Alone

Jammed, I shove my way inside and stand swaying from a strap. Jutting from shadow, my own yellow-lit brow and nose shift and slide in the rattling window. Mouths and eyes jerk and slit, contort, droop, fade against passing streetlamps, congeal in silent glass. Throbbing, the tram barges on, cars at its side and along its wake and darting past, and sways through streets of lit high windows and dark windows flashing back its golden segments. Jostled, I tender to the grinning conductor the exact fare. Past the brick fortress of the brewery, where billows of steam hiss out through the grids of street drains. The red City Baths. The domed Library, closed today, the black birds of its gated portico all gone to roost, squats over its dim lawns. Halting and charging down the long, gaudy row of lit shops to the dingy railway station with its festoon of clocks.

I thrust and joggle my way to the door – ‘Excuse me, please, excuse me’ – and swing off to wait in the safety zone for a No. 8. The bells are silent in the spired cathedral prodding a stained red sky. Tram after tram jerks to a halt and grinds away as the lights change.

There I sat defiant a couple of weeks ago on a Ladies Only seat let into the chained lawn, opened a can of warm beer frothing over my sleeve, flung back my head and gulped it. Passers-by stared in outrage. A pillar of rectitude growled through his mouth-trap, ‘If you were my daughter, my girl, I’d belt the living daylights out of you.’ At that I took another great gulp of bitter beer, eyes closed in ecstasy like a sipping hen. The cathedral bells pealed out loud carillons. Ring out wild bells to the wild sky.

At last a No. 8 comes clanking up. I climb on and sit inside alone and tender the exact fare from my black woollen bag. My face looms on the pane and vanishes in shadow as my nose touches the cold glass. My eyes are oval mirrors.

The lamps along the long stone bridge glow. The river beyond flames with throbbing scarlet and gold. I close my eyes and think of ETERNITY. A lamplit word for blazoning on balustrades. I close my eyes. Clatter and clank I surge through darkness and step out at the red railway bridge into the cool evening. Past the station with its stopped clock in mid-air, and round the corner up the wide hill.

The still branches of trees seem snow-tufted by lamplight. Knotted power lines, slung from grey dead trees, glint above. My steps are silent in the yellow-pooled, silent streets.

It’s not far from here to our old school. When she first came I took a dislike to her straight away, her ragged tawny hair and eyebrows, her wide smile, her intrusive self-assurance. When she sat next to me now and then I pointedly ignored her. One afternoon, long after school was out, we found ourselves talking somehow about life, and places, and poetry, leaning on our cold steel lockers. The surly caretaker trudging past tossed his wet sawdust over our feet. On the crammed tram home I realised I was in love with her.

I began to haunt the dusty prop room in the school clock tower, another dead clock, to twang the few taut wires of the broken harp up there, composing an ode to it. ‘O soul sister, my soul’s symbol…’ I lay alone flat on my navy-tunicked belly in sunny grass working my way through Prometheus Unbound and the dithyrambs of Walt Whitman. I stood displaying rapture under dripping leaf-laced trees. I spent whole mornings skipping lessons on the library roof, unopened books beside me, above the golden autumn mist. I repulsed her every approach, only to thrust on her, as she stood chatting with friends, my poem in copperplate dedicated to her, and stalk away flushed and gulping. Beauty, it was called. ‘Ah, what is Beauty?’ it began. On the far grey misted lake etched with black trees I had set a swan dying above her own frozen image. Life freezing stealthily about me clings and imprisons me. I am embedded in the ice. In the dark lake water since then I have seen clouds and fallen leaves, gulls and yachts; a smiling duck or two; the bloated, bobbing, greasy fleece of a dead sheep; a drowned geranium in a beetroot tin.

The leafy, lamplit street smells of watered gardens. A bicycle purrs past. A wavering lamp. Unseen, I open the iron gate of the tall house where Catherine lives in darkness behind cypresses. Leaves and twigs crackle under my slinking foot. The last curled leaves are clinging to the apricot tree. Her cat, curled on the sill of her dark window, glares with flashing green eyes and leaps away. High on the black, cold pane, high and dry, a snail is clamped in its bubble of slime.

I sit down on the damp leaves under the tree and hug my knees and wait. Here on this scant grass at twelve one night we squatted and pissed two puddles soaking the fetid earth, and let the last drops drip down, and stood to drag up our jeans, and crawled in at the window.

