Our Shadows Read online

  About the Book

  Our Shadows tells the story of three generations of family living in Kalgoorlie, where gold was discovered in 1893 by an Irish-born prospector named Paddy Hannan, whose own history weaves in and out of this beguiling novel.

  Sisters Nell and Frances were raised by their grandparents and were once closely bound by reading and fantasy. Now they live in Sydney and are estranged. Each in her own way struggles with the loss of their parents.

  Little by little the sisters grow to understand the imaginative force of the past and the legacy of their shared orphanhood. Then Frances decides to make a journey home to the goldfields to explore what lies hidden and unspoken in their lives, in the shadowy tunnels of the past.

  CONTENTS

  COVER PAGE

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  TITLE PAGE

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  PART TWO

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

  71

  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  79

  80

  81

  82

  83

  84

  85

  NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  Strange how things in the offing, once they’re sensed,

  Convert to things foreknown;

  And how what’s come upon is manifest

  Only in light of what has been gone through.

  Seamus Heaney

  (‘Squarings xlviii’)

  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?

  It’s a bit like reading, this slide into another body. He’s not really there. He’s made of smoke or fog. But the sense of his presence is her wish for proximity, the way a good story peoples the world, the way you know characters in your head, but don’t feel their cool flesh and the true clasp of a hand. The way they live with you, inside you, and are invisible to others. All her life she will carry this desire to incarnate.

  She can see as if close. He has a beard, lank hair and maddened eyes, ashine. He has a tautness to his posture; he is strained and tight. Possibly, he is in pain. Possibly, his body cramps, or is injured by rockfall. He is thirty-two years old, but mud or shadow makes him appear older. Let us say he is a man perpetually shadowed. He will always be in shadow. He will always be half black and appear aged beyond his years.

  This miner is her secret: Modesto Varischetti. Everyone in her class has been told the same story; there it is, illustrated, in their grade seven reader. All know his name. He is a local hero. But it is with her that he lives; it is her alone that he visits; it is to her he whispers and confides the bleak strangeness of the world.

  PART

  ONE

  1

  In the year of the treasure, daffodils massed everywhere, on rises and hillocks and under the gloom of dark beech. They sprang on ridges and spangled in the muck of damp corners, found space under eaves and beside barrels and tottering woodpiles, and along the shady paths that curved towards the ruins of the Abbey.

  So many trumpets and tubular bells.

  Later, it would seem a portent, this excess of gold. For the poet-farmer Ned Moody, they were bright constellations. The widow Ella Byrne claimed they were a holy sign. ‘Sweet Jesus!’ she said to Paddy’s mother, upraising her hands.

  You couldn’t invent it, so much growing and bobbing under the bulge of a spring-time sky.

  Paddy’s schoolteacher passed him by chance in the lane and said, ‘What gold, Paddy boy, what a splendid find!’ as if it had been his own book-learning that read the flowers and found the trove.

  Paddy looked down at his shoes, taking it all in. He was abashed to be smallish at fourteen and still called Paddy boy. He was abashed to be outside the big story of the treasure. Everyone spoke of it, or had some connection.

  The find was a few miles away at the Mooghaun Hillfort.

  One of four rail workers building the Limerick to Ennis line plunged his spade through bracken and briar, and by the grace of God or Mammon discovered a stone box, full of gold. The hoard looked like brass, they said, and all black mud and slime and nothing much worth a bother; but realised soon enough that it was gold they held in their hands; and with that they went quiet, and trembled, and one said, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ before they whooped and celebrated and hugged each other. They were excited, joyful with greed and alive with wild dancing. They were poor men, poor workers, transformed by fortune, watched by godwits and swifts and a single raven, gliding, as they downed their railway tools and brought up the barrow. Spat on their hands for spirit. Looked around as if watched. Spoke now in hushed tones, afraid to break the spell of the find. There were bracelets, neck pieces and what might have been earrings. There was even a crown, of ten sharp triangular points. Daniel Gregan wore it, they said, and looked grand he did, grand.

  Imagine, they said, Dan Gregan wearing a crown.

  And in the village of Quin local folk delighted to imagine it, and what a treat it was, one of their own, crowned with gold and made special.

  Paddy’s father saw some of the hoard in a small pub in Ennis. One of the finders, Mickey Corcoran, was proud to display his share and showed a collar, shined for the occasion and a marvel to behold. They’d seen nothing like it, a crescent moon worn centuries ago, in godless pride, perhaps, by a chieftain or a king. Those at the pub that were recently starving wondered what a new age this was, with such finds in it, for men on the railways to dig out with their spades and bare hands. There were oohs and aahs and a hum of envy and admiration. Folk at the back pushed forward, and they could not believe their eyes.

