by Toni Jordan
About the Book
When the beautiful and reclusive Inga Karlson died in a fire in New York in 1939, she left behind three things: a phenomenally successful first novel, the scorched fragments of a second book and a literary mystery that has captivated generations of readers.
Nearly half a century later one of those fans, Brisbane bookseller Caddie Walker, is waiting in line for an exhibition. The famous Karlson fragments are in town. For Caddie, this is the biggest thing ever to hit Brisbane. But it’s a chance encounter in the queue - a conversation with a stranger - that will change her life. Incredibly, it seems someone in this overgrown country town knows something new about the fragments.
Caddie is electrified. Jolted her from her sleepy, no-worries life, she is driven to find the clues that will unlock the greatest literary mystery of the twentieth century.
Contents
Cover Page
About the Book
Title Page
Part 1
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Part 2
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
Part 3
27
28
29
30
31
32
Acknowledgments
Also by the Author
About the Author
Copyright page
To Robbie, of course.
1
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
When Caddie Walker thinks back to this morning, she will try to remember everything. She will lie in bed and sift the moments for a clue. The first thing she recalls will be the heat, even before the scarf.
Deep summer. At home the corrugated iron horizon was already glinting and shimmering. Later, hanging on a bus strap, she swayed among the clammy shoppers and musky teenagers. Felt the barest hesitation. She could be on her way to the pool. She could be in the bath. In the kitchen in her knickers with one arm wedged in the freezer.
Now that she is here, though, waiting out the front of the art gallery, those thoughts have gone. She’s halfway along the queue that weaves across the forecourt parallel to the river, among pink-faced women and a few damp-shirted men, children pulling their mothers’ arms and the crumpled elderly fanning their throats with the free souvenir guide from the paper. The Botanic Gardens are on the other side of the river around the next bend, and there the Moreton Bay figs are tall and lush and green yet still people stand here and sweat, and wait. So often these once-in-a-lifetime exhibits are anticlimactic: entombed warriors that look like they were poured in a concrete factory in Moorooka; some squinty masterpiece on tour from the Louvre.
The queue isn’t moving. Caddie skipped breakfast but she’s got a salad roll in the hessian bag over her shoulder. The tomato will be liquifying into pulp. She’d like to get back to her paperback, her index finger marking her place, except it feels disloyal to be reading another novel while waiting to see the fragments, as though the ghost of Inga Karlson will find her wanting.
She should have arrived earlier. She lay awake and watched the sky drift from pitch to pewter through her wide bedroom window as though she were eight and it was Christmas morning, but she didn’t want to rush this. She wants to remember everything.
The fragments are here, locked behind steel and glass inside the new State Gallery. The fragments. Irreplaceable, priceless. Here, in Brisbane.
She threads her hair behind one ear, turns and catches the eye of the large man in the queue behind her. He takes this as an invitation.
‘Single most important invention in the history of western civilisation? Go on, guess.’
Short sleeves; some kind of logo embroidered on the shirt pocket. Socks pulled high and pleated shorts kept up at his broadest point by a nylon belt. The inch-wide strips of visible knee are red and peeling and the strap of a bulky black bag drags one shoulder down. He moves the bag to the other shoulder and reveals damp circles under his arms.
The wheel? The compass? The printing press?
‘Aircon,’ he says. He might be forty. His shirt has been ironed with such determination that it’s still unwrinkled. ‘Think they’d of walked on the moon without aircon? Plus, murder rate through the roof, car accidents, productivity through the floor. That bloke, the aircon bloke, give him a medal.’
Caddie raises her eyebrows, indicating the length of the queue, their common goal.
‘My word. Snow, even. Couldn’t care less. Worth it, you reckon?’
Of course, she says.
‘Me mum, asked her this morning, do you wanna come? Nah, she says. She’s taped Ray. Bloody Ray. Doesn’t get it. Me, I like books. And paintings. I’m a photographer meself. Professional.’ He inclines his head towards the banner at the front that says The Fragments. ‘Me uncle seen them in New York. Seven, eight years ago.’
