Cracked Ink and Hoar Frost

Henrietta here, twenty-three, and I should say up front that this whole thing started because of a rock. Not even a big rock. A lump of marble, cracked right down the middle, that Vic carried around in his bag like other people carry spare pens.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The thing you have to understand about Urandangi is that nobody puts an opera there on purpose. The nearest proper theatre is hours away, so when our little touring group booked the one-night performance, the only venue that would have us was the Dubious Drop Brewery. Which is how I came to be singing chorus in a room that smelled like malt and yeast, with two fermenting tanks humming along in the corner like enormous metal basses that had lost their tuning pegs. The tanks gurgle when they're working. They gurgled right through our big ensemble number, and our conductor, a patient man named Aldo, just waved his hand and said the acoustics were, quote, rustic.

It was the last rehearsal before the performance. One night only, then we all scattered back to wherever we'd come from, and it was over. There's a strange feeling that comes with a final rehearsal. Everyone knows the music well enough now that nobody really needs to be there, so what you're actually doing is spending one more evening together before the whole thing dissolves. You look around at faces you've spent six weeks with and you think, well, I probably won't see most of you again. There's a name for that feeling in every language, probably. Vic would know. He's a professor of historical linguistics when he isn't singing, twenty-six years old and the sort of person who actually does know the word for that feeling in four languages.

So dusk came on outside, and when I looked through the brewery's fogged windows I saw the hoar frost had come down hard that evening. Everything out there was caked in ice crystals, every fence post and dead branch glittering white like someone had frosted a cake with broken glass. The cold in that part of Queensland is a dry cold, a shock cold, the kind that makes your lungs feel scrubbed. It was already dark early, the way winter does, and the frost was catching the light from the brewery windows and throwing it back in little orange sparks.

We ran the second act one more time. Aldo made us do the trio twice because the tenor kept coming in late, and the tenor blamed the tanks for humming on his entrance, which was nonsense but everyone let him have it because he was driving home to Mount Laurie after. People packed up slowly. Somebody put out a plate of sausage rolls from the bar. And I found myself standing near Vic at the coat rack, both of us doing that thing where you put on one glove and then stop and talk.

That's when I saw him take the rock out of his bag.

Not take it out to show anyone. He just lifted it out to shift things around, the way you do, and there it was in his palm under the fluorescent light. White marble, veined grey, split by a dark crack that ran from one end almost to the other. It sat there in his hand looking completely out of place in a brewery in the middle of nowhere.

All right, I'll admit it, I stared.

"What is that?" I asked him. "You've had it in your bag all tour, haven't you. I've seen the corner of it poking out."

He looked a bit sheepish, which I'd never seen on him before. Vic is usually the most composed person in any room, dry as a summer creek bed. He turned the stone over once.

"It's an ink stone," he said. "Chinese, technically, though this one's a copy. You grind the ink stick against it with a little water and the marble holds the ink in that well along the crack. I use it for calligraphy. It came home with me from a conference years ago and it's never left my bag since."

"But we're performing an opera, not writing letters. Why on earth bring it to rehearsal?"

He put it back in the bag, slowly, and I got the sense he was deciding something. Then he did that dry little half-smile of his and said, "Honestly? Because I like touching it. That's most of the reason. I like how it feels under my hand."

I laughed, because that sounded like a joke. He didn't laugh.

"I'm serious," he said. "It's a whole thing with me. Not just the stone. Texture generally. Smooth cold things, and skin that's been oiled, and the way oil changes everything about how a hand moves. It's honestly a bit of a fetish of mine. I'm telling you this at a coat rack in a brewery, God help me."

And there it was. He said it plainly, no drama, the way you'd tell someone you're lactose intolerant. I stood there with one glove on and felt something jolt in my chest, a spark of pure curiosity, sharp and strange, and I didn't examine it. I didn't want to examine it. Examining it would have meant deciding it was weird, and some stubborn part of me wanted to keep the feeling whole and glowing for a few more minutes.

"I've never heard of that," I said, which was true and useless.

"Nobody has," he said. "It's not a category in any book I've found. Which as a linguist I find mildly offensive. Everything else gets a word."

I asked him what he meant, oiled skin, exactly, and he explained it the way he explains etymologies, patiently and with evident pleasure. Warm oil poured slow. The way it darkens skin for a minute and then sinks in. The sound it makes. The way a palm stops catching and starts gliding. He talked about it for maybe three minutes and I listened the way you listen to a foreign radio station, understanding almost none of it and enjoying every second.

Let me tell you plainly what was going through my head, which was nothing sensible. We had maybe two days left of knowing each other. After the performance tomorrow night we'd say goodbye in a car park and that would be the end of it. There was something almost freeing in that. Whatever happened or didn't happen, there were no strings to attach anywhere, because there was nothing left for the strings to tie to. I felt the strange curiosity of the night settle over me like the frost was settling over the town.

I said the thing before I'd properly decided to say it.

"Show me."

He blinked. "Show you?"

"The stone. The oil. All of it. I'm curious and I'll be gone by the weekend anyway, so I can't embarrass myself in front of you for long." I heard my own voice and thought, well, that's settled then.

He was quiet for a second. Then he said, "There's a deadfall snag out past the back fence. Hollowed out by rot, big old trunk on its side. I walked past it this afternoon. It's like a room in there, and it's all frosted up like something out of a fairy story."

So we told Aldo we were off to look at the frost, which was true in a way, and we collected our coats and stepped out into the cold.

The deadfall snag was maybe a hundred metres from the brewery, a huge fallen trunk, grey and bleached, its heart rotted out centuries ago so that what remained was a shell, curved like the inside of a violin. Hoar frost had done something almost criminal to it. Every branch and broken stub was caked in white ice needles, thousands of them, all pointing the same way, glittering in the light spilling faintly from the brewery. Inside the hollow the frost had made its own little garden along