Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  This same feeling, of her body’s competence, she’d often felt with Will. They were well matched in appetite, and unafraid of each other. Balance and imbalance: these were not abstractions when they rocked and rolled their ardent bodies, in the tributes they made, in the way each whispered, at the right moment, the wisp of an endearment, one to the other and back again in the transport of feeling. At first, he was alarmed by her disinhibition. She’d had to teach him, to coax, to approve the first clumsy attempts. But they’d achieved a state in which touch was satisfied and arousal had a safe place: the sweet grapple, her gasps, his sweaty, conclusive shudder—these became easy and necessary and the sign of what made sense. He would lean towards her in the fuggy dark of a hot Sydney night and she would greet him and know again how essential he had become.

  Neither knew then that Will was doomed to an anguishing death. Both had assumed, in the way of true lovers, that their coming together had a kind of sovereignty, that there was no end, none really, in what together they might create.

  55

  And so she awoke replenished, somehow. Not all recollections of Will took their toll; some returned her to their body pact, and the things they had said to each other. To their shared physical life and their history of seeing and knowing. It was still an enigma to Frances why the past was so difficult to manage. She hoped that eventually her feelings would detach or simplify, and that she would be released from the disruptive force of sexual longing. She wished to recall her husband more chastely, and with a feeling of peace.

  After Fred’s death, Else had said to her granddaughters, ‘Do not brood, do not remember, do not lose control of your feelings.’ It was tough advice and callously aphoristic. Now, with a kind of heartache, she wondered how her grandparents had coped with her mother’s death, and if they’d managed to avoid brooding, remembering and loss of control.

  Must ring Nell, she was thinking.

  Should check on Enid.

  Oh, and Luke, whose birthday was coming, and for whom she hadn’t yet found a gift.

  Frances opened the shuttered doors to her small balcony and stood on its jutting planks, still waking.

  It was early, sunrise. The sun was a white ball and the moon was pale and receding. The air was alive with the gargling voices of birds. Frances heard koels and currawongs, their comforting repetitions, and thought of the red-ember eye of the koel, and the yellow-bead eye of the currawong, each seeing with their birdbrains the same flash of a new morning. She scanned the trees for a bird-shape: too far, or too elusive. Perspectives resolved and made themselves clear. Rooftops, stripes of streets, a modest suburban park; up the road the old church and the primary school snuggled beside it. A single blade of light was now cutting a line across the road.

  In this flood of brightness there was something that explained intersections like this, of morning and memory. She heard a leaf blower start up: such an irritant contraption. Someone out there was blowing leaves from one side of a road to another, creating his own mini-cyclones in the name of garden maintenance. So there was this balance, too, the single visionary morning, and this blare of a rude machinery, this cheat’s variety of labour.

  Frances left the balcony and walked in her pyjamas though the narrow terrace house. It occurred to her then that she might give Luke his uncle’s telescope, bought on a whim and hardly used. She searched in the cupboard which stored tokens of Will’s short life. His clothes were by now all dispersed, but she’d kept a few things she considered personal, his tennis racquet, his folio of drawings from high school, his small collection of souvenirs from their holidays together (a brass elephant he had chosen in Kerala still stood on the mantlepiece in the front room). She retrieved the telescope, stored in its original box, and felt that this was proper and fitting: Luke would appreciate the gift and learn the fun of seeing afar, vaulting his sight into starry distances.

  Like many forms of knowledge, this had come to her through love.

  A swim in the high seas, Will used to joke.

  She would show Luke how to focus the moon, so that he could magnify its craters. She would name her favourites, the Mare Imbrium, the Sea of Rains, the Mare Vaporum, the Sea of Vapours, the Mare Nubium, the Sea of Clouds—and of course, the Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquillity. Will’s favourite marias had been those located towards the south, the Mare Cognitum, the Sea that Has Become Known, the Mare Humorum, the Sea of Moisture. He had found these names especially quirky and comical. He was delighted by the fact that moon craters were named as seas. The high seas.

  After his death she saw that the moon was the colour of blue asbestos. Detail, perspective. So much depended.

  As she pulled the telescope towards her, Frances glimpsed another box and knew immediately what it was. Though she’d been dismayed to learn that Enid had thrown away most of her childhood things, she’d had the foresight to take this shoebox with her when first she left home. In it lay the skull of a wallaby she found on a prospecting trip with Fred and Nell. The skull was delicate, light to handle and porcelain smooth, a long-boned snout with huge eye cavities and teeth in separate rows, the front ones protuberant. As a child she’d kept it under her bed, and examined at it only when alone, not sure why it seemed to her talismanic. The creaturely form, its long face, had somehow attracted her. Here was something imperishable; as quietly wondrous in the shoebox as when she first found it, nestled in a hollow of crumbly red earth.

