4

Circular Quay: she loved even the sound of it. Such was the fabulous allure of the place that by noon the crowds had further grown and voices and activity were multiplied. Secular pilgrims all bent on transcendental satisfactions. Ellie realised her own pedantry, thinking in these terms, yet what moved her was the same longing for accessible wonderment.

There were streams of people walking in a kind of procession to and from the Opera House, but more still aimlessly strolling or self-amused, just hanging around, lollygagging, taking in the scene. And then there were the regular citizens wanting to catch a ferry, those who must encounter every day this restless quality of excitement. The mix of peoples would be everywhere – at the Eiffel Tower and the Acropolis, at the Forbidden City and Borobudur, at Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, at the Louvre and Uluru, at art museums that were architecturally wavy or contorted. Monuments addressed us this way: pause here, consider. What hunger is driving you? What loss? What ambition? How does this place figure in your dreams?

 

Ellie had not lost her thrill, or her bouncing heart. The white umbrellas were like flags, the colours of the crowd a festivity. The air still throbbed and hummed with a distant didgeridoo. It filtered and dispersed like religious communication, implying inner worlds and the dimensions of deserts. And in her camera lay the ghost arabesques of the Opera House, radiant as neon light, an image she could not quite comprehend. Photon capture and digital transfer did nothing to explain it. An idea about the thing, not the thing itself.

Ellie hesitated a moment. Download was not equivalent to presence. Or the same as memory, which happened in an enclosure of flesh and carried the blessings of the body, and its manifold complications.

 

James. She must find James.

Ellie shrugged to adjust her small backpack and glanced at her watch. Another half an hour. She decided to sit beside the water and stare into space. The ferries came and left, churning the glistening water.

Combs of light: where was that from?

On the water lay combs of light, shifting their patterns with fluctuations of current and wind. Ellie looked across to the Bridge and wondered if one day she might climb it. It must be a singular pleasure, with no end other than to rise, to see, to stand above the turquoise water and the green and yellow ferries and look out across the Harbour and the city spread between the ocean and the mountains. The great bowl of the water would shine up at the climbers, reflecting the sun like a giant mirror, and the faces of parents and children and taxpayers and tourists would be polished gold and transformed to mini-lights by its glare.

 

At first James and Ellie had groped at each other’s bodies – ignorant kids, filled with vague prohibitions and sexual platitudes – just clumsily exploring. Each watched the other with an ardent and shy fascination. James’s face was flushed coral, his eyes were bright.

After they discovered their hideout everything became possible. They would lie on a blanket in the dusty after-school light, read to each other and talk in soft voices. Once James spoke of clepsydra: Ellie remembered it well. Miss Morrison had told them of notions of time, and said that the clepsydra, the water clock, was one of the earliest inventions. The Chinese, she said, devised particularly ornate and complex clepsydra. The Chinese invented everything, she announced without explanation.

Clepsydra, from the Greek kleptein, meaning to steal.

She wrote kleptomaniac on the board, beside the underlined clepsydra and asked her class to consider how human time was measured.

‘Is it really kept inside your watch?’ Miss Morrison asked. ‘Does time really tick? Or work by numbers? Or pass in neat measured segments? Might there be a time that flows, or indeed does not flow?’

Clepsydra involved vessels that dripped or leaked, flowed or seeped, making use of floating pointers or measures, sometimes of gears. It was a process, she said, of emptying and filling, a fluent time-passing, not one chopped into pieces.

Most of the class looked bored and perplexed. Someone was flicking balls of paper polished with spit. But for intelligent twelve-year-olds this idea was a revelation. Ellie and James truly loved Miss Morrison.

 

And that day, two years later, James was lying on his back in the abandoned foundry, looking at the cobwebby ceiling, all girders and split tin, and speaking, almost whispering, of the invention of clepsydra. He was recalling the year seven class and Miss Morrison with a kind of delicate affection.

That day James turned towards Ellie and ran his hand under her blue dress and she thought not of surrender but that she would gather him in. Ellie could feel James’s warmth and arousal, and his body addressed and aroused her. What she loved in him was his presumption, and his lack of presumption.

That day they decided for the first time to remove their clothes. James, lying down, awkwardly wriggled from his shirt and his trousers, then kicked off his underpants, flinging them away. Ellie was slower and more self-conscious. She lifted her dress above her head and pushed it to one side, then became aware of how little her breasts were, cupped in their modest bra, incipient and girlish. But James was already pushing the bra away, so that together and laughing they managed to dispatch it. James threw it high and sideways, and something in its lacy construction meant that it adhered to the gritty wall, as if casually pinned there. Ellie hesitated only for a second before she slid off her panties.

Without a bed to lie in, with only their blanket and their randy, impatient immaturity, they wrestled for a time and then gripped each other. James’s mouth was at her nipple and Ellie was moved almost to tears; it was so tender a suckle, and so gloriously wet. His hand had wandered between her legs and slipped into the crevice. She knew now, with his boyish nakedness nothing like the pictures of statues she had seen in books, with this sense of urgency and novelty and trembling delight, why adults might want to cast off their clothes and enter each other’s bodies, and what the intensified, messy kisses on telly might signal and portend.

And then James drew her thighs around him and Ellie felt a sharp pain. Her face lay at his chest. She buried her feelings there. James was sweating and his scent was surprisingly lovely. He was labouring, and looking down at her, and in her inexperience she simply lay still, thinking, not thinking. She could feel the contours of his buttocks and the sensation of access.

‘Ellie,’ he whispered.

It was over very quickly. There was an aching pain, and a little blood, but she felt in that unlit and quiet space that somehow she had made them both coherent. Even then she was irrepressibly romantic. In the inept grapple of two children she found an exultation. Ellie kissed James’s damp forehead as he lowered sumptuously upon her.

‘I feel like singing,’ he said. ‘I feel like singing.’

‘Sing then,’ she responded.

That first time they heard afterwards a small animal scuttling nearby, and each flinched and looked about, conscious of another presence. A possum, they decided. They heard it invisibly skitter away. Ellie turned to James’s flushed face and saw him smile back at her and laugh.

She became aware then of the twilight and the need suddenly to hurry home. Light from the evening scarcely penetrated the room. But she stayed a little longer, feeling slightly cold without her thin blue dress, one of her favourites, covered in sprigs of tiny white blossom (how these details remain), noting the seep between her legs and its unanticipated warmth, smelling the almond scent she associated thereafter with men’s underwear, thinking, as she saw James flex his arms and stretch out beside her, of how vast a discovery this was, and how enticingly scary.

This cluster of illicit associations returned James to Ellie. Or meant rather that he would never be wholly released. The intimacy of their attachment was something neither could name. They did not call each other ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, they were too young to be ‘lovers’, yet they were the holders together of an intricate pact. When they met in the empty building where James spread the old blanket on the dusty floor – as if they were somewhere on a picnic, or inside a story or at play – it was the culmination of these affinities altogether unexpressed.

