Sixty Lights

by Gail Jones

  Something in Neville Brady crazed and cracked open. He felt alien in the world, and dislocated. He concocted schemes and designs – to open his own spice-importation business, to immigrate to Canada under a false name, to return to Australia. He would be like Magwitch, he thought, inventing his own Great Expectations, falling out of visible history into secret possibilities. But unfunded, Neville’s concoctions remained distant hopes. Instead, with time on his hands and a sense of inner collapse, he turned to spiritualism of various forms to assure and reconnect him to whatever spirited self he had once, long ago, inhabited: the child who ran along the ship deck, whooping with joy in the sunshine, expecting New Beginnings. Neville attended public talks on phrenology, mesmerism and Eastern religions, on palmistry, seances and gaseous experimentation. He sent away for pamphlets on do-it-yourself divination, scrying and life-after-death experiences. All manner of ghost-trapping and necromancy obsessed him. More specifically, Neville conceived the idea that he must communicate with Honoria: that her untimely death and lost infant and the dreadful consequences with Arthur, meant that something in the order of things, the immemorial order, was out of kilter, out of joint, and dangerously unquiet.

  One morning Neville told the children of a medium, Madame d’Esperance, whose special talent was for summoning the tragically dead. “Ectoplasm!” declared Neville; “it is ectoplasm ghosts are composed of.” The children eyed their uncle suspiciously as he described an account on a handbill of spirit-world happenings: dead parents and grandparents, uncles and aunts, even next-door neighbours and favourite pets, had been conjured out of thin air at Madame d’Esperance’s seances.

  “The gift,” said Neville, with a fanatical tone. “She has the gift of seeing. Do you understand?”

  Lucy and Thomas did not understand. They were embarrassed more by Neville’s new enthusiasm than by his loss of work.

  It was a thin still evening, flimsy as gauze, when Lucy accompanied Neville, holding his quivering hand, to Madame d’Esperance’s Salon of Spiritual Experience. There were three other customers, all nervy and earnest looking, and a maid servant bade them seat themselves at a round covered table. Candles were extinguished, then Madame made her entrance with a single candle held beneath her chin, so that she looked as if she wore a mask and was already lodged at some halfway point between the animate and the inanimate worlds. She appeared, thought Lucy, as if she would have a better claim with worlds infernal, than heavenly; Lucy suspected this bogus profundity and dramatic mien. In an accent of no known nation Madame commanded the participants link their little fingers in a circle around the table and then with great ceremony blew out the remaining candle.

  At this point Lucy became intrigued and excited. In the darkness the others appeared as dapples in a penumbral gloom, shades of people rather than individuals, already transported in their simple and credulous sincerity to the outlandish realm in which linked bodies and gutted candles opened doors almost instantly to the space of death. Someone coughed and someone else bumped the table with an elbow. Anxieties, fantasies, wrenched and deformed griefs, hung as miasma in the air between them.

  Before the session Madame d’Esperance had asked her clients to whom they wished to speak, and had elicited slim details and scraps of personal information. One man, a Mr Talbot, a fat weepy widower, was the first communicant, and when the medium summoned his wife she came as a high squeaking voice, issuing with shrill insistence from a corner of the room.

  “Tubby!” she called. “Tubby, my love!” (for that was what Talbot had said she used to call him), adding, “for my sake marry again, within the year.”

  It was a clear instruction. Lucy heard a gasp of recognition, and imagined Tubby relieved, even delighted, at his ghost-wife’s sound and compassionate advice. The other couple, the elderly Gillams, seeking their lost daughter, were told in straightforward and no uncertain terms that Miriam was invisibly present, floating somewhere nearby, but could only be contacted directly if they returned tomorrow evening. Lucy heard Mr Gillam hush his wife and saw their shapes lean together in commiseration.

  When it was their turn Lucy could feel Neville stiffen beside her. Madame d’Esperance slumped in her chair then rose up again, and called out “Honoria, Honoria,” stretching the vowels to excruciating length. And then, to their horror, an apparition appeared.

  “Ectoplasm,” whispered Neville.

