The Submerged Cathedral (6 page)

A
T ONE END
of their street a scrap-metal yard gives way to an abandoned collection of bronze garden statuary. Behind the fence wire, as Jocelyn walks with Sandra to school, the statues stare out. Closest is a woman, standing, her feet curled over the peak of a craggy mountain so that she looks down from a distance of almost twice the height of Jocelyn and Sandra below. The woman's arms are extended in a beckoning gesture, and her calf-length hair snakes down over two servant boys who crouch at her feet, gazing upwards. Their delicate toes hold the whole edifice off the ground. Their biceps curve under its weight, their thighs strain beneath the planes of their loincloths. One of the young men's hands rests over his colleague's lower back and he glances at him sideways.

When they first began taking this route to school Jocelyn would tell Sandra about when she and Ellen were
small and would play among the statues. How they each claimed their own, visiting their giant iron dolls on the way to school, just like this. Ellen had the mermaids and goddesses, leaving the animals to Jocelyn.

Now, after the first week, Jocelyn's stories have run out. The iron goddess gazes out from behind the wire, ignoring the ambiguous longings of the servant boys, as Jocelyn and Sandra pass. Jocelyn is brisk but Sandra wanders slowly behind her, bobbing with each step so as to keep up the rhythmic bumping of her school case against her leg. A pile of rabbit traps rusts in the dirt.

They pass a garden fountain. Circling its shallow, waist-high bowl is a languid bronze mermaid, arms stretched in a backward dive, hair and tail meeting in a sensual flicker. A magpie scuffling in the dirt cocks its head, one-eyeing them as they pass. Then it lets out an arc of morning sound, those gulped, airy notes. They walk, the magpie goes back to scrabbling. Sandra holds out the palm of one hand and runs it along each diamond hole of the wire fence. When she gets rust on her fingers she wipes it on the skirt of her school uniform.

‘Don't do that, sweetheart,' says Jocelyn, thinking about the waiting manuscript laid out on the glasshouse trestle table.

Past the clusters of stream-haired nymphs and one Queen Victoria, squatting in the dirt without her pedestal,
the fence falls away and the motley collection of wild animals begins. Sandra leaves the path, goes to wander through the accidental animal park.

Jocelyn slumps. ‘We haven't got time this morning, Sandra,' she lies. Trying to force a firm kindness into her voice, clinging to her need to remain serene, the unflappable aunt.

Sandra ignores her. The animals stare this way or that into the air. Three lions, manes streaming, face the narrow road, each with one giant paw extended towards the agricultural-pump workshop across the street. Jocelyn follows her, trying to stay calm.
The mother can shout, but the aunt stays calm.
The child will love the mother through the heart of her rage, but the aunt must stay calm or be cast adrift.

Four pelicans of varying sizes are pencilled in the space. Sandra moves through them to the life-sized bronze rhinoceros, its hide pimpled and ridged. It is her favourite.

‘Come on, Sandra, we'll be late for school …'

Sandra watches Jocelyn while she drops the school case in the dust.

A fury rises up in Jocelyn. ‘That's enough.' She meets Sandra's glare.

But Sandra keeps her eyes on her aunt's while she sits down, spreading the skirt of her uniform about her in the dust. The uniform Jocelyn washed at midnight and
ironed at six so she had time to get Sandra up and washed and breakfasted and make sure Ellen could sleep in.

‘
Sandra!
' And she finds herself with arms folded like any small-town mother, her voice shrill, fury rising, slipping into the territory where she might begin to cry with rage.

Don't take it personally.

Sandra, blank-faced, watches her, waiting for an explosion. She wriggles harder into the dirt. Jocelyn's throat is hurting with the effort of not crying. She can't speak.

She's a child.

Jocelyn doesn't believe it. She wants, more than anything, to march over and yank this child up by the arm and smack her legs hard, and even realising this does not stop the fact that she wants to hurt her. Not scare her, hurt her. Thomas comes into her mind. She feels sick.

She turns towards the road and watches the school bus pass, shiny little heads blobbed at its windows. The dust from the road and the vehicle exhaust settle over them as the bus heaves away. She waits, breathes deeply.

Its massive head down, its horn almost the size of Sandra as she leans into the protective bow of its knee, the rhinoceros stares beyond them both into the silvery mist and the eucalypts.

