Five Bells (21 page)

Later, in their shared room, Catherine summoned her courage and said: ‘I don't believe any of it, Mam. Not a word. Nothing.' She was sitting on the edge of Mam's bed, trying to sound reasonable.

And her mother took her hand and replied that she knew, of course, and that she prayed for her, daily. They would all end up in Heaven, with dear Da, in the shining golden light.

Sweet Jesus
, Catherine thought.

 

They spent the next day eating gelato and photographing the town. Though it was winter the sun was out, and it felt like a holiday. A stern, unsmiling nun shepherded a class of rowdy children in the direction of the Santa Casa. They ran about, all alike in sunflower yellow T-shirts proclaiming their confederated devotion, laughing, calling out, acting naughty and irreligious.

‘Brendan would have liked this,' Mam said in a shaky voice. And then Ruthy again cried. They would say this all their lives:
Brendan would have liked this.
He was already a kind of slogan.

Perhaps her mother was thinking ‘fruit of the womb'. Perhaps the chamber within the chamber was a recess that recalled her own body, and all those babies that had lived there, Catherine, her four sisters, Brendan, and the two that died.

Bambino:
a soft word, a whisper at nighttime.

Catherine wondered for the first time what it must be like to have children and whether she might feel this hyper-maternity and mystical satisfaction. This sense of enfolding and of pattern's repetition, unwound in DNA and nose-shapes and the colour of skin, unspooled more subtly in all that a family might hold in common, those little knots of wordplay and jokes and memories, those occasions of joint sorrow and pleasure so easy it's unnoticed.

Stray kids ran through the streets of Loreto, playing kiss chase. Their calls seemed to bounce off the stone walls and fly
further than voices could. Catherine found herself watching them as they darted and hid. Remembering her own childhood. Joyriding at twelve years old beside her brother in a stolen car, playing silly buggers, breaking rules, sweeping through the streets in a hoax death-swerve that would one day come true.

 

When the ferry arrived at the North Shore Catherine waited one stop, then two, then disembarked for no particular reason at the third. A small Chinese woman with a sunshade and large handbag passed her on the gangplank. Catherine felt like seizing her arm and asking her to sit for a while, to describe China in honour of her dear dead brother, who had wanted to go there, and would have, but for a crash on the M50. The woman looked directly at her and nodded and smiled, as if she had read her thoughts, but then passed onto the ferry and took a seat inside. Catherine watched the ferry pull away and was surprised to see the Chinese woman wave at her, a slight but definite wave, through the grimy window. Catherine waved back. Perhaps the woman had been born in Australia, she thought, and she had only imagined a native Chinese person arriving at that moment. Perhaps she was from Malaysia, or Canada, or any of a hundred thousand other places Chinese immigrants now lived. Like the Irish, dispersed. Flung like snowflakes in a flurry, like particles motioning through water.

 

There were high steps behind her but Catherine lingered, watching the departing ferry move outwards from Kurraba Point to the open harbour. She decided to sit on the jetty. She removed her shoes. There was a wind rising here, carrying the briny scent of the water. A turquoise sky. She heard the chink-chink sound of wire rigging against an aluminium mast, and looked among the moored yachts to see if she could locate it. It reminded her of the triangle she played in the convent band
in grade three. Not selected to learn an instrument, she had been deemed unmusical and was given, at the last moment, a triangle to hit and a place to stand at the very back of the junior musicians. Nonetheless she'd felt proud. Brendan teased her about it, but Mam said she played beautifully, that beyond all the other sounds, even beyond the violins, and the shrill recorders and the heavy-handed drumbeat, you could hear Catherine Healy in the background, and the triangle's shiny tingle-ring.

Strange how time seemed now and then to reverse, patterns to flip over and resume in another life. The quirk of any story, the element of return.

It was getting dark by the time Catherine made her way back towards Darlinghurst. In the twilight there were flocks of bats flying away from the botanical gardens; Catherine could see them silhouetted against the amethyst sky. What a primitive life form they were, especially here, in the city centre, flapping awkwardly into heaven. They implied tales of dark metamorphosis and entrapment in creaturely life, early childhood fears, storybook trepidation. There were also loud, insistent bird calls Catherine could not recognise, squawks and warbles and full-throated chimes; she hadn't heard so many birds in a big city before. The sky was full of alien and animated life. As she climbed the steep steps at Woolloomooloo, Catherine huffed and puffed but felt pleased with herself for the effort, and for the muscular sensuality of her working legs. Pausing on a landing, she looked briefly behind her: the centre of Sydney hung like a vision in a silver panorama – the towers, all arrayed, the canyons between them, the Bridge in faint outline and the Opera House now obscured. The scrolling night would soon leave only the lights; the city would forget itself, become another kind of abstraction.

