by Mandy Sayer
‘Three.’
The paddy wagon slowed down and turned left.
‘I don’t work there anymore. I . . .’ She drew her knees up to her chest. The chain of his handcuffs rattled and suddenly she felt his fingers on her hair and a warm tingle spiderwebbed across her scalp.
‘I would’ve sent ’em to your house,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think your folks’d approve. Now you’re engaged and all.’
The wagon swerved right and a car horn sounded. She heard a man cry out, ‘Paper! Paper!’ and felt a sob begin in her belly. She grasped James around the waist and slipped her head and shoulders through the circle of his cuffed arms, pressing herself against him.
‘Baby,’ he crooned. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with you.’ He flexed his biceps, squeezing her. ‘You know we couldn’t make it together—not forever.’
The paddy wagon slowed down again and came to a stop. Two car doors slammed and then there were footsteps.
‘But what about in Australia? We could’ve—’
‘I get shipped out tomorrow.’ James’s voice was low, almost a whisper. ‘New Guinea.’ Pearl heard a jangle of keys and the muted voices of the policemen and suddenly she wanted to stay locked inside the wagon with James, his arms cuffed around her, forever. ‘I don’t blame you for marrying what’s-his-name, but I want you to know—’ she felt his lips against hers ‘—no one’s ever gonna love you as much as I do.’
And as she tasted the blood from his split lip she knew that no one could ever love James as much as she did, either; that nothing could now break the mysterious force that bound them.
12
At the police station, Pearl and James were separated and charged. Pearl was put in the city lock-up with what looked like several prostitutes while she waited for her parents to come and bail her out. The basement cells were narrow and smelled of mould and stale tobacco. It was well after midnight but she could still hear the chatter of other prisoners through the metal bars. She dozed off and on, and, just after dawn, she heard footsteps echoing through the passage and cringed when she saw her parents and a policeman walking towards her. Her bail had been set at ten quid and she had no idea how they’d raised the cash. She imagined the sergeant had already explained to them in detail why she’d been thrown in jail: assault, resisting arrest. When Clara noticed that she was dressed in an army uniform, her hair a mess of tangles and knots, she barked, ‘Get up off the ground! You look like the lunatic everyone says you are.’
‘Mum, you don’t understand—’
‘We’ll discuss this when we get home.’
The guard unlocked the gate and Pearl walked behind her parents between the two rows of cells. She glanced at the other prisoners, hoping to catch a glimpse of James, to say goodbye. She peered at the gallery of faces—a man with a mango-shaped head, another with a handlebar moustache, a bone-thin man with not one hair on his head—but James was not among them.
Her parents took her home in a taxi. Later, in the kitchen, Pearl stared sullenly at the worn grain of the wooden tabletop. Aub sat quietly, drumming his fingers against a cutting board, while Clara paced the room and fired a series of questions.
Upstairs, a door slammed shut, and they could hear Martin’s footsteps above them. Clara raised her voice and summoned him down to the kitchen. When he appeared, he was still wearing his pyjamas.
‘Were you in on this?’ she demanded.
Martin yawned. ‘What?’
Clara gestured at Pearl, who was still wearing her brother’s army uniform.
He glanced at her, expressionless. ‘I’ve got bigger things to worry about than Pearl playing dress-ups.’ He opened the icebox and pulled out a bottle of milk.
‘Do you know anything about this—this coloured chap of Pearl’s?’
His face tensed slightly. ‘Coloured?’ he said. ‘Like how?’
‘Like black!’ said Clara. ‘Like the man the pair of you invited to your birthday last year.’
Martin swallowed and fingered a button on his pyjama top.
‘I know you know what I’m talking about!’
Martin shrugged. ‘Has he been lying in the sun too long?’
‘This is serious, young man,’ said Clara. ‘You two have always been thick as thieves.’
‘Mum, I’ve been home since I got the telegram last night.’
‘And what about when Hector finds out?’ Clara continued, turning to glare at Pearl. ‘Have you thought about that?’
