A moth had come in through the open window that faced the promenade and the sea. The moth grazed a candle flame and fell, to flop about on the polished table top. Laura closed her eyes. Some time passed and Rose was quiet. Thoughts were sliding through Laura’s head, some bright like sparks in a storm — she wondered where the special train was now — and some obscure — a face she had glimpsed in the audience tonight, a bearded man, someone she didn’t know but for some reason was thinking of as a good person, solid and equitable. Laura yawned and let the incongruous thought fly away. The wings of the maimed moth whispered on the carpet. Then Laura was walking down the long staircase in the tower at Summer-fort, walking backwards in the dark.
Her parents were dead, and she had been left in the care of her older brother. He always kept her close, as though he, and he alone, should be enough for her. But the day had come when she had to go against him — or give in to him for good. She was in agony, she had to make a choice. Her brother had told her that she must either send her suitor away, or go away with him. She sent him away. She was too ashamed to look into his face, as he’d stood before her begging her for an explanation, for a word. But they weren’t alone. Her brother was by the door, bristling with power, compelling her to be quiet. She didn’t look into her suitor’s face, but at his hands, his slender fingers and clean cuffs.
He fell silent, and walked away from her.
That was the moment into which, it seemed, she was born. The moment when her brother left the room to see her suitor to the door. She looked up after them, through the doors to the hallway, at the tall arched window on the landing. She heard the front door close. She discovered that she had to look at her suitor’s face once more. If she did not, it seemed that he’d only ever appear to her in memory turning away.
She ran after him, out of the room and down the stairs.
From the window on the landing she saw him crossing the lawn to the stables, to where a groom stood ready, holding his horse. She ran into the lower hall. Someone spoke her name. The hall was full of light and the reflections of light. The servants who tried to hamper her flight appeared only as silhouettes. Her brother’s stern voice sounded behind her. She didn’t pause. She opened the door and sprinted out under the deep portico, down its steep steps, looking back once at the house, its sandstone pillars and pediment.
There was a gale blowing outside, from behind the house, and she was swept up into it. She saw that her suitor’s horse was already at the foot of the hill, at the iron gates to the estate.
She didn’t take the path, but ran across the close-clipped green grass. The wind was frightening and forceful. The tall eucalyptus trees were shedding their dead branches. Bark was flying from the trees in strips like tattered canvas. It was on the ground everywhere, threatening to trip her. She had to run. She must get to him before he was gone. She must have him touch her cheek again. She sped with giant steps down the steep lawn. A tree branch fell in front of her.
She dodged to avoid the fallen limb and lost her footing, dropping on to one knee on the springy grass. As she got up again she looked to one side and noticed that someone was building a new garden wall. She saw red dust, and raw new bricks. She saw labourers in shapeless, grey clothes — their trouser legs gathered at the ankles. Then she was on her feet and ready to run again. Her suitor would never hear her call out to him against this wind. She ran.
The heroine ran on, leaving Laura Hame standing on the lawn of the heroine’s house. She didn’t see a woman run away from her. She only saw the wind, one last fierce gust that flattened her silk robe against the backs of her legs, bent the trees and cleared a corridor in its own debris. Then the wind stopped blowing, and the garden was silent, but for the insects ticking like a cooling engine.
Laura went to look at the wall the labourers were building.
It was a long wall with arches that made a frame for the view. It was the sort of wall on which gardeners train climbing roses. The men were making bricks. Laura saw a clay pit, and the frames for shaping slick red clay. She saw a kiln with a blackened chimney. She watched a man stamping the drying, unfired bricks, marking each with the flat of an arrowhead. She saw that, while the clothes the men wore were grey and stained with brick dust, they too were marked with arrowheads in a darker grey. And she saw that it was shackles that gathered their dusty trouser legs at their ankles.
Only one of the men seemed to see her. He straightened from his work — mixing mortar — and looked at her. He glanced about him, furtive, perhaps looking for an overseer.
