The Submerged Cathedral Read Free Page B

engagement years ago, their disbelief. She heard them talking in the kitchen, and then Ellen cornered her in the laundry. ‘You know there’s something wrong with you, don’t you?’ Ellen had said it slowly, pity in her voice. Jocelyn could only finger the rounded concrete edge of the laundry trough. ‘Yes,’ she had murmured. She knew.
    Even when her father held her hand briefly in the garden, and patted it, and said, ‘Never mind’, she knewthat it was shameful, this want in her for more than she was offered.
    But now, as she pulls the green swimsuit over her breasts and feels the flick of elastic on her skin, she has no shame, for she knows something else is happening to her. There is some opening up of possibility not to do with Martin, but because of him.
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    Sometimes, after three hours’ work and only twelve pages of her proofing-marks, the frustration of this labour infuriates her, this plodding through someone else’s laziness. She feels like a scullery maid, scrubbing the stains from someone else’s clothes, picking up their mess. She flicks the pencil across the table, listens to it roll.
    She walks through the house, down the front steps, across the lawn and the sandy track. Sometimes she suspects it is this early private summer, it is the sun and the water causing this planetary shift of her world. But she knows it is not the sun and the water.
    She walks past the sidelong glance of the woman two doors down who stands watering her lawn in a chequered apron. The light is so bright she walks with half-closed eyes. Adjusting from the closely read print to the outdoor space and light, her eyes blur and reshape what they see.The maps in the encyclopaedia have begun to make her see things aerially, turn the headlands into vegetation maps, the bays and points into geometric slabs and curves.
    She bends to pick up a small turreted green shell and puts it in her pocket. Already she should go back to the house and the manuscript. She can almost recite the text waiting on the page.
    Ayers Rock, the world’s largest monolith, is six miles round, more than a mile and a half long and 1,100 feet high, rising from the flat surrounding earth.
    But she strides over the white sand to the sea’s edge in her bathing costume. She steps into the thrilling cold water. It shocks her from the ankles up, and she starts to run. The water flashes up all around her and she lifts herself to dive, and in the sun and the swing of her body she thinks an innate, almost cellular prayer: May we never lose this .
    Lying on her back in the water she looks down the beach to see how far she has come, the Rock looming in her mind, ridged and red like some mammoth sea creature’s back. In the distance the house faces the waves, white and open. She gets out of the water and walks on the sand, towards the end of the beach. In the shade she grasps a sapling trunk and pulls herself up onto the stone that marks the beginning of a steep track into the bush.

    The encyclopaedia is studded with short pieces on what the writers imagine to be separate aspects of the Australian national character, its culture. Sporting Life. The Lingo. Australia as a deck of playing cards.
    She reads of the bush and disappearance, of McCubbin’s painting, of people found in the outback by black trackers; real-life stories turned into myth. There are rumours of missing children, local newspaper reports through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tracking suspicious vanishings. And macabre discoveries – like that of a baby’s bones found in a hidden bushland grave in a remote part of western Victoria, now a monastery’s land.
    To Australians the bush is a dangerous, mysterious place , she reads.
    She passes over these pages and onto other mythologies, of bushrangers, or explorers. But the idea of an abandoned dead child, lying in the earth as if grown there, stays with her for days. And the absurdity of