by Gail Jones
In the smaller community of three, taut with conjugal unhappiness and the burden of an unacceptable child, Perdita witnessed other, more strained, human relations. In the scattered light of afternoon she saw her parents argue – the smallest thing would make them ferocious with each other – and discovered that the ruins of a marriage are not necessarily quiet, but include yells, imprecations, megaphoned insults. The first time she saw Nicholas swing at Stella, striking her with an audible whack to the cheek, she ran outside, alarmed, to consider what had occurred. She fled into the bush and simply waited there until her own heart settled, crouching until there was such a quietness, an absorbing distinction and clarity to the look and feel of things, that she grew almost afraid. She was stirred by a rustle in the dry grass behind her and when she turned she saw three rust-coloured kangaroos, lazily grazing in the falling dusk. They were usually a glimpse, bounding away from the car, flinging themselves on their huge feet into bumpy flight, but now they were close, closer than ever before. Perdita liked the way their neat ears pivoted and twitched, catching her presence, and their upright arch, so casually alert. The large one scratched itself on the chest. Cocked its head. Eyed her sideways. And though she was sure it had seen her, it took its time leading the other two away, and then not in bounding, but in slow heavy hops, seesaw, rocking, raising small puffs of red dust from its padded heels.
Later Perdita felt ashamed that she had not rushed to her mother’s side, and found that Stella was a stranger when she re-entered the house. Perdita heard her cursing in old-fashioned language; only afterwards would she know these were also the words of William Shakespeare, wrenched out of theatrical decorum to service a personal fury.
Nicholas sat at the table against the wall, smoking and reading and pretending his wife wasn’t there. In the light of the kerosene lamp he looked weathered, tense. His profile had a sharp, Sicilian quality. Leontes. And the light glinting off his eyeglasses, Perdita thought, made him look sightless, brutal.
In bed that night, shadowed by the already growing city of books, Perdita calmed herself by remembering the eyes of the large kangaroo: they were so lustrous and calm, so intrinsically lovely. Visitants, they were. Intercepting guests that might have had this message: the world is also still and calm and without collisions; the world is also these fond, benevolent presences, fur-warm and comforting, wanting nothing, silent.
Since her distrust of outsiders was more powerful than her hesitation of mothering, Stella would not allow her daughter to be sent away to school. So from the age of five, Perdita was taught at home, inefficiently, erratically, in fits and starts. When she was nine war was declared and Stella, in strange response, became orderly and purposeful. Nicholas left early each morning – as though he were a worker in a city bank, with a train to catch and a satchel of urgent papers to attend to – and then Stella, equally in need of a sustaining and fictitious timetable, waited exactly until 9 a.m. before the first lesson commenced. They would continue for three hours, then halt, even in mid-topic, on the dot of twelve, so that in the afternoons Stella could sleep, sew or read. She had drawn up a list of subjects – history, geography, religion, arithmetic, English, biology, Shakespeare, of course – which she reordered or dispensed with according to her inclination and mood, sometimes adding whatever book she had taken at random from their collection. That these books were adult and difficult seemed not to have occurred to her: and Perdita was both oppressed and delighted by what she could not understand, finding in every case at least a scrap of the comprehensible world. She wrote long lists of words she did not know the meaning of and promised herself that one day, in the future, she would know them all.
From her mother Perdita inherited an addled vision of the world; so much was unremembered or misremembered, so that the planet reshaped into new tectonic variations, changed the size and outline of countries on shaky hand-drawn maps, filled up with fabricated peoples and customs (many of them disquieting, weird, remote from understanding). History was English, and so was morality (‘no elbows on the table’ was a moral precept; ‘don’t complain’; ‘don’t lie’; ‘never tell strangers your real feelings’); so too, now that they were at war and the Hun were enemies again, the world had a protestant purpose and a democratic mission. Communism was evil, Perdita learned, more evil even than the Nazis, and the Godless Russians ate their own children during long frozen winters in which the sun, too defeated, simply slid along the horizon for a few hours before it returned everything to an icy, deathly darkness. Stella had coded the world into her own fierce antinomies, super-populated with villains and evil-doers, fuelled by daft purpose and maniacal intention.
In the world of these lessons Stella and Perdita discovered, for the first time, an experience of intimacy. Perdita loved the imperative sound of her mother’s voice, telling tales about everything under the sun. She loved her laugh, now and then, at her own descriptions, and the way she would embellish information with the slightest encouragement.
‘How?’ Perdita asked. ‘Why? Why not?’
Perdita watched her mother’s mouth move, and heard what a wonder the mighty world was. Mother and daughter were united in what might be told and in the elastic possibilities of any telling.
