Sorry

by Gail Jones

  ‘When?’

  All the intervening spaces fell away. They had found each other in this big, booming city, two misfits, equally alone, carrying in their heads a tatty cargo of precious shared memories. Beneath all the errors and difficulties a life might bring, there were these links, unmistaken. There were these small affirmations.

  One rainy Tuesday they both absconded. They knew the visiting hours. On the bus they exchanged notes, like naughty children, to learn details of the time passed since the evacuation. Through a friend of his father’s, Billy had been offered a mechanic’s apprenticeship. He turned out, he wrote, to be a whiz with machines. ‘Whiz.’ He underlined it. Perdita wrote back that she hated school. That her stutter was worse. That she was seeing a doctor. ‘Oblov’, she wrote on the pad. ‘Oblov?’ Billy copied. ‘Russian’, Perdita wrote.

  When they arrived at Greensleeves the woman in the front room remembered Perdita. Billy Trevor is an adult, she brokenly declared. Another friend of Mary’s.

  Afterwards she realised what a peculiar pair they must have seemed – a deaf-mute man, gangly and shy, controlling his anxious hands in the pits of his pockets, and an eager stuttering girl, leading the way.

  They were seated in a waiting room of conspicuous austerity. There were grey walls, electric lights covered in steel mesh guards, and an absence of decoration. A door opened, and there she was. Mary halted in the doorway. She was almost eighteen, a woman.

  Her lips parted in surprise, she touched her own throat, holding something there, a cry or a whisper, and then she recovered herself and said, ‘Eh, Deeta, long time. Eh, Billy-fella.’

  She was beautiful, calm. Dark curls framed her face. Her manner seemed to Perdita unexpectedly reserved; detention had enclosed her, perhaps, had forced a rigorous composure.

  They were not permitted a hug, or any touching at all. The woman who watched over them saw this triangular pause, the murderous Abo, the half-witted child, the ginger-looking freak, and no doubt silently praised the Lord for her reliable normalcy.

  Mary sat on the other side of the table. Billy wore a broad grin and scribbled a note to Mary, but the woman standing behind them leaned over and snatched it up.

  ‘No notes,’ she said firmly.

  What did they exchange? Mary did most of the talking. She was disturbed to discover Perdita’s condition: the spirited girl she had known spoke a wrecked, knotty speech, her face screwed up with effort, her rascal manner shattered.

  Perdita told her of Joey, down by the river, and of Flora and Ted. She told her of her mother in hospital and the misery of school. Then she remembered and asked Mary if she had received her gift.

  ‘The gift. Thank you. The shell, he’s under my pillow. Good to have all them crazy saints back, eh?’

  Mary stopped speaking for a moment to see if Perdita wanted to say anything. Then she confronted her.

  ‘So why didn’t you answer my letters, Deeta?’

  ‘L-L-Letters?’

  ‘For a whole bloody year I sent you letters, then I gave up hopin.’

  Perdita felt her eyes fill up with tears. What extra deprivation was this, not to have received any letters? Perdita stuttered that she had never seen a single letter. She had felt squalid, abandoned, damaged in some way, and would have found solace in just a handful of words. She would have offered solace. She would – of course – have lovingly responded. Billy was having trouble lip-reading her stuttering disclosures; however, he seemed to understand all Mary said.

  The sisters looked at each other. Mary reached over and patted Perdita’s hand.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘A mistake somewhere, I reckon.’

  ‘No touching,’ was the command.

  Their twenty-minute visit passed too quickly. They learned that when she was not locked away alone, Mary spent time teaching other inmates to read, and writing to charities for donations of books.

  ‘Bring a book next time. And leave your addresses at the office.’

  She sounded remote, a stranger now. She was already preparing herself for their departure. Perdita had always imagined that, when she at last saw Mary, there would be excessive happiness and tears of joy and that their tarnished past would cease finally to define and determine them. Instead they had spent their short time together struggling to communicate, and all felt keenly the constraint and repression of their surroundings.