  There was a wavery light, like a reflection from water, and an imprecise face appeared slowly within it, the blurry outlines of eyes and a small mouth, a shadowy nimbus of hair, and a face-shape, definitely a face-shape, drifting high above them, somewhere near the ceiling. It did not speak or communicate, but hovered there in an implicitly posthumous flare, claiming to be the revenant Honoria Strange.

  “Behold me!” it commanded.

  Although Lucy knew in her heart of hearts that this was not her mother, and imagined devious trickery and hidden contraptions, she was nevertheless captivated by the summoning of such a luminous image. It hung for half a minute or so, an entirely peculiar vision, screened by some inscrutable means unknown, to produce this single liquid face. Lucy heard Uncle Neville let out a sob. Then another, then another, until he had broken the magic circle and dropped his head onto the table. The face disappeared and Madame d’Esperance lit the candle, then pronounced the seance successful and at an end. She said Neville must come again if he wished to hear his dead sister speak.

  “Tomorrow,” she repeated. He must come again tomorrow.

  When Lucy told Thomas about the seance later that night, they agreed it was specious, fraudulent and probably downright criminal.

  “‘Partickler when he see the ghost’!” Thomas joked.

  But then he felt almost immediately ashamed of himself; mocking Neville was too disloyal. Besides, he had seriously wondered about whether his parents might exist as ghosts, and remembered seeing his father’s face, violence-distressed and godforsaken, resting after his death on the hallway mirror. Thomas was too afraid to test his secret speculations. He wished he had not seen the face on the mirror. And he wished he had not told Lucy what he had seen. It was something that would follow him all his life, like having the wrong person’s shadow, like carrying an aberration of presence, like dragging into the bright living world some heavy taint of the grave.

  On Lucy’s second and last visit with Neville to the Salon, Madame d’Esperance employed a planchette. Lucy had never heard of these instruments before: it was a thin piece of wood, shaped in a stretched triangle and mounted on small wheel castors with a pencil affixed to one end, pointing downwards. This device automatically wrote messages from somewhere beyond: it slid around the table, with Madame’s guiding hand, forming letters in spidery spirit handwriting. When Madame d’Esperance revealed the message it was completely illegible. There was possibly a T, and possibly a Y, and a word that might, Mr Gillam thought, have spelled out “mustard”. Madame d’Esperance offered various inventive interpretations, but suggested Neville should return to use the little viewing eye of the planchette, which could be swept over a printed sheet of letters. In this way, she claimed, spirit messages – unimpeded – were spelled more precisely.

  Lucy dreamed that her mother left scrawled and unreadable messages in dust on the surface of a hallway mirror. Her mystic writing pad. And for many years, on and off, she thought about the seance, and the make-believe face, and the unreliable planchette. She could not forget the anonymous image stretched like a sail upon the ceiling, or Uncle Neville’s impassioned sobbing, given up for what he truly believed was his younger sister, recomposed above them, bright and imperative.

  24

  THOMAS, NOW SIXTEEN, was apprenticed to a cooper, a job he found tiresome and almost demeaning. Unlike his employer, he could read and write, and thought it absurd that Uncle Neville had arranged things thus, so that he bent wood all day in heat-moulded curves, and held copper rings at the blazing forge, and shovelled away shit from beneath the carthorses. But Neville assured him t
hat it was a short-term measure, a stopgap, he said, until he received sure intelligence of the future from Honoria, from the wise, all-knowing zone in which she now had her being. Neville saw the world simply bisected, the living and the dead, still communing, still corresponding, still offering each other advice, but despite his expensive visits to Madame d’Esperance’s Salon, he had yet to discover how to rescue the children from the predicament into which he had cast them.

  After only a month at the cooper’s, Thomas learned the necessity of initiative and found his own employment, together with an advance in salary to break his indenture. He presented himself at Mr Martin Childe’s Magic Lantern Establishment, and pronounced himself desirous of a career in the projection of images. Mr Martin Childe was a barrel-shaped man – he might, indeed, have been fashioned by a cooper – who wore corduroy trousers and jacket and a neck scarf tied like a flower. He quizzed Thomas on the reason for his attraction to lantern technology and found in the boy a kindred spirit: both loved, above all, the phantasmagoria, the gruesome narratives of horror, spooks and unseemly violence, and neither, it seemed, enjoyed the Temperance slide shows, or the long, pious sequences on The Life of Christ in Palestine. Mr Childe thought Thomas respectable, intelligent and of excellent taste: he offered him a repast of corned beef and sherry and then employment at various tasks – taking admission, sweeping the auditorium, learning, by stages, the mechanisms of gas jets and lenses and star-dissolving taps (whatever they were). He held rectangles of images up to the window and demonstrated the rudimentary physics and optics by which lantern slides, hand-painted on glass, were enlivened by airy expansion into public vision. They shook hands vigorously as Thomas departed.

