Read Online Sorry by Gail Jones - Free Book Online Page A

were seasons that a whitefella never noticed, marked by tiny efflorescences and the swelling and fading of bush fruit. Mary also knew about the stock on the station – which of the cattle were calving, which horses were slow or ill-tempered, which she wanted the opportunity to ride.
    Billy and Perdita were both charmed by Mary. She was cleverer – and funnier – than anyone they had ever met.
    They were hanging out washing together, each under a scratchy straw hat, when Perdita asked Mary to tell her story. Billy was nearby, lying in the dirt with Horatio, tickling the dog’s belly as he parted his quivering legs. It helped her speak, perhaps, the fact that Billy was deaf, that he smiled up at her as she spoke, with little knowledge of her words. Mary was Walmajarri, she said, from near Fitzroy Crossing. Her people were desert people. Her mother was Dootharra and her father was a white stockman, a kartiya , no name, buggered off, somewheres, long time, nobody knows, somewheres, longaway. Her people had gone to a feeding station to get flour and tobacco, then someone from the Government, seeing her pale skin, seized her from her mother and took her to Balgo Mission. She cried and cried. She said that her mother spoke to her in the wind, and that she was crying too, full of whispery breath, overflowing and spreading out, coming like wind-spirit across the land to find and to claim her. But it was no good, they never saw each other again. Mary was six years old when she was taken away. Mission fellas noticed that she was unusually smart, so later, two years later, she was sent down south, to an orphanage in the city called Sister Clare’s. To learn to be awhitefella, she said, to learn all them whitefella ways.
    â€˜Thank you, Sister, yes, Sister. A cup of tea, Sister. Please, Sister.’
    There was a comic mischief, a shrewd pleasure, to Mary’s skilled mimicry. She shifted accents and registers; her tales held echoes and ironies. Perdita had never heard anyone speak so openly before, or, for that matter, in so many different voices. When Mary recently returned to the north, to the convent in Broome, she heard from blackfellas passing through that her mother had died. Dootharra had rolled into a campfire one night and was too tired, or too sad, maybe, to roll out again. Her skin was burned, she was lost, she was a dark, dark shade. Mary found a rock and struck at her head until it bled, to show in the Walmajarri way her grieving for her mother, to feel it truly and painfully. The nuns had seen her, and scolded her. They said her behaviour was unChristian. She had looked down at the blood-drops on the earth and wanted her own death.
    â€˜I wanted,’ said Mary, ‘to send my voice into the wind, to fly to her, to go away, to go long, longaway.’
    Mary slumped to the ground, as if unbuckled, and began to cry. There, beneath the flapping shirts and dresses, the thin cotton garments made warm and lit by the sunshine, lemon-coloured, slight and wispy as ghosts, she fell down and wept. Billy was shocked by this sadness, come so suddenly, that he did not understand. He began to flap his hands, swatting at the air, then to moan, and then in sympathy also to weep. Horatio turned on to his belly, paws outstretched, and looked imploringly unhappy, as dogs sometimes do. And though she was the youngest and smallest, Perdita reached her arms around Mary and Billy and gathered them in; and their little group, like another family, inclined lovingly together, couched in the comfort of hot bodies in a clumsy child’s embrace.

    At night, after Nicholas took the kerosene lamp into the bedroom, to read in peace, or to study the war, or to write his colossal ‘Keene Hypothesis’, Mary and Perdita often lay close together and talked in the darkness. Mary was intrigued by the city of stacked books – which she would eventually start to read herself – but remarked that the library did not