by A. S. Patric
“Where is home for you?” he asks.
“Go to Elwood,” she tells him. “Please. Thank you.” She closes her eyes, her right leg rapidly jumping on the spot. Her hands twisting around each other in compulsive hand washing. Her head lolls on the top of the car seat. The breeze through the window calms her yet she starts with eyes wide open in five minute intervals, muttering ‘Okay, Okay, Okay, Okay’, to herself.
He drives along the beach thinking the ocean air will be best for the nurse. He notices his brakes are getting worse, and now there’s the grind of the brake pads. Jovan thinks to hell with the weekend, when he gets home tonight, he’ll change his brakes by torchlight after dinner. Until then he gears down to every stop.
He had an uncle in Banja Luka who drove his car for years with no foot brake, using his handbrake every time he came to a stop. Funny that’s about all he remembers about the man who died of stomach cancer all the way over in Zagreb, where only a few members of his immediate family would see him die. At the time Jovan had thought it would have been better to die closer to home, where everyone, down to second cousins and neighbours, could be around him in his last moments.
Of course he was fighting for his life and hoping that the doctors in Zagreb would save him. Instead he found a quiet place to die, where he wouldn’t hear weeping, have tears splashing down on his face, or have his hands desperately squeezed, as if dying were some catastrophe the world had never seen before. Jovan has changed his mind and thinks that it’s as good a way to go as any. Quietly, alone, with as little fuss as possible considering how much a fuss the rest of it is beforehand.
Jovan gears down to stops at red lights like his uncle would have done, and only remembers one more thing about him. Jovan was a child, listening in on adults talking, and this uncle was saying that when he looked at his two daughters he felt such an excess of love he felt like strangling them. A strange thing to say, but the child Jovan was, thought he understood it. It’s not something he understands anymore.
When they’re passing through Brighton, Jovan asks the drugged girl for further instructions, gets them after he’s passed Elwood Park and is driving up Marine Parade, almost overshooting into St Kilda.
“Turn here.” Only a right is possible onto Dickens Street. To the left it’s a flotilla of moored yachts and boats in St Kilda Marina. A half-second along Dickens, she says, “Turn,” again with one option. A right into Hood Street. She says, “Stop,” without opening her eyes.
There are small apartment blocks and houses around them and Jovan wonders where she lives. He sits in his seat not knowing what to do. It isn’t clear how conscious she is until she asks him if this is ‘Point K’, a precarious smile struggling to emerge around her dry teeth. Her eyes open again. Clearer for the drive along the beach from Sandringham to Elwood.
“Yes. Point K.”
“Can I trust you?”
He leans away a few centimetres.
“I think I can. How can I know for sure?” she asks him.
“You don’t need trust me.” Jovan moves his hands to the steering wheel and keys and starts the van again. “I say goodbye now. And you safe.”
“Hang on … I want you to come inside with me. I need you to come inside. Make sure about the flat.”
“Make sure of flat?”
“Will you just help me inside please? I’m scared and I’m not sure of what. Please come and make sure I’m alright. I’ll be alright inside my apartment. I should be alright then.”
“I help.” He turns off the car again. “And I am safe I think.” He smiles at her and she nods at him.
Gazing into the jumble of Jovan’s possessions around her feet, Leni says, “You know when people say this is one of the best days of my life? Like when they’ve just had a baby. Or they’ve just revealed a million dollar scratchy. Or they’ll say this is one of the worst days of my life because they found their pet goldfish belly-up that morning.” She turns her head towards him and says, “On the actual day … there’s no doubt in your head. You know it. There’s never been another like this one.”
He follows her along the short path of concrete discs set into a small uncared-for garden of a four unit building, into an art deco foyer that had seen better days some twenty or thirty years ago, smelling of the passage of all those decades and its vanished inhabitants. Climbing up stairs on which a red carpet had begun to wear through to white cross-hatch threads along the centre.
