Black Rock White City

by A. S. Patric

  Her patient is a foreigner so there isn’t much chance of upsetting her. Tammie mentioned the same interview at the dinner at her home the other evening, the one she came late to, yet because she was speaking to right-leaning bigwigs, she’d used it to highlight the dogged resilience so many admired in John Howard. Whether Australia becomes a republic or not is about as interesting to Tammie as the results of her neighbourhood dog show.

  Her dental assistant returns and apologises for a stomach bug when Tammie wishes she would keep her stupid mouth closed and not say another word about bowels and toilets. The assistant fumbles around now, searching for a new surgery mask. Has to be reminded to fish out a fresh pair of gloves.

  Tammie waits, and feels the slightest remaining irritation from another tattoo she got two days ago, on her shoulder blade. A Norse compass this time. Bjork, one of her favourite musicians, has one on her arm. Tammie often turns around in a mirror at home or her change room here at the hospital admiring the new ink. Graham hasn’t seen it. Who knows when he will? He hasn’t seen the last one either, the skull with a halo of roses. She’s interested in how long it might take for him to notice. A few days, and it would tell her that maybe things aren’t all that bad between them after all. It might take weeks, and then what will it tell her? What if it’s months? What if he sees the two tattoos on her back in a year from now and doesn’t think they’re worth mentioning? Maybe he’d be as outraged as Jovan. Her husband would understand she hadn’t bought into her role, mind, body and soul.

  The message in the skull doesn’t mean much to Tammie. It was a joke, wasn’t it? Fleas on the Trojan Horse. Who knows what he actually meant? Clearly fucking crazy. And who cares? Dr Graffito had become such an interesting presence in the hospital. Where previously a person could die of boredom listening to people bitch and moan about every mundane detail in their trivial lives, now there were these biting messages to make everyone jump, scratching at their Trojan Fleas.

  More than anything she loves the way her first tattoo seems to have hit Jovan. It surprised her. All along, since the Christmas piss-up, and this little thing started, he’s had a nonchalant attitude, as though he can walk away from Tammie, as easy as that. Like she was worthless. She’d finally gotten through to him the other night in his van. Not a bit of graffiti he can clean away. And when they said goodbye he seemed afraid. He’d been altered at least. So yes, an impact.

  Concentrate, Tammie, she tells herself. Two cancellations today. Also space on the schedule for an extended lunch break, and who wants a three-course meal for lunch every day? There were times in the past when Tammie could not fit in a bite to eat the whole day long, her schedule was so filled with waiting patients. An assistant who understood basic dental surgery etiquette would help, yet Tammie knows that when she talks about ‘growing her business’ really the desperation she feels comes from wondering how she can stop it from dying.

  Since she’s thinking of Jovan, and also because this patient has a surname that might be Serbian as well, one of those names ending in ich, she remembers a movie she recently saw.

  “I saw this great film the other day, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but anyway, it was called Being John Malkovich. And I don’t know, maybe you could tell me. Is he Serbian? John Malkovich?” Tammie is about ready to begin now, and it doesn’t matter what the woman’s answer is.

  The patient has murmured something around the white pellets that have been replaced in her mouth by the assistant.

  Tammie is obliged to lean in and ask what she said. Her patient hasn’t spoken since she walked into the surgery.

  The woman says, “He is American.”

  Tammie blinks at the woman on her chair and feels the hair on the back of her neck rise. She looked familiar earlier. There’s no way Tammie could have expected this woman to come and lay herself out in her dental surgery, for a clean and a check-up.

  The woman’s mouth opens again, gazing up at Tammie with unblinking eyes. There’s no doubt in her mind that this is Jovan’s wife.

  “Of course,” murmurs Tammie, hardly able to remember what they’ve just said, “With a name like Malkovich, he must be from your region.” Those hard black eyes don’t blink. “I mean, originally.”

  “My region is now Australia. You and I are in the same region.” Suzana closes her eyes and leans back into the chair. “You can continue to talk as you work,” she tells Tammie.

