Sorry

by Gail Jones

  ‘But it was me …’

  ‘Yeah, Deeta, it was you. And you were a child. A child, Deeta.’

  ‘I knew what I was doing.’

  Such simple words. And such insufficiency.

  ‘You were a child. How could you know? You were only trying to help me. Sisters, eh?’

  Perdita looked down, ashamed in the face of Mary’s generosity. She carried the burden of such vast wrongdoing. There was no honour here, to know Mary was blameless and imprisoned by something unspoken.

  ‘Still sisters?’ Perdita asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Mary. ‘Course we are, bloody oath.’

  But although it was offered, there was no atonement. There was no reparation.

  That was the point, Perdita would realise much later, at which, in humility, she should have said ‘sorry’. She should have imagined what kind of imprisonment this was, to be closed against the rustle of leaves and the feel of wind and of rain, to be taken from her place, her own place, where her mother had died, to be sealed in the forgetfulness of someone else’s crime. Perdita should have been otherwise. She should have said ‘sorry’.

  The clanging started again. Mary changed the subject.

  Now, so much later, she was still sitting in the same chair, still somehow stuck. Time had made rotten her good intentions, had confounded and deformed what she had not had the courage to say.

  How long a time lies in one little word?

  Billy was sitting beside her, as he always did, leaning to the left. He was gesturing happily. Perdita had just told Mary of Billy’s love.

  ‘I need to meet Pearl,’ Mary said to Billy, mouthing her words carefully.

  ‘She’d love to meet you,’ Billy signed, and Perdita translated.

  ‘For the sign language,’ Mary explained. ‘There is a deaf girl here, a Noongah girl from Mogumber Mission. I could learn sign language and teach her. And then talk to you too.’

  So it was that they became a new community of four, all repudiating the clumsy instrument of human speech, and participating instead in the silent articulations of the body. Mary learned very quickly, much quicker than Perdita, and had an emphatic, declarative style. Her hands were ample gadgets, her spirit was enlivened. Pearl joked that Mary signed with an Aboriginal accent, and Mary was charmed by this quirky, possibly accurate, description.

  They entrusted to each other the conversion of words to embodied tokens; they watched each other attentively, seeing voices; they developed an idiom, an idiolect, and withstood the derision of the Greensleeves staff to communicate with eloquent pleasure.

  The secrecy of their meanings was troubling to the institution, but there were no rules, apparently, against speechless meetings. No lopsided knowing, no fraught mistranslation; this was a language rich with hidden density, such as the body itself carries, and soulful as each distinctive, utterly distinctive, signer.

  And with Pearl, Mary rediscovered her sense of humour. Perdita watched as small gestures emerged as a laugh; she saw how it was a gift they exchanged, this sculpture of analogies, hints and mime; how much, potentially comic, resided there, how much, bracketed by arms, was yet to be expressed. Mary practised diligently: a ‘natural’, Pearl signed. They met thrice weekly, each looking forward to the fun of it, to the new meanings they might make.

  Five months later, on her twentieth birthday, Mary was moved from the juvenile detention centre to a women’s prison. Only ‘blood’ relatives, they were told, were permitted to visit. It was another breaking open. Another smashed form. Although Perdita, Billy and Pearl all wrote to Mary, each grieved the loss of their hands full of signs they had been prepared to offer her, and the frail shape of new family they had made together.

  As an adult, absorbed in a novel, Perdita remembered the companionship she shared with Mary in reading. There was nothing quite like this earnest, indulgent privacy. In a life distracted, noisy, shredded by trivial social encounters and the too-much reality of the banal everyday, to settle quietly with a novel – its continuous thought, its completed world, its parallel universe – will comfort and reassure her. Of what? Of established order, at least. Of pattern and of meaning, even if notional.

  Something else. She will remember, long ago, Mary’s hands fashioning a cat’s cradle from string. It was elaborate and complicated. She held up her design, her fingers wide-spread, and looked pleased with herself. Nets, webs, cords intertwining. There was no beginning or end. It might have been the design of a universe.

