6

Strange how time seemed now and then to reverse, patterns to flip over and resume in another life. The quirk of any story, the element of return.

It was getting dark by the time Catherine made her way back towards Darlinghurst. In the twilight there were flocks of bats flying away from the botanical gardens; Catherine could see them silhouetted against the amethyst sky. What a primitive life form they were, especially here, in the city centre, flapping awkwardly into heaven. They implied tales of dark metamorphosis and entrapment in creaturely life, early childhood fears, storybook trepidation. There were also loud, insistent bird calls Catherine could not recognise, squawks and warbles and full-throated chimes; she hadn’t heard so many birds in a big city before. The sky was full of alien and animated life. As she climbed the steep steps at Woolloomooloo, Catherine huffed and puffed but felt pleased with herself for the effort, and for the muscular sensuality of her working legs. Pausing on a landing, she looked briefly behind her: the centre of Sydney hung like a vision in a silver panorama – the towers, all arrayed, the canyons between them, the Bridge in faint outline and the Opera House now obscured. The scrolling night would soon leave only the lights; the city would forget itself, become another kind of abstraction.

 

 

Catherine reached a street of backpackers’ cafés and small open-fronted restaurants just as the lights switched on, casting a cadmium yellow shine, a painterly tone, over the diners sitting at tables outside. The meals looked good, generous servings of unspecific provenance, mostly some kind of mix-up of Thai and Australian cuisine. A sign read: Kangaroo stirfry with hot chilli sauce. Catherine paused, considering. But since she’d not yet seen a kangaroo, a real live kangaroo, big-eyed and cutesy, fetchingly iconic, one she could photograph or write home about to Ruthy, she decided that her first meeting shouldn’t be a feast.

The long climb from the Harbour had left Catherine feeling flush with the heat and in need of a drink. But she didn’t want to enter a wine bar or sit conspicuously alone at a pub, so she found a liquor store further up the street and bought a cold bottle of riesling to take back to the apartment. Then she selected a Chinese takeaway, aware of its sentimentally vague connotations, and ordered ginger fish and a portion of fried rice.

 

On Darlinghurst Road, though still early, it was an edgy Saturday night. There were sex clubs with flashing lights, young travellers already drunk, and a kind of hot human energy, sparking up currents of desire and frustration. Rowdy pubs were spilling their patrons, who swung groggy onto the street. Restaurants were like televisions, boxes of fluorescent encounter and hyped possibility. Everything, every surface, appeared glossy and over-bright. Catherine saw the junkie postures she recognised from her childhood, and the sly handshake that exchanged folded money and small plastic bags, a furtive glance, the slinking away. She noticed an Aboriginal beggar, sitting with his back against a pole, and a group of five young women, laughing and life-filled, heading in scanty dresses for a night on the town. A young man, shirtless and covered with blue tattoos, was shouting obscenities from a street corner to everyone and no one, waving his arms in a kind of violent, useless, feint.

City-ravage, pagan and awesome, on a humid Saturday night. All at once Catherine wanted quiet, and to be hidden away. She wanted to sit alone, in a kitchen, to rest her elbows on a table, and to eat her take-away meal in silence.

 

It had been a haunted day. Some days were better than others. Sometimes Brendan rested in peace, safely interred, but on others, like today, he hung around, insinuated himself into the spaces that broke open between now and then, turned up with his dead man’s words and his unextinguished charisma. Yet it was not a mournful day. There had been a jaunty and delectable newness to things, and Catherine still felt the cheery elation of all she had seen: the didgeridoo player, the Opera House, the Aboriginal paintings, and then the supernatural ferry ride, without destination, from Circular Quay across the Harbour and back again. There was the moment, somewhere in the middle, when standing at the bow of the ferry, high up in the breeze, she could see the smiling clown-face façade that formed the entrance to Luna Park, nestling right there on the shore, tucked in one corner; she saw the Bridge on the left and the Opera House on the right and felt located in space by these three incomparable monuments. She was thinking of Brendan the Voyager, seeking paradise with his disciple monks in ancient Ireland, and though this was a nonsensical analogy, she had thought to herself yet again. Brendan would have liked this.

 

Catherine sat cradling her second glass of wine and played a CD of Sinéad O’Connor singing ‘On Raglan Road’. Darkness had fallen. In the apartment she heard the lovely voice ring out, resonant and yearning, and felt wreathed around and caught up in its sweet lamentation. She rose slowly and walked outside, onto the small jutting balcony on this, the fourth floor. Ahead was the back of the Coca-Cola billboard: its jazzy illumination showed from the rear as a quivering rectangular nimbus, outlining a black building. There were other apartments nearby, and other people enjoying their breezy balcony on a summer’s evening, but only Catherine had the soundtrack of ‘On Raglan Road’, only she had this accent of herself summoned and this particular Dublin romance. At the end of the track she switched off the music, wanting no other layer of words to fall where it had been.

Catherine sat on a metal chair on the balcony, staring into space. She sipped her wine. She considered her good fortune and looked upwards for stars that came from Ireland. In the centre of the city you couldn’t really see the stars. But she knew they were there. They were new stars, new, southern hemisphere stars. There must have been convicts who looked upwards in the early nights and felt entirely confounded. They must have felt that the very heavens had changed, that the all-mothering and humbling darkness had let them fall away, had released them into disaster. Mere perforations of a night curtain that had fallen over their heads. Poor buggers. Stranded. No direction home.

 

Ah, but she would have liked now to be lying in Luc’s warm arms. She would ring him soon. She must not ring too early and must not drink too much in the meantime, lest she sound boozy and needy, or maudlin and mean. Her sexual loneliness was profound, and she had not expected it. When they were together, in the time of mourning, it had been easy to remain self-enclosed, because pleasure seemed so unlikely, because she did not consider she had a right to joy in the time of her grief. Luc was patient, remote. There settled between them a strained and uneasy quiet. But now, in another world, there seemed more reason to believe in secular redemptions, in gestures by which the body delighted in being alive. She had never before been so unclothed in January, felt this kind of warm sensual night just a few weeks after her birthday, sitting with bare arms and bare legs and a cold glass of wine.

St Catherine, St Catherine, O lend me thine aid
And grant that I never may die an old maid.

The air had become dense and seemed to shudder with rising wind. Catherine looked down William Street and saw there entram-melled car headlights, all pushing at even intervals to and from the city centre. White spots in one direction, red in the other, and she was baffled again by the paintings she had seen that afternoon, all those massing dots from the central desert, spin-drifting, swirling and anti-representational. She was not good at abstraction: perhaps that’s what it was, perhaps something in her childhood in the tower, with too little private space to see her own life clearly, had left her depleted in her capacity to appreciate visual art.

 

As a child she has been taken on a school excursion to the National Gallery of Ireland. The students were led in obedient lines before august portraits and historical scenes, instructed to admire. What had claimed Catherine, what had most commanded her attention, was a melodramatic late Victorian picture called The Wounded Poacher. She still remembered the name of the artist: Henry Jones Thaddeus. They had been asked to choose an image in one of three rooms and write a story about it. Most of the convent girls dutifully chose biblical genre paintings, by which they might display their spiritual goodness. But for Catherine the wounded poacher was inexplicably alluring. It showed a man, stripped to the waist, collapsed on a chair and in the care of a young woman who bent tenderly above him. She dabbed a cloth at his chest and he appeared to be in a faint, his mouth slightly open and his posture abandoned. At the poacher’s feet lay two dead rabbits and a gun, and it was a poor house and gloomy, with a little still-life bottle and bowl sitting on a table in one corner.

Only as an adult did Catherine realise how sensuous the image was; and how the woman leaning over the prone man suggested sexual touch. His head leant back against her breast; her arm encircled him. Catherine’s schoolgirl story had been rather dull, but the erotic impression of the tableau had vividly persisted. When at their lunchbreak a nun chided her for choosing to write about a sinner, Catherine had not felt ashamed. She fiercely consumed the jam sandwiches her mother had made for her and sat slightly apart from the other girls, tough as a tart, one of them said.

 

Catherine glanced up at the clock and decided to watch the television news. She found the remote and flashed the severe world into vision. There were the usual foreign wars, tribulations, massacres, collapsing economies, there was global warming and economic downturn and apocalyptic predictions. The war in Iraq: never-ending. Afghanistan: never-ending. Somewhere beyond balmy Sydney on a Saturday evening in January, the world was heartsick and haywire.

