Dreamland

by Gilling, Tom

  It wasn’t greed that had brought George Ruby undone— hardly any of the stolen money had ever been spent—but the compulsion endlessly to repeat his crime: almost, Nick couldn’t help thinking, as though his conscience obliged him to keep going until he was caught.

  Nick had watched him in court, a sad, sinister-looking man, loyally attended every day by his sad, sinister-looking wife. He had noticed Ruby listening to the police prosecutor as if the crimes the prosecutor was describing had been committed by someone else altogether: a colleague, perhaps, or a neighbour whom Ruby knew casually but whose criminal tendencies came as a complete and devastating shock.

  Nick thought about George Ruby and about that strange dissociation between the two versions of himself: Flash George the master forger and Hapless George the bewildered defendant. Until half an hour ago Nick had believed that he was in control of his life; now he realised he wasn’t. But who was?

  He picked up Homolka’s taxi but left the ‘For Hire’ sign switched off. With the sign switched off, the taxi was a solitary place— and solitude was what Nick needed.

  Was he stupid not to have seen Alison for what she was? But what was she—and what did she want from him? He thought of how she had looked at him on the morning they had brunch in Lygon Street—as if she knew something about him already. She had accused him of being inscrutable but she was the inscrutable one.

  He thought about the way she addressed him when they were alone, never using his name—as if she couldn’t bring herself to use the name ‘Kevin’, or couldn’t bring herself to use it to him. If her brother was at the heart of this, then why had things come so far? He and Alison could have stopped at being friends. But they were more than friends. They may have deceived each other, they may have gone on deceiving each other, but not about that. She had lied to him, yes, but no more than he had lied to her—and would have continued lying to her. And what, after all, did Alison’s lies amount to? How many lovers told each other the truth about themselves from the beginning? So their meeting wasn’t the accident it seemed: did that really matter?

  In two days Alison would be back and Nick would know the truth. The question was: how much did he want to know? He could live with deceit. He’d lived with it before. It was self-deceit that made life untenable.

  He found himself, almost unconsciously, turning the corner into Drummond Street. He liked driving past her house, even when the lights were off and he knew she was thousands of kilometres away. The lights were off now. Nick pulled up and turned off his engine.

  A group of white-shirted waiters was sitting over bowls of pasta in the Pizza-a-metro restaurant next door. One of the waiters recognised Nick and nodded. Nick nodded back. He wasn’t sure why he was there. He got out and walked to the door.

  The hall light was on. Nick pushed the bell and waited. Then he pushed it again. He waited a few seconds, then took the key out of his pocket and opened the door. The rain had soaked his back and shoulders.

  It was clear that no one was home. Corby’s bedroom door was slightly ajar. Nick opened it a few inches—far enough to catch a whiff of soiled clothes and stale marijuana smoke. Corby slept on a futon, which he never bothered to roll up. A blue plastic milk crate served as a bookcase for the library books Corby was always borrowing. After several terse conversations—Corby was always ‘on his way out’ as Nick walked through the door—it remained a mystery to Nick what he did for a living. Alison said he did some casual work at a boxing equipment shop in the Banana Alley Vaults near Flinders Street station. He left Corby’s door as he’d found it and walked down the hallway.

  From the bottom of the stairs Nick could see that Alison’s bedroom door was open, which seemed strange. He walked into the kitchen and switched on the light. Corby’s cereal bowl was sitting on the benchtop, with his tannin-stained Tweety-Pie coffee mug. There was an earthenware mug next to the kettle: one of a pair Alison had bought from a pottery shop in the Dandenongs during their first weekend together.

  A glossy magazine was sitting on the sideboard. Nick didn’t recognise the title—magazines opened and closed faster than humorously-named Thai restaurants. He glanced at the cover-line: FIVE WAYS TO MAKE YOUR LOVER A NEW MAN. Almost every magazine Alison had ever bought contained a variation of the same story. The underlying message never changed: life would be so much happier, more comfortable, more fulfilling if you were a different person, if you were someone else. Nick himself had simply acted out the fantasy every glossy magazine dangled before its readers.

