Sorry (23 page)

Perdita struggled in the still space, surrounded by motionless bookcases, bespectacled readers and metal trolleys, against an inner disturbance that had never quite resolved. She was nineteen years old. She roamed among books, went to the cinema with Flora, cared for her mother and wrote to Mary. It felt like an empty life.

One year later Perdita became godmother to Billy and Pearl's twin daughters. Peace-time girls, she thought of them. Neither was deaf, and she was charged with the task of conversation and reading them stories. As they grew she saw how Alison and Catherine fluctuated with ease between the worlds of verbal expression and sign. With their parents they practised a second body, holding up their fingers, enlarging their physical vocabularies; with her they loved sing-song, pun, narrative and rhyme. How their little mouths chattered. She bounced them on her lap, offered kisses, received them. Read stories of fire engines, trolls, princesses, frogs. Slowly, speaking to children, taking care with words, she became their ‘Aunty Deeta', a slender good-looking woman, almost ready for the world. There was a routine to things that was almost equilibrium: Perdita assembled her new self into a precarious unity, the aunt that she was, the librarian, the attentive, caring daughter. She balanced there, existing. As one does.

What came next to mark her life was unexpected. Perdita opened a letter from the woman who had once been Sister Perpetua. She had left the order and was now working as a nurse in the city. There had been a death in the gaol, Perpetua wrote. Mary had died of appendicitis.
Mary had died.

There was no suicide and no allegation of foul play. ‘
A tragic loss … in the hands of God
'. She knew of Mary's long correspondence with Perdita, and thought she should be informed of her friend's sad passing. Here returned to you, Perpetua wrote, is the book you shared, Mary's personal copy of
The Lives of the Saints
.

The letter was shockingly straightforward and matter of fact, as though Mary had just been a name, or a casual acquaintance. Perdita felt a crush in her chest and the world collapsing. She felt woozy, ill. Blotted heaven. Cancelled love.
Oh God. Mary
.

It was such a humble parcel, wrapped in brown paper, and tied crosswise with string. Perdita held it for a while, unable to act. The weight of what lay, interleaved, in any lives. Of what existed between girls long ago, in a doom-laden story. In warm, yellow light, Perdita unwrapped the book, folding back the planes of the paper, carefully smoothing them as she went. Her hands were trembling. Slowly she ran her fingertips along the paper creases. She rolled the string into a little ball. She placed her palm gently across the cover and held it there, pausing.

She sat still, staring into space at nothing, and then more nothing. Nothing, more nothing. Light fell on the kitchen table in a neat clear square. When Perdita unwrapped the book, the past came rushing to meet her.

And only then, turning the pages, peering at what Mary had read, did she begin to know, did she begin to open and grieve. There was a flood of hot tears, and a sudden heart breaking.

I should have said sorry to my sister, Mary. Sorry, my sister, oh my sister, sorry.

What remains is broken as my speech once was. But I see now what my tongue-tied misery could not: the shape that affections make, the patterns that love upholds in the face of any shattering. It is not sentimentality that drives me to claim this, but the need – more explicitly self-serving, perhaps – to imagine something venerable and illustrious beneath such waste.

It is an image of our house, seen at night from outside, that I continually revisit, as though I have converted my history into the opening shot of a second-rate movie. This was the night Stella and I returned after the murder. Mr Trevor had gone earlier to light the kerosene lamps, and as we came upon it, beneath a three-quarter moon, I saw emblematically the shape I would seal my secret within. I was already choked by words and inexpressive, I already had a cramped and mangled speech; here was the shape to contain my calamity.

Houses seen from outside, at night, convey a particular beauty. Their windows are bright beacons, their violet outlines, etched indistinctly against the star-dark sky, have a somewhat mythic implication of shelter and repose. Our house was smaller in the darkness, but more mysterious. Moon shadows fell across its doorways and slanted surfaces, there was a gleam on the iron roof – the corrugations appearing as ripples – and a dark square of void towards the back.

I was afraid to re-enter our house, but I think now that the return enabled my distinctive forgetting. As I crossed the threshold of the doorway, pushing back the screen door, I saw a multicoloured patched rug, a disguise, a deletion, and no longer knew exactly what had happened in that room.

Stella was abnormally loud and assertive, while I merged into the inertia of denial and repression. Three lamps, each producing a soft copper flare, triangulated my mother as she moved about the room, touching the map, the newspaper cuttings, the spines of our books, as if she was securing them in their places, or conferring new meaning. I remember my prevarication, my intermediate state. I remember standing still, watching her, wondering what on earth would happen next.

The details remain: Stella had a button missing on her blouse. Her fingers played around the buttonhole and fidgeted at the gape. Horatio was inside, sniffing in corners, restless, looking with doggy incomprehension around him. I called him, held his head, and scratched behind his ears; then Stella ordered that he be put outside for the night. There were moths banging at the windows, brown dusty shapes, and the night cries of swift, predatory birds. There was the stench of cleaning powder and smoke, my mother's mobile shadow, a bulbous teapot on the table, with unfamiliar tin mugs, left behind by Mrs Trevor when she made tea for the policemen.

What was lost and what remained. What was absorbed into the dateless darkness of my father's death, and what irresistibly persisted, the visible, the present, the shamelessly alive. I knew there were compartments of memory and feeling I had begun to seal; and although I did not will it, I was already selecting what to forget. Events were folding away, finding pleats of the self. The shadows of night were beginning to invade.

