by Toni Jordan
Later that night she’s woken by her parents arguing in the kitchen. ‘I only know that woman to pass the time of day with,’ she hears her father say, ‘whatever you think you saw.’
5
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
Along the streets Caddie cycles on Monday morning on her way to River City Reader, the signs of change are obvious. Queensland’s ‘elected’ officials yearn for their town to become a grown-up city: taller, shinier. World-class. Buildings are vanishing, replaced by car parks and deep pits and phallic towers covered in reflecting glass. They make the city even hotter and Brisbanites soon learn to lower their eyes.
At the end of the seventies the Bellevue Hotel, which had stood for close to a hundred years, was bulldozed illegally by its owners, the Queensland Government, its exquisite iron lacework sold for scrap. Cloudland Dance Hall, where Buddy Holly and Johnny O’Keefe and Midnight Oil and The Saints all played, had a roof arch nearly eighteen metres high, lit by dozens of tiny lights, and was linked to the city by an open-air funicular. Four years ago a wrecking ball ripped through it at four o’clock in the morning.
Caddie arrives at the bookshop ten minutes before the doors are due to open and carries her bike through to its space under the back stairs. Her bag contains a thermos and an apple and her keys are on a string around her neck. She feels radioactive—pedalling fast along Milton Road seemed cooler in her mind than being wedged on the bus with the office workers, but now she regrets it. She takes a handful of misshapen ice cubes from the small office fridge, wraps them in a tea towel and holds it to her throat.
Before she turns on the lights and brings out the vacuum, she stands between the two ‘specials’ tables with her eyes closed, arms outstretched. Fiction runs along the wall on her right, biography and travel along her left. All these stories, real and imagined. If she could only read more, she thinks. Books are time travel and space travel and mood-altering drugs. They are mind-melds and telepathy and past-life regression. How people can stand here and not sense the magic in them—it’s inconceivable to her.
The front door slides open: Christine, arms loaded with parcels and juggling keys and a lunch box. She’s wearing a tweed skirt, which she does regardless of the weather, a T-shirt, a cotton cardigan and a look of benign exasperation. Caddie has never seen Christine outdoors yet she has a Queensland décolletage: distinct, jostling white and brown spots overlaid on angry red, like an aerial photo of a dry river system.
Christine sees Caddie, arms outstretched, palms raised. ‘You look like you’re about to conduct Beethoven’s fifth.’
‘I’m communing with nature,’ Caddie says to her. ‘Just a sec.’
Caddie has worked for Christine on and off since she was fifteen. Back then, Christine was over seventy. Now that Caddie is older, Christine is about fifty. She owns reading glasses in a variety of strengths and chooses them depending on the tiredness of her eyes. She eats Red Tulip After Dinner Mints straight from the box all day and leaves the empty crinkly pockets scattered over the floor of the shop to be crunched underfoot by the unsuspecting. When Caddie lost her father, Christine was businesslike and poker-faced and made everything better by not pitying her. When Caddie first knew her, she was convinced that Christine had read every book that had ever been printed in the English language, but now she’s wiser about things like that. Ninety per cent, tops.
Caddie drops her arms, communing over. Christine comes up behind her and tucks the label of her top inside her collar.
‘Well?’ Christine says. ‘The fragments. Did they live up to expectations?’
‘And then some.’
While she switches on the fluorescent lights and they blink and buzz, Caddie tells Christine about the encounter at the exhibition. It seems even madder this time.
‘Fancy that,’ Christine says. ‘Wouldn’t read about it.’
Christine perches on her stool behind the counter to serve the few early-morning customers: regulars picking up special orders, window-shoppers killing time before dentist appointments. Caddie suspects that no one unpacked Friday afternoon’s deliveries so she heads out the back to the storeroom and sure enough there they are, end on end in a corner, waiting. She doesn’t mind. She’s happy on her own, amid the boxes. There’s a sagging armchair and a sink, there are mugs right-side up, filled with tea-leaf speckled dishwater and spoons, and assorted tea towels of dubious provenance. There are piles of orders waiting to be checked off. She has a lot to think about.
