Our Shadows Read online

  Now, irresistibly, her mind was locked in this way: the plastic bag, the erotics, the knowledge that he had gone. The front room still rang hollow with his absent presence; how much longer, she wondered; what timeline or duration? When do ghosts finally, conclusively, leave?

  As Frances returned, she scuffed at fallen petals of jacaranda. She glanced up at bird-flick and leaf-ruffle and a high criss-cross of contrails. The street looked empty. Mrs Davoren was nowhere to be seen. Frances remembered she must find a pot and plant the stalk of pelargonium.

  There was world pain and there was this pain, of the personal and the specific, and it was hard these days to know where feelings should travel and arrive. A team of metaphysicians would diagnose aberration of scale. Global events sat too close beside individual loss. And Will hadn’t quite gone away, nor had she quite relinquished him. Two years ago, now, and the disproportion of feeling was still unresolved.

  Scale: what else, but a problem of scale?

  Somehow Will had revisited this morning, with the airborne plastic bag. Preposterous, yes, but it was nothing serious to be spoken of, just an intuition, a supple warmth inside her. And it was less heartache than an airy companionship that she felt. Frances turned the key in her door. She had an unexpected sense of her own aliveness as an expanding force.

  She was still consoled and disturbed by the power of sexual recall. Sometimes she woke at night in a lavish sweat, flinging her arms around nothing. Her heart pounded, fat as a clam shell, even as she knew it all was dream-stuff and intercourse with shadows. In the darkness, at those moments, she felt their bedroom grow exotic; the chairs and curtains, the dressing table, the tall shuttered window and the oriental painting they had chosen together, were all erased of association and became curiously strange. She might have been in another city, or another country. She felt adolescent in her terror, though she weighed its occurrence as an adult. No one had told her about the nights that swell and distort after a death, nor mentioned how often and how long they might last. No one had mentioned she might rise in dark to see her own face in the mirror, pale and mysterious as a second moon, a widow at thirty-nine, and unrecognisable to herself.

  At such times Frances thought fleetingly of Else, but was afraid to imagine much further, or think about her father. Or she thought of old Mrs Davoren, single as a nun. Might Mrs Davoren still wake, after all these years, wondering disorientated in darkness where Mr Davoren was? Might she encounter him ageless in dreams and rediscover a yearning? He would come garlanded, Frances imagined, or bringing a bouquet of flowers. He would wear a white rosebud in the wide lapel of an old-fashioned suit. Neat cuffs, cufflinks. A cinematic bowtie. Moustachioed Mr Davoren would step through the night to greet her; they might unite in bashful excitement, as if for the first time.

  Two subsequent lovers had failed to dislodge Will’s presence. Certain details remained exceptionally vivid. His wide chest stayed with her, his large, ugly feet, the shape of his sleeping body, and her own infatuation.

  7

  Before the wheezing got too much and his lungs were scrunched small by bronchitis, Fred Kelly worked underground, in the Great Boulder gold mine.

  Dirty work, hard work, but he liked the world they created, he and his mates, of sweaty hard labour, and smokos, and talk of the big world outside and knowing you depended on the bloke next to you in any danger or strife. In the tunnels, the miners were as close as men could be, pushing the ore tubs together, setting charges in the granite and checking that everyone was safe and out of the way. You cared about each other. He liked that, the union feel of it, the way they rose in the cage at the end of a shift with blackened faces, all looking alike, all whacked with exhaustion and wanting a ciggie, before they all headed off for a wash. When there was a death or an accident everyone went quiet. He liked that too, the secrecy they maintained, the way you didn’t speak easily of the things that went wrong. Losing a mate, that was the worst. You couldn’t tell the missus, unless you were soft, but he was soft, Fred realised; he once told Else the worst. Once he blubbered in her arms, sobbing for young Neddie, only sixteen and an apprentice and pinned by his legs under a fall. The hard part was that young Neddie was crying like a bub and the blokes couldn’t bear it. It told them he was just a boy; it made them think of their own sons; it brought their own worries to the surface, when they spent so long keeping them down.

