The Laneway Between Us

A Melbourne Romance

―

​

 

 

 

For everyone who has ever been lost in a laneway

and found something unexpected.

 

 

Chapter One: The Map in the Rain

 

The rain came down on Flinders Lane the way it always did in July - sideways, uninvited, and with a kind of cheerful malice. Joanne Calloway ducked under the awning of a tiny gallery she had never noticed before and pressed her back against the cool brick, catching her breath.

​

She was already twenty minutes late to meet her editor. Her umbrella had inverted itself at the corner of Swanston Street, and her good leather satchel, the one she'd saved three pay cheques to afford, was thoroughly soaked. The manuscript inside was not. She'd learned to double-bag her manuscripts after the incident of 2021, which she never spoke of.

 

She fished out her phone and typed a rapid apology to Margot, adding three rain-cloud emojis to soften the blow. Pushing her wet auburn hair away from her face, she looked up at the gallery she was sheltering against.

It was small and peculiar, wedged between a dumpling shop and a boutique that sold only things in shades of rust. A hand-lettered sign above the door read: CARTOGRAPHY OF LOST THINGS - Rare Maps & Peculiar Finds. A single lamp burned amber inside. Through the fogged glass she could see framed maps covering every wall, their faded colours bleeding into one another like a watercolour dream.

 

Jo had lived in Melbourne for nine years. She walked this lane twice a week. She had never once seen this shop.

The rain intensified. She pushed open the door.

 

~ * ~

 

The smell hit her first. Old paper, cedar, and something faintly oceanic, like the idea of salt water rather than the thing itself. A small brass bell announced her arrival. Nobody appeared.

 

Jo stepped further in, dripping apologetically onto a mat that read WELCOME, WANDERER. The maps on the walls were extraordinary. Not merely decorative reproductions but genuine antique charts. Some were of Melbourne's Port Phillip Bay from 1840, hand-coloured with particular care. A street map of early Fitzroy with handwritten annotations in French. A map of the world from the 1700s in which Australia appeared as a vague and optimistic suggestion at the bottom.

 

"You're dripping on the Mornington Peninsula," said a voice.

 

Jo startled, spinning around. A man had appeared from behind a shelf, holding a mug of tea and watching her with an expression caught somewhere between amusement and concern. He was tall, dark-haired, with the kind of face that looked like it knew things it wasn't ready to share. It was serious in its architecture but with laugh lines that softened the whole effect. He wore thin-rimmed glasses behind which were striking green eyes and Jo was hypnotised for a few seconds. He was wearing a dark navy jumper and a pencil tucked behind one ear.

 

"Sorry," Jo said, stepping back. "The rain…"

 

"Is exceptional today, yes." He set down his mug and crossed the room with unhurried ease, picking up a folded cloth from the counter and handing it to her.

"1892 reproduction. You're not ruining it. Just moisturising."

 

He smiled. And her heart pounded in her chest.

 

Jo had to look away so turned her attention elsewhere looking down at the large-framed map on the floor propped against the wall, and felt her face go warm. She took the cloth. "I really am sorry. I've never been in here before. I didn't know this place existed."

 

"Most people don't." There was no self-pity in it. Simply fact. He retrieved his tea. "Brandon Ashford. This is my shop. Take as long as you need. The rain won't be done for another ten to fifteen minutes at least."

 

"Jo. Joanne." She handed back the cloth. "How do you know when it'll stop?"

 

He nodded toward the back wall, where she now saw, among the maps, an antique barometer in a mahogany case. "Experience," he said. "And that. Mostly that."

 

Jo laughed, a small, surprised sound. The laugh lines around his eyes deepened in response, though he didn't quite laugh.

 

She stayed for forty-three minutes. She missed her meeting with Margot entirely.

 

 

Chapter Two: What the Annotations Said

 

She went back on Thursday.

 

She told herself it was because she needed to pass Flinders Lane anyway, which was not strictly true. Her flat was in Carlton. Her office, well, her publisher's office, she was a freelance editor who worked mostly in cafes and suffered for it  was in South Yarra. Flinders Lane was not on the logical route between these two places. She went anyway.

 

Brandon Ashford was crouched behind the counter when she entered, doing something careful with a map spread across a light table, a magnifying loupe pressed to one eye. He held up one finger without looking at her.

Jo waited. She studied the walls. Today she noticed a map she had missed before, a hand-drawn affair, not antique at all, showing a section of Melbourne she didn't recognise. Streets that didn't match the city grid she knew. Buildings labelled in a careful hand: The Copper Sparrow. The Night Library. Bellamy's. She leaned closer.