 

Her mother never guessed. Ellie was unconcerned about her father, since he looked at the world and everything in it through a scrim of shadows; but to her surprise, in that whole year, her mother didn’t notice a change in her daughter or sense a new maturity. At seventeen, before Ellie left for university, Lil gave her a private talk about what boys might do, about how sneaky and downright importunate they were, about how, after all, they wanted only one thing. Ellie hung her head, as though reticent, not wanting to betray what she knew. And each time afterwards, with each new lover, she sought the implicated traces of her encounters with James. More than his shape, more than his touch, more than his off-hand humour and his inexperienced fervour, she wanted returned to her the ordinary astonishment of that first known body.

 

Ellie rose in the bright light and began to make her way to the restaurant. She felt nervous, ill-at-ease. What if they didn’t even recognise each other? What if he leant across the table and tried to kiss her? Or worse, that they had nothing to say to each other, that the past was meaningless, and kiddie-romantic, and unfit for their adult-ironic thirties? What if he was married to someone called Emma or Claire, and had two delightful children, a boy and a girl?

In her nervousness Ellie decided to check her mobile: no texts, no messages. She was one of millions checking their phone at exactly that moment; she could see a dozen or so from where she stood. This community of the telephone, so pragmatically conjoined. Ellie stared at the sequences of letters and numbers. In the glowing alphabet in her hand lay every word in the world.

What was it Miss Morrison had said, all those years ago, about the invention of the alphabet? And why could she not stop thinking of her teacher?

 

Ellie walked with feigned confidence along the Quay, past the Museum of Contemporary Art, around which hung funky red banners advertising something-or-other, past the seagulls aflutter and the row of docks for small vessels, and further, towards the Bridge, to the harbourside restaurant James had chosen.

She was surprised at the size of it and would have liked something smaller. It had a wide glassy front, the better to see the operatic view, and furniture that seemed entirely to be made of chrome. Everything glittered in the noonday light. The cutlery glittered, and the crockery, and the smiles on the waiters’ faces, so that Ellie was reminded of a swimming pool, the shine rocking on water and the splashy, unnaturally echoey acoustics. She stood at the doorway waiting to be noticed.

‘DeMello,’ Ellie said, in an apologetic voice, and a jerky impatient waiter pointed to a table. She saw James, looking away, apparently deep in thought. Her first impression was that he might be ill, or had a terrible night.

He was wearing a denim shirt and black jeans and was still handsome in the way that ageing rock stars are, slightly wrecked, but with the charm of a wild history saved by the adoration of flashbulbs. Or someone nuts about Jesus, a holy roller, wanting to convert you on the doorstep or redeem the world.

James had not seen her. He was transfixed by a distant sight, his face faraway and half-dreaming. He had the look of a man who had forgotten something important. Ellie would have found it difficult to approach had he been tracking her walk towards him.

She dived into the mock-watery world of the waiters, past the women with heads like baubles, bottle-blonde and puffed, past well-upholstered men, anticipating sozzled entertainments, past the sinuous fish-moves of figures with wine bottles wrapped in serviettes, and oversized plates held high, dodging and swerving. She emerged standing before him: well, here I am.

James was taken by surprise. He stood up quickly, bumping the table. There was a moment of hesitation before he kissed her cheek, uncertain of how formally or informally to behave. ‘You haven’t changed,’ he said.

‘Nor have you,’ she lied.

A waiter appeared from nowhere to pull out the chair and guide Ellie into it. He fluffed open a stiff serviette and let it fall onto her lap, as if she were an infant or in need of basic forms of assistance. With one hand behind his back he made a dainty ceremony of pouring a glass of water.

 

 

The past caved in on them. In each other’s eyes they saw a dim, vertiginous slide backwards. Family. School. Small-town childhoods. The discontinuous histories each carried within them. They were part of that group for whom time past travels like a screen before them. In the opalescent day lay their shadowy hideout; in the chattering crowd a few preserved words.

Ellie thought: no longer children. She calculated the years that had intervened, and saw too that they were surely unknowable, each to each. Too much time between them, other lovers, other lives.

‘So, here we are.’

‘Yes,’ Ellie said.

Oh God, she was thinking, I shouldn’t have come.

But she was also thinking: it’s really him. This was the James who had been a stubble-headed boy covered with blood, who had cried to see a scrawny chicken decapitated, who had been the clever one, the teacher’s pet, always quick with the right answers, who had met her as a naked boy, nothing like a statue, in a filthy old foundry. She would have to make the effort for both of them. Why is it, she was thinking, it’s always women who have to keep the conversation going and find the right words?

‘Here we are,’ she repeated lamely.

 

 

By the time he arrived at the restaurant James was nervous and moist with sweat; it was a relief, having arrived early, to sit alone in the Antarctic air-conditioning. Faux alfresco. But he had to endure a supercilious waiter, overtly insolent, and the extra brightness of spotlighting, which would surely induce a new headache.

James looked out of the window at the view of Circular Quay. From his table he could see across the water the Opera House entire. He began vaguely to wonder how the Surrealists would paint it. Magritte would place it in a forest or let it float in the sky; Dali would melt it like ice-cream, like one of his dissolving clocks; Max Ernst would use it as ruffles on the cloak around a pompous figure. No: Magritte would set it adrift in the ocean, like a rare, efflorescent species of underwater life; Dali would refigure it as the chambers of a woman’s body; Ernst would have children fleeing it on a sparse, bleak plain, as if it had arrived from nowhere, from outer space, as a menacing apparition. And then there was the Australian, James Gleeson. For him the smooth arcs of the Opera House would be covered with excrescences; grim faces would appear, limbs sprout out, indefinable and disgusting matter would festoon the surface.

James was surprised to have relinquished his initial aversion; it was an art-object after all, it contained multitudes, suggested metaphors.

A woman at a party had once told him that surrealism was an adolescent taste, something for lonely teenage boys wanting to do violence to the order of things – and he found himself agreeing. He had discovered the instability of images when he discovered his own body; somehow these were linked, though he could not bring himself to consider why. He had slept with the woman from the party, whose name he could not now recall, and woke in the middle of the night, his heart pounding, his forehead aflame, his thoughts in a boring and groggy loop – surrealism is an adolescent taste – feeling he had been criticised for his judgement, and found pathetically wanting.

 

James entered the slack reverie of the over-tired. He was thinking randomly of the patina of light on the faces of pedestrians, of the ferries, the buskers, the wake on the water; he was wondering if the seagulls ever flew sideways and smashed into the glass. He tried imagining what it must be like to live here, not simply to visit. Do Sydney-siders regularly converge on this place, as if coming to a shrine? Do they esteem this monument, that from here, receding in the ultraviolet assault of the midday sun, appeared to be constructed of ancient bone? Or was it all rugby and beaches and the Good Life with a beer? Conspicuous consumption. Unreal real estate. The aspiration to a many-roomed immoderate house, shaped like a wedding cake, with a sweeping Harbour view.

But there it was: ancient bone. Imperishable, that was the word.

 

And then Ellie was before him, appearing without announcement. The Opera House disappeared; the commotion of the restaurant subsided. He lurched upwards, bumping the table, causing a little spill. He paused, and then cautiously leant forward to kiss her on the cheek.

‘You haven’t changed,’ James said, his voice rusty from pills.

‘Nor have you,’ she lied.

He was grateful for the small mercy she displayed in not confirming the wreck he felt himself to be. She had not recoiled, or thought him repellent.

