Someone, crossing his or her legs and bumping the table sent a glass rolling onto the carpet. Eliza leapt up stuffed her fingers into the paper napkin dispenser and pressed the wad she drew out against the edge of the table until the paper turned pink. Smith was alarmingly unfazed. Where I asked could we learn if the sisters had been joint tenants. In the Department of Lands building on the other side of the square he said. Individual land transactions are lodged with the Office using standardised forms known as Dealings. The transactions are recorded on a single Register, a copy of which is held by the owner, the original by the government, in that building, in a public archive.
Bernard was absorbed in something passing far below on the street. We told him, with deliberate though unpremeditated insincerity, that we would return to Wolloomooloo soon, and said goodbye to the silk, who nodded silently, smiling vaguely as if from a distance that was receiving him even as we backed towards the lifts, a luminous vanishing point that yawned between the arcadian thicket of the city, until the doors slid closed and it was just us, in the speculative box, if that’s the word, going down.
5
When the radio broke our grave was really dug. All day Dodge listened to A.B.C. Classic F.M., the melodic fog rolling first thing over the living room. I would leave her for school standing by the window in a slate coloured skirt maybe and a pinstriped blouse, swirling the insides of her cup to some semi heard fugue. At times she would say as if out of nowhere ah Sibelius, and with an effort I would recover a noise passed almost out of my perception, like surf or the rumble of traffic in the street below.
Over dinner the radio was retuned and Dodge chewed vacantly through the news, but I had been waiting all afternoon for that static fissure and the piping voice come sudden as a bat got in the window that flaps around the room trying to recover the open air. Not a bat a whatsit. The other. I came back from school one day to dead silence.
The radio is broken she said from the sofa where she appeared to have been watching herself in the reflection of her shoes.
She must have sensed my disappointment in the evenings because she came up with an incentive for return: she bought poppy seed cakes by some kind of correspondence and we had afternoon tea. She would pick an album to browse and if she’d left a turd she would be tender (though I would know then, there is a turd).
What happened to the piano I asked one afternoon, my eyes having fallen on the angle of unfaded wallpaper underlapping the bookcase.
Fell to pieces said Dodge. That’s impossible I said.
Ah she breathed and her eyes widened. That’s right. Mother smashed it up.
What for.
Well her voice trailed she was very upset. Perhaps because the pilot died. Beaten by his vans over the sea. She was a passionate woman my mother. A bitter fit.
Did you learn to play I asked.
Dodge looked surprised and raised her hands. She twiddled them over the air. Well yes. I was very good. I’m sorry I can’t play for you. Might have been your school mistress. It is a pity about the radio I ought to buy a new one. She didn’t, and a pall of silence settled down beneath the chatter. Silence settled down like dust.
Behind the soft yellow stone of the Department of Lands building Eliza and I made an important discovery. At first there was a misunderstanding. I, ever the boggler, had let Eliza do the talking because it was her family but in telling it her own story got so entangled with the anile saga of the flat and her admittedly notional ideas of antecedence that we almost ended up in the basement with the bound records going back to the beginning. Once it was clear that it was in fact a flat, not a farm that we were after we were shown to the maps, told that Canada may have patriated its constitution but we had introduced to the world the strata plan for apartments, which is not a map but a number of floor plans illustrating units in relation to a whole building (common property, by 1982, being titled apart) and which ought to give up the reference for the deed. At least I think that’s how it worked. This was before the automated land titles system launched the following Halloween. The rest had that hallucinatory detail that nine times out of ten in my experience fades irreparably after the saying. Actually come to think of it, ours was not a stratered building but a company title like there used to be. We did end up in the basement after all. Down there the adaptable New Form titles are loose leafed, may be typed as well as hand written, and previous owners are crossed out, but for a building like ours the Old Form titles come on a single oversized piece of paper with a memorial entered for every transaction in blanket historical sequence so that, unless the page fills up and you have to find its successor, the chain of ownership can be seen at a glance. We were hoping for evidence of a tortious conveyance. But in the folio that we turned out of its deep red binding we discovered the flat had never belonged to anyone but the Castor or the Albert family. Indeed the Roses were archaic renters. It was the end of the line. We had only one other question. The deed said nothing about the contents of the flat. Who did they belong to.
The fixtures or the furniture said the boy behind the desk.
What’s a fixture.
A chattel is presumed not to have become a fixture if it is resting on its own weight on the land. A fixture is. Difficult to remove without doing violence to the. Integrity of the real property. A hot water system.
The furniture.
The deed might not tell you. Your auntie could have signed a contract. You’ll have to follow that up with the owner.