by Minnie Darke
She pressed a third earring, a tiny silver heart, into the southern tip of the island.
Now there was just one more earring, an arrow, in her palm.
Darwin? No, she decided quickly. Too hot.
Mooloolaba? Possibly. Its name had a beautiful rhythm.
Magnetic Island? Too small.
Sydney? Way too big.
But what about . . . right here in Melbourne? Evie considered the prospect. She’d enjoyed living here, had loved this place for its blend of sportiness and artiness, the way its women dressed sharply in coats and boots in the winter-time, the trams and the cafés that lined Degraves Street, the haberdashery in the Nicholas Building and the Athenaeum Library, which was the perfect place to secrete herself away to write. But she’d done Melbourne. Hadn’t she?
There were a lot of advantages to the idea. She knew her way around; it wouldn’t be hard for her to work here; she was already here. And, although she wouldn’t be in the same city as Stella and Reuben and the kids, she wouldn’t be that far away from them, either.
Through the bay window, Evie caught sight of the blue Renault coming along Tavistock Row. It reversed into the vacant parking space in front of 12A, and Evie saw Arie get out of the driver’s side, then reach through to grab a bag from the back seat of his car. He was wearing the same T-shirt and jeans as the night before, and his hair looked a touch sleep-mussed. Wondering where it was that her neighbour had spent the night, she stepped back and out of view as Arie came closer to the house.
She returned to her map, and counted on her fingers: Esperance, Bellingen, Hobart, Melbourne. She felt a little thrill at the prospect of choosing a whole new adventure.
There was a small office set-up downstairs in one corner of the Airbnb’s living room. Evie, who hadn’t yet got a new Australian SIM card for her mobile, had been grateful for the landline telephone, and also for the slimline computer that gave her access to the internet. She jostled the mouse, waking the screen. Her usual routine when she was about to make a move was to run a series of searches: jobs + place, house-sitting + place, poetry + place, place + what’s it really like. She opened a browser window, but what she typed into the Google search field was none of those things. Instead, it was: Arie Johnson + Melbourne.
What are you doing, Evie?
Just . . . looking, she told herself.
If he was anything like her, there would be nothing to see. Even in this day and age, it was still possible to remain near enough to invisible in the online space, although to do so you had to live a life like Evie’s – one that remained in the middle of the bandwidth, having neither any major highs nor any major lows that would make you the subject of other people’s interest. But Evie very quickly came to understand, as the search results scrolled down the screen in front of her, that the man next door had not been able to do this.
Her eyes moved quickly from the official Sonder site at the top of the list, further down to the place where she saw all the words that explained the sorrow she’d seen in his face . . . PQ108, the ghost flight, Air Pleiades, Diana Clare.
‘No,’ she murmured.
She remembered the poem she had written and abandoned, and pictured again the image that had driven her to pick up her pen in the first place – an image of the sea opening itself up like a big blue mouth and swallowing the plane whole.
Evie had vaguely followed the British television coverage of the plane crash, and although she remembered the faces of the UK victims appearing in the newspaper pages, she had not known until now that an Australian concert pianist had been among those who died.
Soon, Evie was watching her on the screen – Diana Clare, in a red dress with a plunging V-neck, playing the piano on the stage of a concert hall, an orchestra ringed around her. Evie didn’t know what the music was, but it was big and powerful. Diana Clare’s bare arms rose and fell; her whole body swayed with the tide of her music, her long ginger-blonde hair and red dress accentuating all her movements, giving her the look of a beautiful, exotic sea creature. So this was the woman Arie Johnson had loved – this dramatic, accomplished, celebrated musician.
‘Oh my God,’ Evie murmured to herself, feeling suddenly mortified. She had played music in front of him. He would have been used to the kind of music that Diana Clare could play, and Evie had sat innocently in front of him, plinking at the strings of her guitar like the complete amateur that she was.
On the second page of search results was an interview with Arie himself. He sat with one elbow resting on the closed lid of a piano, his face lit from the opposite side by the light from a window. Eighteen months had passed since the segment went to air, and Arie’s face on the screen was gaunt and sallow compared to the way Evie thought it looked now, but the voice captured by the footage was familiar. His was a surprising voice, slightly deeper than you might expect from looking at him, and textured with an accent that – although clearly Australian – seemed to contain a whisper of something European.
‘Diana was always travelling,’ he said. ‘Her music took her all over the world, and I’d taught myself not to worry about it. To repeat that old mantra – getting in a car is the most dangerous thing we do every day, far more dangerous than boarding a plane.
‘It’s hard to know which mornings are the worst. Sometimes, I think the worst mornings are the ones when I wake up with a vague sense that something terrible has happened, but I can’t yet tell – in that half-awake state – whether that something is real, or just from a dream. And then, as my brain, or my memory or whatever it is, comes into focus, I remember that it’s all true. I have to go through the discovery of it all over again.
‘But then, I think . . . no. The worst mornings are the ones when I wake up from a dream of something good. I’m waiting at the airport in Paris when she steps off the plane. Or I’m at my desk at work when she calls to tell me she’s missed the flight.’