Yet he spoke honestly; she seemed essentially unchanged. In her face he saw the girl he had doted on at school. She was still slim, though more womanly, and held her head just so, slightly inclined to the left, just as she did twenty years ago. And he remembered this: that she was tender, but not meek, that she had a street-tough element and a resilient streak, that she was bold and assertive in ways that had made him seem the weaker one. She wore a white blouse and a blue skirt of some filmy synthetic material. Lipstick. Pink.

‘So, here we are.’

‘Yes,’ Ellie said.

She was stretching one arm then the other from the straps of her small backpack. James saw a glimpse of the skin on her chest as her blouse briefly gaped. A glimmer of sexual memory recurred, the moment of winsome recline, the arm cast back, the curve of an exposed breast, the unconcealed invitation. He suppressed the image almost immediately and looked away. On the path before the restaurant an overweight couple ambled past, their arms affectionately draped around each other’s backs. Both wore identical baseball caps and matching loose clothes, as if belonging to an exclusive club of two. James was moved; he was sentimental. He felt the same way watching old couples walk hand in hand, or bending solicitously towards each other over cups of tea. A gentleness of bodies long proximate and wordlessly comfortable.

It may have been the sedative effect of gazing out the window; James realised that he was no longer anxious. But he was dumbstruck and feeling foolish at the paucity of his words. What to say?

‘Here we are,’ she repeated, and with this forgiving chime, they began.

 

Ellie took a sip of water and seemed slightly abashed. There was food to order; the waiter was hovering and insistent. They busied themselves with gigantic menus bound with gold cord, like something one might see in a church, opened slowly by a priest. Both decisively ordered the grilled barramundi. Salad, not vegetables. And a New Zealand white. So it was quickly settled. Their instinctive unanimity made the first moments together easier.

‘No entreé?’ the waiter asked, in a tone that said ‘cheapskate’. He was perhaps seventeen and subtly fierce in his persecuting disrespect.

James moved a small basket of bread rolls to disguise his embarrassment.

‘We have enough,’ Ellie said firmly. And the waiter turned away.

 

So they were, at last, left alone to talk. James realised that he had chosen the wrong place for a rendezvous, too noisy, too Saturday, too public, too bright, too susceptible to his sardonic turn of mind and his disdain of relaxation. A dusky bar, late at night – that would have worked. A quiet corner with a banquette and the kind of sensual confinement that permits bodies to lean seductively towards each other, to find a whispery tone and a cunning route for confidences. Perhaps a trumpet, low-playing a plangent jazz solo. Perhaps a furtive tab of pharmaceutical stimulation.

But he was here, here-now, and had much to say, and to confess. He must tell Ellie how he had carried her, all these years, how through everything there persisted the residue of her affinity and understanding. She was a voice in his head; she was a passenger he transported. Her shape, her face. Her grace a still incredible immanence that had tempered his fucked-up life.

Her hair was short now, James saw, and seemed a lighter brown. She was looking down at her lap.

And he must tell her of the child who died, and for whom he felt responsible. Only Ellie would understand. He must tell her of his mother, and of his long-time regret. It was a time of apology. He must also apologise. He must say sorry. He must drag sincere words from his heart to his mouth. He must say something, so that he might be cured of the ordeal of his own history, of his failings, of his loss, of his disabling culpability.

 

Of these things, at this time, James said nothing. In the raucous restaurant, no place for a confession, Ellie and James spoke together in a casual way, ascertaining that each was still single, no kids, that Ellie had moved to Sydney to take up a post-graduate scholarship, returning to university after all these years, and worked part-time in a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop on King Street; that he was a med-school dropout but a committed schoolteacher, that he had declined the scholarship that had been proclaimed in the small-town paper, that he had bummed around Europe with a backpack and settled for a couple of years in London, that he was now visiting, just for a few days, with no declared purpose. There was a dark patch he skipped over, something he could not yet tell her. Yes, he still played the guitar, was still a crazy Bob Dylan fan; and no, he had never, never ever, returned to the old town.

The meals arrived and both were relieved to have something neutral to claim their attention. James tore at the bread, using it to mop, as his mother had taught him. Italian, Mama. Today she was more than usually present.

‘Do you remember,’ Ellie said suddenly, ‘our teacher, Miss Morrison?’

‘Of course.’

‘The way she wrote arcane words on the board, and underlined them?’

‘Clepsydra,’ said James. He saw Ellie blush. ‘I was cruel, wasn’t I? Boys are such bastards.’

‘She liked you. Both of us. Teachers always like the clever ones …’

James shrugged.

‘Well, she liked you best, teacher’s pet,’ said Ellie. ‘And she taught us all those fancy Greek and Latin words.’

James thought of clepsydra. Across the table this young woman was recalling their first time: he knew it. In a confused second between mouthfuls he wanted nothing more than to slip his hand beneath her skirt and remove her panties, to find himself back in the foundry, to enjoy adolescent lust. Their love-making had been simple, blundering, making up in lewd vigour what it lacked in sure knowledge. James had no idea then how to treat a woman’s body; he entered, collapsed, found a momentary logic for his meagre boy’s life, pulled into hers. Still, it had astounded him, to be alive in that way at fourteen. To enter another body.

James poured more wine for himself and knew he was drinking too fast. Ellie had barely touched her glass. James’s thirst was crude and demanding. He thought of slipping away for a moment to swallow another pill, but the compulsion of Ellie’s presence was too difficult to break.

Fluids, essential for homeostasis. Polydipsia: excessive thirst, one of the indications of diabetes. Dipsomania: drunkenness.

 

Not long after the death James considered returning to their town. His mother had died in the hospital in the city, where she inhabited her sad lonely skull full of snow, and a letter from a lawyer arrived, requesting a ‘consultation’. James turned up at an office in a tower block, one of those buildings that looks like a huge filing cabinet, and found there a gloomy looking man, Mr English, with marble eyes and a touch of brilliantine in his starkly black hair. He sat behind a wide desk, his hands shaped into a cathedral. After the antiseptic formality of condolences, none of which could assuage the guilt that had subsumed James’s grief, Mr English informed him that the house he had shared with his mother might now be worth something. The strip of land along the beach, once the space of outcast migrants, of dagoes and chinks, he might have said, was being redeveloped to construct a group of chalets for a beach resort. He pronounced the word ‘chalet’ as if he were eating a plum. And then there were the ‘goods and chattels’, he added (James wondered if lawyers lived, as doctors did, in a world of parallel vocabulary), since the house had been closed up when his mother was committed to the ‘institution’. Might there be something of worth locked away? He was acting, he said more formally, on behalf of the ‘institution’, which often had cases like this, of deceased estates ‘going begging’.

James sat before Mr English, noted his large brow and his clean fingernails and the hairs curling on the backs of his hands, noted the framed documents on the wall, and the imposing beige surrounds, and felt too disqualified as a son to know what to say. He resented this horrible man, with designs on their house. It had been such a poor, despised place, symbolic of all he wished to leave; now this man who inspired such distaste was urging a conspiracy of profit. James had risen from the chair and without a word, left the lawyer’s office.

