by A L McCann
“Bad luck there,” a voice said to him out of the shadows.
He turned sluggishly to find Max Wedelkind stepping out into the glow of a streetlight. The man was dressed in a buttoned-up suit and still wore his straw hat. Insects of a thousand different shapes swarmed about him, attracted by the light, but he barely seemed to notice.
“I’m glad my acting days are long gone,” he said. “Mighty tough audiences nowadays.”
“Go to hell,” Paul slurred.
“But I was flattered to see that you hadn’t forgotten me in your little drama.”
Paul could barely stand and suddenly felt as if he were about to vomit. His jaw went slack and his mouth filled with warm saliva.
“Oh, very nice,”Wedelkind snickered.
Paul propped himself up against a wall, and slowly slipped down into a sitting position, his legs splayed out on the pavement.
“The problem was that your Alma Tirtschke was too cheap. Completely ill-suited. Where in the devil’s name did you find her?”
Paul eyed him suspiciously. Wasn’t it Wedelkind who sucked him into the theatre in the first place? Wasn’t it Wedelkind who held the strings that guided him through all his botched endeavours, Wedelkind who was the presiding genius of his ruin? Paul closed his eyes, trying to get it all straight in his mind, trying to unravel the tangled knot of decisions and motivations that had led him to this wretched impasse. In his drunken state he saw his wife melting into his sister’s arms, kissing her with a passion that she had never shown him, giving herself over to the power of cold blood and still, limpid eyes.
“I’m telling you, the problem was with your Alma Tirtschke.”
“Don’t say her name again,” Paul said,”or I’ll thrash you.”
“Alma Tirtschke,” Wedelkind dared him, his eyes almost popping out of his head.
Paul blinked. Wedelkind was holding the child by the hand. She was wearing the same tunic and the spotted blouse the actress had worn earlier that night.
Paul blinked again, then closed his eyes and shook his head. When he looked up the girl was still standing in front of him.
“What is this?” he said.”Take her away from me!”
But the girl bent over him and let him smell the floral scent of her innocence. Her cheek brushed his, her hair fell into his eyes, and her lips touched his so softly that he doubted they were human. She helped him to his feet and led him across the road to a warped little house which opened into a warren of rooms and connecting hallways. The air was hot, almost too hot to inhale. In the darkness there were other forms, little more than blurs, moving languidly as if slowed by the heat. Paul thought he could see a slender white body slip out of its tunic and blouse. But he could barely breathe and his eyes were already heavy as he felt the soft lips again brushing his and the gentle, beguiling hands pulling him down.
He slept for what felt like years, through vast tracts of time stretching him across the ages of man. He was giddy with the incalculable, with huge numbers measuring his mortification, the empty depths of his own soul, the infinity of his nothingness brimming with the bitterness of humiliation.
Slowly the rottenness of the place worked its way into his dreams and he forced himself awake to find that he was lying in the arms of a much older woman. His head ached. He felt as if acid were coursing through his veins, burning him from the inside out. He was still too drunk to move off the mattress. He must have fallen asleep again when he heard the woman’s voice whispering to him. He had the dim sensation of her breath on his ear, but heard the voice as if it were crawling about inside him. “I’ve always hated you. We all do. All of us hate all of you.”
He roused himself again and pulled himself clear of the twisted sheets. He fumbled for his clothes on the floor and dressed as the anonymous sleeper flopped herself over onto her back. In the half-light he recognised Roxanne. Something in him broke and he went back to her, studying the lines on her face, recalling the paintings that were never bought and the brief period, a matter of weeks, when his idealism had been boundless. She still had traces of youth, but time had worn away her slender, serpentine features.
“Is that you, darling?” she said drowsily as Paul touched her face.
But this moment of recognition revolted him, and he fled the room, stumbling back out onto the street where another bright morning was already working its way towards blazing midday heat.
Again Paul caught a glimpse of himself in the brothel window. He was indeed haggard and old, booze-bloated as if, like the picture of Dorian Gray, he were aging before his very eyes.
