by Gail Jones
Enid claimed the photograph. She slid it inside her cardigan, pressing and hiding it away. It was the gesture of a woman who had no idea how to encounter her own capacity for affection. Now, Frances felt her antipathy recede. The irrevocable sight of the sisters, bonded with dolls, enabled her to imagine Enid’s loss for the first time, to see her too as a needy child, and with her own circumstances of pain. Enid sat lumpish, quiet, swallowed by unmentionable feeling. She relieved the silence between them with a hoarse little cough.
Now Frances knew that she could leave. Now she was moved, for the first time, by something mournful in Enid, something that rendered her motives, her disposition and her actions more forgivable.
82
On the last day of Frances’ visit, Val drove her and Enid into town so that they could eat cakes together in a café. Enid was done up for the occasion. She wore a string of beads, made to look like coral, and a matching chipped brooch. The swathe of her perm had been artfully fluffed.
Downtown, on Hannan Street, they stopped at the travel agency so that Enid could gather new brochures for future cruises. She had many, but wanted more, never tiring of the posh promise of floating princess scenarios. Her mind was already afloat, escaping into a deluxe cabin with perfectly circular views. The young man behind the counter stood as she entered: a favoured customer. This too pleased Enid. She was girlishly grinning and enjoying the attention.
‘Enid is top tier,’ said the young man, obsequious in his judgement. He scratched at his acne and looked desperately unhappy.
Enid was oblivious. ‘Top tier,’ she said later. ‘Did you hear that?’
It was a new class formation. The cruising class. Frances thought there was need for a redefinition of cultural capital. She kept her thoughts to herself. She saw in her annoyance a response that might have been Enid’s.
They were determined to find harmony. Val walked them to Paddy Hannan’s statue, so Enid could pay her respects, she said, her tone unreadable. Paddy sat timelessly on the corner pavement in front of the Town Hall. He was clothed in a football beanie and scarf, the blue and gold of the West Coast Eagles.
‘Take a photo,’ Enid insisted.
With her phone Frances snapped Enid alone, her hand possessive on Paddy’s shoulder; then Enid with Val, one on each side; then Val snapped Enid and Frances together. Enid reached for her niece’s hand, and Frances answered the clasp warmly. She cast about for something to say, but there was nothing that met the unlikely moment.
‘Now cake,’ proclaimed Enid, entertaining more material needs. She flicked her index finger at Paddy’s scarf, then on impulse rearranged it so that he looked strangled, his neck tightly bound, his mouth entirely hidden. ‘Ha!’ she exclaimed.
It must have been an elegant store in the 1890s; the pressed-tin ceiling was still there, and a row of green and yellow stained-glass squares sat intact above the door. A feathery lemon light flowed from the street outside, polishing the counter and its glass display. From a small offering Val and Frances decided on buttered scones, and Enid chose what passed, in pure fraudulence, for Black Forest cake. It came with a Hokusai wave of imitation cream, sprayed with fiendish flourish from a can. They found a table and sat down.
‘Look at that!’
Frances had rarely seen Enid so content. She spread her body to take up as much space as possible, pulling her cake close and tucking in with unseemly haste. The waitress smirked and folded her arms across her striped chest.
Val leaned over the table and presented Frances with a gift. It was a self-published pamphlet that recorded the vocabulary of her language.
Enid looked baffled but was busy attacking her wave. Val and Frances smiled at each other.
‘Maybe next year,’ Val said.
Frances heard the warm invitation in her voice. Nothing more needed to be said.
Then Val took back the pamphlet and turned to a page of bird sketches.
‘This one you should know.’ She pointed to kaarnka, crow. ‘Essential around here. And this one, walawurru, the wedge-tailed eagle. My totem.’
She began speaking of birdlife as one speaks of family. Those they had seen at Lake Ballard, the zebra finches, the honeyeaters, those that visited at morning, those on the wing at dusk. Then she began listing the Latin names of birds that Frances might see: ‘Falco cenchroides, Australian kestrel; Noephema splendida, scarlet-chested parrot; Cacatua roseicapilla, galah; Ninox novaeseelanadiae; southern boobook.’ She was filling their space together with wing flash and possibilities of a sighting. A prediction of plenitude, a kind of instruction.