Leni walks carefully, balance an issue. Jovan watches her weave from wooden railing to wallpapered wall and back again, stumbling to her hands on the stairs and getting up again. He puts his arm around her to help her with the bend in the stairs, onto a landing, and up to the next floor. The light, woollen cardigan Leni is wearing falls from her left shoulder. Hangs halfway down her back. Her dress is ripped and dirty. Her left elbow grazed. She’s already fallen once or twice today.
Leni is pretty, even in the bland nurse’s uniform, even this battered and wasted. She spends a long time before her door fumbling around in her handbag, tries various keys before she manages to fit the right one into the lock and turn it. Jovan stands back, three steps down, watching her.
She turns on the light, walks into her passageway with eyes closed. Stumbles into the wall and finds her way to the left and through a doorway into her lounge. It’s a train-cabin style apartment with one long passageway leading from the front door most of the way along to what would end in the kitchen area.
Leni walks to an armchair, vomiting into her cupped hands. There’s a vase of flowers on the coffee table. He pulls out the flowers and throws them to the floor and brings her the vase if she needs to vomit again. The cardigan has fallen off one of her arms anyway so he pulls it down the other arm and wraps it around her hands. She has sense enough to be able to use it as the intended towel, lifting a dry spot of her cardigan to her lips. Jovan returns to the front hall and closes the door and walks down the corridor towards the kitchen. He will get her a glass of water. She needs a wet towel and a proper bucket.
It’s a three-room flat—one long corridor along the side. The kitchen is small, barely usable. He passes her bedroom and the neatly made bed, and notices there isn’t a lot of furniture in there. A chest of drawers and standing wardrobe, open, everything contained within it in tidy lines. The long lounge is about half the apartment in itself, extending out onto a sun room. Not a lot of furniture in here either, a three-seater couch and two armchairs. Leni is sitting in one of the armchairs, head tilted back, blinking and taking in deep lungfuls of air. As far as these things go it is all fairly ordered, yet the flat is a vast, spewing, collapsing, impression of chaos otherwise.
Stacked along every wall are canvases. Some are hung above, mostly they are arranged in readiness for some kind of exhibition a few years overdue. On the parts of the walls he can see, there are drawings and paint applied directly onto the plaster of the wall. Hand-painted vine leaves crawl along the wooden door frames. There’s more paper on the floor. Sketches and drawings, of things seen at the hospital, along the roads, at the library, on a bus, on trains; everywhere that she goes. There are also many attempts at depicting the massacre scene in the toilet they saw together last week. A canvas up on the wall depicts a man, kneeling down, face hidden from view, drawing out the words: Oblivion. Obliteration. He is painted in such a way that he resembles one of the murder outlines he is drawing.
Kneeling beside her as she retches again, listening to her moaning into the bucket, he knows it is going to be a while before he can get out of this woman’s apartment. She calms down, slumps back into her armchair. He sits on her couch to decide how long he has to stay here before leaving. He might check her handbag for more of the drug she’s using yet she could have a stash anywhere in her apartment. She hadn’t previously struck Jovan as a drug user. Perhaps this was indeed something out of the ordinary, ‘the worst day of her life’—it didn’t mean she wouldn’t harm herself in other ways. All he could think of doing was driving her
back to the hospital and that’s exactly what she didn’t want. He takes a few deep breaths, closes his eyes, and because it’s the first time since six o’clock in the morning that he has rested, he falls asleep.
Her heart is beating in quick thuds. She can hear it thumping in her ears. Someone has been whispering Waste of life over and again. Black lips in the cup of her ear. Waste of Life. Leni opens her eyes, afraid and disorientated. She’s home. Vase and flowers scattered around her. Her cardigan and a towel at her feet. Sees a big man on her couch and she can’t remember who he is. She’s shivering as wave after wave of anxiety breaks over her. Leni is drowning within herself. She has no idea how to come up for air. She’s got to do something. She’s not sure what. There’s got to be some way to get out of her own head.
