by Carmel Bird
Now lovely warm lights twinkle in the windows of the houses on the hillsides of Woodpecker Point. I have pink and yellow lights, and a cosy fire crackling in the grate. Down the lane at the Cherry Plums’ house there are lanterns, like beacons beckoning sailors, warning mermaids, flashing starry signals of distress. Votive lamps flicker in the grottoes of the Vicar. And his wife is rolling biscuits for the fete. Doctor de Saxe lives in a house like a giant snowball that glitters with glamorous health, crisp with white nurses and dazzling receptionists who called the ambulance, which arrived too late for the revival of Jennifer Lilley. Big long strips of light, like flags and ribbons, deck the Council Chambers where the Council is discussing how much concrete you would need to fill the well. Supposing it is bottomless. Goes on forever, End-of-the-Earth well, dug by prehistoric insects that are still busy with the digging, their primitive little shovels forever going pick pick dig dig beat beat, little heartbeats in the pit of all the everything, and we hear those heartbeats faint as feathers, sweet as heathers in the heathery, feathery mist.
A Telephone Call for Genevieve Snow
Genevieve Snow was a small dainty woman who taught at the primary school. The men on the staff teased her about being so little and quiet—called her Snow White. Sometimes in the lunch hour Genevieve’s mother would ring up—or the girl from the bank would ring. Never a man—there was no romance in Genevieve’s life.
The teacher on duty would send the message out over the public address: There is a telephone call for Miss Genevieve Snow.
The public address was the true centre of power in the school. It could stop all the staff and most of the children in their tracks.
‘Will Emily Hammond please go to her violin lesson. Lamingtons for the lamington stall must be left at the office by noon on Friday. Will Christopher Worth please go to trombone. People without sunhats will not be permitted to have lunch out of doors. Emily Hammond, your violin lesson has been cancelled today. Football practice will be at two o’clock. Will Verity Sanderson please go to flute at once. Parents who wish to help at the sausage sizzle must leave their names at the office by three tomorrow. There is a telephone call for Genevieve Snow.’
These messages rang out across the schoolyard and into the street so that people who lived in the houses surrounding the school always knew what was going on. They followed the musical careers of the violinists and the flautists; they knew when Emily Hammond had an audition for a children’s orchestra and they hoped all afternoon that she was going okay. The relief, a week later, when they learnt that Emily had been called for an orchestra rehearsal at the Town Hall.
Listening to the PA was like listening to a serial on the radio, but getting only tantalising little bits and imagining the rest. You never knew when The Voice was going to interrupt your thoughts, when you were going to get a new and vital piece of information. Verity took up the piano as well as the flute.
It wasn’t only the locals who knew what was going on in the school. So did the passing motorists.
It happened one day that Nigel West was driving past as The Voice said there was a telephone call for Miss Genevieve Snow. Nigel was a man who had little else to do but drive around ringing people up on his car phone. He would park across the street from, say, the Silk Stocking or the Veronica Lodge Boutique and he would get a thrill out of knowing that when he spoke to the woman who answered the phone, she didn’t know he was the man in the car nearby.
How nice to have a woman to ask for by name. Genevieve Snow.
He stopped the car, looked up the number of the school and, when Genevieve had had time to take her other phone call, Nigel rang her. ‘There is a telephone call for Genevieve Snow,’ The Voice yelled into the PA, and Nigel heard it, and it was a terrific thrill.
Genevieve said hello. Nigel said: ‘That you, Genevieve? Genevieve, I understand your students have a very real interest in the environment. I have some information to give you. Information about the Wolf.’ And Genevieve just said: ‘Yes?’
Nigel was surprised by the matter-of-fact tone in that yes. They often hung up, or blew whistles at him, or said angry things. Genevieve said, ‘Yes?’ just like that. So Nigel drew in his breath, paused and then went on. He was whispering now. ‘Well, Genevieve, the Wolf was once found in most habitats throughout the northern hemisphere, through Asia, Northern America and as far south as Mexico. Are you following me, Genevieve?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, I’m with you.’
