Sorry (15 page)

Of my complicated childhood, this event haunts me still: the slaughter, that day, of Dutch refugees. I was far enough away to see it all as a spectacle, and indeed I may not have heard any screams, but simply imagined I did, after the fact, as it were, after hearing the gory details. It was, I suppose, a direct encounter with war, but it was also at a distance, and alienated, and involved the swoop of shiny planes through a cobalt-blue sky, the glittering sea stretching before me, puffs of telltale smoke faraway arising, rather than any real meeting with physical suffering. And I was not simply afraid, but also exhilarated, by the bursts of gunfire and the impressive explosions. The small world of stealing pearl shell and patting a stray dog suddenly opened into public and historical dimensions.

In my vulgar and rather romantic imaginings, I envisioned the shadow of a Zero upon the water, then a flying boat instantly exploding beneath it. I had not seen frantic human beings, in paroxysmal desperation, grasping at each other, flinging themselves into the water, watching the ping of lines of bullets chase them to their deaths. No child of my age, no old woman, drowning. I remember hearing too that some of the wounded had been taken by sharks, attracted by the amount of blood in the water. I had not seen the tearing of flesh, or the human made meat. So I was witness and not
witness, and in any case, because of my stuttering, could not tell what I had seen.

I know now that I was selfish and opportunistic. To have my mother embrace me, bawling, as if she really loved me; it was like a reward in the midst of other people's devastation. Until we saw the bodies gathered in, and a few Dutch men wandering on the beach, weeping and distraught, their arms limp at their sides in total defeat, we had not truly understood the proximity and scale of the event.

Two days later we were evacuated from Broome. There was no real relief. There was no sense of secure escape. There was only the unmooring and the lifting anchor and the slow drift from the jetty, the subdued quiet of the passengers, whose number included the surviving Dutch, and the catching of the tide, the huge natural force, that pulled us away across the ocean, leaving Broome far behind, tucked under somehow, subdued in memory.

On the journey south Perdita filled exercise books with her untutored, scribbled thoughts. Seasick for most of the week it took to travel down the coast, she was caught in an engulfing, queasy unhappiness, much larger than the discomfort of her own child's body. Her insides churned, her limbs felt heavy. She seemed entirely to have lost her sense of balance. From her dingy bunk she glanced at the tilting jade sea in the porthole and swore she would never again step onto a ship. It was like a delirium. When she rose she staggered; when she lay she felt a compression of time and space and the crowding in of images she had been trying to suppress. Everything was suffused by a sour, metallic smell. The air was stale and smothering. It was a half-way death.

To pass time, to counter this dreadful containment, Perdita
wrote. She had no actual plan, or story to tell; she simply needed to settle within words some of what was rising inside her. At some point she was coaxed onto the deck to see dolphins playing alongside the ship and was encouraged to walk its length, to get her ‘sea legs', someone said. At the stern she saw the frothy wake folding in on itself, curling the ocean into a V-shaped trail. It is this image of the voyage, this severe abstraction, that Perdita most clearly remembered later on. This, and one of the Dutchmen she had seen on the beach in Broome. He was now leaning over the railing, alone, sobbing his heart out.

Stella, on the other hand, was revived by the journey. Although she had been ill, years ago, on her trip with Nicholas to the north, it was as if she now lived in a different body. She liked climbing the steep iron steps to the deck and breathing the sea air, enjoying a sensation from some earliest, dimmest time: the feel of warm sea wind blowing back her hair, the tang of it, and its aura of incredible freedom. She chatted with passengers on the deck, and was invited to participate in protracted games of cards. In the evening, several times, she entertained others with her Shakespearean recitations. They applauded heartily; they thought her exceptionally clever. Stella curtsied to the audience and had never before seemed so happy. For hours on end she forgot she had an ailing, embarrassing daughter, prostrate on a bunk, hidden down below.

For Perdita the journey seemed to last for ever. She did not once see Billy or Mrs Trevor; they were in some other part of the ship, locked in the melancholy of their own departure, coping with their own sense of times and places falling away. Perhaps Billy was also ill. Perhaps he too lay on a bunk, swollen with their shared history, watching with nauseous fear the horizon on the other side of the porthole, tipping and sliding, reducing everything to a circle.

By the time they arrived in Perth, Perdita was morose, pallid
and wholly out of love with the ocean. On the dock, she glimpsed Billy for just a moment. He was looking away, distracted, watching his mother. His hands rested still at his sides. He exemplified the confused, resistant manner of the newly arrived. And then he was gone.

Members of a volunteer charity organisation met them as they disembarked, and Stella handed over their luggage with an air of disconnection. They were driven to rooms that had been rented in an inner-city boarding house. With their two suitcases, and a sense of the contraction of their lives, they waved farewell to their benefactors and, with sinking hopes, entered the sturdy red-brick building that would temporarily be their home.

What would Perdita remember of this? That Stella stood for a long time gazing silently out the window. She had her hands thrust in the pockets of her best linen skirt and was rendered immobile, transfixed not by the view, which was of an ordinary city street, with tramlines and rows of shops and electric lights affixed to poles, but an awareness, perhaps, that she had to make her own life now, that she was responsible for herself and her daughter and whatever destiny they might find. From outside came a clanking, screeching, steely sound, like sheets of metal being torn apart. Perdita rushed to the window to watch the tram rattle past. It was the one City Thing she had seen so far that really excited her.

