Sorry

by Gail Jones

  Mary caught her gaze and vigorously shook her head, and Perdita noticed then that her eyes were glistening with fear. She watched Nicholas’s back rise and fall in jerking exertion and saw his exposed buttocks rhythmically quiver. There was no revulsion or distaste, just an absorbing nothingness. Perdita held the knife with both hands and plunged it into Nicholas’s back. It struck something metallic and did not penetrate far. As he turned his head, she withdrew the knife and, strengthened by panic, plunged it in a second time, into the side of his neck. Nicholas looked at his daughter with an expression of dumb surprise. Then he grimaced and reached falteringly to touch the knife, but fell forwards onto Mary, his right arm flung outward.

  It seemed so pure at the time, so basic and decisive. All was detachment and impersonality. But then Billy was somehow present, kneeling and pulling out the knife, and blood began spurting in a pulsing gush. Mary was scrambling to climb out from underneath Nicholas, to cast off the heavy body that was dying upon her, and as she rose – oh God – she was covered in spattered blood. Her blue dress was discoloured with patches of purple.

  This was the indelible, awful vision: Mary rubbing her chest, frantic and besmirched, as if she could remove the foul taint of all that had happened. Nearby, Billy was humming and flapping his hands. He had thrown down the knife, which lay gleaming beside the body. Horatio was pawing at the door, banging it with his head and whining.

  And then all at once they heard it: Stella reciting Macbeth. It was such an emphatic speech of triumph that Perdita was seized with horror. Stella was gloating, it seemed. She was ruthless, cruel. She stood beside the door with an air of grave formality, as if she spoke as an actor from the centre of a stage. Perdita stepped over her father and hugged Mary, holding her tight.

  ‘Don’t tell them,’ Mary said. That was all. ‘Don’t tell them.’ They held each other and began to weep.

  They were a ruined family. There was such a deformity of fellowship in this room charged electrically with death. The air seemed to crackle and fizz. Perdita imagined fatal currents released from her act, small bubbles of treasonous malice swilling in the air. So there was no subsidence into the quiet recognition of one life extinguished, no appalled, decent or moral stillness, but agitation, words, spiritual upset. The dog, the boy, the two girls softly weeping. Stella’s loud Shakespearean voice droning on and on. Nicholas gasping his last breaths, reddened with dying and silently pleading. When she looked down Perdita saw her father’s upturned eye begin to darken and lose sight.

  ‘What has happened?’ asked Doctor Oblov once again.

  The clinic office returned, and with it the Russian doctor, thoughtful and solicitous, bending towards Perdita, his black bow tie now slightly askew. Perdita looked at the flower dome resting in her hands. She felt ill with the magnitude of all she had mistaken. The engrossing waste of it all, the wreckage of lives. In unstuttering words she told Doctor Oblov the tale of her discovery.

  It was like a biblical miracle to have a voice returned. It was like a movie, or a fairytale, or something one might read of in a trashy novel, or a junk magazine. Perdita heard, to her amazement, her own verbal recovery. The knotted stutter was almost entirely gone, and instead words poured from her mouth, clear and even as water. Something had opened, released.

  ‘Don’t be afraid,’ said Dr Oblov quietly. ‘It can happen like this. The voice suddenly righting itself. Strange, I know, but it can happen, believe me. And give yourself time to think about what you have discovered. Give yourself time …’

  Perdita looked at Doctor Oblov’s close-up face. He was sweating, strained. She saw that he had a small shiny blister on the side of his neck.

  ‘I had supposed,’ he continued carefully, ‘that it was your mother who committed the crime.’

  And then Perdita broke down and sobbed. She sobbed uncontrollably for what she believed was her heartless forgetting. She sobbed for her mother’s deception and her own self-delusion, and saw how Stella had not disabused her of her mistake, but in some ways supported it. She sobbed too for Mary’s extraordinary sacrifice, and for Billy Trevor’s mute and lonely witness. Then she sobbed for her father, who died degrading and degraded, gashed on impulse in a thoughtless, arbitrary moment.

