Black Mirror (2 page)

In the meanly simplifying
genre of art-catalogue biography Victoria May Morrell was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1910, daughter of a wealthy businessman and an Irish beauty. She moved to the West Australian goldfields at the age of three, and grew there, precocious, destined to be an artist, but for a short stint at boarding school in the south-west city of Perth. She left Australia, never to return, at the age of twenty, moving first to London and then to Paris, where she worked on the fringes of the Surrealist movement. She established a reputation as a painter of dreams, producing paintings which were described by one reviewer as
bewildering and shocking
. Her work was largely forgotten in the fifties and sixties, but a revival in the late seventies led to a retrospective exhibition which both consolidated her fame and established her as something of a cult figure in the London art scene —
She now lives the life of a recluse in Hampstead, London
.

This version registers none of the strangeness of Victoria's life. There is no hourglass, flashing. No river-plunge. No dream. It is like reading about someone else, someone already dead, someone obliterated in Parisian dark by twin purple thumb-marks.

 

When Victoria opened the door she put her thumbs beneath her chin and extended her fingers in a gesture she would later describe as shutters of astonishment.

Ah! she said. The Australian biographer at last!

Anna was charmed by this greeting and the appearance of the woman, who, unlike her photographs, was multicoloured, discomposed and vigorously animated. Upon her head she wore a crown of long black feathers, which quivered as though still expressing a will to flight, and about her shoulders hung a robe of crimson silk, full and somewhat cardinal, extending to the floor. Ropes of amber beads clacked on her chest; her lips were painted and her eyes startling with a definition of kohl.

Swans, Victoria announced. In your honour I am wearing swans.

She tweaked a feather, winked and smiled.

Anna stood in the rain, waiting to be admitted. Her umbrella produced a circular veil of raindrops, closing her up in a wet parenthesis. It was one of those taut peculiar moments in which strangers, having passed the flurry of effusive first greeting, are halted before each other, in a pause of true estrangement. Perhaps, thought Anna, she will not admit me.
Perhaps she considers me too young, too realist. It was a pause such as occurs before lovers' declarations.

Well? said Victoria. What are you waiting for? Kiss me now. On the lips.

Anna tilted the water, leaned forward to the face, and placed a kiss soft as a dream and moist as sex on the aged and expectant lips of Victoria.

 

Her arrival in Paris, 193–:

Monsieur Marcel Duchamp answered the door. He peeped, flung it open, then flew his hands to his face in the sweeping gesture of a magician who has that very instant puffed something strange into existence.

Ah, voilà! L'Australienne!

His thumbs were joined beneath his chin and his fingers outstretched in twin shutters of astonishment. The smile was enormous and the tone one of foolish exaggeration.

L'Australienne!

Victoria felt herself suddenly endowed with symbolic accessories: bounding kangaroos, vistas of orange earth, spectral stringy eucalypts, empty dead centres, any number of odd and arresting Antipodean inversions. The mantle of Australianness descended upon her, as though an invisible parasol had collapsed, leaving her drenched in novelty. She stood there bedraggled, pre-empted by nationhood. Duchamp lunged from the doorway, seized Victoria by the wrist, and led her into the drawing room.

He chanted:
L'Australienne! L'Australienne!

They were all conducting a kind of séance. From the entrance to the drawing room Victoria felt herself lean inwards in anticipation of the life she wished to discover. She could hear incoherent mutterings in several languages, could smell the stale emanations of candles and cigarettes, could sense her own bashful elation at announced admission — since no one had yet detected her black-swan trespass or noted the measure of her insignificance — and she was filled with artistic ambition and a will to impress. Faces turned in her direction, lighting up for an instant like spangles flung into shadow, but then turned away again, just as quickly, preoccupied with the proceedings. The room was pink-coloured from light filtered through drawn scarlet curtains; it made her think, said Victoria, of blood pressed thin on a glass slide. There were golden candles here and there, on ledges and tables, and replicated unevenly on a glass-topped cabinet, but over all was the impression of an organic pinkness. She breathed deeply and imagined her lungs blooming with pigment, so that inside her chest became a vase of pink hydrangeas.

