Chapter 1 · Sample

Prologue: The Letter

The flat was on the third floor of a yellow-brick walk-up in Erskineville, two stops from the city, and at that hour of that morning in the second week of October it held the kind of quiet that belonged only to renters who did not yet have furniture they were afraid to scratch. Sara had been there four months. The kettle was new. The couch had come with the lease and smelled faintly of someone else's dog. On the kitchen bench were two mugs, both hers, both used, and a paperback splayed open on its face the way her mother had told her never to leave a book, because it broke the spine, because books were not gymnasts.

It was a Tuesday. October in Sydney was making up its mind. The window over the sink was open six inches and through it came the smell of jasmine from the wall opposite and, under that, the harder smell of warm asphalt. A magpie sang two notes, paused, sang the same two notes again, more insistently. Somewhere down on the street a man was telling another man, with great patience, that he had already explained this. Sara was twenty-two and had not yet learned to be embarrassed by how much she liked the sound of strangers being patient with one another.

She was making coffee in the plunger when the post came up through the slot in the door, a soft thump and slide that she registered without turning. She finished pouring. She added the milk. She carried the mug to the small round table she had bought from a Vietnamese woman in Marrickville for forty dollars, and only then did she go and pick up the mail.

There were three things. A flyer for a locksmith. A notice from the body corporate about the hot water. And an envelope so old that when she lifted it from the others a little brown crumb of paper came away from the corner and stayed on the floorboard like a fingernail clipping.

She stood in the hallway holding it.

It was a long envelope, the colour of weak tea, and the gum at the flap had given up sometime in the last century. The flap lay over rather than sealed. The paper had the soft furred quality of cloth that had been folded into a drawer and forgotten, and at the corners where it had been handled it was beginning to part along its own grain. Her name was written across the front in brown ink. Sara Halevi. And under that, 3/118 Erskineville Road, Erskineville, NSW 2043. The letters were neat without being careful. The hand was unfamiliar. It was also unplaceable in a way that took her a moment to name: it was not anyone's hand she knew, and it was not anyone's hand of any period she knew. It was not the looped copperplate of her grandmother's recipe cards. It was not the angular ballpoint of her father's lists. It sat outside the small set of handwritings she had learned to tell apart in twenty-two years of reading other people's notes, and that, more than the age of the paper, was what made her go and sit down.

She sat at the round table with the coffee cooling beside her and turned the envelope over. There was a postmark. The ink was faded but legible. Sydney G.P.O. And a date. The date was forty years before her birth.

She looked at the date for a long time. She looked at the new locksmith flyer next to it for the comfort of seeing something printed this year. Then she opened the envelope.

Inside was a single sheet of paper, folded once. It had not yellowed evenly; one half was the colour of old ivory and the other still nearly white, as though it had spent its life half in shadow. There were three lines on it. They were written in the same brown ink as the address, in the same hand.

Tomorrow morning at 9:14, walk to the corner of 47th and Marrickville. The door will be there. Do not be late.

There was no signature. There was no greeting. The page was otherwise blank, front and back, and when she held it to the light there was no watermark and no impression of a pen having pressed through from another sheet. She read it three times. She read it a fourth, because she had reached the end of it and had not in any meaningful way understood that she had read it.

Then she laughed. It was a single, surprised laugh, the kind people give when a stranger says hello to them by name. She put the letter down on the table, and she got up, and she rinsed the plunger because she had been raised by a woman who did not allow coffee grounds to set, and only then did she allow herself to think about it properly.

Sydney did not have a 47th Street. Sydney did not, as a city, do that kind of grid. Streets in Sydney had names — Cleveland, Wilson, Enmore, King — and the few that were numbered were numbered up to about Eighth, in the orderly suburbs out west, and even those gave up the pretence after a while and turned into avenues with the names of trees. There was no 47th. There had never been a 47th. And Marrickville was a suburb, a whole suburb, not a road; you could no more stand on the corner of 47th and Marrickville than you could stand on the corner of Hyde Park and Wednesday.

She knew this the way one knows the layout of one's own kitchen. She had lived in Sydney all her life apart from a year in Melbourne for an exchange she had cut short. She had grown up walking these streets with her father, who liked to recite, as they passed each one, the year it had been named and after whom; he had been the kind of accountant who memorised street names the way other men memorised batting averages. She did not need to check.

