The House of Breathing Read online

  From my grandmother Bridget I inherited a vision.

  She told it so often and so variously, with such detail and so many embellishments, that it became more convincing to me than my own experiences and memories; we collaborated to affirm it, shared it indivisibly like impossible Siamese twins of two bodies but one heart. As a child I remember exclaiming: I see it! I see it! and she leaned forward, embraced me, encircled me with a scent of lavender and old-woman mustiness, and replied in a serious whisper, Why yes, I believe you do!

  A ship. The Titanic. The sinkable Titanic. There it is sailing through darkness, slow and magisterial, with all lights ablazing. It is absolutely resplendent. There are rows of light-bulbs, festively numerous, and these everywhere illuminate decks and portholes, riggings and railings, and spill to spread nervous reflections on the surface of the ocean. It is as though the ship cannot contain the brilliance within it, but must whiten its surrounds like a purifying force.

  And it proceeds, cumbrous and steady, sailing forward into a more dazzlingly white embrace, smack into its fatal icy rendezvous, smack into history. See it shudder, tilt and slowly submerge. It upends with a kind of sigh as though the sea opens a mouth. Tiny human beings fling themselves from it. Screams. Drownings. The gradual engulfment. Those lights in an eerie and wavering descent. The sea at last sealing lips over its watery secret and shock waves going sshh!, sshh!, sshh!

  Bridget’s particular Titanic—always stunningly well-lit and remarkable as much for its bright procession as its famous immensity—sailed, collided and sank in slow motion again and again throughout my childhood.

  We lived in a desert-bound mining town, surrounded by thousands of sea-less kilometres of red dirt, stringy mulga, sharp spinifex and hard boulders (so dry, so hot, so finally unnautical), yet she transported her Titanic to our exact vicinity. It sailed past slag dumps and poppet heads, past the ore-crushing and extraction plants, down streets lined with Jacaranda, overflowing hotels and brothels that glowed like furnaces with their scarlet lights, and drifted real as ever into my bedroom each night. Its four enormous funnels. Its nine decks higher than buildings. Its eight hundred and eighty-two feet of ship-shaped and riveted steel.

  And on occasions when my father was compelled to work night-shift—down there, getting gold, with his own lamp upon his head—she stayed perched on my bed for hours, rehearsing her monodrama. Her only story. Again and again. My room was almost floodlit with the power of her descriptions.

  In April 1912 Bridget had been fifteen years old and a junior maid. (It was the thing, she said, to have a servant with an Irish accent; we were considered naturally servantish, our voices told them so.) Her mistress, Mrs Armstrong-Colman, was travelling to Boston to meet with her American relatives, and had decided on the White Star Line’s new ship Titanic as the most salubrious passage. A woman of some means, she booked a first-class cabin for herself and her travelling companion Miss Thompson-Smythe, and for her two accompanying maids third-class berths.

  As it happened Mary Riordan, the other and older servant, was taken ill in the week before embarkation, so only Bridget attended the women on their trans-Atlantic journey.

  What I always remember first, she said again and again, is the dome on the top deck; it was like a giant glass bubble, stuck there between two funnels.

  The women mounted the gangplank and entered the ship by way of the first-class staircase which was entirely covered over by a church-sized dome of glass and steel. As they descended beneath it Bridget glanced upwards and saw sunlight refracted through the faceted glass and thought it the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. An ornamentation entirely impractical. Constructed simply for effect. ‘Utterly splendid’, as Mrs Armstrong-Colman might say. Bridget looked down and saw the fur-enswathed backs of the women; they each clutched at the railing and followed a pert little man in white gloves and a neat hat. She paused, looked back up a second, brief time—it was so altogether captivating, so transfiguring of the sky, so deftly manipulative of light—and then scampered after them.

  Often Bridget would inscribe her glass dome in the air for me. She raised her arms very high and swept her hands in broad gestures over the surface of an invisible hemisphere. Imagine a bubble, she said, only reinforced with steel. And then she added ‘Utterly splendid!’, using Mrs Armstrong-Colman’s voice.

  Bridget was dismissed at the door of her mistress’s cabin—having been given a list of instructions and work duties, several reprimands in advance, and a reminder of the virtues and necessity of chastity.

