by Marele Day
‘Well I haven’t.’
She looked oddly relieved.
‘Where are his discs?’
‘There weren’t any.’
‘What do you mean there weren’t any? He needed discs for the computer, didn’t he?’
‘Of course. I don’t know what happened to them. When I moved his stuff over there were no discs.’
‘But he must have had a print-out, a copy somewhere.’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Why should he?’
‘Writers usually do, you know.’ Apart from the paranoia it was a reasonable thing to do. Who’d spend months working on something without some sort of back-up? Is that why Mark was paranoid? Because he had nearly finished his book and the only record he had of it was a piece of plastic? But there was the modem. Copies could be stored elsewhere. I wondered how Otto was getting on.
‘What do you know about the book?’
‘What’s there to know? To tell you the truth, I wasn’t all that interested.’ She sounded nonchalant but her hands were still picking bits out of the bedspread. And she still couldn’t drag herself away from the mirror.
‘But it was going to be a best-seller. Didn’t that arouse your interest?’
She sighed and looked straight at me. ‘They were all going to be best-sellers. I don’t suppose he’d have kept on writing if he didn’t believe that.’
‘Did you believe it?’
She turned her eyes away and looked at the mounting pile of threads. I wondered how she was going to explain a bald bedspread to her parents.
‘No, not really. He’d get all enthusiastic about something, and then when I’d ask him how it was going he’d say, “Oh that, that’s history”, as if I was a moron or something for even asking. “I’ve got another idea for a book and this is going to be it!” That’s what he said every time, or words to that effect.’ She breathed out heavily. ‘I loved Mark but can you blame me for not having faith in his work? He just never finished anything. Great ideas, no staying power.’
‘But,’ I gently reminded her, ‘he had finished this one, hadn’t he, or was close to it.’
‘Yes but this one was different,’ she blurted out. Oh, if only she could stop the tape and delete.
‘How was this one different?’
‘Just different, that’s all.’
‘ “Just different” is not good enough, Sally.’
‘Why are you asking me all this stuff, anyway? Aren’t you just supposed to . . . to assess the value of his things or something?’
It was a bit late in the conversation for her to be asking this now.
‘Mark was murdered, Sally, did you know that?’
‘Murdered?’ She said it as if it was a word from a foreign language. ‘Mark wasn’t murdered, it was an accident. He wasn’t murdered, he wasn’t!’ She hammered the message into the bear. ‘He couldn’t have been. It was the smack. He couldn’t have been murdered, murder is what . . . is what criminals do . . .’
‘And innocent people are often the victims,’ I reminded her.
I held her hands and made her look at me. She tried to pull away. She was surprisingly strong, but I held.
‘OK, OK, maybe he was murdered and maybe it was an accident. If he was murdered—let’s just say he was murdered—wouldn’t you want the murderer brought to justice?’ The words nearly curled in my mouth.
She thought about it. For a fraction too long for the outburst to be spontaneous.
‘No. No!’ Then softer, as if she’d seen my eyes, ‘Would that make any difference? Why don’t you leave it alone. I just want it to stop!’
This was the second time today I’d been advised to leave it alone. It made me more determined not to leave it alone. Besides, I was too involved now to let go. The arrow was already in the air, moving inexorably towards the target. Too late now to reel it back in. Even if I wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I would get Lavender. If it was the last thing I did. Get him for what he’d done to my father. For what he was doing to my city.
She’d nearly finished the bottle now and the mask was coming undone. Mascara ran down her cheeks and the blood red lipstick was smudged from nose to chin. She looked like a clown.
‘Sally,’ I said softly. ‘Sally.’ I bent down level with her. She pulled her head away. ‘I’d like to take the computer away with me. Would that be all right?’
‘No. No, it wouldn’t,’ she said, trying to cut me with her eyes. ‘It’s Mark’s. You can’t have it.’
‘It would only be for a day or so.’ Only long enough for Otto to go to work on it.
