by Gail Jones
In the air is a criminal stench of blood. They breathe it in. They fill themselves. As night falls and the sense of drama begins to shift, the policemen will question the little white girl, who says virtually nothing, and seems to have trouble forming words in her mouth. Then they question the older black girl, who has confessed, anyway, and the surprisingly self-composed wife, who talks clearly and succinctly about what has occurred. It is clear that the black girl, Mary, has been raped. Bruises are already appearing on her thighs and at her neck. Mrs Trevor confirms that she’s heard rumours about Nicholas Keene and native girls: she hadn’t believed it at first and had once sent away a bloody good cook, her best cook ever, because she thought she was lying about Nicholas Keene, who had not long arrived, and had a baby and wife, who seemed educated and well-spoken and was rather handsome, in fact. Didn’t seem the sort, not at all, she added.
The policemen roll the body onto an oily canvas sheet, tie each end with a rope, and lift it between them, sharing the weight, onto the back of their ute. They wipe their hands on their trousers before shaking hands with Mr Trevor, who nods, and looks serious, but is also grimly enjoying this event and its tellable possibilities. He touches the brim of his hat as he says goodbye.
Light from a kerosene lamp streams out of the open door of the shack: everyone present notices how unevenly it wavers, noting that the fuel is low, and they will soon be left in darkness. Large moths are nevertheless hitting against the wire of the door, drinking in what light there is. The girl Mary is with the policemen: she is quiet and compliant. She sits between them in the front seat for the long ride into the darkness. The little white girl watches as they drive away. In the rear-view mirror they can see her child-shape waving, as if she has just had a visitor, and not a murder, to deal with.
Mary does not look back. Mary looks into the night, tunnelled by headlights that catch at animal eyes, ruby glints, vague darting things, and the trunks of trees that appear to swerve, again and again, into deadly near-collision.
Time looped back and replayed. Mary was driven away into the darkness and Perdita vigorously waved, as if waving still meant something. She saw the twin chutes of the headlights fork out into the night, swing left, illuminate a boab, and then recentre. Behind her, inside, Perdita could hear Mr and Mrs Trevor talking to Stella, telling her to gather some things, to come and stay for the night. Billy was with them, clutching at his mother’s arm to stop his own rising up and flapping, to still his large, inexpressible shock. When Perdita re-entered the shack she saw her mother stepping around the glossy black stain that had been her father’s life. She felt a numbing tingle in her body and a clogging in her mouth.
Stella glanced at her daughter and said simply: ‘Let’s go.’
There was no discussion of what had occurred in that room; no words would explain or commemorate between them, or allow either to say what swelled horribly within their hearts. Stella put her index finger to her mouth in a gesture of stern silencing, ‘Shh!’ She took Perdita’s hand and almost dragged her away.
That night Billy visited Perdita as she lay, unable to sleep, on the thin prickly mattress placed on the veranda of the Trevors’ house. Mrs Trevor had tucked her in clean sheets, given her a cup of warm powdered milk, even kissed her gently on the cheek as her own mother had never done. But then she was left alone with the night sounds: scratches, creaks, the breathy sob of the wind. A three-quarter moon was rising in the sky. Everything was softening, achieving a cloak of weak light. The trees were pale; the clouds above carried a pearly, irregular fringe. For the first time Perdita thought about the existence of ghosts and became afraid. He might be there now, distending into phantasmic, airy shapes, long-fingered, eyeless, yawning and strange, his back and neck gaping open where the knife had been. He might be floating between the book-stacks, wreathing around her bed, passing restlessly in and out of the room where last night he was alive and sleeping.
When Billy crept to her bed, Perdita let him in. He made whimpering sounds. He might also have been afraid. They lay together clutching, and it was then that Perdita knew that Billy had seen everything, and would know for always, for ever and ever, know in the pools of his unblinking, watery grey eyes what role each had played and what had occurred. Perdita liked the firm feel of Billy’s body, so warm and solid and unghostly against hers. When she tried to speak to him – even though he could not hear – she found herself stuttering. Something fretful and uncommon pestered her tongue, some mischief was there, some remnant of the day. Perdita did not panic; she assumed it would pass.
