Sophia’s Testimony (-requested by Carmen after the fact)
My original training was in archeology and I’ll admit people are a kind of dig to me. Right from the first moment I see them. I start dusting back earth carefully, sorting through rubble, collecting samples, bagging and tagging… Some of the samples I take through observation skills, the rest… Suffice to say, with Henry I knew he was for real from the moment he greeted me on Criterion Street. When you talk to the dead all your life you get a sense for the feel of a historical period. People from different places and times smell differently, move differently, sound differently, to you and I today. Such as the way there was no self-consciousness to his attempt to pull out my chair. He did it on reflex and then tried to prevent himself just in the manner of someone with a long-standing physical habit.
When you really pay attention to other people you start to notice things like that. But today most everyone's too attention starved to learn how to be powerful. All our most cherished secrets are like that, hidden in plain sight because no one can be bothered really doing them. Henry wasn't like that though. Which was another signature of his era. He was watching me just as closely. In my memory I was back in in a prattishly middle class home in West Kennett, years ago now, where quite unexpectedly I met other people like myself… We come in all sorts you see, sexes, social classes, ethical temperaments... Until that day back in Wiltshire, I hadn’t known there were other people who wanted to see what lies beneath the silt and dust strata of things.
“Thank you for meeting me today, Miss…”
“Don't stress yourself, Dickens,” I teased him with a little punch in the arm to loosen him up. "Sophia's cool with me."
My practiced eye saw more than his apologetic head ducking. It was clear to me from small nuances in his body language and grey-to-pale-blue eyes that here was someone who usually learns very fast. Someone who makes tremendous demands upon themselves and gets irritated quickly when he doesn’t immediately correctly master a new skill. I could also tell he was used to struggling to fit in and that the fear of not doing so went down to the self preservation level.
“My apologies. It is always the interaction between the formal and informal aspects of modern socializing where I trip up. Usually just when I think I have it all under control!”
I smiled as I watched him thank the waitress as she filled his water glass and took his order for a pot of loose-leaf black tea (Milk, no sugar). The stitches on the cuff of his shirt, which showed by about half an inch at the end of his grey suit coat as he extended his hand for the glass, were elegantly hand-stitched. The material was high quality linen. I wondered if this was Madeleine's work? I had already noticed her noticing me noticing her clothing!
His hands were long-fingered and fine boned in the way we palmists read as indicating a sensitive and artistic temperament. The fact his fingernails were very closely manicured to the finger, and his hands untoughened by hard work anywhere except around the fingertips led my guess that he was a musician.
“It must be difficult for you, adapting to all this.” My sympathy was genuine even though I could not truly imagine his predicament. An old friend of mine back home who is of the blunt sort, would have grunted at me: ‘enough with the small talk’, but Henry had a more gentlemanly style of frankness.
“I can see you’re very good with people, Sophia. It seems you have kindness in you, which is rarer still. I’m told you have The Sight like I do?”
Although he appeared to dodge my question I felt I learned about him from the fact he didn’t answer. There was a feeling of firm emotional discipline around this young man that held in check a brewing storm. At the moment I thought this a glass shattered in the kitchen and someone cried out in shock. Everyone in the café stopped talking for a moment.
Henry didn’t jump like everyone else. He looked back at me when I stared at him and raised one of his eyebrows faintly, but almost defiantly, as if to say ‘what?’ I sensed that like poltergeists, the ghosts of the young ones who had never spent the energy of their heart and sex, he had probably felt the swell and pop in his chest right before the sound. It wasn't the first time this had happened to him. Of course I didn’t take the bait by mentioning it. I’ve always found it best when in the presence of strong preternatural activity, the full capacity of which you aren't sure of yet, to never let them see surprise or fear.
“I do. Did you ever hate it, being Sighted? When you were growing up?”
“Indeed. My mother believed I was a changeling. Whenever I was disagreeable she would threatened to leave me out on the hill for my real family to come and get me. Now, you say you’ve seen a lot of things, Mi… My apologies,” he cleared his throat. “Sophia. For some reason I went to call you some other name and I can’t for the life of me think what it was now?”
It was my turn to raise my eyebrows but my expression was more on the sceptical side. I wasn’t buying his attempt to pass his ability off as a slip of the tongue. I figured he was trying to hedge his bets in case he’d guessed the first letter incorrectly, which he hadn’t.
“Well, I’ve had a few names over the years. Not many people know what they were though…” I left the words hanging in the air to see if he’d take the bait. He pretended not to notice, like a proud peregrine falcon that won’t take landed meat from your hand but must chase the lure. "It's kind of a 'I could tell you but then I'd have to kill you' sort of deal."
“Oh. Well seems best to steer away then. Perhaps instead, you could answer for me what I find to be my most burning current question? Why do you imagine I was sent back when so many were not?”
