Gatherers and Hunters by Thomas Shapcott

were in their stage of reclaiming old local celebrities who had disappeaed into the distance abroad: Rolf Harris, Alan Seymour, Peter Porter, Lorna Sydney; they scoured the minor opera houses and the remainder bookshops for ancient Aussie exports. Not all returned, thank goodness. But Juliet Klein did, yes our Juliet did.
    No, I don’t know if her concert in the Adelaide Town Hall was a success, I arrived in Adelaide two days later, there was my Forum Club Conference and I was not going to miss that, and certainly not for cousin Juliet who had not bothered to write to me for over two years. I know why now but I did not know then.
    And, let me be frank about it, my own singing career – I was a contralto – had been withered by childbearing and kitchen routine. At exactly the time Juliet was being famous. Of course I was jealous – though I couldn’t admit it then!
    Juliet’s correspondence, at any time, was something like a postcard from Exotica written at her dictation by some Post Office clerk or gigilo or hotel menial. No, I am unjust to Juliet but who wouldn’t be, no who wouldn’t be, she was so damned, damned exasperating and so self-absorbed.
    All those years during our adolesence when I carried for, when I cared for her, when I did everything for her – so that she could swan around as if everything she did was so easy and spontaneous and elegant. Why, she practiced for hours just to walk across the intersection as if she could see a thing.
    I’m sorry, Denzel. Can you wipe that bit out? Just rewind and we’ll go over it.
    Juliet sang to a packed hall in Adelaide. Her voice was small but still pure. That’s what the reviews said. You should check them out in, say, the Barr Smith Library. She did not sing the Skye Boat Song. In fact I’m told it was an almost insulting program, ending with Schoenberg’s Book of the Hanging Gardens. Juliet always had an instinct for self-mutilation.
    I came down on the Friday after, and when I arrived at the hotel I was shown the room Kester and I had booked. Kester of course came down earlier. The smell of Juliet was in that room. It was pervasive. I arrived at 11 am and they had not done up the room. The double bed was still a tangle of sheets.
    Of course I recognised Juliet’s smell. I even remember becoming first aware of it, it was strong but, well I can’t explain. It was musky but somehow fragrant. I sound like a smell fetishist and perhaps I am. I was always scrupulous, myself, especially in those Queensland days. I was a compulsive bather.
    There is a world of difference between imagining something and having to confront it.
    What had happened in that hotel bedroom was irrefutably physical. And then the insult, later, of Kester trying to ‘include me in’. I believe he was trying to suggest something like a threesome! As if he could please himself with both of us!
    I cannot understand to this day how I remained calm and polite to the pair of them, how I even sat down with them to meals in the hotel dining room. We went as a threesome to two further concerts.
    It was not until later. If you want to know I think it was twelve months, but I had a lot of thinking to do. And, thank God, I did my thinking. I worked out my own destiny and it did not include either Kester or – if you even thought it possible – Juliet Klein.
    We were only cousins, though in a place like south-east Queensland we were family, of course I admit that. Perhaps in the end I only feel pity for her.
    I don’t have to feel anything for Kester. He scurried down to Melbourne. A good riddance. You say you have interviewed him already?
    Yes, of course you did.
    No, I don’t know when Juliet died. Do you? You’re a bit of a dark horse aren’t you, Denzel?
    I did receive a letter from some legal firm in Belfast, oh nearly a decade later, and it said Juliet Klein wanted me to have the enclosed pearl brooch, it was a family