Our Shadows Read online

  Nell followed instructions and walked this way and that, passing nurses and orderlies pushing heavy trolleys, glancing through doorways and seeing into the lives of those tightly confined, shapes under rucked sheets, staring figures in wheelchairs, those dressed in loose clothes, leaning against walls, or wandering delirious without destination; until she arrived at the locked ward and pressed the code into the keypad. The door buzzed and sprang open and almost immediately someone lunged at her, trying to leave. Nell began gently to tackle, but then let him pass—a man in pyjamas, after all, an old man desperate and sad. The escapee headed off on shaky bowlegs, rushed, as much as he could and with a Chaplinesque lean, away from the room in which he’d been locked. A nurse appeared from nowhere, charging behind him. A thin, harassed woman, stressed and responsible. ‘Fuck you,’ she snarled at Nell.

  It had all begun badly. Behind her she heard the old man yowl.

  Nell found Else’s room. She was sitting by her unmade bed in a wheelchair; the other bed, neatly made up, was empty. At least they were alone.

  It was years since Nell had seen Else and she peered at her face, searching for a younger and more familiar form. Yes, it was Else, but in an altered state, not only with extreme age but with the air of subtraction and inwardness that a monk might possess. Her eyes were dim with medication. Her skull outline was clear beneath wisps of white hair. Yes, it was Else, who sat unaware and apart, with her long, notched fingers resting inert in her lap. Nell took her hand, but Else did not register her touch. There was white-noise drone from the air-conditioner and a timeless dull light. They were locked in, just as the world was locked out.

  No salvation here. And such stuffy air.

  ‘Sweetheart,’ Nell whispered. Where had that word come from?

  Else did not respond. Nell looked around the room and saw how little signified this woman—a framed photograph of her and Frances (in their twenties, embracing at a party), but no other personal effects that spoke of her long and specific life.

  Nell was holding herself together, but barely. Time passed in a slow drag: how long should she sit? What would be decent? There would be no talk, no voice offered in reparation to the past or the present. Any contrition, any forgiveness or love, would remain unspoken.

  She made a crazy attempt.

  ‘Forgive me, mother, for I have sinned. My last confession was too many years ago to remember…’

  Else flinched minutely to acknowledge her voice. ‘Hail Mary,’ she responded, clear as a bell.

  That was it. Else sank back into whatever dozy nightfall had claimed her. Nell rubbed her cheeks, turned the wheelchair, gave an aggressive little shake at the shoulders, but there was just this, this withdrawal, and this far distance. Something inalienable had surfaced, something precious, inveterate; or perhaps the phrase emanated as rubbish removal, like the junk stuff of dreams. Nell refused a symbolic interpretation, since it seemed too weighty and grave, and she could not visit those elements of Else, or herself, that might realise their full connection. Some part of her, the ashamed part, could not bear to think that Else remembered.

  Nell sat, dead still, and impatiently waited. A sensation of doldrum came over her, of feeling banished and sunk. This place was a Bermuda Triangle of the emotions, she thought. But wry analogy was no relief. It was a failed visit, and Nell felt foolish.

  She stepped blinking into the bright day, like one returned from an overnight journey, strung out and bug-eyed. She would not tell Frances. In all they shared, and did not, she must still find her own way back to Else, and to her mother, and to all that was still hidden, or missing.

  33

  Asked once by a fellow miner where it was that he came from, Paddy, in an instinct of privacy, said, ‘Somewhere else.’ When pressed, he said warily, ‘County Clare,’ and met another from his county, who rejoiced heartily in the association. The miners shared their homelands and their polished bits and pieces of memory; there were few Australian-born workers among them. This made for a collective sense, rarely acknowledged, that they were all still visitors, and might one day be spirited home, as if by miraculous power.

  But no one ever went home. There was no return. Together they made up a population, a ‘rush’, and as time went by the miners mostly kept their own worlds to themselves, or stored them in clubs (the Italian Club, the Chinese, the Caledonian, the Irish, the German, and others besides), where they existed for a short time in a sealed zone, speaking their mother tongues and eating food cooked in the old style. Demarcation and sequestration were culturally required. Paddy understood it was about keeping to yourself, being quiet, not drawing attention. He carried a colossal world inside, but it was a secret, and his. Paddy’s Irishness was his own. Quin was his own.

