by Gail Jones
68
At last, she acted. Rang. It was almost midnight in Sydney. Nell answered her phone.
Frances heard her befuddlement and what might have been a switching off of the television.
‘Say again?’
And Frances heard herself saying again: our father, Jack.
She heard her pronouncement, ‘He’s dead,’ met by a girlish shriek, then herself explaining and calming and saying, ‘Letter, there’s a letter.’ There was no form of words that made sense of negligible detail coupled with such momentous news. To cover Nell’s stunned silence, she was rambling and talking too much, as if self-justifying. ‘A year ago,’ she was saying, ‘Enid,’ she was saying, ‘Enid knew, she knew. Somewhere there’s a letter.’ Frances was expressing her own exclusion, with wet cheeks and a dragging sensation, as if she was sinking into mud and, sucked under, barely breathing.
She pressed off the phone and made her way through the sleeping house back to her bedroom. No light, but darkness visible and a sense of woe. Sliding her hands along the wall, feeling its surface in the post-mortem dark, she came upon the doorframe that recorded their heights as children. Fred had bade them stand still and be measured. Nell, Frances, Nell, Frances; and beneath, in an older script, Enid, Mary, Enid, Mary, the track of growing sisters of two generations. Though she could not see them, they were there, pencilled names, dates and heights, in Fred’s spidery handwriting. He had flattened their hair with a ruler and asked them to stand straight. As if reading Braille, with loving caution, Frances brushed her hand across the names.
The doorknob rattled as she entered her bedroom; it stuck as it did when she was a child. Some things remained stuck; some things never changed.
And she had a little fright when Val’s dress on the coat hanger moved person-like, in a flutter, as she closed the bedroom door.
69
Val was from Wiluna, she said, up north, from the Martu community. Mandildjara woman. She spoke proudly of her home, sliding into Aboriginal English, as if only this comfort of community language would speak the world as she found it. Big Country, beautiful Country, Sandy Desert, whitefellas called it, the Canning Stock Route, but it was Yiwarra Kuju, one road and one family, and spinifex and mulga and waterholes—jila—and ghost gums, ah tall, and the light of a wide, clear sky. Plenty bush tucker: bungarras, quandong, roos. And stories there, family stories, from the old fellas and from Country. She missed her mob but was often back on Country. Big mobs of aunties there too, and big mobs of family in Jigalong. Val smiled. She had stated her wealth of connection; she had named her own place. ‘Ethnographic enough for you?’ Val asked. It was a joke and a test.
Frances was charmed. From Enid’s account she had assumed that Val was a kind of servant, subordinated to her aunt and her drastic personality. But this was not the case. Val had her own life, independent, and was better educated than Enid. She visited from time to time and had joined her once as a companion on a sea cruise. There was no supplication, or debt. Val had been excited to ride over the sea, and Enid needed help, she said, being so clueless about the real world. So the arrangement was mutual, and Val came and went as she pleased. When she was in town, she volunteered at the women’s refuge in Dugan Street; when she was back on Country she taught kids in the Martu way, in Language. In her spare time, she tracked birds as a citizen scientist, raising her small black binoculars, writing her lists, and then emailing them to a university in Perth.
On their second night together, Val spoke of Mary and Jack. Frances waited until they were alone before she asked her questions. Some part of her realised that the knowledge she sought was imprecise, and that Fred and Else joined silence and love with such efficiency that the sisters persuaded themselves to skip a generation. They had made this predicament. They had chosen to be Kellys, not Farrells. They had consigned their deleted parents to the thin stuff of family legend. Neglect of a living father was a shame they would have to bear.
Now Frances sought from Val an affirmation of continuity. She did not want details, or even clarity, she wanted abidingness. Some token or totem that might join her to her parents’ lives and place. That Val should be here in Midas Street seemed remarkable, and a rectification.
As a child Val had been named Ngulyi. Her mother was a desert woman, her father a white stockman, a kartiya. At seven she was made a ward of the state, taken from the desert to the Kurrawang mission, and then to Kalgoorlie, where she was adopted by Mr and Mrs Walker. Renamed Valerie, she was sent to St Mary’s School. Nuns. Sisters of Mercy. Mostly white ladies in black habits.