When the local news began, the opening story was located at Circular Quay. A little girl, eight years old, had gone missing from her home – a suspected abduction – and was last seen at the Rail Station at Circular Quay. CCTV footage had found her small face in the crowd, identified by her mother. On the screen Catherine saw a still shot of a blurry child, and around her were five heads, a young man, a young woman, an older woman and herself and then the man who must presumably be the abductor, his hand on the girl’s shoulder, bending to whisper something in her ear. Catherine leant in trepidation towards the screen. One face was remarkably like the Chinese woman she had seen on the north shore, boarding the ferry – could this really be so? Yes, there was the handbag. And yes, it was definitely her, Catherine Healy of Ballymun, next to the little girl. The others were apart, at each end, and seemed to be diverging. The newsreader voice-over said that police would like to locate the man standing directly behind the little girl, with his hand on her shoulder. Others in the photograph – and here red rings magically appeared around the four nearby adults – should contact police immediately to help with their inquiries. The young man was looking down – would he have noticed anything? – but the three women were all looking alert and ahead. Catherine saw her own nebulous head in a noose and marked out. She leant back on the couch and felt slightly ill. She pressed the off button and the newsreader, now speaking about taxes, was sucked back into nothingness.

 

It seemed impossible to be caught in public time like this, and in elbow-rubbing proximity to a mystery crime. It made no sense. Why would an abductor take a child to a busy tourist site on a Saturday morning, and not stash her away somewhere, and act in a more evil way, more dastardly and more truly covert? Was he convinced one could hide a small child in a crowd? Catherine was struck by the poor quality of the CCTV image. There was hi-fi, hi-def, high-bloody-everything; might not the techies be able to produce a clearer photograph? It was in black and white, almost unheard of these days, and grainy, as if glimpsed and recorded underwater. The little girl might have been any little girl. Was the mother sure? How could she be certain? Perhaps the plaits were a giveaway. All the other faces looked stark and similar. The two young people appeared her age, mid-thirties or so, and so did the now suspicious man leaning towards the little girl. The Chinese woman was perhaps sixty, sixty-five, and yes, it was she. As she boarded the ferry she perhaps recalled seeing Catherine earlier in the day, at the train station. And then she waved.

Catherine waited thirty minutes, her hesitation inexplicable, before she rang the police. Her heart was heavy. She was asked: what department? And blurted out in scrambled syntax that she had seen herself on telly, there she was, next to the child, and commanded by the newsreader to get in touch. There were clicks and pauses, then a gruff voice came on.

Catherine collected her thoughts. ‘It’s about the abducted child,’ she said clearly. ‘I am one of the people in the image broadcast this evening. The CCTV image at Circular Quay.’

‘Name and address?’

‘Don’t you want me to come in?’

‘Name and address? I’ll take your details, luv, and we’ll send a police car to pick you up. Right away. OK? Ten minutes or so.’

Catherine left her name and address and then the policeman hung up.

She was shaken by what seemed the dark undertow of the day, a child lost, perhaps a death, and nothing was noticed. There was just this imprecise still from a lazy camera, this unremembered coming together of four visitors to the quay, ordinary people like her, with their own purpose in being there and their own hidden histories.

Brendan would have liked this. Brendan would have seen the drama in being caught unawares adjacent to criminal intent. He would have found thrilling the accident of her appearance and the coalition of unknown faces, the preposterous coincidence, the terrible forces beneath the everyday suggested in this naff red outlining of passing faces. Faces that shared, inadvertently, in something unknown.

But it could be nothing, she told herself. The story was incomplete. Images told you nothing. That was why she was a journalist, why she loved but finally distrusted Henry Jones Thaddeus, why she was moved, but remained ignorant, looking at the Aboriginal dot paintings, why she wanted to get behind the image of the car with blood spatter on the front seat to the still-alive body of Veronica Guerin, to the woman before the blood, and before the police, and before the journalist herself was the story. But the red-ringed heads in a photograph were perhaps the beginning of an explanation.

 

When two policemen knocked on the door Catherine leapt to attention. They were uniformed and young. The taller one, poorly shaven, with a small nick on his chin, held up a card as they do on television, and the other, vaguely handsome, was already turning back towards the elevator. They descended together in the brown light, standing too close to each other, and at the ping of the lift door Catherine saw the police car parked directly in front, brazen and bright in a no-parking zone. All she could think of was that she wished she had changed her clothes; her indigo sundress and open sandals were an offence to the gravity of their errand.

‘Here on a holiday, luv?’ The tall one had noticed her accent.

‘Working. Just arrived.’

‘So what do you think, eh? God’s own country or what?’

Catherine was taken aback by this casual chit-chat. Australian men were always seeking forms of verbal confirmation.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said weakly, sounding more foreign than ever, and all the time she was thinking: the little girl might be drifting in the harbour, eyes closed, face down. She might be turning slowly in the currents, her plaits waving like sea life, her tiny lungs, oh bless her, flooded with cold water, and her poor mam somewhere out there, completely distraught.

The indecency of small talk irritated and pained her.

 

Central Sydney flashed by. A flow of lights, barium, sodium and fluorescent, then deceleration. Workers in reflecting, lime-coloured vests attended a rough hole and a mound of rubble by the roadside. Sad bastards, road-working on a Saturday night. Their faces zipped by, dazed, then fell away into darkness. Orange traffic cones surrounded them, like an artless installation.

There were white taxis everywhere, and crowds jerking on the pavement, intermittently merging, or separating, or lit by pulses of headlight. Every large city is lurid on a Saturday night, Catherine told herself. Flashy, heartless, swaggering, cocksure. Every large city has its adrenaline overdrive and its regions of darkness, where one might be lost, or found, or entirely disappear.

 

In the reception area of the police station Catherine was told to wait a few minutes. Night settled around her. She sat on a sticky vinyl chair staring at a missing persons’ poster. Squares of blurry faces in rows, six by six. Thirty-six missing people. The poster was mounted on a pale blue wall and Catherine leant forward in the jaundiced light the better to examine it, as if convinced she might see there someone she knew. She became aware of the policewoman behind the reception counter watching her with disdain. A bit like her oldest sister, Philomena, sharp-faced and mousey. The low wattage illumination flattered no one. When at last she was asked questions in the interview room – regulation grey, denuded of features but for a distracting crack in the wall above the door – there was really nothing of worth or substance to say. She disappointed the two detectives. No, she had not seen the man and child on the train. No, she could remember nothing at all unusual. She saw them when they alighted. They looked like father and daughter. Unremarkable. Quiet. No, she couldn’t say which direction they took. No, she didn’t notice anything, really.

But Catherine had. There had been something, something that called forth within her a momentary and ineffable tenderness. What was it, then, that the child had evoked?

And yes, if she thought of anything further she would get in touch.

It was a pointless excursion. The detectives were courteous, but bored. Why had they bothered to bring her in? She had been mildly excited at first, thinking herself a special witness, able to help solve a mystery; now she felt like the schoolkid ashamed because she had raised her hand with eager confidence and had no answers. It was nothing like television. There was no resolution and no plot.

 

When Catherine left the interview room she saw before her the Chinese woman who was also caught in the CCTV image. She was short, well dressed, and still carrying her bulky handbag. She sat where Catherine had earlier sat, and was examining the thirty-six missing persons photographs. Catherine sat beside her. The thirty-six faces looked oddly similar, an under-nourished, pale tribe. They were mostly young. Didn’t the old go missing? Did police only search for the missing young?

‘I saw you today,’ she said. ‘At Kurraba Point Wharf.’

‘Yes.’

‘You waved.’

‘Yes.’ The Chinese woman smiled. ‘She’s safe, you know, that little girl. She is safe.’

Catherine sat beside the woman. They stared in the same direction.

‘She was happy, not afraid.’

‘Pardon?’ The accent was unusual.

‘She was happy, not afraid.’

‘Ah,’ said Catherine. ‘I didn’t really notice.’

The Chinese woman touched her hand. The fabric of her dress was shiny, Catherine noticed, oriental perhaps, and covered with small mauve buds of cherry blossom.

‘Safe,’ she said again.

 

Catherine’s name was called. A taxi had arrived to take her back to the apartment. It seemed too soon. She wanted to speak to the Chinese woman who had mysteriously intersected her path three times – three times – in a single day. She leant forward and kissed the woman’s cheek, then embarrassed, emotionally fumbling, Catherine turned and stood. Had they been elsewhere she might have stroked the woman’s hair or laid her face in her lap; this woman inspired solicitude, this woman had the composure of one who knew the pertinence of details, the solution to crimes, the way the future might ripple from a touch or a single word.

