Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  The return had been almost desperately confusing. Fred didn’t know what he felt when other men shook his hand, or asked after lost mates, or wanted to buy him a beer. The RSL sent him a little badge and told him to wear it with honour. Others seemed to know his story and asked him to speak. Someone wanted to record the details of the camps, and to collect ‘survivors’ tales’. Fred remained silent. There were no reliable words. He didn’t want to; no. It was not something he could have spoken of. Else understood, after a while, and loving him, stopped asking. She stopped others asking too, and became severe in his protection. Silence made it possible to keep going, made him appear capable, recovered.

  Violet Friedlander, the widow of a miner, and mother only of Marty, was standing in her doorway to greet him. She appeared diffident, still. Her house was old, made of tin and stone, and shady inside. It had a closed aspect, an air of secrecy, and the musty smell of things wrapped long ago in brown paper and hidden in leather suitcases. When he entered, Fred saw that the homely clutter was largely devoted to Marty: newspaper cuttings in frames, a poster or two, his photograph in many poses, dancing his idiosyncratic styles.

  Seeing him hot from the ride, Violet asked Fred if he’d like to splash himself with water, so he found himself standing in his singlet before a white enamel bowl on a sideboard, bathing in what felt like a ceremony of cleansing. His legs were still twitching with the aftershock tremor of the ride. Above the bowl hung a small mirror, oval-shaped, into which Marty must once have looked. Fred could not avoid glimpsing his own face, shiny with water and rosy with the sun, taking his friend’s place, if only for an insecure second. There was no escaping it. This oval that had once held Marty’s face now held his own, amazed to appear there and unworthily alive.

  Violet brought a pot of tea and a slab of fruitcake to the kitchen table. She set the teapot before him and placed the cups on their saucers and the spoons neatly alongside. She needed this formality, he saw; she needed the movement of her hands, and the calm routine of pouring and offering and sitting opposite him to ready herself. He studied her face. She had been a looker in her day; he could see that from her blue eyes and her straight, small nose, and the studio photo on the mantlepiece with baby Marty, hugely smiling, staring out at a promising future.

  And now her grief was palpable. It entered into the way she handed him a cup of tea, shaking, the way she sliced the fruitcake, ineptly, the way she pulled herself erect, struggling, and could hardly sustain her own upright posture. It was there in her mouth, choking, so that she spoke as if with impediment. For her, the strain of his visit was probably unbearable.

  Then he began. What he told her was a mixture of truth and lies, fashioned from the Marty he had known before the war. This Marty was the one who had died on the stage as a grinning black swan, springing back, undead, to dazed applause. Pavlovian resurrection, he’d once called it, larking about, being ridiculous.

  Pavlovian resurrection. A kind of echo in his head.

  How long ago had that been, Marty in St Mary’s Hall, and he and Else in the audience, affianced, holding hands? And that moment Marty sprang up, after everyone thought he’d been shot, and they’d all responded as if in a mystical fever, sharing one fretful, collective gasp.

  Fred said that Marty had kept up their spirits with his jokes and his dancing, that even when others had no will he still entertained them. He’d shuffled and spun and taught them the foxtrot; he had a quality—they all saw it—of unusual liveliness. Nothing defeated him, through all the hardships they’d endured. (Hardships: it was a useful, blanketing word. He hid under it all he could not describe and trusted that she wouldn’t ask.) Other men became bitter, Fred told her, but there was no bitterness in Marty. Other men lost hope, but Marty never lost hope.

  Fred said that her son died peacefully, half-asleep from an infection; that he’d mentioned her name towards the end and had asked him to visit. So here he was.

  Marty hung as a ghost between them. His mother turned her face away, protecting herself.

  There was a fearful moment in which Fred thought that she might ask for details, but she chose instead to relieve his anxiety and pretend to believe him. She may have been flooded with memory. She seemed faraway now and distracted. He saw her moisten her lips, clamp her mouth and tighten her grip on her handkerchief. He saw her drift away, not weeping, but numbed by some inner response. Eventually she stirred and returned to his dishonest face. In a tired voice Violet thanked him for riding all the way, for bringing news of her son, and for being his close friend. ‘At the end,’ she said with emphasis, to release them both.

