1
At the end of a corridor there’s an old window, so old the
glass,
slow moving like lava, has dripped within itself to distort the view.
Made up of twelve small panels this window curves out from the blank
face of the building forming part of a hemisphere, a shape which
catches the sun first thing in morning and holds it, swinging it slowly
around, till it escapes in the late afternoon. I’ve dragged a
small table under this window. It’s an elegant antique table
borrowed from Suza, my downstairs neighbour, and here I sit, within the
bow of the window, looking out at a view of a city which warps and
contorts in twelve different ways through this old glass.
Within reach of my right hand a pile of handwritten notes, weighed down
by a paperweight, yellows and curls in the sun. The paperweight itself
is interesting. Heavy glass. At its centre is a butterfly, not a glass
butterfly, but a real butterfly. The glass artist who made this
paperweight has set the butterfly at an angle, as if it rides an
updraught, the wings open, the delicate dust on them almost visible.
How he has done this, encased a butterfly in glass without destroying
it, nobody knows and he won’t tell. It’s a
professional
secret. An ordinary brown and yellow butterfly, common enough, its
upper wings are veined and patterned like a church window and its lower
wings bear false eyes, circles within circles, a dark iris, the pupils
orange brown. When the sun swings around through the window and touches
the paperweight a halo forms, and the butterfly, sainted and suspended,
quivers in a hologram of suggested life.
Off the corridor, on the right, is my bedroom. It catches no sun at
all. Even the daylight is toned down by the deep skirt of pines in the
park beyond. I’m not the only occupant of this room for at
night
I’m sure a ghostly woman crosses from the door to the window
under the sloping roof and stands looking out. I’ve spoken to
her. No one ever answers, but in this time here alone my intuition has
honed itself to a fine sharpness. I
know
she’s there.
My kitchen is rudimentary, early lit but cold by midday, so I tend to
live almost exclusively at this window end of the corridor. You could
say I’ve perched here for a while, with the butterfly, out of
the
buffeting winds, my feet resting on a pile of reference books which
will not fit on the table top, and, still wet from my last incarnation,
I’m unfolding and drying.
A romantic notion but not quite true. What I’m actually
doing,
here in my window, is writing a history of this city. It’s
not a
particularly adventurous task, more a
join the dots
companion for the sightseer. What date was the bridge built? Where did
the first ferries tie up? Who sunk the Lady Ann? That sort of thing.
And, of course, stories of our bold city founders - the exploits of the
brave Lieutenant Welbourne; who was the first fine wool breeder and why
is Lady Lennox’s ghost said to haunt the Customs House?
Snippets.
The flotsam gossip of the brave pioneers of this wild colony. Does the
current Lord Mayor get his fine oratorical style from a certain vicar
on his mother’s side? Noble deeds and fine old houses - with
sepia photographs of men in frock coats and women with parasols and
bustles; a horse drawn carriage outside the old drapery store when the
streets were lined with fine laced fringed verandahs; Elsmore House
before it became the psychiatric hospital; the Ratford family
picnicking by the river. A nice little book about the hey-ho and
derring-do of this romantic city, with, perhaps, a little lace work on
the cover, or a cameo - that would be nice - of a past mayor, with
mutton chops and his lady wife. The book will sell with other local
trinkets - souvenir teaspoons, a reproduction trooper’s hat,
a
convict brick, a printed scarf, a pair of wattle earrings, a possum
forged in pewter, works by local artisans - a clever paperweight, for
instance, with a butterfly caught in flight. I need the money. I need
the distraction. A distracting little history. A tedious and
superficial history. And I’m perfectly placed to write it;
the
city lies beyond my window, spread out and quite exposed.
This is a city where the founding families haven’t moved much
but
have remained making their mark on the landscape, ordering its civic
affairs and accruing fame, notoriety and wealth for generation after
generation. These are the families who made the history which is the
subject of this commission - and I’ve been left in no doubt
about
that. For there
was
no history, I’m told, and no
place,
nothing but a wilderness until the brave young Captain Vermont road up
Windy Hill, checked his horse, a rangy bay, and shouted to his second
in command, ‘A fine place, ain’t it, McNelly?
We’ll
set the tents up in that lovely valley.’ No, there was
nothing
here of any importance at all before that. In fact the place
didn’t exist till then. So I am told.
I’ve been commissioned to write this work by the city
council.
