by Kim Kelly
‘Well,’ Roz explained, ‘I had my camera with me that night, didn’t I. Jane was after images of male–female body language for this assignment thing we had to do, blah blah, and so I just happened to take a couple of happy snaps of Chubs in repose – with Rourkie pretending to take him clerically from behind, dick out, swinging it, the whole revolting show. You never know when these things will come in handy, do you? I’ll have some copies made up tomorrow.’ She winked, reaching for the teabag tin, as she added: ‘The revenge will be a pleasure shared, don’t you worry about that.’
Addy wanted to ask her to elaborate on what she meant, if that piece of garbage O’Rourke had hurt her as well, or anyone else, but Roz had moved on: ‘Anyway, when you get back tonight, let’s start making plans to get out of this dump, hm?’
‘Hm.’ Fricken oath.
‘Please don’t say anything to Harriet,’ Roz went on. ‘I’m sure she won’t want to come with us, I’m sure she’s making her own escape plan right now. I don’t want her to think I don’t love her, though, even if I don’t love her all the time – you know how it is.’
Addy nodded, thinking: Not exactly, but I’m not going to argue with your change of tune. No more Harriet! Yippee! Yahoo!
‘Besides, Kendall’s stereo is even better.’ Roz looked like the cat that ate the cream with chocolate topping. ‘Ah yes, in other news, I’ve been deciding maybe I’ll be wanting to shack up with Drummer Boy, maybe he’s a keeper.’
Addy tried not to look too shocked at this: that Roz wasn’t going to turf him after her five minutes of fun, per the usual routine, and that her eyes were sparkling all their shades of hazelly green with the truth of it.
‘He’s heard there’s a whole top floor of a warehouse coming up for rent, in Camperdown,’ she mused. ‘You know, one of those old factory buildings out the back of Newtown. It’s got a bodgied-up shower and a loo, couple of office boxes, and that’s about it, not even sure it’s got a stove – whatever, it’s so cheap it’d be virtually squatting. Big windows overlooking the city, space to paint. Space to be.’
‘Sounds rather excellent to me.’ Addy closed her eyes and made a wish for it, at the same time thanking whoever had cranked the wheel of fate to give her this friend. A writing window with a view high above the rooftops of Sydney: that’d do. And they could take No Name with them.
But Roz lowered her voice once more, as the kettle began to gather steam: ‘Whatever happens now, you have to know, when I got in last night, Dan was guarding the bottom of the stairs like a lion. He was pretty angry.’
‘Angry?’ Addy couldn’t quite imagine him angry, mild-mannered Dan.
‘Yeah. Seething, quietly, that way he does.’
Does he?
‘Hm. Not saying very much about his feelings for you, but saying everything in his actions.’ And Roz warned her once more then, too: ‘So don’t you break his heart. He’s a good guy, Add – such a good guy.’
‘I’m not going to break his heart,’ Addy promised with all of her own. Please, not if I can help it. She looked over her shoulder through the kitchen door, saw him leaning over his book, reading, or maybe pretending to; she called out to him, she called out with every promise: ‘How do you have your tea?’
‘Where am I going?’ Dan asked her, hands on the steering wheel of his beloved old Imp, his smile so mild Addy didn’t hear the question for the wonder of where or how anger might reside on such a good-guy face.
‘Pardon?’
‘Your brother’s house – where is it?’ he said, and they were so close she could smell that last gulp of tea on his breath: white with one sugar. She could still hear him saying, ‘We should probably go now,’ swigging that tea, pulling out his car keys. He was mesmerising. He had become so suddenly all her thoughts, she’d almost forgotten to call her dad on the way out, to warn him of the extra guest: ‘Who is this boy, Adrianna?’ he’d said; ‘Just a friend from uni, Dad,’ she’d replied; ‘Is he a good driv—’; ‘See you soon, Daddy – bye.’