‘Well, Genevieve, after centuries of persecution, the Wolf is now extinct or endangered over most of its range, and the few remaining populations are in danger from fur trappers. This is sad. Don’t you find it sad, Genevieve?’
‘Yes. It’s very sad.’
‘The Wolf hunts in small packs and feeds on a wide variety of mammal prey up to the size of deer or moose. They are by nature enquiring, intuitive, fierce and brave.’
‘I am familiar with most of this. Are you collecting money?’
Nigel had never been asked that question before. It threw him for a minute. Then he said: ‘Not exactly money at this stage, Genevieve. I am simply enlisting Friends of the Wolf and Other Endangered Species. Can I put your name down?’ And Genevieve said yes, and he did. He asked her how to spell her name and then he asked for her address and phone number and Genevieve, a Friend of the Wolf and Other Endangered Species, told him. ‘Thank you for that,’ Nigel said. ‘Goodbye, Genevieve.’
The Voice looked at her sideways as she left the office. The PA was silent and a funny sort of silence hung over the school. Genevieve went back to her classroom, thinking about the man who had whispered to her about wolves. It was a very unusual experience.
It was the beginning of the strange affair between Genevieve Snow and the Wolf Man.
He rang her at home and she sat curled in an armchair listening to more facts about the Wolf. He told her about the Sun Bear, about the Red Fox, the Wilderbeest, and about Cheetahs that hunt alone.
Genevieve loved listening to Nigel. It was a secret. She wanted to keep the thing, whatever it was, going. Nigel was nuts of course. And Genevieve, in her own funny way, was as nutty as Nigel.
Life went on, and Christopher Worth gave up the trombone. People without sunhats didn’t have lunch in the yard. Huge sums of money were raised at the sausage sizzles. Verity Sanderson took up the guitar.
‘The African Buffalo grows to a length of up to three metres, and weighs nine hundred kilos,’ Nigel whispered. It was like a drug to Genevieve. Every night she waited for his call. She wondered what he looked like. And then one Sunday, when she was curled up in the chair, listening to him, he said: ‘If you look out the window, I’ll wave.’
She pulled back the curtain and there he was, a pleasant, ordinary-looking man waving to her from a white Celica.
A neighbour saw Genevieve get into the car, thought nothing of it, and was later unable to say whether the car was a Nissan or a Honda, whether the driver was a man or a woman, whether it happened on Saturday or Sunday. Genevieve was listed as a missing person, and they put her picture on the backs of taxis, on the sides of buses.
The fact of the matter is that Nigel took Genevieve home to his house in the hills behind the city, his cabin where he kept his books about wildlife, his guns and his videos. Genevieve became his prisoner, his love, and his victim.
She stayed in the cabin with him, in terror, locked in, tied up. He read to her from the books about wild animals—stark and horrible details of their lives, their deaths, their dwindling populations. Genevieve hardly spoke; just stared at him with a blank and stupefied horror. ‘Don’t bother to scream,’ Nigel told her. ‘There’s nobody to hear.’ Naked, she would submit to him in silence.
One day he untied the ropes that bound her. With a kind of ridiculous ceremony he unlocked the door, threw it open so that the trees outside appeared suddenly, like a picture on a screen, the light of late afternoon slanting through the branches. Genevieve did not move. ‘Why don’t you run away?’
He snarled at her as he said this. She stared at him with the familiar pale incomprehension. Then suddenly she sprang, her naked body flying clean across the room and out the door into the twilight and the bush. She was faster than he had expected, but within seconds he was after her, a rifle in his hand. The white flash of her skin was luminous against the grey-green shadows of the trees. Two shots and he had her and she fell. Slowly he walked towards her, and in his mind the ground was smooth with gleaming snow. She lay upon the snow, gouts of her sweet bright blood falling as cherries on the sheet.
