Foreign Country
Author: Marija Peričić
Date: 2025-04-08T00:00:00+00:00
Publisher: Ultimo Press

ALSO BY MARIJA PERIČIĆ

The Lost Pages

Exquisite Corpse

For my sisters

CONTENTS

Title Page

Foreign Country

Acknowledgements

Extract from Exquisite Corpse

Copyright Page

THE HOUSE IS a squat and solid cube of stone and wood, huddled under the canopy of ironbarks and yellow gums that grow along the ridge. The windows are blank and black, as if the house is filled with night, even at midday. There aren’t any curtains, because there aren’t any neighbours. If you walked in the front door, you wouldn’t know what was upstairs. You’d notice the room’s coolness, as if the stones of the walls, water-dark, had been moments before dredged up from the sea. You’d notice the smell of old wood smoke, dead ash. You’d notice the silence. But the longer you listened, the more that silence would become eroded by sound. The creaking and tapping of the wooden panels. The wind outside, rushing through the trees, and whistling through the loose roof joins and gappy window frames. A distant car. A mouse scuttling over the kitchen floor. Birds. The floorboards under your feet.

Even if you went upstairs, even if you went into the bedroom—even if you were standing right beside the bed, just a few inches away—even then you might not be able to spot it. Not at first. You’d see the bed, the tangled sheets. And then, a bit like looking at one of those renaissance paintings, which at first glance appears to be nothing more than a flat landscape, a bland pastoral scene, but when you lean closer and look deeper, reveals in the background a woman fleeing in terror from a pack of slavering dogs; a pig being slaughtered by a smiling butcher; a man tormented by demons.

Because there it is. There. On the bed. A body, one arm thrown overhead in the pose of an unquiet sleeper. The face is turned to the side, the mouth slack and open, the eyelids low but not quite closed: a viscous slit glints through the lowered lashes. The skin is white: flat and dense, chalky like milk. If you touched it, it would feel cold and slightly stiff, as if it had been stuffed with horsehair. The sheets are white like the body, and like the plain pyjamas in which it’s clothed. The three whitenesses swirl together, and become one mass, silent and still and strange, as unreadable as a faraway snow-covered mountain range, or the surface of the moon.

Once you’ve seen it, it is impossible to notice anything else. The body sends out a charge to every corner of every room. If you were to go outside again, the house would seem completely different. Now it would be watching you, waiting for you to arrive so it could reveal what it contains.

LATER I WONDERED about all those times when the phone rang and I hadn’t picked up: had it been her? Would I be here now if I had picked up? Would she?

‘MA’AM?’ A MAN’S voice drifts through the night air. ‘Ma’am? Are you Elizabeta Novak?’ There are two cops standing in front of me, a man and a woman.

‘I’m Sergeant Standish,’ says the man, ‘and this here,’ he gestures to his partner, ‘is Constable Prush.’

She nods in greeting and says, ‘We’re from the Bendigo police station.’

‘Now,’ says Standish, ‘I know this is a difficult time for you, but we’re going to have to ask you a couple of questions.’

Constable Prush’s face is wrinkled and pinched with sympathy. She reaches out her hand and pats me on the shoulder with her fingertips. She is a tiny woman—not even up to my chin—with freckled pink skin and blonde hair combed into a painfully tight ponytail.

‘Sorry, love.’ She sounds as if she really means it too. Like she’s an ordinary person and not a cop. ‘I’m so sorry, love. It’s an awful thing. Must be a terrible shock for you.’ The last time I’d had dealings with the police was after the accident all those years ago.

Standish clears his throat.

‘Now then.’ He has a little notepad in one hand and a tiny stub of pencil poised delicately in the other. His eyebrows are two heavy strokes that come down in a sharp V over his nose, which makes him look like a bird of prey. He frowns down at the notebook. ‘Ms Novak, can you confirm that the identity of the deceased is known to you?’ He speaks as if he’s delivering lines from a script.

My head feels thick and strange. It isn’t the jet lag. I see myself, Prush and Standish, the house behind us and the bush stretching out on all sides as if I am witnessing the scene from a helicopter taking off. This is the last place in the world I want to be. I want to be home, with Peter. I close my eyes. I imagine the feel of him, the smell of him. His warmth. My eyelids are hot and lined with grit. The phone in the house starts ringing. When I try to open my eyes, the lids stick together. Yesterday I’d been in Berlin. After more than twenty hours in the air, my body is limp. My skin feels like a baked custard and my mouth tastes of the foul echoes of plane food. Flying is a thing I’ve always hated. To be sitting in the dark, to be sitting still, surrounded by a horde of eating and sleeping strangers. All those unknown, unlovely bodies.

Prush is squeezing my arm in regular slow pulses, like a sphygmomanometer. My blood pressure would be high. One hundred and forty over ninety, at least. I feel it surge through me.

‘Did you know the deceased?’ Standish asks.

Once, I would have said yes, absolutely. Better than I knew myself.

I’VE SEEN MORE dead bodies than I can count. Over the years they’ve become just another part of my professional landscape. Which isn’t to say that I don’t treat the dead with respect—something you can’t say about all nurses—but I’m not sentimental about them. Although, if you ask me, that is almost as bad. I think of my old colleague Nina, from back when I used to live in Melbourne, with the garden she kept behind the bike racks. When she first started working at the Alfred Hospital with me, she used to plant different coloured pansies for each patient she did post-mortem care for, all in neat rows. She ran out of new colours more quickly than she expected.

When you die, it’s not that your body just stops working from one second to the next. It’s not like turning a switch from on to off. Death takes time. Because what we call death is more than a single event: there are many kinds of death that happen in the body. Cardiac death. Brain death. Cell death. When the heart stops pumping blood, and the lungs stop filling with oxygen, the brain goes into a hypoxic state and normal electrical activity is disrupted. Starved of oxygen, the tissues in the brain start to swell. Brain death might take minutes or even hours after the organs lose their oxygen supply. Some people don’t believe that brain death is a kind of death at all, and it’s true that it can be reversed sometimes. But in the minutes and hours after brain death, if the heart has stopped working as well, other changes in the body will start to become visible. Irreversible changes. Then you know it’s too late. The pupils become fixed and dilated, unresponsive to light. After a few minutes the eyes will become glassy, and the skin, which is often mottled and blotchy in the hours and minutes before death, turns waxy and pale. After some hours the skin will cool, and rigor mortis will set in. The jaw will fall back. The blood will begin to pool in the lower part of the body, the part that is closer to the ground, and this area will darken. Later, though you won’t be able to see it at first, decomposition will begin. Bacteria will start to multiply in the organs and cavities of the body, feeding on it. Eventually this bacterial decay will become visible too.

The best thing about the deaths at work is that they’re clean. Even the messy ones are clean. At least for me they are. When I say clean, I mean free of emotional mess: free of feuds and fallout, gossip, recrimination, backbiting and rumour. The deaths I come across at work are nothing more than a list of symptoms that over time—sometimes short, sometimes long—became too heavy for a body to hold.

STANDISH ASKS ME again: ‘Ma’am, is the identity of the deceased known to you?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It is.’

‘And?’ His voice rises just a shade. ‘Can you confirm the identity of the deceased?’

‘I know it’s hard, love.’ Prush pushes her thin face too close to mine and I jerk my head backward. I have the impulse to spit in her face, to shove her away.

‘She’s my sister.’

‘Ah.’

Standish starts scribbling in his notebook. Prush puts her hand on my shoulder again, but I shake it off. I watch Standish make his notes. His eyebrows are pulled down, deeply accusing, while he writes, as if the page has committed some heinous crime. Or as if I have. Prush strolls around the courtyard, perusing it. She looks at the garden beds, at the car, down at the paving stones. She inspects the fence and considers the undersides of the eaves. Her hands are clasped behind her back, and she nods slowly as she walks, taking it all in as if the yard was an art exhibit.

‘Okay, Suze,’ Standish says when he’s finished with his notes. He glances towards the house. ‘Let’s take a look.’ They go inside.

Two very tall paramedics turn up, carrying an empty stretcher between them. The cops come back out and start chatting with the paramedics. It seems like they all know each other. They stand around discussing how much rain they’ve had lately, as if I’m not there at all. I start to feel like maybe I’m not.

When they go inside the house, I can hear their voices murmuring, a sharp cough ringing out. But when the paramedics come back outside they are silent, heads bowed, eyes cast low. They are carrying the stretcher between them again, but now it isn’t empty. Now the stretcher is heavy with the weight of El’s body. I don’t look directly at it. Even though they would have covered her up, and I wouldn’t be able to see her—I would only see a shape, under a sheet, in a bag. A shape. But I still don’t look. Even a shape is too much. Instead I turn my back and look down the ridge. The wind churns the treetops, and they throw their pale limbs up in the air, like a row of hysterical women, keening. How can El live in a place like this? The wind blusters around my head and I lift my face to the sky. A cloud like a bruise blooms over the ridge. Out here the sky isn’t even black, like it’s supposed to be at night. The stars have eaten away at it like mould.

AS A CHILD, I was afraid of the dark. When it was time to go to sleep, I’d make Mum leave the hallway light on, and keep the bedroom door open just the right amount so that a wedge of yellow light would fall into the room, over the floor and onto the foot of my bed, lighting up the pink counterpane.

Sometimes I woke up in the middle of the night, breathless, disorientated, to find that someone had switched off the light. My eyes would be wide open, the dense night pressing in on them.

In those times, in that darkness, I never knew who I was. The blackness behind my closed eyelids and the blackness of the dark room became one. The border of my self had dissolved. It frightened me. There would be the sound of my sister breathing beside me, smooth and soft, but I would have no idea what that sound was supposed to signify. Everything had become a single connected darkness, just like all the oceans of the world are really only one ocean, even though we might give them different names. They are all the same deep water. In those moments, I felt like I’d disappeared, got lost somewhere, in some nowhere place.

At church we’d learned about a place called Limbo, which is where all the lost souls go. It isn’t Heaven and it isn’t Hell, or Earth either. Just some in-between place like the space underneath the floor of a house. Sometimes there were pictures of Limbo in religious books, and they always painted it in shades of red and brown, but I knew that the place was just black. Black, and as dark as the inside of your own head.

I STAND UNDER the senseless stars and watch as the red tail-lights of the ambulance recede into the night. What am I supposed to feel? I wait for the arrival of a definitive emotion, something final, something coherent. All I can think about, all I can feel, is the reality of my body, its routine aches and discomforts. The way my fingers are numb with cold.

PRUSH HAS TAKEN hold of my arm again, and is murmuring, ‘Must be such a shock for you, love, such a shock.’

She barely moves her narrow lips when she speaks. I don’t pull my arm away. I long painfully for Peter. This is the worst possible time to have come here alone and left him in Berlin.

Standish has some papers for me to sign.

‘Now then, Ms Novak,’ he says, bristling with importance. ‘Check over this carefully, will you, to see it’s all correct.’

He hands me a form. I squint at the paper but the letters are running into each other like raindrops on glass. I don’t bother trying to read the form. I know what it says. El is dead. At the bottom is the empty space for my signature.

Standish hands me a pen and I sign. Only when I am handing him back the pen do I catch sight of what is printed underneath: ‘Elizabeta Novak’.

‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I’m Eva Novak. Elizabeta is my sister. She’s the one who . . . who’s—’

‘Well!’ says Standish. His eyebrows shoot up into an inverted V. ‘Well now!’ He puts a cross through that page and screws it up. He puts it into his pocket and we start again.

A FEW DAYS ago, a letter appeared in the mailbox of our new apartment in Moabit. Peter and I hadn’t even moved in properly. We were still spending our nights after work coming and going in the car between Peter’s apartment and my apartment and our new place, laden with piles of boxes and crates. The envelope was battered and dirty, adorned with three Australian postage stamps depicting scenes from The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek. It was from El. That had been the first time Peter and I had ever checked that mailbox, which made the letter even stranger.

I had no idea how El could have got hold of the address. The only possible explanation was that Karin had given it to her. But that seemed unlikely, because Karin is one of the few people, maybe the only person, that knows the reason that I no longer speak to El.

I put the letter between my teeth and we carried our load of boxes up the stairs to the third floor.

‘And—your sister—where does she live again? Sydney?’ Peter always pronounces it Syd-nay.

‘That’s right.’

My voice was muffled by the paper in my mouth.

‘In the Blue Hills, wasn’t it?’

‘Blue Mountains.’ I don’t know why I lied like that. El lives outside of Melbourne. Sometimes the lies just tumble out of my mouth like rotten teeth and I can’t stop them. Other times there are words I can’t get out, even if I want to.

‘Mountains,’ Peter said.

He unlocked the door and I opened the envelope. El’s letter didn’t say much, only: I need to see you. Please come. Followed by her address. El’s my older sister, but you’d never know it from the way she behaves. Artistic temperament, so they say. Emotional, headstrong, fragile. The realities of life are too much for her a lot of the time. It’s a strange thing to grow up with someone, and even look a lot like them, but to be so different.

‘So? What does she say?’ Peter asked.

‘She wants me to go.’

‘To Australia?’

The letter had come with a second envelope folded inside. An airline ticket.

Berlin TXL 23 JUL 2003

Hong Kong HKG 23 JUL 2003

Melbourne MEL 24 JUL 2003

Melbourne MEL 07 AUG 2003

Hong Kong HKG 07 AUG 2003

Berlin TXL 08 AUG 2003

The departure date was in four days’ time.

Peter took the letter from my hand and read it out loud.

‘So dramatic,’ he said. ‘What is it all about?’

I shrugged and picked up a box.

‘You never talk about your family, or about your life in Australia.’ Peter had followed me into the kitchen. ‘Why, Eva? Sometimes I feel like I know nothing at all about you. Like you’re hiding something from me. It’s like there’s a limit with you, a barrier, and you won’t let me past it. How am I supposed to be close to you if I don’t know anything about you? It’s not reasonable.’

Peter often complains about my reticence, saying that it is like being in a relationship with a secret agent. Sometimes this is a subject of argument between us. I’m not a secret agent, I just refuse to dwell on the past. What relevance does it have? The thing that matters most, the only thing that matters, is the here and now. You’re deceiving yourself if you think otherwise. And besides, Peter doesn’t have the right to know every single thing that has ever happened to me. No one does. I never demand to know every detail of anyone else’s personal history—as if I would care!

He kept on at me, following me around the apartment as I unpacked the boxes, wanting to know all the ins and outs between me and El: when I’d last seen her, why I hadn’t spoken to her for so long, what job she did, what she was like. It was like a police interrogation. I wouldn’t even know how to begin answering those kinds of questions. He then reminded me that I had met all of his family, several times: his two brothers, and their wives and children, and his father. Peter’s mother had died years before.

‘And now you have a ticket home, and you don’t even invite me to come with you! Eva, what is this?’

I think for Peter, coming home with me—by which he meant Australia—would represent a cementing of our relationship, a strengthening of commitment. Peter, though he would never admit it, or even identify himself this way, is a deeply romantic man.

‘But she’s only sent a single ticket.’

‘It’s not difficult to buy another one.’

But I knew that Peter couldn’t come with me, even if I had wanted him to. Only last month he had started working at a new physiotherapy clinic and we’d spent all our savings on moving in together. New curtains and carpets, a coat of paint. New taps in the bath, new fridge and washing machine. The light fittings we’d bought off the previous tenants. Our bank accounts were cleared out.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s just not possible. Not this time. We can go together another time. Whatever she wants, it’s not going to be a holiday, believe me. And it’s not as if I even want to go. In fact, I don’t even know if I will go.’

‘You’ll go,’ he said. ‘You’ll go and you won’t let me go with you. And that’s a problem for me, Eva. A serious problem.’

I NEVER FEEL lonelier than I do when I’m staying in a hotel. Dingy motels, posh boutique places: it makes no difference. It’s always the same emptiness. When I wake in the morning, I lie in the bed looking up at the ceiling. I find I’m unable to move. My mind is taken up with every other person who has stayed in this room. The hundreds of them. Thousands. People who slept alone, maybe, or with their wife or their illicit lover. People who snored. People who were crying, or having an argument. People on the run. People who had just realised they left their passport on the bus. People going through acrimonious divorce proceedings, people on diets. I lie there and look up and feel the way the room arches over and around me, in shades of careful neutrality, and I can see all those people coming and going. Wheeling in their suitcases. Hanging up their jackets on the wooden hangers in the wardrobe, brushing their teeth and looking at their faces in the spotted bathroom mirror. There is no trace of them. The ceiling and the walls are blank, impersonal, and the room has become like a huge lung, breathing in and breathing out.

I turn my head to the side. The telephone in this hotel room is white and curved in on itself, like a shiny plastic clam. It starts to ring.

‘Peter?’

‘Sorry?’ It is a man’s voice, rumbling and gravelly. ‘Uh . . .’ he says. ‘I’m looking for Eva Novak. The name’s John Johnstone.’ An unlikely name if ever I heard one. He has a Scots accent too, and pronounces it Jawn Jawnst’n, making it even more far-fetched. ‘I heard about your situation,’ he says, ‘and I’m very sorry for your loss.’

It takes me a second to realise that he isn’t talking about Gracie. She’s been on my mind constantly since I arrived. Not that I ever stopped thinking about her. I can’t.

‘I’m a lawyer here in Bendigo,’ he goes on. ‘I deal with the surrounding area: wills and probate, that kind of thing. Got your details from my mate James Standish down the station here. Thought you might like some assistance.’

‘Sorry . . . Assistance? With what exactly?’

‘Death proceedings!’ There is a pause. ‘I suppose you don’t know then.’

‘Know what?’ I know about death proceedings.

‘Now, it could be that she didn’t discuss this with you, but I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve got a bit of paperwork coming your way. Your sister’s appointed you the sole executor of her estate.’

‘Are you sure?’

He laughs, a great guffaw, as if I’ve told a pretty funny joke. ‘’Fraid so. Got the will right here in front of me, in black and white! From what I’ve read you’ve got your work cut out for you.’

The lawyer’s voice drones on. Is this what she summoned me here for? As a witness to her suicide? To tidy her affairs?

‘Miss? Are you there? As I say, seems like not much use you coming up here to see me before you’ve located all the documents we’ll need to set these wheels in motion. Got a pen?’

‘Yes.’ I didn’t.

He dictates a list which I don’t write down: insurance, certificate of title, bank details, the coroner’s report—‘Although that might not be ready for a while,’ he says.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘How long do you think all this is going to take? I need to get home as soon as possible, to Germany.’

He sighs. ‘Weeks definitely. Could be months. Hard to say.’

The phone clicks loudly as I place it back in the cradle. The hotel walls rise up around me, hard and white.

WHEN I’D FIRST seen El’s house the night before, the place had seemed impressive, imposing and foreign. It sat high on the ridge, all pitched roof and flashing window glass looking out from a neat garden. It seemed like the home of a famous artist or musician, some genteel bohemian. But in the daylight it’s a different story. Now I can see that the place is neglected, derelict, as if it has been sitting empty for years. As if it has been abandoned. When I come through the gate, I see that the garden beds that had looked like they were full of neat roses are bristling with crops of bright weeds. Leggy dandelions and asphodels push themselves up, swamping the roses, stealing their sun and crowding them out. Fallen eucalyptus leaves in pink and orange stud the wet grey cobblestones and the roof of El’s car. The sight of the car makes me sick. It stands in the middle of the courtyard. It is speckled with layers of bird shit in every shade of grey and brown, and there are cottony spiderwebs threaded around the side-mirrors and in the door seals. It’s an old 1970s MG, just like the one El had years ago, the same colour and everything—racing green. For a second I think that it’s the same car, but of course it can’t be. El has always loved old cars, the more impractical and unreliable, the better.

Next to the front door, under a rickety wooden bench, a collection of shoes lies in an untidy heap. A pair of wellington boots caked in dried mud, some worn Dunlop trainers, and a pair of brown elastic-sided boots with the leather cracked and the elastic frayed and sagging. The image comes to me of El returning from a walk on some idyllic sunny day and sliding off the Dunlops and kicking them against the wall. She’s whistling, not a care in the world, and holds a small spray of wildflowers. She unlocks the door, throws it wide and steps inside. Her socks are dirty, and leave damp footprints on the kitchen floor. I stand there staring at the shoes. They are covered in a fine dusting of earth, and a spider has spun its thin web inside the opening of one of the wellingtons.

It starts to rain. The fat drops crack onto the roof, scattering like thrown pebbles. A bird, maybe a magpie, begins to sing on the far side of the house and some cockatoos screech in reply. Water drips from the eaves and purls in the gutters, and the backs of my legs start to get damp. I open the door. The place looks just the same as it did the other night, only it’s messier than I remember. I don’t want to go inside.

‘Hello!’ I call into the empty house, stupidly.

No one replies of course. Inside it smells of cold wood smoke and dead ash. I step in and stand just past the threshold, one hand still on the doorhandle, listening. Not that there’s anything to hear. Nothing but the rain on the roof, the birdsong. The cold from the stone floor rises through the soles of my shoes and climbs up my legs. The silence inside the house makes me nervous. Empty houses always have, ever since I was small.

OUR FIRST HOUSE in Australia was in Altona, on Burt Street—the newest house we’d ever had. It was a bungalow of blonde bricks, with two square windows looking out at the street, and a neat lemon tree planted precisely between them. I must have been eight or nine: it was before Tata became sick, before everything began to go wrong. One summer, our second or third in the house, Mum started taking us to her new church group. Before that Mum had been a Catholic, same as Tata, but neither of them had ever spent any time talking about their religion or their beliefs. We went to church, same as everybody else, but that was it. This new church group wasn’t Catholic though. The ladies from the group were nice, but everyone in that church was really big on preparing for the end of the world. They talked about it all the time. End Times, they called it. They were sure that the End Times would be coming any day, so you had to be ready. Because if you weren’t ready when God or Jesus—I wasn’t sure which one it was supposed to be—swooped down to take everyone—or at least, all those people who were going to be saved, the righteous—to Heaven, then you’d be left behind on Earth and never see your family ever again. They called it the Rapture, which for ages confused me because it sounded like ‘raptor’, and I got the two words mixed up: I didn’t learn English until after we arrived in Australia and it took a while for me to get the hang of it. Some English words were still a mystery to me for a long time. I thought the ‘raptor’ might have been because Jesus would take the form of some kind of bird of prey—an eagle maybe, or a hawk—which was different to how he was usually shown in pictures. He looked so kind normally, only he was always a little sad, with that solemn face and those upturned eyes, sometimes pointing mournfully at his own exposed and glowing heart.

That summer I got sick with a flu, and had to stay home from school one day. I slept all morning, and when I woke up in the afternoon I was feverish and confused. Everything was quiet. The house had never been silent like that before. Normally there’d be someone home, or at least the sound of the radio playing in the kitchen: it was never turned off during the day; it was even left on when everyone went out, along with the hallway light, to deter burglars. But that day there was no radio, no voices, no footsteps or clatter of dishes. From my bed, I called out for Mum, but there was no answer. I remember the heat, and the way my head felt tight and rubbery from the fever. I got out of bed. My legs were shaky. I went to the kitchen, holding on to the walls and doorframes on the way. The sun was blasting in through the window so brightly that my vision filled up with squirming neon shapes and I had to screw my eyelids tight.

‘Mum?’ I called again, with my eyes still closed.

When I opened them, I could see the kitchen was empty and all the dishes were washed and dried and put away. I went from room to room, but every door opened onto silence and emptiness. I kept calling for Mum, my voice getting higher and higher. I went over to the living room window, which looked out onto the front garden and the street. The heat came off the glass in waves against my fevered skin, and the sun was so strong I could hardly see a thing outside. Everything had melted into a white glare.

‘Mum? Where are you?’ My voice cracked in panic. ‘Tata?’

I stumbled over to the front door and opened it. It was like opening an oven door. I ran outside and down the path towards the street. The blistering concrete of the paving stones burned the soles of my bare feet, but I hardly noticed.

‘Mum? Mama!’

Everything was silent and still. I stood at the roadside looking up and down the street. No one was around. No cars, no birds singing, no people walking, no dogs barking. Not even any cicadas. Just that hot sun bearing down like an iron weight. Already I could feel a tingling on the top of my head and my shoulders as the skin started to burn. That’s when I realised what had happened: it was the very worst thing. The Raptor had come. The Raptor had come and I’d slept through it. Everyone had been saved except for me. I was a sinner. I’d always known it, deep down. I wasn’t one of the righteous ones. Now I’d never see my family again. I started to cry. I squinted up at the empty sky through my tears, as if I might be able to catch a glimpse of Heaven up there, maybe the back of God’s head, but there was nothing to see, only bright endless blue, burned white and thin at the horizon. My head was pounding. I ran down the street of empty houses. I ran down the next street, and it was just as deserted. I ran and ran until I got to our friend Mila’s house. Mila was old, older than Mum, and she was one of the few people we knew who came from the same country as us, with the same language. By the time I reached her place a few blocks away I had torrents of tears and snot running down my sweaty face, and I was completely out of breath. From the street it looked like her house was deserted too. All the curtains were pulled shut, but I pounded on the door anyway, with both fists, bellowing for my mother. Mila opened it right away.

‘Oh, mali miš! Little mouse!’ she said when she saw the state of me. ‘What’s the matter?’

I was crying so hard that I couldn’t explain, and even when I’d calmed down enough to get the words out, none of it made sense. She took me in her arms.

I don’t believe in the Raptor anymore, or God or Jesus in any form, but empty houses always give me that same uneasy feeling of being the last person left behind in the world after some catastrophe. Whoever it was in that church who came up with that story was on to something. There’s no worse feeling than being left behind. Being left all alone.

I PUT DOWN the keys on the table and look around the room. The sofa is threadbare and shiny with grime. There is a long tear in one armrest where the foam stuffing extrudes in an obscene bulge. The top of the kitchen table is scratched and stained, and each of the mismatched chairs have loose or missing rungs. Balls of grey dust have settled into the corners of the room, and the glass in the windows is smeary and spotted. Raggy cobwebs garland the cornices. On top of the general atmosphere of grit and shabbiness is the fact that the place is filled with clutter. I’d noticed the piles of books the other night, but now I see that there are all kinds of other things spilling over tables, chairs, and the low windowsills: old catalogues, pages torn out of newspapers, dirty mugs and plates, stacks of magazines, tennis balls, candles, exercise books, desiccated apple cores, pens, balled-up used tissues, cardboard boxes, unopened envelopes, dusty vases and knick-knacks. El used to be so neat. She must have given up in the end. Let herself go.

There is so much mess that when I stand in the middle of the room it seems to be coming at me from all sides. An avalanche. It is going to take a skip to get this place cleared out. And I have to find those papers for the lawyer among all this chaos. There are so many steps to go through before I can get back home to Peter. I take a slow breath in and out.

