Mar 26

Mar 26 The Time of the Ghosts (Enchanted Australia Book 1)

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The Time Of The Ghosts - book excerpt

Chapter One

Garema Place at lunchtime has a frantic air. Random groups of public servants pushing for food and a bit of sunshine. As if Canberra never has sun. As if the day is short. Communal benches having to be shared with strangers. Strips of wall crowded with smokers and with public servants eating their sandwiches. Not a comfortable place to start a story. Kiev in 1643 was more comfortable.

Ann discovered Kat on a park bench in Garema Place. Ann contemplated behind the shelter of a book — as she did every work lunchtime (hiding from her fellow masses) — how she would handle retirement. She saw vistas of nothingness in her future and was under-impressed by them.

Ann had her friends, but the two who mattered most only visited when invited. Close friends needed formalities, Lil explained in her soft voice, when Ann had suggested they drop in on each other from time to time. Mabel didn’t care. Mabel was old-fashioned and fed whoever turned up whenever they turned up. Ann wanted satellite grandchildren as Mabel had them. She wanted Mabel’s home and garden. She would never have told Mabel this, so she accepted Lil’s dictum. She became used to the formality.

It wasn’t like her to strike up conversations with strange teenagers with enormous eyes whose arms hugged their thin bodies in protection, but somehow she did. Or Kat spoke to her. They talked comfortably about the book Ann carried, which changed from day to day. It took a week of talking before Ann realised that Kat was willing to talk about books because Kat was living on the streets and was starved for reading.

Ann had never met a teenager like Kat. Compact and self-contained. Passionate beyond belief. Willing to do anything for other people. Not a scrap of an idea of how to take care of herself. Sharp as a razor. Emotionally whipped red raw. Full of contradictions.

Once Ann knew Kat was homeless, Kat found herself under the care of Lil and Mabel and Ann. Of the three, Ann was the baby.

None of them knew how they would give Kat the new start she had to have. None of them knew how a child so bright came to dead-end streets, but they refused to hand her over to authorities until the authorities asked. It was Lil who said it: “What that child needs is to take care of others, not to be taken care of and made subject to a system.”

Mabel-the-independent couldn’t see anyone who needed help. Ann said, “It occurred to me that there’s us,” but that was mostly trying to make sure Kat was okay.

It was Lil who had the final word. “Yes, there’s us. She can aid us with our elderly lives.”

Mabel snorted. “Speak for yourself. And Ann’s not even elderly.”

“To Kat I’m old. And she doesn’t know that you are seventy-five with the body of a thirty-year-old gardening maniac,” said Ann.

“And if Kat has family?”

“She will have family,” said Ann. “Let’s give her shelter, and she can sort herself out.”

“You have faith in human beings, then,” said Lil.

“Yes, I guess I do,” said Ann, surprised.

“I’ll be party to it, but I’m not talking her into it. The advantage of being twenty-five years past menopause is that I don’t have to handle hormones anymore. You get the blast furnace, Ann.”

Mabel’s life needs shaking up, thought Ann. She had too many definite beliefs. At least she would come to the party. And what a party it would be. Ann wanted to see Kat undermine the quiet certainties of her friends’ lives. Retirement no longer looked so dull.

***

In January Kat found herself installed in Lil’s granny flat, trading accommodation and utilities for housework. There were still the problems of food and spending money. All three older women had an unnatural desire to see Kat have money for clothes.

“Not those horrid black depressing things,” sniffed Mabel.

“If she wants to wear black, she can,” said Ann. “Give her space.”

“And how to we get that money to her? And how do we progress from there?”

“We can do both together.” Mabel lost her brick-wall attitude. “Let’s teach her what we know. We want to make her think she’s helping us, after all.”

“You might not require help, but I do,” said Ann.

“We know, dear,” Lil managed not to sound patronising. Maybe it was the soft accent. “And we know it’s not the retirement.”

Two days later, Mabel was disapproving again. “She won’t go back to school. She won’t ring her mother.”

“And she hates you for asking,” said Ann. “We know. Thank you for playing bad cop.” Ann’s heart was still breaking for Kat’s hurt, maybe because it couldn’t break for her own. She found it impossible to disapprove of anything Kat did. “She’s only fifteen. There’s time for her to find a path to learning.”

“Besides,” said Lil, “things are going on. We need someone young to learn from us.”

“How to cook,” said Mabel.

“Yes, that too.”

“It’s a good place to start, anyhow.” Ann’s brain moved from sentiment to organisation. “Remember the eighties?”

“I’d rather forget,” said Mabel. “Shoulder pads,” she reminded the others. “Power dressing.”

“I mean, remember when we three had dinner parties every month. Themed.”

“We were show-offs back then.” Mabel sounded wistful.

“Let’s do it again. One a month. Take it in turns.”

“And how would Kat be involved?”

“Cold hard cash,” said Lil. “She can serve and wash up and join us for coffee afterwards.”

“And if certain matters arise during the month,” Ann started to say.

“As they will,” interrupted Mabel.

“As they inevitably must,” said Lil.

“We talk about them where she can hear.”

