Wednesday

In the mornings, if he was awake before Cress, Kieran sat in the lounge room and watched old episodes of ‘Whiz Kids’ on the video machine. He’d been taping it for ages, each episode layered on top of the others on the same tape. He liked the idea of that, believing each new show, rather than obliterating the one before, made another layer of knowledge, adding to some kind of rich brew stored magically there on that ordinary black plastic cassette.

The tape was one of his most guarded possessions; he kept it under his bed between viewings so that it wasn’t used by mistake to record ‘The Bill’ or ‘Gardening Australia’, which Cress was addicted to. Just to make sure, he’d painted a big ‘K’ on the spine with Whiteout.

One of the exciting things about putting the tape on these mornings was that he never knew exactly what he was going to see. There was room for three half-hour quiz shows, and he recorded each day’s randomly – at the beginning of the tape or part way through – so there were always bits of various past shows still on it, like secrets. He loved that, the random reminders of things he knew, or had forgotten he knew. He was like a collector of rare shells, or postcards, these mornings, laying out his precious collection piece by piece, absently fingering each one fondly, pleasantly surprised at his hoard. His sparkling array of facts.

He was still there this morning, leaning over the coffee table with his pen, when his grandmother left for the shop. Over the top of the screen voices he heard hers: Lunch is in the fridge, Kieran. Don’t forget. Kieran? To her departing steps he called Yes, without taking his eyes from the screen. Within fifteen minutes he would forget her few words entirely. They would be replaced by six others scratched quickly onto the notebook in front of him: marionette; gothic; lithograph; effigy; mimic; daub. He rewound the tape and replayed the game host’s careful spelling. Checked the letters in front of him, saying the words out loud. Then turned the video off and stowed the tape in his room.

In the shower, he suddenly stopped humming the ‘Whiz Kids’ signature tune to think about the day. It might be a workday, he wasn’t sure. He visualised his chair on the small production line at Enterprise Packaging. The dogged faces of his mates around him. The piles of pegs, ready for bagging. No, not work. A shop day? He pictured St Barnabas, the old women dusting. The smell of the beach outside as he worked, carrying in boxes, sticking price tags on. No. He began to hum again, soaped the thick patch of hair on his chest. Half an hour later, he took some cut sandwiches from the fridge and turned left up the steep road that led from the town towards the rain-forested hills. For the next mile he could still smell the sea.

Laura bent down, close to the sandy earth, to look for the fragments of china. The new moon of a chipped saucer, a broken teapot, pieces of a bowl in eggshell blue. They were pressed into the soil as if they too might have sprouted there, like the wild herbs that splayed around them in the old garden, there at the back of the house: thyme and woody basil and chervil. She crouched close, ran a finger over the bowl’s curve. It was as old as her memory. Like the trees and the house itself. Organic, unsurprising. I’m back, she whispered over the garden. Lips slow with fatigue and the years between visits. I’m here.

She looked up and around. The old wooden house slumped against the side of the slope, its tin and timbers untended. The sun and salt winds had beaten it into something that might, she thought, become part of the forest again, its stumps joining the giant roots of figs, and vines plaiting around eaves and joists in the canopy. She smiled, enjoying the idea, knowing Angela would have enjoyed it too. Then brushed dirt from her hands. What kind of a woman, she thought suddenly, buries broken china in her garden?

Inside the house the question amplified. Now she saw what she couldn’t the night before, when she’d fallen straight into the spare bed to sleep for twelve hours. Every surface, every picture, plate, book, every breath the house breathed was a reminder, a reprimand: All the things, they said, you don’t know. Because, of course, the house was all Angela, everything. The chairs and the spaces between them, the missing louvre in the lounge room, the cracked yellow soap on the sill above the sink. The scrubbed wooden table, the sugar bowl, half-full. It was all imbued with Angela’s voice, her touch, her thinking. Each one held its knowledge of her, covetous, admonishing. You weren’t here, they said.

She went to the living room windows, needing air. Another cracked pane, the frame swollen with moisture and ill-fitting. Mould blossomed in the folds of curtains unchanged for too long. Everywhere there were signs of neglect and degeneration: paint cracked and peeling like sunburned skin, cobwebs soft and languorous with age. She turned and took in the room, the bookshelves, the view to the kitchen, trying to locate the difference that nagged at her. Her hands gripped the velvet back of an old chair and she frowned: inside the decay the house was neat. No chaos of books and brochures and dead flowers on the table and on chairs, no unopened mail on every surface, burned-down candles, newspapers, rags. Someone had tidied up.

She was surprised at her own relief. Someone had dismantled part of the unhappy past and put it back together in a way that might disguise everything, the fights, the resentments, the jealousies. But not quite. She walked towards the bathroom and her next breath brought the thin but invidious smell of turpentine; it was in the walls, the floorboards, the ceiling cracks. She knew then that even if everything had been scrubbed, and every brush, bottle and book despatched to the old women at St Barnabas, the house would still conspire with the past and all its secrets. With Angela. She peeled off her clothes and stepped into the shower, and let the water run hard, let it needle and pummel her skin.

