Sorry (22 page)

‘Proper good one, that story, like blackfella story.'

Perdita looked at her with an avid, questioning stare.

‘Yes,' Mary conceded. ‘That's how it was.'

She clasped her hands in a vaguely prayerful gesture. Perdita waited, watching her, but Mary said nothing further.

‘So why did you protect me, Mary?'

Mary closed her eyes, sighed, and took her time. The release of words Perdita had imagined as an excited rush was instead painstaking and tethered to weighty implications.

‘Maybe I was foolish, eh? Back in those days I wanted to be a saint. Or like Annie McCaughie, pure and well loved. But I also knew that I was much stronger than you, Deeta. And Stella, too. I was stronger than Stella. She wouldn't have survived if you'd been sent away to a home.'

‘I don't believe it,' Perdita replied. ‘She was fierce, tough.'

‘She needed you.'

‘No, we've never been close.'

‘It's true.' Mary persisted. ‘Mothers and daughters, they need each other.'

Here she halted, waited. Billy was staring into his lap, unsure of his role. The room was stuffy and overheated, and all felt its smothering claim on them.

‘Anyway,' Mary added, ‘too much time has passed. I'm useful here. I teach reading and writing. I have my friends, my place.'

There was a calmness to her tone that Perdita found disturbing. From an adjacent room came a clanging, a noisy irritation.

‘Mary?'

‘Deeta, I chose. I chose to help you, eh? And now I have no choice. No one will believe the word of a bush blackfella. Unless,' she added, ‘they're confessing a crime.'

Mary paused. She looked away. The clanging sound – something metallic being loaded and shifted – ceased to meet her silence.

‘I understood this long time.' It was her old, Aboriginal voice. ‘That Stella, that one Stella, she would never help me.'

‘I can,' Perdita insisted. ‘I can write letters, visit lawyers. I can tell them the truth.'

‘They won't want to know.'

‘But it was me …'

‘Yeah, Deeta, it was you. And you were a child.
A child
, Deeta.'

‘I knew what I was doing.'

Such simple words. And such insufficiency.

‘You were a child. How could you know? You were only trying to help me. Sisters, eh?'

Perdita looked down, ashamed in the face of Mary's generosity. She carried the burden of such vast wrongdoing. There was no honour here, to know Mary was blameless and imprisoned by something unspoken.

‘Still sisters?' Perdita asked.

‘Yeah,' said Mary. ‘Course we are, bloody oath.'

But although it was offered, there was no atonement. There was no reparation.

That was the point, Perdita would realise much later, at which, in humility, she should have said ‘sorry'. She should have imagined what kind of imprisonment this was, to be closed against the rustle of leaves and the feel of wind and of rain, to be taken from her place, her own place, where her mother had died, to be sealed in the forgetfulness of someone else's crime. Perdita should have been otherwise. She should have said ‘sorry'.

The clanging started again. Mary changed the subject.

Now, so much later, she was still sitting in the same chair, still somehow stuck. Time had made rotten her good inten
tions, had confounded and deformed what she had not had the courage to say.

How long a time lies in one little word?

Billy was sitting beside her, as he always did, leaning to the left. He was gesturing happily. Perdita had just told Mary of Billy's love.

‘I need to meet Pearl,' Mary said to Billy, mouthing her words carefully.

‘She'd love to meet you,' Billy signed, and Perdita translated.

‘For the sign language,' Mary explained. ‘There is a deaf girl here, a Noongah girl from Mogumber Mission. I could learn sign language and teach her. And then talk to you too.'

So it was that they became a new community of four, all repudiating the clumsy instrument of human speech, and participating instead in the silent articulations of the body. Mary learned very quickly, much quicker than Perdita, and had an emphatic, declarative style. Her hands were ample gadgets, her spirit was enlivened. Pearl joked that Mary signed with an Aboriginal accent, and Mary was charmed by this quirky, possibly accurate, description.

They entrusted to each other the conversion of words to embodied tokens; they watched each other attentively, seeing voices; they developed an idiom, an idiolect, and withstood the derision of the Greensleeves staff to communicate with eloquent pleasure.

The secrecy of their meanings was troubling to the institution, but there were no rules, apparently, against speechless meetings. No lopsided knowing, no fraught mistranslation; this was a language rich with hidden density, such as the body itself carries, and soulful as each distinctive, utterly distinctive, signer.

And with Pearl, Mary rediscovered her sense of humour. Perdita watched as small gestures emerged as a laugh; she saw
how it was a gift they exchanged, this sculpture of analogies, hints and mime; how much, potentially comic, resided there, how much, bracketed by arms, was yet to be expressed. Mary practised diligently: a ‘natural', Pearl signed. They met thrice weekly, each looking forward to the fun of it, to the new meanings they might make.

Five months later, on her twentieth birthday, Mary was moved from the juvenile detention centre to a women's prison. Only ‘blood' relatives, they were told, were permitted to visit. It was another breaking open. Another smashed form. Although Perdita, Billy and Pearl all wrote to Mary, each grieved the loss of their hands full of signs they had been prepared to offer her, and the frail shape of new family they had made together.

