by Gail Jones
It was an aspect of their affection that Victoria also confirmed Mary. The woman had grown up in an orphanage, hungry and ill, and spoke of her past life as though she had lived it as someone else, always once removed. But she had an elaborate fantasy of a long-lost family — a mother, a father, three sisters and two brothers, all of whom were named and detailed, and would one day, somehow, find and reclaim her. So although Mary said very little of the orphanage, she spoke a great deal of her imaginary family, so that she and Victoria, sitting comfortably sideways beneath the Heart, could be lonesome together. Their voices drifted up to Jesus, soft and wandering as candle-smoke.
By her own account Victoria made no other friends, and had no girlish recollections or school-day tattle. Or would not disclose them. Of her boarding school time she remembers — ineradicably — only the river and the swans and her own conclusive act of arson.
The boarding school stood on a promontory beside the Swan River, and beyond the clipped grass and the expensive houses nestling around it was a cliff and a wild space of undergrowth and reeds, and beyond that the ribbony river, shimmering and lucent, buoying shags and pelicans and cruising clusters of black swans. Victoria went often to the river’s edge, to sit quietly and be alone. She went at night so that she could gaze into the lit windows of people’s houses (so many pianos, flower arrangements, jardinieres and antimacassars) and in the day, after school, with her pencils and drawing paper, just to sit there, looking. She possessed a wedge of cover, sheltered and hidden, and it was like the underside of something, cobwebby and damp and unavoidably muddy, but positioned not far from a group of swans’ nests, and with an unimpeded view around the bay and across the river. In the distance was a boat-shed from which schoolboys daily launched rowing practice — she could hear their rhythmic grunts float over to greet her — and ahead, directly ahead, an expanse of sky-filled water. When she swam she entered that sky, diving into pure reflection. She loved subaqueous estrangement; she loved the annihilation of the school world for this cold surprising place, murky with possibility. Jellyfish, fat as faces, encircled and accompanied her. They opened and contracted, opened and contracted, rhythmically, like a heart. She saw them spotting the brown water, wafting towards her like visitants.
Victoria carries into adulthood an image of herself after bathing, still wet, spreadeagled, sleeping very peacefully with her burnt face in the sun.
These times telescope crudely to one single event, when she stumbled across two boys, stamping in the swans’ nests. They had their boaters still on and their school ties straight, but were dancing in Wellington boots, crushing the eggs. Matter and egg-shell were splattered everywhere. It took a little longer to see exactly what they had done. Two adult swans were pierced though the chest with makeshift spears, and they had been plucked of their wing-feathers so that they looked exposed and violated. Their long necks were limp and their black bellies already bloated with death. One boy — ginger, mean-looking, with a practised sneer — noticed Victoria’s presence and called out aggressively:
So what ya lookin at big eyes? Fancy a quick fuck?
And she fled, afraid, grazing her bare hurrying legs on brambles. When they had gone Victoria returned and buried the bodies of the birds, then gathered up the feathers, which seemed too beautiful to leave, and joined Mary, and the Heart, because there was nowhere else to go …
It’s an abomination, Mary declared. Just like in the Bible.
She remembers that Mary Heany held her in her arms and allowed her to cry — not only for the swans but more mysteriously for Lily-white, as well. So Victoria sobbed for all the wounds that she did not understand. For the world outside her swimming sky. For her hiding memories and inchoate emotions; and for the second-sight which folded into time itself to produce and reproduce her own system of ruins. Mary told another of her family stories:
My mother, Mary said, is a giant of a woman. She is even taller than Father Dignam, with blue eyes and black hair, blacker even than swans’ feathers or the blackest, moonless night, blacker than the devil himself and the hot caverns of hell, and she is beautiful and strong and her name is also Mary, since I am her long-lost last-born and named for her especially, and my mother Mary, whose skin is all-white and smooth like egg-shell, wears combs in her hair and has brooches and beads, all of them made of moonstones and little streamers of gold, and a studded crucifix, too, like the one the bishop wears; yet she is not proud or stuck up and goes about in bare feet and wears dresses with flower patterns so that she is always in springtime, and who knows maybe she was sailing on a boat on the river, or walking out alone on the cliff in the sunshine, and saw those two boys doing their dreadful things, and put a curse on them, there and then, so that they will burn away in hellfire, and burn and burn until nothing is left but their dirty charred souls, because she might have forgiven them for the swans, but not the eggs too, so that she punishes them and hates them and sweeps past on the face of the water, looking out for her daughter Mary, who has the same name as herself, and who is waiting and waiting and waiting forever to be found.
Amen, added Mary.
When, late at night, Victoria set fire to the boat-shed, it was a magnificent thing. Convulsive flames transformed the ordinary into a theatre of light, and she watched it from a distance, from her little wedge of darkness, begin as a small lit window flaring in the night, and become a whole cathedral, and wholly glorious. And on the shining water a second boat-shed burned, puzzled by ripples as wood fragments began to scatter and fall. By the time the roof was ablaze boats had been released across the river, and they drifted there, made of fire, arks of brilliancy. The fire-brigade didn’t have a chance; like the Lyric theatre the boat-shed was of Baltic pine.