Minutes later, as the water dripped to a stop, she waited with a towel in one hand and listened. There was nothing to listen to, really, no sound. Nothing but muted birdsong and wind, light and high up in the paperbarks. She moved the towel absently over her body. There, it was more a pitch than a sound. It was something she knew, and realised that instant she knew: it was the countless minute shiftings and shufflings and scrapings of the bush. This made her smile. It reminded her of taking up her guitar after years of neglect, and picking up the chords to ‘House of the Rising Sun’, the first song every guitar student learned. She thought: The fidelity of sound. She walked naked back to the verandah room where she had slept. There, pulling out clothes, she found a forgotten orange that had somehow survived customs. It felt like a trophy. She tossed it lightly in her hands, and walked to the front stairs to sit in the morning sun.

He knew if he stood like this, tall and straight, or at least as straight as the tree, that he wouldn’t be seen from the house. He wasn’t sure why he was so certain; it was just something he knew, like his name. And he knew there were times, like now, when he could tilt his head an inch or two and look straight into the windows of her front room. No one inside would see him. It was something to do with the shadows.

Kieran was good at being still. He learned its advantages early, when he was a very small child, and realised what an unexpected quality it was. Stillness, he saw, was much admired, especially in children: it usually meant an absence of noise and demand, which pleased adults. In the presence of stillness, many people became quiet themselves. Others allowed themselves to expand, filling up the space usually taken by noise, by movement, by the intrusions of others. And this perhaps was what Kieran liked about it most: it allowed people to forget he was there. And forgetting, they revealed themselves.

His capacity for stillness meant he didn’t usually have to conceal himself to watch people. He realised that for many in the town, his presence was no more remarkable than the shrubs on the footpath, the birds on the powerlines. Sometimes, this meant he too forgot; slipped out of the consciousness of standing or sitting in a particular place, slipped out of his own skin. He heard and saw only what he was focused on.

At this moment, though, he was firmly caught inside his own skin and quite conscious of what was happening in front of him. Angela’s house, he’d discovered, was no longer empty. Windows that had been pressed shut for months were thrown wide open. Through one of them, he could see the end of a dishevelled bed, blue sheets kicked into a ball. And even from where he stood amongst the trees a hundred metres or so from the house, he could hear water. Someone was in the shower.

At first he’d blundered down the hill, his boots loud in the dry undergrowth – then stopped, holding his breath, as if that might prevent his exposure. Shit, he’d thought. His heart thumped hard, he felt tricked. Somehow, he had absorbed the fact of Angela’s absence but not the likelihood of someone coming to take her place here. He had to reassure himself, to remember that no one would see him unless he wanted them to.

She was suddenly there now, by the bed. Briefly naked and then not. Long enough for him to see it was a woman all right, but no more. Her head was down, he couldn’t see who, or how old. Just the longish dark hair. He had to concentrate hard on his stillness, resist the urge to get a better view. She sat for a moment, then stood again and lifted her arms to tie back her wet hair. Her arms were muscled, strong, he could see that. She was a woman who worked with her arms.

Several minutes later she appeared on the front steps, startling him. He barely breathed, but couldn’t look away as she sat, forearms on knees, and began to peel an orange slowly, her fingers furrowing, splitting skin and flesh. All the time her eyes were on the garden in the small yard before her, the old rose bushes, the sunburnt grass, but now, at least, he could see her face. Her face. His lips parted, he almost spoke. Angela.

It was the bones beneath her cheeks, the slope of her shoulders, the way she held her head. The face seemed so familiar he almost relaxed, almost broke cover, had a fleeting impulse to wander over and sit down and share her orange. To offer to clean her brushes, to make some toast. But of course, did not. This was not Angela, this was not anyone he knew. The likeness was strong enough though, and it made him want to know more.

There wasn’t much he could do, not now. He wanted to tilt his head to get a better angle, to make sure of what he thought he was seeing, but he didn’t dare. So he closed one eye and focused hard. Not-Angela kept eating, kept staring at the garden. Then, as quickly as she had appeared she was up and gone again, into the house, closing the door. He remained as still as possible for as long as he could. To help, he kept his mind on words and images: shadow, reflection, echo. He thought: Pieces of people. And wondered for the first time where Angela really was. He knew about death and the burial of bodies. He had heard people talk about spirits. When they did he assumed they meant the best parts of a person, the purest pieces. The spirit never dies, he had heard.

When he felt finally it was safe to move, this was what reverberated through him as he slipped between trees, his own body a shadow, an echo moving. At the top of Angela’s track it was still with him. All the way home along the narrow bitumen road, the eucalypts and the lilly-pillies and the exuberant lantana would sing their certainties to him: The best parts, they hummed, the spirit. If he could have replied he would have asked them one of the questions forming slowly in him as he walked. What really happened to Angela? And do spirits come out in daylight – or at night?

