The Submerged Cathedral (9 page)

W
HEN
S
ANDRA IS
at school Jocelyn tries to work on the proofreading, that sprawling mess of words and pictures. It has become an anvil, its pile of manila folders always in the corner of her vision where she has carried it from room to room.

Alf twitches in his sleep on the couch, a charcoal map of the world on the soft pink skin of his belly. He has taken to scrabbling heavily up onto the furniture, and nobody stops him. In the grey light from the living-room window Jocelyn sees the slackness in his skin, his slow, heavy breath. He is the only sound sleeper in the house.

Once, in the kitchen, Ellen says quietly to the window over the sink, ‘I wish I was dead.' At the table behind her, Sandra puts a piece of toast into her mouth and watches out at her mother's world, as if they are both trapped in an iron boat beneath the sea.

Jocelyn sits in George Blewitt's office. He has anatomical diagrams on the walls. The lungs, the spine, coloured pink and white. The doctor leans forward, writing on his prescription pad. The human hand has twenty-seven individual bones. He sits up then, and puts down his pen. He smells of breakfast foods when he talks to her, and she is nauseated. ‘Now,' he says. Trying to be kind. ‘How are you today.' It is not a question. He says it like a gentle sigh. He knows Martin has refused to treat any of them any longer.

She looks at him. She tries to be
kind
as well. She does not know what that word means; knows people want it but it has only the sound of teeth and mouths to her.

‘How is your sister?' he says to the arm of her chair.

She can answer this. ‘Terrible. Not sleeping. She hears cries now.'

George is upset. She knows she upsets him, is sorry in a way.

That first time, Ellen had sat up in bed when Jocelyn went in. ‘I can't help it, Joss,' she'd said and looked down at the eiderdown. ‘I've been hearing it cry all morning. I got out of bed, early. I thought it was coming from the
kitchen
.' She stared at her sister, glass-eyed, pale. ‘I think I'm going mad.' She breathed the words out, pinching and unpinching the yellow flowers of the eiderdown between her fingers, staring up at Jocelyn. Who only moved her head, slowly, who could not say anything.

Who cannot say anything now to the doctor, lets him tell her this is normal, that her sister must not be allowed to stay in bed for too long, that she will perhaps have another child soon. That these things are not fathomable, that some people think they are the will of God – but he sees her face and stops.

‘And do you have something to occupy you?' he asks.

Cooking, cleaning, throwing food out, sleeping, shitting, proofreading, washing Sandra's clothes, washing Sandra, feeding Sandra, washing Ellen's clothes, feeding Ellen, washing Ellen's hair. Washing her own clothes, they should be the cleanest women in the country, washing the floors, sweeping.

‘No,' he says, very gently. ‘I mean, what do you enjoy doing?'

Jocelyn thinks she has lost her understanding of language; perhaps this is what happens when a person starts to die from the inside out.

‘What did you used to enjoy?' he says, coaching her.

She cannot answer. Thinks of Martin; and the imaginary garden comes into her head. They both seem very far away.

‘Work,' she says.

He smiles, picks up his piece of paper and passes it to her. ‘Then you should try to get back into your work. To get back into things.'

Later she takes the little brown bottles from her handbag, putting one on Ellen's bedside table and taking the other to her bathroom cabinet. When she puts the pill in her mouth after lunch she remembers the doctor and looks out the window at the garden. The dogwood has died.

The Valium makes a garden in her blood, she thinks. That is enough.

 

It is seven weeks since the baby.

She is into the second-last volume of the encyclopaedia now, forcing herself through it daily, page by page, noting, scribbling, punctuating. Only this evening has she once more begun to properly read the words.

In the rainforests of Carnarvon Gorge, inland Queensland, is the largest native rock art site in the country. The ochre hand-prints are testament to the primitive presence of the Aborigine.

This morning in the kitchen Ellen told her she was going back to London.

Jocelyn stared at her, silent, then said, ‘You can't take Sandra back there.'

Then Ellen had said, her voice tainted with disgust – the first evidence of emotion in seven weeks – ‘What,
you'll
look after her?'

They faced each other. Neither woman any longer felt
the urge to cry. Ellen walked into the living room to the telephone.

