Shell Page 4

  Until Jeanne spoke again. All those months, Pearl, and you didn’t come. They watched that gate down there every Saturday. They waited for you.

  Late sun through the high leadlight window: it turned the air in the room crimson, yellow, green, and there was the smell of scrubbed floors, meat stewing. Children’s voices rose and fell, the plink of an untuned piano. Her stomach hollowed. For two seconds she was that girl again, crying in the dorm downstairs, missing her mother. Jeanne the one who came to her. Will’s nearly nineteen now. And Jamie’s twenty. It’s an unlucky year to be twenty. She paused, then spoke the nun’s name. Jeanne— Her voice cracking. Don’t you get it? Jamie could be drafted. And not just for the army. It would be bloody Vietnam.

  A light flared in Jeanne’s eyes. The air broke open. Christ, she said. And pursed her lips, looked to the walls, the ceiling. As if Jesus was there, as if her savior could hear her and might intervene.

  Pearl allowed a half-smile. Not sure about Him. I need concrete help now. She looked down to the floor, the dull boards, then up to the nun’s eyes. I lost them once already, Jeanne. I won’t lose them twice.

  They walked together beneath an arching cloister. Pearl felt Jeanne’s hand slip into the crook of her arm, and looked down at the pale skin of the nun’s fingers, the scrubbed nails. There was something artificial about the clean surfaces, the smooth fabric of blouse, her unmarked hands. Why had she not noticed that before? As they reached the door Jeanne stopped, raised one eyebrow and smiled. We’ll find them, she said. We’ve done harder things. She glanced at Pearl. Like arithmetic. Like spelling.

  Something in Pearl subsided. She turned and, straight-faced, rattled out a string of letters. O-r-n-i-t-h-o-r-h-y-n-c-h-u-s. The rhythm still locked in her throat. It was the way Jeanne had taught the infant class to spell, almost singing. Pearl, stuck in the convent that year, had been her assistant, collecting composition books, checking times tables. She hadn’t suspected that Jeanne was cramming her head with everything a motherless girl might need in the world outside. Spelling, grammar, a way of speaking. Lessons in applying lipstick. Blot ten times.

  She smiled, self-conscious. As she began to move away Jeanne spoke again. You should try the Salvation Army, she said softly, as if she didn’t want to be heard. The Red Cross. They’re better than us with missing persons.

  Fifteen years. She had gone from girl to woman and, in the space of half an hour, back again. Pearl walked down the curved stairway, through a sandstone arch and into a garden. The roses were in their autumn flush. Pearl’s senses reeled; her eyes heard color, her tongue tasted fragrance. At fifteen it was her consolation, to sit between beds of soft-cheeked flowers, rubbing fallen petals between fingers and thumb. Even then she’d felt it: a mild erotic charge. Now she stood still among head-high rose bushes and realized she’d been a bit in love with Jeanne back then. It wasn’t surprising: her adolescent heart had nowhere else to go.

  She followed the path down the hill and past St. Joseph’s to the playing fields. Somewhere a clock chimed the half hour, folding through the air, metallic. And with it, Jeanne’s words again: missing persons. When did the boys become missing? What did it really mean? Without. Deprived of. Deficient. Aching for. Or: disappeared. Unaccountably not present. The words had a sinister edge, implied foul play. She shook her head. The boys were somewhere. They were not missing.

  Perhaps it’s me. The realization like a bolt from the invisible savior Jeanne had invoked and believed in. She, Pearl, was the one who was missing: that other Pearl, the one the boys had loved, who’d washed their grubby limbs, adored them. That girl was gone, had been unaccountably absent. Had acquired a veneer to protect herself, a shell she could slip beneath, to hide from the predatory world. And it had prevented others from looking in. She hadn’t known until now that it had also stopped her from seeing out.

  On some days, like today, Axel had to will himself to stop, to walk out and join the groups of men crouched with their sandwiches and cigarettes in mottled shade. Tea in thermoses, enamel mugs. Carpenters, laborers, steelworkers. They were still strangers to him; their informality and their ease with each other intensified his newness, his separateness. In his first days he had been introduced to many in the perfunctory way of the locals—a name and a nod—but their work beneath the podium or high in the air above his workshop distanced him. Though they were of dozens of different nationalities, in Axel’s head they constituted their own culture and breed, stronger, braver, freer than he was. Part of him wanted to be more like them; this was one of the things that kept him away.