Billy rose and went to piss from the edge of the veranda. He was unselfconscious, leaning his hips forward, tilting his belly, and Perdita saw the arc of his water shine in the moonlight. But when he returned to the bed Perdita reached down to feel his body and discovered he had his hands crossed over his private parts. She lifted them away and rested her own hand there, to comfort him, to show that she understood. From inside the house, very faintly, Perdita heard her mother’s voice:
Avaunt! and quit my sight! Let the earth hide thee!
Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;
Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with!
Perdita remembered the speech. It was Macbeth, with bulging vision, seeing slain Banquo’s ghost. Yet Stella did not sound afraid or alarmed, or as if she had actually seen Nicholas’s ghost; she sounded simply as if she was reciting to calm herself to sleep, to hear in measured language what was otherwise fearsome, night-shrieking and dire.
Billy lifted his face as if he too had heard the speech. Perhaps he too was thinking about ghosts, ‘prisoners of the wind’. In the semi-darkness Billy appeared even stranger than usual: his eyes were saucers, his hair copper wire, his features stylised by the fluid moonlight they both seemed to float in.
Vera Trevor could not persuade her Aboriginal domestic help to clean up the blood in the Keenes’ shack. Downright refused, she said. No way, no way. No amount of threat or persuasion changed their minds. Debil-debil there, they told her. But she couldn’t imagine what devils they were referring to, now that Nicholas’s body was gone, taken away for a coroner’s report, and Mary locked up. She and Stella had to do the job themselves. They took buckets and mops and ammonia cleaning powder, and on their knees scrubbed away at the mess of death. With their brushes they formed arm’s-length pink-coloured swirls of foam, then mopped up, and squeezed, and found beneath them a wooden floor that had not quite forgotten the crime. When Vera realised that the outline of the bloodstain was ineradicable, she contributed a rag mat to cover what remained. It was a vivid mat, multicoloured and rather jolly. Stella was grateful. It was nice, she said. It brightened the place up.
The morning was sunny, renewed. It was possible to believe that what had happened was a terrible dream, and that Mary was there, and Nicholas, and the order of things was restored. Yet Perdita found that some trace of the violence remained like congestion in her mouth. When she asked for her breakfast it was already apparent. Something mangled her speech, syllables jammed in her mouth, she could not begin simple words because the consonants would stick. Stella was that morning like a sleepwalker; unresponsive and quiet. She looked up at her daughter, but did not pass comment or express surprise.
Mrs Trevor leaned across the table and commanded Perdita to open her mouth: she peered in like a dentist, but found no infection or blockage.
‘Poor mite,’ she said, non-committally, giving Perdita’s right cheek a little pat with her hand.
But then she went back to eating her toast, offering no further mollycoddle, so that even Perdita did not realise how entrenched the alteration might be. They ate their breakfast in heavy silence. Their gazes did not meet. They were each alone.
Later, in the afternoon, Stella and Mrs Trevor went to clean the shack. Stella had woken fully by then and seemed sensible and practical in the context of death, just as she had the night before, when the policemen questioned her. Bill
y and Perdita stayed behind, playing cards on the veranda.
Perdita wondered where Mary was, whether she was in gaol. She imagined her in a windowless room, sitting alone. She imagined Mary’s head bent, like a saint, and her dark face prayerful. And she imagined a religious light, a beam of iridescence, flowing from the star of an overhead lamp. She could not bear to think of the Broome gaol, a dour ugly building, hard and forbidding, or of the prisoners she had seen linked by heavy chains, sweating in the sunshine, their faces creased and exhausted and verging on desperation. Perdita needed to convince herself that Mary was somewhere unworldly and safe.
It was after the cleaning that Stella really noticed that Perdita’s speech had changed. She told her daughter to pull herself together, to stop being stupid. Perdita sensed at this moment an overwhelming loneliness: Mary gone, her mother angry, no one to talk to. No one to talk to in this incredible, newly warped voice, this juddery, hunchbacked, troublesome voice. What had lodged inside her? What had stuck in her mouth like muck, like vile disturbance? Already resignation was beginning to claim her.
