COPYRIGHT

Fourth Estate

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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2003

The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007149308

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007394869

Version: 2016-08-24

DEDICATION

For Peter

1942–1998

In memoriam

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Ocean of Brisbane

North of Nowhere

For Mr Voss or Occupant

Unperformed Experiments Have No Results

Our Own Little Kakadu

Cape Tribulation

Flight

Frames and Wonders

Nativity

Credit Repair

South of Loss

Night Train

Litany for the Homeland

The End-of-the-Line End-of-the-World Disco

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Other Books by

About the Publisher

THE OCEAN OF BRISBANE

His voice came out of the black space between the two projectors. When a slide slipped off the wall, dropping into nowhere, the tiered funnel of the lecture theatre was so dark that the darkness seemed to rub itself against her, furry, like the legs of spiders. She shivered. Then a bubble of light would come, a coloured diagram or a photograph would appear on the screen straight ahead but below her, and words would unfold themselves on the other screen, the one that was angled across a corner of the room, high up, and therefore eye-level with the tier where she sat. She would see him then for a moment, shadowy, a juggler of ideas, images, impenetrable words, remote control buttons, a magician waving his arms in the twilight cast by the screens.

I watched her watching him.

She was trying to explain him to herself.

I watched how she held onto her own body, arms hugged tightly, and how she kept shivering (it looked like shivering) in the sweltering airless room.

Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper to her. I wanted to put my hand on her arm, soothing, but it would have alarmed her. Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper. He’s just as much a mystery to himself.

He spoke, and his words settled lightly onto the cantilevered screen in black block capitals, crowding, jostling like branches full of crows, she had always been frightened of crows, the way they swooped at you, dive-bombed, that time on the farm at Camp Mountain, long before Brisbane, she was still a child at Camp Mountain, the beaks slashing at her head (or maybe magpies, was it? had they been magpies?), they go for the eyes, Always wear a hat, teachers warned, and if attacked, cover the eyes.

ELECTRON MICROSCOPY, the screen said.

OF CRYSTALS.

And then in a fluttering rush: OF AN ALPHA-HELICAL COILED-COIL PROTEIN EXTRACTED FROM THE OOTHECA OF THE PRAYING MANTIS.

The black letters swooped at her and instinctively she covered her eyes. I watched the way her hands shook slightly (how would she speak to him? how had they ever really? and yet after all these years she had been hoping … but what language could they possibly use?) and all the time, through her fingers, she was watching for crevices of hope, for something to grab onto, and there was something, crystals, yes, she recognised that, he used to have a set, those heavy headphones, telling them he could hear Indonesia, England, the cricket scores, winding the world into his room, swallowing it, he had this terrible hunger, this unnatural … this kind of greed, she could never predict what … and it was never big enough for him even then, his room, their house, their lives, Brisbane, the country, the world, he was like one of those alien children on the late late movies, growing into strangeness, his mind butting against the ceiling, webbed toes, a third eye, foreign to her from the beginning. She pressed a hand against her stomach and stared at it. Where had he come from?

“Coiled-coil,” he was saying, from the dark space between the projectors. On the lower screen were intricate diagrams that looked like tangled chain-necklaces, or twisted ropes of sausages perhaps. “Solving the structures,” he said. “Electron diffraction … especially certain membrane-embedded protein strings resistant to X-ray imaging.” A ghostly pointer picked out the braided strings, and she turned to look at me suddenly, so specifically, that I heard her thoughts, heard the click of association, or saw it, and felt for my plaits against my shoulders. It was like groping for an amputated limb, the coiled coils of childhood.

It seems only yesterday … her look said.

The coiled coils of language, I thought, and knotted myself into the puzzle. I saw diagrams of shared and divergent lives braiding and unbraiding themselves. Alpha-helical, alphabetical, we both rode in an Alfa Romeo once, it belonged to someone his older brother knew, I think, someone from Sydney, the wind whipping through the coiled coils of our hair and we two thinking we were Christmas, swimming through Brisbane like fish. There was nothing to it in those days. We could walk on water. We thought we were the beginning and the end, the ant’s pants, the ootheca of the praying mantis, no less.

O-ith-ee-ka,

oh I thee thir,

thaid the blind man

though he couldn’t thee at all.

What the hell did ootheca mean?

Bet you don’t know, bet I do, don’t, do, don’t too, do so, don’t, do. Those two, our mothers used to say, will argue till the cows come home. Fish out of water, other kids’ mothers said, but we weren’t, we were in our own element, we porpoised through books, we dived into argument, we rode our bikes into endless discussion and rainforest trails where we disappeared and swam in private time, no time, timeless rainforest rockpool debate time. We cavorted in the ocean of Brisbane, our own little pond.

I computed the odds against solving the structure of memory which dissolves and devolves and solves nothing.

Afterwards, waiting for him under the jacarandas, we fanned ourselves with the lecture handouts. From time to time, she smoothed hers out against her skirt and studied it with intense concentration, as though memorisation of the print might yield up a meaning. When she saw me looking, a kind of rash flared across her cheeks and she scrunched the handout into a fan again and whipped it back and forth. She said nervously, apologetically: “Me and his dad …” Then she panicked about her grammar and bit her lip and began again. “His father and me … I, I should say, I and his dad … the Depression and the war and everything … You know, Philippa, I’m sure Brian’s told you, we only got to Grade 6.”

“Oh heck,” I said, “Brian’s stuff is double-dutch to me too. To nearly everyone. To 99.9 per cent of the people in the world, I would say.”

“Is it?”

“Oh God, yes. Brian lives in the stratosphere. He’s really — oh, please don’t, Mrs Leckie.”

“I thought …” She was fumbling in her handbag, sniffling. “I’m not very … I thought it was just me. I don’t want to embarrass him.”

“You won’t, you won’t! How could you even think such a …” There were people jostling us, and we had to step back, step aside, adjust ourselves. We eased our way to the outside edge of the crowd, beyond the cloisters, away from the hot blanket of bodies. “He’s proud as punch that you’re here. Look, he’s just coming out now, he’s looking around for you, see?” I waved madly and Brian made a sign of acknowledgment with his hand and went on talking to some colleague.

“You can’t blame him,” she said meekly. “It’s just, sometimes we wished … his dad wished …” She mopped at her face with the Kleenex she had fished from her bag.

“It’s dreadfully sticky, isn’t it?” I could feel runnels of sweat making a slow tickling descent across my ribcage.

“I wished for his dad’s sake.” She studied her much creased fan again, its print smudging from sweat and oil. Electron microscopy of crystals of an alpha-helical … “Me, actually, to tell you the truth, Philippa, I got to Grade 8 but I never let on. Not while his Dad was alive.” A little smile passed between us, woman to woman — Well, that’s what we do, isn’t it? — and then she said wistfully, “His dad used to talk to him about the crystal set, he understood all that, they used them in the war, I think.”

Delicately, with the thumb and index finger of both hands — handbag slung at crook of left elbow, lecture handout pressed under upper right arm — she took hold of the front of her bodice, just below the shoulders on each side, and lifted the polyester away from her body, raising it gently, lowering, raising, a quick light motion, ventilating herself. “Your dad, Philippa. That was a nasty bit of a turn. Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I said, startled. “He’s fine.” I fanned myself vigorously, guiltily, because I had forgotten, completely forgotten, like a fist squeezing his heart, he says, an item in letters, just a warning, the doctor says, Doctor Williams it was, you remember him, he says at our age you’ve got to expect … “How did you —?”

“Your mum, I think it was, told me … yes, I saw her on the bus one day. Going into the city. We had a chat about you and Brian.”

“Oh dear!”

“She had pictures of all the grandchildren in her purse, I couldn’t get over it, little Philippa Townsend with those big teenagers. And all that snow, I just can’t imagine. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we … ? To me, you’re still that little girl swinging on the front gate talking to Brian after school. You don’t look a day older, Philippa.”

“Oh, don’t I wish!” I was swamped by the smell of frangipani beside their front gate. It was so intense, I felt dizzy. Lightly, indifferently, I asked, “The frangipani still beside your gate?”

“Fancy you remembering! His dad planted that. His dad was very good with his hands.”

“Yes, I remember. Your roses especially —”

“He was a quiet man, Ed, a very shy man, but he was a good man, no one realises how … such a good …” She began pleating her skirt in her fingers. “I suppose Brian told you about the nights, but it wasn’t his fault, those awful nights, those terrible …” She turned away. “I feel …” she said, putting out a hand, casting about for some sort of support. “I don’t feel too …” Her hand drifted aimlessly through the wet air. “I think I have to sit down,” she said.

“There’s a bench, look.” I led her towards it. “We don’t have to go to the reception if you’re not feeling well. I can drive you home.”

“I don’t know,” she said uncertainly. She pulled at the damp frizz on her forehead, trying to cover a little more of the space above her eyebrows. The space seemed vast now. Her fingers explored it nervously, scuttling across what felt like an acreage of blotched skin. I shouldn’t have had it permed so soon before, she thought wretchedly. This dress is wrong. I should have worn the green suit. I shouldn’t have worn a hat. She said plaintively, “You were so clever, you and Brian. Such clever children.” Her voice came from a long way back, from our high school years or even earlier, from the times of swinging on the gate. “He’ll go far, teachers used to say,” and her eyes stared into nothing, following the radiant but bewildering trajectory of Brian’s life. She spoke as sleepwalkers speak: “He’ll go far. They always told us that, I remember.” She looked vaguely about. “I mustn’t miss the tram, Philippa.”

As though the action were somehow related to the catching of trams, she stretched her hands out in front of her and studied them, turning them over slowly, examining the palms, the backs, the palms again. Her hands must have offered up a message, because she gave a sudden sad little yelp of a laugh. “I’m being silly, aren’t I? There’s no trams anymore.”

“Oh, I do that too,” I said. “The trams still run in my Brisbane.” I tapped my forehead with an index finger.

“You know who I ran into in the Commonwealth Bank one day? Last year it was, the big one, you know, in the city, on the corner of Adelaide Street? Mrs Matthews!”

“Mrs Matthews?”

“Richard’s mum, you remember?”

“Oh, Richard,” I said, dizzy with loss. It was so unsettling, this vertigo, hitting sudden pockets of freefall into the past.

“Richard went away too,” she said. “They never see him. It just seems like yesterday when Brian and Richard and you and the others … and Julie … and Elaine. It was terrible what happened to Elaine. I cried when I read it in the paper. It’s not fair, it isn’t fair.” She picked up a leaf and began shredding it nervously and then dropped it. She ventilated herself again, holding the dress away from her skin, shaking it lightly. “Everyone’s children went away.”

“God, it’s hot,” I said. “The staff club will be air-conditioned though. For the reception. I wish they’d hurry it up.”

“But you come back a lot, Philippa. I saw in the paper —”

“Oh yeah. Every year. Brisbane’s got its hooks in me, I reckon. Look, he’s coming at last, he’s seen us. Oh damn.”

We watched the student who had intercepted him: jeans and t-shirt, sandals.

“They all look scruffy,” she said. It was an affront to her. Even the adults, the university people, the ones who would be at the reception, even they looked scruffy. Well, not scruffy exactly. But more or less as though they were dressed for an evening barbecue at the neighbours’. I shouldn’t have worn the hat, she saw. I shouldn’t have worn the corsage. But how could she have known? She had thought it would be like going to a wedding.

