2
It was a kind of tropical summer, cool in the dawning, steaming up as the sun rose, raining in late afternoon or at night. Ellie had not expected Sydney to carry such moistness, such skin scent and sensuality.
That morning she pushed open the sash window, lifting against the resistance of weathered wood and time, feeling grateful to have found an old apartment so close to the city centre. It had the semi-dark, compartmentalised feel of Deco buildings – all deep red brick and shadowed nooks, cosy, European, reproducing a foreign shade remembered slant-wise from elsewhere. But the apartment suited well; it fitted the austerity and quiet inwardness of her bookish life. It was not a slab of a high rise, glassy and tough, such as bordered the freeways that curved down to the city and the harbour. Instead there were Moreton Bay figs, jacaranda and eucalypts with shedding bark; there was birdsong – currawongs and honey-eaters – sounding above the buildings, and a scale of life beyond traffic-roar and the pitch of distraction wrought by cities. From here, in the bathroom, from the small window above the basin, Ellie could see the rooftops of her suburb, the TV dishes and antennas. She could see the renovated additions, the solar accessories and the rusted corrugation on the poorer houses. The whole vista of mortgages, families, graffiti in laneways, the desire for a second car, a bigger life, and the meaning of it all. Just visible was the spire of an abandoned church. It pointed to the sky like the aerial to a lost wireless code.
Ellie would discover today that she will never escape James. He was pressed into her life as they pressed together as fourteen-year-old lovers. Into her memory. Now and for evermore.
Ellie would recall, with sharp clarity, as if she had prised a fading photograph from a powdery album, dear Miss Morrison, her seventh grade teacher. Although she had not thought of her for years, she will carry her all day, close as a new baby.
Ellie will be troubled by the newspapers – the war going on in Iraq, the cruel atrocities, the violence that had persisted beyond any war-monger or peacenik reckoning. For all this, her anticipation of James, her childhood recall, the disturbing continuity of tales about war, Ellie was predisposed, this Saturday morning, to joy. She woke each day to the world, not expecting catastrophe. She woke in blue light, to a damp clear morning, and before the sun was a lit fuse in the gap between the curtains she had already found five objects of interest to consider and contemplate.
After rain during the night everything was bright and cleansed. There were still isolated pools of water, holding the sky in a sharp shine, and a fresh beaded gloss to the trees and the creepers. From next door a frangipani tree, an old twisted monster, sent fragrance into her rooms as a local blessing.
Ellie had gone out early to buy the newspapers and found herself skipping over puddles and hurrying beneath dripping leaves. At each step she scuffed a fallen blossom. Frangipani stars lay everywhere, and sprinklings of jasmine; the browning petals of crepe myrtle had washed across the road and filled up the gutters. It was the world in a benign organic dissolution. Ellie collected a few of the frangipani blooms to place in a bowl on her table, holding them gently against her chest as she walked, her papers tucked in an awkward roll beneath her arm. Such a simple garnering. Such a fine clear sky. She was empty-headed and happy. She felt the frisky vague euphoria of a new day in a new city.
In the bathroom Ellie applied kohl to her eyes and pink to her lips. She would be meeting James later on, after all these years, and was self-conscious in anticipation of the severity of his judgement. Her enhanced lips looked tarty and over-emphatic, but suitable for a harbourside lunch and the exhibitionism of Sydney cafés. She would go to Circular Quay early, since she’d not yet seen it, and wander about, lollygagging, as her father would say, so that she could look out when James came, and watch him unobserved. She would lollygag, people-watch, wander the city, finding the pleasure of eddying crowds and the wayward motions of human traffic, their tidal sweeps at traffic lights, their rhythmic currents of locomotion, doing nothing-in-particular until it was time for their meeting. Six weeks. She had been living in Sydney for six weeks and had not yet seen the Quay. The business of finding her apartment, the settling in; now James’s email had given her permission to take a day to sightsee.
Ellie made herself coffee and spread the Saturday papers on the table. There were the usual horrors. The war in Iraq, bombings in Afghanistan, the rapacity of large powers and the subordination of the small. There was a photograph on the front page of a distraught woman in a headscarf, bending in torn, rigorous grief over the body of her son. It was generic and familiar. She was a no-name mother who had lost a no-name son, the convenient portrait of another attack, and selected because the contortion of her face, and her anguish, and the plea of her uplifting hands, told in dumbshow what exceeded the journalist’s skill.
Death’s enormous sickle.
History would record this time as one of relentless repetition. How many images of grief might the reader of any newspaper see? How many scenes of blasted terrain, or medics rushing headlong with a stretcher on which lay a figure beneath a sheet, too small, too anonymous, and too deathly still? How long would they mean? Ellie thought of the Japanese photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographed movies inside the cinema. He left the shutter of the camera open in the dark auditorium and the film exposed for the entire length of the screening. The result was not a wildly complicated superimposition of images, but simple white-out, pure light, a flare of nothing. Too many images, layered together, left only a blank. She imagined Hiroshi Sugimoto gazing at his photographs in a gallery, marvelling at the mystery of what excess might delete.
From somewhere in the streets beyond a siren sounded. Then another, following, in a high panicked drone. Ellie wished to protect herself from what might overwhelm her mood. She read only the first two paragraphs on Iraq, then sought the national news. The stories were still of the change of government and the ‘honeymoon period’ of inauguration (how strange, she thought, this sexual connotation). But there was optimism about, and the sense of a new beginning. The youngish Prime Minister, his moon-face beaming, looked pleased with himself, like a school prefect dressed in his blazer, receiving a prize. Ellie was always struck by how many male politicians retained a little-boy visage. Or managed to look poignantly dazzled at their own ex cathedra announcements, insisting to the TV spotlights on the innocence of a feckless decision. The microphones looked like listening insects, leaning to suck up the nectar of scandal. Now the government had changed. One might yet be permitted to expect reform; and one might yet be disappointed.
Ellie extracted the book review supplement of the newspapers. These she would save for later, for a casual perusal of the wordy dimensions of the world, the unremitting, mock-heroic, making-of-sense. She had no money these days to buy new books, but for now there were libraries, which she cherished, and these compact descriptions of other worlds.
One of the workers in her local library looked like Miss Morrison. Why had she not made the connection before? And both, in weird likeness, resembled the Queen of England, that abnormally stiff face, that taut string of a mealy mouth. Miss Morrison would draw on the blackboard and write fancy words, underlining them with an oversized oak ruler that clacked as it struck. When Ellie recalled her now it was often in a static rearview, the woman of indeterminate age communing with her own messages, turned away, serious-minded, her back to the class. In their small country-town school, with James sitting beside her, the children were tempted by an impulse to mock, but somehow constrained and respectful. Away from school, however, James could be cruel. He was the child – there is always one – able to parody others. For the guilty enjoyment of his classmates he mimicked Miss Morrison’s hunched-over posture, he copied her rather high-pitched voice, he pretended to underline words on an invisible blackboard, turning back to face his classmates with a grimacing smirk.
Ellie folded the newspapers and drank the last of her coffee. Frangipani scent hung lightly in the room. Another sun-drenched day, the kind that might sell a city. The kind that might signify package-holiday amusements, with volley-ball on a beach, frolicsome children and the shadows of palms quivering over impossibly bright water. Still, Sydney surprised her. Would it always visit her in this way? Would Circular Quay match up to its own publicity? Ellie touched her coloured lips, wondered about her hair, then was annoyed at these traces of vanity she had tried to eliminate.
