The Science of Appearances Read online

  THE SCIENCE OF APPEARANCES

  Jacinta Halloran is a Melbourne-based writer and doctor. She has written on medical science for The Sunday Age, and her stories have been published in New Australian Stories 2 and The Pen and the Stethoscope. A former board member for the Stella Prize, Jacinta is a speaker in the Stella Schools Program. Her first novel, Dissection (2008), was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, and her second, Pilgrimage (2012), was shortlisted for the Barbara Jefferis Award.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

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  First published by Scribe 2016

  Copyright © Jacinta Halloran 2016

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The quotations excerpted from J.D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick, ‘A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid’, Nature, 25 April 1953, no. 4356, p. 737, are reproduced with kind permission from the publisher, Nature Publishing Group.

  While care has been taken to trace and acknowledge copyright, we tender apologies for any accidental infringement where copyright has proved untraceable and we welcome information that would redress the situation.

  9781925321579 (paperback)

  9781925307771 (e-book)

  A CiP data record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For my mother and in memory of my father

  Twins have a special claim on our attention; it is, that their history affords means of distinguishing between the effects of tendencies received at birth, and those that were imposed by the special circumstances of their after lives. SIR FRANCIS GALTON, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, 1875

  Like a blind man following his dog, allow the eye to go where it will — it knows best. Don’t try to see things — let them reveal themselves. MAX MELDRUM, The Science of Appearances, 1950

  Prologue

  The fate of twins differs from that of their singleton cousins only during gestation, birth and the perinatal period, those testing times when the perils of duality come into play. Survive early infancy unscathed, and each twin becomes like any other child: individual, unique and subject to all the vicissitudes and opportunities of time and place and temperament. Non-identical twins, that is — identical twins are another story.

  For Dominic and Mary Quinn, their twin gestation held the kind of sickly fascination usually reserved for some gruesome act of nature: a fly trapped in a huntsman’s web, a snake swallowing a mouse. Blind little babies, so Mary often imagined, curled up together for nine whole months, their spines aligned, sardine-like. Worst of all, they were naked. ‘My elbow was pressed into your eye,’ Mary would tease Dominic. ‘My foot was in your mouth,’ he’d retort. Such indignities were actually impossible, they knew, as their mother had told them they were each in their own separate fluid-filled sac. Still, the aches and pains of their childhood took on a different hue from those of their singleton friends. They had each other to blame for a sore back or a crick in the neck, for surely these troubles had their origins in those cramped conditions in the womb?

  Mary once sketched their pre-birth selves, her brother upside down in her picture (yet right way up in the scheme of things), and she floating above him with a head of curling hair. ‘You’re supposed to be smaller than me,’ Dominic said. ‘And you didn’t have hair.’ As if he could remember! He’d come out sucking his thumb, Mary knew, and she never let him forget it. The break in her collarbone was darker territory: a more serious affliction to bring into the world than a thumb in one’s mouth. To tease her brother was in some small way an attempt to even the score.

  Yet rivalry was only half of it — no, less than half. For the most part there was pride and a sense of being chosen, for twins had a special place in worlds both mythical and real. Carmel Bourke in the third class had a twin who’d died at birth. His name was Stephen. It was the one thing everyone knew about Carmel, her calling card in the town; this shadowy boy, once a separate live being for a minute or two, but now an integral part of his sister. It was almost as if his soul, rather than flying off to faraway limbo as babies’ souls should, had simply entered hers. Eunice Moran claimed Carmel talked to him under the peppercorn trees at lunchtime, but no one besides Eunice had ever overheard her. Stephen was mentioned nightly in the Bourke family rosary: that, at least, was accepted as fact. Both Mary-Anne McKenna and Patricia Moody had testified to kneeling in the Bourkes’ front room, their heads bowed to Mrs Bourke’s crocheted cushions, as Carmel offered up her decade of Hail Marys to ‘my twin brother, Stephen, who intercedes for me from heaven’. Seeing Carmel, mousy-haired and knock-kneed, wandering alone in the schoolyard, Mary hoped that intercession was yet to come.

