The Fragments

by Toni Jordan

  ‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Try to believe me: I’m doing you a favour. Inga Karlson. She’s charming. The wonderful novel, the tragedy of her story. She has this seductive pull. She sucks you in.’

  ‘Yes.’ Caddie thinks: Jamie Ganivet understands.

  But he continues. ‘It’s easy, when you’re young and smart, to spend years falling into the life of another person, a dead person. You need to walk away now and live your own life. If you don’t, Inga Karlson will take over and before you know it, years will be gone and you’ll never get them back. Now excuse me.’

  She says nothing and he turns and she is alone in the lecture theatre. Just Caddie and the rows of empty chairs.

  For the next few days, it’s hard to concentrate. She works as best she can, fielding the usual questions. I’m looking for a book, you know the one, it’s yellow and Why do authors use such bad language these days; can you guarantee there are no four-letter words in this? and Have you got Fit for Life, my friend Debbie lost seven pounds.

  A few of the casuals invite her to the Gold Coast for the weekend: the new casino has opened, just like Las Vegas. They want to see dancing girls sausaged into diamante body-stockings and balancing feather headdresses; they want to stand at the roulette wheel and put the rent on their birthday and watch it spin. Caddie’s never been a punter. She declines, and all the while Rachel is a pebble in her shoe. Jamie Ganivet also, the way he delivered his bad news with his soft eyes.

  On Wednesday after dinner, while Terese and Pretty study, she lies on her stomach on the couch and watches Cheers and Moonlighting and realises, when the credits roll, that she has no idea why Maddie was so mad at David and everyone was so mad at Sam.

  Thursday night her dirty clothes are washed and hung under the house to dry.

  Forget it, she tells herself.

  Ganivet Rare Books is an antiquarian dealer and auction house in an old printer’s warehouse near the pancake place with the giant chess set. Sometimes on school holidays Caddie’s father would take her there for a short stack and they would play. She remembers the huge pawns and knights, almost as big as she was.

  On the way to work on Friday she pays special attention to the window displays on Adelaide Street, noticing the angle of every dead-eyed mannequin. At the shop she brings out the plastic tackle box they use for tape measures and scissors and staplers and double-sided tape and, her favourite, the hot glue gun. A cookbook display, she thinks. Ice creams and salads and microwave cooking because it’s too hot to switch the oven on. She finds posters and streamers. She cuts snowflakes from pastel sheets of cardboard and uses cotton balls to look like drifts. It’s passable, she supposes. She’s never seen snow.

  She’s up and down the ladder in the window between rushes of customers and deliveries for most of the day. Christine is pleased.

  At 4 p.m. Caddie finds herself standing out the front of Ganivet Rare Books.

  6

  Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1938

  In some ways the mill isn’t so different from school. Arrive early, do your best, keep your head down. Some of the girls started at fourteen and are already weavers or quillers. They are hardy girls used to cold winters, the daughters of miners. Girls who contribute much to their family’s keep but will be girls until they marry. If they marry. In the mill, there are girls in their sixties. Men cannot do this work: slender fingers coaxing the slightest of knots in the finest of gossamer threads.

  ‘Working in a factory,’ Mary says from her chair as Rachel rushes to make dinner. ‘My mother would be turning in her grave. My aunt, I’ll never be able to tell her.’

  ‘It’s good for girls. Keeps them busy. Stops them turning into harlots,’ her father says. ‘Course, it’s too late for some.’

  The some he speaks of work the machines at the back. Ruth, Helen, Lidia. Others that come and go. They call to the fixers as they pass, they laugh among themselves. The bottoms of their petticoats show below their skirts. Some days, when the weather isn’t too bitter, they eat their lunch in the small courtyard between the factory’s wings: standing, because Mr Dimley disapproves of sitting on their breaks. It encourages idleness. So they lean against the cold brick with their lunch baskets in one hand and chat as best they can above the machines clanking on the other side of the wall.

  ‘Yoo-hoo. Come stand with us,’ says Helen, during Rachel’s second week, when she’s standing on the other side of the courtyard with Annie. Annie shoots out a hand to grab her forearm. Rachel feels Annie’s hot palm first and wonders at it, before she realises Helen’s call is directed at her. Annie shakes her head, a tiny movement.

