The Sydney and its cargo had slipped silently out of the harbor just after midnight. No crowd to farewell them, no wives or girlfriends. No official salutation, no music or flags. Just the southern stars to steer by, and the sky’s southern stars. But as the ship met the mouth of the harbor, a banner, the length of five men end to end, whispered from the shimmering cliffs: “YOU GO TO AN UNJUST WAR!” A silent battle cry from the powerless, the mothers and sisters and aunts. But the ship ghosted past, eyeless, blind, nosing the Pacific Ocean, grinding its passengers north.
There was fury at the cowardice of it, the lack of honor. What they’ll do, Della said, reading the reports in her kitchen, to avoid a few protesters. Pearl folded leaflets, pressing hard on the creases. She knew where the rage began; it had boiled in her for months. They were all powerless before the old men of Australia, their cynicism and lies. The collusion of her newspaper colleagues, joining the troop ship secretly as it cowered in the shadows of the harbor. And Menzies, making plans to do what he swore he wouldn’t: send conscripts to war. They knew he would. It was another announcement in a midnight parliament, no one to object. The man was scurrilous, a coward. The stealthy departure, Pearl saw, symbolized it all. Made the rest of them powerless, mute.
A demonstration, even a placard, at least felt like volition, felt like a voice. Would have given them a sense of agency. How do you think I feel? she said, not meeting Della’s eye. She pulled the last from a cigarette and ground its end into the ashtray, savage. The betrayal: her own editor had known, and Henry too. It had suited them to keep the government’s secret this time. And not just for the front-page accounts, the interviews with soldiers. It became their secret too. It made the mindless work of the women’s section more galling than ever. She felt more powerless than she ever had, her hands tied.
Still, part of her wondered about the boys on that ship, their own volition. They might have volunteered to be soldiers, but how many knew what it entailed? They might be as ignorant as she was. How much choice did they really have, the sons of the poor and the naïve? Had they been on deck to see the banner, did they know what it meant? And the furtiveness of their departure: like sly dogs rather than heroes, slinking off in the dark. She felt the shame of it for them, the suspicion they must have: that there was something wrong in all this. It was not the way their fathers went to war.
In the days after, the newsroom rang with pro-war rhetoric. There was, Pearl felt, barely a dissenting voice. Only one newspaper—not her own—editorialized against it, and Arthur Caldwell led the opposition in protest. From her desk she watched as each edition rolled out, scaring up the national fear of “Communist China” and the return of the “Anzac spirit.” Australia, it seemed, had conjured a war for itself out of nowhere, out of nothing, a war that wasn’t a war and an enemy no one had heard of. When she stopped a cadet reporter outside the clippings library one day, he could not tell her where Vietnam was.
How could the whole country support this war? That was how it seemed. The losses and terror of World War II were just twenty years behind them, Korea only twelve. We followed Britain into the first, she thought bitterly, and America into the second, and now, compliant children, we were following them to Vietnam. And Menzies—she wanted to shout it to the newsroom—Menzies had led them into all three.
The full team was now at work in a dilapidated warehouse at Woolloomooloo Bay. It was near the site of the old swimming baths, and a pleasant walk back through the Botanic Gardens to the opera house. At first a few of the youngsters had frowned at the shabbiness, of tenements and streets, the air of decay in the area nearby, but Axel saw other particularities. This was the place, he was sure, that could locate and hold his thinking, contain his anxiety, anchor him. The shabby wharf and crumbling houses, the naval yards. And the rusted sheds like the old hot shops of his childhood, where his uncle still made his glass.
But more than all that: here near the water he could still feel the presence of Utzon, the boy he had been, growing up around the shipyards where his father had worked. Aage Utzon, he told the students. A naval architect; his sons had spent their boyhoods in boats. The coastal village of Aalborg was not like Woolloomooloo; its red-roofed houses and churches were centuries old, its air mild. But the color of its harbor was uncannily like Sydney’s; its blue as deep, like a pure cerulean, and singular. The town clustered around it so that, like the workers at the opera house, the villagers could go fishing right in the middle of town.
