by Gail Jones
From behind the door Evie heard the deep custodian woof of a large dog, bounding up the hallway. It was a labrador, she was sure, and not a well-behaved guide dog. The door opened and a bulky black labrador swept forwards, bumping her with its head in a friendly greeting, sniffing under her skirt, weaving around her legs. An attractive woman of about sixty roared at the dog, ‘Rocky! Down!’ but it took no notice. She bent over and seized its collar, dragging it backwards. ‘Uncontrollable, hopeless,’ she said. ‘Sorry about that.’
The dog looked up at Evie, entreating a release. She passed her hand over its hard, bony head.
‘Don’t encourage him…’
The woman introduced herself as Judith, Benjamin’s sister, and led Evie up the dim, cool corridor and into a spacious living room. This was one of those Sydney terraces all renovated on the same model: the back wall knocked down and replaced by sheets of glass, the kitchen incorporated in an open plan, the ceiling cut up with rectangular skylights. It was without shadows, far too bright, and almost crackling in the summer light. Already, she missed the sensations of Melbourne enclosure. She missed the plaintive high screech of a tram rounding a corner, its green and yellow form disappearing into a delicate cool mist. And her own apartment, poky, with mildewed walls and forties beige and an air of bohemian degradation.
Rocky padded over to sit at the feet of his master, and Judith moved to stand beside his armchair. It was as if they had assembled themselves for a portrait in oils. Judith was undeniably the older sister. They had the same long faces, the same full lips and dark brown eyes. Her hair was grey, severely pulled back by a band, his still mostly dark and worn a little long. As Evie played this in her head, she realised how commonplace it might sound, that she would need to convert faces to words with much more authority and precision.
Benjamin stood and walked towards her, unhesitating, his hand extended. They shook, and he invited her to sit.
‘Well, I’m off then!’ Judith was already gathering up her handbag, kissing her brother on the cheek with a swift scuff, and rushing away. The front door slammed. The dog immediately lowered and settled its head between its paws.
‘Now we can relax,’ said Benjamin. ‘She means well.’
She saw his body unstiffen. He turned towards her. His expression was neutral and his bleary eyes strayed a little, like the slide of distant, miniature planets.
‘I hope you don’t mind the absence of dark glasses,’ Benjamin said. ‘I know some people find it a little unnerving.’
They began like this, civil and impersonal. Benjamin was testing her out. He mentioned that he liked all genres of movies, including action and thrillers. In these, he said, there was much more to describe, since car chases, fight sequences, inevitable suspense scenes when heroes moved stealthily through forbidden territory—these never had dialogue. There was an app for blind viewers, but it was mechanical and unimaginative. Now he wanted to try a human, he added wryly.
Evie pondered how she would describe bashings and fisticuffs, and police cars hurtling in elastic slow-motion twists as they crashed. Men running through seedy backstreets. Murders. Conflagrations. The way the hero and heroine charge to the foreground as the world explodes behind them in a golden fire of satisfying immensity.
‘Art-house movies, too, have long silent periods.’
Evie felt that now he was condescending. She did not respond.
‘But you know that, of course.’ There was a note of regret at his blunder. ‘Forgive me, I should have offered you a drink. Tea? Coffee?’
And so Evie and Benjamin, both reticent and private, both wretched, in some ways, with the experience of loss, began to speak to each other. The candour of their meeting was unexpected. Benjamin told Evie of his late, but rather sudden, descent into blindness, how he had believed he would be brave and philosophical but was instead fearful and miserable. It was almost two years, he said, before he accepted his condition and re-entered the world. He hated his weakness and lack of autonomy. He could not come to terms with the loss of his career. His wife had left him. His daughter worked abroad. He said he missed above all the distinction between night and day. He had been an early riser, in love with the dawn; now there was only a slight shift in his perceptual darkness, a tiny cinereous gradation when he stared at the sun. Omnipresent night had once seemed a death, he said; only now was he learning how it could be an alternative life.