As she rose with her cup to the sink Ellie recalled James and Miss Morrison figured intimately together. James had developed a nosebleed in class and Miss Morrison was tilting his head back, her left hand placed on his forehead, her right holding a cloth, soaked red, clenched securely beneath his nose. It was a sort of tableau: the teacher solicitous, commanding, taking control of the child’s body; the boy morosely compliant, embarrassed by his bloody nose and the spectacle of his submission. Miss Morrison had clamped him down, held him there, and his classmates looked on with malicious fascination. Ellie had wanted to say something, or be a nurse, or put her own hands to his face, clammy and loving, but instead she sat in her place watching with the others, silently commiserating.
James often developed nosebleeds. It was one of those afflictions that undermine the gifted, seeming to make them like everyone else, vulnerable and common. James took to carrying a wad of handkerchiefs and would disappear from class at the very first spot of blood. Ellie had felt a kind of frightened pity; the boy otherwise a class star, an intellectual champion, streaming with blood in some dank, hidden corner of the school, his head upturned, his throat draining with fluid, his mouth tasting the trace of something sour and internal like death. Each time James returned to the classroom he would not meet anyone’s gaze, but resumed his smart-arsed, cocky manner, showing off his learning and wittily denouncing his peers. Miss Morrison found him irritating – Ellie could tell – but retained the distant affection clever children inspire. Once there was a vulgar fleck of blood-spatter across James’s chequered shirt; no amount of bravado erased it, or reinstated his power.
And now here was Miss Morrison, cradling him, holding his head like a mother. James had the drowsy, abandoned look of a child feeling faint or swooning, without will, falling inward, becoming limp and yielding like a plant. It was a vision that bound them like a fresco, varnished and cracked with age, shining its meaning through time as from beneath the archway of an Italian church. Ellie resisted the word pietà, but it hung around nevertheless, dignifying what was, after all, a very ordinary distress.
Miss Morrison looked beautiful then, in the way tenderness is beautiful, a kind of indication of the soft collapse into which one might be held. Ellie was surprised to consider her teacher in this way, but found that her childhood was full, in retrospect, of exactly this tenderness, which she missed, and wanted to recall, and had found in the sleepy roll into someone’s arms that precedes a slumberous, post-coital confidence. Her former lover was a gentle man and she dreamt of him still, wanted him still. There was no conclusion in the matter. There was no cessation of desire. True feeling does not conclude; this much she knew.
James had tracked Ellie down through a mutual friend, who wrote a small lifestyle column for the daily newspaper. Ellie had not seen him since they were fifteen or so and was curious as to why, out of the blue, James now wanted to meet.
He had been a handsome boy, and tall – another high-school predictor of success – but she had also known the James who had lived half a block away, the single child of an abandoned mother. He was the boy who rode his bicycle alone and seemed to have few friends. She remembers him pedalling up and down the street in the grainy lavender dusk, doing wheelies, raising dirt, disappearing as nightfall grew. The shape of a boy. A lonely figure. Even then she saw a muted torment in his repetitious route, and in the meaningless display of skids over gravel.
Sometimes she would hear his mother’s voice calling for James; she was bidding him to his dinner, wanting his company, calling in Italian for her son to return to her side. There were times when the calling went on and on. Ellie knew where James hid when he wished not to be discovered, but would never have told; it was part of their pact. In the small space between schoolday’s end and dinner, in which children might recover themselves, might find somewhere beyond the confinement of a desk and mean regulation, James would have returned to their hideout, our hideout, so that when he was not riding the street he was private and self-possessed.
Adults underestimate the degree of solitude required to counter school-life. Whole populations of schoolchildren crave to be left alone. Everywhere. Millions of them. Just to be left alone. So that they can find in sulky noise or quiet the refuge they have lost.
Between mockery and mastery, James made his way, and when at the end of tenth grade he won a scholarship to a boys’ school in the city, no one was surprised to see him leave. His mother was proud and heartbroken. Ellie saw her living a contracted life, lingering near the letterbox in her dressing gown at the end of the day. She’d not bothered to dress, nor to separate daytime from nighttime. Her face looked worn to a frazzle and her manner was infirm; her matted hair flew up around her sad, rather doll-like face. She developed a gesture of tying and untying the cord of her dressing gown so that her hands were a flurry of agitation and could not stay still. She spoke to herself in Italian, further marking her foreign state, announcing to everyone that she had returned to the country of her birth and was immured there, alone, tethered elsewhere by words. People gossiped, or despised her, or took pity in mostly blunt and unhelpful ways, taking her hands so that she burst into tears from a human touch, leaving food on the verandah that she refused to eat. The Country Women’s Association tried to organise her into shopping excursions and social activities. Eventually Welfare had to be told: the woman, Ellie heard, was a danger to herself.
One day James’s mother was no longer there. Ellie waited, and watched, but she did not return. She stared at the letterbox, as Mrs DeMello had stared, feeling a secret collusion.
‘Loony bin’, neighbours said. ‘She was chucked in the loony bin.’
And Ellie imagined a mute, desperate place, full of people bereft in the ways in which Mrs DeMello was bereft, their faces lined nervously at barred windows, their eyes sick with betrayal.
Ellie wished she had answered when Mrs DeMello had called for her son in the dusk. She knew by then what it might mean to have a call unanswered and to feel one’s voice not ringing as it should. And to have been part of this woman’s unhappiness, knowing that James had also left her, had been affrighted by what he had disclosed and the intimacy they had developed.
Although Ellie missed James, she could tell no one about it. There was no summary of the overlap of two young lives, or of what they did, or where they hid. After he left for the posh school James had never written, or been in touch. He was simply gone. Nor did he answer letters or revisit their town. Only when he won a university scholarship did they learn the dimensions of his success and the public achievements of his shining life. Ellie’s parents read the article from the local paper on the phone, but by then Ellie was also living in the city, at another university, and leading another kind of life. She resisted, as much as possible, the effort of imagining him elsewhere.
In her apartment Ellie looked up from the table. A tall tree outside the window had produced an illusion of swinging light upon the wall. She’d not noticed it before, how for a brief time each day the shadows at a certain angle might project a light-show effect. Most days she had been working, whether studying in a library, or serving as a waitress in Gallo’s café on King Street, and this fleeting holiday vision gave her pause.
Outside was seamless sunshine, promising a hot day; in here, swamped by memory, her rooms existed in another light, as if the power of remembering itself had altered the physics of her surroundings. This idea charmed her. This counter-time of James’s return that splashed light in its own theatre.
Ellie sat looking at the watery radiance of moving shapes. It occurred to her then, irrelevantly, how bloody James was, how in recollection he was often not a school star, the clever kid, the ‘genius’, they once had called him, but one of the walking wounded. And another return: James flustered, his head lowered, his eyes downcast. James covering his ears with his hands as he read, as if holding his head together. James not meeting her gaze. James closing himself in.
James slept badly in the room at the hostel. The bed was lumpy with the thousands of other bodies that had preceded him, their exertions, their tossing and turning, their own dragnets of haunted dreams, and the room was full of exhausted air and the trace of furtive cigarettes. The small window was stuck open, but the atmosphere was still and stale.
When, in late darkness, he finally slept, something disturbed his self-enclosure that turned out to be rain, sliding into the room with gentle insistence and a light tapping sound, as if infant fingers were drumming or prying open his sleep. Rising half-blind in the half-light he had fumbled at the window, but he could not dislodge the frame and found himself leaning his face there, in a kind of dizzy spell, neither asleep nor awake, peering down into the black, rainy canyon of George Street. It must have been, he guessed, about 3 a.m. Up the street, just beyond sight, was the sandstone town hall, its façade beer-coloured in a strip of spotlights, and beyond that the shopping block that looked like a nineteenth-century exhibition hall and had a dumpy statue of Queen Victoria squatting at its entrance. On his side of the road, less salubrious, was a line of small stores that marked the beginnings of Chinatown – cafés for noodles and yum cha, Vietnamese bakeries, pawn shops, pubs, more backpacker hostels.