  He had met two Danes on Bennelong Point; they’d exchanged curt greetings in both tongues. Like the others they were not shy. They drank each evening with the other carpenters at hotels around the quay; he’d seen them in the bar below his room. And though he longed to use his language, to speak without doubleness, he wouldn’t with them. He already knew that with them he could not open his mouth and feel like himself. Could not utter words and sentences that would return him to the person he was. Beneath their accents they were as different to him as anyone else, and he’d invented himself as readily with them in Swedish as he did with others.

  These two had been witness to Axel’s early humiliation on the building site—a ritual, but he hadn’t known it then. He’d been crouched at the edge of their group at smoko, drinking the sweet black tea a young laborer had offered him. He caught pieces of sentences: Fuckin’ commos . . . I’m not goin’ . . . they can all kill each other. A pause and then: Where the hell is Vietnam, anyway? Someone mentioned Singapore, New Guinea, names from the Second World War. Battles their fathers had seen, unknown and foreign to him. Axel turned a chip of concrete over in his palm, half listening, his thoughts elsewhere. Until a hovering awareness of eyes turned towards him, and a question repeated.

  What did your father do in the war?

  The tone mocking and familiar. He glanced towards it. Some current of aggression ran out from the man, looking for earth, and he felt it in the seconds before he replied. Milked cows. Surprising himself with irony. His voice even, the concrete turning in his hand.

  Silence ticked in the air, two telling seconds. That’s great. The man’s eyes narrow, his lips hard. When someone asks he can say, I squeezed tits for my country.

  Throaty laughter. Axel held his gaze. Long enough to see the Danes smirking nearby. Then he stood, threw the dregs of his tea on the ground as he had seen the others do, gave a short nod and walked away.

  In his shed he slumped in a chair, and out of habit rubbed a thumb over his wrist, the gray estuary of veins. He’d been a child in that war; he had milked cows. So had his mother. His grandparents’ farm had fed them while his father was away, doing the work that was classified, even now. Still, that wasn’t it. It was the tone of the man’s voice, what it implied. That his father, like all Swedes, had done nothing.

  He’d heard it before. First as a teenager, when he and his mother had taken a short holiday in Norway, years after the armistice. They’d been accosted by a drunk in Oslo and a woman further north. His mother had shielded him from the man, but he would never forget the woman’s face as she took their kronor at a railway kiosk somewhere outside Tromsø. The Norwegian countryside was still marked by the Nazi occupation, fields and houses scarred by fire. Swedes! the woman spat, when she heard their accent. I should charge you double. We paid for you in the war.

  He’d watched his mother’s face darken. Her eyes. He was sixteen by then, with long legs and the voice of a man, but the woman’s words made him mute. Even after his mother had steered him away, leaving their våfflor and coffee steaming on the counter, he felt curiously emptied of words. Don’t worry, Axel, his mother said when they were back on the train. She’s right, they paid dearly.

  The whistle screamed and the train began to move. She spoke softly then. She just doesn’t know what it cost us. She squeezed his hand and smiled. But I’m sorry about your våfflor.

  The carpenter’s insult came back to h
im now as he emerged into splintering sun, and saw the Danes at work in the forecourt, making timber molds for concrete. Axel had heard about the architect’s demand: the concrete finish had to be perfect, nothing less. The exposed surfaces, Utzon had said, would express the building as much as its sails did. By habit Axel swerved to avoid the two Danes, though in truth he would have liked to watch their careful labor. Each man bent to the task, oblivious to the day, to their own tensed bodies, the entirety of the effort around them.

  As he wandered around he felt the energy of the work in full swing. Sometimes he saw the site as an enormous compass, from which infinite readings could be taken. He need only take a step away from his previous position and a new line of sight would emerge, a new reading of the place. So each day he chose a different vantage point. In this way he gradually came to understand not just the shape of the land and the job, but the interaction between all the spheres of work.

