I sat very still for a long while with that picture of myself. Then I shuddered all over. My teeth were chattering and my fingers were almost numb. I stood up, stuffed both hands into the pockets of my coat and began to walk.
By about three o’clock the day had become wet with drizzling rain. I had my long purple parka and my boots, but I hadn’t watched for puddles or gutters and my feet were now wet. I bounced around on my toes trying to get the feeling back, wondering what it was that had kept me there all those hours? I didn’t really know, only . . . only that I just couldn’t . . .I didn’t want to go home yet.
So here you are. Just a man. Orlando. Only a man. Will I tell you about the way you’ve become my own personal nightmare? How you have wormed your way into my brain? My sleep? How your eyes will widen when I take the gun from my coat pocket and point it straight at you. A gun or a knife? That was something I’d have to work out. Would I use a gun or a knife?
A rushing sound in my head made me feel momentarily as if I was falling. I was falling fast from a great height towards something terrible. I was falling into the heart of the volcano, towards the boiling red rock. But all around me was darkness. Everywhere about me cold, black, spongy dark. Falling. Falling through the black water, my hair fanning out like a drowning woman. But the figure at the bottom of the river has changed. The one sucking and gurgling on the murky black water has become my mother.
A slim woman in dark clothes, both arms raised high, swaying in the current on the bottom of the river. Her long red hair, with strands of grey, swirls and flutters gently out from around her head like exotic grass from a forgotten garden. Her heavy black skirt surges around in the water, back and forth, billowing out around her legs every now and again like a tent. Her face is very white and she too has heavy boots on. My mother. I can see her standing on the floor of the river, already gone, part of the undergrowth now, spots of moss and green algae already growing on her hands and skirt.
The rest is blackness. I can’t remember even running. I think I shouted something and began to run, but I can’t be sure.
The next thing I remember was fiddling in my pockets for my door key. Someone had helped me out of a car. Some stranger was gently leading me up to my front door. A police officer? I was outside our little house unable to believe that my key wasn’t where it always was. Had I gone to sleep somewhere by the river? Enormous lumps of time must have passed, but I had no idea. It was now evening. My frozen fingers fumbled around stupidly inside the empty spaces in my jeans, coat and shirt before I finally gave up and banged on the door. Please let someone be home! But there was no answer, despite the shining hallway light. I almost turned away. Carmel would be at the cafe working. Behind me I heard a car engine start. Damn. Then the front door opened. My mother was standing there, dressed in a long black skirt and thick jumper, her hair fanning out around her face, exactly as I’d seen her that afternoon in the river. Even the boots. I wasn’t surprised, but I thought I might have been dreaming.
She cried out and rushed towards me. ‘Jude, Jude.’ She was crushing me in her arms. ‘Where have you been? I’ve been frantic with worry . . . waiting for you all day. You’re so thin! Carmel rang and told me you haven’t been eating. Don’t be angry, darling. What has happened to you?’
I let her hug me, but I couldn’t speak. Inside I was chilly, with apprehension mainly. It felt as if the cold black river water was actually washing around inside me. So now at last I would learn everything. But would it be too late? I had no idea if I’d be strong enough to bear what she’d come to tell me. Part of me wanted to put my hands over my ears and tell her to go away.
My mother stayed for nearly a week. She fed me soup, washed my clothes, made her delicious herbal bread and coaxed me to eat it, and – I ’m ashamed to say – cleaned our house. I saw the other two, Carmel and Katerina, fall in love with her. It only took about a day. Probably less for Carmel. Their relief was palpable when they came home and saw her calmly washing cups at the sink. Mum is an expert at not invading anyone’s privacy. The first day I heard her asking them if they minded her washing all the towels in the bathroom, as if it would be a privilege for her to do it. Off she went smiling, the washing basket under her arm, to find the local laundromat. I’d hardly noticed until then how my slide into depression or obsession – whatever it was – had affected the others. But with Mum there, somehow everything lightened up between us. I stopped evading Carmel, stopped despising Katerina. And they stopped looking at me in that worried, puzzled way. I began to notice little things, too, like the nice smells around me, flowers in the vase on the table, freshly baked bread, and the soapy sweetness of our newly cleaned bathroom. I noticed the way Katerina and Carmel were sort of getting on with each other too. At least the awkward stand-off stage had eased, and they talked a bit. My mother spoke quietly, smiled a lot, and asked calm questions.
