The Science of Appearances

by Jacinta Halloran

  The first time he heard her voice, she spoke of dreams, their lurking, darker meanings, and he heard in those softly rolled rs the voice of a girl who was at home with ideas. An outsider. Her eyes had confirmed it. Her face. She seemed to stand apart from every other girl in the world. She still does, in his mind. Sometimes, as she walks towards him across the South Lawn, it’s as if the world around her falls away, two-dimensional, anaemic, and she’s the only real thing in his vision. Her thick black hair, the rounded bones of her neck that reveal themselves when she bends her head. She’s known the upheaval of loss, just as he has. She’s known grief. Guilt, too, perhaps, though she fights hard against it. Is this why he loves her? Is it enough?

  And then he sees her again and all his doubt dissolves. In Tin Alley he hears his name over the chugging of an engine. He turns to see her standing in the tray of a battered old truck, along with Ruth and a handful of other students. ‘I have something to tell you,’ she calls to him. Her eyes are brighter than ever. ‘Meet me on the South Lawn at five?’

  He nods. Five o’clock. His day takes on new purpose. ‘Where are you going now?’

  ‘Gertie’s taking us to the children’s hospital.’

  She’s already told him about Gertie, a surplus army transport, bought on the cheap by Professor Oeser to take students and equipment on field trips. ‘You’re not going to experiment on sick children, are you?’ he shouts as he runs alongside.

  ‘No wheels or mazes. Only pictures and blocks.’

  ‘We have sweets for them, too,’ Ruth calls out, holding up a jar.

  ‘Can I have one?’

  ‘Yes!’ both girls shout in unison. Ruth opens the jar and together the two girls pelt him with jubes as the truck rumbles down the alley and into Royal Parade.

  ~

  ‘I can’t work you out,’ Tom says, when Mary gets home after another afternoon spent tailing her brother. ‘Three Tuesdays in a row. You’re a sucker for punishment. He’s gonna catch you one of these days.’

  ‘One day it’ll be all right,’ she says, slipping out of her shoes, ‘and I’ll bring him back here to meet you. But not yet.’ She massages her feet. ‘When I’m older, and no one can make me go back.’

  ‘You need to look after number one, Mares. Remember that.’

  Tom’s right. Today had been too close for comfort. She’d been on a narrow path near Physiology when a dark-haired girl appeared at the other end of the walk. Just the two of them in sight, and their approach sheltered by towering hedges, so it seemed they were cut off from the rest of the world. She listened to the tap of the girl’s heels on the stone footpath, watched the swing of her skirt as she walked. She wore a string of green beads. As they drew close the girl halted suddenly, and Mary saw a fine-boned face over which, in only a second or two, passed amazement, recognition, fear. She knows me, Mary realised, picking up her pace. Their shoulders touched as they passed — the slightest, softest brush of wool against wool. Ten yards on, she turned back. The dark-haired girl was looking, too.

  Afterwards she’d loitered in the garden near Agricultural Science, deciding whether to go home. After a while she’d stood to brush the grass from her skirt, when there he was, her brother, running down the nearby alley alongside an old army truck. She ducked behind a tree. He called out to two girls who stood in the tray of the truck but she couldn’t make out his words. She’d wanted to go to him, then, more than ever, but she’d held on to the tree trunk to stop herself. Dom was in love! Her once girl-shy brother, in love with the dark-haired girl she’d encountered only minutes before on the path — the same one who leaned over the rattling tray of the truck and held out her hand. Her fair-haired friend opened a jar, and the two of them began to pelt Dom with sweets. Her serious brother, laughing, hands in the air in surrender, jubes raining down like coloured stones, as the truck rolled on slowly past him and turned into Royal Parade.

  ~

  South Lawn, five o’clock. Hanna runs towards him and throws her arms around his neck. ‘I saw Mary,’ she murmurs into his ear. ‘I wanted to tell you when I saw you earlier, but not in front of the others.’

  ‘What?’ He draws her down to sit on the grass.

