Sorry

by Gail Jones

  The couple watched the signs of gestation with a sense of revulsion. Nicholas found his wife’s bulbous body too intrusively visible, and Stella felt dull, overtaken, a heavy conspiracy of matter. They fell into habitual silence. They did not talk to each other. Their shared misgivings remained unspoken.

  Nicholas meanwhile resolutely went about his work. Into his head flew the abstract nouns of his book-learning; diffusionism, mythology, ethnological genealogy. Yet his categories seemed irrelevantly abstruse when faced with these shy black people, who would make no eye contact but had a good sense of humour, who seemed – surprisingly to him – intelligent and quick-witted, and were at home sitting on the earth and hunting and gathering its produce. A stockman from the station, Willie, served as a translator. Nicholas had not expected to find these people engaging. At the same time, it was a confronting physicality that at first repulsed him. He found the shiny black bodies altogether strange. Many of the men had cicatrixes inscribed on their chests and upper arms, raised welts that signified initiation or high degree; many of the women had pendulous breasts, exposed, that he could not fail to stare at. The children were unclean, he thought, with glistening mucus beneath their noses, and seeds and dirt, sometimes in clumps, studding their oily matted hair. Sitting cross-legged was difficult, and he was always overdressed in the violent heat. There were flies and unidentifiable biting creatures. It was uncomfortable work. Eventually Nicholas ordered a folding table and canvas chair from Broome, and took these with him into the ‘field’, much to the amusement of the community of his research.

  3

  It was the wet season when Stella heaved me out, wetter than the air, smeared with her inside life of fluids and juices, yowling, irascible. Vera Trevor yanked me life-wards and cooed almost immediately – ‘a daughter!’ – at what Stella thought was a bloody mess and utterly unlovely. Rain was beating on the iron roof so that there was a density and amplification to the world of substances; plashing, drip-drip, the cascade of waterfalls and spouts, frog-life, scampering things, clay earth subsiding into overflowing sluices and channels. Thunder boomed in the sky. The humid heat was unbearable. Nicholas came in from the leaking veranda, where he had been pretending to read, and saw his wife flushed and prostrate, resembling an animal. He had wanted a son. If he was to have a child, it had to be a son. He thanked Mrs Trevor for her dedicated service and was annoyed when he discovered that she did not want to leave. There were woman things, she claimed, yet to be imparted. Feeding. Caring. The correct procedure with babies. In an enamel dish, at the end of the bed, Nicholas saw the purple placenta, netted in grey veins, trailing its twisted umbilical cord. It was a meaty, offensive, unaccountable thing. He felt a surge of illness in his guts, and looked away.

  The baby was producing mustard shit and had a maroon complexion. It cried at a volume too large for its size, and bunched its face like an overripe tropical melon. Mrs Trevor said this was normal; she told Nicholas not to worry. He was not in fact worried. He wished privately – although he knew it was a sin – that the newborn baby would not survive. In the nights of sleeplessness that followed, Nicholas felt an evil, irrepressible resentment; he was undone by this advent, he was made base and self-interested. Fatherhood ought to have been a kind of ennobling, but for Nicholas the experience was above all of anxiety, and of the collapse of his work-life and some inner defilement. Before the first week was out, Mr Trevor – ‘call me Freddie’ – had offered to take Nicholas into the bush, so that the women could get on with their business, he said.

  ‘Like the blackfellas,’ he added. ‘Some kinda secret business.’

  He touched his nose, like a music hall comedian. Nicholas gratefully accepted the invitation to flee. When he said goodbye to his wife she barely acknowledged him; her face was averted, turned to the damp wall. Nicholas could smell the stale tang of women’s blood hanging in the air. There was a whiff too of the fecal, of something raw and unsanitary, and of cloths and sponges turning in the heavy wet atmosphere to mould. He wondered what he had seen in her, those days in the Cambridge teashop, when he suddenly decided, there and then, to take a bride. He wondered how he could have believed in any prospect together.

  These days it would be named – post-natal depression – but then Vera Trevor simply noted that Stella was ‘down’, that she showed no interest in her baby and was uncommunicative. Stella spent hours of each day remaining in bed, detached into a feeble, drifting state, futureless and sad. She heard her irrefutable baby wail with hunger, but could not be persuaded to offer her breast. She felt absent, inessential. Birthing had scooped her out.

