by Gail Jones
Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Stella decided, along with other families, that they would move down south, to Perth. Broome was emptying out; Japanese families were being relocated for internment; even Sis and her children, Perdita discovered, had been arrested and sent away, as if being the family of a Japanese pearl diver somehow threatened national security. Fear includes these churlish and punitive measures. It creates internal enemies, monstrous figures in newspapers. Aboriginal families were sent to outstations and missions; the north-west was depopulated in anticipation of an invasion. Word was that the Government was prepared to lose the north to the Japanese, in order properly to defend the south.
It was a period of interregnum, rumour, alarmist speculation and downright lies. Stella became agitated, speaking almost daily of the ‘Nips’ or the ‘Japs’ and their gruesome natures. She no longer attended to her map of Europe, but became increasingly preoccupied with the arrows in the newspaper that showed the projected route of the Japanese as they spread their Rising Suns across the northern half of Australia.
A letter from Margaret arrived – belatedly – to tell of her family’s deaths long, long ago in December 1940. Stella stood holding the letter with shaking hands, remembering not her father and mother, not her sister Iris, but old Mrs Whiticombe, her hands like sticks, her voice expiring, her skull pushing through transparent skin as her soul stretched to leave. She sighed, crumpled the letter, and flung it aside.
When Perdita retrieved it later on, smoothing open the paper to find Margaret’s words, she realised only in a formless way that she had lost her grandparents and an aunt. That her mother was orphaned.
She should have understood by then the signs of her mother’s decline: a kind of dithering incomprehension, neglect of her own cleanliness, paranoia, slowed movement. But turmoil was general; there was packing to do, arrangements to be made. Mrs Trevor, seeing, perhaps, Stella’s precarious condition, enlisted her station staff to assist them; and she and Billy would travel with them first to Broome, then on the state ship assigned to evacuees. The whole world was moving; why not they? In the heaving of populations, in the confiscation of homes, this relocation of two families was a minor thing.
When Singapore fell, in February 1942, the proposed shift gained a sudden sense of urgency. Mr Trevor, who was either oblivious to Stella’s vulnerability or wanted with crude malice simply to shock, regaled her with tales of horrible tortures, beheadings in the street and the rape of English women. He would not be travelling with them; he had chosen to stay and Defend the Nation – another man, Perdita realised later, who did not or could not enlist, but wanted nevertheless to prove his own life worthwhile.
Stella listened transfixed to Mr Trevor’s stories. There had been such torpor in the month since Nicholas’s death and Mary’s departure; now, all of a sudden, there was busyness and organisation and the world war impinging. Ragged warnings flew everywhere, tearing the sky. Disturbance registered on the skin, and in the tone of rackety voices.
Perdita was thrilled by the prospect of a move to the city; she would visit Mary, ride on a bus and finally, like other girls her age, go to school. Yet she imagined her destination with almost farcical error. Since her vision was derived from a collage of images, mostly nineteenth-century etchings, in her parents’ books, she believed The City to be stony, monumental and grand, a place of avenues, statues and spouting fountains, a place dignified, wealthy, bathed in leaden light. But when at last she saw Perth she burst into tears: it was such a disappointment. There were trams in the streets and some imposing hotels, but overall it was boring and unmonumental.
For now, however, there was this new upheaval. Billy was enjoined to help with the packing of books and he proved a willing worker and even-tempered company. It was clear to Perdita that he enjoyed piling the books, binding same-sized volumes with lengths of string, arranging them geometrically in old tea-chests lined with tea-scented tinfoil. Perdita saw the world that she had known all her life disassemble; the book stacks gradually diminished, the furniture, spare as it was, disappeared in one day, the kitchen items, the worn linen, these were all packed away quickly. This was not a home that had ever been decorated or cared for. Utility had governed its furnishings and now made for a swift disposal. When it came to clothes, Stella insisted they should take with them only what fitted into two old suitcases – leather with straps, one of them monogrammed ‘NK’ – that she and Nicholas had brought with them, in another time, another time now unimaginable, all the way from England.