‘Now, where do I hang this towel?’
‘Do you have plans for after your degree, Katerina?’
‘Do you both like curry? You do! Oh good. I’ll cook tonight. That’s if you haven’t any other plans.’
No one had any other plans. Katerina actually came home and ate with us that first night, and every night from then on while my mother was with us.
But in the afternoons when we were alone my mother talked to me.
I tried to tell her about Orlando. About what I’d decided to do. My mother listened, but after all these weeks there was surprisingly little to tell her. Three or four minutes and those vague plans, weird dreams, longings to do something, were out and we were left looking at each other. She didn’t say anything for a while. She lay there quietly on my bed, looking thoughtful, while I sat up in one corner, a mug of coffee in my hands, waiting for her reaction.
‘So what do you think?’ I said at last.
‘To get rid of him would mean nothing,’ my mother said
softly. ‘There are thousands more where he came from and . . . everywhere else. You can’t kill them all.’
So matter-of-fact, to the point. So sensible. Her reaction surprised me. And I felt deflated.
‘It’s you that I’m worrying about, Jude . . . not him.’ I turned away, not wanting to meet her eyes. I sipped my drink.
So she told me everything. Every afternoon for the four days she was with us she lay down next to me on the bed and talked about her life with my father. She told about when she had been taken into detention. How she’d left me with a good friend. She’d been beaten and tortured on and off for three days. Had felt quite sure that she would die there. But as long as I was safe, she had thought, she could endure it.
Then they brought me in. I was only two.
‘You were such a beautiful, plump little girl, Jude. They told me they would kill you slowly if I didn’t tell them where your father was. I didn’t believe them. Days passed. You and I were alone together in this cell. Awful food and no proper milk for you. They gave you nothing to play with. You got cross and fretful. You cried a lot. All I could do was sing to you, say little poems, when all the time this terrible burden hung over me. What if they meant it? What should I do? Every time the door opened I had no idea if they were coming to kill us or just bringing food. They had already beaten me and I’d been raped by six or ten men, so I knew what they were capable of. One day they took us into a special room. There were four of them. Men in uniforms. And a bed. They fitted two electrodes to your little head and said they’d torture you in front of me if I didn’t tell them where your father was. They gave me a dose of it to make sure I understood.
‘That was when I broke. I told them everything I knew. Not just where your father was, but everyone I’d ever known who’d even vaguely resisted.
‘I even gave away my best friend, Maria Sanchez, without them even asking about her. The bravest, funniest, kindest woman alive. I’m sorry to have to tell you that I feel worse about giving her away than I do about your father. Because I knew how much he loved you. How he would have understood that
I had to save you. But once I’d started I couldn’t stop. They’d reduced me to . . . nothing. I was just a block of fear. Just fear. I’d lost . . . everything. Can you imagine what that is like, Jude? To lose everything?
‘All pride and hope. All courage . . .
‘Maria was a teacher. She hid people in her school. People who were wanted. She organised false passports, worked with priests from the local church. They hid hundreds of people. Saved lives. She was really brave . . . braver than anyone, and I told them all about her. Where she lived. I told them her plans, whom she’d helped . . . I gave away the priests, nuns. Everyone I knew who’d worked with her . . .
‘The day we flew out here to Australia I heard that they’d got her. That she was being held in detention. I’d given her away. Six months later she was dead. But it’s not the death that torments me, Jude. It’s those six months. What brutalities she would have endured . . . because her friend had given her away . . .’
At the end of the week my mother left. She said she had to go back to the business or we’d be in trouble financially.
She left in the morning. Kissed me gravely on the cheek before getting into her little car parked out the front of our place. I could see that she didn’t really want to go, that she hated leaving me in the state I was in, but I said nothing.
