by Joy Dettman
Memory had come at her hard as she walked away from the phone box that day. Memory of May, driving into a small garage. It had a lift-up door that crashed to the concrete in a wind. May holding small hands on a tram. Little trains that were not trains, running down the middle of the road making sparks. May pulling on a wire overhead when they wanted to get off. Noisy. Maybe she and Liza had been to the Toorak flat.
Many memories had returned in the past eight years, but they were floating things, colourful bubbles on the wind, that burst as she grasped them.
Ann checked her watch, then turned to the window as the train slowed. Camberwell Station. Not far now. Johnny would be back from lunch by the time she got there. Her heartbeat was rapid, and her lungs kept asking for more air. She breathed deeply, held the breath, tried to calm the frantic heartbeat.
What does he look like? Will he want to see me? I should have waited, should have rung him first. He must have seen my ads. He probably doesn’t want to be found.
Slow train, stopping at every station. Too slow, but not slow enough either. Hope was in the finding of him. What would be in the meeting? The end of hope?
Perspiration beaded her lip, but her mouth was dry. ‘Stupid,’ she said, searching her handbag for gum, or sweets, something that might make saliva. Nothing there – or nothing she could find. Again she read the letter. He’d be there. At two, she would see him. ‘Relax. Just relax. You’re an adult. He’s an adult. If he doesn’t want to see me, then at least I’ll know where he is, that he is alive. At least I’ll be able to stop wasting money on phone calls and ads.’
She found the car yard at the northern edge of the centre, and she stood scanning the lines of cars, seeking a tall dark head. No movement, apart from a youth with a blue bucket. ‘Where might I find John Burton?’ she called to him.
‘Dunno. Ask at the office.’ He pointed with his cleaning rag.
And she saw a tall man walk from the office. Dark, as she expected him to be, dressed impeccably, as his father always dressed. Her hand went to still her heart. His back was turned, and she watched his back, her own borrowing support from a powder blue Holden stationwagon, a few years younger than Ben’s ute.
He was with a male customer, and appeared to be doing a hard sell. She smiled, shook her head. She swallowed, licked her lips. Be calm, she warned. Take it slowly, just in case he doesn’t want to be found. What did people say to a brother, unseen in too many years? Hello stranger. Or, got any bargains today, mate? Or, Johnny hold me. Take all the hell out of my head. Make it go away.
Her eyes were misting when his buyer left without buying, but her smile was wide. She watched him turn, sight her from a distance and walk quickly towards her.
He was laughing. ‘God is kind,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you, Brown-eyes?’
He wasn’t Johnny.
Brown-eyes?
The smile left her face. Her head grew cold, colder.
He wasn’t Johnny.
The world leaned, she swayed to the side, attempting to level the ground.
He wasn’t Johnny.
‘I’m looking for John Burton – ’
‘And you found me instead. Isn’t this your lucky day?’
Mad. Blood roared like the ocean in her ears. Then she recognised him. He was the mauler in the blue shirt at the New Year party she’d gone to with David. Tony. Tony George. He was the man who looked like her father, who had her father’s hands.
‘By the way Tony, did your mother happen to know your father’s name?’
‘What do you do for a crust, Tone?’
‘I sell cars.’
Die on the spot. Drop dead.
She cringed from him. Away. Get away. Reflexes swung the blue car door open, and she crawled inside it, needing to hide from his eyes, needing the dark place of her childhood. Disappointment sucked the air from her lungs, embarrassment leached the marrow from her bones. Crawl into a hole and die. Fool. Fool. Bloody fool.
But ... but John Burton was here somewhere. The letter said so. The man said so, on the phone. Said he was at lunch. She looked at her watch, and Tony opened the passenger side door. He was in the car, filling the car, using up all of the air. ‘John Burton,’ she said, her mouth too dry to say more.
‘I knew it was you, you bitch. We have some unfinished business.’