He had assembled the team of local craftsmen and students early. Insisted they should be involved as soon as possible to ensure that, as his drawings progressed, his small experiments, they understood the work at a cellular level. And that they understood him. This was paramount. At this stage the glassmaking was essentially a collaborative affair. It required not just craftsmanship but generosity, loyalty, trust in one another. They would be working with volcanic heat, with high risk. They would each depend on one another, not least Axel, who would entrust each man and woman with his vision and his heart, the translation of complex idea to tangible object.
The necessary equipment for the project had also been installed: the big furnace and crucible pot, annealing oven and mavers, welding equipment and steel. Sand. The enormous old benches were soon covered in tools: scoops and ladles, tongs, clipping scissors, grinders. At the back, an office and lunchroom had been divided off from the “factory floor.” He and the senior men would gather in this space for discussions, to wring solutions from problems as they worked towards the final form. It was far from final now, but for Axel the real triumph lay in these fraught weeks, in the solving of difficulties, one try after another, until the piece held together in his mind and in space. Until his thinking matched the physical presence of the glass.
He had asked the students to consider some smaller pieces that might accompany the main one. Had them walk around the opera house, examine its plans, and read the Red Book, a dossier of plans and sketches and reports Utzon had produced just after winning the competition. He was pushing them away from material value and pure technique. You have the knowledge, all of you. So go beyond function, beyond order, he told the group one day after they’d suggested clear crystal pieces, classic shapes all sheer or transparent. The opera house is not a classic shape. Have you noticed? What does it make you feel? What are your emotions?
Of course, he said, there is a place for pure skill You must achieve it but then go beyond it. Beyond bland perfection, beyond mere things. These young Australians, individually chosen for their potential, had not initially understood. They had blinked at him, nodding courteously, but in their eyes he could see it: they were constricted by convention. By the pursuit of technical purity at the expense of freedom. Was it their isolation here, their island mentality, that pushed them towards the utilitarian and prevented free flight? Surely, he thought, it should be the opposite. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand beauty. But there was a sense of being embarrassed by it, that it was an indulgence. The practical was held in such esteem. It made them too polite.
He thought about his own student days with Per at Konstfack. They had gone there together to study ceramics, and they too had been like these students; locked into presumptions about form and function, adopting a kind of toned-down simplicity their own country was obsessed with then. Axel had quickly become uneasy with the approach: It’s the downside to the welfare state, he said to Per. I can’t bear it. It’s not all about usefulness. But his new teachers soon opened their eyes to the intellectual force in art, its expressive potential. They began to find their own style.
There’d been a letter from Per a month before, from Åfors. He was writing poetry at night, making glass by day. Experimenting with new types of molds and coloring methods, running with the avant-garde, in a group of young people from various glass houses who challenged one another in the glass room and outside it.
He wrote about the “Nobel Club” they’d recently formed. The name an ironic reference to the great man but really to their explosive meetings. We had fun at the club last week, Axel read. The press is reporting naked games in the fields and rockets fired at midnight, parties, homemade schnapps . . . and some of it might be true. But you know how it is, Axel, because we push each other in every way, and if we go beyond certain lines at the club then it works for us in the glass room too. We compete with each other, we go beyond what we thought we might, or could. We are all producing our best work, and the energy and sense of camaraderie is higher than ever.
Axel smiled to himself now, as he thought of telling these young locals to just relax and take their clothes off, to enjoy some naked dancing on Bondi Beach. Perhaps that might produce some startling work in the glass shed, something beyond expectation. A piece to defy the great Australian complacency, a piece that was more than a scoop of bowl, or a perfect cup.
