Читать книгу The Life to Come - Michelle De Kretser - Страница 12

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 86 percent 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 realization 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 mud-brick 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-colored 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 pin-striped shirt.

When she discovered that he came from Sri Lanka, Cassie inquired 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 realized 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 harbor 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 blond 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, 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” in his book Mobility and Modernity in a Transnational Age. Ash’s father was a GP, his mother a gynecologist. 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 realized 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 gray 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 an asphalted 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 recognized 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 e-mails 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-colored 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, pin-tucked 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 shoulder blades, 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 lambs’ wool 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 realized 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 e-mailed Ash on the day he left: “Australians are hardworking 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. Hardworking 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 hat. 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 colorful 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 farther 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 e-mail 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 pajamas. 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 woolen 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 remodeled 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 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.”

“My husband’s grandfather was alive when I first came here,” said Margaret to Ash. “He told me all about it. It was spoken about openly when he was a boy. Mind you, I always thought there was Aboriginal blood in my husband’s family. You’ve only to look at Lachlan.”

Ash looked at Lachlan: milk and ginger, sanitary blue eyes.

Standing behind his mother, Lachlan tapped the side of his head. He opened the fridge and peered inside, saying, “Is it too early for a beer? Do you want one, Ash?”

“I think that’s what my old woman comes to tell me. You can say she’s a dream. But another word for a dream that recurs is ‘truth.’”

“Bob still hard at it?” asked Lachlan, pulling the ring off a can. He told Ash, “There’s a downward spiral of genetic selection on most family farms. The smart kid goes away, the dumb one stays home and manages the property. Luckily, it happened the other way around with us.”

Margaret said, “This kitchen was the front room in the original homestead. If you go over to that window and look out, you’ll see Bob’s office. Of course, the gun slits are on the other side.”

Ash felt obliged to comply. A low building with a hipped roof stood across the yard. The old glass in the kitchen window was faintly rippled. The child who had appeared at Ash’s door strolled across this cockeyed view. Ash saw Margaret at ten: the straight hair chopped off at the tips of the ears, the triangular face. The eyes were different: not the grandmother’s hooded blue but a shallow, creaturely yellow. They looked directly at Ash. The child was holding something—an apple? an iced bun? a cricket ball?—that Ash couldn’t quite identify. It displayed a semicircular white scar. Ash thought that he had never seen anything as unnerving as the conjunction of that mauled missile and the small brown hand.

After dinner, Lachlan came to Ash’s bedroom to take away his tray. He said, “I can remember when it became fashionable to have a convict in the family tree. All the amateur genealogists hoped to find one. Now you get people who dream up an Aboriginal ancestor. Is it progress? Or another kind of stealing to persuade ourselves we’re legit?”

They were driving back through the not-landscape when Ash saw the wardrobe from his room. It stood in a paddock, upright and empirical and empty: a survivor. What was horrible was that the wardrobe was the Ashfield Tamil. No one else knew this, only Ash, and he was not allowed to tell. He woke to a delirious magpie and a distant shout: “Man up, Stevie!” That would be Bob, calling encouragement to her daughter or her dog.

The first thing Ash had bought in Sydney was a heater. Three or four times a week, Cassie and Ash would have dinner in a restaurant before going back to Ash’s warm flat. There was a smell there—also detectable on the stairs—that was very strong in the built-in cupboards: a musty smell, but pleasant, like old apples and loam. Ash and Cassie would drink vodka in bed, tell jokes, show off a little to each other. These hours were dedicated to the business of bodies but strayed easily into myth. The flat became their castle, the city was transformed into a forest, the preserve of bears; a stranger arrived with urgent messages from the emperor and was turned away at the gate. At different moments of their affair, each of them felt it: the sense of timelessness and fate that underwrites old tales.

In the morning, Cassie liked to climb the stair to the tower. She claimed it was for the view, trying to conceal her fascination with the room: the books, the journals, the printouts, the piles of student essays. The framed Constructivist prints on the wall were of no interest, as they belonged to the old professor. On Ash’s desk, an upturned lid held paper clips and a staple remover. Cassie swiveled slowly on an ergonomic chair. There was something here that held the key to Ash—something more intimate and revealing than the mouth guard he wore to keep from grinding his teeth in his sleep. She carried a book stuck with markers downstairs. “Why are some of the Post-its yellow and others orange?” she asked.

“I ran out of yellow ones,” said Ash, just out of the shower.

At that moment Cassie came close to seeing that he was only an instrument in her quest, which was really for a system and an answer. How was she to live? The riddle was crucial and therefore hard to unlock. She believed that Ash had it under control—this had to do with the white split of his grin.

Spring came like a wind in sudden warm gusts. Underneath the air remained cool. “The bottom of the air is fresh,” said Ash, remembering a phrase acquired on a school trip to France. How pleasing to find life fitting itself so smoothly to words! On a hot October Sunday, he brunched beside the ocean—its pomp and flash!—and risked a swim at Coogee; the sunny Pacific, too, harbored cold depths.

With the improvement in the weather came evenings when Ash walked up the hill to Cassie’s place in Glebe. But drafts and chilly lino weren’t all that he had to contend with there. Cassie rented two second-story rooms at the back of a Victorian house. One of them was really a wide balcony that had been enclosed to make a sunroom. That was where Cassie and Ash ate, on mismatched chairs at a table by a row of clear-paned louvres that sliced up the view. The sunroom was Cassie’s study: her laptop was always open on the table, beside a pile of books. When Cassie served a meal, she never bothered to clear the table, but simply pushed the paraphernalia of work to one side. The resulting juxtaposition of food and books worked on Ash like a stray lash floating in an eye. One day Cassie had left a hefty volume propped spine-up like a tent. Ash hadn’t treated a book like that since the age of seven. Coming upon it, his father had shouted, “You will break its spine!” as if Ash were torturing a kitten. His father’s anger was always connected to the idea of waste. It could be traced to an austere past when a light shining in an empty room was a bill mounting up, books were for the lucky, and no one left anything on their plate. His father would often remark that when he was a boy, whatever food there was in the house was kept locked up—once it was half a packet of biscuits.

Cassie usually made pasta and a salad for dinner, but one evening she produced a feast. A recessed space at the top of the interior staircase had been fitted out as a kitchen that Cassie shared with the other tenant. She went to and fro between this dingy nook and the sunroom, returning twice with a laden tray. She laughed at Ash’s amazement—she had been cooking for days, she said. Surely, thought Ash, it would have been a simple matter to clear the table first? Vegetable curries, a bowl of dhal, an array of pickles and glutinous chutneys encroached on the streamlined laptop, the right-angled books—they threatened knowledge with stickiness and slop. Ash wouldn’t allow himself to remark on this; he believed in the separation of powers. He had intense, almost violent feelings about Cassie’s body, which he entered every few days. But he wouldn’t ask her to tidy her table, or make a move to clear it himself—he would not be masculinist or proprietorial. And it had to be said that the change from pasta to lentils and vegetables was a relief. It was obvious that Cassie could eat whatever she wanted without affecting the hollows under her hip bones, but Ash had begun to count calories of late. When he had first seen his baby sister, Ash had fleetingly wondered how many more siblings there would be. His stepmother was still in her thirties and had hips like a Soviet peasant—a Soviet peasant was what she had been born, after all. Ash saw his inheritance dwindle with the appearance of each new little Fernando: he envisaged a procession of them, all with serene, Madonna faces and backsides like sideboards. The baby couldn’t possibly have guessed what was on Ash’s mind but began to scream anyway. She was twelve now, and Ash’s inalienable paternal inheritance had finally come down to him intact: the makings of a potbelly.

When his plate was empty, Ash said, “Wow! That was absolutely delicious!”

“Have more—there’s heaps.”

About to help himself, Ash recoiled before the aptitude of dhal to splash. The bowl that held the curried lentils was a shallow one; already, the table around it was flecked. Ash’s hand hovered, brown as a hawk. Then he chose fried eggplant as a safer bet.

“Don’t you like the dhal?” asked Cassie. She slid the dish forward, to Ash’s alarm. “I followed the recipe exactly. But obviously leaving out the Maldive fish.”

Ash assured her that the dhal was terrific. “Everything is. But I absolutely couldn’t eat another thing.”