Lucky him.
‘Lucky as. He’s in Sydney now, eh. You ever been?’
To Sydney? Once, for a cousin’s wedding.
He laughs. He meant America. She shakes her head.
‘Karlson, hey? One in a million, she was. The mafia done it, you know. Just like JFK.’ The man puffs his chest, cleans one ear with his pinkie. ‘You been here before? The gallery? It’s world-class.’
To this, she can nod. It’s been open four years already, this world-class brutalism. She remembers the land before it was cleared, the long construction, the hoarding that wrapped around the corner with 95% OF ARTISTS LEAVE BRISBANE. WHY DON’T YOU? graffitied in large, bold letters.
‘I love it here,’ she says.
There is no breeze. A few of the women wear sunhats and a couple hold matching umbrellas the colour of peaches. Directly in front of Caddie an elderly woman adjusts her scarf, patterned with silky swirls of green and aqua, her neck swathed atop a ramrod back. Every so often she turns as though she’d like to join their conversation but then thinks better of it. Caddie steps forward with the queue. A child’s voice carries: ‘Can we have chips after?’ A little more distant is a young woman’s voice. ‘How good is Kmart? So good.’
Soon Caddie is under the shade of the concrete portico that radiates heat like a living thing, and then she’s inside. The air conditioning smacks her like diving into a pool. She buys her ticket. The cloakroom attendant stows the gay umbrellas of the girls and the soft butterscotch leather tote of the old woman with the green scarf. He picks up Caddie’s hessian bag—thumb and pointer, like he’s discarding a dead thing by the tail—and slides her ticket across the counter. The photographer is wiping his neck with a handkerchief and arguing with a different attendant about special access. He knows someone, he says.
Now, she will see them.
In a wide chamber off the foyer, heels click on the cement floor and the guards’ uniforms are crisp like the air.
She steps inside.
It is crowded, but not impossibly so. Straight ahead is a floor-to-ceiling poster of Inga Karlson in black and white. Inga seems both innocent and wise, with eyes wide and glimmering and her pale hair woven in a narrow braid. That gaze. It’s as though she can see into Caddie’s soul, as though Inga alone knows her.
On either side of the poster, metres apart, are two smaller photos: in one, Inga is in a restaurant, surrounded by smiling waitresses and waiters. In the other, she’s at a rostrum accepting a prize. To Caddie’s left a room full of display c
ases shows the world in 1935, when All Has an End, Inga’s first novel, was published.
Caddie will go back to these cases later, and to the display on the right that tells the story of Inga Karlson’s life. She will examine the photos of Inga’s childhood home in the old forest before she migrated to the United States, a cottage of hand-hewn timber and local stone quarried by generations of Karlsons. Inside will be a chair with its arms worn smooth, an apron on a hook, a cast-iron pot, a ladle. An oil lamp with a knob of brass and a frayed wick that witnessed tiny Inga learning to read. Some crackling, accented voice recordings of people who knew her: she was kind and impulsive and contrary, she was hot-tempered. Village ructions when, at six, she broke a boy’s nose for torturing a kitten. At nine, suspected of climbing through the windows of well-to-do strangers just to sit in their chairs and rearrange their possessions. There will be books from the teenage Inga’s library, probably; her clunky black typewriter with keys worn concave, diaries in her own hand. All so much set dressing. None of which Caddie has come to see.