  He paused in the casting yard. Men in hard hats and shorts bent to the acres of concrete, sculpting. Rib segments, ridge beams: they assumed the shapes of animals or their carcasses, hides bleached by the sun. Some pieces colossal, bigger than three men, others boned with steel and delicate as a corset. Weeks before, he’d stood beside one of the men who worked in the air, or so it seemed, installing rib sections and riding the hook. Jago, he said, offering his hand. They both stared at the scene before them, until Jago surprised him with tenderness. They look like the future, he’d said, arms folded. Axel glanced sideways: the face was soft, serious. This man had his hands on these giants daily, and still they were not so familiar as to be ordinary to him. They agreed they were already beautiful; their forms, what they suggested. And grinned, each recognizing something in the other. The interchange dislodged Axel’s guard, and an invisible barrier slid away, at least with Jago. A tentative friendship was born.

  Axel took his cue from these shapes and forms, seen through Jago’s eyes; it was in this way he might organize his own work. It might be sculptural in the same way the building was, the thinking as well as the form. This was what Utzon wanted, something alive to the eye. In the gloom beneath the concourse, Axel could see what the architect meant: what had begun as a mundane assembly of materials—sand and lime and pebble—was now a thing of beauty, a ceiling of ships. Sitting here was like being underwater, looking up at the hulls of twenty boats floating side by side. Or the corrugations in mudflats left by a departing tide.

  Until then he had thought concrete brutal. Used internally it was a material of expedience, easy and cheap. But here it was tactile as fabric, evocative as wood. He spread his palms wide on the surface beside him and wished he could reach up and touch the ceiling, absorbing its calm energy, what it spoke of: strength, beauty. Workmanship. In this way the building emphasized its materials but also its surroundings, made them more themselves.

  Everywhere he looked, this is what he saw. Even the men, shirtless, their helmets tipped back from faces as open as the sky. They bent to their work, or spidered over the giant ribs, and in all of it—their sweat and argument and their deep attention—they were transformed too. Beautiful, authentic, precisely themselves.

  He bought a sandwich from the kiosk near the car park and sat with Jago and the other riggers in the shade. The day was hot. Too hot for March, said one of the locals, could melt your insides. As he spoke he fanned his face with a discarded newspaper. Not your insides, said another, nodding at the expanse of stomach exposed by a blue singlet. The man with the paper ignored the barb. The others chewed their sandwiches and pies. Then: What’s wrong with these people? Pages skittered across the ground and the man turned his head, spat. Drover’s dog knows what the problem is—bloody architect’s never here.

  Axel looked down and away. As if the man’s voice was a solid thing, its aggression wounding: Never bloody here, the man repeated, perhaps fearing they hadn’t heard. And he gets paid a fuckload more than we do.

  The paper had fallen open on a story about some plywood mock-ups, the minister’s refusal to pay “exorbitant” bills from the local manufacturer. It was the third story in as many days about the blowout in costs and the lengthening projections for the building’s completion. Axel felt a tightening in his stomach, beneath his ribs. Even the men, he thought. Or some of them.

  Hang on, Clarrie. It was a young rigger who worked high in the air, maneuvering rib sections into place. A precarious job, and the men did it without harnesses, their bodies moving like extensions of the cranes. Have you ever looked at the place from up there? He spoke in a low drawl, leaning back on his elbow, a smoke burning down between his fingers. His grubby hard hat beside him, marked in felt pen: Johnno. It’s bloody beautiful mate. I tell you, it’s like—he shrugged—I dunno. Like some other power dreamed it up. Someone—the cigarette traced an orange arc above his head—up there. He glanced around. You know? The others blinked gravely, avoided his eyes. It’s fuckin’ genius mate. Genius. That’s what we’re paying him for.

  Silence, like the tail of a bright comet. It stung Axel’s eyes. He wiped them, hoping no one saw. To disguise his emotion he picked at the slices of bread in his hand, the odd contents of his sandwich. There was something yellow and viscous on the cheese that didn’t look or smell right. Jago leaned towards him. Corn relish, he said quietly. It makes me cry also.

