On Brunswick Ground Read Online Free PDF

period of climactic misunderstandings, where furniture snarls and ceilings hang so low you feel squashed.
    â€˜Have you any idea what is going on with her husband?’
    She peers into her glass.
    â€˜About as much as you do.’
    I ask her if Mary is driving, flying or coming over by train.
    â€˜Flying.’
    The rain now seems to be lashing pebbles instead of drops against the window.
    â€˜Can you come and get her with me?’
    I lower the rice cracker I was going to put in my mouth and stare at her.
    As suddenly as it came, the storm has left, leaving behind it a rainless, shining darkness. It’s a long time since anyone has involved me. I think of Bernice’s word ‘committed.’ Why do we feel human again when we are asked to do something, when we feel useful? Why is digging the earth not enough? I should have learned my lesson. I brace myself to let it go, to let the thing loose. You can like people, drink with them, eat cheese and rice biscuits with them – you can lend yourself to them – without jumping on board. I breathe in and out a few times. I let the room settle. I let go of this woman and her story. Then I say ‘Okay.’ That’s okay too.
    Her eyes flicker over me. She has asked the right person. She’s like the drunk. She knows a stranger when she sees one. Even if I’m not leaving, her secret is as safe with me as if I were taking it overseas, far, far away from Brunswick.
    â€˜The plane is at eleven-thirty tomorrow. I can pick you up at eleven. Is that all right with you?’
    I nod.
    â€˜Yes, that’s fine with me.’
    Sarah’s gaze flickers over The Age lying on the table. Jill Meagher’s face is sailing on a sea of print. We both stare at it as if her death is in some way linked to every pain happening at the same time, however small by comparison. I point to the newspaper.
    â€˜I hunted on the web and found that a violent father physically abused the alleged killer. It wouldn’t excuse him, but it might explain something, mightn’t it? While Jill Meagher’s uncle told the press that her bubbliness and kindness were almost a cliché of happiness.’
    Sarah nods.
    â€˜A scary symmetry.’
    On the table is a book by Coetzee, Life and Times of Michael K , lent to me by a friend. Thinking of the man in prison, I grab it and point out a passage to her: ‘He thought of the hot dark hut, of strangers lying packed about him on their bunks, of air thick with derision. It is like going back to childhood, he thought: it is like a nightmare.’
    â€˜Do you write?’ she asks.
    She probably senses I am tinkering with something when she notices the books and notes scattered everywhere. It’s true I have sat at my laptop writing about this presence on the edge of my mind for so many years now that it feels like a joke. I am trying to tame a ghost, flitting through the pages, but it never shows its real face or its real story. Yet I hang on, grasping at straws. I don’t know why I do this. It has become a kind of reflex action, a morning habit I can’t shake off, haunted by an awareness older than my own. Memory seems to be the problem of my life.
    â€˜Is it a thesis?’
    I try and tell her.
    â€˜My grandmother died thirteen years before my birth, I never knew her. I don’t understand why I’m so hung up on her. All I have are the blank facts of her life. What I want is to discover who she really was. I do that by trying to write what she feels – felt, I mean.’
    Her ironic smile surfaces:
    â€˜We’re into women up to our necks, aren’t we?’
    She looks at her rice biscuit and adds:
    â€˜I also want to get to discover who my daughter really is.’
    I wonder if she’ll ever find out. Maybe someone, at this minute, is trying to find out who Jill Meagher really was too, as if there were some mystery behind her sunny personality. I notice, or perhaps I