It was clear that he was finding it hard to continue, that he was getting through by leaving spaces between the words so that he could steady himself, breathe. As he brushed away a tear, she could see that by some miracle there was no apparent anger in him – only pain.
‘Or else, I am on the plane with her. I am beside her when the oxygen runs out and her eyes close. I am holding her hand. In the dream it seems so real, but then, when I wake up, it’s not. On those mornings . . . those are the worst mornings. On those mornings, I start the day by falling from such a great height.’
On screen, he swallowed audibly, and Evie – watching him – did too.
That day was fiercely hot and in the early evening, when Arie went out to pick up some takeaway for dinner, the breeze in the street felt as if it were being pumped through a furnace. As he got into his stifling car, he noticed an unfamiliar vehicle parked outside 12A. It was a Beetle – a vintage original with patches of rust here and there on its body, but with conspicuously brand-new tyres.
It wasn’t until he returned, though, that he realised the car must belong to Evie, for there she was, out in the street, with a bucket of sudsy water at her feet, wiping with a dishcloth at the Beetle’s dusty panels. There were black marks on her forearms and thighs, and also on the striped playsuit that she wore, one shoulder of it falling off as she worked.
Arie dawdled, walking around to the back of the Renault to check if there was anything in the boot that needed bringing inside. He saw Evie move from the pavement side of the Beetle to the curving slope of its bonnet, splashing through a soapy puddle as she went, although the wet footprints from her bare feet quickly disappeared from the hot asphalt.
Once again, in her bearing he sensed that odd blend of self-containment and longing, as if she was quite happy to be doing what she was doing, and content to be doing it alone, but also waiting for the arrival of whatever it was that she was missing. There was something about her that unsettled him, though he couldn’t name it precisely. It occurred to him that her self-containment made him feel unnecessary, though why this should bother him – why
he should want to be necessary to her – he didn’t know.
She looked up and saw him, smiled and offered a wave of her grubby dishcloth, and that was enough invitation for him to walk over to the blue Beetle.
‘You bought a car?’
‘Retrieved it,’ she corrected. ‘It’s been in storage, the poor old thing.’
He walked a circle of it, taking in the vehicle’s exaggerated wheel arches and the small triangular windows that could hinge outwards. The handle of the back-end engine compartment looked like a Frisbee that someone had flown into the car’s body.
‘When I got my licence, all my friends were buying these sleek, brand-new little things, with CD players and air-conditioning. But not me. I wanted something old and groovy. Let’s just say it was not a particularly practical decision. I hate to think what this thing’s cost me over the years.’
‘It’s a classic,’ Arie said, peering in through the soap-bubbled windows at the old-fashioned dashboard dials and leather-headed gear lever.
‘Hey, I don’t suppose you have a hose, do you? I found a tap just by the fence there, but no hose. I mean, I could make do with the bucket, but it would be great to be able to do a proper rinse-off.’
Arie thought. ‘I might. Let me go take a look.’
‘Oh, you were about to eat,’ Evie said, gesturing to the plastic bag in his hand. ‘It can wait.’
‘It’s okay. It won’t take a minute,’ he insisted.
As he passed through the house, setting his takeaway curry on the kitchen bench, he tried to remember the last time he’d opened the little tin shed in the backyard. However many months it had been, it was long enough for the bolt lock to have seized up so that Arie had to yank on it, hard, to get it to open. Inside, a dormant lawnmower hunkered in a corner beneath shelves that contained hopeful things like potting mix, fertiliser and lawn seed.
Taking up most of the space, though, were two bicycles – his old mountain bike, and Diana’s cruisy street bike with its wide handlebars and front-mounted basket – their pedals and spokes all intermeshed so that he couldn’t move one without the other. At the sight of them, he felt a familiar tide of sadness begin to rise inside him.
‘Hose,’ he murmured to himself, trying to stay on track. ‘Hose.’
There it was, hanging in a coil from a rusted nail in the wall, stiff with disuse. It could be perished by now for all he knew, and the orange plastic fittings on either end were probably so brittle that they’d crack under any kind of water pressure, but this was the best he could do.
He held up his find for Evie to see and then set to work attaching the hose to the tap in the front yard of 12A. Arie tested the pressure, then twisted the nozzle closed. Gradually, the water and the heat did their work on the creaky rubber, so that the hose partially unkinked itself as he dragged its length out onto the street and handed it over to Evie.
The heat was still oppressive, and there was something about the way the skin on her forearms was slick with water, and the smell of hot concrete, and the way the puddles beneath the car were evaporating into a faint haze of steam, that made Arie wish that he, too, was barefoot in a puddle, or running through a sprinkler. He wished he knew Evie well enough to flick water at her, and watch soap bubbles settle on her hair.
She examined the nozzle. ‘Do you just . . . ?’
‘Yeah, twist,’ Arie said, miming.
He stood back, close to the brick wall, while Evie squirted water over the curving top of the Beetle, sending rivulets of suds down its sides and into the gutter.
