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 This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places and incidents either
are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely
coincidental.

First published in 2017

Copyright Michelle de Kretser 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or
10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational
institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body
thatadministers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia)
underthe Act.

Allen & Unwin

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Email: info@allenandunwin.com
Web: www.allenandunwin.com

Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

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 belonged to an old man whose rela-
T HE H O U S E BY T H E R I VE R
tionship to George Meshaw was complicated but easily covered
by cousin. He had lived there alone, with a painting that was
probably a Bonnard. Now he was in a nursing home, following
a stroke, and Georges mother had taken charge of the painting.
It was her idea that George should live in the house until it
was clear whether or not their cousin was coming home. She
had flown up to Sydney for the day, and George met her for a
late lunch. Georges mother wore a dark Melbourne dress and
asked the waiter for Really cold water, between remarking on
the humidity and the jacarandasyou would never guess that
she had lived in Sydney for the first thirty-one years of her life.
She bent her head over her handbag, and George found himself
looking at a scene from childhood. His mother was on the
phone, with the orange wall in the living room behind her. As

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 MICHELLE DE KRETSER

he watched her, she bent forward from the waist, still holding
the receiver. Her hair stood out around her head: George saw a
dark-centred golden flower. He couldnt have been more than
six but he understood that his mother was trying to block out
the noise around herhe folded like that, too, protecting a
book or a toy when Dinner! was calledand that this was
difficult because the room was full of the loud jazz his father
liked to play.
Over the years, Georges mothers hair had been various
colours and lengths, and now it was a soft yellow sunburst
again, still with that central dark star. She produced a super-
market receipt from her bag and read from the back of it: Hair
Apparent. Do or Dye.
The Head Gardener, replied George. Moody Hair.
They were in the habit of noting down the names of hair-
dressing salons for each other. His mother said, Also, Isaw this
in an airport shop: Stainless steel is immune to rust, discolor-
ation and corrosion. This makes it ideal for mens jewellery.
George and his mother had the same high laughhee hee
heeand otherwise didnt resemble each other at all. The
Bonnard was beside her, done up in cardboard and propped
on a chair. When George asked what it was like, his mother
said, A naked woman and wallpaper. He needed an excuse to
paintlight.
The house by the river was spacious and built of bricks
covered in white render. It was late spring when George moved
in, but the rooms on the ground floor were cold and dark. There
were mortuary-white tiles on the floor, and the lights were fluo-
rescent tubes that looked as if they would be fatal to insects.

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 THE LIFE TO COME

They had to be switched on even in the middle of the day. George

remembered that his mother had described the house as Medi-
terranean. Ridiculous second- hand visionsa turreted pink
villa with terraced gardens, a bowl of red fish at a windowhad
opened at once in his mind.
He had been back in Sydney for four years and still swam
gratefully in its impersonal ease. In Melbourne, where George
had lived since he was six, he had wanted to write about modern-
ism in Australian fiction for his PhD. After some difficulty, a
professor who would admit to having once read an Australian
novel was found. At their first meeting, she handed George a
reading list made up of French and German philosophers. When
George settled down to read these texts, he discovered some-
thing astonishing: the meaning of each word was clear and the
meaning of sentences baffled. Insignificant yet crucial words like
however and whichwords whose meaning was surely beyond
disputehad been deployed in ways that made no sense. It was
as unnerving as if George had seen a sunset in his east-facing
window, and for a while it was as mesmeric as any disturbance
to the order of things. When despair threatened, he transferred
his scholarship to a university in Sydney. There, George read
novels and books about novels and was wildly happy. He taught
a couple of tutorials to supplement his scholarship. Recently,
with his thesis more or less out of the way, he had begun to write
a novel at night.
A loggia with archways ran along the upper floor on the
river side of the house. That was where George ate his meals
and sometimes came to sit very early, as the park detached itself
from the night. Koels called, and currawongsthe birds who

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 MICHELLE DE KRETSER

had whistled over his childhood. Fifteen minutes by train from

the centre of the city, he lived among trees, birdsong, Greeks.
The Greeks, arriving forty years earlier, had seen paradise: cheap
real estate, sunlight for their stunted children. Fresh from civil
war and starvation, they were too ignorant to grasp what every
Australian knew: this was the wrong side of Sydney. Where was
the beach?
There were mornings when George left the house at sunrise,
crossed the river and turned into a road that ran beside the
quarried-out side of a hill. The sandstone was sheer and largely
obscured by greenery: giant gum trees fanned against the rock,
and native figs, vines, scrub. Brick bungalows cowered at the
base of the cliff and skulked on the ridge aboveit seemed an
affront for which they would all be punished. In the moist, grey
summer dawns, George felt that he was walking into a book he
had read long ago. The grainy light was a presage. Something
was comingrain, for certain, and a catastrophe.
Opposite the quarry, on the river side of the street, drive-
ways ran down to secretive yards. They belonged to houses that
faced the river, with lawns sloping down to the water. A sign
warned that the path here was known to flood. But bulky sand-
stone foundations and verandas strewn with wicker furniture
soothedthese houses were merely domestic, nothing like the
foreboding on which they turned their backs.