And Dan wanted to know what? Where Nick lived, to pick him up. ‘Yes,’ she said, but she couldn’t think of the name of the street, could she; his house was right on the south-west, Erskineville edge of Newtown, about equidistant between the train stations of those two suburbs, and not far from the back end of a big pub; she knew exactly where it was; she knew it was number 104 – neither a prime nor a number she liked the look of, as she wasn’t much of a fan of any number that ended in four, because it always looked uncomfortably lonely, like someone standing interminably on one leg, leaning against a wall. ADDY! You fricken loon. Just answer him. Just tell him the truth. ‘I’ll have to give you directions,’ she said, at last. ‘His house is in Erskineville, but I can’t remember the name of the street.’
‘Okay.’ He smiled with those warm, kind eyes. Because everything was okay.
Except: ‘I’ve got to get a cake on the way, though, for Dad,’ she remembered. A surprise cake was always a mood improver; while it wouldn’t make her dad any less intimidatingly weird, it would go some way to making up for the surprise guest, throwing out his routine, mucking up the schedule. She knew the Olympia Café wouldn’t have anything apart from unnaturally firm vanilla slices and iced donuts sprinkled with hundreds and thousands, hangover food, but she couldn’t think of any alternative in the general King Street direction they’d be heading; she asked Dan: ‘Do you know anywhere that might do a nice cheesecake?’ And on a Sunday morning, it did seem a bit of a longshot.
‘Um …’ Dan thought about it for a moment, turning the key in the ignition; then he said, ‘Yeah,’ like he might have been enjoying the sound of the car engine, before he turned his smile back to her: ‘There’s a great café up past the supermarket that does cakes – all kinds. And their baklava is amazing – let’s get some of that for the road, hey?’
‘Okay,’ she replied, barely. How epically wonderful was this? She never went past the supermarket on King Street, not in the day. And she’d never fallen in love before, but how brave she was this day.
On they drove, through the Sunday-hushed streets, up to Newtown, where the shopping strip was more alive than she’d expected it to be: people going in and out of the bookshop and the record store; a girl in a tutu carrying a pizza box, skipping along still in party mode, probably still drunk; an old woman shuffling past in the opposite direction, past caring, irreparably smashed by the same cup and whatever bundle of tragedies she was carrying, so alone and —
And they’d just sailed past The Curiosity Shop, Addy realised. Was it open? She couldn’t see, they were too far past it now.
‘Dan.’ She almost grabbed his arm. ‘Can we go back? I just want to see if that shop is open – you know, The Curiosity Shop, with the zebra?’
‘The zebra?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder, slowing the car.
‘Yeah – where I saw you, Tuesday morning. The second-hand shop.’ Where I ran away from you.
‘Oh – sure.’ He tossed her a frown: ‘We’re getting on for time, though.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I won’t be long. I just want to see if it’s open – see the lady there, Frieda. I got this dress from her. I just want to say hello, show her I’m wearing it.’ Show you a bit more of what a freak I am to test your keenness while I’m there.
‘Okay.’ He turned the car around, a casual shrug over the no-U-turn lines; it was only a few doors down —
Only, it wasn’t there at all.
‘What?’
She stared from the car window. The shop they had pulled up outside was a second-hand place, but it wasn’t Frieda’s. It was open, the lights were on, bare bulbs illuminating a jumble of furniture: lounge suites, lamps, tables, chests of drawers, chairs hanging from the ceiling; there was a counter at the front displaying teacups and other crockery oddments, beyond that, a few racks of clothes, and at the very back, there was a wall of wardrobes, not a bookshelf in sight. She looked around the other way, across the road: yes, there was Ali’s felafel
shop. She looked up at the bricks above the awning of this whatever-it-was, and they were dark pink, plum-coloured, old: this was the right shop. And it wasn’t. She blinked and shook her head: ‘No.’
A cold, black dread swooped, silent, rushing.
‘What’s wrong, Addy?’ Dan asked her, his voice far too far away and far too close.
All she could say was: ‘I’m going mad. I really am.’
‘What do you mean?’ He leaned towards her, closer still, as he peered out with her, his face almost touching hers in the tiny car.
‘This was a different shop,’ she said, fixed on it and disbelieving. ‘There was a zebra in the window. A red curtain. A tiffany lamp. Gold lettering. And Frieda – didn’t you see her? On Tuesday? A lady, an old German lady with white hair.’