  Tammie has nothing else to say. All her small talk has dried up. She asks Jovan’s wife to open her mouth, and Suzana does that. She also opens those cutting eyes again. Suzana does not flinch as Tammie brings down her sickle probe and applies it to her back molars. Barely blinks as Tammie slips into the soft gum of her mouth, to bring out a bead of blood.

  Tammie’s own silence feels suffocating. She keeps thinking I’ve got to find something to say to this woman. Finds her mind blank. There’s a trembling in her hands and her arms are beginning to feel weak. She should continue talking about the referendum, the cold weather of late autumn in Melbourne, or anything at all. Nothing will come to her because this woman refuses to blink. Mouth wide open to snap off all her fumbling fingers.

  Jovan walks into the silent house late in the evening. All the lights are turned off. He closes the door and hears the echo bounce off the walls. He switches on the lamp on the dresser in the hallway. There are pictures of his children on the walls. No pictures of Suzana or himself. He’s never noticed that before. Drops his wallet and keys on the dresser. He makes his way to the kitchen first. She’s not there. He doesn’t turn on any lights because he can’t tolerate the glare. He walks past the closed door of their bedroom to the bathroom and opens the door. He sits on the edge of the bath. His eyes close and after a few minutes he sways and jerks awake.

  Jovan manages to get up and turn on the lights. Squints. Not asleep, not awake. A vibration through his legs and arms. He walks to the medicine cabinet and swallows some pills and then leans against the bathroom wall to take off his pants. When he gets into the shower he uses almost no hot water. A cool shower, not to wake himself up so much as to keep himself conscious. He is slow, using the soap with gentle hands and when he gets out he gingerly dries himself with the towel. Bruises on his arms and shins, torso, head, so many he’s confused by the map of them over his body—a new landscape of pain. There’s a bulging lump on the crown of his head from when he hit the doorframe of the squad car.

  He throws his towel into the bathtub. Suzana’s long blue skirt is on the towel rail, still a little damp to the touch. There’s the smell of her body within the material. He breathes her in again and turns off the light.

  Jovan walks to the bedroom, opens the door and finds her body laid out on the bed. Motionless and unbreathing. He takes a stumbled step inside. So exhausted that he can not think. He is naked and knows he needs at least a shirt and pants but can’t find the energy. He lifts the sheet and blanket and takes his place beside his wife on the bed. Dead to the world a few moments later.

  Nurses run through the hallways and a doctor nearly barrels into Suzana as she is walking through the foyer. The hospital phones ring without answer. Police park their cars outside in Emergency as Suzana gets into a car she borrowed from Jelka. Commotion brought on, no doubt, by another act of petulance from Dr Graffito. Something for her husband and his friend David Dickens to talk about for hours on the weekend. Suzana heard one nurse say to another, A Bleach Bath. Perhaps that’s the title of his latest piece.

  Jelka’s car is an automatic and it should mean it is easier to drive. Suzana has always driven manuals and her foot is restless for a clutch—she feels she’s not quite in control of the car. Suzana puts the Corolla into drive and stops at Bluff Road, ready to head home when the sound of horns draws her attention to a white van pulling a ragged U-turn through traffic. She’d wondered whether she would bump into her husband at the hospital yet hadn’t expected for that to happen on the street.

  She watches him pull up to a bus shelter. Jo
van gets out, walks around his vehicle so he can usher a young woman over, even opening the door for her. The van roars out into the heavy evening traffic. Suzana contemplates following them, her indicator ticking. A silver BMW behind Suzana beeps—two long blasts. Suzana reaches for the gearstick and realises that the automatic is already in drive. Of course. She rolls out onto Bluff Road. Heads in the opposite direction to Jovan and the blonde.

  A minute down the road and the street lights are on. They were off and then they are on—she never notices the precise instant of change. The sunlight is fading quickly and by the time she reaches the Best Western the sun is nothing but a vaporous haze on the water horizon. She flicks on her blinker and waits to make the turn into her motel, where she will be greeted as Miss Johnson if she bumps into any of the staff on the way to her room. She’s already told Scott on the desk that she’ll be leaving in the morning.

