Sorry by Gail Jones

Sis turned to her and said suddenly, ‘Your dad, I seen him roun. But your mum. Is she still alive?’
    Perdita was shocked that this stranger might have imagined her mother dead. Or might know something.
    â€˜Hospital,’ she said blankly. ‘Mum’s sick. In the head.’
    This did not describe the noisy railway station, or the competing silence, or the mysterious depleting languor to which her mother was now subject. But Sis looked calmly at her and nodded.
    â€˜Ah, yeah,’ she said, her tone sympathetic, as if she knew, in any case, what a railway station might feel like, and what might visit an unfortunate woman like a fist-blow in the dark. Perdita held up her dirty plate, smeared with egg yolk and frilly scraps. Sis took it with both hands and plunged it in brown soapy water.
    â€˜Thanks, missus,’ Perdita said, genuinely grateful.
    â€˜No worries.’
    Sis turned back to her and sweetly smiled.
    When Nicholas returned from the hospital he seemed cheerier somehow. He moved like a man without shrapnel lodged in his back, a man young, unencumbered. In the bar of the Continental Hotel he made weak attempts at jokes, and the locals, knowing already about the mad wife and the reason for his town visit, humoured and indulged him. Perdita sat perched unsteadily on a bar stool, sipping a glass of lemonade. She had rarely seen her father in new company; he seemed inept, but trying hard. As it grew darker she watched him become inebriated; she watched how he leaned on the bar, resting his body there, how his features sagged and transformed, how he gulped as if greedy. At one stage he knocked over a glass of whisky and immediately ordered another, downing it super-swift. He had forgotten she was there. Perdita counted the bottles above the bar, listened to the laughter of drunk men, saw her own reflection, squeamish, in a long wavy mirror etched on the surface with toppling palms. Such a pale small face, such a tentative oval.
    Some time later a buxom barmaid, a beautiful woman with slanted eyes and a marcelled hairdo, took Perdita by the hand and led her along the passageway to her room. She left her with a smacking kiss and a packet of salted peanuts.
    â€˜Sleep, luv,’ she instructed, as she closed the door behind her.
    Perdita thought she would visit Sis, but decided she was too tired, much too tired. Her sore eye was gumming over and had begun slowly to throb. She lay in her clothes and sandals on her luxurious bed, very still, very alone, thinking for some reason, though it was sultry and dank, of her mother’s dream of snow. One day, she decided, she would see snow for herself. She would go to England, or Russia, far, far away. Russia. Yes, Russia. Shewould go to distant Russia and see the snow. But in the meantime, her mother’s dream had become her own private treasure; she fell asleep imagining a soft drift, an endless vertical sadness, a delicate slow sinking, a whiteness, a whiteness.

    Nicholas and Perdita were both woken by the call of butcher birds in a nearby tamarind tree, and by a clanking metallic sound that turned out to be a group of Aboriginal men in iron chains, linked painfully by their ankles. They had been released from gaol to make bitumen roads. From the small window of her hotel room Perdita saw them, men joined in this way, humiliated, caught, and wondered what they had done to be so cruelly constrained. They wore ragged trousers and grimy singlets; their faces shone in the sunshine. A prison guard was sitting at a distance under the blue shade of the mango tree, pinching a cigarette into shape, licking it, turning it, slowly striking a match. He inhaled deeply, watching all the while. When Perdita and her father left the hotel, she realised that she recognised one of the chained men. It was Kurnti, who sometimes worked in the stockyard at the Trevors’ station. Perdita called his name and waved, and he straightaway waved back, his face offering up