by Minnie Darke
But then, when he’d been home less than ten minutes, and was upstairs in his bedroom, having thrown off his work clothes and buttoned up a pair of jeans, he heard a knock at his front door. Pulling a T-shirt over his head as he hurried down the stairs, he had the fleeting idea that it might be her, although he quickly told himself how unlikely that was. But unlikely or not, there she stood on his doorstep, holding a parcel.
‘It’s for you,’ she said. ‘The delivery guy came around lunchtime. I was out the front, and you weren’t here so I signed for it. Otherwise they were going to take it back to the depot and leave one of those pesky cards.’
Arie took the freight satchel from her, feeling the crackle of bubble wrap inside the plastic, but it was only once he caught some of the words written on the docket in the clear envelope on its front that he remembered the internet order he’d placed late one night, on impulse, as a gift for little Marek.
‘Thanks, that was—’
‘I really hope you don’t mind,’ she interrupted, clearly wanting to explain herself. ‘He probably shouldn’t have let me do it. I could have been anybody, but I got the impression he didn’t really care as long as he had a signature.’
This was the first time Arie had been quite so close to her, and now that he was, he could see that she was almost exactly his height. She seemed fresh, as if she’d just taken a shower, the skin of her face plump, her lips newly glossed. The denim shorts she wore made her legs look especially long, and from her hair he caught the bright scent of mint.
‘No, that’s great. Thanks.’
‘No worries,’ she said, and turned away.
If she’d not signed for the parcel, he’d have had to call the freight company, only to have them re-deliver at another time when he once again – most likely – wouldn’t be there, or else he’d have had to drive out to the depot, which was in an awkward part of town. Perhaps she was generally just a very thoughtful person. Or perhaps, Arie thought . . . perhaps she, like he, had been looking for a way to connect.
She had taken only a few steps up the path to his front gate when he called out to her, ‘I should have said, thanks.’
She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling. ‘You did.’
‘I maybe didn’t say it well enough, though. I do really appreciate it.’
She took a step back towards him and he watched her think, a series of thoughts playing out on her face like ripples on the surface of water.
‘Not that I was sticky-beaking or anything,’ she said. ‘And not that I accidentally happened to read anything written on your parcel, but I just want you to know that I definitely will not be next door tonight, envisioning you over here playing with your . . . Dalek plush toy.’
He saw the teasing look in her blue-green eyes, but there was nothing arch in it, nothing sharp. He almost said, It’s for my godson, but he knew the only response to that was, with a knowing nod, Of course it is.
‘It’s not just a Dalek plush toy,’ Arie said, with mock indignation. ‘It’s a talking Dalek plush toy.’
‘Let me guess. Exterminate?’
‘I’ll have you know this is an advanced talking Dalek plush toy. It has no fewer than three phrases.’
‘What are the others?’ she said, laughter in her voice.
‘To tell you the truth, I can’t remember,’ Arie said. ‘It was late, there was whisky. What I was actually looking for, originally, was a K9 piggy bank, but I couldn’t find one and then I got suckered by this 10 per cent off deal. So now I have an advanced talking Dalek plush toy.’
All this was true. Arie had imagined that a piggy bank was a responsible sort of gift for a godfather to give. Promoting saving, teaching the delay of gratification. All that. The shape of the Doctor’s little metal dog would have lent itself nicely to a piggy bank, he’d thought. But although a great many things you could dream up now existed, and were available for purchase somewhere in the world, a K9 piggy bank turned out not to be one of them.
‘If it makes you feel any better,’ she said, one eyebrow arched, ‘I can confess to having a thing for the TARDIS. You know how some people are very good at the kind of forward planning that involves life insurance and things like that? Well, I’m not, but even when I was very little, I knew it would be important to have all my wishes mapped out, just in case I ever accidentally rubbed a lamp and let a genie out. It hasn’t happened yet, but if it ever does, then I’m totally prepared. And . . . my first wish will be for a TARDIS.’
