravagant lace.

  And then there came a moment—I recall it exactly—when I remembered a particular, unusual word Nina had one day used to describe the light in her room. ‘Ardentia’, she said, lifting back the curtain, standing, expansive, in a broad ray of silver twilight. Ardentia is a certain strange phosphorescence on the bodies of fish that fishermen learn to see on moonless nights. Her own grandfather, she told me, had taken her on a night cruise when she was very, very small just to see this legendary marine phenomenon. ‘Ardentia.’ At that moment of recollection I suddenly wept, since it replaced me on the spot, in her arms, beneath the mantilla—this state I had believed irrevocable—with the breath of her speaking, ever so soft and airy, down the back of my neck.

  Patrick: The place I am thinking of is a small, out-of-the-way beach resort which I visited as a child for thirteen consecutive summers.

  We lived in Melbourne where my father worked as an accounting clerk in an office in the city. We were quite a large family—I had four older brothers—so that we were, as my mother insisted, ‘decently poor’, living in the inner city in a ‘decently shabby’ semidetached house. Our neighbours, as it happened, were a family of five daughters, similarly aged; this coincidence produced a childhood full of cinematically confected expectations of romance, tales of secret dalliances, crossings and criss-crossings of affection and regard, relentless flirtation, impossible desire. The whole neighbourhood seemed to delight in our statistically unlikely symmetry: matches were forecast by amused old ladies; scurrilous jokes were told by adolescents; visitors invariably remarked.

  My brothers, I know, took great pride in these circumstances; indeed it later became the basis for their inflated reputations as local casanovas. But I found the entanglement—which was, in any case, mostly based on lies—very troubling and confining. I felt as if my life were threaded in and knotted to the family of girls, that somehow certain decisions had already been made without my agreement, that I had been caught in a design not of my own making. I watched my mother nightly embroider her industrious way over faint brown-inked lines and believed this was how it was: that I was sewn, bound, and predisposed. This belief somehow included the idea that I would never ever escape our tiny house, that I would be stuck forever sharing a cramped room with others and longing always for little moments of peace and quiet.

  I should not overstate. Most of the time I was approximately happy, and was even, as predicted, an especial and close friend of the youngest neighbour. (Her name was Maria and we shared a keen interest in collecting postage stamps.) But it was the conditions of our home life that made our annual visit to the beach so very important.

  Since the year of his marriage my father had rented the same beach house for the same two weeks each and every January. This beach house was old, brilliantly whitewashed, and comprehensively comfortable. It had three small bedrooms, and also a wide-latticed, dog-rose entwined, part falling-to-pieces verandah where, in the domestic economy of redistributed bodies (and to my great pleasure), I was allotted a space. Here against the lattice I slept on a stretcher bed under a hanging mosquito net. Entering the net—this is how I always thought of it—was like creeping indecently under the skirts of some movie star dancer, so flimsy and cosseting and feminine were its folds. But it was a place of encompassing privacy and inertia. In the bleach-bright net I was singular, alone, removed from my brothers who fought in noisy pairs for the upper bunk in each bedroom, removed, more importantly, from the dim house in the city in which, apart from physical discomfort and sibling contestations, there were always high-pitched girl voices issuing in annoying streamers through the too-thin walls.

  At night, I remember, I lay awake in the dark for as long as possible. Sleeping half outside was something of an adventure. The sky was very loud with the sound of the sea. Frisky possums skittered in rascal-packs across the roof. And through the superimposition of net and lattice I could see black bobbing rose-heads, trees wind-stirred into hideous shapes, and further, beyond that, a luminous ceiling of nameable stars. When I finally slept it was with these several dark dimensions rising and capsizing, depending on focus, through the layers of the night.

  From the very moment I arrived at the summer beach house I began to feel released from my sewn up life. In the first place the pattern of our daily living changed. My mother, her appearance altered by a sun hat she wore only in our January fortnight, no longer prepared meals by the rigorous clock, but became gastronomically inconsistent and explorative. Meals were at all hours and likely to come labelled as ‘Monday Surprise’ or ‘Wednesday Magic’. And she no longer sewed—stitches for pennies—but stretched relaxed on a wicker chair engrossed in magazines which bore smiling women’s faces. My father, too, was markedly changed. A man of reticence and regularity, he would stay up late, sleep in, consume alcohol, enlargen, become talkative, friendly, almost accessible; he would dispatch, in short, his city-office self. We were all thus emancipated; our bodies returned to us more definitely sensual, as though we had been shades or Melbourne-embalmed; we remembered how to swim, how to run, how to shout; I tumbled with my brothers on warm subsiding sand, placed my body beside others in the full canary sunlight, slept long and dream-full and wholly languorous.

