Free Book Excerpts

This is the story of an Australian photojournalist’s shift from lethargy to self-awareness through the discovery of transient love, and the fact that fatherhood is powerful beyond absence and death.

Excerpt

ONE

There are no accidents without intentions
Alex Miller

He came back a day earlier. Feeling dull and a bit tired, he supposed, but
not much more lacklustre than at other times.
It was just that he had felt another of those surges of futility. The
paradox made him smile to himself, looking down into a cup quickly going
cold on the café table. A surge of futility: how apt. How ironical. His
editor would smile at the words. It was just that he was used to it. Used to
letting things happen to him.
He had just now allowed the girl behind the counter – a girl with
‘barista’ in italics under her name on a tag – tell him what style of coffee
he was about to drink. It was easier to let her make him a macchiato than
enter into a debate with a stranger. And now? Now all he had to do was look
around and let another day go by until he could no longer avoid calling in
to the paper. Returning early from ‘down South’ would not fix the inertia,
necessarily, but there was no point in staying. There had to be something
else, something more meaningful. He really had to get to the flat, and to
Erin, but he did not feel like answering her questions yet. Back a day early
– why? He did not know exactly why. The journalist he had travelled with had
stayed on, urging him to make the most of the break from suburban reporting.
‘Come on, Bart – we can catch a few waves and down a few bitters,’ his
colleague had pleaded.
But he had taken all the shots they needed. Why hang around? It was
stultifying. And this was just as monotonous. Returning to Fremantle did not
lift his spirits in the least. There had to be more to it all than this, and
casting his eyes around gave him nothing new to muse upon. Until a small
flash of reflected light caught his eye.
A gold pendant swung just inside his line of sight. It was in the
shape of a hand, clenched in the typical southern Mediterranean horned fist,
index and little fingers pointed and sharp. Bart peered at it, where it
dangled on a chain around a woman’s neck. She was attractive, wearing black,
sitting about three metres from him and taking in her surroundings calmly,
totally unaware of him. He watched her, not caring if she noticed.
She moved a little, sitting at the café table with her hands on the
marble top, head inclined at a pensive angle. She cupped chin in palm and
closed her eyes, only to blink them open again, vivid and green, to dance
over the crowd, stare at passing traffic, and finally, to look intently at
Bart.
Somewhere on the street, a small dog yapped insistently. Piped music
struggled above and below the normal suburban cacophony of Fremantle. When a
waiter stood between them like a screen, Bart was certain the woman would
look elsewhere. Surely, she would blink again; stare at some movement, her
gaze attracted by some noise, by someone else. The instant passed, the
waiter shifted, and there her eyes still were: looking at him. Would she
speak?
Could he speak? There was nothing to talk about except where they sat.
He had come back a day early. Who cared?
‘Quite a crowd here now,’ he could have remarked, despite the three
metres that separated them. ‘That’s an interesting pendant,’ he almost said.

A loud crash robbed him of speech before he could even mouth the first
word. An explosion belched over footpath, tables and chairs. Café patrons
exclaimed, then roared, rising quickly from their seats. Bart sensed the
panic and cast a quick eye around. There was glass, glass everywhere.
Needles and knives of it: fragments and sharp remnants of wooden window
frame suddenly turned lethal. People rose and backed away, spilling onto the
street. Confusion and noise blanketed everything, setting chaos on its
unnerving path. Bart was jostled, pushed and yelled at, his lap full of
debris and the table in front of him, which rocked after being jolted by a
running waiter, became piled with glass, putty and old wood. He knew neither
where to look nor what to do. Someone’s elbow struck him forcibly in the
centre of his back and breath left him in an audible gasp dulled by the
tumult that surrounded him.
When the noise subsided slightly, he brushed glass, slivers of paint
and dust from his lap and shoulders, trying to avoid scratching his hands.
Where was she? Where was the woman in the black top? People milled in panic
around him, but he still could not miss a dark red flash of blood out of the
corner of one eye, so he turned. There she was: head covered in blood and
the black of her sweater bearing the unmistakeable stickiness of fresh fluid
pumping from her neck.
‘Jesus!’ He moved to her as if, simply because of his brief scrutiny
of her, the fleeting glance they exchanged, she somehow belonged to him: was
his to protect and help. She lay like an abandoned puppet, with twisted
limbs and a blank face.
‘Wha- whass going on?’ Her mumbling was just audible as Bart reached
her side. A host of waiters, customers and panicky bystanders crowded round.
Questions, aimed at no one and everyone, still floated around his head.
‘What happened?’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Has something blown up?’
‘Where’s my bag?’
Voices rose and fell around him. The woman said nothing more that
was intelligible. Her eyes were closing, fluttering shut.
‘It’s okay,’ he said comfortingly; then turned, addressed no one in
particular, but by raising his voice, they would all hear. ‘Someone – get an
ambulance! Call for an ambulance – is there a doctor about?’ His own voice
sounded strange.
‘What happened?’ Her voice was slightly stronger than before.
Bart knelt and took a wad of table napkins from a hand that waved near
his shoulder. He placed a fistful firmly where the rush of blood was worst.
‘I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘That window – it just smashed. I can’t…’
A moan left her lips. ‘Mustn’t lose it,’ she said clearly. ‘Where’s my
laptop?’ Her eyes went blank again and closed. Her lips stopped moving.
‘Oh, no…’ Bart shook her shoulder.
Her head slumped as she lay awkwardly against the wall, under the
front window.
‘Please, don’t. Hey, hey – wake up.’ If only he knew her name. ‘Does
anyone know her?’  His voice was ineffectual and weak.
Noise receded, and Bart had a presentiment, a slight niggling feeling:
nothing in his life would be the same again. Something had changed:
something subtle, simple, that he could not define. He was assailed by a
sudden scrolling of events in his life, as if it was he lying there, inert,
nearing the end of his life, breathing shallowly with a rope of sticky blood
pumping sluggishly out of his neck. As if it was his limbs that were
twisted, his mind emptying of the present and filling dangerously with grey
dreams and the stuff of unconsciousness.
There, all of a sudden, as if occupying a corner on a flickering
screen, was his father, dressed in blue. Which was weird, since he did not
know him: was not even sure he could visualise him properly. He had not seen
the man since he disappeared from his life when he was a child of six.
But there he was, solidifying in the middle of Bart’s mind as he
looked around for help. Noise and confusion engulfed him, and there was this
quiet assault of irrelevant recall. Reddish hairs on the backs of his
father’s hands, deep lines at the sides of his mouth, peculiarly detailed.