  ‘What’s it called?’ Perdita had asked. ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘My secret,’ said Mary. ‘My secret secret.’

  She was adamant and stubborn; she would not tell. Perdita learned then that Mary was not her mirror, that she had an autonomy no simple category could contain. And her own secrets, too, crisscrossing, unnamed, extraordinary as the patterns imagined in the stars, complex as the tracks that configured the desert.

  In the purple of late night-time, Perdita heard her mother chanting:

  I wasted time, and now time doth waste me;

  For now hath time made me his numbering clock:

  My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar

  Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,

  Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,

  Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.

  Now, sir, the sounds that tells what hour it is

  Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart …

  Stella looked up and saw Perdita standing in the doorway.

  ‘King Richard,’ she said meekly. ‘He’s in prison, and miserable.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Perdita. In prison, miserable.

  Her mother had fewer times, nowadays, of coherent speech. Dementia was setting in. After such a tormented inner life, vibrant with nasty detail and Elizabethan distress, Stella had begun to wane and blur. After the railway station, with its oppressive crowding and noise, after the encumbering weight of her Shakespearean filter on the world, so wordy and metaphoric, so violent and time-bound, Stella was slipping away, finding her own sanctuary.

  By the age of sixty-five she would be entirely wordless and lost. She was grubby and spent hours fidgeting with her buttons and buttonholes. She did not recognise her daughter, or know, any longer, her sins of omission and commission.

  The pathos of her life, Perdita thought, was after all unspeakable. No sign could express it. No hand could draw it in the air. Perdita lay awake at night wondering why she had become Echo to Stella’s Narcissus, why their lives had been so pitched in the tenor of melodrama. She wondered – she will wonder, in fact, all the days of her life – why it was that she actually forgot. And why she must now remember her forgetting.

  In the darkness Perdita was vulnerable to the words of Shakespeare. They flowed into her, insinuating, like unbidden memory. She wanted sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care. She wanted silence. She feared, above all, becoming her mother. In the darkness, too, Perdita was seeking forgiveness. Lying on her side, looking in private reverie at the charcoal outline of the bed-lamp she had decided not to turn on, absorbed by memories she could neither settle nor dispel, she wondered what she would say to Mary if they were alone together now, lying side by side as they had as children. And what would she say if her father materialised here, like Hamlet’s father, to speak of murder and injustice. Could any words utter the contents of so truant a heart?

  What returned to her was the image of the V-shaped trail that unrolled in neat turmoil behind a travelling ship, the ocean marked impermanently by the passage from one life to another, the sign of an everlasting, absorbing divergence. From the ship’s railing, looking down, it had been a beautiful thing. Folding water. Turning light. The dreamy curl of any journey. Now Perdita could not erase what returned only as a symbol.

  Peace-time at last came, first as a rumour, then as news, then as a public celebration. But after the initial trembling astonishment, even euphoria, there had been a sense of hollo
wing out, of meaning gone. Like a faded transparency, the look of things changed. There was a stale and weary quality to climbing on a tram, watching the city rumble by, seeing returned soldiers, still in uniform, wandering about with absent looks on their sepia faces.

  But nothing ever entirely ceases: Perdita knew this. So the wars moved elsewhere – she would never stop hearing of them – and she languished in her own creaturely, receded state, waiting, it seemed, always somehow waiting.

  What life did she find, beyond all this quiet and fury, beyond her idiot, strutting and fretting self? They had no money, Stella and she, so when the time came, and even with a scholarship, Perdita was unable to take a place at university. Instead she gained a position as a trainee librarian. This suited her well. There was a dignity in libraries; it was an honourable job. She admired the atmosphere of muffled restraint and the beige, dusty light. She admired the way book-stacks constructed a mini-city, the labyrinths of silent, orderly words. To see the spines aligned, each with its title, author and organising number, was a particular comfort. When she looked down on the head of a child, bent intently over a book, she wanted to kiss the nape of her neck. When she handed a volume to an old lady she felt, in her very bones, continuities here, the families of readership.