‘Well, good luck,’ Catherine announced. She had no idea why she said this. A formula saying. The Chinese woman raised her hand in a small precise wave. Behind the counter the Philomena look-alike made a sniffing, dismissive sound. On her high horse, as Mam would say. As you do. Lady Muck.

How inconsequential it felt, all this coming and going. It was maddening to be implicated, as though there was a mystery to the day, then to have the possibility of significance rendered trite and officious, a kind of bureaucratic transaction, a woman picking at her teeth in bad light behind a distant high counter.

 

 

In the half-lit apartment Catherine felt lost. She paused in the bathroom, looked in the mirror while she rinsed her hands, then pulled back from her own image, which appeared weary and aged. She scooped water for her face, splashed it, and looked again. No improvement. She lifted her hair from her neck, fanning it. Catherine could not help feeling a vague prickling of panic. She was in Australia and it was not all sparkles and sunshine. Remorseless: the word surfaced. It was surprising to think again of Veronica Guerin, after all these years. Might there be remorseless crime in this country? Catherine patted her face dry. Held it in the towel, smothered. She closed her eyes into an awful solitude, which suddenly felt unendurable.

When Catherine walked into the living room she glanced at the clock and decided that it was time to ring Luc. She would not, resolutely not, tell him of the supposed abduction, but must talk of her job, and the fine weather and their tentative future. Would he join her here in Sydney? Would she be able to persuade him?

 

Catherine dialled and heard the phone ringing into the chamber of Luc’s sleeping, on the other, now-awakening side of the planet. He took a while to pick up. She wondered if he was hushing another woman resting beside him, or if there was just this unbreachable gap, this global distance a single voice might never quite cover. Catherine, close to tears but determined to be chatty, held the receiver to her face and waited.

‘Oui?’

Hearken. It was his half-asleep voice, his mother tongue, in which the wisp of himself as a boy, afraid of his grandmother and of moths, was still touchingly apparent.

‘Sorry. I just wanted to hear your voice.’

 

 

And when they had talked Catherine finished the bottle of wine. And when neither had said what the other could not bear to hear, she had turned out the light. And when in darkness the little girl reappeared before her, shining in photographic silver, televisually fallible, a relic of herself and possibly now dead, Catherine tried to turn away, pretending she didn’t care, into the tunnel of sleep, that sweetest regression.

But she lay in the dark and what came to her wakeful imagining was this: an altar boy swinging a censer and smoke filling the transept of the church, and her mother’s face, and Brendan’s, peering half disappeared through the cloudy air, and the godless and the god-fearing all together in one place, and the mystery of any family, and its assorted pieties and devotions. Any family, anywhere, its assorted devotions. Any child. Or that child, that lost, particular child.

 

 

Pei Xing rode the ferry back to Circular Quay thinking of her husband, Wang Xun. She recollected his hands, his eyes, the timbre of his voice. The shape of his back and his buttocks, and the touch they invited. There was a form of memory, yes, that resided in the cells of the body.

They were married for seven years before he succumbed to the tuberculosis that he contracted in the north; and these were her years of recovering a self. She had been effaced in the prison, but for a concealed, dim life, lived almost entirely in foreign vocabularies; and then again in the labour camp, where she learnt how physical exhaustion might wear a woman to a mere shape. This was how she had seen herself, as hopeless, insubstantial.

When Xun arrived, Pei Xing had not understood at first what it was he was offering her. She had closed down so much, and was so wholly dispirited. She was a woman composed of vacant spaces. But the first time he held her face in his hands, tilted it to look at him, leant to kiss, she discovered a flourish of inner liveliness and a remnant of self undemolished. They sought permission to marry and had to wait a year; there were many political impediments, given her family’s ‘crimes’. But Xun’s father loved his only son and knew of his illness, and so was persuaded to make an intervention in Shanghai. They were authorised both to marry and to return to the city.

With four other families Xun and Pei Xing shared a house near Suzhou Creek and lived in one tiny room, with a communal kitchen and latrine. It was a kind of liberty neither had dared to anticipate. They woke in each other’s company. They ate together, just the two of them. They had private, intense, searching conversations. The rapture of sexual experience was also unexpected. Pei Xing could hardly speak of it, even when they lay in each other’s arms. Both learnt not to make too much noise in their love-making and the quiet time afterwards was eloquent enough. Pei Xing had been surprised to discover how warm a human body was, and how the need of love-making brought its own climate to their bed. And she was surprised to be reminded of the existence of laughter, that there was another faculty forgotten and a body pleasure neglected. There were the tremendous histories of nations, and the vast movements of peoples, there were collective orders of brutality and the crushing of those deemed dissidents; and there were also these more subtle and modest measures of life, the preparation of a meal, a whispered conversation, a suggestive kiss. When Pei Xing discovered her pregnancy there was more rejoicing: his face at her belly, listening to the third life growing between them.

 

Pei Xing was contented and at peace as she moved over the water. Looking back, she could see the smiling-face façade and Ferris wheel of the amusement park, the bridge overarching, the miniaturising North Shore. She loved these ferry rides. She was like a child with a treat. When Jimmy was little she was interested to see the emotional range of children, how profound were their pleasures, how quickly removed, how everything seemed tuned to a pitch of exaggeration. Children had a vehemence and volatility that transfigured the smallest moment. A toy removed could betoken funereal wailing; a toy recovered, a whoop of instant bliss. Now, in Australia, she allowed herself wider feelings.

She had not thought of it before: from here the Sydney Opera House looked like folded paper, like one of those shapes children produce under instruction from a teacher. Cranes. Frogs. Lotus blossoms. Airplanes. And there was a game she had seen Australian schoolchildren play: they folded paper into little peaks, inserted their thumbs and index fingers, and counted out numbers and fortunes, opening and closing the paper object like the mouth of a bird. What was it called, she wondered. The paper House sailed by. It was achieving a golden sheen in the late afternoon light, its shells polished in the setting sun, responsive to the sky.

 

Pei Xing was hungry. At the hospital Hua had eaten most of the rice; her appetite seemed huge. Pei Xing thought often of her mother’s cooking. On the day of the new scarlet coat, the exemplary day, the day she returned to again and again, her mother had cooked her favourite dishes: steamed sea turtle with fried ginger and spring onions, peppery carrot broth, tofu stuffed with pork, and for dessert, balls of sticky rice shaped around sweet sesame paste. She cannot now remember why the festive meal had been prepared, but liked to think it was purely in honour of her coat. Her parents had toasted each other with Shaoxing rice wine and she questioned now, after all these years, if it had been an anniversary of some sort. Their wedding, perhaps. She would now never know.

Gan bei! Her father’s voice was still there, his glass was still raised in a toast.

 

Less than a year before her parents were taken, Mao had famously swum in the Yangtze River. It was 1966, he was seventy-three years old, and there he was, plunged into the brown water near the Wuhan Bridge. Posters appeared everywhere: Mao chubby-cheeked and tubby-shaped, beaming robust health and totalitarian command. He was reputed to have swum thirty Li, fifteen miles, in only sixty-five minutes. Pei Xing remembers the figures exactly, because her father had scoffed, doing a quick calculation.

‘Our leader is indeed superhuman,’ father announced with a wry smile.

They were happy then. The darkness had not yet fallen. They had not yet been swallowed into the belly of a giant man. In documentary footage Pei Xing saw years later, Mao was floating on his back, simply bobbing in the water, relaxed and unstrenuous. He was surrounded by five thousand young swimmers who all adored him, and who would appear lined up, in their bathing suits, in hundreds of thousands of posters. Public management jubilation. Ten thousand legs.

Why had she thought of this? Because her joy was small-scale. Because China had taught her the tyranny of scale. Because in her hunger, on the ferry, she remembered the dense and distinctive pleasure of one single day and the fact that she had never, at her peril, learned to swim.