Enid looked up, nonplussed and disbelieving. She managed a glare of ostentatious disapproval. Frances saw then how finely cultivated was her aunt’s sense of insult, how her discomfort with others extended even to words and conversation.
‘The Latin names are useful too,’ Val modestly insisted.
Frances sat back. She was overcome by admiration. It was equanimity she responded to, as well as expertise. Val knew her own value. She spoke with the conviction of one who knows the bounty of learning. There was a moment in which they simply looked at each other, not appraising exactly, but assuming relative roles, that Val was the teacher and Frances her student, that there was an awareness in each of what they might share. Val returned the pamphlet and Frances stored it, delighted by tripled vocabulary.
‘She’s a smarty-pants, this one,’ declared Enid. Her voice was laden with mistrust and a wish to dispute. She was sullen once again. How mean she’d become, and how easily irritated. Her Black Forest cake was a disintegrated mess.
‘My arthritis is playing up,’ she added. Pitifully, dramatically, she held out her swollen hands.
Val took no notice. Frances saw then how she negotiated Enid’s moods, knew when to placate and when to ignore. There was an essential art here of self-preservation. Frances distracted Enid by showing her the photographs on her phone, whipping them into a shiny sequence. There they were, in their various posed combinations, with the unconvincing smiles of those seduced into thinking statues were quaintly true. Together, apart, they gazed at themselves, standing there, alive, with dead Paddy Hannan, dressed to the nines as an Eagles fan for the weekend footy.
83
Frances cancelled her flights home and hired a car. She would drive to the southern coast. In her redirection of plans she felt the obligation to complete a story, though she was not sure whose it was, or if it might calm the welter of her feelings. In the last few days she’d felt her disparate worlds intermingle. She was uncertain now of what new or old thing was about to declare itself.
It did not occur to her that she had made a decision to be alone for a time, to travel into a past she might discover only by herself. She retrieved the Japanese letter from Enid’s room, thinking to return it to the address in Coolgardie. Violet Friedlander, she reckoned, would no longer be alive, but there might be other family, a grandchild perhaps, who could rightly claim the letter and to whom it might yet be meaningful and precious. This imagined relative would know her family and explain their connection. Then she would visit Albany, on the coast, and search for the waiting dog, Ruffy. Possibly gone by now, possibly missing or dead, but still a motivation.
Two tasks, she thought: two tasks gave serious purpose to her long drive south. A pretext, an explanation, of what in truth was more simply a drive into her own quiet.
When she set off, in the early morning, Enid stood monumental and disapproving in pink velour slippers. There was a low bubbling sob, then a tell-tale snuffle. Her flushed face subsided. No spite, no recrimination, but this leaky display that might, after all, have been an expression of love. Frances embraced her quaking body and felt the weakness there; that her rancour had aged and made her less sure, that she depended on Val’s visits to link her to the world.
Val stepped forward and tenderly took Enid’s hand. ‘We’ll manage, won’t we, luv.’
Enid clasped her dressing-gown to her throat, holding her feelings tight.
>
But it was pure freedom Frances felt out there on the road. The quieter mood of all that space, the wind visible as it moved in the wiry leaves of mulga, the shape of the gimlet gums, which she loved, their coppery bark and warty leaves, the silver sheen of the clumped foliage held up to scratch at the big sky. The moments sat lightly upon her; the car took her as if weightless. She might have gone on like this forever, pulled in her own stasis through the moving land, inward, awake, self-possessed. She knew how congenial solitary driving could be, how the speeding world opened the senses to the pleasure of blur and flow. Open ground, nothing built. The scrubby plain of a thirsty country in colours of quartz and iron; and beyond, a bloom of cumulus and a far horizon.