  “Master Strange,” said Mr Childe – who relished Thomas’s surname and used it frequently – “welcome, my boy, to the Childish Establishment!” Thomas could hardly believe his luck. He ran home along the High Street, whooping and leaping like a boy on a deck, and burst into their small rooms to greet Lucy and Neville with his eyes fired up and aglow, lively and bedazzling, like twin gas flames at an eight o’clock magic-lantern show.

  25

  LUCY COULD NOT bring herself to seek work in the bristle factory, although the turnover was high and they often had positions vacant. She was disturbed by the thought of damage to her hands, even though she longed – in a way she could not even identify – for a small community of sympathetic women. She was not well educated enough to apply for work as a governess, and had virtually no skills that would recommend her to an employer. The idea of working as a nanny did not appeal, nor did she wish to be a domestic servant.

  Lucy found work at last in an albumen factory. Albumen, she discovered, was the substance used in the manufacture of photographic paper, and it was obtained, quite simply, from the white of eggs. When she first applied for the position, she met a woman with a huge bosom – a Mrs McTierney – who tested her ability to crack open eggs. Lucy was given six eggs and instructed to part them cleanly, as if she were performing an operation on a living being. She was fastidious and quick: she passed the test. Mrs McTierney said that usually girls were nervous when she watched, and often wrecked or spilled at least one or two. She fingered the ruffles of her blouse and looked at Lucy sternly.

  “I’m never nervous,” Lucy heard herself declare. “It’s not in my nature.”

  It was true. She suddenly knew it. She was never nervous.

  At work Lucy sat at a long bench with twenty-three other women (two-dozen-hard-eggs, they joked), each with a mountain of stacked eggs at their side and a kind of trough between them. Together the women spent the day separating yolks and whites, whites and yolks, so that the viscous shiny liquid filled a pool before them. They had vigilantly to check for blood or yolk in the white, and to watch, necessarily, for shell and rottenness. Egg odour entered their skin and hair, and sticky matter stained their work aprons and pinafores; but otherwise the job was easy and even meditative. Sometimes the women worked silently, cracking eggs side by side, each enclosed in her own sealed and uncracked thoughts; more often, however, they chattered together. Once a week each contributed a farthing to hire a reader, who sat alongside them, reading aloud from serials, or newspapers, or collections of short stories. Words circulated in the air like a new kind of energy, in waves and particles, focused and diffuse, showing and obscuring what might exist in the world. Lucy loved the timbre of the reader’s voice and her habit of clicking her teeth with her tongue at her own points of concern in the narrative.

  Mrs McTierney supervised, strolling slowly, her hen-like bosom swelling before her.

  The workers were now-and-then rotated to different tasks, so that Lucy had also the job of whisking the albumen in drums to a high bubbly froth, or tipping the liquid into storage for fermentation. Most of all she liked to work with the paper. A single sheet was dipped and floated in albumen solution, then hung up to dry. Lastly it was rolled and sorted into piles of first- or second-grade paper. Everything about this process of labour stank, but it had about it the pre-industrial gratification of completion, of an entire act of manufacture, seen through to the packages neatly addressed and sent away to photographers.

  Years later Lucy found herself using the albumen paper that she and her co-workers may have produced. It was a moment of such profound memory retrieval that with it came the sour smell of fermented albumen and recalled to her the faces of all the women she had loved. She held the paper to the light to discover its grade and to inspect it for streaks or tiny cracks; she rubbed it between her fingertips and assessed the quality of the surface and gloss, checking to see if it was single or double-dipped, and knew at that moment that honourable work returns itself in these stray unguessable circuits; some random experience of labour returns as good tidings; some object sent into the world, blank, potential, arrives as the fortunate component of wholly new meanings.