But we sprawled fully dressed on the bed, talking in the shadowy gloom of lamplight, until we fell asleep. We woke as dawn was breaking, hand in hand.

She crept down and heated milk. The grey cat followed her in, purring and trembling for milk. She fed me coiled spoonfuls of slow copper honey, hot milk sprinkled with cinnamon and cherries on stems, glowing huge in a glass of iced water. But it couldn’t have been cherries. Cherries come in in November. No, that would be right. It wasn’t on my birthday that she came to our place for dinner, that’s what’s wrong.

From the edge of my eye I suddenly see a shadow dangling from my hair. Brush it away. A tiny cringing ginger spider spinning on a thread of hair. Weave, weave a thin curtain to my veiled eyes. I set her on a twig out of harm’s way and watch her crawl and creep.

A striped, heavy bee stung her earlobe once and clung barbed under her dark hair. Her amber eyes glittered with tears of pain. Am I imagining her swollen lobe and tears? Oh, let me not be mad. I crept home at sunrise, exultant, through the cold, fading streets. Our house was still fast asleep and no one in it was any the wiser.

Not long after that, in the long grass of the river bank, watching stars and lamps quiver and slide, she told me she had been raped. Hullo, is that you? she said. Down some stinking lane in the city, Celestial Lane it was, shoved against a wall, his elbow choking her, and the rasping, tearing pain and soggy leak of it. After the event he slunk off. Torn and tousled, she rang me from the Post Office and walked all the way along the cycle path under bridge after bridge of the glowing river to meet me. We came here. She lay in there, bitter and ironic, in the dark. Backward and abysm of time. I made her go and have a shower – there was no one home – and she came back damp-haired in pyjamas, lay down with her back to me and muttered:

I could only just see her in the darkness. I floundered across the room as if through dim water and lay along her back, put my arms round her and uttered it at last.

Turning, you kissed my forehead, my cheek. You fell asleep in my arms. When we woke that first morning you kissed my lips: I had never been kissed before. Your face, and my own in the mirror, had become unrecognisable.

We swam, green-lit. We walked miles and miles after midnight. Leaves drifted like snow about the streetlamps, power lines sizzled, crickets fell silent at our footfall. We lay in the cool sand under rolling stars. In a lit, empty carriage of the express you kissed me, crashing past dark suburbs.

I started work at the café and took the room in the rooming house. We bought the amber earrings to wear one each. You taught me to soul-kiss. The first time we really quarrelled we followed each other in despair all round the house, our room, the dark passages, the kitchen, the foul, puddled bathroom, and back, taunting each other until at last I burst into great sobs and you held me at last. Night after night we clung together, fumbling and futile. I said it was like having an impotent husband. I was sorry for that, in time. Although not in time. I’m yours, I said. Oh, take me.

You started at University. I brought you milk and honey in bed before rushing for the crammed tram, hurtling through the morning streets late for work. When I got back exhausted at night you were always out. None of your friends knew you loved me. Why isn’t it enough, you said, that we know? But none of them could see why you put up with me. Frantic, I made more scenes, and you spurned me in front of them all, an object of scorn. Abject. I walked in on you one night declaiming for their amusement my Black Tooth of Death.

The black tooth of Death

pierces the sun

and its burning blood spurts

streaming like hair

over the sky, glowing

in gutters.

Its Burning Blood! One hot afternoon full of slow flies, I wish I could forget this, I was squatting over a newspaper on the lino trying to insert a tampon for the first time. My fingers were daubed with my own sticky blood. Coming in suddenly, she stood in silence and watched my sullen jabs and the diadem of gilded flies about my burning head, and finally said, I’ll help you, if you like.

You dirty-minded, degraded bitch, she said, and walked out. I wish I could forget it.

I had been proud of the Black Tooth of Death. The fang of the cathedral spire prods the low sun. Its bladder of blood bursts asunder, at sunset. Then bells toll.

Black birds of night plough shrilling through flurries of fire between the silent ships. I am my swan caught in its bed of ice. Embedded in lit glass. How we all clutch and cling at each other’s poor tubes of dying flesh. We wear our own death masks. I gaped at that yellow face at the derelict hut by the docks. What have you done? I gasped. My bicycle lamp bored a bright white rod as I pedalled madly, madly away through the dark. Can she be so haunted by my dim face? What would I do or say if I saw her again? But you don’t see people again, unless they want you to. I wanted to see Catherine again tonight for one last reflection of me. Where is she? I am going to die tonight and she knows it.

