The other current, the cross-current, is her constant anxiety for her father and her mother, the sense she has had for as long as she can remember that she has to protect them, that only she stands between the harsh world and her parents’ vast and frightening innocence, which was as terrible as Brian’s had been.
‘Conduction,’ Vi says earnestly, as though all is now clear. She runs her fingernail along the stain on the cloth, tracing its quills. ‘So that’s why it has spokes. Charles knows everything.’ She smiles complacently, reaching for the ladle. ‘Sarah? Ah no, I’ve served you already. Mercy, two ladles or three? Charles’s father was a schoolteacher in Sydney, that’s where he gets it from. My brothers said I was marrying an encyclopedia, but they were just teasing. They admire him, really. They’ve always been a bit scared of him, I think, that’s why they used to make fun of him.’
Sarah says: ‘It’s sobering, travel. The way it shows us our own ignorance.’ She makes an arrangement on the tablecloth with her fork and the bread-and-butter knife. ‘Amy said that in her letters. She travelled all around Asia first, lived in a Buddhist monastery, then an ashram in south India. Nothing is ever what you expect, she said.’ She swings the fork away from the knife, inscribing a circle. ‘People living out here . . . I had a certain image of my own, you see, and you are not what I was expecting, Mr Given. I thought, you know, roughnecks, cowboys, that sort of thing. But of course to be a rabbi, a clergyman I mean, you would have a college education, so I’m simply revealing –’
Mercy’s father winces. ‘No,’ he says.
‘– I’m afraid I’m simply revealing the awful scope of my ignorance,’ Sarah says. ‘I hope you’ll forgive my foolish and limited –’
‘No,’ he says roughly. ‘As a matter of fact, no. Not with us, it’s not required. For it is written . . .’ He pauses, discomforted by old habits. ‘Our people stand by the Bible.’ He clears his throat. ‘For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent . . . Well, that’s what we . . .’
‘My sister’s children talk like that,’ Sarah says. ‘Always quoting the Torah. Well, they’re not children now. My nephew’s in the army, the Israeli army. My niece is in New York, she’s joined the Lubavitcher sect, I expect you’re familiar with them?’
‘Ahh, no,’ Charles Given says, embarrassed. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t . . .’
‘It’s Hasidic, a sort of extreme, a sort of fundamentalist – Not so different, I think, from the groups that Amy, my daughter, got involved with . . . a Jewish version of the same phenomenon.’
Charles Given sighs. The palms of his hands absorb him. ‘I’m afraid my knowledge is very limited. I never went to university, Mrs . . . er . . . I’m just an autodidact.’
‘Sarah.’
‘Pardon?’
‘My name. It’s Sarah.’
‘Ah. Yes. I’m afraid I didn’t catch your surname.’
‘Cohen. But please call me Sarah.’
‘And, ah, well . . . Mine is Charles.’
‘You are an interesting man, Charles. And extremely well read.’
‘No,’ he says, ‘no, I’m afraid not.’ But he is caught off guard. He is embarrassed by his own pleasure. He is, in fact, almost overwhelmed, like a schoolboy who has just won a prize and been singled out at assembly, in the presence of all his peers. He is torn between self-consciousness, a rush of pride, and the fear of coming retribution from certain quarters after school. Charles Given blushes and cannot speak. Mercy can hardly bear it.
‘Books,’ her father says, tries to say, with much throat clearing, ‘books have been my weakness, I’m afraid.’
‘An admirable weakness.’
‘Not everyone thinks so, Mrs Cohen.’
‘Really?’
Vi says, apparently inconsequentially, ‘The Tower of Babel, men who thought they knew as much as God, you know. I do agree with Mr Prophet that the Bible is all we need, but it was wrong what he did. It was a dreadful thing to do to Charles.’
‘The stew is delicious, Vi,’ Charles says. ‘As always.’
‘You don’t think I put the carrots in too soon? I think they’re softer than they should be. Brian likes them crunchier, doesn’t he? Our son Brian,’ she explains to Sarah, she begins to explain. ‘Our son Brian . . .’ Her voice trails off.
