Read Online Sorry by Gail Jones - Free Book Online

beneath the bedroom door.
    Mary was silent; she lay herself down. Even then I felt that something was wrong. Outside a wind started up, a slack moaning wind.

PART TWO
    DOCTOR : Foul whisperings are abroad. Unnatural deeds
Do breed unnatural troubles; infected minds
To their deaf pillows will discharge their secrets …
    Macbeth V . i

6
    In the world beyond, 1940 was aflame with nations in crisis. The Nazis had invaded the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg; the blitzkrieg had caused the British retreat at Dunkirk; Luftwaffe and Messerschmitt were dive-bombing the Homeland. Perdita heard all this, all this new military language, riveted with metallic names and foreign locations, from her increasingly remote and war-obsessed father. Although he received newspapers two weeks late from Perth, and then only when Mr Trevor made a trip to town, Nicholas was following the war with an almost scholarly attention. Manoeuvres, tactics, victories, defeats: these excited and frustrated him, made him feel both involved and dreadfully excluded.
    He found himself dreaming again of 1918, and yearning for the thunder of tanks advancing and the sheer terror that made grown men, men like himself, shit and puke and call out to God or their mothers in excited extremity. In a repeated dream he leaped over trenches with the stride of a long-jumper, seeing beneath him strewn bodies and grisly death. He carried his rifle, bayonet fixed, up high above his shoulders, keeping it poised horizontally as he had been taught to do, but he never seemed to land on the other side of the trench. He was stuck there, like a corpse in a ridiculous pose. Stuck there in thunderous dreamland, in exploding mid-air.
    Perdita remembers the day, in July, when her father announced that the Germans one month ago had entered Paris. His eyes glittered maniacally; she almost felt afraid of him. How could the distant war invade in this way? Nicholas told his daughter that it was only a matter of time before Australia would be attacked, and that he would be summoned, in a leadership role, to defend the hapless Australians from the evil Hun and their allies. There would be unimaginable suffering, he said, and hideous mutilations. There would be air raids and bombings. The sky itself would burn. As he sipped his tea, gleefully misanthropic, Perdita and Mary exchanged frightened glances. He was like a shadow they lived under. He had become darkened and impersonal.

    It would remain wholly separate, Perdita’s time with Mary. There was something implacable, sure, about what they shared. Mary was by turns girlish and adult, but she looked after Perdita, daily attending her, offering companionship, knowledge and canny advice. She taught her poker (how to shuffle, to deal, how finally, to cheat), desert songs (learned from her mother from whom she’d been taken), and the lives of the saints (the strange details of which she had read about in the orphanage). She taught Perdita, and Billy too, how to locate pitjuri , bush tobacco, and to chew it until the sides of their cheeks began to tingle and salivate, so that they experienced its sour, stimulating effects. She showed them the chevron sand-lines of lizards, identifying the species, and taught them how to track back, hunting stealthily, to a log hole or a burrow. The ripples of departed snakes, the scroll shapes and mounds and pathways of bush tucker – all that had been inscribed there before them, in a hidden language never noticed, became suddenly visible.
    â€˜Whitefellas can’t see nothin’ around them; whitefellas all buggered up in the head,’ Mary declared, touching her temple.‘’Cept you two, of course,’ she added with a broad grin.
    Under her intelligent guidance the scrub, which had seemed so empty, took on fullness and detail. Every bird had a true name, every mark in the wind-scalloped dirt betokened liveliness and activity. Even the glass-clear sky was a fabric of signs. There