Then he was gone, and Bart looked at the knees and legs behind him,
and back at the woman’s limp limbs that had lost all movement. He wanted to
shake off all thought of himself, and his inappropriate memories, to
concentrate on her, lying inert on the café floor. But as long as the noise
continued, so did the images. There was the grizzled roundness of his
father’s chin: the front of a blue shirt. Now, his own back ached, crouched
in an uncomfortable position; and his knees were going numb. But his hands
worked, stemming blood flow from the woman’s neck.
She stirred. The ghost of a smile touched her lips: eyelids fluttered
but remained shut. Bart felt something on his shoulder: a hand, then words
in his ear. He resisted. It was vital to concentrate on holding the wad of
paper napkins hard against her neck: concentrate on small movements, signs
she was still alive: to listen for her breath.
Another prod, another touch and he looked around him, feeling as if he
had risen from some kind of dream. Everything was sticky with blood.
‘Okay, okay – we’ve got her now.’ Paramedics moved in, squatting
close, excluding him, their broad blue and orange backs covering the scene,
forming a human barrier no one could cross. ‘Keep clear,’ someone said.
‘Stay clear. Clear a space – we’ve got her now.’
He gave a statement to someone in blue or black, or perhaps grey,
stammering words and feeling blank and numb.
‘Do you know her?’
‘No.’
‘Did she say anything?’
‘No.’
‘Was she sitting with anyone?’
‘No.’
Making his way to a public restroom to wash bloody hands and wrists,
his mind was still empty. Someone gave him a slim case, which he looked at
blankly. ‘This isn’t…’ Then he remembered what she said. He was holding the
injured woman’s laptop computer. At some point, he would have to get it to
her. At some point, he would have to find out where they took her.

Every time he walked into Minnie Cuff’s ward at Fremantle hospital, Bart
Zacharin would relive the incident at the café. The traffic noise, the
crash: what he knew now was the ancient loose fanlight of a café window
shattering and spreading as it fell on tables, floor, and the neck and
shoulders of the woman with the gold charm.
It was not an explosion. Nothing had blown up. He read about it,
listened to brief radio reports. Not for the first time, he was bemused by
the difference between feelings that accompanied witnessing an incident –
his job ensured he had been at enough incidents – and those elicited by
reports that eventually landed in the newspapers. This one needed no fancy
journalese: it was a simple matter of an old building falling to pieces on
top of the customers inside and pedestrians around it. He matched the
newspaper prose to his own memory of the afternoon: even remembering the
background yapping of a small dog he never saw. As expected, he received a
jibe from his editor at the paper, who asked why on earth a media
photographer did not take any quick on-the-spot shots that would have given
them a front page the next day.
Recollection of the whole incident was detailed, minute: amazing at
the time of his life he often remarked his memory was not what it used to
be. He recalled useless things: the colour of his mother’s hair when she
washed it, addresses of old school-friends, titles of books printed sideways
on bruised spines, in the order they were stacked on his shelf.
Inconsequential details stayed in his head, and vital facts rolled away,
like so many childhood marbles.
But this was different. The accident was marked by a mental jolt, by
physical disturbance. He tried to remember when he had last experienced a
similar shake-up: a shock of a similar nature. An insignificant road
accident a couple of years back, when a utility rear-ended his Toyota came
to mind, but it was nothing like the café incident. Nothing like the jolt he
got when glass and pieces of window frame came crashing down onto tables,
floor and people. Nothing like the presentiment he had that seeing this
woman lying there, sticky with her own blood, would somehow change the order
and sameness of his days.
Every time he sat by the side of her hospital bed, he would remember
the blood pumping slowly out of the side of her neck. Heavy dressing marked
the spot where he had applied pressure with both hands, cramming absorbent
masses of crushed paper napkins. Even when she was better, sitting up and
talking, Bart would look at the tiny pulse in the hollow of her neck and see
again the slow trickle of thick bright blood. He knew now her name was
Minnie, and that she was from Manchester, England: a tourist who was only in
Western Australia for a couple of weeks. He knew she was out of danger and
would recover with only a scar to show anything had ever happened to her in
that Fremantle café. What he could not guess was how reticent she would
prove to be, how elusive, and how determined to give away as little about
herself as possible.
‘You know, Bart,’ she said as he walked up to her bed on the third
day, ‘I’ve just realised – my gold pendant’s gone.’
The instant she said the words he remembered it dangling against her
black sweater: a gold hand clenched in a superstitious gesture: more than a
fist – a fist with horns.
‘I remember seeing it dangling from your neck,’ he said. ‘Just before
chaos took over. It must have been swept away in the debris. There was a lot
of it.’
‘I’ve lost it then,’ she said. ‘What a shame.’
Bart smiled. ‘It didn’t bring you much luck,’ he joked.
Her green eyes widened. ‘Of course it did! I could have been killed.
Permanently um, maimed or something… you know – I could have lost my laptop!
What are you talking about – of course I was lucky!’
‘You’re superstitious then?’ Bart still smiled. His eyes searched her
face, liking the way her serious expression livened her eyes and animated
her features to render her more pretty. But the scrutiny seemed to trouble
her, so he looked away, out of the window to where a fountain played in a
courtyard. Through windows on the other side, he could see identical wards
to this one, people and nursing staff moving about. It was starting to rain.
‘You’re not superstitious?’ His insistence was unusual. Turning, he
allowed himself to fall into his sideways slouch.
Minnie did not answer. An orderly with a tray entered the room. The
bland smell of steaming hospital vegetables rose from the plate as Minnie
uncovered it. From the corridor came sounds of crockery clattering and the
tinkle of cutlery against metal.

‘Have I ever thanked you properly?’ Minnie’s question took Bart
unawares. ‘I mean,’ she said, tilting her head and frowning at the plate of
flat-looking food. ‘I sometimes think, after you go away, that there’s
really no need for you to come so often – goodness knows how far you have to
travel. I don’t even know where you um, live.’ She took a fork and played
with a sprig of broccoli.
‘It’s fine – you don’t have to thank me,’ said Bart. But he was glad
she did. Something in the way she spoke was facile, yet endearing. The tone
seemed to discount the meaning of words as if intentionally. As if she
wanted to say nothing serious, nothing too deep. All effort he had made to
elicit anything from her was met by a silent smile or an inconsequent
sentence; one that sounded as if she had rehearsed it before. She rarely
talked unbidden: and had never asked, for instance, whether he had been hurt
or affected by the shock of the accident.
Bart looked at the massed curls framing her pretty face and long neck.
