by Gail Jones
At its conclusion she blurted out – in a complete, unstuttered sentence – ‘Where would they be keeping her, do you think?’
Joey thought he knew. ‘Lotsa blackfellas,’ he said, ‘in trouble with the law. And them whitefella p’licemen just love to stick us all in gaol.’
He gave Perdita the name of a reformatory for delinquent girls, where a cousin of Rose’s had once been held. It was just the information Perdita needed.
Perdita drank her tea and talked with the family for an hour or so. They were Nyoongar people, Joey said; this was their country.
‘All roun heres,’ he gestured widely, waving his arm across the river.
It was her first experience of community in the city. Here, in a thin margin of wasteland between the power station and the river, concealed, sheltering, enclosed coolly by shade, she had at least recovered a sort of voice. She was moved by Joey’s instinctive magnanimity, she was reminded that there was more than the pitiless school and the anonymous streets and the sense – how it had assailed her – that everything now was defined by forlorn depletion.
For the first time, too, she truly saw the river. By late afternoon there was a purplish bloom on the water, and for all her disappointments she had to admit that it was remarkable in its beauty. As she listened to the family speak, she watched its slow, unregulated, confluent passing. Clouds flowered on its surface, darkened, then dissolved. There were movements below, small sparky transmissions, and something bountiful, unseen. And when she returned to her home she was newly self-possessed. There was a calm to her demeanour and even a fleeting cheerfulness.
Perdita waited for her mother to leave for work, then took the tram to the city and then a bus to the suburbs south of the river. The driver promised he would tell her where to get off, and said she should ask at the shops on the main street for directions thereafter. Perdita was clutching a pearl shell and The Lives of the Saints wrapped together in orange tissue paper tied with one of her hair ribbons. She was beside herself with excitement. Outside flowed pink brick houses, drearily uniform; there were ropes of roses and decorative letter boxes. No doubt about it; it was an ugly city.
After fifteen minutes Perdita became anxious that the driver had forgotten her, and that she would end up who knew where, lost in these empty suburbs. She made her way to the front of the jolting bus and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
‘Next one, luv,’ he said, anticipating her question.
She was deposited by the side of the highway. Still unused to cars speeding on concrete roads, Perdita crossed gingerly to the small strip of stores ahead and asked at the first one where ‘Greensleeves’ was. The lady behind the counter didn’t know, but told her to ask at the newsagency. There she received precise directions. She thought her stuttering made her sound imbecilic. The newsagent looked at her suspiciously, as if she may have been an inmate, or a little slow. Billy must have felt like this all the time, Perdita reflected.
As she turned the corner – fourth on the left – she saw what she took to be the detention centre called Greensleeves, an imposing red-brick building, austere and institutional. In the front garden worked an old man in ordinary clothes; it did not, Pedita thought hopefully, seem at all like a prison.
The visit was a crushing disappointment. When she was met in the front room she was told that ‘under-age’ visitors needed to be accompanied by an adult; she would not be admitted; and in any case, there were visiting hours. Perdita tried to argue but her stutter entangled her, and so, frustrated, she began to cry. She was so accustomed to suppressing her tears that they surprised and humiliated her. The woman in charge said that she would see that Mary received her gift. With reluctance Perdita handed over the orange parcel. She turned away and slowly began her woeful journey back.
17
Of all the anguishing forms of stutter that torment children (mostly males, as it happens, statistically, at least), mine was one of the rarer. Called psychogenic, it is the consequence of shock, or upset or circumstantial disaster. It is infrequent in its appearance and enigmatic in its cure. Most stuttering is developmental, and fades over time; the eruption of stuttering, as it were, is a stranger thing.
We take it for granted, don’t we? The inspiration and expiration that presses the vocal folds, the movement of air from the trachea, the vibration of the voice box, the issuing – unthinking, automatic – of air released into the mouth and fashioned by the tongue and the lips, emerging then as socially efficient speech. When it is botched and muddled, when sentences jar at the beginning or buckle in the middle, a self-consciousness enters language that is in the end unendurable. Looking back, after all these years, I realise that I embraced silence and the silent words of books, rather than perform ineptitude and failure. And it was, I suppose, a perilous acquiescence, because the quieter I became, the more others ignored me, the more I disappeared.
