Black Mirror (18 page)

It was sudden, Tilly wrote, all so very sudden. Mrs Murphy was there, and Tilly, and I, but none of us saved her. My mother, Rose Morrell, just ignited before us. She flew around the room in a terrible panic, fanning her own death, flapping her arms like a bird and screaming for her body. In her flight she knocked over objects and shattered a vase. The whole room responded to her agitation; she was possessed, overtaken, flames shot
upwards from her shoulders and the piled dome of her hair. Mrs Murphy tore down a curtain and threw it like a net over the flaming woman, and we leapt on her, Tilly wrote; we all three leapt upon her. To smother and to save the flaming woman. The woman. Your mother. Your mother, Rose Morrell.

I remember none of this. I remember no mother ignited with sparks sweeping around the room, no mother-shape beneath a curtain, no flesh smell, no horror. It is all in darkness. Tilly claims that I cut my hand on a shard of vase and was preoccupied at the time with my own small bleeding. Perhaps this explains it. Or perhaps, even then, I was too unloving and egotistical.

My mother Rose, tended by Lily-white, lived on for three days longer, but died in extremity. Her skin was entirely burned. Her condition was wretched. Towards the end Mrs Murphy put a damp cloth to Rose's mouth to muffle her constant hopeless moaning. To close off the breath that was agony to her. To save us all from the horror of unconcluded burning. She pressed hard, with both hands, until Rose sank into silence.

(
Christ-Almighty, forgive me
, Mrs Murphy would have said.)

Lily-white sang, and cut at her forehead with a stone.

 

The funeral was huge, with everyone attending. Tilly wrote that I wore a new dress of black linen, which
Mrs Murphy had sat up sewing throughout the night. And that a red sand storm, a willy-willy, blew up halfway through the funeral, causing mourners to squint, and cover their mouths and cough and splutter, so that the proceedings had suddenly to be crudely hastened, and everyone fled, eyes streaming, to avoid the obliterations of dust. A morbid haste attended my mother. Just as Mrs Murphy could not wait for Rose Morrell's autonomous death, so mourners fled the ceremony of her interment before the coffin was lowered. They covered their eyes, Tilly wrote, because the grit was so blinding.

 

… Do you know, by the way, what became of Brauner and Desnos?

The painter Brauner was a strange man given to grotesque presentiments. He painted a series of self-portraits, beginning in 1931, in which he depicted himself cruelly with one mutilated eye. In 1938 his eye was in fact destroyed in a fight at a studio party. He committed suicide on exactly the day he had announced, years earlier.

Robert Desnos, who wrote Surrealistically at will, and produced love poetry of incomparable delicacy, ended up in the prison camps of Buchenwald and Terezine. He died of typhus just a few days after his release. He died unpoetically.

I mourned them both and remember both of them clearly.

And my mother, Rose Morrell? Why do I speak of her with such abraded and tired generalisation? It was like peering into the tunnels of a stereoscope, and seeing only the still, black-and-white frames Tilly had attempted to draw for me. It was unbelievable. It was a mean deception.

 

All my life I have tried to paint her back into existence. All these images. All these figures. I was attracted to the Surrealist promise of
figuring out
. This or that conjunction. An umbrella here. A pair of lips there. The correct superimposition or renegade object. But I learned gradually that it was a crass and over-explicit form. It was the rapture of the visible, artistry with too many, far too many, lights on.

Perhaps, after all, it was Lily-white I was missing. Am. Am missing.

It was 1927, I was
seventeen years old, and I had arrived back on the goldfields to discover my whole world lost. Ruby and Lily-white were gone, Miss Casey was gone, Mrs Murphy was an old woman, with nowhere to go, who sat at the kitchen table with her chin in her hands and her grey hair straggly and her eyes unalert, waiting to die. We offered each other what comfort we could, and tried to find chores and diversions to fill our long days. Mrs Murphy brewed endless cups of pale-coloured tea and sedulously attended her small garden of herbs; I took to my drawings and my paintings and my fantasies of escape.

How can I describe what altered in me with the discovery of Rose's journal? I was already an errant and lonesome young woman, a firelighter, a reprobate, a laughing-stock at school; now I felt myself newly orphaned. In her cuneiform disguises, embossed with ampersands — for somehow I
apprehended her indivisible from the style in which she wrote — I both found and relinquished my mother for the very first time. The journal summoned an admixture of recovery and grief: I loved her, and I wept.

