From the suburban station where she alights, she will catch a bus to where her daughter lives. Amanda is hazy on the details of bus numbers and timetables, but when the bus arrives she checks with the driver, and climbs on board.
If she had been able to satisfy that literary agent, her life would have been different. Friends would not roll their eyes when she refuses to lunch because it cuts into her working day. Lizbie would be proud of her. There would have been money to fix up the house, and she could have afforded a car. But lately Amanda is full of vague aches and pains; the literary skill she aspires to takes time to develop, and at least she hasn’t poured precious years into books that will be read once and discarded. What she yearns for in her writing is to hit one true note. A note that will make sense of something, perhaps of everything, a note that will crack the obliterating silence, once and for all.
She suspects that the story she has just written might have hit that note. If she has been able to capture what she felt when she first heard it from Magda – the sealed room, those gloves, that tiny message, and her sense of something hidden that needed to be uncovered, something dark and rotten, even evil, which has masqueraded as normality.
At the last moment, Amanda recognises the row of shops on the corner of Lizbie’s street and she presses the stop button. When the bus lurches to a halt she moves to the front.
“Have a good day, lady,” the driver says as she steps down.
Ignoring his peeved tone, Amanda thanks him, and sets off towards the sea.
She has brought Lizbie a jar of raw organic honey; she has brought pecans, and almonds, and a block of beautiful white nougat with pistachios. Lizbie has grown increasingly haggard in the years since her husband’s death; she looks a little like the woman who handed Amanda the leaflet outside the station, only younger. Amanda reminds herself that there have been times when she, too, let herself go down. Widows do, and then after a while they pull themselves up. The difference is that she’d had a small child to care for, and it’s this that worries her about Lizbie – there seems so little to tether her to life. Every Monday afternoon, Amanda takes the train and the bus to bring whatever small treats she can gather. She would come more often if Lizbie would let her.
Amanda remembers her daughter as a newborn with the shock of hair that had suggested her name, because of Hardy’s poem: ‘And, Lizbie Browne, Who else had hair bay-red as yours, Or flesh so fair’. She remembers her skipping cracks in the pavement, and then as a stroppy teen, impossible to deal with once she was on the pill.
At Lizbie’s gate she pauses, steadies herself with a few deep breaths before turning in.
Months pass without news of her submissions. But Amanda is engrossed in reading and re-reading Maeve Brennan’s The Springs of Affection as if a painstaking progress through its pages will show her how to emulate Maeve’s stripped yet devastating prose. By the time The Springs of Affection first appeared in print Maeve Brennan had spent time in a mental hospital. But could you ever guess that from reading her masterpiece? Apparently, Maeve had thought people were trying to poison her by putting cyanide in her toothpaste.
I was never mad: what failure, what shame, what guilt had caused the doctor’s wife to fold a tiny boat and write inside its sail?
Amanda has begun another story; it’s set in the year following her husband’s death. After Joe’s brain tumour she had sunk to her lowest, yet she’d done her best to look after Lizbie. The form of the story is slowly coming to her, and she has put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door of her writing room. But on Thursday afternoon she is interrupted by a furious knocking. When she is slow to respond, Magda shouts, “Are you in there?”
Amanda is still half in the world of her story when she opens the door.
“Sorry,” Magda waves a newspaper, “but will you look at this.”
She opens the paper on Amanda’s desk, and points at a black and white photograph in which a woman gazes unsmiling over her left shoulder at the camera. Her hair is scraped back into a ponytail, exposing a face in which the mouth is dark with lipstick, the eyebrows curved like the wings of a bird. “It’s that doctor’s wife.”
Together they stare at it, and as the woman stares back at them Magda says, “The police are investigating her death.”
“Why now?” Amanda says.
“Something turned up,” says Magda. “It seems she had written to an old friend right before she died. The friend had moved around a lot, but when the letter finally found her, she took it to the police.”
Police have opened an investigation into the death of Mrs Erris Cleary …
“Was she buried?”
“Cremated.”
How, then, was anything to be proved? Amanda leans closer to study the face – sharp, grave, alert, intelligent; the woman’s pose, her severely pulled back hair, remind her of Maeve Brennan. People have been tried for murder even without a body; there have been famous cases.
Magda says, “I should have gone to the police.”
“They’ll want to speak to you now,” Amanda says. “You still have that paper boat, don’t you?”
Magda pulls a face, and shakes her head.
“Even so, we both saw it.”
“I’ll go tomorrow morning, before work,” says Magda. “There’s that local police station near the hospital.”
“If you like, I’ll come with you.”
Tossing and turning in the early hours, Amanda wonders whether she should write to The New Yorker and withdraw her story. She wonders why, if that doctor had killed his wife, he would run the risk of bringing in a contract cleaner? Because he had wanted someone, a random stranger, to witness the wardrobe full of bottles!
In Amanda’s story there are two endings. Without an autopsy it could be the same in real life. The doctor’s wife might have hidden those bottles, or they might have been planted; her husband might have killed her for reasons of his own, or he might only have hated her alcoholism. But then why put on gloves to go into her room? If the husband never harmed her, Amanda would like him to explain the gloves.