A bus rumbled along the street with the stray vehicles of a Friday night, but the pedestrians had thinned out, fleeing the rain. There were a few desperate hookers smoking beneath umbrellas and a single druggie, trying to score. One of the women wore heels so high she looked as if she was constantly toppling, correcting her balance, then set to topple once again. This display was contrived to make you want to catch her, James thought, to stand Jesus-like, arms open, as she sexually subsided. That sense of dramatised risk and the anonymity of her body. Oneself a saviour. A car appeared from nowhere and slowed as it approached. James watched the woman leave the shelter of her friend’s umbrella and lean into the car window. There was something about how she leant – from the waist, like a doll – that called forth his pity.
James felt the rain on his face. It was cool and light. He sensed a camaraderie with others awake at this time, the desperadoes of the city and its working drivers. The stragglers, lost and wandering. The sleepless. The deprived. Country guys like him, maybe, who found all this city shit too much and way too overwhelming. When an ambulance sped past, its siren moaning, James thought it emblematic of big city life: there was always an accident or crisis, there was always somebody bleeding or spilling their guts.
He kept telling himself he had come to Sydney to speak to Ellie, to save something of his past, to atone and to tell her, but there was a desolation and finality about being here, here-now, in this rainy, woeful darkness where he felt truly himself.
James must eventually have slept again because at nine he found himself waking. The name Magritte hung on his lips. It flared in his mind, then left. James felt groggy from too many pills and late-night vodkas, unfocused, dull. The day was already hot and the damp of the night was evaporating, and he roused himself because he had to walk down the hallway to piss. It was a queasy visit. The tiles were hospital green and the walls were grubby. He saw spiders beneath the pipes and the stains of other men’s emissions and the morning light that poured though a barred window and should have cheered him up was instead the garish inspiration for an early headache. As he shaved before the mirror above the sink he avoided his own glances. How many men shave thus, not wanting to see themselves? In the lopsided tilt of his head he was hiding from what might be revealed. Loss of faith. Loss of face. Some closing down of what once he might have dreamed or become.
Back in his room James swallowed a handful of vitamins and analgesics, miming the crazy doctor on television, ceaselessly self-medicating. For a few seconds he considered returning to bed, locking himself in a winding sheet, shutting his eyes against the day, refusing the real-time of the city for a dead-beat retreat. But he rose and moved from the gloomy interior – Ellie, Ellie – watching his feet on the uneven stairs.
The young man at the reception counter had also had a bad night and looked even more sordidly wrecked than James. He held up a palm, like a Catholic priest, in a silent greeting. Might be gay, James thought. He had the grey-skinned appearance of someone who lived in a capsule in a 1980s film, a sci-fi with drooling aliens and constant threat. Or of someone drowned, drained away, lost in watery depths. The pallor of the man’s face shone sad and unholy. James nodded hello, wishing not to think of priests, or drowning, or B-grade movies, and stepped quickly onto the street, so as to avoid any small talk.
René Magritte; his favourite painter.
At fourteen Magritte had gone with his father Leopold to the banks of the river Sambre to identify the body of his mother, Adeline. She had committed suicide by drowning and he stood there, solemnly and silently holding his father’s hand, a dutiful son, a reliable good boy, as they fished her slim body from the chill grey water. It was 1912. It was the end of his boyhood. Leopold had a face full of capillaries and was florid with crying; his knees failed, he released his hold, he crumpled before the corpse like a puppet articulated. But pale young René simply stood and looked. René was the strong one, emotionally composed. Cloth covered his mother’s face in a wet sucking shroud. Her dress had reversed as they pulled her from the river feet first, and yet he knew her from the brown shoes on which she had replaced a non-matching buckle and the signet ring on her middle finger that had once been his grandmother’s. When they peeled back the skirt and made her decent, she was grimy with river-silt and pretending to sleep. Her cheeks were sallow, caved in, her eyes were closed, and René felt his heart heave and capsize at the sight. Her face. His mother. Death deep enough to wallow in.
It was not long after that, the soon-to-be-Surrealist began his first job, working in a wallpaper factory, designing repetitions. It was easy, to repeat. Any loose flourish would appear whole if chained in a repetition. Any single flower became many, any rough abstraction a pattern. There was a solace in blueprinted and easy decoration, the sweep of ink through a silk screen and the moist sheets carried away, the regularity of the copies and their filling up of parlours and bedrooms. He could have gone on like this forever, wallpapering the surface of things, printing the same image again and again.
Later, when Magritte was an artist in Paris reinventing his own past, someone pointed out that his most disturbing paintings were of figures blinded or covered in cloth, and he knew then – as though responding to an accusation – how he had converted her, how he had made his mother Art, how everything stored away and given art-form was reborn as another repetition.
James paused in the busy street, looking around, looking lost. Sydney, Saturday morning. January. George Street. Why, after all these years, was he thinking again of Magritte? Why did this recovery of Adeline seem so like his own memory?
There were shoppers speeding into department stores and broad-spectrum hubbub. The buses sounded like thunder hurtling towards the Quay. Cars glowed in the morning glare and were burning and purposeful. Aware of the tenacity of crowds intent on a summertime bargain, James saw how they moved in urgent surges and breaking waves, the hiding place they offered, the self’s liquefaction, the mad sense of being sucked inside a flexible organism. He walked without direction but was not really there. He was somewhere in the Belgium he had invented as a child from a book, somewhere in silvery light, by the grim river Sambre. Being René, the strong one. Being the dutiful son, the reliable good boy.
Lives of Modern Artists: James’s mother gave it to him for his fourteenth birthday. He had been shocked to realise that the boy René standing on the riverbank was exactly his age and that René’s father, Leopold, was employed as a tailor. James’s father had been a tailor in the Old Country, his mother said, before they came to Australia and he found himself labouring on building sites, steering wheelbarrows of wet cement along angled planks, shovelling, hauling, crippling his frail tailor’s back. It was no surprise he had left them. He was lost here, his mother said. There was no work for a tailor when everyone was building houses.
James heard a tone of forgiveness in her steady voice. She met his gaze. Her face across the kitchen table was alight with this rare disclosure. She had been beautiful, he realised. His mother had been beautiful. And there was no taint of bitterness, or recrimination. She might still love him, James vaguely thought. Perhaps feelings of this kind do not conclude.
In the city of Naples beautiful Giovanna had fallen in love with handsome Matheus, the tailor. They had gone on an adventure together, floating across the ocean on the good ship Oriana, and found themselves in Fremantle, Western Australia, feeling stranded. They knew almost immediately that something in their marriage was wrong; but in those days couples endured, sometimes to despair. As if in resistance to migrancy, Giovanna learned almost no English and maintained a prideful and fierce isolation. Matheus joined his paisano for drinks and local advice. He worked hard, learnt English, took his wife to the south-west following an Italian building team. He demolished himself in physical labour. In this country in which men need not talk at all, except of workaday details over a beer or two, Matheus gradually grew silent and then he was gone. Giovanna had seen him retreating for years, becoming thin and stretched as a Giacometti sculpture. One day he stretched into nothingness and slipped over the horizon.