After the war I met a woman who had one arm blasted away, and who kept reaching, so she said, to brush hair from her face with the destroyed lost arm. It felt like that: impossible. It was like a phantom limb asserting lost presence. I felt spooked and disfigured by incompletion.

You must understand that I was wholly alone. In the town my family was completely despised. My father, ever-greedy, had failed to install safety equipment; he had tried to break the unions; he had hired thuggish debt collectors and armies of scabs. I had no friends at all and only Mrs Murphy to care for me. I longed for Ruby and Lily-white, but they had simply disappeared. They had simply
vanished
.

Gone bush, my father said, with a contemptuous sniff. Gone fucking walkabout.

He never spoke of them again. He returned to brothels and carried with him the air of a rejected lover.

There was despair in everything. I wanted wings, or death. I thought that my life had stalled, and that everywhere, everywhere else, the world somehow continued unclouded and bright.

 

And then, by strange fortune, by chance occurrence, I met them, the brothers Louis and Ernest Bell.

Together they offered me for a short time a new kind of family. They were tender-hearted miners, who worked at the stopes, two young men who already had earth so ingrained in their hands that their life-lines and fingerprints were explicit and apparent. I remember they held them up before me: four hands. Exclamations. They were beautifully detailed, like copperplate etchings.

 

One night I had been wandering the streets, peering into windows, trailing down laneways I had known with Ruby and Lily-white, when I forgot my spy-mode of disembodiment, and was struck by a bicycle. Louis was peddling, with Ernest sitting behind, and we all three came a cropper. I had gravel rash burning on my elbows and forehead, and a triangular tear in my cotton skirt. Louis, I remember, bent down to examine the tear, and rose up embarrassed; even under the dim streetlight I could sense his sudden arousal. Ernest was more shy; he hung back in the shadows.

We went to their house, nearby, to clean up our wounds and share a pot of tea. I had never been in someone else's house before, and I confess I was shocked by how little they had. It was a spare, iron cottage, two bedrooms and a kitchen and a small sitting room at the front; and within it cheap furniture of deal and tacks, covered over with turquoise floral-patterned cloth. There were four chairs and a lamp, with a shade of stencilled brown paper, and a shelf of plaster ornaments, a milkmaid and some dogs. A
woman — their widowed mother Maude — leapt from her chair, raised up her hands in concern, then set about fussily tending our wounds. She bathed me first of all, dabbing at my forehead with strips of torn linen; then she bathed her sons. Her bowl of water grew pink with our mingled blood: the liquid tilted and swayed and caught the overhead light. A pink-looking moon. I remember this detail now because it seems so retrospectively expressive.

I decided to lie about who I was.

Ruby, I told them. I am Ruby White.

Ruby White, she's a bit of all right
, Louis responded cheekily.

Louis Bell was what in those days we called a fast worker. Before I left his house he had persuaded me to meet him the following Saturday night, and we became lovers soon after.

We met in the illegal tunnels children had carved into the slime dumps. Sweethearts of the earth, Louis Bell used to say. When I raised my skirt the first time I realised that he was as inexperienced as me: so in our earth burrows we were patient and careful with each other; we rolled pressed together in our worn-out blanket, with the musty scent of the mine dirt coating our exposed skin and catching in the nets of our negligent hair. Candlelight cast our young faces in gold.

Call me Midas, I joked, moving the candle closer to his face.

Louis had never heard the myth explained, so I told him my selective and vague version of King
Midas of Phrygia, how he had won Dionysus' approval and been granted a wish, how he had wished for wealth-beyond-reason so that all he touched became gold; and how he had transformed not only his food and his famous rose garden to golden objects, but his daughter as well.

Bloody hell, said Louis in shocked response.

I told how the spell was removed by bathing in a river, and how King Midas repudiated wealth and became a worshipper of Pan, the god of the woodlands.

Excuse my French, Louis apologised.

I held his golden head between my hands. He was my very first lover and he was utterly precious. In moonlight I would climb through the window of my bedroom, elated, delirious, scented with mine dirt.

Eventually I told Louis Bell who I was. It made no difference, he said; he loved me just the same.

 

The Bells were a family who told funny stories about each other. They transacted their shared bio graphies by polishing up gems of absurd moments, which they exchanged in their own economy as inexhaustible gifts. Stupid sayings, lunatic moments, comic and tricky situations; no detail was wasted or unremarked. They joked about ancestors in ridiculous accents and invented generations in the future who continued their vaudeville temperaments. I was charmed and abashed. I thought of my unmentionable father and brother. Then I thought of my absent mothers and sister and wondered what community might yet have been possible.

