The Fragments

by Toni Jordan

Terese is in the kitchen stirring a dented aluminium pot that can only contain chilli lentil soup. She’s wearing Pretty’s jeans cinched at the waist with a too-long belt and a tentish blouse.

  ‘This is my last dinner for the month, you both know that, right?’ says Terese. ‘I have a huge project due.’

  ‘Got it,’ says Pretty.

  ‘And I don’t mean springing for a pizza. We made an agreement. Vegetables. Saving money. Caddie?’

  But Caddie is outside the gallery, listening to the woman—Rachel—quoting from the fragments.

  ‘Earth to Caddie,’ Terese says.

  Caddie Walker and Terese Xanthidi, the last two names called for every school list and test and roll. Eighteen years ago, on the way home from the symphony at the City Hall—the sole music education day at their overwrought, under-resourced state school—one bench on the charter bus was missing its seat entirely. Mrs Powell faced a dilemma: keep the whole class waiting for another bus or trust Terese and Caddie to wait for an hour until she could return and collect them. Sure enough, in an hour’s time they were sitting exactly where they’d been left—Terese with a sprained ankle, Caddie drenched and smelling like moss and pigeon shit and neither able to stop giggling. They formed an unbreakable, soul-sibling bond that lasted through separate high schools, various boyfriends, Terese meeting Pretty and Pretty moving in. Terese’s mother Olympia still invites Caddie to Christmas lunch and plans something busy for them all to do on Father’s Day.

  ‘Hey,’ Pretty says to her. ‘Wake up, Australia.’

  ‘I just heard something that isn’t possible.’

  ‘If it happened, it’s possible,’ Terese says. ‘By definition.’

  Caddie heads to the kitchen where she bins the roll, fills a glass from a passata bottle of water in the fridge and rests it against her forehead before draining it. She walks to the other side of the dining room and turns up the fan. In front of the whip of air she lifts her hair at the back and feels her neck damp and clammy. The buzzing of the fan vibrates under her skin. She feels like she’s seen a ghost.

  ‘Are you crazy? Don’t do that, you’ll get a stiff neck,’ says Terese, tapping the spoon against the side of the pot. ‘Another half-hour.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ says Pretty.

  ‘This and that. Recipes are for drones. So. What is this impossible thing that happened?’

  ‘I met this old woman. She recited a line from a book no one’s ever read. Well, two people read it back in the thirties but they’re dead now. There are no copies of the book in existence. Only a few burnt sheets.’

  ‘Inga Whatever book, that famous lost one?’ says Pretty. ‘Don’t make that face. I’m an engineer, not a labrador—we read All Has an End at school. And To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet. I can read. It was OK, actually. And everyone loves a good unsolved murder. Her picture was in yesterday’s paper. Intense. Like a scary sexy nun.’

  ‘She was just making it up. The woman,’ Caddie went on. ‘She must’ve been. Making it up.’

  ‘Come and taste this, one of you.’ Terese, with an airplane spoon cleared for take-off.

  Pretty shakes his head. ‘Don’t want to spoil the surprise.’

  ‘“It wasn’t them.”’

  ‘What wasn’t who?’

  ‘The mafia. That killed her, I guess. She said that. And the line. There was something in the way she said it, like she knew it was going to drive me crazy.’

  The woman’s face, Caddie realises, was a magician’s in the seconds before turning over the card you’d memorised. A fractional smile of expectation and control.

  ‘Forget about it, Cads. Sometimes people say things just to spin your wheels,’ says Pretty.

  ‘But say she wasn’t. How could she possibly have known the line? The only two people who read that book are dead. That’s what everyone thinks. But what if that’s wrong?’

  ‘Cads. I bleed maroon, you know that. But—when did Karlson die? Before the war?—if some old lady read that book in America in 1930-something, I don’t think she’d be living in Brissie.’ Pretty switches off the set and ambles to the kitchen, gingerly, toes raised like he’s picking his way across a lawn of bindis. He stands behind Terese and wraps his arms around her and takes the spoon and stirs. He is six foot three, she is five foot two. Terese smiles as he envelops her.

  Caddie finds their relationship inspiring and depressing at the same time.