And he could have been a bridegroom coming towards us, easing away, trailing worshipful students like membrane-embedded alpha-helical streamers. He had the kind of bridegroomly self-consciousness and forced gaiety that goes with weddings.

“Dorrie!” he said loudly, full of energetic joviality, hugging her.

He had always called her that, from before he even started primary school. At five years of age: Dorrie and Ed. Never mother, father; certainly not mum and dad. It was as though even then he knew something they didn’t. And they had been too apprehensive, too apologetic, to protest. They had never even asked why.

“Philippa.”

“Good on ya, mate.” We hugged, old puzzle parts locking together. “You were bloody amazing. I’m speechless, I’m dazzled. What the hell’s an ootheca?”

“What’s a what?”

“An oo-ith-ee-ka.” I pronounced all four syllables carefully, the way he had, the stress on the third, treating each sound like glass. “The ootheca of the praying mantis.”

“Jesus, Philippa!” Brian laughed. “Typical. Absolutely peripheral to the lecture. Trust you to focus on a fucking word.”

“What does it mean?”

“It’s the ovum sac,” he said.

“The ovum sac. Hmm. So the breakthrough was dependent on female biology.”

“Oh, fuck off.” He made a fist and shadow-boxed, stopping an eighth of an inch from my nose. “Listen, Dorrie …” — turning toward her. He had a message of great urgency and import.

“Brian,” she rushed in eagerly, tripping over her nerves. “I remember about the crystal set, you and your Dad, how you used to hear foreign languages.”

Brian frowned, at sea. He just stared at her, disoriented, and then looked around nervously. (“You actually blushed, for God’s sake,” I told him later. “As though anyone would give a damn, even if they’d heard.”)

“Now, Dorrie,” he said gently. “There’s this ghastly reception that Philippa and I have to go to, it’s a stupid boring thing, and there’s no sense in the world making you put up with … So listen, I’m going to call a cab for you, all right? And we’ll come on later for dinner, just like you wanted. All right?”

“All right,” she said, parrot-like, meekly, looking somewhere else. And then afterwards there’s a reception, she’d told the saleswoman, seeing white linen and cake and champagne, and I think this little one, the saleswoman had said, adjusting a wisp of feather at her brow, this little number will be perfect. Just the thing for mother of the famous man. Just the thing for the scientist’s mum.

It’s because I wore a hat, she thought.

“Look,” Brian said, raising his arm, waving. “Here’s a Black and White.” He hugged her again. “Take care of yourself now, Dorrie. Go and put your feet up on the verandah for a while. We’ll see you later, okay?”

He said something to the driver, gave him money, and we both waved. We kept on waving till the taxi disappeared.

“Don’t look at me like that, Philippa.”

“Like what?”

“Just cut it out, okay?”

“Don’t try and dump your guilt onto me.”

“She would have hated it. She’s terrified of social stuff, always has been. They never went anywhere. I was being kind, if it’s any of your business.”

“Jesus, Brian. That was brutal. And so totally unnecessary. I would have kept her under my wing.”

“She would have hated it,” he insisted. “Anyway, I’m not even going myself. I’m off to the Regatta. Let’s go.”

“What? But it’s in your honour!”

“I don’t give a stuff and nor do they. No one’ll even notice I’m not there. It’s the free booze and free food they’re after, that’s all. C’mon, let’s go. You got your car here?”

“You think it’s because I’m ashamed of her,” Brian said moodily on the verandah at the Regatta. “But you’re wrong. It’s not that.”

I sipped my beer and stared across Coronation Drive at the river. Two small pleasure craft, motorboats with bright anodised hulls, were whizzing upstream, and a great ugly industrial barge from Darra Cement was gliding down, shuddering a bit, moving its hips in a slow, slatternly wallow. The sight of it filled me with happiness. Good on you, you game old duck, I thought fondly, and raised my glass to it. “Probably the same rusty tub we used to see when we were riding the buses out to uni,” I said.

“Probably,” Brian said lugubriously, slumped over his beer. “Everything’s stuck in a bloody time warp, it’s like a swamp” — he waved his arms about to take in the verandah, the Regatta, the river, the whole city — “it’s like a swamp that sucks everything under, swallows it, stifles it, and gives back noxious …” His energy petered out and he slumped again. “There was this funny little man in the front row who used to sit in on lectures when I was in first year. Flat-earth freak, or something, he used to buttonhole people in the cloisters. We all used to duck when we saw him coming. Must be ninety now, if he’s a day, and there he was in the very same seat. It gave me the shivers.”

I squinted, and lined up the top of my glass with the white stripe on the broad backside of Darra Cement. “I saw in the paper that home-owners in Fig Tree Pocket and Jindalee and those newer suburbs are trying to get the dredging stopped. One of these days we’ll come back and the river won’t be brown anymore, it’ll be crystal clear. I suppose that’ll be a good thing, but it’s funny how I get pissed off when anyone tampers with Brisbane behind my back. God, I love being back, don’t you?”

“I hate it,” Brian said. He’d thrown his jacket across a spare chair. Now he undid a couple of buttons on his shirt and rolled up his sleeves. “Look,” he said with disgust, raising his arms one by one, inspecting the moons of stain at the armpits. “A bloody steam bath.”

“That’s what I love. This languid feeling of life underwater.”

Between us and the river, the traffic rushed by in beetling lines but the noise was muffled, a droning damped-down buzz. Everything was fluid at the edges. Cars seemed to float slightly above the road and to move the way they do in old silent movies. Even the surface of Coronation Drive was unfixed, a band of shimmer. A drunk man was shambling along the bike path giving off mirages; I could see three of him. I could see the gigantic bamboo canes at the water’s edge doubling, tripling, tippling themselves into the haze. I could see wavy curtains of air flapping lazily, easily, settling on us with sleep in their folds. “The only reason I don’t come back to stay,” I said drowsily, “is that if I did, I would never do another blessed thing for the rest of my life. I’d turn into a blissed-out vegetable.”

“It makes me panic, being back,” Brian said. “I feel as though I’m suffocating, drowning. I can’t breathe. I can’t get away fast enough. I get terrified I’ll never get out again.”

“Go back to Bleak City then,” I said. “Stop whingeing. You sound like a prissy Melburnian.”

“I am a Melburnian.”

“Bullshit. You’ll be buried here.”

“Over my dead body. I can never quite believe I got out,” he said. “I’ve forgotten the trick. How did I manage it?”

I shrugged, giving up on him, and let my eyes swim in Coronation Drive with the cars. An amazing old dorsal-finned shark of a Thunderbird, early sixties vintage, hove into view and I followed it with wonder. “Who was that friend of your brother’s? The one with the Alfa Romeo. Remember that time we came burning out here and the cops —”

“You’ve got a mind like the bottom of a birdcage, Philippa,” Brian said irritably. “All over the shop.”

“Polyphasic,” I offered primly. “Highly valued by some people in your field. I read an essay on it by Stephen Jay Gould. Or maybe it was Lewis Thomas. Multi-track minds, all tracks playing simultaneously. Whatever happened to him, I wonder?”

“To Stephen Jay Gould or Lewis Thomas?”

“Neither, dummy. To that friend of your brother’s. How’s your brother, by the way?”

“He’s fine.”

“Still in Adelaide?”

“Mm.”

“Did he stay married?”

“Knock it off, Philippa.”

‘You stay in touch with her?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Brian. I’m really sorry about all that. Are you, you know, okay?”

“Yeah, well.” Brian shrugged. “It’s easier this way. No high drama, no interruptions. I practically live at the lab.”

“I read a glowing article about you in Scientific American. It was an old one, I picked it up in the waiting room at my dentist’s.”

Brian laughed. “There’s achievement for you.”

We lapsed into silence and drank another round of beer and stared at the river.

“Your mother said she ran into Richard’s mum.”

“Don’t get started, Philippa,” Brian warned.

“I miss them, I miss them. I miss our old gang. Don’t you?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

“I never miss anyone,” he said vehemently.

“Your mother said —”

“Okay, get it over with.”

“Get what over with?”

“The lecture on how I treat Dorrie.”

“I wasn’t going to say a word,” I protested. “But since you mention it, I don’t understand why you feel embarrassed. You were actually blushing, for God’s sake. As though anyone minds.”

“You think I’m ashamed of her.”

“Well?”

“It’s not that. I’m not. I’m protecting her. I can’t bear it when other kids smirk at her. At them. I can’t bear it.”

“Other kids?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, Philippa.”

“I don’t know why you think they were any different from anyone else’s parents.”

He signalled for another jug, and we waited until it came, and then Brian filled both our glasses.

“They were,” he said. “That’s all.”

“They weren’t. I spent enough time at your place, for God’s sake.”

“God, I’m depressed,” Brian said.

“I spent time at Richard’s and Julie’s and Elaine’s. They weren’t any different from anyone else’s mum and dad.” Brian said nothing. With his index finger, he played in a spill of beer. We were both, I knew, thinking of Elaine.

“Sorry,” I said, “I shouldn’t have … That’s something that happens when I come back. Every so often, you know, maybe once or twice a year, I still have nightmares about Elaine. But not when I’m back here. When I’m here, we all still seem to be around. In the air or something. I can feel us.” I stared into my glass, down the long amber stretch of the past. “How long is it since you’ve been back, anyway?”

“Five years.”

“That’s your average? Once every five years?”

“It’s not that I want to come that often,” he said. “Necessity.”

I laughed. Brian did not. “You’re not usually this negative about Brisbane,” I protested. “When was the last time I saw you? Two years ago, wasn’t it? In Melbourne. No, wait. I forgot. London. June before last in London when you were there for that conference — Yes, and we got all nostalgic and tried to phone Julie, tried to track her down … that was hilarious, remember? We got onto that party line somewhere south of Mt Isa.”

“It’s different when I’m somewhere else,” Brian said. “I get depressed as hell when I’m back.”

“Boy, you can say that again.”

“Last time ever, that’s a promise to me,” he said. “Except for Dorrie’s funeral.”

“God, Brian.” I had to fortify myself with Cooper’s comfort. “You’re getting me depressed. Anyway, speaking of your mother, we’d better get going. What time’s she expecting us?”

“Oh shit.” Brian folded his arms tightly across his stomach and pleated himself over them.

“What’s the matter?”

“I can’t go.”

“What?”

“I can’t go, Philippa. I can’t go. I just can’t. Can you call her for me? Make up some excuse?”

I stared at him.

“Look,” he said. “I meant to. I thought I could manage it. But I can’t. Tell her I’m tied up. You’ll do it better than I could.”

“What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Look, tell her—” He seemed to cast about wildly for possible bribes. “Tell her we’ll take her out for lunch tomorrow, before my afternoon flight. I’m staying at the Hilton, we’ll take her there.”

“I won’t do it. I’m not going to do your dirty work for you. This is crazy, Brian. It’s cruel. You’ll break her heart.”

Brian stood abruptly, knocking over his chair and blundered inside to the pay phone near the bar. I watched him dial. “Listen, Dorrie,” I heard him say, in his warm, charming, famous-public-person voice. “Look, something’s come up, it’s a terrible nuisance.”

“You bloody fake!” I yelled. There were notes of rush and pressure in his voice, with an undertone of concern. It wasn’t Brian at all. It was someone else speaking, someone I’d never even met, someone who couldn’t hear a thing I was saying, someone who didn’t even know I was there.

