From the long lounge in the middle of the living room, Lucy watched the closed front door. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she had a house to herself. Ben had taken Tom to see the purple brilliance of the jacarandas along the river, and she’d walked awkwardly from room to empty room, unsure what to do, before slumping on the sofa for a while, still and quiet. It was bliss just to be on her own—no one she had to pay attention to.
Houses could feel so different when you had them to yourself. She remembered, long ago, being home on her own after school—she was seven years old, her three sisters busy in other places, and her mother still at work. Most days, Lucy hadn’t minded her mother being at work—her mother was a doctor, a ‘general practitioner’. Lucy had loved the sound of so many syllables, such very long words. And most days there was something exciting about being home on your own. Something grown-up.
But that day, when she was seven, the house had felt different—lonely and bare. Lucy didn’t want her mother to be working; she wanted her mother to be sitting at home waiting for her, like her friend Astrid’s mother did. She wanted her to be sitting at the kitchen bench, like Astrid’s mother did, with a glass of milk poured and three home-made peanut-butter biscuits laid out on a small plate with a striped edge.
Lucy had looked at the empty kitchen. She looked at the full milk bottle in the fridge, and the mug her mother had left ready for her on the table. She looked at the biscuit barrel, full of plain biscuits bought at the supermarket. And then she ran away to Astrid’s house, where she was exhilarated to be gorging herself on seven of the famous biscuits, and asked for two refills for her glass.
‘My pleasure—any time,’ said Astrid’s mother, Linnea, as she filled the glass again. ‘It’s always lovely to see you.’
And then Lucy and Astrid played in the garden—a complex game where each separate path was a different room in their enormous mansion—until the light dropped and Linnea sent Lucy home.
She was letting herself in at the back door when her mother came in at the front calling, ‘Hello? Lucy-Lu? How was your day, sweetheart?’ And she realised that the whole excursion had been secret. She’d run away, and no one had noticed.
Now she sat inside this new house. It felt friendly. It felt good. Of the five offers made, theirs had been chosen. Maybe it was because they were a family, as the agent had said, but Lucy took it as a sign, as if the house had chosen them.
In the time since they’d moved in, she’d busied herself with the usual tasks and rhythms of Tom’s days—the good ones; the great ones; the ones that sparked with pure frustration, hers or his. There was a perpetual motion to parenting; no one had told her about that.
There was so much new life here. The yard was full of new birds, new bugs, new butterflies. Lustrous beetles glowed on the doorstep, and a python had crossed the road beside the river, right there in front of her and Tom. The spiders’ webs spanned entire footpaths, wide and strong and golden in the light, with their residents as big as saucers in the centre.
Hanging out their welcome, Lucy thought, watching one glisten through the window from her spot on the sofa. It was exquisite, but who knew which ones might bite?
‘Our little home,’ Ben said sometimes at the end of the day, when Tom was tucked in and asleep. He was remembering so many things about the place he’d left almost thirty years before, somehow alive with its history, its geography, its heat now that he’d returned. It was as if he was pulling out the pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle, turning them over and recognising how they might all fit together. She’d never heard him speak so much about this place—and the jigsaw’s picture was mostly mysterious to her.
‘I’m still not so sure where I am,’ she’d said to each of her parents, ringing her mother at her busy doctor’s practice, her father in his studio by the beach. She was used to settling quickly somewhere new.
But if she was honest, she hadn’t quite known where she was since Tom was born. Nothing dramatic, just a kind of wrong-footedness, from moving too quickly through different sensations: anxious, joyous, watchful, bored, and back.
‘A whole new life,’ Ben had whispered when they’d brought their baby home. She saw now that was about them as much as Tom.
‘Take your vitamins,’ her mother told her. ‘It’s exhausting, moving cities, and with Tom.’
‘Get Ben to take you to the beach for the weekend,’ her father said. ‘That’s all that’s wrong with Brisbane: there’s no beach.’
In the garden now, two crows cawed, their calls harsh and sudden, and Lucy jumped with surprise at the noise.
She was differently attuned to sound these days. Even when Tom slept, she was aware of and anticipating the moment he’d wake up. Crying. It seemed he mostly woke up crying—another thing no one had mentioned as a possibility of motherhood and one that made her heart ache.