Laura sat on the wide steps at the front of the house, peeling an orange with her thumbnails, tearing at pieces of flesh. The whole morning, she felt, was at her shoulders, the sun climbing to midday, hauled upwards by the south-easterly and an orchestra of birds. With each segment of orange, another piece of memory lodged in her head. The blue of her school uniform. Her mother’s back.

The yard in front of her was scattered with the remnants of Angela’s rose garden: the plants had grown woody, with wayward stems and stunted blooms, but she could still see her mother’s thin body bent among them, her hands flowered and blotched with paint, gripping thorny stems. The ground around her stained with fallen petals, yellow and red on green, like her studio floor.

Secrets, Fergus had said as he walked her to her car the night before. They passed people drinking at an outdoor café; the wine was the colour of lemons. Their lives were riddled with them. She’d kept looking at the drinkers – talking, laughing, unaware of her personal catastrophe. Her fingers were looped through the handle of the school case, and she carried it the way she had as a child. She felt its weight in her whole body now, not just in her hand. It was, she thought, the precise weight of secrets.

So many things weren’t talked about, Fergus said. So many things were hidden. He’d been talking about his own father, an Irishman who’d fought with the British Army. My father was so ashamed, after the war. Shame made him angry. And silent. After a moment he said: So many silent houses.

Her head had been heavy with fatigue; she wasn’t sure it was a conversation she wanted to have. But now the words struck home. She thought of Angela’s particular kind of silence, one imposed through painting, Laura suddenly saw, chewing the last of the orange and staring at the sky. She sat still, clutching pieces of peel. She thought: Painting as a way of not speaking. As a way of processing shame. In one movement she stood and walked quickly back inside, washed her rimy hands at the kitchen sink and then hesitated, staring through the dusty louvres towards her mother’s studio. The corrugated tin glittered in the morning sun. She felt the pull and the push of answers it might hold, answers she might or might not want. She wondered if it was too early to call Kate.

In the middle of the afternoon, Cress left Iris to tend the counter and took a cup of tea – Darjeeling – into the storeroom at the back of the hall. Three cardboard boxes and a big tea chest, donations from a family on the Gold Coast, had arrived the day before. She ripped the tape from the smaller boxes and regarded the jumble of toys, toddlers’ clothes and biscuit tins with a practised eye. She knew the worth of the contents without touching them. Useful, uninteresting. She pushed the boxes aside with her foot and turned to the tea chest.

It was hip-high, without a lid. Its sides joined by metal strips and tattooed with the vestiges of old shipping stamps. This was what Cress noticed first, the washed-out crimson and blue. The fat curve of a G and a C, the loop of an L. There were other letters there, too faded to recognise, words she couldn’t make out, but that didn’t seem to matter. What mattered was authenticity, whether it was a Regency desk or a great-grandmother’s brooch or a simple wooden box. It caught at Cress every time. In a world clamouring with replicas, this was what meant something: the true. The trustworthy.

Cress bent down beside the box, and forgot that her feet were aching. She ran the flat of her hand over the letters. Someone, many years ago, had made these marks here, someone had delivered it to some wharf in some port, maybe in the Mediterranean, maybe India. How many seas had it travelled? What precious cargo had it carried, who had entrusted their possessions to it?

She stood again to survey the contents, a jumble of odd shapes wrapped in yellowed newspaper. They had been in there a long time, she could tell: all settled together, over time each parcel had found its exact place with the others, despite the irregular edges; she knew if she lifted one it would leave a very faint imprint in the wrapping of its neighbour. She leaned over to look at the newsprint, miniscule letters that teemed over the paper, and was surprised by the remnants of some fragrance. She moved closer and inhaled. It was a smell at once odd and familiar, mulchy and sharp. Tea.

She carefully removed the first item. Her fingers read its shape through the wrapping, a cup or container of some kind. She peeled the newspaper from it with her nails. It was in fact a fine china cup, Royal Albert, off-white and blue. Then its saucer. Then a sugar bowl, a cream jug. A silver salver. Cress was kneeling now, a cushion beneath her knees, placing each precious thing on the floor beside her. She was part-way through the second layer when she glimpsed something beneath it, something bigger, wrapped not in newspaper but in a thin cotton sheet. She hurried through the last few small items, not without some guilt, until she held the soft square parcel in her hands.

It was wrapped like a present without the tape, an envelope that was easily opened. There beneath the wrappings and carefully folded was what seemed to be a very old wedding dress. She stared down at the creamy satin, ran her fingers around the neckline, over the rows of tiny blossoms picked out in glass beads. Without disturbing its folds she could guess it was fifty years old or more: the handwork was exquisite but yellowing, and there was something about the pattern of the beads. She was hesitating over it, wondering how long it had lain in its folds, when she heard Iris moving around the shop, locking up. She looked towards the door, and the sound of the front door bolt sliding into place. Her next impulse surprised her. She quickly wrapped the dress and returned it to its place in the tea chest. Feeling surreptitious, not knowing why.