It made no sense. She stared at him. Nothing to say. Got to get away. Hide. Can’t let him make me run from Johnny. Can’t let him see me dying. Johnny is here. She had the letter. Who wrote the letter? Tony’s was the voice on the phone. And she knew, but she didn’t want to know.
‘Dave married Melissa, six months after that party. You didn’t leave a very lasting impression on him, Brown-eyes, but you impressed me. I swore I’d get you one day.’
‘John Burton.’ She sounded like a parrot, with a two-word vocabulary. She added two more. ‘I rang.’ Too many hopes had been placed on this meeting. She couldn’t let go of hope. She grasped her handbag, took the letter from it, pushed it at him, and watched the paper shiver there while a pulse in her stomach flopped around like a dying fish. She sucked in used-up air, sucked in the heavy male scent of his sweat, breathed it out too fast, as she offered him the letter.
He didn’t look at it. Didn’t need to. He wrote it. ‘Good old Davey Jones been up to his old tricks again. Tut, tut tut,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘I got you a beauty, you smart-arsed bitch. I’ve seen those ads in the missing column for years, then last week I went to Mallawindy. Did some research. That’s the day I decided you’d get your just desserts.’
Then the parrot learned new words. ‘Bastard. Vicious bastard.’ She opened the door, sprang from the car, the contents of her open bag spilling to seat to earth.
He sat there, laughed at her fumbling attempt to sweep up the scattered junk. ‘No use running, Brown-eyes. I’ve only just begun.’
An older male wandered over to lend a hand. He knelt, retrieved her wallet from beneath the car, handed it to her with a small box of tissues and a Burnished Spice lipstick, two pens and a roll of Butterscotch.
‘I’ll take that wagon,’ she said. ‘That’s if I can drive it away in half an hour, and you can get his stink out of it. Someone ought to buy him a can of deodorant. Trying to test drive with him in the car would put off a lot of prospective buyers.’
She had killed two birds with the one stone, bought a long promised set of wheels and re-wounded an old enemy. But she hadn’t found Johnny, and she’d had to give a home address where the car would be parked. She didn’t think fast enough to lie, which meant Tony George knew where she lived. He was in the office when she ran back with her bank cheque, and by the look in his eye, he’d come knocking on her door with a cocked pistol in his pocket. She’d have to move again.
At five past four, she returned to the office – a car owner. Big car owner, and she couldn’t parallel park the thing for love nor money. She told Michael, while they waited for their late four o’clock appointment to arrive.
She’d known him for five years, had worked with him once in a larger space, and when he decided to form his own company, he’d hijacked her. He liked her madness, used it. They were a good team.
‘You bought a ten-year-old Holden,’ he said.
‘A twelve-year-old stationwagon, would you believe. It sort of ... sort of seemed like the right thing to do at the time.’
‘You’re mad,’ he said.
‘I thought we’d already agreed on that.’ They laughed, and they drank bitter coffee, and they waited until five, but the man didn’t show.
It was after six before Ann and the wagon found their way home to Collingwood, to the house she shared. Four girls in three bedrooms, a shambles of who owned what, and a bathroom no-one cleaned. The stink of age ruled each day and hung over into night. The tiny backyard smelt of age; no sun could find its way there to renew the earth, allow it to breathe. A hundred years of living and dying had gone on in this street of narrow houses, packed together like out-of-date cart
ons on a supermarket shelf.
Her possessions were few; by seven most had been transferred to the street. It wasn’t until she opened the wagon’s tailgate that she realised she’d bought more rust than metal, the rust hastily covered by plastic filler. Still, the loading area took her kitchen table, her cases, boxes and blankets. She considered tying her bed on the roof, but with no roof-rack, knew she’d probably lose it at the first traffic lights. ‘Live without it,’ she said, eyeing each end of the street for a prowling vehicle. ‘Just cut and run.’ The office box number was safe. If the mauler wrote again, she wouldn’t open his letters. ‘Go.’
The last box of books hurriedly tossed to passenger side floor, she drove away from Collingwood and slept the night at a motel in Parkville. The next week she spent at a hotel in St Kilda, her loaded vehicle parked all week in the street. What she needed was a flat, with a carpark. She was ready for a bathroom and a front door she could call her own, and maybe a beach not too far away, and she found what she wanted in St Kilda, a short walk from the hotel.