  It was the exposure to fame that made Paddy so guarded. Any number of mawkish ceremonies and stagey tributes wanted his presence. It had been downhill all the way since the showy cart with five horses and the tree-planting ceremony. In 1911, at the age of seventy-one, he stopped prospecting altogether and left the goldfields in the west. He headed back to Melbourne to live with two of his spinster cousins, the Misses Mary and Ellen Lynch.

  Melbourne suited him, as long as he could control his memories. Here in Brunswick he remembered courting Isabella Barnes over thirty years ago, how taken he’d been with her green eyes and the wave of her straw hair, how she’d had hands like eggshell, white and smooth-like, and a way of averting her gaze that made him want to lure her back. It should have been a warning, her turning away, but Paddy wasn’t to be warned. He was love-sick and needing her and already forty-two. They married in St Ambrose Church on Sydney Road. The Hannan clan were there, and the Lynches and a Brennan or two. His favourite sister, Mary, bringing her Clare voice and her jokes, called him a no-hoper, to make him blush and feel inadequate. But though it was a smallish group, they had sherry and plum cake and Dan O’Shea led a singsong:

  Oh, have you heard the news so grand,

  The last and best that’s come to hand,

  About the rich and golden land—Glorious Australia;

  ’Tis flying fast o’er land and main

  Through every house, square, field and lane,

  And if ’tis true, ’tis very plain

  The golden age has come (again);

  But whether ’tis true or not, we’re told

  The rich, the poor, the young and old,

  Are all a-going to dig for gold—over in Australia

  It was a surprising song for a wedding party but it cheered them enormously. Paddy was not one to join in, but saw the others flush with the decadence of raising their voices. Bella’s father was drunk, but that made things easier between them. He slapped Paddy’s back and said loudly, ‘You’ll do!’ There was an explosion of laughter. There was pipe smoke and more singsong and the faces of his brothers and sisters from over the water. They toasted Paddy and Bella. They toasted the golden age. Paddy recalled his father-in-law’s cuff stained with sherry after he’d clumsily mopped a spill, and a fob watch flashing golden, like a monstrance, when he lifted it up to the light to check the time. In retrospect these details assembled in Paddy’s mind to tell him that this marriage was doomed from the start.

  Bella was a cook and seamstress and good with her lovely hands. When they first met, she said proudly, ‘I am good with my hands,’ as if this was all she could think of to recommend herself. She had a comely face and a coy, sweet nature. She had no sense of her own worth, it seemed to Paddy, when she offered herself to him in a way that made him feel ashamed. Someone had taught her to show her thigh like a whore, and to flutter her lashes. But her hands, their loveliness, and that oblique way she had of looking, these were apart, these were romantic. For a short time, she kneaded flour and lit candles and touched him at night. For almost three years they composed a mutual awkwardness that others called a marriage.

  When their baby, George, arrived, Paddy trembled with awe and fear. A wave of hope flowed over him, for an Australian future, for some
thing more than this empty and wandering life. Then George died. Aged two. Just like that. What to say? He had the fever, and one night he was suddenly gone, and Bella’s lovely hands were useless to save him. They hung by her sides; nothing stitched her together. She wandered around their small rooms without touching a thing. She was prone to stare at the mantle clock, with a kind of meaningless pause, and would shrug with exaggerated misery when spoken to. Tears welled up at the slightest cue. She was older now, she was broken-hearted.

  With his own firm habits of enclosure and silence, Paddy was next to useless. He tucked his own grief away; he held fast to an image of himself falling down into the sheltering dark of a shaft. Darkness, that was it; that was all that he felt. He never spoke of his lost boy. He refused to say his name. He never comforted Bella in the way a wiser man might. They were estranged, he and Bella, each in a separate loneliness, and neither had space in their shrunken hearts for another try. Their short marriage ended soon after in bleak resignation; neither wanted to continue.