Nigel carried Genevieve—he carried her tenderly—into the cabin where, after a while, he cut her body into sections. He put some parts of her down the well. Some parts of her he cut into strips, and then he ate them raw. It was the first time he had done that, given in to his great desire. He was sorry, but she had deserved it. He felt he had given her plenty of warning. She didn’t have to listen to him. She didn’t have to pick up the phone, didn’t have to get into the car. Didn’t really have to run for it, out the open door into the bush.
He used to hear stuff on the radio about the mysterious disappearance of twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher Genevieve Snow, hear the appeals for information. Sometimes it was a temptation to ring the number and tell them the truth: I am the Wolf Man, and I have eaten Genevieve Snow. Gradually the name Genevieve Snow disappeared. Genevieve’s picture faded from the backs of taxis, the sides of buses.
The Voice continued to ring out across the schoolground.
Emily Hammond won a scholarship to New York. The lamington stall and the sausage sizzle were legends in the neighbourhood. Sunhats became an institution. Verity Sanderson took up the drums, of all things. But Genevieve Snow had taken her last call.
Major Butler’s Kidneys
Imagine a painting, a portrait of a child. Picture of a girl of five in a dark-russet dress with a round wooden button like a doorknob at her waist. The girl is sitting on a small dark wooden chair and behind her all is rich shadow, a deep woody blackness that throws into sweet relief the creamy glow of the child’s skin. At her throat, a single circle of dark coral beads. Her shoulders are bare in an odd mimicry of womanly sophistication. And her face appears to be too old for her years, the face of a girl of seventeen perhaps, with firm pouting red lips and steady wide-open eyes that gaze out of the picture-frame to one side. Is her hair cut very short, or is it pulled back from a centre part and secured at the nape of her neck? Impossible to tell because the shadow background obscures the detail. Her feet, in black ballet slippers with criss-cross ribbons, are placed wide apart, with the legs of her flouncy pantaloons of white broderie anglaise in full view beneath her skirt. On her left knee there rests a stiff doll made from wood or leather, a formal doll, long and thin in a white dress, off the shoulder with huge puffed sleeves and a dark-pink sash. Tied onto the doll’s head with a matching pink ribbon is a yellow bonnet. From the brim of the bonnet springs a waving yellow feather.
The feather is the punctum of the picture. (I have to stop here to explain what I mean by punctum.)
I learnt the word, and rejoiced in the definition of something I experienced but could not name, from Roland Barthes. In Camera Lucida Barthes speaks of the studium and the punctum he sees in photographs. The studium and the punctum work together in certain photographs (and, I think, certain paintings) to arrest the viewer. First the attention is caught by the studium, the field of interest the viewer takes in the picture, the scene, the subject matter. Barthes describes this as ‘a kind of general, enthusiastic commitment’, ‘a half-desire’, ‘a vague, irresponsible interest’. But the punctum will break or punctuate the studium. It is ‘the element which rises from the scene, shoots out like an arrow and pierces me’. It is a ‘sting, speck, cut, little hole—and also a cast of the dice. A photographer’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).’
The child’s gaze takes the viewer’s gaze out of the picture frame, but the eye always comes back to the sprout of yellow feather on the bonnet. It is the detail that interrupts my gaze, bringing me tenderly to the object within the whole that rebels against the studied formality, that accidentally goes against the grain and is a shimmer of delight, telling me that the rigid world of this child, the world that dresses her as a tiny, provocative woman, places a miniature wooden woman in her arms, and sits her on a chair may yet not crush her spirit. The feather is a hopeful piece of punctuation.
The picture hangs in the Art Gallery of South Australia, and is a portrait of Eliza Langhorne, a Hobart girl, painted in 1849, probably by Thomas Bock. For the purposes of my imaginings, I choose to believe that Thomas Bock painted the portrait.