Now, as the majority of city councillors are members of the current
generation of the founding families, this history is necessarily
limited, or it will be if I stick to the guidelines I’ve been
given which are quite strict. The families know their histories, of
course they do, the stories passed down from generation to generation,
and it’s these stories which constitute the one and only
history
from its beginning to now. I am to confine myself to their stories. I
have a box of interviews on cassette to work from and the photographs
have been supplied from family albums. A simple enough task. But the
real history of this city has begun to fascinate me. Among my yellowed
notes, weighed down by the butterfly, I have photocopies of extracts I
was never meant to see, articles from old newspapers, buried reports,
odd pages from a journal or a diary. Through these I’m
uncovering
another history, which warps and twists between the commissioned lines
of print.
But let me tell you about this pretty little city as it is now. To
begin with, the first defining factor, we are on an island - this is a
city on an island. Now, when you understand it this
islandness
explains much of the psyche here, the ingrown and hierarchical nature
of the place, which in turn explains much about the history
I’m
commissioned to write. For on islands it’s easy to imagine
that
beyond this place, this fortress attacked by the sea at all its edges,
there is nothing, this
is
the
world and all else is an echo. Therefore on islands we grow intensely
inward and self obsessed; here the petty becomes powerful for
it’s easy to grow the power and hold onto it in a place where
all
invasions of modifiers can be swept away by the sea and the wind - like
voices. And the second defining factor? - this lovely valley where
Captain Vermont set his tents is in the crater of a volcano.
You can see the shape of the volcano quite plainly from here, a
depression between those ancient hills which I have sometimes thought
mould the sky like the bodies of recumbent women, their breasts, their
thighs, their hips, giant women who recline at the crater’s
edge
as at a well. They’re its guardians, I suspect, these
Olympian
landforms - but whether they be the muses or the furies I
can’t
tell. From here I can look down into the central business district,
which is built, appropriately enough, over the core, and upwards to the
opposite rim, a shoulder curve, where the blackened trees of last
year’s fires hedgehog against the skyline. This volcano is so
old
and cold and crusty and its passions so deeply buried that nothing has
rumbled in its belly since before the dinosaurs roamed, or so
it’s believed, and the occasional little tremor can be
discounted. We think we are safe here. The sides of the crater are
planted thickly with houses. I look down on shapely roofs to where the
matchbox cars glide the grid of roads and, at night, lighting by
numbers, the streets throw harlequin ribbons across the crater floor.
It’s a pretty view day or night. But the fact is we are all
falling down, little by little, year by year, inch by inch, very
slowly. Sometimes I’m sure I can feel the foundations of this
building slip, and in such dry weather as this the cracks in these old
walls open wide and grin. Nobody ever mentions it but we are edging
fraction by fraction into the core. One gulp of the earth could swallow
this city whole.
A morsel for a kraken. A pretty little mouthful. One day, maybe, should
the depths decide, this whole island might explode and disappear
beneath the sea like Krakatau. Ha!
Sometimes I wonder what the ghost woman stares at from the bedroom
window. There’s no view of the city from there and she avoids
the
lights. This building sides onto the smallest of the parks. Its grand
old pines, prickly and spicy sweet, extend in a belt almost to the top
of Windy Hill. Beyond the trees odd moving spots of light go out at
bedtime and the pool from the one streetlight is only visible if you
lean sideways to see it. Nothing else. So she stares into the dark.
Sometimes, too, an odd wailing floats across the space of the park. A
woman wailing. I had thought at first that she wailed in trouble and
I’ve stood on the back steps at night listening, trying to
place
her. But the sound moves reaching me in rising and falling bursts
through the more obvious moan of the wind in the pines. She’s
further off than the trickery of the wind would have me believe and
I’ve decided that it’s not trouble she’s
in but the
arms of some demon lover. She comes in crescendos on regular nights.
This building was one of the first, built originally as an inn. Rats
tick in the skirtings, spiders spin in the cracks. The stables against
the back wall now house the communal laundry. The old convict brick has
been stuccoed over and the whole edifice painted white. Inside,
it’s been divided horizontally into three flats. We are three
women in these flats, living one above the other, tiered like a wedding
cake.
Immediately below me lives a nursing sister, Suza. She’s
escaping
her marriage for love, heaven help her, of a clergyman. Avoiding a wife
somewhere, he trots briskly up her stairs at night, his crisis of
conscience palpable, while she, taking a short cut across the park
after the late shift at the hospital, her uniform white and startling
as an apparition against the pines, hurries breathless up the side path
where she shouts to her love on the stairs.
He says, ‘Shush.’