To say that things with Peter were strained in the days before I left would be an understatement. Once he had decided that it was a problem for him that I didn’t want him to come with me, it became a problem for me too. He made it one, and started to behave in a way that he never had before. He cancelled outings and standing engagements that we had in our week, things we had done for years and that were built into the fabric of our days, like meeting for a drink after our shifts, or swimming at the Stadtbad Neukölln on Tuesdays and sharing a plate of spätzle afterwards at Zhivago Cafe. He didn’t want to talk when I called. He was busy, he said. Busy sulking. That’s what it seemed like to me, and if I’m honest, one of the reasons I decided to go to Australia was because I didn’t like the feeling that I was being pressured by Peter and his childish behaviour. Sulking is nothing more than low-grade blackmail. I wasn’t going to give in to that. Even taking a twenty-hour flight to a country I didn’t want to visit to see someone that I didn’t want to see had seemed preferable to dignifying Peter’s behaviour by deciding not to go. Now that I am here I’m no longer sure of that logic. The truth is that I hadn’t been able to face spelling everything out for him, all that painful and pointless history. The questions he would ask. The places in my mind that those questions would lead me.

El’s desk is in the corner under a window. It’s a massive boxy antique thing, made of pale wood, scarred and battered. Like everything else in the place, it’s covered with dust and debris. The writing surface is piled with layers of papers, which half-bury an ancient-looking electric typewriter. I start sifting through the papers: stacks of bills and receipts and bank statements, photographs, pages of print-outs, some of them so old that the paper has curled and turned yellow, a copy of El’s citizenship certificate with a huge kangaroo and emu crest embossed on it, pages torn from notebooks and articles from newspapers and magazines. I try to impose some order by grouping things together on the floor: important documents, bills, receipts. I find a small stack of handwritten letters, tied with string. I put the stack aside. Most of the documents that I come across can obviously be thrown out. There are pages and pages of ripped-out bits of newspapers—crossword puzzles and recipes and classifieds ads—and old shopping lists. These I screw up and drop to the floor, but soon the pile of discarded papers starts to swamp everything else. I find two empty bin bags in the cupboard under the sink.

Within half an hour I’ve sorted through the surface of the desk and the first two drawers, and filled up the two bin bags. But, aside from the citizenship certificate and bank statements, I haven’t found any of the documents I’m looking for. I go out to empty the rubbish bags, but I can’t find the bins anywhere. I search around the outside of the house before I realise that there are no bins. The place is off the grid of course—there’s a huge throbbing generator attached to the back of the house and three massive water tanks. The roads are all dirt, and ungraded. How would any rubbish truck make it up that track? Even the driver of the cab I’d come here in had refused to take me all the way. He’d dropped me with about ten minutes still to walk. Around the side of the house I find two rusted forty-four-gallon drums, burned black and full of ash and charred cinders. I empty the bags into one.

I come back inside to a cadence of piercing beeps from my mobile. I’m surprised there’s any reception. Peter’s name is flashing on the green-lit screen. I hang up on him. I don’t know why I do. I haven’t spoken to him since I arrived, even though I promised him I would call the moment I landed. I almost called him from the airport. I was in the phone booth about to make the call, but then I realised that the time difference would mean waking him. And then there was all that hassle about SIM cards, and then when I did try to call him later that night from the hotel, he hadn’t answered.

Almost immediately my mobile starts ringing again. I let it ring out. It’s as if I can’t move my hands in order to press the button, as if they have malfunctioned. Yesterday, at the airport, in the hotel, I would have been able to speak with him. But here in the house it isn’t possible. The phone screen flashes green and grey, green, grey, and then goes black. I picture Peter in the flat in Moabit, sitting cross-legged on the floor, among all the boxes, his back so straight. He’s done yoga for years. I picture the phone clamped to his head, his expectant face as he listens to the sound of the rings and then the slow engaged signal. I know I have to call him back.

I sink into one of the broken kitchen chairs and close my eyes. There is a mountain’s weight of unspoken words pressing down on me. After what feels like a long time, I get up and make my way back to the hotel. It’s dark by the time the taxi drops me there. I fall onto the bed, exhausted.

IN MY DREAM, Gracie is sitting in the bedroom of our Dalgety Street apartment, playing with her dolls under the window, singing to them in her sweet high voice. The sun is falling through the glass, and her hair is lit up by it, lit to a bright white gold like a flame. As I watch, the flame starts to glow, brighter and brighter, so that soon I can hardly look at it. It blinds me. Then I realise that Gracie is going to get burned by her own flaming hair. I try to call out but my voice is silent. It is stolen from me as soon as it leaves my lips. Gracie’s hair is starting to smoke a little, and I can smell the acrid scent of burning plastic, of hot metal. I try to go to her but the air has turned thick, and the dark smoke that fills the room is strangely solid. I have to push my arms and legs forward to move through it. My arms are outstretched with the effort of it when I reach her side. Everything goes into slow motion. She turns up her face to look at me, a simple movement, but it takes a hundred years, a thousand, and in that time I can see every other moment of her life that had ever been and that was still to come, and that would never come but could have, spark and burn and fade, one after another, like a film, like a long book of photographs. Gracie reaches up her arms, slowly, slowly. Her fingers uncurl like fronds of fern. She smiles and I am nearly floored with the beauty of it. I look into her eyes. I crouch down to gather her up. I grip my hands gently around her small fat ribs and I lift her into the air, away from her dolls, but when I stand up she is limp in my hands, just a doll herself: an ugly, dirty rag doll.

IN THE MORNING it is too early to call Peter. Instead, I spend an hour with the Yellow Pages, calling rubbish removal services.

‘Nah, love, afraid I can’t help you with that. Just not doable. Sorry.’

‘And if I pay extra?’

‘Can’t do it, I’m afraid. Fully booked ’til the end of next month. Anyway, there’s no way I’d get the truck up that side of the ridge, ’specially in the wet. I’d love to help you out, but it’s a no go.’

Ricky’s Cleaning and Rubbish Removals was the sixth one I’d called.

‘You wouldn’t know of anyone who might be able to help me?’

‘Well, you might want to give my mate Spiro a ring.’

I note down Spiro’s number before I realise that I’d already spoken to him three phone calls ago. Spiro is about to go on holiday to Greece.

I hang up.

Bennett Creek is only a short distance out of town, but it turns out it may as well be in the middle of the ocean in terms of road access. I’ve already been in Australia a few days. That leaves me less than two weeks to get the place cleared out and ready to put on the market, and to find all the documents I need. I pick up the phone again and call a cab.

The driver collects me from the supermarket, where I’ve stocked up on cleaning supplies. Three packets of black plastic bin liners, jumbo size, labelled ‘Extra Tuff’; mould killer; scourers; a ten-pack of plastic gloves; Windex; Jif cream; Dettol spray. They didn’t have any moving boxes, so I grabbed a few empty fruit boxes from around the side of Coles.

I load my purchases into the back seat of the cab and get in.

‘In town for long?’ the driver asks in a heavy Balkan accent. He is an older man, completely bald, with a suntanned, egg-shaped head. He glances at me in the rear-view mirror and his brown eyes glitter from under his untamed eyebrows. He reminds me of Tata. I used to get that a lot: encountering men who reminded me of him, especially right after he died. I’d see a man, waiting beside me at the crosswalk, or queueing at the supermarket checkout, who looked so like Tata that they could have been brothers. A few times I nearly asked whether they were. I didn’t have the same experience after Mum died. I feel the sting of tears. But what’s the good of crying over someone who is long gone?

We’ve left the town behind and are heading towards the highway.

‘You must be a friend of Lizzie’s,’ the driver says.

My stomach contracts at the name. The only person who had ever called her that was Gracie. Aunty Lizzie.

We turn onto the highway. The sky is choked in clouds of the palest grey. We drive past a row of dilapidated houses whose yards are filled with broken-down cars and parts of cars. Behind them the mountains make a blue shadow. Some light raindrops appear on the windshield. This driver takes me a little further than the last one, almost to the bottom of the driveway, which isn’t saying that much, because the driveway is a dirt track about a kilometre long.

PEOPLE OFTEN SAY they don’t like cleaning, but they like when things are clean. That sounds like laziness to me. I like when it’s done and I like the doing as well. I like the smell of the different cleaners, the sick-smelling chlorine waft of the mould killer, the woody aroma of furniture polish. I like rousting out the grime from every crack and cornice, and getting myself covered in it—in my hair, under my nails—I like the hard work, getting out of breath, sweat on my back and my brow, and then, when it’s all done, stepping into the shower and washing all that dirt down the drain, and stepping out again, pink, clean, new.

Before I’ve even unlocked the front door, I reach into my box of cleaning gear and fish out the roll of bin bags. I rip one off and grab all of El’s shoes from the porch and stuff them in. The most important thing is never to be sentimental. That is something I’ve found to be true all of the time. Sentimentality can be a kind of disease, a sickness. It can bring you low. Once inside the house, I begin racing around the downstairs room with the bin bag, grabbing the most obvious bits of rubbish: the empty envelopes, old magazines, newspapers, and torn-out pages of notebooks.

I find the pile of handwritten letters that I’d put aside the day before. They all have the blue airmail stamp, and have come from Egypt, Cambodia, Kenya. They are all from someone signed only M, but one envelope has a return address, and I see the M is for Marko. They are love letters. The one I start to read is tender and full of in-jokes and anecdotes, and I stop reading because it is too much like eavesdropping.

I don’t recall any boyfriend of El’s called Marko. The only boyfriend of El’s that I remember being around for any length of time was Oliver, and my main memory of him is the time that El had invited him around for dinner to the house we shared. She was never much of a cook, but she’d tried to impress him by making zeppole and ended up in emergency with second-degree burns on her hands. I wonder if this Marko is still around, whether he might be likely to arrive here at any moment. The letters are dated between one and two years ago, and I haven’t seen any sign of the presence of a boyfriend in the house, though in this mess it’s hard to tell.

I continue around the living room and fill up the bin bag. Then I fill up another. I collect the dirty dishes and dump them into the sink. Some of them are covered with food so putrefied that they aren’t worth cleaning, so I just bin the plate or cup along with the food.

When the bags are full, I take them outside and pile them up next to the forty-four-gallon drums. I move quickly. I enjoy the movement of my muscles, the feeling of pitting my body against the chaos of the room. Soon my heart beats fast, reverberating through me, and my skin is sticky with a sheen of sweat. I drink a glass of water standing at the sink, and survey the room. Even with all the bin bags I’ve filled, I’ve hardly made a dent.

IT WAS ON a Tuesday night in my old apartment in Marzahn that I’d first heard El’s voice again. The last time I’d spoken to her was all those years ago, before the accident. I’d just come home from work. Actually, I could hear her voice, not that I recognised it, before I even got into the apartment—even before I’d reached the little landing on the fourth floor. I’d passed by the Schröders’ door below mine, and as usual the smell of meat frying or roasting filled the stairwell outside their place. I was already holding the apartment key ready in my hand, and my body was full of that heavy, hollowed-out feeling I always get after a long shift. The stairs were rackety and old, and at first I thought the sound of her voice was the sound of the wood groaning under my feet, but when I froze—one foot on one stair, one on another—the sound carried on. Intruders, I immediately thought. Intruders in my apartment. Not that I had anything much to steal. I stood there on the staircase listening. The voice came again. It was a woman’s voice. It was only then that I remembered the new answering machine that Stefan had given me. I ran up the stairs and unlocked the door.

‘. . . to tell you. Are you there? Please. I need to talk to you. Really, I do,’ said the voice.

The voice was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. I was standing just inside the entrance of the apartment, with the door flung wide behind me.

‘Eva?’

I felt something inside me contract. My body had recognised her voice before I had. Elizabeta. My sister.

‘Please, Eva,’ came her voice again.

I have no idea how she found my number. I certainly hadn’t given it to her. I heard her sigh, long and low, then there was a click and then silence. The machine beeped. ‘Three new messages,’ it announced with its electronic woman’s voice. Were they all from El?

The light on the answering machine was blinking. I leaned over the machine and reached for the button marked play. My finger hovered in the air over the button. I both did and didn’t want to hear her voice again. The little light blinked: on, off, in its regular rhythm, hypnotic, unrelenting.

‘Hi, darling.’

The voice came from behind me, Peter’s voice. He was standing in the open doorway.

I pressed the delete button on the machine.

‘Two messages,’ the electronic voice announced. I jabbed at the button. ‘One mess—no new messages,’ the voice said.

‘What are you doing?’ Peter asked. ‘You don’t want me to hear your messages?’

Peter, like many Germans, is very direct.

‘No! It’s just . . . the machine. I’m not used to it yet.’ I couldn’t explain to him why I didn’t want him to hear the messages. ‘Really, it’s nothing.’

‘That’s not what it looked like to me,’ Peter said. ‘It looked like there’s something you’re trying to hide.’ He remained standing in the doorway, frowning. ‘Actually, it might be better that I go home.’

I tried to tell him that he had the wrong idea, that the messages were from my sister in Australia, and I think he believed me, but I couldn’t convince him to stay. It is very difficult to change Peter’s mind once he’s made it up. It’s one of the things I love about him. His sureness of himself.

After he left, I opened a bottle of wine and sat beside the phone. I felt the nauseating panic of being unmoored that came whenever Peter and I had a disagreement, which hadn’t been that often in the five years we’d been together. But it is true that usually, maybe always, when we disagreed, I was the cause. I, and my silence.

El didn’t call again, and when I dialled Peter, he didn’t answer.

Later, when I was in the shower, and after I’d climbed into bed, in my mind I could still see the blinking light of the answering machine, like a bright green eye opening and closing, the rhythm of it loud like my heartbeat.

A month later the airline ticket arrived.

I FINISH MY glass of water. The room looks even more chaotic than it did when I arrived. There seem to be more of El’s belongings than there were before, all massed together and pressing in on me. Clearing out the place is starting to feel like an impossible task from a fairy tale, like emptying the sea with a teaspoon.

I wonder if El has any cigarettes. I gave up smoking long ago, but since I’ve been in Australia it’s as if my body has been transported back through time and doesn’t remember that I’ve quit. I hunt through the kitchen cupboards. We both used to smoke Marlboro Golds. I don’t find any, but I do find an unopened bottle of Bushmills. I pour some into my dusty glass and down it.

I call Peter from the house phone, but he doesn’t answer. It could be that he’s at work. Or it could be that he’s decided not to answer my calls. The thought makes me feel slightly ill. I send him a text instead: Missing you darling. Thinking of you. I have only a single bar of reception, even if I climb up on the sofa, and the message is very slow to send.

I pour myself another glass of Bushmills. The kitchen window looks out at the tangled scrubland, the dullest greyish green, everything wet and dripping, illegible to me. I never felt at home in this country. A country which is mostly immigrants. How many generations does it take for immigrants to feel at home in this place? To feel that they belong to the place, and that the place belongs to them. I open the window a crack and the cold air that slices into the room is thick with the smell of dirt and decomposing leaves.

When I was at high school, my friend Julia’s family rented a place out here near Bendigo one school holidays, and took me along with them. The house was a big old weatherboard place, with icy wind blowing in through the gaps in the walls and the floorboards, and mould growing in black constellations on the bathroom ceiling. In the afternoons we’d take their dog Boris out for walks. We’d throw sticks for him to chase, but he was more interested in the wildlife. One afternoon he took off after something, a rabbit maybe or a low-flying bird. One minute he was beside us and the next he was streaking away through the scrub, leaving up-kicked dirt and scattered twigs in his wake. Boris was part greyhound, so once he’d tasted the thrill of the chase there was no way of ever getting him to heel. We could hear him crashing through the bush ahead of us, and we fought our way through the scrub and bracken, calling his name, shouting it. He didn’t come.

We went back to the house and told Julia’s mum, and all of us spent the rest of the afternoon searching. We called and called, we listened out for the sound of his answering bark. It got dark, and the evening air began to fill with the chorus of night animals. We gave it up for the day.

Early the next morning we went out again, and it was only then, in the quiet of the breaking day, that we could hear the sound of his soft whimpering. It was coming from a deep hole, quite close to the side of the house. He would’ve been able to hear us looking for him and calling his name the night before, but the sound of his whining must have been covered up by the braying of possums and the cries of the owls, or just by the wind whistling through the trees.

The CFA, when they arrived with a rope and pulley, came too late. When they pulled him up his body was limp and silent. The sunlight made white sparks on his pale fur.

The area all around here is old gold mining country. If you take a walk through that bush, you’ll come across abandoned mine shafts. They’re all over the place, sudden abysses at your feet. Some of them have been filled up with sticks, stones and dirt, or rubbish, but others still gape open, untouched and unseen for a hundred years, maybe grown over with a layer of scrubby grass and creepers. You’d never know they were there. There is a mountain to the south, not far, that was a mine long before the Europeans came here to mine for gold. The Aboriginal people of the area mined greenstone there, for making axes.

I DRINK ANOTHER Bushmills and then pull on some bright yellow rubber gloves. I get the Jif and the Windex and head for the bathroom. I throw out a tumbler full of dilapidated toothbrushes. I wipe down the shower (mildewed), the sink (cracked) and the mirror (tarnished). I open the cabinet. It’s packed full of boxes and bottles. Temazepam, Stilnox, Valium, Xanax, Endone, Serepax at double the dose mine had been. Most of them are out of date. There are razor blades, bandages and tampons. Calamine lotion and hair removal cream. A comb with broken teeth. I take a Serepax and wash it down with a handful of water from the tap.

The sink is blocked, the water pools. I find a plunger stashed behind the loo, but all it does is bring up blooms of cloudy water speckled with flecks of black debris. I reach my hand into the water, but I can’t feel anything through the gloves. With them off, the water comes up warm and oily against my skin. I pick around in the drain, scrounging with my fingernails for the lump of hair or the wad of cotton that’s causing the blockage. I wedge my nails under the edge of the drain, and the whole drain flips up and comes away. I pull it out of the water, and with it comes a great fat tongue of hair. I retch. The hair is brown and glossy with a thin slimy coating. I can hardly stand to look at it. It’s as if I’d pulled the thing up out of my own throat, up from the depths of my bowels.

I drop it into the sink and, still retching, make for the front door. The objects in the living room—the books and shelves, the sofa and table—leer at me, and appear in the dim light to be huddling together in the centre of the room. The place has become suddenly tiny, as if, while I was in the bathroom, giant hands had reached down and pushed the four walls of the house closer together. When I pull open the front door there is a roaring sound. The rain is coming down in a continuous torrent, a waterfall so fast and strong that I can hardly make out the gate at the far side of the courtyard. The courtyard has become a pool, and rising up out of it, like the centrepiece of a fountain, is the car.

THE CAR. I’D known it was there of course, but I’d avoided looking at it, thinking about it. Now it seems to take up all the space in the courtyard and I can’t look at anything else. The car is absurdly flimsy. I’d had to hunt around for a long time to find a child seat that would fit in the back of it. Who, apart from some man in the grip of a mid-life crisis, would ever think to buy a coupé? And in the country. El’s car keys are hanging on a hook beside the front door. I take them and splash through the courtyard and unlock the car door. I get in. The interior smells like dust and stale cigarette smoke and the seat is so low to the ground it’s like sitting on the floor with your legs stretched out in front of you. Like a kid’s go-cart. At least it isn’t a convertible. The raindrops drum on the car roof. It’s been years since I’ve sat in a driver’s seat. At home Peter always drives. Anywhere I want to go, he gives me lifts. He has a sensible car, a Golf, bright blue, which he keeps extremely clean. He has a tiny dustpan and broom in the boot. He says he likes driving, that it relaxes him. I can’t imagine ever feeling that. Peter is a good driver, careful, alert. The rain runs down the windshield in miniature torrents around the specks of bird shit that cover the glass. It looks like the map of an archipelago. There is a pair of El’s sunglasses on the dash, the same style she used to wear: black, cat’s eye, oversized. She’d been a flamboyant dresser. One of those women whose clothes seemed to be begging you to look at them, daring you. Bright colours, clashing patterns layered over each other, different outfits, all of them like costumes, like she was playing dress-ups every day. This car is just one more outfit. With El, everything was a pose.

I STICK THE key into the ignition and pull the choke out. I put my foot on the clutch and turn the key. The car starts without a hitch. When I press down on the accelerator the engine roars. The sound is like a cartoon car: a smooth vroom on a rising pitch. I press the pedal harder, all the way down, and the roar rises to a high whine. I watch the RPM climb up to sixty. The red zone. These cars are fast, I know.

I used to go driving with El all the time, back when we both lived in Melbourne. I never thought anything of it then. She also loved to drive. But she was a different kind of driver to Peter. I remember one night, after a day at the beach, going along the Nepean Highway in her car that was the double of the one I am sitting in. There were hardly any other cars on the road that night, but then suddenly one appeared right behind us. A cop car, signalling.

‘What’s the problem, officer?’ El simpered at the cop, her voice breathy.

He was an old cop, with a grey implacable face. He was unimpressed and he had his ticket book ready.

‘Clocked you back there at twenty over the limit, miss.’

‘Over the limit?’ Her eyebrows flew up in staged surprise. She looked over at me. ‘We weren’t over the limit,’ she said. ‘Were we, Eva?’

‘You were going a hundred,’ the cop said. ‘Any particular reason for that?’

‘A hundred? No. But, officer, that’s just not possible. Look.’ She pointed at the dash. Her nails were varnished bubblegum pink. She tapped the dial of the speedo. ‘This old thing says it goes to one twenty, but, you know, I don’t believe it really does. I bet they just write it on there to make you feel good, don’t you think? Anyway, I checked it just before and it said I was only doing sixty. And that sign,’ she pointed to the sign we were pulled up next to, ‘says eighty.’ She looked up at the cop. She smiled. She had a little dimple in her left cheek.

The cop peered at the dashboard.

‘Miss,’ he said, ‘your speedo is in miles. Not kilometres.’

Her eyes were wide.

‘Miles?’ she said. ‘What do you mean, in miles?’

Then she sat there, polite and interested, nodding at the cop as he patiently explained the conversion from miles to kilometres. He didn’t write her a ticket. She pulled that stunt all the time.

I turn off the engine and pick up El’s sunglasses from the dash. I unfold the arms. There is a peach patch of face powder on the inside of the nose-pad. I rub it off with my finger, and slide the glasses onto my face. It becomes night. The rain rattles down on the car roof. I rest my hands on the steering wheel and lean back in the seat. My eyes are looking at my hands, curled, relaxed on the wheel. My eyes are looking at my hands, but that’s not what I see.

IF A CAR is travelling down a road.

If a car is travelling down a road at the speed of seventy kilometres per hour.

(Seventy kilometres per hour equals forty-three miles per hour.)

If a car travelling down Barkers Road, in Kew, is going at the speed of forty-three miles per hour (seventy kilometres) and runs a red light.

If a 1971 MG runs a red light at seventy kilometres per hour and meets another car that is travelling at thirty kilometres per hour through the intersection, there is a high chance of collision and serious injury.

A car is travelling down a road.

The chance of a fatal collision doubles with each five kilometres per hour a car is travelling over the speed of sixty kilometres per hour.

A 1971 MG travelling at seventy kilometres per hour will take a greater distance to stop than a 1988 Holden ute. The 1971 MGs are fitted with single-line braking systems, which, if not maintained correctly, have a slower response time than the more modern dual-line braking systems. When a single-line brake is deployed, the car is not stopped as much as slowed. Single-line braking systems are now illegal in this country.

If a 1971 MG runs a red light at an intersection at seventy kilometres per hour and meets a 1988 Holden Rodeo that is travelling along the intersecting street, it is unclear whether the first car will have seen the second approaching and have time to deploy the brakes.

A car is travelling down Barkers Road. A woman is in the driver’s seat. She is driving a racing green 1971 MG. She has the window wound down. She is laughing and looking in the rear-view at the back seat. There is a passenger sitting in the back seat. A five-year-old girl. The driver can only see the top of the girl’s head in the rear-view because she has forgotten to install the child seat. The girl’s hair shines red-gold and springs up from her head in a halo of curls.

Despite appearances, frontal-impact collisions have a far lower chance of a fatality and serious injury than side-impact collisions. A side collision, even one occurring at a relatively low speed, can be lethal. Side collisions cause serious damage to the pelvis, thorax, neck and head, as well as internal organs. In frontal collisions, much of the force of impact is absorbed by the bonnet of the car, whereas the sides of cars have nothing more than the thickness of the door to absorb the shock. In side collisions, the force is absorbed by the body of the passenger, which can be crushed. The force of the collision can be strong enough to break bones and rupture organs, including the spleen and stomach, which, when burst, cause digestive fluids to flood the body.

Upon impact, the head and neck of the passenger are whipped towards the direction of impact, often violently striking the window or door, before being whipped back again as the vehicle comes to a stop. The speed and force of this motion of the head and neck, even without contact with the car window, can cause serious damage to the nerve roots in the cervical spine. The connective tissues in the neck are stretched beyond their limits, and the brain makes contact with the skull, bursting blood vessels, and causing traumatic injury that can result in permanent damage or death. Ribs are broken and the thorax is crushed. The lungs can be punctured from contact with the ribs. The heart is thrust sideways to collide with the ribs, resulting in bruising or puncture, which causes internal bleeding and death.

A car is travelling west along Barkers Road, Kew. The driver, Elizabeta Novak, hasn’t seen that the light has changed at the intersection of Denmark Street. She proceeds through the intersection. A man driving a Holden Rodeo is travelling south on Denmark Street. He has a green light. The Holden driver does not see the MG approach. The front of the Holden makes contact with the right rear passenger side of the MG. The force of the impact causes the MG to skid at an angle of more than ninety degrees. The side of the MG crumples at the site of impact. A passenger sitting in the rear right seat is occupying a position that is deemed unsurvivable in the case of such an accident. There is a passenger sitting in the right rear seat. The passenger is Grace Novak-Rubcic.

The driver of the Holden sustains minor lacerations on his hands and face. The driver of the MG loses consciousness on impact. She sustains only minor head and neck injuries and fractured ribs. The passenger in the rear seat of the MG is not adequately restrained and is thrown sideways. She dies at the scene.

THE HOTEL CURTAINS are made of a thick, copper-coloured fabric, heavy and roughly woven. They don’t close all the way, and I’ve already been awake a long time when the light appears in the space between them. In fact, I don’t know if I’ve slept at all. The light gets brighter, heralding the sounds of the hotel waking up: the bustling and clatter from the kitchen downstairs, the creak of the staircase, and the footfalls of people coming and going along the corridor. This burst of activity is followed by a short period of quiet, when the beam of light from the curtain crack runs along the floor and points like a skinny finger to the writing desk beside the bed. In ordinary light—of the lamp, or when the curtain is open—the wood of this desk looks dull and unremarkable, but when it is lit by this beam the wood glows, amber flecked with gold. I can hear the very faint ticking of the clock on the wall.

Then comes the hour of the housekeepers. The cleaning trolley squeaks as it advances along the corridor. The hum of the vacuum, doors slamming.