On Sundays we sometimes — all four of us — went on family picnics together. We sat in spindly shade and ate corned beef and fruit cake and drank tea from a billy bubbling over a fire of sticks. Maude had come with her husband in the gold-rush, thirty years earlier, and was a buoyant and spirited woman, un defeated by grief. Her sons adored her. Their love was visible in the gestures with which they handed her food, or brushed a few crumbs from her lacy collar, or a fallen leaf from the light ruffled voile of her hat. More than sexual embrace, I yearned for this touch. I yearned for the gently confirming and the familial. The aura of veneration and simple tenderness. Ernest saw me watch as he took and flung the stray leaf, and then he reached over, as though telepathic, and touched the back of my hand. When I looked into his eyes, he blushed and looked away. Louis leant across his brother and kissed me on the cheek with a cheery smack, then kissed Ernest and Maude in exactly the same way, binding us all in a cohesive circuit of affection. We all laughed; it was joyful, this bracelet of hearty kisses.

 

These fluttering and subtle moments, these lovely exchanges, I have preserved against the disaster of all that followed.

When I discovered I was pregnant Louis was delighted and proposed marriage immediately. He even knelt before me and held out a ring in a velvet casket — as he had seen performed in the cinema — and offered eternal undying devotion.

Eternal Undying Devotion, he repeated, as if making a vow.

My hesitation both hurt and dismayed him. But I feared my family. I feared my dull vicious brother and my money-mad father. However, at four months I could no longer contain my secret. It was such an adventure, this body, filling up with life. I peered sideways into the looking-glass and rejoiced in my baby convex, just there, just emerging.

So I summoned my courage and told Mrs Murphy everything; and Mrs Murphy, driven by some old-fashioned code of honour, locked into servant fidelity and mixed allegiances, straightaway left and told my father. This betrayal exploded something both inside and outside: our lives, all our lives, filled up with things broken.

 

On the goldfields, even now, people still talk of it. People still talk of what happened to the Bell family in 1927.

Henry Morrell and two other men knocked down the door of Louis' cottage in the middle of the night. They were armed with antique swords and a metal pail of acid. One of the men flung the acid at Ernest's face, and as he fell, blinded, the other man sliced at his side with a sword. Henry himself, so the trial revealed, cut down my beloved Louis in a fit of maddened fury. The amount of blood was immense, and there in the shadows was Maude, wailing in her nightgown, aghast, bespattered, tearing at her hair.

The mutilated body of Louis Bell was dragged away, and under cover of darkness dumped in an old mine shaft. It was almost two years before it was found and recovered.

 

At the trial in the city Henry Morrell was pardoned. He was pronounced temporarily insane, and acting in defence of the honour of his only sister who had been violated, possibly by force, by a working man. His accomplices, on the other hand, were convicted of the murder, and both later hanged in the Fremantle gaol.

 

What words can tell this? Violence is somehow beyond my language. It becomes a story, told in pubs, printed in columns in newspapers, far from the unspeakable hurt of Maude, collapsing into the oval pool of her eldest son's death, or the anguish of Ernest, who reaches out before him in burning black, knowing he is feeling in the air for the shape of catastrophe. Or from Louis himself, who looks with incomprehension into the eyes of the man who hacks him, who falls unmanned, in agony, in fearful distress, astonished to be witnessing his own death at twenty-three, and thinking:
I wanted to be a father; I will never be a father.

 

For myself: it is a simple summary because I had lost all feeling. I was sent to the city in the south for the period of my confinement, and the baby was born and immediately given up for adoption. Mrs Murphy attended me, but I could not endure her company
and was cruel and spiteful. I addressed her as Judas, and watched with calculated indifference as her mottled old woman's face dissolved in tears. In the meantime I persuaded my father that the only hope for my virtue and my long-term marriage prospects was to send me abroad, to London, so that I could achieve the requisite female accomplishments divorced from the taint of local scandal. I can hear myself now, eloquently persuading him. He agreed to a fare, and an allowance, and I left Australia just three weeks after the birth of my baby. My womb was still open, my breasts still filled with milk. In my mouth, the deathly taste of cinders.

 

Louis was the most joyful man I have ever known; he carried his own body as if it had been given to him as a gift. I remember kissing the open palms of his hands. I remember saying: Works of art!

And I have just remembered something else. There is a strange tale told of the Surrealist poet I mentioned, Robert Desnos. In the prison camp he moved up and down the lines of inmates waiting for the gas chambers, reading their palms and telling their fortunes. In each case, so the story goes, he predicted long life.