“They’ve got something arranged at uni,” he said smoothly, unctuously. “I didn’t know about it, and the thing is, I can’t get out of it. I’ll tell you what though. Philippa and I will take you out to lunch tomorrow. She’ll pick you up at twelve o’clock, okay? and we’ll all have lunch at the Hilton. Look, I’ve got to rush, I’m terribly sorry. Look after yourself, Dorrie. See you tomorrow, all right? Bye now.”

“I’m going,” I said as he lurched back. “I’m taking a cab right now to your mother’s. I won’t be part of this.”

“Philippa, stay with me.”

“I won’t. It’s just plain goddamn rude and boorish when she’s got a meal prepared. At least one of us … I’m just bloody not going to—What? What is it? What the hell is it?

He looked so stricken that there was nothing to be said.

“All right,” I conceded, resigned. “Where do you want to go?”

“Come back to the Hilton with me. I don’t want to be alone. I have to get blind stinking drunk.”

In the cab I said: “How come I feel more wracked with guilt than you do?”

He laughed. “You actually think I’m not wracked with guilt?”

“Oh, I know why I am,” I said. “It’s because I’m a mother too.” If my son did this to me, I thought, I’d bleed grief. My whole life would turn into a bruise.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” Brian said. “I can’t talk about it unless I’m blind stinking drunk.”

We didn’t go to his room. It wasn’t like that. We have never been lovers, never will be, never could be, and not because it isn’t there, that volatile aura, the fizz and spit of sexual possibility. I vaguely remember that as we got drunker we held each other. I seem to remember us both sobbing at some stage of the night. It wasn’t brother/sister either, not an incest taboo. No. We were once part of a multiform being, a many-celled organism that played in the childhood sea, that swam in the ocean of Brisbane, an alpha-helical membrane-embedded coiled-coil of an us-thing. We were not Other to each other or them, we were already Significantly Us, and we wept for our missing parts. We drank to our damaged, our lost, our dead.

When drink got us down to the ocean floor, I think Brian said: “It’s the house. I really believe that if I went there, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I’d never get out of it alive.”

And I think I asked: “What did your mother mean about the nights? Those awful nights, she said.”

And the second I said it, a memory I didn’t remember I had shifted itself and began to rise like a great slow black-finned sea-slug, an extinct creature, far earlier than icthyosaurus, earlier than the earliest ancestor of the manta ray. It flapped the gigantic black sails of its fins and shock waves hit the cage of my skull and I was swimming back to Brian’s front gate, I was waiting for him there, fragrant currents of frangipani were swirling round, and these monstrously eerie sounds, this guttural screaming and sobbing, came pouring out through the verandah louvres in a black rush that whirlpooled around me, that sucked, that pulled … I clung to the gate, giddy with terror.

Then Brian came out of the house with his schoolbag slung over his shoulder and he pushed the gate open and pushed his way through and walked so fast that I had to run to catch up. “What is it?” I asked, my heart yammering at the back of my teeth.

“What’s what?” Brian demanded.

“That noise.” I stopped, but Brian kept walking. “That noise!” I yelled, and Brian stopped and turned round and I pointed, because you could almost see those awful sounds curdling around us. Brian walked back and stood in front of me and looked me levelly in the eyes and cocked his head to one side. He gave the impression of listening attentively, of politely straining his ears, but of hearing nothing.

“What noise?” he asked.

He was so convincing that the sound sank beneath the floor of my memory for forty years, even though, two blocks later, he said dismissively, “It’s nothing. It’s Ed. He does it all the time. It’s from the war.”

And forty years later, swimming up through a reef of stubbies and empty Scotch bottles, he said: “He never left New Guinea really. He never got away. And it was catching. After a while, Dorrie used to have Ed’s nightmares, I think.”

“Oh Brian.”

“Sometimes the neighbours would call the police. The only place they felt safe was the house. They never went anywhere.”

“I never had any inkling.”

“Because I protected them. I was magic. I designed a sort of ozone layer of insulation in my mind, you couldn’t see through it, or hear, and I used to wrap them up in it, the house, and my dad, and my mum.”

My dad and my mum. It would be something I could give her the next day, something to put with the corsage.

It was a long time after I rang the doorbell before anyone came. And when she came, she didn’t open the door. She just stood there on the verandah peering out between the old wooden louvres. She looked like a rabbit stunned by headlights.

“It’s me, Mrs Leckie. Philippa.”

“Philippa?” she said vaguely, searching back through her memory for a clue. She opened the door and looked out uncertainly, like a sleepwalker. She was still in her housecoat and slippers. She squinted and studied me. “Philippa!” she said. “Good gracious. Are these for me? Oh, they’re lovely. Lovely. Just a tic, and I’ll put them in water. Come on in, Philippa, and make yourself at home.”

It was eerie all right, one little step across a threshold, one giant freefall to the past. There was the old HMV radio, big as a small refrigerator, with its blistered wood front. There were two framed photographs on it, items from the nearer past, tiny deviations on the room as I knew it. One was of Brian’s wedding, the other of his brother’s. I picked up the frame of Brian’s and studied it. I hadn’t been at his wedding. We’d all got married in the cell-dividing years of the us-thing. I’d been overseas, though my mother had sent a newspaper clipping. I was trying to tell from the photograph if Brian had been happy. Was he thinking: Now I’ve escaped?

“I don’t understand about marriages these days,” she said, coming up behind me with the vase. She set the flowers on top of the radio. “I always thought Brian would marry you, Philippa.”

“That would have been some scrap,” I said. “We were always arguing, remember?”

“You would argue till the cows came home,” she smiled. “I always thought you’d get married.”

I set the frame down again, and she picked it up. “They didn’t have any children,” she said sadly. “Barry either. I don’t have any grandchildren at all.” She returned Brian and his bride to the top of the radio. “I wish they’d known him before the war, that’s all. Before it happened. I just wish … But if wishes could be roses, Ed used to say, or maybe it was the other way round. Would you like to see them, Philippa?”

I scrambled along the trail of her thought. “Oh,” I said. “Yes, I would. I noticed them from the gate. And your frangipani’s enormous, it’s going to swallow up the house.”

“Ed planted that,” she said. “He was always good with his hands, he had a green thumb. I have to get the boy down the road to mow the lawn for me now. Watch out for that bit of mud, Philippa, there were some cats got in. These ones,” she said, “Ed planted when the boys were born, one for each. This one was for Brian.”

It was a tea rose, a rich ivory. Champagne-coloured, perhaps. Off white, I would probably say to him in some future joust. His mother hovered over it like a quick bird, darting, plucking off dead petals, curled leaves, a tiny beetle, a grasshopper, an ant.

“You’ve kept them up beautifully,” I said.

“And I call this one Ed, I’ve planted a cutting on his grave.”

There was something about the way she bent over it, something about her gaunt crooked arms and the frail air of entreaty, that made me think of a praying mantis. Maybe she heard my thought, or maybe the grasshopper she pinched between finger and thumb reminded her. “He said something about a praying mantis,” she said. “You asked him about it, Philippa. What was that thing?”

“The ootheca.”

“Funny word, isn’t it?” She pulled her housecoat around her and tightened the sash. “He won’t be there for lunch, will he?”

I bit my lip. “He had to take an early flight,” I said. It was and it wasn’t a lie. We both knew it. “He had to be back in Melbourne.”

She concentrated on the roses, bending her stick limbs over them, a slight geometric arrangement of supplication. “Anyway,” she said. “I don’t like going out. We never did, Ed and me.” She straightened up and turned away from me, walking toward the gate. “I hope you won’t mind, Philippa, if I don’t …” At the gate, she reached up and picked a frangipani and gave it to me. “Could you tell him,” she said, “that I’ve still got his crystal set? It’s in his room. I thought he might, you know … I thought one day he might …”

I held the creamy flower against my cheek. It’s excessive, I thought angrily, the smell of frangipani, the smell of Brisbane. I had to hold onto the gate. There was surf around my ears, I was caught in an undertow. When I could get my voice to come swimming back, I’d tell her about the safety layer that Brian kept around his mum and his dad.

NORTH OF NOWHERE

They are curious people, Americans, Beth thinks, though it is easy to like them. They consider it natural to be liked, so natural that you can feel the suck of their expectations when they push open the door to the reception room and come in off the esplanade. Their walk is different too; loose, somehow; as though they have teflon joints. Smile propulsion, Dr Foley whispers, giving her a quick wink, and Beth presses her lips together, embarrassed, because it’s true: they do seem to float on goodwill, the way hydrofoil ferries glide out to the coral cays on cushions of air. Friendliness spills out of them and splashes you. Beth likes this, but it makes her slightly uneasy too. It is difficult to believe in such unremitting good cheer.

Of all the curious things about Americans, however, the very oddest is this: they wear their teeth the way Aussie diggers wear medals on Anzac Day. They flash them, they polish them, they will talk about them at the drop of a hat.

“Got this baby after a college football game,” Lance Harris says, pointing to a crown on the second bicuspid, upper left. Lance is here courtesy of Jetabout Adventure Tours and a dental mishap on the Outer Reef. “Got a cheekful of quarterback cleats, cracked right to the gum, I couldn’t talk for a week. It was, let me see, my junior year, Mississippi State, those rednecks. Hell of a close fight, but we beat ’em, all that matters, right? Keeps on giving me heck, but hey, worth every orthodontist’s dollar, I say.”

Beth never understands the half of it, but in any case, what can you make of people who talk about their teeth? She just smiles and nods, handing Dr Foley instruments, vacuuming spit. American spit is cleaner than Australian spit, that’s another interesting difference. Less nicotine, she thinks. No beer in their diets. But Scotch is yellowish too, wouldn’t that … ? and certainly the boats that go beyond Michaelmas Cay for marlin are as full of Johnnie Walker as of American tourists with dreams. Champagne too. She’s seen them onloading crates at the wharf. She imagines Lance’s wife, camcorder in hand, schlurping up into her videotape Lance’s blue marlin and his crisp summer cottons and the splash of yellow champagne and the dazzling teeth, whiter than bleached coral. How do they get them so white? Here I go, she thinks, rolling up her eyes for nobody’s benefit but her own. Here I go, thinking about teeth. What a subject.

She wonders, just the same, about amber spit and clear spit. Is it a national trait?

“Australians don’t floss,” Lance mumbles, clamp in mouth, through a break in the roadwork on his molars.

Beth’s hand flies to her lips. Has she done it again, blurted thought into the room? Possibly. She’s been jumpy, that’s why; ever since the dreams began again, the dreams of Giddie turning up. Or maybe she just imagined Lance spoke. Maybe she gave him the words. Her head is so cluttered with dialogue that bits of it leak out if she isn’t careful.

“It astonishes me, the lack of dental hygiene hereabouts,” Lance says. “We notice it with the hotel maids and the tourist guides, you know. As a dentist, it must break your heart.”

“Oh, we manage,” Dr Foley says. He lets the drill rise on its slick retractable cord and winks at Beth from behind his white sleeve. She lowers her eyes, expressionless, moving the vacuum hose, schlooping up the clear American words.

“You see this one?” Lance mumbles, pointing to an incisor. “Thought I’d lost this baby once, I could barely …” but the polished steel scraper gently pushes his consonants aside and only a stream of long shapeless untranslatable vowels grunt their way into the vacuum tube.

