by Berry, Tony
‘Fucking idiot. Go back to Sydney with the other morons.’
No use. The tram’s warning bell clanged, but it was all too late. The road rules had been broken but no one would be brought to account. Bromo looked towards the tram driver and held his arms out in a gesture of despair. She shrugged, too, and waved back. They both knew it was another skirmish in a losing battle.
Bromo looked around, alert, always guarded, the habits of a lifetime. The street was almost deserted. Mid-week, midnight and mid-winter created a poor recipe for outdoor revelry, although a few hardy souls were clustered beneath the gas warmers outside Kicking On, a bar the size of a lounge room that had angered residents when it morphed into a venue for live music, complete with amplifiers.
Bromo peered through the windows of the all-night pub. Six people were resting their elbows on the bar, two more sat in the corner craning their necks at a motor race on Foxtel and one lone desperate was working her arm muscles on the poker machines. Gym work for the financially desperate. Both tables in the pool room were busy, two quartets of players leaning on cues and lining up shots.
He took another look behind him and across the road before turning into a narrow laneway lit only by a solitary street light high on the side wall of an office block. The wall had become a graffiti artist’s palette, decorated with brazen swirls of luminous colour. Home was at the laneway’s far, darkened end, beyond a parking lot and past the terrace of three low cottages squatting hard up against the footpath.
Bromo saw the shadowy figure resting against a parked car before it made its move, easing up off the car and taking two steps forward towards the lane. Bromo balled his hands tight inside his coat pocket and moved over to the left, away from the parking lot. Briefly he thought of turning back and making his way to the police station. Let the cops deal with it. The idea went as quickly as it came. He braced his shoulders, making a conscious effort to stand tall and step out confidently. It was the weak and cautious who attracted attention.
Bromo kept his head pointed forward but his eyes flicked to the right. He saw the person moving out of the shadows, coming slowly in his direction. He got the impression of someone lean and tall wrapped in tight, dark clothing, probably a tracksuit, with a hooded top pulled tight up and over the head. Their movement was languid, almost cautious.
Bromo relaxed slightly. This was not an assailant. A beggar maybe, someone wanting a cab fare or simply assurance they could doss there undisturbed, but not a mugger or a druggie. They were more tentative than aggressive.
‘You Bromo? Bromo Perkins?’
Bromo slowed. The voice was male, soft and unfamiliar, with a hint of an accent he couldn’t define. The man stood on the edge of the footpath, keeping a distance between them. Bromo stopped.
‘Who’s asking?’
‘I am.’
‘And you are?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It does to me. I like to know who’s creeping up on me in the middle of the night.’
‘I do not creep, Mr Perkins, and I think you were well aware I was here. They tell me you are not easily surprised. Anyway, I have a message for you, a package.
The darkness cloaked Bromo’s surprise. Midnight messengers were a thing of the past and occurred in foreign, lawless places. He concentrated on the voice. It was all he had to go on. The accent teased him, one he felt he knew but couldn’t immediately define. The man’s face stayed hidden, his body a vague thin shape. There was no identity clue. Bromo needed to whittle down the options.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘About two hours. In case you came home early. Did you enjoy the play? And the after-party?’
Bromo noted the implication. He was being watched. His movements, even something as ordinary as going to another godawful David Williamson play, were known and monitored. He chose to ignore the message and push for an identity.
‘I meant in Australia.’
The man gave the faintest ripple of a laugh. The crossed wires unravelled.
‘A long time, Mr Perkins. I’m as Australian as a Pommy import like you.’
Bromo shuffled his feet, inching at snail’s pace in the man’s direction, twisting and pushing his shoes forward on the gritty road surface. Keep the stranger talking and maybe he wouldn’t notice how much the gap between them had narrowed.
‘A formality. A piece of paper doesn’t change our past. You are not originally from here.’
‘As I said, Mr Perkins, we have similar stories.’