 

There it was, Circular Quay, slowly floating closer. As the ferry moved towards its berth Pei Xing glanced across at the façade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, one of her favourite places in Sydney. Marvels, full of marvels. She loved to see what visual fictions human beings might fabricate. She had spent many hours there in a trance of pure happiness, wandering the hushed high rooms, overtaken by visions. The staff there knew her, greeted her, took her coat and hung it safely in exchange for a coin-sized token, asked in a soft voice how she was going. They welcomed her rapt gazing, her lingering arty wander; they watched with casual beneficence as she circled an installation or halted forever before a particular object or painting. It was there Pei Xing first used the English word ‘fabulous’, only one month after her arrival in Australia. She still remembered the moment: the delight of an unlikely, spontaneous exclamation. It was a difficult word to say out loud. Though she knew the English in her head, in her mouth it was a heavy and formless shape. Fabulous. One of the gallery attendants had heard her; it occasioned her first local exchange of English language conversation.

 

On the pier Pei Xing thought suddenly of Aristos, who would have finished his work by now and perhaps, at this very minute, was sitting on a bus, gazing out of a window. His face appeared in her mind, shifting even as it arose, sped away behind slick reflections.

Aristos, whom death was stealthily following.

Pei Xing looked at the sky. It was shifting colour once again; there was a fine salmon streak to the west, and a change in the weather coming from the east. Beneath omnipresent human speech she heard the murmur of wavelets and flags and the cloth domes of umbrellas. Pei Xing crossed the concourse beyond the five jetties of Circular Quay to check on her friend Mary. There she was, sleeping, nestled in the home she had made beneath her hoarded plastic bags. She was returned, safely returned. Mary snored a little and looked content and comfortable. She was secure in her own world, blindfolded into sleep. She bore a ravaged face, deeply creased, and her hair was grey and matted with dirt and leaves. On the surface of her tired skin lay a glaucous bloom, and there was something, some kind of note, clutched in her sleeping hand.

How the poor of any city vanish and reappear.

Respectful, quiet, Pei Xing stood for a moment, offered Mary a blessing, then rode the escalator upwards to catch the train.

 

The Bankstown Line formed a stylised map in her head, a little train track in black, and a series of perky station names: Redfern, Erskineville, St Peters, Marrickville … Lakemba, Wiley Park, Punchbowl, Bankstown. They were a chant she had learned, and a series of familiar vistas. As she rode through the damp twilight Pei Xing dozed a little. Then she roused herself at her destination and prepared for the walk home. She thought of food as she trod the lit footpaths to her apartment block. Xiaolongbao: steamed dumplings. Bamboo shoots. Moon-cake. Peking duck. She recalled her mother standing outside Old City God’s Temple, waiting in a line for crab xiaolongbao, warning ‘Too much crab will make you cold inside.’ Food lore: Chinese knew all the secrets of the body. Xun had brought her snake’s head soup when she was breastfeeding their son; to this day she does not understand how he procured and afforded it. But she had felt instant strength and her milk flowed swiftly.

 

 

In her apartment Pei Xing brewed herself tea. She selected and played a favourite CD: Liu Fang’s pipa solo, ‘Fei Hua Dian Cui’ (‘Falling Snow decorates the Evergreen’). In the strings plucked forward and backward she heard the descent of the snow, there was lightness, pause, there was the floating of single flakes and their moist feathery touch; there was the sense of stilled time and Buddhic possibilities. She imagined Liu Fang’s beautiful fingers sliding the neck of the instrument, playing, her eyes closed, on a concert stage in Germany or Canada or France, spreading notes as if snow, falling faintly through the universe, and faintly falling.

Pei Xing felt calmed and returned to her self-possession. Some of the pieces on the CD were hundreds of years old. This was music that had endured; this was sound ever-flowing, ripple-effecting, beyond clockface time.

 

Over a large bowl of beef and noodles, Pei Xing listened carefully to several pipa recitals and when she had finished she managed a plate of vanilla ice-cream topped with chocolate sauce. It was a satisfying meal. Not turtle, but satisfying. Instead of cleaning her dishes Pei Xing unlaced her shoes, eased them from her feet, then reclined on the sofa. She switched on the television to watch the nine o’clock news.

The story of the abducted child at Circular Quay seemed to Pei Xing unreal. The ringed heads, in which she saw herself and the woman who exchanged glances at Kurraba Point Wharf, and a young man and woman, neither of whom she could recall, was a kind of adventitious device, surely not useful in solving a crime. But calmly she rang, and calmly she received word from the policeman that a police car would come and collect her for questioning at the station. He noted her name – asked her twice to spell it – took down her address and her phone number, then thanked her for taking the trouble to call.

Pei Xing had not really noticed the man caught in the photograph with his hand on the girl’s shoulder, but she remembered the child, a pretty girl with Chinese-style plaits. She had been attracted to the girl, who seemed unsure, somehow, and a stranger to the Quay, but also filled with the excitement of novelty and apparently unafraid. She had wanted to say this to the policeman: she seemed unafraid; but was not given the chance. So she thought that perhaps the child was in no danger at all, there had been a domestic argument, some misunderstanding; her father – for so he seemed – had simply wanted more time alone with his estranged daughter.

In her fretful imagining Pei Xing wanted to save the child, to think up a narrative, and an ending, in which she would be vouched safe. At the police station she would say this: she seemed unafraid. She would dress well, and look serious. A reliable witness. She seemed unafraid.

 

After Mao died in 1976, China began rapidly to change. By the time her husband had died, in 1982, Shanghai was well into its transformation. There were gangs, she heard, who kidnapped children for ransom. They had a test. They let the child grow hungry, then offered them fish. If the child plucked the eyeball with his chopsticks and tried that first, he was a rich child and it was worthwhile pursuing a ransom. However, if the child reached for the body of the fish and a mouthful of flesh, he was more likely to be from a poor family and hardly worth keeping. It may have been urban myth, but stories sprang up of precious offspring of the one-child policy being stolen away and huge sums demanded for their safe return. Sometimes the stolen child was never seen again. Pei Xing had warned little Jimmy – or Lun, as he then was – to stay close by when they went to market, and if offered fish by a stranger to eat as if he were starving. This way, she reasoned, he might be let go. It made her afraid, the idea of stolen children. And she had made her son afraid too. Even now he ate greedily, as if vigorous consumption was a test of his permanence.

 

When Xun died Pei Xing was working as an English teacher. Those skills once despised as corruptive were now regarded as essential. She gave classes at a middle school, and taught private students in the evenings. It was hard to make ends meet. Xun’s father had also died and there was no provision made for the grandson, or for her, nor did she have any remaining family in Shanghai to support her. She waited, just waited, to see if her parents would be rehabilitated, to find a way to join her half-forgotten brother, now living in Australia.

For years after his death crowds visited the embalmed Mao Tse Tung in his crystal coffin. They lined up for hours around Tiananmen Square, just to file past and pay their respects. Mao persisted undead, his bubble face waxy, glimpsed through the casket manufactured by Beijing General Glass Factory, Number 608. He hadn’t disappeared; he was just more object than ever. He was the emblem of the Chinese capacity for glorification, the great face-object of a monstrous fame.

Pei Xing believed that history was still uncertain and China might, without warning, again turn violent. She returned to habits of quiet and careful circumspection. She would lie low and hide out and disappear if necessary. She would guard her child. She would practise discipline and survive. No degree of caution seemed too large. But Pei Xing enjoyed being a teacher, being out and about in the city. And when she looked over the black-haired heads of her students, all of them reading silently, all of them inward and quiet, she felt that they existed within the compass of her care, and that she might love, if permitted, each and every one of them.

 

The telephone rang and Pei Xing leapt up, startled. It was a nurse from the hospital saying she had left her plastic rice container behind, and would she like them to hold it for a week or post it in the mail? Pei Xing was touched that so trivial an object had prompted a call, that someone had bothered whether or not she might be concerned at what she’d left behind. She suggested they hold it, thanked the nurse sincerely, and replaced the receiver.

When the policeman knocked on the door Pei Xing was ready. There was a man and a woman, both very young, and she was touched to see that the man had the marks of adolescent acne still apparent. Just a boy, as Jimmy was. A blemished, particular boy. He had the slightly abashed manner of adolescents, not sure exactly where to put his hands, looking away to remember what came next. Pei Xing was not afraid as she allowed herself to be guided into the police car, and was pleased that the officers were unenthusiastic and wished for no small talk. They were no doubt bored with this errand – treated like taxi drivers, taking an unimportant Chinese woman all the way to the central police station. For Pei Xing it did not feel compulsory; she felt she was doing the police a favour.