  Stephen’s absence, palpable as it was, served to highlight Dominic and Mary’s good fortune. They’d endured, with only a broken bone between them to show for it, and they could both enjoy the special attention generated not only by their survival but also their intrinsic doubleness. Had they been identical they would have been more celebrated than they were, but as Mary noted, ‘Then we’d have had to be either both boys or both girls, and one of us wouldn’t have existed.’ It was a possibility too abstract to contemplate, as they were each so much themselves. ‘Chalk and cheese,’ their mother would say. ‘As different as night and day.’

  ‘I’m the chalk,’ Mary told her brother. ‘That’s because I like drawing.’

  But Dominic refused to be the cheese. ‘I’m day and you can be night because you hate getting out of bed in the mornings.’

  Mary agreed: this comparison suited them both. Still, the mysteries of the womb, their entwinement, their capacity to hold ground while making space for each other — such were they imprinted, so that they would sometimes wake to find themselves sharing a bed, top to tail, as if during sleep their bodies had reunited of their own accord.

  Punctuated Equilibrium

  1

  On a Saturday morning in June, Francis Quinn dies in the family home on Baynton Street. Four years later, his son, Dominic, will say to a young woman he’s known for just an hour, That was the day my childhood ended.

  But you were thirteen, the woman will reply. That’s time enough. She’ll tell him of her bat mitzvah when she was twelve; the dancing, the gold locket her parents gave her. The end of childhood’s a time for celebration.

  Seventh of June 1947: the aforementioned Saturday, cold and bright. Dominic’s in the backyard, leaning against the fence. He’s watching the chooks — his chooks, so he likes to think — pecking at the grain that’s just trickled through his cupped fingers. He’s laid a looping, weaving trail around the chicken coop, and now his favourite bird, the blue Orpington he calls Treasure, is leading the hunt. Treasure turns his head and humours Dominic with a short bobbing dance, while the other birds follow disconsolately, taking what Treasure leaves behind. In Life Science for Young Australians, Dominic’s read that birds are far better able than humans to discern subtle shades of colour. The scattered grain, to his eyes a mottled brown, must appear to Treasure as richly coloured as the fillings in a box of chocolates: golden caramel, smoky fudge, the amber glow of praline, the secretive purple of Turkish delight.


  Now Dominic’s mother is calling him, her voice rising up against the gentle conversation of the birds. From the back door she waves him towards her, both elbows jutting like wings, both hands circling urgently in unison. ‘Your father has collapsed,’ she says when he reaches her. ‘You must run and get the doctor.’ She swivels him by his shoulders, pushes the tips of her fingers into his shoulder blades. ‘Run as fast as you can.’

  He’s not sure he’s understood anything she’s said, except that he must run. Her hands are no longer at his back, but the sensation of her hard-pressing fingertips remains. ‘Run where?’ he asks, facing her again.

  ‘The clinic in Mair Street.’

  He nods, thick-headed. Mair Street? He knows the town inside out, but at this moment it’s lost to him. His mother’s face, too, is both ordinary and terrible. Something has shifted, in her or in himself, so that the face he’s always known is no longer whole: instead he sees only the fine red veins at the corners of her nose, how the flesh of one earlobe hangs lower than the other.

