her imagination she would press the accelerator and surge forward in a wild soaring through the welcoming sky.
So clearly did she see this death, she wondered if it were a common experience. She decided to ask her friend Nadia, older by a year and very much wiser, a gifted violinist, whose parents, so different from Duncan and Juliet, wanted their daughter to be a solo performer. Nadia had not liked the question and refused to answer. It was only when Anna persisted that gentle Nadia turned on her and grabbed her by the arms. ‘You can be so stupid sometimes,’ she had said. ‘When will you learn there are certain thoughts you must push away? When will you learn to turn your back? Anyone can see their death, but only a fool would give in to it.’
Nadia was a serious girl, which made her a valuable friend but a not-always-easy one, and while she had wisdom beyond her years, on this occasion Anna chose to ignore her. For the fact of the matter was, that far from fear and danger, flying through the air in the moment before death was a kind of ecstasy.
This is how it would be. She would be at the top of the cliff, would turn the car around so the sea is in front of her, the road descending for perhaps a hundred metres then curving to the right to follow the line of the cliff. She starts the car, takes the road only so far as the bend, continues straight ahead over the glimmering, heaving sea, hearing the rushing wind as she speeds through the air, and music rising in a fantastic discord that mocks the costive rhythms of her father. Never in her imaginings does she touch the water; she glides above the waves in a prolonged moment of insight and the music she hears is her own. So it happens, in her parents’ car at three in the morning, she always pauses before the descent to decide if this will be the night, and never actually decides, never actually knows who, at the last minute, turns the wheel, but feels the sadness of knowing what she has missed.
‘Are you afraid of dying?’ Anna asked Nadia a couple of days after the first death questions.
Nadia was back to her usual self and had been quick to answer. ‘Not afraid,’ she said, ‘just not ready.’
From Anna’s perspective, Nadia’s was a perfect life. Her parents believed the solo performer occupied a special place in the world, indeed, so exalted was the place, that when they heard Anna had discontinued her cello studies, they tried to persuade her to change her mind. They spoke of the loss, both to Anna and to music, spoke too, of the terrible disappointment for her father. Anna explained that Duncan fully supported her decision, and kept on explaining until they withdrew, but it was clear they did not understand. Their view was shaped by their daughter, the girl with everything, clever, talented and adored by all. ‘Not afraid,’ she had said to Anna’s question about death, ‘just not ready.’ Anna had looked at her and was puzzled, Nadia was the sort of person to live for ever. Then Nadia had laughed. ‘Just joking,’ she said.
But she was not. During the ten years Anna spent in London, she had written a handful of postcards to Nadia and each time had received a long and considered reply. On arriving back in Australia she had tried to contact her old friend. When she failed to locate her at her past two addresses, Anna rang her family to find out where she was living. Five months before, Nadia had killed herself; perfect Nadia who played the violin like an angel and was loved by everyone, had killed herself. ‘She’d been depressed for a long time,’ her mother said. ‘Even if we’d known, we couldn’t have stopped her.’ Nadia had drowned; weighed down with whisky and valium, she had walked into the ocean and sunk. ‘She always liked the sea,’ Anna said, feeling as if she should say something. ‘She never liked anything,’ her mother had replied.
Anna kept a photograph of Nadia on the mantlepiece. ‘This was Mummy’s friend Nadia,’ she would say to Lily. ‘She played the violin so beautifully people said she played like an angel.’ Often she would listen to her old tapes of Nadia, hearing now she was dead, the furious rushing at emotion that shaped the playing. And while she listened she would remember her wise friend who, even as a child, knew the perils of life, her soft-skinned, almost-smiling friend who never seemed quite large enough on a broad empty stage.
Not so long ago, while playing one of Nadia’s tapes, Lily had joined her; the child had listened without comment until the music was finished and then announced she wanted to be just like Nadia and play the violin like an angel. Anna had not known how to respond, so shocked was she to think Lily might have anything in common with Nadia and her short, stained life. She had studied her daughter, searching for Nadia’s porcelain calm, the self-crushing gentleness, but to her relief found only the outspoken child bursting the seams of her young life. And when she played, she showed none of Nadia’s outward reserve. Lily’s face, indeed her whole body, was fused with the music.
‘I’ll play like Nadia,’ Lily said again.
‘And so you will,’ Anna had replied, ‘like an angel.’
The violin was Lily’s first instrument but she could turn her hand to anything, the piano, percussion, even conducting a pets’ chorus. And Anna smiled, her daughter would be all right, and not just for the two days she was in Melbourne, Lily was a child to grasp opportunity with both hands and fly.
Anna roused herself and turned her thoughts to the day. First, some food; she was not hungry but with Duncan and her mother looming, it would be impossible to eat later. She took a roll from the freezer, cooked it under the griller and ate it with an apple. Next, her luggage; she chose the smaller of her two bags and packed quickly. She washed the dishes, tidied up, and with an hour to spare, left the house for a walk up the mountain.
A couple of years before, with Lily about to start school, Anna had decided to leave London and return to Australia. If not for Lily, she would have stayed, her friends were in London and her work, but she thought Australia would be better for the child. She had picked Tasmania because it was cool, it was said to be very beautiful, it had a relatively low cost of living, and it was an island, detached and contained like herself. A return to Melbourne, the city she loved, had been out of the question, and would remain so while her parents lived there. It was pure chance that had led her to this house on the mountain. A couple of weeks after her arrival in Hobart she had met Raphe at the market. He had been minding a friend’s herb stall when a sudden downpour had given him and Anna an undisturbed half-hour to become acquainted. It turned out the stall-owner had recently moved to the mainland and her house was available to rent. Anna decided to take it and two years ago she and Lily had moved in.
It was an old house even by Tasmanian standards, small and rickety and built of time-bleached timber, with a steep roof of streaky iron which was home to all manner of wild life. The first winter Anna had been terrified, it was as if the roof had been invaded by a troop of sumo wrestlers. Such was her relief when the wrestlers turned out to be a family of possums that she decided they could all live together amicably. The rats, however, with their scratchings and dashings and resonances of filth were quite another matter.
‘They’re only bush rats, hardly rats at all,’ Raphe had said, making no attempt to hide his humour.
‘A rat is a rat.’ And nothing would persuade Anna otherwise.
‘You’ll get used to them, you’ll have to, because there’s no getting rid of them. Look on it as an act of charity, giving shelter to a much-maligned and misunderstood species.’
After two years Anna still had not adjusted to them. And Raphe had been right, there was no getting rid of them; no matter how well-sealed the roof, they managed to find a way in, and once established they multiplied. She bristled at their scratchings and was always scared they would take over the rest of the house. Of course she could have moved, but had come to treasure the place too much to be driven away, even by rats. The house was perched high on Mt Wellington, just thirty minutes from Hobart, no neighbours she could see, but people close enough should she need them. And while there were times she missed the life of a large city, she had enjoyed a gentle blooming these past couple of years.
She pulled on her walking shoes and made her way up the steep incline via the path she had cut through the blackberries. Her chest still ached from last night’s cigarettes, and she pushed herself harder. The slurp of her shoes in the mulch of autumn rains joined with the hissing wind, and the call of birds too, several different kinds that Anna could not