When I saw this picture it reminded me of something. I felt sure I had a picture like this. I collect postcards and, sure enough, among my postcards I found ‘Girl in Red with Her Cat and Dog, 1834–1836’ by Ammi Phillips. This is an American painting of a five-year-old girl in a bright-red dress, off the shoulder, seated on a green velvet or leather stool. She has black slippers (no ribbons), the frills of concertina pleated pantaloons, four strands of red coral beads at her throat. Her brown hair is parted in the middle and is either cut very short or tied back at the nape of her neck. Lips closed, pale coral. Her dark eyes gaze straight ahead, looking into mine. Her brown dog with floppy ears crouches by her right foot; her white cat is cradled in her arms.
I expect there are hundreds, thousands of studies of children in red dresses and white pantaloons holding this pose, painted all over the world in the nineteenth century. There is nothing extraordinary about the relationship between Eliza and Girl in Red. But I can look at them together, comparing them, wondering about them, over and over again. I forgot to say they are both wearing white stockings, and both have gigantic puffed red sleeves. Only the left ear of each girl is visible. Pink skin against the background of the dark. Both pictures are ‘oil on canvas’.
The punctum in the picture of Girl in Red is the head of the cat, which is so firmly hooked over Girl’s elbow that I imagine how the cat’s throat must feel to the cat. A part of the delicate lace edging Girl’s sleeve emerges from beneath the cat’s chin, suggesting the cat is wearing a lacy bow. The cat’s gaze is intense; its ears are large pointed cones.
Again I quote from Camera Lucida—my fascination with these pictures is ‘fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself’. I have never seen the picture of Eliza hanging in the Art Gallery of South Australia; all I have is the postcard that was sent to me recently by a friend. When I saw it I knew it meant something, and my way of discovering what this is, was to write about it. Looking at these two pictures, side by side, makes me almost dizzy, as if my mind is at the edge of a hallucination. The surface of Girl’s card is dull; of Eliza’s is glossy. So as they lie on the table beside the red plastic basket with lattice sides, the sun casts on both a set of dark prison bars, and on Eliza only another set of bright red bars that reach down into the surface of the card.
I borrowed words from Roland Barthes: ‘second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or carry me back to somewhere in myself’. I explore the pictures and I explore the memories and fantasies the pictures have tripped in me. I revel in the word ‘fantasmatic’ because it seems to come very close to describing the response my imagination has to the things that inform and inspire me to write.
I lived in Tasmania from 1940, when I was born, until 1963, when I left Tasmania to see the world. When I lived there, as a young child, I thought a lot about the island’s past; it fascinated me. In fact, I had what was considered at the time to be an unnecessary, unhealthy and dangerous interest in convicts, Aboriginal people and other old things best suppressed. I would spend hours in the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston, breathing in, imbibing the old things there, the mummies, the bark canoes, the furniture, paintings, jewellery, costumes of colonists, the Chinese Jo
ss House, the stuffed animals, the musical boxes, the grandfather clocks. It was a silent place, eerie, an old-fashioned museum.
I read For the Term of His Natural Life obsessively, and then I got hold of a book, first published in 1941, called Shadow Over Tasmania (for the first time—the truth about the state’s convict history) and I knew I was hooked on something very dark, very disturbing, very important. I discovered the bushranger Alexander Pearce, who escaped from Macquarie Harbour (twice) and who, with seven other prison escapees in 1822, tried to get off the island, hoping to set sail for England. This was the first true story I had read about cannibals, and I would return over and over again to the tale of how these men killed and ate each other until only Pearce was left. A particularly hypnotic part of the story was that when Pearce was caught, and confessed his cannibalism to the Reverend Robert Knopwood, he was not believed, and so he was not executed but returned to Macquarie Harbour. He escaped again, ate his companion, gave himself up. This time the soldiers found the remains of the half-eaten companion and Pearce was executed in 1824.