by Toni Jordan
‘You could have gone anywhere you liked,’ Inga says.
‘I have,’ Rachel says.
Her skin is itchy and there’s a restless current in her limbs at the prospect of being out of doors. At the idea of Inga, barely a foot away. Everywhere is mud but she spies something in the distance and darts off the path, skipping over puddles, and kneels beside an elm, its heavy trunk snapped clean through. She parts the loose dirt with her hands to release a thin root.
‘See? This purplish burr, with the flat leaves, like elephant ears? It’s burdock.’ Then, to Inga’s blank expression: ‘Surely you know what burdock is?’
‘If I ever did, I’ve worked very hard to forget it.’
‘It’s good.’ Rachel unfolds her handkerchief flat and wraps the root before thinking better of it—Inga is looking at her as if she’s the tiglon in the zoo. Perhaps she’s being greedy. ‘Do you have a handkerchief?’ she says to Inga. ‘We can split them. There’s enough for two.’
‘I’m full up to here with burdock, as it happens. Couldn’t manage another bite.’
A little further along, in a shady part that seems miles away from the the honking traffic, Rachel finds plantains and sheep’s sorrel and purslane. She’s tender with them. She gentles them into her palm, brushes them clean. These low ground-dwellers have survived the wind, the blustering rain. She wraps them in her handkerchief with the burdock and charges on, Inga behind her. A blackberry bush clinging to its trellis, the fruit spoiled and mushy on the ground. Black cherries also, smashed and leaking blood-juice, savaged by birds, on the path.
‘Such a waste,’ Rachel says, and raises her head to find Inga frowning at her.
‘I would have bought you a hat, if you’d asked,’ Inga says.
‘I have a hat.’
‘Most girls I know would have spent a happy afternoon just staring in the windows at Bergdorf’s. What do you propose to do with this strange collection?’
‘Why, eat them, of course.’
‘You can buy food.’
‘But if you don’t have to. If you can manage enough to eat and you can sleep out of the rain, then you don’t have to put up with anything.’
Inga tilts her head. ‘Has there been much you’ve had to put up with?’
At once it strikes Rachel that a being as sublime as Inga Karlson should not be standing in the mud watching her forage in a deserted park. Porcelain skin and astral hair; it’s like forcing a ballerina to stand in the laundry and work the mangle. The wrongheadedness of it a sudden ball in her throat. Rachel looks down at her shoes. ‘Some. Not so much as other girls, I’m sure. A girl can put up with so much. So much is fine. But not one bit more.’
‘Is that so?’ Inga says.
‘You have to be strong about it, like swallowing cod liver oil on a spoon,’ Rachel says. ‘Hold your nose, get it down. No sense doing one thing and wishing for another.’
‘No sense at all,’ Inga says.
‘Besides. Look at them. No one plants them, no one waters them. They just grow and grow. They’re miracles.’
The day is cooling. They wander back to 59th Street, along muddy paths, crunching small twigs against rocks.
‘I’ll deliver you back,’ Inga says.
At the taxi, Inga opens the door for Rachel and tucks the edge of her skirt so it’s not trapped by the door. The taxi driver rolls his eyes at the state of their shoes.
Back downtown, taxi paid. It’s close to seven and the sun is setting. They stand there on the sidewalk. Rachel’s bag is heavy with weeds, sweetly wrapped.
‘Thank you, Miss Karlson,’ Rachel says. She clasps her bag to her chest but she doesn’t move her feet. She feels a cobweb of tension holding her to Inga and she—she who turned her back on her family in a swoop, she who never checks the mail holding her breath, never scrawls the briefest note to her mother and toys with mailing it—cannot force herself away.
Inga blinks, hands on her hips. ‘Now listen here. Have you not read my book?’
‘Of course I have,’ Rachel says. ‘Everyone has.’
‘Yet you were the only one who didn’t tell me so, back there at the restaurant. Even that tartar of yours praised it to the skies, though that might well mean she’d never heard of it before today.’
‘It’s a private thing, a book,’ Rachel says. ‘It’s hard to…It made me happy. Sad happy.’
