5

When the radio broke our grave was really dug. All day Dodge listened to A.B.C. Classic F.M., the melodic fog rolling first thing over the living room. I would leave her for school standing by the window in a slate coloured skirt maybe and a pinstriped blouse, swirling the insides of her cup to some semi heard fugue. At times she would say as if out of nowhere ah Sibelius, and with an effort I would recover a noise passed almost out of my perception, like surf or the rumble of traffic in the street below.

Over dinner the radio was retuned and Dodge chewed vacantly through the news, but I had been waiting all afternoon for that static fissure and the piping voice come sudden as a bat got in the window that flaps around the room trying to recover the open air. Not a bat a whatsit. The other. I came back from school one day to dead silence.

The radio is broken she said from the sofa where she appeared to have been watching herself in the reflection of her shoes.

She must have sensed my disappointment in the evenings because she came up with an incentive for return: she bought poppy seed cakes by some kind of correspondence and we had afternoon tea. She would pick an album to browse and if she’d left a turd she would be tender (though I would know then, there is a turd).

What happened to the piano I asked one afternoon, my eyes having fallen on the angle of unfaded wallpaper underlapping the bookcase.

Fell to pieces said Dodge. That’s impossible I said.

Ah she breathed and her eyes widened. That’s right. Mother smashed it up.

What for.

Well her voice trailed she was very upset. Perhaps because the pilot died. Beaten by his vans over the sea. She was a passionate woman my mother. A bitter fit.

Did you learn to play I asked.

Dodge looked surprised and raised her hands. She twiddled them over the air. Well yes. I was very good. I’m sorry I can’t play for you. Might have been your school mistress. It is a pity about the radio I ought to buy a new one. She didn’t, and a pall of silence settled down beneath the chatter. Silence settled down like dust.

Behind the soft yellow stone of the Department of Lands building Eliza and I made an important discovery. At first there was a misunderstanding. I, ever the boggler, had let Eliza do the talking because it was her family but in telling it her own story got so entangled with the anile saga of the flat and her admittedly notional ideas of antecedence that we almost ended up in the basement with the bound records going back to the beginning. Once it was clear that it was in fact a flat, not a farm that we were after we were shown to the maps, told that Canada may have patriated its constitution but we had introduced to the world the strata plan for apartments, which is not a map but a number of floor plans illustrating units in relation to a whole building (common property, by 1982, being titled apart) and which ought to give up the reference for the deed. At least I think that’s how it worked. This was before the automated land titles system launched the following Halloween. The rest had that hallucinatory detail that nine times out of ten in my experience fades irreparably after the saying. Actually come to think of it, ours was not a stratered building but a company title like there used to be. We did end up in the basement after all. Down there the adaptable New Form titles are loose leafed, may be typed as well as hand written, and previous owners are crossed out, but for a building like ours the Old Form titles come on a single oversized piece of paper with a memorial entered for every transaction in blanket historical sequence so that, unless the page fills up and you have to find its successor, the chain of ownership can be seen at a glance. We were hoping for evidence of a tortious conveyance. But in the folio that we turned out of its deep red binding we discovered the flat had never belonged to anyone but the Castor or the Albert family. Indeed the Roses were archaic renters. It was the end of the line. We had only one other question. The deed said nothing about the contents of the flat. Who did they belong to.

The fixtures or the furniture said the boy behind the desk.

What’s a fixture.

A chattel is presumed not to have become a fixture if it is resting on its own weight on the land. A fixture is. Difficult to remove without doing violence to the. Integrity of the real property. A hot water system.

The furniture.

The deed might not tell you. Your auntie could have signed a contract. You’ll have to follow that up with the owner.

How old are you.

Old he said and sucked his teeth. You wanna get a soda.

I nudged Eliza forward. We had just found a reason to keep a low profile. Look I said when we were in the street. Don’t tell me she replied. We had to get all that furniture out of there fast, make some money while we still could. And if this Albert turns up. We’ll destroy the letters, say we never heard of him. He can take the flat but if it’s empty what can he do. We’re within our rights.

