by Gail Jones
Then she saw it, a picture of a cicada’s triangular face, its bulging side eyes, cherry-red, and its fairy-diaphanous wings, nothing that suggested epic inertia and then a swiftly compressed life.
And she remembered that Enid had asked her to take photographs of the funeral. She had taken no photographs; she’d had no intention to do so.
It was a kind of protest, a modest triumph against the sport of passive aggression at which Enid was world-class. Had there been an Australian Open in passive aggression—played haughty and sure in a high-roofed stadium, before an ironical, jeering crowd draped in national colours—Enid would certainly have won.
65
In the bathroom, Frances saw the aftermath of her day. She had molten eyes and a bloated appearance. Glancing sideways, she saw her face as a child, remade by bee sting, all distortion and hurt. But she had no wish to recall herself as a girl in pain. She dashed her face with cold water and dried it in a hurry. She patted at her closed eyes and stopped a sob in her throat. And when she slept again, with medication, she dreamt a childhood dream: she was Captain Nemo walking on the bed of the ocean, searching though deep water for something unknown. She must have been wearing a diving helmet because her head felt abnormally large. She sensed a bubble there, and her face stretched tight inside a globe. All heavy as brass, screwed down with wingnuts, and immovable. She could not turn her head. Nothing was clear. She pushed her cumbersome limbs and struggled to advance. Was it water she moved in, or another element entirely, some gluey dream-stuff leaking like death into her diving suit? She woke again with a start, this time to find her mouth clammy and her face wet with sweat, or tears.
Her sheets were twisted and her pillow was on the floor. Frances remembered the book’s illustration: Nemo in a pudgy diving suit with the giant squid looming behind him. And their sentence, Aronnax’s sentence, about phosphoric phenomenon. She repeated it silently to herself, but it was now a charm disenchanted. There had been a joint imagining once, but that was no longer possible.
Children invent sayings and slogans to make the world intelligible. In the middle of the night, this was what she told herself, controlling the past.
There was a kind of drumming to the darkness now, and Frances felt apprehensive. It was as if her room was filled with the vibrations of a future life she must concede and admit. She retrieved her pillow, straightened the sheets, took another pill. She flicked at her lamp switch and turned to lie on her side. In the streaming dark she was wide-awake, waiting for sleep to overcome her.
Against her better judgement, she was a believer in ghosts. Sensations of presence illogically persisted. Figure shapes in the night. The hem of curtains stirring with an exhalation. Bats in nearby trees uttering human night-cries. Memory too, had become a wearisome haunting. In her recent grief she was visited not by Else, or by Will, even now omnipresent and woefully unquiet, but by Nell as a girl in fleecy pyjamas, shuffling in a lost, hazy sleepwalk towards her. How often she had stirred to find Nell moving slowly around the room, her blind eyes open, her mind floating in a dream.
Frances had rested her hands on her sister’s shoulders and steered her back to bed. She’d leant towards her, the moony crescents of their faces almost touching; and whispered into the night their special message: It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon.
As if this was an explanation. As if it actually meant something.
PART
TWO
66
So, who is this girl, dreaming awake, of an entombed miner?
What possessed her—who possessed her—to be half in love with death, swept by fancy to see a grubby face, stark in its own darkness, afraid, expectant, waiting for the kiss of life?
She wanted that moment retrieved; she wanted her own vivacity.
By winter of the following year, Frances had returned for a visit to Midas Street and was sharing her old bedroom with Enid’s companion, Val. Here she was a girl again, but adrift and unsettled, subject to floods of both memory and forgetting. She lay awake on her back, listening to Val snore. She had now forgotten the name of the Italian miner who, in 1907, was trapped underground for nine days, alone in darkness, doomed, and then miraculously saved. She understood that she had been a fantasist all her life, that she had attached herself to stories that might give her valour, explain her body, organise and affirm the dignity and promise of the world. She understood that before Nemo and Aronnax, before the dramas of Nell’s delusions and scarlet fever and her own swollen face, before Fred’s slow death and Else’s eroding decline, that she had lived with this story above all, of the man who was saved. The saved miner was in their primary school reader, with sketched artwork rather like that in a comic book. He was all shadows, he was hollow-cheeked, he was mad-looking and desperate. And there was a second man, the rescuer, rising up from a flooded shaft in a deep-sea diving suit, bulky, with the full helmet, confronting the dazed miner with a lamp.
