The Fragments

by Toni Jordan

  Caddie feels her heart thump. ‘Here,’ she says to Jamie.

  He stands behind her, reads over her shoulder.

  ‘A weird coincidence, so soon after the fire,’ she says, but that’s not what she believes. Her pulse is telling her something else. She feels an urge to downplay it because if anyone is going to point out that this article has nothing to do with their search—the word ‘typesetter’ only, and the date—she’d rather it was her.

  Jamie rubs his hand along his jaw. ‘Perhaps. Coincidences do happen. Surely there were plenty of stabbings in New York back then, and plenty of typesetters. Except. That name. Fischer. I’ve heard it before.’

  12

  Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1938

  The walls are inches from her now: the house has shrunk to the size of a matchbox. After the door slams she hears his footsteps approaching and she thinks of the silkworms that make the thread that clacks on the looms. Every worker in every mill, their families, the shops in town, the movie theatre—everything rests on the filaments of their labour, and they themselves resting snug in their cocoons. They know of no other world until the instant they are plunged into the boiling vat.

  He is before her, rolling up his sleeves. He takes up more space in this house than the three of them together. She knows him. Part of her comes from him. There is greying stubble on his cheeks and a red, raised, two-inch scratch that runs from the side of his throat to the base. She has never seen that shirt or jacket before. He has a pocket square, of all things, too large and too violet. The smell of cigarettes hangs off him. When she was learning to walk, back on the farm, she’d toddle toward him. How could that have been possible? ‘Lock me out of my own home,’ he says. ‘That’s the welcome I get?’ He makes and remakes his fists and she sees the blue veins lift on his arms. George is nowhere to be seen.

  Her mother is standing behind Walter with her arms folded. ‘I’m surprised at you, Rachel,’ she says. ‘Honour your father and mother, the commandment says. There is no sin greater.’

  Rachel knows she is solid by the shivering of her flesh. The first swing knocks her to the floor.

  In that turning mix of dark and light, her skin opens up to become her new world. Every part of her body is connected by a web of paths previously unimagined: her little finger and her hipbone, the inside of her knee and her clavicle. This world is cold and hot, radiating, stabbing. Did she ever feel invisible? Ethereal, like mist? She cannot recall it. She is alive, she is an animal. She is earth and clay and blood. She is conscious of her cheekbone, the space above her belly button, her shin. She tastes iron and she smells it. She is newborn, slicked and writhing. Time passes.

  She raises herself to her elbow to vomit and her mother is there to catch it in a basin.

  ‘A week or two, trust me,’ she says. ‘The ribs, maybe a little longer. If your water’s still pink by Friday we’ll get the doctor, but it won’t be.’

  Rachel lies back down but there’s nothing in the world soft enough. It’s as if sharp stones in the middle of her are grinding against each other. One eye won’t open but with the other she sees Mary dip a cloth in cool water. She wipes Rachel’s brow, her arms and the top of her chest, then swishes the cloth in a jug and wrings the pink away.

  ‘That storm was coming and it was either you or it would have been me and your brother too and that’s the facts of it. One is better than three. Otherwise who would look after us?’ The joints in Rachel’s wrists click and sigh. Every breath is the scraping of a thin shale across river sand. There is language here. Her body is speaking to her and she could hear it if only the wailing would stop. That infernal moaning, like a torrent through a cutting.

  ‘Quiet now,’ her mother says. ‘It’s over, no need for all that fuss and carry-on. They don’t like it brought to mind after it’s over. Men, I mean. They calm down at the end of it, it takes the sting right out of them. That’s something you’ll learn. Anything you want, you ask for afterwards while it still shows.’

  There is an answer to this somewhere but there is no space in Rachel’s mouth to form it.

  ‘Best stay inside for a week or so. Do it right and no one’ll ever know. Even people under the same roof don’t always know. A woman’s life is pain, that’s all there is to it. Pain and blood. When I had you I thought I’d die from the pain. I imagine my mother thought the same thing, and her mother. You’ll think it as well when it’s your turn.’