  Fred would never forget the look on young Neddie’s face. The boy knew there was no hope, that he was dying, that he was stuck there in the dark with his crushed young legs and his horrible pain. His tears made a track through the dirt on his face. His mouth contorted. Towards the end, he gave only short, breathy cries, his eyes turned inward, and then they all knew that he was a goner. Fred remembered how they crowded around, making a little circle to watch the boy die. Their shadows were huge on the tunnel wall, they were monsters, not men, come to see the moment of death. That scared him, that moment; it gave him the willies. Other men felt it too, Mick and Nino and Giuseppe and Ivan the Slav. He saw it in their faces; he saw how they quaked and stared. They were wondering who would tell his mother, and what the shift-boss would say, and if something could have been done different that would have young Neddie heading up the shaft with them, talking of that girl that he’d just met, Ilsa or Elsa, some name like his own Else. His girls were still little then, Enid and Mary, just eight and six, and he found himself thinking he should buy a treat, some lollies maybe, or a cake, to bring home after the shift, to push Neddie further away.

  But it was a short-shift Saturday and they were off to the pub; you did that, especially after an accident, so that you could be silent in company or talk about other stuff as though it never happened, of the trots, or the two-up, or the footy down south. They were rowdy and ferocious, all in it together. They were a brotherhood. Brothers.

  Men in collarless shirts and braces drank themselves silly, then left with cheap plonk in brown paper bags.

  Fred managed okay until he went home.

  Else said, ‘Tell me, love, I know something has happened.’

  Her tone of voice, soft-like and loving, made him give up what he held, so he started telling her about young Neddie and how they all crowded around and could do nothing for the boy, nothing at all, and the next thing, he was crying himself, crying his eyes out like a baby, and telling her everything.

  8

  Fred Kelly began work in 1934 at fifteen, after watching his father die of silicosis. Ern had been down the mines all his life and his reward was rotten lungs. Silicosis: crystals of silica. It sounded almost beautiful. Cyanosis: blue skin. Emphysema. TB. The miners knew the medical terms and how to compare what ailed them. They used work words and body words that outsiders didn’t know.

  Ern Kelly grew thin and pale blue, like a man slowly drowning. He gasped for air, wheezing loudly, and was in constant pain. Fred couldn’t remember a time he didn’t hear his father coughing. There were nights it went on and on and on, and he couldn’t imagine how one man could be so painfully racked. He learnt to sleep against it, to ignore it, to see his blue father from a distance. He learnt to put his head under the pillow and hope that the sinking wouldn’t last for too long. There were times he thought their tin house actually shook with the force of his father’s coughs. In the mornings, his mother, her head bent, removed an enamel bowl of shining slime. None of the children looked too closely, and she never said anything.

  Despite the evidence before his eyes, Fred thought mining an adventurous life. Air compressors were better these days, that was the general opinion. No more of those leather helmets with metal grids that made men look like creatures from outer space, and they used blowers to clear fumes and sometimes water to dampen the dust.

  No job was without risks. You had to take what you could get.

  His mother made widow by the mines, made old and fretful by the inky stranger who’d coughed nightly beside her, also encouraged him. How else to survive? He was the eldest of four and ready.


  He’d seen the fellowship of miners. The way poor men of many nations found a community underground, carving shafts and tunnels, setting charges and drilling and exploding the earth, timbering, hauling, filling and winching the kibbles. In those days, there were still wooden poppet heads everywhere, stories of seams that shone like sunshine and men stealing nuggets in their cheeks and shoes. The bosses took the money, but for some reason the work still appealed, the superhuman experience of sinking miles down into the planet, following a light on your head, like a deep-sea fish, into places few others had ever seen. They were a shoal together, comrades together, slow moving in a flow. Their carbide lights wavered solid rocks into water. Tunnel glisten and light flitter appeared submarine.