‘The only way Hector’ll find out is if one of us tells him.’
‘What about the court case next month?’
‘Two GIs attacked us.’
‘You were seen lying on top of him in the police wagon, doing God only knows what.’
Pearl, exasperated, placed her palms against the table and looked directly into her mother’s eyes. ‘I love him.’
Clara blanched and leaned against the sink. ‘And there I was thinking you were having some kind of mental breakdown—but now I realise you’re just a silly, ungrateful slut who’d . . . who’d run off with the devil if he showed her a good time.’
‘At least I’d know how to.’
Clara lunged towards her and before Pearl could duck she felt a hard slap against her cheek that sent her reeling back in her chair.
The room fell silent.
‘That’s enough, Clara,’ said Aub. ‘Everyone calm down. Jesus, this isn’t the end of the world.’
Pearl raised a hand and pressed it against her stinging face. It felt as if she’d been scalded with boiling water. But she refused to cry, to allow her mother to see her in any way diminished.
The memory of James stayed with Pearl throughout the day and long into the night, like a perfume that had stolen into her clothes, her hair, the corners of her pillowcase. Even though her brother had withheld a secret from her for the first time, and even though she’d been in a brawl and had been thrown in jail, her brief reunion with James saturated her thoughts to the exclusion of anything else. She had no doubt now that her fate was entwined with his. This knowledge eased the welt on her cheek, calmed her anxiety, relaxed the knot of muscles against her spine.
When she awoke her mouth was dry and it was still dark outside. She could see stars framed by the window and a crescent moon. For a moment she thought she’d dreamed it all—her chance encounter with James, the arrest, the fight with her mother. And then it all came foaming around her like a breaker at the beach: his handcuffed arms encircling her in the back of the police van, the music they’d once played together thrumming in her ears, the fingerprints she imagined he’d left inside her, at her core. But she was startled out of her reverie when she remembered that it was Martin’s last night in Sydney and she’d already slept through most of it.
Downstairs, all the rooms were dark. She flipped on the kitchen light and could see that tea had already been eaten. The washing-up was standing in the rack on the sink. Through the door she could see the outline of Mikey asleep on his cot in the dining room. The clock above the stove told her it was eleven minutes past ten. She must have slept for almost nine hours straight. She was starving.
Martin was due to leave the house at four the next morning and his breakfast sat covered with a dinner plate on the table. Pearl lifted it and found four cut sandwiches filled with cold meatloaf and boiled eggs. She picked up one and ate it, noticing that Clara had wrapped fruitcake and biscuits and had left them for Martin on the kitchen counter, as if he were going on a school excursion. Next to them were other little extras: Clarke’s Blood Mixture, DeWitt’s Antacid Powder, Wood’s Great Peppermint Cure for Coughs & Colds.
Seeing all the efforts Clara had made for Martin caused Pearl to wonder if her mother even liked her anymore. Was it possible that all the therapy, the quinine and other medications, the saxophone being returned to Palings, the wedding plans, were designed by Clara to make Pearl burn less brightly, to limit her? Suddenly, reckless ideas were careening through her head: she’d pack a bag and hitchhike t
o another state, to a place where no one knew her. She could assume a false identity, style her hair differently, beg, borrow or steal a saxophone and get gigs under a pseudonym. Maybe when the war ended she and James would find each other again, discover a place and a culture that welcomed them equally.
Through the candlelight she could see her wedding dress hanging from a hook on the wall next to the upright ironing board: extra darts in the bodice, layers of fine netting, crystal beads glinting in the half-light, the sweetheart neckline. Now, after seeing James again, and realising that he still loved her as much as she loved him, she could hardly imagine herself wearing the dress, let alone standing next to Hector in the local church, taking her wedding vows. Her brother might be dreading his posting, but she envied him, the adventures he would have, the music he would play in the highlands of New Guinea, while she’d be entombed in Hector Best’s Millers Point terrace, starching shirts and polishing furniture. Hector’s widowed father would come to lunch every Sunday after church. Hector would forbid her to play music professionally. And she would never see James again.