  Fred stepped from shade into the blazing day. Light fell over his body, touching his shoulders, his back. It was a warm light, and consoling. A black kelpie rose with a sleepy greeting and sidled towards him in a louche sway, its tail in a gentle wave, its expression open and munificent. A fat tongue hung dangling; there was a slurp at Fred’s hands.

  From the doorway Violet said, ‘Chaplin. Marty’s dog.’

  Fred touched the dog’s head. ‘Chaplin. How are you, old fella?’

  This would make matters worse, this creaturely appeal. A simple pat would have been enough, but he found himself rubbing the dog’s head, grasping at its cheeks, giving a series of little thumps to its heaving hot back. Under his hands life was suddenly re-presented, this mangy fur and the tufts of hair in its soft, perky ears; and the panting and the doggy stare, claiming a connection. He prolonged the petting, without knowing why it felt necessary. It was satisfying to do so. He saw that Chaplin was old and that one eye was white and cloudy. That he stood rickety, aslant, and with a tough heave of effort. Fred tried not to cry. He held himself tight. But simple, true feelings were challenging his resolve. More than once he stifled what might have been a rising sob.

  At length he turned and bade Violet a second goodbye. She too held herself firm and retreated into the house. Chaplin had already toppled over, and lay with his mouth open, staring with his good eye, still blinking and aware. Impossible to know what a dog might be thinking. Bemusement, curiosity. Fred was awkwardly self-conscious. The old dog inspired in him deep abashment, just as he had felt with Marty’s mother.

  His bicycle leant against the wall. As he bent to clip his trousers, Fred was overcome with sudden affection, such as a child might feel for a beloved pet. There was a comfort in the triangular and circular simplicity of bicycle shapes. The handlebars, their strong bows, and even the tray at the back. The bulb of the bell, and the disc of the red tail-light. The starburst of bright spokes, their neat uniformity, somehow lifted his spirits. This childhood feeling for an ordinary, modest thing would return to him from time to time, from this day on. This rush of regard. It was a quality of mercy that followed his talk with Violet Friedlander.

  A mercy, that’s how he thought of it, looking into her eyes, so like Marty’s, as he’d tried to make up a story that would help. And Chaplin, with his forlorn lick and slow stiff hallo; and this merciful sunshine, and his longed-for freedom, and the journey ahead of him, and the blazing road home.

  Fred mounted his bicycle and pedalled away. The haze of heat was before him as he headed back to Kalgoorlie. Again, he saw the pipeline; again, he saw water where there was none. The liquid vision of far trees, the way cars streamed before they came close, the wave-like look, blue and cool, of the far horizon. Later, he had no words to describe it to Else, but this ride home, back into his body, back into a rhythmic wash of white light—the way he’d bowed his head like a penitent, a penitent for being alive, the way he’d felt gratitude to Violet Friedlander for her maternal care, the way he’d been able to tell the truth when he told her lies—these pushed him along the road as if carried by a river, or by surf. There was no emu this time, no camels fleeing into the scrub, just the air parting before him, and a pink blush rising as the sun began its gentle set.

  Riding, he was in a daydream of safer memories. In the last six months of Camp 17, a Dutch prisoner arrived, a Protestant minis
ter, who began conducting weekly services. Fred and Marty had joined in, relieved by the diversion, and wanting to recreate a semblance of belief. He had a memory of Marty singing, raising his voice extra-loud. They were a ragged circle, men who’d gathered to recall what they’d withheld, or neglected, or with shame had struggled to believe. Raised to be wary of Protestants, he was in a state—they all were—where such distinctions were meaningless, where a man’s body bleeding or shitting or hurting or starving was all the community they knew and saw. The Dutch minister, Father Dutchy, they called him, had also been in Burma. He’d been with them in the jungle camp. The men shyly recognised each other and embraced like brothers.