‘That is a good plan. Can’t fault that.’
‘My second would be for a Babel fish.’
‘As in, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Stick it in your ear and you understand every language ever?’
‘Exactly.’
Arie pondered. ‘You know, you might be wasting a wish there. A TARDIS has a built-in translator. Probably just as good.’
‘Harder to stick in your ear, though,’ she countered. ‘Not so discreet, when you’re eavesdropping.’
Arie laughed. ‘Good point. And your third?’
‘I believe the honourable thing to do is to reserve one wish so you can set the genie free. One can learn so much from television and movies, don’t you agree?’
She was funny, this woman, and sweet, and as Arie bantered with her, it occurred to him just how long it had been since he’d met someone entirely new.
‘How much longer are you staying?’ Arie asked, reaching for a way to keep the conversation going. ‘Next door, I mean?’
‘A bit over a week.’
The other night she’d mentioned that she’d been in Edinburgh, but she wasn’t Scottish; her accent was Australian. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
‘Hard to say, really. I’ve been out of the country for six years, so I’m not really sure any more.’
But before Arie could ask any further questions that might detain her, he heard the ringtone of the house phone in the kitchen. The only person who ever rang the landline was Belinda Clare, and Belinda was not somebody who could be ignored.
‘I should get that,’ Arie said apologetically.
‘Of course.’
As she turned to leave, Arie impulsively said, ‘I don’t know your name.’
‘It’s Evie.’
‘Arie,’ he offered in return.
She gestured to the parcel in his arms and gave a mischievous smile. ‘I know.’
The phone kept ringing, persisting beyond the number of rings most people would think reasonable, so even before Arie picked up the receiver he’d got a sense of the call’s urgency. Such a call was not unexpected. The approach of Diana’s birthday was one of those times of year – along with the lead-up to Christmas, and the days before the anniversary of the crash – when Belinda was especially fragile.
‘I’m afraid this is one of those calls,’ Belinda said, and Arie could tell from the overly controlled tone of her voice that she was trying not to panic. Yet.
‘The computer?’
‘It’s crashed, Arie. The screen got all these narrow vertical lines on it and then it went completely black. I can’t restart it. I can’t get any sense out of it at all.’
This did not sound good, but drawing on skills honed from years as a tech trouble-shooter, Arie took a deep breath, and tried to exude calm down the phone line.
‘Have you tried—’
‘The photos, Arie. My photos. I’m worried about my photos.’
Just about anyone would be anxious if they thought they’d lost their photographic archive, but Belinda’s fear went beyond most people’s. She had so little of Diana that she felt it was crucial to hold on fiercely and tightly to every piece of evidence that remained.
‘Even if we can’t fix the computer,’ Arie said, ‘the photographs will be fine. Do you remember we backed them up to the cloud?’
‘I don’t like this cloud thing. I don’t trust it.’
Arie gave a silent sigh; he had he
ard all this before. Belinda had made prints of her photographs, but her terror of losing their high-resolution digital versions was almost impossible to assuage, and the fact that she was a technophobe didn’t help.
‘I don’t even know where this bloody “cloud” thing is,’ she went on, becoming increasingly shrill. ‘I mean, what if it goes kaput? It’s all very well if they say “oops, sorry”, but those photos . . . they can never be replaced!’
‘We backed them up to a hard drive too, though – remember?’
Actually, Arie had backed Belinda’s photos up to two separate hard drives. He’d left one at her house and brought the other back to his.
‘I read somewhere that those things can get corrupted, but I can’t even check. I can’t open the hard drive, because I haven’t got anything else to plug it into,’ she said, and Arie thought she might be about to cry. ‘Oh God, I wish we still used negatives. I could put them in a fire-proof box or something. I don’t like . . . I just feel like, it’s all going to . . . Arie, if I lost her again. If she just faded away . . .’
‘Belinda,’ Arie said, ‘it will be all right. I promise.’