Cassie helped herself to wine. Her expression as she drank was particularly aloof. He had disappointed her, Ash saw. But why? Their conversation seemed inoffensive yet at cross-purposes, like her clashing chairs. Cassie had told him the story of her childhood, describing the rain forest and the way it rained. She had been traveling in South America when her parents sold their mud-brick house and the acres in which it stood, and moved to a coastal town. Cassie didn’t say, The minute my back was turned; but Ash understood that betrayal was involved. She had become a visitor in a museum, said Cassie, by which she meant that the near past had turned mythical and remote. Its glassed-off exhibits made up a kingdom that she had imagined would last forever. The name of her museum was Time, but she was still young enough to believe that everything that happened to her was unique. “Exhibit A,” she said, showing Ash a framed photograph of a lush valley bridged with a rainbow. It was nothing like Yukkendrearie. But now, sitting among the ruins of their banquet, Watch out! said Ash to Ash. This pliable girl was a product of the real Australia. There was the heedless way she treated books. No striding up hills in a hat, Ash warned himself. Cassie, too, might prove unimaginable. She might turn out to be nothing like porridge, not even porridge with salt.

Cassie arranged to meet Pippa at a bookshop. She found her in the Australian section, a mazy arrangement in a poorly lit area near the back. Pippa emerged, hissing, “They have exactly one copy of my novel. I turned it face out.”

In the place that had the best coffee that side of Parramatta Road, Pippa asked, “So how’d you go the other night? Did you make the pumpkin curry in the end?” Pippa was an amazing cook. She put on dinners for twelve that involved lemons she had preserved. It was Pippa who had recommended the Charmaine Solomon cookbook that Cassie had consulted to prepare her feast.

“I couldn’t go veggo for anyone,” went on Pippa. Her sharp little face turned pensive. “But I guess you got used to all those chickpeas growing up.”

Pippa and Cassie had met at high school up north. Cassie was one of the few people in Sydney who knew that Pippa had once been called Narelle. Pippa had filed the application to change her name on her eighteenth birthday. She said, “No one called Narelle’s ever going to win the Booker.” Even before that, even when Pippa and Cassie shut themselves into their bedrooms and sobbed because River Phoenix was dead, Pippa had known that she was going to be a writer. The clarity Pippa brought to her objectives was one of the things Cassie envied about her. Cassie was twenty-nine, and the future, as she saw it, remained uncontrollable and vague. She was afraid of being twenty-nine. It was much worse than thirty, the ax hovering before it fell.

She said, “I don’t think Ash liked the dhal.”

“Too salty, maybe? Or not salty enough? Lentils can be tricky,” said Pippa. The offhand way she spoke told Cassie that Pippa didn’t care for the sound of Ash. As if to confirm it, Pippa asked, “So when do I get to meet the great man?”

“It’s early days still,” said Cassie. It was three months. Cassie and Ash only saw each other alone, never with other people; Cassie told herself that what they wanted from each other didn’t involve other people. To counter Pippa’s expression, Cassie told her about something that had happened the previous week. Ash and Cassie were heading to the city on a bus. They had risen for their stop when a woman shouted, “Speak English, you fucken boat jumpers!” This was directed at two African men, an old one and a younger one, talking quietly to each other. Ash and Cassie got off the bus, and Cassie said, “How awful. I should have said something. I’m so sorry.”

Ash replied, “Oh, that woman was probably afraid that anyone speaking a foreign language was insulting her.”

He was capable of that, of surprising grace. It struck Cassie as such generosity of spirit that it couldn’t fail to impress. However, all Pippa said was, “‘Boat jumpers’ is pretty good.” She took a notebook from her bag and wrote down the phrase. Reading upside down, Cassie saw: “the possibility of being bold, confident, and fun.” Pippa had underlined this twice. She put her notebook away and said, “Why don’t you guys come to dinner on Friday?”

“Ash is at a conference in Canberra this week,” said Cassie. “How’s Matt?”

“Good. Hey, listen: George. You know he’s back in Melbourne, right? The latest is his mother’s bought him a warehouse apartment in Fitzroy.”

“That’s nice.” Cassie wondered if she would have a baby with Ash. She tried to picture the baby’s face—it was beautiful, she knew. If a thirty-five-year-old man didn’t have children, did that mean he didn’t want them or that he would be eager to become a father without delay?

“Obviously, I didn’t hear that from George,” went on Pippa. “You know how guarded he is. He calls it ‘private.’ But one of my Melbourne mates told me.”

Cassie stirred herself to ask, “How’s the difficult second novel going?”

Soon after Pippa and Cassie moved to Sydney and their respective universities, Pippa had become involved with a guy called Vince. When they broke up, Vince would stand outside her house, crying. Pippa called this “stalking”—why couldn’t Vince see that it was over and move on? Dumping Vince was another thing Pippa had known all along that she would do. Cassie wondered what it took to be loved so grandly, so operatically. She helped Pippa load Vince’s paintings into her car; Pippa said she was returning them so that Vince could sell them or reuse the canvases. To fling Vince’s work in his face seemed an ingenious cruelty to Cassie. But when she protested, Pippa said, “The alternative is the paintings go out in the rubbish—or do you want them?” Cassie had to admit that she didn’t. Pippa pulled down her bedroom blind and said, “Vince can cry on demand. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s his party trick.” In that same calm, reasoning tone, she had once told Cassie, “Vince is a brilliant kisser.” Cassie peeped around the edge of the blind and saw Vince in the street, his hair and the trees streaming—the rain, at least, was not any kind of trick. Pippa was quite plain, with no figure to speak of and a mouth crowded with teeth, but Cassie couldn’t persuade herself that any boyfriend of her own would wait in a downpour, without an umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of her. Against her will, it became a standard by which she measured men. Ash wouldn’t do it, she thought, stirring her coffee while Pippa talked about her book. At once she thought of things Ash did do and was shot through with delight. She was almost unnaturally happy that year and she was a girl with a great capacity for joy. When Cassie read of war and suffering and children without enough to eat, she knew that she had no right to happiness and would try to reject the sensation. But it welled up again, natural and persistent, at the sight of clouds chasing each other, or the first wave of scented mock-orange in the street. When that happened, time receded and the world shrank to a rainbow-hung valley that Cassie could frame and keep close. The kelpies vanished and the snakes, and the death-dealing spiders in the toilet. Ash became another version of Cassie’s gentle parents: an older, wiser person whom she scrutinized and loved.

The Ashfield Tamil said, “Those Indians are selling frozen paneer cheap. But you can be assured that everything I stock is highly fresh.” He was following Cassie around the shop because she could never find what she wanted. This was partly because the shelves were stocked according to an elusive logic—why were the dried chilies beside the tinned ghee rather than with the chili powder?—and partly because Cassie rarely had a specific purchase in mind. When preparing for her Sri Lankan feast, she had shopped according to a list of ingredients copied from Charmaine Solomon, and was still plentifully provided with things like turmeric and cinnamon sticks. On subsequent visits, she allowed herself to be guided by the Ashfield Tamil. “Sandalwood soap?” he would suggest. “Desiccated coconut?” His gray hair, flattened with something like oil, was combed back from his forehead in a style Cassie associated with young men setting off to fight for the Spanish Republic; it brought old, lost causes to mind.

In the far corner of the shop, a door led to the storeroom. A length of reddish cloth banded with gold that might have been sari fabric hung in front of the door. The shopkeeper noticed Cassie looking at it. “My wife made the curtain,” he said. “A door without a curtain is like a person without clothes.” His oiled hair gave off an odor as he stood beside Cassie in the narrow aisle between the shelves. That top note was followed by the smell of his scalp. Cassie was unable to decide whether these scents were unpleasant or exotic.

“My curry-leaf plant died,” she said. “Do you think I overwatered it?”

“What to do?”

Relaying this to Ash, Cassie mimicked the gesture that accompanied the Ashfield Tamil’s stock phrase—the wrist twisted sharply, “like a spin bowler.” She also said, “His shoes don’t go with the rest of him. They’re the kind with Velcro fastenings.”

“They’re cheaper,” said Ash. He was too polite to add, Obviously.

