The Life to Come E-Book

Michelle de Kretser

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 519

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award, 2018 Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, 2018 New Statesman's best books of the year, 2018 Michelle de Kretser's fifth novel is both a delicious satire on the way we live now and a deeply moving examination of the true nature of friendship. Pippa is a writer who longs for success. Céleste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Driven by riveting stories and unforgettable characters, here is a dazzling meditation on intimacy, loneliness and our flawed perception of other people. Profoundly moving as well as bitingly funny, The Life to Come reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform, distort and undo the present. Travelling from Sydney to Paris and Sri Lanka, this mesmerising novel feels at once firmly classic and exhilaratingly contemporary.

Leseprobe

Michelle de Kretser was born in Sri Lanka and lives in Australia. She went to university in Melbourne and Paris, and is an honorary associate of the English Department at the University of Sydney. Her fiction is published across the world and has won numerous prizes, including the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

First published in Australia 2017

First published in Great Britain in 2018

Copyright © Michelle de Kretser 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 76029 670 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 92557 541 5

Set by Midland Typesetters

For Chris

and in memory of faithful Oliver

CLOV: Do you believe in the life to come?

HAMM: Mine was always that.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame

CONTENTS

I THE FICTIVE SELF

II THE ASHFIELD TAMIL

III THE MUSEUM OF ROMANTIC LIFE

IV PIPPA PASSES

V OLLY FAITHFUL

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I

THE FICTIVE SELF

THE HOUSE BY THE RIVER belonged to an old man whose relationship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered by ‘cousin’. He had lived there alone, with a painting that was probably a Bonnard. Now he was in a nursing home, following a stroke, and George’s mother had taken charge of the painting. It was her idea that George should live in the house until it was clear whether or not their cousin was coming home. She had flown up to Sydney for the day, and George met her for a late lunch. George’s mother wore a dark Melbourne dress and asked the waiter for ‘Really cold water’, between remarking on the humidity and the jacarandas—you would never guess that she had lived in Sydney for the first thirty-one years of her life. She bent her head over her handbag, and George found himself looking at a scene from childhood. His mother was on the phone, with the orange wall in the living room behind her. As he watched her, she bent forward from the waist, still holding the receiver. Her hair stood out around her head: George saw a dark-centred golden flower. He couldn’t have been more than six but he understood that his mother was trying to block out the noise around her—he folded like that, too, protecting a book or a toy when ‘Dinner!’ was called—and that this was difficult because the room was full of the loud jazz his father liked to play.

Over the years, George’s mother’s hair had been various colours and lengths, and now it was a soft yellow sunburst again, still with that central dark star. She produced a supermarket receipt from her bag and read from the back of it: ‘Hair Apparent. Do or Dye.’

‘The Head Gardener,’ replied George. ‘Moody Hair.’

They were in the habit of noting down the names of hairdressing salons for each other. His mother said, ‘Also, I saw this in an airport shop: “Stainless steel is immune to rust, discoloration and corrosion. This makes it ideal for men’s jewellery.”’

George and his mother had the same high laugh—hee hee hee—and otherwise didn’t resemble each other at all. The Bonnard was beside her, done up in cardboard and propped on a chair. When George asked what it was like, his mother said, ‘A naked woman and wallpaper. He needed an excuse to paint light.’

The house by the river was spacious and built of bricks covered in white render. It was late spring when George moved in, but the rooms on the ground floor were cold and dark. There were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluorescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects. They had to be switched on even in the middle of the day. George remembered that his mother had described the house as ‘Mediterranean’. Ridiculous second-hand visions—a turreted pink villa with terraced gardens, a bowl of red fish at a window—had opened at once in his mind.

He had been back in Sydney for four years and still swam gratefully in its impersonal ease. In Melbourne, where George had lived since he was six, he had wanted to write about modernism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a professor who would admit to having once read an Australian novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When George settled down to read these texts, he discovered something astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like ‘however’ and ‘which’—words whose meaning was surely beyond dispute—had been deployed in ways that made no sense. It was as unnerving as if George had seen a sunset in his east-facing window, and for a while it was as mesmeric as any disturbance to the order of things. When despair threatened, he transferred his scholarship to a university in Sydney. There, George read novels and books about novels and was wildly happy. He taught a couple of tutorials to supplement his scholarship. Recently, with his thesis more or less out of the way, he had begun to write a novel at night.

A loggia with archways ran along the upper floor on the river side of the house. That was where George ate his meals and sometimes came to sit very early, as the park detached itself from the night. Koels called, and currawongs—the birds who had whistled over his childhood. Fifteen minutes by train from the centre of the city, he lived among trees, birdsong, Greeks. The Greeks, arriving forty years earlier, had seen paradise: cheap real estate, sunlight for their stunted children. Fresh from civil war and starvation, they were too ignorant to grasp what every Australian knew: this was the wrong side of Sydney. Where was the beach?

There were mornings when George left the house at sunrise, crossed the river and turned into a road that ran beside the quarried-out side of a hill. The sandstone was sheer and largely obscured by greenery: giant gum trees fanned against the rock, and native figs, vines, scrub. Brick bungalows cowered at the base of the cliff and skulked on the ridge above—it seemed an affront for which they would all be punished. In the moist, grey summer dawns, George felt that he was walking into a book he had read long ago. The grainy light was a presage. Something was coming—rain, for certain, and a catastrophe.

Opposite the quarry, on the river side of the street, driveways ran down to secretive yards. They belonged to houses that faced the river, with lawns sloping down to the water. A sign warned that the path here was known to flood. But bulky sandstone foundations and verandas strewn with wicker furniture soothed—these houses were merely domestic, nothing like the foreboding on which they turned their backs.