Bromo concentrated on the voice, the intonation, the accent. He thought he had nailed it. He kept his feet moving, nearer, nearer. The man gave no sign of noticing. Bromo made a wild guess.
‘Been back to Mumbai lately?’
‘Enough.’
The voice came from behind. It was the same accent, but deeper, sharper, more defined and almost in his ear. Two massive arms enfolded him, crushing his chest, forcing his breath into short gasps. The man in the car park took two steps backwards, deeper into the shadows.
‘Sorry about that, Mr Perkins,’ he said. ‘Too many questions. We are simply doing a favour for a friend, delivering an important message and making sure it gets into the right hands. We had to check. Now we know you are here alone you will find it at your door. You don’t have to know who we are or where we come from.’
The speaker moved quickly, further back into the car park’s darkness. Bromo’s assailant released him with a hefty push, sending him stumbling into a low brick fence, and ran back down the laneway. A car sparked into life and reversed out of the parking lot without lights. It stopped briefly and a rear window wound down. Bromo caught a glimpse of a dark, swarthy face. It was the same soft voice as before.
‘Go home, Bromo. Take care. Be warned, don’t shoot the messenger.’
Bromo watched the car go sedately down the laneway. It stopped briefly to let the man with the bear hug climb aboard before easing gently into Bridge Road. Whoever they were, there was little prospect of them being picked up by patrolling police.
Bromo brushed himself down and walked slowly towards the security door of his apartment block. Too many bottomless glasses of red wine sunk at the after-party were starting to take effect. He pondered which was affecting him the most: the wine, sub-continental bandits delivering urgent messages or the mental weariness inflicted by a latter-day Williamson play. He bent and picked a small package up off the doorstep, unlocked the door and decided it was probably a triple heat.
FOUR
BROMO took the stairs slowly and quietly. It was “Do Not Disturb” time. Most of his fellow residents were early sleepers and early risers, starting work at times Bromo had long decided didn’t exist. He fingered the quarto-size buff envelope as he climbed, wondering at its contents as he ran his thumb over a bumpy raised object about the size of a fifty-cent coin midway along the envelope’s bottom edge.
He was in no hurry to open the envelope. He had long ago learnt gifts and good news did not come in packets delivered at dead of night by hooded vandals. Bad tidings and threats were a safer bet. Why rush to spoil a good night’s sleep?
He took his time over pouring a generous shot of peaty Lagavulin. He slipped a CD of Gregorian chants into the player and settled back into his old winged armchair, a comforter salvaged from a second-hand shop and restored at great expense. Maybe now he could cope with whatever his messengers had brought.
Bromo eased the envelope open. He extracted a single fold sheet of A4 paper and a chunk of bubble wrap, tightly Sellotaped to seal whatever small object it enclosed. The writing on the paper was unusually elegant. The letters were formed in an almost perfect copperplate and penned with a fine inked point. Bromo viewed it as the handwriting of his grandfather’s generation, painstakingly learnt from repetitious lessons under unforgiving teachers. The message was formal and concise:
“Dear Bromo:
If you are reading this I will know you are alive and well.”
Bromo smiled
. The sentence evoked memories of an outrageously radical politician who claimed opponents were out to kill her and recorded a video message for posthumous viewing. “If you are watching this you will know I’m dead,” she ranted unnecessarily.
Bromo pondered the line again. How weird to have people sufficiently concerned to inform he was still alive and well. Especially as they were apparent strangers and wrote with a formality and grace from another era. He sipped his malt and read on:
“It will also mean you are a free agent for my contacts will have checked you thoroughly. They mean well and you will probably never hear from them again. However, they will be close at hand and at your service should you need them.”
Bromo bridled as he read. The words aroused an unease. The thought of unknown people probing his life, watching his movements, projected him back to an existence he thought he had long left behind. This was not how it was meant to be. He was a determined recluse, avoiding involvement, harming no one, ambling quietly around the streets of Richmond as he went about his new-found career of travel consultant to the rich and needy. He soothed his jangled nerves with another trickle of Lagavulin.