The shopkeeper wasn’t a refugee, Cassie told Ash. Two of his children had migrated to Sydney, and he had followed with his wife. “So it was quite easy for you to come here?” Cassie had asked, pleased. She clung to an idea of Australia as a place where kindness prevailed over expediency. It had rarely been true in her lifetime, but was one more creed that had emerged from the rainbow valley, like the belief that the human race would tire of shopping. The Ashfield Tamil repeated, “Easy,” in a neutral tone as if hearing the word for the first time. Cassie remembered something her Viennese grandmother used to say: “The worst thing is, we are required to be grateful.”

Cassie always came back from the Spice Mart with another segment of the shopkeeper’s “story”—that was what she called it when talking to Ash. The Ashfield Tamil had three sons. The middle one was still in Sri Lanka, although his parents pleaded with him to leave. He was a teacher in a seaside town; in Australia, he would have to drive a taxi or clean hotels like his brothers. “What to do?” asked his father, and Cassie echoed him, twisting her wrist. Whenever she mentioned the Tamil, Ash remembered his dream of the wardrobe. Cassie’s interest in the man mystified him. To Ash, people were not figures in a story but subjects in history. He was familiar with the historical sequence that had brought a Tamil civil servant from Sri Lanka to the counter of a shop in the west of Sydney.

When he said something along these lines, Cassie, postmodernly tutored, replied pertly, “Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?”

“Not really,” said Ash.

If someone had informed Ash that Cassie thought of him in conjunction with the shopkeeper, he would have been merely incredulous. No brain, however feverish, would ever place Ash in a paddock, not even disguised as furniture and in a dream. Yet the connection persisted in Cassie’s mind, not just because the two men were the only Sri Lankans she knew, but because she secretly believed that they had entered her life to alter its course. Her relations with each had an atmosphere of inevitability. She was aware that these fateful beings were partly her own invention, but that didn’t diminish their power.

As if he had peered into her thoughts, Ash told her, “Your Ashfield friend dreams of improvement—all immigrants do. You and I, on the other hand, would like to be more fully what we are. The fulfillment of the will is an old aim, the fulfillment of the heart a modern one.” The purpose of this lesson was to point out an unbridgeable gulf, as deep as history, with the Tamil on one side and Cassie and Ash on the other.

Cassie said, “I’m so happy I was born.” Ash feared that she had heard only “You and I” and “the fulfillment of the heart.” She lay naked on top of her cold bed. It was past midnight, but Ash was not to join her yet. She said, “I want you inside me, but I want to imagine it first.” That was just silly. Ash felt himself vaguely stirred by the shell-pink luster between her parted legs, but what remained uppermost in his mind was the meeting he had to attend at nine the next morning. Cassie was an overgrown child whose emptiest make-believe had been labeled “creativity” by her parents. In Ash’s view, that indulgence was directly responsible for Cassie’s grubby habit of bringing home scraps of paper that had been written on and discarded in the street. They were stored in a tin whose germy contents she had spread before Ash like treasure. He read, “Tickets. Facial. Jackie—card. Teabags, cheese, stock cubes, matches.” The list had been trodden on and bore the muddy imprint of a heel. Cassie believed that handwriting was disappearing, and that her gleanings would one day have the status of precious artifacts. She asked Ash, “Have you ever seen your little sister’s writing?” Her chin lifted slightly when she scored a point. Ash was reminded again of his mother. His future didn’t contain Cassie, he was sure of that.

Another thing that grated was her habit of referring to the shopkeeper as “the Ashfield Tamil.” Surely the man had a name! Then Ash thought, benevolently, She can’t pronounce it. He remembered his mother’s tongue twisting around Tamil names. Jeyarajasingham. Saravanamuttu. It would be something like that.

Ash didn’t know that on her first visit to the shop, Cassie had said, “My name’s Cassie.” The Ashfield Tamil received this as impartially as if she had said, “The chief export of New South Wales is coal” or “There are ten mammals, four birds, and thirteen fish on the list of critically endangered Australian animals.” As time went on, it was too late to ask his name—it would have embarrassed them both. By then he was greeting Cassie warmly, saying, “Welcome! Welcome!” even though she typically bought only a few inexpensive items. One day, when there was no more of Ash’s favorite mango chutney on the shelf, the Ashfield Tamil produced two jars set aside especially for Cassie, bringing them out from under his counter with a triumphant flourish.

“A very good brand,” he said. “MD is Marketing Department. Government guaranteed.”

When Cassie reported this to Ash, he said he found it strange that a Tamil would have faith in anything guaranteed by the Sri Lankan government. “Other than torture and extermination, that is.”

The shopkeeper confided his anxieties about his rivals to Cassie. The Indians had chosen their location with cunning. There were more pedestrians on the main street, and the Indian shop was also readily visible to drivers stuck in the sluggish river of traffic on Liverpool Road. Once, when Cassie had let three weeks pass before returning to him, the Ashfield Tamil asked, “Have you been going there?” The Indians sold packaged curries, he told her. “Highly convenient for young people.” Cassie took this to mean that he had forgiven her, although no disloyalty had occurred. He was as easily alarmed as a bird. When she stumbled over one of the giant packs of rice on the floor, he cried, “Please be careful! What will happen if you fall and break your leg? You will sue me!” Cassie didn’t take his fears about being ousted by the Indians seriously. Curiosity had taken her to their shop: a pastel-walled, air-conditioned box, where a girl whose plait was thicker than her wrist played with her phone and ignored Cassie. In fact, there was nothing she could have done for a customer, as the stock was brightly lit, rationally arranged, and clearly labeled. One shelf held an assortment of incense, but the shop smelled of nothing. Cassie, inclined by nature to hopefulness, felt confident that these antiseptic premises could pose no threat to the Ashfield Tamil’s chaotic, atmospheric cave.

One morning, there was an elaborate geometric pattern on the pavement at the entrance to the Spice Mart. It had been somewhat scuffed by feet. The Ashfield Tamil told Cassie that it was a kolam, drawn in rice flour by his wife. “She didn’t lift her hand once,” he said proudly, as Cassie surveyed the intricate design. A kolam brought prosperity and protected against evil spirits. “It also provides food for ants.”

“But it’s being destroyed,” protested Cassie, watching a woman wheel a shopping cart over the drawing.

“That is the way. My wife will make another one.” But Cassie never saw a kolam outside the shop again.

Cassie claimed that she could read auras. Ash stood against a white wall like a prisoner about to be shot. His aura was orange tinged with red, said Cassie. He was confident, creative, and sexually passionate. Ash smiled. She could also see flickers of gray, she went on. They signified guardedness. “A fear of loss.”

Her upbringing had left its mark in other ways. First thing every morning, before eating or drinking, Cassie swilled cold-pressed sesame oil around her mouth for twenty minutes. She said, “It’s an ancient ayurvedic practice that draws toxins from the body.” Ash, child of doctors, believed in antibiotics, vaccinations, flossing. Oil-pulling was a harmless eccentricity, like the olive-leaf extract Cassie gravely spooned into him at the first sign of a sore throat. She spoke mistily and reverently of self-sufficiency and sustainable living—what that amounted to, as far as Ash could see, was no heating and a row of potted, yellowing herbs.

Whenever they left her flat after dinner, to see a film or go for a walk, Cassie would leave the light on in the sunroom. “You’ve forgotten to turn off the light,” Ash’s father said one evening in Ash’s voice.

Cassie said, “I know I should,” but left the light on anyway. When they had walked some way from the house, she placed her palm on Ash’s spine, urging him to turn around. The house stood near the crest of a hill. Ash saw a long, golden rectangle suspended in the darkness. Cassie said that she liked to see it waiting there for her. “It reminds me of a ship.”

It clanged with idiocy, even to her ears. It was also only the least part of the truth. Her landlords, elderly Romanians, lived in terror of assassins, informers, vampires, and that shadowy, tentacular, punishing entity, the state. Fifty years earlier, a baby had died of hunger, so now no one was granted access to the ground floor of her parents’ house—they might steal all the food. The Romanians’ tenants had to come and go by means of an external wooden staircase that Cassie called Cockroach Mansions, accessed from the rear of the house. The garden there, once a formal square, had got away from the old people: it was shrubby, bird-haunted, wild. Cassie feared it at night and was ashamed of her fear. When she first moved to Sydney, she had seen the security bars on windows and laughed at the cages in which city people lived. Then a girl she knew was raped by an intruder. Cassie no longer dreamed about it, but she turned her rings so that the stones faced inward and switched on the sunroom light when going out after dark. Why not say all this to Ash as they walked down the hill? She realized that she wanted to appear enameled, unassailable. She held his arm tightly. They had no past, so she was obliged to look to the future. There she had just come face-to-face with an Ash who could harm her—it was as if a steel curtain had descended to divide them.