  She felt suddenly very girlish and not at all like a Maid-with-an-Income and a Position-with-a-Good-Family. She feared, now alone, both the magnitude of the ship and the lack of Mary’s company. She feared, since third-class berths were lodged down in the very bowels of the vessel, just above the boiler and engine rooms, near the rumble and churn of the ship’s metallic innards, down there, beneath the waterline, with no lamps upon heads if the lights should go out—she feared to sleep alone so very deep in the Titanic. The steps leading downwards seemed to go on forever; she now clung like an infant to the decorated iron railings and cursed Mary Riordan for her untimely illness. No pert little man in white gloves and hat led her way. No dome overarched. The whole area was shadowy, enclosed and suffused with the crude stench of machinery and new paint.

  This was the reason, you see, I was on the deck when we hit the iceberg. Part of the forward deck was roped off for third-class passengers—that was our little area of freedom and fresh air—and I spent as much time out of the cabin as possible.

  When Bridget was not required to attend the needs of the two hyphens (as she would later name them), she did not return to her cabin but wandered the territory of the stratified ship, climbing up and down its nine levels of iron staircase, creeping along corridors, peering through windows and portholes and doorways. As a maid she had a pretext for entering first-class areas: if she was challenged she simply responded that she sought her mistress, Mrs Armstrong-Colman, and excuse me sir, sorry sir, is she here then sir? She sought no permission, but simply exemplified the smiling effacement of maids and was often, in consequence, quite undetectable.

  By this means of deliberate trespass Bridget gradually discovered the exorbitance of the ship: she saw swimming baths and squash courts, and the gymnasium within which jolted bizarre mechanical contraptions (a stationary bicycle, a flapping rowboat, an absurd model camel). There was a reception room where a band seemed perpetually to play waltzes. Dining rooms of darting waiters and obese millionaires. Smoking rooms—these specially impressed her—lined with potted palms and patterned mirrors and full of wealthy young men in decadent poses—legs crossed, heads thrown back, and arms draped in languid extension over the plush backs of armchairs.

  And last, but not least, the Turkish Bath. When she glanced through the doorway at the entrance to the Turkish Bath she could not believe her eyes. It was decorated Sultan’s-palace-style, with Persian rugs, brass lamps and masses of drifting fabric. Attendants wearing turbans and bright baggy pants carried fans made of peacock feathers which they lazily swung. Splashes and tinkling laughter could be heard from behind veils. And the whole room, lit in scarlet, seemed to glow like a furnace. It was thoroughly glamorous. Bejewelled. Incredible.

  On the second night of the voyage Bridget discovered an area of upper deck allotted to third-class passengers and at last found a place in which she need not sneak or dissimulate. The deck was rather crowded; over it roamed a motley and often unseaworthy assortment of travellers, most of whom were emigrants to utopian America, dreaming wonderful dreams of skyscrapers and dollars. They chatted, smoked, and played at deck quoits and cards with unusual competitiveness.

  In their company Bridget found herself less lonely and forsaken. She enjoyed the easy and rudimentary nature of their amusements, listened to their gossip, and sat late in the dark against the railing, feeling the sea air pass over her body, watching the ple
ated ocean stream backwards from the ship. A waltz could be heard, hanging quite magically in the icy night wind.

  Not romance, but nearly, she often said; and I gave the word a capital R, presented the young man with a face a little like my father’s, and for years vicariously mourned his tragic drowning, entrapped there, unsaved, his cry knocking against my heart.

  As she was about to retire that second night Bridget met a young crew member who had escaped from the engine room to have a smoke. He was embarrassed to be caught; it was so late he assumed most of the passengers would be asleep. Yet as he spoke Bridget discovered that he shared her Irishness; he was from County Clare, from the very village, in fact, in which her own grandmother had been born; and Bridget was pleased that here, down here in third-class corridors, where the air stank of oil and machinery and reverberated with the rough, ore-crushing sound of reciprocating engines, that she could speak of her home and name her kin.

  The two sat smoking together on the floor of the corridor with their legs outstretched across it, as if, after all, they both owned the place. And when he left to return to work he kissed her cheek, and she blushed, and put her hand to it, as though his lips had in some way marked or indented her.