It was her twelfth city address, and there would be no thirteenth. Thirteen was unlucky. Thirteen was when the questions began. Thirteen was when she placed Mickey’s blood-stained collar in her golden syrup tin and found the mouse nest of papers hidden there. Thirteen was when she first read those scraps of paper. She didn’t like thirteen.
A tiny kitchen off the lounge room, tiny bedroom, miniature bathroom. A carpet near new, fresh painted walls and a private letter box. It was a rear flat, on the second floor, its lounge room window looked down on the parking bays, where one neglected tree had managed to survive. Tenacious thing, it clung to its small circle of earth, and in the week since she’d first seen the flat, and named the tree some sort of plum, its dirty limbs had become a haze of pink. Nature was erupting even in Melbourne, eroding the concrete and allowing the grey earth to produce.
She wound her window wide and popped her head out, attempting to catch a brief scent of the plum tree in Mallawindy, but the breeze was from the wrong direction. Car fumes, and the slight scent of the sea. A heady mixture, but no Mallawindy.
Today she’d buy a bed, bookshelves, a couple of chairs, get some food in, then go down and claim the beach. Almost out the door when the phone rang, she cursed it. Only one person had her new number.
‘It’s Saturday, Michael. You may own me body and soul all week, but today is Saturday.’
‘I’ve just been speaking to Roger the Red. He flew in last night and saw the ads. He’s rapt.’
‘I’m glad someone is.’ There was a long silence that she waited for him to fill.
‘He wants you to fly up to Sydney tonight.’
She changed the phone to her left hand, and drew her hair back from her face. ‘I’m not going. I’ve done enough.’
‘He’s our bread and butter. Appease him. It’s just for two nights, you can fly home on Monday night. He’s picking up the tab. He’s got some big party on tonight and a meeting on Monday afternoon, and he wants you there.’
‘Tell him to hire a call girl.’
‘His parents are over. He just wants to introduce his Mermaid girl.’
‘I’m not his Mermaid girl. It’s Saturday. I have to buy myself some furniture. All I’ve got is a television, a table and a telephone. I haven’t even unpacked my cases.’
‘It’s fate. Just pick up a case and go.’
‘I’ve been sleeping on the floor since Wednesday, and my back is killing me. Today is mine, and I’m going shopping for a bed.’
‘I’ll get one for you.’
‘I’ll get my own. Tell him I’ve got a slipped disc’
‘Do it for me. This is the last time I’ll ask.’
‘I did his stupid ads for you. Now everywhere I go, little old ladies smile at me.’
Michael laughed, but Ann wasn’t laughing. ‘I thought you got on well with him.’
‘I’d probably get on well with a rabid corgi too, but it wouldn’t mean I wanted to sleep with it.’
‘I’d say mat’s the last thing on his particular mind. I think he prefers guys.’
She looked at her cases, stacked against the wall, and to the kitchen bench, buried beneath boxes. For eight years she’d lived by impulse, moving on when the spirit took her, packing her cases and running to another suburb. Free. No strings. No-one making demands. That was before the crazy Yank walked through the office door.
She was good with words, legacy of Malcolm Fletcher, and a life spent in books. She wrote jingles for television commercials, and catchy ads for magazines, and it had all been a glorious game she was paid to play, until Roger bloody Wilkenson the Third.
He was forty if he was a day, and ugly as a red-headed bag of monkeys. He’d breezed in that day with an idea for a TV commercial. A vision, he’d called it, and he wanted them to make his vision live.
‘Picture a cute kid, coming apart at the seams. Picture a gorgeous Mommy, struggling with an antiquated sewing-machine.’ He spoke to her, ignoring Michael, and for the next hour his eyes had been on her every time she lifted her head, so she kept her head down, picked up a pen and began doodling.
