Sorry by Gail Jones

Author:Gail Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 2007-08-23T04:00:00+00:00

To fill what was missing, or to control her bleak sense of intolerable alteration, Perdita took hours-long excursions with Horatio. He was an easy companion; his leaping, sniffing doggy life was a relief from her mother’s immobility, gloomy and loquacious. She liked the way he led her with his nose down and his ears pricked and alert, the way his route was never straight but zigzagged by nimble, sudden choices of direction. He was alert to other creatures and driven by inner forces that knew the world in minute and purposeful ways. Every now and then he chased a lizard, leaving her behind, or took off, racing, towards some invisible attraction; but he always returned and he always led her home.

Without Mary there was less of the world to divine. Perdita dawdled and traipsed as Horatio skipped and rushed; she was walking out her grief for her lost friend and feeling sorry for herself. She wanted above all to kill a snake, not one in the house, which was easy and visible, but to find one here, to drag it from its hiding place, break its back with a flick and crush its head against a rock, just as Mary had done. Though she searched, she found nothing. She was just a stuttering girl in a faded cotton frock, a girl with plaits and with too much time on her hands. She noticed that the world, not just her knowledge, was turning to stone. There was a mica sky and a marble hardness to things; mammal becoming mineral, a weight pressing down. The world was transforming.

There are forms of loneliness children endure that adults have no inkling of: stern seclusions, lives of quiet desperation. Now that her childhood was a spoiled thing, compounded by an inefficient tongue and garbled speech, Perdita entered the dreary territory of the truly alone. She found one of the old boabs that had a hollow bottle belly and squeezed herself inside, pleased to be enclosed, imagining for a moment that she might stay there, never to be found, never-ever, never-ever. She would become as skinny as Christ and simply fade away, a relic of herself, stretched and holy. In the tree belly there was a stench of wood-rot and old animal droppings; it was not the fading haven she had imagined. In such darkness she would be obliged to confront her own thoughts, to remember and to feel again all that had happened. Perdita squeezed out of the trunk, maturely extracting herself from the fantasies of self-annihilation that even young children may entertain. Horatio bounded towards her with excitement, his sticky mouth wide open, his thin tail waving, as if she had just performed a trick or invented a new game. She clasped him with both hands and pressed her face against his fur.

As she approached her home, returning one afternoon from her exhausting wandering, Perdita heard Stella’s voice engaged in recitation. In town she had overheard ‘crazy Mrs Keene’ and immediately knew that this

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