PROLOGUE

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This was our fourth move. The previous eight years spent shifting around the Southern Peninsula, from our first ramshackle asbestos-riddled cottage to larger and more attractive houses. In tune with my brother's increasing success, his every career advance corresponded with an improvement in our own circumstances.

The five of us, father, mother, I and my two sons, were returning to the city this time. Better for everyone, it was decided. Closer to everyone, it was assumed. This newly-erected middle town-house in a group of three situated very near to where life began for us in Australia, forty five years ago. The visual changes in the landscape over the missed years glaring; my eyes long accustomed to open spaces - wide expanses of undulating land and sweeping views of Port Phillip Bay .

The town-house we were now calling home a stylized abomination, its appearance varying only sparingly from the other forty or so developments in the street. That's what they call them, developments; a curious term for tearing down beautiful and quaint old homes on large lots and cramming in as many units as possible in their place. Local Councilors gloated and vociferously supported this encroachment; multi-story apartments and town-houses saturating neighborhoods where once, anything over two stories was considered a visual anathema.

Where the fuck had the backyards gone? This was my first thought as I gazed out of the upstairs windows at condensed rooftops; only the odd surviving oak tree breaking the monotony of brown and grey tiles. Everybody crammed in. Tiny, unusable balconies, pocket-sized courtyards, mostly paved and spotted with the odd potted lemon or apricot tree; left over mementos from the burgeoning Greek and Italian gardens once flourishing year-round.

Unpacking the dozens of boxes full of books and stacking them against the garage walls, I spotted a folded yellow paper on the floor. After the devastation of losing all my writing, any newly discovered paper produced acute anticipation. Assuming it some forgotten note left between the pages of a book, I unfolded it. The few sentences were written in an unfamiliar hand - nothing I'd ever scribbled through the years:

"Two sons later in life. A difficult journey ahead. Age will bring wisdom and wisdom will bring release. Great things are possible when one is unburdened by fear of the unknown. Nothing is ever truly lost. No one is ever truly gone. Everything changes yet remains the same. Strength is to be found through deeds not words. Fortune and misfortune provide guidance not results. Love cannot be captured, only deserved. You must remember in order to forget. Only through casting aside the old can you embrace the new."

The short sentences - despite their fortune-cookie style - felt prophetic, like someone had - Oh God! I collapsed on the worn green leather couch, the paper in my hand a conduit, pointing to an event long forgotten: A vivid and impossibly concise recollection of the old Indian Holy Man with the intricately-woven white beard who'd wandered into my store thirty-some years ago; the brief conversation resurrected in detail, as though it had taken place only yesterday:

"You will achieve great things late in life," he'd said, tracing a weathered brown finger over my palm.

"Ho hum," I'd thought. Expecting to hear next about a soon to come holiday, a great love, money, success blah blah blah. His presence unsolicited, his simple robe, his somewhat dirty turban and white braided beard assumed tools of his trade.

"How much is this going to cost me?"

My only other experience with a fortune-teller had been when I'd tagged along with a couple of girlfriends to a suburban house, the year before. That room a botched attempt at recreating a convoluted Fairy Tale meets Scheherazade affair. Fairy-wings, feathers, sheer curtain drops in lurid colors, faded mock-Persian rugs, odd-shaped gem-stones in groups, yes a crystal ball, and the inevitable deck of well-worked tarot cards.

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