The Submerged Cathedral Read online

  On Jocelyn’s drive home this day, through the cathedral columns of the bushland, a flash of red spins across the corner of her vision: a crimson rosella.

  She follows the road; it winds, turns to dirt and corrugations. The parrot’s flashing, shifting shape stays with her; a bright red hand against the grey-green curtain.

  She rounds the machinery shed and there are chickens pecking about the grassy verge by the track.

  Shit.

  Into the chicken yard, and the feathers and bits of egg and bloody hen corpse lying scuffled in the dust.

  Fox, again.

  She hadn’t checked for eggs this morning, had not noticed anything as she heaved the truck from the shed in the cold light.

  Christ. Now she counts: four more hens are missing. She strides the chook-yard perimeter, checking each wire panel, finds the loosened hole near the henhouse where the fence wire dips.

  Standing there in the dirt, she shouts out at the fox across the yards and the paddocks. Then a rage rises up, she kicks violently at the gate, a rusted hinge tears, the gate shunts and falls looser. Hens quietly flap outside the pen, scattering.

  She crouches in the dirt, in the shit and the dust and the blood.

  It is as if the fox has not just killed chickens but undone everything. Rendered it all pointless, with one under-fence glide ripped out the throat of the years, of the garden, of any reason for being here. And will always be out there, waiting its ruthless new chance.

  No.

  And suddenly she’s at the gun cabinet, yanking open the door, taking down the rifle and grabbing a box of bullets, slipping them into the magazine. The cool weight of the gun in her arms as she marches the path through the plants.

  Fox, is all she thinks, the rifle strap over her shoulder. Marching through the garden, grevillea feathers making tiny movements as she passes. Through the grass, down past the reeds of the dam, the gliding silent ducks. Across the paddocks, into the first scraps of bush. At the ridge and she thinks she sees it, a flash of rust tail. Fury blurs her, she hears obscenities from her own mouth. She heaves the gun to her shoulder, trying to stop her heartbeat, holding her breath, cheek to the metal, firing. The smell of the gun, the dark noise of the bolt sliding back and forth, flipping shells out onto the grass, the wild air, flurry of birds. She can’t see the fox any more but she keeps firing and firing. She has never felt this white physical rage, the sky and the bush whirling, and she loads the magazine again and shoots at nothing, not feeling the pain in her shoulder until the ground is littered with bullet shells.

  And then, in the shot air, the bush is alive with squawks and cracks, with thuds and fear and flight.

  Now her shoulder is all pain, she drops the empty gun’s impossible weight. It strikes the soft ground in slow motion. She steps away from it. And suddenly she wants to lie down here, fall asleep on that ground between the trees and the stones and cover herself with the leaves and dirt.

  The next morning, headachy from tearful sleep, she puts down her cup and pulls on the work boots. Spends till lunchtime in the yellow grass, hammering and stapling the chicken wire taut again across the wooden frame.

  Afterwards, in the garden she finds a little stone carved with a word. She crouches with it in her hand, thinks back to school Latin. Colo. Cultivate, she thinks. And worship.

  After the rain in May that year she walks down to the flats late in the afternoon of the first sunny day. The viciousness has gone from the sun, the grasses beam green light. She walks the track, then stops to watch and listen. The air is all singing with insects caught in the sun, tiny buds of light filling the air. In the lower paddock she makes out first one familiar dark shape, then the next, and then the light is soft over the forms of a mob of kangaroos grazing; some standing stock still and staring in her direction, others bent, slow and busy. She realises small whirrs and almost inaudible squeals fill the air, and then she sees the grasses moving: hundreds of tiny birds, each wingspan less than hand-sized, flying at full pelt just above the grass tips, scoring that air in arcs and spirals, and all the flat surfaces of the green paddocks, rippled with the engravings of the skating birds, are suddenly alive as water.