  When Mrs Trevor asked how she felt, an innocent enough enquiry, Stella replied: ‘You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave …’

  She sounded plumb crazy, Vera Trevor said later. Mad as a cut snake; mad as a blimmen meat-axe.

  Mrs Trevor found a wet nurse among the station blacks, and had her sleep with her own infant, a boy, on the floor of the shack; meanwhile Sal and Daff were assigned mothering duties between them. In her lonesome state, wrecked by her own body, Stella was aware of the little community constituted around her; the three women (the wet nurse was Jukuna, a Walmajarri woman from the desert) and two babies, one black and one white, and the circulation of soft voices in a language she did not understand. Sometimes, in a haze of delirium, she thought it sounded Shakespearean, so full was it of convolution, evocation and rhyme. Something that might have been an ampersand, if it had a sound, repeated again and again, so that what she heard were connections and collusions affirmed: a bracelet of propositions, perhaps, or an extra logic of meanings, from which she was excluded. In words – she knew it – there were these revealed affiliations, these sensible families. In words, body-forgetting, there could be intelligible experience, not this crude engulfment and drowsy clouds of unknowing.

  It was two weeks before Stella was moved to give the baby a name. ‘Perdita,’ she called it, without even hesitating. Vera Trevor said politely it was a pretty name, but she had never heard of it and thought perhaps it was posh English, or an obscure, archaic family inheritance. Stella was questioned, later on, when she had returned from the land of her illness, and explained that Perdita was the daughter of a dead woman, that Perdita was a character, a princess, from a famous English play.

  Mrs Trevor had arranged for Stella Keene to be sent to the hospital in Broome, ‘for a rest’, she said. The baby meanwhile flourished in black arms, which found and embraced her. Perdita grew chubby, contented and well.

  I do not remember when my mother first told me this story. I was perhaps five or six, already aware of the estrangement between my parents and of some sullen accommodation that enabled them to stay together. Small children intuit, heretically, the most hidden understandings. In the involving machine of parents’ behaviour, their words and their silence, their actions and inactions, the child learns what is valued, and what counts for nothing. They didn’t count to each other, my parents. And they barely counted me. I was a foreign coin they possessed, a worthless shape.

  Stella told me that in the Shakespearean play called The Winter’s Tale, there was a king, Leontes of Sicilia, as powerful as he was unjust. In a jealous rage he accused his pregnant wife, Hermione, of dreadful crimes, and though she, and everyone else, attested her innocence, the king would not listen and had her imprisoned. In prison Hermione gave birth to a daughter, Perdita, and the king ordered his courtier, Antigonus, to dispose of the infant. But Antigonus was good-hearted and abandoned the baby, as it happens, on the sea coast of Bohemia, where-after he was immediately eaten by a bear. (‘Exit, pursued by a bear,’ read the famously silly line. I hated this bizarrely particular detail.) Perdita was found, and raised by friendly shepherds. Sixteen years passed. The king had learned the error of his ways, and worshipped a statue of his long-dead wife. Perdita, beautiful and marriageable, arrived at Leontes’ court and was reunited with her repentant, foolish father. Perdita, I understood then, was the lost one found, the lucky chi
ld. I was pleased with my name, and did not think, those days, to read a wider allegory.

  It was not until I was about eight, when Stella taught me the play in a home lesson, that I discovered that in Shakespeare’s story Hermione is restored to life. Her statue unfreezes and she is miraculously alive. The stone rolled away. The blip-blip, blip-blip, on a lit screen somewhere, converting a lime flatline to a mountainous heartbeat. (‘O, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating.’) Hermione rediscovers the daughter she thought was ever-lost, and is instantly reconciled with her errant husband.

  In her first telling my mother omitted this happy ending. I do not know if she really thought herself dead, or if my naming was truly circumstantial, the product of that desperate time in the downpour shack, when she thought herself dehumanised, negligible, a zero, when she lay listening to rain as if it was the sound of her own obliteration. The initial untruth of her telling was perhaps her truth; she was resigned to a life immobile and tyrannically fixed. She could have escaped my father but she did not, even when his contempt for her was ruthlessly evident. She stayed firmly put. I was an adult before I discovered there is no sea coast in Bohemia. Telling makes it so. All my childhood I believed in distant Bohemian beaches, where there might be wild bears, homicidally prowling.

