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In the western desert, said Mary, there were still some blackfellas who had never yet seen the
kartiya
, people, her people, dressed only in hair-strings and feathers and treading lightly across the earth. They carried water bags of red wallaby skin, spears and digging sticks. They knew everything, she said, everything about the world, every big important thing, and every single little thing.

Perdita thought a great deal about these people, wondering what they knew. The
big
questions. The
other
questions. She had seen a desert man in Broome once, sitting propped against a tree, looking lost and alone. He had scars in raised lines cut into his chest and wore a bright ornament of pearl shell around his neck, threaded on hair. Nicholas had pointed him out and said he was an important man of Law. He
knew things
, her father said, that he would describe and uncover.

Sometimes Mary, Billy and Perdita would sit in a triangle, facing each other, for no reason at all but to feel the wind on their faces and wait, utterly still, until bird-life visited them. There were flaring budgerigars and sulphur-crested cockatoo; sometimes there was a hawk, lazily circling, or a fleet cloud of bush pigeon, heading towards the sun. Perdita learned to
ignore the flies clustering in the corners of her eyes, or on the picked ugly scabs of her elbows and knees. She learned from Mary that if you lick stones they colourfully shine – agate, chrysoprase, rose-coloured quartz – that if you put your ear to the dirt you can hear footsteps miles away, and buried life going on, somewhere underground, that there are waterholes,
jila
, hidden in the desert country that the
kartiya
, the whitefella, will never see. There was an entire universe, she was discovering, of the visible and the invisible, the unconcealed and the concealed, some fundamental hinge to all this hotchpotch, disorderly life, this swooning confusion. For Mary there was authority in signs Perdita had never before seen; there were pronouncements in tiny sounds and revelations in glimpses. Vast, imperishable life was everywhere apparent; accretion, abrasion, the unthwarted growing of small things. The stars were there all the time, Mary said, outstretching her arms; we just couldn't see them all the time. This seemed to Perdita an amazing notion. She thought of stars adjusting, each night, their luminous arrangements, then effacing, disappearing, hiding behind day. Why had she never known things like this before? She wondered what God was, and whether he was there, or necessary.

One night Perdita woke from deep sleeping to hear strange sounds. The door of her father's room was ajar, so that a wedge of thin sallow light streamed in towards her bed. Perdita rose and half-asleep walked to peer through her father's doorway. Nicholas was hurting Mary. She saw the humped form of her father's back and heard him grunting and pounding, and she could hear from the shadow beneath him the sound of Mary softly weeping. Perdita was not really sure what it was that she saw, what night vision had visited, bent into shapes and sounds,
a dream perhaps, uncertain, askew, incomprehensible. She retreated to her bed. She did not want to know. She turned her face to the wall and shut her eyes tight.

What witness was this, that Perdita could not bear to contemplate? What palpitation of the heart, what sense of panicked strangulation, was she suppressing behind her tightly closed eyes? Perdita was frightened. The night was dark. With her eyes closed there was an extra darkness she could sink her witnessing into.

Just as Stella had the railway station booming within her, Nicholas, Perdita thought, might be said to have a war inside him. After the Battle of Britain he talked more frequently of the war, but it was the Blitz, in particular, that most aroused his excitement. In the air offensive on 15 September, Southampton, Manchester, Bristol, Liverpool and Cardiff were all bombed. Nicholas talked of Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires. He spoke of thin-fingered searchlights clutching at the sky, of anti-aircraft fire sparking in all directions, of explosions, smoke, civilians burned to cinders in their demolished homes. Calamity was glorious, tragedy was seductive. Something in the shattering of substance attracted and inspired him. Perdita knew he wanted to be in London to see it falling down about him, to sniff death and to enjoy the disaster of warfare. Cuttings from the
Western Mail
began appearing tacked to the walls: grainy and imprecise vistas, buildings aflame beneath flourishes of smoke, figures huddled in bomb shelters, sometimes with insect-like masks, a German plane – one of the most imprinting and memorable images of all – heading downwards, like a crucifix, straight into the earth.

In this remote part of the planet that was Perdita's centre, where there was no electricity, or school, or modern-day
conveniences, the war visited in these textual and solemn ways. Here, where there were three dimensions and irrevocably solid things, where bodies sweated and were scratched and smeared by the world, where there were fires at night, and insects, and banal forms of loneliness, and noise no louder than that of thunder and of rain on a galvanised roof, the newspaper cuttings were like movie stills, fake-looking and stagy.