But Per was right. There were some shapes drawn in his notebook that slipped alongside conscious thought, shapes Axel did not know or recognize until he drew them. At times monumental, archaic, from the heads of the old kings, runic in their promise and mystery. Or miniature, frantic with detail, whole worlds through a window, or cupped and held like a ball. He would follow their lines on the page, trying for less, to eliminate falsity or sham. Tried to keep the form pure, free of rhetoric and sentiment. Occasionally he would take those thoughts to the furnace, would invite a local art student to assist him. And find himself speaking as Lars had, using language to shape the piece as much as his hands did.
That is the tension, in what the light suggests, where it falls or bulges, disappears. Or Look into the deep, the heat fading to ice— If a student turned blank eyes to him, he was careful, but plain: The pipe is an extension of you, the air from your chest. Do you see? The glass will reveal itself but will also reveal you. That, he knew, was precisely what frightened them, what sometimes frightened him.
Now in the red-rusted shed near the water, there were two large prototypes and a gallery of pieces on the floor and shelf and table. He stepped from one to the next, gauging color and line, a finger to edge and roundness. One surface sand-blown and ancient, another imprinted with wire net. Urgency tapped at his shoulders. And fear: the underbelly of art. The thought reverberated in his head: if the final piece revealed anything of this place, of these people, it would reveal just as much of its maker. He stood in the middle of the room, encircled. Felt a pulse, a current beneath his skin. It fizzed and faded. But he knew what it was: an intimation of the story here, of chaos shuffling its reptile feet towards order.
He sank to his haunches to properly see, let the hemispheric, the grooved blue, settle into themselves. The rheumy gray of the arcs and spheres. Let his body find its place with them.
What do they mean by the “Country Party”? Do they mean they are a party for the whole country? When the men began filing into the warehouse, Axel was reading the morning paper. And what is meant here by “Liberal”?
There was the sound of muffled laughter and low hoots of derision. Axel looked up from the pages spread over his knees. Smiled. I didn’t realize I’d made a joke.
The men fanned out to gather their gloves and tools. They’re the joke, one of them said. That’s the meaning of Country Party. They’re clowns, all of them.
The senior man, Barry, looked over Axel’s shoulder at the Herald’s front page. The Liberals are conservative. They joined up with the Country Party and they won the election last month, he said. And no, the Country Party is about people in the bush, the provinces. He grimaced at an image of the new Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes, who would now be in charge of the building—and of Utzon, who was smiling up from the page. Don’t know that they care much for opera.
By lunchtime preparations for the next experimental casts were done. Axel sent the men home early and slumped in a chair, his legs thrust out before him. Took the deep breath he had withheld for the past hour, felt adrenaline seep from his body. The work was not perfect, just as he’d expected; the depth of curve had made it static and the color had been guesswork, though the brown still pleased him. Not perfect, but still enough of the idea was alive in the work to take it to the next stage. This would be crucial, would make demands on him he had never before allowed. His head, his heart. He felt the fear of it pool in his belly. Utzon might talk about the edge of the possible, but Axel knew that in this new glasswork he was working at the edge of the known self. It was, he could hear Lars say, what all artists do.
When he glanced at his watch it was mid-afternoon; he tucked his swimming trunks into a pack and ran up through the Domain for the ferry.
Pearl had fought and cheated for time on her writers’ series; it allowed the slip of consciousness that kept her demons at bay. Prevented her from saying too much, thinking too much. The lives of Devanny and Tennant and Dark fixed her mind on determination rather than despair, reminded her of the standard required:
In 1932, when she was twenty, Kylie Tennant walked six hundred miles from Sydney to Coonabarabran to record the lives of destitute families who had taken to the roads of New South Wales to save themselves. The Great Depression had exposed the injustice and inequality endemic in Australia’s social and political systems. Her long walk also informed her furious lifelong fight for the sexual and professional freedom of women.
The next sentence began to form in her head. Something about that sexual and professional freedom, and its costs, its demands. The things Tennant and others had done to win it, or just to survive it in the thirties and forties. But her fingers stilled on the typewriter. She was not yet born in 1932, when Tennant had done her long walk. Her mother had been twenty-one; Tennant a year younger. At the end of that walk the young writer would marry the man she seduced on the banks of the Castlereagh, and embark on the most productive years of her writing life. She’d had two risky abortions to ensure it.