  Yet the most profound change—for me, in any case—occurred in the sea, in the particular little bay at which we daily swam. As I sank my body in, watching goosebumps arise on flesh becoming blue, gasping from the cold of it—for which, after so many summers, I was still never quite prepared—feeling the inundation of every skin surface, both public and private, I imagined a state of physical dissolution. I imagined that the invisible threads by which I was bound unravelled through the water and were taken by currents, that filaments or skeins trailed away from my body—not, I should say, as if I were some sea-going creature, such as this sounds, but as a mystical being, spool-fashioned and exhilarated. I imagined that I was cleansed and wonderfully renewed. This belief was such that my daily run from the beach house to the sea, through teatree and paperbarks, past rocks to the sand, was filled with a more delicious sense of anticipation than I have ever since experienced. The submersion that followed was slow and solemn, up till the point, that is, when fraternal splashing and horseplay would invade my imagining.

  So there was the house with its verandah and the sea with its renewal. Year after year we regularly returned; I came to think of the holiday as a kind of incorruptible, bright, cellophane-shiny space in which were distilled only those qualities that countered the city. My life, I thought, subtended always to that point, those two weeks elsewhere, those unencumbered, sea-washed, net-embraced, two weeks.

  The twelfth summer, however, was different from the rest. Our first week was as usual—I was still on the verandah, still swam, still played. But in the second week there were bushfires somewhere to the west, so that for three whole days the sky w
as dense with suspended ash. Ash fell in fine sprinkles on the roses over the verandah, it coated the furniture and we could taste it on our tongues. The air became brownish and the sun recoloured an ugly rust red. But worse than this, far worse to my child-mind, was that ash also fell pervasively upon the sea. Waves were dark fringed and ash was deposited in scallop shaped tidal lines all along the beach. I remember that my brothers ran around the bay, scooping up handfuls of the filthy stuff and flinging it at each other, while I stood and stared, utterly dumbfounded, at the sullied sea water. Yet—and this is the strange thing—I still thought it important, vitally important, to swim. To miss even a day would be to destroy the ritual repetition upon which my holiday was founded.

  So eventually I walked into the impure sea, I, alone among my brothers, and duly submerged, I did not unravel. I did not transform into unwinding glory. I did not cast off my parents, or the girls next door, or my stupid-seeming brothers. I stayed tight and wound up and when I arose my skin was stained and explicitly polluted. Around me the sun had broken into scarlet fragments that rocked against my body. Particles of ash swam up to adhere to me. The water stank. My brothers called from the shore in mocking voices and I could see my mother in her sun hat move to the middle distance beside the rocks to see what was going on. So it was, that day, that I did not actually cry—since I could not at all bear the thought of witness—but swam into shore pretending to be wholly unaffected and untouched. Yet the swill of ash would later recur in nightmares, terribly multiplied, as a drowning sludge, viscid, suffocating and final.

  The thirteenth summer was entirely clean. I thoughtlessly enjoyed myself, not knowing that the visit to the beach house would be my last, that the owner would sell it in the following spring.

  My fourteenth summer was thus spent at our house in the city, miserable in exile, bisected in spirit, and dreaming of a seaside which returned contradictorily both in consoling memories and awful nightmares, a seaside which had once, just once, been horribly contaminated, but which was before and ever after absolutely pure.

  Narrator: The place which I will tell you about is really my sister’s place, for it was she who discovered it, she who boldly claimed it as personal and private, she who appointed it with lavish, fantastic, invisible decorations, spun from the munificence of her own daredevilish mind. No introverted soul, she flung out whimsy and visions as other children do chatter; she was larger-than-life, astonishing, an addict of novelties. I loved her, of course, as she commanded to be loved, with exceeding passion.

  The place Anna discovered was a cave at the very edge, the very boundary, of our property. My parents owned a dairy farm in the south-west of Western Australia; it was small and unprofitable, and stood precariously on ancient limestone that reached deep below the earth in a series of caverns and chambers. My father told stories of how, in the past, cattle had been swallowed whole and in one hungry gulp by the treacherous, disguised hollows of his patch of land, but always added—with due parental regard for the not-too-frightening—that all was now safer and much more stable. Nevertheless he warned us never to investigate new depressions or unfamiliar, unusual chinks or cavities: these, my father announced (tapping his pipe in a gesture of emphasis), were the swallowing kind, the mouth to look out for.

  I trod the soil twice daily with my older sister as we brought in the cows for milking at dawn and at dusk. My feet were unsure. I lived for many years—until, in fact, the discovery of the cave—with the belief that I might one day precipitously be claimed by an instant hole, that I might suddenly fall away into an awful, oral darkness, and never be recovered. (Anna was not bothered by such terrestrial threats; in fact she was a child of apparently no fears at all, convinced of her own invincible tangibility.)

  Yet I enjoyed the farm. Our house was set low in a slight valley or declension so that around us rose paddocks unfolding in a vista of mounds and undulations, creek channels and gullies, all of which were spotted with immobile looking cows and over-hung and overseen by drifting hawks. The paddocks were green and pungent with dung, the cows black and white, the hawks an indefinite aerial brown. Red gums and sheoaks stood in isolated native patches: fences perspectivally trailed. There was a glistening dam, and a few large rocky outcrops. A wooden milking shed quaintly showed dilapidation; another, newer and of corrugated iron, housed a hire-purchase tractor.

