Not the Same Sky (26 page)

But Joy kept the assorted pieces in one spot, piled on top of each other. If she looked at them in the evening, she was careful to tidy them neatly before she went to bed, to make sure the edges were lined up and there were no bits of photocopied pages sticking out, as if this act might retrospectively keep them safe for the night. She could tell when Oscar had been reading them—the pile would not be quite as she had left it. Sometimes Oscar read out paragraphs, sometimes Joy listened enthralled despite herself, and sometimes she said, ‘Stop, I can’t bear it.’ And he would stop. But what he had read out loud might stay with her for days, and she would wonder about the consequences of choosing the job she had. And wonder what to do about those letters. You would have to think a lot before deciding to go to Australia, surely.

CHAPTER 31

But then a few pages arrived, and with them a short note from Simon.

Dear Joy,

In the process of my searches I found this. I’ve enclosed a photocopy of the original—it was from a child’s copybook, which had been hand divided into weeks and days, like a diary would be. It has the name Julia Cuffe written on it. But clearly the writer gave up. Still, it’s something. And I thought you’d like the reference to the gravestones. As you can see, a lot of it has faded and the spelling is not perfect. Looking forward to hearing from you. And please do excuse my persistence.

Sincerely,

Simon.

1 May 1856

I have no idea how I got talked into this—well actually I do. I met Lola Montez. Yes I did. Although of course if I told you that you wouldn’t know if it was true or not. But it is. I met her, and now that I think of it, it wasn’t as crazy as you might imagine. She wasn’t like what they said she was—at least not with me. The news had come from Castlemaine that the council had stopped its meeting early so they could all go to see her, and everyone was excited, even those who were pretending they weren’t. I dipped in and out of the excitement—I’ve always found I like only a bit of it, I like to have my feet on the ground, even though people might not think so. I had been asked to do the warm-up dance, get the crowd in the mood, as if there was any need for that. I was a bit nervous—the men can turn on the warm-up if they feel like it. But nervous is like excitement, it does no good. I’ve learned that. So out I went and danced to the piano, mixing moves, keeping time, swirling to my own beat, losing myself as I always do. Best place to be lost. There was a lot of noise that night, more than normal, what with all those who were excited and those who were pretending not to be. But I’m good enough to dampen it down a bit, and I did too. They cheered me well when I’d finished, getting ready for the real cheers for Lola Montez. I never heard such noise, the banging of feet and crazy whooping. They let me stay behind the curtain so I heard her breathing as she stamped on the spiders and threw off the layers of her clothes. She made us believe the spiders were real. I’ll remember that next time when I’m getting lost in a dance. I can still hear the roar that erupted when she finished, I might be able to remember it right. You can do that if you want to. You can think of a minute, hold your breath and let everything rush into your head. But you have to hold your breath. And then you have to sieve out what’s not any use. At the back of the stage they had rigged up a corner for Lola to wash herself and dress for what would be happening after the dance. That’s where I stood. I thought if I spoke to her I could bring the performance back to the woman in my house and the others who dropped in. I tried to practice what I’d say if I got close enough, although I find practising takes the sport out of things. In the end I didn’t need it—she called out to me from behind the curtain.

‘Are you the Irish girl?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, although I don’t know what that means anymore. How can I be from Ireland if I’m not there. That Strutt was right.

‘Me too,’ she said. ‘Before I went to India and Paris. Did you know that I dallied with Liszt—strange man that—and George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas? All that was before Ludwig of course. I waited in Switzerland for him for as long as I could.’

I knew who Liszt was, I picked it up somewhere, you pick up great things on the roads I’ve been on. Maybe someone will know who the others are. I will ask someone. Lola came out from behind the curtain. I’m not being smart calling her Lola—that’s her name, or at least it is now.

‘Keep a diary,’ she said, ‘because if you don’t, they’ll never know.’

They whisked her away then.

‘Good night, Julia,’ she shouted back to me. ‘Keep a diary.’

So that’s why I’m doing this. I saw Lola four nights after that and every night she told me to keep a diary. I asked one night, who for? She said I’d find someone. I said another night that nothing happened to me for a diary, I just stayed as safe as I could.

‘You think nothing has happened you!’ and she laughed out loud, a kind of tinkling sound that ran into an echo.

You hear birds doing it sometimes, once or twice, but then when you want to hear it again, they’ve gone.

‘And don’t marry,’ she said. ‘It’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

On the sixth night I came in, full of satisfaction, waiting to see what she’d say after the dance. But there was a huge melee in the hall. Lola had been involved in a terrible fracas with the man from the newspaper because of something he’d said about her dance. And now she had challenged him to a duel. So she was running late. And they wanted me to dance to the big crowd. I did my best, lost myself as well as I could, but they were shouting, ‘Lola! Lola!’ and it put me off a bit. They shouted for ‘the spider’, but I knew better than to try. When she did arrive she had no time to talk to me, and left the next day, off to Bendigo.

I made this diary a few weeks after she left. We’ll see how I go.

July

I don’t like writing much—it’s too hard. I bet Lola didn’t keep a diary herself. I heard she could have been on the same ship as that Gavan Duffy man.

1857

I left Ballarat. I went to the Melbourne Races. A man I met took me—he said he had two free tickets for women. The races were full of women with coloured feather hats. At home I bet they have children behind their skirts that they talk about all the time. I don’t think I’m going to do that, why should I? You wouldn’t believe this. I got a letter from Strutt. He said a relative of mine had contacted him. So that might be your mother or father maybe. So this will be for you then. I thought it funny getting a letter from Strutt, wonder how he knew where to send it. Fellows like him can do all sorts.