She was lovely. He was starting to know the un-made up features of her face
so well he could imagine her precise expressions hours after he left. There
was a small crease, a dimple, in one cheek, a tiny mole at the angle of her
jawbone, on the left. He remembered the precise way she tilted her head, and
the way the curls would swing if she shook her head. What was happening to
his memory? The constantly annoying forgetfulness, in a mind one could
compare to a steep slope off which everything rolled, except the most
fundamental of things, was gone and he was seized, since the accident, with
clarity and exact recall of things he had not given thought to for years. He
had started to appreciate the immediacy of things, the value of spontaneity.
He shrugged and turned to Minnie. ‘And you’re sure there’s no one to
call – to tell you’re all right?’ he asked. This was curiosity, not
solicitousness. He was intrigued by the fact she seemed alone in the world.
Taking one of his business cards, he placed it silently on her bed stand.
She did not look at it, and he was not surprised. It was silly to suppose
she would be in touch. He knew she did not think he had saved her life;
neither could he mean anything to her at all. She would forget him the
minute she left Western Australia, off to whoever was waiting for her in
England. She did say more than once, though, that there was no one.
All alone, he thought again. But, after all, he wondered who there
was to call if he had been injured, rather than her. Guilt seeped onto his
chest, as if his shirt were suddenly dampened. Of course there was: his
mother, and Anthony Fiorelli, and Hal, and Erin. There was Erin, but he
preferred not to think of her at the moment. All thought of Erin was excised
whenever he stepped into the hospital.
Minnie shook her head in reply. ‘Auntie Virginia, in London… um, would
be needlessly alarmed and wouldn’t have a clue what to do anyway.’ She had
said it before, using exactly the same words and tone. ‘We only exchange
cards at Christmas. I think I have a cousin in New Zealand, but I wouldn’t
know where to start to look! Orago… Otago?’
He started to say she was as alone as he was, but kept the sentiment
to himself. It would have been a ridiculous statement, a complete fallacy,
since he was anything but alone. Still, at that moment, standing beside a
hospital bed in the gathering gloom, he wanted more than anything else to be
alone as she was, so that he could – could what? He smirked at his thought,
only moments ago, of immediacy and spontaneity. Here, with this woman, he
struggled for words, grasping mentally for things to say, self-consciousness
robbing him of any sign of the casual friendliness he wanted to impart.
He attempted to say she was very unlucky, again, but she had started
on her meal, and despite grimaces and hesitant picking, seemed to be
enjoying it. The room felt suddenly small and dark, taking on an intimate
feeling from which he felt excluded. It was the end of visitor’s hours. It
was palpable, felt in the air: she wanted him to go, and he knew it,
although she had not raised her eyes from her plate.
‘Do you want a light on? Before I go, I mean?’
Minnie nodded, and he hit a switch. The feeling of intimacy was
dispelled.
‘Goodbye, then. Sleep well.’ He paused near the door, waiting for her
reply. When it did not come, he walked quickly away.

The jewellery shop window was a field of glitter, a spread of stars of
light. Bart squinted to make out individual pieces, then looked up and
caught sight of himself in the glass at the back of the shop. The frown he
wore made him look studious, pensive: two horizontal lines on his forehead,
although in the shadow of untidy brown hair, were marked. He peered at
himself, fascinated by the fact he seemed totally unchanged by the events of
the past week. He was still a few inches too short, and still tended to lean
to one side. He grimaced and looked down.
Under the glass counter, several trays of rings set with coloured
stones filled one section, and there were watches in the one adjacent. An
arrangement of seashells and dried algae was scattered with dozens of pairs
of pearl earrings. He could not see what he wanted, which required him to
ask.
‘We have charms in a range of sizes and weights,’ replied an
assistant, who was tall and leggy, a stick insect whose bony knuckles were
ring-less and plaintive among immaculate black velvet trays. He brought out
a large one, bedecked with a neat array of charms. ‘These are
eighteen-carat, made in Italy. I think this is what you want.’
Bart had felt foolish holding his own fist in the gesture he had seen
Italians at the Fremantle docks make. But he had to somehow describe or
replicate the shape of the charm Minnie had lost at the café. He wondered
about the exact significance of the clenched hand with index and little
fingers extended, and thought it was a common one, probably used to ward off
bad luck or attract good. The assistant knew what he wanted right away, so
he could loosen his hand, shake off the sign: take his fist behind his back
as if he had made some vulgar gesture: vulgar? Yes, coarse – a gesture he
would never use himself.
‘This one?’
‘That one,’ said Bart, pointing at a gold charm about the size of the
one Minnie lost in the accident.
‘Contro il malocchio,’ said the man behind the counter, voice as thin
as his fingers. It was Italian, but Bart recognised it. ‘It is against the
evil eye.’ The man thought it was for him, that he was superstitious.
‘No, no – it’s to give as a gift,’ he said quickly, as if it mattered
what this man thought of him.
‘You are not superstitious, then.’
Bart looked up. Without saying a word to the man, he looked away and
back again. He was not superstitious. He was nothing at all. Anything he
could not weigh, measure, touch, taste or count meant little to him. His
mother often said he was hard and too practical, materialistic and soulless.
His face looked hard. He was hard. Erin once called him unfeeling and cold.
But he was not that: merely sceptical, realistic, preferring to question
things, consider and analyse them: compare them. Belief was pointless,
superstition more so, since they had little to do with knowledge, or what
was verifiable or disprovable.
‘Religious people scoff at superstition,’ said the salesman, as if
bent on extracting some sort of declaration from him.
Bart grunted and shook his head. It was a similar curiosity he had
levelled at Minnie, but not quite identical. His curiosity about her was
prompted by a sense they had something in common. It was nothing as
pecuniary as what this man was after. He was not about to tell this man, but
he was the furthest from being religious than anyone he knew, especially his
mother. Perhaps it was her very piety, Iris’s sticky insistent Catholic
fervour that turned him into what he was. Perhaps it was why he believed in
nothing.
The charm was ridiculously expensive. He held out his credit card and
the transaction went ahead as he signed the proffered slip, while hardly
removing his eyes from his unsettling reflection. Was his face really hard?
There were two deep lines around his mouth; his nose was long and straight.
Close-set eyes were what probably made him look stern, or his eyebrows,
which almost met in the middle. But he knew for a fact, because Erin had
said so, that his eyes, his soft brown eyes, as she called them, were clear
and revealing. They were droopy, inquisitive eyes that belied the strong set
of his chin and stern expression, softening his gaze even when he was angry.
‘You have sorrowful eyes, Bart,’ Erin had said, in her matter of fact
way, ‘like a small puppy. No woman can resist your eyes, can she?’
