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On the same day that Mrs Trevor visited Perdita with the chocolate cake, Mandjabari, from the camp, came to the shack to visit Mary. Perdita had noticed, with a little jealousy, how fond they were of each other. She had seen Mary join her, from time to time, in the creek-bed, she had seen their muffled conversations in the patchy shade of acacia and their shy, solicitous waves to each other. Mandjabari stood behind the screen door, not even touching it, but seeming like a figure behind a veil, pencilled in and receding. Her presence was formal, somehow, but unassuming, faint. She rocked a little on her heels, so that the shape she made shifted. Mary whispered something in Language, then turned to Perdita.

‘Come, we're going out.'

Perdita grabbed her hat hanging from the bent nail beside the doorway and followed without question. They went first to the creek-bed to share a billy of tea. The men were all
away somewhere, old man Dauwarrngu and the others, so it was just the women and children sitting together in a circle around the fire. The tea was sweet and black and tasted gritty and smoky, and Perdita, who was used to canned condensed milk in her tea, found it undrinkable. Mary said something to the others in Language. An old woman raised her withered breast and pointed her nipple at Perdita, gently making fun of her, and everyone laughed. Perdita looked at Mary and saw her smiling back. Light struck the side of her face so that her smile seemed radiant. She wanted, for Mary's sake, to drink the terrible tea. She wanted to show that she was part of the group. Not to be subtracted, as she was in her parents' presence. Perdita sipped the bitter tea. She felt proud of herself.

It was mid-afternoon, a time of slanting shadows and hot sticky stillness. Perdita, with Mary holding her hand, followed the small band of women as they headed slowly into the bush. Each took turns carrying a tousled-haired girl, about three, and it seemed to Perdita, especially when it was her turn carrying the bony child, that they walked for miles and miles, always in the same direction. They had their backs to the sun and their long shadows were swaying and melding, an all-dark community, proceeding before them.

When they came to an area of escarpment, just before a plain, the women became quiet and began to separate out, searching for food. It was uneven rocky country, hard walking country. Perdita found nothing. She saw the figures around her, moving outlined against the indigo sky, squatting, or bent over, or shifting with gentle tread, and felt herself tiny, and insignificant, and unequal to this place. Once she saw at a distance a frilled-neck lizard and made a quick lunge in its direction, but it fled, its membranous neck flaring open transparently, like an alien blossom.

The afternoon dragged. Perdita gave up her hunting and studied ants swarming at her feet. She chipped away at an anthill with a piece of rock, enjoying the crumble. It was Mary, in the end, who was the big success. She captured and killed a red-bellied black snake, whipping it onto a rock, breaking first its back, and then crushing its head with her digging stick.

‘Eh!' she called, waving.

It occurred to Perdita only then that Mary was known for her hunting prowess, that at sixteen she was already skilled and admired. Mary allowed Perdita to carry the tail end of the snake. They walked back with the limp creature swinging in a bow between them. It looked, Perdita thought, as if she had caught it too, as if Mary was proclaiming a truly shared glory. When they arrived back at the camp, at sunset, the men had returned and hailed Mary and Perdita together. The girls held the snake up high, not a trophy, but an offering, and not mere food, but evidence of their special connection.

As an adult she cannot remember what might have prompted it, but in a rare moment of communication Nicholas decided to tell Perdita about ideas of kin. For Aboriginal people, he said, kin was organisation, the structure of rule, obligation, system, code. He drew a circle and began to divide it into spokes, so that it resembled a cake. In eight segments he wrote the names of ‘skin' groups, different orders of kin affiliation, then explained to Perdita that opposition and proximity on the wheel determined relationships.

She nodded thoughtfully, barely understanding. She picked at a scab on her knee and brushed it to the floor. Nicholas added that kin would have to be destroyed if Aborigines were to enter the modern world. It made them share everything, he said, so they were always poor and could never accumulate property. It made them think in communal, not individual terms, so that they were always bound to the past, to tribal savagery, not looking forward to the new self that would equip them for twentieth-century Australia. This was one of the chief propositions of his research ‘hypothesis'.

Perdita nodded again, keen to make her father believe she thought his ideas important.

