Not the Same Sky (29 page)

The short end of a table, bereft of food settings, symbolising the hunger in Ireland, would protrude on to the street. The long end, complete with plate and spoon, would stretch inside the wall.

‘Well, yes,’ Joy said, and turned to walk towards Circular Quay. She had remembered the direction, which pleased her.

‘What do you think?’ Simon asked, keeping up with her. He knew she would be sorry in a few minutes for undertaking this speed.

‘It depends on what memorials are for. Are they to let us know? To make us accept? Or are they to make us weep?’

‘All three, I suppose.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘That’s a peculiar uncertainty for someone in your job.’

That could have meant anything.

‘Doesn’t anyone here ever get angry?’ she said, more angrily than she had intended.

Sydney didn’t look so gorgeous now. But Simon steered her to the Opera House, whose unanswerable beauty could stop an army in its tracks and keep poets busy forever. In the toilets she found a cold tap at ground level, under which she soaked her swollen, sore feet. The sharp pain caused by the water hitting the nerves in her toes brought tears to her eyes.

And then they made their way to the ferry—they would go home via the water. They bought the tickets by means of a simple transaction. For some reason Joy had expected it to be complicated. She examined the ticket, Single/Return tickets valid day of issue only. State Transit. Sydney Ferries. Ordinary enough for such an extraordinary journey. She wondered if she would be able to keep it. They walked down the wooden creaking jetty to a green and yellow boat, stepped onto it, over the plank, and found a seat outside—one that had miraculously a slight breeze blowing around it. A large liner was being nudged out to sea, and there were crowds staring from the dockside, waving it off. Who wouldn’t? It would have seemed curmudgeonly not to raise a hand.

‘Just for you,’ Simon said.

Joy smiled at him.

‘Yes,’ she said.

But then as she talked about the ship, he seemed to tire of this wonder. He was still discommoded by her reaction at the Barracks.

Their own small boat then reversed from its spot and ploughed its way past the Opera House and under the bridge. Further out she could see other ships crawling their way into their massive journeys, swallowing up the middle distance.

Looking up at the underbelly of the bridge, the air of unreality came back to her, but she lifted her face to the breeze and let it ripple over her. She would close her eyes for a moment.

‘Did you see the lilly pilly on the monument drawings?’ Simon asked.

On the morning of the Gundagai journey, Joy came to Simon’s house where he was packing the car. She tried to help but didn’t know what was needed. His wife, Irene, English born, was coming with them. They had accoutrements for travel and knew where they were. Joy moved around the kitchen and hallway, out of their way, wishing she had stayed longer in bed, wishing they had told her about the production required. This was nothing like she had ever seen. But, eventually, they were ready and she sank into the back seat of their large Holden, suddenly missing her bicycle, home, and Oscar. She would have to concentrate on the scenery.

‘So are you related, do you think?’ Irene asked.

In truth Joy hadn’t thought about it much, and either Simon had decided to leave pursuing the possibility or he was waiting for her to take the initiative—surely she would know more about how to go about it than he would. She felt cornered.

‘I must get some details, Simon, and see if I can come up with anything,’ she said.

‘That would be good,’ he said, looking at her in the rear-vision mirror. ‘But no rush.’

The negotiation out of the city took about an hour. They crossed the Bridge, and Joy peered down through any gap she could find to the water below. She would never want to take a place, or a wonder, like this for granted. They then edged their way through suburbs of red-tiled houses, punctuated by patches of unexpected, nondescript high-rise offices. Then back to red roofs, mixing now with green, both corrugated and tiled. The outer suburbs boasted long, wide gardens. There seemed to be no people around, but then maybe she was looking in the wrong places. She opened the back window to see if she could catch sounds. There was an air of melancholy, the only noise that of the car tyres. And then, suddenly, they were out of the suburbs and in an entirely new country. The atmosphere in the car changed, almost as it does on planes when the seatbelt sign is switched off. That’s that done then.

