by Libby Angel
The hallway light snaps on, prising open my eyes. My Bugs Bunny alarm clock reads 4.52. I hear a procession of doors opening and closing, the clash of steel against doorframes, the low, authoritative voices of men.
Watch the window to your left, they are saying, like builders or removalists manoeuvring a piano down a flight of stairs. Forty-five degrees to your right.
I get out of bed to see two men in green coveralls jostling a stretcher bed towards the living area, and, on it, my mother bound with a series of wide velcro straps, an oxygen mask like a snout on her face.
I think I see her trying to wave at me before I realise her arms are strapped to her sides.
Wait! I want to tell the men. My mother does not want to be a passenger!
Standing in my bedroom doorway, barefoot, bleary-eyed, naked beneath my semi-transparent nightgown, I am Ophelia, beautiful and pathetic.
The men pay me no attention. In grave voices, they speak only to each other.
I smell the towels mouldering in the laundry basket.
Now my father speaks. Go back to bed, Loretta, he says, as he follows the procession towards the front door; I will see you tomorrow.
It’s the first time in years he has used my full name and the formality startles me.
The house is dark again. I lie in bed. I do not blink. I hear the front door close, the sound of tyres rolling over the gravel, a vehicle driving away down the hill. I watch the glowing hands of my alarm clock edge towards morning then fade with the coming of the light.
20
AT FIRST, when Ernest came to, coughing violently in the white smoke, he thought they were trying to cook him. When he tried to get up they began to laugh; a pair of coarse hands restrained him, another fanned the smoke with a branch. Parts of his anatomy, he saw, were covered in a leafy poultice.
He realised then that he had been saved.
Later they offered him food to eat: roots of some kind and some white meat, a lizard or bird, he could not tell. It tasted exquisite. When his vision was sufficiently restored he saw they had found the tents and laid them out on the ground. His dromedary, Mrs Smith, was resting in the shade beneath a tree.
The last thing he remembered he had been lying in the desert as good as dead, choking on the burning sand, his face crusty and full of flies. The camel had knelt down beside him and patiently waited to die.
Now he found himself in an arcadia to rival even the most picturesque of English pastoral scenes, in the centre of a bustling village beside a flowing river surrounded by fertile soil. He heard women singing.
The natives had initially mistaken him for a ghost, he believed, until he recovered enough to empty his bowels, and they discovered without a doubt that he was a thing of this earth. Having no further use for him, they had escorted him and his camel back to the settlement. The journey took more than three months.
They parted ways by a towering gum on the edge of the township. (Law forbade the blacks from venturing any closer.) For lack of any other offering, Ernest gave them the few pennies he was still carrying in his pocket and shook their hands.
They disappeared back into the hills as quietly as shadows… or was that a snicker Ernest heard in the distance?
He had envisaged riding back into town like a knight on a horse, but his horse was long gone and he could hardly use his legs. He was reduced to hitching a lift with a passing farmer, riding in the back of a cart with a pile of cabbages, the camel strung along behind them.
After a week recovering at the sanatorium, Ernest reported officially to the Royal Society. He had definitely seen an elephant, he insisted, but he could not say where exactly, since all his instruments had been lost or broken.
He showed the society the objects he had collected from the natives: spear heads, a caddy, a fishing net. The blacks, Ernest told the men, were really something. Their cosmology could not be dismissed as merely primitive. They had fed him roast duck, and cake for afternoon tea; they could conjure food and water out of landscape more barren than a rock. Their medical knowledge had saved his life, after all.
Then he showed them his notebook. Here were his sketches of the wildlife he had seen, various kangaroos, plains rats and birds. Here were the village and fields of crops. And here at the back was his impression of the elephant, which he had witnessed wading in the shallows of a great body of water.
The society men looked at one another. They feared Ernest might never recover. Out of courtesy or pity they heard him out, patted him on the back, then saw him to the door.
Give our regards to your wife, they said.
Of the twelve men in the expedition, only three had returned, separately and evidently without their wits. After a public expense of some several thousand pounds, the society men lamented, the only recompenses were some crudely fashioned tools, a few accounts of the natives’ dismal amusements, and some dubious sketches and notes concerning the wildlife. Many of these sketches were incomplete (the pages had been torn and used for cigarette papers) or badly stained. All that remained were impressions of a rabbit-like ear here, a curled tail there, all of which doubtless belonged to some never-before-sighted species of mammal or bird but, with only fragments to go by, it was impossible to ascribe a name to them.
