Chapter 12 Ghosts of the past

Light indigo, Naples yellow, alizarin crimson. The flowers lie in drifts in the gutter. Budding in winter, flowering for the September winds. Flowers bursting with pollen and pollen swirling and mingling in the wind. Flowering because of the wind, in accord with the wind. A gust of jasmine perfume, a gust of wisteria perfume. A puff of red bougainvillea, a puff of orange browallia.

Ghosts of the past, passing through, making contact, moving on, cleaving to nothing. Blown further on. Broken, trampled, gone.

Alex standing facing his wife, Ivana. Two tall skeletal figures with their bony forearms held up between them. The same height because of his chronic stoop. Alternately smoking, ashing, whispering half-sentences and touching each others' fingers. Holding each other's gaze a few seconds, then breaking it, then holding it again.

"Friends and family lost and dead in other countries. The ghosts of the past will always be with us," Ivana says to Alex.

"I thought I'd lost her," Alex says to Rini and George in English, examining Ivana's face at close range. "We lost contact for quite a while. Then she had trouble getting into the country as well. Finally she's here. My friends, Rini and George. My wife, Ivana."

He gestures towards the couple standing together against the railing along the sea wall under the harbour bridge, their backs to the harbour.

"Ghosts of the past," says Rini. "It's like a mantra."

She turns to gaze at the view across the water. Then down at the water, lap, lap, lapping below her on the wall. Reciting the mantra, she turns inward and goes back, back to grandma's house. A Depression cottage.

She opens the back door to enter the house, the door used by family and familiars. The door is to the right of the blackened wood-burning stove which sits in its own brick alcove in the timber wall. She passes the deal table, worn smooth, rounded at the edges, and white from decades of scrubbing. The place for sitting and talking, for making cakes and marzipan fruit, peeling vegetables, rolling out pastry. She walks past the table, past the old fridge with legs, an electrified ice chest. Beyond that, the sunroom, looking west across the valley to the ridges in the distance, each band, a lighter and lighter indigo. A place for viewing bushfires as they creep from valley to valley.

She turns left through the doorway to the lounge room which is crowded with furniture. A dining suite, two brown and orange velvet lounge chairs with arms made of varnished wood, an open fire, a piano, a huge radio cabinet and a sideboard with the silverware on it. A silver teapot and hot water jug, both suspended in silver frames over tiny built-in oil burners. The frames cast to look like the branches of a tree and textured like bark.

The door on the left leads into the loveliest room which has the only north-facing window in the house. Sunlight is streaming in through the lace curtains onto the treadle sewing machine. On a table next to the machine are boxes of buttons, cottons, braids, ribbons, paper patterns, pieces of fabric and a pair of sharp scissors. She sits for a moment on the bed beside the sewing machine. Sinking into the hollow in the mattress.

She gets up and goes back outside. Past the plum tree which bears tart plums, along the gravel driveway bordered by huge rhododendron bushes. A fluffy strip of long grass growing down the middle of the driveway up to the doors of the big corrugated iron shed. One door is open and the interior is cavernous and unlit except for the hand-held light used in the pit under the car. The bulbous black Dodge stands over the pit. She moves around it, her eyes sweeping over the walls. Exposed timber studs with things hanging on nails - fan belts, tyres, an old chamois dried hard into its hanging position.

She walks to the bench under the window which also looks west into the valley. She starts turning the handle of the grinding wheel mounted on the bench and picks up a nail to practice on. She brings the point of the nail to the wheel but it hits the wrong way and flies off, making a single spark. She grips the handle to brake, then starts up in the opposite direction. The momentum of the wheel keeps it going. She holds the nail to the wheel and a shower of sparks lights up the darkness. Outside the window, in the sloping and rocky rear paddock, is the sheep eating grass. Poor creature, so alone. The dirt road running along the end of the paddock always deserted.

A train can be heard coming closer. She is lying in the sinking bed in the lovely room, cosy and warm. She gets into the big black car and reverses it up the driveway into the street which runs next to the train line. The train passes and when the gates open, she drives across the tracks into the main street with the couple of neon signs and lit up shop fronts glowing in the cool darkness. The doors of the community hall are open and the tables are decorated ready for the ball. Trays piled high with crustless white bread sandwiches. The women inside are wearing frocks with stiff net petticoats - pale blue, lemon, mauve. Organza over satin.

She drives further on to the park and beyond to the duck pond. She gets out of the car and walks onto the grassy area next to the pond. There are tablecloths laid on top of blankets on the ground and a picnic is spread out on them.

A man is walking down the darkening road towards her.

"Where do you come from?" he asks as he draws level with the car.

She leans out of the car window and replies,

"I'm a local. My family's been living here for generations. You know grandma's house by the train line? You know Aggie? The bushfires. The ball. The frocks. The duck pond. The big bonfire on cracker night."