Perdita saw the initials as an obscure accusation. She could not look at ‘NK’. She could not bear it, somehow. She could not contemplate what was left from what had been a living person.
It was a typically bright overheated day when they departed. No memorable weather, no vista, strangely illuminated, to set down a future recollection that might return with precision the very moment of leaving. The book crates had been sent ahead, and Stella and Perdita had spent the last night at the Trevors’, so leave-taking was essentially anticlimactical. Billy and Perdita sat in the tray of Mr Trevor’s truck and braced themselves amongst the luggage for the bone-shaking journey.
Perdita had yet to realise how utterly lost she would feel; how there are no replacements, ever, for the locations of childhood and their avid, intensified, blazing encounters. There are no substitutions. There are no cunning devices that make exile any less definitive. She kneeled on her father’s suitcase, rested her elbows on the roof of the cabin and, looking at the future, let the hot wind blow in her hair. Billy too looked forward. He too carried what was submerged and inexpressible; he too would later suffer from compulsive reminiscences. He rested his right arm tenderly around Perdita’s shoulder – he was eighteen now and man-sized, but still boyish in his expressions – and she leaned into him, gratefully, aware of his silent care.
I have thought about it all my life, this moment of eclipse. It is perhaps because departures are complex, not simple, that we are tempted to cast them reductively, as if they were episodes in a novel, neat and emblematic. There is a relish with which people speak of their childhoods, but also a shrewd suppression of moments of inversion, when what is deducted begins to define the experience. In the deepest folds of memory, the heaviest sediments, paradoxically, are those produced by loss. The convolutions of what we are include unrecognised wanderings, pilgrimages, perhaps, back to these disappeared spaces, these obscurely, intangibly attractive sites. I wanted a ‘last glimpse’ memory so that I could seal the shack, and the death, and my life with Mary, into an immured and sequestered past. To guard against what? To guard against haunting.
13
For some reason that nobody could explain, there would be four days’ delay before the ship arrived from Perth. Although Perdita longed to stay again at the Continental Hotel, Mrs Trevor arranged that she and Stella be put up at the convent.
‘She’s not well,’ Perdita overheard.
They were ushered with their suitcases into a pious room, a narrow, austere chamber with a single bed, a crucifix, and a high square window. One of the sisters, apparently willingly, had vacated her room for the visitors, and a canvas stretcher, still tied in its bundle, was available so that Perdita could sleep alongside her mother. They placed their suitcases on the bed and looked at each other. Stella was glistening with sweat and possibly feverish. Her damp hair stuck to her forehead and she had a fierce manic stare. She gestured intimacy and leaned forward as if offering a confession.
‘If the Nips come,’ she whispered, ‘we should kill ourselves quickly, rather than be taken.’
Perdita recoiled, stunned at what she had just heard. Her mother was ill indeed; she was infected with macabre imaginings and tragic outcomes, stained with fear by Mr Trevor’s terrible stories. If she had not pitied her mother and known her to be wretched, she might have been afraid of her.
At dinner they were summoned by a bell to the dining room. It had been a community of eight, but only five remained,
yet to be evacuated. The nuns filed in silently, their heads slightly bowed, and Perdita heard the rustle of their grey starched garments as they moved before her. Some women, she decided, emit sound as they move; she will always remember this scrape in the air, the slight compression like a sigh as they spread their skirts when they sat, and their chatter once given permission to speak. Perdita took the hand of her enfeebled and fearful mother and led her towards two chairs at a massive table. A young nun with the face of a child gestured to Perdita to sit next to her. When she sat the nun placed her small black hand over Perdita’s wrist.
‘Mary sends her love,’ she said, so quietly it might have been a prohibited disclosure.
Her name was Sister Perpetua. Mary had been writing to her. Perdita was troubled to discover this unknown connection, particularly since she had never received a letter from Mary. She looked into the nun’s dark eyes and felt pangs of both jealousy and relief.
