by Gail Jones
Mrs Davoren offered no comment on a small girl startled by her own face. By way of reply, she said abruptly that her memory was going, but that she liked every day to surf through the past.
‘There are heaps of pictures on the web,’ she said. ‘It’s like opening the door to a lost kingdom.’
She paused to sweep biscuit crumbs from her lap. It was the action of one brushing at her floating thoughts.
‘My husband is there. Or at least his records, his traces. There’s even a photo from the war where he’s smiling in front of a plane.’ Mrs Davoren looked down. ‘Handsome,’ she added.
And to prove the point she rose, moved to her screen, unfolded on the desk, and with a deft fiddle found the proof within a few seconds. What to others was generic, the posed airman leaning with a slight swagger and squinting at the sun, sealed in the frame of a distant heroism, was to her specific, essential, and poignantly current. Together they stared at the long-dead face of Harold Henry Davoren. He was indeed handsome.
‘And here’s me,’ she added, clicking open a new window. There on the screen was a black-and-white photograph of a factory interior of some sort, women lined up at a table of what? Bullets, shells, possibly bomb casings. The women did not smile for the camera, but looked sombre in their work, their hands resting and hovering among deadly weapons. Frances scanned the image and saw the caption: Women in munitions factory, Hippodrome, Kalgoorlie, 1943.
There was a sensation of cloudburst, or wind, or whatever made the wild weather of sudden knowledge: Frances realised that Mrs Davoren, almost exactly Else’s age, had lived in the same place at the same time and may well have known or befriended her. There was a quake of time converging and the glare of coincidence.
Frances said nothing, but stared. Outside a truck passed by, and they were both distracted by the churn of its loud, rough rev.
‘And now I must get back to my work,’ Mrs Davoren said.
She dismissed her guest, pressing another chocolate into her hand as she left.
27
Fred remembered Else stepping from a tram on Federal Road. Her neat ankles and the flirty swing of her dress. The tram bore advertisements for Wolfe’s Schnapps and Nestlé Swiss Chocolate, Made in Australia. (Fred had tasted neither and thought how unworldly he must seem to her.)
Fred remembered Else in Fernie’s Grocery, turning away from him after an argument. Her cheeks were pink with annoyance and she wore a blue scarf at her neck, and he saw how it turned, ever so slightly, with her turning face. (He had an impulse to grab the scarf and pull her back, like men did in the movies. But he didn’t, he couldn’t.)
Fred remembered taking Else to a photographic studio upstairs in Hannan Street after they announced their engagement. The photographer placed Else on a cane chair beside a fern on a pillar, with Fred standing behind her, resting his hand on her chair. (He felt foolish and his high collar itched and irritated. But Else, in tulle, had never before looked so beautiful as when the white light flashed for an instant on her expressionless face.)
Fred remembered Else standing at a mine gate at the Boulder Block. A poppet head had been struck by lightning and collapsed into the shaft. They went to see it because Else’s cousin was trapped below, and she waited with her family for the good or bad news. She was the one, he remembered, who didn’t cry. (He admired her toughness, and almost fearfully, the hard quality of her stare.)
Fred remembered Else at the Hippodrome rink, before the war, not long after they met. She was roller-skating infinity, looping this way and that, crossing over in the middle, repeating her design. She swept like a bird over the shiny floor and was called out for breaking the circle. (The way her body bent in a dream-glide. He watched from the stalls. He was afraid to try skating himself in case, publicly and in humiliation, he fell.)
Fred remembered Else when Enid was born, a year after the end of the war. He returned once from work and found them asleep together, Else on her side, Enid still half-attached to the breast, and they were turned to each other, curved, as if fixed in a pod. (He took off his boots, so as not to wake them. He was a proud father, and doted on both their babies, but it was Mary, it was Mary, they secretly favoured.)
28
When the war came, Fred decided to join up, despite his life with Else and all she now meant. War was the adventure they all spoke of, the blokes in the mine. It was another big thing, like the darkness they worked in, like handling explosives, that might test a man truly, and prove his worth.
He needed both to be with her and to escape from her. This irresolution, and the gap in his life, were solved by the uniform, the distance and the community of men.
Fred was sent to the military training camp at Northam, an hour east of Perth. It was a vast arrangement of galvanised-iron huts and barracks in the hills around the town. There were long rows of beds with straw pallets and ablutions blocks with cold showers, and basic training, daily, with minimal arms. All the men acted tough. They stood like statues in stiff lines.
‘Toughen up!’ the sergeants shouted.
Once, coming from the munitions store back to the barracks, he’d turned a corner and seen two men bashing the dancer, Marty Friedlander. It was a shock to see a face that he knew, and the vision of coppery whiskers bloodied. The sound of Marty’s wobbly cries and the way he clenched under their fists and boots, the sense of having stumbled upon a defilement—these stopped Fred in his tracks. He stood for a whole moment, unable to move, but then flew forward and grabbed the bigger man by the shoulders, yanking him back, so that he lost his balance. With that, the other man turned, and locked his arm around Fred’s neck and pummelled at his face.