Was it true? With the small grey velvet pouch wrapped and tucked into
his pocket, he left the shop, wondering whether he had a real reason to be
doing what he was doing; whether it was a betrayal, something to conceal,
something to keep from Erin. Of course it was. He laughed aloud. Buying a
charm for another woman was not something he could tell her. He could speak
about this indescribable feeling he had, that came about even before Minnie
had lain on the café floor losing consciousness, to no one. He had to sort
it out himself, and looking in mirrors was not the way. He had looked at his
eyes in the jewellery shop mirror and seen something there. It did not have
a name yet. But he saw it.
The change of mood he looked forward to at the hospital was not going
to happen either. Minnie Cuff had been discharged. She was no longer at the
hospital, and the forwarding address she left was in Melbourne.
Bart stood at the desk, avoiding the nurse’s eyes, shoving hands
deep into the pockets of his jeans.      ‘Melbourne.’ He said it slowly.
‘Mm.’ The desk clerk was sizing him up, deciding whether he was a
relative, an abandoned lover, a do-gooder or casual acquaintance. ‘You
didn’t know she was about to leave?’ she asked.
‘No. I come almost every day, but yesterday I couldn’t…’ What was
the point of telling this stranger anything? He took his hands out, swung
them loosely. Then, thinking he presented a picture of confusion, tucked
them back in his pockets. His left hand encountered the small package he had
brought. Although the nurse could not possibly know what he had there,
embarrassment flooded over him once again. Unable to stand that kind of
scrutiny, he turned suddenly and returned to the Fremantle streets, from
where he had come, heading towards the crowded market.
It was stifling and noisy. Bart felt dizzy, lazy, downing two very
cold beers in quick succession, standing up at a corner pub, where people
stared, where live music was deafening, but which momentarily distracted him
from his dejection. Hemmed in on all sides by the crowd, he needed a task to
occupy him: something that would rid him of the feeling of being watched, of
his stupidity about a young Englishwoman he would probably never see again.
A burly man with a shaved head and dark glasses seemed to be studying his
every move. Bart shook his head. Disappointment that she had left was hard
to shake off. He did not finish his third beer.
He took up, and abandoned quickly, a vague determination to look for
a decent mirror for the flat. Perhaps it was an effort to counter his
earlier purchase. His head swam with the heat and proximity of a dozen
bodies; all intent on pressing, it seemed, as closely to his own as they
could. His chest tightened with the futility of missing Minnie. He would buy
that mirror.
Stepping into a market stall, he inhaled deeply in relief, only to
gag on the suffocating aroma of incense. It was like inhaling deeply into
the dusty musky interior of a potato sack.
‘Mirrors,’ he said, feeling stupid, to a woman whose raised eyebrow
was the only interrogation. ‘I want to look at some mirrors.’ He choked and
coughed.
Erin would be eloquently dismissive of him, buying something for the
flat without her, but he had long needed a mirror, an old-fashioned looking
glass in which to look at his entire body. He needed to see more of himself
than was visible in their bathroom mirror, where his hair looked light, thin
and fairer than it was because of the overhead light. Where the creases on
either side of his mouth were deeper, and where he looked older and hard,
and almost as unfeeling as Erin said.
Two cheval mirrors tilted reflections of the carnivalesque market
crowd. Bart glimpsed his own face among the forms, the lumpy reflected
shapes. He shot out a hand automatically to flatten his hair, and had
another absurd visitation from his childhood. The father he barely
remembered, again, bidding him stand up smartly, telling him to present a
neat compact figure.
This was not the first time: his dreams were full of the man,
especially one that was absurd in its naturalness and visual compatibility
with everything Bart remembered. His father’s slit of a mouth widened, sharp
teeth behind drawn lips. How was it possible to recall such detail? The man
had disappeared from his life when he was hardly old enough to go to school.
‘This is my confession,’ the vision said, not in a ghoulish
monotone, but in a normally modulated conversational tone, which Bart could
not possibly remember him using. ‘I left because domesticity is ugly. Its
intimacy is sticky: its details commonplace. I left because there was
nowhere to go but out and up, like from an underwater cave.’ Absurd, and
revealing: this ascribing of his own feelings to a father who could not have
cared less about giving explanations. He shook his shoulders like a wet dog,
but the feeling persisted.
All Bart could see was the back of his father’s hands, blue plump
veins: long fingers with well-kept nails. Again absurd: he could not
remember ever having studied his hands. What had he done with those hands?
It was futile, yet soothing, trying to remember. His father was a clerk of
the courts. The most he could have done was write entries into a register.
Enter details into a ledger; writing lawyers’ names in columns, followed by
the plaintiffs’, the defendants’. How could he know? He did not know. He
could have remembered those hands performing ordinary tasks such as picking
up a newspaper, curling around a cup of tea. Patting and smoothing the
outside of a black leather briefcase whose battered gentility managed to
give him notions of an occupation of greater worth and importance. Was his
father such a man? His mother had said so, at every possible opportunity.
As a child, there were reasons for his father’s absence that tumbled
from his mother’s mouth whenever people mentioned him. He remembered her
explaining the void left by the absence, the emptiness in their home.
‘Charles is in China,’ he heard her say, from time to time.
Charles was seeking his fortune: like Dick Whittington. Like Marco
Polo. No one ever saw or heard from him after that last morning. Bart’s
mother had no idea where he was. The sentence she sometimes repeated about
China was a total fiction. Where had she got China? It was ridiculous.
Sometimes her lies shocked him. Her strict Catholic beliefs were of a highly
personalised nature. They allowed her to lie. They allowed her to curse when
times were difficult. But she never swayed from her peculiar interpretation
of what it meant to be Catholic. A Catholic with a pursed mouth; a sour set
of lines, engraved on either side in a permanent frown of disapproval that
marked the oval face from the very moment, it seemed, that her husband – my
Charles, she called him – left.
Before that, to her account, it was perfect. Another lie. Bart
reasoned it was far from perfect. If it were perfect, why had his father
disappeared: vanished from the face of the earth? Why were only two places
laid at table, his father included in Prayers for the Dead at Mass, and at
each bedtime? They prayed for his soul as if he were dead, and spoke about
him being in China when it was deemed appropriate to lie.
‘Here you are,’ said the stall keeper. She served to shake him from
his unwanted reverie. The mirror was perfect: a mahogany cheval whose oval
glass was speckled with imperfections and stains, whose frame had a visible
dent, a triangular shape pressed into the wood where it had been battered
sometime during its various journeys from warehouses to shops. He avoided
looking at his reflection again, so stood at an angle to the glass, to watch
the reversed crowd: and saw again the bald burly individual who had bumped
into him at the pub. Who was this guy?