Back at the counter, Iris was snapping an elastic band around a wad of notes for the safe. I’m just going to finish those boxes of toys and clothes before I go, she told Iris. There’s not much left. I’ll lock up the back. Iris stowed the cash and picked up her handbag. You sure? she said, fishing about for her purse. I’ve got to get some shopping on the way home. Cress was already on her way back up through the aisles. See you tomorrow, she called.

She didn’t really think much about what happened next. Later, she would remember she felt outside herself, that it was like watching someone else reach into the box once more and slowly draw the wedding dress out into the air again. She held it gently with the tips of her fingers and let it fall from the shoulders. Ivory satin and lace. The low, scooped neck and fitted bodice, beaded with tiny pearls and beads, and a dropped waist, like an Edwardian tea dress.

She spread out the thin sheet it had been wrapped in and laid the dress on the floor. Ran her fingers once more over the creamy beads, traced the shape of the scalloped hem, the fine tendrils of thread. Then she was gathering it up in her hands, in the crook of her arm, the heavy fabric folding in on itself, returning to the creases that had held it for years. How many years? Cress had no idea, she knew only that the dress moved her in some way, it beckoned to her, and holding it she felt that really it was holding her.

She wrapped it once more and, working carefully but quickly, replaced everything else in the tea chest and walked back down into the dim, empty shop and out through the back doors, locking them behind her. It wasn’t until her steps cracked and echoed shockingly on the car park gravel that she thought of what she was doing. The dress seemed huge and obvious in her arms then, and she swivelled around, looking, imagining her accusers. Nothing. Just the empty car park in the deep shadow of the church, the closed and quiet shed. She opened the car and put her handbag on the floor and the dress on the seat beside her, like a passenger. As if it was, she flicked it glances all the way home.

Kieran lay on his back under the clothes line, watching colours circle above him like birds. The afternoon sea breeze had come in late and soft. He watched it ruffle the checked tea towels, noticed how a shirt puffed out then fell in as if someone was breathing inside it. It reminded him of something uncomfortable, a thought he didn’t want to think, so he looked instead at his grandmother’s grey tights, the legs swaying, one forward, one back, a dance against the paling blue of the sky.

The line slowly spun the tights away, and he found he was staring up at several bunched clouds pinned to the sky like magnets. Blank, no message in them. That’s when he heard the voice. Toast? the voice said. Vegemite toast?

He turned his head on the damp ground. The lemongrass in Cress’s vegetable garden stood mute, and there was no one, no figure, no footprints, on the stretch of lawn beside him. It was the same as it always was, the garden, the roofline of the house, the clothes above him, and the night coming down on them slowly, as it always did.

Kieran looked back at the sky. From where he lay it seemed fragile as an egg, thin-shelled, as if it could be pierced to reveal another world behind it. Was that where she was? And were the clouds a sign? Angela, he said, though his lips barely moved. There was the taste of hot toast between them.

Her music had drawn him to the shed the first time. He’d been walking the hills for months, bored with town, sticking to the high darkened roads and lanes where new houses had appeared along with the new power lines. Later, he would wonder how he’d forgotten the scatter of older places squatting at the end of their dirt tracks along the outer ridge. He would have walked past them every time on his way to the main avenue of lighted windows, where he would occasionally see figures locked together in the silvery hold of television, or each other’s embrace. In the hills, there was always something to see.

Once, he watched a child extend his arm from a high casement, and drop a woman’s dress, shocking red against the light and the dark, its skirt puffing like dough as it fell. The window closed; the dress lay like a stain on the wet grass. Some weeks later, he’d seen a man emerge from a low brick house. It was after midnight, he could hear the laboured breathing of the man as he staggered beneath a cumbersome weight. He set it carefully down on the grass behind the house. The glassy surface glittered: a television. The man had walked away, then turned, drawn a revolver from his jacket, taken aim at the centre of the screen. The explosion had cracked through Kieran’s whole body even as he watched. He’d shrunk away, feeling that he’d witnessed a crime, something outrageous. As if something alive had been shot, or an animal maimed.

The night he found Angela, he’d lost his way. Not lost exactly: he’d followed the irresistible call of an owl, just metres from the road. Later, he could only think the canopy had obscured the stars, so that he took perhaps six steps in the wrong direction before he realised the ground was sloping down. He needed to go up. But as he hesitated, all senses primed, he heard faint music. Not the sweet country melodies he played at home; even from here he could feel the drama of these new sounds, the power. Several more steps and he could make out the darkened shape of a house, and beyond it, a light. He crept closer.