James was almost three years old when Matheus disappeared. He had a recollection only of being swung upwards onto his father’s shoulders, and the terror of such height, the sheer demented panic, that made him clutch to save his life at handfuls of black curly hair. There was no face, or clear memory, just this swoop upwards into the sky and the feel of large hands surrounding his body. Matheus was a name and a legend, the man he was told he resembled. And who had lifted him like that, the better to see the world. Only recently he had learned of Matheus’s brother, Leo, living somewhere in Melbourne, with his own life and family. But it was too late for all that. It was too late for that version of Italian happy-families, arrayed with identical faces at a long sun-speckled table piled high with pasta and wine, raising glasses, as in an advertisement, to the appreciation of olive oil. A man with a moustache, a plump mama, the family commercially jolly. Above them the leaf-light of grape-vines, like a net of open hands.
Lives of Modern Artists taught James how calamitous artists’ lives were – and how interesting, compared to his own. He had stored the book under his bed as if shameful know ledge was held there, but knew essentially that it was the art-life he secretly daydreamed, this promise of making meaning without needing a single word. The promise of Europe and of shadowy spaces, of a life grievous but endurable, the record of which might exist in a gallery somewhere, detached and valuable, impersonal and illustrious, stylish, pure. He flicked through the pages of the book until they were worn. He knew all the artists’ portraits, and self-portraits, and their most famous images. Even when he discovered he had no aptitude for drawing or painting, he still held onto this desire for an artistic life. As a teenager James developed an ambition to be hired as an extra in a movie. He knew now that this was a symbol of his accurate sense of mediocrity, that he would never exist at the centre of anything.
Beneath all, beneath all the sound and fury, lay the sensation of being swung into the air as a human helicopter, to rest perched there, at an absurd height, his hands deep in his father’s hair. This heft and turn in space, profoundly remembered, lay at the base of all that James was and of his dangerous imbalance. Memory was not in the prefrontal cortex, or the hippocampus, or the cerebellum, or the amygdala – how he loved this vocabulary saved from his days as a medical student – but in the space into which an infant might be lifted and turned. All he retained of his father was enclosed in that curve.
Ellie too was stuck fast in movements of James’s body and her own invisibly encircling presence. There had been others since, of course, the usual one-night stands, casually without meaning, and a few of them serious, possibly life-partners. But only Ellie persisted as his father did, in this deeper-level recollection, deposited like radium in the substrata of his cells.
They had been fourteen years old when they first made love. It astonished and moved him to think of it now. It was not audacity or expertise but lustful curiosity; kids, they were just kids. They flung themselves uninhibited into each other’s bodies because each knew so little of what they should do. It was a collision of vague intentions and truly naive. They had laughed, played around. They had tumbled creaturely, like kittens. They had relished a kind of delinquency they knew implicitly to be occurring. And now, as he approached Ellie after all these years, James hesitated before the traces of her persistence. Even in distracted moments he was recovering memories of her body and her words.
The mystery of their pact was contained in the derelict building where they met, the fusty brick office of what once, years before, must have been an iron foundry. Their hideout they called it, as if they were sexual criminals. There was an upturned paint-can on which they set a candle, a few sticks of furniture strewn about, and a single exploded chair, its horse-hair stuffing gaping. This chair returned in dreams, oversized and with menace. It was the kind of anachronistic, lumpish object that theatre students might have adopted to symbolise East German deprivation. There was a panel of almost intact glass sheets through which the boss must once have surveyed the men in the workshop, but each pane had become dingy and opaque with dust. Ellie and James had resisted writing their names; both understood the need for secrecy. They laid a blanket on the floor and hid out together, too happy to bother with the inlaid dirt or heart-enclosed initials, too far gone in their junior hunger to be merely boyfriend and girlfriend.
James thought of René Magritte’s painting called The Lovers. It was a portrait of two enshrouded heads, both swathed in grey cloth. The obliteration of detail was surely all the artist could bear. Adeline, a milliner, used to sew well into the night, and her son no doubt remembered her fingers in lamplight on a curved rim of felt, or pressing the dome of a head-shape onto a faceless wooden mould. He no doubt remembered the precise arc of the needle looping into wool and the angle of her back as she leant forward, to gather more light.
There were many, many hats in Magritte’s paintings. And there were huge apples in living rooms, pipes that were not pipes, trains emerging from fireplaces, reflections not where they should be, day and night coexisting. His images were of displacement and his figures were all verging on erasure. Particularity would have killed him. Realism would have killed him. The buckle. The maternal ring. The circular stain of river mud, the thumbprint of death, that lay in the shallow dip just beneath Adeline’s bottom lip. It was because James understood this that he could contemplate seeing Ellie again. For all that she was an intangible sequence of gestures and moves, it was specificity he yearned for, the tiny details he had known of her, the beloved face uncovered. In his case, he knew, the details would save him. The ideas were too large. The space a drowning might make, the milky-green water closing over a face, was a tremendous, vile and unassimilable thing.
In downtown George Street a car alarm sounded. There was the rumble of a plane in the far distance, slowly descending, and James noticed, all at once, the traffic’s strident roar. In the petrochemical haze he glanced upwards at the ugly mixture of geometric steel, the plate-glass of sparkling skyscrapers, the rude banners of retail. The whole of central Sydney seemed to be bearing down on him, the way slapstick buildings collapse – phoof! – around a smiling fool. James considered sliding into the aisle of a store or an alley. But instead, instinctively decisive, he turned and walked in the other direction.
The train, he decided. He would catch the train to Circular Quay.
In his jumpy discomposure, the short walk uphill to Central Station was easier to negotiate. Magritte fell away. The River Sambre. The drowned mother. The shadows of what he had been. James was fixed upon Ellie as he recommenced his walk, heading westwards.
He saw posters in Chinese and the large diagram of a foot, its pressure points outlined in fine script with a remarkable degree of complication, then a shop selling Buddhist artefacts in which most items appeared to be red. That a store for objects of religious devotion might exist in the inner city seemed hopeful, if anomalous. Peering in he saw altars, incense, a row of cross-legged Buddhas, all made of what appeared to be crimson plastic, and various dangling embroideries, the purpose of which he assumed to be prayer, released wavering into the spiritually receptive air. James would never have entered such a store, but found himself glancing in with interest. A shop assistant looked up and smiled at him; James blushed and turned away. Further along two men’s faces leered at him through the window of a pub; he found himself blushing once again. Then there was a string of cheap frock shops, all staffed by petite Asian women with swaying hair; and beyond were food stores – Thai, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese – more than could possibly be sustained on a single street. Worlds were converging, he thought. Australia was Asian. He saw how various it all was, the zeal of many nations, the emporia of many merchants, the international energy that pulsed between languages and countries. The translations were less of words than of these perplexing combinations: shops, peoples, signs and wonders.
In another life he might have loved it. But James was disintegrating, he knew. He was becoming fissures and gaps, as if something in his body had torn. Time past was leaking in, and shame, and regret, and too much irksome reality. He continued his walk through the city, hearing her name in his mind: Ellie, Ellie; Ellie, Ellie. The name he sighed in his sleep. As though she was a Buddhic chant, or a compass alignment, or the talismanic code to a forgotten world. As though the sound of her name was a kind of inward music.
Pei Xing had woken that morning thinking of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, the poet-doctor. Apart from her father, the first man, though unreal, she had ever loved.