After Pippa moved in, George often came home from his walk to the smell of coffee. They would drink it and eat Vegemite toast on the loggia, and then George would go to bed. Pippa, too, kept irregular hours. Saving to go overseas, she was juggling waitressing with part-time work in a sports store, and George could never be sure of finding her at home. That was fine; the idea was that they would live independently—at least so it had been settled in George’s mind. In her second year at university, Pippa had been in his tutorial on ‘The Fictive Self’: a Pass student whose effortful work George had pitied enough to bump up to a Credit at the last moment. Not long ago, he had run into her near the Reserve Desk at the library. Her hair lay in flat, uneven pieces as if something had been chewing it. As the year drew to a close, a lot of students looked like that: stripey and savage. She had only one essay left to write, ‘in my whole life, ever,’ said Pippa. A peculiar thing happened: she held out a piece of paper, and George feared he would see a note that began, Help! I am being held prisoner…

It was an invitation to a party. Pippa shared a house in Coogee with a tall, ravishing girl called Katrina. When George arrived, Katrina was standing by the drinks table on the side veranda, talking about her cervix. He placed his six-pack in a plastic tub of ice, and Pippa told him a few people’s names. George had left Marrickville on a warm day, but by the time he crossed the city, a southerly had got up. Every door and window in Pippa’s house stood open. The dim corridor and all the rooms were full of cold air. In his T-shirt and loose cotton trousers, George moved from one group of people he didn’t know to another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didn’t seem to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long, bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was fashionable, and the gallery’s three rooms were packed. Over dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. ‘Is this typical in Australia?’ she asked. George had to explain that she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up, tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake. Eastern suburbs caste marks, they identified the arty, bookish daughters of property developers and CEOs. George was still adjusting to them himself, after Melbourne, where the brainy girls wore stiff, dark clothes like the inmates of nineteenth-century institutions, with here and there an exhibitionist in grey. Pippa had stick limbs, that chewed fringe, a sharp little face. She would have made an excellent orphan: black sacking was all that was needed, and heavy, laced shoes. But she came out of the house in scarlet stilettos and leopard-print satin, and found George on the back patio. He had taken refuge there, in the lee of the kitchen door.

Ashamed to mention cold to this waif, George conjured a headache. Pippa offered Tiger Balm and the use of her room. The windows there were open: Katrina could be heard describing a minor surgical procedure on her ovaries. But when George shut the door and lay down, he was out of the wind at last. A long painting, purple and blue swirls, hung on the wall facing Pippa’s bed—George closed his eyes at once. Long ago, his mother had been a painter. A few survivors from that era—severe, geometric abstractions—could be seen in her flat in Melbourne, but for a long time now her involvement with art had been confined to the upmarket school where she taught.

George fell asleep. When he woke, Pippa was there on the end of the bed, unbuckling her sandals. She flexed her toes, then sat sideways and swung her feet up. They were small, chunky feet, George noticed, and her toenails were painted blue. Katrina passed down the corridor, saying something about her menstrual cycle. George wondered what she was majoring in. Gender Studies? Performance Art? Obstetrics?

‘Communications,’ said Pippa. She was drinking bubbly; it was the late 1990s, so people still called it champagne. The soft white plastic cup dimpled under her fingers, and Pippa remarked that she was stuck. The house would shortly be reclaimed by Katrina’s aunt, who was returning from Singapore. Another house had been found for the girls—Katrina’s family had several at their disposal—but it wasn’t available before the beginning of March. Katrina was moving home for the summer, but there were reasons why that wasn’t an option for Pippa. George told a lie about the purple painting and learned that it was the work of Pippa’s boyfriend, Vince. ‘He’s back at his folks’ place in Mudgee, to save money so we can go travelling next year.’ She spoke of ‘Asia’, of ‘Europe’, collapsing civilisations in the sweeping Australian way.

In Marrickville, over Vegemite toast one morning, Pippa asked whether the barking wasn’t getting to George. He hadn’t noticed it but now heard the high, repetitive protest that went on and on. ‘He’s lonely, poor love,’ said Pippa. ‘And bored. Stuck in a yard by himself with nothing to do for hours.’

‘Greeks,’ said George. ‘They don’t like animals indoors. It’s a Mediterranean thing. The Arab influence.’

Pippa said that in Mudgee they were exactly the same. ‘And no one in Vince’s family’s ever been outside New South Wales. No way do they know any Arabs, either.’

A few days later, she told George that the dog’s name was Bruce. He belonged to ‘a hippie dipstick’ called Rhiannon, who was renting on the cheaper, landward side of the street. Pippa had grown up in a country town and still talked easily to strangers. Bruce was a kelpie cross, George learned. ‘Twelve months old. Rhiannon got him from the RSPCA. She drives him to an off-leash park when she’s got time, but she works in some mall up in Chatswood, so she’s got this huge commute. And then Tuesday night’s the ashram, Friday night’s the pub. She’s not a bad person, she just hasn’t got a clue. You should see her yard: she’s bought Bruce all these toys, like a dog’s a child.’

Pippa had offered to walk Bruce when Rhiannon was busy. ‘He’s a working dog, he needs exercise. Guess what she said? “Dogs should run free. It’s demeaning for an animal to walk on a lead. It does really confusing things to their auras.”’

It was good of Pippa to have tried to help, said George.

‘I just feel so sorry for that poor dog.’

She said the same thing a few evenings later. Bruce was barking again. George heard him all the time now. It was difficult not to hold Pippa responsible. ‘I love animals,’ she went on.

‘That must be why you eat so many of them,’ said George. He didn’t intend unkindness but was opposed to illogic. Pippa’s fondness for broad, blurry statements twitched his nerves. ‘I love India,’ she once announced, after watching a documentary on TV. She had never been there. George, who had, most certainly did not love India. He could also see that these declarations weren’t really about animals or India but about Pippa: what they proclaimed was her largeness of heart.

She was saying that she had considered being a vegetarian. ‘But the thing with personal food restrictions is they make eating with other people really difficult. They destroy conviviality.’ She brought out ‘conviviality’ in the way people had once said ‘England’ or ‘Communist’: as if it settled all discussion. George detected a borrowing: Pippa had come across the word somewhere and been impressed.