I lie in the bed and do not think. I look. I listen. I breathe. I feel the unfamiliar sheets over my skin, and the blood course under my skin. I hear my heart. I do not think about El. That she is dead. I do not think about her house, and the work I have to do. Instead I picture a walking track that I often walk in Grunewald, the one that goes past the dunes and the ruin on the Teufelsberg, finishing at the Krumme Lanke, where, if the weather is warm, I stop for a swim. Because I work shifts, I sometimes have days off during the week, and it is on these weekdays, when it is emptied of squabbling families and enthusiastic hiking groups brandishing Nordic walking poles, that I walk there. I like to walk alone. I bring to my mind the start of the walk, as if I am going on it, to the moment of the train doors opening, of stepping off onto the platform at Grunewald station, of doubling back to look at the memorial at Gleis 17, and then walking through the underpass. I try to follow every step in my mind, and recall every detail. The clanking of the train doors, the texture of the bitumen of the station platform, the precise shades of the red roses lying among the grey stones at the memorial, the dank smell of the underpass—dead leaves, damp concrete—the echoing sound my footsteps make there, the green dappled light on the paths, the birdsong that was, in the first years, so unfamiliar to me, so strange.

A housekeeper knocks and I hear the rattle as she tries the doorhandle. I have bolted it from the inside.

‘Go away!’ I call out. ‘I don’t need anything.’

I am aware, dimly, that I have to get up, get moving, that I have things to do, but this knowledge seems unconnected to me, it drifts far off, a small distant balloon at the end of a long, long string that I hold loosely in my fingers. I am aware, but I feel it only as a diffuse uneasiness.

IF YOU’VE FORGOTTEN to do something, neglected to do something that will protect someone, save their life, is it the same as if you have killed that person? Is not doing something the same as doing the opposite? Of course the answer is yes. If you come across a person drowning in the sea, and you don’t dive in after them, don’t call for help, then you are the one responsible for that person’s death. But you could say: what if you didn’t see the drowning person? What if you thought they were only waving?

But I can’t believe anyone would ever think that.

During the weeks after the accident, years ago, my days all started the same way.

6.30 am: Get out of bed.

6.35 am: Shower, dress.

7.10 am: Coffee, cigarette.

7.30 am: Out of the door.

Kent Street.

Highett Street.

Gleadell Street, through the park.

Cameron Street, Bowen Street.

One loaf of bread from the milk bar. One packet of Marlboro Golds.

Bowen Street, Cameron Street.

Through the park, Gleadell Street.

Highett Street.

Kent Street.

Still not yet 8.00 am.

Toast, coffee, cigarette.

They’d given me a brochure at the hospital. Bring your awareness to your breath. But all my awareness was taken up by the stale taste of Marlboros at the back of my throat. Pins and needles in my fingers and the backs of my thighs. Bring your awareness to the breath passing through your nostrils. The faint smell in the air of toast, burned, cold. My hands trembling on my thighs, my heart shaking my body, fast, like an animal’s. I wanted to get out of my body.

If you lie still for a long, long time, you can disappear.

DAYS PASS IN the hotel room, days and nights. One night I sleep for a while, and wake in the dark with an alertness in my body. The clock on the wall tells me that it’s three in the morning, but I’m not tired. I’m more awake than I usually am at midday. I get out of bed and retrieve my mobile from the depths of my handbag. The date on the screen tells me I’m due to fly back to Berlin in just over a week’s time. There are four missed calls from Karin, and three voice messages from her.

Oh, Eva, my darling. You didn’t even tell me you were leaving, you goose! Did you think I’d convince you not to go? Stefan told me. I know it’ll be a difficult trip. I’m thinking of you and sending you all my love. Stay strong. Call me any time if you need to talk.

Me again. I hope you’re holding up okay. Love you lots.

Eva! What’s the story? They don’t have phone coverage in Australia now? Hm. I’ll try you again. Lots of love, darling.

I get back into bed and dial Karin’s number. She answers on the first ring.

‘Thank god you’re okay!’ she says, before I have had the chance to tell her that maybe I’m not. ‘You must be stressed out of your mind.’

I’ve known Karin for ages. We first met when I was living in Melbourne, and we were both working at the Alfred Hospital. She’s German, and it was because of her that I decided to go to Berlin. After the accident, she was moving back to Germany and I went with her.

‘So?’ Karin asks. ‘What’s the story? How is it over there? Give me the rundown.’

‘The rundown . . . the rundown is I’m really not that okay.’

My nose and throat begin to prickle and I close my eyes. I take some breaths. I tell Karin how Gracie has been on my mind. I tell her about the strangeness of being back, about my sadness, about the way the past is everywhere. I don’t tell her that El is dead. She asks me when I’m coming back, and tells me that Peter seems to be missing me a lot. ‘Moping around the place is how Stefan described it,’ she says.

After I hang up I call Peter, but he doesn’t answer. I leave a message asking him to call me back. Then I have a shower. I wash my hair and stand under the hot water for a long time. I make the water hotter, too hot, until my skin is mottled with a web of pink, and steam rises from my limbs. When I get out I realise that I’m hungry. I eat a small bag of salted peanuts and some cheese and crackers that I still have from the plane. I drink a mini bottle of wine from the hotel fridge and eat a Snickers. I open another bottle of wine and pull the desk chair to the window and open the curtains and look out. There is nothing to see except a dark and empty side street. I’m on the third floor. Leaves and scraps of rubbish blow along the footpath. The trees toss their limbs in the wind. I have a little more than a week to get the house in order.

I take my time over breakfast in the hotel restaurant, drinking cup after cup of coffee. I sit and watch the other guests who are breakfasting: an old white-haired couple, and two beefy middle-aged men dressed in identical blue overalls and steel-capped boots. No one speaks much, and they all eat quicker than I do. I am the last person to leave.

‘Checking out?’ the woman at the front desk asks as I walk past her, back up to my room.

‘Er, no.’

But the woman insists that I’m leaving that day. I wasn’t the one who had made the booking; it was the policewoman, Prush, who had organised the room, late on that first night. I ask to extend my booking, but the woman shakes her head. She is small and round, of indeterminate age. Her skin is milky-pale, and her short platinum hair is set in a brushed-out perm that foams around her head like a helmet of soap bubbles. It bounces slightly as her head moves back and forth.

‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ she says. Her voice is fluting, girlish. ‘We’re fully booked.’

The doubt must have shown on my face.

‘It’s the Rotary Show,’ she says. ‘Don’t you know about the Rotary Show?’

I don’t and she looks mildly insulted at my ignorance, as if it is a deliberate personal offence against her. She reaches up to pat her hair. ‘The Rotary Show is a very famous car show. People come from all around Victoria, and sometimes even from interstate, with their specialty cars. Busiest week in the year! We’re fully booked. Have been for months in advance.’

‘Could you suggest another place I might try?’

She gives a little hiccoughing laugh. ‘In town? You won’t find anything anywhere until the week after next. I’m telling you it’s the Rotary Show: everywhere’s fully booked!’

IT TURNS OUT that she is right. Everywhere else is fully booked. An hour later I’m in a cab on the way to El’s place. I have my luggage with me. When the cab pulls up it’s raining hard. This driver drops me further from the house than any of the others have, and I can see why. The dirt road has become a morass of thick red mud, punctuated with potholes where cloudy water has pooled. I packed lightly for this trip, and have only a small duffel bag. I neglected to pack an umbrella, or a raincoat. By the time I make it inside I’m drenched.

THAT AFTERNOON I get back to cleaning out El’s desk. It’s more of the same rubbish—old scraps and useless documents—but then El’s face flashes up at me from a photo. Black and white. She looks beautiful. Young. Her shiny hair is pinned back and she holds a cigarette. (If only I still smoked.) Her eyes look like she knows more about you than you do. We look alike, but she has always been more beautiful.

The photo is on the back cover of a book: All My Broken Hearts by E. Novak.

Novak is the author of the award-winning novels Lose Yourself and The Bird and the Bear. She lives in rural Victoria.

I didn’t know she was a writer.

Her photo reminds me of an El Greco painting that we used to have hanging in the hallway when we were little. The way that her face and hand loom out through the darkness.

But she isn’t facing the viewer front-on. She has her head tilted a little to one side, and looks at the camera with the tail of her eye. She always looked more like Tata. I can see the dent of an old scar making a faint pock under her left eyebrow. I throw the book across the room.

THE TOWN WHERE El and I were born sits on a hillside above the Adriatic Sea. Our house was on the outskirts, about a twenty-minute walk uphill from the town centre. When El was old enough, she was given a bicycle that had belonged to our cousin Nika. It was a beaten-up old thing, with red enamel paint that was scratched and flaking off, and grubby white rubber handlebar grips. Once El had the hang of riding it, Tata tied a small cushion on the luggage carrier for me, so El and I could ride together.

Before El got that bike, we’d never gone to town on our own because it took too long for us to walk there. We only ever went on the back of Mum or Tata’s bikes. It was a summer morning when we set out for town on El’s bike for the first time. It felt like a grand adventure. There were many different roads that would take you from our house to town, but when we were on El’s bike we were only allowed to go by Zatrep Street because Zatrep Street was one of the few streets that had a concreted footpath, which we were under strict instructions to ride on at all times. We were especially forbidden from taking a shortcut down Selačka Lane, which ran between the backs of two rows of houses, and was no more than a narrow path of packed earth.

The first few times we did as we were told and stayed on the footpath of Zatrep Street, but gradually we began to look longingly down Selačka Lane when we rode past it. The lane ran downhill, and then up again in a steep U-shape to meet Primorska Street. We sometimes saw Ivan and Lazar and the kids from Mr Celar’s Year 5 class taking their bikes down the lane, zooming down and then up, wobbling with the velocity, shouting with delight. I started to pester El to take Selačka Lane to town, but each time she refused.

One day, after I’d begged her, El stopped the bike at the entrance of the lane. She turned around to face me.

‘Are you sure you want to do it?’ she asked.

I looked down the lane. It seemed steeper than it had on other days. In fact, it was so steep that I couldn’t see the bottom of the hill.

‘Sure I do!’ I ignored the cold feeling in my belly. ‘Let’s go!’ I gripped tight around El’s waist.

‘No,’ El said, and pulled my hands away. ‘You wait here. I want to try it on my own first.’

I started to cry but she pushed me off the bike, ignoring my tears. ‘I’m just going to test it out. If it’s safe, I’ll come back and we can go down again together. Eva, I promise.’

Through my tears I watched her square up the bike for the descent. She narrowed her eyes and wrapped her fists around the handlebars, then she pushed off with one sandal-clad foot. She shot off down the hill, her speed increasing with each second that passed. Soon she was going faster than I imagined it was possible to go. I lost sight of her for a few seconds, and when she reappeared she had almost reached the bottom of the hill. Then I noticed that her wheels were beginning to quiver, then wobble, then shake, and the bike tilted to one side and El was thrown to the ground, face-down, but still somehow astride the fallen bike. She slid along through the dirt, with her hands out in front of her, and came to rest in a straggly bush that grew along the back of one of the houses.

El’s hands were badly grazed, and she had cuts to her face that took a long time to heal. The deepest one left that scar, just under her eyebrow. El got into a lot of trouble from Mum because we had disobeyed her, and because El, as the older sister, the sister who should be taking responsibility, ought to have known better. El never told Mum that taking the lane was my idea.

THAT NIGHT I can’t sleep. I lie awake, wrapped in blankets on the sofa downstairs, listening to the unfamiliar night sounds. I can never sleep very well on my first night somewhere new, and this night is far from peaceful. The rain is blowing in ragged gusts against the windows, and a loose part of the house, somewhere on the upper floor, or on the roof, bangs in a fitful rhythm. From time to time the screeching cries of animals, maybe foxes or maybe possums, are carried in on the wind.

There are no curtains on any of the windows, and it must be a full moon, because it’s almost as bright as day, but it’s a cold, flat light that makes my teeth ache. The trees outside are ghostly pale, like photographic negatives of trees. I become aware of the scrabbling sound of claws on stone coming from close by, near the front door, and then a soft whimpering that’s almost drowned out by the wind. I shrink further into the blankets and pretend that I don’t hear it. The scrabbling stops and starts, and then I am almost sure that something is scratching against the front door. I try to ignore it, along with the spooked sensation that’s growing in me.

‘What are you afraid of?’ I say out loud. ‘Ghosts? Don’t be ridiculous.’

The sound comes again, louder. I get up, clutching a blanket around my shoulders.

‘Hello?’ I call out.

There is no reply. I open the door, and there, standing under the verandah, is a large dog. The dog looks at me. It is dark grey or black, with a dirty white patch on its muzzle, and a curling, scruffy coat. The rain is drumming down on the tin roof of the verandah, and running off it in streams. The dog keeps looking at me. Raindrops bead its fur and drip onto the ground. It’s wearing a dark red leather collar, with a name tag dangling. I reach out my hand, and the dog gives a low growl and flattens its ears. I back off.

‘Hey, it’s okay. Just want to say hello.’

The dog looks past me into the house, and then dodges around me and through the doorway and into the downstairs room. Its claws click on the stone flags and it leaves a trail of water and muddy pawprints. I stand by the open door and watch the dog sniff its way around the corners of the room. The staircase is folded up, and the dog starts running in a tight circle, sniffing the ground, around the spot where the staircase would touch down. The dog starts barking softly and whining.

‘Are you looking for El?’ I say. ‘She’s not up there.’

The dog ignores me and looks up at the folded staircase. I close the front door and return to my place on the sofa. The dog is still looking up at the staircase. The floor under the staircase is speckled with dark raindrops. After a long time the dog lies down. I take one of my blankets over to it but it growls when I get close. I arrange the blanket into a bed for the dog, while it watches me. It only climbs into the blanket once it thinks I’m asleep.

EARLY THE NEXT morning, I’m woken by the home phone ringing. By the time the receiver is at my ear, an unfamiliar male voice is already mid-sentence.

‘—so happy to be back, my darling! I can’t wait to see you. I’ve missed you so much.’ There is a lot of background noise, and I have to strain to hear his words. ‘And it was awful, because I could never catch you this last week—I did try to, but the situation over here has just been dire, absolutely dire. Hardly a minute to myself. Anyway. I’ll fill you in when I see you. Might not be for a few days though, long story. Just in the airport now—’

‘Wait! I’m not El—’

Was it Marko?

‘What?’ he says. ‘Ill? Have you been? Oh! My bag’s here finally. Got to go. See you soon as I can, my love.’

He hangs up before I can get another word out. The reality of El having a boyfriend is foreign to me. I’m almost offended by it.

THE DOG IS up and scratching at the back door to be let out. In the daylight I see that it’s a bit scrawny and old-looking. Burrs and twigs are stuck in its tousled fur. When I open the door, it runs out and into the bush without a backward glance.

I find two tin bowls under the sink and put out some water and one of the lamb chops that I was going to have for dinner, in case the dog comes back.

I make a start in the kitchen. There is a corner cupboard, as deep as my arm can reach and going all the way to the ceiling. I start at the bottom shelf and work my way up. Cans of SPC beans and peaches in syrup and Heinz tomato soup and tinned tomatoes, stacked in rows. Behind those, tins of Pedigree dog food. I take them out and put them into a cardboard box. A plastic bottle of double-strength white vinegar, three jumbo boxes of Twinings English Breakfast teabags and a large jar of Moccona Classic Medium Roast. Then plain and self-raising flour, two kilos of long-grain white rice, three litres of UHT full-fat milk, golden syrup, honey, a box of spice jars (all half-empty), brown sugar, white sugar, caster sugar, canola oil, olive oil, tomato paste. I fetch one of the kitchen chairs and climb up.

A plastic box full of cake tins, rolls of baking paper and aluminium foil, a cheese grater, a set of metal mixing bowls. I have to stand on my toes. A blender and three rolling pins of different sizes, empty Tupperware containers. I can see a cardboard box at the very back. I stretch up and lean into the cupboard, straining to catch hold of the edge. Maybe this is where she kept all her important documents. As I lean in, the shelf tilts under my weight and the box slides towards me. My torso curves back and the underside of my forearms push down and scrape painfully against the edge of the chipboard shelf. The chair rocks forward, and my arms windmill behind me as I stagger back and leap onto the ground, twisting my knee when I land. The box crashes down, narrowly missing my feet.

My body is quivering and my heart drumming against my ribs. It’s typical of El to have such a stupid arrangement in her house. There is a pulsing ache in my knee, and I lean down and massage it. Who would keep such a heavy object in an unreachable place? Probably she had just stuffed that box in there and forgotten about it. Like she’d forgotten so many things. Gracie would have been thirteen this year. I push the thought away before any image of her can come to me.

I open the top of the box. Inside are copies of the Yellow Pages from 1999.

I DIAL OUR Berlin apartment number from the house phone and listen to the clicks of the long-distance connection, then the soft purrs of the ringtone. If Peter had come here with me he’d have had the whole house sorted out by now. ‘You just need a system, Eva, a strategy. Then everything becomes easy.’ I picture him standing in the kitchen, making lists, stooping down to fill bags and boxes, neatly labelling everything, hefting them from one side of the room to the other, whistling ‘(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay’. If he had come with me, we’d already be on our way back home. Together in our new apartment.

‘Hallo, Peter hier.’

The sound of his voice gives me a sensation of warmth in the back of my neck.

‘I’m so happy to hear your voice,’ I say. ‘I’ve been missing you.’

There is a small silence.

‘So how are the Blue Hills?’ he asks.

‘Mountains. And they’re not blue. They’re brown. Grey. But you can’t call a place Grey Mountains.’

‘And how’s your sister?’

‘She’s . . . she’s fine.’

I don’t know why I can’t say it. The words aren’t there.

‘Only fine? After all those dramatics? What happened? What was so urgent? I can’t understand this situation.’

‘Well, she’s . . .’

‘Is she there, is that why you can’t talk?’

‘No . . . no. It’s just . . . I mean she’s . . .’

My lips go slack. I can hear the rain on the roof. The kitchen has exposed sand-coloured bricks along one wall, and in a tiny cavity on one of the bricks a spider has spun a minuscule web. I stare at it. My mouth is immobile. There are some kinds of brain injury where certain words become inaccessible. Anomic aphasia. People become separated from the word for a thing. They know what an object is, or a feeling, but the name we give to it is lost to them. Like if you’re given a picture of a house on a street in a part of the city that you don’t know, and are asked to describe how to get there. You can see where you want to get to, but can’t locate yourself in relation to it.

‘Eva?’

I know exactly what it is that I have to say, but I can’t get there.

I hear him sigh. ‘I don’t even know why you bothered to call. You know, if you can’t even have a conversation with someone, how are you supposed to have a relationship with them? You can’t. It’s impossible.’

‘It’s not so easy, it’s not all . . . there are too many things . . .’ my voice trails off.

‘I never know what’s going on with you,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I feel like I don’t even know you. It’s like you don’t want me to be close, or you’re hiding from me all the time. You don’t want me to really see you. How can I trust you if I don’t feel close to you? I don’t even know where you are, really. You could be anywhere! With anyone!’ He takes a breath. ‘Look. I need to take a break. I need time to think. Don’t call me again. I hope that you have a good trip.’

When I hang up the phone I do it a little harder than I mean to. In fact, I knock the phone half off the wall. Must’ve been poorly installed. Now the machine gapes out at an angle, hanging off the wires. I try to shove it back in, but it won’t hold, the plaster just crumbles around it. I pick up the receiver. The line is dead.

IF ONLY I still smoked. They used to have those anti-smoking ads on TV where they sliced open the lung of a smoker, and the camera zoomed in on a slow grey ooze of tar leaking out. Every cigarette is doing you damage. I wonder whether those ads ever worked on anyone. To me, the distance between lighting up a Marlboro and the inside of that lung on the TV screen was like the distance between my house and the moon. I hold up two fingers to my lips and suck in air through them as if they held a cigarette. I can almost taste the tobacco at the back of my tongue. Every cigarette is doing you damage. I exhale imaginary smoke. I take a Serepax instead.

El’s house is freezing. Colder than anywhere in Germany. The only heater in the place is an ancient-looking pot-bellied stove. I make a pyramid of sticks with twists of newspaper, like you hear about Scouts doing, but I can’t get any of the larger pieces of wood to catch. Damp probably. After fifteen minutes I give up. I never was one for camping. I find a beanie and a hideous lumpy knitted jumper hanging on a hook by the door. When I pull the jumper down over my head I get a whiff of El’s amber and vanilla perfume, instantly familiar. Perfume’s not something I’ve ever bothered with. I take another Serepax and lay down on the sofa with a cup of tea. My body sinks down deep in the swampy cushions. I pick up El’s book from where it landed on the floor. All My Broken Hearts.

It all began one summer with a little lump on the sole of Tata’s left foot, in the exact middle of the arch. The lump was tiny, and there was no way of knowing, by looking at it, that this little lump would one day cause our family to be torn apart.

At first it wasn’t much more than a pimple, and seemed nothing to be worried about, but after a few months Tata’s foot began to hurt. During the day the spot would throb, and at night the whole foot would swell. Tata thought he must’ve stepped on a piece of glass that had become embedded under the skin and started to fester. If my sister Eva or I ever got up in the night and went to the kitchen, we’d find him there, sitting on a kitchen chair with his foot balanced on top of his other knee, massaging the lump with his thumbs, trying to flatten it, or squeeze out whatever was lodged in there. One day he held his foot over a mirror in the bathroom and saw a black mark, oozing blood at the edges. He tried removing it himself, with tweezers, and then with a knife, but just ended up cutting his foot open and bleeding all over the bathroom cabinet.

That wasn’t the first time he’d performed this kind of backyard surgery on himself. A few years before, he’d had these terrible corns on the joints of his pinkie toes. He refused to see anyone about them, or go to the pharmacy even. Instead he cut them off one day in the shed using a kitchen knife. His toes got infected of course, and he wouldn’t see anyone about that either. He thought that the sores would heal better if they were in the open air. But Tata was never a man to be seen in thongs, not even around the house. Tata was a man with a shoe obsession. ‘You can learn everything you need to know about someone from their shoes,’ was his refrain. ‘Everything.’ When he would meet someone for the first time, we’d notice his eyes sliding down to their feet to take in their footwear and get the measure of them.

I’m sure his shoe collection would have rivalled Imelda Marcos for volume, if only his finances hadn’t stood in the way. Luckily, he did have this friend who could get things for you on the cheap, if you needed them, a back-of-a-truck kind of situation. And what Tata needed was to be kept in Italian leather loafers. He also made sure we all had nice shoes—especially Eva and me. When we were little, it was patent leather Mary Janes, to be worn with lace-edged socks that had to be folded neatly down—a thing we both hated. We were usually given matching pairs of shoes. I remember one white pair in particular, which was embroidered with little roses on the toe: red for me, and pink for Eva.

So, a couple of festering sores on Tata’s toes certainly weren’t going to stop him from wearing his favourite shoes. Instead, he cut holes in the corners of all his loafers (probably with the same kitchen knife that he used on the corns) as well as in his socks. He went around like that for months.

In the end he did go to the doctor about the lump under his foot, expecting for it to be cut out and that to be the end of it. But it turned out to be a melanoma. The doctors wanted to start him on chemo, but Mum wouldn’t allow it. She got angry when they brought it up.

‘No treatments!’ she shouted. ‘God will provide.’

Tata didn’t care too much about God providing or not, but he was happy to have nothing to do with medical people.

Prayers were the only treatment Mum allowed. Her own prayers, family prayers, and prayers from her special new church group. One Tuesday evening, the doorbell rang, and I opened the door to a crowd of strangers.

They marched into our living room, where Tata was sitting in the recliner in his white undershirt, watching the soccer World Cup on TV. He looked up in surprise as the strangers flooded the room. Eva and I had to fight to keep our spots on the sofa beside Tata’s chair. An old lady darted forward and grabbed his left foot and propped it up on the leather pouffe. Tata sat there stunned, his mouth an O of surprise. Then Mum appeared and tried to make him take off his shoe, but he didn’t want to, and they had an argument about it in Croatian, yelling at each other. Mum clung on to his foot, like it was a life raft, and shouted at us to help her. All of the church people, who only spoke English, stood around silently with their heads politely bowed while Mum wrestled with Tata’s foot, trying to get the shoe off. Eventually she did get the shoe off, and the sock as well. Mum waved to the crowd and they huddled in close over the naked foot. They prayed over it, loud and long, some of them even moaning and shaking in the throes of passionate religious emotion. We giggled while Tata sat splayed out deep in his chair, as if he’d been shot into it by a cannon, his eyes closed and his hand spread wide over his face, his body a rictus of embarrassment.

After that, the church group came every Tuesday night. Tata forbade Eva and me to open the door to them, but he couldn’t stop Mum from letting them in. When he heard them coming, Tata would lock himself in the bathroom hoping they would go away, but they’d wait for hours, hanging around in the living room and the hallway, talking quietly in twos and threes. After a few hours Tata would get hungry, or someone would need to pee, and he’d be forced out of the bathroom. As soon as he’d emerge, the church people would manhandle him down the long hallway, into the living room, and into the recliner. They’d grab his foot, strip it, and start praying. After a few weeks they even sent for some special senior church person from Brisbane to come and pray over the foot: they took up a collection to pay for his ticket. Mum held on to our pocket money for a whole month too, to contribute to the cause.

But even the prayers of the man from Brisbane didn’t help. Tata was getting sicker. We could all see it. Every week he was thinner than the one before. He seemed to be shrinking, and before long he was just a bag of bones, sunk in that huge recliner. One day, when we came home from school, he’d disappeared. At first I thought he might have shrunk down to nothing or maybe fallen into the cushions of the recliner among all the crumbs and dust. I was scared he’d died. I crawled underneath my bed and cried for a long time. It became dark and the phone rang. Mum answered it, but I picked up the extension, and Eva and I listened in. It was Tata. He told Mum that he was in hospital. She was angry and swore at him and then hung up. When we asked Mum about it later, she said we weren’t allowed to talk about Tata, especially in front of the church people. She told us he was in bed. That he was sleeping and couldn’t be disturbed. She wouldn’t let us go into their bedroom. She even put a big pile of pillows on their bed, and pulled the covers over them, and pretended it was him.

‘See,’ she whispered from the door of the bedroom. She pointed at the bed. ‘There he is. He’s just sleeping. Shh.’ Finger to her lips.

But Eva and I knew it wasn’t him.

The following Tuesday, the church people came over like they always did, but Mum wouldn’t let them into the house.

‘He’s resting,’ she said in a stage whisper from the front door. ‘The healing powers of the Lord are taking effect!’

Some weeks passed, and then one night the doorbell rang. I opened it. On the porch was a tiny old man in a wheelchair. One of his legs was cut off above the knee, the stump wrapped in white gauze. The man was wearing loose white pyjamas and had a scruffy white beard. He wheeled past me. I didn’t recognise him as Tata until he was inside. Mum wouldn’t speak to him, or even look at him. Over the next few days he hardly spoke to us, except to ask us to make him cups of Nescafé with milk and three sugars. He died a few weeks later. I don’t know how Mum ever explained this failing of the Lord to her church group, or if she ever did.