It came, as Annie’s poems always came, complete. It came while her concentration was far, far away. Then, like Malcolm before him, Roger snatched the paper from beneath her hand, and he read the silly little ditty aloud, in an infant voice.
‘My Mummy can’t make button holes, she press-studs all my dresses,
but press-studs are embarrassing. I get in lots of messes.
If she had a Mermaid sewing machine, that button holes so fast.
I wouldn’t show my knickers to the neighbours walking past.’
‘Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to make quantum leaps in a single bound,’ spouted Roger bloody Wilkenson the Third. ‘Is this a girl? Is this a gem? Is she married?’
Michael had put aside the afternoon for him, prepared to court him, prostitute himself to get the account. The company had been struggling to hang on in ‘83. The Wilkenson empire was huge in America and growing daily in Australia, and the weird little guy who controlled it had a reputation for demanding perfection. Now he thought he’d found it.
‘Where did you come from? Did someone give birth to you, or did you evolve from the ocean waves and the night wind, my lovely?’
‘My name is Ann.’
‘Too plain Jane and no nonsense. I like nonsense.’ He spoke then of a second vision – a mermaid rising from out of the waves. He was like a little boy who still believed in magic, and if the world refused him his magic, then he was prepared to make his own. And he had the money to buy the right ingredients.
He took them out for dinner that night, and he plied them with wine. Ann saw its price on the wine list. She was drinking liquid gold. ‘You were my inspiration for the mermaid. You have her eyes. Dragged from the ocean, overawed by the enormity of the vast city. I want you for it,’ he said.
‘I’ll write your ditties, and drink your wine, but that’s it.’
He started talking money and he ordered more liquid gold.
‘I’m not a member of Actors Equity,’ she said.
‘I’ll get around those details, my lovely.’
‘My name is Ann.’
‘We’ve been through that,’ he said.
The next day Michael began twisting her arm. ‘We need him, Ann, or we’re both going to be out of a job. Give him what he wants.’
Two days and two dinners later, she gave in, proving once more to the little maniac that his money could buy him anything. He’d flown over again when they shot the ad, and he’d bought her a watch for Christmas. ‘It’s got your name on it, pretty lady, and I don’t know any other Ann.’
She wouldn’t accept it.
‘They are only zircons. I picked it up in Bangkok.’ He’d lied.
And now he was back in Australia, trying to buy a date for a party.
‘He’s booked you on the six o’clock flight. He said he�
��d pick you up at the airport.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I said you’d be there.’
‘Then ring him back,’ she said.
‘I can’t. I don’t know where he’s staying.’
She hung up, but the phone rang immediately.
‘I’ll buy you a bed. I’ll get it delivered before you get back. I’ll get Jan to fill your fridge. Do it for me, Ann, and I promise I won’t ask you again.’
‘Promise. Spit your death and hope to die.’ She heard him spitting on the other end of the phone. ‘I spat,’ he said, and she laughed. ‘What sort of a bed do you want? Think I should buy a queen size?’
‘Manipulating swine,’ she said, and she placed the phone down. But why knock it. A weekend in Sydney. There were things she wanted to do in Sydney. She’d been planning to take a week off and go there. Fate.
A small red case unzipped, revealed a small black briefcase, identical to her father’s. It was tossed to the floor while she unpacked a larger case, transferring items to the red.
Crazy. Crazy world, crazy life, but it left her little time to think. The weekend wouldn’t cost a cent; she’d have her own room, with a bed, and a telephone. She probably wouldn’t have to spend more than a few hours with the Wilkensons, so she could hole up with a telephone book, and work her way through the Sydney Burtons.
Jeans. Shirts. A frock to wear to the dinner, a suit for the meeting. A few pieces for emergencies, and shoes, all with heels. She liked high heels and made no concession to her height.
The red case closed, placed beside the door, she took up the briefcase she’d found seven years ago in the window of an opportunity shop. Like Mary’s lamb, it followed her wherever she went. Its key was on her keyring, now she turned it in the lock and up-ended the briefcase on the table. The litter of many years tumbled free.