She walked towards the quay in opalescent light. The city closed down, prosaic, the horizon grubby with clouds and promising nothing. It was like this sometimes: as if Sydney was within her, an idea she carried around, vaporous, unexamined. Until, on evenings like this, it revealed her to herself. She was hollowed out, impervious. As torpid as the streets.
Usually, the city was enough: a scoop of bridge as she rounded a corner, the harbor shattered by sunset. Her friends in the back bar of Lorenzo’s talking of protest, of marches, the poetics of action. She loved these nights, the conversation and argument, the taste of insurrection. They made her brave. From the Telegraph building to Hunter Street she would be optimistic, glad. The fight rising in her at the door of the bar, the defiance she was born to.
But tonight the air was precarious. All sandstone shadow, smudgy. She thought that time was like this too, a spongy edge, imprecise, as close and as far as memory. As her dead mother’s face. The world had turned her a year older in summer. In four years, she might die. Her mother had died at thirty-six; the calendar led Pearl towards it like a dirge badly played, like this vagrant shadow she moved through, that moved through her. As if she was porous, as if there was no substance to her at all.
She recognized it now. Fear, familiar as a friend, precise as a knife. Not of death, though for years it was what she expected: to suffer as her mother had. This might be worse, this prospect of slightness, of falling short. She’d felt its weight since she was fourteen—there would be two lives to live, the one she was given and the one her mother lost. As if loss could be recouped somehow, her family restored. As if she could save them.
Her day had begun as they always did: with the smell of newsprint and the faces of boys. There, among bold headings and columns of type, they waited: serious, smiling, patient. She ignored them at first, skimming headlines and leads. Turned pages on the potential in their eyes. But each day one, at least, forced her hand. A frantic calculation: how old, what suburb? An ache in her, whatever the answer; her brothers were there, in every young man who passed in the street, stepped off the ferry, gazed out from a page of the Telegraph.
Today it was footballers. Preseason training, so they still looked coltish and soft, a bunch of local lads mucking around in the park. One reached for a pass with a thief’s intent; she’d leaned in until the photograph blurred, until the face was no longer Jamie’s as he swiped the milk money, or Will’s as he eyed the twins’ toast.
Six years. With each one, her fear grew: they wouldn’t know her. She wouldn’t know them. Boys changed, grew jawbones and beards. Their eyes: had they sharpened with their faces and their sorrows? Had the small soft bodies she’d helped feed and wash grown hard against the memory of her? Or would they still hold her shape in new muscles in their arms and their legs, in the hands they’d once placed against her cheek at bedtime: Sing to us, Pearlie? They’d been two and three when their mother died, adolescents when she’d seen them last. Now they were men. Or nearly. Who may not want to see her at all.
She stepped up her pace towards the harbor. That morning, as she closed the sports pages, her contact had called. The phone shrilling in the early quiet of the newsroom. Her heart flapped in her chest; it could only be one person, though he usually called at midday, when the newsroom rang with noise and adrenaline. But when she lifted the phone his voice was no different: soft, subterranean, as if it flowed over pebbles. There’s a bus at six thirty. One sentence, the call over before it began. She held the receiver hard against her ear. Sometimes he paused before he rang off, and in that gap she could see him, hunched at his desk, lips parted over what was unspoken. His pale bureaucrat’s face flushed with the euphoria of risk.
A current of anticipation bolted through her, but she lowered the receiver slowly. As if his breath was contained there, all he had to tell. What have you got? she wanted to say. Is it the date, the time? But back in its cradle the receiver was mute, the Bakelite dull and indifferent. So was the fashion feature unfinished in her typewriter. She glanced at its plain sentences, its tedious tone. Lifted her fingers to the keys. A cigarette burned down beside her.
Now she crossed Pitt Street in a pulse of office workers, the last of the light in her eyes. Turned up the hill to Macquarie Street for the pleasure of old buildings, the Mint, Sydney Hospital, Parliament. Then the library. Below her the new ribs of the opera house reached up, bleached bones against the paling sky. The building failed to lift her tonight; it looked like something broken, too difficult to fix. Perhaps, as some said, it would never be finished. Her father might be pleased; a monument to politicians, he’d said, peering at the sketches in the Herald years before. But Pearl had looked at the artists’ impressions and even then felt her heart shift. Look carefully, Da, she’d said quietly. Maybe it’s a monument to us. But like some in the newsroom—mating turtles, they laughed, a collapsed circus tent—he wouldn’t be swayed.
At the top of Bent Street she looked left and right. Sat at the bus stop until her man appeared, tie loosed, hands in pockets as arranged. A middle-aged public servant, his countenance dulled by routine. Expressionless. She stood then, and as he came up beside her she tilted her face to the sky. Even so she knew his lips barely moved as he spoke, pressing lightly over brief syllables. Melbourne, he said. Next Wednesday. Tenth of March.
He took out a handkerchief, wiped his face as if to clear some residue, a letter or noun that might betray him. Glanced at his wristwatch, then turned and walked away. Pearl watched him go. His suit ancient and loose, the pants shiny with wear. Chifley wore his suits until they were threadbare, her father once told her. People loved him for it, the old prime minister: his humility, his insistence on staying with them. Unlike the new one. In this way Patrick Keogh expressed his hatred for Menzies without having to say his name. It was like a code of honor, an act of resistance, this un-naming. So Pearl had learned her politics by inversion, always the positive rather than the negative, the heroic rather than the bastard. It gave her an optimism that couldn’t survive her childhood. In that moment at the bus stop, she hated Menzies more viciously than her father had.
A bus appeared on the other side of the road. It snorted and swallowed him, the man in Chifley’s suit. Pearl stood in the vacuum and watched the bus disappear. The date ticked dangerously in her head. Tenth of March. Just over a week. In eight days the first marbles would roll, the first ballot for conscripts for Vietnam. Menzies claimed otherwise, but they all knew: it was a lottery, a deadly one, and if you were twenty and had the right birthday, the right number on a marble, you’d win a free ride to the war.
Jamie was twenty. And might have the right birthday. And next year, so might Will.
The harbor was a spill of darkening water. She sat on the grass at the end of the quay and watched the sky absorb its own color. Tried to catch the precise moment when daylight switched off. An old challenge, and she never won; tonight she turned her gaze from a lumbering ferry to find the city already faded, shrinking into shadow. When she thought of her brothers this was just as she saw them, their shapes retreating, faded to gray. Their faces refusing to be fixed.
At seven she pushed herself up and walked to a phone box on George Street. Dialed a number inked onto her hand. Ray. Her closest ally in the group. An hour later, in the dim light of the back bar, she listened to him announce the ballot date as if the leak was his own, as if he’d conjured it, as if he’d worked the contact himself. A seam of quiet triumph in his speech. It had to be like this, she knew, to protect her and the contact, but she hated Ray for whole minutes, for the fidelity of his voice, the conviction in his eyes, how plausible he was. She looked to the ceiling, sickly yellow with smoke, and then to the floor. Closed her eyes against what would follow: the murmurs and barks of outrage, the calls for placards and protests. It felt suddenly predictable. Empty.
Voices rose and fell. Disembodied, they took on a menacing quality, as if they’d emerged from the rough darkness she’d walked through, the grubby streets. A dog’s warning growl, a tubercular cough. Then Brian’s unmistakable snarl: For fuck’s sake, what did you all think? That they’d cancel because we didn’t like it? She opened her eyes, turned to look in his direction, watched him lunge at a beer jug and refill his glass. We all knew it was coming, he said, accusing the room. Now it has.
The air fell momentarily still. Then, as if at some signal, it became fraught, the voices charged with adrenaline. Usually, Pearl’s voice would be with them; instead she glanced to the door, longing to leave. She could not feel what they felt: the charge of energy beneath the anger, the excitement. It was paradoxical and familiar—they would all say the draft was criminal, a bastard act, but in truth the news enlivened them, validated them. She’d felt something similar in the newsroom when reports of a disaster broke. A crackling intensity, almost erotic in its heat and rush. And a collective sense of purpose, of responsibility: to translate a world confirmed again as incoherent, random, impersonal.
She inched sideways, dipping her head, making herself small. Tonight nothing felt impersonal or random. For Pearl, the news had assumed human faces: Jamie’s, Will’s. Standing there, she’d realized. That’s what they wanted, everyone here: the human faces of conscription. If her comrades learned about her brothers, knew their names, they’d fall upon them as surely as a journalist would. The movement needed emblems. Examples. Real men, not numbers; flesh and blood.
But they didn’t know about them. And wouldn’t. The decision hardened in her: Jamie and Will would not be used. She was surprised by the strength of her own conviction. No one would know, not here, not at work. She had a sudden image of Henry at the news desk. Sleeves pushed up, eyes narrowed to a looming deadline. She would not tell him about the boys, and she would not give him the leaked ballot date. The decision sat heavy in her stomach, but there were old scores to settle. She looked away to the back wall now, as if her thoughts were traitorous and might be visible, might be read.
The temperature in the room had turned feverish. Plans were made, tasks allocated. She had to leave before her face or her silence betrayed her. She skirted the discussions and made for the door. As she reached the back hallway a voice followed her, male, drunk: Another leak, Lois Lane. A cough or a laugh, she wasn’t sure. Baby, you keep screwing Superman.
She was almost ready for him. Without turning she said calmly: Keep screwing yourself. But the coward was gone.
She stood at the rail of the ferry, pulled her hair into a band against the wind. Gulls shrieked in their wake: too late, too late. To one side of her a young man pressed a transistor to his ear and a woman slipped a foot from her shoe. Brian’s words rang in her head: What did you all think? That they’d cancel because we didn’t like it? Yes, she’d wanted to say. Yes. A part of me thought it couldn’t happen. But the gulls kept crying the truth: she’d known for months that it would, they’d all known. In the years since her mother’s death she’d found a mechanism for forgetting, a lever that turned her blood cool. She felt it in her body: it switched one Pearl off and another on, a girl without history or conscience. A girl unencumbered, trying life on for size. But in three words, tenth of March, her history had spoken back.
Darkness thickened as they passed Bennelong Point. In starlight the new structure was a strange oceanic creature mantling the land. Each head turned to it, a gravitational pull. God help us, said the man next to her. But now Pearl could see how its new curves pulled at the water. She’d heard the first thing Utzon had done, before he thought about design, before he began to draw, was to consult the sea charts for Sydney Harbour. It made sudden sense: the building was marine more than earthly. From this angle, in this light, it was not a structure but an eruption from the sea. An act of nature rather than man, a disturbance. She stared at its massive base, a plinth for a sculpture or a ceremony, and thought about surfaces, the familiar faces of earth and water, what lay beneath. About the architect’s way of seeing.
The ferry moved them on. Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, the finger wharves of Woolloomooloo. Garden Island. She counted them off, a prayer over worry beads, as the boat arced towards Manly. Then turned to see the last of the Harbour Bridge. As a child she’d thought some kind of magic resided there; that as her ferry slipped beneath the exact midpoint of the arching steel and concrete, she was at the fulcrum of a great mystery. In that very moment, caught, frozen, she might be altered. Might become steely. The grinning face of Luna Park soon told her otherwise: she and the world were no less ordinary, no less fragile. Still that vault of bridge and sky made it seem possible that her very cells might change.
Nearly thirty years later, she could pinpoint the day they did.
It was her first week at the Telegraph. She’d come to journalism late, after years of waitressing and night classes, the School Leaving Certificate she’d missed out on, courses in typing and shorthand. But her love for it was instant and profound. From the beginning she was obsessed by the process; the notion of a story, what it was, what it could do, the risk and potential of it. Ideas flared in her dreams.
She’d tried to explain it to Jamie and Will. Work, she’d shrug when she finally got to the orphanage at Croydon, and it was true. The people she’d met, or interviewed: the Lord Mayor, Dawn Fraser. They sat on the grass of the boys’ playground and ate the Violet Crumbles she always brought, but their eyes were blank. Kick the ball, Pearlie, they’d say, and she didn’t resent it. They were children; they couldn’t know how it was. That walking into the newsroom was like an erotic encounter that made her forget everything else. Even them. In those early days, she couldn’t wait to start each shift. Had met each story and interview like a lover. Each new day made her skin spark, swelled her sense of herself. This new Pearl, enlarged by confidence, surprised her too. What she was capable of. Steeliness.
They’d run away from St. Joseph’s before Jamie turned fifteen. As if they’d lashed out in their loneliness and confusion, the lengthening weeks between visits. Even then, they had suspected: her new life was bigger than they were. They must have known they couldn’t compete. But couldn’t understand. Now, ten years after she’d first walked into the newsroom, she couldn’t account for it herself. Wasn’t she their Pearlie? From the day their mother died, the love she’d spent on them. She’d emptied herself, hour by hour, so there’d be no room in them for suffering.
Before long they barely remembered their mother. A shadow figure, another baby at her breast. Then nothing. Only air stretched thin with crying, Pearl holding their father’s head against her. Then their Da’s ravaged face as he packed their singlets, their socks and coats into bags. And Pearl, her hands grasping theirs as they left the house, for the last time, though they didn’t know it then. Wave to Da, she said as they walked to the big black car, and they would never forget how shiny it was, how thrilling and terrifying to climb onto the back seat. Pearl between them, her mouth a straight line. Wave to the wood pile, the orange tree. And they did.
She’d had one phone call from them after they fled, their voices turned manly to stop her worrying, or to stop her chasing them. A friend’s uncle ran cattle in Queensland, they said. They’d get work fencing or mustering, as laborers or roustabouts. You can’t ride, she reminded them, gripping the phone, trying for calm. They’d never been outside Sydney. The closest they’d come to horses was the milko’s mare, shoveling the steaming piles she left every morning into buckets for the vegetable garden. You’ll kill yourselves, she said.
It’ll be great, Pearlie. Will laughed down the line. Jamie said, I’ll look after him. But Pearl knew who was likely the scared one, the one who’d break his bones. Look after yourself, Jamie, she said. We’ll write to you, they promised. Write to your Da, she said. But part of her—guilty, unexamined—was relieved.
They did write to their father. A year later a note in a grubby envelope, postmarked “Bedourie.” “We are fine and brown as nuts,” Jamie wrote. “We have learned to ride and fix fences. There is steak three times a week and jam tarts.” In Will’s ragged hand: “Da, there are ant hills big as houses. It is hot as blazes. I know how to cut balls off bulls.”
Then another year later, two?—she couldn’t remember: a postcard from the coast. Somewhere north of Brisbane, all tinted blue sea and bathing beauties. It was hard to tell whose writing. But through the scrawl she could read she’d been wrong about Jamie; it was Will who was vulnerable after all, especially in a fight. A small misunderstanding with a ringer, the card said, Will’s wrist in a cast. When it mended they might make for Victoria. They were living on mangoes and fish.
That was all. They didn’t know about their father’s accident, the stroke that had felled him, right there on the foundry floor. That she’d moved him to the care home and let the house go. If there’d been more cards or letters they would have gone to the dead letter office, she supposed, though for months she’d checked with the new tenants, collected notices and bills. When Menzies had brought in National Service, she’d begun to search for them in earnest: electoral rolls, telephone books. Queensland, Victoria. She couldn’t find them in the phone books, and of course they weren’t on the electoral roll. They were eighteen and nineteen then, not old enough to vote. To get a passport, buy a house or a beer. But they could be forced into army fatigues, she thought now, biting her lip. Given a gun to kill boys just like them, boys they didn’t know, had never seen.