For her part Evie told him that her father had died five weeks ago. She was encouraged to say more because Benjamin could not see her; he could not see how her eyes began to swim and redden, how she looked down, how she had trouble controlling her unruly expressions. It was a relief to speak from a position of invisibility. She said she felt remote from ordinary life and things. She was staying in her father’s apartment, surrounded by his possessions, and had not yet packed them away or disposed of them, as was her duty. It was a difficult situation to find herself in, but she was unable to resolve it. She was not sure how long she would stay in Sydney, but needed work in the meantime. She’d been part-time for three years now in the bookshop and her funds were depleted.
Benjamin asked what work she had done in the past and Evie said she had trained as a philosopher, but found university life unphilosophical.
‘It’s a peculiar vocation, unsuited to institutions. Elucidation when the system wants obfuscation. Clarification when it prefers darkness.’
She wanted to retract; perhaps he heard it in her silence.
‘It’s okay. I’m used to it. No one prefers darkness…’
They were careful then, curving around words that seemed to speak too directly of her or his condition. Evie was aware of her attraction to metaphors of sight and light.
‘I wrote a paper once,’ she said, changing the subject, ‘on acheiropoieta. It’s the idea of miraculous images, things made without hands, just appearing. The Shroud of Turin, Christ’s face on Veronica’s veil. Or the Virgin turning up as an image on cheese, or toast. When I was a child, I thought of movies like that. I couldn’t imagine people making them: they were just there, huge visions mysteriously unfabricated. It was a kind of natural magic.’
Benjamin remained silent. She was encouraged by his evident attention.
‘Anyone who looks at a photograph,’ she went on, ‘intuits this mystery. Then, as an adult, it occurred to me we might read the natural world in this way: patterns in rocks, the clouds, the secular iconic…’
Evie became self-conscious. She blushed. She had not spoken like this for a long time.
‘Go on.’
‘It still interests me. Our veneration of images. Our wish to see them as impromptu, and separate.’
‘This may be difficult to sustain when we’re watching Die Hard,’ Benjamin said. ‘Not much veneration there.’
She liked his attempt at humour. She liked his hands, veined purple, and his low, soft voice. And she wondered too how she would deal with this unusual job, whether she would mind being the eyeball, rolling along in movie-time. Whether the act of finding intervals into which she might stuff a few explanatory words would seem rude, even violating. She didn’t mention her reservations; she needed the work. And she needed, even in so strange a manner, to begin to talk to people again, to return to the world. Benjamin sent her away with Marnie, a Hitchcock movie, for their first session.
~
In the evening, Martin Skyped. Evie had left it open each day, as he had requested, and there he was, ringing in the morning on the other side of the planet. His voice boomed into the apartment, teleporting his vivid quasi-presence along with it. Evie was struck by how efficiently he filled the room, how his voice resonated, conducting him from Palermo to Sydney.
When his face came into view, she thought he looked rather tired, but he dismissed her inquiry about his health by saying he’d been out late at dinner. She was unpersuaded. He had the brainy pallor of fluorescent lights, and the moist, febrile look of one who had just risen from a sickbed. She guessed he was hungov
er. She felt a surge of love for him.
Martin began speaking in a falsely jovial tone about the life of the city, but soon changed register to a surrealist ramble. He spoke of palm trees without palms, of the ruins of buildings in the old centre, untouched since the war. He had seen two street kids, tough-looking boys, wheeling a family of five puppies down Via Roma in a pram; he had seen churches, deconsecrated, with concreted windows; he had seen a row of goats’ heads hanging in the Ballarò market, and, beneath them, a tasty bowl of glaucous eyes. He was trying to entertain, to convey the narcotic oddity of being a stranger in a new city, delighting in the non-PC fun of tourist primitivism. But he was also desolated, she saw, and not coping well.
‘Just a late night,’ he said again.
‘Noah,’ Evie insisted. ‘What about Noah?’
Martin paused. She could hear him formulating a response. He told her about a man named Antonio, whom he had met and distrusted, but who had known Noah. A colleague. He’d claimed a link between the sculptor Ragusa, who had worked in Tokyo, and international art smuggling. Martin’s story was unclear. Evie anticipated clarification. But instead he said, ‘Conspiracy theories! Don’t you just love them?’
