Black Mirror (15 page)

Then in a wardrobe she found an entire set of women's clothes, hanging perfectly still and hidden in semi-darkness. They were elaborate garments, many with panels, embroidery and transparent attachments, and out-sized hats decorated with pink tea-roses or yellow gauze, together with shoes lined up beneath them in neat matching couples. These were her mother's clothes. They were empty, lank and smelled like death. Earwigs scurried and moths lifted up: it was a little universe of soft and crushable creatures. Victoria stared for an instant, even touched the fluted sleeve of a cornflower-patterned dress, and then slammed shut the wardrobe. As she fled she saw her own face, peaky and child-androgynous, vibrate for a second in the crown-shaped mirror above her parents' dressing table. She spoke to no one, not even Lily-white, of what she had discovered.

 

It was not long after this that a strange man came to the front door and asked to see her mother. Victoria watched the scene from her place tucked within the folds of the curtains. It occurred to her, and for the first time, that perhaps after all her mother was somewhere still alive, and hidden away like her wardrobe of clothes. Perhaps she was in a cave, or a mine, or inside some Egyptian sarcophagus. It was an appalling thought and one which made her tremble. The man
was tall, thin, and spooky pale, and insisted on speaking personally to Mrs Rose Morrell. Mrs Murphy argued at the doorstep — pushing her pudgy body towards him like a hen — but the pale man became even more distressed and agitated. He flailed his arms and raised his voice.

Rose! he called out. Rose, it's me! (As if she was hiding alive in the house.)

Please Moira, he said, begging Mrs Murphy. Please, Moira, please.

Then Lily-white, who had been listening, emerged from the house, took the visitor by the arm and guided him gently into the garden. In a gesture of tender solicitude, she sat him down beside her on the gravel. Leaning close she whispered something, and the man let out a cry. He buried his face in his hands, shuddered and wept. Victoria had never before seen a grown man weep; and would never again see a man weep with such despairing abandon. Lily-white rocked back and forth, sang a song in her own language, and eventually the man rose, turned slowly, and walked away. Lily-white stayed there, singing, in the amber light of late afternoon, and it seemed to Victoria that her voice was full of plan-gent Melbournes.
Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne
, Lily-white sang.

 

It was a world, the child found, populated with many strange men. When she walked in the town with Ruby and Lily-white, men would often hail them with
incomprehensible messages, and seemed somehow always on the verge of misbehaviour. They shoved their hands deep into their miners' pockets. Winked. Leered. Sometimes they burst out laughing at their own private jokes. One day a returned soldier exposed himself in the lane: he stood absurdly at attention, with one hand cradling his genitals and the other raised in salute, and sang out:

Reckon you'd like a bit a this one, ya fuckin darkie fuckin gin?

Lily-white averted her eyes, tightened her grip on the children's hands, and pushed carefully past him. There was a guttural spitting sound behind them, and a parting obscenity.

Is he a debil-debil? Victoria had asked, fascinated by what she had seen.

Nah, said Lily-white. He's a sick man. In the head.

She touched her temple, which was moist with sweat. Her eyes were large and lustrous and inflected by fear. She raised Ruby up onto her hip and they hurried away, slowing only when they met a black man, one of Lily-white's people, further up the laneway and resting in a shadow. They spoke to each other in their special way, then Lily-white laughed and continued home. When Victoria glanced back the second man waved; he was kindly looking after them. He was wishing them well and safe.

 

Because Aborigines were, on the whole, banned from the centre of the town, and lived mostly in shabby
camps around its outer fringes, Victoria saw them moving down laneways, traversing the town in concealment in their small friendly groups. It was as though the town possessed secret passages and a world constituted by margins. When she thought of it Victoria imagined a double cartography: the laneways were a kind of net beneath which the mine-shafts invisibly ran, but these routes did not match up and this made a complicated pattern. It pleased her to think in such terms, of enigmatic routes and spaces, of mazed complications. She loved too the dappled and penumbral aspect of the lanes, so much nicer than pitch-darkness with its doomed-looking miners, and the way you could peer through picket fences and Mexican creeper into everyone's lives, and watch people on the dunny, and find cast junk, and garbage, and sad broken things.

