Our Shadows Read online

  Both were rebels, uncontrollable, Else often said.

  ‘Mad as cut snakes,’ agreed Fred (but winked and smiled). He was their ally, closer than Else. To him they owed the lesson of gentleness and grandfatherly care. He offered no impediment to their wilful world but encouraged their errancy. He knew of their misbehaviour and disappearances on cycling adventures; he taught them boys’ stuff and took them gold fossicking on weekends. He did not judge but called them close and offered advice. Both would remember the sour tobacco smell on his breath, his rough, rumbling cough, and the way he liked to touch their heads with an open palm. This they loved above all. It was a feathery gesture, made in passing, that softly confirmed they were there.

  From their house in Midas Street the girls discovered the bigger world. On bikes they sped down the broad, dusty roads of Kalgoorlie, down Hannan and Lionel, then looped on Federal Road and back to Boulder. They cycled the circumference of their town and much of it inside and beyond. They passed the prison and the airport, then back up through South Kalgoorlie, north to Piccadilly and Lamington. They rode around the old mine sites heedless of danger and boys; and in races near Mount Charlotte, or in the backblocks, along the hot road to Coolgardie, where there still lay the dark shafts of old diggings, like mouths to fall into.

  They were a team of just two, defying Aunt Enid, baffling their grandparents, asserting an independence that sprang mostly from incaution and dares.

  They learned the advantage of having no mother or father: a certain boldness with their bodies and unladylike immorality.

  4

  Inland, they grew in their own frontier. That, at least, was how Frances then thought of it.

  All around lay arid desert, warped in glare, and a world of gold mines underneath, deep and benighted, or exposed to the sky in an open cut. Spindly trees, wiry shrubs. The dart in brilliant light of small creatures to a slim patch of shade. It was gruff country, for blokes, for men who were men, even when they winced with the disappointment of bugger-all, after years of illness and hard labour. Lit with gold promise, their town told them what to desire. Rich dirt, above all, and wealth shrewdly extracted. One’s photograph on the front page of The Kalgoorlie Miner. The esteem of men, not women, and adherence to a principle of success.

  But the sisters had seized upon Else’s phrase, ‘the balm of the ocean’, and only as an adult Frances understood how these words had refashioned them.

  It had been such a casual comment, ‘the balm of the ocean’, but it had settled inside, somehow, fantastically plausible.

  In their minds they grew an ocean, spotted with light. They spoke of ocean as an ambition, without understanding why, and resolved to move to the coast together when they were grown up. Frances did not consider this might be a longing for their father. Assiduously, they erased him, so that he became the rumour of another life. Instead of summoning a parent, they exchanged him for a prediction.

  Against mines and dirt and the stink of chemicals in the air, against scratching dry and the sound of ore crush and the blister quality of local light, they attached to this other, sweeter dimension, of an imaginary life. Men and boys scabby from the sun, red-necked and squinting, called out and threatened them. Leering from habit, loitering with intent, they carried a rude swagger that was meant to intimidate. Frances saw the power of their derision and unlike Nell, was afraid. Against this too, this rough challenge, they prepared their vision.

  Ocean swayed in the girls’ minds, immense and trembling. Restlessness and movement were part of the appeal. From magazines, they cut pictures of swimmers and divers mid-fling, and surfers flying supernaturally on a mere spill of dissolving froth or paddling under an arc of wave rising massively before them. There was a swimming pool on Cassidy Street, but that didn’t count. They wanted waves and tidal magnificence, pulled by the moon. This invention of their own ocean was essential to their childhoods. When Fred bent to look at their cuttings, he expressed admiration, but left mumbling to himself in puzzled amusement.

  Cross-legged on the floor, they devoted themselves to their vague objective, knowing that it was a counter-world they shared. These would be their happiest times.

  Both would recall the blue cuttings, scattered like images from a dream.