  But there was also loneliness and a dwindling faith in what meanings might be found. Furtively, Perdita practised sortilege, opening books at random to seek out sudden understandings. She saw ‘transmission’, ‘leaf’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘face’. Her mind spun on possibilities: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. All these collected words, bound within covers, and here she was, stuck with atomistic, contingent play. Words left their logical clusters and flew apart. Each book she fetched from its slot, sliding it into her hands, made meaning harder.

  Perdita struggled in the still space, surrounded by motionless bookcases, bespectacled readers and metal trolleys, against an inner disturbance that had never quite resolved. She was nineteen years old. She roamed among books, went to the cinema with Flora, cared for her mother and wrote to Mary. It felt like an empty life.

  One year later Perdita became godmother to Billy and Pearl’s twin daughters. Peace-time girls, she thought of them. Neither was deaf, and she was charged with the task of conversation and reading them stories. As they grew she saw how Alison and Catherine fluctuated with ease between the worlds of verbal expression and sign. With their parents they practised a second body, holding up their fingers, enlarging their physical vocabularies; with her they loved sing-song, pun, narrative and rhyme. How their little mouths chattered. She bounced them on her lap, offered kisses, received them. Read stories of fire engines, trolls, princesses, frogs. Slowly, speaking to children, taking care with words, she became their ‘Aunty Deeta’, a slender good-looking woman, almost ready for the world. There was a routine to things that was almost equilibrium: Perdita assembled her new self into a precarious unity, the aunt that she was, the librarian, the attentive, caring daughter. She balanced there, existing. As one does.

  What came next to mark her life was unexpected. Perdita opened a letter from the woman who had once been Sister Perpetua. She had left the order and was now working as a nurse in the city. There had been a death in the gaol, Perpetua wrote. Mary had died of appendicitis. Mary had died.

  There was no suicide and no allegation of foul play. ‘A tragic loss … in the hands of God’. She knew of Mary’s long correspondence with Perdita, and thought she should be informed of her friend’s sad passing. Here returned to you, Perpetua wrote, is the book you shared, Mary’s personal copy of The Lives of the Saints.

  The letter was shockingly straightforward and matter of fact, as though Mary had just been a name, or a casual acquaintance. Perdita felt a crush in her chest and the world collapsing. She felt woozy, ill. Blotted heaven. Cancelled love. Oh God. Mary.

  It was such a humble parcel, wrapped in brown paper, and tied crosswise with string. Perdita held it for a while, unable to act. The weight of what lay, interleaved, in any lives. Of what existed between girls long ago, in a doom-laden story. In warm, yellow light, Perdita unwrapped the book, folding back the planes of the paper, carefully smoothing them as she went. Her hands were trembling. Slowly she ran her fingertips along the paper creases. She rolled the string into a little ball. She placed her palm gently across the cover and held it there, pausing.

  She sat still, staring into space at nothing, and then more nothing. Nothing, more nothing. Light fell on the kitchen table in a neat clear square. When Perdita unwrapped the book, the past came rushing to meet her.

  And only then, turning the pages, peering at what Mary had read, did she begin to know, did she begin to open and grieve. There was a flood of hot tears, and a sudden heart breaking.

  I should have said sorry to my sister, Mary. Sorry, my sister, oh my sister, sorry.

  23

  What remains is broken as my speech once was. But I see now what my tongue-tied misery could not: the shape that affections make, the patterns that love upholds in the face of any shattering. It is not sentimentality that drives me to claim this, but the need – more explicitly self-serving, perhaps – to imagine something venerable and illustrious beneath such waste.

