North of Nowhere, South of Loss

Then she realises Sue’s asleep. Sue is flinching and bucking and moaning and crying in her sleep.

Oh God, she thinks. Any second now, someone’s going to wake and hear this shit. Show blood and you’re dead, that’s the rule. Her mind is racing.

Okay, she thinks. Nothing else for it. Swift and efficient, she slides into Sue’s bed, jabs the mosquito net back under the mattress, grabs the girl in her arms, and muffles Sue’s face between her breasts. “It’s all right,” she murmurs. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s going to be all right.” Sue’s snuffling sobbing breath is warm against her. With her left hand, she strokes Sue’s hair. “Go to sleep now,” she murmurs. “Go to sleep. It’s all right, baby, it’s okay.”

Sue’s body shifts slightly, softening, rearranging itself, moving up against Beth’s like an infant curling into its mother. Her breathing turns quiet. Beth goes on stroking Sue’s hair with one hand, and stuffs the other into her own mouth. At the fleshy place where her thumb joins the palm of her hand, she bites down so hard she tastes blood.

FOR MR VOSS OR OCCUPANT (#ulink_8ef2c589-0462-5269-8477-841a669d2111)

“Foreclosures,” Mr Watson was in the habit of saying, “are a steal.”

Further wise thoughts would follow: a foreclosure was manna from heaven, a sweetheart deal, a buyer’s dream. He did not, however, run through the litany for this particular client, the young mother whose pubescent daughter had refused to get out of the car, the young single mother it would appear, hubba, hubba maybe he’d try his luck — God, if people knew how much quick hot fucking took place in empty rooms behind For Sale signs! — but no, on second thought, he smelled trouble right off the bat. A bit off, he reckoned; a bit out of it, the way academic types always were. A bit pinko, for sure, the stink of Sydney (Balmain, even Newtown maybe) coming off her like Four-X pong off a pub, a real wolverine in sheep’s clothing, weird clothing, they were all Commies down there, dykes, women’s libbers, worse. Put your thing in the wrong place with her kind, chop chop and goodbye. One way or another, she was bound to get herself into strife in Brisbane, and serve her right.

Still, a sale was a sale. For the political and moral sensibilities of a live prospect, he had nothing but respect.

A “distress sale”, he called it delicately, evasively, though not a single distressing thought entered Laura White’s head when she saw the house. Not at first. It was as though she had willed desire into solid form.

“Oh,” she said. “I grew up in a house with wide verandahs.” Stricken almost, mesmerised, soft rot of the railing and lattice against her back, she leaned into childhood. “Everyone used to close them in for sleepouts. To think there’s still a house … and so close to the city. I can’t believe my luck.”

Nor could Mr Watson. Not a modern piece of plumbing in sight, stove out of a bloody museum, but she was hooked before she walked through the door. Piece of cake. (Though the daughter sitting out there in the blue Mazda might be a question mark. He could hear pistol-cracks of rock music like rude punctuation.)

“And the roof!” the mother sighed.

“Yeah, well. Gonna have to put in a few quid. I got a friend can give you a good deal on clay tiles.”

“Oh no,” she said. She got quite choked up at the thought of hearing rain on corrugated iron again. Command performances: January cyclones, cloudbursts, thunderbolts, you lay in bed and the universe did its quadraphonic full-frontal subtropical act. “And the garden!”

Garden? Bit of a jungle if you wanted Mr Watson’s private opinion, but who was he to complain?

“All this space and right in the city,” she marvelled.

“Yeah, well!” Mr Watson said. “The Gap, you know. Very desirable, very pricey these days.” She wasn’t the usual type for The Gap. Volvo country, Saab city, it was yuppie turf, they went for it like lemmings. They got turned on by the idea of being half an hour from their stockbroker’s one way, half an hour from the rainforest the other, but they liked family rooms and built-in bars and swimming pools to go with it. You had to be fly to unload a place like this in a location like The Gap. A double lot too, what a waste. If it weren’t for the bloody zoning laws, a developer would snap it up in two shakes. “That’s why the price is once in a lifetime,” he said fervently.

“I’ll take it.”

“What?” She threw him off completely, breaking the rules like that, not even trying to haggle. It made him uneasy. It was like seeing someone naked in public, it put you at a disadvantage somehow. From sheer habit he said belligerently, “Nobody in their right mind quibbles about an asking price like this.”

“No,” she said, startled. “I’m not quibbling.”

“Hafta be crazy.” He couldn’t quite get hold of the reins, couldn’t stop his mouth from galloping along a track it knew too well.

Her lust for the place was too obvious, she thought. Unfashionable, this intense desire to come home; unfashionable to express it even in Brisbane these days. She walked along the front verandah, trailing her hand along its railing, getting acquainted, sighing over the lattice, burying her head in the jasmine that was matted around the posts. She had the feeling that she had to justify something, pass a test, explain. “I’ve been poring over the papers for weeks. Traipsing all over, looking and comparing. Why is the price so low?”

“Oh, as to that.” He was back on familiar turf, he knew exactly where he was with sweet suspicion. “Not a thing wrong with the place. Solid gold, believe me. Not a thing wrong that a bit of cutting and pruning won’t fix.” He laughed. “Not to mention a modern appliance or two, eh? though there’s people paying me to find them old stoves and pull-chain toilets, there’s people phoning from Melbourne for places like—”

“Yes, I know. That’s why I’m curious.”

