He sat shivering on wide, cement steps. Behind him rose the blocky sides of the State Library, wide slabs of raw concrete and dark glass, looking for all the world like a colossal stack of unwanted telephone directories. Across the wide, cold river, the glass spires of Brisbane’s skyscrapers winked in the morning light. The sun itself seemed a tiny, fustian token in cloudless brittle blue. Nicholas was curled tight around himself in the cool shadows—the sun’s rays were still creeping down the monolithic sides of the library building, their small warmth teasingly close yet out of reach. Around him waited other library patrons: bearded men in anoraks, precise women with tight hair and string bags, university students with deadline faces, old men straight as their canes. Nicholas reluctantly pulled his hand from a warm pocket and checked his watch.
It was nearly nine. The drive in had been slow and dejecting. Caught in peak-hour traffic, he had been forced to crawl past a man lying at the side of the road. The man’s lips had been white, his eyes wide with confused terror, chest caved in and ribs protruding, head held off the ground by invisible hands. It took minutes for him to expire, and appear again a split second later, falling from a car that had crashed weeks, months, years ago. Why are you still here? Nicholas had wanted to ask. Why can’t you move on? You weren’t evil, were you? The Thomas boy wasn’t evil. Cate wasn’t evil. Why are you doomed to this horrible, endless rerun? As if hearing Nicholas’s thoughts, the dead man rolled his eyes toward him as his crushed body jerked. Fear and confusion. That was all Nicholas ever saw in their eyes. Terror, bafflement, a glum desire to be done with. Never enlightenment. Never hope. Never portents of heaven or signs of the divine. And they were everywhere. There was no escape, no refuge, no place without ghosts.
He needed answers.
There was a twitter of excitement among the people waiting outside the library. They all started moving, like cows at milking time, as the tall glass doors opened. From their hurried rush, they might have been racing to read the last books on a doomed earth. Nicholas rose wearily. I fit in here, he thought. An unkempt man with strange fires burning behind his eyes. He shuffled into the library.
He watched the last of the small crowd of patrons disperse like swallows to nests: some scurried to the information desk, some to the reference books, some to the microfiche catalogues, most to carrels where they proprietarily placed bags beside the LCD terminals. Nicholas wandered to a far stall and staked his own claim with a pencil, notepad, and a bottle of water. He furtively checked that no one was watching, then reached into his satchel and produced a spray can of insecticide that he sat close by his chair. Then he settled to work.
Half an hour later, he’d mastered the online photograph library. On the screen was a box labeled “Search terms.” Into it he typed “Carmichael Road.” An icon bar gradually filled as the computer searched.
“Search results: 15 hits.”
The first photographs were of different Carmichael Roads in other towns and many suburbs. Then he found Carmichael Road, Tallong. He clicked the link. The black-and-white photograph was from 1925; the caption read “R. Mullins’s delivery truck.” Behind the fragile-looking old vehicle was a nondescript house, naked without connected power lines or a crowning television aerial. He clicked another link. This revealed a posed photographic portrait of “Clement Burkin, meteorologist.” Another link: “C. Burkin’s home, Carmichael Road.” Yet another: a plan of the suburb of Tallong, Parish of Todd, 1891. The fold lines of the old document were as dark as the faded streets with their handwritten names: Madeglass Street, Ithaca Lane, Myrtle Street. The thirty-two lot house blocks hung like ribs from the spines of roads. To the east of them sat a large rhomboid flanked by Carmichael Road on one side and cradled by a loop of river: “Arnold Estate.”
It took only a glance to recognize what the proposed Arnold Estate was. The woods. He leaned closer to the screen.
Dotted lines ran through the rhomboid: “Proposed subdivision. Raff & Patterson, Surveyors.”
He wrote down the names.
Another link—a flyer for a land auction from twenty years later, in 1901: “Fifty-eight magnificent new sites! High-set views!” Again, the area of the woods was divided into dotted lines of proposed streets; another development that never happened. “£5 deposit. Thorneton & Shailer, Auctioneers.”
He wrote down their names, too.
“Flood damage to jetties and boat houses, 1893.” A jetty on leaning piers seemed to slide down into still, sepia waters. Nicholas blinked. Of course, the ’93 flood. The river would have broken its banks in lots of suburbs, including Tallong. He flicked back to the auction flyer, its map showing the loop of river around the woods. The river waters would have torn right through them. A memory rushed back of leaning trees festooned with bent iron, and the heaved, rotting boat, her nom de guerre, Cate’s Surprise, flaking away to show her real name.
He typed “Wynard,” then “Boat.” Search.
“Search results: 1 hit.”
He clicked the link.
There she was. The caption read: “Former ferry boat Wynard docked at private jetty, Sherwood, 1891.” The sepia photograph was of the same boat he’d seen resplendent in fresh paint on a mirage pond, then decrepit and collapsed in a choked gully.
I’m not crazy.
Nicholas sipped his water as his heart thudded. He closed his eyes and concentrated, trying to get all the images he’d seen into some order in his mind.