I wanted to tell him I wasn’t the Oracle of Fucking Delphi and I was over people wanting big universal answers to the meaning of things! After some of the bad calls I'd made in the past it was a wonder I was still practicing at all. Sometimes when a seer makes a mistake people get hurt. But sometimes you just have to take a deep breath and be the priestess you were looking for as a younger woman. Table the fact you don't have all the answers. Deliberately assuming that mindset I found myself thinking mythically. “I suppose you were able to make all of Hell weep for you or something, hon.”
He frowned as he sipped his tea and glanced up at me over the rim of the cup. “What do you mean?”
I smiled to myself. I felt so old under the weight of the piled up meanings around that story… That moment when you realize you’ve made a reference that only two humans left alive would have understood the exact significance of and neither of them are present. With a melancholy sigh I relied on explanation in the place where I missed understanding. “In the myth of Baldr, the Norse shining one, he was slain by the finest projectile, a little piece of mistletoe. Hel agreed to return Baldr on the condition that all the denizens of the Underworld would all weep as one for his sad tale. Everyone did except for Loki, if it hadn’t have been for Loki then Baldr would have been resurrected.”
He nodded to himself slowly. “Rather fitting,” he muttered. “I was slain by something very fine indeed. Mere words... I cannot imagine though why I would be wept for by so many. There are an ample number of tragedies in this world after all. Mine was but one drop of salt in the ocean.” He shrugged gracefully, as if the weight of excessive self-importance were something you could slip off the shoulder’s like an old coat, even at his age.
“Why did you kill yourself?” I asked.
“What makes you think I killed myself?”
“The air felt like a held breath when you walked up to me. Suicides feel like that. Suicides used to make me claustrophobic until I got used to it.”
“Fear,” he sighed. “Fear that if I refused to do so the man I loved would fall victim to state sanctioned murder for the crime of loving me. His mother made it clear to me that such an outcome was on the cards, and let me know what I needed to do to protect him.”
“Wow… Nice mother! And did your man get any say in this, whether he wanted this grand sacrifice in the name of his protection?” I was probably a bit sharp with him, but his story hit a nerve for me. It hit somewhere far too close to home.
Pain flashed into Henry's eyes that reminded me of sheet lightning, partly shielded and diffused by clouds that obscure the view of the thing itself. Curtly he shook his head and swallowed uncomfortably. “As to his mother, I imagine she felt she did what she had to.” Quite suddenly he looked back at me. “She had reason enough to be afraid for her son. Times were different then. May I now in turn ask you something personal?”
“I guess…”
“What brings you to Hobart?”
“Dark MOFO primarily, they paid for my flight.”
“Yet you’re here for something else. Looking for something… That’s what having the Sight is about, don't you think? The Noticing? Who are you hiding from and why does it scare you that you know I'm real?”
The hair was standing up on my arms as if I was afraid he somehow knew everything. “Pardon?”
“I was too frank, let me try again," his tone was calm and carried a cool, understated type of kindness which I first mistook for mere politeness. "What I mean to say is this: what you are and what I am puts us in league. You can tell me the truth safely.”
Stimulus question: Henry, please explain your thought process after meeting Alma up until the moment you solved his riddle?
One question obsessed me utterly. What kind of fairytale were we in? It was a question I'd lived with all my life but now Arthur had brought it to a head. I had assumed a love story. Yet the genre of the love story, ending with a marriage as they usually do, had never really made a lot of sense to me. My early demise had, in fact, been a result of the world convincing me that tragedy was the only kind of narrative where someone like me appears. So I guess I didn’t really look at Sophia immediately and think of her as someone who could help me. What was there left to help with? Everything I half-lived after he wasn't there anymore was an after thought. A postscript of sorts. Surely? It seemed too late for everything. Now was just about picking through the ashes of a vanished flame, trying to make sense of it, and speaking aloud my silenced tale.
I already knew the way I wanted to write about love wouldn’t be like your conventional love story. It would be serpentine, winding, crooked, and intricate full of quiet contemplative retreats where he and I would meditate on the mystery of one another from afar. Where we would shed skins and don new ones for each other’s fresh delight. Where we would only seek each other’s company again once we had watered the flower of our longing, only when we were aching for it, so that the sight alone of each other ravaged the senses. This is how he and I had begun on instinct alone, but we we had never arrived… It seemed as though perhaps we never would.
Love as an art form, with all the usual discipline you’d expect from art, rather than a gorged-down, unconscious biological imperative, was something I was born knowing the way I was music. I knew stories about love that didn’t wrap up with a happy ending, but instead bore it out through the trials of life its glory and bravery both untarnished by the corrosion of time. Already I knew how to begin it, and perhaps even how to live it, given the chance, I just didn’t know how to write it yet. I suppose nothing deemed unspeakable easily knows how to speak of itself, until suddenly it does, and the world rearranges to make room for a fresh influx of guerilla narrative.
“What’s the saddest fairytale you can think of?” You asked me while I was sitting in your lounge room with my notebook, trying to crack Arthur’s code. I see now that you weren’t far off leading me to the answer in that question, but clearly this was not the way I was meant to find it.