George looked on cooking as time stolen from books. When he invited Pippa to move in for the summer he hadn’t thought about arrangements for food. He would have been content to go on as usual, defrosting a pizza or grilling a chop. But the day after she moved in, Pippa said, ‘I’m going through a Thai phase. You can’t cook Thai food for one.’ The cold, white, murderous kitchen filled with the scent of coriander and lemongrass pounded to a paste. George kept the fridge stocked with riesling and beer. Pippa stir-fried fish with spring onions and purple basil. She served a salad that combined ginger and pork.

With nothing said, they had divided the house between them. There were three empty bedrooms on the upper floor, but Pippa installed herself in a room off the hall. She liked to lie reading on a divan that stood under an aluminium-framed window. There was nothing else in what must have been the old man’s living room; he had dotted cumbersome furniture throughout the house. Any one of his rooms would have done as the set of a European play—the forbidding, minimalist kind.

Paperback novels accumulated around the divan. George looked them over one day when Pippa was out. Most were second-hand, and all had been published in the past twenty years. Pippa read nothing older, nothing in translation and very little that didn’t concern women’s lives. Her knowledge of history was cloudy. Referring to a biography of Joan of Arc that she planned to read, she placed its heroine in the Napoleonic Wars. George’s own novel sang inside him. He was taking apart everything he knew and putting it back together differently in ruled A4 notebooks. He used a laptop for his thesis, but his novel had woken an instinct that mingled superstition and veneration, and he was writing the first draft by hand.

Summer intensified. George and Pippa ate mangoes for dessert. Their flesh was the same colour as the wall behind George’s mother on that long-ago day with the phone. The memory of that scene kept following George around. It said so much about his parents: for a start, the invasive way his father played records full blast so that he could hear them no matter where he was in the house. And why hadn’t his mother turned down the volume before answering the phone? Think first! George wanted to shout. She often remarked that women of her generation had been deceived. He knew that this meant, I was deceived. It was her way of alluding to his father’s girlfriends. She had left when she could no longer ignore them; the latest one had turned up on Christmas morning with a present for George. But the reason George and his mother ended up in Melbourne was a man she had met at a party. He lasted two years, just long enough for her divorce to come through, then scampered home to his wife.

Pippa produced a dish of bananas prepared with turmeric and cream. That was the evening two boys came to the door in search of the old man. They looked like teenage real estate agents, with ties and short, waxed hair, but suggested melodrama because they arrived during a storm. Lightning turned the sky biblical behind them. For a blazing, vertiginous instant, the iron veranda post was a cross. The boys shouted at each other in Vietnamese, over the downpour, and everyone shouted in English. At last, George wrote down the address of the nursing home, and the boys plunged back into the rain.

It rained for three days. George went on with his novel at night. The river rose, ran across the road and stopped the cars. Long after the sun came back, and the traffic resumed, the path beside the river stayed treacherous with mud. George slept naked in the swampy afternoons; there was air-conditioning in the rooms upstairs. Pippa wore shorts and a lime-green bikini top; she was pretty much flat-chested. She rubbed ice cubes on her wrists and went barefoot on the tiles. George noticed her feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young child’s feet—even the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and left shoes.

George’s father taught computer science at a technical college on the North Shore. Two or three times a year, he met up with his son over a drink in the city; what followed was a conversation between strangers. George had left his new number on his father’s answering machine, but it was his mother who called. She was in Lausanne, where an expert had declared that the Bonnard was a fake. ‘A good fake, mind you,’ said George’s mother. He could hear her breathing in Switzerland. ‘I guess I’ll be hanging on to the day job for a while.’

The phone often rang. George took down messages from Pippa’s friends. The friends dropped in. They stayed for meals. George and Pippa moved a table out to the strip of concrete that passed for a yard. They strung fairy lights over the back door, and set the table with blue and white plates; Pippa had found a cupboard full of old china. ‘I love pretty plates,’ she said, giving them a wipe with a tea towel. She asked if George was sure he wouldn’t change his mind about dinner. George said again that he really needed to work.

One night, he stretched his arms, cracked his spine, left his desk. Standing on the loggia, he identified Katrina: her voice floated up, describing the mole between her breasts. He had retained a distinct mental image of her breasts, George discovered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving small, sweet prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had seen her tip the prawn heads into the bin—they would stink like anything for the rest of the week.

He was returning from his walk one morning when eggs for breakfast passed from an idea into a need. He went up to the shop on Illawarra Road. The eggs had just hit the pan when Pippa came into the kitchen; there were tiny grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. George watched her arrange the remaining eggs in a green majolica dish. She picked up the empty carton. ‘These are cage,’ she said. ‘You should get free range.’

George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.

‘But there’s no unnecessary suffering.’

George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So that’s OK, then. He said nothing: he had remembered, just in time, that he was talking to someone whose idea of ethics was a dinner party. Besides, his eggs had started to brown.

In February, a heat wave struck. The air-conditioning gave out. At night, after Pippa came home from the dinner shift, George would light mosquito coils and a lantern. They sat on the loggia drinking mojitos; Katrina and her boyfriend had left a present of a bottle of rum. George asked one or two questions about Katrina. There was room for a character like her—a minor figure—in his novel.

Pippa said, ‘That’s a relationship where the names say it all.’ George looked at her. Her eyes were bright with dislike. ‘The Kat and the Matt,’ said Pippa. There was mint and sugar on her breath.

On one of the mojito nights, the inevitable happened: Pippa grew confessional. She wanted to be a writer, she told George. When she got back from overseas, she intended to enrol in a creative writing course. George thought back to her essays: a stew of passionate opinion, mangled argument, atrocities of usage and grammar; that Credit had been the purest largesse on his part. He remembered her hanging back one day, as the other students were dispersing, to say, ‘I love English.’

‘In that case, I suggest you learn to write it,’ answered George.

Pippa was talking about her travels now: they were to provide her with raw material, experiences. George, whose novel was set in Heidelberg, where he had spent a day at the age of nineteen, said that literature and the world were two different things. Pippa grappled with this, slitting her eyes. She said, ‘You mean, look in thy heart and write?’ George meant nothing of the kind: girls like Pippa understood ‘heart’ as a licence to gush. But coming from her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted. He divided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran his finger round the rim of the jug.