It was no brave new world, but bleached and empty. The people in it were worn down by the scarcities of war-time, and not particularly sympathetic to an English widow and her peculiar daughter. Stella wrote letter after letter to her father-in-law, asking in polite terms for ‘monetary assistance', but received no response. Perhaps he was dead, she thought. They were abandoned, stranded. After the enjoyment of the voyage
and a sense of her own emancipation, Stella began to feel weary and disconsolate. Jobs were hard to come by; their savings were diminishing. Day after day she left, wearing her best clothes and a thin smudge of cerise lipstick, declaring her intention to join the world of labour.

Eventually she found work in a florist's shop. Each day, at 9 a.m., Stella helped unload a mountain of mixed flowers from the back of a van, then sort and re-order them into small neat bunches, which she wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbon. Other flowers, those more ostentatious or expensive, the tuberoses, the gladioli, the agapanthus, were set aside for unique arrangements. It was easy work. The store owner, Mrs Brodie, was originally from Manchester, and though she had, in truth, no need of an assistant, she felt compassion for the down-at-heel woman with the anomalously posh accent, who stood before her one Saturday morning, asking, almost pleading, for work of any kind. Her husband, she said, had been killed in the war. They agreed to part-time hours and a modest salary.

For Stella it was a relief to have found something to do. The work was decorous, feminine and even a little artistic. And she was surrounded all day by floral perfumes and the denser, sensual smell of wet leaves and greenery. After the hot dry north, characterised in her memory by ugly boab trees and red parched earth, this was almost English in its enwreathing ambience. Glorious greenery. Fish ferns, baby's-breath, leaves as big as hands. The buckets of roses, the pinks and the peaches, the whites for weddings and the crimsons for romance, she particularly admired. All her life she had wanted to be given a bouquet of roses. With her first wage – and even though it was an extravagance – she bought six roses, of salmon pink, and arranged them proudly in a jam jar in their rented room. In a place of no adornment they were a gorgeous apparition. Stella fussed to set them just right, equi
distant, equally inclining. She pushed the jar into the centre of their table.

For Perdita the roses were a revelation. She had never seen such blooms before, nor smelled such sweetness. These were objects that had existed only in fiction. She lifted on tiptoe to bring her face close to the petals. So this, perhaps, was one of the functions of cities, to incarnate what had existed only immaterially, in words. To present the variousness of things, the far-fetched richness, the startling oddity of what came from the fabulous elsewhere. And not just one thing, but many, multiplied, in visions, and touchable, real and absolute.

‘
By any other name
,' said Stella, ‘
would smell as sweet.
'

A slight tremor passed over her painted lips. It was a moment of unity. Perdita loved her mother. She looked up at her and in that moment forgave her for everything. Stella reached forward and adjusted the angle of the rose heads, cupping them, lifting them slightly, letting them fall in a circle.

At school Perdita suffered. It was the final year of primary school and she knew nothing of playground codes, hierarchies, cliques and games, nothing of the educational necessity of humiliation, punishment and spite. Children who carry too much misfortune are necessarily despised. She was not pretty, she had no father, she could not speak without stuttering. Her clothes were crudely home-made and her origins obscure. She bore, moreover, a preposterous name, which other children chanted as though it were a singular stutter: ‘P-P-P-ditta!'

Teachers sometimes defended her in a half-hearted way, but it was clear they too thought her an irredeemably unfortunate case.

Perdita also learned that school lessons were nothing like her mother's. Knowledge was, it seemed, more severely parti
tioned, and there were lists to learn, and right and wrong facts. Stella had taught her nothing of the history of the monarchs of England, yet this was clearly the backbone of Australian education; similarly she had neglected mathematics and geography, two of the most prestigious disciplines. Shakespeare was not as important as her mother had tediously proclaimed; yet Perdita realised that teachers were nevertheless impressed by her familiarity with his works – the only thing she could tell them when they asked: so what
do
you know? And she discovered, by accident and in an instance of mutual puzzlement, that she could recite complete verses of Shakespeare fluently, without entering the word-fray and deformation of her stutter.

At the end of the school term, when there was a concert for parents, Perdita was chosen to stand on a stage and recite Hamlet's famous soliloquy: ‘
To be, or not to be
'. Stella sat in the audience, beaming approval. She wore her best grey blouse with a spray of violets pinned to the collar, something kept from long ago, stored for the promise of a celebration. It did not escape Perdita's notice that she was mimicking her mother, that from all that was forfeited, broken, lost or destroyed, she had retained her mother's exacting skill.
Unbroken Shakespeare
. She heard her voice swing upwards, unfastened, like a flying kite, clever as any toy and just as easy. For a while she was buoyed; she was in a dream of fluency. From her open mouth: flight. From her tongue and her throat, vibrating with pleasure, came words that had existed, polished and prized, for hundreds of years. But after the performance Perdita returned to the country of her exile. She was again the pitiable child in ill-fitting clothes, who could not complete a single sentence with ease.