‘I’m not asking you to forgive me, Jude,’ she said. ‘I don’t forgive myself, so why should you . . . ? Please just understand that this is what I live with . . . what I have to live with for the rest of my life.’
I knew at this point I should move towards her, put my arms around her, bury my face in her shoulder, tell her I loved her and that I understood. Part of me wanted to do exactly that. But I couldn’t move. I still had the black water in me. I could hardly even nod my head. I certainly didn’t look at her.
The car drove off and I walked back into the house and fell into my bed with my clothes still on. I slept immediately, a heavy dreamless sleep, for about four hours. When I got up it was mid-afternoon. I showered, dressed, and went out into the street and headed back to the city. I had an important biology exam that day, but university didn’t even enter my head. Virtually all I could do was walk. I had to think, try and sift through everything she’d told me.
In some crazy way I felt like I’d just arrived on the earth and I had to work out what it meant to be alive.
I headed up Victoria Street towards the market. The place was buzzing with activity. Men in leather aprons shouting out prices, rolled-up cigarettes smoking from the sides of their mouths. Men lifting heavy boxes of potatoes and cabbages, their fat leathery fingers counting money. The merchandise was set up in long wide rows: fruits and vegetables, rugs and clothes, elaborate displays of Australiana – koalas, leather purses in the shape of Tasmania, kangaroo-skin toys and lambskin coats. The smell of chips and toast and sausages filled the air. I bought a hot dog and an apple and ate them as I wandered along, stopping eventually by a trash stall. There were saucepans and irons, old radios and records in tatty covers, glass vases and grimy lamps that had little girls and dogs holding up the bulb. A young thin man sitting behind a stall eyed me up and down serenely then looked away, not expecting me to buy anything.
‘How much is this?’ I held up a brass, ruby-studded bauble hopefully. I’d noticed the hook in the back and decided that it would look terrific as an earring.
He shrugged. ‘Two bucks?’
I nodded and reached into my bag for the money. He took the coin and gave me a strange look as I slipped the thing into my right ear lobe.
‘What do ya reckon?’ I asked him. He smiled slowly at me.
‘Pretty gross,’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ I gave a weak smile. ‘That’s what I reckon, too.’
I am alive today because the others are dead. My father. My mother’s best friend . . . Maria. Maria the brave one. Dead now and I am alive.
I was taking a short-cut home through some small streets when I found myself staring into the window of a tattooist’s shop. Most of it was blacked out with some kind of dusty material and only a few designs were on display. They too looked dusty, curling at the edges. The place probably wasn’t in business any more. Still I stood there, imagining what it would be like. There was ‘Mum’ curling around a dripping red heart in the middle of a thorn bush and ‘Tiger Baby’ across the chest of a naked girl. I laughed to myself. That kind of stuff was the pits. And yet . . .I spat on my hands and rubbed them warm in the chilly air. I thought about my skin, the clear olive skin I’d inherited from my father. My skin was beautiful. Everyone said so. My shoulders and arms, slim, smooth and virtually hairless. I tried the door thinking that no one would be there. But it swung back easily.
I looked into the gloomy interior. The walls were covered with pictures of all kinds of tatts. Great big complicated things mostly. Of men and their trucks, barbed wire, guns and blonde female fantasies. I walked in.
‘Yeah?’ came an aggressive voice. I squinted, trying to work out where it had come from. At last my eyes adjusted. There was a heavy-gutted man, about forty, in a blue singlet, sitting down behind a counter. He was drinking from a can and reading a magazine.
‘What do ya want?’ he snarled. I took a breath.
‘I want a tattoo,’ I said.
‘Where?’ he asked scornfully, as though he didn’t believe me. I thought for a bit.
‘On my arm.’
‘What? On the top?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you know what you want?’ he asked. I shrugged. This guy didn’t realise. I was past intimidation. I was nineteen. Jude Torres. No one messed with me.
‘Not really,’ I snapped. ‘You got anything I could look at?’
‘Listen . . .I ’ve got little chicks . . . girls . . . like you, coming in here all the time, muckin’ me around! Why don’t you go home and think about it for a while.’