  She’s feverish with talk. ‘This afternoon, on the way to Tin Alley, there was a girl on the path, a sketchpad in her hand. As we passed each other I saw you in her. Your face, very clearly. I turned back to look and she turned, too. Neither of us spoke, but I think she knew … Oh, Dom, she looks like you — very much — except her skin’s darker. She’s been out in the sun.’

  He takes her hands. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asks. ‘I’m glad you saw her. I’m glad she saw you.’

  ‘I should have run after her. I should have grabbed her and held her and called someone to get you … No, that wouldn’t have worked. I might have scared her away forever.’ She pulls her hands from his and puts them to her face. ‘I can’t bear that you’re separated. You’re family, and you love each other. You should be together. I should have been able to help you.’

  He wipes her cheeks with his handkerchief. She puts her face to his chest. ‘My family, the ones who stayed in Germany: my grandparents on both sides, my mother’s sister and her two children.’ Her voice is muffled, and he feels its vibrations against his breastbone. ‘They were taken away and separated, long before they died. Each adult was sent to a different camp, the children without their parents. Couldn’t they have at least been allowed to stay together?’ She draws away and looks at him, her pupils large and dark. ‘The children at least, Dom.’

  He sits with her until evening comes. When the grass grows cold he coaxes Hanna to her feet and they walk to Swanston Street, his arm around her. He waits at the tram stop, rubbing her hands in his until she stops shivering.

  ‘Mary’s beautiful, Dom,’ Hanna says, smiling at last. ‘The liveliest ghost I’ve ever seen.’

  16

  ‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ Mary says to Robbie on his next visit. Old, old news, so why tell it now? Tit for tat, she tells herself: all those hospital parties, those blonde nurses in their cute little caps. She remembers Joan Corrigan, her schoolgirl crush on Dominic. Don’t you dare tell him. Too many secrets, kept for no good reason. A secret kept is an opportunity missed. She’s as implicated as anyone. ‘I’ve become an artist’s model.’

  ‘Bloody hell.’ Robbie stops halfway through shedding his trousers, one leg in, one out. ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘It didn’t just happen. I made it happen.’ That walk along Wedge Street, years ago, the day they moved into Beauchamp Street, the day she knew he loved her. She told him, then, how her life would be. ‘I’m going to be an artist. Modelling is how I pay for lessons.’

  ‘So you’re starkers? In front of other men?’

  ‘Women too.’

  Trousers discarded, he sits on her bed. ‘So how do you do it?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Show me. Come on, you might as well practise.’ He rests back on his elbows in his white Y-fronts and monogrammed socks.

  ‘You really don’t mind?’

  ‘I don’t know. It depends on how good you are at it. Give me a little demo.’

  She sees the swell of his cock against his underpants and all at once she realises. It comes as an aching, inexorable truth, a huge and terrible relief. She’s going to give him up one day. She’s his first love, his home-town girl, the one who gave herself to him, free of promises or ties. He owes her a lot. She owes him too, in the very same way. Now she’ll perform for him, be his slut, his floozy. Art is performance and performance is art. Let her be Robbie’s slut if she wants to. One of those starchy young ladies from Merton Hall is going to trap him for the rest of his life, but that girl will never own his first afternoon of sex; that exploration and discovery, those nuggetty boyish bones, that ragged patch of sky. That’s hers to keep if she wants to, and of course she does. Wher
e would she be without Robbie? He brought her to Melbourne. He’s the touchstone that changed her life.

  She thinks back to that first time she posed for the class: the twist of her spine, the release of something worthy as she turned to those silent, earnest faces. I’m doing this for art. Now she swings her back to him.

  ‘Are you miffed?’ he asks.

  Slowly, slowly, she turns to him, a different person. Not the Mary he teased in the school playground, not the girl who cleaned his house, but the Madeleine she’s become. It’s the first time she’s ever shown him; strange that she held herself back all this time. She undoes the buttons of her blouse — slowly, so slowly — while holding his gaze. I’m doing this for love, or something that passed for it, she tells herself. Blouse, skirt, petticoat: every motion is art, poetry, song. Poor old Robbie. He’ll never keep her now.

