Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  What a laugh, by crikey. You wouldn’t be dead for quids.

  Afterwards, Marty came forward and spoke to Else. He approached with an exaggerated bow, doffing an invisible hat. And she responded likewise, with a curtsey, as if both recognised the other time-travelling from another era.

  What could Fred do with this newly mingled life? He knew that he was happy with Else, as one is happy in a dream. But there was fissure of feeling, a gap, that he had trouble crossing. He had the life of the mines daily to contend with—what he must do there, his focused work, his touching at the rim of danger. How he should speak, and the authority he needed to keep them all safe. And then there was all that Else embodied, adult play and dance, the fabrications of cinema, her miraculous joy at being alive.

  In the mines there was a merging of men with darkness, like an intimate skin, like a clasping to the breast. The first time he entered the cage he was dropped to level twelve. The lights on the plats flew upwards as the levels blurred past. He felt the drop in his guts and when he stepped from the cage he almost fell backwards. There was a yellow light in a wire frame and a rusted sign of mining regulations. Men paused for a smoke on the plat before they went in. Earth smell, body smell, rising and falling dust. A growl sound that seemed to come from the mouth of the tunnel. That first time left its mark. The dark matter of mining had claimed him.

  In the tunnels ahead of them, they saw men-shapes, of their own form and variable size. Sometimes men were there, and sometimes they were not. Sometimes the figures deformed and transmitted unspeakable fears, and you had to hold it together, stop shaking, or hurry to get out. Down the mines, all were superstitious and believed in fate. Many coughed like their fathers, and ruined their backs, or worse. You kept an eye on the new ones, who didn’t know when to stop the machine and assess the hole. You watched their backs, in singlets, straining at their work. You couldn’t be a sissie or a sook and your life depended on your mates.

  As they squatted at their cribs, they were mostly silent. But every now and then someone would spin a yarn, or tell a rude joke, or make a confession, their faces dramatic in the lamplight, hooded like monks and partially hidden. Fred told the story of Marty Friedlander and his antic dancing. Phar Lap Polka, imagine that! Bloody ridiculous. It amused his mates, but he felt disloyal to Else. The queer dancing man had been a wonder to both of them, bold in a mad way, original, and full of twisted spirit. And mockery of Marty Friedlander did not bring the worlds closer together.

  19

  No name no name but there he is in the penguin suit Flinging

  special and unlikely

  Aeroplane Waltz she knew that one

  Bzzzz

  Aeroplanes and birds Sky-dance yes and no What Bird is That?

  And Something Else Something Else

  There now she said it

  20

  Mary Mary

  My baby girl yes two

  two bawling bubs two more

  At the swing the little black girl pushing firm at Mary’s back the rush of her legs flying scoop and fall in the sheeny air

  Then Mary pushing Val her name yes Val Something or other Val flying in the same pattern of scoop and return

  Mary-Val Val-Mary my two lovely daughters

  Fred his hands trembling the second time he cried

  21

  Nell put it down to Frances ringing and talking about scale: that night, with chemical assistance, she dreamt of the Super Pit.

  She was down in its belly, searching for something lost, and daunted by the enormity of the hole she found herself in. Dreaming, she saw an inside-out and upside-down Babel, a tower inverted into the earth, all circular levels and steps of mythical incomprehension. And language useless, undone, in the face of what godless men might build.

  She was lighting a cigarette and offering one to Frances. But before her sister could be persuaded to take it, her fingers caught alight and she was blowing at them in panic. The more she blew, the more the unnatural fire took hold, so she saw her arm aflame, and then her chest, and then her clothes alive with flags of fire. There was no pain, but a frantic effort of extinguishment, or that was how, two days later, she placed it in words for Dr Wright.

  Only now, caught unawares, Nell made the connection. Else and Fred had taken the sisters to Carols by Candlelight at Centennial Park. Fred had left the mines by then and was on a pension; his lungs had packed it in. He coughed all the time and kept them awake at night. She was twelve, perhaps, and Frances ten. What year was that? 1988, the Bicentenary. The Celebration of Invasion. All this—summarising—she said in the clinic to Dr Wright.

