North of Nowhere, South of Loss. Janette Turner Hospital

were a child leaving home. She can feel this pain, this kind of bleating stab, at the edge of one eye. Knife, that’s what it feels like. Switchblade. When he reaches for the money, palm up, she sees the tracks on his forearm, a dot matrix map. “Oh Giddie,” she says in a desperate rush, and it’s like finding blessed safe words to hold all the blood. “I hope you use clean needles.” The words feel bottomless. They hold the sadness neatly and nothing spills out.

      “What? Oh, yeah, well mostly. Whenever I can.”

      She puts the envelope back into her bag and sets it down between them. The black window stares at her, explaining nothing. Gideon begins to fidget in his seat. His ankles, jazz dancers, jiggle violently against hers. The black window says: Fix it then, Mr Fixit Man. Beth mouths at the window: Don’t. Not that it matters. Not that it matters to her.

      At the Blue Marlin Shopping Centre, a couple of blocks before her stop, Giddie bounces up like a rocket. “Hey, this is where I get off. Great seeing you, Beth. Take care of yourself.” He leans down and gives her a kiss on the cheek. He’s blinking furiously and his eyes, clear a few minutes ago, are bloodshot.

      “Yeah,” she says. “You too. Take care of yourself, Giddie.” She hangs onto him but he pulls irritably away.

      “C’mon, Beth, I’ll miss me stop.”

      She watches his jerky progress to the front of the bus, down the steps, out. She presses her nose to the window to wave, but when the bus moves he’s already sprinting across the parking lot, a blur. Unfixed. It isn’t until she gets to her own stop that she realises he’s taken her bag. She remembers now the way he held his left arm, pressed against his denim jacket, as he stumbled down the bus.

      She can feel the wave coming in. It’s tidal, a king tide. She stares at the tarantula, the sheet stuffed into her mouth. King tide. There’s a watery halo around the tarantula’s legs. Sobs are leaking into the room.

      She sits up, panicked. So much of the sheet is balled up in her mouth she’s afraid she will gag. But it’s Sue again, the next bed to hers. Damn, I warned her, Beth thinks, exasperated.

      She lifts her mosquito net, slides out, tiptoes to Sue’s bed, lifts the net and leans in. She puts her lips against Sue’s ear. “For God’s sake, stuff the sheet in your mouth,” she whispers savagely. Her own anxiety is acute. Sue has her hands up over her face, the way Beth’s mother used to when her father was drunk. It is always the worst worst thing. “Stop it” she hisses, furious, grabbing Sue’s wrists. “You’re asking for it, damn it.”

      Then she realises Sue’s asleep. Sue is flinching and bucking and moaning and crying in her sleep.

      Oh God, she thinks. Any second now, someone’s going to wake and hear this shit. Show blood and you’re dead, that’s the rule. Her mind is racing.

      Okay, she thinks. Nothing else for it. Swift and efficient, she slides into Sue’s bed, jabs the mosquito net back under the mattress, grabs the girl in her arms, and muffles Sue’s face between her breasts. “It’s all right,” she murmurs. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay, everything’s going to be all right.” Sue’s snuffling sobbing breath is warm against her. With her left hand, she strokes Sue’s hair. “Go to sleep now,” she murmurs. “Go to sleep. It’s all right, baby, it’s okay.”

      Sue’s body shifts slightly, softening, rearranging itself, moving up against Beth’s like an infant curling into its mother. Her breathing turns quiet. Beth goes on stroking Sue’s hair with one hand, and stuffs the other into her own mouth. At the fleshy place where her thumb joins the palm of her hand, she bites down so hard she tastes blood.

FOR MR VOSS OR OCCUPANT

      “Foreclosures,” Mr Watson was in the habit of saying, “are a steal.”

      Further wise thoughts would follow: a foreclosure was manna from heaven, a sweetheart deal, a buyer’s dream. He did not, however, run through the litany for this particular client, the young mother whose pubescent daughter had refused to get out of the car, the young single mother it would appear, hubba, hubba maybe he’d try his luck — God, if people knew how much quick hot fucking took place in empty rooms behind For Sale signs! — but no, on second thought, he smelled trouble right off the bat. A bit off, he reckoned; a bit out of it, the way academic types always were. A bit pinko, for sure, the stink of Sydney (Balmain, even Newtown maybe) coming off her like Four-X pong off a pub, a real wolverine in sheep’s clothing, weird clothing, they were all Commies down there, dykes, women’s libbers, worse. Put your thing in the wrong place with her kind, chop chop and goodbye. One way or another, she was bound to get herself into strife in Brisbane, and serve her right.

      Still, a sale was a sale. For the political and moral sensibilities of a live prospect, he had nothing but respect.

      A “distress sale”, he called it delicately, evasively, though not a single distressing thought entered Laura White’s head when she saw the house. Not at first. It was as though she had willed desire into solid form.

      “Oh,” she said. “I grew up in a house with wide verandahs.” Stricken almost, mesmerised, soft rot of the railing and lattice against her back, she leaned into childhood. “Everyone used to close them in for sleepouts. To think there’s still a house … and so close to the city. I can’t believe my luck.”

      Nor could Mr Watson. Not a modern piece of plumbing in sight, stove out of a bloody museum, but she was hooked before she walked through the door. Piece of cake. (Though the daughter sitting out there in the blue Mazda might be a question mark. He could hear pistol-cracks of rock music like rude punctuation.)

      “And the roof!” the mother sighed.

      “Yeah, well. Gonna have to put in a few quid. I got a friend can give you a good deal on clay tiles.”

      “Oh no,” she said. She got quite choked up at the thought of hearing rain on corrugated iron again. Command performances: January cyclones, cloudbursts, thunderbolts, you lay in bed and the universe did its quadraphonic full-frontal subtropical act. “And the garden!”

      Garden? Bit of a jungle if you wanted Mr Watson’s private opinion, but who was he to complain?

      “All this space and right in the city,” she marvelled.

      “Yeah, well!” Mr Watson said. “The Gap, you know. Very desirable, very pricey these days.” She wasn’t the usual type for The Gap. Volvo country, Saab city, it was yuppie turf, they went for it like lemmings. They got turned on by the idea of being half an hour from their stockbroker’s one way, half an hour from the rainforest the other, but they liked family rooms and built-in bars and swimming pools to go with it. You had to be fly to unload a place like this in a location like The Gap. A double lot too, what a waste. If it weren’t for the bloody zoning laws, a developer would snap it up in two shakes. “That’s why the price is once in a lifetime,” he said fervently.

      “I’ll take it.”

      “What?” She threw him off completely, breaking the rules like that, not even trying to haggle. It made him uneasy. It was like seeing someone naked in public, it put you at a disadvantage somehow. From sheer habit he said belligerently, “Nobody in their right mind quibbles about an asking price like this.”

      “No,” she said, startled. “I’m not quibbling.”

      “Hafta be crazy.” He couldn’t quite get hold of the reins, couldn’t stop his mouth from galloping along a track it knew too well.

      Her lust for the place was too obvious, she thought. Unfashionable, this intense desire to come home; unfashionable to express it even in Brisbane these days. She walked along the front verandah, trailing her hand along its railing, getting acquainted, sighing over the lattice, burying her head in the jasmine that was matted around the posts. She had the feeling that she had to justify something, pass a test, explain.