  Dutchy believed, despite everything, that the world was reparable. That spirit endured. From his damaged mouth, cratered with blisters and sores, he spoke in fragments that vaguely soothed, if only because familiar. And in his conviction he offered others the chance to pretend they also believed, and to sing frail songs in a quivering voice, and to mutter a few broken lines in a prayer, to walk in the valley of the shadow of death, and to entertain the remote prospect of peace, and redemption.

  This seemed to Fred the same courtesy that Violet had offered, to pretend together, and to conspire together, against all the evidence to the contrary.

  ‘At the end’; that’s what she had said.

  And even though both were unbelieving and felt their grief interminable, it was good to have it spoken out loud. Good to have accomplished, in words at least, what didn’t exist in feeling or belief. Fred recalled that neither had eaten the fruitcake. Though he was hungry, it had glistened before them untouched, too heavy and too extravagant for such a spare conversation. When he got home, he thought, he would eat arrowroot biscuits spread thickly with butter. He would stand in the dark backyard and smoke a cigarette. He would walk back into the house, calmer after his smoke, and tell Else, waiting patiently, that it all went well.

  Fred noticed the darkening sky and flicked on his bicycle lamp. It was cooler now and peaceful. He pedalled with purpose. Before him lay a cone of weak light, shivering on the bitumen, leading back towards her.

  48

  It was another life and a second chance. Within a year of his return, Fred Kelly was a father.

  What new belief was this?

  At the hospital Enid was wrapped in a tight bundle and delivered to his hands, neat and clean as a whistle. At first his emotion was mainly of fear, afraid he would drop her, or spoil her, or do something wrong with his large and unsteady working-man hands. He was flustered and uncertain. He felt an enormous duty. He had never seen his own hands so ugly and inept. But gradually it became easier, and Fred helped at night with the calming and bringing Enid to the breast; he stood patting the new baby held at his shoulder; he rocked her and he dangled her so that her legs swung beneath, as if in a pedal or a funny run. Yet, somehow, for some reason, he felt unconnected. She was a vigorous baby with a ferocious howl, already her own self. He saw that her face, still coming, still unfinished, was nevertheless definitive in its claim for attention; he felt uncertain, more contingent and less definite in the world. Sometimes, he was terrified.

  Taking the tiny hand, wanting to soothe her, he knew he had not yet fully returned to himself.

  But then, Mary. Then, there was warm blood spilling into his hands when the baby who would be Mary came too early. He panicked and flew about the house as Else stretched her throat and moaned. She called him back. Made him act. Made him the midwife. There was no clean, tight bundle, but Mary insistent, coated in clotted stuff, smeared and slippery with her lurid newness. Her arms flung open in welcome or appeal as she first breathed in the world. She was still raw, still messy; but Fred thought even then that Mary was true, and life itself.

  His actions were not planned, but one after another, following an instinct given to him by the softness of Else’s body and his fingers there, at the red part, and the necessity to act. Her almighty outpouring had astonished and stilled him, her wetness, and the force of her rippled opening.

  There was no disconnection this time. It was his job to mop up and to cut the cord; it was his job to tug out the placenta and clean his wife’s thighs with a flannel cloth. He would remember until the moment of his death the feel of a baby newly come. The shape, the weight, and the sense of a seal on a message, broken open.

  Fred felt useful and coherent. He had helped bring forth a life. He wrapped Mary himself, folding her thin arms, dabbing her little face, cradling her loose and slightly misshapen head. He might have been in a dream, but for the pure vividness of his index finger resting at her cheek, and the way she flickered, minutely, in her own new expressions. And how this time he felt restored to the world of flesh.

  49

  Marty’s eyes you could swim in them ah Marty

  But Fred

  And girls the shape of them shaping her bellyful and Enid and

  Mary and the repetition

  Mouth breast milk and those eyes looking upwards up

  50

  That night Mary and Fred there to catch as she fell

  Thought she would die all that blood but it was Mary who died

  Who at the lip of her grave sliding away? Jack sweet Jack

  gone too too far gone with his face his name

  What pattern what?

