Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

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  The body belonged to a woman who died in the hospital from a heart attack the day before. It has been prepared for the undertakers. An optometrist finds the body on the trolley in the morning with that strangely inappropriate word cut into its chest. The victim of the heart attack was a mother of four children and a grandmother of two. She owned a milk bar in East Bentleigh and there is no reason in the world why someone would have wanted to cut a word into her chest.

  It is determined that the letters were made post-mortem and that these cuts were not tentative. They struck bone on every letter.

  There are a few quiet days with no new instances of graffiti. Mr X-Ray and Tammie complain that the hospital has become boring again.

  Jovan is called to the Doctor’s Cafeteria. One of the other janitors had joked that Jovan was a specialist in graffiti removal and it soon became an accepted fact. So Jovan is now the only one who is called for any instance of graffiti.

  In the Doctor’s Cafeteria, the blackboards that inform everyone what they might eat today have all been washed clean. Across them is a new message, written in a mixture of melted sugar and chalk:

  DOG

  EAT

  DOG

  They are repeated over and again. That isn’t the problem. Hot water and a bit of scrubbing from a kitchen sponge is all that is required. It’s a repeated message on every available plate and bowl that causes distress. These letters are burned into the ceramic surfaces by a blowtorch through a metal stencil.

  The police shake their heads and give the hospital the same message—it is going to need to get more cameras. Surveillance everywhere. More security guards. New locks. They’ve conducted interviews and done background on everyone after the Inspiration cadaver. These police interviews either went nowhere or into areas of people’s lives that were destructive and disturbing but non-pertinent. Nothing moved nearer to the origin of the graffiti. Everything got drowned in a toxic whirlpool of unrelated questions and answers, speculation and accusation, crying and shouting, murmuring and mumbling, and finally, dissolving into confused silence.

  Blanket surveillance isn’t a popular idea with most of the doctors and nurses who have gone through police interviews for the first time in their lives. They don’t want so permanent and invasive a security feature for what they still hope is a nuisance, soon to pass. They agree to new locks and another bleary-eyed security guard.

  Every few years, rumours circulate that the Sandringham Hospital will be closed down. It occurs to Jovan that this graffiti debacle is not merely an annoyance or embarrassment, it’s a threat to every doctor working here that the government will take this as an opportunity to close down a small, outdated hospital.

  The message burned into the plates reads:

  Masters of Destiny

  Victims of Fate

  Jovan suggests that if the plates are washed thoroughly they are still perfectly useable.

  The managers order new plates (that will take months to arrive because they’ll have to be tabled and approved in the next budget) and decide on paper plates while they wait.

  After a week, the cafeteria is filled with a motley array of plates and bowls, mugs and cutlery, brought in from fifty different homes.

  Jovan puts all the ruined crockery into two big cardboard boxes and drives home. He doesn’t know what to do with them so he slides them onto a shelf in his garage, looks at them for a while before he turns off the light.

  They resemble artefacts. Not in the way of being ancient. It isn’t what they might mean—that’s been interpreted in different ways. Old plates with the vague traces of cutlery marks across their faces, chips and hairline cracks from contact with clumsy hands and blemishes from thousands of trips through the dishwashers. Now they can’t be used because of these new marks trapped in their surfaces. It seems nothing much more than the result of a burned meal yet now they are unusable.

  Whoever Doctor Graffito is, he would know that Jovan is the man obliterating all his words. That they would drip from his elbows in black foam when he washed the graffiti from the walls. That the message on the plates would be shattered into pieces, and it would be Jovan sweeping that desperate communication into a pile of rubble. They must walk by each other in the corridors of the hospital occasionally and maybe both men nod at each other in passing.

  Jovan thinks about the plates as he washes his hands in the laundry and walks the hall to his kitchen. Why brand the plates and use chalk on the menu boards? Who are the victims and masters, and what is the difference between fate and destiny? What is the meal and who is to eat it? Dog eat dog is easy to rub away, easy to ignore. Masters and victims both just bones for those chalk dogs to gnaw and crack for marrow. All of it washed away easily from the mind as everyone continues to feed.

  Suzana is talking to a friend on the phone. After listening to English all day, as well as the various languages patients speak, he enjoys hearing perfectly understandable Serbian, particularly with his wife’s Belgrade accent and expressions.

  She’s speaking with Jelka, a Croatian woman from Dubrovnik, who calls herself Yugoslav when she’s in Suzana’s company. They almost never meet outside of work because her husband, Ante, is the kind of Australian Croat that grew up hating Serbs as if it was the central feature of his identity. Jelka avows that Croatians who are from Croatia, as she is, are pretty much over all this nonsense.

  Suzana doesn’t ever talk to Jelka about having lived in Bosnia for a few years, Jovan notices, maybe because that’s where the loveliest illusions of Yugoslavia were most thoroughly destroyed. Other parts of that fractured world can blame politicians and governments for the catastrophe, and still evoke those sweet daydreams of fellowship, community and a shared spirit of place. Jovan can hear Jelka’s voice, but not the words. A tinkling of pleasing tones through the small speaker in the kitchen phone.