She hasn’t been working long at the hospital. Hasn’t been a nurse all that long for that matter. But she had loved the idea of a hospital. Being around people during their greatest need had made her feel as if she wasn’t stuck at the periphery of people’s lives. Floating out on the outskirts of life in general. She told her friends she was interested in finding a way to look at the human experience from a more ragged and raw perspective. It had given her ideas for her art and that feeling of being at the centre of life, where it was really happening.
Leni thought she was prepared for the ragged and the raw, the ugly and brutal, yet there was no way to be ready for what happened this morning—for the body in the bathtub, face down in the water, letters written in thick black marker across a woman’s back and along her arms and legs and across the back of her neck: Waste of Life.
Leni stood there. Took a step forward because maybe the woman was alive. The smell in the air, as well as the vicious pale colour of her skin, killed the idea dead. She had seen so many images on television and cinema screens, on canvases and in books, that the image refracted through all those mediums first, then got lost in these reflections, in the images she had seen, until she didn’t know what she was seeing, and where she was, or who she was, whether she was the murdered woman with those words printed onto her skin coming back to see what had been done, a spectre taking steps backwards until she was stopped at a wall behind her. Solid after all. Nothing but a woman ready to die in the next moment in a bleach bath.
A woman with long blond hair going white, floating around her head. Tiny bubbles in the liquid burst and dissolved slowly in the air coming through the door Leni had opened. The smell of chemicals in the room burned in her nose and throat. Bleach. Bottles of industrial bleach were scattered around the room. The naked woman, face down in a bathtub of bleach, her ankles and wrists tied together behind her back. Hog-tied is what it was called. The brutal rope forming livid marks in her flesh. And that message on her back, along her arms and along her legs and across her neck—fading below the line of bleach, clear and black above the waterline.
She closed the door and walked back into the bedroom outside that bathroom. There was a nurse’s uniform laid out without a wrinkle on the bed with the name tag still on it. The name belonged to someone Leni worked with, a girl called Melissa Martin. They have talked often about men and the world, about music especially. They went out dancing once. They had called themselves friends though it was hard to find the time to go out a second time. The woman with her face in bleach was Mel Martin.
Leni walked out into the hospital hallway, where people were strolling by, saw them pass and had a thought of slipping out amongst them, and into the same oblivion. She stood by the door with an idea that no one else should see it. No one should be allowed to wander in and discover a woman in a bathtub with its bleach and that message and the contorted position Melissa Martin was in—that most of all. It wasn’t over and done, like when she saw a dead body for the first time in the hospital. This was a different kind of death and it was just beginning.
As Leni stood there, back against the hallway wall, she saw every detail whenever she shut her eyes. She’d never had such a clear image in her mind before. It was as if the same photograph was being taken over and again, opening her eyes, flash—closing her eyes—there it was, every minute detail. The braided white rope. Blue nail polish. The cluster of fingers bound at the wrist. Another flash when Leni opened her eyes. A mole on the left hip, match-head black below the waterline of bleach, and she thought, what if I can never see another thing ever again. Blinking. The hog-tied woman. What if every time I blink, I see Mel Martin, with those words on her body? That cruel, taut, white curtain rope. It was that thought more than anything else that made her start blabbering words in a chain, my-god-my-god-jesus-christ-jesus-my-god-my-god-god-oh-god, a meaningless prayer for a demolished god. Babbling louder and more desperately, until enough people had moved into her orbit for her to speak the one sentence that would open the door again to Melissa Martin, drowned in a bleach bath—a hog-tied woman with the words:
Waste of Life
Life of Waste
Life or Waste
She blinks and wants the morphine pills in her handbag. To crush them between her teeth again so they are quicker, dissolving into her bloodstream without the long wait of stomach acid to break down the hard pills. Enough of the morphine to eradicate what she saw. She’s blinking at the huge man on her couch and wondering if it might be him, and knows that of course it could. Who can say that it isn’t? He might be the author of Obliteration and Oblivion. Wasn’t that a horrific joke now? It was his industrial bleach. The halting English simply a great cover. It’s easy enough to prepare words and sentences. They are found in books, on the Internet, everywhere, anywhere. The cause of all the trouble and the author of all the graffiti in the hospital.