In the meantime, it is I who am fearful of dangerous times to come and who desperately needs your help. Hence this unorthodox and secretive approach. The enclosed bauble is but an indication of the source of my fears and is only part of the problem.
Now that I have been assured you are safe and free, I will be in touch ~ Sigiriya.”
Bromo picked up the envelope and turned it over, looking for identifying marks. He skimmed over the note again. Although it rang a faint and distant bell, he could summon up no one from his mental contact book with the name Sigiriya. He felt at the bubble-wrapped object and scraped a fingernail over its taping. Finding a way in had a degree of difficulty on a par with his daily task of unfolding the morning paper, so firmly wrapped that his coffee often went cold before the broadsheet was released from its cling-film cover.
Slowly Bromo picked his way into the package. Inside was a square of cardboard. Blu-tacked to it was stuck a clear diamond-like pebble the size of a ten-cent coin, an imperfect circle yet not elongated enough to be described as oval. Printed on the cardboard above the glistening clear gem were the words “True or False?” Beneath it was another phrase, “Bloody or Clean?”
He peeled the gem away from its backing and removed the small ball of adhesive from its underside. He held it between thumb and forefinger, rotating it slowly, letting the light catch its rounded slopes, sparkling and dimming, the colour changing from water-clear to pallid blue with the occasional brief and merest flashes of yellow, red and green. A real sparkler of a stone although he had no way of knowing its worth. Whether it was glass or diamond he couldn’t tell. Still less did he really care. It was just another bauble in the Bromo book of useless possessions; a make-believe trinket or the Koh-i-nor – did it really matter as long as it sparkled and dazzled and kept the wearer happy.
Of much more concern was the reason it had been sent to him, and the sinister circumstances of its arrival. No one in their right mind – certainly no one who pretended to know him – would send him a real diamond. A bottle of malt would get a far better reception. And if it was merely cut glass, why bother?
As for the identity of Sigiriya, that was best regarded as another cryptic clue to tease his brain. A quick mental shuffling of the letters already showed it wasn’t an anagram. Unless, he mused, the message came from someone with the unlikely name of Iris Yagi or Isi I Gray or …
Bromo drained his glass and walked slowly across to the window wall. He flicked off the light switch and gently eased open the sliding door facing down into the parking bay and the patch of concrete and shrubs that constituted the developer’s idea of a landscaped entertainment area. He could see no shadowy figures, no watchers, no signs of movement lurking in the dark patches between the dim lighting. He recognised the onset of mild paranoia, an uncomfortable but familiar feeling. He did his best to reject it. Of course there was no one there. Why would there be?
Bromo slid the door shut and switched the light back on. He folded the paper and the gem back into the envelope. Cryptics were for a clearer head and another day.
FIVE
IT took less than thirty minutes for Tamsyn Chong to realise the party was a disaster. She accepted farewell gatherings were rarely fun. Tonight was no exception. The jollity was forced, the few brief speeches insincere. Too many people attended out of duty, doing what was expected of them and wishing they were somewhere else. Their remedy was to get stuck into the grog, rapidly downing lethal cocktails or double shots of spirits. The occasion had been made even worse by Natalie bringing her foul mood from the office to the pub.
Tamsyn was neither party girl nor drinker. Tonight she had tried, accepting a glass of sparkling wine and inserting herself into a small circle of fellow workers clustered at the end of the bar. It didn’t work. The wine made her dizzy and the chatter between the women was either recycled gossip culled from the Herald Sun or ribald comments about the pub’s male clientele, topics to which she felt unable to make any contribution.
Natalie pushed her way into the far side of the group. She laughed raucously at one of the women’s remarks and glowered across at the unsmiling Tamsyn.
‘Cheer up, Tam. I thought you’d be celebrating.’