The trapped man: his was the image of a face sprung from darkness and found alive. He had a beautiful name—she knew it once—but Frances could not now recall it.
The secret history of her own life, the untold inner story, included the moment she began to fear Nell after seeing her set fire to a woman’s hair. This inexplicable blaze remained, the woman flaming upwards, a human candle by candlelight. It seemed a startling declaration of hidden character, as if she had not known her sister truly until then.
Neither mentioned the event, or ever alluded to it; but she supposed Nell must remember, especially now, speaking to a sympathetic physician, enjoined to analysis, and bent on stability. When as a teenager Nell became ill with delusions, hearing messages in the airwaves, believing herself a target of sinister intent, Frances thought of her plight as the poison of the crime she carried. Not orphanhood, or Enid’s vigorous and casual spite, not her fitful bad behaviour or the various torments of adolescence, but the revelation of violence and the drama of its expression. Frances thought so often of this human arson that it took on the status of a parable; this was the splurge, perhaps, of Nell Kelly’s true self. Her lack of remorse confirmed it; and Frances thought herself a righteous witness. She gained something by contemplating her sister’s lack and misdeeds.
Around that time, they both lost their religion. One week they went to mass, the next they did not. Symbols persisted into complicated adolescence, but it was a kind of repertoire that remained, a vague, membranous world, the flit of altar images rehearsed and compounded since childhood. St Mary’s School. St Mary’s Church. The Madonna, in a lapis robe, pretty and mournful, weeping beneath a jagged halo of stars. Any number of woolly saints and scrolled admonitions. All that had been installed for their devotion claimed them less than their bookish world, still alive and evolving, and this rough place they found themselves in, governed by men and boys, most tough as old boots. Daily they needed to be secular, they needed to be open to other realms; and they needed to be firm against insult and threat. Both decided independently that their religion was unpersuasive. They settled for something more ascetic, less symbolic, closer to the quick and energy of life. Both had then trusted experience, not doctrine, and now, older than Mary, they found they were still lost.
When Enid opened the door on that first day, there was a surge of misrecognition. Enid looked like Else. It was as if Enid had gathered from Else’s passing some of her mother’s features, and though more aged was also more avid and formidably doubled. Her cheeks were grey tissue but she had Else’s dark eyes. Even her silver hair, bobbed in a tight perm that suggested early Roman sculptures, seemed uncannily to refer. After a pause, Enid stepped forward to hug her niece. It had been almost eight years.
‘Sweetheart!’ she exclaimed. The tone was accosting.
Never much given to touch or affection, Enid seemed pleased to see her back, or to have another guest over whom to practise control. And Frances, halted by metempsychosis, felt blank and distracted.
It was an odd mix of sensations, the touch of one dead, a re
turn to the family home and this disproportionate fondness. Enid smelt of Eau de Cologne 4711, Else’s habitual scent, the very one, she had claimed, that movie stars wore. Else, always Hollywoodish, always wanting more glamour.
Val stood nearby, unintroduced. She was patient, calm and self-possessed. Frances was surprised to see her dark skin; she’d not imagined Enid capable of such a friendship. Val offered a spontaneous hug and the spectre of Else flew away. Here was genuine feeling and sturdy touch.
She placed her hands on Frances’ shoulders as if making a show of inspecting her. ‘You look just like your mum,’ Val declared.
And Frances was confounded again, lost again between generations. She was in a trance of arrival and locked in serious confusion. She offered up a smile that might have shown wary amusement as Val leant forward and dragged her suitcase into the hallway.