‘Mmm,' she said gravely, offering an imprecise affirmation. She saw her father's hand hover in a slight tremor above the
page he had drawn. It was a dim, muggy day, the air was charged with the possibility of an electrical storm, and Perdita met her father's gaze through his fogged-up spectacles. At this moment he seemed most human, and almost vulnerable: he was asking his young daughter to confirm his ideas. His face was glowing with perspiration, his hair slightly upright with atmospheric energies and currents. How reddish his face was, an Englishman oppressed by the weather, straining to clarify systems and to figure designs. A sudden crack of thunder made them both jump. They could hear the world outside filling with exclamations of power, the verve of pressure, inflation, of air masses moving. They could hear a wind from the west, brimming with physical threat and loaded with sky-lakes of heavy water. Nicholas took his glasses from his face and wiped each lens with scholarly deliberation, then he wiped his shiny forehead with the same handkerchief and turned away. Geckos on the ceiling were clicking madly, incited by the vibrating charge in the air.

Perdita did not know if her father was correct, but what she had gathered was this: that in the culture of the people she knew there were multiple uncles and aunts, multiple brothers and sisters, and that the cake-shape enabled everyone to know how to behave and whom they should marry. When she asked Mary about this, she learned that she – Perdita – had been given a skin group: since Mary had a designated daughterly role in relation to Mandjabari, Perdita was included as a sister. Mary told her matter-of-factly, thinking it a casual disclosure, but Perdita was both surprised and delighted. She knew herself suddenly implicated in a wider pattern, where there would always be someone, somewhere, to know of and look after her; and she knew too of the formal recognition of her love for Mary, her sister. The Trevors, she discovered, did not have a skin group, but this was when Perdita decided once and for all that Billy was her brother, just as she had intimated to the cook,
that day, talking about her family in the Continental Hotel.

Perdita examined her skin. It was freckled and pale, the mark of her foreignness in this place, the mark of implicit deficiency. She wanted so much to be dark. When she placed her forearm alongside Mary's she saw herself the bright negative of a surer presence. Mary teased and humoured her.

‘No worries,' she said. ‘Stay this place long enough and you'll maybe turn blackfella. Maybe marry a blackfella too and have blackfella babies.'

Mary leaned forward and kissed her cheek.

‘No worries,' she said again.

One night Mary announced that sometimes she thought of Annie McCaughie as another sister: Annie, who had died of measles or diphtheria, Annie forever a little girl, and With Our Gentle Lord, and Resting in Peace. She had worn Annie's clothes, inherited her book, carried about her neck the dead girl's cross on a chain – until, that was, someone at the orphanage stole it – and had
read the same words
. Mary had a theory that when people read the same words they were imperceptibly knitted; that there were touchings not of the skin, and apparitional convergences. Some kind of spirit inhered in words that one might enter and engage with; there were transactions, comminglings, adjacencies of mind and of sense. Mary's version was simpler, of course, but for years later Perdita considered how this superstition worked; Mary extended to written words the forms of community she longed to express, just as, in their generosity, the creek people had bestowed on Perdita a relationship of skin. By this reasoning, too, David Copperfield was part of her and Captain Cook was part of Mary; and even in the world-weariness that reading sometimes induces, they absorbed irresistibly, naïvely, elements of the lives they imagined. A kind of family without limits. Occult relations.

One month before Christmas Nicholas collected Stella from the hospital and brought her home. She had been gone six months, some of which time was spent in the convent. Nicholas also brought a pile of newspapers, a few many weeks old, and packages of books. A photograph of Winston Churchill appeared with the other images on the wall, so the return of Stella was marked iconographically by the introduction of this man – his square baby-face, his obstinate glare, his rude pugnacity. Stella looked about herself meekly, as though she had mislaid something important. She spoke in a quieter voice and her skin had the quality of a porous fossil, sallow, chalky, more contracted to the bone, more like the old woman she had prematurely become. Her hair was grey. She was fifty-two years old. Perdita was filled with affection when she saw her mother, so reduced and unfamiliar. In the histories of mothers and daughters there are no doubt everywhere these instances of sudden feeling, insurgent, after times of alienation. Perdita rushed forward and embraced her, clasping her around the waist, pushing her face into her mother's thin bony chest, but was aware that her embrace had no reply: Stella stood like a statue, her arms at her sides.

Mary stepped forward and simply took Stella's hand.

‘Come,' said Mary. She led Stella to the table, sat her down, and gave her a cup of tea. ‘Drink,' she instructed. ‘Be careful. Hot.'

