Our Shadows

by Gail Jones

  Her new father said, ‘Go easy, easy now, Val.’

  She closed her eyes, she said. She learned to float and make a star shape and accept the wide ocean sway. Even then, feeling held, it had seemed like a dream.

  The ship. To be afloat in landless darkness. It was to be held there and included.

  ‘Held here,’ she corrected. ‘Sounds a bit crazy, eh?’ Val smiled.

  It was a friendly challenge. It was a wish to affirm a truth. In their conversational ease there was spontaneous trust.

  Frances had never heard anyone speak like this before. Even those enraptured by artworks found words to include cautious aloofness. She was accustomed to sardonic quip and social-media smarts, and a range of verbal reference more cunningly guarded and ephemeral. Blogs, tweets, the ping of exclamatory news alerts and the common delusion of instant relevance. Lyric talk with poetical conviction was altogether exotic. Ocean. Night-time. The flash of light on water. And this from a woman raised in the Sandy Desert. If she did not ask questions, it was because Val inspired reticence and care. Frances looked down into her lap, wanting to show respect. She was hauling in and securing the tale of the older woman’s experience, keeping it shushed, as serious children kept secrets, charged up with the tension and excitement of commission; but not sure exactly what she’d been told, or why.

  72

  Val, Enid and Frances sat in the frilly pink room, watching the television news.

  In Thailand twelve boys, twelve soccer players and their coach, had been trapped underground in a cave, as water rose to imperil them.

  Tham Luang Cave, Chiang Rai, the caption read.

  There was a shot of rainfall and boys’ bicycles lined up at the cave entrance. Distraught family members addressed the camera as if their children sat watching on the other side: ‘Please hurry up. Come home. Let’s go home together!’

  One woman was stroking the saddle of her lost son’s bicycle.

  Another sat on the ground in wet darkness, her head in her hands.

  The seep of true feeling, the terror of children gone. On the screen, under spot-lighting, the rain twinkled and shone.

  ‘Doomed,’ announced Enid, with miserable cheer.

  Each night, they watched. Enid became bored by the lack of conclusive bad news, but Frances and Val followed the rescue plans with avid attention. A Thai Navy Seal team had been sent into the black water. Thick orange pipes were pumping water from the cave. Hundreds of soldiers scoured the mountain for alternative routes into the chamber. At the cave entrance, there erupted a field of offerings: joss sticks, flowers, shrines, messages. Journalists held up fluffy microphones and explained the latest news to eager cameras. All was clamour, witness, talk of planning and speculation. On day four, the Navy Seals said they needed help to negotiate the labyrinth of dark passages. An American team arrived, and two Australian cave divers. Still the rain came; still the relatives waited, tearful, afraid, attending their damp, golden shrines.

  Enid thought it ludicrous that the boys were called The Wild Boars.

  ‘Wild Boars!’ she squawked.

  Frances and Val looked at the young faces displayed on the screen in chequerboard rows. A voiceover said it was not known if they were yet still alive.

  73

  It was a week since her arrival, and Frances had not seen the letter that held news of her father’s death. Enid said bluntly that she couldn’t find it. It was there somewhere, she said. She shrugged and walked away, and it was all Frances could do not to follow her and furiously insist or begin dragging open drawers and searching the backs of wardrobes. But she waited. Frances considered herself a patient woman, though Enid’s company was maddening, her pessimism corrupting, her mean spirit contaminative. She took her aunt on trips to the shops, she played poker, cooked meals, tried to offer companionship. It was Val who held her there; it was Val who tempered the mood, who offered wit and good humour, who chided Enid and corrected her bad behaviour. Enid submitted to Val. Frances could hardly believe it. Though she blustered and complained, it was clear she enjoyed Val’s company and missed her when she was gone.

  Early July, ten days after they’d gone missing, the boys in the cave were discovered alive. Torchlight shone on astonished, adjusting faces. It was an eerie scene, the boys bathed in spooky flare, leaning towards the divers, expectant, frightened, uncertain what visitors had emerged from the murky dark. Television showed a hollow world, drained of colour. There were no features but zonked faces, with mesmeric stares.

  Frances was smiling, Val was weeping, Enid remained staunchly, even diligently unmoved.

  And now there were emphatic warnings against hope.

  The message was repeated again and again: there was still the dangerous slow business of retrieving the boys alive.

  They heard: ‘visibility’, ‘oxygen’, ‘worsening conditions’. They heard: ‘risk’, ‘danger’, ‘flooding’, ‘prayer’. Flecks of words against hope, flung outwards.

  74

  A Thai Navy Seal lost his life while dragging air tanks into the cave. The weight of water upon him. The closing black.

  Val was upset and Frances worried that Enid was right after all, that the grace of finding the boys alive could not be sustained until rescue. That they would perish despite the seething televisual attention of the world.

  Val didn’t want to talk about the dead man. She was suspicious, she said, that if they talked about death the boys would die.

  In her custom you didn’t name the recently dead. You gave them time to keep their names safe and quiet; you released them from the desecration of too much speaking. At the refuge she counselled women not to speak the names of the dead. Too risky, she told them. Keep your hurt, battered face closed off to death. Don’t let it invade you. Silence is protection and a defensive power. ‘Safe, Martu way.’