Towards the centre of the room the crowd is tighter. There are three displays in front of Caddie now. She stops at the first, the largest in the exhibition, devoted to All Has an End. There is a rare signed first edition: a modest print run for a small novel by an unknown female immigrant. There is the manuscript itself, with sentences underlined in faded blue ink and Inga Karlson’s squat, confident jottings in the margins. There are the three brusque publishers’ rejections, the ones that give comfort to writers everywhere, then the newspaper clippings of the book’s triumph as it builds, and photos of mobs in front of bookstores in London, New York and Sydney. There are letters from bookstore owners: ‘In twenty years in this business, yours is the one I am proudest to sell.’ There are some half-dozen letters from Inga to her publisher, becoming less legible as the years pass, including the famous posthumous one. Karlson’s Pulitzer is there, and selected reviews, some condescending (‘undeniably pleasant’) and some obsequious. There are the threats and the complaints; the letters that call her ‘a traitor to her own race’, ‘an accomplice to the Jews or perhaps a jew yourself’, ‘a spreader of poison, of lies, of propaganda’.
Caddie takes her time.
When she passes the next display, the one about the fire in 1939 with the various theories laid out by the various experts, Caddie turns her head and keeps going. She knows the famous melted necklace will be there, and the funeral photos and mementos and the obituary and the letters written to Inga Karlson by readers around the world after she died, letters they still write to her. Other people’s books, claiming they’ve solved this cold, cold case—all blindly confident, each contradicting one another.
And then Caddie is before the fragments: all that remains of Inga Karlson’s second novel. She approaches, penitent to altar. Stands her ground in the jostling crowd. There is a small sign that says ‘Do Not Touch the Glass’ and another that says ‘No Flash Photography’.
The fragments are like shabby tombstones in a long case. She can see the page numbers printed on the seven of them, these random sheets saved from the fire. In order, they are 46, 53, 108, 117, 187, 200 and 238. They are all damaged, although 108 has suffered only charring down the right-hand side and a small oblong hole in the top right corner. Page 200 has one whole corner burnt away and other parts are crumbling, swallowing every third or fourth word. This is where the title appears—The Days, the Minutes—floating in the last sentence on what is left of the page.
Caddie can see the fragments, and seeing them makes her long for her father in a way she hasn’t for years, an ache that spreads up her side and finishes behind her sternum, which is a bone she knows to be smooth in other people’s chests but imagines laced with steely holes like a box grater in her own.
She stays for an hour or so, oblivious to the strangers milling around, travelling through her past in silence. When she returns to herself she’s being nudged by the photographer, who is positioning his tripod. He doesn’t seem to recognise her. Caddie blinks. The logo on his shirt looks like a yellow-rimmed eye, wide and staring.
She exits through the gift shop. Souvenir catalogues and copies of All Has an End at every price point, from calf-leather bound with gilt lettering to shoddy paperbacks that Caddie’s boss Christine would never allow in the bookshop. There are novels by others inspired by the fragments, reconstructing the story as fantasy, verse, crime and the rest. She passes all these by. The exhibition is here for a while. She needn’t be greedy.
Outside, in the oven air, she blinks. Two smiling young people in red Inga T-shirts are at the top of the steps leading to the grass, handing out flyers advertising tomorrow night’s lecture on the life, work and death of Inga Karlson. ‘All welcome,’ the boy says. Caddie takes a flyer and shoves it in her bag.
The sun is blazing now and she’s struck by a smell of wet earth from nowhere obvious. The hum of the traffic mixes with the fountain in the river to make a buzzy white noise. Her eyelids are heavy. She can smell the frangipanis from here, both the flowers and the long dark leaves: tropical and fruity versus earthen and waxy. Frangipanis are green and lush and restful now, in summer, and bony like skeletal arms reaching skyward in winter to let the sun through. She imagines mist from the fountain on her skin and her stomach turns at the thought of her decomposing lunch.
‘They remind one of a particular variety of Mormon,’ a woman’s voice says.
Caddie turns and recognises the scarf. The voice belongs to the elderly woman, the one who was in the queue. She’s fanning herself with the flyer gripped in a gloved hand. She looks out of place against the cement and the blue sky.
‘The Karlson fanatics,’ the woman continues.
‘They could take a tip from the Mormons,’ Caddie says. ‘If someone knocked on my door and said, “Can you spare a sec to talk about literature?” I would let them in. I would make them a cup of tea.’