‘No,’ she said sullenly.
‘I can get a court order for it.’
‘Get it, then,’ she sneered.
I breathed and counted to ten. Several times.
‘Well, what are you waiting for? You know the way out.’
Yes, I knew the way out.
I tossed her a tube of Beroccas. ‘Here, have these. They’re great for the hangover you’re going to have.’
I slammed the security door shut and walked down the steps to the car. Except for the sound of the surf a few blocks away the street was quiet. I wondered how many other women were sitting behind security doors drinking tequila and watching re-runs of Days of Our Lives.
I wondered too whether there were any undigested grains of truth in this load of horse shit she’d just piled on me.
DRIVING back over the Bridge I thought about the mess I’d just left, and thought about my job. You did get to look behind the facades, behind the security doors, and it wasn’t always pretty.
There were a lot worse things to do in life: I could be a doctor telling a cancer patient he had six months to live, even if that patient were cancer himself like Harry Lavender. Or I could be a social worker taking to court a parent who beats up on a child. I provided a service. People could take it or leave it, I didn’t ram it down their necks.
By the time I got to North Sydney I’d almost convinced myself.
I slid off the Bridge into the city, heading west. Passing under the Monorail felt like walking under a ladder but there was no way to avoid it. The metal snake was now part of the city. I zoomed across Darling Harbour and took in the ever-shifting sights. And sites. Gleaming new metal and the maze of scaffolding, the signs of those who had won the tenders, bright clean signs belying the wheeling and dealing that had put them there, the palm trees lining the new avenues, transplanted fully grown from the places where they’d been planted, like old bull elephants uprooted from jungles to be caged in zoos for people to gawp at. I tried to picture what all this had looked like a few short years ago but couldn’t. Like everyone else, I would accept it once it was a fait accompli, vaguely aware that the signposts of the city’s history and my own were being effaced, as if someone had gone through my photo album and replaced the photos of me with those of another child, more modern, better dressed.
Traffic was banked up on the approach to Glebe Island Bridge. A container vessel was leaving port, the same vessel that had witnessed my altercation with the security guard. From halfway round the world water had carried it right up the veins into the heart of this city. Blue water that here was green at the edges and hid a multitude of sins. Water absorbs everything: schemes gone awry, dumped cargo, bodies, gold wedding rings, a child’s first thong, they all lay on the bottom beneath the placid levelling surface. Just like the reminders of the city’s past levelled by the developers of the future.
Everything stank of Lavender.
The city was highly strung, a girl like Sally, a beautiful, made-up face, a sophisticated child, cool and crying and laughing all in the one breath, a liar, a tease. A girl craning her neck to see her reflection in the mirror or glass buildings. The nerves run riot by the jagging edge of jackhammers.
More than four million people crowded into this city while the rest of the continent remained a vacant lot. Because here the isolation was less intense, here you could stand on the foreshores and gaze out
to sea and know that just beyond the horizon lay another country. Even if it was only New Zealand.
‘GIVE us a Scotch, Jack.’
The after-work crowd was in full swing. There was that dull rumble of male voices, punctuated by the muted click of balls hitting together in the pool room. And not just the balls on the table. Men in jeans and T-shirts lined up shots, resting their cigarettes and beer on the cushion, muttered under their breaths when they missed the easy ones and tried to look nonchalant when they pulled off a tricky one. Smoke filled the room and the laughter was wicked. It was what my grandmother would call a ‘den of iniquity’.
Out here it was more like a din of inequity. I squeezed onto a bar stool besides two solicitors arguing over something in the Financial Review. Up the end of the bar sat George in his flares and nylon windcheater, muttering to himself and reading the evening paper with a rather shaky finger. Every pub had a George. He was there morning, noon and night and never seemed to eat, apart from salt-and-vinegar chips. ‘Never missed a day,’ he would tell you if you were unlucky enough to get into conversation with him. ‘I’ve been coming here for thirty five years and never missed a day.’ He had a wife at home but no-one ever saw her. Rumour had it that he and his wife never spoke to each other. When their only son was killed in action in Korea they still didn’t speak. She just left the telegram on the kitchen table for him to see. Both hugging their individual grief, too locked up in their isolated cells to share it.