It was a clumsy fight, all mud and tussle, and when it was over Fred had a spattered shirt and bloody nose which made him look dramatically injured, as Marty was. Medics carried Marty away to be properly patched up. Fred felt guilty for having mocked this man, whom Else so admired and, he now grasped, other men seemed to despise. Spreading his swan wings and dying Pavlovian, the eccentric spasms of his musical arms and legs, the whole silly show of endurance dancing: these were behaviours, apparently, that few men accepted. Or was it his humour and his gentleness that the others sought to destroy? When next he saw Marty, he felt inexplicably ashamed. Marty walked with a limp and had a split lip and a face still purple from the bashing. He met Fred with a diffident shuffle and extended his hand. They shook, neither looking the other in the eye.
Later, he found they were in the same AIF division, bound for Malaya. When he shipped out with the 8th Division, he felt suddenly his own fear. What had he done, and why, leaving his lovely wife Else? By now he missed her so badly, she spilled into his dreams. Nightly he found her there, waiting, ready; and nightly he was disappointed and left alone. He laboured over a letter, but it was empty, insufficient. Prevented from revealing where he had trained and where he would be sent, he’d jotted a few chirpy lines—guess who I’ve seen here! Your favourite dancer!—and signed a cheesy SWALK, Sealed With A Loving Kiss, just as she had taught him. Nothing that was in his heart was written down. Nothing of the giant, heavy love that he bore for her. Nothing that meant anything true or sincere. She was a book person, and would know how inadequate he was, how thin in expression and dumb with real feelings. The soldiers were encouraged to send a letter before their deployment, so he sent it anyhow. He imagined her reading it in rosy lamplight, kissing the single page fondly, like a woman in the movies.
29
War huh
what was it good for
absolutely nothing
the cleaner’s radio
Clear today cleaner
words cleaner today the names
SWALK
Fred and Marty imagine And the few words he sent her but still
The people were saying
No two e’re were wed
But one has a sorrow
That never was said
Oh the singsong lovely lovey dovey
But still
&nb
sp; 30
Tea and television and tea and television
What Else? Who Else?
Enid it was Enid not Val
Val was the other one the black one the one they loved more
Val and Mary other sisters on a swing
skirts blown up blossom-like and their bare legs in sunshine
shining
The to and fro sway shape of another an other Enid chucking
stones at them poor Enid
Hands plumping a pillow
Oh Mary? Returned?
Oh light falling in a soft dusk and immensity in the window Oh
falling
Oh
31
Nell was awaiting Frances, who’d managed to get an afternoon free in the middle of the week. They would do the ocean walk, along the cliffs between the swimming beaches. They would have a good talk and find coffee in one of the Bronte cafés.
Nell tapped on Matt’s computer, roused it, and saw that he’d left the weather site open. For Matt it was less interesting to look out the window than to peer at the statistics of the weather, and she saw lit before her the flamboyant complication of the forecast. The page was for surfers and displayed information in both figures and graphics, numbers for primary and secondary swells, wind directions rendered in pointy triangles, as well as air and sea temperatures (both at 22 degrees). Concentric patterns, neat rows of arcs. There were the times for first light and last light, and for sunrise and sunset. She noted there were twenty minutes of light before and after the sun appeared and disappeared.
What might that sunless light-time be called, she wondered. Gloaming or twilight in the evening, but what of dawn light before sunrise? She was attracted to the arcane in-between of natural things, to these incongruities of time and vision and the riddle of pre- and post-light. In the bush, in the desert, pre-dawn was when the birds awakened, all melody and streaming song, announcing the ever-repeated new. Here, the sound of the sea was amplified, and down on the water perky surfers in glistening wetsuits were already tense and waiting, poised animal for the rush.
Below the numbers and statistics were a set of surfing photographs, lush curls of water elegantly falling, and men, all men, speeding high on a crest. Nell lingered over the photographs. They contained her secret ambition, but until she conquered her fear and became a better swimmer, she would not take lessons. Scrolling, she saw at the bottom of the page two shapes of Australia. The first, labelled swell, showed a lime-green ocean, full of lines in parallel arching towards the coast and swirling around New Zealand. The second, labelled wind, followed the same linear patterns, with arrows dispersed over an orange-coloured sea. The impression was of an entirely orderly field. Not a churn of mad water, not the Moskenstraumen; nor even a local dumper that hit the body like a fist and left the poor swimmer winded and half-drowned. There was a regular physics here, within waves, of swell and of flow.
Nell studied the images. It was Matt’s thing, calculation. She wanted only the hit, the immersion, and the ecstasy of a swim. Above all, she wanted eventually to surf, to ride all that energy and to be part of that watery religion.
Frances wore her joggers and a practical broad hat. They set off together towards the cliffs, each at first silent and uneasy, but as they found their stride, and their joint rhythm, their talk was released. From the sky they might look like insignificant spots moving along the vast curve of the cliff, with the Pacific restless and surging, clawing away at the rocks, and the little pathway a feeble intrusion in a place otherwise inhuman. The wave pool below, and the beach, and the apartments at the top of the cliffs: none of this counted. What counted was the whistling wind and the ozone and the hint of a whale fluke offshore, the sense of being at the very rim of the island continent. Each was solemnly impressed with this collection of scenes, sharing the changed dimensions, the motion and the light.