As an adult, absorbed in a novel, Perdita remembered the companionship she shared with Mary in reading. There was nothing quite like this earnest, indulgent privacy. In a life distracted, noisy, shredded by trivial social encounters and the too-much reality of the banal everyday, to settle quietly with a novel – its continuous thought, its completed world, its parallel universe – will comfort and reassure her. Of what? Of established order, at least. Of pattern and of meaning, even if notional.

Something else. She will remember, long ago, Mary's hands fashioning a cat's cradle from string. It was elaborate and complicated. She held up her design, her fingers wide-spread, and looked pleased with herself. Nets, webs, cords intertwining. There was no beginning or end. It might have been the design of a universe.

‘What's it called?' Perdita had asked. ‘What does it mean?'

‘My secret,' said Mary. ‘My secret secret.'

She was adamant and stubborn; she would not tell. Perdita learned then that Mary was not her mirror, that she had an autonomy no simple category could contain. And her own secrets, too, crisscrossing, unnamed, extraordinary as the patterns imagined in the stars, complex as the tracks that configured the desert.

In the purple of late night-time, Perdita heard her mother chanting:

Stella looked up and saw Perdita standing in the doorway.

‘King Richard,' she said meekly. ‘He's in prison, and miserable.'

‘Ah,' said Perdita.
In prison, miserable.

Her mother had fewer times, nowadays, of coherent speech. Dementia was setting in. After such a tormented inner life, vibrant with nasty detail and Elizabethan distress, Stella had begun to wane and blur. After the railway station, with its oppressive crowding and noise, after the encumbering weight of her Shakespearean filter on the world, so wordy and metaphoric, so violent and time-bound, Stella was slipping away, finding her own sanctuary.

By the age of sixty-five she would be entirely wordless and lost. She was grubby and spent hours fidgeting with her buttons
and buttonholes. She did not recognise her daughter, or know, any longer, her sins of omission and commission.

The pathos of her life, Perdita thought, was after all unspeakable. No sign could express it. No hand could draw it in the air. Perdita lay awake at night wondering why she had become Echo to Stella's Narcissus, why their lives had been so pitched in the tenor of melodrama. She wondered – she will wonder, in fact, all the days of her life – why it was that she actually
forgot
. And why she must now remember her forgetting.

In the darkness Perdita was vulnerable to the words of Shakespeare. They flowed into her, insinuating, like unbidden memory. She wanted
sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care
. She wanted silence. She feared, above all, becoming her mother. In the darkness, too, Perdita was seeking forgiveness. Lying on her side, looking in private reverie at the charcoal outline of the bed-lamp she had decided not to turn on, absorbed by memories she could neither settle nor dispel, she wondered what she would say to Mary if they were alone together now, lying side by side as they had as children. And what would she say if her father materialised here, like Hamlet's father, to speak of murder and injustice. Could any words utter the contents of so truant a heart?

What returned to her was the image of the V-shaped trail that unrolled in neat turmoil behind a travelling ship, the ocean marked impermanently by the passage from one life to another, the sign of an everlasting, absorbing divergence. From the ship's railing, looking down, it had been a beautiful thing. Folding water. Turning light. The dreamy curl of any journey. Now Perdita could not erase what returned only as a symbol.

Peace-time at last came, first as a rumour, then as news, then as a public celebration. But after the initial trembling astonishment, even euphoria, there had been a sense of hollowing out, of meaning gone. Like a faded transparency,
the look of things changed. There was a stale and weary quality to climbing on a tram, watching the city rumble by, seeing returned soldiers, still in uniform, wandering about with absent looks on their sepia faces.

But nothing ever entirely ceases: Perdita knew this. So the wars moved elsewhere – she would never stop hearing of them – and she languished in her own creaturely, receded state, waiting, it seemed, always somehow waiting.

What life did she find, beyond all this quiet and fury, beyond her idiot, strutting and fretting self? They had no money, Stella and she, so when the time came, and even with a scholarship, Perdita was unable to take a place at university. Instead she gained a position as a trainee librarian. This suited her well. There was a dignity in libraries; it was an honourable job. She admired the atmosphere of muffled restraint and the beige, dusty light. She admired the way book-stacks constructed a mini-city, the labyrinths of silent, orderly words. To see the spines aligned, each with its title, author and organising number, was a particular comfort. When she looked down on the head of a child, bent intently over a book, she wanted to kiss the nape of her neck. When she handed a volume to an old lady she felt, in her very bones, continuities here, the families of readership.

But there was also loneliness and a dwindling faith in what meanings might be found. Furtively, Perdita practised sortilege, opening books at random to seek out sudden understandings. She saw ‘transmission', ‘leaf', ‘tomorrow', ‘face'. Her mind spun on possibilities:
tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
. All these collected words, bound within covers, and here she was, stuck with atomistic, contingent play. Words left their logical clusters and flew apart. Each book she fetched from its slot, sliding it into her hands, made meaning harder.