  He checked the answering machine. The machine was on but the green light wasn’t flashing. Nick pressed the ‘Play’ button. There were five messages, all from him. The most recent was more than a week old. Either nobody ever rang Corby or else he was always home to receive the call.

  Slowly Nick climbed the stairs. He knew he shouldn’t be here. At the same time he couldn’t leave. The faint smell of Alison’s perfume hung in the air. He could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the shower head. The washers needed replacing and while Corby was strong enough to grind the taps shut, Alison wasn’t. Suddenly Nick knew that she wasn’t in Tokyo: she was here, in Melbourne.

  Nick had never attempted to understand the complexities of the Qantas staffing roster. He knew Alison had to clock up a certain number of flight hours within a given roster period and that some routes were more sought-after than others for the hours they accumulated. And he knew that now and then she was placed on stand-by. During that time she might be called in at short notice or she might not. It sometimes occurred to Nick that for a flight attendant Alison didn’t actually spend much time flying. He walked into her bedroom. He knew it was a violation—of her space, of her privacy—but he couldn’t stop himself. Her uniform was hanging up and there, on top of the wardrobe, was her Qantas cabin bag.

  She had lied about flying to Tokyo. Had she lied about other trips too? He’d dropped her at the airport in her Qantas uniform at least half a dozen times but she had always discouraged him from coming to meet her. Was that because she knew she wouldn’t be there?

  He went downstairs. How much did he really know about Alison—about the people she knew and the places she went? She had mentioned the names of various friends but Nick had never met a single one of them. There was Corby, of course. But Corby was different.

  One of the kitchen drawers was stuffed with utility bills. Nick rummaged around until he came up with a telephone bill. He glanced at the calls to ISD numbers. Corby had called Alison once, for a minute and a half, at the Hotel Mulia Senayan in Jakarta two months ago, but that was all. Nick glanced down the page at the list of mobile calls. Several calls had been made to one number in particular. Nick stared at the last four digits: 7777. A sick feeling rose up from the pit of his stomach. He knew that number. It had been given to him by Danny Grogan’s father.

  A key was jiggling in the front door lock. Nick slammed the kitchen drawer shut.

  ‘Hello,’ said Alison, shutting the door behind her. She walked into the kitchen and kissed him warily on the lips. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought you were in Tokyo,’ said Nick.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  They studied each other in silence.

  ‘I came to fetch a shirt.’

  Alison took off her coat. ‘Which one?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Which shirt are you looking for?’

  Nick said, ‘You told me you were flying to Tokyo.’

  ‘I was sick. I’ve been trying to ring you. Your phone’s been off the hook.’

  Nick didn’t believe her. His phone had been off the hook, but he still didn’t believe her. And he knew she didn’t believe him. Standing there, Nick remembered a phrase from a French novel he’d once read: life was an unrelenting succession of lies. It had sounded trite at the time but now he realised how perceptive it was. Life was an unrelenting succession of lies. His own life. Alison’s. Danny Grogan’s. The only way to sustain those lies was by telling mor
e lies—different lies, better lies. Every little slip required another lie to make things better. The process never stopped. It was like a mathematical sequence that went on and on, searching for an end point that didn’t exist.

  Nick said, ‘Your cabin bag isn’t packed.’

  She laughed. ‘Of course it isn’t packed.’

  ‘But you always pack your cabin bag the day before you fly.’

  ‘What are you trying to say—that I’m not sick? For heaven’s sake, I’ve got a doctor’s note here to prove it.’

  Nick knew he ought to go. After all he hadn’t told Alison, he had no right to interrogate her. Maybe she was telling the truth about this. Maybe he’d just lost his ability to believe. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Coming here was a mistake.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘It was.’