(
You see how serious I was? How bent on Surrealist transformation?
)

Everyone was there. Breton, Ernst, Desnos, Man Ray, women of extraordinary beauty clad in feathers and furs whose names she did not yet know (one was Gala, perhaps, another Dora, Jacqueline) and they sat at an oval table upon which were scattered letters of the alphabet, symbols and cards. André Breton was busy
invoking the spirit of the Marquis de Sade: his eyes were closed and from his mouth came strange intonings:

Oh
corpus delicti
, body

dismembered and remembered

no crystal, but worms,

no necktie but excrement in vertical rivers,

the absence of butterflies,

brain …

Here someone took up the letter J and shouted:
Juteux
!:

— brain a juicy jungle

swung through with monkeys —

Brioche
!:

— a brioche curled upon itself

tasty convolutions, without butterflies.

hollows intolerable: the banker, the taxidermist.

Gloved hands, handless gloves,

razors invading —

Duchamp took up an A and eyed Victoria mischievously.

L'Australienne
!

— Noir et noir et noir et noir, Breton sang.

Black and black and black and black,

black is the body continent

at which we force frontiers,

black the juicy jungle, the tasty convolutions,

the monkeys, the monkeys,

the razors invading …

Victoria ceased to listen. She was suddenly ashamed and flushed with embarrassment. Her gloved hand
burned against her face. She remembered a desert hawk, its whole face sharp, diving fast through the sky towards some cowering creature, and the mushroom of dust as it speared its prey. Then the peculiar silhouette of two beings uprising, its diminishing shape, its wingbeat, its swift arcing away. Whatever recalled this little death stayed as the colour of her cheeks.

noir et noir et noir et noir

Surely they could all see it: the stranger rosy with discomfort. A man peered over rimless spectacles in which twin candle flames were reflected. Words everywhere dispersed and disassembled. Faces gleamed with alien light. Three porcelain cats, distinctly bourgeois, seemed to regard her from the ledge above a gaping fireplace. At the end of the table, now a vast expanse of dark green felt, sat a young woman with frizzy hair and bee-stung lips, Simone-someone-or-other, who acted as secretary to the chants and invocations. Victoria saw her pen inscribe, upside-down, the mysterious word
corps
. The handwriting was copperplate and there was a netted shadow of hair filaments lying, with a perceptible quiver, across the perfectly formed letters.

(
You cannot imagine
, said Victoria,
how red that room appeared
.)

Did Duchamp introduce her?

Only, Victoria thinks, as
L'Australienne
. It was years before some of them called her Victoria. She thought of having a map of Australia tattooed on her forehead, so that it would be too unSurreal and literal-minded
for them to call her by her emblem. Disbelieving in nations they still wanted an Australia.

(
It is the same with Africa. All of Europe
, Victoria added,
wants an Africa
.)

After the séance they drank bowls of Kir Royale. Scarlet rose-petals floated on the surface of each drink. People stood around the room peeling petals from puckered lips and flicking them away. A man in a quilted smoking jacket lined with silver braid, a rich man, perhaps, or a figure of importance, spat out a mouthful of petals so that they adhered to a pink lampshade; he proclaimed:
An explosion of bloody flowers, set off by gentle anarchists!
And soon everyone was spitting. One of the women pasted two dripping petals on the cheeks of another, and there was a short epileptic burst of applause.

 

How did it happen, her presence there, witnessing this theatre? How had she come across the ocean, yearning for mother-England, and ended up in this red drawing room, clenching her gloved hands, anxious for approval and known only as a nation? The details remain spot-lit in her old woman's memory: the scattered alphabet, like blown litter, across the broad green table, a woman's hand in the act of forming the word
corps
, the pink standing lamp of spat rose-petals, the man with candles for eyes, her generalised confusion and disorientation.