 

 

‘I once thought of returning to the old town,’ James said, out of the blue. ‘After Mum died I considered visiting to deal with her things. To sell the house. Tidy up. And I wanted to see you,’ he added shyly.

‘When was that?’

‘Almost ten years ago. You had left, I heard. So I never returned.’

It was as close as he would come to saying that she was his only reason for returning; or more forcefully, that she was the only past he could admit.

‘Couldn’t do it,’ he went on, remembering the dreadful emptiness of that time, the funeral, oh God, that no one attended, the woman he was with, who found his prolonged weeping rather touching at first, but then disgraceful and unmanly. She told him so. After that they could only draw painfully apart. After his mother, the scale of his feelings shifted. After mother, the deluge.

‘I didn’t cope very well. The death, I mean.’

Why was he telling her this?

‘I’m sorry,’ Ellie said. ‘I remember your mother. I remember her voice, calling.’

It was the wrong thing to say. James looked at the mess of fish scraps on his plate. Jesus, she was sorry.

As if telepathically called the waiter appeared to take away their plates. Coffee, yes. The waiter smirked at his small victory.

 

The vast white silence of his mother’s death overhung their conversation. He had seen her on the very last day, summoned by a nurse at the hospital who believed in the spiritual solace of goodbye, and who, reading her details, had already called a Catholic priest. His mother was almost entirely vacant. She did not acknowledge her son. She could not speak or respond. Beneath the covers of the standard issue hospital linen, pale blue blankets with a honeycomb texture, her body had never looked so reduced and so small. The outline might have been of a child, or a victim of starvation. Her spotted hands clutched at the covers and her face was closed and unfamiliar. James thought her eyes enormous, sunk as they were into their sockets, and was afraid she might open them, afraid of what they might see. Afraid for himself, perhaps, because while she lived, even in a snowstorm, he was still a little boy. While she lived, even evacuated, he need not be the grown-up and sensible one.

So he stood there listening to the disastrous ebbing of her breath, he stood there, at her bedside, giving death its dominion, he stood there letting her slip into darkness without dragging her back, or following, or pretending – for whose sake? – that there might be a glow, a release, a transformation, he stood there in blasphemous misery hearing the priest’s words as gibberish and his own shabby muteness as a self-accusation, he stood there willing her to die more quickly.

Go away, for Christ’s sake, go away, go away.

Overhead a fluorescent tube quietly fizzed. The light it cast was knife-sharp and almost unbearable. There was nowhere to hide. James stood in silence under the shadowless fluorescence that already signified her absence.

Afterwards the priest clasped his hands in an automatic handshake, and James found almost comical his earnest tone. ‘She’s with God,’ the priest said. James wanted in return to give hysterical, ungodly offence, to argue for the medical impossibility of resurrection, to send this man and his ingratiating theories packing. But the nurse was beside him, with a cup of tea, and he drank down his feelings, calmed his own mutiny, grateful to have a solid object like a teacup to clutch on to.

 

The coffee arrived. Her flat white, his espresso. James drew his cup forward and looked up. Ellie was examining him.

‘You didn’t marry?’ she asked softly.

Only then, hearing her blunt inquiry, looking into her eyes, seeing the slight moisture there and the intensity of her concern, did James realise there was lingering desire in her voice. Her lips were still slightly parted. She lowered her gaze and tore open a small sachet of white sugar.

‘Well, you know …’ he said vaguely. The noise in the restaurant rose, fell back, resumed its generalised clatter. He was distracted by the din and felt once again numb and dull. He glimpsed the threshold of what might be said, then retreated. ‘So what about this new government?’ He was trying to find another topic.

‘I’m full of hope,’ Ellie announced. ‘I believe, I really do, that the Apology will change everything. It will alter history. And it can’t be bad having a polyglot prime minister.’

‘You think that matters?’

‘Has to. Has to open his horizons.’

James was silent. Ellie was still the optimist; she believed in redemptive futures. He repressed the impulse to lecture her on the necessity for political cynicism. Besides, they had reached that point in the conversation when both were disengaging, when too much remembering had eclipsed what it might be possible to say to each other. James was confused by his own responses to seeing Ellie so unchanged, and so self-possessed. This was her beauty, he reflected, her command of her own life, her staunch independence. Something about her concentrated presence was effortless and assured. And now Ellie was turning her silver rings on her slender fingers; she had the resigned, soft gaze of a passenger on a long-distance flight. He had bored her, he thought. He was an idiot, a fuckwit.

The lunch concluded. Ellie was sending her mobile number to James.

‘Let’s talk again,’ she said. ‘In another context. Give me a call. Any time.’

James’s phone rang. He silenced it. ‘Got it,’ he said. These were magical numbers. The code to find her by.

There was a moment of tense hesitation as Ellie looked into his eyes. What must she be thinking?

Her bright pink lips. Bob Dylan’s ‘I Want You’; its facile declaration.

‘Of course. We’ll talk tomorrow, if that’s OK.’ He looked down at his fingers, entering her name into the mysterious world of telephonic memory. ‘Thanks. For meeting up.’ He felt unworthy of her, a prisoner of his own skulking gloom and tongue-tied desire. A mug-shot of a man.

Ellie stepped forward and embraced him. This time James felt her shape, the sturdy curve of her back, the soft and confident press of her breasts. He made himself let go, made the embrace unsexual. It had been like a bad date, a couple attracted but inert, a conversation that turned from easy news to freelance unhappiness.

‘Tomorrow,’ she repeated.

James watched her walk away. He thought of the priest holding his hands, saying ‘With God’. He thought of René Magritte’s painting of the lovers, their faces smothered in cloth. Then he thought of another painting, the giant red lipstick lips, ludicrous, dream-crazy, floating like a joke in the sky.

 

 

Pei Xing disembarked at Kurraba Point Wharf on the North Shore. She stepped lightly from the ferry onto the narrow gangplank, then onto the jetty, finding her land legs. Only a few other passengers ended their journeys here. She looked up at the high row of steps and the rim of houses overlooking the harbour, some of them teetering, it seemed, with the weight of their own importance. The wind was still fresh. She held her face to it, enjoying the sweep of scented air and the deep breaths of spirit. The Harbour was magnificent, and richly blue. From somewhere among the small yachts moored in the bay there was the clink-clink of metal hitting an aluminium mast. In her sudden lightheartedness Pei Xing paused to perform a Tai Chi gesture, right there, in the sunlight. And so, after placing her heavy handbag carefully to one side, she held out her right arm, lifted her left leg, leant sideways, swung back, swooping her arms in a restrained formal elegance before her, moving into eternity for a few precious seconds. She held the pose, staring at nothing. She felt the shape of her body and the fine balances it could achieve, muscles taut, or relaxed, or forming a woven pattern of crimson chords tucked deep inside her. The left leg down, the weight moved, the arc of her arms afloat on the air. Qigong. The life of breath.

Then she began again, her arms upraised: the soft sway of a movement known as ‘cloud hands’.

Behind her the ferry lurched away with an animist tremor of departure.