He walked towards the Eastern Arcade, thinking that he might find Wedelkind and beat him to within an inch of his life. But when he got there the phrenologist’s door was closed and a sign on the window indicated that the space was for rent. It was cooler in the arcade, out of the sun, but still the air was musty and in want of circulation. Paul stood gazing at the “For Rent” sign wondering whether he had dreamt the whole encounter the night before. The man is a phantom, he told himself. I can kill him at a stroke. He confidently turned away from the window and walked back towards Bourke Street.
He bought a copy of the Argus from the stationer and checked the reviews, pausing just inside the arcade entrance to read the headline: “Gun Alley Debacle”. His aching eyes moved quickly over the article.
Last night at the Bijoux Mr Paul Walters, whose play The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities was banned shortly before Christmas, was back before the public eye with yet another obscene and insulting piece of grotesquerie. Citizens of the city will not need to be reminded of the shocking particulars of the Gun Alley murder, which are currently being replayed at the trial of Colin Ross. As if the public were not already sick with these details, Mr Walters has seen fit to rub salt into the wound, as it were, with a callous and offensive rendition of these shocking events. Fortunately, this time the audience was in no mood to be insulted. Many people left at the first appearance of a lascivious Alma Tirtschke, others shouted their dismay and a few even leapt up onstage to physically put an end to the performance. We are not in the habit of praising such outbursts of public disorder, but he who lives by the fickleness of the mob should be prepared to die by it. With any luck, public outrage will put an end to The Gun Alley Atrocity before Paul Walters again finds himself before the courts.
He threw the paper away and wandered off towards the market. The stalls looked cooler than the street. Paul veered into their shade only to discover that the promise of relief was illusory. What he found were sweating bodies and stagnant air, the stench of bestial humanity tinged with the rankness of overripe fruit and day-old fish. The people looked bigger and uglier than any he had ever seen. Flabby arms trembled before him, hairy armpits gaped, and sagging bellies pushed him into rotting, ulcerated flesh, torn open by the sun. He decided to hurry out of the place when a man with a large beer belly bounced him back into the crowd.
“Say, ain’t you that bloke?” the man said. “Hey, youse. It’s that bloke.”
Paul tried to get past him, but the man was insistent, knocking him back with his fat, meaty arms. Paul turned away and began to walk in the opposite direction straight into a wall of sweating flesh that wrapped itself around him with the same insistence.
“It is that bloke,” said another voice.
“It most certainly is,” a voice, more mellow and insinuating, chimed in.
Paul searched around him and saw Wedelkind’s merry old face smiling through the crowd. He seemed to wink at him just before the first man with the meaty arms slapped him across the face. Paul wriggled like a fish but the mob had him in its wet, fleshy hands. He could smell the bodies closing around him. The odour made him gag more than did the threat of violence.
At that moment he had a vision of Wedelkind bobbing up and down like a jack-in-the-box. He would have torn the old man limb from limb if only he could have found his way clear of the blows and kicks. Someone spat on him. With his arms and legs pinned to the filthy floo
r of the market a steady stream of warm saliva, phlegm and mucus rained down on him.
Finally he got back on his feet, wiping the slime off his face. “It’s the old man!” he cried on the verge of tears. “The Gaukler!”
But Wedelkind was nowhere to be seen. The crowd stood back at the sight of what it now took to be a raving lunatic. Passers-by who hadn’t seen the incident unfold would have sworn that Paul Walters was a vagrant or a madman. As the initial perpetrators of his humiliation vanished, the tone turned from hostility to fear. People shrank away from him in revulsion, clearing a wide path as he made his way out of the market towards the river, where he did his level best to clean himself up and wash away his humiliation.
When he got back to St Vincent Place Ondine and Laura were seated silently in the downstairs sitting room. The papers had been delivered and now lay on the polished walnut table.
“So,” he said, throwing his coat onto the arm of the couch and standing before the two amazed women like a bloated scarecrow.”So!”
But embarrassed silence greeted him as neither one was game enough to say the first word.
“Bitches,” Paul muttered under his breath.