Her mother’s face swam up before her, as it always did when she met or read about a woman of that time. The same hard fact of her life, of her mother’s and her own, implicit in the expression she always wore. A year after Tennant’s long walk, Amy too had been pregnant. Had she actively chosen to have her baby, or been too afraid to seek out an alternative? Pearl had never considered the fine line of it. Had assumed that for Amy, there was no line at all. There had been none for her, either, when it came to it.
Her mother would be fifty-five now, if she’d lived. The tragedy of it, and the irony, Pearl could see, was that she hadn’t survived her own innocence, in a way, the innocence of her choices. Had died in the aftermath of another pregnancy. She should have lived. As always she wondered what her mother would look like now. For Pearl she was frozen in her midthirties, still lovely, still angry. Would she have mellowed with age? Pearl tried to imagine her as a grandmother and couldn’t. The only certainty was that she’d be raging against this government, penning letters to members of parliament against the war. Unleashing her formidable temper on local representatives, the system, on anyone who thought her boys should fight.
The telephone shrilled; she propped it against her head and kept typing.
There’s a record of James and William Keogh at St. Vincent de Paul’s in Melbourne just over two years ago. Jeanne’s voice was steady, promising nothing. The right ages. They were there for three nights.
Pearl stopped typing, held the phone hard against her ear. And.
And nothing. I’m sorry. Jeanne breathed out. But it narrows things a bit.
Pearl’s first impulse was to say: it’s not enough. She leaned back in her chair and breathed out, let it go. It does, she said, thank you. Don’t suppose there was a forwarding address, or work records?
No, nothing. I spoke to the director, he wasn’t in the job then. I left my name and number.
She replaced the receiver. Her chest empty and taut as a drum. This was how it was some days: this hollowing, her body a brittle shell. At these times her mind was not her own. At work she imagined silent enemies, at home she imagined shapes behind curtains or under the bed. She would check each room when she walked in at night, open cupboards, stare at the arrangement of items on shelves. Dark thoughts rushed in: she would never escape the women’s section, and she would never find the boys, never know where they’d gone. She threw equations around in her head—what might be worse, their permanent absence, or telling her father? The weight of each in the air she walked through.
But in her head, her mother’s words. All those years before, but written large in front of her, daily. If they ever try to send them to war—she’d eyed the boys, still babies dribbling their food—I’ll hide them in an attic somewhere. I’ll get a gun and shoot off one of their toes. Her fierce mother, who couldn’t squash a spider or a snail. Who would never strike a child for punishment, not even when the twins accidentally burned down the woodshed.
Her mother would never have lost them.
Late that afternoon she sat opposite Suze in a back alcove of a city café. Do you think they might target the boys? Because of me. As if speaking the words might burn up the fear, the anxiety that stalked her. They’re capable of that. They could work the numbers so they both get called up.
Suze frowned. I don’t think so, love. They’re not clever enough for it.
They’re corrupt enough for it. She was sure it was not beneath them, whoever they were.
They tapped your phone, Pearl. They’ve tapped lots of phones.
In her rational heart, she knew this was true. But it was all right for Suze, painting in her garret. I’m a reporter, Suze. And I go to protests. I march. Or used to. They’ll have a file on me as thick as your arm. She stared hard at her friend. If they got enough they could jail me. I’d lose my job. My home.
They ordered tea. As the girl left Suze straightened her back, hands clasped around a salt shaker. Now, listen to me. Then leaned in towards Pearl, her voice mocking, theatrical. Have you heard of Mrs. Booth’s Investigations Department? She smiled, her eyes wide.
Pearl levered her shoes off under the table. Her whole body felt tight, constrained. Now she allowed the muscles in her back and neck to loosen, and with them something childish. Petulance. This a joke? She pulled off her cardigan and dropped it on the seat. Her voice sullen, her eyes.
