Authors: Gail Jones
Sixty Lights (19 page)
The fireworks factory:
In the month before Ellen was born, Lucy had been on an excursion alone, seeking gifts. She had wandered into an unknown part of the city and quickly become lost. At every turn, people seemed to point or stare at her; she felt absurd, haphazard; she could feel sweat on her face and a panicky acceleration racing in her pulse. Her large pregnant belly was impossibly heavy.
A beggar's thin arm reached out and dragged at Lucy's skirt, catching like a claw, and she pulled away roughly and turned into a doorway. Inside was like a heated cave. There was a bitter stinging stench of sulphur and magnesium and in the dim light Lucy could see twenty or so boys, all no older than twelve, squatting on the floor in cramped groups making bundles of firecrackers. They mixed and rolled the toxic powder and stuffed tubes of cardboard with their thin skilled fingers. Even in the half-light she could see that many had been burned, and that the group of boys closest to the doorway, stamping paper with a red Ganesha and packing crackers in rows, all had missing digits, or in some cases, missing hands. One of the boys waved his stump arm at her and shouted something that made all the other boys laugh. Lucy saw his
fierceness, his mockery, his wish to strike her where she stood. She hitched her heavy skirts, turned and fled. The boy's face had been lovely: it was still the face of a child, but anguished with the need for an explanation for the sacrifice of his hand.
During the time of Diwali, during the pains that caused her to fall forward in the street at night as the sky flashed and boomed and reconstellated with fireworks, this boy's expression floated back to her like an accusation.
The kiss:
She had come upon them kissing. Violet was leaning her back on the hallway wall and Thomas was facing her. With both arms he enclosed her in the brackets of his body and pressed with the slight possessive tilt of his hips. A bluebell-shaped light hung above them, like a singular star.
They were rapt and isolated. They were on their own planet. Lucy stood guiltily watching the full length of the kiss; it was a long intake of breath, nothing like the rough quick kisses of William Crowley. She stepped backwards â just in time â so that the couple could preserve their aloof orbit of just two. In a likeness that made their kiss appear heraldic.
The earth:
As they grew to know each other, Lucy and Violet began to talk and exchange stories.
“What do you remember”, Lucy had asked, “of the Grosvenor Foundling Home?” Violet remembered the pungent smell of floor polish and the feel of a rough flaxen garment rubbing across her skin. She remembered
the taste of gruel flavoured with salt and lumps of turnip, and the experience of being pinched on the arm, again and again, by an older child.
“Images,” Lucy persisted. “What images do you remember?”
Violet paused, then said she remembered nothing much but the rather ordinary image of a graveyard. It was beside the building â far too close for emotional comfort â and she could see thin whitewashed wooden crosses â thin as children's bodies â from the perpendicular window on the staircase. When there was a scarlet-fever epidemic children began to disappear and the earth in the graveyard became newly churned and dark. For a long time there were no new crosses, but then one day, suddenly, they all appeared together: seven, she remembered. Seven new crosses.
“Like Lowood School? Like the school in
Jane Eyre
?”
Violet confessed she had never read the novel
Jane Eyre.
She apologised for the scant, ordinary quality of her images and the dispersed and simplistic nature of her memories. She said later that she had wanted to say something that would impress her new sister â to describe some airy beam of light resting on a single cross, its shadow, its promise, its everlasting etc., but could manufacture nothing beyond churned earth and the certainty of seven lost souls.
Neville:
This much Thomas imparted: the death was a foolish accident.
Neville had been to see Madame Noir and was returning by way of the public house to tell his good news. At the Spread Eagle he had been in particularly fine form:
he talked excitedly, his beery cheeks burning with liquor, of the predicted destiny of his grandchild, Neville Newton. The boy would be a genius with numbers and enter the World of Commerce, Madame Noir had foretold. He had Great Expectations: he would make a fortune by the time he was eighteen years old.
The publican said later that Neville's happiness was clear; he talked fondly of the child's father, the late-lamented Mr Newton, whom he had known as a companion in Bombay, India, and said he would soon bring the child to the Spread Eagle â the epiphany, he said â for all to see.