  Thirty-Eight

  IT WAS IN Lisbon that Jocelyn had begun to think so often of the Gymea lily, the flame lily, that mammoth, prehistoric plant. In the bush at Pittwater she had come across, over and over, its giant green leaves fanning out from the earth, tall as she was. Now and again from the heart of one of those clumps shot the flower’s wood-hard bamboo trunk, only just slender enough to encircle with her hand, rising above her ten, fifteen feet high, and then, shocking crimson against the grey bush, the flower’s head. Enormous, frightening; part beautiful, part decay.

  At Belem, in the cathedral by the sea, a life-sized Christ hung from his bloody nails. In the sculpture the flesh of the hands and the feet was torn ragged, the bones parted by bolts. The thorn crown sprayed his face bloody. Nearby there was a wedding, the bride tiny-waisted and white from head to foot. Jesus on his cross, through his blood and rags, an image of sexually charged agony.

  She touched the concavity between the Christ’s ribs. And, for one half-second, had the shocked recognition of Martin’s body under her hand. But there at the dripping Christ she remembered too a bloodwood eucalypt she had seen at Pittwater, a stain of bloody sap from its trunk like a wound in a human arm. Every time she entered a Portuguese church in the years after that, she remembered her country and it was filled with red and bleeding plants.

  Thirty-Nine

  SHE CIRCLES THE dusty cloister, sweeping the concrete path, recalling every European cloister garden she has seen; the low box hedges, lawns, the intricate fleur-de-lis, the rose gardens and shrubberies, arranged in quadrangles beside four gravel paths all leading to the centre axis – tree, or fountain, or pool, or white stone Virgin or Christian cross.

  In the middle of the garden were the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A river flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.

  She sweeps, sweeps. The sun is savage overhead today, bearing down on the lifeless and stunted rose. She moves slowly, sweeping and thinking, sweeping and thinking. Not touching the cloister, yet.

  Three years after first seeing Parc Guell, Jocelyn climbed the stairs and steps of Lisbon and found herself drinking gin in the afternoon. She sat by the window and wrote to Ellen, in the weeks curling up like a dangerous wave to the anniversary of that April day the baby died. She did not know what to say.

  I am thinking of you now, when I climb these hills, and the sea is another tiled blue surface.

  The window was dirty. From outside the apartment came the chipping of hammers on the paving stones, the men on their haunches in the street with their small tools, cutting the stones into pale neat blocks.

  I am thinking of you then, and what it did to all of us. I hope Sandra is well and growing and happy. She did not ask after Thomas.

  I am well. I am in Portugal now, in Lisbon. The fronts of the houses are tiled, and there are eucalyptus trees. I got married a few years ago.

  Anyway, Ell, I send you my love and I hope you are as happy as you can be, at this time of the year.

  She did not say, Duncan has gone.

  He had finished the gallery garden. A modernist garden, with long narrow pools and low plantings, and vast open swathes of space. The gallery was angular and flat, a creature from space. It was 1974.

  Soon after the garden was completed, one Lisbon afternoon, they had found themselves wandering into a market, into a sea of secondhand furniture. Triangular lampshades on coiling metal stems, couches with springs sprawling to the gravel, scratched occasional tables, a telephone on a stand with a seat and a saucer-shaped ashtray set into the oak. Duncan sat on the seat of the phone table, lifted the receiver.

  Jocelyn was picking over a table of opaque green vases and ivory-handled cutlery. She heard him say, ‘Hello?’ and she turned. He’d crossed one leg over the other like a
woman, and had lit a cigarette. She stopped, smiling at him across the small gaggle of browsing Lisboetas. ‘Ola,’ he was saying, ‘may I speak to Jocelyn.’

  A woman looked up, blank-faced him for a second, turned back to her companion, they resumed examining the bottom of a bowl. Jocelyn waited, a laugh readying itself, but Duncan was not looking at her.

  His face turned suddenly serious and he said into the receiver, clearly, in English, ‘Your Martin is gone.’ She went cold. He still did not lift his head.

  Then he said, more quietly, ‘I am wasting my life with you.’

