Five Bells Read Online Free

sun. Perhaps some refractive quality of the water, or those shining petals, perhaps the geography of sheltered spaces or the winking skyscrapers on the far shore, perhaps these together contributed to an increased incandescence.
    Catherine fumbled in her bag for her sunglasses, thinking of Luc’s pale shoulder, glimpsed from behind. She felt the brush, ghostlike, of an unshaven kiss. Elvis Costello’s ‘I Want You’ trailed mournfully through her head.
    How did Australians cope with all this light?
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    As Catherine sought a patch of shade and put on her sunglasses, she felt a fleeting nostalgia for dull sky and objects fogged over. Her mother’s sad face flickered intoremembrance, framed by a cheap nylon scarf and squinting in sea-spray. It must have been Sandymount, and the sea like liquid ash. It must have been just after. A week, no more. Midwinter. Mourning winter. Chrysanthemums, not roses.
    It was like a still from a fifties’ black and white movie – the woman’s face turned just so, panning to the light-sliced ocean, the tone Irish, miserable, and a strained soundtrack, a Bach cello. This scene may have been fiction, but it was already ineradicable.
    And now she looked across the wide, encircling stretch of the harbour, the enormous glaze of sun-fire and surface-dazzle stretching into the distance, and wondered what she was doing here, in Sydney, in Australia. Restlessness had caused her to move across the planet.. The job offer was a year-long placement, but it was enough; she had felt the need to flee London. She could not have stayed there, with Luc, becoming heartless in the mire of her grief. She hoped he would forgive her, and join her, and understand why she had fled.. The calm of their lives had been destroyed by her obdurate mourning. It had deformed their conversations, interrupted their contentment, filled to the brim all the spaces between them. It was eleven months now, and still she could not free herself.
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    Catherine noticed the tiny human shapes of climbers moving in a line upon the Bridge. They were cartoon-like in their simplicity and vaguely nonsensical in their endeavour.
    How small we might appear. Going nowhere, just up and down again.
    Flags waved at the summit of the bow, like a mountain conquered. There was not a single cloud. The sky was a high dome.
    I beheld the Bridge.
    Beheld. Where did that come from? Since the death there had been incursions of stray vocabularies, as though current language was worn and deficient. Hearken. That was another. Hearken. It suggested gold-leafed manuscripts, lovely decrepitude, and paper so brittle it must be held behind glass.
    Catherine turned away, almost tearful, from a jumble of associations she could neither disentangle nor inspect. How confused this place had made her, this Circular Quay, turning on the curve of lost time and unbidden recurrences.
    Catherine glimpsed the Scottish lovers retreating along the wharf. They were almost skipping. His arm rested around her shoulder and hers slid along his waist. The utter fit of their bodies was a beautiful thing to behold.

2
    It was a kind of tropical summer, cool in the dawning, steaming up as the sun rose, raining in late afternoon or at night. Ellie had not expected Sydney to carry such moistness, such skin scent and sensuality.
    That morning she pushed open the sash window, lifting against the resistance of weathered wood and time, feeling grateful to have found an old apartment so close to the city centre. It had the semi-dark, compartmentalised feel of Deco buildings – all deep red brick and shadowed nooks, cosy, European, reproducing a foreign shade remembered slant-wise from elsewhere. But the apartment suited well; it fitted the austerity and quiet inwardness of her bookish life. It was not a slab of a high rise, glassy and tough, such as bordered the freeways that curved down to the city and the harbour. Instead there were Moreton Bay figs, jacaranda