  So lovely and specific in re-creation, this farmscape existed then as the unobtrusive circumstance, the mere daily condition, of my childhood life. (Like many rural born I know my home more exactly with excommunication.) I moved through its features barely aware, charmed, perhaps, but also largely indifferent, and with only the risk of a plunge disturbing my habitual unreflection.

  Anna, I believe, was more observant than I. It was she, that day, who pointed with an ah ha! at the rocks near the boundary. We were upon our horses, inspecting the fences, but finding fencelines too strict and boringly imperative, Anna had trotted off southwards on some slight deviation into an area of wild scrub. When she called me to join her I was confronted with the history book posture of white explorers: Anna, still mounted, sat stiff on her horse with her arm extended and a finger firmly pointed in expeditionary certainty. This image I retain of her—humorous, bold, replete with instinctive satire; more particularly a ring of light just so on her yellow hair, a face unable to suppress its grin, spatters of shadow on the theatrical arm, and the horse, the necessary addition to so many of her games, heaving its sides slightly but otherwise obediently still.

  The hole in the rocks I knew at once to be terrible. It was the precise apparition my father had described, not a walk-in room but a sneaky dark aperture, a going nowhere tunnel, a body-sized orifice. To my great alarm Anna hastily dismounted, threw herself headfirst into the rocky hole and wriggled quickly away, her feet following immediately like scrabbling little animals. I burst into tears—as I was wont to do—and begged and begged and begged her to return. I screamed into the hole and reached in my arms, hoping to snatch at a retreating toe. Whereupon, after apparently interminable distress, Anna duly returned, again headfirst, her dirty face smiling at my shameful display.

  It was weeks before Anna persuaded me underground. Each time she took torches, books, candles and food, and I waited, excluded, on the lonely surface. Bound to absolute secrecy—by an exchange of blood squeezed from pinpricks to the thumbs on the stroke of midnight—I was privately miserable, sequestered away in my foolish and untellable fear. And when I finally descended it was with a rope around my waist so that I would not fall away forever to the centre of the earth, but be caught by a tree-hold and able to climb out.

  After a slanting, constricted, knee-scraping belly crawl the cave itself was unexpectedly spacious. It rose to a vault from which young stalactites and sinuous plant roots depended. The walls were partly of earth and partly of rock, so that the sense of containment was not, as I had imagined, tight and sculptured, but rather pleasantly burrowish, with a sweet scent of vegetable life moderating the musk of mineral lime. It was also vaguely lit—Anna’s candles and torches had implied to me pitch blackness—by a space in the ceiling through which a lucent spot of sky was clearly visible, a spot which, for its tiny size, conveyed a disproportionate quantity of fluctuating blue light.

  Into this special enclosure we emptied ourselves. In this secret cave, this secret receptacle, so far from the tap of our father’s pipe, we fashioned playtimes and stories with exuberant skill and preternatural pleasure. Anna was a genius of nonsense and invention. She was a performing chatter-box, silly, burlesque, endlessly entertaining. I sat in the half dark and watched, captivated, as my sister danced and revolved around me, a human cinema, a cluster of characters, a congregation of worlds all completely compelling. Anna’s voices were louder tied in by convexity, her body much larger rescaled by compartment. She achieved in our cave that gift of multiplicity, that high pitch of largesse, for which actors of all kinds persistently strive.

 
The farm became changed with the advent of the secret—a secret which, by the way, Anna called Our Den Of Iniquity. I was no longer afraid of the swallowing earth; rather I imagined that we trod over dozens of perfect hollows, a honeycomb of dwellings which were the residences of creatures ebullient as children, but in other ways indescribable. And the shape of the farm seemed also to change. I looked out of my window up the slopes of the paddocks, past the static cows and the lazy wooded creek, and imposed upon the land, from a hawk’s eye view, a neat triangulation to the point of the cave. This private geography I nightly rehearsed; before I lay beside my sister I would gaze into the dark, reconstruct swift diagonals and a pointy apex, and bid the hidden cave a succinct goodnight.

  Anna was just twelve, and I only nine, when she died. She overturned a tractor and was instantly broken. My parents buried their daughter beside the house, fulfilling both the stringencies of poverty and their own fervent atheism.

  All the long, lonely, Anna-less years of my adolescence I continued to visit Our Den Of Iniquity. Anna’s hieroglyphics remained chalked upon the wall, still indecipherably Egyptian. Her dress-ups and books stayed unmoved on the floor. Her feathers, her marbles, her magnifying glass, her sketches, these tokens of solidarity with the world of substance, all remained crudely and disloyally in existence. Her fantastic life gone, the cave forfeited, in response, its most congenial aspects—of the rambunctious and the ridiculous, of the higgledy-piggledy, the hugger-mugger, the harum-scarum. And when I lay in the half dark, with the little spot of light directly above my head, I did not dare replace Anna there in the secret cave, now so sad, so dismal, so sister-deprived, but instead reversed my imagining so that the vectors of my mind-map extended back in converging lines to the grave beside the house, her new underground, her body-sized cave, back where, thinking very hard with my eyes tightly closed, I sought and sought her skidaddled soul.