  Doctor Oblov put his arm around Perdita’s shoulder, composing the shape of comfort. At last, a formal feeling came, the nerves ceremonious, the contentment of a stone. Perdita’s body ceased its anguished ratchet heaving, and she felt the intensity of her recollection, so fierce, so tough, mitigated by the quiet room in which she found herself, by kind Dr Oblov, murmuring words of reassurance, by the high radiant window with its persisting plant, by the books on the bookshelves, the small items on the desk. A sense and materiality of things reestablished. The honesty of objects. The irreproachable real.

  Doctor Oblov rose and extended his hand to take the dome and indicate that their session was over.

  ‘We will talk of this,’ he said gently. ‘We will find its meaning. Now you need rest. Now you need to be quiet.’

  When Perdita left the clinic she was bloodshot and fluent. Flora saw the tear-stained face and general dishevelment, and expressed alarm. There was a peculiar moment between them. Flora reached out with her handkerchief to touch her face. On hearing Perdita speak – with such unexpected facility – Flora could not contain her surprised exuberance.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she said with a gasp. ‘Jesus bloody Christ.’ Then she was embarrassed. ‘Pardon my French,’ she added.

  And on the way home both remembered at the very same moment: Doctor Oblov, dear Oblov, had forgotten his promise. To give Perdita the dome.

  22

  There was a Japanese soldier, Hiroo Onada, who hid in the jungles of Lubang Island in the Philippines for almost thirty years after the Second World War finished. He refused to believe that the war had ended and he would not surrender. His liberation came in 1974 when he met a Japanese student camping in the jungle, who told him of the new world and began his process of repatriation.

  When I heard this story as an adult I felt I understood Hiroo Onada. It was possible that someone might carry a war inside them, and that isolation might go on, and on, and on. It was possible too, since eighty per cent of his battalion of 12,000 men had been killed, that Hiroo Onada was distorted or remade by loss. I imagined he had lived in silence for thirty years. I wanted to write to him, to express international solidarity. Later I heard that he had found modern Japan insufferable, and had relocated, an old man looped and ragged, still houseless and wandering, to the jungles of Brazil.

  In 1946, the year Perdita left school, Billy was married. Pearl was as rotund and smoothly white as her name suggested, and like Billy she was deaf. They met at a training school where Billy had enrolled to learn the art of sign language. Pearl Underwood was his youthful instructor, only two years older than he, and as soon as he saw her serious, articulate hands, her unwavering stare, the particular gesture with which she arranged the combs in her hair, the triangle of mottled skin beneath her neck, her shape as she walked and bent and stood, in short, all that she individually and uniquely was, he was entirely smitten. And there was something in the speedy disclosures of fingers, in the fluttering specificity of hands making silent words, that Billy found transfixing. He watched the alphabet appear with judicious pointing, understood the dextrous wavings and sweepings and poses, and realised for the first time his own expressive possibilities. Pearl remarked that he tightly compressed his lips as he signed, as if forcing words to re-route from his mouth to his fingers. She joked with him, and treated him like a man.

  It was a slow courtship, proceeding by letters, by syllables, and then by cautious physical correspondence. When at last Pearl reached out and touched his hand, Billy blushed so fiercely he imagined his chance was lost, that Pearl would certainly be put off by his unmanly lack of control. But she was moved, and noticed his gentleness and absence of presumption. She straightened his fingers to correct a sign.

  Billy wrote th
at he had never before been so aware of his deficiencies, and never more determined to ignore them. ‘You would like her, Deeta, she’s warm and funny.’

  Their first outing together – which Perdita had suggested and encouraged when Billy confided his attraction – was to the Piccadilly Theatre. The movie screening was The Maltese Falcon, which Perdita had seen with Flora the week before. She imagined them lip-reading and body-reading Sam Spade and Brigid O’Shaughnessy, noting the wry lift of lips and the haughty sneers, seeing sexual desire and criminal intrigue in wordless and subtle motions. She had loved the bug-eyed character of Cairo, slyly pathetic, and the concluding, bizarrely dislocated, Shakespearean line:

  DETECTIVE TOM POLHAUS: ‘What is this?’