  Already, they’d reached a state of understanding.

  Val confirmed in Frances some of her deepest intuitions: that there were busy transmissions between people that began almost from the moment they met; that there were friendships and affections across time and space; that there were recuperations, renewals and the return of lost things. Beyond the span of a single history, beyond any individual case, there were intersections, like family. As Val sat subdued before the news report, Frances brought her a cup of sweet tea, which she accepted without looking up, knowing that it was a care now established between them. Frances knew that Val did not stand in for her mother; and she did not seek a substitute or a comforting mystification. Rather she understood this was affinity, one face to another. Making known one’s self. Risking the private story. When she’d mentioned The Great Wave and Val had spoken of the ocean, they were equal and joined in a mutual imagining.

  They’d lain on their beds, parallel, as the sisters had once done, and spoken into the darkness—as children and lovers do—of what secretly, preciously, moved and delighted them. Under blankets in the cold air, blown from Central Australia, they’d made a commitment to fellow feeling which Frances had no wish to question. Her generation were emotional cynics, hard to convince. But Val took for granted a concord of spirit.

  Ever mistrustful, Enid was bewildered by their connection. One night she put her head around the door and said a tough goodnight. She flicked at the light switch several times so they disappeared and reappeared. From their beds, they saw Enid’s indignant face flash there, not there, in a hostile regard. Frances thought it a childish gesture, but some aspect of it scared her, to see Enid on and off like a wired machine, her anger coded electric, her face a nasty mask.

  Soon enough, Enid retreated to her own room. She was easily bored and her instinct was to withdraw, not to converse. Frances and Val were relieved. The invading presence did nothing to dissuade their friendship.

  In the darkness, Val spoke frankly of her mother. She’d lost her mother very young but knew her shape and her Language. Clasped at her mother’s hip, the sensation was of her cheek against warm skin, and the rhythm of her wal
k, and her long breasts swinging, and the red earth skipping away with the seesaw of each stride. There was no distress in this telling, but it was a heartfelt recall. After her mother, there were aunties, who tried to keep her on Country; but then the mission, and the new, unaccustomed life, replacement love, and the school, and the white people and the Church.

  Frances was reluctant to ask Val what had happened to her mother, or how she had reconnected with Country. Later, it might be possible to ask. She had a conviction there were personal topics yet to unfold and that these confidences made a future friendship possible. This was the quiet attention each offered, one to the other, alert to what might be at risk in Enid’s mocking presence.

  In the future, Frances would ask more questions about her own parents. Time would allow her lenience with Enid and confidence with her own seeking. She would tell Val about how she and Nell had invented their own ocean. About Will’s death and her work and her life in Sydney. About how Nell and she had been apart but were now reconverging. She would invite Val to Sydney to meet grown-up Nell. The three would speak together, walk the Bondi cliff track together, and gaze together at the mighty roaring roll of the Pacific.

  75

  A team of thirteen international divers entered the cave, supported by hundreds of Thai divers and rescue workers. There were nine chambers and eight tunnels between them. The boys were one kilometre below the surface and 2.4 kilometres from the entrance. These numbers seemed enormous. How did the boys end up so far beneath the earth? What terrible darkness did they lose themselves in?

  Val liked the name of the coach, Ekapol Chantawong; she said this was the name of a man you could trust.

  Enid sniffed her derision, but wisely said nothing. She repositioned her heavy body on the couch.

  Frances remembered the bicycles, which had been the sign of disappearance and the location of discovery. The parents must have taken the bicycles home and kept them nearby. Somewhere in Chiang Rai thirteen bicycles awaited their young riders.

  And so it unfolded. The rescue. It had been eighteen days.

  The boys were sedated with Xanax and ketamine and moved slowly, like human parcels, through the treacherous water. In chamber three, each boy’s vital signs were checked, and gauze placed over their eyes to protect them from the light outside. Doctors monitored their breathing and the level of sedation. Chamber after chamber, the boys were transported.

  So many men’s arms held these boys in the darkness of the cave; so many cradled and guided them through the black water, giving safe passage, as in a birth.

  Four at a time over three long days.

  76

  Nell was brooding; Frances could hear it in her voice.

  ‘We need that letter. And are you staying in Kalgoorlie? I thought it was just for a week.’

  ‘I decided to wait until the Thai rescue was completed.’ It sounded dubious, but what could she say? How could she explain her compulsion to follow the boys’ entrapment? It was the dim remnant of a childhood story that she saw through a glass, darkly. There was an intricate connection she couldn’t quite see the shape of. Nell had always said that she was too sentimental, and this may have been true; a sentimental pathos defined her attachment to particular stories.

  Nell hesitated. She was aiming for the expression of grievance.

  ‘Well, I can’t come west, if that’s what you’re thinking. Too going much on.’

  ‘Nell, I’m not asking you to come.’

  Frances heard her own sigh, and their distance, and telephonic silence. ‘I’m coming back soon. Just a few more days.’

  Something in her tone of voice had told Frances that her sister was close to tears.

