North of Nowhere, South of Loss. Janette Turner Hospital

COPYRIGHT

      Fourth Estate

      A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Fourth Estate

      Copyright © Janette Turner Hospital 2003

      The right of Janette Turner Hospital to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007149308

      Ebook Edition © JUNE 2016 ISBN: 9780007394869

      Version: 2016-08-24

DEDICATION

       For Peter

       1942–1998

       In memoriam

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Ocean of Brisbane

North of Nowhere

For Mr Voss or Occupant

       Unperformed Experiments Have No Results

       Our Own Little Kakadu

       Cape Tribulation

       Flight

       Frames and Wonders

       Nativity

       Credit Repair

       South of Loss

       Night Train

       Litany for the Homeland

       The End-of-the-Line End-of-the-World Disco

       Keep Reading

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Other Books by

       About the Publisher

THE OCEAN OF BRISBANE

      His voice came out of the black space between the two projectors. When a slide slipped off the wall, dropping into nowhere, the tiered funnel of the lecture theatre was so dark that the darkness seemed to rub itself against her, furry, like the legs of spiders. She shivered. Then a bubble of light would come, a coloured diagram or a photograph would appear on the screen straight ahead but below her, and words would unfold themselves on the other screen, the one that was angled across a corner of the room, high up, and therefore eye-level with the tier where she sat. She would see him then for a moment, shadowy, a juggler of ideas, images, impenetrable words, remote control buttons, a magician waving his arms in the twilight cast by the screens.

      I watched her watching him.

      She was trying to explain him to herself.

      I watched how she held onto her own body, arms hugged tightly, and how she kept shivering (it looked like shivering) in the sweltering airless room.

      Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper to her. I wanted to put my hand on her arm, soothing, but it would have alarmed her. Don’t worry, I wanted to whisper. He’s just as much a mystery to himself.

      He spoke, and his words settled lightly onto the cantilevered screen in black block capitals, crowding, jostling like branches full of crows, she had always been frightened of crows, the way they swooped at you, dive-bombed, that time on the farm at Camp Mountain, long before Brisbane, she was still a child at Camp Mountain, the beaks slashing at her head (or maybe magpies, was it? had they been magpies?), they go for the eyes, Always wear a hat, teachers warned, and if attacked, cover the eyes.

      ELECTRON MICROSCOPY, the screen said.

      OF CRYSTALS.

      And then in a fluttering rush: OF AN ALPHA-HELICAL COILED-COIL PROTEIN EXTRACTED FROM THE OOTHECA OF THE PRAYING MANTIS.

      The black letters swooped at her and instinctively she covered her eyes. I watched the way her hands shook slightly (how would she speak to him? how had they ever really? and yet after all these years she had been hoping … but what language could they possibly use?) and all the time, through her fingers, she was watching for crevices of hope, for something to grab onto, and there was something, crystals, yes, she recognised that, he used to have a set, those heavy headphones, telling them he could hear Indonesia, England, the cricket scores, winding the world into his room, swallowing it, he had this terrible hunger, this unnatural … this kind of greed, she could never