by Gail Jones
Frances was staring out past pine trees to the ruffled ocean. Nell saw her preoccupation, surely greater than her own, surely more dignified and more intrinsically wise. Another whisk, her hair blew. A large sun umbrella shifted. Nell saw its angular shade push away the glare, then correct and reassemble. She began to sob. Frances clasped her again, stroked her wet face, and used her soft thumbs to smudge at the tears.
The waitress who had taken their order abruptly reappeared. She tilted her head as if flirting, wanting to be included in the sad news.
‘Anything I can get you, sweetheart?’
And with that Nell started up again, lost it again, so that Frances helped her from the table, left too much cash, and dragged her towards the patch of grass across the road. They sat under the rustling pine trees, in a net of bristly light, settling down. Nell released her feelings by degrees in a stammering ebb. When at last she stopped heaving, she looked up at her sister. Frances had a waxen pallor, but still she had not wept. Her relative self-control made it easier for Nell. As usual, Nell could be the feeling one, the family member in whom feeling concentrated and became visible.
‘We really should go,’ Frances said.
A small child was stamping and paddling under a running tap, washing sand from his feet. His mother bent, examining each foot in turn, brushing with the water, then pronouncing him clean.
Life went on.
The child raised his arms like a zealous fan at a pop concert, waving in a rhythm, asking to be seized and lifted. The mother pulled him to her hip, still brushing under his feet, this brightly cleansed child, this little human of the future. Then she took one foot and half swallowed it, in an extravagant kiss. The boy squealed, delighted, pretending alarm. He squirmed and buried his face in his mother’s shoulder.
Frances linked her arm in Nell’s. Together they walked back up the steep hill, sombre among all the playful life: the running taps, and the kisses, and the children, and the pine trees, all carrying on, death-defying, around them.
61
Nell felt that her face was still shapeless with weeping. She felt disfigured and reduced, a Picasso version of a woman. Vanity compelled her to look. In the bathroom mirror she was mussed and blotchy, almost beyond repair. She emerged to Matt’s quiet touch and elaborate sympathy; he had a gift for it. He was like an old woman in his concentrated solicitude.
Poor Frances, she thought, in a shameless thrill of superiority; poor Frances, all alone.
Matt was patient, as ever, and poured another glass of white wine. He sat beside her, his arm resting lightly along her shoulder, and Nell could tell that he was making an effort. He’d never met Else but knew her from family stories. She had the status of a fairytale, and might have been all apple cheeks, triangular headscarves and native cunning, outwitting a wolf. But he too had been raised by his grandmother; he knows what’s what, Nell thought. His sympathy was the declaration of understanding and an appeal not to lose her to grief.
Nell gulped at her wine. She ate biscuits covered in chocolate. Sugary indemnity against the hours to come.
Later, Frances rang to ask how she was. As Nell expected, her sister had already arranged the funeral, a small private service at the crematorium. Frances had sent a death notice to be published in the newspaper back in the west, and skyped Enid, who was at a port somewhere in New Zealand.
Enid was not sure she would make it back for the funeral. ‘Cruises,’ she had said to Frances, ‘you know how it is. Boats. Another world.’
Nell listened to this account, secretly relieved. The simplicity of the arrangements somehow reassured her, and Enid’s absence meant that there might be the liberation of true feeling. She was moved by the decency of her sister, and by her evident composure. Frances spoke softly and sounded reasonable. She would phone again and keep in touch. Frances would cook her a meal, tomorrow night, and Matt was of course welcome too.
There was a long, thoughtful lull.
‘There’s an Irish song Else was fond of: “She Moved Through the Fair”. I wonder if we can play it at our little ceremony.’ Frances was asking her permission.
Nell had never heard of it, but this was not the time to say so. ‘If it will help,’ she said meekly.
And so together they were assenting to all the business of grieving—not the feeling, but the bureaucracy and management of the feeling, not the mess of weeping or the gravity of loss, but what might efficiently supplement: arrangements, phone calls, contacting those concerned.