Pippa’s e-mail said: “Matt and I are going to Bali for eight days. I’ve finished my first draft: reward! Would you like my car while we’re away?” Cassie scrolled down to the PS, which was where Pippa always buried what she really wanted to say. She read: “Whenever George is asked to name an Australian writer he admires, he says, ‘Christina Stead’ or ‘Patrick White.’ The safely great, the safely dead. Where is his support for his fellow writers? I heard him on Radio National the other day. The interviewer called his novel a masterpiece.”

The car was an ancient white Peugeot, liable to stall on hills. There was no air-conditioning, so Cassie drove with the windows down. She steered the heavy machine carefully around curves, proud of her thin, strong arms, picturing herself at the helm of a boat if a sea-scented northeasterly was in.

One afternoon, she was driving through Annandale with Ash when he asked her to pull over. It was a sticky, overcast day, the kind of weather that turned him contemplative, and he hadn’t been saying much. He climbed out and stood with his back to the car. Along that part of Johnston Street the houses were perched high, above a long retaining wall. Ash looked at the big sandstone blocks in the wall, which was inset with an iron gate behind which steps led to the house above. His lips felt wrinkled. He waved vaguely at his surroundings as Cassie came around the car to join him. The shadow of old events lay across him. How was he to explain that the humidity, the massive, grimy stones, and the trees in the gardens overhead had caused time to run backwards? For the rest of his days, Ash would believe that he now said, “I thought I was in a place I visited long ago, a place I dream about.” In fact, he remained silent. Cassie saw that he needed something, so she gave him her hand. It felt as dry and papery as real life to Ash.

At Cassie’s monthly meeting with her supervisor, Leanne explained that Cassie’s discussion of Shirley Hazzard’s fiction was unsatisfactory. While remaining perfectly still, Leanne could make her face go bigger and her eyes shrink. Since taking up her role as director of the Centre, she had seemed brusquely unimpressed by Cassie’s work. Cassie assumed, humbly, that this was because Leanne now had more glamorous and sweeping responsibilities to Australian literature than the supervision of her thesis. “Admiration is a problematic starting point for analysis,” went on Leanne. “I have to say how surprised I am that you haven’t grasped that by now.” The thing about Leanne was that she had a low, scented voice, excellent for conveying disappointment. It pointed out that one of Hazzard’s stories sinned in implying that a former colony’s efforts to modernize might entail painful consequences for its citizens—Cassie had failed to take the writer to task for this.

From the edge of her chair, Cassie said, “But what if she was right?” The jacaranda across the quad was in flower. A group of tourists could be seen through the window, photographing one another in front of the tree, giggling and adopting rock-star poses. Cassie, too, found a kind of freedom in the luminous purple blur. She said, “I mean, life in developing countries might have been as awful after independence as before—just differently awful.” What was in her mind was something Ash had told her: that Sri Lanka, in the 1970s, was given over to national socialism. “Small ‘n,’ small ‘s,’” said Ash. “But not too far a stretch.”

Leanne said, “I expect you to interrogate the colonialist point of view, Cassie, not take it over.” She began to go through Cassie’s bibliography, finding fault. But her face had returned to its normal dimensions, for it was gratifying to have identified an ethical slippage. The previous summer, when Leanne still seemed to have time for Cassie, she had confided that she intended to take up rowing—she even invited Cassie to join her. Nothing came of the invitation, but Cassie noticed that something had sharpened her supervisor’s cheekbones. Leanne’s hair, freshly hennaed, chimed with her statement lipstick—any one of these things by itself could have made Cassie feel small and inept. Her supervisor’s old, kind voice asked, “Is everything all right? It’s easy to get caught up in things that carry you out of your depth.” Cassie took this to mean that she was being informed she wasn’t cut out for academic life. Leanne was staring across the desk very intently, and Cassie looked away with a slight frown. Leanne sighed. “You’re still very young,” she observed. It was the worst thing she could have said.

Cassie came away with a list of reference works about post-

colonialism. In the corridor, the Lawson specialist was just coming out of his room. He asked Cassie what she was working on. When she told him, he said, “Hazzard’s no good. Sentimental, women’s magazine fiction. You’re wasting your time.” Cassie’s bright face among all the closed, dark doors was a reminder of the last graduate student he had attracted, several years ago, a porcelain virago who attacked “the symbolic masculinity of the bush ethos” with cold brilliance. What the Lawson specialist really couldn’t forgive was that in order to refute her arguments he had been obliged to dip into, and occasionally even read, Luce Irigaray.

Cassie went on her way, round-shouldered as if she were protecting her chest. In the quad, she sat on a wall and looked up into the jacaranda. She saw that the short upper lip of each blossom was bent back to display an opaque white tongue. Light striking there was deflected outward, creating the tree’s radiant effect. The jacaranda was itself, but so vibrantly itself that it seemed charged with hidden meaning—it could have been a sentence composed by Hazzard. Cassie took out her notebook and wrote:

The Problem with Shirley Hazzard

1. She is a woman.

2. She is a great artist.

3. She is fearless.

4. She has stayed away instead of coming home to be punished for 1–3.

When she reported her conversation with Leanne to Ash, he replied that he wasn’t surprised. “Every Friday afternoon, Leanne shuts herself into her office and reads Who. Cover to cover, every week without fail. She’s a perfect example of a type in the humanities, caught between theory and trash. Of course Shirley Hazzard’s beyond her.” Hazzard was the one Australian novelist Ash had read (under the impression that she was American).

“How do you know what Leanne reads?” asked Cassie, thrilled.

“A library meeting got shifted to Friday lunchtime at short notice. Leanne sent apologies. I bumped into her later on, and she confessed why she hadn’t turned up.” Ash went on, “The problem with Leanne is that she’s invented a story about Asians and wants to stick us in it.”

Cassie was about to tell him that Leanne had objected to Hazzard’s depiction of a North African country, not an Asian one. Then it struck her that it was the first time she had heard Ash refer to Asians as “us.”

He said, “You mustn’t repeat what I’ve told you, obviously.”

She wondered which disclosure had alarmed him.

It was summer, a season that lasted from the beginning of Novem-ber to the end of March. Light fell in yellow sheets. The true Sydney weather set in, damp and hot. Cassie’s velvet dresses had given way to denim miniskirts and limp floral shifts. She told Ash, “Summer Hill’s a size-twelve suburb. All the women there have two kids, and the secondhand shops are full of the clothes they can’t fit into anymore. That’s where I come in.” The shifts, and the sleeveless cotton tops that showed her bra straps, were easier to remove than the lilac blouse but made her seem ordinary. Ash spent November marking essays in his tower. A student quoted Marx: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” It was an observation that had long exercised Ash. It was self-evidently true. But did it matter?

Pollution veiled the city in brownish gauze and obscured Ash’s view of Botany Bay. But if he craned his neck he could see a jacaranda flowering in a park. By the middle of the month the tree was exactly poised between fullness and decay. Ash saw a pillar that ran between a carpet and a cloud, both the color of Cassie’s blouse. There were jacarandas in his street as well; Ash’s shoes slipped on petals after a storm. One day he saw a wondrous thing: a car made out of flowers. Drawing closer, he realized that fallen blooms had covered an old Holden set on blocks under a tree. Ash had received an interesting e-mail that morning. At the conference in Canberra, he had met an Iranian-Canadian anthropologist. She had skin like an apricot. Now she had wangled him an invitation to a symposium in the States. Ash was thinking about that.