Before she opened her eyes she had felt him in the bed beside her. It was as if he had flown through the window from the Russian cold to find warmth beside her body, to nestle his dark head between her small breasts. He appeared as he did in the famous film version – played by Omar Sharif – those enormous brown eyes, that air of sexual distraction. The first seconds were snowy, image-confounded and fabulously arousing; and she might have been holding his face in her hands, so sure was his incarnation.
When Pei Xing realised she was awake she found that her cheeks were moist with tears. Doctor Zhivago had been her father’s favourite novel and his most famous and prestigious translation. Though dangerous and counter-revolutionary, a target for the Red Guards and the Mao Tse Tung Thought Propaganda Teams, he had cherished it, with tortured obstinacy, until his very last breath. He liked to quote a section from the opening about ‘inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example’; and even now she remembered the whole paragraph, though she had once striven to forget it.
‘We all possess an inward music,’ he had told her, sounding like a teacher. ‘Every person on the planet. Every single one of us.’
Inward music. What was that? she had often wondered.
Her father was prone to announcements. Every now and then he dispensed an aphoristic sentence, or felt obliged to comment, in italics, on literature or politics. What others might have derided, Pei Xing found endearing.
Her father owned a Feltrinelli first edition, in Russian, from 1957. And then one in English, Harvill, from which he wrote his translation. She had watched him work night after night at his desk, in the glow of a brass lamp, with English-Chinese and Russian-Chinese dictionaries by his side, and a Great China brand cigarette dangling from two fingers. She imagined the trade in meanings as a kind of game, in which tokens shaped like mahjong tiles were exchanged and switched. Signs moved from one world to another, clacked together, made new sequences. A man in Bolshevik Russia became virtually Chinese; a world unfolded from a paper envelope. This game existed in the borderless continent of her father’s head. She could see how he concentrated: ‘cher’ in Russian, ‘neve’ in Italian, ‘snow’ in English, until he arrived at the sound ‘xue’, and then the character: the radical symbol for rain, the strokes for frozen, the little block of marks that revealed the transition from alphabets to ideograms. As he removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose, Pei Xing felt a pure, focused pang of love.
She considered her father the most intelligent man in the world. She competed with her brother for his attention, but somehow knew that her bookishness gave her a clear advantage.
‘There are many words for snow,’ her father announced. And he tilted his head back and chuckled, as if he had just told her a joke.
In the bonfire the Red Guards lit in their lane in 1967 Doctor Zhivago was aflame in the pile of books deemed ideologically treacherous. Pei Xing watched the book-burning with her parents, who were forced to kneel in mute witness. Her father’s face was bruised and her mother looked absent.
The immolation of books took longer than expected. Sometimes a book would flip open page by page, each separately blackening, curling, igniting, disappearing, and still there were more pages rising softly underneath. The pyramid of paper seemed for a time to resist its own fire, so that a Guard poked at the smouldering mess and called for kerosene. When at last it flared up, with a kind of fierce luminosity, everyone was relieved that the event was at last consuming itself. And because she could not look at her parents’ faces, and because she was afraid, and because history had become this incredible will to erase, Pei Xing watched the bonfire with devoted attention. It was impressively bright.
The past never left her. Her parents were always there, always kneeling, the last time she saw them alive. The pile of books was perpetually burning.
And the seductive Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago seemed almost more real to her than her own parents, since he lived on robustly in cinema and words, and since his own life story had a definite, well-described conclusion. This was something her father believed in, that fiction might eclipse life. It pained her to think of it now, how distant he had become, how vague and how replaced. Her mother was more present: the ministrations of food and comfort, the Guangdong folk-tales, the sound of her piano as she practised a Brahms piece, or a Bach. These memories greeted her more frequently, and more often in moments of happiness.
It had rained during the night but the sun was now shining. The day was fast heating up. Pei Xing rose, splashed her face, and went immediately to the kitchen to prepare her Dragon Well tea. There was some cold sticky rice left over in a bowl in the fridge; she covered it with condensed milk and slices of mango and ate her breakfast standing up, as she always did, looking as though searching into the far distance.
Beyond the window above the sink lay the broad sprawl of Bankstown and the outer western suburbs. Mighty trucks were rumbling along the freeways with homicidal speed; there were houses of dubious design, with utes on the front lawns and chunky letterboxes made of bricks; there were factories and steelworks and a huge hardware store, the size of a jumbo-jet hangar, spread over an entire block. A mattress factory and a glass factory stood absurdly side by side. Aussie Mattresses. Down Under Glass.
In the shopping centre beside the train station there were dozens of small businesses with signs above the doorways in Vietnamese and Arabic; these Pei Xing found particularly enchanting. She loved to look directly into the faces of people on the street: men with powerful forearms and forthright eyes, and women in hijabs and scarves walking together in friendly clusters. Their children all looked plump and smiling and for some reason reminded Pei Xing of nutmeg. Then there were Vietnamese at the fishmongers on the corner, a meeting place of sorts, and casual groups at the Pho shop, who all seemed to know each other. This version of Australia was Asian and Arab. These people moved in an aura of their own, not afraid to claim space; and among them were other populations, migrant as she, each pulled from another history and cast up at the bottom of the world. On the street Pei Xing always felt cosmopolitan. She felt she was moving among friends in a spacious new world. She thought people from the Middle East, especially, were very exotic. She tried not to stare.
Conspicuous beneath a sun umbrella, Pei Xing walked the streets of Bankstown to catch an early train. She looked at the signs above the stores and saw again how beautiful a script Arabic was, how different from Chinese characters, and from English translations. There were cursive waves and dots and ultra-precise dashes, like flags. There were suggestions of Mecca and arched windows and the spaces a mosque might contain. How might ‘snow’, she wondered, appear in an Arabic script? How might desert peoples write the word ‘snow’? Would it be imagined as flying sand?
It had occurred to Pei Xing more than once that she would like to learn Arabic, so that she could speak fluently to her neighbours and chitchat with the small children who played in the stairwell of their ugly block of flats. She could address the women in headscarves and ask what they thought of this place, and where they worked, and what kind of food they ate and how it was prepared. Her son Jimmy had tried to persuade her to move to the suburb of Ashfield, to the large Chinese community in which he lived. But Pei Xing liked it here, near the western Sydney University. Here she had a little work teaching her own language, and here, one day, she might yet learn Arabic.
At the train station Mr Nguyen was settled in his glass booth. Ignoring the ticket machines that looked like the robots of an unfortunately boxy future era, Pei Xing preferred her friend, and his hasty chat.
‘Mrs Chang!’
‘Mr Nguyen!’ She folded her umbrella.
‘Hot enough for you?’
It was a rhetorical question. Pei Xing had teased him before about the battery-run miniature fan that he held to his face. It was of pastel pink plastic and shaped like a rocket ship. It blew his fringe backwards into a glossy black fin.
‘You sound Australian, Mr Nguyen.’
‘I’m trying,’ he responded. ‘The usual?’
Mr Nguyen knew that each Saturday morning Pei Xing made the long journey to Circular Quay, then to the North Shore, to meet someone from her past. He was too polite to ask any details, but recognised her reticent dignity and the lifelong habit of privacy. He had said once that she reminded him of a schoolteacher from his childhood in Saigon and Pei Xing accepted this disclosure as a verbal gift; the remembrance she inspired in him was spoken with affection.
‘The usual. Circular Quay.’
Mr Nguyen brushed at his fin, in unconscious grooming, as he produced the ticket.
These simple exchanges sustained Pei Xing. People put too little faith in modest conversation, she thought, and in what was known but remained silent or impossible to express. The veneration of small sentences, or a gesture, or even a single word; this was the fabric of civility, the basic social contract. One could die without it.
