Free Sorry by Gail Jones Page B

gold painted stars and had affixed to its plaster head an elliptical halo of lights. These were switched on for important occasions. Mary had watched and watched, waiting after prayers, silent and respectful, her head bowed in penitence as specially instructed, but had never seen – not a bit – any shivering or weeping.
    In blackfella stories, Mary said, things changed all the time: a tree into a woman, a woman into a tree. There were rocks that had been children and stars that talked. Spirit was everywhere, she insisted, not just in a church.
    Perdita, who felt spiritless, wished she believed something. Behind her thinking there existed a perishing twilight, a sense of outer space, of nothing really there. She thought of this nothing as a kind of hazy, wreathing smoke, floating upwards,away. A nothing like starless night. A nothing eyes-closed took you into.
    Later Perdita would learn with fretful misery how useless was her knowledge. Her mother’s history and geography were wild surmise, her politics were eccentric to the point of crude error; even her Shakespeare was a nonsense, partial accomplishment, a clutter of stories and quotations, an ingenious but lamentably archaic vocabulary, the integument of exile, neurosis, migrant sadness. This maternal inheritance, more than anything, would serve to humiliate her.
    But Mary’s gentle teaching – all that drifted to her in the darkness when they were lying close together, all that was told on a walkabout, with Billy and Horatio accompanying, benignly, happily, both of them running ahead, all the unfortunate saints, and the bush knowledge, and the shared stories of mothers – these things remained securely lodged, and vouched safe.
    This small remembered moment: Mary had Billy and Perdita sit on the front step, a pile of gathered seed pods nestling between them. The pods were long and curved, like a Turkish man’s slipper, and crisp as if baked like potatoes in the oven. In each seed pod were rows of tiny black and red seeds, so shiny you might have believed they were painted with acrylics. Jequirity seeds. Together they strung the seeds on lengths of cotton thread, each fashioning a necklace. As they worked, Mary sang a song in her own language, a few words of which – ‘wind’, ‘mother’, ‘fire’ – Perdita caught as they drifted past, fragile and dispersing as ash. Lamentation was like this, a falling thing, something in the air itself, something flighty and incalculable. When the necklaces were made the three wore them as a sign of their bond, their own little tribe. This moment of making will remain after everything else collapses: fingers, voice, the summoning unity of three souls.

    Mrs Trevor looked in on them from time to time. Her son Billy was spending less time at home; she had become curious about what the three got up to together. Vera Trevor had a round face, a freckled neck and a look of beaming good-naturedness. Her hair was an unruly mysterious pile, curly, high, quivering with a second nervous life above her. She had never really managed to befriend Stella Keene – it helped a little now to know that she was actually ill, and not just rejecting the country-hand-of-friendship – but had always liked her daughter, ever since she had pulled her, slippery and full of life, from her mother’s body. Vera Trevor wished secretly that she could adopt Perdita – poor mite, her father a cold fish, her mother off with the fairies, and stuck here, with nothing much, not even a doll, in this god-awful shack. When Mrs Trevor pulled back the flyscreen to find Billy, Mary and Perdita looked up to see her shocked expression. It had been at least two years since she had entered the shack and she found it crammed now with books and festooned with images of war. Poor mite, she thought again. Two crazy parents.
    â€˜Where’s Billy?’ she asked, for something to say, and both girls