ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON the intercom buzzed, just as I was setting out the things I needed to cook a meal for my husband’s children. I’d already set the table. I wasn’t expecting them so early. My husband was barefoot, reading a newspaper in a cane chair in the sun. I laid down my knife and went to the screen, which showed an image of the caller, shot from a vantage point above her head. It was a stranger, a girl in ugly sunglasses. When I greeted her, she began to talk, immediately, about a cell phone; she thought we had given her a phone or she had our phone. Her voice was metallic, an electronic interruption in an afternoon of low, winter sunshine. We were going to have to investigate.
I waited for my husband to pull on a pair of shoes, looking at the girl as she folded her arms and twisted miserably from side to side. I could see her shoulders clearly, her cheap sweater, her dark springy hair.
We didn’t plan to invite her upstairs. We could deal with whatever she wanted in the foyer quickly. When she took off her sunglasses to speak to us, I could see that she was crying. She told us she’d bought a mobile phone from a couple in our building. They made the transaction in this foyer, and they said they lived in our apartment, number ten. She paid them a thousand dollars, then the phone stopped working.
Her hands were dirty. She must have been digging hard, bare-handed in the earth, to get that amount of black dirt under her nails. We live in a region of parks. Opposite us was the park that overlooked the Parliament building. It’s planted with specimen trees, none belonging to this country. A little above us, on our side of the street, following a high escarpment that is one of the few scenic places in this flat city, lies a vast expanse of orderly lawns and monuments. We often walk along the escarpment paths in the early evening. In the dimming park young girls in hijabs play football with their textiles flying; babies are photographed on pale small rugs; lovers talk, frowning, in the privacy of lawns beyond earshot of the paths. As twilight deepens, teenagers occupy a Victorian gazebo, and the smell of cannabis, syrupy with natural oil and boyish saliva, drifts over memorials to fallen soldiers, over the whispering wall and the eternal flame.
There were so many places near where we live where the girl in the foyer could bury something or dig up whatever had been left in the earth for her to recover.
She said that she’d come to plead with the phone sellers to unblock the phone. My husband suggested the obvious things: she should contact the telco company, then the police. I suspected that just one of the things she told us was true: she’d lost some money.
After we said good-bye and watched her stumble, still crying, across the road towards the Parliament building, my husband said no, it wasn’t money she’d lost, it was love. She’d fallen in love with a man, he lived in our building with his wife, he gave her the wrong apartment number, she was trying to force a confrontation. The man had given her the phone so that they could talk privately, then he decided to end the affair and cut her off.
We had some experience with this kind of thing.
When we arrived and unpacked, he noticed a long, fair hair on one of the sofas. We’d bought some of the furniture that was already in the apartment; we were busy and it was easier than going shopping. The hair belonged to the previous owner, we decided, although we knew the owner was a man and unlikely to have long, fair hair. A visitor, then. A woman who visited that man and lay on the sofa. A passing woman, not a wife. We had the sofa cleaned. We were away often, at work, or at another house belonging to my husband. The cleaners were no good. Time passed and more hair drifted from the sofa: fine and fair. I picked it up and disposed of it, absentmindedly, until one day my husband called a locksmith. After that there were no traces of strangers.
Sometimes I wonder about the woman who met a man in our apartment. How they must have rushed past our things, hand in hand, how she flung herself beneath her lover, overjoyed, laughing, both of them laughing at love and trespass.
I reminded myself that the woman we met in the foyer had dark hair.
I thought her crisis had to do with something that was supposed to be buried, something she scrabbled for with her desperate hands, until she admitted to herself that it wasn’t there.
The children came for their meal, they ate plate after plate of rich food, because they lived in a student household and this cooking was one of the small pleasures of their week. It was almost possible to forget the crying, dark-haired girl. Our dining table was lit with a row of candles on a shelf behind my eldest stepdaughter. A person sitting on a park bench near the Parliament building could see right into the apartment, despite the dim candlelight. They could watch my stepdaughter’s careful laughter and see her proud, slim dress; they could see her father, or the other children, or me.
I left the table and went into an adjoining room and closed the door. The only light in this room came from the streetlights below, which illuminated a wide margin of the park. There was no one on the benches. No dark-haired girl, not even one of the sad women who often crept away from an expensive rehab clinic on the far side of the park to sit among the trees in the darkness. But I had reason to be vigilant about all witnesses, man or woman.