But there are also memories of the laneway that have always disturbed her. A butcher up the road gave away his unsaleable bits of meat, so she had seen black people pass by carrying sheep's heads and horse's heads and other objects, obscured, in dripping hessian bags. This sign of their deprivation: the mucky scraps of butchered animals. Even when Victoria helped Lily-white smuggle tea and flour over the wall to her friends — there was a lovely starburst of hands reaching upwards to receive it — this image, this grisly image, did not quite dispel. A sheep's head, under an arm, its fat eyes staring, its neck especially bloody and slimed with viscera.

And it was in a laneway, too, that Henry blinded Lily-white.

Victoria was somewhere else, sitting in the dirt with the infant Ruby, and Henry summoned Lily-white to identify the lizard he had stabbed. He had pinned it through the gullet with a stick, and left it there, squirming. As Lily-white bent down to examine the creature, Henry pulled out the stick and then suddenly pushed it, like an arrow, through Lily-white's eye. She seems not to have howled — at least Victoria and Ruby didn't hear her — but came stumbling past, holding her face, which was gushing matter and blood. Her body was already acting blind, with one arm outstretched before her, and her movements anxious and uncertain, as though the world had been redefined in an instant by its impediments and obstacles. She found her way to the kitchen, and as the screen door banged Mrs Murphy's voice rang out:
Christ-Almighty! Christ-Almighty!
Ruby, in a delayed reaction, burst into tears. Victoria took the child onto her hip, carried her inside, and there they watched Mrs Murphy — who continued murmuring, all the while,
Christ-Almighty, Christ-Almighty
— tend their wounded mother, Lily-white, whose left eye was entirely split open and gone, whose beautiful face was ruined forever, and who was so very still and submissive beneath Mrs Murphy's large mottled hands, that the girls knew this was something calamitous and wholly irremediable.

Henry entered and the screen door banged once again. He lifted a pitcher of milk from the sideboard and tipped it into his face.

That night Mrs Murphy seized Henry — though he was almost eleven years old — and dragged him to his father's room to punish and berate him. Without knowing it, she used the belt that had been made from the skin of an Aborigine's back.

 

Lily-white was different, after that. She grew rather solitary and silent and walked awkwardly, with a slight tilt to one side. More than blindness assailed her; half her spirit seemed gone. She was afraid of Henry and her fear conveyed itself to Ruby, who put up her hands to her eyes whenever he approached. Henry enjoyed this, and teased her, making jabbing gestures in the air, and he so swaggered with his power to intimidate and scare that even Miss Casey grew afraid of him and stopped demanding schoolwork. Through her employer she arranged to have Henry sent to boarding school early, and on the night of his departure there was such rejoicing in every female heart in the house that Victoria thought that the roof of the house would lift off, or some other bewitching sign materialise to express or betray them. No one waved at the train. And Henry spat at them from the window.

 

He had been gone a couple of weeks when a crate arrived one day from faraway Egypt. Mrs Murphy and Miss Casey unpacked it together,
ooh
ing and
aah
ing in chorus as each foreign object was divested of its straw. There was a framed photograph of Herbert Morrell posed in Nubian dress (looking larger and more florid
than Victoria remembered him), at which Miss Casey exclaimed, and sighed, and rested her hand flatly over her bosom above her starched beige blouse; and another of the Sphinx, its effaced features eerie. There were pots with inscriptions, a leather pouch of piastres, and rolls of fabric worked finely with designs of silver and gold. And below these, in extra straw, was a series of mummified animals: a heron, a cat, a small stretched-out snake, and then finally Mrs Murphy withdrew a mummified baby. Its face and hands were revealed, and it was an inadmissible object, of quite a different order to the other souvenirs that surrounded it. It was black-skinned, almost ebony, in its extreme desiccation, and its features had sunk inwards, stretched taut on resilient bone, so that it looked truly less like a baby than some miniature adult, shrunken, or perhaps tortured, by an unknown extremity. It was sheathed in a kind of rag of disintegrating cloth, with black hands holding it like kitten claws, clenched in on themselves. Its eyes were closed tight, with tiny lashes just visible.

