Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  Fred felt no pity for the Japanese; that would have to come later.

  He felt only the vacuum of so much now gone.

  He had no pity left, not a bit, not even for himself.

  39

  Kelly-skelly-man that’s what he said

  That thin a breath would blow him away

  A stranger then his face

  changed

  part of him gone

  But he came back to her came into her and first there was Enid then Mary

  40

  Enid then Mary

  Then Enid and the bubs

  Mary of the Sorrows oh

  And that statue in St Marys with Mother Mary weeping

  And the shine of the teardrop and the head ringed with stars

  And the face oh the face inclined so sadly

  Someone said they were real tears

  you could feel the real wet

  but she Never

  Never once felt the real wet of believing

  She didn’t believe in God there now she said it

  She believed only in Mary

  41

  Frances on the phone, saying, ‘No problem, sweetheart.’

  Sweetheart: there it was again. No one used this word now. Nell had not heard it for years until it popped into her mouth when she saw Else.

  Like ‘deep and crisp and even’, it had flown in from the past. Nell knew that her talks with Dr Wright were opening cracks for words to emerge from; words and particular moments that been long forgotten. She’d considered terms like repression and the unconscious the clichés of a privileged class, those wealthy enough to afford sensitive forms of distress. There were so many cherished syndromes these days, and proudly owned pathologies; so many boasts of what she felt instinctively should be private and hidden. Alarums of ego, refined disturbances. But she understood now, almost against her will, how histories that she’d lost, whole stages of knowledge, could be reassembled by uttering a few words or describing a bizarre dream. For her, sceptical by habit, this had been a revelation, that feeling might take form in this way, become actual again and continuous; that lost memory might return intact and vivid as yesterday.

  Else had always told them not to dwell on the past, and she’d taken her at her word. She’d practised forgetting, wanting more room for a future, away from the mines, and the goldfields, away from the Super Pit and the dust and the tremble of the house.

  It was like the lull in a comic-strip storm, when cauliflower clouds part and striated beams shine and there is an instant, surprising clarification of vision. In the clearing Nell remembered lying in her bed, stricken with scarlet fever. She felt that she would burn up and never recover. It was a kind of punishment for the woman at the carols. It was a retribution. Her head was aflame. Her entire body shone red like sunburn and was appallingly itchy. And there was Else, leaning over her, wiping her limbs with a cool rag, flapping it open, dipping it in a bowl, wringing it out, and then wiping with more water to console and save her. There was Else whispering above her, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart,’ with Frances’ peaky face peering from behind her shoulder, and more cool wiping and touching and loving reassurance. No doctor had been called. Children with scarlet fever were usually placed in quarantine, and Else should have notified a doctor and sought antibiotics; but she nursed Nell herself, with a stubborn belief in her own power to heal. Frances did not contract scarlet fever. She lay on her bed reading, watching her sister suffer under Hokusai’s giant wave. Sometimes she read to Nell, as Nell had read to her when she was the one coloured and blindly inflamed.

  St Mary’s sent someone over to ask why the girls weren’t at school. Else stood her ground and downright lied. Their secret, she said. ‘We wouldn’t want to worry them, now, would we?’

  But the nuns would know, Nell thought, just as they knew the mind of God.

  God was inside their brains like sparks between wires.

  God visited swiftly and shrewdly, with the legless running of dreams.

  The nuns would not be so easily tricked.

  Nell felt a wind inside her head when Frances said the word ‘sweetheart’. She might topple over. Aronnax looked at her inquisitively and sprang onto the armchair with ginger speed. As in most households, it was the cat who controlled the space; the cat was boss. Nell gave way.

  In their small apartment with its regulation peach-coloured walls—the palette of real estate fashion of the 1970s—Nell stepped back and leant in the doorway. It was propping her up. How did she find herself here? How had she moved from tough one and sweetheart to this mess of a woman? She considered going for a walk, to the shops or the beach, or doing a little yoga to recover her poise. But instead she stilled herself and breathed deeply as Dr Wright had taught her. She thought of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and casually looked for it on her bookshelves. It was not there. It had never been there. It had been left behind years ago, guiltily returned to the Mechanics Institute, or perhaps even destroyed or taken away with Else’s things. Most likely Enid had thrown it out.