  Perdita and Billy left disheartened. As they stepped outside the building it began to rain and soon they were both drenched. They made their way back to the bus stop, up the rain-blue suburban streets, in a dripping sad silence. Skeins of white rain chilled and enveloped them. Cars skidded past, sending up sheets of water. Everything was darkening, wintering, becoming night, conveying in the very elements their inexpressible woe.

  19

  The therapy that Doctor Oblov developed involved iambic pentameter, the rhythm and stress of the lines that Shakespeare used. He would ask Perdita to read a sonnet – which she did, unstutteringly – then he would give her composed lines of everyday speech, written in the same line length and with the same system of emphasis. Thus Perdita found herself rehearsing lines about asking the price of bananas, apologising for being late to school, remarking, with ordinary and fluent banality, on the state of the weather and the expectation of rain. Dr Oblov had pages of lines written up for her when she visited. At first it was only Shakespeare whose words emerged unmutilated, but gradually one or two of the doctor’s lines worked in the same way, so that with a sing-song and exaggerated Shakespearean manner, Perdita found she could control an entire sentence. She began to fashion her own sentences with lines ten syllables long, and with the accent as it should be, on every second beat.

  ‘Think of words,’ Doctor Oblov said. ‘Divine, bizarre, Macbeth. Think of sentences,’ he added. ‘Da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum, da-Dum.’

  So Perdita began by rehearsing Dr Oblov’s words, as if she were reading more sonorous and ancient lines:

  Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

  So do our minutes hasten to their end;

  Each changing place with that which goes before,

  In sequent toll all forwards do contend.

  Rhyme, it was wonderful. Rhythm was much harder. When she was not chanting made-up lines – and sometimes snarling in the centre when her stutter returned, so that her progress was uneven and always frustrating – Doctor Oblov asked Perdita more details about her life. In these narratives her speech was bumpy and crude; she could not find an iambic rhythm to make her own life feasible. This, said Doctor Oblov, was where they were aiming: that she should one day tell her own story with simplicity and lucidity.

  ‘Why did you go bald?’ Perdita once asked him.

  ‘Ah,’ he said sadly. ‘I used to brush my sisters’ hair at night, one hundred strokes each for Olga and Ilena. It was a ritual we shared, a sign of our love. When they were gone my body showed in a symbol what was lost.’

  Here Doctor Oblov waited to gauge Perdita’s response.

  ‘We have no control over these symbols when they happen,’ he said carefully. ‘Only afterwards, later, can we try to understand or repair them.’

  Perdita was turning the flower dome in her small white hands. It was a fair spring morning; dove-grey light was streaming in on them from the high office window; there were books lined against the walls, an aspidistra on the windowsill, a tone of quiet disclosure and easy trust, and she realised all at once that she possessed a feeling of hope. She had been hopeless, resigned. She had been closed up like a pearl shell, hidden in the murky deep, washed by the tidal flow of forces she did not understand. Now there was this room in which a man talked of love for his sisters, was unembarrassed and confiding, was sincerely interested in her story, a room in which – she believed it then – she would gradually relearn to speak.

  On her thirteenth birthday, Perdita was obliged to reveal to Flora Ramsay that she had no school friends at all, not one, no one whom Flora could invite home for
tea and lamingtons. Her friends, she said, were Billy and Mary, but neither could join Flora’s planned celebration. So it was that they set off to the cinema together, a Saturday matinee, 2 p.m., at the Piccadilly Theatre. Flora wore her going-out summer hat, a dome of dun-coloured straw speared by a glass-topped pin, and Perdita the new birthday frock Flora and Ted had bought her. It was of stiff red cotton, and she thought it fabulous. Four oversized red buttons studded her chest.