On the hook next to the wedding dress hung Martin’s army uniform—washed and pressed since she’d taken it off that afternoon: the khaki shirt, trousers made of herringbone twill, the bush hat. The canvas gaiters and boots sat beneath them on the floor, next to his bulging rucksack.
The two outfits reminded her of a prank she and Martin had pulled when they were kids. One day they had turned up to school wearing each other’s uniforms: Pearl in Martin’s blazer and long pants and he in her blouse and navy-blue tunic. They took their places side by side in the classroom. At first, the teacher, Miss Winthrop, didn’t notice, and merely asked the class to open their readers. Pearl, unused to itchy woollen trousers, kept scratching at her crotch. Miss Winthrop turned her back and began writing on the blackboard, while Martin lifted the hem of his skirt and flashed his knickers at the other kids. A boy sitting directly behind him couldn’t control his excited fits of giggles, which became infectious. When Miss Winthrop heard the children laughing she swung around and saw everyone pointing at the twins and, recognising the ruse, she laughed too. She allowed the twins to impersonate each other for the rest of the day, and whenever she addressed them she good-naturedly reversed their names.
Pearl glanced at the wedding dress, then back to the army uniform, and a crazy, impossible idea flared in her mind.
Intermission
‘The idea was so outrageous,’ Pearl says on tape number twelve, ‘that for a moment I thought I’d gone crazy. Crazy with love. Crazy with grief. Crazy with the whole damn—’
She pauses and I can hear ice tinkling in a glass as she slurps on a drink.
‘All I knew for sure was that I had to see him again. And I really didn’t care what—’ Her voice cracks. A police siren sounds in the background. ‘I didn’t even care if I—not even if I—’
I’m on the edge of my seat now, waiting for her to get to the point. I hear a little static, like a badly tuned TV station. Then the speakers emit a sound like crumpling paper, followed by a squeal, and I look down in horror to see the wheels of the cassette slowing down and chewing up the remains of the tape.
I hit the stop button and then press eject, and the cassette drops forward in its slot. Fortunately, the tape hasn’t broken but is tangled up in the machine like a glossy brown ribbon. I go to the bathroom to find some tweezers. My heart’s racing and my fingers are trembling as I rummage through the cabinet. Never in my life have I felt such a strong sense of urgency, not even when I began writing my detective series. It’s not just the responsibility of writing Pearl’s biography—or her version of it; I’m hooked on what will happen next, how the story of Pearl and Martin will resolve itself. Will she find James again? Will they reunite? And what about Martin and Roma?
No one talked much about my mother when I was growing up. All I knew for sure was that she was a teenager when she fell pregnant and that Martin had hardly known her when he got her up the duff. She died of pneumonia shortly after my birth. I’ve never seen a photo of her but my father always told me she was unusually beautiful, with cascading black hair and wide amber eyes. She was also a fabulous dancer and used to do impersonations of Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandee, a film I’ve watched over and over again, just to imagine her in the role.
My own son has never had to resort to such lengths in order to know me. Even though his mother and I broke up after about a year, we shared custody of Arnhem, who’s now twenty-four. He mainly grew up with his mother’s people, the Bundjalung of northern NSW, but would always spend school holidays with me.
In fact, I last saw him only a few nights ago, at the Deadly Awards at the Opera House. It was the first time a father and son had been honoured at the same ceremony: me for services to Indigenous literature; Arnhem for his choreography with Bangarra Dance Company. We had a great night together with all our old mob and ended up at the Iguana Bar doing tequila shots and dancing to Barry White.
Where the fuck are those tweezers? The phone starts to ring and I let the machine pick it up. It’s bloody Brian Jackson again, asking me if I’ve found the tapes of the live recordings yet. Since I started listening to the cassettes a few weeks ago, I’ve been avoiding him. I can’t bring myself to hand over any of this material until I know how the story ends, until I complete the job.