Inga will ask now about the thing she said. They’re onto you, whispered while kneeling at Inga’s side. An act of disloyalty toward her employer. She’ll ask, any moment, Rachel thinks.
But Inga doesn’t ask. She says, ‘I know what you mean.’ She starts walking away, then turns back to Rachel.
‘No, I don’t believe we’re finished yet, Rachel. Come on then. Do keep up.’
Inga turns left again under the El, casting a ladder of long shadows on the road. Sparks fly as a train passes overhead. They’re heading further downtown.
One thing Rachel’s realised in the time she’s been here: this is not one city but dozens, and each could be in a different country. The only things in common are the garbage and the rats. She’s never been this way before. They pass a building on the corner: leather coats, suede windbreakers, the sign says. Complete Line of Riding Apparel. Another few blocks, and things are becoming grimmer. Boys in caps, loitering on steps, staring at them. A black man, sweeping. Two nuns, fearsome in their flowing black habits and black veils and white coifs.
They pass the courthouse and Inga veers around the women’s prison and they are clipping along when, with no warning, she swerves into a narrow alley obscured by carts and broken crates and a chair missing its seat. Rachel trots behind her. They pass a stack of cardboard that might be a night-time shelter, a huge steel dumpster with Bureau of Sanitation on the side and a cluster of orange cats of various sizes that stare at their ankles like watchmen. Rachel thinks she sees a rat move fast behind some round trash cans at the blind end but the cats are unmoved. It all smells like sour piss and rotting fruit and foreign sausage.
Halfway down the alley, Inga stops in front of a khaki metal door. There’s a button in the right-hand jamb that Rachel wouldn’t have noticed if Inga hadn’t pushed it. She stands there, grinning, with her hands in her pockets.
‘What now, Miss Karlson?’
‘My name is Inga. Now we wait.’
They don’t wait long. A panel slides open and dark eyes appear, then the panel closes again. There’s a delay—Inga scrapes the sole of her shoe against a ledge—and the door opens. There’s no evidence of any person inside but there is a narrow, shadowy staircase heading down. A wind rushes up toward them; it smells like a greasy sea.
Inga starts down. When Rachel is barely inside, the door smacks shut.
She stands at the top. The stairs are steep. The walls are uneven and flinty; they might have been dug with picks and shovels by the Dutch when this city was New Amsterdam. She needs to walk back to Schrafft’s, she thinks, before this goes any further.
Inga is a dozen steps down when she turns back. ‘We don’t have all night.’
Rachel opens her coat and pulls at her apron, touches the netted cap. Her ugly flat shoes, for the long days on her feet. ‘I really should go.’
Inga rolls her eyes, comes back up the stairs and stands close to Rachel, in this small space at the top of the stairs, and she slips her hands inside Rachel’s coat, around her waist.
Rachel’s breath catches. Her arms float away from her sides, trembling. Inga is undoing the bow of her apron at the back. Rachel feels it tighten as Inga unpicks the knot, then the constriction at her waist disappears and it’s lifted over her head. Inga rolls the apron tight and stuffs it in one of the voluminous coat pockets. Then, with her face a breath from Rachel’s, she reaches up and pulls one pin from Rachel’s hair, then another, and there is nothing Rachel can do to suck air into her lungs. She couldn’t feel the pins before but now she shuts her eyes and she feels every sharp grip drawn away. The cap is removed and her skull feels l
ighter, as if the top of her head might lift off and float to the sky. Her curls drop against the skin of her face. She opens her eyes to the sight of Inga leaning in closer still and sifting Rachel’s curls between her fingers, loosening them. The gentle tugs as her hair snags in the V of Inga’s fingers. Now Inga undoes Rachel’s top button with warm hands, then another button, and opens her collar wider. She folds up Rachel’s coat sleeves past the pale flesh of her inner arm to above the crook of her elbow, and she rubs her thumbs over Rachel’s cheekbones and pinches the skin. She stands half a pace back.
‘There,’ says Inga. ‘That’s better.’
19
Brisbane, Queensland, 1986
It only took two phone calls to track down the mysterious photographer. When the secretary of the club phoned Caddie back, he knew straight away the man she was chasing.
