To get to the Dixon place I had to walk up our street, along Bourke Road, then along the street behind our own. I had never been to the front of the Dixon house but knew which one it was: large, Edwardian, a terracotta gargoyle jutting from one of the eaves. I carried a bag containing clothes, cheese sandwiches and a few books for the journey. Under my arm was a small wooden box of my mother’s that contained all we needed to fund our escape. I hid behind an oak tree on the opposite footpath. A boy wearing an Eagles t-shirt purred down the middle of the road on a skateboard. I recognised him as Matthew Barrett, who was a year below me at school. Wagging as well, no doubt. I watched until he hopped off his board at the end of the street and flicked it up into his right hand with his foot. Show-off. I scuttled across the road.
The path along the side of the Dixon house was dark and overhung with branches. The brickwork underfoot was cracked and uneven. I trod as quietly as possible, keeping an ear out for voices from within. By then it was midafternoon, incredibly hot. I was sweating profusely. Strangely, I wasn’t afraid; my plan was so perfect in my imagination that it allowed no alternative conclusion to the one I had envisaged. I paused in the shade. An orange butterfly landed on a nearby leaf, where it perched, twitching slightly. A beautiful, fragile thing. I held out a finger, but it took off again, only to fly straight into a large web, whereupon an evil-looking spider darted out from the shadows. I imagined the butterfly’s little screams, the schrick, schrick of spider fangs being whetted. Seeking to rescue the insect, I reached for it but, to my horror, merely tore off one of its wings.
Which was how Mr Dixon found me: cowering in the shadows with a butterfly wing pinched between thumb and forefinger.
‘What are you doing here, young man?’
Idiotically, I held up the wing.
A smile formed on his lips. ‘Besides murdering poor insects.’
‘It was an accident. I was trying to save it.’
‘Ah, a rescue mission?’
I inspected the butterfly wing, which had left a fine dust of scales on my fingertips.
‘Can I help you with something?’
I hesitated before speaking. ‘Why did you nail the little door in the shed closed?’
Across Mr Dixon’s face flitted the same expression I had seen on his daughter’s – that of reluctance to reveal something – and I realised how alike they were. He checked over his shoulder. ‘Claire begged me not to tell you,’ he said at last. ‘Do you really want to know?’
I nodded.
‘Let me give you some advice.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Women often mistake desire for kindness, but men: we usually mistake kindness for desire.’
This seemed more like a riddle than any sort of advice, but before I could untangle its meaning, Mr Dixon pressed on.
‘Look, Patrick. Claire told me she didn’t want you bothering her anymore.’
I reeled. The box I had been cradling under my arm fell to the ground. The world reasserted itself with sudden, bitter clarity: the haze of bushfire smoke, the peeling paint of weatherboards against my shoulder, the tick and whirr of a lawn sprinkler. I heard a querying voice – Claire’s – coming along the path and sensed myself gazing about wildly. Perhaps it would be she who rescued me, rather than the other way around? Mr Dixon flicked open the wooden box with the toe of his shoe.
‘Dad?’ said Claire, coming up behind him. ‘Oh, Patrick. Hi. What’s going on?’
But her father was gazing at the pile of golden bracelets and necklaces glinting in my mother’s jewellery box like a nest of serpents. ‘Did you steal this from somewhere?’ he asked.
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘Where did you get them?’
I stood as tall as I could. ‘I wove them from straw.’
He looked at me as if I were a fool. There was a gust of cool wind, very sudden, bearing with it the unexpected fragrance of rain on dry concrete and gardens. And then the dust storm struck.
Anyone living in Melbourne that year would recall the storm, which darkened the afternoon as effectively as an eclipse. There are dozens of photos of the massive, three-hundred-metre wall of orange dirt as it rolled over the city and dumped a thousand tonnes of dirt scooped up from the drought-stricken rural regions of the state. Confused by this ersatz dusk, birds twittered in the trees and pets trembled beneath houses or cars. Mr Dixon swore and staggered backwards with his arm over his head. I lost sight of him. The temperature plummeted. There was confusion, exclamations of fear from the surrounding neighbourhood. A woman – Mrs Della Bosca, I think, from several doors down – yelled out. I heard a dog crying nearby, a truly horrible sound, as if the creature were being strangled. Leaves and branches flew about in the wind.
