by Gail Jones
Infirm of purpose!
Give me the daggers: the sleeping and the dead
Are but as pictures: ’tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil. If he do bleed,
I’ll gild the faces of the grooms withal
For it must seem their guilt.
Blithering Shakespeare. Who would believe that a wife recites while her husband bleeds to death, that she converts into fancy, high-falutin speech this senseless moment, this wasteful gash? She counterfeits art because blood-letting is familiar and known. Blood-lusting Shakespeare. Incarnadine words. There is more of it than one would expect. It spurts from the wound in a lively fountain. It is spreading, as death must, sinister and unstoppable. The dog is whining at a high pitch and scratching at the door. The two girls are crying. Nicholas’s face is brick-red, then white, then mottled pale blue. He has no dying words. His vessel is spilt. No mournfulness yet, only shock, and the excruciating questions that are yet to come.
Perdita is tear-blinded and overwhelmed. Suddenly, too, she feels drowsy; her limbs are heavy and cumbrous; she wants to sink somewhere, slowly to release, to sleep, perchance to dream. It is as if a cloud has blown through her eyes and into her head, and she is struggling to see, and to think, and to stay fully awake. She stands upright, holding Mary, or being held, but wants nothing more than to fall into the oblivion of fatigue and forgetting. Perdita looks at her mother and her mother looks back. Stella, now self-conscious, stops her recitation. She halts, then she curtsies.
In this cloudy moment, Perdita sees her mother hold up the wings of her skirt, daintily cross one leg over the other, and bend low, supplicating, before her tiny audience. Behind her a breeze has entered the open window, lifting the corners of faded yellow curtains. A map of Europe, covered with spiders, also ripples and lifts.
14
In the town of Broome, everything had slowed down but the flow of displaced persons. With five hundred Japanese pearl divers and their families interned, things were quiet; the pearling industry was sunk. Luggers were destroyed, or towed south, anticipating invasion. Some of the buildings stood empty, or were looted. But as people flowed from Broome, moving to missions and to camps, boarding southward-heading boats, another population was passing through.
Since Broome was a refuelling depot on the way to somewhere safe, American service personnel from the Philippines, rich businessmen from Asia, stray families like Perdita’s, were all in transit. So too were Dutch refugees from Java. Planeloads of them arrived in flying boats each night. Catalinas, Dorniers and Empires rested in Roebuck Bay, half a mile offshore to evade the worst vagaries of the low tides that might leave them stuck listing and useless in the mud.
It was a long trek across the sea-bed to the town, so most of the women, children and elderly stayed on board, waiting for the refuelling so that they could continue their journeys. The men came into the town, strolling around, looking lost, wondering what place they had come to that was at once so full and so empty. At night the sky throbbed with planeloads of anxious people. The drone was of transience, suspension, the wish for safe haven.
Perdita was roused from her sleep to watch them pass over; they were like fat-bellied birds, impossibly cumbrous, descending at an angle to land with a splash on the ocean. Their mighty propellers shone silver in the moonlight. All over the world, no doubt, people were moving – armies in the night, forced transportations, the homeless pushing handcarts, men dragging a child, a mother. Even the nuns at the convent were planning to disperse: three more were leaving in the morning for Beagle Bay Mission, Sister Perpetua among them.
Having watched the boat planes descend, Perdita would return to her bed and lie awake listening to her mother’s fretful sleep. It was dark in her part of the world so it must be light in Germany. Perhaps Adolf Hitler was at this moment eating a boiled egg, sitting perched on an iron stool with a silver spoon in one hand and a salt shaker in the other. Perdita realised she knew of no other German, not one, not a single face or name. War was like this, she decided. There were figureheads – aloof, magisterial, remote – who must nevertheless eat and shit and lie down at night-time to sleep, and then there were ordinary people, the collectivised enemy, the Huns, the Dagos and, much closer, the Japs. It was this effacement, surely, that made killing so easy.