‘Rodney,’ he said. ‘Rodney Free? The shots, from the gallery? He told us all about it? The hoops he had to jump through? Showed a lack of respect for photography as an art, he said.’ He would ring Rodney and give him her number. ‘You got a job for him?’
‘Kind of. I’m interested in some photos he’s taken.’
‘Cause Rodney’s usually chasing a job.’
Rodney called back ten minutes later. He would meet her for coffee, no problem.
So on Saturday Caddie runs for the bus home when the bookstore closes at noon. She’s arranged to meet Jamie first, outside Spagalini’s.
Caddie walks up her street to Milton Road. It’s a nice suburb, Auchenflower. Happy families live in these houses; she suspects theirs is the only rundown rental. In the backyards, kids are running through sprinklers in their togs, laughing, while their mums watch from kitchen windows. Crisp blue sky, flat as a plate, and still air the temperature of skin. Cicadas in shrubs, humming, and the tops of trees peeking over iron roofs.
She turns the corner towards the Night Owl. She crosses Milton Road and she can see him as she approaches: Jamie, standing on the footpath, looking the other way. It’s as if he senses she’s there. He turns around towards her.
‘Hey.’ He looks at her, then at the footpath, then at her again. ‘The game’s afoot.’
‘Follow your spirit, indeed.’ She kisses him on the cheek, smiling.
He grins like she’s given him a present. ‘Most people think that was Conan Doyle.’
‘I’m not most people,’ she says. ‘I know my Henry V.’
She centres herself, focuses. Jamie opens the door for her. Inside there’s a pizza oven behind the counter and a few tables out front covered with red-and-white checked cloth. Rodney Free is sitting in the corner. His hair is shorter and shinier. His camera lies unpacked, ready to fire next to his cappuccino—to establish his bona fides, perhaps—and his black bag has a seat of its own. They order coffees at the counter on the way to the table. Rodney looks up as they approach but shows no sign of recognition. She introduces Jamie, who shakes Rodney’s hand, then herself. She reminds him about the fragments, the exhibition. The more Caddie speaks, the blanker he looks.
‘Peppermint?’ He holds a crumpled paper bag open for them. It’s half-filled with smooth white balls.
She shakes her head, as does Jamie. Rodney sniffs and helps himself to two, then rolls the bag closed and returns it to his pocket.
‘We stood next to each other in a queue? If you say so.’
She reminds him of his fondness for air conditioning, books and paintings. It was only a month ago.
‘I must of made quite an impression,’ Rodney says as a peppermint draft wafts towards her.
Her coffee comes with a high frothy head that reminds her of a poorly drawn pot. Rodney cheeks his peppermints and takes a sip of his cappuccino. The chocolate moustache that remains makes him look like a large Don Ameche.
‘No drama. Not good with faces.’ The peppermints are two strange growths in his cheek pouches. He waves his palm in the air as if erasing an invisible blackboard. ‘All a big blur. I meet that many people.’
She smiles at him. He’s right, it doesn’t matter. She just wants to look at his photos from the exhibition.
‘They’re right here.’ He unzips the side pocket of the bag and inside there’s a black portfolio with his name across the front. It looks expensive. Rodney strokes it as though it’s a small dog. ‘Strange request, this. What’s it all about?’
‘I’m trying to find a woman.’ As soon as Caddie says it, she knows it doesn’t sound right.
‘Not like that,’ Jamie says. ‘Caddie met someone.’
That sounds even worse. Caddie and Jamie look at each other.
‘The woman. I think she knows something.’ She tries again. ‘We had a fascinating conversation, one I haven’t stopped thinking about.’
The front door opens: three teenage boys, here to pick up takeaway pizza. Which one is the Auchenflower special? one of the boys says. This isn’t the way Caddie imagined this conversation progressing. She wants to say, I have no idea why I’m doing this. She looks at Jamie.
‘Meeting someone you really click with, it doesn’t happen every day,’ Jamie says. He blinks. ‘Caddie would like something to remember her by.’
That’s it exactly. The single conversation under a baking sky when a stranger saw you for who you are. A small miracle that could vanish if she doesn’t capture it, regardless of whatever the woman may or may not know about Inga Karlson or her work. Perhaps these tiny arcs of recognition have sparked around her before and she hasn’t noticed. She tries to face Rodney but can’t stop looking at Jamie.
