by Marele Day
I went west, chasing the thin, pale, retreating sun. An uncle in France I never found, blackmarket butter, cigarettes. Using my mother’s cloak of invisibility to barter with men in back alleys, lost children like myself.
I learned the geography of my new country. The highest mountain was Mt Kosciusko. The teacher pronounced it ‘cozzioscoe’ and it stayed in the spelling list for weeks. She did not tell them about Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the freedom fighter, who also went to a new land, America, and helped that country win its independence. How he came back a hero to a Poland again belittled by Russians, Prussians and Austrians taking yet another helping. Who developed a theory of guerrilla tactics. Know your terrain, fight with what you’ve got, slip through the interstices of the organised ranks.
Nor did she tell the children about Strzelecki, who did deals with the governor to keep that lone Polish pinnacle in a range full of English names. The price was his discovery of gold and a shut mouth.
In this new land I would also trade gold for a mountain with my name on it. I would also be a man who could persuade governors to do my bidding.
THE BMW HAD a home in Bronte and was registered in the name of a Mr Arthur O’Toole. It was early morning as I drove to the address looking in the rear vision mirror all the way. No BMWs as far as the eye could see. Maybe, like the smart little pig of that famous porcine trio, I was up too early for the wolf to catch me.
But not early enough to catch Sally Villos. The phone had rung and rung till it had rung out.
I knocked on the door of a liver bricked semi. Several times and hard.
Eventually the door opened a crack and the oldest woman in the world appeared though all I could see was an eye, a tiny blue lake in a desert of wrinkled dunes.
‘What do you want?’ she wavered suspiciously.
‘I’d like to see Mr O’Toole,’ I said brightly.
‘You one of them Jehovah Witnesses?’
‘No, no, it’s . . .’ It must have been quite a relief for her to know I wasn’t trying to sell her shares in Paradise on Earth because before I even had a chance to finish the sentence she said:
‘Come in. And don’t let the cats out.’
I wished I could have said the same to her about the smell. Ranging round inside the house were dozens of cats: white ones, tabbies, big black monsters and a few mangy ones of dubious parentage.
‘Is Mr O’Toole in?’
‘Sit down.’
I looked for a place to sit that wasn’t covered in cat fur but there wasn’t any. Just as well I was wearing jeans and not the black skirt I’d toyed with this morning. At least the denim was some protection against the claws but it didn’t stop seven cats simultaneously leaping into my lap. When I had gently but firmly removed the successful ones I looked down to find the heel of my shoe in a crusty saucer of milk.
‘What would you be wanting Mr O’Toole for?’ she asked, looking out through those tiny peepholes.
‘It’s in relation to his car, the BMW.’
‘I don’t know nothing about BMW. Our numberplate started AJC. I always remember it, Arthur always used to say Australian Jockey Club. But we haven’t had a car since Arthur passed away. That was a Hillman—brown, no, it was green, more like khaki . . .’
‘You say Mr O’Toole has passed away?’ She didn’t exactly look like she was grieving.
‘Yairs. Let me see now, it must be getting on for twenty years, yes, twenty years this October. It was the Labour Day weekend.’
‘Do you have any family?’
‘Not so’s you notice,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘There’s only Ronny but I’m as good as dead to him. He never comes to see me, I don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. You young ones don’t know what it’s like to be on your own.’
I refrained from reminding her that the old don’t have a monopoly on loneliness.
‘Still, I’m not complaining, I’ve got me cats. I’ve got me work cut out with them, I give ’em a good home. I don’t understand how some people just let their cats roam around the streets. I bring ’em in and give ’em a good home. That’s where all me pension money goes, in looking after them cats.
‘Will you have a cup of tea, dear?’
‘No thanks, I’m in a hurry.’
‘You young folk are always in a hurry,’ she said, managing a smile.
Things didn’t look very hopeful in the BMW line.
I looked around the room. Apart from the live cats there were ornaments of cats and on the mantelpiece photos of cats. And people. Dour-faced sepia men and women in gilt frames and a couple of more recent ones: recent for Mrs O’Toole anyway.