And now that they had seen his depiction of the elephant, resplendent with headdress, well, they couldn’t in all seriousness verify the rest of Ernest’s images anyway.
To avoid public embarrassment, the government honoured Ernest’s achievements in a small ceremony at Parliament House. In consideration of his somewhat incidental ethnographic contributions, the governor was pleased to bestow upon him and his wife a handsome house on the edge of town and a generous stipend. They hoped he would continue his studies of natural history; they hardly needed to mention that the emphasis of these studies should be on research rather than fieldwork, at least until the inquiry was over.
Over the next few weeks, Ernest obliged the society with a number of written accounts of his journey and its trials. In an effort to appease their auditors and render the expedition findings more palatable to a public whose money had been all but wasted, the society revised Ernest’s writings almost beyond recognition before submitting them to obscure journals.
After the inquiry, Ernest developed a passion for baking puddings and pies. He raided his wife’s cookbooks and all but banished her from the kitchen. He played hymns on his Broadwood & Sons piano, and sent new musical arrangements to Rev Hansen at the mission, who accepted them graciously.
He had a new concern too, a son.
Ernest kept the wonders of the desert under his tongue and never spoke of them again.
21
IN THE morning I stagger out of bed, drunk with sleeplessness, past my brother’s room, his empty bed, into the living space. The rain has stopped. I am alone, as if in the midst of a nuclear fallout, where I am the sole survivor. Or perhaps I have always been alone.
Get out the violins! I hear my mother say.
I remember her instructing me how to execute a stage kick: one player lies on the ground, back to the audience, the other drives a foot into the floor, stopping an inch short of the first player’s body. The player on the floor doubles up and yells out in feigned paroxysms of pain.
I remember her drawing a moustache over my top lip with eyeliner and dressing me up in a top hat, bow tie and tails.
But she is no longer interested in make-believe of any kind: the exaggerated gestures, the greasepaint and coloured gels, the scenery on pulleys, the gracious bows. All of it has gone.
And I decide that I, too, am finished with theatrics.
I make myself a cup of tea: black, because there is no milk.
I sit at the kitchen bench by the phone, sliding the tracker on the teledex from A to Z and back again. It makes a whirring sound. I press the button and it springs open. I look at the names and numbers of my parents’ friends and acquaintances, some written in my mother’s loops and swirls, others in my father’s microscopic
hand, its low-lying waves reminiscent of an electrocardiogram.
I slide the tracker back to A and press the button. I pick up the phone and dial the first listed number, for James Anderson. When nobody answers I proceed to the next contact. Then I slide the tracker down one notch, to B, press the button, and so on, until I have rung every number in the teledex.
When someone answers my call I ask the person if they know what has happened to my mother. If there is a message machine I leave a message asking the person to call back. If the number has changed or is incorrect I listen to the ghost lady on the other end of the line—The number you have called has been disconnected C R N 3—before hanging up.
Some people tell me they have no idea who I am. They do not know anyone by the name of Leda or Gilbert. Sorry, they say, I think you have the wrong number.
The actor who allegedly stole the Theatrical Society funds explains to me how my mother wanted a different life.
The poet tells me that my mother flew away. Blood of the air, he says.
Didn’t anyone tell you? Mrs Gore cries. That bitch, your mother, stole my husband!
She went back to the Netherlands, the Chief Justice says in his pleasant voice. You must have seen it coming.
I come to the last of the contacts in the teledex, for Mrs Heaven, our housekeeper from long ago, inexplicably listed under X.
I am a very busy person, Mrs Heaven tells me. Please do not bother me again, she says, and hangs up.
My final phone call is to my father’s office. His secretary, Ruth, tells me she hasn’t seen or heard from him all day.
The sun rises to the top of the sky. Sitting on one of the four remaining chairs at the dining table, I eat a bowl of dry cornflakes.
After a few minutes the phone rings, but when I pick up the receiver, there is nobody on the other end.