  The thought of talking to Scott again, to explain that she’ll be staying on for a little while longer, makes her grip the steering wheel tight—two weeks in that room was enough to find a little space and for that same space to collapse into less than what she had before finding it. She flicks off her blinker yet she doesn’t turn towards Reservoir Road either. She can taste blood in her mouth. Clumsy nicks in her gums from the stainless steel probes.

  She keeps driving down the Nepean Highway and when she passes Mornington, detours onto the Esplanade, so she can continue along the darkened bay. Her window is down and Jelka’s Corolla is quiet. Suzana can hear the ocean and see the flashing white seagulls tumbling around beneath the street lights—spaced out in regular intervals—illuminating the shore sweeping along the peninsula.

  Suzana keeps the car humming, on through Rosebud, and thinks how before she’d seen Rosebud, she’d imagined the tulip fields of Holland in some diminished form, and was surprised by how drab, dismal and utterly charmless the rudiments of a town were here. The place takes its name from the shipwreck of a cargo vessel called Rosebud and not from flower growing. Further along the road is Rye, another speck of a seaside town. Rye is the Serbian word for heaven. The town has as little to do with paradise as it does grain.

  She drives on to Sorrento, where she turns into a car park near the waterline. When they first started looking for places to rent, this had been where Suzana wanted to live. Frankston is affordable and practical, Sorrento is neither. The white limestone buildings of the town, the way they pick up the evening lights, still appeals to her.

  The real-estate agent told them, imparting a history lesson to foreigners, that the first attempt to create Melbourne had failed here. Those original colonists buried their dead and moved down to Tasmania. It was a generation later before Melbourne was given another shot at life. Had things gone differently Suzana wouldn’t be sitting in an empty gravel car park by the beach. She’d be stopped at a busy intersection roaring with the power of generations—glass towers rising to radiate into the night skies from a white city teeming with spectral ambition. A failed nucleus, she thinks, and turns the car off.

  Suzana gets out of the car. There’s enough moonlight so that she need not watch her step too carefully as she makes her way down and over a hillock. She sits and removes her shoes, stands again and walks across the wet sand. Seawater rushes over her feet in white foam and then leaves a flawless stretch of sand as it draws back. Walking by the shoreline, tasting blood again. Pain in her gums. The shaking hands of that empty woman Jovan fell into. Suzana had thought she could pull her husband out, as if he had been drowning. They’d had an agreement about Tammie. Suzana was obviously mistaken, if not about the dentist, then about Jovan.

  She can feel her sleeve sticking to her inside elbow. The swab and medical tape have come loose. She rolls up her sleeve and peels the bandage off. A blood test at the doctor’s before she went in to see the dentist—killing two birds with one stone. That phrase had run through her mind. It doesn’t signify the difficulty of resolving two issues at the same time. It means simply crossing both items off in one deft stroke. She is still so much more literal when she uses English than a native speaker would be, imagining tiny bird heads, a stone and the impossibility of that one throw.

  Suzana rubs the soft part of her elbow. Her blood filled the small glass cylinder and she will be told tomorrow what she already knows. She rolls down her sleeve. The nurse blinked when she saw the scars on Suzana’s wrist. A quiet one; efficient. A friendly hello as she brought out the needle, tied a rubber tube around Suzana’s bicep, and found the vein with a firm, sure touch. Suzana is carrying her shoes, sandy up to her ankles, specks of mud on her calves. She’ll have to wash her skirt when she gets home. Shakes her head. When she gets to the motel. Shaking her head again.

  The nurse told her it was easy to miss a vein. Little of the useless chit-chat that she had to endure with Tammie, as bad as the slips of her dental hooks. Are you hoping for a little boy or a little girl? The young nurse with a lovely smile, asking as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Suzana hadn’t seen the blond nurse’s face as she walked from the bus shelter to her husband’s vehicle. Pretty, no doubt. Did men ever pick up ugly women?

  The breeze off the water is getting colder with the evening. Suzana turns, trying to work out the direction of the wind, wet feet beginning to feel icy. She takes a few steps back into drier sand. The wind gives her no choice, it’s a face full of whipping hair whichever way she turns. She sits down and puts her shoes beside her and uses both hands to gather her hair, pulling it across one shoulder and tucking it beneath her cheek.