Words of English came drifting above the crowd. Victoria looked up from her Kir and saw the painter
Leonora Carrington, sashaying towards her in a polka-dotted dress. She had a rose-petal stuck to the centre of her forehead and walked directly to Victoria, said Hallo Australian with a fake Indian accent and a sideways shake of the head, then kissed her on the lips. Victoria was close enough to see the streaks of her pale makeup and feel the electricity of her long black hair. She is my age, realised Victoria, and so much more confident. There was a scent of patchouli oil and sexual fluids. Someone wound up the gramophone and saxophonic jazz rose quaking into the room. Leonora took Victoria by the wrist, an emissary with floral lungs from the land of
noir
, and led her forward to meet the Surrealist maestro, Monsieur Breton. He removed a petal from his tongue and inspected it critically on the tip of his index finger. Then he announced:

We are all Australians.

All bodies are black.

And Victoria thought to herself — quite unSurrealistically —
Neither statement is true.

Somewhere in the past
you will find Anna in girlhood, in the blazing goldfields, awaiting Visions.

She likes to sit on the verandah at twilight, watching the moonrise. She peers into mauve-coloured air and sees boys skidding their bikes beneath dark shadows of jacaranda which release blooms and whispers on waves of desert breeze. Dust arises from wheels, performing wheelies. There will be a dog-fight somewhere, a few blocks away, and the sound of batteries crushing ore further off in the distance. Lights randomly switch on, in beady spots and rectangles. The triangular shapes of poppet heads can be glimpsed against the sky. Insects whirr: moths and mosquitoes. There is the smell of mutton cooking and an echoic clatter of plates and pans. Her father, who must work night-shift, is moving about in the kitchen, preparing their dinner. Soon Anna will be summoned inside by her name; she will shift from the mauve into the lemon light, and they will sit together, facing
each other, listening to the droning wireless so neither is obliged to talk. Chops. Mashed potatoes. A silent cleaning-up. Father leaves for work; Anna returns, padding on barefeet, to the open verandah, and watches the dark unfurl its patterns of planets and stars.

 

Sometimes Anna likes to pretend she is invisible: this way she can follow her father into the mine. She watches him pack his crib — a slab of bread, left-over meat and a thermos of tea — then sits on the crossbar as he cycles away into the night. The wind is cold on her invisible face and she leans forward affirmatively, like a racer on a circuit. The bike swerves through streets, a show-off, a skite, leaps gullies, circles poles, recklessly accelerates. It travels as though flying, past pubs and shacks, past the Methodist church, and the primary school, and the falling-down Mechanics' Institute. It speeds down the brothel road, just for fun, and red lights stream away and scarlet women wave. Other shift workers are also on bicycles, pedalling hard to produce a twinkling headlight, and they converge in a kind of neat and synchronous solidarity, an asterix that only a racing child notices.

Ahead Anna will see the gold-mine curve upwards to greet them. It has looped strings of lights, like a giant ship, and seems to shudder with mechanical noise and activity. These sounds are imprecise but somehow appalling. There is a screech as the metal cage is slowly lowered and a series of internal growls and below-surface rumblings. Invisible Anna stands
there in the cage with the miners, and descends and descends. Blind dark sweeps over her: she imagines this is like death. But she will have a lamp on her head that will cast a small moon into the blackness before her; and as she follows her father down a corridor deep into the earth, as she experiences tunnel-vision and earth-smell and scary enclosure, the little moon governed by her head rests and slides on his back. He recedes, held into being by her fragile projection. In her imagination the tunnel is so low that he must bend his head like a cyclist.

It is as though she has been there. It is as real as her two hands.

 

At home on the verandah, visible Anna tucks her knees up under her chin and languidly — naughtily — unpicks the hem of her dress. She trails kinky thread, like a girl in a myth. She is thinking:
Twelve hundred, he is at level twelve hundred.
When she moves into the house, she sees glowing in the dark the phosphorescent lime-green of numbers on the wireless, and uses this eerie beacon, which her father habitually leaves, to navigate towards her bedroom without turning on a light. With the sound of the wireless somewhere behind her, blaring ABC, and the smell of mutton still in the air, and the night cold swiftly descending, Anna touches the outline of her bed, slides into it hoping for dreams, and thinks of the mysterious word
moonstruck. Moonstruck at twelve hundred
.

