by Tracy Farr
Another strange note I will not send. I will kiss it to seal it, and place it in the box with the others. Why can I not forget you, Rosa love? You, lodged in my heart.
Yours, ever,
Zigi
29. Fifty-six years ago
O! My daughter is born!
My daughter is born on the wave of this pill, this mask, this syringe, and I dive down into myself and hold her up to breathe.
There is Frank, with a flat box of fruit jellies, sugar crust, shaped mandarin and lemon and orange and cherry. I taste the sugar sweets, I mumble, and I stumble and, whoops, I am sick down my front. The nurse says, never mind, let’s clean you up, I think it’s time you popped off now, Mr Golden, Sister will show you the baby through the viewing window. Frank plants a kiss on my forehead, with beer on his breath to wet the baby’s head, just about drowned the little fucker I’ d say from the smell of it and oh, here it comes again, and oh that’s mandarin, and sugar, and oh, they say she’s a girl but I haven’t seen her bits and pieces yet.
A doctor in the corridor says yes, an earthquake, in Alaska, the earth rent and rift (Like me! I think, Like me!). They say it might be an army. Soon-army, they say. Ah, imagine! A tidal wave, a giant flooding wave, like none ever known.
The nurse says: talk about giant waves, you should have seen her spew!
They’ll bring her in the morning. My daughter. My daughter is born.
28. Fifty-six years ago
It’s a small ceremony, just me and Frank, with Mr Pritchett the dentist, and his receptionist, Marjory, as witnesses. I hold a posy of blowsy orange roses and crisp fishbone ferns, cut from Marjory’s garden, the stems wrapped in a fat tamp of silver foil. A little water drips from the wad of damp cottonwool tucked within the foil. It’s cool on my wrist.
I move into Frank’s little brick house. He is gentle with me, quiet and kind, as always. He pats my hand, there, there, and brings me tea. We sit in his bed, upright, like a king and queen carved from stone. I reach for him, guide his bald head to rest on my breasts, as I used to, long ago, when he would come to Mr Pritchett for his teeth. He would smile up at me as I passed the instruments, handed water to rinse his mouth, and snapped the crocodile teeth of the metal clasp to fix the bib at his throat, and I would feel sorry for him, for his quiet kind shyness, and press him to me, brush against him gently, warmly.
Frank Golden is a good man. He will be a good father to this baby, when it comes. His big bulk will protect it, keep it safe.
Fortune’s turned. I am Mrs Golden now.
27. Fifty-seven years ago
Letter, unsent
November, 1957
Dear, loved one, you who I cannot forget.
Forty-five days have passed since I felt your touch. On every one of those days, I have thought of you. Your hair. Your skin. Your voice, telling tales, laughing. Your breath, mine. Our skin marked and mapped with our urgency.
I cannot send this letter. I know your name – Rosa – and your street. But you were not on the bridge, that night. Did you read my note? I can only hope you did not. That you did not dismiss me. That instead you simply missed me – no dis, just miss – or that we slipped unseen past each other.
Oh, love, I miss you. You do not know it, but I miss you, and remain, here – for now, from a distance – your
Zigi
26. Fifty-seven years ago
In London, in November, the sky is low to the ground, grey and fat with damp. The flat full of girls is riddled with cold, coughing, lipstick and crying. My hands on my belly, I dream, awake and asleep, for the first time in years of home: of the dry light, the faraway sky, the jellyfish stink of the river, the metal salt ocean, black swans hissing for water in shallowing lakes, the redbrick, flatland, heat-hazed, horizon-filling slab of it, calling me back.
I book passage on the Arcadia, send a telegram to Frank, and start to pack my things.
25. Fifty-seven years ago
Poem enclosed with letter, unsent
THE CURVES OF YOUR BODY
For Rosa
I have traced the curves of your body,
its terraces and faults,
the lay of the land,
its beautiful folds.
I have measured the depth of you, the width of you,
the height of you, the steep
dips of you, the uplift of you.
I have paced you out in yard-long steps.