Catherine reached a street of backpackers' cafés and small open-fronted restaurants just as the lights switched on, casting a cadmium yellow shine, a painterly tone, over the diners sitting at tables outside. The meals looked good, generous servings of unspecific provenance, mostly some kind of mix-up of Thai and Australian cuisine. A sign read:
Kangaroo stirfry with hot chilli sauce.
Catherine paused, considering. But since she'd not yet seen a kangaroo, a
real live
kangaroo, big-eyed and cutesy, fetchingly iconic, one she could photograph or write home about to Ruthy, she decided that her first meeting shouldn't be a feast.

The long climb from the Harbour had left Catherine feeling flush with the heat and in need of a drink. But she didn't want to enter a wine bar or sit conspicuously alone at a pub, so she found a liquor store further up the street and bought a cold bottle of riesling to take back to the apartment. Then she selected a Chinese takeaway, aware of its sentimentally vague connotations, and ordered ginger fish and a portion of fried rice.

 

On Darlinghurst Road, though still early, it was an edgy Saturday night. There were sex clubs with flashing lights, young travellers already drunk, and a kind of hot human energy, sparking up currents of desire and frustration. Rowdy pubs were spilling their patrons, who swung groggy onto the street. Restaurants were like televisions, boxes of fluorescent encounter and hyped possibility. Everything, every surface, appeared glossy and over-bright. Catherine saw the junkie postures she recognised from her childhood, and the sly handshake that exchanged folded money and small plastic bags, a furtive glance, the slinking away. She noticed an Aboriginal beggar, sitting with his back against a pole, and a group of five young women, laughing and life-filled, heading in scanty dresses for a night on the town. A young man, shirtless and covered with blue tattoos, was shouting
obscenities from a street corner to everyone and no one, waving his arms in a kind of violent, useless, feint.

City-ravage, pagan and awesome, on a humid Saturday night. All at once Catherine wanted quiet, and to be hidden away. She wanted to sit alone, in a kitchen, to rest her elbows on a table, and to eat her take-away meal in silence.

 

It had been a haunted day. Some days were better than others. Sometimes Brendan rested in peace, safely interred, but on others, like today, he hung around, insinuated himself into the spaces that broke open between now and then, turned up with his dead man's words and his unextinguished charisma. Yet it was not a mournful day. There had been a jaunty and delectable newness to things, and Catherine still felt the cheery elation of all she had seen: the didgeridoo player, the Opera House, the Aboriginal paintings, and then the supernatural ferry ride, without destination, from Circular Quay across the Harbour and back again. There was the moment, somewhere in the middle, when standing at the bow of the ferry, high up in the breeze, she could see the smiling clown-face façade that formed the entrance to Luna Park, nestling right there on the shore, tucked in one corner; she saw the Bridge on the left and the Opera House on the right and felt located in space by these three incomparable monuments. She was thinking of Brendan the Voyager, seeking paradise with his disciple monks in ancient Ireland, and though this was a nonsensical analogy, she had thought to herself yet again.
Brendan would have liked this.

 

Catherine sat cradling her second glass of wine and played a CD of Sinéad O'Connor singing ‘On Raglan Road'. Darkness had fallen. In the apartment she heard the lovely voice ring out, resonant and yearning, and felt wreathed around and caught up in its sweet lamentation. She rose slowly and walked
outside, onto the small jutting balcony on this, the fourth floor. Ahead was the back of the Coca-Cola billboard: its jazzy illumination showed from the rear as a quivering rectangular nimbus, outlining a black building. There were other apartments nearby, and other people enjoying their breezy balcony on a summer's evening, but only Catherine had the soundtrack of ‘On Raglan Road', only she had this accent of herself summoned and this particular Dublin romance. At the end of the track she switched off the music, wanting no other layer of words to fall where it had been.

Catherine sat on a metal chair on the balcony, staring into space. She sipped her wine. She considered her good fortune and looked upwards for stars that came from Ireland. In the centre of the city you couldn't really see the stars. But she knew they were there. They were new stars, new, southern hemisphere stars. There must have been convicts who looked upwards in the early nights and felt entirely confounded. They must have felt that the very heavens had changed, that the all-mothering and humbling darkness had let them fall away, had released them into disaster. Mere perforations of a night curtain that had fallen over their heads. Poor buggers. Stranded. No direction home.

 

Ah, but she would have liked now to be lying in Luc's warm arms. She would ring him soon. She must not ring too early and must not drink too much in the meantime, lest she sound boozy and needy, or maudlin and mean. Her sexual loneliness was profound, and she had not expected it. When they were together, in the time of mourning, it had been easy to remain self-enclosed, because pleasure seemed so unlikely, because she did not consider she had a right to joy in the time of her grief. Luc was patient, remote. There settled between them a strained and uneasy quiet. But now, in another world, there seemed
more reason to believe in secular redemptions, in gestures by which the body delighted in being alive. She had never before been so unclothed in January, felt this kind of warm sensual night just a few weeks after her birthday, sitting with bare arms and bare legs and a cold glass of wine.