Only ten kilometres out, she saw a billboard in the landscape. Words. Not an advertisement, exactly; only black words. She slowed the car and read: ‘Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people. Proverbs 14:34.’ A banner above read Kurrawang Aboriginal Christian Community Inc. This was another of Val’s places: this was the way to the mission. Frances steered the hire car onto the turn-off road. The other side of the billboard read: ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Mark 8:36.’ This one she knew; the nuns cited it often when speaking of goldrush fever and the manifold, contemptible sins of men. At the foot of the billboard lay beer cans, smashed against the sign, and the stain of a wild and disdainful throwing. Scattered in the scrub were plastic bags and what looked like the remains of a barbeque: gristle, ravaged bones, crumpled paper towels.
There was a brief temptation to drive on to the mission. She would see where Val had lived and check it out. But Frances hesitated.
Permission: the word struck her now; she had no permission.
She turned the car around and continued the drive to Coolgardie, the biblical words invasive, like a text meant for her, just as Nell had once read casual words as intended messages. Frances did not believe in righteous nations, or in generalised sins. But she was drawn to the idea that there might be profits that corrupt the spirit.
Sister Teresa, it was, who had quoted the Gospel of Saint Mark. Her year seven teacher. She had a voice bright and high, and liked musically to intone. She had a dark, weathered face and clear black eyes. An old nun, from India. Madras, Tamil Nadu. Frances saw her shape now, retreating down a corridor, lopsided with her distinctive limping gait. Her black habit kicking up to the left and showing the glimpse of a bulging shoe. Polio, perhaps. Only now Frances realised that Sister Teresa may have had polio.
In the shade of this memory she sped on, down the Great Eastern Highway, and it pleased her vaguely to recall Sister Teresa, to see her speaking and withdrawing, to travel back in time to her schooldays as speedily, purposefully, she travelled southwards.
The town of Coolgardie looked dozy and deserted. There were cars here and there, parked in the dazzling winter light, but not a single person appeared on the main street. Red dirt blew across the highway, which seemed vastly wide as if stretched to signify emptiness. A modest, peeling sign read: ‘Welcome to Coolgardie: Mother of the Goldfields!’ Like Kalgoorlie, it had a few stone buildings, impressively solid, and tall old hotels to show a former glory. But most were boarded, or dilapidated, or concealed in a melancholy smear. The Marvel Bar Hotel, standing alone and closed up, was now the RSL. There were yawning gaps where once were buildings. Frances stood beside her ticking car, squinting in the sunlight. The local Information Centre was closed for repairs. You could visit the old jail. You could look from a distance at the old railway building. You could stand in the old cemetery and consider a field of lonely ghosts. So this was a town, she thought dispassionately, where the unvisited dead far outnumbered the living. On such a day you might contemplate death’s greedy dominion.
Predictably, a crow flew past: kaarnka! it called. It was flashing black wings, watching fierce-eyed from above.
Later, she would think of how alone she then felt, with this letter to return, with the dusty wind all about, with her sense that she might glance up and see a group of men coming home from the mines, looking from a distance like the tribe of skinnies. And one man would be like Fred, one would thicken and solidify and lift a stringy arm to wave hallo; a man walking towards her, filthy with grime, from the underground past. Another man might be her father, walking towards her as if to Mary, hailing them both, obscuring the boundary of death and life.
Frances understood that she was seeking signs of life. There was no solace in dead community, in counting twelve Kelly graves in the cemetery, or seven Mahomets. She missed her sister.
Nell should be here with her. Nell and Val. Both.
She searched with care, but the Friedlander house had disappeared. There were a few recent houses back from the main road; a new open-pit mine was somewhere nearby. More gold out there, more prospecting, more hope of profit from the earth. Newfangled methods located and dug it. But still she saw no one, not a single soul. A large brick building, well-maintained and apparently in use, rose up before her. The sign said ‘Sisters of Mercy Convent’.
She paused, uneasy, sensing that her past was chasing her. Sister Teresa, tolerant and kind. Sister Teresa, whom she’d not thought of for years, who had shuffled towards her, and then away, indistinct and half there, in timid revelation of her own condition. What quality did she have, that she returned now as an exemplar of some mystery, and still hypothetically alive?