I extricated my shoe from the saucer of milk and walked over to have a closer look.
‘That your husband?’
‘Yairs. Looks nice in his uniform, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, he does.’ I wandered along the mantelpiece a little. ‘What about this one, the one of the boxer?’
‘That’s young Ronny. Not much brains our Ronny but very good at the boxing.’
I studied young Ronny carefully. Stocky, curly brown hair—30 years later he was the man I’d seen on the street corner in Bondi. The man Mrs Levack had seen in Mark’s flat?
‘Where does Ronny live?’
She shook her head. ‘Like I said, could be dead for all I know. Haven’t seen him for years, not even Christmas. Doesn’t even phone or send me a card . . .’
I hoped she wouldn’t think me unkind if I left before the loneliness started.
‘Thanks for your time, Mrs O’Toole. I must be going.’
‘Sure you won’t have a cup of tea? I’m all by meself here, don’t get much company.’
Apart from 500 cats.
‘No, perhaps some other time. Thank you, goodbye.’
I cleared my lungs of cats and breathed in the hot sharp breath of Sydney. Too hot, too sharp. Up the other end of the street, ominous as a dreadnought, was a navy blue BMW.
I had that insidious feeling Mark must have felt if ever he’d looked up and caught Mrs Levack spying on him through the window—the sort of feeling you get when you look up just in time to see the edge of a curtain fall back into place. The sort of feeling you get when you see the car that wasn’t following you pull into the street where you’re parked.
My brain was making up stories the rest of me refused to believe. So it’s a coincidence. So it’s not the same car. So he’s decided to visit his mother after all these years.
I walked right past the Daimler and examined the bottom of my shoe for dog shit, a habit I’d brought with me from Balmain. There wasn’t any but that didn’t stop me going through the motions of wiping it off.
The BMW drove right past. I kept wiping, intent on my task. I couldn’t see the driver but the numberplate definitely checked out.
It disappeared round the corner and I followed.
But the streets of Bronte were suddenly devoid of BMWs.
I drove to Bondi, parked across the road from Mark’s flat and waited. Waited for the BMW and an explanation of its out-of-nowhere appearances.
I went into a cake shop in Campbell Parade and ordered iced coffee and apricot slice. The coffee was strong, cold and bitter, and did to my insides what the sea did to the outside. Behind me, down a long row of tables voices murmured—Polish, judging by the sounds of schussing which laced the conversation. Probably two mothers talking about their sons. I wondered whether the sons drove BMWs and hung around in crematoriums. Wondered how long it would take for mine to turn up. For a city of nearly five million people Sydney is a very small place, and getting smaller all the time. There must have been a million cars in Sydney but I kept seeing the same one. The atmosphere wasn’t yet claustrophobic, but if the circuit got much smaller I’d be gasping for air.
Across the road the sea and sky were hazy blue. It was still early and in any case the shop was air-conditioned, but the day was going to be hot and heavy. Officially it was autumn but the summer lingered on. Not that Sydney took a blind
bit of notice of the seasons. Variable, she blew hot and cold like a moody child. Once, in a movie, I heard California described as a beautiful dancing lady, high on heroin, enchanting like the drug, who doesn’t know she’s dying till you show her the marks. Sydney was like that: not so high, not so dying, only sick sometimes. Terminal illness. Transformed eventually into mineral stillness. She’d been a very sickly child, poxy and plague-ridden. But she’d grown strong, like a mushroom on a dung heap. Like an exotic mushroom I’d seen once at Gary’s. A beautiful crimson fungus had sprung out of the ground like a spider flower. But in its centre was a dark foetid substance that smelled exactly like human excrement.
Three young Japanese girls came down the esplanade in knee length shorts, flitting like bulbuls from window to window: cake shops, icecream shops, fish and chip shops, though the signs said ‘patisserie’, ‘gelato bar’, ‘seafood mart’. Doors which never closed invited joggers, swimmers and tourists to come in and enjoy themselves. Indulge, I’m yours for only a few dollars—it’s only money—taste my wares, sit in the sun in your reflective glasses and take it all in through the pores. Bondi Beach, no need for brochures, the place is its own publicity.