Mercy and her father exchange a look.
‘Mercy,’ he says stiffly. ‘Mercy . . .’ beseeching her, needing any formula, anything neutral, anything meaningless.
But words stick in Mercy’s throat.
‘Mercy,’ he says, harsh with effort. ‘It would be a good idea if you made the tea for your mother.’
Mercy nods. When she scrapes her chair back, it falls over. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Sorry, Dad. I’ll get it.’
In the kitchen, she devotes herself to details, she lets the details make as much noise as they please, the whole clanging orchestra of them, let them clash, let them rise in crescendos, the fragrance of the loose tea-leaves, the dimples in the battered pot, the high polish, the curved surface, the reflections, her moon face elongated, the texture of the tea-cosy, hand-crocheted, the whistle and steam of the kettle, the roiling boiling water like a river in flood. Her mother is right. Hang on to the details, the details may save you on drowning day. The details, the divine details, her blessings upon them, are so noisy they can block out all the rest. The talk in the dining room, for instance; a background murmur she cannot hear.
When she returns with the pot and milk and sugar on a tray, her mother is saying: ‘I remember when Brian was very little, he was standing on the verandah one night and looking at the moon, it was full, and you know, Sarah, the nights are very clear and they can be very cold out here, and we have millions and millions of stars, the heavens are wonderful, aren’t they? They say you can’t see nearly as many stars in the city, I can’t remember what the reason is, Charles will know . . . it’s funny, I lived in Brisbane until I was ten years old, you know, and then my father was transferred out to Longreach, which is outback but still a town, so I’ve lived in cities and towns, but not for a very long time and it seems like a dream now, I can’t really remember what it was like.’ She laughs a little. ‘They are sort of like heaven for me, cities and towns. I believe in them, I believe that Brisbane is still there, but it doesn’t seem very real, you know. Of course I know it is, heaven I mean, much more real than Brisbane. I always think I can remember standing in the garden in Brisbane and seeing the stars, but I expect it’s just part of my dream. When Brian was little, he used to try every night to count the stars. He used to write the numbers down in a book. I remember this one night when he was staring at the moon and he said: “Mummy, does God switch it off every morning?” Isn’t that lovely?’
Sarah says, ‘Moments like that . . . memories of our children . . .’ She presses her right hand against her mouth. With her left hand she lines up her fork with the white squares in the gingham cloth, squinting a little, making the alignment precise. She moves the salt shaker, and then the pepper, on to the same axis, intent. ‘They’re overwhelming, aren’t they, the memories of little things?’
Vi is suspended in sudden knowledge. ‘Your Amy . . . ?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah says. ‘I’m not myself. It was when you mentioned the moon.’
Vi reaches over and places her hand on Sarah’s wrist. Sarah stares at it. The two women seem to exchange information through the surfaces of their skin. They seem to discover all that they need to know about each other.
Mercy’s father puts his head in his hands.
Mercy prays. Please, God, she begins, from sheer habit, but no, she will not. Miss Rover come over, she thinks urgently instead. But Miss Rover whispers, as she always does: Powerlessness is seductive, Mercy. You must think for yourself and act on your own. And so she wills, in her own right, with her own force, that no one will speak. She wills that nothing will be said.
‘Your dinner,’ Vi says to Sarah.
‘You’ve hardly touched it.’
‘I had this sudden . . . it was so vivid I could smell the lilacs beside the porch . . . Amy would have been ten or eleven . . . it’s a difficult age, isn’t it, to have lost one mother already, to feel very uncertain about your father . . . ? And then Amy and I, we never quite knew how we should . . . first I was her schoolteacher, then suddenly I was her stepmother, it was complicated. Amy herself engineered it, actually, and what was strange . . .’ She watches Vi’s automatic reach for the casserole dish and so she extends her own plate, she permits Vi to add another scoop of stew to her almost untouched meal. ‘It’s delicious,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I’m not feeling very . . . It’s the details, isn’t it? Details that get stuck in the mind, they’re so potent, they’re like concentrated essence of the past. One drop, and a whole era mushrooms out, all these sensations you’d forgotten –’
‘Yes,’ Vi says, excited. ‘Yes. That’s exactly how it is. I remember Brian was wearing a little white shirt I’d made him, and brown pants . . . I’d cut down an old pair of Charles’s, do you remember those, Charles? They had a very thin black stripe in them, you could hardly see it, and Brian used to say it prickled his legs. And he used to ask Charles, “What’s prickle? What makes prickle, Daddy? Is it the hairs on my leg and the hairs on the pants playing tickle?” The questions that boy could think up.’ She shakes her head in fond wonder. ‘What was that book, Charles, that he used to want you to read to him? Over and over, he knew the whole book by heart.’
