Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  There was a child once, with cystic fibrosis, who’d come to have her back tapped and massaged. She was a quiet, uncomplaining girl of six, with a dry sense of humour. She always carried a koala soft toy. Nell drew a face on her hand to speak to the toy in funny voices and together they developed a proxy dialogue. As soon as she arrived, the girl held up her koala and began a conversation in its voice. And Nell responded with the face on her hand in the persona of a stupid boy. The hand-boy got everything wrong—colours, names. He didn’t even know what his mouth was called, so the girl had to instruct him: mouth, silly! It was the purest of conversations, without aim or information. The exhausted mother used her break to flick through magazines and seemed grateful that someone was distracting her child.

  After a few visits, Nell learned that the girl wanted to be a ballet dancer, but was too sick, the koala said. That she had stars pasted on her bedroom wall because she couldn’t sleep on her back and had to be propped in a sitting position at night. She looked across at the stars to help her sleep. Twenty-seven. She could count. There were twenty-seven stars. It was this detail that remained with Nell after the child mysteriously stopped coming—that the night sky had slipped into the vertical, that she was drastically crooked in what her body saw, that she had counted her stars. It was a lucid image she carried, the girl staring through semi-darkness at a constellation of her own; possibly coughing, or in pain, possibly already aware of her own dying. Her face was chalky as if lack of oxygen was turning her skin to marble, such as she had seen with Will, poor Will, in those last awful weeks. Frances was chalky then too; there were times when the minerals in the body made themselves evident, when a whole family might be turned into chalk, or stone.

  The physiotherapist responsible for the child, an older woman, didn’t know why the sweet girl with the toy koala had ceased her appointments. ‘It happens all the time in our profession,’ she said. ‘Patients just disappear.’

  52

  It was Enid who blocked Nell’s imagining of their parents.

  Whether in vindictiveness or from an intuition of her own exclusion, Enid had shaped the lives of Mary and Jack into something disposable and banal, something that needed no further thought, and no investigation. Mary had died, through medical malpractice, after giving birth to Frances; Jack couldn’t cope and left his daughters behind with Fred and Else, all the better to flee. Every now and then Enid added a trite embellishment: that Mary was the dreamer, the clever one, while she on the other hand was practical and therefore better suited to life. That Mary was a reader, like Else; whereas she knew what was what and how to avoid the attractions of fantasy. Jack had been down in the mines for a while, but couldn’t take it, Enid said, a weak man, ‘unmanly’, who ended up driving a truck. A truck! (As if the ignobility of truck-driving, as she saw it, had shamed the whole family.) She conceded at least that they were a happy couple, ‘unreasonably happy; he was a fool, a no-hoper, and he doted’. These were puzzling words—no-hoper, doted—so that apart from vagueness, there was a linguistic fog obscuring the missing Jack Farrell.

  Of Mary, there was mostly a blank, since she was rarely mentioned. Nell suspected that her grandparents had made a promise of some kind, that if asked, neither would speak, for fear of losing control of their feelings. It was something the Kellys never did, Enid said: lose control of feelings.

  Every now and then some information slipped into view. Once Else had been given a bunch of white chrysanthemums in return for a jar of her fig jam. She was arranging them in a vase, and without thinking she said, ‘Mary hated the odour of chrysanthemums.’ Then moved her fingers gently through the petals, pushing here and there, adjusting a bloom or pressing it down, fidgeting to make the arrangement the right shape for the smallish vase. The sisters had exchanged a glance but were none the wiser. A mother who disliked the odour of chrysanthemums. It was not much to go on. A lanceolate shape, a floral suggestion.

  In her simplified accounts of their family history, Enid essentially wished to discredit her relations and recommend herself. Now, in her early seventies, she was more democratic. It was all meaningless, she said. All those blokes suffering in the mines, Fred’s death, Else’s condition, Mary’s death, Jack’s disappearance. The disappointing men, her aggravation at friends’ marriages and their squalling babies. All meaningless. She declared this wisdom in italics and lit with malignant shine.