Lucy envisioned him, flushed and voluble, among rows of glittering glass and cynical patrons. (“Neville will be a father, after all.”) He leaned on the bar, his dirty scarf dangling, his elbows crooked like a child at a pantomime, inventing futures. His charming smile flooded the room with a good-humoured glow, so that the other men forgave him his fatuous tales, and played along, indulging him, feeling their own hidden gentleness arouse, thinking of their own sons and daughters and their own dreamy ambitions. By the time Neville left the public house it had begun to rain. He pulled up his jacket collar and pulled down his hat and wove through the wet streets towards the Childish Establishment. Thomas saw him from the window, across the road, and waved. Neville responded and stepped forward into the path of a heavy carriage. He was struck, said Thomas, directly in the chest, and slipped in the wet street, falling backwards so that he hit his head on the pavement as he fell crushed under the wheels. Thomas had rushed outside and run to the site of the accident. The carriage driver was distraught, and chattered incoherently with shock. Uncle
Neville was quiet. He lay with his face in the rain and his eyes tightly closed. He was already gone.
Thomas said: “I just sat in the rain, feeling empty, and unable to act. At last someone took my arm and guided me away. It was not like Dickens; it was base and awful and Neville looked disfigured and forlorn, the rainwater steaming with blood down his face . . .”
The skylight:
Something she loves: Lucy sleeps beneath a skylight. It is so like a photographic glass plate â a rectangle of dark possibilities within which features emerge. She wakes to see stars that have moved and the slight shifts of colour, and notices for the first time the many gradations of the dark. There is a purple stage and another where the sky has a slight coppery tinge. Then the space is reversed, becoming bone white in the mornings. In winter sometimes she woke to find a rectangle of snow held above her, a kind of magical
carte-de-visite
, with a message of frozen time.
One day, Lucy believes, one day in the future, people will discover how to photograph the vast night sky. They will sit behind a glass panel, and make visible these changes. They will show everyone the prodigious nature of the heavens, its positive/negative exposures, its blindings and enlightenings. Photographs of the night will convince everyone of the existence of God.
LUCY NOW FOUND
her own culture a shock. After almost eight weeks in England, she was still thinking of India and feeling misplaced and dislocated. The radical modernity of London disturbed her â the clutter, the heavy clothes, the trams, the bells, the cash registers and the lampposts. English people seemed at once too large and too faint; they had pale faces and pale eyes and talked too much of the weather in their wet-wool clothes. The hops smell of public houses was sickening; Lucy could not pass by one without thinking mournfully of her dear Uncle Neville. These may be, she reflected, the forms that grief takes, this sense that everything is unmitigated and out of kilter. Standing on the corner of Oxford and Regent Streets she looked at the stream of people flowing by with their heads down and their coats pulled against the cold wind, and felt as they did: embattled, quashed, and by something as imprecise and irresistible as wind. Ellen was asleep in the wicker baby carriage Thomas and Violet had given her as a gift. She was too large now for its neat little newborn space. Occasionally someone peered in, and offered a compliment to the bonny baby, but more often Lucy and Ellen moved together as if in a bubble, invisibly asunder, enclosed in a depressed patch of air within the blustery currents around them.
Thomas had noticed his sister's low spirits and offered to seek out a tonic: he recommended Dr Whittles' â a pick-me-up, said Thomas, and highly effective. He also suggested attendance at his magic-lantern shows, so Lucy began to accompany Violet, sitting in a regular space reserved for her in the back row near the door, in case the baby became noisy. She had forgotten how odd and how exorbitant the images were â how deanimated and posed, rather like Victor Browne's photographs. They saw adventures, romances, shows on natural history. Each commenced with the rose-tinted slide of a fairy, holding up a flowery sign saying
WELCOME TO ALL
!
One night they saw a show on the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and Lucy was dismayed at the India she saw enlarged and illuminated. A man in a British Army uniform stood at the front of the screen announcing the titles. He held up a curved sabre with each announcement.
“Savagery at Meerut!”
“Cowardly Sepoys defeated by English Bravery!”
“The Great Mutiny put down!”
“Our Soldiers Triumphant!”
“The Empire Retained!”
