Sorry

by Gail Jones

  When she was an adult she learned that Stella did not pay the bill, but that the hotel manager, knowing her tragedy, did not insist. Everyone, she discovered, knew of the murdered husband and the crazy wife and the little girl who had seen something that made her words seize and stick. In small towns there exist these discreet forms of solidarity. Nicholas Keene was not well liked, ‘buggered in the head’, they said, ‘a gutless wonder’, but his wife, well, she was a pitiful Englishwoman, without a bloody clue, his daughter a lonesome and isolated stray.

  Feeling suddenly unburdened, Perdita flung herself on the bed, and absorbed its luxury (the smell of soap powder, once again, the creaseless cover, the listless encompassing of an over-soft mattress); she remembered her father at the bar, slumping over his whisky, and the palm tree mirror with the liquor bottles lined prismatically before it, and the beautiful woman from the bar, crowned by a high dome of hair, who had given her a packet of salted peanuts. She remembered Sis, from Beagle Bay, who worked out the back in the kitchen, and who had treated her with wise, ineffable tenderness. She remembered the image of her large black hands plunging into a sink of dishes, a voice tone, a compassion.

  Early in the evening Stella and Perdita went for dinner to the beer garden. They were served barramundi and chips, with a single ring of canned pineapple, startlingly yellow and balanced, in lieu of salad, at the edge of the plate. Perdita was surprised to see how much food existed in the world. She watched the hotel patrons scoff their meals of fish or steak, and down in huge thirsty gulps their frothy beers. At one point she saw Sis emerging from behind a painted lattice frame. Impulsively, without any hint of hesitation or stutter, she called out her name. Sis turned with a small tray, looked around her, puzzled, then saw Perdita and waved. Perdita waved back. It was like receiving an answer to a necessary question. Sis stood for a moment with her tray, just to look at them. She was smaller than Perdita had remembered and was wearing a tent-like dress patterned with orange hibiscus blossoms. Perdita waved again, across the diners, grateful to be so confirmed.

  She was not sure, even later in bed, trying to filter her feelings before sleep, why the exchange of waves had so moved and impressed her. Perhaps, since everyone was disappearing, this sudden reappearance, definite, intense, swathed in large blossoms declarative of festivity, recovered in its sweet sign the possibility of a child she might have been, a child cheerful, unstuttering, a child who has a clean room and a plate of food and knows nothing of death, and nothing of Kiev, and who waves – just like that – in spontaneous joy.

  In the room that night, under white electric light, Perdita watched Stella slowly undress. It was the first time she had seen her mother’s body exposed. Stella was preoccupied and stood naked for a moment, dangling her bra, then flung it sideways onto the bed as she rummaged in her overnight bag for a nightdress. She had a long shapely back and enormous buttocks. The tops of her thighs were dough-like and dimpled. If Perdita had been able to offer a word of love – just as she had called out Sis’s name – she would have done so right then. But her fat tongue bulged and her heart pounded: she was afraid she would stutter. She saw the nightdress recovered and lifted above the head. Then the garment coming down, a soft cream sheath, sealing her mother away.

  In the morning, in the dazed half-sleep and half-light of just-awakening, Stella whispered in a thick voice across the room to her daughter.

  ‘I had my snow dream again last night.’

  There was a pause; Perdita waited and heard a slow yawn.

  ‘It’s been years, I think, since I’ve had my snow dream.’

  Stella was lying inside the cone of the mosquito net. She was masked by white folds, which trembled with the sea breeze that flowed in through the open window. Perdita, barely awake, thought her voice sounded untypically vague and gentle, as if fluttering downwards, as if in slow motion, as if carrying into waking, perhaps, some of the soft qualities of snow.

  Perdita had developed a rash from lying under the oleander bush in the front yard of the hotel. She held her crimson forearms to her mother and wanted sympathy.

  ‘It’s your own fault,’ said Stella, curtly.

  Perdita wanted to see Mary. It was all she wanted. She slung her body into the car, already gritty with their travel, and almost demanded information.