Perdita wondered for the first time if she and her mother would be killed in the war. She had seen the small army contingent in town, relaxed soldiers hanging about, sitting on steps, sharing cigarettes, inexpertly playing cards, and not inspiring any confidence at all, and she knew of the Rising Suns extending their dots further and further south; they were now filling New Guinea like paper measles. Stella moaned in her sleep and turned this way and that, moving her head from side to side, slowly turning her limbs, as if she was floundering in a body of deep water. Perdita was beginning to absorb her mother’s doomed disposition. There would be subsequent ordeals, of this she was sure. A sound like a sob came from her mother’s throat. Perdita pressed her face into the pillow and wondered what she was dreaming.
In those few days she spent in the town, which stretched in her memory disproportionately long, the way most children remember an extraordinary visit, or a birthday party, Perdita saw how tenuous was the social world torn by panic. She saw a scuffle between two soldiers outside Streeter and Male’s store, a boulder thrown through an open window, the shattering consequence of which made her leap in fright, and an old Chinese man struck casually in the street.
As she wandered past William Dampier’s chest – a monument to honour the English pirate who visited the bay in the 1600s – she knew with adult intelligence how historical heroes might shift in and out of focus, what folly might have attended choosing this fellow for commemoration. A dog began following her, a scruffy, limping creature, to whose misery Perdita would normally have been responsive, but she threw stones to make it retreat and felt a small immoral triumph when finally it slunk away. Horatio had to be left behind with Mr Trevor, and Perdita realised how much she missed her own dog, now that everything was gradually slipping away.
In the evening there was a glorious tangerine light, and in an episode of respite Perdita and Stella sat outside with the two remaining nuns and Mother Superior, sipping fruit cordials. They did not speak of the war, but of the weather and their garden. One of the sisters was particularly proud of her vegetable patch. Then Mother Superior changed the topic and asked Perdita about her faith, and when she replied that she had none, interrogated her mother as to the neglect of her daughter’s soul. Stella glanced sidelong at Perdita and they shared a moment of exasperation. Perdita looked up at the sky and saw banks of clouds growing a darker orange-red, lying in streamers, astray, stretching all the way to Japan.
When she attended again to the conversation Stella was declaring: ‘My religion is Shakespeare. He answers all the big questions.’
The Mother Superior looked scandalised. Her blue eyes enlarged.
‘This is not a question of literature,’ she responded. ‘It’s a question of the immortality of the soul.’
‘Quite,’ said Stella, conceding nothing.
But still the Mother Superior persisted. She bent her large body towards Perdita and asked: ‘How old are you, child?’
‘She is eleven,’ Stella answered.
Perdita knew then that in all the negotiations between them, Stella would always take precedence with speech. She had often before felt puny in her mother’s presence – confounded by some of her Shakespearean assertions, oppressed by her rules and incessant admonitions (‘don’t blink so much’, ‘sit up straight’), driven miserably inward by the din of such a verbally expressive woman; but they had also had the hours and hours of lessons, in which they had discussed the world and everything in it, in which any topic was splendidly complex and open to discussion. Although she had always longed to go to school, Perdita had also loved her mother’s idiosyncratic lessons, the degree to which she explained arcane details, her cheerful
ly protracted explanations, her volcanic spilling-over of peculiar knowledge.
Perdita watched as Stella pulled the small table between them closer, took a pack of cards from her pocket and, without reference to the assembled company, began a game of solitaire. It was her way of finishing the conversation. Perdita watched her mother shuffle, and riffle, and deal to herself; then watched the suits of cards begin to emerge and form pillars of meaningless, ephemeral value. Her hands moved quickly and she did not take her eyes off the cards to glance upwards as the Mother Superior pushed back her chair, mumbled something and left. Then the two young nuns, smiling shyly, also departed. Perdita remained watching her mother complete the integrated circuit of her game. Its neatly interior system was a kind of reassurance.