They were eating strawberries; Pippa had brought a big, soft bag of them home from work. Passing along the loggia the next morning, George saw a cut-glass bowl of miniature Father Christmases. Overnight, each berry had grown a mouldy white beard.

Day and night, bushfires burned in the mountains. Sitting out on the loggia, George and Pippa could smell the smoke. But there was no longer the high, intolerable sound of barking: Pippa had persuaded Rhiannon to give her a key. Bruce tore up and down the yard, chasing the ball Pippa threw for him; he slept, content and exhausted, for hours. Sometimes she sneaked the dog out and took him for a walk along the river. She invited George to go with them, but he explained that he was allergic to pets. He was conscious of a fresh danger: Rhiannon’s landlord wanted his house back, and she was having difficulty finding a rental place that would let her keep a dog. It looked as if she might have to return Bruce to the pound. The way Pippa relayed all this, George got the distinct impression that she was putting out feelers. So when she said, ‘I thought it was cats people were allergic to?’, he answered firmly, ‘Dogs, too.’ There was no point raising anyone’s hopes.

Autumn came, and George’s father died. A classic end, a cliché really: lobbing a ball into a net one minute, a massive coronary the next. He was between girlfriends, as it turned out, so it fell to George to pack up his flat.

The flat was only a couple of streets away from the Meshaws’ old house. George hadn’t been in that part of Paddington for twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaks—George remembered the blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up the stairs, he dreaded entering the flat. But it was as impersonal as a showroom. His father had never been a hoarder; even the piano seat held only a cardboard wallet filled with dull documents. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and always forgot that Meshaw wasn’t his father’s real name. Syllables had been trimmed, vowels altered, consonants suppressed to create something that could fit into Australian mouths. His father was a product of the old world, and his vices, like his virtues, had been old-fashioned: wine, women, music, an unshakeable faith in the rational mind.

The last item in the wallet was a yellow envelope. George hesitated, afraid of embarrassment, of pornography—there had been a packet of condoms beside the bed—but at last he looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They were photographs of George’s mother, angled, arty shots, many of them out of focus—one showed only a blurry fan of fingers. George crouched, moved his hand, spread the images over the floor. The instant before he examined the last one, he already knew what he would see: his mother, bending forward from the waist, a wavy cord trailing to the phone. Everything in the photo was exactly as George had remembered—the orange wall, his mother’s bright, dark-centred hair—although the image had taken on a brownish-yellow tinge. What memory had blanked from the scene was his father’s presence: he must have been there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife. The pieces in the puzzle of George’s parents shifted, acquired new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discoloration; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to light. George pictured his father handling the photos, laying them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos in the flat.

That evening, he called his mother. She hadn’t come up for the funeral, merely saying, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ George told her about finding the Polaroids. What he was really saying was, Do you understand now? Admit you were wrong to leave him! He started to describe the photo with the phone and the orange wall.

His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the picture. ‘The one where you can see my roots have grown out? It’s so typical of your father to have kept that. I never liked it—I didn’t like you poking that camera at me ever.’

‘Wait,’ said George. ‘I took that picture?’

‘All of them. Don’t you remember?’ She said, ‘An idiot girl gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favourite thing. You loved watching the colours change as the image developed. When you ran out of film a second time, your father told you the camera was broken. He knew that seeing you with it upset me.’

With the change of season, it was cool at night. George stood on the loggia, inspecting the loose shapes of trees. There was only ugly furniture around him and big, tiled, silent rooms. Pippa was living in Stanmore, in a house with Katrina. Bruce was barking—he had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have talked her way into staying on, after all. George had just finished the first draft of his novel. It was called Necessary Suffering. At least for now; that was one of the things George wanted to think about. But first he had to put together the puzzle of his parents. Sometimes the reason his father saved the Polaroids was George’s mother and sometimes it was George—sometimes even the idiot girl was involved. George’s brain wouldn’t stop showing him the photo with the telephone. He saw his mother folded in two with her back to the wall. Something like a smudge kept dancing on the edge of his mind. To study it calmly, George turned it into a sentence written out in black on the white frame of the Polaroid: Maybe she was trying to get away from me.

The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red disc that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George closed the door of his father’s flat for the last time and went for a walk. It was a bright afternoon, but the street where the Meshaws had lived was black with shadows. Tall plane trees arched over it; the leaves remained thick overhead but were starting to change colour and fall. George saw what he had known, what he had forgotten: the row of houses, with their wooden balconies, looked into the face of a sandstone escarpment. He came to a gate where he had stood on a summer morning: looking back at the house where he had always lived, looking out at the waiting taxi. The escarpment and the trees kept the sun from the street. What was coming was a life in which his father was a stranger. George looked from his father, barefoot on the veranda, to his mother, sitting in the taxi with her face turned away. Who was the cat and who was the mat? George’s father said, ‘If you stop crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets.’ Then he stood on his hands.

II

THE ASHFIELD TAMIL

CASSIE SPOTTED THE SPICE MART because she was on the lookout for a South Asian grocery. At the launch of their university’s Centre for Australian Literature, Ash had expressed his disappointment with a Sri Lankan restaurant where he had recently dined. The dhal had proved particularly unsatisfying, said Ash. It was thin and sour, nothing like the comforting curried lentils, velvety with coconut milk, that he had eaten as a child.

Ash—as Ashoka preferred to be known—mentioned the dhal because he had noticed that women were moved by references to that aspect of his past. When they learned that he had lived in Sri Lanka as a child, they pictured him in a tropical garden where fruit fell to the hand, too innocent to divine the vicious historical turn that would soon cast him on the grudging benevolence of the West. This satisfying nonsense simplified everything, clearing factual clutter to reveal the way forward. Now whatever needed to happen next could happen.

It had been explained to Ash that the government funded the Centre for Australian Literature after a ministerial survey of humanities graduates found that eighty-six per cent of English majors had never read an Australian book. Asked to name a contemporary Australian novelist, responses were more or less equally divided between ‘that Oscar and Louise guy’ and Stephen King. Most declined to ‘Name a novel by Patrick White’, although one student recalled Riders on the Storm. These results were welcome: they could be blamed on the ousted Labor government.

Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree-huggers and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education. The flagrant bias of the national broadcaster was a gift to the government’s spin doctors, but the survey struck an unexpected chord with the right-wing press. ‘Aussie Heritage Lost to Multiculturalism’ (broadsheet) was backed up by ‘Our Classroom Shame’ (tabloid). At this warning shot from its chief ally, the government acted decisively, and the Centre for Australian Literature opened after just five years.

At the launch, Cassie watched the men whose speeches followed one another. She was in the first year of her doctoral candidature. Leanne, her supervisor, was the inaugural director of the Centre, but Cassie saw that Leanne was of no account. The Aboriginal elder whose customary welcome had opened the ceremony was equally beside the point. These two were required by protocol but only got in the way, like a debutante’s white gloves. The men on the podium had smooth or corrugated faces, they tolerated the symbolism of women and Aboriginal people, and they were in charge. Their various speeches came down to one: ‘Do not imagine we wouldn’t crush you if we chose.’ Cassie had been brought up to believe that the world these men inhabited—the rage and spite and cruelty that were its grim, medieval furnishings—had been swept away. Now and then, the realisation that it had not swam blackly before her like a frightening malfunction of vision.

While she listened, Cassie went on eating, having edged her way to the buffet as soon as the speeches began. She was a bony girl who was always hungry. As a child, she had craved white bread, and thin slices of dried sausage spread with mustard, and dark plum jam in which you could stand a spoon. All these things, which Cassie was fed by her grandmother, were banned at home. At home there was nourishing sugarless cake, and soybean casseroles in which tomato skins floated. From the mudbrick house in a valley up north, where two kelpies had succumbed to snakebite, Cassie fled during the holidays to Sydney and her grandmother’s flat: to plate-glass windows and Schubert, to creamy veal and embroidered tablecloths, to a toilet with no spiders and no scary notice about blockages taped to the wall. Oh, the wonderful, modern pleasure of a toilet that flushed!

The Minister for Education said, ‘I like to begin every day, the pressures of public office permitting, by dipping into one of our world-class Australian writers.’ He misquoted a line of Henry Lawson and beamed. The mistake was spotted only by the Lawson specialist, an alcoholic, who by that stage of the evening was incapable of speech. Education being a trivial portfolio, the minister, a golden boy, had also been entrusted with Immigration. ‘Young people are the wealth of our nation,’ he announced. He had forgotten, momentarily, that he was in an institution that catered to lazy, feral degenerates, for his own children had come into his mind: a trio of cherubs.

All the bottles within sight were empty. The Lawson specialist began to drain the contents of abandoned glasses, believing he was the only person present who remembered that the minister had once left children seeking asylum to drown off the Australian coast. As often happened, the Lawson specialist was quite wrong. The minister himself recalled the incident perfectly: the children were foreigners and Muslims, and the pressure of public office had not permitted their rescue. ‘As Shakespeare reminds us,’ improvised the minister, ‘the child is father to the man.’ Shakespeare, while unfortunately not Australian literature, was universal and, like the minister, beyond reproach.

Cassie’s mouth was full when a man she didn’t know asked if the pastry she was eating contained meat. A girl came out of nowhere to confide, ‘I often think about going veggo. But I just really love a good steak!’ Smiling, she shook all her curls at the dilemma, extravagant in a rose-coloured dress. She turned her rosy shoulder in such a way that she was addressing only the man and said, ‘And bacon!’

‘Yes, it’s the kind of thing that must have once taken up many a conversational hour in Rome,’ he replied. ‘You know: the injustice of slavery versus the inconvenience of life without slaves.’

The girl’s enthusiastic body went still. Then she went away.

‘Hi,’ said Ash. ‘I’m Ash.’

Cassie was a little shocked. But she saw a knight: brutal in a just cause.

A bunch of people ended up at a Lebanese restaurant later that evening. Cassie found herself sitting next to Ash. They asked each other questions that had nothing to do with what they really wanted to know, while their bodies conducted a separate, unambiguous conversation. Ash learned that Cassie was writing a thesis on Australian expatriate novelists. He was at the dinner because he knew Leanne from a library committee, he explained. It had rained earlier, and drops clung to the cars parked outside the window by which they sat—Cassie thought of fish with rivers still slipping off their fins.

Menus were brought. By means of urgent gestures, the Lawson specialist indicated that he needed a drink.

Someone asked, ‘Shall we share?’

Ash said that he was a vegetarian. ‘But the rest of you, please go ahead. I’ll order for myself.’

‘Why don’t we all get vegetarian?’ said Leanne, glancing around. ‘I can’t remember the last time I ate meat anyway.’

Her research assistant said helpfully, ‘When Baniti took us to that halal restaurant in Auburn last week. We had camel.’

‘Well, obviously I didn’t want to be culturally insensitive,’ said Leanne.

Ash told a story of getting lost between his apartment and the university. It was a ten-minute walk, but he had found himself on the Princes Highway. It had been plain to Ash from day one that the natives adored an idiot Pom. ‘I’ve no idea how it happened, but I wound up on a bus heading to Kogarah,’ he concluded. He gave the suburb three syllables, ko-ga-ra, transforming it into an Italian resort.

‘Kog-rah! Kog-rah!’ the Australians shouted, and split their sides.

Ash told Cassie softly, appealing to her alone, ‘When you’re still finding your way around, you make mistakes.’

At The Spice Mart, which stood across the road from Ashfield Station, rice was heaped on the floor in stitched cloth bags as well as in giant plastic packs. The man behind the counter was as elongated and flat as if he had passed under a roller. Wrapped in the dusty smell of lentils, he was anomalous among the spices and Bollywood DVDs, having clad his two dimensions in a bureaucrat’s pressed trousers and pinstriped shirt.

When she discovered that he came from Sri Lanka, Cassie enquired after his ‘ethnic group’. It was an excuse to speak about Ash. ‘My partner has Sinhalese ancestry,’ she explained, ‘although he identifies as British.’ She realised that she had almost said ‘husband’ when even ‘partner’ was a stretch for someone she had known barely a month. The shopkeeper continued to examine her through the heavy glasses that turned his eyes into aspic set with beetles. He was a Jaffna Tamil, he said. ‘But here no one knows who we are. What to do?’