  She glides towards him in her underwear and stockings. He licks his lips, pulls her to the bed and, with his ugly underpants at his knees, makes to assume his usual position, but the experiment’s not yet concluded. She resists him, pulls away. With the flat of her hand against his chest, she straddles him. Eyes closed, she lets herself think of Sam’s hands tracing a curve in the air — a pear, an apple, a rock, a breast — and, for the first time with her home-town boy, she comes.

  ~

  Bob Cameron sneaks down the kiosk stairs and hightails it down the pier. On the tram he sits back, legs apart so that his cock can rest unhampered. Mary Elizabeth Rosalie Quinn. That strange lateral incisor of hers, the way it wraps over the canine. He can’t help but look at it every time she smiles. Otherwise her teeth are all right, and as for her mouth — he can’t complain on that front. He could get one of his mates in dentistry to have a look at her. No, bugger that. She’s his secret. He’s not going to show her to anyone. They might go getting ideas, about him, about her. A mark of bad breeding, that crooked tooth, but that’s what happens with country folk: sooner or later the inbreeding shows. The damned thing is, he can’t decide if he finds that tooth repulsive or attractive. That’s the thing about her — she’s hard to pin down.

  ‘My home-town girl,’ he calls her before they start at it. ‘I’m your Melbourne girl now,’ she says when they finish.

  The truth is he’s not especially trying to be faithful, but he is anyway. He’s been to the pictures with the right sort of girls — ex-St Cath’s and Merton Hall, the few PLC old girls who aren’t lesbians — but they wriggle and scold like schoolteachers if you dare as lay a finger. The other blokes get mightily pissed off, too. ‘Why do they agree to come if they’re going to be so frigid?’ they mutter on a Monday morning around the cadaver. ‘Those girls know what being asked to the pictures means.’ Another Saturday evening down the drain. ‘Christ, we could’ve gone drinking instead!’ He listens and grumbles in solidarity, all the while thinking about Mary underneath him in the gardens on a pile of dead ferns, her feet nestling into the small of his back — Jesus, those first few times — and he goes hard right there and then.

  He wonders if the clandestine thing is part of the attraction. Fuck, she gets him hard. Win–win all round: she wants to keep hidden and so does he. Dominic Quinn is the only problem, then. Since that time he got sprung he’s avoided Quinn on campus, turning tail and running, like a common bloody criminal. And then Quinn turned up at Ormond. Thank Christ he was down the pub that night. He’ll breathe easier when he starts his hospital training: no chance of running into Quinn there, unless he turns up as a patient. He quite likes the bloke — always has — but what the fuck can he do? It’s not his fault she ran away.

  On St Kilda Road he closes his eyes and pictures Mary in his Kyneton bedroom. A recurring fantasy, he’s loath to admit. She’s lying on his single bed amid the detritus of his boyhood — old clothes, a cricket bat, his crocheted blanket — propped on one side with her skirt riding up. She cradles his old stuffed, one-eyed bear, shipped over from Harrods on the occasion of his birth. At least he wasn’t born in Kyneton: imagine his old man dragging him out from between his mother’s legs. Doctor or not, some things are beyond the call. Nope, born in Melbourne, like other normal people, and destined always to return there — his mother made sure of that. ‘The sooner you go off to a decent school, the better,’ she said to him, again and again, from the time he could talk, and he’d learned to believe it, so that when the time came to board he wasn’t the slightest bit homesick or lonely. A bloody good thing too, as no one likes a homesick mummy’s boy.

  That his mother’s a snob of the worst kind has already occurred to him. He finds Mary’s impersonations really quite good — ‘Don’t you know this is Kosta Boda, dear?’ — and he laughs with a sense of being outside himself, caught up in a strange, subversive moment that will one day be lost and forgotten. His home-town girl, who reminds him from where he’s come. He knows that he’s drifting without resistance in the current of his mother’s ambitions, and that soon those ambitions will coalesce with his. The only son, the apple of her eye: such plaudits aren’t easy to refuse. So under the blankets with Mary — odd, unpredictable Mary — he breathes out and giggles like a schoolgirl and puts his mouth to her pretty pink nipple because — and here’s the thing — he and she both want him to. She’s not of his ilk in any possible way, and he understands with a more tolerant part of himself that she’s special. His time with her isn’t governed by the usual laws. It’s time out of time — beyond the expectations of parents and school, outside the inevitable march of the years. Mary will never be what his mother wants and expects for him. In some ways she’s more than he expects for himself.