"You're no Australian," he says. "What about your short round women in black, your thin dark men with moustaches, your speaking with hands, your black curly hair, your political meetings, the Communists, those newsletters, that music."

A small boy walks up. His hair is thick white and curly like a sheep's fleece. He turns to Rini.

"You're the Indian, I'm the cowboy," he says. "You're black. You're the Indian. I'm going to scalp you. Chop! Chop!"

Standing behind the small girl, he waves his tomahawk in the air and brings it down on the back of her head. Then he runs away screaming as blood streams down her neck, dripping off the ends of her black curls onto her shoulders. She, standing quietly, shocked, unbelieving. "My friend."

"Hello, my friend." Billie's standard greeting to Rini, as she pokes her head around the door of Rini's study. Looking at Rini bent over her books and papers. The whiteness of the room. Diffuse light from the sheet hanging over the window.

"I haunt these pages like a ghost," says Rini. "Day in, day out, feeding on words. Absorbing, grazing, ruminating through masses of text. Saturated and swimming in print. The relationships of social power are embedded in the syntax, the grammar. I'm the ideal reader. Their brutal language is inscribed on my body forever. These scars."

Rini looks down at her upturned hands. Two small mounds forming like pimples at the top of both her palms under the middle fingers. Then blood starts gushing from small holes which appear in the top of the mounds. Unstoppable. But how can an atheist have the stigmata?

George finished taking photos of Alex and Ivana under the Harbour Bridge. He walked up and put his arm around Rini's shoulder as she stared down at the wavelets breaking softly on the old sandstone steps. A ferry trailing its white fan-like wake was ploughing across the water towards the Quay. The roadway of the bridge so high and the trains so loud above them. The pylons so tall. The steel girders so huge.

"Even after thousands of sightings, the harbour's so beautiful. Breathtaking," said George.

•••••••••

Eleni came on a prearranged visit to Billie's studio on the day when her business, Migas Gallery, was closed. The studio had previously been the flat Billie lived in. It was at the front of an old house partly shielded by a privet hedge. Eleni walked up the path and as she approached the front door, Billie came out onto the verandah through some double glass doors and beckoned to her. Eleni circled a pot of browallia in full bloom, stepped over a black and white dog lying with its stomach on the tiles and followed Billie into a large room full of golden light.

"For me, the ghosts of the past are our relatives buried in far away countries. On land and under the sea," said Eleni. "But you carry your ghosts with you, Billie."

She spread her arms as she pivoted on one foot, indicating the walls and surfaces of the studio. The walls of what was previously the living room were lined with hundreds of small drawings and prints, many of them faces and figures.

"They're all people I've known," said Billie.

"I like the Aboriginal portraits," said Eleni, pointing to a group of faces near the door.

"He's not Aboriginal. He's blonde but he has brown eyes," said Billie. "James, you know, the city council community arts officer. You think he could be Aboriginal? He haunts me but he's not really a ghost. He seems to pop up everywhere. I was involved with him years ago but I can't quite shake him off."

"So this bronze head is the same person?" asked Eleni.

She picked up a small bust from amongst the crowd of miniature objects which sat on the top of a deep set of shelves containing stacks of drawings and drawing papers.

"Yes," said Billie as she moved the figure of Lot's wife as a pillar of salt closer to the tiny burning city tableau.

They walk into a smaller room, the former bedroom. It is now used for printing and other dirty activities because it has an ensuite bathroom. Under the window is a tall drying rack full of prints from a single run. Snatches of the song, Peaceful Easy Feeling from someone's radio reach them from outside.

I like the way your silver earrings lay against your skin so brown... And I want to sleep with you in the desert tonight with a million stars all around...

Not nostalgia but nausea sweeps over Billie. The song which James loved years ago. Touching her brown skin. Fucking in the open, out in the country under the stars.

"The ghost of my old bedroom is still here," said Billie. "I can almost see it."

Billie drove home. She was now living with Tan in the flat above her Uncle Jim's shoemaking workshop. As she rounded the last corner before home, Billie's dog, Tui thrust his head over her shoulder through the driver's window and gave a couple of barks, announcing their arrival. By the time she had opened the gate and parked the car in the backyard, Uncle Jim had come out of the workshop to greet them.

"He just got back from doing a delivery," Jim said to Billie, indicating the small panel van parked next to her car. On the side of the van was a picture of a giant shoe which Billie had painted.

"And we got more orders for the shoes made from the leather that you painted and printed. I think it's a goer," he said, patting her on the back as she walked into the building.

