by Gail Jones
For Perdita the journey seemed to last for ever. She did not once see Billy or Mrs Trevor; they were in some other part of the ship, locked in the melancholy of their own departure, coping with their own sense of times and places falling away. Perhaps Billy was also ill. Perhaps he too lay on a bunk, swollen with their shared history, watching with nauseous fear the horizon on the other side of the porthole, tipping and sliding, reducing everything to a circle.
By the time they arrived in Perth, Perdita was morose, pallid and wholly out of love with the ocean. On the dock, she glimpsed Billy for just a moment. He was looking away, distracted, watching his mother. His hands rested still at his sides. He exemplified the confused, resistant manner of the newly arrived. And then he was gone.
Members of a volunteer charity organisation met them as they disembarked, and Stella handed over their luggage with an air of disconnection. They were driven to rooms that had been rented in an inner-city boarding house. With their two suitcases, and a sense of the contraction of their lives, they waved farewell to their benefactors and, with sinking hopes, entered the sturdy red-brick building that would temporarily be their home.
What would Perdita remember of this? That Stella stood for a long time gazing silently out the window. She had her hands thrust in the pockets of her best linen skirt and was rendered immobile, transfixed not by the view, which was of an ordinary city street, with tramlines and rows of shops and electric lights affixed to poles, but an awareness, perhaps, that she had to make her own life now, that she was responsible for herself and her daughter and whatever destiny they might find. From outside came a clanking, screeching, steely sound, like sheets of metal being torn apart. Perdita rushed to the window to watch the tram rattle past. It was the one City Thing she had seen so far that really excited her.
It was no brave new world, but bleached and empty. The people in it were worn down by the scarcities of war-time, and not particularly sympathetic to an English widow and her peculiar daughter. Stella wrote letter after letter to her father-in-law, asking in polite terms for ‘monetary assistance’, but received no response. Perhaps he was dead, she thought. They were abandoned, stranded. After the enjoyment of the voyage and a sense of her own emancipation, Stella began to feel weary and disconsolate. Jobs were hard to come by; their savings were diminishing. Day after day she left, wearing her best clothes and a thin smudge of cerise lipstick, declaring her intention to join the world of labour.
Eventually she found work in a florist’s shop. Each day, at 9 a.m., Stella helped unload a mountain of mixed flowers from the back of a van, then sort and re-order them into small neat bunches, which she wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. Other flowers, those more ostentatious or expensive, the tuberoses, the gladioli, the agapanthus, were set aside for unique arrangements. It was easy work. The store owner, Mrs Brodie, was originally from Manchester, and though she had, in truth, no need of an assistant, she felt compassion for the down-at-heel woman with the anomalously posh accent, who stood before her one Saturday morning, asking, almost pleading, for work of any kind. Her husband, she said, had been killed in the war. They agreed to part-time hours and a modest salary.
For Stella it was a relief to have found something to do. The work was decorous, feminine and even a little artistic. And she was surrounded all day by floral perfumes and the denser, sensual smell of wet leaves and greenery. After the hot dry north, characterised in her memory by ugly boab trees and red parched earth, this was almost English in its enwreathing ambience. Glorious greenery. Fish ferns, baby’s-breath, leaves as big as hands. The buckets of roses, the pinks and the peaches, the whites for weddings and the crimsons for romance, she particularly admired. All her life she had wanted to be given a bouquet of roses. With her first wage – and even though it was an extravagance – she bought six roses, of salmon pink, and arranged them proudly in a jam jar in their rented room. In a place of no adornment they were a gorgeous apparition. Stella fussed to set them just right, equidistant, equally inclining. She pushed the jar into the centre of their table.
For Perdita the roses were a revelation. She had never seen such blooms before, nor smelled such sweetness. These were objects that had existed only in fiction. She lifted on tiptoe to bring her face close to the petals. So this, perhaps, was one of the functions of cities, to incarnate what had existed only immaterially, in words. To present the variousness of things, the far-fetched richness, the startling oddity of what came from the fabulous elsewhere. And not just one thing, but many, multiplied, in visions, and touchable, real and absolute.
‘By any other name,’ said Stella, ‘would smell as sweet.’
A slight tremor passed over her painted lips. It was a moment of unity. Perdita loved her mother. She looked up at her and in that moment forgave her for everything. Stella reached forward and adjusted the angle of the rose heads, cupping them, lifting them slightly, letting them fall in a circle.
At school Perdita suffered. It was the final year of primary school and she knew nothing of playground codes, hierarchies, cliques and games, nothing of the educational necessity of humiliation, punishment and spite. Children who carry too much misfortune are necessarily despised. She was not pretty, she had no father, she could not speak without stuttering. Her clothes were crudely home-made and her origins obscure. She bore, moreover, a preposterous name, which other children chanted as though it were a singular stutter: ‘P-P-P-ditta!’
Teachers sometimes defended her in a half-hearted way, but it was clear they too thought her an irredeemably unfortunate case.