But Suze was practiced with her friend’s moods, immune. No, she said. It’s deadly serious. She leaned further across the pink tablecloth, its embroidered freesias and leaves. Mrs. Booth was the wife of the Salvation Army boss, somewhere around the turn of the century.
Pearl narrowed her eyes. She wanted to complain about Askin, the new premier, the direness of Tory governments in both Sydney and Canberra. And? She shook her head. The country’s going down the sewer. We all are, Suze. And you want to talk about ladies in bonnets.
Come on, sweetie, I’m trying to help. I know things are hard.
Can’t even call anyone— She was furious but her voice caught, surprising her. Tears gathered behind her eyes and she blinked them back.
A tray arrived with teapot and cups, milk jug and strainer. Suze waited until the tray was emptied and the girl and her green starched apron had gone. Then she grasped the teapot. And. The word louder than she’d meant it to be. She moved the teapot in a circle, once, twice. Our Mrs. Booth set up an office for locating missing people. All ages. Lots of people got lost in those days, apparently. Domestic servants, factory workers, abandoned children.
Never heard of her.
Suze tipped the teapot back and then forward. Back and forward. Now it’s called “The Salvation Army Family Tracing Service.”
The ritual of tea. It calmed Pearl, usually. But the day had turned her contrary. She poured milk into cups. Silent.
For Christ’s sake Pearl, listen They look for people. A lot of the time, they find them.
Axel sat on warm sand. There was the sound of the sea splintering, and children. On the ferry over, the water had been quiet, marbled. He’d thought of Stockholm and its islands, the boats skimming between them. Gamla Stan and its copper roofs. Gray skies that lowered and shrank the city and the harbor, closed everything in. It’s why I write, Per had told him, years before. To break through it, see around it.
Axel had frowned at him. In Stockholm they spoke differently, vowels clipped and sculpted and fast. So he had to listen hard and follow the shapes of the words. Sometimes the end of someone’s sentence arrived while he was still in the middle of it.
Per’s sentence came back to him now on Manly beach, the wide sweep of the Pacific like a kinked cloth before him. He wished Per was with him, so he could say no, that’s not why you write at all. If it was, why would anyone write in Sydney? Surely this endless equatorial light broke through everything. Poetry couldn’t be possible here; the air was too thin for it, the sun too hot. How could poetry be made and survive in such brutal clarity? This wasn’t a place of poets but of the body. He’d written as much to his mother on the back of a postcard—some forgotten beach, its surfers and bikinis, the shimmer of tanned flesh dulling the sky and the ocean behind them.
But today he wished he could join the surfboard riders. Be more like them. Their ease in the ocean reassuring against the figures that rose and sank in the waves breaking closer to shore, heads and shoulders appearing and disappearing in a way that could still unnerve him, though his early terror had gone.
In the past few weeks he had begun to learn about waves. Their shape and temper, their speed and velocity. Their behavior at high tide and low, in southerlies and northeasterlies. The first few times he’d waited, he watched others and he watched the sea. Hesitated before a lurching rise of water, trying to time it, to lift himself a little in the way he’d seen others do, letting the wave buoy him up and over. But then—like today—he’d take a second too long and the wave would break and suck at him, tumbling his limbs, stinging his eyes. You had to grow up with it, he thought, this wild water. To feel anything like at home inside it.
Still, even in his tentativeness he preferred a decent swell, to feel the muscle of the water holding him, or nudging and shoving, lifting and dropping him. It gave him something to fight. Today, in waist-deep water, he’d stood waiting for fear to leave him, for his body to absorb rhythm, until his blood pushed and pulled with it and his body stopped resisting. Until he knew he could win.
On the ferry back, he sat outside to feel the spray and rush of sea air. Inside, men read newspapers and couples leaned together, faces flushed with warmth. They didn’t even look through the windows. But the ride towards the city felt to Axel like a homecoming. A cautious happiness crept through him as if it had been thieved. How could these others turn their backs to it? The Heads, the houses. The opera house unfurling like a flower, like one of their waratahs. The wild and beautiful native that symbolized their state.