  Here, you wanted a dream; I’ll give you a dream.

  In his characterless consulting room, Dr Wright looked interested. He pushed at the bridge of his glasses as if to say ‘go on’, and bent his head in submission to encourage her. It was this diffidence—and the beige furnishings—that enabled his patients to speak.

  Nell explained that she secretly enjoyed the annual outing to Carols by Candlelight, though she would never concede it and remained tough in her denunciation. But it was all the songs, and people joining together to sing them, and it was the faces, honey and bright, each with their illumining flame. She liked the way small children crawled into their parents’ laps, and the way families leant against each other’s shoulders, resting in pyramids, in the warm night air. She liked Silent Night, Holy Night, and Good King Wenceslas Looked Out, although she had only the vaguest idea of what they might mean. She loved the words, such charming words: ‘deep and crisp and even.’

  Nell was sitting with Frances and her grandparents, lost in a kind of reverie, imagining a track of fat footprints perforating the snow. In front of her sat a woman with a beehive hairdo; little flyaway strands were visible in the corona of candlelight. For no reason at all Nell leant forward, instinctively furtive, and with her candle carefully set the woman’s hair alight. The beehive must have been held together with a lacquer of hairspray, because it exploded in a whoosh and made a magnificent high fire. The woman screamed and waved her arms, but there was Fred, in a second; he’d leapt up and was smothering the lit head with a picnic blanket. Nell saw him pat the turban shape as he spoke crooning words of calm. ‘All right now, luv. You’ll be all right now.’

  He was a kind of hero, her pop, and she was the guilty one. But it occurred to nobody that a child might have deliberately set fire to a woman’s hair. Even Frances, she was sure, had not seen her crime. There was commotion and someone dashed away to call an ambulance. Then, almost as quickly, the commotion faded. Else was holding the woman now, and another, a friend perhaps, was tipping a bottle of fizzy cola over the burnt woman’s head. Frances was nearby, quietly snuffling into her sleeve. Else had taken up the chant: ‘All right now, luv.’

  Nell smelt the burnt hair and tangy cola as a kind of pollution; no more snow, no more deep and crisp and even, no more voices sweetly tuned to a chilly white Christmas.

  On the drive home Fred gave them a little lecture on being attentive with fire. ‘You’ve seen what can happen,’ he said. ‘How quickly it can take.’

  He clutched at the steering wheel and drove with the confidence of a man who believed that he’d saved a woman’s life. Else and Nell gave him his due and let him rattle on about heat variance and different types of flame.

  Frances was still teary. In the darkness of the back seat, Nell put her arm around her sister, resuming her position as the strong one, and virtuously comforting.

  Nell claimed she had forgotten this incident until the dream.

  ‘What a little fuckwit I was,’ she said to Dr Wright. ‘A right little bitch.’

  Dr Wright adjusted his glasses and made no comment. He was professionally blank. With doctorly care he shifted in his chair and cleared his throat. Nell had never told anyone that she’d set fire to a woman singing Christmas carols. It was like the assassination of a liberation priest in South America, as he held up the host.

  ‘And now you’re exa
ggerating,’ Dr Wright said softly.

  Nell liked Dr Wright. It may have been transference, or it may have been attraction, but she waited for such moments, when he subtly adjusted her perception of her past, or implied the inauthenticity of her dramatisations. His rebukes were reasonable and timed to halt her tendency to performance. He was a man about her age, early forties, mild-mannered and unstylish. He wore cardigans, which she was inclined to believe indicated social deficiency.

  ‘And Frances?’ he asked. ‘What are your feelings now about her?’

  ‘She didn’t see me set fire to the woman, so that’s something, I suppose.’

  It was an evasion, and a non sequitur. Nell paused. The doctor’s question was one she was unable to answer. Truly, what were her feelings now, about Frances?

  ‘You’re getting closer,’ Dr Wright said.

  ‘To what, exactly?’

  ‘A truth, your truth.’

  He had no idea, she thought, how much she withheld. What she could offer up to him in these sessions was only a fraction of what she hid.