  SAM SPADE: ‘The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.’

  Billy wrote that they had both enjoyed the movie and that they had walked home in the moonlight, hand in hand. He had underlined it: hand in hand.

  When Perdita met Pearl, she instantly adored her. Her years of stutter had made her aware of the exhausting task of asserting a self in the face of silence, yet Pearl had somehow managed to do so, lifelong, with energetic fortitude. Pearl insisted on teaching Perdita sign language – ‘it is necessary,’ she wrote, ‘for the progress of our friendship’ – and Perdita found in her own hands a reckless and pleasurable flaunting. It seemed a form of poetry: there were literal spellings-out, but there were also flourishing elisions and ostentatious metaphors; there were moments of shrug and embrace and whole body engagement, as well as nuanced inflections of the eyebrow or a curling smile. So she had been barely expressive, when her stutter had maimed her and driven her to silence, and now she felt almost mystically extra-expressive. With Billy and Pearl she discovered another dimension of communication. There were meanings that could exist only in sign, connotations for which only the inventive body and a gestural repertoire sufficed. She loved the three of them together, watching each other’s faces and hands, as though the body itself was a kind of book. And she loved Billy anew. In signing she learned again what she had intuited as a child. That he was richer inside than many might guess; wiser, more thoughtful, more given to the marvel of things.

  Billy and Pearl married in June, on a rainy Saturday, at the State Registry Office. Mr and Mrs Trevor were there, and with them their phalanx of Trevor sons. Perdita came with Stella. It was an awkward meeting. Mrs Trevor, who wore a memorably ugly hat of green feathers in the shape of a nest, was clearly taken aback by Stella’s aged and haggard appearance, and equally by Perdita’s recovered speech. And since Perdita could not explain in a reasonable narrative how she was healed of her stutter, Mrs Trevor wondered out loud if she had possibly been seeking attention.

  ‘No,’ Stella intervened. ‘Perdita was not seeking attention.’

  There was a chill between them, an open hostility.

  ‘You know nothing,’ Stella declared. ‘Nothing at all.’

  And with that all conversation between them ceased. Perdita had been asked so often about the recovery she could hardly believe it herself. Only Doctor Oblov’s reassuring explanation, his belief in the complexity of the resolutions and irresolutions of character, enabled her to claim her own voice with any confidence.

  ‘There is a margin of mystery,’ he told her, ‘that every doctor allows.’

  That would do, for now. A margin of mystery. On this wet wedding day, surrounded by more various forms of belief and scepticism, Perdita acted as a translator between Billy and Pearl and the others. Billy was pleased that all his brothers had come; he thanked them; he mentioned the weather; he joked that the beer was coming soon. Pearl apologised for the absence of her mother and sister, who could not afford the train fares from the country, she explained, but hoped one day soon to meet their extended family. She and Billy were both – how did Pearl sign it? – ‘full of heart, overflowing, round as the marbled moon’, to have found each other.

  ‘Delighted,’ Perdita translated, knowing its falsity.

  There is a photograph of the wedding party on the registry office steps. The bride and groom are at the centre, as convention dictates, and they have a clarity and joy no one else possesses. Both are smiling broadly. They are holding hands. The sign they make is a definite, irrefutable thing. Mr and Mrs Trevor are distracted by something to the right beyond the photographic frame, and the Trevor sons, four more, all remarkably uniform in appearance, are standing in a row behind them, wishing they weren’t there.

  In this, the only image Perdita has of Stella and herself together, they are both in shadow. Stella is faint and blotted, her features bluish and inky. Perdita is beside her, leaning close, as directed by the photographer, and it will pain her later to note how little resemblance exists between them, how even in this most conventional act of documentation, they are still set apart, they are still strangers.