‘And I’d like to bring Mrs Davoren,’ Frances added. ‘My neighbour, the one I told you about.’
And so it was settled.
Years ago, Else Kelly had firmly stipulated: no priest, no Catholic service, no readings from the Bible. Unlike Fred, she did not believe. Unlike Fred, she would not even pretend.
They assembled together with respect to her wishes. Mark and Sal (but not Luke) were there, and Matt, and Viv, from Nell’s work. There was a nurse from the nursing home, a large woman, Madge Crankshaw. Frances said later she had seen her on the ward but could not recall ever having shared a single conversation or figure out how she knew the venue and time of the service. Nell met Mrs Davoren and commented kindly on her hat, hugely conspicuous and adorned with a clump of cloth roses. It was the kind of hat one might wear to the races or a wedding. Mrs Davoren remained stony-faced, and seemed in command of the situation, shaking the hand of the funeral director, giving Nell and Frances and Nurse Crankshaw a peck on the cheek. There was a sly sense of possession, Nell thought, a practised control.
Towards the end of the short service the funeral director, in a combination of bored forbearance and meticulous timing, pressed a key somewhere on his laptop and played ‘She Moved Through the Fair’.
It was Sinéad O’Connor in lavish desolation. A voice singing slowly of someone retreating, of a star and a swan, of lovers forever and never parted. Nell looked at Frances, uncomprehending. Neither watched as the coffin, mechanically alive, began to recede on metal wheels.
At the ascension of voice Mrs Davoren began to weep, and then as if by contagion they all wept together, Frances included. Briefly, they were in emotional accord, carried away on the glassy roll of a few mellifluous Irish vowels. When the song concluded, Mrs Davoren rose, offered swift goodbyes, and with her walking stick eagerly pointing the way, pushed along the aisle and burst outside to her waiting taxi. Nell couldn’t dispel the feeling that the service had been for her benefit, and that the sisters’ emptiness, their shared introversion on the subject, had been overtaken by this old woman’s claim to prior knowledge of their grandmother.
They were in a public place, a crematorium, a room modern and unhallowed, and Else, their beloved Else, was ash now, and gone.
The aircon grumbled. The furnishings—mauve walls, a spiky flower arrangement of orange strelitzia, a podium, mid-stage, of fascist angularity—all were deplorable. It seemed a disaster, this ceremony. They were holding themselves and each other together against women more competent with death—Nurse Crankshaw and Mrs Davoren—and left indecently with the sense that an important task was uncompleted.
Irrationally, Nell decided she that hated Mrs Davoren. Having only just met her, it was a relief to despise the flashy hat, and the unwanted peck on the cheek, and the way she’d gushed at the song, which was intended for Else, after all. It was Else’s choice, ‘She Moved Through the Fair’, so transcendentally mournful.
What Irishness remained in them, tumbling genetic in blood hum down the diasporic generations, that they were so keen for a keening, that they all wept together? What entreaty pierced them communally, like shared sentiment or kin memory or the rediscovery of antique feelings? It may have been a nostalgic purity that appealed: the singer before crude tattoos and the delinquency of TV fame, singing her heart out with a sweet Celtic tune. How, in the absence of a priest, she carried them through irreligious grief. How she stood in—yes—for womanly beauty enduring. Or it may have been that they needed a moment appro
ximating a sodden singsong, like men in a pub, forgivably uncertain of the true reason they gathered.
62
Matt slept soundly beside her.
And now this. This returning.
Returning now was the vision of the house where she grew up, in Midas Street, Kalgoorlie. It was an old weatherboard with a bull-nosed roof of rusty corrugated iron, a miner’s house in a long line of similar houses, dark inside, closed in, but with a sleep-out at the rear, and ever-dusty louvres in regular rows looking onto a parched backyard. An outdoor toilet, rather rickety, stood near the back fence; and to the side a squat but generous tree of figs.