The ferry slowed. Voices rose and fell around her. Two men brought their palms to their hats, an orchestration of limbs. She looked up, and between half-heard words and phrases, in the shifting space between earth and sky, she saw it: the boys had been abandoned by them all. Mother, father, sister. Through death, grief, selfishness—in one way or another, they’d each disappeared, left them. Leaving was what her brothers knew. What they expected. She watched Manly materialize in the gloom. Of course, they wouldn’t bother coming home.
From the ferry terminal she walked quickly towards the beach and the rectangle of redbrick flats on the hill. Sounds reached her through lace-curtained windows and thin walls: muffled conversations, music from a tinny radio, a child’s sudden cry. But when she turned the key in the back door of her flat, there was silence. Just the clock ticking in darkness. She hurried from one light switch to another, as if brightness and color might have their own sound, their own weight.
Fluorescent tubes revealed rooms unchanged by the past few hours: there was the brief shock of crockery still cupped on kitchen shelves, photographs safe in their frames, records in their rack. They did not reassure her. She pulled off shoes and stockings, poured a drink. Took it to the back step, sat in its time-worn curve and peered into darkness.
The night garden was thick with dreams. Beneath the earth, beneath the eyelids of birds, in the air that came like an exhalation from the sea. Pearl listened. It always felt closer at night, the slump and hiss of waves like an old man breathing. What did old men dream? Did they remake the past, did they weep in the night? Did they dream old lives, angels, the faces of those still unborn? She knew what her father would see in his sleep. Not angels but the faces of his boys as they played in the garden, ate their porridge, waved to him from the welfare’s black car. She’d watched him through the back window as he’d stood, staring, a hand extended as if the dusty tracks were a line he could pull to bring them back.
She leaned forearms on knees, sipped scotch. Her head reeled with the stars.
Where are you? She said it aloud to fix them in their flight, the galaxies of possibility. Looked to the Southern Cross: an old habit from childhood, her mother’s finger tracing its shape in the night sky. Alpha, beta. In her own lonely year at the convent, sleepless in a narrow bed, she had sought out the blue blaze of its most southern and brightest star. Acrux, Sister Jeanne had told her, and the name and the star became an obsession. Whenever she found it she could hear her mother’s voice.
The alignment of words and stars. She straightened. Pictured the dark stone of the convent, wooden floors that reeked of phenyle. The pinched alabaster faces of nuns, their sour eyes. And Jeanne, the youngest, one of them but separate, as human and ordinary as the children. She read books, told stories, laughed like a drain. Covered for Pearl when she snuck off to see the boys. And then failed her when they ran.
She tilted her head to the Cross, burning bright. Closed her eyes, wished on Acrux. Or was it a prayer? For absolution, for mercy. That’s really all we want, she’d read somewhere. Now it felt true. She opened her eyes to the merciless heavens and saw there was no choice. She would have to start with Jeanne.
All night the shush and beat of the road. Axel lay in his bed and thought that maybe the human heart was pneumatic, a fist of rubber, no more fragile than the tires squeezing bitumen outside his window. But daylight unfurled him like a flag. He stretched his limbs beneath the sheet, spread his palms across his chest, the beat there relentless. Kaboom, kaboom.
He rose early and walked to Circular Quay, where he could sit with coffee and thick toast and watch birds wheel above the ferries. The water gray at that hour and splintered with memory, shifting in currents, dangerous. There were unguarded moments when he felt it in his body: the pull of dark water. Of immersion. Of nothing but a liquid embrace, a return, back, back.
He would emerge from these moments weightless. Lift his eyes, searching: a leaf would do, fine-veined. The press of air on his face. Or his hand on sandstone. Once, in the gardens, a ladybug, its miniature perfection. The tremble of the leaf beneath it brought him back to the world. His surviving self.
He had arrived in Sydney as summer was tipping over. Even then, everything he saw or touched felt warm: each place, each sweep of landscape or seascape was mediated by heat and light, and his body moving through it. In that way, he thought, he saw with his skin, felt his way with his pores, open or closed to the elements and this light. He had lived in the dark for months of every year, among shapes hunched in snow, made new by it, and strange. This, Axel knew, had made him different. He thought of these people whose lives clustered around the harbor, their houses with open windows and doors and balconies, everything flung wide so they took great gulps of the world. The new opera house, even half-finished, expressed them perfectly, sails hoisted in currents of summer air.
When he left Sweden, winter was conceding slowly to spring. The horizon a frail line of possibility once more in the early mornings. It was a fine string that tautened his dreams; he would stand at the window not knowing if he was awake or asleep. Outside the world was more than it could be, bigger than the day to come and the night just gone. Brimming.
But he’d always loved autumn most, those days before the rain came and everything was drawn in crisp outline: slate on a roof, fronds on a pine tree, a woman’s eyelashes. The details of things. Before the obliteration of snow. His body felt like a child’s then. Unafraid. Limbs loose, feet and fingers prickling with questions. He took long runs through forest and field, climbed trees before their leaves fell, high enough to see the village, toylike, miniature. Figures moved around as if they were singular, not part of this big pattern. He would feel a shiver of pleasure, watching.
On these adult excursions it was the child’s eye that surveyed and recorded, was imprinted with form and detail, the intricate curves and lines of the world. Once, surprised by rain as he wandered out of the forest, he ran to the bus shelter. Leaned against a post and watched fat raindrops smack onto bitumen. The realization sudden and sure: the glass candleholders his uncle had made were the precise shape of a raindrop exploding on the road, a liquid coronet. Surely it was every child’s desire to hold such a coronet in his hands, these two-second miracles splashed and strewn so extravagantly around him. To crouch and capture one, two, three in a curved palm before they died away. That, he saw then, was exactly what his uncle Lars had always done in glass: translated the shapes of nature, its sculptural language and form.
And so, in a different way, had Utzon. The thought leapt with the gulls from the rail of a ferry as he watched it tack a seam across the harbor. What more was this new structure than a lush shrub the architect was coaxing from the ground? Or shards of Copenhagen china? Like Utzon, Axel knew these shapes; he’d grown up with them, they were within him. Despite the newspapers, the grumblings in the street, the building had never seemed strange to him. Always it had reminded him of a bowl, newly shattered, and of birds. From the day he’d seen the model in Höganäs it had consumed him, beaten in his head like wings.
Now, though he had been working at the site for a month, though he’d walked the same path to it every day, it still took him by surprise: the tremor of emotion as he rounded the quay and saw the sails arcing out of chaos. As if he’d come upon a rare and beautiful animal in a stark landscape. There was no Swedish word to describe this, no English word that he knew; it wasn’t as simple as “awe” or even “love.” It was the clutch at his heart as he lifted his eyes to its curves and lines. Its reach for beauty, a connection between the human and the sublime.
He left the crusts of his toast to the pigeons and raised a hand to Yanni wiping tables inside the café. As he moved down the quay he passed other faces, familiar but unnamed, behind milkshake machines or piles of newspapers or flowers bunched in buckets. A spill of voices, a swell of leaves and petals in the strengthening sun. And now, something else on the periphery of his vision. A beat, an energy. There, behind the newsstand, words jagged into the air. They jerked sideways above a shifting sea of heads, placards held aloft to be read: “NO WAR,” “OUT OF VIETNAM,” “DON’T REGISTER.” The bodies moving beneath them at once languid and urgent, the faces smiling and snarling and smiling again.
More placards appeared, more words. Loud voices bulged into the space in front of him. He dug his hands into his pockets and turned a shoulder to the looming crowd, pushed and edged through the noise rising around him like a tide. Grimaced as his foot crunched another—Shit, man! a girl yelled—but one more push and he was on their flank. He turned then, an apology half-spoken. Förlåt. But the girl was gone, already lost inside the march.
Axel stood still. Sweat leapt from his pores. Jävlar! The curse mouthed rather than spoken as he breathed out, trying for calm. He tipped his head back, looked at the sky, wide and empty of trouble. His heart slowed. The moment passed. He released another breath and resumed his pace towards the point. He was, he realized, thinking in his own language. Every day he struggled to find meaning in this local form of English he was expected to use. Even alone in his workshed he fought with it, with words. Drawing, blowing, ideas spooling through loops and funnels of molten glass.
It wasn’t just a matter of mechanics, of alphabet and grammar, or even habit. There was something less tangible at play, something about the imagination, about feeling. He had grown into his craft as much through language as he had through tools; had learned it at sentence level, thinking in simile and metaphor, using image and emotion. He had begun to understand this at his uncle’s side, this link between language and art.
But symbol and metaphor were lost down here beneath the heavy hand of heat and lethargy and a vastness of sky and ocean and air. Beneath a particular attitude, he saw suddenly, one the protesters with their placards might sense: a kind of huddling around sameness, a retreat from risk and—despite the openness of air and sky—from exposure. He saw it plainly in the derision of Utzon in the papers, the growing clamor of voices mocking his vision. As if they were ashamed of a building that might reveal them, the soaring shapes of their dreams, the true interior of their hearts. As if they were afraid of grandeur.
Now he stopped as he approached the security gate, and looked beyond it to Sydney Heads. Listened. The sound of incalculable distance rang in his ears. It whipped around the rock of the headlands, to him the spine of some giant sea creature, its flesh flayed by wind. Everywhere he looked in this place he saw what Utzon saw. The drama of harbor and horizon, of cliff and ocean, and at night, the star-clotted sky. It held the shape of the possible, of a promise made and waiting to be kept.
How could such a place be named by this arid language then? The English he had studied at school had not prepared him for this country. Its sentences were without rhythm, flat, featureless. He understood well enough, the women especially, who spoke without guard. They were different from the women he knew at home. He wondered if it was a matter of sophistication or history or even weather, this difference. This leaning into or away from another’s sentences, or into or away from landscape, or surroundings. The things you were willing to reveal, what you were willing to hear.
Sometimes he would stand on the quay and let the streams of people part around him like water, and he would listen. Words, phrases, perhaps a whole sentence—and I said to her she’d be a bloody fool—and he would try to hear what was there, what was in the words that made these people. Did their language make them feel a different way?
Once, standing still in afternoon sun that slanted across the water, the moving bodies, he closed his eyes. And opened them to a vision: the new building lifting its wings above the land, the water, above all these heads that didn’t know, not yet, what it might say about them. How free they were to become who they were, or could be.
He picked his way around the site to his workshed on the eastern side of the podium. Out of habit he bent his head, looking for imaginary obstacles; he needed these few minutes to isolate his thoughts. His early work in the glass shed was solitary; for Axel this was essential. But the elements demanded it too; the mysteries of fire and water and minerals could not be roused if there was a crowd. This had been his first lesson in glass: the maker had to exclude the world, forget even himself, sometimes. You have to be present but invisible, like your soul, his uncle had told him. Axel was just a boy then; he thought the soul was a ghostly twin that lived inside people, in the heart or the head, a shadow person. Later he would understand that for Lars, for the best of them, perfect glasswork was the shadowy twin. They were constantly in search of the soul.
But that day, two decades before, the word fell into the dim air of the shed in Åfors and charged it, so that Axel felt as he did in an autumn field before a storm. Not afraid, but sensing its raw power, elementary, in the tips of his fingers and his feet. He looked for some clue in his uncle’s face, but it was unaltered, already turned to the forge. Axel did as he’d been told and retreated to a corner to watch and learn. To be invisible too.
The shed had been assembled near the water, away from the routes taken by most workmen and the storage areas for roof components and steel. This pleased him. He’d rarely worked in close proximity to others, or under their scrutiny. That would come when the work had developed its form, when its physical requirements exceeded his own hands. Until then his needs were not extravagant, he’d told the site manager by telephone from Sweden those months before. Furnace and crucible pot to begin with, benches and tables and hooks. High-quality sand. A maver.
Perhaps a desk and chair, he’d added after a moment.
There was a grunt at the end of the line. It’ll be basic, the man said.
But Axel could already feel the Australian sun at his back. That’s fine, he said, imagining light at the windows instead of darkness, glass pierced by the colors of the antipodes. He gathered his own favorite tools for luck, the clipping scissors and tongs he’d always used, and sent them ahead by ship.
Now he unlocked the door and went to the back of the shed, to a small table set away from the furnace. This was for thinking and reading as well as drawing; he did not believe this piece of glass could be properly designed on paper. Rather he would sit with coffee and write down words and phrases, or sketch a thought in lines and angles. There were various objects he had found as he walked to work—a piece of twine, a hair ribbon, a corner ripped from an old street map. As well as photographs of doorways, an advertisement for something called “brick veneer.” The city in various lights.
He tacked all these to a sheet of ply beside the table, along with assorted press articles: a woman who quoted Shakespeare for a shilling outside the library, laborers in a tunnel at the Snowy Mountains Scheme, Jørn Utzon sailing at Pittwater. Someone on the engineering team—Jack Zunz?—had passed on various reference books: Australian art and topography; history, both terrestrial and maritime; even novels. This pleased him. He had learned during his years of study in Stockholm, and his work at Åfors and Kosta, that design was rarely the result of one stream of thinking, one tool, one dimension.
Two years before, he had written Utzon a letter. Emboldened by praise for his own work in Stockholm and New York, Axel picked up his pen. I am a glassmaker from Småland, he wrote. My people, like yours, know water . . . Then he took a breath and made his offer. Six months later, a reply: I have seen some of your work, the architect wrote. Why don’t you come to Sydney? There was no concrete brief, but Axel knew what was required for the foyer of the major hall: the shape of an idea to match the opera house in its scale and its flight. A piece of art that might have its own presence or, like the building, transcend the possible, the partisan. Language itself.
Now, though he had been in Sydney for weeks, there was still no contract between them; he had not even met the great man. Other architects dropped by, engineers, various foremen. The commissioned glass was mentioned only in abstract terms, in queries about the adequacy of the shed and the information he had about Sydney, about Australia, about the building and its history. There was an understanding between them all, he soon saw, that the glass project would stand alone. That it would be an accretion of observation and reflection. That Axel would render thought and impression as surely as a builder rendered a house.
So at the furnace and the table, he experimented with shape and color, with ovoids and rings, blue, white, some of them clear, some shadowed like ice. He read and watched and walked the site, walked the city. Listened. Drew. The lines like an embarkation, a glimpse at a landscape already receding, so he had to look hard to keep it in his head. And to gather the courage to see what the lines might reveal, not just about what was in front of him, but within.
He thought often of Lars as he worked, as he translated the delicate geometry of harbor and sky, the stream of light. As he tipped the pipe to his mouth and his breath inflated the bulb of glass, malleable as a lung. The memory of his uncle had entered his own glasswork like language, become intrinsic to it, a kind of conscience. He could hear it: It’s there in your hands: light and heat and depth. And: Wait for the shift. In you and in the glass. The connection between the two. That, Axel knew, was where the secret of each piece was hidden, in this tension between man and glass.
Each day, when he looked up and saw that hours had passed, when he lifted his eyes to midday light at the windows, he would greet the others who, of course, had been in the room the whole morning. Not just Lars but his mother, his father. And Utzon. Always Utzon. He felt the architect’s presence as a subtle weight in his wrists, in his shoulders, in the play of possibilities as the pipe emerged from the furnace, in the first push of breath in its throat. Then it was just him and the work, the small miracle of the gather, clear and clean from the fire. He had to be wholly present within it, lost to all else, for its secrets to be revealed. The world retreated to a bowl of light and possibility.