What a sweetie! chimed Miss Casey. How very quaint! And peculiar.

But Mrs Murphy was repelled (
Christ-Almighty
, she whispered, crossing herself, criss-cross), and Lily-white, who had been watching the unpacking from a distance by the giraffe near the curtains, closed her one remaining eye and turned away.

 

Later, when it was night, Lily-white came for Victoria. They stole outside — she remembers an orange
full-moon resting low on the horizon — and took with them all the mummies and a large iron spade. Lily-white carried the Egyptian baby close to her body, and seemed unable to speak. They chose a spot in the lane, a little way from the back of the house, dug a hole, and buried the mummies, one by one. Lily-white lit some gum leaves and swept veils of smoke over the graves, and then sang a song in the voice that resembled sorrowful moaning. The orange moon rested in her single eye. She looked tired and altered. Fearful of debil-debils. She was worn down by these white people and their barbaric predilections.

In bed later on Victoria tried to comfort Lily-white, but was instead thinking, for some reason, of those clothes hanging bodiless in the coffin-like wardrobe, and the strange man, the visitor, calling out her mother's name. For months she had been unable to bring herself to ask. But now, lying with Lily-white and speaking very softly so as not to awaken Ruby, she put her lips close as a kiss to the woman's dark cheek.

My other mother, she said. Where is she, Lily?

Lily-white drew in a breath, half-dozing, and answered slowly.

She gone, your mother. Gone to her spirit. Somewheres. I dunno.

Is she dead, Lily?

Yeah, Viccy, yeah. Your mother dead. Maybe in whitefella heaven. Or in her spirit place. Somewheres.

It was a relief to hear it. Victoria nestled in the dark triangle Lily-white had made with her arm, and they
snoozed together, very close, each exhausted by sorrow, and by burial, and by untimely grief.

(vi)

Herbert Morrell was perhaps lost somewhere in Egypt; in any case he stayed away for several years. Miss Casey, poor Miss Casey, who was faithfully waiting, and under a romantic delusion of considerable profundity, grew unhappy and tetchy and talked to herself over cups of tea; her red hair became straggly and her beige blouses less laundered. But for the rest of the household it was a peaceful time. Ruby was suddenly a feisty little girl; Victoria discovered paintbrushes and brushed open her visions; and Mrs Murphy, time-moderated, was less stern and almost lovable. Only Lily-white remained exactly as she was. Her wounding had fixed her forever in a moment of distress, and left her there, marooned.

 

So when was it, exactly, that Mrs Murphy began taking the girls with her to the moving pictures? She would gather up her bobbled and scalloped grey shawl, pin it in the centre with a golden brooch featuring two clasped hands, then simply announce their excursion. It was somehow always a surprise. At the Lyric Picture Palace, sitting either side of fat Mrs Murphy, cosseted by fuzzy darkness and loving every minute, the girls saw a completely new empire of signs. Faces and gestures made startling by the elimination of colour,
bodies moving about with unnatural speed and jerkiness, mute declarations, tormented bold posturings. Victoria adored the laminated quality of the images, and the intervals of printed dialogue, always flowery and in exclamation. No one was impassive and no one ever stayed still. Life was racy. Middles were disastrous. Endings were happy. The women were all gorgeous and the men all handsome. They saw heroines with large eyes swept away on ice floes, bounders and cads grabbing women by the waist, evil men with moustaches, zippy chases in cars, daredevils in biplanes, trains out-of-control. They saw Rudolph Valentino kiss smouldering brunettes with tiny dark mouths and quivering presences. How the auditorium roared: it was such commotion! The miners in the back hooted and stamped their feet like thunder, so that the sound of the piano was completely inaudible, and Mrs Murphy, overcome, put her hand up to her mouth.
Christ-Almighty
, she declared to herself, smiling.