Butler's Ringlet by Laurence Fearnley

Author:Laurence Fearnley [Avery, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143771715
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

She flicked through the pages, slowly at first, then faster, as if searching for one image in particular. She returned to the beginning and searched again. All the photographs were of Ecki. Nowhere within the pages of the three albums before her was a single image of her own face – or Warwick’s. She must have known that. She was, after all, the one who had arranged the albums. She realised she hadn’t even registered the absence of their faces at the time of mounting the photographs. What struck her as completely odd now must at one time have struck her as normal.

Three albums of Ecki’s face. There had to be more. She felt a sense of panic rise in her. It was as if she was being forced to question the nature of her own identity. As if the lack of an image raised the question of her very existence.

She could hear Ecki’s voice. He was outside with Warwick. A deeper voice – Warwick’s – replied to a question she had not heard. Without understanding why, she felt the full weight of her unrest. She had spent several weeks in this place – half of her holiday – and in all of that time Warwick had acted as if she was not quite a stranger, but a friend of a friend. He’d been considerate, but tied to that consideration was an impenetrable sense of formality that prevented things from being what they had been before.

Yet, as far as she could tell, there was no other person in Warwick’s life. She had glanced quickly through his bathroom cabinet, rummaged through his chest of drawers while pretending to look for a jersey, and even looked through his kitchen cupboards for signs of someone, but had found nothing. Neither had she heard any awkward phone calls during which Warwick had left the room in order to talk quietly, in private, to another person. There was no trace of another human: no flowers arranged in jam jars, no newly painted kitchen chairs, no brightly coloured duvet covers with matching pillowcases. There was nothing. There was nobody.

Sabine remembered back to the autumn morning in Würzburg. She had been walking to work when a bus had passed her. Mounted on its side had been an advertisement for an airline company offering cheap flights to Australia and New Zealand. The next evening, while walking home, the bus had passed her again. At the time it had struck her as an amusing coincidence. But, the following morning she had caught a glimpse of it once more. She had looked out for it that evening and, once again, it had been there, pulling away from the stop opposite the secondary school.

In the space of those few moments she had read the smaller print on the advertisement: the cost of the airfare. It had struck her as affordable. When, three days later, she saw the bus once more, she took it as a sign. She was meant to return to New Zealand.

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