Pearl woke early in dream-tossed sheets. Children had been trapped on buses, passed through windows to gargoyle faces, carried off into darkness. Her twin sisters. Were they? The straw-colored hair, inscrutable eyes. In the dream she had lost the use of her arms, watched on as they were taken, expressionless, looking back at her over the shoulders of strangers. No sound. They’d never made much noise, hadn’t even cried much as babies. But she’d wanted them to cry in the dream, to claw, scream out, fight. Instead they’d complied with their captors, or so it seemed. Her own arms stuck to her sides.
She pushed herself upright and reached for pouch and papers. The ritual of tobacco—pinch, order, roll, her tongue against thin paper—dislodged the dream pictures. They were never literal, she knew that. For days she’d been thinking about the Freedom Rides through western New South Wales. The black activist Charles Perkins, the protests at Kempsey and Moree. She’d tried to interest the women’s editor in a story about Perkins leading Aboriginal children through the gates of Moree’s swimming pool, where they had been banned. Was that it? She leaned back against her pillows and inhaled. Turned her face to the long sash window, where shapes emerged slowly from shadow. The nicotine did its work.
The burr of the telephone brought her back to the room. She levered herself upright, shrugging an arm through a shirt on her way down the hall.
Trouble is, the men in this country. Ray’s drawl, his lazy diction. He’d grown up poor in Marrickville and didn’t try to disguise it. His vowels remained broad and flattened, he seemed incapable of saying your or and, but beneath his street sweeper’s speech was one of the sharpest minds Pearl knew. She balanced the receiver between shoulder and chin, pushed an arm through the other sleeve. Pictured him, the crease of skin between his eyebrows, one hand raking his hair.
The army’ll make their sons into men, eh? That’s what they’ll say. Sort ’em out. Something, fabric or skin, rubbed against the receiver, then the snap of a struck match. Menzies is counting on it.
Pearl glanced up the hallway. Had she put out her own cigarette? Distracted, she said: Menzies is a fool. Outside, a kingfisher dropped one pure note through the cool air. She shivered, pulled the shirt close. Everyone knows.
An’ half the sons’ll think the same. He went on as if she hadn’t spoken. War’s a great lark. Adventure, women. She heard him exhale. They’ll be queuin’ up for their bloody ballot papers, you watch.
She wanted to say, not my father, not my brothers. But the lugubrious voice rolled on. Fuck these pansy protests, they won’t change nothin’. There was the grumble of an electric jug. We wanna harden up. He muttered something about work, then was gone. As usual, no hello and no goodbye.
She filled her own jug and put it to boil. His words in her head: They won’t change nothin’. It was true: the protests went almost unnoticed. The phrase “National Service” rang nostalgic in this country, with its images of clean-cut boys and bright metamorphosis: from untidy youth to uniformed men, bronzed, strong, responsible. Ready to fight for freedom. Who would reject it? In the factories and sheds, in Pitt Street? Her father, of course, she knew that. Patrick would see right through it.
Light pressed at the window. She opened the kitchen blinds. First week of autumn, the sun hesitant, shy as a bride at five a.m., her father would say. As a child she’d imagined a girl in a dew-damp dress, white as the morning, its hem grubby against the grass she fled over. Later she understood better, but on those mornings when she’d willed herself to wake and sit in the early chill with him, it was part of a fairy tale in which there was only the two of them, she and her father. She leaned close to smell his work shirt, shivering in her thin nightie. Shared his weak tea, watched the smoke from his durrie float across the backyard.
Her own rollies had never tasted as sweet as she’d imagined. She’d thought they’d be just like those mornings, which held the deep flinty smell of her father’s breath and skin, like the embers of old kindling. She’d searched for years for just the right tobacco, settling recently for a blend of plum and spice she found consoling, if not sweet. Those hours with her father reenacted in the rhythm of the match striking, the tobacco catching, the shape of thumb and forefinger around the smoke.
He could still manage one with his left hand. Every week, in a parlor wheezing with old men, she would slot a smoke between his fingers and wait as he raised it to his lips. The match lit an unalloyed pleasure in him, flushed the sorrow from his face, and on that first deep draft he would turn his head to her and smile. Crooked, fleeting. It didn’t matter. She would fill two hours with talk and politics, at least half of it on the scoundrel prime minister, all the while rolling and rolling, filling his tin with smokes to last a week. Filling the air with banter, anything but the obvious: the appalling absences, his wretched loneliness. For whole minutes, she did not have to look into his eyes.
No matter that Patrick rarely spoke now, that the stroke had taken his voice and his strength and half his memory. His eyes held everything, all that he’d lost. Spoke for him: where are my boys? Even the twins visited, bringing husbands and grandchildren and flicking the blond plaits they both still wore. They swept in and kissed their father and sat babies on his knee, then left again in a bubble of their own self-sufficiency. Pearl had never quite forgiven them their luck. To have each other, a mirror image, physical proof they were not alone. Patrick would smile his half-smile, his good arm around a baby, his gaze just over their heads. As if his sons might arrive at any moment.
She sipped tea. Relit her cigarette, brushed tobacco from her blouse, scattering the shreds of memory: her father’s voice, clear as a bell and as sure, at the kitchen table before her mother got sick, before Jane was born. Uncle Kevin was dead of the malaria he’d got in New Guinea, the stinking war still killing a year after it finished. Her father’s voice like crushed glass as he told them. He wiped a handkerchief across his face, looked around at their faces. And swore to her mother, to the boys themselves, even as they waved their baby fists: there will be no wars for my sons.
She walked into the Telegraph building at a quarter to ten. It was her habit to be punctual; she’d learned it as a teenager, keeping chaos at bay for the others and for herself. She’d found routine and order comforting then, a way to negotiate the days. A cushion against grief, against the appalling and sudden recognition, as she washed a bowl or pushed a broom into corners, that her mother was gone. She might cry then, hands pressed to her face, but the soft clack of the clock, the minute hand relentless, pulled her back to the room. The lump of mutton stewing, the sting of onion in the air.
In the partitioned cubicle off the main newsroom she collected the day’s edition and sat at her desk. She’d laughed when they’d told her: the women’s pages. The punishment so transparent, and all for one unguarded moment, her face caught and snapped at a protest. She didn’t regret it, even now, months after Menzies brought his midnight bill to parliament. There were few in the chamber that night to object, to hear him talk about “National Service” or “aggressive communism,” and it was too late for the papers. So they’d cobbled together a rally in Hyde Park the next day. On their placards: “IT’S NOT NATIONAL SERVICE, IT’S THE DRAFT!” And: “OUT OF VIETNAM!” A week later she was summoned before the news chief.
It’s too obvious, Pearl, he’d told her. You’re too obvious. You’ve forgotten the rules.
She’d sat opposite him in his glass-walled office. Screwed up her face. What rules?
Henry’s desk was littered with papers and notes and a dummy layout for the front page. He played with three paperclips, pulling their ends apart. Without fear or favor, all that. Remember?
She held his eye. I have no fear, she said calmly, and shrugged. And I don’t favor anyone.
He cocked an eyebrow. Depends on who’s reading. A hand in the air to cut her off. The protest was the last straw, Pearl. Heart on your sleeve, for all to see. He let a second tick by, a beat. Including the boss.
Come off it, Henry. The effort to contain her voice. That rally was on my own time. Are you saying I can’t have a private life? She tipped her face to the ceiling to hide her smirk. So much for democracy, she said.
So much for objectivity. He leaned forward. You’re a reporter, Pearl. You report the news, not make it.
She tried not to blink. Don’t patronize me, Henry. Her voice a low growl. We go back too far.
He had the decency to blush. Five, six seconds ticked by on the newsroom clock.
Finally: Look, he said, quieter now, pursing his lips. You know Bob won’t fire you. Just lie low in women’s for a while. All right?
She stood then but kept her eyes on him. Anger flamed in her throat. No promises, Henry. Then turned for the door. Over her shoulder: Remember that line? She didn’t wait to hear his reply.
That had been November. She’d measured the time by the stories she’d missed, could have no part of: the Wanda Beach murders, the ban on Dawn Fraser, Churchill’s death and funeral. The Rolling Stones. The Freedom Ride just a week before: what she’d have given to cover that. Some days were worse than others. A kind of grief possessed her: every few hours she would leave her cloister for yet more coffee from the cafeteria at the end of the corridor, but really to inhale the smell and feel of real news. Smoke and ink, the clash and banter of fifty typewriters, human voices rising and falling, and always the air of some impending drama, a kind of lull that was the newsroom waiting, holding its breath, even as its engines churned and composed, deciding the news of the day.
An unlucky error of timing: she looked up from the page to meet her editor’s eye. Pressed the stub of her cigarette into the ashtray, once, twice, taking her time. Pushed back her chair. Betrayed nothing as Judith briefed her: a preview of the Royal Easter Show, a chat with a charity matron, the weekly fashion piece. And—Judith was all apology—they’d forgotten the Recipe of the Week. Could Pearl dredge one up from the files?
The banality of it all—skirt lengths, hats at Randwick, the call to conformity—was like a dead hand on her shoulder every morning as she walked through the door. And there was the certainty that, as she searched old editions in the library for Rhubarb Crumble or Shepherd’s Pie, her colleagues in the newsroom were watching. The news editor himself probably, waiting for her to cross another line.
She typed up a recipe, grimacing over the ingredients for Spicy Meat Loaf, and finished a trite piece about fearful young women on shadowy beaches. She hated these stories. It wasn’t just the subject matter but their flattening effect, the way they turned real lives two-dimensional, like the paper itself. Objectified them, made them items to be read and turned away from, unlike the social columns, the display ads for frocks and appliances. Capitalist press, her father would say, it’s what they do, and lately she’d begun to understand what he was saying. That the newspaper barons were heartless, manipulative. Like puppeteers, pulling invisible strings.
At lunch she dropped a notebook into her bag and left the building. Wandered down to Pitt Street. The windows of Grace Bros. were all new autumn fashion; she wrote: “stilettos, pencil skirts, denim. Pillbox hats, rolled collars, Jackie Kennedy. Shrimpton, goddess of Carnaby Street.” It was a bit like thinking and writing in a foreign language. Pillbox hats? Her eyes went instinctively to her own knee-length skirt, the collared print blouse from her mother’s cupboard. She ran her hand over gabardine, firm across her thigh, a reassurance. She couldn’t bear couture.
In a phone box nearby she pushed a coin into the slot. The convent’s number carved into memory. She left a message for Sister Jeanne.
Back at work she filed her fashion story, then pulled out a folder labeled “Affront.” In the first weeks of her exile from the newsroom, she’d concocted a series on forgotten women writers. Good series were popular with editors—the regular guarantee of filled space on the page. A guarantee for Pearl too: they might protect her from some of Judith’s more vacuous story ideas. Already she had enough names to string it out for months: Kylie Tennant, Katherine Susannah Pritchard, Jean Devanny. Eleanor Dark, Christina Stead. Write one up, Judith had said, and I’ll see if it fits.
But Pearl had been delayed by the pleasures and disappointments of research. As she read, it became clear how interconnected the women were, how different their lives to those of their male counterparts. It was all too familiar: they’d all lived in captivity, caught in the prescribed role of caring too much: for husbands, children, parents. Into this crowded cage they still managed to squeeze writing. Good writing: in the thirties, she realized, they’d published more quality fiction than men had. While washing nappies, feeding elderly aunts, playing helpmeet to husbands. Pearl looked at her folder and then around the room. “Affront.” At the midpoint of the sixties, what had changed? She pulled out her notes on Jean Devanny and Kylie Tennant and began a tentative draft.
Time was sluggish. As the clock dragged to five, she gathered the files spilled across her desk. In the library she dropped them on the wide wooden counter next to someone else’s returns, plain manila folders tagged with subjects and dates. Then turned and walked back through the newsroom, listening to snatches of phone calls, conversations. Stopped near the news desk to eavesdrop. Something about the Works Minister, incomplete drawings, contractors. Tom, one of the boys on the political round, was trying not to shout at the chief of staff. This is the real story, she heard him say, as if he alone knew, not the blackfellas in Walgett, or Borneo or the bloody election. It’s that fool, Ryan.
Tom stalked away, still talking over his shoulder to those at the news desk. He raised his brows as he walked past Pearl. You watch, he said, to her and to the room. Utzon’s on a hiding to nothing.
There must be records. If they’ve had jobs, paid rent. She sat opposite Jeanne in the plain convent library, her thoughts derailed by the nun’s bare head. Or nearly bare. The heavy black and white wimple was gone. In its place a plain white band that exposed dark hair. It made her look a different creature to the one Pearl had known as a teenager. A woman with a woman’s feelings and thoughts. A woman’s body. Pearl’s own thoughts skittered away as she spoke. She tried to focus but was distracted by the nun, the way her eyes looked now, her skin, the movement of her head. Fluid, unrestrained. But somehow, less certain.
She found herself speaking in a different way. Felt a shift in the power differential; she was no longer the child, impressionable, naïve. May not even be, she realized with a start, much younger than Jeanne at all. She sat back in her chair, tucked her own hair behind her ear. Straightened her spine.
Jeanne frowned. You’d have to know what kind of jobs. The sort of work they’d done. Victoria’s a big place.
No idea. Pearl shrugged. They did station work in Queensland, years ago. Horses, fencing.
So they could still be in the bush.
I don’t know. Possibly. Pearl felt an old defense tighten in her chest. It gave her voice an edge she hadn’t intended.
Jeanne stood and moved to the sofa. Patted the cushion beside her, the familiar gold band on her wedding finger. They’re two needles in a big haystack. You could look up the names of some stations and ring them, I suppose.
Pearl ignored the implied invitation. She thought, not yet. For some reason I thought the church could help. She looked directly into Jeanne’s eyes.
The nun raised her eyebrows. Only if they were going to church. Her gaze steady.
I thought you lot had ways to find missing children. Networks. Files.
There was a two-second beat before Jeanne replied, two seconds that spoke what they couldn’t say. That they’d both been angry after the boys left, each blaming the other. The two telephone conversations they’d had at the time made it worse. Finally: Jamie was nearly fifteen, Pearl, Jeanne said levelly. That’s not a child.
Nearly fifteen means he was fourteen. And Will was a year younger.
And now they’re young men. Jeanne lifted her face to the ceiling. The crucifix against her pale throat the same one she’d always worn. She said: Pearl. I suppose there was an assumption, back then. That they’d be with you.
Pearl felt the color rise in her cheeks but she held Jeanne’s gaze. Well, they weren’t. And I had problems of my own then, Sister. The title a punishment they let hang in the air between them.
Until Jeanne spoke again. All those months, Pearl, and you didn’t come. They watched that gate down there every Saturday. They waited for you.
Late sun through the high leadlight window: it turned the air in the room crimson, yellow, green, and there was the smell of scrubbed floors, meat stewing. Children’s voices rose and fell, the plink of an untuned piano. Her stomach hollowed. For two seconds she was that girl again, crying in the dorm downstairs, missing her mother. Jeanne the one who came to her. Will’s nearly nineteen now. And Jamie’s twenty. It’s an unlucky year to be twenty. She paused, then spoke the nun’s name. Jeanne— Her voice cracking. Don’t you get it? Jamie could be drafted. And not just for the army. It would be bloody Vietnam.
A light flared in Jeanne’s eyes. The air broke open. Christ, she said. And pursed her lips, looked to the walls, the ceiling. As if Jesus was there, as if her savior could hear her and might intervene.