Jocelyn stood on the green linoleum staring into the kitchen sink, listening to Ellen's voice talking to the travel agent. Staring at the small digs and dints in the white enamel, Jocelyn stood.

When she heard Ellen speak again she went in and touched her arm: ‘I'm coming with you.'

Ellen narrowed her eyes for an instant, then shrugged. Turning her gaze back to the faded pink flowers of the carpet, she said into the receiver, ‘Actually, it's three seats.'

Afterwards Jocelyn returned to the manuscript, to the hand-prints of Carnarvon Gorge. High on the rock face, those perfect outlined hand-prints, of men, mothers, children. Families. The pale red hand its own silent language, there among the glittering green and the squawks of the birds dropped down from the air.

At nine o'clock in the evening it is her turn for the telephone.

In Pittwater the ringing carries out and out, across the black lapping water. Martin answers at last; then, after she tells him, they listen to the clicks and hisses of the telephone wire, each holding tight to the receiver, the black plastic, like driftwood for the drowning.

1964

A
NTHONY STANDS AT
his counter and dries a water glass with a cloth. Through the window he watches the new one – quiet, not so young – moving between the buildings. Walking with slow steps the path around the cloister (such as it is, more school quadrangle than holy place).

They are all scrubbed clean of their stories by the time they get here. At first they had been mostly pale, slow Irish boys whose families had delivered them from Dublin streets to Dublin brothers. One son a parish priest, the other a Trappist – but never suspecting their boy might be torn from his country like that, not understanding that a promise to a monastery meant to go where you were sent, agree to be dragged across oceans to the bottom of the earth, towards God.

Anthony was the first Australian boy to come. And
through the decades since his own arrival, the infirmarian has watched the same shock play out across their faces in the first weeks. The real shock of being woken in the dark, breathless with a pounding heart, the waking they would never get used to. The shock of walking on gravel under the cold stars for Vigils and then Lauds in the dawn. And the screeching, screaming white birds with wingspans like arms that circle the black trees beyond their dormitory rooms.

It's the shock of bending not to a soft dark kneeler hollowed by the centuries of other men's knees, but to new-hewn wood that even after twenty years still splinters the skin and smells of the strange gaseous trees of this land. The shock of a monastery's prayer only held together by clapboard, and of the blinding sun on baking earth outside.

And nothing to contemplate out there but the bone-yellow Australian plains, the flat, bleached blue sky, the sound of mattock thudding into tussock, or striking iron stone and juddering in their hands. And they try to suppose that Christ could live here, though it horrors their hearts to think of it.

But the greatest shock for any of them, he knows, is the silence – by order of the abbot and St Benedict. Of having your own tongue stilled inside your mouth, the better to listen for God.

So. It's this that brings each one in time to Brother Anthony's infirmary door, and he tends to them, as they stare about at the white beds and the grey curtains, the smell of Epsom salts finding their nostrils. He shuffles between them, offering bed rest and tea and hot-water bottles, and then they realise they have the chance to speak. For austere conversation is permitted with him, the infirmarian, but by this time the silence has woven itself in with the shock, and often it is only when they have recovered and he is opening the door for them to leave that they want to tell him their stories, those lives peeled off them before they entered here.

But once they know it's possible, they store their speaking up and deliver it to him with their ailments. He does not ever tell them he's heard all their lives before, from other flat-faced boys just like themselves.

 

Obedience, humility, perseverance
. Shovelling shit over the fence from the dusty earth of the sheep yards, Martin does not know why he is here, does not care. It is a relief to be told: walk there, wear this (a flapping dress, absurd, he does not care), sing this, sleep, eat.

He shovels each raked grey pile into the barrow, hitches his habit up to move, lifts another shovelful of pebbled sheep shit. In this mindless repetition he thinks
he is supposed to pray. The idea is ludicrous. He lets his brain fall still.

If he tries to think of his arrival here – a week ago, a month? – it is as some watery delirium, or dream. A leather chair, the abbot's hand. Perhaps he cried. Later, being led to one narrow iron bed in a row of twenty, then one space in the choir-stall among the rows of others, one refectory chair, one plate, one cup.