  Jocelyn could only stand, staring across the green glassware at him. Duncan did not look up. He took a long drag of his cigarette, then stubbed it out in the saucer, and gently placed the telephone receiver back into its stand. He stood up, brushed ash flecks from his trousers, and looked her in the eye for two long seconds before walking away down the bright corridors of other people’s belongings.

  She reread her letter to Ellen. A tram rattled in the street below.

  She did not add, I haven’t heard from Martin. Did not say, I don’t know why I still sometimes hope I might.

  A month later, two envelopes had been slipped under the door of the apartment on the same day. In one envelope were two pieces of paper: a divorce notice and a cheque for £100,000 from Duncan.

  In the other was a letter, and a smaller envelope.

  Dear Jocelyn, she read.

  You must wonder why you never heard from me. Mum never gave me your letters – I don’t know why she kept them, but I have just found them in the back of a cupboard. I am sixteen now. I have read them all this morning. I have always, always thought of you and missed you. In the cupboard there was also this letter. I am so sorry.

  Love Sandra xxx

  And there in her hand was the other little envelope, thin and flattened with age. Jocelyn caught her breath, and let the tears come down her face. It was postmarked in Victoria, nine years ago. She unfolded the paper, heard her own breaths cut through the rooms.

  Her Martin had told her where he was, and sent her a prayer, from the Song of Songs.

  Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.

  The sweep down to the paddock is lined at last with melaleuca and banksia in a curled maze. On her way back from the baby’s grave she treads the boardwalk through the silky grasses at the edge of the dam, to stand and watch the sheet of still water. The reeds have reached shoulder-height, replicating themselves in lime-green stands around the water.

  Back in the refectory she trawls through all the monastery’s cupboards for china: for the mismatched plates, the floral visitors’ cups and the green cut-glass vases.

  She gathers together everything but a few plates, some dishes for cooking and one cup. She piles the stacks up against a wall behind the old stable. Her ceramic pile builds. One afternoon she hurls a dish against the stone wall. And then the others, each smash cutting through the valley’s air. The noise sets the crows whirling from the pine trees near the woodshed.

  Forty

  SHE WATCHES OVER the cloister as she undresses. She has been thinking of Gethsemane these last weeks, of choice. In a garden at night, a choice is made. To escape, or to continue. Reason, or faith.

  She has not read anything but reference books for years, and she ransacks the library shelves for a Bible. Isn’t the Christian Bible full of plants, and stories? Bushes bursting into flame, seeds falling on so many kinds of wrong ground, Eden with all its fruits and traps and beauties … Is it because she is so tired she cannot find a single prayer book left behind? In all the leathered volumes there is nothing for her. She begins to crave a story with which to rock herself to sleep.

  In the days, to keep herself sane, she starts to list from her childhood’s Sundays every plant she remembers coming from a vicar’s mouth.

  Olive, wheat, palm. Vines, grapes. The lushness of oases. Bulrushes, papyrus.

  Like counting sheep, she begins recounting the stories in all their laughable excess, their rhythmic seesaws. Loaves and fishes. Cain and Abel. One, two. She walks, bends, kneels, digs. One, two. Forty days and forty nights. The good son, the prodigal. Water, wine. Adam and Eve in their garden of good and evil.

  In the spring she manoeuvres a wheelbarrow full of garden tools through the sacristan’s garden, the vegetable garden, along the path beside the abbey, the dormitory, and pushes through the narrow gap between the library and the infirmary into the cool of the cloister.

  Taking the shovel, she moves to the centre and digs deep, beneath the rose. It comes away easily, roots rotted and crumbling. Gloved, she tosses it into a shaded corner of the path. She spends the day this way, digging with hoe and pickaxe and shovel, pulling weeds out by the roots, turning the soil again and again.

  The next day she takes load after load from the rotted compost, spreads the stinking matter over the ground. Another day of digging, another of spreading piles of manure through. Preparing the earth, but still her ideas are unformed.

