by Carmel Bird
The Death of Belinda
It is a very sad fact that Belinda Tillyard never woke up from the ordeal of the strange sleep that provided such a scientific breakthrough. She drifted away as great red tears of monkshood and strawberry juice dribbled from the corners of her eyes.
‘Your mother has died in her sleep,’ Gustav told the family, himself understanding almost nothing of what had happened. After a time he found himself strangely attracted to Hermione Uhu, but, without some intervention such as Belinda’s mother’s cinnamon cookies, nothing would ever come of that. Hermione was utterly dedicated to her work, blinkered, almost part of her own computer systems, or so it seemed to some. She received many accolades for her work, and in her acceptance speeches she always paid humble tribute to the sampler made by her great-grandmother and to the wisdom of the ancient herbalists. People generally took this reference to ancient wisdoms as a little eccentricity for which the great scientist must be humoured and forgiven. She received funding for the establishment of a huge Imago-Genetic Research Institute, and although there remained, as there always will remain, old-fashioned thinkers who tut-tutted philosophically and ethically about privacy and human rights, the IGRI went ahead in leaps and bounds. The name of Belinda Tillyard drifted away, but her legacy is in fact alive wherever two or three are gathered together to marvel at the work of Hermione Uhu and the miraculous isolation of the Genetic Unconscious Deciding Factor.
The Sea is Going to France
Isn’t it a pity they have to grow up? They look good enough to eat.
My children, my rosebuds, my little farmyard chicks, my rabbits, little white rabbits, my blossoms. These are my babies, my two little girl babies, my perfect ones, my doves. My pink-and-white doves are fluttering on the sand. These babies are pink and white and perfect and they are running on the silver-white sand where the foam of the sea washes round in a great wide arc. The wet sand meets the dry sand and the babies run on the wet sand, leaving mouse footprints that fill up with water. The footprints blur with water, these rabbit prints, these marks of baby owls, these owlets, these bees. My two little bees are flying across the sand, and behind them, the sea, green as the leaves of the lavender, stretches out and away, and is going to France. The sea is going from the south of England to the south of France, and my babies are running on the beach.
The grown-up sea is lapping on the wise white sands in the sun in the south of France. In runny lines of moving foam, the little waves are eating at the beaches in the south of the south. Of France. Where ladies in black dresses splashed with geraniums and poppies stroll beside the sea, amble into lobbies of hotels. In hats. These ladies in their hats sit in the velvet chairs in lobbies and they smoke and drink and chatter in their dresses with geraniums. They smell of perfumes which came from Paris, and before that from flowers in the fields of all the flowers in the paradise of France. Ladies in their bedrooms in the hotels have enormous glass bottles of perfume which capture the lives from the flowers from the fields of the south of France. The civet cats, the sperm whale are invisible in the bottles. But they are there in the perfume in the bottle in the bedroom of the hotel in the south of France. Outside the bedroom windows, the sea, the lavender sea, leads out and out and out and reaches out to wash my babies on the beach.
They are fat and perfect, pink babies, white babies. Fine chains of stars dangle from their hair. They are mermaid babies, the prints of their flippy tails marking the wet sand.
But these are words I don’t talk in. If I ever talked like this, with mermaids, bottles of perfume in hotels in France, then everyone would think I was mad. My sister Ellen is mad. But all I am saying is that it’s such a pity that they have to grow up. They are so sweet and pretty and innocent. And perfect. Their legs are round and fat. It seems sad to me that their legs have to grow long, that these babies have to bleed. My babies bleeding on the beach on the silver-white sand, filaments of bright blood curling like smoke into the sea. I made these babies. They came from me. And now they are perfect. But there I go again with the mad nonsense I talk. Mad nonsense talk, dream talk. When I let my thoughts go on like that, I see the babies as pomegranates, two scarlet globes splitting open, spilling secret seeds and out jump the juicy babies, red as the autumn sunset.
Mother rabbits eat their babies, don’t they? Then they would never grow up. Well, of course they wouldn’t grow up. What a silly thing to say. If you ate them, they couldn’t grow up. It is a pity that they have to grow up.