By midday, she can’t stand it any longer.
‘Do you need me this arvo?’
‘You should have taken a long weekend. I’ll call Dan, he needs the extra hours.’ Christine’s hand is already on the phone.
‘Sure you don’t mind?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You spend more time here than me. I only wish you were heading off on a date. Can’t have everything, I guess.’
Caddie was burnt in love once, but that was long ago. Now she sometimes takes a half-hearted stab at dating, the occasional ritualised dinner with a friend of a well-meaning friend. Six months ago she soldiered through an excruciating one-night stand with a boy she knew from high school, clearer-skinned now, with better clothes, but the same bumptious boy. At not yet thirty, she can feel her life shrinking into the gentle sameness of her days and she knows she is pacing back and forth in a comfortable cage of her own construction. She needs someone to bump against, to disrupt things. She can’t go on like this, she knows. She must resolve the tension between longing and fear.
But not right now. Right now, she has something else to occupy her. Caddie grabs her bag. Outside, the sky is pale and high and she legs it up to QUT at the far end of the city, sticking to the shade where she can.
The library isn’t crowded. She’s good at this and soon, in the reference section, in the Concise Companion to American Literature, she finds what she’s looking for.
Karlson, Inga (Born 1910 Preitenegg, Austria; died 1939, New York City), American author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning All Has an End (1935) and the lost work The Days, the Minutes (1939). Karlson’s work explores themes of tolerance, injustice and equality. Her surviving novel tells the story of Cadence Wells, an American girl of Austrian parents, who must protect her father from his past as totalitarian forces gather in Europe. Some scholars believe that Karlson’s second lost novel was a sequel or even a prequel to her earlier work, on the basis of the letters ‘Ca—’ appearing in the much-studied remaining pages, or ‘fragments’. ‘The “Ca—” is clearly a reference to Cadence Wells,’ writes Professor Milo Halloran. (For an opposing perspective, see The Inventiveness Test: Redefining Inga Karlson’s Literary Legacy by Professor Maurry Klink.) The exact subject matter of The Days, the Minutes will likely never be known. In February 1939, following intense public interest and an attempted robbery of the plates of the novel, strict security was put in place. The only two people who had read the manuscript—Karlson herself and her publisher and editor, Charles Cleborn—perished in a tragic warehouse arson attack that destroyed all the finished copies of the novel, as well as the safe containing the printer’s plates. The police investigation was inconclusive, though the role of Cleborn himself remains the subject of conjecture. A separate branch of Karlson scholarship has arisen examining the cause of the fire. (See What Forensic Science Reveals about the Murder of Inga Karlson, by Virginia Kray, Betrayal: The Death of an American Legend, by Wallace Fillipi, and Mob Assassinations: How the FBI failed JFK and Inga Karlson by Skip Johanson, among others.)
This entry leads her to another, then another. They all say the same thing. There were two people who knew the contents of the novel. They both died. There was no one else.
It’s well after lunch when she remembers her apple. She heads out to the lockers and, when she reaches her hand into her bag, finds a piece of paper, folded and scrunched, stained with tomato from yesterday’s roll. It’s the flyer for tonight’s lecture on the life of Inga Karlson, to be given by the retired academic
Dr James Ganivet. The leading Australian expert on the life and work of Karlson will speak, it says, in a rare public event. If the woman, Rachel, really did know a line from the missing novel, he’s the one to ask about it.
Instead of cycling home later that afternoon, she rides to Dutton Park at twilight. She walks her bike down the creaking timber jetty and boards the ferry to Queensland University just as the black clouds of flying foxes arrive from their colony upstream at Indooroopilly Island. She’s the only passenger. There’s a breath of wind but the tide is strong and she hears the waves against the bow and sees the light glinting on the surface of the river. The river, the campus, the angle of the light. There is nowhere else like here in these lavender hours.
