by Kim Kelly
‘No, not really.’ She wanted to kiss the tip of his nose for his enthusiasm for water molecules; she’d almost forgotten her question.
Nevertheless, he continued: ‘The important thing is, we think we know water, this thing we see every day, but we only know a small bit about it. And it’s the same with life, with people. Of the less than tiny fraction of us that isn’t space, about sixty percent of the matter we’re made of is water, and the rest is stardust – basically, the same stuff that everything in the world is made of, and we hardly know about any of it. So, if someone really needed to, and under the right circumstances was able to, what’s to say they, or something of them, couldn’t break from where they were and be somewhere else for a time – and then return to wherever they’d come from? Nothing. Unless you could prove absolutely it was impossible, then it’s possible. And it’s only by imagining that something might be possible that it can ever be possible at all. Yeah?’
‘I’ll have to take your word for that.’ She smiled inside his smile as he turned to her. You are quite a bit madder than I am, aren’t you?
‘Yeah, well, anyway.’ He brushed the back of her hand with his, a deliberate accident. ‘If you imagined you spoke to someone from the past, maybe you really did. Trust me, I’ll tell you if you start talking to someone who’s not here.’
‘Phew.’ She shared the laugh, but doubt’s grey tendrils swept over her, too: ‘You’re not just saying that, are you?’
‘No.’ He held her steadier than ever in his eyes, with all his perfect loveliness. ‘The truest thing is, Addy, I don’t know, and no one else does either, so you might as well err on the side of the amazing – my dad says that. It stops him from losing his mind. You know, he sees a lot of terrible things, like any emergency doctor does. He’s seen people dying in the most awful pain and fear, but he says, in almost every case, there’s this quietness that takes over right at the end. He calls it grace, not in any religious way or anything. He says it’s like that person is more than just leaving their body, they’re going somewhere, to be somewhere else. To be something else maybe. Where do they go? Where does all their electricity go? The thing is, no one knows.’
She saw it wholly then, this deepest truth she’d ever met. She saw it in the love that shone in Dan Ackerman’s eyes, the knowledge that she belonged somewhere outside herself for the first time. The knowledge that there was no such thing as death in love. And it transformed her, irreversibly, there on the sands of Port Kembla Beach.
She reached for his hand, curled her fingers around the edge of his palm and she let the warmth rush through her; she let the fear and pain fall away, a carapace to the most luscious of bloomings: freedom.
A pelican stood in the shallows nearby, long, white feathers ruffling as it watched the hauling of a catch further out, the motor of the fishing boat a steady purr; and she kissed him then. She raised her face to his; she tasted the trace of cake on his lips; she tasted his saltwater and let it be one with hers, as the full moon rose over the ocean, bright and silver and round.
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’, 1871
AUTHOR NOTE
Addy Loest is a girl magicked up from the soup of my own soul. Her experiences of university and growing into herself in the 1980s in so many ways reflect mine, but she is not me. I couldn’t possibly have written a true memoir of those times – we’re all very respectable people these days. And what is the real truth, anyway?
Real truth, for me, whispers through all our bonds of family, friendship, the threads of history, recent and distant, that make our hearts beat and make all kinds of tangles in our minds. Real truth is that winding path you take, through and around uncertainties, anxieties and the boot-stamps of distress, to find at last what treasures you hold inside you: what you’re really good at and passionate about. What makes all your atoms sing.
While the setting of the story is absolutely the Sydney I knew, eagle-eyed readers familiar with the city will spot that I’ve invented Flower Street and the Hairy Egg, and blurred some elements of the university itself, in order to avoid the real truth incriminating any real-life person, and also because my memory has become naturally blurry after all these years. It’s important, too, to stress that none of the characters in the story represent anyone I’ve ever known; my university days came a few years post-85, and I was never a participant at WoCo or the SRC, so any resemblance to any real-life person really, truly would be accidental. All of Addy’s descriptions of her mental unsteadiness are, however, taken directly from my own songbook of long personal struggle with the beasts in my brain.
Those for whom the name Ackerman has rung a bell: yes, Dan is the grandson of Daniel from my very first novel, Black Diamonds. The whole Ackerman family still lives very large in my imagination – as if they might be real people – and I never know where or when one of them is going to reappear on the page.