Now, in the house, in its silence, she wanted a different kind of sound. Standing with her arms stretched high, she pulled a CD down from the shelf and put it into the player. It was an old compilation of nineties songs; she couldn’t remember where it had come from. She waited for the disc to load, and cranked up the volume.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced either—unless you counted swaying through a lullaby. Her father had told her once that she looked like a tree in a breeze when she moved to music, and she’d held onto that compliment, loving the idea of herself stretched out, sinuous and moving free. She wasn’t tall—‘average everything,’ she always joked—and she was rarely graceful. Now, just a year shy of forty, and always a little bit tired, she felt slower and duller sometimes, as if she needed to urge herself forward.
But when her body, her arms, her legs began to move in time to music, any music, she was a different being, extended and alive. It was as if the movement was drawn out of her, one long fluid line pulling her up and away. She scooped her long red hair up onto the top of her head, watching her reflection in the window. Her arms made a canopy over the space in which she moved.
A staccato four-beat drove on beneath song after song; she loved its insistence. It reminded her of the little pendulum that had marked out the tick and the tock of music lessons in her childhood, reliable and clear, while the melody played and curled across the top. She loved the predictable and perpetual beat of that plumb, the regular and contained arc it made from one side to the other, on and on. She tapped it out, that safe sound that kept music in check.
And then she started to sing along.
She’d always sung. Her mother had sent her off to singing lessons for years, and she’d won prizes in eisteddfods and talent quests. Her mother had thought she should try for the conservatorium, but she didn’t. She did an arts degree, a couple of drama subjects, and took a touch-typing course on the side. She took short contracts to work in university offices, travelling in between—and she became known for her knack of unravelling any problem, reorganising any mess, meeting the most impossible of deadlines.
Fixing things.
‘I thought you’d make more of yourself,’ said her mum.
‘As long as you like what you do,’ said her dad.
What she loved was standing in a crush of people at a gig, the whole darkened room shouting the words of a song straight back at the performer on the stage. That was power; that was life. That kind of communion she loved.
It was a long time since she’d felt that: the last gig she’d been to, before Tom was born, she’d suddenly felt scared among the bodies—felt him kicking hard inside her as if he were afraid too.
‘I need some air,’ she’d shouted at Ben and gone outside, not knowing she wouldn’t go back.
Now, there was a thrumming silence; the music had stopped, and the crows were quiet too. Across the street, someone was knocking on a door, and then she heard a cheery greeting called.
It was funny; she must have filled thousands of hours before there was Tom—all the things she’d done, on her own, for herself. Now she fought to keep herself away from the washing that needed folding, the dinner she might start to cook. No. She wanted sound. She wanted movement. She wanted to feel like her old self. She notched up the volume, sent the CD around again.
Perhaps Elsie had danced here, in this room. Perhaps she’d sung too. Could you sense that, the traces of earlier moments? She waited, but could hear only the slam of the back flyscreen and a corresponding thump somewhere downstairs—something knocked down by the wind. There were often things moving and bumping in the crawl space, above and below. She tried not to think of the python: this whole city seemed wildly alive.
Or maybe it was a bit of Elsie, left behind. Lucy raised her hand to the empty room. ‘Hi,’ she said aloud, feeling foolish all the same. As if Elsie would come back and let herself in.
The songs looped again, and Lucy felt them beat into her body. She drifted into the kitchen, still humming along as she flicked on the kettle to make tea.
‘You even lived in London and you never drank the stuff,’ Ben had marvelled that morning. ‘I wonder why you’ve started now—some late-onset postpartum tastebud glitch?’
‘You and your grown-up descriptions.’ She’d laughed at him. The answer was behind the bevelled glass of one of the kitchen cabinets. A teacup, saucerless; a slightly fluted cream cup with a big blue floral blaze.
