Black Mirror Read Free Page B

summoned inside by her name; she will shift from the mauve into the lemon light, and they will sit together, facingeach other, listening to the droning wireless so neither is obliged to talk. Chops. Mashed potatoes. A silent cleaning-up. Father leaves for work; Anna returns, padding on barefeet, to the open verandah, and watches the dark unfurl its patterns of planets and stars.
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    Sometimes Anna likes to pretend she is invisible: this way she can follow her father into the mine. She watches him pack his crib — a slab of bread, left-over meat and a thermos of tea — then sits on the crossbar as he cycles away into the night. The wind is cold on her invisible face and she leans forward affirmatively, like a racer on a circuit. The bike swerves through streets, a show-off, a skite, leaps gullies, circles poles, recklessly accelerates. It travels as though flying, past pubs and shacks, past the Methodist church, and the primary school, and the falling-down Mechanics’ Institute. It speeds down the brothel road, just for fun, and red lights stream away and scarlet women wave. Other shift workers are also on bicycles, pedalling hard to produce a twinkling headlight, and they converge in a kind of neat and synchronous solidarity, an asterix that only a racing child notices.
    Ahead Anna will see the gold-mine curve upwards to greet them. It has looped strings of lights, like a giant ship, and seems to shudder with mechanical noise and activity. These sounds are imprecise but somehow appalling. There is a screech as the metal cage is slowly lowered and a series of internal growls and below-surface rumblings. Invisible Anna standsthere in the cage with the miners, and descends and descends. Blind dark sweeps over her: she imagines this is like death. But she will have a lamp on her head that will cast a small moon into the blackness before her; and as she follows her father down a corridor deep into the earth, as she experiences tunnel-vision and earth-smell and scary enclosure, the little moon governed by her head rests and slides on his back. He recedes, held into being by her fragile projection. In her imagination the tunnel is so low that he must bend his head like a cyclist.
    It is as though she has been there. It is as real as her two hands.
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    At home on the verandah, visible Anna tucks her knees up under her chin and languidly — naughtily — unpicks the hem of her dress. She trails kinky thread, like a girl in a myth. She is thinking: Twelve hundred, he is at level twelve hundred. When she moves into the house, she sees glowing in the dark the phosphorescent lime-green of numbers on the wireless, and uses this eerie beacon, which her father habitually leaves, to navigate towards her bedroom without turning on a light. With the sound of the wireless somewhere behind her, blaring ABC, and the smell of mutton still in the air, and the night cold swiftly descending, Anna touches the outline of her bed, slides into it hoping for dreams, and thinks of the mysterious word moonstruck. Moonstruck at twelve hundred .

    In the blazing goldfields little Anna is just another thin sandy child in a hemless cotton dress, covered with the flower print of a blossom wholly unknown to her; she is just another scallywag miner’s daughter. Her home is monumental and there is a scale to things that is certainly inhuman: even if she were God looking down, the poppet heads above the mines would seem out-sized, the grey slag dumps, like ancient monoliths, would be too massive and solid, and the miles and miles of railway sleepers laid across the red dirt, a ladder horizontally to travel on, a reaching promise of other places, would be too repetitious and too extensive. Once a teacher drew railway lines on the blackboard to illustrate the principle of converging perspective and Anna thought: Yes, that is it, that is exactly what I know .
    In her precocity she recognised recession as the shape of desire. She knew too the