There was no overseer in sight.
The man put his trowel down and came over to Laura. He walked stooped over, seemed at once cowering and eager. He kept looking about him — but none of the other prisoners noticed he’d abandoned his task.
Laura leant towards him.
He opened his mouth. A trickle of silver river sand spilled from it. His mouth stretched wide. It was packed with sand. He thrust his fingers into the sand in his mouth. The day grew suddenly dark, as though thick cloud had crossed the sun. The garden turned the colour of prison clothes — and cold. The world was leaving Laura. She was dying out of it. She reached out to the man and grabbed his arm. It felt soft, like sand, and yielded, creaking, beneath her fingers.
The man had fished something out of the sand in his mouth. A crumpled paper. He unfolded it for Laura to see, raised it to her eyes.
Before the world grew dark Laura read the few lines at the foot of the page. She was able to read it because the words assembled themselves around a core of letters she’d already encountered:
Yours
Cas Doran
Secretary of the Interior
The light faded. The words, paper, prisoner, all the world sank away.
LAURA OPENED her eyes on the Hame suite. The stumps of the candles were bearded with melted wax. Rose breathed peacefully beside her. Rose’s eyes moved under her lids, back and forth, scanning some beautiful thing.
Laura lay on her back and looked at the warm pool of candlelight on the ceiling. She knew she couldn’t climb back on to the dream that had tossed her and taken off without her. She could feel it still, like the beginnings of a fever. She was reluctant to go to sleep again, but didn’t want to disturb Rose, so got up and left the room.
The Beholder kept a fire watch, a group of men who patrolled the dream palace’s balconies and stairways on their soft-shoed feet. Men with keen noses for smoke, who kept the sand buckets filled and their eyes on a board of switches which, if flipped, would set an alarm bell ringing in each room.
At three a.m. the dream palace was hushed, its guests breathing softly, sleep troubled only by the emotions of the dream. Grace Tiebold lay on her back in the dais bed, her face softly visible in the light of the dimmed chandelier. The dreamer wore her heroine’s brother’s face, and was frowning sternly in her sleep.
The eight men of the fire watch were at their station in a cosy room on the second tier of balconies. The room was like those that opened out on to ballrooms, where chaperones sit to keep an eye on the antics of young people on the dance floor. The fire watch’s window opened on to the silent auditorium.
The men spun around, startled, when Laura appeared at the door. ‘Am I dreaming?’ said one of the younger men — a bit of a joker.
The girl blushed. She asked where the manager had got to. She said she was looking for someone to take her home.
The men exchanged glances. One cleared his throat and one scratched his head.
‘He’s asleep,’ the girl guessed.
‘I’m afraid so, Miss. You see — no one ever wakes up.’ He wasn’t apologising. She was the one at fault, since no one ever woke.
‘Dream too rich for your blood?’ said the joker, and arched an eyebrow. He’d just finished doing his rounds, had pressed his ear to several doors and had been excited by the sounds of a male curse and female sigh.
One of his workmates clipped him over the back of the head. ‘Sorry about him, Mi
ss Hame. He has terrible manners. Would it be acceptable to you if one of us walked you?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, ‘but not him.’ She didn’t even glance at the joker as she said this. He found himself blushing.
‘I’ll see you home myself,’ said the oldest man. He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. He found a lamp and lit her way down the back stairs to the stage door.
The Strand was empty, its streetlamps pale in the moonlight. The westerly had dropped. The girl walked quietly beside her escort. Now and then she turned to look at the regular flashing light on the end of So Long Spit, miles away across the bay. Laura thought about the dream. It wasn’t the first time she had strayed inside one of her aunt’s dreams before. She had never mentioned it to Grace. Laura didn’t want her aunt to feel that she’d somehow failed to keep Laura’s attention. The dream had been exciting, and Laura couldn’t see why it hadn’t kept her in its grip, why her dreaming self would choose to show more interest in prisoners building a wall and — most of all — why the dream should give her Mamie’s father’s name. A name formed around the letters on the fragment of paper Uncle Chorley had fished from the mouth of a dead ranger. Did it mean anything? What did it mean?