He snatched up the papers, knocking over a teacup in his haste, and hurled them ineffectively across the room, sending pages fluttering to the floor.
Ondine’s eyes darted towards Laura.
“I told you it was daft,” Laura said to Paul.
Paul looked at her, dumbfounded. “You told me it was daft?” he said and threw his arms into the air.”Neither of you have the right to accuse me!”
Laura stood up and took his hand, but he shook her off.
“Sit down Paul,” she said,”and try to be civil.”
“You’re in love with my sister.”
For a moment there was dead silence.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. She looked into his red eyes, then at his pale, unshaven cheeks and dry, cracked lips.
“Say it. You’re in love with my sister!” he repeated.
Finally Ondine stirred. “Perhaps your sister is in love with your wife. At any rate, what business do wives and sisters have falling in love with anyone?”
As Paul listened to his sister he felt something black and heavy drop within him and then squirm around in the pit of his stomach.
“Then I am nothing,” he said.
He pushed Laura away from him, caught between violence and melodrama.
“You’re being stupid, Paul,” she remonstrated.
“Stupid?” he screamed.
Like a madman he lunged at his coat on the arm of the couch and drew out a knife which he held up to the light.
“Stupid?” he wailed again at the top of his voice.
In response to the racket coming from downstairs Anna had appeared at the door of the sitting room in time to see her son plunge the knife into his chest right up to its ebony handle. His face turned red and as he staggered towards the couch he withdrew the blade and plunged it in a second time. Anna screamed as Paul stumbled forward onto his knees, blood drenching his white shirt and dribbling onto the floorboards.
“Oh my God!” his mother shrieked.
Paul tumbled to the floor. Ondine and Laura flew to him, rolling him onto his back. He was still. He had stopped breathing. His hand still clutched the knife lodged in his heart.
Laura felt his cheek and then his neck. Then she dabbed the tip of her index finger in the blood forming a puddle around him and rubbed it on her thumb, studying its consistency. Paul was still motionless. She looked at Ondine and smiled.
“Dead?” Ondine asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Hardly.”
Laura pulled the bloody fingers away from the handle of the knife one by one, letting the hollow, retractable blade spring back out as it fell to the floor. She picked up the stage prop and squeezed the handle, which in fact was made of black rubber, spraying a jet of watery red liquid into the air. Both women laughed. Ondine touched Laura’s hand just as Paul opened his eyes and stared blankly at the ceiling.
Anna, recovering from the initial shock, looked at her son with incomprehension. “What is wrong with you?” she said angrily. For a moment all she could see was the image of his father. She sat down on the couch and closed her eyes, hoping to dispel the memory of those miserable years in Brooke Street.
“Me? What is wrong with me?” Paul cried in disbelief as he got to his feet. He strode past the two younger women, snatched his coat from the couch, walked into the hallway and back out onto the burning bitumen of St Vincent Place.
EPILOGUE
Colin Ross insisted that he was innocent right until the end. Some strands of reddish hair and a shred of blue material, apparently from the dead girl’s tunic, were uncovered in his Footscray home. It was this evidence that finally convicted him. He was executed at Pentridge Gaol in the April of 1922. The same week the city council met to consider the future of the Eastern Arcade and Market, discussing plans for urban renewal that promised to transform Melbourne into an orderly, modern metropolis.
For some, however, the case was not over. Ross’s lawyer claimed to have received letters from the real killer, describing the crime in graphic detail, and then wrote a pamphlet expressing his outrage at the verdict. A spiritualist in the arcade, Madam Gurkha, responded with another, portraying Ross as a syphilitic, predatory maniac. But for most people the murder, the most notorious in the city’s history, quickly passed into the realm of anecdote. Grandmothers told their grandchildren that they were there to lay flowers on the cobblestones where the body had been found, and local personalities briefly mentioned the scandal of Gun Alley in their pithy memoirs and nostalgic evocations of old Melbourne. Years later, when the crime had been almost completely forgotten, curious researchers began to stumble across its traces in the basements of libraries and wonder what capital they could make out of it. Eventually one of these sleuths managed to test the forensic evidence in the case, comparing DNA from different strands of hair, proving that Ross was probably innocent.