  One day he woke up and Bella was gone. There was no note: she was illiterate and had signed the marriage register with an X. There was only a glove under their bed, the shape and size of her hand. For a while Paddy kept the glove in his jacket, superstitious he would do her harm if he threw it out. But after only a few months, he deliberately left it behind, tucked into the seat of a tram. He let Bella go too, he let her go, wherever she was, with one uncovered hand and her own large sorrow.

  He’d heard of men cracked in the head with their women gone. Men turned sour, bitter, and mean to all the world. But he stayed sane, if sorry. Bella had been his own softness for a while, and his possible new life. He returned to solitariness and women you pay for; he returned to the grey, stiff sheets of his bed, and self-abased he tossed and turned, and was never again at rest. He blamed himself for the death and the failed marriage. For all his generosity in material ways, he was tight with feeling. He’d not learned largeness of affection. The full measure of love, the clue to what it all meant, had come only with George, and George too was now gone. His love was now gone.

  34

  It was a glossy evening, crystal from drizzle, when Paddy sought out the new priest at St Ambrose Church. Rooftops shone, pendant lamps floated away in the distance, the tram lines shimmered. The cables were fine strings of stretching light. He was surprised to find the city at night so beautiful. But he walked through the wet streets of Brunswick like a man essentially damned. Moist, shivering, aware of his gaunt look and his early grey hair, he arrived at the church by the side door to discuss his dead boy, his blessed dead boy, his dead unnameable boy, and the sin of his sad wife gone forever who knows where.

  The priest was not the one who’d married him, a kind fellow from County Tyrone, but someone smaller and shifty, a Father Keenan from Antrim, a man with a sharp weasel face and a voice like a saw. The legend of Saint Ambrose, the sawing voice said, was that, as a baby, a swarm of bees alighted on his face. When they flew off, he was unmarked, his baby face still pure, but for a single drop of honey left tenderly on his forehead. It was a blessing and the omen of a remarkable future. The priest was attempting to say that there were blemished and unblemished men, those wounded by the world and those unscathed, and that the pure of heart, who followed doctrine, need have no fear. Paddy was unconvinced by the tale. He felt sure Father Keenan had used it before, an all-purpose allegory, a priestly trick, to warn others of the various stings and disfigurements of sin. He saw nearby the patterned voids that composed the grille of the confessional. He saw the black gown and purple stole and the priest’s brown scrubbed shoes. He did not take confession.

  Ever polite, Paddy rose, thanked the priest, turned his damp collar up, and leaving quietly claimed his hat from the pew. He made the sign of the cross and kissed his thumb. He stepped back into the glowing night with his heavy baggage of sins.

  His still unnameable boy, his wife gone away.

  The rain had ceased, but the streets were still brightened by gloss. He moved from lamplight pool to lamplight pool as if following a secret route, watching pedestrians flicker in and out of visibility before him, hearing their shoes on the pavement approaching and retreating, catching snatches of conversation, a word or two flying past untethered from sentences, and knew that he was dazed as if ill, and that his gloveless hands felt sticky and cold. A tram passed, its wooden sides rattling, its steel cables sliding like magic, fast and efficient.

  Away from the main road, a tunnel opened before him: it was a laneway with no light. The backs of the outhouses, festering rubbish, a mound of rags that might have been a man asleep, or drunk, or dead, or just a mound of rags. Paddy plunged in, almost tripping on the uneven paving stones, wretched now, unstable and almost afraid. He slowed his pace and walked gingerly over the ancient bluestone, realising he was befuddled and had lost his way. He was not at all sure which laneway he had entered, or why he had entered a laneway at all, when he could have stayed in the light, when he could have kept to his known path. How could he be so lost in Brunswick? The air stung cold. ‘Death’s sting,’ he thought, melodramatic with sadness. Death’s sting and his own bright, particular boy.

