by Iain Ryan
The streets of the village are empty, but you feel eyes on you. At the centre, there is a small store. A man stands in the doorway holding a rusted steel mace. He’s short but has the proportions of a man.
‘Halt there,’ he says.
‘I’m not here for thieving. I need a druid.’
‘I see. What troubles you then?’
‘I’m without memory.’ It’s true. You remember nothing before the cave from which you emerged.
The shopkeeper weighs the mace in his hand. ‘What do you want with memories?’
You cannot answer this.
‘Well?’ he says.
‘I should have them, shouldn’t I?’
He shrugs. ‘Sister Rhys can perform medicine. Do you have gold?’
‘I have gold and I can work.’
The shopkeeper thinks on this. ‘Yes, you look like the sort who can. Stand back a little. Move back to that stone.’
You do not understand the request, but you comply. The shopkeeper nods to himself then closes his eyes, as if in prayer. He begins to hum. His humming grows louder and the regular sound of the village fades away. Birds fly silently. Water drips into a well without note.
A door opens behind you, breaking the spell.
Footsteps.
‘I’d stay put if I were you,’ whispers the storekeeper, at a distance but uncannily loud in your ear.
A woman’s voice says, ‘This better be important, Brother Dal. I don’t like to be disturbed this time of morning, not for the …’
The shopkeeper opens his eyes. ‘Sister Rhys?’
‘This one’s marked with the spiral,’ she says. ‘All over its back.’
5
Sister Rhys has a wife who prepares food and a bucket of warm water. They have a spare bed for you but both the room and the lodgings are too small to accommodate your bulk, so they lay linens on the floor by the fire and you take to it and sleep despite the unknown dangers these people present.
The sleep is deep but broken by feverish dreams.
Dreams of war.
Blood dripping into an ocean.
Salt and sand whipping wind.
Red fire.
Black slugs.
A mouth torn open.
In the evening, the wife presents you with more food, this time accompanied by ale. As you eat and drink on the floor, you check your belongings:
Gold.
The sword.
A charcoal map.
A yellow triangular vial.
‘Do you know what that contains?’ says Rhys. She sits at the table, a book open in front of her.
‘I took it from orcs.’
The two women exchange a glance.
‘They’re dead now,’ you say. ‘What is it?’
‘May I?’ Rhys takes the vial. She lowers her reading glasses and checks the liquid in the candlelight. Frowning, she takes a small sniff. ‘Hmmm. I wouldn’t drink this. Not out in the open.’
‘What country are we in?’
‘Emery, on the edge of Swann. So, it’s true then? You remember nothing?’
‘Do you know me?’
‘Of course. Well, not you in particular but your kind. Your people helped clear this land. That spiral on your back, the ink there, that’s a sigil familiar to the likes of me. Very familiar.’
‘What does it mean?’
‘Everything,’ she says. ‘Everything.’
‘So, will you help me?’
‘Our medicine won’t work on you but I can show you a place on that map of yours where tall magic is performed. There is one there called Rohank.’
The wife pauses by the stove. ‘You can’t send him to the priest.’
‘What choice do I have?’
‘Some are the kind that ought not remember,’ says the wife. She turns to you and adds, ‘Have you thought of that?’
‘I want to know.’
‘Of course, you do,’ says Rhys. ‘But she’s right. That thing on your back isn’t about what you want. It’s about what will be. About what’s coming.’
‘So, what is it then?’
‘How would I know?’ says Rhys. ‘It’s your tattoo. Not mine.’
ERMA
I finish mapping out Jenny’s box of research materials on a bright Tuesday morning. I mark the details up on the wall and put a context around every date, time, place and person. My kitchen is filled now with biographical information, networks, academic milestones, personal memories, photos (where I had them) and locations and times.
Qualitative research 101.
The timeline is busy in the first half of 2004. April, May, June are a dense circuit of specifics: receipts for petrol, cafes and booze, notes from meetings, signed consent forms, schedules and field notes. I have data now, new connections. I know Jenny preferred pen and paper. I know Jenny drove everywhere and never took public transport. I know she stayed up late. Every interview or appointment happened after midday. She ate out and drank with interviewees.
I suspect she interviewed Archibald Moder while I was in Spain, which is a lot later than arranged.
So she lied to me.
Lied continuously.
Lied and crammed, condensing eighty per cent of a year’s work into the three months before her death.
Two things are definitely missing:
Her car.
Her dictaphone.
The car is everywhere in the fieldwork. It’s worth tracking down. So is the dictaphone. I’m fairly certain it contains her last five interviews. The interviews happened. They were consented to and the paperwork is here, but there are no copies of the audio. I take the paperwork for the Archibald Moder interview to the window and hold it up to the morning sun. Looks like she mailed it to him with a return envelope. Normally you get the interviewee to sign-off in person but for some reason they did it all in advance. I zoom in on Moder’s handwriting on the form. It’s the scrawl of an old man. Shaky. Uneven. But definitely the scrawl of my signed books, purchased from resellers on eBay. I’ve never met Moder in person. He hasn’t appeared in public this century. He used to be a licensed psychotherapist and the word is that in his retirement he views interviews as work, even on the phone. He doesn’t talk to anyone. And yet he spoke to Jenny.