On the Avenue that afternoon we made a start at intervening. Though I had considered how otherwise rewarding it could be to hang around as long as it took to get to the bottom of the whole obstruction in a formal way, the fact was Eliza had recognised the situation the moment she got my news in the mail. It was a sudden opening, a time to strike. There was no room for two agendas. My first premonition trumped the second. No. The scales fell from my eyes. The ultimatum hit me with the usual cumbersome aplomb. Fat chance losing anything until you find it but you can always try shaking off even the submerged facets in the market. Hail Jonus moneta! The hardest currency is monochrome! In other words somewhere among the tumbled down debris of our brief effort I got over it. Revisions, I thought. Carp ’em, my ink is ice. Of course one is still struck by moments of transparency but the façade is the last to fall from even the miserablest heritage listing and frankly I said to myself or at least do now which is the same thing, if from the rising waters of nature’s own superbly rendering sheets the most mucked up growler wrinkling in the perfumed air before the spring lets go a pure floater or two from its equally crystalline delitescence, the tide of time, that’s literalture. It runs against you, vainly repulsive. I stood stupefied in the rubble of my opulence. A chanceable hitting, some of us perseverate young. I was still in my salad days of self control. It was before I got ink and paper. If we can’t shift all this before he comes, Eliza pondered aloud as she would faced with my almost unrelieved leisure respecting efforts at conversation, innocent of the flood gates she had divided in me.

We’re through. What else was it after all to be between us to begin with.

Eliza wanted to know if I could remember the names of anyone Dodge had had dealings with. She had sat down on a pile of old magazines. In the living room they were all that was left of a collection that had come up to my knees in most places, even as I grew older. There was too much to tell. Factaque sparsa. But great masses of accumulation. From where. Impossible to tell. The venereal flow of international bric a brac. Open sesame. Here we go again. Deliacious ecstasy oh it doesn’t matter and refuse of an interminable bargain that sends you senselessly out of your depth even as it generates the very jetsam that keeps you floating on tides of junk capped by dirty Kleenex drifting albums fold out star charts cigarette tins calendars empty perfume bottles bits of lead type terracotta picture frames torn up ferry time tables cameo heads playing cards needlework monogrammed gloves and combs and suitcases strings of beads and heaps and other. The spectacles she used to buy from the chemist, themselves a wonderful piece of work in the world’s catalogue. Infinite seed. A list is nothing, details lost to view in their own ascendance save a glint from between the dark stacks of a microlith flake shard of creamware a pencil or a choker a broken light bulb pharate still in the striped box a jade brooch at most a briefer stretch of turpiloquium. There was a stuffed blue Persian cat. You had to be careful where you trod. One day Dodge slipped on a glossy leaf and came down safely on a brittle stack of weather reports, flakes of yellow paper flurrying around her petticoats.

Help!

That evening she put her hands on her hips and said I think it is time we cleared this up. We used the suitcases and we bundled the best things together and carried them over to the Wayside Chapel on Hughes Street and dumped them on the doorstep. A candle in a crown of thorns. We stuffed the bottles and the broken pots in doubled garbage bags and I took them in the lift to the bins in the courtyard. Then we put the paper and the books together and I took them down to the courtyard in garbage bags one by one until the bins were full. We piled the rest in the bathtub and we burnt it. We burnt the photo albums. They glowed red and turned to ash. By the time we went to bed the same scene that Eliza was sitting on a pile of old magazines in had begun to effloresce through the emptied space a neat square whose matching furniture gave it the tenuous coherence of a window display returning to view under streaks of dust as if the shadows of the objects drawn off had held on. I feel like I have said that before. In any case, a clearing far more efficient than the one in the office in Wolomooloo the place of plenty. The sort of holocaust the solicitor was doomed to dream about as he shifted the Gestetnered pulp of his reckoning from one end of the room to the other, pages like drops of water no of blood, that on their own are almost nothing and in conglomerate can suffocate you or burst walls.

Dodge went on shopping after that but only for repairs and perishables. Bit by bit we put the old rooms back in order polished and dusted the original knick knacks fixed what we could. I was eleven years old and that year I got my period and Dodge almost stopped shitting herself. It was a false sign. Her guts had taken a secret turn for the worse.

I couldn’t remember. Do you know I asked Eliza how much any of this stuff is worth.

With composure she looked around until her eyes came to rest on the bookcase: a fine squat deep hued piece much older than the rest of the furniture. It looked like the most valuable thing in the room. I wondered if Eliza knew something about furniture. No she said but we could find out.