The woods. Many planned subdivisions. Many scheduled auctions. Yet none had transpired; the woods had remained undeveloped and untouched.
He opened his eyes and flicked back through his notes, then typed a search for “Auctioneer, Thorneton.”
Three thumbnails: that same flyer for the Arnold Estate subdivision; a photo of a rakish, smiling man in a boater hat accompanied by a heavyset woman in a bustle that was an explosion of tulle; an old photo of the stone Anglican church where both Tristram’s and Gavin’s funeral services had been held.
Nicholas felt a flutter of fear. But why should that be surprising? The church had been the center of Tallong for more than a century. He clicked to enlarge the image.
The caption read: “Funeral service for P. Thorneton, Auctioneer. 1901.” The photograph showed undertakers in top hats with black ribbons sitting atop a horse-drawn hearse. Mourners grim as crows were grouped around the dark stone church. Pritam’s and Hird’s Anglican church. The church of the Green Man. The building, only a decade or so old then, already looked centuries old, as grim and severe as something that had forced its way bitterly up through hard earth.
Nicholas pulled another name from the flyer and typed: “Surveyor, Raff, Patterson.” He bit his lip, then typed, “Funeral.”
He sipped water while the search bar filled.
The first photograph was unrelated—it showed the tombstone of a Glynnis Patterson from Toowoomba. But the second made Nicholas’s breath hiss in through clenched teeth. “Funeral Service for Elliot Raff, Surveyor, 1891, Henry Mohoupt, Undertaker.” The image was cracked, making the dull gray sky look fatally wounded. A crowd of mourners beside a horse-drawn hearse outside Pritam’s church. The trees were shorter and the dresses were fuller, but otherwise the photograph was almost identical to the one taken twenty years later. But, again, the church. Solid and brooding.
He sat back and rubbed his eyes. It was midday. The surrounding carrels were full. He looked outside. The river ran alongside the library, swollen and brown. Its opposite bank was laced tight with an expressway that ducked and weaved in and out of itself, feeding into a business district studded thickly with skyscrapers and office buildings. Bruise-blue clouds loitered discontentedly at the horizon.
Nicholas stretched his neck, trying to get all the new facts straight in his head. Auctioneers plan to sell the woods; each dies the same year. Surveyors plan to divide the woods; each dies the very year he plans to slice them up.
He turned back to the monitor and typed “Water pipe, construction.”
It took him ten minutes to reach the last, telling image. The caption didn’t surprise him: “August 3, 1928. Workers boycott construction of water pipeline through western suburbs following multiple fatalities.” The photograph showed a bullock team and an empty dray beside dislocated sections of three-meter-high pipe. Behind the dour men and lumpish oxen, the woods glowered. He skipped to the end of the text accompanying the photograph and read the words: “… the unpopular pipeline was diverted through a neighboring suburb.”
He reached into his satchel and pulled out Gavin’s cigarettes, slipped one into his mouth. A woman opposite leveled a scornful stare at him. The middle-aged man sitting next to him sent him a thundery look, then got up and walked away. Nicholas jiggled the cigarette in his mouth; the dry whisper of the filter on his lips was comforting. The woods had been unassailable. Auctioneers, subdividers, council pipes—something wanted no one in those woods. But the church … why did the church keep cropping up?
He typed “Anglican church,” then hesitated. He closed his eyes and concentrated. Standing outside the cold, mossy church in the rain, peering over at the marble cornerstone, reading the lead letters: “Dedicated to the Glory of God, 1888.” He typed the year. Search.
“The Right Reverend Nathaniel de Witt stands beside Mrs. Eleanor Bretherton who lays foundation stone for Tallong Anglican Church, 1888.” While the Reverend de Witt smiled, Bretherton looked at the camera with undisguised contempt. In one gloved hand, she held a guide rope attached to the heavy stone that was suspended by an overhead crane outside the frame. But it wasn’t her expression that held Nicholas’s stare. It was that he recognized her.
Eleanor Bretherton looked exactly like the old seamstress from Jay Jay’s haberdashery that he remembered from his childhood. The old woman who’d freaked out Suzette. Mrs. Quill.
It was impossible. Bretherton must be her grandmother or great-aunt. But those explanations rang hollow. Certainly, Nicholas was trusting memories twenty years old, but the similarity between Bretherton and Quill was uncanny.
Only the voice in his head said it was no coincidence.
He typed “Quill, Haberdasher.” Search.
“Search results: 0 hits.”
He thought a moment, then typed “Myrtle Street, Tallong,” hesitated, then, “shop.” Search.
His jaw tightened as he watched the search bar fill.