  Years later, too, Lucy flicked through her diary of Special Things Seen, and saw that on her first day at work in the albumen factory she had left at four o’clock in the afternoon, and recorded that the sky was the colour of a sheet of photographic paper, drenched in wet egg-white, a bright screen, gleaming lightly as it hung to dry.

  26

  “STRANGE,” SHE SAID to Thomas, “how fiction predicts.”

  In Great Expectations there is an episode in which Pip, having newly come into his fortune, goes to a tailor to have a fine suit fitted. A boy there, Trabb’s boy, treats him with insolence, sweeping the floor by banging the broom at every corner, scowling, getting in the way, physically dissenting from and mocking the hero’s changed circumstances. Lucy thought of this episode when she began work at the albumen factory, except that her own situation was a kind of reversal. The women at the factory knew that she could read and write and were alerted every time she opened her mouth – with that peculiar cross-planetary accent of hers – that she was not one of them and was lodged for some reason in the wrong class and work. At first they knocked or slapped her with relaxed and easy malice as they passed, and one deliberately flicked an egg from the top of her pile, so that it smashed across her shoes and she was obliged to apologise to Mrs McTierney and waste time cleaning up. They joked about her name: “she’s a strange one,” they said, and excluded her from their friendly conversation.

  All this altered when one day a fierce man came to the factory. He was large and ill-kempt, with a shock of orange hair. He stood at the doorway demanding to see one of the workers, Rose; he hollered her name and emanated a threatening presence. Rose was a small woman, no more than five feet tall, who was cowered and abused by her much larger husband. Mrs McTierney was at the back of the room and stood her ground, asking the man immediately to leave, but Lucy, acting on impulse, moved forward at once to meet and confront him. She saw his face strewn with whiskers and his irrational glare.

  “This is ungentlemanly, sir,” she boldly declared – speaking in a voice that sounded stage-hall and melodramatic – “you must leave. Now.”

  T
he man was dumbfounded for a second: he simply stared. He had wild black eyes and alcoholic breath. Then he swung his arm in a wide arc and using tremendous force struck Lucy across the face with the back of his hand. She fell heavily, taking with her a nearby stack of eggs and detonating at least twenty in a messy explosion. The floor was blazoned with yellow and white commingled, and Lucy lay on her side, stunned and stinging, with the sharp taste of blood flooding into her mouth. Pain overtook her stagey illusion.

  The man then turned on his heel and left, and Rose, standing half-hidden, fell away into a faint.

  After that the women’s behaviour carried an air of propitiation. They were considerate, kind and included Lucy in their talk. They forgave her accent and gathered her into a quiet receptive embrace in which she experienced deliberate tenderness and everyday solidarity. From these women Lucy at last learned about female knowledge: she learned about miscarriages, recipes, home remedies and local gossip; she learned about the delectable and frightening otherness of men, about the arbitrariness of love and the glorious delirium of passion. All this from her foolish bravery and her face battered, leaking blood, lying sideways in a thin pool of broken eggs, which resembled so many smashed-up and still-glistening lights.

  Three months later, Rose was murdered by her violent husband. The details were not at all theatrical. He broke her head with an ale bottle, confident in his brutal, annihilating authority. The women asked Lucy – “bein’ that she was educated an’ all” – to give a little speech about Rose’s passing. It was a ritual of the workplace. A system of formal mourning. Lucy stood at the head of the troughs of collected white and spoke of the pain of being hit and the fellowship of women. She told them of her parents’ deaths, and how something holy attaches to grief. She said there is a glow to love: she had actually seen it. It is like the entire sun coming to rest in the belly of a kneeling sheep. It is like a glint from the beads of an Italian necklace that hung at her mother’s throat. It is like two lovers flashing mirrors through space and time. Some of the women wept. There was a chorus of muffled sobbing behind Lucy’s words and throughout the hall a warm atmosphere of shared distress. Lucy said, last of all, that this glow defeats the fist that swings cruelly to strike a face and the poison that creeps up into mothers’ wombs. It is a miraculous light, a light that carries the amazement of seeing a falling star plunge at night into the ocean. Lucy fell silent. She was not sure she believed it. She was a fourteen-year-old girl describing life, in an egg-filled factory hall to a group of weeping women. But the blessedness of the moment – even then she knew it – was in its simple saying, in finding the right words.