The light, and the music, were coming from a shed below the wooden house. Perhaps it was the sound, but in the darkness the low building was an animal slumped in sleep. Foliage furred its walls and the roof sagged on old bones, but even from a distance, in the midnight chill, its irregular presence was benign. Different to the houses up the road. He’d wanted to walk straight up to one of the shed windows, knock on the glass.

But didn’t. Instead he’d dropped to his knees behind a straggly shrub, tried for a better line of sight. Through the windows he could make out square slabs of colour, some patterned, and smaller, spiky shapes he couldn’t identify. He squinted, angled his head. But he was too far away, and the shape he wanted to see – the human one that belonged to the music and to the light – was not in view. Someone was there, though. His instincts and the music told him, so he waited, and watched, his chest swelling and dropping with the music that was now layered with a pleading female voice climbing mountainous notes, higher, higher. Falling, climbing again. Kieran closed his eyes, there were cliffs and caves behind them, swathes of silk, castles of stone. He held his breath.

The music stopped. His eyes flew open. In the sudden silence he felt exposed, uncovered; still watching the empty windows he edged backwards, staying low, until he reached another line of shrubs. Grabbed at a branch for camouflage, and felt his own sharp breath as thorns tore at his hands and arms. Rose bushes. He pulled back, cursed silently, but he was behind the house now, so he sprang from his crouch and ran, zigzag, up the hill. Stopped when he reached the road, his heart banging, mocking him with music, that music. In thin moonlight he walked slowly back towards town, a beat in his limbs. He felt excited, happy. He lifted his stinging hands to his face, to his nose. Blood and roses. That night he slept impatient for the next night, for the thudding dark.

But he hadn’t returned to the hills for several nights, delayed by chores at home and by the semi-finals of the ‘Einstein Game’. When he did, slipping between shadows, shape-shifting as he moved, he came to the bottom of the track and found the rose bushes first. Dared to touch petals in velvety moonlight. This gave him courage. Around the right-hand side of the house, he dipped his body to the damp grass and tried to move like smoke, insinuating himself. When he came to the lighted window he crouched, one grey mountain rock among the others in the tangle of fronds and leaves.

I know you. The voice was steady, its owner unmoved. You don’t need to hide.

The words might have come from the tree-ferns; that would have been easier. His body had truly become one of the rocks, surely he too had been standing there forever. But he was a rock with eyes, and now he forced them to see, looking at last – the seconds stretched out, treasonous – at the window. Nothing. The other window was dark; he bent sideways, then boldly took a small step towards it.

You can see better in the light. The shrubs, not the window. He swung round.

She was standing behind them, at the corner of the shed. He was looking at a pale face, featureless in the once familiar dark. There was some kind of woollen cap, and dark hair. He knew at once that he was safe with her, but his limbs were granite once more, unwilling to move. His heart slowed. He breathed.

Come on then. Come in. There’s tea. She turned. Stopped, looked back at him. Regarded his still face. You don’t have to talk, she said, and was gone.

But Angela did need to talk. It began there, that night.

Do you like to paint? There was no answer so she turned from the canvas to look at him. Blankness. He shook his head. No? Have you tried it? Again the blankness, silence. Then: I can do other things, he said. I can spell Kosciusko. And eucalyptus. I can make toast, all kinds.

She stood regarding him. All kinds? Her voice waiving the need for an answer. Waiving any obligation to be, or say, anything. She smiled a small smile. What about cleaning brushes? she said, and handed him a posy of them, multi-hued.

He’d looked at them. Magic wands, he thought later. As they passed from her hand to his, something was sealed between them. From that moment the words would thicken and layer, until talk became glue. Her voice would keep him there when he knew he should go, knew he would sleep long into the next morning and endure Cress’s hard eyes when he woke. But he also knew, after a while, that Angela needed him to hear her. He would become essential, like her painting. She was making shapes in her life, figuring it out. She needed him. He loved that.

A soft growl. Kieran could feel the vibration of the car engine through the ground, and turned his head to watch his grandmother climb out of the car and close the door. Watched her hurry around to the other side, sort of skipping, and take something from the passenger seat. Then hurry away, holding a parcel in two outstretched arms, looking straight ahead. He was about to call out to her, but there was something in her face that stopped him, he knew instantly it would be like waking a sleepwalker from a dream. So he just lay there on the grass, quietly, and watched her disappear behind the kitchen garden.

Cress carried the parcel straight through the house and into her bedroom. On the way she listened for sounds: there was no murmur of television, no rustling in the kitchen. Kieran? she called softly, almost to herself. The house made no reply. In the bedroom she looked quickly around. There were several options: behind the old, carved dresser, beneath the pile of scarves and hats on the wooden chair. She stood still for a few moments, holding the dress in her arms. There was the faint smell of dust, and of tea. Then, deciding, she knelt beside the bed and slid the dress beneath it. Her hands hovered momentarily. Then she patted the parcel softly, a blessing to keep it safe, to keep it quiet. When she walked back into the kitchen, Kieran was there, making toast.

