by Gail Jones
Paddy contemplated the visitor with the toothbrush moustache. He would not admit him again. What had accumulated in his life could not be buttoned down in a neat package in the shape of a man. He felt embarrassed to be the centre of attention; he felt unworthy. His mother had once said, ‘Gold can put a halo on the devil,’ and he understood this now, the glister of supposed riches, the disguising effect, the way men would trade their souls for the mere rumour of a shine. ‘For what shall it profit a man?’ He’d seen what gold could build and destroy, what toil, what fortitude, what dignities and indignities.
Paddy had become a reader. He liked to sit still. He liked to know what was going on in the world. Staggering, it was, the war in Europe, and so many dead, and the Easter business, oh terrible, in Dublin town. It was more than a world away, but still he sent his thoughts over there, imagining those men and women fighting for Ireland, their families grieving, sweet Jesus, when it all went wrong; and such terrible trouble, and such troubles still to come. In the paper there was a grainy photograph of Henry Street, after the Rising, with the post office just a shell, and rubble lying all around. He stared at it, disbelieving: terrible, terrible.
‘The Dublin Post Office, fancy,’ he later said to his nieces.
And he thought of his own parents, long dead, and all the missing of Ireland, all who left, he among them, and would never, ever return. What a sorry race, the Irish, doomed to endless leaving. Turning the large pages carefully, Paddy looked further at the paper, tilting for the light and scanning the long, smudgy columns. But he felt feeble-minded and dispirited with the news of the Rising. Men lying dead in the post office, slain. He was unable to concentrate. Under aureoles of benign lamplight, he felt himself splotched in shadow.
At length he roused himself, checked his pocket watch, and realised that he was needing his afternoon chocolate. Paddy collected his coat and umbrella, touched the nose of the giant brass lion to the left at the top of the library steps—a kind of superstitious gesture he had no explanation for—and set off, preoccupied, up Swanston Street. There was a light Melbourne rain and the air was ashimmer, as if in the wake of a receding tide. Distant thunder could be heard. A storm was approaching. Pedestrians were hurrying now, popping open their umbrellas, closing them again as they leapt on a tram or inside a shop. Coats shone with rain-slick; everything was flooding with light, everything seemed to him in a process of furling and unfurling. He would have stood there simply looking, had not a speedy young man almost bowled him over, rushing towards him, unseeing, in the direction of Lonsdale Street. The man was pock-marked and made Paddy snatch at a shred of something forgotten. Then he was gone, and the flimsy shred too was gone, and there remained just a sour whiff of wet clothes, and a sudden sad tiredness, and the need to get home for his chocolate and his tea.
And oh, it came over him as the daylight was fading. By Argyle Square on Lygon Street, Paddy might have sat down and wept. He remembered tussocked fields and the slang along the River Fergus, he remembered the haggard in autumn, full of cut hay, and the fields during the Hunger, bulging with blighted potatoes, all mushy and black and dooming them to a starving. Faces, he remembered faces, stained at the mouth with bright green; and the eyes in a muddy scalp, ill-fated and shadowed. Thomas Something’s rude questions had turned the soil within him, like the sod’s damp base found by a spade inside gravel, darker with the wet and long-hidden, darker and richer, and smelling of life and death and what cannot be seen without the turning.
