Black Mirror (21 page)

The catalogue description reads thus:

When she opens the door it is Winston, returned, carrying a bunch of lilacs.

I heard, he said. I heard from Cécilia.

Anna steps forward and leans her cheek against his chest, and his arms enclose her like a perfect wreath.

The sky was bone.
Anna looked up and saw not a single bird. Perhaps, she thought foolishly, death has driven them away. The quiet worlds of bird flight and seasons and flecked shadows upon a face, the transient colours of water or stone or the high dome of the sky, these shift with the special-effects of grief. On Hampstead Heath it was Sunday and families were out and about, enjoying the alleviation of severity that marked the beginning of spring. Children in eskimo parkas and with rosy cheeks flung themselves onto the grass, heedless of mud, or fought with friendly aggression over the possession of a striped ball. There was an old man in a scarf, alone, sitting and reading, and a serious track-suited jogger leading a barely controllable dog. Beneath an oak, against the trunk, two lovers, both black and both somewhere in their early teens, kissed and groped with concentrated and disciplined persistence.

Anna saw all this as if it were a film: it hung before her, remote and not quite real. She was conscious too of a slight instability to what she saw; the projection might indeed be a figment of light and shadow, held up tremblingly by an invisible mechanical contrivance, contingent, finite, illusive, false. She viewed it all, this world of light, from a dark and separate chamber.

 

What haunted Anna was that she had not yet said her piece. She had not said the words she had so often rehearsed:
I am here, I am yours
… She had imagined a ceremonial conclusion, composed of a farewell, an expression of love, and the family revelation. She had imagined saying:
Here I am: Anagnorisis.
But Victoria died in her dreaming, luxuriously alone.

 

When she was not in monologue Victoria had been asleep, deeply removed and inaccessible. Towards the end she slept more fitfully, and her fragments of speech shortened, but what marked them above all was self-communion. Victoria's
liaison
was with her avatars, her own other selves, and she met them in an excited time-lapsing rush, the way, Anna thought, one sees film of petals quickly opening in a magical pop, or storm clouds skidding across an inconstant sky, or the polished sun rising or falling with the confident bounce of a tennis ball. Victoria was racing through her history, swift as an animation, colliding with herself. She seemed — how to put it? — she seemed almost
busy
. Then, on the final day, Victoria at last became quiet.
She had been asleep for hours and woke only once, with a start. She said lucidly:

I dreamt I was searching for something, in the River Seine.

And then she slept again, and did not wake. It was in the end that simple; it was that exclusive. Her quietus was a slow sinking into the space of her dreams.

 

And now, thought Anna, Victoria is ash as she wished, mingled with her swan's feather head-dress and the bouquet of velvety flowers she and Cécilia had contributed, and the small carved wooden hourglass Winston placed upon her coffin, and the various conventional floral tributes from collectors and fans; and she has left behind her a wretched chamber, filled with elongated shadows and words unsaid. There was this intolerable grief, and there was also the task, the preposterous task — bequeathed formally by Victoria — of delivering her ashen remains to her long-lost sister, Ruby.

Hampstead Heath flickered before Anna: it had become blustery, all of a sudden. She saw the trees and the grass and the sky and the people, and it appeared not present-tense at all, but waxen and antiquated. Like one of those mute movies punctuated by a black placard bearing the pretended remnants of speech.

Beyond the trees faint smoke scrolled upwards from somewhere. Smoke. Just that. Just that prepossessing sign.

Anna has not been in her town on the goldfields for many years. It has altered, grown. New highways crisscross the town where small bumpy roads had been. There are supermarkets and car-lots with bright plastic bunting. The old-timers seem to have disappeared, and the streets are full of teenagers with strappy sandals and cocky attitudes. In the distance Anna sees Beryl Ray and Moira Ahern, both pushing baby-carriages. They walk in unison, leaning forward, as though moving trolleys of ore. Anna waves, but neither Beryl nor Moira pauses or turns to acknowledge her.

She leaves the railway station carrying her small single suitcase, passes the Railway Hotel, the Commercial Hotel and the Palace Hotel, and then she stands in the main street, beside the Australia Hotel, to get her bearings. The façades of the buildings are largely unchanged since the gold-rushes: history persists in this casual architectural eccentricity, in these tall shapes with their verandahs and iron lace and iron roofs. Across the road stands the elegant Exchange Hotel, with the enigmatic sign
Rialto
fixed to a high surmounting dome. Two men are rolling barrels of beer onto a ramp and guiding them carefully into cellars beneath. One of them looks up and spontaneously waves — How ya bin, luv? he shouts — and Anna nods in his direction with no idea at all who this friendly person might be. From the window behind her a fluid orange light seeps out, smelling of stale beer. She crosses the road and then double-crosses back again, realising in the blur of her own confusion
what it was after all that she had forgotten, that she would meet her father at the Australia, not at the Exchange.

Anna Griffin waits in a galvanised moment, caught by the currents of her own homecoming excitation.

The town around her looks almost completely unreal. It is a confluence of white mythologies she nowadays despises: frontier heroism, brute wealth, value measured by the size of excavation and extraction. A small boy close by idly bangs at a rusted pipe with a piece of metal and the clanging sound — more than the buildings and the street names and the earth smell carried in the wind — reminds Anna of interminable afternoons in this place, afternoons of truly funereal boredom, vast in magnitude, full of stunning glare, bleached by an absorbing and drowsy sadness, from which she retreated to the lending library of the Mechanics' Institute. There she fell into the welcoming shadows of the classics and was dragged by dead Englishmen into cold wordy spaces. There she discovered a catalogue of Victoria's early exhibition (
donator anonymous
) in which she saw, like a revelation, the brilliant authority of images. Familiar objects trans-mutated. The mystery of repetition. Her own landscape seen and rendered with fantastic scrutibility. Here was a seam, a claim, an alluvial outcrop.