  Perdita had not yet been to a cinema, and was not at all sure what to expect. They walked into town – to save a fare one way – and Perdita was so hot and bothered by the time they arrived that her sense of occasion was diminished when they entered the foyer. She found herself sweating; her forehead and underarms were damp. But then – oh – what a place this was. It was lush with a cushiony interior she had seen in no other building, which she would later realise was a distinctively cinematic genre of adornment. There was a thick autumn-toned carpet underfoot and all around hung curtains of amber velvet, parted by silken cords to reveal posters of film stars, blazoned behind glass and inhumanly beautiful. Sofas in the same amber stood along the walls; they had tubular arms with tassels, and bulbous feet. In an illuminated booth stood a woman with a startling helmet of blonde hair – ‘from a bottle’, Flora whispered – who dispensed tickets casually from a large pink roll and received patrons’ money with an air of bored disdain. She was the most glamorous woman Perdita had ever seen. Her nails were scarlet, matching her cupid’s-bow lips; she had black powder on her eyelids and rouge circles on each cheek. Her neckline plunged in a way Flora would at dinner call ‘tarty’. But then, at first encounter, for her first visit to the cinema, this woman was the glossy and dazzling herald of visions to come. Perdita couldn’t stop staring. Flora had to lead her away.

  When they entered the auditorium it was almost completely dark. Boy ushers in military-style uniforms with small brimless caps had to shine beams of flashlight to show them to their seats. Perdita wondered why no one turned on the lights. There was a pleasant hubbub of muffled voices and a sense of expectation. Flora was restless and declared that she couldn’t get comfortable. Suddenly band music from somewhere played ‘God Save the King’, and everyone stood up; this was a ceremony that filled Perdita with dull solemnity. But then she heard a low whirring sound behind her and turned to look. A cone of white light shot with bright swiftness from a square box in the wall, and then the show began. Heavy curtains parted in mysterious synchronism, and with triumphal, blaring music a Cinesound newsreel appeared.

  Perdita’s heart was pounding fast under her new red dress. She reached across and gave Flora’s hand a quick affectionate squeeze. In gun-metal grey and white, armies marched at an angle across the screen, fighting planes dived upwards, politicians gesticulated. The announcer’s voice carried a tone of stern exhortation, not unlike Stella’s pitched in recitation; indeed he was almost shouting the news of war-time events. The war was faster-moving and less melancholy than Perdita had imagined it. Sound-tracked for victory, the Allied troops seemed, more than anything, rather chipper and cheery. One saluted directly to the camera and posed as a hero, another gave a jubilant wave as he sped away in his Jeep.

  Perdita felt dizzy with the flashing speed of the images, the number of people appearing and disappearing on the screen, the detonation of a kind of fear that she knew nothing of the world. The dark cinema swayed and shifted around her so that she clutched at the hand-rests of her seat.

  Then, just as suddenly, the images again changed. A lion roared in a circle, there was a swelling orchestral score, and ‘Hitchcock’s Rebecca’, written in curly letters, appeared gigantically strewn across the width of the screen. From somewhere inside the screen a woman’s voice began narrating.

  Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me that I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter for the way was barred to me … Then, like all dreamers, I was possessed of a sudden with supernatural powers and passed like a spirit through the barrier in front of me.

  Perdita watched a spectral mist waver and disperse, then experienced mobility, with supernatural powers, as she moved with dream slipperiness up a winding road. Manderley was a ruined mansion; its burned-out shape stood in silhouette. The image rested, then was clouded over, and then another image began.

  When the lights at last came up Perdita was not sure where she was. She looked around and saw people taking up handbags and standing to leave, and heard Flora say, ‘Well, then,’ in a pleasant, self-satisfied tone. She realised her hands had been clasping two of her frock buttons throughout the movie, as if she needed to hold on to a self that was so easily swept away, so easily transported into the lustred world of stories told in light. The noble pallor of the heroine seemed to stay with her; her face and her voice would not entirely fade. Perdita did not want to leave her seat. Flora took her elbow and gave her a slight nudge, and slowly, still in the half-life or double life of watching a movie, she rose up, trance-like, and allowed herself to be led outside, back into the hot summer’s day, gold-coloured now, and glarey, and way too solid. She remembered later how the town hall clock chimed just as they stepped onto the street. It announced her birthday, she thought. It announced the new girl she had become after her first visit to the cinema.