  ‘Why not?’ says Caddie. ‘Why wouldn’t she live here?’ Brisbane, her father used to say, was like a member of your family: you yourself could call it out for anything and everything, but heaven help anyone else who cast aspersions.

  ‘God, all of you stinks,’ says Terese cheerfully. ‘Shower.’

  Pretty sniffs theatrically at his armpit, kisses Terese on the cheek and heads down the hall. ‘Your little old lady was a stirrer, Cads. A senior practical joker.’

  ‘Probably,’ says Caddie.

  ‘Definitely,’ says Terese.

  Now that the couch has been abandoned, Caddie lies down full stretch and hugs a cushion to her waist. ‘I went back to the exhibition and spoke to the cloakroom man and the security guards. No one remembered her.’

  ‘You’re not weird at all.’

  ‘Her first name was Rachel.’

  ‘Too many novels. All those made-up stories. You should read more biographies. Or a story about convicts, that’s just as good. Although the art gallery would’ve been a great place to be today. Cool as. Basketball, he must be mental. I went to the movies with Lisa.’

  The possibilities of it. The endless branching scenarios, all competing in Caddie’s imagination.

  ‘What if someone found a Shakespeare play we didn’t know about? Or if Harper Lee had written another novel and someone read it and remembered it?’

  ‘But she didn’t.’

  ‘But what if she had? Just imagine.’

  ‘It doesn’t taste exactly like I expected,’ says Terese, spoon to her lips. ‘Maybe I should have measured the chilli.’

  ‘“The seconds spent on this earth and the number of them that truly mattered”,’ Caddie says.

  ‘You and books, heh?’ says Terese. ‘I suppose everyone’s stupid about something.’

  During dinner, as Caddie chokes down compulsory lentil soup, Pretty and Terese talk about this year’s election and whether Joh can hold on (Terese: yes; Pretty: no) and whether the Mentals are the best Australian band ever (Terese: yes; Pretty: no). The conversation floats around Caddie like mist.

  Afterwards, as Pretty washes and she dries, determination sprouts gossamer roots. Later as she shampoos her hair it burrows deeper; it reaches its tendrils into her imagination and takes hold. By bedtime Caddie knows she is committed. It is clear to her in a way that nothing else has ever been.

  She is going to find the woman with the scarf.

  Bursts of clarity like this are rare in anyone’s life. She’s read this chosen-one story in a hundred books and now, she thinks with a thrill, it has come to her. The nameless thing she’s been waiting for. She imagines Inga Karlson herself willing her on: Inga Karlson, whose killer was never brought to justice, who whispers to her in her father’s voice. Who speaks to everyone, yet makes you feel that she is speaking only to you.

  At midnight Caddie is lying alone in bed as the ceiling fan sways and rattles and the bulb burns above her. As soon as she switches the light off, a mosquito dive-bombs her ear drum; as soon as she switches the light on, it vanishes.

  ‘Do your job,’ she says to the gecko in the corner of the ceiling, and it wipes its eye with its tongue.

  4

  Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1933–6

  Rachel turns ten, twelve, fourteen in the house in town. It’s a small house in the middle of a row and everything is hard and solid like bricks and road and nothing is green or yellow or swaying like corn when the breeze changes. There are people everywhere. Rachel hears them breathing on the other side of the wall, or pissing in a pot, or coughing.
On their side, they all sleep in the same room, Rachel’s parents Walter and Mary and her and George. Their debts are cleared from the sale of the farm so sleep comes easier, at first.

  Her mother makes biscuits and beans and the best vinegar pie in Pennsylvania because, despite where they live, they are still country people. Her father takes them on picnics to the river and Rachel learns it forwards and backwards: the depths of it, the shallows. He takes them to singalongs at the church. The neighbours on either side work in the mines but Walter is lucky: on account of his skill with farm machinery he is well paid as a fixer in a silk mill. One of the few men among a workforce of females. He works hard and asks for little and, for a time, his belt stays in the loops of his trousers. For a time, Rachel’s parents hold back the world for her. Her mother stays home with George and sews, and Rachel stays in school, the crowded one that smells of feet, on the other side of the factory. She is third in silent reading and oral reading and fourth in spelling, but can barely keep her eyes open in arithmetic and history and needlework. On her way home she snips cuttings from any rare thing she spies growing—a creeper on a crumbling wall; a miraculous broad-leafed wildflower in a pavement crack—and plants them in eggshells filled with soil and then, if they survive, in rusty cans foraged from trash piles. They line the windowsills and aim toward the light. They tickle her palm when she brushes her hand over them.