Stella darkened all the lamps but one, which she took into her room. Another detail – the acrid smell of kerosene, sharper
this night than at any other time in my childhood. Stella did not say good night, she simply retreated, preoccupied. There was the sound of a drawer being opened, of rustling clothes, of shoes dropped to the floor. Rather than stay wide awake, and alone, where violence had happened, I crept outside. Beneath the gleaming night sky I lay on the earth with Horatio. I buried my face in his belly and listened to the rhythm of his sleeping.

Afraid of slumbery agitation, or ghostly visits, I willed myself to think instead of Stella's snow dream: a field of flakes descending, the slow transformation of the shapes of the world, the slow, inconclusive, obliteration. I saw a distant place, all forgetful white, reversing its presences. I saw Mary, and Billy, covered by snowflakes. I saw my mother's bare feet beneath the hem of her nightgown. Everything was losing definition and outline. Everything was disappearing under the gradual snow. Calmed, I looked at the sky and saw only a blank. Soft curtains coming down, a whiteness, a peace.

The word ‘sorry' has dense and complicated meanings in Australia.

In April 1997 a report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) entitled ‘Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families' was tabled in the Australian parliament. It is based on 777 submissions (of which 500 were confidential) enquiring into the forcible removal of thousands of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families. It is a moving and distressing document of the emotional and physical suffering of the people who have become known as the ‘Stolen Generations'. The federal policy of ‘removing' children continued until the early 1970s.

At an Australian Reconciliation Convention held in Melbourne in May 1997, Prime Minister John Howard refused to say ‘sorry' to Aboriginal Australians for past government policies of mistreatment. The audience at the convention rose and turned their backs to the prime minister, shaming him in a silent protest with their bodies. Prime Minister Howard had refused on many occasions to say ‘sorry'.

One of the recommendations of the ‘Bringing them Home' report was that a National Sorry Day should be declared. On 26 May 1998, one year after the tabling of the report, the first ‘National Sorry Day' was held. It offered the community the opportunity to be involved in activities to acknowledge the impact of the policies of forcible removal on Australia's indigenous populations. A huge range of community
activities took place across Australia on Sorry Day in 1998, including marches for reconciliation in all major cities. Sorry Books, in which people could record their personal feelings, were presented to representatives of indigenous communities. Hundreds of thousands of signatures were received. On 26 May 2000 a highlight of the day was a walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge: an estimated 250,000 people turned out to support the reconciliation process.

On February 13th, 2008, Australia's newly elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, offered a formal apology to indigenous Australians. This novel, written in 2006, could not have anticipated the reconstructed understanding of the word
Sorry,
nor the forcefulness of this act of cultural intervention.

Sorry Day was an annual event between 1998 and 2004 and was renamed in 2005 as the National Day of Healing for all Australians.

For Aboriginal people, ‘sorry business' is the term given broadly to matters of death and mourning. It refers to rituals, feelings and community loss. ‘Sorry Day' now connotes the revival of the reconciliation movement and the restoration of hope.

This novel was completed at two writing residencies, one at the McDowell Artists' Colony in New Hampshire, USA, and the other at the Camargo Foundation at Cassis, in France. I am deeply grateful to both institutions for the provision of a quiet space to write and stimulating fellow residents. Anne McClintock and Alice Attie were both splendid companions, both artists of enormous astuteness, sensitivity and intellectual gifts. Poets Sue Standing, Glorie Simmons and Francis Richards, composer Andrea Clearfield and artist Dore Bowen, all offered specific and interventionist inspiration. Dr David Green in Boston patiently and lucidly discussed psychiatric issues of child trauma. I am deeply grateful to many supportive friends, particularly Susan Midalia and Victoria Burrows, who both read an early version of this text and offered wonderfully intelligent advice, as did Jane Palfreyman and James Gurbutt. Catherine Hill offered cleverly incisive eleventh-hour editorial commentary, which contributed significantly to the revision of the book. Sue Abbey, whose work I have respected for many years, also contributed clear-sighted and circumspect advice. Thanks too to Amanda Nettlebeck, for a timely and illuminating discussion on the ethics of writing, and Hilary Rumley who generously assisted with anthropological information. Both Michelle de Kretser and Elizabeth Smither provided for me the model of utterly wise, poised and dedicated writers; I thank both for our reassuring literary conversations.

I am particularly indebted to Carlos Ferguson, who cautiously, and in a spirit of artistic collaboration, showed me the beauty of sign language at Annamakerig. Thanks to Daniel Brown for
his spontaneous generosity in offering me a special space in which to begin my final reading of the text. Professor John Norman kindly shared his detailed memories of Broome in war-time. Any errors, historical or otherwise, are of course mine.

My colleagues at the University of Western Australia have been, once again, magnificently supportive and Zoe Waldie has been a consistently brilliant literary agent.

My family share, or don't share, my own early memories of Broome; in both cases they have been the source of wonderful conversations and the endlessly involving pleasures of nostalgia.

 

On this
page
cites words inspired by Emily Dickinson's Poem 341 which can be found in ed. Thomas H. Johnson,
Emily Dickinson: The Complete Poems
(London & Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987) p. 162.

The quote on this
page
is drawn from Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Classics 2000) p. 87.

Knowledge of the Broome woman spirit mentioned on this
page
comes from Anne Brewster, Angeline O'Neill and Rosemary van den Berg's book,
Those Who Remain Will Always Remember: An Anthology of Aboriginal Writing
(co-edited, Perth: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).

The quote from
Rebecca
is reproduced with the permission of the Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London, on behalf of the Estate of Daphne du Maurier and is copyright © Daphne du Maurier.