  ‘Come on then, Miss Nose-in-a-book,’ says Ruth. ‘Don’t listen to bug-eyed Betty there, it’s none of her beeswax. We don’t bite.’

  There is nothing for it. Rachel moves toward the other girls. Annie watches her go, arms folded.

  ‘Isn’t this nice? All friends together,’ says Ruth.

  ‘Mr Lehrer is your father, can that be right?’ Helen says to Rachel.

  Rachel nods.

  ‘We never seen you at the dance hall,’ says Lidia. ‘Too much of a prude to dance, are you?’

  ‘If you want a boy to ask you, you’ll need to be more encouraging,’ says Ruth. ‘You don’t even smile at them right. You tilt your chin down, see? And give them something from your lunch pail to show what a good little cook you are.’

  ‘A sweet thing. A piece of pie, not a tunafish popover,’ says Lidia.

  ‘Let the kid alone,’ says Helen. ‘The boys around here, who’d bother?’

  ‘I don’t know how to dance,’ says Rachel.

  ‘You need a man to teach you,’ Ruth says. ‘A grown man.’

  ‘A grown man can teach you other things besides,’ says Helen. She puts one arm out in front, around the neck of an invisible dance partner, and rests the other where his hand would be and sways, before breaking into a one-girl Lindy Hop.

  They dissolve in giggles, all except for Rachel. Rachel can’t take her eyes from Helen, the way her body moves. She’s like a snake. It’s wrong even to look at Helen dance that way, she’s sure of it. These girls are three or four years older at most but they seem another type altogether: accustomed to hard work and not surprised that they’re the ones to do it. Turning their meagre wages over to mothers with big broods of baby siblings and carrying the water to wash their fathers’ clothes.

  Ruth slaps her knee and looks sideways at Helen, a pantomime of disapproval underlaid with admiration.

  ‘What?’ says Helen. She lifts her skirt to the level of her knees before dropping it again. ‘Bad enough that life’s short. Shouldn’t have to be dull too.’

  These girls are common, Rachel knows, and for the first time she thinks that might have some things to recommend it. On her long walk home she imagines dance-hall music, the swishing of skirts, those warm girls laughing with their arms around each other, and her among them.

  The next morning, she’s packing her lunch basket and her father’s pail when he emerges from the yard, straightening his shirt. She almost doesn’t recognise him. His hair is black with brilliantine, slicked. She’s failed to notice he’s grown a thin and debonair moustache, like Clark Gable’s. It’s as if he’d never spent month after endless month tending corn. If he wasn’t her father, he could be a movie star.

  Inside, her mother is sitting at the table. George has already left for school; he meets with a herd of boys from down the street, no doubt for mischief, on the way.

  ‘What in heaven’s name do you call that?’ Mary says when she sees her husband.

  The silence is thick like bread on Rachel’s tongue. Her father’s head pivots. The turning of a mighty ship.

  ‘Who is it you’re speaking to? Is it me?’ her father says.

  ‘Is there anyone else here?’ Mary says.

  Rachel. Rachel is also here, but she knows what her mother means. She feels like a ghost in this house, like a cloud of gas you could walk right through. Her hand could not grasp her fa
ther by the arm or cup itself tight over her mother’s mouth even if she tried.

  Her father puts one foot on the seat of a chair as though he’s never in his life been told not to do that, and he polishes the top of his shoe with his sleeve. Looks at it this way and that. Spits and shines it again. ‘I thought perhaps you were speaking to the furniture, that tone,’ he says. ‘Not to the man who puts food on your table.’

  ‘There’d be more food if you spent less on making yourself ridiculous,’ Mary says.

  Rachel is near the window on the other side of the world and she watches her father stand upright. His gleaming foot lifts from the chair and rests on the floor, without a sound. She wants to stop things now. She wants to press on the clock hands with her fingers because there is only one way this is headed and she’s amazed her mother can’t see it. She needs to say something, smash something, puncture the air but she’s only a spirit herself.

