painted child skipping on the wall of a factory, encircled by the caption Skipping Girl Pure Malt Vinegar. Nelly had montaged this old black-and-white image over a contemporary streetscape, so that while the painted child remained stranded in two dimensions, her metal twin rose airily above her in the sky.
Tom knew the advertising sign of old. His uncle had pointed it out, on a sightseeing evening drive, when the Loxleys first came to Australia; the sign was one of Tom’s earliest memories of the city. The skipping girl wore a scarlet bolero over a snowy blouse, with white socks and strapped black shoes. A neon rope lit up in alternation above her head and at her feet to simulate movement. Her red skirt fl ared like a night-blooming poppy.
Modern magic was at hand: Tom Googled the sign. He learned that it dated from 1936: the city’s first animated neon sign, calculated to imbue dull vinegar with the romance of novelty. Over time it had deteriorated, been dismantled and replaced; the sky-sign he knew as a child was that copy.
When the vinegar factory relocated to a different suburb, the skipping girl was left behind. By then neon was no longer glamorous, no longer a sign of the times. Besides, the skipping girl had become a landmark. There was a local outcry at the suggestion that she might be moved. Eventually, as buildings were demolished and the streetscape altered, she was shifted along the road to a different rooftop. There she froze in a deathly sleep. It had been years now since her turning rope had lit up the night sky. She had entered the memory of a generation as a spellbound red fi gure.
Tom could remember the contrary emotions his fi rst encounter with the sign had brought. His instinctive surge of pleasure in the magical sight quickly turned queasy. The big red child’s mimicry of the human seemed tainted with malevolence. The boy twisting around in the back seat of the car for a last glimpse of her was reminded of the long, dim mirrors of India that rippled with secret being; objects that shared her strangeness, denizens of a zone somewhere between artifi ce and life. She called up a personage who had terrified Tom when he was very young, the tall red scissorman who comes / To little boys who suck their thumbs.
There was this too: the sign continued the kingdom of things into the sky. Fresh from a country where giant cutouts and logos and billboards were still rare, Tom was subject to a sentiment he was too young to articulate: that the skipping girl’s presence violated something that should have been inviolable. It was a perception that would dim over time, as he grew accustomed, like everyone else in the city, to the invasion of the sky by commerce. Now tiny silver planes routinely inscribed brand names on the atmosphere, as if the blue air itself were a must-have accessory. People stepping out of their houses in the morning lifted up their eyes to hot-air balloons emblazoned with trademarks, hanging from heaven like Christmas-tree baubles.
Nelly had a printer’s tray called Own Your Own that displayed an identical vinegar label, each featuring a skipping girl, in every niche. Tom studied a colour reproduction of the construction in Art & Australia. There was a depressing hint of the cage and the production line about the imprisoned, endlessly reiterated figure. It was reinforced by the fi ne white-painted wire mesh fastened down a vertical line of compartments. But closer examination revealed that in all but two recesses, a tiny box camera had been painted in at the girl’s feet. Its viewfi nder faced out, suggesting it was for her use.
Tom supposed it was Nelly’s way of pointing out that the skipping girl had floated free. In acquiring mythic status she had become more and less than the product she embodied: a servant of the market who exceeded the commodity that bore her name. Once an emblem of modernity, she had fallen out of fashion and into a life of her own.
He walked up to Victoria Street one evening while the light still held, past a glass-walled gym where scantily clad bodies had the stripped look of fish. It was the first time in years he had scrutinised the skipping girl sign. He saw that the building on which it perched had been converted into offices and apartments. A woman came jogging out of the lobby, murmuring ‘Beat it!’ as she adjusted her earphones.
Gazing up at the red figure with a piece of moon at its back, Tom felt his old foreboding flicker. He had just remembered that the skipping girl was double-sided. From the pinnacle of a metal frame, she stared along the street in two-faced vigil. Her eeriness was immanent. Nelly’s image-making merely drew on that quality and intensifi ed it.
A Prime Cut declared the real estate board adorned with the picture of a bull in front of a disused warehouse. You are everywhere said the vertical scrawl on a telephone pole beside it. Across the road, a multi-storey shopping centre was rising from a hole in the earth. With its empty window-sockets and fragmentary stairs, it might have been archaeological; a ruin from the future.
The tremor usually settled after breakfast, but that morning Iris’s hands went on shaking. She jabbed and jabbed at the remote. It took both hands to raise it to chest level and aim it at the set, which made finding the right button awkward.
Iris sat before grainy footage of heads bobbing in water, her mind taking its own direction. An incident from her department store years swam up to meet her. She had been on her way to Hosiery one lunch hour when she heard her name. A stranger stood in her path, a tremulous form in a checked cap and navy jacket. ‘Iris!’ he said again. ‘I say, it is Iris, isn’t it?’ He peered at her; she saw a brick-red pear packed with teeth. ‘Frank Saunders.’ Iris smiled in propitiation, certain he was one of Audrey’s perverts. He said,‘We met in India. I was in the Hussars with Larry Fitch.’
What struck Iris was the corrugated column rising from his collar. The image was overlaid by another, a muscled neck with a little scar at the base. Her hand went to the stranded gilt at her throat.
Saunders was saying, ‘I say, Iris, you do look tremendously well.’
He swayed closer. Stale sweat and fresh beer muddled the fragrant department store air. An officer who gave off an odour of caramel took Iris in his arms; behind his shoulder she glimpsed a presence, sandy hair, a Fair Isle pullover. It was as if a sideboard or a standard lamp should come to life and address her. ‘Do you remember…?’ began Saunders, and Iris said, ‘No.’ She said, ‘My name is Mrs Arthur Loxley. I don’t know you from Adam.’ In her wake, he called, ‘I say, I say…’
Iris shook in her chair, and loud farts rolled from her. She was blocked up, again. Once she could have turned to milk of magnesia. Lately, however, even a half-dose mitigated relief with disaster.
When you could no longer manage the lavatory: that was when they put you in a home.
She had reached the age where choice is synonymous with fear. Iris was afraid, in this matter, of an alliance between Tom and Audrey; an ancient animal mistrust of the strong and the young.
She feared soiling herself. She feared the consequences, impressed on her at an early age, of irregularity. Sebastian de Souza had locked himself in the lavatory every morning at twenty-five minutes past seven and remained there until he had extruded a well-formed stool. His wife and child followed him in turn. Thankfully there was a good strong fl ush, although the slit-windowed cabinet remained pregnant with odours. The implications of the ritual far exceeded hygiene. To fail the daily rendezvous was to fall short of a moral standard. Diarrhoea was heathenish; constipation warned of wilfulness. If the flesh was disobedient, the spirit was base. Bodies that lacked discipline required control.
Iris’s son said, ‘Stop worrying, Ma.’ He said it often, with varying degrees of irritation. But Iris’s thoughts leaped and raced, skittish with fear.