‘Arie . . . could you . . . could you come? Please. I know I’m not being totally rational, but I just don’t think I can sleep tonight unless I know that they’re all right. Can you bring your computer, so I can check the hard drive? I just want to know if they’re definitely there. Can you come? Please?’
Arie, knowing that she meant can you come right now, breathed another silent sigh. An hour and a half out to her place, an hour and a half back. At least it was Friday, so there was no need to be at work early in the morning.
‘Of course,’ he said. Because what else would he be doing? ‘I’m leaving now.’
‘Oh God, what would I do without you? Thank you, Arie,’ she said, and the relief in her voice was palpable. ‘I know it’s a long way. I’ll make up the guest bed in case you want to stay.’
Arie put his computer, a jumper and a toothbrush into an overnight bag. As he drove out of Tavistock Row, he caught a glimpse of the woman next door – just her silhouette – in the bay window of the upstairs room. He wondered what her Friday night held in store. He’d have quite liked, he realised, to have talked with her some more.
For the last two years, almost everybody he’d talked to for more than a couple of minutes – including Grace on New Year’s Eve – knew his story. He hadn’t realised, until tonight, just how weary he was of the strange careful-clumsy manner that people tended to use when dealing with the bereaved. People were overcautious around him, as if his grief were some kind of unpredictable dog that might any minute get off the leash and bite them. And the intense way they tried to avoid upsetting or offending him seemed only to make it twice as likely that they would do so.
In the presence of the woman from next door, though, Arie – for the first time in a long time – had not felt like the sad man. She was from outside his circle of friends, acquaintances and colleagues, and beyond that, she’d been overseas for years. She was like a blank page, and this had made Arie feel as if he could be one, too.
AT 12 TAVISTOCK Row, Arie and Diana had dedicated the room with the bay window to the Steinway and installed themselves in the rear-facing room across the hallway, but the owners of the near-identical number 12A had configured their place quite differently. When fixing it up for an Airbnb, they’d decided to keep one room for storing personal effects, locking its door when they had guests, and to fit out the bigger, street-side room for their guests to sleep in.
It had polished floorboards, a painted fireplace with a dark timber mantel, and a high queen-sized bed covered in bright white bedding. By mid-morning that Saturday, the mercury was rising steeply and the blue of the sky was singed with the faint orange tint of heat-haze. Evie kneeled on the upholstered cushions of the bay window while she worked the plastic chains to partly close the blinds and block out some of the sun.
Evie loved this window seat, this room, this house, but she knew that very soon she would have to move on to a more realistic environment. Once her savings were exhausted and wherever she ended up choosing to settle, she wouldn’t be living in a house like this one. Unless she was house-sitting. If she ended up having to rent, then she’d be back to the type of accommodation that she could afford on whatever wage she could cobble together from her usual combination of low-paid McJobs.
Today she would haemorrhage yet more money. Her plan was to get an Uber out to Crosby’s house, stopping on the way to pick up four new tyres for the Beetle. It was going to be hot in that rickety shed of his, where she would face the task of remembering how to change a tyre.
While she’d managed to get a temporary permit that would allow her to drive the Beetle back to Tavistock Row, it would still have to be checked over by a mechanic before it could be fully re-registered, and Evie was in no doubt that this, too, would be an expensive process. Perhaps she should have just sold the old car, or even junked it; she could easily have picked up a small, cheap car for less than it was going to cost her to make the Beetle roadworthy. But she and the Beetle had been fellow travellers for quite a few years before she’d left it behind, and she felt as if she owed the car some loyalty. Sometimes, she mused, it could be expensive to have a sentimental soul.
Below her, the front yard of 12A looked like a landscape architect’s drawing, with its circular brick courtyard, timber lounges, and the wedges of grass kept green by the electronic watering system that clunked and hissed into action every other day in the pre-dawn hours. This yard was a stark contrast to next door’s, which was cut through with a cracked cement path and sprouted nothing but a single flowering gum tree that dropped its leaves and flowers onto parched and patchy grass.