That was what Ellen thought. Or what she said she thought. Ellen is mad though, as I said before. She is forever going to doctors, and they put her in hospital and give her drugs and shock treatment but nothing helps as far as I can see. Ellen tries to kill herself and then they put her in hospital and give her all these treatments and she comes out and tries again. She had twin babies, you see. And these little pink twin baby girls were asleep in their cots when Ellen looked at them and said to herself what a pity they have to grow up. So then she sang them a story about rabbits—Ellen makes up stories, and songs—and then she started to put the babies in the oven. The lucky thing for those little rabbits is that their grandmother walked in at that moment, just before Ellen turned on the gas. We still don’t know whether she was going to gas them or cook them. She doesn’t seem to know herself. Anyway, they were saved. And what I do know is that Ellen is saving sleeping pills, and she is going to swallow them, and get in the bath, and swallow poison, and cut her throat. Then what will become of the little ones, the little rabbits? They will grow up. Ellen herself never really grew up, I suppose. Didn’t want to grow up. She wanted to stay a baby herself, a baby on the beach, washed by the water, shining on the sand. She wanted to live, but only as a baby. So she would cook the babies and eat them, and she would be a baby, and none of them would ever grow up, and everybody would be in their mother forever. Rabbits in the oven. Poor Ellen. It’s a shame she had to grow up. I look at the babies on the beach and I think it is a pity they have to grow up.
Marked and scarred and lined and painted and dressed in black satin. With geraniums. Poppies. In Paris. In perfume. A cloud, a sea of French perfume. Going to cinemas on the Champs Elysées. Drinking brandy in cafés. Buying hats and flowers. Smoking Russian cigarettes with men in taxis. Holding hands. Bleeding.
The footprints blur with the water, these rabbit prints, these marks of baby owls. Two little owls are flying across the sand, and behind them, the sea, green as lavender, stretches out and away, and is going to France.
The Golden Earring of Hepzibah-May Mull
Sailors who wear golden earrings will not drown.
The drought is very bad this year. The water level of the lake is low, very low, lower than I ever remember. And I am a man of eighty-three with a memory of things.
The cross on the spire of St Paul’s is fully exposed so that in some lights it appears to be a sort of miracle, an upright stone cross standing alone on the surface of the water.
They flooded the town in ‘58. It was a town like any other. Then they built the dam, flooded the town and made Lake St Paul—a landmark, beauty spot and tourist attraction. Now, every seven years or so, when the level drops, the cross on the tip of the spire becomes visible, first as a shadow like a hammerhead shark beneath the surface; and then the carved stone cross begins to poke through, like a lone gravestone pushing up through the marshy ground. And finally the whole cross sits there on the water as it does today, and my mind plays with the idea that the spire of the church is stretching. One day the whole town will probably come up and float on the surface of the water—another miracle, landmark, tourist attraction.
Or floating blot upon the landscape, ruined kingdom, water-world where eels and spotted sea-snakes, Loch Ness monsters and their mates writhe and coil and copulate in the tiled corridors of the primary school, the glass cases of the haberdasher.
I was teaching at the high school when it happened. I was in charge of history and social studies with three periods of biology to fill
up my timetable. I coached the boys’ hockey. We won the premiership that year. My only daughter, Judith, was the last bride married in St Paul’s. (By coincidence her father-in-law’s middle name was Noah.) I gave Judith away. It was spring and I had a brand new suit. Eileen had done the flowers in the church, and I will never forget the perfume of the bulbs. There was something sickening about the smell. Eileen got every kind of white or cream spring flower she could lay her hands on. Beg-borrow-or-steal. I was concerned for Judith’s hay fever. She has suffered from upper respiratory problems since she was very small, and her life has been more or less shaped by attacks of asthma and bouts of pneumonia. There was a time when Eileen and I suspected epilepsy but it was a false alarm.
I remember how I was feeling at the wedding as the volume of the organ became louder. It was ‘The Wedding March’. Judith and Eileen were both quite traditional, even sentimental. I stepped into the central aisle with Judith at my side in white. She was small and regal and tears came to my eyes. I faltered and I felt a flutter of concern from Judith and I looked down at her. Her bouquet was faintly quivering. Then I glanced at her profile and I noticed something that steadied me, and I felt my flesh go chill. Through the white mist of my daughter’s wedding veil I could see that she was wearing a small ring of gold in the lobe of her right ear.