(viii)
Only Mary Heany could possibly have told them. When the school expelled Victoria Morrell for criminal acts, Mary was not present at the ritual humiliation at Assembly. Victoria, said the headmistress, was a symbol to them all, a symbol of pure wickedness. She had disgraced the good name of her family, and the excellent name of her school. Three hundred girls, six hundred eyes, looked steadily upon her, thrilled at her abasement. Two teachers loaded Victoria onto the train, and neither offered comfort, neither waved.
Her conflagration returned, again and again. Sails of flame blowing open on water of dense black. Sparks. Scintillas. The whole vision bisected, streaming in two directions at once. This doubling made it much more impressive than the Lyric. She closed her eyes and saw it still, a kind of retinal after-image, cast like a flare on the screens beneath her eyelids, persisting into vision even in the darkness after fires.
Victoria felt powerful and incorruptible. Sweetly delinquent thoughts assailed her. She considered buildings for their immanent combustibility and wondered if she could rob a bank, or even commit murder. She could not have known then the other forms of darkness that awaited her. She stepped off the hissing train into a white-hot day, and saw that only her father and brother were at the station to meet her. No Lily-white, no Ruby, no Miss Casey, no Mrs Murphy. For a moment Victoria could not comprehend what had happened. Henry was enormous, over six feet tall, and now eighteen years old, pimply, rigid-faced, with wiry brown whiskers and an Adam’s apple, and her father in this company was both smaller and more corpulent, but aged not at all. (He tipped his Spanish hat, as though to a passing acquaintance.) Sometime during the three years she had been away at school they had both returned, and changed her home almost completely. Lily-white and Ruby had been banished — Victoria had no idea where and no one could inform her; Miss Casey, rejected, had returned to the city of her own accord; and only the widow Mrs Murphy remained. At the house she ran to Victoria and desperately engulfed her, crushing the young woman’s body into her own. She had become thin and grizzled, a shadow of her former self.
So this was Victoria, then, caught in awful reversal and returned to a place which was no longer her home. The glassy eyes of stuffed animals followed her around the room, and she nestled in the c
urtain folds beside the giraffe, and experienced such extreme desolation that Mel-bourne was all she was, a kind of sound around an emptiness, a shape containing its own vacuity. She sang to herself in a way that recalled her lost mother, Lily-white. She cried, and forgot to eat, and was tormented by loneliness.
One day she sought out Mrs Murphy for company and a talk, and found her alone, seated at the peculiar task of cleaning a chandelier.
I wish I was made of glass, Victoria heard herself announce.
Mrs Murphy looked up from the smooth crystal petal she was polishing.
What was that, lovey? What? What?
But Victoria had fallen silent. It was not something she could repeat. It was too preposterous. She had become a girl who speaks nonsense, a girl spiritless and lost.
Mrs Murphy resumed her work, glum and uncommunicative.
Perhaps she needed some exclamation mark to show them how terrible she felt: Victoria decided to make a bonfire of her mother’s clothes. She stole into her father’s room and simply lit them where they were. It was impossibly easy.
But the space was too confined or her spirit too damp, because the fire was not special. Flames began and then sank almost immediately to smouldering, and the wardrobe filled up with acrid smoke. Something too had alerted and disturbed Mrs Murphy, for she ran in — crying out Christ-Almighty, Christ-Almighty — and then returned with a bucket of water and doused everything with one swing. Victoria was given the task of cleaning up, and made to feel ashamed.
She scooped scraps of burnt soggy fabric, holding her nose against the smell, and with these redolent remains, powdering even as she held them, wondered then what her mother, Rose Morrell, might actually have looked like. She knew her other mother Lily-white in such physical detail (she had even stared unflinchingly at the circular pit where the eye once lay, just to know her with close and loving particularity), but realised that she had no image of this Rose woman at all. She was perhaps like Mary’s Mary, blue-eyed and black-haired, a woman taller even than her brother, and even more powerful. Victoria sifted small objects from the detritus of the burning: an opalescent buckle shaped as a broad petalled flower, buttons of bone and of pearl-shell, small coin-shapes of amber. These unburnable traces were precious to her. Most of the shoes were also unburned, but were ruined now, and sullied, and filled with mucky puddles of foul-smelling ash.
Les chasseurs, Victoria whispered to herself. Feu. Coeur. Cendre. Cinderella. She put the shoes into a box, to be taken away.
It was only when Victoria leant right into the wardrobe, tilting, on her knees, into the space of scorched darkness, that she found the hidden treasure of her dead mother’s journal, tucked in a far corner. She tilted back, almost nauseated from the stench and the enclosure, with the stowed-away book in her trembly hands. Her mother’s journal. Its cover was splashed but its interior dry, and when Victoria opened it she saw immediately that her mother was more elusive than she had imagined, writing mostly not in English, but in some cryptogrammic style. Only the curly ampersands were at all recognisable. It was like receiving a love letter written in the wrong language. It was exciting and heartbreaking, all at once. Victoria tucked the journal in her dress, and rushed to hide it in her bedroom. Her secret. Her mother. Dragged from the fire. Goosebumps rose on her skin, as though marking physically her entry to a paranormal zone.