I remember how, when we lived at the house near the racetrack, my mother would drive me to the corner shop, hand me some money and ask me to run in and buy milk or bread. When I walked back towards the car, groceries in hand, she’d pull away from the kerb. When I ran after the car she’d slow down until I caught up, but as soon as I reached for the doorhandle, she would accelerate away. After driving around the block two or three times she would pull up next to me, eventually stopping the car long enough for me to get in. I’d climb into the back seat, slam the door, and sulk all the way home while my mother laughed, her head thrown back so I could see, in the rear-vision mirror, the fillings in the underside of her top teeth.
The phone rings again. This time it is my brother, who says, My earliest memory of you is one of resentment. I remember having to move over on the back seat to make way for your bassinet. I remember covering my ears with my hands to block out the terrible sound of your screaming.
And, I have taken the rifle, he says.
So go and shoot some tin cans, I say.
All day I sit at the dining table. First comes dusk, that time of day when a rock looks like a man crouching and the trees bare their souls. Then the sun slides down behind the town into the sea.
I turn on the overhead light, then sit down again, watching my reflection. I am performing in a one-woman show, I am under investigation in the Spanish inquisition.
But of course I am none of these things. I am simply myself, a thirteen-year-old girl, trying to understand.
Before me, on the table, are the journals, or what is left of them. I pick up a fragment…natural though hidden causes…put it into my mouth, chew and swallow. It tastes of dust and iron.
I sit and wait. I think I hear sirens howling in the distance, but it is only my father’s lovers calling him back.
The desert becomes little more than an ache in my joints, the circus a collection of fairytales told to frighten children. With every retelling, details are changed or lost.
But there is no way to forget, not yet. In my cells, I know.
22
ON THE final night of the retreat, I wake up to see her standing in my room, her feet filthy, her arms folded.
There is so much more, she says.
You have to go, I tell her.
If you vanquish me from this earth I can never again return.
Go, Mama, I tell her. Fly away and be free, fly on towards the light.
No sooner have I spoken the words than I regret it.
Wait! I say, Come back!
But she can no longer hear me.
I imagine her, my mother, squatting in a dilapidated house on the shitty side of town. There are holes in the roof where the sky gets in, and holes in the floorboards. The windowpanes are cracked or broken, the plaster crumbling off the walls, the locks broken off the doors. There are rats living under the sink. The rooms are empty. In the kitchen there is only a stained mattress on the floor and a small portable gas stove. She is wearing the overalls and the scribbled-on clogs.
She lives here with her lover, a man much younger with long hair and a beard. He is a puppeteer. In winter they build a fire in the middle of the floor to keep warm. They cook chops in a cast-iron frypan and throw the bones out of the window. They are happy, always singing. She is writing a book, using pencil and notepad, about living with authenticity.
One day I go to visit her. I ask her to come home. She refuses, and for the first time I am forced to conceive of myself as apart from my mother.
Then I imagine her living somewhere in Europe. She lives way up high on top of a cathedral spire among griffins and gargoyles. She knows all the choirboys and is a personal friend of God’s. She lives the rest of her days in a giant nest, mixing it up with angels and pigeon shit, way above the fray.
While I continue onwards, dragging rock upon rock through the sand, building a cairn—part triumphant monument, part pyre—that is nobody’s but my own.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Henrietta’s journal owes much to Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender, eds, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1940, Allen and Unwin, 1992.
Ernest’s journal fragments are in part adapted from extracts of Charles Sturt’s Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia: performedunder the authority ofHer Majesty’s government, during the years 1844, 5 and 6. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/sturt/charles/s93n/, University of Adelaide Library, last updated 12 November 2012, accessed 15 June 2015.
Thanks to Bruce Pascoe, for additional information pertaining to Charles Sturt’s expeditions.
‘Advertisement for Immigration’ and ‘Ship Rules’ abridged from material held by South Australian Maritime Museum.
Lines from ‘Leda and the Swan’ by Yeats, and from Salome: A Tragedy in One Act by Oscar Wilde.
Thanks to the following people for help and support: for reading early drafts, to Rick Hosking and Marion Campbell; for matters related to natural history, to Harry Parnaby; for financial support, to the Penguin Books/University of Melbourne Prize; to my editor, Jane Pearson, and Text Publishing; to Martine Murray.