Our Shadows Page 7

  Paddy withdrew. He was dizzy with the idea of a map remade and appalled to be mistaken for a politician.

  This was a night in Coolgardie, not long after the find, when Paddy was discharged from the town’s tin-pot hospital. Like hundreds of others he’d had a bout of typhoid. He’d been tended by the gentle hands of Clara Saunders, not a nurse, but assistant housekeeper at the Exchange Hotel. During the epidemic she came daily to the bedsides of the afflicted. He saw how delicate she was in placing a spoon at a mouth, and the way she wiped clean those shamed by their own soil and reduced to a snivel. She dealt with the dying by leaning close and whispering something private, and then folded their clothes neatly when they’d dearly departed. Paddy would wait for her to arrive at his bed. He could not have named what he felt at her touch. She was fifteen, a girl merely, and he was now fifty-seven; but he’d been so long alone, that he felt his heart bang at her approach, and even the sight of her wrists when she was wringing a rag to damp another man’s brow seemed to him lovely. Paddy thought he might again consider marriage—who would know, out here? He would wait until Clara reached eighteen to court her. He gave her a brooch which featured, in the current fashion, a chunky nugget of gold. But the next year, she married Arthur Williams, who ran the billiard hall at the Great Western Hotel. And when Arthur died a few years later, she married the publican, Joseph Lynch.

  So for a time Paddy walked the warm night air imagining a new future for himself, rapt in a fancy of what might unfold under Clara’s ministrations and touch, when his thin miner’s body might become newer and younger, defying history and time. He was someone whom accident, chance, luck and mistake had made unnaturally passive. No-one could rightly say who would prosper and who would fail, nor did good character or fine intentions have anything to do with it. If nothing else, the typhoid epidemic reminded them all of the miseries and elations of chance.

  Along Hay Street there were brothels, from the very beginning. Mostly English, French and Japanese women. Under wan lights, tired women plied their trade; costumed nationally, or in what substituted—the frills and laces that lonely men had come to expect. At one establishment women performed the Tarara Boomdeay; and though Paddy had never seen it, he’d imagined it in detail, all panties and legs, flaunted and shameless, the flash of a thigh and a lewd invitation; then he imagined it again, closer, in morose delectation. Though not without sin, he felt guilty on the women’s behalf, and wondered what a town this might become, so venal and uncircumspect. Red scarves draped over lamps gave off a sinful glow. There were women in doorways, smoking like men, calling every man Johnny, their shapes backlit as if projections, or figments. Heartless, he imagined, and playing men for fools, each in their narrow, pinkish room under a hot tin roof.

  Paddy caught a glimpse several times of one of the Japanese women. She moved stiff as a statue in her pale silk kimono, dressed as a mystery and theatrically attractive. Her face was white with rice powder, her lips were a tight butterfly, and her expression was placid. He’d seen her only two or three times—always from across the street—but at each glimpse she carried the sheen of Last Things. He came to believe that she, not Clara, not Bella, was the woman he would contemplate guiltily when he was aged and doddering, when sinfully, alone, he was awaiting his death.

  He never learnt her name, though he made discreet inquiries. Nor did he ever visit or seek her out. The Japanese woman was to him a figure in a dream, alive only at night, and hidden, existing just beyond a screen. If he were to touch her, she would collapse pulverised, dust to dust.

  For all his ready-made fame, Paddy felt useless, as though, having become rich, he should move on and let the place happen without him. Walking along Hay Street, seeing the johns and the busy whores, he felt how old he’d become. He touched his ribcage to confirm that he was still there. This world of desert and gold, nothing daffodil-like or green, no village eyes to judge how rich men become laws unto themselves, or how men take what they want, or buy it, and then offensively boast afterwards. He saw himself in a bedroom with Mikado-yellow wallpaper, alone and awaiting death, everything in shades—what would he call it?—of tarnished gold.

  His ma would have said Godforsaken had she seen the future. And he would have been scared, most probably, and stayed away, stayed home. Stayed home, longing and untested, in Quin, in County Clare.