Pearl allowed a half-smile. Not sure about Him. I need concrete help now. She looked down to the floor, the dull boards, then up to the nun’s eyes. I lost them once already, Jeanne. I won’t lose them twice.
They walked together beneath an arching cloister. Pearl felt Jeanne’s hand slip into the crook of her arm, and looked down at the pale skin of the nun’s fingers, the scrubbed nails. There was something artificial about the clean surfaces, the smooth fabric of blouse, her unmarked hands. Why had she not noticed that before? As they reached the door Jeanne stopped, raised one eyebrow and smiled. We’ll find them, she said. We’ve done harder things. She glanced at Pearl. Like arithmetic. Like spelling.
Something in Pearl subsided. She turned and, straight-faced, rattled out a string of letters. O-r-n-i-t-h-o-r-h-y-n-c-h-u-s. The rhythm still locked in her throat. It was the way Jeanne had taught the infant class to spell, almost singing. Pearl, stuck in the convent that year, had been her assistant, collecting composition books, checking times tables. She hadn’t suspected that Jeanne was cramming her head with everything a motherless girl might need in the world outside. Spelling, grammar, a way of speaking. Lessons in applying lipstick. Blot ten times.
She smiled, self-conscious. As she began to move away Jeanne spoke again. You should try the Salvation Army, she said softly, as if she didn’t want to be heard. The Red Cross. They’re better than us with missing persons.
Fifteen years. She had gone from girl to woman and, in the space of half an hour, back again. Pearl walked down the curved stairway, through a sandstone arch and into a garden. The roses were in their autumn flush. Pearl’s senses reeled; her eyes heard color, her tongue tasted fragrance. At fifteen it was her consolation, to sit between beds of soft-cheeked flowers, rubbing fallen petals between fingers and thumb. Even then she’d felt it: a mild erotic charge. Now she stood still among head-high rose bushes and realized she’d been a bit in love with Jeanne back then. It wasn’t surprising: her adolescent heart had nowhere else to go.
She followed the path down the hill and past St. Joseph’s to the playing fields. Somewhere a clock chimed the half hour, folding through the air, metallic. And with it, Jeanne’s words again: missing persons. When did the boys become missing? What did it really mean? Without. Deprived of. Deficient. Aching for. Or: disappeared. Unaccountably not present. The words had a sinister edge, implied foul play. She shook her head. The boys were somewhere. They were not missing.
Perhaps it’s me. The realization like a bolt from the invisible savior Jeanne had invoked and believed in. She, Pearl, was the one who was missing: that other Pearl, the one the boys had loved, who’d washed their grubby limbs, adored them. That girl was gone, had been unaccountably absent. Had acquired a veneer to protect herself, a shell she could slip beneath, to hide from the predatory world. And it had prevented others from looking in. She hadn’t known until now that it had also stopped her from seeing out.
On some days, like today, Axel had to will himself to stop, to walk out and join the groups of men crouched with their sandwiches and cigarettes in mottled shade. Tea in thermoses, enamel mugs. Carpenters, laborers, steelworkers. They were still strangers to him; their informality and their ease with each other intensified his newness, his separateness. In his first days he had been introduced to many in the perfunctory way of the locals—a name and a nod—but their work beneath the podium or high in the air above his workshop distanced him. Though they were of dozens of different nationalities, in Axel’s head they constituted their own culture and breed, stronger, braver, freer than he was. Part of him wanted to be more like them; this was one of the things that kept him away.
He had met two Danes on Bennelong Point; they’d exchanged curt greetings in both tongues. Like the others they were not shy. They drank each evening with the other carpenters at hotels around the quay; he’d seen them in the bar below his room. And though he longed to use his language, to speak without doubleness, he wouldn’t with them. He already knew that with them he could not open his mouth and feel like himself. Could not utter words and sentences that would return him to the person he was. Beneath their accents they were as different to him as anyone else, and he’d invented himself as readily with them in Swedish as he did with others.
These two had been witness to Axel’s early humiliation on the building site—a ritual, but he hadn’t known it then. He’d been crouched at the edge of their group at smoko, drinking the sweet black tea a young laborer had offered him. He caught pieces of sentences: Fuckin’ commos . . . I’m not goin’ . . . they can all kill each other. A pause and then: Where the hell is Vietnam, anyway? Someone mentioned Singapore, New Guinea, names from the Second World War. Battles their fathers had seen, unknown and foreign to him. Axel turned a chip of concrete over in his palm, half listening, his thoughts elsewhere. Until a hovering awareness of eyes turned towards him, and a question repeated.
What did your father do in the war?
The tone mocking and familiar. He glanced towards it. Some current of aggression ran out from the man, looking for earth, and he felt it in the seconds before he replied. Milked cows. Surprising himself with irony. His voice even, the concrete turning in his hand.
Silence ticked in the air, two telling seconds. That’s great. The man’s eyes narrow, his lips hard. When someone asks he can say, I squeezed tits for my country.
Throaty laughter. Axel held his gaze. Long enough to see the Danes smirking nearby. Then he stood, threw the dregs of his tea on the ground as he had seen the others do, gave a short nod and walked away.
In his shed he slumped in a chair, and out of habit rubbed a thumb over his wrist, the gray estuary of veins. He’d been a child in that war; he had milked cows. So had his mother. His grandparents’ farm had fed them while his father was away, doing the work that was classified, even now. Still, that wasn’t it. It was the tone of the man’s voice, what it implied. That his father, like all Swedes, had done nothing.
He’d heard it before. First as a teenager, when he and his mother had taken a short holiday in Norway, years after the armistice. They’d been accosted by a drunk in Oslo and a woman further north. His mother had shielded him from the man, but he would never forget the woman’s face as she took their kronor at a railway kiosk somewhere outside Tromsø. The Norwegian countryside was still marked by the Nazi occupation, fields and houses scarred by fire. Swedes! the woman spat, when she heard their accent. I should charge you double. We paid for you in the war.
He’d watched his mother’s face darken. Her eyes. He was sixteen by then, with long legs and the voice of a man, but the woman’s words made him mute. Even after his mother had steered him away, leaving their våfflor and coffee steaming on the counter, he felt curiously emptied of words. Don’t worry, Axel, his mother said when they were back on the train. She’s right, they paid dearly.
The whistle screamed and the train began to move. She spoke softly then. She just doesn’t know what it cost us. She squeezed his hand and smiled. But I’m sorry about your våfflor.
The carpenter’s insult came back to him now as he emerged into splintering sun, and saw the Danes at work in the forecourt, making timber molds for concrete. Axel had heard about the architect’s demand: the concrete finish had to be perfect, nothing less. The exposed surfaces, Utzon had said, would express the building as much as its sails did. By habit Axel swerved to avoid the two Danes, though in truth he would have liked to watch their careful labor. Each man bent to the task, oblivious to the day, to their own tensed bodies, the entirety of the effort around them.
As he wandered around he felt the energy of the work in full swing. Sometimes he saw the site as an enormous compass, from which infinite readings could be taken. He need only take a step away from his previous position and a new line of sight would emerge, a new reading of the place. So each day he chose a different vantage point. In this way he gradually came to understand not just the shape of the land and the job, but the interaction between all the spheres of work.
He paused in the casting yard. Men in hard hats and shorts bent to the acres of concrete, sculpting. Rib segments, ridge beams: they assumed the shapes of animals or their carcasses, hides bleached by the sun. Some pieces colossal, bigger than three men, others boned with steel and delicate as a corset. Weeks before, he’d stood beside one of the men who worked in the air, or so it seemed, installing rib sections and riding the hook. Jago, he said, offering his hand. They both stared at the scene before them, until Jago surprised him with tenderness. They look like the future, he’d said, arms folded. Axel glanced sideways: the face was soft, serious. This man had his hands on these giants daily, and still they were not so familiar as to be ordinary to him. They agreed they were already beautiful; their forms, what they suggested. And grinned, each recognizing something in the other. The interchange dislodged Axel’s guard, and an invisible barrier slid away, at least with Jago. A tentative friendship was born.
Axel took his cue from these shapes and forms, seen through Jago’s eyes; it was in this way he might organize his own work. It might be sculptural in the same way the building was, the thinking as well as the form. This was what Utzon wanted, something alive to the eye. In the gloom beneath the concourse, Axel could see what the architect meant: what had begun as a mundane assembly of materials—sand and lime and pebble—was now a thing of beauty, a ceiling of ships. Sitting here was like being underwater, looking up at the hulls of twenty boats floating side by side. Or the corrugations in mudflats left by a departing tide.
Until then he had thought concrete brutal. Used internally it was a material of expedience, easy and cheap. But here it was tactile as fabric, evocative as wood. He spread his palms wide on the surface beside him and wished he could reach up and touch the ceiling, absorbing its calm energy, what it spoke of: strength, beauty. Workmanship. In this way the building emphasized its materials but also its surroundings, made them more themselves.
Everywhere he looked, this is what he saw. Even the men, shirtless, their helmets tipped back from faces as open as the sky. They bent to their work, or spidered over the giant ribs, and in all of it—their sweat and argument and their deep attention—they were transformed too. Beautiful, authentic, precisely themselves.
He bought a sandwich from the kiosk near the car park and sat with Jago and the other riggers in the shade. The day was hot. Too hot for March, said one of the locals, could melt your insides. As he spoke he fanned his face with a discarded newspaper. Not your insides, said another, nodding at the expanse of stomach exposed by a blue singlet. The man with the paper ignored the barb. The others chewed their sandwiches and pies. Then: What’s wrong with these people? Pages skittered across the ground and the man turned his head, spat. Drover’s dog knows what the problem is—bloody architect’s never here.
Axel looked down and away. As if the man’s voice was a solid thing, its aggression wounding: Never bloody here, the man repeated, perhaps fearing they hadn’t heard. And he gets paid a fuckload more than we do.
The paper had fallen open on a story about some plywood mock-ups, the minister’s refusal to pay “exorbitant” bills from the local manufacturer. It was the third story in as many days about the blowout in costs and the lengthening projections for the building’s completion. Axel felt a tightening in his stomach, beneath his ribs. Even the men, he thought. Or some of them.
Hang on, Clarrie. It was a young rigger who worked high in the air, maneuvering rib sections into place. A precarious job, and the men did it without harnesses, their bodies moving like extensions of the cranes. Have you ever looked at the place from up there? He spoke in a low drawl, leaning back on his elbow, a smoke burning down between his fingers. His grubby hard hat beside him, marked in felt pen: Johnno. It’s bloody beautiful mate. I tell you, it’s like—he shrugged—I dunno. Like some other power dreamed it up. Someone—the cigarette traced an orange arc above his head—up there. He glanced around. You know? The others blinked gravely, avoided his eyes. It’s fuckin’ genius mate. Genius. That’s what we’re paying him for.
Silence, like the tail of a bright comet. It stung Axel’s eyes. He wiped them, hoping no one saw. To disguise his emotion he picked at the slices of bread in his hand, the odd contents of his sandwich. There was something yellow and viscous on the cheese that didn’t look or smell right. Jago leaned towards him. Corn relish, he said quietly. It makes me cry also.
A general shuffling then, soft moans as men stood and stretched, balled up sandwich paper, and wandered off into their afternoon. Axel bent to retrieve the discarded newspaper and Johnno’s voice lifted over their heads once more as they dispersed: But it’s time we all got a pay rise. Eh, Clarrie? We’re fuckin’ geniuses too.
The tenth of March dawned an ordinary day. No different. The heedless world: it could still take Pearl by surprise, that daily suffering and triumph left no visible trace. Mothers died, children disappeared, and still the world turned, the moon rose and slid away. In the newsroom the relentless hum of story, as if each edition brought that world into being every day. But today the preoccupations of the women’s section were shadowed by the weight of her own.
She sat with an atlas, open on Indochina. Burma, Malaya, Korea. The final a and its upward lift. It made the names delicate, feminine. Vietnam was an arthritic finger pointing south; no musical a, but still she could see a girl, oval-eyed beneath a wide bamboo hat. Rice fields feathered behind her. Pearl ran her palm over the map: the bone of the eastern mountains, forest green to the border, flecked with villages, unpronounceable. Did that make it easier for pilots to drop their bombs? If you couldn’t name a place, if its letters refused your attempts. She’d seen anger flare in people when they couldn’t spell a word. Couldn’t find their way to meaning. Perhaps war was a failure of imagination, she thought. And nerve.
She closed the atlas and returned it to its shelf in the library. Stopped to hear the midday bulletin on the police roundsman’s radio. Standing there, staring at gray carpet, she felt the air thicken. Some inner gravity tipped and wavered. She kept her feet planted. But the bulletin reported only the spin of wooden marbles in a barrel used for lotteries, for games of chance. Loud protests on the footpath, chanting and yelling. She imagined the demure façade of the government building made somber and furious by the lack of decorum.
There would be no announcement about the numbers, she knew that. Still the day had fallen heavy around her, expectant, like the day of an execution. She shivered as she subsided into her seat, and put her hand to her forehead as she would to a child’s, testing for fever. A wave of nausea rolled through her. Years before, she’d sat in the newsroom and felt this roiling apprehension when a young boy was kidnapped off a street in Bondi. His father had recently won the opera house lottery. She’d stared at the boy’s photograph, the gap-toothed smile that was also Will’s. At the time she hadn’t understood her reaction; she’d waited obsessively for news of him, cried when the police reporter told her Graeme Thorne was dead. He was just a boy, an innocent, younger than her brothers.
She picked up the phone now, asked for a line. While she waited she ran her fingers over typewriter keys, searching for meaning in the familiar: a s d f / ; l k j. These days she barely glanced at the keys, could type blind and fast, rarely faltering. Now the pads of her fingers traced over the letters as if they were code. The faint indent in the vowels, a e i o u, and in t, in s. If she closed her eyes and waited, perhaps they’d spell out names, the numbers of those chosen. As if the machine was a Ouija board. As if some evil or sorcery was at work.
News? Suze didn’t bother with hello.
No, nothing. Her voice toneless. Maybe, she said, it’s not really happening. Maybe they’re making it all up. That was exactly how it seemed: as if somewhere in Melbourne, in an anonymous room, a group of men was playing with magic. One press photograph had been allowed, but one photograph meant nothing—she knew how subjective photographs were, how malleable. No more truthful than drawing, than writing. They might have taken it yesterday. And who knew what happened after the one photo was taken? Or before? No one was there to see. No witnesses.
Yes, they might just sit down with a beer and decide which numbers they want. Or don’t want. Suze struck a match at the other end, exhaled. Maybe they won’t pull them from the barrel at all.
Pearl was silent, imagining.
If you can’t see something—if you don’t believe in it—is it real? Suze laughed softly. It was an old joke between them, a line from a children’s story, used to excuse one or the other for bad behavior, or to deal with hard things.
Pearl stroked the black keys, stared at her own fingers. Magicians pulling numbers from a hat, pulling cards from a loaded stack. Waving a wand to make people appear or disappear, as if it was all a cruel trick. Maybe that’s what they want, a kind of fake innocence around it. As if they’re not responsible, just following orders, as if it’s out of their hands.
They both fell silent. At last Suze said: What about the protests?
Who cares? Pearl meant it. In her whole body she could find no interest in the politics of the day, the machinations of dissent. She told Suze she’d let her know what she heard and hung up, then stood and went straight to Judith. Anger boiled beneath her skin, flushing away the nausea. I’m not well, she told her, and it felt true; she’d been lamed by the day and its potential. Judith examined her face over cat-eye glasses. You do look off, she said. And went back to her list. It’s nearly five. Go home if you’ve filed. Pearl threw a cover over her typewriter and left the building.