After Pippa moved in, George often came home from his walk to
the smell of coffee. They would drink it and eat Vegemite toast
on the loggia, and then George would go to bed. Pippa, too,

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 THE LIFE TO COME

kept irregular hours. Saving to go overseas, she was juggling

waitressing with part-time work in a sports store, and George
could never be sure of finding her at home. That was fine; the
idea was that they would live independentlyat least so it had
been settled in Georges mind. In her second year at university,
Pippa had been in his tutorial on The Fictive Self: a Pass student
whose effortful work George had pitied enough to bump up to
a Credit at the last moment. Not long ago, he had run into her
near the Reserve Desk at the library. Her hair lay in flat, uneven
pieces as if something had been chewing it. As the year drew
to a close, a lot of students looked like that: stripey and savage.
She had only one essay left to write, in my whole life, ever, said
Pippa. A peculiar thing happened: she held out a piece of paper,
and George feared he would see a note that began, Help! Iam
being held prisoner...
It was an invitation to a party. Pippa shared a house in
Coogee with a tall, ravishing girl called Katrina. When George
arrived, Katrina was standing by the drinks table on the side
veranda, talking about her cervix. He placed his six-pack in
a plastic tub of ice, and Pippa told him a few peoples names.
George had left Marrickville on a warm day, but by the time he
crossed the city, a southerly had got up. Every door and window
in Pippas house stood open. The dim corridor and all the rooms
were full of cold air. In his T-shirt and loose cotton trousers,
George moved from one group of people he didnt know to
another, trying to get out of the draught. The girls didnt seem
to notice it. They were Sydney girls, with short skirts and long,
bare arms. Recently, George had gone to an opening at a gallery
in the company of a visiting lecturer from Berlin. The artist was

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fashionable, and the gallerys three rooms were packed. Over

dinner, the German woman expressed mild astonishment at
the number of sex workers who had attended the opening. Is
this typical in Australia? she asked. George had to explain that
she had misunderstood the significance of shouty make-up,
tiny, shiny dresses and jewels so large they looked fake. Eastern
suburbs caste marks, they identified the arty, bookish daugh-
ters of property developers and CEOs. George was still adjusting
to them himself, after Melbourne, where the brainy girls wore
stiff, dark clothes like the inmates of nineteenth-century insti-
tutions, with here and there an exhibitionist in grey. Pippa had
stick limbs, that chewed fringe, a sharp little face. She would
have made an excellent orphan: black sacking was all that was
needed, and heavy, laced shoes. But she came out of the house
in scarlet stilettos and leopard-print satin, and found George
on the back patio. He had taken refuge there, in the lee of the
kitchendoor.
Ashamed to mention cold to this waif, George conjured a
headache. Pippa offered Tiger Balm and the use of her room.
The windows there were open: Katrina could be heard describ-
ing a minor surgical procedure on her ovaries. But when
George shut the door and lay down, he was out of the wind
at last. A long painting, purple and blue swirls, hung on the
wall facing Pippas bedGeorge closed his eyes at once. Long
ago, his mother had been a painter. A few survivors from that
erasevere, geometric abstractionscould be seen in her
flat in Melbourne, but for a long time now her involvement
with art had been confined to the upmarket school where
she taught.

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 THE LIFE TO COME

George fell asleep. When he woke, Pippa was there on the

end of the bed, unbuckling her sandals. She flexed her toes,
then sat sideways and swung her feet up. They were small,
chunky feet, George noticed, and her toenails were painted blue.
Katrina passed down the corridor, saying something about her
menstrual cycle. George wondered what she was majoring in.
Gender Studies? Performance Art? Obstetrics?
Communications, said Pippa. She was drinking bubbly;
it was the late 1990s, so people still called it champagne. The
soft white plastic cup dimpled under her fingers, and Pippa
remarked that she was stuck. The house would shortly be
reclaimed by Katrinas aunt, who was returning from Singapore.
Another house had been found for the girlsKatrinas family
had several at their disposalbut it wasnt available before the
beginning of March. Katrina was moving home for the summer,
but there were reasons why that wasnt an option for Pippa.
George told a lie about the purple painting and learned that it
was the work of Pippas boyfriend, Vince. Hes back at his folks
place in Mudgee, to save money so we can go travelling next
year. She spoke of Asia, of Europe, collapsing civilisations in
the sweeping Australian way.

