North of Nowhere, South of Loss

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

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

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

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

“And the roof!” the mother sighed.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ll take it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s that man?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

“Is that him over there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That muddy puddle,” Jilly sniffed scornfully.

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

“Who wants peaceful? I want excitement, Mum.”

Laura said carefully, neutrally: “Would you rather go back and live with your father in Sydney?”

“I dunno,” Jilly kicked at the gargoyle and screwed up her face. “Anyway, Dad’s not in Sydney, he’s back in New York right now. His secretary said.”

“Oh.”

“I could go if I want. Dad’d send a ticket.”

“Yes, I suppose.” The bamboo canes clicked softly, the gargoyle leered. Laura stared at the eyes reflected in the water. Full fathom Jive your father lies … She managed to keep her voice even. “Is that what you’d like to do?”

“I dunno. S’pose I’ll give it a bit longer before I make up my mind.”

“Thanks, Jilly.” Laura hugged her, but Jilly stiffened and drew back.

Two letters arrived. One was junk mail, a garden catalogue addressed to Mr Voss or Occupant. The other, for Laurence Voss, was a letter.

Laura phoned the real estate firm and asked for Mr Watson. “What can I do yer for?” he boomed cheerily. “Pruned the jungle back yet?”

“I love it the way it is, Mr Watson. I’m calling to ask for Mr Voss’s forwarding address.”

“Whose?”

“You know, the former owner. Mr Voss.”

“Oh, Mr Voss. Right. Of course.”

“It’s a curious coincidence, isn’t it?” Laura said.

“How’d you mean?”

“Well, Patrick White. Voss and Laura. You know.”

Mr Watson didn’t know. “Sorry. Don’t follow you.”

“Patrick White’s novel Voss? Voss and Laura are the main characters, they have this strange sort of connection, a fusion almost—”

“Never read it,” Mr Watson said briskly.

“Well anyway, what’s Mr Voss’s forwarding address?”

“Wouldn’t have a clue, luv. The bank was already the owner, you know. I acted for the bank.”

“Yes, I know. But you said you got him into a nursing home.”

“What? Oh right, right. That Mr Voss. Look, I got someone in the office at the moment. Call my secretary back in half an hour, will ya? She’ll give you the nursing home address.”

Laura called back. It turned out that there had been some problem or other, and Mr Voss had changed his mind about the home. Neither the nursing home nor the real estate company had a forwarding address. Mr Watson was sorry, his secretary said. She suggested Laura contact the Westpac Bank. Laura did. The bank had no forwarding address. No one knew what had happened to Mr Voss, the mortgage manager said. He’d vanished into thin air.

Though there was no return address on the letter to Laurence Voss, Laura marked it “Return to Sender. Forwarding address unknown” and dropped it into a mailbox. Let the post office open it, send it to the dead letter office, whatever they did.

No more personal correspondence arrived, but every week or so junk mail came. To Mr Voss or Occupant, to Laurence Voss, sometimes to L. J. Voss. It was very classy junk mail: glossy garden catalogues, magazines for orchid fanciers, kits for gazebos and teak garden benches, mail-order kits for grandfather clocks and harpsichords, brochures for leather-bound sets of Tolstoy and Goethe. You could tell a lot about a man from the mailing lists he was on, Laura thought. You could feel great fondness for a man of such elegant tastes.

She filed all the catalogues in a carton in her study, but kept one or two on her bedside table to browse through at night. Once, she was startled and excited to turn a page and find a photograph of Caliban with identical bulging eyes and knowing smirk. You could have him delivered. He had a companion piece, a sylph-like cast-iron sprite with wings, a stooped figure who could be placed in such a way that he appeared to be drinking from a cupped hand. Ariel, she thought with delight, and decided to order him. She would put him on the opposite side of the pond: Beauty and the Beast, so to speak.

She used the catalogue order form as it was, imprinted with the name of Mr Laurence Voss and his address — which was also hers — at Settlement Road, The Gap. She filled in her own credit card number.

She felt she had stepped into the envelope of Mr Voss’s life. She felt they were kindred spirits. She felt his presence most strongly by the pond.

“The Spicers said he was weird,” Jilly said. She babysat fairly often for the neighbours, who had a real pool. “They hardly ever laid eyes on him, but they were glad when he went. The police had to come, Mrs Spicer said.”