‘No,’ I said, hard as hell, quite sure now. ‘I want to get it done now.’
‘I bet ya you’re a student, aren’t ya?’ he sneered. ‘Trying to . . .’ ‘And what’s it to you if I am?’ I cut him off darkly. ‘Yeah, I’m a student! A medical student. Every week I cut up bodies. I know what I’m getting into . . .’
‘Ah shit!’ he said. He sniffed, looked at his watch, chewed his gum a bit and then took another swig from his can. Burped. He picked up a plastic-covered book and chucked it down the counter at me.
‘Have a look through that,’ he growled. I stepped forward and picked up the book.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Just give us a couple of minutes, will you?’ He muttered something and turned up the volume on the tiny television set that was perched on a shelf on the wall. There was some kind of game show on with an audience that was applauding loudly.
‘Take ya time,’ he said.
‘I will,’ I replied.
‘If it’s big it’ll cost ya. And if it’s small, and delicate like, it’ll cost ya too.’
‘I know that.’
I walked out three hours later with the outline of an evil black snake coiled around a rather beautiful, slender rosebud on my shoulder. It felt tight and painful under my shirt, but I didn’t mind. It felt good. I had to come back in three days to get the colour and finishing touches done. I had his card in my purse and his telephone number. If anything happened before then I was to give him a call. I’d nodded and said yeah, that I understood. But I couldn’t imagine anything of any consequence ever happening to me again.
I walked quickly up past the fashionable end of Brunswick Street, into the old, seedy, working-class area where every second shop was boarded up or closed or being used for housing. There were a couple of milkbars still open, and a dry cleaner’s, and on the other side a gaudy Chinese takeaway with bright-red dragons out the front. I was looking for the Lebanese barber I’d passed many times on my way back from uni.
‘Men’s Barber,’ it said on the window. ‘Haircuts for $9.’ He’d never seemed to have any customers when I’d passed before. He
was always sitting in the window reading some sleazy magazine. But we’d smiled at each other politely a couple of times as I’d passed. I was positive he wouldn’t refuse to do me because I was the wrong sex.
I am alive and they are dead. Brave Maria, hiding people in her school. And my father, refusing to submit. Determined to continue his work. I am alive and they are dead. My mother chose me . . . why?
‘Just cut it all off.’
‘What style you want?’ he said with a curled lip. I could tell he wasn’t happy about me being there, but he needed my nine bucks. He kept looking out the front window as if expecting to be ‘caught’ any moment with a girl in his old-fashioned chair. ‘I don’t want any style,’ I said curtly.
‘But . . . you mean you just want it very short?’
‘Just hack it off any old way,’ I said.
‘Young girl,’ he said reprovingly in his thick accent, ‘I don’t just hack hair off . . .’ He lifted up a clump of my hair with one hand, and we both stared at me in the mirror. I was small and dark and my eyes stared back, so fiercely that I was almost frightened.
‘Beautiful hair,’ he murmured, ‘so thick and shiny. You don’t want me to cut it all off. Why don’t I try and . . .’ But the grip of his hand at the back of my head had made me remember. I was appalled to feel my throat constrict and tears well in my eyes. We were both still looking into the mirror, but my vision had blurred. The barber watched as tears began to roll down my cheeks. He stood there rigidly for a few moments. Then his whole attitude changed.
‘What is it?’ he said kindly, letting my hair go and picking up one of my hands, rubbing it in his own like a kindly father. ‘Come on. You have some trouble, yes? Maybe boyfriend no good, eh?’ I shook my head miserably, mad that I couldn’t control myself. His simple kindness was making my tears run faster.
‘No,’ I managed to sob at last. ‘I just want my hair cut!’
‘Then you shall have your hair cut, little girl,’ he said, suddenly becoming very practical and business-like. He picked up his scissors and comb and placed them with great precision and professionalism on the shelf under the mirror. Then he began to spray my head with a fine mist of water from a plastic water-gun.
Queen Kat, Carmel and St Jude Get a Life Page 29