  Jelka got Suzana a housecleaning job after they met on a Frankston bus one day. Realising they spoke the same language because one swore at the other, saying ‘fuck your bitch of a mother’, the other responding, ‘watch your mouth, fat slut’. The bus had swerved and braked, dumping Jelka into Suzana’s lap. Or it was the other way around. Annoyance and embarrassment instantly turned into laughter and banter all the way home. They still call each other fat sluts in happy greeting.

  Jelka is Suzana’s first friend made in Australia. Her only friend here. They talk a few minutes on the phone every evening before Ante gets home for dinner.

  Jovan sits down at the table. His wife pours him a glass of wine as she moves around the kitchen—attached to the wall phone by a long cord. He has forgotten the sore lip he got from the bite the dentist gave him when they fucked a few days ago, but the wine glass reminds him as he brings it to his mouth.

  Jovan waits and listens to his wife’s side of the conversation. Good to hear her sounding so everyday. Carefree.

  When she puts down the phone, they say hello to each other and then find little to say. The day before, they almost talked. An actual conversation. She asked Jovan whether he remembered what he hated most about the university they both had taught at in Sarajevo.

  He said, “I think the staff rooms filled to choking with tobacco smoke would be close. Winters were always unbearable. It made me think about how in Scandinavian mythology Hell was a place of ice and cold and how we should have had that kind of idea for Hell in our part of the world as well. The devil could be some sinister version of the Snow Man. Good old Frosty with horns.”

  She didn’t smile. She told him she didn’t remember the winters any more. Not really. It was now white without the bite of cold. It was the ceaseless sounds of chaos she remembered, as students rumbled through the halls and rooms, that used to give her these dizzying headaches and nausea, because it would never stop the whole day lo
ng. As she was waking that morning she thought she was hearing it again, until she realised it was the sound of an almost-tuned station on her clock radio.

  He knew she couldn’t remember anything she hated about Sarajevo University or their lives as teachers there. That’s the unvoiced in her asking. It was the students she remembered. Their vivid faces. The animation and energy. The rampant movement and hanging limbs at rest. The way it had exhausted her then. The way it now leaves her numb and dead.

  He can’t speak to any of it because it isn’t about words anymore. It’s about another existence. Neither of them is sure about the present but this is some kind of afterlife.

  They eat their meals and they wash the dishes. Discuss what needs to be bought next time she goes shopping. Sit on the couch. Watch a movie. Fall asleep halfway through, her head on his chest, both of them with their closed eyes, flashed with what could have been afternoon light from above, passing through the branches and limbs of trees they’re moving through, lying back on a creaking hayrick wagon, on some long journey back home.

  In the morning they wake in bed. He has a vague somnambulist’s recollection of Suzana towing him down the hall from the couch and into the bedroom. He turns his mind from conversations of the university, and other thoughts of Sarajevo, and directs them towards the day ahead. Feels her hit the clock radio a few seconds before it sounds, as she always does. Hears her heavy sigh.

  Half out of bed, sitting on its edge rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. Bent over and breathing through her nose. Every vertebra visible. Each rib defined. Skeletal weariness my dear. Skeletal cherishing in my love. All of it clinging to the bones. All of me cutting down to bones. The ribs and vertebrae disappear as she stands and wobble-walks to the bathroom. Calls out his name and tells him he better get up. After her shower she comes in smelling of soap and shampoo and pushes him awake. He hadn’t noticed himself drifting off.

  “Come on, I need a lift today. Some place called Black Rock. Do you know where that is?” She’s sitting on the edge of the bed again, his side this time.

  “Not far from the hospital,” he mumbles into the pillow.

  “What kind of name is that for a place?”

  “I don’t know,” he slurs into a deeper, whiter oblivion.

  “Give me another minute.”

  “Sounds as though you could find another thousand in that pillow.”

  He drifts away from her soap and shampoo, thinking about the irony of her coming from a place called White-City, which was the literal translation of Belgrade. He could almost hear Dr Graffito whispering some absurdity in his ear about burying a Black Rock in White City.

  There’s a journalist asking questions today. When he comes around to Jovan he doesn’t accept the janitor’s only answer, which is, “pain in fxxxing arse.”

  Dog eat dog eat dog

  Every man for himself

  Winner rapes all

  The last man standing

  Dog eat dog eat dog

  This is printed on the back of the hospital newsletter. Patients get the newsletter and read the message before anyone realises. The red slashed words are overlayed onto a full page Rorschach image. Most people think it’s a bit of enigmatic poetry not worth reading or perhaps a bizarre ad for something to do with mental illness.

  “Who do you think is responsible for this?” The journalist has a recorder which he has switched on and off a few times.

  “You reporter—you job to make the theories.”

  “I’m asking you whether you have any suspicions. Any intuitions? Any guesses?”

  “I am hundred per cent not sure,” Jovan says. The journo stands nonplussed, going cross-eyed over what sounds like a Zen koan.

  He shakes his head to uncross his eyes. “One possibility is all I’m asking for. Any kind of theory. Something I can use.” The line would be, inside sources say …

  “Ask police,” Jovan tells him.

