From this temple they would cross to a discount department store. Here sly comedies were enacted. Bald mannequins clad in cheap, belted raincoats thrust suggestive hips at passersby. A boy in pyjamas straddled a man’s thigh, offering him a power tool for Father’s Day. Two women who appeared to be laden from a shopping spree at the store were discovered, on closer inspection, to be bag ladies in gaping sneakers and clothes held together with pins. Everything on display looked trumpery. That was the crack through which parody made its entrance, mocking the shoddiness of all such enchantments.
Between the river and the railway lines lay a semi-industrial zone where lights were few. Streets that began with auto repair shops and small foundries ended in yards packed tight with vegetables and vines. There were herbs planted in old paint tins, ashtrays on verandah tables, rusty bed frames, palings crooked as bad dentistry.
They passed an electricity substation and an overgrown quarry. Late cars zipped by on the freeway. Mists crept up from the river. Sometimes there were fireworks staggering about the sky.
When his wife left him, Tom moved to this inner suburb because it was one of the few he could afford on his own.
In that hellish interval when the humiliation of Karen’s choice was a blade endlessly drawn across his soul, he had a singular stroke of luck, buying his flat just weeks before the property boom doubled its value.
It was a neighbourhood on the way up. The butcher had taken to stocking free-range eggs. The doctors no longer bulk-billed. Wooden plantation blinds were replacing cutwork nylon in windows. Tibetan prayer-fl ags fluttered across verandahs; neighbours fell out over parking for their four-wheel drives. Pubs that had featured topless waitresses now offered trivia nights and wood-fired pizza. It was easier to buy a latte than a litre of milk. The roomy weatherboard places on the big corner blocks were coming down; townhouses were going up. There were fewer lemon trees and more roof gardens. Construction sites gave off the odour of cement dust and prodigious money to be made. Vistas ended in angled cranes, colossal needles knitting up the future.
The marvellous city built by gold and wool had once voided its filth in these parts. The sweet-watered river of the early days of settlement had been swiftly converted into a reeking flow. A sludge of cheap housing appeared, row after row of wooden cottages: so many fl imsy coffins in which to bury the ambition of another century’s poor. It was the kind of suburb where people had lived in tiny buildings and worked in huge ones. Tanneries set up beside the river; later, factories. They were symbols of a great metropolis, signs that the colonial city was no longer raw material but an up-to-the-minute artefact.
Now the echoing shells of these industrial molluscs promised Prestigious River Frontage; or what one copywriter called An Envious Lifestyle. The riverside path had taken on rural airs, with poplars and gums and unruly willows. Men and women sweated doggedly along its length, or lunched on terraces overlooking the water. Wealth was inserting itself into this newly fashionable terrain, as decoration accrues on a renovated façade.
In the course of their walks, Nelly and Tom noticed that some shop fronts displayed a commemorative plaque. ‘William Merton, bootmaker, conducted business on this site in 1899.’ ‘Alice Corbett ran a bakery here in 1920.’ The memorials were puzzling in their arbitrariness, offering no indication why these places, dates and citizens had been singled out. Tom discerned the willed creation of a sense of the past: a municipal mythmaking. It produced the inscriptions in parks that signalled a site pregnant with meaning for the people who had lived here first: a tree where corroborees had been held, or one whose bark had served to fashion boats. Cloaked in virtuous intention, these signs functioned insidiously. They displaced history with heritage, plastering over trauma with a picturesque frieze. A spectator might have their detail by heart and no inkling of the chasm that separated bark canoes and William Merton, bootmaker.
The unofficial past flared more vividly, illuminated in matchlit glimpses. Tom and Nelly paused before roadside shrines dedicated to lives that had ended violently: makeshift memorials composed from soft toys and plastic fl owers. There were dates, photographs, greeting cards on which the ink had blurred. Each shrine was a little gash in the illusion of continuity. Propped against walls or fastened to poles, what they proclaimed was the terrible fact of rupture.
Nelly talked of people in cities needing to find places that seemed to speak to them privately; places that detached themselves, like spots of time, from unmemorable surrounds.
They discovered they were both drawn to a convent school that stood beside a traffic-choked intersection a few miles to the north. Stiff pine trees lined its high perimeter wall. Painted white, an arcaded verandah on the upper floor glimmered in the apertures between dark branches.
It was the trees, they agreed, that gave the place its aura: setting it off from the polluted streets, suggesting an enchanted domain. At the same time, the pines were ambiguous presences, their green-black wings suggesting menace as well as protection.
Tom said the scene reminded him of a woodcut in an old book of children’s tales. It was like something remembered from a dream, said Nelly. ‘Something marvellous and strange you can almost see under the skin of reality.’
Tom described a tiny pair of opera glasses, imagined by Raymond Roussel, to be worn as a pendant. The writer had envisioned each lens, two millimetres in diameter, to contain a photograph on glass: Cairo bazaars on one and a bank of the Nile at Luxor on the other.
Nelly yearned for this virtual object; as Tom had known she would.
One day she produced a calico bag from her pocket, unfastened the drawstring at its neck and tipped its contents into her hand. When she opened her fingers, her palm was full of eyes. They had belonged to her grandmother, who had inherited them from her great-grandfather, who as a small boy in London had been apprenticed to a manufacturer of dolls. It was the child’s task to separate the black and brown eyes from the grey and blue ones, and then to sort each group again, in precise gradations of hue.
Nelly moved her fingers. Blue eyes shuddered in her palm. Kingfi sher, cornflower, steel. Smoke crushed with violets. Tom looked at them, and they looked back. It was impossible not to avert his gaze.
They spoke of the past, discovering each other. Tom learned that Nelly was an only child. Her mother had died when she was fifteen, her father was into serial marriage. There had been a goldfish called Fluffy.
It was not much to go on. He knew that Nelly had once been married, but little beyond that bare fact. A stray remark of Posner’s confirmed that the union had been short-lived. Tom longed to know more, of course. But he wouldn’t question Posner; and Nelly had a trick, to which he did not immediately tumble, of deflecting questions about herself with enquiries of her own. She drew from him stories of childhood, women, sorrows, travel, his preferences in matters trivial and weighty. What’s the fi rst thing you remember? Would you rather live in the mountains or by the sea? What’s something you regret not doing? Describe a perfect city. Tell me something you’ve never told anyone else.
It was the kind of talk that takes place in bed. Except that Nelly, despite the intensity of her attention, withheld all bodily intimacy. She never touched Tom. Her hand didn’t accidentally brush his; an occurrence that, in any case, is never accidental, and requires collusion. It occurred to Tom that even her enthusiasm for their walks might be a device for avoiding closeness. There was the Wordsworth precedent: William and Dorothy out striding the dales for fear of what might take place between them in the confines of Dove Cottage.