  If she had been able to speak with confidence, Perdita would have described in a headlong verbal rush – to anyone who would listen – the puzzling transubstantiations she had just experienced, the seesawing in and out of her own body and mind, the stunned surrender, in darkness, to an alternative world. But she had accustomed herself to silence and inwardness, so instead wrote a rambling letter to Mary, retelling, rather woodenly, the plot of Rebecca. Cinema was, she wrote, both like and unlike reading, but somehow she could not say why, exactly. As in speech, written words seemed to fail her.

  What she wrote to Mary was fatuous and glib and she had no resources, it seemed, to tell what she had seen and felt. In a half-understood and nebulous way, she realised that this was another task she would have to relearn; how to reassociate her words and her feelings.

  The day after Rebecca – it served now as a punctuation – Flora took Perdita to visit her mother. Flora mistakenly thought that Stella would like to see her daughter to mark her birthday, but found not just the usual remoteness but feverish self-enclosure. Florid-nosed with the flu, her eyes teary with sneezing, Stella was so preoccupied with her illness that she couldn’t bear a visitor. Nevertheless, they persisted. Flora and Perdita sat in chairs drawn alongside her bed and tried dutifully to make light-hearted conversation. For some reason Stella’s hair had been drawn up into a silver hairnet, which Perdita thought, recoiling, resembled a cobweb. Perdita was wearing her new birthday frock and hoped Stella would notice, but inattentiveness, she knew, was a symptom of her condition.

  They were about to leave when Perdita decided to recite a sonnet for her mother, the one she had learned, a week ago, for Doctor Oblov. So she began.

  Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

  So do our minutes hasten to their end;

  Each changing place with that which goes before,

  In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

  Stella turned, inhaled deeply, as if awoken from sleep, and put her index finger to her lips: ‘Shhh.’

  Then, in a gesture of remarkable, almost unprecedented, gentleness, she reached out and touched Perdita’s cheek with the back of her hand.

  ‘“In sequent toil all forwards do contend,”’ she repeated. ‘Go, now.’

  Without another word Flora and Perdita rose and left. When she looked back Perdita saw that the bedraggled woman on the bed, her mother, fifty-five years old, crowned by a cobweb and wrecked by life, had slumped into herself and appeared immediately to sleep.

  The summer of that year seemed to go on for ever.

  Stella remained in hospital, somewhat improved. Perdita and Billy had contrived to see Mary several times, each vi
sit taking a book from the family collection. Perdita stole Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca from the public library, and after reading it and carefully removing its institutional stamps, had offered it as an extra gift. Mary received it graciously and confessed only later that she found it dull.

  There was still a feeling of distance and loss between them, but gradually, too, something was re-establishing; there was some corridor of understanding they cautiously met in. The first time Perdita tried one of her iambic pentameter sentences, Mary had laughed – it was too lah-di-dah and stupidly musical. Nevertheless, the sentence emerged complete, so they laughed together in the end, both aware of the inherent possibility of recovery. Billy saw them laughing and joined in, unsure of its import, but pleased to find again the girls’ long-ago smiles. With each visit Perdita felt a little more confident, of her friendship, of her speech, of finding continuity. She loved Mary. That was it. It was all that simple.

  School too was becoming slowly more tolerable. Perdita had earned the respect of her teachers, who discovered that she was, after all, unusually intelligent, but simply preferred not to be asked questions and not to speak. Once they stopped badgering her, she fell into excellence. She wrote essays of surprising maturity and stylistic verve; she continued to fail at maths – in which she had no interest – but was otherwise cherished as a gifted student. When the tale of her unfortunate background was known, she was endowed in addition with a kind of narrative claim; teachers told her story to one another; she exemplified misfortune; she made them feel better about themselves.

  She was promoted to the ‘top’ class and in this singular treatment became further marked out and separated from her peers. But Perdita, understanding by now the difficulties of school, was resigned to her loneliness. No one wanted to talk to a stuttering girl, and now that she was ‘brainy’ she was even more difficult to accommodate. Her peers called her the M-M-Martian and when she heard this she thought: yes, that is so, I feel like an alien; I feel as if I am visiting from another planet.