1858

I went back to Brisbane. You wouldn’t believe it, but they’re finally making a proper graveyard and some man found me and asked me if I’d come out when they put up the headstones, one of them being for Samuel, a man I knew once. I think I will. It’s a nice thing to have a stone.

I still don’t like writing. It makes everything look peculiar when it’s put down. It’s only my life.

Joy read it again.

‘Oh, I’ll have to go now,’ she said out loud.

CHAPTER 32

Joy Kennedy had heard people say, ‘No one was more surprised than me …’ and she had said, ‘Yeah,’ she had never said, ‘I know what you mean.’ That would be a lie. She never believed them and wondered what effect they were trying to create. But here she was, getting a case filled, and a separate bag with aeroplane paraphernalia, getting ready to go to Australia for three weeks and, in truth, no one was more surprised than she was.

The travel agent knew a lot about the way she should go.

‘You can’t stop in both Bangkok and Singapore.’

‘Oh, I see,’ Joy said, believing him, disappointed that she was not allowed.

‘Well you could if you wanted, but people don’t usually.’

‘Oh, well I will if I can.’

To think that her hesitation and her lack of knowing how to get to the bottom of the world had almost denied her this.

‘Or you can stop in Singapore on the way there, and Bangkok on the way back. Or vice versa.’

But she wanted to see both on the way there, one after the other—two strange Asian places, before landing in the midst of her own language even further away. Clearly, the travel agent thought her contrary. Why couldn’t she have the same package as everyone else?

‘And you will need all the extra days you can manage, to get over the jetlag.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘It’s terrible, I believe.’

‘Oh, so you haven’t been.’

‘No, not yet.’

That gave Joy a steadier footing—she was closer to getting there than he was. Unless he decided to go next week just to get one up on her. The crankiness was a manifestation of her concern about what she was about to do. Yes, no one was more surprised than she was. She had never intended to go to the other end of the world to face history.

‘You’ll need a hotel with a swimming pool. You’ll need some exercise for sure after the flight.’

He would have the last word.

‘Thank you,’ she said, letting him.

He didn’t know whether she could swim or not, some people can’t.

The decision for Joy to go had been taken by Oscar and her the previous week—although she felt it was really Oscar who had decided.

‘Why don’t you go?’ he said.

‘Why don’t you go?’ she asked. ‘I don’t see why people should go to the end of the earth just because it’s possible.’

‘But it’s you who needs to go. It’s you they want for the memorial.’

‘And still I don’t know what they want.’

‘And you’ll get to see Sydney at last.’

‘But I’ve never wanted to see Sydney.’

That seemed such an ungrateful thing to say. Not ungrateful to Oscar, no, to Sydney and all its flourishing, breathtaking beauty. She had seen it on television, and on the calendar that the committee had sent. Maybe it wouldn’t be as beautiful as the pictures. Frankly, it couldn’t be as beautiful as the pictures.

‘And the harbour,’ Oscar said.

Clearly, Oscar did want to go. He rushed Joy into getting the tickets, or so it felt. He said there was no point in waiting now the decision to go had been made. When she was at the door of the travel agent, with the tickets, one for each way, clasped in her hand—she felt they needed to be held tighter than would tickets to say Torremolinos or Prague—the travel agent said three weeks might not be enough, that maybe she should have thought of going for four. But she drew the line at that.

Over tea the next morning Joy talked about the tickets. The florist knew a story about a nest of storks, a vague story that had perhaps become mixed up with others, and the trouble was that he couldn’t be definite enough about the source to check. He was good at checking—dictionaries, books of synonyms, going home after something came up during the day, getting a chair or a hop-up ladder to take books of fables from the top shelf, and getting utterly lost.

And here was the story about the storks. He had thought of it when Joy had first mentioned the memorial and Australia. The story was that the storks had their nest in Schwandorf in Bavaria, and lived happily there as far as the people who looked at them every day could see. And the townspeople who were going about their work, or out for an evening walk, did look at them, because it is hard to pass a stork’s nest on the top of a deserted factory chimney and not look up. They lived their lives publicly. When they were asleep and flat on the nest, with their heads tucked in, they were quite private, people could only see the shape of them, and even then could not be sure if those shapes really were their storks. But when they stood up in all their tallness and their long necks, it was impossible not to see them and everything they did. They were a kind of warning—you will always be seen. But they were also a rare unadorned beauty, a kind of majestic overlord, and this was even before the people remembered the business of them flying hither and thither with their baskets, dropping babies into houses for people to mind.

But one day it was noticed that they were not there. No one could quite put their finger on when they had last seen them. The man who tended the garden going down to the river could have sworn that it was Wednesday, the man who lived closer to the stack wasn’t sure, a small girl knew they were wrong and that the storks couldn’t have been seen since Monday. But the adults believed more in seeing than in not seeing, and so they set on Wednesday as the last day. One could not of course be absolutely sure, because they could have been asleep and sometimes it was hard to tell if that hump was them and it was possible to forget to look at a stork’s nest. Unlikely. But possible. But whenever they had last been seen, and whatever doubts there were about it, they were not there now. Gone. But where? And why? The town felt unlucky. There were those who preferred not to think about the bad luck aspect of it, they’d had enough of that and more. But it was there, niggling, every day. The storks had deserted their town.