  Soon the ceiling blurs and Rachel sleeps and wakes and sleeps again in a strange world of scarlet and rose and magenta and shade and light swirling together and the whispering of her bones lulling her to sleep. What is her body saying to her? She focuses, she listens as best she can. It’s a murmur, a hush. She tosses and turns and every movement sends new sparks through her. There is a message here, if only she could understand it.

  When she wakes again, she is lying in bed with the sun lancing across her. The house is quiet. She places her hand in the middle of her chest and feels it rise and fall despite the pain. She is here. She has always been here.

  She staggers to her feet. Her limbs don’t fit together right but there’s a pleasing kind of agony when she moves. She checks the bedroom, the street through the window. George must be at school, but her parents? Who knows.

  She uses the pot under the bed and sees that her mother was right: there is no longer any trace of pink in her water and her stream is strong and fast. Later, on the way to the outhouse to empty it, she feels the blue sky pressing on her skin, every breeze, every ray of sun. On the fence a robin tilts its head and looks straight at her. It seems she’s missed more than a day. Summer is upon them. She has never felt the earth so solid beneath her feet before.

  She drags a chair from the kitchen to the bedroom wardrobe by taking a few steps at a time then resting. She worries her knee will give way but she stands on the chair to reach the suitcases they brought from the farm all those years ago. She empties her drawer into the best one. Tunics, smalls, stockings. Her coat, folded. The first book she ever owned, The Magical Land of Noom, and two others she picked up from street stalls: Goodbye, Mr Chips and All Has an End. A lace tablecloth that was the beginning of her hope chest. Her best hat—red wool—from the hook behind the bedroom door and her Sunday dress—cotton—from its hanger. All those months gentling fibres of silk into being and she doesn’t own a thread of it.

  She pulls, too early, a spindly ghost hand of orange carrots from the windowsill and wraps them in an apron and they go into the case as well: dirt, feathery tops and all. She takes the money in the handkerchief in the flour canister and rips out the page of her mother’s notebook with Aunt Vera’s address in New York City. Rachel has a body now, she does not intend to waste it. She leaves the chair in the bedroom and her key on the dresser where her father left his those weeks ago.

  13

  Brisbane, Queensland, 1986

  Her bike is in the back of Jamie’s car with the front wheel removed—he is amazed that she doesn’t own a car. Brisbane is a hilly city. His car is a daggy white Holden that once belonged to a sales rep. It has a few dings but the inside is tidy. Before setting off, they opened all the doors and ran the aircon for a couple of minutes but the steering wheel, she knows, must still be blistering. His radio is on; he turns it down. Jamie drives in silence, one hand on the wheel.

  ‘You live in Bulimba,’ she says, as they get closer. It is the other side of the city from Auchenflower.

  ‘Born and raised.’

  Bulimba is tucked in a curve of the river, hilly and laced with small creeks like veins, most of which have been built over. It is close to Morningside, where she was born, where she lived with her father. Morningside was like a small town inside a small town and she knew every inch of it. Her father told her stories of the people: the Jensens and the McKenzies, and the Lees who lived in the big house on Wynnum Road, and the famous Holland boys who swam in the quarry when it flooded and trained by towing half-full four-gallon kero tins behind them. The Rossiter
s who owned the tannery and the Whites who lost their youngest when he tightened a belt around his neck while playing at being a puppy and that boy who melted three toes clean off playing on hot tar when he was a toddler. Even now, she doesn’t know how many of her father’s stories were true. Packing up and moving across the river to Auchenflower when her father died was her great act of separation, as significant in her small world as moving to New York or London.

  They drive into Bulimba and the mid-afternoon light is coming in, low and sparkling. It carries chirping cicadas with it. The air has cooled to the temperature of blood. They pull up in a sloping street.

  ‘Wow,’ she says.

  Queenslanders are usually simple worker’s cottages on sixteen perches, wobbling on their stilts with a choko vine growing on the outdoor dunny next to the concrete path that leads to the incinerator. Jamie’s house, though, is three times wider than a normal block with verandahs that wrap all the way around and front stairs that descend to a landing and butterfly left and right to the ground. She’s lived in this town her whole life and never met anyone who lived in a house like this.