My mother, initially mortified, also acquiesced; it was easier for her to imagine me arrested and deficient. She enjoyed her power. She enjoyed talking for me and finishing the ends of my sentences. She enjoyed the concern she solicited, as a widow encumbered by an apparently dumbstruck daughter. I do not think this was any malevolence on her part; she was simply accustomed to discontent and disillusioned with life. It fitted, somehow, this damaged child. It did not occur to her to seek help, medical or otherwise. She was a resolute fatalist: passive, ill-tempered, constantly complaining, and fuelled by a persistent sense of regret. And when I was cured of my stutter, she expressed no particular surprise. Nor for that matter, any rejoicing.
February 1943, when Perdita began high school, coincided with the German surrender at Stalingrad. A battle that had begun in September the previous year, was finally resolved as a defeat for Hitler’s army, the first of many and an omen of things to come. It was a brutal year. The Americans bombed Rome. The British bombed Hamburg. The Germans finally destroyed the ghetto in Warsaw. Full-scale gassing began at Auschwitz. In Asia, the Japanese and the Allies were waging war in Burma. Nicholas’s map, which had been folded away for most of 1942, reappeared and was pinned in the sitting room, above the fireplace. Stella discovered again the dubious satisfaction of tracking murderous humanity, and the unimaginable extensiveness of war-time suffering. There was wickedness everywhere, and vast, vicious events. It relieved her despondency to glance at the map in the morning, before she painted her lips, pinned her jaunty hat, and went to work for a few hours in her perfumed and floral retreat.
Perdita found herself wondering if the war would go on for ever. When she contemplated the planet she lived on, it was difficult to believe in noble purpose, or even vague goodwill. The walls were tumbling down. Entire countries were blighted. Now that she read the newspaper every day, Perdita saw for herself how the crackpot apparatus of war just kept turning and turning, engineering more mutilations, running amok. She began to have nightmares about the Dutch refugees. Incoherently, and in terror, she woke in the middle of the night, believing she had actually seen the scramble on board the boat planes, and witnessed at close quarters the moment of massacre. It was always the same. There was the throb overhead of descending planes and the rat-tat-tat of deadly bullets. The sky was darkening and the water was black. There were screams and confusion. She was holding a crying child. The child was shot in the face and then disintegrated in her arms.
It should have been possible for them to make a life together. In their little house with the fanlight and rippled panels framing the front door, settled now, and more secure than they had been for a long time, they ought to have had peace and the possibility of rest. If the world beyond was chaotic there was this small closed space, and the map that converted anguished history into blunt representations. There was her mother’s employment; there was school; there was regularity. The procession of days and nights was ordered and planned.
But Stella’s condition was detached from work-a-day securities. The pathos of it, and the tragedy of it, was that she succumbed even when externals appe
ared comfortable and propitious. Stella by degrees stopped eating and by fractions stopped sleeping. She was hard to stir in the mornings and seemed to have lost interest in her work. Perdita was obliged to phone her employer, Mrs Brodie, and fabricate excuses: a flu, a migraine, a female indisposition – unmentionable, of course, and an easy fib. When Stella dragged herself from the bed she was not responsive to questions, and could not explain to her daughter the sense of grievance she carried about her, enveloping as an extra layer of skin.
As her plight wrapped them both, Perdita chose to stay home from school to keep her mother company. She would nurse her, she decided. No one need know of Stella’s illness, and it would pass, surely, as it had done before. They would battle this together.
Stella’s refusal to eat was the difficult issue. In less than two weeks she had become alarmingly thin; her face was ashen and her movements were slackened and old, and no amount of cajoling or trickery seemed to work. Perdita began to despair: what if her mother starved to death in their little East Perth house? She boiled eggs, peeled them, and sat close to Stella pushing yellow bits and white bits into her mouth with her fingers.
‘S-S-Swallow,’ she would say, ‘just s-s-swallow.’