“It isn’t going to get solved this way,” I replied, getting to my feet and walking to the window. I leaned against the casement and looked out. The window didn’t face the street as those on my family home had done and I felt the loss of it. The front window was where I sat waiting for his arrival to repeat itself, as I had a feeling it would, time after time in different contexts, different streets, different eras.
“Maybe this is something Henry has to do alone,” Madeleine suggested tactfully.
If displeasure had been read into my comment it wasn’t present. I was merely in a state of deep concentration, the type that comes right before settling into the calm at the eye of the storm where all good ideas body forth from. Arthur knows me. This I must have faith in that if nothing else. He would know me anywhere, no matter what, and I would know him. And if that is so then he would have picked something that would fall into line with my most natural impulses, the things I would do if I was just acting normally….
“Research,” I suddenly said aloud to myself. “If I couldn’t solve it off the top of my head, I would do research! Carmen? May I borrow your internet machine?”
This is the way fairytales happen in the 21st century… They start with words like: I entered “Fairytale +Sea Shell +Mill wheel” on Google and the top hits were ‘The Little Mermaid’. And they finished with... I still don't know how they finish. He and I are history's suspension dots.
My heart began to gush a glut of ocean water into my throat. It stung but I swallowed hard. Without needing to elaborate I knew the story. Released in the 1840’s ‘The Sea Maid’ by Hans Christian Anderson was childhood reading material for Arthur and I. But which was the part that had contained an image of both a sea shell and a water mill? I searched for this and found in them in the part of the tale that deals with the sea maid’s journey to the dwelling of the sea witch, where she must pass through water mill-like swirling and over the skeletons of drowned men.
Drowned in a flooding Hobart rivulet, which contained multiple mill wheels, through which my battered corpse had to pass, I had gone full fathoms five to the sea witch’s depths where the skeletons of whales lurked. So this imagery brought the hairs to a stand on the back of my neck, to the tune of the pouring rain outside. But that was just only the beginning of my friend's ingenuity and subtlety.
As I continued the research I could feel his mind dancing with mine. I was on the blood trail the story was leaving. Finally it was truly pungent with truth! In the story Ariel was a fae creature fallen in hopeless love for a human man. The man hears her singing voice and greatly admires her. Later she rescues him from drowning. She is so enamored of him that when the sea witch offers to trade her two human legs to walk on land in return for her voice, she accepts. The sea witch cuts out her tongue, in later versions her voice is stored in a seashell. The sea witch tells her she can only earn a human soul if she is given the kiss of true love by her prince, otherwise she will simply turn into sea-foam. She agrees to these harsh conditions and the sea witch adds her voice to her ‘collection’.
As I read my fingers that itched to play but had not the quality of music in them twitched and burned. What if, as for the sea maid, I find him only to be unable to identify myself without my music? In the story Ariel gets her chance to be human and perhaps earn a soul but the prince will only ever love the owner of that beautiful voice he once heard, and Ariel has cut out her tongue so she cannot sing... This is the central wrenching tragedy of this saddest of the faerie tales…
She is locked out from receiving a human soul because he can love no one but the owner of that voice she no longer has. Given an option to save herself by doing harm to her beloved she prefers death to betrayal, and as the reward of an amoral universe is forced to watch him marry another.
Keeping her love silent the mermaid turns into sea foam, but her spirit is lifted up by the faeries of air who tell her there is still a chance for her if she spends hundreds of years doing good deeds. In later versions of the story the little mermaid gets her voice back from the sea witch at the end, the sea witch has been collecting voices in sea shells.
As soon as the thought of voices in seashells occurred I thought of the image of the shell inside the ear that Arthur had showed me. It had always been the way he skin-rode people, after-all, going in through the ear… I looked up seashells and ‘collection’ down the rabbit hole of the hidden Allport collection.
Suffice to say there’s a whole Huon Pine 'cabinet of curiosities' of which a large part is devoted to a sea-shell collection, probably started by Cecil’s mother and continued on by him and his son Henry… The idea of Cecil’s mother as the sea-witch who stole my voice and prevented me declaring my love made sense. And the idea that Arthur would secret this virtue he meant to support my work with, this magical packed punch he'd brewed in our denial, into something associated with giving me back my stolen voice unwords me utterly.
Wrapped up in the layers of meaning is Hans Christian Anderson’s own unrequited love for a young man, and his pain when forced to keep his love that dared not speak its name silent whilst watching his beloved marry someone else. Tears rolled down my face as I read. Arthur didn’t just know indeed how I think, it seemed to me he was saying: I see you. I know you. I knew you before I knew you. I know and see your silent pain that none other witnessed. For the first time since I’d come back the oyster-cut pain in my feet stopped smarting. As if in the simple act of witnessing the knives I walked over for him Arthur had miraculously closed up the stigmata of it.
Tears gushed a raw flood of life over my face and I dropped back my head. At that moment in my mind’s eye I saw a beacon light go up from my chest, parting my ribs into the night-sky. The intensity of the feeling made we gasp because it was black hot shot with silver and smelt of burning whale fat. I felt the lighthouse I had become and let even the light tangled into my bones erupt towards the heaven in offering with one message.
I’m here.