He already loved this sandstone city. At some angles on some days, it looked to him like a painted set, a picture from a child’s schoolbook, every feature reduced to its classic shape. Oddly, only the bridge and the towering shells on the point made it real, their daring outlines pulling the scene into the present. The irony of perception. To him, even now, the opera house rose up like an idea as the ferry approached the quay, something he’d dreamed and was slowly remembering. He didn’t want to lose that sense of the place, wanted never to feel it as so familiar that he would sit on a ferry and look away.
At Circular Quay he walked past the queues and swung down past the passenger ship terminal. The same route he still took some days: a left turn at Cadman’s Cottage and up the stone stairs that served as old in this place, wide treads worn concave by the weight of 180 years. Above the wharves, and among the crumbling terrace houses, there were still one or two places like this. The Mercantile sat between them all, but it was weeks before he realized why he’d chosen the faded hotel: the steps, the old cottages, all stone and wood and shrinking as humans do, reminded him of home. The low, slate-roofed farmhouses of Småland.
Now he pressed his boots into the curve of the steps, pleased by the notion of all the feet that preceded his here. Turned up William Street, past pubs and tenements towards the Mercantile. Home, yes, though it had taken time to accept it. Some days the hotel still felt like a small foreign country within another. The bar especially. Its smell: stale, as if the sweat of a thousand men had soaked into the planks of the floor. An acrid smell that went with the beer, strong and crude. No women. This didn’t surprise him. He imagined his mother standing at the door, the shock of the sounds, the odor, the wild-eyed bravado. Then turning away.
My young Swiss friend. Mrs. Jarratt came limping out of the kitchen with a tray of washed glasses, blocking his way. He stood back. Had no one heard of Sweden? His landlady let the tray down behind the bar, pulled a cloth from her shoulder and plucked up a glass to dry. He might have moved off then, the way cleared, but the air around her was expectant, loaded. He waited for whatever it held.
Troubles down there then. Her hand inside the glass, a bird’s claw. All over the papers. She frowned, peering at the glass for smears. It’s the bloody election if you ask me. They need a sacrifice, eh? That young architect, what’s his name? Made his own bloody altar.
Axel pursed his lips. Utzon, he said.
Yeah. Mr. Unpronounceable. They’ll skewer ’im, that’s what I reckon. She stopped polishing and stared at a point on the wall, above the picture rail with its single framed photograph of the young Queen Elizabeth. Foreign, that’s the trouble. They don’t like foreign.
Axel winced.
Olive’s voice dropped a notch. I go down there, you know. Look through the fence. I’ll admit, it’s grown on me. She glanced towards the window. A whole minute ticked past, or so it seemed. Then: Got a postcard, years ago, some customer. She shrugged. The Eiffel Tower—is it? Pinned it up in the bar. Her voice almost wistful, and in profile her face had the dignity of a dowager, down on her luck. But then a sound like a bird caught in a trap. She was chortling: Probably still there!
A pause, or a subsidence. Axel frowned. Tilted his head, trying to make sense. The worn carpet made it worse, its faded whorls, circling on themselves.
Your building down there, she said, resuming her polishing. Color swarmed in her cheeks. God knows why, it’s a bloody mess—but it brings that postcard to mind.
A split second, a glancing light, and Axel was there in Paris, on the Champs-Élysées, his eyes newly open. The miracle of steel arcing skywards, leaping towards heaven. He looked at her. Perhaps— He put his hand to his throat, the tight hum of emotion. Perhaps they both wake us up. These structures. Or wake up our dreams. A weak smile on his lips: had he said that aloud? Did Olive hear him?
She looked at him as if she too had just woken. As if the bar was full of men, listening. Her bony shoulders lifted and dropped. Anyway, she said. We’ll see. No use complaining. And sniffed. But people will. She shoved the cloth into a glass and twisted it savagely. Look back fifty years. Same thing, different complaint. And fifty years before that, and on back to bejesus. A vein in her hand swelled and flexed as she worked.