24. Fifty-seven years ago
Letter with poem enclosed, unsent
October, 1957
Rosa (oh dear Rosa),
I write to you as a maker of marks. I read the land, order its seams and faults, make sense of them, write them onto maps that men can read. The earth folds in on itself, heaves and cleaves and shifts and rises. And I read that, I map it. I measure it with a hundred-foot tape. I measure it, mark it, write it to paper.
The land has tells that people do not. Read the land, the faults are clear. They’re a puzzle to be solved, and once solved, to be written. Slate and shale, graben and twist, schist and chert: incantations of the land.
But you, Rosa. You. O, I cannot forget you, the smell of you, your wild eyes. Your dark eyes. Your legs. Around my legs. Around me. Your schist, slate and shale. The slip of you. Your dark hair, the straight line of it, the no fault of it, cut straight across your forehead, the line of it above your eyes. Rose quartz your lips. The mudstone of your hair; the greenstone of your eyes.
Yes, I am a maker of marks. And the marks I made upon your body! Writing its curves and slips, its rises, its bulges, its slopes and terraces. I made invisible marks upon your body, inside and out, as you marked me. My paces stepped the length of you; I had the measure of you, I was the measure of you. As I might estimate distance on a map, so I estimated the distance between our bodies, between yours and mine. The closing of the gap – this diminishing value – can be achieved in one of two ways. I move towards you. Or you towards me. Or a third: we move together. We displaced space between us, love, and filled it with ourselves. We measured the space between us with the volume of our bodies. The volume of this, the volume of that. The density of the space, now filled. The consequence of it.
Here is a poem for you, love.
I cannot shake you from me, and so I am
Your Zigi
23. Fifty-seven years ago
Note, slipped unread from a pocket through a hole, into the space between a coat’s leather and its lining
Dear Rosa, beautiful Rosa,
I leave London tomorrow, for home, at the end of this geological congress. Can we meet again? God, I hope we can!
Forgive me this cliché; I’m still more than a little bit drunk, you’re in the bathroom and writing this is all I can think of. Meet me in the middle of Waterloo Bridge, at 6pm tomorrow – no: today, Friday. I will wait for you there, but I must go straight to the airport, from the bridge.
You know me only as Zigi, but this is my name: I am Dr Zigmund Silbermann. You may write to me, if you will, at the Department of Geology, here at my university.
I wish only to see you again.
Dear, I wish it so much!
Zigi
22. Fifty-seven years ago
This is the night we meet.
Micky, wicked girl, has got them again, the purple hearts, and we pop them in the afternoon, and o o oh there we are in the bright and haze of them, the don’t-know-where of them, the colours merge and wheel of them, the gorgeous buzz and hum. I leave my camera at home, but my eyes are my camera; I will never forget this, never not never not remember. Here is this pub, the two of us in this snug. This pint. The light of the fire of the stick of the match. Hold it still for just one moment, Micky, hold it, hold it, light another. Smoke sweet dusty full lungs blue smoke.
And look: look at you there, you, beautiful boy, there at the bar.
You’re short, solid, an outline, coloured in, filled in. You wear wool trousers and suede shoes, movie star dark glasses. You stand apart from the others
you’re with, at the edge of the crowd of older men in their socks and gaiters and sturdy walking boots.
Micky leans in to me, her arm around my waist, whispers something, smoothes her hand down her skirt as she talks. Micky is looking your way. We are both looking your way. We are smiling. Look at you now, you’ve seen us see you. Yes. You smile back at us, show your neat teeth. Look at you take a slim book from your pocket, lean back against the bar, foot up on the stool. Yes, like that, and your cigarette burns, but let it; let the ash lengthen and teeter and drop, and you brush it from your sleeve. No, better still, you brush it from your thigh. Or better still: let me brush it from your thigh.
I’m at the bar now, Micky’s with me. The music rocks, steady. We rock, we roll. I lower my eyes, lower my face; then I tilt up my eyes to you, raise my eyebrows, raise my drink. I’m by your side now, and I have my hand on your book. What’s that, now; what is it you’re reading? You flick the cover, show me this volume of poetry, this slim thing, and the pages splay, and you part the pages with your finger, at the page with the turned-down corner.