Amanda rises early, and a pain in her hip that is new sets up a protest as she shuffles to the kitchen to fill the kettle. By the time Magda arrives she is dressed and ready, still tired, but moving more freely. Exercise eases the stiffness: Amanda knows this, yet she is a reluctant walker.
“I wish I hadn’t thrown out that boat,” Magda says. “I feel so stupid.”
“You weren’t to know.” Amanda gathers her purse and keys. “How could anyone be expected to?”
They set off under a clouded sky, along streets not yet clogged by rush hour traffic. This would be a good time of day to walk, Amanda thinks, if she could ever get motivated.
The police station has a sealed look, and Magda scans its blank windows with anxious eyes. “Do you think they’ll take us seriously?”
They mount worn slate steps, and push through a heavy door into a waiting room. There are scuffed white walls, and a lofty ceiling; light flares in a trio of windows high above their heads. Aside from the two of them, an old lady with bandaged legs dozes under a wall heater, and a hazel-haired young woman perches on a bench seat; she glances up at them, her eyes a wounded blue.
There is no one behind the glassed-in counter.
“At least my first job’s not ’til ten,” Magda says.
They sit side by side, and as Amanda shifts her left buttock to ease her hip she marvels at how the young woman’s spine never touches the back of the bench. What it must be like – the absence of pain, and no inkling that one day that will change. The young woman brings out a string of beads from her bag; they are lumpy and dark, with a little chain and a cross, a rosary; she cups them in her hands for a minute, and then puts them away.
A female police officer appears at the counter, and the young woman rises from the bench with a bird-like grace. The old lady still dozes, and Amanda wonders whether she is only there for the heater.
“Maybe we’ll be next,” says Mag
da.
A sudden flood of light at the windows washes over them, illuminating Magda’s small plain face with its sun-damaged skin and smoker’s wrinkles. A surge of love for her friend catches in Amanda’s throat: who’d have ever thought they would get this old. She turns to watch the young woman, whose body is poised at a tentative slant as she speaks to the policewoman. She nods, and hands a yellow envelope across the counter, and after a minute or two, a door Amanda has not noticed slides open, and the young woman walks through it and disappears.
Amanda thinks of her story in its envelope, slithering into the dark of the post box. Life is full of hidden doors and unexpected openings. She will not withdraw her work. It might be wishful thinking, but her gut feeling is that this one will find a decent home – maybe not The New Yorker, but somewhere that means something. If at last she has hit that one true note it must be allowed to ring, it must be allowed to shatter the silence.
Acknowledgements
Murmurations is not set in a specific city, or country, but in the daunting urban landscapes painted by the American artist Edward Hopper. Noted for his reticence and habitual silence, Hopper’s flat, saturated colours, his erasing of detail, produced pictures in which absence is as compelling and eloquent as presence. Each of these stories began as a response to one of Hopper’s paintings, and while the original prompts are no longer necessary to the novella that grew out of them, the works that provided the inspiration are, in order of appearance: Automat (1927); Hotel Window (1956); Stairway (circa 1925); Summer Evening (1947); Room in New York (1940); Morning Sun (1952); Summer in the City (1949); Woman in the Sun (1961).
I am grateful for the continuing support of the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide, where I am a Visiting Research Fellow. Gratitude to the shakers and movers at Spinifex Press: Susan Hawthorne, Renate Klein, and Pauline Hopkins, and to all those who work behind the scenes. Thanks too, to my agent Fran Moore, and to my indefatigable friend Gay Lynch, for her fierce encouragement, perceptive reading, and generous responses. I am indebted to Annette Willis for the beautiful book on Edward Hopper that allowed me to study his paintings as prints rather than on a screen. Finally, love and gratitude to Christopher and Rafael Lefevre without whom I would be lonelier than a Hopper painting.
Other fiction titles available from Spinifex Press
The Happiness Glass
Carol Lefevre
But what did teenage girls in country towns want with Latin and French and art? What use would it be to them?
The literary longings of a studious girl born into a working class family, hot afternoons in a dust-plain Wilcannia schoolhouse; the temptation to stay, and the perils of breaking free — The Happiness Glass reflects complex griefs in the life of Lily Brennan.
Lily’s story allows the author to navigate some of the difficulties of memoir, and out of its bittersweet blend of real, remembered, and imagined life, the portrait of a writer gradually emerges.
In fiction that forms around a core of memory, life writing that acknowledges the elusiveness of truth, Carol Lefevre has written a remarkable, risk-taking book that explores questions of homesickness, infertility, adoption, and family estrangement, in Lily Brennan’s life, and in her own.
“… These scenes are worthy of Patrick White. There are many pleasures in this short, cunningly crafted, deeply felt book, not the least of which is consistently good writing.”
