by Molly Murn
Dry the knife. Wrap it. It’ll rust, Anderson says as he splashes handfuls of water against his face, snorting forcefully as he does so to stop water going up his nose. I’ll make a man of yer yet, he whispers to himself.
William scrapes silver from the fish with his knife, and the scales eddy around his feet in the shallows. He has caught five whiting, which he handles tenderly, thinking them the most beautiful of fish, the way they streak and glide under water, beautiful even as they lie motionless in his hands. They are clever, too. Fast. So hard to catch.
It is late afternoon, the time of day when the seals like to rest on the rocks. Emue and Poll walk to the water’s edge and splash water up their arms, over their heads, down their chest and backs until they are wet all over. William crouches, leaning back onto his heels, and watches the women as he runs his hands over the silken fish, smoothing them under water. Slowly, Emue and Poll walk along the shore until they are opposite the outcrop where the seals are basking. The women swim out to the rocks—knives in their mouths. William has not seen this before. Usually, they are armed with a club, or some kind of stick. In the water, Emue and Poll are strong—sleek-headed, they bob out from waves. Once they reach the rocks, Emue and Poll lie gently down beside the seals. From this distance William finds it difficult to distinguish the women, shiny and dark, from the seals. If a seal lifts its head and sniffs, the women also lift their heads. If a seal props itself up with its left flipper, then the women prop themselves up with their left elbow, scratch themselves and then lie back down again. They are perfect mimics. Occasionally the water washes over the women, but they remain there as hushed and languorous as the seals. William watches Emue and Poll for about an hour and it’s almost as if they are making peace with the lumpish animals. The men have come down to the beach, and are also watching the women with great interest.
Prepare the boat. We is goin’ out, Anderson shouts.
Just wait, Father, let’s see what they do.
I know what they up ter and I want ter be ready.
Without any warning at all, Emue and Poll jump up, raise their knives and bring them down on the seals’ noses, striking them with such force that they crumple instantly. The seals have no time to scream. Once half a dozen have been struck in this way, William watches the men rush in to collect the spoils.
King George Beach (Sandy)
Diana sits on the verandah and begins a list.
Things my mother has taught me.
How to live alone.
To love the taste of salt.
To light a fire.
Sorrow.
Everything about the island.
What to do with babies.
What to do with bees.
Grandmothers are nicer than mothers.
She stretches out her legs to catch the sun. The others are down on the beach and she can just make them out, clumped together like a little deposit of discarded shells. Alfie is asleep inside. To wade in water. Being here again is like stepping into a river. She’s up to her knees in it. When Diana was a child she had recurring dreams of being engulfed in water. Of a tsunami flattening their home, or even the whole of the island. Nell had taught her that thousands of years ago the island was connected to the mainland by a land bridge, but that the sea level kept rising, until the island became separated. But the explanation that Diana preferred belonged to Nell’s things about the island category. The island’s severance was due to Ngurunderi, the Creator and spiritual ancestor of the Ngarrindjeri, whose country extends to Kangaroo Island. Ngurunderi was chasing his two wives, who’d broken taboo—eating fish forbidden to women. Near the end of the chase, Ngurunderi’s wives ran across the land bridge that connected the island to Cape Jervis. Ngurunderi made the waters rise and drowned his wives. The women became the rocks known as the Page Islands in Backstairs Passage. Or Rhunjullang—two sisters. The Ngarrindjeri speak of Kangaroo Island as the land of the dead. Uncle Jim has told Diana this many times. We are close to our dead here, he says. Land of souls. Ngurunderi crossed to Kangaroo Island when he knew it was time to leave. He threw his spears into the water, dived in, and then rose in his canoe to become part of the Milky Way. A bright star watching over.