The stall keeper spoke, something about time or money. He made a
quick offer, which was refused and countered, and paid his second offer in
cash.
As he expected, Erin hated it. ‘We don’t need one,’ she said,
smiling, amused at his prolificacy and doubtful taste. ‘The back of the
bathroom door mirror is enough, isn’t it?’ She was not vain. ‘And it doesn’t
go with anything else, does it?’ The contents of the flat were mainly her
choices. She went for a minimalist style that suited her practicality.
‘I liked it, that’s all,’ said Bart. He noticed a box of books near
the front door. She had been tidying up again, in his absence. ‘My books?’
he asked.
‘You’ve read them, haven’t you?’
It was like the day he had returned from the South. ‘I was expecting
you tomorrow,’ she had said. Bart wondered whether it was disappointment he
detected in her voice, or displeasure at the fact he was subject to whims:
annoyance he could not stick to a schedule.
He would not ask how long the box of books had been there. ‘I want
to keep them. I don’t like getting rid of books.’
‘Why? You’ve read them, haven’t you?’ Repeating the question, her
eyes seemed to know, would not have much effect on Bart. Erin repeated
questions when she wanted to make a point.
He smiled. ‘I don’t know. A bit like the mirror, Erin – a bit like…
you know. I like to keep things.’
‘I know.’
If she knew, why was she always trying to rid the flat of his
belongings? He kicked the box, squatted and read the spines. A History of
Western Philosophy slid forward to reveal the paperback novels underneath. A
small well-thumbed photography manual followed. He noted she had made her
decisions, her choices of what should go, by size. They all fitted neatly
into the box. Automatically he stooped, hefted it up and turned towards the
bedroom. His bedroom.
They had separate rooms from the outset, since Erin was an
insomniac: something of which she seemed proud in a way. Placing each book
back exactly where it belonged, in semi-darkness, he found himself wishing
for deep sleep, dreamless kind of sleep that brought respite, oblivion. He
hated that last word. It was stagy and over-used, but it was what he wanted
right then. Right there. Respite from what? More and more lately he needed
to get away. From the flat: from Erin.
Was that why he visited Minnie in hospital? Was that why he had
attached himself to a stranger from England – one with stitches in her neck
where a large sliver of glass from a broken window had very nearly sliced
into her jugular? He wanted to sit and brood. To read a bit, to look in his
mirror and think of Minnie, who was gone now, to goodness knew where.
But he was hungry, and the evening had to proceed as usual. How was
he going to phrase it nicely when he asked Erin to please not sort his
belongings anymore? How was he going to explain to her he needed space? If
he were to be true to himself, it needed no explanation. They both knew
about space. It was what he liked about her from the outset: the similar way
she had to his of regarding privacy: her practical way of going about living
together. It was not cloying. Certainly not demanding in the way of
appreciation or gratitude, and that was what he wanted when he thought of
his mother and how it used to be living at home.
In the kitchen, Erin was talking. Not to herself, but to him. It did
not really matter whether he listened or not. ‘They installed the new ovens
today. The noise was something else.’
‘Who? What ovens?’
‘Downstairs, in the café… the new pizza ovens – we knew they’d
arrive today, didn’t we?’
He had nothing to say. He was hungry.
‘There!’ Erin exclaimed. The dish was superb – golden cheese melted
over a mass of pasta smothered in some sort of white sauce. Her large
capable hands tossed a salad of different kinds of green leaf. She looked
marvellous: big, dark, practical and very Jewish. It was unmistakeable, and
what his mother had hated about her instantaneously.
‘Your mother hates me,’ she had said that first time. ‘Iris hates me.’
He smiled. ‘Yes – it doesn’t matter.’ He laughed. It was funny. He
took Erin into his arms and laughed, pleased that it did not matter. ‘When I
told her your name she thought you were Irish. Catholic. It’s very funny.’
They had laughed together and finished up in bed. Now, he looked
again and knew her piercing eyes would meet his and she would see what was
in them. She had deep dark eyes that addressed the beholder, arrested and
mortified with candid silence. She could speak volumes with her eyes, and
did so with intention and purpose. Erin did not suffer fools easily, and
Bart was starting to feel foolish.
He looked about at her practical neatness, her ruthless cleanliness.
A hopeless un-romantic, he had called her in the early days, because that
was what she was. And he had been so attracted to it. There were no
knick-knacks in her home, no clutter in her life. She wore no jewellery; her
hair was always drawn into a thick dark plait that snaked down her back.
It was what he had liked about her, this practicality. They were
alike, he thought. He was a sceptical realist and she was practical, and
they suited each other. Looking around the flat, one was struck by the neat
division, the organization of his things and hers. So determined were they
to retain individuality and separateness they had two bedrooms, two copies
of some books; two toasters, two lives. It was how he thought it should be.
It was his friend Anthony who negated all Bart had guessed about
relationships. Anthony and Carmen Fiorelli were so close, so intimate, that
Bart got frequent glimpses of what it could mean to really share a life. But
would he not be stifled by that kind of closeness? He had no idea.
Certainly, there was something he missed, something he could not possibly be
getting now. There was something he wanted.
Minnie, Minnie Cuff, who lay in a hospital bed and who thanked him
only cursorily, only very casually, for looking after her when she was
injured; who had disappeared and who would never be seen again: she had
presented a small glimpse of something he was not getting.
Bart ate delicious pasta and salad and thought of Minnie Cuff’s
face. He had studied her face when she was unconscious, when she was awake
and when she happened to be asleep one day he visited her. Her flighty
dismissive nature, and the inattentive way she had with details seemed to be
there, even when she was asleep.
Downstairs, the racket from the café was a rumble he welcomed as
something familiar, something daily and ubiquitous.
‘Anthony and Carmen are expecting us later,’ Erin said between
mouthfuls. ‘You can tell them about our new mirror.’
It was his mirror; he wanted to say, struck by the contradiction of
what he felt. What was it he wanted? Was it sharing, intimacy – or a life
that was completely and utterly his own? Confusion tugged at Bart’s chest
like a badly fitting shirt. It was similar to the separate bedrooms thing.
Anthony thought it was unusual, Carmen did not talk about it, but he could
sense the opinion in her eyes. How could a couple not share a bedroom? It
was unthinkable for Anthony’s wife, whose passionate European temperament
naturally excluded separateness, included everything that was close and
personal.
One of seven children, it was no wonder Carmen cherished Anthony
Fiorelli and his own desire for togetherness. They were both of mixed
Portuguese and Italian origins, and the noisy heart of Fremantle, with its
bustle and community spirit, was automatically what they chose. Bart thought
they hardly gave it much consideration. It just happened, like their three
children just happened. Sometimes he envied them their ways; at others he
wondered how they sustained it all without suffocating.
