nor any address for her. Only the date and the name of the café where we were to meet.’
Daniel blinked, feeling as if a genie had appeared to grant three wishes. Only it was one wish, and he must grant it. ‘Maybe she won’t come . . .’
‘She will come,’ the man said. He had begun to shiver slightly like a snake-bit cat Daniel had once seen. ‘We were to meet . . .’ the man whispered, ‘in the café where I first saw her. Such an absurd . . . name – The Smoking Dog – Rue de Gris. July seven, at dusk. I thought she was mad but she said she would be there, and that knowing this, I would have to come. She was right. Tell her that. I would have come to her.’ After a pause he added, ‘The café has . . . had a view of Sacré-Coeur.’
Daniel had looked up the French words in a phonetic dictionary. Rue de Gris merely meant Grey Street, and Sacré-Coeur was probably Sacred Heart Basilica. He had looked up the street on a map of Paris and found that there were seven different Grey Streets, but only one that would afford a view of the basilica.
Somewhere in the hotel a baby began to cry, and Daniel turned away from the window. He felt wide awake because back home it was early afternoon. The thought that his sense of time connected him to Australia reassured him. He heard men’s voices in the street below, the words unintelligible, a hard blat of some other language. Daniel took up the television control on the bedside console, pressed the mute button and channel-surfed. Usually he found it soothing to see people talking silently, gesticulating and laughing, cooking and singing or driving along roads. But tonight – today – for the first time, the images seemed too personal, too full of meanings he did not want to puzzle out.
He lay back and watched the play of light reflected on the wall instead, wondering as he had done before if the dead man and the woman he had promised to meet had been lovers.
‘Let sleeping dogs lie,’ his mother might have said. A tough, stocky, practical little farmer’s wife, she had performed a staggering number of daily duties, her favourite being the care of a small beloved flock of hysterical silkies. Yet Daniel had never seen his mother as a domestic slave. She had been a woman with a sharp edge to her tongue and strong opinions, which she did not hesitate to air, and she had ruled the house with an iron will.
Discipline had been the provenance of his mother, too. She had wielded a willow switch with the same determined efficiency she had applied to cleaning the rugs, as if misbehaviour could be beaten out in much the same way as dust. Age had bent and narrowed his father, faded his blue eyes, but his mother had become more and more solid, without ever being fat, more densely energetic.
David fancied that in another life his father might have been a librarian or a scholar in a university, for he loved to read, but his mother could only ever have been a farmer’s wife. Daniel had loved his father, and respected him, but it had always seemed a waste of time to bother wading through a lot of words written by someone he didn’t know when he could be roaming hills rippling with dry grass, or swimming in the tea-coloured water of the creek. It did not matter to him that he was barely average at school, since he was to inherit and work the farm.
Of course it hadn’t turned out that way. His father had overextended himself to buy some long-overdue farm equipment and then there were a couple of bad drought years, and then a year of floods, and the bank foreclosed. They had gone under with barely a struggle, and Daniel’s mind stuttered to the weeks of packing, to watching his mother crating her beloved silkies for sale. Daniel hated everything about the unit in suburbia to which they had moved, but he knew his parents needed his income to help pay the mortgage.
He had gone to work in a trucking company; then, three months after they had moved into town, his father had a heart attack on the way to church, crashing the ute and killing himself and his wife both. She had died on impact, but his father