  Her father raises his right arm across his body in a gentle arc until his hand is above his head and there it pauses, a pendulum at the top of its swing. Nothing will change the coming of the weather, there is nothing to say. His arm swoops down and his body pivots and the gliding hand connects with the side of her mother’s face in a slap Rachel feels in her stomach. The arm continues its swing with smooth grace and her mother is lifted from the chair, which falls on its side. She hits the wall—thud—and there she slumps.

  Everything is still. Rachel cannot move for trying. It takes some time but even as Mary holds one hand over her mouth, dark blood begins to seep between her fingers. Her father walks over to where her mother lies. He squats beside her and observes, head cocked to one side. She gives a small gurgle.

  ‘Look what you made me do,’ he says, soft in her ear.

  Mary rolls to her hands and knees, then he stands again and kicks her in the stomach, the sound of a heavy rug thumped with a rattan beater. She drops.

  ‘Respect, Mary,’ he says. ‘It’s not too much to ask. And do something with your hair. Sticking up like that. You look like a coloured woman.’

  Mary’s rolled up in a ball now, tight and groaning. She coughs and a white sliver of tooth tumbles into the pool of blackish red.

  ‘As for you,’ her father says, and Rachel is surprised that he knows she’s there. She raises her hand and turns it, front and back. It’s true, she is visible. Or perhaps he can hear the thudding of her heart.

  ‘If you’re late to your shift don’t expect me to save you,’ he says. ‘And don’t be slow today. A one-legged girl could move faster than you.’

  He picks up his pail and he leaves. Rachel sits up most of that night and the next, listening for his key. He doesn’t come home for two days.

  7

  Brisbane, Queensland, 1986

  Caddie pushes open the heavy door of Ganivet Rare Books. In front of her is a narrow foyer with cracked leather couches in a U-shape and glass display cases scattered like pillars. Behind them is a trestle table fronted by half-a-dozen plastic garden chairs on which men are sitting: middle-aged men with beards and with glasses; one with a walking stick leaning against his thigh. She’s amazed. At the bookstore where she works, women customers outnumber men ten to one.

  The men are looking down at books open in front of them. They turn pages and run their fingers along the lines and make notes in small pads and not one pays any attention to the opening of the door or to Caddie. She is invisible: a spectre.

  On the other side of the table are shelves of books and three young people, student types, replacing and finding leather-clad volumes and laying them in front of the perusing men in a hushed ballet of stretching and bending. Further back, the room expands into a wider space: more plastic chairs arranged in rows in front of a rostrum; walls lined with overflowing bookshelves.

  She hovers, clutching her handbag. No one approaches. No one says anything, so she stands in front of a glass case, trying to appear absorbed. She sees a 1984, author and title in white cursive script on a rust-coloured dust jacket; two volumes of The Ingenious Nobleman Mister Quixote of La Mancha, an English translation, in dark green leather with with the title in gilt; and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, the Chapman and Hall edition with 7/6 Net printed on the spine of the dust jacket. All arranged on perspex stands behind glass: exhibited as decoration.

  Caddie thinks of the men and women who used to own them. She wonders who they are, these people, unaware their possessions are here abutting the books of people they’ve never met, linking them with strangers. There’s something heartbreaking about secondhand bookstores. All those stories, bought because they were once wanted and then discarded like rubbish or hocked for cash.

  A voice behind her asks if she’d like a catalogue.

  She turns. It’s him, Jamie Ganivet, in a white business shirt and grey suit trousers. He looks like he’s slept in them.

  ‘Hi again.’ She raises her palm.

  The door jangles opens and they both turn. The man who enters is fifty-something, grizzled and bearded with motorcycle leathers and huge hands, and a black helmet under one arm. He looks as though he eats his meat off the bone, Flintstone-style.

  ‘Ganivet,’ he says, as he passes. ‘Has that Akhmatova come in?’

  ‘Any day now, Simon. I’ll call you.’

  Simon strolls towards the back, swinging his helmet like a bowling ball.

  Caddie is expert at finding pleasure in small things that belong only to her. Even in the bookshop, none of the casuals would have read Akhmatova. Only one or two would have recognised the name. She smiles. She sees that Jamie Ganivet is also smiling.