  Sometimes, on weekends, Fred took the girls prospecting. ‘Speccing’, he called it. In the desert beyond the town, littered with the remains of disused shafts and the mounds of old diggings, they set off together, peeling their eyes, scouring the dirt, searching fastidiously for something golden. Bits and pieces of mining equipment lay scattered in their path and much around them spoke humbly of effort and function—a rusty bucket, skeins of wire, the wooden handle of a windlass, small bottles turned amber or cyan by the sun. Fred often remarked on what a jumble was left behind and held up battered and broken objects for their inspection. See this, he would say, this is a part of a winch. Or this, from a dry-blower. He could name something that looked like a simple cog and describe its function. Objects of labour had been worn sculptural by the elements. Nell kept a collection of bottles and metal pieces, Frances more obscure things, and certainly more worthless: an enamel cup with its bottom gone, the bleached wallaby skull, an assortment of stones that coloured and shone with a lick.

  In his shirt pocket Fred carried a plastic phial of gold. It was never more than dust to the girls’ eyes, but still they hoped to contribute to his tiny hoard. He took his pan and his waterbag, and Nell, as the older sister, was allowed to carry his rifle. Occasionally Fred took a pot shot at a startled rabbit, but they never saw him hit anything as a blink of fluff bounded away. He showed them how to pan, and to pick up specks by pressing them into their forefingers or thumbs. How to wipe the speck on the rim of the plastic, how to seal it away, so that each speck accumulated in the phial to make a particulate portion of real gold. Real gold, not fool’s gold, not pyrites. They were taught the difference. Each understood that this was a ritual they shared. The walk around the old diggings, the retrieval of fragments, the low whispers in which they exchanged observations and casual moments. Moments of family, moments by which they converged.

  So this was how Fred visited in the auspicious morning, evoking a search less for gold than for a promise of union. It was sunny, their faces were hot and burnished. Nell trailing behind, edgy with her wish to impress her grandfather; Frances in a kind of traipse, always at the back, watching their shadows merge and pull together through the orange light of afternoon.

  Fred held an old-fashioned idea of mining. It was noble, men were brave, mates went together into the darkness. But still he liked this earthed wander, and the glint of something half-buried, and the pan twitching in his long fingers, like a cymbal to be played. Frances’ job was to carry the waterbag, and she recalled the hessian smell of stale water, the cool as she pressed
it to her cheek, the tart mineral flavour when they held it above their mouths and drank from the waterfall. These were vivid times, fossicking in the desert with Fred. He gave them slow looking and a gentle voice. He gave them the advice of an old man who knew what’s what. Else had often said so: Fred was a man who knew what’s what.

  Frances lifted the telescope to examine it. Still in good condition. Perfect for Luke. Then, like a window blown open, she saw them both, Fred and Will, meeting her there. She was cross-legged in front of the cupboard, with her wallaby skull uncovered and her gift for Luke decided; and here were the men she had loved: visiting with the calm temerity of those ghosts who arrive with no invitation or demand.

  There was a knock at the door. Frances roused herself from her mental wandering. She could ignore it, she thought. So early. Too early. But the knocking continued. She pulled on jeans and a shirt, as if instructed, walked down the creaky wooden stairs and opened the front door to Mrs Davoren.

  ‘I saw you on the balcony, so knew you were up,’ she said, by way of greeting. She was chirpy with the new day, birdlike and sudden in her gestures.

  ‘Here,’ she added. And with this she handed Frances an envelope of old photographs. ‘Better you keep them.’

  Mrs Davoren returned to her usual, taciturn self. With a half-smile that Frances thought of as cunning, she said nothing more, and left.

  Oceanus Procellarum, Ocean of Storms. Now Will’s vocabulary was rushing back.

  There were only three photographs. In each Else appeared alongside Nora Davoren, then Conlan, according to the pencilled note on the back. Frances saw a friendship there, one which must have soured, or faded. Both women looked relaxed. They had curly hairdos, shaped unnaturally, and shining lips. They had the glow of youth upon them, their faces chin up in blonde light, before severance and loss.

  The morning air was soft, the birds continued their tolling racket, and Frances turned back into the house with a sense of things falling at last into shape.

  56

  Fred remembered Else in a black dress and smart shoes at Mary’s funeral. She seemed smaller then. They had both been made smaller by the death of their daughter. And this time they both cried, and Jack, their son-in-law, also cried, and it was shocking to see another man cry, blubbing like that, actually sinking, at one point, into the dirt near the grave, and arms leaning in to pull him upright and support his desolate sag, and him shrugging them off and not caring and making a spectacle of himself, so that people talked afterwards about how unmanly he had been, how undignified in the face of loss, how his trousers were stamped with red dust he didn’t bother to flick at, how he spoke to no-one assembled and didn’t even turn up at the wake; and all the while Enid was in hospital, too distraught to attend and full of rage, and theories, and mad speculations—‘breakdown,’ they said, ‘nerves,’ they said—so she too was absent, and it was just Fred and Else left to cope with the mourners, and somewhere, in another room, the bubs were bawling their lungs out, motherless children, knowing in a world composed of bodies that some body essential had gone, that her touch was gone and her voice and her soft hands at bedtime; and it was all they could do, him and Else, to pass around the tea and the ham sandwiches and the shots of neat whisky; and they heard Mary this and Mary that echoing around the room as others called up their dead daughter in their own and innermost ways; and at last everyone went, leaving just the mess and the clean-up and the two bubs now cried to sleep; and they fell onto the bed without first doing the dishes or undressing and held each other, oh God, like an old couple drowning, bidding goodbye; and Else said, ‘Things will never be the same again,’ and he knew the truth of it in his bones and he had nothing to say in reply, there was a bubble of nothing in his mouth, a great air pocket, and empty.