 

The weekly visit was a source of argument between Pei Xing and her son Jimmy. Even Cindy, his girlfriend, did not understand, but was quieter about it and less confronting. Why would a woman want to visit her former prison guard? Why reattach to that history? Why torment herself so? And Pei Xing would pause, and collect her thoughts and say again that it was something difficult to explain, but that there were forms of forgiveness that make life go on, and forms of reproach that hold history still. She needed, she told them, to live in the aura of forgiveness. At this announcement Jimmy had almost guffawed. He had been sloshing noodles into his mouth, his chopsticks quickly scooping, and he threw his head back in an exaggerated, groaning laugh. He was eating pork heart and bok choy cooked in an aniseed broth, topped with glass noodles. Pei Xing looked into the bowl at his half-eaten meal and saw before her xin, the character radical of heart. One of the very first characters her father had taught her. She must have been only three years old. Four strokes of the brush. Simplicity itself. He had guided her hand. And almost immediately Pei Xing saw the character ‘heart’ everywhere, in ‘love’, in ‘mind’, in ‘remember’, in ‘forget’.

Cindy looked critically at Jimmy, but said nothing. In the restaurant in Chinatown they had been enjoying their meal; now, Jimmy implied, she had spoiled it once again with all this talk of the old country, with all this returning to the past and her refusal to let go. Pei Xing considered continuing the argument (‘this is how one lets go, in sympathetic reconciliation’), but remained silent. She could not bring her words to her mouth from her own lumpish heart.

It occurred to Pei Xing that there were things her son would never understand because he was not a reader. Reading had taught her that actors in history must find a logic beyond violence. When Jimmy was smaller they had watched action movies together; it was the one activity he allowed her to join. Now she wondered if, seeking his company, she had also encouraged his ignorance.

Cindy was also eating like a starving peasant. Pei Xing flinched at their manners, at the voracity of their consumption. She averted her gaze. Another dish arrived, steaming mushrooms with shallots, and Jimmy stabbed at it with his chopsticks even before it hit the table.

All around them were happy young men and women, many of them students, or like Jimmy, children of migrants who left China in the 1980s. Hong Kong businessmen, Guangzhou entrepreneurs. Dissidents, perhaps, from Beijing and Shanghai, even minority Uighars, a group of whom ran a small restaurant in a side-street not far from where they sat. They were gambling, every one of them, on another kind of life. Chinese people liked to gamble. You only had to go to Star City Casino on a Saturday night to see Chinese at the roulette tables, mesmerised by the wheel, or betting their savings on the capricious turn of a single card. They were the regulars, hailing each other in the timeless light, wandering the cavernous, cacophonous spaces, wondering what they were doing there and what happened to the dreams of their ancestors.

Pei Xing had been tempted herself when she had first arrived in Australia. Incapacitated by migrancy, she had sought a dollar-sign solution. And after her brother’s sudden death, within weeks of her arrival, she lost most of her savings in a single, utterly desolate night.

 

Pei Xing began the long walk up the hill towards the nursing home. Dong Hua would be waiting. Although she had experienced a stroke, the nurses said that she could still understand what was going on. She couldn’t speak and was paralysed in most of her body, but she waited, they said, she waited for each visit. The weekend duty nurse was a plump, efficient woman who ushered her in and the staff knew by now that Pei Xing visited every Saturday, bringing her lunch with her, to sit with Mrs Dong and read to her in English, or to talk softly in Chinese. They indulged and liked her; they brought her cups of green tea.

 

Hua sat propped in a wheelchair, tilted to one side. Her face was pulled back towards the bone, burnished and hard, like beaten bronze. Pei Xing saw the twitch of the mouth on the right side that indicated recognition. Hua, or one of the nurses, must somehow keep track of the days, since she was always there, in a clean blouse, with her long hair brushed, parked beside the empty visitor’s chair.

Pei Xing crossed the room and lightly touched Hua’s hand. Then she straightened her collar, which had folded under. A tear sprang from the corner of the patient’s eye; more lightly Pei Xing wiped it away with her finger.

She did not ask the usual rhetorical questions – ‘so how are you today?’ – these only upset Hua. Instead, she announced matter-of-factly:

‘We are almost at the end of Doctor Zhivago. Chapter Fifteen. Conclusion. But don’t be fooled. After Conclusion there is Epilogue, then sixty pages of Zhivago’s poems. So we have a few weeks yet.’

Pei Xing flicked though her book – another fifty pages of story. ‘The Conclusion is seventeen chapters,’ she said. ‘Let’s see how we go. It takes Mr Pasternak a long time to finish his story.’

In truth, she was pleased with Mr Pasternak’s delay, with the story that went on and on and on. She always remembered her joy as a young woman when she discovered that after the Conclusion, after Zhivago’s death, which she now approached with serious trepidation, there was the story of his discovered daughter, the laundrywoman Tonya, living in a labour camp.

Pei Xing made herself comfortable and held the large volume before her:

All that is left is to tell the brief story of the last eight or ten years of Zhivago’s life, years in which he went more and more to seed, gradually losing his knowledge and skill as a doctor and a writer, emerging from his state of depression and resuming his work only to fall back, after a short flare-up of activity, into long periods of indifference to himself and to everything in the world.

Pei Xing glanced up at Hua. She was staring into the distance, but was certainly concentrating. Hua looked over as if to ask: why have you stopped? So Pei Xing resumed:

During these years the heart disease, which he had himself diagnosed earlier but without any real idea of its gravity, developed to an advanced stage …

Pei Xing read from an English edition, and in the beginning had paused every now and then to explain a word or a phrase she thought Hua might not know. But she quickly discovered that Hua preferred her to read right through. She may have been guessing the meaning from context, or learning as she went; she may have had a better knowledge of English than Pei Xing had surmised. Pei Xing recalled how many words she had looked up in the dictionary, the first time she read it, and how many idiomatic translations she had found difficult to understand. ‘He went more and more to seed’: how unintelligible that had sounded. From Doctor Zhivago she had learnt a smattering of English phrases, formal syntax and a broad and rather old-fashioned vocabulary.

After five minutes or so they had entered their rhythm: the reader’s voice in a steady current, the tone even, firm, and Russia, textual Russia, entered the room, seeping under the door, flying through the window, infusing the summer air, bringing to North Sydney the Red Army and the spring of 1922. The plump nurse quietly placed a cup of tea at Pei Xing’s elbow, and she sipped as she read, kept up the cadence, and pronounced as confidently as she could all the polysyllabic names.

 

One day in Sydney’s Chinatown Jimmy had introduced a new friend, Lin, a young man in a leather jacket and with hair gelled into a high dark helmet. Pei Xing thought he looked like a gangster from a Hong Kong movie; she imagined black dollars, heroin, bad luck, spilt blood. His family, said Jimmy, was also from Shanghai; you should meet his mother. And so to please her son, who for some reason wanted to impress this young man, to forge guanxi, connections, to get ahead in some obscure and possibly criminal way, she agreed.

When Pei Xing stood for the first time before Dong Hua, she felt a surge of nausea. The tapeworm in the gut. The body remembering its beatings. A shrill inner cry she had tried for long years to smother. No, no, no. This woman was responsible for her debasement, had been sadistically cruel, had made her consider suicide. She carried a new name and a new hairstyle and had aged stiff and metallic, but it was still the same person; it was still Comrade Peng.

