Prologue

One more week and he is waiting, his heart faltering, on her front step. In his hands he holds a fish.

She smokes slowly, in the bath, and the slight scent of it fills the house. Later, she will tell him how impressively the bathwater holds sound, how in her underwater ears his door knock is suspended for a second, stilled time. This afternoon her half-closed eye has spiked the bathroom light globe into a yellow grevilleal star, and she is all watery conductor of the senses. So that when the fly screen judders and his knuckles strike the frosted glass the sound of it moves through the fibres of glass and wood and plaster and iron bath claw and water, and it enters her body like a note struck on a bell.

Her hair is wet down her back when she finds him there on her doorstep with electricity rising in him, and holding out to her a fish. Martin has been home for the weekend. He has caught the small bream with his line on the Pittwater beach in the early morning, pulled it flipping and sliding from the water. Has driven it, wrapped in newspaper in a polystyrene icebox on the seat beside him, through the late morning city and then all through the afternoon, climbing the mountain roads to her door.

But now she is standing there and he knows he is only some stranger on her doorstep, yammering and gaping with the open mouth of the uncertain, the mad. He holds out to her the newspaper and this shining platinum flower from the sea.

And all he knows is please take this fish from my hands. His heart in spasm, please keep standing there, hand on doorframe and dripping hair and green dress casting its light on your skin, please open out your hands for this simple offered thing.

© Charlotte Wood 2004