Through the centre of the house ran a narrow hallway, with a bedroom at either side, the old-fashioned body-shape of early pioneer dwellings, fit for humble lives, for secrets, for retreat after hard labour. In the kitchen stood an Early Kooka wood stove, of cream and spearmint-green enamel, with its emblem of a kookaburra, chest puffed, holding a worm in its beak. The stove, and the emblem, and the childish pun seemed to Nell to mark the very centre of the house; it was where they gathered, the kitchen, and it was at the pivot of all their interactions.
She remembered that the curtains had a motif of pineapples, incongruously tropical, and that they sat at the pink formica table, the five of them, with Enid and Fred at the ends, to share repetitious meals of grimly English austerity, sausages and mash, pea soup in the winter, a glistening bowl of canned peaches for their dessert. A glass of water stood beside each dinner plate, on the right. Salt and pepper in yellow plastic cones marked S and P. All these signs and symbols, evident and hidden. Their lives were contained there, under a sixty-watt bulb, shedding in dim radiance its pyramid of brown light. There she saw herself, sitting next to Else and opposite Frances, and now she was glancing around, and seeing the pineapples and the kookaburra and the faces of her family; she was hearing the rumble of giant trucks and grinding machines—the mines awake at night, working, teeming—then she was moving in a circle, and again, in the whirl of her recollection, saw herself with skinny limbs poking from a loose cotton dress and her head raised, listening to Fred speak of something or other; and then rising from the table and moving away, through the sleep-out, where Enid’s bed lay perpetually unmade, out into the yard, to stand by their beloved fig tree with its sticky harvest and copious hands, to stand there under the gritty sky and begin to sob without end, cradling her own body gone crooked, seeing with teary eyes the night-time wash away, imagining herself like a foetus in alcohol, pale with unlived life.
Beside her Matt stirred. He seemed to utter a string of words, as if in response to her dreamhouse, then sighed and resettled and became completely still. She rested her cheek at his back. She heard his healthy breath, in and out, and drew instinctively towards it, listening as if to find an answer to her unspoken questions there.
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The Perth Mirror 2/8/1941
VANDALS TEAR ARM FROM PADDY HANNAN’S STATUE
Vandalism reached its imbecilic worst in Kalgoorlie during the week when some mentally warped individuals broke an arm off the bronze statue of Paddy Hannan outside the Kalgoorlie Town Hall.
It was the culminating act in an outbreak of vandalism that not even the £5 reward offered for information by the Kalgoorlie Council has been able to stop. Why any cranks should want to destroy the statue of a man who was the very soul of the city they live in is beyond comprehension.
Even those among us who know the rip-roaring days of the ’90s by nothing but history revere the memory of the great prospector who not only put the Fields on the map, but who opened up to the world wealth hitherto undreamed of.
Paddy Hannan is as much the soul of Kalgoorlie today as the memory of Nelson is the moving spirit behind the British Navy.
It is the fate of the famous to have their lives summarised for them.
Paddy knew this to be so and considered his reward unmerited and his achievement accidental. He believed that the ruckus would eventually die down and was vexed at the blathering history that was imposed upon him. He thanked God for his fortune, but hated to be congratulated for what, if truth be told, was merely happenstance success. Intuitively, he understood the unethical component of luck. Worthier men than he, men who worked harder and suffered more, men who lost everything on a chance, or died thirsting in the desert, or choking in a tunnel, or tripping into the ogre mouth of a mineshaft in drunken darkness—these men had no blessing of good luck to assist them. These men died forgotten, with their names blown away like dust.
The statue was vandalised again and again. Its head was torn off; it was covered with paint; someone stole the mining pick that lay at its side. The bronze was filled with concrete to make it immovable, and, when this did not work, a replica replaced the original.