When it was over Stella said: ‘There!’ and lifted her head to smile at Perdita. Her daughter smiled back. She felt proud of her mother, even as she was aware she had offended their hosts and acted with rude and unreasonable stubbornness.
Early in the morning of 3 March 1942, Perdita walked by herself, and secretly, down to the bay. It was her intention to see if she could break into a sorting shed and steal some pearl shell, a piece for her and one for Mary. Since the pearl industry had shut down, she reasoned, no one would miss two pieces of shell. The mother-of-pearl particularly attracted her. It had a beauty she mostly associated with light: the lustre of moon-lit clouds, beam-shot from below, the strange coiny iridescence on the bellies of fish, the glittery traces threaded in the border of her mother’s Spanish shawl.
She walked through the sleepy streets, crossed the road down to the beach, and made her way towards the water. If she felt any trepidation at all it was not for her anticipated crime, but the problem of where she might hide the shell on her return, so that her mother wouldn’t find it. A single plane flew high overhead, curving through, then around, the perimeters of the town. If Perdita had glanced up she might have seen that it was unfamiliar. The plane that flew overhead at 8 a.m. was a Japanese fighter plane, a Mitsubishi Zero. A little later, at 9.15, nine Zeroes would sweep across the sky, bringing with dreadful upset beams of piercing bullets.
For now it was quiet and the sheds were deserted. Perdita walked around the rusty iron walls of the two largest sheds and saw, to her surprise, that both were accessible. One had a padlock and chain, but the padlock was unclosed; the other simply had a chain caught on a hook. As quietly as she could, Perdita unhooked the chain and entered the building. It smelled like the ocean, briny and piquant. Morning light flooded in through a high, barred window. Most of the pearl shell had been cleared away, but there remained a small pile pushed against a wall. From it Perdita selected the two most impressive pieces. They were coarse and ugly on the outside, but their inner nacre was lovely. One of the shells had a pearl blister: she would keep that one for herself. Perdita held them together, as if they were the sides of one shell. They almost fitted.
She was thinking of Mary, thinking in a speculative, floating way about what she might say when she presented the gift of shell, when she heard the faint sound of another intruder outside the door. Perdita instantly felt guilty and afraid she would be discovered. She did not replace the shells, but crept towards the crack in the iron doorway and, taking care not to rattle the chain, pushed at it gently to see who might be there. It was the scruffy dog, the one she had earlier flung stones at. The dog looked up at her with timorous entreaty, wagging its tail in a slight, interrogative way. Perdita hesitated for a moment, then bent to embrace it. Its fur was greasy, and it stank a little, but she clutched at its scrawny body as if it was Horatio returned.
She could not say how long she stayed on the beach, but she was there when the Japanese planes approached. She heard them first, a mechanical hum, dull and menacing, and then at once saw them lined in formation in the sky above her. There was a moment of unreality when she watched them tiny, suspended, then Perdita heard gunfire as seven of the Zeroes flew directly overhead. They had divided, two heading to the airport, the others circling to destroy the flying boats settled in the bay. There was a sound of dense, strafing fire and distant screaming.
The flying boats were invisible in the distance, but Perdita believed she could hear human voices lifted in the wind, transported by terror. There were explosions and she saw smoke in black clouds rising above the water. Behind her was the sound of men shouting and starting Jeeps and running for their guns, and further away, the boom of planes exploding on the tarmac at the airport.
The attack lasted an hour. Sixteen Dutch refugee planes were sunk in the bay and six military planes were destroyed at the airport. Of the Japanese planes, one was shot down; it flew out into the distance, aflame, then plummeted into the ocean.
History records what Perdita could not see from the shore: that the refugees trapped in the planes were bombarded as they leaped into the water, or burned to death as their planes exploded. That there was undignified scrambling, anguished mayhem, and appalling suffering. Almost one hundred people died. Later a mass grave would be dug for those whose names and faces had been so swiftly obliterated, who were now simply charred or mutilated bodies, simply the Dutch.