Evie waited in frustrated silence. ‘What, Martin? What have you actually discovered?’
‘Not much really. There is a woman, called Dora. Antonio said she was the thief.’
Martin was only half-convinced; she could hear it in his voice. But Evie was filled with questions.
‘Later, later,’ said Martin. He was planning to meet this woman, then he would report back. There was no point chiding.
When it was Evie’s turn, she gave Martin a nonsensical version of her new employment. She would be the voiceover, she said, in a new kind of cinema; she would not allow any silence to go unchallenged. Something her employer said reminded her of an early eighteenth-century scientist called Johann Wilhelm Ritter, who was interested in the subjectivity of seeing. He fitted a contraption to his eyelids to hold them open so that he could expose his eyes to direct sunlight for up to twenty minutes at a time. The consequence was that for days afterwards—or so he reported—the fire in the hearth was a wondrous sulphuric blue, and blue paper appeared to be fiery red. So there are men like de Saussure, she said, who wanted to calculate the blue tint of the sky, then others, like Ritter, who revelled in the instability of vision. The childish bloody-mindedness of pressing on the eyelids or staring too long at the sun.
Martin was curious and they talked on this topic for half an hour. He wanted to know more about Ritter. Evie mentioned Purkyně and Goethe; she taught him the word ‘phosphene’. She resisted making an alphabetical list of eighteenth-century philosophers preoccupied with vision.
Then suddenly she felt the need to disengage. Evie glanced at the clock and saw that it was not even ten, yet somehow it seemed later. The energy of her talk had infected Martin. He looked revived now and ready for a much longer discussion. He smiled and made jokes. As if it were a machine for invigoration, the Skype screen had opened a current of words, iotas, semes, sparks, pulling her brother back to life as she herself subsided. When she said goodbye, he made her promise they would continue their discussion. He had a plan for a series on deconsecration and needed to think about the colour blue.
‘Blue,’ he said emphatically. ‘I need to think about blue.’
Evie slept badly. In her father’s double bed, she tossed and turned. A dream transformed her into a woman composed of particles, streaming like electricity through circuits and systems. She’d been hijacked in sleep by movie special effects, of the type favoured in sci-fi dashing and lit transmigrations. Noah, it seemed, was present in the dream. His voice was there, speaking in bass tones, but his image and body were not; his image and body were gone. Untimely, as dreams of the dead inevitably are, but also partial, mostly missing, just an acoustic ghost. He sounded like the wind, her father, like a straining wind. He had no substance at all, and no holy afterlife.
16
HIS FATHER, JOSHUA Glass, died of heart failure.
Towards the end of Noah’s first year in Adelaide, he received the news by phone from his uncle Luke.
‘It was his heart, Noah,’ his uncle’s quavering voice declared. ‘They said it was his heart.’
The repetition of ‘heart’ dismayed him. Still, he could not imagine his father’s heart. His first thought was that he had not seen Joshua for many years, and now would never see him again. His second thought was for his mother, Enid. He had not seen her, either, and wondered how she must be coping, why she’d not called him herself, whether she would need help with the funeral arrangements. His mind turned on these wearying practical matters, in which guilt and grief and relief competed. He had become detached from his parents. He had not cared enough to keep in touch. He was a bad son.
Noah flew to Perth for the funeral, leaving his children with Norman and Margaret. They had never met his mother; now was not the right time. He thought he was managing well. But the sight of his mother, shrivelled and demented, being wheeled into the chapel by a uniformed nurse, and the look of Uncle Luke, his eyes brimming, so resembling his father, as he bravely shook hands, these signs of broken family filled him with regret. Noah felt a gagging at his throat and by evening his rash had scalded and spread. It fanned open, scaly, and exhibitionist as a flag. He was aware he displayed his guilt for all to see: the unprodigal son, ever the boy, pleading implicitly to be an orphan.