“The police?”

“Yeah. He wouldn’t leave when the bank foreclosed.”

“I don’t blame him,” Laura sighed. “After you’ve spent your life building the perfect garden. Poor old man.”

“He wasn’t all that old,” Jilly said. “Same as Mr Spicer, they reckon. And he only came a few years ago and planted all that fast-growing bamboo and stuff. Pretty suspicious, they reckon. Like what was he hiding? He was kinda spooky, Mrs Spicer said, a real loner. The kids called him the bogeyman.”

“Suburbanites don’t understand the desire for solitude,” Laura said. “They probably think I’m a bit weird too.”

“Yeah, well,” Jilly shrugged. “I told Mrs Spicer you were on sabbatical, writing a book. She said that’s different.”

“How kind,” Laura said drily.

“She asked me what your book’s about, and I said Patrick White and literature and stuff. I couldn’t remember exactly.”

“It’s a study of authors who become reclusive. Patrick White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. The way they create solitary characters and personae and then disappear into their fictions.”

Jilly mimed a theatrical yawn. “Oh wow,” she said.

“Or maybe it’s the other way round. Maybe the characters swallow up the author. You know, move in and take over. With both White and Pynchon, you get a sense in the later novels of invasion, and there’s a line in Dickinson—”

Jilly groaned. “I wish I had a normal mother. You know, who plays tennis and stuff, and has people round for barbecues.”

“We’ll have a barbecue,” Laura offered guiltily, quickly.

All the neighbours came to the barbecue, and all Jilly’s friends from The Gap high school. Also a man whom nobody knew. The man nobody knew looked vaguely familiar to most of the neighbours, but everyone assumed he came with somebody else. Laura wasn’t aware of him till Jilly pointed him out: “Mum,” she said urgently. “That’s the man who stares at me at the bus stop.”

Laura was disturbed. She’d seen him before somewhere, but she couldn’t think where. “Does he do it every day?” she asked Jilly.

“Almost every day. He drives past in this red Toyota. Sometimes he drives round and round the block and stares when he goes past, and sometimes he just parks and stares. He gives me the creeps.”

“Men who stare are usually harmless,” Laura said with a lightness she did not feel. “That’s all they do. Stare.”

(“Don’t think I won’t be watching,” her ex-husband had promised after the custody case. “Don’t think you’ll get away with this.”

But anyone angry made that kind of threat. It meant nothing.)

“Who’s that man?” she asked a woman she’d got to know in the supermarket, a woman who was wiping hamburger from a toddler’s face.

“Oh, I see him in the library all the time,” the woman said. “I think he’s a friend of the Spicers. Very shy, but rather nice. Gives the kids iceblocks and lollies.”

The man seemed shyly friendly, or perhaps cordially aloof, like someone dragged to a party by friends too soon after a divorce or a death in the family. He moved from group to group, he smiled, he chatted, he was charming, he kept moving. Laura heard someone say, “I didn’t catch your name,” and he laughed quietly as though this were a particularly clever joke and moved on. She watched him gradually work his way further from the fringes of the crowd until he disappeared behind the bamboo.

Perhaps he was someone her ex-husband had hired. But then again, perhaps he was just a friend of the Spicers.

She slipped away to the pond.

The man was sitting cross-legged beside Caliban, with his hand on the gargoyle’s head, staring into the water. Laura looked at his reflection and thought he had the saddest eyes she’d ever seen. It’s his garden, she thought with sudden certainty. He’s grieving for it.

Oblivious to Laura’s presence, the man began stroking Caliban’s head in a blind, desolate way, a gesture both intimate and … what? Hungry.

Stricken, Laura said: “I ordered Ariel to go with him. Do you like him?” and the man started violently, as wild-eyed as Caliban himself. Laura felt momentarily frightened. She could not tell if the look was hostile, or haunted, or simply that of a man much disoriented by loss. Then he smiled, and Laura thought with a shiver that his smile was a little like that of her former husband, who could move from charm to threat to charm again without warning.

Caliban’s reflection grinned at her from the water. A real steal, he smirked. She thought uncomfortably: it is a kind of theft, a foreclosure.

“I know how you must feel,” she said apologetically. The man’s eyes unnerved her. She spoke to his reflection, which watched hers. “Look, if you want to come and sit here sometimes … well, that’s okay. I’ll understand.” She felt as though she were placating some capricious force, and couldn’t tell if she spoke from compassion or fear.