  Under the heading ‘Gold Rush! Late Bronze Age 1200BC to 500BC’, a list appeared in the newspaper: 138 penannular bracelets with solid, evenly expanded terminals; three penannular bracelets with evenly expanded, hollowed terminals; six beaten collars; two lock-rings; two penannular neck-rings; three ingots; two torcs; one ten-pointed crown.

  These were terms some of the folk had never heard before, penannular, torc. Even the schoolteacher wasn’t entirely sure. Word was that the navvies sold a few pieces to be melted be
fore the authorities caught on, so that what had been history became blunt wealth, little brooches or pins, or a wedding band. What remained went to Dublin, for display in the museum. Mickey Corcoran one day visited his aunt in Quin and when he was asked agreed that yes, the daffodils were a sign, that like them he’d never seen so many in a single year. They’d all noticed, he said. All had noticed the daffodils. So gold was exploding all around them, soft-nodding, when they made their find, digging there beside the ruins and broken stones of the fort; just as the folk of Quin saw how lovely the world had become, full of promise after lean years, full of good luck and new dreaming and pretty as a picture in a frame.

  Paddy’s father never tired of describing what he’d seen. Like something fallen from the sky, he said, made in the heavens. He insisted on the antiquity and quality of the goldsmithing. They knew what’s what, those old folk, he liked to say. What’s what, and how to craft fine-looking things.

  His children wished that he’d been shown the crown. What was more unlikely than a crown of gold in County Clare? After the years of famine, and folk leaving, and talk of bag-of-bones babies, and howling mothers torn apart and soaked in grief. After tales of men slitting their throats with a rusty scythe under cover of darkness, or women setting barns afire, so as to be transported. In this beautiful country, peat yielded the dead. A spade might strike at the uncoffined bodies of the Hunger. Under a field, under a spongy sod, you might find a man bound in sacrifice or punishment. A cord at the neck and scoured skin, tarn-stained and unlovely.

  They all knew of it, and it scared them. That there could be a skull, or a hand.

  And now here was a turnaround, by Christ. Here were flowers, and a fortune.

  2

  Paddy Hannan was not an imaginative boy—he was quiet, practical, a doer, not a thinker—but he placed together in his mind the daffodils and the gold. That a man like Mickey Corcoran, feckless and mostly lazy, held up treasure in a pub. It was a feverish sensation, to think of this man, and those flowers, and the mad crazy luck of it all, men just digging for a railway and stumbling upon buried treasure. All that he knew—their cottage, and the walls of stacked stones just beyond, and his sisters’ cold hands, and him fetching the frothy milk, careful not to stumble or slop, and helping his Pa with the hay stacked uneven in the haggard—these combined now, magic-like, as signs of potential revelation, of what might change a life in a single second. Uncovering; that’s what it was. There were chances to uncover. He felt his senses come alive. There was a buzz in his blood. Something might be hidden behind a day’s labour or a poor man’s glance. Some common thing might break open into fullness and fame.

  It was 1854 and half the world’s Irishmen were abroad, fossicking and dirt-scrabbling and making good their sorry lives. Paddy’s uncle was already in Australia, mining at Ballarat. Years of leaving for gold, or food, or to push away the hungry years; all those sentenced and transported, the criminals and the politicals; men and women gone over the water to be servants and day labourers: every family in County Clare had somebody gone. They took their names and their faces, and they never returned, never. They were as ghosts to those who remained, and those who remained were stricken and godforsaken and left waiting in dim hearth light, tight-lipped, holding their elbows and privately keening. The gone were gone and the waiting were everywhere about, with their mugs of tea and their perpetual, waning reminiscence. They were bent in odd shapes with the grief of departure. Potsticks stuck fast in thickening gruel. Candles burnt to the stub, and almost useless.

  Paddy boy felt bogged and left behind. He wanted to grow faster. He wanted to be spoken to as a man. He wanted to be part of an adventure abroad he couldn’t even get the gist of.

  Repetitiously, the Mooghaun Hillfort entered his dreams, and asleep his mouth whispered the shiny word ‘crown’. He saw navvies dancing like pagans, and birds affrighted, dispersing. He saw whin flare in the sunrise and everything in the world turned golden. He woke restless and disquieted and wanting like the others, to leave.

  Clare was emptying anyhow. Clare was a porridge bowl upturned. Clare was a county echoing with the vowel sounds of goodbye, goodbye.

  So who was this old Paddy, dying in Melbourne, in 1925?

  His heart was sagging and his eyesight was poor. He knew that he was not long for this world. He hoped mourners would place candles near his head, like folk did in the old country, that the family would weep and bless themselves and see him properly laid out on a green baize tabletop, all dignified and Irish. They would walk backwards from the room, as you did in church, and become quiet and solemn. They would let his death enter and swell inside their sad migrant hearts.

  He was looking forward to his coffin. Rest, and no rush. He would give up his ghost in his own sweet time.

  But still he was there, the Paddy boy part of him anyway, in Quin, in Clare, in 1854.