  When Nicholas returned from his week with Freddie Trevor, he discovered his little shack overtaken by women. For a few months he moved into the Trevors’ house, and enjoyed there relative comfort and babyless quiet. And when Stella was moved to the hospital in Broome, it seemed all the more reasonable that he should stay where rational adults were, and not return to the bawling and the chatter and the black women, limp and sprawled on the floor of his shack, acting as if they owned it.

  At the Trevors’ Nicholas discovered that he could force the cook, Martha, and that she would not tell. All the white men did it; he felt manly and justified. At first he put his hand over her mouth, and watched her dark terrified eyes as he pushed hard into her. He made threats to kill her if she ever told. But gradually, he reasoned, Martha simply knew what to do; she believed his murderous threats and was sure to remain silent. Nicholas liked to pull her head back by its tangled hair and feel that he penetrated so that he hurt her. Martha was fifteen or sixteen years old and a wonderful cook, good as any, the Trevors claimed, in a civilised household. When, a few months later, Vera Trevor discovered that Martha was pregnant, she was sent away, down south, with few questions asked. The new cook, called Sheila, arrived almost immediately to replace her.

  If there was any hesitation in Nicholas, moral or otherwise, it was one generated by the disquieting presence of Billy, the Trevors’ youngest son. He was perhaps only eight or nine years old, but had about him the gravity of an older boy. He had the habit of appearing unexpectedly, as if spirited from place to place, and then he would just stand there, and stare, and unequivocally hum. If Billy was upset in any way he would often flap his hands, beating at his confusion, stirring up the air, attacking and shooing invisible entities. He had upstanding ginger hair and stippled greenish skin. Nicholas thought it best to ignore him, but sensed his persistent witness and censure; he felt a kind of violence towards Billy that he could imagine giving in to. He would throttle the boy if he could, seize him by the neck, fiercely crush the pink cord of his little-boy breath, and close everlastingly those insolent, staring, grey eyes. Only later did he learn that Billy was a deaf mute. If he had seen anything, well, he couldn’t say. He was, Nicholas thought, more creature than boy, rightly contemptible.

  When Stella returned from hospital, Nicholas moved back to the shack with his wife and their baby. They were an insecure family. Stella was quieter, still detached, but also given to barbed observation and general unhappiness. Her baby was a duty, her husband a fate to be suffered. Aboriginal women took Perdita into care for hours and Stella barely noticed her daughter’s absence.

  Nicholas decided he would make the best of things and become a famous anthropologist. He would crack open the code of primitive humanity, return to Cambridge triumphant, drink sherry with the dons, wear a long cardinal gown with an ermine trim, receive a silver badge on his chest, rosette-shaped, from the King, and an accolade detailing his discoveries, in full, in the Sunday Times.

  He would write something incomparably difficult, fuelled with academic afflatus and magnificent prose. He wrote first to a bookshop in Sydney, ordering a crate of miscellaneous books, and began sketching out his own key to all mythologies, a work of dilatory, exalted oddity that he would never finish.

  The books from Sydney, as it happened, saved Nicholas and Stella, and eventually their daughter would also discover them. Derangement of many forms finds its home within books. Stella was still self-consolingly reciting Shakespeare, especially the tragedies, and Nicholas, driven by the power of his compulsion to fame, was absent more often, away somewhere in his ‘field’. But when they came together, appalled to be in each other’s unmediated company, they could retreat, singly and sequestered, each into his or her own reading.

  The books were stacked high against the walls, teetering in Babel piles. Nicholas never bothered to construct a bookshelf – he had not a handyman bone in his body – he simply leaned his books, as they accumulated, in random towers, never ordering or straightening, or even disposing according to subject. This is my memory of the furniture of our home. These books swelled in the moist heat and were prey to mice and to silverfish; an unlettering occurred, in titles, in spines. In some books only certain letters disappeared, as if an intelligent bug had taken offence at particular words; in others it was the edges of the pages that were consumed, so that they were lacy and partial, and left one to guess the lost sentence beginning every verso and the chewed sentence ending every recto. Snakes, attracted by the mice, liked to nest between the columns; we became accustomed to seeing an uncoiling as we dislodged a book from the back of the stacks. Stella was at first frightened, but became in the end so blasé about the supernumerous snakes that she kept a shovel nearby, so that she could flick them out the door as she was seeking her text. Sometimes, just out of annoyance, she cut them in two with the blade, disposing of them in a swift, elbow-jabbing, downward chop. It was a singular pleasure, she said, to see their writhing mad deaths.