But I sensed other things in the chaos. There was Claire’s lovely breath against my ear, her lips soft on my cheek. I felt her caress my hump. ‘For luck,’ she whispered. I wheeled about, disoriented, but could see almost nothing through the brown, swirling haze. Grit stung my eyes. I covered my face and crouched in the lee of the house.
The worst of the storm was over in ten minutes. Afterwards, there was dirt in our hair and mouths. It coated the grass like a dry, brown frost. Gutters and leaves sagged with it. Mr Dixon loomed up with dust silting from his shoulders. He was repeating something over and over.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Where’s Claire?’ he was saying. ‘Where’s Claire?’
I looked around. The garden was strewn with shredded leaves and plants; the pool resembled a swamp. A sparrow wobbled around drunkenly on the grubby path, its beak opening and closing. But Claire – and my mother’s jewellery box – were gone.
Mr Dixon never told anyone about the jewellery box, even when it became common knowledge that our house had been burgled on that strange afternoon. My parents didn’t replace it and, perhaps as a consequence of having nowhere to deposit his guilty offerings, my father moved out. My mother died seven years ago after a stroke. Mr and Mrs Dixon moved away. Now only I remain: the keeper of local secrets, teller of stories. Alone, and happily so.
I am still a distinctive figure but, never having had any beauty to lose, I find middle age much more agreeable than childhood or youth. I am treated in the neighbourhood with something resembling affection. People nod to me in the street, offer salutations in the supermarket, assist me discreetly if they perceive a need. I amble to the shops and, while waiting for the traffic lights to change, all sorts of people – kids and adults – touch my back as they pass. It doesn’t bother me. We all need some luck, and I am happy to be its wellspring. Besides, we all need that human touch.
And every year or so a postcard arrives – from Los Angeles, from Mexico City, from Jakarta. The postcards are never signed. They bear only a single scrawled quote from Søren Kierkegaard, the same one every time: Face the fact of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.
The Middle of Nowhere
1
Drug addiction is ninety-eight per cent famine, two per cent feast; you get accustomed to bad news. Still, I had no inkling when I picked up the phone on that grim afternoon that what Martine told me would propel us even deeper into the shit. I listened and hung up. The day took on a dreamlike quality, faintly absurd, dark at the edges.
My girlfriend Tess was sitting at the kitchen table when I went back in. She was like one of Schiele’s women – all elbows and hair and eyes. ‘Who was that?’ she asked. ‘You look terrible.’
I lit a cigarette. My fingers were like twigs. My inadequacies as a human being were never more evident than when confronted with the prospect of having to console someone. The kettle had recently boiled and steam was bleeding down the window pane. It was winter. It had been winter for years.
‘Maggie overdosed,’ I said, when at last I could speak.
‘Oh no.’
‘But she’s not dead yet. She’s in a coma, on a respirato
r or whatever.’
Tess stood. ‘Oh, fuck. Fuck.’
‘In Cabramatta.’
‘Sydney? What the fuck was she doing up there?’
‘Went up last week to get clean. Beach life and all that shit.’
‘Is she going to be okay?’
‘They might have to turn off the machine tomorrow morning if nothing changes.’
‘Tomorrow. A machine? Jesus.’
Tess sat down and put her head in her hands. She and Maggie had been friends since high school. I stood at the kitchen door and stared at our crappy garden, which resembled a miniature abandoned city, littered here and there with garden pots and house bricks, the ruins of a wooden chair. It was always like this: when we thought our lives couldn’t get any worse, they did.
Things moved quickly. Convinced we might be able to save Maggie somehow, we decided to drive to Sydney. But first we had to score. Phone calls were made, cash counted out on the bed.