Stella expelled the egg fragments with her tongue. Perdita found herself wiping her mother’s chin with the dishcloth, as one would a small child. She would try again, steering her fingers carefully, willing nourishment, leaning closer than she had ever been to the rumpled face, ridiculous and sad in its infant non-compliance.
‘S-S-Swallow.’
Stella echoed with unthinking cruelty: ‘S-S-Swallow.’
But still she did not. An alien neutrality had settled on her features. Perdita stared at her mother’s face and felt she was almost unrecognisable. Camouflaged like this. Faraway and so quiet.
Perdita was also worried by their financial situation. She had spent almost all the money she had found in Stella’s calfskin purse, and now had no idea where other reserves might be kept. Their ration stamps for meat, tea and butter were all used up. Curiously, too, her own appetite increased as her mother’s decreased, so that she was often craving snacks and eating, with guilty voraciousness, Stella’s smaller but untouched portions of food. Perdita began stealing milk from the front porches of houses in their suburb. It was easy. Just a sprint through the unlit streets, a quick reconnoitre, and she seized a billycan of milk in the pre-dawn dark. Sometimes she beat the milkman entirely, and instead took the coins that lay in trust beside the empty cans. When she heard the ringing clop-clop of the milkman’s horse and cart, she hid guiltily, like the low-down thief she had become.
Negligent of her surroundings, Stella one day walked into a door left open at an unaccustomed angle. She let out a succulent hiss and grabbed her forehead. There was a cut there and she touched it and examined the blood on her hand. Her response was one of submissive bewilderment. Perdita sponged her mother’s head, dried it, placed sticking plaster over the wound, and thought how very easily and how quickly the human body succumbs to impressions of damage. She suffered for her mother. She touched her wrist, just her wrist, and was overwhelmed by feelings of pity.
One morning there was a knock on the front door, which Perdita chose to ignore. It was insistent, nevertheless, and Stella peevishly ordered her daughter to see who was there. Perdita remembers walking with deliberate slowness, willing the knocking to stop, but there was a figure in smoky-blue shadow, who would not desist, but who knocked again and knocked more, and then called out: ‘Anyone there?’
It was the florist, Mrs Brodie. She stood in a tartan frock between the panels of rippled glass, exuding severity and concern in equal measure. She saw first the unfortunate child, whose unusual name she could not remember. Then she saw Stella Keene drift like a wraith up the corridor towards her, dishevelled, denuded, with a cool vacant stare, bearing a bruise above her eye the size and colour of a plum. Mrs Brodie clapped her hand over her mouth – oh my goodness! – to stopper any sob that might arise there.
The care she felt for her mother was not enough, they said. She needed drugs, looking after. She was feeble-minded. A woman from the welfare department arranged an ambulance to take Stella to hospital; in the meantime Perdita was housed in an institution that reminded her of Greensleeves. She slept in a room with seven other girls and was distressed that the girl in the bed beside her, who could not yet have been school age, cried in her sleep. But after only two nights Perdita was moved on. Adult decisions had again taken hold and configured her life.
Perdita discovered she had acquired foster parents. The Ramsays, Flora and Ted, were both in their sixties and had their own grown-up children somewhere. They looked at Perdita through apparently matching wire-rimmed spectacles, wishing her well. Ted was a carpenter and Flora looked after flowers for the local church. They were sensitive, considerate people, who said grace before dinner and did not finish her sentences.
On their first night, Flora gave Perdita a little pencil and notebook, so that if she did not feel like talking, she might write down messages. Perdita loved the crisp, stiff covers, the blue-lined pages, stapled in the middle, and the freedom to make her silence into another kind of text. Why had she never used a notebook with Stella? Flora tucked Perdita into bed, then sat on the cover describing the events of her day. A trip to the shops, a bit of gardening, a visit to the next-door neighbour, who was feeling poorly. When it was time for lights out, she brushed Perdita’s hair back from her face, bent over her lovingly, and kissed her forehead. It was a transaction of such easy, instinctual virtue that Perdita basked in the sympathy and felt the cool press of Flora’s lips remaining, lingering there, as she lay in the dark. She could hear the clink of teacups as Flora made a pot of tea, and the low drone of marital chit-chat, finishing the day. A chair scraped on the floor. A drawer of cutlery was being closed.