The poem’s a dirty love song, rhythm skipping ugly on the page, rock steady, rock steady, words to part lips; something by one of the Beats, or translated from a language no one knows. And you read it, leaning in to me, your breath in my ear, your words, your rhythm. Your accent’s unplaceable. You’re there with your friends. My geological colleagues, you tell us, it’s a rocky relationship, and you all laugh. Micky’s there and she laughs loudest, with her hand on your arm, but you’re watching me, and your pupils are large. You’re drinking rum, the smell of it like cake, like spice, like perfume. The smell of you is all I can smell, not the beer or the smoke or the pickled eggs. Your hand touches mine as you hand me a glass. It fires my skin.
You’re here for a geological congress, your first time in London, you should be with the others (over there now, sucking on pipes, scribbling maps on napkins). But you’re in London. London! And you’ve escaped the scientists, the solid talk of rocks and maths, the petty hiss of academic rivals.
We sit in the snug, my hand on your chest, in your shirt, your hand on my leg, your blunt fingernails there. I move, so your hand slithers up the fabric.
Then there’s a gap of not remembering.
And then I push you against the kitchen cupboard. You are my height, or shorter; my hair is short, so that your hair is almost as long as mine; I recognise something in you, like looking in a mirror, but the wrong way around, so that the reflection is other, is skewed but recognisable. I push you against the dresser, and plates rattle. You edge to the table, then to a chair, and ease yourself onto the chair and I climb you and take you in, and your face is hard then soft then hard again, and your hands, your blunt-fingered hands, find their way to my arse and push me and lift me, and your face disappears in my shirt, and you come up for air, smiling. And we heave and blow together; you rock me, back and forth, in the kitchen chair, your fulcrum, my weight. I put my hand across your mouth to catch your shout to God, and you bite me as you come, in the dark, in the kitchen that smells of sausages and tea leaves and laundry.
We huddle in the doorway, say goodbyes I can’t remember. Drink and pills and lust still muddle my brain. You press my hand, and I crumple paper into the pocket of my coat. You slip away, into the grey light near morning.
21. Fifty-seven years ago
Here in London, I find that I’m playing art student, playing photographer, and not quite sure, day to day, which of these I prefer. I sport a severe look, my dark hair cropped short, high on the forehead, exposing my pale face, a slash of red on my lips; I dress often in black. There’s a self-portrait I took, myself in motion, in and out of light and shadow. I’m in a pub. Smoke obscures me. I hold a cigarette in my hand, but as if I’m holding it for someone else, as if to hand it back.
There are endless parties, many of them in our flat. And there’s an endless stream of people crashing in the flat, all of them Australians, friends from home, or friends of friends, or brothers of cousins of friends. They stay for a night, or for weeks or months. I come home late one night to find a man, naked other than his sleeping bag, camped on the floor, next to the kitchen table.
Gidday, he says. Barry, from Dardanup. Micky’s cousin. The couch was taken.
I step around him to fill the kettle, put it on the gas burner to boil. He joins me, draped in his sleeping bag, and we sit at the table and drink tea, smoke cigarettes.
There are Australians everywhere, not just in our flat: at the school, in the pub, mounting shows in galleries. We congregate, whether we mean to or not. We hear each other’s loud, flat voices across rooms. We drop the same social clangers, miss the same cues, and our Australianness earns us forgiveness. We’re outsiders together, here, a little like puppies, or children, occasionally making a mess in the corner, but to be tolerated for our ability to entertain. We’re loveable rascals. Although it’s more than that; we have become, it seems, somewhat en vogue.
Micky has an invitation to an exhibition opening at Whitechapel Gallery for one such Australian painter currently courted by art connoisseurs. We go for the wine and the cheese, but stay for the paintings. They are flat, cartoonish, our mythic bushranger in his slit tin hat, lit with un-British sunlight. There are older myths, too: Leda, the swan curving up and over her, those great wings spread, so you can almost hear their beating. The swan is dark, like swans at home, the beak tipped red with threat, there against her thighs. I’ve watched swans here, in the parks. They’re pretty and white, creatures from a faery tale. I draw them sometimes; I add a delicate crown in silver filigree, slanting jauntily over one serene eye. I draw them as she, always. But this swan, Nolan’s wild dark bird! It menaces, the god come to earth as he-swan, neck snaking thick and hard with power against the soft caught curve of Leda. I shudder to look at it.