If we put all the tooth stories end to end, Beth thinks, we could have a twelve volume set. Oral history, Dr Foley calls it, laughing and laughing in his curious silent way at the end of a day, the last patient gone. Every American incisor and canine has its chronicle, lovingly kept, he maintains, laughing again. Many things amuse him. Beth can’t quite figure him out. She loves the curious things he says, the way he says them. She loves his voice. It’s the way people sound when they first come north from Brisbane or Sydney. He seems to her like someone who became a dentist by accident.

As he cranks down the chair, he murmurs: “The Annals of Dentition, we’re keeping a chapter for you, Lance.”

“I’m mightily obliged to you, Doctor, mightily obliged. Fitting me in at such short notice.” Lance shakes the dentist’s hand energetically. “And to you too, young lady.” He peers at the badge on Beth’s uniform. “Beth,” he reads. “Well, Miss Elizabeth, I’m grateful to you, ma’am. I surely am.”

“It’s not Elizabeth,” she says. “It’s short for Bethesda.”

“And a very fine city Bethesda is, yes ma’am, State of Maryland. I’ve been there once or twice. Now how did you come by a name like that?”

“The tooth fairy brought it,” Beth says.

Dr Foley’s eyebrows swoop up like exuberant gulls, then settle, solemn. Lance laughs and, a little warily, pats Beth on the shoulder.

“Well, Lance,” the dentist says in his professional voice. “Fight the good fight. Floss on. Mrs Wilkinson will handle the billing arrangements for you.” He ushers the American out, closes the door, and leans against it. “Don’t miss our thrilling first volume,” he says to Beth, madly flexing his acrobatic brows. His tone has gone plummy, mock epic, and she can hear his silent laughter pressed down underneath. “Wars of the Molars. Send just $19.95 and a small shipping and handling charge to Esplanade Dental Clinic, Cairns—”

“Ssh,” she giggles. “He’ll hear.”

“No worries. Now if Mrs Wilkinson hears me—”

“She might make you stand in the corner.”

“You’re a funny little thing,” he says, leaning against the door, watching her, as though he’s finally reached a judgment now that she’s been working a month. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she says, defensive. “It’s on my application.”

“Oh, I never pay attention.” He brushes forms aside with one hand. “I go by the eyes in the interview.” Beth feels something tight and sudden in her chest, with heat branching out from it, spreading. “You can see intelligence. And I look for a certain liveliness. ‘You haven’t been in Cairns long, I seem to remember.”

“No.”

“Just finished high school, I’ve forgotten where.”

“Mossman.”

“Hmm. Mossman. No jobs in Mossman, I suppose.”

“No,” she admits. “Everyone comes down to Cairns.”

“Does your father cut cane?”

He might have winded her.

“Well,” he says quickly, into the silence, “none of my—”

“My father raises Cain,” she says tardy.

His eyebrows dart up again, amused, and spontaneously he reaches up to touch her cheek. It’s a fleeting innocent gesture, the sort of thing a pleased schoolteacher might do, but Beth can hardly bear it. She turns to the steriliser and readies the instruments, inserting them one by one with tongs. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not funny at all, I suppose. And none of my business.”

She shrugs.

“I didn’t realise Beth was short for Bethesda,” he says.

“It’s from the Bible. Mum gave us Bible names.”

“It’s rather stylish.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m pleased with your work, you know.”

“Thank you.” She fills the room with a shush of steam.

“Listen,” he says, “after I close the surgery, I always stop for a drink or two at the Pink Flamingo before I go home. You want to join me?”

“Uh …” She feels dizzy with panic. Anyway, impossible. She’d miss dinner. “Uh, no thanks, I can’t. Dinner’s at six. We’re not allowed to miss.” She keeps her back to him, fussing with the temperature setting.

“Not allowed?”

“At the hostel.”

“Oh, I see,” he says doubtfully. “Well, I’ll drop you home then.”

God, that’s the last thing she wants. “No. No, really, that’d be silly. It’s way out of your way, and the bus goes right past.”

“You’re a funny little thing, Bethesda,” he says, but she’s reaching into the steriliser with the tongs, her face full of steam.

“Girls,” Matron says from the head of the table. “Let us give thanks.”

Beth imagines the flap flap flap of those messages which will not be spoken winging upwards from Matron’s scrunched-shut eyes. Thank you, O Lord, for mournful meals. Thank you for discipline, our moral starch, so desirable in the building of character. Thank you for stiff upper lips. Thank you for the absence of irritating laughter and chatter at the table of St Margaret’s Hostel for Country Girls. Thank you that these twenty young women, sent to Cairns from Woop-Woop and from God Knows Where, provide me with a reasonable income through government grants; in the name of derelict fathers, violent sons, unholy spirits, amen; and also through the urgings of social workers and absurdly hopeful outback schools. Thank you that these green and government-sponsored girls, all of them between the dangerous and sinward-leaning ages of sixteen and twenty-four, are safely back under my watchful eye and curfew, another day of no scandal, no police inquiries, no trouble, thanks be to God.

“We are grateful, O Lord,” Matron says, “for your abiding goodness to us, and for this meal. Amen.”

And the twenty young women lift grateful knives and forks. Beth, hungry, keeps her eyes lowered and catalogues sounds. That is finicky Peggy, that metal scrape of the fork imposing grids and priorities. Peggy eats potato first, meat second, carrots last. Between a soft lump of overcooked what? — turnip, probably — and some gristle, Beth notes the muffled flpp flpp of gravy stirred into cumulus mashed clouds, that is Liz, who has been sent down from the Tablelands to finish school at Cairns High. Liz’s father is a tobacco picker somewhere near Mareeba, and Liz, for a range of black market fees, can supply roll-your-owns of head-spinning strength. That ghastly open-mouth chomping is Sue, barely civilised, who has only been here a week, dragged in by a district nurse who left her in matron’s office. Where’s this bedraggled kitten from then? matron asked, holding it at arm’s length. From Cooktown, the district nurse said. Flown down to us. You wouldn’t believe what we deal with up there. North of nowhere, believe me. In every sense.

“Inbreeding,” Peggy sends the whisper along. “Like rabbits. Like cane toads, north of the Daintree. If this one’s not a sample, Bob’s your uncle. Whad’ya reckon?”

What does Beth reckon, between a nub of carrot and a gluey clump of something best not thought about? She reckons that this, whisper whisper, is the sound of matron’s own stockinged thighs as Matron exits, kitchen-bound.

“Oh Christ, look at Sue,” Peggy hisses. “Gonna cry in her stew.”

A sibilant murmur circles the table like a breeze flattening grass — Sook, sook, sook, sook! — barely audible, crescendo, decrescendo, four-four time, nobody starts it, nobody stops. Stop it! Beth pleads inwardly. Malice, a dew of it, hangs in the air. Sue wants her Daddy. Nudge, nudge. Maybe she does it with her brother.

“Leave her alone,” Beth says.

Peggy makes a sign with her finger. “Well, fuck you, Miss Tooth Fairy Queen.”

“Girls,” Matron says. “Jam pudding and custard for those who leave clean plates.”

January presses hotly and heavily on the wide verandah. Beth, in cotton shortie nightie and nothing else, lies on the damp sheet and stares through the mosquito net at a tarantula. How do they squat on the ceiling like that? If it falls, it will fall on Peggy’s net. Please fall, Beth instructs it. She beams her thoughts along the road of moonlight that runs straight from the louvres to the eight hairy legs.

Night after night, the tarantula will show up in exactly the same spot, but is gone by day. There’s another. It has been camped below the louvres, opposite Corey’s bed, for six nights. Then suddenly both of them will pick new stations. Or maybe they change shifts. Maybe there are hordes of tarantulas waiting their turn in the crawlspace below the verandahs? What do they see from the ceiling? Ten bunks on the east verandah, ten on the west. Do they sidle in through the glass louvres that enclose the verandahs? The louvres are always slanted open to entice sea breezes. Is that how the spiders get in? And where do they hide by day?

No one worries about them. Or perhaps, Beth thinks, no one admits to worrying about them, though everyone takes note of where they are before the lights go out. As long as she can still see, by squinting, the filaments of spiky hair on the spider’s legs, Beth can stop the tide from coming in. She can keep back the wave that has her name on it.

Beyond the spider, beyond the louvres, she can see the tired palms that bead the beaches together, filing south and south and south to Brisbane, reaching frond by frond by a trillion fronds north to Cape York. She can hear the Pacific licking its way across the mangrove swamps and mud flats, though the tide is far out. God, it’s hot! She reaches to her right and yanks at the mosquito net, tucked under the mattress, and lifts it to let in some air. Uhh … bite! Bite, bite, bite. God, they’re fast little blighters, noisy too, that high-pitched hum, it could drive you crazy in five minutes flat. She hastily tucks the net in again and swats at the stings. Greedy bloated little buggers. By moonlight, she examines the splats of blood on forearm and thigh.

“Who’s making all the fucking noise?” complains someone, drowsy.

“Can mosquitoes spread AIDS?” Beth asks.

“Ahh, shuddup ’n go to sleep, why don’t ya?”

But if dentists can … ? Beth wonders. She is fighting sleep, she is fighting the wave coming in.

She fans her limp body with her cotton nightie, lifting it away from herself, flapping air up to the wet crease beneath her breasts. There is no comfort. The tide is coming in now.

Every night the tide comes in. It seems to well up from her ankles. She feels this leaden heaviness in her calves, her thighs, her belly, her chest, it just keeps rising and rising, this terrible sadness, this sobbing, it can’t be stopped, it bubbles up into her throat, it is going to choke her, drown her, she has to stuff the sheet in her mouth to shut it up.

Then she goes under the wave and sleeps.

Black water. Down and down and down.

Beneath the black water, beneath the wave, in a turquoise place, the pink flamingos swim. Their breath is fragrant, like frangipani, and when Beth vacuums the bright pink ribbons of their spit, pouff, tables appear, and waitresses in halter tops and gold lamé shorts. This way, the waitresses say, and Beth follows, though the sandy path between the tables twists and turns. There are detours around branching coral, opal blue. Here and there, clamshells lurk with gaping jaws. At every intersection, the bright angelfish dart and confuse.

“Where is he?” Beth calls, and the waitresses turn back, and beckon, and wink. “Is he waiting for me? Is he still here?”

The waitresses smile. “He is always just out of reach,” they murmur. “See? Can you see?” The waitresses point. And there he is beyond a forest of seaweed, fiery red. He sips a piña colada that wears a little purple paper parasol like a hat, but when she fights her way through the thicket of seaweed, he’s disappeared.

“Terribly sorry,” the waitresses say, winking, “but he’ll be right back. Dental emergency. Floss on, he says, and he’ll join you as soon as he can. He really really likes your work. He really likes you, you know.”

And all the waitresses line up and link arms and kick up their legs in a can-can dance. He really really really really likes you, they sing, but they roll their eyes to show it’s just a sick joke and then she sees that the waitresses are Peggy and Liz and Corey and Matron herself and she throws the piña colada at them and they disappear.

But their laughter stays behind them like the guffaw of a Cheshire cat. Sook, sook, sook, it splutters, hissing about Beth’s ears. We can hear you crying in your sleep.

No, Beth protests. Never! Never ever.

Nevermore, the waitresses sing, offstage. He’s gone for good.

No, Beth argues. That isn’t true.

And see, he’s coming back, he is, she can’t mistake his coat, there it is, yes, white against the brilliant coral, starch against sea-hair flame, but she won’t turn her head, she’s not going to make a fool of herself, she pretends not to see. She wants to be surprised. She wants to feel a light touch on her cheek and then she will turn and then …

And then? And then?