‘Black habits!’ she laughed.
And at St Mary’s she met Mary Kelly and they became friends. Mary was her age and bullied by Enid, but spirited, Val said, and cheeky and clever. She borrowed books from the Mechanics Institute and shared them with Val; Val in turn told her stories and the true names of desert creatures.
‘We were close,’ she said, ‘we were really close friends.’ Val paused, looked away. ‘I loved her, your mum.’
She spoke as if still united with Mary, preserving their friendship. Frances heard how steady her voice was, how intently clear. The calm tone was a surprise. What else was contained in this biography, so lightly told? But it was her own story she cared about.
‘My father? Jack?’
‘Nice fella, Jack. Not like the others. Respectful.’
Frances hoped for more, but Val continued her own tale.
As she approached thirteen, the Walkers took her to live in Perth so she could attend a good high school. The girls wrote to each other and kept in contact. Val first met Jack as a grown-up, when he and Mary came to Perth with baby Nell for a visit. She liked his shy, quiet manner and his nervous fathering, how he held Nell at his chest with a large hand cupped around her head, how he took a turn with the change and the bottle-feeding and the rocking to sleep.
Two years after Mary’s death, Val returned to the goldfields. Much later, after Else was moved away into the nursing home, she began to look after Enid as a tribute to Mary. But Enid would never know, or could ever know, that she was the object of care.
‘Mutual aid,’ Val declared. ‘Enid needs help and company from time to time; I need a place to stay when I’m in town. Good arrangement, eh?’
It was enough, for now. Frances would figure out the rest of the history and bide her time. But she did not wish to imagine her mother looking like herself. It was the kind of compliment that stripped a layer off the daughter and gave it back to the lost parent. That at least was how it now seemed to Frances—her look-alike mother, friend of Val, sister of Enid, wife of respectful Jack, existed in the bounteous original, while she was the inevitable copy, and less.
70
Elements of the town remained the same. Sharp winter shadows returned the façades of the 1890s hotels, the Australia, the Palace, the Kalgoorlie, the Criterion. Further along stood the Tatterstalls, with the Rialto around the corner. The Exchange, tizzed up, flew an Australian flag. The York with its twin turrets and flags, its archways and diamonds, was newly restored in salmon pink and lemon yellow. Above and below lay the shade of long empty verandahs. This too was mining heritage, a main street dominated by hotels. The courthouse had acquired a gold-leaf dome and a high, tapered spire; it might have been transported from Samarkand, placed there to impress. Together these buildings said ‘prosperous’, but Frances knew better. For all the four-wheel-drive vehicles, branded with mining emblems, for all the large ladies pushing trolleys from the supermarket, laden with writhing toddlers and red-spotted plastic bags, and the pit workers, both women and men, crossing the road in their high-vis, there was a sense here of resignation and loss. Nothing felt prosperous. There was still hard-scrabble labour and the effort to make community. And still—yes, she felt it—a quality of irrepressible sorrow. In the chill morning Frances wondered how she could have grown up here without understanding this anomaly.
Now, under the hotel verandahs of Hannan Street, Val and Frances drifted
together. They were in step, and compatible. An easy quiet surrounded them.
Frances’ return carried with it a sense of misplacement, of moving away and beyond the solidity of places known, even as she re-entered them. She glanced into familiar and unfamiliar windows: the Chinese takeaway on the corner, the shoe shop she’d visited with Else, the store that sold metal detectors and hard hats and claimed to buy nuggets of gold. A blackboard advertised counter lunches and topless barmaids. Steak + Chips Special. The belly, the groin: there were hard men here, hard, boozy men. Even at this hour beer stink leaked through the open doors of the bars; it brought to mind a livid encounter with an early boyfriend, spilled drinks spreading like piss, and a bashed man in the street.
She and Nell had needed to escape the tough boys who ganged up to shout: ‘Fucking cunts! Up-yourselves bitches!’ She’d been afraid of their hostility and easy obscenities, the way they moved in packs and had punch-ups at the slightest provocation. Nell gave as good as she got, dirty-mouthed, especially when she was ill; but Frances had cowered.