Cassie was familiar with this kind of thing. Her grandmother had grown up in Vienna, and laments about Australian ignorance circulated readily with the torte.

The shopkeeper asked if she had seen an Indian grocery. ‘That side, on Liverpool Road?’

‘No.’

‘I have been here three years. They came last month. You didn’t see them?’

Iron-spined, he came out from behind his counter to show her the chutneys and pickles, and was revealed as a darkly varnished plank. On his advice, Cassie came away with onion sambol and a little curry-leaf plant in a pot. Ash was pleased with the sambol, which he said went tremendously well with grilled cheese. Cassie told him about the Ashfield Tamil, concluding, ‘He used to be a postmaster in Sri Lanka.’ As soon as he had said that, his clothes had made sense: Cassie saw that he was dressed for the past.

‘Tamils do very well for themselves,’ said Ash. ‘They’re hardworking, intelligent people. Terrifically good at maths.’ He knew no Tamils but was repeating the kind of thing his father said. The only other person who had offered Cassie fixed pictures of this or that race was her grandmother. When Cassie’s grandmother was young, her politics had landed her in a camp. She emerged from it at the end of the war despising everyone she had once loved: the poor, the oppressed, Communists, Jews. The other prisoners had spat at her and threatened her and taught her to steal. She had gone into the camp trusting in goodness and come out knowing there was none. By the time Cassie knew her, she lived in Cremorne with a view of Sydney Harbour and hated Australians. Her daughter had betrayed her by marrying one. The flaxen grandchild—a throwback to her girlhood—was forgiven. As time went on, the harbour became a casual blue insult hurled at the grandmother’s life. To thwart it, the curtains in her flat were kept shut. In aquarium-like gloom, the grandchild listened to ravishing Lieder and a voice that said Italians were liars, Slavs were animals and gypsies spread disease. Between the girl’s visits, the grandmother lived for dumplings and strudel, for childhood recovered spoon by spoon. Merciful childhood turned her arteries to concrete and killed her before the blonde sprite grew tall enough to say, ‘You are a bitter, crazy old woman, Oma, and your hair has fallen out.’

Ash’s mother was Scottish; he had been born in London, and educated at universities in England and the States. For five years in the 1970s, well before the civil war, the Fernandos had lived in Sri Lanka. Ash went to an international school in Colombo where the little girls wore pale pink or pale green or pale blue dresses. ‘International’ meant an Egyptian boy and four Taiwanese sisters and Ash. Everyone else was white. The only language Ash had ever spoken fluently was English, although he had enough French to deploy, in a respectable accent, various phrases made essential by Derrida and Foucault.

When Ash was born, the British had been gone twenty years from the subcontinent. Empire was a concept, deplorable of course, but nothing to do with Ash. He was a political scientist, and had written incisively, and at times intelligently, on The Global Subaltern: Mobility and Modernity in a Transnational Age. Ash’s father was a GP, his mother a gynaecologist. Their professional disparity engendered a tension that must have informed Ash’s childhood, although he had not been aware of it. Yet it might have been at the root of the mild rebellion that turned him from medicine, which was so plainly his destiny, to politics. As soon as Ash left school his parents divorced, and he realised that all three of them had been waiting for this to happen. His parents remained friends, living only streets away from each other in Swiss Cottage with new partners and stepchildren. Ash acquired a half-sister. Christmas, by tradition a grave festivity at which the three Fernandos had opened expensive gifts and peacefully dismantled a goose, developed into a riotous affair with reindeer antlers and aunts. A preposterous ceremony known as Kris Kringle played its part in Ash’s decision to apply for the lectureship in Sydney that he saw advertised on a sleety November day.

Women—but not only women—were drawn to Ash, to his politeness and his eyes. His eyes suggested, obscurely, that he had suffered. In Sydney, an emeritus professor offered him the use, rent-free and for as long as he liked, of a pied-à-terre in Newtown. It consisted of a big, high-ceilinged room on the top floor of a subdivided Victorian mansion. A bathroom opened off the hall, and a short stair led to a room at the top of a tower. It contained a hard chair, and a table that served as a desk. On clear days, the view reached to a distant, glinty line that was Botany Bay. It was the long stair down to the street that had defeated the professor’s knee. For most of his life, he had been a radical with a kingly beard. Now, having retired to the Hunter Valley, he was writing a monumental work that examined everything by which he had lived and judged it a sham. His wife had stopped speaking to him. Introduced to Ash, he saw a foreigner newly arrived in Australia: that meant someone who needed help. He lied, ‘My heart,’ hitting himself on the chest to explain about the stairs. He wouldn’t confess to arthritis, which made an old man of him. That night, resting between savage paragraphs, the professor began to cry. He was remembering what Ash had said: ‘In every way that matters your heart is entirely sound.’

Everyone Ash knew in Sydney lived in houses in which rooms opened off a long passage. These corridors were unfailingly dark and cold—why didn’t Australians heat their houses? There would be, at best, a dodgy, unflued gas heater in a living room. Sydney remained for Ash a city of cold bedrooms, cold bathrooms. Oh, but how he loved it! For a long time after leaving Sri Lanka, he had remembered leafy lanes held in a sea-blue rind. He went back when he was twenty-four. Colombo was full of soldiers and dust. Ash went away again quickly and didn’t return. In Sydney he recovered lost mornings of steamy grey warmth. The city was regulated and hygienic—occidental—yet voluptuously receptive to chaos and filth. It knew the elemental, antique drama of the sea. Whether or not Ash could see it, the sea was there with its deaths and its ships. Whenever a storm stirred the Pacific, every hill in Sydney was a tarmacked wave. The city smelled briny and fumy. It was a smell that made Ash feel something like homesick but without sadness. In those first weeks, when he was at his most porous, past and present fused. The understanding cries of crows—Ah! Ohh! Aahh!—rang out from his childhood. A botched arpeggio overheard on a humid afternoon revived the Czerny exercises played by nine-year-old Ash. He recognised things he couldn’t name: trees that ruined concrete with their toes, reckless floral perfumes. Even the fruit bats rotting on power lines were dreamy visitants from the past.