The rule was, she would not call. If there was urgent reason, she knew where to find him: from Monday to Wednesday he caught the five-thirty train from Central; the bus at six from Macquarie Street on Thursday and Friday. He would always, he said, be five minutes early.
She found him standing behind a pillar on the main platform. Anonymous in brown suit and narrow tie. She wound her way through the waiting crowd towards him, stood as close as she dared. Not a flicker of response in his body or his face. After a minute: The numbers, she said, looking at her shoes. The heels were scuffed. It’s personal. Then looked up and straight ahead.
He turned his head away. Perused a poster for carpet shampoo on the pillar. The month? The words dissipating in the air like mist.
Her own voice a whisper: February.
No sign that he’d heard her, no twitch or nod. His face as blank as every other. She became aware of bodies moving, proprietorial, towards an approaching train; he joined the queue for the door and was gone.
Two days that stretched to nothingness, in which every worst scenario was probable. She ghosted through them, alive only in the depths of research for Eleanor Dark or Kylie Tennant. Their extraordinary fortitude, their guts. Their open criticism of men and society, its treatment of women. At night she drank enough to ensure deep sleep, the sleep of the dead, her mother would say. Shrugging off headaches in the morning.
Late on the third day she packed her files and checked with the wires reporter once again. Nothing. The phone rang as she approached her desk and she answered it in her peremptory way: Pearl Keogh. No embellishments.
A vacuum that wasn’t quite silence. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath. The world shriveled to a bubble of air around the receiver, her hand gripping its curve, the ragged edge of a manila folder on her desk. Yes?
His voice down the line then, reciting numbers. For the seconds it took she did not breathe. She knew this because when the phone clicked and buzzed she could feel only an ache in her chest, a pressure that released itself on the breath she finally drew. Sounds returned to her then, the hum of traffic, tack and ping of typewriters, the rush and pump of footfalls all through the working building. She bent her head, smiled without knowing, ran her hand over thighs and knees. As if she’d left her body for whole minutes and just returned. She breathed in again, out. Dialed Suze. There was no number for Jamie.
Axel leaned on his elbow, his eye skimming the shed floor. Everything he had done to date seemed not irrelevant, perhaps, but out of place, out of time. The glass shapes he had toyed with did not speak to him, not in a language that resonated with thought and feeling. Not with this building, its place here, nor with its designer’s intentions as he knew them. It was early days but still, he had hoped for more. He began to think it was he who had lost his way, his awareness of necessary context and connection. There were days when he felt unmoored, without history; even without skill. He looked over the medley of experimental pieces in which he had tried to evoke the sky and the sea, the dreamlike freedom and limitation of horizons, and struggled with blueness, with light. He was, he knew, second-guessing the architect, terrified of his potential to fail. There was so much he didn’t know.
A street map of Sydney was spread on the table at the back of his workshop. Axel folded it, pressing forefingers along creases, meticulous. The way to know a place, his mother had said, was with your feet, your legs. Even in winter. He could see her still, striding out where the snow was solid, skiing cross-country to drink coffee with a friend. Miles: she thought nothing of them. You should really taste that air, Anders, she’d say when she came back, as she shook her hair free of her woolen cap, took off her jacket. His father, in the corner chair with a book, would say nothing, but there would be the trace of a smile behind his pipe.
It was late morning. He locked his workshed, the map in his hand. In his mind’s eye he could see his path: through the gardens, down to Woolloomooloo, up through Potts Point and around the bays—Elizabeth, Rushcutters, Double, Rose. Imagined shadows deepening through gardens and parks, the slant of sun on calm water. But as he pocketed his key and wandered through the site, stepping around steel and concrete, he was surprised by an almost empty forecourt, an odd absence of noise, and remembered the stop-work meeting. The draft, he’d been told the day before. To Axel’s blank face the laborer added, National Service. To get recruits for the army. He’d explained then: compulsory registration, the ballot for twenty-year-olds. Wooden marbles and birth dates. Vietnam. That word again.
He wandered halfheartedly towards the Botanic Gardens gate and the gravelly sound of a loudspeaker. Part of him wanted to skirt around the men and keep walking, to breathe calmer air. But the ballot, the idea that a man’s fate could spin and drop in the hands of another: this made him pause. It wasn’t the notion of National Service; he had done his own, like every Swedish boy, unworried by the specter of war. This was different. He thought of the marbles he had played with as a child, the rough glass rolled between forefingers and thumb. A boys’ game but they came to it like colonels, each intent on a win. Each strike planned with precision.
He slipped into the crowded circle of men. Their eyes were turned to a makeshift stage and the voice of a union organizer, his words made brittle by amplification. Not our war. Axel listened and tried to follow, glanced briefly around. Something in the tone of the meeting made him anxious. He tried but couldn’t locate its source; the sea of faces was alive with something he couldn’t catch, couldn’t access. He turned and began to edge his way out, murmuring an apology, his head down. At the crowd’s perimeter odd phrases rang out, a word, a low whistle. As he made open ground he briefly heard the union man more clearly. Reds under the beds—and a low roar in reply. It lodged in his ears, like the sound of an injured animal, frightened. He didn’t want to hear any more, but still words and phrases came to him, partial. We have no fight with . . . Any member who resists . . . It falls to us . . .
The world around him shrank and concentrated. He stopped. It falls to us. More words came to him then, nearly twenty years old but clear enough. The task falls to us. All of us here. His father’s voice, singular among many, not in volume but in authenticity; he knew that even then. Even then, crouching in the attic where he wasn’t meant to be, looking for hidden Christmas presents. It filled his boy’s heart with dread.
The same dark feeling churned in his chest now. Such words could be dangerous. The weight of them, the responsibility. He hurried on into the Botanic Gardens, shutting out all but the vault of sky and trees, his eyes searching out one perfect shape to calm him, one thing of beauty. The harbor intricate behind thatched branches. The line of a hill, consoling as a breast or hip against his own. He loved these gardens, the sweep of grass, the great knotted figs. Paths between plants so wild he might have dreamed them. Bird-of-Paradise, Dragon Tree, Cabbage Tree Palm.
More than once the shape of a shrub, an alignment of leaves, returned him to infancy; he wanted to crawl beneath them, look out at the world from their safe harbor. All his life, this allure of enclosed spaces. He’d tacked clumsy shelters into trees, into corners of the garden, the space between his dresser and his bed. Had emptied his wardrobe once, folding himself into it to read. He’d heard his father telling a friend it wasn’t so odd, not at all. Didn’t we all want the womb again? Invisibility, secrecy. The watery echo of our own heartbeat, unassailable.
Axel remembered these words too: spoken lightly, so that no one could guess their true weight. Six months after, his father was gone. Had disappeared, turned invisible, become his own secret. But not to Axel. These years later, he still sifted the clues in his head, all the stones his father had dropped for him. Water, the letter A. Anders, Axel, America, Argentina, Australia. The whole arc of the world. He would lie on the beach at Manly, the thud of surf in his ears, knowing the same sounds were felt by someone on the west coast of America. So that the great Pacific Ocean linked rather than separated them. He imagined the figure of a man, his feet in the sand, one hand raised to shade his eyes, backlit by the glow of California.
When he came back to himself there was an urgency in him, in the wind through the great fig trees and the percussive flap of leaves. He knew he would have to change his plans. He checked his wristwatch, strode down to Macquarie Street and into the city; was on a bus within ten minutes. He spread his map across the empty seat beside him. The coast around Sydney: its multiple points and headlands like fingers of seaweed floating out into the water. North of the harbor, there were roads that ribboned between beaches, the villages like loose beads. He leaned in close: as if the boatshed he sought might be marked, as a town hall might be, or a cathedral. A place of importance. But of course there was nothing to be seen.
The first time he’d made this journey he’d had to ask the most basic questions: bus routes, directions, times. He made inquiries at work, his face composed, unaffected, about places to swim, points of local interest, proximities. In the end it had taken hours from the time he’d left the Mercantile. He’d finally reached Palm Beach in the middle of the afternoon, too late. He’d stopped at a snack bar at the edge of the sand and was met with wide smiles and shrugs when he asked about Utzon.
Now the bus ducked and weaved through the streets of the northern beaches. He ticked them off on his map: Queenscliff, Harbord, Curl Curl, Dee Why, Collaroy, Narrabeen, Mona Vale. As the bus emptied he kept his finger firm on the wavelike pattern, moving it carefully: Bungan, Newport, Bilgola. Nearly there. He lifted his eyes to the horizon now, assembling a picture in his head. Avalon. Whale Beach. This horizon, these trees: this is what Utzon saw, what Utzon heard, what he smelled every day. The bus lurched, stopped. Palm Beach.
He walked about in dazzling sunlight. The air was granular, salt and sea spray. The usual cafés, a fruit shop, a window of bikinis and floppy hats. Nearer to the beach the smell of pies, hamburgers frying, suntan oil; a mix peculiar to him but not offensive. It seemed to belong to the shining young bodies queuing for food and milkshakes, or lounging on the sand, watching the surf.
The beach itself was a long crescent, curved to a rocky headland, its lighthouse a white smudge against blue. Houses clung to the hill directly behind the beach. But there were no boathouses. How could there be? The sea was like a hungry monster here, clawing at the shore to fill its empty belly. He stopped a sea-slicked young man with a surfboard under his arm. Again, the smile, the shrug. Sorry.
The sun was fierce; his scalp pricked with heat, his feet tender on blazing sand. He bought a soft drink in a green bottle at the beach snack bar and wandered up and down. Looking for hidden inlets where a boatshed might be, tucked out of sight, out of the public eye. There were many tall palms that might conceal something, but on close inspection didn’t. Perhaps it wasn’t a boatshed after all: how could a group of architects work in one of those? Finally, he went back into the village and asked: Mr. Utzon, his office. He’d been working there for months. Blank faces, one after the other. He sat on the grass near the beach. Watched low waves slump to shore.
In Hellebæk he could feel the man, at least. He’d gone looking for Utzon’s home in the tiny Danish village, again without directions or address, knowing only it had been built near a forest and a lake. That the house lay low against the earth, sat lightly, hovering. White paint and glass. He would know the architect’s house when he saw it, he was sure of that. He already understood its shape, its lines.
That whole area was so much like the countryside at home in Sweden. The forests of birch and old pine, the tides of leaves. Low wooden houses, birds circling. The sound of wind and water, water everywhere, the land a thin skin over an invisible sea. And in the end it didn’t matter that he didn’t find the man there. He saw him everywhere, walking in the woods, by the bulrushes edging the lakes, at his drawing desk. Drinking coffee, playing with his children.
It was the same in Helsingør, a short train ride away. From the waterfront Axel had stared at Kronborg Castle, the way it seemed to float above the water of the promontory, clouds roiling over its bulk. He’d tried to see it as Utzon had, imagining his opera house. As Shakespeare had, imagining Elsinore. The somber stone and turrets were solid, immutable, but when they were softened by clouds its scale became more human. He’d shrugged, as Utzon might have. Hamlet, after all, was just a man.
When he’d finally seen the plans for Sydney’s opera house, the early photographs of the building in construction, the shape of the harbor and Bennelong Point, he had thought: of course. He is the only architect for this project, this place.
Home from Åfors for a weekend after the results of the competition were announced, he told his mother about it, about the extraordinary design, that the winning designer was Danish. He was in the kitchen, brewing coffee, slicing cheese.
What is his name? she asked from the sitting room, reading before the fire she had lit that morning. Outside, the world was muffled and thick with snow. I haven’t heard the news for days.
Utzon, he said, lowering a tray onto the small table and settling down beside her. Jørn Utzon. He bit into an open sandwich, dropped a sugar cube into his cup.
His mother looked over at him, frowning. Utzon? She sipped coffee. I wonder if it’s the same one.
Axel raised his brows. Held a piece of salami out for Aldous.
But she was staring at him, saying, Are you sure it’s Jørn Utzon? Is he young, still in his thirties? When he nodded she smiled and picked up her coffee. Then it must be. Your father and I knew him. Briefly.
When? The question like a cry, so that Aldous lifted his head. Something in Axel’s voice had galvanized him, but he settled to sleep again. Axel cleared his throat noisily, coughed, his hand to his mouth. Bones in the cheese. He smiled. I meant, did you meet him here?
She lay her hand on his shoulder. It’s a long time ago, Axel. Jørn did some work with the Danish Brigade. They were smuggling Jewish people out of Denmark. You won’t remember. She paused, thinking. He was working in Stockholm then, in an architectural office. Copenhagen was occupied; he couldn’t practice there.
He looked at her over his coffee, trying for calm. She said: We didn’t work with him directly, not Anders and me at any rate. But we liaised with the group. He was very young, in his early twenties. We met him only a couple of times. But I remember the intelligence in his eyes, in his face. She held the cup in the fingers of both hands. And so now he’s going to be famous?
They had settled to their afternoon then, the books and newspapers he’d brought. Occasionally one would read something aloud to the other, make a comment on this or that, the light silence lifting and falling in the room like a curtain billowing from a window. His mother looked forward to these times more than anything, he knew; these weekends in his company, the conversation, books, the comfortable quiet. It was a mutual joy.
But gradually, as he sat there, he was seized by an anxious energy. His head alive with an insect buzz. It alarmed him at first; he tried hard to disguise it, finding more snippets to amuse her from the newspaper, teasing out her reactions so he didn’t need to talk. He didn’t much trust his voice. When the coffee pot was empty he fell upon it gratefully, went to the kitchen for more. None for me, älskling, his mother called, so he filled his own cup and added a measure of akvavit.
In the sitting room he picked up a book of poetry in German from a pile on the table. Rilke. Within ten minutes the words and the akvavit had taken effect, and the urge to flee the house, to find Jørn Utzon, had gone. But in the following months, in the years of his apprenticeship, he sought out every project Utzon had drawn, read everything he could find about the man. When he discovered the architect was immigrating to Australia with his family for the years of the opera house project, he knew what he had to do.
But now he couldn’t imagine Utzon on Palm Beach. There was no correlation; it wasn’t the same. Gulls strutted and cried, the air crisped over water that was constantly changing. The shore shifted, slid away with the tide. He linked his fingers around his knees. He might never find the place Utzon worked in. But he knew the architect well enough; he would prefer to be out, by the sea, walking on the headland, noting every curl and fist of foliage, bending to new shapes in leaf and flower, looking not at the ocean itself but through frames of branches and boughs at the splintered blue. He saw the whole through the partial. Everything mediated by its frame, leaving imagination to do its work. He loved him for that.
In the late afternoon he stood and brushed sand from his trousers. Walked to the bus stop and was not unhappy.
On the journey back a man sat across from him, bent his head politely, went back to his newspaper. Axel leaned across the narrow aisle. I hear the architect of the opera house has a boatshed out here, he said, a kind of working office.
The man lowered his paper. Yes, he said. Not at Palm Beach itself. It would have to be the around the other side, at Pittwater. Lots of boatsheds around there.
Axel nodded and smiled. Turned to the window. So, he thought. Yes. It made complete sense.
How much had she drunk? Days later, Pearl would remember the dizzying mix of beer and something sparkly, thrown down fast in joy and relief while they sat in the ladies’ lounge at the Federal. Two hours later, the surprise of unsteadiness, an unfocused walk to the bar, where she ordered a jug of water to stave off embarrassment and the stupefying tears that threatened, sudden, unforeseen.
