Winter Traffic

by Stephen Greenall

  ‘Fuck no. Too reachable as it is.’

  ‘That’s not the general consensus.’

  ‘Believe it, old cock. Almost anyone at all can hold out their grubby fingers and smear the Incremental. It’s tragic.’

  ‘I’ve heard it all.’

  He always had sad eyes, Bob Mack: his response to other people’s humour is to grimace. He cannot partake, cannot risk falling into the cauldron that is joy. A crusader burnt by the heat of his own flaming sword but keeping the agony a secret. Imagine it—heading up the Pirates and not one natural dobbing bone in your body.

  ‘I better take this.’

  ‘Do it,’ says Rawson, drifting to another room. Another room, another street, another premises, though still within reach of the park, the bull’s roar circumference of the quaking Shake. He totters while straining to catch the light of her high bower, the light that says she is home. Rawson tells himself he is a decent man, checks the street to ensure no one’s looking.

  —

  Her door is ajar at the head of a common stairwell, the top-floor flat of a three-storey building. Long of tooth, mean of dimension: it would have started life as a timothy. Later it housed micks, nineteen brothers and sisters of the working class, and after that the kero-lit surgeries of an unlicensed dentist. Rawson breathes it deeply—the past commingled with her patchouli and marijuana—and intones her name through the deepest octave available.

  ‘Edwina.’

  D Major. He noses the door to reveal the bohemian atelier and the pearl at its heart: the artist-at-work, seated, addressing her easel, assessing him like a known and mild nuisance. She wears a man’s white business shirt that is open, unbuttoned, and Rawson averts his gaze from the dove-wing arc of her youthful tits. His eyes resort to the other figure in the room, dark and large, a glowering Bill Sikes who lost his purple homburg. Rawson dreams about the next world, the one shorn of mirrors.

  She picks up her joint and takes a deliberate drag; to process his manifestation will require a new level of high. Rawson is slightly in awe of her composure, her high queen fucking beauty, so he pulls a hard right into her chaotic kitchenette. In the abbreviated fridge he finds three beers—plainly the products of three different breweries—and helps himself to the Grolsch.

  ‘You’ve got some explaining to do, young lady.’

  He applies himself to the bottle in the aftermath of this pronouncement, wondering if it will fly, will signify in this jungle of broken records. She laughs but there is not much cruelty in it. Rawson says, ‘Does your father know?’

  ‘Know what.’

  ‘That you’re pushing papers for a known felon.’

  ‘Felon? FYI, Caallum’s very well connected in the art world. And I don’t push papers, I run the place.’

  ‘That’s because the boss is out on the corner, pumping serious weight into the Darlinghurst bloodstream.’

  ‘Wow, do you really talk like that?’

  ‘FYI—yes I do.’

  ‘Networks, Michael. It’s good for my career.’

  ‘I thought you were a painter.’

  ‘What’s your point.’

  ‘Paint shit. Paint shit well. Bang—instant network.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know the first thing about it.’

  ‘I know your dad,’ he says. ‘That means I’m obliged to look out for you.’

  Another mellifluent giggle. It countervails his timeworn claim to authority, proven fragile at every fresh turn. Like his faith, his levity. Edwina tells him to cut the shit and stands, holing a single button at her navel, exhaling dangerously. ‘We both know what you came for.’

  Rawson’s answer is to sway, moored by his only physical contact with the world: the glassy throat of the bottle in his palsied hand. If he dropped the vessel, let it smash, he would cease to be—would fade like a graphite sketch beneath the paint of some final version. He conceals his terror as she comes at him, passes, reaches past a midden of crumpled designer clothes. In the corner a canvas is hiding from the world, ashamed of its own being. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ says Edwina—possibly to him, possibly to it.

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  Rawson glimpses a mass of colour, two-thirds encircled by eggshell white, the virgin territory where her brush has not yet been. Is this really how she sees him? A mass of variegated purples? His face is a version of hell: Tyrian cheeks, Crocus eyes, Orchid chin, Psychedelic lips. She ports it towards her workstand and tells him, Come on—you’re my Archie.

  ‘Stop it.’