She’s rescuing him, she tells me, it’s her mission
-
she’s rescuing him from his church, from his religion, from
his
god, from his wife, from the patriarchy and from all notions which do
not fit with
the wild
and pagan yearnings of the soul
- her words, not mine. He needs rescuing, is worthy of rescue, Suza
says. He’s a small man, almost dainty, quick at argument,
with
benign eyes. After her work at the hospital, Suza’s wild and
pagan soul resurrects itself out of her starched uniform. Suza has a
penchant for velvets and satins, patchwork and old lace, crystals and
feathers that she buys at the markets. Suza’s resurrected
soul
dresses itself like some half crazed bag woman; her flat reeks of
incense and flowers dumped by the armful in vases; she covers her walls
with Rossetti prints, a Beardsley hangs in the bathroom and a Klimt
over her bed. Suza’s soul pines for some past incarnation
from
which she was born again too soon and too starched. When that soul
breaks through there is nothing to connect her to the nursing sister
who has spent the last hours holding some old woman’s hand or
wiping some old man’s arse at the hospital, except for the
sensible white shoes left at her door. On these light evenings, draped
in an Edwardian shawl, she serves the clergyman red zinger tea in
Chinese cups on the lawn beneath my window. He, sprawled beside the
white lace cloth she spreads, reads her
Morte d’Arthur from
a blue velum copy. Obviously fascinated by her laugh, her hair, her
Modigliani face, her butterfly notions of love, men and life, he gives
up with barely a struggle, or so it would seem, on God, the hanging
Christ and his own forgotten prim, bible studies wife.
I watch them from my window, down there in the garden under the ancient
fig tree, its brown fruits splitting around them on the grass like
sexual innuendos, showing pink. At night their sandpiper cries of
delight in adulterous love drift upwards through the floorboards to
disturb my rock solid solitude with something too redolent of envy,
while I imagine Suza’s empty uniform hanging against her
wardrobe
door like a chrysalis shell. Then I wish I could undress my soul as
easily as Suza does, but I suspect that if I did I’d
disappear,
blow away, like dust.
The basement flat is the largest and the most expensive to rent but the
darkest. The sun hardly reaches it at all. There, a young couple,
Angela and Hadley, live out an intense nightmare of married life. At
least that’s what it sounds like. In the night, often, the
sounds
reach me through the floorboards, Angela’s sobbing,
Hadley’s rage, the slam of doors. Sometimes she locks him out
and
then he blows around the outside of the building like a gale, banging
on windows, abusing the walls. It seems he suspects her of every kind
of fickleness while she, screeching her innocence, points out his
faults. What these faults are is unclear but her pitched tone is
impressive. On good days he comes home with his faults, whatever they
may be, smothered in roses and the nights are silent. Next morning she
is singing at the clothesline, a pretty thing in a soft porn camisole
of
embroderie englaise
and a
swinging skirt of virgin blue. I’ve seen bruises on her
shoulder
and her cheek, purple turning yellow, and a distinct imprint of fingers
on her upper arm. Once she saw me looking. ‘Love
play,’ she
said, ‘Hadley’s very passionate.’ An
ingénue’s shrug - and a coquette’s
smile. Such
dangerous games.
And as for me, in the topmost flat, caught in light, a hologram - I am
a marm for all seasons, a witch in a window, all eyes and ears,
watching this little world of ours swim through the waves of the glass.
Away to the right, where it’s worn a gap in the hills, a
river
winds off under a light industrial fug till, further out, it bends and
twists like a broken snake and pretends it’s silver. An
abused
river, a sewerage flow, yet it persists in an illusionary beauty,
especially when the light catches its scales in the morning, or in the
evening when the sun bleeds into it. Perhaps it’s a
distortion
caused by these old glass panes, or more likely a trick of distance,
but the eye seems to step up to the river as if it’s higher
than
the city, an ascending glory, an incandescent twist through a green
land to where it wedges itself, misty, into heaven. This, of course is
quite untrue, the river stinks. Human excreta catches in the rice grass
and last year it yielded up a leg, just a leg, with the sandshoe still
attached.
Romantic, paradoxical, this is, most of all, a city of churches. Five
spires are clearly visible from where I sit. Testament to the faith and
the achievements of those brave and noble settlers, once the spires
would have dominated the landscape, soaring high over the huddle of the
barracks, the prison and the warehouses built of sandstone which fringe
the river. But now, a sign of the times, God in perspective, they are
merely little pricks between the chain stores, the office blocks, the
banks and motels. Even the multi-storeyed car park is higher - this
city gets it priorities right and cars are closest to heaven these
days. Several of the churches are architecturally splendid and the
subjects of a series of highly prized water colours which hang in the
state gallery and, although many have lost most of their congregation,
the buildings are protected. Some, however, not considered so worthy,
have been sold off for purposes other than God’s. One is no
longer a church but a private dwelling. It is here that a man called
Daniel climbs the turret like a fly to a window and hangs there against
the light through the blues and vermillions, tapping on glass.
One day, soon, I will break into his church, and then, quite simply, I
will kill him.