  She’s saying something else. ‘Tell Dr Cameron he must come at once.’ She turns from him and moves quickly down the hallway. His father collapsed, like the house of cards he sometimes makes with his sister — a silent fluttering downward trajectory of something to nothing. His mother stops at the door of the front room. She is about to turn the handle when she sees Dominic still there. ‘Go!’ she says in a strange, strangled voice. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  He vaults the front gate and heads left down their street, past the Flannerys’ place, the Duthies’, the McCorkells’. He tries to picture his father in the front room: collapsed, his mother had said, not fallen, like a soldier. Will he be on the floor, or can a person collapse in a chair? Dominic runs. His muscles, not yet warm, are fighting him, and his breath is uneven, as if his lungs haven’t caught up with the rest of his body. He’d like to stop and do his warm-up exercises, the stretches and bends that Mr Welsh has taught him to go through before he runs, but there’s no time for that. He thinks of his mother, of her beckoning hands, her thin wrists. What will she do while she waits for him to bring the doctor? He mustn’t let her wait too long.

  Mollison Street’s an obstacle course of women, prams and shopping baskets. First he ducks and weaves on the footpath; then he takes the path of least resistance along the street itself. Mick Fairless, broom in hand outside Nuttall’s Store, shouts, ‘What’s the rush, Quinn?’ and Dominic’s heart bounces with extra force against his breastbone. His father is ill, collapsed — the word taunts him — but it’s the thought of his mother that lengthens his stride.

  The clinic’s just three houses from Mollison Street. At the front gate he slows his pace: it’ll do him no good to bowl over one of Dr Cameron’s patients on their way out. Judith Mudd, the younger nurse, is at the front desk. There are people waiting, so he leans towards her and cups his mouth. ‘My father’s ill. Mum wants the doctor to come straight away.’ The words are hollow, not his, drawn from him in a ragged, whispered rush. He can barely speak. What’s wrong with his father? How can he tell the nurse when he doesn’t know himself?

  ‘Is he unconscious?’ Judith Mudd asks.

  ‘Yes,’ he answers, not knowing if it’s true.

  Nurse Mudd leaves her desk and taps at the surgery door, while the waiting patients — Mrs Stringer with her baby, old Mr and Mrs Cuthbert, and one of the bigger McKenna boys — shift in their seats. The sweat dries on his skin. How long’s it been since he left the house? He hears Judith speaking quickly and the doctor’s voice in return, muffled behind the wall. He sounds weary or, worse, uninterested. It’s up to him now to persuade Dr Cameron. He crosses the room and squeezes himself past Judith Mudd and through the half-open door. ‘My father’s been shot through the chest. He’s bleeding to death.’ There, he’s said it: now everyone understands.

  Dominic sits at the kitchen table, waiting for his mother to return from her room. Dr Cameron has left and Mary’s not yet home. He’s made a pot of tea, taking care to turn it gently to help it brew. For his mother he’s brought from the sideboard one of the teacups she reserves for visitors. He pours the liquid, strong and black, and plies it with sugar, thinking of soldiers, their backs to a sandbag, drinking hot, sweet billy tea. He fills a tin mug for himself.

  ‘Why did you tell the doctor that he’d been shot?’ His mother stands by the door, leaning into the jamb. There’s a slack in the line of her body that he’s never before seen.

  He looks away. ‘I had to make him come.’

  ‘It isn’t true,’ his mother says. ‘It was his heart.’ She folds her arms across her chest, as if her heart, too, is ailing. ‘If anyone asks, that’s what you say.’

  He wonders now why he told Dr Cameron that story. Sure, his father owned a shotgun, but when it was last loaded and fired was something only his father knew. For as long as Dominic can remember it has stood in a corner of the woodshed with its barrel broken open. During the war he often held it to his shoulder, drawn to the even weight of it, the cold metal trigger, the weathered wood of the stock against his palm. He’d take it from the shed and line up the sight with the tin that held his mother’s clothespegs. He once sighted a magpie as it searched for worms, but afterwards, remembering the magpie’s clear grey eye encircled in the sight, he regretted his bravado. His father told him he’d often shot rabbits on the family farm, out Deniliquin way, when he was young. ‘Farmers need guns, teachers don’t. At least, the education department doesn’t permit the use of guns in the classroom.’ This was his father’s joke. He taught mathematics and geography at Ascension College, out on the Trentham road. He’d never been a soldier. Fifteen in 1914, forty in 1939; his father has stood on the margins of both wars. Dominic shifts in his chair. Had stood. A cold wave of fear washes through him. As it drains away, something of himself goes, too.