 

Predictably, they took the M5 route into the city. Pei Xing rarely had a chance to fly like this along the freeway, since she owned no car and went everywhere by public transport. But it was almost exhilarating, the speed at which they moved, the dark night flashing by in a neon rush of even-spaced lights, the glassy effect of staring through the window, alone with her thoughts. There were long and sinuous tunnels, foggy with chemicals, like something she had seen in a car chase in a Bruce Willis movie – all that thunderous truck-tonnage ready to detonate in a fireball, or replayed again and again as Princess Diana’s final moments – the artificial quality of the light, a pinkish gel, the way the fast-shifting walls swung distorted and dangerously close. Pei Xing was relieved when the car shot out of the tunnel, back onto the open road. When they passed the airport, and entered the short tunnel beneath the runway, there was the thrill of proximity to aircraft landing and taking off. All that activity in the sky, all that national and transnational coming and going. The paranormal roar of the planes set off a tremble in her body; the boom of machinery lifting into the air, the improbability of it all.

I am young, Pei Xing thought. I am still a young woman. She turned to look out of the back window to see the jet angling away.

 

At the police station she was asked to wait a few minutes. On the wall in the waiting area was a poster asking in many languages, including her own, if she needed a translator. There was another of missing people, six by six squares, melancholy portraits garnered from albums and passports. Pei Xing leant forward to examine them. Some were trapped in dead-eye snapshots, eternally misrepresented, some were animated at a party or cutaway from an embrace, some were neutered for passport protocol, lured prematurely to anonymity. The stylistic incoherence of the photos – when so much these days was blandly standardised – seemed to Pei Xing especially poignant. For one man the sign of his existence was a bleached, almost featureless face, resting like a mushroom in an unlit hollow. How could this image possibly help find him?

The door opened and the woman Pei Xing had seen at the wharf was shaking hands with a detective and being thanked for helping with their inquiries. She leant back from the portraits and saw the woman recognise her.

‘I saw you today,’ she said. ‘At Kurraba Point Wharf.’

Her accent was what? Irish. A tourist, perhaps.

‘Yes.’

‘You waved.’

‘Yes.’ And Pei Xing thought: she is seeking reassurance. This is a young woman, far from home, who cannot bear the thought of a lost child.

‘She’s safe, you know, that little girl. She is safe.’

The woman sat beside her. They stared ahead.

‘She was happy, not afraid.’

‘Pardon?’

‘She was happy, not afraid.’

‘Ah, I didn’t really notice.’

Pei Xing imagined she could hear the breathing of the woman beside her. They sat close, like relatives awaiting bad news. Like mother and daughter. The policewoman behind the reception counter shifted in her seat, to remind them both that she was there, superintending. Pei Xing gently touched the Irish woman’s hand.

‘Safe,’ she repeated.

The word would make it so. And then the young woman was called to a taxi and rose in a hesitating manner, as though she had a confession she was anxious to impart. In an instinctive movement she leant down and kissed Pei Xing on the cheek. So much, apparently, lay beneath this clumsy gesture. So much beneath a few exchanged words. It was the contraption they worked with, words, and it was insufficient.

‘Well, good luck.’

It was effortless good will. Pei Xing raised her hand in a small wave and watched the woman leave, half-turned back to her, through the sliding glass doors. She readied herself for the interview: to say she seemed unafraid.

 

When, half an hour later, Pei Xing was driven home in a taxi, this time feeling disappointed and subdued, she reflected that she had not persuaded anyone at the police station that the child would be safe. They were already writing in a file somewhere that she was an unreliable witness; they were already tagging her as a helpless optimist, unrealistic and deluded. Chinese. The Chinese woman was no help at all. Perhaps the Irish woman had seen something meaningful. She had appeared burdened and in need of solace; perhaps she had already imparted some crucial information and was dragging sorrow and a surer knowledge of what might have happened. Pei Xing leant her tired face against the cool glass of the car window. The night was humid, electrical. There was the buzz and hum of imminent lightning and a wavy disturbance in the sky as the weather assembled and shifted. Soon the wind would whip up, the sky become ocean, the streaming rainstorm obliterate all one might see.

Back through the perilous tunnels. Back towards Bankstown. This time she closed her eyes.

 

In her reading that day of Doctor Zhivago, Pei Xing had paused after the drawn-out account of his death. Hua was weeping through her expressionless, frozen face; a line of tears soaked her collar. Yuri Zhivago had a heart attack on a stalled tram. Feeling faint and in need of air, he had pulled and pulled again at the leather strap on the window, first down, then up, then roughly towards him, even though the crowd shouted at him that the windows had been nailed shut. He was so confused and in such pain that he did not understand. Something inside him simply broke. Somewhere in the heckle and jeer, his heart was bursting. He could hear nothing. He stumbled from the tram and fell beside it onto the hard cobblestones. A crowd gathered and someone announced that his heart had stopped.

Pei Xing knew what Hua was thinking, that it was an ignoble death. But they were both moved, and it was not possible to read any further. Pei Xing was not weeping, but felt choked and tight in the chest. She tended to Hua as if they were both bereaved, talking to her of other matters, fussing a little in her ministrations, pulling the hospital shawl closer as if wrapping her body against the chill wind of mortality.

But now, after the worrisome television news and her general unsettlement, after the futile trip to the police station and her implicit disqualification, Pei Xing opened the novel to read what she had not read to Hua, the Conclusion, and its redolent, distressing last paragraph. It concerned Zhivago’s beloved, Lara, who had returned to the city to try to track down their lost daughter.

One day Lara went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street, as so often happened in those days, and she died or vanished somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list which later was mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.

It was this section that prompted Pei Xing to weep. This paragraph summoned the fate of her mother and her father; this was the proxy tone of unremarked death, the impersonal sweep of fate and the atrocities it enacted. It was not all ‘struggle sessions’ and mass criticism and public executions, sometimes there was just this, a quiet disappearance. A number mislaid. One person gone. Two.

 

In the inhuman dark Pei Xing could not sleep. The encumbering past was too much with her. The little girl on the television was too much with her. In the unresolvable story she had been given to live there was no guarantee that everything finally and securely would repair. She realised too what it was in the television photograph that had bothered her: it was the four heads, ringed so emphatically in red. Four was a bad luck number in Chinese, four was the homophone of ‘death’. Four people, the television announcer said; four people, he repeated. Four. So she must remember five. There might be four adults, all come together in failed witness or a momentary pattern, but there was always too a fifth, a child who must be disposed finally to life, not death. She was aware of her casuistry, her number superstition, aware she wanted, in her sleepiness, just to make things settle and become right. But it seemed to her a neat formulation. Five. Only the inclusion of the child promises something in the future. The humid darkness held Pei Xing in her bed. She lay still, quiet, sifting her day. She could hear traffic on the M5 and the distant sound of aircraft. So many were lost. So many.

But there was snowfall, and the Opera House, and Doctor Zhivago. There was the sound of the pipa, ever so lightly plucked. Not everything, surely, was known through four. Every pattern broke open into mystery, and what is yet to come. She told herself this, still anxious in the darkness. She told herself five.

 

 

After the inquest into the death of Amy Brown, after the scrawled, childish-looking note from her mother, James decided to write a letter in reply. He was unable to face the parents, unable to drive out to their dusty farm and knock on the door, bend to pat the dogs, smile weakly in embarrassment at the dire cause of his mission, fumble for words while Mrs Brown offered tea and cried. So it was the least he could do. In the little wheat-belt town where he had known such happiness, he sat in his room and composed a note to try to make things right. He can still see himself in the act of writing the letter, sitting on his bed with his knees pulled up and a pillow tucked behind him, hunchbacked, sleepless, half-destroyed.

Dear Mr and Mrs Brown,

I am writing to express my condolences over the death of your daughter, Amy. Amy was an excellent student and much admired by her peers. She was always helpful, courteous and well behaved. She will be missed by her friends and those who loved her. As her teacher I want to offer my deepest sympathy at this time of loss.

James DeMello

He sent the letter, and almost immediately regretted its inane formality. He had made grief tedious, had stuffed it like a cleaned corpse into a freezer of stiff words.

James had wanted to say: Forgive me, forgive me, something went wrong. The world collapsed and Amy was under it. There is no word I can offer, there is nothing I can say, that will make things right. I, a poor son, who ceased visiting his own mother, can only tell you that I tried on the beach to bring her back, I tried and tried but she was already gone, and I shall never forget this, oh God, oh God, this wanting to breathe into her and bring her back, and the desperation I felt and the God-awful failure. And my own grief, I know, is nothing compared to yours, but it is huge and it is dark and I am not sure how to go on.