In Marrickville, over Vegemite toast one morning, Pippa asked

whether the barking wasnt getting to George. He hadnt noticed
it but now heard the high, repetitive protest that went on and
on. Hes lonely, poor love, said Pippa. And bored. Stuck in a
yard by himself with nothing to do for hours.

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Greeks, said George. They dont like animals indoors. Its a

Mediterranean thing. The Arab influence.
Pippa said that in Mudgee they were exactly the same. And
no one in Vinces familys ever been outside New South Wales.
No way do they know any Arabs, either.
A few days later, she told George that the dogs name was
Bruce. He belonged to a hippie dipstick called Rhiannon,
who was renting on the cheaper, landward side of the street.
Pippa had grown up in a country town and still talked easily
to strangers. Bruce was a kelpie cross, George learned. Twelve
months old. Rhiannon got him from the RSPCA. She drives
him to an off-leash park when shes got time, but she works in
some mall up in Chatswood, so shes got this huge commute.
And then Tuesday nights the ashram, Friday nights the pub.
Shes not a bad person, she just hasnt got a clue. You should
see her yard: shes bought Bruce all these toys, like a dogs
achild.
Pippa had offered to walk Bruce when Rhiannon was busy.
Hes a working dog, he needs exercise. Guess what she said?
Dogs should run free. Its demeaning for an animal to walk on a
lead. It does really confusing things to their auras.
It was good of Pippa to have tried to help, said George.
I just feel so sorry for that poor dog.
She said the same thing a few evenings later. Bruce was
barking again. George heard him all the time now. It was diffi-
cult not to hold Pippa responsible. I love animals, she went on.
That must be why you eat so many of them, said George.
He didnt intend unkindness but was opposed to illogic. Pippas
fondness for broad, blurry statements twitched his nerves. I love

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India, she once announced, after watching a documentary on

TV. She had never been there. George, who had, most certainly
did not love India. He could also see that these declarations
werent really about animals or India but about Pippa: what they
proclaimed was her largeness of heart.
She was saying that she had considered being a vegetarian.
But the thing with personal food restrictions is they make eating
with other people really difficult. They destroy conviviality.
She brought out conviviality in the way people had once said
England or Communist: as if it settled all discussion. George
detected a borrowing: Pippa had come across the word some-
where and been impressed.
George looked on cooking as time stolen from books.
When he invited Pippa to move in for the summer he hadnt
thought about arrangements for food. He would have been
content to go on as usual, defrosting a pizza or grilling a chop.
But the day after she moved in, Pippa said, Im going through
a Thai phase. You cant cook Thai food for one. The cold,
white, murderous kitchen filled with the scent of coriander
and lemongrass pounded to a paste. George kept the fridge
stocked with riesling and beer. Pippa stir-fried fish with spring
onions and purple basil. She served a salad that combined
ginger andpork.
With nothing said, they had divided the house between
them. There were three empty bedrooms on the upper floor,
but Pippa installed herself in a room off the hall. She liked to
lie reading on a divan that stood under an aluminium-framed
window. There was nothing else in what must have been the
old mans living room; he had dotted cumbersome furniture

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throughout the house. Any one of his rooms would have done
as the set of a European playthe forbidding, minimalist kind.
Paperback novels accumulated around the divan. George
looked them over one day when Pippa was out. Most were
second-hand, and all had been published in the past twenty years.
Pippa read nothing older, nothing in translation and very little
that didnt concern womens lives. Her knowledge of history was
cloudy. Referring to a biography of Joan of Arc that she planned to
read, she placed its heroine in the Napoleonic Wars. Georges own
novel sang inside him. He was taking apart everything he knew
and putting it back together differently in ruled A4 notebooks. He
used a laptop for his thesis, but his novel had woken an instinct
that mingled superstition and veneration, and he was writing the
first draft by hand.

Summer intensified. George and Pippa ate mangoes for dessert.

Their flesh was the same colour as the wall behind Georges
mother on that long-ago day with the phone. The memory of
that scene kept following George around. It said so much about
his parents: for a start, the invasive way his father played records
full blast so that he could hear them no matter where he was in
the house. And why hadnt his mother turned down the volume
before answering the phone? Think first! George wanted to
shout. She often remarked that women of her generation had
been deceived. He knew that this meant, Iwas deceived. It was
her way of alluding to his fathers girlfriends. She had left when
she could no longer ignore them; the latest one had turned up
on Christmas morning with a present for George. But the reason