The dream falters. The water turns opaque with thrashing sand. Shark, perhaps? The pink flamingos avert their eyes. There is something they know, it’s no use pretending, the suck of the sobbing wave is pulling across the dimpled ocean floor. But still he taps her lightly on the arm. “It’s all right,” he says. “You’re such a funny little thing, Bethesda.”

And so she turns. But it isn’t him, it’s Giddie.

“Oh Giddie,” she says, resigned. “I might have known.”

“G’day, Beth.” It’s his lopsided grin, all right, and his bear hug, which haven’t changed. It’s the same old dance. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you? the waitresses sing. We’re back again, he’s back again, all together now, the old refrain. “C’mon,” Giddie says, pulling her, and the waitresses twirl. Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance? “C’mon,” Giddie says, and now they’re swimsliding down and around, it’s a spindrift sundance ragtime jig, it’s the same old tune going nowhere. Shark time, dark time, lip of hell; they are going, going, gone. “C’mon” he says, and it’s the edge of nothing, the funnel, the whirlpool, he’s gone over, he’s pulling her down.

“No!” she screams, struggling. “No! Let me go, Gideon, let me go!”

But he won’t let her go and she’s falling, plummeting, there’s no bottom to this, it’s forever and ever, amen, though she makes a last convulsive grab at the watery sides — Gid-ee-oooooon! — and crash lands on her bed.

She gulps air, trembling, the sheet stuffed into her mouth.

Heedless, the sobbing wave rushes on, noisy, shaming, a disgusting snuffling whimpering sound, the sound of a sook.

No, wait. Wait. It’s not Beth’s wave. It’s not Beth.

She listens.

Sue, she thinks.

She must warn Sue: keep the sheet in your mouth. They don’t forgive, they’re like the fish on the reef. Remember this: the smell of injury brings on a feeding frenzy. They go for blood. You have to keep the sheet in your mouth.

“What are you reading?” he asks, and Beth startles violently. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry. What a jumpy little thing you are, Bethesda.” He sits down beside her on the sea wall, the hum of the esplanade traffic behind them, the tide lapping the wall below their feet. “Is this all you ever do in your lunch hour? Read?”

She says primly: “I’m watching the tide going out.”

He grins, then offers: “I’ve offended you. Would you like me to leave?”

“No,” she says, too quickly. Then, indifferently: “If you want. It doesn’t matter.” She tucks the book into her bag and sets it on the wall between them. “It’s me, I was rude.” She is angry, not with him, but with herself, for the thing that happens in her throat when he says her full name that way. “You gave me a scare. I didn’t think anyone could see me here.” She gestures toward the pandanus clump behind them, the knobbed trunks and spiky leaves rising from a great concrete planter with a brass plate on its rim: Rotary Club, Cairns District. She trails her finger over the engraved letters and says, inconsequentially, “I used to have to be a waitress at the Rotary dinners in Mossman.” She rolls her eyes. “Grown-up men, honestly. They sing the stupidest songs.”

“Oh God, I know. They tried to get me to join. One dinner was enough. They were raffling a frozen chicken and throwing it round the room. Playing catch.”

“In Mossman,” she says, “they had this mock-wedding. Fundraising for a playground or something. You should’ve seen the bride.” She shakes her head, incredulous. “Mario Carlucci. His father’s a cane farmer but Mario’s in the ANZ bank, he’s the manager already, everyone says his father got it for him because the Carluccis have the biggest account. Anyway, Mario, he’s about six-two, and they made this special dress, satin and pearls, with you know …” She gestures with her hands.

“Large mammary inserts,” he says drily.

She laughs. “Yeah.” She looks at him sideways. “You seem like you should be an English teacher, not a dentist.”

“What!” he says in mock outrage, his brows working furiously. “Fie on thee! Out, out, damned spot, you’re fired.”

“You’re funny.”

“You’re pretty funny yourself, Bethesda.” He smiles and she swings her eyes away, nervous. She focuses on the Green Island ferry, in the distance, nosing in toward the wharves.

“Look, Beth,” he says, “I don’t want to pry, but I’ve been making a few inquiries, and from what I hear, that hostel is pretty awful. I wondered if you’d like me to—”

“It’s okay,” she says. “I don’t mind it.”

“And another thing. I’ve been looking at your application and your references again. God knows, I don’t want to lose you at the clinic, but you got a Commonwealth Scholarship, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t you take it?”

The ferry is bumping against the pylons now. Men will be wheeling the gangplanks into place. More tourists — people who are free to go anywhere they want, free even to go home again — will disembark and others will board.

“All right,” he says quietly. “I just want you to know, if you need any help … I’m worried about you, that’s all.”

“No one needs to worry about me,” she says politely, swinging her legs back over the sea wall in an arc, away from him. “But Mrs Wilkinson will worry about you if we don’t get back.”

Every Thursday afternoon, last thing, he gives Mrs Wilkinson and Beth their pay envelopes, and every Thursday she saunters along the esplanade, pretending to browse, in the opposite direction from her bus stop until she’s about three or four blocks from the clinic. Then she crosses over and makes for her spot on the sea wall behind the pandanus palms. She takes the pay envelope out of her bag and opens it. Four crisp fifty-dollar bills, brand new, straight from the bank every time, a miracle that makes her hands shake. She puts them back in the envelope, back in her bag, and takes her bank book out. Its balances, marching forward line by line, entry by entry, shimmer. Already she can see the way the page will look tomorrow morning at the teller’s window. She kisses the open book, slips it back in her bag, and hugs the bag to her chest. She can feel a warm buzz against her ribcage.

On Thursday evenings, she feels as though she could walk across the water to the marina. She feels as though she would only need to lift her arms and she would rise, float, up to the decks of the big catamaran, the one that goes to the Outer Reef. And out there on Michaelmas Cay where the seabirds are, where they rise in vast snowy clouds, she would feel the lift of the slipstream, the cushion of air beneath, the upward swoop of it, climbing, climbing, We are climbing Jacob’s ladder …

She is singing the old hymn triumphantly inside her head, or maybe belting it out loud — why not? — because here she is, Sunday night in Mossman again, after the minister and his wife have taken her in. Here’s the small Sunday night congregation, the ceiling fans turning sluggishly, moths thick around the altar lights, everyone fanning themselves with hymnbooks, singing their hearts out, Every rung goes higher, higher, her mother loving every minute of it, one of her mother’s favourite hymns, her mother turning and smiling … Oh no, wait, this isn’t right, she’s mixing things up, she shouldn’t have thought of this. Wrong track.

She swings her legs over the sea wall and crosses the road and runs all the way to the bus stop, her feet thud thud thudding on the pavement, too noisy for thought. Three people waiting, that’s good, and she recognises the woman in the pink cotton dress who always catches her bus. She throws herself into bright conversation. “Thought I’d missed it,” she says. “We had this little kid this afternoon, an extraction, and it turned out he was a bleeder, you have no idea what a—”

“You would’ve missed it, love,” the woman says, “except it’s running late. I think I see it coming now.”

“You should’ve heard this kid’s mother,” Beth babbles. “Poor Dr Foley, I thought she was going to—”

“G’day, Beth.” She hears the voice behind her and comes to a dead stop. She hears the voice but she doesn’t believe it. Old hymns, her mum, now this. Someone taps her on the shoulder. “G’day, Beth.” If I don’t turn, she thinks, he’ll go away. He isn’t really there, he’s inside my head.

The bus is pulling into the curb, and she stares straight forward and gets on. She pays, walks halfway back, and sits down. Someone is following her down the aisle, someone sits down beside her, someone in jeans and white T-shirt and denim jacket, but she won’t look, she stares out the window. Her own reflection stares back at her, resigned.

“G’day, Beth. I reckon you’re pretty mad with me, hey?”

She sighs heavily. “How’d you find me, Gideon?”

“Well, you know, I went to Mossman first, natch. And that’s how I found out about Mum. Geez, Beth. You should’ve let me know.”

“And how was I supposed to do that, Giddie?” — given that she hasn’t seen him for about two years — “How was I supposed to know where you were?”

“I dunno,” he says irritably. “There’s ways. For one, you could’ve told Johnny Coke. It would’ve got to me. There’s links all the way from here to Melbourne, you know. I mean, this is where they bring half the stuff in, for Chrissake, it stands to reason. And the rest of it grows up the Daintree. Think about it, Beth. You’ve always got your head in the bloody clouds.”

She stares out the window, appalled at her own ignorance. She thinks of all these people, hundreds of them, thousands of them maybe, all hooked, all hooked up to each other, a vast network of arteries and veins and capillaries all bleeding each into each.

“Anyway, the minister says he got you fixed up in this hostel in Cairns, and at the hostel this arvo some grouchy old biddy tells me where you work. So. I plan to be waiting for ya when ya knock off, hugs and kisses, surprise surprise, only nobody’s there. Then wham-bam you come racing past me out of nowhere. ‘You mad at me, Beth?”

“Yeah,” she says. “No. I don’t know.” She punches the seat in front of her. “You stole the money out of Mum’s biscuit tin. How could you do that to her, Giddie?”

“I didn’t steal it,” he says, offended. “Geez, Beth! I would’ve paid her back. Geez!” He swivels to look at her better. “You look pretty good. I hardly recognised you, lipstick and all, and your hair like that. Aren’t you gonna give me a hug? Yeah … Hey, that’s more like it.”

She’s smiling in spite of herself. “Mum always said you could wrap the devil round your little finger, Giddie.”

“Yeah,” he grins. “She did, didn’t she? I went to her grave, Beth, the minister told me where it was. Picked some flowers, an’ that.”

She can’t speak, and puts her head fleetingly on his shoulder, then straightens up and looks out the window again. There’s nothing to see but herself, and beyond that the curl of a breaker coming in, a great fizz of crest turning into foam, a monster wave. She has to get home first, she has to get to the hostel before the wave breaks, she has to lock herself into the loo. “Hey,” she says brightly, turning. “So where’ve you been all this time?”

“Oh, up and down the coast, you know. Brisbane mostly, but.”

“Brisbane. ‘You visit Dad?”

“You gotta be kidding,” he says. “Anyway, I think he’s out again. One of me mates got a few weeks in Boggo Road for possession, and he heard Dad got out on good behaviour. That’s a laugh, eh? Went out west, Charleville or somewhere, shearing is what I heard, can you believe? Dad?” He laughs.

“Remember that time he took us fishing on the Daintree?” Beth asks. “You were ten, I think, and I was seven, yes, that’s right. I remember because I had Mrs Kennedy that year, Grade 3, and I wrote a story about it and she read it out to the class and kids told you and you were mad as hell with me. You’d had something on your line and it was pulling like crazy and you wouldn’t let go and you went right over the boat. I was screaming because I thought the crocs would get you.”

Gideon frowns. “I don’t remember that,” he says. “You made that up, Beth. You’re always making stuff up.”

She’s incensed. “Dad yanked you back in the boat and walloped you. And you were so mad, you sneaked out that night and stayed at Wally Rover’s place just to give Dad a scare. So he’d think you’d run away.”

But it’s no use. He can’t remember a thing. Gideon’s memory is like a little heap of expensive white powder. He bends over it and breathes, and pouff, there’s nothing but fog.

She stares at her face in the black window. I remember enough for both of us, she thinks.