Cassie was thinking about Christmas. She was sure there would be invitations for Ash: to Yukkendrearie and the Hunter Valley and an assortment of celebrations in Sydney. Cassie hoped that he would go north with her to her parents. Pippa, to whom she confided this wish, said, “Parents and Christmas—sounds like the full catastrophe.” Pippa’s aura was invariably the muddy green that signified professional resentment and low self-esteem. She had met Ash at last, at a harbor bar one evening. Ash and Cassie got there first, and Ash ordered champagne: the real deal, French. Pippa arrived alone, perfume-first. Her hair, newly styled, was combed over her forehead. “It’s a pixie cut,” said Pippa, touching it in answer to Cassie’s compliment. Ash kissed her on both cheeks. Cassie knew that Pippa would remember this display of middle-class pretension; an evil teacher in her first novel had been in the habit of campaigning for animal rights and kissing everyone she met. The Moët, too, would be a black mark.

Pippa said, “Matt says hi and he’s so sorry. He got his dates mixed up—he has a school concert on tonight.” For Ash’s benefit, she explained that Matt was a music teacher. Pippa was wearing dangly earrings, and an intensely pink dress with straps that crossed at the back. Whenever Pippa got dolled up, Cassie was reminded of weddings in their country town: the frocks, hairstyles, and makeup that aspired to the social pages of provincial newspapers and whispered of tightly banked-down fear.

Ash informed Pippa that he intended to buy her novel and read it over Christmas. “Oh, please don’t feel you have to,” said Pippa. “You’ll probably hate it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you know. It’s a small book about a family. No one could call it a masterpiece.”

Ash was flummoxed by this, Cassie could tell. He had spent the best part of a year in Australia but still couldn’t read the signs that shouted, Reassure me, please! He said, “Tell me what I should read to really get a handle on Australian fiction.”

“Patrick White,” Cassie heard. “Christina Stead.” At the next table, backpackers were shouting with laughter and drinking beer. Cassie turned her head to look at the view. The view, like champagne, amplified every emotion that was offered to it. When Cassie turned back to the others, she saw that Pippa looked superb. Her neck and arms glowed. Ash mirrored her resplendence: his teeth gleamed, and his shirt. Pippa was telling him that she always kept a notebook to hand in which she recorded observations and snatches of conversation. “It’s a way of keeping my writing honest.”

“Do you know Cassie’s theory that handwriting is dying out?”

“The world is one amazement after another to Cassie,” said Pippa with airy treachery. “You know she was homeschooled until the age of twelve, right?”

That night, Cassie told Ash, “You’ve never asked me for suggestions about books to read.”

“Darling Cassie,” said Ash. He had recently begun to address her that way, she noticed, not just saying “Darling,” which might have suggested affection, but “Darling Cassie,” as if soothing a cantankerous child. She also noticed that the reflection from the bedside lamp hung in the window in a disturbing sort of way. It occurred to her that she had ended up drinking quite a lot of champagne. “Darling Cassie,” Ash went on, “did you hear me trying to talk to your friend about the elections? She said she couldn’t bring herself to vote for the Greens because the guy handing out their How to Vote cards looked like her father. Every conversation led back to her. A narcissist, like all artists.”

When Cassie called Pippa to find out what she thought of Ash, Pippa said, “If I found him in my bed I wouldn’t sleep in the bath.” It was a formula taken over from a young Frenchwoman who had taught at the girls’ school for a year, and still carried a corrosive charge of teenage contempt. Cassie could remember lying on her bedroom floor with Pippa’s head in her lap while they agreed that they didn’t have the same taste in men. By this they meant that Pippa was in thrall to the surly, pretty countenances of Duran Duran, while Cassie had discovered the Cure.

Cassie told Pippa, “You made quite an impression on Ash. He calls you an artist.” Early on in their relations, Cassie had hit on the strategy of dousing the envy that flickered up in her around Pippa with a stream of compliments. Even when the compliments were more or less fabrications, it worked. There remained the stark fact that Pippa was an artist and Cassie was a student. “Student” brought to mind something squidgy and malformed like a snail without a shell. Cassie took her phone into her bedroom and studied herself in the mirror as she asked Pippa’s advice about Christmas. Was long, straight hair timeless and classic or just boring? She was still undecided that evening when Pippa e-mailed her. Cassie never opened an e-mail from her friend without believing that it would contain magical remedies. This dated from their first year of high school when Pippa had mysteriously known the answer to everything: which bands it was safe to like, whether a French braid was tragic or cute. She had advised Cassie not to believe all the awful things she heard on the news. Then she told her different awful things.

“Yesterday I went over my first draft,” wrote Pippa. “Today I shredded the printout and deleted the files from my hard drive. I’ll have to start again from scratch but I feel like someone’s scraped me out with a spoon. I wish I could be a successful writer, because then I wouldn’t have to want to be a successful writer.” The PS said: “Matt always says he loves my writing but what does he know about books? You are so lucky to have an intellectual you can discuss your work with. Your parents will love Ash.”

Cassie thought about the boyfriends her parents had loved: the high school basketball star, the drummer, the student vet, the Chilean, the IT guy. Her parents hadn’t met the pastry chef (married) or the architect (married, coke addict), but no doubt they would have loved them, too. There remained the question of whether Ash would love her parents. At some point on Christmas Day, Cassie’s father would bring up the subject of her “Nazi grandmother.” He would play his Doobie Brothers CD after lunch. Cassie’s mother would pluck absentmindedly at the hair in her armpit. She would brew ostentatious quantities of red clover tea, and if that didn’t get Ash’s attention, she would talk about her night sweats at the breakfast table. A willow-hooped dreamcatcher would sway on its hook in defiance of Cassie’s lecture on cultural appropriation. And it was quite possible that the topic of ley lines would arise. What was certain was that before the day ended, her parents would sing harmonies on “Desperado.” Worst of all, they would hear Ash’s crystalline English vowels but see only his eyes; they would make up a story about the blameless, wounded children of unfortunate nations and stick him in it. Having concocted a victim, they would set out to rescue him; they had attempted it with the Chilean, sending him brochures about migrant services and tins of rocky, health-giving biscuits long after he and Cassie had split up. Cassie saw that she had been crazy to consider exposing these ridiculous, cherished innocents to Ash’s excellent manners. He would explain them to her afterward. He would say, “Darling Cassie, your parents exemplify a generation. They set out to make love and they ended up making money.” Then she realized that Ash didn’t know about the killing made from the sale of the rainbow valley to a health resort. The sentence passed on her parents was her own. Love had survived her judgment and it would survive his. Her natural buoyancy reasserted itself. She would cook a perfect dhal for Ash—she had practiced on friends and grown confident—and he would agree to spend Christmas with her parents.

Meanwhile, there were to be no secrets between them, so the next time she saw Ash, Cassie told him about the embarrassing fortune that would one day be hers. “Of course, I would have preferred Mum and Dad not to sell. But they believed they were doing the right thing by me. They don’t care about money for themselves.” Ash received this in silence. He had never met anyone who didn’t care about money—even the most unworldly found it useful for paying the rent. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the parents were not as naïve as the daughter. Ash had seen Cassie’s face when champagne fizzed in her glass or the first frangipani flowers appeared: it denied the existence of evil, the possibility of despair. Ash was conscious of a secret wish, so shameful he could hardly examine it even in private: that something would happen to wipe that expression from Cassie’s face for all time.

Cassie told the Ashfield Tamil, “I’m planning a special meal.” It was Friday morning. The Spice Mart should have opened at ten but was still shut when Cassie got off the train at half-past. She wandered up to Liverpool Road and went into a restaurant where she drank green tea. The restaurant had a smell Cassie remembered and disliked from a stopover in Hong Kong: it made her think of noodles cooked in dirty water. Stiff red ducks were strung across the window. She left after fifteen endless minutes, thinking, If he’s not there now, I’m going to the Indians.

The Ashfield Tamil switched on a light that was dimmer than the glowing day. He told Cassie that his journey to work involved a bus and two changes of train. The second train had stopped for forty-two minutes between stations—a rumor ran through the carriage of a body on the track. “What to do?” he concluded. He asked Cassie how long she had been waiting. Before she could answer, a couple laden with shopping came in, the woman in a blue sari. A conversation began in what Cassie supposed was Tamil: a language as rounded and floaty as bubbles. The Ashfield Tamil tapped his chrome-plated watch. Cassie had a vision of him behind a desk, reprimanding a clerk who had spent too long at lunch. The clerk looked down and shuffled his sandals. The postmaster’s mouth was a thin, violet line that said, “Forty-two minutes.” His aura stood out clearly: its lemony hue announced that he was struggling to maintain control of the situation. The couple left without buying anything, and the Ashfield Tamil told Cassie, “They couldn’t wait. They went to the Indians.”

