By Marcella Polain

Fremantle Press, PB, 350pp, released August 2007
Everywhere I look and sleep
(Perth, present)

Much later, I dreamed I was on a beach with everyone I love.

But this was after everything happened, of course. It was also after the girl with the yellow hair returned, even though I thought that, once I had written this, I wouldn’t see her again. It was after the man made entirely of shadow also returned, darting as usual from the corners of my eyes into the next room and then the next. And it was after I first heard the demon run up behind me, growling, as I left the supermarket and the hair on my neck stood up and I gasped and swung around, swung my bags of shopping wildly but no-one was there.

It was after my child grew up and I lay awake, weeping because I already knew how grey Europe was, like a very old timber door too heavy to open but behind which you know all manner of things happen. It was after the letters stopped coming from Elisabeth in France and from my sister in Sydney. It was after my brother locked the door of his office one morning and didn’t answer the telephone and eventually the police had to come and break their way in. And it was after I phoned my sister that same day and she said, Well, things will never be quite the same now, will they, thanks to you. Idiot. As if somehow I was responsible.

And it was after we last saw one another and she told us our mother had been right all along with her stories and predictions about just what would happen to the world, and the price we’d pay for rolling our eyes. And about how nobody — not a single country, she would say, wagging her finger at us — did anything when the Turks held each member of our family by a handful of hair and pressed a sword to their throat, saying they could live if they converted. And, I know what you think; you think you’re so clever with your educations, the three of us not looking at her, our lips pressed together, embarrassed by the blaze of her.

Burning has a particular smell, and it took me a long time to discover that other families have other smells. They might stink too, but they don’t all stink like ours. I think my sister must have always understood these things better than I did. I think this because she was right about me. Idiot, she said. No-one but our mother had ever before called me that.

When the police broke in, he was sitting at his desk, his dark eyes round and looking at them. He didn’t say a thing.

But it’s logical. I too would kill the best Armenians first. The most intelligent and respected, the most courageous, the beautiful. And so, I am none of those things; I am an idiot and a liar. Because how can an idiot recognise truth?

And I am also a liar, of course, because I am Armenian. If all I say happened really did happen, wouldn’t you already know? And who is likely to be in possession of the truth: the remains of a people, the bits and pieces left of them, who wander the earth, ablaze with visions of an apocalypse — past and future — or Turkey’s emissaries, respectable men in suits and ties, negotiating a way into the European Union?

I listened to my sister. She knows how to stand, to speak, how to be the centre of attention. It occurred to me that she, too, seems to be, if not ablaze, then smouldering. But I would never say that. She was born here and that is that. She’s Australian, whatever it takes. In that way, she has kept her head down. When we have spoken, she has spoken only of the future, of the outline of a life: the names of the cities in which she’ll some day live, the names of the children she’ll some day have. I have always laughed because I know the future is a trick and I’ve told her. I never mean to make her weep. Sometimes things happen that you just can’t control. This is why I listened but didn’t look at her. Her voice was clear, and heavy with some kind of menace. She sounded like our mother.

I can tell you this because I’ve written the remainder. What I can’t tell you is the point at which the story begins. The truth is I have to write this story in this way because there is no beginning. We just like to think there is, that we can hold everything neat and complete in our hands, examine it.

My sister would say if I did something useful with my hands instead of writing things I shouldn’t, everything would be different. It’s as if she believes that writing can actually make things happen. It isn’t like that. The facts are the facts, whether we like them or not. And the fictions are awfully like facts. I would tell her writing is dreaming; it has never really raised the dead. But I would also tell her I think there are some things we’re born with and they sit there and sit there, waiting for something, who knows what, and one day that thing arrives and the whole lot just unfolds itself and breathes, a concertina, an intricate fan. It unfolds itself like a creature and stretches, fills its lungs, raises its head and stares back at us with its shining eye.

Each evening, on the television, I find myself watching for blood. It appears: a child’s painting, what we imagine blood to be. A woman carves her arm with glass, working as studiously as if she were preparing a menu or an installation. Another woman, in a quick half pirouette toward him and away from her bright sink, stabs her startled husband in his buttery chest. A man breaks open his wife’s head with a hammer as she bathes. Her meagre blood sprays one inoffensive trail across his face as a child might from a water pistol.

And then, one evening, a German NATO soldier in Kosovo stammers something like people were herded in this room, a policeman threw in grenade, finished them with machine gun … so much blood it ran down walls into basement.

Today I am at my kitchen table, surrounded by a vase and papers and pens and washing. I am holding on to an open book, a book someone has given me. I am looking through the window, beyond the computer where one day I will write and into the almost-dark, at the newly turned earth at the base of the lemon tree and the white chrysanthemum my son laid there.

I remember the first time I saw a basement. I am in Vancouver where, even in summer, the air is sharp with cold and the light shifts all day with the rush of clouds. In Vancouver I felt for the first time that I was on the edge of something, standing on its very edge as if land were just a platform after all and I was leaning out over that edge much too far northwest and into the teeth of something huge and inhospitable, feeling its teeth pricking my ears and nape. So, I could understand the need for basements: the central heating control unit, the stack of firewood; shelves lined with tinned and bottled food; the ham radio, a water tank.

I am visiting the sister of a close family friend, and her husband, both elderly now, putting faces to their names that have circulated in conversations all my life. The skin of their faces and throats and hands is pale and, when they smile, their cheeks fold into deep soft lines. They are pleased I have come, insist I stay the night. She will enjoy the company, she says, because in the evening, she continues, he will excuse himself and disappear. He has people to talk to in Fiji, South Africa, Argentina, England, New Zealand, Poland. His disappearance is not to be taken personally, and am I quite sure that I understand?

I follow them as they slowly ascend the simple concrete steps to their door, their bodies folded, too, into gentle stoops. Later, she makes tea in an elegant pot and we sit by the large windows that overlook their garden, green and moist and soft with July light. And it is here she points out to me something I am having trouble seeing. Have you ever noticed, she says, how the Negro has a prominent forehead? I look at her. Behind her own head, wind blows her wet trees about and the slant of the sun catches drops of water on so many leaves that, for a moment, there is light enough for it to be as if jewels are falling.

Did I nod? Or is it hers, that encouraging nod, the nod of someone grandmotherly, two generations ahead, that triggers mine — me both unaccustomed and disbelieving, respectfully nodding back? Well you see, then, she says. Like monkeys.

Should I be afraid?

In the Christmas of 1959, my parents found a photographer whose paper and chemicals were so stable that the colour shots he took remain as reliable as if we were still standing there, my mother Lucine and I. My child hair springs from me like angry copper wire. My eyes look deep into the lens, my gaze direct, if apprehensive. Behind, the Christmas tree is large and furious with lights. I wear long white socks and tiny blue, buckled shoes. I could not be called a beautiful child but there is something intense, something that flushes me now with a quick embarrassment. I stare into the parent’s eye, down the long lens of history, and spy something there, moving.

The hair on the back of the photographer’s neck rises. The shutter opens. Her cardigan is blue; the pleats in her skirt are small white knives. Keep very still, somebody says. And she does, knowing already the harshness of light, what this might mean; knowing the flashes of things in the world — fireworks, the sun on the water, anger, the edges of blades.

This extract opens Marcella Polain’s new novel, The Edge of the World. A Perth writer, Ms Polain has previously published two collections of prize-winning poetry, Each Clear Night and Dumbstruck. Ms Polain lectures in the writing program at Edith Cowan University.

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