  He goes to the window and quietly kills the beer. A frost is upon the Wardlaw Park, glistening near the red dust and maple and tin and Chinese cedar. Bob Mack is visible in the lamplight, talking to some sheila on the swings. Rawson has had many muses but never been one / will not stand for it. ‘Shouldn’t you be backpacking around Europe or something.’

  ‘Why, what’s Europe got.’

  ‘A lot of fucken paintings for one thing.’

  ‘Granted.’

  ‘And experience. You know’—Rawson waves breezily at the McPherson triptych on her wall—‘that thing you need if you want to be any good at this caper.’

  ‘Caper. God, I love the way you talk. I told Tarquin about it.’

  ‘Who’s Tarquin.’

  ‘No one. A writer.’

  He moves with his back to her, sensitive to every work-sound she makes, and arrives at the ancient record player that abuts the yellow chrome desk. Such is her decor, antiques blended in with cutting-edge contemporary, all of it expensive, all of it snapped up at the moment of seeing. The lies she tells her friends about the amazing deals she got. ‘Mahler,’ he intones, eyes straining to read the label on the record as it spins.

  ‘Turn around.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Look at me.’

  He won’t. A minute of nothing, of Mahler, then the creeping advance of her poltergeist behind, giggling his name and entwining herself around the blasted grey gum of his trunk to press the joint between his lips. Rawson inhales as she kisses the top button of his shirt, then the one below that, then the one below that…Is this the final woman he will know? Hell of a way to go out. Edwina’s tongue hits his belt buckle and Rawson takes her about the shoulders—lifts her and places her away as though he is a crane and she a parcel. Between them a curtain of carnal smoke. ‘I want,’ she says, ‘to paint you.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Coward.’

  ‘Guilty.’

  ‘Do you know what my father says?’ She studies his face, conducting voodoo physiognomies. ‘He says you had amazing potential. Mind like a steel trap, could have topped your subjects and been dux of school.’

  Rawson nods to suggest he has heard this theory before. ‘So what happened.’

  ‘Your body: it got in the way.’

  ‘Ah, my body.’

  ‘Do you want to fuck or what?’

  Gustav is like a French film: he doesn’t end, he just stops. Rawson rallies and puts on another record, Shostakovich, the next bloke on the list. Edwina’s grass is typically potent, characteristically very good. ‘Tell me about Tarquin.’

  It banishes her from his immediate presence; she reclaims the scoob and returns to her pedestal, her cool detachment. ‘What do you want to know.’

  ‘What does he write about.’

  ‘This and that.’

  ‘Does he write you love letters?’

  ‘He’s writing a novel: missing girl, obsessed detective. That’s why he needs to meet an actual policeman, do some research.’

  ‘You should tell him to go to the movies.’

  ‘That’s all he does, trust me…Why? Would you see him?’

  ‘Where’s the girl.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘In the book—is she in a basement or in a grave? Is she in a riverbed somewhere, or just the wrong fucken living room?’

  His interest intrigues her. ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ she says carefully. ‘I’ve o
nly read his poetry.’

  Rawson grunts. ‘Did it work?’

  He goes across to her ironwork bed, a Gulliver felled in slow motion to the sound of Russian strings. He reposes with eyes closed and is horrified, a moment later, by the unjust detonation of her Polaroid camera. He lurches awake and makes a grab for the device but the girl is too light on her feet, compelled beyond his reach by her own amusement. She dervishes the room and flaps the developing square, his death mask resolving into form and colour.

  He should have known—the door of her fridge is plastered with such impromptu snaps, Edwina replicated many times, grinning at the camera from within a thicket of friends, girls beautiful like her, gorgeous and thin. The limitless conceit of young women who know themselves to be entirely photogenic: no landmarks in those images, no special occasions, just idle moments, nights on the piss. Rawson watches as she examines it closely but finds something amiss: all the joy flows out of her. Possibly the camera is magic and shows the bromide stains that lie upon a soul, all its cysts and weeping cancers.

  ‘Who was that woman,’ she wonders with a string of slow words; the girl has mesmerised herself. ‘At the gallery today.’

  ‘No one. Just a cop.’

  ‘What did you do to her.’

  ‘Me? Nothing.’

  ‘She left in tears.’

  ‘Hiding in the bushes were we.’

