From Dreamtime Alice

Dreamtime Alice is a memoir about a girl who leaves Australia with her father to perform on street corners throughout the United States. The father is Gerry, a swaggering, 63-year-old jazz drummer and compulsive storyteller; the daughter is a confused 20-year-old tap dancer who perhaps identifies a little too closely with the literary heroine, Alice Liddell.

Part memoir, part biography of the young woman’s father, and part analysis of Lewis Carroll’s famous Alice books, the work is the as-yet unrecorded story of the busker’s life. It charts the geography of the street performer’s day-to-day existence, filtered through the growing consciousness of a young woman striving to invent and thus discover herself.

The following excerpt is set is New Orleans, 1983, during the time in which the father and daughter are living in a room at the back of a witchcraft shop and performing on Bourbon Street.

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Over those first few weeks behind the Witchcraft Shop, we became more and more intimate with its inhabitants, and after a while they and their antics didn’t seem quite so peculiar. Frenchy spent the better part of each day rooting about with his potted plants and herbs out in the courtyard, digging and transplanting with a tablespoon. He was always squatting in the sunlight, with one of his woollen berets perched on his head. I was relieved to find that the imaginary woman was quite an aloof lover, and only returned to his room on the odd occasion. Byron never again turned on a performance to match the one with which he presented us on our first day there. He mostly kept to his room, no doubt hiding from the predatory Viet Cong. The transvestite, Sandy, and his lover, Daryl, lived amicably enough together, though they reminded me of a 1950s heterosexual couple: Sandy was all housework and plastic rollers and fingernail polish, and Daryl was all motorbikes and six-packs of Dixie. There was another gay couple who lived upstairs, next door to Byron, who seemed to be a bit more balanced. They were waiters at a local restaurant and on their days off would invite us up for Vodka and Diet Sprite (the boys were always watching their weight). Thomas, with his gruff, formidable humour, usually kept to himself, but occasionally he’d pop up to one of our Vodka and Diet Sprite parties and drag on a secret joint. Athena, the high priestess, was even more distant, and could barely crack a smile when we barrelled into the shop each morning to pick up our mail.

But Pete, the assistant warlock, the man whose life was a role in an amateur play, he more than made up for Thomas and Athena’s cultivated reserve. Pete was always popping over with cans of generic beer and his crystal balls and tarot cards. It always seemed to me that he wanted desperately to belong to the cult (and culture) of witchcraft, but wasn’t yet quite accepted. Consequently, he seized any opportunity to display his abilities. And Gerry and I, both amused by Pete’s role-playing and genuinely interested in the occult, allowed him to rehearse and refine his expertise on us.

I was raised with ghosts. They were always there, lurking about the upright piano and watching me as I slept. They wrote notes to my parents on the big sheets of butchers’ paper which were spread across the living-room floor each night. They spoke through mediums. They told my mother she was Chinese in a previous life, that my father was a drummer in the German army and died when he was thrown down a well. My parents clicked their tongues and nodded knowingly. I was so young then that I took it all very literally, and when other kids asked me where our family came from, I always answered Germany and China.

The ghosts told my parents what kind of car to buy. They advised them on their house insurance, and how my father could get more gigs. Every night after tea, the butchers’ paper carpeted the living-room floor; both my parents gripped the ball-point which lost itself in the extravagant penmanship of the afterworld, the bold, unwieldy loops and squiggles, purgatory’s cursive letters. Ghosts apparently didn’t possess the force to lift the pen at the end of each word, and their sentences were one long, unbroken river of letters around which we would crowd, attempting to decipher. This was the way I learned to read, not from the alphabet other kids had hanging on their bedroom doors, or from bedtime stories, but from our excited attempts to translate what I thought of then as monologues from heaven:

Eventhoughyourfatherleftyouheisstillaliveandthinksaboutyou,

some kindhearted spirit once wrote to my mother. It got so that my parents wouldn’t purchase a toaster or visit a relative without first consulting one of the resident ghosts. And there were many in that big Stanmore house. One had a penchant for Ella Fitzgerald and demanded my father play her records whenever he graced our rooms. I used to lie in bed at night and listen to them creaking up and down the hall, and occasionally felt their breath on my forehead. The ghosts weren’t always right in their advice, but I sensed even then that their presence was benevolent. One was even with me during my first traumatic day at school, guiding me through the intricacies of tracing and play-lunch, numbers up to ten, the cool stares of conspiratorial older kids, first and second-graders who wore the right kind of school shoes and made a point of using local argot I didn’t quite understand. There was definitely a presence about, no further than an arm’s length away, who drew me towards a couple of other odd kids who also thought kindergarten terribly overrated, and with whom I could commiserate and play. In class, I found myself stricken with silence when I knew the answers to the teacher’s droning questions, and it was that anonymous force which finally pushed my hand up and allowed me the pleasure of my own voice.

My parents did not deliberately seek out the ghosts; actually, it was quite the reverse. Their communion with the afterworld began on a rainy night in the autumn of 1951, not long after their first wedding anniversary. My father had a gig in Melbourne, and he and my mother decided to drive the five-hundred miles from Sydney over the Easter long weekend. The first evening on the road brought them to a deteriorating guest house in Albury. They booked into a room with a four-poster bed and a pull-string light switch near the door. They snuggled into each other’s bodies and fell asleep quickly, exhausted from the day’s drive.

The moon rose from the West. The Southern Cross’s quartet of stars blazed against a rural sky. Later that night my mother awoke to find a seven-foot black man standing at the end of the bed. He was dressed in only a pair of cut-off jeans, and was simply gazing at her. Moonlight caught the sweat pearling down his muscular neck and torso. When she looked at him she could sense the lush odour of freshly-cut grass and the fragrance of growing things. The gaze in which he held her was one of deep sadness. But the man did not cry, he simply stood as still as a flame tree and bore out his unhappiness in the indigo light. In spite of the fragrance, and the man’s melancholy aura, the figure before her was so stark and realistic, my mother thought the man must have broken into their room. Seconds later, she was thumping Gerry on the chest and trying to raise him from the coma into which he still slips every night. When he finally awoke, he too felt himself pinned to the bed by the woeful gaze of the person at the bottom of the bed, who wouldn’t flinch or weep, but just stood there as lean and majestic as a Michelangelo figure. My father eventually reclaimed his self-possession. He sprung from the bed and made for the hanging string near the door.

They both witnessed and confirmed what happened next: as soon as he yanked at the string and the light blinked on, the man suddenly slipped beneath the bed and dissolved.

A few years later my parents befriended a medium called Tony Dayman, who emigrated with his family from Poland in 1936. When my mother described the incident to him, Tony explained that the man was South African, that he’d been dying in some small township, and because he’d been trapped in that purgatorial silence between life and death, his spirit had sought out a sympathetic presence to help usher him out of the world.

It was my mother, I think, who attracted the mediums and ghosts. Men, both living and dead, flocked about her beauty like moths around a globe—that bouquet of short blonde curls, the high cheek bones and sad green eyes, all of which had been imprinted on her by a statuesque father, the first man to desert her. Sometimes I think they were all clamouring to fill that space which was left by him, and which widened when she married a man with the same name, looks, and detachment as her absent patriarch.

Perhaps spirits only appear to those who are haunted by loss and absence, to those whose stories betray fear’s handiwork. For the first four years of her marriage, my mother tried desperately to fall pregnant, but my father’s desire was attuned to both the moon and her body, and he only felt himself swelling toward her during the first and fourth quarter. For fifty-six moons she felt the tide inside her dragging itself down, and the first flower of blood which appeared against the silk of her underwear each month made her mourn for a presence she’d never known. Even her younger sister, who’d married two-and-a-half years after herself, had been able to produce a son: she’d fallen pregnant in the seventh week of her marriage, had given birth by the eleventh month.

My mother knitted lemon-coloured matinee jackets for the child. Trimmed his fingernails with paper scissors. She combed the fine blonde down of his hair and mashed steamed carrots into a creamy paste soft enough for his tongue to suck and dissolve. Her sister lovingly shared the child. My mother rehearsed the role for which she was preparing. She pushed the sprung, white wicker perambulator up and down Parramatta Road, pausing in front of shop windows long enough for strangers to stop and coo over the blue-eyed baby, and to marvel at what they assumed to be my mother’s svelte, post-natal figure.