  After lifelong parsimony and a job at a grocer’s in Boulder, Enid had one day retired and gone on a cruise to Singapore with her friend Val. More mellow and less nervy now, she found a vocation in holiday cruises, blowing her savings on luxurious captivity. The spectacle attracted her: silver dishes of cold prawns trimmed with parsley sprigs and circles of lemon; aligned cutlery on linen napkins beneath the ice sculpture of a mermaid; the sea safely lassoed in the tight circle of a porthole. These elements she described in detail when her nieces rang for a chat. Still on the goldfields, sharing their childhood home with Val, she’d decided, she told them, that her entire life savings would be spent on cruises. They should expect no inheritance, she declared, the delight evident in her voice.

  The sisters were relieved. After a career of embittered complaint, Enid was now almost content, serenely floating away twice a year to yet another far horizon. They need not worry about her. She saw the world as the mermaid did, passionless, frozen, borne along in a splendour almost too enticing to touch. All that had humiliated her in the past was dispelled in the dining room of a cruise ship, where waiters with gold brocade on their white cuffs politely offered a second serve.

  Enid never asked after Else and made no plans to visit Sydney to see her. She told them that she was now ‘a self-sufficient lady’, and that Val, deeply indebted, was a constant help around the house.

  Enid was less helpful when Nell rang to ask about Jack’s whereabouts. Brazenly, she had claimed to know, and suggested correspondence of some sort, but Nell suspected she knew as little as they. There were moments when her lies were clearly exposed, but she didn’t apologise because hypocrisy suited her; she had after all made a life of it. Nell heard Enid’s voice change the subject to ‘Tahitian Dream’, the next on her list of planned voyages without purpose. She expected drinks with umbrellas, she said, and sprinkled frangipanis. The ocean awaited her conquest, she added, in what she no doubt hoped passed for wit.

  Late at night, in bed, Nell told Matt of her plan to take his advice. She stroked his belly, her fingers searching, and he turned towards her. His eyes shone in the light of the bed lamp. ‘Good plan,’ he said, congratulating himself.

  He rose up on one elbow, drowsy, and leant over to kiss her. But then, disinclined, he sunk back onto his pillow. Too tired.

  ‘So where’s Enid off to this time?’

  ‘Tahiti, with frangipanis. She plans to conquer the ocean.’

  ‘Good for Enid.’

  Matt had a soft spot for Enid, which Nell had never quite understood, but loved him for expressing it and for the calm with which he approved her spendthrift actions, if not her character. This link to the aunt they sardonically mocked allowed subtler tenderness to be expressed. When first they met, he mentioned he was snowboarder from Canada who’d moved to Australia for the surf; so Nell told him of The Great Wave she had on her wall as a child.

  ‘Hokusai, what a cliché,’ he’d declared dismissively.

  But then, almost at once, he saw his mistake. ‘But for a child, of course,’ he went on, ‘and one who had never seen the ocean, it must have been a miraculous image.’

  His quick appeasement worked. She saw that he was at pains to include the child that she had been, to excuse her, to admire her, and to allow her sole possession of the Japanese wave. Matt was the eldest of five children. Nell often wondered if it was this that made him solicitous on small topics, and aware of the value of ordinary experience. She’d seen it often; how he sensed what to say to validate some casual comment, or to raise a childhood moment to one of revelation. He’d grown up in Kamloops;
this too endeared him. A small town, a country boy, a wish to surf in Australia. He described one day cresting a mound of snow, and imagining more; not just his own velocity, but the rushing dissolve of an entire ocean.

  As they grew, Nell and Frances were disappointed to discover the ubiquity of The Great Wave. It was everywhere; a universe of ornate waves existed in galleries and giftshops, in newsagents, in classrooms, and on trinkets as trivial as keyrings. As children they’d considered it wholly theirs, their vision, hung as an icon on the bedroom wall, and it offended them to see it so widely known and dispersed, so profaned and depleted by multiplication.

  Now, Nell was thinking of the bubble heads she’d missed, how all those years had not preserved the small faces and the human element of fear. How the details were lost to one heaving spectacle, and miniature Mount Fuji framed in its high scroll.