There were the months after Jocelyn left. When all he could think to do was walk into the bush and disappear. And then, with the entire supply of the surgery's morphine and some opiated instinct, a train trip south, then west. Occasionally, out through the windows over those rhythmic days and nights, he stared into a stunned Hereford's glossed, resiny eyes, its turned head looming from the dark. He had walked into a pub, legs moving as though he had been months at sea. The weeks in the town, the morphine running out and crying into the sheets for Jocelyn's sleep-flung hand over his hip.

And now there is the silence, as he kneels and works and walks and sleeps.

Anthony watches him, knows the buried baby is what haunts this Martin's mind, kneeling there in the yellow-lit chapel or stalking out across the paddocks. They have all heard how he was found up on the ridge that day, incoherent by the unknown baby's grave. And Anthony has
seen him since, returning across the flats in the early mornings. When Martin is absent from the abbey, Anthony knows it is that old child's grave at which he kneels to offer his Psalms.

We are all lonely, brother.

In the beginning, Anthony knows, their heads are bursting full of words, and in church the Psalms come rushing out, all words and noise, all need and desire and relief.

Anthony thinks he can see the shape of their need in the first weeks, and it is all shaped like women. They scandalise themselves, they find the Psalms have hips and breasts and they arch backwards into prayer that smells of women, is soft as women. And they think it is any woman they want, but in the infirmary Anthony sees their faces when they're released into a dreaming sleep, and they're each crying for their own mother.

When Anthony arrived here in 1930 he felt the Irishmen's cold gaze on him and their brimstone hearts harden against him. But standing there on the porch with his bag heavy at his shoulder he turned and looked around him at the scraped land, at the sky bluer than any Irish air, and he thought,
This is my country
; and he stared those old men down, and set his bag on the cold verandah stone.

He liked to work with the sheep, it reminded him of home, and then he liked to walk in the frosty dark to
Vigils still caught in the slow web of sleep. Then he learned the sign language and learned to trust those peaceful things coming into him, he thinks from the Virgin, and he is able to believe now in the love of God almost all the time.

A bout of influenza, then pneumonia, had brought him to the infirmary in '42 and kept him here for three months. Where he began to learn the rhythms of old Ignatius's bottles and herbs and when and why he used them. After which the old man kept him there in training.

From this infirmary he has watched the tides and circles of the novice year. It moves on, the shock disappears, their faces turn brown with work in the sun, their forearms grow sinewed, and lustful thoughts subside.

The only fullness left there then is the wish still to talk. Sometimes Anthony thinks that this is what becomes of desire in a monastery: all need turns into only the desire to speak.

So they read the Psalms.

I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.

 

In his student days, when morphine was only for pleasure, Martin liked to take a tiny amount and then walk around the steep edges of the Pittwater beach. He is reminded of
it in the cloister, on the third day of the fast in this, his first year. Of the way that clear, slow glaze had formed over his vision, the seaweeded rocks becoming blood splotches beneath the water.

He is enjoying this wandering of his mind, those images, lost for so long, returning desiccated, but somehow more intense.

He is interested too in the physiology, and the illusory psychology, of the fast. The lightheadedness, the tilting of the room if he moves too quickly. The intensification of the senses over the days, so that he can smell laundry soap on the clothes of Anthony where he sits reading, though he is eleven feet from the open window, inside the infirmary. This hypersensitivity disconnects Martin from himself. Watching, he wonders if this is what it feels like to die, this effervescent, aerial stroking away from the physical, sensory world. When the senses are so sprawling, so easily released, sent out like streamers or homing birds, returning with a distant scent, the sound of scraping mud from boots on the neighbouring farm … and then he knows it, in the short hard spaces of concentration, as delirium. What he imagines as some kind of god takes visceral, sculptural form, and almost, once, speaks. And Martin can even attempt what he thinks might be prayer: it is like swimming in green water. Cool, easy, progressive, nearing something clear and sharp.

This ease will sink rapidly away when he once again has that electrical weight, the massive bulk – of bread, or pea – on his tongue. But it is as though the deprivation of food sets the fuse for every sense but hunger, which only lies dully, unrecognised, at the base of all the other fissuring, hissing and popping machinations of the nerve endings.

And, inevitably, Jocelyn. She comes singing into his body, all fern-frond hair and smooth eucalyptical limbs, all dank, androgynous arousal, rising from the coastal rainforest or the marshes of western New South Wales. She is cross-continental, bicoastal, vampiric as she comes to him on these yellow plains.