There’s another ballot in six months. As relief gave way to an old pessimism. She tipped back water, refilled the glass.
He won’t be in it. Suze was serene in booze, sure of herself, infuriating.
While Pearl began to leak at the edges, emotions fragile as wet paper. She was determined to be bleak. And next year both of them, Will too.
It won’t happen. Suze looked her in the eye, or tried to. He’s only up for one ballot, Pearl. She emptied her own water glass, lowered it. Quit this shit, sweetheart. You’ve had good news.
Pearl squinted across the table. Well. You know me, she said. Hell, since I was ten. A grimacing smile. Old catastrophe thinking.
Suze leaned in, whispered. There was a catastrophe, love. No wonder you feel like that. She refilled her water glass. You were still a child when your mother died. We’d only just put away our dolls. Remember?
That one with the weird hair. I used to dream she came to life.
We were starting to outgrow things, toys, skipping. Even our mothers. Their old-fogey ways.
Pearl said nothing, so Suze went on. We wanted different lives to theirs. We used to sit around at school and tell each other how much we hated them. She leaned forward. Pearl, are you listening to me? It was a terrible time to lose your mother.
It was after seven. Axel slipped quickly through the Mercantile’s public bar, hoping to avoid Mrs. Jarratt—call me Olive—and make the bathroom before the other men. The various moods of Olive Jarratt were hard to predict. In the days after he arrived she’d stood back from him, regarding him as she would a wild creature that had wandered into her bar. Watched him from a distance, kept her conversation to a minimum.
You’ll get your tea every night, she snapped out the first time they met. Axel was diverted by her nostrils, which flared after every few words. Full board, except for lunch.
He’d been in the country just four hours. Tried for courtesy. Full board, he repeated.
Yep, she said levelly. All found.
He gave a twitch of a smile, a half nod, and didn’t move from the patch of swirling orange and brown carpet inside the front door.
Mrs. Jarratt sighed. You get your breakfast and your dinner here, she said loudly, as if he was deaf, indicating behind her to a room with plastic-covered tables and a sideboard stacked with white cups. Your room cleaned once a week and your sheets. The rest—she looked him up and down—you do yourself.
He dropped his eyes to his shirt and khaki pants, to check all was in order. But Mrs. Jarratt had already turned away. He watched her haul her bad leg towards the bar. Plenty of caffs in town to buy your lunch, she said, chin to her right shoulder. Probably a canteen down there at the Point.
But after several weeks he realized he’d passed some unspoken test. She relinquished her customary abruptness and began to speak to him in a monologue, comfortable with his silence. Would materialize beside him at any hour and resume a conversation of her own invention, on various subjects he rarely understood. Out of politeness he would nod, attempt an expression of interest and after five minutes feign an appointment or a headache. Now he took the stairs two at a time, praying they wouldn’t squeak.
He saw the letter as he unlocked his door. Blue airmail envelope, King Gustav Adolf on the stamp. On the back, Mor, in her plain hand. Nothing else. He placed the letter on the table; made himself wait until he’d showered, pulled a razor around his jaw and upper lip. As if she could see him. As if she was physically here, looking him over to make sure he was all right.
His room was plain: single bed, iron-framed, beneath a window that looked out over William Street. A small table and chair, a cupboard of dark wood, rough mat on the floor. Someone, a previous tenant he assumed, had left a wooden crate in the corner and two postcards tacked to the tongue and groove: Hong Kong Harbor jostling with sampans, the Empire State Building. He would stand in front of these, smoothing back lifted corners, seeing his father between the sails of the boats, or walking up 104th Street. Hands in his pockets, whistling perhaps.
Suze leaned across the narrow table. Listen to me, Pearl. This isn’t your fault. You didn’t start the war in Vietnam and you didn’t invent bloody conscription. She grabbed her hand. And you can’t save them from everything.
Pearl blinked and swallowed the sob rising in her throat. Only Suze could do this, pull tears from a well she thought was dry. She was sober now, or close enough. She pressed her lips together, bent her head. Then dragged a sleeve across her cheeks. I owe them, she said.
You owe yourself, Suze said. Plucked up her bag and tapped Pearl’s shoulder. Let’s go.
They walked through rain-slicked streets towards Lorenzo’s. Suze’s choice, and it took Pearl by surprise. Suze hadn’t been to a meeting in months. I like the cause but not the people, she’d shrugged when Pearl pressed her. They linked arms and walked without speaking.
Axel pulled a comb through his hair. Not wanting to sit in his room or force down the bitter brew that was the price of conversation with other men downstairs, he tucked the letter into his shirt pocket and walked to Lorenzo’s. The consolation of real coffee. He’d discovered it within days of arriving: Italian, too strong, but amid the accents and faces of Lorenzo’s Bar on Saturdays he cared less and less. He began to dream the aroma, beans in a grinder, the smell rather than the taste in his mouth. It had been like this at home: the smell of coffee had seeped into the curtains and rugs, baked into the walls by a fire that, in his memory, was always lit. Though it wasn’t, not in summer, he knew that.
At night the bar was noisy and alive in a way it never was in the mornings. The barman ground beans and tipped his head towards a door at the back. Meeting, he said.
Axel sat at a low table with coffee and schnapps, stirred sugar around in the cup. Picked up a Herald discarded on a chair. Yesterday’s, but no matter. He challenged himself to read to the end of a whole page without stopping at a word. But there he was again: snagged on a phrase, the letters impossible, his lips moving soundlessly over and around shapes that sat on the page like sharp stones in his path. “Thespian.” He ran his fingers over the letters, his tongue refusing the “th.” Eye and mouth conspired: he couldn’t pronounce it so he couldn’t understand it. Stupid. He gave up on the word, took a mouthful of schnapps. Browsed photographs instead. Then pulled out his letter.
Min älskling—always the same beginning. The one he used too: my darling. Each day Aldous lies by the stove and mourns. His tail lifts and drops when I come into the room, his eyes follow me but his head doesn’t move. Until the clock sounds three, the chimes soft as his paws on wood, and he is up and nudging my knee for the walk we take each afternoon. Can he count? Those chimes like a finger pressing, one, two, three.
Axel lowered the airmail sheets onto the open newspaper. Tipped his head back, eyes to the ceiling, where Aldous and his mother moved against planes of deep color, green, yellow, and then abruptly into white. What might have been fields and snow was just this, a background to the fine detail of his mother’s coat, her skirt and boots, the hairs of Aldous’s tail stiff with alertness and joy.
Of course, he misses you too. So we walk. Last week there were snödroppar beneath our feet, but they are all of spring so far. Fresh snow yesterday, and it stayed into the day, on branches and paths and chairs so we couldn’t sit out, Aldous and me, and I wanted to, even in the weak sun. I wanted to sit and breathe in brand-new air, feel the seasons change.
I imagine you there, Axel, in air that must be just like this. New. A place where surely change is daily, unremarkable. Is it? All that sun and warmth, it must make people brave. Make them kind.
His eyes went to the dark rectangle of the window. An old conversation: when Axel first went to study in Stockholm, at Konstfack, he and his mother had talked about art and change, how the best artists, the way they thought, could impact on the smallest thing, on every part of life. When you go into a place, his mother said one day, look closely at the buildings, their windows and doors, look for paths along a river, or the seafront. So that people can walk by the water. So they can look out. And in the woods, so they can look in. Seats beneath trees. Places for children to play. Do the doorways have overhangs, shelter from the rain, the snow? Or for your old mother—she raised her brows, mocking—to rest on her way up the street? She’d turned to stoke the fire. These things make people kind, Axel. They lift their spirits.
Axel didn’t need to be told. He’d sought out all these things early here, as he looked for the form his glasswork might take. He looked at what was there, but mostly he looked for what was not there. For the missing or the denied, at what might be hidden. This habit, he knew, was born in him. He came from a place where shapes and contours had more than one meaning, and where the language of myth was the language of every day. In places all over Sweden, in Norway and Denmark too, the line of a hill might be the ceiling of the underworld, graves dug deeper than memory and ordinary to the eye. They were not hidden but ingrained in perception and outlook. No hill was just a hill.
At first he’d looked for shapes as Utzon had. In nature and in the structures built for families, for communities, for deities. Kronborg, the Mayan temples and their stepped platforms, their sculpted levels linked to make a meeting place between heaven and earth. So Utzon said, at any rate, and Axel had understood at once. It was not about religions so much as narrative and sacredness, the ways the earth was inscribed. The Mayans had their own way of communicating this, ways of passing their myths one to the next through ceremony and story and the grandeur of stone.
He thought of his mother treading her own stories through the forest, and knew those ways were missing here. Australians appeared to have no myths of their own, no stories to pass down. He’d read about the myths of indigenous people, the notion of a Dreaming and the intricate stories it comprised. He wondered if Utzon knew these legends, their history in this place. Had he known anything of Aboriginal people when he designed his building? As he sat down and drew shapes that could turn a place sacred? Turn its people poetic: their eyes to a harbor newly revealed by the building, its depths and colors new to them, and surprising. Perhaps that was what the architect was doing here: creating a kind of Dreaming, a shape and structure that would explain these people to themselves. Perhaps the building was just that: a secular Bible, a Rosetta stone, a treaty. A story to be handed down.
If people would bother to look. If they’d bother to see.
From the room at the back came shouting and laughter, words shuttling back and forth. The language of debate, earnest, blasphemous; sentences ran together in waves over his head so he had no hope of comprehending. Only the occasional bullshit/fuck that or volleys of hooting laughter. It all made him queasy. He turned the pages of the paper, ignoring the “th” word but wishing once more for someone beside him, prompting him as his mother had, her hand on his face, turning it towards hers and sounding the word, her mouth careful, particular over a j or a z or an a. She would smell of whey, cardamom, snow.
The streets were suddenly cool after days of heat. They walked down Broadway towards the city, heels hard on the cooling pavement, pulling cardigans to their chests. The early dark lapped at buildings and faces, deepened the layers of sky. Pearl felt the occasional rub of her friend’s shoulder against hers, caught the wheaty scent of her hair, consoling as summer grass. You can’t save them. She didn’t believe her. Suze was an only child, with the insouciance of someone who’d been the sole focus of family worry or care. Their friendship had been made solid by this difference; they’d never had to compete.
Suze was the day to Pearl’s night, a child of wind and air. She’d walked through her days with an absence that drove teachers wild; fey, untroubled, bright. She flourished beneath the benign neglect of parents who loved her but largely ignored her. Pearl had fallen in love with their American accents, the calm of their household against the chaos of her own. The exotic smell of their kitchen—goulash and Welsh rarebit, curry and shortcake—became the smell of them. Suze was born exactly nine months after they’d landed in Sydney; there was no hint of America about her. She’s an Uzzie, her father would say fondly whenever Suze uttered anything about America. McCarthy can’t get her. A wide smile beneath his beard. She’d grown up without the obligation of worrying or caring too much. Pearl knew it made their friendship all the more miraculous.
Outside Town Hall station a man crouched in a ragged blanket, his hat upturned before him. Evening, ladies. The voice battered but his eyes were bright, mad, the gaze out beyond their faces and into the dark. They were caught in a funnel of people around the entrance, moving them forward. It didn’t matter. Pearl stopped, spun around, shuffled back. Dug in her pockets and bent to him, wrapped his fingers around a pound note.
Suze was quiet as they fell back into step. What? Pearl glanced towards her.
Seconds ticked by. There was the click and scuff of their heels on bitumen. Finally: That old man, Suze said. What did he say to you?
They slowed their pace towards the corner. He said, thanks sweetheart. Will you marry me? Pearl laughed softly in the air between them. But Suze was blinking, her lips pursed.
He’s all right, you know. The headlights of cars caught and released them, tires pressed over the wet road. Pearl turned. Suzy? People look out for him.
Suze moved her head from side to side. Slowly, as if there was something she didn’t believe, or couldn’t understand. It’s not him, she said, it’s you. You shame me sometimes, girl. She sniffed, threw her arm around Pearl’s shoulder. They walked wordlessly through the light gauzy air of the town.
There were more people in the back room than Pearl could ever remember. It was almost wall to wall. The ballot’s spooked everyone. Bridget shrugged when Pearl found her. And there’s talk Renshaw will call the election.
They fought their way to the bar. Male eyes on Suze, her long unruly hair, angelic eyes. Pearl handed her a scotch and leaned in close: Don’t mention Jamie. Suze frowned. Just don’t. She smiled and steered her back towards the group of women.
They came in halfway through Bridget’s sentence . . . the ones who get investigated? Those girls at Wanda Beach. Like it was their fault. Eyes wide above her glass. Like it matters what sort of girls they were, what school they went to. They bloody well had a right to be on the beach, whatever time it was.
Della shook her head slowly. Yeah, well I’d love to be able to walk around the harbor or down the beach at night, but no way. She waved her glass around. It pisses me off but I’m scared. She shrugged. I admit it.
See? Bridget barked. We move through the world in a different way. Men don’t think twice about walking in the dark or leaving a door unlocked, a window open. It’s fucked.
Pearl thought about her solitary walks home from the ferry, often late. The bodies of those girls in the dunes, the sand claiming them. If you never went anywhere alone, was that acquiescence? If you relied on one man for company, for protection, for sex?
So weird, she said. You take responsibility for yourself and you’re suddenly culpable, asking for it.
In the lull that followed they could hear pieces of conversations from the bar, from the back of the room. There was, Pearl knew, a wellspring of intention, a thousand plans for action. But even here, even tonight: the ennui she’d felt in the days before the ballot. It crept along her veins, made her blood sluggish. The mere mention of another demonstration made her tired.
Therese came to stand beside her. Personally, she grinned, indicating a loose group of men inventing slogans nearby, I don’t go anywhere without my hat pin.
Then Suze spoke, quiet, even. Something in her tone made them all turn. There are parts of a man, she said, that will shrink at the sight of this. Pulling a bright red penknife from her jeans pocket.
Sputtering laughter. The women dispersed then to join other knots of conversation; Suze kissed Pearl’s cheek and left to catch a cab.
Within an hour, the room felt too moody, its jokes and spats exaggerated, edgy. Pearl slipped out, needing food—peanuts, anything. Moved through the crowded front bar, scanning the room, nodding at familiar faces. Special Branch hadn’t bothered with Lorenzo’s yet, though she’d seen them weeks before, skulking behind trees during a gathering at the Domain. But there, in the corner, someone unfamiliar, alone with his newspaper. Wire-rimmed glasses and the face of a boy. Thatched blond and intense, bent to his reading as if his life depended on it. Or as if he didn’t have one.
From the back room came a general shuffling towards the street. Therese suddenly beside her: Coming? she said. Party in Darlo.
Meet you outside. Her eyes on the blond boy. He was older than Jamie, younger than she was. There was something in the tilt of his head, the line of his back.
She moved towards him, doubling around behind his chair. Dipped her head to his neck—Are you hiding, comrade?—and he raised his head without turning. But when he stammered an answer she felt it immediately—his voice, the smell of his skin, and moments later, his eyes—the bolt of pleasure, the kick in the belly, the flush of heat that came with wanting.
It had taken only a minute, two. The door behind him opened to a spill of men and women and noise. Words and phrases barreled into the air, shattered around him, so that Axel, trying to listen, felt partial too. An old fragmentation. He dropped his head to his newspaper, the consolation of still pictures, sentences in print.