2
I sat in Mark and Jill’s fetid Yarraville lounge room, waiting for Mark to return with the dope. The place smelled of cat litter. Jill dozed on the couch. Parkinson was on TV, talking to some English dickhead with a private-school haircut. One of Jill’s sons came in and pilfered a cigarette from her packet. He was about sixteen, rangy, face set in a permanent scowl. He didn’t acknowledge me as he slunk away.
‘Fucking kids,’ Jill murmured without opening her eyes. ‘Suck the marrow from your bones if you give them half a chance.’
A door slammed and Mark appeared and motioned for me to follow him upstairs. By the time I located the bedroom, he had two spoons, a ball of cotton wool and several plastic water ampoules on the carpet in front of him. He gestured to the spare spoon as he drew up his own dope and began to navigate the battered veins on the back of his hand. ‘Wanna have a taste here?’
I paused. Junkies almost always came in symbiotic pairs, in which using alone was the worst sort of betrayal. I thought of Tess waiting in the car, but shrugged anyway. ‘Sure. Thanks.’
I mixed up, injected myself and sat back to absorb the impact. Those few seconds after a hit offered me a sense of completion otherwise foreign to me. If only it could always be like this. If only the ten seconds after a hit could be expanded to fill every corner of my waking life. Then. Then life would be magical.
I became aware of Mark poking me in the arm. ‘Wanna buy a gun?’ he was saying.
‘What?’
‘A gun, mate. Wanna buy a gun?’ He held out the item in question, partly wrapped in a tea towel. I had never seen one for real. It was an almost mythical object.
‘Piece of cake to use,’ Mark was saying. ‘See that magazine? With, you know, bullets. Pop it in, snap. Like in the fucking movies.’ And then, grinning like a ghoul, he raised the weapon and pointed it at my face. ‘I could shoot you right now . . .’
My eyeballs froze.
‘. . . not that I would, of course. You’re one of me best customers. See that? The safety. Safe as fucking houses, mate. Seven hundred bucks.’
It shocked and pleased me that he thought I was the kind of person who needed a gun. It took a few seconds to locate my voice. ‘No. Thanks. I have to go to Sydney tonight.’
Mark stared at me, eyes like holes torn in a sackful of bones. ‘What you going there for? All that fucking sun. Yuppies. Full of poofters, too. Fucking full of poofters.’
‘A friend OD’d. We got to see her.’
‘Oh.’ His eyes drooped and he rubbed his nose. The back of his hand was stained with blood and freckled with track marks.
There came the sound of Jill yelling for him downstairs. I made to leave. It was almost six o’clock. I had been inside nearly an hour already and Tess would be fuming.
‘Sure you don’t want that gun?’ Mark asked again as he rummaged through a pile of laundry. ‘It’s clean as a fucking whistle, if that’s what’s worrying you. A bargain, mate.’
Jill called out from the top of the stairs. ‘Mark! Get out here, will ya.’
He sagged, momentarily boneless, and the gun, still partly wrapped in its tea towel, dropped into the pile of clothes, soundlessly, as if into water. Then he snapped to and brushed past me. ‘Fuck. What, woman?’
I stared at the butt of the weapon for what seemed a long time. There was a small part of me that had always loved the idea of having a gun. Just for show, that adolescent fantasy of putting it to the head of some drunken thug in a pub, of being the person in the darkened street that others should fear, instead of the other way around, as it usually was.
Outside in the hall, Jill was issuing a lengthy complaint and she and Mark clomped downstairs. Without thinking, I grabbed the gun and jammed it under my leather coat. I went downstairs, where they were still arguing, and hurried to the back door.
‘Hey! Wait.’
I glanced behind to see Mark bearing down on me through the stinking kitchen. He was older than me but not someone to be messed with. He was the real deal, a man who had spent lengthy periods of time in Pentridge. Stealing the gun was stupid. Really stupid. Terrified, I fumbled with the doorhandle, but he was upon me.
