by Gail Jones
When Perdita awoke she was hungry and went exploring. In a small wooden shed out the back she located a kitchen, and a kind woman bent towards her, touched her cheek ceremoniously, and offered her a breakfast of toast and fried eggs.
The woman – Sis, her name was – ministered sustenance and gentleness to whomever wandered lost into her modest kitchen. Sis was from Beagle Bay Mission and had family all over, she said, all over the place, ebrywheres, ebrywheres roun here. She had married a Japanese pearl diver; they had six children, she announced proudly, now all grown up strong. Perdita replied, sounding earnest, that she was an only child, but that there was Billy, her friend, who was maybe like a brother, even if he was a Trevor, and simple, and could not hear or speak at all. She watched the woman’s body move sideways, drying dishes, stacking them.
Then Sis turned to her and said suddenly, ‘Your dad, I seen him roun. But your mum. Is she still alive?’
Perdita was shocked that this stranger might have imagined her mother dead. Or might know something.
‘Hospital,’ she said blankly. ‘Mum’s sick. In the head.’
This did not describe the noisy railway station, or the competing silence, or the mysterious depleting languor to which her mother was now subject. But Sis looked calmly at her and nodded.
‘Ah, yeah,’ she said, her tone sympathetic, as if she knew, in any case, what a railway station might feel like, and what might visit an unfortunate woman like a fist-blow in the dark. Perdita held up her dirty plate, smeared with egg yolk and frilly scraps. Sis took it with both hands and plunged it in brown soapy water.
‘Thanks, missus,’ Perdita said, genuinely grateful.
‘No worries.’
Sis turned back to her and sweetly smiled.
When Nicholas returned from the hospital he seemed cheerier somehow. He moved like a man without shrapnel lodged in his back, a man young, unencumbered. In the bar of the Continental Hotel he made weak attempts at jokes, and the locals, knowing already about the mad wife and the reason for his town visit, humoured and indulged him. Perdita sat perched unsteadily on a bar stool, sipping a glass of lemonade. She had rarely seen her father in new company; he seemed inept, but trying hard. As it grew darker she watched him become inebriated; she watched how he leaned on the bar, resting his body there, how his features sagged and transformed, how he gulped as if greedy. At one stage he knocked over a glass of whisky and immediately ordered another, downing it super-swift. He had forgotten she was there. Perdita counted the bottles above the bar, listened to the laughter of drunk men, saw her own reflection, squeamish, in a long wavy mirror etched on the surface with toppling palms. Such a pale small face, such a tentative oval.
Some time later a buxom barmaid, a beautiful woman with slanted eyes and a marcelled hairdo, took Perdita by the hand and led her along the passageway to her room. She left her with a smacking kiss and a packet of salted peanuts.
‘Sleep, luv,’ she instructed, as she closed the door behind her.
Perdita thought she would visit Sis, but decided she was too tired, much too tired. Her sore eye was gumming over and had begun slowly to throb. She lay in her clothes and sandals on her luxurious bed, very still, very alone, thinking for some reason, though it was sultry and dank, of her mother’s dream of snow. One day, she decided, she would see snow for herself. She would go to England, or Russia, far, far away. Russia. Yes, Russia. She would go to distant Russia and see the snow. But in the meantime, her mother’s dream had become her own private treasure; she fell asleep imagining a soft drift, an endless vertical sadness, a delicate slow sinking, a whiteness, a whiteness.
Nicholas and Perdita were both woken by the call of butcher birds in a nearby tamarind tree, and by a clanking metallic sound that turned out to be a group of Aboriginal men in iron chains, linked painfully by their ankles. They had been released from gaol to make bitumen roads. From the small window of her hotel room Perdita saw them, men joined in this way, humiliated, caught, and wondered what they had done to be so cruelly constrained. They wore ragged trousers and grimy singlets; their faces shone in the sunshine. A prison guard was sitting at a distance under the blue shade of the mango tree, pinching a cigarette into shape, licking it, turning it, slowly striking a match. He inhaled deeply, watching all the while. When Perdita and her father left the hotel, she realised that she recognised one of the chained men. It was Kurnti, who sometimes worked in the stockyard at the Trevors’ station. Perdita called his name and waved, and he straightaway waved back, his face offering up a truly innocent smile.