FIVE MEN SIT around a table. All of them, except one, are smoking. The table is draped in a white cloth, and behind it a white-jacketed waiter pours a drink. The man second from the right has a five-o’clock shadow, and a quiff like Elvis. He faces straight ahead, not towards the camera. Only the corner of his eye looks at the camera. His hands are folded on the table, wrists crossed, and you can see the stub of a cigarette between his fingers. That man is Tata. The man to his left is taking a pull on a pipe. He holds the bowl of the pipe with one hand and clutches his glass with the other. At least it looks like a pipe. When I look closer, it appears to be a pipe-shaped cigarette holder. The man to the right of Tata, the one in the centre, is taking a drag from a cigarette, gazing out of the frame while he does it. There are bottles on the table, maybe sweet wine, maybe slivovitz: the glasses are small. Everyone, apart from the cigarette-smoker, is looking at the camera. Except there is also another man in the background, standing by the window, looking out, or maybe about to close the lace blinds. Outside it’s dark.

I’ve seen this photo a thousand times. Even the frame is familiar: dark plastic imitation wood with gold edging in little waves. Tata used to have it propped up on his bedside table, and I remember gazing into the faces of these unknown men and making up stories about them when I was little. The faces were as deeply familiar to me as if they were old friends. The sticking-out ears of the pipe-smoker, his sharp cheekbones and thin lips. The insouciant eyebrows of the man in the centre. When we were little, El and I made up names for them all—the old guy with glasses was Walter Tweed, and the moustachioed man on his left we called Ivan Green-eye, after Tata’s best friend (who had brown eyes, but drove a green Ford). Tata’s face looks exactly the same as in every other photograph I’ve ever seen of him. He never faces the camera directly. Without fail his face is turned to the side, looking only with the edge of his eye, or he has his chin tilted down and he peers up at you from under his eyebrows. Or he doesn’t even look at the camera at all. Even his wedding photo is like that. His face is always suspicious, his eyes guarded and a little pinched. It’s true that he never really trusted anyone.

He was particular about how he looked, and you could see it in the photo. His jacket is perfectly moulded to his form, unlike the jackets of the other men, and he is the only one that has his shirt buttoned up all the way. His hair is neatly styled. Even after he went practically bald and what hair he had left was white as paper, he kept up his appointments at the hairdresser more religiously than he ever attended church. He always wore the best clothes that he could afford and he ironed them all himself—even his pyjamas—every Sunday evening while watching the news. He would never have been seen dead in anything as casual as trackpants.

I’ve seen this photo a thousand times, but as I peer into it once more I notice something new. Right at the front, in the centre of the lower edge of the frame, is an empty chair. You can just see the top of its curved back, and I recognise the shape: I used to have a set of those chairs in my kitchen in Berlin when I lived on Bülowstraße. In the photo, you can see that the tablecloth has been hiked up on that side of the table, as if someone has just stood up. This person’s glass, I realise, is the one the waiter is filling. But who had been in that chair? The man at the window, with his back to the camera? Or the other, invisible man, the one who took the photo? They’re all looking, I realise now, not at the camera, but at the man behind the camera. They’re looking at him and waiting for him to take his seat again, so that they can get back to their cigarettes, to their conversation.

It had never occurred to me that there was another man in the room, the invisible photographer, who had stood up from the table, pulled out a Kodak or a Zeiss, counted to three and pressed the shutter. I’d always felt that the frame of that photo was like a window into a scene from the past, and that it was my own eye looking through that window. I was the one looking in on them sitting there, frozen in black and white, made small by distance, by time. But if the camera was my own eye, then the empty chair would be mine. It would be my glass that the waiter is filling. It would be me that they are waiting for. The shadows in the room pull me in.

A LOUD BANGING wakes me. I am still on the sofa and I am still wearing El’s beanie. It has slipped down over my eyes. When I pull it up the room is bright with daylight. I sit up, dazed. The banging comes again.

‘Liz!’ A voice calls from outside. ‘Lizzie!’ My stomach lurches. A pale face appears at the window, framed by hands cupped against the glass. It is the thin face of an old man, made thinner by a long orange beard that’s fading to grey. His eyes dart around. When he spots me he waves.

‘There you are!’ he says.

I get up and open the door, my body still sleep-dulled.

‘Morning, love, glad to see you’re better.’

Standing in the doorway, my head is thick with confusion. The man chatters on: ‘Said to myself: now, why hasn’t Lizzie given me a call these last days? Thought your blower must be on the blink again. And what with all the rain, I figured you wouldn’t be popping in. Here.’ He thrusts something at me: a casserole dish covered with a damp and threadbare tea towel. The dish is warm. ‘Made some of my famous mushroom stew. That’ll fix you up, eh! Slippery Jacks, saffron milks: picked them on the far side of the ridge. There’ll be plenty more coming up after this rain.’ A rich herby aroma wafts up through the tea towel. He shuffles past me into the house, leaving a trail of wet boot-prints.

‘Now, let me just see about that phone of yours.’

I follow him into the kitchen. He has taken off his hat—a tattered and soggy cabbage-tree—and is hunched over, inspecting the phone where it hangs from the wall from its loose wires.

‘Er, no,’ I say, ‘there’s no need to—’

It’s as if he hasn’t heard.

‘Looks like it’s come a bit loose here,’ he says. He presses the side of his face against the wall and squints at the back of the phone. Then he whips out a screwdriver from his back pocket and unscrews the phone from the wall. He opens the back of its base and starts poking around.

‘Ah!’ he cries in triumph. ‘Now, see this here? Loose wire. Thought so.’ He fumbles with the wires for a minute, and then puts the phone back together and into place on the wall. ‘There.’ He picks up the receiver and listens. ‘Good as gold.’

He puts his screwdriver back into his pocket and picks up his hat. The phone starts to ring. He grabs the receiver.

‘Hello?’

I can hear a male voice on the line.

‘To who? Eva?’ he says. ‘Sorry, mate, wrong number.’ He hangs up. ‘Some foreign bloke, could hardly understand the bugger.’

He turns and gives me a long look from under his eyebrows, and starts to chuckle.

‘Wait, you must be Eva. You’re a dead ringer for your sister, aren’t you?’ He laughs again. ‘The name’s Joe. I live next door.’ He puts on his hat. ‘Pass on my regards to Lizzie. Tell her I’ve got some cauliflower seedlings with her name on them, ready to go.’

He shuffles out into the rain.

In the middle of the courtyard he turns back. ‘Nice to meet you, Eva.’ He tips his hat and walks off.

I call Peter but his mobile is turned off, and he doesn’t answer at his apartment.

WHAT NO ONE tells you about learning a language is that, no matter now fluent you become, your mother tongue will always be the only language that will ever be real to you. Mum, El and I first learned English from watching Sesame Street. None of us could speak it when we arrived. Every afternoon at four-thirty saw the three of us sitting in a row in front of the TV, concentrating hard as we followed along with Big Bird singing the alphabet song.

But Big Bird couldn’t help us with everything. The Australian language wasn’t the same as what we saw on TV and heard on the radio. When we spoke to people, we misheard everything, and misspoke. Tata spent the first year saying ‘Good onion’ whenever someone did something praiseworthy, and thinking everyone in Australia was named ‘Mike’, which is how he heard ‘Mate’.

THE DOG COMES back again, this time scratching at the back door. It still won’t let me touch it, but it does let me get a bit closer without growling. It suspiciously sniffs the back of my hand when I offer it, and then pushes past me into the house. I see that it’s eaten the lamb chop—even the bone is gone. The dog does a lap around the downstairs room and then settles into the spot under the staircase.

‘She’s not here, you know,’ I tell it.

The dog ignores me and gazes up towards the first floor. It starts whining.

‘I’m telling you, she’s not up there. You can sit there as long as you want; she won’t come down.’

The fixed gaze of the dog starts to unnerve me a little, as if it’s seeing something that I can’t see.

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘You want to go up there and look?’

I unloop the cord from the wall and pull down the staircase. The dog races up the moment the steps touch the ground. I hear its claws clicking on the floorboards overhead as it inspects the bedroom.

‘See?’ I call up to it. ‘There’s nothing up there.’

The dog doesn’t come back down again, and when I go after it later I find it curled up asleep on El’s bed. It’s still there in the morning.

I FIND SOME photos: El waving from behind the wrought-iron balustrade of a balcony; El about to dive into a river or a lake, smiling at the camera; El sitting on a sofa with a woman I don’t know, each of them holding a bottle of Tiger beer; El dancing with a dark-haired man at a party. Maybe the man is Marko. Both of them are laughing; he is looking at her and she is looking directly at the camera. The picture is a polaroid, and the image is grainy and faded, as if it was taken decades ago, but El’s hair is shorter than she used to wear it, so it can’t be that old. The man is in profile, and has one hand at her waist, and the other above her head, holding the tips of her fingers as she twirls around.

I have a painful longing for Peter, physical, like a spasm. I check my mobile, but he hasn’t called. It’s still too early in any case. Five years ago, in the year that we met, for a brief period we went to a weekly dance night in a dilapidated theatre that was shortly to be demolished. It was Peter’s suggestion—for me that kind of thing was too new age to ever be appealing, but Peter is interested in different kinds of alternative therapies: bodywork, as he calls it. Feldenkrais, Alexander technique, even reiki. Though Peter would disagree, I have always thought of him as being a bit of a hippy at heart. The body knows, he is never slow to observe.

The dance night was an authentic movement night, and it seemed completely unstructured and chaotic. People danced very differently to the way people dance in clubs, or at parties. Here, they favoured a highly expressive style of dancing, with extravagant movements—whirling, leaping, reeling, collapsing—almost an interpretative dance. Some people spent the whole ninety minutes supine in the middle of the dance floor, eyes closed. But there was a kind of structure to the dance: an instructor would occasionally call out cues, and there was a pattern in the music, which was supposed to slowly build up in a wave and then die down. The wave is building! the instructor would call out. Let the wave carry you! There would always be at least one Leonard Cohen song, usually ‘Hallelujah’ at the end.

The few times that I attended, I never managed to get over the awkwardness of the situation. I would remain at the fringes of the dance floor, and I could never expand my movements beyond my usual uncertain repertoire of swaying and shuffling and side-stepping, while the other dancers wheeled and spun past me, seemingly freed from the laws of gravity. Peter was one of those. He used to be a gymnast when he was at school, and even now, in his forties, his body has lost none of its lightness and flexibility. Peter loved those dance nights and would not hesitate to leave me on the timid fringe and leap away into the undulating crowd at the centre of the dance floor. Later, he would be beaming. Peter seemed to feel at home everywhere.

THE DOG COMES down and wants to be let out again. It runs off, but this time it reappears after a few minutes, and starts trotting up and down the backyard. I change the water in the dish and put out another lamb chop.

‘Here’s some breakfast for you, if you like,’ I say to it and go back inside.

Through the kitchen window I watch the dog slink up to the house and snatch up the chop. It retreats with it through the rain to the far side of the backyard, where it settles down under the cover of a tree. When it’s finished eating it comes to the back door again, and this time it lets me scratch it on the head and read its name tag. Archie.

‘Hi, Archie. My name’s Eva. Pleased to meet you.’

He follows me inside.

I GO BACK to sifting through the documents in El’s desk drawers. Archie sits down beside me. There is no order among El’s papers: letters and old bills are next to newspaper clippings of recipes and classified listings and receipts that are so faded it’s impossible to know what they are recording. An unruly scrap of newspaper floats out from inside an empty notebook.

At first I think it must be a different Elizabeta Novak, because I know what the article says isn’t true. El never put the seat in the car that day. She’s lying to cover her guilt. El had a copy of my car key, and used to either borrow the seat from me, or borrow my car when she took Gracie out.

My car was always parked in the street outside the apartment. A few days after the accident I went to get something from the back seat, or maybe it was from the boot. I can’t quite remember. The street was quiet, and the car was covered with dead leaves and a layer of black grimy dust. When I went to open the boot I saw the child seat through the window. The sight of it was as terrible as the sight of some monster crouching there, and made me forget why I had even gone out to the car in the first place. I think I hurried back inside. After that, I didn’t go near the car again. But I had to walk past it every time I wanted to catch a tram, and each time I did, I turned my head away. When I left Australia a few weeks later I just left the car parked there in the street. I suppose it got towed in the end.

THE METAL DRUMS that serve as the bin and incinerator are getting worryingly full. From inside the house, it seems like the rain has stopped, but I step out into a misty drizzle. I’d planned on waiting until the rain passed, but it seems that is never going to happen. The drums are under the eaves in any case, and the contents are quite dry. I drag one drum away from the house into a small clearing. Archie watches with interest from inside the kitchen. I light a few pieces of notepaper and drop them into the drum, but the paper burns out without the flames catching. I try ripping up some notebooks and photographs and mixing the pieces among the other rubbish, some of which must be damp, and then lighting them. I take a fallen branch and stir the lit papers through the drum. Lines of flame lick along the edges of photographs and paper scraps. I dredge up a pair of old tights that suddenly ignites with a bright and spitting burst, like a birthday sparkler. The flame flashes up high for a second, and I lunge back. I stand a few metres away and watch the rubbish burn. The fire triggers a sense of relief, and I become aware of the muscles in my shoulders and my jaw and my hands slackening, and of how rigidly I’d been holding them before. After a moment, the flames begin to rise up above the lip of the drum, wheezing and popping, sending a plume of grey smoke into the low pale sky.

I hear a sound behind me, and something touches my shoulder, the back of my neck. I turn and find I am face to face with a man who I do not know, but who looks familiar. He leaps back with an expression of alarm, and we stare at each other for a moment.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I thought you were Lizzie. You gave me quite a shock.’ He has his hand over his heart. ‘And I must’ve given you a shock too.’

It is the man from the photograph, Marko. El’s boyfriend.

‘It’s you,’ I say, before I can stop myself.

He looks younger than he had in the picture, unexpectedly tall, and with a ruddy complexion and wiry unruly hair, thinning a little at the temples. He seems to emanate a wild electricity.

‘Ah ha, so what’s Lizzie been saying about me? Only compliments, I’m sure.’

‘Well—’

‘And you must be?’

He holds out his hand towards me, large and square and neat. I have the unnerving sensation that he has somehow been summoned by the burning of his image, the photograph come to life. The top of my head starts to tingle unpleasantly.

Archie rushes up in a flurry of joyous barks and starts leaping all over Marko.

‘Hullo, Archie!’ he says. ‘Well, someone’s pleased to see me.’ Archie stops jumping and rolls onto his back on the muddy grass, and begins to quiver and squirm with excitement. Marko crouches down to scratch his belly. When Archie has calmed down, Marko straightens up and looks at me.

‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘you were about to introduce yourself?’

‘I’m Eva. El’s—Lizzie’s sister.’

‘Of course! I should have guessed. You look exactly like her. And I’ve heard so much about you. Lizzie must be thrilled you could make it. She upstairs?’

‘Marko, listen.’

I tell him that El is dead. I look at the ground when I say those words. When I raise my eyes, he has turned his face away. He doesn’t say anything. He leaves the clearing, with Archie skipping at his heels, and goes into the house through the back door. I hear him calling El’s name.

I let the flames die down and then I go after him. The house is empty but I find him sitting in his car, a battered-looking black Saab, which is parked at the bottom of the drive. I have no idea how he got it through all the mud. He is smoking a cigarette. When he sees me, he leans over and opens the passenger door. I get in. Silent tears are running down his face.

He takes a drag on his cigarette and blows the smoke out of the open window.

‘What happened? Were you with her? Why didn’t anyone call me?’ His voice is angry and tight with his tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘She’d already—it had already happened when I arrived.’

I sit staring at my hands, clenched in my lap.

‘What . . . what was it? Was she in an accident?’

I shake my head.

I tell him about how I had found her, and that she had probably done it herself.

He shakes his head. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No way. You’re wrong. There’s no way that’s true. If I know anything at all, I know that.’

I say nothing. In my experience people always react that way when faced with the suicide of someone close to them. It’s hard for anyone to imagine that someone they love and know well would choose to end their life. People never see it coming. He stubs out the cigarette on the window rim and takes another from a pack he has in his jacket pocket. A gold packet, Cleopatra Lights. He offers me one and lights it for me. The smoke is harsh in my throat and numbs my tongue. I close my eyes and lean my head back. It is warm in his car, and the proximity of his unfamiliar body in the enclosed space causes a pleasant tension in the skin at the back of my neck. I blow a lungful of smoke out of my nose.

‘When did it happen?’ he asks. ‘I called on Tuesday, she was here then. When did you arrive?’

‘No, that was me on the phone.’

He looks at me and I can’t read his eyes.

‘Get out of the car,’ he says, in a low voice. ‘I have to go.’ He turns his head away as he starts the engine. I stand and watch him drive off. He doesn’t wave and neither do I.

I WANT TO call Peter, but I don’t know what I would say. And now he doesn’t want to speak to me. He probably wouldn’t even answer the phone. He hasn’t replied to any of my messages. I dial his mobile, and it rings once, twice, and then goes to voicemail, as if he’s hung up on me. My impulse is to call again, but I stop myself. I tell myself that I’ll be home soon in any case, and then we can talk in person. It’ll be easier to talk in person.

THE BUSH AROUND El’s house is full of birds. I don’t know all their names, but I hear their different calls at different times of the day. All of their calls sound like a kind of shrieking. At night I hear owls, and something that might be bats. The next morning I wake early and get dressed. Archie grunts and watches me from his bed of blankets on the floor but doesn’t get up. I pull on El’s old raincoat and step outside. It’s just getting light and the rain is like a soft white net curtain. From the front door, the land spreads out below the ridge in a wide bowl-shaped valley. The rain has saturated all the colours, and the ground is wrapped in thin scraps of mist. I follow a track that leads along the top of the ridge. As soon as the house is out of sight the rain starts to come down harder. I put up my hood and keep walking.

El doesn’t have any neighbours. The closest house, probably that man Joe’s, is still far away down the other side of the ridge, on the town side. From El’s place at night you can’t see a single light in any direction—not a streetlamp, not the headlights of a car, not a lit-up window of a house. Only the stars and moon. All that darkness, all that emptiness, gives me the creeps. It makes me jumpy, even now, in the morning light. Earlier, when I was lying in bed, I’d pictured myself going on this walk. In my mind it was going to be a relaxing and invigorating bushwalk, the kind that optimistic and energetic people go on in books. I’d pictured myself striding along, among the trees and flowers, with birds flitting past me, twittering. I’d imagined how the sun would come out, and how I would relish the feeling of the muscles in my legs gripping tight to my bones as I strode along the track. But now that I am out here it isn’t like that. I am nervous, on edge. I keep looking back over my shoulder as if someone might be following me. But of course no one is. There’s no one around. Soon there isn’t even any birdsong either, just the ugly sound of my own panicked heart, my ragged breath, the hiss of El’s jacket brushing against itself as I swing my arms with each step.

WHEN I’D FIRST seen El’s house I’d been surprised by its size, and by its elegance. Not that it was a mansion or anything, but I suppose I’d been expecting something more like a shack. The night I’d arrived, all the lights of El’s place had been on, glowing warm and golden in the darkness. I remember knocking on the door and hearing the faint sound of voices coming from inside, of music. Standing there at the closed door, my body was tight with nervousness at seeing El again, with fear. The ground-floor window looked into the living room. There was no one in there. I remember noticing how many books there were in the room, how they lined the walls, how they were stacked up on tables and in piles on the floor. I knocked again. I waited. I tried the doorhandle. It was unlocked. I stepped inside.

‘El?’ I called into the empty room. ‘Hello?’ The room was warm and there was a strong smell of wood smoke. I took a few more steps inside. My shoes made no sound on the stone floor.

‘El? It’s me. Eva.’

The faint murmur of voices carried on, oblivious. Trust her to have people over on the night I was coming, I thought, and not even keep out an eye for me. It sounded like they were upstairs. I put my shoulder bag down on a small table near the door.

‘Elizabeta!’ I called out, less politely.

I took a few more steps into the room. As well as the wood smoke, there was a scent I couldn’t identify. The ground floor seemed to be mostly just one room: a small open kitchen on one side and then the living room. On the right, along the far wall, there was an alcove with a writing desk. On the left, there was the door to the bathroom, but there seemed to be no way to reach the upper floor. I looked up at the wooden ceiling, and saw that there was a pull-down staircase, folded up. I went over to a cord that was looped against the wall and pulled hard. The staircase swung down silently into the middle of the room.

As I put my foot onto the bottom rung, a sudden sound rang out like a cry. It made me jump. A second later another cry followed—they were some chords played on the piano. A few notes, a classical piece. Peter would have known the name of it. The voices had stopped. They had only been on the radio.

‘El?’

The stairs were narrow—so narrow that I would hardly have been able to fit both of my feet on the same rung—and so steep that they were more like a wide ladder. About halfway up I could see into the upstairs room, a dimly lit bedroom. There was a rumpled bed in the corner. This room looked empty too.

‘El? Where are you?’

I felt the hair on my neck start to rise. The music echoed loudly through the room, tinny and thin. There was an old radio on the dressing table. I went over and turned it off. The silence rushed at me like a flock of birds. The room was a mess: there were clothes spilling out of the wardrobe and a pile of dirty plates and glasses stacked on the floor in one corner. The air was stale, and something smelled awful. I became aware of a mechanical rumbling sound coming from somewhere behind the house. On the unmade bed the sheets were bundled into a big messy knot in the middle of the mattress. There was a dark shape caught up in the sheets. At first in the dim light it looked like a black cat curled up asleep, but when I took a step closer I saw that the black shape was hair. The hair was attached to a head and the head to a body. El’s body. Lying tangled in the sheets with one arm thrown up, like a drowning swimmer, and her head turned to the side. Her hair fanned out above her head as if she was jumping down from a great height. Her eyes were closed, but I didn’t need to go any closer to know she was dead. I’d seen enough dead bodies in my life to know.

Pills, I thought at the time, it must have been. She must have called me here for this. To witness this scene. Had she kept track of the time? When my plane was getting in? Had she timed it for maximum effect? As if what she’d done could make up for what had happened all those years ago.

I WALK AND walk. Thick red mud cakes my boots. I start to sweat under all my layers. The rain intensifies and little hailstones ping down onto the hood of the raincoat. I can’t imagine why anyone, especially El, would choose to live in a place like this. She could have moved anywhere.

Something red shines among the trees up ahead. I squint through the rain. It’s the roof of a house, what once had been metal but was now a corrugated sheet of rust. When I get closer I can see that the place is long-abandoned. It is a small cottage made of wooden planks, except for the stone chimney, which is a fluted column of roughly graded grey stones. The narrow verandah is missing the posts on one side and the roof droops crookedly down, like the face of a person with Bell’s palsy. Probably it had been built by some long-dead goldminer. There is no glass in the windows and I can see a few clumps of dandelion growing inside the front room. When I step under the eaves, the hailstones rattle onto the metal roof like a volley of ammunition.

I bow my head and pass through the low doorway. Inside, the air smells like mud and is almost as damp as it would be at the bottom of a stone well. The cottage is just one small, low room with a floor of packed earth. It is completely bare, apart from heaps of twigs and broken bricks, and a pile of empty beer bottles stacked in the blackened fireplace. I don’t know what kind of a life anyone could have had in a place like this.

Something rushes at me out of the darkness and I jump back. There is a swooshing sound and the rustle of feathers, and a small black bird, unless it is a bat, sails out through the window and away.

WHAT IF I’M wrong about the child seat? What if El did have it in her car? But I can still so clearly see the shadow that the shape of the seat made that day when I went out to my own car. I remember it as one of those grey and windy spring days, warm, the air full of leaf scraps and pollen. I remember going to open the passenger side rear door, or it could have been the boot, and seeing my face reflected there in the window, my head outlined against the sky, and beyond it, inside the car, the dark shape of the child seat. But now when I picture it, the memory is hazy, like the light was that day.

A hot wave of anger rushes through me when I think about the newspaper article that I found. The thought of El speaking to some reporter from The Age about Gracie fills me with such fury that I forget that El is dead.

But what if it’s true? the thought comes again. What if I’m wrong?

But I know I’m not wrong. I saw the seat in my car that day.

But can I be sure that I saw it there?

Of course I’m sure. And anyway, there’s no way to find out about something like that now. It was so long ago.

But there are always ways to find out: I could ask people, I could find the reports.

I can’t. I can’t look at those things.

I TEXT KARIN: Hey, odd question—do you remember what happened to Gracie’s car seat? She replies a few hours later that it must have been taken to the wreckers along with the car. But why would Karin remember a detail like that? And, which car?

I GET A call from the Bendigo Crematorium. El’s remains are ready to collect. Bendigo isn’t far away, but it takes me nearly two hours to get there. I take a taxi, train and two buses. The woman at the front desk speaks in low thoughtful tones. She asks me whether I want to have a memorial. I don’t. The thought of all the decisions that the memorial would force on me is too much. Decisions about music and guests and caskets. Flowers and invitations. Package options. I just want to go home. I fill out a form for the remains and the woman hands me a small cardboard box, sealed with tape. It’s heavier than it looks. I wish more than ever that Peter had come with me.

When I get back to the house, I cut open the tape with a kitchen knife. Inside the cardboard box is a rectangular plastic container, opaque pale blue speckled with cobalt, like a robin’s egg. The container has a moulded, rounded shape, and an impregnable air. It isn’t designed to be opened easily. Or at all. On one end I find a raised circle, a plug. I prise it up with the tip of the knife. I reach my hand into the container. The ashes are cool and velvety against my skin, and touching them is like dipping my fingers into a shaded forest pool. I push my hand in up to the wrist and make contact with something rough and stone-hard. A charred hunk of bone. I take a pinch of ash between my thumb and forefingers and rub it into dust, creamy between my fingertips. I lift my index finger to my mouth and I spread the ash on my tongue in a thin layer. I press my tongue onto the roof of my mouth. Chalky, unremarkable. Like paper. I breathe the taste of it out through my nose and the sound of my breath hisses through the room.

After Tata died, Mum seemed like she was in a hurry every day, rushing here and there, no time to sit down for a cup of tea even. Eva and I woke up the day after he died to find Mum in the shed, already dressed and made-up. She was hunkered over one of Tata’s briefcases with a cigarette clamped in the corner of her mouth. She didn’t look at us. She was busy jimmying the briefcase lock with a screwdriver, trying not to break a single pillar-box red fingernail.

The lock popped open and the briefcase disgorged a flood of photos of unknown women, of Tata holding a large brown horse by the bridle, of me and my sister as toddlers, naked, bathing in a rocky stream; the title deeds of the house; a silk scarf with a pomegranate pattern; two Yugoslav identity cards; expired work passes from France; a fake Rolex; three gold rings set with gemstones; and a wedding band engraved with my mother’s name.

I made breakfast for Eva and myself, cornflakes and white toast with strawberry jam, and then Mum drove us to Footscray, to the hospital. She rarely drove, and when she did she never went over forty kilometres an hour, so the sound of car horns and abuse accompanied us like a chorus. When we got to the hospital, Eva was busting for the loo. I went with her, and when we came out again we found Mum pleading with the receptionist, a blonde girl with a tired face, who was shaking her head. Mum’s body was draped across the reception counter.