  Rachel turns fifteen. She hasn’t seen the farm for years and is accustomed to the smells of the city, the wood smoke and rot. One silk mill closes, and then another. Walter keeps his job but his salary drops by three-quarters. Mary must work also and again they are lucky: she finds work as a silk hand in the same mill as Walter. Half the state is unemployed by now. People are hungry. There are marches in the streets; there is the Baby Strike, child workers picketing for a shorter week than the usual fifty-four hours and a minimum wage, and an end to the teaching charge they must pay before they’re hired. On Sundays Rachel hoes the scrap of earth alongside the house and plants turnips and peas and tomatoes and potatoes. Other than the time she spends at the free library or with her nose in a book, she is happiest there with her fingers in soil. She coaxes this, gentles that. They speak to her.

  Her father does not help. He smokes, standing above her as she kneels in the dirt, as though he’s never grown a thing in his life.

  She reads Calico Bush and knows that Maggie’s burden is far worse than her own, she reads The Good Earth and hopes for the constancy and good sense of O-Lan. To spend her days reading and growing things: could there be any better life?

  Then it happens that Rachel leaves school to look after George and the house. She already knows how to boil clothes and sweep before you mop and how to iron clothes smooth. She’s known these things for a long time.

  Rachel is almost eighteen when she’s woken by Mary coughing. It’s growing worse, this hack that began soon after she started at the mill. Months of festering illness have turned Mary’s hair bone white and her constant wheeze has joined the soundtrack of their lives: the clank of the rail line behind the house, every roar and fart from the adjoining houses. Tonight the coughing goes on for hours. Rachel boils water for the steam and Walter paces as the edges of Mary’s lips turn blue. It seems that every breath will be her last.

  ‘Oh dear lord our God.’ Walter rakes his scalp with his fingernails. ‘She’s a good woman.’

  They pile all their coats on top of her and they rub her back and her feet. They make comfrey tea which she can barely sip. Walter has some whiskey in a flask, the source of countless fights between the two of them, but now he wets Mary’s lips with it and she shows no resistance. Somehow George sleeps through the worst of it in a corner of the bed he and Rachel share. That gasping. Like watching someone drown in air. Rachel would give anything to see her mother well again. She thinks the dawn will never come.

  It does, though. Mary has survived the night and is asleep now. Her hair is damp and her breath still whistles but it’s a solid sleep. Rachel and her father haven’t slept at all.

  ‘Get dressed,’ he says to her. ‘Outside clothes.’

  She does. She makes oatmeal, leaves some covered in a bowl for her mother and George and then she sets out with Walter in the crisp dawn in her mother’s coat and boots.

  They arrive at the mill a little before seven. They walk along endless rows of looms, some already clanking, some starting up, all run by women who give neither of them a glance. Rachel has never imagined sound like this, filling every space within her head and without, but the windows are high and the space is tolerably warm. How kind these bosses are, she thinks. It takes her a few days to understand that cold fingers make errors and that light is necessary to see flaws and weakened spots in thread. This room and all its comforts are for the benefit of the silk.

  The foreman, Mr Dimley, is at the end of a row near the windows and her father takes her by the wrist and leads her over.

  ‘And who’s this?’ Mr Dimley yells over the machines. His shirt is almost white and he wears a coat, unlike the other men on the floor, who are mostly fixers like her father.

  ‘Rachel, my eldest. Here in place of Mrs Lehrer.’ Her father’s voice reminds her of the day they left the farm.

  Mr Dimley steps back and looks her up and down. ‘In place of? Does this look like a charity? I have a list of women waiting as long as my arm.’

  ‘There’s no need for that. My wife’s a good worker. She’ll be back tomorrow.’

  Mr Dimley sucks his teeth. ‘Hands.’

  Rachel can’t imagine what he means.

  ‘Show Mr Dimley your hands, Rachel. Quick now.’