Being with them tonight was not something he would have planned
himself, but Erin had fixed it, so it was fixed.
Later, many months later, in another country where he would never
thought of going of his own accord, Bart was to remember the evening spent
with Anthony and Carmen Fiorelli as the evening things shifted once more. It
was a watershed evening that irretrievably unbalanced things. To say it
changed his life would be silly, since his life was at that time in flux,
liable to change. Even small shifts could constitute a complete change in
direction, he supposed.
The Fiorelli living room was warm and cluttered. Its small size
demanded intimacy, making it impossible for anyone to have a side
conversation, deviate from the main column of talk. Conversation about the
mirror wafted about him, and he nodded, interjected words and smiles as if
he were participating. But he was distant, detached, wondering whether Erin
or Anthony could sense he was miles away in thought: whether Carmen could
see he wanted to be anywhere but in her cluttered living room, where the
laden coffee table was a kind of barrier he could physically place between
him and Erin: Erin and her sensible ways, her practical plait and her deep
sharp eyes.
Why was he feeling this way? Anthony would tell him it was his own
life that was telling him to settle, buy a house; marry, have children. He
looked at his lifelong friend and smiled in spite of himself.
In his pocket, Bart’s mobile phone vibrated, then rang out its silly
tune. He hated the contraption, and often said to himself he would
disconnect. Throw it out of a window. Flush it down the toilet. What was the
point of being constantly available to anyone and everyone?
Erin looked at him.
He looked back.
‘Bart, your phone.’ Her voice was not cold, but there was a familiar
stiffness about it he would rather have not heard. So it was with a kind of
reluctance, yet a kind of thankfulness for the interruption, that Bart put
his hand in his deep trouser pocket and pulled out the phone. It was the
call that changed everything.

A year ago, Bart had sat at the Esplanade, on the Swan River foreshore in
Perth, watching celebratory fireworks that marked the nation’s birthday.
Alone, he occupied a bench on the broad grassy reserve with a clutch of
someone else’s picnic bags and two terriers tied to the concrete plinth. He
nursed a plaster on his left cheekbone, frowned, and smiled to himself. It
would do little to enhance his looks, if the deep cut left a scar, but it
hardly mattered.
The important thing was that he had helped protect a friend’s livelihood and
property from destruction, and proved to himself to be of some physical
worth. The cut still hurt, so did the recollection of impact with the
intruder’s knuckles.
He had hurried downstairs from his lodgings above Hal Caffary’s art
gallery, stopping suddenly on the landing, from where he could partly see
his old friend confronting two belligerent youths, one wielding a long sharp
screwdriver, the other a syringe full of some dark liquid.
He started, his gaze meeting his old friend’s eyes, and saw in them
the urgent appeal. This was a situation Hal had often spoken about, had
tried to prepare against, but was loathe to have to handle in reality. And
it was happening, there and then, in the Highgate shop whose neighbours on
both sides had experienced hold-ups in the past.
From the stairs leading straight down into the back of the shop, Bart
could see almost everything. Without thinking, he took up the baseball bat
Hal jokingly kept behind a bookcase on the landing, and felt its hefty
woodenness in his palm. His brain ticked, his hand shifted its weight. This
would not work. He had never threatened anyone, or countered anyone’s
threat, with a baseball bat. Slowly, on his way down, he allowed it to slide
silently back and shook his head.
‘Hey! Put that down,’ he said, as confidently as he dared, knowing
he was still more or less out of sight. ‘The cops are on the way.’ With
hesitation turned determination, he stepped noisily and pushed a panic
button below a side counter, then walked boldly further, into a spot where
he was fully visible to the intruders.
The youths were startled but yelled out at once, knowing to make as
much unsettling noise as they could. They moved jerkily about, screamed,
shouting orders, confusing Hal. One of them jumped a counter and smashed a
case containing coins and figurines.
‘Where’s the money?’
‘Get down! Show us the keys! Where’s the money?’
‘You’ll get hurt if you don’t give us the keys! Open the till! Where’s the
money?’
The shouting continued at the same speed and pitch, making Hal blink
silently, clenching his fists. He stood so still his grey ponytail, his
rigid back, even his slightly stooped shoulders, seemed made of bent steel.
Bart strode on, twisting from side to side as he had seen one of the
youths do, and the balance was redressed, the dynamics shifted. Slamming his
palm down on a counter, he leapt over it and faced the boy with the syringe.
‘Get out now, and we’ll forget this,’ he said in a normal voice.
The youth shouted something unintelligible in his face, but it was
obvious something had changed.
Bart quickly seized the wrist of the dangerously pointing hand, and
kicked violently towards the other thug, who came at him with the
screwdriver.
That was when Hal reappeared with the baseball bat. He had no
compunction about giving the closer of the two a whack. In a matter of
seconds the would-be thieves were backing out of the shop, but not before
one had dealt Bart a chop on his cheekbone with the side of a clenched fist.
Blood streaked down and dripped off his chin, and he flicked it off
with a rough swipe, as he would wipe sweat if he were jogging. Looking at
his hand quickly, he took in the red smear but had to concentrate on the
boys’ movements, to see they felt threatened enough to run off.
‘Get the hell out of here!’ he shouted, trying the same pitch and
attitude they had used. He repeated it several times, snarling
unintelligibly, a language they seemed to understand, until the red and blue
whirling of a police car light entered the corner of his vision. It was
over.
‘We did it,’ he said sideways to Hal, his landlord and friend.
‘You did it, mate,’ the older man said, a smile in his voice and
gratitude in his eyes. Not gratitude, perhaps, but surprise that Bart’s
usual inertia had disappeared in an emergency.
That was days ago, and here he was now, watching a pyrotechnic
display with half a jaundiced eye and a plaster on his face.
He had thought of bringing his mother to see the fireworks, but she
had something else to do – her eyes, the way her mouth drooped and the
creases around it deepened: everything about her face indicated she was not
pleased with the invitation. ‘I’m going to church with Nola Evans and Harry.
It’s only right and fitting. And while I’m there,’ she added pointedly,
‘I’ll pay your respects too, and say some prayers for your father.’
‘I thought he was in China,’ Bart said, his voice too loud in her
small kitchen. He was angry at her, wondering now why he had bothered to
come. ‘Tell me, Mum – tell me once and for all if you’ve ever known where he
is, or if you know for sure he’s dead.’ He stood up, in the middle of the
room, feeling not for the first time that he lacked another two or three
inches to really present a forceful enough figure. ‘Do you know anything for
sure? Anything at all?’