Tan was on the third floor in his study surrounded by books and papers. As Billie walked in he was rifling through a concertina file of newspaper clippings labelled The War in English, Vietnamese and Chinese. He folded the file back like an accordion, pulling out pieces of paper, reading sections under his breath and replacing them. Then he started to focus on one compartment, drew out a piece of folded paper which opened out into a tabloid-sized sheet and started to skim read it. He passed her a photo which showed a group of men in open-necked shirts standing under a poinciana tree at night. A very young Tan was squatting in front of the group.

"Talk about ghosts," Tan said. "This is the staff of the first newspaper I worked on. Except one person is missing: Thi, the person who took the photo. She was the only woman working on the paper and was close to my friend, Min. We all thought they would get married one day but that didn't happen. She was a kind of feminist, I suppose. She was in total revolt against the traditional female role. Specifically against her father who was always trying to introduce her to acceptable suitors. She also hated her mother for her submissiveness. Eventually, her father disowned her financially because she refused to marry any of the men he found. She had to leave her parents' home and that placed her in a very difficult position.

"We didn't get much pay working on our newspaper. We were all working in other jobs as well. It wasn't an officially sanctioned journal and we sometimes got raided and closed down. I don't know if she had ever been on the payroll anyhow. Min wanted her to go and live with his family. Then Thi somehow made contact with the CIA boys who worked at the American Embassy and became one of their 'special girls' which was considered better than being a prostitute for the GI's. She came to hate anyone who wasn't American because everyone she had known, now saw her in a negative light. She slipped away from the newspaper as well, from us, because our views were anti-American.

"Her father was furious that he'd given her such a good education and this helped her to reject her family. She could speak and write English and did some translation work at the Embassy.

"One day she met a young American who fell in love with her. He was able to extricate her from the 'special girl' category and claim her for himself. When the Americans pulled out of Vietnam, he took her back to America with him. They got married and had a family but she never saw her parents again. And the irony of it all is that she became a wife and mother just as her father wanted. From what I've heard, she never had a career or even a real job of her own. I think Min's still burning a torch for her, even after all these years. He wanted so much to be the one who saved her but he didn't have the means."

Rini and George came over to Billie and Tan's place to show Uncle Jim some film footage of the island as it was 20 years ago. They set up the old Super 8 projector on a table in the living room. Rini threaded up the first of the old Super 8 three-minute movie reels from a stack in a box beside her.

"We're related by marriage," Jim explained to Tan. "Rini's grandmother was my father-in-law's cousin. Their mothers were sisters and they came from the same island."

He picked up a flat brown paper bag from the table.

"But first everyone, my contribution tonight is this old photo which I think you might find interesting. My wife (she's dead now) kept it all these years. This photo was taken in 1931 when King Victor Emmanuel of Italy visited the island. The locals were very unhappy about the occupation because the Italian administration had banned any connection with mainland Turkey. The locals had their farms and did all their trading on the mainland. The island has never had a natural water supply. So they were starving again. Just like 30 years before that under the Turks. So many people had to leave. Anyway that's some of the background to the photo.

"Now, we need to use this magnifying glass to look at the photo," said Jim producing one from his pocket. "You see, here is the King walking from his boat and shaking hands with the Mayor. Now look at the crowds around the waterfront and on the steps. The people closest to the King are giving the raised arm Nazi salute but towards the back, there are three men giving the clenched fist Communist salute. From left to right is my father-in-law, my father and Rini's great-uncle."

Rini started up the projector.

"This is what the island looked like in 75 before there was any tourism," she said as the camera panned around the three sides of the harbour. But you can see that those thousands of houses on the hill which were in the background of Jim's photo, are no longer there. Burnt down by the English in World War II to disguise the fact that they'd looted the place."

"Allegedly," said George.

"So they say," said Rini.

"Greeks are a bit Anglo-phobic," George said to Tan.

••••••••••••

James stood to one side of the Lord Mayor, greeting people at the doorway of the Council's Carnivale bash.

"Eleni from Migas Gallery," said Eleni walking forward with her hand extended. James took her hand then moved sideways to put his arm around her shoulder.

"That's the wonderful new Greek gallery, isn't it? You had the Lord Mayor opening one of your shows recently didn't you?"

"It's not actually a Greek gallery," said Eleni. "Just bankrolled by a Greek. It's a commercial art gallery."

"But you're Greek aren't you?"

"Yes, I am. And where are you from?"

"I'm from Australia."

"And your family? Where did they come from?"

"Australia."

"Well, there you are," said Eleni, "you've proved me right. I told Billie I thought you were Aboriginal but she said you weren't."

"No, no, you misunderstand me. Obviously I'm Caucasian."

"Really? Well, where did your family come from?"

"Oh it's really boring. They all came from Scotland, Ireland, England. I think someone was French. By the way, I've been wondering about the word Migas, is that the Greek word for migration?"

"No, no. It means mongrel, you know, like mongrel dog."

 

 

 

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