He looked over his shoulder from time to time. He approached corners with vague trepidation.

Johannes Meyer was working at the dock one day and he saw her first.

He slid the sack down from his shoulder and brushed the dust from his arm. She was walking towards him with an umbrella against the sun. There was a man with her, short and fat and overdressed, a watch chain bright between his vest pockets, wiping his forehead with a white handkerchief and pointing out into the harbour, showing her the ships. They came closer, walking down the storehouse side of the dock, where the sun blazed hottest against the stone facades. Then they paused for a moment as the man lit the woman’s cigarette. When she lifted her head, she was looking directly at Johannes.

They stood like that only metres apart, eyes on each other, each remembering and yet thinking that it couldn’t be.

DAYS CAN GO EITHER WAY

She’d sent Samanta away and had been thinking of it for days, recalling the boy at the docks (he wasn’t a boy anymore!). Deeply regretting that she hadn’t approached and spoken to him. Elisabeth Montoya felt an unaccountable sense of loss.

Her true impulse had been to go over and greet him (embrace him!) but she didn’t move, just looked, in a kind of shock. Because he wasn’t an old friend, he wasn’t anybody at all, just a face from a long time ago, and it was this thought that had percolated among a rush of others and held her there, motionless. And then somebody had yelled, further down the dock, and she’d watched him turn to the voice and then bend down to pick up the sack at his feet. She’d watched him shoulder it, bounce it into position, and then turn to look at her again. And then Señor Bonas (who hadn’t stopped talking the whole time) had taken her by the arm and they’d moved on. He was showing her the new dock warehouse that had been purchased.

She wasn’t listening to him. She only felt the man’s eyes following her. With every step away, she’d thought to stop and turn around, but she didn’t.

Elisabeth Montoya walked away with Señor Bonas. With every excruciating step, she hoped to hear him call out, call out after her.

Please, she’d thought. Hoped. Please call out to me.

A LETTER FROM CHILE

(From Consul General Walpole, Santiago de Chile, to Lieutenant Governor George Arthur, Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land)

May 25th, 1834

Sir: I have the Honour to transmit to you the Translation of a Paragraph contained in the Araucano, a Paper published here under the Authority of this Government & which was Communicated to me by the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.