  When Else bought Nell a print of Hokusai’s The Great Wave for her tenth birthday, Frances was consumed with envy. It hung in their bedroom, an object of curiosity and veneration, and was like nothing else in their ordinary miner’s house. It was Nell’s object, both knew it. It was Nell who owned The Great Wave and possessed its glory, the frozen shape with its peculiar claw-like foam, and Mount Fuji a squat triangle in the faraway distance. ‘Japanese Classical Prints,’ the label read. The girls relished the wave as if it pledged them a special power. It offered exalted perspective and foreign style and since they’d not yet seen a real wave, this abstraction sufficed. The Great Wave was as real to them as any reckoning.

  ‘Reckon they’re that big, the waves?’ Fred had asked with a grin. ‘Bigger than a mountain?’

  Nell and Frances united in friendly scorn. Yes, that big, rising and falling, making and unmaking.

  They were each impatient to leave. They wanted goodbye, goodbye.

  They did not love their own place; even as children it seemed to them ravaged. And they did not want for enormity; they had the Super Pit.

  Kalgoorlie sat alongside a great gouge in the ground, 3.5 kilometres long and 1.5 kilometres wide. In 1989 all the old gold mines, all the discrete shafts, had been joined together in one vast and lucrative hole. It was tiered, elliptical and hellish, like the picture of a European myth. But some compulsion pulled them to visit and when Nell and Frances gazed into the Pit from the caged viewing platform, they felt the thrill of imagining peril and effort. There were vehicles and machines moving constantly to manage the void. Giant yellow trucks with fat wheels drove up and down the steep slopes, winding around the ledges with arduous deliberation. The girls could feel grit on their faces and sense the reverberation of labour. It was like being God, so high, and looking straight into the belly of the earth, the carved steps of the terraces, the way humans were rescaled.

  In time, tourists came in buses to take photographs with heavy cameras. They donned high-vis vests to show they knew equally of danger and fun. The sisters saw them disembark, take a photograph, then return in lines to their seats, their orange fluoro shining and glorious, even behind the dimmed glass.

  Nell and Frances went to the Super Pit to feel superior and to mooch around. They went to defeat boredom, to defy their Aunt Enid, and to see the grievous hole in the ground that signified their town’s wealth. They went to be higher than the earth and to witness its despoliation. It was the satisfaction of bosses, Fred often said, to be the one who was up high, the one who looked down.

  But they were not twins at all; that was easy to see. There was the loud one and the quiet one. There was Nell, who by twelve already shoplifted and smoked, who swore at her aunt and flounced in annoyance at her long-suffering grandparents. And there was the other, her eyes moist with silent entreaty. Frances was the girl wringing her wrists and pulling at the sleeve ends of her cardigan. Barely able to remember the long list of their offences, it was she who confessed their misbehaviour to the priest. Groggy with sin, she included her own wickedness. How she coveted The Great Wave, how she resented Nell’s ownership.

  5

  Frances closed the door and stepped into a Saturday morning in Sydney.

  There was haphazard dazzle and a slight quiver of breeze. The polish of yellow light, already warm at this hour, gave her otherwise modest view a cellophane gloss. Back lanes, sliding cats, lines of green garbage bins; and there was a jacaranda, shedding, that coated the road with mauve blooms. What was it about a sunny Saturday that made for transfiguration?

  A plastic bag danced along the street, as if in a movie. A puff, a rise and fall, the sly twist of a brief shine. Frances loathed repetition, the unoriginality of things, but paused anyway
to watch its tremulous writhe, to catch and to crush it into her shoulder bag.

  Now she was righteous. She congratulated herself. A small act, certainly, but a contribution to the planet.

  Everyone, this spring, was talking about plastic bags, about climate change and refugees and assorted human and natural disasters; about veganism and human rights, about the price of electricity and the perfidy of banks; about the shitstorm in America and the universal corruption of politics; about war misery, never-ending, and the oceans, ever-rising, and whole towns aflame under a burning sky. Television news was meanly routine: women and men bent with perpetual grief in a dusty land, a child’s coffin borne aloft to a soundtrack of lamentation; and there was always a flood somewhere, or a mudslide burying a village, or a spiral of mad weather threatening a tiny island. Everywhere, women assaulted, and despicable violations.