When the arcade was finally demolished Hamish McDermott was still living in a flat above Flinders Lane. The place was small and had become cluttered with the detritus of his years as a bachelor. He imagined he was living in a time capsule that historians would rummage through after his death, sorting through shelves of dog-eared books by obscure writers, newspaper cuttings of the city’s most macabre crimes, six paintings by an unknown Australian artist, bought years before at a pawnbroker’s, and the effusions of a journalistic hack with just enough insight to recognise his own mediocrity. For the first time he felt dated. Perhaps this meant he was ready to die, he told himself. But what did it matter? It’s a curious thing about cities. People linger on for years in the same old haunts, stubbornly refusing to vacate. Finally their ghosts are exorcised when enough buildings and streets are demolished that they cease to recognise their surroundings. When the Eastern Arcade and Market were destroyed, generations of ghosts disappeared into the ether.
Sometime in the early-twenties, after the furore around the Gun Alley murder had died down, a place called Walters’s Magic Shop opened in the arcade. It quickly became a magnet for young children, and its oddity guaranteed its popularity. Children who couldn’t afford any other amusement would congregate there and run amok through its dusty aisles of curiosities.
Of particular interest was the collection of stage props, which included fake limbs, frightening masks, a couple of life–sized corpses, a skeleton, an imitation iron maiden and a whole range of devices capable of producing weird sound effects, like the wind in the trees, or the rattle of chains. The children would stab each other with the retractable daggers and swords, and sometimes even make themselves up with fake blood and a bit of mutilated tissue before running out into the arcade to scare passers-by. The place also stocked a variety of magic tricks including hats with false bottoms, miniature guillotines with trick blades, unsolvable puzzles involving interlocking hoops and triangles, and tiny boxes tha
t could makes coins disappear. As the years went by Walters’s Magic Shop also accumulated no end of other useless bits and pieces. A couple of discarded mannequins, entwined like Quasimodo and Esmeralda, stretched their dead limbs through piles of terracotta cupids, plaster sphinxes, Chinese lanterns, religious icons, rusted surgical instruments and yellowing newspapers, such that the children almost had to dig them out of the rubbish. The debris of deceased estates from every corner of the city somehow found its way into the back of the store where a multitude of odds and ends bred like mosquitoes on the muddy banks of a sluggish, tropical river.
The owner of the store, as well, was something of a local attraction. He had a decrepit gentility about him, as if he couldn’t be bothered washing his clothes or cutting his thinning black hair, but dressed expensively just the same, at least by the standards of the day. His heavy, sallow face was usually unshaven and his stomach bulged against a grubby vest. He was an apathetic businessman and let the place run to rack and ruin. The children treated him with a combination of camaraderie – as if he were one of them, the king of the kids – and derision – as if he were a bit touched in the head. For the most part he’d talk to them as equals and tolerate their rummagings. He’d even tell them stories about his past and, when he had the energy, warn them against the blandishments of a capricious figure called the Gaukler, whose trickery, he said, had been the secret of both his making and his unmaking. Sometimes the children would listen attentively, sometimes they’d snigger under their breath. The older ones, already rubbing shoulders with the larrikin pushes of Collingwood or Fitzroy, found stories about the Gaukler lingering around the old arcades of Melbourne too eccentric to be taken with a straight face and mocked the old man as a kind of freak, a laughing-stock.
There was something eerily melancholic in these stories, a touch of madness, the desperation of loneliness and solitude, the strange life of a city full of cracked tunes and tainted visions. There was one particular circumstance in all of this that people still claim to remember with great clarity. Once a week, two graceful ladies would walk arm in arm through the arcade to the magic shop. When Mr Walters saw them outside his window he’d scurry to the door and lock it, leaving these poor women tapping on the glass with their parasols, or whatever it was women carried in those days. After a moment or two they’d give up and walk away, only to return the next week, to be rebuffed in the same fashion.