He dreams then that she is in Spain, makes her flamenco and castanet like a clacking souvenir doll. His tongue is sticking to the roof of his mouth. He drinks water carefully, moves slowly, in stages as though learning for the first time to move, tests his weight on his hands, the balls of his feet, gets down to kneel. Prays her, stumbling, from his mind.

 

After these decorated hallucinations the cool clarity of the infirmary comes to him as relief. Washed out, still a little lightheaded, it is a comfort to rejoin the conscious presence of another human being and the stark wooden light. Martin breathes deeply as he lies there, but keeps
his eyes open, not wanting a return, yet, to those shifting images.

‘St Bernard prescribed prayer and love alone for the sick,' the infirmarian, Anthony, tells him, screwing the lid on a jar. Then laughs softly, a guttural sound. ‘I don't know how well that worked,' he says. Then sniffs his fingers.

The football dressing-room smell of liniment recalls for Martin his university days again. Another roomful of men.

‘St Bernard thought there was nothing but trouble in medicine. That to seek relief from disease in medicine was in harmony neither with our religion nor with the purity of the order. Odd, do you think?'

Martin is still stunned by the sound of the man's voice, its confidence, its volume. He nods, not hearing the words, only their noise, the sharpness of the loudly spoken air outside the chapel. He himself has not spoken for weeks, only responding to another novice's unlawful, urgent whisper with nods or shrugs.

Now he traces back, follows Anthony's speech about Bernard, the Abbey of Cîteaux built on a swamp. About the prohibited study of medicine. Martin imagines his university professors laughing to see him here, sitting under the clumsy hands of a halfwit man-nurse administering wives'-tale poultices like a child slapping mud pies.
Shaking their heads at his wasted years in the lecture halls, the anatomy lab, the hospitals.

The infirmary smells of carbolic acid and Dettol, has the metallic sound of kidney dishes and shoe squeaks on linoleum. The first time he came in here it was a home-coming of the senses, but he dreamed of the baby for nights afterwards. Of that moment, the slippery weight in his hands, over and over.

Anthony washes his hands at the sink in the corner, waiting for Martin to speak, this sallow young man, quicker-eyed than most. Anthony has noticed that Martin watches his movements too closely, like an examiner.

He has noticed, too, across the yards and at mealtimes, that Martin has seemed not to take to the sign language. The other novices learn quickly enough the monastery's ancient language of the fingers. The hands of some move in the air like smoke, like dancing steam. There are even jokes, curled with deft fingers when the novice master's back is turned. It's only strictly meant for work.
Help me
, or
stop
. It is not the language men carry in their hearts; but their hearts' language is supposed to be kept for God.

The young monks finger sentences to one another across the cloister, behind the covers of books when they're filing in for the reading, the
Lectio Divina
. In the garden, and beyond, fluttering fingers across paddocks and from beneath tractors and across the snufflings of
pigs in the sty. Desperate dances of fingers to reveal their selves to one another.

Except for this Martin, this young man floating upwards out of his delirium and dehydration, carefully watching everything, walking the perimeters, but leaving unlearned the language of the hands.

Once during Anthony's early years he heard a boy cry out
Take me home
, this cry,
Mama, bring me home
, and under-blanket stifled sobs and sobs to follow. But in the morning he saw the young brother's face had set to stone from grief. It was as though all need had flowed out of the boy in the night and now he was ready to wait for God.

Later it was tuberculosis, not the Holy Spirit, that descended into the boy and dwelt there, and by the time it came to the end he was simply tired out with waiting. His twenty-four-year-old eyes watched past the rites read him by the abbot, heard the wheeling of that white cockatoo screaming into his morning dreams, and Anthony knew it was the bird's shriek, not the peace of God, which went with that boy into death.

It was the first burial Anthony saw here, the lowering of a friend wrapped only in his habit into the stony grave.

When Ignatius died ten years later, Anthony had washed the old man's body and, as he moved him a last, leftover breath had come out, as though to say
Do not cry,
I am here
. But it was only physiology, that exhalation, not life. And Anthony had sat by the bed until morning and held Ignatius's dead hand in his, thinking,
I cannot go on
.