After some asking around she bought the latest two editions of the Australian Antiques Collector and took them back to the flat to study. Unfortunately they had nothing in the way of a general guide but she read me an interesting article on rabdophilism. A cane whose knob is a fly made of black and blond horn fits snugly in the hand. Portraits of mute film actors and actresses appear on shafts. Valentino is represented in ivory. One finds the cheap metal bust of American presidential candidates and Walt Disney characters increase in price. Caricatures of faces from the curious bones of the whale’s inner ear. Camphored stretcher. It went on like that, the siren call. The turned and tapered legs are capped and shod in copper. There was nothing in the magazines that looked like anything we had so to start with we thought it would be useful to make a roll. We began in the living room. The problem, we found, was we didn’t know the proper names. Armchair I said. Eliza made a note on the back of my letter, which she had taken out of her bag along with the greater part of a pale blue Derwent pencil. What dilated in me at that first real flare of her own peculiar galaxies. Maybe it has it written on it somewhere. I turned the chair over onto its back but the sagging hessian, though its pores exhaled an odour like old straw, was blank. For some reason Dodge had left me with something resembling a respectable vocabulary for materials but if she knew what kind of furniture any of it was she never mentioned it. Striped, offered Eliza, writing. In bad condition.

The dining room was equally incommunicable. By the time we got to Dodge’s bedroom Eliza threw the sheet of paper half full of her commentary on the kidney dresser and declared the exercise a dead end. She sat down on the bed, which was still unmade, the tartan quilt rolled up in one corner and trailing on the carpet. The room, whose denomination as forbidden territory had lingered between Dodge and myself long after the early years, though it had for practical reasons become a dead metaphor, now touched off in me the frisson from a loss of mystery, an immediate pleasure or uneasiness, the sheer idea of Eliza’s midnight search representing at the end of such a prolapse a broach of far less murrain character than that of the literally superficial contact for which I had been improperly broken in. It was enough to know that the mole grey oak doors of the dressing table, the wardrobe, though closed now, had been opened. Distracted by a new sense of permissiveness, curiosity creeping up from the ruins of censure, I knelt down and reached my hand under the bed. My knuckles struck loaded cardboard. Putting in both hands, I dragged out a box.

There were books, that was the first surprise. Some, mostly those that had lost their spines, were picture books. A pasteboard edition of Grimm. A malkin puss in boots with graffito, abstract, as the police in Paris say. There were also notebooks bound together in a decaying rubber band. Under them locked together in a tangle of stiff limbs, a stuffed doll with a hard head, and hard hands, and hard little shoes, and a filthy rubber ducky, and a tiny phonograph, and some heavy contraptions made of a kind of metallic alloy, one of which turned out to be a man dancing with a pig, and one a sedan chair whose passenger was pulling on the ponytail of a Chinese porter as on a pair of reins, and one was a bust of a minstrel figure dressed in a blue suit and a red bow tie. Its arm, hand turned palm out before its belly, was a weighted mechanism. I pressed it with my finger and it swung up to its open mouth, its eyeballs rolling back in its head.

Eliza giggled.

It wants a penny. We can’t sell that I said. Why not, she said. Someone will buy it.

The rubber band had congealed to the surface of the notebooks and it crumbled away over the embrasures where the bloated leaves puckered together like the ripple marks on the rock platforms at Collaroy. Having never before seen a sample of Dodge’s handwriting with the chance to tend to deasil, I found the apparently puerile scrawl impossible to date. We set about studying them. Hurry up and get this over with. There were four notebooks, all bound in thick cardboard with a piece of stuff like gauze along the spine. Two were simply cryptic, covered in what appeared to be a nosediving kind of shorthand but whose crabbed or porpoised coils may have been no more than what the social services would call echopraxic. One had been written on for the first two and a half pages only. What seemed at first to be tables were in fact six diary entries, in different ink, but since there were no dates we couldn’t tell whether they had been made days or months or some other period apart, or sporadically, over wide gaps, or all on the same day. The content was not helpful. Cloudy, with some scattered showers on the seaboard, otherwise mostly mild for the present. Still a tendency to morning coastal fogs. Impure thoughts. Lost a tooth. The last pit of tears turned out to be a phone and address book.

Here look at this said Eliza. She pointed to an entry that barely read ralph Siv 977 8218 will buy beefwood. What do you think of that. Would you know beefwood if you saw it.

I wouldn’t.

Naturally Eliza thought it would be worth looking in the dining room. But the dining room furniture is all maple.

All of it.

It’s a set.

To simplify, the same idea came to us at once. Back in the living room we went over to the bookcase. It was a composite piece. Eliza pulled on an empty draw at random. That’s easy, she said and sniffed. Cedar.

And you know what that is I said tapping the reddish side panel.