Sydney was a summer city as London was a winter one. Its dusty golden light set a nimbus around bodies moving unhindered in floaty clothes. When dark jackets and heavy scarves appeared in the streets, the city looked hangdog and shifty. That yolky light was one of the things Ash had missed without knowing it. His emails to friends around the world said, ‘I spent too many years in places where the light was blue.’

Cassie was oaty porridge: pale, reassuring, wholesome. Ash thrilled to her satisfying breasts, her orderly teeth. Her eyes, widely spaced, gave her the remote look of someone listening to distant music. She wore empire-waisted velvet dresses, with sleeves gathered at the wrist, which had belonged to her mother. Cassie was taller than her mother, and the jewel-coloured dresses barely skimmed her knees. Evoking a vanished age, they intensified her faraway air. Her reading glasses had large frames that made her look like a girl playing at being a grandmother; when she took them off, there were a few seconds when she seemed dopey and pitiless. All her effects were like that, uncalculated, incidental, and her artlessness was part of her power. Sometimes she turned up in jeans topped with a vintage blouse, pintucked and demure, in a lilac-y sort of blue. Tiny fabric loops fastened two nacre buttons at the back. At the sight of Cassie’s shoulderblades, faintly shining through the blouse, Ash wanted nothing more than to undo those buttons.

There were fragile, potent, slightly witchy things on Cassie’s windowsill: a bird’s skull, lavender sea urchin cases, a view of the Prater painted on glass. There was also a photo of her parents: solid, dark strangers. They proved what Ash had known all along: Cassie was a changeling, magical. That was the kind of foolishness she called up in Ash. He would have been embarrassed for any friend who indulged in it.

Cassie had the Sydney imperviousness to cold. Her velvet dresses—emerald, sapphire, topaz—were unlined. When an icy gale blew from the west, she slipped a weightless coat over her dress, or a lambswool cardigan. She seemed to own neither scarf nor gloves. Her concession to winter was socks inside her boots. Previously, Ash had thought of Australians—if he thought of them at all—as no-nonsense, practical people: Canadians with tans. Now he realised that he had overlooked what history had required of them: they were visionaries, adept at denial. Australians had seen pastures where there was red dust, geraniums where there were trees as old as time, no one where there were five hundred nations—they dealt with winter as a tank deals with a blade of grass.

In bed, arching beneath Ash, Cassie bit the side of his palm. There was salt in her, he decided. That made him think of his mother: her salty Scottish eyes. His mother had emailed Ash on the day he left: ‘Australians are hard-working and very successful. They are suspicious of their success and resent it. They are winners who prefer to see themselves as victims. Their national hero, Ned Kelly, was a violent criminal—they take this as proof of their egalitarianism. They worship money, of course. Anyway, enjoy yourself.’

Cassie always wore two rings, a garnet and a square-cut emerald in old-fashioned claw settings, which had belonged to her grandmother. Her friend Pippa had told her, casually, ‘You’ll be murdered for those one day.’ People often remarked that Pippa and Cassie were like sisters. That was quite true in the sense that each girl kept track of, rejected and coveted whatever belonged to the other.

In the winter break, not long after Ash met Cassie, a colleague invited him to his family’s sheep station in western New South Wales. ‘It’s the real Australia out there,’ said Lachlan, as if Sydney were a collective hallucination. The real Australia was called Yukkendrearie, or so Lachlan said—it wasn’t so very different from the name on the map. Ash and Lachlan crossed mountains blue with menace. A distant viaduct had the look of all out-of-place objects, sinister and forlorn. Then the mountains were behind them, and there were the carpet rucks of threadbare hills. All this was disappointingly familiar: sheep, hills making waves.

Ash asked, ‘Will we see real Australians?’ It was a joke, but not wholly. He was keen to encounter the outlandish, to be enlarged or overwhelmed.

‘Bound to. Strong, silent types. Famous for self-reliance and endurance. Hard-working and practical. Stoic.’

‘So the real Australian is a Victorian Englishman?’

‘All archetypes are fossils.’

Ash didn’t say, Shame to have a borrowed one, though.

Lachlan sent a text message whenever they stopped to stretch their legs. His partner of eleven years had recently left him and wasn’t returning his calls. Zipping up his jeans beside an empty highway, Ash saw a row of canaries in a windbreak. But it was only an arrangement of light.

In the afternoon, the scenery drained away. What was left was flatness and sky. There was no end to either, and a peculiar light. All that space might have been restful but scraped Ash’s nerves instead. Like reality TV, it was both harrowing and dull. How did Sydneysiders trim their children’s fingernails or buy stuff from the Apple store or sign up for Fun Runs with this enormity breathing down their necks? Ash wondered what word might apply to what they were moving through: certainly not ‘landscape’. It was a presence that spoke of absence; it brought to mind the desolation left by a plundering army—which wasn’t, after all, very far from the mark. Half a cow lay near a fence, its head twisted away from the ivory basket of its ribs. It was only a stray splinter from the coffin of pastoral romance—that had perished here long ago. Ash had pictured himself striding up a hill in a borrowed Akubra. What lay around was less disconcerting than the magnitude of his mistake.

‘See that signpost?’ said Lachlan as they flashed past. ‘Bony Track. Half a dozen Aborigines were tied up and shot there in the 1830s. Plenty of those colourful local names all over the country. We’ve a Butcher’s Creek ourselves. Stone dry.’

‘What happened there?’

‘My forebears were much too canny to keep a record.’

In a far paddock, a broken feather was stuck into the ground: some weirdo had neglected to cut down a tree. The Subaru rushed at the dead, discarded distance. A hawk appeared, strung up in the white air.

Lachlan said, ‘Not much further now, couple of hundred k. We’ll be there in time for tea.’

He said, ‘Dinner, I mean.’

He said, ‘Since Dad died, Mum likes to have tea on the table as soon as it gets dark.’

