Another thing that grated was her habit of referring to the shopkeeper as “the Ashfield Tamil.” Surely the man had a name! Then Ash thought, benevolently, She can’t pronounce it. He remembered his mother’s tongue twisting around Tamil names. Jeyarajasingham. Saravanamuttu. It would be something like that.
Ash didn’t know that on her first visit to the shop, Cassie had said, “My name’s Cassie.” The Ashfield Tamil received this as impartially as if she had said, “The chief export of New South Wales is coal” or “There are ten mammals, four birds, and thirteen fish on the list of critically endangered Australian animals.” As time went on, it was too late to ask his name—it would have embarrassed them both. By then he was greeting Cassie warmly, saying, “Welcome! Welcome!” even though she typically bought only a few inexpensive items. One day, when there was no more of Ash’s favorite mango chutney on the shelf, the Ashfield Tamil produced two jars set aside especially for Cassie, bringing them out from under his counter with a triumphant flourish.
“A very good brand,” he said. “MD is Marketing Department. Government guaranteed.”
When Cassie reported this to Ash, he said he found it strange that a Tamil would have faith in anything guaranteed by the Sri Lankan government. “Other than torture and extermination, that is.”
The shopkeeper confided his anxieties about his rivals to Cassie. The Indians had chosen their location with cunning. There were more pedestrians on the main street, and the Indian shop was also readily visible to drivers stuck in the sluggish river of traffic on Liverpool Road. Once, when Cassie had let three weeks pass before returning to him, the Ashfield Tamil asked, “Have you been going there?” The Indians sold packaged curries, he told her. “Highly convenient for young people.” Cassie took this to mean that he had forgiven her, although no disloyalty had occurred. He was as easily alarmed as a bird. When she stumbled over one of the giant packs of rice on the floor, he cried, “Please be careful! What will happen if you fall and break your leg? You will sue me!” Cassie didn’t take his fears about being ousted by the Indians seriously. Curiosity had taken her to their shop: a pastel-walled, air-conditioned box, where a girl whose plait was thicker than her wrist played with her phone and ignored Cassie. In fact, there was nothing she could have done for a customer, as the stock was brightly lit, rationally arranged, and clearly labeled. One shelf held an assortment of incense, but the shop smelled of nothing. Cassie, inclined by nature to hopefulness, felt confident that these antiseptic premises could pose no threat to the Ashfield Tamil’s chaotic, atmospheric cave.
One morning, there was an elaborate geometric pattern on the pavement at the entrance to the Spice Mart. It had been somewhat scuffed by feet. The Ashfield Tamil told Cassie that it was a kolam, drawn in rice flour by his wife. “She didn’t lift her hand once,” he said proudly, as Cassie surveyed the intricate design. A kolam brought prosperity and protected against evil spirits. “It also provides food for ants.”
“But it’s being destroyed,” protested Cassie, watching a woman wheel a shopping cart over the drawing.
“That is the way. My wife will make another one.” But Cassie never saw a kolam outside the shop again.
Cassie claimed that she could read auras. Ash stood against a white wall like a prisoner about to be shot. His aura was orange tinged with red, said Cassie. He was confident, creative, and sexually passionate. Ash smiled. She could also see flickers of gray, she went on. They signified guardedness. “A fear of loss.”
Her upbringing had left its mark in other ways. First thing every morning, before eating or drinking, Cassie swilled cold-pressed sesame oil around her mouth for twenty minutes. She said, “It’s an ancient ayurvedic practice that draws toxins from the body.” Ash, child of doctors, believed in antibiotics, vaccinations, flossing. Oil-pulling was a harmless eccentricity, like the olive-leaf extract Cassie gravely spooned into him at the first sign of a sore throat. She spoke mistily and reverently of self-sufficiency and sustainable living—what that amounted to, as far as Ash could see, was no heating and a row of potted, yellowing herbs.
Whenever they left her flat after dinner, to see a film or go for a walk, Cassie would leave the light on in the sunroom. “You’ve forgotten to turn off the light,” Ash’s father said one evening in Ash’s voice.
Cassie said, “I know I should,” but left the light on anyway. When they had walked some way from the house, she placed her palm on Ash’s spine, urging him to turn around. The house stood near the crest of a hill. Ash saw a long, golden rectangle suspended in the darkness. Cassie said that she liked to see it waiting there for her. “It reminds me of a ship.”
It clanged with idiocy, even to her ears. It was also only the least part of the truth. Her landlords, elderly Romanians, lived in terror of assassins, informers, vampires, and that shadowy, tentacular, punishing entity, the state. Fifty years earlier, a baby had died of hunger, so now no one was granted access to the ground floor of her parents’ house—they might steal all the food. The Romanians’ tenants had to come and go by means of an external wooden staircase that Cassie called Cockroach Mansions, accessed from the rear of the house. The garden there, once a formal square, had got away from the old people: it was shrubby, bird-haunted, wild. Cassie feared it at night and was ashamed of her fear. When she first moved to Sydney, she had seen the security bars on windows and laughed at the cages in which city people lived. Then a girl she knew was raped by an intruder. Cassie no longer dreamed about it, but she turned her rings so that the stones faced inward and switched on the sunroom light when going out after dark. Why not say all this to Ash as they walked down the hill? She realized that she wanted to appear enameled, unassailable. She held his arm tightly. They had no past, so she was obliged to look to the future. There she had just come face-to-face with an Ash who could harm her—it was as if a steel curtain had descended to divide them.
Pippa’s e-mail said: “Matt and I are going to Bali for eight days. I’ve finished my first draft: reward! Would you like my car while we’re away?” Cassie scrolled down to the PS, which was where Pippa always buried what she really wanted to say. She read: “Whenever George is asked to name an Australian writer he admires, he says, ‘Christina Stead’ or ‘Patrick White.’ The safely great, the safely dead. Where is his support for his fellow writers? I heard him on Radio National the other day. The interviewer called his novel a masterpiece.”
The car was an ancient white Peugeot, liable to stall on hills. There was no air-conditioning, so Cassie drove with the windows down. She steered the heavy machine carefully around curves, proud of her thin, strong arms, picturing herself at the helm of a boat if a sea-scented northeasterly was in.
One afternoon, she was driving through Annandale with Ash when he asked her to pull over. It was a sticky, overcast day, the kind of weather that turned him contemplative, and he hadn’t been saying much. He climbed out and stood with his back to the car. Along that part of Johnston Street the houses were perched high, above a long retaining wall. Ash looked at the big sandstone blocks in the wall, which was inset with an iron gate behind which steps led to the house above. His lips felt wrinkled. He waved vaguely at his surroundings as Cassie came around the car to join him. The shadow of old events lay across him. How was he to explain that the humidity, the massive, grimy stones, and the trees in the gardens overhead had caused time to run backwards? For the rest of his days, Ash would believe that he now said, “I thought I was in a place I visited long ago, a place I dream about.” In fact, he remained silent. Cassie saw that he needed something, so she gave him her hand. It felt as dry and papery as real life to Ash.
At Cassie’s monthly meeting with her supervisor, Leanne explained that Cassie’s discussion of Shirley Hazzard’s fiction was unsatisfactory. While remaining perfectly still, Leanne could make her face go bigger and her eyes shrink. Since taking up her role as director of the Centre, she had seemed brusquely unimpressed by Cassie’s work. Cassie assumed, humbly, that this was because Leanne now had more glamorous and sweeping responsibilities to Australian literature than the supervision of her thesis. “Admiration is a problematic starting point for analysis,” went on Leanne. “I have to say how surprised I am that you haven’t grasped that by now.” The thing about Leanne was that she