Chapter One

A fortune teller once gave Polly three devastating predictions.

They would shape her life, the woman told her. Undeniable and inescapable.

The woman hadn’t used those exact words, but that was how Polly remembered it. The fortune teller was an immigrant from Korovinja, recently arrived too, if her accent and grasp of English were any indication. She’d said the predictions were written in the stars, maybe because she thought that sounded romantic. It was a cliche that crossed most cultural boundaries, in any case. She’d taken a long drag on one of her smelly European cigarettes and gazed into an actual crystal ball. She’d muttered incantations in her native language.

Toks had been there too. They were seventeen and walking around the fair sneaking sips from the hip flask Toks had swiped from her dad and filled with his slivovitz. It wrinkled Polly’s nose with every sip and Toks had laughed at her. She’d also snorted with laughter at whatever the woman had said in Korovinjan. “You’re a witch,” she’d sneered, but Polly had shushed her. Something in the woman’s manner made her want to hear these dire prophecies.

Music – specifically the piano – would feature in Polly’s future. The crystal ball decreed it. Probably wasn’t hard for the woman to guess. Polly wore a necklace that Toks had given her with three charms on it: musical notes, a treble clef and a tiny, silver baby grand.

The second part of the prophecy was firearms. Rifles, the fortune teller had clarified, reaching for the right word. They’d gotten there via the term ‘sniper fire’ and that sobered things up for a moment. Anyone escaping the conflict in Korovinja would know all about that.

And, thirdly, Ksenia Tokarycz.

(Toks had loved that bit.)

One would be Polly’s passion. One would be her salvation. One would be her ruin.

It was total bullshit, of course, but on days like this the prophecy always slipped back into Polly’s mind and swirled around like it was something.

Right now, she was combining all three undeniable and inescapable prophecies into one.

She was shooting Toks’ piano.

“Think that’s enough, Mum?”

Tilda stood just behind her on the slight rise at the edge of the dam. Polly felt her there and sighed. She was being self-indulgent. She knew that. It shouldn”t take her sixteen-year-old daughter to gently come and tell her so. Tilda was wise beyond her years. Wiser than her mum, that was for sure.

Polly aimed one more shot across the water and into the remains of the Steinway as it hung from the massive, ancient eucalypt at the edge of the dam.

She blocked her daughter out for just another moment. A grounding breath, the slow tip of her head to the scope, the gentle caress of her finger on the trigger. Something low this time, she thought. She’d obliterated good chunks of the upper register over the last few months – certain notes in particular – but there were enough low wires still left in the frame. She eyed them through the scope and counted up from the left of the cast iron plate. The B flat two octaves below middle C. It still had one wire left.

She let her shot fly on the depth of her exhale, that small moment of silence and stillness, that fleeting second of death at the bottom of her breath when everything stopped, when everything went quiet before she breathed in again. The Browning T-bolt .22 Long Rifle – her father’s and lovingly maintained – spat a single shot of hot metal across the dam and hit precisely the wire she was aiming for. It snapped with a twang as loud as the shot. It didn’t quite sound the way she’d hoped it would but it did set the remaining wires in the frame resonating.

It was a harp on the wind. A piano in a tree. It was her soul under three-hundred pounds of highly strung tension and far too many memories.

She lowered the rifle and gazed past the metal frame of the piano, past the tree that held it and out over the escarpment, its cliffs of sandstone high in pink and gold. The view stretched across the rolling green hills of the New South Wales south coast, over the smudge of a small town that gathered on the shore and then out over the ocean. The breeze was fresh with salt and the promise of an afternoon storm and it caught on the tones she’d wrung from the piano.

The sound wasn’t quite right. It never was.

“Did you have bad dreams, Mum?”

Polly listened to the song on the breeze. The harmonics, their overtones. It was almost an A minor pentatonic tuning now. Just a few more wires to remove. Once she had it just right she’d haul the piano frame down from the tree, re-wire it, re-tune it and hang it back up again.

It was a work in progress.

Polly dropped the magazine from the rifle and slipped it into her pocket. She turned to face her daughter.

“No dreams, but yeah, that’s enough.” She smiled. Tilda had that crease between her brows. A frown line that shouldn’t be there in one so young. “I’m alright, sweetsticks.”

Polly held out her arm and Tilda slipped underneath it. They strolled back up to the house, the piano still singing softly behind them.

“You still coming to the school with me this morning,” Tilda asked.

Tilda was the leader of the local primary school band. Quite an honour for a sixteen-year-old and Polly was proud of her. Tilda always tried to play it down by suggesting that conducting a rag-tag bunch of under-twelves with poorly tuned flutes and bashed up trumpets was the musical equivalent of the infinite monkey theorem – “You know, give enough monkeys enough typewriters and eventually they’ll produce Hamlet,” she’d say – but Polly knew otherwise. Tilda was a gifted musician herself and she was brilliant with the kids. They were doing an extra Saturday morning rehearsal for their performance at the Country Fair coming up in a few weeks. That the kids were giving up soccer and netball practice on a Saturday morning for the band spoke volumes for the esteem the kids and their parents held Tilda in.