At Goulburn, Simon angle parked the car in line with all the others and they made their way to get coffee in the hotel. They settled themselves and ordered. Joy got up and looked at the photographs of the city at various stages of its building. Hard labour. You could hear the sound of convicts building the roads. They wouldn’t have reached this far when the girls were passing through. There were photographs too of days when the city was showing off to itself, hat days. And who among them penned such vicious remarks about girls? She did not know, nor could she imagine. She went to the toilet. While fixing her hair and checking that she still looked like herself despite all the travel, the woman at the sink beside her asked, ‘Are you here on holidays?’

‘Yes, we’re on the way to Gundagai,’ she said.

‘I see. Great place for the Irish.’ She whispered the last word. ‘Lots of them settled there.’

‘Really,’ Joy said, not knowing what was expected of her. ‘And Yass too,’ she added.

‘Don’t know if there were many of them there, but you could be right,’ the woman said.

After the coffee they set forth again.

The girls would have pulled out of this town too—although this road would not have been here for them. They would have travelled down there below the road, had their accident there, camped there, stopped for repairs there, laughed there, wept there. They rounded a bend and saw a blue river—she could imagine the girls washing themselves there, blowing dust from their dresses and flouncing up their hats on their way into town.

‘I know what you mean,’ Simon said, though Joy had said nothing.

Irene said nothing too, just stared at the river.

The first stop was at the church where so many had been married, baptised and observed their children’s lives and finally, where they were buried. It looked like any Irish chapel—at least the simple ones—its only peculiarity being that the bottom quarters of the stained-glass windows opened out.

‘It’s unusual to see stained-glass windows that open out,’ Joy said.

‘Heat, I presume,’ Simon said.

‘I suppose, yes,’ Joy said, wiping her neck again.

The second stop was at a church where a lesser number had recorded their lives.

The gravestones were sun-bleached, making them appear neglected. Modern, well-tended headstones spoke for the newly arrived. Joy rubbed some of the dust off a Shannon grave. She could see herself working out here—scrubbing, mending, chiselling. She could pick out the names, tumbling over each other, into a single testament. She wondered aloud if any of them had kept a diary. And then thought to herself that perhaps they had decided their lives would frighten people—particularly the children—and were best left put away. They might, too, have lost the language to tell the story. Somewhere on the sea, it might have left them. The graveyard was high up and looked out over silver sunburned hills that rolled into one another. An occasional tree stood out as if boasting. Some snow-white clouds were bundled up like mountains in the corner of the sky. They carried no promise of rain. They couldn’t. There was no rain in them.

They stayed quiet as they left the town—it seemed the least they could do. They were on their way to the hotel in Gundagai where they would stay the night. The silence went with the thinning light, which was casually throwing shadows and colours this way and that.

With the evening coming in rapidly, Irene and Simon took pictures of Joy. She would keep them forever. Standing beside the Holden, looking completely startled. Standing at the statue of the Dog on the Tucker Box, its neck stretched in a howl to the heavens, looking puzzled. There was one of her looking happy enough on the street that pours directly into another series of streets that roll like flour mounds into the distance. There is a shadow in her hair in that one. And there is one of her under the verandah, looking startled again, but smiling, her foot out in front of her as if she doesn’t know where to put it. In none of these does she look like she felt.

The three of them sat in the hotel and had dinner and deep-red wine. Sitting on the verandah afterwards they watched the night come in over the hills. You could wrap this darkness around you, ring the hills with it and call it home. You could make believe that beyond those valleys was the unknown. There must have always been the unknown. The crickets were still out in force, singing away, much louder than in the city. It was impossible to imagine you could not see what was making this swashbuckle of noise. The last of the birds were fussing about, getting their place for the night into shape, just as Joy, Simon and Irene had done before dinner in their rooms. A brilliant moon began to make its way up the sky. They watched stars dropping at will, and out here, under this endless sky, they thought too much of this cascade to say anything at all. They turned their backs on it and went inside to the warmth of more wine and people living a Friday night. When Joy had taken two sips, the need for sleep consumed her again, and she had to stumble upstairs where she fell onto the bed, feeling strangely fulfilled.

