North of Nowhere, South of Loss

“Who wants peaceful? I want excitement, Mum.”

Laura said carefully, neutrally: “Would you rather go back and live with your father in Sydney?”

“I dunno,” Jilly kicked at the gargoyle and screwed up her face. “Anyway, Dad’s not in Sydney, he’s back in New York right now. His secretary said.”

“Oh.”

“I could go if I want. Dad’d send a ticket.”

“Yes, I suppose.” The bamboo canes clicked softly, the gargoyle leered. Laura stared at the eyes reflected in the water. Full fathom Jive your father lies … She managed to keep her voice even. “Is that what you’d like to do?”

“I dunno. S’pose I’ll give it a bit longer before I make up my mind.”

“Thanks, Jilly.” Laura hugged her, but Jilly stiffened and drew back.

Two letters arrived. One was junk mail, a garden catalogue addressed to Mr Voss or Occupant. The other, for Laurence Voss, was a letter.

Laura phoned the real estate firm and asked for Mr Watson. “What can I do yer for?” he boomed cheerily. “Pruned the jungle back yet?”

“I love it the way it is, Mr Watson. I’m calling to ask for Mr Voss’s forwarding address.”

“Whose?”

“You know, the former owner. Mr Voss.”

“Oh, Mr Voss. Right. Of course.”

“It’s a curious coincidence, isn’t it?” Laura said.

“How’d you mean?”

“Well, Patrick White. Voss and Laura. You know.”

Mr Watson didn’t know. “Sorry. Don’t follow you.”

“Patrick White’s novel Voss? Voss and Laura are the main characters, they have this strange sort of connection, a fusion almost—”

“Never read it,” Mr Watson said briskly.

“Well anyway, what’s Mr Voss’s forwarding address?”

“Wouldn’t have a clue, luv. The bank was already the owner, you know. I acted for the bank.”

“Yes, I know. But you said you got him into a nursing home.”

“What? Oh right, right. That Mr Voss. Look, I got someone in the office at the moment. Call my secretary back in half an hour, will ya? She’ll give you the nursing home address.”

Laura called back. It turned out that there had been some problem or other, and Mr Voss had changed his mind about the home. Neither the nursing home nor the real estate company had a forwarding address. Mr Watson was sorry, his secretary said. She suggested Laura contact the Westpac Bank. Laura did. The bank had no forwarding address. No one knew what had happened to Mr Voss, the mortgage manager said. He’d vanished into thin air.

Though there was no return address on the letter to Laurence Voss, Laura marked it “Return to Sender. Forwarding address unknown” and dropped it into a mailbox. Let the post office open it, send it to the dead letter office, whatever they did.

No more personal correspondence arrived, but every week or so junk mail came. To Mr Voss or Occupant, to Laurence Voss, sometimes to L. J. Voss. It was very classy junk mail: glossy garden catalogues, magazines for orchid fanciers, kits for gazebos and teak garden benches, mail-order kits for grandfather clocks and harpsichords, brochures for leather-bound sets of Tolstoy and Goethe. You could tell a lot about a man from the mailing lists he was on, Laura thought. You could feel great fondness for a man of such elegant tastes.

She filed all the catalogues in a carton in her study, but kept one or two on her bedside table to browse through at night. Once, she was startled and excited to turn a page and find a photograph of Caliban with identical bulging eyes and knowing smirk. You could have him delivered. He had a companion piece, a sylph-like cast-iron sprite with wings, a stooped figure who could be placed in such a way that he appeared to be drinking from a cupped hand. Ariel, she thought with delight, and decided to order him. She would put him on the opposite side of the pond: Beauty and the Beast, so to speak.

She used the catalogue order form as it was, imprinted with the name of Mr Laurence Voss and his address — which was also hers — at Settlement Road, The Gap. She filled in her own credit card number.

She felt she had stepped into the envelope of Mr Voss’s life. She felt they were kindred spirits. She felt his presence most strongly by the pond.

“The Spicers said he was weird,” Jilly said. She babysat fairly often for the neighbours, who had a real pool. “They hardly ever laid eyes on him, but they were glad when he went. The police had to come, Mrs Spicer said.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t leave when the bank foreclosed.”

“I don’t blame him,” Laura sighed. “After you’ve spent your life building the perfect garden. Poor old man.”

“He wasn’t all that old,” Jilly said. “Same as Mr Spicer, they reckon. And he only came a few years ago and planted all that fast-growing bamboo and stuff. Pretty suspicious, they reckon. Like what was he hiding? He was kinda spooky, Mrs Spicer said, a real loner. The kids called him the bogeyman.”

“Suburbanites don’t understand the desire for solitude,” Laura said. “They probably think I’m a bit weird too.”

“Yeah, well,” Jilly shrugged. “I told Mrs Spicer you were on sabbatical, writing a book. She said that’s different.”

“How kind,” Laura said drily.

“She asked me what your book’s about, and I said Patrick White and literature and stuff. I couldn’t remember exactly.”

“It’s a study of authors who become reclusive. Patrick White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. The way they create solitary characters and personae and then disappear into their fictions.”

Jilly mimed a theatrical yawn. “Oh wow,” she said.

“Or maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe the characters swallow up the author. You know, move in and take over. With both White and Pynchon, you get a sense in the later novels of invasion, and there’s a line in Dickinson—”

Jilly groaned. “I wish I had a normal mother. You know, who plays tennis and stuff, and has people round for barbecues.”

“We’ll have a barbecue,” Laura offered guiltily, quickly.

All the neighbours came to the barbecue, and all Jilly’s friends from The Gap high school. Also a man whom nobody knew. The man nobody knew looked vaguely familiar to most of the neighbours, but everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Laura wasn’t aware of him till Jilly pointed him out: “Mum,” she said urgently. “That’s the man who stares at me at the bus stop.”

Laura was disturbed. She’d seen him before somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. “Does he do it every day?” she asked Jilly.

“Almost every day. He drives past in this red Toyota. Sometimes he drives round and round the block and stares when he goes past, and sometimes he just parks and stares. He gives me the creeps.”

“Men who stare are usually harmless,” Laura said with a lightness she did not feel. “That’s all they do. Stare.”

(“Don’t think I won’t be watching,” her ex-husband had promised after the custody case. “Don’t think you’ll get away with this.”

But anyone angry made that kind of threat. It meant nothing.)