Yes.

But the rest. I don’t know. The key to the oval windowed doors was in the lock. If Eliza had been hoping to crack it she was gracious, allowing me to open them and together we removed the things that had been arranged inside. Aside from the framed photograph there was a long legged person getting swept by the wind in bronze that was far too big for the low shelf, a few porcelain ladies and a hairy faced beer mug and a spoon from Government House. We laid them out in a row on the sofa and I got a torch from the kitchen to see if I could show up an inscription, the traces of a stamp, but there was nothing. Eliza pulled open the top drawer and felt blindly along the walls. Here, she said, I think, and took it all the way out onto the carpet. She pointed to a patch of yellow paper disintegrating at the edges and covered with an angular, old fashioned script. By an impurely formal logic the ragged arc where the bottom right hand corner of the label had been torn away led our eyes to the last finished word

King. &so remain

family it is

Beefwood

Bingo.

Too easy.

Eliza shook her head appreciatively. This is real she said. This could be worth something. Nonetheless we put off making the phone call. Nothing happened. We were living on domes of silence. Another rent notice arrived before we took up the address book again. Albert was obviously not in a hurry to take possession (why) but by then our funds were getting low and there wanted less than a week before the notice on our application for letters ran out and we weren’t sure who might start trying to get in contact after that. We had no fear of creditors but there are others. Our level of comfort was also beginning to decline. We were far into the more obscure end of the silver and most of the food had gone rotten. Fancy clothes are no good if you have to eat the lingering pickle. Eliza had put the books without spines in the bathroom. Time had caressed us, as brief and personally riotous as it had been. The welcome had been overstayed, we were being coaxed out.

She thought I should be the one to make the call. I carried the phone from the dresser and put it on the dining table while she recovered the entry for Siv. And if the eights are threes. We can try it again, in different combinations.

I got an answer straight off. I said I was calling about the Beefwood bookcase.

Dodge Rose is selling?

The situation was explained. There was a long pause. He didn’t think he was in a position. He said, he would call back. Perhaps, in the meantime, we could send him some photographs.

Do you think it’s a bargaining technique. We couldn’t afford to wait. We decided to take the bookcase to him. The postal address he’d provided was in Manly. We would catch a ferry.

The next day we took the bookcase in the shopping trolley down on to Macleay Street. After wrapping it in a spare blanket the fit was perfect. For the route we decided to take in Cowper Wharf, the Art Gallery, the Domain, Spring Bent Street, then Loftus to the Quay. That should satisfy the local historians in me. It’s not like I don’t owe it to them. Eliza did the lateral steering and I pushed. We almost ran up the back of a Phoenix but had no serious trouble otherwise. It was good to be out. The controller in the ticket booth at the wharf made us buy three tickets then opened the service gate so we didn’t have to haul over the turnstile. At the end of the platform a man wearing an uncommonly dusty pair of aviator glasses turned his back on us to wait. We sat in the shade of the Freshwater, a hand each on a rickety wheel, rocked on the low waves. The smell of guano and brine was like a purgative, I mean a pick me up. No hang on I do mean the other one. I leant over the edge and watched the seaweed swell and contract around the pillars in the deep green water. Objects beneath the surface are not where they appear. They aren’t there at all. Eliza scrubbed her latterly strawberries and cream then rancid cheeks ecstatically. It’s nice down here. She started laying out plans for moving the rest of the furniture, offered to push from now on. What we ought to do, she said, was get someone to value it anyway. Yes, initiative, that’s what we needed again. The situation was not so dire. After all we had nothing to lose. What a beautiful day. A bar of sunlight had fallen between the ferry and the platform roof and began slanting in on us, warming through the chill breeze. I thought about unlacing my pumps. It was complicated. I might not have time.

Was it the Barrenjoey that picked us up or could I have called a ghost ship in from the Heads, what echoes, her hull clean of cement and what must be making itself felt as the no less speaking blubber/meat of that smallish but unhappy whale who would drag a vermilion zigzag through the harbour before failing, as a corpse, to stop washing up on the shore. Maybe the boat had already been condemned, it can be hard to keep count. Apart from the known survivors, which don’t tend to run into the pavement anymore. So many ferries since The Lump made her maiden voyage have gone under, smashed to matchsticks in the vanished smog. I thought I would like to remember all their names; that would have taken some distilling. This tide you used to wish you could drain away in your separate fantasy, at last hollow, and dry, and empty, and noisy with only the diggers of the molten vessel for the Cpt. Cook Graving Dock, like horrific, repetitive dentists pulling the stump of a bloodwood tree from the inaurous silt exposed forty eight feet below sea level. These estoppels and reversals won’t do forever. I am the skipper of something.