  24

  In 1929, four years after his death, a statue of Paddy himself, in bronze, was unveiled in Hannan Street. He was depicted behatted, sitting on a rock, with his canvas waterbag at his side. The bag served as a fountain, with a little faucet on top, and it was remarked how fitting it was that to drink one had to bend a knee, or bow, as if approaching a seated monarch. Old miners snickered, but were moved that an ordinary bloke, in ordinary clothes—not uniformed, mounted on a horse or pointing with a sword up to heaven—should be immortalised in this practical and helpful way. Those who remembered Paddy thought the likeness reasonable; but it was hard to judge, a man of metal, forever stuck in one grim expression.

  On Wangkathaa lands, the town continued rushing and exploding. Greed flowed down the streets like an unfurling gas, and the air was burning and smelt noxious and oddly stale. The earth was pocked like the dimly remembered face of Mickey Corcoran from the Old Country, and returning soldiers from the war, already wonky with gas or injured by shrapnel and bombs, saw in the shapes destroyed their own wretched conditions. Everything a blemish and broken. Everything sullied. Slime dumps ringed the town to show how much was disposable, and batteries rumbled with the ceaseless din of ore crushed for extraction. There were no trees and vast spaces of nothing but dust.

  Trams shot in several directions, up to Lamington, where the toffs lived, down to Boulder, where it was mostly miners. There was a racecourse and a taste everywhere for opportunities to gamble. There was a superabundance of hotels, all awash with stinky miners and out for quick bucks. And though workers came from many nations, no blacks or orientals were allowed in the mines. Australia for the White Man. This snide, nasty slogan was everywhere to be heard, tucked into the brains, undiscriminating, of both the poor and the rich, the workers and the bosses, the maids and the mistresses. If any newcomer was surprised, they were soon put right. There was a special vocabulary of valuable associations: Auralia, Bonanza, Perseverance, Luck.

  Not permitted in the streets of the decent folk, the black people were cast out. Paddy saw their dark shapes at the edges of his vision: he looked, and he looked away. They camped at a distance, on the margins of the town, clustered in small family and tribal groups. Sometimes their singing could be heard, charged by desert wind and its own breezy soundings, rising, falling, as cries and moans rose and fell, filtered by the wiry foliage of mulga and casuarina. It was most likely a dirge, he thought, since plundered people, hurt people, were compelled historically to lament. The Irish above all heard a tone they understood: of loved ones gone and land brutally taken, of lives destroyed, and asunder, and disrespected.

  But this time the Irish were the lucky ones. They had the Luck of the Irish. They had God on their side. Here they were white, almost British. When he allowed himself to hear fully, it was shame Paddy felt. It was the shame of his own wanton luck and the voices carried on the wind and the black people, out there, expelled and dying. In the mica sheen of dusk before night, he felt the coming of ominous dreams.

  25

  When she was eight years old, Frances was stung on her face by a bee. She proved to be allergic, and her face ballooned so that her skin was glossy and red, her eyes were swollen shut and her appearance disfigured. In order to see she had to push up her eyelids with her fingers, and what she saw in the mirror appalled her, a monstrous-looking girl, inflated and ugly. She began to cry, but had to prise her lids open for the tears to escape. She would remember what might have been her own fiction: pulling her bottom lids down, and the tears gushing like a waterfall. At length she gave up trying to see, and consented to be led by the hand, first by Else, and then by Nell. It wa
s a sore prison, this; she was blinded and trapped in a fierce pain she did not understand.

  Frances was not taken to a doctor. Else said simply: ‘It won’t last; it will die down.’ So she was left unmedicated to suffer her condition. As her face deflated there was also an itch to contend with, and the stretched skin stung and felt plasticky, as if it belonged to a doll. When her eyes eventually opened her face was still enlarged and then she had a terrifying worry that she might never recover her own face, that she was stuck with this other girl, who only barely resembled her.