You see, Diana, Nell used to say, those women had agency—they are at the heart of the story. The lands of the Ngarrindjeri could not have been formed without them. But Diana could only worry for them—their anguished flight. To flee. Diana liked to imagine the land bridge back into being—the sea cleaving open to reveal a muddy slippery passageway that she could run or slide along, the water closing in behind her, like it did for Ngurunderi’s wives as they tried to escape their raging husband. Sometimes this was the only thought that calmed her dread. Especially once Pearl came along. Came along! She laughs at that. That was a cleaving open, too. Nell didn’t warn her about the pain, the blood, the burning, the wanting to flee right out of her own body.
And now here she is, back again, wading deep. She might at least corral her thoughts by not drowning in them—write this list. Yet she approaches the exercise with an unusual detachment for someone whose mother has just died. Detachment. To step out of the river, to reach higher ground, back to Adelaide, is at least a ferry trip away and nearly two hours’ drive. It’s at least a whole funeral away. Days away.
The last time she was here was three years ago. It had been a mistake to come, although not at first. Nell was so ill with the flu that she needed Diana to hold her glass to her lips so she could gulp down paracetamol. And Marian and Red, the neighbours, were away. When Nell got better enough to boss Diana around, they began to fight. Not about anything much but because Nell was resentful of her incapacity and Diana felt a kind of guilty satisfaction in Nell’s need of her. Not to be afraid of snakes. While Diana was there, a king brown snake visited daily to drink from a leaking seam in the water tank. Nell’s house squats high on an enormous concrete-encased water tank—half of the tank protrudes in a semicircle in front of the house to form the wide exposed verandah. The water tank and the snake was, of course, not the only thing Nell and Diana fought over, but the memory of that snake was burnt cruelly on Diana’s mind.
Diana puts down her list and crawls to the edge of the tank and peers over, the rough surface scratchy on her knees. It’s still there, the trickle of water at the base of the tank, darkening the sand. The snake lay on the cool side—it was February and startlingly hot, like now—and flicked its tongue at the water. The first time Diana saw it she screamed. The unearthliness of it. The shock of it pressed tight along the bottom of the tank. Its proximity, like it brought the scrub and all its dark secrets right up to the house. She was horrified that Nell didn’t mind it being there.
Why would I mind? It’s not bothering me.
What about the children—when they’re here?
They’re not here.
But when they are here?
Then I’ll teach them not to be afraid of snakes.
This is the kind of conversation Diana remembers having with Nell, where Nell would set her mouth into a line and not ever relent. Diana had slammed the glass doors and gone inside to pack her things. It wasn’t that she was overreacting, it was that this stand-off about the snake came after so many other small grievances, like gravel collecting in shoes. When she came outside to get her cigarettes and her sunglasses, Nell was down on the sand holding the shovel, shaky with exertion and illness. Diana remembers Nell’s hair blowing the wrong way revealing a pink line of scalp. She remembers Nell’s eyes wide and hard. She remembers the snake in two raggedy pieces and blood seeping into the sand.
Snakes should be scared of us, Nell said.
She’s mad, Diana thought. And now that brown snake haunts Diana. Its glinting skin. Its emblematic death. Not to be afraid of snakes. Nell’s awful lesson. But what was the lesson?
Alfie cries from the bedroom, and Diana shivers. She folds the list up and slips it into her book, steps through the glass doors. Closes them gently behind her. Walks down the hallway
to the spare room and tries not to think of Nell following ghostly behind her, hands gripping her shoulders, vice-like.
Shh shh, darling, I’m coming now.
Alfie is getting almost too heavy to lift, but she leans down and he scrambles up, nestling into her neck.
Mummy, mummy.
Mummy’s at the beach. She’ll be back soon.
He begins to protest, his little body stiffens, and she staggers under the weight of him until the two of them plop heavily backwards onto the double bed. He laughs.
Do it again, Nanny Di.
I can’t, I can’t. My back.