Perdita also learned that school lessons were nothing like her mother’s. Knowledge was, it seemed, more severely partitioned, and there were lists to learn, and right and wrong facts. Stella had taught her nothing of the history of the monarchs of England, yet this was clearly the backbone of Australian education; similarly she had neglected mathematics and geography, two of the most prestigious disciplines. Shakespeare was not as important as her mother had tediously proclaimed; yet Perdita realised that teachers were nevertheless impressed by her familiarity with his works – the only thing she could tell them when they asked: so what do you know? And she discovered, by accident and in an instance of mutual puzzlement, that she could recite complete verses of Shakespeare fluently, without entering the word-fray and deformation of her stutter.
At the end of the school term, when there was a concert for parents, Perdita was chosen to stand on a stage and recite Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: ‘To be, or not to be’. Stella sat in the audience, beaming approval. She wore her best grey blouse with a spray of violets pinned to the collar, something kept from long ago, stored for the promise of a celebration. It did not escape Perdita’s notice that she was mimicking her mother, that from all that was forfeited, broken, lost or destroyed, she had retained her mother’s exacting skill. Unbroken Shakespeare. She heard her voice swing upwards, unfastened, like a flying kite, clever as any toy and just as easy. For a while she was buoyed; she was in a dream of fluency. From her open mouth: flight. From her tongue and her throat, vibrating with pleasure, came words that had existed, polished and prized, for hundreds of years. But after the performance Perdita returned to the country of her exile. She was again the pitiable child in ill-fitting clothes, who could not complete a single sentence with ease.
When their crates of books arrived, later than expected, Stella and Perdita sorted through them to decide what could be sold. It was all the property they had, said Stella, so they must choose wisely. Perdita sat on the floor, cross-legged, setting up her piles of yes, no and maybe. Stella’s yes, no and maybe were also establishing. They compared the piles and in the end kept more books than they were prepared to sell. Both were comforted. The room felt less empty. Perdita discovered The Life of Captain Cook and thought of Mary; she discovered The Golden Bough, annotated in the margins, and thought of her father.
‘When,’ she asked her mother, ‘will we v-v-v-visit M-M-Mary?’
‘We’ll see,’ s
aid Stella, non-committally.
That was it. No more talk. No concession or offer.
Perdita resented the secrecy and agency of adults. She resolved to find her own way to visit Mary. In the meantime, she tried to meet her new life with courage. She grew tough at school, fighting the boys with her fists. Once she bloodied a nose and felt, for a guilty instant, a searing surge of gratification. Soldiers must be like this, she reasoned, callous and stern, excited by a small channel of blood and an enemy cowered. She ignored the girls, as they mostly ignored her.
Perdita missed Billy. She missed Mary and Horatio and all that she had known. She remembered Billy rolling in the dirt, scratching Horatio’s speckled belly, and the look of both of them there, reclined and happy as they came to rest with their faces exposed to the sun. Mary was nearby, laughing. She filled a tin mug from the water tank and with a wide swing of her arm splashed it over both of them. Horatio leaped up and shook his fur; Billy performed mock fury and a chase and then settled to a fond giggle. It was such a lucid moment, returned, bright and complete. Perdita missed them all. How was it possible, she often wondered, to continue with so much missing?
16
When, at the end of the year, their charity term in the rented room expired, Stella and Perdita moved into an old semi-detached house in the inner city, in East Perth. It was a narrow brick building, with a fanlight above the front door and long rectangular side panels of milky rippled glass. Something about the sturdiness of the entrance appealed to both Stella and Perdita. With their donated furniture and boxes of books, they took possession of the house in a spirit of triumph: at last, it seemed, they had a place of their own.
The rent was modest, in part because the house backed onto a railway line, so that at all times of the day and night they heard the restless toing and froing of the trains, a comforting rumble, an appealing clack-clack, a soothing rising and falling of sound as the trains approached, passed, then faded evenly into the distance. With each train the glass windows in the house shivered and rattled, responsively energised, bestowing on the building an almost tremulous quality.
Nearby stood a power station, a concrete works, and a modest bakery, and beyond them an Aboriginal encampment, mostly hidden from view, on the bank of the Swan River. Perdita could see a small group of people sitting around a fire; the shape of the gathering was one that she recognised. If it had not been for her stutter, she would have approached and befriended these people. Perdita believed they would understand her; she would be accepted, even welcomed, as a stranger from the country. She believed she would be invited to sit down at their fire. She would tell them about Mary, about all that had happened.
