Five Bells Read Online Free Page A

and eucalypts with shedding bark; there was birdsong – currawongs and honey-eaters – sounding above the buildings, and a scale of life beyond traffic-roar and the pitch of distraction wrought by cities. From here, in the bathroom, from the small window above the basin, Ellie could see the rooftops of her suburb, the TV dishes and antennas. She could see the renovated additions, the solar accessories and the rusted corrugation on the poorer houses. The whole vista of mortgages, families, graffiti in laneways, thedesire for a second car, a bigger life, and the meaning of it all. Just visible was the spire of an abandoned church. It pointed to the sky like the aerial to a lost wireless code.
    Ellie would discover today that she will never escape James. He was pressed into her life as they pressed together as fourteen-year-old lovers. Into her memory. Now and for evermore.
    Ellie would recall, with sharp clarity, as if she had prised a fading photograph from a powdery album, dear Miss Morrison, her seventh grade teacher. Although she had not thought of her for years, she will carry her all day, close as a new baby.
    Ellie will be troubled by the newspapers – the war going on in Iraq, the cruel atrocities, the violence that had persisted beyond any war-monger or peacenik reckoning. For all this, her anticipation of James, her childhood recall, the disturbing continuity of tales about war, Ellie was predisposed, this Saturday morning, to joy. She woke each day to the world, not expecting catastrophe. She woke in blue light, to a damp clear morning, and before the sun was a lit fuse in the gap between the curtains she had already found five objects of interest to consider and contemplate.
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    After rain during the night everything was bright and cleansed. There were still isolated pools of water, holding the sky in a sharp shine, and a fresh beaded gloss to the trees and the creepers. From next door a frangipani tree, an old twisted monster, sent fragrance into her rooms as a local blessing.
    Ellie had gone out early to buy the newspapers and found herself skipping over puddles and hurrying beneath dripping leaves. At each step she scuffed a fallen blossom. Frangipani stars lay everywhere, and sprinklings of jasmine; the browning petals of crepe myrtle had washed across the road and filled up the gutters. It was the world in a benign organic dissolution. Ellie collected a few of the frangipani blooms to place ina bowl on her table, holding them gently against her chest as she walked, her papers tucked in an awkward roll beneath her arm. Such a simple garnering. Such a fine clear sky. She was empty-headed and happy. She felt the frisky vague euphoria of a new day in a new city.
    In the bathroom Ellie applied kohl to her eyes and pink to her lips. She would be meeting James later on, after all these years, and was self-conscious in anticipation of the severity of his judgement. Her enhanced lips looked tarty and over-emphatic, but suitable for a harbourside lunch and the exhibitionism of Sydney cafés. She would go to Circular Quay early, since she’d not yet seen it, and wander about, lollygagging , as her father would say, so that she could look out when James came, and watch him unobserved. She would lollygag, people-watch, wander the city, finding the pleasure of eddying crowds and the wayward motions of human traffic, their tidal sweeps at traffic lights, their rhythmic currents of locomotion, doing nothing-in-particular until it was time for their meeting. Six weeks. She had been living in Sydney for six weeks and had not yet seen the Quay. The business of finding her apartment, the settling in; now James’s email had given her permission to take a day to sightsee.
    Ellie made herself coffee and spread the Saturday papers on the table. There were the usual horrors. The war in Iraq, bombings in Afghanistan, the rapacity of large powers and the subordination of the small. There was a photograph on the