An old image appeared. “Sedgely Confectionery Shop, Myrtle Street, Tallong, c. 1905.” A solitary, timber-clad shop with a deep awning sat alone on the corner of unpaved Myrtle Street. Words painted in its windows proclaimed “Boiled sweets,” “Choicest Fruits of the Season,” and “Teas, Light Refreshments and Ices.” Nicholas peered. It was in the same place where the group of shops stood today—the convenience store, Rowena’s health food store, the computer repair shop. In front of the confectionery store stood a woman in a white dress. She must have turned away from the camera as the photograph was taken because her head and face were smoky and blurred. The caption read: “Possibly proprietress Victoria Sedgely.”
Nicholas’s mouth went dry as a crypt.
The woman in the photograph held in her arms a small, white terrier.
Katharine swore as the spinning clay collapsed in on itself and what was to have been a tureen folded into a damp, malformed thing that brought suddenly to mind a birthing film a nurse had shown her when she was pregnant with Nicholas—the folded, exhausted clay lips looked horribly like that film’s mother’s bloody vulva. Katharine ground the spinning wheel to a halt with the heel of her hand, scooped the aborted pot off, and pounded it into a ball that she slapped onto the block of clay at her feet.
Normally, a few hours in her under-house studio was distracting enough to wick away any vexed thoughts. Not today. She switched off the wheel with her toe. In the new quiet she could hear the steady patter of rain on the bushes outside the window. The day was dark. She rose and went to the tubs to wash the already drying patina of pale clay from her hands.
What would Don have said?
Katharine shut off the tap with an irritated twist. What would Don have said? “Can you make that a double, love?” she thought bitterly.
Ah. But the drinking came afterward. What did he say about Quill before all that?
Katharine dried her hands. She didn’t need to think about that. Don was long dead; dead, in a way, even before he died. Quill was long gone, too. Life was for the living.
“Stuff and nonsense,” she said to herself, and reached to switch off the light. The warm yellow of the tungsten bulb clicked off, leaving the room a dull aquarium slate; light swimming in through the window fell on the distorted lump of clay under clear plastic. It looked horribly like a broken head, and in Katharine’s mind appeared a vivid memory of Gavin Boye’s shattered face as a white plastic bag was zipped up around him. Yes, life was for the living, but the living were dying again. She closed the door and hurried upstairs.
The house was quiet. Even a week ago, returning to this silence would have been welcoming, a cocooning balm for her to luxuriate in, a private hush in which she could curl up, read a book, doodle designs on a sketchpad, stare idly out the window at the hibiscus. But today, the silence was eerie. The furtive whisper of the rain on the roof made it even more unnerving.
“Suzette?” she called. For a moment, she had the terrible feeling that her daughter was down at Myrtle Street with the greengrocer Pamela Ferguson and something bad was about to happen. Then she remembered Suzette was a grown woman now. She was in no danger.
“In here, Mum!” Suzette’s voice came from her old bedroom up the hall.
Katharine walked up and looked through the doorway. Suzette was leaning over an open suitcase that was half-packed. It was a sign of how effectively the Close women had been avoiding one another; Katharine had no idea her daughter was returning to Sydney today.
“Almost done?” she asked lightly.
“Almost,” agreed Suzette. “I’ll have to ring a cab. Black and White or Yellow?”
“They’re much of a muchness,” replied Katharine.
Suzette nodded.
“Your brother all right?” asked Katharine.
“I think so. A bit …” Suzette stopped folding clothes and thought for a moment. “I don’t think it’s good for him here. I’ll go home, and maybe talk him into moving down.” She fixed Katharine with a look. “Then I’ll get you down.”
“I’d have to sell both kidneys to afford to live in Sydney, and then where would I be?”
Suzette shrugged. “I could help.”
Katharine bristled, and fought back the stubborn urge to bite. “Thank you, love, but I own this place and it’s fine.”
Suzette smiled thinly, as if hearing a safe bet won.
“Listen,” began Katharine. “The other morning, over breakfast …”
“It was fine, Mum, I just don’t like porridge—”
“No, no. You asked me about … about the seamstress. Mrs. Quill.”
Katharine saw her daughter’s hands freeze for a moment in midair, before they continued their busy packing.
“Yep,” agreed Suzette.
“What made you think about her?” asked Katharine, still trying to keep her voice as airy as possible.
Suzette cocked her head. “I thought you couldn’t remember her?”
Katharine shrugged. “Oh, bits and bobs. Little old thing. Pleasant enough. Hardly saw her outside her shop. I don’t know where she lived, but it couldn’t have been far.”
Suzette was looking at her hard. “What makes you think that?”
Katharine thought. What did make her think that?
“I never saw her drive. And on the odd evening I saw her walking with her silly little dog—”
Katharine fell silent as Suzette’s face became a hard mask.
“Little dog?” she repeated.
“Yes, I think … a little—I don’t know—Maltese or something …”
Suzette was staring at her. “What color was it?”
Katharine frowned. “Honestly, it’s so long—”
“Mum?”
“White. But why?”
Suzette didn’t answer. She dropped the clothes she was folding and hurried out past Katharine.
A moment later, Katharine heard the fluff of an umbrella opening, the door slamming, and her daughter’s footsteps hurrying down the road.