  Motivated now, Nell sat before her computer. There it was, under a tab for free books. Nell clicked on the link and the novel swooped in return towards her, accompanied by familiar black and white illustrations, Captain Nemo walking in his diving suit on the ocean floor, with the squid behind him, waving its fat-suckered tentacles. She saw the appeal of the image: Nemo’s glorious freedom underwater, wandering among fishes, and the omnipresent thrill of a monsterly danger.

  Now Aronnax leapt onto her lap, deciding to rest there, to bestow. Nell settled and read.

  It had been the narrator’s enthusiasms that initially compelled her. Pierre Aronnax was a Frenchman, travelling on the Abraham Lincoln in a quest to find a sea monster. He was all curiosity and impeccable manners. When the sailors first saw the monster, covered in profound darkness, the descriptions were of light:

  At two cables’ length from the Abraham Lincoln, on the starboard quarter, the sea seemed to be illuminated all over. It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon. The monster had emerged from some fathoms of water, and then threw out that very intense mysterious light mentioned in the report of several captains. This magnificent irradiation must have been produced by an agent of great SHINING power. The luminous part traced on the sea an immense oval, much elongated, the centre of which condensed a burning heat, whose overpowering brilliancy died out by successive gradations…

  Reading these words had been giddy pleasure for the sisters. Aronnax was the only man who knew that the light must be electric, but absurdly still imagined a narwhal or ‘formidable cetacean’. This contradiction amused them. Nell had chosen a single sentence to entertain Frances—It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon—and it had become a kind of private joke between them, to say with amusing formality, ‘this is not what it seems’, or ‘what an idiot’, or ‘something here is amazing; look’. It was their top-secret code. Sometimes too they talked of agents of great SHINING power. No one knew why the girls giggled, or what they meant, and as she read the words again, Nell was struck by their canny discernment, that together the sisters had found a useful witticism to enjoy and adopt.

  Aronnax was excited. It was his first encounter with the sea monster, Nemo’s submarine, the Nautilus.

  Nell pushed the cat from her lap and rose to make coffee. So now she had deep and crisp and even, and sweetheart, and it was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon.

  Dr Wright would be pleased.

  This was the first time since childhood that Nell had looked again at the context of the sentence. The weight and solemnity of the prose surprised her, the small print, the stern intimidation of the adjectives. But the sisters had found something there that served as surrogate meaning. Words could do this, chimps with typewriters could produce an idiot Hamlet, Nell and Francis could enclose mysteries in one abstruse line. Minus explanation, pseudo, but usefully theirs.

  Yet Nell was not sure how these words linked to her adolescent illness, or to
her unremitting sense of anxiety. She felt defined by an infirmity she could not locate or name. Dr Wright was inclined to avoid diagnosis. She must be patient, he had counselled. These conditions take time. These conditions resist labels. Throughout their sessions, he wore a thoughtful expression. So, like a novice in a cloistered order, Nell tried daily to learn patience, as if it was prescribed as a spiritual exercise. Mostly, she felt defeated, or simply unsure. It was like walking into a room and then forgetting why one had done so. The everyday failure, minor in itself, that might suggest a larger loss of mind, as one turns blankly, seeing a wardrobe, a bed, a basket of dirty clothes, and wonders what intention might unite or make sense of the glint of her own face beyond, resting depthless and perplexed on the wardrobe mirror.

  42

  Nell remembered, now: she had told only Fred.

  The sisters decided early on that Else was unreliable with illnesses. It scared them that she would not seek help but kept them in the house, so that she could play nurse.