If he could have retrieved the letter, and sent a symbol or an image or some other wordless emblem, he would have felt more honest. At the funeral there were flowers, and suddenly it made sense, why this might be so. In this town with no florist, this tiny town on the edge of nowhere, somehow roses and lilies had turned up, somehow there were elaborate wreaths and cellophane-wrapped bunches, and he had no idea how or from whence they had arrived. Yet it made sense. Something offered so that everything did not have to rest inside words. Something silent delivered from the living world. Something with no purpose other than to declare that the beautiful exists and will not last.

Rough farmers were standing around in hot suits; many, James guessed, retrieved the suit they’d been married in, and left it unbuttoned to accommodate their older body. The women were also dressed up, and some wore hats that looked as if they too belonged to an older generation. Mr and Mrs Brown, broken-hearted, stood silently holding hands.

James does not remember anything that was said, not a single word. Only this: the flowers wilting beneath a sheen of sunlight and cellophane, and what people wore, the way they stood looking down, and the heat on their heads, and the absence of children.

 

At Circular Quay James was now at a loss. Having met with Ellie, having gulped back the words he might have said, he felt aimless and without purpose. All around him were families in a kind of festive mood, and couples strolling together, looking at the sights. He glanced up at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and could see a line of people, barely visible, climbing its bow. What must they see, he wondered. There would be the Harbour below them, and all the wake-patterns on the water, there would be a bird’s eye view of boats and of the meringue peaks of the Opera House, and perhaps there would be a view much further, out eastwards to the ocean. Flags flapped on the summit, in a playful image of triumph.

 

James’s attention was caught by a family he overheard to be Italian. They had spread a rug on the grass and were unloading a late picnic, and there were three generations, a Nonno, a Nonna, a Papa, a Mama, and two small children. One of the children, a boy about four, kept breaking away and chasing sea-gulls from the grass, so that they flapped messily about him, rose upwards and squawked. The little boy was pleased to have such evident effect in the world, to stir birds into the sky and scare them with his arms. And then the Nonna called out: Matteo, Matteo, and the boy turned and ran on his fat little legs into her arms. She said Matteo, bello; Matteo, bello, and the child sank into her lap with a lump of bread she had torn for him. His little sister, about two, reached over to take the bread, and he pulled it back, kicking and wriggling, setting off a squeal. But then the mother intervened and found bread for her daughter. The child flopped back into her mother’s lap and Mama cuddled her, and blew on her hair, and took up her toddler toes and sucked them.

It was a simple little drama, everyday, unremarkable. But what had snagged in James’s heart was Matteo, bello. It was as if he had heard it before, in the distant past. His own true name, given by his father, was Gennaro, Gennaro DeMello.

He had never told anyone, not even Ellie. At some stage his father had left and when he was enrolled in school someone persuaded his mother to call him James. And so he became James, a fake Anglo translation. But on his birth certificate and passport, there it was, Gennaro DeMello, symbol of something he had one day lost. The sing-song of someone he used to be, but now orphaned and contracted and misidentified.

Si parla Italiano.

James thought of lingering longer near the happy family, but was afraid he would look suspicious, a guy just hanging around, a guy seedy-looking and ill. They would think he was a druggie, or someone who liked to look at small children. James gave Matteo a little wave as he walked past the family, and to his great surprise, Matteo waved back. Ciao! the child called. He waved in the Italian child’s manner, closing his hand and opening it, closing and opening. In that second James lost his miserable nonentity. He became the man heralded by a child, caught in the egalitarian affirmation a small child might bestow. James smiled. Spent as he was, alone, the small wave moved and pleased him.

Auguri, he thought.

 

 

It was the wine, James decided, that made his mind swim in this way, and caused him to feel sleepy at only four in the afternoon. He considered visiting the Museum of Contemporary Art, but decided instead to take a short nap in the sunshine. He found a spot on the grass, on a slope, and laid himself down. He closed his tired eyes. He could hear a didgeridoo playing, a muffled soothing sound, and the distant busy din of traffic and people; he could hear the whole world jangly and abuzz on a Saturday afternoon. But he slipped away within seconds into a dreamless sleep, his body finally yielding to bone-aching tiredness. It was peace, it was retreat. The oblivion was sweet.

 

When James awoke it was just after six o’clock. Surprised to have slept for so long, he glanced at his watch a second time, for confirmation. It was as if someone had scissored out a slice of the day, destroying time. So he rose and sat for a while, calculating the shift of scene. The light had altered to what painters used to call Naples Yellow and the air had turned unusually humid and heavy. A change in the weather had begun to travel in from the sea. The crowds had thinned a little. The didgeridoo hum was gone. The non-stop faces and noises were less invasive and compelling. No sign, anywhere, of the Italian family, or the boy who had offered such an innocent and easy salutation. It was good to have slept, after so much wakefulness. James’s mind felt clearer; he did not have a headache; he was relocated in the present tense, here and now.

James stood, shook off his doze, and set off in a semblance of true volition to visit the nearby Botanic Gardens. Inattentive to the crowds, conspicuously alone, he walked once more around the circumference of Circular Quay, crossed in front of the Opera House and headed up a hill, finding himself in a space of leafy parklands and wide expanses of grass. A strong wind flew in off the ruffled waters of the Harbour, and James, with no reason to be there but to wander and look, simply drifted between the trees, followed the winding paths, read the Latin tags affixed to little signs below exhibitions of plants and bushes. In dwindling light he saw there was a native garden, marked with a placard that acknowledged that the land was first possessed by the Cadigal people; there was a begonia garden, a rose garden, an oriental garden and a succulent garden.

 

At length James arrived at something called Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, a bench carved by convicts out of sandstone in 1810. Mrs Macquarie, wife of a colonial Governor, liked to sit here, the sign said, to watch tall ships enter the Harbour. He imagined a woman in Regency dress, like someone in a television drama, decorous, prudish, moving with stiff reticence. She would speak in posh tones and gaze into the far distance, her tendril hair blowing.

There was no one else present, so James sat down on the chair, displacing Mrs Macquarie’s ghost and acting colonial. He stared at the water. It was bucking under the wind and iron-toned with the coming night. Almost at once a kind of aggravated disquiet assailed him. James could not release himself from the pressure of absent others, Amy Brown in particular, and the tragedy of her death, Ellie and all that she urgently signified, his mother, vivid still and intolerably memorable. So long in inertia, so long sealed away, he was now made restless by his understanding that there would be no conclusion to all this, and that Amy’s death had punctured or ripped something, had opened him both to devastation and to revisitings from the past. He was oppressed, all at once, with a sense of her plea from beyond the grave, as if she were a vision, transparent, with the world shining through her. Ghosts disobeyed time. Their flimsy bodies were interminable. They were at once long-lasting and bizarrely sudden. Afflicted by what he could not name or speak, James needed once again to move his body.

 

With dusk the light had become purple; yellow was draining to the west. Bats rose in flocks from the Botanic Gardens and were streaming across the sky; though distant and high above, they were a loathsome presence. With no plan, with no purpose, James began the walk back towards Circular Quay. In the twenty minutes it took, night had fallen; out here, in the open, it was like parts of the world silently ceasing to be, a downward bending to nothing. The sensation of disappearance was contiguous and threatening. James quickened his pace, almost afraid.

 

But as he approached the Quay he saw that everything was transformed. The Opera House was illuminated against the dark sky and looked still and shiny, like something made for a church. It seemed to bulge in his direction, as if it had grown in his absence and possessed an organic life he’d not noticed before. Beads of light picked out the shape of the Quay, most of them ornamental and over-powered; so too the Bridge was visible as a pattern of dots following its shape, the faint outlines of girders and struts, the honey-coloured pylons, a single crimson light blinking at the high point of its arch. Beneath the Bridge, far to the north, James could see the shimmering icon of the amusement park: a face hideously smiling, its lit hair in afrighted spikes. Along the near side of the Quay the white umbrellas were still up, massing like wings over the heads of customers now beginning to gather for dinner outside. High palms were moving slightly in a rising breeze. Most impressive of all was the Harbour itself, which was black now, pure metaphysical black, and covered in a net of broken light. The ferries were still heading out and returning, their beacons shining, their little windows lit. And there were red buoy lights on the water, showing the way.