‘I saw you inside.’ The woman raises an eyebrow. ‘Were you also having a religious experience?’
Her voice is pleasant. She looks young despite the wrinkles. Her hair is white and soft. She wears no makeup other than a maroon lipstick, and her long-sleeved cream pea coat is linen. Her skirt is also linen and peacock green. Her gold and pearl brooch matches her stud earrings. She smiles.
Caddie must have seemed like an idiot standing there, thinking of Inga Karlson and her dad. ‘I was miles away.’
‘Entranced, were you?’ the woman says, from behind pale, hooded eyes.
Caddie makes a face and flattens one hand over her heart. ‘Guilty. I stand before you an unreconstructed fan. I think Inga Karlson was one of the best people who ever lived.’
The woman laughs, like an iron bell. ‘Dying young was quite the career move, wasn’t it? Especially for a one-book wonder. Who would remember her if she’d grown old and dull?’
A gracious person would smile and shrug and agree to disagree, but that’s the kind of sensible thought that strikes Caddie hours after the conversation’s ended. She feels prickles rise but she can’t stop them. ‘The number of books doesn’t matter. How she died—that was tragic, but irrelevant. Inga inspired people. She saw them. That’s no small thing.’
The woman sniffs and waves in the general direction of the exhibition. ‘People are sentimental fools, in general. All that fuss for a few charred sheets from a book no one’s ever read. Most people would queue up to see a potato if someone wrote about it in the newspaper.’
‘You don’t believe books can change the world? The Bible? Ayn Rand?’
‘I believe most of the people queuing to see those mouldy bits of paper hadn’t heard of Inga Karlson before this week.’ She pauses to move her handbag to her other arm. ‘Had you?’
‘I read All Has an End once a year, at least. My dad. He read it to me when I was little. And…well. My name is Cadence, actually. You can’t be more invested that that.’
When she was younger, Caddie sometimes pretended she had another name, Sandy or Evelyn,
but that was years ago. Her father chose her name and to deny it is a kind of disrespect. The briefest thought of him reminds her of warm flannelette sheets taken from a sun-baked clothesline; of slivers of apple from her lunchbox, tinged with the metallic tang of his knife.
‘This rotten heat,’ the woman says, and before Caddie’s eyes her knees sag and the skin on her face seems to fall as though it’s threaded with invisible wire pulling it down. She extends her gloved hand behind her but there’s nothing to rest on.
Caddie leaps forward to take her elbow, bird bones under the linen sleeve, and guides her to the stairs to sit. ‘I’ll get you some water.’
The woman grips her wrist with claw fingers. ‘Don’t you dare. I loathe fuss. Fuss and bother. Can’t abide it.’ Her voice is cut with sharp inhalations.
‘I’m talking about a glass of water,’ says Caddie, ‘not a fleet of ambulances.’
‘Keep talking. Talk, talk. It’ll pass in a minute. Tell me, is that really your name? What a burden for you.’
‘Not a bit. Everyone calls me Caddie, though. Maybe we should get out of the sun.’
‘I should, you mean. No. I like the sun. Everything grows like weeds here. I’m old, that’s all. Besides’—the woman smiles and drops her gaze to a silver bracelet watch on her bony wrist—‘I ordered a taxi for half an hour ago. This town, honestly. I love it, but it’s half-asleep.’
On the other side of the river the white expressway glints as it threads under the bridge—because that’s what the river is for here: freeways and warehouses and industry. A wide highway for barges and dredges and scows.
The woman narrows her eyes and tilts her head, bird-like. Definitely not a dove. ‘If you think those rubbishy old scraps are so important, I’m sure you remember the words written on them. Which ones do you think are the most…profound?’
‘That’s easy,’ Caddie says, though of course it isn’t. She loves all the fragments. ‘Everyone likes the iconic line from page 46, but for me the best bit is from page 200. And in the end, all we have are the hours and the days, the minutes and the way we bear them.’