‘Please, you don’t understand. Please. We have to see him. I have to show my girls.’ Her voice was wavering like a yodel from her tears.

The receptionist went on shaking her head, no. Eva, red-faced, grabbed Mum’s arm and tried to pull her away from the counter. Mum shook her off.

‘I’m sorry,’ the receptionist was saying, ‘it’s against hospital policy, ma’am.’

Mum’s eyeliner had run down the corner of her right eye and the wet mascara had matted her eyelashes together. The receptionist looked from Mum to us girls and back again.

‘Please?’ Mum’s voice rose into a wail. ‘Please, help us.’

The receptionist sighed.

‘I’ll have to make a phone call,’ she said.

She told us to wait. We sat down on the shiny upholstered chairs under a TV screen, Mum in between me and Eva. Mum fished a limp tissue from her pocket and loudly blew her nose. The room was decorated in shades of dusty pink, grey and dark green. It was worse than that dull scrubbed sick-coloured lino you see in hospital dramas. There was no one around. We waited. The TV blared out the news of scandals in the love-life of Jack Nicholson.

The receptionist came and told us that they never allow bodies to be viewed in the hospital, but that they would make an exception for us. Just this one time. Mum started crying all over again, then grabbed the receptionist’s hand in both of hers. She pressed it to her wet face.

‘Thank you! God bless you! You’re a good girl.’

The receptionist disengaged her hand and passed Mum a plastic bag. It was blue and transparent with a drawstring, and marked ‘Patient clothing’. Mum opened it, and a wave of stale sick-smelling air was released into our faces. Inside was a pair of mismatched flannelette pyjamas in two different shades of blue and some underwear, also blue. I wished we’d never been given it.

Later, a woman came up, a whip of a woman dressed like a nurse, who said in an Irish brogue that her name was Mairead. She must have been about fifty, and her black hair was slicked up into a quiff and curled tight like a duck’s tail at the back. She wore frosted pink lipstick and a pancake of makeup, which had settled in the deep lines that ran from the outside of her nostrils to the corners of her mouth.

‘Follow me, please,’ said Mairead.

She turned and bustled off on her squeaky shoes. We walked in a row behind her, holding hands, along a corridor. We turned into a room marked ‘Linen’. We were swiped into a private area. We went down a cold concrete walkway, one side open, with the rain blowing in. Mairead opened a door and there was a room like the hall of a cheap hotel, and a chair with a skirt on, for the modesty of its legs. She told us to put our bags on that. The only bag we had was the blue plastic one. A tall man appeared, his face kind and hairless. He opened another door and there was Tata, laid out on a metal gurney in a tiny room. He was covered with a sheet from the neck down and his head was tilted far back, chin pointed up at the ceiling. Eva grabbed my hand. I was afraid. Mum flung herself over his dead body, wailing. I stood just inside the door holding Eva’s hand tight in mine. The room was very cold. I didn’t want to go closer.

Mairead and the tall man watched us with respectful faces from the anteroom.

Tata’s eyes weren’t fully closed. His eyebrows were tufts, his nose was a beak, much sharper than it was when he was alive. His eyes were hollow. His mouth was open. I could see inside.

Mairead came in.

‘Do you want to say goodbye to Dad?’

She ushered us over to him. We stood by his head and looked at his face. He looked different. Cold radiated from him.

‘Do you want to hold Dad’s hand to say goodbye?’

I didn’t answer. His hands were hidden under the sheet. Eva swiftly put her hands behind her back. I didn’t want to touch him either. Mum lifted the sheet and tried to pull out his hand. It didn’t move, his arm was rock hard, frozen at the elbow. Mairead came over and together they wrestled with the recalcitrant arm, trying to detach the hand’s grip from the other forearm.

I looked away. There was a picture on the wall of a tree with autumn leaves in varying shades of pink and orange, which was probably painted in the 1960s by some well-meaning Anglo woman in a craft group. I looked back and Mairead was holding Tata’s hand in her hand. Eva had backed away into the corner. Tata’s hand was a large and yellow object, heavy-looking. Mairead held it out to me, like she was offering me a cup of tea. I didn’t want to touch his hand. There was a gaping wound on his arm and a hole on the back of his hand, deep red and purple. I laid my hand on his shoulder, which was covered in a white hospital gown. His body was cold: cold and hard, like a piece of furniture. I touched his chest lightly, in the place over his heart. His ribs rose up in a high and unnatural dome. Even his hair was cold. I stroked it with one finger.

Mum asked Mairead if she could cut some of his hair to keep. Eva and I exchanged a look. Mairead whipped out a pair of scissors and Mum snipped away. How he would have hated that: cutting his hair when he was dead. In my mind I see could him cursing under his breath—jebem ti—and making that dismissive gesture with his hands, like he was flicking water off them. I looked at his face and his eyes winked at me. I hallucinated it. It wasn’t real. I knew it was only imaginary. Tata and me, we are the same kind of animal, you see.

I MAKE MYSELF a cup of tea, and drag the armchair over to the window and sit and watch the rain. There is nothing to see from that window, apart from trees and rainclouds, except for, I notice, a small brown bird perched in the tree right outside. Its feathers are puffed out against the cold, and it faces into the wind with its tiny eyes closed and its claws clinging tight to the branch. The leaves and branches undulate like rolling waves that the bird seems to be sailing across.

Archie comes over and lays his head on my lap and closes his eyes, which are a surprising hazel colour. His ears are softer than I expect, and cool. After a while he seems to fall asleep. He makes soft snuffling snores and murmurs. I pick some of the burrs out of his fur.

THE CONTAINER THAT holds El’s ashes is about the same size as a shoebox, but it is bulkier, denser. Days later it is still sitting on the kitchen table, drawing my attention and taking up space. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.

Tata’s body was cremated too. Our family comes from a place called Kraljevica, a small town in what is now Croatia. The whole family, especially Tata’s younger brother, Lovre, took it as a matter of course that when Tata died, his body would be sent back, intact, to Kraljevica to be buried in the churchyard there, so that he would be together with all the ancestors. They are all Catholic, and have strong feelings about these kinds of things. Lovre had even carved a headstone for Tata, and on it was a picture of his favourite childhood horse. No one in the family had ever left home in the way that Tata had. At times a cousin or uncle went to Pula or Zadar for work for a while. Aunt Vera had moved to Rijeka, where she was a professor in the art academy, and Tata’s cousin Ante still lives in Trieste, as far as I know, where he works as an architect. But moving to Australia was a notion completely unheard of. People from places like Kraljevica stay close to where they were born, no matter what. Even all through the Yugoslav wars, the family in Kraljevica stayed put. Gracie was the only one in our family who was foreign-born.

When Lovre and the rest of the family found out that not only was Tata’s body not going to come home, but that it had been cremated, everyone was outraged. A huge scandal erupted and caused rifts between us that were never healed. At the time Tata died I was ten years old, and all I knew about the whole thing was overhearing Mum arguing on the phone with someone in Kraljevica, an argument where she kept saying: ‘No! I’m not doing it! You don’t understand!’ It ended with her hanging up and then pulling the phone cord from the wall. Mum wouldn’t tell me or El what they’d been arguing about, but the next day the phone rang and when I picked it up Lovre’s voice thundered: ‘My brother belongs here—and you know it’s your duty to send him! And if you don’t, may the Lord visit upon you curses, trouble and sharp words. May the sky over your head become an iron roof, the ground under your feet, a slab of stone. May you and your children find no rest, no peace, may the Lord give you fear in your heart, eyes that are weak, and sorrow in your soul—’ His voice was still droning on when I managed to hang up the phone.

We never got around to having a memorial for Tata—there were so many things going on at the time—and I didn’t even think about what happened to Tata’s ashes until many years later. When I asked Mum about it then, she told me that she threw the ashes into the green wheelie bin.

‘What? Don’t look like that. What does it matter?’ she said. ‘You know as well as I do that your father was not there among that dust and ash. Your father is in Heaven.’

I take the container with El’s ashes and put them into the empty kitchen cupboard, right at the back.

WHEN TATA DIED, we thought things were about as bad as they could get. What we didn’t know was that it was just the beginning. Everything was about to get a lot worse. The first clue we really had about what was coming was the day that El and I came home from school to find all of our belongings out on the lawn. Everything was out there: our beds and pillows, the sheepskin rug, our shoes and clothes—some of them still on their hangers—our dolls, the library books we’d borrowed—The Magician’s Nephew and A Wrinkle in Time—the light-up globe, packets of colouring pencils and drawing paper, Monopoly and Scrabble and Uno. Even El’s little white writing desk was there, and its matching chair, sitting on the grass in the sun. We thought it was fun and funny to see our bedrooms out on the lawn, as if someone had magicked away the walls of the house. We laughed and played in our invisible house, having a great time. But just as we were jumping around on our beds in the sunshine, a monstrous shape rushed out from inside the house, its hair and clothes flying, and its mouth gaping as it let out a deep wail like a siren. We froze, and stood on El’s bed, clinging on to each other. I started to cry, and then El did as well. The monster began to shout at us, calling us names, blaming us for everything that had gone wrong: for Tata getting sick, for him dying, for us having to come to this country even. The monster looked like Mum, and spoke with her voice, but I knew it wasn’t really her. Or maybe it was both her and not her. I wasn’t sure. All I knew, looking at this not-mother, was that a sick panic was taking over, as the world suddenly tilted on its axis, made strange and uncanny. After a while the monster, the not-mother, went inside the house again, but she locked us out.

We tried to continue playing, but we couldn’t. We couldn’t pretend any more. Now our outside house was a frightening place, scary and senseless. A place without protection. Soon it got dark. We huddled together in one of the beds under the covers as the cold set in. The moon appeared, and the stars.

At that time, we were too young to know about mental health crises, breakdowns, depression, the things that happen when a person is pushed too far by life. We thought that the woman who looked like Mum mightn’t be our mother at all, but a demon that had taken her form. Mum’s church group was always talking about demons, and was busy casting them out of people and places. It seemed to us as sensible an explanation as any.

I prayed about it every night. I’d pray that I’d wake up the next morning and things would be like they used to be and that we were all together again. That Tata wouldn’t be dead, and the demon would be cast out of Mum. Then I started to pray in the day too, silently. Soon all I did was pray, non-stop. I thought if I prayed enough, everything would be all right. A prayer was constantly running through my mind all day long: Please, Lord, oh good and kind Lord, may my mother be freed from the demon, may my father come home from Heaven, and may we all live together again in our house on Burt Street.

I knew that Mum had a demon in her because of me. It had to be. It happened because I ignored the voice of the Lord. And now He was teaching me a lesson. He was teaching me a lesson because of Suzie Watson and the maths test. I sat beside Suzie at school. Suzie had golden pigtails and a fat pink face and sparkly pink polish on her fingernails, even though you weren’t allowed to wear any. I didn’t like Suzie. She made fun of the way I spoke and when I used the wrong words. Suzie always kept her arm protectively curled around her work, but only on the right side, the side I sat on. Jeffrey Pinkerton sat on her left side, and she never bothered covering her work from him. I felt deeply insulted by this. Suzie’s arm was a provocation, an accusation that I was the kind of person who would cheat, as well as a statement of Suzie’s perceived superior intelligence. This irritated me. I wouldn’t cheat, but I did prefer sharing. One day, Suzie didn’t cover up her paper properly, and when I managed to see one of her answers, I felt good about copying it, just to get my own back at her. I didn’t care about getting the right answer. I felt good, but then I heard the voice of the Lord. It boomed through my little head.

‘You are cheating,’ He said, ‘and cheating is wrong.’ I heard Him loud and clear, but I ignored the voice of the Lord.

I got 100 per cent on the test, the highest in the whole class, and I won a prize from the teacher: a new and beautiful pen that wrote in green gel ink. I felt sick with guilt when I had to stand up in front of the class to accept the pen.

‘See?’ said the Lord, when I had sat back down again at my desk. ‘I told you cheating was wrong. Now you must pay the price.’

I sat there in class, feeling sicker and sicker. The pen lay on my desk. Every time I looked at it, I felt the wrath of the Lord travel like a lightning bolt through my body. I slipped the pen up my sleeve and asked to go to the bathroom. On the way I went past the outdoor basketball courts, which had no one on them. I dropped the pen down a storm drain. I watched it disappear between the metal slats, but the sick feeling didn’t disappear with it.

‘You shall pay for your sins,’ the Lord said. After that, I thought that every little thing that went wrong must be the Lord making me pay for my sins. How much would I have to pay? I would ask Him about it, but He never gave me a straight answer. But when I found out that my mother had become possessed by a demon, then I knew that this was the real payment. All the other times hadn’t really counted.

My sickness got worse. Soon it had become like a real sickness in my body, not just the invisible one in my heart. No matter how hard I prayed to the Lord, the sickness didn’t go away. That sick feeling of guilt was a cold lump lodged in the middle of my chest. It made it hard to swallow, and I became afraid to eat. Then I forgot how to. My clothes grew large and loose, my limbs stick-thin, with joints that bulged like prey in the belly of a snake. When I wanted to sleep, my body ached and burned. Besides the pain, the voice of the Lord kept me awake too, telling me about all of the things I’d done wrong, and how it was my fault that my mother was a demon.

NOT LONG AFTER this, Mum went to hospital for what they probably back then called a nervous breakdown. She was gone for what felt like decades, but was really only six months.

THE DAYS ARE dark, the sky loaded with low clouds that the sun never breaks through.

Karin calls.

‘The car is here,’ I tell her. I whisper it, as if El might overhear me. ‘The same car. It’s outside right now.’

‘Really? The same car that was in the accident?’

‘The same type. I can see it through the window,’ I whisper.

‘Have you and El talked about it?’

‘I can’t.’

Karin tells me to call Peter, that when Stefan saw him at handball practice he seemed really depressed and hardly said a word. I don’t tell her about our argument, about how he doesn’t want to speak to me.

I think that the reason it’s so difficult for me to speak to Peter, or anyone really, about my past is that there is a problem with conversations. They’re too unpredictable. They’re not safe. You never know where they’re going to end up. Some people’s—maybe most people’s—pasts are neat arrangements. A familiar series of events that everyone recognises. If you have a past like that, it’s easy to talk about, because you never really have to explain anything. Everyone already has an idea of the shape, the connection of the events. But if your past is not like that, then it’s harder. People want to know something about you, about your past, but it doesn’t make sense to them, they can’t recognise it, so you have to start explaining it all, first one thing, and then another, because all those points in the past are connected to one another, each one leading to the next like adjacent towns along a road. You can’t get to one town without first going through the one before. And all of those towns on the map of the past are painful places, and shameful; they’re places that you don’t ever want to go back to, and talking about them means that as well as having to go to those places while you’re talking about them, you’ll also continue thinking about them, probably for a much longer time than it takes to have the conversation. You’ll be back there in that place that you don’t want to visit again, stuck, but the person you’re telling can move on, any time they like.

The rain comes down. I sort, I dust, I scrub. Archie watches me from his bed of blankets. I hunt around downstairs for the certificate of title, for the insurance papers. I stuff black plastic bags full of rubbish until they bulge, and lug them to the door. They gather there like a crowd of fat black snowmen. I wake, I work, I sleep. I don’t go outside. Sometimes Archie wants to be let out and then comes back inside soaking wet, muddy. I dry him with an old towel, and I can still feel each of his ribs, in spite of all the tins of Pedigree that I’ve been feeding him. I could count those ribs. The rain falls, taps on the windows, hammers on the roof. Day follows day follows day. It is cold in the house. I manage to light the heater, but it doesn’t give any warmth, and only fills the place with smoke. The drumming and hissing of the rain is so loud and constant that it seems to have disappeared. It has become a permanent feature, like the sound of my breath. I only notice it if I pass by a window, the frame of which holds a composition entirely in shades of grey and white. Pale grey sky, white mist of rain making ghosts of the trees. The land outside is as foreign as the bottom of the sea. As improbable. A series of shapes.

THE RECIPE IS in Mum’s handwriting. Every October she made favete, ready for All Saints’ Day. The dark ones and the light. Whenever I think of them I can taste the bitter almond and Maraschino.

On All Saints’ Day everyone—everyone who’s Catholic—goes to the cemetery to honour the dead. It’s a social event. When I was little, everyone in Kraljevica would be at the cemetery that evening. Father Juric would say a mass, and you’d light candles and decorate the graves of your ancestors with yellow and white chrysanthemums. Afterwards, we and all the cousins would go back to Aunty Slavica’s place for dinner.

To prepare for All Saints’ Day, in order not to bring shame upon yourself and your family, you need to clean the graves of the ancestors. That was a social event too. It was always on the Saturday ahead of the holiday. We usually packed a picnic, along with the scrubbing brushes, buckets and gloves, and made a day of it: Mum and Tata, and when they were still alive, Baka Jelena and Djed Luka too. That day of cleaning seemed more fun to me than the actual holiday. All of the Novaks were in one section, so all of the cousins would be there too with the aunties and uncles. El and I never did much cleaning, but we spent the day with the other kids, running and playing among the graves and in the park that ran down to the beach. The autumn sun would be out, and at lunchtime Mum and the aunties would set up a picnic under the trees.

But in Australia, we had no graves to clean. Mum got it into her head that we should go to Melbourne cemetery with our friend Mila, whose husband was buried there, and help her with cleaning his grave. Mum thought it would be a good way to get to know people. Later, we realised how doubtful Mila seemed of this plan. The night before, Mum packed as usual, buckets and brushes along with containers of sarma and bread and cold ćevapi. Mum, Tata, Mila, and El and I caught the bus together to the cemetery, loaded up with all our things. The day was hot, and by the time we got off the bus it must’ve been well over 30 degrees, even though it wasn’t yet midday. We walked along the footpath to the cemetery gates, trying to stay in the thin strip of shade cast by the wrought-iron fence.

Melbourne cemetery was much bigger than the cemetery in Kraljevica. It was so big that it was divided into sections, by religion, which were shown on a map when you came in. Not everyone was Catholic. Mila’s husband was buried in the far corner of the Roman Catholic section. As we walked along the concrete paths between the unfamiliar headstones, I started to notice how quiet the place was. Where was everyone? Had we come on the wrong day? El had noticed it too, and piped up, ‘Why is it so empty here?’

‘Ssh!’ Mum hissed. ‘We don’t know the ways of people from all these other religions.’

But even the Roman Catholic section was empty. Mila’s husband’s grave was in the middle of a row, a slim plot with a small grey headstone: Josip Horvat 1889–1964. May he rest in peace. All the graves around it were at least double the size, made of towering slabs of shiny black or pink stone, with mostly Italian names inscribed in gold lettering under photos or carvings of the deceased. But even the fanciest-looking grave had cloth flowers that were faded, and lanterns that were broken or askew.

Mila sat down on the edge of Josip’s grave to rest, the palm of her hand flat on the slab that covered his body. Mum handed El and me a scrubbing brush each and told us to get to work. We brushed the cobwebs and dust off the headstone and picked up pieces of rubbish from the ground. The whole time we were waiting for the other people to arrive. By then the sun was directly overhead, burning down on our heads. Mila was still resting on the grave. She had closed her eyes and seemed to be asleep. Occasionally a couple or a lone woman would walk past, on their way somewhere else.

There were no trees in the Roman Catholic section, so when it came time for our picnic, we just set up on top of Josip’s grave. Mum’s hands darted around as she spread the blanket, distributed paper plates, and unpacked the containers of food. Mila wasn’t hungry. There was too much food, and the sarma and ćevapi had become warm and sticky in the sun. We perched on the grave and huddled close to Mum and Tata. All of us ate quickly, not speaking, not looking at each other. From the cemetery in Kraljevica, under the trees where we used to picnic, you could see the sea. I looked up at the sky and tried to tell in which direction the sea lay here. I felt lost if I didn’t know where it was. The drone of cars from Lygon Street was a little like the sound of waves, if you used your imagination.

A family, all blonde, appeared on the footpath. The two boys, a little older than El and I, gaped at us. The bigger of the boys pointed in our direction. ‘Look at them!’ he said. ‘Are they having a picnic?’ His voice rang out in a perfect Australian accent. The whole family turned their heads in our direction.

‘I’ve told you before that it’s rude to point,’ the mother said, pushing the boy’s still raised arm down. Then she whispered something else to him, grabbed his hand and pulled him along. They carried on towards the Presbyterian section. The adults averted their eyes, but both of the boys kept their heads turned to stare until we were out of sight.

I HAVE BEEN sleeping on the sofa to avoid going upstairs, and I keep the staircase folded up. That way I can pretend to myself that there is no upstairs. But less than a week before my flight home I reach the point where upstairs can be avoided no longer. I’ve cleared out El’s desk and sorted through the downstairs room. No certificate of title, no insurance papers. I unhook the cord for the stairs and they swing down without a sound. Archie bolts upstairs. I jog up after him, pretending that I’m not uneasy.

The first thing I find just inside the bedroom is a wooden chest fastened with a metal clasp. There are a lot of folders inside filled with medical records.

IT’S HARD TO believe that the scans are of El, of the insides of her body. On the ward, too, I always have trouble connecting the grainy images on the lightboard with the person in the bed. The connection between the two seems arbitrary, as if each of the patients had been issued with a set of random images when they were admitted. And in one way those images aren’t of El, not really. Those images in the CT scans, and in the X-rays, are not pictures of a part of that person, the patient: they are pictures of a set of theoretical and practical problems—symptoms and conditions, treatments and outcomes. They don’t claim to represent a living person with hungers, with desires, fears and disappointments.

WHEN I CATCH sight of myself in the mirror I do not recognise myself.

I do not recognise myself.

The day after the accident I went to see my GP, Dr Greer, who gave me the same questionnaire. I remember circling the numbers in a blue Bic, and the way my hand was shaking, but not which numbers I circled. Those kinds of questions are impossible to answer even at the best of times, and it’s never the best of times when you’re presented with them.

THE WHOLE BACK wall of the bedroom is lined with wardrobes. Not the built-in kind: freestanding ones. Mismatched: each in a different size, each in different-coloured wood. None of their doors close properly, and all of them are stuffed full. I reach into a wardrobe and start rifling through, as if I’m browsing in a shop. There are so many hangers jammed on to the rail that it is difficult to separate them out to see anything. El’s style hadn’t changed much. Long silk and cotton skirts in hippy designs, leather coats, high boots, trailing scarves in printed pastel shades, wide sunhats. Practically every shoe is high-heeled, even out here. All I own is flats. You could almost admire her for it.

There is a dress of light blue silk with a pattern of small metallic golden dots. It has a high ruched neck and a long skirt that would reach all the way to your feet. I remember El buying that dress. It was from a boutique in Southbank. I hadn’t even wanted to go into the place: you could already see from the outside how expensive everything was going to be, and we were both still at uni then. But she dragged me through the door because something in the window display had caught her eye. She’d dashed around the shop, blithely piling skirts and dresses and shirts that she couldn’t afford in her arms and parading each one for me, as if it was only us two in the place. I envied her. Her ease, her openness. Her way of being was totally unlike how mine was, how it still is.

She came pirouetting out of the changeroom in this dress. The skirt flared out in an elegant flute. I grabbed for the tag at the back: $399. I must have looked shocked.

‘Don’t worry so much!’ she said. ‘I’ll have this dress forever. It’s an investment.’

I pull the dress out of the wardrobe and run my hand over it. The filmy touch of the fabric reminds me of something. I bunch it up and hold it against my cheek. I breathe in El’s perfume. That perfume came in a pinkish triangular glass bottle with a gold top, and had some French-sounding name. Back when she was a student she used to have to save up to buy it, or shoplift it, which she more often did.

The dress is very soft. I kick off my trainers and take off my jeans. I peel off my jumper and the three tops I have on underneath. The dress slides over my head with a soft rustle. It settles into place and the weight of the skirt pulls the fabric down onto my shoulders. I do up the row of buttons at the front. It fits a little tighter than perfectly, but when I walk, the skirt swirls around my ankles like the sea foam of a broken wave.

I PULL ALL of the dresses and skirts and blouses from the hangers and stuff them into rubbish bags; the shoes and hangers into cardboard boxes. It takes much less time than I expect. The wardrobe on the left has an upper shelf, packed with jumpers and cardigans and rolled-up scarves. Behind them, right at the back, I find a large book, about the size of a phone book, Persian Miniatures. When I lift it down I see that the pages are all stuck together and that it’s not a book at all, but a metal safe camouflaged as a book. It has a keyhole underneath the front cover. Of course it’s locked. When I shake it, the safe makes a rustling sound. I hunt around in the wardrobes, on El’s dresser and in her desk, but I don’t find the key.

I spend about fifteen minutes trying to pick the lock using two bobby-pins, before I take a hammer to it. I wedge the hammer claw underneath the opening beside the lock, and rock it back and forth. It only takes a few minutes until the soft metal begins to bulge and tear open.

THE BOX IS full of papers, but they seem to be mostly scraps and envelopes. On top there is an envelope with my name on it in El’s writing and my old address in Berlin. No stamp.

The first year I was living in Germany I got a few letters from El. I can’t remember how many, and I don’t know what they said because I threw them away without opening them. I can picture myself binning them along with supermarket catalogues and flyers for carpet cleaning. I didn’t even care enough to tear them up.

THAT DENTIST SIGN was right outside my bedroom window. The flashing used to drive me crazy when I first moved in. Stepping into my bedroom at night was like stepping into a fever dream. After a few weeks I came to almost appreciate it. Then I stopped noticing it.

THEN I FIND a stack of receipts, most of them with the ink completely faded.

FOR HER FIFTH birthday El bought Gracie her first bike. Pink, with white wheels and training wheels and pink streamers on the handlebars and a cane basket decorated with white plastic daisies. At first Gracie was afraid of taking her feet off the ground and putting them onto the pedals at the same time as she was holding on to the handlebars. She could only put her feet onto the pedals if she held the hands of one of us, and she could only hold on to the handlebars when her feet were on the ground. We spent about half an hour taking turns steering her up and down the driveway while she clung to our hands. Gradually she grew bolder, risking first one hand on the handlebars, and then both, as she pedalled. By that afternoon she was shouting for us to get out of the way as she zoomed maniacally back and forth along the drive, hooting with glee at the sound of the wheels on the concrete, at the feeling of the wind in her hair.

NOW I HAVE all of the documents I need from the house.

THE NEXT MORNING the rain has slowed and I have the documents packed in a manila envelope, ready to take to John Johnstone’s office. Once I’ve dropped them off, I can go home, back to Peter. When we’re together I know we’ll be able to sort things out. I find a lead for Archie hanging by the door, and I clip it on. We set off.

The driveway is washed out, carved by the running water into channels and pools. Archie and I skid and slide over the slick red clay all the way down the slope. On the way I check the post—the letterbox is a kilometre along the road, towards town. The neighbour, Joe, drives past me in a rusty white ute. He waves but doesn’t stop. El’s letterbox is one in a line of about ten standing at the roadside like a crowd of derelict hitchhikers. They are all made of different kinds of junk: kerosene cans, what looks like a washing-machine drum, old tractor parts—every one of them dented, flaking and crookedly nailed to their posts. El’s is an old milk can. I disturb a small cloud of midges when I open the flap. The letterbox is stuffed full with a damp mass of paper.