As I said before, we are a traditional family, conservative. There was a time, when Judith was sixteen, when she asked us if she could have her ears pierced. We hardly knew what had got into her, and Eileen, as I remember, was at a loss for words. This type of custom of mutilation of the body was confined to certain classes of people—gipsies and foreigners, Egyptians and Roman Catholics, and people Eileen always described as ‘common’.
‘Can I have my ears pierced?’ Judith said to me one morning at the breakfast table. It was a question that took my breath away. We looked around at Judith’s companions for an influence, searching for a common girl or foreigner, but the only high-school girl who wore gold earrings was a person called Hepzibah-May Mull. And Hepzibah-May was not one of Judith’s friends.
‘Is Hepzibah-May a friend of yours?’ I said to Judith. And Judith answered no.
There had been an incident involving Hepzibah-May’s earrings.
I was sitting in the upstairs staffroom marking a pile of essays on the French Revolution when I heard a scream. I rushed over to the window and looked down into the girls’ playground. Girls were gathered at the monkey bars. I remembered seeing first that little crown of girls standing on the gravel looking up. I saw with that strange clarity we have in moments of crisis and distress. I saw black shoes, black stockings, navy tunics, white blouses and black ties. I saw the silver badges on the ties. Perhaps the badges were glinting in the sunlight. Perhaps there was no sunlight. It was raining, lightly raining.
The monkey bars were an ancient wooden construction, worn smooth and shiny from many years of use. The ground beneath the bars was slightly hollowed out and prone to form a puddle in wet weather. Dangling from the bars and kicking, screaming, was the girl with golden earrings. As I learnt later, one of the gold rings in her ears had caught on a nail and the child had panicked. Her head was trapped; her hair was tangled in the bars, and someone called the gardener for assistance. I went downstairs and ordered the gaping girls to move away. Meanwhile the gardener, standing on a ladder, was in the process of sawing through one of the wooden bars to free Hepzibah-May’s head. I could see that blood was dripping from her ear lobe onto the collar of her shirt. Her shirt, I noticed, was not white, but grubby. One seldom thinks of how much blood can come pouring from the flesh of one girl’s ear.
I remember once when Judith put her arm through the glass of our front door and there was blood hitting the ceiling. We had fifteen-foot ceilings and the blood made a distinctive pattern, like a palm tree.
Hepzibah-May was taken to the hospital where part of her damaged ear lobe had to be removed.
There had been some trouble with her once before. It was when they had a competition for the design for the new war memorial. The students in the art class were working on designs and my daughter, Judith, had a large new box of pencils. The pencils were clearly marked, each one, with Judith’s name. I had marked Judith’s pencils myself. With the blade of a pocket knife I had peeled back a strip of paint and a fine shaving of wood. I had then printed my daughter’s name, JUDITH ANN REEVES. The letters just fitted in the space. The pencils disappeared and were later found, during a search, in Hepzibah-May Mull’s locker. Hepzibah-May’s design for the memorial was quite impressive, the art teacher said, for a girl of her age and background. But because of the incident with the pencils Hepzibah-May had to be disqualified from the competition, and as it happened Judith’s design won. The new memorial was constructed in bronze and concrete from Judith’s design. It was a clock tower of very pleasing proportions with the names of all the local fallen of two world wars printed on the clock face. The clock face reminded me and others of an enormous dinner plate.
Etched or incised into the dinner-plate face of the clock on the memorial that Judith had designed in art class were the names of almost every family in the town from A to Z. In our own street the Goldbergs, the Forthes, the Zabahs and the Hayes had sons who died in action in the war.
The hands of the clock would move like clockwork day by day across the names, marking, it seemed to me, each name with shades and shadows of the daily occurrences of life.
On the first Anzac Day after the completion of the memorial Judith was invited to place a wreath of scarlet flowers on the steps that led up to the clock. This ceremony was to be observed during the dawn service, but Judith suffered a severe attack of asthma in the night and was unable to attend. She often had these attacks before some big event. They were brought on by anxiety and excitement, the doctor said. Eileen and I were both concerned for Judith on her wedding day, but by a miracle she was spared an attack.