‘Maybe – I wasn’t really looking,’ he said, somewhere behind her ear, shifting, a sigh of seat-leather: ‘I don’t think I noticed anyone except you when I was in there.’
‘But how …’ She turned to him now, as much to assure herself that he was still there, still Dan Ackerman; she gripped the edge of her seat, clutching for sense. For nonsense. ‘I came here three times – on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. I bought a shirt. I bought a book. I put this dress on lay-by. I talked with Frieda – we talked for ages. She was friends with my grandmother – she gave me this dress. She told me what happened to my — oh!’ I made it all up in my broken head? I can’t believe that any more than — ‘How can she not be there?’
‘Maybe she was,’ Dan said, unflinchingly reasonable. ‘I mean, obviously she was, or you wouldn’t have seen her – and you wouldn’t have the dress, would you.’
‘But – no. How can that be?’ I can’t cope with myself anymore. You should drive me to the nearest hospital. This is the end.
‘Nothing we see is really here,’ he said, no less reasonably. ‘I mean, it is, and it isn’t.’
She stared at him: no idea.
He said: ‘No, I’m not stoned.’ Then he looked out the front windscreen at the slow Sunday traffic. ‘It’s just more fancy maths. Quantum physics – really. You can’t trust anything you see. And at the same time, you can trust everything.’
She could only keep staring: Go on.
‘Well, it’s complicated,’ he began, ‘and I’m not saying I understand it, but it’s the most amazing thing you’ll ever think about. It’s like something you can just see out of the corner of your eye, and when you try to look right at it, it’s gone. Blows my mind.’ He looked at her again, and he held her in his eyes, inside his own wonder: ‘The time we’re in now is only a slice of all time that’s ever happened or ever will happen – we can’t see beyond it either backwards or forwards. We’re sort of stuck, but all time is happening all the time around us, in every direction. In the quantum world, inside all our atoms – and every atom everywhere – the rules we think of as rules, like time and gravity and matter, don’t apply. Things can exist in different places at the same time, or not be where you expect them to be. We get a glimpse of it, we know time isn’t a straight line, that it doesn’t move at the same speed in every circumstance – that’s Einstein’s theory of relativity – the faster you move, the slower time goes, it’s relative to the speed of light, and at the speed of light, time stops altogether, and then beyond the speed of light, time starts travelling backwards. It’s nuts. In the quantum world, it’s even more nuts. And not nuts at all. We see all kinds of shit that’s there, and not there. I don’t know, Addy. Maybe you just needed to see that lady at that time. The window opened, and then it closed.’
A shiver of something like recognition shimmered up Addy’s spine, but still she quipped: ‘Maybe you read too much science fiction.’
‘Maybe,’ he laughed, ‘or maybe I am madder than you. The thing is, we don’t know. We’re almost completely made out of space – at a percentage of ninety-nine point nine, nine, nine repeating. Each one of us, we’re almost a hundred percent nothing. That’s not science fiction – that’s just a fact. We’re nothing, but we’re huge – we are space. And we’ll never know the end of truth – it isn’t a destination. It’s a ride. A magical ride, hey?’
God, she wanted to kiss him; she looked down at the flowers of her garden dress, and touched the falling poppies at her knees: Please. How she wanted to fall and fall for him, be mad with him. How she wanted to believe – everything.
‘Or maybe the old lady and the zebra just had to move in a hurry,’ he added with another light, anything-is-possible laugh. But that seemed somehow the least plausible of all to Addy. He glanced at the clock on the dash then: ‘We really should get going – if you want to get this cake.’
‘Yeah,’ she breathed out the word, wondering at the atoms she’d just sent whirling through the air: was Frieda Stevenson somehow, somewhere there?
She was still caught up in the conundrum two minutes later, running into this café she’d never seemed to have seen before either, even as she asked for the price of the sole but rather perfect cheesecake she saw there among the array of tortes and tarts, slices and pastries, trays of baklava and Turkish delight. Was this real? Was it just that Addy had been tearing about in such a distracted daze she could never quite tell where she was?
