Black Mirror (16 page)

At home Victoria replayed the pictures. She was always the star, and everyone fell in love with her. Ruby was given only minor roles — she was after all still little and easy to boss — and together they walked around in accelerated fashion and practised virtually their own version of cinema-melodrama. Victoria was clever at paroxysms (of desire and death); and Ruby was a mimic of such skill she seemed able to be anyone, and could cry and laugh and fall over on cue. They even copied the convention of scenic punctuation: Victoria held up little cards with
dialogue and flowers drawn on them, and they both stood still for a moment while their imagined audience read.

Heroine swoons. Falls into Duke's arms. Victoria embraces her sister as she rapturously crumples.

Victoria Morrell looked directly into her sister's black eyes, and saw there the answering lights of a comparable ardour.

 

There were many different darknesses; even Victoria knew that. There was the darkness she had heard about, deep under the ground; there was the darkness of the cinema, pierced by a cone bearing images; and there was the town at night, into which, movie-crazy and Lyrically besotted, she sought out adventures. For a time she snuck out on Saturday nights, sometimes waking up Ruby to accompany her, just to peep into lit windows and spy on other people's lives. The two girls discovered that they were completely invisible: on Saturday nights everything carried a specifically adult visibility. In the pubs sweat-stained men bent and swayed — some had been drinking since the end of their short shift which finished at noon — and they became fluid-looking and indefinite and seemed aquatically sealed there, with the rows of bright bottles and the cedar piano, and the embattled-looking barmaids
with rolled-up sleeves, sealed there in a queasy dank bubble of drunkenness, broken only — and it was a kind of shattering — when someone stumbled outside into the night to vomit or cry. (The girls held their noses and felt no pity at all.) There were the houses, too, small huts of ridged tin where light streamed out in little channels from rusty perforations, huts with women left alone nursing their babies by lamplight, and a goat tethered in the backyard, or a leashed barking dog; and the larger houses, mostly quiet, but for the occasional Rexanola gramophone or an argument or bash-up. There were sheds in which men in tight circles played card games in European, and the Glide-Away Roller Rink where couples, still with their skates on, smooched in the shadows along the outside walls. Trams slid past, all rectangular illumination, and over everything hung the incessant rocky rumbling of the mines.

Beyond the main street, tucked away, were rows of tin brothels, which Victoria found particularly captivating. Some of the women sat in doorways beneath lamps shaded by scarves, and they were posed spectacularly, like criminals or film-stars. They wore flimsy garments of elaborate femininity (beads, laces, boas of feathers) and their faces were made up so that they all bore identical expressions. Ruby and Victoria watched them apply lipstick and smoke cigarettes, then flick the butts into the bushes when a man came along. Neither girl knew exactly what these women did, but they appeared rosy-coloured and splendid, hieratic as
sphinxes. In Brookman Street there existed a Japanese brothel; and these women were even more fantastically strange. There were only glimpses as they opened the door to a customer or moved in the backyard with a lamp to the toilet; but Victoria was in love with their rice-powder paleness and their dark lacquered hair, and the way they shuffled in the long pleats of their rustly kimonos. She and Ruby would climb the picket fence and simply wait; and then out into the darkness one woman eventually came, her white face bobbing like a petal on a wet black bough, her small lamp guiding her and perfectly steady. The sky arching above, the round face, and the glimmering lamp. It was a lovely thing, it was an apparition.

 

One Saturday night, at the end of such an excursion, they heard above the regular mine noise the sound of fire bells. Everyone else was running, so they did too, Victoria holding Ruby's hand and dragging her behind, and when they came at last to the fire it was both golden and disastrous. A crowd of assorted people stood in the street, some in their pyjamas and dressing gowns and one or two in roller-skates, and before them, exploding, was the Lyric Picture Palace. Its interior was lined with Baltic pine, and this made for an opulent and irresistible conflagration; the wood cackled and spat, the piano was ablaze, curtains had disintegrated in flashy display, and as they watched the walls leaned, then fell inwards, and on top of that the pressed-tin roof, embossed with lilies-of-the-field,
crumpled in a spurt of brilliantly yellow flame. The firemen had withdrawn and patiently looked on from the sidelines, their tired faces burnished and their postures defeated.