Mr Nguyen reminded Pei Xing of no one in particular, but his face was generically kind and his tone solicitous. How did this kindly intelligent man end up here, locked in by timetables, and piles of change and an airless booth?
The train station was noisy and busy, all brutalist steel, echoing with voices and the severe acoustics of hard tubular spaces. Rubbish blew along the platform, a McDonald’s carton for fries, a jangling aluminium can. Without hesitating, Pei Xing picked up both and deposited them in a metal garbage bin hanging from a pole. Waiting passengers watched suspiciously and with blank incomprehension.
The train from Liverpool approached, slowing its roar, screeching to a halt; and when Pei Xing boarded, something that persisted as a trace from early morning returned as a complete image.
Once she had sought her father at his desk and found him missing, then located him smoking on his bed, an ashtray balanced on his chest. He was lost in thought, gazing at the ceiling. Music was playing from the gramophone – something moody with wailing trumpets. The light was yellow; it was always yellow in her parents’ bedroom. This easy vision: of the great man at rest, a small blue brass and enamel vessel moving fractionally with his breath. The cigarette, Great China, dangling from two fingers. As a girl she had been caught by the quietness and solemnity of the moment, the knowledge that he had not seen her, his contemplative self-sufficiency, the mixture of aloneness and distance her spying implied. Children tell themselves things in a summarising mode: she told herself then, ‘I love my father.’
Perhaps love rested more in images than in words. There was no memory of him speaking at this time, or even acknowledging her presence. It was a quiet, folded moment, entirely her own.
Two young men, both wearing hoodies despite the heat, sat directly in front of Pei Xing and began talking in loud voices. One wore a pattern of human skulls on his fleecy jacket; the other had the tattoo of a Chinese character, fate, just visible on his neck. Odd to see these characters appearing as fashion on the skin of young men. Decoration Chinese. Empty Chinese. Pei Xing looked out the window and watched the buildings of Bankstown slide away.
Her father, Chang Yong, had met her mother, Nan Anyi, in London some time in 1935. He had been at Birkbeck College in London, studying for a doctorate in English Literature; she was a student of piano, at the Royal Academy. They met through a mutual friend, Wu Xingfu, who was one of those energetic expatriates for whom linking with others was an exciting and essential duty; he was always organising get-togethers in pubs and picnics in parks. Londoners gazed at the motley crowd of Chinese students, incurious as to their histories but also – they sensed – dimly hostile to their presence.
Chang Yong owned a Box Brownie camera, his prized possession, and there once existed a series of cheesy photographs of their group posed before various London landmarks, the lions in Trafalgar Square, rows of pansies in Hyde Park, the twisty decorated gates of Buckingham Palace. There was a particularly askew image of Yong and Anyi standing with palace guards in their pillar-high bearskin hats; both look dwarfed, innocent and silly with pleasure. They had their chins raised to Wu Xingfu as he took the photo; he must have been kneeling in order to show the comic dimensions of the guards. Soon after there was a formal photograph of their marriage, also by Wu Xingfu and also slightly off-centre. The couple were standing on the steps of the registry office in Camden, both now unsmiling, as was the convention. Anyi wore a tailored suit and her hair was styled as a black sea-shell in a neat wavy bob, glistening as if wet; Yong wore pinstripes and a self-consciously slanted fedora. They were glamorous, and they knew it. What the photographs told Pei Xing was that they had loved each other, that London had emboldened them, and that they saw, in their nascent marriage, limitless days ahead.
None of these images survived the Cultural Revolution. None of their group. Wu Xingfu, who had a doctorate from the London School of Economics, was murdered in the early days, after being expelled from Beijing Normal University and denounced as a ‘rightist and snake-demon revisionist’. A son of the ‘landlord class’, educated abroad, there was little he could say in his own defence. His wife, who worked as a doctor at the Peiping Union Medical College, renamed the Anti-Imperialist Hospital during the Revolution, committed suicide a few days after she learned of his death. Pei Xing had seen a note in the newspaper announcing Wu Xingfu’s posthumous rehabilitation under the Deng regime, during the long weeks and months in which she searched lists for her parents’ details. She read the names of the dead carefully, with filial piety. Her greatest fear was that she would look forever, with utmost care, and never find them.
Her parents’ names at last appeared. Pei Xing’s first thought was for herself; that she was no longer ‘politically black’, that she could now leave the country. Chang Yong and Chang Anyi were both rehabilitated, twenty-two years after their disappearance. Their names appeared in a list in the paper, in the column of political resurrections, and a formal letter from the Public Security Bureau followed.
Pei Xing felt nothing when at last she read it. She applied for the return of their property and possessions, and received instead a small amount of money. Then she wrote to her brother in Australia asking if she might join him. When she went to the Xuijiahui office for papers for herself and her son, she had difficulty speaking of a ‘family reunion’ without betraying excitement. The official behind the desk, a stalk-thin man with the face of a dried peach, wrote down her birth-date – 26th December, Chairman Mao’s birthday – and raised an eyebrow and smiled. Pei Xing was accustomed to comments on the auspicious date of her birth. But the official said nothing. He signed the papers. He handed them over. Pei Xing left the office briskly, and without pausing to thank him.
There is a section of Doctor Zhivago that is full of snow. Zhivago is with his wife, Tonya, travelling in the freight truck of a train, and the journey is remarkable for the snowfall that impedes their progress and enters the hero’s thinking as a series of metaphors. The snowflakes begin as woolly but thicken to a white stage curtain as wide as the street, one slowly descending and swinging its fringe. Snow is a swirling fire in the headlight of the train. Snow covers the land as a child in a cot, his head beneath an eiderdown. And then there was a section her father had read to her. Zhivago is lying in the stalled train, hearing a sound like that of a waterfall, and realises all at once that spring is in the air, the time when the snowflakes turn black as they fall to the earth.
The poet thinks: transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry.
Pei Xing remembered this phrase because her father taught it to her like a poem, after he had discussed the translation of ‘snow’. When she was in distress she recited it: transparent, blackish-white, sweet-smelling, bird-cherry. There were so many – mostly improbable – words for snow; the melody of the phrase mysteriously nourished and sustained her.
There was no distress here, here and now. There was just this unbidden recall and the suburbs of Sydney flashing past. But what Pei Xing saw from the train was mostly unbeautiful. The backs of houses with their collapsing fences, the power-lines, the graffiti, the drifting glimpses of mortgaged lives. There were car bodies, rusted out, and the tangle of weeds around rubbish, riotous greenery and lush urban wastelands. A shopping trolley had been tossed with guilty haste into a gulley; it looked like an animal cage as the train whizzed past. More graffiti, scrawled in puzzling, illegible messages. A young man, perhaps, a bold young man, had climbed wire fences at night to ego-mark the city and try, with a ritzy signature, to make it his own.
Pei Xing did not enjoy this train journey and often buried herself in reading. But motion she liked. She liked a sense of moving forward.
Catherine Healy woke that morning to dazzling light. To be in a city so shining. A city so bright. She stood on the small balcony, enwreathed by warm air, her face lifted to the sunshine. There never was a light like this in Dublin. Not on the sunniest day.
Catherine had woken by eight in the apartment in Darlinghurst, which was situated, obscured, behind a vast Coca-Cola sign. There was a glimpse of William Street, leading to the city, but no Harbour view. Here, everyone asked: do you have a Harbour view?