There was a shout. Some people came off the boat. The man in the sunglasses got on and we followed him, rolling our burden over the gangway ahead of us. The engine coughed up with a shudder, a yellow petrol cloud swirling over the water and we floated out, smooth, as if there were no longer an engine. Towards the Heads the ferry began to pitch. The spray hissed up the sides to strike our parched lashes. A little prosopopoeia. I have a vague notion about Manly. Once children used to sift in the long shadow of the pines on the beaches, wet hair making rosettes in the hot sand, for sovereigns and bones and older coins, and their discoveries were published in the daily papers. We turned into Henrietta Lane from the Corso, after which indeed I am obliged to stop labouring the loom. Needless to say, I didn’t write that either. Wherever they were, our terminal white gloves, which even looked like sails at first, reeking, roughly washed of their gore, belonged to a small antiques dealer’s, the kind you normally find in country towns, a maroon flag above the door with Antiques on it.

A handy cove. Didn’t know they kept such characters. Should help us when we’re back in the saddle, so to speak. I do not know what I can be hoping for from these inane citations but I draw the line at knicking, I mean stealing onelegged men’s crutches. Such quandaries as engulf the general user, fingers trailing in the ferried clews, the suddenly modern. Maybe if I slit my wrists, I almost said my correspondences. Could I have missed an appointment of some kind, with all this scurrying out of public exits. Let it be the unwound trammel of my braue Mayd’s original perdition, and me on her coattails, and see where that gets us. She mumbled to herself as we pushed the door open with the trolley and the tinkle of a real bell. At the Yass Historical Society museum there is everything from a Koertz wool press to a tiny trouser button stamped Bracken. This little shop was truly packed. From among the generic clutter a man with a kind face peered over his. He smiled, lifted what looked to be a thesaurus from his lap and laid it in the hollow he left in the seat of an easy chair. His quick, gentle eyes went to the trolley then met ours without flinching. Maybe in the bad light he thought he was on familiar ground. Do antiques dealers get visits from bag ladies. Eliza had been skipping showers to save soap. We introduced ourselves. He might have started then, his steady eyes deliberate. Yes yes, he said, welcome. You needn’t have come out here yourselves, I’m obliged. We told him what was in the trolley. Eliza unfolded the top layer of the blanket and Mr. Siv nodded in recognition.

The piece interests you.

Well, a long time ago now, Dodge and I discussed it, in relation to another deal, which went ahead anyway I believe. She must have made a note. I have to say I’m not really in that line anymore. It is a nice cabinet —

Bookcase.

Yes. It is very nice, you certainly shouldn’t have trouble finding anyone to buy it.

It’s very old.

Does seem to be. Georgian, by the look of it. But I’m not an expert.

There’s a lable.

A table?

A label.

Oh, the craftsman’s lable, that’s common. It should tell you how old it is, if it isn’t too damaged.

Why would it be damaged.

Because it’s so old, any reason. Can you understand it.

We couldn’t make out much. Would you like to see it.

I’m afraid if you can’t make it out I have no hope he said smiling and tapping his crow’s feet. Eliza looked embarrassed. We had forgotten to work out a price in advance. Would you be interested in buying it I asked.

He raised his eyebrows and pouted. I could give you two hundred dollars for it.

Eliza swallowed. She looked at me. That is, I said, quite a lot lower than we were expecting.

Siv burst. Ah it’s like that I’m afraid. Rotten business. People think there’s a fortune in it. I am sorry to disappoint you. He hung fire. Perhaps you would like a cup of tea.

We thanked him and he left the room still chortling under a very domestic tapestry that flapped back against the door jamb as he went. Eliza quietly ground her teeth. We waited a long time before we trusted him out of earshot. Do you think it really isn’t worth that much.

Eliza shook her head. He’s gurning.

Could she have said that.

A man looks at you like that wants your land or your daughter.

You think he’ll pay more.

Through the. Sh —

That’s continental direct speech for you. He was reversing into the room already, a kitchen’s halogen light streaming faintly through the brief aperture, slaver clinking with the essentials from a porcelain tea set and a plate of ginger nut biscuits between his hands. By the way, he said I remember now what Dodge was going to swap me the bookcase for. Couldn’t think for a moment. Hard to digest all of a sudden, the old thing coming back like that. Belly of the mind. I had a very nice set of ceramic tableware, cream. She bought it in the end. Is it still around.