44
Paddy was five when it began and almost ten when it ended, and though little, he saw too much for any clever forgetting. All that the Hunger meant and brought with it was deposited inside him, like mud layers and turf and standing stones piled high; and there were no words to say it, and he had never told anyone, but stored it in pictures, those deaths, those souls stricken and piteous with want. His father had poor-relief work, helping to drain the Fergus, so had a wage for a while, sixpence a day with the Public Works, before that stopped, one day, and the road building, too, and more and more headed off to break stones in the workhouses, or just to die, or to try to get a passage across the water. And there was a scalp not far away with a small family in it, just a hole in the ground for their shelter, and them looking out at him passing with their black, sunken eyes; evictees, his father said, at least we have a roof still; and there was that other family that they saw, a mother with a babe and a boy, their mouths green from the nettles and the grass that they’d eaten, fallen together, interlaced, just in the field behind the Abbey, for who knows how long, dead and unburied and under the sky, for the birds and foxes to pick at; and his father made him bring bracken to cover them before they found the priest; and he pulled at the scratchy twigs and did his very best, but still they could be seen, a bit of the woman’s face and her amber hair, and her withered dug, which he turned away from, and the hand of the boy his age, that he tried to kick under cover, but it was stiff and didn’t move and he felt so tearful seeing his boot strike the boy’s bony hand and trying, and trying again, to hide it away. And the other lads, like himself, in rags begging for a little stirabout, then disappearing who knows where, and who knows too if they even had a Ma and a Da; and the evictions and the stealing and some transported to Tasmania, all the better maybe than to waste away with the wanting; and the worst of it was the fellow who killed all his family of six, with two already gone, and each of them aching with hunger and going anyway, his father said, but still a sin and still wrong, he said that too; and when he heard this Paddy panicked, he was anxious that it might not be his choice, that sometimes adults did sinful things because the hunger was too much to bear, because it was bigger than all of them, and better off dead, because it was all darkness and frightful and no one knew when it would end.
45
The fleshy heads of hydrangeas, blue, mauve and pink, crowded the path to Mrs Davoren’s front door. They suggested the perseverance of voluptuous life against the strictures of fussy pruning and the old woman’s wish to control. Elsewhere straggly plants were tethered with stiff plastic ties or held upright by sticks.
Mrs Davoren was surprised when Frances knocked in the morning; it was not one of the casual encounters they relied on to keep their small stream of talk flowing.
‘What has happened? What is wrong?’ Her grey face looked briefly afraid.
And so they began a little awkwardly, Frances calming her, then reminding her of the image of Mr Davoren, handsomely standing in front of the plane; and then the moment she’d shown herself, in a collective photo, in the workshop at the Hippodrome.
‘Munitions factory,’ Mrs Davoren corrected.
There was careful hedging, governed by the polite wish not to intrude, until Frances finally came out with it, asking if she once knew a woman named Else Kelly. Else.
Mrs Davoren looked confused at first, then her expression showed that she remembered. With a voice full of disapproval, she said, ‘Ghastly woman, yes. A complete bitch, if you pardon my French.’
There was a pause. Mrs Davoren saw Frances’ embarrassment, and then made the connection. ‘Not your nan? Oh dear.’ There was the tense burp of a quick laugh.
They were each reconstructing politeness, each wanting to know more; there was a flurry of apology, and the wish to sound reasonable.
Frances heard that Else was considered a bit ‘loose’ and a show-off. That she may have had a fling with that dancer, Marty, and that she had kissed Harold Henry once, and during their engagement, the bitch, she said again, still mightily aggrieved. Else was too pretty and too popular for other girls to like her, and wilful, too, and had married the lovely Fred Kelly—a surprise to them all, him being so quiet and teetotal. They thought she’d catch a mine manager or a businessman, with those kind of looks, copied from movies, with her hair marcelled and lightened and the way she danced and did the voices.
‘Always,’ said Mrs Davoren, ‘making a spectacle of herself.’
Frances had rarely heard her
so talkative and insistent on her own judgement.
She added—perhaps realising how churlish she sounded—that she and the other girls had been rather envious of Else, and seeing her spirit and boldness understood their own timidity.
‘But she shouldn’t have kissed him, all the same,’ she said sternly, for good measure. She held her liver-spotted hands in a shield at her chest, proclaiming her own righteousness in this historical competition.
Frances walked the short distance back to her own place not knowing what to do with this meagre information, just a few gossipy lines about Else, that made her sound petulant and self-centred. Along with her mother and her father, Else remained a mystery, the one who had been there all their lives, taking charge, offering homilies, never once consulting a doctor, and confident, if rather grumpy, in her forms of grandmothering.