I start going through the bathroom drawers, which I really must get around to cleaning out. I find a set of my father’s old dentures, a twisted tube of menthol ointment, Pearl’s grey pumice stone, a bottle of bubble bath still containing the dregs of some rude yellow liquid, and plastic prescription containers—some still half-full—that date as far back as 1989.
I haven’t smoked a cigarette for nine years but I’m suddenly dying for one. I dump everything on the floor and claw my way through miniature bottles of hotel shampoo, spools of dental floss, bobby pins and emery boards. I search the next drawer, and then the next, packed with shower caps, razor blades, Band-aids and foot powder. I’m just about to break, to race up the street to buy a pack of Marlboro and a set of tweezers—in that order—when I remember Pearl often used to sit at an antique mirrored vanity that had once belonged to her grandmother, and which now stands in a corner of Clara and Aub’s former bedroom.
The room—on the second floor—hasn’t been touched since Pearl died, and when I open the door I inhale the tart sting of mothballs. It’s a large room, full of heavy wooden furniture and a canopy-covered bed.
I rush over to the mahogany vanity with the oval mirror. The drawers are tiny, as if made for elves. The first drawer: white face powder and puff and a metal hip flask still smelling of whisky. The second: three tubes of lipstick and a faded coupon for half-priced false eyelashes. The third: six plastic hair rollers and an old packet of pipe tobacco. The fourth: a nail file, clippers, a few false fingernails, a safety pin and, at the very back, behind a jar of Tiger Balm ointment, a pair of tweezers.
Back at my desk, I stuff one of my grandfather’s old pipes with the stale tobacco, light it and inhale. Suddenly, I’m both dizzy and slightly delirious, the tension draining away from me like dirty dishwater down a sink. After a few more puffs, I put the pipe down and pick up the tweezers. I lower them to the coiled tape, pinch one edge, and begin, very gently, to pull.
12 (cont.)
As Pearl headed through the pre-dawn darkness of Kings Cross and into Darlinghurst, she was relieved to be wearing Martin’s uniform again, to feel the rub of twill between her thighs, to hear the steady clump of his boots against the footpath. As she walked she chanted Martin’s serial number over and over to memorise it like a piece of music, or the telephone number of someone she’d recently met and whom she longed to see again. She wished she could move faster along the footpath, but the weight of the army pack, along with her brother’s tenor sax case, slowed her down.
As she approached the sandstone walls of Victoria Barracks, she felt at once terrified and intensely alive. She was moving
towards everything she now knew she couldn’t live without: the adventures she longed to have, the jazz she yearned to play, the only man she’d ever love. As she passed through the gates, it was as if she’d stepped over some invisible line that divided her past from her future, separated one fate from another, and no matter what painful death or glorious reward was ahead, there was no turning back now.
It hadn’t been easy to convince Martin that her plan would work. When she’d burst into his room six hours before and shook him awake, she’d already called Nora Barnes and had only a short time to put her scheme into action.
‘Mart,’ she hissed.
He stirred and glanced at the clock. ‘I just got to sleep, Pearl.’
‘Do you still want to get out of going to Moresby?’
He rubbed his eyes. ‘What?’
‘The army,’ she said, hardly able to contain herself. From the parlour she heard the grandfather clock chime ten-thirty. ‘Get up, we haven’t got much time.’
‘What the fuck?’ he groaned.
She quickly outlined her idea: he would dress in her clothes and assume her identity.
Martin rolled his eyes and lit a cigarette. ‘You think Mum and Dad aren’t going to notice that I’m not you? And have you thought about Hector?’
Ah, Hector. It was thinking about Hector that had precipitated the whole idea. Pearl explained that she’d called Nora Barnes to confide that she was having serious doubts about her marriage, but was terrified of how her mother would react if she called off the wedding; she’d probably kick her out of the house or—even worse—have her locked up in Hector’s asylum. Nora suggested that she could hide out on their farm if she wanted to disappear for a while. Now that Nora had a baby they could do with a hand.
Martin listened to Pearl’s so-called solution, frowning with confusion. ‘That all sounds fine,’ he said. ‘But how’s it going to get me out of New Guinea?’