  It is an image of our house, seen at night from outside, that I continually revisit, as though I have converted my history into the opening shot of a second-rate movie. This was the night Stella and I returned after the murder. Mr Trevor had gone earlier to light the kerosene lamps, and as we came upon it, beneath a three-quarter moon, I saw emblematically the shape I would seal my secret within. I was already choked by words and inexpressive, I already had a cramped and mangled speech; here was the shape to contain my calamity.

  Houses seen from outside, at night, convey a particular beauty. Their windows are bright beacons, their violet outlines, etched indistinctly against the star-dark sky, have a somewhat mythic implication of shelter and repose. Our house was smaller in the darkness, but more mysterious. Moon shadows fell across its doorways and slanted surfaces, there was a gleam on the iron roof – the corrugations appearing as ripples – and a dark square of void towards the back.

  I was afraid to re-enter our house, but I think now that the return enabled my distinctive forgetting. As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, pushing back the screen door, I saw a multicoloured patched rug, a disguise, a deletion, and no longer knew exactly what had happened in that room.

  Stella was abnormally loud and assertive, while I merged into the inertia of denial and repression. Three lamps, each producing a soft copper flare, triangulated my mother as she moved about the room, touching the map, the newspaper cuttings, the spines of our books, as if she was securing them in their places, or conferring new meaning. I remember my prevarication, my intermediate state. I remember standing still, watching her, wondering what on earth would happen next.

  The details remain: Stella had a button missing on her blouse. Her fingers played around the buttonhole and fidgeted at the gape. Horatio was inside, sniffing in corners, restless, looking with doggy incomprehension around him. I called him, held his head, and scratched behind his ears; then Stella ordered that he be put outside for the night. There were moths banging at the windows, brown dusty shapes, and the night cries of swift, predatory birds. There was the stench of cleaning powder and smoke, my mother’s mobile shadow, a bulbous teapot on the table, with unfamiliar tin mugs, left behind by Mrs Trevor when she made tea for the policemen.

  What was lost and what remained. What was absorbed into the dateless darkness of my father’s death, and what irresistibly persisted, the visible, the present, the shamelessly alive. I knew there were compartments of memory and feeling I had begun to seal; and although I did not will it, I was already selecting what to forget. Events were folding away, finding pleats of the self. The shadows of night were beginning to invade.

  Stella darkened all the lamps but one, which she took into her room. Another detail – the acrid smell of kerosene, sharper this night than at any oth
er time in my childhood. Stella did not say good night, she simply retreated, preoccupied. There was the sound of a drawer being opened, of rustling clothes, of shoes dropped to the floor. Rather than stay wide awake, and alone, where violence had happened, I crept outside. Beneath the gleaming night sky I lay on the earth with Horatio. I buried my face in his belly and listened to the rhythm of his sleeping.

  Afraid of slumbery agitation, or ghostly visits, I willed myself to think instead of Stella’s snow dream: a field of flakes descending, the slow transformation of the shapes of the world, the slow, inconclusive, obliteration. I saw a distant place, all forgetful white, reversing its presences. I saw Mary, and Billy, covered by snowflakes. I saw my mother’s bare feet beneath the hem of her nightgown. Everything was losing definition and outline. Everything was disappearing under the gradual snow. Calmed, I looked at the sky and saw only a blank. Soft curtains coming down, a whiteness, a peace.

  A NOTE ON ‘SORRY’

  The word ‘sorry’ has dense and complicated meanings in Australia.

  In April 1997 a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) entitled ‘Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families’ was tabled in the Australian parliament. It is based on 777 submissions (of which 500 were confidential) enquiring into the forcible removal of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. It is a moving and distressing document of the emotional and physical suffering of the people who have become known as the ‘Stolen Generations’. The federal policy of ‘removing’ children continued until the early 1970s.

  At an Australian Reconciliation Convention held in Melbourne in May 1997, Prime Minister John Howard refused to say ‘sorry’ to Aboriginal Australians for past government policies of mistreatment. The audience at the convention rose and turned their backs to the prime minister, shaming him in a silent protest with their bodies. Prime Minister Howard had refused on many occasions to say ‘sorry’.