Iris shook her head and started to look through her handbag,
something she always did when angered or confused, as if what she found at
the bottom of the large crammed bag gave her comfort in some way. ‘I know
nothing, Bart. I leave it to God. I put myself entirely in God’s hands. It’s
worked all my life. Look at us – do we lack anything?’ She did not look up
and wave a hand around her, to indicate their comparative fortune, but it
was as if she had.
He stamped out of her kitchen, and out of her house, heading for the
station and the evening on his own without looking back, disgust
accompanying him as far as Riverside Drive.
Looking at crowds gathered there, listening to the roar of voices,
music, traffic, he made a conscious decision to forget about Iris for at
least that night. To forget about how he had spent his entire childhood and
youth wondering about his father. Charles – not ‘my Charles’ – not the
Charles his mother created out of nothing, but the father who had escaped
all this, who so neatly disappeared when, perhaps, it had all become too
much. Bart often envied Charles. He often envied him his great fortune at
not having to endure his mother’s heavy presence.
He did not have to bow his head at table and say grace for dutifully
prepared dinners. He did not have to listen to mumbled prayers,
God-bless-yous and Heavens-be-praiseds. He never had to be grateful to a
woman who ‘worked her fingers to the bone’ as a dental receptionist, a
single mother: an indeterminate widow. An abandoned spouse. He never had to
kneel in church, as Bart had knelt every Sunday until he left home,
listening to Iris’s audible breathing as she concentrated on devotions. He
half expected her, sometimes, to rise off the church floor: levitate, as he
had read some saints did in ecstatic rapture.
Dad did not have to tell the truth at all costs, turn his cheek to
bullies at school or show respect to narrow minded pious teachers at St
Patrick’s. He was free. Charles was free of it all, and Bart envied him.
But what was the use of sitting at the fireworks and thinking of his
long gone father? He had not lived home with Iris for some time now – he was
free too. Or was he? It was difficult to ever be free of Iris. Her
congealing piety, the uncompromising faith: the cloying religious pall she
threw over everything seemed to flow beyond the confines of her stifling
home.
Bart’s first home away from home was a small flat in Highgate, which
he shared with two other men. They were everything Iris was not, and a shock
to the system, but Bart relished their every departure from norms he had
realised would not be observed.
Hal Caffary, the older man who owned the flat and art and
antiquities shop directly beneath it, was the type who endured almost
everything as long as it ensured his calm unruffled life was not overly
disturbed. He laced everything with cynical humour that Bart liked, coming
to see it was a layering that hid a canny knowledgeable side that was as
practical as his days were long.
And there was Tan, a Vietnamese guy whose parents ran a deli, not a
hundred metres from the flat: an irreverent youth with enough determination
to prove he was as unlike his parents as possible, and whose presence
ensured the place was never quiet or tidy.
Tan and Hal had smiled, each in their own peculiar way, when Bart
mentioned he was going to the Esplanade for the fireworks. They probably
would have smirked if he had said he would ask Iris along. The fact she did
not go was, it seemed to Bart many months later, a kind of blessing. Because
that evening was in the end a memorable one: not because of the crowds and
bustle, not even for the fact Australia Day was marked in an ordinary kind
of way, but for the fact it was the evening he met Erin.
His first meeting with her was engaging and unusual enough for Bart
to feel a sense of attraction, which he had looked for in return in Erin’s
eyes: practical eyes that seemed to gauge and measure him. What he saw was
amusement, confidence: a kind of awareness and relaxed self-reliance that
seemed to ask little of him. She was in control, and he found himself going
with it, with the relief of not having to make anything like a decision or
choice. It was what had started an attachment, a relationship, but not, in
hindsight, what anyone would call a love affair.
Hal and Tan had teased him inordinately: out of proportion, it
seemed clear, to what the relationship was. What was it? Bart often
wondered. Probably what he needed at the time: someone sensible and cool,
organised, and able to make him feel on an even keel. From the beginning,
she seemed in charge, and seemed to steer their relationship toward
something she wanted for herself. It was not long before she took him home,
the invitation offered matter-of-factly, without ceremony.
Erin’s flat was tiny and uncluttered, her single bed the largest
object there, but curiously, the most inconspicuous. Her walls were bare
save for a landscape showing a grey sky and an even greyer sea, with a black
line of horizon punctuated by a tiny boat.
‘That’s an interesting picture,’ he had said, for something to say;
excited yet daunted by his presence in her space so soon. She had invited
him so soon, and he did not know whether to be suspicious, glad or repelled
by it.
‘I like grey,’ Erin responded. It was an explanation. Neat,
uncluttered, making the picture seem unimportant all of a sudden.
Bart nodded. Women were inscrutable, deep. It was impossible to
gauge the full meaning of what they did or said. They were able to size a
man up in a few seconds; decide if he were a threat or a promise, which is
what Erin did with him, immediately.
He looked at her, hoping to find in her eyes something to elaborate on
what she meant and felt about grey, and found in her eyes a kind of
amusement. Her smile was infectious, there was little for either of them to
say. Erin raised her hand and tapped him on the arm. It was a friendly
gesture, but it was physical contact, so primed Bart and sent him out on his
way home with a feeling of anticipation.
The next time they met he was sure, the physical promise Erin had
tacitly made would be reinforced. The thrill of anticipated sex made Bart
walk briskly, giving him a boost of energy and light-headedness he could not
hide from Tan and Hal, and that was what prompted the teasing.
They were still teasing him four months later, when he was packing
his things to move out.
‘So this girl,’ asked Tan, watching him stack books and magazines.
‘She must be quite somethin’ for you to be moving in with her a’ five moment
notice!’ His narrow eyes belied the cheery disposition, but twinkled with
delight. His tight accent was, to Bart, a charming bonus.
‘I’m not moving in with her exactly, Tan. We’re renting a flat in
Fremantle together.’
‘There’s a diff’rence?’
‘Uh-huh, yes.’ Bart tried folding a t-shirt, gave up, rolled it into
a ball and squeezed it into a corner of a duffel bag. He remembered the
first time he and Erin had made love, when she had walked backwards with
him, allowing him to lead her to the bed. Inexplicably, the memory, though
clear and explicit, did not arouse him. He balled a pair of socks and turned
to Tan. ‘Neutral territory. She’s not moving in with me and I’m not moving
in with her.’
‘Bu’ you’ll be livin’ together, righ’? Like a couple, I mean?’
‘You mean am I sleeping with Erin, Tan? Yes, I’m sleeping with her –
you knew that very shortly after I knew that.’ The laughter that filled the
small room attracted Hal, who was holding a wooden spoon and cursing under
his breath.
