Black Mirror by Gail Jones Page B

she could master this difficult piece without acceding to the organic temptation to play with both. Jules remembers seizing the wrist of her right hand to signal his distress, because he felt he was dying, because his whole body was pulsing, and because his mother, undistracted, was blithely preoccupied with playing the piano. The music halted abruptly and Hélène bent down; she saw her son open-mouthed, quaking, his whole face distressed.
    Single-handed , Jules Levy would joke to Victoria; I learnt about mortality with an accompaniment, single-handed.
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    In the darkroom Victoria watched images of herself emerging. In a chemical revelation she floated into being, silver and shiny. Jules swayed her face and her body in the developing emulsion, and then hung her, dripping, among the rows of brides. She saw herself reversed, whitened, immobilised, etherealised, shrun ken and wholly contained within rectangles. She was almost unrecognisable to herself. That moonstone flesh. That objectivity.
    In the dark-room light his skin was varnished bright red: her ruby jewels.
    Kiss me, she said.
    She stood on tiptoe to reach him and Jules bent obediently for a kiss.
    Victoria slid her hands into his trousers and asked him to undress her. He fumbled at the fake pearl buttons of her blouse, and one pearl pinged off, rolling somewhere into the darkness. She placed his slender hand directly on her breast: This is my heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, uncontained in any rectangle. She slid her two hands around to his belly, and peeled away his trousers, slowly releasing him, then rubbed against his thighs and fondled his penis. With the force of her whole body she willed him to develop.
    Above them lustrous images swung. Beyond his shoulders she could see herself naked in miniatures. Upside-down and downside-up. He had made print after print, so that she was a multiplication.
    Drops of fluid fell, and she wiped them from his body with her blouse.
    It was only afterwards that Victoria noticed that they were both partially dressed: Jules still had his shirt on and she still had her skirt on.
    They were like the two fitting halves of some mythical unphotographed creature.
    And it was only afterwards she pondered his casual remark: ‘over-exposure and under-exposure are both forms of invisibility.’

4
    In the waxy beige light of late afternoon Victoria is lying asleep with her mouth wide open; a fine thread of spittle shines on her chin. She appears to be dead, but her breathing is audible. Cécilia has left a purple-coloured cyclamen on the bed-table beside her; the intensity of its colour and its pretty liveliness accentuate Victoria’s pale emaciation. As Anna leans across the bed she catches a coil, as of incense, of the honeysuckle aroma of desert dust; or is it the similar scent of warm dried apricots? Old people begin to smell of all they have met, Anna thinks. They surrender to the permeability of elements. They capture time in these bodily and distillate ways.
    When Victoria wakes up she believes, for a second or two, that there is a snail moving silently along the ridge of her cheek. Anna must pluck it away; she obligingly lifts the invisible creature and pretends to flick it out the window.
    Is it gone? Victoria asks. Her tone is forlorn. She is still on the dreamy periphery of delusion.
    Gone.
    This range is difficult and Anna is still unused to it; she finds herself strung double-crossed between fussy old-womanliness and a capricious storyteller who is pleased to pronounce on the superiority of her knowledge and experience. Victoria discloses a life gaudily melodramatic and striped with punctuation marks; yet she sobs, she is depressed, she beads each narrative with ellipses.
    Let me wipe your chin.
    Piss off, Anaesthesia.
    Anna wipes her anyway. For Victoria the hand moving the cloth at her face is her mother Lily-white, long ago. She sees a net of black fingers and gauze dabbing at a wound. It was a