The last image was of the Viceroy, pompous, erect, beaming under a gold-coloured palanquin, topped by a star. The audience rose and applauded. In this vision Indians were a nation of snarling barbarians, with daggers in bared teeth and murderous attitudes, and the British a noble race, etched in classical style, uprighteous, valiant, bleached and pure. Lucy felt goose-flesh arise on her arms. She was chilled, upset.
“How ghastly,” said Violet, when the lights came on.
Lucy remonstrated with Thomas after the screening, but he said it was a popular show and nourished the National Spirit.
“I am disgusted”, Lucy said loudly, “by National Spirit.”
Thomas and Violet exchanged glances; they both looked
surprised and critical. Lucy felt then the descent of an inner emptiness. Neville, she thought, would know what she meant. She experienced an acute sense of loneliness, a clouding of her self in the absence of understanding.
“Tomorrow”, said Thomas, acting jolly, “we have
The Flying Dutchman!”
“Which version?” Lucy demanded.
She made some feeble excuse or other, and with her baby carriage before her swept out into the street to cease the confrontation. It had been raining and the lamps had been lit and the city of London was transformed. There was a glossy black sheen cast over everything and solid buildings stood firm above their projected duplications; it was another kind of magic lantern, another visual effect which halted Lucy Strange in her steps. The creme stone of an otherwise ugly bank building was remade as a quivery film of light. Gas lamps threw down diagonal lines of spots along the road. Huge edifices leaned into vacant mirrors. Lucy stood still in the cold, shivering uncontrollably, wrapping her woollen shawl more and more tightly. She was bound to this contradiction: between the material and its ethereal incarnation in light. She had seen these reflections a thousand times: why did they rise up now with the force of revelation?
That night Lucy dreamed she met the dead author, Charles Dickens, walking in the street. He carried a lamp, like Diogenes, and his head was bent like a detective looking for clues.
“This way,” Dickens kept saying. “Follow me. This way. I'll show you where it is.”
He pointed with his beard, as Indians do, and had a gently persuasive manner and a comic appearance.
Ellen awoke Lucy before she discovered their destination or what they were seeking. Baby-cry rent the dream and pierced
the texture of the night. Lucy rose automatically, barely awake, and gathered in her daughter. She felt Ellen's hot convulsing body register her presence, slowly cease sobbing, and then, yet more slowly, begin to relax and settle. The sweet scent of breast milk. Her regular puffy breathing. Her sinking back, satisfied. Lucy fell asleep again immediately, the baby curved into her, a smaller true reflection of her own sleeping shape.
IN MID
-
WINTER IT
was confirmed: Lucy was ill. The doctor harrumphed and made notes and fiddled absent-mindedly with his cufflinks and his oxblood tie. He had listened to her chest and found cavities where living lung should have been.
“Consumption,” the doctor announced.
He looked over his eyeglasses with an air of strict professional gravity, but sounded, Lucy thought, oddly pleased with himself for the certainty and abruptness of his diagnosis.
In truth Lucy had guessed of her condition for some time. On the ship she had coughed a gob of blood into her handkerchief and seen â oh God â her own shining death. In an instinctive act she flung her sullied handkerchief overboard, and watched it fall into the foam wake, churn briefly and disappear. She had seen enough by now of street life in London and Bombay to know that blood-spitting was the greasy sure flag of mortality.
“Thank you,” she said to the doctor, hearing the absurdity of her remark, wondering if doctors are accustomed to these inappropriate gestures of gratitude. He made a waving movement, a kind of dismissal, then commenced a cautionary lecture. She could return to normal relations with adults, he said, but must be aware of the special susceptibility of children. Distance, he said, tapping his pipe on the desk. Distance. She
must drink a pennyworth of milk each day, and rest, and stay warm, and must not indulge in exertions of either the mind or the body.
Lucy watched the doctor's mouth move as he spoke; she judged him professionally dissociated, unconcerned. These things she instantly resolved: that Ellen must be protected from her breath; that Violet and Thomas should not be told, until it was no longer possible to conceal her condition; that she would resume, more seriously, her work of photography, securing whatever she was gifted or fated to see; that she would be brave, determinatively brave, and not consider, not for one moment, that a life abbreviated is a life diminished.