‘Deeta!’ he called out. ‘Yah, Deeta!’
Nicholas turned to look, but did not say anything. He simply seized his daughter’s wrist and dragged her away.
Perdita carried through the day the image of a black man waving. The smell of hot tar. The clunk of heavy chains. The sound of her own name called out to her, as if it was Aboriginal.
That day Nicholas took her to a convent. It was a large wooden building, lined with shutters. Black and white faces in wimples peered at them curiously as they walked together up the gravel driveway, lined with purple bougainvillaea. In the front room, where they were told to wait in silence, there was a large crucifix on the wall, which Perdita stared at, fascinated. Christ had a face of famished hollows and softly closed eyes, and a look of calm, self-satisfied repose. Perdita remembered Stella’s stories, explicit and unbelievable. She wondered suddenly if Nicholas planned to leave her here, with these stiff, wimpled women in triangular dresses who worshipped this wretched, assassinated king. She experienced a moment of panic; why was she never told anything? Why did adults, always and anyhow, get to make all the decisions?
Perdita was about to ask when a nun called Sister Immaculata led a young woman into the room: Mary. She had bronze-coloured skin and deep black eyes. She stood a little apart, as if in a different world from the convent sisters. Mary was sixteen years old, tall for her age, and had about her an air of maturity and self-possession. Perdita shyly smiled. The smile was more confidently returned. Nicholas explained that Mary had been raised in a Catholic orphanage down south, and that she would be coming to live with them, to cook and to clean, and to help with lessons, while her mother was away. Mary could read, he added. Sister Immaculata performed a little bow and Perdita wondered if her father was someone important. Then the sister lurched forward, all of a sudden, and took Perdita’s face in her hands.
‘Dear, oh dear,’ she said, staring into her infected eye.
She ordered the child to stay put as she fetched some ointment. Perdita felt the long explorative fingers of the nun, arthritic and witchy, holding open her eye as she applied translucent cream from a tiny metal tube. The nun’s thumbs rested beneath her right eye, then her left. Perdita was afraid. She understood the healing intention, but still she felt afraid. Both eyes were streaming uncontrollably with tears. At some point in the procedure Mary took her hand and stayed close, instantly affectionate, in an implicit companionship. It was a fond, easy handclasp. Perdita felt the lacing of their fingers. This was the moment, the very moment, that Perdita began to love Mary.
On the return journey Nicholas and Mr Trevor sat in the cabin, and Mary and Perdita sat in the tray of the truck, sharing their space with boxes and crates of stores the men had bought. Before they left town they had been on a shopping trip to Streeter and Male, the general store, and had bought canned milk, cereals, biscuits, corn. At Fongs they had bought a sack of rice, and Perdita had wanted to linger there, where the exotic resided. Then at the bakery they had purchased a few loaves of still-warm bread. This was an unusual treat for Perdita; her mother never baked bread and she had rarely tasted it fresh.
The truck broke down ten miles short of its destination. Mr Trevor and Nicholas stood with their heads under the bonnet, fiddling with the fan belt. They tapped on the radiator with a spanner, and talked in technical whispers. Adjustments were made, the engine attended to. It click, click, clicked, as by degrees it slowly cooled. Mary and Perd
ita sat in the dirt eating bread and honey, tipped directly from a brand-new jar, spread with their fingers. Flies swarmed all around, buzzing, insistent, but they simply ignored them and ate like they were starving. Perdita would have stuffed herself if she could. She would have taken it all in, every substance and sweetness. She would have filled herself so that there were no spaces left that her mother-memory could inhabit. At some point Mary leaned towards Perdita and with her little finger wiped a trail of honey from the side of her mouth, then licked her own finger clean, winked and smiled.
‘Sisters, eh?’ Mary said.
Perdita felt – what was it? – claimed, rescued. She smiled with her own mouth full of sticky bread and felt her small, unnoticed life reconfiguring around her.