Vulnerable, too, to Nell’s crafty spite. She had seen Else weep with frustration at Nell’s misbehaviour. The contradictions seemed larger now, and more like faults of character.
Churned up, Frances decided to go for a run. She still had time for a run and a shower before her afternoon shift at the gallery. She changed quickly, laced her joggers, did a few hamstring stretches, feeling the delectable pull of her muscles and a return to the inside of her own body. Like Nell, she relied on physical integrity when the metaphysical failed. She bounced a little on her heels, then set off, running along the hot footpath, down the street that sloped to the water, swerving to avoid small obstacles, dogs and children, pacing with her own breath and stride until she achieved a rhythm, a stable rhythm, around the grass oval at Jubilee Park.
Today, she needed to run around the oval. She did not want to speed off under the fig trees or follow the track along the bay; she wanted ravishing repetition and the security of not looking.
She was aware of how bright it was, and the sun on her nose and neck and the beginnings of sweat under her arms and on her warm brow. She was aware of rising breeze and the swooping flit of swift native finches, and of the dollops of green flashing by, the vibrations of leaves in windy light. But she found a firm stride, a committed regularity, and in this she discovered a small quotient of happiness. No: she was feeling largely happy. Why not consider the word; why not admit the feeling? It had been impermissible during the time of Will’s illness and dying; she’d forgotten this radiant opening of simple times and things. Happy Frances paced around her own diorama, repeated the oval, the Jubilee Oval, the easy jubilation. She felt herself steady with the purity of moving a stride at a time, one leg after another, each foot following her own steps, in a way she thought of as deep, and crisp, and even.
46
Luke was almost thirteen now, still spindly and beautiful. He was also on the cusp of transformation. He had a fuzz on his chin and a still-forming voice; and he was all gangly limbs and uncoordination. He had a way of sitting that implied his body was knotted—elbows butterfly out, knees drawn up, his large hands locked, entwined and unstill. Frances watched him bend over his phone in religious concentration. All thumbs, texting. She noticed how much he resembled both Mark and Will, the mysterious betokening children carry, unaware, for the satisfaction of their elders. His dark eyes, the distinctive angles of his face. An openness he had, a way of declaring interests that she and Nell had never quite achieved. Luke still treasured his clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris, proud to repeat the Latin), but his ambition now was to be a bass guitarist for a famous band. He practised irregularly but when he did, it was with fanatical intensity and a hunched druggie posture, his guitar held close and embraced as a companion body. Clownfish, this famous band would be called. Their world tour would include Iceland, which was completely cool, and Brazil, also cool, he added, keeping a straight face for only seconds before he burst into a smile.
Luke was spending the long weekend with her, while Mark and Sal took a break on the South Coast. Luke was not bothered by hanging out with his aunt and seemed unacquainted with the tedium most boys of his age usually suffered. Perhaps, Frances thought, in a year or two he might not feel like this, so she should make the most of his benevolence while it lasted. They planned a trip to the movies (whatever blockbuster currently played), a Thai takeaway and a swim at Bondi. She would allow him to stay up as late as he liked, and each morning she would encourage him to jog with her around the park. They would buy breakfast somewhere ‘cool’, somewhere with miniature tables on a pavement, waiters uniformly in black; and funky in their running gear, sweaty and pleased with themselves, they would eat pastries and drink coffee—which his parents didn’t yet allow.
There was a moment, late on Saturday night, when Luke appeared at the doorway of her study and said he’d like to talk about Uncle Will. It had never occurred to Frances that he might initiate such a conversation. He slipped into the circle of her lamplight, his face shining and intense. With emotional recklessness he said, ‘Do you think Uncle Will felt much pain, at the end?’
It was innocently direct, and not contrived to hurt.
‘Some, I think. The morphine was a help, but it made him constipated.’
Why did she say this? Why had she not avoided this sordid detail of his dying? Frances was on guard, wishing to supress the image she had of her husband’s body in its dire extremity, the skin gone yellow and blue, the reek of death adhering. There was no edification in disclosing the details, nor could she risk a description of his final days.