The woman who now called herself Dong Hua had also looked shocked. Their sons had contrived a meeting neither would ever have wished. Pei Xing held herself together – was that the English phrase? – and made vacuous small talk for fifteen minutes, after which she invented an excuse and left. She told Jimmy she would never see this woman again, this woman who, she said, without going into details, had been her guard at Number One Shanghai Prison. It was incomprehensible, this fold in history, this diabolical return. What afterlife was this?

But within a week Dong Hua had knocked on the door of her apartment. ‘I need to talk,’ she had said.

‘Go away,’ Pei Xing responded. ‘I have nothing to say to you.’ But Dong Hua had wedged her foot in the doorway – that old joke about salesmen and Jesus-people – and would not leave. Pei Xing remembered how Comrade Peng had borrowed a pair of boots to kick her senseless on Mao Tse Tung’s birthday. She remembered the blow to her face that had broken her nose and the sour taste of blood at the back of her throat. She looked down at the shoe in the doorway and thought she would faint.

‘I will call the police,’ Pei Xing said weakly.

But still Comrade Peng would not leave or withdraw and Pei Xing, caught in the seizure of her former role, would not have dared to crush the guard’s foot in the door.

Pei Xing thought to herself: I can never escape this, never; it has followed me to Australia. I am Australian now, and still it is here. Still it is here.

 

 

But they had talked, and shared tea, Pei Xing striving to maintain face for the sake of her son. Hua spoke of her childhood. Her father had been of the virtuous proletariat, working in the Shanghai Number Four Steel Factory. Hua talked about her life in the Red Guards and how exhilarating it had seemed, how she had worshipped Chairman Mao, how proud her family had been. Even with the failure of the Great Leap Forward Campaign, when their family was starving, when a small piece of pork that had been two yuan was selling for fifty yuan, she still believed everything she was told. She had been chosen in the da chuanlian period to travel with other young Red Guards to spread Mao’s words across the country. She had never travelled before; it was an exciting time. She spoke of her years working in the prison, how she had believed the inmates were evil, dupes of foreign devils, conspiring against China; she believed too in destroying the despised Four Olds, that everything traditional should be crushed and eliminated. It was our history, she said: Red Guards, the Cultural Revolution, the thoughts of Chairman Mao. You were an ‘educated youth’, she said, of the bourgeoisie, a basic class enemy.

As she spoke, Pei Xing heard the same old excuse: we were all in it together. Millions were Red Guards, millions were persecuted, millions were sent to the countryside for re-education; your story is but one and worthless in the scheme of things. Guards, prisoners, all the same. It was a murderous time. Brutality occurred. The mighty dialectic of historical materialism held them all in its sway. Pei Xing felt the exhaustion of so unremitting a narrative – a revolution is not a dinner party, said Chairman Mao – its crass inhumanity, its dark determinism.

There was a pause.

‘But my violence,’ Hua added softly, ‘that was inexcusable. I am sorry,’ she said. ‘More than I can say.’ She lowered her head. There was a long, awkward silence.

It was as if the sky had fallen in. Pei Xing stared at this woman she had spent most of her life hating.

‘I’m sorry,’ Hua said again. ‘Please forgive me.’

Pei Xing was in a turmoil of mixed responses. This woman, she thought meanly, was pleading not to be hated. An ignoble plea, a denial of her actions. A suggestion that history was essentially vague and impersonal. But this woman, she thought more generously, was asking forgiveness, had surrendered herself to another story in which she was the villain. She had no reason to ask forgiveness if she believed she had acted without choice.

 

Guanyin, Goddess of Compassion and Mercy. Her mother had owned a small Qing statue, of white crackle-glaze porcelain, elegant and pure, that was crushed by the Red Guards. Pei Xing still remembers the pop! sound as the god’s head was flattened underfoot. Guanyin was first among gods, her mother declared, and though she considered herself too educated to be a sincere Buddhist, and was committed, like her husband, to staunch Western secularism, she loved this delicate figure, which she had inherited from her own mother, and knew all her tales of miracles and redemption. Guanyin had a narrow, thoughtful face and an expression of loving kindness. She stood in a lotus blossom and held up one hand. The statue had rested in a small alcove by their front doorway.

Pei Xing said nothing. She would not forgive this woman. She would not befriend her or hear any more of her self-exculpation.

 

Dong Hua continued to visit, uninvited, and with infuriating determination. Each time she visited she repeated her formal apology. She offered gifts of ginseng, rice wine and candied ginger, which Pei Xing found easy to dispose to the garbage. She stayed only for short periods, ten minutes or so. Then she set off for the long walk back to the train station. Pei Xing was determined to remain strong and not relieve this brutal woman of the guilt she must be feeling. There was almost a pleasure in watching her walk away unsatisfied, seeing how she struggled in the heat and moved with a slow, unhealthy drag.

But the challenge of Dong Hua was to her deepest self. If there was no recovery within history there was no point to suffering. If there was no meeting, no words, there could be no escape from the hateful circle of vengeance, there could be no peace, there could be no future. After each visit Pei Xing was obliged to confront her own intransigence, to consider the dreadful power of her own stubborn reasoning. After each visit, Pei Xing wept.

 

She remembers exactly when it was she decided to forgive. It was just before sunset, the sky full of the last flickering glimmers of the day. There were puffy clouds lying stretched and copper-coloured on the horizon, looking Chinese, as they appear on watered silk scrolls. There were the distinctive calls of Australian birds, which always sounded to Pei Xing a little dejected, and she was sitting with her Dragon Well tea at the window of her apartment. Below, a boy was circling a small area of asphalt car park on a skateboard; its massive clatter and rumble – angry-sounding, repetitious – reverberated with hard energy against the brick walls that surrounded him. Looking down she saw this boy, caught in his noisy curves. He was insanely intent on his confined route, almost imprisoned, when he might have been out there, flying along the street.

 

Pei Xing closed the novel. ‘Now we shall take a break,’ she announced, ‘and have something to eat.’ She cradled the old woman’s head in her hand and with a teaspoon fed her portions of rice porridge she had brought from home. She placed the rice at Hua’s pleated lips, pushed it in, tipped a little. Then she wiped the shiny trail of food with the edge of the spoon, as one does with an infant. Hua’s skull was heavy, motionless, and it was the thinness of her hair that truly suggested her frailty. A nurse came and went. Time slowed, seemed to pool. There was the drum of an air-conditioner and the minute clicking restlessness of electrical objects. There was the languid quality to time that rests in hospitals for the aged, something entropic, slightly fearful, something Pei Xing associated with worn decks of playing cards or those rust-coloured chrysanthemums that fall apart in a mess, petal by slim petal.

On the table before them lay the novel they had shared. Their reading was moving towards the inevitable conclusion. And they had been visited again by a kind of provisional peace; they had entered the fluidity that composed them; they had read their chapters.

 

 

At Circular Quay Catherine rejoiced in the sunshine.

God, it was bright. Such a shine to the world, as Mam would say, such a shine to the world and all the Good Lord’s creations.

