by Penni Russon
It is to Boedica’s palace that Charlie’s music has brought you. Sedge stops flickering and becomes still and fixed, solid and stone but you are still spirit. You pour yourself through an invisible crack in the wall as thin as the opening of an envelope, and you travel down passageways and all the time you feel, not borne now, but tugged, towards yourself and not-yourself, the girl in the dream: Clara.
Greya is keeping watch this night, and she sees something, some shuddering of the air. She frowns and frowns at Clara, lying sleeping on the bed and you think she will fix Clara here with her eye. But you also think Greya may have a heart for Clara, may know what it’s like to wish herself somewhere else and that is why she recognised you at the markets. And indeed, as she bends to light a candle, she looks furtively around her. And then hurries out of the room, brushing through the swirling breath of wind that is you.
You are left alone with Clara.
There she lies sleeping, dreaming dreams of her own, and you realise she is dreaming you now, that this is what has brought you here, not in your body but out of it. And her sadness is Pia’s sadness, heavy and dark, and you realise with a shock of recognition that it is your sadness, this is your face you are seeing, your loss, your grief. And you want to wake her, you long to, but she sleeps on and you are air, the air of Claire, and you cannot make an impression on her dreams. But you know what you must do.
I can hear music. Can you hear it, Clara? Andrew whispers in my ear. It’s sweet. It hurts.
I wake from my dreaming and I hear it – the glory – and yes. It does hurt. Here in the halfway place between wake and dream, my heart bursts open and grief comes rushing in.
Run, Clara, Andrew tells. Get out of this place before you fade into shadows and nothing.
I open my eyes and I am crying. Why am I crying, Andrew?
And look, there I am, flickering against the wall, like I was already turned: shadows and nothing. Only it aint me, it’s her. That girl from the other side of dreaming, from fairyland, and it’s her tears, the ones she can’t make herself, that burn my face. And she opens her mouth, as if to speak, but what comes out is not words, but a billowing black cloud. And there is music all round her, silvery bright, but fading, fading, and she is fading too, the strands of her barely coming together. Her face gets desperate with all the sounds not coming out. I lean forwards to listen.
Once more she opens her mouth and this time I see words, silver words pouring out of her. Run Clara. Run Clara. Run run run.
I close my eyes. I am tired and sad, too tired to run. And then I am jolted to my feet by a deafening crack, lightning trapped under the earth’s crust lunging upwards. The girl is gone, and I am awake, blood coursing through me.
A candle flickers, casting shadows and light, but no one is there to be lit, not the ghostie girl and not the frowning one who was supposed to be watching this night. She aint in my room where she sat at day’s end, and she aint in the vestibule either. She’s gone, leaving only her light behind.
I hear again the memory of the crack, the sharp sound of stone separating from itself and I go looking, huddling against the stone walls, barefooting along the corridors, hoarding that candle light behind a cupped hand, breath held ready to puff it out. The light bounces back to me and I think that crack is a dream and nothing more, and I am sure to be caught and my heart slams against my rib like a bird on glass.
I aint tired now. I’m awake, more awake than I’ve ever been, my blood ticks in my veins. If there aint no broken apart walls then I’ll get out another way, I’ll climb to the roof and fly like a bird.
But here is a place where the light won’t go, where brick crumbles from brick, where stone is cleaved in two, a rupture in the walls where darkness bleeds into darkness. It’s a narrow crack, but it’ll do me.
I hesitate. Up there somewhere, in her high rooms, Boedica watches over us all, the ones she’s collected, parent and infant and child, man and woman and beast and bird, with her bright empty eyes. She tries to feed her emptiness, mistaking it for appetite, but it grows and it grows and it grows.
Now all this feeling is opened up inside me, I almost feel something for her. But I gotta run and it aint nothing to do with what Dolores teased when she saw me, it’s to do with my own wild self. I gotta keep running till I’m free to choose my own life or I will end up tatters and ghosts, that’s all.
Andrew is gone. And I gotta live with the sadness, and put it next to something like hope, or that sadness is for nothing, it’s a tune for dying to, that’s all, that’s all, and Andrew wants me to live, to the fullness of my self. I want me to live to the fullness of my self.
In the darkness I hear the rolling voices of Duguld and Brown and if I stand here feeling sorry for Boedica they will find me, and aint neither of them ever spared a care for me. I work my body through that crack. It squeezes me tight and holds me and if it won’t let go I’ll be found here, half in, half out, straddling two places all at once.
They are coming, closer, closer and I will be caught. I am holding my breath and that is what’s keeping me stuck, and when I let it out in a rush, I deflate nice and easy and then I am through.
She will hunt me down, chase me to the edge of the river, but she won’t cross it, this I know, for her territory, her whole known world, ends there.
I run on slippered feet into the shadows and freedom quickens my heart. Somewhere hiding in this black night is Groom, and he wants to be found.
