by Carmel Bird
He finally dared to take two photos of Bethany. Hundreds of shots of Lisa and Robert. Two of Bethany. She looked rather serious.
Mary Harrison was delighted when she saw the wedding photos. The whole wedding party looked like princes and princesses. Would Harry mind doing a very large print to go over the lounge-room fireplace?
That was when he decided to enlarge one of the photos of Bethany. He would enlarge it and go over the road and give it to her. At last he had the words. He would say: ‘I did this enlargement for you. Do you want to get married?’
No, he couldn’t say the second part. But the first, he had the first. I did this enlargement for you. He could start calling her Beth. Perhaps. He wasn’t really sure he wanted to marry her anyway. Did he really want her in his house all the time? Filling the bathroom up with tins of floral talcum powder.
It was a huge enlargement of Bethany. Harry looked into its eyes and then he saw them, the images. Reflected in each of Bethany’s eyes were three little skulls, two upright, one reversed. Impossible. He was going mad. Somebody was playing tricks. He processed the photo again. He enlarged the other one. There they were in both pictures, six little death’s-heads, four up, two down. Like two little families in her eyes, the mother, the father, the upside-down child. It was the Purkinje-Sanson Principle.
From his bookshelf he took a textbook and read:
Whenever we see an object, that object is reflected in each eye, not once, but three different times in three different places. This threefold reflection is caused by the curvature of the cornea. Two of the reflections are always right side up and one is always upside down. Depending on the angle at which the object is seen, the three reflections occur on different parts of the eye because of the differing angles of curvature of the cornea.
Did this help? Did this explain? Did every photograph of a human face contain six little skulls, three in each eye? Enlarge the image and the skulls would appear. Harry then looked into the empty eyes of Lisa and Robert and the other members of the wedding party.
It did not occur to him to destroy the enlargements. He stuck them on the wall of the dark room. He would know they were there but nobody would ever see them. He made a small print of one of them, and fancied that even then he could discern the skulls in Bethany’s eyes. He felt compelled to give the photo to her. He thought: ‘I did this photo for you. Do you want to get married? I think there is something the matter with your eyes.’
He put the small print in a thick cream envelope and crossed the road. The dummies were naked, their arms in a heap on the floor, a vase of nasturtiums at their feet. A common sort of flower to have in a fashion display, thought Harry.
With a sort of flourish he gave the envelope to Bethany. She smiled as she thanked him and then she said: ‘I have been meaning to come over. Make an appointment. I have been having a bit of trouble with my eyes.’
One Last Picture of Ruby-Rose
A Letter to ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’
Dear Sir,
I am writing to you to ask for help. I have told my story over and over and over again—to the social worker, the psychiatrist, the police and the solicitor—and nobody will believe me. I am in custody in the psychiatric ward now.
Nobody else believes me, but I know you will, even if you can’t explain what has happened to me. There might be other people you have heard of who have experienced this, others that have written in to your TV program. I think that if I was a different person with more education and money instead of a single mother from St Kilda, people might be more prepared to listen to me, to take me seriously. What happened to me hasn’t even been reported in the papers because they think it’s all the ravings of a madwoman. They take flying saucers and everything pretty seriously these days, don’t they, so why not this?
I will start at the beginning of the story, start with the birth of Ruby-Rose. It was a normal birth in the Women’s Hospital, but nothing was normal after that. My baby was beautiful, but they told me straight away she would be retarded, and she probably wouldn’t live to be five. I refused to accept this. I took her to every specialist I could find—some of them were kind, but most of them just asked me questions about smoking and drinking and dope and sex. Then I started taking Ruby-Rose to alternative treatments and also astrology and Tarot. The only person that gave me any hope at all was a Koori woman, Maeve, who reads Tarot in St Kilda. She was always positive and gave me a lot of strength. Things were going to turn out right for Ruby-Rose, I knew that in my heart.
