Story for performance #174
webcast from Sydney at 07:59PM, 11 Dec 05

It was just a fuzzy photocopy. There were pages of it. The tail end of hundreds and hundreds of reproductions, reproductions of reproductions. You can see the dozens of hands that must have passed these pages over any number of machines, passed them to others to copy their own version and pass it on again. Department after department, division to division, clerk after clerk, hand to hand, like the repeated images in some 1940s movie, with bits cut out and slabs inked over, burying the deaths in black ink and slicing up any possibility of explanation, any description, accounting, or confirmation in the broken uncertain lines. Details and certainty drift far below the ever-multiplying strata of fading ink. Too much air between the lines, too many edges of too many letters not finished, too many gaps in the picture and the story seems furry and old before it hits the news.

Are you receiving me? Are you receiving me? She can hear the voice of the telephone operator of her childhood calling for confirmation down the line from the ‘exchange.’ (Making sure the connection was made.)

You peer as if with the eyes of the wives, the mothers, fathers, children. The words tell you the facts. There had been a message. There had been a warning. The danger had been known. But then there was a gap. There was an empty space then, when something failed to happen, and the next message wasn’t passed on. It just didn’t get off the ground and they didn’t know. They never heard.

You shouldn’t expect to know everything that happens to a loved one, especially when you are not there with them, and not even, truth be told, if you are standing right in front of them. (You are at a family party perhaps, or a gathering of close friends, it’s a sunny day and you are surrounded by quiet comfortable conversation. Maybe you relax and you let your attention go towards the one you are speaking to without being distracted by your own social anxieties, a need maybe to keep in touch with everything else that’s happening. This time you can relax and your focus shifts close in—maybe you haven’t met this person before or perhaps you haven’t spoken to them for a long time and your circle of attention draws in. And something changes. You turn back and you find everything has changed.) But you have let them go. You had to. They are doing important work, you know, and you get on with your life somehow, getting the children to school and fixing the guttering, meeting friends and seeing the odd movie maybe. You were doing it for something. Maybe you have never even thought of it as doing it for the country, maybe not even for the defense of a way of life that had been fought for and understood, but you have trusted somehow that your life was valued, even if you were sometimes kept in the dark. It was important work and while you constantly try to conjure their faraway days you didn’t expect to get to know every little thing that happened.

But this paper in your hands is blurred, many letters indistinguishable and some of the c’s look more like incomplete o’s. Your heart starts pounding as you read. As you struggle to make sense of these half-made letters, of the numbers of people that must have seen this before you, these guardians of the beloved flesh that you have entrusted to them. You peer at these letters, scrunch your eyes up and move the paper back and forth, trying to suppress the impatience, the panic even, building, your fingers trying to reach inside the paper, to peer beyond this insubstantial screen of the page to find the edges of the words. Your breath comes in shorter bursts and the lines seem to wander and dissolve, shimmering any meaning that might have come through this broken cobweb of facts.

Are you receiving me? Are you receiving me?

She sits at the edge of the garden and the world turns on this weekend between the passing of the laws and the next time. Chairs are scattered higgledy-piggledy among the weeds and random pebbles—where do they come from? Sliding back onto swept concrete slabs from nowhere—that bruise the bare feet as she drops from that little bit too high step to the ground to empty the early morning tea leaves. There’s a melee of twittering raucous birds and the soft roar of a plane sweeping along its air tunnel with the quiet exchange of neighbourhood voices. On the other ‘line’, another plane sears directly overhead spearheading a triangle of sound-filled air waves that silence everything out to its edges, then the quiet clattering of leaves as the din settles.

In a hushed place, somewhere, she imagines, thick little windows of black printed ink are rolling out over new pages, inscribing a shiny bank of new laws that spread across the pages. In this hiatus, she tries to see into what has happened and how to prepare for what might be coming, quite unsure that we have an accurate threat picture for the times.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Clare Grant.