Dust and Silence at Number 56

Johnny Ryman unlocked the front door of 56 High Street, New Norfolk, and stepped into a building he now had legal right to occupy.

He had collected the keys the previous afternoon from the letting agent's office in Hobart—a brief transaction conducted across a laminate counter by a woman who had barely looked up from her paperwork. Two keys, front door and back, dropped into his palm with neither ceremony nor warmth. The lease was signed, the bond paid, the premises now available for the leaseholder's use. What happened next was Johnny's concern alone.

He had not driven to New Norfolk immediately. The temptation had been considerable, but something held him back—a reluctance to rush the moment, perhaps, or simply the recognition that arriving at dusk would not serve his purposes. He had returned to his father's house in Glenorchy, eaten a meal he barely tasted, slept poorly, and departed before George had risen.

The drive to New Norfolk at half past six in the morning had taken him through roads still quiet with the residue of night. The shopfront was quieter still.

The door resisted slightly before yielding, its hinges protesting months of disuse. Johnny stepped across the threshold and stood in the dim interior, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

Dust lay thick on every surface. It coated the empty shelving units left behind by the previous tenant, filled the grooves of the floorboards, hung suspended in the shafts of light that penetrated the grimy windows. Cobwebs draped the corners where walls met ceiling, their architects long departed. The air tasted stale, thick with the residue of vacancy.

The silence was not peaceful. It was the silence of abandonment—heavy, almost accusatory, as though the building resented being disturbed after so long without human presence. Johnny's footsteps echoed against the bare walls, each creak of the floorboards unnaturally loud in the stillness.

He walked the perimeter of the main room slowly, running his fingers along shelving units and windowsills, collecting dust on his fingertips. The space was larger than he had estimated from outside—perhaps eight metres deep and six wide, with a doorway at the rear leading to what he presumed was a storeroom or office. The ceiling was high enough to feel spacious despite the room's modest footprint. The floorboards, beneath their coating of grime, appeared solid.

Through the rear doorway, he found a smaller room cluttered with detritus the previous tenant had not bothered to remove. Cardboard boxes, collapsed and water-stained. A broken chair missing one leg. A calendar from 1994 still hanging on the wall, its pages curled and yellowed, frozen on a February that had passed three years prior.

A window at the back of this room overlooked the laneway he had noticed from the street. The glass was cracked in one corner, and grime obscured the view, but he could make out the overgrown path leading toward the river. The escape route. The unofficial thoroughfare that had existed long before this building and would persist long after.

Johnny stood in the centre of the storeroom and breathed.

The air tasted of mildew and neglect. The silence pressed against his ears. The building offered nothing—no warmth, no welcome, no indication that it was worth the loan his father had guaranteed with his livelihood.

And yet.

Something in the emptiness felt like potential rather than absence. The dust could be swept away. The cobwebs could be cleared. The broken chair and the water-stained boxes and the calendar frozen on a dead February—all of it could be removed, replaced, transformed. The building was not ruined. It was waiting.

Johnny did not know yet what he would make of this space. The details remained unformed, shapes glimpsed through fog rather than seen clearly. But standing in the dust and silence of 56 High Street on the morning of 20 November 1997, he understood with sudden certainty that he had been right to sign the lease. Right to risk his father's workshop. Right to follow the instinct that had pulled him to the kerb a month earlier and held him there for eleven minutes while something shifted in his understanding of what his life might become.

The building was his now. Whatever it became would be his responsibility.