A million years ago she was a student here, while her father was alive. She remembers her exhilaration when she first saw the green acres of playing fields and the sandstone. The disciplined neatness made her happy. No other lawns were so pleasingly laid out or such a perfect green. In the whole world, no other shrubs had ever been so precisely clipped nor any fountains drilled so as to fall in such elegant sweeping arcs. In her class was a boy who looked Asian; she passed women in exotic headscarves in corridors. On Friday nights at the Rec Club she watched people her own age drink Bundy and Coke and laugh and talk as if born to it. She felt like she had a passport to a bigger world. Now the gardens seem tortured, each stunted plant the misshapen foot of an ancient Chinese maiden. This campus: it has a force field. She almost turns around and goes home.
Instead she finds the lecture room and chains her bike at the front. It’s full, but not with student types—semester doesn’t start for another week or so. She’s lucky to find a seat at the back near the door. The seating angles downwards towards the rostrum and the art gallery’s director of exhibits, Malcolm Kirby, is already there. He’s a jolly man, or he does a good impression of one. He talks about the fragments, the years of planning to bring them here, the insurance hurdles, the logistical nightmare, the sleepless night when they were in the air. The fragments had their own seat in business class, he says, though they made poor use of the complimentary champagne. All this effort—and there’s a touch of the shoulder-chipped genius, a disrespected Sinatra about to break into ‘My Way’—has been vindicated by the response. The queues, Kirby says, the queues and the press. At last, he introduces the retired expert. Bachelor majoring in English literature, honours thesis on ‘Romantic Pacifism: ethics, politics and tolerance in the novel of Inga Karlson’, master’s on ‘Moral Storytelling and its Role in Community: global implications of All Has an End’; PhD on ‘Imagined Heroes and the Danger of Projection: the nature of identity in the life and work of Inga Karlson’. He post-doc’d at Harvard, published widely. His loss to academia is the private sector’s gain. His name is Dr Jamie Ganivet.
It occurs to her now she’s heard the name before. Ganivet Rare Books on Charlotte Street.
Dr Ganivet climbs to the rostrum from his seat in the front row. His ‘retirement’, she realises, is from academia rather than the workforce: he’s not yet thirty-five, despite his too-long pepper-and-salt hair. It falls foppishly across his face. He’s a solid man, fleshy in his jeans and jowly in his open-necked shirt. The captain of the debating club gone to early seed. At the rostrum he takes off his glasses and cleans them on his untucked shirt before positioning them again. He moves his face too close to the microphone.
‘Um,’ he says. ‘Hello.’
Sharp feedback. Everyone winces.
‘Sorry. Is that better? Can everyone hear me?’
The audience is asleep, or dead. He uncurls a sheaf of papers and they slide from the rostrum to the floor. Everyone else is unmoving while he drops to his knees, collects them. Reorders, clears his throat, begins again.
‘Um. Inga Karlson,’ he reads, ‘is not much of a correspondent. Like Santa Claus and Juliet Capulet, she receives hundreds of letters every year and never replies.’
Caddie cringes for him but as he progresses, his delivery becomes more fluent and he seems to forget the audience, so involved does he become in telling Inga’s story. She remembers the rockstar professors from her university days, the clever, witty ones, with their dry remarks about academic rivals and theorists. Jamie Ganivet has none of this. His sincerity is almost painful. He loves Inga too, Caddie can sense it.
She already knows about Inga’s ancestors and parents and childhood, her home, her village. But soon he moves on to textual criticisms and points of literary theory, interwoven with trivia—the name of Inga’s childhood pet (a cat: Muschi); her early work (an attempt at acting in the pioneering talkie days and a screenplay, sold but not produced) and some rumoured past lovers (a renowned surgeon-to-the-stars; the silent matinee idol Conrad Nagel). He quotes from letters and diaries of literary intellectuals at the time, either rude, dismissive or lascivious on meeting Inga, and sexist in the discussion of her work.
The matter of her murder—this he skirts around. He’s not a detective, he says, and this is not his area of interest. There are many theories, most of them ridiculous and all of them unrelated to the legacy Karlson has left us. He never raises his eyes from his notes.