  He was near the old abbey with the schoolteacher, whose name he had long forgotten, and the news coming of the find up at the Mooghaun Hillfort, and the start, long ago, of all his golden imaginings.

  There was a gust of night wind flowing from Australia to Ireland. It was giving him a ride home, and his body was light and breezy.

  Darkness enfolding and the winding sheets of a cloud.

  No rush at all now; he would die himself slow.

  He would let the wind take the breath from him and be part of a larger air.

  3

  For Frances Kelly, Paddy Hannan was little more than a statue. The story of her family bore no other relation to him.

  He sat cast in bronze, on Hannan Street in Kalgoorlie, looking bored and magisterial, and she and her sister Nell rode past on their bicycles without actually seeing him. He’d become featureless, empty, even though his name was omnipresent. Only once it occurred to her: everywhere publicly acknowledged, he did not seem to exist as a real man. His was a name separated from spirit; it would be near impossible to imagine him. There was no pioneer reverence and no point of connection.

  It was hard to imagine beyond her own story. When Frances thought of her family in this place, in Paddy Hannan’s place, they seemed melodramatic, as if lodged in the wrong century. Theirs was a tale of bad luck, the mischance of orphanhood and fate. Nell and she had been born only eighteen months apart, and after their mother died at her birth, they were dispatched to their grandparents as a cruel compensation. The couple wept together over the bubs and were inconsolable. It was 1977. Their grandfather Fred was by then fifty-eight, sick from working in the gold mines and nightly hacking out his lungs in a shuddering growl. Else, their grandmother, was fifty-six, too tired to raise more babies and wrecked by the loss of her own daughter.

  Aunt Enid declared medical malfeasance (dirty forceps) to anyone who would listen, claiming that Mary had suffered terribly in the final hours, jerking with convulsions and crimson with rash. She looked a sight after the birth, Enid would say, a total sight. Details followed of spilled blood, botched staunching and unprofessional panic. Her alarmed nieces listened throughout their childhood to this repellent account, appalled that Enid owned the story and told it with such glee. Neither wished to consider a death by birth, that Frances had survived her mother in this way, pulled by filthy implements into bungling hands. It was a fearful thing, and never spoken of by other members of the family.

  So this was their arrangement: grandparents, Fred and Else, Enid, who would never leave home, and two girls who grew distorted by missing parents. For a few years they appeared to be twins, Nell and Frances. Everyone said so. In their alikeness they bore the family grief together, just as jointly they endured Enid’s pitiless tales. Their father Jack left for the coast less than a year after his wife’s death and sent occasional and obliquely cautious letters. He’d had enough of the goldfields and couldn’t stand bereavement there. He couldn’t cope. He returned to his home town of Albany in the south, and to what Else called, sympathetically, the balm of the ocean. Enid described Jack as a coward and a ratbag no-hoper. With
so little else to cling to, these phrases stuck in their minds: balm of the ocean, ratbag no-hoper. What does your father do? He’s a ratbag no-hoper. Gradually, both learned to dissimulate and disguise; their absent father became a doctor, working abroad and uncontactable because of the importance of his role.

  Equally fair, with pale eyes and wry expressions, the sisters learnt that a timid story did not avail, that they must protect themselves and their grandparents by more extravagant claims. Enid’s descriptions were converted to an apotheosis. The girls told how Mary Farrell had suffered a saintly death, her life force ineffectual against incompetent medics and slovenly nurses, her talents, too many to mention, snuffed out by lesser beings, ignorant of her soaring, exceptional mind. Preserved thus, their courageous mother also withstood Enid’s assaults. Nell and Frances removed her from what had seemed a degrading end and began by degrees to own her themselves.

  A fiction still, but of their own, a mother fiction. They made a neat story to elaborate, by turns histrionic or grave. Enid spluttered at their insubordination and tricks.

  Jack was more difficult. He never visited, so could be neither loved nor contested. There were only a few letters. Nell and Frances did not remember what he looked like, and the wedding photograph they’d inherited failed to convince. The man in it was too slight and unheroic beside his pretty bride. She smiled bravely at the lens; he looked shifty and embarrassed, his left hand dangling, conspicuously awkward, like that of a man returned from a war. What presented as a problem of belief was also a challenge. In the end, the sisters simply ignored the man in the photograph and devised the doctor, with his offending hand tucked like waiter behind his back, as he bent, kind and formal, with a stethoscope towards the ill. Nell and Frances agreed that the wedding photograph was unsatisfactory, despite the bridal dress each together and separately admired.

  Later they differentiated. Nell, the older, was suddenly taller, and by twelve looked and sounded more mature. She possessed a self-sufficiency and later a craziness that obliged others to resent her. Frances began to accept that she lived in Nell’s shadow, although she understood the intensity of their bond and the necessity to join forces.