“Good. Hey, listen: George. You know he’s back in Melbourne, right? The latest is his mother’s bought him a warehouse apartment in Fitzroy.”
“That’s nice.” Cassie wondered if she would have a baby with Ash. She tried to picture the baby’s face—it was beautiful, she knew. If a thirty-five-year-old man didn’t have children, did that mean he didn’t want them or that he would be eager to become a father without delay?
“Obviously, I didn’t hear that from George,” went on Pippa. “You know how guarded he is. He calls it ‘private.’ But one of my Melbourne mates told me.”
Cassie stirred herself to ask, “How’s the difficult second novel going?”
Soon after Pippa and Cassie moved to Sydney and their respective universities, Pippa had become involved with a guy called Vince. When they broke up, Vince would stand outside her house, crying. Pippa called this “stalking”—why couldn’t Vince see that it was over and move on? Dumping Vince was another thing Pippa had known all along that she would do. Cassie wondered what it took to be loved so grandly, so operatically. She helped Pippa load Vince’s paintings into her car; Pippa said she was returning them so that Vince could sell them or reuse the canvases. To fling Vince’s work in his face seemed an ingenious cruelty to Cassie. But when she protested, Pippa said, “The alternative is the paintings go out in the rubbish—or do you want them?” Cassie had to admit that she didn’t. Pippa pulled down her bedroom blind and said, “Vince can cry on demand. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s his party trick.” In that same calm, reasoning tone, she had once told Cassie, “Vince is a brilliant kisser.” Cassie peeped around the edge of the blind and saw Vince in the street, his hair and the trees streaming—the rain, at least, was not any kind of trick. Pippa was quite plain, with no figure to speak of and a mouth crowded with teeth, but Cassie couldn’t persuade herself that any boyfriend of her own would wait in a downpour, without an umbrella, hoping for a glimpse of her. Against her will, it became a standard by which she measured men. Ash wouldn’t do it, she thought, stirring her coffee while Pippa talked about her book. At once she thought of things Ash did do and was shot through with delight. She was almost unnaturally happy that year and she was a girl with a great capacity for joy. When Cassie read of war and suffering and children without enough to eat, she knew that she had no right to happiness and would try to reject the sensation. But it welled up again, natural and persistent, at the sight of clouds chasing each other, or the first wave of scented mock-orange in the street. When that happened, time receded and the world shrank to a rainbow-hung valley that Cassie could frame and keep close. The kelpies vanished and the snakes, and the death-dealing spiders in the toilet. Ash became another version of Cassie’s gentle parents: an older, wiser person whom she scrutinized and loved.
The Ashfield Tamil said, “Those Indians are selling frozen paneer cheap. But you can be assured that everything I stock is highly fresh.” He was following Cassie around the shop because she could never find what she wanted. This was partly because the shelves were stocked according to an elusive logic—why were the dried chilies beside the tinned ghee rather than with the chili powder?—and partly because Cassie rarely had a specific purchase in mind. When preparing for her Sri Lankan feast, she had shopped according to a list of ingredients copied from Charmaine Solomon, and was still plentifully provided with things like turmeric and cinnamon sticks. On subsequent visits, she allowed herself to be guided by the Ashfield Tamil. “Sandalwood soap?” he would suggest. “Desiccated coconut?” His gray hair, flattened with something like oil, was combed back from his forehead in a style Cassie associated with young men setting off to fight for the Spanish Republic; it brought old, lost causes to mind.
In the far corner of the shop, a door led to the storeroom. A length of reddish cloth banded with gold that might have been sari fabric hung in front of the door. The shopkeeper noticed Cassie looking at it. “My wife made the curtain,” he said. “A door without a curtain is like a person without clothes.” His oiled hair gave off an odor as he stood beside Cassie in the narrow aisle between the shelves. That top note was followed by the smell of his scalp. Cassie was unable to decide whether these scents were unpleasant or exotic.
“My curry-leaf plant died,” she said. “Do you think I overwatered it?”
“What to do?”
Relaying this to Ash, Cassie mimicked the gesture that accompanied the Ashfield Tamil’s stock phrase—the wrist twisted sharply, “like a spin bowler.” She also said, “His shoes don’t go with the rest of him. They’re the kind with Velcro fastenings.”
“They’re cheaper,” said Ash. He was too polite to add, Obviously.
The shopkeeper wasn’t a refugee, Cassie told Ash. Two of his children had migrated to Sydney, and he had followed with his wife. “So it was quite easy for you to come here?” Cassie had asked, pleased. She clung to an idea of Australia as a place where kindness prevailed over expediency. It had rarely been true in her lifetime, but was one more creed that had emerged from the rainbow valley, like the belief that the human race would tire of shopping. The Ashfield Tamil repeated, “Easy,” in a neutral tone as if hearing the word for the first time. Cassie remembered something her Viennese grandmother used to say: “The worst thing is, we are required to be grateful.”
Cassie always came back from the Spice Mart with another segment of the shopkeeper’s “story”—that was what she called it when talking to Ash. The Ashfield Tamil had three sons. The middle one was still in Sri Lanka, although his parents pleaded with him to leave. He was a teacher in a seaside town; in Australia, he would have to drive a taxi or clean hotels like his brothers. “What to do?” asked his father, and Cassie echoed him, twisting her wrist. Whenever she mentioned the Tamil, Ash remembered his dream of the wardrobe. Cassie’s interest in the man mystified him. To Ash, people were not figures in a story but subjects in history. He was familiar with the historical sequence that had brought a Tamil civil servant from Sri Lanka to the counter of a shop in the west of Sydney.
When he said something along these lines, Cassie, postmodernly tutored, replied pertly, “Isn’t history just a set of competing stories?”
“Not really,” said Ash.
If someone had informed Ash that Cassie thought of him in conjunction with the shopkeeper, he would have been merely incredulous. No brain, however feverish, would ever place Ash in a paddock, not even disguised as furniture and in a dream. Yet the connection persisted in Cassie’s mind, not just because the two men were the only Sri Lankans she knew, but because she secretly believed that they had entered her life to alter its course. Her relations with each had an atmosphere of inevitability. She was aware that these fateful beings were partly her own invention, but that didn’t diminish their power.
As if he had peered into her thoughts, Ash told her, “Your Ashfield friend dreams of improvement—all immigrants do. You and I, on the other hand, would like to be more fully what we are. The fulfillment of the will is an old aim, the fulfillment of the heart a modern one.” The purpose of this lesson was to point out an unbridgeable gulf, as deep as history, with the Tamil on one side and Cassie and Ash on the other.
Cassie said, “I’m so happy I was born.” Ash feared that she had heard only “You and I” and “the fulfillment of the heart.” She lay naked on top of her cold bed. It was past midnight, but Ash was not to join her yet. She said, “I want you inside me, but I want to imagine it first.” That was just silly. Ash felt himself vaguely stirred by the shell-pink luster between her parted legs, but what remained uppermost in his mind was the meeting he had to attend at nine the next morning. Cassie was an overgrown child whose emptiest make-believe had been labeled “creativity” by her parents. In Ash’s view, that indulgence was directly responsible for Cassie’s grubby habit of bringing home scraps of paper that had been written on and discarded in the street. They were stored in a tin whose germy contents she had spread before Ash like treasure. He read, “Tickets. Facial. Jackie—card. Teabags, cheese, stock cubes, matches.” The list had been trodden on and bore the muddy imprint of a heel. Cassie believed that handwriting was disappearing, and that her gleanings would one day have the status of precious artifacts. She