  She felt the melt of a slight tearfulness and saw that Matt had closed his eyes. She allowed herself a feeling that might have been grief, a sense of everything receding, then vanishing. She might have groaned for her own shortcomings, and for her need to make amends, for that woman set alight, for her cruelties to Else, for her estrangement from her sister. When she was ill, as a teenager, before her era of medication, it was easier to be tormented; she had an excuse. Everything was crackpot and wild; she knew her own deviation. Now she was tasked with more cautious understandings; now she was in the presence of a man of good humour and equilibrium, and this place they inhabited, this modern eyrie by the ocean. ‘Who can be unhappy in Australia?’ he once asked. It was a jokey taunt, but he meant it, seeing as a wholesome Canadian what passed plausibly as a paradise.

  She thought of the little girl with the koala, who in her own way she had risked loving. She was dismayed at how frequently she’d imagined her dead. A child turned to marble in a frieze, ornamental, ossified, a child hostage to her bad lungs and fixed on the solace of a fake sky.

  Matt was asleep. He snoozed contentedly. She envied him his swift sleeping, in almost any circumstance. Nell leant to switch off the bed lamp and saw him swallowed by fuzzy darkness. Gradually, he returned, a human shape bent towards her, protected by sleep; and more gradually still she made out the barest features of his face. She could hear his low breathing, its rhythm, mounting to the rasp of a soft snore, and beyond that, the rhythmical rasping of sea, the great wash of it nearby, and the consolation it offered.

  When the girls left home, Enid tossed the Japanese print into the garbage, along with other precious emblems of their girlhood together. She saved only those things she found useful or hoped one day to sell. They would return to the empty wall and the room stripped of their memories. Only the bedspreads, of orange chenille, remained as gloomy originals, now elevated to dusty nostalgia when so little else could provide it.

  53

  There was a chill in the Melbourne house despite the warming November.

  Perhaps this was how death came, as a sudden drop in the temperature.

  There was a stir of white curtains and a sense of presences entering and leaving.

  Outside, night had fallen, outside the world was slowing, and yawning, and settling down into sleep. A tram sound made Paddy remember an old man dragging stones in a slipe. A whisper from the next room made him hear his Ma saying the rosary. Over the chair his old overcoat, funereal black and slightly shiny, hung man-shaped and welcoming, expecting his body. He saw in the darkness the pale face of a Japanese woman, sliding away like a moon disappearing behind clouds. He saw a brown hawk tipped in flight, in a slow-motioned uplifting, and the reddish whorl of a dust storm rolling over the horizon. Camels were fleeing, far away, running ungainly on their skinny legs, and men were tying their horses and tents, as the wind curled and swept. Somuch movement out there, all turbulence, all granulated, as if everything was blasted and coming apart, submitting to the will of the storm, with all that was solid melting into red air, and him so quiet, here in bed, so very quiet and still and snugly nestled in shelter. His own shelter.

  His lifetimes were all merging, and there was no gold rush now. There was no rush for anything.

  A few streets away, a neatly ordered cemetery awaited him; this was where Paddy Hannan was headed. He liked imagining his rest there, after so much hard labour, pinned down by a Celtic cross, inscribed with a shamrock or two. It soothed him to think he might stop searching and be completely at rest. The bed he lay in was comfortable. He might simply sink down inside it, as if it provided a coffin ready-made, drawing him earthwards, cossetting and placating like the body of a large woman, and smelling deliciously of woman-wet and Sunlight soap. Ah, breasts and soft folds and the scent of clean linen. Ah, clods for an old man lowered down and down. A patter of dirt falling pfth, pfth on a thin coffin lid. So there was no bother of moving his tired limbs or his strangely heavy head. There was no bother at all.

  Paddy tried to see again what his father had long ago described, an arc of beaten gold, a necklace, such as a man now would never wear. But he saw only daffodils, and his sisters, and the pocked face of Mickey Corcoran.

  Hearing faintly the distant trams sliding up and down Sydney Road, feeling the cool hand of his favourite niece resting on his brow, there it was, clear as day, the pocked face of Mickey Corcoran.

  Not his father, not his kinsmen, not the old house at Quin. Not Bella, not his boy.