It is only money.
Everything has a price.
Too seedy to be St. Tropez, too seedy, too slack, too egalitarian.
CARS sat in the sun silently absorbing the heat, reminding me of childhood summers. Days at the beach and before you went home all the doors of the car would be flung open and the heat that rushed out nearly knocked you over. After ten minutes the car would be aerated enough to get into but even then you had to sit on a towel, crusty with salt, so your sunburn didn’t stick to the seat. Then you would drive home. West. Eyes squinting in the harsh light of the setting summer sun.
The car was not in the parking area. Outside the Pavilion were three or four coaches with bevies of schoolboys milling round eating icecreams. A whistle blew and lemming-like they rejoined their coaches.
People bathed between the flags and up one end of the beach was a small group of boardriders. Blue awnings and arches characterised the apartment blocks overlooking the beach. At the south end, where the boardriders were, was Bondi Towers, terraced in mediterranean tiles and ‘landscaped’. At the north end was the wide brown sea of sewers.
I had scanned the whole beachfront and found not a trace of my ubiquitous shadow.
But I remembered something else: Robbie. And the ‘address’ he’d given me: Bondi Beach. Any day the surf’s up.
Today the surf was ‘up’.
I walked towards a group of guys sitting on their boards in the sand. They looked at me like I was a tourist.
‘Hi. Is Robbie down today?’
‘Robbie who?’
‘Robbie Macmillan. He surfs down here.’
‘So do lots of people.’
‘Blond guy. ‘Bout twenty, 23.’
He flipped his hand towards the riders, some coming in, some paddling out: ‘Take your pick.’
‘Thanks for your help, fellas.’
I walked down to a group of lifesavers doing drill by the edge of the water.
‘Excuse me, I’m looking for a guy called Robbie, blond, ‘bout twenty, 23.’
‘What about one called Lex, dark, ‘bout 30?’ said a dark guy about 30.
‘No, thanks. Smart arses aren’t my style.’ I turned my back on him and walked away.
‘Hey, Claudia! Claudia!’ It was Robbie, in the shallows, running towards me, surfboard under his arm and grinning from ear to ear. Young, eager, not yet bitten enough to be shying away. ‘How’re you going?’
I grinned too. ‘Not bad. How’s yourself?’
Our eyes were having a conversation all of their own.
‘Can we talk?’
‘I thought we were.’
We walked further south, towards the rocks. The sea was deep blue now, the colour of a cigarette commercial. The waves heaved and crashed on the edge of the rock platform but we were well away from that, in a hollow wrought by wind and heavy seas.
‘I want to talk about Mark.’
‘Oh. Is that why you came down here—to talk about Mark?’
I liked Robbie, liked his youthful eagerness. It reminded me of life before the skid marks. Something wafted up from the memory bank, incomplete perhaps, but I held onto what I could of it:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven
I’d wanted the dawn to last forever. It was guys like Robbie who made me think it could. But there’d been enough of them, the young boys, the blond whose name I couldn’t remember, to make me realise my dawn and theirs didn’t coincide. Next time I got involved it would be with someone who’d also gone through the dark night and was awake enough to see the dawn. Someone like Steve Angell.
‘I want to ask you about the heroin.’
He watched a wave roll in and crash against the rocks before he replied. ‘How do you know about that?’
‘The autopsy.’
‘Autopsy? Are you a cop or something?’
‘I’m something, a private investigator. And a friend of the family. I went to school with Mark’s sister.’
‘I don’t think Mark’s family would want to know about his . . . bad habits.’
‘They might not have to.’
Robbie sat with arms dangling over bent knees, looking back now at the beach and the specks of humanity on it. Slowly he started to speak. ‘Look, I do a bit of dope now and then but smack . . .’ He shook his head, ‘as far as I’m concerned it’s a one-way street. I’ve seen more than one mate go that way.’