For those who might be wondering, the paperback Addy reads, Kathleen McAllister’s The Fire Flight, is a fictional novel; some might recognise that it’s also a coded homage to the work and spirit of the timelessly marvellous Colleen McCullough.
The John Donne quotes that appear in the chapters, ‘Addy Loest Is Probably Not Going to Die Today’ and ‘Anything Is Possible, but Some Things Are More Possible than Others’, are from ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’; and those which appear in the chapters, ‘English Literature & Other Forms of Middle-Class Indulgence’ and ‘This Is What a Hero Actually Looks Like’, are from ‘The Good-Morrow’.
Quotes from Donald Horne’s 1964 classic, The Lucky Country, which appear in the chapter, ‘Best Intentions & the Art of Self-Sabotage’, can be found in the Penguin Books Australia edition (2005, pp.10-11), and have been reproduced here with kind permission of Penguin Random House Australia, and the author’s family.
The quotes from and paraphrasing of Tacitus on Germany in the chapter, ‘Not German Enough, Heart Too Broken’, are taken from Thomas Gordon’s translation of the monograph (P.F. Collier & Son, New York, 1910).
Special thanks to the following irrefutably real people for sharing your own memories of our Sydney: Mark Swivel, David Anderson, Damien McDonald, Mick Meehan, Sarah Bunn, Narelle Woodberry-Daniels, Anna Broinowski, Kate Broadhurst, Donna Meadows, Louise Briffa, Helen Mountford, Adam Long, Matt Drewett, Caleb Cluff, Mick Walsh, Greg Johnston, Jason Roweth, Lucy Halliday, Anthony Porthouse, Elisabeth Storrs and Rachael Vincent. Not all of you witnessed my personal capacity for green ginger wine, but to those who did, chin-chin!
An extra special thank you to Linda and Dirk Visman as well, for photographs and recollections that helped me imagine Port Kembla and the steelworks as it was in those days.
Thank you, always, to my ever-magical agent, Selwa Anthony, for your unwavering belief in the power of stories, and to Linda Anthony for your sparkling enthusiasm for this one. Thank you, Alexandra Nahlous, my editor, for caring not only for my words but for my characters – and for this writer’s heart. Thanks once again to designer Alissa Dinallo for making this book look beautiful, and to Joel Naoum for making its publication possible. To the team at Bolinda Publishing, who have produced the audiobook edition, thank you for believing in my work, too.
To my sons, Tom and Cal, I hope you find this semi-historical document useful as time goes by – bulk mamma thanks, Cal, for your very useful thoughts on the first draft. And to my darling Deano, ex-Port metallurgist and best-ever nice guy, I couldn’t do the maths without you, mein Schatz, but I’ll always be a bit glad I’d done just a little more growing up by the time I took you home.
KIM KELLY
Kim Kelly is the author of eleven novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and perennial bestseller The Blue Mile. With distinctive warmth and lyrical charm, her work explores Australia,
its history and people, its quirks and contradictions, from colonial invasion times to the present, and from the red-dirt roads of the outback to its glittering cities.
An editor, reviewer and literary consultant by trade, stories fill her everyday – most nights, too – and it’s love that fuels her intellectual engine. In fact, she takes love so seriously she once donated a kidney to her husband to prove it, and also to save his life.
Originally from Sydney, today Kim lives on a small rural property in central New South Wales just outside the tiny gold-rush village of Millthorpe, where the ghosts are mostly friendly and her grown sons regularly come home to graze.
ALSO BY KIM KELLY
Black Diamonds
This Red Earth
The Blue Mile
Paper Daisies
Wild Chicory
Jewel Sea
Lady Bird & The Fox
Sunshine
Walking
Her Last Words
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Available at all major online retailers worldwide,
in paperback, ebook and audiobook.
First published 2021 by Jazz Monkey Publications
Copyright © Kim Kelly 2021
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.
The characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Quotes from The Lucky Country by Donald Horne, which appear in this book, are reproduced here by kind permission of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, copyright © Donald Horne, first published by Penguin Australia, 1964.
A CIP record for this book is available at the National Library of Australia.
Design: Alissa Dinallo
Cover image: Shutterstock montage
Text dinkus: Kim Kelly
Author photograph: Dean Brownlee
Printing: Lightning Source, Ingram Content Group
Publishing services provided by Critical Mass
www.critmassconsulting.com