  He opens the door and looks at the keys in his hand. His eyelashes flutter. ‘Like many things,’ he says, ‘it’s a disappointment when you look a bit closer.’

  When she unpeels herself from the vinyl seat and steps out, she sees the garden at the front is dense and dark, studded with gums, dangerous with oleander, spattered with sprinkles of light filtered through monstera leaves the size of umbrellas. As they walk the narrow path from the street, strange pods crunch underfoot. In one corner is a broad stand of bananas with a single immature green hand and a hanging purple flower, and in the other is a huge mango tree: a Bowen, not a stringy. Every second house has trees like this but they belong in the back garden, not the front, which should be the preserve of roses and hibiscus. Perhaps a frangipani on one side.

  This house is backwards, she thinks. It cheers her. She loves mango trees: the smell of the bark and the small hard bubbles of sap that form like jewels on the limbs. The memory of childish suspension, hanging from branches with waterfall hair. As they near the house on the concrete path, things with hooks catch Caddie’s clothes, lattice webs cling to her like caul. She stops and tries to untangle herself. Jamie stops also, and turns.

  ‘Sorry.’ He moves his hand to touch her hair, hesitates in mid-air before pinching out something she cannot see. ‘Good intentions, but it gets away from me. I like it this way, I guess. It’s a garden that doesn’t let anyone tell it what to do.’

  From the road, the house appeared to float on a cushion of green with its windows glinting. Now she can see that the stumps are wedged with odd bits of timber and the paint is flaking, brittle as parchment. The front steps have no rails.

  ‘Careful,’ he says, as he climbs the stairs, jangling his keys. He takes a large stride over a tread that looks splintered and moist. ‘That one’s a bit iffy. Here.’

  He holds out his hand. ‘Big step,’ he says.

  His hand is warm and dry. She feels giddy, as though she’s about to enter some other world.

  ‘OK?’ he says.

  She holds his hand tighter and steps where he steps. At the top, she turns and looks down towards the river. She’d forgotten that the south side smells different: the noxious pet food factory and the bacon factory and the rendering plant and the fertiliser works, the mangroves and their mud and, when the wind is from the east, as it is now, the faintest hint of decaying fish washed up on Colmslie Reach.

  The front door opens into a long dark hall with closed doors leading off it. The pine boards are polished but there is no hall stand, no paintings or rugs. He flicks a switch that lights a naked bulb. Halfway down, the space opens up on the right but the house is almost empty except for lumps of furniture under old sheets. There’s a ladder against one wall and tins of paint on the floor. The cottage arch above their heads has been stripped back to pine and so has the one that divides the two rooms. It’s stuffy—paint and solvents and windows closed tight on this hot afternoon.

  The kitchen is half-finished and cupboards, empty boxes really, are part-installed without the benchtops. The drawers are in a concertinaed pile in the corner. There’s a microwave oven on a wooden stool in the other corner and on top of it, a torch. There’ll be another torch in the bedroom, she knows without looking, and one in the bathroom. Everyone knows that the power could go out at any time.

  ‘Maid’s day off,’ Jamie says. He opens all the windows along the back, which overlooks another verandah. As she comes closer, she sees the glass is dimpled and thicker at the bottom than the top.

  She sees faint horizontal lines on one of the doorjambs: alternating faded scribble near them that would be easy to miss if there was anything else to look at. Old height markers, for two growing children. ‘All these original features. You’re keeping them?’

  He nods. ‘It’s masochistic. By the time it’s finished, I’ll be too old to climb the stairs.’

  She runs her finger over the bumps and ridges of the pane and thinks of the generations of people who’ve done just that before her. ‘This bubbly glass.’

  ‘I grew up here,’ he says. ‘When I was little I used to look through the glass, then through the open window, back and forth. The world looked weird. People on the street seemed sturdier and broader in the legs. It always made me think other people stood more securely on the earth than we did.’