“I’ll tell you something I do remember,” he says suddenly. “Remember that time Mum made us matching shorts out of curtains and we had to wear them to school?”

“Yeah, I remember. We wanted to die.” She smiles and slides her arm through his. “I miss you, Giddie.”

“Yeah, me too. Listen, Beth, it’s great that you’ve got this job. You couldn’t lend me a bit of dosh, could ya? Just enough to get me back to Brissy on the train. I’ll pay you back.”

She holds herself very still, then she withdraws her arm. “Sure,” she says. “I suppose. How much?”

“Well, I dunno. Fifty should do it.”

She opens her bag and takes out the envelope. “I’m saving up, Giddie,” she says. “I’m going to go to Brisbane, go to uni and stuff, and be a teacher.”

“Wow,” he says, but he’s looking at the crisp new bills. “You’re doing all right.”

“I bank nearly all of it,” she says. She hands him one of the bills, her eyes following it as though it were a child leaving home. She can feel this pain, this kind of bleating stab, at the edge of one eye. Knife, that’s what it feels like. Switchblade. When he reaches for the money, palm up, she sees the tracks on his forearm, a dot matrix map. “Oh Giddie,” she says in a desperate rush, and it’s like finding blessed safe words to hold all the blood. “I hope you use clean needles.” The words feel bottomless. They hold the sadness neatly and nothing spills out.

“What? Oh, yeah, well mostly. Whenever I can.”

She puts the envelope back into her bag and sets it down between them. The black window stares at her, explaining nothing. Gideon begins to fidget in his seat. His ankles, jazz dancers, jiggle violently against hers. The black window says: Fix it then, Mr Fixit Man. Beth mouths at the window: Don’t. Not that it matters. Not that it matters to her.

At the Blue Marlin Shopping Centre, a couple of blocks before her stop, Giddie bounces up like a rocket. “Hey, this is where I get off. Great seeing you, Beth. Take care of yourself.” He leans down and gives her a kiss on the cheek. He’s blinking furiously and his eyes, clear a few minutes ago, are bloodshot.

“Yeah,” she says. “You too. Take care of yourself, Giddie.” She hangs onto him but he pulls irritably away.

“C’mon, Beth, I’ll miss me stop.”

She watches his jerky progress to the front of the bus, down the steps, out. She presses her nose to the window to wave, but when the bus moves he’s already sprinting across the parking lot, a blur. Unfixed. It isn’t until she gets to her own stop that she realises he’s taken her bag. She remembers now the way he held his left arm, pressed against his denim jacket, as he stumbled down the bus.

She can feel the wave coming in. It’s tidal, a king tide. She stares at the tarantula, the sheet stuffed into her mouth. King tide. There’s a watery halo around the tarantula’s legs. Sobs are leaking into the room.

She sits up, panicked. So much of the sheet is balled up in her mouth she’s afraid she will gag. But it’s Sue again, the next bed to hers. Damn, I warned her, Beth thinks, exasperated.

She lifts her mosquito net, slides out, tiptoes to Sue’s bed, lifts the net and leans in. She puts her lips against Sue’s ear. “For God’s sake, stuff the sheet in your mouth,” she whispers savagely. Her own anxiety is acute. Sue has her hands up over her face, the way Beth’s mother used to when her father was drunk. It is always the worst worst thing. “Stop it” she hisses, furious, grabbing Sue’s wrists. “You’re asking for it, damn it.”

Then she realises Sue’s asleep. Sue is flinching and bucking and moaning and crying in her sleep.

Oh God, she thinks. Any second now, someone’s going to wake and hear this shit. Show blood and you’re dead, that’s the rule. Her mind is racing.

Okay, she thinks. Nothing else for it. Swift and efficient, she slides into Sue’s bed, jabs the mosquito net back under the mattress, grabs the girl in her arms, and muffles Sue’s face between her breasts. “It’s all right,” she murmurs. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s going to be all right.” Sue’s snuffling sobbing breath is warm against her. With her left hand, she strokes Sue’s hair. “Go to sleep now,” she murmurs. “Go to sleep. It’s all right, baby, it’s okay.”

Sue’s body shifts slightly, softening, rearranging itself, moving up against Beth’s like an infant curling into its mother. Her breathing turns quiet. Beth goes on stroking Sue’s hair with one hand, and stuffs the other into her own mouth. At the fleshy place where her thumb joins the palm of her hand, she bites down so hard she tastes blood.

FOR MR VOSS OR OCCUPANT

“Foreclosures,” Mr Watson was in the habit of saying, “are a steal.”

Further wise thoughts would follow: a foreclosure was manna from heaven, a sweetheart deal, a buyer’s dream. He did not, however, run through the litany for this particular client, the young mother whose pubescent daughter had refused to get out of the car, the young single mother it would appear, hubba, hubba maybe he’d try his luck — God, if people knew how much quick hot fucking took place in empty rooms behind For Sale signs! — but no, on second thought, he smelled trouble right off the bat. A bit off, he reckoned; a bit out of it, the way academic types always were. A bit pinko, for sure, the stink of Sydney (Balmain, even Newtown maybe) coming off her like Four-X pong off a pub, a real wolverine in sheep’s clothing, weird clothing, they were all Commies down there, dykes, women’s libbers, worse. Put your thing in the wrong place with her kind, chop chop and goodbye. One way or another, she was bound to get herself into strife in Brisbane, and serve her right.

Still, a sale was a sale. For the political and moral sensibilities of a live prospect, he had nothing but respect.

A “distress sale”, he called it delicately, evasively, though not a single distressing thought entered Laura White’s head when she saw the house. Not at first. It was as though she had willed desire into solid form.

“Oh,” she said. “I grew up in a house with wide verandahs.” Stricken almost, mesmerised, soft rot of the railing and lattice against her back, she leaned into childhood. “Everyone used to close them in for sleepouts. To think there’s still a house … and so close to the city. I can’t believe my luck.”

Nor could Mr Watson. Not a modern piece of plumbing in sight, stove out of a bloody museum, but she was hooked before she walked through the door. Piece of cake. (Though the daughter sitting out there in the blue Mazda might be a question mark. He could hear pistol-cracks of rock music like rude punctuation.)

“And the roof!” the mother sighed.

“Yeah, well. Gonna have to put in a few quid. I got a friend can give you a good deal on clay tiles.”

“Oh no,” she said. She got quite choked up at the thought of hearing rain on corrugated iron again. Command performances: January cyclones, cloudbursts, thunderbolts, you lay in bed and the universe did its quadraphonic full-frontal subtropical act. “And the garden!”

Garden? Bit of a jungle if you wanted Mr Watson’s private opinion, but who was he to complain?

“All this space and right in the city,” she marvelled.

“Yeah, well!” Mr Watson said. “The Gap, you know. Very desirable, very pricey these days.” She wasn’t the usual type for The Gap. Volvo country, Saab city, it was yuppie turf, they went for it like lemmings. They got turned on by the idea of being half an hour from their stockbroker’s one way, half an hour from the rainforest the other, but they liked family rooms and built-in bars and swimming pools to go with it. You had to be fly to unload a place like this in a location like The Gap. A double lot too, what a waste. If it weren’t for the bloody zoning laws, a developer would snap it up in two shakes. “That’s why the price is once in a lifetime,” he said fervently.

“I’ll take it.”

“What?” She threw him off completely, breaking the rules like that, not even trying to haggle. It made him uneasy. It was like seeing someone naked in public, it put you at a disadvantage somehow. From sheer habit he said belligerently, “Nobody in their right mind quibbles about an asking price like this.”

“No,” she said, startled. “I’m not quibbling.”

“Hafta be crazy.” He couldn’t quite get hold of the reins, couldn’t stop his mouth from galloping along a track it knew too well.

Her lust for the place was too obvious, she thought. Unfashionable, this intense desire to come home; unfashionable to express it even in Brisbane these days. She walked along the front verandah, trailing her hand along its railing, getting acquainted, sighing over the lattice, burying her head in the jasmine that was matted around the posts. She had the feeling that she had to justify something, pass a test, explain. “I’ve been poring over the papers for weeks. Traipsing all over, looking and comparing. Why is the price so low?”

“Oh, as to that.” He was back on familiar turf, he knew exactly where he was with sweet suspicion. “Not a thing wrong with the place. Solid gold, believe me. Not a thing wrong that a bit of cutting and pruning won’t fix.” He laughed. “Not to mention a modern appliance or two, eh? though there’s people paying me to find them old stoves and pull-chain toilets, there’s people phoning from Melbourne for places like—”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I’m curious.”

“Distress sale,” he said with voluptuous sorrow. “Old codger lived here all his life.” He intimated a pensioner’s woes: fixed income, land revaluations, rising rates, the remortgaging trap. “Familiar story, eh? And then the interest rates the last straw. Terribly sad.” Shit, he was going to blow it. Overdoing it, Sonny Jim. She was looking at a point beyond his left shoulder so intently that he turned around, spooked, half expecting to see the old bloke he’d just invented.

“Who’s that man?” she asked.

“What? Where? Oh …” There was a man across the road, in shadow, who stared at the two of them on the slightly sagging verandah. “Neighbour, I suppose. Bloke from across the road.” Very likely, Mr Watson thought, some bloke who objected to a hippie moving in, well maybe not a hippie exactly, but not a Volvo owner either, and you would have to call her a hippie type with that mane of brown curls and that strange arrangement of black tights under a longish gauzy skirt and those very long earrings apparently made out of bike chains and that black stretch top. Not unattractive, if you went for that sort of thing which Mr Watson didn’t, well maybe on occasion if you could slip in and out without complications, but you hardly ever could with her type.

“The thing is,” he said smoothly, “the old man told me himself it was really beyond him now. He told me: ‘Just sell it to someone who loves it, that’s all I ask.’” He saw her uncertainty and her desire for the house, he followed the quick dart of her eyes across the road to the silent watcher, back to the verandah and the jasmine, across the road again. “Those were his very words,” Mr Watson said. “His very words. Sell it to someone who loves it.”

“But what about him? What will he do?”

“Ah,” Mr Watson said modestly. “Well, actually …”

“Is that him over there?”

“Of course it’s not him. I told you, the owner’s old, much older, a pensioner. As a matter of fact …” He became expansive, his chest rising to fill the lift of his imagination. He spoke of going beyond and above the call of, etcetera, he evoked hearts of gold and a nursing home and knowing the right people and jumping waiting lists — “Contacts, you know, another client, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours kind of thing” — and, in short, taking care of everything exactly as the old man had wished.

“Well,” Laura said. “I’ll take it, then. I know Jilly will love it.”

“You won’t regret it, Mrs White,” Mr Watson beamed; and then boisterously, recklessly: “It’s a steal. Believe me, a real steal.”

Jilly hated it, but was resigned. “Honestly, Mum! ‘You’d think we were freaks or something, the way people stare around here. And there’s not another kid for miles around who’s over the age of ten.”

“Think of all the babysitting money you can earn.”

“Squalling brats every Saturday night? Yuck!” Jilly pined moodily for the fast pack of thirteen-year-olds she’d run with in Sydney. “Brisbane is the pits,” she said.

Laura grinned. “Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought when I was your age. It grows on you though.”

Jilly rolled up her eyes. “Spare me,” she said.