Catherine had stayed for a while in the semi-circle of people watching the didgeridoo player. He was an Aboriginal man, covered in what looked like ceremonial white paint. Like the best buskers, he paid no attention to the crowd, but entered his music as though it were a room he might rest in. Sitting on the ground, the instrument between his bare legs, held by his toes, he also paid no attention to the electronic backbeat issuing from two fat black speakers set up on a ledge behind him. He entered the autism of recital. He was deliberately alone.

Catherine wondered how authentic this performance might be, and whether they were listening to music that was wrenched from a community somewhere, and a dark night, a long history and a secret sacred purpose. CDs were on sale, and she considered buying one, but instead dropped coins into the hat splayed on the path for that purpose. It was the beauty of the sound that most surprised her. She had imagined a wearisome, uniform thrum, but heard instead a set of nuanced tones, at times like a human voice, distant, misremembered, at others like wind, or blown rain, or the amplified sighing and heartbeat one hears during illness or love-making. This was romantic, no doubt, and perhaps some honky-white fancy, Irish-inspired, but knowing nothing of the culture she responded only to the sound. This wooden tube of breath, pulsing and alive. She must tell Luc, who had an interest in ‘world music’ and who had once, in a similar moment, hearing the sound from a loudspeaker broadcasting to the street, considered buying a didgeridoo in Paris.

 

Catherine’s mother had a saying: Remember Frances O’Riordan!

Frances O’Riordan was a thirty-seven-year-old Cork housewife mysteriously cured of her deafness when she went to see the moving Madonna at Ballinspittle. Completely deaf since twenty, she had stood before the Virgin and been touched by acoustical God. Glory be. When Catherine was listening to U2, with the volume turned up, Mam would shout out: Remember Frances O’Riordan! It was an ambiguous message. Catherine was never sure if her mother was telling her that hearing should be preserved for holy sounds, or that amplified U2 would drive her to ungodly deafness. She thought of it now, her mother’s high call, and calculated that the good woman must be sixty this year. Happy Birthday, Frances O’Riordan.

 

The didgeridoo music followed Catherine as she walked towards the area called the Rocks. When she passed an ice-cream kiosk, she realised she was hungry. She walked beneath the massive train line suspended above her – just as a train roared on the iron tracks, slowing, arriving – and crossed to a street of old sandstone buildings, mostly modest and quite small, the barely preserved but gentrified remnants of a colonial city. The Harbour Bridge loomed at the end of the street; it hung against the sky like one of those dream-catchers you find in hippy homes, a net for invisible entities and the gluey stuff of the ether. Ruthy once owned one, before Mam declared it Protestant and asked her to take it down. Catherine decided to find lunch, then visit the Museum of Contemporary Art. In the rising wind fluttered red banners advertising Conceptual Art from Osaka. They depicted what appeared to be a simple black hole. A simple black hole on a bright red flag.

Give it a go, whatever. You never know now, do you? as Mam would say.

 

Up a side-street, beyond the bustle, Catherine discovered a French patisserie. It had white tables on the pavement, a busy brown interior and a courtyard out the back, surrounded by trailing vines. Couples sat close, sipping coffee and tackling baguettes and tarte tartin.

Luc. Ah my lovely, hungering for your touch.

They had met in a place not unlike this hidden-away café. She had fled Ireland to Paris after the murder of her heroine, Veronica Guerin. Though not yet finished her journalist training, Catherine was star-struck with Guerin; she wanted to be like her and to write fearless stories, to work with a risky profile on the Sunday Independent. She wanted to play Camogie like a demon and defeat the champion team from Cork, to expose the murdering bastards who drug-dealt junk at Ballymun, to talk with such confidence, to display blonde cool. Catherine and Brendan marched in street demonstrations after the news of her death. Together they wrote letters against the Gardai, and felt dismally outraged.

Catherine admitted only later that she had been afraid. A coward, to be sure. It would be easier, she told Mam, to be a journalist in London. She would visit Paris first for a short break, a few days’ holiday. Then London. Across the water.

 

It seemed that everyone in Dublin in ’96 had an urban tale about Guerin. Someone had known her at school; someone else knew gossip or scandal. She was a saint or a complete bitch, or a fucking brilliant journo. Her image was everywhere. Her name was in the papers. But Catherine had never met or seen her, other than on television, and knew only in a remote way that there might be brave acts of writing, and that this murder on Naas Road, this silencing of one writer, would punctuate and determine the course of her life. Remorseless killing, that’s what the papers said. At stake was the precarious self she had only just begun to confirm, the one that found the world comprehensible, that wished to report it to others, that wanted to be part of the great otherworld that is our lives in print. This was only a nebulous understanding, and an instinct to flee. But it was enough to impel her to act decisively and finally to leave. Her sisters were married, all except Ruthy, her favourite, who seemed to be enjoying her job at the lingerie counter of Dunnes. Her Mam had settled into the paralysis of life at Ballymun. Catherine felt the need to escape the local nets they were trapped in.

Brendan was staying put. He had at last finished his doctorate, a study of Seán Ó Faoláin’s editorship of the literary magazine called The Bell, and had just been appointed at University College, teaching literature. ‘I’m Modern Oirish,’ he proudly proclaimed. He had taken to wearing new clothes and quoting James Joyce to visiting Americans. They apparently found him adorable and wanted their photographs taken with him, with their jointly literary smiles and their muck-about attempts at the brogue. Catherine wondered then if Brendan would write a fine book one day, a real book, in hardback, with real ideas.

‘Real life,’ he once told her, ‘is really overrated.’ He said really with elastic and cynical emphasis, as though he was weary of the entire world.

And she remembered with heartbreaking clarity the look on Brendan’s face, wide open as the ocean and joyful-miserable, as he led a farewell sing-song over drinks at the Penthouse pub. They had their arms around each other and sang at the tops of their voices. Using the excuse of her departure, friends and family drank too much and afterwards staggered addled and idiotic around the streets and the car parks.

Brendan said: ‘You’ll miss the piss in the lifts of the towers of Ballymun. You’ll miss the screechin’ of priests and the flappin’ of nuns. You’ll miss the seagulls diving for vomit on O’Connell Street at five on a Saturday morning.’

‘Disgraceful,’ Mam said. ‘Disgraceful.’ She was wearing her best frilly white blouse for the occasion, and touched the frills lightly when emotion overtook her.

Catherine hooked her arm and leant against her mother’s shoulder, warm and full of love. She steered her home, through the pile of rubbish and the syringes and the graffiti in the lobby, up the stinking elevator, all the way to the sixth floor. She made her mother a cup of sugary tea and put her to bed.

 

Brendan wept at Dun Laoghaire as she waved from the ferry; and waved to her as if he was a man drowning, not waving. He made a scene, Mam would have said, embarrassing them all, and was foolish and emotional and brotherly loving to a fault; he shouted from the wharf to the deck that they’d meet up in China. Yes, yes, he shouted. In China, in China. The semaphore of waving continued until he could not be distinguished from the others left behind. This was ever-Ireland, Catherine thought, those departing, those staying, and the frail signs in between, resting, fading, on the cold trembling air. The Irish: always leaving.

 

The images on telly were all of the shot-up car, Guerin long gone. Catherine dreamed of it; it scared her. A cherry-red something or other, an unpretentious little car, with blood on the front seats.