She had no wish to recall. Yet walking here, with Val, she saw faces she remembered and irrationally felt like one incriminated for leaving. Recognition sparked now and then in passing expressions; someone she went to school with smiled vaguely, then slipped away; the man who’d once been their dentist, still pasty and pinched, twitched the slightest hello.
A clean window proclaimed an Aboriginal Language Centre, new since her leaving. Val paused there, pulled her in, and greeted the woman behind the counter. She introduced Frances first in Language, then in English.
Dolly, from Leonora, offered a wide smile and spoke a sentence.
‘Tjupan,’ Val said, naming Dolly’s language.
She continued: ‘Martu Wangka; that’s my mother’s tongue.’
And spoke some words in reply. The women beamed at each other. Neither translated.
It was a kindness of Val to bring her to this place. Tucked here, in this modest room, was something that might be forgotten or was otherwise hidden. Something beyond the official history of the town: Paddy Hannan, gold rush, the aggrandisement of wealth. Something beyond boys’ fearsome taunting and the tone of threat and aggression. On the wall hung Language charts, saving local vocabularies with bold illustrations. Birds, animals, parts of the body. A compass that translated north, south, east and west. Waterhole. Kangaroo. Earth. Sky. There was a shelf of colourful children’s books in Western Desert languages. Frances was attracted to a cover that said Piyarrku! above a pink-and-grey galah, its fanned head feathers blazing, its feisty eye alert.
Piyarrku: onomatopoeic?
‘Put the kettle on?’ asked Dolly. She tossed her white curls and gestured with her chin at a kettle.
Val leant across the counter and planted a kiss on her cheek.
‘Nah, gotta show this girl ’round,’ Val explained. ‘Bye, Auntie.’
Frances wanted to say this was her town, that she was born here, that she didn’t need showing around. But for some reason, she hesitated. This was the place of her parents and grandparents and great-grandparents. She had kin ghosts concealed in the stiff steps of ancestors, stretching, like cracks in sky, to show ancient names and dates. The democracy of family trees appealed, everyone equally real or unreal, the repetition compulsion of particular names, the recording of children deceased, or marriages with ‘no issue’. This was time flattened and equalised: relatives existed ideally, and on the same plane. The trunks of lineage, the ledges of siblings, the sticks that connected or disconnected.
Ireland was somewhere in the past, imperfectly imagined. Fred had spoken of it with obligatory veneration. Mythic, ever rainy, pictured as laneways bordered by low walls of stone under a leaden sky. Green meadows. Motionless cattle. A sheen of hoarfrost, or fantasy. It was a version entirely static and eerily inveterate. Add a lady in a shawl. Add an old man playing a fiddle. Yet Frances felt loyal to what might stand in as an origin. It surprised her to think of this now, in Val’s company, after she’d spoken Martu Wangka, and with such facility and easy pride. The tones of another language had summoned a wish for emplacement.
Frances wondered how kin was envisioned for Martu people, what imaginings Val carried of kin across the years. What pattern, or constellation? Those artworks she had seen, in which relations were dotted assemblages, exploding outwards; might they approximate? She knew herself to be ignorant. She thought of stars massing in the Milky Way, and the curved trace of deep time. Was this plausible, or some vague whitefella guess? It may have been a tendency in herself, an unmet desire, to want an explanation for what now visited as ill-informed speculation. She needed new words, a new language for revelations of intimate involvement. Bodies, histories. There was a quality of abjection here, a sense of being outside the family stories that made herself intelligible.
They stepped back to the broad pavement, and then crossed the street into the light. The sky was cloudless and unsoiled, washed of its mining dirt.
At the Vietnamese bakery Val bought two meat pies. They cradled warm white paper bags and found a seat on a slatted bench in a clearing near the shop. There was a statue there: Saint Barbara, patron saint of miners. A short, bronze girl, Barbara appeared blindly vacuous, as statues inevitably do, standing between two hefty boulders repurposed as a water feature. Water spurted and dribbled into an oval pond. At Barbara’s feet an inscription offered ‘Grateful Appreciation for a Century of Mining’, as though the little girl had stood there from the beginning, commanding the town to grow around her. Frances turned away, discouraged. This was not her place. Improbable, dumb objects rested where feelings might return.