He caught my eye and gave me a silent salute. His mouth moved into something resembling a smile but the blackened teeth detracted somewhat from its charm. I returned him a disinterested closed-mouth one, the sort that issues no invitation but still George lumbered towards me, armed with the newspaper.
‘Now, George, don’t annoy the customers.’
‘I’m not a customer,’ I said. ‘I live here.’
‘And so does he. Unfortunately,’ said Jack under his breath.
George didn’t really bother me. I was curious about him, curious to know whether Guy had gone like this before he’d finally taken to the streets. He was always pointing out ghoulish bits in the paper, almost gleefully, as if life really was the shit sandwich on three-day-old white bread he thought it was. People didn’t really listen to George, merely nodded their heads politely, hoping he’d go away.’ . . . and just a young bloke too . . . good swimmer . . . had his legs broken . . .’
‘Yes, George, terrible isn’t it?’ I smiled politely.
Then it started to sink in.
‘Can I see that, George?’
He had his finger under bold black letters:
SURFER DEAD ON BONDI BEACH
I raced through it, through the body and the broken legs looking for the name.
It jumped out at me and pulled me down like a drowning man.
The name was Robbie Macmillan.
‘Excuse me.’
I walked towards the toilets with measured steps, smiling politely at the clusters of suits I had to squeeze past. One more second, Claudia, just one more.
Then I locked myself in, reeling like a maniac, leaning against the door to stop myself falling down. I saw the broken swimmer swimming uselessly for the shore, the rough waves pushing him back and back, the mouth finally opening to take in the wide brown sea . . .
I knew why people retched and gagged. Because there were some things you couldn’t stomach. Why the eyes streamed. Because you couldn’t hold it in. Why they raved and ranted and went mad. Because the message to the computer in the skull was just too much and the system revolted.
Why was Robbie’s body lying broken on the beach, the bloody irony of the beach that was home to him? An innocent bystander the crims reckon they don’t kill. But they’d killed Robbie, they’d killed Robbie.
And I knew just who had put the boot in.
I flushed the toilet and put the seat down. The blaze subsided, turning into a cold hard lump where the heart used to be.
‘CAROL? It’s Claudia.’ . . . ‘I’m alive and kicking.’ And so If was someone else.
‘That body that was found at Bondi. It was Johnny the Jumper.’ . . . ‘Don’t be pedantic, I just know.’
They knew too but didn’t have ‘proof’.
‘Bring him in, Carol. The bastard’s a maniac.’ . . . ‘I don’t know what charge. Use your imagination. Maybe he’s got bald tyres. Just get him, Carol. Get him.’
I had another call to make — the nameless number in Mark Bannister’s address book. It rang twice, then the trill turned into something else, something I’d never heard before. It was not engaged and it was not disconnected. Ming ming ming ming ming. Burning my brain out from the inside like a microwave.
‘Otto? The data transmission number — I’ve got it.’ I could almost feel Lavender breathing down my neck.
As soon as I slammed the receiver down the phone started ringing. I wrenched it up again. There was heavy breathing. I’d had this kind of call before.
‘Put it away, you wanker!’ I shouted and slammed it down again.
It rang again almost immediately.
This time the heavy breathing had turned into sobbing. I’d heard that before, too.
‘Sally? Did you just ring me? What’s wrong?’ . . . ‘Don’t move, I’ll be over right away. Don’t answer the phone and don’t answer the door till I get there.’
I had a sort of inverted Midas touch. Everyone who talked to me about Mark was turning into a corpse or a screaming heap. Two down, how many more to go?