“We make her belong,” said Ann.

“We scare her shitless,” said Lil. Ann and Mabel looked across, surprised at the language. “If the word fits, use it.”

***

Lil was tiny and delicate and had the whitest hair. She was also a cook. Kat looked at the kitchen and looked at the food and looked at the carefully-written instructions and wondered how anyone could think like that. Organised beyond belief.

The food was almost ready and all Kat had to do was the finishing touches and the serving and the washing up and the overhearing of gossip. A hatch next to the dining room made the last possible. Kat carefully rearranged the bench, so that she could hear without being seen.

There was something strange about her old ladies. I will defend them to the death, she thought, because they are uber-cool and besides they’re my old ladies, especially Ann. But I want to know what’s up.

Immediately, what was up was food. The first dish was a finished and prettified dish of cold beans. Lil had explained that the beans were in beef broth with onions and balsamic vinegar and garlic.

“Yum?” said Kat, dubiously. Lil had laughed and fed her a spoonful and it was fabulous.

“I learned this when I left home,” Lil explained. “It goes well with chickpeas.” And Kat tasted a spoon of the chickpea dish, made with honey and coriander. “Spanish flavours,” said Lil. “Old Spanish flavours.”

“Are you Spanish, then?”

“No, I was born in France.”

“You don’t sound French.”

“I don’t sound Parisian,” Lil corrected. “I sound perfectly French. I’m from Aquitaine.”

That meant nothing to Kat, but she nodded sagely.

She pawed a shred of chicken from the dish while Lil was carving and Lil nearly sliced a sliver off her slim finger. “Yummo,” she said, to avoid a scold.

“Green stuffed roast chicken. Keep it in the warming oven until it’s ready to serve.” Lil covered it with aluminium foil and showed Kat the warming oven. She also showed her how to make French style coffee and Middle Eastern style coffee.

“Why do you put dried orange peel in it?” Kat asked.

“I was taught it that way. Also with spices. Modern Greeks and Turks use cardamom.”

“I think I’ve tasted that,” Kat admitted.

“You are cosmopolitan, then,” Lil approved, her faint accent making each word clear and bell-like.

From there Kat was on her own in the kitchen, trying to recall all she had been shown, and to do it as if she had always been able to cook coffee on a stove, four times on and four times off the heat, and had always been able to time service and work out when the nougat-ish things got served.

She discovered all the things Lil hadn’t explained and got them mostly right. And all the time her new grandmothers were sitting at the dinner table, chatting away about children and work and gardens and why the sales were so bad this year.

When the coffee was finally sitting in front of the drinkers (Lil sipping a tiny, elegant dark pool of coffee, rich with grounds and orange peel; Mabel hugging a teacup filled with espresso; Ann drinking plunged decaf with soy), everyone relaxed. Kat sat on a kitchen stool, carefully tasting the spiced drink from her own tiny cup and trying not to be surprised.

The three ladies were talking about ghosts. Not in whispery voices aimed at sending shivers down a spine, but in the practical common-sense terms one would use to agree on a shopping list.

Kat disapproved. It took the magic from the world. She switched off half her hearing on purpose, the way she had for the last year at home when she was trying to not hear the baby. Instead of practical and solid occurrences, she gleaned stray information. Her spine shivered, delectably. Misty figures wandering. Whispering shadows. Things seen, glimpsed through gaps in the veil that separates life from death. It was all good.

Kat stored it up. She was going to ask Ann for more information. Ann always told everything to everyone. She’d sounded the most excited about ghosts, too. Wouldn’t strip the joy away. Kat wished Ann were her grandmother. All young and caring and open and friendly and willing to listen. She was perfect. Ghosts were perfect, too. The perfect conversation was Ann talking about ghosts. It would happen soon.

The conversation that stuck in her mind was quite different. It was of some small importance, because later on Kat would remember it as the first time she gave cheek to all her grandmothers at once.

The subject of the Inquisition came up during coffee. Kat was rather pleased she knew what it was.

“There are better topics for after dinner,” Mabel sniffed, as only Mabel could.

“Yes, but are there any as juicy?”

“How, juicy?” This was Lil, looking unimpressed.

Kat shifted so she could see everyone. This looked as if it was going to be good: Mabel bored, Lil unenthused, and Ann on a rampage. Until now, everyone had been so very polite.

“Torture and evil and chasing of witches.”

“Ann, my dear, do you think they could compete with old age?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Ann was determined to get a discussion going. “What’s old age compared with torture and evil monks?”

“I should be scared of men who hate sex?” Mabel almost shifted from being bored. Not quite, but she was on the verge of engaging.

Then Lil finished the topic for good. “I have met angry monks. Menopause is worse.”

“Mine wasn’t,” said Ann.

“My, weren’t you the lucky one,” said Mabel.

“But what about magic?”

“We were not talking about magic,” Lil pointed out, “but about the Inquisition. The Inquisition would not recognise non-Church magic if it was bitten in the . . .”

Ann interjected, “Child present!”

“Where?” asked Kat, helpfully, and started clearing the table.

And that was Kat’s first dinner party. It was more consequential than it appeared.