The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser

Author:Michelle de Kretser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2017-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

When Pippa moved to Sydney to go to university, she missed the town in northern New South Wales where she had grown up. In Sydney everything was strange: noises, intersections, buildings, views. Someone had put a dimmer switch on the stars. The city was daredevil, filthy and full of people who knew where they were going. Driving to a party in Leichhardt, Pippa couldn’t get off Parramatta Road: every intersection displayed a ‘No Right Turn’ sign. ‘It’s like a Communist Party convention,’ said Vince, peering through the windscreen. He was from the country too, a different part of it, and no help with navigation. Later, when Pippa was living in a share house by the beach, she would lie in bed at night listening to the surf. She felt how easily the city could pound her, too. It was shocking and thrilling. Her thoughts ran with its rivers, flinging themselves into the sea. Sydney was a place where everything piled up behind you. All its windows watched and shone. Those sad palm trees—their broken green spokes! The city’s beauty, like its money, was self-important, calculated to stun. It judged all who came its way according to silent, iron rules. If you were not rich, you were nothing: that was the first rule. She was part of this place now, its snappy answers and impersonal brutishness. She set her teeth. She was going to be a writer. When she was famous, Sydney would be obliged to place commemorative plaques outside the houses where she had lived. Her future was as vast as the light beating its wings in clifftop parks.

By the time Matt and Pippa became friends, she was living on the other side of the city, and the Pacific was nowhere near. Not far from her house was a park where they would meet—Matt wouldn’t go to the house, because a woman who had no further use for him also lived there. The wreckage of that relationship was what Pippa and Matt picked through that spring, sitting under a lemon-scented gum. There were scribbles of sun on their faces and arms. Until then, Matt had been the subject of stories told by Pippa’s housemate late at night as a joint passed back and forth—they were rather scathing little stories. In the park, he grew real to Pippa, emerging from a pack of boys who jingled coins in their pockets. On a sticky November day, she arranged to meet him there in the late evening. They arrived at the same time, each bringing beer, and exclaimed at the same thing: the ghostliness of a white flowering hedge at dusk. Matt did most of the talking. As he spoke, he moved his hands, which were nothing like Pippa’s idea of a musician’s hands: they had dimples for knuckles. After a while, lying on her back in her thin cotton dress, Pippa wanted to take one of those fleshy hands and place it between her legs. At home, she would write down things Matt had said.

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