The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red disk that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George closed the door of his father’s flat for the last time and went for a walk. It was a bright afternoon, but the street where the Meshaws had lived was black with shadows. Tall plane trees arched over it; the leaves remained thick overhead but were starting to change color and fall. George saw what he had known, what he had forgotten: the row of houses, with their wooden balconies, looked into the face of a sandstone escarpment. He came to a gate where he had stood on a summer morning: looking back at the house where he had always lived, looking out at the waiting taxi. The escarpment and the trees kept the sun from the street. What was coming was a life in which his father was a stranger. George looked from his father, barefoot on the veranda, to his mother, sitting in the taxi with her face turned away. Who was the cat and who was the mat? George’s father said, “If you stop crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets.” Then he stood on his hands.
CASSIE SPOTTED THE SPICE MART because she was on the lookout for a South Asian grocery. At the launch of their university’s Centre for Australian Literature, Ash had expressed his disappointment with a Sri Lankan restaurant where he had recently dined. The dhal had proved particularly unsatisfying, said Ash. It was thin and sour, nothing like the comforting curried lentils, velvety with coconut milk, that he had eaten as a child.
Ash—as Ashoka preferred to be known—mentioned the dhal because he had noticed that women were moved by references to that aspect of his past. When they learned that he had lived in Sri Lanka as a child, they pictured him in a tropical garden where fruit fell to the hand, too innocent to divine the vicious historical turn that would soon cast him on the grudging benevolence of the West. This satisfying nonsense simplified everything, clearing factual clutter to reveal the way forward. Now whatever needed to happen next could happen.
It had been explained to Ash that the government funded the Centre for Australian Literature after a ministerial survey of humanities graduates found that 86 percent of English majors had never read an Australian book. Asked to name a contemporary Australian novelist, responses were more or less equally divided between “that Oscar and Louise guy” and Stephen King. Most declined to “Name a novel by Patrick White,” although one student recalled Riders on the Storm. These results were welcome: they could be blamed on the ousted Labor government.
Predictably, the national broadcaster—a viper’s nest of socialists, tree huggers, and ugly, barren females—had seized on the survey, exhuming one of its bleeding-heart ideologues to moan about funding cuts to education. The flagrant bias of the national broadcaster was a gift to the government’s spin doctors, but the survey struck an unexpected chord with the right-wing press. “Aussie Heritage Lost to Multiculturalism” (broadsheet) was backed up by “Our Classroom Shame” (tabloid). At this warning shot from its chief ally, the government acted decisively, and the Centre for Australian Literature opened after just five years.
At the launch, Cassie watched the men whose speeches followed one another. She was in the first year of her doctoral candidature. Leanne, her supervisor, was the inaugural director of the Centre, but Cassie saw that Leanne was of no account. The Aboriginal elder whose customary welcome had opened the ceremony was equally beside the point. These two were required by protocol but only got in the way, like a debutante’s white gloves. The men on the podium had smooth or corrugated faces, they tolerated the symbolism of women and Aboriginal people, and they were in charge. Their various speeches came down to one: “Do not imagine we wouldn’t crush you if we chose.” Cassie had been brought up to believe that the world these men inhabited—the rage and spite and cruelty that were its grim, medieval furnishings—had been swept away. Now and then, the realization that it had not swam blackly before her like a frightening malfunction of vision.
While she listened, Cassie went on eating, having edged her way to the buffet as soon as the speeches began. She was a bony girl who was always hungry. As a child, she had craved white bread, and thin slices of dried sausage spread with mustard, and dark plum jam in which you could stand a spoon. All these things, which Cassie was fed by her grandmother, were banned at home. At home there was nourishing sugarless cake, and soybean casseroles in which tomato skins floated. From the mud-brick house in a valley up north, where two kelpies had succumbed to snakebite, Cassie fled during the holidays to Sydney and her grandmother’s flat: to plate-glass windows and Schubert, to creamy veal and embroidered tablecloths, to a toilet with no spiders and no scary notice about blockages taped to the wall. Oh, the wonderful, modern pleasure of a toilet that flushed!
The minister for education said, “I like to begin every day, the pressures of public office permitting, by dipping into one of our world-class Australian writers.” He misquoted a line of Henry Lawson and beamed. The mistake was spotted only by the Lawson specialist, an alcoholic, who by that stage of the evening was incapable of speech. Education being a trivial portfolio, the minister, a golden boy, had also been entrusted with immigration. “Young people are the wealth of our nation,” he announced. He had forgotten, momentarily, that he was in an institution that catered to lazy, feral degenerates, for his own children had come into his mind: a trio of cherubs.
All the bottles within sight were empty. The Lawson specialist began to drain the contents of abandoned glasses, believing he was the only person present who remembered that the minister had once left children seeking asylum to drown off the Australian coast. As often happened, the Lawson specialist was quite wrong. The minister himself recalled the incident perfectly: the children were foreigners and Muslims, and the pressure of public office had not permitted their rescue. “As Shakespeare reminds us,” improvised the minister, “the child is father to the man.” Shakespeare, while unfortunately not Australian literature, was universal and, like the minister, beyond reproach.
Cassie’s mouth was full when a man she didn’t know asked if the pastry she was eating contained meat. A girl came out of nowhere to confide, “I often think about going veggo. But I just really love a good steak!” Smiling, she shook all her curls at the dilemma, extravagant in a rose-colored dress. She turned her rosy shoulder in such a way that she was addressing only the man and said, “And bacon!”
“Yes, it’s the kind of thing that must have once taken up many a conversational hour in Rome,” he replied. “You know: the injustice of slavery versus the inconvenience of life without slaves.”
The girl’s enthusiastic body went still. Then she went away.
“Hi,” said Ash. “I’m Ash.”
Cassie was a little shocked. But she saw a knight: brutal in a just cause.
A bunch of people ended up at a Lebanese restaurant later that evening. Cassie found herself sitting next to Ash. They asked each other questions that had nothing to do with what they really wanted to know, while their bodies conducted a separate, unambiguous conversation. Ash learned that Cassie was writing a thesis on Australian expatriate novelists. He was at the dinner because he knew Leanne from a library committee, he explained. It had rained earlier, and drops clung to the cars parked outside the window by which they sat—Cassie thought of fish with rivers still slipping off their fins.
Menus were brought. By means of urgent gestures, the Lawson specialist indicated that he needed a drink.
Someone asked, “Shall we share?”
Ash said that he was a vegetarian. “But the rest of you, please go ahead. I’ll order for myself.”
“Why don’t we all get vegetarian?” said Leanne, glancing