  It was Mickey that appeared before him, like an apparition.

  And moss on a blackened wall and a trickle of rain coming down, shining.

  And yellow scum on a bog hole and the fear there and then of what was under.

  And no shame now, and bright candleflame with its quick quiver to heaven.

  And then, ah yes, the shape of his mother from behind, as she prepared potatoes for their dinner, and shuffled the plates and scolded, and then, sweet Jesus, as she called to them one and all, as she called to her children one and all to come near to her, to come near.

  54

  Darkness had fallen by the time Frances left the gallery. She’d been held back for an opening, obliged to stand invisibly, once again, part of an apparatus of mute order and surveillance. ‘Discipline and punish,’ Jake liked to call it. She was relieved to see that he was not working this evening.

  She watched wealthy art-lovers greet each other with high hallos, enact habits of affinity—pecking at cheeks, exclaiming on costumes, holding up champagne flutes to twinkle their own fizzing welcome, the splatter of a huge painting framing their faces. There was milling and circulating and networking and mindless chatter, most of it helpless with jollity. The crowd was all nervous excitement and she was all bored detachment. Frances found she could not stop touching her hair. She watched the waiters with their drink trays weave and shimmer, holding flutes high as trophies, moving with the grace of their good looks, turning or pausing as commanded. She longed for a quaff.

  At length, the group was hushed, and the young curator, dressed for the part in a yellow cravat, shuffled to the echoing microphone and gave a taut, witty speech. Frances loved him for that, the cravat and the speech; her mood instantly changed. He said that just as the body has its stutters, hiccups, farts and sneezes, so artworks might trouble the stability of inner things. He mentioned the blending of senses and the aspiration to wholeness. The body, he said: where is the body in art? Where is the carnal balance? It was a brief interval of ideas on a frivolous occasion.

  Abstract, she reflected, but oddly apposite, too; and her run that day had made her consider physical balance and imbalance. She’d had the sense that she could have gone on forever, looping the Jubilee Oval, regular and strong. There was a moment she had imagined herself from the sky, a clownish shape, bouncing and bobbing, legs flying back, tracing its own Zen inscription around the park. The paintings on the walls pleased her less than this recollection of untroubled self; it had been a moment of absorption and glad indulgence. Endorphins? she wondered. The buzzing chemistry of the run? The vacant, self-righteous rigour of repetition?

  S
he’d barely looked at the paintings, but would do so at her next shift, before the gallery opened. She would stand alone, and test for an aesthetic stutter, or a sneeze.

  Frances left her overtime labour in surprisingly good spirits. She slid into the bright November night impulsive and free. She set off towards the city to catch the bus home and saw with pleasure the curved rows of lights at Circular Quay, the ferries pushing from their berths with a confident tug, the scattering of shiny arrows on the oily black water. Stutter on the tide, sneeze in the high wind. There was a rustle of voices from the harbourside and a festive tone. In the distance, across the bay, stood the Opera House illuminate, its wings cutting at the sky, its concourse lively with visitors. Electric definition sharpened the look of the city: the whole scene might have been arrayed for her outsider’s amusement. This was still novel to her, this thrill of vicinity and this boisterous elation. Something in her nature forbade irony at such big-city visions; it was the country girl, perhaps, shy at so many lights, or the wish to give herself fully to a sensual life.

  Her bus was already there, by the quayside, as if she’d summoned it. She climbed in and was taken. An irresistibly benign quality had settled over the evening, which strobed bright in the bus windows, and in their blurry reflections. Light bulbs stretched to flags, flags to waving streamers. Up the tunnel of high buildings, the driver was now racing. Frances rested her face on the glass, enjoyably tired, as the vehicle rumbled up Castlereagh Street and headed out towards the west. She must run more often, she decided. It was surely the long run that had returned her body to this receptive attention. To be in step with an inner rhythm that otherwise evaded her. By the time they turned into Derwent Street she was calmer, her mind was quieter, and her elation had receded to a sense of simple wellbeing. It was enough. It was artful. She took a deep breath. She pulled her bag over her shoulder, pressed the button for her stop and jumped off the bus into the cooling night.