  ‘We don’t even know what he looked like,’ Nell half-wailed.

  Frances waited.

  ‘Our father. We don’t even know what he looked like, afterwards, after Mum.’

  She knew then that Nell had identified a subject that would later obsess them. There was the wedding photograph with the dangling hand, and already it seemed more or less fictitious. He might never have existed beyond that, without a further image to prove it. To offer explanation seemed irrelevant and a poor excuse.

  ‘Perhaps there’ll be a photo somewhere. Once we have the letter…’

  ‘I feel guilty,’ added Nell.

  Her statement was startling. Guilt? More likely remorse or disbelief.

  What Frances felt above all was despondency. Delay had cheated them of their father, and the drama or melodrama of a meeting. It was their fault. They’d been foolish. They’d not developed true filial piety for their father, Jack Farrell. Else Kelly and Fred Kelly had filled up their infant hearts, so that as children the loss of their parents was already resolved. They’d accustomed themselves to a hole in history. And what of their mother, Mary? She was gone entirely; she was unimagined. She had been ever dead.

  ‘I have to go now,’ Frances said abruptly.

  Frances was still standing in the dark backyard, her phone upheld, when Val appeared in the doorway. She stepped forward, framed, the house light pallid behind her. ‘Here,’ she said.

  Val held up a letter.

  ‘Enid finally saw reason,’ she added, with a mischievous smile.

  Frances knew at once that the dread of another confrontation was dispelled, that there was no need to badger Enid again, or try again to catch her off guard. She might at last have answers to Nell’s questions, and to her own.

  They moved together back into the light, and Frances sat at the table. Enid clattered around the kitchen, truculent, glum. Each plate she banged told of her forfeited control over the letter. She was a grunting presence now, maddened by loss of importance. When at last she calmed down, Enid decided to claim rectitude. ‘I’ve kept it safe, that letter. It doesn’t say that much. Anyways.’

  She made a belligerent show, drying their teacups.

  The envelope had been torn roughly and the pages stuffed back in wrong order; but the solicitors, Wentworth and Fellowes, offered orderly condolences on the death of their father in Albany, Western Australia. Wentworth and Fellowes said the daughters must make contact to claim a modest inheritance. No other living relatives had been located. There was a caravan, apparently, but not much else after medical expenses had been discharged. There was a dog, Ruffy, for whom their father had made provision and hoped would be taken into their care. The executor would await their clear instructions. Condolences, once again. Sorry for your loss. Wentworth and Fellowes.

  The letter was nine months old. Enid had said nothing for nine months.

  Frances imagined an empty caravan on a high rocky ridge, somewhere exceptionally windy, so that it shuddered, having no human body to ballast it. A shell of a home, almost a hovel, for a man faceless and forgotten. For poor Jack Farrell.

  Return him the name. Return.

  And then she thought of Ruffy, a kelpie, perhaps, or a border collie, a breed in any case of loyal waiting and sad, liquid eyes. Ruffy would be near the caravan, sitting still and pining and low-moaning with dog-grief. He would be unyielding in his fidelity and immovable in his love.

  77

  Frances dreamt of a woman going up in flames, and an abandoned dog in a hole, barking like crazy under a meniscus moon.

  Waking mid-dream, atremble, she had no idea where she was, then heard a snuffle—Val—and a heavy body-turn. She recognised her old room, recalled Nell lying in the bed opposite, and the companionship of soft talk with no particular consequence, their old reciprocity in this shared space, night after night, year after year.

  Val made a stretching gesture and turned again. She was in her own unnerving dream, moving to suppress or contain it. She may have been at sea, floating on an endless blue.

  In this room, there was time’s overlap and another deepening of the darkness. Frances sensed again that she was a different person at night. Improvised. Permeable. Open like a window to local spirits and primitive feelings.

  Perhaps everyone is a different person
at night.

  She realised this was a sentence she’d formulated in her childhood. She’d known its relevance then, its explanatory power, but had long forgotten, only to recollect it now. It was the scribble of an old note in a childish hand.

  Enid had mentioned that morning that Mr Covich died last year. Mr Covich, the Super Pit voids officer. He’d seemed at one stage almost to flirt with Enid, then had given up, defeated, or warned away. He had talked explosives with Fred across the side fence. His demeanour had been deferential and his manner unusually calm. What might a voids officer die of, Frances wondered, since he was younger than Enid. Hard now to envisage the features of his face. What she saw instead was a man-shape with no visible border, a bloke who, like Fred, carried responsibility heavily, so that he lost definition, and was worn down by it, eroded and always tired.

  She could hear through the night the mechanical hum of the Super Pit, industrious as ever, its tiny humans excavating new space, with the gumption of their huge, slow-moving vehicles. She wondered vaguely how workers managed their nocturnal solitude. Fred had talked sometimes of the mateship in the mines, men close to each other’s stink and fear and strain, men obliged to each other, keeping each other alive. But in the Super Pit the workers were scattered in trucks, overshadowed by machines, caught on long circular roads. Their labour was system, their human connection less clear. It was fearful to consider it, the scale of this separation, and of this darkness.