In the morning Perdita saw that Stella's feet looked tiny, childlike, beneath the lacy white hem of her threadbare nightgown.

I have never discovered what treatment my mother received, or why, each time, her absences were so long. Whatever electro-chemical disturbance seized her in this way, whatever awry synapses or deficient serotonin, she never spoke to me of her
condition, or the periods in which she simply left. By the time I was old enough to ask her, she was not interested in replying, and had already begun, in any case, to enter the honeycomb of dementia, the looped craters under-arching what might have been a memory, the brownish corridors to nowhere, the frail struts of something that had once been dense pillars of identity.

I remember watching her lift, with finger and thumb, the corner of an old newspaper, look up distractedly, and say, ‘Still. The war.' Nicholas had promised her we would return to England when the war was over, and perhaps it was now just another slumberous waiting, another unreal suspension, stretched in a duration no clock would show, and not quite persuasive enough to cause her to worry about her family back home. She held up the corner of the newspaper for what seemed ages, frozen by a story, perhaps, or an obscure foreign detail that summarised this or that victory or defeat, or something that reminded her of the holiday she had taken once with Mrs Whiticombe, when they had crossed the Channel on a ferry, still more or less young, and witnessed for themselves the comfortable exoticism of Belgium and France.

Stella seemed at first unaware of the elapse of time. She was incurious about me, and about Mary, she had not followed the war, she had not read her sister's letters. Only when she noticed, one morning, that I was wearing a dress stretched across the chest and too tight under the arms did she acknowledge that I had grown, that my body was changing, and that, implicitly, time had passed. This returned Stella to sewing, which I now believe was therapeutic. She sewed new dresses for each of us, neat, practical garments.

Once, having miscalculated and ordered too much fabric, she, Mary and I all ended up with dresses of the same rose print, a tent-like shift we each wore, looking like the jovial pink members of a singing club or an English gardening group,
uniformed for a whimsy. It reminded her, Stella said, of Martha, Sal and Daff, years ago, who all wore the same dress, comically alike. And as she said this I remembered Sal and Daff in the same sky blue, I remembered one of them holding me, I remembered one of them whispering, and was overcome by a sadness so profound I wondered for the first time if I would become my mother, if I would be this kind of unhappy woman, coiled around emptiness, falling hopelessly silent like a pearl shell at the bottom of the ocean. A crowd trampling through St Pancras, eddying with their parcels and packages and important bags, calling out, quarrelling, raising their arms for attention, an anonymous crowd, carrying anguish of all kinds, each burdened continuously just by being alive, this population of the head scared and alarmed me; this population was like a threat, like an inheritance of evil I might one day discover.

Sal and Daff linger still, implying something unspeakable. When Stella mentioned their names I dreamed about them the same night, a double woman, seancing them back into being so that I could recover them, if only fleetingly, and as co-joined figments, as distant love-objects, as alternative mothers.

Perdita and her family celebrated Christmas that year with Mary still living in the shack. Though her role was undefined, no one seemed to think that she should leave. She cooked more often, and kept Stella company, reading to her as she sewed, as Stella had once read to Mrs Whiticombe, watching her hands, fingers long and held apart like a pianist, relaxed on the edge of a lavender bedspread. It may have been the idea that she had a servant that pacified Stella – who had always believed that she was misplaced in class – and Perdita,
self-interested, enjoyed this small restful period, marked by Mary's voice and her mother's subsidence into something like peace.

On Christmas Day, however, there was altercation. At first, Stella appeared voluble and happy. Mary, Stella and Perdita each wore their rose-print dresses (Stella's surmounted, unseasonably, by her black Spanish shawl), and her sense of festivity was flamboyant and infectious. During the morning Nicholas smoked alone outside; Perdita could see him through the gauzy window fiddling with strings of tobacco, filling his pipe with his thumb and gazing with unfocused intensity into the far distance; then she could smell the pipe smoke thinly dispersing, its bitter brown spread. But inside, Stella buzzed in a tizzy around the room, placing wildflowers here and there on stacks of books, checking the large chicken roasting slowly in the oven. There were no gifts, but the meal was genial enough – Nicholas and Stella were civil to each other, Perdita and Mary exchanged shy smiles, all enjoyed the treat of roast chicken and salty potatoes, glistening in a golden oily pyramid before them. It might have been a happy family sitting there, sated and complacent.