In the long summer school holidays, Stella continued her work at the florist, and Perdita was often home alone, with the house to herself. She created a garden, went for walks to the river, and with precocious fervour began reading more of the volumes that had been unpacked anew from the boxes. Some of the books bore her father’s signature – ‘Nicholas Keene’ – and again, as with ‘NK’, Perdita felt the vague presence of something unthinkable. She read her father’s books carefully, mindful of Mary’s superstitious opinion that mysterious and unwonted communions occur between readers. There were three novels by Joseph Conrad, which she avidly read, wondering at each turn of the page what her father had thought, and whether, from the reticent no-place of death, he was somehow nevertheless present, penetrating an eerie membrane to visit his daughter, here reading. At the beginning of Heart of Darkness she came across a passage:
We felt meditative, and fit for nothing but placid staring. The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun …
Although, in truth, she did not understand the novel at all, Perdita loved this paragraph. It gave her such dreamy pleasure that she put the book face down, keeping the page, and allowed herself slowly to absorb the words. This was one of the moments in which, with mild-mannered poise, she wondered if her father was nearby, metaphysically hovering.
She was alert to phantom interventions and spooky symptoms, willed them, waited. She now believed in ghosts, even though she had never seen one. She believed, at least, that there are no cessations, that what is missing continues on, persisting, somewhere else. Mary had taught her this, the principle of invisible presence, that one must always reckon on more than one sees.
Perdita Keene was by then just twelve years old. She had an entire philosophy of life, cobbled together, ingeniously, from all she had met, and believed she was like no other girl her age in her degree of eccentricity. That she was so exceptionally isolated was no surprise but, like most of the afflicted, the vexed and the miserable, she had her own resources of resilience and power.
There was a thumbprint visible on page 46 of Heart of Darkness, the faintest of whorls, a delicate stamp of identity. It jolted Perdita as a sign that Nicholas had been indisputably here.
The more Perdita thought about Mary’s proposition, the more difficult it became. Since the first reader is the author, might there be a channel, somehow, between author and reader, an indefinable intimacy, a secret pact? There are always moments, reading a novel, in which one recognises oneself, or comes across a described detail especially and personally redolent; might there be in this covert world, yet another zone of connection?
It hurt Perdita’s head to have to think of such matters. When she was a grown-up, yes, she would know for sure. She would understand what reading is. Outside, a train passed by with the usual rattle. Her window responded. There was this world too, of machines and objects and other people, carrying on regardless, with their separate lives. At this moment, in her own bedroom, with Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness open before her and a lovely perforated light falling through the threadbare curtains, she could not see how these elements would ever fit together. She wondered if this was one of the big questions that Shakespeare had asked: how does the life-in-words fit with all these other lives?
By this stage Perdita was almost mute. She spoke as little as possible, simply to avoid publicising the curse of her stutter. She was furled, inward. She thought of herself as an ammonite. When she was with her mother it was taken for granted that Stella would do all the talking. They had never discussed this; it had simply evolved as their social mode. They understood each other, wary and calculating. At school, almost from the beginning, teachers had learned not to ask her questions, and other children, apart from their teasing, began to consider her inconsequential. Perdita realised that the speechless, the accursed, gradually vanish. She noticed with a kind of fear how frequently she was overlooked, how she was becoming dim and disregarded in the estimations of others. Less than a character in a book. Less than a fiction.
After weeks of solitude, of mooching, of reading, of distended days, Perdita resolved at last to seek out Mary. To do so she needed adult advice, but she knew better than to consult her mother or tell her of her plan. One afternoon, decisively, she walked to the encampment by the riverbank. She watched her own feet proceed, left-right, left-right. There was only a small group this time, of four adults and two small children, and as she approached she felt her heart nervously begin to pound and her mouth to fill up with clotted impediments. It was a family, perhaps. They sat together in the navy shade of a Moreton Bay fig tree and had, as she had seen before from a distance, a small fire on the ground and swags of belongings tucked away in the roots of the tree. A billy of tea was brewing over an aromatic fire. Perdita walked directly towards the group and a man with grey hair and a creased face hailed her at once with a friendly wave.
‘Eh! Cousin! Eh!’
Perdita relaxed.
‘We
seen you before,’ he announced. ‘Lotsa times, walken by the river. How come you never came up and said hallo?’
The man, Joey his name was, winked at Perdita in an exaggerated fashion. The others all introduced themselves – Em, the wife, Jack and Rose, Joey’s son and daughter-in-law. The two sleepy grandchildren were Liz and Mac. Joey was a leech-gatherer for the Royal Perth Hospital. He had a permit, he said, a ‘gub’ment dog-tag’, which gave him permission to camp by the river.
‘White city,’ he said wryly.
Em smiled and passed Perdita a mug of tea.
Other Aboriginal people, too, were excluded from the inner city. Joey’s family had no permission, so they came and went.
‘Mostly the p’licemen look the other way. But better we stay hidden, y’know?’
Perdita took her time telling them her story. Her audience thoughtfully ignored the stutter, did not finish her sentences, and patiently attended as she told them of her home in the north and her black sister, Mary. She told them that her father attacked Mary, that he had been killed with a knife, that Mary confessed and was taken away, down south. As her story progressed Perdita found it more and more difficult to speak; her mind was clouding over as if it was impossible to reach the details of what had occurred. So her version was spare and increasingly vague.