  ‘Your family home,’ she says. ‘You must love it, to have stayed.’

  ‘I didn’t stay. I went away, then I came back.’

  It’s an important distinction, she understands. Everyone loves Queensland, but very few have anything to compare it to.

  He heads across the hall and opens a door to a room crammed with furniture. ‘My filing cabinets are in here.’ He squeezes through a gap to reach the far corner, where he pulls off a sheet and reveals a four-drawer filing cabinet made from some dark hardwood. He opens the top drawer and rummages, then closes it and does the same at the bottom.

  ‘Eureka,’ he says at last. When he turns, he’s brandishing a tattered manila folder.

  The sheets have been removed from the dining table and from two unmatched chairs. Caddie and Jamie sit together, almost touching, the manila folder open in front of them. It’s had a hard life: the spine is reinforced with yellowing tape and the tab has been labelled and relabelled with different coloured markers. Caddie can make out Reviews, Karlson and 30s lit, general and Oz Lit, general.

  Manila folders cost what, a few cents? It’s so much easier to toss a used one and grab another. Philip’s study at home could be a newsagent’s, all of it nicked from the department’s stationery cupboard. Someone who reuses folders—especially if they own a house like this—is a particular kind of person.

  Inside the folder is a fat pile of letters: a mix of fine paper and coarse, of varying faded inky blues, alarming reds, disconcerting browns. Some are handwritten and others typed. Some are neat, margined, crisp; others are grubby and crumpled like they’ve been retrieved from the bin. They all have envelopes stapled to the top left-hand corner addressed with varying degrees of legibility and abbreviation: Dr James Ganivet, University of Queensland.

  ‘My fans. Ten years’ worth of correspondence. Here is where conspiracy theories go to die.’

  Jamie moves the stack closer and begins to leaf through it, turning each letter over to form a new pile as he scans down the page, focused and thorough. Caddie picks a few at random as he finishes with them.

  I NEED YOUR HELP! If the TRUE FACTS are brought to the attention of the AMERICAN PEOPLE, INGA CARSON will be revealed as the world’s most norotious PLAGIARIST!!! The true author of her books is JOHN STEINBECK who is an american HERO and he is the one who deserves the credit…

  I really hope this doesn’t sound like I’m some Elvis crazy but the truth is I know for a fact that Inga Karlson is alive. She used to come into our nursery all the time and buy plants and I got to know her over a n
umber of years…

  It is a little known fact that the Karlson books were really written by Louis Bromfield. I know this to be true because he was my grandmother’s cousin and we as children spent time at his house and he told me so himself and I saw his jornals, all of which contained the books as claimed. It was a pact. They did it together and it was the Marxists set the fire because she owed them money. I hereby offer you 50 per cent of the royalties if you write the book revealing the truth. I will provide all documents on receit of your check…

  ‘I know it’s here somewhere,’ Jamie says.

  A typed sheet, near the top, says:

  Are you working for our enemies? Inga Karlson was a Russian spy and COMMUNIST who was executed by the CIA as a threat to America. The Cold War will be won by us and then the proof will be revealed. Stop promoting the work of this traitor!

  Caddie feels faintly ill.

  ‘Ah,’ he says. ‘Here.’

  He takes a letter from the pile and places it on the table between them. It appears ordinary enough: normal A4 paper, unremarkable typing.

  September 17, 1981

  Dear Sir,

  My name is Martin Fischer and I am writing concerning my father Samuel. He was murdered on Sunday February 12, 1939, when I was eight years old.

  Time gets away from us all and I feel that I need to do my best for him as now I’m a grandfather myself and my grandkids are asking questions about who my pop was and what he did. He was a typesetter and the last job he did was for Charles Cleborn, it was Inga Karlson’s lost book. Don’t tell me he didn’t because I know he did. He worked on it, all night sometimes, and he’s been left out of history. It’s not right.

  Have you seen any reference to my father, Samuel Fischer, in any papers or documents relating to Inga Karlson? Any reference at all, to anyone named Samuel, or Sam, would give us all something to be proud of for a change, for the sake of my kids.