Alfie rolls off Diana, and they lie together, his warm head squashing her arm. Diana rubs her thumb over the back of his chubby hand and breathes him in. She feels stranded, pinned down in a boat with Alfie. I am half-sick of shadows, said the Lady of Shalott. Tucked into the dresser mirror opposite the end of the bed is a postcard. It’s a reproduction of a painting of her namesake, Diana. The figure of Diana is turned away, looking over an expanse from a great height, to a glimpse of moon or sun breaking through impasto clouds. Her calf and shoulder and cheek sheen with light. Her clothes fall in Grecian folds like the clouds. It’s almost as if she holds on to the side of a mountain—tenacious like an olive tree. Diana loves the strength of her. The hanging on. The quality of the light as if lit from within. Nell had bought her the postcard at the National Gallery in Adelaide when Diana was ten. It was the only way Nell had been able to get Diana out of there. She hasn’t seen the postcard in years. When she was a child she’d stuck it on the wall next to her pillow. She would gaze at it and wonder how to sketch light so that a moon on a canvas shone back at you more alive and visceral than actual light.
On that first visit to the gallery she’d been alone. She remembers thinking that her dress was embarrassingly rumpled and her plaits loose and scrappy after spending all night on the ferry from Kingscote with Nell. She hadn’t slept at all, and she has never been able to sleep in a room full of strangers—their coughing and their wriggling and the close smell of them. It sharpened her into a fine vigilant point of light that could not sleep. It is still that way—she has to take Valium now whenever she goes on a plane. When they finally arrived in Glenelg, Diana was so relieved for the stinging fresh air and the firm ground underfoot that she practically tripped out of the MV Troubridge like a little lamb disembarking. She was hoping for an ice-cream and a stroll along the foreshore, as if she was all cultured and from the city and not an untidy, thick-in-the-head island girl. This was the seaside, not an unruly deserted beach. But she realised as Nell steered her through the crowds that she didn’t really know why they were here and what they were doing. Visiting friends, Nell had said. So why then was she put on a tram all by herself? Nell had dropped a pouch of coins in her hand, along with hand-drawn instructions of how to get to the gallery once she reached the city, and when the tram trundled away from Nell, Diana hated her. Nell hadn’t even watched her go, but stalked off towards the bus stop for Brighton with her shoulders all hunched. Bitch, thought Diana, but then felt immediately like weeping. She pressed her face up to the oily glass and looked at her own lips in the reflection until the pricks of tears disappeared back inside her skull.
Looking beyond her reflection, into backyards and vacant lots and railway sidings, she felt sorry for all of those people whose lives backed onto the tramline. Their flappy sheets strewn on lines, their broken swing sets, their weedy gardens, their crumbling chimneys, the furtive smoking on back porches, the trampolining in just underwear—all of it, exposed. So Diana stared straight ahead at the wooden panelling for a while, and then counted how many bald heads there were on the tram. Twenty-three. As they got closer to the city, the back gardens became prettier and thicker, and Diana didn’t feel embarrassed anymore about being a voyeur. In fact, she made a promise to herself then that one day she would leave the island and one of those shapely gardens in Adelaide would be hers.
In the city she was frightened. The buildings hunched over her, and Nell’s map made no sense, especially when people kept knocking into her. In the end, she asked a mother with a daughter about her own age for directions. The mother held Diana’s elbow kindly while she explained how to get to the gallery, and Diana admired the woman’s heavy eyelashes and brown knitted skirt. She wished that the woman was her own mother. She bought an ice-cream on the way for lunch and realised she was ravenous—the ice-cream settling in her belly like a cold stone sinking. Nell had instructed her to buy a sandwich at a particular location marked on the map, but she couldn’t find the spot, and she didn’t give a stuff about Nell’s silly plans. I don’t give a stuff, she said aloud, throwing the map satisfyingly into the gutter.