I said she was a beautiful baby, and she got more lovely as time went on. I took photos of her from birth, and this got to be an obsession with me. I have thousands of pictures of my baby. I will enclose some so you can see. She cried a lot, but when she wasn’t crying she had a smile that lit up her face.
Well, time went on and Ruby-Rose turned one and then two and she was getting stronger and by the time she was three I thought she was even trying to talk.
Then, on the morning of her third birthday, something happened that I think is somehow connected with what happened after that. I feel you will understand when I tell you.
Ruby-Rose and I went for a walk in the gardens—she loved the gardens, loved flowers and birds. I was taking heaps of pictures of her. She was wearing her birthday dress and it was white with frills and she looked like an angel. A man who was walking in the gardens stopped us and said, oh what a little angel, and Ruby-Rose jumped up and down and laughed in a certain way she had. Then not long after that she was running, she had a cute little way she would run, and suddenly she tripped over a rock and sat down. She didn’t cry out, but she bent over and fished something out of the grass and held it up. I looked and saw she was holding something metal. She gave it to me and it was a brooch, a silver ballet dancer with a skirt made from opal.
I’ve always been superstitious about opal—my mother said it was unlucky. We were all named after stones—my name’s Amber—but Mum said she would never call a person Opal. Yet Maeve says it’s really lucky, so you don’t know who to believe. I still had this worry about it—from what Mum used to say. But Ruby-Rose was so happy, like she had found a treasure in the grass. So we took the dancer home and I cleaned it up until it shone. It was a lovely little thing. Like a lot of mothers I used to imagine my daughter would become a dancer. Just a dream.
Ruby-Rose’s treasures are kept on the mantelpiece over the mirror. She liked me to hold her up to the mirror and she would see herself and laugh and put some treasured object on the ledge, or else take something down to look at it.
Well, I held her up to the mantelpiece to put the dancer with the other things, and Ruby-Rose reached up—and when she let it go the silver ballet dancer slipped down behind the mantelpiece, out of sight between the wooden part and the wall.
I expected Ruby-Rose to scream, but she just went rigid in my arms, and a look of pure astonishment came over her face.
I said not to worry, it didn’t matter, and one of the men from the flat downstairs would help us look for it, would take the mantelpiece off the wall and find the dancer again. She seemed to accept that, but I was strangely worried. It was the opal, I think—it was getting to me.
Then we had her party and she sat up to the table in her white dress like a little angel. We had six other children from the creche and one other handicapped child, who cried all the time. It was sad. Maeve was there to help me with things and Ruby-Rose had a really lovely party with all the usual stuff like chocolate crackles and party pies. I took a lot of pictures. After it was all over Maeve helped me with the clearing up and then she left. I wish now she had stayed.
I’d practically forgotten all about the silver dancer behind the mantelpiece, then Ruby-Rose went over to the fireplace and started patting the wood with her hands and looking up at me. I told her that after one more sleep I’d get Tom or Ben from downstairs to come and help us fish the dancer out. Just one more sleep. She accepted that and then she fell asleep in my arms, worn out by th
e excitement of the day.
At times like this I would sit very quiet in the armchair and stroke her forehead and stare down into her face and wonder how it could ever be that she would be taken from me.
Sometimes I would cry—I couldn’t help myself.
We’re coming to the part that nobody can believe. Well, Maeve believes it, but of course nobody believes Maeve either.
I took off her shoes and put Ruby-Rose down in her cot and she hardly stirred. She lay there in her white dress that was all crumpled and dirty. I thought she looked more beautiful than ever. I am trying to remember every detail in case you can see something nobody else has noticed.
I thought of going downstairs and asking one of the men to come and get the dancer out. Then I didn’t go. I was tired. I thought I’d take a picture of Ruby-Rose in her sleep. As well as taking photos with my ordinary camera, I had been taking Polaroids of the party. There were some left.
I picked up the camera, stood on the chair, focused on her face with one curl across her forehead, and I pressed the button. I watched the thing as it rolled out of the camera, held it for a while as I watched the photo forming before my eyes. I like seeing it do that. There she was, pink cheeks, golden hair, dark eyelashes, grubby white dress—a picture of bliss.