  By day six, Frances was more or less recovered. She realised then how much she loved her sister, who had been patient and tender in her ministrations, and who read to her from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, so that she had creatures to imagine and drama to follow, and her sister’s voice, reading with expression, to drag her sentence by sentence through her darkness. Captain Nemo and his madness, Pierre Aronnax, the storyteller, with his conscience and good sense, all those writhing fiends underwater seeking to clutch and drown the submarine. Afterwards, they both enjoyed replaying the Verne, commenting on the twists of the plot and the excitement of the reading. They passed between them a favourite sentence, which they thought amusing: It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon. And afterwards, too, Frances was slightly afraid of Else, who was tough in her stoical commands, and ‘dead against doctors,’ she said, ‘and all their tomfoolery and needles and potions.’

  It was when she’d finished her phone call to Nell, mentioning the sailors of The Great Wave, that Frances recalled her own bubble head and how afraid she had been. Even Enid, temperamentally ruthless, had been temporarily kind, seeing her niece so cruelly afflicted. Her own plump face was acceptable, now she had a comparison. Ever tactless, ever humourless, she told Frances that her bee-stung face had made her value her own good looks. Frances understood then how brittle her aunt was, how she might shatter if suddenly struck, so this was not a moment of insult but unexpectedly of compassion. She saw Enid touch her own cheek to affirm her face as something that only partially represented her; this woman, still living with her parents, who thrived on criticising others, who wanted to be taken seriously as an aunt. The sisters were fair in their looks: Enid was swarthy, with chin hairs and the faint beginnings of a moustache. Nell had laughed, unrestrained.

  ‘Laughing will end in tears!’ Another of Enid’s sayings.

  But Frances held Enid’s chubby fingers and tried to reassure her of her existence.

  So much remained unspoken between the sisters. They carried a reservoir of shared moments, but rarely mentioned them, and Nell seemed bent on repressive silence and rigorous forgetting. Frances often wondered if Dr Wright would make a difference, if now, therapeutically obliged to talk, Nell might begin at last to talk to her, and to help share all they carried as separate and lonely bundles. They’d never really spoken of Will’s death: this, too, still pained her. How might they now discuss it, that desperate time, that witness of his body failing and the sound of his wheezing agony, the way she still dreamed of him sexually, and lived with the sensation he’d not fully departed. Nell had come to visit and said, ‘For God’s sake, turn off the television,’ and Frances had been unable to explain how, in his extremity, Will wanted its flashy worlds and artificial noise. To say so in front of him would be a betrayal, yet she wished to appear reasonable to her sister and understood her objection.

  Borrowed thirty years earlier by Else from the Mechanics Institute on Hannan Street, the Jules Verne book had a wonderful cover. Captain Nemo walked in a bulky diving suit on the ocean floor, while behind him his submarine, Nautilus, was being attacked by a giant squid. Large-eyed, bulbous, with a sharp beak and waving tentacles, it posed a clear threat: humans were no match for such enraged and vigorous sea life. The sisters coveted this book, in part because it was stolen and because its story was so gloriously foreign to what they both knew. Ocean adventures, men battling wild, nautical creatures. There was a frontispiece that showed in dotted outline the journeys of Nautilus: it was thrilling to think humans might secretly wander beneath the sea, looping around the Pacific and the Atlantic, ending finally in the Moskenstraumen—what a word!—a giant whirlpool churn of the ocean somewhere off Norway. They imagined Nautilus disappearing like water down a smelly plughole, and gone forever.

  What reassurance, Nell’s voice, when Frances was drowning in her own spiral darkness.

  It was not a mere phosphoric phenomenon.

  No incredulity here, but necessity, and a kind of truth.