By the time the vehicle was back on the road, its old engine cranked by an iron handle into a cantankerous rumble, darkness was falling. Birds were roosting in the twilight, restless, then settling; Perdita could see their bleary shapes on the blood-woods and high in the gums. A flock of galahs rose flapping, then noisily descended. Mr Trevor kindly drove his passengers right to their door. In the bluish evening Perdita saw the outline of their shack loom up, then heard Horatio hurl towards them, frantic with welcoming joy. He rushed at her so energetically, his dog-life effusive and exploding, that he knocked her flat.
What return was it, that night, with no mother, with Mary?
I have thought of it, over the years, not as a substitution – since one person can never, after all, replace another – but as the portentous sign of things made dangerously misaligned. Mary was not a mother, but a sister; there was still Stella’s absence, and my inexpressible, almost inadmissible, missing-her. I wondered every day about where exactly she was, what treatment she was receiving. I imagined a handsome doctor in a white gown, giving her an injection in the upper arm as she gazed, distracted, into the middle distance. Her hair was brushed back in even furrows; she wore a simple nightgown of faded pink. It was a generic, dull image, from who-knows-where, but somehow I found it reassuring.
Despite the fact that I was unconvinced of her love (since she had never been a mother who might embrace, or kiss, or reach inadvertently to caress), there was the stringent complicity of our isolation and the far-fetched world of notions we had daily shared. Perhaps I attached to her snow dream so passionately because it was something personal, some token of a truly inner life she would rarely reveal.
My father groped in the darkness as Mary and I stood at the door. Horatio was still jumping up, not yet ready to be calm, his fast panting exaggerated in the still of the night. Mary reached again for my hand, as if this time it was she who needed the comfort of touch. We heard something fall with a heavy thud – knocked-over books, no doubt – then a scratching and a fumbling. At length the bloom of a kerosene lamp uprose in the darkness, and with it came my father’s face, swelling into view, burnished and brass-coloured above the flame he was controlling with his thumb and index finger. The lenses of his spectacles once again took away his eyes, leaving behind twin discs of light. I saw him there, half present, blurred in groggy distance, as if at the end of a tunnel. I pushed Horatio down, gave him a quick smack on the nose to quiet him, and then led Mary, trembling, into our illuminated home.
It looked so small, now, after the room in the Continental Hotel, almost suffocating, and with a heavy odour of dust. A spray of cockroaches fanned open and scuttled into corners. But there was book-scent, and things known, and our shadows in the lamplight, the dog waiting to be fed, the unpacking of the day’s purchases. Mary was passive, doing exactly what she was told. I remember that my father gave her a place to sleep beside me, on the floor. He unrolled a canvas swag, and without a word took the kerosene lamp with him and went into the bedroom. The pool of light that he dragged behind him was closed off, contained, becoming a thin bright seam pressed beneath the bedroom door.
Mary was silent; she lay herself down. Even then I felt that something was wrong. Outside a wind started up, a slack moaning wind.
PART TWO
DOCTOR: Foul whisperings are abroad. Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets …
Macbeth V. i
6
In the world beyond, 1940 was aflame with nations in crisis. The Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the blitzkrieg had caused the British retreat at Dunkirk; Luftwaffe and Messerschmitt were dive-bombing the Homeland. Perdita heard all this, all this new military language, riveted with metallic names and foreign locations, from her increasingly remote and war-obsessed father. Although he received newspapers two weeks late from Perth, and then only when Mr Trevor made a trip to town, Nicholas was following the war with an almost scholarly attention. Manoeuvres, tactics, victories, defeats: these excited and frustrated him, made him feel both involved and dreadfully excluded.
He found himself dreaming again of 1918, and yearning for the thunder of tanks advancing and the sheer terror that made grown men, men like himself, shit and puke and call out to God or their mothers in excited extremity. In a repeated dream he leaped over trenches with the stride of a long-jumper, seeing beneath him strewn bodies and grisly death. He carried his rifle, bayonet fixed, up high above his shoulders, keeping it poised horizontally as he had been taught to do, but he never seemed to land on the other side of the trench. He was stuck there, like a corpse in a ridiculous pose. Stuck there in thunderous dreamland, in exploding mid-air.