  Ian Stackpole was lying in a coma in the intensive care ward of the Royal Melbourne Hospital after what was described on page five of the Herald-Sun as a ‘callous hit-and-run, just metres from the door of the casualty department’. An ironic undertone ran through the dozen or so paragraphs. Stackpole’s brush with death in a hospital carpark appeared to have made the paper on oddity value alone and the reporter couldn’t quite make up her mind whether the location made the victim lucky or unlucky.

  Of course there was nothing in the report to suggest the accident could have been the result of mistaken identity: only one person knew that Stackpole had been wearing Nick’s jacket when he was knocked down.

  In fact some doubt remained as to whether Stackpole had been knocked down or whether he’d fallen and been struck where he lay. Either before or after he was hit, Stackpole had suffered a massive internal haemorrhage caused by a burst aorta. Nick wondered where (not to mention how) the reporter had got hold of this information, which would normally have been treated by the hospital as confidential. Now that he was comatose, Stackpole appeared to have surrendered his right to confidentiality.

  None of these revelations altered the fact that he’d been hit by a car and that the driver had refused to stop—but it left some room for doubt, and doubt was what mattered to Nick now. As long as there was doubt, there was hope.

  He drove into the city, parked the taxi and fed a handful of coins into the meter. The rain had stopped and shafts of watery sunlight penetrated the clouds. The pavements were beginning to steam. Strangers bumped into him, as though oblivious to his physical presence. He felt like a walking ghost, a mass of confused thoughts and quivering nerves. A derelict was sitting on a strip of cardboard outside a pawnbroker’s shop with a biscuit tin between his legs. A handwritten sign around his neck said: ‘No home. No work. No money.’

  Apart from a few coins and a packet of cigarettes, the biscuit tin was empty. Nick stopped and took a twenty-dollar note out of his wallet and placed it in the tin. The vacant expression on the derelict’s face didn’t change. He stared through Nick as though he didn’t exist. Maybe he was right, Nick thought. Maybe I don’t exist.

  That night, a man named Kevin Michael Chambers burnt to death in a rented house in West Sunshine. According to the Age, the dead man had been living at that address for less than a week. The fire appeared to have started in the living room, probably while Chambers was asleep. He had probably been asphyxiated by fumes from the nylon carpets long before the flames reached him.

  Although officially unemployed and on the dole, Chambers had been doing very well out of the illegal economy: working for cash as a labourer on building sites and driving a cab at night, also for cash and without a licence. He was thirty-three years old. There was a small photograph of the victim, taken on the pier at St Kilda with a diminutive black woman identified as his mother, Grace. Apart from the afro hair, there was nothing about the pale-skinned man that identified him as the black woman’s son.

  Nick had been driving all night. He’d filled the tank twice. According to the odometer, he’d travelled more than four hundred kilometres—and yet Nick had no recollection of where he’d been. Strangely, he wasn’t tired. At some point he must have pulled over and slept for a while. There was a packet of Winfields on the passenger seat beside him, and some butts in the ashtray. He wondered how they had got there. He lit another cigarette. How long was it since he’d spoken to Alison? It felt like days, not hours. The memory of it seemed to belong to a dream, a bad dream, the sort that returned long after you had woken up.

  He was parked outside a Pizza Hut restaurant in Footscray. It was raining again. The early-morning traffic splashed down Ballarat Road. Nick looked at his watch. The time was 6.42 a.m.

  First a man incinerated in his vehicle by a bolt of lightning in south-west Sydney. Then a patient knocked down in a hospital carpark wearing a borrowed jacket. Now a man asphyxiated in a house fire in West Sunshine. Nick felt responsible for all three.

  He rested his head against the steering wheel. He’d stood up in court and told a harmless lie, and somehow it had led to this. He didn’t understand how or why. All he knew was that he was not in control of his life and hadn’t been since the day he said yes to Harry Grogan. Perhaps, now and then, he’d done something to alter its course in one way or another: he’d made one choice rather than another, gone ahead when he should have paused, said ‘yes’ when the prudent answer would have been ‘no’ or ‘maybe’. But in the greater scheme of things none of that mattered. Fate, or luck, or something had delivered him here, to this exact point, and there was no way back.

