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There was a square hole cut into the wall behind my bed that had once been a fireplace. Somebody, long before I got there, had taped up the flue with a piece of cardboard. When the weather turned windy, black dust would sometimes breach the barrier and turn up in the hollow white space behind my pillows. The pillows, too, would fall into the fireplace hollow during rough sleep, or rough sex. The fireplace bothered me. Sometimes I could hear the sound of something that wasn’t the wind or shifting cardboard, something that might have been an animal, but anyway sounded alive.
On my first night in the house I tried to remove the piece of cardboard in the chimney. Somebody had stuck it to the plaster with pieces of masking tape. When I prodded at it the cardboard flipped out and along with it a mound of dirt and soot. Once the soot had settled I peered into the flue. Its edges were lined with newspapers, yellow at the edges before they blackened and became indistinguishable. I reached out and picked away at them. I could make out one of the pages, just barely. A marriage announcement for a man and a woman, the wedding held at St. Barnabas’s Church on Broadway, in the winter of 1932. A jolt of air sent forth another tumble of dirt, and the marriage announcement disintegrated in my fingers. I reached for the cardboard. I taped the chimney back up, and left the newspaper in fragments on the floor.
Now, a year later, the money I had saved was rapidly disappearing. I wrote sometimes, for magazines and literary journals and the street press, but it was never enough to keep me in rent. My student allowance had dried up with the end of semester and the official termination of my student status. I was paying full fare on the train.
In a word, I was drifting.
I had spent four years of university preparing to spend the rest of my life in the sandstone sanctum of academia. For years before I enrolled, I had passed by the golden buildings on the hill in Camperdown and imagined it to be a kind of utopia where men and women spent days on end walking the flagstones and making sense of all that was senseless. I thought it was where I belonged, and I had no plans that extended much beyond the reaches of its architecture. All year, my thesis supervisor had spent our weekly meetings laying the groundwork for my doctorate proposal. She said more women were needed to stop the discipline turning stale. Young women with good minds. Like me. But by the time November arrived I had applied for nothing, had written no proposals, had already missed deadlines. I sat in her office on that final afternoon surrounded by stacks of ungraded essays she had organized into neat rows across the rose-print carpet. A poster of Nick Cave glowered down from the corkboard above her desk. I looked out through her window to the already fruiting trees in the courtyard of the Woolley Building, and everything looked brighter, and more vivid, as though it might contain significance. Because I had never thought that I might miss it before. My supervisor hummed, and conceded, when I pointed out how neurotically inarticulate and exhausted I had become, that it might be best to wait a year.
I walked out of my supervisor’s office and down the long hallway to the wide-open exit. I sat down on the brick wall and lit a cigarette, although it was not a designated smoking area, and considered how senseless the last year I had spent in the Woolley Building seemed suddenly to be. The university was very tranquil at this time of day, and there was nobody to see me. My legs were crossed too tightly, and I imagine if someone had passed by and noticed I would have looked as though I were disappearing into the bushes growing up against the wall. I did not appear, from the outside, to have entered any sort of wilderness. But half a year ago I had sat on this same brick wall outside the Woolley Building waiting for a man, with a sense of anticipation and purpose that, by this afternoon, I had lost entirely. Its essential train of logic had been exposed as absurd, along with all the patterns of reason that I had believed I could rely on. I did not know what the future would look like anymore. I smoked the cigarette and the sun beat down and then I walked to Glebe, to buy the first novel I would read on those rocks in the summer at Gordon’s Bay.
By January the money was gone and I needed a job. The heat was relentless. We were told that the intense weather signaled the end of “stationarity.” The thousand-year storms no longer happened every thousand years. They seemed to occur yearly now, maybe more, along with the heat, the fire, and the floods. I went to bed at night with all the windows open. Bats conspired outside in the trees.
Directly across the street from my bedroom there was a car mechanic’s called Sydney Prestige. They announced their “excellence in European auto service” across the awning, but they were a constant source of angry arguments from irate BMW drivers claiming negligence and fraud. A paperbark tree grew out the front. Its roots broke open the pavement and tripped over the kids and the drunks who passed by. When the summer began, I tried to take charge of the windows. I dismantled the plastic blinds, bought curtain rods, and hung long strips of white fabric over the glass. I had thought that the white light they collected in the afternoon sun would quieten the room. But all through December the white fabric got soaked by afternoon storms and turned brown in the exhaust from the buses that stopped on the street below. After a while the curtains were filthy, and I stopped closing them when I undressed in the mornings. The men working across the street at the mechanic’s would look at me when I passed naked in front of the open windows, but nobody ever called out or said anything.
When I was a child a high fence had shielded my bedroom window, but my mother would insist that I close the blinds when I took my clothes off. People might see, she would say, looking into the thick shrubs that lined the fence. The seeing—it was evident to my mother—was a danger. But I never felt endangered when I undressed in front of the open windows in Redfern, and in the year before I left Sydney it stopped occurring to me that perhaps I ought to.
It was Maeve who told me that there were openings at the call center. I thought perhaps the job would be stressful, but I reasoned that it would only ever be temporary. And besides, the fact that Maeve already worked there all but guaranteed that they would hire me.
I was interviewed in a beige room on the seventh floor of a building in Darling Harbour, in the office of the country’s largest labor hire company. Four women were hired that day, and I was the only one who had finished high school. I figured out later that the hiring policy was based on the likelihood that the applicants would stick around, and the four of us didn’t look like we were doing anything else. As we left the group-interview stage and emerged from the elevator into the rush-hour foot traffic on Market Street, a girl with bleached hair and three inches of black roots told me she had failed the spelling test, but was pleased that they’d told her she’d receive a call in a couple of days. She made a sound that I think was meant to be laughter. I told her I had studied literature, and she asked me if that meant books.
The actual office was located on the other side of the city. It spanned the second floor of a skyscraper on the corner of Bathurst and Elizabeth Streets, overlooking Hyde Park. Technically, the office was on the same street that I lived on, and I could walk to work, but my stretch of Elizabeth Street was all kebab shops and bars and brothels, as though in the half hour it took to walk down Elizabeth Street to my house the city was gradually loosening its belt and taking off its clothes.