 

"That one's not for sale," Brandon said, appearing beside her. She hadn't heard him get up, but his voice, deep, rich and knowing, sent shivers up her spine.

 

"I wasn't. I was just looking." She straightened. He was closer than expected, close enough that she could see the faint ink stain on the inside of his right wrist. "What is it?"

 

"A city that used to exist." He tilted his head, studying the map rather than her.

"Or might exist. Depending on how you look at it."

 

"That's not an answer."

 

"No," he agreed. "It's not."

 

He moved to the small electric kettle on the counter. She noticed now that there were two mugs, and began making tea without asking. Milk in both, which was presumptuous, she thought, until she realised she did take milk and had no idea how he knew that.

 

"Someone sold me a collection last year," he said, his back to her. "Estate of an old man in Brunswick. Maps, charts, notebooks. Among them was this." He nodded toward the mysterious map. "No name. No date. But it's hand-drawn on paper that carbon dates to the nineteen-fifties, and every place on it has an annotation on the reverse."

 

He handed her a mug. She took a sip. It was good tea, strong and honest.

 

"Annotations?" Jo asked.

 

"Instructions. Or something like them."

 

She set down her mug and reached for the frame, then hesitated, looking at him. He nodded. She lifted it carefully from the wall and turned it over. On the backing paper, in that same careful hand, was a list:

 

The Copper Sparrow: Ask for the room with the window that faces east. Go on a morning after loss.

 

The Night Library: It is only open when you are ready to understand something. You cannot find it. It finds you.

 

Bellamy's: Order the soup. Tell the truth. They are related.

 

Jo read them twice. A peculiar feeling moved through her. Not quite wonder, not quite unease, but something in between. "What does it mean?"

 

"I've spent a year trying to work that out," Brandon said quietly. He was leaning against the counter, watching her with that same expression she was starting to recognise. Carefully open, like a window someone was trying to decide whether to close. "The Copper Sparrow I've found, it's a guesthouse in Collingwood, still operating. The other two..." He shook his head.

 

"You've been looking for them."

 

"I have. Rather obsessively, my sister tells me."

 

Jo set the frame back on the wall with great care and looked at him. "I'm a researcher," she said. "By training, if not currently by occupation. I edited academic texts for six years before I moved to fiction." She picked up her mug again. "I'm very good at finding things that don't want to be found."

Something shifted in his expression. Not the careful openness, but something warmer, underneath it.

 

"Jo….

 

“Calloway,” she offered.

 

“Jo Calloway," he said, as though trying the name out. "Are you offering to help?"

 

"I'm offering to be curious alongside you," she corrected. "There's a difference."

 

This time, he did smile. It rearranged his face entirely, and Jo made a private note that this was dangerous information to possess.

​

 

Chapter Three: Collingwood, On a Morning After Loss

 

The Copper Sparrow was on a side street off Smith Street, behind a wrought-iron gate covered in wisteria that was, in July, all bare silver branches. It looked like the skeleton of something that had once been beautiful and would be again.

 

Jo and Brandon arrived at ten in the morning on a Tuesday, having agreed, without quite discussing it, to go together.

 

This was their third meeting. Or their fourth, if you counted the time Brandon had appeared at her favourite coffee shop on Lygon Street. The one she mentioned in passing on Thursday, to return a scarf she had left behind in the shop. She hadn't been certain she'd left a scarf. She was now in possession of one that was not hers, which she had chosen to think of as a gift from the universe rather than a sign of her own fraying attention.

 

"You said the annotation said to ask for the east-facing room," Jo said as they pushed through the gate.

 

"And to come after a morning of loss." He was quiet for a moment. "I had a difficult phone call with my father this morning. Does that count?"

 

"I think loss comes in all sizes," she said carefully. "Can I ask what happened?"

 

Brandon was quiet for a few moments. Then he said, "He's selling the family home. Been in the family for forty years. I knew it was coming. It still… " He stopped. Started again. "It still sat in the chest somewhere, the way things do."

 

Jo thought of her own mother's voice on the phone last Sunday, telling her that the old Calloway house in Bendigo had finally been cleared after her grandmother's passing. She had hung up and sat very still for twenty minutes.

"I think we both qualify," she said.

 

~ * ~

 

The woman at the front desk of The Copper Sparrow was in her seventies, with silver hair and the particular manner of someone who had heard everything and was unimpressed by most of it. Her name badge said VERA.

​

"We were wondering," Jo began, "about the room with the east-facing window."