  ‘She’s in Perth,’ Stella said. ‘At a reformatory school. When she’s a bit older, she’ll be moved to the prison.’

  It was enough for now. Mary was away, unreachable. She was no longer in Broome. Perdita looked down at her crimson arms, which had become papery and spotted and itched unbearably. She began softly to cry.

  ‘Cut it out,’ said her mother, sounding Australian.

  On the front of the newspaper between them was balloon-headed Mussolini, saluting the sky. He looked more statue than man; he had a granite angularity. Stella said it was good to see the Italians getting more attention. They were, she claimed, more interesting than Nazis, much more cultured. Cathedrals. Artworks.

  ‘Duomo,’ said Stella emphatically, offering no translation.

  When they returned to England, she said, they would have a holiday in Italy, and see Venice, Verona, Mantua and Rome, the ‘Shakespearean cities’. She was back in the hard world now, of dictators and deeds to perform, and drove leaning forward over the steering wheel, as if urging the car onward into history.

  ‘Much more interesting.’

  Perdita longed not for Italy but to move to town. There were pearling luggers floating in the sunlit bay, and a stripe of narrow jetty stretching to meet them. On the shore, close by, were sorting sheds, in which could be glimpsed slender men dressed in sarongs and batik head dresses, sitting cross-legged on piles of shell, examining them, and tossing them into yet new piles. Jewellery, buttons, mother-of-pearl watch faces and ornaments for rich houses: that the town was founded on pearls and pearl shell seemed to Perdita almost impossibly glamorous.

  She loved too the people she saw in the streets, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Aboriginal families who lived in houses and were not consigned to stations or missions; they were all much more beautiful than the people she knew. All had black liquid eyes and open faces; they spoke to her with gentleness; they were exotically kind. Perdita also loved the tin-walled stores owned by Chinese merchants, which were full of red-papered objects covered in fancy writing, stamped images of fishes, dragons, circles, cranes. There were noodles in nest shapes and huge sacks of rice; there were cans of mushrooms and fishpaste and cracker-strings of dried chillies. The objects and smells in the stores – Wings, Tangs – were inexplicably seductive.

  Stella bought two Gouldian finches in a temple-shaped bamboo cage. Perdita was not sure, since the sky was full of them, why Stella should want two for herself, but was pleased to witness what was almost frivolity. Stella held them high: Dromio and Antipholus, she called them. They bounced on their perches, full of quivering life.

  Much of Perdita’s knowledge of Broome was derived from Mary. In town children went to school, and had friends and played games. There was a Buddhist school for Japanese children (she had seen them sitting outside playing an unfamiliar board game), a government school for kids like her and for non-Buddhist Asians, and a Catholic school that had Mass – whatever that was – where the children, Mary said, learned stories and mysteries, like those contained in The Lives of the Saints. There was a cinema, and a bakery. Perdita had never been to the cinema, a small shed, with outdoor seats arrayed in front of it, and a screen of patched canvas, but she knew that it must be something marvellous. She knew that the baker had a drinking problem, that the policeman had a girlfriend as well as a wife, that there was a woman spirit in the town, a woman in a red dress, who appeared and disappeared, without reason or warning. Mary had also told her, somewhat imprecisely, of the astonishing things men and women got up to together and Perdita knew there were women who traded their bodies to men. She wished to see for herself, to stand beside Mary as they peeped at private moments, to learn trul
y about the lives that other people led. The isolation of her destroyed speech made Perdita aware of the larger isolation in her life; somehow she had not known or realised it before; somehow it had been simply the unexamined condition of things.

  They drove first to the stores and the bakery, and then to the convent. Everywhere people turned to look – the English widow, driving a car, bringing her daughter to town; she was a novelty here, and a source of story. Perdita felt particularly conspicuous. She could not reply when addressed and so received pitying looks and insincere pats on the head. It seemed to her that everyone was sorry for her mother (they enquired about her health, made harmless small talk, avoiding mention of the death, as if Nicholas had never existed), but she had the impression they considered her an idiot.