  ‘Are you sleeping with her.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Liar…She wouldn’t have you.’

  ‘But you would? How does that work.’

  Edwina keeps looking at the Polaroid / will look at nothing else. ‘Don’t get carried away—painters always sleep with their models. See? I don’t need to go to Europe. I already know how it works.’

  His nod is solemn and it occurs to him that Europe is old hat to Edwina. She was there at nine, at ten, at thirteen, at sixteen. She could go tomorrow if she wanted / she could head for the airport tonight. That’s how it goes when your father is prominent, ex-attorney general and future something else. The tresses of her jackdaw hair fall almost to her waist and Rawson sees again the central problem of female beauty: you cannot ever touch it, get to the end of it. Paint it, sculpt it, hurl odes and petals in its wake—these are just the pale approximations, the salty crusts left by that process, chemical, of loving something outside of you, something you cannot ever merge with or hold. The detective feels everything like an artist now—the useless longing, the sentiment for the sake of it—and he has fucked the beauty many times. Yet in the moments during / immediately after it was still outside, exogenic, refusing miscegenation. He glimpses the logic of cannibals, so zany and so sad.

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  He does—then cheats and peeks. Edwina is going to her bookcase, selecting a volume, hiding the Polaroid within. Her shape reaches for a small steel box and moves stealthily towards him.

  ‘I said shut them! Open your mouth.’

  Compliance tastes bitter on his tongue. Acid mass. She says, ‘Did anyone ever send you love letters?’

  Rawson absorbs, thinks about it. ‘Once.’

  ‘Who was she?’

  ‘It was a bloke.’

  She laughs; the sound is light and excellent. ‘Oh, you would have loved that. You’re so bigoted.’

  ‘Am not. Poofters rock.’

  ‘I mean your generation. What did he write?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  His eyes swim with complex memory. I FOLLOWED YOUR PROGRESS WITH DETACHED FASCINATION, NEVER QUITE KNOWING WHY. WAS I IN LOVE WITH YOU? OF COURSE—IN THE SENSE THAT EVERY MAN WORSHIPS HIS DIAMETRIC SELF. THAT IS WHAT YOU ARE TO ME, MY INVERTED CORRELATIVE. ‘He said that we were opposite souls.’

  ‘Did he say he loved you?’

  ‘Loved me, protected me, thought about me, hated me.’

  ‘Jesus. Obsession!’

  ‘Tarquin doesn’t say such things?’

  ‘He says the first part. Not the last part.’

  ‘No—I’m sure he doesn’t hate you.’

  ‘He probably should.’

  ‘Give him time.’

  The light beneath her door is disrupted by twin shadows. A pairing of shoes: someone lurks in waiting, ear cupped to the door. Rawson averts his eyes and they go to the bookcase, wondering where she hid him. To know will tell him much. He rises and moves towards the spines and some are virgin / some are cracked.

  ‘My friends have this game,’ she says, back at her easel. ‘What’s your biography called.’

  ‘That’s easy,’ says Rawson. ‘Whores and Horses.’

  ‘So you’ve played this before.’

  ‘What’s yours.’

  ‘Miss Mess.’

  ‘Terrible. Try again.’

  ‘I’m too young to have a biography.’

  ‘Volume One, with more to come.’

  ‘How about…First Impressionism!’

  ‘Better,’ says Rawson with a smile.

  ‘Are we going out?’

  She dresses as he scans the books. Middlemarch, Madame Bovary. His hand hovers above the cannons—Ulysses, Moby Dick—then hesitates, reluctant to make a culpable guess. The Red and the Black.

  ‘The Names, the Faces.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the title,’ says Rawson softly. ‘My memoir.’

  ‘Well write the bloody thing.’ She gives this command to the mirror, her eyes and mouth agape as she applies the wand of her mascara. Even when grotesque she is lovely.

  ‘It’d be the longest confession in the English language,’ confesses Rawson to the literature. Emma, Orlando, Felix Holt the Radical. When he sees the right one he reaches fast and plucks it, quickly sourcing the Polaroid. Time’s worst bookmark / she parked him in The Iliad. ‘I adore you,’ he whispers, far beneath the requisite volume.

