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indeed,’ I say. ‘But my favourite is Life is a Dance .’
    ‘Ah, yes,’ he sighs. ‘ Das Leben ein Tanz oder Der Tanz ein Leben .’
    ‘Indeed. So much better than The Last Waltz , wouldn’t you say?’
    The preliminaries have been dealt with.
    ‘Do you have something for me?’ I relax into the music, turning the page of the score with a snap of paper.
    ‘Yes.’ And then louder: ‘I’ve so enjoyed your Strauss, Miss Oxnam. Please accept a tip.’
    His right hand reaches across the top of the piano and a fewpennies clank into the change dish perched there. He steadies himself with his left hand, which drops a folded paper behind the upraised keyboard cover. He doffs his hat and moves away.
     
    I’ve finished my shift, having unobtrusively collected the note from behind the keyboard cover. Now I’m following the patches of gaslight along Charlotte Street. On my right, a decaying drift of jasmine. On my left, warm exhalations: hops, sweat and damp smoke coughed out through the mouths of open hotel doors. I dodge lewd suggestions, bold hands. Even plain girls are pretty in the drunken dark. Outside the Great Northern, a quick sidestep saves me from yet another fight tumbling into the street, the jerky dance spurred on by a string-pulling crowd in the doorway.
    I slip across the road towards the night beyond the town. Charlotte Street is muddy from recent rain. I do my best to avoid the worst of the puddles, holding up my skirt in one hand. A yolk-yellow moon hangs low in the cloud-sling of the sky, and a light breeze brings to my nose a whiff of the lavender oil I’ve rubbed onto my skin to deter mosquitos. But the Mediterranean can’t compete for long with the tropics’ sweet rot and cloying jasmine soon muscles in again.
    How romantic it sounds: a secret tryst at midnight, on the banks of the Endeavour River. I’m to meet a handsome man, as I do every month on the eighth. Pity it’s work and not play. Even so, I smooth back my hair, bite my bottom lip to bring some colour to it, as though he’ll be able to see me in the dark.
    I scramble down the bank. Debauched sounds of cursing and laughter follow me, faint ghosts of themselves, tearing voice-strips off the edges of the air. In the distance, beyond the river and over the ocean, a purple razor of lightning is sharpening itself, backand forth, on the leathery strop of the horizon. The night turns sickly white for a brief moment, then blackens again. On that edge between cold light and nothingness, between dark trees and the cream between them, I think I see movement to my right. I’m used to Percy’s — or are they Samuel Roberts’s? — spies. They follow me constantly. My room at the boarding house is searched regularly. The vase I keep on my writing desk to check has been moved minutely when I’ve been out. At least three times, probably more. But whatever evidence of betrayal they’re looking for, they won’t find it.
    I pass the massive bauhinia tree where I leave the coded notes I’m given at French Charley’s. I presume one of Percy’s elves descends to spirit the mysterious missives away, decode them, and pass them on to another elf like myself. The maw in the side of the bole gapes threateningly. I never stick my hand inside without imagining a snake curled up in the dark, ready to strike. And yet the routine has become, if not monotonous, then predictable.
    Tonight, I go further. Small twigs and leaves crack under my boots. Fruit bats rustle overhead, squeaking. They make me think of funerals in the rain. Each of them a rat-faced undertaker shielded by a black umbrella of wings. I shiver just a little when I feel a hand on my arm.
    ‘Mary.’ A familiar if disembodied voice.
    I turn. The bowl of his pipe glows red, a single fevered eye.
    ‘Percy.’ I smell his pine cologne, say the first thing that comes to mind. ‘Is one of your men following me?’
    ‘Maybe.’ He’s calm. ‘What of it?’
    Should I ever need evidence of how