In the blazing goldfields little Anna is just another thin sandy child in a hemless cotton dress, covered with the flower print of a blossom wholly unknown to her; she is just another scallywag miner's daughter. Her home is monumental and there is a scale to things that is certainly inhuman: even if she were God looking down, the poppet heads above the mines would seem out-sized, the grey slag dumps, like ancient monoliths, would be too massive and solid, and the miles and miles of railway sleepers laid across the red dirt, a ladder horizontally to travel on, a reaching promise of other places, would be too repetitious and too extensive. Once a teacher drew railway lines on the blackboard to illustrate the principle of converging perspective and Anna thought:
Yes, that is it, that is exactly what I know
.

In her precocity she recognised recession as the shape of desire. She knew too the principle of correspondence, that even the vaguest feeling finds shape in a common thing. This knowledge reassured her; every thing possessed design, every ordinary thing possessed design and meaning. On the blackboard the white lines were her own personal geometry.

Perhaps it was the flatness of the desert that made structures and shapes so dominant. Perhaps it was the illusions. Where the vaulted sky wavered, solid fabrications seemed impressive. Here the waltzing wind disturbed everything but steel.

 

Once, when she was seven, Anna saw a black cat fly in a blur past the window of her school. It spun upended
and squealing in a gusty cylinder of air. Other children burst into laughter and ran for a better look; but Anna was immobilised: this
marvellous
thing. The tin walls of the school room suddenly rocked and banged — as though the whole world was alarmed and shaken by what was yet possible.

She began to anticipate such events; she began to look.

She waited for dust storms the way other children waited for Christmas. To see it again: a cat spun dizzily in a whirlpool of air. The world restless, upset, susceptible to dislodgement. Or to see, better still, the atrocity she had heard of: a man from Broad Arrow had been decapitated in a dust storm by a piece of flying tin; his lost head, they said at school, was still out there, spinning. Such a lonesome idea. And such a
marvel
.

 

Anna also wishes to be God, with a swooping view; this is another form of invisibility she likes to practise. She will be high enough to see the neat curve of the globe, then she will zip through space, to the enamelled blue sky, and sweep above the desert plain with its saltbush and sandalwood; she will survey the mines with their steel poppet heads, and the makeshift houses, and sheds with rusty rooves of corrugated iron; she will breeze through smoke winding upwards from the campfires of prospectors, she will follow the straight gravel roads and the crooked dry creeks, then she will settle, the holy spirit as a barefooted girl, on the scorching earth.

This is no self-importance; it is simply the route of her imagining. Anna would rather be spirit than body. Her tiny shape frustrates her. In a child-way she intuits this by wishing herself translated into speeding thin air.

 

On Sunday mornings hymns travel the town as Anna does: metaphysically. Although they no longer go to church, she loves the fragments and melodies of blown-away song and in her head sings the hymns of the Methodist church.

(
He's got the whole wor-ld in his hands,

He's got the whole wor-ld in his hands …
)

But in the house her father, Thomas Griffin — people call him Griffo — is a man who has become almost entirely silent, and Anna believes that in his skull no hymns enter and no sound ever plays. He is a man closed in on himself like the fists of a miner he once saw, crushed under a cave-in and clenched in final anger, still holding the damp wilted stub of a dead cigarette.

 

On this particular Sunday, Griffo gathers what they need for a rabbiting excursion. He pours black sugared tea into a metal flask, and cuts fat wedges of bread which he wraps in oiled paper. And as a special treat, and mindful of the need to indulge his motherless daughter, Griffo includes in the picnic a can of condensed milk. He packs these items in the same crib box he takes nightly into the mines. Anna can detect the slight self-consciousness of his gestures, the mark
of a man still unused to the preparation of food. From her position lying with her cheek on the grainy kitchen table, she feels a certain meanness and condescension: she knows her father has forgotten the jam, but will not move to tell him. Griffo's silence, and their poverty, impose an economy on language. There is the condensed milk, of course, but Anna is weighing up in her stomach how tasty it would have been to have two doses of sweetness. Just last year her mother was offering jam on a spoon. She sees it now, a shiny mound of brown gelatine, a glistening jewel held up to her face, an offering, a love-gift, with a smile hovering behind. It was new fig jam, smelling of sugar. They had traded, she recalls, tomatoes for figs.