You wake in your own bed. The music continues to leak between the worlds and the door of your room gleams silver. You hear the dog bark, once, twice. You leap out of bed and in the time between heartbeats you snatch up the broken music box and dive between doors.
There you are, looking at the interior of your own house, the soft spongy bones, the colourless wallpaper peeling like sheaths of dead skin, the cobwebs and dust, the desolate emptiness. If you step forwards it would be into dizzying space, the sagging floor giving way beneath you. You feel hope escaping you, in this place. That is what this place does, squeezes hope out of you, out of your heart, out of the very air.
The broken house is dark, desolate, and then your eyes alight on the exact thing you seek, your music box, gleaming with its own brightness. You place the broken one at the threshold between worlds and take up your whole, perfect one. Your inside self surges with loneliness for the broken box, for the life it will have here in this grey, abandoned place. But you can’t have Sedge and lose it too. You must get back to your own world with only what belongs to you. You fold up Andrew’s I.O.U. and tuck it safely under the broken music box.
With the music’s last breath you cross back, into your world, into your place, into the safe arms of home.
You stand in your room holding the box in your arms. You turn the key and it plays perfectly ordinary music. You lower yourself to the floor. You close your eyes to conjure him, Charlie, and there he is, the closeness of his bristling chin, the warm spice of him, the laughter in his throat. And he is near, but he is so absent, so utterly vanished, so completely disappeared. And you let yourself feel it: the gaping hole of him, the unbearable loss, which you must bear. You must. And your sorrow overwhelms you, and you are rasping great ugly breaths and your mother comes in and finds you there, and she kneels beside you and holds you, and rocks you back and forwards as you cry and cry and —
In the morning the dog is gone.
Your parents come outside to help you search for it. Though none of you can find a point of exit (the gate is firmly shut), the dog has somehow vamoosed the yard. Tears spring into your eyes as you call for it – Dog! Dog! – for you have no name to call it by.
‘A mystery,’ says Dad.
‘I swear it wasn’t me,’ says Mum. ‘I might even have taken to it. It had a nice face.’
‘It’ll be back,’ says Dad. ‘When it gets hungry.’
You
shake your head. It won’t be back. It was halfway owned after all, just not by you.
‘Ah, well,’ says Dad, and rubs you on the shoulder. You bury your face into his chest. He puts his arm around you.
Your mother starts walking the fence line again, looking for evidence of the mysteriously disappeared dog.
‘Maybe we could get a puppy,’ you say.
‘May-be,’ says Mum, not making any promises. ‘Or an adult dog from the Pound. One that’s already house-trained.’
‘A stray?’ You consider this. ‘Maybe. If it chooses us.’
Pia sits in the living room. She sees you standing in the doorway, the music box in your arm.
‘Darling Claire.’
You sit beside her and nuzzle in. You press your cheek to the babe who swims under her skin. Your saltwater soaks through Pia’s dress, leaving unsightly splotches.
‘We lost him, the three of us. It was stupid of us to lose him. Wasn’t it, Pia?’
Pia curls a lock of your hair on her finger. ‘He is close,’ Pia says.
You put the music box on the coffee table in front of her.
‘For the baby.’
‘Oh Claire. You don’t have to —’
‘I want to.’
She hugs you close to her side.
The baby pirouettes in the dappled dark, singing itself into being.
And this is where I leave you Claire, the dreamer, half listening (as you always will now) for the ache of music pressing on the other side of the air, rising from a mostly forgotten dream. I am a dreamer too, and I must wake into a world of dreamers. You can feel it – can’t you? – the peeling off of me, another small loss you have to bear. We all bear it, as best we can, this infinite chain of miniature losses, a hundred thousand stories, a hundred thousand endings. A rehearsal you could call it, for the last ending that’s bound to come, eventually, somewhere in the white space between here and dreaming.
The dog pads through market, following a rich trail of smells. This scent map leads it all round the city, head and tail.
‘Told you that dog’d be back, didn’t I tell you that, Mother?’
‘Local galloper. Scored a tough win. Makes her own luck.’
From market it follows the scent to Doctor’s, where it’s kicked for its troubles. The kicker is Ketch who never said he were brave. The dog scares him something dreadful with its knowing eyes and who knows what it might whiff on Ketch. Even after being kicked, the dog takes a long hard sniff and smells Andrew being buried in black clay, but not afore Doctor tells a last goodbye, to his favourite, to his best boy.
At Boedica’s walled town the dog stops and inhales the colour out of the world: all them smells weaving into its head, mapping sadness and despair till its heart is black from emptiness. It sniffs hopelessness, and it almost gives up, lies down to be found by Boedica’s troops, and you know who they’re hunting, don’t you? Though she aint made that call yet. Soon. Not yet. The dog sniffs the sharp wits of the girl with the orange hair, and is pleased with her, for she will always get by.
At the last, it sniffs a tasty dish, better to a dog than liver and bacon, it sniffs out hope it does, it sniffs out freedom. And it follows that sniff down to the river, sniffing up love and courage and companionship, through the gloom of the evergreen, through the rushes and the weeds.