She thought of the patterns people enter, which might make domestic life so sheltering and sincere. Then she thought of her orange-wrapped gift, and wondered if Mary, lying alone in the same city, possibly awake and thinking of her, had ever received it. It was so quiet here, at the Ramsays’, without the intermissions of railway noise to which she had grown accustomed. And in the quiet her thoughts expanded and travelled through the night; her mother might die, this time, of starvation, no doubt, and she would grow up with the warm-hearted well-intentioned Ramsays, but be nevertheless completely and desperately alone.
Perdita wondered where her mother was and if she was eating and recovering her strength. The memory of the purple bruise disturbed and troubled her. It might remain for ever. It might show the world Stella’s clumsiness and dereliction, just as her own mish-mash voice advertised a private havoc.
It was almost a liberation, the Ramsays’ understanding, their easy concern. Both Flora and Ted took trouble to make Perdita feel at home. They settled her in their own daughter’s room and showed her around. Ted taught Perdita how to make a small wooden box; he showed her how to saw, to nail, to create dove-tailed corners. ‘Tricky’ seemed to be his favourite word. ‘This bit is tricky,’ he would say, and shyly smile, and Perdita felt a sense of achievement when she completed a tricky task, when she sanded her box, rubbed it clean and varnished it to a shine.
In the small workshop, out the back, Perdita saw how hands might fashion a useful object, how an old man with nicotine-stained fingers might reveal the beauty of wood and the honour of simple labour. She smelled the fragrance of the wood shavings and saw the care with which, frowning pleasantly, he handled his tools. Ted praised Perdita warmly when she finished her box.
‘The lid fits,’ he said. ‘That’s the trickiest part.’
And then he placed a carpenter’s square along the edge to confirm the box’s right angles.
From Flora Perdita learned the rudiments of cookery. They stood side by side at the kitchen table, their hips almost touching, sifting flour, kneading dough, pressing out floral scone shapes, in a silent companionship. When Flora pulled their creatio
ns from the oven, she might have been discovering a new world.
‘Well I never!’ she declared.
It was almost a new life. Almost liberation.
Less than a month after she joined them, Flora Ramsay announced to Perdita that she was to see a doctor. Perdita felt a rush of blood to her face and tinge of inexplicable shame.
‘A speech doctor,’ Flora explained. ‘Recommended.’
Since she was to miss a whole day of school, Perdita consented, but was still appalled that her spoiled and stupid speech would be examined by a stranger. A complete stranger.
‘Just to check, luv,’ said Flora, without offering any details.
So it was that Perdita, only newly in foster care, arrived at a clinic building attached to the children’s hospital. Flora wore gloves and a hat, and seemed nervous as she pushed back the heavy swinging door and led Perdita to the front counter behind which sat a uniformed nurse. There were charts on the walls that exposed the inside workings of mouths and throats; there were cut-away anatomies and lurid interiors. A pink and lilac plastic half-head rested on the counter. It had a single bulbous eye and scary implications. Blue veins and red arteries webbed the face and throat, grotesquely bulging and ugly. Perdita decided that she must be brave. But although the nurse smiled at her as she asked her to spell her name, bravery was not, after all, so easily come by. Once again she could not spell her own name without disclosing her condition. Sensibly, Flora did all the talking. She fumbled with her handbag for a pen and signed some papers.
Here, in a small office behind the clinic in which Perdita felt herself afraid, she met her doctor, Doctor Viktor Oblov. A native of Novosibirsk, in Russia, he had come to Australia on a merchant ship at the end of the First World War, in which he served as a medic. He treated shell shock, he said, and male hysteria. Although he was introducing himself to Flora, Perdita listened intently: he sounded engagingly like a character from a Conrad novel. He had thinning grey hair, unfashionably long, and wore a bow tie of royal blue, tweaked just so at the corners. His shirtsleeves were rolled, as if he was about to engage in physical labour. He was about the same age as Flora, but somehow also more sprightly and alert. Perdita was instantly charmed. When he spoke his voice was soft and low, an excellent thing in a doctor, and his accent was sufficiently pronounced to grant him professional authority.