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

seem to include a Bible, nor her favourite, most scary book.
    â€˜Good stories. Proper stories,’ Mary said with emphasis.
    When she had first arrived in the city she was given a bundle of belongings: two gingham dresses, two pairs of underpants, one woollen sweater and green leather sandals. In a brown paper bag there was, in addition, a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, a gold cross on a chain, and a thick blue-covered book, The Lives of the Saints . Inside the cover was a name, ‘Annie McCaughie’. She had died, Sister Benedict said, of measles or diphtheria; she was With Our Lord, Resting in Peace, and her parents had generously donated her possessions to the Aboriginal orphanage.
    From Annie McCaughie’s book, Mary learned about the ghastly profession of sainthood. Saints were devoted to God, with extravagant piety, but then equally fated, most of them, to die deaths of hyperbolic and nonsensical suffering. The women, in particular, were predestined in this way, their holiness determined, it seemed, by the measure of their earthly torments. Mary told Perdita the outlines of the stories. St Agatha, having refused the attentions of a Roman prefect in Sicily, was tortured by being hung upside down and having her breasts twisted from her body. She is represented holding her severed breasts before her, lumpish and bloody, on a golden tray, evidence of her virginal courage. St Apollonia, deaconess of Alexandria, who defended her faith against marauding anti-Christians, had all her teeth knocked out in a brutal attack and was pictured displaying her dislodged, dental motifs restingin her lap. (She was, Mary added, the patron saint of dentists and the saint to whom one prays in times of toothache.) St Lucy, who suffered the gouging out of her eyes, was depicted holding them on a plate, or in a purse, or dangling gruesomely from a stalk like two ripe cherries.
    Perdita listened in horror to the stories Mary retold. She had never imagined – even in the theatrical surplus of a Shakespearean tragedy, glutted with sensation – that women could be treated in this way, torn apart and made holy by tremendous injustice and error.
    â€˜I know more saints,’ Mary had whispered, her voice deep and warm under the cover of darkness, and Perdita was both curious and afraid to learn more of what humans might do to each other. Annie McCaughie’s book, Mary said, had also been hers: it had a page of tissue paper at the front, covering a depiction of St Stephen, the protomartyr, being stoned to death, and a cover embossed in the centre with a circle of gold doves. Inside there were many coloured illustrations, all on the same thick glossy paper, all behind a thin layer of tissue paper, which made each viewing seem a singular disclosure. Perhaps for Mary there was some solace in thinking that suffering might have a spiritual purpose. Or perhaps nothing, in the end, matched the atrocity of a distant mother rolled into a fire, so lost in grief, and so irremediably heartbroken, that she did not care to remove her burning self from the unholy flames.

    There were forms of knowledge of the land and the body, carried into adulthood, that Perdita learned especially, and only, from her sister, Mary. Often they would simply walk – Mary said sitting inside for too long was like a kind of sleep – and in their wandering, sometimes with Billy Trevor trailing behind, humming to himself in his own quiet world, sometimes with Horatio trotting and sniffing this way and that way ahead, they traded stories and stored up secrets. The twitchy and particular life of animals was of interest to Mary, and she was always aware of the barest movement, of dry grass bending, a rustly stir, the traces and suggestions of other live presences. Her totem was the honey ant: she knew where they nested. With her digging stick she would extract them, and present Billy and Perdita with squirming black-and-amber handfuls. They would suck the