Later it would be her voice he remembered, and her eyes. Or rather, a sense of being seen. They’d spoken but they hadn’t met. Their few words might fit into a palm, rubbed with a thumb, tossed up to feel their weight. Why then did he feel a transaction had been done, a proposal made and agreed to?
She said: Why are you hiding? Or some such. The voice low and sudden in his ear, conspiring; his skin pricked as if dipped in cold water. Then a woman’s cheek against his. Breath clammy with alcohol. A phrase of his father’s came first: I beg your pardon?
She was crouched behind him. An arm over his shoulder; he registered orange and brown on a sleeve, a marcasite watch.
Nothing to be afraid of here, she’d said.
He still hadn’t seen her face.
She squeezed his arm then, and leaned away. Gone. He let newsprint swim up from the page for two, three, four seconds before he lifted his eyes towards the door. Flecks of orange flashed like low flames among the figures moving out into the night. Which one? A dark head turned to his question—did he say it out loud?—the face serious and open as a friend’s. She held his eyes until the dark engulfed her. He sat staring for whole minutes as if she was still there. As if she had asked the question: Which one? Me, he wanted to say. It’s me. He swallowed the last of his schnapps, and the bolt of warmth might have been the drink or it might have been the joy and fear of recognition. Of being seen.
He’d returned to Lorenzo’s every night for weeks after that, a tremor of hope in his chest. But though the meeting room filled and tilted with sound and emptied again in the late hours, she wasn’t there.
On Saturdays Axel would walk the early morning streets, greet men sweeping the pavements or wandering home with stunned eyes after night shifts at the wharf. The sky the color of new milk in the pail. At the market he bought his scant supplies: fruit, soap, hard biscuits. Looked in vain for something resembling the cheese he loved at home. The old Greek women would smile and offer him discs of Cyprus bread. No cheese. Only the feta they made themselves, bitter to his tongue.
The sun was still low in the eastern sky, the day open. He was at once repulsed and drawn by the idea of the city and its watery edges: harbor and river and sea. Felt an obligation to know them, to see them in all weather, as if he was earning the right to be here. As if the right to create this glasswork demanded something in return. A concession, perhaps, to the people and the place, all that went before here, everything he didn’t yet know. To pay attention: like a kind of tithe or tax on his presence. It was, he thought, a small price for the return. He set off towards the harbor.
Down at Woolloomooloo, he stood to watch the activity around the old wharf. An air of dereliction attended the men and the buildings; even the water appeared faded and dull and, like the men, overworked. He looked closely: here, among the sheds and decaying warehouses, there might be a building suitable for the next phase of the glasswork, when a bigger space was required. When there would be a team of glassmakers, furnaces, annealing ovens. The glasswork itself. And Woolloomooloo Bay was not so far from Bennelong Point.
At Rushcutters Bay the air had turned silver, and the sun struck lozenges of light across the surface, lovelier than he had imagined. It was, he thought, as if the harbor had split into two different bodies of water, such was the change over the two miles he’d walked. Rushcutters itself was a different color: parks of rich green, trees that threw shadow and shade. He thought of the Mercantile and the scabrous streets it stood in. This place had once been no lovelier, he knew, the bay shallow and dull and swamped with rushes.
Before he’d left Sweden he had tried, unsuccessfully, to learn about the city he was coming to. He had been working in Malmö, making a piece for the town hall, but he could find little to help him in the library, or even at the university in Lund. So he’d caught the ferry to Copenhagen: if Utzon could see the sea charts for Sydney at the Australian Embassy there, then surely there would be maps and photographs of the place, press articles, general information.
Yes, of course, said an attractive young woman in a room hung with photographs of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and kangaroos in grassy fields. She had a charming accent, more formal than the Australian men he’d spoken to by telephone, more British. But still the flattened vowels, the twang, she called it. And blushed. He was offered pamphlets about weather and industry and beaches, and finally books that looked to Axel like school history texts. They were by and large a recitation of facts; convicts, explorers, wheat, and wool. One-dimensional.
He thought then he would have to walk in this place, as his mother said, and wait for the country to reveal itself. But then from the somber pages of a book passed to him by one of the architects, he learned something of Sydney’s early history. This felt important in a place so content with itself, so disinterested in how and why. He’d begun to read about the first days of the British colony. (“Colony,” he’d had to ask what it meant.) Here at last were scattered references to indigenous people, the groups who had first lived here, had hunted and fished and sung and danced here. On the very land, he realized, he worked and lived and walked on.
Now, at Rushcutters Bay, a startling story came back to him about the punishment of two convicts in the earliest days of New South Wales. The men were “flogged”—whipped or beaten, he understood—for stealing fishing hooks and lines from the local Aboriginal people here in this bay. But the beating was so severe that the natives, watching nearby, wept loudly, and a woman had rushed forward to attack the man with the lash.
Axel’s eyes flickered over the park and buildings, the gothic trees he’d come to know as Moreton Bay Figs. Did their great roots mingle with past times, now layered beneath this one? What was in this soil he walked on, beneath the polite paths and grass? At home in Småland he might have known, from his parents’ and his uncles’ stories, from listening and watching: a Viking grave, a buried village. But even though he looked for signs, as he trod the neat streets around Darling Point to Double Bay, he could see nothing but surfaces. The bright veneer of the place.
When he reached Point Piper he took a laneway past the yacht club. Stood on a miniature beach as the sun began to strengthen. Wished he could see through the earth he stood on, to find traces of the people who were here first. He wanted to see how they lived, hear them speak, hear them sing. He wanted to look into their eyes. To meet the woman who could not bear to watch a man flayed for taking a curved hook fashioned from a shell, a fibrous line. Even if they were her own.
Pearl could smell the place as she went through the gate, within minutes of getting off the bus: a pall of deteriorating flesh, of talcum powder and disinfectant and yesterday’s roast. The staleness settled on her as she walked the corridors; it took a long soapy bath, whenever she got home, to scrub it from her skin. The funereal scent of lilies on tables and sideboards deepened the offense. She hurried past them, trying not to breathe.
In the common room a radio was tuned to the races. She stood momentarily in the doorway, readying herself. It was hard to tell if anyone was listening; the dozen or so faces were blank, unmoved by the race caller whose cries ricocheted around and evaporated among the crochet and antimacassars and the thick, listless air.
Patrick Keogh was in his usual chair, close to a French door that opened to the garden. She wondered if, in the world he inhabited, this was part of his escape plan. Through the door before anyone noticed, across the lawn, over the high brick wall meant to deter patients like him. Who might regard the wall as a minor obstacle; who might measure its height against the depth of their own misery, and run for it. She watched Patrick’s still profile as she crossed the room; from this angle he might still be young, his mind and body strong, untouched by demons. Sadness balled in her chest, sudden and hard.
Sometimes he did not recognize her immediately. She had tried to get used to it but each time he turned a blank gaze to her a piece of her shrank. It was made worse by his eyes, as blue and fierce as they ever were. Hello, Dadda, she said now, softly, fingers light on his shoulder. The race caller’s voice trailed away to winner, favorite, odds.
Now Patrick twisted his torso, a mechanical man on low batteries. Regarded her. Seconds ticked on the black-and-white institutional clock. Clack, clack. Recognition crept to his eyes like a slow dawn. A twitch, a crease at the side of his lips, the closest he came now to a smile. She bent to him, kissing his forehead, relief flushing through her. The world tilted back into place.
Pearl pulled a chair close and took his hand in hers. Their familiar routine: they sat together as the last races were called, her father’s gaze fixed on the radio as if he could see the track, the hooves and whips and silk. Maybe he could; she hoped so. In between she made small talk, the weather, the garden, football scores. Labor’s chances at the election. As she spoke her eyes flicked over his clothes, his shoes, checking that his lovely, spade-shaped fingernails were trimmed and clean. She pulled a tube of moisturizer from her shoulder bag and smoothed it over the dry skin on his hands and his forearms, continuing her prattle.
She’d always known she wasn’t his. What she’d have given, when she was younger, to be his flesh and blood. It meant nothing now; she was so utterly his daughter in every other way. He’d made sure of it, making no difference between her and the ones who followed. And he’d named her. Though she was three when she met him and had been Shirley forever. The story of her renaming became part of her personal mythology: six months after Amy met Patrick, as soon as she was sure of him, she had introduced him to her daughter. And Patrick, bending to take her hand, had said simply, Shirley, is it? Well. Shirl the Pearl. Frowning gently at her, and at her mother. Then: Amy, that’s who she is. Just look at her. That’s her true name. He smiled like a priest, baptizing. Pearl. It was the moment, she knew, when he became her true father.
Now from the corner a ragged cry went up, the words harsh, unknowable. It was Billy, no older than Patrick, his face anguished, hands gripping the arms of his chair. He cried again. One or two faces turned to his and away again. Billy blinked at them, subsided, and was quiet. The rattle and chink of the tea trolley sounded in the corridor.
Pearl looked to her father, but his eyes were untroubled. Then: Where’s Amy? he said. Where’s your mother? This happened sometimes, his voice resuming the strength it once had and his forehead creasing. Is it onions she’s gone for? He swung around to her. We’ve onions in the garden!
Pearl squeezed his hand. She’ll be along soon, Da, she said. Don’t worry yourself. She’ll be here soon.
A woman in white appeared at their side with clay-colored tea in a thick white cup. Pearl watched Patrick’s fingers curl around the handle. Once it was the chains and hooks and ropes of wharf or foundry, a beer glass, fiddle strings. Now his hands around a teacup, this slight tremble, was enough to make her weep. She looked away. A magpie crept from the lawn to the patio, tipped back its head and caroled. Just look at this visitor now, she laughed, and Patrick turned his ear to its song. The remnant of a smile crossed his face. His dear face. Pearl swallowed hard. Amid all that had been taken from him—wife, family, memory—this remained. Just he and the bird, watching each other. She heard the low push of air as her father tried to whistle.
She stood behind his chair and wrapped her arms around him. The boys will be along, Da. The voice of a fourteen-year-old. She came out of nowhere, still needing approval. Did he hear her? It didn’t matter. The words had been spoken aloud now; he might remember what she said, he might not.
As she left she looked over her shoulder. His face was still turned to the magpie.
The bus plowed the ordinary streets back to the city. She thought about her parents, what love was. Their marriage had been like any other, she guessed, up and down, happy and besieged by turns. She had always seen her father as the hero in it, circling her mother and her moods, her wounded sense of herself. Amy’s face: the twist of her lips, the way they pressed over a joke or some displeasure; the lack of emotion in it sometimes, though that usually meant fury. It soon showed up. She’d skin spuds as if they were alive. Pull weeds from the garden, vicious, indiscriminate. Back inside, her hands snapped dry washing into folds. But much worse than that: the thunderous silences that rolled around a room, collided with everyone, bruising.
At these times her father would busy himself at the wood pile, or walk to the shop for a paper or a pouch. If she was quick enough Pearl would slip through the gate and walk with him, quiet at his side. After a few moments: She’s got a fine temper, your mother, he’d say, hands in his pockets, looking straight ahead. She would feel—briefly, softly—his palm on her head. At the shop he’d buy barley sugar twists.
But she saw now they had understood each other. As if the things that had passed between them had brought them acceptance, and a restraint—at least from Patrick—that meant there were few arguments. Only the kind of questioning Pearl loved, a kind of storytelling between her father and her twelve-year-old self, a way of winkling out his take on the world.
But why would the government hate the workers? What’s the sense of it, Da?
They think we’re below them, girl. Down there with foxes, with dogs.
But foxes and dogs are clever.
They are. But still treated badly, still at the mercy of men.
Why?
Maybe they’re scared of their cleverness. Their teeth.
You’re making fun.
I am not, Pearl.
The workers do the work.
They do.
You’re a worker, Dadda. Do they hate you?
It’s not personal, girl. They don’t know me.
And if they did—said her mother, clearing plates.
Her father frowned. Maybe hate is the wrong word. They need us, but they don’t much like us. They need us to keep in our place so they can keep in theirs.
Where?
All the rich houses. The swanky hotels now, the silver service. If they keep us beneath them they can stay on top. See? On the table he made a triangle with three matchboxes on the bottom, two on top, then one more. There’s always got to be someone at the bottom.
Pearl would keep that image for the rest of her life. The triangular shape of the world. What it was that pushed and pulled and held its fine point. It was there in her father’s fingers, the line of grease he could never scrub from his nails.
Axel’s Saturday walks settled him, endowed a kind of possession that driving never could. And afterwards, footsore, thirsty, there was coffee. Each week he sat at the same low table, the Saturday Herald on his knee, or a letter from home, or his history book. Today it was the paper; a habit, now, to check for stories of Utzon. Nothing. He turned the pages over again, making sure. Then a presence on the seat beside him. He turned. Early afternoon sun slanted through glass and settled on her face, in her eyes, so her skin was infused with light. She said: Pearl Keogh. And offered a hand. The name no surprise: she was luminescent. Axel Lindquist, he said, trying for calm. Grasping the hand, the strong fingers. On her wrist, a marcasite watch. She said, Shall we have coffee, though it wasn’t a question, and turned her head to a waiter.
He folded the newspaper and pushed it to the side. Then: You Swedes, she said. Meant to be good lovers, aren’t you?
Axel glanced past her to the street. They’d known each other precisely ninety seconds. But now her smile widened, opening up the still space between them. Is that so? he said, returning it.
They caught a late afternoon ferry and sat outside. The lowering sun washed over them, along the deck and the passengers leaning at the rails. In that mild air they spoke without wariness, words and thoughts considered and offered as evidence of who they were or might be. Something in the light, in the roll of water beneath them—in the very decision to catch the ferry—made them brave. Or perhaps, Axel thought later, it was the physical spark of their first sentences—Meant to be good lovers, aren’t you / Is that so?—that fired the air around them, took them beyond that to reckless.
A journalist. The reply to his question casual, the words snatched by wind. But he thought: of course. Her easy questions, the veneer of toughness she’d need in that world. Now she waved his own questions away, and asked him about his home, his work. So he told her about Småland as a way of answering both. About lakes strewn across the land like shards of glass. His province, he said, was merely paths between water, as if the earth was a veneer too. As he spoke he had a clear picture behind his eyes. The certainty he’d had as a boy: even when the sun shone uninterrupted from a clear sky, the land held a memory of water.
He’d felt a shock of elation when he realized the connection, the inevitability: that glass would be made in this liquid place. But of course I had known it all along, even as a child, he said, watching my uncle at the forge. Like a dragon, I thought then, breathing smoke and fire. This kinship of glass and water. So water itself became a substance, something to look through, and outwards to the world.
Pearl asked: What was your first piece? The first things you made.
He smiled a boy’s smile. Trolls, he said. With strange heads and large noses. And a jar for flowers. He felt color rise in his cheeks. My mother still has it. There it was before him, clear and unsettling as a dream: uneven, misshapen, the bubbled glass tinged green from iron in the sand. His mother coming through the door with flowers from the fields, setting them in the jar where their fragrance mingled with coffee, with cardamom. And another smell, sweet, acrid. Because, at the edge of the picture, his father, the tobacco tin open by his side.
He would roll the papers with exactitude, pass his tongue along the edges, tucking, tapering. Always one for his mother first. If it was summer they would go outside in the sun and crouch together like thieves. His mother tipping her head back and exhaling, his father twisting his lips to send the smoke sideways. Axel would kick a ball absently around the yard, pretend not to watch. But the intimacy of this ritual would stay with him, the casual arrangement of their bodies, the unison of breath, inhale, exhale, cigarette between thumb and forefinger, elbows on knees. He saw that they barely glanced at each other. It wasn’t necessary.