Because of Neil and his long campaign of threats against me, I was always slightly afraid. Neil stalked his targets, gathering domestic information that he interlaced with his threats. He was capable of taking up position opposite the Parliament like a military officer on duty, motionless, guarding the small personal hinterland of his resentment. I was always slightly afraid, but I was also defiant, determined to be seen, even if the viewers were barking men or solitary lying girls or sad alcoholics, and I never drew the curtains.
In daylight the reflections of the big windows along the front of the apartment make it hard for anyone on the outside to see in. The view from inside, a view of sky and the crowns of trees, is bright and clear. I cook a great deal. I pause, in the kitchen, to stretch and look out through the windows. Herons fly over rooftops from some interior wetland to the feeding grounds on the river. Crows move about singly, or in groups. Wagtails land on our balcony, showing themselves to our elderly house cat, which mews behind glass. Parrots fly in pairs, and so do small brownish-gray birds fast as darts, one leading and the other following a wing beat behind, gliding or climbing and dipping very fast. The second bird lags slightly, so if the first flies through a gap in a moving obstacle — traffic, for example — the second might not be quick enough to follow. Then the first climbs, bewildered, circling back over a mate crushed on the road.
I thought of these birds as I followed the taillights of my husband’s car in heavy traffic one evening. My car is smaller, less powerful. He accelerated through a change of lights. Then he pulled over and waited for me, but I swept ahead of him and found myself on a freeway, the tarmac lit by high, majestic orange streetlights, each light at the end of an arc of steel, alone with the giant dark, green and cream traffic signs announcing directions to the airport. I turned back across many empty lanes to where he was waiting for me.
The next day I saw two crows high on the bend of the arm of a streetlight, one upright and the other bent toward it, bowing its head in what seemed to be a moment of worship. Crows make courtship gifts. Woven balls of grass or twigs, presented to one another with some kind of formality, before their love can begin. Crows are not easily led; they don’t fly in formation; believing in the joy of speed, they don’t take passionate and fatal risks.
Neil was a gardener, a professional, expert with complicated watering systems, which he installed for the very rich. He always wore the casual costume of a senior lawyer on holiday: sockless boat shoes, Bermuda shorts, a soft white T-shirt, a light tan. I thought I saw him recently when I returned to my old suburb to collect my mail. A man was texting intently outside the post office. I thought: Neil will look like that when he gets old. Suddenly I realized it was Neil; he was looking at his phone to avoid meeting my eye and this pleased me, this small act of avoidance, which might have been a moment of shame. I hoped it was shame. No, I hoped it was fear.
I was distracted because the moment I saw Neil I also saw a woman I knew, Juliet, who was walking toward me with a small dog in her arms. It was a chihuahua. Juliet was a lean woman, lean from yoga but not calm; she looked tired, in fact. The dog and Juliet lived next to the railway line. But each day they walked to the river, the zone of the extremely rich, which was surprisingly close to the railway and the sanitation lanes. I knew her history. I liked her, and I hoped she never had cause to run into Neil. Her story had plenty of premium high-grade grief. She didn’t need the grief an old low troll could cause. Juliet. Her life ended at the airport in Nice. Or before that, on the drive up from Monaco, watching the clipped hair of her husband’s driver from a rear seat in a big car. Now all that is left of that life is the knowledge of how to be very thin. Yoga, walking, a lifelong refusal of fine food, because it is important to be thin. I have to remind myself: the man who dismissed her wasn’t her husband. He was just a man, a rich man whose children she bore.
Juliet passed me with a narrow smile. I took a step toward the door of the post office and Neil looked up, then he quickly looked away. I guess he was on his way to his own post office box. He kept a Gmail account in a fake name for the hate mail he sent out from an Internet café in the next suburb. He kept a post office box for correspondences he set up with women. The death threats and hate mail, the weird letters to and from women—it’s how he pulled himself together. Some men buy a pint after work, and then they buy another one for a mate and both men relax with their elbows on a bar. Neil had his hate mail.