Kate had answered the phone after two rings. At last, she said. I was about to call you.

I’ve got news, Laura said, and stopped. It felt like something she should have rehearsed.

In the pause she heard Kate laugh. You’ve inherited a secret fortune, she said. Good. A few more years for the orchard.

Laura smiled. Wondered briefly and for the first time what the house might be worth. Then: No, she said. Not quite–

She had to imagine words then, imagine the sound of them as they were spoken, as Kate might hear them. She realised she had to tell herself this story, as well as her daughter. All this time, she said, I haven’t been an only child at all. I’ve got a brother out there I’ve never known. She stopped, waiting for something from Kate, but there was nothing. Born two years before me and adopted out. Then never spoken of. She said: A little surprise in the will.

It took a few seconds. When it came Kate’s voice was changed, tentative. She said, Adopted. Trying it out, perhaps, for meaning, for some kind of sense. You mean, given up.

She was seventeen. Laura heard herself speaking. There was no emotion in the words. It’s what they did, in those days.

Who?

Single girls. They went away, had the baby in secret. There was that documentary...

But didn’t anyone try to help her?

Laura took a deep breath. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Realising as she said it. And there’s no one to ask.

At the other end Kate was quiet. Then, Shit, she said. So – did she ever find him again? And who was the father?

August was. My father.

Laura heard Kate say What? as she began to explain that no, Angela hadn’t tried to find the child and that she had no other information to go on. She felt suddenly overtaken by the dreamlike quality of the previous few days, of everything Fergus had said. And by all the knowledge she’d lived her life without. Right now I feel I could have hallucinated the whole thing.

Kate waited. Are you all right? she asked finally. I knew I should have come.

Cress stood in her high garden, watching twilight disguise the town. She was thinking how kind it was, this hour of the day, how forgiving. It was difficult, faced with an indigo sky behind a fretwork of trees, to regret too much, resent too much. Beauty buffed away at all your calluses, she thought, at old hard hearts. Softened them up to live another day, reminded you it was useless to regret. The sun would come up and go down again tomorrow regardless, splaying beauty around, immune to her. To everyone.

Lights began to glow in stepped yellow rectangles down the hill to the sea. Gone were the days when she could watch each window flare in the darkness and name its owner, visualising the face, the hands at their Sunday night tasks. For a long time after Ed died she had done that compulsively. Jealousy strangled reason, her throat would burn with it, but still she would stand here, watching the windows. Each house smug with companionship, each window alight with joy.

Back then, when she could no longer bear the blitheness of it all – the faces, the occasional voice carried up on air flavoured with ignorance and roast meat – she would go inside. It was before Kieran came to stay, long before. In the dark house, she would lie on her back and close her eyes, trying to hear. Not listening so much as trying to hear, to summon sounds – his voice, his whistle, the noises he made going out or coming home. Terrified she would forget.

She didn’t spend time staring at lighted windows anymore. That kind of longing had thinned out her body and her days, and she’d soon found she didn’t need the consolation of envy. Besides, it was hard to be jealous of complete strangers, and when her view filled up with the windows of new houses, modern, anonymous, she stopped looking. The newcomers held no interest for her, their transplanted lives too narrow, their ambitions too raw.

She wandered over and turned on the hose and breathed deeply in the cooling air. Listened for the bleep of cicadas. She didn’t resent the newcomers or the changes, she conceded now, aiming the spray carefully among tender lettuce leaves and cherry tomatoes. Among the town’s hills and fibro beach houses, its five churches, its new cafés and delis and gift stores, it was still possible to withdraw a little. But not completely: a whole life lived in the bowl of a small town meant it was impossible to disappear. She knew that, and so, of course, had Angela. There was always someone who remembered, someone who asked where you were.

The shed that was Angela’s studio was a dozen steps down a path trodden into the kikuyu. The valley and the town lay below it, and the silver disc of the sea. The last of the afternoon sun blazed on the corrugated-tin walls; Laura squinted, telescoping vision, and was surprised to find everything, the overgrown shrubs, the wild passionfruit vine – the air – thickened with memory. One in particular: she was a child, arguing with her mother about her painting, about her bloody art. That’s what she’d called it, hoping to shock, but Angela’s voice was even: You’ll see one day, she said. In the end you cling to what makes you feel you’re alive. Her own childish outrage then, because even in the face of her mother’s indifference, she’d still believed she was the most important thing.

What about me? she’d squeaked. Angela had looked at her briefly and turned back to her canvas. That’s different, she said. Children leave you. They go.

So it’s true, Laura had thought. Art comes first. Stupid, ugly art people put on their walls and forgot. She said: People buy paintings! They go too.

Angela passed a mottled brush from one hand to the other. No, she said calmly. Even when they go, they’re still mine. They’re me. Or I’m them. They’re not separate from me. Her mother staring out of the window, away from her. She remembered the wild pink of a crepe myrtle, a brazen, startling pink. Laura had turned from it, from Angela, and walked out of the shed, up the hill to the house.