Sitting on the steps below the imposing porticos of the art gallery, she finally did weep. She felt like a scrap of paper, like the discarded map, blowing about in the wind. Who even cared where she was? Nell certainly didn’t. The thing she longed for most in all the world, the thing she wished for on every birthday cake, the thing she wanted right now, was a sibling—preferably a brother who was older than she was and could pick her up. It was lonely bearing Nell all on her own. But it was a secret wish. And so in all of her little games, she played alone, her dolls lined up in a row with their static faces standing in for the characters and siblings she needed them to be. Diana took a long time to go inside the gallery because she didn’t want anyone to notice her. Not only because of the shabby dress and her red nose from crying, but also because surely she must be the only child here. She was a beacon. But it was still hours until Nell said she would meet her here, so she bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood and entered.
She remembers now the emerald green walls, the shining parquet floors, the leather chesterfields, the high ornate ceilings, the concertinaed rooms, but mostly the peacefulness, like walking into a cool pocket of air. And so she wandered. Imagining that she was there with an older brother who was just over in the next room kept her from blubbering shamefully.
She scanned the first room and the paintings were flat and old and offered no allure. There was nothing to pull her towards them, so she decided to stand in front of every single painting for the slow count of five. At least then she would look like someone who was supposed to be in an art gallery. But this made her dizzy, and the only thing that steadied her was staring into the beautiful mirror silver of a waterhole. Its edges seeping pink from the sunset, the trees reflecting back, creating a black and silver chiaroscuro effect. At the edge of the waterhole, an Aboriginal woman stood with a baby secured to her back in a sling. She carried a basket. Her feet were bare. The mood of the painting, so peaceful that Diana could almost feel the mist between the trees, the smoke curling from a little fire on the other side of the painting. A second woman knelt beside a wurlie, making the fire. And a man sat with a blanket around his shoulders gazing at Diana knowingly. She read the inscription, Evening Shadows, backwater of the Murray, South Australia. She knows now that the painting, as arresting as it is, depicts one of the most insidious colonial romantic notions, that the first Australians would die out. It’s meditative scene, a lament for a lost idyll. Yet this painting did something to that young Diana. It slowed her down and made her see. Even now, she thinks of that painting when flying in an aeroplane and looking down to expanses of water—the way they soak light, or can be the darkest bodies, the only part of the country that cannot be strewn with electricity. Dark portals. She was first shown this in Evening Shadows.
When Nell found Diana she was curled up asleep in a chesterfield, the light through the skylights, subdued. Nell spoke softly and kindly, Diana, are you all right? To Diana her mother looked smudged out. Exhausted. The security guard looked on with pursed lips. Diana did not want to leave then. She felt wanted finally—it was the way Nell looked at her. And she felt scrubbed through with light.
The young woman in the postcard was the Diana she hoped to grow into. Agile. Beautiful. Strong. Art. To acknowledge the creative sel
f.
Alfie pulls Diana from the bed. I’m hungry, Nanny Di. It was nice to be wanted. To be pulled along. The trick of the light.
Later that night Pearl cannot sleep. This is something that has been happening lately. Even with the hush of the sea. Even with sheets so clean and comfortable. Even with wine making her body loose. She’d hoped it might be better without Nico in the bed—his swift descent into sleep leaves her stranded nowadays—but it was no better sleeping alone. In fact she wishes she could back herself against him, skin to skin, and drape his arm over her hips. She wishes she could take back their last conversation. Too often lately, they cannot understand each other. The sky, lit by the almost full moon, glares back at her, and she burrows into the covers so she won’t leak away brightly out the window. When she was about twelve she had gone nearly a year without being able to fall asleep easily. Especially at Diana’s. But she thinks it all started one night here—at Nell’s. And it’s a similar feeling. Like she has no edges, no skin, and her skull is light but too open, and everything is pouring out. Or in. And her chest hammers wildly. And she digs her nails into her ribs until the skin tears and the physical sensation of this braces her. It is not quite so severe as that now. Tonight it’s just that her thoughts are bright and glary like the moon. Her body is taut and will not yield. Reminders of Nell surge then drift. She follows them.