You didn’t have to do much to get mail from Neil. If you cut him off in a merge lane on the freeway, he’d take down your number plate and work his way through his system of contacts until he found your address, and then he’d threaten your life. If you said you wouldn’t go to bed with him, you needed a wide margin of regretful flattery, otherwise the hate mail went on for years and years.
It was unlikely that he feared me. The suburb was populated by addicts, painters, the very rich and so on, but there was no one else, I hoped, like Neil. Neil, that great swearing, barking man, hunched over his phone, unable to meet my eye.
For fifteen years I lived in a series of bad houses, on both sides of the country.
The first house was a long way from our apartment and the spacious parks. It had the sweet smell of wood rot. I was there for a long time, thinking myself blessed, breathing the strange, musky perfume of the house, until a friend visited and told me what the smell really meant: the stumps under the floorboards were decomposing. The house was entirely made of wood, from the rafters to the crumbling stumps, and as it turned out this rotten timber burned like newspaper.
The terrace at the back of the house was shaded by an old fig tree, which produced huge crops of sweet dry figs, year after year. I watched that house burn; the fire brigade came minutes after I first saw smoke pouring from the ceiling. By then it was too late.
All my life I have been protected by my own stupidity, unable to see malice until it was directly in front of me, on paper, in my hand, unable to see flames until they formed above me, creeping along the rafters. I thought I lived in a place of bees and honey. This stupidity has bought me whole seconds of dull happiness, while around me ordinary things ignited fiercely.
The second house was on the other side of the country. My publisher was in the East, and I took leave from my job to work with her on a new book. This house was old and pretty, sitting squarely above a steep road where boys roamed in the early hours, breaking into cars wherever they could. My car was Swedish: solid, with a tough windscreen that never cracked, although it was covered in big boot prints most mornings. Jets flew low in the sky, and at certain times there was a light precipitation of something foul smelling, chemical dew or aviation fuel, most noticeable in the garden when washing was being unpegged from the clothesline.
It was also haunted. How was I to know? I spread out my rugs and arranged my furniture. At that time I was not aware of the lawlessness of the street outside, I had not seen the staunch little car with the tough windscreen covered in angry boot prints, morning after morning. On the day I took possession of the house I just saw bright rooms that gathered themselves beautifully around my belongings.
Something in that house didn’t submit to being dead. I woke each night in my bed, and cool air blew down inexplicably on my face, as if a very cold person had closed his lips and blown steadily on my own mouth, my forehead, my shoulder, the back of my wrist. I still remember the feeling when I’m flying and the air-conditioning nozzle is pointing directly at my face. That’s exactly what it felt like. When that happens, now, I put down my in-flight magazine, I reach up, twist the nozzle aside and order something steadying: gin. Something to flood the body with false warmth. And I comfort myself: I am flying, I am in flight.
I haven’t mentioned the third house, where I lived after I left the haunted house, before I married and moved into our apartment. My book was finished and removalists packed my things for the journey back across the continent. The largest and most fragile item was a dining table, very old and extendable, which had somehow survived the fire, although it was made of wood.
The third house was built of stone; it would never burn. It was the most unhappy place I ever lived. The worst thing about this house was Neil, somebody’s husband, polite and handy, at first, willing to hang paintings and lift tubs of house plants from the boot of my car.
But there were other, lesser problems. It had a garage that faced a sanitation lane. A long time ago these lanes were dusty, tufted with long grass and wild fennel, traversed by carts collecting shit and urine from backyard privies. Then they were scraped flat and surfaced with bitumen and issued with the names of English trees. Yew Lane, Linden Lane. Garages and high walls replaced the original fences. Small infill houses appeared among the garages. Green rubbish bins on wheels were drawn up untidily against the walls, which were painted bright shades of gray.
Cars drove slowly past the infill houses, dodging bins, each on their way to a pad of oily paving, and these cars began to trouble a woman who lived in the lane. She spoke to other mothers who lived in the laneway about the dangers of the cars. A child could be killed. She began to make barricades across the laneway with rubbish bins. Drivers had to leave their cars and wearily clear a path for themselves when they returned from work. This woman was not the only problem with the third house: one of the neighbors was a painter, who turned up on my doorstep at odd hours.
