Max, a thirtysomething creative writing tutor, has died, and now haunts the second-floor flat in London’s Tulse Hill where he once lived with his Australian girlfriend, Hannah. This is inconvenient, as Max doesn’t believe in ghosts, and yet here he is, watching Hannah grieve, “floating about like a jellyfish, my tendrils … sweeping up the lint and hair from the floor. Sometimes when I come forth I take up the whole of a room, like a balloon slotted between ribs and blown up to make a space for breath.” Notice that funny, mysterious “come forth”, and the near-violence of the simile that follows (“slotted between ribs”): this is not going to be a quirky-sad love story, all poignant memories and hard-won insights. We are in Evie Wyld’s precise and unforgiving hands, and she knows exactly where she wants to take us.
The narrative jumps largely between Max’s sections as a ghost trapped in the flat, titled “After”; Hannah’s chapters, set in the run-up to Max’s death, called “Before”; and “Then” – flashbacks to Hannah’s childhood in rural Australia. She grew up with her parents, her Uncle Tone and older sister Rachel on The Echoes, land on which a residential school for Indigenous and mixed-race children once stood. An old paddock concealed their small bones: victims of racist child removal policies that, until as recently as 1969, saw tens of thousands of kids taken from their families and either fostered with white families or sent to orphanages, missions or “training homes”. Few records were kept, but it’s known that many children died of neglect or from physical punishment, and their remains were secretly buried on site.