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George and his mother ended up in Melbourne was a man she

had met at a party. He lasted two years, just long enough for her
divorce to come through, then scampered home to his wife.
Pippa produced a dish of bananas prepared with turmeric
and cream. That was the evening two boys came to the door
in search of the old man. They looked like teenage real estate
agents, with ties and short, waxed hair, but suggested melo-
drama because they arrived during a storm. Lightning turned
the sky biblical behind them. For a blazing, vertiginous instant,
the iron veranda post was a cross. The boys shouted at each
other in V ietnamese, over the downpour, and everyone shouted
in English. At last, George wrote down the address of the nursing
home, and the boys plunged back into the rain.
It rained for three days. George went on with his novel at
night. The river rose, ran across the road and stopped the cars.
Long after the sun came back, and the traffic resumed, the path
beside the river stayed treacherous with mud. George slept
naked in the swampy afternoons; there was air-conditioning in
the rooms upstairs. Pippa wore shorts and a lime-green bikini
top; she was pretty much flat-chested. She rubbed ice cubes on
her wrists and went barefoot on the tiles. George noticed her
feet again. They were nuggety and rectangular, like a young
childs feeteven the sparkly turquoise nail polish belonged
to a child. He wondered if Pippa bothered with right and
left shoes.
Georges father taught computer science at a technical college
on the North Shore. Two or three times a year, he met up with
his son over a drink in the city; what followed was a conversa-
tion between strangers. George had left his new number on his

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fathers answering machine, but it was his mother who called.

She was in Lausanne, where an expert had declared that the
Bonnard was a fake. A good fake, mind you, said Georges
mother. He could hear her breathing in Switzerland. I guess Ill
be hanging on to the day job for a while.
The phone often rang. George took down messages from
Pippas 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
wouldnt 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 dis
covered. As a change from Thai, Pippa was serving small, sweet
prawns with lemon juice, brown bread and butter. George had
seen her tip the prawn heads into the binthey 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.

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George replied that free-range chickens, too, were killed.

But theres no unnecessary suffering.
George picked up a metal spatula. He almost said, Ah! So
thats 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 hera minor
figurein his novel.
Pippa said, Thats 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 herbreath.
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 enrol 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, Isuggest 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

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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 licence to gush. But coming from
her, the quotation so astonished him that he merely grunted.
Hedivided what was left of the cocktail between them, and ran
his finger round 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 Christ-
mases. Overnight, each berry had grown a mouldy 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: Rhiannons 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 anyones hopes.
*

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Autumn came, and Georges father died. A classic end, a clich

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 hadnt been in that part of Paddington for
twenty-three years. The last time he saw his father, they had
eaten big, juicy kangaroo steaksGeorge remembered the
blood slobbering out across their plates. Running lightly up
thestairs, 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 docu-
ments. One of them was a birth certificate. George knew and
always forgot that Meshaw wasnt his fathers 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 unshakeable
faith in the rational mind.
The last item in the wallet was a yellow envelope. George
hesitated, afraid of embarrassment, of pornographythere
had been a packet of condoms beside the bedbut at last he
looked inside. The envelope held twenty or so Polaroids. They
were photographs of Georges mother, angled, arty shots, many
of them out of focusone 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

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was exactly as George had rememberedthe orange wall, his

mothers bright, dark-centred hairalthough the image had
taken on a brownish-yellow tinge. What memory had blanked
from the scene was his fathers presence: he must have been
there, in that room full of jazz, aiming the camera at his wife.
The pieces in the puzzle of Georges parents shifted, acquired
new angles. All the Polaroids showed that yellow discolor-
ation; the chemicals were breaking down from exposure to
light. George pictured his father handling thephotos, laying
them out like data along the lid of the piano. He studied the
images again: unstable proofs of tenderness, the only photos
in theflat.
That evening, he called his mother. She hadnt come up
for the funeral, merely saying, Im 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
orangewall.
His mother cut him short, saying that she remembered the
picture. The one where you can see my roots have grown out?
Its so typical of your father to have kept that. Inever liked itI
didnt like you poking that camera at me ever.
Wait, said George. I took that picture?
All of them. Dont you remember? She said, An idiot girl
gave you a Polaroid camera. It became your favourite thing.
You loved watching the colours 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.
*

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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
barkinghe had been barking for hours; Rhiannon must have
talked her way into staying on, after all. George had just finished
the first draft of his novel. It was called Necessary Suffering. At
least for now; that was one of the things George wanted to think
about. But first he had to put together the puzzle of his parents.
Sometimes the reason his father saved the Polaroids was Georges
mother and sometimes it was Georgesometimes even the idiot
girl was involved. Georges brain wouldnt stop showing him the
photo with the telephone. He saw his mother folded in two with
her back to the wall. Something like a smudge kept dancing on
the edge of his mind. To study it calmly, George turned it into a
sentence written out in black on the white frame of the Polaroid:
Maybe she was trying to get away from me.
The sun rose over the misty park: an autumn sun, a flat red
disc that had strayed from a Japanese print. Later that day, George
closed the door of his fathers 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 colour 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.

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 MICHELLE DE KRETSER

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? Georges father said, If you stop
crying, you can keep anything that falls out of my pockets. Then
he stood on his hands.

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