Sorry by Gail Jones Page B

would have stuffed herself if she could. She would have taken it all in, every substance and sweetness. She would have filled herself so that there were no spaces left that her mother-memory could inhabit. At some point Mary leaned towards Perdita and with her little finger wiped a trail of honey from the side of her mouth, then licked her own finger clean, winked and smiled.
    â€˜Sisters, eh?’ Mary said.
    Perdita felt – what was it? – claimed, rescued. She smiled with her own mouth full of sticky bread and felt her small, unnoticed life reconfiguring around her.
    By the time the vehicle was back on the road, its old engine cranked by an iron handle into a cantankerous rumble, darkness was falling. Birds were roosting in the twilight, restless, then settling; Perdita could see their bleary shapes on the blood-woods and high in the gums. A flock of galahs rose flapping, then noisily descended. Mr Trevor kindly drove his passengers right to their door. In the bluish evening Perdita saw the outline of their shack loom up, then heard Horatio hurl towards them, frantic with welcoming joy. He rushed at her so energetically, his dog-life effusive and exploding, that he knocked her flat.

    What return was it, that night, with no mother, with Mary?
    I have thought of it, over the years, not as a substitution – since one person can never, after all, replace another – but as the portentous sign of things made dangerously misaligned. Mary was not a mother, but a sister; there was still Stella’s absence, and my inexpressible, almost inadmissible, missing-her. I wondered every day about where exactly she was, what treatment she was receiving. I imagined a handsome doctor in a white gown, giving her an injection in the upper arm as she gazed, distracted, into the middle distance. Her hair was brushed back in even furrows; she wore a simple nightgown of faded pink. It was a generic, dull image, from who-knows-where, but somehow I found it reassuring.
    Despite the fact that I was unconvinced of her love (since she had never been a mother who might embrace, or kiss, or reach inadvertently to caress), there was the stringent complicity of our isolation and the far-fetched world of notionswe had daily shared. Perhaps I attached to her snow dream so passionately because it was something personal, some token of a truly inner life she would rarely reveal.
    My father groped in the darkness as Mary and I stood at the door. Horatio was still jumping up, not yet ready to be calm, his fast panting exaggerated in the still of the night. Mary reached again for my hand, as if this time it was she who needed the comfort of touch. We heard something fall with a heavy thud – knocked-over books, no doubt – then a scratching and a fumbling. At length the bloom of a kerosene lamp uprose in the darkness, and with it came my father’s face, swelling into view, burnished and brass-coloured above the flame he was controlling with his thumb and index finger. The lenses of his spectacles once again took away his eyes, leaving behind twin discs of light. I saw him there, half present, blurred in groggy distance, as if at the end of a tunnel. I pushed Horatio down, gave him a quick smack on the nose to quiet him, and then led Mary, trembling, into our illuminated home.
    It looked so small, now, after the room in the Continental Hotel, almost suffocating, and with a heavy odour of dust. A spray of cockroaches fanned open and scuttled into corners. But there was book-scent, and things known, and our shadows in the lamplight, the dog waiting to be fed, the unpacking of the day’s purchases. Mary was passive, doing exactly what she was told. I remember that my father gave her a place to sleep beside me, on the floor. He unrolled a canvas swag, and without a word took the kerosene lamp with him and went into the bedroom. The pool of light that he dragged behind him was closed off, contained, becoming a thin bright seam pressed