 

All this came towards James in a lustrous rush. He couldn’t help thinking of the adjective ‘cinematic’, the way everything with perceptual force, everything city-scale and spaced out, was nowadays described. There was flicker and montage; there was the strangely versatile and celluloid shine of the darkness. It was so: cinematic. Faces manifested before him, veering in and out of focus, and a continuous ribbon of activity seemed to catch at his vision. The crowds had grown once again, and included the smart set heading for dinner and those anticipating a night at the theatre or the Opera. The elevated train rumbled and raised voices sounded. Everything was converging, everything was ample and ablaze. This was one of those parts of a city that passes for a myth.

 

James walked along the Opera House side of the Quay and took a seat under one of the umbrellas for something to do. A waiter appeared instantly, bending like an actor taking a bow. There was generosity in his manner, a calm assertion of connection. James was not hungry but he ordered a meal and a bottle of wine because he wanted to prolong whatever abnormal feeling this was, waking to a new time, into this cinematic illusion, waking into the visionary present after so much smothering past. His steak came, dribbled with sauces, and he looked at it without interest, but he began drinking almost immediately, feeling the Cabernet Sauvignon suffuse his body, falling into him, warmly, like a familiar drug. His metabolism recognised the stimulant whizz in the bloodstream, the cheap revival of chemical life.

Oh Ellie. The ledge in time that was their bed had forever gone. He realised he was leaning on the table, drinking alone, looking to all the world like some miserable bastard whose girlfriend had just left him. An Agelasti, that’s what he was. James could not remember the last time he had laughed.

 

After the unfinished dinner he rose wide-awake, and walked, wishing to lose himself, into the streaming crowd. James made his way to the steps of the Opera House and sat looking at the sky. Then, as the numbers swelled, arriving for concerts and plays, he walked back again. He might have been floating, the loose crowd parting before him, voices circumambient, a sense of idiosyncrasy to his sensations and being in the world. Faceted faces drifted past, the crowds moved gently around him, he saw figments, apparitions, as an artist might have seen. Magritte. He was Magritte, who had lost his mother.

 

At a small liquor store facing the city James bought two large bottles of whisky. These were of thick glass, expensive, and reminded him somehow of a fist. The young man who served him thoughtfully put each bottle into an eco-friendly bag. Drug of choice for the evening, James thought, for a silhouette of a man, false-hearted, misnamed, thinly sketched in graphite by a schoolchild in another time and place. He was not worthy of Ellie. He was too wounded, too lost, too finally disconsolate.

He thought of his cock in a woman’s hand – any woman – as she guided him in. A woman’s mouth half-open, and the carnal, comforting sigh as he fell into her body. This was the imprecision that desire might become, the unbearable paraphrase and substitution.

A drum of voices hung around, creating the resounding white noise of a busy Saturday night. James wanted silence. He sat on the ground in a dark corner behind the ice-cream stand and took a few gulps of whisky. Then he retrieved pills from his jeans’ pocket, and complicated his tox result. Slurred his sick-drinking self, destroyed his sexual imaginings, wanting the peaceful ruination of not having to remember. And though he’d given them up long ago, he was desperate for a cigarette.

 

On impulse James bought a ticket and boarded a ferry, any ferry. Randomly chosen. He was not sure where the ferry was headed as it surged into the night. It was like entering a small, unstable and generalised world: the rocking seemed exaggerated and the passenger compartment confining. He couldn’t bear the overhead lights and the neat little seats, the young people talking in puerile witticisms, the mobile phones and the texting and the Saturday night excitation, so he moved to the back, outside, into the moist gusting wind. It was like being alone, being wholly alone. His nerves settled, he felt himself return, he began again to look. There was the wake, lush white and sucking under the black water; there was the Opera House sliding its great and singular form, and the reflection of the Opera House, which looked thin and unabiding and made of snow. And there was the city, retreating, all those towers of lights, all those engineering wonders, high-rising and firm.

 

It was not a decision, but an act. James slipped over the edge and the whisky pulled him down. At first it was a bounteous wash of dark and light, the water colder than he had expected and covering him quickly. The Harbour seemed to throb around him as the ferry pulled away, and then slacken and gently take him and require his surrender. There were verticals of filmy light and fish-shapes breaking open. There was a winding embrace so that he opened his arms like a lover. There was pressure. There was night, the tide of night, flowing in. He was thinking of his true name, Gennaro DeMello, which came to him as a song, Gennaro bello. He imagined singing from the Opera House penetrating the water – Gennaro bello, Gennaro bello – an extended melisma, a round pure moment.

He felt the water of the Harbour enter his body. His chest was filling. The black wet pushed its thumb-balls in. He felt the sad sinking of giving up and letting go.

He was washed and washed into the mothering darkness, a release, a release, as sound releases; into the wake, Gennaro’s wake, and into waves, in waves.

 

 

The market was a joy. Ellie had caught the bus up Glebe Point Road and disembarked before her stop when she saw the market. It was near closing time, so stallholders were looking rather hot and bored, but pleased too to see browsers still wandering about and relaxed into friendly chit-chat and casual light banter. The market was a mixture of craft, new goods and second-hand junk – clothes, knick-knacks, books and collectibles. Ellie walked past the vendor roasting caramelised nuts in a big open pan at the entrance, and headed straight for the second-hand stalls and the trays of old books.

The sunlight now was orange and the day was drifting away; it gave the shoppers a healthy non-commercial glow. They were defeating all market predictions by their delight in trash and treasure; they held up crumpled cast-offs and cracked old teacups; they leafed through children’s books from the 1930s, they paused over someone’s collection of rusty tools, most superceded these days by something electrically loud. Ellie bought an old hammer so that she could hang a small print on her wall. The man who sold it was pleased, he said, to see that his hammer was going to a good home: it was a small courtesy he offered her, a sweet civility. He reminded Ellie of her father. He wore a scraggly cloth hat on his thin white hair, and read a novel, self-contented, when he did not have customers. She saw that his hands were callused; he had been a hard worker.

Ellie moved then to rummage through trestle tables piled high with discarded clothes. They gave off a slight whiff of naphthalene flakes and were remnants of every era and style, mostly retro-shaped and of fabrics one no longer saw, velveteen, chiffon, Crimplene. She extracted a cheongsam dress of a dense woven silk, covered by tiny emblems of cranes and pagodas. It was of shiny teal blue, with cloth fasteners at a slant and a small mandarin collar. Ellie stretched it across her breasts and hips to gauge if it would fit and decided yes, it was worth a try. She would wear it when next she met James so that he might remove it slowly.

 

Though he had looked nerve-wracked and bloodshot James still carried timeless appeal. Ellie was not sure how much this was overcoded by memory, but there was a charge to his presence and an arousing promise. His proximity in the restaurant had made her want to lean closer. She could feel her naked thighs beneath her thin skirt and had imagined his hand there, gently exploring. Her sexual fantasies all had this efficient simplicity. She would ring him in the morning and arrange another meeting, possibly at her apartment, with a bottle of wine. She would have indirect lighting and a melodious CD.

 

 

At fourteen they had been inept but lusty lovers: they didn’t know what was what. But they knew that there was a world of feeling awaiting them, and the opportunity to talk. The space of disclosure, when they lay in a sweaty embrace in late afternoon, was a sort of second home, so that they were homesick when they were apart, needing the wrecked foundry to rest in, and their own rug upon the floor, and the way light flowed and settled there, needing the bare talkative intimacy of one other person. The meaning of their meetings eluded them, but there was a sufficiency, a self-sufficiency, and a kind of sensual arrogance. Some afternoons they had thrashed about, in sheer heedless pleasure, and it took months before they each learned to slow down and take their time, and for Ellie to learn that she might instruct and more fully participate.

 

She remembered when James first discovered that women menstruate. He had not known how clandestine women were obliged to become, how curved around their own bodies. He told her then of the terrible shame of his nosebleeds and how he feared that he would never outgrow them. Imagine an adult, he said, bleeding from the face like that. Ellie had gently reassured him. It would pass. Everything passed. They were kids, just kids. No one, she told him, would remember his nosebleeds.

They had sex, but they did not know what ‘sexy’ was; their responses were untutored and without any deception. They shared pleasure and discomfort. They told each other funny stories. They discussed books they had read and whacky teenage ideas. Together they enjoyed unusual words, those that described something in the world of ravishing or antique particularity.

The word ‘clepsydra’ became a kind of code between them, an erotic trigger and a flag of assignation. No one else knew. When she leant over in class to whisper it, James would respond with a little nod, and sometimes reach, surreptitiously, to squeeze her hand. Neither she nor James had ever uttered the word ‘love’. Both were too shy. Both were troubled by what might dissolve if they dared to name it. Neither wished to alarm the other, or to reach and find their hands empty.