“Sure,” said Polly. She nudged Tilda with her hip as they walked. “Said I would. But I’m taking the flutes and the clarinettes when you split them up.”

“Oh, great. Leave me with the monsters on trumpet.”

“You’re getting paid.”

Tilda grinned. “I know, right!”

It was her first paid job, aside from the money both of them made composing. She was still ridiculously happy about it. Polly grinned back. She loved this kid.

“I’ll give the playground piano a quick tune while we’re there,” Polly said. “Apparently it’s driving the teachers insane again.”

The house was a good hundred metres up a gentle, grass covered slope from the dam. One of the farm dogs bounded out to greet them as they got closer to the gardens around the main residence. He sniffed at the backs of their hands as they walked, then ran off again to snap at flies and sniff fox trails.

The property was a farm. Jerinja. Polly’s mother had named it in honour of the traditional owners of the land. It had been a farm when Polly had grown up on it. Now, she employed a manager to run their sixty-four Holstein cows across their land, and the eighty-three on the neighbouring property, as one joint dairy farm. When her parents had retired up the coast, Polly had built a series of off-grid cabins in secluded nooks around the property and turned the place into an artist’s retreat. She’d had the mad idea that writers, artists and musicians would be easier to wrangle than cows.

As she and Tilda climbed the stairs to the long, wide verandah on the main residence, she was forced to accept, not for the first time, that that wasn’t always the case.

Magpie was waiting for them.

“What brought this on, darls?” Magpie asked, as soon as they were within earshot. Magpie was sixty, rough as guts with a voice like sandpaper and an attitude just as abrasive. She shot a pointed look at the rifle slung over Polly’s arm. “I was trying to have a lie-in.”

Tilda snorted. “You weren’t. You knew it was croissant day. You were up.”

The older woman put a show into sounding jaded and disinterested. She wasn’t fooling anyone.

“I could be over croissants, you know,” she sniffed. “And Daz always gets the ones from Minh’s. Kuay’s are better.” She grumbled this in a vague kind of way, with the air of someone who knew her gripes were never taken seriously but who had no intention of stopping. She fixed Polly with a hard stare that demanded an answer to her original question.

“No reason,” Polly said.

Magpie took the gun off her. She held it up and lined up a shot out over the balcony, above the gardens, past the cottages, over the escarpment and the town by the shore and out to the ocean. She might have been aiming for New Zealand. The view was sensational. Her technique was dreadful. Polly still had the lead in her pocket.

“Pew-pew!”

Tilda snorted again. A teenager’s eternal disdain. “Daz surfs near Minh’s bakery. That’s why. And you put so much raspberry jam on them I’m surprised you can even tell the difference.” She stopped next to Magpie with one hand out for the rifle and her weight on one hip the way only a teenage girl can.

Magpie handed it over. “Rude,” she muttered.

“You love me,” Tilda sang. She struck a similar pose in front of Polly and Polly meekly handed over the ammunition. Tilda headed into the house.

It was February. On days like these – the long stretch of unbearably hot days before the first hints of autumn made them simply tolerable – everyone staying at Jerinja had breakfast together on the verandah, the long table full of delicious food, friendly conversation, books, newspapers and plans for the day. This weekend was a quiet one. Just their regulars – Magpie Lister, one of Australia’s most celebrated contemporary artists who had come for a week’s retreat eight years ago and never gone home, and Richard Castelli, a viola player with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. He joined them whenever he had two performance-free days in a row and they had a spare cabin.

Magpie and Richard were more than regulars. They were family. As were Daz, the chef at Jerinja, and his boyfriend, Justin. Daz and Justin were sheltering from their own demons. Most of the adults at Jerinja were hiding from something. Retreating.

And Tilda made six.

Magpie and Polly set plates around the big table on the verandah. There were four different kinds of homemade jams and marmalades, fresh fruit, and the Saturday papers. It was old fashioned but Daz picked up the papers each morning from the corner store near the surf beach. The glossy magazine section lay on top. Polly averted her eyes from the image on the cover but Magpie didn’t miss a thing.

“So that’s why,” she said, triumphantly. “I knew it.”

Polly wrinkled her nose. Sprung.

There was a picture of a woman on the front cover. She was dressed in black – a black shirt, high collar at her throat. Over it, a black suit jacket, but at her cuffs, a brilliant emerald green. It was a colour that matched her eyes, but no one looking at this picture would see that. Against a dark background she struck a wild, exuberant pose. Her eyes were closed, her head was thrown back and her arms were wide. Her hair was flung across her face and she was most definitely standing in a spotlight. She held a slender, white stick in one hand. The fingers of her other hand were outstretched but curled at the tips as if she was grasping something, controlling it.

She looked extraordinary. As beautiful as she’d always looked, Polly thought, and a million times better with age.

“Is Toks coming home, Mum?” Tilda was back with a tray of croissants Daz had re-warmed in the oven. Daz and Justin were just behind her. She nodded at the magazine. They all sat down. No one knew where Richard was.

“Well, she’s coming back to Australia, at any rate,” said Polly. She doubted Toks would actually come home. Toks hadn’t needed her home in sixteen years. There was no reason to imagine she might need it now.