Charles looks at her sorrowfully. ‘Vi,’ he pleads.
Mercy thinks that their lives have become like that children’s game where the ringleader pretends the wind has changed. Each time the wind changes, everyone has to freeze, an arm in mid-air, a foot in mid-step, a mouth open. Everyone understands, even Sarah understands, Mercy can see it, that it is better to say nothing.
‘Yes,’ Vi says, ‘yes, you’re right. I’m sorry, Charles, it just keeps . . . Oh Mercy, you’ve made the tea, that was lovely of you. Could you? Thank you, darling.’ She reaches for the tray which Mercy pushes toward her. ‘Aren’t these lovely?’ she says to Sarah, leaning her cheek briefly against the gaily coloured tea-cosy. ‘My mother crocheted this. You can’t get them now for love or money.’ She pours tea, deploying cups and saucers with soft urgency. ‘What was that book, though? Where did we put it, Charles?’
‘Vi,’ he says, despairing. ‘Vi, my dear.’
Mercy thinks: there is the fact that talk can change nothing. And there is the need to talk bearing down like a river in flood, unstoppable.
She watches Sarah. She can feel the pressure of words rising in Sarah, can see them pushing against Sarah’s throat. Then she can see Sarah’s thoughts on a screen inside her own head. More and more often, lately, this has been happening, quite suddenly, against the inner surface of her eyes. It is not a good sign. It frightens Mercy. It’s because I think too much, she tells herself. It is because I read. It is because I have eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
She sees the taut wrists of the man on the bus. They remind her of Gideon’s wrists, as Gideon handed her to Donny. She can taste a question in her mouth. She has it on the tip of her tongue. Instead she says flatly, without intending to: ‘In the Living Word Gospel Hall one day, they took all my father’s books from his library and threw them into the fire. They tried to burn Miss Rover’s books too, after she left, but they only got a few. I saved them, I hid them. Nobody knows. She was the last schoolteacher we had here.’
Sarah pushes her plate away.
‘You should have left,’ Mercy says sadly. ‘I told you. You should have hidden on the truck.’
‘No,’ Sarah says quietly. ‘I am doing what I should be doing.’
Is Mercy doing what she should be doing?
She sees the beautiful eyes of Nick at Ma Beresford’s window. She sees the ballet of his index fingers. He will take all the possible directions by the throat, she thinks.
And so will Sarah, she decides.
And so will I, she promises herself.
THIS WEEK
Jess: Old Silences
Out here, silence is the dimension in which we float. It billows above us like the vast sails of galleon earth, ballooning into the outer geography of the Milky Way; it washes below us where the opal runs in luminous veins; it stretches west as far as the shores of the Ice Age, with nothing between then and now but rusted and powdering rock. If I strain my eyes, and shade them from the terrible glare, and stare east across the silent tongues of fire and the crumbling red elevated plains toward tomorrow, toward the dimly imaginable Queensland coastline, I go on and on and on seeing nothing but a silence so profound that it roars in my ears and pummels me and makes me feel seasick.
The silence of the fire, from this distance, is particularly eerie, though I can imagine it snapping and crackling and pistol-whipping Bernie’s and the Living Word where there is nobody left to hear.
What is the sound of one verandah post falling in a ghost town?