‘And Dad, will my dad get it?’ Luke persisted. ‘Will he die of it too?’
This boy wanted her to tell the future, or more mystically, to protect his father. So young to be imagining the death of his father. Frances thought of the demolition she and Will had watched together on television: the elegy of something strong in its forced unmaking; the dust rising, the swelling fizz in the air, the shape falling away in its slow-motion tumble. And Will saying, ‘Wow.’ Will enjoying the fall.
‘We all die, Luke. All of us. But there’s no pattern really. Your father is healthy, and his lungs have been checked. No shadows. Who is to say he won’t live to a hundred?’
Where was religion when you needed it, to reassure children of sparkling afterlife and the virtuous dignity of suffering? She could not admit that, yes, there were patterns, and that his father’s chances were not good. She did not know if Mark was in the clear; that robust lie—no shadows—simply glided from her mouth.
Luke seemed unsatisfied and plainly felt he’d been fobbed off. ‘But Grandad, too.’
‘I know, Luke, but he was down the mines, like my grandad. That was another time, a rougher time. All those old blokes… unsanitary conditions.’
Luke lingered, evidently unsure what to ask next. She had said so little and possibly sounded unconvinced by her own answers. And what if he might remember her saving lie in a tragic near-future, and came to despise the cowardice of this moment, when she could not honestly speak, when she could not say that, yes, his father would possibly suffer; yes, she was concerned about his father too; yes, even Will had spoken of his worry for his brother and described their tight, loving family as hopelessly condemned. She imagined future contempt. She imagined judgement.
But Frances was engaged in the business of reassuring her nephew. She had no option other than to keep his father alive, if only by not-saying, or by the magical thinking of evasion.
Her nephew was thin and insubstantial in his summer pyjamas. He stood for a minute, slightly shuffling, looking quizzically at his bony feet, then said, ‘Can we skip the jog in the morning and go straight to the beach?’
Already his shoulders had relaxed and he had reached for a pencil on her desk, which he rolled beneath his index finger, inadvertently, in a tiny kind of play.
He looked up and smiled at her. They were together again on the side of life.
Their connection was confirmed by this brief, lamplit exchange of a few simple sentences, and in the morning they would dive together into the mothering sea, and watch out for each other, and bodysurf to the shore, and fe
el in the now of their immersion a brief intimation of immortality.
47
When Fred returned from the war, he couldn’t settle until he’d visited Marty’s mother, Violet. She lived in Coolgardie and he rode his bicycle to her house. Easy to find, just off Burt Street.
It was good to pedal hard, to be by himself, to feel the heat from the road and the sky enlivening his withered body. It was good to be outside, and free of walls, and tunnels, and in the desert space of the goldfields. He was surprised to realise how much he loved this landscape—the gimlets and casuarinas, the sweeping hawks and the streaking crows, the high shine of the cloudless, metallic sky. He loved the stiff grasses and the saltbush and the tiny tough flowers. The wind moving through them, and the scent of the red earth, baking. Alongside, the white pipeline stretched all the way from Perth. He loved it too. Water in the desert. And the story of how the pipeline was built.
In the distance he saw a running emu, and then a cluster of wild camels. It pleased him to think of them out there, full of life, and trembling in a silver mirage which made them look like globes of water.
Fred was also surprised at the energy still living inside him, that he could pedal so far, that he could enter a trance of pedal-ling. It was an act of will, to visit Violet Friedlander, to discharge his duty. It was necessity; it was his task, and his responsibility to fulfil. To put to rest Marty with his black blood gurgling and spurting, and the bubbles of it, and the red of his insides cut open, and the worshipful and disgusted feeling of seeing him there, fixed to a pole as the effigy of some kind of sacrifice. What Fred had felt in his throat, and in his heart, which he thought would burst into pieces. What he’d wanted to cry out. What he’d dreamt of often since and woke from in fright.