  ‘Mad Max, beyond thunder poem,’ she says.

  ‘Conan the librarian,’ he says.

  Something crackles between them and is gone.

  ‘Caddie, is it? I told you already, I can’t help you.’

  ‘This is a bookshop. I want to buy a book. How much is that one?’ She points to the Cervantes.

  ‘It’s four thousand five hundred dollars. Will that be cheque or card?’

  She picks at the plastic strap of her bag. ‘What’s the point of books like that anyway? You can’t read them. It’s like they’re in prison.’ She taps her fingernail on the glass, as if to get the books’ attention.

  ‘I prefer to think of it as a zoo, preserving endangered species for the benefit of future generations. Look, I’m flat out. I work for a living. I’m not an academic, I’m a bookseller.’

  ‘You’re not a bookseller,’ she says. ‘I’m a bookseller. Booksellers are professional reading consultants who sell books that normal people can afford to people who want to read them.’

  He reaches into his trouser pocket and pulls out a collection of keys, on a ring. ‘Hold out your hands,’ he says.

  She blinks, but does as he says. He takes a step to the glass cabinet, unlocks it and takes out one volume of the Cervantes. Rests it in her hands.

  The weight of it surprises her. ‘Don’t I need gloves?’

  ‘You can’t feel it through gloves,’ he says. ‘This was printed in 1742. It has engraved plates, see here…’ He opens it with only the tips of his fingers, to show her. ‘This isn’t just a story. This is…a way to understand the world, passed down from person to person, and changing each one on the way. It’s the smell, the touch. Books are art that talks to us.’

  This glorious thing, heavy in her hands. Cadence Walker, the last link in a chain spanning centuries. She sees that space and time are not always linear but are sometimes folded into pleats. She imagines all the people who’ve held this book. Everyone walking in the footsteps of others.

  She holds it out towards him. He tucks it back in its case.

  ‘Inga Karlson,’ she says. ‘Please.’

  He says nothing.

  ‘Look. I have to know. I won’t stop until I know.’

  ‘Is this for a thesis? Some kind of work?’

  No, she says. She tells him again. She spoke to a woman outside an art gallery. That’s all. She can’t remembe
r the last time she’s felt so ridiculous, or when she’s felt this excited about anything, about a possibility. She thinks of her workmates, packing for their trip to the casino. Perhaps she is a punter after all. Chasing the long odds, the million-to-one.

  ‘I’m not normally like this,’ she says.

  He’s quiet again. He opens his mouth and closes it. Then he says, ‘I’ve had offers for that Cervantes. I’ve never sold it. It was the first book I bought when I took over the business. It was my favourite novel as a teenager—not that edition, obviously. I love that mad old bastard,’ he says. ‘Wait here.’

  He disappears into a small office and comes back with a wallet in his hand.

  ‘Marika, I’m grabbing a tea,’ he says, to one of the young people filing books. ‘Won’t be long.’

  In the pancake place a few doors up they sit in a gloomy booth in front of the chess set. There’s not much light from the tall stained-glass windows but she can see that several pieces are worn and the edges of one black knight are chipped. She remembers her little hands, post–short stack, leaving butter smudges on the narrow waists of the pawns when she rocked them to pivot forward. She was terrible at chess. Seeing half-a-dozen moves into the future? Weighing up possibilities before acting? It’s not her.

  The ponytailed waitress knows Jamie drinks English Breakfast. Caddie orders one too, though the woman doesn’t look at her. The building was once a cathedral and the ceilings are dark timber and high and raked. It’s cool in here, a kind of crypt. There’s a full-size suit of armour guarding the hall to the toilets. Caddie has no idea why.

  Jamie rests his elbows on the table and joins his fingertips together. Tilts to look at her over his glasses. ‘Convince me,’ he says.

  She takes her notebook from her bag, opens it to the page where she transcribed the line and slides it across the table.

  He reads it and shrugs. ‘That doesn’t prove anything. Anyone who’s studied Inga’s style could have written that line. Even if she’s the right age—what sort of accent did this woman have? Just say, by some miracle, she’s read the manuscript. What on earth is she doing here?’