Newspapers, letters and catalogues have melded into one flat gelatinous grey sheet, stuck to the bottom of the mailbox. A colony of snails is feasting on it. I prise the mess loose with my fingernails. There is one letter perched on top of the pile, glowing bright, still new enough not to have become incorporated into the sludge. It is addressed to The Estate of E Novak, Care of E Novak. It is an official envelope with one of those little plastic windows on the front. I tear it open standing there by the road.

Right at the top the cause of death is given:

SUDDEN CARDIAC ARREST (SCA)

DUE TO SUSPECTED

CONGENITAL HYPERTROPHIC

CARDIOMYOPATHY.

Not suicide.

I read on. The coroner has written a biography of El:

Elizabeta Novak was forty-two years of age at the time of her death. Elizabeta was born in former Yugoslavia, in what is now Croatia, and moved to Melbourne with her family as a child.

Ms Novak was a writer who lived alone in her house in Bennett Creek. Ms Novak sustained various injuries in a motor vehicle accident in 1995, which caused significant psychological and physical damage. She underwent multiple surgeries as a result of this accident. Though she made good recovery in the years after the accident, the event had a lasting and detrimental effect upon both her physical and mental health. She experienced some loss of memory, and chronic pain and insomnia. She has a history of anxiety and depression, and had been diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.

Bennett Creek is a remote area, and Ms Novak was not known to many locals. She had no close friends and no family living locally.

Some weeks before her death she had attempted to contact her sister, Eva Novak, who was living in Germany, and from whom she was estranged. When her calls were not answered she left several messages on her sister’s answering machine. Eva did not return her calls. Elizabeta also purchased a return airline ticket for Eva and sent it by post to her.

At 10.12 pm on 24 July 2003, Bendigo Police received a call from Eva Novak alerting them to the death. Police attended the premises at 11.38 pm the same evening. Ambulance Victoria paramedics arrived shortly afterwards.

Ms Novak was located in her bed in the upstairs room. Paramedics attempted resuscitation before declaring that Ms Novak was deceased.

The post-mortem examination did not show any unexpected signs of trauma. Routine toxicological analysis of Ms Novak’s blood post-mortem detected small amounts of diazepam, and fluoxetine, but not at amounts of any significance or risk to health or life. No alcohol or other commonly encountered drugs or poisons were detected.

A post-mortem computerised tomography (CT) scan showed evidence of abnormal thickening of the heart walls, suggesting hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

Dr Pilchard provided an opinion that the medical cause of death was sudden cardiac arrest. I accept Dr Pilchard’s opinion.

Police investigation

Upon attending the premises, Victorian police found no evidence of third-party involvement. Sergeant James Murray Standish conducted an investigation of the circumstances surrounding Ms Novak’s death, at my direction.

The deceased’s sister, Eva Novak, reported that she had been estranged from the deceased following a motor vehicle accident in 1995 in which her (Eva Novak’s) only daughter (Grace Novak-Rubcic) was killed.

Medical records show that the deceased sustained ongoing injuries and psychological damage as a result of this motor vehicle accident. The deceased made some progress in recovering from the physical injuries she sustained in the accident, but the psychological damage caused by the death of her niece was lasting. Although the deceased was not responsible for the accident in which her niece was killed, she suffered from overwhelming feelings of guilt and blamed herself for the death.

General Practitioner Dr Ferdinand Blix reported that Ms Novak was a regular patient of his. Dr Blix reported that over the last twelve months Ms Novak had presented with shortness of breath and chest pain, which Dr Blix attributed to symptoms of depression and anxiety. Dr Blix prescribed Ms Novak with fluoxetine to manage her depression. Ms Novak also reported difficult sleeping, and was prescribed with small quantities of the sedatives zopiclone, diazepam and oxazepam.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Pursuant to section 72(2) of the Coroners Act 1998, I make the following recommendation connected with the death:

That the Medical Board of Australia advise general practitioners on the risks of untreated hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and the need for cardiac symptoms to be investigated, even when comorbid with stress and anxiety. This is of particular importance in the case of female patients.

I convey my sincere condolences to Ms Novak’s family and friends for their loss.

I read the letter again and walk back up the hill to the house with Archie whining and pulling at the lead the whole way.

HEALTHY HEARTS BEAT at a range of 78 to 82 beats per minute (lub-dub). Each beat of the heart (lub-dub) is formed by the contraction of the atria (lub-dub) and ventricles, making the familiar double thud (lub-dub) of the heartbeat. The atria pump blood into the ventricles (lub-dub), the valves between the atria and ventricles close (lub), the ventricles contract to pump blood away from the heart, and the aortic and pulmonary valves close (dub).

In instances of sudden cardiac arrest, the heart unexpectedly stops pumping blood, causing the organs of the body to be deprived of oxygen. Oxygen deprivation to the brain rapidly leads to a loss of consciousness, and then death. If an episode of cardiac arrest happens outside of a hospital setting, the chances of survival are around 10 per cent. In a hospital, this increases to about 20 per cent, but only if resuscitation and defibrillation commences quickly. For every minute that resuscitation is delayed, the chance of survival decreases by 7 per cent.

IF I WROTE a biography of El, what story would it tell?

I used to think I knew.

I FIND MARKO’S mobile number in El’s address book. We talk for a long time. I haven’t spoken to anyone for that long in years. But it’s Marko who does all the talking. He wants to talk about El, his relationship with her, and his life. I listen while he tells me about his feelings for her, his guilt for being away so much because of his work, for keeping her at arm’s length, for remaining in his house in the suburbs instead of moving in with her. I let him say what he needs to say.

When he seems to have exhausted his words, I tell him that the coroner’s report has arrived.

‘You were right,’ I say. ‘It was cardiac arrest. Not suicide. It seems that she had a heart problem.’

I read out the report to him, from start to finish.

‘I knew it couldn’t have been suicide,’ he says. ‘I don’t know how you could even think Lizzie would do something like that. She’s just not that kind of person. You should know that.’

We sit in silence for a while, then he asks me if there’s anything he can do to help, and I tell him there isn’t, but that he should come past to see if he’d like any of El’s things. We hang up.

There’s something I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t know how to. Before I have time to think about what I’m doing and can second-guess myself I dial his number again. He answers right away.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘when you called just now and I saw El’s name come up on my mobile I forgot that she’s gone.’ Tears crack his voice. ‘I wanted to tell her about what just happened with the coroner’s report, and how I’d known it all along.’

‘I have to ask you something,’ I hear myself say.

I ask him if El ever spoke about the accident. Does he happen to know whether the child seat was in the car when the accident happened? Even as I’m speaking I know how insane and ridiculous the question sounds. He is silent, and I realise how selfish a question it is, too. He is grieving.

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘you don’t have to—I don’t know why I—’

‘No, it’s fine,’ he says. He is silent for a moment and I can hear the static in the line. ‘It is a strange question though, and I’m not sure why you’re asking it.’ His voice is quiet and slow, like the voice of a medium relaying something from another realm. ‘But the answer is that the seat was in the car. Of course it was.’

THE ENGLISH WORD grief has been handed down from words in other, older languages, and the meaning of these related words—like gravity—all describe sensations of heaviness, of burden, of being pulled into the earth. The German word for grief, trauer, and the Serbo-Croatian žalosti have very different sounds, and come from different lineages of older words, but they also describe the same feeling of weight, of heaviness, of sinking. Of falling.

The furthest that you can ever fall is to the bottom of a grave. If you are the one being buried (and it will be you, one day), the view would be (will be) of a long bright rectangle of blue or grey sky, superimposed upon the darkness, and fringed with black blobs, like ripe and swollen fruits—the outlines of the heads of the mourners: their faces, their tears are blotted out. They are nothing but blank silhouettes. Like paper cut-outs of people. And that view will be your last of this world.

DAYS PASS, AND the date of my return is only a few days away. I find that I’m overcome with a lethargy that I haven’t experienced for a long time. I feel anaesthetised, tranquilised. My body has become heavy, my physical sensations dulled, and my thoughts stupidly slow and circular. I have still been sleeping on the sofa. Archie has started sleeping at my feet, keeping me warm. Some days I don’t manage to move very far from that sofa. Even though it makes the room cold, I leave the back door ajar so that Archie can get in and out when he needs to. Simple tasks, like getting up to put wood on the fire, or making some tea and toast, have become complex to the point of impossibility. There are so many steps, and I don’t know how to organise them all in my mind: which thing should come before which other thing.

Sometimes the thought comes to me that I need to go to the lawyer’s office, because after I’ve done that, I will be able to go home. But it is only a theoretical sort of thought that carries no urgency and is impossible to translate into the reality of action. The only reality is the house. Nothing exists apart from the house. It makes up my whole world. It makes up all countries, all continents and histories. I don’t know what has happened to my life outside of the house. I lie on the sofa with Archie beside me, trying to remember. There had been something, I know there had been something, but it has receded to the very border of my memory. I try hard to grasp hold of it. There is Peter, and our apartment. I have the thought that I ought to call him, but then I remember he doesn’t want to speak to me. Perhaps I should call him anyway. But each day bleeds into the next, and I still haven’t picked up the phone. Whenever I think about doing so, my brain becomes slack, numb. He is too far away, far beyond the reach of something as prosaic as a phone. The house is the only real place. I get the feeling that if I went to the window and looked closely, the view—the rain, the grey trees—would reveal itself to be just a photo stuck to the inside of the window glass. A photo I could peel off with the edge of my fingernail, and behind it I would find nothing but blackness, emptiness. The emptiness of outer space.

Even with my exhaustion, I lie sleepless at nights, reading pages retrieved from the wooden chest upstairs. Some of them are covered with El’s handwritten notes: crossings-out, notes in the margins. Seeing her handwriting is like seeing her hand reaching out to me.

I WAS SEVEN years old when we arrived in Melbourne. El was eight. We’d never been on a plane before—no one we knew had. Tata’s work had paid for the tickets.

Here are the things that we knew about Australia when we arrived: that there were kangaroos. That everyone spoke English. That there was a lot of space and wilderness. We landed and the plane doors opened and we stepped out onto the staircase. The air in Australia was humid and blurred with heat-haze, and it smelled of dust and diesel. My ears were ringing from the flight. We couldn’t see any kangaroos. El and I went down the steps to the tarmac, side by side. I counted them quietly to myself jedan, dva, tri, četiri, pet, šest, sedam, osam, devet, deset, jedanaest, dvanaest, trinaest. I held El’s hand tightly all the way down.

Things we didn’t know when we arrived: how to speak English. How to be foreign. How to be far from home.

THE RAIN FALLS; it roars down. Water dashes against the outside of the window glass. Raindrops find their way inside, they pool on windowsills, and a slow drip begins from the bedroom ceiling. The sound of it is like a finger tapping impatiently. I know I should be home by now, but the thought doesn’t worry me. El’s house is like a ship on the high seas. A dry place in the water. At night I feel it rocking, hear its timbers groan.

IF EL’S DEATH wasn’t by suicide, does that mean that she had put the seat in the car, like Marko believes she had? If that’s true then I’ve been wrong about so many things. I’ve been wrong about her. That missing seat, the neglect it showed, had become an emblem of her flightiness, her irresponsibility, her selfishness—all these ideas had crept up around her and obscured her from my view, the way a vine creeps over a building until you can’t even glimpse the bricks.

If El had put the seat in the car, it means Gracie didn’t die because El was irresponsible. It means Gracie died because there was an accident. And if it was an accident, it could just as easily have happened when I was driving. Am I the one who has been irresponsible, selfish? Have I been wrong about myself?

I look up the number for the coroner’s court. I pick up the phone receiver. I put it back down and take a Serepax. I pick it up and dial the number.

‘I’d like to request a file,’ I hear myself say in a clear voice.

ONE AFTERNOON, MARKO comes over. I leave him alone upstairs looking through El’s belongings, and I go outside to sit on the wall of the courtyard. I close my eyes and feel the warmth of the sun slowly seep through my clothes and onto the skin of my back.

After the accident, I didn’t keep anything of Gracie’s. No photos, toys, clothes. I couldn’t stand to look at them, to have them near me. I had to get rid of them. Things that she’d touched, that she’d loved, or even seen. When I came back to the apartment from the hospital, I went straight into the bathroom and took off all my clothes. I stood there for a while, naked, and then I got a pair of kitchen scissors and cut up everything I’d been wearing—underwear, socks: everything—into tiny bits. I knew I could never wear any of those things again. It took hours. I’d even tried to cut up the leather part of my brogues, but they were too tough. My hands became red and painful, and all the skin was scraped off from around the base of my thumb from trying to force the scissors through the leather. I gave up and took out the shoelaces and tore out the inner soles and cut those up instead. In the end, all that was left was a pile of fuzz from the jumper and tiny scraps of fabric, little squares and triangles like bright confetti all over the bathroom floor.

After a short time, Marko comes out of the house, his arms full of books and one of El’s silk scarves tied around his neck. Archie follows close behind him. Marko sits down beside me on the wall and lights a cigarette for each of us while Archie settles himself at our feet, his eyes closed in the sun. We sit smoking in silence, looking down the ridge at the trees and their glossy leaves quivering and shaking off stars of reflected sunlight. I’ve never been in a place that is as quiet as it is here. The silence does something to the space, it brings things closer, so that the horizon seems only a step away.

‘Lizzie never got over that accident, you know,’ Marko says. ‘It permanently changed her world. I don’t just mean her injuries.’

What injuries? A few scratches? I almost say. But that’s not true: I picture her CT scans.

Marko continues: ‘There was something about the way that things just carried on as usual that was unbearable for her. The way time, and people’s lives, just moved along.’

I blink away a stinging in my eyes. Time didn’t carry on for me at all for a while. I was thrown out of the flow of it. I once read a study about emotional disorders—depression, anxiety—and how the sufferers experience time. People with depression, when they were asked to guess how much time had passed, always guessed too much time. They were living in a slowed-down world, each tick of the clock stretched out. But for me it wasn’t like that. For me, time and the world totally stopped. I was no longer swept along by the flow it. I could see that everyone else was, and it was like standing on the side of a riverbank and watching people drift by on the current.

‘But don’t get me wrong,’ Marko goes on. ‘It didn’t break her, that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’ve never seen anyone as tough as her. You know how hard she fought afterwards about getting that child seat banned? It ended up that the industry regulations were reviewed, just because of her. She saved people’s lives.’

He stubs out his cigarette on the wall and turns to look at me.

‘I know why you asked me about the child seat. I know why you thought it was suicide. Lizzie told me you were never close after the accident.’

I feel uneasy under his eyes.

WHEN I LIVED on Dalgety Street, I used to park my car in the street. It was a white Toyota Corolla. I don’t know what happened to that car. I last saw it that day in October, a few days after the accident. At the time I was taking all kinds of medication to dull my senses, and I remember the way the pills made my body feel numb, as well as my heart; the way they made my feet clumsy and heavy in my shoes, and my head full of fog. I went out to the car. I wanted to get something from the back seat, or from the boot. I think it was through the passenger window that I could see a dark shape in the back seat, and at first I thought it was a rucksack or a large pillow. As I got closer I saw it was the child seat, or that’s what it looked like. I have a memory of leaning down to look into the passenger window. At least I think I did. I remember the feeling of pressing my face into the glass, and the cold imprint that it left on my forehead and the tip of my nose. Reaching my hand up and lying my palm, flat, against the window, and the gritty dust sticking to it. The skin around my fingernails was bitten and torn bloody.

SOMETIMES, IN MOMENTS of pressure and despair, those prayers that we learned in the church group, and must have repeated a hundred times, still surface and run through my mind. There were a lot of things about the church that confused me, that didn’t seem to make sense to me, but that everyone else seemed to grasp with no problems. The biggest of these was this idea of faith. Faith seemed to mean that you believe in an improbable thing in the absence of all evidence, and this groundless belief was seen as a virtuous thing, and the whole of what it meant to be a good member of the church. The opposite of faith is asking questions and expecting answers. The opposite of faith is asking for evidence.

BECAUSE WE DIDN’T have any family in Australia, aside from our parents, when Mum went to hospital after Tata died, El and I were sent to live with people from the church. We were split up. I was put with this family called the Dobsons who lived in a tiny fibro house at the far end of Preston. They had two biological children, Jason and Jenna, who were a little older than me. The thing I remember most about the Dobsons, and liked the least, was the food. White square sliced bread from the shop, soft like cake. Mint sauce with the meat. I’d seen food like that before, but I’d never had to eat it on a regular basis. No paprika; no smell of garlic frying; no gulaš or knedle sa sljivama, but carrots and peas all boiled separately in water and served in wet little piles on the plate. It took me a few days to realise that the meals were supposed to be like that, and dinner wasn’t the result of some horrifying kitchen disaster.

The other thing I hated about the Dobsons was having to speak English all the time. At home, Mum and Tata only used English when there were English-speakers visiting, which was practically never, or when El and I were in trouble, almost as a scolding. It was unnerving to suddenly have to communicate all the time in the language of outsiders, of punishment, even more so because most of the English-speaking took place at the table, over that damp and disconcerting food. English to me seems flat somehow, not able to convey meaning in the same way that Croatian does. It feels a bit like you’re always lying, and you’re never really getting to the heart of what you actually mean.

But the absolute worst thing about living at the Dobsons was Sundays. How I hated those Sundays. In the morning we went to church, and after church was what was called the Sunday Roast—a monumentally bland meal of dry lamb, watery boiled potatoes, and overcooked broccoli that was the same week after week—and after Sunday Roast came Family Time. Family Time meant that I had to leave the house for the afternoon so that the Dobson family—which meant everyone but me—could have time together. The rule was that I had to stay away until dark. It wasn’t enough that I go to my room during Family Time: I had to be completely out of the house. No matter the weather. There was a creek at the bottom of the garden, and that was where I spent my Sundays. I first arrived at the Dobsons’ in late summer, and the creek wasn’t more than a sluggish trickle between two wide dusty banks. I’d spend hours walking along that creek bed, each of my steps raising a cloud of fine river dust. I felt like I was walking on the surface of the moon.

On the face of it, I was the lucky one. My foster family were the Gardiners.

Mr and Mrs Gardiner were like everyone’s picture-book grandparents. They had rosy cheeks and lived in a little cottage which had roses growing around the door. Mrs Gardiner always baked a fresh apple pie on Sundays, and the smell of apples and cinnamon would fill the house. There was a vase of flowers on the dining room table, which was never dusty or covered with old envelopes and empty glasses and ashtrays full of cigarette butts. My room was like every girl’s dream of a room: it had a fourposter bed with a canopy and a walk-in wardrobe. They bought me clothes and toys and books, and they even had a piano, which Mrs Gardiner was teaching me to play.

IT WAS TRUE that I’d been jealous of El being with the Gardiners. I visited their house on a few occasions, and spent the whole time wishing I could stay. I could’ve shared her room, I thought. She wouldn’t mind. When it was time for me to leave, I’d try to delay my departure as long as possible. I’d ‘lose’ my shoes, or ‘forget’ a library book so that we’d have to go back for it. The whole time I was hoping they’d say: ‘Eva! Why don’t you just stay here with us!’ Which of course they never did.

But something was wrong with me. Every day I felt more sad and more nervous than the day before. The nicer the Gardiners were, the sadder I got. I knew how unhappy Eva was with the Dobsons, and it felt wrong for me to be happy when she wasn’t. One day, the sick feeling got so bad that I could hardly breathe, and I knew I had to run away. I had to find my sister, and take her home, back to our real house. I ran out of the Gardiners’ cottage and down the street. I ran through the park and past the shops. But after that the streets became unfamiliar, and I didn’t know where to run to. Then night-time came and I was wandering, lost, along the ghostly footpaths of the bland and clean suburb, crying, and too cold in my summer shorts and a new pink striped t-shirt.

Then the Gardiners appeared in their shiny blue car. When they saw me, they pulled over and bundled me into the back seat. Mrs Gardiner took off her jacket and put it around me, and it smelled like lavender. When we got home, Mr Gardiner made cocoa, and Mrs Gardiner wrapped me in blankets and sat me in front of the TV, and put on cartoons. Then they both sat beside me, drinking cocoa and watching the cartoons, and laughing over them, trying to get me to laugh, as if everything was all right. It just made me feel worse. If only they’d have raged and shouted.

EL NEVER TOLD me that story. After Mum came back from the hospital and we were all living together again in something that was approaching normality, that hospital period was something we decided, seemingly by silent mutual agreement, never to mention again. We all excised it from our past. As our English improved, it seemed more and more that the real language that we became fluent in at home was silence.

‘HELLO THERE!’ A VOICE calls from the yard, faint over the sound of the rain, which has come back. I am in the kitchen and I crouch down and duck my head below the level of the kitchen bench. Archie runs over to me and starts sniffing at my face. I grab on to his collar.

‘Hello? Eva?’ the voice calls. Boots crunch on the gravel. My heart is like a fist lodged in my rib cage, clenching, unclenching. I hunker down lower and wrap my arms around Archie. I can feel his heartbeat. I close my eyes. The voice sounds like that man Joe. Checking up on me.

‘Just wanted to look in and see how you are,’ he calls. ‘Listen. I heard about Lizzie. I’m sorry.’

I press my face into Archie’s fur and wait for him to go away. He clears his throat and I hear his boots shuffling. ‘Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do. Any time. I’m right next door.’

I strain to follow the sound of his steps as he comes right up to the front door. If he walks all the way around the house and looks into the kitchen window he’ll see me, hunched here on the floor. But I hear him pause. A bird sings behind the house and Joe mimics its cry. Two sharp bursts of whistling, like a catcall. Joe and the bird call back and forth a few times. Then I hear his boots crunch away.

I stay where I am, listening, still clutching Archie. He starts to whimper softly. I imagine Joe waiting silently somewhere for me to step out. I am like a shy animal, a deer in a wood. I couldn’t have spoken to him even if I wanted to. I stay huddled on the floor long after he has gone. I watch the bright specks of dust drift through the darkening room. The phone rings and I don’t answer it. My legs begin to stiffen with cold and with cramp.

When I stand up, the blood rushing to my feet makes my legs ache behind the knees. I go to the door and stand beside it. I hold my breath and listen. I picture Joe standing on the other side, also holding his breath. I grab the handle and quickly open the door wide, but there is no one there. The yard is empty, swimming, and the rain comes down in dense veils. But there is something on the doorstep. I reach down. A dish covered in a clean chequered tea towel. I lift the edge of it and breathe in apple and cinnamon. An apple pie, still warm.

NIGHT COMES AND I take a few Stilnox, but I can’t tell whether or not I sleep.

Early in the morning, my mobile rings. Karin. She wants to know where I am, why I’m not back. I tell her that the situation is complicated. She tells me that Stefan has just come home from having dinner with Peter, at Peter’s old apartment. He’s moved all of his things back there. I picture our new apartment, dark, silent, and empty apart from my green sofa and the few moving boxes that are mine. It’s been a long time since I’ve lived with anyone.

‘What’s going on, Eva? Are you coming back, or what? You really need to talk to Peter. I know it’s hard for you, but you have to consider him in all of this too. He deserves better.’

WHEN I HANG up the phone I notice that the air is filled with a strange silence. The rain has stopped. I open the front door. The world outside is brimful of water. I step through the door and then I am walking across the yard, through the standing water. I can’t feel my body. It is like being in a dream. I am getting into the car. I am turning the key. The engine springs to life. I am putting on the seatbelt. First gear. A jerky three-point turn and I’m lurching down the muddy, washed-out driveway. I haven’t driven in years, but as soon as my feet touch the pedals, my body remembers. The gears shift smoothly. The engine doesn’t stall. My hands don’t shake. The road is more solid than the driveway, rockier, but it is still full of potholes, too many to avoid. The cabin of the car rocks wildly. I pass Joe, driving the other way. He doesn’t wave. It starts to rain again and the windscreen wipers sweep back and forth without a sound. The flat landscape slides past, banks of gumtrees, fields, houses. A flock of white cockatoos wheels over me. Then I am on the highway, and am sucked along the curves of it with both fists clutching the wheel. I breathe in and I breathe out, perfectly calm, perfectly measured. I feel the engine power me along, and the landscape recede smoothly behind me. I know where I am going. I have been there before: 5/43 Dalgety Street.

The trees and fields give way to houses, industrial parks, and I cross the edge of the city. I meet other cars. I am driving over the bridge, and the sea appears on my right, flat and wide, pearl-grey and quiet. The world is totally silent, and I drive along as if I am underwater, as if I am driving along the bottom of the sea, under the weight of all that cold water.

Lorimer Street, Lakeside Drive, and then I have arrived. There is an empty space right outside number 43. I pull in and turn off the engine, and I sit. The only sound is the cooling metal of the car clicking and crackling, and then nothing but the static of silence. I turn my head to look at the place I left my car, as if it might still be parked there ten years later, maybe with the child seat still inside. The tall building rears up beside me. I get out.

I see my finger is reaching out to press the bell by the gate for flat five. It’s on the second floor, so I can’t hear it ring. That silent bell seems connected to nothing, like a prop, so I press it again, and then again. I hold it down. All the windows of number five that I can see are dark. The curtains are open. No one is home. But then the gate buzzes and I go through.

The garden is just the same. Drops drip from the leaves, I walk down the path. The garden is not at all the same. The plants have grown wild, huge, into nightmare versions of themselves. I pass a monstera vine, which could never have been there before. It surges up one side of the building, reaching the second storey. Have I been gone that long? The roots of the vine claw onto the stones of the wall, gripping tight, and the plant seems to writhe and buckle in a suspended fury, like a green snake in its death throes. I pass a tree made of ivy, whose canopy hangs down, perfectly round, like an umbrella. Calla lilies taller than I am, burning bright yellow and red, their heads drooping under their own weight. A chain of hearts, waterfalling from a second-floor balcony all the way to the ground.

My shoes echo in the concrete stairwell as they have a hundred times before, a thousand times. The door of number five is open, and there is a woman in the doorway. For a crazy second I think the woman is me, the me of the past, and I have become some other person, standing there looking at myself. But I’m not that crazy. The woman looks nothing like me, and could never be me. She doesn’t know me.

‘Yes?’

I can see past her down the small hallway and into the living room. ‘Hallway’ is much too grand a word: it’s just a square, awkward space that only fits one person at a time. Someone has painted all the interior doors red, but the curtains are still the same. I can’t see into the bedroom.

I used to share it with Gracie.

I want to tell the woman.

A fat black and white cat threads through the woman’s legs and looks at me.

‘Can I help you?’

The woman’s voice has become impatient, suspicious. The hallway light is on and her face is in shadow, but I still see her frown. She starts to close the door and the cat runs back inside.

Sorry, I want to say. Sorry.

She closes the door in my face.

I know the way to Kew from here, and I want to go there. I want to see it. But I don’t know what will happen if I do. I drive back to El’s house at Bennett Creek because it is the only place I have to go.

SIT IN A comfortable position.

