The phone often rang. George took down messages from Pippa’s friends. The friends dropped in. They stayed for meals. George and Pippa moved a table out to the strip of concrete that passed for a yard. They strung fairy lights over the back door, and set the table with blue-and-white plates; Pippa had found a cupboard full of old china. “I love pretty plates,” she said, giving them a wipe with a tea towel. She asked if George was sure he wouldn’t change his mind about dinner. George said again that he really needed to work.
One night, he stretched his arms, cracked his spine, left his desk. Standing on the loggia, he identified Katrina: her voice floated up, describing the mole between her breasts. He had retained a distinct mental image of her breasts, George discovered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had seen her tip the prawn heads into the bin—they would stink like anything for the rest of the week.
He was returning from his walk one morning when eggs for breakfast passed from an idea into a need. He went up to the shop on Illawarra Road. The eggs had just hit the pan when Pippa came into the kitchen; there were tiny grains of sleep in the corners of her eyes. George watched her arrange the remaining eggs in a green majolica dish. She picked up the empty carton. “These are cage,” she said. “You should get free-range.”
George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.
“But there’s no unnecessary suffering.”
George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So that’s OK, then. He said nothing: he had remembered, just in time, that he was talking to someone whose idea of ethics was a dinner party. Besides, his eggs had started to brown.
In February, a heat wave struck. The air-conditioning gave out. At night, after Pippa came home from the dinner shift, George would light mosquito coils and a lantern. They sat on the loggia drinking mojitos; Katrina and her boyfriend had left a present of a bottle of rum. George asked one or two questions about Katrina. There was room for a character like her—a minor figure—in his novel.
Pippa said, “That’s a relationship where the names say it all.” George looked at her. Her eyes were bright with dislike. “The Kat and the Matt,” said Pippa. There was mint and sugar on her breath.
On one of the mojito nights, the inevitable happened: Pippa grew confessional. She wanted to be a writer, she told George. When she got back from overseas, she intended to enroll in a creative writing course. George thought back to her essays: a stew of passionate opinion, mangled argument, atrocities of usage and grammar; that Credit had been the purest largesse on his part. He remembered her hanging back one day, as the other students were dispersing, to say, “I love English.”
“In that case, I suggest you learn to write it,” answered George.
Pippa was talking about her travels now: they were to provide her with raw material, experiences. George, whose novel was set in Heidelberg, where he had spent a day at the age of nineteen, said that literature and the world were two different things. Pippa grappled with this, slitting her eyes. She said, “You mean, look in thy heart and write?” George meant nothing of the kind: girls like Pippa understood “heart” as a license to gush. But coming from her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted. He divided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran his finger around the rim of the jug.
They were eating strawberries; Pippa had brought a big, soft bag of them home from work. Passing along the loggia the next morning, George saw a cut-glass bowl of miniature Father Christmases. Overnight, each berry had grown a moldy white beard.
Day and night, bushfires burned in the mountains. Sitting out on the loggia, George and Pippa could smell the smoke. But there was no longer the high, intolerable sound of barking: Pippa had persuaded Rhiannon to give her a key. Bruce tore up and down the yard, chasing the ball Pippa threw for him; he slept, content and exhausted, for hours. Sometimes she sneaked the dog out and took him for a walk along the river. She invited George to go with them, but he explained that he was allergic to pets. He was conscious of a fresh danger: Rhiannon’s landlord wanted his house back, and she was having difficulty finding a rental place that would let her keep a dog. It looked as if she might have to return Bruce to the pound. The way Pippa relayed all this, George got the distinct impression that she was putting out feelers. So when she said, “I thought it was cats people were allergic to?” he answered firmly, “Dogs, too.” There was no point raising anyone’s hopes.
Autumn came, and George’s father died. A classic end, a cliché, really: lobbing a ball into a net one minute, a massive coronary the next. He was between girlfriends, as it turned out, so it fell to George to pack up his flat.
The flat was only a couple of streets away from the Meshaws’ old house. George hadn’t been in that part of Paddington for twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaks—George remembered the blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up the stairs, he dreaded entering the flat. But it was as impersonal as a showroom. His father had never been a hoarder; even the piano seat held only a cardboard wallet filled with dull documents. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and always forgot that Meshaw wasn’t his father’s real name. Syllables had been trimmed, vowels altered, consonants suppressed to create something that could fit into Australian mouths. His father was a product of the old world, and his vices, like his virtues, had been old-fashioned: wine, women, music, an unshakable faith in the rational mind.
The last item in the wallet was a yellow envelope. George hesitated, afraid of embarrassment, of pornography—there had been a packet of condoms beside the bed—but at last he looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They were photographs of George’s mother, angled, arty shots, many of them out of focus—one showed only a blurry fan of fingers. George crouched, moved his hand, spread the images over the floor. The instant before he examined the last one, he already knew what he would see: his mother, bending forward from the waist, a wavy cord trailing to the phone. Everything in the photo was exactly as George had remembered—the orange wall, his mother’s bright, dark-centered hair—although the image had taken on a brownish yellow tinge. What memory had blanked from the scene was his father’s presence: he must have been there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife. The pieces in the puzzle of George’s parents shifted, acquired new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discoloration; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to light. George pictured his father handling the photos, laying them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos in the flat.
That evening, he called his mother. She hadn’t come up for the funeral, merely saying, “I’m sorry for your loss.” George told her about finding the Polaroids. What he was really saying was, Do you understand now? Admit you were wrong to leave him! He started to describe the photo with the phone and the orange wall.
His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the picture. “The one where you can see my roots have grown out? It’s so typical of your father to have kept that. I never liked it—I didn’t like you poking that camera at me ever.”
“Wait,” said George. “I took that picture?”
“All of them. Don’t you remember?” She said, “An idiot girl gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favorite thing. You loved watching the colors change as the image developed. When you ran out of film a second time, your father told you the camera was broken. He knew that seeing you with it upset me.”
With the change of season, it was cool at night. George stood on the loggia, inspecting the loose shapes of trees. There was only ugly furniture around him and big, tiled, silent rooms. Pippa was living in Stanmore, in a house with Katrina. Bruce was barking—he had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have talked