20. Fifty-nine years ago
Letter from London
May, 1955
Dear Frank,
I went to tea at my publisher’s house; Babs (Mrs Swan to you!). She stays in a flat in London during the week, close to the office of Cygnet & Swan. She invited me to her cottage in the country, and I caught the train on Saturday. Oh, Frank, you should have seen it! A cottage older than any building in Australia – as old as Shakespeare! A thatched roof, low ceilings inside so I had to stoop the whole while (Babs is a tiny bird of a thing, so she flits about, upright, oblivious). There were faery tale flowers surrounding the cottage, and bluebells in the woods (the woods!) at the bottom of the garden. And inside, the rooms were stuffed with books and papers, with paintings and photographs, with old china and furniture.
She lives there with Cicely (whom she calls Cygnet) who is, I have discovered, her partner in publishing. It is Cicely who owns the house, I think, and lives there all week round, while Babs is in the city. Cicely, I think, is the money behind Cygnet & Swan. She is older than Babs and, I gather, content to leave Babs to run the business as her own.
We ate sandwiches and cakes, all made by Cicely, at a table in the garden. Cicely fed the scraps to the dogs, two of them, great beasts that lounged and lapped at her feet, followed her into the house, back out again, never let her out of their sight. I shot them, in black and white: Cicely with her hand feeding morsels to the dogs; Babs with her hand on Cicely’s shoulder; both of them lighting cigarette after cigarette. Light and dark was playing on them, changing with the sun’s movement across the sky.
Later, Cicely shooed us off while she cleaned up, and we walked, Babs and I, in the woods, after tea. Babs is eager for another book from me – but, do you know, Frank, I don’t believe I have another in me. I avoided telling her as much, though. I held her off with talk of my studies, of this deadline and that.
My camera bag was slung over my shoulder as we walked, but I left the camera in its bag. I was mesmerised by the blue of the flowers, the bluebells in the woods, and couldn’t bear not to capture it, but my camera was threaded with black and white film. I could have coloured the p
hotographs, Frank, couldn’t I? Added the blue in afterwards, like you taught me to. But I prefer, these days, to shoot in black and white, pure and simple, and let the shadows tell the stories (stories of dark and light, without colour).
My fondest regards,
Rosa
19. Sixty years ago
The London flat is full of strange girls. It has been since the ship arrived, and the latest mob turned up. It was supposed to be one or two, a cousin of Ellen’s, and maybe her friend; but four of them came, in the end. We’ d met on the ship, and all got on so well, and here we are, so the flat is, yes, full of strange girls. The strangest of them all, in some ways, is me. My age hardly qualifies me as ‘girl’, though I never admit it. I’m too old to be a student, but most of the time I manage to get away with it. The others think I might be as old as thirty (imagine!) but could not conceive that I might be the age I am: forty!
I, like the rest of them, am red-lipped, bright-eyed, busy as a bee. They favour capri pants, ballet flats, tailored shirts in crisp white. But I play the art school beatnik, hair au gamin, black skinny pants, black turtleneck or French sailor’s top, a leather coat over it all. I carry my camera in a woollen bag stitched with big red blanket stitches, two leather toggles to close it with.
I thought I’ d come away here to write more faery tales, to draw and paint them, but the camera seems to have taken me over. Having decided to stay a little longer, I’ve enrolled in classes at the Central School of Art, taking Photography and Composition, and I look to reality now, capturing what I see rather than inventing worlds. Miss Fortune’s Faery Tales – now published – is almost forgotten. It seems another Rosa Fortune that wrote those tales. I have walked past bookshops and seen it there, and taken a while to realise: Oh, that is mine. Rosa is me. I am Rosa.