My mobile buzzes. Kanika’s number.
‘Finally,’ she says, as a greeting.
‘I’ve been digging around in that box you gave me.’
‘Of course you have. And?’
‘Do you think the publisher would still be interested in my book?’
‘Yes. They’re an academic publisher, they’re used to delays. How are you feeling, otherwise?’
‘Good. Better. I feel better.’
There’s a pause.
‘I’m fine, by the way,’ says Kanika. ‘Thanks for asking.’
‘You’re always fine.’
‘No, I’m not.’
I stare at the timeline.
Neither of us speak.
That Dictaphone is out there somewhere.
In a cafe.
A desk drawer.
A locker.
Police storage.
The glovebox of a car. Her missing car. Sessionals live in their cars. We call them highway academics for a reason. So that’s the obvious place for it. Not a great place for it, Jenny, but something fell apart at the end didn’t it, some—
‘I’m late for something,’ says Kanika.
The line goes dead.
‘The Dictaphone and the car,’ I say to the kitchen wall, the phone still pressed to my ear. ‘And the police. The police will have some of her stuff.’
Harlowe meows at my feet.
I have the business card of one of the detectives who investigated my assault. It’s in the drawer by my bed.
Find the Dictaphone.
Call the cops.
Find the car.
Three action items.
Three neat moves.
The timeline condensed.
That’s what it tells me
.
A starting point.
And, like a lot of research, it’s an elaborate redressing for a one-word question: Why? But that’s also the great thing about research. The process of it – the methodology, the collection, the analysis, the objectivity – it can bury anything.
I drive across town and park in the backstreets of St Lucia, then follow the river into campus, realising as I go that it’s another winter at the University of Queensland. The teaching semester is over. Almost a whole year since Jenny.
There’s a tech counter in the Social Sciences and Humanities library where postgrads borrow equipment. If Jenny got her Dictaphone from there, she may have returned it. I might be looking for a tape, not a device. Today, a tall kid in a baby-blue Shins T-shirt stands behind the counter, slowly winding up a black cable.
‘You open?’
‘Sure.’ He stops winding but doesn’t really move or look at me. His name tag reads, ‘Bernard’.
‘Bernie, I’m a staff member up in the CWCU. I think one of my postgrads returned a Dictaphone without wiping it.’
‘What’s the CWCU?’
‘The Centre for Creative Writing and Cultural Understanding.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s upstairs in Forgan Smith Tower.’
‘We … we have a tower?’
I lean over the counter. ‘Are you OK, Bernie?’
‘I just didn’t know we had a tower.’
‘Her name is Jennifer Wasserman.’
Bernie ties off the lead. ‘Try the book.’
I scan the entries of the logbook on the counter, searching for staff numbers from this time last year.
April 25th – Sanyo ICR – Wasserman.
Her signature beside it.
‘This is her. Is this Dictaphone in here?’
Bernie wanders over to a shelf of equipment and looks around. ‘It’s gone. Your friend should bring that back or, oh man, she’s totally gonna get banned forever.’
‘She’s dead, Bernie. So, she kind of is banned forever.’
‘That’s heavy.’
‘Yeah. What does one of these things look like?’
He brings a Sanyo ICR over. It’s a small silver device about the length of a glasses case, the sort of thing you could slip into a handbag or jacket pocket. Easy to lose.
‘Bernie, if someone misplaced one of these, would it come back here?’
He turns the recorder over in his hands and shows me a sticker with the university’s contact details on it. Below the sticker there’s a number engraved on the surface. ‘You can’t hock them. Cashies call us straightaway. But they don’t turn up all that often either, not when they’re lost. Security might be able to help.’
‘Really?’
‘They look after the lost property locker.’
‘Don’t they go through it and return your stuff?’
‘Nah. They don’t like us, hey.’
‘Do you ever go over there and check?’
‘Nah. It’s just me down here. What if someone needed something and I wasn’t here?’ He pauses. I can see now that Bernie’s quite stoned. His hand is gently patting the Dictaphone like it’s a small pet. ‘Uhm, how did your student die?’ he says.
‘Shot herself.’
‘With a gun?’
I nod.
‘Bummer.’
‘Not really. She was an arsehole.’ It feels good to say it, even just to Bernie, but, moments later, I start to feel queasy. Why did I just say that? I think I’m going to cry, right there at the library AV counter. Heat washes down my neck.
Nope. Not yet.
Can’t.
Oh fuck.
Look the thing is—
OK, the thing with Jenny is, there’s no pinning down how to feel about her. That’s why I don’t open up that part of my brain. I mean, what choice do I have? If I am to remember her, what version of her is the right one? What role can I assign? What story? Is she my would-be murderer? My crazy ex-colleague? My dead friend? And those are the simple stories, the easy designations. What do I do with the days before Thailand where I grieved for Jenny as a victim and hated her as her own murderer? Into what part of my mind can I pour the shame of my survival, the stifling lack of closure, the infinity of unsaid explanations? All of the ten thousand whys of Jenny Wasserman? Where do I put all of that? And it’s not like there’s a smooth transition between any of these different moods or representations. Not at all. She’s not contained. All the ideas I have about her flicker inside me, rendering my life invisible in the blur. I’m done with feeling any of that. I’m done with Jenny and her—
No.
