Free Sixty Lights by Gail Jones Page A

listen to leaves brush and rustle, and detect the light currents of a breeze – feeling the world as a princess feels a pea – and wonder why her adorable parents had died. Against the specificity of things leaned her own vague questionings; and against these small solidities, familiar and comfortable, a larger tenuousness. The world was untrustworthy. It held in cruel secret the possibility of erasure.
Death
, what an odd word, Lucy thought.
Death, breath
, she rhymed to herself.
Breath, death. Death, breath.
Her body carried trapped within it a sensation of shivering; even though the air was hot Lucy seemed to exist in a chilly grief-envelope. She tried hard to remember her mother’s face, so that she might expel this unaccountable sensation, but already it was a vestige, already it was a hieroglyph. It could not be willed into vision. It could not be called, or fabricated. Instead she was met everywhere by involuntary and mostly trivial recursions. Once, having fed the chickens, her apron full of eggs, her boots plastered with grey muck, Lucy turned back to the house and caught sight of a pure white blouse, one of her favourites, flapping on theclothesline. It bounced as though it was electrically animated, the long sleeves waving. Lucy remembered her mother removing this blouse, pulling it up slowly over her head; but the garment snagged halfway, so her mother opened the buttons from the inside-out to reveal her face. Lucy had her arms held up, her girl-face peeped through its linen encasing, and she stayed like that, comically misshapen, for their mutual amusement. Just this small occasion. Just this scrap of a moment that in another time and other circumstances had no real employment as a memory. All this from the happen-stance of a fluttering blouse, while she stood there with her lap of still-warm eggs, and her filthy boots, and her child’s sad perplexion, all gathered together in a tiny tight loop of time.
    What Lucy could remember were her mother’s stories. They are now the matted fabric she clothes herself with, to try to smother her persistent shivers. Fairy stories. Childhood stories. Invented combinations. One of the stories is about a Dutchman and an Englishwoman. The Dutchman is a balloonist; he sails the world using the sky as his private ocean. Winds are his tides. Stars his companionable fishes. Night is the depthless wave that sweeps him smoothly along. When he sleeps, on turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers, and in a long wicker basket that looks like a Venetian boat, he looks upwards and spies a second black ocean. This man travels on his own unanchored dream which lists and uplifts, ripples and swoops, bucks, crests, glides luxuriantly along, all in the realm of an endlessly imponderable journey. (Lucy loved the way her mother would tell it, this crazy sailing. And she loved the embellishments:
turquoise silk cushions in the shape of fingers.
)
    The Flying Dutchman is on a quest to seek a particular woman. She grew up in an ice cave and is known for the icy-pale translucence of her skin and for the ethereal quality of hercharacter and intelligence. She bears a strawberry birthmark on the left side of her chest – just like Lucy – and is so sensitive to the world that she uncomfortably detects a single pea tucked away beneath mattresses. The woman is imprisoned in a small room in a palace in India; but has read of the anti-gravitational Dutchman, and planned her own rescue. She composes seductive messages, which she writes along the slippery lengths of satin ribbons, ties to pigeons and balloons, and then sends skyward, knowing they will find him. Floating endearments and invitations drift on the tidal winds. Longings-to-escape festoon the sky. So when the Dutchman, all alone, roams his oceanic space, accustomed to birds and clouds and the ornamentation of stars, he now meets sinuous sentences and multicoloured enticements. He steers his strange vessel in the