When Jocelyn returns to the house later, red-faced and near tears, Ellen laughs.

‘You should have seen her getting on the plane at Heathrow.'

Jocelyn clatters dishes, tries to make herself calm. ‘She hates me,' she says into the dishwater.

Ellen barks a laugh through a mouthful of toast, still leaning over a magazine. ‘I know. She hates me too.'

Jocelyn rubs cereal from a dish in the water, shaking her head.

Ellen gets up from the table and comes to stand behind Jocelyn, puts her chin into the curve of her sister's neck. ‘She's just being a little brat. But we are grateful,' Ellen says.

Jocelyn turns to apologise, and starts crying into Ellen's shoulder.

The currawongs start up outside.

 

When Martin arrives for the weekend they sit long at the table after dinner. Suddenly Ellen leans towards him, stabbing the air with her cigarette.

‘Have you ever been unfaithful?' Her earrings swing and glint.

Martin blanches, snorts. ‘Ellen! What a question!'

Ellen sees Jocelyn's face, and laughs. ‘Not to
Joss
, of course, but before, I mean?'

‘Ellen,' says Jocelyn. She is realising how much Ellen has drunk.

Martin blushes, silent now. Drinks from his glass.

‘I think you've had too much wine,' Jocelyn says to Ellen, hears her own prudish voice.

Ellen ignores her. ‘Oh come on, it's a fair question.' She leans to Martin again, grinning. Her neck is pale in the candlelight. ‘You tell me and I'll tell you my secrets. We're almost family, aren't we?'

She swings again to look at Jocelyn. She seems very drunk now, leaning backwards in her chair, leering. Then says to her sister, a hardness edging beneath the question, ‘Don't you
want
to know?'

Jocelyn stares back, feels her face grow hot. She and Martin don't look at each other. She stands to collect the dinner plates, hating her own primness. ‘No,' she says quietly.

Ellen bursts out laughing, crows, ‘Well,
that's
interesting!'

As Jocelyn leaves the room she hears Ellen say conspiratorially to Martin, ‘I have. With a German.'

Later, as Jocelyn's undressing for bed, Martin comes into her room. ‘Are you all right?' He puts his arms around her.

‘I'm sorry,' Jocelyn says.

He laughs softly. ‘I don't care. She was just pretty drunk, I suppose.'

He holds her in the hug, kisses her shoulder next to the strap of her slip.

After he has gone to his own room she lies in the dark, thinking of Ellen and a German and Thomas. And trying not to think about what Martin's expression might have been when she did not look at him across the table. Trying not to wonder why he had not said,
Of course not.

 

Martin drives the road back to the city in the dark before dawn. Shivering to keep himself awake, trying to warm up, he flexes the muscles of his thighs repeatedly, shrugs his shoulders. He is glad this morning to be driving away from that house, from Ellen's voice. Rags of mist appear white on the road and sweep up suddenly above the car as he drives. He winds down the window and the icy air rushes in. He can make out the long hump of the mountain range now against the paler dark of the sky.

He is so tired. He slows the car, pulls over onto the gravel at the side of the road, and gets out, trudges to where the gravel meets the trees.

He stands there in the quiet, with his hands in his pockets, thinking of Jocelyn looking like a small girl when her sister talks. Thinking of Ellen's sly voice, her traps. The day to come at the surgery will be long, with all its complaints and smells, and there seems to be so much driving, all the bloody driving.

The sky is lightening, and he can smell the eucalypts. A bird whirrs. The mist still hangs in the air. If he wanted to, he could step slowly down into the dim fog and the dripping trees, and disappear into the bush.

 

In the weeks before Christmas the weather warms again and Jocelyn takes Sandra to the town swimming pool. She is going to teach her to swim. Sandra has been excited about coming, but the first day they arrive she is too embarrassed to change in the sunlit chlorine-scented rooms, and only after changing in a toilet cubicle will she walk to the pool, holding Jocelyn's hand. She stands at the edge, watching the other children leaping around in the water. She stands with her hands clasped in front of her thighs, arms stretched, covering her pudgy belly. The bright fibre-glass panels of the fence cast a blue glow over her.