  Nell caught the bus home from Dr Wright’s. She loved the Sydney buses, so easily maligned by those who never left their cars. The drivers reminded her of old-timers in Kalgoorlie, crochety men, mostly men, and self-enclosed, but generally kind, and keen to show off their skills. Many passengers said thanks as they left, and in return received a nod, or quick scan, or the lifting of a single finger. The buses seemed to Nell a small, contained world, admixing courtesy and efficiency as they rattled up and down the hills to the coast. Gazing at Bronte Road flowing by, tricked by motion and signage and the vague world beyond, she found her memory rumbled, and travelling a little further.

  When they arrived home that night, there was Aunt Enid—who detested the Carols—sitting in her summer dressing gown in front of the television. Else immediately began the story of the fire, and Fred’s flurry of action that had saved a woman alight. But Enid was bored. Her tough mouth held a sneer. She asked not a single question and returned her attention to the screen. Else and Fred both looked disappointed. Nell remembered taking Fred’s hand and saying, ‘Good on ya, Pop,’ and he glanced at her with pleased abashment. It was a fond, sweet moment. Else was already in the kitchen, heating milk in a saucepan. There were the domestic sounds of cups found, and milk poured, and the click of a cupboard door closed. Frances—now she recalled—had gone to their room. But Else, Fred and Nell sat at the kitchen table, drinking hot milk, caught still in the smoky spell of the night’s excitement, while Enid, stubbornly miserable, stayed in the front room with the television flicking its dull light across her ageing face.

  22

  Nell didn’t tell Matt. She’d sensed already how precarious their marriage had become, how she’d bedevilled him with her mopey moods and her forms of disengagement. He was the one who lived in the world, while she’d retreated and become less. Yet in spite of all they’d been through, he’d retained a constancy and faith. It would not help to know that his wife had once set a woman on fire.

  ‘You and Frances,’ he began, ‘you should find your father.’

  Always offering advice. And not for the first time on this theme.

  Nell didn’t appease him by answering; she turned away. Even Dr Wright had never been so direct. Matt was crushing garlic with a knife and cutting it into minute pieces: she heard the careful chop, chop, chop of his task. She was beside him, slicing tomatoes, watching them spill their bright innards.

  ‘I’m serious. Maybe try at least to find out if he’s still alive.’

  Nell could hear the plea in his voice for some end to her restlessness. Beneath the sentence she also heard: the missing father will cure you. This was not the day for an argument, so she said simply, ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘No need for a point. Why do you always want a point?’ Matt paused, perhaps hearing how exasperated he sounded.

  Nell left her cooking preparations and wiped her hands on a tea towel. She gazed at where the band of ocean would be. It was dark now, lowering, and the sky was filled with the concealed turbulence of an approaching summer storm. She could see the cubic lights of other apartments, and sometimes a figure moving across a lit window; she could look down onto the street and see head- and tail-lights, white and garnet, a neat double code, streaming towards and away. Everything had a quality of mosaic abstraction. It could be any city. Then Nell lifted the sash window and heard traffic and the nearby ocean. After rush hour, the sound of waves would be more distinct. The Pacific would flow into their small rooms with its pacifying thrum; it would soothe them both and remind them why they were here.

  It was a relief to make love. Nell clasped Matt and her body said come; so that he would forgive her distance and be enfolded by flesh. The light was out and they met easily in the sheltering darkness. She held his hips, steered him to her, felt their coming together as a reprieve. His familiar body, the sweat and the friction of his movements, composed a welcome of sorts, quietly easy and reciprocated. Afterwards, they heard Aronnax spring onto the bed, sensed her turn in a circle, pad thrice at the mattress, then flop in a ball at their feet.

  Matt was quickly asleep. Nell lay awake. It was a particular form of loneliness, to be awake when a partner slept. Insomniac time was dreadfully slow. She wanted time lapse and a vision of stars wheeling into sunlight, the sun bouncing up, and curving, and sliding down again to a brassy sky, and the sunset, and then a headlong rush back into night. She wanted a sped-up life, that took away this slow recollection. Talking to Dr Wright had changed the time and space of her days: the past was everywhere infiltrating. She was under siege to whatever vagrant bits of childhood returned.