A janitor going postal is not a stretch in anyone’s imagination. All of the mayhem culminating in this murder. And Mel Martin has told Leni she’s been seeing a janitor at the hospital and it had to be this man, pretending to help Leni so he could win her trust and do to her in her own house what he did to Mel in the hospital. Exhausted for now by his struggle with the other nurse, he’s resting before beginning again.
Leni looks at the phone in the corner of the room and thinks it might be better to walk away quietly, while he’s sleeping. Perhaps he is pretending to be asleep. She is quick—out of her chair and across the room without making a racket. Leni calls the police on her neighbour’s phone downstairs.
When the police storm into her apartment the janitor is still asleep. His first response is violent objection, speaking in a different language or in English that no one can understand. She can hear the noise through the ceiling above her as they begin a long struggle to subdue the colossal brute. Thumping into walls. She’s babbling with her eyes squeezed shut, into the chest of another police officer, as they haul him down the stairs and drag him away.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Tammie has a new patient at the end of her work day. A check-up/clean. The woman in the chair isn’t a talker and she doesn’t need to be, yet she doesn’t say good afternoon to Tammie, not even a head-nod by way of greeting. Sits in the chair, waits and watches her prepare. Tammie does pleasant chatter better than anyone. She can do it for the both of them. Talking about the up-coming referendum, the weather, or about a film she saw the other night, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same as talking to dogs—the tone of voice is key.
It’s important to Tammie that her patients feel at ease and confident that they are in good hands. The best hands around. Not true, of course, but she knows she isn’t the worst either. A great dentist is a natural. It’s a feel for pain, economy and precision of movement. Still, that sense for another person’s pain is crucial.
Tammie gives herself that escape clause, about how some are ‘naturals’. She doesn’t believe it. That’s everyone’s favourite cop-out. If she’s honest with herself, then what it comes down to, is how much you care. After all these years, gazing into the straining maw of a stranger continues to be the slightest bit revolting. On bad days she feels as if she’s a vet who despises animals, from
their pathetic moans to their awful smells, from the hair in their noses to their fearful flinching.
She moves around her dental surgery efficiently, directs her newbie assistant courteously, to the point, and it will all be under way in a few minutes, over in about thirty. She natters on pleasantly, thinking about other things entirely. Daydreaming about those big hands, those steady yellow eyes, the crude, heavy voice from a deep chest and that wonderful cock of his—Jovan and the clean smell of his body, even after a day’s work.
When Tammie puts on her white coat she begins her performance. She knows it’s not necessary. She might go about her job efficiently yet she’s eager to cultivate her business. Wants her patients to speak well of her to their friends. She feels the same way when she puts on a dress for Graham and they go out to a fundraiser, an auction or dinner party. She knows it’s not her, but what is? Role-playing is what it’s all about. Graham has that ugly horsehair wig with curls down the sides that he puts on top of his head, his black gown that makes him look like a religious nut or Halloween diehard. She’s never gotten used to it. He walks a different way and speaks as though his every word has weight when he enters barrister mode. So Tammie is mostly happy to play her role as well.
“I was watching this interview the other day, with John Howard,” says Tammie, to fill the dead air as her dental assistant suddenly discovers she desperately needs to go to the toilet. Using the word ‘toilet’ in front of the patient. Tammie feels hard-pressed to erase that word for a woman with her mouth half-open and waiting. “And this was on British television. The host asks the Prime Minister of Australia, what he said to people that suggested England would become a republic before Australia did, and that perhaps it was, after all, inevitable. The host says it with a wink. Little Johnny gets this sour expression on his face, and says, ‘The only thing inevitable, is death.’ Glares at the Pom. ‘And taxes,’ he adds. Here we are gearing up for a referendum on whether Australia is ready to be an independent nation, finally ready to cut the Queen’s apron strings, and our Prime Minister can’t conceive of ever doing away with that silly Union Jack in the corner of the flag.”