The Shakespearean lessons were those Perdita loved best because they were stories. When her mother recited she was at a loss, completely bamboozled by the half-English, half-ornament quality of the verse, the overwrought pomposity of it all, the lavish sentiments. But when Stella first read aloud from Charles Lamb’s summaries, the plots became intelligible, and Perdita was entranced by how terrible and how heroic people could be, by how many monarchs were mad, how many lovers disguised, how many women were faithless, or exceeding in beauty, how mistaken identity was everywhere and disastrously abroad, how easily stabbings or poisonings or suicides might occur, to shuffle off, Shakespeareanly, one’s mortal coil. Stella had a particular affection for the tragedies, and a love of the soliloquies of Hamlet above all, so that by the time she was nine Perdita knew his most famous lamentations by heart:
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t! Ah, fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
Perdita was not entirely sure what this meant, but liked the animating grizzle, the bad-tempered tone. Stella declared that this speech, and others like it, were about ‘the big questions’. She told her daughter that everything one needed to know about life was contained in a volume of Shakespeare; that he was all-wise, incomparable, the encompasser of every human range.
Even as a child Perdita knew this to be false. She stepped out into the dazzling light of Australia; she saw their blue kelpie, Horatio, scratching his balls in the angled cool shadow of the water tank; she saw zebra finches flash past, their black-white racing; she saw the Trevors’ windmill at a distance, creakily turn, time-worn, straining, holding its iron wings cruciform; she felt hot wind brush her face and heard the hum of blowflies and the crackle of live things desiccating and the scamper of unseen lizards; all this life, all this huge unelaborated life, told her there was more on heaven and earth than was dreamt of by Mister Shakespeare.
There were dreaming spaces Mandjabari knew of, and old-man Dauwarrngu. There were even things her father knew of, with complicated names, and then there were all the unremarked, simple and non-noble feelings, the taste of warm water dribbling from a canvas bag, the silky air of early evening shining with nickel-glow, the floaty feeling induced by hearing Aboriginal songs by firelight, and the rhythm of the clap sticks, repeating, and the words, the Language, drifting and braiding, drifting and braiding and dissolving into the da
rkness, like wind, like forgetting. Small questions, Perdita thought. There were small questions here. Or perhaps – the idea subversively filled her head – there were different big questions.
When she tried to discuss this with her mother, she was met by staunch refutation. Stella looked up from her sewing, a seersucker blouse with a row of tight crimson smocking, and said that some things in life were implicitly understood: the immortality of the soul, the mortality of the body and the peerless, exceptional, genius of Shakespeare. Beyond dispute, it was, wholly beyond dispute. She flapped the blouse fabric before her and examined it on her lap. Her fingers fiddled with a dangling thread, distinct as an artery. Beside her lay her sewing box, of wicker, and a biscuit tin of old buttons. Shakespeare had identified, she asserted again, all the ‘big’ questions. Stella directed her hazel stare at her daughter and dared her to contradict. Perdita sensibly withdrew. She had, after all, known for a long time of her mother’s idiosyncratic fixation and its suite of tough declarations on the meaning of life.
When he first arrived, Nicholas had spent a few hours each day with Willie, learning the tribal language of the region. Since Willie was a stockman, paid in tobacco and flour, and certainly not paid more by Mr Trevor to indulge this lazy-bugger whitefella, here for no reason and asking too many smart-aleck questions, Nicholas had to follow him at his work, and even to assist from time to time. As Willie roped steer and branded, made fence posts and erected them, chopped wood, carried water, fixed the bore and the windmill, dragged sacks of provisions and heaped them in the shed, as he broke horses, nailed nails, fashioned furniture from wood, Nicholas gradually collected a sparse vocabulary and a smattering of concepts; gradually too he began to admire the black man’s hard labour, and his dignified care in the explanation of his own words. There were times Nicholas felt that Willie was holding back, not telling him everything, or even deliberately misinforming him on some crucial matter or other, but this was the characteristic treachery of the native he had been told to expect. In other terms, however, Willie was indispensable; Nicholas needed help for all that his book-learning had monumentally excluded.
By the time Perdita was about six, Nicholas had acquired enough knowledge to add to letters and reports to the Chief Protector of Aborigines the publication of the first of his meagre output of academic articles. He privately realised now that he would never become a famous intellectual, such as he had seen pointed out, crossing the lawns at Cambridge, moving in long gowns with magisterial self-importance, burnished by citational prestige and university gossip. Nor would his contribution to Aboriginal ethnography be anything other than a crude transliteration of stories, and the more useful, perhaps more respectable, delineation of language systems and kin groups, much of which, in the end, he garnered from Mr Trevor. Like his wife, Nicholas had developed a passivity in relation to his own life. He lost track of time; he lost purpose and ambition; the barest professional pretext enabled him to stay in a country in which he had unconscionably, disastrously, lost himself. He saw that Perdita, the lost one, was the member of his family who most seemed unlost.
Now and then Nicholas received letters from his ageing father – asking him, begging him, to return home with his family, offering inducements, the managership, once again, of the largest store – but these consolidated his sense of estrangement and disaffection. He despised his father for having given him so much, for his unending solicitude and irritating hopefulness. ‘My son’, the letters always began. He had, moreover, no compunction in asking his father for money (which always arrived, monthly, with more filial begging), but felt that while he remained abroad he was free from the haberdashery destiny Mr Keene senior would foist on him. To his father he sent letters composed entirely of fictions, suggesting he was on the edge of a scholarly breakthrough, that his work would have a universally relevant importance, discovering, as it must, the base infancy of man. His paper would become known as ‘The Keene Hypothesis’.