At night they returned together to the shack. Mr Trevor had been there already and refilled and lit the kerosene lamps. As they walked towards it under the three-quarter moon, Perdita saw from the outside how very small their world was, how frugally they lived. Two rectangular windows shone like animal eyes in the darkness; the shape of the building was crouching, cowered. She felt a rising apprehension at the thought of re-entering the room where her father had bled to death and saw him again, his life ebbing, looking weary and surprised. She wondered if dying people always looked surprised, if death was like that, flabbergasting, and delivered from behind.
Where Nicholas had fallen there was now the oval rag mat, which Perdita had seen before, in the Trevors’ house. It was a cheery, a glorious lie, a text of other men’s shirts and cast-offs, floral and scrappy fragments, of something that was once worn by Sal and Daff. Perdita stepped onto the mat with a little shudder. There was a smell too, just perceptible, of eucalyptus smoke. She discovered later that the people from the creek had smoked the house. They had dragged smouldering leaves around the room, to clear the contaminating violence of slaughterous thoughts, to release from captivity the unquiet spirit. They had let Nicholas drift away; they had let him be air.
11
When I try to recall those first weeks after my father’s death, my memory falters. Burdened as I was by the loss of my fluent speech, other events lessened in importance, or were unremarked. Stella took to wearing her Spanish shawl – this is a reliable image because others, I recall, remarked upon it, taking the extravagance as a sign of genuine mourning. I did not attend the funeral. Children did not then, it seems, so there is no tidy memory of my father encased, flower-covered, eulogised and sealed away, framed in his coffin by the beams of a high church ceiling, like an image in a movie. There was only the body in the canvas and its rough removal, the policemen veering into the night with Mary sitting between them; then darkness, and a plume of dust, settling in the far reaches of the thinning lamplight.
The days were all the same, dull and empty and governed by grief for my father, for Mary, for all that had changed. Stella and I fell into repetitious reading and sewing. Nicholas’s newspapers continued to arrive, and we also became rather obsessed with the war, following it with an interest neither of us had expressed, or had been able to express, when it was hitherto, so definitely, Nicholas’s pastime.
Stella retained the newspaper cuttings on the wall and added a few of her own. She particularly liked the map, which from the beginning had been filled in to mark the German expansion and which had not been destroyed in her Christmas-time rage. Event time was war-time. We wanted a reliable history, a large scale detachment.
My father had been killed when the siege of Leningrad began, in September 1941, just before I turned eleven years old. This was during Stalin’s scorched earth policy; and it was when Jews were ordered to wear yellow stars. I knew of Odessa, Kharkov, Sevastapol, Rostov. I had been nowhere, seen nothing, never attended school, yet I held in my head a war-time globe, the ‘thick rotundity of the world’ composed of cities aflame, armies massing, territories fought over and lost and turned into graveyards. The map on the wall, corpulent Europe, became covered with Stella’s tiny drawings of swastikas. At a distance they looked like spiders, swarming across the paper. From my mother I had already received an engrossing and gaudy education; the world at war magnified my national cartoons and my mechanical geography, and gave me a confident, absurd contemporaneity. I was not squeamish or afraid; no details bruised my heart to make me feel anything more profoundly than I had felt the loss of Mary.
The issue of my speech rankled Stella. She seemed to believe that the stutter was an affectation that I had developed to annoy her, or to dramatise my father’s death in the very chamber of my mouth. But in truth I simply found it uncontrollable, and was often in tears with the struggle against my own failure, screwing my mouth into contortions so that I might recover what I had always taken for granted.
Other people also responded with distance. Mrs Trevor certainly seemed to like me less, thinking I was brain-fevered in some way by the shock of the blood and the knife, and even Billy, who had lip-read, to some extent, my communications in the past, now seemed frustrated by the jerky motions of my meaning. My friends who had inhabited the creek-bed, and who had always welcomed my visits, had disappeared. Willie said they had gone north for ceremonies, for dances, for the ‘sorry-time’ of mourning someone in their own community, someone important. There would be rituals for weeks, dancing, grieving. But I believed that they also missed Mary, and had decided to leave.
