Wishing to know how he should wrap the roses, the flower seller at the stand outside the town hall asked me what the occasion was. I said what it was and he said, ah, that's why it's been so busy. He then somewhat muddied the waters of the impression he'd just created, of the connection between his trade and the event happening on the other side of the city being newly discovered by him, by going on to tell me that an earlier customer had told him that the man who (allegedly) had killed the young woman had done it because he had autism. He said that he had responded to her that no, the (alleged) man knew how to rape and murder. He repeated this, almost shouting, while I nodded and tried to interject that I agreed that it wasn't something autism makes people do. He had visible disabilities himself and I did think that this was the reason why he was shouting, a lack of 'situational awareness' perhaps? At the same time, I very much did not like having the repeated shouted words 'raped and murdered' included as part of the commercial transaction in which I was participating. It occurs to me now that I'm probably attributing the bad social encounter to the flower seller's disability in the same way that I gather many people have linked the crime to the (alleged) criminal's disability. I suppose it would be better to just put it down to him being like other people - imperfect to the point of being an actual jerk, and really uncomfortable about the undeniable, brutal eruption of gendered violence into our quiet days, and not knowing what to do with the disturbance that eruption brings.
In the Woolworths under Lygon Court I looked for a candle, or rather for a box of candles. I saw in my mind's eye what it was I was looking for: white candles, in a long blue and white box, not the kind for dinner parties but so you can have some light when the power goes off. Where would you have looked? I looked in bit where the lightbulbs and batteries are, the barbecue stuff section, the stationery section, and in the minor household repairs area. I paused at the chemical air freshener area, where fruitily scented and extravagantly named candles in glass pots occupied a couple of shelf segments. Another woman stood eyeing the same candles. She caught my eye, smiled apologetically and said, Don't mind me. I almost asked her, are you trying to buy a candle? Unwilling to leave without a candle I went to the front of the shop to ask a staff member. There appeared to be two staff in the whole supermarket, a woman and a man at the cigarette counter. I asked the man, Where do you keep the candles? He laughed very softly and said, we don't have any. You've sold out of them, I said. We don't carry them anymore, haven't for years, he replied. He too had fielded many such requests in the course of the afternoon, and like all of us, jerks that we are, he did not know how to behave in the present hideous circumstances. I went back to the air fresheners and picked out a Just Organic Soy Wax Candle - Indian Lime and Coconut Scent.
At the park, I could not see the vandalism that had been perpetrated on the memorial during the night. It had been washed off and now people were standing on it. Do you know what it was? Somebody had painted a huge cock and balls on the grass. I mention this for instructional purposes: this is not an instance of people clumsily not knowing how to behave. A number of people today made remarks to me to the effect that they couldn't conceive of who would do such a thing. When I hear something like that said I am envious of the lucky lives those people must have led, to not know that rapists are everywhere and they are always ready to force themselves in. I put my yellow roses with the other flowers, in the centre of the ring of people standing still and quiet under the bright soccer field lights, also under a very dark sky. I don't think anybody present knew how to behave. I certainly didn't. I borrowed a lighter from a woman standing near me and lit my smelly candle.
I looked around at people's faces, at the sky, watched people come out of the crowd and put down flowers or candles. I would normally be at my yoga class at this hour on a Monday. My yoga teacher, who I have known and loved for more than twenty years, taught drama to Eurydice at school. I didn't see her but she was there. On the weekend she had told me she was doing what she could to cope, sitting with the anger and sadness when it came instead of pushing it away. So I tried to do that too, and when I felt like I would cry, I breathed deeply, and let the breath bring peace in and take grief out.
The vigil was this: half an hour of silence, a welcome to country and a statement of the purpose of he gathering, said with heartfelt clarity in the simplest of words taking less than a minute, then twenty minutes of silence, then a choir sang and then it was over. Do you know how to behave in a silent gathering of sadness and anger and grief? Do you know how to focus your mind and do you think it serves a good purpose to try to do this? Do you know how to behave in your thoughts when you know you are sometimes grieving not for the lost person, or her family, who you didn't know, but for yourself? Are you capable of not noticing that the man and woman behind you stink of ganja, that there are at least six women standing within your field of vision who are wearing the same burgundy cable-knit beanie topped with a ball of tan angora fluff, that the Premier and his wife are standing in front of you and they are both weeping?
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| Beanie |
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| Premier |
I photographed these things in an attempt to ignore them, and this did work, up to a point. Long periods of silence, in a crowd, are the realest. There are no words to interrupt your own processes, your own wandering and retrieval, your own reflection and feelings. Silence and time.
What do you think the choir sang? Will it surprise you to learn that it was Hallelujah? Do you understand that I felt complicated feelings about this and I felt complicated feelings about having complicated feelings, but all the same, this too was the realest. I could see the steam from their breaths. Silence, music, durable hard-won words that those who wanted to could sing, guided by a choir of local people who did an amazing job of singing on through, with their beautifully imperfect human voices cracking but rising in pure and familiar harmony.
As I rode away afterwards I thought about what Hilary Mantel wrote about England's collective mourning, on the occasion of, but not entirely about, Princess Diana's death:
For a time it was hoped, and it was feared, that Diana had changed the nation. Her funeral was a pagan outpouring, a lawless fiesta of grief. We are bad at mourning our dead. We don’t make time or space for grief. The world tugs us along, back into its harsh rhythm before we are ready for it, and for the pain of loss doctors can prescribe a pill. We are at war with our nature, and nature will win; all the bottled anguish, the grief dammed up, burst the barriers of politeness and formality and restraint, and broke down the divide between private and public, so that strangers wailed in the street, people who had never met Diana lamented her with maladjusted fervour, and we all remembered our secret pain and unleashed it in one huge carnival of mass mourning. But in the end, nothing changed. We were soon back to the prosaic: shirtsleeves, stacking chairs, little sticks. And yet none of us who lived through it will forget that dislocating time, when the skin came off the surface of the world, and our inner vision cleared, and we saw the archetypes clear and plain, and we saw the collective psyche at work, and the gods pulling our strings.I'm more sorry than I can say that Eurydice Dixon had her life taken away. May we never have to have another event like this vigil again.
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