At breakfast, Joy counted the postcards she had bought the day before and took them outside. With her head down, she forgot where she was, even though she was in the open air, at a wooden dried-up table, sitting outside under a tree in the warmth—unlikely to be home. Then she lifted her eyes and saw the blue sky. Again. Today it had not even one godforsaken cloud. She could hear the crackle of the gum trees, shedding their covers. Or so she thought. No doubt it was something else. But she didn’t ask, too often she had been ridiculously wrong in this foreign landscape. Irene joined her, looked down the street and said something about yellow wattle. She could make sporadic remarks like that on the beauty of things around her, casual, observed. But it sounded as if she didn’t feel anything, as if she had just passed her eyes over whatever it was, but had not stopped them moving on to something else. Irene was adrift between two hemispheres, and although she was mostly happy, it was easy to see that she was occasionally overcome with longing, the sound of it could sometimes be heard in her voice. And then Simon put the paraphernalia back into the car. Joy helped this time. They retraced their journey and were contemplative as they travelled the road.

All that was left now was for Joy to come up with possible ways in which she could help. Would she offer to be a part of the stonework?—that was what she did really. But then again should she offer to do some of the lettering on the surface, after all that’s also what she did? She was in two minds about the whole thing, confused about her place here, when this letter, if you could call it that, was found in the belongings of one recently deceased David Taaffe, Member of State Parliament. It looked as if the letter had been in his family for a very long time. It began ‘Dear …’ and a name had been added: Honora Raftery. Joy was glad she was there for the brouhaha. It certainly took the attention away from her. The historians got into the swing of it. What did the letter really mean, they questioned. Of course the facts of it were easy to find out, and find out now they would. But what was the tenor of this letter? That’s a hard thing for historians to decide. And can we agree on tenor so many years later? Does language not change? Was there a danger that we would make a mistake in our ascribing of certain emotions to this woman? And of course it wasn’t technically a letter, because it was addressed to no one, and could this mean therefore that she had deliberately left it to one and all? It’s a pity David was dead, perhaps he would have known more. Clearly he knew enough to hold on to it. You could see, too, a row brewing as to who could understand best, who could interpret the emotions and who owned them.

‘What do they mean who owned them?’ Joy asked Simon.

‘No, not them, I think they mean who owns the letter and the things with it.’

‘Ah.’

‘I think,’ Simon said.

On the night before Joy left, she listened to the crickets for as long as she could—she wanted to store the sound of them. When she fell asleep she had a restless night, her dreams being impatient for the morning and the marathon journey home ahead of her. Irene picked her up, she had insisted.

‘It’s good you’re going back to Oscar,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in being lonely if you don’t have to be.’

Joy persuaded her not to come into the airport building. She wanted some time between the leaving of her and the leaving of the place.

When the plane banked over the harbour, she felt that the city was on her tongue, going into her throat, as she swallowed her farewell.

CHAPTER 35

Joy’s homecoming was a delight. Her return stopover in Singapore had been interesting—it was a marker against which she could check all the things she now knew that she hadn’t known weeks ago. She was surprised that her impatience to get home disappeared. The flight from Singapore to London dragged interminably, but she tried to practice stoicism. In London she was crazy with sleep, her eyelids unbearably weighty. Having checked in at the Aer Lingus desk, she curled up on a chair and fell into a half consciousness, thinking, so these are the people who fall dead asleep at airports, people who have traversed the globe. But you wouldn’t know that to look at them, unless you noticed the depth of their disappearance into the chair. She could see webs of colour behind her lids, floating gossamer soothing her taut eyes. She let herself sink further into the chair. One of the other passengers woke her when it was time to board, and she staggered slightly as she walked towards the plane.