I look back at the cot.
Ruby-Rose is gone.
This is why I need your help. Over and over again I have told them—I took a picture of my baby and when the camera made the picture it swallowed Ruby-Rose. Or something swallowed Ruby-Rose. She faded out somehow—just as the picture of her was materialising on the paper. They think I killed her and hid her body. I have told them. I took the picture and the camera sucked her in.
They took the picture away from me. I’ve got thousands of other pictures, but that’s the one I want. She left a warm dent in the cot, no more. Her shoes were on the floor where I had put them.
My mind goes back to the opal dancer, to the bad luck. I wonder if the dancer had anything to do with it. I’m desperate in my search for explanations—crazy with grief. I got in touch with Tom and Ben and they said they went upstairs to the flat and pulled the wood off but they couldn’t find any dancer. They said it was just spider webs with a tram ticket and some hairslides. I know the thing fell down behind the mantelpiece. I saw it with my own eyes—but nobody believes what I saw with my own eyes anymore. Where did the silver dancer go? It’s so weird, and I rack my brains for an explanation. There has to be some connection between Ruby-Rose and the dancer. There just has to be.
But what?
Please, can you please write to me and tell me if you have ever heard of such a thing before? I swear to you that every single thing I have written here is the truth. And something else as well I’d like to ask you—would there be any way you could persuade them to give me back the photo? That would mean more to me than anything.
It’s the last picture I ever took of Ruby-Rose.
Thanking you.
Yours sincerely,
Amber-May Wilson
Why Breezy McCarthy Drank the Cider
You’d have to say Breezy McCarthy was a slut—well, a bit of a slut anyhow. Good-time girl, fast. Breezy was fast.
This is the story of how Breezy came to drink the cider that Maris Joyce and I were making in a cupboard at the back of the locker room at school.
French was taught by Sister Apollonia, a little old nun with shaky hands, enormous teeth and a few white whiskers, whose accent was flat and Australian, but whose love for all things French was a great inspiration. It was the chapter on Normandy, on the manufacture of cider, that gave me and Maris the idea. We consulted an encyclopaedia for the finer details: ‘In small fermentations it is usual to start things off with a little brewer’s yeast. A tub can be placed underneath to collect the yeasty froth that works out of the bunghole, and the cask must be topped up to keep it full and to allow the scum to overflow.’ I rather admired the phrase ‘allow the scum to overflow’. And another: ‘If the fermentation is tumultuous…’ There was a recipe for cider cup, and we longed for the day when we could combine our cider with sherry and mint leaves and sugar and cucumber and soda water. Cider cup. Sophisticated. If the fermentation is tumultuous…Allow the scum to overflow.
The making of cider is done in three processes. The apples are ground into a pulp, called the pomace; the juice is squeezed out by a press; then the juice is fermented. You can pound a few apples at a time, using a heavy hardwood bruiser. (We had a mallet.) The pulp is spread three inches deep on a cloth which is then folded over the pulp. More cloth is placed on top and the process is repeated several times until a ‘cheese’ is made. This cheese is then pressed, standing in a tub that catches the juice. The juice is then run into a wooden cask where it ferments with the aid of brewer’s yeast and honey and flour suspended in a little bag. When fermentation ceases and the liquid shows signs of clearing, the cider is run into a clean cask and stored in a cool place.
Our cider never showed any signs of clearing. It was stuck in the first wooden cask (which was in fact a wooden moneybox) complete with brewer’s yeast and flour and honey in a little bag, and it turned to poison.
Over the weeks the cider grew thick and black, and was streaked with fine threads like a sort of furry cotton. It bubbled quietly on the surface, developing a particular type of silvery scum, a dark, purple and sinister experiment. A witch’s brew. You could detect the smell of apples and decay and something else as soon as you walked into the locker room. We would have just thrown it out in the end, but one day Breezy came and asked me if she could taste it. She had heard we were making cider in the cupboard, she said, and she was a fairly experienced drinker. She would taste it for us and tell us what she thought. I imagined she was joking.