‘It’s dark at five,’ said Ash.

‘Yes.’

An email had not been sent or had not been read or had failed to arrive. The fragrance of dead lamb enveloped them as they drew up before the sprawling timber house. But food was irrelevant—on getting out of the car, Ash discovered that he was ill. A light-eyed dog stood a little way off and barked at him. The wind came and slapped everyone. Ash spent the three days of his visit in bed.

Plastic ring binders filled a fireless fireplace in his room. A massive wardrobe, sturdy and somewhat scarred, loomed against one wall. Ash looked inside, hoping for something useful like extra blankets, but found only a wire coat hanger and an emery board. He spread his coat over his bed and climbed in. Pressed-metal walls tightened around his dreams.

His door opened. It was hinged in such a way that from his bed Ash couldn’t see who was standing there. After a while, a child with a dirty face edged around. The farm was run by Lachlan’s sister, Bob. Presumably the child belonged to her. A hard brown arm connected the door to the child. The arm was paler on the inside, like the limbs of the yellow-eyed creature he had seen on arrival. Ash concluded that it was Bob’s child who had barked at him—it made perfect sense.

A second door gave on to a side veranda shared with Lachlan’s room. The wind shouted at the English elms, and Lachlan shouted at his phone: ‘You can have the Eames recliner.’ ‘No, I never said Glen could come and get it.’ ‘Well, what I mean is, we’ll say it’s yours.’ ‘That’s right, it’ll stay in our lounge room. But now you’ll be the one who sits in it.’ ‘Well, if I say Glen can have it, will you come back?’ ‘What do you mean that’s bloody typical?’ ‘No, you can leave the Thermomix out of it.’ ‘No, Glen can’t have it either.’ ‘That’s right, one or the other.’ ‘What do you mean, typically binary?’

Sometimes Ash woke to hear Lachlan’s keyboard. Lachlan had a major research grant and was writing two books at once. Meanwhile, Ash shivered unproductively. He wore a cashmere sweater, a Christmas present from his mother, over his pyjamas. He struggled into his coat and scarf, and tottered along a passage that struck icy through his slippers. There was the sound of splashing behind the bathroom door and someone—Bob?—bawled, ‘Afternoon delight! Afternoon delight! Ah-ah…’

On the last day of Ash’s stay, his mother brought him a piece of toast as he lay in bed. She said, ‘Are you sure you couldn’t manage a boiled egg? Or a beer?’ She wasn’t Ash’s mother, of course, but Lachlan’s: they had the same voice, echt Aberdeen. Margaret’s straight, short hair, the delectable pewter of pencil shading, was parted on one side like a child’s and fastened with a child’s flowered clip. She picked up Ash’s coat and hung it in the wardrobe. Ash felt shivery again and decided to risk a cup of coffee. Lachlan brought it to him in a mug that said ‘Farmers Do It in the Dirt’—it was excellent coffee, frothy and strong.

Lachlan said, ‘Feel up to a tour? Shame to have to leave without seeing the old place.’ He was wearing only a woollen vest over his red RB Sellars shirt, so Ash was too abashed to retrieve his coat from the wardrobe. He lifted his scarf from the hook on the door, and Lachlan peered at him, saying in an incredulous way, ‘Not feeling cold are you?’ as if Ash had taken it into his head to challenge an unassailable proposition in logic.

Ash trailed his host in and out of big rooms with empty fireplaces. They were like rich people’s rooms anywhere, only colder. Lachlan said things like ‘1869’ and ‘the Twenties’ and ‘1976’; Ash gathered that the original homestead had been added to or remodelled at these dates. He was shown the former telephone room—larger than his study in the tower—and a room that had once contained the family silver. There was also a ballroom with stained-glass windows built to impress a duke, who sent a last-minute telegram in his place.

They crossed the ballroom, emerged onto yet another veranda and went back into the house by a different entrance. Ash remarked on the number of doors.

‘Fifteen external ones,’ said Lachlan. ‘I counted them once. Handy for Bob’s boyfriends—always an escape hatch somewhere. I’d look out of my window and see the latest bloke running away.’ ‘Does your bedroom door open in such a way that you can’t see who’s standing there?’

‘They all do in the old part of the house. Very practical, the ancestors: you can give the maid her instructions without having to look at her.’

A wonderful surprise waited in the kitchen: it was warm. Margaret sat by the Aga, peeling potatoes onto a sheet of newspaper. ‘We’re having mash for our tea,’ she told Ash. ‘With Thai green curry.’

Ash offered to peel potatoes—it would be a reason to linger in the warmth. When his offer was refused, he said firmly that he felt too weak to continue and sat at the table anyway.

‘Have you shown your friend the gun slits?’

‘His name’s Ash, Mum.’

‘I know that.’ Margaret turned to Ash. ‘My children think my mind’s going because of my old woman.’

Ash looked polite. Lachlan said, ‘Mum!’

‘When I wake up these days, there’s an old Aboriginal woman waiting,’ explained Margaret. ‘She gave me a scare the first time, but I look out for her now.’

‘It’s called hypnopompic hallucination,’ said Lachlan. ‘A kind of dream that carries over into waking.’

‘That’s what you say. But I spotted my old lady outside the bank last week when Bob took me into town. She was wearing a blue tracksuit.’ Margaret added the last pale potato to the bowl and dipped her fingers in the earthy water, saying, ‘Well? Are you going to show him the gun slits?’ She told Ash, ‘They’re in the old cold-storage room. It’s Bob’s office now. You should take a look before it gets dark.’

‘I’m not sure I’m up to that,’ said Ash. The phrase ‘cold storage’ had filled him with dread.

‘They’re just slits in the walls,’ said Lachlan. ‘For shooting at marauders. In case there were escaped convicts about. Or blackfellas.’

Ash said, ‘I thought Butcher’s Creek had taken care of one of those problems.’

‘Oh, you know about that? Well, you see, a shepherd was found speared,’ said Margaret. ‘So whole families were slaughtered at the creek in retaliation.’

‘You know there’s no actual historical record of a massacre, Mum.’