  By the time I was ten, when I began seriously to read – so that silent words, not utterance, would be my form of expression – half the front room was crowded by books. My narrow canvas stretcher was in the same room, against the side wall. I would fall asleep watching my parents read at the kitchen table, and if I woke in the night I found myself in this peculiar, librarian city, the massive architectonics of other people’s words. Terraces, ziggurats, prominences and voids. In the darkness the pillars of books seemed to tilt and arch over me, yet I fancied not collapse, but a kind of shelter, the roof-shaped protection of open volumes.

  After my father died, my mother became gradually more boldly explorative; she opened books that she had been forbidden to touch, sought out those marked specifically as his own. Because we were stranded together, and because I stuttered, we read. There is no refuge so private, no asylum more sane. There is no facility of voices captured elsewhere so entire and so marvellous. My tongue was lumpish and fixed, but in reading, silent reading, there was a release, a flight, a wheeling off into the blue spaces of exclamatory experience, diffuse and improbable, gloriously homeless. All that was solid melted into air, all that was air reshaped, and gained plausibility.

  4

  My early childhood was watched over by Sal and Daff, and by Billy Trevor. They called me Deeta. Sal and Daff continued, for several years, to work at the Trevors’ house – a big station homestead, just a quarter of a mile up the track – but then Sal, and one month later Daff, disappeared with no warning. I was six, perhaps, when they abandoned me. I cried for days and days, as did Billy beside me, holding one of my hands while he flapped the other, like a broken bird-wing, like a trapped cockatoo, in a gesture of private and glum desolat
ion.

  By then they had taught me fragments of their language, Yawan, as well as a few basic words of my wet nurse’s tongue. Before my stutter, I was a flexible and canny speaker, and I loved the full-mouthed sounds of indigenous nouns, the clever and precise onomatopoeia of the bird names, the cyclical songs, full of sonorous droning. And although I was a whitefella, a kartiya, Sal or Daff would carry me angled on their bony hips, and take me down to the creek-bed, to sit with their people.

  I would be passed, like other small children, from body to body, nestling there, cradled in capacious laps, and I would feel the long fingers sift through my hair for lice, and the stroking of my arms, and the tickle of a tease. I was nourished and cared for in ways my parents were incapable of understanding. Sometimes Mrs Trevor came striding down through the scrub to drag Billy and me away – mongrel no-hopers, she called them, layabout blacks – but often we were simply forgotten and stayed where we were left.

  From Sal and Daff I learned that my totem was a green tree frog: many had appeared in the wet season, at the time of my birth, and that this frog-fella, this one, this one was special to me. ‘Im special-fella.’ Sal’s totem was puturu, a grass seed that her mother was gathering to grind for flour when she discovered she was pregnant. We didn’t know what Daff’s totem was; she could not remember her mother. But there were spirits everywhere that might enter a woman, and Mandjabari, the old woman, said Daff one day might know.

  ‘Spirits ebrywheres,’ she said. ‘Ebrywheres, all roun.’

  Billy, Billy was different; but the small group in the creek-bed fed him and played with him and taught him skills with his hands. The spirit within him was particular and probably unknowable.

  Only when I was older did I realise how much I loved Billy, how faithful and consistent a companion he had been. He was an odd-looking boy – pigeon-chested, with crooked teeth and dappled skin. He had bottle-grey eyes, which he forgot to blink, so that they often appeared watery, as if he was on the verge of tears. These features made him look both stupid and wise, and old-man Dauwarrngu said that Billy knew things, secret things, like blackfellas, this one Billy-fella. Billy used to like to plait my hair. The feel of his hands there, at my neck, was like adoration. I have come to believe that we have lovers all our lives, but only know them to be so if we remember the specificities of touch.