  At night classes, at the School of Mines, Fred studied nitroglycerine explosives. Handling and blasting. He passed his exams. The trick was to locate the bore holes, watch for faulty fuses, taking care with the detonators not to under- or over-charge. Fred trained to be the one that set the charge. He learnt about misfirings and noxious fumes; he learnt that the detonators contained poisons, fulminate of mercury; he learnt that one of the most dangerous things was leaving an unexploded plug in the rock. A bloke might drill into it and be blown to kingdom come. If it went with ore to the surface, it could explode men and machinery up there.

  Fred Kelly became a quiet and cautious man. There was respect in his job, but responsibility, too. He had nightmares about mates walking back into the smoke and fumes too soon, being engulfed in a cloudy death, and not coming out again. Gusts of cyanide, sulphur, carbon monoxide, arsenic: he knew them all; he knew exactly how a cloudy death might smell. Sometimes, more explicitly, he dreamt of body parts and blood. He’d seen enough to know. Not his work, thank God, but they’d all seen what could happen. And simple things: the flight of a spanner down a shaft that shattered a skull beneath. Or rock falls: young Neddie, dying in their shadows. Or Luca’s mistake with a charge that tore three bodies apart; the bloody mess along the tunnel walls; the vague glitter of blood and guts; the waste of men, of mates. Flesh torn open carried a stink inside. He’d stood at the plat holding an arm, waiting for the cage to haul them up. So much of his energy went into strenuous forgetting; he was hellbent to unremember and keep it down below.

  Luca suicided in the pit of the Monte Christo quarry. He sat on a box of dynamite and lit the fuses with his cigarette.

  These were things you couldn’t tell the missus; you had a duty to protect.

  At work he was ‘gelignite Fred’. Watch your step or he’ll blow you up!

  At home he wanted to be just Fred and Dad, a bloke who looked after his little family, who pulled his youngest onto his back for a ride, who went on Sunday picnics to the salt lake or the Saturday dance night at the Y. He wanted to be comfy in his bed, asleep with Else’s warm palm resting on his hip, as his palm rested upon hers. A mutton or rabbit stew and enough tucker to fill his crib. A cigarette outside, in the backyard, after a double shift. He wanted simple and ordinary things. To see his wife smile. To see his two girls grow. To stay upright, alert at the job, safe and alive.

  9

  Me Else where?

  And how he came back that one time stinking of poisons in his

  clothes and saying Else Else

  And how the boy

  And how oh he was lovely then the dance at the Y good-looking

  shy shy was what got to her

  The sky-blue shirt the shy shirt the Y shirt the smell of Velvet

  Soap musky and new pressed

  His hand atremble a tremble at the small of her back

  One two one two Fred and Ginger one two

  Like nobody’s business

  Sex there she said it

  But the kiss lovely then before they both knew

  Light streaming through paper lanterns on New Year’s Eve

  The smell of him yes one two one two

  10

  Before the bubs

  How they screamed lonely

  Lonely for Mmmmm ah Mary ah lonely for Mary Mary

  Somewhere Else

  Piss and shit everywhere there she said it

  Two bawling bubs too much

  And he cried in her arms that one time never seen him cry

  Before

  11

  Nell returned from her Saturday morning yoga class feeling both loose and virtuous. She liked the tingle in her limbs and the sense of elongation. Her ginger cat, Aronnax, even more supple, curled mewing at her legs, expressing hunger, as she entered the apartment.

  There was a new email from Frances saying that she really should visit Else. More guilt: Nell’s yogic good mood was swiftly eclipsed.

  She could not truthfully say why she wouldn’t visit Else. She could cite the depression, but that wasn’t it. There was a deeper aversion, something ignoble and cowardly, that made her stay away. It was human persistence, not transience, that most alarmed and scared her.

  She was still looking at the blinking screen when Matt came home, minutes later, with coffee and the papers.

  ‘Fed the cat?’ he began.

  Aronnax was more his; they shared a nesting bond. Aronnax liked to leap on his shoulder as he read the newspapers; it was his lap she wound into.