When Frances glanced back at Val, there was a ragged woman with matted hair standing close beside her, bending to whisper. They did not include Frances in their conversation. She watched as Val gave the woman her half-eaten pie and a five-dollar note. The woman pressed her hand and slid away, her body moving with a heaviness, a dejection, that was more than poverty.
‘Wiluna, like me. My mob.’
It was clearly a confidential matter.
‘Shame job,’ Val added, without further clarification.
And then Frances saw them, desert people sitting on the ground at the edge of the clearing, those come in from remote areas for family, or health care, or welfare assistance; all wisely distrustful of whitefella contact. It was a huddle of seven adults, leaning together in solidarity, held in the contentment of shared language and mutual understanding.
Val saw her watching. For a moment she maintained a detached, frowning silence. ‘My niece,’ she said, ‘is working at the Super Pit. And studying engineering.’
A warning against assumptions, or condescension.
Frances broke the remainder of her pie in half and Val took her portion without comment. They ate together, then sucked their fingers and wiped them on paper serviettes. A light burble of falling water arose from Saint Barbara’s fountain. Four-wheel-drive swoosh and truck rumble sounded in passing. Again, Val was hushed; she was far away. She looked distant, enclosed in excursive thoughts.
Frances was glad of her company. Val would have been her mother’s age, about seventy now. She had silver hair in longish threads, and a keen, open face. She gave the impression of no-nonsense decisiveness and remarkable patience. After Enid’s sneering pugnacity, Val’s poise was a relief; her presence inspired composure. Calmly, Val rose and walked to the group sitting together in the clearing. She bent, then squatted, lowering herself into their opening circle. Frances watched Val greet them, crack a joke, enjoy arousing a laugh and light chatter. One of the women took her hand in what looked like a family connection. Another joke, a hoot of approval, and another collective chortle. Some funny comment, relished and shared, had been passed within the group. Val rose and touched lightly several upraised hands. Then she ambled back, theatrical, sure, smiling with the satisfied air of a natural entertainer.
Val and Frances sat a little longer by blind Saint Barbara. They would rise whe
n ready. No rush. There was sunshine beyond the winter chill and they were both taking their time.
A small flock of galahs appeared from nowhere and swung screeching above their heads.
Piyarrku! Piyarrku!
Val noticed, heard it too, the world proclaiming its own names.
71
On their third night together, Val spoke of the ocean.
They were again in the bedroom, perched each on their bed, legs drawn up close as if on a raft.
Frances described the Hokusai wave that once hung in the room and Val spoke in reply of standing on the deck of the cruise ship at night, alone, looking at the moon scattered over the water, absorbed by its strangeness. At home there were dunes and distance and unfixed horizons; on the ocean it was another, more restless immensity. She’d made only a single trip to please Enid and had never cruised again, but returned often to the time she stood with the darkness beneath her, with current-swell and tidal-roll and the glow of phosphorescence on the water.
‘Shimmer,’ Val said. ‘The energy of being here.’
She looked at Frances, then away, as if troubled by the majesty of her declaration. It was a secret feeling, perhaps, not to be too lightly spoken.
Frances was not sure that she understood what shimmer Val had described, but she was moved by what seemed an intimate disclosure, by this suggestion of a private, flowing space, that seemed to support them. And in attending to Val’s words, Frances saw something lonely there, some stranded or isolated moment of her own hidden nature.
There were seashells in the desert, Val went on, as if by way of explanation. Fossils. Fish bones. Evidence of long-ago ocean. The desert sand had a memory of creatures of the sea. She remembered when first she’d seen the Indian Ocean from the beach at Perth. A little black girl in new bathers, aghast and staring. Not just the hills of those waves, breaking towards her, but rhythm, and repetition, and the spray song of falling water. I was afraid, she said. I was really afraid. But her second father, dad Walker, taught her to swim at Scarborough beach. He had held his hand beneath her back to protect her from sinking. She spread her limbs, slowly trustful, into the sheath of cold water.