He turned to Pearl. Fine strands of hair, straw-colored, whipped around her face. There was so much I didn’t know. Don’t know. Still.
She shrugged. I know less with every year.
He squinted at the setting sun. For a long time I wanted everything to be perfect. I thought it was just about effort and skill. He stopped, afraid of saying too much. Of what he couldn’t say in English, not properly. How his glasswork had flowered into complexity, a way of shaping his yearning, of what he saw—the lakes, the shore and its paths, rain, snow. His liquid world. The terrible strength of water and of glass. Their fragility and beauty. I was just a child then, he shrugged.
Later, in her bed in a room that held the sound of the sea, he woke to find her eyes on him. Lying on her side, head propped on her hand. They looked at each other until she said, quietly: Nothing can come of it, Axel. Just this. Skin. Amnesia. She let her head fall to the pillow. It’s nice. That’s all.
He was dulled by sex and sleep. Amnesia? The word out of context, dragging at his brain. Then: You mean—a way of forgetting?
Yes. She yawned, her hand on her mouth and then on his chest. They spoke gently, as if there was a child in the room they did not want to wake.
Axel looked up at the ceiling, closing a hand over hers. For me, he said, it’s the opposite. With you my body remembered itself. As if it was—He turned his head to her. Fully conscious. Even my hip bones. My eyelids.
She frowned. Aren’t you conscious at your work? She thought of his fingers and hands, their delicate negotiation of her body and of the materials and tools of his trade.
Yes, of course. But only of the work, what it asks, what it demands. He paused. It’s different.
She thought about this. The thin curtain lifted and fell, an echo of his accent; the words settled on her skin. On the weight of her legs and shoulders against the sheets. She closed her eyes and turned to him. They slept.
In the morning they drank tea at a table by the kitchen window. Pearl tipped a matchbox end to end, looked out to the garden through narrowed eyes. She wore a permanent squint, Axel thought, wore it even in her sleep. At first he had taken it for interrogation, or an analytical attitude to everything from a government policy to a blade of grass. But perhaps it was not aggression so much as uncertainty. It gave her a fierceness she might need in a newsroom, but some men, he knew, would look her in the eye and see a challenge there, a glove thrown down. Jonas in the casting yard, for instance, would want to take her down a peg before she even said hello.
He smiled to himself: the local slang he’d absorbed.
What?
He shrugged. Odd expressions. Your language. Sometimes I think you have to learn it twice. English, and Australian.
But she was blank, quiet, a child pulled too early from sleep. So he kept his voice low. When I was very young, he said, I used to dream in words. No pictures. In the mornings I would tell my mother: älva, bil, ljusstake. Elf, car, candlestick. If she asked what they did I couldn’t say. Instead I would spell them out. His finger moved on the table, making word shapes. He watched her, followed her gaze. She didn’t speak. Tell me your earliest memory, he said.
Her eyes on the wood of the tabletop, as if his words were inscribed there. First memory. Her fingers on the matchbox. Tip, tip. Then she looked at him. Or first sense? Not sure they’re the same.
Seconds of silence as Axel sought the difference. But before he could answer: The smell of urine, mine, some other child’s. A sheet with a diamond pattern. A late storm—she glanced to the window—and the sky, split with light.
The word light held by the ticking air between them. Then: My father, she said. Her voice trancelike, removed. Leading me away from the smell and the crying.
Axel looked down, unsure he was meant to hear. It was as if she had told an old secret, or pulled something hidden from beneath the bed, so old she barely recognized it. He stilled the urge to touch her. Looked past her to the hallway, to roses on old wallpaper, faded, pale. There among them, his own father’s face.
For a long time I thought I’d dreamed that. The sheet, my father.
He waited.
It took ages to find the right questions. Eventually I asked him about that place, that smell. Had I made it up? He hesitated, my father, and then he told me. You had another life for a while, he said, you and your mother. Before I met you. Before you chose me.
Axel looked quickly around him, imagining the conversation in this kitchen, the child, the man. The shadows of other children.
There was only one answer I wanted. It was the only one he gave. He said, you are mine, as much as the twins are, Jane, the boys. My Pearl. Haven’t you always been?
She nodded.
Where are your sisters now, your brothers?
Pearl lit a cigarette and exhaled, waving away the smoke and the question. So he was startled by what came next. Lost them all. Her eyes, her voice once more her own as she told him.
Six children, and a mother dead from blood poisoning. A father drunk on grief. Pearl the eldest at fourteen, unable to stop the disintegration, the scattering to homes and orphanages. The baby taken by her mother’s youngest sister and the twins, even at eight, had each other. It was the middle ones who suffered. She told the story as if reciting from a school text. The words cold stones in her mouth.
She kept repeating two words, “the welfare,” as if they were obscene. This confused him. In his mind “welfare” translated to benevolence. Food for every child, warmth, medicine. Dignity. I don’t understand, he said, his hands in his lap.
She raised her eyebrows. No, she said, it’s different where you come from. Here it’s the people who take your children away. For being poor.
Homes, he heard. That were not like homes at all. Her brothers had fled the beatings and the loneliness. But I’ve got to find them now, she said flatly, before the army does.
More questions flared in him but he kept them to himself. They sat in silence. Then she pulled the empty cups towards her. Without looking up she said: And you, Axel. What’s your wound?
He blinked at her, tilted his head.
The thing that hurt you.
His face was a shutter that opened and then closed. I’m not sure—
My mother died when I was fourteen. She ran a finger over her forehead. See? You can read it on my face. That’s how it’s always felt.
His hands cupped together in his lap. Oh. Fourteen. His fingers laced on the table. You need her then.
There was the raw blue of sky and one bird, crying. She said, Yes, I did.
He let her words settle. The weight of them. Then: My father is missing, he said.
He told her about the work his parents had done in the war. Bringing Jewish people out of Europe. The White Bus movement, the Danish Brigade. Some vague and forgotten member of the Swedish royal family, doing deals with Hitler to free Jews from the camps. Clandestine meetings and voices he could hear from his bedroom, someone in the spare bed for a night and then gone. His father away for a week, a few days, and then, after Axel’s tenth birthday, not coming home at all.
I’ve never heard of the White Buses. She eyed him as if he’d made it up.
He didn’t flinch. No one—how do you say it?—made a song and dance. How could they? There were so many who were not saved.
Pearl plucked the cups from the table and pushed back her chair. Yes, she said. He heard her behind him at the sink, refilling the electric jug. He might have imagined it, but he felt the air turn raw, jagged.
Sweden was neutral in the war, she said. He could hear the click as she plugged in the jug, turned it on.
Her voice came to him as a soft echo, bouncing off the wall she faced and the familiar innuendo of others. He let it remain there between them, let the seconds tick away. Then: Neutral, yes. Which was not as easy as you might think, he said. And not as straightforward.
He dropped his hands to his lap, turned his face to the window. A bird hung there, its angle improbable, as it sought the syrup of crimson flowers bunched along a branch. The tree burned with color. Axel didn’t know its name. He was still disarmed by the notion that flowers grew on trees here rather than in the ground. He walked home some evenings beneath galaxies of red and yellow and ivory, navigating his way by them, cluster and constellation.
What is this tree? He turned as she spooned instant coffee into mugs. The odd brew another new experience, not wholly pleasant.
A cursory glance over her shoulder. Callistemon, she said tartly. Common bottle brush.
But Axel found their spiky plainness beautiful, the messy flowers steadfast in the wind and sun.
Pearl put the coffee in front of him and turned away. Got a meeting this morning, she said. I have to make a call.
Later, this is how she will remember it. The telephone on the hall table, her hand along its curve. The wind stilled, bringing the rush of traffic closer, a dog’s bark. So she might have imagined the click when she pressed the phone to her ear, a noise she will recall as one brief pipe of a cicada and the ear’s expectation of more. It was that expectation, an absence of sound rather than a silence, that turned her stomach. She was barely aware of returning the receiver to its cradle. Stared at it, and at her own hand, as if they might be contaminated. She turned to Axel and said: My phone’s been tapped.
No one could be trusted. Pearl knew this in her body. But it had bloomed into consciousness with her mother’s death, when a cleft opened up between her and safety. Suspicion calcified in her limbs. It had taken a long time for them to unclench, for any optimism to return. Loosen up, one boyfriend had said when she was nineteen, we’re not all bad. She wasn’t convinced, but something in his tone had nudged at her. It was, she saw too late, his unencumbered childhood; he had no reason to be fearful, no reason to distrust. He anticipated only safety and goodness, expected it in the world and in others.
She sat on a bus and looked at faces sliding by on the street. Her lips pursed over her own naïveté. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? All these people on the footpath, on the bus: they would vote for a government without rigor or compassion, applaud when young men were sent away to war. Or when spies were turned on neighbors, shadow people who dealt in secret dossiers and threats. They were all cheats and liars, and worse: they had turned her fearful again, paranoid even, terrified of what might be next.
Part of her, she knew, would be forever stuck at that moment in the flat. The shock that had registered in her body, as if the dull carpet she stood on had been alive, electrified. Now she shrank against the window with her forehead to the glass and saw the city flicker past, reduced to scenes, each one unknowable now, a façade. The women with their shopping bags, the men in doorways. She hated them for it, all of them, for what she’d felt as she stood there, gripping the telephone. The cleft reopening, her whole body sliding towards it.
She got off the bus near Central. It was early, so she wandered into the station. She loved the open canopy of the vaulted roofs, the benign light. And there was safety in the air of the country and interstate platforms. They were consoling in their intimation of distance, of elsewhere. The threshold between here and there. She sat down on an empty seat on an almost empty platform and let other places and other lives ghost along the tracks in front of her, around the ornate steel above.
Three children slumped resentful on a nearby bench. Crumpled shirts and too-big shorts on the boys but below her plain skirt the girl wore patent leather shoes. Red. Her legs stuck out straight from the seat and she stared down at the shoes, the miracle of them. The boys shoved and shouldered without conviction, their faces pale and tired. But something in the girl had been wakened in the shine of the patent leather. Pearl watched her and knew: the little girl was seeing herself there, some bright potential, for joy or beauty or something larger than what she had or what she was.
The knowledge caught in Pearl’s throat, stung her eyes. She watched this girl but saw another, years older but the look was the same, staring into a window at Mark Foy’s, where dummies wore dresses a mother might wear, or that a daughter might ask to, and expressions that might tell her what she most needed to know. What a woman might be.
At twelve she’d watched Amy for ways to be a woman a man would love. Sideways looks at the cut of a skirt, the colors in blouse and ribbon. Her hair tied this way or that. The way she arranged her features as she pressed pastry on the table—the thinness of that pastry, the movement of floury forearms. The shape of her lips when she sang to the baby. Or gathered the washing in.
Pearl listened and saw. Even then, there was something in Amy that repelled and frightened her. She couldn’t acknowledge or name the thing; it lived alongside the love that burned in her as she watched her mother at the treadle machine or bending to kiss the boys. She grew to fear the love she saw reflected in her, a love that could relinquish volition and accept servitude, daily. The dailiness of it. Her mother’s anger, simmering, subcutaneous, hinted at where it might lead.
At twelve Pearl had resisted the surrogate role she was meant to assume as the eldest. Though it was hard with Jamie and Will who, at one and two, had been displaced by the new baby at their mother’s breast. Could find nothing to compensate, unlike the twins. Then, or later. It was for them that she’d made her decision. That was how it felt. A week after the funeral, when the gulf of grief, kept shut by the flurry of arrangements and visitors, had opened at their feet. One day she was at school writing a composition on the Commonwealth, aware that no one in class could bear to look her in the eye, and the next she was tying her mother’s apron around her waist, hooking marbles out of Jamie’s mouth, the baby howling on her hip.
A note was sent to her father: was there no alternative to Pearl’s leaving school? The girl was bright. She might go far.
But even if Pearl had passed on the note, Patrick Keogh was beyond replying. It wasn’t just the grog, not then. For a while he simply lost the capacity to translate the world around him. He knew his girl was clever; he loved her quickness, the way that, even at twelve or thirteen, she’d known how things stood. The inequities of life. But his own loss had blinded him to hers; he could not see that her world had collapsed into itself, vanished in a day: her mother, her schooling. But Pearl was not blind to her father. She saw him diminish, shrink before her eyes.
He’d never been much of a drinker. A glass of beer before his dinner at night, two on Fridays. A skinful at parties, yes, for the courage to sing “Molly Malone” and “The Black Velvet Band.” His face tipped up like a choirboy. But the voice in his throat had the longing and loss of Limerick ground up in it, a fine slurry, her mother would say, kissing his eyes when he’d finished. Pearl, in a corner with the babies, watched the other women wanting to.
That face again, just weeks after the funeral. Some nights he would look at her with the eyes of a child who wants something but is afraid to ask. Or hasn’t the words. But she was too tired, too needy herself. If she’d still had her religion she might have named it, spoken it for him: mercy. Might have found it in herself, and gone to stand behind him in his seat at the table’s head, put her arms about his neck. Consoled him with stories, with songs.
But by nine o’clock she was all used up. Goodnight, Da, she’d say, throwing a tea towel over the clean dishes in the rack and plucking the last empty bottle from his hands. Go to bed now. This turning herself into someone else each day. This fight, as she spooned the porridge, pulled singlets over small heads, stirred the copper, to be what she had to be: immune to her previous self. To her plain, untroubled girlhood.
Still, even without the drink, Patrick would have been unable to respond to the teacher’s note. Pearl knew it, and understood that despite his pride, his plans for her future, her father was grateful for her decision. And that his gratitude was as big as his shame.
When her mother’s sister offered to care for the baby, Pearl looked at Jane asleep in her cot and wept for the first time.
Sitting at the station now she could only look back at herself with pity. Because it was whimsy, she’d only played at being a woman. Imagined it, dreamed it. Even at thirty-two she was still dreaming it, still trying on womanhood as she had her mother’s hairbands, regarding herself in the mirror. As if the glass was regarding her, and might speak, saying yes, yes. Or perhaps, not yet. Despite the clever blond boy she’d taken home the previous night and just abandoned, without ceremony, outside her flat.
She glanced again towards the children nearby. Beyond their heads the row of clocks moved on. The boys found the energy to argue and the girl cried out, her head tipped back. Mum! And a woman at the magazine stand turned. Pearl stood, pulled at her skirt and walked from the platform. Stepped into the current of people moving towards the station entrance.
Ray was lounging against a stone pillar. He fell into step beside her. They’ve bugged my phone, she said into the arched sunlight. It was particled with shadow. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his head jerk sideways and then back. Let’s get a drink, he said. Dug his hands in his pockets as they walked. Autumn sun slid over awnings and paths. He steered her towards Elizabeth Street, and as they approached the bar he said, Timing’s interesting.
She stopped on the footpath in a drift of fallen leaves. Aware only of the sound of her voice, a low hiss in the air. Why? She swallowed. What do you mean? A breeze picked up, leaves flipped around her feet. There was nothing else, just the bladed edge of the world, tipping.
He turned his face towards her. Just heard. Troops to Vietnam. Conscripts too.
Blood avalanched through her veins, taking voice and words. The air stilled. Finally: When? An undertone, ice sliding through water. She stepped across the leaves and waited, her back to him, so when the answer came it might have been from anyone. Soon, he said.