  ‘Terrible business. Terrible,’ they murmured in collusion.

  More condescension awaited at the convent. Perdita was left alone in the foyer where she had first met Mary. A pop-eyed nun with a ruddy complexion gave her a glass of lime cordial, touched her hand lightly and slipped away – not even attempting conversation with the girl whom everyone knew would falter in reply. She was left sitting in a wooden chair so large that it hurt the backs of her bare legs, which dangled like bell ropes without touching the ground. Above her the old-fashioned crucifix still hung; Perdita craned her neck and saw how ugly it now looked. She hated its glossy wood and painted features, the stretched thin body, its ribs apparent, the ludicrous, unbelievable story.

  Perdita remembered Mary’s body, taller than she, and how she held her arms outstretched, proud of her hunting triumphs, how she slept with her knees drawn up, folded into her own dreaming. It was in this room that Mary had first held her hand. Here, where brazen light showed up the emptiness to things, the apathetic God, the way lives fell apart, the destructive possibilities of any love.

  Stella returned with Sister Immaculata and said that there was no further news of Mary but what they had already gleaned. Sister Immaculata stretched forward and took Perdita’s chin with one hand. With the other she prised and stretched back the top and lower lids of the eye that had once been infected.

  ‘Fully healed,’ she declared.

  The nun released Perdita’s face. Adults had such preemption, took such liberties. Perdita hated the way a hand could reach forward and claim the face; how her mother spat on a handkerchief then held her head tilted and wiped her face clean, dabbing roughly, imperatively. How adults, without asking, made all the decisions. How they claimed to possess all the big questions. She was miserable, sullen. Perhaps now, with her newly ruined speech, she would always be someone, a kind of object, whose face was grabbed, who was assumed to have nothing important to say.

  Perdita and Stella drove back to the shack in silence, with the finches chirping in the back seat and Mussolini’s fat head shuddering between them. Perdita remembered for no reason the stray word duomo. Without a clue what it meant, she stored it away in herself, like a buried treasure, its echoic deep sound and its unknown meaning.

  12

  At 8 a.m. on 7 December 1941 the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii. The newspaper carried a spectacular photograph: the sinking of the USS Arizona. Direct hits had sparked its magazine, and the ship exploded in a fireball and sank in five minutes, taking 1300 lives down through a bubbling cauldron of oil. In the photograph the Arizona was a ship shape tilted heavenward, covered by smoke and flames. Perdita scanned closely to see the bodies floating in the water, but found none; the image was taken from too far away, from on board, the caption said, the USS Solace. It was grainy and imprecise, as befits the dissolving of lives, but too impressively disastrous not to print in the daily paper. There must be many war photographs like this, she thought, too big in scale to include the suffering human, the little man, savagely anointed, his skin blistered with burns, flailing in choppy waters, on the point of drowning. Life was like that. Some deaths were witnessed, some were not; some sobbing victim was going unnoticed, some murdered man fell forward, crumpling onto the floor in an opulent pool of blood, and no one could say what had really happened. This oppressive understanding inhabited Perdita for years; she carried it inside her chest like a brick. The word Arizona settled alongside Kiev. You could name things, at least. In the absence of a testimonial face, there might at least be a category.

  To fill what was missing, or to control her bleak sense of intolerable alteration, Perdita took hours-long excursions with Horatio. He was an easy companion; his leaping, sniffing doggy life was a relief from her mother’s immobility, gloomy and loquacious. She liked the way he led her with his nose down and his ears pricked and alert, the way his route was never straight but zigzagged by nimble, sudden choices of direction. He was alert to other creatures and driven by inner forces that knew the world in minute and purposeful ways. Every now and then he chased a lizard, leaving her behind, or took off, racing, towards some invisible attraction; but he always returned and he always led her home.

