At that moment Cassie came close to seeing that he was only an instrument in her quest, which was really for a system and an answer. How was she to live? The riddle was crucial and therefore hard to unlock. She believed that Ash had it under control—this had to do with the white split of his grin.
Spring came like a wind in sudden warm gusts. Underneath the air remained cool. “The bottom of the air is fresh,” said Ash, remembering a phrase acquired on a school trip to France. How pleasing to find life fitting itself so smoothly to words! On a hot October Sunday, he brunched beside the ocean—its pomp and flash!—and risked a swim at Coogee; the sunny Pacific, too, harbored cold depths.
With the improvement in the weather came evenings when Ash walked up the hill to Cassie’s place in Glebe. But drafts and chilly lino weren’t all that he had to contend with there. Cassie rented two second-story rooms at the back of a Victorian house. One of them was really a wide balcony that had been enclosed to make a sunroom. That was where Cassie and Ash ate, on mismatched chairs at a table by a row of clear-paned louvres that sliced up the view. The sunroom was Cassie’s study: her laptop was always open on the table, beside a pile of books. When Cassie served a meal, she never bothered to clear the table, but simply pushed the paraphernalia of work to one side. The resulting juxtaposition of food and books worked on Ash like a stray lash floating in an eye. One day Cassie had left a hefty volume propped spine-up like a tent. Ash hadn’t treated a book like that since the age of seven. Coming upon it, his father had shouted, “You will break its spine!” as if Ash were torturing a kitten. His father’s anger was always connected to the idea of waste. It could be traced to an austere past when a light shining in an empty room was a bill mounting up, books were for the lucky, and no one left anything on their plate. His father would often remark that when he was a boy, whatever food there was in the house was kept locked up—once it was half a packet of biscuits.
Cassie usually made pasta and a salad for dinner, but one evening she produced a feast. A recessed space at the top of the interior staircase had been fitted out as a kitchen that Cassie shared with the other tenant. She went to and fro between this dingy nook and the sunroom, returning twice with a laden tray. She laughed at Ash’s amazement—she had been cooking for days, she said. Surely, thought Ash, it would have been a simple matter to clear the table first? Vegetable curries, a bowl of dhal, an array of pickles and glutinous chutneys encroached on the streamlined laptop, the right-angled books—they threatened knowledge with stickiness and slop. Ash wouldn’t allow himself to remark on this; he believed in the separation of powers. He had intense, almost violent feelings about Cassie’s body, which he entered every few days. But he wouldn’t ask her to tidy her table, or make a move to clear it himself—he would not be masculinist or proprietorial. And it had to be said that the change from pasta to lentils and vegetables was a relief. It was obvious that Cassie could eat whatever she wanted without affecting the hollows under her hip bones, but Ash had begun to count calories of late. When he had first seen his baby sister, Ash had fleetingly wondered how many more siblings there would be. His stepmother was still in her thirties and had hips like a Soviet peasant—a Soviet peasant was what she had been born, after all. Ash saw his inheritance dwindle with the appearance of each new little Fernando: he envisaged a procession of them, all with serene, Madonna faces and backsides like sideboards. The baby couldn’t possibly have guessed what was on Ash’s mind but began to scream anyway. She was twelve now, and Ash’s inalienable paternal inheritance had finally come down to him intact: the makings of a potbelly.
When his plate was empty, Ash said, “Wow! That was absolutely delicious!”
“Have more—there’s heaps.”
About to help himself, Ash recoiled before the aptitude of dhal to splash. The bowl that held the curried lentils was a shallow one; already, the table around it was flecked. Ash’s hand hovered, brown as a hawk. Then he chose fried eggplant as a safer bet.
“Don’t you like the dhal?” asked Cassie. She slid the dish forward, to Ash’s alarm. “I followed the recipe exactly. But obviously leaving out the Maldive fish.”
Ash assured her that the dhal was terrific. “Everything is. But I absolutely couldn’t eat another thing.”
Cassie helped herself to wine. Her expression as she drank was particularly aloof. He had disappointed her, Ash saw. But why? Their conversation seemed inoffensive yet at cross-purposes, like her clashing chairs. Cassie had told him the story of her childhood, describing the rain forest and the way it rained. She had been traveling in South America when her parents sold their mud-brick house and the acres in which it stood, and moved to a coastal town. Cassie didn’t say, The minute my back was turned; but Ash understood that betrayal was involved. She had become a visitor in a museum, said Cassie, by which she meant that the near past had turned mythical and remote. Its glassed-off exhibits made up a kingdom that she had imagined would last forever. The name of her museum was Time, but she was still young enough to believe that everything that happened to her was unique. “Exhibit A,” she said, showing Ash a framed photograph of a lush valley bridged with a rainbow. It was nothing like Yukkendrearie. But now, sitting among the ruins of their banquet, Watch out! said Ash to Ash. This pliable girl was a product of the real Australia. There was the heedless way she treated books. No striding up hills in a hat, Ash warned himself. Cassie, too, might prove unimaginable. She might turn out to be nothing like porridge, not even porridge with salt.
Cassie arranged to meet Pippa at a bookshop. She found her in the Australian section, a mazy arrangement in a poorly lit area near the back. Pippa emerged, hissing, “They have exactly one copy of my novel. I turned it face out.”
In the place that had the best coffee that side of Parramatta Road, Pippa asked, “So how’d you go the other night? Did you make the pumpkin curry in the end?” Pippa was an amazing cook. She put on dinners for twelve that involved lemons she had preserved. It was Pippa who had recommended the Charmaine Solomon cookbook that Cassie had consulted to prepare her feast.
“I couldn’t go veggo for anyone,” went on Pippa. Her sharp little face turned pensive. “But I guess you got used to all those chickpeas growing up.”
Pippa and Cassie had met at high school up north. Cassie was one of the few people in Sydney who knew that Pippa had once been called Narelle. Pippa had filed the application to change her name on her eighteenth birthday. She said, “No one called Narelle’s ever going to win the Booker.” Even before that, even when Pippa and Cassie shut themselves into their bedrooms and sobbed because River Phoenix was dead, Pippa had known that she was going to be a writer. The clarity Pippa brought to her objectives was one of the things Cassie envied about her. Cassie was twenty-nine, and the future, as she saw it, remained uncontrollable and vague. She was afraid of being twenty-nine. It was much worse than thirty, the ax hovering before it fell.
She said, “I don’t think Ash liked the dhal.”
“Too salty, maybe? Or not salty enough? Lentils can be tricky,” said Pippa. The offhand way she spoke told Cassie that Pippa didn’t care for the sound of Ash. As if to confirm it, Pippa asked, “So when do I get to meet the great man?”
“It’s early days still,” said Cassie. It was three months. Cassie and Ash only saw each other alone, never with other people; Cassie told herself that what they wanted from each other didn’t involve other people. To counter Pippa’s expression, Cassie told her about something that had happened the previous week. Ash and Cassie were heading to the city on a bus. They had risen for their stop when a woman shouted, “Speak English, you fucken boat jumpers!” This was directed at two African men, an old one and a younger one, talking quietly to each other. Ash and Cassie got off the bus, and Cassie said, “How awful. I should have said something. I’m so sorry.”
Ash replied, “Oh, that woman was probably afraid that anyone speaking a foreign language was insulting her.”
He was capable of that, of surprising grace. It struck Cassie as such generosity of spirit that it couldn’t fail to impress. However, all Pippa said was, “‘Boat jumpers’ is pretty good.” She took a notebook from her bag and wrote down the phrase. Reading upside down, Cassie saw: “the possibility of being bold, confident, and fun.”