 

Vera looked at them both for a long moment. Then she looked at the map Brandon had brought, the original, in a protective sleeve. Something in her face shifted.

 

"Room seven," she said. "We don't advertise it. Follow me."

 

Jo had a sense of something shifting. Something strange but exciting.

 

Something out of the ordinary.

 

The room, when they got there, was small and high-ceilinged, with a bay window that faced a garden of winter roses. They were clearly visible. There were two armchairs, a small table, and on the walls, maps. Not the same maps. Different ones, but clearly of the same vintage and the same hand.

 

"My father put them up," Vera said, standing in the doorway. She had the look of someone deciding how much of a story to give. "He made the map your young man is holding. And the others like it."

 

Brandon and Jo turned to look at her. Then at each other.

 

"His name was Arthur Hales," Vera said. "He was a cartographer. After the war he became…interested… in the idea that a city has a geography of feeling. Not just streets and buildings. Places that have a particular quality, depending on the circumstances of the visitor." She paused. "He was not a mystical man, you understand. He was a scientist. He called it psychogeography, long before that word was fashionable. He mapped Melbourne the way others mapped stars. He spent forty years doing it."

 

"And then?" Jo asked softly.

 

"And then he died. And I have been waiting," Vera said simply, "for someone to come with the map."

 

She looked at them both again. The particular look of a woman assessing whether people are ready for a truth.

 

"Sit down," she said. "I'll put the kettle on. There is quite a lot to tell."

​

 

Chapter Four: The Night Library

 

They spent two hours with Vera. She gave them tea, shortbread, and a cardboard box of her father's notebooks. It was dense with observation, annotation, and the occasional small, precise watercolour sketch of a building or a face. She also gave them a handwritten list of other people who had come with maps over the years, and what they had been looking for when they arrived.

 

Walking back toward the city in the thin winter afternoon, Jo and Brandon were quiet together. It was a comfortable quiet, the kind she hadn't known she missed until it was already there.

 

"Do you believe it?" Brandon asked eventually. "The psychogeography. That the city has …  moods. That the right place at the right time does something."

 

Jo thought about it properly, the way she'd trained herself to think. Turning the thing over, looking at it from behind, she said at last, "I think place and feeling are related. I think we know this instinctively. Why else do people return to places where they were happy? Or avoid streets where something terrible happened?"

 

She stepped over a puddle left by the morning's rain. "Whether Arthur Hales mapped it accurately, well that's a different question. But the instinct behind it?

 

Yes. I believe that."

 

Brandon was quiet for another moment. "I've been in this shop for three years," he said. "I came back to Melbourne after years in Edinburgh. I was a geography lecturer there. My marriage ended." He said it without drama, as a simple sequence of events. "I came home and I found this collection, this shop, and I've felt, since then, like I was waiting for something. I couldn't explain what. The map just seemed like a clue."

 

Jo looked at him. The late sun, winter-pale, caught the side of his face and made something ache pleasantly in her sternum. A feeling she recognised but had not visited in a while. She looked away.

 

Joanne was happy Brandon had confided such a personal detail to her. She wasn’t sure why exactly, except that she liked Brandon. And really, wasn’t that enough?  

 

"A clue to what?" she finally asked.

 

He didn't answer immediately. Then, "I'm beginning to think that might be the wrong question."

 

~ * ~

 

The Night Library found them, as Arthur Hales had said it would.

 

It was three weeks after the visit to The Copper Sparrow. They had met six more times by then. At the shop, at the State Library reading room where Jo went to work on difficult manuscripts and Brandon had begun, she discovered, to go also; once at the NGV for a cartography exhibition she had mentioned in passing; once for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond that had been her grandmother's favourite. She'd told him that. He'd remembered.

 

The two of them had begun to speak about more personal things. Yes, the psychogeography had brought them together, but they had bonded, to her surprise and delight. And she knew that Brandon felt the same way. Because of the way he looked at her. The way his eyes lit up when she’d come into view.

 

And her heart fluttered like a bird every time.

 

They were walking back from dinner through Carlton Gardens when Jo saw it. On a laneway she had walked hundreds of times, in a gap between buildings she was certain had always been an alley full of bins, was a door. Warm light crept beneath it. A small engraved plate at eye level read: THE LENDING LIBRARY CURRENTLY OPEN.

 

"Brandon," she whispered. Almost as though it was a secret she was telling him.

 

He turned. Saw it. Something crossed his face that she hadn't seen before. A kind of cracking open.

