The Submerged Cathedral by Charlotte Wood Read Free Book Online Page A

Ellen is somehow buoyed by it; she can make the distinction in time, can separate the resting power in Thomas’s hands from what happened later. Not much later, though, she says thoughtfully – the last port of call had been memorable for their first exquisite argument, his dizzying shove of her against the cabin door. She had been drunk, and therefore could see that she had perhaps brought it on herself, and they apologised to each other, crying, for days.
    In the photograph Thomas’s hands are large, his fingers curved, not threateningly, over Ellen’s honey shoulders.She wears a golden serpent coiled around her throat, and its head, having slithered up the nape of her neck and up through the high nest of her curling black hair, descends again to rest like a jewel in the centre of her forehead. She laughs now, holding the photograph. ‘It took me days and God knows how many tins of gold paint and yards of tinfoil, that wretched snake!’
    The serpent’s little malevolent eyes were a pair of marcasite earrings, a gift from Thomas.
    In other pictures from that voyage she is voluptuous and sleep-eyed under sun hats so broad they fill the frame. The photographs are black-and-white, but Jocelyn always sees her sister in red.
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    Though it is early November Ellen has insisted that Sandra go to school in the town for the weeks until Christmas. She bossed the headmaster into it in a short meeting, her loud English voice sounding around his little office, and now she or Jocelyn walks Sandra to the school gates in the mornings and waits there for her again in the afternoons.
    Jocelyn took her there on the first day. Sandra held Jocelyn’s hand tightly, gripping the hard plastic handle of the brown Globite school case in her other hand. Jocelyn saw two boys turn and stare at Sandra, hands on theirgrey serge hips, waiting to see what she would do when Jocelyn let go her hand. Jocelyn remembered stepping onto the ferry at Palm Beach. She asked Sandra if she was all right, but the girl did not answer, only tilted her face to be kissed as Jocelyn bent down. Then she let go her aunt’s hand and walked steadily past the two staring boys, into that bright square of playground and monkey-bars and other children’s noise.
    A week later Jocelyn is trimming quail in the kitchen, and Sandra comes to stand beside her, watching the cleaver come down to crush and snap the thin birdy bones. The halved, pink-fleshed bodies lie slumped in a heap to one side. ‘Out of the way, Sandra, I don’t want to hurt you,’ Jocelyn says. It is the violence she does not want the girl to see. She tries to cut more quietly, but the bones won’t break, so she returns to the sharp, heavy dropping of the cleaver, trying to put her body between Sandra and the bones. But Sandra moves to get a better view, concentrating, interested. After a time she says, in a casual, adult’s voice, ‘Is that lobster?’
    Jocelyn almost drops the knife, but is careful not even to smile.
    â€˜No, sweetheart, it’s quail. Little birds, like chickens.’
    â€˜Oh,’ says Sandra, disappointed. She pushes hair from her eyes and then wanders outside to find the dog.
    The mind of a child, the endless acceptance of new,unthinkable things. Like finding yourself on the other side of the world in a land where the bark of the trees is red and you have been let go by a father who swore you were his most loved thing.
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    Sandra carries everywhere with her now a feeble picture book Jocelyn had bought for her during their first days here when Sandra had hardly spoken. The story involves a kangaroo’s joey lost in an unfamiliar part of the bush where it doesn’t belong, and finding its way home by asking for help from other tedious national symbols: koala, echidna, wombat, lyrebird. All first hostile at the junior outsider’s intrusions and too busy to help, what with their sleeping, digging, snuffling and