  Without Mary there was less of the world to divine. Perdita dawdled and traipsed as Horatio skipped and rushed; she was walking out her grief for her lost friend and feeling sorry for herself. She wanted above all to kill a snake, not one in the house, which was easy and visible, but to find one here, to drag it from its hiding place, break its back with a flick and crush its head against a rock, just as Mary had done. Though she searched, she found nothing. She was just a stuttering girl in a faded cotton frock, a girl with plaits and with too much time on her hands. She noticed that the world, not just her knowledge, was turning to stone. There was a mica sky and a marble hardness to things; mammal becoming mineral, a weight pressing down. The world was transforming.

  There are forms of loneliness children endure that adults have no inkling of: stern seclusions, lives of quiet desperation. Now that her childhood was a spoiled thing, compounded by an inefficient tongue and garbled speech, Perdita entered the dreary territory of the truly alone. She found one of the old boabs that had a hollow bottle belly and squeezed herself inside, pleased to be enclosed, imagining for a moment that she might stay there, never to be found, never-ever, never-ever. She would become as skinny as Christ and simply fade away, a relic of herself, stretched and holy. In the tree belly there was a stench of wood-rot and old animal droppings; it was not the fading haven she had imagined. In such darkness she would be obliged to confront her own thoughts, to remember and to feel again all that had happened. Perdita squeezed out of the trunk, maturely extracting herself from the fantasies of self-annihilation that even young children may entertain. Horatio bounded towards her with excitement, his sticky mouth wide open, his thin tail waving, as if she had just performed a trick or invented a new game. She clasped him with both hands and pressed her face against his fur.

  As she approached her home, returning one afternoon from her exhausting wandering, Perdita heard Stella’s voice engaged in recitation. In town she had overheard ‘crazy Mrs Keene’ and immediately knew that this was so; someone outside was required to name it and the name had been casually flung as they left the bakers, not to hurt but simply to identify: ‘That’s crazy Mrs Keene, the one whose hubby got it in the neck, you know, out bush.’ It was like a brain-wave sparking – yes, it was true. Even isolated as she was, with few acquaintances, Perdita knew that other mothers did not behave like this, seething with words from four centuries ago.

  Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,

  And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;

  Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,

  And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood …

  Perdita had not heard this one before – a sonnet, apparently – but knew that Stella’s madness had method in it. She almost pitied her expertise with such descriptive resources. Stella was doomed, she realised, to emotional aggrandisement and the lunatic exaggeration of the otherwise everyday. Her redescription of life in Shakespearean terms meant that she was always strung in a poignant register; she was always unbeara
bly, ponderously, poetic. When Perdita opened the screen door, she saw her mother staring at the bamboo cage, purchased in town less than two weeks ago, which she had removed from its hanging hook and placed on the table. In the cage was a tiger snake, nestled in a coil. It had within its long yellowish body two quivering lumps – the twin finches digesting – and these prevented it moving back between the bars through which it had come. Stella looked up and fell silent as Perdita entered the shack. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying. She might have been a child, with this posture of brooding disappointment over the loss of pets.

  ‘Can you do something about this?’ she asked in a low voice.

  Perdita had just turned eleven, but felt she was being addressed as an adult. She paused, considering. Then she went to her father’s meagre toolbox and fetched a hammer. When she slid open the door to the cage the snake cautiously poked its head out, and she crushed it, then and there, on the kitchen table, with not one, but three, heavily pounding blows. The thin skull was flattened, the inner exposed.

  ‘Christ,’ said Stella. She grimaced at the mess and leaned closer as if to check that the snake was really dead. ‘Well done …’

  It was not a hunt, or the congratulations of a whole community who would roast the snake over the coals of a slow-burning fire; it was not Mary, seeing how brave and grown-up she had become; but it was her mother, moved by odd circumstance to offer two spontaneous words of praise. Perdita felt an unaccustomed pride. If she had been sure of her voice she would have said something in response, but deciding it was best not to disturb the moment with a possible stutter, she simply smiled at her mother and removed the battered snake, its head no more now than wet bloody mush. She flung it wastefully into the bush, for the ants and crows, whipping it upwards through the sky as a tennis player might serve.