Peonies, thought Lucy, and something like a fuchsia. She’d found it forgotten at the back edge of the deck, the sludgy-mud rime of its last cup of tea still coating its bottom. For a few days, washing it with every load of dishes she thought of returning it to Elsie—ringing the estate agent, or looking up the address on the settlement papers. Then, on a whim, she’d taken it from the kitchen bench and made herself a cup of tea. One of Ben’s teabags. Weak, no milk; sharpened with a small slice of lemon. You could tell it was the drink the house was used to—there was no room for a coffee machine on the narrow bench top, and the decor predated anything hippy and herbal (as Ben liked to call such things) by several decades.
Now, she drank her tea, savouring its warmth as she stood by the kitchen table, until the beat of the music made her set down the cup to tap the bassline of the song with both her hands. Her wedding ring clinked a kind of percussion, and she jibed and swayed to its beat. There was a particular shape to this music, something low and funky that made her feel at least a decade younger.
And then she was back there, in a dark room thick with people. She was wearing a long red dress that left her back bare and she was tracing shapes across the skin of her neck, her chest, her collarbones with an ice cube that dripped, delicious, down her skin. The room was hot and the audience pressed in closer. She was shouting this song back to a singer six feet away on a tiny stage.
She was standing on her own. She’d never felt more completely alive.
The music. The cool wetness. The dark room and the close air. It was summer and she was on her own for the first time in years. She had left Ferdi Klim and just about felt as if she could fly. Ferdi Klim. Their names hooked together for years on end, and then she’d walked off to find her own space. And felt invincible—even now, her body stretched higher, straighter with the memory of ice tracing her warm skin. That was who she wanted to be, the woman who reached out for more.
It took a moment for her to realise that there was another noise nearby, and that slammed her back to the present. She grabbed at her loud ringing phone.
Another thing she hadn’t understood all the years before Tom came along: motherhood’s terror—extremity, catastrophe, terror. The crazy swing from love to dread that could disrupt the most nondescript day. No mother she’d known had talked of it: not her sisters, nor her mother, nor the friends she’d left behind in every place they’d lived.
There were so many things to worry about—Tom himself, and the spiders in the garden; the planet; and everything in between. She couldn’t bear to watch the news. Some twins, she’d heard the edge of a report just this morning, had been starved to death by their own mother in this very city. She’d broken a plate in her hurry to switch off the radio.
Now, she scooped her phone off the counter. Ben was ringing to tell her something dreadful. Something had happened. By the river. Something had happened to Tom.
And then the ringing stopped, just as suddenly as it had started, and Lucy stared at the silent screen. There was no number listed.
All the smoothness, all the music’s joy fell away from her body.
She hadn’t been like this before. Easy come, easy go; easy even with the randomness of life. Now, every hiccup, every unknown, was a crevasse into which she could fall.
In other countries, she’d read once, there were spirits who travelled ahead of you in time, doing the things you’d do next. Alone in the house, she stood still to remember their name. Not a doppelgänger. Not an alter ego. Vardøger: that was it. It was Norwegian. She’d typed a paper for someone once—a professor in London, who specialised in Norse mythology—and she’d liked the sound of these creatures. ‘They never threaten, never frighten,’ he told her. ‘Some people hear the vardøger; some people see them. Perhaps you hear something busily going about its business and doing whatever it does. And then, a short while later, the person themselves arrives, and does all those things. It’s like a premonition, a future self.’
The security, the comfort, of a version of yourself gone on ahead.
The Vardøger of Lucy Kiss: Ben had joked about taking the phrase as the title for a novel. But what would her future self be doing? She’d loved this game when she was pregnant with Tom, holding onto an idea of herself somewhere ahead, with her baby safely delivered. She’d always be calm, always fabulous, the kind of mother who could take a toy, a snack, from an elegant tote bag at a moment’s notice. Instead of her current self, lugging Tom’s stuff jumbled together in an old conference bag of Ben’s, in the bowels of which she could rarely find a thing.
From outside, she heard footsteps pounding along the bitumen: if that was her vardøger, it was running away.
Then there were voices in the street, and laughter. Rinsing her cup at the sink, Lucy leaned forward to try to see the speakers. The cup clattered onto the draining board as her phone rang again, and she grabbed it, registering Ben’s name on its screen.
‘Hello?’ Her heart pounded; the line was completely silent. ‘Hello? Ben? Hello?’