“Mrs Spicer,” she said, when the flow of the party had reabsorbed her, “that man over there, just coming up from the pond. Is he Mr Voss?”

Mrs Spicer was startled. “Good God,” she said. “I shouldn’t think so.” She studied him intently. “To tell you the truth, it’s hard to say. We practically never saw him. I don’t believe we ever once saw him face to face.” She squinted, and tipped her head to one side. “It could be … but no, I don’t think so. That man’s a friend of the Taylors, I think. I’ve seen him round. Mr Voss was stockier, heavier than that. Just the same, I wouldn’t take chances. I’d notify the police.”

“The police?” Laura said apprehensively. “Why the police?”

“Well, confidentially,” Mrs Spicer lowered her voice. “I didn’t want to alarm Jilly with the whole story. But I play tennis with Milly Layton whose husband’s a cop. Voss was suspected of murder, you know.”

“Murder?”

“The story is that his wife ran off with another man. He got custody of their daughter, and that was the situation when they moved in here, Voss and his kid. She used to babysit for us, as a matter of fact, when Key was a baby. Lovely girl. Just about Jilly’s age. Could never get a word out of her about her dad or mum, though I poked around. Discreetly, you know. Then one day she just disappeared. His story was that the wife had kidnapped her, but the police weren’t so sure. They couldn’t find any trace of the wife or daughter, and for a while they had a theory he’d murdered them both. Came and dug up the pond because they thought he might have buried them in the mud.”

It seemed to Laura that she could feel the meaning of the gargoyle’s leer seeping into her body like cold water. “But they never found anything,” Mrs Spicer said lightly, “so charges were dropped. Voss went a bit berserk, Milly says. They had to cart him off. All I know is, the police cars came and went, came and went, I don’t know how many times. Then the For Sale sign went up. It was there for months you know. They couldn’t sell it. Word spread, people had a bad feeling about the place. Quite frankly, I say where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You’ve got to wonder what someone was hiding behind all that jungle. I expect you’ll be having it cut back.”

“Oh, well, I grew up in a house like this out past Samford, you see. Right in the rainforest. I like it this way. Mrs Spicer, Jilly says that man drives past when she’s at the bus stop and stares.”

“Really?” Mrs Spicer studied him more intently. “You’ve got to wonder about some of the Taylors’ friends. Bloody peeping Toms, it’s disgusting. Listen,” she said, “I’d inform the police. You can’t be too careful when you’ve got a daughter.” She looked obliquely at Laura. “Especially when you’re managing on your own. Not easy, I’m sure, being a single mother.”

“No,” Laura said.

“Jilly says you’re doing a book on Patrick White’s Voss. Funny, isn’t it? The name, I mean. The coincidence.”

“It is a bit weird,” Laura acknowledged.

“Read Voss in high school. Based on Leichhardt, wasn’t he?”

“More or less, yes.”

“All those explorers were raving lunatics,” Mrs Spicer said. “Well …” She squinted across the lawn. “No, I’m sure that’s not Mr Voss, he’s too shrunken and pale for Mr Voss, but you must call the police. We don’t want pervs in The Gap, it’s a family place. Ask for Milly Layton’s husband. As a matter of fact, I’ll give Milly a tinkle myself.”

“Mrs White,” Sergeant Layton said. “Staring is not a criminal offence. I’m not saying there aren’t loonies around, but if we followed up every phone call we get from a frightened woman, we’d never do anything else, d’ya see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “It’s just that … I thought it wouldn’t hurt to have it on the record, you know, in case anything … He drives a red Toyota, my daughter says.”

“Mrs White.” The sergeant spoke in the patient tones of one whose daily task involved fending off — wearily, kindly — hordes of neurotic women. “I have a daughter myself. I worry myself sick about her safety. Know what I do? Tell her never to accept rides from strange men. It’s that simple. Train them to be sensible, know where they are, give them a curfew: that’s all any parent can do.”

But look, she wanted to say. I think I may have done something stupid. I told this man he could come and sit by my pond. I could see he was hurt you see. I could see he was in pain. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean he wouldn’t do harm, would it? And now I’m worried that he’ll read something into my offer, I’m frightened that …