Perdita remembers the day, in July, when her father announced that the Germans one month ago had entered Paris. His eyes glittered maniacally; she almost felt afraid of him. How could the distant war invade in this way? Nicholas told his daughter that it was only a matter of time before Australia would be attacked, and that he would be summoned, in a leadership role, to defend the hapless Australians from the evil Hun and their allies. There would be unimaginable suffering, he said, and hideous mutilations. There would be air raids and bombings. The sky itself would burn. As he sipped his tea, gleefully misanthropic, Perdita and Mary exchanged frightened glances. He was like a shadow they lived under. He had become darkened and impersonal.
It would remain wholly separate, Perdita’s time with Mary. There was something implacable, sure, about what they shared. Mary was by turns girlish and adult, but she looked after Perdita, daily attending her, offering companionship, knowledge and canny advice. She taught her poker (how to shuffle, to deal, how finally, to cheat), desert songs (learned from her mother from whom she’d been taken), and the lives of the saints (the strange details of which she had read about in the orphanage). She taught Perdita, and Billy too, how to locate pitjuri, bush tobacco, and to chew it until the sides of their cheeks began to tingle and salivate, so that they experienced its sour, stimulating effects. She showed them the chevron sand-lines of lizards, identifying the species, and taught them how to track back, hunting stealthily, to a log hole or a burrow. The ripples of departed snakes, the scroll shapes and mounds and pathways of bush tucker – all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed, became suddenly visible.
‘Whitefellas can’t see nothin’ around them; whitefellas all buggered up in the head,’ Mary declared, touching her temple. ‘’Cept you two, of course,’ she added with a broad grin.
Under her intelligent guidance the scrub, which had seemed so empty, took on fullness and detail. Every bird had a true name, every mark in the wind-scalloped dirt betokened liveliness and activity. Even the glass-clear sky was a fabric of signs. There were seasons that a whitefella never noticed, marked by tiny efflorescences and the swelling and fading of bush fruit. Mary also knew about the stock on the station – which of the cattle were calving, which horses were slow or ill-tempered, which she wanted the opportunity to ride.
Billy and Perdita were both charmed by Mary. She was cleverer – and funnier – than anyone they had ever met.
They were hanging out washin
g together, each under a scratchy straw hat, when Perdita asked Mary to tell her story. Billy was nearby, lying in the dirt with Horatio, tickling the dog’s belly as he parted his quivering legs. It helped her speak, perhaps, the fact that Billy was deaf, that he smiled up at her as she spoke, with little knowledge of her words. Mary was Walmajarri, she said, from near Fitzroy Crossing. Her people were desert people. Her mother was Dootharra and her father was a white stockman, a kartiya, no name, buggered off, somewheres, long time, nobody knows, somewheres, longaway. Her people had gone to a feeding station to get flour and tobacco, then someone from the Government, seeing her pale skin, seized her from her mother and took her to Balgo Mission. She cried and cried. She said that her mother spoke to her in the wind, and that she was crying too, full of whispery breath, overflowing and spreading out, coming like wind-spirit across the land to find and to claim her. But it was no good, they never saw each other again. Mary was six years old when she was taken away. Mission fellas noticed that she was unusually smart, so later, two years later, she was sent down south, to an orphanage in the city called Sister Clare’s. To learn to be a whitefella, she said, to learn all them whitefella ways.
‘Thank you, Sister, yes, Sister. A cup of tea, Sister. Please, Sister.’
There was a comic mischief, a shrewd pleasure, to Mary’s skilled mimicry. She shifted accents and registers; her tales held echoes and ironies. Perdita had never heard anyone speak so openly before, or, for that matter, in so many different voices. When Mary recently returned to the north, to the convent in Broome, she heard from blackfellas passing through that her mother had died. Dootharra had rolled into a campfire one night and was too tired, or too sad, maybe, to roll out again. Her skin was burned, she was lost, she was a dark, dark shade. Mary found a rock and struck at her head until it bled, to show in the Walmajarri way her grieving for her mother, to feel it truly and painfully. The nuns had seen her, and scolded her. They said her behaviour was unChristian. She had looked down at the blood-drops on the earth and wanted her own death.