Through the organic growth it’s coming. It’s coming to find us where we lie sleeping, and it will join us by and by. For there’s only ever always a long journey to go.
‘I had a dream,’ Groom tells. ‘It was you and me. We was travellin to make somethin new. A beginnin.’ He lays his hand on mine, and I twitch with the warmth of it. ‘Let’s make a beginnin, Clara?’
I keep my hand in his. ‘This day?’
‘Some day. Some night or other.’
We stand at river’s edge, watching the brown water swirl.
‘This night,’ I say. The undergrowth stirs behind me, and there she is. My dog, who found us when we were crouched up sleeping, just as I dreamed a name to call her by.
‘Charley,’ I beckon. She comes to the water’s edge and whimpers. One of my hands rests on her brindled neck. The other stays folded in Groom’s. ‘Charley,’ I whisper. ‘It’s time to go.’
Groom hesitates. He tightens his grip. ‘What do you think we’ll find on the other side?’
‘Us,’ I say. ‘You and me.’ And I walk in to the cool rushing river, still holding Groom’s hand.
author’s note
Whatever you think about Freud, he was clearly onto something when he said that a great internal drama plays out in kids between the ages of three and five. When I began sketching Clara together with words, I had half an eye on my eldest daughter Fred. The motif of doubles in the novel came about after a conversation we had when she was four and we were listening to our heartbeats.
Fred: What does it mean?
Me: It means my heart is busy pumping blood all over my body. It means I’m alive and so are you.
Fred: What happens when you get this people again?
Me: Which people?
Fred: This people (she points to herself).
Me: Another person just like you?
Fred: Yes.
Me: That never happens. You are unique. There is only one little girl like you in the whole wide world. Just one Frederique.
Fred: (sadly) Oh, pleeease.
I too had lain in bed as a child, trying to picture the whole world’s population. The world was so inconceivably big to me as to seem infinite, and if it was infinite, I was sure that meant there had to be another girl, just like me – no, not just like, but me, another me – living a parallel life somewhere on the other side of the world. I envisaged the world not so much as a ball, but as a coin, with two almost identical halves. The idea that I could be alone in the universe, that I was unique, was unbearably sad.
In the period of my life that Fred and I had this conversation I was writing a thesis at Melbourne University as part of a Masters in Creative Writing, entitled Melancholy Ever After, about the effect of melancholy on narrative structure in fairytales. This novel is an indirect response to the ideas I was chasing in that thesis, and the problems I uncovered in fairytales where children remained in their fairytale landscapes, forever locked into their childhood bodies – Peter Pan is really very creepy.
I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank my fellow students and the academic staff, in particular Kevin Brophy who supervised this thesis and helped me find my voice as an academic. Also visiting tutors Olga Lorenzo, Rod Jones, Claire Gaskin and especially Carrie Tiffany, whose writing exercise gave Old Mrs Jarvis her horse-racing obsession, and her words.
Sometimes I think if I sit very still, and listen very carefully, my children might reveal something true about the universe. This happens more often than you might think, at least three times a day. Frederique and Una are both in this novel: the parts of myself that are shaped by them, the tangle of their thoughts, the atmosphere they create in the house when it is night and they are sleeping. Even Avery, who was born at the end of the writing process, dreamed himself into the story.
Lili Wilkinson, Slimejam (Christopher Miles), Cochineal (Rachel Holkner) and Sushipyjamas (Kate Whitfield) read and gave feedback on drafts, and also got me out of the house after dark. Kate Constable also read drafts, but I mostly have to thank her for loving Clara and understanding Claire. To Kirsty Murray, who has been organising me into things for over ten years, thank you so much. I always listen to everything you say. You have very authoritative hair.
The phrase ‘only ever always’ sprang from the space that lies between my friend Zoë and me, a space that stretches and shifts, but never grows apart. We have known each other so long, I am not sure whose memories are whose anymore.
Emily shared Rupert Brooke with me and I thank her for it with fond affection. We were fifteen and she was madly in love with him, even though he’d been dead for seventy-five years.
Sometimes Only Ever Always has felt more like a three-dimensional puzzle than a novel. To all the peeps at Allen & Unwin who helped take it apart and put it back together again, thank you – especially Eva Mills. I don’t know how I got so lucky.
Finally, spending a day scouring and sifting and quarrying the debris of your imagination is a strange and sometimes lonely job. Martin keeps a light on, and guides me home.
about the author
Penni Russon was born in Hobart, and spent her childhood roaming around on a small mountain. Eventually she had to grow up, and she moved from Tasmania to Melbourne to study classics, archaeology, women’s studies and contemporary literature. She writes, edits and teaches creative writing, and lives in outer Melbourne with her husband and three children.
Find out more about Penni at pennirusson.com, or her blog eglantinescake.blogspot.com