  And thicker than water and bloody hell and bloody well Throw the bucket down and bring it up and no gold father said just fool’s gold and shite and playing the fool

  You’ll be spoiled lassie no one will want you whoring like that family disgrace better off

  Dead now there she said it

  51

  Nell woke that morning from a dream in which she held her hand up to a child, a little girl. Her hand was speaking.

  She rang Frances to say yes.

  Yes, it was a good idea to try to find their father. Yes, she had changed her mind. She joked and made light of what had seemed such a firm position of denial beforehand.

  ‘It was your suggestion to begin with,’ said Frances, irritated.

  ‘It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon,’ Nell replied.

  Frances did not respond. Nell could tell she was reserving her judgement. Possibly she felt herself manipulated by their code sentence and its eruption into their conversation.

  It may have been that Nell longed not for her father but for a return of sisterly connection. Encouraged by Frances’ belated talk of Will’s dying, prompted by sensible, intelligent Dr Wright, she’d imagined a new type of speaking possible between them, a new closeness and revived possibilities of disclosure. Her sister had been a support during her various episodes, but they’d never discussed them afterwards. Frances had never asked her what it felt like to be the crazy one who heard messages in the air and believed television advertisements were addressed to her, and her alone, as lunatic knowledge and cryptic instructions. It would have been a relief, to describe. To be asked, how did it feel. Frances had never judged, but she had never asked questions, either. It was as if what was difficult in their family was stored away underground, never to be excavated, but somehow awaiting accident or explosion. There had been an isolating quality to her illness that she had needed to express. She had never told Frances of her nightmares afterwards of combustion and the Super Pit; she had never discussed the Carols by Candlelight incident, which, revisiting now, she worried that Frances may have witnessed; they had never talked of the possessive way each regarded The Great Wave as their own sign. Only now, in her early forties, Nell saw how much weight they’d carried alone.

  ‘I saw Else,’ she heard herself announce.

  Again, there was a pause.

  ‘How did she seem?’

  What to say? ‘She didn’t know me,’ said Nell. ‘And she didn’t once make any eye contact or speak. Nothing at all, really.’

  The arc of conversation avoided Else’s ‘Hail Mary’.

  Nell was guiltily aware of supressing, for the time being, the fraction of sentient self that had evid
ently survived. For a moment the sisters were united, thinking of the same face.

  ‘Next time, we’ll go together,’ Frances said. ‘It will be easier. For both of us.’

  Nell had been thinking, never again, what’s the point, Else has gone, but said, ‘Yes, together.’

  Ah, Else, now residing in the elsewhere of the nursing home, fixed in bright light, in a wheelchair or a bed, trapped in the solitary confinement of her riddled brain. It made Nell afraid: there was no other word for it. She saw Else fretted, destroyed. She wondered what mine shaft or oubliette now contained her. It was always in the papers and every night on the telly, this appalling condition. But up close it was worse, that recoil, that withdrawal, that made one yearn for any sign.

  Nell sat at her work desk at the physios’, wishing to appear busy. She answered the phone, typed names into a spreadsheet of appointments, but was mostly bored. The other receptionist, Viv, always seemed always busier and at ease. Viv’s desk was a festival of travel magnets, keepsakes and trinkets proclaiming her affections. A squat gnome had I wuv you! scrawled on its chest. A ditzy postcard from a rellie read ‘Leprechauns of Dublin’. A theme there, somewhere. Nell possessed no ornaments or showy cards, but resisted disrespect. She liked Viv; they’d become friends and shared drinks after work in the din of a cave-like wine bar.

  Patients came and went, each with their private ailments. There were days Nell was appalled to realise how much could go wrong within the mechanics of body. Joints out of whack, dodgy knees, frozen shoulders, problems with mobility, back pain, whiplash and injury; not to mention neurological conditions that seized and disabled—stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease. She saw patients hobble towards her each day and counted her own blessings, hardly believing in this world of such damage that she could still be physically strong.