  And then, just as they were together about to fall asleep, resting at last, still clothed, sinking into their exhaustion, there was the unmistakable sound of an explosion somewhere—boom!—gelignite surely, and not long afterwards, fifteen minutes at most, a knock on the door to ask him, still an expert, to come and see; so here he was, on the afternoon of Mary’s funeral, heading out to a house in Balfour Street, South Kalgoorlie, and it was the usual story, some bloke stealing gelignite from the mines, but they didn’t know it deteriorated and had to be properly stored, and the back shed of his house had gone up with a boom, lucky that it wasn’t the main place, but still, on the day of his daughter’s funeral, he had to leave Else alone in her black dress and go to see the smouldering black of a senseless explosion and to deal with ash and fire and another man’s wife crying and all the hubbub and carry-on with the police and the firemen coming and going; and when he went home at last, it still boomed, that shed gone up in smoke and all cinders with its sour stink and its charcoal ruin; it still boomed in his head as he entered the bedroom and saw Else fallen asleep, safe now, in sleep’s quiet and blanketing peace, and he lay beside her wide awake, his own clothes reeking, left alone in a windy place, alone with his daughter dead, with his mouth empty and his fear and his own big hollow nothing and the endless boom of stolen gelignite and his daughter Mary, beloved Mary, his daughter Mary dead.

  57

  Fred felt the burden of over-remembering. On the troopship, after Nagasaki, a medical officer had told him, ‘You’ll forget things. That’s okay. Sometimes we need to forget. Don’t worry too much about the holes in your memory.’

  Yet even in old age he remembered the details of that medical officer’s face: a round chickenpox scar high up on his left cheek, his slack lantern jaw, his small, piggy eyes, the uneven mouth that spoke, trying to comfort, in a strangely boyish tone.

  There were not enough holes. He remembered Mary every day of his life. She had returned in look-alike Frances, and this was both a pain and a joy to him. Sometimes Frances had only to step through a doorway and Mary was there too. So with a kind of cowardice he gave his greater love to Nell, needing to shun what was too close to his memory. It took some time to realise this, to analyse his own preference, to try to practise even-handedness and make an equal show of loving both. His own unlikely survival was hard enough to deal with. He knew that nothing was painless. But with Mary’s babies he told himself that some purpose had arrived; this was how, right at the beginning, he spoke of them to Else.

  She had struck him across the face with a stinging blow. She already had purpose, she said crossly. She did not want substitute daughters.

  Both had been shaken by Else’s sudden act: that her grief should hit out like this and increase the hurt. He’d darted away from her ferocity, but this moment never faded.

  His memories of Marty did not fade either; they seemed to intensify as he aged.

  Here was Marty in the camp, helping to pull off his boots when he was tired. He’d flopped on the grimy rag that passed for a bed, and Marty knelt there and tugged, then eased, then slid first one and then the other boot from his bare and festering feet. With a care and gentleness that Fred thought of as maternal, Marty dabbed at his infections, wiped and cleaned. Marty was spattered with muck that might have been his own dried blood. He looked apologetic when Fred flinched with pain. But he knelt there, seeking no thanks or acknowledgement. Afterwards, he stood the boots next to his own in a frail patch of sunlight; to dry them, Marty said, to help you get better.

  There they were, his eternal boots, for which later he felt a kind of reverence.

  To the end of his days Fred wondered why he’d enlisted as a soldier.

  58

  Fernie for Fairness

  Ah Fernie the grocer Fernie for Fairness in Hannan Street and Fred there waiting

  Must have been after the war him skinny as a stick

  A brown parcel in his hands tied in a butterfly with string

  Fernie for Fairness

  Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips

  And fairness gone from the world Marty Mary both gone and so many and Kelly the skelly man light above her heavier body and the sheets flapping like wings and nothing the
y could

  say nothing

  59

  The dark of it all her mind her mine all those tunnels all darkening all

  60

  Nell looked up as she gathered that something was wrong. There was Frances, answering a phone call, and it was the shadow of wings passing over her. Nell placed her teacup on its saucer and waited.

  ‘Else. She’s gone.’

  Nell saw the tiniest convulsion in her cheek as she spoke the enormity. Otherwise, Frances was completely still. They leant together at the table and embraced in silence. Good to be close for the news. Good to feel her sister’s arms around her.

  ‘Too sudden to call us in, apparently.’

  ‘Too sudden,’ Nell repeated. She heard her lamentable inanity.

  It would be up to Frances to organise. Frances would take control.

  The sea air whisked up at them, all frothy light and delectation. They’d had an early-morning swim and now sat on their towels in wet bathers, like kiddies, at a hipster café. Surfers were trudging up the hill with their boards clenched under their arms, having been out for hours. Nell looked at their shoulders and backs with disinterested appreciation. Chunky gods, barefoot, with their boardshorts still dripping. A clan of their own; devotees.