‘Listen, I know I said farewell dinner, but I’ve only got as far as
dessert. What do you think of um … Italian?’
‘You mean takeaway Italian, from Bellini’s up the roa’?’ Tan’s eyes
lit up.
Hal waggled his eyebrows. ‘Won’t be anything like Bart’s girl can
cook, from what I hear, but hey – he can put up with anything before all the
bliss starts, can’t he?’
‘I can’t believe you haven’t had time to cook!’
‘Look – buying and selling, especially buying, other people’s pictures
is not exactly a picnic. Today I received a consignment from England that
had three pieces missing.’ He grimaced. ‘The faxes and emails … the paper
chase I got myself into, was something else.’
‘It was a joke, Hal.’
‘I know you and your jokes!’
It turned out to be an evening of confusion, laughter and a kind of
wistfulness on the part of Bart. He had enjoyed his stay with these two very
different men, would miss the shambolic untidy life of freedom and
tolerance.
Iris had given him a disapproving lecture, full of warnings and
tight-lipped censure that afternoon, which filled him with such a dose of
relief that he was no longer living at home he wondered whether living with
a woman – any woman – was such a good idea. He forked linguini with gusto,
looking forward to Hal’s upside down pudding, listening to their witty
banter and contrasting accents and laughter, thinking he could have put up
with a couple more years of this.

Bart held the mobile phone to his ear and mumbled, ‘This is Bart – hallo?’
‘It’s Minnie, Bart – Minnie … Cuff.’
He pursed his lips, turned; looked at Erin, Anthony and Carmen. The
small living room seemed now to be even more crammed and stifling. They all
looked at him expectantly, wanting to know who was on the other end.
‘Work?’ asked Erin, mouthing the word.
He would not have to lie – she did it for him. Bart nodded and spoke
quickly into the phone. ‘Um – hi! Tell me where you are.’
‘Bart,’ the tinny voice said. ‘I’m afraid I’m… look, I’ll be leaving
quite soon, and I wondered whether you could… we can… I’d like to…’ she
hesitated, seeming to grab for a reason to see him, ‘… say goodbye.’
‘Tell me where you are,’ he said again into the phone. He listened
to what the distant voice said, took a deep breath and closed the
contraption, holding the tiny thing between both palms and trying to think
quickly. ‘I have to go,’ he said, feeling unprepared and deceitful. He stood
straight, pulling himself out of his habitual sideways slouch. ‘The paper
needs some quick shots of something.’
‘They’re always doing this,’ Erin explained to Carmen, in an
exasperated voice that suddenly pitched all women together, at the same time
full of a kind of pride. ‘They want quick shots of this and quick shots of
that and it takes all evening sometimes. I wish he didn’t keep that camera
case in the car all the time.’
‘That paper – they should get their act together, hey Erin?’ joked
Anthony.
‘Look – I have to go,’ Bart repeated, wanting to escape his own deceit
as well as get to the woman whose image had pervaded his thoughts for days.
Running down the front stairs of the Fiorelli house and loping towards his
car, Bart felt disembodied, strange. He nursed a sense of guilt and elation
whose mixture he was not used to. It sped him towards the address he was
given at breakneck speed, an interval during which he did not tell himself
to be sensible or to slow down, feeling he was entitled, now that he was
summoned, to a little recklessness.
He punched the radio switch in the car with the kind of vigour he
had seen in Anthony, then punched it off again as the grating sound of some
unfamiliar song trespassed on his thoughts. He needed silence: he needed
noise. He was entirely confused and euphoric. The thought of Minnie calling
him provided a cocktail of duplicity and anticipation that gave as much
punch as a shot of whisky. How long was it since the accident? Since she
disappeared? Twenty-four, thirty-six, seventy-two hours? A week? It was not
important. She was still in Western Australia, and she had called him.
He drove swiftly and expertly through Fremantle traffic and sped up
the coast road along Leighton Beach, ignoring the possibility of police
wielding radar guns. At Claremont, he heaved along the hump-backed bridge
over the railway and turned into unfamiliar streets. The address Minnie gave
hummed in his brain. He knew the street name but not its exact orientation –
was it parallel to the Stirling Highway or did it run across it?
He blinked at road signs, street names and street numbers in the
gloom, avoided other cars. He avoided a van, a dark van whose bristly-headed
driver, wearing a dark tie, came too close. The driver manoeuvred adroitly
around his car and sped away, too fast for the narrow street.
Was he there yet? He pulled up abruptly behind parked vehicles twice
in his search. He thought he glimpsed the same van again, but he must have
been mistaken. Then he saw her.
Minnie was standing on a tiny balcony over a sign that said Chez
Madeline. It was a café that must have had rented rooms upstairs. She was
gazing up and down the dark street, her frowning face lit up by the yellow
suffused glare of a nearby streetlight. She did not smile until she saw him
alight from his parked car.
‘Come up… quickly.’
There was a small lobby-like hall. Minnie ran down a tight flight of
stairs breathlessly and stood on a landing, feet level with Bart’s eyes.
‘Come up,’ she said again. Her eyes looked behind him, and to both sides of
him, then at the closed door, as if to make sure he came alone. It was only
a feeling Bart got, but he sensed a kind of edginess in her. Still, it was
not an unfamiliar thing. It was how she made him feel. It was her
unusualness. Or perhaps it was guilt. The fact he had lied to Erin.
He kissed her: a small sudden peck on the lips that reddened his
face and made her smile.
‘Don’t do that.’ Her laugh was youthful, full of a kind of pleasure.
‘I just have,’ he responded, reckless, taken by the same sensation
he experienced as he sped towards the address she had given a scant
half-hour ago, spurred by the renewed expectancy that erased all
disappointment brought on in the last two or three days, when he thought she
had gone out of his life. ‘I just have,’ he repeated, this time to himself
as she turned away.
The room was small, brightly lit and furnished predictably with bed,
chair and desk. A corner cabinet had an electric kettle and cups on it. Her
bags were pushed into a corner: a jumble of coloured leather. He was not to
know it yet, but the jumble of bags was a sight that would occupy his mind
for some time, becoming a preoccupation.
She stood and stared at Bart for a second, then ran a hand down her
thigh, turned and flung herself onto a hard chair, apparently at a loss for
something to say. ‘Oh – I’m glad you found this place.’ The relief seemed
deeper than the situation warranted.

‘Are you all right?’
Her response was a bright smile.
‘So you’re leaving, are you?’ Bart muttered awkwardly.

Copyright 2008 Juliette Field. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.