  ~

  In lectures Dom’s class learns of the elucidation of DNA and the growing certainty that this collection of four nucleotides — adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine — holds the key to permanent, heritable change. They hear about the work of Avery and McCarty: their painstaking purification of the transforming substance, their dogged elimination of protein, lipid, carbohydrate and RNA as the substance that held the power to transform one strain of pneumococcus into another and hold it stable for generations. If the results of the present study on the chemical nature of the transforming principle are confirmed, wrote Avery and McCarty in their breakthrough 1944 paper, then nucleic acids must be regarded as possessing biological specificity.

  Their detractors muttered on, until two years ago, when Erwin Chargaff’s biochemical work on DNA, published in Nature, showed that DNA was more complex and diverse than previously thought. Chargaff’s work lent weight to Avery’s assertion that DNA was not simply a structural cell element but had the capacity to relay genetic information.

  Chargaff’s rules on DNA composition are simplicity itself. The number of adenine residues always equals the number of thymine residues, the number of guanine residues always equals the number of cytosine residues; these rules hold true even though the ratio (G+C):(A+T) varies from one type of organism to another.

  ‘Such symmetry, such reproducibility: surely this tells us something about the structure of DNA. Read Chargaff’s paper for yourself,’ Rupert Kingsley exhorts them, holding a copy of Nature above his head. ‘And Avery and McCarty’s seminal paper. They’re both in the library. Read the work of the dissenters, too — Mirsky in particular — so as to sharpen your own analytical skills.’ His voice rises, and his blue eyes burn bright. ‘We are living in exciting times, ladies and gentlemen. The race is now on to discover the structure of DNA. With structure comes function: the whole mechanism of heredity at its most fundamental level will then be understood.’

  ‘Exciting times,’ Tibble says as they leave the theatre. ‘The only thing exciting about genetics will be a pass next to my name on the results board come November. Then I’m dropping it.’

  It’s the first Dominic’s heard of it. ‘You can’t be serious. It’s the best subject we have.’

  Tibble groans. ‘It’s too much work. And it’s all so theoretical. I’m going to do an
imal husbandry next year. Get my hands dirty on a cow’s udders.’

  ‘But you heard Kingsley. Genetics is on the brink of a whole new era. It’s a great time to be studying it.’

  ‘It’s all right, mate, you can’t help being a swat. Just promise you’ll still talk to me when I’m covered in cow dung.’

  All Dom can talk of these days is his work in the glasshouse, his quest for the hybrid of superior height, vigour and yield. ‘Maize is a godsend for geneticists,’ he tells Hanna over lunch at the caf. ‘Each maize kernel is an embryo produced from an individual fertilisation, so hundreds of offspring can be scored on a single ear. It’s incredible.’

  She’s in a strange mood. She plays with her cup, turning it in the saucer, around and around. Her nails are painted pale pink, the colour of the inside of a shell, he thinks. The varnish, he sees, is chipped in places, and the cuticle of her left index finger is pulled away to expose an arc of raw, tender skin at the base of the nail.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘Don’t you know? Can’t you guess?’

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  ‘Breeding for strength and height. Doesn’t that remind you of something?’ She pauses, and shakes her head at his incomprehension. ‘The master race.’

  He understands, dismisses, apologises. ‘Of course. I wasn’t thinking.’ He can’t help but feel she’s overreacting. Under the table he touches her knee with his. ‘These are plants, Hanna, not people. We’re working to produce better crops — disease and drought-resistant varieties that can be grown in places where people are starving. The motives are sound. The intention is good.’