She was thinking of this, and of her mother’s face, stolid, indifferent, as she approached the side door of the shed. She reached out, and her fingers on the door handle felt bold, transgressive. You are not a child, she told herself, twisting the knob and finding the door unlocked. Still, she had to breathe in to slow her heartbeat as the door soundlessly opened and she stepped into the shed for the first time in more than thirty years.

Her bare feet met cold concrete. She stopped two paces in. Cold feet. She felt again the reaction she’d had with Fergus, the urge to laugh, and then to run. She made herself stop and be still in the big, open space that bulked around her, to breathe in the air that was not just turpentine now but thick with the smell of oil paint and linseed and cleaning fluids. She closed her eyes briefly and opened them. Made herself see, to acknowledge what was there.

Easels, canvases stacked against walls, shelves of tins and bottles, paper, paint. At one end, a small couch with a green rug. These things her eyes took in and were comfortable with, the green of the rug a cheerful flag of colour in the dimming light. She felt braver then, approached the layers of work against one wall and thumbed through them. No surprises there – specimen after specimen, labelled in Angela’s hand: ‘Grevillea banksii’, ‘Callistemon Rocky Ck’, ‘Melaleuca wilsonii’. This last a blazing pink like the crepe myrtle of her memory.

She was turning towards the easels when her eye was caught by two large shapes propped side-on against the end wall. She made her way across the floor, cool, colour-battered, to stand in front of the big canvases. Felt unsure then whether their size or her own shock made her feel suddenly small, suddenly a child again, naïve, without any measure of understanding.

Both pictures were chaos: of colour and detail and ungoverned form. Or so it seemed at first. Stepping back, she thought she could make out in one the ravenous shapes of a strangler vine, its extraordinary energy and reach outrageous even in a rainforest. As she stared, other forms became clearer: fronds and succulent leaves and tree roots rioting, and strange and exotic flowers, and a hundred shades of green beneath a benevolent sweep of sky. Across the bottom a scrawled title in tall sloping letters: I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #3.

The other canvas was unreadable. It was painted with the same exuberant brush and slap of palette knife, but its shapes, she finally decided, were unknowable. She tilted her head, seeing finally that some kind of order, rather than chaos, informed this one, that in the swirls and flights of colour and stroke there was something like rhythm. That was all. The scrawl at the bottom again, this time: I Go Looking for Signs of Contentment #2.

She looked up. Might have allowed the notion that these were from the hand of a different artist but there, on the easel, was a third, smaller picture in the same form and pattern, unfinished. Up close its nature was also unrecognisable, but it was this one that Laura stood longest before, her eye trying to trace the movements of brush, of fingers, of intention. After minutes, shape and meaning eluded her. Then a suspicion, faint at first, not to be trusted, took hold behind her eyes. It was something that was missing whenever she found herself in a gallery, that had been missing for her always, she realised now, when she thought of ‘art’. In the layers of paint, in the sweeping, almost careless tracks and paths it made, she could see the tentative traces of joy. It was a word she had never before attached to a painting; and rarely to her mother.

The thought resonated, floated an image before her; it propelled her past a wide bench where an electric jug, a toaster and two mugs sat perfectly aligned, and out of the shed. She was remembering that childhood argument again, and her thoughts became moon-shaped, then circular, rounds and half-rounds pressing her to remember, pressing softly like fingers at her temple. Even when they go, they’re still mine ... They’re not separate from me. She closed the shed door and hurried back up the slope towards the china garden.

She knelt amongst the herbs and china once more, but this time her fingers were quick, finding the half-round of a saucer buried deep, the curved mouth of a broken cup. The edges of small plates were already exposed, inverted moons waxing and waning, earth-bound. A jagged spout, the teapot bowl a perfect globe, rimed with damp. And an egg-cup, chipped twice.

She held the egg-cup in her palm. It was off-white, crusted in dirt, a speckled yellow chicken just visible on one side. A child’s egg-cup, hers. She could hear the soft crack of a knife against egg-shell, see the scoop of yolk on a spoon. She bent to replace it, but meaning was sudden, it was a wind, bristling leaves, grass, skin. She pulled back. Part of her is buried here, she thought. She knew suddenly that everything she touched now, every roundness, every sharp edge, might be a limb, a fear, a secret.

She stood and steadied herself. She’d said to Fergus: I’m not sure if I’m up for all this, as if knowing, or understanding, might be a choice. As if a past could be chosen, and another one ignored. Driving away from him she’d thought, I don’t have to do it. I don’t have to exhume it all, don’t have to pluck each hidden thing from its hiding place, into the pitiless air. A shadow moved over her, and a noise that made her shiver. She looked up as the black cockatoos screamed past. The hill, all this time, was a wall of fading colour. This was something she had forgotten: that the sky could make landscape bigger, thicker here, almost impenetrable. It was one thing she hadn’t missed.