The air had become dense and seemed to shudder with rising wind. Catherine looked down William Street and saw there entrammelled car headlights, all pushing at even intervals to and from the city centre. White spots in one direction, red in the other, and she was baffled again by the paintings she had seen that afternoon, all those massing dots from the central desert, spin-drifting, swirling and anti-representational. She was not good at abstraction: perhaps that's what it was, perhaps something in her childhood in the tower, with too little private space to see her own life clearly, had left her depleted in her capacity to appreciate visual art.

 

As a child she has been taken on a school excursion to the National Gallery of Ireland. The students were led in obedient lines before august portraits and historical scenes, instructed to admire. What had claimed Catherine, what had most commanded her attention, was a melodramatic late Victorian picture called
The Wounded Poacher
. She still remembered the name of the artist: Henry Jones Thaddeus. They had been asked to choose an image in one of three rooms and write a story about it. Most of the convent girls dutifully chose biblical genre paintings, by which they might display their spiritual goodness. But for Catherine the wounded poacher was inexplicably alluring. It showed a man, stripped to the waist, collapsed on
a chair and in the care of a young woman who bent tenderly above him. She dabbed a cloth at his chest and he appeared to be in a faint, his mouth slightly open and his posture abandoned. At the poacher's feet lay two dead rabbits and a gun, and it was a poor house and gloomy, with a little still-life bottle and bowl sitting on a table in one corner.

Only as an adult did Catherine realise how sensuous the image was; and how the woman leaning over the prone man suggested sexual touch. His head leant back against her breast; her arm encircled him. Catherine's schoolgirl story had been rather dull, but the erotic impression of the tableau had vividly persisted. When at their lunchbreak a nun chided her for choosing to write about a sinner, Catherine had not felt ashamed. She fiercely consumed the jam sandwiches her mother had made for her and sat slightly apart from the other girls,
tough as a tart
, one of them said.

 

Catherine glanced up at the clock and decided to watch the television news. She found the remote and flashed the severe world into vision. There were the usual foreign wars, tribulations, massacres, collapsing economies, there was global warming and economic downturn and apocalyptic predictions. The war in Iraq: never-ending. Afghanistan: never-ending. Somewhere beyond balmy Sydney on a Saturday evening in January, the world was heartsick and haywire.

When the local news began, the opening story was located at Circular Quay. A little girl, eight years old, had gone missing from her home – a suspected abduction – and was last seen at the Rail Station at Circular Quay. CCTV footage had found her small face in the crowd, identified by her mother. On the screen Catherine saw a still shot of a blurry child, and around her were five heads, a young man, a young woman, an older woman and
herself
and then the man who must presum
ably be the abductor, his hand on the girl's shoulder, bending to whisper something in her ear. Catherine leant in trepidation towards the screen. One face was remarkably like the Chinese woman she had seen on the north shore, boarding the ferry – could this really be so? Yes, there was the handbag. And yes, it was definitely her, Catherine Healy of Ballymun, next to the little girl. The others were apart, at each end, and seemed to be diverging. The newsreader voice-over said that police would like to locate the man standing directly behind the little girl, with his hand on her shoulder. Others in the photograph – and here red rings magically appeared around the four nearby adults – should contact police immediately to help with their inquiries. The young man was looking down – would he have noticed anything? – but the three women were all looking alert and ahead. Catherine saw her own nebulous head in a noose and marked out. She leant back on the couch and felt slightly ill. She pressed the off button and the newsreader, now speaking about taxes, was sucked back into nothingness.

 

It seemed impossible to be caught in public time like this, and in elbow-rubbing proximity to a mystery crime. It made no sense. Why would an abductor take a child to a busy tourist site on a Saturday morning, and not stash her away somewhere, and act in a more evil way, more dastardly and more truly covert? Was he convinced one could hide a small child in a crowd? Catherine was struck by the poor quality of the CCTV image. There was hi-fi, hi-def, high-bloody-everything; might not the techies be able to produce a clearer photograph? It was in black and white, almost unheard of these days, and grainy, as if glimpsed and recorded underwater. The little girl might have been any little girl. Was the mother sure? How could she be certain? Perhaps the plaits were a giveaway. All the other faces looked stark and similar. The two young people
appeared her age, mid-thirties or so, and so did the now suspicious man leaning towards the little girl. The Chinese woman was perhaps sixty, sixty-five, and yes, it was she. As she boarded the ferry she perhaps recalled seeing Catherine earlier in the day, at the train station. And then she waved.

Catherine waited thirty minutes, her hesitation inexplicable, before she rang the police. Her heart was heavy. She was asked: what department? And blurted out in scrambled syntax that she had seen herself on telly, there she was, next to the child, and commanded by the newsreader to get in touch. There were clicks and pauses, then a gruff voice came on.

Catherine collected her thoughts. ‘It's about the abducted child,' she said clearly. ‘I am one of the people in the image broadcast this evening. The CCTV image at Circular Quay.'