Frances spoke to Nell, for the first time, of losing Will. It was as if she had decided, two years late: today was the day. Walking alongside her sister, gasping up the steep steps, feeling the wind in her lungs and the stern logic of keeping pace, Frances spoke of Will’s decline and his stoicism in the face of death, but also of those moments both felt the despair of his leaving. She spoke of the television game shows, of Luke’s visit and the clownfish, and how odd it was that this small moment now seemed the main event of that time—a child, a picture book, the innocent luxury of imagining a future. She spoke of Will’s body towards the end, how it filled her with love; and how she had been unable to let him go until the nurse Liza had suggested it.
Frances’ tone was steady; she managed to speak without weeping. She bent to re-lace her shoe and when she straightened her body showed a burden gone.
Nell was wise enough to stay silent and let her sister say her piece. By the end they had walked the sea cliffs all the way to the Waverley cemetery. They found themselves dawdling along the grassy paths between Victorian headstones, reading out names to each other, and random dates, commenting on stone angels and left flowers and the broken containers of spent candles. There were lumpish, crooked monuments as far as the eye could see, plaques and crosses with the pathos of tilt and collapse. There were weeds and trees, the sense of a barely contained wildness. Unable to comment on Will, without the words or the wherewithal, Nell instead joked that the location offered a magnificent view for the dead. ‘Location, location, location,’ she chanted.
Frances smiled.
‘Give it ten years,’ Nell continued, encouraged. ‘Graves now, but soon apartments, with an infinity pool of teal tiles and views all the way to America.’
They were easy-going now; they could joke about the dead.
Wind swept at them with lively force and a kind of voice. There was a hot sun and glinting sparks on the surface of the water. Together they sat on a gravestone, facing the ocean, and each took a swig from Nell’s bottle of water. Neither spoke; something subtle and necessary had been resolved in the wash of white light and their unexpected pleasure in elevation. The cemetery was peaceful, empty and congenial. They sat still, just looking. Gulls called and swooped, seeming to bump on the wind.
‘Pacific,’ Nell named it, though all was swish and roar and waves bashing at the cliffs.
Frances said nothing in response and did not congratulate her wit. It occurred to Nell that her sister had no understanding of irony.
Then Frances turned to her and grinned. ‘Highly pacific,’ she said.
‘South pacifically, specifically,’ Nell replied.
Now tenderness and good humour passed between them. At length, they headed inland to find coffee and a sheltered space to talk.
In the café, they were on more public and clamorous territory. Away from the dead.
‘So, they might have met, years ago, Else and Mrs Davoren.’
‘So what?’ Nell could not be persuaded that this was of any interest to anyone.
‘What are the odds? Two women in their nineties, seeing them both on the same weekend, linking them when possibly they are historically linked.’
Nell remained indifferent. Pattern recognition, the first refuge of nutters: apophenia, encrypted signs, the weirdo fun of false connections. She knew all this stuff. Too well. But she resisted criticising her sister and changed the subject. ‘Matt thinks we should find our father,’ she blankly announced.
Frances was taken aback; it must have seemed a challenge. ‘Why?’
‘I guess he sees we’re fucked up and imagines this might help.’ Nell gave a rueful smile. ‘What do you reckon, Fran?’
Nell was conscious of the taunt of her words, and of Frances’ discomfort. She wasn’t sure why she’d had mentioned Matt’s suggestion, except that it helped to untangle her ravelled thoughts, and to release herself from the struggle of silence and control. Dr Wright would be pleased. Progress, he would say.
Frances said she’d consider it, but turned away, aloof now and flung into the depths of her own feelings.
Liar, Nell thought.
Confronted with this suggestion, she too had wanted to suppress it. (‘What’s the point?’) She too had been afraid to consider the proposition. Conjugal pressure, her own wish for distance: she felt vulnerable to voices that coaxed or instructed. Self-determination, was it too much to hope for? Nell rose from the table and paid the bill. Frances sat staring into space for a moment, and then joined her with a slight smile and a neutral thank you, as if nothing had been said.
Returning, they could see surfers in silhouette in the far distance, just off Bronte and Tamarama beaches. Far enough out to be floating above dark water and danger. Paddling, resting, watching the horizon for a set. Their black forms bobbed tiny, barely discernible, on the glary brightness; and they made a kind of bracelet shape, a loose curve on the furrowed shine, waiting patiently to rise up, to break open their brief communion, and be overtaken and carried forth by the heave of fast water.
32
Without telling Frances, and on the advice of Dr Wright, Nell visited Else.
She entered the nursing home filled with dread and foreboding. What act was this, pestered to behave, driven largely by guilt? How could she feel good playing the role of dutiful granddaughter, when she’d so assiduously avoided it and been determined to stay away?
The large woman on the reception desk had startling blonde hair, piled high with tin clips in the shape of butterflies. Nell walked past her and was called back and asked to sign in. She hesitated, knowing there was still time to leave, and was conscious of supressing a powerful urge to flee. The dim corridor awaited; a fluorescent strip flickered.