Jocelyn slips into the water first, the cold stunning her a moment, then lies on her back, trying to coax Sandra in. But Sandra will only sit on the edge with her legs dangling, ankles and feet moving from side to side in the water.

‘You'll like it, I promise,' Jocelyn says, praying this to be true. At seven, she herself had taken almost a whole summer to put her head under. She remembers the slow, obstinate fear growing during the walk to every lesson;
the determination that today she would do it – but once in the water, thrashed by the kicks and splashes of other children, she'd lose her nerve, rearing up at the last second, breathless and petrified.

Martin and Ellen had argued about throwing a child in at the deep end. Each remembered the shock of it themselves, the shooting panic and splutter, the terrified disbelief at their parents' betrayal.

‘But it was good for me,' Ellen said. ‘You would never have got me in the water at all otherwise.'

Now Jocelyn and Sandra eye one another across the water, waiting it out. Sandra's small mouth is set hard, her arms folded with her hands tucked into her armpits. Jocelyn coaxes, jokes. Then flicks water, hoping Sandra will take up the game and kick a splash back at her. But Sandra only flinches and holds herself taut when Jocelyn reaches out a wet hand to her.

After twenty minutes of sitting in the shallow water watching toddlers with plastic toys and kickboards, Jocelyn water-crawls over to Sandra at the edge. ‘It's all right, I won't make you. Just stay there and watch the other children while I do some laps in the big pool, okay?'

Sandra nods stiffly.

After swimming a lap Jocelyn lifts herself to hug the tiled edge, looking back at the children's pool, hoping to see Sandra wading or playing with the other children. But
she is still there in the same spot, sitting in the blasting sun with her feet in the water.

Jocelyn sinks down in the water again, pushes off from the wall, stroking and breathing, emerging and submerging, concentrating on controlling her breath. She can't remove the image from her mind, of Sandra's expression when she had reached out from the water. She had seen in Sandra's face a kind of fear that children should not have.

On the way home in the car, Sandra says, ‘You're my mum's sister.'

‘Yes,' Jocelyn says.

‘I'm going to have a sister,' Sandra says, lifting her chin. ‘When I can swim, I'll teach her.'

Jocelyn nods as she drives, thinking of Ellen's baby. For whom they all wait, for whom they wish good things. The baby will have pianist's fingers, her grandfather's mouth. The baby will be an early walker, will be held in the water with her sister kissing her tummy.

 

On the next swimming outing Sandra sits again on the edge of the children's pool while Jocelyn swims laps. Then Jocelyn returns to the little pool and lies back in the shallow blue water at Sandra's feet, propped on her elbows, asking her about school, about the numbers she's
learned, her friends. Sandra grips the concrete edge, dark hair hanging round her face. She sways her feet, answering yes and no, staring into the milky water. Then she says, ‘My dad's not bad, you know.'

Jocelyn stops still in the water. ‘I know,' she says quietly.

Sandra stares back, her dark eyes wide. ‘Not on purpose.'

Jocelyn cannot say anything, only nods. They both turn to watch a boy walking with his father over the lawns towards the car park.

 

The heat intensifies, and Christmas is almost here. They have Sandra making decorations from cotton reels and milk-bottle tops, covering the dining table with glue and crêpe paper and tinsel. On the previous weekend Martin dragged in a tree and it leans in a corner of the living room, its tip curled against the ceiling.

Ellen and Jocelyn and Sandra take the train to Sydney and meet Martin for lunch, and then they all scatter through the department stores. In David Jones the pianist trills Christmas carols, and women strut, hats bobbing. Jocelyn chooses for Ellen an opal brooch, heavy and trimmed with gold lace, but it still has the feel of a stone taken from the earth. Only later does she realise she has
wanted to give Ellen something from Australia. As if she is only a visitor.

Sandra's gifts are easy, and she piles them in her arms. A swimming costume with vertical red and white stripes, a box of pencils, books.

The four of them meet again at the department-store coffee lounge for afternoon tea, squirming to peek into one another's shopping bags. Martin is especially dramatic, snatching bags from Sandra's sight, making her shriek, and Ellen tells them both to be quiet. When Ellen turns away Martin makes a face and Sandra convulses with giggles. He murmurs to her, begging her not to tell, and they spend the hour whispering and sniggering.