  A general shuffling then, soft moans as men stood and stretched, balled up sandwich paper, and wandered off into their afternoon. Axel bent to retrieve the discarded newspaper and Johnno’s voice lifted over their heads once more as they dispersed: But it’s time we all got a pay rise. Eh, Clarrie? We’re fuckin’ geniuses too.

  The tenth of March dawned an ordinary day. No different. The heedless world: it could still take Pearl by surprise, that daily suffering and triumph left no visible trace. Mothers died, children disappeared, and still the world turned, the moon rose and slid away. In the newsroom the relentless hum of story, as if each edition brought that world into being every day. But today the preoccupations of the women’s section were shadowed by the weight of her own.

  She sat with an atlas, open on Indochina. Burma, Malaya, Korea. The final a and its upward lift. It made the names delicate, feminine. Vietnam was an arthritic finger pointing south; no musical a, but still she could see a girl, oval-eyed beneath a wide bamboo hat. Rice fields feathered behind her. Pearl ran her palm over the map: the bone of the eastern mountains, forest green to the border, flecked with villages, unpronounceable. Did that make it easier for pilots to drop their bombs? If you couldn’t name a place, if its letters refused your attempts. She’d seen anger flare in people when they couldn’t spell a word. Couldn’t find their way to meaning. Perhaps war was a failure of imagination, she thought. And nerve.

  She closed the atlas and returned it to its shelf in the library. Stopped to hear the midday bulletin on the police roundsman’s radio. Standing there, staring at gray carpet, she felt the air thicken. Some inner gravity tipped and wavered. She kept her feet planted. But the bulletin reported only the spin of wooden marbles in a barrel used for lotteries, for games of chance. Loud protests on the footpath, chanting and yelling. She imagined the demure façade of the government building made somber and furious by the lack of decorum.

  There would be no announcement about the numbers, she knew that. Still the day had fallen heavy around her, expectant, like the day of an execution. She shivered as she subsided into her seat, and put her hand to her forehead as she would to a child’s, testing for fever. A wave of nausea rolled through her. Years before, she’d sat in the newsroom and felt this roiling apprehension when a young boy was kidnapped off a street in Bondi. His father had recently won the opera house lottery. She’d stared at the boy’s photograph, the gap-toothed smile that was also Will’s. At the time she hadn’t understood her reaction; she’d waited obsessively for news of him, cried when the police reporter told her Graeme Thorne was dead. He was just a boy, an innocent, younger than her brothers.

  She picked up the phone now, asked
for a line. While she waited she ran her fingers over typewriter keys, searching for meaning in the familiar: a s d f / ; l k j. These days she barely glanced at the keys, could type blind and fast, rarely faltering. Now the pads of her fingers traced over the letters as if they were code. The faint indent in the vowels, a e i o u, and in t, in s. If she closed her eyes and waited, perhaps they’d spell out names, the numbers of those chosen. As if the machine was a Ouija board. As if some evil or sorcery was at work.

  News? Suze didn’t bother with hello.

  No, nothing. Her voice toneless. Maybe, she said, it’s not really happening. Maybe they’re making it all up. That was exactly how it seemed: as if somewhere in Melbourne, in an anonymous room, a group of men was playing with magic. One press photograph had been allowed, but one photograph meant nothing—she knew how subjective photographs were, how malleable. No more truthful than drawing, than writing. They might have taken it yesterday. And who knew what happened after the one photo was taken? Or before? No one was there to see. No witnesses.

  Yes, they might just sit down with a beer and decide which numbers they want. Or don’t want. Suze struck a match at the other end, exhaled. Maybe they won’t pull them from the barrel at all.

  Pearl was silent, imagining.

  If you can’t see something—if you don’t believe in it—is it real? Suze laughed softly. It was an old joke between them, a line from a children’s story, used to excuse one or the other for bad behavior, or to deal with hard things.

  Pearl stroked the black keys, stared at her own fingers. Magicians pulling numbers from a hat, pulling cards from a loaded stack. Waving a wand to make people appear or disappear, as if it was all a cruel trick. Maybe that’s what they want, a kind of fake innocence around it. As if they’re not responsible, just following orders, as if it’s out of their hands.