  In another week the paths are marked out with the stones she’s gathered onto the flatbed of the truck from around the property. The large boulder stone for the centre she’s rolled, lugged, kicked in increments over the months from the bottom of the ridge. Has given up, often, with grazed hands and once a strained back that left her bedridden for a week. But then each time she passes she has leant her body to it, given it another shove in the direction of the buildings. Managing, on the last day, by lying the wheelbarrow on its side and wedged against the stair for leverage, to heave the stone and the wheelbarrow upright, then pushed the barrow up a plank over the terrace stairs, and then through the sacristan’s garden, through the gap in the buildings, then tipped it crashing onto the cloister walk.

  Now, each day as she rises and goes to bed, she sees through her window the four black expectant squares. The wooden lines frame the paths leading to the boulder in the centre, pale and solid. The roughly hollowed cup of its upturned underside makes a fountain bowl.

  But no plantings. Drawings, each night until she can no longer hold the pen, but nothing sets. Only rising and sinking, these stray images and edges of something she still cannot fully see. Half-formed beneath the water of her mind, like Debussy’s magical church.

  A month passes and still she has made no decision on the cloister. And then for a beautiful week it rains, turning the square to slush and sweeping the mud up onto the cloister paths in silty waves.

  After the rain stops and the earth dries out she begins the first path, the panel of the paper design beside her in the dust. Sits on a cushion to work now, her legs aching sore from the days of kneeling. Picking out colours from the buckets of chips, pushing them gently into the cement as it dries. The drawings have taken shape over the months, the paths radiating from the centre, the fourth squeezing through the gap between library and infirmary, moving out into the cutting flower garden, then drifting, fading out in its sandy earth. She squats like the men cutting the paths in the Lisbon streets. She stands and moves back, stares as she once stared hard at Gaudi’s tiled walls, at the Lisbon azulejos.

  One morning she wakes with a crimson rosella in her head. She takes a piece of paper and writes an order for one hundred plants of Telopea speciosissima, the red waratah. She is fearful now, sometimes, of what she may be doing here, of what instinct guides her. Of how it can be possible for reason to transmute into faith. And she thinks of it all the time now, of a doctor sending her a prayer, and of whose paradise she is replicating here.

  Gradually, over the months, she lays down her mosaic pictures, colouring the paths with the chips and the shards of all the monastery’s crockery. When she has finished she stands, fetches a broom and a bucket of water. Sloshes, and sweeps.

  The four mosaic paths are painted with memory: of the cliffs of the Blue Mountains; the frilled beaches and dark headlands of Pittwater; the lake garden with its dead silver trees; and the monastery’s young avenue of eucalypts in raging red flower.
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  And in the blunt, cupped surface of the stone, now filled with water, is the Gymea lily’s beautiful, decayed face. In the centre of that face, two swimming figures.

  Forty-One

  THEN AT LAST, her path complete, one afternoon she pushes open the stiff wooden gate to the cemetery.

  She still visits the baby’s grave up on the ridge most days, climbing the stone stairs she has made up the sharp incline, picking dead fronds out of the way as she goes. The avenue of Gymea lilies either side of the path and around the grave is still alive, their green shoots toughened now into broad leaves, shoulder-height. And the rust on the fence is darkening and corroding. In a few years the fence will fall away completely, and the rods of the lily trunks will take its place.

  She thinks of Martin as dead. Except that now she stops a moment after kicking open the gate. She has not wanted to come into this room of plants and wooden crosses, in case this last belief proves true.

  The grass is thigh-high despite the shade of the Port Jackson fig, its trunk as broad as a piano, its muscular limbs spread low and wide.

  Jocelyn searches the place, then sees the faded crosses, each only just taller than the grass. She counts – twelve men buried here, in three simple rows. The thick crosses are lichened over with years; there are no headstones.

  She walks to the first cross she can see nudging through the grass, drops to her knees and pulls the weed away to read the name carved into the wood.

  Ignatius, Michael Brenton, 1890–1954. A man planted in the earth.

  She moves to the next, Thomas, Paul Sheridan. Only names and dates, no poetry or prayers. The next cross and the next, a boy of seventeen, a man of eighty, of forty-two, sixty, sixty, fifty-one. She stands and kneels at the grave of each life left here in this abandoned ground.