She wanted to ring Luc just to say: my, but the sun shines! And by dark there’s this billboard, old-fashioned kitsch, a fluorescent wall of shifting crimson stripes and curly white lettering, like something from an all-American movie, directed by Altman … and it stands out for miles and miles, my own personal landmark, my own electric advertisement … and who would have thought it, a girl from the Pearse Tower, a girl from Ballymun …
In the air hung diesel fume and petrol stink and the roar of traffic streaming down and up the slope of William Street, to and from the centre. Catherine had been in Sydney for only two weeks, and her accommodation was borrowed and temporary. Someone from the newspaper office where she worked had invited her to flat-sit; she would soon need to begin looking for a place of her own. But in the meantime she liked this fake version of camping, living with unfamiliar furniture and knick-knacks, and someone else’s clothes hanging in the wardrobe. It was like a holiday, or a dream, or something that allowed her to feel contingent and uncommitted. When she thought of her four sisters and her mother back in Dublin, and her dear brother Brendan, God-rest-his-soul, she believed she was the free one. The only one who had escaped.
Catherine rose, showered, and pulled a loose indigo sundress over her head. She surveyed herself in the mirror briefly and decided against lipstick. She would have breakfast on Macleay Street, then walk back to the train station. She would visit Circular Quay, she would become a Saturday tourist, she would acquire a sun-tan.
Beside a fountain that resembled a dandelion, a sphere of rent water, ablaze and extravagant, Catherine drank a glass of soy latte and picked at a flaking croissant. There was a waitress in black trousers and dreadlocks who was casually chirpy and a clientele of good-looking, mostly youngish couples, the kind who start the day at the gym, or walking fast with a tiny dog. Tracksuits, ponytails, a perky little cap – they were everywhere, this tribe, in Ranelagh and Rathgar, in Camden and Notting Hill, in Potts Point in the sunshine with the Saturday papers.
Catherine would sit here quietly considering her good fortune, as though some part of her felt it was ill-deserved, like a lottery win, mere chance, that made her instantly enriched. She enjoyed the astonishing weather and the nature of her freedom. Might a migrant feel this way? For all that trailed behind, lost families and countries, there was a sense too that a new sky might cast a light of revelation. The fountain beside Catherine blinked and she found it a contemplative object. Mammy would love this. And Mary. And Philomena. And Claire. And Ruthy. Especially Ruthy. And Brendan too, before the accident took him and he ended up, before his time, at Glasnevin Cemetery.
Catherine experienced a momentary longing for sponge cake and potatoes, saw the ring road stretch out, all grey desolation and over-sized lorries, charging devil-may-care through rain-slick and blur.
The man sitting closest to Catherine flapped open his paper and she glimpsed the front page. Another bombing somewhere. This much she knew, that there were always bombings. On Catherine’s tenth birthday, 12th October 1984, the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel in Brighton, hoping to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, and her birthday was ever after linked to this history, usurped, really, by politics and men and the absolute shite of all that bombing. For days it was in the papers and on the television screen – five dead, nothing of course compared to Iraq now – but Catherine discovered then how all she had longed for on her birthday meant nothing in the wider scheme of things. Being the second youngest of five sisters was bad enough; she would always feel overwhelmed by the designs of others. But this was the day she began to think about Irish politics, to think about a history that was other than Irish-eyes-a’smilin’. She and Brendan, who were close, though he was five years older, huddled together imagining the birthday death of Margaret Thatcher and considering like grown-ups the meaning of life.
A few months earlier Brendan had marched against the visit of President Reagan to the village of Ballyporeen. Catherine was the only one at the dinner table who spoke in Brendan’s support, even though she did not really understand what the demonstration was about. Mam slammed down the serving spoon on the tablecloth and said there will be no politics in my house! And Da had just sat there, eating his peas, and the others had all giggled.
Brendan and Catherine were the serious ones, the clever ones, Mam said, when she was in a better mood. Brendan was on the television; you could see him in O’Connell Street, shouting at the top of his voice with the other rascals, making a holy show of himself and wanting to be famous. He was shouting that Reagan was a warmonger and feckin evil and would bring Star Wars to the world, zapping innocents from the sky. Catherine was thrilled to see him there, in the streets, doing something noisy in the centre of Dublin. Familiar city images flashed past, and before them his face, floating in a crowd whose mouths opened and closed in unison.
Her big brother, ah lovely, and with the gift of the gab.
A few days later Brendan showed her a newspaper article that said Reagan had presented a paperweight to the Irish President: he thought this hilarious. He mimed the presentation, put on an incompetent American accent and mocked the weightiness of what was needed to hold down the bothersome papers of the state. Catherine had to shush Brendan when his laughing became hysterical – Mam would want to know what they found so funny. But it was a wonderful moment, when they knew their complicity, when they leant against each other’s bodies and decided wordlessly and instantly, in sibling love and in the apprehension of a shared future, that they might form a team.
In Sydney, people on the streets seemed contented and relaxed. Perhaps it was the sunshine. Perhaps sad people hid. Catherine thought of the fourteen-year-old mothers begging at the end of O’Connell Bridge, their pallid skinny babes resting sideways in their laps, and decided there’s nothing of this here, no girls ruined before their time, or none that were obvious anyway, not sitting where everyone could see them, showing off their sorry lives. There were no frazzled wives with vertical lines between their eyes, standing in cold slanting rain outside Dunnes Stores, moaning with their shopping. Or those who had made it in IT, sweeping the city in sleek European cars; or the tough-looking men with shaved heads and leather jackets and south Dublin confidence.
Catherine realised that she was missing her home. Even though she had been living in London since she was twenty-two, Dublin, which she visited annually, was still her default comparison. She had left Ireland just after the murder of the investigative reporter, Veronica Guerin, when she decided journalism would be better pursued abroad. Here now, her comparisons were still with her own city. In the Holy Spirit School she was always the top student in her class, just as Brendan was, in the Holy Cross, and some time around her tenth birthday they both knew they would leave. Catherine lived in anticipation of the day she would take the ferry at Dun Laoghaire and sail over the waters. Away from her entangling sisters and the misery of Ballymun housing, away from North Dublin sorrow, which was unlike any other, away from the ring road that strangled them and lassoed them all in. To dirty London, as it turned out. City-of-Sin, Mam called it. City-of-Sin. But it had to be better, they reasoned, better than dreary Ballymun.
Catherine ordered a second coffee. The dandelion fountain was surprisingly captivating. White ibis with curved black beaks long as a scythe, and potbellies, like old men, were treading the puddles beneath the fountain, unmindful of café-goers and shoppers passing by. You could kick them like a football if you were so inclined, since they barely flinched as human legs passed their way.
Two young travellers, probably from Sweden – blonde girls with skimpy shorts, tanned legs and exclamatory manners – took turns having their photos taken in front of the dandelion. Carefree, the word was. Their parents were probably executives of Volvo or owned rental property in Iceland and were off now, on a yacht, sailing a sparkling fjord, communicating only sparsely and by electronic mediation. But Catherine had dragged her past and her family with her. They hung around. She thought of them often and with a kind of doleful, compelling concern. Most of all she thought of Brendan, though he was no longer in the world, and it was a riddle to her how powerfully the dead continued, how much space they took up with their not-here bodies. Brendan lay trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain, he had infiltrated, somehow, the way damp entered the clammy rooms of those stinky old flats in Dublin, leaving blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere.
Catherine would ring her mother soon, or perhaps send a postcard of the Opera House. Or of the Bridge, or Bondi Beach, or a cute kangaroo, aerodynamically leaping. Filial piety, that’s what Father Maroney would call it. Dutiful daughter.