You learn a lot about a man from the garden he creates, Laura thought. You could fall in love with the creator of a garden. There was half an acre — well, it was hectares now, but she’d never learned to think metric — it was large anyway for a city lot but what enchanted her was the way the former owner had made it seem infinite. She knew how it was done in a garden; technically, she knew; but there still seemed to be sleight of hand or magic involved. She knew it was done with boundaries — high walls or lush plantings — that blocked out a sense of external scale and drew the eye upward; and she knew that within the enclosed space, a clever gardener never used rectangular beds but created outdoor “rooms” with different moods and personalities, rooms that flowed naturally from one to another like nooks along a rainforest path. Everything was curves, sinuous loops, unexpected little circular oases of lawn that slithered into S-bend banks of passionfruit or massed orchids.

There was a place where she loved to sit. It was not large, but it seemed so, a grotto-like space that imparted a sense of absolute seclusion and tranquillity. Around a small pond rose a curve of bamboo on one side, a bank of tree ferns matted with climbers on the other, so that only water and green enclosure and sky could be seen. Birds called and their calls bounced about, odd and haunting, among the hollow bamboo canes. The slightest breeze made the canes click softly against one another: klik klik. The house, the street, the neighbours might have been miles away. If it weren’t for the wooden bench and the watcher, Laura could have believed herself deep in the rainforest.

The watcher. He nestled into grasses at the muddy edge of the pond, leaning out like Narcissus towards the waterlilies. How could she account for him in a Brisbane suburb? A gargoyle that might have been filched from some French cathedral, he stared at his own mordant reflection with a wicked grin. Or was it a grimace? The mouth of someone being tortured, perhaps? Instantly she nicknamed him Caliban.

But where had Caliban come from? He weighed a ton. She tried, but there was no lifting him. Cast iron, she thought. But imagine a Brisbane pensioner with such tastes, and where would he have had the casting done? A vision came to her of the old man caged in his nursing home: how he must grieve for his garden. The gargoyle eyes, bulging like a fly’s, watched her from the gnarled head. Intruder, the eyes accused.

A house is suffused with the presence of its former owner, Laura thought. For a time, one felt like a trespasser. She must write to the displaced gardener, thank him, tell him what a sorcerer he was. Dear Mr Prospero …

“I think it’s creepy,” Jilly said sulkily. What was she supposed to do with herself in Brisbane, watch the waterlilies grow? “And there’s a man who drives past and stares at me when I’m waiting at the bus stop for school. It gives me the creeps.”

“It’s just because we’re new here, that’s all.”

“Well, no one stares at you in Sydney just because you’re new. And this is the only house in the whole street without a pool.”

“We’ve got the most beautiful pool in Brisbane.”

“That muddy puddle,” Jilly sniffed scornfully.

“It’s so peaceful, don’t you find it peaceful here?”

“Who wants peaceful? I want excitement, Mum.”

Laura said carefully, neutrally: “Would you rather go back and live with your father in Sydney?”

“I dunno,” Jilly kicked at the gargoyle and screwed up her face. “Anyway, Dad’s not in Sydney, he’s back in New York right now. His secretary said.”

“Oh.”

“I could go if I want. Dad’d send a ticket.”

“Yes, I suppose.” The bamboo canes clicked softly, the gargoyle leered. Laura stared at the eyes reflected in the water. Full fathom Jive your father lies … She managed to keep her voice even. “Is that what you’d like to do?”

“I dunno. S’pose I’ll give it a bit longer before I make up my mind.”

“Thanks, Jilly.” Laura hugged her, but Jilly stiffened and drew back.

Two letters arrived. One was junk mail, a garden catalogue addressed to Mr Voss or Occupant. The other, for Laurence Voss, was a letter.

Laura phoned the real estate firm and asked for Mr Watson. “What can I do yer for?” he boomed cheerily. “Pruned the jungle back yet?”

“I love it the way it is, Mr Watson. I’m calling to ask for Mr Voss’s forwarding address.”

“Whose?”

“You know, the former owner. Mr Voss.”

“Oh, Mr Voss. Right. Of course.”

“It’s a curious coincidence, isn’t it?” Laura said.

“How’d you mean?”

“Well, Patrick White. Voss and Laura. You know.”

Mr Watson didn’t know. “Sorry. Don’t follow you.”

“Patrick White’s novel Voss? Voss and Laura are the main characters, they have this strange sort of connection, a fusion almost—”

“Never read it,” Mr Watson said briskly.

“Well anyway, what’s Mr Voss’s forwarding address?”

“Wouldn’t have a clue, luv. The bank was already the owner, you know. I acted for the bank.”

“Yes, I know. But you said you got him into a nursing home.”

“What? Oh right, right. That Mr Voss. Look, I got someone in the office at the moment. Call my secretary back in half an hour, will ya? She’ll give you the nursing home address.”

Laura called back. It turned out that there had been some problem or other, and Mr Voss had changed his mind about the home. Neither the nursing home nor the real estate company had a forwarding address. Mr Watson was sorry, his secretary said. She suggested Laura contact the Westpac Bank. Laura did. The bank had no forwarding address. No one knew what had happened to Mr Voss, the mortgage manager said. He’d vanished into thin air.

Though there was no return address on the letter to Laurence Voss, Laura marked it “Return to Sender. Forwarding address unknown” and dropped it into a mailbox. Let the post office open it, send it to the dead letter office, whatever they did.

No more personal correspondence arrived, but every week or so junk mail came. To Mr Voss or Occupant, to Laurence Voss, sometimes to L. J. Voss. It was very classy junk mail: glossy garden catalogues, magazines for orchid fanciers, kits for gazebos and teak garden benches, mail-order kits for grandfather clocks and harpsichords, brochures for leather-bound sets of Tolstoy and Goethe. You could tell a lot about a man from the mailing lists he was on, Laura thought. You could feel great fondness for a man of such elegant tastes.

She filed all the catalogues in a carton in her study, but kept one or two on her bedside table to browse through at night. Once, she was startled and excited to turn a page and find a photograph of Caliban with identical bulging eyes and knowing smirk. You could have him delivered. He had a companion piece, a sylph-like cast-iron sprite with wings, a stooped figure who could be placed in such a way that he appeared to be drinking from a cupped hand. Ariel, she thought with delight, and decided to order him. She would put him on the opposite side of the pond: Beauty and the Beast, so to speak.

She used the catalogue order form as it was, imprinted with the name of Mr Laurence Voss and his address — which was also hers — at Settlement Road, The Gap. She filled in her own credit card number.

She felt she had stepped into the envelope of Mr Voss’s life. She felt they were kindred spirits. She felt his presence most strongly by the pond.

“The Spicers said he was weird,” Jilly said. She babysat fairly often for the neighbours, who had a real pool. “They hardly ever laid eyes on him, but they were glad when he went. The police had to come, Mrs Spicer said.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t leave when the bank foreclosed.”

“I don’t blame him,” Laura sighed. “After you’ve spent your life building the perfect garden. Poor old man.”

“He wasn’t all that old,” Jilly said. “Same as Mr Spicer, they reckon. And he only came a few years ago and planted all that fast-growing bamboo and stuff. Pretty suspicious, they reckon. Like what was he hiding? He was kinda spooky, Mrs Spicer said, a real loner. The kids called him the bogeyman.”

“Suburbanites don’t understand the desire for solitude,” Laura said. “They probably think I’m a bit weird too.”

“Yeah, well,” Jilly shrugged. “I told Mrs Spicer you were on sabbatical, writing a book. She said that’s different.”

“How kind,” Laura said drily.

“She asked me what your book’s about, and I said Patrick White and literature and stuff. I couldn’t remember exactly.”

“It’s a study of authors who become reclusive. Patrick White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. The way they create solitary characters and personae and then disappear into their fictions.”

Jilly mimed a theatrical yawn. “Oh wow,” she said.

“Or maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe the characters swallow up the author. You know, move in and take over. With both White and Pynchon, you get a sense in the later novels of invasion, and there’s a line in Dickinson—”

Jilly groaned. “I wish I had a normal mother. You know, who plays tennis and stuff, and has people round for barbecues.”

“We’ll have a barbecue,” Laura offered guiltily, quickly.

All the neighbours came to the barbecue, and all Jilly’s friends from The Gap high school. Also a man whom nobody knew. The man nobody knew looked vaguely familiar to most of the neighbours, but everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Laura wasn’t aware of him till Jilly pointed him out: “Mum,” she said urgently. “That’s the man who stares at me at the bus stop.”

Laura was disturbed. She’d seen him before somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. “Does he do it every day?” she asked Jilly.

“Almost every day. He drives past in this red Toyota. Sometimes he drives round and round the block and stares when he goes past, and sometimes he just parks and stares. He gives me the creeps.”

“Men who stare are usually harmless,” Laura said with a lightness she did not feel. “That’s all they do. Stare.”

(“Don’t think I won’t be watching,” her ex-husband had promised after the custody case. “Don’t think you’ll get away with this.”

But anyone angry made that kind of threat. It meant nothing.)

“Who’s that man?” she asked a woman she’d got to know in the supermarket, a woman who was wiping hamburger from a toddler’s face.

“Oh, I see him in the library all the time,” the woman said. “I think he’s a friend of the Spicers. Very shy, but rather nice. Gives the kids iceblocks and lollies.”

The man seemed shyly friendly, or perhaps cordially aloof, like someone dragged to a party by friends too soon after a divorce or a death in the family. He moved from group to group, he smiled, he chatted, he was charming, he kept moving. Laura heard someone say, “I didn’t catch your name,” and he laughed quietly as though this were a particularly clever joke and moved on. She watched him gradually work his way further from the fringes of the crowd until he disappeared behind the bamboo.

Perhaps he was someone her ex-husband had hired. But then again, perhaps he was just a friend of the Spicers.

She slipped away to the pond.

The man was sitting cross-legged beside Caliban, with his hand on the gargoyle’s head, staring into the water. Laura looked at his reflection and thought he had the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. It’s his garden, she thought with sudden certainty. He’s grieving for it.

Oblivious to Laura’s presence, the man began stroking Caliban’s head in a blind, desolate way, a gesture both intimate and … what? Hungry.

Stricken, Laura said: “I ordered Ariel to go with him. Do you like him?” and the man started violently, as wild-eyed as Caliban himself. Laura felt momentarily frightened. She could not tell if the look was hostile, or haunted, or simply that of a man much disoriented by loss. Then he smiled, and Laura thought with a shiver that his smile was a little like that of her former husband, who could move from charm to threat to charm again without warning.

Caliban’s reflection grinned at her from the water. A real steal, he smirked. She thought uncomfortably: it is a kind of theft, a foreclosure.

“I know how you must feel,” she said apologetically. The man’s eyes unnerved her. She spoke to his reflection, which watched hers. “Look, if you want to come and sit here sometimes … well, that’s okay. I’ll understand.” She felt as though she were placating some capricious force, and couldn’t tell if she spoke from compassion or fear.

“Mrs Spicer,” she said, when the flow of the party had reabsorbed her, “that man over there, just coming up from the pond. Is he Mr Voss?”

Mrs Spicer was startled. “Good God,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so.” She studied him intently. “To tell you the truth, it’s hard to say. We practically never saw him. I don’t believe we ever once saw him face to face.” She squinted, and tipped her head to one side. “It could be … but no, I don’t think so. That man’s a friend of the Taylors, I think. I’ve seen him round. Mr Voss was stockier, heavier than that. Just the same, I wouldn’t take chances. I’d notify the police.”

“The police?” Laura said apprehensively. “Why the police?”