‘What’s happening?’ she said clearly, without a stutter. ‘What’s happening to Mary?’
But before Sister Perpetua could respond, the Mother Superior, a large woman true to her name, sitting at the head of the table, commanded a prayer. The nuns were instantly silent and closed their eyes for grace. Perdita kept her eyes open and saw that Stella did likewise; she was smiling with an air of heretical childishness. Still, however, she looked pinched and afraid. On the tables were small bowls of a flower Perdita could not identify – something vividly fuchsia pink against the white cotton tablecloth. It had not occurred to her that there would be flowers in a convent. This detail moved her, the wish for adornment displaced, the assertion, at some level, of a sensual life. This was also, she reflected, the first time in her life she had sat at a dinner table with flowers. She was beginning to discover her deprivations.
When they were able again to speak, Perdita learned that the young woman beside her had been at the orphanage with Mary.
‘We were like sisters,’ she said.
Perdita felt stricken. Their conversation faltered. And the more Perdita sought information, the more her stutter impeded her. Mary was in some kind of delinquent girls’ home, but kept mostly in solitary confinement and allowed no liberty. Her main occupations, the nun said, were reading and writing. This seemed such scant and mean information. All Perdita knew for sure was that there was no star-shaped lamp; there was no compensating fantasy of saintliness and dignity. She missed Mary in ways she could not even begin to define. Her throat constricted; her eyes began to moisten. Before her the pink petals of the nameless flowers seemed faintly to quiver.
The meal was of chops and mashed potatoes, concluded by a small bowl of peaches, tipped in segments from a can. Perdita discovered again the fierceness of appetite she associated with upheaval. She ate quickly and found that she was still hungry when she finished, but felt too shy around these polite, excessively well-behaved women to ask for more. She would probably stutter, anyway. She would probably shame her mother by not being able to complete a sentence. Beside her, Stella slurped at her peaches slowly. Perdita rested her spoon in the centre of her bowl. She looked around her. Everyone was still eating. She stared into her lap, unhappy, and waited for the meal to be over.
When they returned to their room and set up the canvas stretcher, there was no space between the beds to stand or pass, so Stella and Perdita found themselves in a sleeping proximity neither had experienced before. They were side by side, close enough to whisper in the darkness, close enough to comfort each other and to find inside the unbounded night a neutral ground on which they might meet.
‘What will become of us?’ Stella asked, not expecting an answer.
There was a silence that Perdita waited to be broken by recitation. She waited for Shakespeare. Let it be over soon, she thought. Her eyelids were heavy; sleep was claiming her; her mother was tedious in her obsessions, when others were trying to sleep, or to think their own thoughts at the end of a long day. But instead of recitation, Stella went on to speak of her sister Margaret. She remembered how, one winter, they blew warmly upon each other’s ungloved hands, holding them close to their lips, just as the nuns did, here, in their pointless prayers. She and Margaret were shivering, with chattering teeth and stiff, frozen bodies, yet they stayed outside, in front of the library, and blew and blew, until their shortness of breath and the extremity of the cold made them both succumb to hysterical laughter. Two boys walking past called out and threw snow at them just because, she said, they were jealous, and petty, and also because they had no Shakespeare in their lives. Margaret wore a cherry-red scarf and joked that it perfectly matched her nose. Margaret was the only person in her life, Stella added, ever to have loved her.
In the darkness, lying on the uncomfortable stretcher that creaked each time she moved, Perdita felt urgently obliged to protest. She tried to formulate a sentence that would express what she was now feeling: a fondness so huge that it must have been love. But her mouth held back her words, mangled and destroyed them, so that what emerged was a series of isolated consonants, lurching forward, sprocket-like and uncompleted.
‘Go to sleep now,’ Stella interrupted softly. She sounded almost loving.
Perdita heard the sea wind rise and the distant throb of a plane flying overhead. She heard the footfall of a nun somewhere in the wooden building. And she heard her own shadowy fears begin to stir: that like a figure in a fairytale her speech would be forever cursed; that she would move through the world fundamentally incapacitated, never able to express a single coherent thought.