Gently rest the palms of your
hands on your thighs and place
your feet
flat on the
floor.

Relax your eyes
and the space between
your eyebrows.

Invite openness
behind your eyes.

Let your
eyelids drift
shut.

Loosen your tongue from the roof
of your
mouth and
breathe.

FOR A LONG time after the accident I was stuck outside myself, outside my own body. I could only see myself from the outside, as if I was another person. (I was another person.) I was foreign to myself. I couldn’t feel who I was from the inside anymore, couldn’t get inside my own skin. Back then I wasn’t able to be in a car, let alone drive, so I caught the tram everywhere. I’d get on the tram and find the empty seat furthest from everyone. One day I looked over and saw that I was sitting beside someone. It was a thin woman with unbrushed mousy hair. This thin woman had a grey face, and nervous hands that had all the skin picked off from around her fingernails. This woman had dry lips cracking in deep pink splits, and purple smudges under her eyes like bruises. I could see her heart shuddering the wall of her chest through her shirt, and her shallow little sips of breath like she was trying to swim through choppy waves. This woman was me. I hated looking at her. It caused an ache deep in my belly. I didn’t want to be friends with this woman. I didn’t even want to sit beside her.

At the time I thought—if I thought about it at all—that the feeling of seeing myself from the outside came from the drugs that they’d given me to numb the pain. But now I think that I’d been expelled out of my own body, as if I’d been the one in the back seat of the car, not Gracie. Even though I hadn’t been there, it was as if my body had been the one flung through space, smashing hard against the unyielding objects in the world.

Grief has its own logic. Its own reality.

UPSTAIRS IN EL’S bedroom, inside her dresser, I find an envelope. It’s fat and squishy, and the flap is tattered and soft from too much opening and closing. I reach my fingers in, expecting it to be full of cash. When we were kids, we sometimes found envelopes in strange places around the house—inside the metal posts of the bed, rolled up in ugly socks, stuffed underneath drawers. The envelopes would be full of cash, usually US dollars, sometimes a few hundred, sometimes a few thousand. Tata didn’t think much of banks. When he died I inherited his leather briefcase. I used it at school and then later at uni. After many years the lining got a tear in one corner. The tear got bigger and bigger and then the lining came loose and one day an envelope fell out. It had ten thousand US dollars in it.

I reach my fingers into the envelope, expecting the greasy feel of bills, but instead I touch something soft and flossy. A lock of hair. Gracie’s. It’s tied with a thin pink cotton thread wrapped around and around. Laid on the palm of my hand, the hair makes the shape of a question mark. It’s so fine and so silky that I almost can’t feel it against my skin. I hold it up to my lips, brush it against them, and it’s like a gentle breath against me. I open my mouth. I want to eat it, to swallow it whole and make it a part of me.

THE REPORT ABOUT the accident arrives much quicker than I expected. I only realise what it is once I start reading it, because all the letters are addressed to ‘E Novak’, which now, to me, means El.

WHEN WE LIVED on Dalgety Street, my car was always parked in the street outside the apartment. Those old buildings don’t have private car parks. I went out to the car to get something from the boot. It had been parked there a while, and had become covered with rotten lilly pilly fruits and bird shit. As I went to open the door I glanced inside the car. I got a shock when I saw my face reflected in the window, my hollow temples and bony cheeks. The backseat was empty.

‘You’ve been in an accident, love,’ the woman said to me.

I remember that she seemed to appear out of nowhere, like people in dreams do. She was suddenly leaning over me, and her face was the only thing I could see, the only thing in the world. She had two round pink patches on her cheeks and I wondered if it was rouge.

My memories of the accident are few, and they’re like a series of still photographs, not like a movie, which is how they say memories are supposed to be.

MY MEMORIES OF that time are the same. Disconnected. From each other, and from me.

All of my memories behave strangely now. Something happened to my head in the accident, and now the flow of time is different. All smashed up and flung about. They test me at the hospital sometimes, and write reports about what’s going on in my head, the state of it in there. I don’t think I do so well at the tests.

But my memories of the accident are always there, bright and clear as illustrations in a book that I can flick through. Sometimes new ones appear, or new details of old ones.

First is an image that’s framed by the rear-view mirror. It’s the top of Gracie’s head. I can’t see her face, just her hair. She’s just seen a motorcycle, and wants to tell me about it because she loves motorcycles.

PINK MOTORCYCLES WERE the ones she loved the best. Whenever she saw a pink motorcycle she’d be telling everyone about it for days.

Next I can see the car, coming up on the right. In my memory it’s looming over us, like a horse rearing up on its hind legs; like a wave, breaking. The front tyres are huge and distorted, as if they’ve buckled, or are melting. I know that’s not what it was really like at the time, but that’s how I see it now. The next thing is a white picket fence with a hedge behind it. The fence is old, and some of the palings are broken or missing, and the hedge is stringy and I can see the white wall of a house through it.

After that, there’s nothing for a long time.

‘You’ve been in an accident, love,’ the woman says. I must look confused, because she says: ‘You’re in hospital. I’m a nurse.’ Eva’s a nurse too, I remember thinking. Maybe they know each other.

I’D WONDERED THE same thing. They’d taken El and Gracie to the Epworth in Richmond, which was the closest emergency department. If they’d been taken to the Alfred, where I was on a shift, they might have come into my ward.

The nurse went on. ‘My name’s Liz, what’s your name?’

‘Liz,’ I managed to say, but I didn’t recognise my own voice. My tongue was thick as a piece of porterhouse.

‘No, love. My name’s Liz. I’m a nurse. You’re a patient. And your name is?’

‘Liz. Liz. Too.’

I stayed in hospital a long time. In hospital, people kept talking about the accident, about what it had done to my body. They talked and talked, and gathered around my bed and made notes and showed me pictures of my own insides, all broken and patched up. They talked so much at each other, telling each other, and me, how it was. They had names for everything and scales to measure everything, and they told me about all of them. But no one ever talked to me, or asked me any real questions. All they asked was for me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten, one being the lowest and ten being the highest. How are you supposed to rate a pain? And what about the other kinds of pain that are not in your body? No one asked me to rate those. No one asked me if I felt scared, or if I woke in the nights with my heart going too fast, or what my dreams were like. No one asked me if I saw the point in all the operations. Or in anything.

They talked and told me so much, but no one said the things that I really wanted to know about, and that was Gracie. Where was she? No one would say. They dodged the question. And where was Eva? Why didn’t she come? They dodged the question, but their silence gave me the answer. The very worst possible one.

I TRIED TO visit El. I did visit, I did go to the Epworth once. But I only made it as far as just inside the main entrance. Then I couldn’t go any further.

Much later I found out that the child seat had failed. It was supposed to protect Gracie from just such an accident. To save her life. Some people said that she wouldn’t have survived anyway. Other people said that she would have, but it would’ve been worse if she had, because she would have had brain damage. Everyone said that it wasn’t my fault—everyone except Eva. I still don’t believe them. I still spend so long—probably if I counted all the time together it’s amounted to days, months, maybe years—thinking about that day, mapping it out. What if we’d left two minutes later? What if I’d driven a few kilometres faster or slower? What if we’d decided to stop for an ice-cream? What if Eva had bought a different child seat? What if what if what if

WHAT IF.

What if I was wrong about El.

I was wrong about her.

What if I’d picked up the phone those times. Some of the times I’d known it was her. I’d felt good knowing that she wanted to speak to me, and not letting her. I’d felt good not giving her the satisfaction. I owed her nothing, was what I thought. Once, I had picked up, and when I heard her voice, I hung up again.

TAKE A SLOW
breath in
through your nose.

Feel the air as it enters your
nostrils
cool.

Notice the way
your chest
swells with the
air
you have taken
in. Notice
the muscles between your
ribs
stretch. Hold.

Slowly
allow the breath to
leave your body.

I TAKE TWO Stilnox and drink all the Bushmills. Towards the end of the bottle, I don’t bother to use a glass.

I’m in the bathroom and my stomach is pitching and squeezing and I might vomit. The tap is running and I’m watching the water swirl around the chipped cream porcelain before being sucked down the drain. The drain is silver on top but I can see the black mould creeping up the inside of the pipe. I splash water on my face and rinse out my mouth. I take another Stilnox.

My face in the mirror is the face of a person I’ve never met. It is made up only of exteriors, clean and smooth. Coherent. I look into my foreign eyes but even I can’t tell what I am thinking.

I am picking up the phone receiver. The continuous purr of the dial tone is like a language I’ve never heard before. I crawl into the sound to try to understand it, to learn it, but even when the notes surround me like the walls of a house, I am always only on the verge of making sense of it, but I never can. Then the tone changes to something else: soft, evenly spaced beeps with stretches of quiet in between, like a chain of round islands in a calm blue ocean. Each beep is as smooth and sweet as a sugared almond, in pastel pinks and blues. I hold them in my ear like I would hold a sweet on my tongue. The beeps get further apart. I have to wait for them. I wait, and then there is nothing ahead but empty black ocean, silence. Silence has a language too. It is a language dense with echoes of sighs, of static, things on the wind, on the outer edge of your memory.

I sit listening for a long time.

‘El?’ I say into the receiver.

My voice is a cracked thing, blunt and hard. The ugly sound of it flies like a bat through the air of the room. My hand holding the receiver is cold and numb. The silence listens.

‘El. Elizabeta. I didn’t call you back. When you called. I didn’t answer.’

The sound of my voice travels into the receiver and down the telephone line. The line goes from the telephone into the wall, and from the wall down under the house, and from under the house up again and up, out into the dark sky, out into space, stretching and stretching, disappearing, and my voice is travelling along that line in the dark, so slowly, as slowly as an ant walks along a wire.

‘El. El. I know it wasn’t your fault. I’m sorry.’

The quiet of the telephone goes on and doesn’t change pitch. My voice has come too late.

My memories are like thoughts belonging to someone else. The past is a country far away, a foreign place, that someone else travelled through and told me about, sent me a postcard. I don’t think I’ve ever been there, and I can’t ever really go there. I no longer know what belongs to me.

The silence contracts and becomes solid, hard, an unyielding wall of emptiness. I search but there is no way through. I hang up the phone.

IF A CAR is travelling down a road.

If a car is travelling down Barkers Road, Kew, at the speed of forty-three miles per hour (seventy kilometres).

A car is travelling down a road.

A car is travelling down Barkers Road, Kew, at the speed of forty-three miles per hour (seventy kilometres).

I am sitting in the driver’s seat.

I am sitting in the driver’s seat of a 1971 MG (racing green).

I am travelling down Barkers Road, Kew, at the speed of forty-three miles per hour.

The hands on the wheel are mine. The eyes in the rear-view are mine. The seatbelt hugs my chest, my hips. It is my feet that press and release the pedals.

It is night. Earlier, it had rained. Now the black streets are washed slick and clean. Empty.

My hands rest on the wheel. The streetlights lick over them when they pass overhead. My hands are lit up and then fall into darkness. Visible. Invisible.

I look straight ahead, at my hands, and at the road opening itself in front of me.

I drive along Barkers Road.

All of the lights are green.

Lennox Street.

Burnley Street.

Findon Street.

Elgin Street.

All of the lights are green. The car travels smoothly through.

Denmark Street.

At Denmark Street the lights are green.

At Denmark Street the lights are orange.

There is no one travelling in the opposite direction.

The lights are red.

My right foot moves from the accelerator to the brake. My foot presses down hard. My foot presses down hard enough to lift my body from the seat.

The red light is very close.

I press my foot down. The car is travelling at fifteen miles per hour.

There is a car approaching from the right. A rusty white ute.

The round headlights of the ute shine out brightly.

I pass the red light. The car is travelling at ten miles per hour. The car travels smoothly into the intersection.

The headlights of the ute shine brighter. I turn my head.

Under the streetlight of the intersection I see the driver of the ute. I see the face of the driver behind the windshield. I see his mouth and eyes open in surprise. It is the face of a man I know.

I wrench the steering wheel to the left. There is a bush in front of me, illuminated by the headlights. There is a bush with small white flowers.

My body flies up from my seat and bounces down. My body bounces down and the springs in the car seat squeak. The car bumps to the left. The bush scratches against the front of the car. It makes a whining sound.

The car comes to a stop.

Small white flowers press their faces against the windshield.

The engine idles smoothly. I turn off the headlights. I put on the handbrake. I turn the key and the engine stops.

I push myself up from my seat. I push myself between the two front seats. I climb into the back seat. I put my feet up onto the seat. I draw my knees into my chest. The black leather is cool against my back. I curl up into a ball, smaller than I have ever made myself. I slide down and press my face against the backrest. The leather is hard against the skin of my face. The leather is cold. I ball myself up and stuff myself into the crack between the car seat and the backrest. There is the smell of old carpets in empty rooms. I am as small as a mouse. I am as small as a beetle. I am a crumb. I am sand. I am dust.

GRACIE IS GOING to the museum with her aunty. It used to be Mum that took Gracie to the museum, but she moved long ago to the Blue Mountains with her new church group. No one is allowed to visit her there. It’s against the rules. Since Mum moved away, Aunty Lizzie takes Gracie to the museum, and Aunty Lizzie is who Gracie likes going with best of all. Gracie is going to the museum with her aunty.

Aunty Lizzie’s favourite exhibit is the taxidermy animals. Gracie was afraid of the taxidermy animals when she first saw them, but Aunty Lizzie made up names for all of them, and stories too. The fox, who is called Harrington, is always up to some mischief, and has moved to a different place in the exhibit each time they visit. That’s because Harrington, and all the animals in the exhibit, aren’t really dead taxidermy animals. They are alive. They’re only pretending to be dead. They are pretending by keeping very still when anyone is watching. When the museum is closed at night, and all the visitors have gone home, the animals have a party.

Gracie’s favourite exhibit is the underwater one. There is a room where all the walls, and even the floor, are luminous photos of underwater life. Clownfish hiding in rainbow coral; shoals of bright silver mackerel shining against the blue; striped angelfish with elegant tapered fins; swordfish; stingrays; stonefish. The light in this room is dim and blue, and underwater sounds play from hidden speakers. The soft rushing of the water; distant whale song; dolphins chirping and chattering. Gracie is going to the museum with her aunty.

I MAKE MYSELF smaller. I make myself flat. I slide between the crack of the car seat and the backrest. I slide through and I am in the underwater world. The water is warm; it is the temperature of my own blood. I blink open my eyes and I am in a flashing shoal of fish. They have round green eyes, they flick their tails. They stare at me. I open my mouth and can taste the water’s bitter brine. When I look up, all I see is shifting blue. Some seaweed floats past, some bubbles. In my ears is a rushing sound, but in the distance I can make out voices singing.

‘What the hell do you think you’re playing at, girl?’

There is a loud bang. I open my eyes and someone has hinged the front seat forward. A face appears. It is a face I know, a thin face, an old face with a scraggly orange beard.

‘Love, you all right in there?’

Hands reach towards me.

Then I am sitting in a different car with the man I know. I am pressed back into the seat as the car accelerates.

We are travelling down a road.

WE ARE TRAVELLING down a road. Someone else is in the driver’s seat. It is the man from the ute. I can only see the back of his head, and his eyes in the rear-view. I have seen his eyes before, and his thin face. I have the feeling that I know him, but I can’t understand the feeling. Sometimes his eyes look at me. Sometimes his mouth opens and he speaks to me but I can’t understand anything he is saying. He is speaking a language that I can’t understand. The language he speaks is the rushing and crashing of waves on rocks.

I look out of the window. We drive along streets I have never seen. We drive past houses, rows of shops, schools, parks. We drive past fields. We drive over bridges. I fall asleep and when I wake up it is still night and we are still driving. The man is still there. I try to say something to him, but I am speaking the same wave language as him now, so I don’t know what it is I say.

We are on a highway and we drive past trees. I have never seen so many trees. They line up by the side of the road to watch us pass. There are thousands of them. Their green heads bow down to look at us and are lit up by the headlights. They are like two waves rearing up. They are like two waves rearing that will crush the car, that will flood the land. We drive and drive. No matter how far we drive, there is always more road up ahead. The road unrolls endlessly under our wheels. Maybe we drive forever.

WE HAVE STOPPED somewhere. A place where there are no lights. I get out of the car. I get out of the car and I know I have to get away from this man. He opens his mouth and shouts his water-talk at me. He raises his hand. He reaches towards me. I am afraid of the man. I turn and I run. He runs after me. I hear him calling, and I feel more afraid. He runs after me but I am faster. I am small, I am quick.

I pass a house I know. I run up a slope. It is dark. I can see a few steps in front of me, and my feet flashing along—left right left right. It is dark. Trees catch at my clothes and at my hair. I push past them. The air is warm and quiet. The crashing sound I make as I run through the bush sounds like the man’s speech. Maybe the crashing sound is the man, shouting at me. Maybe he’s right behind me. I do not turn around, I keep running.

It is dark. I take a step and the ground opens under me. I tumble and something hard strikes my shoulder; I tumble, and something sharp scratches my face. I reach the bottom, then I lie there on my back. Above me I see the wide night sky and a few raggedy treetops looking down. I am lying in the bottom of a gully; a dried-out riverbed. I breathe in the smell of the powdery clay. I breathe in the clean smell of the trees. I breathe in the stars. I breathe in the darkness.

All around me the bush softly clicks and sighs. I breathe in the sounds. I hear an owl call; its two notes ring out like a high voice asking: ‘Who? . . . who?’ I hear an animal rustle in the undergrowth, and the trees whispering. I hear the trees whispering about me. I roll over and press my face into the damp earth. I hear another sound. A crunching, crashing sound. I hear the sound of a large animal coming through the undergrowth. The man, coming after me. I am quiet. I listen. I listen and I do not make a sound. I do not look up. I hear him crashing and calling in his wave-talk. I lie quiet.

There is a small stone right under my face. It is an almost perfect cube. I keep my eyes on it. The stone is shaped so precisely that surely someone must have carved it into a cube with a chisel. There comes the sound of cracking, of snapping, loud. I lift my head. I lift my head and I see a shape against the trees. I see the shape of the man. I jump to my feet. I scramble up the far side of the gully.

The gully’s wall is made of loose stones, and I slip back down. I climb again and slip again. I climb again and my fingers scrabble for the top. I haul myself up and I haul myself over and I run. I run through the dark. I run and there is a stitch across my left side. I pass through a clearing. I climb over a fence of rusted wire. I run. I listen, but now my body speaks the same crashing water language as the man, and I can’t tell if I am alone. I can’t tell if I am safe. I run and there is a dark shape ahead of me. I run towards it. It gets bigger. I run closer and it is a large shrub. It reaches its branches out to me like arms. I run into them. I push myself into the middle of the shrub. Twigs scrape my face and hands. I push past them. There is a slim trunk at the centre, with a circular space around it, a ring of clear dirt. I lie down.

I curl myself up around the trunk like a cat. My face is pressed up into my knees. My breaths rush in. My breaths rush out. My nose is running with something warm and sticky. I open my mouth and let a glob of spit slide from my lips onto the dirt. I close my eyes.

I sleep for a long time.

JOE’S HOUSE IS small and made of rough-hewn mud bricks. The house is one circular room with a stone fireplace right in the centre. The roof beams radiate from it all the way out to meet the walls, like the spokes of a wheel stretching out from the hub. From where I am lying on a sofa, the squat shape of the chimney with its halo of beams looks like a benevolent deity leaning over me, keeping watch. I wake and sleep under its gaze. In that house I sleep with a dreamless intensity, a furiousness like hunger.

I HEAR A familiar clicking, scratching sound, and then Archie runs in from outside. He leaps up onto the sofa where I’m lying and starts licking at my face. His fur is warm from the sun.

Joe follows him in.

‘Ah—I see Archie’s woken you up.’

I sit up. Archie settles down beside me and puts his head on my lap.

‘Did you build this place, Joe?’

He looks around the room, as if to check. ‘Yeah.’ His gaze travels from the floorboards up the walls and along the ceiling beams. ‘Yeah, I did. I built this place.’ He sounds surprised. ‘With some help from my mates.’

‘It’s beautiful.’

He nods.

‘Yeah.’ He looks out of the window for a while. ‘It is. Built it for my wife.’

Joe doesn’t seem like the marrying type. I ask him where she is.

He is still looking out the window.

‘She’s gone. Gone for good.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear—’

‘I mean, she left me. Well, she left me, but then she went and died.’ He gives a strange laugh, like a cough. ‘I don’t know which was worse, in the end.’

THE SUMMER THAT Gracie turned four, El and I rented a tiny stone cottage in Apollo Bay for the whole of January. Every day we walked down the hill to the beach and let our bodies be tumbled in the surf and warmed in the sun. We adventured through the bush behind the cottage and discovered insects and plants we’d never seen before. Tiny, impossibly pink translucent spiders; miniature orchids, bright purple. The house became filled with magical stones, seashells, feathers and heart-shaped leaves.

Those summer weeks in that shabby cottage exist outside of time for me. As if I could go there if I wanted to. As if I could get in the car, drive a few hours and open the screen door, and then I’d find El and Gracie still in the kitchen, singing ‘En Den Dore’ together while El made pancakes, the air scented with vanilla sugar.

JOE HANDS ME a photo.

‘My wife, Selma. When she was young.’

The woman in the picture faces away out of the left of the frame. The sun is shining on her, on her face. Her eyes are closed, and she’s smiling. Behind her is an apartment building, houses, trees, power lines. She smiles with closed eyes, and I can almost feel what that sun would feel like on my own face, on my own closed eyelids.

‘Cancer. Breast cancer, nasty stuff. The killer. I didn’t know. She kept it to herself. Tough cookie. Doc told her she was dying. At first she didn’t believe it—I found out all this later, from her sister—then she started to get sicker. Then one day she disappeared.’

Joe looks out of the window. He is silent. Minutes pass. He is watching some small fat birds hopping around on the grass. His face relaxes into a smile as he follows them with his eyes.

‘Where did she go?’ I ask.

He gives another laugh. ‘India!’ He looks at me. ‘She thought there was some bloke over there that could help her, some healer fella. I don’t know. I didn’t know she was sick even, I thought she was sick of me. But in the end it wasn’t that. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. Kept thinking back over every little thing, trying to figure it out. I missed her like hell. No one laughed like her. No one I’ve ever met.’ He chuckles softly, and shakes his head. ‘I missed her so much I hired a detective to track her down. I thought she might’ve gone back home to Slovenia.’ He laughs again. ‘I sent this detective bloke all over Slovenia looking for her. Didn’t find her, of course, because by that time she was just down the road at Peter Mac.’ He shakes his head. ‘And here’s me thinking she’d hared off back to the old country and found herself some other fella. But no. I met her sister one night, by chance. Must’ve been, what, ten, fifteen years after Selma disappeared. Dead ringer for Selma. Anyway, she was the one who told me all this. Selma wouldn’t let anyone tell me at the time. She died about a year after she left me. Wasn’t an easy death, her sister said. Not easy. She used to paint pictures—Selma loved painting. Birds. She liked birds the best.’ He points to the walls, where framed watercolours hang: hens, blackbirds, peacocks, ravens, robins. ‘The last thing she said to her sister was to keep a watch for the birds. If it was a raven, maybe it was her.’ He laughs. ‘Life’s a funny thing.’ He looks at me closely. ‘Lizzie told me she asked you to come, sent you the ticket and all that. She loved you, you know, so much. She lived her whole life in a kind of shadow. Lived a long time with a lot of pain, your sister did. From that accident. So did you. I’m so sorry about your little girl. About Gracie.’

I haven’t heard someone say her name for longer than I can remember. Tears flood my eyes.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Me too.’

The tears come down and I let them fall. I let the world become smudged and soft, sliding into place around me.

I DIAL PETER’S apartment. I should have been home weeks ago.

‘Hallo, Peter hier.’

He doesn’t hang up when he hears my voice.

‘I’m sorry that I didn’t come home when I said I would. I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you what was going on. Can I tell you about it now?’

Then I tell him about how things got out of hand, how things were already out of hand from the moment I arrived, and maybe even before that. I tell him about how I found El’s body, the shape of it on the bed, about the house and how cold it was and about the mess within it and the empty bush all around, about the unfamiliar birds. About the silence out here, about the night sky. About Archie. I tell him about the police, about collecting the ashes, about what the coroner said. I tell him about Marko and about El’s X-rays and about her books, and about the photo of El’s face on the back cover of her book, about how young she looks in it. I tell him about Gracie. I tell him about how I found a lock of her hair, about the car in the yard. I tell him about driving to Dalgety Street, and seeing the strange woman in my old apartment. I tell him about the child seat, and about how I was wrong about it, I tell him about all of the other things that I was wrong about.

It’s a lot to tell. He listens to every word. He doesn’t say much, but when I have finished telling, he says: ‘Come home soon, darling. I’ll be waiting for you.’

A FEW DAYS later, Joe and Marko and I drive to some bushland a couple of kilometres away where there is a lake. We take Archie with us. Marko is holding the blue plastic container of El’s remains in his lap, and I have the folded envelope in my jacket pocket and Archie on my lap. We turn off the highway onto a dirt track, and as we lurch along it, Marko tells me how El had especially loved the lake, and would spend a lot of time there when she was working on a book. She would sometimes even write from there, perched on one of the stones scattered around the shore.

‘Lizzie loved swimming too,’ he tells me. I remember that photo of her that I’d found, laughing in the sun. ‘She first started after the accident, for rehabilitation for her back, but it stuck. She became a real fanatic, and was out there in the water in all weathers. She would spend days sometimes walking in the bush around here, and even sleep out too. If ever I came to her house and she wasn’t there, I knew this was the place to come find her.’

Joe parks the car and we get out. The day is bright, but the sun still too remote to give more than a pale warmth. The gravel crunches under our shoes as we walk to the water’s edge. Archie rushes ahead. There is no one else around. The lake spreads itself out before us, fringed by reeds and she-oaks and eucalyptus trees, its waters still, reflecting the blue of the sky. We pass a kind of obelisk made of rough-hewn granite, with a plaque to memorialise some major who once passed by this place and decreed a new name for it. What’s missing from the plaque is the destruction that the major heralded, and the names that he erased.

Joe takes out a bunch of roses that he had stowed somewhere, and hands a white rose to Marko and a pink one to me. Archie is trotting up and down the shoreline, looking out at the water, as if he’s looking for El. Marko clears his throat and loosens the lid of the blue container.

We stand in a row holding the roses, and I realise that I haven’t thought about what to say. It seems like no one has.

‘Elizabeta Novak,’ I say after a while. ‘My sister. We here are only a few of those who loved you.’

‘And we love you still,’ Marko says. ‘And always will.’

He throws the ashes in, and we drop our roses in the water, where they float.

‘Safe travels, Lizzie, my girl,’ says Joe.

We stand and watch the roses drifting on the water. The stems soon sink and then only the heads are visible, drifting away from each other, facing the sky.

Marko bends down and unlaces his boots.

‘I’m going in,’ he says.

He strips to his underwear and wades into the water and then dives under. When Marko’s head disappears it’s as if he was never there. Archie starts to whine and paw at the water. What seems like minutes later, Marko’s head appears far out, bobbing, and he swims further out in a slow and steady freestyle. Later I see him floating on his back, drifting in the blue.