  “I’m asking you.”

  “How could I know?” Jovan is mopping the floor and sloshes hot, dirty, soapy water on the journalist’s shoes to get rid of him. He continues down the hospital hallway talking over his shoulder. “Why you ask me?”

  “Have a wild guess. Say anyone you can think of, for God’s sake.”

  “No one here can do this thing. Maybe anyone, everyone, as well, does this things.”

  “And you haven’t seen anyone suspicious? In particular.”

  “Yes suspicious. Very suspicious.”

  “Who have you seen looking suspicious?”

  “Everyone. This is hospital. Everyone has secret. Not much of the secret. So suspicious is nothing different from must be obvious.”

  “Do you even know what the word ‘suspicious’ means?”

  “Maybe you explain me one day.”

  The journalist walks away shaking his head and swearing under his breath. He returns a few minutes later with his card and the promise of money for a photo of the body with the engraved message, or perhaps another incident if it is equally bizarre.

  The next event is discrete. In fact, it takes days to become clear that it is an incident. The water cooler in a hallway near radiology looks almost normal. It is rarely used. When a nurse tries to get a cup of water it oozes out of the blue plastic tap. It trickles out oily but doesn’t smell as oil would. It raises the hackles of everyone who comes near enough for a sniff. They don’t need to press the blue lever. The look of the yellow viscous stuff alone is enough to force a person to step back with an alarmed expression forming on their confused face.

  Management asks Jovan to put a tape around the area and they call the police again. Detectives arrive and ask questions. The journalist takes photos. They seem dull pictures of an ordinary water cooler. It’s difficult to catch the difference in the liquid, on film.

  It starts being whispered that it’s human fat in the water cooler, taken from the plastic surgeon’s liposuction waste storage. Jovan isn’t asked to take the cooler away. A quarantine waste worker wearing yellow and black hazmat gear does that.

  The journo gets a headline from Dr Graffito himself. Or so he says … after his own run in with the reporter, Jovan thinks he’s liable to make the news as much as report it. A man speaking in an undisguised voice, well educated, middle-aged, phones the journalist to tell him that above the ordinary looking newspaper photo of a water cooler, the words should read:

  Origin of the Species

  Jovan is parked near a railway line. Four trains have passed. Two heading towards Frankston and two going to the city. There were mathematical problems that he’d been given in school when he was a boy, using trains to figure out various sums. He might be able to work out how long he’s been sitting in his panel van on this street. First he’ll need to start thinking again.

  Jovan doesn’t know how long that will be. Sometimes it has taken an hour to get going again after he’s been derailed. At this moment he’s not sure about anything. He might never be able to think again. He has seen that happen in Bosnia and knows it might happen to him. A ruin beside the tracks. He runs his own name through his head and he’s not even sure about that. He repeats it: Jovan Brakochevich, Jovan Brakochevich … It’s like a sum that needs trains to be calculated and he doesn’t know which stations are where and hasn’t been given the appropriate timetables and the people at the stations are family, strangers, everyone in between, looking at him, waiting for him to disappear so that they can get on with their days, and then there is nothing but a crashing of glass and metal in his endless calculations.

  Please, he says. Murmuring the word into the silent, dead space of the cabin. Please, his lips barely moving.

  About ten metres away is a house he’s been invited to. He will be welcomed. He is an expected guest. A name will not be necessary. He might not be required to say anything. Perhaps they’d let him sit. If there was no demand on him to speak he’d be delighted to nod at people as they talked and toasted his friend’s slava, raising glass after glass to
each other, celebrating the world they were living in. He wants to be able to do that—nod at them as they enjoy Slavko’s feast day.

  There are cars on both sides all the way up and down Raymond Avenue and some are parked on the nature strip. Kids are playing in the street and some have already noticed Jovan in his vehicle. Sitting motionless. Wondering what he’s doing. Trains passing and the man in the panel van not moving. Maybe they’ll call their parents out soon to investigate the strange behaviour.

  He knows his body will still work even without being able to think properly so he removes the keys from the ignition. He opens the door. He moves his legs out to the bitumen. He puts one foot in front of the other trusting that by the time he gets to the door he’ll be able to respond sensibly if someone says hello. The children greet him in English and he knows he doesn’t need to say anything to them. Concentrates on getting through their play area. All these Serbian children playing cricket and speaking English. They don’t expect a man like Jovan, a refugee from the wars of their parents, to smile and speak.

  They allow him to pass without comment, as if the giant lumbering through their field of play is barely visible. A ball is lofted from a cricket bat and another kid runs to catch it and crashes into the huge Bosnian. The kid falls to the ground. He might have thought he’d run into a parked car. The child is stunned, begins crying even though he has caught the ball.

  Jovan doesn’t need to think. It’s OK if his mind is derailed for this. He picks the kid up and sets him on his feet. Kneels down with one hand on his shoulder, the other hand behind the boy’s head, lightly assuring him that everything is as it was before the crash. ‘Dear heart’, he calls the child—words he hasn’t used since his own boy died. The kid still has the tennis ball in his hand and realises it means it’s his turn to bat, so off he runs, as if nothing at all happened.

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