  A kiss, she said, just like this; and she would kiss my cheek, and I would blush and put my hand to touch, as though the young man himself, ardent even as a ghost, had inspired or inspirited it.

  In between administering small services to the two rich hyphens, Bridget often climbed the stairs to visit the dome. She liked to see it at different times of the day, to watch how it glowed and changed, how it trained yellow beams to various sections of the staircase. This was how, much later, she always thought of first-class, governed and overhung by this fantastic jewel, this encompassing light. Then she would return to Mrs Armstrong-Colman’s cabin, to brush her mistress’s hair or lay out clothes, or prepare cups of tea from the wood and marble sideboard.

  The cabin seemed to her sumptuous—its scrolled sofa, its cheval glass, its sideboards like catafalques—no more, of course, than in Mrs Armstrong-Colman’s Warwickshire home, but remarkable because it was transferred to a ship. Bridget marvelled, unrevolutionary, at how certain people always carry their own worlds with them, reproduce materially their own importance, remain always defined by whatever surrounds them.

  I was often lost. Sometimes I would panic when I came up or down a stairway and had no idea where I was, Grandma said.

  And I, who had never been lost—my own town being flat and low, every street and house known to me—thought then of my father beneath the earth, hidden away in some tunnel, almost incarcerated. It frightened me to know nothing of the dimension he worked in. I was afraid he would one night disappear as my mother had. So finally. Forever.

  It was something like an underground mine, with its confusing depths and levels, but also nothing like a mine; it was so strictly partitioned, its inner areas demarcated by style and admission. In her own cap and frilly apron Bridget was always climbing stairs and passing between the layers of different sorts of people; and though she usually seemed to know which section she was in, she often had to ask directions back to the third-class stairway.

  She liked best to be up high, up there, in the light, where the great bulb of the glass dome was and where the names of millionaires circulated in the air like seagulls: Astor, Guggenheim, Straus; where she could linger at the fringes of the first-class dining room, observing fluttering serviettes and gorgeous women.

  Secretly Bridget wished most to enter the realm of the Turkish Bath, but attendants would only let her peep for a second through the doorway. This prohibition was enticing. At night, in her cabin, way down there, she lay on her narrow bunk disrobing behind veils of gauzy fabric, feeling peacock fans fluctuate like wings over her body, and imagining herself clothed only in a scarlet light.

  The collision. The collision.

  That night was very cold and she was rugged up warmly. Stars were like sequins. A waltz flowed in the air. The wind from the north was freezing and continuous. And moving through the dangerous darkness and the contentious waves the Titanic shone so brightly that it coated the surface of the ocean with flecks of shimmering light.

  By twelve-thirty most of the card players and chatterers had gone to bed, and there were only a few stragglers remaining, smoking or talking in hushed, private voices. Bridget had planned to wait for another hour before retiring—in the hope of encountering a second time her compatriot and his kiss. She sat against the ship’s railing, breathing the fresh briny air. Inhalation, exhalation: the simple pleasure of night-time wind entering deep into the lungs.

  The music now sounded deliciously Romantic. She thought of women with breasts and bracelets, of tiaras and champagne glasses, of long dresses, swirling.

  It loomed out of the darkness like something unreal. More vitreous than the dome, uncannily pale, it seemed to proceed towards them, as though it, and not the ship, was driven and determinative. People on the deck began shouting with excitement and Bridget stood up very quickly, all the better to see the sight. Until the very last moment she thought the ship would veer or swerve to avoid the iceberg, but instead they moved slowly and steadily into conjunction, perversely waltzing, each fixed absolutely on its stubborn course. There was a jolt, a shudder, and the loud screeching sound of tearing metal. Broken ice fell heavily on the forward deck. Cries and exclamations. Mariners somewhere running and issuing orders. The band hesitated slightly in its musical rendition, then blithely continued.

  In that strange period of suspension all on the deck were exhilarated. Under the hard starry sky they played football with pieces of ice and skidded to waltz music. Bridget laughed and clapped. She joined in the fun, kicking and sliding and feeling ice sting her hands with its extraordinary coldness. But then, remembering her duties, she left to seek out the two hyphens in order to tell and reassure them.