“Distress sale,” he said with voluptuous sorrow. “Old codger lived here all his life.” He intimated a pensioner’s woes: fixed income, land revaluations, rising rates, the remortgaging trap. “Familiar story, eh? And then the interest rates the last straw. Terribly sad.” Shit, he was going to blow it. Overdoing it, Sonny Jim. She was looking at a point beyond his left shoulder so intently that he turned around, spooked, half expecting to see the old bloke he’d just invented.

“Who’s that man?” she asked.

“What? Where? Oh …” There was a man across the road, in shadow, who stared at the two of them on the slightly sagging verandah. “Neighbour, I suppose. Bloke from across the road.” Very likely, Mr Watson thought, some bloke who objected to a hippie moving in, well maybe not a hippie exactly, but not a Volvo owner either, and you would have to call her a hippie type with that mane of brown curls and that strange arrangement of black tights under a longish gauzy skirt and those very long earrings apparently made out of bike chains and that black stretch top. Not unattractive, if you went for that sort of thing which Mr Watson didn’t, well maybe on occasion if you could slip in and out without complications, but you hardly ever could with her type.

“The thing is,” he said smoothly, “the old man told me himself it was really beyond him now. He told me: ‘Just sell it to someone who loves it, that’s all I ask.’” He saw her uncertainty and her desire for the house, he followed the quick dart of her eyes across the road to the silent watcher, back to the verandah and the jasmine, across the road again. “Those were his very words,” Mr Watson said. “His very words. Sell it to someone who loves it.”

“But what about him? What will he do?”

“Ah,” Mr Watson said modestly. “Well, actually …”

“Is that him over there?”

“Of course it’s not him. I told you, the owner’s old, much older, a pensioner. As a matter of fact …” He became expansive, his chest rising to fill the lift of his imagination. He spoke of going beyond and above the call of, etcetera, he evoked hearts of gold and a nursing home and knowing the right people and jumping waiting lists — “Contacts, you know, another client, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours kind of thing” — and, in short, taking care of everything exactly as the old man had wished.

“Well,” Laura said. “I’ll take it, then. I know Jilly will love it.”

“You won’t regret it, Mrs White,” Mr Watson beamed; and then boisterously, recklessly: “It’s a steal. Believe me, a real steal.”

Jilly hated it, but was resigned. “Honestly, Mum! ‘You’d think we were freaks or something, the way people stare around here. And there’s not another kid for miles around who’s over the age of ten.”

“Think of all the babysitting money you can earn.”

“Squalling brats every Saturday night? Yuck!” Jilly pined moodily for the fast pack of thirteen-year-olds she’d run with in Sydney. “Brisbane is the pits,” she said.

Laura grinned. “Yeah, I know. That’s what I thought when I was your age. It grows on you though.”

Jilly rolled up her eyes. “Spare me,” she said.

You learn a lot about a man from the garden he creates, Laura thought. You could fall in love with the creator of a garden. There was half an acre — well, it was hectares now, but she’d never learned to think metric — it was large anyway for a city lot but what enchanted her was the way the former owner had made it seem infinite. She knew how it was done in a garden; technically, she knew; but there still seemed to be sleight of hand or magic involved. She knew it was done with boundaries — high walls or lush plantings — that blocked out a sense of external scale and drew the eye upward; and she knew that within the enclosed space, a clever gardener never used rectangular beds but created outdoor “rooms” with different moods and personalities, rooms that flowed naturally from one to another like nooks along a rainforest path. Everything was curves, sinuous loops, unexpected little circular oases of lawn that slithered into S-bend banks of passionfruit or massed orchids.

There was a place where she loved to sit. It was not large, but it seemed so, a grotto-like space that imparted a sense of absolute seclusion and tranquillity. Around a small pond rose a curve of bamboo on one side, a bank of tree ferns matted with climbers on the other, so that only water and green enclosure and sky could be seen. Birds called and their calls bounced about, odd and haunting, among the hollow bamboo canes. The slightest breeze made the canes click softly against one another: klik klik. The house, the street, the neighbours might have been miles away. If it weren’t for the wooden bench and the watcher, Laura could have believed herself deep in the rainforest.

The watcher. He nestled into grasses at the muddy edge of the pond, leaning out like Narcissus towards the waterlilies. How could she account for him in a Brisbane suburb? A gargoyle that might have been filched from some French cathedral, he stared at his own mordant reflection with a wicked grin. Or was it a grimace? The mouth of someone being tortured, perhaps? Instantly she nicknamed him Caliban.

But where had Caliban come from? He weighed a ton. She tried, but there was no lifting him. Cast iron, she thought. But imagine a Brisbane pensioner with such tastes, and where would he have had the casting done? A vision came to her of the old man caged in his nursing home: how he must grieve for his garden. The gargoyle eyes, bulging like a fly’s, watched her from the gnarled head. Intruder, the eyes accused.

A house is suffused with the presence of its former owner, Laura thought. For a time, one felt like a trespasser. She must write to the displaced gardener, thank him, tell him what a sorcerer he was. Dear Mr Prospero …

“I think it’s creepy,” Jilly said sulkily. What was she supposed to do with herself in Brisbane, watch the waterlilies grow? “And there’s a man who drives past and stares at me when I’m waiting at the bus stop for school. It gives me the creeps.”

“It’s just because we’re new here, that’s all.”

“Well, no one stares at you in Sydney just because you’re new. And this is the only house in the whole street without a pool.”

“We’ve got the most beautiful pool in Brisbane.”

“That muddy puddle,” Jilly sniffed scornfully.

“It’s so peaceful, don’t you find it peaceful here?”