He didn’t see it coming. When the spray of water hit him full in the chest, he looked up in total surprise to see Evie grinning at him from the far side of the car. As he stood there, rooted to the spot, her grin faltered, and Arie could see that she couldn’t quite believe what she’d just done. The look of embarrassment on her face deepened to mortification.
‘Oh God, I’m so—’
She might have been about to follow with ‘sorry’, but Arie – feeling a little rush of exhilaration – had already taken two big steps towards the bucket and caught up its handle.
‘Right,’ he said, and Evie, relief palpable on her face, dashed away to the back of the Beetle as he came charging around the front. But she’d found herself at the end of the hose’s length and couldn’t get any further away from him unless she abandoned her weapon. She turned the hose on Arie as he swung the bucket in her direction, and his aim was good – the soapy water fanned up and out of the bucket’s lip, drenching Evie from head to mid-thigh. At the same time, the hose spray hit him again, saturating his clothes entirely.
He backed away, all out of ammunition, and when he reached the pavement, he turned and leaped over the low fence. Reaching the tap, his sopping shorts and T-shirt dripping onto the grass, he turned it off.
Evie flicked her wet hair from her face as the last of the water drizzled out of the hose onto the pavement. Arie tried not to notice the way her playsuit now clung to her slender figure, the wet fabric plastering tightly to her breasts.
Eyes up, eyes up, he told himself.
‘Truce?’ she said. ‘I’m not quite finished.’
‘What? You think I’m just going to turn this tap back on?’
‘Um . . . yes?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You can trust me,’ she said, her eyes wide with mock innocence.
‘Tell you what. You give me the hose, and I’ll finish rinsing the car.’
‘But can I trust you?’ she asked.
‘It’s a mystery,’ he said.
Laughing, she approached him, and handed him the business end of the hose. Holding her hands in the air, she looked down the length of her wet body. ‘Seriously, do your worst. I can’t get much wetter now anyway.’
Arie spun the tap so the water flowed again, but other than giving Evie a light spray in the face, which she received quite happily, he did as he had promised and rinsed off the car.
‘There you go,’ he said when he was done. ‘One washed car.’
They stood together, and Arie noticed that she – like he – was breathing just a little more heavily than usual.
The expression on her face was both mischievous and sincere when she said, ‘I really am sorry. If that was childish. But it’s just so . . . hot. If I’d really thought that you’d mind, I wouldn’t—’
‘If you hadn’t have started it, I would have done,’ he said, although he knew this probably wasn’t true.
‘So, can I get you a drink?’ she asked.
Evie went into the kitchen, leaving a trail of water along the hallway, and returned with two ciders and a bottle opener. She levered the tops off and handed one of the frosted bottles to Arie, who was already sitting on a lounge in the courtyard.
‘Cool change is coming,’ he said, and she followed his gaze to the southern sector of the sky where scudding puffs of cumulus were massing on the horizon.
‘Hallelujah,’ she said. ‘There were a couple of times today when I seriously thought I was going to get heat-stroke. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen weather like this.’
Evie settled herself onto the second lounge so that she was resting her back against its wooden slats and looked over at Arie, reassessing, curious to know if she could read anything new in his face, now that she knew so much more about him. All she saw, though, was the same faint cast of sadness to his features. Grief certainly left its marks.
‘So tell me, what was it you were doing all that time you were away overseas?’
‘Just travelling,’ she said with a shrug.
‘You must have worked,’ he observed.
‘Enough to get by. I changed a lot of sheets. Babysat quite a lot of children. Poured a great deal of beer.’
‘I thought I observed a certain level of expertise in the bottle opening.’
‘Yep. Champion bottle-opener, me,’ she said.
‘So what brings you home then?’
The memory of a song played on ce
llo and flute flitted through her mind, but all she said was, ‘Oh, nothing in particular.’
‘And what will you do now? You and your little blue Beetle?’
‘I haven’t got anything you’d call a plan. I suppose I’ll pick a corner of the country, go there, and work out what to do next.’
‘Where’s home though?’
‘Home?’ Evie repeated. She hardly knew.
‘Where does your family live? Where did you grow up?’
‘I grew up in Hobart,’ she said, not answering the first of his questions; the answer was too complicated. ‘As soon as I could, I started travelling around Australia. Before I left, I’d been living in Melbourne for a while. That’s why I came back here. To get my car, and all the other stuff I left behind.’
‘And now you’re just going to pick a place to live? Simple as that?’
‘Yes.’ She smiled at his expression of genuine bewilderment.
‘That sounds . . .’ he began, and then frowned slightly, trying to find the word for it.
‘Disorganised?’ Evie suggested.
‘No, the word I almost said was “foreign”. It’s just that I . . . I can’t imagine what it would be like to be so free.’
‘Well, you actually are that free. Really and truthfully,’ Evie said, then hoped that this had not been tactless.
It was true, though. He could, if he chose, drop every single thing he believed was confining him – whether that was his house, his job, his mortgage – and do something different, go somewhere different, strike out on an entirely different path. Something Evie had learned on her travels was just how many people were locked in cages with invisible, imaginary bars, and constrained by rules they had made up for themselves. Equally, though, she’d learned how lonely you could get when you stepped through those bars and dismantled all the rules.