‘Robbie,’ I said softly. ‘you don’t have to justify yourself to me, we’re talking about Mark.’
‘Yeah, well . . . with him it was . . . manageable. You’d never know to look at him that he was doing smack. He looked healthy, he didn’t hang out on street corners.’
‘Where did he hang out?’
‘Down here . . . At the video arcade . . .’
‘Is that where he was getting it from? The video arcade?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Which video arcade?’
He told me. It was one of those arcades down the seedy end of George Street.
‘You guys seem a bit old for video arcades.’
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘It was the video arcade, wasn’t it?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe . . .’ I bored holes into him with my eyes.
‘OK, OK,’ he said after an interminable silence. ‘I know other guys scored down there. I don’t know for sure, Claudia, I’m only guessing. Don’t quote me. OK?’
‘I won’t quote you,’ I smiled. ‘Look, I’ve got to go. Here’s my phone number.’
‘In case I hear anything about Mark?’ he said cynically.
‘In case you want a drink sometime. I believe it’s my shout.’
The eyes came back, and the grin. ‘I got quite a thirst,’ he said, ready for anything.
I grinned back ruefully, too chicken to tell him I’d drunk that fountain dry.
IT was there. In Campbell Parade. The sight of it pushed my stomach down to my ankles and started my palms sweating. The esplanade metamorphosed into a Kafka novel: smiles on innocent passers-by became derisive and mocking, dogs became wolves ready to attack on a silent signal. All the windows had eyes and they were all looking at me.
I breathed into my abdomen and gathered force. Gradually the heart beat came back to normal and the rush subsided. The wolves were back to dogs and nobody was looking.
The dashboard of the BMW was like the cockpit of a supersonic jet, complete with phone and a computer screen. I would have liked to break into it but if I even as much as breathed on it alarms would go off everywhere. I scanned the beach for ex-boxers in leather jackets. The beach was nearly empty now, even Robbie was gone.
I drove into town with the sun blaring through the windscreen like my childhood summers. Near Taylor Square I s
topped to buy a paper. ‘Shake-Up in Sydney’s Crime World’ said the headline. When I got back to the Daimler the BMW was waiting in a No Standing zone. The driver had his head in a newspaper. Probably reading the death notices. I slid out into the traffic. The BMW didn’t move. Even when I was through the lights it still hadn’t moved.
I drove down Liverpool Street and up Kent with eyes in the back of my head. There was no sign of him. Miraculously in Kent Street I found a free parking meter, pushed a coin into the slot then went and stood by the pedestrian crossing. I waited. I was in a relatively quiet part of town verging on the Rocks where a few years before a hitman in a red Mercedes had gunned down a gangland punk outside a preschool. He’d been visiting his mother.
He came. Slowed down at the crossing and I got a good look at him. He had the heavy look of a cop or someone else who ate too much meat. A rugged head, not too bad for an ex-boxer, that went straight into the expensive-looking leather jacket. No neck was visible though he wasn’t at that moment sticking it out. I was the one sticking my neck out. He looked at me too, like I was any girl in the street, and drove on. I waited. He didn’t show.
I got back in the Daimler and joined the traffic going over the Bridge. The gaudy face of Luna Park loomed up on the other side. Luna Park: Just For Fun. An amusement park with a plaster grin, its painted lips the entrance to a labyrinth of company titles in which the real owner hid. I turned left into Milsons Point and parked the car in a side street. Ten minutes later the BMW came into view. I got out of the Daimler and walked towards the station. I stood on the platform and waited. He didn’t show. I let two city-bound trains go by—just to be sure.
Now I knew. It was not me he was following. It was the car.
OFFICE workers gushed through the conduits of Wynyard Station on their way home from work. I pushed against the tide and finally came out to Wynyard Park. At lunchtime on sunny days it was sprinkled with sandwich eaters and following their trail, the deroes who went through bins. Now it was virtually deserted.