I find it difficult, out here among the breakaways, out here in the country of mirages and salt pans and lost languages, to separate the notions of time and space and sound. They seem interchangeable. The words for them seem arbitrary, but also slippery and fluid. Perhaps, for example, it is another town, and not Outer Maroo, which burns; or perhaps the fire has burned itself out, and what we are still seeing are spirit flames, the mirage of a conflagration.
It is impossible, from this vantage point, to pin down where time ends and where space begins and how one might possibly describe the sound of the silence of either one (because there is a sound that silence makes in the inner ear and under conscious memory and along the arteries and lymph glands and on the skin, a sound like a heartbeat, like a drumbeat, like the feet of dancers in a corroboree, like time passing, like the wind blowing across thousands of miles of bare rock). It seems to me, out here, that time and space and sound are merely functions of one another and that they are related as solid and liquid and gas are related. They sneak across their own boundary lines, and their separate states coalesce at this vanishing point where I sit, like Robinson Crusoe, among the breakaways.
The ‘breakaways’; ‘breakaway country’; I say the words aloud because that might be a way to explain how the sound of my voice, bouncing about like a skipping stone, becomes part of the geography, and draws this space into the particular shape of my thought, and gives it a slot in time which I presume to label as the time of my life.
Funny, that. I am having the time of my life.
I am un-having it. I am breaking away from all my pasts out here where the landforms cut loose and take off like wild brumbies.
In the very idea of ‘breakaway country’ there is an implication, purely verbal, of an event in time, of some particular incident that took place, before which there was a stable and appropriate state of the land, some outback norm of worn-out worn-down elevated flatness, from which these sudden mesas and harsh ravines were and are a deviation. They are deviant. ‘Breakaways’, we surveyors labelled them, shading them in on government charts. The breakaways, you could be forgiven for assuming, were headstrong: they were land with a rebellious and adolescent streak.
Certainly they make movement and progress (toward what? for what purpose?) more difficult, for us, for opal fossickers, for Ethel’s mob, for explorers, and most certainly for surveyors, and so we marked out the problem with words as much as with instruments, we hammered in a few verbal stakes. It is very personal, very judgmental, this language of the makers of maps. Deviant landforms, we say, and by implication: here are the moral boundary posts, running sometimes parallel, and sometimes not, with the dingo fence.
The breakaways themselves are impassive. They have receding brows and ridged feet held demurely together in front of them like the Sphinx. They brood in silence. They watch over the bora rings, those mazy circles of stones placed here who knows how many millennia ago? There are gigantic rings and small ones, a
nd rings within rings, a paisley surface, complex, a great corroboree ground and meeting place for five tribes. Absences in their ghostly thousands thrum against the skin of red clay like a pulse. They are all gone into lost centuries, gone into the dark history of Inner Maroo, gone to Bourke, gone to Innamincka, gone to Cunnamulla, gone.
Inner Maroo is down there among the bora rings, a square-pegged system of lost round holes within the wrong circles. Oyster’s Reef, which I cannot quite see from here, is also there, just on the far side of that bluff that looks like a giant man crouching. That is Lungkata, Ethel tells me. He was killed for stealing emu eggs. You can see the spear scars – those deep vertical grooves, those ravines – on his flank.
‘He was one of the Wangkumara mob, my mob,’ she says.
Her mob is still with us, all around us, and was, and ever shall be. She can feel them, she says. She can see them. They talk to her, those First Ones. I have an image of them sitting around smoking gidgee leaves, chatting, giggling together in that low rolling way, chewing charred goanna strips. Last week, last month, last year, she communed with them. She knew what was coming. This town’s been sung, Jess, she warned me. The writing was on the walls of the breakaways, she reckoned. The days of Outer Maroo were numbered (not that I needed to be told), and she could wait. She could afford to wait. She could smile to herself and simply wait.
And now her waiting days are done; and here is the Old Fuckatoo come home to roost.
I can see the glow of that great bird of prey brooding over the town. The ex-town. The town could never quite be seen from here, but its transfigured self, Aurora Maroovialis, floats above it like a spirit ship above its twin: refulgent, the sunset of Outer Maroo, the pure idea of Oyster’s City of Light.
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