“Well, confidentially,” Mrs Spicer lowered her voice. “I didn’t want to alarm Jilly with the whole story. But I play tennis with Milly Layton whose husband’s a cop. Voss was suspected of murder, you know.”

“Murder?”

“The story is that his wife ran off with another man. He got custody of their daughter, and that was the situation when they moved in here, Voss and his kid. She used to babysit for us, as a matter of fact, when Key was a baby. Lovely girl. Just about Jilly’s age. Could never get a word out of her about her dad or mum, though I poked around. Discreetly, you know. Then one day she just disappeared. His story was that the wife had kidnapped her, but the police weren’t so sure. They couldn’t find any trace of the wife or daughter, and for a while they had a theory he’d murdered them both. Came and dug up the pond because they thought he might have buried them in the mud.”

It seemed to Laura that she could feel the meaning of the gargoyle’s leer seeping into her body like cold water. “But they never found anything,” Mrs Spicer said lightly, “so charges were dropped. Voss went a bit berserk, Milly says. They had to cart him off. All I know is, the police cars came and went, came and went, I don’t know how many times. Then the For Sale sign went up. It was there for months you know. They couldn’t sell it. Word spread, people had a bad feeling about the place. Quite frankly, I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You’ve got to wonder what someone was hiding behind all that jungle. I expect you’ll be having it cut back.”

“Oh, well, I grew up in a house like this out past Samford, you see. Right in the rainforest. I like it this way. Mrs Spicer, Jilly says that man drives past when she’s at the bus stop and stares.”

“Really?” Mrs Spicer studied him more intently. “You’ve got to wonder about some of the Taylors’ friends. Bloody peeping Toms, it’s disgusting. Listen,” she said, “I’d inform the police. You can’t be too careful when you’ve got a daughter.” She looked obliquely at Laura. “Especially when you’re managing on your own. Not easy, I’m sure, being a single mother.”

“No,” Laura said.

“Jilly says you’re doing a book on Patrick White’s Voss. Funny, isn’t it? The name, I mean. The coincidence.”

“It is a bit weird,” Laura acknowledged.

“Read Voss in high school. Based on Leichhardt, wasn’t he?”

“More or less, yes.”

“All those explorers were raving lunatics,” Mrs Spicer said. “Well …” She squinted across the lawn. “No, I’m sure that’s not Mr Voss, he’s too shrunken and pale for Mr Voss, but you must call the police. We don’t want pervs in The Gap, it’s a family place. Ask for Milly Layton’s husband. As a matter of fact, I’ll give Milly a tinkle myself.”

“Mrs White,” Sergeant Layton said. “Staring is not a criminal offence. I’m not saying there aren’t loonies around, but if we followed up every phone call we get from a frightened woman, we’d never do anything else, d’ya see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “It’s just that … I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have it on the record, you know, in case anything … He drives a red Toyota, my daughter says.”

“Mrs White.” The sergeant spoke in the patient tones of one whose daily task involved fending off — wearily, kindly — hordes of neurotic women. “I have a daughter myself. I worry myself sick about her safety. Know what I do? Tell her never to accept rides from strange men. It’s that simple. Train them to be sensible, know where they are, give them a curfew: that’s all any parent can do.”

But look, she wanted to say. I think I may have done something stupid. I told this man he could come and sit by my pond. I could see he was hurt you see. I could see he was in pain. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t do harm, would it? And now I’m worried that he’ll read something into my offer, I’m frightened that …

But how could she expose such foolish behaviour to the police? Women ask for it, you know. They’re all masochists at heart, they’re like children really.

She said: “Well, you see, I thought he might be Mr Voss, the former owner. My neighbour says not, and I suppose she would know, but I don’t feel completely certain, and your wife told my neighbour that Mr Voss—”

Sergeant Layton laughed. “My wife,” he said fondly. “Listen, Mrs White. For number one: women embroider things, bless their souls. And for number two: I don’t tell Milly everything. And for number three: we never had anything solid on Voss, he was a routine suspect, that’s all. And as a matter of fact, we got the bodies and the killer on that one. Started off as a kidnap, all right, but then it seems the ex-wife’s fancy boyfriend tampered with the kid — excuse my language, Mrs White, it’s a dirty world. Anyway, the ex-wife threw a tantrum (jealous or maternal, we don’t know which) and the boyfriend went off his rocker and killed them both. We caught up with him west of Port Augusta, found the bodies in the boot of his car. And for final: your Mr Voss cracked up, poor bugger. Stands to reason, dunnit? With his wife running off, then pouf, his kid disappearing, then the bodies.”

And with the police accusing him of murder, Laura thought.

“Your Mr Voss is in the loony bin, poor bugger, so you can set your mind at rest on that score, Mrs White. He’s not the bloke who’s staring at your kid. Set a curfew, and tell her never to accept rides from strange men. All a parent can do.”

“Yes, you’re right of course, Sergeant Layton,” she said.

Jilly woke with a start. It was the middle of the night, quiet as death, so what had disturbed her? The French doors were open on to the verandah and a wisp of breeze barely nudged the humid air. Damp hot silence settled onto damp sheets. So why, Jilly asked herself, every nerve taut and her heart thumping like a rock band’s drum, why do I feel like I’m being watched? Then she saw the man beside her dresser, standing in shadow.

She screamed.

Fast as thought, he left on silent cat feet, and when Laura came running there was no sign, not a single telltale sign save Jilly’s fear.

“It was that man,” Jilly sobbed. “That creepy man was in my room.”

“God, Jilly!” Laura switched on the floodlights for verandah and back porch. She watched the light pick out the curve of lawn that ended in the bamboo. Nothing beyond the bamboo could be seen. “He’s gone now,” she said as calmly as she could. “There’s no one anywhere near the verandah.” She bolted the French doors and all the windows and pulled down every blind in the house and they huddled together on Laura’s bed in the sticky still heat. “It’s okay,” she said, stroking her daughter’s hair. “It’s okay. I’m afraid this is my fault, Jilly. I thought he was Mr Voss, you see. I told him he could come and sit in the garden. It was incredibly stupid.” Jilly was trembling like a live bird held under a cat’s tender paw. Laura said, to calm her: “I do think he’s probably harmless. I think he’s just a very sad man, you know. They say that’s all voyeurs do, they just look.”

“Call the police,” Jilly begged, still shaking.

“Yes,” Laura said. “Yes, of course.”

Laura called the police. We’ll send a squad car, the night dispatcher promised. And in due course — it seemed a very long time to Jilly and Laura — a squad car arrived. There were heavy footfalls on the verandah, and lines of torchlight raking the yard, and then a constable came to the door.

“No sign of an intruder, ma’am,” he said. “Uh, our records indicate you’ve got peeping Tom worries. Understand this is a second report?”

“It was the same man,” Laura explained. “The one who’s been staring at my daughter at the bus stop.”

“Yeah, well, generally harmless, these blokes. Let us know if anything happens.” Then he dropped his voice, confidentially. “Teenage girls, you know, ma’am, very, uh, vivid imaginations.” He dropped his voice still further and whispered: “Hormones.” Then he smiled. “Still, keep us informed.”

“Thank you, officer. I will.” Laura kept her anger tamped down. “Thank you for coming so quickly.” The sarcasm was lost on him, however.

“Any time,” he said cheerily. “Give the kid a hot cup of tea and settle her down. She’ll be right.”

“Bloody police,” she fumed to Jilly.

“Bloody useless police,” Jilly said.

“Yeah,” Laura grinned, cooling down a little. “Bloody hopeless cops.”

They did make tea. It felt good, Laura thought, to have your teenage daughter leaning against your shoulder, cuddling into your arms the way she did when you rocked her through tooth-cutting nights long ago. They sat on the bed with the blinds down, and a candle burning, and talked all night.

“Mum,” Jilly asked somewhere near dawn. “Do you think Dad misses me?”

“Of course he does. How could he not?”

“I mean, really misses me? Or, you know, just feels he should? Or just wants to bug you.”

Laura’s hand paused for a moment, then resumed its stroking of Jilly’s hair. “How do you mean, bug me?”

Jilly sighed. “Well, I phone his office, you know, sometimes, when I’m lonely. Reverse charge, from pay phones. I didn’t want to upset you. Do you mind?”

“It’s natural, Jilly. He’s your dad.”

“His secretary says Dad and Caroline want me to visit them in New York. She says there’s a Qantas ticket waiting in Sydney any time I go and pick it up.”

“I see.”

“But how come I only ever get to talk to his secretary? How come he never calls me? How come he never writes?”

“I don’t know, Jilly.”

“D’you think he really wants to see me?”

“I’m sure he does.”

“It’s a one-way ticket.” Jilly pleated the sheet between her fingers. “D’you think he’ll try to keep me there, Mum?”

“That’s a tough one, Jilly.” Laura sighed. “Your father’s rather used to getting his own way, and to being able to buy anything he wants. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t love you. I know he does. ‘You’ll have to decide what you want to do.”

“Mum, I hardly have any friends at school. They think I’m weird. And I’m scared of that man in the red Toyota. Why’s he following me? Why’s he always watching? I’m even scared of the house now. I’m not even gonna feel safe in my own room.” She snuggled into Laura’s arms. “If I promise to come back from New York, will you mind if I go?”

It’s a steal, Laura thought. Her whole body felt like lead, but what could she say? The fears you could feel for a child were bottomless. They could fill the world. Suppose Jilly stayed and the man whom nobody knew … ? She’d never forgive herself. “I’ll miss you horribly,” she said. “But maybe it’s best for now.” Either way, she didn’t think she’d feel any safer.

It was done within days. Laura drove Jilly to the Blue Coach terminal for the deluxe bus to Sydney. Her father’s secretary was to meet her at the other end the next morning, take her to a hotel, put her on the plane for New York. It had all been arranged by Jilly’s father. “Please don’t stay around, Mum,” she said. “We’ll just get weepy if you do, and I hate goodbyes. I’ll be embarrassed for the whole trip.”

“It’s not the kind of thing people mind, Jilly,” Laura said. “Crying at goodbyes.” She wanted to say: I don’t feel safe when you’re out of my sight. I want to drive you to Sydney. I want to sit beside you on the bus, see you safely on to the plane. I want to make certain your father meets you at the airport, I don’t want any New York taxidrivers whisking you off to God knows where. I want to wrap you up in cotton wool.

“Yuck, I hate crying, I hate goodbyes,” Jilly insisted. “I’m nearly fourteen, Mum. I can look after myself, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I’ll phone you from New York, I promise.”

“From New York!” Laura cried in alarm. “Phone me from Sydney, okay? Reverse the charges. Phone as often as you like. Phone me when the bus gets in, and phone me from the airport, okay?”

“Mum!” Jilly protested. Sometimes, she thought, parents needed so much protecting, it was exhausting. But at the sight of her mother’s face, she relented. “Yeah, all right.” She gave Laura a quick brusque hug. “But don’t make such a big deal of it, okay?”

“Okay.” Laura watched her daughter, with nothing more than a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, wave brightly and disappear into the terminal. She saw the line in her mind’s eye. Laura watched her daughter disappear.

She got into her blue Mazda in the parking lot and sat and listened to the radio for fifteen minutes, then she drove round the block and parked discreetly down the street where she could watch the coach leave the depot. She couldn’t see a thing through the darkened windows, but she pictured Jilly sitting halfway back, resolutely not crying.

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