Upstairs one of the long bedrooms had a small balcony overlooking a paved courtyard. You could hear the sound of the sea at night in winter. A railway line ran next to the highway at the top of the street, carrying passengers to beach-side stations. Sometimes, in the early morning, the air outside the windows was white and sticky with sea mist. I thought all this was beautiful, or beautiful enough to make me want to stay. I lived there for a long time, without ever really wanting to.
When I arrived, I put my suitcase down inside the front door, thinking suddenly: gardenias. The front path needs a hedge of gardenia. In the meantime a bottle of good wine, a gift from a friend with a vineyard, had broken in my luggage and everything was flooded with wet sweetness, the smell of must. I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was a disaster; I told myself it was almost worth the damaged clothes, to smell the old grapes fermented in the climate of a life that had gone. And new clothes could easily be bought; buying new clothes would be an additional pleasure.
Small trees grew in the courtyard. In spring their leaves came, brownish and transparent at first, then broadening, quite quickly, into solid green. I thought of cicadas bursting from their shells, their wings elongating, turning hard in the sun. The courtyard was a sun trap. I began to make a garden. Someone I knew bought a block of land with a derelict orchid house. I asked to see it before it was demolished. Inside I found poor makeshift treasures: a moonflower cactus overflowing the cracked porcelain bathroom basin it had been planted in, succulents flabby from water deprivation and scabbed with old injuries. The orchids were all dead. I carried off the cactus and replanted it, I rescued the succulents, and Neil helped me to lift them from the boot of my car and position them in the courtyard. I carried water to my garden in the early morning, a long sip for every plant.
The gardenias grew tall, making a glossy, broad-leaved hedge. The painter lived on the other side of the hedge. She painted big, realist pictures that I could not afford. If the painter kept her studio windows open, if the night was warm, there was a composite scent: little gardenias and vapor from the turpentine she used to scrub down her failed canvases, cleaning up, starting, more hopefully, again. Then the painter decided that the hedge must be cut down. She was convinced that the wind carried gardenia leaves up into her gutters; she tried to persuade a local addict to clear them. The pitiful and unpaid addict was in no condition to climb a ladder, let alone work at the edge of the painter’s roof; I feared for his life.
The gardenias would have to go. And when the gardenias went, all that was left was the occasional wash of turpentine drifting in the air, saying clean up, start again.
When I came to the apartment with my husband, it was hard to believe that I lived there. We met our neighbors in the elevator with brief eye contact and soft greetings. We knew nothing about the neighbors, and we were not keen to learn. We were relieved to be with one another; we weren’t sociable. Months after we moved I remembered that my old dining table, then a square shape, suitable for two, was extendable. The extra leaves and the detachable handle that fitted into a delicate bolt under the ledge of the tabletop were in storage, as they had been for many years, but when I retrieved them and wound the stiff handle the top opened out, creaking, like a hidden door opening in an ancient house. I slipped in the heavy wooden leaves. Then I reversed the handle, anxiously, waiting to see if the rods that locked each leaf into its neighbor aligned. The rods slid into sockets that had been prepared for them over a century before, the handle corkscrewed for a final time, and the table was tight, whole and long enough for many guests.
We still kept to ourselves; we invited only the children to eat with us. Like myself, the table had been through fire. It may have been one of the things Neil looked at enviously, as he hung paintings in my previous house, gathering pieces of information, pretending to be a lawyer on holiday and a man with community spirit who was helping a woman establish a home.
Not constantly, just sometimes, I feel a sense of dread. Doesn’t everyone? Even Neil, especially Neil. His first life ended when he left his mother’s arms for the people who were going to be his new parents. He was given away. When he met his birth mother, he was in his thirties and they had nothing to say to one another. He was practicing his impersonations of the wealthy and his mother was old, stained with cigarettes, a battler from a life long past.
Those past lives. Like houses filled with breath and even laughter until the point where a key no longer fits a lock, the blond girl is left waiting tearfully by the door that no longer belongs to her lover. Her lover will shrug when he arrives and finds his key doesn’t fit, and they’ll decide to meet in hotels, or not at all. Babies are suddenly handed over, women—and by this I mean myself—fly across a continent, about to begin a long period of solitude, not realizing that that solitude will end and they are just one move away from lying on a sofa with their own hair untied, and laughing and talking softly to a man while the light fades with the traffic noise far below.