67
Enid had installed her own taste with awful triumphalism. Frances stepped across the threshold and saw pinkish curtains of a plastic, space-age material. Pink swathed the windows and frilled the old fireplace; leftover frill, economically, was tacked above the doorway. A vase of pink plastic roses stood on a glass coffee table, next to a Prussian-blue ceramic ashtray shaped as a fish. (Did Enid now smoke?) There was a bumpy sofa, strewn with five checked cushions. A television the size of a small car took up most of the side wall.
Frances peered with a sense of despair at what once had been their lounge room, looking for a relic, or for something familiar. There wasn’t much. She wanted to see a commonplace thing that she knew, the bronze rose bowl with the wire-work lid that used to sit above the fireplace, Fred and Else’s framed wedding photograph that used to rest there, beside it. A china ornament, any ornament, at the centre of a lace doily. No sign of these things. Enid had refashioned their lounge room in the spirit of erasure. Frances contained her feelings and made cheery small talk. She looked with interest at Val, who shared an ironical gaze when, from her frilly shallows, Enid was tactless or bossy.
Over dinner that first night, Enid revealed that Jack had died.
‘No point looking for your dad. He’s dead.’
The severity of the announcement left Frances dumbstruck. There had been no gentle lead-up or compassionate unfolding; just this hammer blow, hit from above. It would have been difficult to imagine a less considerate statement.
Frances stared down at her plate of over-cooked chops and potatoes. She refrained from displaying the shock of reversal that Enid was expecting.
They all fell silent. Enid waited for a response, for the satisfaction of her revelation, but then went on, heedless, pleased to wield her news as a weapon. ‘About a year ago, now. A letter came from lawyers, for you and Nell. I can show you later.’
Enid sounded aggrieved not to be given more credit for her authority on the issue.
The room seemed to recede. Frances was unable to speak. She rose from the table, walked through the house to the backyard, and moved into the darkness. The fig tree was still there, spreading in a low dome. The outside toilet had gone. So too the row of struggling gerberas Else had lovingly coaxed. There was a droopy clothesline, its arc strung in a bright line over the mostly concealed yard.
The night sky gleamed and was opulent. The air was cold. Frances gazed unfocused into space that smelt of dust and explosives.
She thought to herself: get a grip, then realised that this was one of Enid’s sayings, one that she used to insist others hold on, even as she prised their fingers from a cliff. A childish image, but it returned to remind her of family stoicism and injunctions against feeling.
At some point she became aware of Val, standing beside her.
‘Clueless, bloody clueless. She doesn’t mean to hurt.’
Both knew that she did. Already, Frances was reminded of the long history of Enid’s surly performances.
Val touched her arm, then moved into a hug. ‘Sorry about your dad. Lovely bloke, he was. Kind.’
Frances heard the babble of the gigantic television switched on. Along the hallway drifted the jolly petulance of soap-opera dialogue, then a stream of whiny wallowing and maudlin violins.
Val squeezed her hand. ‘Clueless,’ she repeated.
There was no mourning for a father, but for the idea of a father. Frances knew that she had no history with this man and did not yet understand how his absence formed a meaning. There would be regrets—for her timing and passivity and disassociation—but these would come later. Here was another kind of confusion, another vulnerability. It was a lonely wanting, with no decisive information. She leant against Val, whom she had known only for a couple of hours, but who in some invisible connection had known both Mary and Jack.
‘You need to go back. Finish your dinner,’ Val said.
‘I can’t.’
‘Then say something to Enid so she’ll leave you in peace. Say that you’re tired, that you need to sleep.’
Frances hesitated.
‘C’mon, love.’ Val tugged lightly at her shoulder.
They re-entered the house together and Frances excused herself. Television voices continued their emotional drone.