On their second day at the convent Sister Perpetua gave Perdita a book; it was The Lives of the Saints. Perdita opened the cover and saw with a tiny flare of joy an inscription trailing beneath the tissue paper in a scrawled clumsy hand: Annie McCaughie, Shenton Park, Perth, Australia. It had been ‘confiscated’ when Mary was expelled from the convent after she had learned that her mother had died. The book was just as Mary described it. There were glossy picture plates in old-fashioned hues and rather decorous depictions of saints approaching their holy ends – their eyes cast to heaven, their hands firmly clasped. They wore colourful robes and were uniformly youthful and good-looking.
With the mantic enthusiasm that most child-readers display, Perdita opened the book at random, believing she could discover secrets by the mere focus of her mind. On her first try she was rewarded: she opened at Margaret of Antioch. Pleased not only to have discovered by accident that her English aunt had a saintly precedent, she read that Margaret was a woman famous for imprisonments of various kinds. A virgin of exemplary virtue, as one might expect, she was subject to tortures for her Christian commitment before she was finally beheaded. Of her imprisonments, the most remarkable was within the belly of a dragon. She held in her hand, so the story goes, a small wooden cross, and it so tickled the dragon’s insides that he belched her forth. She is thus often depicted subduing a dragon and is the patron saint of childbirth.
This, Perdita decided, was Mary’s story. Her suffering was to be imprisoned, but she would also burst forth. In the context of all that had happened, her casual discoveries made sense. Without faith, there was superstition; without spoken words, there were written stories.
Perdita took Mary’s book and sat on the floor against a wall, her knees drawn up. Above her was a painting, bordered by cowrie shells, of a friendly giant carrying a baby on his shoulder. Perdita would read the book, and then she would return it to its rightful owner. And the reading, as Mary claimed, would knit them together. There would be a surrender to something as close as a kiss. There would be imperceptible continuities and inspiring revelations.
Possession of the book offered Perdita a lull in her fears. Just as she had rejoiced, that day, to see Sis’s wave, here was another occurrence of something returning. In the ruin they had all experi-enced together, certain books, certain faces, remained dependable. The white convent walls closed protectively around her. Stella was away somewhere with Mrs Trevor. The nuns, it seemed, had labours to perfor
m, although Perdita could not guess what these were. She was left alone with Mary’s book, once Annie McCaughie’s book, The Lives of the Saints. A secure, pleasant solitude shaped itself around her. In the sweet warm air drifted lilting voices, occasional noise from outside, a banging door, a parrot-screech, a car passing slowly, crunching on the gravel. Nothing to disturb the composed inwardness of her own world of reading.
From another angle, Stella is there in the room. There, when it happened.
In the way the scene returns and returns, unsettled, mutable, fraught with the abstraction of trauma and the shattering of time, she contracts and expands by the book-stacks leaning in the corner. As the heart palpitates. As the mouth stumbles, opening and closing, over the cruel blocks and absences that constitute a stutter.
It is afternoon and the day is unendurably hot. Birds have quietened; the dog is audibly panting; its mangy flanks squeeze in a patch of shade just outside the screen door. So much depends on details that are forensically dim, and the blind-spotted nature of a child’s recollection. Tormenting possibilities flow to greet her. The vision that rests in concave spaces, the dubious sequence of events, the corrosions of any and every violent action: these assail Perdita each time her mind draws near. (What happened? the policeman had asked. Just tell us what happened.)
When Nicholas falls, the knife still lodged in his neck – he is being yanked into awareness of what has happened, that he is doomed and will die, ignoble and prostrate – Stella is already, certainly, present in the room. She is standing there, yes, she is calmly reciting Macbeth. There is no point crazier than this moment, nothing less plausible. Perdita sees how her mother’s hair flies upward as if electrified, how she has a stony gaze and a solid intention. Her voice is loud; she is performing on a private stage.