Frances left the letter from Takahashi Hideo almost furtively in the convent letterbox. Someone practical would claim it. Some assiduous and thoughtful sister would open it, curious; someone would know the Friedlander family and return the letter. Briefly, she experienced a sense of failure. It might have been the solitude of the delivery, or the sense she’d arrived where she had no place to be; it might have been the alarming absence of a visible population. She understood then that she had imagined a warm greeting, a family who welcomed her and offered a cup of tea, and then exclaimed over the found letter, embossed with another time, all the way from Japan. A family, a complete family, who would explain the connection between Violet and Fred, and affirm her commendable and energetic attachment to the past.
Spooked, Frances turned back to the highway to continue her journey. The sky was now brazen. She’d lost track of time. There was carrion once more on the side of the road, and once more black feathers ejected in a startled escape. It was smallish camel this time, its form just recognisable among the foaming innards and rib cage, and the neck arched away in what must have been the shape of a last agony. Odd that she could not avert her gaze.
84
A phone call. Nell.
Frances pressed the car to a skidding stop, surprised that a signal was possible. A cellular network, she told herself, knew where she was.
‘Sweetheart,’ Nell began. ‘I need to talk about something.’
Frances waited. There was a low boom that might have been the muffled sound of an explosion. She looked around but saw nothing indicative, no plume of dust or smoke, only the flat land and the grey bitumen road, extending.
It would be rude to ignore the call, but Frances had been taken by surprise, interrupted in what had been an agreeable seclusion.
‘Yes?’
‘Do you remember, years ago, the woman on fire at Carols by Candlelight?’
‘Of course.’
‘That was me. I burned that woman. That was me. For no reason.’ Nell paused. ‘Did you know?’
‘Yes. I saw.’
There was a silence. Frances gazed into the far distance, patient for her sister’s sake. Ever thus. Sisters. Then it appeared: a smudge of smoke, low on the horizon, starting a faint upwards trail. There was always smoke on the horizon. There was always ash, dispersal.
‘You said nothing.’
‘I couldn’t speak up because I didn’t understand.’ Frances hesitated. ‘I guess I was in shock.’
It was a relief to admit it. Now she remembered the poor woman’s screams.<
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‘But you didn’t comfort, either. You withdrew. We lost each other.’
Frances had clung for so long to her own story, that she was the righteous one, that now she drew back from what sounded like an accusation. She held the phone stiffly, unsure how to respond. She recalled what seemed to be gloating and a lack of remorse. She’d fled to their bedroom that night, confused, afraid, while Nell sat drinking milk in the kitchen with Else and Fred. The high tones of Nell’s voice—excited and victorious—had been disgracefully loud.
Frances thought of the wallaby skull, its brainless hollow, the cavity she poked her child fingers into.
What sisterhood was this, so belated in truth-telling? Why was Nell calling her now, of all times, to express long-ago injury? Thirty years? More? A single terrible event.
‘It’s still here,’ said Nell. It was as if she had heard her sister’s thoughts and wanted to plead a case and correct the record. ‘Still here.’
What followed was the clumsy conversation of sisters reconsidering. What was still here? They spoke of their father and their mother. They spoke of Enid and the wave. They mulled over the forms of their love and their regrettable distance. Finally, moving cautiously, moving to dark matters, they spoke in hushed tones of the unknowable death of Jack Farrell.
‘A caravan,’ Nell said sadly. ‘Good that you’re going anyway, good you’ll be there.’
It struck Frances as a platitude. She might be driving to waste, to desolation.
But for her part, Frances had mentioned Enid with compassion, how she’d been the sister left behind, and no doubt maimed by her grief. Frances described the photograph of the girls alike for one shuttered moment, each clutching a doll. Nell registered this shift. Together they contemplated Mary and Enid as sisters, saw in the ripple effect of their conversation the wash of a more kindly understanding. Their words began at last to quieten and ebb away. Nell had said her piece; Frances had confirmed.