Tamsyn forced a weak smile but had no answer. Natalie threw back the last third of a creamy coffee-coloured concoction in a long-stemmed glass. She wobbled into the woman alongside side her and lurched a couple of steps towards Tamsyn.
‘What’s up, still in mourning for your fluffy pet?’
Tamsyn’s emotional armoury was non-existent. She winced as the barb hit home. She felt the tears welling up, her face crumpling. She had no way of stalling her reaction. Her head drooped, unable to face Natalie’s leer. The other women were suddenly silent, stilled by Natalie’s outburst. Two exchanged uncomfortable glances. Feet shuffled. One tried being a peace-maker.
‘Give over Nat. It’s supposed to be a party.’
Natalie stared the woman down and seemed to bite back words. She refocused on Tamsyn. There was no let-up.
‘Thank God you don’t have a real dog. You can’t even be trusted with a bloody toy.’
Tamsyn straightened her arm. One sudden movement. The contents of her glass spilled forward and out, hitting Natalie full in the face. Tamsyn was as surprised as her sodden target. It had happened without a second’s thought ‒ something she had often wondered what it would be like to do. All those films and TV shows she’d enjoyed where some meek victim had suddenly snapped and upended their drink over their bullying opponent. It was a moment to savour. Such a simple action. Yet demanding so much courage from one so shy.
Tamsyn felt frozen in time. Her arm was still outstretched, clutching the glass. Natalie, slack-jawed and in shock, stared at her, droplets of wine trickling down her cheeks. Tamsyn felt a ripple of a thrill. So much impact for so little effort. She sensed someone at her side, gently bringing her arm down into her body.
‘Here, you need a refill. Look like you’re still in shock.’
It was one of the men from the storeroom. Big and craggy, as if hewn from rock, rough and unbuffed. His name escaped her. His right hand was tilting a bottle towards her glass. Tamsyn stared at his middle finger. It was a stump, ending at the first joint. The man caught her look.
‘Another dog,’ he said. ‘Pit bull. Vicious brute. My own stupid fault. Never trust them.’
He filled her glass and nodded his head in Natalie’s direction.
‘Guess you reckoned she had it coming to her. Good on you.’
Tamsyn didn’t know what to say. His summation of her feelings was about right. She looked down at the floor, saw the splashes of wine on the polished timber, two on the toe of her left shoe. She hoped they wouldn’t stain. She shrugged and took a long gulp of the wine the man had poured. It was sharper, stronger, not so sweet and mild as the one she’d been drin
king. Slightly bitter. Never much of a drinker, Tamsyn found it different from what she was used to.
She raised her eyes and saw Natalie had moved away and was talking to two men at the bar. The other women were still grouped close to her, protective, closing ranks.
‘She’s a real bitch,’ said one.
‘Going out with a bang, eh Tam,’ said another. Everyone laughed.
Tamsyn looked at the women and giggled. It was funny, so few words had ever passed between them in the office and here they were offering support and encouragement.
‘Stupid bloody fuss over a fucking fluffy dog,’ said the first woman. ‘There’s boxes of the things out the back. She could’ve just given you another one.’
Tamsyn heard the words. They seemed to be coming from somewhere far away, from an echo chamber, surreal, bouncing off the walls. She gulped at her drink despite its bitter aftertaste. She grinned at the women around her.
‘A flucking fuffy dog,’ she said.
She heard them laugh. She was the one making them laugh. She’d never done that before. She was the quiet one in the corner of the office, never socialising, always reading, going home to her tiny bedsitter with its two-burner electric stove and a portable television squeezed into a corner of the room. Tonight she was the centre of attention.
‘Flucking fuffy dog,’ she repeated.
It worked again. Tamsyn heard them laughing. She saw Natalie turn and glare at their group and say something to the men alongside her. Her hair was hanging forward in damp strands. Tamsyn pushed her glass towards the man with the bottle. Her words were slurred.