From her blazer pocket she took a small silver tumbler, big enough for a shot of whisky.
Maris and I just stood there like idiots while Breezy filled her tumbler about six times and tossed down the cider, fast. She didn’t make a face, didn’t turn a hair.
‘You girls,’ she said, ‘you don’t know the first thing about making cider, do you? You ought to talk to Mex. He makes gin. He’d put you right on your piss-ant cider.’ She laughed. She put her tumbler back in her pocket and flounced out of the locker room. I dipped my finger in the cider and tasted it. Maris did the same. It was revolting beyond belief. We stared at each other, stared after Breezy. What a girl!
Breezy McCarthy, good-time girl, fast girl, slut, was a sort of widgie, if that word from the fifties still has any meaning. This was a time when there were gangs of bodgies and widgies that hung out on street corners and struck a kind of fascinated terror into the hearts of decent people. Breezy went around on the weekend in full-circle skirts that reached just below the knee, and that were puffed out with yards and yards of white rope petticoats mixed up with scarlet taffeta. So you got this nifty little redhead with long skinny legs, mesh stockings, black suede flatties (very down-at-heel), full black skirt with the red and white rope and stuff underneath, bare midriff, little pink top and a very great deal of make-up. Of course she looked different in school uniform, but even then you could tell she was a bit of a slut. She hitched her tunic up to show off her legs. Such as they were. Her ears, of course, were pierced and she wore little silver rings. In those days such ornaments were seen only on Italian girls. Or girls like Breezy McCarthy. She would get, people said, her comeuppance. It was a small town. Big country. Australia in the fifties.
The main boyfriend was Mex—baby-faced Mex with the high wave of black hair, gleaming with oil—Brylcreem I suppose—sweeping up off his forehead. Maybe his name was really Max, but he was called Mex, rhymes with sex. Breezy’s name was Bridget, but even the nuns called her Breezy. Mex worked as a car mechanic and always smelt of oil and grease, and he rode a loud black motorbike, a BSA, on the back of which you would often find Breezy. (Never mind that her sister Madeleine was killed on the back of a motorbike in 1957.) They chewed gum and drank hospital brandy
. They smoked. And Breezy’s voice was highly over-cultured due to her strict attention to the elocution lessons we got from the nuns.
Once I had a dance with Mex and I nearly fainted from excitement when he pressed himself hard up against me so I could feel his cock. Breezy noticed all this and came and took him out of my grasp. Came spinning across the dance floor with all her rope petticoats frothing away under her skirt. She stood behind Mex and put her hands over his eyes and he let me go, dropped me like a hot potato, and went off with Breezy. Then to the beat of Bill Haley and his Comets he threw Breezy between his legs and then over his head and carried her out the door. We believed she never wore underpants. Breezy had been doing it with boys for years and years.
It was no surprise to anybody when Breezy and Mex had a shotgun wedding. It was quite a fancy affair, a nuptial mass in the little weatherboard church on the corner. The McCarthys had tickets on themselves, and knew how to throw a party and hold their heads up. But in fact Breezy wasn’t as sure of herself as she pretended to be. She was very young to be getting married, and she was scared—scared of having a baby, scared of being stuck with Mex for the rest of her life, stuck in the old home town.
Six weeks before the wedding, she was rushed to hospital with violent stomach cramps and vomiting and diarrhoea. That was when the pregnancy was discovered. But of course Breezy knew about it already. They asked her what she had eaten, what she’d drunk, and she dobbed on me and Maris Joyce. She told Sister she had swigged the cider we were making in the cupboard in the locker room. Forget about Breezy and her problems—I thought we were going to be expelled. Sister told us that Breezy’s life hung in the balance, and that the new life she was carrying (this was the first we had heard of it) was in terrible danger from our evil mischief. I remember the way she said that, with a kind of slow pleasure. Evil Mischief. And where had we got the recipe? And, Mother of God, where had we got the idea?