I longed for Billy’s companionship, but he seemed to withdraw. I saw him staring at the sky, as if to read meaning there, or lying with his face on the dirt, compelled by the wriggling life of some tiny creature. In his own anguish, and missing Mary, he became more pathetic and more than usually disassociated. I watched him drag sticks behind him, leaving trails in the sand, and I wanted nothing more than to walk by his side, to hold his restless hands, to still his blubbery lips and dry his eyes each time he broke into sobbing. Mrs Trevor, under a large hat, watched over Billy. She willed us apart with her troubled gaze. I imagined she might embrace me, or cure my speaking, but she was distant and suspicious, more critical of Stella, and removed from whatever affection she had once held for me.
I watched Horatio nuzzle at Billy as he lay on the ground, trying to rouse him. Even this upset me: another shift in affections. The dog was mine, not his. I called Horatio to my side and hugged him and slapped his cheeks, to show my possession.
As I talked less, Stella began to talk more, to fill up the shack in which she now felt abandoned. Every now and then she harangued at nothing precisely, complaining about her life and her daughter, addressing God, or William Shakespeare, but mostly she filled the silence with monologic ramblings of a kind of theatrical earnestness and stalwart misery. Her misfortunes were many, she said, but when the war was over they would travel to England, they would live with her sister Margaret, they would start anew. She would make a garden, she said, and fill it with clematis and annual bulbs with fat, scented blossoms, and she would sit in a wicker rocking chair in the soft English light, listening to the wireless.
I was filled with wild loneliness, guilt and grief. I thought I would die for all that remained unexpressed. There was a murder of Jews at Kiev on 29 September, as the Germans began their advance on Moscow. We read about it in November. In history books it says that 33,771 people were killed, men, women and children. I remember knowing only that there was a dreadful massacre at this place, and that with indecent, childish misunderstanding, I attached emotionally to the name Kiev, thinking that perhaps it was special enough to contain my vast private woe, my sense that some things, after all, were irremediable.
When at last she cast off her Spanish shawl, Stella enlisted Mr Trevor to teach her to drive. Nicholas’s Jeep had stood st
ill for weeks, a monument to his sudden disappearance and the rude persistence of objects over people, but one day Stella noticed it and summoned her neighbour. The battery had become flat, the starter motor had seized, the whole machine was about to become sculptural and dead, but Mr Trevor bent into its belly and tinkered and repaired. When Stella sat behind the wheel and pumped the accelerator, so that the engine churned and rattled into life, Horatio leaped up, exulting, thinking Nicholas had returned. Perdita saw him sprint from behind the shack to welcome her father home. He circled the car several times, sniffing the earth, looking confused, his vigorous tail gradually stilling. Perdita had seen Horatio search for Mary – turning in sad circles where she once slept, lying beneath the tank stand where she liked to sit and read – but realised now that he also missed Nicholas. There was no howling or fuss; like Perdita, the dog moved in a quiet befuddled sorrow. Perdita left the shack and ran to clasp her dog. They sat in the dirt and watched Stella staring ahead behind the wheel, listening to Mr Trevor’s explanation of the pedals of the car, sitting resolutely where Nicholas had once sat.
The first time they drove to Broome to collect stores, Perdita was excited. She loved going into the town and believed too that she would discover what had happened to Mary. Stella at first drove slowly, testing each corrugation of the road, each gravel and sand trap, but when they arrived both she and Perdita felt a sense of release. They booked for one night at the Continental Hotel and Perdita found it reassuringly unchanged.
Perdita shared a room with her mother, much like the one she had earlier stayed in, and saw that it possessed the same shadowy coolness and aura of calm. The twin beds were high and neat, and draped by conical white mosquito nets. The walls were pale green. There were no war images to look at. Sunshine filtered in stripes through the cyclone-proof shutters. There was an electric light, and even a fan. Perdita would have liked to stay there for ever.