Read Online Five Bells by Gail Jones - Free Book Online Page B

girls with skimpy shorts, tanned legs and exclamatory manners – took turns having their photos taken in front of the dandelion. Carefree, the word was. Their parents were probably executives of Volvo or owned rental property in Iceland and were off now, on a yacht, sailing a sparkling fjord, communicating only sparsely and by electronic mediation. But Catherine had dragged her past and her family with her. They hung around. She thought of them often and with a kind of doleful, compelling concern. Most of all she thought of Brendan, though he was no longer in the world, and it was a riddle to her how powerfully the dead continued, how much space they took up with their not-here bodies. Brendan lay trapped in her atoms and in the folds of her brain, he had infiltrated, somehow, the way damp entered the clammy rooms of those stinky old flats in Dublin, leaving blotches like blossoms and streaks going nowhere.
    Catherine would ring her mother soon, or perhaps send a postcard of the Opera House. Or of the Bridge, or Bondi Beach, or a cute kangaroo, aerodynamically leaping. Filial piety, that’s what Father Maroney would call it. Dutiful daughter.
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    Last Saturday, her very first in the new southern world, Catherine swam in the ocean. Instead of heading off to see the monuments,she had decided to find holiday indulgence and enjoy the hot weather. She watched children leaping in the surf and sun-worshippers posing their brown bodies, stretched unselfconscious, on the new-moon arc of Bondi sand. It had been a day awash with light, rather like this one, and the sound of the sea falling onto the shore was nothing like home, but a kind of joyous plash! as the water curled and foamed and dispersed, a blue muscle, turning, and a commodious body one might rest in. She wondered if this was how sex felt for a man, to be surrounded, to be held, to be dashed somewhere, gasping.
    Luc, she decided, would love Bondi Beach. All that flesh and the mystery of such an immersion, one’s body buoying, the currents, the kiddie-excitement of a breaking wave.
    She had seen the body-surfers flying prone on the angle of a swell, following the ridge of the water, their heads bonneted by froth. Energy and massive churn pulled them to the shore. She had seen children no older than eight fly towards her on blue boards. They lay on their bellies and held out their heads like turtles, and smiled as they fled past. Everyone’s face was bright; everyone glistened and was animated.
    And she had seen a woman her age swim directly towards the horizon, her arms turning in assured and rhythmical strokes. There was a moment of envy; to swim like that. And a moment of terror. To go so far out, to push the body into distance. As she lolled in the churning shallows Catherine resolved to take swimming lessons. She would be that woman, on a kind of journey, going far out into the ocean.
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    In the summer of the year following Catherine and Brendan’s political deal, their mother took them to the village of Ballinspittle, to see the moving Madonna. Not the others, just them. They needed a miracle, Mam said, to show them back to the Way.
    Children in the village had witnessed the outdoor statue of Mary opening and closing her eyes and moving her hands in the tiniest wave, and their fervour and testimony attracted pilgrims by the thousand. All over Ireland people had heard of this marvel, and then all over the world. Some said Our Lady had actually taken a step forward, in a diamond of white light, radiant with grace; others that it was a nod or a blink or a wee tilt of the head, a body-message to the faithful. The Spirit was among them; it had only to be witnessed.
    On an overcast day in July, Mam, Catherine and Brendan boarded a chartered bus full of nuns to take them to the miracle in County Cork. Brendan and Catherine sat together at the back of the bus, feeling ill with the journey and shuddery with every bone-shaking jolt of the road, and were