Kieran moved around his town like music. Like a hum, a repeated lyric, he slipped between bitumen and beach, fence and doorway, seen but unnoticed. Expected but not missed. Constant but unlooked for. At the bus stop, between the shelves at St Barnabas, lost in green on grass or yellow on sand, he moved like eyes move. Seeing all, seeing nothing.

These were Kieran’s colours, green and yellow and brown. He disappeared in them. This was not what he intended – he wanted familiarity, not secrecy. But he was pleased with the effect. It allowed him to be part of the town but not exactly of it; a benign bystander. He liked the word benign; had heard it used twice now on ‘Whiz Kids’, and twice it had produced blankness in the eyes of the contestants. But he had copied the dictionary entry into his notebook the first time. Benign: gracious, gentle; mild. It was like a sigh, a soft wind in leaves.

That was what he became, a sigh of wind, invisible, as he watched the woman in Angela’s garden, for the second time that day. He’d needed to come back, to see if she was real – and there she was, kneeling among the herbs, behind the line of old roses. Kieran watched her hands. Looking for a clue about who she was, what she was doing here. From this angle he couldn’t see her face, but hands, he knew, told stories of their own. Cress’s hands, for instance. They were full of secrets. He had watched the way she held certain things, and her fingers definitely spoke. This woman was feeling the herbs as if she was blind. Kneading the soil as if – what? He wasn’t sure. As if it was more than soil. As if it had magic in it.

But then she’d been still, this woman, for a long time, and Kieran wanted to go. A flock of black cockatoos gave him his chance: their noise was huge, grating, and their shadow deepened the dusk for a moment; the woman slowly lifted her head. By the time she put a name to the shadow and the sound he would be gone, up through the scrub to the road, following the birds’ black cloud towards the sea.

Cress watched the spray of water from the hose turn silver in the deepening dark, and the trees and distant houses receding, and as she did she thought about the notion of disappearing. Of becoming less and less visible. There was something comforting about it. Why? She had never entertained the idea of disappearing; she had never wanted to completely vanish. But she liked the idea of withdrawal. She liked to think of her life now as a partial retreat, a kind of fading, like curtains hung too long in the sun. So that no one noticed them much anymore; they no longer attracted the eye.

Sometimes she thought her past, all that she’d done, had been bleached, become invisible. To herself as well as to others; there were large patches now that were gone from her, gone. Who was that girl in the starched nurse’s uniform, in the Sunday hat at church, in the laundry with her mother, boiling sheets? Was she these days just the eighty-year-old version of herself, or one of the versions? She twisted the nozzle of the hose; bent to check a cabbage for grubs. Comfortable on her haunches, she fingered sinewy leaves. When a black cloud of cockatoos deepened the twilight, she looked up, watched them pass. She thought: Only the sky knows me.

It was almost dark. She turned the nozzle again, trained the glittering spray of water out over the vines, the beans, the choko, the passionfruit. Moisture shone on fat leaves, making them droop. This made her happy; she thought she would make some tea. Recently, she had discovered chai: its aroma and faint exoticism returned her to her youth, or at least to an imagined one, careless, meditative, dreamy. The twilight garden gave her that too, that sense of ease, that dreaminess, as it settled under the rich weight of water.

Cress turned off the hose. Kieran would be back soon; he loved chai too, with honey. Two spoons. She looked back over the fence to see the last spear of light fade over the forest, then went inside and took out the milk and honey and tea. And waited for her grandson to come home.

Nine o’clock. Laura had kept herself awake as long as she could, and now the narrow bed looked to her like a haven. She smoothed the sheets with the flat of her hand. Tucked them in firmly again, carefully, as if there was already someone in the bed who was afraid, and needed reassurance. Washed her face, took off her clothes. Stopped briefly to listen as a chorus of frogs honked softly in the summer air.

Then she lay and listened to the house settling around her, its old wood and wrinkled tin contracting as the heat withdrew. It’s just a house, she told herself. But knew that it was more than a house – it had become the keeper of a certain period of her life. It was an archive of all the best and worst things that had happened here. She had known this, she realised, since the day she left, thirty or so years before. But there hadn’t been a keeper in her life, no one to really answer to, since she left this place. She’d been determined to make it so; the house, she decided, would not spoil that now.

I am no longer that sooky girl. The thought revived her energy briefly, made her brave. In the dull yellow light of the naked bulb, she willed all the ghosts of the house to come. Come now, I’m ready. She said it aloud, knowing they would not be hurried. They would stretch their infinite limbs and crack their lively knuckles and wait, until the invitation was stale and her mouth dry from anticipation. They would wait for her while she waited for them. They wouldn’t come tonight. She picked up one of the books she’d brought up from a pile in the parlour. Silas Marner. She lasted two pages, then reached for the light.