Together father and daughter set out on the bicycle, with Anna balanced on the crossbar, her twiggy arms braced. They ride out past the edge of the town and enter the scrub territory of small mining claims, where many shafts are ruined and long abandoned. Scattered about are windlasses, metal buckets and bits of broken-down machinery, all eaten and corroded by blistery rust. Sometimes there are lonely old men with flyblown beards, picking away at the earth. They have scabby hands, bent shoulders and mystically patient dispositions. And sometimes one will call out: Eh! Griffo! Eh! and Anna's father answers back with a silent wave. He used to be a laughing man, this bloke, this bloke they call Griffo, Ern's boy of course, poor Ern who was hurt. People round here remember a different Griffo.

Poor bugger, they say, missus pissed off, left im high an dry, an with the kiddie too …

Anna's invisibility enables her to hear such things. She watches the old fossickers and listens to their thoughts, and knows they describe in their own ways the varieties of forsakenness.

 

But now Anna and her father are working together, checking the traps. Of a dozen traps, ten are full. They release the bodies of the rabbits and gather each one into a hessian bag. The small corpses are limp and warm, some punctured by the narrow jagged teeth of the traps, and all carry the stench of wasted blood. Flies in lazy dozens stir around their work. Anna has flies in her eyes and can see them clinging in massed groups on the back of her father's shirt. She does not mind the trapping, but she hates the lingering flies. Sometimes she strikes at them, shooing, and they rise up in ominous clouds. She carries smokebush to wave at them, and to hold off the bloody-death smell.

When they pause for their small meal, in the thinnest slice of shade, Griffo unpacks and portions the food with slow and deliberative movements; then suddenly he says:

She's not coming back, you know.

He kicks at the ground with the toe of his boot, setting off tiny detonations of dust. Then he squats and shifts four thick slices of bread into alignment.

I know, Anna replied. (Although she hadn't.)

It is a shocking moment because Griffo begins to
weep. He is almost immediately embarrassed and wipes his teary face with the back of his hand; then he spits into the dust, as if to spit out his tearfulness. It is the only time in her life Anna ever sees her father cry, there, with ten dead rabbits, on a hot Sunday morning, and the lingering tunes of blown hymns still playing in her head, and the pestering flies, and the dank smell of musty hessian, and the stronger pungent smell of fresh animal blood, and the anomalous taste of condensed milk, infantile and syrupy, still delicious and sticky around the corners of her mouth.

She leans forward and kisses her father lightly on the cheek. He flinches and looks away.

 

Riding home they catch sight of a pack of wild camels which buck away into the far blue distance, screaming. Their forms rock and jerk, like something wounded.

Anna listens to her father's breathing as he pedals the bicycle. She holds the bag of bloody rabbits close to her chest. A stain appears on her dress: she rubs it with spit but it does not seem to fade or disappear.

 

At home father and daughter perform the ceremony of skinning, up the back, in the woodshed. Griffo demonstrates how to remove all the fur in one action, peeling it back from the body like a glove, inside out. Beneath their skin the rabbits are startlingly red. On their shiny bodies, small as foetuses and terrible in their exposure, lies a sinuous network of dark blue veins. Anna and her father clean the skins and stretch
them in the sun to dry, nailing them with little tacks to planks of old wood. The shape of rabbit skins, Anna knows, is the shape of her father's sadness. The stumpy legs are like arms, reaching up to catch something missing.

Her whole world is like this: analogies, sadness, the hush evoked by a shape. She looks at her father's boots in the corner of the shed, their frayed laces tied together, their blunt toes communing, and even these seem weighted with his particular misery. She looks at his hands in the act of flensing rabbit skin. They are dirty hands, with nicks and scratches, hands ever busy with chores that do not need explanation. When he has finished Griffo wipes his knife on old newspaper and cleans his bloody hands with a scrap of rag, but through neglect or distraction or self-preoccupation does not, not once, meet his daughter's gaze.