  Knowing that she was a minor and that with the lapse of time she would not be charged or convicted, Doctor Oblov agreed to help Perdita claim her guilt, and to seek release for Mary. He agreed to intercede and talk to Stella. They all sat at the kitchen table, a pot of tea and a plate of frosted biscuits between them. Dr Oblov spoke, as usual, in a low, tender tone, explaining what might be done, what petitions might be made, how he would testify to the suppressions and delays that corrode knowledge of difficult events.

  But Stella was unmoving, and would not offer corroboration. She stared into the well of her teacup, morose and tense.

  Confronted by her daughter’s open admission, Stella announced simply: ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’

  Her passivity shocked Perdita and left her in despair. It was Stella’s testimony, not her own, that was needed to free Mary. And she would not be persuaded.

  She banged down her teacup, staining the tablecloth, and repeated the line: ‘What’s done cannot be undone.’

  It was like a door slammed shut. Her face was closed, mean. Stella was refusing to speak when a few words might release Mary from prison. Dr Oblov and Perdita argued and pleaded, until at length Stella rose slowly and left the room, pitiless in her manner and offering no explanation, tough as a mad monarch, awesomely stubborn.

  Dr Oblov stood and shook hands rather formally with Perdita.

  ‘Write to me,’ he said. ‘Keep in touch.’

  They paused in silence, each knowing the gravity of what existed between them.

  Perdita remembered an orrery she had seen at school and the moment she had realised that nothing, no metal armature, held up the planets. They spun by mystery alone; they held formation by a strenuous lace of force-fields and attractions. Now it seemed that something was flying outwards. Something was centrifuged, disappearing, flung godforsaken beyond horizons. Nothing was large enough to meet her comparison. Nor powerful enough to send it away.

  She watched Dr Oblov unlatch the front gate and turn to the left. He held himself erect and walked with a sprightly youthfulness. His body was well-equipped for life, she reflected. And all that he knew was in a healing service.

  Soon after the strange accession to memory and speech, Perdita had gone with Billy to Greensleeves. She was apprehensive; she was beginning to understand the true dimensions to things. Mary was delighted at Perdita’s recovered voice and sat back in her chair and gave a little clap. But then Perdita told her story and Mary listened, more seriously now, taking it all in. She seemed unsurprised.

  ‘Proper good one, that story, like blackfella story.’

  Perdita looked at her with an avid, questioning stare.

  ‘Yes,’ Mary conceded. ‘That’s how it was.’

  She clasped her hands in a vaguely prayerful gesture. Perdita waited, watching her, but Mary said nothing further.

  ‘So why did you protect me, Mary?’

  Mary closed her eyes, sighed, and took her time. The release of words Perdita had imagined as an excited rush was instead painstaking and tethered to weighty implications.

  ‘Maybe I was foolish, eh? Back in those days I wanted to be a saint.
Or like Annie McCaughie, pure and well loved. But I also knew that I was much stronger than you, Deeta. And Stella, too. I was stronger than Stella. She wouldn’t have survived if you’d been sent away to a home.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Perdita replied. ‘She was fierce, tough.’

  ‘She needed you.’

  ‘No, we’ve never been close.’

  ‘It’s true.’ Mary persisted. ‘Mothers and daughters, they need each other.’

  Here she halted, waited. Billy was staring into his lap, unsure of his role. The room was stuffy and overheated, and all felt its smothering claim on them.

  ‘Anyway,’ Mary added, ‘too much time has passed. I’m useful here. I teach reading and writing. I have my friends, my place.’

  There was a calmness to her tone that Perdita found disturbing. From an adjacent room came a clanging, a noisy irritation.

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘Deeta, I chose. I chose to help you, eh? And now I have no choice. No one will believe the word of a bush blackfella. Unless,’ she added, ‘they’re confessing a crime.’

  Mary paused. She looked away. The clanging sound – something metallic being loaded and shifted – ceased to meet her silence.

  ‘I understood this long time.’ It was her old, Aboriginal voice. ‘That Stella, that one Stella, she would never help me.’

  ‘I can,’ Perdita insisted. ‘I can write letters, visit lawyers. I can tell them the truth.’

  ‘They won’t want to know.’