It seemed to Laura that the faraway flashing light was tapping on her eyes, as though asking to be let into her head. But Laura was tired, and her mind remained dark, and puzzled.
They reached the gates to Summerfort. The house was above them, hidden by the bulk of the hill, but the man could see the driveway running through flax and tea tree. The drive was paved with broken scallop shells, which shone in the moonlight and slithered noisily against each other when the girl stepped on to them. ‘I’ll be fine from here,’ she said.
‘Goodnight, Miss Hame,’ said the man. He stood at the gate holding his lamp high, till she disappeared around the bend in the drive.
Fourteen
Grace appeared with the breakfast tray. She carried the morning paper tucked under her arm.
Chorley saw that his wife looked pleased with herself, so didn’t hurry to comment on her dream. He sat up in bed and stretched out his arms. Grace peered at him speculatively and tossed him the newspaper. He opened it and settled back on the pillows.
The room was quiet. Chorley could hear the sea and the cheerful sound of sugar lumps dropped into hot tea and the crisp crusts on rolls pierced by a buttery knife.
Grace handed Chorley his coffee and climbed into the bed. She put the buttered rolls down between them. The Tiebolds began to fill the bed with crumbs — only Grace giving a momentary thought to the person whose job it was to clean up after them. (She still remembered having to clean tobacco dust and pipe ash off the counter of her tobacconist father’s little shop.)
Husband and wife swapped pages of the paper and murmured to one another about the news. For instance, the buzz about who would be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. They agreed that one man in particular struck them as a good choice. ‘Solid and equitable,’ Grace said.
‘Yes,’ Chorley agreed, ‘though, for the life of me, I can’t think of anything else I know about the man.’ He shook his head, and put the paper down, stretched his legs and said, ‘Grace, why must I always fall into your villains’ heads? I never seem to have a choice. And I can’t say that I enjoyed being that jealous brother. He spent the whole dream breathing in clean air and breathing out smoke.’ He pulled a face and Grace for a moment saw the luxurious fury of her heroine’s controlling brother.
‘He’s light-headed all the time from holding his breath,’ Grace said, and kissed her husband on his slightly scratchy morning jaw. ‘I like that.’ Grace sighed and shrugged and nestled down in the bed.
Rose burst into her parent’s room. ‘Laura got up and went home last night,’ she said. She was waving a note about. ‘She writes that she couldn’t get back to sleep.’
‘I thought so,’ Grace said.
Chorley looked down at his wife, worried. Grace’s tone was so strange, so knowing. ‘Laura was very upset yesterday,’ he said. ‘No wonder her attention wandered.’
‘No,’ said Grace, ‘she wandered. She’s done it before. She wanders about my dreams as if —’ Grace screwed up her face. ‘I was about to say, “as if they’re her own”, but when I catch my dreams I follow them faithfully.’
Chorley was shaking his head at his wife.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘what Laura does — no one does that. Not even Tziga can do that — go exploring, as if it’s a world, not a dream.’
‘Mother?’ said Rose. She was disturbed by her mother’s tone.
‘I thought so,’ Grace said again, brooding. ‘I felt her taking a tour backstage.’
‘Hang on, Grace,’ said Chorley. ‘At one time, for months, you imposed my face on the faces of all your heroes — whatever other faces they wore in the dreams you caught.’
‘It’s not at all the same as your face appearing in my dreams,’ Grace said to Chorley.
‘But when you did that you were changing something, Grace, even if it was unintentional. All Laura does is change things a little.’
‘I don’t go rummaging in other people’s cupboards,’ Grace said, softly. Then she dropped the subject.
