Free Five Bells by Gail Jones Page A

the understanding that they were truly alike. The older girls bothered her less, content to know Catherine was peculiar, and the youngest, Ruthy, only seven years old, was sure her big sister was special because she had been taken to see the statue. Catherine had given Ruthy the moving-Madonna keyring, and was pleased to see how treasured it was. Mam seemed to worry just the same, but practised a measured forbearance, apparently resigned. Catherine felt her relinquishment as a kind of relief; she was liberated now into a career of self-understanding.
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    Catherine paid for her drink and left the café. The dandelion fountain shone. She paused and gazed into it. A sixties’ object for sure, when water features popped up everywhere in modernist cities, smoothing crude box-shapes and ugly façades, nostalgic for genuine and replaceable nature. This liquid dandelion stood alone, a memorial, perhaps. Not beautiful, exactly,but buoyant somehow, light, luminous and strangely sensual. There was something in the falling of fine water drops that reminded Catherine obliquely of snow; and snow reminded her of the story Brendan loved above all others.
    At his funeral she had read from James Joyce’s The Dead . She had stood before the casket, in front of all those people, and Mam crying her eyes out, and her sisters with their hankies, and the priest just behind her, hovering with disapproval, and read the last paragraph of James Joyce’s short story. The congregation in Our Lady of Victories looked distracted and confused. Some thought she was gone in the head to read out this something-or-other, blatant and disrespectful and certainly unreligious blather, but it was what Brendan would know, his literary world, and what he would have liked. And how did it go, now, the section about snow falling general, all over Ireland? Over the plain, over the hills, over the dark Shannon waves; then over the cemetery where the beautiful young man was lying buried? And that fellow, Gabriel his name was, looking out the window:
    His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
    Upon all the living and the dead. This was how Brendan haunted her, visiting at unexpected moments, falling over her, as if from the sky, smoothing her own definition. So that Catherine might be rising from coffee in a good mood and remember his funeral, so that she might be walking in the sunshine in another country entirely, so that she might be heading for the Opera House or wishing she had written to her mother, and think suddenly, irresistibly, of the intimate presence of snow.

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    Their connection began when they were both nine, and together watched her father with the axe. Under the pepper tree he raised it high, and brought it down on a scraggly white chicken, which he had tied, just one loop, with a rope to the chopping block. Father was unsure of his aim, perhaps, or worried that the bird would flap away. But in the act itself there was no trace of uncertainty or worry, just irreproachable gravity and the blade fast-falling, just the whoosh of an intention sharper and heavier than most.
    Only seconds before, the doomed chicken was making a throaty, moaning sound, inert but for its roving and nervous eye. Ellie saw it blink, and blink again, and wondered if chooks had thoughts or memories, or heard songs in their heads, as she often did. She held James’s hand tightly and pulled him close. In the olive-green light of the backyard he looked nervous and afraid. His face was pinched, his mouth was firm, his brown eyes were moist and suddenly huge. Clouds flew above them, wind, a single bird.
    Then the axe-blade fell. The chicken’s head popped off – no big deal – but when her father untied the body a ghastly thing happened. The body writhed a little, uprighted itself, then lurched away in a swoony, directionless run.