The Lost Love Song by Minnie Darke

Author:Minnie Darke [Darke, Minnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143792321
Publisher: Penguin Random House Australia
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

AT 12 TAVISTOCK Row, Arie and Diana had dedicated the room with the bay window to the Steinway and installed themselves in the rear-facing room across the hallway, but the owners of the near-identical number 12A had configured their place quite differently. When fixing it up for an Airbnb, they’d decided to keep one room for storing personal effects, locking its door when they had guests, and to fit out the bigger, street-side room for their guests to sleep in.

It had polished floorboards, a painted fireplace with a dark timber mantel, and a high queen-sized bed covered in bright white bedding. By mid-morning that Saturday, the mercury was rising steeply and the blue of the sky was singed with the faint orange tint of heat-haze. Evie kneeled on the upholstered cushions of the bay window while she worked the plastic chains to partly close the blinds and block out some of the sun.

Evie loved this window seat, this room, this house, but she knew that very soon she would have to move on to a more realistic environment. Once her savings were exhausted and wherever she ended up choosing to settle, she wouldn’t be living in a house like this one. Unless she was house-sitting. If she ended up having to rent, then she’d be back to the type of accommodation that she could afford on whatever wage she could cobble together from her usual combination of low-paid McJobs.

Today she would haemorrhage yet more money. Her plan was to get an Uber out to Crosby’s house, stopping on the way to pick up four new tyres for the Beetle. It was going to be hot in that rickety shed of his, where she would face the task of remembering how to change a tyre.

While she’d managed to get a temporary permit that would allow her to drive the Beetle back to Tavistock Row, it would still have to be checked over by a mechanic before it could be fully re-registered, and Evie was in no doubt that this, too, would be an expensive process. Perhaps she should have just sold the old car, or even junked it; she could easily have picked up a small, cheap car for less than it was going to cost her to make the Beetle roadworthy. But she and the Beetle had been fellow travellers for quite a few years before she’d left it behind, and she felt as if she owed the car some loyalty. Sometimes, she mused, it could be expensive to have a sentimental soul.

Below her, the front yard of 12A looked like a landscape architect’s drawing, with its circular brick courtyard, timber lounges, and the wedges of grass kept green by the electronic watering system that clunked and hissed into action every other day in the pre-dawn hours. This yard was a stark contrast to next door’s, which was cut through with a cracked cement path and sprouted nothing but a single flowering gum tree that dropped its leaves and flowers onto parched and patchy grass.

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