But Rose wasn’t about to let it drop. She felt that she could make a better job of defending Laura than her father had. ‘You mustn’t be mad at her, Ma. Laura doesn’t mean to be annoying. She’s like that at school — always drifting — and teachers think it’s insolence. Only sometimes she isn’t able to pay attention to what she’s supposed to be paying attention to. It’s like Da says, her mind wanders. She used to get dreadful marks in Comprehension because she was always supposing that the questions were trick questions and there was some less obvious answer that the teachers really wanted.’
Grace shook her head. ‘I’m not angry at her, Rose.’
‘Good,’ said Rose. ‘At least she’s not making your heroes look like anyone else — like, for instance, that handsome lifeguard on the infants’ beach, who we think is a smackerel.’
‘What on earth is a smackerel, Rose?’
‘Oh, you know, a smashing mackerel, which is to say a miracle,’ Rose explained.
Chorley frowned at his daughter. ‘This isn’t George Mason’s nephew we’re talking about again?’
‘No!’ Rose was disgusted. ‘He was brassy and parboiled. The lifeguard is a god!’ Then she said that if her parents had finished arguing she would leave them in peace. But only if they had.
They found themselves making promises as if she was the adult and they children, then they watched her raid half the contents of their breakfast tray and swan out of the room. For a moment they stared at the closed door. Then Grace said to Chorley, ‘Laura isn’t just wandering around behind my scenery. Dreams don’t have a backstage. It’s all real, and it goes on and on, a big world in a small box. Every dream is like the Place itself, vast, and no place to wander alone.
‘Look — it’s a good day’s walk between Doorhandle and Tricksie Bend, but in the Place you can walk for weeks and still find nothing you can recognise from the other side. Tziga and I talked about doing a transverse trip. Our talk inspired a group of rangers, who set out with a lot of food and water, and a stash of Wakeful.’ Grace paused to take her husband’s hand. She said, ‘They were never seen again.’
Part II
The Try
One
The main autumn Try took place on the road west of Doorhandle. It was always a circus. At Doorhandle there were dozens of officials overseeing the registration of candidates from around five in the morning. Police were present as crowd control. Marquees and refreshment stands were set up for the sightseers, journalists, the candidates themselves and their families. At the end of each Try day the grass in the forest clearing was trampled flat. Hundreds Tried at Doorhandle.
At Tricksie Bend the Try was usually a quiet event, for Coal Bay was a small catchment area, despite the summer population of holidaymakers at Sisters Beac
h. At Tricksie Bend, on the morning of Laura and Rose’s Try, the Regulatory Body had only to register forty-five nervous adolescents, and two adults.
Laura and Rose arrived with only half an hour to spare. They came with Chorley. Grace was acting as an official, and had gone ahead of her family.
As their car passed through the village, Laura and Rose had turned to look back through the window at the downhill view of its houses. They exchanged a look.
The time had come. It seemed that within a day they had gone from not being allowed to do something to being pushed into it. For fifteen years they had steered clear of the border, now they were steering straight for it.
Chorley turned the car off the road. It bounced up a hill towards the meadow on the bluff above the river. Other vehicles had already flattened a trail through the dry grass. A small crowd of onlookers was clustered around parked cars and carriages. The candidates were already in formation further up the slope, standing knee-deep in golden late summer grass, along a line marked by a shiny blue satin ribbon. The ribbon was strung between two stanchions and extended right across the meadow.
Laura said, ‘Does that mark where the border is?’
‘They line you up along the ribbon,’ Chorley said. ‘The border is several paces beyond, I think.’
The cars, carriages, horses in nosebags, the small crowd milling under the shade of hand-held umbrellas, the short line of candidates and the finishing-line ribbon were all humble and unceremonious. Rose was disappointed. ‘It’s not what I expected,’ she said.
Her father told her that Tricksie Bend was favoured by parents who supposed their children might suffer from stage fright — who were afraid that stage fright might affect their candidate’s performance. ‘Of course your mother and I know that’s nonsense. But Tricksie Bend is more private. That makes it better for you.’