Last Saturday, her very first in the new southern world, Catherine swam in the ocean. Instead of heading off to see the monuments, she had decided to find holiday indulgence and enjoy the hot weather. She watched children leaping in the surf and sun-worshippers posing their brown bodies, stretched unselfconscious, on the new-moon arc of Bondi sand. It had been a day awash with light, rather like this one, and the sound of the sea falling onto the shore was nothing like home, but a kind of joyous plash! as the water curled and foamed and dispersed, a blue muscle, turning, and a commodious body one might rest in. She wondered if this was how sex felt for a man, to be surrounded, to be held, to be dashed somewhere, gasping.
Luc, she decided, would love Bondi Beach. All that flesh and the mystery of such an immersion, one’s body buoying, the currents, the kiddie-excitement of a breaking wave.
She had seen the body-surfers flying prone on the angle of a swell, following the ridge of the water, their heads bonneted by froth. Energy and massive churn pulled them to the shore. She had seen children no older than eight fly towards her on blue boards. They lay on their bellies and held out their heads like turtles, and smiled as they fled past. Everyone’s face was bright; everyone glistened and was animated.
And she had seen a woman her age swim directly towards the horizon, her arms turning in assured and rhythmical strokes. There was a moment of envy; to swim like that. And a moment of terror. To go so far out, to push the body into distance. As she lolled in the churning shallows Catherine resolved to take swimming lessons. She would be that woman, on a kind of journey, going far out into the ocean.
In the summer of the year following Catherine and Brendan’s political deal, their mother took them to the village of Ballinspittle, to see the moving Madonna. Not the others, just them. They needed a miracle, Mam said, to show them back to the Way.
Children in the village had witnessed the outdoor statue of Mary opening and closing her eyes and moving her hands in the tiniest wave, and their fervour and testimony attracted pilgrims by the thousand. All over Ireland people had heard of this marvel, and then all over the world. Some said Our Lady had actually taken a step forward, in a diamond of white light, radiant with grace; others that it was a nod or a blink or a wee tilt of the head, a body-message to the faithful. The Spirit was among them; it had only to be witnessed.
On an overcast day in July, Mam, Catherine and Brendan boarded a chartered bus full of nuns to take them to the miracle in County Cork. Brendan and Catherine sat together at the back of the bus, feeling ill with the journey and shuddery with every bone-shaking jolt of the road, and were surprised by how loudly the nuns chattered and the topics of their conversation. Mam sat up the front with an old biddy and looked particularly pious. It felt like forever.
When they arrived in Ballinspittle they found the place invaded: ‘Every Irish eedjit is here,’ whispered Brendan; ‘every sad fuckin headcase.’ Pilgrims were everywhere, spilling out of cars and buses. A public address system, from which prayers were broadcast, was in full crackly voice. There were little stalls, selling holy objects made of plastic, and toilets set up at the base of the statue. The Virgin Mary was disappointing, truth be told. A figure in cast concrete, ringed with eleven light-bulbs that signified her halo, she stood quietly in her little grotto, twenty feet up, and seemed obdurately disposed not to move at all. Catherine and Brendan stood where they were told and looked up at the statue. But nothing moved. They stood for ages and ages, with Mam looking too, and stood even when rain began to fall and others went for shelter.
‘It takes patience,’ Mam said. ‘It takes patience to see what is true in this world.’
Mam bought them each a keyring souvenir of the event, and some Lourdes holy water for Gran, and a little badge with Mary’s face, but her children could tell she was mightily disappointed.
‘We didn’t go in the right spirit,’ she said softly. ‘Our hearts weren’t open.’
Catherine hugged her mother and wished for her sake that the Virgin had danced a jig and blessed them all in a strident yawp. Or better still, just raised her white hand in a silent gesture, the way the priest does, quiet-like and calm and well-understood, at the shuffling, slightly sorrowful end of the holy mass. Just that: the simple, direct, loving code of the hand. It would have sufficed. It would have offered her mother meaning.
Mam hugged her back. It was a rare moment of concord.
Brendan also felt sorry for Mam. ‘It was me,’ he said meekly. ‘I spoiled it for you.’
He glanced at Catherine to show that he cared for his mother, though she knew of his scorn and his atheism and his belief that Mam was merely gullible and had wasted their money. She loved her brother for that pretence, for trying to comfort Mam. And for the fact that he cared what his little sister thought.
In the evening Catherine saw her parents take a small glass of sherry together – another sign that all was not right with the world. Illnesses, wakes, these were the sherry occasions. They spoke together in low, hushed voices. Da smoked a cigarette. Catherine knew her mother was describing the trip and the nuns. She was telling him of the low-wattage halo and the little stalls selling trinkets; she was reconvening the details so they would make a good story. Da nodded and looked serious. In the yellow light of the kitchen there they were, her parents sharing a trip they could not afford, entering into the limited circle of their own experience, having never moved beyond Ireland, and little beyond Dublin.
Only years later did Catherine realise what an important event this was for her mother, to journey with other souls to perform an act of witness, to see her own credulousness multiplied among the faithful, all looking at the same time in the same direction, all waiting for epic-scale confirmation and a fan of light from heaven. Afterwards, Mam spoke often of Ballinspittle, so that eventually the sense of failure fell away, and what replaced it was a tale of communal hope and the ardent wish to see something not on the telly. Her tone was solemn and prayerful: ah, you should have seen them, all lookin’ there together, all eyes fixed on her face, and the faith of it, and the love, even when the rain came down, and we all stood there together, patiently waiting, patiently waiting in the rain for her holy sign.
After Ballinspittle Catherine and Brendan were linked inseparably. It marked the understanding that they were truly alike. The older girls bothered her less, content to know Catherine was peculiar, and the youngest, Ruthy, only seven years old, was sure her big sister was special because she had been taken to see the statue. Catherine had given Ruthy the moving-Madonna keyring, and was pleased to see how treasured it was. Mam seemed to worry just the same, but practised a measured forbearance, apparently resigned. Catherine felt her relinquishment as a kind of relief; she was liberated now into a career of self-understanding.
Catherine paid for her drink and left the café. The dandelion fountain shone. She paused and gazed into it. A sixties’ object for sure, when water features popped up everywhere in modernist cities, smoothing crude box-shapes and ugly façades, nostalgic for genuine and replaceable nature. This liquid dandelion stood alone, a memorial, perhaps. Not beautiful, exactly, but buoyant somehow, light, luminous and strangely sensual. There was something in the falling of fine water drops that reminded Catherine obliquely of snow; and snow reminded her of the story Brendan loved above all others.
At his funeral she had read from James Joyce’s The Dead. She had stood before the casket, in front of all those people, and Mam crying her eyes out, and her sisters with their hankies, and the priest just behind her, hovering with disapproval, and read the last paragraph of James Joyce’s short story. The congregation in Our Lady of Victories looked distracted and confused. Some thought she was gone in the head to read out this something-or-other, blatant and disrespectful and certainly unreligious blather, but it was what Brendan would know, his literary world, and what he would have liked. And how did it go, now, the section about snow falling general, all over Ireland? Over the plain, over the hills, over the dark Shannon waves; then over the cemetery where the beautiful young man was lying buried? And that fellow, Gabriel his name was, looking out the window:
His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
Upon all the living and the dead. This was how Brendan haunted her, visiting at unexpected moments, falling over her, as if from the sky, smoothing her own definition. So that Catherine might be rising from coffee in a good mood and remember his funeral, so that she might be walking in the sunshine in another country entirely, so that she might be heading for the Opera House or wishing she had written to her mother, and think suddenly, irresistibly, of the intimate presence of snow.