‘Eight dollars fifty, darling,’ the nice café guy smiled a pleasant Sunday-morning smile, leaning out from his steaming espresso machine, and Addy could tell very clearly this cheesecake cost more than she’d been hoping to spend. The baklava was expensive here as well, at four dollars a box of ten. This was a yuppie hang-out, a place where law graduates and other cashed-up trendies came to drink real coffee. She glanced out the door at Dan, where he was making space for cake in the boot of the car, looking just like a doctor’s son, and the nasty thought crept up behind her: You can’t be good enough for him – seriously. He’s way too cool and interesting and lovely for you.
Stop it – seriously. She was quick to dismiss this crap now, and not only because she didn’t have the time to waste. She looked back to the cheesecake in the counter: it was a baked one, Continental-style, a gorgeously golden circle of sweetened cheesy goodness. It was her father’s favourite kind. He deserved this cheesecake as much as she deserved a bit of self-respect. Whatever the story was, she saw him and would always see him as that little boy so lonely, hurt and lost; and it didn’t matter what that cheesecake cost. He was worth it, and so was she; she promised to be kinder to herself, and at the same time knew she would have to break that other promise to that same self she’d made: that she was going to tell him she’d dropped out of law. That would not be happening today: unexpected guest plus unexpected and possibly devastating disappointment that his daughter wanted to be a writer? Way too much. She would wait a little longer for that, maybe save up to buy him a bottle of Scotch for the event.
She told the café guy: ‘I’ll take it, thanks – and a box of baklava.’ Because she knew Nick would also like at least half a dozen of them. And, What the hell: ‘One of those chocolate éclairs as well, please.’ For me.
Back on the footpath, arms full of enough dessert to kill them all, Dan took the box full of cheesecake from her and laid it down in the boot, wrapping a rug around it to keep it safe for the trip, settling it snug up against the toolbox there. He has a toolbox in his boot, she noted: her father would be impressed. Real men carried toolboxes in their boots, and Dan Ackerman was a real man. He knew things about quantum physics, important, essential things that she wanted to know about now herself. All her heartstrings sang, nerves spinning into a warm, fizzing ball of light as she considered, yes, maybe she had imagined Frieda and the zebra; maybe she’d bought her garden dress in that ordinary second-hand furniture store for a few bucks and had made up a story around it, an extraordinary story for a broken head and heart. Elfriede – Elfie? Didn’t Frieda say that’s what she’d been called once upon a time? Didn’t that sound quite a lot like Elke? Didn’t that sound a huge lot like a fraught imagination missing her mum? Wishing she could know her. Maybe she’d
also dreamt Dan could play the Moonlight Sonata; maybe he’d been playing ‘Chopsticks’ instead. Did shifting facts make her feelings any less true? No. Truth is a magical ride, so he’d just said – and she wanted a tattoo of that, as soon as she could organise it.
One hand on the wheel, he ate a diamond wedge of baklava as he drove, a pistachio crumb sparkling golden on his lip. And it was here, now, within that tiny glint she felt at last the goldenness thick in the air between them, these atoms that had already spun their thread and by this alchemy made a metal all their own. There was a fantasy, yes, but it was real, too. This madness. This daring and daring to fall.
‘Where do I turn off?’ he asked her, and after giving him directions, just like anyone would give another person directions, she found that Erskineville was where it had always been.
Nick was waiting on his front step for them, black eye in full bloom, the tiny terrace tinier for the shape of him. He waved back into the house, through the door as he closed it, and as she imagined Dave in there, lifting a barbell, grunting a farewell, happiness seemed to chinkle everywhere, from each gleaming leaf of the camelia at the gate and into the clear, bright sky.
‘How’s your head?’ she asked as her brother squashed his massiveness into the back of the Imp.
‘Ug,’ he replied, and as she laughed, he said: ‘How’s yours?’
She laughed some more, handing over the box of baklava to him, and a bit more at the way his t-shirt sleeves strained around his shoulders: that was unreal.
She didn’t notice the silence between him and Dan, though, their exchange of glances in the rear-view mirror. As she turned back around, she saw only Dan’s fine, long fingers tuning the radio dial to Triple J, Sydney’s only decent music station, and off they went, listening to bands no one had ever heard of and probably never would again, as the rickety outer-reaches of King Street gave in to concrete highway.