“They came here to tell you that?”

“They come every week,” he said, as if that explained anything.

Cassie was after fresh green chilies, pandan leaves, and raw cashew nuts. She also wanted palm sugar and cardamom pods. She trailed after the shopkeeper as he located these items for her, one by one. When he reached up to a shelf for the sugar, his sleeve slipped down, exposing the white tufts on his wrist. Cassie was still annoyed about the delay, and the sight increased her irritation—that narrow, womanish wrist looked like a bid for sympathy. The Indians’ prices were cheaper, she reminded herself.

The Ashfield Tamil stooped and retrieved a small packet that seemed to have slipped between shelves. “Muthu samba rice,” he said.

“I’ve still got heaps of basmati, thanks.”

“This is Sri Lankan rice. Very special.”

She inspected the white grains. The plastic packaging was slightly greasy to the touch, and some of the lettering had worn off.

“The last packet,” he said. “For your husband.”

“He’s my partner, actually.”

“What to do?”

On Saturday evening, there was a storm. When Ash was climbing Cockroach Mansions, the first plump drops arrived; he held out his palm to receive them. The whole of Glebe was gardenia-scented. Cassie appeared in the doorway, her toenails painted silver. She had darkened her eyelashes as well, and looked starey and judgmental. Ash said, “Warm rain!” and kissed her—how he adored this weather!

The lease drawn up by the Romanians forbade their tenants to remove so much as a dead twig from the garden, but Cassie had risen before dawn to steal gardenias from the laden shrubs. They gleamed in tumblers on the table, along the windowsill. Amazingly, the table, set for two, held only flowers, candles, and a bowl of pistachios. Cassie poured water from a jug, made of milky green glass and hand-painted with pink roses, in which ice cubes tapped.

Ash opened the wine he had brought. They clinked glasses as the room darkened and the wind grew huge. Cassie moved along the louvers, closing them as lightning began its epileptic jig. Thunder and the racket of rain on corrugated iron made conversation difficult. Standing at the window, Cassie and Ash drank wine and ate pistachios. Lightning produced one weirdly lit, arty still after another: the tinsel roof of the shed, the tattered banners of a banana palm. The gale was blowing the rain sideways and breaking it up into millions of tiny droplets, so that a horizontal stream, furious yet fine as mist, flowed past the tops of trees. Ash slipped an encircling arm around Cassie. Part of her face and the candle flames were reflected in the glass—they looked like pieces of heaven. Farther along, a branch was hitting against a pane. The scent of gardenias neither increased nor faded but merely drenched.

Cassie raised her voice over the din: “Anyone could be out there, watching.”

Ash said that he thought it unlikely.

“If I left you,” shouted Cassie, “would you stand in the rain without an umbrella hoping to see me?”

“Are you saying your old boyfriend is out there?” Ash tried to remember what Cassie had told him about her previous partner; surely she had painted a picture of a smart-arse who laughed at his own jokes, rather than the portrait of a lunatic?

“It was a hypothetical question.” She wanted to say: I would like to believe you were capable of it, that’s all.

Ash gestured at the apocalypse. “Darling Cassie—it would be suicidal.”

She said, “It’s OK, I know you wouldn’t do it.”

It was the moment of bafflement that arrived in all Ash’s dealings with women: a crystal filled up with smoke. He moved away from the windows as lightning returned to produce more shivery photographs. Now it was difficult not to imagine how the room would appear to someone looking in. The Ashfield Tamil was outside in the downpour, peering up at a beautiful girl who questioned him about his life as if it mattered—Ash was sure of it, for thirty seconds.

Cassie asked him—cheerfully, as if their last exchange hadn’t taken place—if he was ready to eat. Left alone, Ash refilled their glasses and gulped the contents of his. Cassie reappeared with a tray of dishes, went away, and returned with more. She said, “Everything’s still warm but won’t be for much longer. Start helping yourself while I get the rice.”

Ash set out all the dishes and placed the tray against a wall. He surveyed the banquet, wondering why, from time to time, Cassie lavished so much labor on a meal. Then his mind slid to a period during his own graduate student days in New England when he had smoked spliff after spliff while watching a videoed television drama set in a legal practice in Amsterdam. When the last tape ended, Ash watched the whole series again and then a third time. He was particularly taken with an episode in which one of the barristers defended a man accused of having sexual congress with a hen. The lawyer argued successfully that his client loved the bird, was gentle with it, and that no cruelty had occurred. Why should a man not desire a fowl? That struck Ash as both tender and profound. Weeks passed pleasantly. In the dead of night, he would wake in terror: the mountain of undone work weighed on his chest and it was difficult to breathe. But the next day, nothing was as pressing as the next episode and the next spliff. He concluded that Cassie’s cooking was another kind of displacement scheme elaborated to avoid working on her thesis. For much the same reason, she had recently attended a two-day St. John’s Ambulance first-aid course. She had said, “I might be able to save a life.” Ash, who knew that there was more to saving a life than preventing someone from choking on a fishbone, could have predicted Cassie’s fantasy. It was the kind of dream girls with clear, remote eyes could offer themselves because nothing ever happened to test it.

Cassie returned with a two-handled pan that she stood on a cork mat. She said, “It’s special muthu samba rice from Sri Lanka,” and lifted the lid. A stench that had been born in a sewer rose like a fog. Vanquished, the gardenias retreated. Ash had the presence of mind to hold a napkin to his nose. Cassie, a stricken statue, remained there clutching the lid. “It’s special,” she repeated. “From the Ashfield Tamil.” Her face wore its blind, uncaring look.

Ash took the lid from Cassie’s lifeless fingers and replaced it on the pot. He opened windows. The gale had died down to a stiff breeze. Cold air filled the room, spreading rather than dispatching the reek. One of the candles succumbed to the draft.

“Does muthu samba rice always smell like that?” asked Cassie. She sat down—abruptly, as if an invisible intruder had whacked her behind the knees.

“How on earth would I know?” Ash added, “I doubt it.”

“Could it have been off? Can rice go off? I thought it just went weevilly.” Cassie was turning her rings. She closed her hands so that the jewels dug into her folded fingers.

Ash joined her at the table. They faced each other across a spread of cooling food. The spare chairs looked on like witnesses. Cassie should have made a move: to take the saucepan away, to make a fresh, odorless bowl of rice. She did neither of those things, but after a while began helping herself to curries—she couldn’t help it, she was hungry. She scooped food into her mouth with her eyes lowered over her plate. The tepid dhal was particularly delicious. Ash looked on in wonder. His face said, What is wrong with you Australians? You eat curries without rice, a barbarism. You fear being attacked by people you’ve killed. You stole their land for animals that you slaughter in their millions, when you don’t leave them to die by the side of the road. Your shamefaced paddocks— But Ash couldn’t go on, because another part of him wanted to uncurl in giggles. The candles and flowers, the stink! A dinner party gone wrong: the first-world definition of tragedy.

Across the table, Cassie’s white forehead was as defenseless as a rib. Controlling a smile, Ash looked away. Her books caught his eye: lined up on shelves, stacked on the floor. There were so many books, safe in a room where gardenias flared and the roof held through a storm. He thought soberly, She has no idea how lucky she is. It wasn’t an accusation but a recognition: Cassie was alone on her side of the gulf. On the other side, Ash stood shoulder to shoulder with the Ashfield Tamil, lashed by rain, transfixed by an enchanted girl whose notion of loss was a real estate deal that had made her a minor heiress.

Cassie looked up without lifting her head, checking out Ash through her blackened lashes; there was a tiny smear of yellow at the corner of her mouth. Ash knew that he would undress her before the evening ended. He would spend moments savoring the sight of her: the scene loomed plain as pornography, the girl’s pearly flesh, the man’s clothed, formal limbs. Ideally, she would be wearing a red bead necklace to set off her nakedness—there had been a Spanish girl who liked to do just that. Cassie’s hair was falling over her face. Ash scratched his neck. He began to help himself to food, not realizing that he was doing it. He saw the rest of his life: the books that would make his name, the solid comforts. He thought, I will die alone.