  Frances had learned to appreciate glassy containment. These topics stayed inside the television, the foul, lazy television. She switched them off with a wand and drank a glass of shiraz. All this, all this world pain, she laboured diligently to ignore.

  Old Mrs Davoren waved; Frances acknowledged her.

  Mrs Davoren was ninety-four and pottered each morning in her front garden. Her longevity and purpose were a kind of lesson. This too was possible, this slow wander down the decades, with cineraria and hydrangea, vintage flowers, to attend to, with secateurs at the ready, and a skew-whiff sunhat of straw. She had the optimism of someone who remembered the Second World War. Her husband had died over twenty years ago; the photos were all of a dashing couple, he in a uniform and a pencil moustache, she in a net-covered hat that resembled a chrysanthemum. All flowers, Mrs Davoren; her life seemed emphatically floral.

  She clicked the latch to her gate and stepped onto the footpath. She wore an apron which featured a pansy print.

  ‘A cutting,’ she announced. ‘You said you liked the pelargonium.’

  And there it was, a gnarled stalk with a single bright flower, the scarlet she had praised only last week. Frances graciously accepted and stuffed the stalk in her bag. Mrs Davoren was not to know she had no garden, just a few pots in a concrete courtyard, across which shadowy cats fled.

  ‘The home?’ the old woman asked.

  ‘Yes, the nursing home.’

  ‘And how’s it all going, with your poor nan?’

  What could one say? ‘As well as can be expected.’

  Mrs Davoren apparently found this an acceptable response. With a neutral smile she retreated, having wanted nothing more than to give a token of her own gardening success.

  ‘Off, then,’ she instructed.

  Frances was unreconciled to these weekly visits. She should have been a virtuous granddaughter, patient and endlessly loving, but Else’s behaviour had deteriorated, as the nurses liked to say, as if there was some standard measure for the internal weather of her brain, for all those thunderstorms and lightning and ebbing away. It appalled her to see Else bite, or rage, or grab viciously at passing strangers.

  Deteriorated, they repeated.

  One of the early symptoms was when Else began to joke that her name was Elsewhere, or Someone Else. When it was no longer a joke, when she became both Elsewhere and Someone Else, Frances loved her and felt ashamed of her; she wished her well, and she wished her dead. She arranged the transfer from Kalgoorlie to the nursing home in Sydney, but even with more regular visits, she still felt an obscure guilt, as if, in reverse genetics, she had somehow caused the condition.

  She arrived one Saturday to find that two nurses had tied Else to a wheelchair after she attacked the visiting vicar, a mild, speckled man who by all accounts did nothing to provoke, other than lean courteously towards her, and ask a simple question. Frances found Else weeping, pathetic, her nervous hands clenched, and had no idea how to comfort, other than to loosen the bandages that held her. Else’s hand flung upwards and became a fist. Frances did not duck in time to miss her blow. For a woman of ninety-six, Else had wicked left hook, the nurses said.

  So much time was spent trying to figure out what her grandmother meant, what system of knowing she had entered, how to communicate. And why, indeed, she had this impulsive violence inside her. In the absence of dialogue, there was the excruciating intimacy of peering too close, trying to ascertain what drama might exist behind the face, now fixed, now mobile, but always inexpressive. Each time Frances visited the nursing home, walking up the pink, malodourous corridors, pressing the keypad to the locked ward (the wanderers, those considered irritable, or violent, those who wanted to escape and spent their days rattling at windows, or crying, or testing the door-handles), she was apprehensive about what state Else would be in. The nurses in their glass booths maintained professional caution: they said as little as possible, predicted nothing, commented only on medications and costs.

  Frances was dismayed by how often they said, ‘As well as can be expected.’

  The rooms of tormented elders, spending their days in a disorderly throb of stray emotions and disintegrated memory, imprisoned by their forgetting, lost to the world; these patients were both their own tribe and tragically singular.