Whoever he was, this Arie Johnson who lived next door, and whatever he did with his time other than sit up late at night drinking whisky and making random purchases from The Who Shop, it was obvious that gardening was no part of it. Over the past few days, Evie had begun to think that Arie probably lived alone. She hadn’t seen anyone but him going in or out of the front door of number 12, nor spotted another person driving the slate-blue Renault that was parked most of the time out the front – although it was not there right now. From their two brief encounters, Evie had come to the conclusion that he was nice. Possibly even very nice.
So what? she asked herself sternly. Nice was only one part of the equation.
Since leaving Edinburgh, Evie had reflected a good deal on romantic failures, her own especially. It was easy – in retrospect – to see how often and how quickly, in the past, she had given her heart to people who didn’t want it. Or at least, not enough.
Before Dave there had been Michael, a history academic in London, who’d broken up with her by email even though he lived just around the corner from the pub where she worked. Before Michael there had been Ben, a fellow Australian on board the cruise ship where Evie had been employed, who’d told her he was separated from his wife, though he later explained – as he said his goodbyes to Evie before going back to that same wife – that it had really been more a case of him taking some ‘long-service leave’.
Whatever Evie did next with her rather open heart, she resolved that it wasn’t going to involve giving it away to anybody who didn’t fully and completely want it.
Evie made the bed with care, tugging on the white linen to get rid of all the wrinkles. Then, on top, she spread out a map of Australia. It was old and the paper had thinned at all the folds; undoubtedly, some of the rose-pink roads that snaked over the contours of the continent of Australia would have changed course by now. She’d found the map in one of the boxes she’d exhumed from the Beetle. It was dated but still perfectly adequate for her purposes.
You could go west, Evie suggested to herself.
Her eyes travelled across the wide span of the Nullarbor Plain. While it would hardly be a joy to drive for three days, in March, in a rattling VW Beetle with no air-conditioning, the west was fresh country, a part
of Australia she’d never been to before. She wouldn’t want to live right in Perth, but Fremantle was a possibility. Or she could go further south to Margaret River, or Augusta, or Albany. Scanning this sector of the map, she spied the word Esperance, printed in neat round letters on the edge of the country’s south coast. Esperance. A word for hope, left behind by French explorers. There were worse ways to choose a destination than by its name.
Evie had no map pins, but she did have earrings, so she put a small silver star stud through the paper at Esperance. The next earring, a crescent moon, she pushed into the township of Bellingen in the New South Wales hinterland, for no other reason than because this was a profoundly pretty part of the country – lush, green and hilly, yet not all that far from the coast – and because she had passed through there a few times and liked the atmosphere. She could imagine sliding with ease into a job in a laid-back café, spending her days in sandals and light clothes, needing few possessions to get by in the mild, easy-going climate.
Where else?
Stella and Reuben wanted her to come back to Hobart. Evie looked at the island of Tasmania, which she might have described as a triangle, or a heart-shape, or the face of a devil with a pointed chin. As a teenager, Evie had ached to leave the place behind, but that was long ago. Now that she was older, she could picture herself living, once again, under the snow-sugared mountain that curled its foothills around the small capital, reacquainting herself with the changeable weather that so regularly altered the colour and texture of the river that divided the city. Stella had a friend who was looking for a house-sitter, too. His place was one in a row of ramshackle boathouses just out of the city, most of which had been done up as tiny residences. It was an appealing idea, spending winter evenings rugged up and watching the sun set from one of the timber jetties that jutted out into the yacht-filled bay.
The island also had a drawcard that no other place had: not only Stella and Reuben themselves but their children, too. Matilda and Oscar were ten and eight, and Evie knew that there was time yet to be a proper aunt to them, to help out with school pick-ups and sport, spend time baking, or taking photographs, or sketching, or reading, or whatever it was they were interested in doing. The first thing she would have to do, Evie realised, if she chose Hobart, was to find out exactly who they were, these two children whose lives she had so far almost entirely missed.