‘Your mate,’ he was saying in his tubercular croak, ‘the one who OD’d.’
‘Woman.’
‘What?’
‘It was a woman who OD’d.’
‘You know who he was scoring off?’
I shook my head.
Mark prodded me in the chest. ‘Means there’s some good dope up there. You find out anything you let me know, okay? Give me a call and we can set something up.’
I nodded and bolted into the freezing night air.
‘About fucking time,’ Tess said when I got into the car. ‘All okay?’
I started the engine. ‘Everything’s fine. Let’s go.’
‘You’re not fucking stoned, are you? Did you have a taste already?’
‘Course not.’
3
Naturally, Goose wasn’t ready for us when we swung by to pick him up. Like children, musicians always needed help locating their shoes and socks, their wallets or keys. Tess pushed past him and stomped down the hall. ‘Come on, Goose.’
I sighed. ‘We’re in a hurry, mate.’
‘Did you score?’
I searched his stupid features for sarcasm. He had the kind of ravaged, rock-star face adored by women before they knew better. He and Tess had been lovers a few years ago and, although he had dumped her, I knew Goose would take her back in a heartbeat, if only to spite me. ‘Yeah,’ I said and headed to the kitchen to mix up.
‘Bad night for driving,’ he said a few minutes later, above the din of rain on the tin roof. ‘You sure this is a good idea?’
It was a fair question. I secretly hoped Tess would lose interest after getting stoned, but she shook her head as she tightened a belt around her upper arm, injected herself, then sloughed off the tourniquet.
Her eyes became sooty. ‘No. We got to go.’
Goose hiccuped. ‘When are they turning the machine off?’
‘Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning.’
‘Fuck. What should we take?’
Tess picked a shred of tobacco from her trembling lower lip. ‘I’m taking a scarf,’ she said at last.
‘You think it will be cold up there?’ Goose asked.
‘No, you idiot, it’s . . .’
‘What?’
‘It’s a scarf that Maggie gave me. It used to be hers and she gave it to me because she knew I liked it. It was a present, and I thought maybe it would help her wake up, you know.’
And, as if we doubted her, Tess produced a red, woollen scarf from her bag and waggled it shyly in front of her face.
4
We stopped for a break at a pub in Gundagai and took a corner table after buying beers and a packet of chips. I felt conspicuous among thes
e salt-of-the-earth types, with their dirt-stained fingernails and sun-bleached hats. The beer made me feel sick. I went to the bathroom, where, flushed and faint, I locked the stall and sat on the toilet lid with my face in my hands. This whole expedition was a waste of time and money. The last thing I wanted was to visit the dying – the dead, most likely.
After a while there was a loud bang on the door of the stall. It was Goose. ‘Come on,’ he was saying. ‘Let’s get going.’
I unbolted the door to find Goose wild-eyed and gesticulating. As always, he stank of incense and BO. ‘There’s some guys in the bar reckon they can get us some dope.’
‘Is that a good idea? You sure they’re not cops?’
‘Mate. These guys are not coppers.’
‘But we don’t have much money.’
‘Tess and me sorted that.’
When I was ten years old, my father took me to the footy at the MCG. After the game I went to the toilet while my father waited in the crowded concrete walkway. I got confused among the crowds and couldn’t locate him in the heaving throng. As instructed a thousand times by schoolteachers and parents, I waited patiently by a wall for the crowd to clear and for my father to find me. I was afraid, nearly crying. The hot-dog stand was closing, drunken groups of men staggered past, armpit to shoulder, like unseaworthy vessels. A small man appeared and asked me gently whether I was lost and needed help and would I like to go with him? The man had eager, beery breath and a shaving cut on his right cheek. I was unsure how long he had been there with one hand outstretched, as if offering me an invisible gift or, perhaps, waiting to take something from me, and, as I stood in a cold bathroom at the back of the Gundagai pub inhaling the scent of urinal cakes and chip fat, I was reminded of that long ago day.
A Lovely and Terrible Thing Page 6