When war was declared in 1939, Nicholas was excited until he discovered he had been denied a commission; his fiction then was that he worked in British Army Intelligence, engaged on some kind of clandestine mission. But he would return to England, he decided, as soon as the war was over.
Locals in Broome thought Nicholas Keene a fraud and a bloody no-hoper; no one seemed to know what the hell he was doin’. Wastin’ time, prob’ly. Muckin’ round. Voices laconically gossiped on pub verandas: why that pommy bloke hung about, anyhows, in that buggered little shack, with his mad-crazy missus and his gone-feral kiddie, was anyone’s guess.
5
Something happened, something broke, in Perdita’s eleventh year, in 1940. Stella, normally garrulous, stopped talking altogether, and fell again into her own deep cavernous emptiness, all compulsive interrogation but with no answers to ‘big questions’. She yawned all the time, and would not make eye contact. She stopped washing and eating, she picked undetectable specks from her dirty clothes. She said there was a huge, deafening uproar sounding in her ears, like crowds jostling for their carriage in St Pancras Station, and the clang of metal there, and the resounding platform, and heavy iron machinery slowing down or speeding up, and the hissing emissions of steam from corroded lead pipes. People were shouting, she said, and whistles were blowing. Too many people were shouting. Nicholas also shouted at Stella, but it seemed to make no difference. He found her recalcitrant unhappiness an affront, a disgrace.
Perdita could not really imagine ‘St Pancras Station’. It may have been like the inside of the engine of Mr Trevor’s truck, only much, much bigger. Some kind of rattling contraption, hot and agitated. In England, she knew, there existed colossal chambers of stone and metal, buildings in which a hundred people might stand together at one time. In such a place it made sense that everyone would be shouting; there would be crowded anxieties, dropped parcels and small lost children; there would be tormenting intrusions and no easy exits. Whatever her mother experienced must be truly dreadful. Perdita looked at her turning a teacup, again and again, by its comma-shaped handle. She felt a sudden wave of love and concern, a feeling rare enough, but for which she was grateful. What linked them persisted in the emotional residues of what had been taught, the tales they mentally engaged with, the flights of fancy.
Nicholas decided that Stella needed more time away, in the hospital, in Broome. She had ‘lost something’, he said, and Perdita wondered what thing it was. Certainly, Stella was possessed of an unnerving silence. Words, thought Perdita. Perhaps it was words she had lost. When they packed to leave, all Stella wanted with her was her biscuit tin of loose buttons. She clasped it to her chest as if it were a book, or a baby.
Although by then Nicholas had his own Jeep, the trip into town was in Mr Trevor’s half-worn-out truck. Nicholas and Stella sat with Mr Trevor in the tight little cabin, and Perdita sat with their luggage in the tray, in the dust and sun, jolted at every turn. Through a rectangle of grimy glass she could see the backs of their heads, bobbing like dolls, like strangers, as if inorganic and unattached, and she wondered how long her mother’s absence might be, and if, after this illness, she would recover at all. Mrs Trevor, leaning her flushed face forward, talking in serious adult tones, had told Perdita that her mother just needed another rest; just for a little while, she said, where nurses could look after her. But Perdita knew there was hideous desolation there somewhere. This was not simple tiredness but some bigger, unmentionable fatigue-with-life, something that opened the mind up to a railway station and invading crowds.
The visions on that journey were those that will return all her life. It is not that anything Perdita saw was unfamiliar; it is that they were trailed out, spool-like and consecutive, for future memory, that they were marked by the poignancy and rarity of the occasion – taking her mother away, for who knew how long – and the sense, some intuited, anxious and desperate sense, of the injustice of her disposal, and of its necessity.
From the tray of the old truck, bruised with the wallop of too rough a
journey, Perdita watched the shuddering world pass by – boab trees here and there, their bellies distended, their stick limbs dead stiff, scratching at the sky, the sculptural forms of anthills, also quasi-human, flashes of morning light broken by scraggly trees and granite outcrops, random uprisings of startled birds, fleeting shapes that might have been wallaby, a lone bullock, far away, hurtling crazily through the open scrub; all this travelling landscape, all this mobile world, seemed somehow impressed with the solemnity and purpose of their journey. Behind them, a cloud of orange dust mushroomed and spun with the turbulence Perdita understood as catastrophe.
In town Nicholas and Perdita stayed at the Continental Hotel. Perdita loved the long verandas and the wide-open shutters and the inside beer garden, shaded by multicoloured umbrellas. A small Malay man in a sarong and headscarf led them to their adjacent rooms. He bobbed and bowed as he opened the doors. They had beds with clean linen; they had running water and electric lights. Perdita slumped onto her bed, feeling as if she had been battered. There were bruises on her buttocks and knees from the journey, and she felt a sting in the corner of her eye that she knew was the beginning of an infection. Instructed to stay in her room while her mother was taken to the hospital, Perdita simply lay, relieved to have the world at last stop still, worried that she had not said goodbye to her mother. She dozed a little, on the cool soap-smelling sheets: Lifebuoy. A breeze infused by ocean salt threaded through the shutters.