‘Lucky I’m a professional. You know, fashion. Runways and location, for magazines. Or I nearly am. Right now, I do a lot of groceries.’
‘Groceries?’
‘Catalogues. Vitamin bottles, that’s my specialty. They’re a lot harder than they look, vitamin bottles. They’ve got to look serious, like proper medicine, but not too serious, because they’re not poisons? The bottles are made from plastic but you’ve got to make them look like glass. And I do a lot of graduations. And funerals.’
‘People hire a photographer for their funeral?’ Jamie says.
‘Not for their funeral. They’re dead, mate.’ He pops another peppermint. ‘Freelancing’s not what it used to be. Cameras are cheap now, see? Every man and his dog thinks he’s Lord Snowdon.’
‘That must be hard,’ she says.
Rodney Free sighs. ‘Film, petrol, new lenses. Mum’s physio. It adds up.’
Jamie takes his wallet from the back pocket of his trousers and extracts a ten. ‘You must let us give you a little something.’
‘That’s very kind, very kind,’ Rodney says, and his hand snakes out to grab the note. ‘Nice to meet people who understand fair recompense vis-a-vis a man’s stock and trade.’
Jamie drops another ten on the table.
Rodney nods as if performing an act of benevolence and slides the photos out of his portfolio and across the table.
‘Tell you what,’ he says. ‘Help yourself.’
There are almost fifty. Some of them are of the fragments and other Inga artefacts, but the reflection off the glass obscures almost everything. Most of the others are blurry. One is Rodney’s shoe, a tan and shiny lace-up. Caddie hopes Rodney has a second job.
And then she sees her. Rachel.
‘These.’
In a few minutes, the exchange is over. Rodney Free folds the notes and slips them in the top pocket of his shirt, next to his pens and a tiny Spirax notebook.
‘A pleasure doing business with you,’ he says to Jamie, as he packs up his camera, his portfolio and his black bag. Then he’s out the door without paying for his coffee.
Jamie leans towards her and edges the photos around so they can both see them. She can scarcely believe it. In one, everything is blurred. The cases holding the fragments, the jostling crowd. There’s a sense of bustling energy. It’s not the same atmosphere as Caddie recalls: the feeling in the room was something like a crowded memorial, while Rodney Free’s p
hotos make it look like a disco. Even the display cases seem to be spinning.
Rachel is there all right. She’s at the left of the shot but Rodney’s exposed it over and over and she’s shattered into a dozen ghosts of herself. She is holding a multitude of arms aloft. She’s noticed Rodney and she’s waving her hand, her many hands, in the general direction of the camera in an attempt to block the picture. This, Caddie realises, is the second photo, chronologically.
The other photo must have been taken first. It also features a blurred figure in the foreground—it’s Caddie herself. She sees the way her hair falls around her face, her rapt expression. Is this really how she looks?
Rachel, dead centre and sharp. She hasn’t seen Rodney’s camera yet. She looks exactly as Caddie remembers, but her expression is different. She’s staring up and to the side, towards the heavens. She has a look of—the word that comes into Caddie’s mind is adoration. As though she’s in the presence of the most wondrous thing that could possibly exist.
‘She’s old,’ Jamie says.
Caddie is also surprised. It’s the research they’ve been doing, imagining young Rachel in the 1930s. Here are her thin arms, her white hair. In the first photo, she’s completely unguarded and in the second, frantically defensive. So vulnerable, so exposed. Caddie wishes now she’d paid more attention to Rodney’s camera on the day and stood between them as a shield; though of course then she wouldn’t have the photos. Still. That delicate old face. So utterly guileless. Despite the way she spoke, it’s clear now she is as devoted to Inga as everyone else. Caddie herself was there for ages, probably with the same expression on her face. Imagine someone looking at you like that, thinks Caddie. You’d feel it from wherever you were in the world.
There’s an uneasy spot, too, in Caddie’s thoughts. It hovers just out of reach. Something to do with tracking down candid photos of unsuspecting elderly women and keeping them like trophies.