Who else had I contaminated? Who else was fallible? Perhaps in the connection to the heart . . . the slender thread between the fallible and the infallible . . .
Oh dear God, no, not Steve. Not Steve, the connection to the heart, the slender thread. I had to hear his voice, to know he was OK, that he hadn’t been touched.
I sat staring at the phone. I couldn’t move. It was ringing with laughter, that horrible echoing laughter like the demon in a horror movie.
What if Steve hadn’t been touched? If he was alive and well and unkicked?
I nearly killed him . . . one particular program and his heart went haywire . . . phone tapping . . . so sophisticated now there’s no way of telling . . .
He knew how to do it.
Maybe . . . Lucifer was once an angel . . . no, oh no, not Steve . . .
I willed myself to pick up the phone. If I heard his voice I would know.
I dialled each digit hard and deliberately. A wrong number would be a bad omen.
I didn’t hear his voice. I heard the phone ringing and ringing and ringing.
BY THE LOOKS of Sally she’d poured half the duty free shop down her throat. The tequila and Scotch bottles were empty and so was a bottle of cooking sherry. I went into the kitchen and made her a cup of coffee.
‘Ugh!’ she said. ‘No milk.’
‘It’s better that way. Now, what happened?’
‘It’s you, it’s your fault,’ she screamed at me. ‘It happened because of you!’
She pushed me away violently. ‘Don’t touch me! Get out of here, I never want to see you again!’
‘Sally,’ I said softly enough to get under the pitch of her voice, ‘you called me, remember? I’m here because you called.’
‘Who else could I call?’ she screamed.
If I still smoked, now would have been the time to light one up.
‘OK, try telling me about it.’
I waited. Waited all the time it took for her to calm down enough to be coherent.
It didn’t take as long as I expected.
‘Not long after you left two men came. When I opened the door they pushed me back into the house. One of them told me to sit down and the other one started looking in all the rooms. When he came to my room he called out to the other one. The other one made me stand up and walk in front of him. He had a gun and he stuck it in my back. He stuck a gun in my back . . .’
A pity he hadn’t pulled the trigger.
‘What happened whe
n you got to your room?’ The words came out like cold hard stones.
She blew her nose.
‘It was dreadful. All Mark’s things were all over the place . . .’
‘Let’s go and have a look.’
Everything was all over the place. Everything except the computer.
‘Did they take it?’
She nodded.
‘They . . . they said something strange. They said, “We’re repo men, the owner didn’t keep up with his payments.” Then they laughed, like it was a joke or something.’
‘Did they take anything else?’
‘No . . . just the computer.’
Of course the computer, of course. Conveniently before Claudia could have it examined more closely, of course.
‘What did they look like?’
‘Like businessmen. One was young and the other old, about 40.’
‘Was the older one wearing driving gloves?’
She paused, consulting the script. ‘They both wore gloves.’
‘Did you see what sort of car they were driving?’
‘I’m not sure. Before I answered the door I looked out the window. There was a white car, some sort of Japanese one, I don’t know which, parked across the road but I don’t know if it was theirs.’
‘Didn’t they get into it when they left?’
‘I . . . I don’t know. I was too upset to think about looking. I just phoned you.’
‘When will your parents be back?’
‘In a couple of weeks.’
‘Couldn’t you go and stay with friends till then?’
‘I guess so,’ she said without much conviction.
‘I don’t expect those men will be back if they’ve got what they want, but it’s better to be on the safe side. Ring and let me know where you’ll be.’
I didn’t expect those men back. I didn’t expect they’d been there in the first place.
‘And Sally, go easy on the bottle. It makes you start imagining all sorts of things.’
I headed for the city, Again. Underneath the make-up and the act Sally was erratic, highly strung. Just who was tautening those strings of hers? Sooner or later she’d slip up—if she hadn’t already. OK, there was an outside chance that she’d had visitors after I’d left. And that they’d taken the computer.