In retrospect, Cassie would look on the evening as a watershed, although nothing seemed to change at the time. She went on seeing Ash. It was accepted between them, without discussion, that they would be spending Christmas apart. On Cassie’s last evening in Sydney, Ash gave her an expensive French perfume that smelled like a rainy garden. Cassie gave him a copy of Pippa’s novel. If Ash received any Christmas invitations, he hadn’t accepted them. He said that he intended to spend the next two weeks writing a conference paper undisturbed.

Cassie looked out at the Pacific from her parents’ terrace in the north, and tears came into her eyes: she had seen Ash working alone in his tower in the hot, empty city. The old professor’s white walls were heartless. All Ash had for consolation was Australian literature. Cassie hunted down her mother’s copy of Pippa’s novel and skimmed it: “. . . kisses me good night . . . my honest forehead . . .

I notice . . . Caesar salad with free-range eggs . . . I answer . . . I am . . .

beautiful, glazed organic carrots . . . my father . . . I notice . . . my

honest toes . . . I whisper . . . my beautiful brother . . . I see . . . I

notice . . . moon rises like sadness . . . my honest . . . organic strawberries with balsamic . . .” Cassie’s tears flowed down her arms. What were they really for? Having asked the question, she was frightened of the answer. Her suffering was so intense, it never occurred to her that Ash might not share it. The possibility that he was indifferent to her absence couldn’t enter her mind—there was nowhere for it to go.

For the rest of her visit it went on like that: Cassie would be floating on her back, or lying in a hammock with a book, and she would start to cry. The tears dried as suddenly as they started—if anyone tried to talk to Cassie about them, for instance. A cousin with young children came to stay. Cassie’s tears dripped onto the baby’s bald head. The infant of rare, startling beauty she would have had with Ash appeared to her that night: he was a stout child running away across a yellow field. She checked her phone five or six times an hour. But the day before she returned to Sydney, she lost the phone on a beach. She had been back in the city for about a week when Ash e-mailed to say that he had been texting her. He asked if she would like to have dinner. Cassie discovered that her excessive tears had been preemptive: it was as plain as a plate that she didn’t want to see Ash again. She replied to him the next day, saying that she planned to do a lot of work over the summer. She sent him her love.

One evening some months later, Cassie ran into Ash in King Street; she was wearing a velvet dress the color of rubies, so it must have been after the season turned. The scene came back to her long afterward, when years had passed. So much had changed since that encounter with Ash that Cassie could no longer remember what they had said to each other or whether she had gone back to his place for the night—it was quite possible, it was a period of idle buccaneering when she counted off men like someone climbing a ladder and keeping a tally of rungs. Ash had come into her thoughts now, as she was driving away from a medical center, because her car radio was telling her that the Australian government would be returning yet another group of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees to their executioners. Cassie felt profoundly ashamed, but not sad: sadness had been impossible from the moment her doctor confirmed what Cassie already knew. She had texted her husband, but he was in a meeting all morning. She wanted to call her parents, but it didn’t seem fair to talk to them first. She was gripped by a longing for the smell of the house in which she had grown up: sandalwood, mildew, bergamot, rooms in which log fires had burned the previous night.

The news gave way to indie pop, and Cassie’s mind drifted, as of old, from Ash to the Ashfield Tamil. After the muthu samba dinner, she had never returned to the Spice Mart; she bought curries in cardboard boxes at the supermarket now. But presently, arriving at an intersection, she gave in to a whim.

It was a roasting summer day, blue booming overhead. Cassie parked under a tree in a side street, and made her way on foot along Liverpool Road. She passed the Indian shop: a girl still sat at the counter, playing with her phone. Cassie went on, past a Thai massage parlor and a Korean butcher, past restaurants proposing pho. She asked herself what story she could offer the Ashfield Tamil to explain her disappearance. She saw him tapping his watch: “Nine years,” he said sternly. She wondered if he would recognize her when she walked in.

The Spice Mart sign remained in place, but the shop behind it was empty. A “For Lease” notice was stuck to the window. Cassie put her hands on either side of her face and peered through the plate glass: a sheet of plastic packaging and a copy of the local newspaper lay on the floor. Without its curtain, the door to the storeroom looked naked. Cassie thought she could detect traces of a geometric pattern on the concrete, but that might have been only dust.

There was a travel agency on one side of the shop, and on the other a stair that led to a kickboxing gym. Cassie went into the travel agency, where a woman was speaking Vietnamese on the phone. The young man at the other desk said that the Spice Mart had closed at the end of December—he didn’t know what had become of the owner. His colleague finished her phone call and looked across at Cassie. “I think he’s gone to Seven Hills,” she said. “Or maybe Blacktown? Somewhere out west. Cheaper rents.”

Cassie said, “I used to be his customer. A long time ago.”

The woman nodded. There was nothing else to say. The phone on her colleague’s desk began to ring. She smiled at Cassie and asked, “When are you due?” Startled, Cassie glanced down at her stomach. The travel agent said, “You’re not showing yet. But I can usually tell.”

In the street, Cassie realized, I’ll never know what became of his middle son. A flower of nausea opened and rose within her without warning. She leaned against a tiled wall until it passed. Her phone rang—it was her husband. Cassie answered the call, thinking, I must tell Ash.

As it happened, a snowstorm over New Jersey brought power outages, and Ash didn’t read Cassie’s e-mail until late the next day. She wrote: “The kolam kept his business safe all these years.” Ash came to the end of her message and smiled: she was still telling him a story about the Ashfield Tamil. Ash and Cassie had kept in touch, e-mailing each other now and then, and there was Facebook, of course. Ash knew that Cassie had given up on Australian literature and now worked as a fund-raiser for a conservation group. He knew that her husband wrote speeches for a politician, and that she had cropped her hair—a mistake, judging from the photos on Facebook. He wondered if she still collected scraps of grimy writing and whether she had saved anyone’s life. He said her name aloud: it conjured the ugly stones on her fingers. He pictured her asleep on her continent of gum trees and flies. Why had she stayed there—why did any of them stay? The calm violence with which Cassie had cut herself free of him still had the power to stupefy Ash. Months afterward, she had come up to him somewhere in one of her bedraggled velvet dresses and flung her arms around his neck. Her eyes were chemical stars. It was plain to Ash that Cassie had always belonged with the Ashfield Tamil on the far side of the gulf: camouflaged, wrenched out of place and thrust into outlandish scenarios, those two would always be identifiably themselves. It had nothing to do with the will or the heart but with a talent for existence. Ash realized that he knew nothing about Cassie that mattered—did she still paint her toenails silver? He opened the folder called “Sydney” on his laptop. He was after a photo of Cassie, but the images were identified only by number. Ash found himself looking at a woman in a stripey T-shirt on the deck of a ferry; her blown hair was a red flag. It took him a minute to recall her name: Leanne. He reread Cassie’s e-mail: he was watching his fingers fumble at a lilac-blue loop. He remembered the cold breath of the houses. Cockroach Mansions returned, and an old car bridal with fallen flowers, and an afternoon when time streamed in reverse.

Ash hit Reply. He wrote with no corrections and without a pause.

“In August 1977, when I was nine, my father was working in a town in the North Central province of Sri Lanka. He had accepted a temporary appointment at the hospital there. My mother and I stayed in Colombo, where I came down with measles. When I was out of quarantine, I was sent north to convalesce, away from Colombo’s noise and pollution; my mother was to join me in a week or so. My father met me at the station, and we caught a taxi to his house, which was not far from the hospital. As the car passed the hospital compound, I noticed a boy who sat on a patch of grass just outside the gate, selling lottery tickets nailed to a stick. He was wearing only a pair of shorts, and I saw that his legs were twisted below the knee.

“The town, which had once been the capital of Sri Lanka, was famous for its ancient monuments. My father took me to see them at the first opportunity: colossal temples and palaces, and stone reservoirs of green water that were the remains of an ingenious system of irrigation. I grew bored pretty soon. The old city is spread out, and the day was overcast and moist. Despite the deep shade cast by the giant trees that stand along the roads and among the ruins, I felt thirsty and hot. Unused to having sole responsibility for me, my father had neglected to pack the thermos of iced, filtered water that accompanied my mother on our outings. I refused to drink king-coconut water, and there was no question of my consuming one of the unhygienic, violently colored sherbets sold in the street. My father gave in to my whining and we turned back. I could tell he was disappointed by my lack of enthusiasm for the history that lay around us, but all he said was that I was right not to overdo things while I was still convalescing.