  Because the music was playing I thought everyone was safe. It charmed us, that music. It was like a terrible trick.

  From the lifeboat Bridget could see people gathering at one end of the ship as the other inclined and dipped into the water. She could see the bulging dome, and lights so radiant and supernumerous that they coated the ocean with silver scales. Music, waltz music, crept by her upon the waters. And because she was young and unknowing, because she was on an adventure, and dazzled, bewitched by spectacle and allayed by sweet music, she did not really believe that the Titanic would sink. As she listened to the melody and the soft plash of oars, she wondered again when she would meet her Irishman and his kiss. She touched her own cheek. She watched the ship recede. The darkness gather.

  Only later did she learn of the fifteen hundred lost souls, of the crew, of the band, and the shortage of lifeboats, and of the multitudes in third-class who in the alarm and confusion, way down there, became lost. Forever.

  When the ship was at last out of sight, a series of shock waves arrived. They made a noise like whispers: sshh!, sshh! Mrs Armstrong-Colman, who had managed to bring her mink, placed both her fur-covered arms around Bridget, encircled her with a powerful scent of lavender water and must, and wept.

  It was nothing recondite or strange. I simply absorbed and enjoined with my grandmother’s fixation, took upon myself her hysterical reminiscence. This gave my childhood and my home an odd imaginary quality: the broad streets of my town, with their civic buildings of desert sandstone, their large verandahed hotels and their low houses of wood and corrugated iron, were somehow less significant to me than the many-layered floating world Bridget repeatedly described. The shingly earth and the saltbush country, blazing in the sunshine, were dim by comparison with her light-bulbed ship and its golden dome. Shaft holes and mines, which other children regarded with casual disinterest, became indicative of depth and truly fearful. And there, in the desert, I grew obsessed with drowning.

  At first I did not comprehend Bridget’s story. I saw only a ship, g
lorious with lights, slipping below the ocean as my grandmother floated away. But then my mother died, so suddenly and unimaginably, and I became inquisitive and troubled by intimations of closure. I recall asking Bridget what became of the young-man-and-his-kiss, and she said simply that he drowned. Of course. He drowned. (Did I not understand that?) And it was only then, concentrated on the Irishman, that I registered for the first time a sense of consequentiality. I could see him washed in the darkness, fed on by strange fishes. His young face was like my father’s, but sea-changed and vague, and his body dangled on the currents, lifeless and inert. A design of ripples slipped back and forth over his two workman’s hands, so that he was no longer human in even that most human of places. Flux and reflux upheld and surrounded him; seaweed of many kinds wreathed and entangled him; he was cruciform; unfathomable.

  With no vision at all of my mother’s death, I saw—with awful clarity—this stranger’s entirely.

  Thus haunted I also became condemned to repetitions. In particular I developed a habit of listening to the waves of my own breathing: inhalation, exhalation; inhalation, exhalation. I would awaken in the middle of the night, in the middle of the scary, fluid darkness, and place my hand over my mouth, to check that I still lived. Inhalation, exhalation: I was bent on immortality. In addition—and with that propitiatory impulse of childish superstition—I secretly named my own bedroom ‘the house of breathing’, so that my safety was guaranteed, even as I slept. In contrast to the breathless rooms of the sunken Titanic, my room was breezy and undrowned. Life-preserved. Water-tight. Ventilated and air-conditioned. Buoyant, in the end, as any millionaire.

  The desert wind, like a lover’s emissary, flew directly through the window to kiss my cold cheeks.

  As well as her obsessive retelling of her tale, my grandmother developed a lifelong practice of somnambulism. Every now and then she would rise up from her bed and roam the Titanic that existed in her head. Through shallow pools of moonlight and spilling shadows she mimed the climbing of stairways and gawking at the dome. She moved from third to second and first-class, into smoking rooms and gymnasiums, and sought out the young man or waited on the deck. She paused at the entrance to the Turkish Bath, precluded even in dreaming, and continued on, with dreamy slowness, through each and every spectral and memorised level. Aroused, I would awaken her, take her by the hand, and lead her back to her bedroom: it became a kind of ritual of all of our years together.