Still, the old statue remained a landmark. Tourists began in dribs and drabs to visit the town. Visitors held up their mobile phones. Their casual images, Instagram forgetful, placed wide-smiling faces with dour Paddy Hannan. There they were, wanting luck, invading his stiff afterlife.
64
Her eyes flew open. What had disturbed her?
The voice somewhere of a child.
It was still dark, but a nacre of streetlight reached though the long windows of the balcony, and quivering leaves, trapped in silhouette, were cast at the foot of her bed. She had the sense common to those who wake in the middle of the night that time was pooling, not flowing, that there was a basin of feeling into which one might fall and drown. Frances lay on her side looking drowsily at the film of shapes, thinking how very Japanese they appeared, how this was a decorative element that she might once have noticed on a screen, or a lacquered tray.
But it was a fleeting notation, a scrap of otherworldliness. Soon enough she remembered the appalling funeral, and Nell angry at its conclusion, and herself too vacant to respond. Matt had taken Nell home, sheltering her with his arm; and she had lingered to speak to the nurse, and to thank the funeral director, who waited politely, his hands professionally clasped, and offered a volley of gentle but fatuous remarks about how small the gathering had been, how ‘select’.
Afterwards, she had stepped alone into a white summer blaze and walked outside along the pebbly paths beside the crematorium. Cicadas crazy with their high screech filled the air, then the roar of planes, diagonal, in noisy competition, to and from Kingsford Smith. So many planes heaved to the sky or slid to a landing—which from her angle appeared headed into a block of ugly flats. Travellers coming or going, peering through blister windows in ascent or descent, halloing or goodbye-ing in chorus. She gazed at the planes and was overcome by a wish for departure. There was cacophony and heat haze. There was her lifting and falling self. Here she was, stuck in Sydney, on a fierce summer’s day, sick with an extra grief that made her heart rotten.
It was the male cicadas that screeched and crackled: why did Frances think of this?
The loudest—by far—the loudest insects in the world. There were over two hundred species of cicada in Australia. They had five eyes, two compound, one on each side, and three simple, perched on the top of their heads. Five eyes. They might live underground as nymphs for six or seven years, but above ground, outside, lived only a few weeks.
What returned to her was a picture book she owned as a child, part of a series on Australian wildlife. Possibly the cicada and its shrill statistics meant as much to her then as the clownfish did now to Luke. Why else would she recover these details now, of all times, when so much had fallen away, and she too had fallen into a state of docile negation? She stood still, halted by this younger self, who leaned into the images to marvel at five insect eyes. The child in time, precognitive of the adult.
The Irish song was a mistake. Did Else know that the second verse was sung by one dead?
St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians. The mollifying, the expected text, would surely have worked better—faith, hope, love, these three: but the greatest of these is love.
Will’s funeral, yes, Will.
And now in whirlpool night, in a Moskenstraumen of her own, Frances was at last reflecting.
The banal truth of things: that those we love disappear, that we all disappear, that there was no end to this learning to deal with disappearance.
It did not help to have this ready-made sentence present itself. Too easy. Too efficient. Too severely categorical. And where did the cicadas fit, asserting vibrant endurance, abrading the air itself with their rackety will to live? Something allowed the past to interrupt and console, even if it was the simplest of tales, of nature’s ingenuity, discovered anew by each generation of curious child.
Such a mundane conclusion, but Frances would not renounce it, that the child-past made sense of our lost adult now. That those books of childhood held premonitions of what would help in the future. That children are certain of wonder, that it carries them forward, that they speak in confident whispers from the past.
She checked her phone, optimistically luminous in her room’s semi-dark. There were two messages to say that Nell had rung hours ago, perhaps guiltily to ask if she’d made it home in one piece. Frances texted to reassure, though Nell would be sound asleep.
Her thoughts were sharp and skittering. Her rent was due. Overdue. Tomorrow, the agent’s office.
The funeral director: she must transfer the balance of payment.