Footsteps stroll past along the lit street into silence. I dip into my woollen bag for the poem and the honey earring, and set the little packet in the corner of her window sill. Below the gold-globed snail I see my skull sink in the deep pane. I sneak over the grass to the gate. On the doorstep the safe cat nods, licking one pale shoulder. I plunge on to the street.

Downhill as I stride, stiff and chilled, the city lies dwindling in whorls of river water. Far headlights slide.

I love lights. Lights and mirrors. I love lights in the mirroring water. She loves Venice best, she said, even more than Paris, Venice watching herself in mirrors of sunlight and water. She gave me Death in Venice to read, but I hated it and could never finish it. She talked of renting a room in some decaying palace there, along a quiet canal. Live crabs crawl in the windows of the restaurants, she said. She escaped from the chill rain once into a church full of candles and lit dark ikons. She said Venice is at her best in the rain. They put her poem about it in the school magazine. My Beauty was rejected.

Venice at sunfall awash with gold

licking mossed black stone, floats

her churches, islands, boats of lights.

Night spangles her whorling waters,

moon-silvered, cloud-furred.

Chill rain spatters the winter sea.

At the foot of the hill black trees float. The high railway line that I have in mind slits the park. I trail in darkness.

Hitchhiking along the red dust road she told me all about Venice, on our way to Tibooburra and the black stone desert. I think for the sake of the sound of water only, she talked about Venice. Here is no water but only rock. Red dust coated us. A truck came. The bones, the sea shells there have turned to stone. In a dusty truck we arrived at a dusty homestead with tanks and iron-roofed verandahs and prancing kelpies yelling. There were a few scorched gums at the lip of a crazed creek bed. We slept out under the full moon. Don’t sleep in the creek bed, girls, whatever yer do. Swaggie camped there a few years back. Never found a trace of ’im even after the water went down. Yer never know when there’s a flood cumun. Sure yer won’t sleep up at the house? Righto. It’s your funeral. We cringed into our sleeping bags under the white moon. And his ghost may be heard. Le spectre en pleine lune. At a supper of date scones and tea the station wag had regaled us with the local mad murderer with his hatchet and grisly gully crammed with corpses. Into our minds great spiders came stalking out of trapdoors.

On the wharf one night we went to see the white, the grey and the black ships, streaked with rust, their lancing spars strung with lamps, drift and slowly turn, spangled, on the night river bound for Piraeus, Napoli, Singapore, Bombay, Rotterdam. Taunted by sailor boys, we swaggered away. Wannafuck? No, thanks. Go on. Come over ’ere. I’ll pull yer tits for yer. This model for display purposes only. Tell yer what. I’ll give yez five quid to do the both a yez. You first, jabbing a thumb at her. It would be her first. Sorry, we spik only Tamil.

A prowling Vice Squad car pulled up. Come over ’ere, you two. Come on. Yair, you. An’ what are you doin’ down ’ere? Let’s ’ear it.

His meaty, furred hand thrust with elaborate patience into his breast pocket and, sneering, we spelt out with elaborate patience our real names and addresses.

Any more cheek outa you an’ you’ll be up at the station before yer know what ’it yer.

You listen ter me fer a change, sister. Once we got you up to the station we can prove anything we wanna.

We strolled off, laughing sardonically. If you want to know the time, ask a perleeceman.

Oh ma darlun, oh ma darlun,

Oh ma darlun Melbourne Town,

When the Vice Squad’s on the Whore Path

Best to take it Lying Down…

The sailor men had gone. Silent ships lay dribbling, creaking above their sinking lights. When her parents sailed she didn’t see them off. Safe in our room later we embraced by candlelight each other’s long candid gentle body.

Some of them are all right. That night it rained up on the Murray the sergeant and his wife gave us chicken and Barossa Pearl and a hurricane lamp in our cell. We lay reading his Posts and Pixes in the glow of its vased flame. Once we had strawberries and cream. Once we played a pianola, sipping frothy milk warm from the cow. Once in a pine wood, sleeping on heaped brown pine needles, we woke ringed with honey-eyed huffling cows. On a driftwood fire in sand dunes we boiled saveloys and a little convulsing crab. On Green Island we dived all day over the fretty coral among flickering fish. In the rain we watched from the pier a barracouta whip a shoal of whitebait black and silver leaping high and dry. Giant beaded spiders threaded the trees with webs. Crabs came crunching out of the sand under our sleeping bags and stilted goggling in the torchlight into the sea.