 

"That was not there last week," he said, with the certainty of someone who paid attention to things. “I could have sworn.”

​

Jo reached for the door. His hand reached at the same moment, and their fingers met on the handle, and neither of them moved for a moment that seemed to occupy more time than moments usually do. The electric spark that moved through her was delicious. She looked up at Brandon, into those beautiful green eyes.

 

"Together?" she said.

 

"Together," he said, smiling.

 

The room inside was small and lamp-lit, with floor-to-ceiling shelves and a man at a desk who looked up as though he'd been expecting them. He was young, younger than Jo had imagined, with bright blue eyes and fair hair that hung down a little low over his eyes. He wore a red jumper and the expression of someone who found everything quietly delightful. He looked, she thought, like an old soul, someone who had always understood more than he said.

 

"Looking for something?" he asked.

 

Brandon said: "We have a map."

 

"Everyone who comes here has a map of one sort or another," the young man said pleasantly. "What kind is yours?"

 

It was a strange question, and yet Jo found she understood it completely. She said, without looking at Brandon: "The kind that shows you where you've been so you can understand where you are."

 

There was a silence. Then Brandon said, quietly, "Yes."

 

The young man, who never gave his name, and whom they never saw again,  brought them each a book from the shelves. Jo's was a slim, battered novel she had read at nineteen and wept over and never found again. Brandon's was a geography text from the 1950s that had a chapter, she later learned, that had defined his whole approach to his discipline. How the young man had known, neither of them could say.

​

They sat in the warm lamp-lit room and read for an hour, and when they stepped back out, the door was simply a wall again, and the night was clear, and Melbourne glittered around them.

 

They both stood together, in silence, both awed at what had just occurred.

​

 

Chapter Five: Bellamy's, and the Truth

 

They found Bellamy's in August, when the wisteria was beginning to think about returning and the days were lengthening by small, brave increments.

 

It was not where they expected. It was not a restaurant, not a café, not any of the establishments they had investigated over the preceding weeks by working methodically through Arthur Hales's notebooks. It was a kitchen at the back of a community centre in Northcote, run by an enormous cheerful woman named Helen who cooked soup, specifically soup and nothing else. Every Wednesday evening for anyone who turned up.

 

"How did you find us?" Helen asked, ladling something that smelled of lemongrass and ginger into wide bowls.

 

"An old map," Jo said.

 

"Arthur's," Helen said immediately, nodding. "He came here thirty years ago. He said my soup told the truth about people. I didn't know what he meant then."

 

She set two bowls on the table and looked at them both with the forthright kindness of someone who had cooked soup for strangers long enough to see everything. "I think I do now."

 

They sat across from each other at a long communal table. Others came and went around them: an elderly man who ate silently, a pair of young women sharing a phone, a teenage boy who had the look of someone who had walked a long way. The soup was extraordinary.

 

"Tell the truth," Brandon said, quoting the annotation, and looking at her across the bowl. The instruction hung in the warm air between them.

 

Jo turned her spoon over. "I have been using the map as an excuse," she said, "to spend time with you. I thought you should know that."

 

Brandon set down his spoon. Something about the careful openness of his expression softened entirely, like ice in spring. He was very present, but his eyes had changed in a fundamental way. "I have been terrified," he said, "since Edinburgh, of getting something like this wrong again. I have been very methodical about maintaining a friendly professional distance." He paused. "I don't think it's working."

 

Jo felt the ache in her sternum again, but warmer now, and closer to something she was ready to name.

 

"No," she agreed. "It really isn't."

 

~ * ~

 

They walked home through streets that were full of the particular Melbourne evening that Jo had loved for nine years without ever quite finding the words for it. The way the light pooled amber on bluestone laneways, the smell of coffee and rain and something green from the gardens, the warm percussion of restaurants and bars and the lives inside them. She had written around it in every manuscript she'd edited, recognising it in other people's words, never quite claiming it in her own.

​

She claimed it now. She walked beside Brandon Ashford through the amber light of a Melbourne evening, and she felt the specific weight of something intangible becoming real.

 

At the entrance to Flinders Lane, outside his shop, the lamp burning its quiet amber in the window, he stopped.

 

"There's something I want to show you," he said. "I should have shown you at the beginning, I think, but I was … collecting my nerve."

 

Her heart gave a small, involuntary leap. The kind she'd learned to ignore in the past but couldn't quite suppress after all these weeks of careful, cautious becoming. She watched his face, searching for clues, and felt the strange tenderness of knowing someone well enough to notice when they were afraid.