She checked anyway. She got her laptop and she searched, and the map gave her what she had known it would give her, which was nothing — a polite blank, a suggestion that perhaps she had meant Marrickville Road, which she had not. She tried it the other way. She tried 47 Marrickville, and got a house, a perfectly ordinary brown-brick house on Marrickville Road with a Hills Hoist visible from the satellite view. She tried 47th Street Sydney and got results from New York.

She closed the laptop and looked at the letter again.

She thought, briefly and seriously, about whether someone she knew would do this. The list of suspects was short and quickly exhausted. Her brother was not capable of this much patience. Her friend Yael was capable of it but would have signed it, because Yael could not bear to not be credited. Her ex would not have known the address; she had moved here after they ended things. And no one, none of them, could have aged a sheet of paper that convincingly. She had picked up the envelope. She had felt the corner crumble. Paper that old was old.

She thought, less briefly, about throwing it away.

She did not throw it away. She put it back in its envelope and she put the envelope on the round table and she went and had a shower, and she went to her job at the bookshop on Glebe Point Road, and she came home, and she ate two-minute noodles standing at the bench because she had not been to the shops, and at no point in that long ordinary day did she stop knowing exactly where the letter was. She could have told you, with her eyes closed, the angle at which it lay against the salt shaker.

She set her alarm for half past seven. She told herself, as she set it, that she was setting it for work. She did not work on Wednesdays.

The morning came up clean. The jasmine smell again, and the magpie, and a different two notes this time. She dressed without thinking about it: jeans, a grey jumper, the boots that were going at the heel. She put the letter in her jacket pocket, folded once along its old fold, and she went out.

The closest geographic plausibility, she had decided in the night, was the corner of Illawarra Road and Marrickville Road, where the suburb declared itself loudest, where the bakery with the spinach pies was, where the train line crossed overhead and the tiles of the station had been in the same configuration since before her father was born. If a corner of Marrickville existed anywhere in the city, it existed there. As for the 47th — she had decided, walking to the bus, that this part of the instruction was a test of good faith, and that she would simply stand at the corner of Illawarra and Marrickville and let the universe sort out its own arithmetic.

She got off the bus at four minutes past nine. She had ten minutes. She bought a coffee she did not want, from a man who called her love without looking up, and she stood with it across the road from the station, in a patch of sun that was already too warm for the jumper, and she watched the second hand of her watch.

At 9:13 the corner was as it always was. A woman with a pram waited for the lights. Two builders in high-vis stood smoking outside the pub. The 426 came down Illawarra Road and slowed and did not stop and went on. A pigeon worked at something on the kerb. The shopfront opposite — she had been looking at it without meaning to, because it was directly in her line of sight — was a dry cleaner's. Kim's Quality Dry Cleaning. The sign was yellow. There were two mannequins in the window in plastic suit-bags, and a cardboard cut-out of a smiling shirt giving a thumbs-up. She had walked past this dry cleaner perhaps fifty times in her life. She had once, when she was sixteen, picked up a dress for her mother from inside it and remembered the smell of the chemicals and the tiny brass bell over the door.

At 9:14 the shopfront opposite was a door.

There was no flicker. There was no sound. She did not see it change. She looked away, because the pigeon had at last got its prize and lifted off, and when she looked back the dry cleaner was gone and in its place, in the same width of frontage between the same two brick pilasters, was a door. It was a tall door, the colour of a deep green river, with a brass handle worn pale at the centre by a great many hands, and above it, where the yellow sign had been, a fanlight of pebbled glass. The mannequins were not there. The cardboard shirt was not there. The number above the fanlight, in iron figures fixed to the brick, was 47.

She stood with the bad coffee going cold in her hand. The woman with the pram crossed against the lights. The builders went on smoking. No one else, as far as she could tell, was looking at the door. The 423 came down Marrickville Road and stopped and a schoolboy got off and walked past the door without turning his head, the way one walks past a thing that has always been there.

Sara put the coffee down on the low brick wall beside her. She took the letter out of her pocket and held it, not because she needed to read it again but because it seemed, at that moment, the only object in the world that knew what was happening.

She crossed the road.

She was twenty-two years old, she lived in a yellow-brick flat in Erskineville, she had not yet written anything that anyone had read, and she put her hand on the brass handle of the door at 47 Marrickville Road, which had not been there the minute before and would not, she would later understand, be there the minute after, and she pushed it open and she went in.