One day Billy put his face in the doorway and his eyes grew large. Perdita saw at once how very unusual their little dwelling had become, all books, all symbolic strife, the missing mother, the remote father.

Billy would not enter the room but simply stood there, staring, his eyes scanning the Blitz photographs as they trembled in a slight breeze, his expression baffled. His large hands began slowly to bat the air. In the accustoming texture of childhood, where the startling becomes the expected, and parental peculiarity is adapted to the everyday, Perdita had few experiences of imagining her home from the outside. Billy, who spoke no words, but simply looked with exceptional gravity, and told his responses through the wayward movements of his body, gave her pause. It was the first understanding, perhaps, that her parents were locked in their obsessive devotions, that only Mary, finally, could be relied upon to notice her, her own small life, there in the background, her own small, unfinished life, with all its huge, aching questions.

Although Mary had told Nicholas that she was conducting regular lessons, in truth she was not. Lessons, such as they were, were random and occasional. Perdita knew many things Mary had never heard of and Mary had other resources Nicholas would never have guessed. Perdita enjoyed telling Mary the story of her name: it sounded astonishing as she told
it. A mad Sicilian, a wronged mother, an enchanted woman-statue, paranormally – magically! – brought back to life; the child with her name abandoned on the bear-infested sea coast of Bohemia.

‘Antigonus is eaten,' said Perdita, ‘but the baby girl is saved.'

‘Saved,' Mary repeated.

‘Yes, saved. She returns to her father. She makes her mother live.'

Mary looked interested.

‘Like magic,' insisted Perdita.

As she told the tale Perdita realised that what she liked most was its ending; so that although there was a rage of passion, a convulsion of injustice, a good man eaten offstage by a savage bear, there was also restoration, stability, a royal family reunited.

Mary also liked the story, particularly the part about the statue coming to life. In the chapel at the orphanage in Perth, she said, there was a statue of the Madonna that sometimes shivered and wept. One of the nuns had seen it. The Madonna wore a long blue robe covered with gold painted stars and had affixed to its plaster head an elliptical halo of lights. These were switched on for important occasions. Mary had watched and watched, waiting after prayers, silent and respectful, her head bowed in penitence as specially instructed, but had never seen – not a bit – any shivering or weeping.

In blackfella stories, Mary said, things changed all the time: a tree into a woman, a woman into a tree. There were rocks that had been children and stars that talked. Spirit was everywhere, she insisted, not just in a church.

Perdita, who felt spiritless, wished she believed something. Behind her thinking there existed a perishing twilight, a sense of outer space, of nothing really there. She thought of this nothing as a kind of hazy, wreathing smoke, floating upwards,
away. A nothing like starless night. A nothing eyes-closed took you into.

Later Perdita would learn with fretful misery how useless was her knowledge. Her mother's history and geography were wild surmise, her politics were eccentric to the point of crude error; even her Shakespeare was a nonsense, partial accomplishment, a clutter of stories and quotations, an ingenious but lamentably archaic vocabulary, the integument of exile, neurosis, migrant sadness. This maternal inheritance, more than anything, would serve to humiliate her.

But Mary's gentle teaching – all that drifted to her in the darkness when they were lying close together, all that was told on a walkabout, with Billy and Horatio accompanying, benignly, happily, both of them running ahead, all the unfortunate saints, and the bush knowledge, and the shared stories of mothers – these things remained securely lodged, and vouched safe.

This small remembered moment: Mary had Billy and Perdita sit on the front step, a pile of gathered seed pods nestling between them. The pods were long and curved, like a Turkish man's slipper, and crisp as if baked like potatoes in the oven. In each seed pod were rows of tiny black and red seeds, so shiny you might have believed they were painted with acrylics.
Jequirity seeds.
Together they strung the seeds on lengths of cotton thread, each fashioning a necklace. As they worked, Mary sang a song in her own language, a few words of which – ‘wind', ‘mother', ‘fire' – Perdita caught as they drifted past, fragile and dispersing as ash. Lamentation was like this, a falling thing, something in the air itself, something flighty and incalculable. When the necklaces were made the three wore them as a sign of their bond, their own little tribe. This moment of making will remain after everything else collapses: fingers, voice, the summoning unity of three souls.