In Wollongong prison we got a horrible cell. We were sorry we’d asked. The stink of piss and phenol, the oozy, scribbled walls, the mosquitoes all night! There was a sketch over the latrine of a bulbous woman with one breast labelled ‘standard’, one ‘super’, and across her thighs ‘drive in’. There was a small judas in the heavy door. Once a boy of twelve in the next cell, we were told, wriggled through this one to get at a prostitute in here. We slept on hessian on a slanted board with the door open. As soon as we started out hitching next morning a patrol car turned up trying to book us for vagrancy. Come over ’ere, you two. Yair, you.

In a semi-trailer rolling down aeroplane hill in angel gear the last orange rays of the sun set her hair alight. Jammed all three in the cabin, we struggled to keep talking all night, the driver drugged, dazed by the white rods of the headlamps condensing in drops on the windscreen. We awoke at grey daybreak lumbering into Sydney. That was the driver who found his son hanging from the staircase in his house.

It is dank and chilly under the drifting trees. I climb the stairs of the railway bridge on to its narrow, fenced footpath high above the avenue and the lamp-hung river. The bars shudder in my hands. A far lamp. A squall. A jointed golden clattering train blasts past, carriage after carriage of wax faces as I stagger inches away pounding with blood, and dwindles shrieking. Across to the far bank and out of sight. The bars still hum under my clamped hands.

I fumble down the stairs and actually look both ways before crossing the silent avenue to the river bank.

River of stars. Consider death by water. I would float down with cans and tyres, kittens in sacks, rats, leaves and merds, nudging the hulls of the lit, moored ships, swinging wide to seaward, the ruffled, breathing sea. At low tide corpses and jellyfish are washed up, stranded on the sand: blue or amber jellyfish, lucently hooded and mantled, their tangled arms glazing in the sun. With our five senses we too palp the world, for the time being. Shelley burned on the sand. The stiff corpse that I cast tonight will be washed and dressed, rouged before rot sets in, and buried in fire or in earth.

The earth is our black sweet mother. Brown, orange, tawny, grey, white, ginger mother of us all, having brought forth the races of man in her own image. Loam people, bog people, sand and clay people, ochre people, red and yellow. I will be laid to rest in my mother.

I will be laid to rest

In my mother’s breast.

Unmannerly badged with gore.

Not dead but gone before.

R.I.P.

They’ll say what I can’t understand is how a young girl like that. Who had so much to live for. How about:

Our Shirl has passed away

And we who are left mourn

On this our darkest day –

That Shirl was ever born.

Lovingly remembered and sadly missed by Mum

and Dad and Val and Auntie Eth.

Here lies one whose name is writ on water. But my body refuses to take the plunge, the pang of death by water or fire, earth or air.

I cast a shadow

over the stars

in black smacking water.

I hurl the other honey earring splashing, spindling, spurting bubbles beyond hung lamps of water. The black trees are afloat in the rusty sky as I walk on and on along the cycle path, along with the slow river. Behind, a hoot, and the striped gold line of a train, one above, one below. River lights enlace the arches of every stone bridge: underneath them, and out on the cool grass of the bank, couples lie entangled. Here and there a cigarette pulses red and vanishes in the smoke haze.

The lights of the city are still far away. Hurry. Some stranger is trailing me, urgent.

The river rustles the bullrushes. The orange moon hangs low, spooling, dripping. Frogs quawk. I hurry hurry on.

‘You can ’ear ’em, can’t yer?’ the voice quavers behind me. ‘It’s me kids. Quawk. Quawk. ’Ear that? There’s thousands of ’em. Cry all night.’ He plucks at my sleeve. ‘You can ’ear me kids.’

‘I won’ ’urt yer, miss. Honest, I won’t.’ He straddles the path, head cocked. ‘Just wancher to watch while I do it. I won’ ’urt yer. Oh, go on, please, miss. Oh, please!’

Fumbling, he pulls out his pale stalk of flesh. His milk spawn spurts, flailing the lit river, rocking far lamplit streets.

Oh God! Oh God! Run! And I pound stumbling along the narrow asphalt, gasping, hot lights leaping and swirling in river and sky as I come galloping round the corner within sight of the last lamplit bridge of all. I slump to a standstill. Look over my shoulder. There is no one in sight.

A puddock sut

by the Yurra’s brim

An’ thocht there was niver

a puddock like him.