  He saw nothing before him, nothing to resolve or to clarify his path in the darkness. He smarted at his own foolishness, getting lost, close to home. But he was certainly afraid. He listened for tram sounds so that he could locate Sydney Road. He turned in the lane, this way, then that. Soiled rubbish, the mound, oh the mound, possibly moving. A hunkered thing, like himself, and like himself in the grip of a crushing force.

  When the rain again started it seemed appropriate: that he should be drenched and sickened, with no stars overhead.

  35

  Frances first heard of the Hippodrome when Fred spoke of it.

  It was towards his end. He’d entered the state of relentless reminiscing she now understood was the mark of slow dying. It was on Hannan Street, he said. It had been a cinema, and then a roller-skating rink, then a munitions factory. Nowadays, it was a furniture store. He’d been to a dance there, too, and a fancy-dress ball. Else had taken him as a pirate, and she went as a pirate’s girl. Earrings, imagine! But three times at least he’d seen her fly in the Hippodrome on roller skates, looping the loop, spinning in a crouch, weaving like a devil between the couples and the more cautious movers. She was bold in those days, he’d said proudly. But she changed after Mary.

  ‘Nothing was the same after we lost your mother, Mary.’

  Perched on her stool at the gallery, Frances watched visitors pause before, and then leave, grunge-genre photographs from Taiwan. These were mostly of lurid interiors in which staged atrocities were occurring, a rape, a robbery, a man overdosed with his gear splayed on the floor beside him. There was a repulsive image of a suicide, a pretty woman slumped with cut wrists, her faux blood ablaze in the light of a lime neon sign—Midori—falling like radioactive spill through the window. The colours were hyper and the compositions neo-classical. Frances wondered if she was becoming conservative, closing her mind to what might radically challenge; or was simply exhausted by the displays she was obliged to endure. Visitors to the gallery left looking a little revolted and grim. She too felt grim.

  She turned to the sound of her name and saw Jake, who was seeking her company. Another gallery attendant, he was over-educated, like her, underemployed, like her, and devastated by his failed career as a painter. He saw in Frances a kindred spirit, or at least one to whom he could honestly complain.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘The usual. Irony. Trauma. The scuzzy emptiness of the real.’

  Jake smiled. ‘Not to mention Midori,’ he added. ‘Shall we try Midori in a bar somewhere, after work?’

  It was a dumb pickup line, such as a teenager might use. She was still thinking: Hippodrome, cinema, roller-skating rink, munitions factory, dance hall, furniture store. Pervasive incongruence. The shifts in history made symbolic.

  ‘So?’ he persisted.


  Jake had the look of one perpetually disappointed. A down-turned mouth, strong creases in his cheeks, the premature ageing of the failed. Frances secretly found the look seductive. For months she’d thought him as queer as Christmas, but then saw him kiss a girl in the bar on the corner near the gallery. It was not a gay man’s kiss. They’d avoided each other after that, after he saw her looking with interest, and had only recently recommenced their droll conversations.

  ‘Another time, perhaps.’

  ‘Come on, live a little.’

  ‘Another time.’

  Jake looked surprised that she’d turned him down, but then tried harder to impress, reeling off the artist’s credentials, his big shows in London and Milan, the rise of the neo-baroque in photography in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei.

  Frances was bored. How to make him cease?

  At last Jake noticed that Frances was no longer listening.

  ‘Next week, maybe, when things have settled down.’

  He was persistent, at least, she granted him that. And there was some small gratification in the energy of his attempt.

  ‘Next week,’ she agreed, immediately regretting it.

  Jake stood beside her, performing calm. What might he be thinking? Frances was aware he’d become awkward and lost confidence when she disengaged. She saw him rub at his eyelids, like a child, with his fists tightly curled. There was a pain, then, that came out of nowhere and was almost unbearable: Will had the same gesture. It showed her the child still within, it revealed an eight-year-old, tired and grumpy, or perhaps after tears. Towards the end it recurred. The adult Will, dying, also rubbed his eyes with his fists curled in this childish way. He’d taught her the word okinami; the big wave, that’s what it was. Hokusai’s was not a tsunami but an okinami. She had no control of the wave of her feelings; Frances began to cry.