  Nell was not sure why it began, but intuitively knew it was an illness. At fourteen, almost fifteen, her disquiet took form. She was convinced that the Russians were using the television to communicate with her. Its electrical waves, its blinking light and its jumble of mixed messages; all were a valuable cipher. She did not cease watching television but did so in a state of dread. She tried to find clues that would prove her hypothesis. She tried to figure out exactly what was being said, worried she might be given a quest, or a task, or some kind of test of her skill. She might be called upon to protect her family or tell them when to flee. In this confusion, her sense of responsibility was keen, so she felt doomed both to watch, and to be afraid watching.

  Repetitious advertisements were the centre of her mad attention. There was always something whizzing out of space to shine a dull surface, or gigantic hamburgers spilling their guts, or children romping innocent into the arms of look-alike parents, all gullible with joy and reckless hope. There was always shampoo and detergent and toilet cleaners, with dandruff, grime and germs that looked like cartoons. There were numerous cars with exceptionally good-looking drivers, and others turning in the street to watch as they sped from the city onto winding mountain roads. At some stage Nell thought that hardware store advertisements might have the answer: it was their frequency and the fact that they were always third in a row of four. Friendly people held up power tools or offered advice on fences. This was way too suspicious. These people were in a uniform of green aprons and offered the lowest price. They smiled with confidence as the banner of their store swung into view.

  There was a point at which Nell believed that, if she deciphered these ads alone, she would know exactly what the Russians intended. As she pieced together the images, she began to see malevolence everywhere. Everything carried intricate danger and a spike of zany meaning.

  Fred listened carefully. He took Nell to a doctor, who referred her to another doctor, who prescribed antipsychotics and a short stay in a clinic attached to the hospital. So Else eventually found out. But in the beginning, it was just Fred and Nell, caught in the confidential task of seeking help together. Nell held Fred’s hand, even though she was too old to do so. And he was pleased—she felt it—to be trusted in this way. Yet Nell’s dark, busy thoughts fluttered like fruit bats; her mind was all wings and would not be still. The first doctor had shaken Fred’s hand, ignoring her for the most part, and she noticed that they both wore RSL badges. What might this mean? When Nell described her panic, she believed she sounded persuasive. The mysteries of rays and TV waves rippling through the air; the sumptuous evil of Russians that she knew of from movies: together these made her a target and an intelligent dissident.

  The doctor wrote notes in his pad and asked formula questions. ‘And how does this make you feel?’ he asked. ‘And why do you think these messages are for you?’

  Nell knew that the exactitude of her observations was her proof. Fred fixed her with sad, confused eyes, blew his nose and looked into his lap. His face was slack, dragging. She saw how old he was and wondered if he had any idea of what malicious technology might do. When he lit up a ciggie outside, cupping with his shoulders against the wind, his hands quavered with fear for her. She looked around and saw the indifference of others. No one noticed an old man standing with a girl; and no one knew what momentous information she had disclosed. An ambulance arrived and offloaded a patient on a gurney, with eyes tightly closed. Just grey curls, rushed away, and the fading echo of nurses’ footsteps as they headed through silently parting doors. With the presumption of youth Nell said crudely, ‘I think that one is dead.’

  Frances and Else visited Nell in the clinic. Else strode to the chair in the dayroom and sat beside her. She placed her hand nurse-like on Nell’s brow, as if holding her head in place. Frances stayed back. Nell saw her in the frame of the doorway, hesitating. Then Frances advanced, came close and bobbed down to her level. She looked directly at her sister, leaned near enough to breathe onto her cheek, and whispered:

  ‘It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon.’

  How long that moment lasted. Nell was dim and timeless with whatever they’d given her and saw her sister through a filter of muddling chemical agents. But she knew this sentence, their sentence, and smiled her recognition weakly. Her little sister, there in a halo of sallow light, was speaking the truth, avowing their complicity, expressing in ritual words their special refrain. Frances knew too, she realised, of the sinister television, and the Russians, and their machinations through the televisual waves. She stupidly giggled, then began to cry. Else was mopping at her cheeks with a handkerchief, again taking control, and again she was saying, ‘Sweetheart, sweetheart.’