Mrs Trevor looked in on them from time to time. Her son Billy was spending less time at home; she had become curious about what the three got up to together. Vera Trevor had a round face, a freckled neck and a look of beaming good-naturedness. Her hair was an unruly mysterious pile, curly, high, quivering with a second nervous life above her. She had never really managed to befriend Stella Keene – it helped a little now to know that she was actually ill, and not just rejecting the country-hand-of-friendship – but had always liked her daughter, ever since she had pulled her, slippery and full of life, from her mother's body. Vera Trevor wished secretly that she could adopt Perdita – poor mite, her father a cold fish, her mother off with the fairies, and stuck here, with nothing much, not even a doll, in this god-awful shack. When Mrs Trevor pulled back the flyscreen to find Billy, Mary and Perdita looked up to see her shocked expression. It had been at least two years since she had entered the shack and she found it crammed now with books and festooned with images of war. Poor mite, she thought again. Two crazy parents.

‘Where's Billy?' she asked, for something to say, and both girls simultaneously turned and directed with their chins, Aboriginal style, out the window to the left.
Poor mite. Like a blackfella.

For those who do not read, for whom reading is not part of the texture of knowing, the gorgeous complication, the luxurious interiority, the thrilling extrapolation from black marks to alternative reals; for those who might not understand what it is to collaborate in making a world, or building a thought, or consolidating, line by line, the salvage of something long gone; for those bereft, that is, and booklessly broke, those word-deprived, craving, caught in dull time, it will seem odd that two girls, with not much to do, spend a few hours of each day hidden in the valleys of pages. Proxy lives, new imaginings, precious understandings.

When Mrs Trevor appeared in the doorway, Perdita and Mary were both reading. Both were otherworldly and somewhere else. It startled them, seeing Mrs Trevor, and she too was startled. They could see a kind of flinch in her body and her high hair quaking. Perdita was a hundred or so pages into
David Copperfield
; Mary was reading a book on the life of Captain Cook. They were ensconced, happy.

After their girlhoods have been lost for ever and Perdita's spoken words turned to a forced, gluey halting, both remembered how easy it had been to dwell there, side by side, together and separate, in such safe, quiet pages. In the granular light of the shack, penetrated more by shadow than by light, they sat quietly together reading, their heads flared open like parasols, open and inclining with sisterly ease.

Mrs Trevor had brought them a cake to share. It was a chocolate cake, frosted with thick brown icing. Perdita sprang forward and clasped Mrs Trevor around the neck, kissing her loudly, burying her face in her curls, and Vera felt for a moment that she might cry, here and now, in this mean little shack with its mad decorations. Some private thought released – that she had always wanted a daughter, that she had tried, and tried, and then Billy came, decisively, to end her trying. That evening she would tell her husband that maybe the Government should know, a little girl like that, stuck in the back of nowhere, with no mother to watch over her: it shouldn't be allowed. She needed proper looking after. A mother. A real mother.

For now, they found Billy and sat together and shared the cake. Mrs Trevor sliced it in generous portions, pleased to see the three faces looking so grateful, and so hungry for what, in loving kindness, she had baked and brought. She watched the three of them eat; Billy, her favourite son, despite the fact that he was slow, ate with a kind of fastidious care, his teary gaze fixed resolutely on the floor. Vera could tell he was afraid
of the newspaper images tacked to the wall because he began to flap his hands in agitation whenever he caught sight of them. Mary ate, Mrs Trevor thought, just like a native, stuffing it in as if afraid it would disappear before she claimed it, no table manners, really, not even from the convent; and Perdita, well, Perdita, she was just normal, Vera thought, just a normal little girl, affectionate, sweet, pretty in her own speckled way, and stuck in the wrong bloody place with the wrong bloody parents.

When all had eaten their fill Vera Trevor left, taking Billy with her. There was something about the shack that chilled and disturbed her, something murky, unnatural, a zone of the
abnormal
. She told Perdita to visit whenever she liked, but felt ill at ease, and a little cowardly, leaving her behind. When she turned to look back, Mary and Perdita had already re-entered the shack, not even waiting long enough for a wave.