It’s more than she’d hoped for. His words are heavy with feeling. She could listen to him all night. There are, however, no hints towards a solution to her puzzle.
She’s startled by a rustle of applause. A few concluding remarks from Malcolm Kirby and the whole thing packs up. People leave in dribs and drabs, though a few approach Ganivet for short chats. Caddie waits until last. While he’s packing his papers into a leather satchel, she asks him if he has a moment.
He doesn’t look up. ‘A number, I expect,’ he says. ‘Though none of us can really know, can we?’ He folds his satchel closed and clicks the latches.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘I meant an actual moment, now.’
He looks up, eyebrows knitted. For the first time she can see his eyes: deep and clear, with lashes that could advertise mascara and rims that hint at kohl. Oh, my. How he would have been picked on at school by the footy boys.
‘Look, sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m not really—’
‘I’ll be quick. Is there any chance—’
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry to be blunt, but the fact is: no. There’s no chance.’
She has a sense of déja vu. The memory hits her with full force: here in this very lecture theatre, asking the wrong questions to the disdain of the professor and titters from the other students. The expression on her lecturer’s face, a kind of petulant withholding. He had knowledge, she lacked it. A different expression from the old woman’s yesterday, outside the gallery, but the same effect.
‘You don’t know what I’m asking. It’s important.’
‘Let me guess,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘Inga Karlson changed your life. She opened your heart, you receive messages from the great beyond, she’s a real presence to you. Or you’re researching a book. Or a short film. Perhaps you’ve already sold your proposal and now you’re on deadline. You think Inga is the way to make your fortune, or at least your fame, because you’ve been in love with her since you were a child.’
She feels her face bloom. ‘Wow, incredible. Not just knowing my question before I ask it, but the uncanny prediction that you won’t be able to answer it. You should be on the stage.’
‘Well, yes. I am on the stage. Literally.’ He looks at his watch, then walks to the edge of the platform and down the steps, Caddie following. The jolly Malcolm Kirby has been chatting to people also and is already halfway up the aisle. He turns, then he waves.
‘That was great, Jamie, great. Well done, stellar effort,’ he says. ‘We could repeat it next week at the exhibition itself. “Once more unto the breach”?’
‘“Or close the wall up with our English dead” is the next line, if you recall,’ Jamie says. ‘Once only, that was the deal. Now we’re even.’
‘Correctamundo. But if you change your mind, give me a tinkle, yes? Such a waste, you. The one that
got away. Catch up soon?’
Kirby jogs to the door. Jamie stares after him: a man who’s pelted for the last bus in the rain, to watch it pull away. They’re alone. He stops and turns. Caddie comes up to his shoulder—his build camouflages his height. He ducks his head through the strap of his satchel, takes off his glasses and wipes them on his shirt. Without them, his eyes seem even softer. She feels the hairs on her arm stand on end. She moves to block his path.
‘Look, sorry. You’ll have to excuse me, please.’ He steps around her.
‘My name is Caddie,’ she says, in a rush. ‘That’s actually my name.’
He turns. ‘That’s not your fault, unless you named yourself. But you’re not Cadence Wells. Cadence Wells is a character in a book.’
‘I met a woman who knows a missing line from the fragments. From page 200.’
He looks to the ceiling and reaches one hand to the back of his neck to rub the base of his hairline. ‘See, here’s the thing, Caddie. You can’t know if this woman knew a line or if she didn’t. No one can be sure, because no one knows what the missing lines are.’
A lost Christmas beetle bounces off the fluorescent light above them, once, twice.
‘It sounded perfect.’
‘What it sounds like is the kind of exercise they’d give in a creative writing class: take page 200 of the fragments and keep going until you have a short story. Your woman was probably a retired English teacher.’
‘No,’ she says.
‘No?’
‘That’s crap. I’ve read and re-read every line Karlson wrote. I can practically recite her first novel. Anyone who’s studied Inga, anyone who’s serious about comparative literature, would spot it as a Karlson sentence.’