  She brings both up in front of her and Mr Dimley takes them. He turns them over and scrapes his rough thumbs across her palms and along the length of her fingers and then, with a sharp, hard jolt that takes her unawares, shoves his knuckles in the tender space where her fingers join without once taking his eyes from hers. She gives a sharp inhale but keeps her hands in his. They are hot and fleshy, like raw meat.

  ‘Too soft,’ he says. ‘Useless. Never done a proper day’s in her life.’

  ‘She’s finished her schooling so she’ll be quick and clean.’

  ‘No use in the world for a girl with schooling. You’ve done her no favours there.’

  ‘That might be so for most girls but not Rachel. She’s a good worker, Mr Dimley,’ her father says. ‘Does what she’s told.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Dimley says. ‘I can always use a girl who does what she’s told. Turn.’

  She spins in a slow circle.

  ‘She’s tall for fifteen, mind,’ he says.

  ‘Mr Dimley,’ her father says. ‘Her mother’s on a grown woman’s wage. Rachel is eighteen, near enough.’

  ‘Shame. I need a fifteen-year-old to hold your wife’s place. Otherwise it’s the next woman on my list. Let’s ask your girlie, shall we? How old are you, Rachel?’

  Rachel looks at her father. ‘Fifteen, sir.’

  ‘Schooling’s good for something, then. Annie!’ Mr Dimley calls to a younger girl with a scarf covering her head. She’s flushed from darting between the machines, skirts bunched in one hand and an empty bobbin in the other. She comes toward them.

  ‘Take young Rachel and show her your work. Look sharp.’

  Annie jerks her head. ‘Come on then,’ she says.

  Mary does not come back to the mill the next day. She can’t take a dozen gasping steps without the world spinning. The frame of her ribs shudders and compresses with each breath, so every morning Rachel joins the girls walking to the mill with their hair in nets and their aprons in cloth bags. Silk is soft as the inside of a cheek and strong as wire. Rachel starts as a bobbin carrier working twelve-hour shifts and a half day on Saturday, zipping between the machines. Fibres become strands and strands become yarns and yarns are rolled into skeins and skeins are cleaned and dried again and shipped to be dyed, then shipped again to be woven into stockings and fabric. The weather turns colder every day. At ho
me, she falls asleep as soon as she’s eaten, after she’s soaked her feet in a bucket of water.

  ‘You’re not speaking to those common girls at the mill, are you?’ Mary says to Rachel one night at supper, in her slow, heaving way. ‘Just turn your head if they speak to you. They’ll soon learn.’

  ‘If she carried on like that she’d last two minutes,’ her father says.

  ‘We’re not really factory people.’

  ‘We’re factory people now,’ Walter says.

  Mary reaches over to flatten the curl in Rachel’s collar. ‘Your father’s people owned land in this valley. You keep yourself nice, better things will come.’

  Walter stands, an eruption of force, and his chair tips over to the floor behind him. Snorts once through his nose. Picks up his plate scraped clean and hurls it at the wall.

  George yelps. The plate has broken into three. The divot and crumbled plaster fall like snow.

  ‘That’s what we are now,’ he says. ‘Factory people. One more word, Mary. One more, so help me.’

  He collects his coat and is out the door.

  In the factory, Rachel sees her father anew. On the farm he was up with the sun, alone with the corn, planting or tending or driving the tractor as it pulled the harvester. He barely saw his children before nodding in his supper soup. Now, as she runs between the rows delivering fresh bobbins, she sees him work the floor maintaining each machine. She sees him drop small parts and tools so a girl will bend to pick them up. The smiles that he and Mr Dimley share across the expanse of the floor as though the two of them speak a language the girls do not. At home he rarely strings more than a dozen words together but at the mill he chats to everyone, he tells jokes, he commands the workroom. To the new girls, her father is a one-man welcome wagon. You’re from Cleveland! Well I’ll be! My Uncle Frank’s from Cleveland! I’ve spent lots of time there, what a town. I bet you were the prettiest girl there.

  After the first week, he no longer walks home with her. Longer hours mean more money, he tells her. Get along with you. One night, on an errand to a friend of her mother’s in town to pick up a tonic, Rachel passes a tavern and, through the window, sees her father at the bar, arms wide, mid-story. Mr Dimley beside him, roaring with his head thrown back. She walks home alone with the little bottle clutched in her cold fist.