 

At their first meeting Luc had seen her reading an English book and shyly struck up a conversation. She was suspicious at first, a guy with a literary pick-up line, taking a chance with tourists. We Irish girls, she thought, are wise to the pick-ups. But she was reassured by his lack of confidence and his apologetic English.

‘I read it better than I speak,’ he said. ‘You can test me if you like.’

And she liked that too, the quiet humour, the self-deprecation. So Catherine had tested him then and there with Nabokov’s memoir, and he filtered the ornate prose to say that this was a book about memory, and that the poor man was so afraid of passing time, and so confused, so desperate, that he considered the baby’s carriage a sinister kind of coffin. Every shape, said Luc, was already filled up with death.

‘I read it in French,’ he confessed with a smile. ‘Poor Mr Nabokov.’

Luc was a translator, from Russian to French, originally from Besançon. He was struggling, he said, to make a living. Russian literature was out of favour.

‘But only temporarily,’ he added softly. The Russians were ‘eternal’, he insisted, and sombre enough and broad enough to express life for all of us.

‘It is something to do with scale. The consequential and the inconsequential. They are not afraid of history; or the smallest human endeavour. Side by side.’

It sounded formal, like something he had read in a book. But Catherine was attracted to the way he implied that words mattered. She saw in him seriousness of mind and an endearing manner, both youthful and old.

 

Catherine and Luc spent four weeks together, then parted. It was a relationship with the economy of a holiday romance, strictly contained, without obligation or the projection of a shared future. In Luc’s tiny room in Belleville they had sat up in bed together eating raisins, talking of books and exchanging stories about their lives. It was a happenstance affair, genial, uncommitted, and she discovered he was another of those souls who carry the past before them, who somehow understand the compulsion to repeat and revisit. They recognised this in each other. They liked each other’s stories. Into the shell of each other’s ears they poured random narrative seductions. Catherine found herself telling Luc about Ming Ming and Ping Ping, as though she understood at last how so humble an excursion might bind children together. She told of the grander trip to Ballinspittle and of her mother’s godforsaken disappointment. She told of her brother, how he was word-filled and crazy-like, and her best and truest friend. She told of the assassination of Veronica Guerin, Irish heroine. She told of where she grew up and of the sorrow of Dublin, a sorrowful city if there was ever one.

Luc had fewer stories he was prepared to impart. His childhood was a cloudy, obscure place, which he was always on the brink of clarifying. When he spoke of it, without fluency, he seemed to Catherine to be picking his careful way through a fog, as if he had never spoken of anything personal before. But he told her this: that his maternal grandparents were from the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the south, where in 1951, in the early years of their marriage, there had been an outbreak of ergot poisoning. Infected rye bread had been sold at the local bakery, and his grandmother was among the many who suffered appalling hallucinations, most of which involved blood-letting, dismemberment and scenes of atrocious violence. Ergot poisoning, Luc explained, has effects like LSD, like a bad trip. There were only seven deaths, but there were widespread delusions of a mostly fearsome kind. A town gone mad. Everyone remembers a tailor rushing through the streets believing he was pursued by spiky devils, and a young woman who ran into the river, believing her body was on fire.

Grandmother was hospitalised and never really recovered, Luc said, and his mother, then a baby, was raised by her aunt. In her late teens his mother had moved to Besançon, but could not overcome her guilt at leaving her mother. When he was eight they made the only visit he can remember: they took a bus to Pont-Saint-Esprit and saw her briefly. He remembered the sound of the river beyond the window and the distant wailing of herons; he remembered how his mother’s guilt transferred to him, that he absorbed it there and then, blotting its darkness in, standing before this old woman who neither greeted nor spoke to them. She had purplish-grey skin and flapped her hands like a moth, he said. He was afraid. He felt alone. He had felt the guilt entering him. He looked out of the window at the river, and wished he could dissolve there.

‘And translation?’ Catherine had asked.

‘It could have been any language, anything other than French. I loved literature and longed to be transported elsewhere, to exist inside a language. Russian appealed because of the alphabet, which seemed to me as a child like something from a dream in which meaning was coded, but not immediately evident. Backwards-facing letters. The mystic glyphs of Cyrillic. Serifs. Ligatures.’

Here Luc paused. ‘And because of the novels, of course. Those weighty novels you fell into for weeks and weeks. As a teenager, I read the classics, all the great works. I fell into Pushkin and Dostoevsky. I loved Gogol and Tolstoy.’

Luc warmed to his explanation, as if it was a summary of his passions. ‘And Doctor Zhivago,’ he added. ‘I really loved Doctor Zhivago.’

 

When Catherine left for London they stayed in touch by email – thinking phone-calls were much too intimate. In this way she knew of his brief marriage, his translation commissions, the death of his mother. He knew of her job with Reuters, her ugly flat in Golders Green, the on-off affair with one of her colleagues in the office. They remained friends against the odds, practising a long-distance affection.

When Luc at last visited Catherine in London, almost eight years after their friendly Nabokovian encounter, they were two foreigners who both found the English amusing, who were carrying bundled in themselves the mosaic of displaced lives, who were sentimentally fond of the unencumbered month they had once spent together. Luc looked older than Catherine expected. He had grey at the temples and deep creases beside his mouth, as if some sadness had afflicted him that he had never told her. Men have secrets, many secrets; she knew this by now.

But his body was unchanged. He was still slender and milky-white, he still had bluish flanks in the cold and a lovely tilting step when he emerged naked from the shower. She would kiss his goose-pimpled flesh and make a show of drying him, wrapping him round as if she had discovered the young boy still inherent. Beneath the towel, almost imperceptible, she felt him shiver. Kissing his neck and his shoulder, rubbing her nose down his ridge of his spine, smelling the gardenia perfume of the soap on his body.

Once, lying in her arms, he whispered: ‘As a child I was really afraid of moths. There are giant moths in the south of France: they have furry grey abdomens and coarse rustling wings.’

‘Moths?’ Catherine asked, expecting a funny story.

‘Yes, moths.’

There was no funny story but only a cosy moment, like that of the confessional in Our Lady of Victories on a cold winter’s day, with the scent of damp wool, animal and acerbic, and the priest’s voice, and her own, and the muffled sound of the rain, pouring in a light steady veil, washing into the shadowy car park outside.

 

Catherine was not sure now, on a Sydney Saturday, why she should remember this fragment of conversation. Moths, fear of moths. It was the gift of tenderness, perhaps, to persist and return like this, delivered wistfully and for no purpose other than to recall the texture of an affair. And it was a token between lovers: to confide the vulnerability that might have followed from childhood.

She rose from the table and paid her bill. Outside the light was startling and the sky avid and aflame. Catherine walked towards the Museum of Contemporary Art, breathing in the voluptuous light, thinking of the clean, sleepy body next to hers, of the melodious quality of his voice after they had made love, of a childhood faraway, in Besançon, and another parallel, in Ballymun, and thinking of the rhyme in her head, Besançon/ Ballymun, of its inward music and the trinity syllables, thinking too how romance is no longer possible, how Doctor Zhivago is no longer possible, that epic perspective on history, that snow-decorated love, and she decided, there in the sunshine: I must ring Luc this evening.