  Nell ignored them both. She was thinking of Else red-eyed and crying after some misbehaviour or other, after she’d sworn, or flung her schoolbag like a missile at the wall, or accidentally-on-purpose knocked a little keepsake, a china dog, from its perch on the mantlepiece, despising herself as she did it, but needing the shatter, and the interruption, and the sense of her own power to destroy. There was Else sweeping the pieces of broken dog into a dustpan, tipping them into the rubbish bin, bawling like it mattered. Nell recalled with a pang her own hostility and how she’d inflicted everyday violence.

  ‘So?’ he insisted.

  ‘No, feed her yourself.’

  That was it, the paucity of their exchange showed the minimalism they’d reduced to, just the shape of lives together, the pixel variety of a relationship that once had more fullness and definition. Matt mumbled something but did not complain; he loved her even when she tormented him, habitually submitting to the force of her volatile temper and will. Nell heard him put the papers on the table and extract the sports pages and magazine. There were the sounds of the cupboard opened, and the cat food located, and Aronnax meowing with bossy impatience.

  Nell typed a reply: pretty busy this week lets talk on the phone x

  Unlike her sister: never one for punctuation or expansive expression. Nell was vigilant of her feelings. She must keep control, keep up the medication (Dr Wright, who owned her soul, said so again and again), stay on an even keel. Pretty busy meant nothing, since nowadays she had just a few shifts at the physios’, where she worked booking the appointments and answering the phone. It was a low-stress job, and she was able to pretend that she worked in the helping professions. Clients were grateful when she found them a spot, not too early in the morning, or after the children came home from school. Regulars knew her name and asked how’s it going, Nell? As if they knew her secret, that she was the one unwell.

  Nell squeezed Matt’s shoulder and leant over to kiss him on the cheek. It was an apology of sorts, and though he didn’t look up from the papers she knew he was pleased.

  ‘The usual?’ she asked.

  This was their Saturday ritual.

  ‘The usual: deaths, disasters, bad banks, global warming.’ Matt continued to look down. ‘And mad-as-meataxe politicians,’ he added with a smirk. His dappled look and straw hair made him appear boyish, and she appreciated his energetic wish to entertain.

  It satisfied them both, this summary of the world’s ills, this rhetorical containment.

  Nell found the arts pages and sat down beside him. Aronnax silently ate. This was peace, this was consilience.

  12

  When Frances rang in the afternoon, she did not berate or persuade. ‘When you’re ready,’ she said, ‘we can go together.’
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  They were no longer close. Between the sisters there lay a gulf of issues undisclosed and undiscussed; and Nell knew that since Will’s death, two years ago now—could it be so long?—her sister was irremediably changed. It was hard to say, exactly, but Frances went quiet without warning, seemed sulky with secrecy, and disengaged in arbitrary ways from the real business of life. With Will gone she’d seemed depleted and Nell had found herself stronger. What crude trade was this, between siblings, that made a contest of feelings? That a sorrow in one space—gentle Will, his ghastly death at home in front of the television—might bolster the other. She dismissed from memory the last time she saw Will alive. Frances was ragged with her caring and could barely speak from exhaustion. Will was reduced and pitiable and stank of decay. She’d been afraid to kiss him, worried she might lean too close to his cracked mouth and its fetid half breathing.

  Frances said, ‘I’ve been thinking about that Hokusai print, The Great Wave, we used to have in our bedroom.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The tiny people in it, the tiny bubble heads along the sides of the boats.’

  ‘There weren’t any boats, any heads,’ said Nell. ‘Just an enormous wave. And a miniature Mount Fuji.’

  ‘The heads,’ Frances insisted. ‘It used to scare me when we were little. I loved the design of the wave and the frothy curl but thought how small those faces were. And how very vulnerable.’

  Nell was googling the print on her tablet as Frances spoke. She pinched at the image and spread her fingers to make the details appear. There were indeed boats, and scarcely visible, the heads of frightened sailors. Yes, she now remembered the boats, but couldn’t say she included the faces. Or had been disturbed by them. Or troubled in any way.