Enid was clearly disappointed not to have the chance to say something more; and she may have sensed her own brutality and found it had not given her the requisite amusement. She may have wished to share a few details, and to remind her niece that Jack Farrell was a ratbag no-hoper. What kind of man abandons his baby daughters? She sat clasping a cushion at her belly, as if smothering a small animal. She bore a sullen expression; families were tiresome to her. But already she was withdrawn, caught in her flat-screen world. On television—in America—a man stood in the rain, bravely wet, arguing with a woman who grimaced under the shelter of a dripping umbrella. Enid was enthralled. The weather of another world.
Frances recalled Else shouting from the back steps: ‘You girls get out of the rain! You’ll catch your death!’
When would Enid ask her about Else, and the funeral?
How did Jack Farrell catch his death?
Frances sat on the bed, her head lowered, her feelings a muddle. The most solemn claim, to mourn a parent, was an impossibility. There was no proprietary cause, no sense to it, and no protocol.
She wished she could miss him, but this was claiming a suffering unearned. She knew the truth of this understanding and was ashamed to concede it. And what might Nell think? How to tell her, how to divulge?
Val was asleep by nine, ensconced in a comfy snore. The Great Wave was gone, and with it the signs of childhood existence. Val’s cardigan was folded on a chair, and her dress hung on a coat hanger on the door, looking in the half-dark like a deflated person. Together with her shoes nestling under the chair there might have been another in the room, a thinner woman, a stealthy wraith. There was no menace, such as a child might imagine, but the old room felt in any case both cramped and empty. Under the tin ceiling, pressed with a pattern of ivy, the air was grainy and stale.
Frances rose, left the bedroom, and walked quietly through the house. She discovered that Enid had also gone to bed.
Ah, free. She felt it now. This house. Her history. The way rooms hold a breath and the venture of memory. So here she was, returned.
Here she was, in Midas Street. She had a sense now of how misshapen her life was. She had been raised by loving grandparents, but was incurious about her parents, protecting her sister in their little world, but herself unsure. And now, a widow in the family house with her aunt and a woman she did not yet know, she sensed above all recurrent loss.
She switched on the light in the kitchen, filled the kettle and made herself a cup of tea. A cold draught issued from a gap in the weatherboard. The kitchen was largely unchanged. She noted the same floral linoleum, worn bare near the sink, the same chipped cupboards and the Early Kooka stove. The accustomed fittings made her grateful, as if acknowledging her right to return, to be there.
Then she became aware of a low, unceasing hum. It was the twenty-four-hour labour of the Su
per Pit. Night workers were involved in extraction and crushing, driving haul trucks and steering huge, lumbering shovels. Waste and ore were being shifted from vehicle to vehicle to electromechanical plant. She remembered the vocabulary, dolerite, quartz, telluride, sulphide, vanadium: the data of minerals and their strange poetics. She imagined a dim cabin perched on a giant truck, a craggy worker in a helmet, lit in his cabin by orange lights. As he drove the curved roads of industrial ravage, as he turned carefully along the recursive routes, made scarier in the dark, made deeper and more precipitous, he blinked into the twin tunnels of the headlights, quaking. There was fear there, she was sure, at the immense space he moved in. The flashing of other lights, and other twinned headlights, swerving from rockface, tilting back to muddy furrows and gravel and a direly sloping trail; these composed a mining world of mighty and impersonal labour. The driver would light a ciggie and drag on it. He would exhale foul air, his air, to make the cabin his own.
Frances sat still at the kitchen table. She was that driver, turning, staring through the narrow headlights, pulling at a thick steering wheel made for men’s large hands. She saw the laborious night and the creeping progression of slow vehicles. A vision of the Super Pit had risen to disturb her; it was proximate, audible, not far beyond this house. Its gape and its hole were a constant unmaking. She was assailed somehow; she was oppressed by her own imagining.
Returning to her senses, she told herself that she should call Nell.
She should call Nell and tell her the news about Jack.
Their father. Jack Farrell.
But she simply sat at the table, plucking at her jeans, sad and distracted and overwhelmed, realising with a shiver that she now felt very cold.