  The door to the bedroom is closed. His father lies behind it, while the air of the house thickens and cools. ‘Can I see him?’ he asks.

  ‘No.’ His mother’s answer brooks no challenge. She sits up straight, the blood again in her cheeks. ‘I want you to wait with me until the undertaker comes, and then you can go and get Mary from Joan’s.’

  ‘Will I tell her?’

  ‘If you want.’ She looks at him and her face softens. ‘No, you don’t have to do that. Just bring her home and I’ll tell her.’

  He nods, relieved to be spared the task. To tell is to find words for what’s happened. Is that what he must do: find the words to confess? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. My father’s dead. My father’s dead because I didn’t run fast enough.

  ~

  For a week the front room is brightened with roses, the best from their neighbours’ gardens. Mary stands by the table and breathes deeply, almost sure she can taste rose juice on the tip of her tongue. She’s a bee, a honey bird, sampling nectar. Some of the roses droop, sleepy, full to bursting with sweet perfume. She, too, closes her eyes and drops her head, runs her fingertips lightly over her petal-pink cheek. She wants to be as beautiful as the full pink-mauve roses that have come, wrapped in new brown paper and tied with ribbon, from the Camerons’ garden. They’re her favourites by far.

  In one of last year’s exercise books, the pages of equations torn away, she draws the largest rose — the outer petals that have come away from the bud, and the rounded outline of the others, curving inwards, holding tight. Tomorrow she’ll draw it again, a new outline as more petals give way. So many drawings, page after page of this rose, the same mauve-pink rose, yet each drawing different, an entity in itself. In the still, cold front room the roses are blossoming, expanding and contracting, always in motion.

  This was her father’s room — is it still? — where he came to read the newspaper. ‘Give me peace,’ he’d often said at the kitchen table, the paper gathered to him like a blanket, or rolled tight like a truncheon on the back of her legs. When the war ended two winte
rs ago and the brass band played down Mollison Street, she’d thought her father would throw away his paper to march in the street with the rest of them, but instead he’d stayed home. On her mother’s request she’d worn her best ribbons, but later pulled them from her hair and waved them like streamers as she danced. Old Mr Ramsay had done his Winston Churchill on the shire hall steps, and Dom had nudged her when she’d laughed at his gobbling turkey neck. Peace was music and fluttering paper and a kiss from everyone, except those you most wanted one from.

  Her father, her newspaper-and-necktie father, at peace at last. Father Clancy said peace eight times in the Mass and four times at the grave. Pease pudding hot, pease pudding cold … she’d often sung it when she was little, so she couldn’t help the chanting in her head every time. Rest in pease.

  The clock ticks on the mantle, marking rose time: their graceful undoing, their delicate waltz of death. Mary thinks of Robbie Cameron. There he is, in his garden on Jennings Street, lying beneath a tree, looking up through knotted branches and glossy leaves. He’s thinking of her. His eyes are grey-green — like the sage leaves with which her mother stuffs the Christmas chicken — and flecked with gold. Although it’s still school term and Robbie’s away boarding in Melbourne, she buries her face in the soft pink blooms and tells herself that Robbie has picked them for her.

  The front gate creaks, and Mary turns to the window to see Mrs Cameron coming up the path. She wears a cream-coloured coat and carries a large cornflower-blue pot with a lid. Mary runs to the front door and opens it wide. ‘Well, that’s good timing,’ Mrs Cameron says, all singsong. ‘I was just about to put this down.’

  ‘Is it for us?’ Mary asks. ‘Can I see?’

  From the hallway her mother calls, ‘That’s enough, Mary. Where are your manners? Ask Mrs Cameron inside.’