When after work Henry Morrell heard of the wardrobe burning, he entered Victoria’s room with a savage grin, and beat his younger sister about the head. In the morning she saw her own face swollen and discoloured, remade in lilac and indigo, and with two black eyes. This was almost unsurprising, to see something so monstrously sad. The mirror held her up, ruined and defeated, susceptible now to death-wishes and hauntings and the flitting retreat of all her hopes.
THE BLACK MIRROR STORIES
Music that rises out of abandoned places Your space is under the earth, inside the earth, inside the stars.
Where do images go?
Why does a mirror gather light for thirty years and then hold nothing?
(Peter Boyle, Light From Beyond)
Victoria said:
I have several Black Mirror stories and I will give you three.
What are the Black Mirror stories, my Anna-lytical?
They are myself, unrecognisable. They are myself, writing disaster. I looked into a mirror and darkness looked back.
Black Mirror Story 1
I do not remember her death, but they say I was there.
I do not remember her funeral, but they say I was there.
My mother is everything I do not remember, a darkness with no flashes, an evacuated space, an oubliette. Sometimes I cannot bear so much black-coloured forgetting.
I once tried, like the artist Brauner, to paint with my eyes closed, believing this act might recover the lineaments of her lost face, or at least its vague aspect, or intimation; but there was still no consequence and no true icon. I tried too, like the poet Desnos, to speak Surrealistically at will; I imagined that a word-link, unconsciously chanced upon, would somehow reconnect us. But all contrivances failed. Art is the windowpane, the barrier, against which we press our searching faces.
When I was seventeen years old, I discovered my dead mother’s journal in a coffin-like wardrobe, full of cinders. For several days I tried unsuccessfully to decipher it — it appeared to be written in an alien and difficult script — until one morning it accidentally fell open upside-down and I noticed that the words read this way were much more familiar. In fact the letters were cuneiform versions, upside-down and back-to-front, of the English alphabet: my mother had simply disguised them by making each more square and substantial; yet she had placed the ampersands the right way up, and by this simple trick misled intruding readers. I began at first to transcribe the shapes, but found after no time at all that I could read the words fluently.
You already know a little of what I discovered. My father, the chauffeur, seems to have been a young man of unusual patience and tenderness, or at least this is how my mother always described him. He existed to wait for her voice, to pop up the umbrella, to take her elbow and hold open the door as she stepped on the running board of the Daimler. He existed in the rain and in the car; he seems never to have entered the house. I think that perhaps my mother loved the terrible exclusion he bore. He must have known her best through the rear-view mirror — a lover in a glass box, small and rectangular; and she must have known him best by the back of his neck. And like all secret lovers they would have cherished their plaited glances, the furtive outreaching, the hidden complicities. I have thought of this often and wondered how they sustained their secret. I picture my mother with cupid-bow lips and a pounding heart, approaching very slowly in one of those bulbous veiled hats, and this man, my father, shifting from foot to foot in the foggy cold, and tracking her motion towards him as though he were tracking a point of perihelion. She would have burned as she grew closer; his cold made her blush and feel her own warmth unendurably. She might have lowered her eyelids, only to glance up again as his hand pulled at the door handle, to see herself, a woman in a hat, floating in the lustre of his eyes. I imagine between my parents an enormous decorum and restraint, since the affair was apparently never discovered, and she never ran away with him. Together they practised an almost oriental formality, moving in tight patterns of oblique correspondence.
When I deciphered the journal I was at first dismayed. I did not judge my mother for taking a lover, but felt instead doubly orphaned by the long deception; Father was not my father; we had both been hoodwinked. And where was this chauffeur, this William, this man always shivery in the greyish light of rain or speed?
I dreamt a car sped past that I knew he was driving, but I saw only the back of a man’s neck, in blurry retreat.
It’s strange to remember it now: like all irrevocable revelations it carried with it a certain quality of despair. I did not, of course, tell my father or brother of my discovery, but confided in Mrs Murphy. Her live
r-spotted hands flew to her face and she looked at me with a puzzled stare as though she had suddenly gone deaf and was lip-reading gibberish. She was dismayed by my knowledge and demanded I destroy Rose’s journal. She answered no questions and forbade discussion on the subject. She closed shut like a door. She banged in my face. I was left unassuaged and unbeloved, and I retreated behind the curtain folds like a five-year-old girl.
But small details, once revealed, find their own routes of enlargement. One day a letter came from Tilly, addressed to Mrs Murphy. The envelope lay on the kitchen table and I noticed, with just a peep, that it contained a return address. So it was that I eventually found out what I needed to know: I wrote to Tilly who lived somewhere in mythical Melbourne and asked her all the questions Mrs Murphy had forbidden me.