 

He unlocked the shop and led her to the back room, which she had never seen. It was smaller than the front, with a large worktable covered in reference books and a single lamp and, on the far wall, a map she recognised as his own work. It was Melbourne, but her Melbourne, the Melbourne of recent years. She could see her street in Carlton. The State Library. The Vietnamese restaurant in Richmond, marked with a small symbol. The Carlton Gardens. The laneway where they had found the Night Library.

 

"You've been mapping it," she said softly. "Like Hales. You've been doing what he did."

 

"For three years," he said. He was standing beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him against the cool of the August evening. "Not quite knowing why. And then you came in out of the rain and…" He stopped. "And it felt like the map had been missing something it was waiting for."

 

Jo looked at the map for a long moment. She could see, now, that there was a street in Carlton - her street, marked with a small notation she couldn't quite read. She leaned in.

 

In Brandon's careful hand: Jo. And a date. The date of their first meeting.

She turned to look at him. He was watching her the way he always watched things - seriously, carefully, with the laugh lines ready.

 

"Brandon," she whispered.

 

"Jo," he said.

 

And then there was no more cartography required, because some distances simply close, and some places are found all at once, without a map, and the finding is enough.

 

The moment arrived the way she'd somehow always known it would. Not with grand declaration, but with a silence that had slowly run out of room.

 

Brandon reached up and tucked a strand of her auburn hair behind her ear, his fingers grazing her jaw as they withdrew, and the deliberateness of it, the way he didn't rush, the way his eyes asked before his mouth did, made her breath catch.

 

When he finally leaned in, she inhaled deeply, the anticipation almost too much. Their lips met and Brandon kissed her. It was soft at first. Almost unbearably so. His lips barely brushing hers, like a question he already knew the answer to but wanted to hear anyway. She felt her hand find the fabric of his shirt without deciding to, fingers curling into it, drawing him closer, and something in him answered, a quiet sound at the back of his throat, a hand sliding to the curve of her waist and pulling her against him with a certainty that undid her completely.

 

The kiss deepened, and she stopped thinking. There was only the warmth of his mouth, the solid reality of him after weeks of wondering, the way he kissed her like he had every intention of doing it again. Like he was in no hurry to be anywhere else in the world.

 

When they finally broke apart, foreheads resting together, both of them breathing unsteadily, Joanne felt the peculiar sensation of something settling into place. Some long-held tension releasing from her chest like a sigh she'd been holding since the very first day she'd met him.

 

"That was…" he murmured, almost to himself.

​

She laughed softly, eyes still closed. "Yeah..."

 

 

 

Epilogue: A Map of What Came Next

 

The following spring, they held a small exhibition at the shop. Cartography of Lost Things had, by then, acquired a reputation through no effort of their own, the kind that happens when a place becomes the sort of place people tell each other about in careful voices, as if the telling too loudly might dissolve it.

 

The exhibition was called The Heart of the City Has a Geography, and it featured Arthur Hales's original maps alongside Brandon's ongoing work and three essays by Jo. The first of her own writing she had published in years, and the least agonising, which she suspected was not a coincidence.

 

Vera came down from Collingwood and stood in the centre of the shop for a long time without speaking. Then she said: "He would have liked this." Jo thought that was perhaps the finest thing that could be said about any work.

 

The Night Library did not reappear. Some doors, Jo had come to understand, are only ever open once, and what you carry out of them is your own business.

Bellamy's, Helen's kitchen in Northcote, they went back to every third Wednesday. The soup was always the truth, and the truth was always, somehow, what they needed.

 

The map in the back room of the shop grew. A new mark appeared in the winter of that year, in a suburb Jo had never thought much about, which turned out to be where her favourite bookshop was and, subsequently, where they found the flat they moved into together: ground floor, east-facing windows, a courtyard with a lemon tree that produced lemons with the unsolicited generosity of lemon trees the world over.

 

Melbourne, in all its particular amber and bluestone beauty, held them without comment, the way Melbourne does. Warmly, wryly, with good coffee and the occasional excellent rain.

 

Jo kept the scarf. It suited her far better than the one she thought she'd lost.

 

And if sometimes, walking through a laneway she had walked a hundred times before, she would see a light that hadn't been there, a door that was new, a sign in a careful hand, and then she would reach for Brandon's hand, and he would already be reaching for hers, and they would go in together.

 

Some cities are maps of what has been. Others are maps of what might be, if you are paying the right kind of attention.

 

Melbourne, they had agreed, was both.

 

~ * ~

 

— END —