He had no idea what she meant.
Fifty years is no time, Axel. Believe me. People say, “It’ll take a lifetime,” as if that’s forever. But I can tell you, a lifetime goes bloody fast. It’s no time at all. She coughed, sudden, phlegmy. Crossed one leg over the other. Then held out her hands, touched finger to finger, counting. Two thousand and fifteen, she said. That’s fifty years. Hope your foreign mate gets it finished by then.
Axel nodded. Recognizing the cantankerous old barmaid as an ally. He’ll finish it, he said. If they let him.
Olive tipped her head towards the front bar. You hear a lot of bullshit in here.
He smiled at her. Something like fondness in his eyes.
Yes, she said. You know. She picked up another glass and moved away down the bar.
Pearl woke with the biliousness of failure, of impotence. She rose and made tea in a blue enamel pot and left it to draw. Stepped outside. The air needled with new light, sharp points on which fear swiveled. The world had dawned resentful, pale. She pressed her feet into calf-length grass, still damp. Raised her face to the sky to feel what the air held: the breath of small creatures, salt. The residue of night. The earth particulate at this hour, its edges blurred, its lines inexact. She opened her arms to it, the whole trembling world.
That’s when she saw the bird. Or heard something bird-shaped. In those crystal seconds, that’s how it seemed, that she’d seen the sound, her eyes forming the bird around it.
Tawny Frogmouth? Some species of owl? She saw it as a blur of edges, foliage, bark. Its plumage, even the part-closed eyes, was of the tree, grown from it or grafted, a small branch flaking bark. She stood still, hugging herself. An owl in the garden, her mother once said, was like a blessing. Beneath the clothes hoist, handing up pegs, Pearl had thought of raffles and chocolate wheels, a florin found on the footpath. Like good luck? she’d asked, eyes skimming thin limbs on a loquat tree. A reason to hope, her mother replied, pulling work shirts from the line.
Now as the light thickened she let a fledgling hope rise in her, feathering up and over her limbs. A rare optimism, and it warmed her as the world reassembled itself in colors tinted like old photos. Or in faces imagined in the night. She looked back to the tree, to the bird. Old questions leapt in her throat: was the child she’d been still in her? Guileless, soft, open to the world, in a way she had not felt for years. Which version of her was real? What was true to the self? She looked up. Well? The bird was inscrutable, as still as stone, but Pearl knew it saw everything, more than everything; it saw more than she did or ever would.
Sunlight lapped at the grass as she turned, took the back steps two at a time. Plucked up pencil and drawing paper and began to sketch the bird, the branch. Her brothers would love to see that owl. Minutes later she lowered the pencil and surveyed the ordinary walls, the ill-matched chairs, plain curtains that concealed nothing. The phone book was under a pile of newspapers on the table, and she idled through it to S. The Salvation Army.
She was already halfway down the hall before it hit her. She stopped, mid-stride. The habit so ingrained she’d already envisaged her finger in the dial, the numbers spinning. Her hand already cupped, anticipating the pleasing curve of the receiver. Its shape, its innocent pale green: ordinary and unassuming as a ticking bomb.
She dropped to her knees before the telephone, gripped the cord and pulled it from the wall. Fucking morons! The curse helped. She fell backwards with the effort and lay there, staring at the yellowing plaster of the ceiling, the cord still in her hands. It had made a satisfying crack as the connection severed. She hoped someone, somewhere, heard the sound, the snap of the line breaking, hoped it was loud enough to hurt his ears. His filthy eavesdropping ears.
She went back to various meetings, back to Lorenzo’s, to the Newcastle. Everywhere there was talk of action. Her body leaned into it. She wanted, despite Henry—perhaps to spite him—to be physically involved, to add her body to the thrust of anger and distress. But it was worse than ever. The men had taken control; they dominated discussion of ideology and action, their voices loud and brutish or worse, calm and dismissive, arrogant. On her first night at the Newcastle she’d been surprised at the low numbers of women; now she knew why. In her short absence the group had changed its face. The women made tea and were handed the typing. The men turned a paternal eye to them if they spoke; nodded or smiled, and went back to their plans. Even Ray exuded a proprietorial air.