Joe sits down on a rock in the sun and pulls a pipe from his pocket.

‘Ah well,’ he says, and busies himself with his tobacco pouch. Archie trots over and flops down beside him.

I wander off towards the lake’s edge. There is a narrow rocky path that I follow around the curve of the shoreline. Soon Joe and Marko and Archie are out of sight. I can hear the wind in the she-oaks, and then a kookaburra call, and a little later I catch sight of it on a low branch. It seems to watch me as I go past, still singing its song.

Further along I see a cluster of wild orchids to my left, some white and some of an almost luminous purple, and I sit down to the side of the path. The orchids hold their small faces to the sun, and their slender stems seem to spring out directly from the barren earth. The ground is silty and strewn with stones. I pick one up. Underneath, the earth is softer and damp, and I dig into it with my fingernails. I dig a small hole, and then I reach into my jacket pocket for the envelope. Inside is the lock of Gracie’s hair. I take it out and hold it to my lips for a moment, and then put it into the hole in the earth. I try to think of something to say, but sometimes there is nothing to say out loud, or even silently. Instead, I speak to her with my heart. Now, when I picture Gracie, my memory of her means something different. I cover the hair with earth, and then with the stone. The orchids nod their heads at the sun, and I sit awhile and watch the water and the unchanging sky.

When I make my way back, I find the others lying on the rocks at the water’s edge, smoking.

‘I can see why Lizzie loved it here,’ Joe says. ‘It’s a special place.’

‘This was a really special place for her,’ Marko says, ‘a place she felt at home. Usually she liked being out here alone. But one night I spent the night here with her. We spread some blankets under those trees and slept there.’ Tears are sliding down his face, but he is smiling. ‘It sounds quiet here now, but at night, in summer, this place comes alive like you wouldn’t believe—cicadas, kangaroos, possums. It’s like a wild party. We hardly slept.’

I look up into the blue and think about how big that night sky must have been, with the moon and stars overhead, slowly turning.

JOHN JOHNSTONE’S OFFICE is next to the Bendigo hospital. A small metal plate announces:

Wills, Probate and Estates.

I have all the papers ready in a large yellow envelope.

‘Ah! Found them all at last, I see,’ he says as I step into his office.

John Johnstone is a large and red-faced man. His grey hair falls in oiled waves to his collar. Around him, piles of paper rise from every horizontal surface in his office. He gestures to the chair opposite him. When I sit down, his mobile phone starts ringing. It’s on maximum volume, and the ringtone is that Mozart one, a symphony of beeps. He doesn’t seem to know how to set it to silent, so he shoves it, ringing, into the bottom desk drawer, covers it with papers, and then slams the drawer shut. The jangly notes still ring out.

I hand him the envelope and he leafs through.

‘Well, that looks to be all in order.’ He takes the papers and puts them into a manila folder. He writes El’s name on the front with black permanent marker, then he lays the folder on top of a tall pile of identical folders.

‘The hard work is done,’ he says.

WHEN A HOUSE is empty, the key makes a different sound in the lock. You can hear the space inside the house in the sound of the key turning. El’s house smells of lavender wood polish, with faint notes of bleach. The downstairs room is full of echoes and splashes of watery sunlight filtered through the trees. The room is sun-warmed, and strangely smaller than it was before, now relieved of its old cargo of objects. I walk around downstairs and check for anything left behind. All is empty and quiet. The walls hold light and air and silence. There is nothing more to do.

Upstairs the windows look out onto an undulating carpet of treetops. I can just make out a glimmer of Joe’s roof in the distance and, beyond that, only the endless cloudless sky.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A HUGE THANK you to everyone who worked on getting this book out into the world.

To my publisher Brigid Mullane—I’m so very grateful for your support and guidance. Thank you also to the whole fantastic team at Ultimo Press: Alisa Ahmed, for your sharp and careful eye and the deft way you wrangled all of those unruly image files; Zoë Victoria and Andrea Johnson, for the publicity and marketing on this book. Thanks also to Deonie Fiford and Rebecca Hamilton for the close attention to this manuscript in the editing and proofreading stages. Thank you to Josh Durham for the gorgeous cover design. To my agent, Sarah McKenzie—thank you for all your encouragement and support.

Foreign Country began as part of a creative writing PhD. My gratitude to Maria Tumarkin, Jeanine Leane and Julienne van Loon who supported me though my years of candidature, and in the development of this manuscript. Thank you also to Michael Sala and Elizabeth Reader for your generous feedback on this manuscript.

I am grateful to have received funding from the University of Melbourne to develop this manuscript post-PhD, through the Arts Graduate Research Publication Support Grant.

Thank you to Varuna, the National Writers’ House, where I finally completed the draft, among the trees and the quiet and the birdsong. I also had the pleasure of attending the International Lamplight Residency, presented by Varuna and the Irish Writers Centre, where I worked on a huge restructuring of this work. Thank you to Mary Anne Butler and Conor Kostick for your wise guidance on this. My thanks to my fellow Lamplighters—Aoife Clifford, Jacquie Byron, Finn O’Branagáin, Christine Foley, Sinéad Ingoldsby, Aoibheann McCann and Michelle Walshe—I’m grateful for your advice and encouragement, and I so enjoy reading all of your work.

Thank you to Annette Castillo, for battling through the early drafts. Thanks also to Frederic Cappon for assistance and advice with some of the images in this book. My thanks also to Jeff and Jodie M (and their super fund) for assistance with images.

Finally, and most of all, thank you, Gavi, for everything.

A note on the images

The documents that are presented in this book are all fictional. The photographs of people, with the exception of those, are of members of my family. The upper image is open source, and that is by Dr George Jallo, USA, open source/Wikimedia Commons.

Marija Peričić is a writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Her first novel, The Lost Pages (2017), won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award 2017 and was shortlisted for the 2017 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. She was named as a 2018 Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. Her second novel, Exquisite Corpse (2023), was shortlisted for the Davitt Awards. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in Meanjin, The Big Issue Fiction Edition, and Southerly.

I: GRETA

1.

I’M SURE YOU already know the story of Dr Carl Dance. Probably you saw the news headlines back when it all came out: ‘The Greatest Love Story of All Time’, ‘A Story of True Romance’, ‘The Nation’s Greatest Lover’. It was in all the papers, and I don’t mean only the Swedish ones, I mean everywhere: London, New York, Berlin. Everyone loves a good romance. Sometimes Lina’s picture was there too, right on the front page, and underneath would be printed ‘The Doctor’s Lover’ or something like that. But you can’t always believe what you read in the papers. I suspected from the start that something wasn’t quite right about Dance. That suit. That accent. The little beard. It was more than those things, though, it was something harder to put my finger on. And while I knew the whole time that he was a chancer—or I suspected it, at least—I was still the one pushing for Lina to see him. That’s something I have to live with forever.

The thing you need to know about Lina is that she was beautiful. Not just pretty, I mean there was something almost magical about the way she looked and the effect she had on people. Lina had the usual Fredelius family face: straight eyebrows over dark eyes, brown hair. That sounds like nothing special but somehow, on her, those plain features were transformed. My eyes, like hers, were brown, but hers were clearer and larger, and the irises were illuminated with flecks of gold. Her hair was soft and silky, and lay smooth as water in every style she put it in: unlike the wiry strands that covered my head, which would never lie flat, even if I used an iron. Next to Lina I always felt a bit undone, a bit drab. There was something seamless and elegant about her, about the way she moved. An effortlessness. Me, even though I looked alright—just alright—from the outside, on the inside it sometimes felt like I was being held together with scraps of sticking plaster and safety pins. Especially when I was standing beside Lina.

From the time when she was in her pram, or toddling beside Mama down the footpaths of Södermalm, people noticed Lina. Women would smile at her in the street.

‘What a perfect doll! Isn’t she just the spitting image of Baby Mary in Sunshine and Gold!’

Later, men noticed too. Any time we went anywhere together I’d see their eyes snapping over to Lina as if propelled by magnets. Meanwhile, I was invisible to them. It was as if I wasn’t even there. I’d watch them gawp at Lina, with stunned faces and goggling eyes, sometimes even with their mouths hanging open a little, tongues lolling. Lina didn’t care. Usually she didn’t even notice, and if she did she’d roll her eyes. Sometimes she’d pull an ugly face at the man, and laugh at his bewildered reaction. It made all the attention she got a bit easier to bear.

Lina’s the big sister. Everyone was always surprised about that. People would take me to be the older one. She was smaller than me, for one thing, slender and frail, with tiny bones like a bird’s. Even before she got ill she was that way. Just after her twentieth birthday was when the illness first appeared. At the start it seemed like nothing much, she was more tired than usual and her heart would race when she climbed the stairs. But after a few weeks her face paled and she lost weight. When she finished her shift at the factory she often went straight to bed. Not that she ever complained. Lina never complained about anything, which might sound like an admirable trait, but in reality was mostly frustrating. If you don’t worry about yourself, it just means someone else has to do that job for you. I had to almost drag her bodily to the doctor. We had no money, so we went to the public hospital, Serafen.

Serafen is right in the middle of town, across the street from the City Hall. Two hundred years before, the place had been the grand residence of some wealthy industrialist. It was a long building of red brick, with a row of mullioned windows running along the front. As you came around the curving drive, the two wings of the building unfurled themselves in front of you in a perfectly choreographed sweep. But when you got closer you could tell that the place had seen better days. There were tiles missing from the roof, and the far wing of the building seemed to be sinking into the ground. The brickwork had long, dark cracks running up and down it, and the awnings over the windows were sagging and broken.

The waiting room was a draughty hall that echoed with fits of coughing and the cries of small children. It must once have been an impressive room, with tall windows that looked out over a small park, but now it was dingy with neglect. You could hardly see through the window glass for the layer of soot and grime that coated it, and the floor was covered in muddy footprints and littered with dead leaves and scraps of newspaper. No matter what time of day you went there, the place was packed with patients, mostly workers from Södermalm, all jostling and complaining, and the air was heavy with the smell of coal briquettes and sweat and damp, dirty wool.

The first doctor we saw there was this old man, Dr Blix: an ancient bloated ogre with a bare and warty scalp. I only remember that detail because the whole time Lina was explaining what was wrong with her, he didn’t once look at her. Instead he sat with his chin sunk on his chest, the shiny dome of his skull pointed right at us, while he had a brief snooze. When he woke up, he told Lina her problem was that she hadn’t had any children yet. If I hadn’t been there he wouldn’t have done any tests even. I had to practically fight him to order the X-rays and blood tests. When we went back for the results, I was clenching my fists, ready for another round with old Blix. But when the door of the consultation room opened, it was a different doctor.

‘Good afternoon,’ he said, shaking hands with each of us. ‘I’m Dr Dance.’

You couldn’t think of a greater contrast between Dr Dance and his decrepit predecessor. Dr Dance was thin and clean and neat, old too, but wearing an elegant suit and gold wire spectacles. He had a white triangular beard, and bright eyes that darted sharply from Lina to me and back. But the main thing I noticed was his foreign accent. American. The only other time I’d ever heard an American accent was on records. Ethel Waters, Hoagy Carmichael. I remember wondering what a man like that—a real-life American, a fancy-looking doctor—was doing working at a place like Serafen.

He went over to the lighted screen and put up Lina’s X-rays: one taken from the front, and one from the back. It was strange to see the image of her rib cage up there while she sat on the chair beside me. Like she’d been split in two. The X-ray showed up the hard white of her breastbone, and her collarbones made elegant grey arches above the paler lines of her ribs, as faint as watercolour strokes, or curls of smoke. Even her bones were beautiful.

Dr Dance was standing there with his arms folded, frowning at the X-ray.

‘Not good news, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘See this here, this white patch?’ He pointed with a pen to a mottled area near Lina’s spine. ‘We call that an opacity.’

‘You mean those little blobs, like clouds?’ Lina asked.

‘That’s right.’

‘But they don’t look dangerous at all.’

‘Perhaps not, Miss Dahlstrom, but I’m afraid they may very likely be. These cloudy opacities,’ he tapped at one with his pen, ‘which might not seem like much to your eye, look to be a case of pulmonary tuberculosis.’

‘TB?’ I said. I glanced over at Lina. She was smiling absently at the X-ray screen as though it was a painting on a wall. ‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘Greta, don’t worry, I feel fine . . .’ Lina put her hand on my arm.

‘Miss Dahlstrom,’ said Dr Dance, ‘you might feel fine now, but very soon you will start to feel ill. Make no mistake, I’m afraid this looks to be a serious case. I’d like to run the tests again, for confirmation.’

‘And if it is what you say, what will the treatment involve?’ I asked.

‘Unfortunately this hospital offers no specialised treatment for tuberculosis. There are private sanatoriums available: I would recommend sixteen weeks’ stay at the outset . . . However, the closest of these is, I believe, in Västerbotten, which means—’

‘Sorry, Doctor,’ I said, ‘but sixteen weeks in a sanatorium . . . I mean, how much is that going to cost? We want to do the best we can for Lina, but . . .’

‘Greta, please! I really feel fine. I’m just a bit tired sometimes, is all. Everyone’s getting all worked up over nothing.’

I gave her a look. It was difficult enough to get a doctor to take you seriously. This was not the time for one of her displays of stoicism.

‘Sorry, Dr Dance,’ I said again. ‘But a sanatorium is out of reach for us. It’s not realistic.’

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Places like Västerbotten come with a hefty price tag, it’s true.’ He paused, put his elbows on his desk and steepled his fingers. He leaned forward and looked at Lina the same way he had looked at the X-ray, attentively, intensely. ‘Perhaps I can help. In addition to consulting here at Serafen, I run a private clinic in Östermalm, and there we offer a range of treatments that would be suitable for Miss Dahlstrom. I myself specialise in various radiation treatments, advanced developments in the field.’

‘But private clinics,’ I said, ‘I mean, we don’t have that much money to spare.’

‘Rest is the most important cure,’ he said. ‘Let’s focus on that for now. First of all, I want to run these tests again. For the time being: rest, fresh air and plenty of good food.’

We were both quiet on the walk home. Lina looked exactly as usual: not one bit deathly ill. If anything, she looked better than usual. She was smiling as we walked along, and with her pink cheeks and bright eyes she was the picture of health. She looked as ordinary and happy as if we were coming home from a trip to the cinema. It seemed impossible that, invisible to the eye, inside her chest, close to her heart, she was carrying the seed of an awful disease that one day might do her in.

2.

ALTHOUGH LINA LOOKED healthy, she was by no means well. She slept ten, eleven hours a night if nobody woke her, and was often out of breath. A few weeks before, Petter—that’s Lina’s husband—and I had managed to convince her to drop her shifts at the factory down to two days a week. But that meant she and Petter couldn’t afford the rent on their own rooms anymore, so they’d had to move back in with Mama and Papa and me. At that time we were living in an apartment in Hallandsgatan, where we’d moved after Lina was married. I wasn’t married then, and I’m still not. I don’t really see the point of husbands.

I loved having Lina living with us again, but I have to say, it was a bit too cosy with the five of us packed into that place, not to mention all of Lina and Petter’s boxes and suitcases in there too, stacked in every corner like the luggage room at Central Station. Our apartment was a three-room place in the back section of the building, which was shaped like a square around a small inner courtyard. It was always cold and damp in our apartment because our windows only looked out onto the courtyard, so we never got any sun.

There was my bedroom, and Mama and Papa’s, which were always freezing, and then a bigger room that had the stove and sink and a kitchen table, and, since Lina and Petter had moved in, also a kind of couch we’d made out of old crates and cushions for Lina to rest on during the day. Lina and Petter had my room, and I camped out on Lina’s couch at night. Really it wasn’t too bad unless everyone was home at the same time, in which case it felt like a crowded enclosure at the zoo.

One evening, about a week after Lina’s second appointment at Serafen, all of us were home. Papa was sitting at the table reading the paper, Petter was beside him rolling a cigarette. Mama and I were making dinner. The room felt cramped with the four of us in there. Lina was lying down in my room. Dinner was cabbage rolls—we always had those on Wednesdays—stuffed with the previous night’s leftovers. I hated cooking cabbage rolls because the apartment always got so steamed up and then you had that squalid smell of cabbage water in your hair and your clothes and you never seemed to be able to get rid of it. I was in among the clouds of steam, draining the rolls and putting the potatoes to dry, when there was a knock at the door.

Mama went to answer it and came back with a tall, thin man behind her. It took me a good few moments to recognise him. It was Dr Dance from Serafen. To say he looked out of place in our apartment is an understatement. He was so polished and elegant, so tall and neat, politely holding his hat and gloves in his hands. He stood out from the dinginess of the room as if he had a spotlight shining on him.

Mama’s fingers plucked at the patched skirt of the housecoat she always wore. ‘This gentleman says he’s here to see Lina,’ she whispered, and shuffled off to fetch her.

‘Who are you?’ asked Petter. He got up from his chair.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said the doctor. He stepped towards Petter with his hand outstretched, a hand as white and clean as his gloves. ‘The name’s Dance: Dr Carl Dance. Good to meet you. And you are?’ Just then Lina appeared, wrapped in a blanket.

‘Sit down please, Dr Dance,’ said Papa. Dr Dance laid his hat and gloves on the table and took a seat. We only had five chairs, so Mama hovered nearby. ‘What can we do for you?’ Papa asked.

‘I’m here about Miss Dahlstrom.’

I saw Petter bristle at the ‘Miss’. He’d always been the jealous type.

‘Last week she and,’ he gestured to me, ‘this young lady here came to consult with me at Serafen. I ran a few tests and the results are back.’

‘And?’ I asked, but I already knew it wasn’t good. Why else would he have come?

‘I’m sorry to be bringing you bad news, but I’m afraid the results confirm the initial diagnosis. Pulmonary tuberculosis. It’s of the utmost importance that Miss Dahlstrom seek treatment right away.’

Lina laughed. ‘Ill? Not a bit! I’ve been telling you all the whole time I feel completely fine,’ she said. ‘A bit tired, maybe . . .’

Papa motioned for her to be quiet.

‘Are you sure, Doctor?’ Papa asked.

‘I’m afraid there’s no doubt about it.’

‘And what about treatment?’ I asked. ‘Like I said, we couldn’t afford a sanatorium like that one you mentioned in Västerbotten.’

‘I think I have a solution,’ Dr Dance said. He turned and addressed Papa. ‘As I explained to these two ladies, as well as consulting at Serafen I run a clinic in Östermalm where we specialise in all kinds of brand-new treatments, including radiation therapy, which is my own special area of interest. The facilities we have at the clinic are far better than the ones you’d find in—’

‘And who’s going to pay for that?’ Petter cut in. ‘Private treatment, that’s an arm and a leg. Not something for the likes of us.’

‘Yes, I understand your family’s situation, and I’d like to offer to treat Miss Dahlstrom pro bono—for free. You wouldn’t pay a cent.’

I could see Petter fuming every time Dr Dance called Lina ‘Miss’.

‘That’s a very generous offer you’re making, Doctor,’ Papa said carefully. He looked impressed; his eyebrows were pulled up so high they were almost touching his hairline. ‘What kind of treatment did you say it was?’

Mama was standing by the stove, frowning as she folded and refolded one of the grey cloths we used as dishrags. Only Lina looked unconcerned, her gaze moving from face to face as if she was watching a play.

‘There are a few options open to us,’ said Dr Dance. ‘The main one I have in mind is a new kind of radiation therapy. It’s the very latest technology from the States. Basically, it’s a great big old X-ray machine that blasts the growths that are causing the illness—blasts them and destroys them.’

‘Blasts?’ I said. ‘That sounds a bit dangerous . . . Does it cause any other damage?’

He nodded gently. ‘That’s a good question, miss. I know the treatment might sound aggressive, but you can rest easy that it is perfectly safe. The ray I’ll be using is routinely used in America, though you won’t find such a thing at Serafen, or indeed anywhere else in Stockholm.’

Lina let out a loud laugh. We all turned to look at her. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just all of you sitting around with your serious expressions.’ She mimicked Mama’s worried look.

‘Lina, it’s a serious situation,’ I said.

Mama was wringing the dishrag in her hands. ‘Now I don’t know about this . . . this, what’d’yacallit, this . . . ray,’ she said. ‘A ray? I never heard of such a thing.’

‘Mama, we don’t have the money for a sanatorium. We should think about it,’ I said. ‘But anyway,’ I went on, ‘it’s not up to us: Lina should be the one who decides.’ She still looked like she was a spectator on the scene. Sometimes she played too much at being the baby of the family. Even though she wasn’t. ‘Lina? Don’t you have anything to say about all this?’

She smiled. ‘Oh, you’re blowing it out of proportion. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me that a bit of a rest won’t fix. This nice doctor here has just made a mistake. I’m sorry, Doctor, I don’t mean to be rude, but that’s how it is.’

Dr Dance was nodding. ‘Miss Dahlstrom, I completely understand that you feel that way.’

Petter squirmed in his chair. His face had turned a bright shade of pink. The doctor went on, ‘But I regret to tell you that this is the illness speaking. Your calm feelings are the treacherous symptoms of the first stage of this terrible disease.’

‘Now, you listen here, mister,’ said Petter. It had been one too many ‘Miss Dahlstrom’s for him. He stood up. He put his hands flat on the table and leaned over towards Dr Dance. ‘First of all, it’s Mrs Dahlstrom. Mrs. That’s right. She’s my wife.’ He pointed his finger at his own chest. ‘And second of all, what right do you have to come bursting in here, telling us about some crazy ray and how my wife has a terrible treacherous disease!’

Petter was a very tall and large man. He practically had to stoop and turn side-on to go through doorways. He towered over Dr Dance, who sat with his head tilted back, looking up at him.

‘Mr Dahlstrom,’ the doctor said, ‘you have my apologies.’ He put his hand on his heart. ‘I’m awfully sorry I offended you. I meant no insult. I myself am something of a bachelor at heart, and I always make the mistake of assuming everybody else is too. I do apologise.’ He stood up. ‘And yes: you’re absolutely right, Mr Dahlstrom, I had no right, no right whatsoever, to intrude on you all in this manner with such grave news. Once again, I apologise. I was only hoping to save time, which can be of the essence in cases like these. But I see I have been too impatient. I’m truly sorry.’

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a calling card. ‘I know it’s a lot of information to take in at once, but I do ask that you consider my offer. Please take as much time as you need to talk it over.’ He put the card on the table. ‘But please also keep in mind that this illness can progress quickly, and swift action is of the utmost importance.’

He nodded to each of us, then picked up his hat and gloves and left.

3.

ALL THROUGH OUR dinner of cabbage rolls, now cold, Petter seethed about Dr Dance and his ‘Miss Dahlstrom’s.

‘Just because he’s some rich American, he thinks he can come barging in here like an oil baron and act like my wife’s fair game.’ He shoved his half-eaten plate of food away and leaned back in his chair.

‘Petter, that’s not the point at hand,’ I said. This was hardly the first time someone had fancied Lina. ‘We need to think about what’s best for Lina’s health.’

‘Health! As if anyone’d trust that creep! Making eyes at Lina. Forget it!’

‘He was just trying to help,’ Lina said. ‘I thought he was very polite. And so serious.’ She too was hardly eating. She’d cut up the cabbage roll and was pushing the bits from one side of her plate to the other.

‘He certainly did seem to be dedicated to his work,’ said Papa, who always found this an impressive characteristic in a man. ‘He must be a very good doctor, putting in that extra effort to come all the way out here to give us Lina’s results. Shows real commitment. Not to mention his offer of free treatment. It isn’t something to turn our noses up at, that’s what I say. Even at Serafen we’d have to pay.’

‘He says it’s free now,’ Mama said, ‘but then later he’ll say different. And at least with Serafen, you know where you are. I don’t know about this clinic.’ She shook her head. ‘Sounded to me like he wanted the chance to try out his newfangled machine—his ray—on someone. Our Lina’s not some kind of guinea pig!’ She sniffed. ‘But the whole thing’s not up to me.’

‘We could go and take a look at the clinic,’ I said.

Petter slammed his hand down on the table. ‘We’re not discussing it further! I’m not letting that American anywhere near Lina, and that’s the end of that!’

We ate in silence for a few minutes.

‘Well,’ Lina said, ‘all I can say is Dr Dance is certainly miles better than that first chap we got at Serafen. Blix. Remember him, Greta? Couldn’t even manage to stay awake through my appointment.’ She laughed at the memory.

Lina was right about that: I wouldn’t have trusted that fool Blix with so much as bandaging a cut on my finger. I remember thinking how lucky it was that Dance had turned up when he had. Out of nowhere, too, like a fairy godmother in a story. Even though Dr Dance seemed unusual, I thought Petter’s reaction against him was much too hasty, as well as wrongheaded. If I’d had to choose between that old ghoul Blix and Dr Dance’s crazy ray, I would’ve chosen Dance any day of the week. Anything was better than Serafen. In the seven years I’d been working at the Hellgren tobacco factory, there had been nine cigar-rollers who died at Serafen, some of TB, and some in childbirth. As bizarre as Dr Dance’s ray sounded, and as odd as he might seem, I knew he was our best bet to cure Lina.

Over the following days, while I was getting more and more worried about Lina’s diagnosis, she herself was brimming with joy. She sailed about the place with a dreamy look on her face, smiling the whole time, as if there was music in the air that only she could hear. She kept repeating that she was fine, she’d never felt better, and that we were all jumping at shadows. And she did look fine. More than fine. Lina always looked lovely, as I said, but at that time she was absolutely radiant. Her face was rosy, the skin smooth as wax, and her eyes sparkled even more than usual. She laughed more than usual too, and seemed to find everything beautiful. The view of the dirty courtyard, the cross-section of a cut apple, she marvelled and exclaimed over all of it. ‘Everything’s just so . . . glorious,’ she’d say. ‘Can’t you see it?’

Lina had always had a cheerful disposition, but this was something else, something with a sinister edge. It frightened me. I’d come across her crouched in the corner, trying to catch dancing dust motes in her hand, or sprawled over the couch in the main room with her head thrown back and her eyes closed, a rapturous expression on her face, as if she was drunk.

Published in 2025 by Ultimo Press,
an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Ultimo Press

Gadigal Country

7, 45 Jones Street

Ultimo, NSW 2007
ultimopress.com.au

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Copyright © Marija Peričić 2025

Extract from Exquisite Corpse copyright © Marija Peričić 2023

Foreign Country
eISBN 978 1 76115 422 5

Cover design Design by Committee

Cover images Bubbles by Lukas Gojda / Dreamstime; paintings of Australian flowers by Rosa Fiveash / State Library of South Australia; car by Lars-Göran Lindgren Sweden, Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Author photo Courtesy of Brent Lukey

Text design Simon Paterson, Bookhouse

Copyeditor Deonie Fiford

Proofreader Rebecca Hamilton

Ultimo Press acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Country on which we work, the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin Nation, and recognises their continuing connection to the land, waters and culture. We pay our respects to their Elders past and present.