  This Saturday, Else was wearing a shirt that was not her own. It was a synthetic T-shirt, red and white with a football logo, and may have belonged to a man. It was stained with the food scraps of several meals. Else was now quiet, compliant. Frances lifted her arms, thin as wishbones, above her head, removed the man’s T-shirt and threaded her into a fresh cotton blouse. She did the buttons, carefully, after her first attempt was misaligned. Else placidly submitted. She looked at Frances, focused for a second, and uttered the single word, ‘Mary.’

  Else spoke often, but unintelligibly, and Frances sensed that if she was known at all, if there was some way in which her presence registered continuity or a familiar face, she was mistaken for her mother. Else’s sentences, if they could be called that, were a slurry jumble, the words fluent in a meaningless way even as they followed the rhythms of real speech. Now it seemed she was asking after Fred, who had died almost thirty years ago, when Frances was thirteen. Fred’s name occurred, and reoccurred, with a querulous tone.

  In the small hospital room these beloved names hung echoic: Fred, Mary, Fred, Mary. How flimsy they sounded, wafting on the air, like spirits.

  The blocky face of a day nurse appeared at the door. She wore a uniform of pink cotton and an unflattering perm.

  ‘All okay?’ she asked.

  It was a kindliness Frances noted.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ As if there was a normalcy to this condition of irrevocable dwindle. As if they conspired to affirm it, or ignore it, or to dissolve the anguish in the room.

  The face withdrew without comment.

  Frances would have liked company now. She felt the weight of her own widowhood, and distance from her sister. There were times she wanted simply to run from the nursing home. There were times the damp reek of ill bodies, the whimpers and yawns of suffering souls, and the banal regimens of institutional life, all without the usual, encouraging markers of the passing hours, made her feel trapped with these patients in the land of the lost. She knew it was Else who truly suffered, so she felt too the ignominy of these powerful feelings, that, unforgivably, she was pitying herself.

  This was one of the easier visits. Frances fed Else a banana, pushing segments into her mouth, watching her slowly chew, then swallow, then open her mouth for more, as if she were an infant and Frances the mother. Frances stored the peel in the plastic bag she had plucked from its windy dance.

  When the tea woman came, Frances gave Else her cup of tea, checking the heat on her wrist, tasting it (sugary), holding the baby cup with its closed lid up to her lips. Else looked respectable in her crisp new blouse. Frances combed her hair, what was left of it, and patted her bony head. She sat listening to a gentle burble of syllables, monotone now, and emptily calm.

  Eventually she rose, kissed her grandmother on the forehead, and without looking back, silently left th
e room.

  6

  Perhaps it was different for men. Before his illness, her husband Will used to sit with his feet on the coffee table, only half-watching TV, detached, as he swiped at his phone. He would grunt at political faces and stir when the sports news came on, but overall he maintained a remote composure. It was ever thus, he assured Frances; the world had always been a bloody mess. Always winners and losers, mostly losers, mostly the poor. Always death and catastrophe and the suppression of the working class. Always confusing, dire. Hopelessly, he awaited the socialist revolution.

  In the sedative light of the television, he seemed yielding and subdued, though she suspected a reserve of melancholy he’d never quite shown. His easy temperament had attracted her; he was a thoughtful man, rueful, but she’d rarely seen him sad.

  All marriages are secretive, Frances had told herself. All have these slim pockets of guesswork and unknowing.

  On the sofa Will was his own boss, and spoke with relaxed pessimism, while she was alone with her muddled panic and a sense that the world was failing.

  In those days, before he was sent home to die in the front room, she liked to stand behind him as he sat, looking down at his thinning hair. She would pat his shoulders, and squeeze them a little, knowing he submitted in thankful silence. It was their habit, this gesture; it was the physical hello. The concave at the nape of his neck still moved and aroused her. There, where she might kiss, where after lovemaking her breath settled, exhausted from their wrestle and the exorbitance of feeling. She dabbled her forefinger there, as a private sign. Each time, it was like touching something new. His head would nod ‘yes’, even when asleep, as her body spooned around his, fitting together.