  Frances asked for a day off from her job as an attendant in an art gallery. Usually she worked on Saturdays, their busiest day, but she had missed a visit to Else and pleaded compassionate grounds. Her role was to stand in a corner, self-effacing and silent, and unperceived, watch scowling visitors looking at art. She had studied art history at university, and this was what she had become, a vacant woman, a statue, an employee silent and obscure. The tedium of her position was almost impossible to describe. No matter how enticingly original, or how shocking and new, within a day or two all art achieved its own effacement before her, becoming the mere fixtures between which slow visitors ambled. Every image lost value; every object became null. She could not have chosen a job more antipathetic to her love of visual arts. There was an almost unbearable melancholy in her dutiful watching; a sense of the draining of meaning and the oppressiveness of muffled talk. Footsteps were clear, but humanvoices sank, in dying fall, into a murky blur. Sometimes the gallery was like a tomb. The stunned look people have, like those newly bereaved. The whispers, the slow gestures, the slide along nominated paths. The sleepy elderly. The incomprehension of bored youth. There was a purplish quality to the air that added to this mortuary impression.

  Frances was required by the gallery to wear black. The longer she stayed in the job, the more appropriate it seemed.

  She struggled against her own disappointments, especially her futile attempt at a career, and while Will lived managed to reconcile herself to the dreary work. But it was harder now. Frances stood in the heavy air of gallery corners, remembering. She stood seeing nothing but some inner cinema of faces and locations. There was a void in her life, and a wish only vaguely to fill it. Perhaps, Frances thought, she might be depressed, as when after Will’s death the doctor had prescribed something to help her sleep. Back then she was exceedingly thin and completely worn out. Nell brought over meals, which they ate together in silence. Her sister’s companionship had been more or less formal; it led to no genuine expressions of intimacy. Nell held her when she wept, but that was it. There was no recuperative small talk or alleviation of feeling.

  Now, it seemed to Frances, there was also her own sense of resentment at being the one to care for Else. Nell made constant excuses and spoke only in evasion. Again, in the caring role, Frances felt isolated; she felt she had sole responsibility for clinging tightly to Else’s fading self, to call, and to connect, and to heave her from darkness back to life.

  26

  On Sunday morning Frances took a box of chocolates to Mrs Davoren. It was a restrained and decorous acquaintance that they mutually enjoyed. There were talks on the footpath, or with Frances leaning across the low front fence, and only twice in five years had she been invited inside, so she was surprised when offered a cup of tea.

  Mrs Davoren’s house was packed with what these days is called memorabilia, but what to her were the authentic tidings of her long, acquisitive life: foxed photographs in tarnished frames, knick-knacks of the type and period that Else used to collect—china animals, a stiff shepherdess, a collection of flower prints, all English. The furniture appeared rather lumpy and stained, armchairs with multiple cushions, many embroidered with floral designs. There were three standing lamps, Chinese hats, which must have dated from the fifties, and in the front room a record player with two corpulent speakers and a desk with a recent laptop, on which, Mrs Davoren said proudly, she daily ‘surfed’. Only a few books, mostly class
ics and some of them abridged. Frances saw in this woman a gentle conspiratorial glee—to defeat time, to cultivate her own garden, to assume her own immortality. In the dim room the glow from the computer was a little distracting: its screensaver was a repetitious arc of multicoloured light, gliding in a bright, technological swerve.

  Her hands trembled. Like Else, Mrs Davoren saved her best china for guests. Frances received the shaking tea cup with due respect.

  ‘Do you believe in God?’ the old woman asked, with pre-emption.

  ‘No, not at all.’ Why dissemble? Frances thought.

  ‘Me neither.’

  It was as if she’d passed a test. Mrs Davoren proffered the box Frances had just given her, gesturing with a little push in the air that she should choose.

  ‘I used to be a Catholic, but there you are,’ she continued. ‘There you are.’

  Then she insisted on biscuits.

  So the two women, generations apart, sat in the shady lounge room, each balancing on their knees a cup of tea, and spoke in a shy, fractured way about losing their religion. Frances wondered if this was why she had been invited indoors, to hear an old woman’s thoughts on the subject of God, on what vanishes, and what remains.

  ‘When I was a child,’ Frances said, apparently irrelevantly, ‘I was stung horribly by a bee and my entire face swelled.’

  This was the token of transformation that had sprung immediately to mind. And so she found herself, as if in confession, telling her story, hush-hushed. Strange, that she should lodge on it, and in such company. It may have been a source of continuity, this regarding of appearance.