  His mobile phone was ringing. He could see from the caller ID that it was Alison. Her voice sounded different, but different to what? The last twenty-four hours had changed everything. They had changed Alison. And they had changed him.

  ‘It’s me,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’

  He told her.

  ‘Have you read the paper?’

  He knew at once that she was talking about the fire.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m scared,’ she said. ‘I’m scared for both of us.’

  As he turned the key in the ignition Nick glanced at himself in the mirror. He had a cigarette between his fingers. A fine stubble of hair was growing back. For the first time in many months he studied his reflection and saw not Kevin Chambers but Nick Carmody.

  He was going to need Grogan’s money. Whatever happened, he was going to need Grogan’s money. He couldn’t predict what Alison was going to tell him, or what she would insist on being told, but he knew things couldn’t go on as they were. Alison had known from the beginning that he wasn’t the person he was pretending to be, and yet she’d let him act out his charade— almost, he thought, as if she was calling his bluff, daring him to make a mistake.

  He drove home and parked outside his house. The fly screen was open and the front door slightly ajar. Nick sat there for a while, watching for movement behind the venetian blinds. He picked up his mobile phone to call the police. What was he waiting for? He could pretend to be a passer-by, a neighbour walking his dog. His mind raced ahead. He couldn’t wait for the police. By now it was clear, in any case, that there was nobody inside the house.

  Walking up the garden path, he could see that the door wasn’t ajar: it had been wrenched off its hinges. Something else was wrong. The dog wasn’t barking. She slept in a kennel in the yard but she knew the sound of Nick’s footsteps.

  He walked along the side path, between the house and the rotten timber fence. A galvanised iron gate separated the rectangle of scorched earth at the front from the dead grass and cracked concrete at the rear. A rusty padlock hung from the bolt, giving the impression that the gate was locked, although the padlock didn’t work.

  The gate hadn’t been opened. The broken padlock was exactly as he’d left it. He stood there and whistled twice. The dog didn’t come. Nick unhooked the padlock, opened the gate and walked slowly around to the back of the house.

  The remains of a raw chicken carcass lay on the hot cement, encased within a moving crust of black flies. The greyhou
nd had never been able to resist the offer of food. Kicking the carcass over, Nick noticed white powder sticking to the skin: some kind of poison. The gizzards were lying in a plastic bag nearby.

  A thin grey paw protruded from the kennel. The dog’s chin was lathered with foam but its skin was already cold. Nick felt the tears welling in his eyes. He knelt down and gently stroked its velvet skull. He hadn’t expected this. Whatever it was he’d expected, it wasn’t this. This was the dog’s reward for all the helpless love it had shown him. Nick took the ragged tartan blanket out of the kennel and draped it over the lifeless animal. He wished he had time to do more.

  The house had been turned over from front to back. There wasn’t a cupboard that hadn’t been trashed, a drawer that hadn’t been pulled out and emptied. The burglar had found the bundle of company cheques made out to cash that Nick had hidden beneath the bottom drawer of his chest of drawers. His digital camera was gone, and a couple of dozen CDS. Nick saw the remains of a joint ground into the living room carpet. The burglary had been thorough but not professional: the burglar had been distracted before he could finish. He hadn’t found, or hadn’t looked for, the key to the garage, and the garage was where Nick had hidden Kevin Chambers’ passport. It took him several minutes to find it, stashed behind a small mountain of paint tins. Until now, he’d never thought of using it. The possibility of passing himself off as the person in the photograph was just too remote. But Nick had few options left. He held the photograph up to the light. There was a certain facial resemblance, but Kevin Chambers’ hair was down to his shoulders and it was peroxide blond. Maybe that was to Nick’s advantage. The passport was more than seven years old.

  Nick flicked through it. Apart from a few days in Bali in 1999, Chambers hadn’t been out of Australia, not on this passport, anyway.