“Oh, darls. You didn’t know!” breathed Magpie, attentive to nuance as always. “That must have hurt. Tilds, stop hogging the raspberry jam, you horrible girl.” Magpie didn’t do nuance herself.

Polly sighed and snagged a croissant from the tray. She had known. She’d known for months. She just hadn’t wanted to think about it.

The breakfast table was its usual clattering chaos. Tilda held the jam to ransom and Magpie did the same with the coffee pot, chuckling like a madwoman. Tilda contemplated her own empty mug and surrendered instantly. Justin disappeared behind the sports section and Daz regaled anyone who’d listen with his exploits that morning at the surf breaks off the point at his favourite beach. Polly looked out at the coast, if only to stop her eyes from dragging back to that picture, and she let the familiar, happy noise of her favourite people wash over her. If she concentrated, she could just hear the sound of the breeze through the wires of the piano frame in the tree down the hill. She shouldn’t listen, but it was a sound that would never leave her.

“It says she’s back here for two years.” Magpie was flicking through the magazine. “You bloody work at the Opera House, Poll. How could you not know that?”

“I tune the pianos at the Opera House. I’m not part of the orchestra. I just work there,” Polly protested. “And yes, everyone’s known for ages. I just haven’t been paying attention. Ksenia Tokarycz will be the artistic director and principal conductor of the Sydney Symphony for the next two years. She opens the season in about three weeks.”

Everyone paused in their breakfast and looked at her. Justin even dropped one corner of the sports section and peered around it. He raised his eyebrows.

“And?” drawled Magpie.

“And?” Polly poked her tongue out. Magpie didn’t give in. “And I don’t know how I feel about seeing her again.”

They were all silent for a moment. It annoyed Polly a little. They were being careful around her. It was kind of them, and considerate, but sometimes it got on her nerves. She was okay. She folded her arms. The fingers of one hand traced the scars on her upper arm. An old habit. Automatic. Nerves. She stopped doing it as soon as she saw Justin looking at her closely.

“Well, I had no idea she looked like that,” Magpie said, sounding altogether too lecherous for Polly’s liking. Magpie flicked through the mag again until she found another picture she approved of and held it up for the rest of the table like show-and-tell. She whistled.

“Pretty hot,” agreed Tilda.

Magpie blew a raspberry. “You’re sixteen, whelp.” She folded the magazine, reached across the table and thwacked Tilda on the side of the head with it.

Tilda threw a crusty croissant-end at her.

“Children.” Justin was as mild as ever. He went back to his paper.

“I can admire female beauty where I see it,” Tilda protested. “She’s gorgeous, Mum. A bit Gen X for me though.”

Polly snorted. “I should think so, daughter of mine. Toks is a year older than me.”

“And those pics made you want to go shoot her piano again?”

It was still ringing in the background. The soundtrack to her life.

Polly hunched her shoulders up to her ears and blew out a noisy sigh, shaking off her crummy mood.

“You can all stop looking at me like that. I’m fine. I’m just feeling my discontent, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. We were chasing the same dream, her and me. The same crazy ambition. We were going to pursue it together.” She slugged back her coffee and waved a hand at the front cover. “She got it. I didn’t. That’s all.”

Tilda leaned over and put her head on her shoulder. “You got me.”

“And I wouldn’t change that in a million years, sweetsticks,” Polly told her. “I wouldn’t change one thing.”

There was another silence because they all knew what that meant.

Then Magpie mimed puking under the table.

“God, Maggs, you are terrible.” Justin shook his paper out and the noise and chatter swelled like a switch had been flicked.

They talked about the coming Country Fair, the guests who would be arriving at the retreat later that day, a rumour Daz had heard about venison being available at the local butcher and the potential for pies. That set Magpie off again with some long rambling tale from her childhood that turned out to have no relevance to anything, and as soon as Daz and Justin clocked that the punchline could yet be another half hour away the meal was over and they were all standing to help clear away.

Polly couldn’t help but notice Tilda pulling the pages on Toks out of the magazine and putting them in her pocket. She grinned when she felt Polly watching.

“Whatever happened with you guys, she’s pretty cool, though. You have to admit that, Mum.”

Polly grinned back. Toks was definitely that. If her daughter had a bit of an obsession over one of the world’s most esteemed orchestral conductors who also just happened to own the farm next door, that was completely fine. Polly wasn’t entirely sure she was over her own obsession.

“Will you be working with her?” Tilda asked. Yep, there was a definite glint of fan-girl in her eyes.

“Principal conductors do not work with lowly piano technicians, love,” Polly said with a smile. “It’s entirely possible we won’t even see each other.”

“Aren’t there piano concertos and… stuff?”

“There are. And I do my work and get out of there long before the maestro sails in.” Polly gave Tilda a sideways squint. “If you’re after an autograph, ask Richard to get it. He’s principal viola.”

Richard was just coming up the verandah steps. He looked half asleep and was wearing, despite the warmth of the morning, an actual vintage smoking jacket.

“Ksenia Tokarycz scares the hell out of me,” he said. “Get your own autograph. Have I missed breakfast?”