After a minute or so Victoria realised she was standing beside Mrs Murphy. The old woman was weeping quietly and clutched at her grey bobbled shawl. When they turned and left together Mrs Murphy was still too upset to scold, the girls too inflamed to settle and sleep. Victoria would have liked to sing Mrs Murphy one of Lily-white's songs, one of those songs full of the sound of
Mel-bourne, Mel-bourne
, but did not know how. So instead she contemplated the streak of incandescence still distantly visible in the sky and added another darkness to her secret list, the darkness after fire.

(vii)

When, at fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in the city, Victoria could not believe the degree of cruelty inflicted on her. They all waved at the train, and everyone cried — Ruby was dramatically inconsolable — yet they did not call her back and did not change their minds. She watched Ruby break away and chase the train the entire length of the platform, and the crowd was embarrassed by her ferocious shouts and the wretched force of her sobbing. As the train drew away she looked so very small: this sister, seven years old, her heart publicly breaking.

Victoria knew nothing of girls her age and nothing of school life. The daily codes of the classroom were completely unknown to her. She wore a uniform, and was given books, but this was the merest disguise; they all somehow knew beforehand that she was an interloper, and ignorant. Her French, she discovered, was peculiarly accented and in some cases simply wrong, and her history — Miss Casey's history — a handful of bizarre and disconnected stories, all romantically charged and over-supplied with red-headed lovers and tragic kings. Teachers chided her and other girls mocked. Victoria experienced the terror of social non-entity. It was the loneliest time.

She will remember this period in two specific ways. The first was her friendship with Mary Heany, the large woman in the kitchen who might have been Mrs Murphy's daughter, so neatly did she copy that body and those skills. She hung back in the shadows, outshone by her kitchen. The girls hated her too: she was a Mick, and overweight, and dumb, and a cook. Her face was coarse and ruddy, her fingers were like sausages. Victoria knew immediately that this woman would care for her.

The kitchen was downstairs and at the back of the boarders' building, and Victoria discovered one day that Mary actually lived on the premises: she had a modest room, airless and dank, and it was decorated, rather dominatively, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In this large-framed picture, which hung directly above her bed, Mister Jesus, miserably solemn and conspicuously
underfed, pointed with a burning finger to his exposed glowing heart, which was miraculously externalised, as though he bore a kind of kitchen cupboard buried in his chest. Victoria was entranced by the oddity of the image, and by the woman, Mary Heany, who sat sideways on the bed, her chunky knees protruding, complaining of her sinfulness. (Mary had a boyfriend, a dock worker, who visited Saturday nights, just — as she put it — to bounce to heaven on her body.) In the brown light of the bedroom they traded stories of loneliness, and Victoria told her of gold-mines, and the Voisin, and Ruby and Lily-white. She told her of the blinding and the fire and the black Egyptian baby, even of the wardrobe of her mother's clothes, which had begun to enter her dreams, stirring and blowing like wraiths, billowing into woman-shapes in a vague misty glow. As she gave voice to these things she cherished them all the more; it was perhaps, Victoria thought, like opening a secret cupboard and showing off your heart. Mary understood everything. Mary was wise and thoughtful. Mary was silent when necessary and spoke when required. And she enabled some kind of restoration: that Victoria might inhabit her surer self. In the daytime she wore a uniform and was a shape behind a desk; but at night, in Mary's company, Victoria knew her own specificity.

It was an aspect of their affection that Victoria also confirmed Mary. The woman had grown up in an orphanage, hungry and ill, and spoke of her past life as though she had lived it as someone else, always
once removed. But she had an elaborate fantasy of a long-lost family — a mother, a father, three sisters and two brothers, all of whom were named and detailed, and would one day, somehow, find and reclaim her. So although Mary said very little of the orphanage, she spoke a great deal of her imaginary family, so that she and Victoria, sitting comfortably sideways beneath the Heart, could be lonesome together. Their voices drifted up to Jesus, soft and wandering as candle-smoke.