  Nell did not immediately settle. For a while after the clinic, especially when she messed with her medication, she thought the Russians were back, this time poisoning their toothpaste. She stopped cleaning her teeth and was alarmed that her family continued to do so. Later, she entered a brief stage of pyromania. Often, it was just flicking lit matches into letterboxes and watching the mouth flare yellow and pour out smoke. But once she lit a fire at school, in a wastepaper basket, and was told to pray for intercession to Saint Dymphna, patron saint of mental illness. She was suspended from class.

  It had been such a glorious blaze. Serenely, she’d stood by, watching the flames catch. Others were in a state of gratified outrage. Convent girls loved a naughty act which affirmed their own virtue and Nell, though adrift, enjoyed the power of notoriety. But Sister Joseph panicked and screamed and flapped about. She shouted, found water, made an unholy row.

  Fred died two months later. Nell had just turned fifteen and Frances was thirteen. Nell understood that the consultation with the doctor was their last intimacy together, his old hand in hers, his shaking cigarette near Emergency, how he turned away to exhale smoke and hide his own loving worry.

  43

  A visitor with a moustache combed neat as a toothbrush was pestering Paddy Hannan for his story. He had a pencil and a notebook and sought to write it all down. A literary man, he was, all neat upholstered in fawn tweed, with a decorative bowtie and the shiny discs of owlish spectacles. He shook hands like someone soft, who had never lifted a shovel.

  In Brunswick, now an old man, Paddy had imagined himself protected from his fame and hidden away. He lived a quiet life. Mass at St Ambrose, a walk in the park, meals with his nieces’ and nephews’ families. Mary and Ellen for company, and his porridge at seven, lunch at noon and milk chocolate at five before supper. John, the eldest of his brothers, who came to Australia not long after him, was always around for a chat and a smoke.

  Ellen showed the visitor into the front room, drew open the curtains and offered tea. She asked the visitor if he was partial to a wee bit of seed cake. He accepted. So Paddy was obliged to sit with this man, Thomas Something or other, and endure at least a morning tea’s worth of bothersome questions. He answered evasively and could see the frustration mounting in his interlocuter, wh
o had a nervous habit of twirling his pencil as if it were a miniature baton. In the kitchen, Ellen was humming ‘Love thee dearest, love thee’ and this distraction did not help the composure of either man. She was rummaging in drawers and banging pans to remind them she was there.

  Thomas wanted detail, he said, and some of the early life. He asked Patrick Hannan what he remembered of his childhood. County Clare? The Great Famine? The life of his parents?

  Paddy replied impassively, ‘I remember nothing.’

  This was not true. But how could he say that his own life was largely incomprehensible to himself? How could he hope to summarise?

  He sipped his black tea, all companionable and friendly-like. He did not take cake. He corrected a few dates—when he prospected in New Zealand, when he went to South Australia for a while, the date he left for the west, but was otherwise unhelpful and unforthcoming. When the man had finished his seed cake, Paddy rose from his chair, extended his hand, and said, ‘Good to meet you.’ Thomas Something was surprised: Patrick Hannan had a reputation for politeness. But he was being dismissed, and told not to return.

  In the afternoon, Paddy caught the tram into town to sit in the library. No one recognised him there, no one would ask for his story. Just another grey-bearded old man, turning the thin pages of a newspaper, sitting under the great dome of the library in its watery blue light. He loved the space there, so high and open above his head, the octagonal tiers, the wide annulus, the skylights symmetrically arrayed. After shafts and tunnels, after tents and tin cottages, this was like sitting inside the skull of a god. He loved the green bells of lamplight, and the way the desks radiated in lines from a centre, like the spokes on a wheel. He sought his usual chair, folded himself there, and felt as occasionally he did in a church, that he was part of a larger design, one that might be seen from the sky, the counterpart of vault, of asterix, or the simple spoke.