I didn’t think so. Yes I will have a biscuit. I was getting delusional no, dizzy. No wonder the deal wasn’t going well we could hardly think straight. Eliza started laying it on with her mouth full. We came to you because you were one of the names we found associated with the bookcase. There were others.

There sure were.

Everyone gave us the same response, more or less, so we decided to do the rounds and settle it with someone today. Obviously we don’t plan on wheeling this thing back and forth across the city another time.

That’s understandable.

You’re our first customer. But we did talk values on the phone and we’re going on a ballpark figure of two thousand.

He crossed his fingers calmly and placed his hands in his lap. You do believe it is valuable.

Would you like to see the label.

No, I know what it says better than you do.

Eliza bit. What do you say Siv. You understand, we need to know if you’re still interested. We’ve made a late start as it is. We think we’re being very reasonable.

Narcissus let himself go in the fleshpots of afternoon tea, he peeped into his teacup, placed it back on the saucer. It can be surprisingly hard for us connoisseurs to say what a thing like this is worth. Once money enters into it. I won’t pretend it is not a very attractive object, certainly a, certainly a collector’s piece. Perhaps, if there was something here that interested you we could include it in the exchange.

We’re really not interested in old furniture.

What would you say to eight hundred. A predictable reduction I know, but I haven’t got more than a thousand in the shop. His hand strayed over the bench where he was leaning and it was hard to tell if he meant to indicate a repository, letting it come to rest somewhere between a clay vase studded with periwinkles and a ricket of pencils and old chewing gum wrappers.

Have you got a T.V.

I beg your pardon.

Have you got a television. We’ll give you the bookcase for eight hundred dollars and a television said Eliza.

Nothing in the shop, but I have a cranky black and white object out back I never watch. You’d be welcome to it.

Is it a deal.

He looked like he could hardly believe it. I couldn’t. If I wasn’t so hungry I might have said something. It isn’t laughter ruins reason.

Why don’t you help me get it out of there.

The bookcase was in three separate pieces. Together we lifted the base, the writing slope and the upper plinth from the trolley and sat them right way up in the middle of the shop. Nice work everyone almost screamed at once. The sun in the leaves outside filtered through to the glass ovals.

Now he said, if you go through there you’ll find the television in the second room on the right. Just unplug it and you can bring it out here like that. We ducked under the rag into a corridor. Doesn’t want us to see where he keeps his stash grumbled Eliza, squinnying for the doorway. It’s probably in that dense book. I bet it’s one of those fake ones with the pages cut out. A camouflaged sarcophagus. His burnished assiette. Vehicle and its freight, one sinking into something. We found the television in a mock Tudor living room with the curtains drawn, a worn in velvet armchair with the foot rest levered out, a lowboy, a liquor cabinet, a few rugs and journals lying around on modest furniture. I sometimes have the eye of a murderer. I pulled the plug and we carried the curved plastic box between us into the shop. It was orange. That’s it he said, a respectable distance from everything. It’ll fit in that trolley won’t it. We lifted it in. He counted eight hundred dollars in cash from one hand to the other then he passed the wad to Eliza. Uniform and divisible. Never let your feelings get away from you. You’ll be getting into antiques yourselves with that thing. Be wanting a computer soon, not a mirage but rasterized.

We have a whole flat full of stuff to get moving. Do you know someone who could value it all for us. We didn’t think of it before.

He gave us the name of a friend at the Old Ark on Wentworth Avenue, or was it City Road. We said goodbye then. I preferred not to look at what we were leaving behind. Somehow Eliza and I found our way back to the wharf. At the ticket booth she stuffed the fresh money in her sock and I broke the last of the original notes. The last pair of white mice, the last bow tie. The dish rolled into the microscope. It was a rough crossing. We tried sitting inside but Eliza felt ill, so we threw the blanket over the latest idiot and chocked the trolley with our feet on the deck. I am giving up my goods. What do you want to do now I said through all the bitter spindrift that flew between us. Not bitter. You want to get a meal in Chinatown, or we could go back to the Bourbon and Beefsteak and order Sonofabitch Cowpoke Stew.

She tapped her fingers to her mouth.

I gotta buy cigarettes she said irrelevantly. Too much salty. Perhaps she didn’t hear. Then, I am for staying in, ya bastard.