 

By her own account Victoria made no other friends, and had no girlish recollections or school-day tattle. Or would not disclose them. Of her boarding school time she remembers — ineradicably — only the river and the swans and her own conclusive act of arson.

The boarding school stood on a promontory beside the Swan River, and beyond the clipped grass and the expensive houses nestling around it was a cliff and a wild space of undergrowth and reeds, and beyond that the ribbony river, shimmering and lucent, buoying shags and pelicans and cruising clusters of black swans. Victoria went often to the river's edge, to sit quietly and be alone. She went at night so that she could gaze into the lit windows of people's houses (so many pianos, flower arrangements, jardinieres and antimacassars) and in the day, after school, with her pencils and drawing paper, just to sit there, looking. She possessed a wedge of cover, sheltered and hidden, and it was like the underside of something, cobwebby
and damp and unavoidably muddy, but positioned not far from a group of swans' nests, and with an unimpeded view around the bay and across the river. In the distance was a boat-shed from which schoolboys daily launched rowing practice — she could hear their rhythmic grunts float over to greet her — and ahead, directly ahead, an expanse of sky-filled water. When she swam she entered that sky, diving into pure reflection. She loved subaqueous estrangement; she loved the annihilation of the school world for this cold surprising place, murky with possibility. Jellyfish, fat as faces, encircled and accompanied her. They opened and contracted, opened and contracted, rhythmically, like a heart. She saw them spotting the brown water, wafting towards her like visitants.

Victoria carries into adulthood an image of herself after bathing, still wet, spreadeagled, sleeping very peacefully with her burnt face in the sun.

These times telescope crudely to one single event, when she stumbled across two boys, stamping in the swans' nests. They had their boaters still on and their school ties straight, but were dancing in Wellington boots, crushing the eggs. Matter and egg-shell were splattered everywhere. It took a little longer to see exactly what they had done. Two adult swans were pierced though the chest with makeshift spears, and they had been plucked of their wing-feathers so that they looked exposed and violated. Their long necks were limp and their black bellies already bloated with death. One boy — ginger, mean-looking, with a practised
sneer — noticed Victoria's presence and called out aggressively:

So what ya lookin at big eyes? Fancy a quick fuck?

And she fled, afraid, grazing her bare hurrying legs on brambles. When they had gone Victoria returned and buried the bodies of the birds, then gathered up the feathers, which seemed too beautiful to leave, and joined Mary, and the Heart, because there was nowhere else to go …

It's an abomination, Mary declared. Just like in the Bible.

She remembers that Mary Heany held her in her arms and allowed her to cry — not only for the swans but more mysteriously for Lily-white, as well. So Victoria sobbed for all the wounds that she did not understand. For the world outside her swimming sky. For her hiding memories and inchoate emotions; and for the second-sight which folded into time itself to produce and reproduce her own system of ruins. Mary told another of her family stories:

My mother
, Mary said,
is a giant of a woman. She is even taller than Father Dignam, with blue eyes and black hair, blacker even than swans' feathers or the blackest, moonless night, blacker than the devil himself and the hot caverns of hell, and she is beautiful and strong and her name is also Mary, since I am her long-lost last-born and named for her especially, and my mother Mary, whose skin is all-white and smooth like egg-shell, wears combs in her hair and has brooches and beads, all of them made of moonstones and little streamers of gold, and a studded crucifix, too, like the
one the bishop wears; yet she is not proud or stuck up and goes about in bare feet and wears dresses with flower patterns so that she is always in springtime, and who knows maybe she was sailing on a boat on the river, or walking out alone on the cliff in the sunshine, and saw those two boys doing their dreadful things, and put a curse on them, there and then, so that they will burn away in hellfire, and burn and burn until nothing is left but their dirty charred souls, because she might have forgiven them for the swans, but not the eggs too, so that she punishes them and hates them and sweeps past on the face of the water, looking out for her daughter Mary, who has the same name as herself, and who is waiting and waiting and waiting forever to be found.