The boy thrived under the warm glow of so much attention. My aunt, too, was glad for the relief my mother provided, for her son was not yet twelve months old before she realised she was pregnant again.

The second pregnancy must have been a blow to my mother, who was four years older and had been married so much longer. I can see her now, buying lavender lingerie and perming her hair. But still nothing happened—her womb never lost a second in its interminable ticking toward the end of each month.

She continued to care for the boy and her tired sister whose breasts began to ache with milk. My parents were living in Katoomba then, but every week my mother would visit, bringing preserved figs, pickled cucumbers, and crocheted, ribbon-choked bonnets. She rubbed almond oil into her sister’s swelling belly, and together they dropped pennies onto an unfolded lace handkerchief to fathom the next child’s gender.

My aunt was well into her second trimester when the infant child fell ill. At first, the rash which rose into his pale skin just seemed like one of those standard allergic reactions to which children are prone when spring pollen begins to creep through the house. It was difficult to keep an eighteen-month-old in bed all day, but they rugged him up and wiped his nose and imbued him with vegetable soup.

By the following Tuesday, when my mother next visited, the child was already dead. He’d passed away suddenly only the night before in Camperdown Children’s Hospital, from a second allergic reaction to his medication. The mysterious red welts which the doctors could not explain still rose through the child’s pores as he lay on one of the morgue’s stark white sheets. The two sisters held each other and rocked back and forth, pressing their faces into the hollows of one another’s necks, my aunt’s burgeoning foetus held fast in the tight lock their bodies created.

Gerry drove the old MG down from the mountains on the day of the funeral. The white casket was as small as an enamelled toy box. On the way to the crematorium, it sat like a mute ghost in the back seat between my mother and the child’s father. When they lifted it out, it looked as if it could be simply blown away by the tempestuous wind sweeping through Rookwood that day.

My parents returned to Katoomba the next morning. Gerry was still parking the car as my mother walked dolefully up the stairs of their building. She was halfway up the second flight when the old woman who lived in number three shot out of her flat and called my mother’s name. The old woman usually kept to herself, and despite my mother’s attempts to trade recipes and knitting patterns, to conjure up a little morning tea and scones, the woman had always seemed quite indifferent to domesticity’s lighter pastimes.

But that day, when they met on the landing, she directly called my mother’s name and touched her arm.

“Don’t worry over that child you’ve lost,” she soothed, resting one hand against my mother’s cheek. “He’ll be back soon. Just don’t you worry.”

And then she was gone. She disappeared into her flat as fast as she’d shot out of it. My mother stood unsteadily on the landing and held on to the bannister. Twenty three days later her doctor confirmed she was pregnant. Thirty two weeks later she bore her first son.

Having been raised in the shadow of the afterworld, I settled rather comfortably into the practises and paraphernalia of the Witchcraft Shop. I made a point of befriending the eye painted on the wall of our room, and would often sit staring back into it whenever I felt sad or confused. Pete read my tarot cards one night, and the whole reading pivoted around the card of The Magician, which appeared in an apparently significant place in the pattern of cards on the laminex table, a place not far from the salt and pepper shakers which indicated my symbolic future. Pete predicted a long and fruitful union with the man who represented the figure on the card, who was swathed in a red robe, his arms raised into some potent gesture. He reminded me of a clean-shaven Jesus. When I pressed for more details, Pete couldn’t tell me if I’d met the man yet, or if he remained in the ambiguous months ahead. My stomach widened into a series of small thrills, and I silently speculated on who he might be. The Magician…the magician…a long union with the magician…I quickly dismissed Donald and Flipper—and even Grimaldi, whose profession was nicely aligned with the card.

It would have to be Romano, I decided. Romano, the whisperer, the urban wanderer, the illusion-keeper. I remembered the way he’d touched the small of my back as we’d crossed Fifth Avenue, and began counting the weeks till our return to New York.

Pete had peaked our interest in the future with the tarot reading and when he invited us in the following evening, for a reading from his crystal ball, we couldn’t help ourselves. The smooth crystal was about the size of a navel orange, and Pete kept it wrapped in a purple silk handkerchief. He let me hold it for a moment, but then briskly swept it out of my hands and told me not to look into it. In the crystal’s cloudy universe I had expected to see a scene from some point in my own life, actors in period costume performing a script which was yet to be written, enacting a future moment of euphoria or fear.