  The Super Pit was visible from space. Everyone said so. She remembered the day of its inauguration, the mayor, the mining officials, the politicians in their grey suits, the way her class had to stand in the sun, squinting in lines on a dais, and sing the national anthem. As a child she imagined herself in space with a small rocket strapped to her back; she would look down and see the Super Pit reduced to a dark blot. It reassured her to imagine in this way, lofty and unconcerned.

  Three to four times a week, there was blasting at the Super Pit and around it the earth shook. Their house was close enough to receive the letter drop, warning in advance of each blast. So three to four times a week, they knew beforehand of the ground made shaky and unstable, the dust fluffing up, the curtains aquiver and the teacups tinkling. Fred mentioned the subsidence, in ’42, of the Perseverance Mine. He talked of half a house falling into a hole in the ground, and a poor mongrel at the bottom, yelping and howling. The girls found this tale terrifying. The detail of the dog in the hole seemed an especial calamity. Fred suggested to Else they might move to somewhere further out, to the south, or across Hannan Street. Enid was afraid, he said. In truth, they were all afraid.

  But Else wouldn’t hear of it. Else was not afraid. She would not be moved.

  They stayed in the Midas Street house and it was Nell, the strong sister, the one who toughed things out and misbehaved, who was convinced they would crash into a giant hole or be blown sky high by a misplaced charge. Their trembling house, their own instability. She told no one of her fears and was jittery only in private. She ridiculed Enid, who had taken up crochet, her fingers fast and nervy, to calm herself down. All the while her own self, the self inside, had trouble staying still. It was a fitful, alarmed presence, with the whoomp-whoomp, whoomp-whoomp of heavy heartbeat when the blasting happened nearby.

  23

  When the place was still called Hannan’s Find, he was already a legend. Other men pointed him out or wanted to shake his hand. He was invited to speak, to officiate, to donate, to pronounce, or simply to appear. Paddy Hannan had a glow of good luck around him, as if he was a man apart, a living phosphor, as if he shone as a yellow beacon in the warm desert dark. Gold assayers showed him specimens, poor miners asked for tips, strumpets proposed. In 1897, a tree was planted to mark the spot of the first find; the plaque said
that Florence Snell, stepdaughter of the mayor of the new town, wielded the spade in honour of the three men who’d found the ‘Colours of Gold’.

  The plural perplexed those assembled for the unveiling, who knew gold to be singular, and of only one colour. Paddy, driven to the ceremony as guest of honour in a carriage drawn by five horses, was one of the perplexed.

  The clout of the find had left everyone stunned. Solid buildings emerged, rushed and swift. Ten thousand miners, houses, horses and carts. A town appeared, so it seemed to Paddy, almost in an instant. At its centre, abnormally wide streets were laid out to accommodate the turning of camel trains, and a series of elegant hotels popped up to compete along Hannan Street. The Palace, the Exchange, the Duke of Cornwall, the York, the Oriental, all two storeys with turrets, flags, shaded verandahs and curved stairways. Paddy’s favourite was the Oriental: its sandstone, its arched and decorated windows, its blue-painted domes, topped by twirling tin vanes—a part of the Oriental world, a Xanadu, had fallen from the sky. Soon there was a railway, and a Railway Hotel, and electric trams rattled and rocked in all directions. As mushrooms grow, so did the town, absurdly flourishing in a cluster where nothing might be expected.

  Already there was talk of Kalgoorlie as the capital of its own colony, Auralia. So wealthy a place could surely make its own rules; it needed no Australian federation to carry or approve it. A delegation summoned Paddy to the smoking room the Oriental Hotel and bothered him with ambitious Auralian schemes. Bearded men with bellies and linen suits flapped open an Australian map, defining the borders of the new golden territory. The map was the colour of watered whisky and seemed to proclaim not just colony, but profit. Money speaks, they said. Money rules.