He sat in the chapel between his mother, who did not recognise him, and his uncle, who was heartbroken, listening to a man he didn’t know spin a story of his father’s life. Joshua was devout, devoted, selfless and saintly. He had given his life to the poor Aborigines of Western Australia. He had brought them the light, when they were lost in leprous darkness. He had served afterwards on committees and was a leader of the church. A local politician spoke of how Joshua was a ‘pillar of the community’. A torrent of banalities swept over and swamped everyone.
Somewhere else was Joshua with a bloody chicken tucked under his arm, fearful and strange. Somewhere else rose the sharp stink of kerosene as his father turned a metal knob to extinguish the light. And somewhere was his voice, not yet dead, still full of commands, and his tenacious refusal to make peace with his son, and his son’s equal refusal to repair their estrangement. Death was no end, thought Noah, but the continuation of these remnants, and these failures between them.
Then Luke rose, and gathered his shaky voice. He told of how his older brother had returned in 1945 from a prison camp in Burma. He was a hero, said Luke, already a doctor, and a survivor, already a good man. He married his childhood sweetheart, and was blessed with their first son, Noah, in 1946.
From the platform, framed by twin vases of wattle blossom, Luke looked down on Noah with no hint of reproach. Joshua had rarely spoken of his war experiences, but Luke knew, he said quietly, how much they had affected him. He had chosen a Higher Cause. He had served his God. He was proud of his two sons—here Luke indicated Noah to the congregation—and devastated by the death of his youngest, James. His wife, Enid, had been his loyal companion of many years—here Luke indicated Enid, who had fallen asleep—and she had staunchly accompanied him on his life’s mission.
When it was Noah’s turn to speak, his throat was so constricted he felt he was choking. He looked out across the congregation, a small cluster of grey heads, one or two Aboriginal faces, and croaked a few platitudes. It was difficult to speak. He quoted from a Methodist hymn his father sang, even in the shower, and in a scarcely credible tone described him as ‘sturdy’. He reached into nowhere, failing, for truthful feeling, and could not bear the sound of his own weak voice.
Afterwards an old black man, whom he could barely remember, came forward to say how much he had loved Joshua Glass. The man had been one of the drivers who brought stores from Derby to the leprosarium; he wondered if Noah remembered the jeep. Often, he had let him and Francis sit in the jeep, the man said. Back in them old days.
Back when he was a kid, before the city time. ‘Long time, now. Long time.’
Noah stared into the man’s face and saw Francis there. Yes, Francis was his nephew, Maggie was his sister. This man had taken the job to keep in touch when they were sent to the colony. They were his family. This man had been the emissary of another world, bringing tea chests of packed goods, tobacco, flour and condensed milk, bringing the rumour of a freer, healthier place. The jeep, of course Noah remembered the jeep. He asked after Francis and was told he was doing well. He was a qualified mechanic up in Derby. Had his own business and a family, four little girls. James had helped him in the early days. Good boys, Francis and James.
‘My boy Francis,’ the old man said. There was a pride in the announcement—he could not conceal his feelings—and a claim of success.
Noah had missed the man’s name when first he spoke and now it was too late to inquire. But this old fellow was the guardian of part of his life. He remembered each of them, Noah, Francis and James; he had preserved, and even cherished his memories of each of them as children. The man held a brown felt hat and stood turning it by the rim. A bushman’s hat, Noah saw, with a spray of goldfinch feathers arrayed in the leather band. Large hands, scarred, black, capable. They shook hands, in the end. Noah calmed his own trembling fingers in the old man’s firmer grasp.
In a stinking bar in East Perth Noah watched his uncle, whom he remembered dimly as a man of moderation, drink too much beer and tell stories about his brother. They were propped at a table ringed with stains and the burn marks of cigarettes.
The younger by five years, Luke had hero-worshipped Joshua. His own war had been spent in Darwin, and the family believed that Joshua had died in a prisoner-of-war camp in Burma. It was a shock to everyone when he returned, more skeleton than man, dreadfully thin, his civvies ill-fitting, his hat pushed back, to greet their shaken and disbelieving stares. Luke felt ashamed, wanting to be the only son. He’d not wanted his brother to return from the grave.