She listened to the ideas and schemes: demonstrations, fundraisers, midday marches to catch the lunchtime crowd. Someone had a contact in the Postmaster General’s. They might intercept draft papers, disrupt the recruitment cycle, alert brothers, sons, boyfriends before their letter arrived. But that wasn’t enough to save Will from the next ballot. She would have to know where they were.
At work she read the first accounts from the field. Wrote about miniskirts, Mary Quant, anything that Judith threw at her. On the day she finished her piece on Kylie Tennant she sat back to re-read it, wishing she could summon Tennant’s fortitude, her clear intention. Her own words mocked her. She rolled the last page from the typewriter and shuffled the pages into place on her desk. As she clipped them together, her phone. The Federal. Brian’s reptile drawl. Come for a drink. The revolution is nigh. And was gone.
A small crowd had gathered in the beer garden. Ray was propped on a stool at a round silver table with two beers in front of him. He pushed one towards her and blew smoke into the air. She frowned at him. Thought you didn’t drink on weeknights? She dropped her satchel at her feet.
It’s Wednesday, he said, I make allowances for Wednesday.
A few women from Sydney Uni were arguing with a boy about pacifism. He was spectacularly drunk. You’re an idiot, Pearl heard. A long-haired girl in overalls was trying not to shout. All you white males, you sexist pigs, you won’t last. You’ll die out like the dinosaurs. But Brian was calm, moving amongst them all, speaking quietly.
Did you tell him to call me? Pearl cocked her head towards Brian. Ran a finger through the condensation on her glass. I’m not high on his list.
Nope. Not me.
Then Brian was next to them, smiling, sober despite the drink in his hand. Lois Lane. He lifted his glass. How’s Superman? He didn’t wait for an answer, but lowered his voice: Reckon he’d know about the next ballot or troop ships? With his X-ray vision and all.
For a moment—her hands on the table—she felt out of time and place. The bar noise receded; there were just the words, reverberating. Because of course she’d got the first ballot date but nothing about the second, or about the first ship. And she hadn’t heard from her contact in weeks, not since the state election. No idea what you mean. She looked away, unnerved by this new Brian. Calm, sober. More or less. You’re talking to the wrong girl.
Well. Brian looked from Pearl to Ray and back again. If you happen to hear anything.
She grimaced a smile as he moved away.
Ray stubbed out his cigarette. Nothin’ to do with me. He took his time grinding it into the plastic ashtray.
Maybe your man will know. Whoever gave you that leak about chockos. She tried to keep the sourness out of her voice, unsuccessfully.
But Ray’s face was emotionless, as always. Before you snap, mate, it came through Trev, in the office. Tell you the truth I nearly didn’t tell ya, Trev’s a bit of a loose cannon. Into conspiracies, sees ’em everywhere.
She was poised to ask the obvious questions but he went on: It was a one-off. He’d been at a wedding, cousin or somethin’. One of the groomsmen works in Canberra, right, and he’s pissed, big-noting about Menzies and the Nashos and how the little poofs’ll wet their pants when they realize where they’re goin’ . . .
Pearl gulped beer. Her heart had slowed; it was so like Ray, the convoluted story, its provenance. But there was, she supposed, an outside chance it was true. Trev’s cousin, she said.
Trev’s cousin’s groomsman.
Christ. She laughed and swore at the same time. Well, my bloke’s disappeared so Trev might be our only hope. You better keep him sweet.
Nah, Trev’s resigned. Ray stood, pocketed his cigarettes. Movin’ to Brisbane. Reckons they need him more than we do.
They both looked around when they heard Brian raise his voice nearby. He’d done the rounds of the room; now he was giving Della his full attention. You understand, eh, you know about this, he was saying. It’s called direct action. If we can stop a ship they’ll know we’re serious.