“I was happier in my father’s cool bungalow. In those days there was no TV in Sri Lanka, and I would spend the morning reading in a planter’s chair with a tall glass of sugared lime juice at hand. I’d brought my favorite comics with me, and they were supplemented by an old storybook I found in the bungalow, a tale of derring-do called The Captain’s Revenge. I’ve forgotten most of it, but I know that the Captain was slim and plucky and always carried a dagger—sometimes between his teeth. When I grew tired of reading, I would go in search of the cook. He had a really majestic silver mustache, and he told me a ghost story about a water carrier who appeared at dusk and made his way with his cart to a spot near an outbuilding where a well had once stood. There was also a tale about a white dog that brought misfortune to whoever saw it. My parents were rationalists, and my father would certainly have put an end to the cook’s stories if they had come to his notice. But he would no doubt have been pleased to learn that the ruins we had visited together had made quite an impression on me. Although we’d spent no more than an hour among them, they had begun to invade my dreams. Night after night brought stupendous domes, flights of steps, tall stone figures, ancient trees whose massive branches formed archways through which I had to pass. That sounds alarming. In fact, I would wake from those dreams, in which I wandered among the ruins on grassy paths, filled with a tremendous sense of well-being.

“One morning, lolling about in my chair, I became aware of a commotion in the street. I went outside and down to the gate and looked down the street. People and vehicles were rushing through the junction with the main road. There was an odd smell—then I saw smoke rising from the direction of the shops. The cook appeared on the veranda and called me inside. He said there was ‘trouble with Tamil people.’ The phone started to ring, and I ran past the cook to answer it, sure that it would be my mother, who put a trunk call through to us every day. It was my father. He told me that there had been ‘an incident at the station.’ An ‘incident’: I was struck by the word, at once portentous and vague. My father said there was nothing to be concerned about, and that I was to stay indoors and do as the cook said. Then he asked to speak to the cook.

“My father didn’t come home for lunch that day. I pestered the cook for information, and at last he told me that when the Jaffna train pulled into the station that morning, a mob had boarded it and assaulted the Tamil passengers. The violence spread and escalated, and soon Tamil shops were being looted and Tamils attacked in their homes. Casualties were still streaming into the hospital, and my father expected to be there all day. The cook related these facts dispassionately and assured me that, being Sinhalese, we had nothing to fear.

“‘Why do people want to kill Tamils?’ I asked. ‘What have they done?’

“The cook considered this, smoothing his mustache. Even-tually, ‘They are not like us,’ he said, and went away.

“I felt intense excitement as I ate my rice and curries in solitary splendor in the dining room. The events unfolding outside had the unreality and glamour of the books I read. They would bring the test of courage I had always longed for—the Captain and Batman collaborated in the scenarios my imagination supplied. At the head of a daredevil band, I issued brutal orders: ‘Spare no one!’ ‘Holy smoke—stand back, you dogs!’

“In fact, time dragged, heavy and slow. I must have taken the siesta that had become routine when I was ill. The smell of smoke intensified as the day wore on. My sense of eager anticipation had vanished, and I felt aggrieved by my father’s prolonged absence. Self-pity, which lies close under the surface in children, took over. My mother’s failure to call exacerbated my sense of neglect. When I complained to the cook, he lifted the receiver and held it out to me: there was only silence, and I understood that the line was down. This often happened in Sri Lanka, so it seemed unimportant and increased my sense of injustice: my mother should have found a way around the problem. It was an endless day, characterized by grievances and tedium.

“That night, I was woken by a bustle. There were voices: a woman’s, a strange man’s. My father came into my room. When he saw that I was awake, he sat on my bed. ‘One of my colleagues and her husband have come to stay for a few days,’ he said.

“‘Why?’ I asked.

“‘Their house was set on fire.’ He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They were red with exhaustion. He said, ‘A lot of the medical staff, Sinhalese and Tamil, left in a rush. But Dr. Rajanathan is very brave. She insisted on staying and helping me. We’ve kept a skeleton service going.’

“I laughed. I saw bony figures bending over patients, tending their injuries. My father smiled. He told me that early the next day, I was to take the train to Colombo in the care of one of his Sinhalese clerical assistants. He touched my hand briefly and said, ‘Go to sleep now, son.’

“It was a time in my life when I was fascinated by the idea of character. I would scrutinize people I had heard described as ‘thoughtless’ or ‘stubborn’ or ‘generous,’ trying to discover those traits in their faces. I woke early the next day, eager to study brave Dr. Rajanathan, but she had already returned to the hospital. Her husband must have joined us for breakfast—I can’t remember him at all.

“On the way to the station, our taxi passed a truck full of soldiers traveling slowly toward the center of town: the army had been called out. I saw roofless buildings and others that were only charred remains. Broken glass twinkled beside the road. Very few people were about. Even the boy with the twisted legs had deserted his post at the hospital gate. I pointed this out to my father, who looked half-asleep. He was unshaven and smelled stale. At the station, where we were met by the same profound quiet that hung over the town, there was no difficulty buying tickets. When our train pulled in it was almost empty; no Tamils were traveling that day. My father stepped forward to hand me up into the carriage, and I noticed then that his gait was lopsided. I remarked on his limp, and he shrugged, saying, ‘Someone threw half a brick at me.’ He shook my hand and wished me a pleasant trip.

“The clerk and I had a first-class compartment to ourselves. He was a pudgy young man with an unctuous manner and a jiggling knee. I had disliked him as soon as he came forward to greet us at the station. When our train set off, he asked me an inoffensive question or two. I answered briefly and coldly, buried myself in my book, and ignored him. Later, lulled by the movement of the train, I dozed off. When I woke, he was gone. He returned after a long interval and I said, peevishly: ‘Where were you? You’re supposed to look after me.’ He said that he had been talking to a friend who was traveling third class—he had exchanged his own ticket for one paid for by my father—and assured me that I was perfectly safe. ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ I said. ‘There’s been a riot. At any minute, I could find myself beset by grave danger.’ It was the language of my storybooks, but as I spoke, I found myself swept up in its drama. My mind’s eye showed me a solitary hero making a last, gallant stand against an advancing horde. My self-pity brimmed over, and I said, ‘I’ll tell my father that you left me alone.’

“The fellow’s ingratiating mask vanished at once. Years later, when I encountered the term ‘class hatred,’ I saw that naked face. It wasn’t looking at me but at a child with a Batman T-shirt, a leather traveling case, and French sandals. The clerk leaned forward and hissed, ‘Nothing will happen to you. Nothing happens to people like you.’ The change in him frightened me, and he saw it. He settled back into his seat and, jiggling his knee furiously, told me that a group of about fifty Tamil workers—technicians and clerks, but also gardeners and cleaners—had asked permission to stay overnight in the hospital. Their homes were far away and they were too terrified to venture into the street. The medical superintendent installed them in two rooms on the upper floor of a laboratory that stood near the main hospital building. The lab was locked. But in the night, men armed with iron rods broke down the door and swarmed up the stairs.

“I interrupted: ‘Why didn’t the police stop them?’

“‘The police,’ repeated my escort. ‘Let me think: did we see the police at all yesterday? You know, I don’t think so. It must have been a police holiday.’ From his tone, I could tell that his words were as deceptive as a conjurer’s silk handkerchief: they seemed ordinary but concealed something startling. I shrank back against my seat, not knowing if I feared a dove or a fist in my face.

“The clerk went on, telling me that most of the people inside the lab escaped by jumping from the windows. A few remained trapped and were bludgeoned to death. He said, ‘There was a boy your age who was inside.’

“He stared at me. I saw that he wanted me to ask what had happened to the boy, and I was too afraid of him to resist. I remember that it was difficult to form the words because my lips, my mouth, and my throat were all painfully dry.

“‘What do you think happened? He was a cripple. He couldn’t jump.’ He looked fuller in the face after he said it. More satisfied.

“A week or so later, my father returned to Colombo. We were all back in London by the end of the year.”