  There’s enough moonlight to see out across the bay a good distance, to watch it heave out into small rolling waves and settle back into its chaotic, restless skin. Suzana hadn’t been able to answer the question easily; as naturally as she should. It had been neither a boy nor a girl before the pleasant nurse asked, the possibility had been enough. It was enough even after the home test gave her a positive in the motel yesterday. And Suzana’s answer, after staring at the smiling nurse for a stunned second, was the easier cliché—boy or girl, it doesn’t matter, ten fingers, ten toes and healthy. The truth is she wants both a boy and girl, both Dejan and Ana.

  Afternoon light pushes through the edges of the curtain. The smell of pan-fried sausages from the kitchen, coming up under the bedroom door, has woken him. He gets up slowly and goes to the bathroom. He takes two pills and hobbles to the kitchen, his body so sore he can barely walk. He sits at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, waiting for his eyes to be ready for the blaze coming through the kitchen windows.

  “I thought that might get you out of bed,” says Suzana.

  “Well, yeah … I can’t remember when I ate last. What time is it?”

  She looks at the clock for him as he rubs at his face. “Almost two o’clock.”

  Suzana lets him eat before she asks any questions. He is wearing the new bathrobe she bought him for the colder weather. It fits him well and that’s a relief. Buying for Jovan isn’t easy.

  “Are you OK?” She asks him, when he’s finished his meal, and has begun to sip the fresh cup of tea she’s put before him. “I’ve talked to David Dickens. Or at least, he talked at me. After half an hour of his monkey chatter I wasn’t sure of anything. A woman was murdered at the hospital. That can’t be true, can it?”

  “I swear to God …” Jovan shakes his head and wipes his hands across his face as though it might be possible to pull unwanted images from his eyes. “That hospital has done my head in.”

  “There are other jobs,” she says.

  Jovan looks at her. “You’re right. One thing’s for sure, I’m done with this job.” He sips his tea, and notices the way her hand is resting on her belly. He doesn’t say anything. Her hand moves away from it as if it never strayed for that particular touch.

  “I spent most of the night on a wooden bench at the police station because this drug-fucked nurse got it in her fucking head that I was Dr Graffito. Me. Like I could be insane enough, not only to write
all that graffiti, but insane enough to clean up my own graffiti after making it—for months on end. That’s extra insane, isn’t it? As hysterical as that was, I could have been in some real trouble because of that poor woman they found in a bathtub. The police were just as hysterical, grabbing me up as though I had my hands around a second woman’s throat.”

  “Drowned in bleach?”

  “Seriously,” Jovan holds up a hand. “I’m too tired. I feel broken. It’s so fucking terrible I don’t know what to say. She’s a woman I’ve seen around in the hospital. A nurse called Melissa Martin. I never knew her name before getting hauled in by the police. They held me for questioning, and then forgot me in the holding cell as they got a confession from Bill Dimitriadis. I don’t know if I mentioned that Greek kid—a janitor like me.”

  “You mentioned almost beating his head in.”

  Jovan nods. “Bill’s old man, who was also a janitor in the same hospital for twenty years, turned Bill over as soon as he found out about it. Fucking drove him to the police station. I can imagine the old man taking him by the ear through the front door.” Jovan leans back in his chair and breathes out, carefully rubbing at the swelling on the crown of his head. “Bill and the girl were together a few times and she’d blown him off for some hotshot surgeon.”

  “What? So Bill killed her.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “And he did all that graffiti?”

  “That idiot didn’t even come up with the words he wrote on the poor girl’s body. He’s been getting letters from Graffito. Dropped off in the bottom of his locker in the change room. Saying different things, yet in each letter there’s the constant refrain ‘Waste of Life’. Or it’s ‘Life of Waste’. One moment Bill’s the confidant of the famous Dr Graffito, and he feels special, and the next, Bill is getting his life deconstructed. About twenty letters in all, each one urging the guy a little further along a path that, step by step, gets him to kill some poor nurse who did nothing worse than kiss him once or twice.”