Just done.
Enough.
The swelling inside me resides, just in time.
I regain my breath.
Bernie is staring at me, seeing all this play out.
‘It’s complicated,’ I tell him.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Yeah right.’
It starts to rain as I cross the campus to security. Inside the office, two uniformed guards claim to know very little about a lost-and-found depository but I cajole one of them into phoning someone else and together they direct me to a basement on the edge of the university grounds. It takes a while but eventually I find it. Down there, a security guard with a sandy moustache and a permanent squint tells me he can’t let me inside to snoop around. Instead, he steps inside the depository on my behalf and returns with a plastic tray of dictaphones. There are dozens of them.
I sort through each one, looking for the make and model Jenny used. ‘Jesus. What else do you have in there?’
‘You name it, it’s in there. When did you lose this thing of yours?’
‘I didn’t lose it. A student of mine did. Jennifer Wasserman. Would have been last year.’
He just shrugs as if to say, Good fucking luck.
I separate out the five dictaphones with UQ engravings on them. I run the numbers but Jenny’s dictaphone isn’t there. They’re all empty. No tapes. ‘You should return these to the tech office in the library. I reckon they’re looking for them.’
‘Sure,’ says the guard. He sweeps them back into the tray with one fast movement. ‘I’ll get right on it.’
‘Thanks for your help.’
At the foot of the stairs, I pause to listen to the rain falling outside. Winter rain is rare in Brisbane. ‘Gonna be with us for a day or two, apparently,’ says the guard.
‘I don’t suppose you have a spare umbrella in there?’
He shakes his head. ‘Had to stop collecting them. It got to be that we couldn’t close the bloody door.’
I had vague plans of dropping into the Centre to see Howard and Kanika and my office but I use the rain as an excuse to ditch. It’s a mistake because after I cut through the Michie Building, I hear someone say, ‘Erma? Is that you?’ I’m halfway down the Michie’s rear stairs, dripping wet. I shield my eyes and look. Anita Milburn stands under the alcove above, cigarette in hand. She does not look good. Anita usually has a fresh, wholesome quality to her – plaited ginger hair, lots of polos and sweaters – but today she’s in a loose cardigan and has bags under her eyes. ‘Holy shit,’ she says.
‘I’ve got to go.’
‘I thought they fired you.’
I take off.
‘They should have,’ she shouts after me.
I don’t know why but I actually wave to her, as if she’s just said something completely different.
The windscreen fogs up in my car. I’m in the UQ car park, waiting out the rain. The lot is three-quarters empty this time of year and sitting out here alone doesn’t feel right. The car is a cage around me. Something is creeping out from the edges of my mind, loosened up by this visit.
Something missing.
Or something found.
I close my eyes.
I move ideas around.
I hate it but I chart out another timeline and in my mind the line snakes across campus and through people I know, through Anita Milburn and
her wretched face and fuck-you tone.
Anita is somewhere in the middle of that line.
I thought they fired—
Before all this, I had a boyfriend for a time. Two years, maybe two and a half. His name was Louis. We lived together while we both did the last stretch of our PhDs. I think that’s what the relationship was about, our projects. A PhD can be lonely and we kept each other company. That’s all it was: a pooling of resources. A year after graduation Louis took a job in Chicago and a month into his new job he emailed to say he’d found someone new, a senior lecturer in cultural sociology at Northwestern. His new girlfriend was already a name. She’s a full professor now. I’m sure they live in a nice place free of bullet holes.
I rebounded from Louis into Ryan Solis, a postgrad assigned to the Centre. Ryan looked a bit like Louis. He was also a year from wrapping up his thesis, so something was definitely going on. But Ryan wasn’t much of an intellectual. I didn’t see a lot of potential in him on that front. I wasn’t his supervisor. I don’t know why they named Ryan in the disciplinary complaint because all I did was sit in on his thesis presentations.
I read his work.
I gave him notes.
I signed his paperwork.
So, I guess there is some duty of care but …
Jenny introduced us. The whole thing didn’t last long. A month or two. Ryan loved to drink and took to it like a first-year undergrad, even though he was twenty-three. I just couldn’t be bothered with the endless socialising. The long nights in the Valley did nothing for me. I have no idea why our inevitable break-up hit him so hard. Ryan was good with women. He came from a good family. He was never going to fail at life, not entirely. And he didn’t, he’s a casual lecturer at Griffith these days. But when I dumped him, he apparently drank for a month non-stop and talked about suicide. Rumour was, he actually tried it. Jenny told me all this in a cafe in Paddington after she demanded we meet. She shared a house with Ryan and three other students, including Cynthia Dunstan, also on the list.
‘Ryan’s devastated,’ Jenny said. ‘Absolutely devastated.’
I’d seen her looking at Ryan. The way she looked at him after a few drinks. ‘Why don’t you fuck him then?’ I said, standing up. ‘Maybe that can be your job now.’
I don’t know why she didn’t.