Black Mirror (23 page)

The woman who levitated
as a little girl, constellating her home town from the shiny sky, seeing below her the curve of the horizon, as space itself is curved, and the stellar arrangements of spinifex, and dust moving in twirling eddies, and corrugated earth, and straggly-looking trees; who saw, further in, the poppet heads like monsters and the glinting iron rooves, the landscape of pockmarks and shaft holes and slime dumps and slag heaps, and everything that, seen together from a child-glorious elevation, was profound in its quality of strange, strange loveliness; this woman is in France, in Paris in fact, preparing to descend and enter the earth.

 

After her brief visit home, Anna was drawn, as though tracking a ghost, back to where Victoria had been. Grief has an ambition of rematerialisation; it seeks longingly what might have been held, or seen, or
spaces once inhabited. To Anna it seemed that Victoria was somewhere just ahead of her, somewhere just out of reach, trailing mysteries still, and leading her on like a drifting wraith in a creepy story. It was a movie she had seen: a plot in which a wide-eyed child is tempted out of bed into blue-tinged darkness, and then entranced into smoky clutches and inexplicable translations. She could not dispense with this intuition: that she was following some cliché or other, that her feelings, their whole system, their whole expression or non-expression, were unoriginal.

 

Outside the entrance to the ancient catacombs of Paris lies a large semicircular bed of pansies. They are bright pink, purple and yellow faces, all bobbing in a slight breeze and looking surprised. Anna considers plucking one, but manages to resist. She is panicky and apprehensive. She would like to tear silken petals into fine even strips. She would like to destroy a flimsy face. Her pulse is hammering in her body and her skin is flushed and hectic.

 

The descent is by a series of spiral steps; these are poorly illuminated and seem interminable. Then there is a chamber, open and dull, with educative plaques on the wall, and a long walk through a vaporous tunnel before reaching the ossuary. Here a sign says:
Arrêtez! Ici c'est l'empire de mort!
, and Anna almost smiles.
Stop! This is the empire of death!
: it is so melodramatic and artificial, so redolent of adventure stories, old-fashioned
commandments, boys with lit torches held gleefully beneath their chins. But she is chill, and afraid. Her lungs are weighted with the fuggy air, and her breathing difficult and heavy.

What am I doing here?

Why would anyone enter earth-chambers to see six million skeletons?

 

In this vision before her it is the neatness of the depositions that is unexpected. Green mouldy bones, mostly skulls and thighbones, are displayed stacked geometrically or in uniform rows. Most are in diamond or triangle shapes, or layered in simple horizontal designs: everywhere is the implication of fastidious arrangement. Mortuary workers in candlelight must have handled every bone, placing it, just so, with deliberation and care, into artful exhibition. Here the empire of death is not blasted remains; it is remade as architecture. The bones are stacked higher than Anna's head, and she must traipse forward, through this dim tunnel, which opens onto a neon-lit chamber, only to close back into another narrow dim tunnel. Another shaft of bone on bone on bone on bone.

From somewhere she hears a short burst of giggling; young people in a group are making cartoonish ghost sounds —
whoo-hoo! whoo-hoo!
— and telling nervous and probably silly jokes. Then it is quiet again, but for a few echoic reverberations, and Anna becomes conscious of the crunching wet gravel
beneath her, and the patches of mud underfoot, and the dripping earth ceiling.

 

She remembers that Ernie told her of swarms of cockroaches living in the mines, especially in the crib and toilet areas: men relieved themselves, he said, into holes alive with insects. As a child this detail had shocked her; and Anna looks about her now for scurrying life. She sees nothing, not even a mouse. Everything is still.

 

She remembers Victoria calling herself
a Prospector of the Marvellous
: Victoria was a woman unafraid; she would not have entered this place with a pounding heart. Victoria, she knows now, was an alchemical woman, a woman who made gold from red dirt and the many varieties of darkness.

 

She remembers an image she saw once, a safety poster, displayed outside the Midas mine. It was a picture of two large white hands, hanging downwards. They appeared severed and ghostly. The caption simply read:
THESE ARE PRECIOUS
.

The asterix of any hand.

 

She remembers a boy called Eamon Ahern. When she was nine Anna Griffin had a crush on Eamon Ahern. Even now the long-ago name is adorable. Eamon Ahern died when he rode his bicycle straight into the mouth of a mine. Anna still feels responsible. She still feels guilty.

She remembers — but it must be false, it must be one of Victoria's memories, transmigrated — Ernie as a young man, unscarred, working in the mine. He is stripped to the waist and has a small lamp affixed at his forehead. Under the earth, shadows are so definite, and light so intense, that he appears to exist as a photo graphic solarisation.

 

She remembers Winston Field's chest: she remembers placing her ear there, listening for the drum of his heartbeat. She lifted her face to his and said: The rumour is true; you're alive. When he laughed she heard it inside him, deep in his body. His voice, it is his voice she now remembers.