 

Clepsydra, the water clock, time rendered continuous. Time in transient light, talking softly about everything they were and might be. And now he was returned, her James, the body remembered above others, and in the saturated time of his return Ellie felt something open before her, another scale, a refashioned future, the glimmering of something half-concealed up ahead. She had always hated driving along country roads in the dark, seeing only in the pale stereoscopic limits of the headlights, sure only of things weakly illuminated, shapes, barest presences, rushing forward in the dark, atomised, gone. Now, looping back to the past, everything had changed. It was like recovering sight. It was like moving more slowly, watching objects solidify, and seeing the way. With her father they had driven cautiously, to avoid hitting kangaroos. ‘See?’ he once said, when they braked in time. ‘They rise up in the dark and you have to be careful.’ From the passenger seat she had watched the animal bounce off into the night, a silver outline, a mobile arc, energetic and unharmed.

 

Some of the stallholders in the market were beginning to pack away their wares. There were Turks selling Gözlemes; they had turned off their hotplates and were scraping leftover tabouli into plastic containers. There was an African man wrapping wooden statues, elongated human figures and animals with horns; there was a Hungarian baker, over-supplied with poppyseed cakes, and a Thai woman who sold jewellry made from sea shells. Merchants of many parts of the world were here, in a hippy leftover rehearsal of united nations. Ellie found heartwarming this Sydney of mixed populations. As she left the market – how everything converged – she saw a little stall behind which a Chinese woman sat. It occurred to Ellie she might discover a trinket to go with the mandarin dress. The woman was sixty or so, and sitting by her side was a girl about eight, who was likely her granddaughter. Her stall was a foldaway table covered with oriental odds and ends. There were jade charms, pink coral ornaments and a few hexagonal coins; there was a row of brass-handled magnifying glasses of different sizes; there were small cut-paper pictures in crimson and embroidered silk dragons. Objects from another world. Objects from Communist China.

Ellie picked up a magnifying glass. No reason, really.

The little girl said gravely: ‘you can make fire, as well as see,’ and she held a glass to the fading sun to show Ellie how rays might concentrate. Ellie pretended she didn’t know and tried to sound amazed. The girl was pleased. She beamed at her grandmother. So Ellie left the market with a hammer, a Chinese dress, poppyseed cake and a magnifying glass, and walked up the hill and a few blocks further, back to her apartment. She was sweating when she arrived and unlocked the door. The air was heavy with the threat of a coming storm.

 

It was difficult to filter all she had remembered that day, all that circulated around seeing James again, after so many years. Ellie took a shower, dressed in a sarong and prepared herself a gin and tonic. Then she sat for a while in front of a small electric fan, letting it blow cool over the damp surface of her hair. Miss Morrison had taught them about birds that came from Siberia, migratory birds that flew through China, then continued all the way to south-west and south-eastern Australia. These birds curve around the planet, that’s what she had said. They had chanted out the names of the birds in a sing-song fashion, the way they had been taught their maths times-tables, and Ellie had loved the way the listing and repetition became a kind of music. She must ask James if he remembered the chant. She would ask him to do the sing-song of the birds that curve around the planet, to give voice to the vectors Miss Morrison had described. James had talked of this once as they lay on the blanket; he had chanted the names and then turned to embrace her. These fragments they shared. They were more plausible, more secure, less private and idiomatic, now that he had returned to her. And it seemed to Ellie that there was an unexpected profundity to these recollections, as though they portended the completion, at last, of something long ago begun.

 

Ellie found the print, an old one and foxed, of native Australian flowers, and standing balanced on a chair hammered a nail into the wall, taking care not to make the plaster crack. Then she hung the picture. It was the simplest of pleasures and she loved the feel of the hammer in her hand, the warm wood, slightly concave for a labourer’s grasp. Lovely old bloke, he was, who wanted his hammer to go to a good home. And the print of a bunch of flowers, dryandra, another item she had rescued from obscurity at a market stall, here glowed in the pallid twilight and was suddenly redeemed and beautiful.

 

Ellie made herself a snack of cheese and poppyseed cake, opened a bottle of red wine, and decided against turning on the television for the news. Instead she stretched on the couch and resumed her reading of a Russian novel, one she was hoping to write about in her thesis. She took notes as she went, placing tiny coloured stickers on significant pages, so that the book was already looking half-transformed, an oddball art object, sprouting a rainbow of rectangles. If she were to write on this book, she reflected, she would have to learn Russian, and in a casual half-serious way entertained the idea of looking up courses on the internet, before the weekend was over. It appealed to her, the idea of learning the Russian language. There might be curiosities of translation that would remake the novel and transport her to a different kind of European otherworld. The novel was called Petersburg, by Andrei Bely. It was written in olden times, in 1913. The young revolutionary, Nikolai Apollonovich, must assassinate his father, Apollon Apollonovich, with a complicated time bomb. Wonderful names, these Russians. Ellie would compare it, she thought, to James Joyce’s Ulysses and find intelligible links between cities rendered in words. The intellectual adventure of comparison excited and moved her, so that when she returned to her Sydney world it was thundering outside and it was eleven, perhaps, or nearing midnight. Time had leaked as she read, time had lost its authority, the peculiar duration of reading had entirely taken over.

Ellie stood up and slowly walked to the window. In the distance she heard the low rumble of a storm, and saw flashes of lightning tearing the sky. There was sublimity to thunderstorms and a sense of barely withheld threat. She watched for a while as trees sparked into seconds of existence, then fell back into darkness; she saw the ragged skyline in electric shock; she saw the undersides of clouds illuminated, like surreal creatures floating there; she saw the city take on a quality of abstraction, doused with crude light. Then the rain broke and fell heavily, in loud-roaring sheets. The air was filled up with noise and agitated presence. Each raindrop a small lantern.

Ellie closed away her book, undressed, and went to bed. In the darkness she lay listening to the sound of the flooding rain. It was a betokening, somehow, of another kind of engulfment, one of time, of memory, and of James returned.

 

 

And they are sinking now, all of them, into the wet sleep of the city. Rain is falling all over Sydney.

 

Catherine is still mourning her dead brother and still speaking to him in silence, summoning his company in the torrential night. An altar boy swinging a censer and smoke filling the transept of the church, and her mother’s face, and Brendan’s, like faces in an old film. She is remembering the summer he made a trolley-cart from a broken-down pram; it was the summer, light-lit, of her holy communion, and her little communion bag with the rosary beads in it, and a fiver, a gift from her parents; and everything then was white, her knee-socks were white, and her dress was white and her gauzy veil, white as those petals at the Quay, perpetually subsiding; and now she is seeing no floral emblem to carry her feelings, but enormous white eyelids, one resting upon another, the rims overlapping in a bulbous, rhyming fold, and the eyelids are closing, slow-motion, closing into dreaming; and she is thinking, so she will remember, so she will remember in the morning, must Google Woolloomooloo, must Google Woolloomooloo …

 

Pei Xing is preserving the lost child on television by magical-thinking the number five: Wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu; wu, wu; and remembering ancient men painting with water on the footpaths of People’s Park, practising calligraphy. The signs disappeared almost as they produced them, elegant broad flourishes with oversized pens. And returning half-sleeping in rain-sound to the park in Shanghai, she remembers old people performing cloud hands, swaying their bodies in the air, then walking backwards, stepping carefully, stepping beautifully solemn. It was another Tai Chi practice, walking backwards, backwards. And before she slips into dreaming Pei Xing realises this is her: some of us walk backwards, always seeing what lies behind; and she falls asleep like this, reversed into her own history, seeing her own childhood and what she has lost, walking backwards, and backwards, walking forwards backwards …

 

Ellie is thinking of rainfall over the Opera House, thinking of the Harbour swept shining and mystical by rain light, thinking of the time-lapse of all that she has known and read, and of James, and with James, ever and ever and abiding. The night has gained an enormity with the coming of the storm and in the drench she imagines it out there, Circular Quay, the vast dark water, the rain-glazed tide, the Harbour buoys with their red flares tossing messages across the water, seabirds rising up and rain coming down and the falling, falling, upon the living and the dead, ever and ever and abiding. There is the musical sound of rain on her roof and Ellie is thinking, so she will remember, must ring James, must ring James, must ring, ring …