She sat alone at an oak desk in the Mechanics' Institute library, her heart quickened in a kind of inner applause, and felt exhumed by art.

Anna? As though he is not quite sure.

Griffo.

They kiss and embrace beneath the sign of the Australia Hotel.

Hey Griffo!

The man at the Exchange waves once again.

Griffo answers his wave in a comfortable copy.

 

Anna is once again staying in her childhood home. She has an iron bed with a horsehair mattress on the back verandah, and a clear view of the pigeon coop, ringed by diamond wire, and neat rows of glossy corn, carefully irrigated by muddy furrows; and further back, the rust-stained shed, exactly as she remembered it, where she and her father used to skin rabbits. Above her, and more evocation than real, the corrugated iron roof heats and cracks, releasing a pungent metallic scent; and the ore crusher, immemorial, sounds its thunder across the sky.

Griffo now lives with Lola, a tiny plump Italian woman, who has transformed him to this gentle nurturer of pigeons and corn. She is a brown woman with a round face (
my lucky penny
, he nicknamed her), and anyone can tell that Griffo and Lola are precious to each other; there is a regard and solicitude in their mutual glances, and a jokey tenderness to their occasional and easy talk. Anna has never seen her father so calm and contented: he whistles and hums as he checks his corn, and Lola watches him, from time to time, through the plastic Venetian blinds at the kitchen window.

In the afternoon they sit together in the shade and drink tea. Lola hands out biscuits and pours from a teapot, her motherly movements deft and precise. She passes Anna and then Griffo a cup of tea, and when she has her own she sits back in her chair, smiling.

Well? Whadaya know? she politely asks.

It is a rhetorical question. Griffo touches her forearm and dips a pale biscuit into his drink. In this small communion, and with sunshine through the lattice falling sideways upon then, they are knitted together by patterns of light. Anna can hear the pigeons making their mournful-sounding calls, she can see her father's grey hair, and the way his face now resembles the leather of rabbit skin, she can see the woman beside him brush tiny crystals of sugar from the table. A dog barks somewhere. There is a slight breeze in the pepper mint. The simplicity of her homecoming almost moves Anna to tears.

 

When she is settled in her bed the first night, Lola visits with a jam-jar filled with sprigs of smokebush.

So you will know that you're home, she says. So you will know where you are.

Lola places the floral offering on the wooden floor beside the bed.

You can smell it, she adds. Like a memory of something, eh?

Anna smiles and pats her blanket so that Lola sits on the edge of the bed.

Thank you.

No problem.

Well, thank you anyway.

A relaxed silence settles, a respectful hush. Lola leans over and softly kisses her step-daughter on the forehead.

Sleep now. It's late. I'll cook eggs in the morning.

And then she rises and walks into the house, switching off the verandah light as she goes.

Anna is remembering herself as a tiny child. She wore bunny-slippers with a bead clasp and a sky-blue animal-print nightie. Her mother lifted her skyward (
fly! fly!
) before she tucked her into bed.

My, what big eyes you have.

A gentle enfolding. A goodnight kiss.

The verandah is draughty and Anna curls her body against the wind. For some reason, half-asleep, she chants to herself: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, hold the horse while I get on.

For some reason, too, she remembers once again seeing trains-as-film — bubble faces, montage, consecutive images-in-a-flash — spooled on the curves of her new imagining, electrified by all that Victoria had shown her.

 

About four years earlier Griffo had caught his right arm in the leather belt of mine machinery, and shattered irreparably the bones in his wrist and forearm. His flesh withered and the palm of his hand decreased in size by almost half; there was also some paralysis. No longer able to work underground, Griffo retrained as a ‘numbers man', a clerk's aide, in the above-ground
mine office. He taught himself to write with his left hand, to shake hands back to front, and to hold a newspaper and shuffle cards single-handed. He re-learnt the world and its activities from the left side of his body.

I got a walloping, said Griffo, and I needed a breather. But I'm all right now.

In a modest gesture, he pulled protectively at his brown cardigan with his good left hand, as though afraid he had tempted fate by his satisfaction with life.

I only think about the accident once in a blue moon. Life's different now. Lola, the pigeons, the garden.

Anna and Griffo stared at each other. Without his cloak of dirt, she thought, and with his benevolent Lola, my father is like Lazarus, returned from the grave.

 

Give us a hand in the garden, Anna.

They move outside, together, in concert.

Pigeons flutter against the wire and sound their welcoming
vroo vroo
. The garden is a quiet fertile place. Anna helps Griffo break open sticks of gelignite, stolen from the mines, to spread as fertiliser in the soil beneath his blooming orange tree. As a child she expected exploding oranges. Now her father pats at the earth with his good left hand, he smooths the red soil and applies a little water, and tells with his body that there will be no more accidents or explosions. His manner is ceremonious and his pace steady and patient. When the task is finished Anna and Griffo wash their hands in a bucket. The sky rests there, broken by their washing, then reassembled.
Everything Anna sees has this quality of precarious coming-together.

In the back shed, now filled up with new gardening equipment, stands Anna's childhood bicycle. It looks battered, old and surprisingly small. It leans with her into the angle of continuous past.

 

It was not difficult to locate Ruby Morrell. Everyone knew of her. She was almost eighty years old, vigorous, indomitable, a leader of her people, and she spent most of her time at the offices of the Centre for Aboriginal Rights, installed in a bow-shaped wicker chair which framed her head like a halo. She recalled Victoria, not in appearance, but in some distinctive air of authority and command; and when first Anna met her she felt a recurrence of the taut contractions of grief. Told of Victoria's death, Ruby became silent and inward, but did not weep.