—Susan Varga, Australian Book Review
ISBN: 9781925581638
Locust Girl: A Lovesong
Merlinda Bobis
Winner 2016 – Christina Stead Prize for Fiction,
NSW Premer’s Literary Awards
Shortlisted: 2016 ACT Book of the Year Award
Philippine National Book Award for Best Novel in English
Most everything has dried up: water, the womb, even the love among lovers. Hunger is rife, except across the border. Nine-year-old Amadea survives the bombing of her village to wake ten years later with a locust embedded in her brow. She journeys to the border, which has cut the human heart. Can she repair it with the story of a small life? This is the Locust Girl’s dream, her lovesong.
“… a book that can be read with pleasure for its language alone, and which subtly and surely subverts the status quo. Bobis messes with our minds, in the very best way.”
—Lucy Sussex, The Sydney Morning Herald
“It’s allegorically pertinent not just to the question of refugees but also to how the future might play out if climate change is as disastrous as some of the modelling suggests.”
—Ed Wright, The Australian
ISBN: 9781742199627
The Floating Garden
Emma Ashmere
Sydney, 1926, and the residents of the tight-knit Milsons Point community face imminent homelessness: the construction of the harbour bridge spells the demolition of their homes. Ellis Gilbey, landlady by day, gardening writer by night, is set to lose everything. Only her belief in the book she is writing, and the hopes of a garden of her own, allow her to fend off despair. This beautiful debut novel evokes the hardships and the glories of the 1920s and tells the little-known story of those who faced upheaval because of the famous bridge.
“The Floating Garden is a fine example how fiction can be useful in expanding our understanding of the past … I enthusiastically recommend this book to other readers, especially those who care about Sydney, and those interested in a new type of historical fiction.”
—M.D. Brady, Me, You, and Books
ISBN: 9781742199368
Dark Matters: A novel
Susan Hawthorne
When Desi inherits her aunt Kate’s house in Brunswick she begins to read the contents of the boxes in the back room. She discovers a hidden life, one which could not be shared with Kate’s family.
Among the papers are records of arrest, imprisonment and torture at the hands of an unknown group who persecute her for her sexuality and activism. Scraps of memoir, family history and poems complete this fragmented story.
Can Desi find Mercedes? The woman Kate has loved so much. Mercedes, who had escaped from Pinochet’s Chile. Where is she and can she help unravel Kate’s story?
“Dark Matters is a transformative tour de force; lyrical as Sappho and revolutionary as Wittig in Les Guérillères.”
—Roberta Arnold, Sinister Wisdom
“This is a book of underworlds and infernos, places of execution, practices of erasure and sites of desire. It documents the practicalities of attempting to break lesbian cultures woman by woman, finger by finger and story by story. Against such violence Hawthorne offers poetry as activism, as remedy, as mode of repair. Dark Matters is a meteoroid. When it hits, it will make a different world of you.”
—Hayley Singer, Cordite Poetry Review
ISBN: 9781925581089
Symphony for the Man
Sarah Brill
1999. Winter. Bondi. Harry’s been on the streets so long he could easily forget what time is. So Harry keeps an eye on it. Every morning. Then he heads to the beach to chat with the gulls. Or he wanders through the streets in search of food, clothes, Jules. When the girl on the bus sees him, lonely and cold in the bus shelter that he calls home, she thinks about how she can help. She decides to write a symphony for him.
So begins a poignant and gritty tale of homelessness and shelter, of the realities of loneliness and hunger, and of the hopes and dreams of those who often go unnoticed on our streets. This is the story of two outcasts — one a young woman struggling to find her place in an alien world, one an older man seeking refuge and solace from a life in tatters. It is also about the transformative power of care and friendship, and the promise of escape that music holds.
An uplifting and heartbreaking story that demands empathy. Amid the struggles to belong and fit in, we are reminded that small acts of kindness matter. And big dreams are possible.
“Music transforms lives in an intricate symphony of grit and grime
that is delicately infiltrated by flourishes of magic realism. Simple, rippling, meditative prose details a miracle of kindness. This strangely filmic novel makes its stealthy way into the reader’s heart.”
—Carmel Bird
ISBN: 9781925950069
Lillian’s Eden
Cheryl Adam
In Lillian’s Eden, debut novelist Cheryl Adam takes the reader to Australian rural post-war life through the life of a family struggling to survive. With their farm destroyed by fire, Lillian agrees to the demands of her philandering, violent husband to move to the coastal town of Eden to help look after his Aunt Maggie. Juggling caring for her children and two households, Lillian finds an unlikely ally and friend in the feisty, eccentric Aunt Maggie who lives next door.
“Lillian’s Eden has a rather classic feel to it, harking back to life during the 1950s in rural Australia. In many ways, it is reminiscent of The Dressmaker and Cloudstreet, with its element of the ridiculous that only comes with this type of nostalgic Australian fiction. Unflinchingly honest, this is a novel that will have you in stitches from laughter while stealing your breath away with its emotional intensity.”
—Theresa Smith, Theresa Smith Writes Blog
“Lillian’s Eden is a garden full of stolen roses, family secrets and ambivalence. It’s also home to one very attractive snake. I couldn’t stop reading till I found who got cast out.”
—Kristin Henry
ISBN: 9781925581676
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