Pete sat us down at his kitchen table and lit the clean wick of a new red candle. His place smelled weird, something between over-ripe bananas and kitty litter, though I saw no cat about. Through the flickering candlelight I noticed the random, darting movements of cockroaches and a stack of dishes in the sink. There were a couple of smooth white bones propped against the dish-rack, and some sort of animal jaw sat on top of the utensil tray, grinning lewdly back at me. A heavy, full-length mirror was propped against one wall, and reflected a circling mobile Pete had made out of finger-sized plastic dolls and metal crucifixes. Beside the mirror was an altar: a black lacquer cabinet with candles, bowls, and an incense burner on top. A crucifix and skull hung above, along with various feathers and tendrils of Spanish moss.

Pete sat down and went to work. Still swaddled in the purple silk, the crystal ball lay in the curve of his hand and he began to rub it with the hanky as if he were polishing a piece of silver. When my eyes strayed towards it, he reminded me not to gaze into the ball. He continued to rub and Gerry took a guzzle of beer and burped.

Suddenly Pete stiffened and his eyes rolled back in his head for a moment. I sat there with my hands under my thighs and wondered how long he’d rehearsed that movement in the full-length mirror. His voice then assumed a ghostly, soprano quality as he gazed into the ball.

I see children, said the voice. I see children and I see sadness. I see a house falling down.

I rested my elbows on the table and leaned forward. The voice coming out of Pete was not his own. It was not quite a man’s and not quite a woman’s.

I see a scalpel. I see a drum. I see the shy man he used to be.

Gerry straightened up at the mention of himself and momentarily forgot to swallow his mouthful of beer.

I see you both growing older…I see a wedding…I see a small boy wearing a hat—a checkered cap. I see his small hands holding a lacquer box. I am seeing your father’s death. Your father is dying…I am seeing your father lifting away. I see the boy in the cap growing older. I see the box is shrinking as his hands develop. I see the man in the cap fathering…the man in the cap is fathering your father. The man in the cap is returning your father to you. And you’re an old woman now. And you’re holding that child, you’re rocking him back and forth and you know it’s him—you know that infant is your father…Even though you’re an old woman now, you’re an old woman who’s begun to notice the reaper’s breath on the bathroom mirror…

Pete paused and batted his eyelids. His chest rose with one long inhalation and his eyes rolled back again. I stole a glance at a part of the ball where the purple silk had fallen back, but saw only a flickering pink light buried in its glassy depths. I looked at Gerry, whose face had blanched to the colour of pale eggshells. My hand crept across the table toward him, and without looking, he took it in his and held it carefully, as if it too were a crystal ball whose secrets forbade the weight of his gaze.

Dew tiptoed across the window pane. The pink limbs of Pete’s mobile circled overhead. The thought of losing, of living without, and regaining my father years later made me dizzy, even though I was sitting down.

Pete wouldn’t reveal any other details about Gerry’s departure—no cause, no year. I wondered how long I would have to live with his absence before I’d recognise him enfolded within the bruised, purplish skin of a newborn. What would his calling card be? A gaze? A gurgle? An unformed upper lip which would make him wary of language, of his family, of his own breathy voice?

Would I discover him in his developing obsession for the sounds he’d later find he could raise from upturned pots and cake tins? Would episodes from my father’s childhood emerge and re-enact themselves? Would he grow up to father me once more, and on and on, this old act of love, this story of ours, transcending the casket’s trajectory?

The possibilities were intriguing and terrifying. I had not then anticipated my father’s death. I had not anticipated children, let alone grandchildren. But now it suddenly seemed necessary, a duty, to extend my father’s existence, or, more precisely, the life we had together, our union.

When Pete positioned me in front of the full-length mirror that night and showed me what to do, I stood still and gazed into myself, those two pupils dilated by darkness and desire. Shadows trembled on the wall, and the room began to breathe. I raised my arms and relinquished myself to the glass, not Narcissus’s cold blue lake, nor the Queen’s conversational mirror, for I knew that shadow in the background was my father, and he was watching, watching me watch myself momentarily surpass the silence and anonymity of that half-lit, temporal room.