  Edwina locates her purse and keys, doesn’t bother to kill the lights. They go out onto the landing and Patrick Conlon is there, his throat cut but not bleeding, dead eyes contributing nothing to the mild gladness of his smile. Rawson makes a slow sad nod of acknowledgment.

  ‘Wait,’ says Edwina, ‘I forgot something.’ She turns and slaps the Big Ship hard, rising on tiptoes to exert her maximum force. Pain dries on his cheek like water from the beach.

  ‘What was that for.’

  ‘For being such an arsehole to me at the gallery today.’

  Rawson looks to Patrick for support; Conlon raises his eyebrows, inclines his head, opens his busted hands.

  ‘Fair enough,’ says Rawson. ‘Shall we?’

  —

  They pass through the snarl at the bottom end of Crown, their common air a curtain, muslin, into which their faces press the present. It grows more chilly with every step until it sears their lungs like pleurisy; they are not dressed for preternatural weather. Relief bears down in the form of a gas-lit tram, sardined with racegoers for old Victoria Park. The men wear hats and read form guides folded to quarters, quartos, and when the elbowed-together horde at last disgorges the three of them take seats. Patrick and Edwina enjoy the window while Rawson is exposed to the aisle / the attentions of grave conductor. The Incremental has no shillings so the uniform hands him a harmonica, indicates that Bobby Cobra must play to pay their fare. He presses lips to metal and the issue is jaunty, melodic, adept. I didn’t know you could do that, says Edwina to the glass.

  Patrick is no taller than she, small but perfect in his proportions, handsome like Alan Ladd: as a child, Rawson’s favourite film was Shane, but he never permitted himself to note the resemblance, not until this moment. The ruin of Patrick’s larynx, open to the world. ‘This man was Golden Gloves,’ says the Big Ship to Edwina. ‘A gifted boxer, not just a cop. We called him Perseus.’

  ‘Um, why.’

  ‘No—we called him Perseus Two. He was a sequel.’ Rawson turns his words to Patrick’s ear while Patrick stares silently at the living nocturnal. ‘I never said a kind word to you. Was always aloof.
I wanted to believe you’d made it out somehow, but in my heart I knew that Éamon had had his way. I almost sent flowers…But send them where? And to who?’

  When they alight the evening has turned warm and the pavement is awash with American sailors; a dull ache signals in the Incremental knee. He takes Edwina by the arm and pilots her through the crowd, following Patrick as Patrick angles to a doorway that is celebrated in white neon. The man on the door of the Orpheum looks a tough nut to crack, assesses Rawson and shakes his head. Patrick petitions the jawbreaker’s ear while Rawson tries hard to look pacific, ineffectual, whistling upwards at a low roof of stars that constellate in patterns strange to him. Someone presses a trumpet into his hands and he looks doubtful for an instant. Then he unfurls a jazzy refrain, his phrasing elegant and self-complete. The passing GIs stop to whistle and cheer and the bouncer nods, waves them in, accosts nobody for cover. Rawson is exultant but loses his footing and tumbles down the stairs: looking up, back and across his shoulder, he sees that Patrick is waving, retreating, boarding the tram, was messenger only.

  The surviving pair wander through subterranean galleries, low chambers in which are conducted speakeasies, burlesque shows and card games, billiard tables in mid-contest crowded by static watchers, men reflecting upon the state of the game as though snooker will both supply and acquit their existential quandaries. Rawson and Edwina aspire to the distant sounds of music, an echo that rebounds and draws them on in exasperated pursuit until, plagued by thirst, Rawson carves a passage through stagnant bodies to a bar where he earns two cocktails for a successful stint on a pair of castanets. The liquor is dark and an eyeball bobs horribly in every iceless glass; when Rawson peers close to confirm the abomination, he finds just candied cherries.

  ‘Lotus & Lethe,’ says the neighbour at his elbow. ‘That is what they call them.’ The voice is familiar but the man conceals his identity behind a black fedora, a strategic way of inclining his head. They clink their glasses and drink but the libation has no flavour. ‘There was a girl on my arm,’ says Rawson vacantly. ‘Did you see which way she went?’

  The man shrugs. ‘This is a good place for forgetting. The names, the faces. Do you like poetry?’