When Perdita made it back to the convent, still clasping her pearl shells, her mother wept when she saw she was safe. The scruffy dog had fled when the planes roared overhead; so it was just she and Stella again, clinging to each other, pleased at least to have each other alive, and wondering together what on earth would come next. Perdita had been expecting a scolding, but found instead the unusual gift of her mother’s tears. But Stella was blowing her nose and wiping her eyes, and already beginning to turn away.
PART FOUR
LADY MACBETH: Your face, my thane, is as a book where men
May read strange matters. To beguile the time,
Look like the time …
Macbeth I. v
15
Of my complicated childhood, this event haunts me still: the slaughter, that day, of Dutch refugees. I was far enough away to see it all as a spectacle, and indeed I may not have heard any screams, but simply imagined I did, after the fact, as it were, after hearing the gory details. It was, I suppose, a direct encounter with war, but it was also at a distance, and alienated, and involved the swoop of shiny planes through a cobalt-blue sky, the glittering sea stretching before me, puffs of telltale smoke faraway arising, rather than any real meeting with physical suffering. And I was not simply afraid, but also exhilarated, by the bursts of gunfire and the impressive explosions. The small world of stealing pearl shell and patting a stray dog suddenly opened into public and historical dimensions.
In my vulgar and rather romantic imaginings, I envisioned the shadow of a Zero upon the water, then a flying boat instantly exploding beneath it. I had not seen frantic human beings, in paroxysmal desperation, grasping at each other, flinging themselves into the water, watching the ping of lines of bullets chase them to their deaths. No child of my age, no old woman, drowning. I remember hearing too that some of the wounded had been taken by sharks, attracted by the amount of blood in the water. I had not seen the tearing of flesh, or the human made meat. So I was witness and not witness, and in any case, because of my stuttering, could not tell what I had seen.
I know now that I was selfish and opportunistic. To have my mother embrace me, bawling, as if she really loved me; it was like a reward in the midst of other people’s devastation. Until we saw the bodies gathered in, and a few Dutch men wandering on the beach, weeping and distraught, their arms limp at their sides in total defeat, we had not truly understood the proximity and scale of the event.
Two days later we were evacuated from Broome. There was no real relief. There was no sense of secure escape. There was only the unmooring and the lifting anchor and the slow drift from the jetty, the subdued quiet of the passengers, whose number included the surviving Dutch, and the catching of the tide, the huge natural force, that pulled us away across the ocean, leaving Broome far behind, tucked under somehow, subdued in memory.
To pass time, to counter this dreadful containment, Perdita wrote. She had no actual plan, or story to tell; she simply needed to settle within words some of what was rising inside her. At some point she was coaxed onto the deck to see dolphins playing alongside the ship and was encouraged to walk its length, to get her ‘sea legs’, someone said. At the stern she saw the frothy wake folding in on itself, curling the ocean into a V-shaped trail. It is this image of the voyage, this severe abstraction, that Perdita most clearly remembered later on. This, and one of the Dutchmen she had seen on the beach in Broome. He was now leaning over the railing, alone, sobbing his heart out.
Stella, on the other hand, was revived by the journey. Although she had been ill, years ago, on her trip with Nicholas to the north, it was as if she now lived in a different body. She liked climbing the steep iron steps to the deck and breathing the sea air, enjoying a sensation from some earliest, dimmest time: the feel of warm sea wind blowing back her hair, the tang of it, and its aura of incredible freedom. She chatted with passengers on the deck, and was invited to participate in protracted games of cards. In the evening, several times, she entertained others with her Shakespearean recitations. They applauded heartily; they thought her exceptionally clever. Stella curtsied to the audience and had never before seemed so happy. For hours on end she forgot she had an ailing, embarrassing daughter, prostrate on a bunk, hidden down below.