I looked sideways at Judith on her wedding day and I caught a glimpse of a golden earring. I saw that her perfect skin was pierced by some wicked piece of gipsy metal, and I stood suddenly still in the aisle of St Paul’s as the music of the organ rolled around me and rose and grew enormous in the church. I turned away and concentrated on some detail in the window above the altar—a tree with foliage in gold and green and filled with birds. The window was glowing in the sunlight of the afternoon. So easily the sunlight passed through the coloured glass of the picture. And the picture is in darkness and the birds are swimming silently in the midnight slime.
I never spoke to Judith about the golden earrings, and always after that she wore them. Does she take them out at night? And I always wondered what she made of my silence on the subject, and of Eileen’s silence also. Judith got married and went to live in Sweden. So far away. We hardly saw her after that. Eileen lived for Judith’s letters and the pictures of the children. The children now have children of their own. I sometimes receive pictures of them shortly after they are born. I am grateful for the pictures, but they all look much the same as each other.
The strangest photograph I got was the picture of my great-granddaughter, Norma, taken in the months before she was born. I took the envelope when it came in the post and I thought someone had sent me by mistake a photograph of a pyramid. The unborn child, sleeping pharaoh, was photographed in profile, lying on her back in the water across the base of the pyramid in black and white and mysterious shades of grey.
I have sometimes gone out to Lake St Paul at twilight; driven out along the highway through the forest. But I have never seen the surface of that great sheet of water at night when black and wet and artificial it shines and sighs and murmurs underneath the moon.
A sad thing was the flooding of the gardens. People had worked for generations growing avenues of almond trees and standard roses. I sometimes think of rose bushes as they try to bloom, almond trees as they attempt to blossom on the floor of Lake St Paul. We had an orange tree in the back garden and a lemon. Oranges and lemons say
the bells.
The saddest thing for me, I have to say, is the fact that Judith’s war memorial is sitting in the middle of the town, at the bottom of the lake. But I do have the sense—it is almost knowledge—that in the course of time the land will reach up, rise; the waters will recede, and the clock on the monument will look face out again, the names of the sons of Goldberg, Forthe, Zabah and Hayes glinting through fungoid slime that grows like fur upon the faces of underwater clocks.
The drought is bad. The water level of the lake is lower than I ever remember. I am a man of eighty-three with a memory of things.
What World is This?
As Revealed In Jane’s Journal and Margaret’s Thoughts
One
The Journal of Jane Wordsworth, younger daughter of Lady Charlotte Wordsworth of Carrickvale, Convenor of the London Chapter Ladies’ Committee for the Promotion of the Emigration of Single Women to Van Diemen’s Land 1832
In the morning, quite early, Sarah and I had the great pleasure of selecting the fabrics for our new opera cloaks—rose velvet for Sarah and white cashmere with swansdown for myself. We visited also the French milliner in Lavender Lane where we purchased some of her smaller artificial flowers fashioned from crepe de Chine, for beneath our new cloaks we will both wear our pink silks which will require new trimming. From the bird-seller on the corner Sarah bought a sweet canary in a willow cage. Mother has promised we may each choose something from her jewel-case. We were quite worn out first by the excitement of anticipation and then by the demands of the decisions required of us, but we were also most delighted with the results of our labours. This excursion was allowed only on the strict understanding that in the afternoon we would both accompany our Mama, our Aunt Georgiana and Mrs Jamieson when they conducted the Charitable Interviews. This was for our exercise of Good Works, for our own Education, and also for our Edification. We were not called upon to speak or to offer any judgment whatsoever, although nothing could prevent us from discussing the events that had passed between ourselves afterwards, within the private confines of our own rooms. The Interviews are conducted at the request of Canon Bracebridge who is the Deputy Chairman of the Committee proper. Although we were weary, we were eager to comply with our Mama’s wishes, not the least because we have been for some time in a wonderment as to the duties and activities of the Ladies’ Committee. Tippie has scarcely stopped barking since Sarah brought home the canary.