 

Why has Anna Griffin come?

Anna has come to visit the dead woman, Victoria Morrell.

This is where she will be. This is their
rendezvous.

 

A group of five teenagers, four girls and a much taller, awkward and spotted boy, pass Anna, then hesitate, and return to ask her if she will kindly photograph them here. Here, exactly here. They speak English with an accent that is possibly Dutch.

Anna peers through the viewfinder of the camera and there they are, young, vivid, undiminished by the gloomy empire of death. Their smiles are elated. One of the girls bursts into soft laughter, then places her hand over her mouth and recomposes herself. (Behind
their heads, almost perfectly aligned, is a double row of skulls, the eye sockets huge, the analogy unmistakable.) In the flashlight this group is both dazzled and dazzling: Anna has never before seen faces so lunar-bright.

Moonstruck at twelve hundred.

It is as though the memorialising light has rescued or redeemed them. She hands back the camera. The group chatters and moves on. Comic ghost noises float up like streamers behind them.

 

So Anna is alone again, with the artful bones. She is looking for a hand to clutch. She is looking for a daughter to rescue. She would like to haul Victoria to the surface — not glancing backwards — and reanimate her, from the beginning, as a tiny child. Instead she leans her back against the cold grimy surface of the lost souls around her and whispers into the darkness:

I am here, I am yours, I am evidence of the return of vanished things.

In this enclosure her voice sounds husky and sexually charged. It falls, dissolving, into the shadowy air.

But Anna has said her piece. She has visited what she feared. She feels suddenly acutely aware of her own body; there are bubbles of spit in her mouth, a trickle of sweat on her spine, dampness in her hair where drops of water have landed. Her heart rate has — without her noticing — at some stage quietened and normalised.

 

And now she moves through the ancient tunnels as though in another body, and not in a grave; she imagines
she tracks the artery to some larger and invisible heart. Here, where there is lime and clay and the mystery and vulgarity of bones intermingled, where there is this easy coalescence of elements and memories, this accession — what is it? — of seanced conjunctions, she marches past waste and elimination and follows in the breezy wake of the young people ahead of her. They are jesting and laughing and need no explanations at all.

Give me your hand. Give me a kiss.

Darkness sweeps over Anna with the caress of an open sky.

 

In the desert where they all grew, singly and together, resolving images from the imprecisions of sky and dirt, there is a spot that alone is Lily-white's. It is the place, under the earth, where she buried the placenta she gave birth to with her daughter, Ruby. She returned part of her own body, those cells that cradled her mothering life, to the site where she first felt quickening, the site Ruby began. It is a modest dip in the land, oval-shaped and simple. Whitefellas would pass by and not notice anything at all. But a small mound of gathered stones marks the generation of spirit. This place is holy. It contests all the mine-work and despoliation that is everywhere around. It is the unregarded and persisting monument of countless other stories. It is its own kind of marvellous. A secret marvellous.

This is a work of fiction which is indebted to many Surrealist texts — both print and visual — and to the work of commentators on Surrealism, particularly Mary Ann Caws, Rosalind Krauss, Whitney Otto and Hal Foster. I also draw in oblique ways on texts by Breton, Aragon, Desnos and Carrington.

The following Australian texts have been useful: Ian Templeman and Bernadette MacDonald,
The Fields
(Fremantle Arts Centre Press 1988), Geoffrey Blainey,
The Golden Mile
(Allen and Unwin 1993), Gavin Casey,
Short Shift Saturday
(Angus and Robertson 1973), AN Bingley,
Back to the Goldfields
(Hesperion Press 1988), Norma King,
Daughters of Midas: Pioneer Women of the Eastern Goldfields
(Hesperion Press 1992).

Winston's prayer and song are derived from Opal Palmer Odisa's magnificent story ‘Me Man Angel' in
Bake Face and Other Guava Stories
(Flamingo 1987).

I have many friends to thank for support and discussion, particularly Susan Midalia, whose literary critical intelligence was an enormous help at a difficult time. Veronica Brady, Victoria Burrows, Trish Crawford, Hilary Fraser, Prue Kerr, Joan London, Margaret West and Terri-ann White, have all offered indispensable moral support. Beth Yahp's clever advice and good humour is gratefully acknowledged, as is Marion Campbell's continuing role as a writing mentor. Jane Southwell's scholarly work and energetic discussion did much to clarify my own ideas on surrealism. I would also like to thank my editor, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, for her patient work, Elaine Lewis, for her consistent belief in my writing, and my agent, Fran Bryson, for her general help and advice. My beloved daughter Kyra has been an inspiration from the beginning.

This project was supported by the Eleanor Dark Foundation with a writing residency at Varuna, and by the Australia Council with the gift of a writing space at the Keesing Studio in Paris. My colleagues in the Department of English, Communications and Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia have been unfailingly generous and supportive.

I wish above all to thank my parents to whom this book is lovingly dedicated.